Scribner's Magazine, Volume XXVI, September, 1899

The greatest glory of Canada is not its modern progress, but its vast and ancient wilderness. If you weary of the sameness and unprofitableness of every thing you know, go where I went last year, to the upper waters of the Ottawa, where the beaver is the master architect and the moose is king of the woods. See for yourself, as I saw, that the Ottawa and the Gatineau, appearing to come from widely distant regions, have their origin close together and are twins. Behold these two children of the lakes, nourished from the same generous breast. Trace their courses, and see that, though journeying far, in widely different directions, they finally arrive at a common destination.

Nobody knows all about that head-water country around the sources of the Ottawa. It is a prolific game region, where sportsmen rarely go, for the simple reason that they can get all the hunting they want nearer to the railroad. There are plenty of deer close to almost any Canadian Pacific station west of Pembroke, and it is not much trouble to get a chance at a moose in two days from Deux Rivières, Rockliffe, or Mattawa. Not many hunting parties start from there either, and I suppose the reason is that for thousands of miles to the west the woods, prairies, and mountains lie close to the railroad and afford almost limitless opportunities.

The territory enclosed by the Ottawa and the Gatineau has been, from immemorial times, the home of the Algonquin Indians, and they still remain there, in such primitive innocence that they receive no annuity from the Dominion Government. In this they are unlike the Indians of the United States or their brother tribes of Canada.

The map which accompanies this article is reproduced from the latest Crown Land Office charts of the Upper Ottawa River. Hundreds of lakes, some of them many miles in extent, are unmarked, because they have never been surveyed. But a glance at the map will give some idea of the flood which is poured out at the feet of Canada's stately capital. As a canoeing country I believe the Ottawa valley to be unequalled anywhere in the world. The dotted line on the map shows the course of a lazy autumn trip which I took around the borders of the great interior island, formed by the streams which fall from a common birthplace in the Kakebonga region and reunite in front of the city of Ottawa.

The coureurs du bois of the old régime have passed away, but the song of their beloved wilderness is as sweet to-day as when they found it irresistible.

At Mattawa I procured the supplies which are necessary for a canoe trip in the woods, and the branch railroad took me to the shore of Lake Kippewa. Then a lumber company's steamer carried me to Hunter's Point, the farthest settlement, eighty-five miles north of Mattawa. From there it was all canoe and portage. Nowhere was there a carry more than a mile long, and generally the distance was only a few hundred yards from one lake to another, or around a rapid. The rivers form a continuous waterway, but we made many short cuts. In five hundred miles of canoeing there were, perhaps, twenty miles of carrying, all told.

Mr. Isaac Hunter, the postmaster at Hunter's Point, has his office in the front room of his house or else in his coat-pocket. He has a large, well-cleared farm, where his father lived before him, and he sells hay to the lumbermen at fifty dollars a ton. Plenty of people in the United States might well want to be in his place. Yet the farm he lives on has no legal status. It has never been surveyed, and the Crown Land Office has no official knowledge of it. So he pays no taxes and he never cast a vote in his life.

When I got to Mr. Hunter's I was at the end of civilization. Beyond his house there were no roads except the water-ways, and the journey I wished to make through the wilderness was several hundred miles long. But I felt as sure of the way as though I had been there before. There are no maps which are of any use at all. Not one of them shows more than half of the lakes which form the easy road we travelled.

I told Mr. Hunter where I wanted to go. He said: "Well, my brother-in-law, Joe Decountie, knows the way to Ross Lake, about half way to the Grand Lake Victoria. Mr. Christopherson, the Hudson's Bay agent at Grand Lake, will be back here soon. If you want to go with Joe and bring back a moose by Saturday, you'll find Mr. Christopherson here then, and he can tell you how to go the rest of the way. You'll need a canoe. They sell pretty high this year. You can have that one out by the water for six dollars."

Joe was young and big. He lived across the bay from his brother-in-law. He and the rest of the twenty or thirty other people around Hunter's Point speak Algonquin and French and very fair English, and their names show that those early adventurers from Europe, two hundred years ago and later, had no violent race prejudices. The more I have seen of the half-bloods of Canada, the more I have come to admire them. They are of fearless stock, and have inherited many good traits from both races. They regard with amusement and pity their half-brothers, the full-blood Algonquins of the remote forest, but they understand the arts of wood-lore which make life more than endurable there. They have French, English, Scotch, and Scandinavian family names, and any one who thinks they lead an uncomfortable life is very much mistaken.

A good deal has been written lately about the hardships and dangers of camp life. For years I have spent a considerable time each season in the woods, sometimes depending for days on the resources of the country, and I can truthfully say I never had one uncomfortable hour there.

"Where shall we go after a moose, Joe?" I asked.

Joe said: "Well, it's bes' to go where we sure to find 'em. Dese fellers aroun' here don't like de place where I go, because it takes most all day to get dere. But I never failed yet to see moose." So we threw our luggage into the canoe, and departed, in a gentle rain-storm.

It was nearly a year since I had had a paddle in my hand, but it was only a short distance between portages. I know of no form of severe muscular exertion which is so little irksome as paddling a canoe. Rowing is galley-slavery in comparison. With the paddle there are not less than three variations of position on each side, which bring new muscles into play and relieve the weary ones; and a shift from one hand to the other is a complete rest. So it was not long, during the succeeding month of canoeing, before I came, at daylight, to look forward to a long day's paddling with positive delight.

If any one wishes to know just where we went on that little side issue of a moose hunt let him get a good map of the Kippewa region, and locate the space between Lake Ostoboining and Hay Bay. It is a blank space on a Crown Land Office map, but there are at least fifty small lakes in it. It took six hours' canoeing and carrying, from Mr. Hunter's house, till we came to the lake Joe had chosen.

That moose hunt was too easy. We got to the lake, put up the tent, chopped some wood, and just at dusk, when Joe was baking biscuits in the frying-pan, suddenly he set the pan down and made a rush for the canoe. At the same moment I saw a big bull moose wading out of his depth, from the opposite shore, into the deep water, about the length of a city block from the tent. He did not see us at all, and went right on, swimming leisurely across. The lake was narrow, and the moose did not hurry. His broad yellow antlers were so heavy that he barely kept his nose above the water. It was a great sight to see the ripple spread in a diagonal behind him, while Joe urged the little canoe right up close astern. What a pity it was too dark for the camera! When he was forty rods from shore and we were close to him, Joe asked, loudly and pleasantly, "Jack, where you goin' to-day?" Jack turned his big head, and the expression in his ox-like eye was that of pained surprise. He began to swim so hard that he half climbed out of the water.

"Let's head him off," said Joe. So we made a respectful circle around the moose, and he ported his helm and turned back toward the place whence he came.

"Drive him to the tent," I suggested; and we did the meanest thing I ever saw done on a moose hunt. We kept between him and where he wanted to go, and actually made him carry himself to shore close to the tent, before I turned the express bullet loose. It was all done so quickly that the biscuits did not burn.

"Now, we worked ourselves out of business, didn't we?" commented Joe, by the fire-light, after we had completed certain anatomical dismemberments, the result of which would have astonished the moose very greatly if he could have seen himself hung up. "My pore leetle cousins ain't got no fresh meat," continued Joe, relapsing from the severely studied English with which he had previously addressed me. "It's 'bout twelve mile straight so, to de house. How you t'ink if I bring my cousins to-morrow to take out de moose?"

I thought that was a very good idea, so the next day Joe left me and walked through the woods to Hunter's Point, to bring his relatives. In the afternoon it rained, so Joe and his cousins did not appear, and I had the blankets to myself that night.

The Hudson's Bay Company supply a tent which can be closed up tightly. This is good in mosquito time, but in the fall there is nothing so fine as a plain shed tent, open in front. The heat from the fire is reflected down from the slanting roof, and you can keep warm and dry in the coldest rain that ever fell, especially if you have a light fly spread above the tent. I had brought along a tent of this pattern, and was as comfortable as any king that night, though the nearest human being was twelve miles or so away. The rain made the fire burn more brightly than usual, by knocking the film of ashes from the logs.

The next morning I was awakened by my old friends, the moose-birds. A pair of them were trying to carry off the moose meat, all at one mouthful, and at the same time fighting away a third bird which sneaked in between their trips to their place of storage. The moose-bird takes life very seriously, and his sole business is stealing everything he can stick his bill into. Unless he is very often disturbed he is without fear, and will readily alight on a stick held in your hand, if you put a piece of meat on the end of the stick. I have often photographed the bird at a distance of three or four feet.

About two o'clock that afternoon Joe and his friends appeared on the scene, with another canoe; and they carried the moose home in sections.

The next day was so warm and bright that we took the canoe and went on a long observation tour. Joe made a big circuit, from lake to lake and pond to pond. One of the geographical peculiarities of the country is that you can go by water in any direction you choose, with short portages. Between almost any two ridges you will find a lake or two.

In many places we saw where, earlier in the season, the moose had been eating the water-lilies. The remnants of the roots, as thick as a man's wrist, were floating on the surface by the score.

About four o'clock in the afternoon, when we were on the return to our tent, and paddling along very quietly, we heard a stick break close by the edge of the water. Looking sharply into the thick brush I caught sight of a cow moose, with two calves, in the woods about twenty feet back from the shore. We kept very quiet, hoping they would come out where they could be photographed. But soon the cow's great ears straightened out in our direction, the calves backed around behind their mamma, and in an instant they had begun a noiseless flight.

It was dusk by the time we reached our own lake, and there was a faint moon. All through the day we had traversed about as fine a moose country as one could find. Every lake had its well-defined path around the shore, just along the edge of the bushes.

At the head of our lake, about a mile from the tent, we stopped and ran the canoe ashore. Joe grunted hoarsely, and splashed the water with his paddle, and, sooner than it takes to tell this, we heard, not two hundred yards away, the most impressive sound that ever comes to a sportsman's ears, the ripping, tearing noise made by a bull moose, hooking the trees right and left out of sheer joy and pride in his strength. He tore down a few cords of saplings, judging by the racket, and then came out, "oofing" at every step, circling around us. In the gathering dusk we saw his great black shape for a moment as he crossed the little stream in which the canoe was hidden. That was the time to have fired, if I had wanted him very badly, but Joe, whose wealth of luck had made him over-bold, whispered, "I bring him close," and emitted a loud roar, very like the squeal of a horse, and the moose never stopped to take one more look. He simply wheeled around behind the fir thicket where he was concealed, and, with a few characteristic remarks in his own language, expressive of disdain and opprobrium, made a hasty departure for a distant section of the country. He acted as though he recognized Joe's voice. "Well, we fright him good, anyway," said Joe.

There was only one other place on our whole subsequent trip where the moose seemed to be so plentiful as right here, close to Lake Kippewa. We had one moose, and had seen that there were plenty more. The Quebec law allows only two in a season, to one man.

I wished to see more of the Kippewa country before going north; so we went back to Mr. Hunter's the next morning, and there met Mr. Christopherson, on his way back to the Grand Lake Victoria, and with him an Indian named Jocko, one of the "Grand Lakers," as Joe called them. Jocko was a thick-set, open-faced barbarian who smiled at the slightest excuse, and who was so pleasant and bright that I am going hunting with him some day if I can. Mr. Christopherson said there would be no trouble in finding our way to the Grand Lake Victoria, as there was a plain trail from Ross Lake, where Joe had been, to Trout Lake, and that on this latter sheet of water were two or three families of Indians who traded at the Grand Lake Victoria, any one of whom could be induced, for a dollar a day, to show us the way.

Joe and I spent another week camping about Kippewa Lake, getting used to each other's paddling, before we started on our northern journey.

It was at this stage of the proceedings that Joe modestly suggested that he had a little nephew, Billy Paulson, thirteen years old, who could do a good deal around camp, and that he would like to take him with us. So Billy went and was happy. He was a versatile little boy. He could read, which Joe could not do, and he spoke English without much accent. I shall not soon forget my amazement when he began, soon after our introduction, to whistle, in good tune, Sousa's "Washington Post" march. How it had reached that far corner of the earth I do not know, and neither did he; but he had it, and with "Her Golden Hair was Hanging down Her Back," as an occasional interlude, he made distant lakes melodious during the succeeding days.

The next day we took another side trip, to the east end of Lake Kippewa. Joe had been telling of a wonderful trout lake, away up the mountain, and we went to see it. There we found one of Billy's relatives, Johnnie Puryea, and two squaws, catching a winter's supply of trout. They had been there about a week, and had more than three hundred beautiful fish hung up on a frame over a slow, smoky fire. While we partook of Johnnie's trout, such a violent thunder-shower came up, with heavy wind, that we stayed late. It was almost as dark as it could be when we started back over the mile portage to the big lake. There was no good trail, only a few trees being "spotted," and the side of the mountain was furrowed with countless ravines, at the bottom of some one of which lay our canoe. We could not see the trail at all, but kept going down hill, and feeling of every tree we came to for the axe-spots. I suppose we were about two hours making that mile, and I vividly appreciated the force of the expression "feeling one's way." When we finally found the canoe, and the moon came out from under the clouds, the smooth lake seemed, after the storm, to be an old friend.

The next morning we paddled along the shores of the deep indenting bays for miles, looking for moose tracks. At one place a whole family, big and little, had left fresh hoof-prints in the mud, and Joe followed them to see where they went, while Billy and I trolled, and caught as many walleyed pike and pickerel as we pleased.

All along the shores of the lake, at conspicuous points, the bush-rangers, or fire police, had posted printed warnings against leaving fires in the woods. It is a misdemeanor there to leave a smouldering fire. He who starts a blaze must see that it is extinguished.

Joe showed us a place where he and a companion were watching for moose last year. "De moose come out. I shoot. De ca'tridge bu'st, and mos' blind me. I listen for my chum to shoot, but he no shoot. I look 'round, and my chum run away. So we no get dat moose."

There are many men who do not seem to be able to face a moose, but the animal cannot do anything to a man with a heavy rifle, who uses it.

My note-book is full of Joe's moose stories. Here is one that shows how common the animals are at Kippewa. "Las' year anoder lad and me, we took a big head out to de station to sell. A man offer us five dollar for it. At las' we sell it for six. De trouble was, 'noder feller sell a moose, de head, skin, meat, and all, de week before, for five dollar. I swore I never help take out no more heads twenty-five mile for t'ree dollar my share, and me kill de moose, too!"

The shores of Lake Kippewa are high hard-wood ridges, and one can see a long way through the trees, as there is not much undergrowth. It is an ideal place to hunt. As late as October 14th it was rather warm for a night fire in front of the tent.

Every red and golden leaf as it fell at our feet bore to us the same message. The Indian summer was upon us, and it was time to be going northward. So we gathered our simple belongings together, and started on our swing around the wilderness circle, to find where the two rivers run from the same lake, to behold the mountain home of the twins.

There is joy in the mere fact of following unmapped water-ways. No matter if you mistake your course, you can, at least, come back by the same way you go. The river will run just as it has run during all the centuries while you were neglecting it, and the lake will stay where it has waited for you these countless years. The land-marks will not fade away. Few, indeed, have been the kings of earth who ever felt as jaunty and independent as the one white man and two half-breeds who left Hunter's Point for the far Upper Ottawa, on the 16th of October, last year. No matter what happened to other people, we were secure; and the farther away we got, the better pleased we were.

Half a day of steady paddling through the Birch Lakes took us past shores where the standing pine has never been disturbed by the lumbermen. There are in these vast forests thousands of miles of country which have never yet been decimated.

The farther end of Big Birch Lake was the best we could do the first day, and we camped at the foot of a portage as well cleared as a country road, which has been in use by the Indians for a hundred years, and probably much longer. Joe here rebelled against any elaborate tenting arrangements for travellers. He cut three long poles, stuck them in the ground slanting, and threw the tent over them. In truth this did just as well, when the wind did not blow, as anything else.

A half-mile climb the next morning brought us to the top of a long hill; and right at the very top, where a hundred dollars' worth of blasting would let it run down into Birch Lake, stretched away Lake Sissaginega, or "Island Lake," appropriately named, for there are about five hundred islands in it.

Joe produced a couple of short oars from the bottom of the canoe, and nailed a pair of rude rowlocks onto the gunwales. He explained that on the long, wind-swept lakes which we should have to traverse, a pair of oars were superior to two paddles against a head wind. It was a wonderful thing, but during hundreds of miles of lake travel after that we never once had a serious delay from weather. Nearly every morning the wind rose briskly with the sun, blew during the middle of the day, and moderated toward evening; so we pursued the ancient Indian custom of starting very early in the morning, before the wind came up; took a good rest in the middle of the day, and continued as late as we could in the evening. But not once on all our prosperous journey were we really wind-bound, though this is one of the most common of occurrences on these lakes, where the wind often piles the swells up so high that not even a birch-bark can weather them.

The height of the wave which this marvellous little evolution of the ages can stand is not conceivable till you have witnessed it. Running with a heavy, fair wind, the swells rise behind you and seem about to engulf you. But in some way the canoe rises with the wave, and the boiling, foaming mass rushes harmlessly by, while you sit on the dry, clean bottom, and your pride increases with each successive triumph.

A very long lake next north of Sissaginega is Cacaskanan, not shown at all on the maps. On this lake, about eleven o'clock the second day out, while Joe was rowing, and merely casting an occasional perfunctory glance over his left shoulder, he suddenly hissed, "See de moose!" We were at least a mile from shore, and though I have seldom met any one, civilized or savage, who could beat me at seeing game, I took off my hat to Joe from then on. Sure enough, over Joe's left shoulder he had seen a cow moose in the edge of the timber on shore. A projecting point allowed us to get pretty close to the animal. The wind was partly off shore, and all the time we were approaching we could see her watching the shore, starting at every sound made by the wind among the dead tree-trunks, but paying no attention to the water side at all. This enabled us, considering the difficulty of navigating among fallen tree-trunks, to make one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever taken. We got to the very shore, and crept within thirty-five feet of that moose. I made my exposure of the negative before she saw us at all. This photograph will give a better idea than could ever be conveyed in words, of the tremendous difficulty of still-hunting the moose in thick, dry timber, where the crackling of a twig will spoil the best-made stalk.

That photograph was more satisfactory to me than the shooting of fifty moose would have been. The moose does not show to the best advantage in the picture, but that was her fault, and not ours. At the click of the shutter she went to find the rest of her folks.

Late that afternoon we came to a place where Lake Cacaskanan narrows to about one hundred yards wide, and here there were many moose tracks. Just beyond, we met a family of the Indians who had killed two moose that very day, and had more than a hundred musquash freshly skinned. Billy was wonderfully impressed by the dirty, unkempt appearance of the little children, whose shocks of matted hair he unconsciously Kiplingized by referring to them afterward as "haystacks." The Indian who was the head of this family, on being told by Joe where we were going, said that we would walk on the ice before we got back. I fear he was a sluggard, who saw lions or bears in the path of every enterprise. He was burning logs twenty feet long, to save the trouble of cutting them in two, and so he had fire enough for four tents, instead of one.

Monday morning, October 18th, we had breakfast by starlight. Venus and Jupiter were two particularly bright morning stars. Billy looked long at the waning planets and remarked, in an awe-struck tone, "My, but they must be high up!"

That day we reached Ross Lake, where there is a lumberman's supply depot for operations over on the main Ottawa, in the direction of Lake Expanse. We had no occasion to stop there, and all the afternoon followed the directions we had received from Mr. Christopherson, pursuing the Hudson's Bay Company trail through some small beaver ponds, till we reached Trout Lake, a beautiful sheet of water about fifteen miles long, where we expected to find an Indian to guide us to the Grand Lake Victoria.

We found the summer camp all right, where the Indians had a potato-patch, which they had not dug, so Joe said they had not left for the winter; but not a smoke or sign of life could we find. We explored the lake, finding abundant moose signs and trolled for salmon trout, which at this time were up near the surface. One we caught was the largest I ever saw. We had no means of determining its weight, but when placed in the centre of the canoe, crosswise, on the bottom, its nose protruded over one gunwale and its tail above the other.

On the morning of our third day on the lake we heard a dog bark, and found the Indians encamped on a secluded island. The wretches had seen us the first day, but, fearing we were game wardens or other evil-disposed persons, had kept out of our way. Joe said the Indians up there had a reputation for hiding from passers-by. After we had met them and given evidence of good intentions, they were sociable enough. While we were inviting the Indians to pass judgment on the contents of a certain jug, an extremely large domestic cat belonging to them ate much of the moose meat in our canoe. Nearly every Indian camp in these woods has at least one cat, to keep the moose-birds and wood-mice in subjugation, and the cats, being hard to get, are highly prized.

We soon made a bargain with Kakwanee, a young Indian just married and needing money, to show us the way to the Hudson's Bay post on the Grand Lake Victoria. Without knowing it, all the time we had been on Trout Lake we were quite near a crew of lumbermen who were building a dam at the outlet, to raise the water for a reserve supply, to be used, when needed, to drive logs down the Ottawa, the water running out through Lake Expanse. The intention was to raise the water six feet; and as there are at least seventy-five square miles of water in Trout Lake, it will be seen that a large reservoir would be produced by closing the outlet, perhaps fifty feet wide. The Indians were doing a good deal of laughing among themselves, as they said there was a marsh on the other side of the lake, where, unless another very long dam was built, the water would run off in the direction of Lake Kippewa as soon as it was raised a foot or so; and the lumbermen did not know this.

In the evening while we were camped, waiting for Kakwanee to bid farewell to his bride, Billy heard a trout splash the water. He at once got some birch-bark and placed it in the cleft of a split stick, warming it by the fire to make it curl up, and then lighting it on the edge. In this way he made a torch which burned brightly for a long time. Getting into the canoe he pushed silently out, standing up. Letting the light shine into the clear water, he soon located the big trout, which lay quietly on the bottom in the full blaze of light. Then he made the motions of spearing, though he had no spear; and there was no doubt, from the realism of the pantomime, that Billy, child as he was, well knew a very unsportsmanlike way to kill fish. It was a beautiful sight to see Billy stand up in a very tottlish birch-bark canoe, as confident as a bare-back rider on a circus horse.

Joe had done some work as a "shanty-man," and the sight of the crew who were building the dam made him reminiscent. "One time," said he, "I do de chainin' for a gang; dat is, fasten de logs wid de chain, and bind em fas'. My chum, he was French, and he drive de sled. He was goin' for git marry so soon it was time for de camp to break up, an' he was sing an' smile to hisself de whole time. De ver' las' day, de las' load, he say, 'Now, Joe, dis load be de las' I ever drive fore I go home to my Julie.' So he start de sled, an' de sled hit a dead birch. When I come 'long behine him, dere he was dead. A limb break off de birch when de sled strike it. It was all rotten, an' de piece of de limb not so big as your arm. But de limb was freeze, an' it hit him on de head, an' he never move. He go home to Julie, sure, but not de way he expec'."

"My," said Billy, solemnly, "it must be awful for a man's peoples when he go 'way from home feelin' good, and laugh and sing, and, the next thing his peoples know, he come home dead!"

The next morning Kakwanee appeared and we resumed our interrupted journey, running all day through two lakes, neither of which has ever appeared on any map of Quebec. It seems wonderful that after white men have used watercourses for canoe routes for a century or two, and when lumbermen have investigated the country, there are stretches of many miles together which are not indicated on official maps except by white spots. But this is true of over half a million square miles of British-American territory. The two lakes we traversed are called by Indian names which mean "Crosswise Lake" and "Old Man Lake." Out of the latter runs a river which falls into the Grand Lake Victoria. This lake is really an expansion of the Ottawa. In many places its shores are covered with medium-sized pines, and in others bare rocks are the only things to be seen. The greatest enemy to these forests is fire, and in all parts of the country are vast tracts which have been so devastated.

It was a long day's paddle from the lower end of the Grand Lake Victoria to the old Hudson's Bay agency near its northern extremity. Here Mr. Christopherson received us with great hospitality. He said I was the fourth white man who had visited the post that year. The Indians who came there to get their annual supplies, material and spiritual, had long since left their little summer cabins for winter hunting-grounds. Though the sun shone warm and bright, it might turn cold any night now, and so Mr. Christopherson sent Jocko to show us the portages as far as an Indian village, twenty-seven miles up the river. There we could get a guide to see us through to the place where the water runs the other way. Jocko, himself, wanted to go away hunting, so he only accompanied us as far as the Indian settlement.

This procuring of guides through an unknown country, on the instalment plan, was very fascinating to me, and it illustrated a characteristic of the northern forest Indian which is universal. The red man of the prairies was a nomad, but the son of the woods does not make very long pilgrimages, or know much about the world beyond his own hunting-ground. Before he is old enough to remember any thing he makes his first journey to the trading-post where his ancestors have for generations been regular customers and perpetual debtors. He does not remember how or when he learned the way. On his own stream and its tributaries he is an infallible guide, for he learned all the landmarks before he could pronounce their names. But every forest traveller has found the Indians in one locality reluctant to go far from home. When Alexander Mackenzie felt his way, by stream and portage, to the great river which bears his name, and thence down to the Frozen Ocean, he found that the Indians on one reach of the river always believed that below their own country there were impassable rapids and insurmountable rocks, ferocious beasts and hidden perils. If you will journey toward the head of the Ottawa, in the fall of this year, you will find precisely the same state of aboriginal mind. The Indians around the Grand Lake Victoria are within a few miles of the sources of rivers flowing toward the four quarters of the American continent. Ten days' steady canoeing in any direction would take them to Hudson's Bay or Lake Huron or Lake Ontario or Montreal. But they never travel for the sake of seeing the country, or get far from home.

It was on the last day Jocko was with us, October 26th, that I made the photograph of him which is one of the illustrations of this article. He was in his shirt-sleeves and wore an old straw hat. While we were eating our lunch at noon, the black flies were a little attentive and it was uncomfortably warm. That was the climate of the far Upper Ottawa in the last days of October. There was not yet a suggestion of snow. For all the atmospheric indications told us, we might have been in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

The Ottawa above Grand Lake House comes down out of the rocky hills, and is full of rapids. In many smooth places the current is very swift, and it was worth coming a long way to see Joe and Jocko paddle up places where Billy and I could not go. Fighting inch by inch against a rapid current is one of the most trying tests of endurance I know. It is unlike anything else in the world. You pull and pull, and realize that an instant's relaxation will cost you all you have gained. If the water only would stop for an instant! But it is so easy for the current to rush on and on. How futile are human energy and perseverance against a power which has never for one second faltered in uncounted years!

Jocko told Joe—he could not say it in English—that he enjoyed travelling with us more than he did with the Hudson's Bay Company people, because they travelled for dear life, making fifty or sixty miles a day, and nearly paralyzed his arms. When he had gone from Hunter's Point to Grand Lake House a few weeks before, he and Mr. Christopherson had made the trip in less than three days, but his arms were numb all the next night. He liked to find a white man who travelled "like an Indian," and said if I would come up this fall he would show me some moose and deer hunting around the head of the Coulonge and Dumoine, the like of which white men did not often see.

We reached the camp of the old chief, Jocko's objective point, just at purple twilight, when the smoke was rising straight toward the sky, and we witnessed one of the most peaceful and beautiful bits of wilderness comfort I have ever beheld. It seemed more like approaching a white man's farm than an Indian camp.

There were two or three log-houses, a few acres of cleared land, and two or three horses and cows. A tame horned owl scolded us from the roof of a barn. The Indian girls were singing and calling to each other across the wide river. A score of children and grandchildren of the fat old chief turned out to welcome us, and we slept in one of the log-barns, on the hay. Jocko sat up and visited with his Indian girl friends, and I heard them laughing and chatting until long after midnight.

As I lay looking out at the shining surface of the Ottawa, from my cosey nest in the sweet, wild hay, it was bewildering to remember that so much of Canada lay south of us. Only a rifle-shot away, at the end of a forest path, were the bubbling springs which form the sources of the Coulonge, that pine-embowered stream which, for two hundred miles, straight away to the south, traverses the centre of the great interior island whose borders we were encircling. I thought of the long reaches of moonlit river, where the timid deer were drinking, and the moose, in all the ardor of their courtship, roared hoarse contempt for impertinent rivals. And this was only one of the streams whose sources we were circumnavigating: the Maganasipi, the Bear, the swamp-fed Black, the Dumoine, the Tomasine, the Desert—all these rivers and a thousand lakes, gathered all at last in the generous arms of the twin rivers, and borne away to join the grand chorus, the voice of many waters.

In the morning there was a pow-wow, as the result of which a son and grandson of the chief agreed to see us out to the Gatineau, the boy going along to help his father if a freeze-up should make it necessary to carry their canoe back over the ice. For many miles through devious channels and short cuts, we ran past natural meadows where the unsown grass had grown high and dried up for the lack of something to feed upon it—ancient beaver meadows, from which all trace of the original forest had long ago disappeared. Joe and the Indian discussed the beaver question earnestly. It appears that the most interesting issue in Algonquin politics is what to do about the beavers. There are plenty of them all through the back country, and the Indians regard them as their personal property. They only kill a certain proportion of the little animals, and carefully preserve the supply. The beaver's habit of building for himself and family a comfortable and conspicuous residence enables the hunters to take a pretty accurate census of the population, and to tell just where the animals are to be found. On our way we turned aside and photographed a beaver-dam and a house. The natural history books generally picture these constructions as quite symmetrical affairs, but all I have ever seen have been rough piles of sticks and mud, and the photographs show typical beaver construction.

A few years ago a sportsman's club in Quebec induced the legislature to pass a law entirely prohibiting the killing of beaver until the year 1900. Two hundred years ago, when the Iroquois made raids on the Ottawa country, and prevented the annual catch of beaver skins from coming down to Montreal and Quebec, hard times fell upon Canada. Precisely the same condition has confronted the Indians and the Hudson's Bay Company recently. It is almost as bad a situation as it would be in Illinois if the farmers were forbidden by law to kill hogs. The Hudson's Bay Company's agents at Grand Lake Victoria and the Barriere lake have not dared to buy the skins. The Indians have had no other reliable way to pay for their supplies. Ruin for the traders and starvation for the Indians would inevitably follow the continued enforcement of the law. Some relief has been afforded by the fact that the post at Abittibi ships all its furs by way of Hudson's Bay, so they cannot be seized by the Quebec authorities; and thousands of skins, worth $10 apiece, were diverted to that market last year. The Indians have been very much disturbed over the matter, for they find the law of necessity more urgent than a statute whose logic they cannot understand. "Some families up here starve to death last winter," interpreted Joe, after listening for awhile to Jonas, our new guide. "I t'ink I no starve, w'en de beaver build his house close by my water-hole."

Our newly acquired pilot had no idea of losing any business opportunities. His canoe was ahead of the one in which Joe, Billy, and I travelled, and he had his muzzle-loading, cylinder-bore double shot-gun, a handy little weapon, lying in front of him, both hammers at full cock, hour after hour as he paddled, the muzzle pointing squarely at the back of his boy in the bow. It was trying to unaccustomed nerves, but the boy seemed to be used to the idea of sudden death. Jonas had a curious habit of holding a bullet in his mouth, ready to drop it in an instant down the gun-barrel, on top of the shot. The utility of keeping his decks cleared for action appeared when, toward evening, he cleverly snapped up a reckless mink which darted along the bank, where the stream was narrow and crooked. The report startled a caribou, which crashed out of the alders, not fifty feet away. Jonas spat his bullet down the left barrel and fired again, neatly missing both his boy's head and the reindeer. Joe derided Jonas in choice Algonquin, and said to me, confidentially, "I t'ink we better go in front in de mornin'." All the same, the Indian's idea of a gun which will do for partridges one minute and moose the next is a sound one, in a country where one's breakfast flies or runs away.

At noon the next day, we reached the head of that branch of the Ottawa rising in the Barriere lake. Long ago forgotten Gatineau timber-cutters built a dam, to divert this water to the Jean de Terre, but now the dam has fallen into disuse, and the stream seeks its ancient bed. Just beyond the dam is the Hudson's Bay post, a branch of the one on the Grand Lake Victoria. Mr. Edwards, the agent, was delighted to see strangers, especially when I produced a letter which Mr. Christopherson had sent by me, enclosing his three months' salary. Mrs. Edwards soon discovered that our Billy was her nephew, and that much-related young person was at once honored with a seat at the family dinner-table with the twelve little Edwardses, fraternizing with them in the three-ply language which is the natural speech of these mixed races. Mr. Edwards told me he had that season refused hundreds of beaver-skins from Indians, every one of whom was on his books for a year's supplies, and now he did not quite see what the post was going to do, with beavers demonetized.

Jonas, our most recent guide, did not wish to linger, being haunted by the fear of coming frost which the warm air belied. So that same afternoon we hastened on, regretfully declining Mr. Edwards's invitation to go on a caribou hunt. These reindeer abound in the Barrière lake country.

We camped perhaps fifteen miles from the post that night, and the next morning, soon after starting up the lake, came to a narrow place where the water, instead of coming toward us as it had been doing all the time for days, formed a little rapid, running the same way we were going. The day before we had seen the water pouring into the Ottawa through the lumbermen's worn-out dam, and here, twenty-four hours afterward, continuing up the same lake, we found the current was with us instead of against us, down instead of up, and we were drifting out toward the Gatineau, in the other direction. If we had not known about the two outlets to the lake we should have thought the water was bewitched.

All that day we ran through Lake Kakebonga, which the Hudson's Bay people consider the most bewildering sheet of water in the Gatineau Valley. There are dozens of deep bays, which look about alike, and if you start into the wrong one, you get wholly astray. Once during the day it became a little foggy, and Jonas at once went ashore and waited for the veil to lift, as he said no one could find his way there in thick weather. These large lakes are all long and narrow, and very crooked. Like Kippewa and Victoria, Lake Kakebonga is nowhere wide, but its shore-line is very long, and the canoe route often cuts across a portage to save miles of travelling.

East of Lake Kakebonga there is a very rough bit of country which we crossed by what are locally known as the Sixteen Portages, or "the Sixteen," where we clambered into and out of the canoe on an average about once in half a mile. At last we came to a long, wide path over a level plain. "I know dis portage so well I know my own house," said Joe. "I was up here from de Gatineau fourteen year ago." And there our forest friends turned back, and left Joe and Billy and me to make our way by the smooth current of the Jean de Terre out to the Gatineau. I suppose we ran twenty miles after three o'clock that afternoon. Then, when it was so dark we could see no longer, we camped on a dry sand-bar, cooked our supper by a little fire, turned the canoe on edge, spread our blankets, threw the tent over all, and were lost in dreamless oblivion.

