Spiritual vampirism

INTRODUCTION. — THE PHILOSOPHY OF MESMERIC IMPOSITION.

On page 392 of the concluding sketch of a late series, the “Tales of the Southern Border,” occurs the following passage:—

On my next meeting with my friend Carter, who proved still to be in the land of the living, I spoke to him of the cabinet and its remarkable contents, which had so unexpectedly been left in my charge; offering to resign to him my trusteeship. To this, however, he would by no means consent, but continued to insist, as in his original letter, that I should without reserve make what use of it my sense of propriety might dictate. I was finally overruled into undertaking the mere arrangement and editorship of its contents—for the revelations there made are in many respects so strangely horrifying and unusual, that I fear the world will be little disposed to pardon my agency in giving them publicity. However, as I believe them to be, in every respect, genuine life-experiences, I have determined to make the venture, come what will of it. We shall therefore give, as proper introduction to the singular narrative which we have selected from beneath the blood-stained seals of the cabinet it has been our fate to open, the following singular paper, which we found lying separately above the folds of the MS. which constitutes the History of Etherial Softdown.

TO BE READ BY PHILOSOPHERS ONLY.[1]

The existence of what may be called the nervous or Odic fluid—the sympathetic element—has been partially known to all ages. The knowledge of this powerful secret, in moving and controlling mankind, has been professionally and almost exclusively confined to the adepts of all sects, religions, and periods; though it has occasionally, in various ways, leaked out of the penetralia, principally through its forms, accompanied with little or no apprehension of their vital meaning. It is in this way that a series of scientific phenomena, the discovery of which probably originated with a remote priestcraft, and had been made to subserve exclusive ends, has gradually been fragmented among the people, and in many imperfect, ignorant, and vitiated forms has now become the common property of science.

When it is understood that this nervous fluid is nothing more nor less than that force—whether electrical, magnetic, odic, or otherwise named—which, lubricating the nervous system in man, produces all vital phenomena—is, in a word, the vital force—the active principle of life—it will not be difficult to comprehend how important a knowledge of its laws may be rendered to even those relations of life not exclusively physical.

Mesmer promulgated, under his own name, as a new and astounding discovery in science, something of the sympathetic laws to which this nervous or Odic fluid is subject, and by

which the vital and spiritual relations of man to the external universe are in a great measure modified, and even controlled. This was no discovery of his, but had been the mainly exclusive secret of the ancient priesthood; employed alike in the ceremonies of the novitiate in the Thibetian temples of Buddha, in the Egyptian Initiation, and in Grecian Pythism. But the particular reason why his announcements caused such prodigious excitement, in 1784, as to run all Paris mad, even including the court of the wary Louis XVI., and still continue to excite and madden mankind, is, that, as the sympathetic ecstacies and furors, superinduced by the mummeries of his famous “vat,” were called by a new name, the people failed to recognise them, although they had been familiarised with, and even acting habitually under their influence, while surrounded by accessories of a more sacred character. The immediate success of Mesmer’s experiments amazed men. He, in fact, little knew what he was doing himself; the effects he understood how to produce, because accident had furnished him with the formulas. Having gone through these, which, though most grotesque and preposterous, later experience has shown, really included all the “passes” and other conditions necessary to establish sympathy through the nervous fluid with the victims of his delusion, he proceeded to produce exhibitions the most extraordinary the world ever saw, except in the hideous and frantic orgies of some wild, barbaric creed, and the parallels to which, in this country, are to be found in the shrieks and bellowings of a fanatic camp-meeting, Miller ascension-tent, Mormon rite, or hard-cider political mass-meeting.

Beginning with the postulate that “Nature abhors a vacuum,” it does not seem difficult to understand something, at least, of the rationale of this sympathetic influence of one man over another. The laws of the distribution of this Odic force seem to bear a somewhat general affinity to those of electricity. The surcharged cloud discharges its superfluous fluid into the cloud more negatively charged. The man holding a superfluous amount of vital or Odic force, can dismiss a portion of this—along the course of its proper lightning-rods, or conveyers, the nerves—into the organisation of a being more negatively charged, or, in other words, of a weaker man. As electricity can only act upon inert matter through its proper media, the elements, so the Odic fluid can only act upon organised matter normally through its proper medium, the nerves of vitality. This communication of the Odic fluid, by which sympathy between the two beings has been established, can be, to a certain degree, regulated and controlled by manipulations which bring the thumbs and fingers of the hand, which are properly Odic poles, in contact with certain great nerves, or centres of nerves, along which the influence can be readily communicated. These manipulations, the vital and original meanings of which these Mesmer agitators have betrayed, may be traced very clearly through the most important ceremonies of religion, and the secret orders of fraternisation in the world. From this point of view, how significant the “laying-on of hands” in ordination, the “joining of hands” in the marriage ceremony, &c.

Here let us remark, that we would no more be understood as accusing a Christian Priesthood, in modern times, of having made an improper use, either inside or out of their profession, of the manipulations mentioned above, than we would think of accusing them of having, as a class, any special knowledge of their significance beyond that of ceremonial forms, set down in the discipline. It has been to the Heathen Priesthood that we have consistently attributed a knowledge of the psychological meaning of these ceremonials, which have descended through the Hebrew and Christian churches as avowedly divested of vital significance, and intended, in their arbitrary exaction, as, to a certain degree, ordained tests of Christian faith and obedience.

But it is by no means indispensable to the exhibition of the Odic phenomena, that the processes of manipulation should have been literally gone through with in all cases—nor, indeed, in the majority even—for some of the most apparently inexplicable and extraordinary of them all are brought about without such intervention. Take, as comparatively “modern instances,” such effects as those produced by the preaching of Peter the Hermit, when not only vast armies of men were moved like flights of locusts toward the Desert, on the breeze of his fiery breath, to disappear, too, as they, within its bosom, and never be heard from again, but even great armies of children rushed in migratory hordes to the sea-ports, to ship for the Holy Land!—and those produced by the crusade of Father Mathew against intemperance, in our time, when all Ireland lay wailing at his feet. These great furors were precisely identical with those already enumerated, so far as the sympathetic or motive power went. So with the story of the rise of Mahomet, Joe Smith, Miller, and all such agitators. They are usually men of prodigious vital power, and of course surcharged with the Odic fluid, who begin these great movements; and they possess, beside, vast patience and endurance. They begin by filling the individuals in immediate contact with them, as Mahomet did his own family, with the superfluity of the Odic force in themselves, and having thus obtained a single medium by this immediate contact—which, although it may not imply the formal manipulations with preconceived design, implies the accidental equivalents—the circle gradually enlarges through each fresh accession, in much the same way that it began, until, after a few patient years of unshaken endurance, the apostle finds himself surrounded by thousands and thousands of human beings, whose volition is swayed through this Odic force—this sympathetic medium—by his own central, resolute, and self-poised will, as if they were but one man. His moveless volition has been, from the beginning, the base and axis of the vast sympathetic movement going on around him, and upon the single strength of the Odic force within him, all depends, until, through a thorough organisation of ceremonial laws and observances, the system of which he was the vital centre assumes a corporate existence, and can stand alone.

This is about the method in which all such organisations, radiating from the one man power or centre, widen their circles to an extreme circumference, until the force of the pebble thrown into the great lake is exhausted. So it is with all sympathetic excitements—from the Dancing Dervishes, the Shaking Quakers, or the Barking Brothers, to the vast Empire of France, led frenzied over the world in the will-o’-the-wisp chase of universal sovereignty, by the fantastic will of a Napoleon. These are some of the general phenomena of sympathy, and there are many quite as extraordinary, if not as broad in what are called atmospheric or epidemic conditions, which go to prove the universality of this sympathetic law.

The distinctions between Od and Heat, Od and Electricity, as well as Od and Magnetism, have been so clearly demonstrated by the investigations of Baron Reichenbach as to leave at present no choice between the terms. Od expresses that force which, differing in many essential properties from the other two, can alone through its phenomena be reconciled with what we know of the Sympathetic or Nervous Fluid. It is therefore used as a synonym of this mysterious agency, and as conveying a far higher definition and significance than either the term Electricity or Mesmerism.

The worst and the best that the agitation begun by Mesmer has accomplished, is, to have stripped old Necromancy of its mysterious spells, by revealing something of the rationale of them, while at the same time, in unveiling its processes to the sharp eyes of modern knaves, they have been enabled to appropriate and practise them again with even more than the old success, under the new christening of “scientific experiment.” It is, I think, easily enough shown, by a minute and circumstantial comparison of the cotemporary history of the dark age of black art ascendancy in Europe, which was literally the dark age of chivalry, with that of Cotton Mather witch-burning enlightenment in New England, that the arts practised by the accused in both these countries, and at all other such periods in all other countries, were nearly identical with each other; and those familiarised to us through the doings of mesmeric manipulation, revelation, clairvoyance, spiritual knockings, &c., &c., are generally the very same, though assuming slight shades of difference, indicating some progressive development. A partial knowledge of psychological laws, which was formerly, and with great plausibility, considered altogether too dangerous pabulum for the vulgar mind, has been sown broadcast by the empiricism of this mesmeric movement, the principal oracles and expounders of which have been clearly as ignorant of the causes with which they agitated, as ever wrinkled crone of peat-smoked hovel was of the true laws of that occult palmistry, through the practice, or vague traditions of which, she finally prophesied herself into the martyrdom of the “red-hot ploughshares,” or the warm resting-place of the pot of boiling pitch. They only know that certain formulas produce certain results, and as they are blundering entirely in the dark, they mix those which have a basis in science with the crude and meaningless forms which ignorance, with its abject cunning, easily supplies. From such amalgamations have arisen the mummeries of conjuration in whatever form, and by the imprudent use of which, the credulous, simple and superstitious, are so easily “frightened from their propriety,” and thus made easy victims of more dangerous arts.

But it is a study of the fearful uses which have been made by the evil-disposed, of this partial knowledge of the laws of relation of soul to the body, that is more interesting now than these olden disguises of the same evil in more helpless forms; as now, through the mesmeric agitation, it has really attained to some gleam of causes—has now something of scientific illumination to steady and give direction to its reckless and deadly aim. In the radius of its hurtful circumference, the vicious power of the witch, fortune-teller or conjuror, was as much more circumscribed than that of the semi-scientific charlatan of clairvoyance, as the vision of the mole is less than that of the viper, which, at least, looks out into the sunshine though every cloud may impede its malignant gaze.

The relative degrees in which the Odic or sympathetic fluid may be found exhibited in the different individuals of our race, have been previously remarked in general terms. In the sexes, we most usually find the positive pole in man, who gives out, and the negative in woman, who receives and absorbs from him, the dispenser. Though this be the general rule so far as the sexes are concerned, it is by no means the universal rule for the race—since there are among men but few positive poles, or fixed centres of Odic radiation; and where such are found, they are observed to possess much of what we commonly call “influence” with or upon others. All the parties, therefore, within the circle of this sympathetic radiation, or “magnetic attraction,” as it is popularly termed, must necessarily be, relatively to this positive pole, negative poles, without regard to sex—while each of these comparatively negative poles may in turn be a positive pole, or Odic centre, to those below or of weaker nature than himself.

Those men who have been known to all humanity as prophets, poets, law-givers, discoverers, reformers, &c., are, and have been, what we mean by positive Odic poles; for while they have seemed to stand in immediate and direct communion with the spiritual source of all wisdom, they have at the same time given out the impulse thus granted, to the people by whom they are surrounded, thus acting as the chosen media of divine revelation, and from the cloudy summits of Sinais handing down the tables of the law to all the tribes.

Now there is a mighty radiation of the Odic force from these men, through which the love, wisdom, or rather will in them—or sent through them—is made operative upon the great masses of mankind; and this same radiation, in the greater or less degrees, is found emanating from a thousand different sources at the same time, affecting man for evil as well as for good; for, when we comprehend that this Odic or sympathetic force is the sole medium of communication with the spiritual and invisible world, as well as with the visible and material world, it can then be easily understood how what are called “evil” and “good spirits” should through it affect mankind. This will be fully illustrated when we observe the common conditions of health and disease. Health is good and disease is evil; and these are the two eternally antagonistic chemical forces in the universe. Health is that normal condition of the body which enables it to resist evil and maintain the proper balance of the spiritual and material elements. Disease is that abnormal condition of the body in which the integrity of the spiritual and organic functions has been destroyed through the sympathetic media by evil, and good overcome.

In either case, the balance is destroyed, and the immediate consequence may be, in the one, sudden paroxysms of fearful insanity, or in the other, sudden death, as in common apoplexy.

Thus the popular fallacy, that all things having a source in the spiritual, or rather the invisible, must of necessity be good, is in a very simple way exposed. We see there may be what are called evil, as well as good spirits, which hold communion with us; and the safest and only true general rule with regard to such matters is, that, while the good spirits are those propitious chemical forces which make themselves known to us in love, and joy, and peace, through the unbounded happiness of the normal conditions of health, the evil spirits are those vicious chemical forces, morbid delusions, and malign revelations, which are made known to us through all other diseased conditions as well as that of Clairvoyance. Remember that no such being has yet been known throughout the whole range of Mesmeric experiment as a healthy Clairvoyant, or a “subject” who has attained to the super-eminence of Clairvoyance, who was not what they fancifully term “delicate”—that is, liable to those diseases which are well known to supervene upon nervous weakness, exhaustion, or emasculation. This condition of nervous exhaustion renders them, of course, the very negation of the negative pole of sympathy, and the first person approaching them, who possesses the ordinary Odic conditions of health, is clutched hold of by their famine-struck vitality, in the agonised plea for life! life!

“Give! give!” is still the insatiable cry. They must have the Odic fluid restored, and that, in taking from your “enough,” they exhaust and undermine the holy purposes of your life to make up that deficit in their own—which loathsome vice has brought about—the “hideous selfishness of weakness” rather rejoices. The sympathetic rapporte being once established, they can at least, through this dangerous medium, live in the integrities of your life, and enjoy, both physically and spiritually, a surreptitious vitality, which, while it reflects the prevailing phenomena of your own mind and spiritual being, has, in addition, some approximation even to the physical exaltation of your higher health.

These human vampires or sponges may be, therefore, as well absorbents of the spiritual as animal vitality. Their parasitical roots may strike into the very centres of life, and their hungry suckers remorselessly draw away the virility of manhood, or the spiritual strength.

They seem to be mainly divided into two classes, one of which, born, seemingly, with but a rudimentary soul, attains to its apparent spiritual though merely mental development, by absorption of the spiritual life in others, through the Odic medium. Another class, born with a predominating spirituality based upon a feeble physique, is ravenous of animal strength, and can only live by its sympathetic absorption of the same from others, through the same pervading medium. Of the two, the first is the evil type; for, born in the gross sphere of the passions, with a vigorous organisation, but faintly illuminated at the beginning with that golden light of love which is spiritual life, the fierce half-monkey being is propelled onwards, and even upwards, by the basest of the purely animal instincts, appetites, and lusts. If such beings strive towards the light of the harmonious and the beautiful, it is not because they yearn for either the holy or the good, but because it lends a lurid charm to appetite and glorifies a lust.

The other character, in whom the spiritual predominates, whether from a natal inequality, as is very frequently the case, or from the sheer exhaustion of the physical powers, through emasculating vices, is yet, in itself, good, so far as its morbid conditions leave it an unaccountable being; but, as its revelations and utterings depend entirely upon the Odic characters and will of those from whom its strength may be derived, it can only be regarded, whether used for evil or good, as a medium. This character is the common Clairvoyant, to whom we are indebted for those strangely-mingled gleams of remote truth, with errors the most grave and injurious, which have so tended to confuse the judgment of mankind in regard to the phenomena of Clairvoyance. Such persons can be made as readily the medium of any falsehood which the knavish passions of their “Mesmerisers” may dictate, as they can be caused to announce, by a will as strong, but soul more pure, the disconnected myths of science and of history, which have so surprised the world in what are called the “Revelations” of Andrew Jackson Davis. This man belongs to our second class, and is purely “a medium” of the sympathetic fluid. His organisation is most sensibly sympathetic and delicately responsive, but is too feeble to balance his spiritual development. His case stands, therefore, as the most remarkable modern instance of what the ancients termed “vaticination;” but, as has been the case with other false prophets, his “gifts” have proved of no value, except to knaves. He was undoubtedly practised upon by a choice set of such characters; and, now that he has found in marriage a sympathetic restoration, through the physical, of its needed balance with the spiritual, he has lost his “lying gift” of prophecy.

We have examined this man carefully, and are convinced that the whole mystery of his revelations and character may be contained in a nut-shell. He is to the sphere of intellectual and spiritual sympathy, and in a lower sense, precisely an analogous case with that of Mozart in the sphere of the musical and spiritual. When the great soul of humanity has been long—say one generation—in travail with a great thought in art, science, music, or mechanics, there is sure to be somebody born in the succeeding generation who is physically, mentally, and spiritually, the impersonation and embodiment of this thought, of which the age is in labor, and who must of necessity become, solely and singly, the expression and embodiment thereof. Thus Mozart, the infant prodigy in music, who at five years old was the pet of monarchs and the miracle of his age, continued, with no signs of precociousness, a steady and consistent development, which showed him to be indeed the embodiment of the musical inspirations of his age. His revelations in music were just as prodigious as even the rabid worshippers of the Davis revelations would imagine those to be; yet there are some most essential differences between the results of the two.

Davis, born amidst the travail of this new Mesmeric agitation, became the most sensitive organ of the sympathetic fluid in intellect, as the other had been in music; but as, in the case of Mozart, the exciting cause came from Nature, and constituted her purest and most sacred inspirations, so the inspiration of Davis came from man, with all his imperfections and subjective tendencies. The sequel has been, the inspirations of Mozart are considered now by mankind as only second to the Divine, while those of Davis are justly regarded as morbid, fragmentary, incomplete, and worthless.

The organisation of Mozart was equally sympathetic with that of Davis; but it was of that healthy tone which could only respond to nature and the natural; while the organisation of Davis belongs to that much inferior type, which, from its morbid and unbalanced conditions, can respond only to the human as the representative of nature. Such persons receive nothing direct from nature, but only through its representative, man.

It would seem as if the world were absolutely divided into two classes—the radiating and the absorbing; the first receiving from nature, and the second from man. In the first, are the holy brotherhood of prophets and the poets, and in the second, the poor slaves of sympathy—the knaves and fools—the impostors who play upon its well-known laws, and, deceiving themselves as well as others, may well be said to “know not what they do.”

We are convinced that no man, who has kept himself informed of the psychological history and progress of his race, can by any means fail to recognise at once, in the pretended “Revelations” of Davis, the mere disjecta membra of the systems so extensively promulgated by Fourier and Swedenborg. When you come to compare this fact with the additional one, that Davis, during the whole period of his “utterings,” was surrounded by groups, consisting of the disciples of Fourier and Swedenborg; as, for instance, the leading Fourierite of America was, for a time, a constant attendant upon those mysterious meetings, at which the myths of innocent Davis were formally announced from the condition of Clairvoyance, and transcribed by his keeper for the press, while the chief exponent and minister of Swedenborgianism in New York was often seated side by side with him.

Can it be possible that these men failed to comprehend, as thought after thought, principle after principle, was enunciated in their presence, which they had previously supposed to belong exclusively to their own schools, that the “revelation” was merely a sympathetic reflex of their own derived systems? It was no accident; for, as often as Fourierism predominated in “the evening lecture,” it was sure that the prime representative of Fourier was present; and when the peculiar views of Swedenborg prevailed, it was equally certain that he was forcibly represented in the conclave. Sometimes both schools were present; and on that identical occasion we have a composite metaphysics promulgated, which exhibited, most consistently, doctrines of Swedenborg and Fourier, jumbled in liberal and extraordinary confusion. This is, in epitome, about the whole history of such agitations. The weak Clairvoyant falls naturally into the hands of knaves who are superior to him in physical vitality. He becomes, first, the medium of their vague and feeble intellection; and then, as attention is attracted by the notoriety they know well how to produce, the “medium” becomes gradually surrounded by the enthusiasts of every school; and as he is brought into their various Odic spheres, he pronounces the creed of each in his morbidly illuminated language, and it sounds to the mob like inspiration.

There is no greater nonsense; men are inspired through natural laws. But this comparatively innocuous character, which we have thus far stepped aside to indicate, is nothing compared to the first specimen of this Clairvoyant type which we have classified. This, it will be remembered, is the animal born with feeble spirituality, but vigorous physique, which is, at the same time, intensely sympathetic. These, as we have said, are the infernal natures; for, possessing no life outside the lower animal passions, self is to them the close centre of all being, and their Odic sensitiveness a vampire-absorption, the horrible craving of which, not content with the mere exhaustion of the animal life of the victim, by wanton provocations, drinks up soul and mind to fill the beastly void of their own. These worse than ghouls, that live upon the dying rather than the dead, possess some fearfully dangerous and extraordinary powers.

Vampirism, as a superstition, prevailed, not many years ago, like a general pestilence, throughout the countries of Servia and Wallachia. Whole districts, infected by this horrible disease, were desolated; people grew wild with terror, and, in their savage ignorance, committed monstrous sacrilege upon the sanctities of burial. Bodies that had rested quietly in their graves for ten, twenty, and even eighty days, were dragged forth, to have stakes driven through their chests; and if any blood was found, they were burned to ashes.

The belief was, that the deceased, when living, had been bitten by a human vampire, which, coming forth from its grave by night, had sunk its white teeth in his throat, and drunk his blood, thereby causing a lingering death; in which he was also doomed to the hideous fate of becoming a vampire, after his burial.

The bodies of vampires, when dug up, presented a perfectly natural appearance; and, even in those cases where the scarfskin peeled off, a new skin was found underneath, and new nails formed on the fingers. The vital blood was found in the heart, lungs, and viscera, exhibiting the conditions of perfect health. How the vampire got out of his grave, without scratching a hole, does not appear.

Thus we find, in modern vampirism, a strange compound of ancient superstition with well-known scientific truths. The vampire is the counterpart of the ancient ghoul, with the simple transfer of the habits of the vampire-bat to its identity. These are then connected with the fact, well known to the medical profession, that persons have been buried, supposed to be dead, who, in reality, had only fallen into what is called the death-trance; and who, had they been left above ground for a sufficient period, would have probably resuscitated of themselves. That they have done so after burial, is a familiar fact; since bodies exhumed, long after, have been found to have changed their position in the coffin. How long bodies, thus inconsiderately buried, retain a resemblance to the normal conditions of life, has not been fully ascertained.

We have here the historical origin of what is called vampirism; but there are certain phenomena of this fearful infection, closely resembling those which we have attributed to the Spiritual Vampire.

Vampirism is clearly a disease of the nervous system; it being first excited through the imagination of ignorance and superstition. The nerves, then affected through the odic medium, lose their balance, and the mind constantly playing within the circle of the one thought of horror, a rapid and premature decline is the immediate consequence.

The infection of which the victim died remaining still within the odic medium of the sphere it occupied, passes into the nerves of others, who die also; and thus the disease spreads like any other epidemic. But mark—whence the true origin of this superstition of the ghoul and the vampire, so universal in the world? Is it not that mankind, everywhere, has felt, with an unconscious shuddering, the presence of the spiritual vampire? The instincts of the masses have, in their superstitions, foreshadowed all the great discoveries of science. Has it not been, that they have felt the hideous incubus always; but not being able, through any connected series of observations, to discover the real cause of their dread and suffering, have given its nearly identical attributes a “local habitation and a name” among their superstitions?

What we have termed the Spiritual Vampire, is a scientific fact—we believe as much so as the bat-vampire; and that it feeds, not alone upon the living, but upon the spiritually dead; that originally, so far as its spiritual entity is concerned, it too comes forth from its sensual charnal to feed upon the soul-blood of mankind. This may seem a horrible picture, but we cannot consent to withdraw it. These records were made under a sense of duty to mankind; and if they should ever see the light, it must be as they have been written. We dare not reveal all that we know of this thing—we can only venture to say enough to arouse men in amazement, at the realisation of what they have always known and felt to exist, without having expressed it. No mortal mind could have conceived such possibilities, even in hell, much less in actual life.

Amidst the profound securities of the best-ordered households in the world, unless a strict eye be had to such facts and phenomena as we have adverted to and shall describe, the most insidious and fatal corruptions of the bodies and souls of your children, your wives, and your sisters, may creep in, while there is no dream of wrong or danger. If we shock you, it is to put you somewhat upon your guard against the many evils, concealed under the apparent harmless approaches of the viciously-purposed manipulator, or the covert practiser upon the odic or sympathetic vitality of the pure and unsuspecting.—We will abide the issue.

Milton clearly had vampirism in his thought when he wrote—

CHAPTER I. THE GIRLHOOD OF ETHERIAL.

CHAPTER II. SCENES IN THE GOTHAM CARAVANSARIE.

In Barclay Street, New York, years ago, flourished, at No. 63, that famous caravansarie of all the most rabid wild animals on the Continent, who styled themselves Reformers and New-light People, Come-outers, Vegetarians, Abolitionists, Amalgamationists, &c. &c., well known to fame as the “Graham House.” Here, any fine morning, at the breakfast-table, you might meet a dozen or so of the most boisterous of the then existing or embryo Reform notorieties of the day. Mark, we say notorieties, for that is the word.