"De wolf was howl pretty good las' night, wasn't he?" commented Joe, as he waked Billy and me in the smoky dawn. "I tink I hear em close by onetime." And in the sand, about one hundred feet from our resting-place, were plenty of tracks, where the deer-killing brutes had prowled around while we slept; perfectly harmless creatures, but unable to resist the temptation to come near the fat and juicy Billy.

Of all northern wilderness streams, the most interesting I have ever seen is the Gatineau, into which we were soon carried by the current of the Jean de Terre. The descent which the devious Ottawa makes in seven hundred miles or so, is accomplished by the Gatineau in its straight course of less than two hundred, and there are few places where you cannot hear the roar of the next rapid. In the spring every bend is a maelstrom. On the banks and overhanging cedars we could see the marks made by the spring freshets, fifteen feet above the fall level of the water. And even then, as we approached a rapid, it was necessary to know on which side the portage was, because generally the opposite bank was a vertical wall, and once in the sweep of the current, there could be no return.

"You see dat rapid?" said Joe, after an early camp on the portage, as we went down to look at the boiling cauldron below, "I tink I always remember him. One time I work in a shanty back on dat leetle stream we pass dis afternoon. De shanty was mos' ready to break up, and good many de men was go down on de drive. Dere was only one foreman for all de gangs, 'cause so many men been laid off. Dat mornin' de foreman tell dis man 'I want you for do dis,' an' dose men 'I want you for do dat,' sen' dis man here and dat man dere, an' he pick six men an' he say 'I want you for take de batteau—dat's de big row-boat—'wid forty-five chains, to de gang for fix de boom in de pond down below,' and he say 'Dat rapid dere, don' none you dam fools try for run him. I tell you dat batteau ain't like de canoe, an' de chains won't help you swim; so I want you for portage de whole t'ing.' So de men take de batteau, and de foreman say, 'You, Joe, you an' your chum an' Big Jule, you take de big canoe, an' you go down for help on de boom.'

"So we start an' follow de batteau, an' of course you can't see ver' far in de river, he is so crooked. I was in de bow, an' I see dem men in de batteau, 'bout two acres ahead, 'fore we get to de bend. Well, we come to de head dis portage and we see nobody dere. I take out my pack an' put de tump-line on my head, an' my chum say 'Dem fellers make de portage pretty quick.' I go down wid my pack, and start up de portage once more, for bring de canoe, me an' Big Jule. W'en I get to de head of de portage, my chum, he come run up all out of breat', an' he say 'I see a hat an' a oar in de water down by de foot de rapid!'

"Den I know w'at's de matter. Me an' Big Jule we have de canoe on our heads for carry it down de portage, but we don't say one word. We jus' turn de canoe down and I jump in de bow, an' my chum in the middle, an' Big Jule for steer, an' we run de rapid. We t'ink maybe somebody hang on de rock; but fore we know it we strike jus' where dey strike, on a side jam w'ere de logs pile up. I jump out, an' my chum he jump out, an' we catch de canoe an' let her swing, an we holler to Jule to jump, an he jump jus' in time I tell you, for the canoe go under de jam an' smash, cr-r-ack all to piece. I never so near de en' of my life till I die, sure. Well, we go back an' tell de foreman, and he sen' some men for shut down de dam, up in de lac, an' we look for dem feller four days. We look way down below, but we no fine 'em, an' de mornin' de fift' day, I was stan' up in de bow, an' I see black spot come up an' bob up an down in de eddy right down dere, an' in fifteen minute we have dem six feller out on dis san' bar. Dey was all in a bunch. It was hot, and dey look awful.

"Well, sir, after dat you not hear one word in de shanty at night. De mens come in, an' dey jus' sit an' say not one word, an' good many de young lads git fright, an' leave de drive an go home. O, I t'ink I remember dis rapid pretty sure."

Joe's boyhood experience of the Gatineau stood us in good stead all the way down. He remembered perfectly all the rapids, knew which could be run and which could not. "W'en you see de swells run black over de rock, don't you be fright' dat you strike," said he, "but if de water be white, den you look out." And he showed how, along the edge of the rough water, there is often a liquid path, not more than the width of the canoe, which may be followed with perfect safety.

Another half-day's run brought us to a lumber shanty, with its tell-tale smoke.

"Quay!" shouted the cook, which is good Algonquin for "Hello!" And then I realized that weeks of constant out-of-door existence had transformed me into a good enough imitation of an Indian to deceive a lumberman.

"Don't I know you?" asked Joe of the cook, not deigning to reply in the Algonquin tongue. And then the white man on shore and the half-red man in the stern of the canoe recognized each other as camp-mates on some by-gone excursion down the river in escort of a few thousand logs.

"What shanty you from?" asked the cook, turning to me inquiringly. "Didn't I see you with Gilmour's boss last year?"

Explanations followed, and the canoe which had come all the way around from Mattawa secured the undivided attention of the lumber crew when they came to supper that evening.

The next day brought us down to the Desert village, where we left my beloved canoe on the bank, and took a stage coach.

As we carried the luggage to the village hotel, at three o'clock on the afternoon of October 30th, the first flakes of snow began to float softly down, and the splendid Canadian summer was at an end.

"It is not a place for everyone," said the priest, quietly, as he led the way under drooping peppers. "These children are orphans of good family. Their excellent mother died a year ago; but they are poor, and I have promised to find them a guest to fill their bedroom. A few dollars will be a blessing to them."

His glance, practised in such measurement, added—"And you are a gentleman—a man to be trusted.

"The house is plain but comfortable. Francisca, like her mother, is an admirable housekeeper," he remarked as he led his guest into the paradise of roses.

The Professor, noting the sweet unkemptness of it, had his New England doubts, but he had none when Francisco, bareheaded, warm, and beautiful, came up from irrigating the oranges, "kissed the hands" of the Professor, and turning his own supple palms outward made him a present of the house and all in it, which at that moment included Francisca, standing under the roses of the porch, and more beautiful even than Francisco.

The professional ears were pricked at the soft organ-tones of speech. If he should not decide to take the Chair, at least his time need not be lost, he argued. That, indeed, had been his motive for seeking a Spanish household.

When he packed his trunk in Boston a Spanish dictionary was included, as became a professor of languages; and now as he unpacked it in the little roof-bedroom with the red, round eyes of oranges staring levelly in, and a drifting cascade of perfume and green and white outside, he was well content.

Perhaps it was that foreign ancestress of his, to whom he was fond of ascribing his bent for languages, who made this foreign corner of his own country so instantly attractive to him.

When he went downstairs later he stepped into an open world. There were untold windows, all wide to the air, and through the green curtains of vines nodded the heads of many roses. Francisca, and the ancient relative to whom the orphans gave a home, and who served as a nominal duenna, were giving the last touches to a table laid in the corner of the broad veranda, which ran about three sides of the house. The grassy space it enclosed was of brave Bermuda, brown, but never-dying, and returning green thanks for a cupful of water. The Professor's foot came to love the touch of that thick carpet in after days.

Beyond, the orange-grove stretched to the lime-hedge, and over that the peppers drooped their ferny branches.

Nothing in all the place was trimmed. Where the long trailing arms of the Lady Banksia fell by their own weight, or clambered by their own daring, there they remained. The Professor stooped under the same trailing branch each time he passed around the veranda. A dozen times he took out his knife impatiently to cut it, but an involuntary compunction arrested his hand. It was so in keeping with the place—it was so in keeping with Francisco and Francisca.

And with an incredible ease and swiftness, the Professor found himself growing in keeping, too.

In another corner of the deep rose-covered veranda all his writing materials quickly congregated. An Indian basket of oranges stood on the little stand by the hammock's elbow, near the rocking-chair in which Francisca sat daily, converting fine linen into finer lace, and cultivating the Professor's Spanish at the same time.

Francisca "kept the house," not with semi-yearly upheavals and the terrible cleanliness of the Professor's ancestral memories, but in a leisurely, sweet fashion of her own, leaving much to the sun and air, ignoring brasses and other troublous matters, perhaps, but never failing—wise Francisca!—to put a rose in her hair, and to set hot, savoury dishes with tropical names before her men-folk. Therefore no man ever found a flaw in Francisca's housekeeping.

Had there been twenty men beneath her roof, each would have been her peculiar care. Her manner to her young brother had a caressing sweetness which a New England girl would have kept for her lover or conscientiously forborne him—for his soul's sake.

As for Francisco, sixteen, brown, slender, wearing his peaked sombrero with consummate grace (a gift he shared in common with every wood-cutter and ranchero of the pure blood), he was the Professor's companion in every walk, every blood-stirring lope across the open mesa, every delicious climb up the chaparral-sided hills or the ferny cañons. The boy grew into his heart; and in return Francisco loved him as boys and Southerners can love, with adoration.

It was only a short time after he came among them that the Professor stopped one morning on his way out of the breakfast-room (in which they never breakfasted!) to examine a quaint inlaid guitar, hanging by faded ribbons against the wall.

"It is Francisco's," said Francisca. "He plays beautifully; but he has never played since our mother died—he hung it here then."

"That is not well," said the Professor. "You should win him to play again."

That evening, in the moonlight on the porch, Francisca laid a tender hand upon her brother's head as he sat on the step below. Her hands seemed made for such a purpose.

"Francisco, the Señor asks if you never mean to play your guitar again."

Francisco was silent a moment, looking at the stars.

"Perhaps," he replied. "Some day, when we are very happy again—not yet." Then turning his head, he touched the caressing hand lightly with his lips.

"At thy wedding—or mine—querida," he said, lightly, and rising abruptly, went into the house.

"He cannot bear yet to hear her spoken of," said Francisca, following him with moist eyes.

"I was—ahem!—very fond of my mother. She died when I was a boy," said the Professor.

"But ours was with us only a little year ago. She sat where you sit, and looked at us with her beautiful soft eyes.

"And you—you had not even a sister." Francisca looked at him as if she would like to make up that deficiency of tenderness—perhaps to stroke his head, as she did Francisco's.

There was abundant leisure for the Professor's studies, for the long, gorgeous wonderland of summer was upon them, and most people were at Santa Catalina, or in the high Sierras, taking an exchange of paradises.

The days rounded through their delicious sequence of perfumed dawns alive with birds, and middays of still air and shadowed lawns, to the infinite twilights and great moons.

In the evenings—the evenings of Southern California—they sat out under the vines, watching these enormous yellow and orange moons, and Francisca sang Californian songs.

Thus the days passed; punctuated by a talk with the Padre, a ride, a stroll, or some playful share in the labor of irrigating the oranges—the one form of labor Francisco ever seemed engaged in; but these he irrigated perpetually.

The Professor missed nothing; he desired nothing. The intoxication of living in close touch with the sun and air, and Earth in her summer mood, has never been half told. Every fibre of his being rejoiced in that long summer.

The little ranch of five acres—all that remained of five hundred—was large enough to hold his content. We do not know that the Garden of Eden was larger. He wrote hopefully to the Faculty concerning that Chair, and with laudable moderation to his principal correspondent in the East: "California has a charm impossible to analyze. I wish you were here." And then he paused, pondered, and carefully erased the last sentence, but not so perfectly but that Miss Dysart by dint of holding it up to the window-pane deciphered it, and sat biting her pencil gravely a space thereafter.

To wake in the morning and know the sun would shine all day; not to be withered by the heat or chilled by the wind, but subtly flattered and caressed by a climate which was only another Francisca; to be wooed to large thoughts and visions by the landscape; not to feel the press and friction of a narrow life and arbitrary customs, and yet to be conscious through all this space and tranquillity of the forward impetus of a vigorous young life all about him—this sufficed. The opportunities for usefulness were great in a place destined to detain every soul who lingered a rash year within its borders—and to make of the next generation natives.

In lieu of caressing the land itself, he often caressed Francisco, its breathing type, drawing the lad to him with an arm about his slender shoulders.

And Francisca, the other breathing type, regarded them both with that smile of tenderness which has in it so much of the maternal. When all is said, the wisest man remains something of a child to any woman, though she is but an inexperienced girl, and he may have forgotten more out of books than she will ever know.

One day Francisco, running lightly up the path and steps to where Francisca sat filling a bowl with roses, and the Professor sat watching her, dropped an envelope upon the table.

"This is all your mail, Señor," said Francisco, gayly.

The Professor opened, glanced, and fell into a brown study, from which he woke to encounter Francisca's eyes over the bowl of roses.

"Is anything the matter?" asked those eyes anxiously.

"Nothing," the Professor replied to them. "An old friend of mine is coming out unexpectedly—is on her way to Santa Barbara."

"That is pleasant for you," said Francisca, sweetly. "And the days are cooler; she will be sure to like our country."

"She is coming to-morrow," said the Professor, rising abruptly. "I must go at once to the hotel."

"We will send many roses to her room; and Francisco shall pick the large Indian basket full of fruit—she will be so tired with the long journey."

"Thank you," murmured the Professor, vaguely.

He did not hear Francisca's caution to her brother: "Do not pick any of the heliotrope, Francisco, for the heavy scent may be disagreeable to an old lady—and only the very choicest peaches—old people must be careful what they eat." But this was not needed for his confusion.

"How well you are looking!" exclaimed Miss Dysart, as she stepped from the train the next morning, with a critical glance at the Professor.

"The only climate on earth," replied the Professor, laughing to hide a shade of embarrassment; "and you—you are looking well, too."

Distinctly well, in her immaculate shirtwaist and sailor-hat, without touch of travel or dust about her.

"Oh, all climates suit me—even our own," Miss Dysart answered, lightly.

"Only one trunk, thank you; I am a 'transient.' And so this is your earthly paradise. Is that ferny thing a pepper-tree?"

She was so much absorbed in the landscape all through the short drive that the Professor ended by feeling quite at his ease. At the hotel door she dismissed him graciously.

"You may come back after lunch, if you like, and show me something of your paradise."

"Of course," said the Professor with unnecessary alacrity.

As he walked back he had a sensation as if a cool breeze from the Back Bay, at once bracing and chilling, had suddenly begun to blow across the summer air. The same sensation recurred later in the day when he found himself strolling with her under the drooping peppers to the Mission and through the town. Had they not often planned it—ages ago?—or had not he planned it in his mind—at least it had been tacitly understood, and—here it was.

She was looking admirably, too. The little precision of her starched collar and cuffs, and severe hat and correct gown, were an echo of his native city. She was the best type of the things he liked and approved and believed in.

And her mood was the bright mood of comradeship he always enjoyed. She faced the semi-tropical world with fresh, appreciative eyes, and her sense of humor was like his native air re-breathed. So singly did the place occupy her that the Professor expanded gradually and his tongue lost its knot.

"And you regret nothing here?" said Miss Dysart at last, suddenly.

"Nothing," replied the Professor, emphatically—and stopped.

"That is what it is to have a foreign grandmother. You do not even miss the symphony concerts—the Greek play—the Sunday afternoons."

The Professor laughed rather drearily.

"It is the same thing, I suppose, which leads the scarlet geranium to be a climber here, and calla-lilies to grow wild, and heliotrope to run up to the house-eaves. What a poem of a place!" she exclaimed, stopping. "And what a beautiful creature!"

"This is—er—where I am staying," replied the Professor, all his impediments returned. "That is Francisco—he is a handsome lad; and that is his sister, Miss Francisca, on the veranda. Pray come in and see the roses."

Miss Dysart followed him with composure, and gave her gloved hand cordially to Francisca.

"I have heard so much of your paradise," she said, "but I did not know it could be so true."

A bewildered expression crossed Francisca's face as the two advanced, but it passed, and her manner was as perfect as Miss Dysart's own. So was Francisco's, who placed a chair, and drew a rose-branch to shield the visitor's eyes from the sun—his own reflecting the blankness of Francisca's. Francisca had to call him twice to pass the wine she poured in the quaint old glasses, and which they could never conceivably be too poor to offer a guest.

As Miss Dysart sat sipping her wine politely—she was not fond of wine—she felt, as she looked, like one in a foreign land. The Professor, seated discreetly behind, noted this with a smile. But Francisco and Francisca were as much a part of the landscape as any rose in it.

The conversation turned, as conversations infallibly will, to the transcontinental journey, with the "You remember this—you saw that" of travellers.

Francisco and Francisca listened silently, only when Miss Dysart turned to the latter, she said with a kind of proud humility: "Ah! I know nothing of these things. I only know—this," with a gesture about her.

Miss Dysart and the Professor looked at her, and the value of "these things" was differently visible in their eyes.

"How beautiful she is!" thought the Boston girl.

"How much she knows and has seen!" thought Francisca.

The Professor's thoughts are not recorded. What he said was playful, but with an undertone which was not lost on one of his hearers. "'These things' are not worth your rose-garden, Miss Francisca—saying nothing of the rest of the rancho."

"Ah! it is nice of you to say so," replied Francisca, "but I do not believe it—nor does Miss Dysart."

Miss Dysart kept her lids discreetly lowered.

"By the way," she said, "I have someone to thank for a portion of a rose-garden myself. I don't suppose the hotels furnish that."

"Miss Francisca—" began the enlightened Professor.

"The Señor," interposed Francisca, quickly, "naturally wished you to have a Californian welcome. Francisco and I carried them down for him."

This time Miss Dysart raised her lids and looked straight at the girl before her.

"Thank you," she said, quietly.

"But if you care for roses," said Francisca, rising, "you must look at ours in the garden. We are proud of our roses, though it is not the rose season," she added; "for that you must come in April and May."

"Thanks!" exclaimed Miss Dysart, "but when one is used to one's roses by the half-dozen, this will do!"

"You shall have as many as you like every day, of course," said Francisca. "Or, perhaps," she added, quietly, "you will like to come and gather them yourself. The garden is yours."

"'Gather ye roses while ye may!'—you are most kind. I will take this one now, if I may," replied Miss Dysart, bending above a great white Lyonnaise.

"Just the rose I should expect you to choose," said the Professor, cutting it for her.

"Pray, why?" inquired Miss Dysart a little sharply.

"It is such a calm, vigorous, upright rose—a kind of apotheosis of our own New England roses. A well-bred rose; it does not straggle, nor shed its petals untidily. It would not look out of place in Boston;—and it has not too much color."

"You prefer these, I suppose," remarked the girl, coolly, glancing at his hand. The Professor looked down guiltily.

"I have been gleaming after you ladies. This is your Mermet."

"Thank you!" replied Miss Dysart dryly replacing the pink bud in her belt.

But the red rose remained in his hand.

Miss Dysart turned away abruptly. "What a place for a Flower Mission!"

Francisca looked puzzled. "Flower Mission—what is that?"

"The depth of your ignorance, Miss Francisca!" exclaimed the Professor. "You see, Mildred, Nature runs a Flower Mission on such a large scale that she deprives us of that—as well as many other legitimate philanthropies."

"Ah!" said Francisca, "now I do know what a Flower Mission is. It must be very helpful. And we do so little good with all these—only to dress the church."

"And welcome strangers," suggested Miss Dysart.

"My sister is always giving flowers away, and fruit," declared Francisco. "The Señor and the Padre know if that is true."

"But only for pleasure, thou foolish one," said Francisca, smiling at him.

Francisco did not smile back. He remained grave, and bowed their guest farewell, with his caballero air, without a word.

"What a beautiful, solemn boy!" exclaimed Miss Dysart as she walked down the street.

"Francisco? Oh, he can be merry enough; you must allow for the effect of a visitor from Boston."

"Pray let poor Boston alone! What an absolute partisan you have become!"

"Have I? Perhaps it is only my mean effort to hide our consciousness of inferiority. We have no Missions here—except Franciscan ones."

"We! our!" repeated Miss Dysart, emphatically. "Have you ceased to be a New Englander already? Is this the effect of this remarkable climate?"

"I am afraid—it is," replied the Professor, meekly.

And as he walked home that eastern breeze blew more keenly still. As one turns to the sun, he turned to the house hopefully. Only Francisco was still sitting on the top step gazing gloomily into space. The Professor laid an affectionate hand on the boy's shoulder.

"What is the matter, Francisco? Are you not well?"

"There is nothing, Señor," was the melancholy reply.

The Professor fidgetted restlessly about the veranda and lawn, feeling as if the whole place had been subtly changed. There was no Spanish that afternoon, either; Francisca was apparently too busy, for she did not come out at all.

In the evening, however, she was idle enough. Francisco and she sat on the steps and watched the moonlight make patterns on the walk below. The Professor had gone to call on Miss Dysart, inwardly reviling the social necessity which demanded starched linen and a black coat on such a night. It was still early when Francisca with some light word of excuse, and the little caress to her brother nothing could have made her forget, rose and went in.

It was not even late when the Professor with eager feet came up the path, all inlaid with the ferny tracery of shadows from the pepper-boughs. The veranda, apparently deserted, greeted him silently, and he stood a moment battling with an immense disappointment. It seemed to him that he had lost forever an evening out of his life.

Slowly he mounted the steps, and on the threshold he paused again. A long tendril of the Banksia swayed in the half-shadow, and surely his ears caught a suppressed sobbing breath. He made one step toward it.

"Francisca!"

"It is I, Señor," replied the melancholy voice of Francisco; and the boy came forward into the moonlight. "Did you wish anything, Señor?"

"Nothing," replied the Professor, mendaciously, his cheeks warm in the darkness.

"Good-night, Francisco!"

"Good-night, Señor!" returned the boy in the same melancholy tone.

Long after the Professor's light was extinguished, the lad lay watching the night away in the hammock.

The stamp of that vigil was on his face the next morning when he asked the Professor to advise him as to some orange-trees at the farther end of the ranch. The Professor, who had also passed a white night, gave a haggard consent. Francisca alone appeared fresh and smiling. The best artists do not adorn the stage.

There seemed nothing particular the matter with the grove, when they had reached it.

"Which are the trees in question?" asked the Professor, who at that moment wished all oranges in a climate much too tropical for them.

"Señor," replied Francisco, facing him—and it struck the Professor the boy had grown tall overnight—"do you love my sister?"

"Francisco!" exclaimed the Professor, violently, and the blood began to pound in his ears.

"I must know, Señor. When you spoke of an old friend, we thought, Francisca and I, of an old woman—and now here has come this young lady from your home, one of your people—and she calls you by your name, and you call her by hers. She has come because she cares for you, and you spend your time with her, and yet, Señor, you gave her back her rose and kept my sister's!"

There was a guilty movement of the Professor's hand toward his breast-pocket, instantly checked.

"When you came home last night you called my sister by name. Señor, this cannot be! I am not jealous; you have a right to love this other, but I must know. I do not say for a moment," he added, proudly, "that Francisca has thought of you, but she is very young. She might come to care, and—I will not have it so!"

"Francisco!" exclaimed the Professor again.

"We are poor now," said Francisco, lifting his head, "but my people were great people when yours, Señor—the Americans—were nobody!"

"Nonsense!" exclaimed the Professor, sharply, catching at a tangible point of remonstrance with relief. "My people were never 'nobody'—they were New Englanders."

Francisco bowed.

"Francisco," said the Professor, in a different tone, "I thought you loved me—I thought you trusted me."

"What has that to do with it, Señor?" inquired Francisco, sternly. "It is of my sister I think. If you do not love her you must go away at once."

"I will be answerable to your sister only," began the Professor.

"Pardon me, Señor, you will be answerable to me. I am the head of the family. Francisca is only a child," said this other child.

The Professor was silent. When he spoke, at last, he was answering himself rather than Francisco.

"I will go!"

Francisco winced, but did not flinch.

He made a gesture for the Professor to lead the way back, which the Professor did like a blind man. He could not have told whether his bitterness was toward the boy or himself. Half way he stopped.

"What am I to tell her?"

"You can have business—and she will understand."

The Professor ground his teeth, and going to his room, began grimly flinging things into his trunk. He was furious with Francisco, with himself, with the climate which could lead a man to this.

He ate his lunch in silence. So did Francisco. Men have these refuges. Francisca the woman, with a thread of speech, kept that silence from bursting. After lunch the Professor finished packing, wrote a brief note declining the Chair, and went down to buy his ticket. All the way down the landscape cried out to him.

As he left the station with his ticket in his hand he encountered Miss Dysart on the threshold with her purse in hers.

"What is the matter?" she exclaimed, after one glance. "Where are you going?"

"Home," answered the Professor. "I was coming to tell you."

Miss Dysart opened her lips, then closed them again, and turning without a word they walked on until the bend of the road threw them from the town into the country lane. There she stopped.

"Why are you going? You must have reasons."

"I have reasons—" He stopped, smitten with the conscious absurdity that she who was his principal reason had scarcely crossed his mind all day.

"Business—it—it is impossible for me to stay," he wound up, lamely.

"Why is it impossible?"

The Professor looked at her and anathematised the climate again.

"I—really cannot explain, Mildred," he said. "But there are reasons why—I feel obliged to go."

Miss Dysart's cheeks flushed, and she looked a moment at the wide valley before them.

"I feel that you are making the mistake of your life," she said, in a low voice.

The Professor made a vague gesture.

"But you will not go," she said, quietly. "You will think better of it. You will not do yourself so much wrong."

"I shall go. I have bought my ticket."

"I will buy it of you. I was on the way to buy one myself."

"You were—!" He looked at her in his turn. "We shall travel together, then."

"We shall do nothing of the kind. What is the use? If you go back you will simply break down again. You have your work here. You love this country."

The Professor's eyes swept mutely over the valley and hills, and the girl watched him jealously.

"You love it more than New England," she said, with a touch of bitterness.

"Differently!" exclaimed the poor Professor; "differently!"

"You love it more," persisted the New England girl.

The Professor drew a long breath. "Can I help it? One is affection—fondness; the other—" He stopped abruptly.

Her lips were closed tightly.

"Oh, you will suffer intolerable homesickness—you are homesick now. And then it is all of no use—Everard, you must stay; you must think better of it. Stay and take that Chair! There cannot be any business so pressing. It will be no use—not the slightest use for you to go."

In her earnestness she put her hand on his, but instantly withdrew it. Her troubled eyes looked straight into his, and the Professor's looked straightly back. But he shook his head, and suddenly she looked away.

"And you?"

"Oh, I," she answered, lightly; "I am a thorough-going dyed-in-the-wool New-Englander. I was brought up to go to church on Sunday and clean house twice a year, and have a proper respect for calling cards. I shall go on and join aunty at Santa Barbara, and get home in time for all my clubs and classes. Besides, I have been meaning to tell you, I am going to take a year in the College Settlement."

"A year in the College Settlement!" echoed the Professor, vaguely.

"Yes; that will suit me better than—this. Don't forget to send Francisco with the ticket! Good-by!"

She gave him her hand frankly, and once more their eyes encountered.

"If I had had a French grandmother, you see—it might have been different with me," she said with a touch of mirthfulness. "And that at least is true," she concluded to herself, looking so straight ahead that she walked a space beyond the hotel without seeing.

The Professor, going in the opposite direction, went like a man under sentence.

That "intolerable homesickness" was already upon him; but he was determined to go. He, too, was a New Englander. It is a great thing to have inherited principles.

He was determined to go—all the way up under the hanging peppers—all the way beside the scented limes; nor did his determination falter as he turned into the accustomed path under the oranges, and the sight and perfume of a thousand roses stormed him all at once.

There in the wonted place Francisca sat, steadily drawing the threads with unsteady fingers. Her lips might be a little pale, but they smiled. Even the rose was not missing from her hair.

Francisco, perfectly miserable and perfectly proud, rose mutely from the steps to salute the Señor.

The Señor with two gentle hands lifted the boy from his path, and made two steps to the chair—one touch drew the lace from the brave fingers.

"Francisca," said the Professor. "Francisca—Francisca!"

This was the only explanation he ever made, but in fact it was a perfect statement of the case.

If it needed any elaboration it might be held to receive it when Francisca, stooping—long afterward—to recover the abused lace, picked up with it something else.

"What is this?" she said, a little puzzled.

"Oh, that," said the Professor, "that is Miss Dysart's ticket! She is going away to-morrow."

"Ah!" said Francisca only.

"Francisco is to take it to her, and by the way, where is the dear lad?" He made a movement to rise, but Francisca stopped him, raising his hand in hers.

Out on the twilight air already heavy with sweet odors, came floating the sound of a guitar, low, but inexpressibly joyous and tender.

Francisca's eyes filled with tears, but "Caro Francisco!" she only said.

Daniel Webster cut from the seal a morsel of meal eight inches long by two inches square. He crowded out of sight as much of the delicacy as his mouth and part of his œsophagus would hold—about six inches—and sliced off the visible two inches with a blow of his knife.

"I never knew before," commented Praed, "why the Eskimo nose was so snubby. I now see it all. It is a beautiful example of the law of survival. If you touch an Eskimo anywhere, you draw blood. The long-nosed men of the Stone Age slashed their skins at meal-times and died of hemorrhage. Only the short-nosed men could live. Even Daniel carves perilously close to his lovely snub—and if Daniel's nose were a little shorter it would be a cavity."

"Just so," I replied, indifferently. Praed's jaunty talk jarred upon me, and his superior tone toward the Eskimos displeased me. He was attached to the Relief Party as botanist. I believe he was a Professor of Natural History in some Western college. He had climbed a mountain in the Canadian Rockies, a minor peak, no difficult ascent. I am told that a carriage road has recently been opened to the summit. But the mountain was a virgin peak and bore a living glacier, and Praed wrote for the papers about it and made a great achievement of his exploit. Upon the strength of his reputation he assumed to direct the policy of the Relief Expedition, and when the leader refused to fall in with his views, Praed grumbled, and once or twice approached open insubordination. The leader, a modest fellow, took his unruly botanist quietly, but several members of the party told me the man worried him.

However, when it suited his purpose, Praed could be humble enough. He discovered my irritation at once and evidently thought to soothe it.

"Oh, come now, old fellow," he said. "Don't take your Eskimos too seriously; I admire them as much as you do. Here, Daniel—Dahlgren, how do you say 'I like you' in Husky-tongue?"

"Iblee pee-yook amishuwa," answered I, in the pidgin-Eskimo we had learned to use during our year in the Far North.

"Iblee kumook amistwa," repeated Praed. Daniel received the communication with that heavy gravity which had won him his nick-name; his birth-name was Meeoo. Praed shrugged his shoulders.

"I never shall learn the lingo," he sighed. "Tell him I am going to give him this knife."

"Ooma pilletay iblee savik," I translated.

Daniel received the knife without comment. I caught a flash of pleasure in his eye, but it escaped Praed.

"He doesn't seem very grateful," he said. "I despair of the aborigine. He has no sense of humor, no gratitude, apparently no more affection than his dogs. He is pure selfishness. He is homely, he is fearfully unclean—"

"Professor Praed," I interrupted, "you arrived in Greenland three days ago. After you have knocked about with these fellows for a month you will change your opinions. As for dirt, eight or nine months in every year that bay is skimmed over with a little matter of five or six feet of ice. Until your party came, there was not a hatchet in the tribe to cut baths. In winter all these little streams that you see disappear. The Husky has to melt ice for drinking-water, and that is no light affair for him. In summer, it's true, he might bathe; perhaps you would like to try it."

"Those are all very well as excuses," responded Praed; "but they don't remove facts. Your dear friends are disgustingly soiled. And I am going to accept your invitation to take a bath."

He did accept it. He said he was accustomed to cold water, every morning (implying in his tone, that he feared I wasn't); that he had been baptized in the Susquehanna River through a hole in the ice, and that he guessed he could stand a summer sea in Greenland. He took off his clothes, swam out to a berg, grounded some forty feet off the beach, climbed hurriedly upon the ice, and danced up and down and shouted until we put off in a boat and rescued him. For three days afterward he shivered under blankets and drank up the little store of whiskey that remained in our supplies.

I was not sorry that this object-lesson had occurred. Our expedition had lived for nineteen months among the Eskimos. Two or three of us, whose chief duty was hunting, had learned to know the Innuit as one knows brothers. In a savage land you choose your friends, not because they can judge a picture or say witty things about their neighbors, but because they will go through any emergency by your side. More than once Daniel or one and another of our Eskimo comrades had saved us from death; more than once we had interposed between a Husky and the Kokoia. It was not pleasant to hear the cock-a-whoop members of the Relief Party, with their amateur knowledge of Arctic conditions, classify our comrades among the Greenland fauna.

But the Relief Party got on well with the Eskimos. They had a cargo of knives, hatchets, saws, needles, scissors, wooden staves, and all things that represent wealth to the Innuit. These things they distributed freely among the settlements; it was but natural that they should win the hearts of the Husky-folk.

Praed reappeared after his chill with a triumphant air, bearing bead necklaces and mirrors—for trading, he said. The Eskimos, however, shook their heads at these gewgaws, and Praed had to fall back upon useful articles. He obtained for himself the office of chief distributor, and waxed popular in the tribe.

One day, a fortnight or so after the episode of the bath, Daniel's wife, Megipsu, came running up the beach.

"The man with gifts is at my tupik. He desires something. I do not understand him. Will you come?"

I found Praed holding out the skirt of his coat toward Megipsu's little daughter.

"Like this," he was repeating. "Make me a coat. Scion of a savage race, if I had you at home, I should chastise you. You are stupid."

The child stared blankly at him.

"What is it, Professor Praed?" I asked.

His face turned red, and his reply came hesitatingly.

"Well, you see," he said, "your Greenland climate is not what I expected. When the wind is quiet, everything is warm. When the gale comes up in the afternoon, it is cold. Now the—the fur clothes; their odor is as the odor of abattoirs. At first I didn't comprehend the evident joy you have in them. But, on the whole, you seem so comfortable in all weathers, that I thought I'd try a suit myself. You see, I don't like to be lumbered with a leather jacket all the time."

"Hm!" reflected I, "Praed is learning his Greenland." All I suggested, however, was that if he minded the smell he might carry his leather coat out with him and leave it upon a rock until he should need it.

"And have it stolen," he said, with a glance of pity.

I perceived that he had a great deal of Greenland yet to learn. The most northern Eskimos do not steal. I arranged with Megipsu for a sealskin suit, however, to cost two pairs of scissors, a packet of sail-needles, a hunting-knife, a cracker-box, and Praed's wooden signal-whistle, which Megipsu fancied. In a week the Professor appeared in the silvery clothes. He was highly enthusiastic. I listened patiently while he explained the garments.

"You see, when it is warm," he said, "I can loosen the draw-string and throw back the hood, and a draught of air comes in from the bottom and goes out at the neck and carries off the perspiration. When the wind rises, snap! I haul in the draw-string, cover my head, and I am hermetically sealed. Not a chill can touch me."

"Precisely," I agreed. I had been wearing Eskimo clothes for a year and two months. "I understand," I added, "that you are going oogsook-hunting with Meeoo."