From the Meglatherium Oracle, whose monstrous head, covered with a mouldy excrescence, answering for hair, which gave it most the seeming of a huge swamp-born fungus of a night—who sat bolting his hard-boiled eggs by the dozen, with bran-bread in proportion, washing them down with pints of diluted parched-corn coffee—even to the most meagre, hungry-eyed, and talon-fingered of the soul-starved World-Reformers, that stooped forward amidst the babble, and, between huge gulps of hot meal mush, croaked forth his orphic words—they were all one and alike—the mutterers of myths made yet more misty by their parrot-mouthings of them!

Here every crude, ungainly crotchet that ever possessed ignorant and presumptuous brains; here every wild and unbroken hobby that ever driveller or madman rode, was urged together, pell-mell, in a loud-voiced gabbling chaos. Here the negro squared his uncouth and musky-ebon personalities beside the fair, frail form of some lean, rectangular-figured spinster-devotee of amalgamation from New England.

Here the hollow-eyed bony spectre of an old bran-bread disciple stared, in the grim ecstacy of anticipation, at the ruddy cheeks of the new convert opposite, whose lymphatic, well-conditioned corporation shivered with affright, as he met those ravin-lit eyes, and a vague sense of their awful meaning first possessed him, as his furtive glance took in the sterile “spread” upon the table, to which he had been ostentatiously summoned for “a feast.”

Here some Come-outer Quaker, with what had been, at best, cropped hair, might be seen with the crop now shaven yet more close to his bullet-head, in sign of his greater accession in spiritual strength beyond the heathen he had left behind, sitting side by side with some New-light or Phalanxterian apostle, with his long, sandy, carroty, or rather golden locks, as he chooses to style them, cultivated down his back in a ludicrously impious emulation of the revered “Christ Head” of the old Italian painters.

Here the blustering peace-man and professed non-resistant, railed with a noisy insolence, rendered more insufferably insulting in the precise ratio of exemption from personal accountability claimed by his pusillanimous doctrines. Here too, a notorious Abolitionist, with his tallow-skinned and generally-disgusting face, roared through gross lips his vulgar anathemas against the South, which had foolishly canonised this soulless and meddlesome non-resistant ruffian, in expressing their readiness to hang him, should he be caught within their territory.

Here the weak and puling sectary of some milk-and-water creed rolled up his rheumy eyes amidst the din, and sighed for horror of a “sad, wicked world.” Here the sharp animal eyes, the cool effrontery and hard-faced impudence of ignoramus Professors of all sorts of occult sciences, ologies, and isms, met you, with hungry glances that seemed searching for “the green” in your eye; and mingled with the whole, a sufficiently spicy sprinkle of feminine “Professors,” of the same class, whose bold looks and sensual faces were quite sufficient offsets to the extreme etherialisation of their spiritualized doctrines.

Here, in a word, the blank and ever-shocking glare of harmless and positive idiocy absolutely would escape notice at all, or be mistaken for the solid repose of common sense, in contrast with the unnatural sultry wildness of the prevailing and predominating expression!

But this menagerie of mad people held caged, in one of its upper rooms, the object of immediate interest. On entering the apartment, which was an ordinary boarding-house bedchamber, a scene at once shocking and startling was presented. A female, seemingly about thirty-three, was stretched upon a low cot-bed, near the middle of the floor, while on the bed and upon the floor were scattered napkins, which appeared deeply saturated with blood, with which the pillow-case and sheet were also stained. A napkin was pressed with a convulsive clutch of the hands to her mouth, into which, with a low, suffocating cough, which now and then broke the silence, she seemed to be throwing up quantities of blood from what appeared an alarming hemorrhage.

A gentleman, whose neat apparel and fresh benevolent face somehow spoke “physician!” leaned over the woman, with an expression of anxiety, which appeared to be subdued by great effort of a trained will. He bent lower, and in an almost whispered voice, said:

“My dear madam, you must restrain yourself. This hemorrhage continues beyond the reach of any remedies, so long as you permit this violent excitement of your maternal feelings to continue. Let me exhort you to patience—to bear the necessary evils of your unfortunate condition with more patience!”

The only answer was a slow despairing shake of the head, accompanied by a deep hysterical groan, which seemed to flood the napkin at her mouth with a fresh effusion of blood, which now trickled between her fingers and down upon her breast. The humane physician turned, with an uncontrollable expression of horrified sympathy and alarm upon his face, and snatching a clean napkin from the table, gently removed the saturated cloth from the clutching pressure of her fingers, and tenderly wiping the blood from her mouth and person, left the clean one in her grasp.

“Be calm! be calm—I pray you! you must some day escape his persecutions. You have friends; they will assist you to obtain a divorce yet, and rescue your child from his clutches. Do, pray now, be calm!” The voice of the good man trembled with emotion while he spoke, and the perspiration started from his forehead.

At this instant the door was suddenly thrown open, and a tall, gaunt man, with a very small round head, leaden eyes, and a wide ungainly mouth, with a projecting under jaw, singularly expressive of animal stolidity, paused on the threshold and coolly looked around the room. The woman sprang forward at the sight, as if to rise, while a fresh gush of blood poured from her mouth, bedabbling her fingers and the sheet. The physician instinctively seized her to prevent her rising, but, resisting the pressure by which he gently strove to restore her head to the pillow, she retained her half-erect position, and with eyes that had suddenly become strangely distorted, or awry in their sockets, she glared towards the intruder for an instant, and then slowly raising her flickering hand, which dripped with her own blood, she pointed at him, and muttered, in a sepulchral voice, that, besides, seemed choking:

“That is he! see him! see him! There stands the monster who would rob me of my babe, as he daily robs me of money.” Here the blood gushed up again, and she was for a moment suffocated into silence, as the object of her denunciation stood perfectly unmoved, while a cold smile half lit his leaden eyes. This seemed to fill the apparently dying woman with renewed and hysterical life. She raised herself yet more erect, and still pointing with her bloody, quivering finger, while her head tossed to and fro, and the distorted eyes glared staringly out before her, she spoke in a gasping, uncertain way, as if communing with herself. “The wretch taunts me! my murderer dares to sneer! O God! must this always continue? must that brute always follow me up and down in the land, to rob me of the money that I earn—to be my tyrant, my jailor! He will not give me money to pay postage even, out of that I earn abundantly, while he is earning nothing. He will not give me clothes to keep me decent, while I earn enough. He will not give my child shoes to wear, though he is trying to take her from me!”

“That is a lie, Etherial! you know I gave the child a new pair yesterday!” gruffly interposed the man at this stage of the deeply tragic soliloquy, while he stepped forward towards the bed. A choking scream followed, and the blood was spattered over the spread as she fell back screaming—

“Take him away! take him away! He is killing me with his brutality!” and then her head sank in sudden collapse upon the pillow, and the face, which had heretofore looked singularly natural in color, for one in such a dreadful strait from hemorrhage, turned livid pale, while the blood continued to pour upon the pillow from the corners of the relaxed mouth.

The poor physician, whose frame had been shivering with intense excitement during this interview, sprang erect, as the form of what he supposed to be a corpse fell heavily from his arms, and with the natural indignation of a feeling man, fully roused at what he considered the murderous brutality of the husband, rushed forward, and seizing him furiously by the collar, shook and choked him in a perfect ecstacy of rage, shouting, at the same time—

“Unnatural beast! monster! You have killed that poor child at last! murdered your own wife, whom you swore to nourish and protect! Infernal villain! you ought to be drawn and quartered—hanging is too good for you! You saw the terrible condition of the poor victim of your brutalities when you came, yet you persisted! In the name of humanity, I send you hence! Death is too light punishment for you!” and he hurled the unresisting wretch—who, by this time, had grown perfectly black in the face under the rough handling of this roused and indeed infuriate humanity—staggering out of the door—and closing it upon him, he proceeded to apply such restoratives as on an examination the real condition of the patient suggested.

A short and anxious investigation proved it to be rather a state of syncope than actual death; and, with a full return of all his professional caution, skill and coolness, he applied himself to the restoration of his patient, with a heart greatly relieved by the discovery that the result he so much dreaded was not yet, and hugging to his kindly breast the consolation “while there is life there is hope!” He paid no attention to clamorous knocks for admission and loud-talking excitement, which the violence of the preceding scene had no doubt caused in alarming the house. In a short time the good doctor cautiously unbolted the door and came forth from the room, treading as though on egg-shells. After leaving careful instructions with the landlady that his patient, who now slept, should under no pretence be disturbed, most especially by the husband, until his return, as her present repose might prove a matter of life and death, he left the house, promising to call again in two hours.

For one hour the woman lay calm and motionless on her gory bed, as if in catalepsy, when to a low, peculiar knock at the door, she sprang up, wide awake, and in the apparent full possession of her faculties.

“Who?” she asked, in a quick, firm tone, as she threw the hair back from her eyes.

To the low response, “I, love!” she stepped quickly from the bed and snatched a shawl from the back of a chair, and by several rapid sideway movements of her feet at the same time, thrust the bloody napkins which strewed the floor beneath the bed, where they would be out of sight, and by a movement almost as swift, threw a clean “spread” over the blood-stained pillows and sheet, then drawing her large shawl closely over the stained dressing-gown in which she had risen, she rushed first to the glass, and smoothed her hair with an activity that was positively amazing, and then to the door, which she unbolted on the inside—showing that she must have risen to bolt it immediately as the doctor passed out—and admitted a man who was in waiting.

“Ah, my soul’s sister! my Heaven-bride! how is thy spiritual strength this evening?” and at the same time, as her yielding form sank into his outspread arms, he pressed her lips with his, adding, “I salute thy chaste spirit!”

“Brother of my soul, I was weary, but now I am at rest. I was wounded and fainting by the way, but the good Samaritan has come!” and she turned her eyes upward to his with a melting expression of confiding abandon.

“Angel!” accompanied by a closer and convulsive clasp, was the response.

“What do they say of poor me again, to-day, those cruel wicked people outside?” she asked, with eyes still reverentially upraised to his, as they moved slowly with clasped arms towards the cot, on the side of which they sat, she still leaning against his bosom.

“My good sister, they say what evil spirits always prompt men to say of the good, who, like the Prophets, are sent to be stoned and persecuted on earth. You should not regard such. There are those who know you in the spirit, to whom it has been revealed through the spiritual sense, that you are good and true, as well as in the right, and through such, you will find strength of the Father.”

“Oh, you are so strong in spiritual mightiness that you do not sympathise with the weaknesses of we humbler mortals! I wonder, indeed, how you can forgive them?” and her downcast eyes were furtively raised to his. The man wore his hair thrown back over his head and behind his ears. He drew himself up slightly at this, and stroked back his locks, then placing his hand with patriarchal solemnity upon her bowed head, proceeded in a somewhat louder tone. “My simple child—my soul-sister, I should say, you are hardly upon the threshold of the true wisdom. Your knowledge of the law of spiritual correspondence is yet too incomplete for you to understand how entirely good has been mistaken for evil, and evil confounded with good in the world. For instance—it is called evil by the ignorant world, for a brother man to caress thee in the spirit as I have caressed thee but now. The imaginations of a world that lieth in evil are impure. ‘Evil to him who evil thinks!’ The great doctrine of correspondence teaches that there are two lives—the spiritual and the animal. The passions of the animal are in the fleshly lusts; those of the spiritual are in no wise such, they are in the Heavenly sphere, they are of love and wisdom. Thus, my caress in this Heavenly sphere is of no sin to thee, for by and through it I convey to you, my spiritual sister, the strength of love and wisdom for which your heart yearns. Thus—”

As he stooped his head to renew the unresisted caress, the door flew open again, and the man with the wide mouth, the hideous chin and the leaden eye, stood again upon the threshold, and as the affrighted pair looked up they saw he was backed by the curious faces of half-a-dozen chambermaids, jealous of the honor of the house, flanked by the indignant landlady and a score of prying, curious, sharp-eyed faces, which might be recognised at a glance as belonging to those pickled seraphs of reform, known as “free-spoken” spinsters in New England.

“There, they are at it!” shouted the man with the gaping mouth. “I told you so! I told you that Professor was always kissing her!”

“Yes!”

“There they are, sure enough!”

“I always thought so!”

“The honor of my house!” bristled the landlady, striding forward. “I did not expect this of you, Professor!”

“Madam!” said the gentleman with his hair behind his ears, striding forward as he released the suddenly collapsed and seemingly lifeless form he had just held within his embrace, and which fell back now heavily upon the pillow-spread, which was instantly discolored by a new gush of blood from the mouth. “I was administering, with all my zeal, spiritual comfort to this poor, sick and dying sister, when you burst in! See her condition now!”

He waved his hand towards the tragic figure. “The Professor” occupied a parlor on the first floor, beside two bed-rooms adjoining this, and being on the palmy heights of his renown and plenitude of purse, it was not convenient for the landlady to quarrel with him at present. “Ah, if that is the case, Professor, I beg you to pardon us. The husband of this woman has misrepresented you and your beneficent motives, and accuses you of all sorts of improprieties. We came up, at his urgency, to see for ourselves, and the shocking condition in which we find her now, proves that the ravings of the husband are, as she has always represented them, insane.”

“I’ve seen you kissing her before!” roared the husband, advancing threateningly upon the Professor, who, however spiritual in creed, did not now appear particularly spirited, as he turned very pale, retreated backwards, and holding up his two trembling hands imploringly, exclaimed—“Hold! hold! my dear brother! It was a spiritual kiss! I meant you no harm, nor that angel who lies there dying! Our kiss was pure and holy as the new snow. Hold him! hold him! Don’t let him hurt me! I am a non-resistant! I am for peace!”

“Your holy kisses! I don’t believe in your holy kisses!” gnashed the enraged husband, still following him up with warlike demonstrations; but here the easily appeased landlady interposed once more, to save the honor of her house in preventing a fight.

“No blows in my house!” she shrieked, as she threw herself between the parties. “The Professor is a man of God, and shall not be abused here; shame on you, Aminadab, with your poor, persecuted wife there, dying before your face! Everybody will believe what she says about your persecutions now!”

“Bah, you don’t know that woman! she’s no more dying than you are!” grunted the fellow, whose wrath fortunately seemed to be of that kind that a straw might turn it aside. All the women rolled up their eyes and lifted their two hands at this speech.

“What a brute!”

“The horrid, murdering wretch! and she bleeding at the mouth, and from the lungs, too!”

“Lord save the poor woman’s soul, with a husband like that!”

And other speeches of like character were ejaculated by all the women present.

At this moment a fresh effusion of blood, accompanied by a low groan, from the mouth of the suffering patient, flooded the clean spread with its purple current, and the horrified females rushed from the room, screaming—

“He’s killed her at last, poor thing!”

“Where’s the doctor?”

“She’s dying of his brutality—run for the doctor!” At this moment, with a hasty and heavy step, that gentleman was heard advancing along the passage, followed by a crowd of pale, frightened-looking women. He strode into the room.

“What now?—what’s to pay?” and his eye fell on the trembling form of the brutal husband, who had by no means forgotten the rough handling he had received, and now skulked and quailed like a whipped cur, as his eye saw the instant thunder darken on the brow of the doughty doctor.

“You here again—you brutal fellow? I shall instantly bind you over to keep the peace toward this unfortunate woman, whose life you are daily endangering by your brutalities. Take yourself off, sir!” Aminadab waited for no second invitation, but availed himself of the open doorway.

Without noticing the spiritual professor, who had drawn himself into as small space as possible in one corner, the good man advanced to the side of his patient with an anxious, flurried manner.

“What can that besotted wretch have been doing to her again?” and he gently placed his fingers upon her pulse, and shook his head gravely as he did so.

“Very low! very low, indeed!—nearly absolute syncope again! This is horrible! How sorry I am that I was compelled to leave her for a moment.”

“Is she really in danger, doctor?” asked the spiritual professor, advancing with recovered assurance.

“Who are you, sir?” he said, looking up sharply. “One of these officious fools, I suppose?” Then glancing his eye around at the crowded doorway, he straightened himself hastily, and exclaimed—

“Leave the room, all of you—she must be quiet—I wish to be alone with my patient! Leave the room, sir, I say!” in a sterner voice, as the spiritual professor hesitated on his backward retreat.

“I—I—I p-pro-test against the impropriety!” he stammered forth, looking back at the women, with a very pale face, as he accelerated his backward movement before the steady stride of the resolute doctor.

“Out with you, sir—I will answer for the proprieties in this case!”

The door was slammed in the ashy face of the spiritual professor, and securely doubled-locked before the doctor returned to the bedside of his patient.

The bleeding from the mouth had now ceased. All the usual remedies in such cases having so far entirely failed, the puzzled doctor had come to the final conclusion that the hemorrhage—be its seat where it might—was only to be subdued by a restoration of the patient to the most perfect repose. Sleep, calm, unbroken sleep, to his sagacious judgment and sensibilities, seemed to offer the sole alternative to death. He had been impressed by his patient that her constitutional tendencies were, by a sad inheritance, towards consumption, and the loss from the lungs, of such quantities of blood as he had witnessed, was well calculated to fill his professional mind with horror and dread. The case had thus appeared to him a fearfully uncertain and delicate one, and this sense may fully account for the stern and unusual procedure of turning even the husband out of the room on the two occasions we have mentioned.

As her physician, he felt himself bound to protect his helpless patient against those moral causes of irritation which he had been led to believe existed, not only from her reluctant disclosures, but from what he had himself witnessed. Believing that her beastly husband was the chief and immediate cause of this fatal irritation, he had felt himself justified in his rough course towards him, and was now fully and resolutely determined to protect what he considered a death-bed—providentially thrown into his charge—inviolate from farther annoyance, from whatever quarter, at least so long as he held the professional responsibility. In this resolute feeling, and as the day was warm, he threw off his coat, raised all the windows, and sat himself quietly down beside his patient to watch for results.

The eyes of the kind man very naturally rested upon the object of his solicitude, and after the first excitement of anxiety was over, and he had settled calmly into a contemplative mood, he first became conscious that there was something strangely fascinating in the position of the nearly inanimate figure. He had never before thought of the being before him as other than a very plain, but much-afflicted woman, by whose evident physical calamities, no less than her private sufferings, he had been strongly interested.

She had told him her own story, and he had believed her, thinking he saw confirmation enough in the conduct of those she accused of ill-treatment; but the idea of regarding her as attractive in any material sense, had never for an instant crossed his pure soul. Now there was an indescribable something in her attitude, so expressive of passion, that, in the pulseless silence, he felt himself blush to have recognised it.

Her arms, which he now remembered to have been bare in all his late interviews with her, were exquisitely rounded and beautifully white, and he could not but wonder that he had not before observed the strange contrast between them and the plain weather-beaten face. They looked startlingly voluptuous now, contrasted with the pallid cheek which rested on them, and the glossy folds of dark hair in which they were entangled. So strikingly indeed was this expression conveyed, that even the purple stains of blood upon the spread beneath would not divest him of the dangerous illusion. The good doctor felt the blood mount to his forehead in the shame of deep humiliation as he recognised in himself this wandering of thought.

What! could it be that one so habitually pure in feeling as he, could permit the intrusion at such an hour of impure associations? Such things were unknown to his life, so disinterested, so spotless, so humane. What could it be that had caused such feelings to possess him thus unusually? It could not be possible she was conscious of the position in which her body was thrown. Was there some strange spell about this woman—some mysterious power of sphere emanating from that still form, that crept into his blood and brain with the evil glow of these unnatural fires?

The poor doctor shuddered as he turned aside from the bed, and, with a soft step, glided to the window, and there seating himself, strove to recover the command of his thoughts by distracting them with other objects in the busy street.

The good man was on grievous terms with himself, as he continued to beat the devil’s tattoo on the window-sill with his heavy fingers. He felt alarmed, nay, even guilty. He knew not why. We shall see!

CHAPTER III. THE SYREN AND THE MOB.

The woman continued, with calm, regular breathings, to sleep for several hours. The dusk of evening had now closed in, and yet her patient guardian sat silently watching her motionless figure. A long and serene self-communion had gradually restored the excellent doctor to his ordinary equanimity, and he now, with untiring vigilance, awaited the changes that might supervene in the condition of the patient.

After all his thinking on the subject, he found himself now no nearer comprehending the cause of the late unwonted disturbance of his habitual serenity than at the beginning. He had dealt harshly with himself, in endeavoring to account for it, and never dreamed of reproaching the feeble and wretched being before him, as in any degree the conscious agent of what he considered a weakness unpardonable in himself.

With the natural proclivity of generous souls towards the extremes, he had, in the plenitude of his self-reproach, proceeded to exalt the sleeping woman into an earth-visiting angel with wounded wings, the spotless purity of which the breath of his darkened thought had soiled. The poor, good-hearted doctor!

The silence of the room was now broken by a low exclamation of fright, accompanied by a slight movement of the patient. The doctor sprang forward softly to the bedside.

“Who?—what?—where am I? What has been happening?” asked the woman, with an expression of bewilderment and alarm.

“Nothing! nothing, my dear madam! I am here—you are safe—but you must not talk.”

“Where is he? is he gone?” she persisted in a wild, terrified manner.

“Yes, he is gone. He shall not come back to disturb you again. You must be quiet now, and get well. Please be calm, and trust in me.”

“Trust in thee?” said the patient, in a voice which had instantly lost its vague tone. “Trust in thee, thou minister of light, who hast come to my darkened pillow, to my bloody death-bed, to console me!” and here she clutched his hand. “Trust thee—I would trust thee as I trust God!” and she pressed his hand to her heart.

“You must be silent, madam,” urged the physician, endeavoring to extricate his imprisoned hand, for he felt strange tinglings along his veins, which alarmed his now penitent and vigilant spirit. She only shook her head, and clung with yet greater tenacity to his hand, and then, first raising it to her lips with a reverential kiss, she placed it upon the top of her head, with the palm outstretched, and signified her desire that he should keep it there, with a smile of entire beatitude. The doctor barely knew enough of mesmeric manipulations, to understand that this laying-on of hands was commonly resorted to among the believers in the science, as a remedy for nervous headache. He could see no harm in the innocent formula, if it assisted the imagination in throwing off pain, and he very willingly humored his poor patient, in permitting his hand to remain there.

In a moment or two a singular change came over the face and general physical expression of the woman, and the doctor, who had witnessed something of mesmeric phenomena, instantly recognised this as clearly presenting all the symptoms of such a case. He had mesmerised her by a touch, and it was not without a thrill of vague wonder that he awaited further developments.

There was a perfect silence of ten minutes’ duration, when the mesmerised patient began moving her lips as if in the effort to articulate. The curiosity of the doctor was now fully aroused—his will became concentrated—he desired to hear her speak; in his unconscious eagerness, he willed that she should do so with all the energy of his firm nature; and speak she did.

“Happy! happy! Ah, I am content in this pure sphere! My soul can rest here!” a long pause, then suddenly a shudder vibrated through her frame, and she shrank back as one appalled by some spectral horror.

“Ha! it is all dark now! I see! I see! his hand is red! red! red! red! There is murder on this soul!”

The doctor sprang up and back as if he had been shot. His face grew livid pale, and he trembled in every joint, while with chattering teeth he stammered—

“Woman! Woman, how know you this?”

“I see it there—that huge red hand! Now all is red! There! there! I felt it must be so! The pale and golden light breaks through! It spreads! It fills and covers everything! His heart did no murder—it was his hand! He can be redeemed! This soul is pure!”

The poor doctor sank upon his chair and groaned heavily, while he covered his face with his hands. He spoke, in a few moments, in an almost inaudible tone, to himself, while the woman, who had suddenly opened her eyes, turned her head slightly, and watched him with a sharp attention.

“Alas! alas! how came this strange being in possession of the fatal secret of my life? I believed it buried in the oblivion of thirty years. My life of dedication to humanity, since, I thought might have atoned for that quick sad deed! Yes! I struck him! O, my God—I struck him! but the provocation was most fearful! Woman, who and what are you, that you should know this thing?” and with a vehement gesture he jerked his hands from before his eyes, and turning swiftly upon her, he met the keen, still glance of those watchful eyes, which shone through the subdued light of the room, steadily upon him. The doctor was astounded! He sprang to his feet again, exclaiming angrily—

“What shallow trick is this? You seemed but now in the mesmeric sleep, and mouthed to me concerning my past life, and here you are, wide awake! How came you with the secrets of my life?”

The woman answered feebly, and with a sob that at once touched the gentle-hearted doctor, and turned aside his wrath—

“You took your hand away—you would not let me speak. Place your hand upon my head again, and I will tell you all.”

The troubled doctor re-seated himself with a shuddering reluctance, and renewed the manipulation.

In a few moments she appeared again to have sank into the sleep, and commenced in that slow, fragmentary manner supposed to be peculiar to such conditions:

“I see! The dark shadow is on this soul again! It is of anger and suspicion—they are both evil spirits! They strive to make it wrong the innocent! It is too holy and pure to yield! I see the golden light fill all again! The bloody hand is gone. No stain of crime remains upon this soul. It will be pardoned of God. This soul needs only human love. Through love it can be made free before God! All the past will be forgiven then—the red stains will fade! A sudden anger made it sin. Love can only intercede for this sin. Love will intercede! It will be saved!”

Here her voice became subdued into indistinct mutterings, and the doctor drew a long breath as he withdrew his hand—

“Singular woman! How could all this have been revealed to her? She must commune with spirits in this state. My story is not known to any here. I never saw or heard of her, until sent for as a physician, to visit her in this house. Strange that this fearfully passionate and repented deed should thus rise up in my path, thousands of miles away, amidst strangers, who can know nothing of me! Oh, my God! my God! Thou art indeed vengeful and just!” and the miserable man clasped his hands before his eyes and moaned. “It was my first draught of love and life. He dashed it! I was delirious in my joy, while the beams rained from her eyes into my hungry soul—hungry of beauty and of bliss. He dashed it all, and in the hot blood of my darkened madness I slew him! Oh, I slew him! His shadow, that can never be appeased, though I have given body, and soul, and substance, to relieving the sufferings of my race since that unhappy hour—it rises here again! It haunts me! Yes! yes! I feel that love alone can make me strong once more, to bear such tortures! But have I not denied myself such dreams? Have I not with dedicated heart walked humbly since in self-denying ways? Have I not clothed the orphan, fed the poor and nursed the sick? Have I not ministered amidst pestilence, and held my life as of none account that I might bring good to others? Can I be forgiven? No! no! The Pharisee recounts his holy deeds and thanks God that his life is not sinful as another man! I am not to be forgiven! I shall never know those dreams of love!”

The strong man bowed his frame and shook with agony. Could he but have looked up, a keen, quick gleam from the eyes which had been so steadily fixed upon him during this painful soliloquy, would have struck him as conveying the ecstacy of a sainted spirit over a soul repentant—or of some other feeling quite as exultant.

This curious scene was, however, most unexpectedly interrupted at this moment, by a loud yelling from the street below. The clamor was so sudden, and yet so angrily harsh, that both parties sprang forward in the alarm it caused—the woman, springing up into a sitting posture on the bed, and the doctor to go to the window.

“What is it?” she exclaimed wildly, as she tossed back her hair. “What do these cruel people want to do to me now?”

The doctor, who saw at a glance the meaning of what was going on below, and the necessity of keeping his patient cool, turned to her, with a very quiet expression—

“Do not be alarmed, madam. It is merely some disorderly gathering of rowdies, in the street below. There is no danger to you—only do not get excited, or you will bleed again. I am here to protect you.”

“Then I am safe!” was the fervid response, which, however, was followed by a roar so sullen and portentous, from the infuriated mob underneath, as to leave some doubt of its truth even upon the mind of the doctor.

“Down with the amalgamation den!”

“Down with the saw-dust palace!”

“Tear it down!”

“Let’s lynch the wretches!”

The response to speeches of this sort, from single voices, would be a simultaneous burst of approbation from the great crowd, and a trampling and rush to get nearer the building. It seemed a formidable sight, indeed, to the doctor, as he looked down upon this living mass of men, surging like huge waves tossed against some cliff, while the torches, that many of them bore, glared fitfully upon the upturned, angry faces.

A powerful voice, which rose above all the tumult, exclaimed with a hoarse oath, as the speaker turned for an instant towards the crowd, from the top of the front steps—

“Let us burst open the door and lynch every white person found with a negro. Here goes for the door!” and he threw himself furiously against it, while a perfect thunder-crash of roars attested the approbation of the dangerous mob. The door resisted for a moment, when there was a sudden yell from the outside of the mob, nearly a square distant—

“Here! here’s what’ll do it! pass ’em on!” and the alarmed doctor saw immediately the portentous gleam of fire-axes, which were being passed over the heads of the crowd towards the door, and in another instant the crash of the cutting would commence. The doctor, as we have seen, was a very prompt man. He thrust his head out of the window, and in a loud, commanding voice, shouted—

“Stop!”

The man at the door, who had just received the axe, and was in the act of wielding it, paused for an instant, to look up, while the whole sea of faces was raised toward the window, amidst a moment’s silence, of which the doctor instantly availed himself—

“Gentlemen, do you war upon women? I have a female patient here, in this room, at the point of death! If you proceed, you will kill her!”

“Who is she?” shouted some one, while another voice, in a derisive tone, yelled out amidst screams of laughter—

“Is she Rose? Rose? de coal-brack Rose? I wish I may be shot if I don’t lub Rose!”

Amidst the thunders which followed, some one shouted from a distant part of the mob, to the man with the axe—

“Go on, Jim! It’s all pretence with their sick women!”

“Down with the door—they don’t escape us that way! Look out for your bones, old covey, when we catch you!”

The axe was again swung back, but the doughty doctor still persisted—

“Stop!” he shouted again, in a tone so startling for energy of command, that the axe was again lowered.

“Are you Americans? Have you mothers and sisters?”

“Yes, but they ain’t black gals!” gibed one of the mob, and set the rest into a roar once again.

“I appeal to you as men—as brothers and fathers, do not murder my poor patient!”

“Who is that noisy fellow?” bellowed a brutal voice below.

“I am a physician! I have nothing to do with this house or its principles; I only beg to be permitted to save my patient!”

“What is your name, I say?” bellowed the hoarse man again. “Out with it! We’ll know you—some of us!”

The name was mentioned. There was a momentary pause, and a low murmur ran through the crowd; then shout after shout of applauding huzzas.

“We know you!”

“Just like him!”

“Noble fellow!”

“The good doctor! Huzza! huzza!”

And so the cry went up on all sides, for the doctor’s reputation for benevolence was as wide as that of John Jacob Astor for the opposite trait.

There seemed to be a vehement consultation among what appeared the leaders of the mob, which lasted but for a moment or two, when one who stood upon the top step looked up, and in a firm, respectful voice, said to the doctor—

“It’s all right, sir, about you! We shall let the women pass out! But you must clear the house of them!”

“But it is dangerous to move my patient.”

“We cannot help that, doctor; we do this for your sake, not theirs, for they ought every one of them to be burned, and we are determined to abate the nuisance of this house. So hurry them along here quick, for the boys will not keep quiet long.”

“Yes, hurry them women along; we’ll let them go this time.”

“All but that lecturing lady (?), who says that she would as soon marry a negro as a white man!”

“Yes, all but her; we want to be rid of such creatures; let’s duck her in the Hudson.”

“No, boys, we will make no distinction. We have promised—let the woman go.”

“Down with the lecturing women and their black lovers!”

“Duck the hag! we’ll wash off the scent for her!”

Cries such as these convinced the doctor that indeed no time was to be lost, particularly as the sound of the axe was now heard below in good earnest. Approaching the bed hastily, he took the shivering form of the panic-stricken woman, who had heard distinctly these last ominous cries, into his arms. She clutched him with a desperate grip, while he hurried down the stairs.

On the way, he met the Spiritual Professor in the passage, surrounded by the women of the house, who were clustered about him, in the seemingly vain hope of obtaining from him something of that ethereal consolation and strength, of which he was the so much vaunted Professor. Indeed, he himself now seemed the most woful, of all the whimpering, terrified group, in want of any kind of strength, whether spiritual or otherwise; and his teeth literally chattered, as he clutched at the doctor’s passing arm.

“Wh—wh—what shall we do? They mean to burn the house, don’t they?”

“Do?” said the doctor, sternly, shaking off his grasp. “Try and be a man, if you’ve got it in you! Get these women out of the house, and take yourself off on your spiritual legs as fast as you can, or you may make some ugly acquaintances.”

The Professor still clung to his skirts.

“Oh Lord! the doctrine of correspondences does not sanction—”

“Go to the devil, with your correspondence, or I shall kick you out of my path!” roared the angry doctor, while the snivelling Professor, more alarmed than ever, slunk aside to let him pass. The crash and clatter from below now announced that the mob had effected an entrance from the street, and leaving the women, all screaming at the top of their lungs, around their doughty spiritual guide, he rushed on with his burden towards the front entrance, which had thus been taken by storm, and was now rapidly filling with excited men. Some were seizing the furniture, which they began to demolish, while others hurried forward to intercept him.

“It is the sick woman. Remember your promise; let me pass.”

“Yes, that’s the good doctor; let him pass, boys.”

“No, not yet!” roared a burly-looking ruffian, pressing through the throng. “We must see who it is he has got there. Who is she?” and he roughly dragged aside the shawl that partially covered her face.

“Monster!” shouted the excited doctor, “the woman is dying! Make way! Let me pass!”

“Not so fast!” said the ruffian, resisting his forward rush. “I shall see! I shall see! Boys, here she is! By G—d, this is she, that lecture-woman; she wants to marry a nigger, hah! We won’t let her go.”

“But you will!” said the doctor, releasing one arm, with which he struck the ruffian directly in the mouth, and with a force that sent him reeling backwards.

“Good! good!” shouted twenty voices; “served him right, doctor.”

The fellow had rallied instantly, and was rushing, like a wild bull, headlong upon the doctor, when several powerful men threw themselves between the two, seizing the ruffian at the same time.

“No, Jim, you stand back!” said one of them, brandishing a heavy axe before his eyes. “You touch that gentleman again, and I’ll brain you!”

“It’s a shame!” interposed others. “It’s the good doctor who nurses the poor for nothing. Doubt if he gets a cent for that creature.”

“Yes, if she was the devil’s dam herself, we promised the good man to let her go. Stand back, boys, and let the doctor pass.”

An opening was accordingly formed, through which the doctor hastened to make his way. When he made his appearance at the door, he was greeted with three wild, hearty cheers for himself, and as many groans and hisses for the character of the woman whom he bore, the news of the identification of whom had instantly found its way to the outside.

Regardless of all this, and only congratulating himself upon the prospect of getting his patient off alive, he pressed rapidly through the crowd, with the purpose of bearing her to the shelter of his own bachelor home.

The mob now instantly occupied the building, which was gutted by them, and the shattered contents, along with its occupants, men and women, roughly hurled into the street. Some of the former were very severely handled, and among the rest, the Spiritual Professor had his share of material chastening. The mob found him under a cot-bed, with three or four feminine disciples of his spiritual correspondences piled over him, or clinging distractedly to his nerveless limbs.

They dragged him out by the heels, with his squalling cortege trailing after him, and finding that the occult professor of spiritualities had gone into a state of obliviousness, or rather fainted, they proceeded, in their solicitude for his recovery, to deluge his person with sundry convenient slops, which shall be nameless, and afterwards kicked him headlong into the street below, where the screaming boys pelted him with gutter-mud and rotten eggs, until, finding his spiritual legs, as he had been advised—it is to be supposed—of a sudden, he made himself scarce, down Barclay Street, in an inappreciable twinkle.

In a word, the people, in this instance, as in many others, when they have found it necessary to take the laws of decency and common sense into their own sovereign hands, did the work of ridding themselves of this most detestable nuisance effectually. The Graham House was broken up, and although the pestilent nest of knaves and fools who most delighted there to congregate, have endeavored, in subsequent years, to reassemble, and renew the ancient character of the place as their head-quarters, yet the attempt has only been attended with partial success.

The blow was too decisive on this night; for, although the walls were left standing, the proprietor was given clearly to understand, that the unnatural orgies of amalgamation would not be tolerated again by the community, under the decisive penalty of no one stone left standing upon the other, of the building.

He took the hint, and it was about time! It has been fairly conjectured by this time, from the glimpses we have taken of the interior, that the house was the scene of other vices than those implied in amalgamation merely. It will be seen in yet other words and years how much there was of real danger to the well-being of society, in the doctrines taught and practised within its unhallowed walls. No one lesson could ever prove sufficient for these people; they enjoy a fatal impunity even now, and we shall endeavor that men shall know them as they are!

CHAPTER IV. BOANERGES PHOSPHER, THE SPIRITUAL PROFESSOR.

CHAPTER V. BOANERGES AND THE YOUNG MATHEMATICIAN.

CHAPTER VI. THE NEW “SAVING GRACE.”

CHAPTER VII. THE CONVENTICLE OF THE STRONG-MINDED.

Her strong toils of grace.

Shakspeare.

Take we a glimpse now of another interior scene in the strange, mingled life of the great metropolis. In a bare and meanly-furnished but roomy parlor of a house in Tenth Street, near Tompkins Square, we find assembled, on one summer’s afternoon, a group of females. There are perhaps ten of them in all. The characteristic which first strikes the eye, on glancing around this group, is the strange angularity of lines presented everywhere, in faces, figures, and attitudes, except when contrasted with an uncouth and squabby embonpoint, which seemed equally at variance with the physical harmonies, supposed to be characteristic of the sex. What all this meant, you could not comprehend at first glance; but the impression was, of something “out of joint.” Where, or what, it was impossible to conjecture. Some sat with their bonnets on, which had a Quakerish cut about them, though not strictly orthodox. Some, conscious of fine hair, had tossed their bonnets on the floor or chairs, as the case might be. There was, in a word, a prevailing atmosphere of steadfast and devil-may-care belligerence—a seeming, on brow, in hand, and foot, that, demurely restrained, as it certainly was, unconsciously led you to feel that a slow and simultaneous unbuttoning of the cuffs of sleeves, a deliberate rolling up of the same, and a dazzling development of lean, taut tendons, corrugated muscles, and swollen veins, would be the most natural movement conceivable. Not that this bellicose sentiment, by any means, seemed to have found its proper antagonism in the forms and personalities then and there presented; but that you felt, in the vacant reach and persistent abstraction of the expression, that the foe, at whom they gazed through the infinite of space, was not an Individuality, but an Essence,—a world-devouring element of Evil, with which they warred.

And warriors indeed they seemed—we should say Amazons—wielding, not the weapons of carnal strife, but those mightier arms with which the Spirit doth, at times, endow our race. As for the war they waged, whatever might be the power with whom they were engaged, it seemed to have been a protracted and a desperate one; for, verily, judging from the harsh lines that seamed the faces of those present, one would imagine them to be “rich only in large hurts!”

There were young women present who were clearly under twenty; whose foreheads, when they elevated their eyebrows, were wrinkled and parchment-like as any

“Painful warrior famoused for fight.”

Why this unnatural wilting? would be the certain question of the cool observer. What fearful wrongs have these women suffered? What “contagious blastments?” Is the wicked world arraigned against them for no just cause? Has it combined its respiring masses into one large, simultaneous breath of volcanic cursings, to be wreaked upon their unoffending heads alone? To be sure,

“Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt;”

and can it be that these, too, are “innocents?” It is true, physiology teaches that, when women wither prematurely, acquire an unnatural sharpness of feature, become

“Beated and chapped with tanned antiquity,”

before they have seen years enough for the bloom of the life of true maturity to have freshened on their cheeks and foreheads, there must be some cause for it. Common sense teaches, too, that that cause is most likely to be, originally, rather a physical than a spiritual one—that mental aberration, dogged and sullen moods, one-ideaed abstractions, a general peevishness and fretful discontent, a suspicious unbelief in the warm-blooded genialities, and much enduring sympathies of those around them, whose lives are intact—or, in other words, who have held themselves, in health, through nature, near to God—must have its source in some evil not entirely foreign to themselves.

Ask the wise physician why are these things so? He will answer, God has so ordered this material universe, that, while we live in it, we must conform to its laws; that, however powerful our spiritual entity, our relations to this life must, to be happy, be normal.

But this is prosing. It may, or it may not, account, in part, for the combative and generally corrugated aspect of this conventicle of the “strong-minded,” to which we have been introduced. Now let us listen!

She to whom the place of presiding Pythoness seemed to have been, by general understanding, assigned, now solemnly arose, amidst a sudden pause of shrill-tongued clatter. She was very tall—nearly six feet. Her straight figure would have seemed voluptuously rounded, but that the loose-folded and wilted oval of her face suggested that the plump bust, with its close, manly jacket of black velvet, buttoned down in front, might owe something of its elastic seeming roundness to those conventionalities, à la modiste, and otherwise, against which her principles most vehemently protested. Her flaxen hair emulated the classic tie of any Venus of them all, on the back part of the head; while the effulgence of sunny curls flooded the very crow’s-feet in the corners of her great, cold, dead, grey eyes.

She shook her curls slightly, and spoke:—

“My sisters, we have come together this afternoon, not to talk about abstractions of right and wrong to our sex; for, upon all these elementary subjects, our minds are fully made up—all those inductive processes of which the human intellect is capable, our minds have already passed through. Our opinions are irrevocably formed, our conclusions absolute! Woman is oppressed by man. She is denied her just rights. She is taxed, yet denied the privilege of representation. She is a slave, without the privileges of slavery! for, in the old slave-states, the possession of twenty, or thirty, or forty slaves gives to their master the faintly-representative privilege of an additional vote, while, to our tyrants, though each may hold, in reality, a dozen wives, the law grants nothing! Leaving us, in fact, not even the ‘shadow of a shade’ of a social or civil existence! We are thus reduced to a condition of insignificance, in relation to the active affairs of life and the world, that we have determined to be, both incongruous and insufferable.

“Man, our time-out-of-mind despot, has determined to reduce us to, and hold us within, the sphere of mere wet-nurses to his insolent and bifurcate progeny;—we must, forsooth, spawn for him, and then dedicate our lives to educating his procreative vices into what he calls manhood! We are wearied with the dull, stale, commonplace of nursery-slops, and of the fractious squallings of our embryo tyrants! Man must learn to nurse his own monsters, and we will nurse ours! We have declared our independence of his tyranny; our great object is to displace him from his seat of power! For six thousand years he has been our despot—our ruthless and unscrupulous tyrant! We have therefore a settlement to make with him—a long arrearage of accounts to be rendered.

“But we are weak, while he is strong! He possesses the physical force, and all the guarantees of precedence since time began, while we have only our own weaknesses to fall back upon—what they, in their surfeited rhythm, style ‘witching graces,’ and ‘nameless charms!’

“Well, we must use these against our obese foe as best we may. We must clip the claws and teeth of the lion, at any rate; and, in consideration that the whole World of Past and Present is arraigned against us, we must accept as our motto, that of the only man who ever deserved to be a woman, Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits,

“‘The end justifies the means.’”

A small noise—a scarcely sensible “teetering” of pedal extremities upon the thin carpet, followed this “stern demonstration” of “woman’s rights,” from the accepted Priestess of the conventicle; when various exclamations arose from different parts of the room, such as—

“Right! right! End justifies the means, in dealing with the brutes!”

“They give us no quarter, and we will give them none!”

“Nurse their brats, forsooth!”

“We must circumvent them as we can, to obtain our ‘rights!’”

“Yes! yes! All stratagems are fair in love and war!”

Suddenly sprang to her feet a very emphatic, stout woman, straight and thick-set, with soiled cap, coarse, stubby, grayish hair, sparse, silvery bristles on her chin, gray, savage eyes, and large fists, which she brought down with a crash upon the frail chair-back which constituted the bulwark of her position. In a voice of creaking bass, she exclaimed—

“The sister is right—they are our oppressors; but it is because we have been cowards enough to yield them the supremacy; it is nothing but our own cowardice that is to blame. Man knows, as well as any other animal, on which side his bread is buttered; we have only got to learn him what and where his place is, and he will keep it. When I first married, I had some trouble with my Jonas; but I soon taught him that he had better be back again in the whale’s belly, than employed in trenching upon my ‘woman’s rights!’ (A general disposition to laugh, which was, however, frowned down by the dignified Priestess.)

“It is true, my sisters; we have only to assert our rights, and take them! Man will never dare to rebel, if we are resolute. Overwhelm him with our strength—make him feel his littleness beside us, and he will slink into any hole to hide. I am myself in creed a non-resistant—(suppressed laughter.) I do not believe in pummelling truth into man; forced conversions do not last, and should not. But I will tell you what sort of conversions I do believe in; they are spiritual. Bow, bend, aye, break his spirit to your will, and then he is yours; instead of being slave to him, he is your slave. This is what we want. When he can be reduced to obedience, then he will be happy; for when he has accepted us as his spiritual guides, and no longer dreams of lifting his thoughts in rebellion, then will he always go right. They themselves are for ever confessing, that without us, as mothers, they would never—the greatest of them—arrive at any thing; that they owe it all to us—all their greatness, all their goodness. Let us take the hint, and hold the spiritual birch over them always, and they will ever remain obedient, for their own good.”

This speech was received with very general approbation; though, that all did not recognise it as orthodox, became immediately apparent. A tall, thin, cadaverous-looking lady, with excessively black hair, and eyes that literally glistered as she rose—the huge ear-rings and multifarious trinkets about her person quivering with excitement—exclaimed, in a shrill voice—

“It is false! it is not true that we desire to make slaves of man. We are opposed to slavery—to slavery of all sorts; and, although man deserves, on account of his oppressions of the poor negro, to be made a slave of, if human slavery were to be tolerated, yet we desire rather to return good for evil; and all we ask is equality in the Senate, in the Presidential chair, on the bench of justice, in the counting-house and workshop. We want our rights; our right to marriage as a mere civil contract—our right to choose with whom we shall enter into that contract, whether colored or white man, and our right to annul that contract when it pleases us. What kind of freedom is it, when, if I choose to marry a man of color, no matter how noble he may be, I am to be mobbed and driven out of the society of my race; while, if I am so unfortunate as to marry a white man, who turns out to be a brute and tyrant, as he is most like to do, and attempt to rid myself of the horrid incubus, by leaving him, or by suing him for a divorce, I am equally mobbed by the hue-and-cry, and banished from society as an outlaw? We want our rights in marriage—we want equality. I can—”

Here the speaker was interrupted by a voice marvellously flute-like and lingering in its intonations:

And cold shoulders were simultaneously turned upon the dark-haired and be-jewelled orator of amalgamation.

The dulcet-toned interrogator, who, to the surprise of all eyes, appeared a squabby, cottony, pale-eyed, thick-lipped, lymphatic-looking personage, who wore a wig clumsily, and had no vestige of hair upon brow or violet eyelids, proceeded, in mellifluous phrase—

“We did not come here to talk about private grievances. The sister who speaks so fiercely of our rights, in regard to marriage, had better have had a little experience on the subject. She is, I should judge, considerably the rise of forty, and has never yet been married; not even to one of the dark-browed children of Ham, towards whom she exhibits so decided a leaning. Now, I have been married six times already—(great sensation,)—and to white men, and gentlemen, at that; and consider myself, therefore, qualified to speak of marriage. Marriage is a great blessing; let her try it when she gets a chance, and she will find it so! (much bristling and fidgeting, the dark-haired woman looking daggers.) It isn’t marriage that is the great evil, against which we have to fight—nor it isn’t the slavery of the colored race, either. It is the slavery of our own race, of our own kith and kin, of our own blood and complexion. It is the emancipation of our own fathers, sons, and brothers, from the barbarous penalties of the penal code. Our erring fathers, sons, and brothers; it is their cause, my sisters, it is their cause we are called upon to vindicate. According to our brutal laws, one little frailty, to which we all may be subject,—one little slip, which any, the purest of us may make—subjects man to solitary incarceration for life, in which he is cut off from all loving communion with our sex; or to the horrible penalty of death by the rope! This, my beloved sisters, is the crying evil of the day; and man, cruel man, is in favor of such inflictions. We must soften his flinty heart, through our charms. It is our duty, it is our mission, to effect amelioration in favor of the erring classes. We are all erring; and in how much are we better than they?—except, that through our cunning, and in our cowardice, we have as yet escaped penalties which, under the same measure of justice, might as well have been visited upon us. I have visited the penitentiaries and prisons of many States, that I might carry consolation to the shorn and manacled children of oppression. I tell you that I have seen among them gods, whose shattered armor gleamed in light! I have seen Apollo, with his winged heel chained to a round-shot! I have witnessed more glorious effulg—”

“Hiss-s-s-s!” “Nonsense!”

“It was Mercury, the god of thieves, you saw with the round-shot at his heels!” said an oily voice; and, as all eyes turned in that direction, the forehead of the speaker flushed crimson while she proceeded—

“It is not man at all; it is we who shut ourselves up in tight frocks, who make hooks-and-eyes our jailors, and ribs of whalebone our strait-jackets! Let us first free ourselves physically, give our lungs and hearts room to play, and then we may talk about open battle with man for our rights. But, as it is, to speak thus, is nonsense. We are weak, while man is strong; we must fight him with other weapons than open force. While he laughs at our pretensions, let us, too, laugh at his foibles, and govern him through them. It was to consult, as to some consistent and uniform system, by which we should be enabled to accomplish this result, that we came together this afternoon. It has been well said, that our motto should be, ‘The end justifies the means.’ To the weak and the determined, this is a sacred creed, and we should go forth with it in our hearts, and act upon it in all our relations towards men. It should be our business to get possession of them, body and soul. We need their influence, to advance our views, to obtain our rights. We should be all things to all men; should believe in the Bible, in Fourier, in Swedenborg, in Joe Smith, or Mahomet, if necessary, so that the influence be gained. We must seek out everywhere men who hold places of power and public influence, and win them—not to our cause, for that would be hopeless—but to ourselves; and through ourselves to our cause. We must not scruple as to the means; for ‘the end justifies the means.’ We must find, by whatever stratagem, art, or intrigue, that may be available, the assailable points in the characters of those who may be of use to us, and secure them, at whatever risk of reputation; for, as we will secretly sustain each other, we will at once dignify ourselves and our cause into the position of martyrdom, and be able to take shelter behind the omnipotent cry of persecution. There we are safe.”

“Good!” “Good!” “Right!” “Right!” “Just the thing!” burst from all sides of the room; while the weather-beaten face,—that is, the forehead,—of the lithe, glib speaker flushed with momentary exultation, while she continued, with still greater emphasis—

“Thus banded, my sisters, if we are firm, faithful, and enduring, we may conquer the world. There is never a period when there is more than a dozen men who wield its destinies. There are nearly a dozen of us here present, and there are other spirits that I know, resolute and strong enough, to be our associates; let us resolve, then, to govern those who govern; and the romantic fragments of the life of a Lola Montes will have been firmly conjoined in the fact of a governing dynasty, the sceptre of which shall be upheld by woman.”