"Yes," he laughed. "I'm going to show the untutored savage the superiority of the rifle over the harpoon."

He learned more about Greenland upon that expedition. There was a floe, perhaps a mile wide, anchored near the mouth of the bay by half a dozen grounded bergs. To this floe the Eskimo and the white man set forth in kayaks. It was midnight when they left and we were asleep, but the Huskies at the village told us that the Professor couldn't manage his canoe, and finally had to permit Daniel to tow him.

Next night they returned with a seal. The Professor had many words of praise for a country where the sun never sets and there is no loss of working-time, but nothing to say about the hunting. At last he confessed that Daniel had killed the seal.

"The phoca barbata is a wary animal," he protested. "He will not permit a white face to approach. Two or three of the creatures were taking sun-baths upon the floe, but before I could creep within shooting distance they flopped into the water—a most ungraceful gait. All Arctic animals seem to be clumsy. I fired at one seal and I think I hit him, but he, too, dived. At last I resigned the rifle to Daniel. The savage squirmed over the ice like a worm. When the seals lifted their heads, Daniel lifted his. It is not surprising that he deceived them. His black muzzle looks precisely like that of the seal, and he wears a seal's fur. But his methods would never do in civilization. It took him half a day to crawl across that ice-floe."

"But he shot the seal," someone put in.

"No," replied the Professor. "That's just the point. He wormed himself along until he could almost reach the creature, and then sprang upon it and clubbed it to death with the butt."

I do not think Praed fully appreciated the marvellous adroitness of the hunter, nor the thoughtfulness of the man in saving a cartridge. He never seemed to comprehend that a charge of powder and bullet is worth more to an Eskimo than a diamond is to a bride at home. However, he began after that to treat the Huskies somewhat as if they were human beings.

His complete enlightenment as to the Eskimo character came all in a blaze at the end of our stay in Greenland. Our work there was done. Our explorations had been successful, our scientific collections were almost completed. There were only the loose ends to be gathered up.

The Professor had seen some desirable flowers in a valley across a glacier. Near that same glacier, in the preceding summer, I, who was acting as mineralogist of the main party, had piled a few specimens in a cranny to be carried to camp later, and I thought I might as well have them. We started forth together. Daniel and one or two other Huskies went with us for comradeship.

At the edge of the glacier we halted. It was a stupendous thing, crawling through a gap in the hills down into the sea like a section of the Midgard serpent. Halfway up the flank, I remember, there was a round hole, and out of it spouted a waterfall, red with basaltic mud. One of the Æsir might have made such a wound with his spear.

The back of the monster was rugged with crevasses.

"You can't cross here," I counselled. "You'd better try farther up, where it's smoother. I'll climb the cliff and take an observation, while you wait here and eat your luncheon. It doesn't do to hurry too much in Greenland."

I was almost an hour making my way up the crags to a point where I could take a bird's-eye view of the mass of ice. It was not a wide glacier—the cliffs opposite were not more than four miles away—but the great number of icebergs it threw off bore witness to the rapidity of its motion.

Suddenly, almost below me upon the blue-white ice, appeared four or five black figures. They emerged out of a cleft near the edge and marched steadily toward the centre of the glacier. The surface beyond them and upon either hand was criss-crossed with blue crevasses. Glints from the shining icicles hanging down their sides darted up to me as I stood, a mile away. It was very picturesque, but I had no heart for enjoyment.

"The man is crazy!" I burst out and scrambled down the rough stones to overtake him.

In a quarter of an hour I had reached the bottom of the gorge, between the glacier and the mountain. A furious torrent roared along the side of the ice, but a few pinnacles of rock protruding out of the stream gave foothold to cross. Opposite my landing-place a huge blue cleft in the ice, with a gradually rising peak, furnished easy ascent to the surface.

As soon as my head was clear of the cleft, I saw one of the Eskimos running toward me. I hastened to meet him.

"Pra' has fallen!" cried the man. "The ice has eaten him. He has gone to sleep forever."

"Damnation!" I shouted. "Run to the ship. Tell all the white men to come and bring a rope!"

He sped into the cleft and I moved on. Surmounting a mound in the ice, I could scan the whole surface. A quarter of a mile beyond me, the dark figures of the party crouched beside a long narrow crevasse. As I drew near, the tall figure of the Professor rose and faced me. He made no move to meet me, and when I had approached within a few feet of him, I saw that his hands hung limp at his sides and that he was sobbing. He could not speak, but he pointed to the crevasse. I threw myself at full length upon the ice and peeped over the brink.

A hundred feet below me, on the edge of a block of ice that hung unsteadily upon a mass of débris, lay Daniel. His head was doubled unnaturally forward upon his chest. The trash about him was stained with red. He must have died in an instant.

One look was enough. I sprang to my feet and faced the Professor.

"How did that happen?" I exclaimed. "Good God, man, speak! Don't act like a baby!"

Praed burst out sobbing afresh. It was a moment before he could control his tongue. When he spoke he clinched his hands and gazed blankly up the glacier toward the sun.

"It was I," he said; "he saved me. I fell—"

"Well?" I demanded.

"Do you see that shoulder of ice on this side of the crevasse, and the shelf jutting out opposite?"

I peered over the edge once more. The wall hung slightly out at the top and I had a good view of everything beneath. The cleft was not more than five feet wide, but, except for the débris lodged below me, it sank away into darkness. It may have been a thousand feet deep.

Some twenty feet down the side a ledge, perhaps twelve inches broad, started from the wall. Upon the opposite wall, about six feet higher, as far as I could estimate, allowing for the foreshortening, there was another shelf, considerably broader. Upon it sprang up the stumps of two or three heavy icicles that had grown down from an ice-bridge. Doubtless, anciently the débris caught below had been part of this bridge, and in its fall had carried the upper ends of the icicles with it. One end of the shelf slanted up almost to the surface.

I took this in at a glance.

"Yes," I said; "go on."

"I must confess from the beginning," he proceeded, in a curious monotone, as if his body, not his mind, were talking, "I doubted your judgment of the glacier. The access to the summit was evidently so easy that, I thought, some route across would surely open out before us. I desired to surprise you; I knew you could easily overtake us. Therefore, I set forth. The Eskimos hung back, but I promised them knives if they would follow.

"It was easy enough until we came to this crevasse. I attempted to leap across, but I slipped and fell. I do not know how it happened, but I struck several times and whirled over and over, and felt a blow upon the back of my head. It dazed me. When I came to myself I was seated upon that ledge, with my back against the wall. The wall slants in, as you see, and the outer edge of the ledge is raised, so I was secure.

"But I had only half recovered my senses and I began to cry out for help. I was so much disturbed that I didn't know what was going on until I saw someone upon the shelf opposite. Then I think I shouted louder. Suddenly there came another shock and I should have fallen, but someone held me up. It was Daniel. He must have leaped across."

He paused and I looked down again. The ledge, at its broadest barely a foot and a half wide, fell away into the wall, not two feet from the spot where Praed must have brought up. It was a brave leap.

"Go on," I commanded.

"Daniel laughed at me," resumed the Professor, like a child reading from a book, "and waited till I got back some of my self-possession. Then he made signs to me to spring across and catch the icicles with my arms. I was afraid. He laughed again and made another sign that he would lift me across. I let him take me by the knees and lift me until my head and waist rose above the shelf, and then I leaned forward and we both toppled over. I caught the icicles, and he held me firm and perhaps—I don't know—if I had kept still—"

I hastened to steady him.

"What did you do?" I asked. "Keep cool."

"I struggled. I squirmed with my feet in getting up—and kicked him free. When I was safe I tried to help him—I meant to help him. But the ledge was empty and he lay there."

"Good God!" was all I could say.

We passed the succeeding three hours in dead silence. Praed never moved, I think, and never took his eyes from the sky above the névé basin. The Eskimos sat quietly beside the grave of their friend. I sprang across the crevasse where it narrowed, descended to the shelf with the icicles, and mused upon the courage that had dared a leap to that narrow footing.

At last the party from the ship arrived with ropes. The leader of the Relief Party hastened in advance. His pale face turned red as he saw Praed, and he sprang forward with hand outstretched.

"Praed, old fellow!" he exclaimed. "By the Lord, I'm glad to see you alive. How did you get out?"

Praed turned toward him. I couldn't see his face, but the leader fell back.

"What's the matter?" he said. "What is it?"

"It's an accident," I put in. "Daniel has fallen and is dead."

Then Praed showed the first sign of manliness that I had ever seen in him.

"It is my fault," he proclaimed. "I am to blame for his death. I demand the right to fetch up his body."

In pity for his evident wretchedness, the leader consented. We lowered the Professor by a rope to the heap of trash. But as his weight bore upon the block where the body lay, the ice tilted and fell. Daniel fell with it. The ringing of icicles on either wall of the glacier lessened to a tinkling; the tinkling merged into a sustained harmonic, like the final note of some violin sonata. The tone died away. No final crash followed. The utmost depths were beyond our hearing.

During most of the voyage home, Praed behaved like a man in a dream. He rarely spoke, and when we addressed him he started before he replied. Only once did he show any trace of his ancient aggressive manner, and that was when someone said a slighting word of an Eskimo.

"The Eskimos," retorted Praed, "are heroes."

That was absurd. Perhaps there are three or four left in the tribe who would have done what Daniel did. The Professor was pitiful in his broken condition. We deemed him a chastened man.

The other day, however, a member of our old party came to see me. There is only one topic of conversation among men who have journeyed to the Far North. In the course of our Arctic gossip I asked for news of Praed.

"Haven't you heard?" asked my friend. "He is lecturing through the West. He has won a great reputation for his courage in descending into the crevasse."

"Hm!" I said, and both of us were silent. We were thinking of a strain of ice-music as unearthly as the Theme of the Grail, and of a vast white tomb, now doubtless afloat upon some Arctic sea. It bears the body of a better man than Praed.

The painting of George Butler has the interest of all art that is not manifestly the product of the influences of the moment, but owes its quality to the personality of the painter. Such is the interest of Whistler's, Winslow Homer's, the late Homer Martin's, LaFarge's, Vedder's. It is art that has a direct rather than an illustrative interest—a real rather than a historical value. It does not contribute much to the race, the moment, and the milieu theory. And, of course, it suffers some neglect at the present time, which apparently belongs to the theoreticians, and when, accordingly, the illustrative and historical interest of all data that can contribute to the construction of formulary is felt so universally and so nearly exclusively. But the play of those forces that are so highly differentiated as to escape classification—the forces that make up personality—rewards contemplation in quite a different way. It eludes the pursuit of philosophy, but it repays the æsthetic attention quite as much, quite as legitimately, as the study of that impersonal and rather mechanical result of current habits of mind and points of view, the art of the schools. Butler was a pupil—long ago—of Couture, and one may still see evidences of the fact in his portraits now and then. But compare his relation to Couture with that of Sargent to Carolus Duran, for example, in order to see how wholly personal his painting is and how little he owes to any mere source of acquisition, except in certain means of technical expression, early adopted and perhaps rather lazily adhered to. Power and distinction such as Sargent's, even when exhibited almost solely within the range of technical expression, have certainly an individuality of their own that is most striking and admirable. But it is an individuality of accomplishment rather than of quality, marked more by its eminence of excellence than by its native idiosyncrasy. Of course, any intimate association of the two painters would be more misleading than illuminating, and in contrasting them in this single but fundamental respect I only have in mind the radical difference thus illustrated between a painter who has achieved fame by distancing competition in following traditional lines and expressing current tendencies, and a painter who has a controlling personal bent and has followed that.

Butler has, at all events, always done just what he wanted to do, and in the strictest sense. His temperament has always dictated his expression, and in thoroughly imperious fashion. It may be said, indeed, to have dominated his intelligence to the extent, at least, of eliminating, as objects of curiosity, interest, or effort, everything not strictly in accord with itself. But the result has been the felicity of extreme concentration. If in doing what he wanted to do his wants have been few, he has, on the other hand, wanted them with an intensity proportionate to its singleness. Beauty exhibited in the human face and form has absorbed his artistic attention and activity. I remember not only no landscapes, but nothing really to be called a composition among his works. A few Barye-like animal fragments, of heroic mould—a tiger's head, a dog's head and shoulders, the foreparts of an extremely leonine lion, some very feline cats—are, I fancy, the only diversion of his devotion to the single figure and the portrait, and they are but examples of the instinctive exercise of his remarkable gift of representation, and show a fine faculty at play rather than at work. They do not illustrate the "discipline of genius" as some writer has defined art to be, but are merely "artistic" in the sense in which artists use the word, i.e., born of the impulse to create or reproduce an "effect" of some kind. In the portrait and the single figure, however, he has expressed himself with freedom, with zest, and with completeness.

Portraiture is a branch of art in which artistic aptitudes exhibit themselves in as individual a way as in any other perhaps, despite the preponderance usually assigned to the "likeness." And neither à priori nor historically can it be asserted that the imagination itself plays in portraiture an inferior part. The material is possibly less varied than that of landscape or decorative art; but that is nothing. A painter shows his quality quite as much within a limited as within a wider range. And the material of portraiture is at least as highly differentiated as it is limited. The interest of the "Lesson in Anatomy" resides in many of its various pictorial elements no doubt, but also and in the supreme degree in what Burger calls "the working of intellect," as seen in the countenances of the listening circle around the demonstrator. A painter who exhibits himself in portraying human intellect, emotions, character, personality, and with these highly complicated and maturely developed phenomena shows us his point of view and way of looking at things—which are what art and genius mainly are, according to Mr. Henry James—has an opportunity certainly of doing so on a very high plane. And on such a plane Butler is, I think, very much at home. The quality that all his portraits show in common is displayed with perfect freedom and the effect only to be attained by the easy exercise of a native gift.

In the first place they are extremely human. They are in no degree portraits à la mode and do not exploit the painter's virtuosity. They show, on the contrary, his respect for, and interest in, his model. One establishes relations through them with their originals. They have character in the moral and intellectual, as well as in the artistic sense. They acquire in this way a typical value. The Century Club's portrait of General Greene is also a portrait of the American soldier, as many another, easily mentioned, is that of the American lady. They are intellectually generalized, that is to say, endowed with a wider than merely individual interest. In the second place they are extremely pictorial. The most intractable subject is made agreeable by being handled with a touch directed by an instinctive preference for, and delight in, the beautiful. The sitter receives the benefit of a translation into a heightened and poetized medium without loss of anything essentially characteristic. In both these respects—their humanity and their pictorial quality—Butler's portraits are decidedly exceptional in current art.

Current art is certainly concentrated upon physical character rather than upon beauty, and current appreciation of it is in harmonious accord with its realistic effort and aim. One may refine speculation to the point of asserting that there is no opposition, essentially considered, between the two; that Rembrandt is as distinguished for his beauty as Raphael, and that on the other hand there is as much character in "The School of Athens" as in the "Lesson in Anatomy." But in matters of this kind terms are approximate only, and the fact that definition is a difficult matter does not obscure the plain truth that a marked difference exists between the work of a painter in whose mind an agreeable conception of an object mirrors itself, and that of one mainly anxious to be exact. Technic has spread prodigiously (quite as much perhaps as it has developed) in the present epoch, and has become rather arrogant in its aggrandizement. Criticism, too, in becoming largely technical has assisted the tendency, so far as it exerts an influence on practice. It has grown tired, no doubt, of its own commonplaces and generalities, its easy habit of estimating aims rather than accomplishment, its routine insensitiveness to aspect and perfunctory absorption in significance. But in assuming the painter's point of view—not a very esoteric one, certainly—it has not been quite self-respectfully discriminating enough to avoid the purely professional attitude. And it is perhaps time for the pendulum to swing back again a little, so that both in estimating and in enjoying the painter's art we may once more think of its intellectual rather than so wholly of its mechanical side, which latter we may also be sure, nowadays, will be quite carefully, and in many cases competently, attended to by the painters themselves.

In this way, at any rate, having in mind Butler's portraits, we shall be able, whether or no they have the accent and relief requisite for a portrait of the striking or "stunning" order—in this way we shall be able to appreciate what a fine talent it predicates to say of a painter that he sees the finest side of his subject. This is often understood as lightly as it is said, and taken to indicate merely a preference for the agreeable to the more markedly characteristic. And this is no doubt especially true in the field of portraiture. But certainly, and especially in portraiture, very little reflection is needed to show one that the great peril to be avoided, and the most constant menace, is caricature of one sort or another. It may be the caricature that comes from imperfectly seizing and imperfectly rendering the traits of the subject, the caricature that inadequacy is. Or it may be that which comes from undue and disproportionate accentuation of what is perceived too exclusively. Success depends upon avoiding both by forming a correspondent conception of the subject—a conception that is clear and consistent and positive—and painting that. The painter then copies his conception, not his model, and the representative value of his portrait will have precisely the interest of his conception—in so far, of course, as he is able to convey it. In a sense, to be sure, it may be said that it is impossible to paint a portrait without proceeding in this way, without first forming a conception of the sitter plastically, if not morally; that the result is necessarily the product of some preliminary conception. But that is metaphysical fine-spinning. Empirically we all know that unconscious caricature—which is the caricature here referred to—is due to either a defective or a distorted conception, in other words, to a mental image either so faint or so little correspondent to the original as to be practically no conception at all. Of a very large number of portraits, assuredly, it may be asserted that they embody no more developed and complete an antecedent image in the mind of the painter than a mere mechanical impression, barely distinct enough to direct the muscular movements requisite to register it upon canvas.

Butler's conception is, as I have intimated, always very sympathetically formed. It seems to indicate that he likes the sitter. His own cordiality enters into it. It is a result of harmonious relations between his imagination and the sitter's nature—the qualities, as well as the appearance, of the subject. Landscape painting, says Eugène Véron, is "the painting of one's emotions in the presence of nature." Butler's portraits, similarly, seem the painting of his idea of the subject in its suggestive, stimulating, rectifying presence. His conception implies a certain slowness of formation—the time to become acquainted, at least. That of such a painter as Sargent is so rapid as to seem quite impersonal, in comparison. It is apparently formed so quickly as to be really an impression rather than a conception at all. Though occasionally plainly transitory, it is often wonderfully vivid and searching, but rarely does it attest that assimilation which is a necessary preliminary of synthesis of such complexity as the conception of an active personality is entitled to. Its qualities are fundamentally "artistic." Butler's is at the same time more mature and less objective. Sargent's grandes dames, for example, are always fine ladies, but Butler's portraits of women have, all of them, whatever the sitter's type, the patrician look. Yet they are noble rather than elegant, and simple in their refinement. Their graciousness is native, and there is something ample in the ease with which they carry themselves. Add to this a poetic strain that characterizes very intimately their unaffected naturalness and gives them a universal as well as a specific interest, making of them abiding works of art.

The Italian type, which almost all his single figures illustrate, has had a particular charm for Butler—as the accompanying illustrations attest. And to its interpretation he has brought a remarkable and an instinctive sympathy. Stendhal would have liked his Italian figures—Stendhal, who better than any other writer, perhaps, has understood the Italian national character in its nobility as well as its finesse. Its finesse has not interested Butler, as indeed it could hardly interest a painter of his frank nature, and it is not, of course, a particularly paintable quality, though it must be confessed that Velasquez made something of it in his Innocent X. of the Doria Gallery. But its nobility, its largeness, its elemental and untormented quality, its freedom from pettiness and perplexities, its naturalness, its frank following of the dictates of will and passion, unsophisticated by the restraints and complications of vanity or self-consciousness in any of its myriad forms—can be read in Butler's Capri peasants as in a book. Health and vigor, an animation that is not feverish or hardly alert, the charm of pensiveness without sadness, of repose without revery, of work without strain, and existence without effort, they show in every expression of their large lines and simple, graceful attitudes. Now and then from the face shines a beautiful soul, its innocence untouched by experience and acquiring an almost pathetic quality from its unworldly, yet by no means spiritual serenity. They win your admiration and your heart. They have infinite capacities of feeling, of loving, of wilfulness, of self-sacrifice. They have been refined but not corrupted by their not too close or too reciprocal contact with civilization. They are all of a piece, and one comprehends the tragedy that excess would mean for them. In their way they are the acme of poetry and beauty expressed in character that has a wonderful correspondence to the envelope of its plastic manifestation. "I would rather," exclaimed once a friend of mine—a lady, naturally—"I would rather know one Jew than forty Gentiles, they have so much more character." Character in this sense the Italians possess in effusion, so to speak, and Butler's Capriotes and Venetians exhibit it with a native dignity and charm that one has only to think of such contrasts as Bastien-Lepage's, or even Millet's, peasants (far more interesting in many other respects, of course) to appreciate.

Some of them are beautifully painted, as all are sympathetically understood. The elder of the two boys here reproduced is an especially lovely bit of handling, of quality, of clarity in the gently gradated tones. A Capri woman seated in a straight-backed chair upon a homespun carpet making lace, is very nearly a marvel in the same way—a figure that painters themselves are particularly pleased with. The blue dress, the white bodice, the dark face and hands, the blue-black hair, the greenish background, and the gray and red carpet compose largely in masses of importance, and are painted with a liquid and luisant effect that is nevertheless as far as possible from a blended and effeminate one. The touch is firmer, perhaps, more positive and vigorous, certainly, in the Venetian water-carrier here engraved, though it is equally distant from anything brutal, and the brush is restrained by refinement within the lines of true distinction, with the result that the reader may discern even in black and white. Is she not a majestic creature—for pictorial purposes, at all events? Pictorially, at least, she is superb. This is what a painter of genuine temperament and an instinct for character can make out of a bare-headed girl lugging a jar of water. One perceives at once the vitality and completeness of Butler's purely plastic impressions.

So vital and complete indeed are his plastic impressions that they explain, I think, his fondness for the single figure, his carelessness for composition. It may be argued from this fondness that his talent is an impressionable rather than an imaginative one; that his plastic exceeds his architectonic faculty. But to argue this is to miss an important side of his art. He does not, it is true, see things in their relations so much as in their essence. The genius for image-making, for originating conceptions of complex and interdependent interest, for composition, in a word, he certainly does not possess in any marked degree, or we should have had from him at least some experimentation in this sort. But it is remarkable how little, in looking at one of his noble figures, one feels this as a limitation, how close an equivalent he gives us for it. He has comprehended his model so thoroughly, and realized it so perfectly; he has conveyed the character itself so essentially, so subtly, and so intimately, merely in presenting its plastic phenomena, that he has amply suggested its characteristic environment and everything related to it that, in an elaborate composition of which it should be the centre, might contribute to its completer expression and relief. It does not look in the least like the study for a figure in some picture or other. It is a picture in itself. We do not get the pleasure that the pictorial presentation of this contributory environment would give us; we forego the sensuous delight that composition is capable of affording; but the striking thing about Butler's single figures is that they themselves so impress the imagination as to make us forget that they are unaided by accessories. One may add, by the way, the not impertinent corollary that it would be difficult to find among contemporary painters one who could satisfactorily supply this omission on the same plane of conception and workmanship.

Butler's color is one of the prominent qualities of his painting. It is extremely full and rich, at the same time that it is quiet and grave. Color as color interests him, plainly, and he does not leave it to take care of itself, as is a frequent practice at the present time, when painters seem largely to have given over the illustration of its decorative possibilities and to be devoting themselves either to the value or the vibration, instead of the quality, of their color. On the one hand, the prevailing middle tint that is obviously middle tint, and, on the other, the high key of luminosity that is obviously mere pitch instead of melody, make such canvases as Butler's seem, perhaps, a trifle old-fashioned. How long is it since Titian was mentioned in a modern studio except as a subject of interest to the antiquarian? The practitioner who, twenty-five years ago, was endeavoring to divine his "secret," perhaps abandoning the quest as hopeless, has exchanged his atmosphere for one more rarefied, where, if the prospect is considerably more arid, there is correspondingly less demand on the vital forces. The lack in Butler's work of the current display of machinery—which is what an exclusive devotion to values or vibration may not unfairly be called—the lack of this inversion of the normal relations between means and ends, is not felt particularly, I fancy, by anyone but the professional practitioner. His low key and his unconcern for illustrating the potentialities of pure technic à propos de bottes, enable him to exhibit, very charmingly, his feeling for color in and for itself.

This gives his work an agreeable element of contrast to that most in vogue. One of his canvases is a welcome sight in a contemporary exhibition for this reason alone. A disproportionate devotion to color means the loss of many admirable sources of pleasure in art, beyond any doubt. And in the main these are especially admirable, because they are intellectual sources rather than sensuous. But the content of art is beauty, and beauty implies sensuousness, and in painting there is no such source of sensuous impression as color. A feeling for it is shared alike by the savage and the civilized man, and no doubt there is something barbarous in the delight which certain of its manifestations inspire. But this fact in itself shows the elemental and universal quality of this feeling and exhibits it as a mark of temperament. An acute or profound sense of its intimate appeal has characterized all epochs of expansion in the history of art, and its neglect has been the invariable accompaniment of that petrifaction by system which has assailed art at its every apogee. It is so sensitive as well as so elemental that it has suffered neglect as well in the development as in the decay of art; in the admirable evolution of Florentine line and mass following the lovely harmonies of Giottesque color, as well as in the sterilities succeeding the high Renaissance. It is the sign-manual of the spirit of invention, of imagination, of novelty, of free exercise of the faculties; and it individualizes the painter more sharply, perhaps, than any other characteristic. Color is his short-cut to sentiment, his most eloquent expression, his readiest means of communicating emotion. More than his style one may say that his color is the man.

Butler's feeling for color is not feeling for its subtleties. It is a broad and tranquil delight in its simpler effects. He is not fond of hues and tints, of gradations and oppositions, of jewel-like harmonies and delicate flushes, of iridescence and sheen and sparkle. His color is the suave and sweet vibration of tone, now rich and deep, now clear and soft, but vibrating mainly near the primaries. Its distinction is that it is always color; that one of his canvases nowhere loses its music, so to say, and becomes mere sound. Locally, it is always treated in large masses, giving the eye repose rather than stimulus, and the general harmony is correspondingly large. He sees things in color, evidently, which is very different from seeing color in things, as also from not seeing color at all. It is through their color that his figures acquire their solidity and firmness—a greater relief than they would have, perhaps, if wholly dependent on justness of value. Their color is so pervasive and penetrating, it characterizes and expresses them so forcibly, it is so emphatically the instrument of their realization, that without it they would lose identity.

It is difficult, for instance, to judge of the "Girl with Tambourine" minus the rich glow that pervades the orange background, warms the olive of the soft, smiling countenance, the plump neck, the slender arm and hand, and mellows the brown and red of the contadina costume. Reduced to black and white, with its values as carefully preserved as has been essayed in the accompanying reproduction, it unfailingly loses, in some measure, its reality, its roundness, its "tactile values"—to employ Mr. Berenson's favorite term. Scientifically speaking, this perhaps involves a contradiction since, speaking thus, "tactile values" depend upon the light and dark relations of color, and not upon its kind or quality. But the kind and quality of color have such power over the emotions, and leave such a lively impress on the retina that, practically and concretely, they serve to increase wonderfully the sense of a picture's substantiality at the same time that, and in virtue of the fact that, they increase the vivacity of the beholder's interest. Is it not possible that this consideration has been somewhat lost sight of in the logic that dictates the practice of much current painting? The old masters are there to show what a loss in mere substantiality, in weight and force, the neglect of color involves. Indeed, the "valueless" coach-panel painting of the English pre-Raphaelites points a similar moral, and perhaps accounts for the revival of interest in it. As to color as a vehicle for the communication of poetry, there is, of course, nowhere any dispute. Poetry implies personal feeling, and in no way can feeling be expressed more personally than in color. And if Butler's color, as well as his sympathetic interpretation of character, makes his canvases contrast, in a way that may be stigmatized as "old-fashioned," with the colorlessness and the brutality that abound, one may properly retort that the limitedness of the laudator temporis acti is clairvoyance itself compared with the partisanship of the pedant of the present.

Sitting on the veranda one summer day, ruminating over other people's troubles, and wondering how womankind can invent and discover so many things to fret and vex them, I was surprised to hear someone yelling at the gate, "You-all got any bitin' dogs here?" I was surprised, because the voice failed to match the serenity of the suburban scene. Its tone was unsuited to the surroundings, being pitched a trifle too high. Before I could make any reply the gate was flung open, and the owner of the voice, who was no other than Aunt Minervy Ann, flirted in and began to climb the terrace. My recognition of her was not immediate, for she wore her Sunday toggery, in which, following the oriental instincts of her race, the reds and yellows were emphasized with startling effect. She began to talk by the time she was half-way between the house and gate, and it was owing to this special and particular volubility that I was able to recognize her.

"Huh!" she exclaimed, "hit's des like clim'in' up sta'rs. Folks what live here bleeze ter b'long ter de Sons er Tempunce." There was a relish about this reference to the difficulties of three terraces that at once identified Aunt Minervy Ann. More than that, one of the most conspicuous features of the country town where she lived was a large brick building, covering half a block, across the top of which stretched a sign—"Temperance Hall"—in letters that could be read a quarter of a mile away.

Aunt Minervy Ann received a greeting that seemed to please her, whereupon she explained that an excursion had come to Atlanta from her town, and she had seized the opportunity to pay me a visit. "I tol' um," said she, "dat dey could stay up in town dar an' hang 'roun' de kyar-shed ef dey wanter, but here's what wuz gwine ter come out an' see whar you live at."

She was informed that, though she was welcome, she would get small pleasure from her visit. The cook had failed to make her appearance, and the lady of the house was at that moment in the kitchen and in a very fretful state of mind, not because she had to cook, but because she had about reached the point where she could place no dependence in the sisterhood of colored cooks.

"Is she in de kitchen now?" Aunt Minervy's tone was a curious mixture of amusement and indignation. "I started not ter come, but I had a call, I sho' did; sump'n tol' me dat you mought need me out here." With that, she went into the house, slamming the screen-door after her, and untying her bonnet as she went.

Now, the lady of the house had heard of Aunt Minervy Ann, but had never met her, and I was afraid that the characteristics of my old-time friend would be misunderstood, and misinterpreted. The lady in question knew nothing of the negro race until long after emancipation, and she had not been able to form a very favorable opinion of its representatives. Therefore, I hastened after Aunt Minervy Ann, hoping to tone down by explanation whatever bad impression she might create. She paused at the screen-door that barred the entrance to the kitchen, and, for an instant, surveyed the scene within. Then she cried out:

"You des ez well ter come out'n dat kitchen! You ain't got no mo' bizness in dar dan a new-born baby."

Aunt Minervy Ann's voice was so loud and absolute that the lady gazed at her in mute astonishment. "You des ez well ter come out!" she insisted.

"Are you crazy?" the lady asked in all seriousness.

"I'm des ez crazy now ez I ever been; an' I tell you you des ez well ter come out'n dar."

"Who are you anyhow?"

"I'm Minervy Ann Perdue, at home an' abroad, an' in dish yer great town whar you can't git niggers ter cook fer you."

"Well, if you want me to come out of the kitchen, you will have to come in and do the cooking."

"Dat 'zackly what I'm gwine ter do!" exclaimed Aunt Minervy Ann. She went into the kitchen, demanded an apron, and took entire charge. "I'm mighty glad I come 'fo' you got started," she said, "'kaze you got 'nuff fier in dis stove fer ter barbecue a hoss; an' you got it so hot in here dat it's a wonder you ain't bust a blood-vessel."

She removed all the vessels from the range, and opened the door of the furnace so that the fire might die down. And when it was nearly out—as I was told afterward—she replaced the vessels and proceeded to cook a dinner which, in all its characteristics, marked a red letter day in the household.

"She's the best cook in the country," said the lady, "and she's not polite."

"Polite! Well, if she was polite, she'd be a hypocrite, and if she was a hypocrite, she wouldn't be Aunt Minervy Ann."

The cook failed to come in the afternoon, and so Aunt Minervy Ann felt it her duty to remain over night. "Hamp'll vow I done run away wid somebody," she said, laughing, "but I don't keer what he think."

After supper, which was as good as the dinner had been, Aunt Minervy Ann came out on the veranda and sat on the steps. After some conversation, she placed the lady of the house on the witness-stand.

"Mistiss, wharbouts in Georgy wuz you born at?"

"I wasn't born in Georgia; I was born in Lansingburgh, New York."

"I know'd it!" Aunt Minervy turned to me and nodded her head with energy. "I know'd it right pine blank!"

"You knew what?" the presiding genius of the household inquires with some curiosity.

"I know'd 'm dat you wuz a Northron lady."

"I don't see how you knew it," I remarked.

"Well, suh, she talk like we-all do, an' she got mighty much de same ways. But when I went out dar dis mornin' an' holler at 'er in de kitchen, I know'd by de way she turn 'roun' on me dat she ain't been brung up wid niggers. Ef she'd 'a' been a Southron lady, she'd 'a' laughed an' said, "Come in here an' cook dis dinner yo'se'f, you ole vilyun,' er she'd 'a' come out an' crackt me over de head wid dat i'on spoon what she had in her han'."

I could perceive a vast amount of acuteness in the observation, but I said nothing, and, after a considerable pause, Aunt Minervy Ann remarked:

"Dey er lots er mighty good folks up dar"—indicating the North—"some I've seed wid my own eyes an' de yuthers I've heern talk un. Mighty fine folks, an' dey say dey mighty sorry fer de niggers. But I'll tell um all anywhar, any day, dat I'd lots druther dey'd be good ter me dan ter be sorry fer me. You know dat ar white lady what Marse Tom Chippendale married? Her pa come down here ter he'p de niggers, an' he done it de best he kin, but Marse Tom's wife can't b'ar de sight un um. She won't let um go in her kitchen, she won't let um go in her house, an' she don't want um nowhars 'roun'. I don't blame 'er much myse'f, bekaze it look like dat de niggers what been growin' up sence freedom is des tryin' der han' fer ter see how no 'count dey kin be. Dey'll git better—dey er bleeze ter git better, 'kaze dey can't git no wuss."

Here came another pause, which continued until Aunt Minervy Ann, turning her head toward me, asked if I knew the lady that Jesse Towers married; and before I had time to reply with certainty, she went on:

"No, suh, you des can't know 'er. She ain't come dar twel sev'mty, an' I mos' know you ain't see 'er dat time you went down home ter de fair, 'kaze she wa'n't gwine out dat year. Well, she wuz a Northron lady. I come mighty nigh tellin' you 'bout 'er whence you wuz at de fair, but fus' one thing an' den anudder jumped in de way; er maybe 'twuz too new ter be goshup'd 'roun' right den. But de way she come ter be dar an' de way it all turn out beats any er dem tales what de ol' folks use ter tell we childun. I may not know all de ins an' outs, but what I does know I knows mighty well, 'kaze de young 'oman tol' me herse'f right out 'er own mouf.