Storms of applause, during which the plain, Quakerish-looking speaker subsided into her seat. As she did so, there might have been observed, under the flush of exultation which mantled her brow, a singular obliquity of the left eye! Ha! Etherial!

CHAPTER VIII. INTRUSION.

We will now enter one of the upper rooms of the notorious Graham House, with the interior of which we have before been familiarised, and which had been reopened, on a modified basis. A single glance at the confused piles of manuscripts, books, and papers, scattered about the room and on the table, mingled with stumps of pens and cigars, and a long-tubed meerschaum, showed that it could be no other than the characteristic den of a literary bachelor, who, with chair and table drawn close to the stove, sat there to show for himself, earnestly engaged in what seemed to be the business of his life—writing.

You saw in a moment that this was not a Northern man, for in addition to the long, black, and wavy hair, the dark, bronzed, and vaulting features indicated clearly a Southern origin. He was evidently young—certainly not more than twenty-seven, judging, as one instinctively does, by contour of person and features, and not by the expression of the face. But that expression, when you saw it, as he lifted his head, at once left you in doubt whether it could possibly belong to so immature a period of life. Although the brow was broad, and mild as that of a child, yet there was a solemn and unnatural fixedness in the whole face, which, united with the cold stillness of the great, gray, hollow eyes, told at once a dreary tale of suffering, which sent an involuntary shudder through your soul. Where the expression rested most, it was impossible for you to tell; but the feeling it conveyed was one of absolute horror. That a face, which seemed so young, should be one that never smiled!—And could the story that it told be true? Could it be that for years that face had never smiled?

A light tap was heard at the door, and, with a momentary frown of vexation at the interruption, he turned his head, and a young man entered the room, with somewhat hesitating step, which showed that he was by no means certain of his ground.

He was slight and thin, something below the average height, with even a darker complexion than that of the face we have just described; his black hair, and preternaturally black and vivid eyes, glittered beneath straight, heavy brows, which nearly met. His nose was prominent and partly arched; and there was, in the whole bowed bearing and cat-like gait of this person, an inexplicably strange and foreign look, which, alike in all countries, characterises that fated race which is yet an outcast among the nations.

His greeting was singularly expressive of eager appreciation, while that of his host to him was cold, distant, and merely polite. Pushing aside his writing materials, as he handed him a chair, Manton—for such was the name of our young writer—turned upon his visitor a frigid look of inquiry, and said, with a formality almost drawling—

“Doctor E. Willamot Weasel, I hope it is well with you this evening?”

His visitor, in rather a confused manner, commenced—“Ye-es, yes—I—I fear I am intruding on your seclusion; but p-pardon me, I cannot bear any longer to see you thus seclude yourself from all the amenities of social life. You need relaxation; your stern isolation here with the pen, and pen alone, is playing wild work with your fine faculties. Pardon me, if I insist upon it, that you must and should accept the sympathies of the men and women around you. In the doctrine of unity in diversity, Fourier demonstrates that there is nothing more fatal to consistent development of both body and mind, than entire pre-occupation in a single object or pursuit.”

Detecting a shade of vexation, at this juncture, crossing the open brow of Manton, Doctor Ebenezer Willamot Weasel hastily reiterated his apologies.

“I beg of you not to mistake my zeal for impertinence. I have already received much good and many valuable truths from conversation with you, and I conceive myself under strong personal obligations of gratitude to you, that I hope may plead for me in extenuation of what you, no doubt, consider an impertinent intrusion. I would, as some measure of acknowledgment for such obligations, beg to be permitted to protest with you against this dangerous and obstinate isolation from all human sympathies, in which your life, dedicated to literary ambition, seems to be here fixed.”

“My good friend, Doctor Weasel, my life is my own, and my purposes are fixed. I need no sympathisers, since I am sufficient unto myself. They would only distract and minify the higher aims of my life. You may call it literary ambition, but I call it a settled and sacred purpose to achieve good in my day and generation. I am content, sir! Do not attempt to disturb that contentment!”

This reply was somewhat curtly delivered, and seemed to discompose the Doctor, who, however, hesitatingly persisted—

“Ah! ah! ah! yes! I expected to hear something of the sort from you, of course, but I beg you to consider that, under the harmonic law of reciprocation or mutual support and benefits, discovered by Fourier, and which lies at the base of all true organisation, you have no more right, as an individual, to hold yourself aloof, intellectually and socially, from the great body of mankind who are working for your benefit as well as for their own, than a rich man has to lock up his hoards of gold, and bury it where future generations may not reach it! The social state can only exist by individual concessions in favour of the whole.”

“Your argument,” was the cold response, “like all generalising postulates aimed at particular cases, overleaps its mark. I consider that I shall effect more earnest good by persisting in this isolation against which you protest. For as I do not ask or require the individual sympathies of my race, but rather choose the still-life of undisturbed sympathy and communion with nature, I feel that I shall accomplish more, far more, for humanity, in thus dedicating myself to her interpretation. Through me, as a medium, my fellow men may thus learn far loftier truths than they themselves might ever impart reciprocally amidst the babble of what you call social intercourse.”

“But you do not exclude women, surely? That would be unnatural; for you know that the life of man cannot be completely balanced, without the ameliorating presence and subduing contact of woman. He becomes a savage without her; his passions are brutalised, and the man is spiritually and socially degraded.”

“An admirable truism, Doctor! I honor and revere woman; in her high place she is to us, emphatically—angel! But this very reverence in which I hold her, prompts me to avoid contacts that may despoil me of my ideal. I am prepared to worship her, but not to degrade or look upon her degraded. There is nothing, in the range of human possibilities, so hideous to me as such contact—for I would hold my mother’s image always uncontaminated. I am a stranger, sir. I make no female acquaintances at present here.”

“Sorry,” said the Doctor, “very sorry, sir; for my special mission in this case was to persuade you to give up your isolation, in favor of an acquaintance with a most noble and charming woman, a friend of mine, who, having met with your papers in the journal you are now editing, is exceedingly anxious for an introduction, which I, in plain terms, have come to request. She is a woman of masculine and daring mind, and is taking the initial in most of the reform movements of the day, and particularly the most important of them all, the science of physiology as applicable to her own sex. She has taken the lead as the first lecturer on such subjects, and is accomplishing a vast amount of good. I am sure you will be much struck with her, and I never met two people whom I was more anxious to see brought together. You will appreciate each other, as physiology is one of your favorite subjects.”

“Bah! a lecture-woman! But I don’t mean to be disrespectful, Doctor. You could have told me nothing that would have more firmly fixed my resolution neither to be introduced to or know the person of whom you speak, on any terms whatever! Your manly-minded women are both my disgust and abhorrence!—as what they choose to call manliness is most usually a coarse and sensual impudence, based on inherent immodesty, which renders them incapable of recognising the delicate unities of propriety, either in thought or deed. I fully concede a woman’s capacity for displaying the great and even loftier processes of intellection; but the moment she unsexes herself, she and her thoughts become vulgarised. Such people are universally adventuresses, and of the most unscrupulous sort. I, as a stranger here, wish to run no risk of becoming entangled in their plausibilities. I am working for a full, free and frank recognition, by the social world, of my right to choose the place, the social circle rather, that I shall enter and become a part of. I do not wish to be dragged into such contacts, but to command them at my will!”

“But, sir,” persisted the Doctor, “she admires your papers so fervently, and pities the cruel and self-inflicted isolation in which you live, with such ardent, disinterested and motherly warmth, that you can scarcely, in your heart, be so obdurate as to reject her genial overture—the sole object of which is, to draw you forth into some participation with the milder humanities—to make you feel that New York is not really the savage, base and flowerless waste which we are led to presume you consider it, from the attitude you have assumed toward its social conditions. You are killing yourself here with tobacco, wine and labour, while she would show that even self-immolated genius may find a warm place to nestle, in distant lands, and near the matronly bosom, in spite of cold and sullen self-reliance!”

“The fact of her being a matron,” frigidly responded Manton, “considerably modifies the general character of the proposition which she has done me the honor, through you, to communicate. But, Doctor, I must finally and definitively state to you that I do not, at present, wish to cultivate any female acquaintance whatever in the city of New York. I propose to wait until I can select instead of being selected.” And rising at the same time with an impatient movement, which might or might not, be mistaken for a desire to be left alone, Mr. Manton politely showed Doctor E. Willamot Weasel, who had now taken the hint, to the door.

Almost the same moment after his discomfited visitor left, Manton hastily gathered up the scattered leaves of manuscript on his table, and muttering, as he thrust the roll into his pocket, “Curse the intrusion! this ought to have been in the printers’ hands an hour ago, and yet it is not finished!” and snatching up his cap, he passed from the room, and left the house.

Not long after, there came a sharp ring at the door of the Graham House, and the female servant, who hurriedly hastened to open it, was quite as sharply interrogated by a woman on the outside, who was closely veiled, and wore a sort of Quaker garb—

“Is Mr. Manton in?”

“No, ma’am, he has just gone out.”

“Where is his room? I have a letter for him, which I wish to deposit in a safe place with my own hands. What is the number of his room?” she asked, in an imperative manner.

“Ma’am, the gentleman is out. Can’t you leave the letter with me or the mistress? We will give it to him when he comes.”

“No, I choose to place it myself. What is his number?” And as she spoke, she slightly unveiled herself. The servant seemed to recognise her face even through the dusk, and said, though rather sullenly, as she gave way for her to pass—

“Yes, ma’am, walk in. His room is No. 26, on the third floor.” The female glided rapidly past, and as the servant attempted to follow her, exclaiming, “Ma’am, I will show you the number,” she answered hastily, “Never mind, I know where the room is now!” and darted up the stairs.

The servant muttered some droll commentaries on this procedure, which it is not necessary to repeat, and seeming to be afraid to complain to her superiors, dragged herself surlily back towards her subterranean home.

In the meantime our light-footed and unceremonious caller had reached the third floor, and walked straight forward to the door of the room just left by Manton. She troubled herself with no idle ceremony of knocking, but walked confidently in.

CHAPTER IX. BESIEGED.

An hour after the last scene, Manton returned to his room, and, seeming greatly hurried, lit his lamp, and throwing himself into a chair, seized his pen, muttering between his teeth, “It must be finished to-night! a man has no right to be tired!” He was drawing his writing materials towards him, to proceed with his work, when a something of strange disorder among his papers caught his quick eye.

“Ah! who has been disturbing my papers?” and as a flash of suspicion shot through him, he sprang to his feet, exclaiming, “my trunks, no doubt, have shared the inquisition!” and stepping quickly to them, he threw up the lids.

“By Heaven, it is so! what accursed carelessness this is of mine, leaving everything unlocked in this fashion!”

His first glance had shown him that the trunks had been disturbed, and a cautious effort been made to replace the contents as they were before. Uttering some energetic expletives of wrath, he knelt beside one to ascertain how far the examination had been carried, when, reaching the packages of letters and papers at the bottom, he saw there, too, unmistakable evidence of a pretty thorough examination having been held of their contents.

If he had been enraged before, this filled him with uncontrollable fury. He stamped his foot heavily upon the floor, and his whole frame shook violently, while with gnashing teeth he called down a fearful imprecation upon the head of this wretched violator, whoever it might be, of the sad and mournful secrets of his past life, which he had held sealed in his own bosom, so sternly, so long, and, alas! so vainly. Those letters revealed all. Some prying reptile had thus slimed the holy penetralia of his proud life!

The very thought was horror—loathing! A shudder of unutterable disgust crept through him; an uncontrollable fury blazed through his soul; his eyes glittered with almost demoniac fire; his face turned deathly white, and his teeth ground and clattered like the clamp of a wild boar’s tusks, and yet he made no tragic start; he stood still, with his arms clutching each other across his breast, and his eyes looking out into the blank distance, through which their concentrated light seemed to pierce to some far object. He at length pronounced slowly—

“Yes, my curse shall follow you; be you man or woman, it shall overtake you in terror! I feel the prophecy in me! The wretch who has thus contaminated those chaste and loved mementoes, shall yet feel my curse! My consciousness is filled with it! I know not how, or when, or where! my curse shall reach and blast the author of this sacrilege!—bah!” and his face writhed into the devilish mockery of a smile; “it is almost sufficient vengeance, one would think, that the wretch found no money!”

Starting suddenly forward, he commenced pacing to and fro with long strides, with knitted brows, compressed lips, and eyes bent upon the floor.—For more than an hour he thus silently communed with himself, without the change of a muscle in expression, when drawing a long sigh, he threw off this frigid look in a degree, merely saying in a low voice, “My curse is good!” and returned to the table to resume his seat and his labors.

As he did so, his eye fell upon a note directed to himself, which, as it had been placed in no very conspicuous position among the objects on the table, had, till now, escaped his attention. He reached it, and the dainty crow-quilled hand of the superscription, the snowy envelope, and the pure white seal, disclosed at once the woman.—He regarded it for a moment, coldly, and without any expression of interest or surprise, and with a slight sneer upon his face, broke the seal, when out slipped a gilt-edged note, which he opened and read aloud with a jeering tone:

Manton, whose face had, during this reading, writhed with almost every conceivable expression, tossed the letter from him as he finished it, with the exclamation—“Pah! this must be Doctor E. Willamot Weasel’s lecture-woman! Impudent adventuress in every line, as I expected!” And he resumed his pen and his labors, continuing in a low voice as he commenced his writing—“Unfortunate allusion, by the way, to the withes of grass—we cannot help being reminded of a certain Mr. Samson, and a Miss or Mrs. Delilah. Curse her! how came she to speak of my mother?” and grinding his teeth heavily, he proceeded with the work before him, without paying any further attention to the circumstance.

The greater portion of the night was spent in intense labor; but, when, after a very late bath and breakfast, the next morning, Manton went out to the office of the Journal for an hour, and returned, he was not a little surprised to find another missive, as neat and snowy as the first, awaiting him, on the table.

He thought it must surely be the first, that he had, in some unconscious mood, re-enclosed in the envelope; but, glancing around, he saw it lying open, where he had tossed it.

“Gramercy! but she fires fast!” he said, with a droll look passing across his features, as he stooped down, his hands cautiously clasped behind his back, to survey more closely the delicate superscription—Mr. Stewart Manton, Graham House, Present.

“Present! present! but this sounds rather ominous! Can it be that my spiritual correspondent of last night is an inmate too? My correspondent is evidently both in earnest and in a hurry! What shall I do? By my faith, I have a great mind to throw it upon the centre-table of the common parlor below, and let this benevolent lady reclaim her own, or else leave it to the irresistible access of curiosity, common to the sex, and peculiar to this queer house, to explore its unclaimed sweets. The first taste has quite sickened me. I have something other to do than listen to such inane twattle.”

He continued for some moments to gaze upon the letter, while a half-sneering smile played upon his grave and melancholy features. “Well, but this must be a quaint specimen of a feminine, to say the least of it! I have heard of these spiritual ladies before! The character must be worth studying, though it seems to be transparent enough, too. Well! we’ll see what she has to say this time, at any rate! It can hardly be richer than the first! Here it is!”

“Well! but this is cool! decidedly refreshing! This pertinacious creature is surely some mad woman confessed, as she certainly is a most raging and impertinent fanatic! Boy, forsooth! patronising. I should almost be provoked, were not the thing so egregiously ludicrous! Well, well! it is consoling, at least, that I have found my good Samaritan at last. I shall preserve these precious epistles, as decidedly curious memoranda of this original type of the Yankee adventuress, for Yankee she must be, who has set out thus boldly on a speculation in the spiritualities. I think I have had enough of this trash now, as I intend to take no notice either of it or of the writer. I should suppose she might get discouraged.”

The letters were thrown carelessly into a drawer, and Manton sat down to his work.

The next morning, when Manton returned from the office, at the usual hour, what should meet his eye, the first thing on entering the room, but a third snowy missive, placed now more conspicuously, on the very centre of the table. The poor man stopped, frowned, then gradually his eyes distended into a wild stare, and lifting his hands at the same moment, he shouted out—

“Good God! What, another?” and then, with a sudden revulsion of feeling, he burst into a loud, unnatural laugh. “This is patience for you! By heaven! she dies game to the last! Well! let’s see what now, for I am beginning to be charmed with the progress of this thing. There’s an absolute fascination in such daring.”

He snatched up the note, and opening it, read it sotto voce, with an indescribable intonation of contempt:—

“Good! I am in a fair way for salvation now, one would think! This seems a strange character—such a mixture of fanaticism, cant, and, withal, appreciation! That poem of mine was certainly an extraordinary one. I hardly expected to find any one that would appreciate it at first. But see! she has already caught its subtle reach and meaning. Pooh! what a fool I am! This is perfectly on a par with all the other hysterical cant which I have received from this person. The probability is, if the lines had been written by Mr. Julian Augustus Maximilian Dieaway, upon whose soft sconce she desired to make an impression (in the way of speculation), the same extravagant tropes and metaphors would have found their way to the snowy surface of this gilt-edged paper, through the delicately-handled crow-quill! Curse it! I shall order the chambermaid to stop the nuisance of these missives!”

This letter was impatiently tossed into the drawer with the others, and Manton threw himself into his chair; when, after sitting with his head leaning on his hands, moody and motionless, for some time, he suddenly straightened himself, and drew from the heap of magazines and books before him a fresh-looking copy of the —— Journal. Turning over its leaves eagerly to that which contained his new poem, he perused it and re-perused it over and over again, with an expression of restlessness and intense inquiry in his manner during the time. At last he drew a long breath, and threw the book back upon the table, exclaiming in a firm voice, “No! I am satisfied. This is no namby-pamby die-away rhyming—there is genuine stuff there; that is true poetry, or I have it not in my nature to produce it. That cursed meddlesome woman has made me distrust myself for the moment; by her extravagant praises, has made me doubt the genuineness of my own inspiration. Her letter is so evidently disjointed ranting, that it has shaken my self-reliance to have even read it. Curse her silly and impertinent legends, I shall read no more of them!”

Poor Manton was evidently troubled now, at length; and can the reader conjecture why this last letter had so excited him? Had a subtle arrow found its mark? Was there any thing in the poem really to justify the high-flown and ecstatic panegyrics of missive No. 3, in the snow-white envelope? You shall see—you shall judge. Here is a true copy of the poem:—

NO REST.

CHAPTER X. “ONCE MORE TO THE BREACH.”

CHAPTER XI. CARRIED BY STORM.

CHAPTER XII. SPIRITUAL CONFIDENCES.

We shall follow the bedraggled heroine of the last chapter, begging leave of the reader to “see her home.”

Mark with what an elate and vigorous step she trips it up Barclay Street into Broadway, after taking leave of Manton at the door of the Graham House. One would think that she should surely be tired, after that tremendous morning’s work, trudging and splashing through the dirtiest mire of three-fourths of the great city. But no—she springs in her gait, and her strange, animal eye, glitters fairly with a devilish obliquity, which has for the moment usurped its expression. She does not mind that people turn and stare after her dragging and bespattered skirts—not she!—her very soul is possessed with the pre-occupation of an ecstatic gloating over some great conquest achieved, or closely perceived already in the prospective future into which she glares.

We shall see what we shall see—only follow, still follow. She has turned up Broadway, and threads the great throng there with rapid glide, as street after street is passed. Ah, now we have it! She crosses—this is Eighth Street! There, in Broadway, near the corner, stands a great house, with wide-open door; the smeared and dirty lintels, the greasy latch, the wide, uncarpeted hall of which, at once reveals it to be one of those miscellaneous and incomprehensible edifices, which are not unfrequently met with on the great thoroughfare, and the uses of which are not generally more specifically known, than that they are fashionable boarding-houses.

Into this ever-gaping entrance she wheeled, and darted up the broad, uncarpeted stairway, which she continued to ascend with almost incredible ease and swiftness to the fifth story. When near the end of a long and narrow passage, she paused before one of the doors, and tapping it slightly, entered without farther ceremony.

A handsome and well-dressed woman, who was engaged in writing at a small escritoire, looked up indifferently as she entered, but the moment she caught the expression of the newcomer’s face, she sprang to her feet, throwing down the pen, and with a strangely shrill and unmusical laugh, screamed out in a most inconceivably voluble style—

“Why, I declare! Marie, what’s the matter? Your eyes are almost bursting out of your head! You look as if you had found a bag of gold, and meant to give me half! Why, bless the woman, how she looks! Have you caught him at last? Well, we’re in luck! I’ve caught my man for sure! He’s been here all the morning, he’s just left! Why, how the woman looks! She keeps staring so! You haven’t gone crazy for joy, have you? Now, do tell! how have you managed to catch that insolent baby, you seemed to have set your heart on so? Why, how muddy the woman is!” she shrieked, looking down at the condition of her dress. “Ha! ha! ha! ha! Do tell, what sort of a game have you been playing? Did you have to hunt him through a pig-sty?”

The woman had been standing motionless, in the meantime, with distended eyes and compressed mouth, stretched in a rigid smile of supernaturally savage exultation. She gazed towards the face of the speaker, but did not seem to listen to her, or see her features. She looked the abstracted embodiment of triumphing evil. Very soon her stiffened lips quivered slightly, while the voluble lady stepping forward, shook her sharply by the shoulder, shrilling out again—

“Do look at the woman! Why, what can be the matter? Can’t you talk? The cat’s got the woman’s tongue surely! I did not think you were so much in earnest about that green boy! Why, I could twist him about my finger like a tow-string! I have achieved something in conquering my man!”

“Y-your man!” said the woman slowly, interrupting her. But these words were accompanied by a look of such strange and taunting significance, that the other turned instantly pale and sprang back, as if she had received an electric shock from those singular eyes, that fell upon her for a moment with their evil obliquity, and then returned instantly to their natural expression. “Wh-why, what do you mean?” stammered the other angrily.

The woman only answered with a pleasant smile—“Now don’t be a jealous fool, Jeannette Shrewell—I shall never interfere with your schemes if you don’t with mine.”

“Yes! but because you knew Edmond long ago,” continued the other in a fierce and shrewish voice, “you dare to insinuate to me that he too has passed through your hands!”

The woman broke out into a loud laugh—“Why, what a child you are! You know what my relations to Edmond are, perfectly. Spiritual—purely and spotlessly spiritual. I should no more think of him than of my grandfather.”

“Spiritual!” shrieked the other, springing forward; “do you dare to use that stupid cant to me? Keep it for the sap-headed boys and senile drivellers that you decoy with such bait, to plunder. You shan’t insult me to my teeth with it.”

The speaker, whose physical energies were far more vehement and overbearing than the other, seemed to have entirely awed her. She sank meekly into a chair, turned very pale, and lifting her eyes with an humble look, she said, in a low imploring voice, “Now, Jeannette, please don’t be so violent. I did not mean to taunt or insult you. You have altogether mistaken me, dear friend. Now, please be calm.”

But the other, whose long black curls still writhed and quivered, like the snakes of the Gorgon head, with rage, stood towering before the suppliant, as if she meant to crush her; and as she thus stood, she really looked superb.

Her profile was delicately chiselled and Roman, with large, dark gray eyes, thin lips, and fine chin; and now that every feature was inspired with anger, the eye ceased to be offended by their habitual expression of selfish, cold, and sharp intellection. She continued, quite as vehemently—

“You have sown the wind, and you must reap. I have heard this vile insinuation before of something between you and Edmond at B.”

“Jeannette! Jeannette! it is false! every word of it. It is a vile slander of my enemies. Ask Edmond himself—he will tell you it is so.”

“Yes! yes! I know it is false. But who gave circulation to these reports? Hey? Your enemies, were they? Your enemies must have a great deal to do, that they keep themselves busy with these manifold stories of your adventures. Who was it aspired to the eclat of any affair with the rich, generous, learned, and travelled Edmond? Who was it dragged him, through his unsuspecting recklessness of conventional usages, into conditions which rendered him liable to such an imputation? Who boasted of it, and attempted to place him in the same category with the dupes and gulls and fools she had already ruined and plundered? Hey? Who was it? Marie ——, I know you,” and she stretched herself to her full height; but, had her vision not been blinded by passion, she might have perceived a cold and scarcely perceptible smile of scornful incredulity pass over the face at which she pointed her sharp finger. “I know you, woman! Beware! beware how you cross my track with Edmond! You had better rouse the sleeping tigress with her young in your arms. He shall be mine! I have sworn it! One year ago, when I heard of his return from Europe, and left everything, mother, sisters, friends, and came on to this city, a thousand miles, alone and unprotected, that I might throw myself in his way, I swore that he should be mine. I had watched his career for years, from a distance, and he had grown to be my ideal. When he became, first the pupil and then the expounder of the new philosophy in France, I too became its student; with unwearied labor I mastered its prodigious science, for I divined the purpose of the man. I knew he must return to his own country, and become its exponent here, and that then my time would come.

“I studied the German, the French, and the Italian; with all which languages I knew him to be familiar. I acquainted myself with the literature of each, that I might be able always to speak with him in the tongues and of the themes of which his long residence in Europe had made the associations most pleasant. Armed thus, cap-a-pie, I have met him at last, as I felt it was my destiny to do.

“I have attracted him; I have all but conquered him. That man shall be my lover! Ay, woman, he shall be my lawful husband! Cross my track in any way, if you d-a-a-r-e! I know your arts; I will render them for ever unavailing to you; I will explain them, and expose them. Cross my track, then, if you d-a-a-r-e!” and, as she hissed out the words between her teeth, she stooped forward and shook her finger in the face of the now actually trembling woman. “Remember! our compact is, you let me alone, and I will let you alone; you help me, I’ll help you; cross me, I destroy you!”

“Is that all?” murmured the woman, in a soft voice, opening her eyes, which had been closed during the greater part of this tirade, while, at the same time, the old obliquity became for a moment apparent.

“Why, Jeannette, I never dreamed of any thing else. I would sooner cut off my right hand than interfere with you, in any respect. Our two courses are entirely different. You have one object and one species of game to hunt down, while I have another. We shall not clash!” and seeing the features of the other relax from exhausted passion, she leaned forward with a pleasing smile.

“Just to think, you stormy child! I had hastened home to tell you of my good fortune, and you so overpower me as to make me forget all I had to tell. You have frightened me sadly, Jeannette, and all about nothing. But I’ve got him—I think he’s booked at last!”

“Pooh!” said the other, sinking into a chair. “Well, I asked you ever so long ago; how did you manage it? You seem to have had a great deal more trouble this time than usual. He does not seem to have been very civil to you heretofore, I should think.”

“No!” said the other, in a low, hoarsened tone, while the blood mounted in crimson flush to her forehead, not to her cheeks. This nice discrimination is very necessary to a true apprehension of such a character. “No, he has acted like a sullen cub, heretofore, a perfect young white bear, with his insolent pride, and clumsy haughtiness! He is the most insulting and impracticable boor I ever took hold of!”

“Ah! I perceive you are splenetic!”

“No! It is simply annoying, that the insufferable fellow should give me so much trouble. Why, only think, he positively refused to be introduced to me—said I was a shallow adventuress, and that he did not wish to know me—even when our Doctor Weasel went to him, with a special request on my part for such an introduction!”

“Oh, yes! but our Doctor is proverbially awkward in such matters. No doubt he spoiled it all in the manner of the request.”

“Well, but you know, if the Doctor is awkward, he’s got money, and as long as he believes in Fourier and Swedenborg as devotedly as he does now, we can use his purse. But to proceed: That sullen Southerner not only refused to be introduced to me, in the most insulting terms, but when I wrote him three or four of my most irresistible billet-doux, that never failed before, he treated them with what I suppose he meant to be silent contempt, for he did not answer one of them, though I had taken the pains to place them all upon his table with my own hands, during his absence, and find out all I could concerning him at the same time.

“I found the key-note, however; the boy loved his mother, and has been playing hyæna with the rest of the world ever since she died, and been endeavoring to imagine himself a misanthrope, with a life dedicated since solely to the ambition of achieving, in her name, good for mankind. This discovery, privately made, put me fully in possession of all I wanted to know of his weakness. I saw he was earnest and chivalrous, as his origin implies, and proudly secretive, so far as the privacies of his life were concerned. So I at once felt that this incrustation of reserve with which he had fenced about his life, could only be broken down by a coup de main.

“I determined to come down upon him, by surprise, in spite of everything. I called on him, and sent our trusty Doctor up to bring him to the parlor per force. The ruse succeeded so far as to effect an introduction; but, to tell you the truth,” and her forehead fairly blazed while she spoke, “I never was treated with such insolent and frozen hauteur in my life before! I went away with my ears tingling and blood on fire, but I cursed him in my very heart, and swore to have a woman’s vengeance! You remember how sick I was that night. Oh, God! such furies as tortured me! I scarcely slept; but a happy thought came to me just about morning.

“He was a poet—his brow revealed that—but with characteristic sternness he had yet published nothing which could be accounted the highest expression of his inmost life. He had made his way in literature rapidly and brilliantly through a novel combination of style, in which the essential elements of prose and poetry were combined; but had never yet ventured to associate his proper name with anything bearing the forms of poetry.

“Now, the Doctor had told me that the poem, under the soubriquet of ‘De Noto,’ in the last number of the Journal, was his, and it at once flashed across me—appreciation! appreciation! The young poet has stolen timidly forth, under disguise, with this myth clear from his soul! He does not expect to be understood at once, and any prompt appreciation will overwhelm him from the very suddenness of the thing; and in his delighted surprise he would yearn towards the acknowledged devil himself.

“I sent him another note expressing that intense appreciation for which I knew he was craving. He treated it with the neglect that he had the others; but I somehow felt that I had made my mark. I called this morning, and as I knew his contempt for mere conventional forms, I ventured upon a dashing ruse de guerre.

“I challenged him, for I knew his own personal hardiness, to take a long walk through all the slop of the thaw. With a stare of surprise he accepted it. I felt even then that my point was half gained. There were people in the parlor, and my object was to get him alone with myself. I felt that I had already touched one weakness, and my object now was to arrest his chivalrous sympathies in behalf of my forlorn and unprotected martyrdom to the cause of woman in her resistance to the brutalities of the marital law, and her right of proclaiming to her sisterhood the sanitary laws of health, in which they have been kept in profound ignorance by the ‘profession.’

“At first, I arrested his attention by the daring of the position which I had assumed, and then aroused his sympathies by a fervent relation of the wrongs inflicted on me by my brutal husband. The story was old, but I managed to throw into it a great deal of feeling, for there is nothing like a tale of persecution to arrest chivalrous minds all over the world. We understand all these propositions as scientific! When I parted with him he smiled upon me, for the first time, genially. I am sure of him now!”

“I should think you might be!”

CHAPTER XIII. CLAIRVOYANT REVELATIONS.

In a good-sized, neatly-furnished apartment, of a large house in Bond Street, about two weeks after the incidents which were related in the last chapters, a group was assembled, about nine o’clock in the evening, which consisted of Manton, the woman Marie Orne, her daughter, and Dr. E. Willamot Weasel, of whom we have before spoken.

The dark eye of Doctor Weasel glistened with benevolent delight as he gazed upon the group, from which he sat somewhat apart. Manton was seated on a chair near the glowing fire, with the mother on a low stool on one side of him, and the daughter kneeling on the other, while both with upturned reverential eyes drank in eagerly each word that fell from his lips. They seemed to be enchained, enchanted, while he spoke; and the mother, in the almost total speechlessness of her rapt appreciation, could only venture to trust her trembling voice in low, whispered exclamations; while the sad eyes of the impish-looking daughter imitatively stared unutterable things.

The woman’s subtle suggestiveness had roused the brain of Manton, and fully drawn him out on his favorite themes; whatever of natural eloquence he possessed, and he possessed much, flowed smoothly now, for, in spite of himself, his frozen heart had been warmed by the unwearying deference which he met with from these people.

The lamps burned brightly, the hearth glowed, and the eyes of all were bent upon him with genial warmth and admiring earnestness. The north wind howled cold without, to remind him of the long, harsh “winter of his discontent,” which had for ten weary years been unrelieved by any approximation to a scene thus flushed with the sanctities of domestic quiet. Manton always idealised woman—he idealised everything. He was a poet. The very presence of woman was hallowed to his imagination. There was a thrill of sweet fancies and gentle memories conveyed to him, in the very rustle of a silken gown. He adored, he worshipped woman, as she lived in his memory—the holy attributes with which he invested her, penetrated and held him enchained in peaceful awe. He could not, he dare not believe evil of her, if she bore the semblance of good, in thought, or deed, or life.

He had shrunk thus long from contact with her, not because this interval of self-inflicted separation had been other than a weary penance of yearning, but that his fastidious nature dreaded the common contact, which might degrade or mar that ideal of love, which woman personated to him, and in the worship of which he had found the strength for brave deeds.

It was the weakness, the petty flippancy, the commonplaceisms of woman, from which he shrank. He believed that her spiritual strength should equalise her with man’s physical strength in disregarding common fears, paltry conventionalities, and contemptible topics. The miserable skeleton of soul and body, which the world calls “woman of society,” was more horrible to him, by far, than the actual contact with her dry bones in a prepared skeleton would have been—for where one was a comparatively pleasing object to his eye as a philosopher, the other was but the painted, dim-eyed, ghastly spectre of a living death.

There was in this woman, at least so far as he could judge, a total abandon to her natural impulses, which seemed to utterly repudiate those restrictions which are merely commonplace. This was refreshing to him, from its novelty, at any rate, in contrast with the insipidities he so much dreaded, although his taste had from the first been constantly offended.

Yet she seemed so utterly lawless and quietly defiant of what the world, that works in harness, might say, he could not help respecting her for it. It was a new thing in his life, to meet with a woman, sufficiently heroic, to face the martyrdom that she was daring, for so elevated and noble an aim as the emancipation of her own sex from the conditions of utter helplessness, into which their ignorance of the laws of life had sunk them.

Besides, she had shown so much earnest patience with his rude pride, had followed up its aberrations with such a matronly tenderness, exhorting him only, and unceasingly, to be at rest—a rest, the need of which his proud and fainting soul had confessed so often to his inward consciousness. And then this fine appreciation—ah, where is the young poet who can withstand appreciation? And then such delicate deference in trifles!

He had spoken incidentally of his taste in dress; and now the mother and daughter were dressed in the most graceful and faultless simplicity! The heart of Manton was touched. He felt grateful and pleased with these strange Samaritans to him in a strange land.

On a slight pause in the conversation, the woman, still gazing up timidly into the face of Manton, changed the theme suddenly, by asking him,

“What do you think of Clairvoyance?”

“The world is not old enough yet, by twenty years, I think, to answer that question.”

“My reason for asking the question, was, that I have some strange premonitions myself, which I cannot explain. You will, no doubt, be able to explain the mystery at once—”

“Yes!” interrupted Doctor Weasel, eagerly, “do let us have you examine the matter! Facts have come within my own knowledge, concerning revelations which have been made by her, that are the most extraordinary I ever knew. For instance, when she has been brought into clairvoyant rapport with individuals whom she has never seen or heard of before, she has revealed to them the whole history of their lives.”

“This unexpected enunciation of their life-secrets to men, must of course be productive of strange scenes occasionally,” said Manton, in a tone which had suddenly become cold.

“Oh, very curious and interesting! very curious!” exclaimed the Doctor, quickly. “Marie, do relate to him that incident of the bloody hand, that you have so often told me.”

“Well,” said she, “it has been some years since that a number of my friends, who knew of this gift of mine, were in the habit of inviting me to their respective houses, to meet friends of distinction, who were curious to observe the experiments, either upon themselves or upon others.

“On one occasion I was invited to meet a celebrated physician of this city, whose reputation for purity of character and life was very high. There were no parties present but my friend, this physician, and myself. Such an arrangement, I afterwards understood, had been made at the particular request of the physician himself, who desired that there should be no other person present but his host at the interview.

“When the physician placed his hand upon my head, as is the necessary formula to bring me into spiritual communion with my interrogator, I relapsed almost immediately into the syncope of the clairvoyant state, and of course became entirely unconscious of what I uttered in that condition. But our host, who was his most intimate friend, has given me many times the following explanation of the scene:—

“He says that when the physician placed his hand upon my head, I first said from the sleep, ‘I am content! All is pure here—this is a holy soul—one that is regenerate and will be saved!’ and then that while I was recounting his many deeds of kindness to the poor and friendless, and the rich, I suddenly shrank back, exclaiming, ‘Blood! blood! blood! There is blood upon this hand! This soul is darkened now with blood! Here is some fearful crime! Murder has been committed by this hand; everything seems red beneath it!’ My friend says the doctor staggered back as if he had been shot, on hearing this, turned pale as death, and swooned on the floor; and after he recovered, acknowledged that he had committed murder and fled from the consequences; the name by which he was now known was an assumed one, and he implored his host not to expose him to the penalty of the gallows by revealing these terrible facts.

“My friend, of course, did everything he could to relieve him on that point, and assured him that he would never breathe the fact where it could injure him; that the purity of his life for so many years had cancelled the enormity of the crime, so far as society was concerned.

“But in spite of all this, the wretched and guilty man left the house in overwhelming despair, and the last I have heard of him was that he had locked himself in his own house, and was killing himself with the most unheard-of excesses in drinking brandy, to which vice he never before had been addicted.

“When I realised the tragic results of this fearful insight, with which I seem to have been mysteriously endowed, my very soul was shaken with sorrow; and since that time my spirit has wrestled in agonies of prayer with God, that this poor child of crime and headlong vices might be ‘saved!’”

As the woman uttered these last words, Manton recognised, for the first time, and with a shudder, a peculiar obliquity of the left eye. His soul was chilled within him; and for the moment, the light of the glowing room was darkened as if the shadow of drear winter had passed over and through it.

Doctor Weasel exclaimed gaily, “Is not that extraordinary? I assure you, I have myself witnessed things in connection with this power of hers, quite as inexplicable, though happily not so tragic.”

“It sounds strangely enough,” said Manton, shortly.

“I assure you I have no means of accounting for these things,” said the woman in a meek, deprecatory tone.

“Suppose you demonstrate it, madam, in my case;” and a slight sneer, which crossed the face of Manton, whose manner had entirely changed, did not escape the hawk-like quickness of the woman’s eye. “My life, I am willing to submit to the scrutiny of your inscrutable sense.”

“Oh, by all means!” exclaimed Doctor Weasel, springing to his feet in a paroxysm of delight. “Let us have the experiment, by all means! Do please place your hand on the top of her head!”

Manton turned, and with a bow most studiously deferential, seemed to ask of the lady her permission to do so.

“Oh, yes, yes,” and her head was bowed forward to meet his upraised hand; while the daughter, who seemed to understand the thing, either from previous experience, or from some private signal, rose from her clinging position about his knee, and stepped back, leaving the two alone, without other contact.

In a few moments after the hand of Manton had rested upon the meek, submissive head of the woman before him, she commenced exhibiting the common and preliminary attitudes, muscular retchings of the throat, nervous twitchings of the lips and limbs, accompanied by the apparently palpable, organic changes, which are recognised to be symptomatic with well-known conditions of the mesmeric sleep.

Manton watched all these phenomena with the sharpest attention, and then, as the lips began to move as if in inarticulate enunciation, he leant forward over her, and asked—

“What can you tell us of the soul, with which you are now in communication?”

After several preluding and spasmodic efforts to articulate sounds, the Clairvoyant at length said, in a voice only distinct above a whisper—

“I see light! all light!—pure, holy light. It fills the universe with a mild radiance! I can see no blurs, no clouds in the foreground. I can see only angels, seraphs, and seraphim, and all forms of light revolving in the sphere of this mighty soul!”

“Is there no evil there?” said Manton.

“No, I see none; I see only white light.”

“But look close—perhaps you might find something dark. Look long and steadily into the world you visit—see if there be not clouds there.”

There was a pause. The lips moved without articulation again; and again Manton asked—“What do you see now?”

“I see, I see, the light is parting on either side; out in the far distance, between those walls of light, a giant form uprears itself in shadow. Down the long vista stands this darkened giant. He is fierce and stern, and wears a cold, hard front, with flaming eyes, that scare the ministering angels all away. He strikes around him with the imperious sway of his huge, knotted club, and all the bright forms flee. He seems the savage Hercules of pride!”

There is a pause; and after a stillness of some moments, Manton asked again—

“What now is the vision, to your sense?—is the giant gone?”

“No, he is humbled but not subdued; and from afar behind him, down this darkened vista, a light has grown up, like a rising star. It advances slowly, rising over his head. The splendor increases as it comes. Now, the dark and wrathful giant has fallen on his knees—the flood of glory overcomes him. His club is dropped. His eyes, upturned in awe, seem dimmed by the sudden glory of an angel’s presence. Ha! I see! the features of that angel are like his whose soul I see! The giant is subdued! His pride has bowed its forehead in the dust, before the angel radiance of a visiting mother!”

Manton felt his flesh creep as this was spoken, and as the Clairvoyant paused for some moments, he asked: “What does this spirit of the mother say?”

The slow answer was—

“She seems to rebuke this pride even more with her effulgence, and to say, My son, I am with thee in the spirit, but I cannot be with thee through the medium of the flesh which thou hast so poisoned and corrupted, since I passed from thee into this higher sphere. Make thy body clean and purify thy life, and I shall be always with thee present, in the spirit. It is necessary for your usefulness in your present life that you should accept of human sympathies. It is only through such that you can establish a true community with the material world of which you form a part. Accept human love—accept a moral representative of myself—believe in the possibility of its chasteness as well as utility, and you will yet be strong, powerful of good, and happy.”

Here Manton, who had become intensely excited during the progress of this scene, removed his hand with a vehement gesture from the head of the woman, and springing to his feet, seized his cap, and with scarce the ordinary adieus, hastily left the room. He rushed hurriedly through the dark storm, which careered along the street, muttering as he went:—

“Eternal curses on this infernal woman! What can it mean? She dares to speak of my mother again. Hah! does not this account for the inexplicable disturbance of my papers in my trunk? Is it possible that this can be the accursed and despicable wretch who has stolen into the privacies of my life? But think, think! I may have been hasty. This whole subject of Clairvoyance is an impenetrable mystery. That strange story of the bloody hand has impressed me. For all we know, as yet, such things may be within the possibilities of Clairvoyance. That myth she uttered as if she were in a dream, was strangely significant to me—supposing her to be ignorant of all my past life; and then she seemed so patient, so disinterested, so gentle and so kind, so matronly, so tender, and so heroic, too. I cannot altogether distrust her, nor can I believe; I can only wait. I must see more; I must know more; I must comprehend the whole. There is a something here I cannot understand—a something betwixt heaven and hell, which I must bide my time to fathom. Curses on all mysteries!” and, rushing onward through the storm, like one hag-ridden, or pursued by stern, accusing ghosts, the bewildered Manton soon reached his cheerless room, all storm-drenched and depressed.

CHAPTER XIV. THE PROUD MAN BOWED.

Transparent as is the meaning of the foregoing scene, it conveyed to Manton, who knew none of these things which have been revealed to the reader, a tremendous shock. Mind and soul were thrown into chaotic convulsions; he knew not what to think, or which way to turn for truth.

Had the incident occurred but a short time previous, before his nature had begun to be moved by generous sympathy and honest respect for this loyal, persecuted, and indomitable woman; had it occurred before that eventful walk through the slush of New York, he would have at once turned upon her in freezing wrath, with the deliberate accusation of having entered his room in his absence, and searched his private papers, or else have merely sneered at it, as the accidental hit of a reckless adventuress.

But he had admitted her to his respect as a noble and unprotected devotee. In a word, he had, as was usual with him wherever women were concerned, idealised her into a heroine. Could he suspect her after this? He rejected the weakness of such suspicion almost with terror.

Had he known any thing of New York life; had he formed any relations except those of a strictly business character; had he cultivated acquaintances at all, who belonged to the city, and knew it, a few inquiries might have settled all his doubts. But, alas! pride, pride, that fatal pride! He knew nobody, he cared not for what any one said of another.

He had heard this woman violently abused at the dinner-table below, to be sure; but then the character of the persons who had joined in this cowardly vituperation was, to his mind, evidently such as to prejudice him in her favor; for he had a proud way with him, which never permitted him to judge of the absent by what was said of them, but by who said it. Taking these things together, he would have felt ashamed to have asked any questions concerning the woman, of those whose opinion and opportunities of knowledge he respected.

If she had thrown herself upon him, it had been with perfect frankness, and without any attempt at concealments. She had told him how she was persecuted and slandered by ignorant women, because she had been bold enough to tell them the truth about themselves. He had already heard something of this, and the stories told were of precisely such character as envious, vulgar, and malignant gossip circulates about females who make themselves conspicuous by their virtues or their talents. Besides, had he not, before he knew more of her, been violently prejudiced, too? What more natural than that others should be so, including these ignorant women?

And then this wonderful Clairvoyance! Who can dare to say that he believes nothing of its claims? He held its marvels and miracles in great contempt, and firmly believed, that whatever of truth there was would soon be unveiled of its apparent mystery by the close analysis of science, and shown to proceed from purely natural laws, the exact relations of which had not been heretofore understood.

And then it might have been accident. Ah! and then it might have been—what his thought had long struggled with, as the solution of all such phenomena—it might have been sympathetic! a mere result of the unconscious projection of his stronger vitality through a magnetic or odic medium of sympathy, which had been instantly established through the contact of his hand with the thin and sensitive region on the top of her head.

She might thus have been made to feel him intellectually, if not spiritually; to see, through this sympathetic sense, those images with which his brain was most full, and thus express this startling outline of his life.

Be those things as they may, he was restless and excited; his imagination was aroused, his memory profoundly stirred. He was thus fast hurried past the point where a cool analysis could well avail to rescue him. Tossed to and fro by doubts and dark suspicions, which a generous confidence strove hard to banish with its magnanimous suggestions, backed by self-reliant pride; confounded with the fear of acting with injustice towards a helpless female; with the fear, too, of the soft pluckings at his heart, from those tender memories which she had thus aroused by her offers of maternal sympathy—together with the penetrating light and warmth of that genial and unlucky evening spent with her, amidst the quiet of domestic surroundings—he could form no conclusions, discriminate no clearly definite purpose—could only wander to and fro, restless, in troubled, sad irresolution.

A vague dread of evil in advance afforded apprehension of he knew not what, that always, when the gloaming darkened most, seemed parted to a tremulous, dim light, like summer coming through the morn, and made his pulse go quicker, while those yearning memories faintly glimmered, as if within a shaded reflex of the glowing day.

He kept himself strictly secluded; yet, day by day, those dainty missives crept in upon him by some mysterious agency. At first they were read mechanically, and, amidst his troubled doubts, produced no apparent effect; but, by and by, they grew more chaste, more delicately worded, and more sweetly toned.

Was it that they were really advanced upon the blundering specimens we have seen? or could it be that his fancy had become excited with regard to them—that he was merely idealising unconsciously? or was it that those awkward first attempts at producing imitations of the rhapsodical style peculiar to himself, which had so excited his contempt, as obviously taken from the study of his writings, had now been cunningly improved upon, since personal intercourse had afforded his correspondent a closer insight of his purer and more simple forms of expression?

Had his haughty egotism been touched at last, by a skilful reflex of himself, thrown shrewdly into his eyes, from the dazzling surface of this snowy crow-quilled page?

We shall see, perhaps. Here is the last that he received from her:—

This letter strangely thrilled upon the already over-wrought sensibilities of Manton, whose nervous organisation had been rendered intensely susceptible by the protracted excitement under which he had been laboring. He read it over and over again, with increasing agitation, until it seemed, while his eyes suffused, as if the accusing angel of his own conscience spoke to him in mild rebuke.

Long he moaned and tossed—the dim moisture struggling all the while to brim over those parched lids, that for years before had never known a freshening. Those tearless lids—how rigid they had been! how bleak! Like some oasis fountain where the hot simoon had drank!—Dry! dry!

Suddenly, with a deep groan, the young man bowed his head upon his hands, while the tears gushed between his fingers in a flood, that seemed the more violent from its long restraint. His body shook and rocked, while he gasped aloud—

“It is true! It is true! This woman tells what is true! This sullen pride has been the cause of all—I feel its crushing judgment on my shoulders now! Great God! deliver us from this thraldom! Let me but know my race once more! let me but weep when others weep, and smile when others smile, and it will be to me for a sign that thou hast received the outcast into the family of thy love, once more! Forgive, oh, forgive me, that have so long held thy goodly gifts of earthly consolation in despite! The worm’s presumptuous arrogance has but moved thy pity, oh, thou Infinite One! Forgive! forgive! oh, let me feel that countenance reconciled once more! Give back to my weary soul the holy communion of thy creatures! Pity! Pity! Pity! Ah, there is a paradise somewhere on the earth, for the most wayworn of her darkened children—a rift in the sunless sky, a glittering point above the darkened waters! Men are not all and totally accursed by their defiant passions. Pity sends star-beams through the port-holes of the dungeon. Mercy comes down on holy light of visions, where stars cannot get in. Oh, love, Infinite Love! Thou art so powerful of penetration—come to me now!”

For a long time he sat thus, while his frame shivered in voiceless throes; when suddenly straightening himself, with a powerful effort, and while the tears yet rained like an April shower, he drew towards him his paper, and wrote—

CHAPTER XV. DELECTABLE GLIMPSES BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

Turn we now to that large and mysterious house, to which we have before referred, near the corner of Broadway and Eighth Street. We will pass the greasy lintels, into the wide and dirty entry, climb those five flights of stairs, turn down the long, dark passage, and pause before a door, just one beyond that which we have had occasion to remember in the course of this narrative.

We will take the liberty to enter. The scene presents the woman, Marie, reclining on a lounge, holding a note in her hand, which she seems to have read and re-read with a peculiar look of puzzled inquiry.

The impish-looking daughter, to whom we have before referred, was seated in a chair, behind the woman’s head, and out of her sight. The creature seemed to have much ado to keep from laughing outright, for her face was screwed into all sorts of contortions in the effort to subdue it, as she peeped over her mother’s shoulder, and watched her puzzled looks and bewildered gestures.

“Well!” said the mother, as if speaking to herself, “if one could only comprehend how he came to write this to me—it seems to contain a great deal. Upon my word, it appears a beautiful snatch of rhyme, and to convey quite a confession—only I don’t understand—it reads as if it were an answer to something that had gone before.” She reads—

“Most too high-strung for my purposes, it must be confessed! He never expresses any flesh and blood in his correspondence. Ah, well, I’ll soon bring him out of that! But this really does puzzle me! This is all the note contains.” She turns the note to examine it. “It is certainly in his hand, yet he makes no explanation.”