"Fus' an' fo'mus', dar wuz ol' Gabe Towers. He wuz dar, whence you wuz dar, an' long time 'fo' dat. You know'd him, sho', 'kaze he wuz one er dem kinder men what sticks out fum de res' like a waggin' tongue. Not dat he wuz any better'n anybody else, but he had dem kinder ways what make folks talk 'bout 'im an' 'pen' on 'im. I dunner 'zackly what de ways wuz, but I knows dat whatsomever ol' Gabe Towers say an' do, folks 'd nod der head an' say an' do de same. An' me 'long er de res'. He had dem kinder ways 'bout 'im, an' 'twa'n't no use talkin'."

In these few words, Aunt Minervy conjured up in my mind the memory of one of the most remarkable men I had ever known. He was tall, with iron-gray hair. His eyes were black and brilliant, his nose slightly curved, and his chin firm without heaviness. To this day Gabriel Towers stands out in my admiration foremost among all the men I have ever known. He might have been a great statesman; he would have been great in anything to which he turned his hand. But he contented himself with instructing smaller men, who were merely politicians, and with sowing and reaping on his plantation. More than one senator went to him for ideas with which to make a reputation.

His will seemed to dominate everybody with whom he came in contact, not violently, but serenely and surely, and as a matter of course. Whether this was due to his age—he was sixty-eight when I knew him, having been born in the closing year of the eighteenth century—or to his moral power, or to his personal magnetism, it is hardly worth while to inquire. Major Perdue said that the secret of his influence was common-sense, and this is perhaps as good an explanation as any. The immortality of Socrates and Plato should be enough to convince us that common-sense is almost as inspiring as the gift of prophecy. To interpret Aunt Minervy Ann in this way is merely to give a correct report of what occurred on the veranda, for explanation of this kind was necessary to give the lady of the house something like a familiar interest in the recital.

"Yes, suh," Aunt Minervy Ann went on, "he had dem kinder ways 'bout 'im, an' whatsomever he say you can't shoo it off like you would a hen on de gyarden fence. Dar 'twuz an' dar it stayed.

"Well, de time come when ol' Marse Gabe had a gran'son, an' he name 'im Jesse in 'cordance wid de Bible. Jesse grow'd an' grow'd twel he got ter be a right smart chunk uv a boy, but he wa'n't no mo' like de Towerses dan he wuz like de Chippendales, which he wa'n't no kin to. He tuck atter his ma, an' who his ma tuck atter I'll never tell you, 'kaze Bill Henry Towers married 'er way off yander somers. She wuz purty but puny, yit puny ez she wuz she could play de peanner by de hour, an' play it mo' samer dan de man what make it.

"Well, suh, Jesse tuck atter his ma in looks, but 'stidder playin' de peanner, he l'arnt how ter play de fiddle, an' by de time he wuz twelve year ol', he could make it talk. Hit's de fatal trufe, suh; he could make it talk. You hear folks playin' de fiddle, an' you know what dey doin'; you kin hear de strings a-plunkin' an' you kin hear de bow raspin' on um on 'count de rozzum, but when Jesse Towers swiped de bow cross his fiddle, 'twa'n't no fiddle—'twuz human; I ain't tellin' you no lie, suh, 'twuz human. Dat chile could make yo' heart ache; he could fetch yo' sins up befo' you. Don't tell me! many an' many a night when I hear Jesse Towers playin', I could shet my eyes an' hear my childun cryin', dem what been dead an' buried long time ago. Don't make no diffunce 'bout de chune, reel, jig, er promenade, de human cryin' wuz behime all un um.

"Bimeby, Jesse got so dat he didn't keer nothin' 'tall 'bout books. It uz fiddle, fiddle, all day long, an' half de night ef dey'd let 'im. Den folks 'gun ter talk. No need ter tell you what all dey say. De worl' over, fum what I kin hear, dey got de idee dat a fiddle is a free pass ter whar ole Scratch live at. Well, suh, Jesse got so he'd run away fum school an' go off in de woods an' play his fiddle. Hamp use ter come 'pon 'im when he haulin' wood, an' he say dat fiddle ain't soun' no mo' like de fiddles what you hear in common dan a flute soun' like a bass drum.

"Now you know yo'se'f, suh, dat dis kinder doin's ain't gwine ter suit Marse Gabe Towers. Time he hear un it, he put his foot down on fiddler, an' fiddle, an' fiddlin'. Ez you may say, he sot down on de fiddle an' smash it. Dis happen when Jesse wuz sixteen year ol', an' by dat time he wuz mo' in love wid de fiddle dan what he wuz wid his gran'daddy. An' so dar 'twuz. He ain't look like it, but Jesse wuz in about ez high strung ez his fiddle wuz, an' when his gran'daddy laid de law down, he sol' out his pony an' buggy an' made his disappearance fum dem parts.

"Well, suh, 'twa'n't so mighty often you'd hear sassy talk 'bout Marse Gabe Towers, but you could hear it den. Folks is allers onreasonable wid dem dey like de bes'; you know dat yo'se'f, suh. Marse Gabe ain't make no 'lowance fer Jesse, an' folks ain't make none fer Marse Gabe. Marse Tumlin wuz dat riled wid de man dat dey come mighty nigh havin' a fallin' out. Dey had a splutter 'bout de time when sump'n n'er had happen, an' atter dey wrangle a little, Marse Tumlin sot de date by sayin' dat 'twuz 'a year 'fo' de day when Jess went a-fiddlin'.' Dat sayin' kindled de fier, suh, an it spread fur an' wide. Marse Tom Chippendale say dat folks what never is hear tell er de Towerses went 'roun' talkin' 'bout 'de time when Jess went a-fiddlin'.'"

Aunt Minervy Ann chuckled over this, probably because she regarded it as a sort of victory for Major Tumlin Perdue. She went on:

"Yes, suh, 'twuz a by-word wid de childun. No matter what happen, er when it happen, er ef 'tain't happen, 'twuz 'fo' er atter 'de day when Jess went a-fiddlin'.' Hit look like dat Marse Gabe sorter drapt a notch or two in folks' min's. Yit he helt his head dez ez high. He bleeze ter hol' it high, 'kaze he had in 'im de blood uv bofe de Tumlins an' de Perdues; I dunner how much, but 'nuff fer ter keep his head up.

"I ain't no almanac, suh, but I never is ter fergit de year when Jess went a-fiddlin'. 'Twuz sixty, 'kaze de nex' year de war 'gun ter bile, an' 'twa'n't long 'fo' it biled over. Yes, suh! dar wuz de war come on an' Jesse done gone. Dey banged aloose, dey did, dem on der side, an' we on our'n, an' dey kep' on a bangin' twel we-all can't bang no mo'. An' den de war hushed up, an' freedom come, an' still nobody ain't hear tell er Jesse. Den you come down dar, suh, an' stay what time you did; still nobody ain't hear tell er Jesse. He mought er writ ter his ma, but ef he did, she kep' it mighty close. Marse Gabe ain't los' no flesh 'bout it, an' ef he los' any sleep on account er Jess, he ain't never brag 'bout it.

"Well, suh, it went on dis away twel, ten year atter Jess went a-fiddlin', his wife come home. Yes, suh! His wife! Well! I wuz stan'in' right in de hall talkin' wid Miss Fanny—dat's Jesse's ma—when she come, an' when de news broke on me you could 'a' knockt me down wid a per-meter fan. De house-gal show'd 'er in de parler, an' den come atter Miss Fanny. Miss Fanny she went in dar, an' I stayed outside talkin' wid de house-gal. De gal say, 'Aunt Minervy Ann, dey sho' is sump'n n'er de matter wid dat white lady. She white ez any er de dead, an' she can't git 'er breff good.' 'Bout dat time, I hear somebody cry out in de parler, an' den I hear sump'n fall. De house-gal cotch holt er me an' 'gun ter whimper. I shuck 'er off, I did, an' went right straight in de parler, an' dar wuz Miss Fanny layin' face fo'mus' on a sofy wid a letter in 'er han' an' de white lady sprawled out on de flo'.

"Well, suh, you can't skeer me wid trouble, 'kaze I done see too much; so I shuck Miss Fanny by de arm an' ax 'er what de matter, an' she cry out, 'Jesse's dead an' his wife come home.' She uz plum heart-broke, suh, an' I speck I wuz blubberin' some myse'f when Marse Gabe walkt in, but I wuz tryin' ter work wid de white lady on de flo'. 'Twix' Marse Gabe an' Miss Fanny, 'twuz sho'ly a tryin' time. When one er dem hard an' uppity men lose der grip on deyse'f, dey turn loose ever'thing, an' dat wuz de way wid Marse Gabe. When dat de case, sump'n n'er got ter be done, an' it got ter be done mighty quick."

Aunt Minervy Ann paused here and rubbed her hands together contemplatively, as if trying to restore the scene more completely to her memory.

"You know how loud I kin talk, suh, when I'm min' ter. Well, I talk loud den an' dar. I 'low, 'What you-all doin'? Is you gwine ter let Marse Jesse's wife lay here an' die des 'kaze he dead? Ef you is, I'll des go on whar I b'longs at!' Dis kinder fotch um 'roun', an' 'twa'n't "no time 'fo' we had de white lady in de bed whar Jesse use ter sleep at, an' soon's we got 'er cuddled down in it, she come 'roun'. But she wuz in a mighty bad fix. She wanter git up an' go off, an' 'twuz all I could do fer ter keep 'er in bed. She done like she wuz plum distracted. Dey wa'n't skacely a minit fer long hours, an' dey wuz mighty long uns, suh, dat she wa'n't moanin' an' sayin' dat she wa'n't gwine ter stay, an' she hope de Lord'd fergive 'er. I tell you, suh, 'twuz tarryfyin'. I shuck nex' day des like folks do when dey are honin' atter dram.

"You may ax me how come I ter stay dar," Aunt Minervy Ann suggested with a laugh. "Well, suh, 'twa'n't none er my doin's. I speck dey mus' be sump'n wrong 'bout me, 'kaze no matter how rough I talk ner how ugly I look, sick folks an' childun allers takes up wid me. When I go whar dey is, it's mighty hard fer ter git 'way fum um. So, when I say ter Jesse's wife, 'Keep still, honey, an' I'll go home an' not pester you,' she sot up in bed an' say ef I gwine she gwine too. I say, 'Nummine 'bout me, honey, you lay down dar an' don't talk too much.' She 'low, 'Le' me talk ter you an' tell you all 'bout it.' But I shuck my head an' say dat ef she don't hush up an' keep still I'm gwine right home.

"I had ter do 'er des like she wuz a baby, suh. She wa'n't so mighty purty, but she had purty ways, 'stracted ez she wuz, an' de biggest black eyes you mos' ever seed, an' black curly ha'r cut short kinder like our folks use ter w'ar der'n. Den de house-gal fotched some tea an' toas', an' dis holp 'er up mightly, an' atter dat I sont ter Marse Gabe fer some dram, an' de gal fotched de decanter fum de sidebode. Bein', ez you may say, de nurse, I tuck an' tas'e er de dram fer ter make sho' dat nobody ain't put nothin' in it. An', sho' 'nuff, dey ain't."

Aunt Minervy Ann paused and smacked her lips. "Atter she got de vittles an' de dram, she sorter drap off ter sleep, but 'twuz a mighty flighty kinder sleep. She'd wake wid a jump des 'zackly like babies does, an' den she'd moan an' worry twel she dozed off ag'in. I nodded, suh, bekaze you can't set me down in a cheer, night er day, but what I'll nod, but in betwix' an' betweens I kin hear Marse Gabe Towers walkin' up an' down in de liberry; walk, walk; walk, walk, up an' down. I speck ef I'd 'a' been one er de nervious an' flighty kin' dey'd 'a' had to tote me out er dat house de nex' day; but me! I des kep' on a-noddin'.

"Bimeby, I hear sump'n come swishin' 'long, an' in walkt Miss Fanny. I tell you now, suh, ef I'd a met 'er comin' down de road, I'd 'a' made a break fer de bushes, she look so much like you know sperrets oughter look—an' Marse Jesse's wife wuz layin' dar wid 'er eyes wide open. She sorter swunk back in de bed when she see Miss Fanny, an' cry out, 'Oh, I'm mighty sorry fer ter trouble you; I'm gwine 'way in de mornin'.' Miss Fanny went ter de bed an' knelt down 'side it, an' 'low, 'No, youer gwine no whar but right in dis house. Yo' place is here, wid his mudder an' his gran'fadder.' Wid dat, Marse Jesse's wife put her face in de piller an' moan an' cry, twel I hatter ax Miss Fanny fer ter please, ma'm, go git some res'.

"Well, suh, I stayed dar dat night an' part er de nex' day, an' by dat time all un um wuz kinder quieted down, but dey wuz mighty res'less in demin', speshually Marse Jesse's wife, which her name wuz Miss Sadie. It seem like dat Marse Jesse wuz livin' at a town up dar in de fur North whar dey wuz a big lake, an' he went out wid one er dem 'scursion parties, an' a storm come up an' shuck de boat ter pieces. Dat what make I say what I does. I don't min' gwine on 'scursions on de groun', but when it come ter water—well, suh, I ain't gwine ter trus' myse'f on water twel I kin walk on it an' not wet my foots. Marse Jesse wuz de Captain uv a music-ban' up dar, an' de papers fum dar had some long pieces 'bout 'im, an' de paper at home had a piece 'bout 'im. It say he wuz one er de mos' renounced music-makers what yever had been, an' dat when it come ter dat kinder doin's he wuz a puffick prodigal. I 'member de words, suh, bekaze I made Hamp read de piece out loud mo' dan once.

"Miss Sadie, she got mo' calmer atter while, an' 'twa'n't long 'fo' Marse Gabe an' Miss Fanny wuz bofe mighty tuck up wid 'er. Dey much'd 'er up an' made a heap un 'er, an' she fa'rly hung on dem. I done tol' you she ain't purty, but dey wuz sump'n 'bout er better dan purtiness. It mought er been 'er eyes, en den ag'in mought er been de way er de gal; but whatsomever 'twuz, hit made you think 'bout 'er at odd times durin' de day, an' des 'fo' you go ter sleep at night.

"Eve'ything went swimmin' along des ez natchul ez a duck floatin' on de mill-pon'. Dey wa'n't skacely a day but what I seed Miss Sadie. Ef I ain't go ter Marse Gabe's house she'd be sho' ter come ter mine. Dat uz atter Hamp wuz 'lected ter de legislatur, suh. He 'low dat a member er de ingener'l ensembly ain't got no bizness livin' in a kitchen, but I say dat he ain't a whit better den dan he wuz befo'. So be, I done been cross 'im so much dat I tell 'im ter git de house an' I'd live in it ef 'twa'n't too fur fum Miss Vallie an' Marse Tumlin. Well, he had it built on de outskyirts, not a big jump fum Miss Vallie, an' betwix' de town an' Marse Gabe Towers's. Dat wuz atter you went 'way, suh. Nex' time you come down, you mus' come see me. Me an' Hamp'll treat you right, we sholy will.

"Well, suh, in dem days dey wa'n't so many niggers willin' ter do an' be done by, an' on account er dat, ef Miss Vallie wa'n't hollin' fer 'Nervy Ann, Miss Fanny er Sadie wuz, an' when I wa'n't at one place, you might know I'd be at de yuther one. It went on dis away, an' went on twel one day got so much like an'er dat you can't tell Monday fum Friday. An' it went on an' went on twel bimeby I wuz bleeze ter say sump'n ter Hamp. You take notice, suh, an' when you see de sun shinin' nice an' warm an' de win' blowin' so saft an' cool dat you wanter go in a-washin' in it—when you see dis an' feel dat away, Watch out! Watch out, I tell you! Dat des de time when de harrycane gwineter come up out'n de middle er de swamp an' t'ar things ter tatters. Same way when folks gitting on so nice dat dey don't know dey er gittin' on.

"De fus' news I know'd Miss Sadie wuz bringin' little bundles ter my house 'twix' sundown an' dark. She'd 'low, 'Aunt Minervy Ann, I'll des put dis in de cornder here; I may want it some time.' Nex' day it'd be de same doin's over ag'in. 'Aunt Minervy Ann, please take keer er dis; I may want it some time.' Well, it went on dis away fum day ter day, but I ain't pay no 'tention. Ef any 'spicion cross my min' it wuz dat maybe Miss Sadie puttin' dem things dar fer ter 'sprise me Chris'mus by tellin' me dey wuz fer me. But one day she come ter my house, an' sot down an' put her han's over her face like she got de headache er sump'n.

"Wellum"—Aunt Minervy Ann, with real tact, now began to address herself to the lady of the house—"Wellum, she sot dar so long dat bimeby I ax 'er what de matter is. She ain't say nothin'; she ain't make no motion. I 'low ter myse'f dat she don't wanter be pestered, so I let 'er 'lone an' went on 'bout my bizness. But, bless you! de nex' time I look at 'er she wuz settin' des dat away wid 'er han's over her face. She sot so still dat it sorter make me feel quare, an' I went, I did, an' cotch holt er her han's sorter playful-like. Wellum, de way dey felt made me flinch. All I could say wuz, 'Lord 'a' mercy!' She tuck her han's down, she did, an' look at me an' smile kinder faint-like. She 'low, 'Wuz my han's col', Aunt Minervy Ann?' I look at 'er an' grunt, 'Huh! dey won't be no colder when youer dead.' She ain't say nothin', an' terreckly I 'low, 'What de name er goodness is de matter wid you, Miss Sadie?' She say, 'Nothin' much. I'm gwine ter stay here ter-night, an' ter-morrer mornin' I'm gwine 'way.' I ax 'er, 'How come dat? What is dey done to you?' She say, 'Nothin' 'tall.' I 'low, 'Does Marse Gabe an' Miss Fanny know you gwine?' She say, 'No; I can't tell um.'

"Wellum, I flopt down on a cheer; yessum, I sho' did. My min' wuz gwine like a whirligig an' my head wuz swimmin'. I des sot dar an' look at 'er. Bimeby she up an' say, pickin' all de time at her frock, 'I know'd sump'n wuz gwine ter happen. Dat de reason I been bringin' dem bundles here. In dem ar bundles you'll fin' all de things I fotch here. I ain't got nothin' dey give me 'cep'n, dish yer black dress I got on. I'd 'a' fotch my ol' trunk, but I dunner what dey done wid it. Hamp'll hatter buy me one an' pay fer it hisse'f, 'kaze I ain't got a cent er money.' Dem de ve'y words she say. I 'low, 'Sump'n must 'a' happen den.' She nodded, an' bimeby she say, 'Mr. Towers comin' home ter-night. Dey done got a telegraph fum 'im.'

"I stood up in de flo', I did, an' ax 'er, 'Which Mr.Towers?' She say, 'Mr. Jesse Towers.' I 'low, 'He done dead.' She say, 'No, he ain't; ef he wuz he done come ter life; dey done got a telegraph fum 'im, I tell you.' 'Is dat de reason you gwine 'way?' I des holla'd it at 'er. She draw'd a long breff an' say, 'Yes, dat's de reason.'

"I tell you right now, ma'm, I didn't know ef I wuz stannin' on my head er floatin' in de a'r. I wuz plum outdone. But dar she sot des es cool ez a curcumber wid de dew on it. I went out de do', I did, an' walk 'roun' de house once ter de right an' twice ter de lef' bekaze de ol' folks use ter tell me dat ef you wuz bewitched, dat 'ud take de spell away. I ain't tellin' you no lie, ma'm—fer de longes' kinder minnit I didn't no mo' b'lieve dat Miss Sadie wuz settin' dar in my house tellin' me dat kinder rigamarole, dan I b'lieve I'm flyin' right now. Dat bein' de case, I bleeze ter fall back on bewitchments, an' so I walk 'roun' de house. But when I went back in, dar she wuz, settin' in a cheer an' lookin' up at de rafters.

"Wellum, I went in an' drapt down in a cheer an' lookt at 'er. Bimeby, I say, 'Miss Sadie, does you mean ter set dar an' tell me youer gwine 'way 'kaze yo' husban' comin' home?' She flung her arms behime 'er head, she did, an' say, 'I ain't none er his wife; I des been playin' off!' De way she look an' de way she say it wuz 'nuff fer me. I wuz pairlized; yessum, I wuz dumfounder'd. Ef anybody had des but totch me wid de tip er der finger, I'd 'a' fell off'n dat cheer an' never stirred atter I hit de flo'. Ever'thing 'bout de house lookt quare. Miss Vallie had a lookin'-glass one time wid de pictur' uv a church at de bottom. When de glass got broke, she gimme de pictur', an' I sot it up on de mantel-shelf. I never know'd 'fo' dat night dat de steeple er der church wuz crooked. But dar 'twuz. Mo' dan dat I cotch myse'f feelin' er my fingers fer ter see ef 'twuz me an' ef I wuz dar.

"Talk 'bout dreams! Dey wa'n't no dream could beat dat, I don't keer how twisted it mought be. An' den, ma'm, she sot back dar an' tol' me de whole tale 'bout how she come ter be dar. I'll never tell it like she did; dey ain't nobody in de wide worl' kin do dat. But it seem like she an' Marse Jesse wuz stayin' in de same neighborhoods, er stayin' at de same place, he a-fiddlin' an' she a-knockin' on de peanner er de harp, I fergit which. Anyhow, dey seed a heap er one an'er. Bofe un um had come dar fum way off yan', an' ain't got nobody but deyse'f fer ter 'pen' on, an' dat kinder flung um tergedder. I speck dey must er swapt talk 'bout love an' marryin'—you know yo'se'f, ma'm, dat dat's de way young folks is. Howsomever dat may be, Marse Jesse, des ter tease 'er, sot down one day an' writ a long letter ter his wife. Tooby sho' he ain't got no wife, but he des make out he got one, an' dat letter he lef' layin' 'roun' whar Miss Sadie kin see it. 'Twa'n't in no envelyup, ner nothin', an' you know mighty well, ma'm, dat when a 'oman, young er ol', see dat kinder letter layin' 'roun' she'd die ef she don't read it. Fum de way Miss Sadie talk, dat letter must 'a' stirred up a coolness 'twix' um, 'kaze de mornin' when he wuz gwine on dat 'scursion, Marse Jesse pass by de place whar she wuz settin' at an' flung de letter in her lap an' say, 'What's in dar wuz fer you.'

"Wellum, wid dat he wuz gone, an' de fus' news Miss Sadie know'd de papers wuz full er de names er dem what got drownded in de boat, an' Marse Jesse head de roll, 'kaze he wuz de mos' pop'lous music-maker in de whole settlement. Den dar wuz de gal an' de letter. I wish I could tell dis part like she tol' me settin' dar in my house. You'll never git it straight in yo' head less'n you'd 'a' been dar an' hear de way she tol' it. Nigger ez I is, I know mighty well dat a white 'oman ain't got no bizness parmin' 'erse'f off ez a man's wife. But de way she tol' it tuck all de rough aidges off'n it. She wuz dar in dat big town, wuss'n a wilderness, ez you may say, by 'erse'f, nobody 'pen' in on 'er an' nobody ter 'pen' on, tired down an' plum wo' out, an' wid all dem kinder longin's what you know yo'se'f, ma'm, all wimmen bleeze ter have, ef dey er white er ef dey er black.

"Yit she ain't never tol' nobody dat she wuz Marse Jesse's wife. She des han' de letter what she'd kep' ter Miss Fanny, an' fell down on de flo' in a dead faint, an' she say dat ef it hadn't but 'a' been fer me, she'd a got out er de bed dat fust night an' went 'way fum dar; an' I know dat's so, too, bekaze she wuz ranklin' fer ter git up fum dar. But at de time I put all dat down ter de credit er de deleeriums, an' made 'er stay in bed.

"Wellum, ef I know'd all de books in de worl' by heart, I couldn't tell you how I felt atter she done tol' me dat tale. She sot back dar des ez calm ez a baby. Bimeby she say, 'I'm glad I tol' you; I feel better dan I felt in a mighty long time.' It look like, ma'm, dat a load'd been lift fum 'er min'. Now I know'd pine blank dat sump'n got ter be done, 'kaze de train'd be in at midnight, an' den when Marse Jesse come dey'd be a tarrfyin' time at Gabe Towers's. Atter while I up an' ax 'er, 'Miss Sadie, did you reely love Marse Jesse?' She say, 'Yes, I did'—des so. I ax 'er, 'Does you love 'im now?' She say, 'Yes, I does—an' I love dem ar people up dar at de house; dat de reason I'm gwine 'way.' She talk right out; she done come to de p'int whar she ain't got nothin' ter hide.

"I say, 'Well, Miss Sadie, dem folks up at de house, dey loves you.' She sorter flincht at dis. I 'low, 'Dey been mighty good ter you. What you done, you done done, an' dat can't be holp, but what you ain't gone an' done, dat kin be holp; an' what you oughter do, dat oughtn't ter be holp.' I see 'er clinch 'er han's an' den I riz fum de cheer." Suiting the action to the word, Aunt Minervy Ann rose from the step where she had been sitting, and moved toward the lady of the house.

"I riz, I did, an' tuck my stan' befo' 'er. I 'low, 'You say you love Marse Jesse, an' you say you love his folks. Well, den ef you got any blood in you, ef you got any heart in yo' body, ef you got any feelin' fer anybody in de roun' worl' 'cep'n' yo' naked se'f, you'll go up dar ter dat house an' tell Gabe Towers dat you want ter see 'im, an' you'll tell Fanny Towers dat you want ter see her, an' you'll stan' up befo' um an' tell um de tale you tol' ter me, word fer word. Ef you'll do dat, an' you hatter come back here, come! come! Bless God! come! an' me an' Hamp'll rake an' scrape up 'nuff money fer ter kyar you whar you gwine. An' don't you be a-skeer'd er Gabe Towers. Me an' Marse Tumlin ain't a-skeer'd un 'im. I'm gwine wid you, an' ef he say one word out de way, you des come ter de do' an' call me, an' ef I don't preach his funer'l, it'll be bekaze de Lord'll strike me dumb!' An' she went!"

Aunt Minervy paused. Once again she had wrought the miracle of summoning to life one of the crises through which she had passed with others. It was not the words she used. There was nothing in them to stir the heart or quicken the pulse. Her power lay in the tones of her voice, whereby she was able to recall the passion of a moment that had long spent itself; in the fluent and responsive attitudes; in gesticulation that told far more than her words did. The light from the vestibule lamp shone full upon her and upon the lady whom she unconsciously selected to play the part of the young woman whose story she was telling. The illusion was perfect. We were in Aunt Minervy Ann's house, Miss Sadie was sitting helpless and hopeless before her—the whole scene was vivid and complete. She paused; her arm, which had been outstretched and rigid for an instant, slowly fell to her side, and—the illusion was gone; but while it lasted, it was as real as any sudden and extraordinary experience can be.

Aunt Minervy Ann resumed her seat, with a chuckle, apparently ashamed that she had been betrayed into such a display of energy and emotion, saying, "Yessum, she sho' went."

"I don't wonder at it," remarked the lady of the house, with a long-drawn sigh of relief.

Aunt Minervy Ann laughed again, rather sheepishly, and then, after rubbing her hands together, took up the thread of the narrative, this time directing her words to me: "All de way ter de house, suh, she ain't say two words. She had holt er my han', but she ain't walk like she uz weak. She went along ez peart ez I did. When we got dar, some er de niggers wuz out in de flower-gyarden an' out in de big grove callin' 'er; an' dey call so loud dat I hatter put um down. 'Hush up!' I say, 'an' go on 'bout yo' bizness! Can't yo' Miss Sadie take a walk widout a whole passel er you niggers a-hollerin' yo' heads off?' One un um make answer, 'Miss Fanny huntin' fer 'er.' She sorter grip my han' at dat, but I say, 'She de one you wanter see—her an' Gabe Towers.'

"We went up on de po'ch, an' dar wuz Miss Fanny an' likewise Marse Gabe. I know'd what dey wanted; dey wanted ter talk wid 'er 'bout Marse Jesse. She clum de steps fus' an' I clum atter her. She cotch er 'breff hard when she fus' hit de steps, an' den it come over me like a flash how deep an' big her trouble wuz, an' I tell you right now, ef dat had 'a' been Miss Vallie gwine up dar, I b'lieve I'd a-flew at ol' Gabe Towers an' to' 'im lim' fum lim' 'fo' anybody could 'a' pull me off. Hit's de trufe! You may laugh, but I sho' would 'a' done it. I had it in me. Miss Fanny seed sump'n wuz wrong, de minnit de light fell on de gal's face. She say, 'Why, Sadie, darlin', what de matter wid you?'—des so—an' made ez ef ter put 'er arms 'roun' 'er; but Miss Sadie swunk back. Miss Fanny sorter swell up. She say, 'Oh, ef I've hurt yo' feelin's ter-day—ter-day uv all de days—please, please fergi' me!'

"Well, suh, I dunner whar all dis gwine ter lead ter, an' I put in, 'She des wanter have a talk wid you an' Marse Gabe, Miss Fanny; an' ef ter-day is one er de days her feelin's oughtn'ter be hurted, take keer dat you don't do it. Kyar 'er in de parler dar, Miss Fanny.' I speck you'll think I wuz takin' a mighty heap on myse'f, fer a nigger 'oman," remarked Aunt Minervy Ann, smoothing the wrinkles out of her lap, "but I wuz des ez much at home in dat house ez I wuz in my own, an' des ez free wid um ez I wuz wid my own folks. Miss Fanny look skeer'd, an' Marse Gabe foller'd atter, rubbin' a little mole he had on de top er his head. When he wus worried er aggervated, he allers rub dat mole.

"Well, suh, dey went in, dey did, an' I shot de do' an' tuck up my stan' close by, ready fer to go in when Miss Sadie call me. I had myse'f keyed up ter de p'int whar I'd 'a' tol' Marse Gabe sump'n 'bout his own fambly connection; you know dey ain't nobody but what got i'on rust on some er der cloze. But dey stayed in dar an' stayed, twel I 'gun ter git oneasy. All kinder quare idees run th'oo my head. Atter while some un pull de do' open, an' hol' it dat away, an' I hear Marse Gabe say, wid a trimble an' ketch in his th'oat, 'Don't talk so, chil'. Ef you done wrong, you ain't hurt nobody but yo'se'f, an' it oughtn'ter hurt you. You been a mighty big blessin' ter me, an' ter Fanny here, an' I wouldn't 'a' missed knowin' you, not fer nothin'. Wid dat, he come out cle'rin' up his th'oat an' blowin' his nose twel it soun' like a dinner-horn. His eye fell on me, an' he 'low, 'Look like you er allers on han' when dey's trouble.' I made answer, 'Well, Marse Gabe, dey might be wusser ones 'roun' dan me.' He look at me right hard an' say, 'Dey ain't no better, Minervy Ann.' 'Well, suh, little mo' an' I'd 'a' broke down, it come so sudden. I had ter gulp hard an' quick, I tell you. He say, 'Minervy Ann, go back dar an' tell de house-gal ter wake up de carriage-driver ef he's 'sleep, an' tell 'im to go meet Jesse at de train. An' he mus' tell Jesse dat we'd 'a' all come, but his ma ain't feelin' so well.' I say, 'I'll go wake 'im up myse'f, suh.' I look in de parler an' say, 'Miss Sadie, does you need me right now?' She 'low, 'No, not right now; I'll stay twel—twel Mr. Towers come.' Miss Fanny wuz settin' dar holdin' Miss Sadie's han'.

"I'll never tell you how dey patcht it up in dar, but I made a long guess. Fus' an' fo'mus', dey wuz right down fon' er Miss Sadie, an' den ef she run off time Marse Jesse put his foot in de town dey'd be a big scandal; an' so dey fix it up dat ef she wuz bleeze ter go, 'twuz better to go a mont' er two atter Marse Jesse come back. Folks may like you mighty well, but dey allers got one eye on der own consarns. Dat de way I put it down.

"Well, suh, de wuss job wuz lef' fer de las', 'kaze dar wuz Marse Jesse. Sump'n tol' me dat he oughter know what been gwine on 'fo' he got in de house, 'kaze den he won't be aggervated inter sayin' an doin' sump'n he oughtn'ter. So when de carriage wuz ready, I got in an' went down ter de depot; an' when Marse Jesse got off de train, I wuz de fus' one he laid eyes on. I'd 'a' never know'd 'im in de worl', but he know'd me. He holler out, 'Ef dar ain't Aunt Minervy Ann! Bless yo' ol' soul! how you come on anyhow?' He come mighty nigh huggin' me, he wuz so glad ter see me. He wuz big ez a skinned hoss an' strong ez a mule. He say, 'Ef I had you in my min' once, Aunt Minervy Ann, I had you in dar ten thousan' times.'

"Whiles de carriage rollin' 'long an' grindin' de san' I try ter gi' 'im a kinder inkling er what been gwine on, but 'twuz all a joke wid 'im. I wuz fear'd I mought go at 'im de wrong way, but I can't do no better. I say, 'Marse Jesse, yo' wife been waitin' here fer you a long time.' He laugh an' 'low, 'Oh, yes! did she bring de childun? I say, 'Shucks, Marse Jesse! Dey's a lady in deep trouble at Marse Gabe's house, an' I don't want you ter go dar jokin'. She's a monst'us fine lady, too.' Dis kinder steady 'im, an' he say, 'All right, Aunt Minervy Ann; I'll behave myse'f des like a Sunday-school scholar. I won't say bad words an' I won't talk loud.' He had his fiddle-case in his lap, an' he drummed on it like he keepin' time ter some chune in his min'.

"Well, suh, we got dar in de due time, an' 'twuz a great meetin' 'twixt Marse Jesse an' his folks. Dey des swarmed on 'im, ez you may say, an' while dis gwine on, I went in de parler whar Miss Sadie wuz. She wuz pale, tooby sho', but she had done firm'd 'erse'f. She wuz standin' by de fier-place, lookin' down, but she lookt up when she hear de do' open, an' den she say, 'I'm mighty glad it's you, Aunt Minervy Ann; I want you ter stay in here.' I 'low, 'I'll stay, honey, ef you say stay.' Den she tuck 'er stand by me an' cotch holt er my arm wid bofe 'er han's an' kinder leant again me.

"Bimeby, here come Marse Jesse. Trouble wuz in his eye when he open de do', but when he saw de gal, his face lit up des like when you strike a match in a closet. He say, 'Why, Miss Sadie! You dunner how glad I is ter see you. I been huntin' all over de country fer you.' He make ez ef ter shake han's, but she draw'd back. Dis cut 'im. He say, 'What de matter? Who you in mournin' fer?' She 'low, 'Fer myse'f.' Wid dat she wuz gwine on ter tell 'im 'bout what she done, but he wouldn't have it dat away. He say, 'When I come back ter life, atter I wuz drownded, I 'gun ter hunt fer you des ez soon's I got out'n de hospittle. I wuz huntin' fer you ter tell you dat I love you. I'd 'a' tol' you dat den, an' I tell you dat now.' She grip my arm mighty hard at dat. Marse Jesse went on mightly. He tell 'er dat she ain't done nobody no harm, dat she wuz welcome ter his name ef he'd 'a' been dead, an' mo' welcome now dat he wuz livin'. She try ter put in a word here an' dar, but he won't have it. Stan'in' up dar he wuz ol' Gabe Towers over ag'in; 'twuz de fus' time I know'd he faver'd 'im.

"He tol' 'er 'bout how he wrenched a do' off'n one er de rooms in de boat, an' how he floated on dat twel he got so col' an' num' dat he can't hol' on no longer, an' how he turn loose an' don't know nothin' twel he wake up in some yuther town; an' how, atter he git well, he had de plooisy an' lay dar a mont' er two, an' den he 'gun ter hunt fer her. He went 'way up dar ter Hampsher whar she come fum, but she ain't dar, an' den he come home; an' won't she be good 'nuff ter set down an' listen at 'im?

"Well, suh, dey wuz mo' in Marse Jesse dan I had any idee. He wuz a rank talker, sho'. I see 'er face warmin' up, an' I say, 'Miss Sadie, I speck I better be gwine.' Marse Jesse say, 'You ain't in my way, Aunt Minervy Ann; I done foun' my sweetheart, an' I ain't gwine ter lose 'er no mo', you kin des bet on dat.' She ain't say nothin', an' I know'd purty well dat eve'ything wuz all skew vee."

"I hope they married," remarked the lady of the house, after waiting a moment for Aunt Minervy Ann to resume. There was just a shade of suspicion in her tone.

"Oh, dey married, all right 'nuff," said Aunt Minervy Ann, laughing.

"Didn't it create a good deal of talk?" the lady asked, suspicion still in her voice.

"Talk? No, ma'm! De man what dey git de license fum wuz Miss Fanny's br'er, Gus Featherstone, an' de man what married um wuz Marse Gabe's br'er, John Towers. Dey wa'n't nobody ter do no talkin'. De nex' mornin' me an' Miss Sadie an' Marse Jesse got in de carriage an' drove out ter John Towers's place whar he runnin' a church, an' 'twuz all done an' over wid mos' quick ez a nigger kin swaller a dram."

"What do you think of it?" I asked the lady of the house.

"Why, it is almost like a story in a book."

"Does dey put dat kinder doin's in books?" asked Aunt Minervy Ann, with some solicitude.

"Certainly," replied the lady.

"Wid all de turmile, an' trouble, an' tribulation—an' all de worry an' aggervation? Well, Hamp wanted me ter l'arn how ter read, but I thank my stars dat I can't read no books. Dey's 'nuff er all dat right whar we live at widout huntin' it up in books."

After this just observation, it was time to put out the lights.

Early in May, 1898, Admiral Dewey brought from Hong Kong on the United States steamship McCulloch, Aguinaldo with seventeen of his colleagues and landed them at Cavité. Aguinaldo, in addition to prosecuting a vigorous campaign against the Spaniards, at once began organizing a government, dictatorial in form and in fact, of which Cavité remained the Capital until the arrival of General Anderson early in July. When the latter had established his head-quarters at Cavité and commenced active preparations for the coming attack on Manila, Aguinaldo changed his Capital to Bacoor, a little village a few miles from Cavité, and nearer to Manila. The Capital remained at Bacoor until it was seen that General Merritt would not permit armed Insurgents to enter Manila, when Malolos was proclaimed the Capital and Aguinaldo himself took up his residence there early in September, and the newly elected Filipino Congress met at the same place on the 20th of the same month.

From that time until its capture on March 31st Malolos was of the first importance to the Insurgents, but its fall was disappointing to many, for the cry of "On to Malolos" had been very popular, and it had been expected that the consequences of its occupation by American troops would be immediate and far-reaching. It simply furnished one more instance in history where the fall of an enemy's Capital failed to bring to a successful ending a campaign or a war. The only two instances that may be cited against this statement really tend to prove the proposition, for France was defeated before the entry of Paris, and the Confederacy was in its last extremity when Richmond fell. The immediate results would have been the same in either case if neither the one nor the other had been occupied.

Malolos is twenty-two miles from Manila, in the Province of Bulacan, on the railway connecting Manila with Dagupan, the only one in the Philippine Islands. This made it very accessible, but the real reason for the selection of Malolos as the Insurgent Capital was the fact that the present revolution had its first beginnings there; that the place persistently remained a hot-bed of revolution, and as a reward for the patriotism and loyalty of this picturesque little town, the legendary seat of the Bulacan kings, Aguinaldo fixed upon it as the site of his permanent Capital.

Aguinaldo now lays claim to descent from the Bulacan kings, but the best informed Filipinos say that this occurred to him after coming to Malolos, and was prompted by an effort to inspire among his followers a greater awe and respect. His followers ascribe to him supernatural powers that enable him to perform miracles and make him proof against the bullets of his enemies. Whether he encourages them in this belief cannot be verified. This peculiar power among the Filipinos is known as "anting anting" and is popularly supposed to be possessed by many. A wily Filipino goes through a battle or escapes some danger and then exhibits a curiously carved knife-handle or match-box or piece of jewelry or coin, and claims that his immunity is due to this trinket. He is at once regarded as an "anting anting" man, and his power and fame grow and spread at each subsequent lucky escape.

Malolos lies in the heart of a valley of marvellous fertility, extending north from Manila, and is surrounded by fields, large and small, fringed with rows of bamboo and cultivated principally to rice. As one rides through this valley, with the beautiful, glossy-leaved mango trees dotting it in all directions, he cannot fail to be reminded, if he has seen them both, of the beautiful Santa Clara Valley of California, so much are they alike.

The first mutterings of the revolution were heard in Malolos in 1888. In the same year Masonry was first introduced into the Philippine Islands by Don Centeno, the Civil Governor of Manila, who encouraged the diffusion of its teachings among the natives, and assisted in the formation of chapters in the city. He was influenced to do this through hostility to the Archbishop and to the Church.

Catholicism is radically opposed to secret societies of any kind, and the fight between the Archbishop, as representative of the Church, and the Masons grew so bitter that finally a determined attack was made upon the Archbishop's life. The leaders were promptly arrested and thrown into prison, and from there they sent a memorial to the Queen, remarkable for its eloquence, and for the fact that it revealed a widespread and deeply rooted devotion to the principles of freedom.

So strict was the surveillance over the meetings of the Masons in Manila, now that it was suspected they were merely a cloak for the revolutionary discussions, that Malolos soon became the Mecca for all revolutionists. It had always been a popular place for hunters and fishermen, and now many of the hunting lodges became Masonic rendezvous. The well-to-do and educated classes quickly and eagerly accepted the revolutionary teachings, and Malolos, from 1888, was regarded as a strong revolutionary centre. It must be borne in mind that the Filipino never became a pure Mason, accepting and practising the teachings of that ancient Society. Only some of the outward forms of the Society were adopted and used, under cover of which the spread of revolutionary ideas was made easy. Before 1888 there were scarcely two dozen Filipinos who were Masons, and these were residents of Paris or other European Capitals, but from that year the spread of the Society was rapid. In 1892 there were many lodges all over the Archipelago, and women were admitted as members. Its mysteries and symbols appealed to the barbaric, half-civilized natives, and these they retained, while their meetings were centres of discussions of the abstract and theoretical principles of freedom and independence with which the Malay brain is always pregnant. Discussions soon led to plotting against the Spanish authorities and the preliminary steps toward revolution, and what was Masonry only in name soon gave way to the Filipino League, of which Rizal was the leader. This league was an association with a basic form of Masonry, but whose true designs were political and anti-Spanish.

The methods of the league were soon found to be not radical enough by a majority of the members, and the league, in 1894, was dissolved and the formidable and bloody Katipunan formed under the leadership of Marcelo Hilarío del Pilar. Its object was to secure the freedom of the Philippines by putting to the sword all the Spaniards in the Archipelago. Manila, of course, was the seat of the supreme council of the Katipunan, and its branches or chapters were established in all the provinces and principal towns of the Islands.

Every member on being initiated into the Society received a name by which he was always thereafter known to the other members, and all were masked. In this way no one knew the identity of any other member, and even a man's next door neighbor or his brother or partner in business might be seated next to him nightly at the Katipunan Lodge and he would never be the wiser. At initiation the new member took a bloody oath and subscribed to it by dipping his pen in the blood drawn from an incision in his left arm. This idea is said to have been derived from a painting called "Pacto de Sangre," executed in Madrid by a famous Filipino painter, Juan Luna. After the revolution broke out in 1896, the members of the Katipunan could always be identified among the dead and prisoners by the scars.

A symbolic chart was in the possession of each member, and by that he could find the Katipunan Lodge in the provinces or towns wherever he might be and identify himself by means of it. As an example of the names borne by the members, General Ricarte, now in the Insurgents' army, was known under the name of "Vivora," meaning viper, poisonous snake. The present General Pilar, of whom so much is heard in the uprising against the Americans, is not the Pilar of Katipunan fame, though it is generally taken for granted that he is. The present Pilar assumed that name some years ago, but his characteristics are such as to easily lead one to believe that he and the Pilar who originated the Katipunan are one and the same.

From 1888 to 1892 Malolos seems to have been the most troublesome place in the Islands to the Colonial Government. There are slightly over five thousand towns distributed over the Archipelago, and out of these Malolos was the only one which rejected the parish priests that the Government selected. As Malolos was known to be much disaffected, great care was taken to select the most exemplary of priests to be sent there, but without avail. The first two sent were deported and the third assassinated.

El Katipunan del Norte (the northern branch of the Katipunan) was most active in the Province of Bulacan and especially around Malolos. Contributions poured into the revolutionary fund, and when open rebellion finally broke out in August, 1896, the Spaniards fought the rebels over very much the same ground as the Americans fought the Insurgents in the advance from Caloocan to Malolos and beyond. Peace was agreed upon in December, 1897, at Biac-na-bato, in the Province of Bulacan, and until May, 1898, there was a period of quiet in the Islands.

While the Insurgent Capital still remained at Cavité, Aguinaldo, on June 18th and 23d, respectively, issued the proclamations which gave his government a representative form. In the proclamation of the 18th he invites attention to the Providential circumstances that had placed him in the position in which he then found himself, and signifies his intention not to shrink from his responsibilities, but to make the redemption of his people, "from slavery and tyranny, regaining our liberty and entrance into the concert of civilized nations," the aspiration of his whole life, and the "final object of all my efforts and strength." In the same proclamation the methods were given by which the chiefs of towns and provinces and the representatives to the Revolutionary Congress were to be elected.

In the proclamation of the 23d it was directed that the Dictatorial Government should thereafter be styled the Revolutionary Government and that the Dictator should thenceforth be known as the President of the Revolutionary Government. The executive, legislative, and judicial powers were defined and the manner of administering them was prescribed, and on the 27th of June the rules concerning the details of installing the government were published.

From Bacoor, on the 6th of August, was sent the letter to foreign governments, in which the "President of the Revolutionary Government of the Philippines, and in the name and representation of the Philippine people, asks the support of all the powers of the civilized world, and earnestly entreats them to proceed to the formal recognition of the belligerency of the revolution and the independence of the Philippines, since they are the means designated by Providence to maintain the equilibrium between peoples, sustaining the weak and restraining the strong, to the end that by these means shall shine forth and be realized the most complete justice in the indefinite progress of humanity."

The Augustinians had been assigned to the parish of Malolos, and in fact this body of friars held all the livings in the Province of Bulacan. In the convent forming part of a new church erected by them at Malolos, Aguinaldo established his head-quarters, surrounded by considerable barbaric splendor and ceremonial. This was known as the "White House" of the Insurgent Government. The State Department was also in the same building, and in a less pretentious structure a hundred yards away the Treasury Department was installed.

When the American troops occupied Malolos, General MacArthur made this building his head-quarters, and in it was found a small field-safe containing some drafts and a little money. The postage and telegraph stamps issued by the Insurgent Government were made here, but all had been removed. The convent with the church adjoining, and the Treasury Department, were on two sides of the plaza of Malolos, and on the third side the War Department was established in some buildings that the Third United States Artillery afterward occupied.

The old Augustinian church some distance from the plaza had been taken as the Insurgent Capitol. Here the Revolutionary Congress assembled on September 20, 1898, and sat in deliberation until, in January, 1899, the Political Constitution of the Filipino State was given to the world. The constitution was proclaimed by Aguinaldo on the 21st of the month.

Malolos has a population variously estimated at from five to seven thousand, and as the Americans entered it, every man, woman, and child left with the retreating army.

With the exception of American troops moving about, the place was in a state of desolation. The refugees tried to take with them most of their valuable possessions, but the houses remained just as they left them. It was weeks before any of them dared to return, and then they came one or two at a time, carrying over their shoulders a bamboo rod to which was attached a white cloth as a flag of truce. They timidly approached their houses, and, finding them intact, and that there was really nothing to fear, hastened back into the country to bring their families and tell their neighbors.

---

Bellingham was intoxicated; there's no doubt about that at all," said Dawson of the Standard. "All the men on the press noticed it, and the chairman of his own party city committee admitted it to us."

"Well, that makes no difference except that it's all the better for us," said Blakely. "It was a rascally, indecent attack, and I guess the Governor won't hesitate any longer about using that matter you and I worked up for him."

Jim Blakely was the editor of a small newspaper with a very limited circulation but having an immense political influence. More keen than the shrewdest of the political managers, more powerful than the chairman of the State committee, more resourceful than all the party candidates, Jim Blakely sat in his little office and suggested the most successful political movements throughout the State. No candidate for Governor even thought of conducting a campaign without the aid and supervision of Jim Blakely.

But Governor Clinton in this campaign had been somewhat restive under his management, and had declined to follow absolutely the lines laid out for him by Blakely and his other party associates. Clinton's opponent, Alfred P. Bellingham, the rival candidate for Governor, was a man of fifty years or thereabout—a political nonentity, having no opinion on any question which he could not readily change the next day with the greatest facility. Bellingham had evaded every honest political issue which Clinton had tried to force him to meet, and had conducted a campaign of the lowest and meanest personalities. But, in opposition to the advice of his party managers, Governor Clinton had steadfastly declined to meet Bellingham with his own weapons; and to indulge in attacks upon his private career.

Then one day the reporter Dawson had brought to Blakely's attention certain important discoveries which he had made in raking over Bellingham's past life. The first was the record of an indictment found twenty-three years ago against Bellingham for altering ballots cast at a representative election, with intent to defraud, but which had been nol prossed by the District Attorney owing to political pressure. The other was the record of an arrest of Bellingham some ten years ago for drunkenness and disorderly conduct, and his conviction and fine.

Clinton's party managers had received the news with great enthusiasm. They had recognized the splendid ammunition which these records would furnish; and they earnestly urged the Governor to make use of them upon the stump.

"No," he had said, "I won't descend to that depth. If I can't be elected without the aid of those things, then let the people defeat me." And he had persisted in this refusal, despite the entreaties of his political friends and the disgust of his managers.

It was a quarter before nine; and at nine o'clock it was the custom for Governor Clinton to meet his party managers every morning, to discuss the speeches of his opponent made the night before and to plan out the trend for the evening's speeches.

"This vile abuse of last night of Bellingham's I guess will settle it," said Blakely again; and he went to his safe and brought out the certified copies of the legal proceedings. As he did so Governor Clinton came into the office. He looked flushed and angry.

"Have you read that scoundrel's attack on me, Jim?" he asked, hurriedly.

"Yes," said Blakely in a casual manner, as if it was of no importance. He knew enough now not to try to force the Governor's hand.

"Well?" said the Governor.

"Well," answered Blakely, "it's only what you've got to expect all the rest of the campaign." Clinton hesitated.

"No," he said; "Jim, I've got enough. He's pushed me too far. I can't keep silent any longer. Have you got those documents you were telling me about?" Blakely pointed silently to the papers on his desk and lit his pipe. Clinton examined them with curiosity.

"How do you account for last night's speech?" he asked.

"Drunk again," replied Blakely. "Tell him, Bill." Dawson repeated to the Governor what he had just told Blakely.

"I'm going up to Stanfield at half-past nine," the Governor said, still red with wrath, "to my old school, Copley School. They've asked me to make the speech on the awarding of the prize cups. It's Founder's Day. I'm billed for a rally to-night, I believe, at Dunster. Well, give me those papers and I'll make a speech there at Dunster to-night that will make that fool Bellingham wish he'd never been born."

Blakely, metaphorically speaking, inwardly hugged himself; but he did not allow Clinton to see his joy at the Governor's conversion. Placing the papers carefully in his pocket, Clinton, after a few minutes' further talk, left the room, rode down to the station, and boarded the Southwestern Limited. Blakely waited until the door closed behind him and then slapped Dawson on the back. "I thought we'd land him finally. The Governor's a mighty good fellow, but he's got some high-toned views about politics that have to be gradually knocked out of him. His political ideas are very crude. He thinks you catch an election just as you catch cold. He expects a grateful people to present him with the election on a silver salver."

"Whereas," replied Dawson, "the usual way is for the candidate to present the silver salver, or, rather, the silver salve to the people."

On the way to Stanfield in the train the Governor dictated his speech to his private secretary. He realized that he was reversing entirely his former course of action by entering now into a personal conflict. But the attack made upon him by Bellingham had been so gross, so violent, and so savagely uncalled for in every way, that Clinton felt that the people of the State should now be told the plain facts regarding the manner of man held out to them to be accepted as their Governor.

He began his speech in a vein of cool, keen sarcasm, taking up, point by point, the portions of Bellingham's career that had protruded into the public gaze. He showed how he had started as the smallest and lowest kind of a political hanger-on, and how he had then become a ward boss. He then charged him with the indictment for altering ballots. He pointed out how, although this was twenty-three years ago, Bellingham had done nothing since which showed that he was any more fit for election now than then. To be sure, the mark of the criminal law had appeared in his life but once since then. But a negative life, a life lacking in results, was no qualification for the high office of Governor. He took up the conviction for intoxication and disorderly conduct and the payment of the fine of ten years ago. With high scorn, he asked the people how they would be pleased to have a man with that record at the State House. Then coming down to last night's assault, he declared in positive language that he could not believe that any man in his normal condition would make such statements as Bellingham had done; that there was but one explanation; and that one, an explanation which he disliked to consider, but which it was his duty to state. The Governor then repeated the account of the meeting as given by the reporters, and he asked the people to draw their own inferences. In reference to the infamous personal charges made against him, he would condescend to reply but to three. He then showed how utterly groundless they were, and demanded that Bellingham instantly furnish proof or retract them in public. Having finished with a tremendous avalanche of scorn and contempt for his opponent's personal character and accusations, the Governor turned his attention to the political issues. He showed how Bellingham had been unwilling, or else too cowardly, to declare his position on any of the great questions; how he had evaded them on every stump, and had refused to reply to the direct and pertinent questions put to him every night by the Governor, vainly seeking to find out where he stood.

The Governor grew more and more rapid in his dictation as his feelings mastered him, and the private secretary had hard work in keeping up with him. The speech, however, was wholly finished in thirty-five minutes; and the secretary drew in his breath in relief and said, "Well, Governor, if there is anything left of old Bellingham after you've made that speech, they'll have to take a microscope to find it with."

"You think I'm right in making it, don't you?" asked the Governor. "I hate to resort to this style of warfare; but I am not obliged to sit still in silence forever under such a plan of campaign as they've been carrying on, am I?"

"Not at all," said the secretary; "I consider it your duty to the people of the State to show him up."

Vivid had been the excitement for the last two weeks at Copley, after it was definitely known that Governor Clinton was to visit his old school on Founder's Day and make the speech awarding the cups. Founder's Day was the great day of the year at Copley. The athletic games came in the afternoon, and in the evening the prize speaking, and later a dance. Two cups were always awarded for excellence in the field sports: one, the Master's Cup, which was awarded to the House, or dormitory, whose inmates won the greatest number of points in the games; the other—vastly prized by the boy who won it, and whose name was inscribed upon it for future generations of boys to admire—was the Founder's Cup, and was given to the boy who singly won the most points, showing the greatest all-around general excellence in the sports.

Every year there was the most vigorous rivalry between the boys of the Master's House and those of Prescott House, the other dormitory, for the possession of the Master's Cup; but this year there was still keener rivalry for the possession of the person of the Governor. When it became known that the Master of Prescott House was a class-mate in college of Governor Clinton, the Prescott House boys were certain that he would lunch with Mr. Toppan and with them. The Master's House boys were equally positive that only the Head Master, "Popper" Stoughton, was high enough to do honor to the head of the State. On the Governor's decision as to lunch, therefore, depended large transfers of property; and it was said that "Goggles" Livingston had even risked a whole week's allowance upon the less favored Prescott House side.

Application to studies at the recitation building that morning had been very desultory. Although the school was not to be dismissed until one o'clock, the delightful impending event of the Governor's arrival proved a distraction disastrous to continued efforts of learning. And the subdued excitement was so pervasive that when "Stump" Taylor translated "Gubernator navem navigat," as "the Governor sails a boat," little Mr. Saunders, the Latin tutor, forgot to correct him.

At about a quarter before twelve, steps were heard in the outer corridor, and every boy who had sufficient ingenuity immediately discovered that it was necessary for him to ask permission to leave the room and to consult the Master about something.

The Governor crossed the threshold of the old building with an interest that was solemn, and even almost painful, for this was the first time that he had been back to his old school for eighteen years.

After a few minutes' talk with the Head Master in his room, the Governor asked that the whole school might be called together. At the first sound of the bell a race began from all over the building toward the Master's room. And as Clinton stepped forward to speak, a continuous chorus of shrill cheers split the air. "Boys," he said, when a semblance of quiet began, "boys, I'm going to make a very short speech." Again the cheers broke out. "I see you appreciate that remark as well as your elders," he said. "You will be glad of its shortness, because you'll have to listen to a longer one this afternoon. All that I've got to say is that I've asked Mr. Stoughton to dismiss you now instead of at one o'clock. He has thought best to submit to my request before I order out the State troops to enforce it. I hope you'll get lots of fresh air and sport now before we meet on the field this afternoon. This session is now adjourned sine die. Those of the Latin class who can't translate that will have to stay after school." Tumultuous laughter followed these remarks, as if the restricted air of the school-room made a laugh easier there than elsewhere, when it was allowed at all. Many of the boys filed out at once; but a large number clustered in the doorway and vigorously discussed the Governor in low tones.

Clinton looked round the room. How natural it seemed, and how little changed! Certainly the school must have been very conservative.

"Why, you've even got the same old desks still," he said to Mr. Stoughton. Then he stepped down from the platform and went to a very much battered and inked-up desk which stood in front of all the others, and directly under the eyes of the master as he sat at his desk. "Who sits here now?" he asked, turning to a group of boys beside him.

"That's 'Kid' Nelson's," one said.

"Where is he?" asked Clinton. Amidst a great scuffling and pulling, and with many muttered jests flung at him, a handsome boy, old in face but small in stature, with a light of deviltry in his eye, came shambling forward and gently grinned in a somewhat shame-faced fashion. The Governor paused a moment, smiling. "I rather think I know why you sit here, Nelson," he said. "I guess my old master had as much trouble with me, 'Kid,' as Mr. Stoughton has now with you. That used to be my seat most of the time when I was here." Saying this, the Governor sat down at the low desk and squeezed his long legs in under the bottom of the desk, almost prying it from its iron feet.

Meanwhile "Kid" Nelson straightened up with a proud look, and when he went back to the group he was evidently being congratulated as a hero.

As he started to leave the room, Clinton suddenly stopped before a full-length portrait of a noble-looking, pleasant-faced man apparently about sixty years old. It was his old master—"Old Winthrop," as the boys used to call him. He had died ten years ago, and Clinton had hardly seen him more than once or twice since he left the school; but the picture almost brought the tears to his eyes as he stood there and thought how much he owed to that man. Winthrop had been a stern, almost relentless, master; but he had had a complete and true understanding of a boy's feelings and motives, and his boys had respected him as they had respected no one else, then or since. They had, every one of them, placed the most absolute confidence and reliance in him. No boy ever thought of questioning "Old Winthrop's" decision, whether the decision was on a point of school discipline, or athletics, or local etiquette, or morals, or base-ball, or religion. He had taught his boys, and they had learned the lesson well, that "honor" and "loyalty" were the two great things in life; that to do what was not honorable was to commit the greatest crime; that to be disloyal to one's friends, to one's school, to one's trust, to one's self, was to render one unfit to associate with gentlemen. "He made me all that I am now," murmured Clinton to himself, and his voice was a little husky. "If I've ever done anything well, it was due to him."

The Governor walked out across the fields with the Master and Mr. Toppan in the direction of Prescott House; and when it became noised about that, after all, he was to lunch there, and not at the Master's, the Prescott boys yelled with joy and jeered at their crestfallen rivals across the way.

On the way, Clinton stopped to look in at the Chapel, where the prize speaking was to take place that evening. He laughed as he saw the well-remembered platform with its faded red carpet, and as he thought of his woeful failure the last time he had engaged in a speaking competition there. How he had vainly and weakly struggled with "Webster's Reply to Hayne," and lost his memory in the middle of it, and had sat down ignominiously, and how Old Winthrop had said, "Well, Clinton, whatever else you may do when you grow up, you will never make a speaker. Your effort was the worst I ever heard here." That was the only point that Clinton could remember on which Winthrop had ever been wrong. Certainly the audiences that were nightly cheering the keen, eloquent speeches which the Governor had been making for the past four campaigns would vigorously question the fulfilment of Mr. Winthrop's prophecy.

"Well, boys, who is going to win the Founder's Cup to-day?" Clinton asked as he sat down in the lounging-room of the Prescott House and a crowd of boys stood round the doorway, while the bolder sat uneasily on the edge of a table in the middle of the room.

"'Scotty,' I mean Bruce Campbell," replied one, rather grudgingly. "He's a Master's House fellow; but we're afraid he'll get it; although 'Skipper' Cunningham—he's one of us"—he said, pointing to a tall, stalwart, nice-looking boy outside in the hall, "will give him a hard push for it. You see, 'Scotty's' bound to get three firsts at any rate, and it's a close thing in the two-twenty-yard dash. 'Skipper's' good for a lot of seconds and one first, anyway," he said, enthusiastically.

"Oh, no, two!" shouted another boy. And thereupon so lively a discussion arose that the overawing presence of the Governor was quite forgotten.

"Prescott House is sure of the Master's Cup, anyway," said "Kid" Nelson, confidentially, to the Governor; "you can bet on that." Since his interview in the school-room, "Kid" had quite taken Clinton under his personal care.

Meanwhile, the Governor arose, and examined the pictures of the old athletic teams on the wall, and to the delight of the boys pointed out his own picture, a disreputable-looking member of one of the old foot-ball teams, absolutely unrecognizable now as the portrayal of the tall, determined, grave-looking man who stood towering up above his devoted Copley School mates for the time being.

And he still further won their undying devotion when, after asking to be taken to a certain bedroom upstairs, he very knowingly walked to the window, leaned far out, then jerked himself back with a satisfied air; and then showed them how a boy, by hanging far out of the window while two other boys grasped his legs from within, could reach round the corner of the House, get hold of a portico-railing, and escape from the room and down to the earth in that fashion. It was undoubtedly an immoral thing for the Governor to do, but he could not resist the temptation, so delightful was it to find how the memory of all the most minute old misdeeds came back.

The Masters of Prescott House, indeed, were very sure that Governor Clinton's influence had been very far from good on their charges, when during the next week they found that five boys made use of this highly reprehensible method of exit from the House during evening study-hour.

And at dinner what could more delight the boys than that Clinton should decline to sit at the head of the table, next to the Master and the other teachers, but should sit opposite, with a boy on either side, where he could learn all the details of the present school life, its rivalries, revelries, hardships, and zests!

Time passed quickly, until at three o'clock all assembled on the field for the great expected sports. The day was glorious for them; a crisp, cold, sunny October day, with the air intensely clear and full of life. What a day and what splendid games, thought Clinton. And he cheered and shouted like a small boy, and was far less stately than the grave First Class fellows who called themselves "Sub-Freshmen" in a manner anticipatory of future dignities.

Firsts, Clinton found, counted ten; seconds, six; thirds, three, and fourths, one; and the contest between the two houses was as close as the greatest lover of sports could desire. And so it happened that when the two-hundred-and-twenty yard dash came off, the Master's House had won 78 points and Prescott House 80 points; and of the two favorites, "Skipper" Cunningham had won 44 and Bruce Campbell 41. It was admitted that this race would practically decide the day; for the few remaining points, it was fairly well settled in advance, would be equally divided between the various champions from the two houses.

"It's a good deal more exciting than a political campaign," said the Governor to his friend Toppan.

There was a half hush as the two rivals lined up for the famous event in the final heat—all the other competitors having fallen before them in the preliminary heats. Both Cunningham and Campbell were shapely formed youths, lithe and muscular, as each leaned far forward with his arms stretched out in the starting posture, waiting for the signal.

The pistol cracked and the two boys were off. By the time they had gone half the distance Campbell was leading by about eight feet. Suddenly he was seen to stagger and something appeared to fly off from his legs. He fell down upon the track and Cunningham darted by him with the race well in hand. As he went by, he looked to see what the matter was, and then suddenly stopped and turned around. His Prescott House followers held their breath in amazement, dismay, and confusion. Then the spectators saw what had happened. Campbell's running-shoe had become loose and the spikes had stuck in a clayey bit of soil, pulling the shoe off the foot, and causing Campbell's ankle to turn and throw him. Cunningham, panting for breath, walked up to Campbell as he rose slowly, and said, "Too bad, Bruce, old man; are you hurt?"

"No," said Campbell, "I got my wind a little knocked out. What did you stop for?"

"Oh, all right," said Cunningham; "then we'll start the race over again." And he walked down to the starting-line in a simple, unconcerned way.

And how the boys were cheering him,—even the Prescott House boys, though it was a great disappointment to them! The failure to win then might cost them both cups; and if Cunningham had won that race, both cups would have surely been theirs. But they cheered just the same.

The Governor turned to the Head Master. "By George!" he exclaimed, "that's a splendid piece of work. That boy is a boy to be proud of. Did you see, he had that race cold? It was a sure thing and he didn't choose to win it in that way."

Mr. Stoughton was looking proud and happy. "That's the kind of a boy he is," he answered; "and I believe," he added, with enthusiasm, "they all are, here."

The Governor was about to say that the credit was due to Stoughton when he noticed that preparations were being made to start the race over again. Again the pistol sounded and the two were off, this time Cunningham doing a little better than before, but still a few feet behind Campbell. Toward the end he began to gain, and the Prescott House boys plucked up courage again and yelled themselves hoarse; but Campbell was still in the lead and finally won by about three feet. The rest of the games came out just as expected; and, as prophesied, the two-twenty-yard dash was the decisive match, giving the Master's cup to the Master's House with 98 points, as against Prescott House with 96 points, and the Founder's Cup going to Campbell, with 51 points as opposed to Cunningham's 50 points. And so the Master's House boys celebrated their victory, and the Prescott House boys celebrated their defeated hero's, "Skipper" Cunningham's, deeds with almost as much vigor as if they owned the cups. And really it was not much of a defeat after all.

After the games, before going back to the school to award the cups formally, the Governor went up to where Cunningham stood. "Cunningham," he said, holding out his hand, "I want to shake hands with you. I'm proud of my school and that you're in it, and I'm proud of you. I want to ask you what made you stop and offer to run the race over again."

"Why," said the "Skipper," blushing and confused and very much surprised, "what else could I have done?"

"I know," said Clinton, "but it was only one of the fortunes of war that is likely to happen in any contest. The race was yours, legally, even if Campbell did have an accident. Why shouldn't you have run it out and won the cup for your House and for yourself?"

"Oh," replied the "Skipper," simply, "but that wouldn't have been honorable. It wouldn't have been fair and square. No Copley boy would do that."

It was all said in so matter of course a way that the Governor saw that the idea that elsewhere such a thing was often done had never entered the boy's head. As he walked away, the boy's words rang in the Governor's ears: "Not fair and square." "Not honorable." "No Copley boy would do that."

How the Governor made a splendid speech, and how he called them all "old fellows," and how he spoke of the fine traditions of honor which Mr. Winthrop began and Mr. Stoughton was continuing, and how he told them interesting stories of political fights—where they would be tempted to forget some of the Copley standard of conduct—and how he praised old "Skipper" Cunningham and said he was as good as the victor, and how he said that he was going to present a cup to the school to be fought for every year, to be called the "Winthrop Cup," and to be given to the second best athlete, and how he said he wanted the "Skipper's" name to be placed first upon it, and how he proposed three cheers for "Popper" Stoughton—all these things are part of the school history, and are handed down from one class to another as they tell of that memorable "Governor's Day."

And then all the boys escorted him down to the station, and gave their school, class, and House yells, and nearly jerked his arm off in their anxiety to shake hands with him. And at six o'clock the Governor and his private secretary boarded the limited express, which was due to arrive at the great manufacturing city of Dunster at half-past seven, just in time for the rally.

"Well, Mr. Porter, I'm sorry you were busy writing out that dictation, for you missed a good time. I haven't had as much fun for years. But now comes the serious part of life again. Have you got my speech all written out?"

Porter produced it; and the Governor read it through, while the lines in his face deepened and his look became again severe and judicial. "I guess that is sufficiently strong," he said, when he had finished reading—"but no more so than the man deserves; isn't that so?" he burst out heartily.

"No," said Porter.

"You don't think that I'm taking any unfair advantage of him?" Clinton asked, in a thoughtful manner. "Of course, his getting drunk may have been more in the nature of an accident than anything else and doesn't necessarily mean that a man is unfit," he said half to himself. "It's a rather small issue, isn't it, to make against a man?"

"You didn't make it; he did," answered Porter.

"You're right," said the Governor, suddenly, and he began to study the speech carefully in order to get it clearly in his head. "Let me have those copies of the court record," he said. Porter handed them over. "I don't want to use these against a man if it wouldn't be a square thing to do," again argued the Governor, "I don't want to take unfair advantage of a weakness on his part."