Here the child, whose blood seemed ready to burst through her face in the continued effort to restrain her laughter, tittered aloud. The mother sprang erect, and, turning upon her with an expression of rage and surprise upon her face—

“What! Why, what are you laughing about? What business is this of yours, pray?”

The child, although evidently a little frightened, had so entirely lost her self-control as to be unable to restrain the bursts of laughter which now followed each other, peal upon peal, as she danced about the room in a perfect ecstacy of glee.

The mother’s face turned first pale and then red, as she followed the motions of the child with her eye, until at last, with the expression of an infuriate tigress, she sprang to seize her. The child was too quick for her, and with the agility of a monkey, darted from beneath her grasp; and still shrieking with laughter, was pursued around the room—leaping the furniture with an airiness that defied pursuit—which her strange, wild laugh yet taunted.

The woman, after exhausting herself in vain attempts at catching her, sank upon the lounge—and at once, in a whining, fretful voice, commenced to pour upon the head of the child, the most inconceivable and galling epithets. So long as this tone was held, the child held out in defiant spirit, either of sulking obstinacy, or of harsh and irritating laughter, and to every reiterated question from the angry mother—“What are you laughing at? What do you mean?”—she only clapped her hands and danced more wildly to her elfin mirth.

The mother now changed her tone of a sudden, in seeming hopelessness of carrying her point by storm. She began to sob violently, and turning with streaming eyes towards the child—

“You—you tre-treat your poor mother very cruelly to-day; I am dying to know what it is you mean; but you will not tell me! Please, dear, come and tell poor mother why you laugh, what it is you mean, and what you know about this letter?—for I am sure you know something—do tell poor mother, and she will forgive you all! Come, dear child!” and she reached out her hand as if to clasp her to her bosom.

The child, who seemed to have no intellectual comprehension of the meaning of all this, but to have taken a purely impish delight in watching the confusion and puzzle of her mother, in regard to the letter at first, and then instantly, when she flew into a rage, to have answered in a monkeyish and hysterical rage, on her own part; now at once, with equal promptness, and with the common instinct of young animals, responded to the tender inflections of the maternal voice.

Dropping her whole previous manner, she instantly sprang forward and knelt at her mother’s side. The mother did not speak for some moments, but silently caressed her, placing her hand frequently on her head, the top of which she fondly stroked with a tenderness that seemed to linger there. She drew the child’s face to hers too; and although she seemed to kiss it frequently, it might have been observed that she breathed deep and heavy exhalations upon different portions of it, which she only touched with her lips.

The effect was magical beyond any power of expression. The hard, ugly, animal lines of that child’s face, which had been writhed and curled but a few moments before, in every conceivable expression of most ignoble passions, at once subsided into the meek and suppliant confiding of that inexplicable and most tender of all the relations known to the animal world, mother and child!

“Dear, why did you not tell me what you knew about this letter before?” said the mother, in a tone as musically reproachful as if she dallied with her suckling babe. The child buried her head in her mother’s bosom, and after a silence of some time, during which her mother industriously stroked the top of her head, she looked up, and in a sly, bashful tone exclaimed—

“I did it just for fun, to try how writing love-letters went—I copied the verses from a book, in your hand, and sent them to him as yours!”

Scarcely were these words uttered, than the languishing and tender-seeming mother hurled the child from her, backwards, upon the floor, with a violence that left her stunned and prostrate, and springing to her feet, raged round and round the room, as only a feminine demon infuriate could be imagined to do, spurning now and then with her foot, as she passed, the still senseless form of her own child!

Hell might find an equal to this whole scene, but hell has always been too civil! It is enough! This is jealousy! That woman is jealous of her own child! and she only thirteen years old!

How long she might have raged and raved, and to what consequences it might have led, heaven can only judge. Providentially, perhaps, a knock at her door announced the postman. She clutched the letter she received convulsively, and tearing it open, the instant he closed the door, read—what? The letter of Manton, which we saw in the last chapter!

She read it through, standing where she had received it—her eyes dilating, and her whole form changing. She literally screamed with joy as she finished the letter, and clapped her hands like one bewildered with a sudden triumph.

“Ah, ha! I have him! I have him! He is mine henceforth! He cannot escape me now!” and her oblique eyes fell upon the motionless child upon the floor. “The little fool!—she catches my arts too soon—she is not hurt—but I must help her.” She moved towards the child, but the demoniac triumph which possessed her seemed irrepressible. She bounded suddenly into the air, and almost shrieking aloud as she did so—

“I have conquered—I have conquered him at last!” came down like a statuesque Apollyon transfixed in exultation. It was a horrible glimpse of unnatural triumph! It lasted but for a moment; for, with a sudden drooping of the usually stooped shoulders, as she turned towards the letter again, she said, thoughtfully,

“This will not do—he perseveres even here in talking about mother! mother! and chaste! and holy! and all that sort of thing. The foolish boy is too much in earnest. I have used this stuff about long enough. I must find the means of bringing him gradually around. Such a relation as the silly fellow desires won’t do between us—we are both too full of life! Oh, I’ll write him a note at once that will prepare the way—will break up the ice, as he calls it, still more about his life!”

She raised the child, which had been stunned by the fall, and sprinkling some water upon her face, which caused the first long breathing of recovery, she laid her upon the lounge, muttering, as she did so, “The meddlesome little fool! She must do everything she sees me do! She must imagine herself in love with every one whom she sees me pretend to love. She must write love-letters when she sees me write them, and heaven only knows what she won’t do next with her monkeyish imitation! But I can’t be crossed by a child so, if she is my own. Lie there until you get over the sulks—you are not much hurt!”

She turned away from the child and seated herself at the table, exclaiming, as she seized her pen, “Ah! this letter! I feel that I shall need all my skill and wit to word this properly, so as not to alarm him. In his present excited and hysterical mood, the veriest trifle would have the effect of driving him off, at a tangent, forever beyond my reach. And yet it will not do to let things go on in this way; for I see that that idea of the motherly relation, if once permitted to become settled in his mind now, will remain a fixed barrier, which I shall never be able to pass on earth. I must see him to-night, and take advantage of his present over-wrought, ecstatic, and bewildered condition, to break down this boyish dream of his! Bah! to think that he should have taken me to be so much in earnest in all that first twattle about motherly relations, which I found necessary to use in order to get at him at all! Pity my correspondence hasn’t warmed him up a little by this time! I’ve tried hard enough, to be sure, but the queer fellow will persist in etherealising everything!”

During this soliloquy, the child, who had entirely recovered, lay perfectly still, with sharpened attention, catching every word that was spoken. There was an eagerness in her eye which showed her to be, if not an apt scholar of such teachings, at least a very attentive one. The woman wrote:—

“Ah! ha! that will do it!” she said in a low chuckling tone, as she rapidly folded and directed the letter; “though he might take the alarm at this if he were cool, yet there’s no danger now! It will no doubt shock him a little, but he has learned to believe in me, and in his present excited state he has deified me almost into an object of worship; and any suspicion he might feel he would only blame himself for. Ah! this will do! it shall go instantly! Here!” she said, turning sharply to the child, “Here! get up there, put on your bonnet, and take this letter! You know how to deliver it, and where! Come, up with you!”

“But, mother,” said the child, as she slowly lifted herself half-erect, “I don’t feel like it—I’m not well! You hurt me!”

“Nonsense!” said the mother, harshly; “go take a bath, and do it quickly too! You’ll feel well enough! This letter must go, and shall go! Get along, I say, and do what I tell you!”

The child dragged herself slowly out of the room.

“That little wretch will torment me to death!”

The letter was despatched and reached its destination.

Manton, whose excitement had continued, without the slightest diminution, to return upon him, in paroxysm after paroxysm, seized upon this last letter with the famishing eagerness of a man who looks for strength—for spiritual consoling. He read it with suffused and swollen eyes; he scarcely saw what he read, so much had his vision been dizzied and obscured by weeping. But those last words did indeed shock and thrill him. He was strangely startled, and for a moment they seemed to open to him an appalling and terrific gulf of falsehood, more hideous than yawning hell.

We say, it was but for a moment; but in that little space the blackness of darkness overcame his soul. A shuddering of dread, of doubt, of fear, and all that horrid brood, the birth of rayless and unutterable gloom, passed over him convulsively, and then the whole was gone. He had been too intensely wrought upon by the ecstacies of Faith. He shook off, by one great throe, the giant shadow of its natural enemy, this Doubt, which he now conceived had so long made his life accursed; and the rebound, by a necessary law, carried him to a yet greater and more unreasoning extreme of trust, and unquestioning confidence in this woman, as under God the instrument and medium for restoring him once more to life and the world.

He at once determined to visit her, and prove to his own soul the falsehood of these dark suspicions of the being who had thus moved and spoken his inmost life for good.

CHAPTER XVI. REMORSE.

CHAPTER XVII. “TO-MORROW.”

It would be well for sinners were there no to-morrow. At least it would be well for them so far as impunity in the enjoyment of sin was concerned. But it may not be; the inevitable time of reaction must follow that of excess, the wages of which are remorse.

The effect of that to-morrow upon poor Manton was fearfully crushing. At first he dared not think—the horrid realisation would have slain him. He dared not look up, lest he should see the great height from which he had fallen. He dared not hear the voices within him, or above him, lest they should blast his sense. He shrank from the sunlight, as though each ray were a fiery arrow, to cleave hissing through his brain. He dared not look his fellow-man in the face, lest he should see the mark upon his brow, call him accursed, and spit upon him. The innocent eye of childhood was the most dreaded basilisk to him; and the face of a pure woman made him shrink and shudder in affrighted awe. His shadow seemed a spectral mockery to him, for it no longer glided with him, straight and firm, but was bowed, and crept sneaking after.

The burden of a hundred years had fallen upon the young man’s shoulders in one fatal night—a ghastly, loathsome burthen of self-contempt—his face had grown old; his eyes lost their proud fire; his lips, their firm expression; there was no longer any “aspiration in his heel.” The haughty, bounding self-reliance, the unflinching, upward look, were gone! gone! Manton had lost his self-respect.

Ah, fearful, fearful loss, that it is! There was a leaden desperation in the man’s whole air that was shocking, even to those who had never seen him before. There was no bravado in it—it was sultry, slow and self-consuming—shrank from observation, and burned inward.

He neither sought nor found any palliation for himself. He blamed no one else; his pride would not permit him to confess to himself that he had been unduly influenced, or that any unfair advantage had or could have been taken of him. No, it was his own fall. His own grossness had profaned those associations which he had stupidly deluded himself, for years, into supposing to be really sacred things in his life. He had rendered himself, thereby, unfit for Heaven, unworthy Earth, too base for even Hell.

His first sullen recourse was to the wine-cup, that he might numb the unendurable agonies. He drank to monstrous excess; but, no, it would not do; that cold burning, as of an ice-bolt through his heart and brain, lay there still, in the two centres. He sought and found men like himself, with great thoughts and stricken hearts; like himself, brain-workers; and in the fiercest orgies of desperation, hours and hours were spent without attaining to one moment of the coveted oblivion.

The evening had long set in among such scenes, when a note was suddenly thrust into his hand from behind, and as he turned his head, he saw a boy hastily making his way through the thronged room. This movement had not been observed by his noisy companions—he hastily concealed the note.

He had recognised the superscription with a feeling of deathly sickness, for which he could not clearly account. It was as if the fresh wounds were all to be torn open again.

He soon after found an opportunity to withdraw beyond observation, and opened the note, which contained only these words:—

The sheet was bespattered with blood. Manton nearly fainted. Recovering himself in a moment, he muttered, “Infernal brute that I am! to have neglected the poor, frail creature thus—after last night, too! May God forgive me, for I shall never forgive myself!” He hurried from the room.

The scene, on reaching her apartment, was, as may by this time be expected, ghastly enough. But as we have seen a little more of these horrid bleeding scenes than Manton has, we will refrain from another description of one, since we have found that they only differed in the intensity of effect and degree in the precise ratio of the results to be attained. In this instance she had not reckoned without her host.

Manton, who never dreamed of suspecting her, and had been fully impressed with the belief that these attacks were fearfully dangerous, and that the magnetism of his touch, whether imaginary or otherwise, could alone suffice to restore her to the calmness necessary for the arrest of the hemorrhage, felt as if an awful responsibility had been suddenly devolved upon him, as he thus apparently held the very life of this singular woman in his own hands.

This impression had been consummately fixed upon the mind of Manton by her obstinate refusal to permit the presence, at their interviews, of any third person, not even that of her own child. She could thus, through his generous humanity, most effectually draw him to her side; and, when once in her reach, he was again in the power of those fearful arts, of which we have seen something.

The life of Manton became now a succession of the “to-morrows” of remorse. Each new sun arose upon its succeeding scene of wilful, self-degrading excess, such as we have witnessed. He never permitted himself to grow fully sober, but drank incessantly—morning, noon and night. But that the wines he chose were comparatively light, and less rapidly fatal than the heavier and more dangerous drinks of our country, he must have, undoubtedly, destroyed his life, as he did his business reputation.

He still wrote brilliantly—nay, even with a fierce and poetic dazzle of style that surprised men greatly, and added much to the notoriety, if not to the solidity of his reputation. But everything went wrong with him. His purse was regularly drained by a remorseless hand; his wardrobe fell into neglect, and the marks of excess upon his fine, proud features, were at once rendered conspicuous by their association with almost seedy habiliments.

Before one year had passed he had begun to exhibit himself before men, in the pitiable light of one who had more pride left than self-respect. In a word, he had fallen fully into the toils of the hellish Jezabel.

Remember, in judging of poor Manton, that while he is hoodwinked, through much that is most noble in him, we see this woman through the strong light of day. He looks upon her as a devotee of science, in the holy cause of human progress and social amelioration. A poet and enthusiast, his life is dedicate to both. He regards her as a frail being, whose life hangs by a thread, and that thread held in his own hand—degraded into a false relation to himself—a relation which he loathes, to be sure, and which he feels to be heavily and swiftly dragging him downward, every instant, while it lasts, but which he dare not utterly break, for the fear that that frail thread of life, of which he has so strangely become the holder, should be snapped. He has only seen her, through her representations of herself; and therefore, all that is chivalrous and tender in him has been aroused in her defence, as the white roe, hunted into his strong protection for defence against the demon hounds of New England bigotry, jealousy, and fear. Apart from all other considerations, these were sufficient to compel an utter negation of self, in all that related to her, as well as a hasty dismissal of those suspicions that might thrust themselves upon him.

A house, in the meantime, had been taken for her in Tenth Street, for the rent of which Manton and the benevolent Doctor Weasel were to become jointly responsible. But the woman was far too astute to permit any such entanglements as might lead, prospectively, to mutual explanations between her victims. The Doctor alone ultimately became her endorser for the rent. She had other designs upon the less plethoric purse of Manton.

In entering upon this arrangement, Manton had been induced to believe, by her own representations, that for ten years before the name of Preissnitz had been heard of on this continent, this woman had been practising water-cure among her women patients. Manton had been sufficiently educated in the profession, to understand that its general pretensions were essentially empirical. He was too much an Indian, indeed, and had lived too much among Indians, to regard anything beyond the simplest natural agents as efficiently curative. He therefore recognized what Preissnitz had discovered, as simply confirmatory of his experience of the usages of savage life, and his own observation so far as it went. It contained not to him any more than any other pathy, the essential vis medicatrix of nature; but it seemed good to him, because it was new to the popular sense, and was well worthy to be urged upon its recognition, and thus to find its proper place among the other systems.

He entered upon the project with the fullest enthusiasm, for this woman seemed to him, from her personal habits and untiring energy, to be specially set apart to preach the crusade of physical cleanliness to her sex. The house was therefore occupied by her as proprietress and female physician, while Manton, Doctor Weasel, the fiery Jeannette, and victimised Edmond, of a former scene, occupied respective chambers as boarders, and patrons of the new enterprise.

CHAPTER XVIII. A DIVERSION. — THE LEGEND OF THE MOCKING-BIRD.

But even in the black abysses of the hell down which he had fallen, a flower could grow to the eye of Manton. It was the strange birth of a wizard evil place; yet, as it spread beneath his nourishing eye and hand, it daily grew more beautiful to him. It may have been the unconscious contrast of a something young, living, and blooming in an unnatural sphere like this, where he, with the sudden weight of centuries upon him, breathed with such heavy gasping. He could not tell what it was that thickened this drear air; he only felt the oppression on his lungs, and shuddered when sleep had partly sobered him, and he could realise it for the hour. His sympathies had been first touched for that ugly, impish, persecuted child, to which we have frequently referred, because he saw, at once, that the mother’s querulous jealousy was forever subjecting it to a species of covert torture, which kept it always haggard and wretched. Had it been a sick and neglected kitten on the hearth, he would have felt for it the same kind of sympathy. He accordingly noticed and caressed the child, and endeavoured to rouse its low, ignoble frontal region into activity. The response of a hungry and vivid animality, surprised him with its aptitude of apparent intelligence. He did not understand that marvellous faculty of imitation which, in all the animal tribes approximating man, or which, in other words, are born with embryo souls, assumes the external semblances of intelligent expression. The faculty of music is below man, and common both to bird and beast; and he had yet to learn, to his heavy cost, how a perception and detection of the physical harmonies of sound may be utterly distinct from the spiritual comprehension of their meaning. He had yet to fearfully realise how this insensate aptitude of harmony, which enables the monkey of the organ-grinder to dance in perfect time the most wild and rapid strathspey that ever Highland pibroch rung, or a stupid parrot to whistle the divinest strains of Mozart, could yet bestow upon the combined parrot and monkey of our own race that semblant mockery of the “gift of tongues,” the use of the soul’s higher language. In a word, he would have been greatly shocked to hear the affiliated Poll and Jocko talk down Shelley in his own etherealisms, and appal Byron with the mad bravado of forgotten lines from his own reckless and besotted misanthropy.

Poll and Jocko are easy enough to detect through all the human disguises of their combined powers, if the man of common sense and society meets the impersonation for the first time, when developed, or in most of the latter stages of development. But it was a very different thing with poor Manton, who only saw an undeveloped, abject animal, from which he expected little but the gratitude of the brute for protection, and from which anything like a vivid response was as surprising as it was unconsciously gratifying to his egotism, for the reason that all that was really pleasurable in it was owing to the fact of its constituting a close reflection of his own mind.

Gradually the feeling took possession of him, as he observed in her an excessive sensibility, that could weep at a moment’s warning, and laugh like April through the glistening storm in the next instant, that he would make amends for the great sin of his life, in working upon this sensitive organisation for good. The fine delicate chords of this frail instrument might be made to respond to the divinest notes; and this creature, with developed brain and expanding soul, become a medium of the loftiest intelligence—aye, be even to him the consoler of after years. The idea was a strange one, but it suited the intellectual audacity of Manton for that very reason.

It seemed to his darkened hopelessness, that here, through the innocence of childhood, he might renew that broken chain of living light which held him in communion with the upper world, until its blackened, severed links, falling about him, had left his manacled soul in hopeless bondage. He dreamed that if he guarded it with holy zeal, his prayers might rise upon the first odors that went up from this strange young flower to Heaven, and bring its light down too, in forgiveness, to him.

He did not know—for he had fed on poisons until it had become a kind of second nature to him, as to that old Pontiac king—that the pure light of spheres could never reach him through this lurid glare, which he had now come to think the natural day—that the odor of no flower could rise through its thickened air to meet the keen, grey stars. The man became bewildered with the gorgeous dream he nourished; and, day by day, without knowing why, he threw himself between the child and the baleful shadow of its mother. He spread his hands above her in blessing; he watched that he might shield her.

From the moment when his attention had been first attracted to her, she seemed to become illuminated; her ungainly body appeared assuming the lines of beauty; her mean, harsh features, softened, as the gnarled shrub assumes, in slow unfolding, the graceful mellowed drapery of spring. The coarse, elfin locks, grew tamed and smooth; a dark blue, in soft and gradual displacement, entered the sharp, greenish, animal eyes. The low, ape-like forehead, swelled above meekly-curved brows that had lost their hirsute squareness. Indeed, so rapid was the expansion of the frontal region, that it absolutely startled and affrighted the devout experimenter, when he placed his hand upon it, and felt it almost lifted by the wild throbbings beneath. The work was progressing too fast; he feared that the general health of the subject might fail; but how to check and remedy this powerful reaction, so as to control it from fatal results, now so fully occupied the spiritual subtilty of the man, as to leave him little time to think of himself.

The loathsome contact of the reptile mother daily grew more abhorrent to him; and her characteristic cunning soon discovered that she had no real hold upon him herself, and at once encouraged this growing interest in the daughter, with the same assiduous art that she had before displayed in tormenting her with jealous gibes. Through this help she hoped he might be held within her reach. She had already, by her malapert, silly, malignant interference, so far completed his ruin as to have brought about a desperate, and finally fatal collision, between himself and his business associate in the Journal, which his genius had built up; and now he was thrown again to struggle hap-hazard with the world, he had become more reckless and desperate than before, so that she feared he might, at any time, break away from his bondage, and that, too, while he was still of use to her, and before she had gloated fully upon his ruin. She had studiously taught the child the process of those infernal arts, of which we have seen something; and, although the creature understood nothing of the rationale involved, yet her imitative cunning made her a most sharp pupil and practitioner.

By saying that the child did not understand, we mean to convey, that she could not have explained to herself, or to others, what effect certain manipulations would produce specifically; yet she had a feeling of them, a vicious intuition, that answered with her all the purposes of intellection. To look at her through the eyes of Manton, the uncouth and grotesque girl had become a fond and graceful plaything, that clung about him in soft caresses, that kept his heart warmed towards her, and caused him to regard the mother even with a modified sense of the growing disgust which was possessing him, and of which her shrewd insight made her fully aware.

Her child had become necessary as a bait—and her child let it be—for, in her hideous creed, nothing was sacred. She was filled towards her victim with fierce yearnings, and, had she possessed the actual entity of soul, would have loved him madly—but no, she hated him, as the slave hates the despotic master to whom he hourly cringes for each favor. In a word, she hated him as a man—or in his double capacity of a spiritual being, rather; and, as even her hate was secondary, her appetites towards him were those of the weir-wolf for mankind. She would devour him body and soul, but she meant to feast alone.

Fearing lest the tenderness of his nature might be too strongly moved towards the child, if not diverted in other directions, she at once set her subtle wits to work to furnish her “Tiger,” as she called him, with sufficient toys of the same kind to keep him quiet, and avert the chances of his leaning more towards one than another. Some letters were hastily despatched to New England, and the result was the appearance of a fair and gentle child, about the age of her own.

Elna and the stranger, Moione, sprang into each other’s arms when they met, as if their very heart were one. They were fast friends, it seemed, and a thousand times had Elna said how dearly she loved the gentle Moione; and so jealous were the children of their first meeting, that Manton saw little of either for several days. A glance at the broad, serene brow, great, clear eyes, and delicate mouth of the new-comer, filled him with a strange, inexplicable sense of confidence, and even relief; which he could not well explain, to be sure, because it was too undefined to himself. He could only wonder how that white-browed creature came in such a place. It seemed as though it were a promise, answering to his prayer for the elfish Elna, that this calm spirit should have descended in their midst.

The vehement and headstrong petulance of her nature promised to find here a balance that would sober it within the bounds of reason; and strangely, although he saw hope for her, and for his own yet undefined purpose in her development, he saw nothing definitely in the stranger, but a good angel sent to aid him. His soul went out to greet her, but was it yet his heart?

These children were both dedicate to art; and Manton found it now by far the most pleasing occupation, to watch and give direction to the rapid unfolding of this instinct for the creative. The newly-aroused intellect of Elna here displayed many impish and brilliant characteristics of the imitative faculty, that might easily have been mistaken, by a less partial observer than Manton, for genius. These peculiarities were strikingly contrasted with the placid, but vigorous style of Moione, to a degree that one formed the exact offset to the other, not alone in art, but in all physical and mental, as well as spiritual idiosyncrasies. As these children grew upon him, there seemed something strangely familiar in them to Manton. He often tried to account for this to himself. Had he seen them before in dreams? Had he known them in some different world, and in a previous stage of being? Why was it that the vehement eccentricities of temper, the elfin wildness of motion, and light, mocking spirit of this child Elna, all seemed to him so familiar? Why was it that the coming of the fair-browed Moione had surprised him so little? There was that in her pure, calm face to startle most observers; yet, from the first, he had looked upon it as a matter of course, and as if he had unconsciously waited for her to arrive. Why was it that he had felt comforted since she came? What was it, in that name of hers, that sounded to him so much like a half-forgotten music-note?

So he had questioned himself a thousand times, becoming each day more puzzled than the last, until accident furnished him with the curious solution of this mystery. One day, in looking over a pile of old manuscripts, he found one, upon which he seized, with an unaccountable thrill. In an instant the whole thing flashed upon him—

“I have it! I have it! Here the mystery is solved at last! Strange, that I should so utterly have forgotten this manuscript! Two years ago, before I ever saw these people, this strange foreshadowing of what seems now a reality in my life, came to me in a summer’s day-dream; and I wrote it off, to be thrown aside and forgotten until this moment. It seems the most wonderful coincidence. I am no believer in miracles, but this appears a marvellous reach of the soul into the future; I was conscious of nothing when I wrote, but the pleasure of embodying in words what seemed to me a beautiful thought; strange, it should have been thus thrown aside and so utterly forgotten, until the increasing coincidences of my present relation have gradually forced me back to find it! What blind instinct, struggling in me, sent me here to look through these old manuscripts, with no definite purpose? What vague struggle of consciousness and memory is this, that has been moving me for weeks to understand why it is those children seem so familiar to me? Strange! strange! strange!”