"As I said before," replied the private secretary, "I consider it your duty to the party."

"Of course," said the Governor, "that makes the difference; if only I personally were the gainer, I might hesitate, but the party welfare demands it."

At half-past seven the train drew into the station in Dunster; and a delegation of the city committee met the Governor with a barouche and four horses and a band playing "Hail to the Chief," to the Governor's great weariness. At the city hall, where the rally was to be held, a large crowd of representative men of the party were assembled in one of the ante-rooms behind the stage. As the party leaders filed up, Clinton addressed a few happy words to each, calling most of them by name, for he had spoken in Dunster before.

Then the signal was given and the chairman of the meeting, looking worried and overweighted by the responsibilities of the occasion, marched up on the stage with the Governor, the rest shambling on behind in a shamefaced manner and with a certain want of confidence, like a flock of sheep. While the chairman was making his speech of introduction, which occupied thirty-five minutes, and during which he carefully anticipated every point which the real speakers of the evening might make, the Governor took out the pages of his speech, together with the court documents, and again carefully read them through. At last the chairman finished and the Governor walked slowly forward on the platform. The audience cheered wildly and the band hurriedly played "Hail to the Chief." The Governor took his manuscript and the other papers out of his breast-pocket, laid them on the reading-desk, opened them, gave a last glance at them, and then stood waiting for the uproar to subside.

As he stood there looking at the excited audience, a man's face in the row next to the front caught his eye, and he looked hard at him. It seemed familiar. He gazed still harder; and then saw that it was no one whom he knew, but that the face was the very image of "Skipper" Cunningham's. Like a flash Clinton's mind reverted to the scene at Copley School. He heard the frank, manly, ringing tones of Cunningham as he replied to the Governor's remarks.... Then Clinton perceived that the audience was waiting for him, and he began,

"My friends of Dunster, not alone my party mates, I thank you for this warm welcome. I have tried my best while your Governor to earn it...."

Those who were there said that Governor Clinton had never before in his life made so strong and so ringing a speech. The argument was searching, filled with sarcasm, and unanswerable. It stirred his audience from the bottom of their souls, for the Governor's words seemed instinct with truth and sincerity. As he sat patiently waiting for the local candidate for the Legislature, who was speaking on painfully uninteresting local issues, to finish, Clinton felt, himself, that his speech had distinctly been a success. He also felt that he had done right.

After the Governor and his private secretary, Mr. Porter, rode back to the hotel, he said, "Porter, I wish you'd take down a note which I want to dictate to-night to Bellingham. Enclose with it the manuscript of my speech and the copies of those court records. Take a copy of it and send it to-night."

On reaching the hotel the note was written and mailed with the enclosures that night; and the Bellingham episode in the campaign appeared to be closed so far as Clinton was concerned.

The Governor reached the State House the next day about noon; and at three o'clock it was announced to him that Mr. Bellingham was outside and desired to see him.

"This is a nuisance," muttered the Governor as Bellingham entered. The latter walked up to the Governor and held out his hand.

"Governor," he said, "I am here to apologize to you most sincerely for what I said in my speech the other night. I want to tell you that I will make full explanation of it in the newspapers and to my audience to-night. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate and how much I thank you for your note and for your forbearance in not delivering that speech which you sent me. For I admit you had the greatest provocation to return the attack."

"Oh, that's all right," replied Clinton. "It's all over with now. Sit down."

Just at that moment Jim Blakely and Dawson, the Standard reporter, were waiting outside in the private secretary's office for a chance to see Clinton, and conversing excitedly with Mr. Porter.

"What in Heaven's name made the Governor give up his idea of attacking Bellingham in his speech last night?" asked Blakely. "I thought we had it all decided on that he was to produce those convictions and make a rousing assault on that blackguardly politician," he continued; "and now he goes up to Dunster and makes a speech with not a word in it on Bellingham's personal record, and confines himself to political issues. He's a damned fool, that's what he is. He's throwing away his election."

"I don't know," said Porter, "how it happened. All I know is, that he had his speech all prepared and was studying it all the way to Dunster. He had it on his desk before him, and I was never so surprised in all my life as I was when I heard him go on without a word regarding Bellingham's career or in reply to his disreputable assaults. And you could have knocked me down with a feather when the Governor told me last night to write to Bellingham and enclose the legal papers. Wait a minute and I'll show you what he wrote. I know I can rely on you two not to make it public."

Both men nodded, and Porter took up some paper on his desk and read:

"Well, I call the Governor, with all due respect, a tenderfoot," said the reporter, whistling loudly as he heard the letter. "Did the Governor give you any explanation of his change of heart?"

"Nothing very intelligible," answered Porter. "He said something about Copley School that I couldn't make out."

"And now," said Bellingham, inside the Executive Chamber, to Clinton, "I want to explain to you the other night's speech. I admit that I was drunk. I admit also that many years ago I was indicted for fraud at an election, and I was convicted and fined for drunkenness; but, God help me, I believe that during the past twenty years I have lived down these things. I hadn't touched a drop of liquor for five years up to the other night. It was, you remember, a very biting cold night, and I had driven six miles from the railroad station and was thoroughly chilled through. I felt it in my lungs, and my host over-persuaded me to take some whiskey. It went straight to my head, and you unfortunately know the result. But as I said before, Governor, I cannot sufficiently apologize to you and thank you for your forbearance."

The Governor paused a moment. "You needn't thank me," he said. "You should thank 'Skipper' Cunningham."

Bellingham looked confused and waited for the Governor to explain his remark. The Governor, however, offered no explanation. Instead, he said, abruptly, "Bellingham, I'm going to tell you, as man to man, that I think you've done a very square thing by coming here to me to-day and saying what you've said. I think it was a mighty frank and honorable thing in you to do. I'm proud to be fighting you as my opponent."

He paused again, and then suddenly asked, "You never were a Copley School boy, were you?"

"No," said Bellingham.

"You ought to have been," answered the Governor.

---

During the two years and nine months of Stevenson's residence at Bournemouth preceding the date of his father's death, he had made no apparent progress toward recovery. Every period of respite had been quickly followed by a relapse, and all his work, brilliant and varied as it was, had been done under conditions which would have reduced almost any other man to inactivity. The close and frequently recurring struggles against the danger of death from hemorrhage and exhaustion, which he had been used, when they first occurred, to find exciting, grew in the long run merely irksome, and even his persistent high courage and gayety, sustained as they were by the devoted affection of his family and many friends, began occasionally, for the first time, to fail him. Accordingly when in May, 1887, the death of his father severed the strongest of the ties which bound him to the old country, he was very ready to listen to the advice of his physicians, who were unanimous in thinking his case not hopeless, but urged him to try some complete change of climate, surroundings, and mode of life. His wife's connections pointing to the West, he thought of the mountain health-resorts of Colorado, and of their growing reputation for the cure of lung patients. Having let his house at Bournemouth, he accordingly took passage on board the steamship Ludgate Hill, sailing for New York from London on August 17, 1887, with his whole party, consisting of his wife, his widowed mother, whom they had persuaded to join them, his young stepson, and a trusted servant, Valentine.

It was the moment when his reputation had first reached its height in the United States, owing especially to the immense impression made by the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He experienced consequently—for the first time—the pleasures, such as they were, of celebrity, and also its inconveniences; found the most hospitable of refuges in the house of his kind friends, Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild, of Newport; and quickly made many other friends, including the owner and the editor of this Magazine, from whom he immediately received and accepted very advantageous offers of work. Having been dissuaded from braving, for the present, the fatigue of the long journey to Colorado and the extreme rigors of its winter climate, he determined to try instead a season at the mountain station of Saranac Lake, in the Adirondack Mountains, New York State, which had lately been coming into reputation as a place of cure. There, under the care of the well-known resident physician, Dr. Trudeau, he spent nearly seven months, from the end of September, 1887, to the end of April, 1888, with results on the whole favorable to his own health, though not to that of his wife, who at these high altitudes was never well. His work during the winter consisted of the twelve papers published in the course of 1888 in Scribner's Magazine, including, perhaps, the most striking of all his essays, A Chapter on Dreams, Pulvis et Umbra, Beggars, The Lantern Bearers, Random Memories, etc.; as well as the greater part of the Master of Ballantrae and The Wrong Box—the last originally conceived and drafted by Mr. Lloyd Osbourne—and the ballad of Ticonderoga.

The following letters are extracted from those which tell of his voyage to New York and his reception there at this date, and of his winter's life and work at Saranac:

[The following refers to a review by Mr. Gosse of Stevenson's volume of verse called "Underwoods." The book had been published a few weeks previously, and is dedicated, as readers will remember, to a number of physicians who had attended him at sundry times and places.]

[The Wondrous Tale referred to in the following is Stevenson's Black Arrow, which had been through Mr. Archer's hands in proof.]

[The lady to whom the following letter is addressed, as well as a good many others to come, had been a close friend of the Stevenson family at Bournemouth, and on their departure had been trusted to keep an eye on their interests in connection with their house (which had been let) and other matters, and to report thereon from time to time. In their correspondence Stevenson is generally referred to as the Squire and the lady as the Gamekeeper.]

[The following narrates the beginning of the author's labours on the Master of Ballantrae. An unfinished paper written some years later in Samoa, and intended for Scribner's Magazine, tells how the story first took in his mind. See Ed. ed. Miscellanies, vol. iv., p. 297.]

[On the 16th of April Stevenson and his party left Saranac. After spending a fortnight in New York, where, as always in cities, his health quickly flagged again, he went for the month of May into seaside quarters at Union House, Manasquan, on the New Jersey coast, for the sake of fresh air and boating. Here he enjoyed the society of some of his New York friends, including Mr. St. Gaudens and Mr. W. H. Low, and was initiated in the congenial craft of cat-boat sailing. In the meantime Mrs. Stevenson had gone to San Francisco, to see whether a sailing yacht was to be found available for a few months' cruise in the Pacific. The Casco, Captain Otis, was found accordingly; Stevenson signified by telegraph his assent to the arrangement; determined to risk in the adventure the sum of £2,000, of which his father's death had put him in possession, hoping to recoup himself by a book of Letters recounting his experiences; and on the 2d of June started with his mother and stepson for San Francisco, and thence for that island cruise from which he was never to return.]

[The following is addressed from Manasquan to a boy, the son of the writer's friend, the sculptor St. Gaudens; for the rest, it explains itself.]

---

It was a raw December afternoon—within a week of the end of term—and Taffy had returned from skating in Christ Church meadow, when he found a telegram lying on his table. There was just time to see the Dean, to pack, and to snatch a meal in hall, before rattling off to his train. At Didcot he had the best part of an hour to wait for the night-mail westward.

"Your father dangerously ill. Come at once."

There was no signature. Yet Taffy knew who had ridden to the office with that telegram. The flying darkness held visions of her, and the express throbbed westward to the beat of Aide-de-camp's gallop. Nor was he surprised at all to find her on the platform at Truro station. The Tredinnis phaeton was waiting outside.

He seemed to her but a boy after all, as he stepped out of the train in the chill dawn; a wan-faced boy and sorely in need of comfort.

"You must be brave," said she, gathering up the reins as he climbed to the seat beside her.

Surely yes; he had been telling himself this very thing all night. The groom hoisted in his portmanteau, and with a slam of the door they were off. The cold air sang past Taffy's ears. It put vigor into him, and his courage rose as he faced his shattered prospects, shattered dreams. He must be strong now, for his mother's sake; a man to work and be leant upon.

And so it was that whereas Honoria had found him a boy, Humility found him a man. As her arms went about him in her grief, she felt his body, that it was taller, broader; and knew, in the midst of her tears, that this was not the child she had parted from seven short weeks ago, but a man to act and give orders and be relied upon.

"He called for you ... many times," was all she could say.

For Taffy had come too late. Mr. Raymond was dead. He had aggravated a slight chill by going back to his work too soon, and the bitter draughts of the church had cut him down within sight of his goal. A year before, he might have been less impatient. The chill struck into his lungs. On December 1st he had taken to his bed, and he never rallied.

"He called for me?"

"Many times."

They went up the stairs together and stood beside the bed. The thought uppermost in Taffy's mind was—"He called for me. He wanted me. He was my father, and I never knew him."

But Humility in her sorrow groped amid such questions as these: "What has happened? Who am I? Am I she who yesterday had a husband, and a child? To-day my husband is gone, and my child is no longer the same child."

In her room old Mrs. Venning remembered the first days of her own widowhood; and life seemed to her a very short affair, after all.

Honoria saw Taffy beside the grave. It was no season for out-of-door flowers and she had rifled her hot-houses for a wreath. The exotics shivered in the northwesterly wind; they looked meaningless, impertinent, in the gusty churchyard. Humility, before the coffin left the house, had brought the dead man's old blue working-blouse and spread it for a pall. No flowers grew in the parsonage garden; but pressed in her Bible lay a very little bunch gathered, years ago, in the meadows by Honiton. This she divided and, unseen by anyone, pinned the half upon the breast of the patched garment.

On the evening after the funeral and for the next day or two she was strangely quiet, and seemed to be waiting for Taffy to make some sign. Dearly as mother and son loved one another, they had to find their new positions, each toward each. Now Taffy had known nothing of his parents' income. He assumed that it was little enough, and that he must now leave Oxford and work to support the household. He knew some Latin and Greek; but without a degree he had little chance of teaching what he knew. He was a fair carpenter, and a more than passable smith.... He revolved many schemes, but chiefly found himself wondering what it would cost to enter an architect's office.

"I suppose," said he, "father left no will?"

"Oh, yes, he did," said Humility, and produced it—a single sheet of foolscap signed on her wedding-day. It gave her all her husband's property absolutely—whatever it might be.

"Well," said Taffy, "I'm glad. I suppose there's enough for you to rent a small cottage, while I look about for work?"

"Who talks about your finding work? You will go back to Oxford, of course."

"Oh, shall I?" said Taffy, taken aback.

"Certainly; it was your father's wish."

"But the money?"

"With your scholarship there's enough to keep you there for the four years. After that, no doubt, you will be earning a good income."

"But—" He remembered what had been said about the lace-money, and could not help wondering.

"Taffy," said his mother, touching his hand, "leave all this to me until your degree is taken. You have a race to run and must not start unprepared. If you could have seen his joy when the news came of the demy-ship!"

Taffy kissed her and went up to his room. He found his books laid out on the little table there.

But the wedding, after all, did not take place until the beginning of October, a week before the close of the Long Vacation; and Taffy, after all, was present. The postponement had been enforced by many delays in building and furnishing the new wing at Carwithiel; for Sir Harry insisted that the young couple must live under one roof with him, and Honoria (as we know) hated the very stones of Tredinnis.

The Bishop came to spend a week in the neighborhood, the first three days as Honoria's guest. On the Saturday he consecrated the work of restoration in the Church and, in the afternoon, held a confirmation service. Taffy and Honoria knelt together to receive his blessing. It was the girl's wish. The shadow of her responsibility to God and man lay heavy on her during the few months before her marriage, and Taffy, already weary and dispirited with his early doubtings, suffered her mood of exaltation to overcome him like a wave and sweep him back to rest for a while on the still waters of faith. Together they listened while the Bishop discoursed on the dead Vicar's labors with fluency and feeling; with so much feeling, indeed, that Taffy could not help wondering why his father had been left to fight the battle alone.

On the Sunday and Monday two near parishes claimed the Bishop. On the Tuesday he sent his luggage over to Carwithiel, whither he was to follow after the wedding service, to spend a day or two with Sir Harry. It had been Honoria's wish that George should choose Taffy for his best man; but George had already invited one of his sporting friends, a young Squire Philpotts from the eastern side of the Duchy; and as the date fell at the beginning of the hunting season, he insisted on a "pink" wedding. Honoria consulted the Bishop by letter. "Did he approve of a 'pink' wedding so soon after the bride's confirmation?" The Bishop saw no harm in it.

So a "pink" wedding it was, and the scarlet coats made a lively patch of color in the gray churchyard; but it gave Taffy a feeling that he was left out in the cold. He escorted his mother to the church, and left her for a few minutes in the Vicarage pew. The bridegroom and his friends were gathered in a showy cluster by the chancel step, but the bride had not arrived, and he stepped out to help in marshalling the crowd of miners and mine-girls, fishermen, and mothers with unruly children—a hundred or so in all, lining the path or straggling among the graves.

Close by the gate he came on a girl who stood alone.

"Hullo, Lizzie—you here?"

"Why not?" she asked, looking at him sullenly.

"Oh, no reason at all."

"There might ha' been a reason," said she, speaking low and hurriedly. "You might ha' saved me from this, Mr. Raymond; and her too; one time, you might."

"Why, what on earth is the matter?" He looked up. The Tredinnis carriage and pair of grays came over the knoll at a smart trot and drew up before the gate.

"Matter?" Lizzie echoed with a short laugh. "Oh, nuthin'. I'm goin' to lay the curse on her, that's all."

"You shall not!" There was no time to lose. Honoria's trustee—the second cousin from London—a tall, clean-shaven man with a shiny, bald head, and a shiny hat in his hand—had stepped out and was helping the bride to alight. What Lizzie meant Taffy could not tell; but there must be no scene. He caught her hand. "Mind—I say you shall not!" he whispered.

"Lemme go—you're creamin' my fingers."

"Be quiet, then."

At that moment Honoria passed up the path. Her wedding gown almost brushed him as he stood wringing Lizzie's hand. She did not appear to see him; but he saw her face beneath the bridal veil, and it was hard and white.

"The proud toad!" said Lizzie. "I'm no better'n dirt, I suppose, though from the start she wasn' above robbin' me. Aw, she's sly.... Mr. Raymond, I'll curse her as she comes out, see if I don't!"

"And I swear you shall not," said Taffy. The scent of Honoria's orange-blossom seemed to cling about them as they stood.

Lizzie looked at him vindictively. "You wanted her yourself, I know. You weren't good enough, neither. Let go my fingers!"

"Go home, now. See, the people have all gone in."

"Go'st way in, too, then, and leave me here to wait for her."

Taffy shut his teeth, let go her hand, and taking her by the shoulders swung her round, face toward the gate.

"March!" he commanded, and she moved off whimpering. Once she looked back. "March!" he repeated, and followed her down the road as one follows and threatens a mutinous dog.

The scene by the church gate had puzzled Honoria, and in her first letter (written from Italy) she came straight to the point, as her custom was. "I hope there is nothing between you and that girl who used to be at Joll's. I say nothing about our hopes for you, but you have your own career to look to; and as I know you are too honorable to flatter an ignorant girl when you mean nothing, so I trust you are too wise to be caught by a foolish fancy. Forgive a staid matron (of one week's standing) for writing so plainly; but what I saw made me uneasy; without cause, no doubt. Your future, remember, is not yours only. And now I shall trust you, and never come back to this subject.

"We are like children abroad," she went on. "George's French is wonderful, but not so wonderful as his Italian. When he goes to take a ticket, he first of all shouts the name of the station he wishes to arrive at (for some reason he believes all foreigners to be deaf); then he begins counting down francs one by one, very slowly, watching the clerk's face. When the clerk's face tells him he has doled out enough, he shouts 'Hold hard!' and clutches the ticket. It takes time; but all the people here are friends with him at once—especially the children, whom he punches in the ribs and tells to 'buck up.' Their mothers nod and smile and openly admire him; and I—well, I am happy, and want everyone else to be happy!"

It was May morning, and Taffy made one of the group gathered on the roof of Magdalen Tower. In the groves below and across the river-meadows all the birds were singing together. Beyond the glimmering suburbs, St. Clement's and Cowley St. John, over the dark rise by Bullingdon Green, the waning moon seemed to stand still and wait poised on her nether horn. Below her the morning sky waited, clean and virginal, letting her veil of mist slip lower and lower until it rested in folds upon the high woodlands and pastures. While it dropped, a shaft of light tore through it and smote flashing on the vane high above Taffy's head, turning the dark side of the turrets to purple and casting lilac shadows on the surplices of the choir. For a moment the whole dewy shadow of the tower trembled on the western sky, and melted and was gone as a flood of gold broke on the eastward-turned faces. The clock below struck five, and ceased. There was a sudden baring of heads; a hush; and gently, borne aloft on boys' voices, clear and strong, rose the first notes of the hymn—

In the pauses Taffy heard, faint and far below, the noise of cowhorns blown by the street boys gathered at the foot of the tower and beyond the bridge. Close beside him a small urchin of a chorister was singing away with the face of an ecstatic seraph; whence that ecstasy arose the urchin would have been puzzled to tell. There flashed into Taffy's brain the vision of the whole earth lauding and adoring—sun-worshippers and Christians, priests and small children; nation after nation prostrating itself and arising to join the chant—"the differing world's agreeing sacrifice." Yes; it was Praise that made men brothers; praise, the creature's first and last act of homage to his Creator; praise that made him kin with the angels. Praise had lifted this tower; had expressed itself in its soaring pinnacles; and he for the moment was incorporate with the tower and part of its builder's purpose. "Lord, make men as towers!"—he remembered his father's prayer in the field by Tewkesbury; and at last he understood. "All towers carry a lamp of some kind"—why, of course they did. He looked about him. The small chorister's face was glowing—

Silence—and then with a shout the tunable bells broke forth, rocking the tower. Someone seized Taffy's college-cap and sent it spinning over the battlements. Caps? For a second or two they darkened the sky like a flock of birds. A few gowns followed, expanding as they dropped, like clumsy parachutes. The company—all but a few severe dons and their friends—tumbled laughing down the ladder, down the winding stair, and out into sunshine. The world was pagan after all.

At breakfast Taffy found a letter on his table, addressed in his mother's hand. As a rule she wrote twice a week, and this was not one of the usual days for hearing from her. But nothing was too good to happen that morning. He snatched up the letter and broke the seal.

"My dearest boy," it ran, "I want you home at once to consult with me. Something has happened (forgive me, dear, for not preparing you; but the blow fell on me yesterday so suddenly)—something which makes it doubtful, and more than doubtful, that you can continue at Oxford. And something else they say has happened which I will never believe in unless I hear it from my boy's lips. I have this comfort, at any rate, that he will never tell me a falsehood. This is a matter which cannot be explained by letter, and cannot wait until the end of term. Come home quickly, dear; for until you are here I can have no peace of mind."

So once again Taffy travelled homeward by the night mail.

"Mother, it's a lie!"

Taffy's face was hot, but he looked straight into his mother's eyes. She, too, was rosy-red, being ever a shamefast woman. And to speak of these things to her own boy—

"Thank God!" she murmured, and her fingers gripped the arms of her chair.

"It's a lie! Where is the girl?"

"She is in the workhouse. I don't know who spread it, or how many have heard. But Honoria believes it."

"Honoria! She cannot—" He came to a sudden halt. "But, mother, even supposing Honoria believes it, I don't see—"

He was looking straight at her. Her eyes sank. Light began to break in on him.

"Mother!"

Humility did not look up.

"Mother! Don't tell me that she—that Honoria—"

"She made us promise—your father and me.... God knows it did no more than repay what your father had suffered.... Your future was everything to us...."

"And I have been maintained at Oxford by her money," he said, pausing in his bitterness on every word.

"Not by that only, Taffy! There was your scholarship ... and it was true about my savings on the lace-work...."

But he brushed her feeble explanations away with a little gesture of impatience. "Oh, why, mother? Oh, why?"

She heard him groan and stretched out her arms.

"Taffy, forgive me—forgive us! We did wrongly, I see—I see it as plain now as you. But we did it for your sake."

"You should have told me. I was not a child. Yes, yes, you should have told me."

Yes; there lay the truth. They had treated him as a child when he was no longer a child. They had swathed him round with love, forgetting that boys grow and demand to see with their own eyes and walk on their own feet. To every mother of sons there comes sooner or later the sharp lesson which came to Humility that morning; and few can find any defence but that which Humility stammered, sitting in her chair and gazing piteously up at the tall youth confronting her: "I did it for your sake." Be pitiful, O accusing sons, in that hour! For, terrible as your case may be against them, your mothers are speaking the simple truth.

Taffy took her hand "The money must be paid back, every penny of it."

"Yes, dear."

"How much?"

Humility kept a small account-book in the work-box beside her. She opened the pages, but, seeing his outstretched hand, gave it obediently to Taffy, who took it to the window.

"Almost two hundred pounds." He knit his brows and began to drum with his fingers on the window-pane. "And we must put the interest at five per cent.... With my first in moderations I might find some post as an usher in a small school.... There's an agency which puts you in the way of such things; I must look up the address.... We will leave this house, of course."

"Must we?"

"Why, of course, we must. We are living here by her favor. A cottage will do—only it must have four rooms, because of grandmother.... I will step over and talk with Mendarva. He may be able to give me a job. It will keep me going, at any rate, until I hear from the agency."

"You forget that I have over forty pounds a year—or, rather, mother has. The capital came from the sale of her farm, years ago."

"Did it?" said Taffy, grimly. "You forget that I have never been told. Well, that's good, so far as it goes. But now I'll step over and see Mendarva. If only I could catch this cowardly lie somewhere, on my way!"

He kissed his mother, caught up his cap, and flung out of the house. The sea-breeze came humming across the sandhills. He opened his lungs to it, and it was wine to his blood; he felt fit and strong enough to slay dragons. "But who could the liar be? Not Lizzie herself, surely? Not—"

He pulled up short, in a hollow of the towans.

"Not—George?"

Treachery is a hideous thing, and to youth so incomprehensibly hideous that it darkens the sun. Yet every trusting man must be betrayed. That was one of the lessons of Christ's life on earth. It is the last and severest test; it kills many, morally, and no man who has once met and looked it in the face departs the same man, though he may be a stronger one.

"Not George?"

Taffy stood there so still that the rabbits crept out and, catching sight of him, paused in the mouths of their burrows. When at length he moved on, it was to take, not the path which wound inland to Mendarva's, but the one which led straight over the higher moors to Carwithiel.

It was between one and two o'clock when he reached the house and asked to see Mr. or Mrs. George Vyell. They were not at home, the footman said; had left for Falmouth, the evening before, to join some friends on a yachting cruise. Sir Harry was at home; was, indeed, lunching at that moment; but would no doubt be pleased to see Mr. Raymond.

Sir Harry had finished his lunch and sat sipping his claret and tossing scraps of biscuit to the dogs.

"Hullo, Raymond!—thought you were in Oxford. Sit down, my boy; delighted to see you. Thomas, a knife and fork for Mr. Raymond. The cutlets are cold, I'm afraid, but I can recommend the cold saddle, and the ham—it's a York ham. Go to the sideboard and forage for yourself. I wanted company. My boy and Honoria are at Falmouth, yachting, and have left me alone. What, you won't eat? A glass of claret then, at any rate."

"To tell the truth, Sir Harry," Taffy began, awkwardly, "I've come on a disagreeable business."

Sir Harry's face fell. He hated disagreeable business. He flipped a piece of biscuit at his spaniel's nose and sat back, crossing his legs.

"Won't it keep?"

"To me it's important."

"Oh, fire away then; only help yourself to the claret first."

"A girl—Lizzie Pezzack, living over at Langona—has had a child born—"

"Stop a moment. Do I know her?—Ah, to be sure—daughter of old Pezzack, the light-keeper—a brown-colored girl with her hair over her eyes. Well, I'm not surprised. Wants money, I suppose? Who's the father?"

"I don't know."

"Well, but—damn it all!—somebody knows." Sir Harry reached for the bottle and refilled his glass.

"The one thing I know is that Honoria—Mrs. George, I mean—has heard about it, and suspects me."

Sir Harry lifted his glass and glanced at him over the rim. "That's the devil. Does she, now?" He sipped. "She hasn't been herself for a day or two—this explains it. I thought it was change of air she wanted. She's in the deuce of a rage, you bet."

"She is," said Taffy, grimly.

"There's no prude like your young married woman. But it'll blow over, my boy. My advice to you is to keep out of the way for a while."

"But—but it's a lie!" broke in the indignant Taffy. "As far as I am concerned there's not a grain of truth in it!"

"Oh—I beg your pardon, I'm sure." Here Honoria's terrier (the one which George had bought for her at Plymouth) interrupted by begging for a biscuit, and Sir Harry balanced one carefully on its nose. "On trust—good dog! What does the girl say herself?"

"I don't know. I've not seen her."

"Then, my dear fellow—it's awkward, I admit—but I'm dashed if I see what you expect me to do." The baronet pulled out a handkerchief and began flicking the crumbs off his knees.

Taffy watched him for a minute in silence. He was asking himself why he had come. Well, he had come in a hot fit of indignation, meaning to face Honoria and force her to take back the insult of her suspicion. But after all—suppose George were at the bottom of it? Clearly Sir Harry knew nothing, and in any case could not be asked to expose his own son. And Honoria? Let be that she would never believe—that he had no proof, no evidence even—this were a pretty way of beginning to discharge his debt to her! The terrier thrust a cold muzzle against his hand. The room was very still. Sir Harry poured out another glassful and held out the decanter. "Come, you must drink; I insist!"

Taffy looked up. "Thank you, I will."

He could now and with a clear conscience. In those quiet moments he had taken the great resolution. The debt should be paid back, and with interest; not at five per cent., but at a rate beyond the creditor's power of reckoning. For the interest to be guarded for her should be her continued belief in the man she loved. Yes, but if George were innocent? Why, then, the sacrifice would be idle; that was all.

He swallowed the wine, and stood up.

"Must you be going? I wanted a chat with you about Oxford," grumbled Sir Harry; but noting the lad's face, how white and drawn it was, he relented and put a hand on his shoulder. "Don't take it too seriously, my boy. It'll blow over—it'll blow over. Honoria likes you, I know. We'll see what the trollop says; and if I get a chance of putting in a good word, you may depend on me."

He walked with Taffy to the door—good, easy man—and waved a hand from the porch. On the whole he was rather glad than not to see his young friend's back.

From his smithy window Mendarva spied Taffy coming along the road, and stepped out on the green to shake hands with him.

"Pleased to see your face, my son! You'll excuse my not askin' 'ee inside; but the fact is"—he jerked his thumb toward the smithy—"we've a-got our troubles in there."

It came on our youth with something of a shock, that the world had room for any trouble beside his own.

"'Tis the Dane. He went over to Truro yesterday to the wrastlin', an' got thrawed. I tell'n there's no need to be shamed. 'Twas Luke the Wendron fella did it—in the treble play—inside lock backward, and as pretty a chip as ever I see." Mendarva began to illustrate it with foot and ankle, but checked himself and glanced nervously over his shoulder. "Isn' lookin', I hope? He's in a terrible pore about it. Won't trust hissel' to spake and don't want to see nobody. But, as I tell'n, there's no need to be shamed; the fella took the belt in the las' round and turned his man over like a tab. He's a proper angletwitch, that Wendron fella. Stank 'pon en both ends, and he'll rise up in the middle and look at 'ee. There was no one a patch on en but the Dane; and I'll back the Dane next time they clinch. 'Tis a nuisance, though, to have'n like this—with a big job coming on, too, over to the light-house."

Taffy looked steadily at the smith. "What's doing at the light-house?"

"Ha'n't 'ee heerd?" Mendarva began a long tale, the sum of which was that the light-house had begun of late to show signs of age, to rock at times in an ominous manner. The Trinity House surveyor had been down, and reported, and Mendarva had the contract for some immediate repairs. "But 'tis patching an old kettle, my son. The foundations be clamped down to the rock, and the clamps have worked loose. The whole thing'll have to come down in the end; you mark my words."

"But, these repairs?" Taffy interrupted. "You'll be wanting hands."

"Why, o' course."

"And a foreman—a clerk of the works—"

While Mendarva was telling his tale, over a hill two miles to the westward a small donkey-cart crawled for a minute against the skyline and disappeared beyond the ridge which hid the towans. An old man trudged at the donkey's head; and a young woman sat in the cart with a bundle in her arms.

The old man trudged along so deep in thought that when the donkey without rhyme or reason came to a halt, half-way down the hill, he, too, halted, and stood pulling a wisp of gray side-whiskers.

"Look here," he said. "You ent goin' to tell? That's your las' word, is it?"

The young woman looked down on the bundle and nodded her head.

"There, that'll do. If you weant, you weant; I've tek'n 'ee back, an' us must fit and make the best o't. The cheeld'll never be fit for much—born lame like that. But 'twas to be, I s'pose."

Lizzie sat dumb, but hugged the bundle closer.

"'Tis like a judgment. If your mother'd been spared, 'twudn' have happened. But 'twas to be, I s'pose. The Lord's ways be past findin' out."

He woke up and struck the donkey across the rump.

"Gwan you! Gee up! What d'ee mean by stoppin' like that?"

The Chief Engineer of the Trinity House was a man of few words. He and Taffy had spent the afternoon clambering about the rocks below the light-house, peering into its foundations. Here and there, where weed coated the rocks and made foothold slippery, he took the hand which Taffy held out. Now and then he paused for a pinch of snuff. The round of inspection finished, he took an extraordinarily long pinch.

"What's your opinion?" he asked, cocking his head on one side and examining the young man much as he had examined the light-house. "You have one, I suppose."

"Yes, sir; but of course it doesn't count for much."

"I asked for it."

"Well, then, I think, sir, we have wasted a year's work; and if we go on tinkering, we shall waste more."

"Pull it down and rebuild, you say?"

"Yes, sir; but not on the same rock."

"Why?"

"This rock was ill-chosen. You see, sir, just here a ridge of elvan crops up through the slate; the rock, out yonder, is good elvan, and that is why the sea has made an island of it, wearing away the softer stuff inshore. The mischief here lies in the rock, not in the light-house."

"The sea has weakened our base?"

"Partly; but the light-house has done more. In a strong gale the foundations begin to work, and in the chafing the bed of rock gets the worst of it."

"What about concrete?"

"You might fill up the sockets with concrete; but I doubt, sir, if the case would hold for any time. The rock is a mere shell in places, especially on the northwestern side."

"H'm. You were at Oxford for a time, were you not?"

"Yes, sir," Taffy answered, wondering.

"I've heard about you. Where do you live?"

Taffy pointed to the last of a line of three whitewashed cottages behind the light-house.

"Alone?"

"No, sir; with my mother and my grandmother. She is an invalid."

"I wonder if your mother would be kind enough to offer me a cup of tea?"

In the small kitchen, on the walls of which, and even on the dresser, Taffy's books fought for room with Humility's plates and tin-ware, the Chief Engineer proved to be a most courteous old gentleman. Toward Humility he bore himself with an antique politeness which flattered her considerably. And when he praised her tea, she almost forgave him for his detestable habit of snuff-taking.