Manton now proceeded to read this curious manuscript, the contents of which we shall also place before you:—

Friend, do you know the Mocking-Bird? I warrant, if he is a familiar of your childhood, you have a thousand times wondered at the strange malignant intelligence which characterises his tyrannical supremacy over all the feathered singers. Not only is he “accepted king of song,” but he is the pest and terror of the groves and meadows. Spiteful and subtle, he conquers in battle, or by manœuvre, all in reach of him; and you may easily detect his favourite haunts, by the incessant din and clatter of wrath and fear he keeps up by his malicious mockery among his neighbors. From my earliest childhood, I can remember having been singularly impressed by the weird and curious humors of this creature. Since those times of innocent wonder, I have been a wide wanderer. The prepossessions of my fancy were irresistibly attracted by the wild legend I give below. It was told me by an old Wako warrior.

On a hill-side, above an ancient village of his tribe, while we were stretched upon the grass beneath a moss-hung live-oak, he related it. The moon was out, gilding with silver alchemy the shrub-crowned crests of prairie undulations—piled, as we may conceive the waves of the ocean would be—stayed by a word from heaven, while on the leap before a tempest. It was a fitting scene for such a story. Out from the dark gorges on every side ascended the night-song of the mocking-bird. The old man had listened to the rapid gushing symphonies for some time in silence, then drawing a long breath he remarked—“That is an evil bird!” I begged him for an explanation, and he proceeded.

Those peculiarities, indeed, of the Indian’s phraseology—those broken-pointed expressions, so condensed and meaning, and eked out continually by significant gestures, I could hardly hope to convey, were I fully able to remember them. The wild and fanciful methods of the Indian mind, believing what it dwells upon, yet half conscious that it is dreaming, are difficult to remember or repeat. We can only do the best we may to preserve the idiosyncracies.

“Yahshan, the Sun,” said the old chief, pausing reverently as he uttered the name, “in his great wigwam beyond the big waters, made the first Wako! He laid him in his fire-canoe and oared his way up through the thick mists that hung everywhere. When his arm tired of pulling, he took him out and stretched him upon his back on a wide dark bank, and then rowed on his path and left him. The Wako lay like the stem of an oak, still and cold. Before Yahshan entered his night-lodge in the west, a dim hazy light had hung over the figure, but this only made its broad couch look blacker—for nothing that had form could be seen. Yahshau, the Moon—the pale bride of Yahshan—came forth when he had gone in, and rowed her silver bark through the ugly shadows above the Wako, to watch lest the spirits that hated Yahshan should do harm to his work, which it had taken him many long ages to finish. He was very proud of it, and the evil spirits hated him that he had made a thing so goodly to look upon; and they drifted hideous phantom shapes across the way of Yahshau, and tried to overwhelm her light canoe, but its keen shining prow cut through them all, and left them torn and ragged behind her. At last they fled, for when her eye was on the mute form of the Wako, they feared to do it any harm. When all were gone, and nothing that looked like mischief was to be seen, she too went in. And then they flocked out from the deep places where they had been hid, and gathered with hot fingers and red eyes about the quiet Wako. He did not stir, for his senses had not yet been waked. Quick they pried open his clenched teeth, and poured a green smoking fluid down his throat. Just then the prow of the fire-canoe appeared parting the eastern mists, and they all fled.

“Yahshan came on. He looked upon his work and smiled—for he did not know that evil had been wrought—and came now in glory, riding on golden billows, scattering the chill mists that clung around the icy form, for it was time to waken it up with life. He rolled the yellow flood upon it, and the figure shivered; again the glowing waves pass over it—the figure was convulsed—tossed its limbs about, and rocked to and fro. Its eyes were open, but it saw not; its ears were open, but it heard not; it was tasteless and dumb; it smelt not, nor did it feel. Life had gone into it, and the heart beat, the pulses throbbed, the blood coursed fast, and it was monstrous strong. But what was this? Being, self-fed and self-consumed, hung upon the void of midnight, hurried and driven from its own still gathering impulse through a chaos of crude matter. That green liquid of the evil one now rushed in burning currents through the veins, and it dashed away, crawling, leaping, tumbling, like a mad torrent, over piled-up rocks across the dark plains, striking against hard, formless things, and rebounding to rush on more swiftly, till it had left the fire-canoe and Yahshan all astounded, far behind, and the terror of darkness was beneath and above it. But what was this to it? On! on! the green fire still burned within, and it must go—chasms and cliffs, with jagged rocks—into them, over them all. What were rough points and bruises, and crashing down steeps, and midnight to it? There was no feeling, yet the heart leaped, the blood careered, the limbs must follow. Motion, blind motion—no control, no guide—but through and over everything, move it must.

“The bad spirits thronged after it, grating and clanging their scaly pinions against each other, and creaking their pleasant gibes, when suddenly there was no footing, and the headlong form pitched down, downward, whirling through the empty gloom, while all the herd of ill things laughed and flapped themselves in the prone wake behind it.

“At once, with a sigh of wings, like a sharp moan of tree-harps, a shape of light shot arrowy down amidst them. They scattered, howling with affright. It bore up the falling Wako on strong, shining vans an instant, then stretching them out, subsided slowly, and laid it on a soft, dark couch again. This was Ah-i-wee-o, the soul of harmonies, the good spirit of sweet sounds. She is the great queen of spirit-land. Yahshan and Yahshau are her slaves; and all the lesser fire-canoes that skim in Yahshau’s train obey her. She gives all life its outer being; to know and feel beyond itself—without her, life is only motion. There is no form, no law, no existence beside, for she holds and grants them each sense, and in them reveals all these. Yahshan could give life—but not content with this, he was ambitious. The formless chaos his fire-canoe sailed over must be a world of beauty! A soul dwelt in it, but that world was passionless and barren. Yahshan had given life to many shapes, but the cold spirit had scorned them all; and yet she must be wooed to wed herself to life, that, out of the glow of that embrace, might spring the eternal round of thoughts made vital, clothed out of shapeless matter with symmetry. He planned an impious scheme. He would not pray the good Ah-i-wee-o for aid, but would act alone, and be the great Medicine Spirit. He would frame a creature from out the subtlest elements within this chaos, so exquisite that, when it came to live, confusion would be harmonised in it, and the order of its being go forth the law of beauty and of form to all. Then that coy spirit of desolation would be won at last, and passing into its life, a royal lineage would spring forth, and procreation wake insensate matter in myriad living things, gorgeous ideals, harmoniously wrought, and self-producing forever. All these would be his subjects, and he would rule, with Yahshau, this most excellent show himself! So he labored on, in the deep chambers of his night-lodge, through many cycles. The work was finished. It lay in state, within his golden wigwam at the east, that Yahshau and her glittering train might look upon it and wonder. Then he carried it forth; but evil spirits are wise, and, though it was a mighty work, they knew that it was too daring, and that Ah-i-wee-o would punish its presumption, and would not let the senses wake with life; so they poured that fearful fluid in, that fires the blood, and makes life slay itself. They say the white man has dealt with them, has learned from them the spell of that bad magic, and makes his “fire-water” by it. So when Yahshan waked up life, its power waked too; for he knew not of the craft, and it tore the glorious work from out his hands, while they flew behind and mocked him.

“Ah-i-wee-o bent over the swooning Wako; for the life that had been so tumultuous scarcely now stirred his pulse. She was a thing of beams, silvery and clear; a warm, lustrous light clung around her limbs and showed their delicate outline. She floated on the air, her wings and figure waving with its eddies, like the shadows of a Lee-ka-loo bird upon the sea. Her eyes, deep as the fathomless blue heaven, looked down on him with pity and unutterable gentleness. It was a marvellous work the overdaring Yahshan had accomplished. Beautiful, exceedingly, was that mute form, and rarely exquisite its finish. Must that glorious mechanism be destroyed, and all the noble purpose of its framing be lost? No! She moves her tiny, flower-like hand above it, and every blotch and all the bruises disappear, and it was fair to view, and perfect as when Yahshan had given it the last touch. Now she stooped beside and touched him, white sparks flew up, and she sang a low song. At the first note, the dark, formless masses round them quivered and rocked: the Wako smiled; for feeling now first thrilled along his nerves. The song rose; the dumb things shook and stirred the more. She touched his nostrils and his lips; the sparks played between her small fingers and danced up. Yet a louder note swelled out, and the thick mists swayed and curled, and a cool wind rushed through them, and dashed a stream of odor on his face. He drew long breaths, and sighed with the burden of delight, and moved his lips to inarticulate joy; and now that wondrous song pealed out clear, ringing bursts that shook the blue arch and swung the fire-boats, cadent with its gushes; and through the dim mists great shapes, like rocks and trees, leaped to the measure, marshalling in lines and order. Now she pressed his eyelids with her fingers; the silver sparks sprung in exulting showers, snapping and bursting with sweet smells. Once more, pealing triumphant, a keen, shining flood, that symphony poured wilder forth; his eyes fly open, and that heavy mist, like a great curtain, slowly rises. First the green grass and the flowers, bending beneath the gentle breeze, turn their deep eyes and spotted cups towards him in salutation, and all the creeping things and birds, that love the low herbs, dew-besprent, are there: and as the mist goes up, majestically slow, other forms of bird and beast are seen, and dark trunks of trees, and great stems beside them, looking like trees, until his eyes have traced them up to the great moose, the big-horned stag, the grizzly bear, and the vast-moving mammoth. But then it has drunk the harmony of grades; for all are there. And, side by side, he marks how, from the crawler, every step ascends, in beautiful gradation; the last linked to the first in one all-perfect chain. Then came the knotted limbs, with all their burden of green leaves; and, underneath, the round, yellow fruits, or purple flushing of rich clusters and gay forms, that flutter through them on wings of amethyst, or flame, or gold, their every movement a music-note, although all was dumb to him as yet. Still higher the mist-curtain goes; and the grey cliffs, with shining peaks, and a proud, fierce-eyed bird perched on them, meet his gaze; and then the mists float far away, and scatter into clouds, and all the splendor and the pomp of the thronged earth is spread, a gorgeous, but voiceless, revelation to his new being. With every touch of the enchantress, Ah-i-wee-o, the soul of chaos had passed into a sense; and all the pleasant harmonies the Wako felt, and all the scented harmonies the Wako tasted and inhaled—all the thoughts of harmony in grand or graceful forms the Wako saw—that blissful interpenetration gave conception to, and the magic of that powerful song brought forth. One more act, and his high marriage to eternity is consummated: ecstacy has found a voice, and all these harmonies articulation, yet his ears were sealed; and though music flowed in through every other sense, his dumb lips strove in vain to wake its language.

“But this was the supremest gift of all. This was the charm that had drawn beauty out of chaos—the magic by which Ah-i-wee-o ruled in spirit-land, and chained the powers of evil. It were death to spirits less than she, to hear the fierce crashing of those awful symphonies she knew. His nature could not bear the revelation. Besides, what had he to do with that celestial minstrelsy which led the heaven-fires on their rounds? There was ambition, full enough, up there; and Yahshan had been playing far too rashly on those burning keys. She would not curse this perfect being with a gift too high, and add another daring rebel to her realm! No! he must be ruler here, as she ruled everything. From all those harmonies he must extract the tone, and on it weave his song of power to lead them captive. This divine music is the voice of all the beautiful, the higher language of every sense; and not until the soul is brimmed to overflowing with sparkling thoughts of it, drank in through each of them, will the beamy current run, as streams do in the skies. He must lead the choir of all this being—yet, this infinite sense would overbear his nature, if suddenly revealed; it can only wake in other creatures, as its birth matures in him—and he shall go forth into silence—every living thing shall be mute—and from the low preluding of the waters and the winds the first notes of his exulting powers shall be learned, and they shall learn of him—until all the air is one harmony—all breath takes music on, and echoes bear the twice-told glee—until fainter, more faint, it is gone!

“She touched his ears—the sparks leaped up—she pressed his lips with one entrancing kiss and sprang away. The quick moan of her pinions cleaving the air is the first sound that steals on the new sense, and stirs the dead vast of silence that weighs upon his being. And now myriad soft wavelets of the infinite ocean follow—breaking gently over him—the whisper of quivering leaves to the caressing zephyr, the low tremble of the forest-chords, and the deep booming of great waves afar off; the ring and dash of cascades nearer, the tinkling of clear drops in caves, the gush and ripple of cold springs, the beat of pulses, the purr of breathings, and the hum of wings, in gentlest ravishment possess his soul—for now is the bridal of his immortality consummate in a delirium of bliss, and lulled upon his couch he sweetly sinks into the first sleep.

“The Wako is roused next morning by a warm flood from the fire-canoe—for Yahshan had come forth right royally, and though Ah-i-wee-o had humbled his presumption and would not permit him to be sole lord as he had hoped, yet all he had dared attempt had been accomplished, and he believed it to be in full his own work, and thus wore all his panoply of splendor in honor of his glorious creation. The Wako rose, and lo! around him as far as the eye could reach, a mighty multitude of all the animals of the earth were rising too. They waited for their king, and it was he. They came flocking around him to caress him in obeisance—a gentle, eager throng!

“The panther stroked his sleek glossy fur against his legs and rolled and gambolled like a kitten at his feet. The great bear of the north rubbed his jaws against his hand and begged to be caressed. Big mountain (the mammoth) thrust his huge tusks in for a touch; and the white-horned moose bowed his smooth-bristled neck and plead with meek black eyes for notice. All the huge grotesque things pressed around, and the smaller creatures, pied, flecked, and dotted, crowded beneath their heavy limbs, unhurt—all, full of confidence and love, gracefully sporting to win one glance.

“Above him the air was thick with wings, and the whirr and winnowing of soft plumes made pleasant music, and the play of brilliant hues was like a thousand rainbows arched and waving over him; and the little flame-like things would flutter near his face, and gleam their sharp brown eyes into his, and strive, in vain, to warble out their joy, for their sweet pipes were not yet tuned.

“All were there, great and small; and the wide-winged eagle came from its high perch and circled round his head, and brushed its strong plumes with light caressing, through his hair. He went with them into the forest burdened with rich fruits, and ate, then shook the heavy clusters down for them. Then he passed forth to look upon the land, the first shepherd, with that countless flock thronging about his steps.

“It was, indeed, a lovely land! Here a rolling meadow, there a heavy wood; the trees all bearing fruits, or hung with vines and bloom. A still, deep river, doubled sky and trees in its clear mirror, and he gazed, in a half-waking wonder, when the ripples the swan-trains made, shivered it to glancing fragments.

“But wander which way he might, he came to tall gray cliffs, with small streams, that pitched from their cloudy summits, and bounding off from the rough crags below, filled all the valley with cool spray.

“He found his lovely world was fenced about with square towering rocks, that nothing without wings could scale. But there was room enough for all, and profuse plenty the fruitful earth supplied.

“At noon, he went beneath a grove of sycamores, where a great stream gushed out, and laid him down beside its brink, while his subjects stretched and perched around him, in the shade, to rest. His sleep was broken by strange new melodies that crept in. He opened his eyes; near him were two maidens, and all the birds and beasts were gathered around them, and they were singing gay, delicious airs, teaching the birds to warble.

“One of them was fair—white as the milk-white fawn that licked her hand and gazed up at her musical lips; but her hair was dark and a strong light gleamed in her small black eye. This was Ki-ke-wee. She sung and laughed and kissed the song-bird that perched upon her finger, and when it tried to follow her wild carol, she mocked its blunders and stamped her tiny foot, and frowned and laughed and warbled yet a wilder symphony to puzzle it the more.

“The other was a darker maiden with large, gentle eyes. This was Mnemoia; her voice was soft and low—and she sang sweet songs and looked full of love and patience. The Wako half rose in joy and wonder. They bounded towards him—sang a rapturous roundelay to a giddy, whirling dance, then threw their arms about his neck and kissed him. They became his squaws, and Yahshau smiled upon them as she sailed by that night.

“The Wako was very happy and Ki-ke-wee was his favorite. She grew very lovely and full of curious whims that each day became more odd. She loved the blue jay most among the birds, and taught him all his antics; and the magpie was a pet; and the passionate, bright hummer lived about her lips.

“As yet nothing but sounds and scenes of love were in that little world; and the strong, terrible brutes knew not that they had fierce passions or the taste for blood; but Ki-ke-wee would stand before the grizzly bear and pluck his jaws and switch his fierce eyeballs until he learned to growl with pain, and then she would mock him; and when he growled louder she would mock him still, until at last he roared with rage and sprang upon the panther—for he feared Ki-ke-wee’s eye!—and the panther tasted blood and sprang to the battle fiercely. And now the tempest broke, and everything with claws and fangs howled in the savage discord. Ki-ke-wee clapped her hands and laughed. Mnemoia raised the enchantment of her song above it all, and it was stilled. Then Ki-ke-wee would tease the eagle and mock him till he screamed and dashed at the great vulture in his rage; and she would dance and shout for joy; and Mnemoia would quell it, then go aside and weep.

“The Wako loved the beautiful witch, and when he plead with her she would mock even him, and every day and every hour this mocking elf stirred some new passion, until at last even Mnemoia’s song had lost its charm, and the bear skulked in the deep thickets and shook them with his growl, and the panther moaned from out the forest, and the gaunt wolves snapped their white teeth and howled, and all the timid things fled away from these fierce voices; and battle, and blood, and death, were rife where love and peace had been. The birds scattered in affright and sung their new songs in snatches only; and hateful sounds of deadly passions, and the screams and wails of fear, resounded everywhere.

“Ki-ke-wee made a bow and poisoned the barbed arrow, and mocked the death-bleat of the milk-white fawn when the Wako shot it at her tempting. This was too much! Ah-i-wee-o cursed her and she fell. The Wako knelt over her and wept; and when the dissolving spasm seemed upon her, he covered his face with his hands and wailed aloud. A voice just above him wailed too! He looked up surprised; a strange bird with graceful form and sharp black spiteful eyes was mocking him! He looked down—Ki-ke-wee was gone; and the strange bird gaped its long bill hissing at him; and when it spread its wings to bound up from the twig in an ecstacy of passion, he knew by the broad white stripes across them that it was Ki-ke-wee!

“He found the neglected Mnemoia weeping in the forest; and soon after they scaled the cliffs and fled from that fair land to hide from Ki-ke-wee. But she has followed them and mocks their children yet, and we dare not slay her, for the wise men think she was the daughter of the Evil Spirit that poured the green fluid down the Wako’s throat, and that the same bad fire burns yet in our veins. Our hunters chasing the mountain-goat sometimes look from the bluffs into that lovely vale that lies in the bosom of the Rocky Mountain chain, but they never venture to go down!”

CHAPTER XIX. SOME SELECT SCENES.

CHAPTER XX. SELECT SCENES CONTINUED.

CHAPTER XXI. SELECT SCENES CONTINUED.

CHAPTER XXII. FURTHER REVELATIONS.

Another year had now passed, which, although it found Manton not entirely released from his thrall, had yet left him a calmer and a stronger man. One by one the manacles had fallen off, unconsciously to himself. Hope was slowly filling his darkened life once more with visions of an emancipated future, and he now even dared to smile in dreams.

Whence came these fairy visitors? Ah, he did not understand yet, clearly, in his own heart. He only felt and welcomed them, fresh-comers from he knew not what far Eden of God’s ministers of grace. He did not question them—it was joy enough to have had them come down to him in his hell. Perhaps they were but airy counterparts of those sweet children he had watched over with such fostering tenderness.

But now at once a shadow fell upon his dream. Moione, the wise, the resolute, and the gentle, seemed all at once to droop, to become wavering and shy, while Elna grew more conscious in her impish grace, and more exultant, more capriciously tender, more caressingly electrical. Manton could not but observe that although Moione shrank from him now, she held her pencil with a heavy hand, and worked with a hopeless carelessness, while her lids drooped low and trembled often with a furtive moisture.

Another might have observed what he could not see, how at such times the eyes of Elna lit with glistening joy, and how her spirit mounted in rollicking ecstacies; how she danced and sang like some mad elf; or else her drawing-sheet was spoiled while her pencil went riot over it, in all fantastic drolleries of form, mocking characters, of every sentiment, and worst of all that she mocked Moione, too, and made him see her heavy brow, and covertly suggested painful questions.

Manton would sometimes see enough of this to startle him gravely, and make him question his own heart, long and painfully. Elna seemed to watch these moods and dread them, and would break in upon them with some wild antic or pouting caress.

Suddenly Moione went away, without any other explanation than that she should return to her mother in New England. The thing was done in a cold and resolute way that left no room for explanation. She had been here—she was gone; and strangely enough it was not until now that Manton realised how much of light there had been from her presence. Deep shade filled the places which had known her once, and it seemed as if his vision had been filmed—as if the shadow of that shade filled Heaven and darkened earth before him. He could not have explained why this was so. It was a voiceless consciousness, through which he felt a sense most indescribable, that made him first aware of a great want. It seemed as if the moon and stars were gone, with their calm inspirations of repose, their pure and holy beamings, and that their place about him had been usurped by a red and sultry light, more garish than perpetual day, and clouded in brazen unnatural splendors, too thick for those star-pencillings to break through, or that chaste moon to overcome.

As the weeping Elna clung about him now, he shuddered while he felt that strange, new thrillings crept along his veins. Why had he not felt this before, when Moione was beside them? Was he again given over to the evil one? and had the white dove again been banished from his bosom? These vague forebodings could never be entirely banished from the heart of Manton, although the lavish tenderness of Elna, who, by some strange instinct, seemed aware of the struggle, the shadow and the cause, and wrought eagerly to dispel them.

Elna was no longer a child, if, in reality, she ever had been since Manton had known her. She became daily more and more lovely in his eyes, which soon grew again accustomed to the unnatural atmosphere surrounding him, though he yearned often for the calmer and the clearer sky he had lost; yet she gave him little time to think of the past. The preternatural activity into which her brain had been roused gave him full employment in guiding its eccentric energies. And then the bud had begun to unfold its petals, as well as give out its aroma. Her sick and wilted frame seemed to have become suddenly inspired with a tender and voluptuous sensuousness, which filled out her graceful limbs in rounded, bounding vigor, and swelled her fine bust with its elastic tension, and lit and deepened her keen eyes with most lustrous and magnetic fires.

He could not dream long among such conditions. One morning, as he sat beside her at her drawing, she looked up suddenly into his face, and with bewitching naivete remarked—

“This is my birthday—do you know how old I am?”

“No, I never thought.”

“Well, I am seventeen to-day.”

“Seventeen! Great God! is it possible?” And Manton bowed his face, covering it with his hands, and for a long time spoke not a word, though his frame trembled. That magical word, “seventeen,” had revealed every thing to himself. He had as yet always called her by the affectionate baby-name of “Sis.” He had thought of her only as a child; for through these four weary years he had kept no note of time. He supposed, up to this moment, that he had been feeling towards her, too, as towards a child—the same saddened, persecuted child which had first attracted his sympathies by her mournful expression of constant suffering. He had never once thought before that any change had taken place in their relations; he had still fondled her as a spoiled and petted playmate; he still attributed the strange thrills her touch had lately produced in him to a thousand other and innocent causes beside the real. He had not dreamed of passion; he had only learned to dearly love her, as he thought, because she had been developed beneath his hand, and seemed, in some senses, almost a creation of his own—a sort of feminine elaboration of the thought of Frankenstein within him—the creature of his own daring mind and indomitable will. Seventeen! seventeen! Now the whole truth was flooded into his consciousness. She was no longer a child—she was a woman. And he felt that he had indeed loved her as a woman, while recognising her as a gay pet, a plaything. He now understood how deep, how pure, was the unutterable fondness that had grown thus unconsciously into his life, for her, and how monstrous had been the relations into which the mother strove to drag and hold him.

With the first flash of this conviction of his real feeling towards Elna, came the purpose, as stern as it was irrevocable. He lifted his head and turned towards the young girl, with moistened eyelids, and said to her solemnly, and with trembling lips—

“Sis!—Elna, do you know that you are no longer a child? that you are now a woman?”

The blood sprang to her forehead, and, with downcast eyes, she said, in a faint voice—

“I know I’m seventeen to-day.”

“Do you know, too, Elna, that we cannot continue to be to each other that we have been?”

“Why, can’t you be my brother still?” said she, looking up quickly, as if astonished.

“Because you are a woman, dear; and I realise now, for the first time, that I love you as a woman.”

Her dilated eyes glistened, for a moment, with a strange expression of exultation, and, in another instant, she threw her arms about the neck of Manton, and burst into the wildest expressions of mingled ecstacy and grief, in the midst of which she sobbed out frequently.

“My mother! my poor mother! what will she do? She will never consent to this—it will kill her.”

“Elna,” said Manton, calmly, disengaging her clasped hands from about his neck, “your mother is an evil woman; I know, and you know, something of her terrible passions. But she shall submit to this; my will is her fate—she cannot escape me, now that it is thoroughly aroused. She must bear it—she shall bear it, if it kills her. I shall hold no middle ground; and she dare not stand before me, or openly cross my track. This expiation is due from her to me. She has striven to hideously wrong me, and wrong you, and she shall now reap the consequences. I shall hold no terms with her; and you must make your choice now, calmly, between us, for ever! I have not guarded you thus for years, with sleepless vigilance, against her demonising influence, to have you fall back at once into her talons. I know it is a fearful thing to ask a child to do—to sunder all instinctive ties, and go apart into the house of strangers; but where implacable evil dwells, purity must look to be grieved in every contact, and there are no human ties sufficiently sacred to justify pollution of soul and body in continuing such contacts. I love you, Elna—I feel it now—I have loved you long, unconsciously; I would make you my true and honored wife, within another year—say the birthnight eve of eighteen. But mark me, you must be separate from this horrid mother. Elna, which do you choose?”