He had heard something (it appeared) from the President of Taffy's college, and also from — (he named Taffy's old friend in the velvet college-cap). In later days Taffy maintained not only that every man must try to stand alone, but that he ought to try the harder because of its impossibility; for in fact it was impossible to escape from men's helpfulness. And though his work lay in lonely places where in the end fame came out to seek him, he remained the same boy who, waking in the dark, had heard the bugles speaking comfort.

As a matter of fact his college had generously offered him a chance, which would have cost him nothing or next to nothing, of continuing to read for his degree. But he had chosen his line, and against Humility's entreaties he stuck to it. The Chief Engineer took a ceremonious leave. He had to drive back to his hotel, and Taffy escorted him to his carriage.

"I shall run over again to-morrow," he said at parting; "and we'll have a look at that island rock." He was driven off, secretly a little puzzled.

Well, it puzzled Taffy at times why he should be working here with Mendarva's men for twenty shillings a week (it had been eighteen to begin with) when he might be reading for his degree and a fellowship. Yet in his heart he knew the reason. That would be building, after all, on the foundations which Honoria had laid.

Pride had helped chance to bring him here, to the very spot where Lizzie Pezzack lived. He met her daily, and several times a day. She, and his mother and grandmother, were all the womanfolk in the hamlet—if three cottages deserve that name. In the first cottage Lizzie lived with her father, who was chief lighthouse-man, and her crippled child; two under-keepers, unmarried men, managed together in the second; and this accident allowed Taffy to rent the third from the Brethren of the Trinity House and live close to his daily work. Unless brought by business, no one visited that windy peninsula; no one passed within sight of it; no tree grew upon it or could be seen from it. At daybreak Taffy's workmen came trudging along the track where the short turf and gentians grew between the wheel-ruts; and in the evening went trudging back, the level sun flashing on their empty dinner-cans. The eight souls left behind had one common gospel—Cleanliness. Very little dust found its way thither; but the salt, spray-laden air kept them constantly polishing window-panes and brass-work. To wash, to scour, to polish, grew into the one absorbing business of life. They had no gossip; even in their own dwellings they spoke but little; their speech shrank and dwindled away in the continuous roar of the sea. But from morning to night, mechanically, they washed and scoured and polished. Paper was not whiter than the deal table and dresser which Humility scrubbed daily with soap and water, and once a week with lemon-juice as well. Never was cleaner linen to sight and smell than that which she pegged out by the furze-brake on the ridge. All the life of the small colony, though lonely, grew wholesome as it was simple of purpose in cottages thus sweetened and kept sweet by lime-wash and the salt wind.

And through it moved the forlorn figure of Lizzie Pezzack's child. Somehow Lizzie had taught the boy to walk, with the help of a crutch, as early as most children; but the wind made cruel sport with his first efforts in the open, knocking the crutch from under him at every third step, and laying him flat. The child had pluck, however, and when autumn came round again, could face a fairly stiff breeze.

It was about this time that word came of the Trinity Board's intention to replace the old light-house with one upon the outer rock. For the Chief Engineer had visited it and decided that Taffy was right. To be sure no mention was made of Taffy in his report; but the great man took the first opportunity to offer him the post of foreman of the works, so there was certainly nothing to be grumbled at. The work did not actually start until the following spring; for the rock, to receive the foundations, had to be bored some feet below high-water level, and this could only be attempted on calm days or when a southerly wind blew from the high land well over the workmen's heads, leaving the inshore water smooth. On such days Taffy, looking up from his work, would catch sight of a small figure on the cliff-top leaning aslant to the wind and watching.

For the child was adventurous and took no account of his lameness. Perhaps if he thought of it at all, having no chance to compare himself with other children, he accepted his lameness as a condition of childhood—something he would grow out of. His mother could not keep him indoors; he fidgetted continually. But he would sit or stand quiet by the hour on the cliff-top, watching the men as they drilled and fixed the dynamite, and waiting for the bang of it. Best of all, however, were the days when his grandfather allowed him inside the lighthouse, to clamber about the staircase and ladders, to watch the oiling and trimming of the great lantern and the ships moving slowly on the horizon. He asked a thousand questions about them.

"I think," said he, one day before he was three years old, "that my father is in one of those ships."

"Bless the child!" exclaimed old Pezzack. "Who says you have a father?"

"Everybody has a father. Dicky Tregenza has one; they both work down at the rock. I asked Dicky and he told me."

"Told 'ee what?"

"That everybody has a father. I asked him if mine was out in one of those ships, and he said very likely. I asked mother, too, but she was washing-up and wouldn't listen."

Old Pezzack regarded the child grimly. "'Twas to be, I s'pose," he muttered.

Lizzie Pezzack had never set foot inside the Raymonds' cottage. Humility, gentle soul as she was, could on some points be as unchristian as other women. As time went on, it seemed that not a soul beside herself and Taffy knew of Honoria's suspicion. She even doubted, and Taffy doubted, too, if Lizzie herself knew such an accusation had been made. Certainly never by word or look had Lizzie hinted at it. Yet Humility could not find it in her heart to forgive her. "She may be innocent," was the thought; "but through her came the injury to my son." Taffy by this time had no doubt at all. It was George who poisoned Honoria's ear; George's shame and Honoria's pride would explain why the whisper had never gone further; and nothing else would explain.

Did his mother guess this? He believed so at times; but they never spoke of it.

The lame child was often in the Raymonds' kitchen. Lizzie did not forbid or resent this. And he liked Humility and would talk to her at length while he nibbled one of her dripping-cakes. "People don't tell the truth," he observed, sagely, on one of these occasions. (He pronounced it "troof," by the way.) "I know why we live here. It's because we're near the sea. My father's on the sea somewhere, looking for us; and grandfather lights the lamp every night to tell him where we are. One night he'll see it and bring his ship in and take us all off together."

"Who told you all this?"

"Nobody. People won't tell me nothing (nofing). I has to make it out in my head."

At times, when his small limbs grew weary (though he never acknowledged this), he would stretch himself on the short turf of the headland and lie staring up at the white gulls. No one ever came near enough to surprise the look which then crept over the child's face. But Taffy, passing him at a distance, remembered another small boy, and shivered to remember and compare—

—but how, when the boy is a cripple?

One afternoon he was stooping to inspect an obstinate piece of boring when the man at his elbow said:

"Hullo! edn' that young Joey Pezzack in difficulties up there? Blest if the cheeld won't break his neck wan of these days!"

Taffy caught up a coil of rope, sprang into a boat, and pushed across to land. "Don't move!" he shouted. At the foot of the cliff he picked up Joey's crutch, and ran at full speed up the path worn by the workmen. This led him round to the verge, ten feet above the ledge where the child clung white and silent. He looped the rope in a running noose and lowered it.

"Slip this under your arms. Can you manage, or shall I come down? I'll come if you're hurt."

"I've twisted my foot. It's all right, now you're come," said the little man, bravely; and slid the rope round himself in the most businesslike way.

"The grass was slipper—" he began, as soon as his feet touched firm earth; and with that he broke down and fell to sobbing in Taffy's arms.

Taffy carried him—a featherweight—to the cottage where Lizzie stood by her table washing up. She saw them at the gate and came running out.

"It's all right. He slipped—out on the cliff. Nothing more than a scratch or two and perhaps a sprained ankle."

He watched while she set Joey in a chair and began to pull off his stockings. He had never seen the child's foot naked. She turned suddenly, caught him looking, and pulled the stocking back over the deformity.

"Have you heard?" she asked.

"What?"

"She has a boy! Ah!" she laughed, harshly, "I thought that would hurt you. Well, you have been a silly!"

"I don't think I understand."

"You don't think you understand!" she mimicked. "And you're not fond of her, eh? Never were fond of her, eh? You silly—to let him take her, and never tell!"

"Tell?"

She faced him, hardening her gaze. "Yes, tell—" She nodded slowly; while Joey, unobserved by either, looked up with wide, round eyes.

"Men don't fight like that." The words were out before it struck him that one man had, almost certainly, fought like that. Her face, however, told him nothing. She could not know. "You have never told," he added.

"Because—" she began, but could not tell him the whole truth. And yet what she said was true. "Because you would not let me," she muttered.

"In the churchyard, you mean—on her wedding-day?"

"Before that."

"But before that I never guessed."

"All the same, I knew what you were. You wouldn't have let me. It came to the same thing. And if I had told—Oh, you make it hard for me!" she wailed.

He stared at her, understanding this only—that somehow he could control her will.

"I will never let you tell," he said, gravely.

"I hate her!"

"You shall not tell."

"Listen"—she drew close and touched his arm. "He never cared for her; it's not his way to care. She cares for him now, I dessay—not as she might have cared for you—but she's his wife, and some women are like that. There's her pride, anyway. Suppose—suppose he came back to me?"

"If I caught him—" Taffy began; but the poor child, who for two minutes had been twisting his face heroically, interrupted with a wail:

"Oh, mother! my foot—it hurts so!"

(To be continued.)

---

I approve of you, for I am an optimist myself in regard to human affairs, and can conscientiously agree with many of the patriotic statements concerning the greatness of the American people contained in your letter. Your letter interested me because it differed so signally in its point of view from the others which I received at the same time—the time when I ran for Congress as a Democrat in a hopelessly Republican district and was defeated. The other letters were gloomy in tone. They deplored the degeneracy of our political institutions, and argued from the circumstance that the voters of my district preferred "a hack politician" and "blatant demagogue" to "an educated philosopher" (the epithets are not mine); that we were going to the dogs as a nation. The prophecy was flattering to me in my individual capacity, but it has not served to soil the limpid, sunny flow of my philosophy. I was gratified, but not convinced. I behold the flag of my country still with moistened eyes—the eyes of pride, and I continue to bow affably to my successful rival.

Your suggestion was much nearer the truth. You indicated with pardonable levity that I was not elected because the other man received more votes. I smiled at that as an apt statement. You went on to take me to task for having given the impression in my published account of the political canvass not merely that I ought to have been elected, but that the failure to elect me was the sign of a lack of moral and intellectual fibre in the American people. If I mistake not, you referred to me farther on in the style of airy persiflage as a "holier than thou," a journalistic, scriptural phrase in current use among so-called patriotic Americans. And then you began to argue: You requested me to give us time, and called attention to the fact that the English system of rotten boroughs in vogue fifty years ago was worse than anything we have to-day. "We are a young and impetuous people," you wrote, "but there is noble blood in our veins—the blood which inspired the greatness of Washington and Hamilton and Franklin and Jefferson and Webster and Abraham Lincoln. Water does not run up hill. Neither do the American people move backward. Its destiny is to progress and to grow mightier and mightier. And those who seek to retard our national march by cynical insinuations and sneers, by scholastic sophistries and philosophical wimwams, will find themselves inevitably under the wheels of Juggernaut, the car of republican institutions."

Philosophical wimwams! You sought to wound me in a tender spot. I forgive you for that, and I like your fervor. Those rotten boroughs have done yeoman service. They are on the tongue of every American citizen seeking for excuses for our national shortcomings. But for my dread of a mixed metaphor I would add that they are moth-eaten and threadbare.

Your letter becomes then a miscellaneous catalogue of our national prowess. You instance the cotton-gin, the telegraph, the sewing-machine, and the telephone, and ask me to bear witness that they are the inventions of free-born Americans. You refer to the heroism and vigor of the nation during the Civil War, and its mighty growth in prosperity and population since; to the colleges and academies of learning, to the hospitals and other monuments of intelligent philanthropy, to the huge railroad systems, public works, and private plants which have come into being with mushroom-like growth over the country. You recall the energy, independence, and conscientious desire for Christian progress among our citizens, young and old, and, as a new proof of their disinterested readiness to sacrifice comfort for the sake of principle, you cite the recent emancipation of Cuba. Your letter closes with a Fourth of July panegyric on the heroes on land and sea of the war with Spain, followed by an exclamation point which seems to say, "Mr. Philosopher, put that in your pipe and smoke it."

I have done so, and admit that there is a great deal to be proud of in the Olla Podrida of exploits and virtues which you have set before me. Far be it from me to question the greatness and capacity of your and my countrymen. But while my heart throbs agreeably from the thrill of sincere patriotism, I venture to remind you that cotton-gins, academies of learning, and first-class battle-ships have little to do with the matter in question. Your mode of procedure reminds me of the plea I have heard used to obtain partners for a homely girl—that she is good to her mother. I notice that you include our political sanctity by a few sonorous phrases in the dazzling compendium of national success, but I also notice that you do not condescend to details. That is what I intend to do, philosophically yet firmly.

To begin with, I am not willing to admit that I was piqued by my failure to be elected to Congress. I did not expect to succeed, and my tone was, it seems to me, blandly resigned and even rather grateful than otherwise that such a serious honor had been thrust upon me. Success would have postponed indefinitely the trip to Japan on which my wife, Josephine, had set her heart. In short, I supposed that I had concealed alike grief and jubilation, and taken the result in a purely philosophic spirit. It seems though that you were able to read between the lines—that is what you state—and to discern my condescending tone and lack of faith in the desire and intention of the plain people of these United States to select competent political representatives. I can assure you that I have arrived at no such dire state of mind, and I should be sorry to come to that conclusion; but, though a philosopher, and hence, politically speaking, a worm, I have a proper spirit of my own and beg to inform you that the desire and intention of our fellow-countrymen, whether plain or otherwise, so to do is, judging by their behavior, open to grave question. So you see I stand at bay almost where you supposed, and there is a definite issue between us. Judging by their behavior, remember. Judging by their words, butter would not melt in their mouths. I merely wish to call your attention to a few notorious facts in defence of my attitude of suspicion.

This being a drama, my young patriot, I wish to introduce you to the stage and the principal characters. The stage is any city in the United States of three hundred thousand or more inhabitants. It would be invidious for me to mention names where anyone would answer to the requirements. Some may be worse than others, but all are bad enough. A bold and pessimistic beginning, is it not, my optimistic friend?

And now for the company. This drama differs from most dramatic productions in that it makes demands upon a large number of actors. To produce it properly on the theatrical stage would bankrupt any manager unless he were subsidized heavily from the revenues of the twenty leading villains. The cast includes besides twenty leading villains, twelve low comedians, no hero, no heroine (except, incidentally, Josephine); eight newspaper editors; ten thousand easy-going second-class villains; ten thousand patriotic, conscientious, and enlightened citizens, including a sprinkling of ardent reformers; twenty-five thousand zealous, hide-bound partisans; fifty thousand respectable, well-intentioned, tolerably ignorant citizens who vote, but are too busy with their own affairs to pay attention to politics, and as a consequence generally vote the party ticket, or vote to please a "friend;" ten thousand superior, self-centred souls who neglect to vote and despise politics anyway, among them poets, artists, scientists, some men of leisure, and travellers; ten thousand enemies of social order such as gamblers, thieves, keepers of dives, drunkards, and toughs; and your philosopher.

A very large stock company. I will leave the precise arithmetic to you. I wish merely to indicate the variegated composition of the average political constituency, and to let you perceive that the piece which is being performed is no parlor comedy. It is written in dead earnest, and it seems to me that the twenty leading villains, though smooth and in some instances aristocratic appearing individuals, are among the most dangerous characters in the history of this or any other stage. But before I refer to them more particularly I will make you acquainted with our twelve low comedians—the Board of Aldermen.

It is probably a surprise to you and to Josephine that the Aldermen are not the villains. Everything is comparative in this world, and, though I might have made them villains without injustice to such virtues as they possess, I should have been at a loss how to stigmatize the real promoters of the villainy. And after all there is an element of grotesque comedy about the character of Aldermen in a large American city. The indecency of the situation is so unblushing, and the public is so helpless, that the performers remind one in their good-natured antics of the thieves in "Fra Diavolo;" they get bolder and bolder and now barely take the trouble to wear the mask of respectability.

Have I written "thieves?" Patriotic Americans look askance at such full-blooded expressions. They prefer ambiguity, and a less harsh phraseology—"slight irregularities," "business misfortunes," "commercial usages," "professional services," "campaign expenses," "lack of fine sensibilities," "unauthenticated rumors." There are fifty ways of letting one's fellow-citizens down easily in the public prints and in private conversation. This is a charitable age, and the word thief has become unfamiliar, except as applied to rogues who enter houses as a trade. The community and the newspapers are chary of applying it to folk who steal covertly but steadily and largely as an increment of municipal office. It is inconvenient to hurt the feelings of public servants, especially when one may have voted for them from carelessness or ignorance.

Here is a list of the twelve low comedians for your inspection:

• Peter Lynch, no occupation,
• James Griffin, stevedore,
• William H. Bird, real estate,
• John S. Maloney, saloon-keeper,
• David H. Barker, carpenter,
• Jeremiah Dolan, no occupation,
• Patrick K. Higgins, junk dealer,
• Joseph Heffernan, liquors,
• William T. Moore, apothecary,
• James O. Frost, paints and oils,
• Michael O'Rourke, tailor,
• John P. Driscoll, lawyer.

You will be surprised by my first statement regarding them, I dare say. Four of them, Peter Lynch, James Griffin, Jeremiah Dolan, and Michael O'Rourke neither drink nor smoke. Jeremiah Dolan chews, but the three others do not use tobacco in any form. They are patterns of Sunday-school virtue in these respects. This was a very surprising discovery to one of the minor characters in our drama—to two of them in fact—Mr. Arthur Langdon Waterhouse and his father, James Langdon Waterhouse, Esq. The young man, who had just returned from Europe with the idea of becoming United States Senator and who expressed a willingness to serve as a Reform Alderman while waiting, announced the discovery to his parent shortly before election with a mystified air.

"Do you know," said he to the old gentleman, who, by the way, though he has denounced every person and every measure in connection with our politics for forty years, was secretly pleased at his son's senatorial aspirations, "do you know that someone told me to-day that four of the very worst of those fellows have never drunk a drop of liquor, nor smoked a pipe of tobacco in their lives. Isn't it a curious circumstance? I supposed they were intoxicated most of the time."

You will notice also that Peter Lynch and Jeremiah Dolan have no occupation. Each of them has been connected in some capacity with the City Government for nearly twenty years, and they are persons of great experience. They have more than once near election time been amiably referred to in the press as "valuable public servants," and it must be admitted that they are efficient in their way. Certainly, they know the red tape of City Hall from A to Z, and understand how to block or forward any measure. The salary of Alderman is not large—certainly not large enough to satisfy indefinitely such capable men as they, and yet they continue to appear year after year at the same old stand. Moreover, they resist vigorously every effort to dislodge them, whether proceeding from political opponents or envious rivals of their own party. A philosopher like myself, who is, politically speaking, a worm, is expected to believe that valuable public servants retain office for the honor of the thing; but even a philosopher becomes suspicious of a patriot who has no occupation.

Next in importance are Hon. William H. Bird and Hon. John P. Driscoll. It is a well-known axiom of popular government that citizens are called from the plough or counting-room to public office by the urgent request of their friends and neighbors. As a fact, this takes place two or three times in a century. Most aspirants for office go through the form of having a letter from their friends and neighbors published in the newspapers, but only the very guileless portion of the public do not understand that the candidates in these cases suggest themselves. It is sometimes done, delicately, as, for instance, in the case of young Arthur Langdon Waterhouse, of whom I was writing just now. He let a close friend intimate to the ward committee that he would like to run for Alderman, and that in consideration thereof his father would be willing to subscribe $2,000 to the party campaign fund. It seems to a philosopher that a patriotic people should either re-edit its political axioms or live up to them.

Now Hon. William H. Bird and Hon. John P. Driscoll never go through the ceremony of being called from the plough—in their case the ward bar-room. They announce six months in advance that they wish something, and they state clearly what. They are perpetual candidates for, or incumbents of, office, and to be elected or defeated annually costs each of them from two to four thousand dollars, according to circumstances. One of them has been in the Assembly, the Governor's Council, and in both branches of the City Government; the other a member of the Assembly, a State Senator, and an Alderman, and both of them are now glad to be Aldermen once more after a desperate Kilkenny contest for the nomination. They are called Honorable by the reporters; and philosophers and other students of newspapers are constantly informed that Hon. William H. Bird has done this, and Hon. John P. Driscoll said that.

These four are the big men of the Board. The others are smaller fry; ambitious and imitative, but less experienced and smooth and audacious. Yet the four have their virtues, too. It is safe to state that no one of them would take anything beyond his reach. Moreover, if you, a patriot, or I, a philosopher, were to find himself alone in a room with one of them and had five thousand dollars in bills in his pocket and the fact were known to him, he would make no effort to possess himself of the money. We should be absolutely safe from assault or sleight of hand. Whoever would maintain the opposite does not appreciate the honesty of the American people. If, on the other hand, under similar circumstances, the right man were to place an envelope containing one thousand dollars in bills on the table and saunter to the window to admire the view, the packet would disappear before he returned to his seat and neither party would be able to remember that it ever was there. I do not intend to intimate that this is the precise method of procedure; I am merely explaining that our comedians have not the harsh habits of old-fashioned highwaymen.

Then again, there are people so fatuous as to believe that Aldermen are accustomed to help themselves out of the city treasury. That is a foolish fiction, for no Alderman could. The City Hall is too bulky to remove, and all appropriations of the public money are made by draft and have to be accounted for. If any member of the Board were to make a descent on the funds in the safe, he would be arrested as a lunatic and sent to an insane asylum.

As for the other eight low comedians, it happens in this particular drama that I would be unwilling to make an affidavit as to the absolute integrity of any one of them. But there are apt to be two or even three completely honest members of these august bodies, and two or three more who are pretty honest. A pretty honest Alderman is like a pretty good egg. A pretty honest Alderman would be incapable of touching an envelope containing $1,000, or charging one hundred in return for his support to a petition for a bay-window; but if he were in the paint and oil business or the lumber trade, or interested in hay and oats, it would be safe to assume that any department of the City Government which did not give his firm directly or indirectly a part of its trade would receive no aldermanic favors at his hands. Then again, a pretty honest Alderman would allow a friend to sell a spavined horse to the city.

Having hinted gently at the leading characteristics of the twelve low comedians, I am ready now to make you acquainted with the twenty leading villains. There is something grimly humorous in the spectacle of a dozen genial, able-bodied, non-alcoholic ruffians levying tribute on a community too self-absorbed or too easy-going or too indifferent to rid itself of them. I find, on the other hand, something somewhat pathetic in the spectacle of twenty otherwise reputable citizens and capitalists driven to villainy by the force of circumstances. To be a villain against one's will is an unnatural and pitiable situation.

Here is the list:

Thomas Barnstable, President of the People's Heat and Power Company.

William B. Wilcox, General Manager of the North Circuit Traction Company.

David J. Prendergast, Treasurer of the Underground Steam Company.

Porter King, President of the South Valley Railroad Company.

James Plugh, Treasurer of the Star Brewing Concern.

Ex-State Treasurer George Delaney Johnson, Manager of the United Gas Company.

Willis O. Golightly, Treasurer of the Consolidated Electric Works.

Hon. Samuel Phipps, President of the Sparkling Reservoir Company.

P. Ashton Hall, President of the Rapid Despatch Company.

Ex-Congressman Henry B. Pullen, Manager of the Maguinnis Engine Works. And so on. I will not weary you with a complete category. It would contain the names of twelve other gentlemen no less prominent in connection with quasi-public and large private business corporations. With them should be associated one thousand easy-going second-class villains, whose names are not requisite to my argument, but who from one year to another are obliged, by the exigencies of business or enterprise, to ask for licenses from the non-alcoholic, genial comedians, for permission to build a stable, to erect a bay-window, to peddle goods in the streets, to maintain a coal-hole, to drain into a sewer, to lay wires underground; in short, to do one or another of the many everyday things which can be done only by permission of the City Government. And the pity of it is that they all would rather not be villains.

Thomas Barnstable, the leading villain whose case I select for detailed presentation, has none of the coarser proclivities of David J. Prendergast, Treasurer of the Underground Steam Company. As regards David J. Prendergast, I could almost retract my allegation of pity and assert that he is a villain by premeditation and without compunction. That is, his method of dealing with the twelve low comedians is, I am told, conducted on a cold utilitarian basis without struggle of conscience or effort at self-justification. He says to the modern highwaymen, "Fix your price and let my bill pass. My time is valuable and so is yours, and the quicker we come to terms, the better for us both." What he says behind their backs is not fit for publication; but he recognizes the existence of the tax just as he recognizes the existence of the tariff, and he has no time to waste in considering the effect of either on the higher destinies of the nation.

Thomas Barnstable belongs to another school. He is a successful business man. In the ordinary meaning of the phrase, he is also a gentleman and a scholar. His word in private and in business life is as good as his bond; he respects the rights of the fatherless and the widow, and he is known favorably in philanthropic and religious circles. Having recognized the value of certain patents, he has become a large owner of the stock of the People's Heat and Power Company, and is the President of the corporation. Hitherto he has had plain sailing, municipally speaking. That is, the original franchise of the company was obtained from the city before he became President, and only this year for the first time has the necessity of asking for further privileges arisen. Moreover, he finds his corporation confronted by a rival, the Underground Steam Company.

Now here is a portion of the dialogue which took place five weeks before election between this highly respectable gentleman and his right-hand man, Mr. John Dowling, the efficient practical manager of the People's Company.

"Peter Lynch was here to-day," said Mr. Dowling.

"And who may Peter Lynch be?" was the dignified but unconcerned answer.

"Peter Lynch is Peter Lynch. Don't you know Peter? He's the Alderman from the fifth district. He has been Alderman for ten years, and so far as I can see, he is likely to continue to be Alderman for ten more."

"Ah."

"Peter was in good-humor. He was smiling all over."

Mr. Dowling paused, so his superior said, "Oh!" Then realizing that the manager was still silent, as though expecting a question, he said, "What did he come for?"

"He wishes us to help him mend his fences. Some of them need repairing. The wear and tear of political life is severe."

"I see—I see," responded Mr. Barnstable, reflectively, putting his finger-tips together. "What sort of a man is Peter?"

Mr. Dowling hesitated a moment, merely because he was uncertain how to deal with such innocence. Having concluded that frankness was the most businesslike course, he answered, bluffly, "He's an infernal thief. He's out for the stuff."

"The stuff? I see—I see. Very bad, very bad. It's an outrage that under our free form of government such men should get a foothold in our cities. I hope, Dowling, you gave him the cold shoulder, and let him understand that under no consideration whatever would we contribute one dollar to his support."

"On the contrary, I gave him a cigar and pumped him."

"Pumped him?"

"I wanted to find out what he knows."

"Dear me. And—er—what does he know?"

"He knows all about our bill, and he says he'd like to support it."

This was a shock, for the bill was supposed to be a secret.

"How did he find out about it?"

"Dreamt it in his sleep, I guess."

"I don't care for his support, I won't have it," said Mr. Barnstable, bringing his hand down forcibly on his desk to show his earnestness and indignation. "I wish very much, Mr. Dowling, that you had told him to leave the office and never show his impudent face here again."

There was a brief silence, during which Mr. Dowling fingered his watch-chain; then he said, in a quiet tone, "He says that the Underground Steam Company is going to move heaven and earth to elect men who will vote to give them a location."

"I trust you let him know that the Underground Steam Company is a stock jobbing, disreputable concern with no financial status."

"It wasn't necessary for me to tell him that. He knows it. He said he would prefer to side with us and keep them out of the streets, which meant of course that he knew we were able to pay the most if we chose. It seems Prendergast has been at him already."

"Disgusting! They both ought to be in jail."

"Amen. He says he gave Prendergast an evasive answer, and is to see him again next Tuesday. There's the situation, Mr. Barnstable. I tell you frankly that Lynch is an important man to keep friendly to our interests. He is very smart and well posted, and if we allow him to oppose us, we shall have no end of trouble. He is ready to take the ground that the streets ought not be dug up, and that a respectable corporation like ours should not be interfered with. Only he expects to be looked after in return. I deplore the condition of affairs as much as you do, but I tell you frankly that he is certain to go over to the other side and oppose us tooth and nail unless we show ourselves what he calls friendly to his 'interests.'"

"Then we'll prevent his election. I would subscribe money toward that myself."

The Manager coughed, by way perhaps of concealing a smile. "That would not be easy," he said. "And if it could be done, how should we be better off? Peter Lynch is only one of fifteen or twenty, many of whom are worse than he. By worse I mean equally unscrupulous and less efficient. Here, Mr. Barnstable, is a list of the candidates for Aldermen on both sides. I have been carefully over it and checked off the names of those most likely to be chosen, and I find that it comprises twelve out-and-out thieves, five sneak-thieves, as I call them, because they pilfer only in a small way and pass as pretty honest; four easy-going, broken-winded incapables, and three perfectly honest men, one of them thoroughly stupid. Now, if we have to deal with thieves, it is desirable to deal with those most likely to be of real service. There are four men on this list who can, if they choose, help us or hurt us materially. If we get them, they will be able to swing enough votes to control the situation; if they're against us, our bill will be side-tracked or defeated and the Underground Steam Company will get its franchise. That means, as you know, serious injury to our stockholders. There's the case in a nut-shell."

"What are their names?" asked Mr. Barnstable, faintly.

"Peter Lynch, Jeremiah Dolan, William H. Bird, and John P. Driscoll, popularly known in the inner circles of City Hall politics as 'the big four.' And they are—four of the biggest thieves in the community."

"Dear me," said Mr. Barnstable. "And what is it you advise doing?"

"Like the coon in the tree, I should say, 'Don't shoot and I'll come down.' It's best to have a clear understanding from the start."

"What I meant to ask was—er—what is it that this Peter Lynch wishes?"

"He uttered nothing but glittering generalities; that he desired to know who his friends were, and whether, in case he were elected, he could be of any service to our corporation. The English of that is, he expects in the first place a liberal subscription for campaign expenses—and after that retaining fees from time to time as our attorney or agent, which will vary in size according to the value of the services rendered."

A faint gleam of cunning hope appeared in Mr. Barnstable's eyes.

"Then anything we—er—contributed could properly be charged to attorney's fees?" he said by way of thinking aloud.

"Certainly—attorney's fees, services as agent, profit and loss, extraordinary expenses, machinery account, bad debts—there are a dozen ways of explaining the outlay. And no outlay may be necessary. A tip on the stock will do just as well."

"Dear, dear," reiterated Mr. Barnstable. "It's a deplorable situation; deplorable and very awkward."

"And the awkward part is, that we're a dead cock in the pit if we incline to virtue's side."

Mr. Barnstable sighed deeply and drummed on his desk. Then he began to walk up and down. After a few moments he stopped short and said:

"I shall have to lay it before my directors, Dowling."

"Certainly, sir. But in general terms, I hope. A single—er—impractical man might block the situation until it was too late. Then the expense of remedying the blunder might be much greater."

Mr. Barnstable inclined his head gravely. "I shall consult some of the wisest heads on the Board, and if in their opinion it is advisable to conciliate these blackmailers, a formal expression of approval will scarcely be necessary."

A few days later the President sent for the Manager and waved him to a chair. His expression was grave—almost sad, yet resolute. His manner was dignified and cold.

"We have considered," said he, "the matter of which we were speaking recently, and under the peculiar circumstances in which we are placed, and in view of the fact that the success of our bill and the defeat of the Underground Steam Company is necessary for the protection of the best interests of the public and the facilitation of honest corporate business enterprise, I am empowered to authorize you to take such steps, Mr. Dowling, as seem to you desirable and requisite for the proper protection of our interests."

"Very good, sir. That is all that is necessary."

There was a brief silence, during which Mr. Barnstable joined his finger-tips together and looked at the fire. Then he rose augustly, and putting out his hand with a repellant gesture said, "There is one thing I insist on, which is that I shall know nothing of the details of this disagreeable business. I leave the matter wholly in your hands, Dowling."

"Oh, certainly, sir. And you may rely on my giving the cold shoulder to the rascals wherever it is possible for me to do so."

That is a pitiful story, isn't it? Virtue assaulted almost in its very temple, and given a black eye by sheer force of cruel, overwhelming circumstances. Yet a true story, and the prototype in its general features of a host of similar episodes occurring in the different cities of this land of the free and the home of the brave. Each case, of course, has its peculiar atmosphere. Not every leading villain has the sensitive and combative conscience of Thomas Barnstable; nor every general manager the bold, frank style of Mr. Dowling. There is every phase of soul-struggle and method from unblushing, business-like bargain and sale to sphinx-like and purposely unenlightened and ostrich-like submission. In the piteous language of a defender of Thomas Barnstable (not Josephine), what can one do but submit? If one meets a highwayman on the road, is one to be turned back if a purse will secure a passage? Surely not if the journey be of moment. Then is a corporate body (a corporation has no soul) to be starved to death by delay and hostile legislation if peace and plenty are to be had for an attorney's fee? If so, only the rascals would thrive and honest corporations would bite the dust. And so it happened that Mr. Dowling before election cast his moral influence in favor of the big four, and a little bird flew from head-quarters with a secret message, couched in sufficiently vague language, to the effect that the management would be pleased if the employees of the People's Heat and Power Company were to mark crosses on their Australian ballots against the names of Peter Lynch, Jeremiah Dolan, Hon. William H. Bird, and the Hon. John P. Driscoll.

Let us allow the curtain to descend to slow music, and after a brief pause rise on some of our other characters. Behold now the fifty thousand respectable, well-intentioned, tolerably ignorant citizens who vote but are too busy with their own affairs to pay attention to politics, and as a consequence generally vote the party ticket or vote to please a friend. As a sample take Mr. John Baker, amiable and well-meaning physician, a practical philanthropist and an intelligent student of science by virtue of his active daily professional labors. For a week before election he is apt to have a distressing, soul-haunting consciousness that a City Government is shortly to be chosen and that he must, as a free-born and virtue-loving citizen, vote for somebody. He remembers that during the year there has been more or less agitation in the newspapers concerning this or that individual connected with the aldermanic office, but he has forgotten names and is all at sea as to who is who or what is what. Two days before election he receives and puts aside a circular containing a list of the most desirable candidates, as indicated by the Reform Society, intending to peruse it, but he is called from home on one evening by professional demands, and on the other by tickets for the theatre, so election morning arrives without his having looked at it. He forgets that it is election day, and is reminded of the fact while on his way to visit his patients by noticing that many of his acquaintances seem to be walking in the wrong direction. He turns also, at the spur of memory, and mournfully realizes that he has left the list at home. To return would spoil his professional day, so he proceeds to the polls, and, in the hope of wise enlightenment, joins the first sagacious friend he encounters. It happens, perhaps, to be Dowling.

"Ah," says Dr. Baker, genially, "you're just the man to tell me whom to vote for. One vote doesn't count for much, but I like to do my duty as an American citizen."

"It's a pretty poor list," says Dowling, pathetically, drawing a paper from his pocket. "I believe, however, in accomplishing the best possible results under existing circumstances. If I thought the Reform candidates could be elected, I would vote for them and for them only; but it's equally important that the very worst men should be kept out. I am going to vote for the Reform candidates and for Lynch, Dolan, Bird, and Driscoll. They're capable and they have had experience. If they steal, they'll steal judiciously, and that is something. Some of those other fellows would steal the lamp-posts and hydrants if they got the chance."

"All right," says Dr. Baker. "I'll take your word for it. Let me write those names down. I suppose that some day or other we shall get a decent City Government. I admit that I don't give as much consideration to such matters as I ought, but the days are only twenty-four hours long."

Then from the same company there is Mr. David Jones, hay and grain dealer, honest and a diligent, reputable business man. He harbors the amiable delusion that the free-born American citizen in the exercise of the suffrage has intuitive knowledge as to whom to vote for, and that in the long run the choice of the sovereign people is wise and satisfactory. He is ready to admit that political considerations should not control selection for municipal office, but he has a latent distrust of reformers as aristocratic self-seekers or enemies of popular government. For instance, the idea that he or any other American citizen of ordinary education and good moral character is not fit to serve on the school committee offends his patriotism.

"What's the matter with Lynch, anyway?" he asks on his way to the polls. "I see some of his political enemies are attacking him in the press. If he were crooked, someone would have found it out in ten years. I met him once and he talked well. He has no frills round his neck."

"Nor wheels in his head," answers a fellow-patriot, who wishes to get a street developed and has put his case in Lynch's hands.

"He shall have my vote," says the hay and grain dealer.

As for the twenty-five thousand hide-bound partisans, I will state to begin with, my optimistic correspondent, that if this drama were concerned with any election but a city election, their number would be larger. But these make up in unswerving fixity of purpose for any diminution of their forces due to municipal considerations. They are content to have their thinking done for them in advance by a packed caucus, and they go to the polls snorting like war-horses and eager to vindicate by their ballots the party choice of candidates, or meekly and reverently prepared to make a criss-cross after every R or D, according to their faith, with the fatuous fealty of sheep. Bigotry and suspicions, ignorance and easy-going willingness to be led, keep their phalanx steady and a constant old guard for the protection of comedians and villains.

In another corner of the stage stand the ten thousand superior, self-centred souls who neglect to vote and despise politics—the mixed corps of pessimists, impractical dreamers, careless idlers, and hyper-cultured world-disdainers, who hold aloof, from one motive or another, from contact with common life and a share in its responsibilities—some on the plea that universal suffrage is a folly or a failure, some that earth is but a vale of travail which concerns little the wise or righteous thinker, some from sheer butterfly or stupid idleness. Were they to vote they would help to offset that no less large body of suffragists—the active enemies of order, the hoodlum, tobacco-spitting, woman-insulting, rum-drinking ruffian brigade. There are only left the ten thousand conscientious citizens, real patriots—a corporal's guard, amid the general optimistic sweep toward the polls. These mark their crosses with care against the names of the honest men and perhaps some of the pretty honest, only to read in the newspapers next morning that the big four have been returned to power and that the confidence of the plain and sovereign people in the disinterested conduct of their public servants has again been demonstrated.

"Ho, ho, ho," laugh the low comedians. "Mum's the word." The faces of the big four are wreathed in self-congratulatory smiles. At the homes of Peter Lynch and Jeremiah Dolan, those experienced individuals without occupation, there are cakes and ale. It is a mistake to assume that because a citizen is an Alderman he is not human and amiably domestic in his tastes. Jeremiah loves the little Dolans and is no less fond of riding his children on his leg than Thomas Barnstable, or any of the leading villains. When their father looks happy in the late autumn, the children know that their Christmas stockings will be full. Jeremiah is at peace with all the world and is ready to sit with slicked hair for his photograph, from which a steel (or is it steal?) engraving will shortly be prepared for the new City Government year-book, superscribed: "Jeremiah Dolan, Chairman of the Board of Aldermen." A framed enlargement of this will hang on one side of the fire-place, and an embroidered motto, "God Bless Our Home," on the other, and all will be well with the Dolans for another twelve months. In his own home Jeremiah is a man of few words on public matters. Not unnaturally his children believe him to be of the salt of the earth, and he lets it go at that, attending strictly to business without seeking to defend himself in the bosom of his family from the diatribes of reformers. Still, it is reasonable to assume that, under the fillip of the large majority rolled up in his favor, he would be liable to give vent to his sense of humor so far as to refer, in the presence of his wife and children, to the young man who was willing to become an Alderman while waiting to be Senator, as a T. Willy.

If you have read "The Hon. Peter Stirling," you will remember that the hero rose to political stature largely by means of attending to the needs of the district, befriending the poor and the helpless, and having a friendly, encouraging word for his constituents, high or low. The American public welcomed the book because it was glad to see the boss vindicated by these human qualities, and to think that there was a saving grace of unselfish service in the composition of the average successful politician. It would be unjust to the big four were I not to acknowledge that they have been shrewd or human enough to pursue in some measure this affable policy, and that the neighborhood and the district in which they live recognize them as hustlers to obtain office, privileges, and jobs for the humble citizen wishing to be employed by or to sell something to the City Government. To this constituency the comparative small tax levied seems all in the day's work, a natural incident of the principle that when a man does something, he ought to be paid for it. To them the distinction that public service is a trust which has no right to pecuniary profit beyond the salary attached, and a reasonable amount of stationery, seems to savor of the millennium and to suggest a lack of practical intelligence on the part of its advocates. They pay the lawyer and the doctor; why not the Alderman?

I am reminded by Josephine that I seem to be getting into the dumps, which does not befit one who claims to be an optimistic philosopher. The drama just set before you is not, I admit, encouraging as a national exhibit, and I can imagine that you are already impatient to retort that the municipal stage is no fair criterion of public life in this country. I can hear you assert, with that confident air of national righteousness peculiar to the class of blind patriots to which you belong, that the leading politicians of the nation disdain to soil their hands by contact with city politics. Yet there I take issue with you squarely, not as to the fact but as to the truth of the lofty postulate seething in your mind that the higher planes of political activity are free from the venal and debasing characteristics of municipal public service—from the influence of the money power operating on a low public standard of honesty.

Most of us—even philosophers like myself—try to cling to the fine theory that the legislators of the country represent the best morals and brains of the community, and that the men elected to public office in the Councils of the land have been put forward as being peculiarly fitted to interpret and provide for our needs, by force of their predominant individual virtues and abilities. Most of us appreciate in our secret souls that this theory is not lived up to, and is available only for Fourth of July or other rhetorical purposes. Yet we dislike to dismiss the ideal as unattainable, even though we know that actual practice is remote from it; and patriots still, we go on asserting that this is our method of choice, vaguely hoping, like the well-intentioned but careless voter, that some day we shall get a decent government, municipal, state, national—that is decent from the stand-point of our democratic ideal. And there is another theory, part and parcel of the other, which we try to cling to at the same time, that our public representatives, though the obviously ornamental and fine specimens of their several constituencies, are after all only every-day Americans with whom a host of citizens could change places without disparagement to either. In other words, our theory of government is government by the average, and that the average is remarkably high. This comfortable view induces many like yourself to wrap themselves round with the American flag and smile at destiny, sure that everything will result well with us sooner or later, and impatient of criticism or doubts. As a people we delight in patting ourselves on the back and dismissing our worries as mere flea-bites. The hard cider of our patriotism gets readily into the brain and causes us to deny fiercely or serenely, according to our dispositions, that anything serious is the matter.

Yet whatever Fourth of July orators may say to the contrary, the fact remains that the sorry taint of bargain and sale, of holding up on the political highway and pacification by bribery in one form or another, permeates to-day the whole of our political system from the lowest stratum of municipal public life to the Councils which make Presidents and United States Senators. To be sure, the Alderman in his capacity of low comedian dictating terms to corporations seeking civic privileges is the most unblushing, and hence the most obviously flagrant case; but it is well recognized by all who are brought in contact with legislative bodies of any sort in the country that either directly or indirectly the machinery of public life is controlled by aggregations of capital working on the hungry, easy-going, or readily flattered susceptibilities of a considerable percentage of the members. Certainly our national and State assemblies contain many high-minded, honest, intellectually capable men, but they contain as many more who are either dishonest or are so ignorant and easily cajoled that they permit themselves to be the tools of leading villains. Those cognizant of what goes on behind the scenes on the political stage would perhaps deny that such men as our friend Thomas Barnstable or his agent, Dowling, attempt to dictate nominations to either branch of the legislature on the tacit understanding that a member thus supported is to advocate or vote for their measures, and by their denial they might deceive a real simon-pure philosopher. But this philosopher knows better, and so do you, my optimistic friend. It is the fashion, I am aware, among conservative people, lawyers looking for employment, bankers and solid men of affairs, to put the finger on the lips when this evil is broached and whisper, "Hush!" They admit confidentially the truth of it, but they say, "Hush! What's the use of stirring things up? It can't do any good and it makes the public discontented. It excites the populists." So there is perpetual mystery and the game goes on. Men who wish things good or bad come reluctantly or willingly to the conclusion that the only way to get them is by paying for them. Not all pay cash. Some obtain that which they desire by working on the weaknesses of legislators; following them into banks where they borrow money, getting people who hold them in their employ or give them business to interfere, asking influential friends to press them. Every railroad corporation in the country has agents to look after its affairs before the legislature of the State through which it operates, and what some of those agents have said and done in order to avert molestation would, if published, be among the most interesting memoirs ever written. Who doubts that elections to the United States Senate and House of Representatives are constantly secured by the use of money among those who have the power to bestow nominations and influence votes? It is notorious, yet to prove it would be no less difficult than to prove that Peter Lynch, Alderman for ten years without occupation, has received bribes from his fellow-citizens. How are the vast sums of money levied on rich men to secure the success of a political party in a Presidential campaign expended? For stationery, postage stamps, and campaign documents? For torchlight processions, rallies, and buttons? Some of it, certainly. The unwritten inside history of the political progress of many of the favorite sons of the nation during the last forty years would make the scale of public honor kick the beam though it were weighted with the cherry-tree and hatchet of George Washington. In one of our cities where a deputation of city officials attended the funeral of a hero of the late war with Spain, there is a record of $400 spent for ice-cream. Presumably this was a transcript of petty thievery inartistically audited. But there are no auditings of the real use of the thousands of dollars contributed to keep a party in power or to secure the triumph of a politically ambitious millionaire.

You have read what Josephine says, my optimistic friend. She has stated that she would write to you her summing up of the whole matter if I did not, so I have inserted her deduction in all its crudity. She declares the trouble to be that the American people are dishonest. Of course, I cannot expect you to agree with any such conclusion, and I must admit that the boldness of the accusation is a shock to my own sensibilities as a patriot. Of course, Josephine is a woman and does not understand much about politics and ways and means, and it is notorious that women jump at conclusions instead of approaching them logically and in a dignified manner. But it is also said that their sudden conclusions are apt to be right. Dishonest? Dear me, what a dreadful suggestion. I really think that she went a little too far. And yet I am forced to agree that appearances are very much against us, and that if we hope to lead the world in righteousness and progress we must, to recur to political phraseology, mend our moral fences. I do not indulge in meteoric flights, like Josephine. Let us argue the matter out soberly.

You and I, as men of the world, will agree that if the American people prefer or find it more serviceable to cherish bribery as a federal institution, no one will interfere. The fact that it is ethically wrong is interesting to real philosophers and to the clergy, but bribery will continue to flourish like a bay-tree if it is the sort of thing which the American people like. Now, to all outward appearances they find it, if not grateful and comforting, at least endurable and convenient. Certainly, except among the class of people whom you would be apt to stigmatize as "holier than thous," there is comparatively little interest taken in the question. The mass of the community seek refuge behind the agreeable fiction that the abuse doesn't exist or exists only in such degree as to be unimportant. Many of these people know that this is false, but they will not admit that they think so in order not to make such doings familiar, just as their custom is to speak of legs as lower limbs in order not to bring a blush to the cheek of the young person. For thorough-going hypocrisy—often unconscious, but still hypocrisy—no one can equal a certain kind of American. It is so much easier in this world, where patting on the back is the touch-stone of preferment and popularity, to think that everything is as serene as the surface indicates, though you are secretly sure that it is not. How much more convenient to be able to say truthfully, "I have no knowledge of the facts, so don't bother me," than to be constantly wagging the head and entertaining doubts concerning the purity of one's fellow-citizens, and so making enemies.

As I have indicated earlier in this letter, the ideal is dear to our patriotic sensibilities that we are governed by average opinion, and that the average is peculiarly high. The fastidious citizen in this country has been and still is fond of the taunt that men of upright character and fine instincts—what he calls gentlemen—will not enter public life, for the reason that they will not eat dirt. The reply has been that the real bugaboo of the fastidious citizen is one of manners, and that in the essentials of character, in strong moral purpose and solid worth, the average American voter is the peer of any aristocracy. The issue becomes really one of fact, and mere solemn assertion will not serve as evidence beyond a certain point. If the majority prefer dishonesty, the power is in their hands to perpetuate the system, but believing as you and I do that the majority at heart is honest, how are we to explain the continued existence of the evil? How as patriots shall we reconcile the perpetuation in power of the low comedians, Peter Lynch and Jeremiah Dolan, except on the theory that it is the will of the majority that they should continue to serve the people? This is not a question of kid gloves, swallow-tailed coats, and manners, but an indictment reflecting on the moral character and solid worth of the nation. How are we to explain it? What are we to say? Can we continue to declare that we are the most honest and aspiring people in the world and expect that portion of the world which has any sense of humor not to smile? Are we, who have been accustomed to boast of our spotless integrity as a people, ready to fall back on and console ourselves with the boast, which does duty nowadays on lenient lips, that we are as honest as any of the nations of Europe except, possibly, England? That is an indirect form of patriotic negation under the shadow of which low comedians and leading villains could ply their trade comparatively unmolested.

As a philosopher, who is not a real philosopher, I find this charge of Josephine's a difficult nut to crack, and I commend it respectfully to your attention to mull over at your leisure, trusting that it may temper the effulgence of your thoughts on Independence Day. Yet having had my say as a philosopher, let me as an optimist, willing to succor a fellow-optimist, add a few considerations indicating that the situation may not be so ultimately evil as the existing state of affairs and Josephine would have us believe. I write "may not be," because I am not altogether confident that my intelligence is not being cajoled by the natural cheeriness and buoyancy of my disposition. The sole question at issue is whether the majority of the American people are really content to have the money power of the country prey upon and be the prey of the lowest moral sense of the community.

We have before us an every-day spectacle of eager aggregations of capital putting aside scruples as visionary and impractical, and hence "un-American," in order to compass success, and at the other side of the counter the so-called representatives of the people, solemn in their verbiage but susceptible to occult and disgraceful influences. The two parties to the intercourse are discreet and businesslike, and there is little risk of tangible disclosure. Practically aloof from them, except for a few moments on election day, stands the mass of American citizens busy with their own money-getting or problem-solving, and only too ready to believe that their representatives are admirable. They pause to vote as they pause to snatch a sandwich at a railroad station. "Five minutes for refreshments!" Five minutes for political obligations! Individually there are thousands of strictly honest and noble-hearted men in the United States. Who doubts it? The originality and strength of the American character is being constantly manifested in every field of life. But there we speak of individuals; here we are concerned with majorities and the question of average morality and choice. For though we have an aspiring and enlightened van of citizens to point the way, you must remember that emigration and natural growth has given us tens of thousands of ignorant, prejudiced, and sometimes unscrupulous citizens, each of whose votes counts one. Perhaps it is true—and here is my grain of consolation or hope—that the average voter is so easy-going, so long-suffering, so indisposed to find fault, so selfishly busy with his own affairs, so proud of our institutions and himself, so afraid of hurting other people's feelings, and so generally indifferent as to public matters, provided his own are serene, that he chooses to wink at bribery if it be not in plain view, and likes to deceive himself into believing that there is nothing wrong. The long and short of it seems to be that the average American citizen is a good fellow, and in his capacity of good fellow cannot afford to be too critical and particular. He leaves that to the reformer, the literary man, the dude, the college professor, the mugwump, the philosopher, and other impractical and un-American people. If so, what has become of that heritage of his forefathers, the stern Puritan conscience? Swept away in the great wave of material progress which has centred all his energies on what he calls success, and given to the power of money a luring importance which is apt to make the scruples of the spirit seem unsubstantial and bothersome. An easy-going, trouble-detesting, self-absorbed democracy between the buffers of rapacity and rascality.

A disagreeable conclusion for an optimist, yet less gloomy than the other alternative. This condition admits of cure, for it suggests a torpid conscience rather than deliberate acquiescence. It indicates that the representatives are betraying the people, and that there is room for hope that the people eventually may rise in their might and call them to account. If they do, I beg as a philosopher with humorous proclivities, to caution them against seizing the wrong pig by the ear. Let them fix the blame where it belongs, and not hold the corporations and the money power wholly responsible. It may be possible in time to abolish trusts and cause rich men sleepless nights in the crusading name of populism, but that will avail little unless at the same time they go to the real root of the matter, and quicken the average conscience and strengthen the moral purpose of the plain people of the United States. There will be leading villains and low comedians so long as society permits, and so long as the conscience of democracy is torpid. The players in the drama are, after all, only the people themselves. Charles the First was beheaded because he betrayed the liberties of the people. Alas! there is no such remedy for a corrupt democracy, for its heads are like those of Hydra, and it would be itself both the victim and the executioner.

A Question of
Accent.

I suppose there is no gainsaying the authority of "general usage" in the matter of English pronunciation—even when that usage is etymologically wrong. If there is one instinct in the Anglo-Saxon race which is at once widespread and admirable, it is surely our instinct to avoid even the semblance of preciosity; the Prig is justly our pet abhorrence. Maybe some of us incline to carry this instinct a thought too far; as, for instance, the educated English lady who, when taken to task by an American for saying sónorous, replied: "We always say sónorous; of course we know well enough that it really is sonórous, but it would sound awfully priggish to say so in every-day talk!" But she was an extreme example, and, though I still persist in saying sonórous, I am far from wishing to undo the long-done work of that "general usage" which has given us bálcony (for balcóny) and anémone (for anemóne). About paresis I may be in some doubt, for the word is so young in general use that there may still be time to check the spread of the illiterate parésis. The latter pronunciation does not seem to me to have been consecrated by sufficiently long usage to have won indisputable authority; there may be a chance for páresis yet!

There are, however, many words in our language, derived from the Latin, on the accentuation of which both authority and usage are still divided; and I cannot think the time past for etymology fairly having something to say about these. Yet it seems to me that the etymological rule for accenting such words, as it is commonly set down, leaves a good deal to be desired in point of logic. It is that syllables which are long by derivation should be accented, that those which are short should not; and by it we get compénsate, contémplate, etc.; but a large number of recognizedly educated people say cómpensate and cóntemplate, and also have the authority of some excellent lexicographers therefore. What authority there may be for throwing the accent upon the penult in these words cannot yet be considered as final.

A word which leads me to an explanation of my idea is elegiac—which the Standard Dictionary now gives as elégiac only, but which used to be pronounced elegíac by most cultivated English speakers. It is rather a scholarly word, and I fancy most scholars to-day still pronounce it elegíac; it seems to me that there still hangs about elégiac, as Walker said in his day, a "suspicion of illiteracy." But, if elegíac is right, why is it right? The rule for accenting syllables that are long by etymology does not hold good here, for the i in elegiācus is short, as it is also in the Greek elegiakós. It seems to me so highly probable as to amount almost to a certainty, that scholarly Englishmen fell into the habit of saying elegíac simply because they had already formed the habit of saying elegiācus. They accented the i in English because it was accented in Latin; and in Latin it is accented, not because it is long (which it is not), but because the a which follows it is short. And, if English scholars said elegíac from habit, may not the results of a similar Latin habit be found in our pronunciation of hosts of other English words of Latin origin?

The rule for accentuation I would propose is this: "If the syllable which is penultimate in the English word is accented in the Latin, it should be accented in the English word also; if, however, this syllable is unaccented in Latin, the accent in the English word should fall back upon the antepenult." Thus the penultimate i in elegiac is accented because the corresponding i is accented in elegíacus. An old school-master of mine used to insist upon our saying Quirínal, because the i was long; I maintain that Quírinal is right, because the second i in Quirinālis is unaccented. This rule would give us cóntemplate and cómpensate because the syllables tem and pen are unaccented in contemplātus and compensātus respectively. (It is of no avail to argue in favor of contémplate that the tem is long, and accented in contémplo; our English word is derived from the Latin participle, not from the first person singular of the present indicative.) Désiccate would be right on the same principle, and desíccate, wrong.

By this rule of mine we can preserve an English pronunciation as nearly like the original Latin as it is in the spirit of our language to do; and, where authority and usage are wellnigh equally divided, this seems to me worth while.

It is always more or less futile to quarrel with the vernacular. Otherwise we should take exception to the word design in the sense of invention. The latter is the more expressive term. In the language of those nations from which modern art is derived, dessiner, disegnare mean to draw. Italian authors of the Renaissance, in estimating an artist's achievement, invariably weighed his inventive faculties. Thus Vasari, in summarizing Raphael's qualities, extols his "disegno, colorito ed invenzione"—his drawing, color, and invention. An illustrator "invents" and "draws;" for instance, "Giovanni Albertelli inv. e dis." Emphasis is here laid on the word invention, and on its vogue in other lands, both because it is very forceful, and because it seems to imply something more than "design." A plagiarist might venture to risk the term "design" when he would balk at "invention."

If we enter one of our patrician homes—palaces, palazzi, or private hotels, they would be called elsewhere—what do we find to exalt the decorative artist, where the work has been the sole product of the architect, and it may be added of the patrician himself? Much splendor there is, assuredly, and gold, and rich carving, and sumptuous marble, and opulent stuffs; even expatriated mantles and whole rooms, kidnapped from the harmonious surroundings where they were a perpetual joy—imported to discord with our modern alien habitats. Sometimes we happen on an Italian Renaissance room without a spark of the easy invention and graceful free-hand work that was the charm of the original; but more frequently we meet with debased Louis XV. and Louis XVI., debased in the inspirationless copy. The originals of these things are very beautiful indeed, and will ever be the immortal models for decorative artists. But it must not for a moment be supposed by the laity that in mechanically reproducing these things we are inventing or adding an iota to the art product of the world. Perhaps this lack of invention can better be appreciated when the bald statement is made that a well-equipped decorator would not think it worth his while to enter our buildings for the purpose of studying fresh ideas; always excepting those instances where the services of a capable artist have been engaged, and the few exceptions to every rule.

Archæology has taught its lesson of accuracy in the arts. As we have already observed, the tendency is to copy rather than to assimilate. The reproductive processes have overwhelmed the practitioner with an excess of material, far more than can be digested. We have acquired the photograph habit. Could half the time be devoted to invention that is given to the excavation from portfolios of the desired prototypes, and to the formation of collections, it would be better for art. We have repeatedly anathematized the vast aggregation of photographs so cheaply and easily obtained. Were they to perish from the earth, design would take a great leap forward—for their abuse is almost inevitable. The mere power of limning is compromised by an over-reliance on them. Constant reference, even to an original study from nature, clogs the creative faculty, and hampers the impatient hand, much more so, an alien reproduction. Once a distinguished artist lost all his preliminary studies for a picture when his house was ransacked by the Prussians. "I am glad of it," he said, "for now I feel emancipated and can work with greater freedom." It must always be borne in mind that the best designs were made before the invention of the reproductive processes, and the exactions of precise archæology. It is safe here to use the word "best," because the constant copying of them is an admission of their primacy. It must not be supposed that the Renaissance man was more virtuous than we are. Probably he was less so. He stole things wherever he could lay his hands on them. Fortunately, there was less to steal in quality and quantity. Nor had he acquired the lesson of accuracy. Even the engraver, when he tried to counterfeit, let us say an "Albert Dürer," did it rather clumsily. If an artist wished to reproduce another's work for self-instruction, he rendered it very freely, infusing a good deal of his own personality into the copy, unconsciously, without doubt. From our point of view this copy was pitiable as an imitation. For his purpose, it was just as good as the closer reproduction, even better. Giuliano Sangallo's drawing from the antique would make schoolboys merry, while both they and their preceptors admire the creations which these somewhat clumsy sketches evoked. One of the fragments of the lost "Battle of Anghiari," by Leonardo, comes to us through the exuberant handling of Rubens, the freest sort of a translation, as were all his Italian notes. Raphael, painter-architect, makes a pen and ink from the "Three Graces at Sienna," after graduating from the school of Perugino (we follow Müntz). From the photographic standpoint the humblest in a well-conducted antique class could do better. But these men, and hosts of others, invented—some painters, some sculptors, some architects, perhaps the two or three in one. Take, for instance, that much used and very popular member, the capital, a magnificent vehicle for decorative expression. Observe Sangallo's in the Palazzo Gondi, Stagio-Stagi's at Pisa, or those in the Palazzo dei Pazzi. But why specify these, when beautiful examples swarm in Bologna, Ferrara, Urbino, and all over northern Italy, full of lovely ideas and graceful in contour, capitals evolved from the antique in a general way, and quite equal to them for pure beauty, and surpassing them in fancy? We are prone to denounce the "barocco" work. Eliminating for the nonce the question of taste, let us glance at it from the inventive point of view. We have seen compositions by the much abused painter-architect, Vasari, evidently turned out with perfect facility, that would tax the creative faculty of a modern almost to despair. The Zuccari Brothers, Poccetti, and men of that generation, at times did things in shocking taste, but at times they composed very beautifully and were always interesting, flinging broadcast fresh ideas. We may not like a frame, or an arm-chair by a barocco Brustolon, yet we must admire his fluent design. Thanks to passionless imitations, the uninitiated are prone to associate nothing but dry formality with such names as Vignola or Palladio. Let them see the villas by these architects in the neighborhood of Rome or Vicenza, and they will soon be disabused of any such impressions.

It is high time that the architect should declare himself an artist by a display of the artistic qualities, an important one being the invention of ornamental motives. He should differentiate himself from the engineer. But as matters now stand, finding himself unable to evolve fresh decorative forms either from lack of time or faculty, he has recourse to his library, and cribs or re-distributes decorative conventions, more or less trite, according to the date of the print or photograph, with the well known result. These aids are also within the reach of the engineer, or even the "builder," pure and simple. With a very little study, either might learn to handle them adroitly. So that if the architect wishes to occupy an impregnable position, he must fortify it with artistic accomplishments.

That somewhat negative quality, jejune good taste, a sparse use of the very well known and approved decorative forms, has its charm. It is a perfectly safe policy for an architect to pursue. In the face of much tawdry stuff, one craves it—the mere hungry surface, relieved here and there by the authorized classic motives. But this cold chasteness is as much a moral as an artistic idea. It means æsthetic sterility, petrified decoration. A living art connotes invention. The same is true of the dictum that a good copy is better than a bad original. Perhaps it is; but no artistic progress can be made under such a tenet, and the beautiful prototype deteriorates in reproduction, and loses the inspiration in its frequency.

Be it understood that the question of decorative instruction is not under discussion. More tenaciously, perhaps, than others, we hold that the student must know the historical conventions, his grammar of ornament, just as a writer must know his alphabet, not in order to use them subsequently, but to profit by their lessons. What concerns us now is the golden mean between the use and abuse of accredited conventions. Certain simple decorative motives, such as dentils, egg and darts, pearls, frets, etc., have become part and parcel of our decorative conceptions. They are valuable accessories, almost as essential to artistic syntax as the unimportant, yet necessary, conjunction is to rhetorical syntax. In literary composition no objection can be made to a timely quotation as an auxiliary to the subject-matter, but very serious objection would be made were citations forced to do the author's work vicariously. It is only when architects make their conventions bear the sole brunt of ornamentation and call it "art" that complaint is made. Did we not constitutionally object to the thoughtless use of the superlative so much in vogue, especially when æsthetic themes are under discussion, we should say that in the use of classic conventions, the discretion and taste of the della Robbia were very nearly supreme. The founder of the clan, Andrea, was, perhaps, less influenced by the antique than any decorative artist of his time; still he was influenced by it, as every Italian of his date must have been. Take one of his famous tondi as an example. The expressional picture is in the centre, architecturally framed as it should be by a fillet or two, or an egg and dart, perhaps, confining a decorative border of great beauty, inspired by the fruits of the earth, largely treated. Here we have a composition firmly framed, well suited to structural needs, sufficiently architectural, yet immensely interesting. This is the very acme of decorative excellence.

Archæology and chance have recently conferred one benefit, not to mention others, for which we must be truly grateful. They have clearly demonstrated the inventive faculties of the ancients. They have proved to us that the architects and decorators of classic times were always doing what artists will ever do—the unexpected. Familiar with the reproductions of certain consecrated monuments, students have been too prone to believe that the art of the Greeks and Romans was highly conventionalized; that it moved in very narrow and prescribed channels. The rendering of these monuments in the authoritative works has aggravated the belief. Actually, the ancients worked with great freedom, doing what we should never look for. Suppose it had been required to "restore" a Livia's villa, not knowing the original, would it ever have entered the restorer's head to paint a freehand landscape on its walls? Suppose the task was to make a patera à l'antique, would it ever have occurred to the designer to plant a portrait head in its centre with a meagre line or two about it? Yet just such a patera was found at Bosco Reale a few years since. The problem being to build a Roman arch, who would ever have dreamed of constructing such an one as we find at Timgad, dedicated to Trajan, with its lateral bays crowned by curved pediments? It is very well known in these days that the ancient Greeks and Romans were creative artists, whether they diademed an Acropolis, or carved the throne of a Zeus, or "hit off" a Tanagra figurine, or colored a Palatine wall, or a Pompeiian villino—not to mention the myriad household utensils, some the most humble, exquisitely designed. In plain English—they invented.

The failure of the architect as a decorative designer is a logical sequence of commercialism. It is not to be expected that the breadwinner should make superfluous sacrifices—that would be "bad business." While in every profession there are philanthropic enthusiasts capable of high and costly flights of altruism, the rank and file cannot be called upon to immolate themselves to an unremunerative idea. One must live, and live well, too, in these days. Taking his long and expensive training into consideration, and his multifarious requirements, it may be boldly asserted that few, if any, of the professions are so poorly paid as that of the architect. He is not bedecked with the trappings of wealth. His range of theoretical knowledge must be wide, and his practical experience very considerable. Probably no class of men is more roundly abused for its pains. The client has usually a pack of complaints against his architect, and makes it a point to air them. On several occasions we have heard men, high in their respective callings, irritably denounce, on the flimsiest grounds, all architects as "frauds." It is needless to say that our sympathies have invariably been with the latter, for, as a profession, we believe them to be high-minded, cultivated, conscientious, and efficient. The reason that they are not decorative designers is because they are not paid for original design. Yet, with all their diversified requirements in these days of novel and necessarily tentative construction, they would quickly acquire the lost habit, if it were worth their while. Yes, the habit is lost, has perished of inanition, temporarily, at least. The client does not want original design at the price exacted. He is not a Mæcenas; he prefers the mechanical reproduction of stale forms at a lower figure, i.e., the shopworn conventional. Moreover, he is rather inclined to the habitual as being safer. Under these conditions, fresh thoughts cannot be looked for. Even those men whose lives are devoted to architectural decoration alone, the decorative painters and sculptors, are frequently forced by the client to use the wearisome ornaments of the past, much to their chagrin, because fresh thought is too expensive. Not much objection seems to be made to a lavish outlay on mere barbaric material, but a vigorous stand is taken against an outlay on artistic invention. What is the result? Unable to evolve fresh motives, the architect, perforce, turns to his portfolios and copies. He must have ornament, for ornament is part and parcel of his profession as well as solid construction and harmonious proportion. Therefore, he purloins it. There is no sin in it, for it is done overtly and no one is deceived. Any man in the other professions would do likewise under similar conditions. It would be reprehensible if he did not. Only this road does not lead to new ideas—to a new style. Artistic invention cannot thrive under such conditions.

F. C.

It is not many years since a wealthy New Yorker, a man who employs builders a good deal, and architects somewhat, objected to arguments and appeals similar to those printed above, by demonstrating that a good old building was certainly fine, whereas a proposed new building only ran small chance of being fine, and that it followed (for so it seemed to him)—it followed that it was wiser for an architect to copy the old building rather than to try to design a fresh one. This was a fin-de-siècle idea, indeed! Surely, the decadence can hardly go farther than to embody itself in a declaration that it was less troublesome and more satisfactory to take your designs ready-made from fine old things of the past! The rich New Yorker in question was, undoubtedly, quoting his favorite architectural practitioner; but that same practitioner would hardly have been willing to have said as much among artists. Assuredly he would never have stood up at a meeting of artists and have declared his gospel in any such terms.

The difficulty in the way of expense may be thought by some not so great as Mr. Crowninshield has made it. When the present writer was a pupil in an architect's office, the head man, the designer, the real maker of the drawings, a workman prolific and able in his way, allowed this confidence to escape him—"Yes, I used to think I would get a mountain of tracing-paper and trace everything [photographs were not so cheap in those days]—and then I would never be out of material! But I found by and by that it was too much trouble to find what I wanted; it is really much easier to design it; what you want, is a knowledge of the style, and what may be done, and what cannot be done; and there you are! Besides the time lost in finding your 'material' you lose another infinite lot of time in fitting the material together—and then it does not fit!" That is as true now as it was a good many years ago. The only reason why a modern designer finds it easier to copy than to invent is that he is not really familiar with the style, nor really in the habit of designing in it. He is not really familiar with the style, because he has accustomed himself to go straight to books where all his details are to be found complete, and with their relative dimensions figured, and to copy them. He is not in the habit of designing in the style (whatever it may be), because, again, he has done nothing for years but patch together copied details. He is not in the habit of inventing, because, as Mr. Crowninshield has shown, he has too much else to do and too much else to think of; and because invention is not required of him by his clients, nor even delicate, choice, and careful treating of what he has chosen, nor even seemly combination of what he has chosen into new resulting wholes. If he really knew his style so that he felt at home in it—so that he felt it to be plastic in his hands; so that he dared play with it and alter its details in absolute conviction that he would not abandon its essential characteristics in so doing—then he would find it easier to invent than to copy, provided always he had the habit of freehand drawing and of simple modelling, and the habit of using either or both of those familiar arts for the ornamentation of objects large and small.

R. S.