She threw herself hysterically upon his breast, sobbing—

“You!—you! Ah, my poor mother! I see it all! there is no choice! Yours! I am yours!—for ever yours! She is good to me sometimes; but I know she is bad—you must shield me from her. But we will not go away at once—it would kill her. Oh, my poor mother! my dear mother! this is hard!” and she shuddered, as she clasped him more closely in her arms, and sobbed yet more wildly still.

Manton spoke in tender soothing to the gentle trembler, who continued, amidst bursts of hysteric laughter, and smiles of stormy joy, to moan—“Poor mother! how will she bear it?”

Manton, at length, gently released himself from her caress, and placing her head upon the cushion of the sofa, whispered, “Be calm, Elna! She must bear it—she will bear it; it is a righteous retribution, that has overtaken her at last. I go now to tell her every thing. Promise me to be quiet, and wait till I return. She shall know her doom, in this same sacred hour in which I have learned to know myself and you.”

She buried her face in her hands and shivered as he turned away.

He mounted the stairs with calm, unhurried step, and, tapping at the door of the woman’s room, it was opened instantly, and she met him on the threshold. Her eyes sought his as he entered, with a strange and troubled glare of inquiry. His brow was fixed, and all his features seemed just cast in iron. She reached out her hand to him, with a vague, quick gesture; but he did not accept it. He stood up before her, erect, rigid, and impassive. Her eye grew wilder, and a yet more furtive and startled expression glanced across her face, as she gasped out feebly—

“What now! has it come?”

“Yes!” answered Manton, with a cold, ringing, and metallic tone; “it has come, woman! The same curse that your devilish arts brought upon poor Jeannette, has now come home to roost. We are for ever severed, and, on no pretence or artifice, shall you ever again come near me. Know you, woman, that I love your child with an honest love—have come to a realisation of the fact, and told her so.”

She reeled and staggered backwards, shrieking—

“Ah! ah! it has come at last! I felt it would be so!”

There was something in her gait and manner so like stunned madness, that Manton involuntarily sprang forward, to catch her wavering form in his arms. She thrust aside his clasp, and, staggering towards the bed, fell across it—not in a swoon, not in a bleeding-fit, but in a paroxysm of weeping; in which the flood-gates of long years seemed suddenly opened. There was no word, no sob, no gesture of impatience, but her eyes ran always a clear flood of silent tears.

Ha! ha! Etherial! has it come to thee at last? Is it thou that must in turn be s-a-v-e-d? Where now thy disguises? Where thy unnatural triumphs? O, woman! art thou woman, Etherial?

To Manton, the phenomenon seemed more moving and inexplicable than any we have yet described. She did not sleep, but always the tears poured forth; and for twenty-four hours she did not change her posture, or utter any word, but these, which sent a chill shiver through the frame of Manton, as he heard them—

“She will serve you so, too!”

Those words he could never forget. It was a weary watching beside that bed, that Manton had to pass through before the incessant flow of tears began to be checked, and the woman to recover something of her power of speech, at intervals.

The first thing now spoken was, “I must be content. It cannot be escaped! She must be yours, if you can hold her!”

A fearful “if” was that suggested to Manton; but he was too happy after all this solemn travail, to notice its significance—

“I shall try to reconcile myself to see you both made happy; while I shall walk aside in the cold isolation of my duties to my mission among women.”

Manton, who had expected a much more sultry and formidable climax to this critical scene, felt his heart bound with the sense of relief, as, when after all this exhausting watch over that dumb and sleepless flow of tears, the calm and unexpected philosophy of this conclusion came to his consolation. He had anticipated a frantic, obstinate collision; perhaps as savage as it might prove tragical. And his grateful surprise may be conceived at the result.

So soon as this result had been attained, he hastened to impart the news to Elna, whose approach to her mother, while in this condition, had been studiously guarded against by Manton. When he saw her, now, in her own room, to which he eagerly hastened, she sprang about his neck, exclaiming—

“Will she bear it? Can she live?”

“My darling, she has passed through a terrible struggle, but she has now awakened to a recognition of what is, and has been, and must continue to be, the falsehood of her purposed relation to me.”

“Ah!” exclaimed the young girl rapturously, clasping his neck still closer—“Now I may dare to love you as much as I please!”

CHAPTER XXIII. ANOTHER INTRIGUE.

CHAPTER XXIV. REANIMATION.

CHAPTER XXV. THE SEPARATION.

Had it ever occurred to Manton to reason at all upon the subject of his passion for this girl Elna, or had it been possible for him, under the circumstances which had lately surrounded his life, to reason concerning her, in any sense, he must and would have felt how ominous such a passion in reality was. To be sure, he did not feel that the relations into which it had been attempted to drag him by the mother, had ever been voluntary or accepted on his part; he had loathed and rebelled against them from the first.

But this did not, in reality, make the fact of his having continued near her—to occupy the same house—any the less offensive to the moral sense; for, taking the best aspects of the case, the durance had not been a physical one, and he might, if he had so willed, have walked himself bodily off, and thus escaped this horrible entanglement; but he had not done so. Although we have endeavored, as some extenuation, to trace the reasons why he had not thus acted, yet we have found no excuse sufficient, in all this, for the new sin he has committed, in daring to love, and contemplating honorable marriage, even, with the daughter of such a mother. But we have naught to extenuate, naught to set down in malice, in this too fatally true narrative; we have related it because it is true, and because we felt it to be our duty to do so, that others might be warned of these things, which may, perhaps, enlighten the reader somewhat, as to the character of the new thraldom to which Manton has been subjected.

It must always be borne in mind, in speaking of Manton and measuring his actions, that although the nervous sanguine temperament predominated to an extraordinary degree in this man’s organisation, the tendencies of his mind were, nevertheless, unusually conservative. This rendered him, necessarily, a man of habits; and therefore, more than usually liable to suffer from gradual and constant encroachment: for, if his quick sense has not instantly detected the danger on its first presentation—if his ear has not recognised the serpent’s hiss at once among the flowers, his fearless hand would soon be caressing the shining reptile, and bear it, it might be, even to his own bosom. It was this tenacity of habits which had rendered him so easy to be imposed upon. Nothing was so difficult for him to throw off as a habit; for, from the intensity of his nature, it always cost him the suffering of a strong excitement before its chains could be broken.

Manton found, very soon after his return, that what he most dreaded now, was to be at once precipitated, which was a separation between himself and Elna. Not that he did not fully concede to the general propriety and prudence of such a step; for he remembered that he had at once proposed the previous separation, when he came to understand the nature of his feelings towards her; but that had been when she was to be placed beyond the reach of her mother, and they could be both out of town at the same time; but now that his business made it imperative for him to remain in New York, if he dreaded before lest she be left with the mother one day even, were not the same causes operating still, and with redoubled force, when, in addition to her baleful contact, he had to contemplate that of the creature she had married?

The moral and spiritual grime of such a contact was enough to blast an angel’s bloom—to sully the purest wing that ever winnowed dream. He must be there to shield his fair treasure always, till the time had come when he could snatch her for ever beyond their reach. But the war had now fairly opened.

On the very day of his return, Manton had been not a little astonished to find the heretofore abject and cringing mother turn upon him, suddenly, with a lofty insolence, that seemed at first incredible; but his surprise and anger rapidly gave way to wonder and stunned amaze, at finding her exhibiting the most unparalleled phenomena of brazen, grave, deliberate falsehood that ever still imagination, in bottomless conceit, had conjured as the thought of demons in dark hell. This was yet, strange as it may seem, a most terrible realisation to have come upon his life; though he had, up to this time, known that she was unscrupulous, as far as the attainment of influential connexions, for the dissemination of her theoretical views, was concerned—that she was, in this respect, a dangerous and an evil woman—that her influence would make her presence deadly to purity, in her own or the other sex; yet, he had not learned to regard her as utterly God-forsaken. The veil was now lifted. The scales that had remained fell forever from his eyes. She now stood revealed, not as he had heretofore striven to palliate his convictions concerning her—the ferocious fanatic of one idea—the cunning and detestable Jesuit of a “A cause”—but as the incarnation of unnatural passions and a demonised selfishness. He trembled to his heart’s core at the thought of that fair young girl, whom he had learned to love, being left to the tender mercies of a monster such as this. He saw at once the whole nefarious scheme that had been concocted between herself and her worthy coadjutor.

This was but the initial step. This precipitation of a quarrel with himself, which would bring about at least a partial separation with Elna, and then their subsequent game would slowly and surely accomplish the rest. Was it likely that a wretch like this pink of delicacy, Narcissus, who had before, for years, been steeped to the lips in that monstrous traffic, the sale of bodies as well as souls, would quietly permit to slip through his fingers a lovely and fascinating girl as Elna had now grown to be, over who’s value, in dollars and cents, he had gloated from the first? or was it likely that his worthy consort, who had clearly learned to appreciate the convenience of such speculations, would not fully coincide with him in his view of the policy of defeating Manton, who, in the event of success, would be sure to separate her from them as far as the poles are sundered?

We shall now see how far the young lady herself was likely to, or had already, become a party to such utilitarian views.

Manton had left the house, and taken board elsewhere. The same evening, he visited Elna, who received him alone, in the warm, well-lighted, and neatly-arranged parlor. Manton had come in the most hopeless mood, for all the results of this separation had been most fully and painfully impressed upon him since the first indication of the rupture that had led to his quitting the house.

The young girl sprang eagerly to meet him, and with a bounding caress clasped his neck, exclaiming—

“Dearest one, you must not look so sad! We are to have the parlor thus every evening, when you shall come to see me; when we shall be very stately and proper folk. I shall play the dignified matron in anticipation, and you shall be my very wise and solemn lord and master. Mother is not to permit any interruption, and we shall have such nice and easy times. Come, sit down here by my side, and let us begin to play stately. And clear up that gloomy brow of yours, for I am determined that we shall be happy!”

Manton could only smile faintly, as he seated himself.

“Ah, heedless child, you do not see in all this gay vision, the black and deadly realities that couch within its shadows! I understand your mother’s game fully. This will not last long; and you are about to be sorely tried, my little love!”

His head fell back heavily, and his eyelids drooped with an expression of unutterable despondency. Elna, who had been watching him eagerly, now flew to his side, and taking his head gently on her shoulder, commenced caressing his face in a peculiar manner. She did not absolutely touch it, but her lips crept over certain portions with a slow snake-like motion, while the deep heavings of her chest, disclosed that she was breathing heavily upon them, and a certain greenish dilation of the pupil of her eyes revealed—what? Ah, horror! and she so young! What? what! is that the mother’s art? Let us see.

The lines of the man’s face are sunken in the expression of hopeless prostration. Soon a slight twitching of the nerves becomes evident, then a faint smile breaks across its pallor; the inspirations become deeper, and she breathes with almost convulsive energy. The glowing air lingers and burns along the sensitive temple, and now it pauses on the cheek, close beside the ear—ha! her arm is about his neck; is it a wonder that the blood mounts flushing to that man’s cheek and forehead, that his eyes fly open filled with wild and vivid fires, that a shuddering thrill is running through his frame, as he stretches forth his arms to her, with a low, ecstatic laugh, of passionate yearning, while she clings about him, and their lips meet, in a burning, lingering kiss, and then, with a light laugh, she springs beyond his reach, and dances in tantalising mockery about him, permitting him but to touch her for a moment, eluding his grasp, with yet more subtle sleight, until exhausted by morbid excitement the unfortunate man sinks upon the sofa?

This picture is only but too real. But why should Manton have endured the repetition of a scene like this? He was a man of habits, and for years, before a thought of passion had for once intruded upon him, this young girl, under the sacred shield of childhood, had been taught to approach him with fondling caresses. There seemed no danger then, but when the real time for danger came, he felt a vague and general monition of it, yet failed to locate it where it really rested. These caresses had become so dear and natural to him; they seemed so harmless.

He blamed only himself, cursed only the unetherialised grossness of his own nature. There was to him far too much of affection and accustomed tenderness in all this to arouse his suspicions for a moment. He hated only himself, and strove on each of these now frequent occasions, to chasten, by the severest self-inflicted penance, his own soul.

In the meanwhile, this modern Tantalus grew thinner and more pale each day; was wasting rapidly to a shadow, beneath such scenes as we have witnessed.

The girl, Elna, grew fairer and more strong each day—seeming to have fed upon his slow consumption.

We will not dwell upon such pictures farther. It was enough that all the consequences dreaded by Manton followed, in slow, but sure progression, and that the last blow the subtle couple struck at him was fully characteristic and consummated the separation.

Elna had seen little, as yet, of public amusements, and her strong imitative faculty had led her to express a passion for the stage, which Manton greatly dreaded, and had particularly wished to guard her against, until her mind should become more fully developed, and until he, himself, should possess the legal right to attend her, upon all such occasions. He had, therefore, at all times resolutely opposed her going to any public place of amusement, unless he could accompany her. But now it happened that, being engaged in bringing out a new work, with the press only twenty-four hours behind him, urging him inexorably for a certain amount of daily matter, which left him no leisure whatever, except a few moments, which he wrested from the vortex, for the short evening re-union with her he so loved, he had, therefore, no time left to accompany her to such places.

Here the enterprising couple saw at once their advantage; the mother understood what Manton did not, the extreme shallowness of the character he had thus perseveringly idealised. She at once laid siege to her passion for dress and display, as well as novelty. They bought her fine and showy clothes, and urged her first to accompany them to concerts, then to theatres, and then to public balls.

When the young girl first came to Manton, all flushed with eagerness, to show him her finery, and ask him if she might not go with her dear mother and her new “papa,” he felt his heart sink unutterably within him. He reasoned with her long and earnestly, endeavoring to make her understand how impossible it was for a woman, who was to become his wife, to appear at any public assembly in the city of New York, with a person so notorious as this, whom she had thus, suddenly, learned to style “papa.”

But he soon found it to be all in vain; for, when he told her if she would only be content to wait a few weeks until his book had been published, that he would himself dedicate any amount of time she might require to visiting such places with her, she still urged that she did not see why it was improper for her to accompany the man whom her mother had married, to any public place—that her new dresses were so beautiful—that she wished to attend this magnificent concert.

Manton sighed heavily and only answered in a mournful voice to her repeated entreaties—

“Alas! poor child, my dream is nearly over! I see they have bought you with the tinsel of a fine dress and new ribbons!”

The child wept and fondled and caressed; but all her arts failed this time. His heart felt like lead within him; and he no longer had nerves with life enough to be played upon. But she went that night, nevertheless, and the great gulf had sunk impassably between them.

Manton was now again a madman. In the pride of his hopeful love he had built magnificent schemes, which his singular energies had rapidly placed upon the firm basis of realisation; it only required the calm exercise of his own will to consummate all and make his name illustrious. But he had not labored for himself—and she, for whom all had been achieved, was no longer his—she was gone—utterly gone! She had sold her birthright, and was no longer his. The world became dark, its honors and its ambitions as nothing. To recount the wild and desperate extravagance by which he dashed to earth all that he had achieved, as the heartless and hideous shallowness of the phantom soul he had been worshipping, became, with each day, more apparent, would be only painful to the reader, who can well understand what to expect from the recklessness of such a madman. Suffice it that the separation was complete. He last saw her, but for an instant, on her eighteenth birthnight, to commemorate which, the mother, in pursuance of her schemes, had assembled a large party at her house. This was to have been their wedding-night; and Manton, though long since hopelessly separated from her, could not resist the passionate desire to see once more, upon this night, to which he had so long looked forward with holy raptures, that face and form.

He rang the bell, and, by a curious instinct, she recognised the characteristic pull, and met him alone at the door. She was lovely, radiant even, as she had sometimes come to him in his wild imaginings. Dressed in pure white, with a wreath of flowering myrtle resting lightly on her brow. There was a look of exultation on her face which she had not been able to throw off, as she came forth from the admiration of the crowded room. Manton took her hand—

“Ah, child, you are very lovely now—you look just as I dreamed you would look on this night, when you were to have been my bride. My eyes are filled with blood, now! I cannot see you any more! Farewell! farewell!” and he rushed from the door into the dark street, while she, who had spoken no word, made no attempt to detain him, turned coldly back, and entered, with a beaming face, the scene of her new triumph.

CHAPTER XXVI. DESPAIR.

“The white feet of angels yet upon the hills.”

Months and months had passed, and yet this wretched man was staggering on, not this time drunk, literally, but, as though blinded by red blood oozing from his brain, which had been crushed by the weight of this blow. He was wandering vaguely hither and yon, distracting his brain in ineffectual chimeras, the very impossibilities of their success affording to him their greatest attraction. But gradually all this maddened struggle had been settling down into one sultry, close, inevitable conclusion of sullen self-destruction, which must result from the continued precipitation, upon conditions that promised death in one form or other. He went to Boston while the cholera was raging there at its worst. The pretence of the visit was some wild, distracting scheme that he had seized upon, and in which he was endeavoring to secure co-operation there.

But unfortunately for his mad purpose, since that very separation from daily contact with the girl Elna, which was working so sadly upon his imagination now, his attenuated and exhausted physique had rapidly recovered all its inherent vigor, and in animal health and strength he had suddenly become, by an inexplicable reaction, more prodigally abounding than ever for many years. So that fate seemed to have closed up to him any ordinary means of getting rid of himself, except the pistol and the dagger, from the use of which his manliness unconquerably revolted.

But by a strange process of self-delusion, he had managed to confound himself into the idea that the abject cowardice of the act of suicide might be avoided by a species of half unconscious indirection. For instance, cholera was rife in the city, and he well knew that long warm baths, by relaxing the system, would lay it more open to the attacks of any epidemical tendencies that might be prevalent; and accordingly, without ever venturing to explain to himself why, he continued, day after day, to take these long hot baths, and then to eat and drink, in the quietest possible way, everything that was specially to be avoided at such a time.

While this novel process was thus coolly progressing, he one morning met, by the merest accident, on State Street, a person whom he knew to have been long and intimately the friend of the lost Moione and her family. Manton eagerly asked him if he knew where she could now be found; for, strange enough, her calm image had lately intruded often into the darkened vistas of his thought, from whence he had supposed her banished long ago.

Her address was promptly given: it was in a remote and humble district of the city; and, although Manton already felt the seeds of the disease, which he had thus pertinaciously invited, rioting within him, yet he vowed to himself that he would at once seek her. His first visit failed; but the second found her, thin and wan, stretched on a lounge, awaiting she knew not whom.

With a short cry of sudden joy, as she recognised his features, she sprang to meet him, as of old, with a childish caress. Ah, why was it that he felt such sullen cold, and yet saw light, falling like star-beams upon the midnight of his soul, as his arms met this fond and childish clasp? He did not understand it—but we shall see!

The physical results, which he had so assiduously courted, could not be avoided. As he had walked about among his friends already for several days, with the premonitory symptoms of the fatal epidemic fully developed in his system, and as fully understood by himself, yet without the adoption, on his own part, of one single precautionary step, it was now sure to wreak its worst. Some, who could not help observing his ghastly appearance, thought him monstrously reckless, and others, hopelessly insane.

Regardless of every remonstrance, he still kept his feet, until, at length, the third evening found him leaving his hotel, in a hack, which he ordered to be driven to the home of Moione; and from which he had to be carried, by the driver, into the parlor, where he sank upon what he supposed to be the last couch upon which he should recline in life. A strange, indestructible feeling, that he must die beneath her eye, had urged him to this last and desperate exertion of the feeble vitality remaining in him. He had lain himself there to die; but why the strange purpose that she should minister to his passing breath? Was it only here that peace could be found for him?

Moione was alone, with a timid, young, and undeveloped sister. Their mother was accidentally away that night; having been detained by the illness of a friend, joined with the inclemency of the night, which set in in darkness and storm, in terror, in thunder, and in blaze. In the meantime, the paroxysms of cholera had commenced upon the enfeebled frame of Manton; and the black fear of the night outside only corresponded to the convulsed and writhing agonies which now tossed him to and fro, in helpless, but most mortal agonies. The thunder crashed, and the frail house shook, and the fierce pangs shot along his quivering nerves, as vividly as any blinding burst of lightning from without. The darkness which surrounded him had been penetrated by a calm, pure light, that dimmed not nor trembled before the blinding blast. A voice, the soft, clear, cheerful tones of which vibrated not to the quick rattling of thunder-crashes from without, told him of strength and hope, of peace and a calm future, in the life yet beyond him on the earth—that he could not die now, and should not!—until his will became electrified with a new impulsion, and was roused to cope with the fell demon that had thus, of his own invitation, possessed him; and, illuminated with a sudden and rapid intellection, he directed her how to baffle every paroxysm of cramp as it rose.

It is sufficient, he was thus sustained by light applications of cold-water, until the passing of the storm enabled her to summon to his aid a physician, whose skilful application of the same powerful remedy, even in the “blue-stage” of collapse into which Manton had now fallen, sufficed to relieve him from the disease, with the vital principle yet striving in his frame; though many days must elapse before those starry eyes, that held sleepless watch above him, could impart to his dimmed and incredulous consciousness sufficient strength to enable him to lift his hand, in vague and mournful wonder that he still possessed a being.

Ah, what an awakening was this! Deep, deep, beneath the realms of shadow—dark and deep—he had lain in long and dumb oblivion of consciousness. He knew not that he lived; it was a blank of rayless rest—a peace without sunshine. How profound! how unutterably still! What a contrast with the ceaseless, dreadful tension of the moiling chaos of past years, during which the passions had never slept, but, through his very dreams, had moaned in the weariness of strife. Alas! the rebellious heart, which struggleth in unyielding pride with life, refusing to concede to its conditions, how it must suffer? The world know little of the life-long horrors of that fight—the unidealizing world, the conservative, the compromising world. It little dreams what this self-immolating madman must endure—to what nights of sleepless thought, to what days of bleak and sullen isolation—walking apart from sympathies that are distrusted and scorned, yet yearned for—hating nothing, yet loving nothing which is warmed in the embrace of earth, because that earth may be accursed in his sight: its barren bosom has not yielded to his exacting soul the flowers and streams and echoing groves of the Utopia it has framed within him.

This is the unpardonable sin of pride! He dares to treat with contempt a world that will not turn to his inspired voice, and live as he has dreamed it might live. It is not to be wondered at, that the bolts fall thick and fast about him; but when we see his pale brow scathed and seamed with many a stunning stroke, while his hollow eyes yet glitter with a deathless and defiant fire—when we think of the mortal tension of his unsympathised life—oh, should we not remember, that this painful warrior has been battling, not for base lucre, not for selfish ends, but for the beautiful, as it has been revealed to him—the true, as he has felt it—for the ideal in him; and that, though wretched and suffering and wan, it is, after all,

It is of his suffering that his prowess comes—of his experiences, his themes—of his solitude, his reach and radiance of thought—of his strong will, his conquering flight at last. Do not think to pity him; may-be he is pitying you. Do not attempt to “save” him; it may be, it is you who will be damned in the effort. Only let him alone—do not persecute him. Let his pride pass—that is what sustains him; but for that, he would be like you, a mere “compromise.” Give him the same chance that you give to others around you, and, although you may not understand him now, only give him time, he will make you understand him; it may be, in wonder and in joy.

But this waking—but this waking of the weary man! Was it a new birth—a new resurrection—or, a mere waking from a light sleep, without a dream? The world upon which his shrinking vision now opened was filled with sunshine—he was blinded with the glory thereof. He closed his thin eyelids, and the splendor came through them, all rosy-hued and dimmed, that he could bear it; but there was a starlight for him too, and he could bear its calm effulgence better.

Yes, there were two stars, and they were tempered, that they might neither freeze nor slay his feeble life. When they came over him, as he lay in a half-trance of weakness, he could feel them through his eyelids and upon his heart; and they were warm, and he felt his heart warm, as buds to the unfolding spring. A dim-remembered music flowed into his soul, faint and dim, but oh, sweetly mellowed, that he might not die!

There was a rustling, too,—it was as of a tempered wind,—and a soft touch; it sent no thrill, but it was of healing—it sunk into his life in strength. A strange, balsamic tenderness, like a new sense of peace and joy, pervaded all his being—and a new growth set in apace, and a dim remembrance of ancient strength flitted into his thought.

Ah, ha! this wondrous presence, what was it? Moione, the ministering Moione! It was she! Ever there, sleeping and awake, she leaned over him. When he dreamed, he dreamed of a fair spirit, that hung upon the air above him, on viewless wings, and ever, with still eyes looking upon his, shedding their soft radiance deep into his soul. No wonder that life, in swift, light waves, came flooding in again; no wonder that the crushed and much-enduring man became as a child once more, and laughed out in the sunshine with a simple joy. The Present was sufficient unto him; he remembered not the Past now—the hideous, the spectre-haunted Past. What was it to him, when serene hope thus smiled? Ah, it was a happy time, that period of rapid convalescence. Yes, rapid, for his heart beat freely again. The natural sun could reach him; no lurid delusion, like miasmatic fog, hung over to intercept the rays.

They talked of the future, and peopled it with wild dreams, like children, until it all became as real to them as their own being.

There was a strange and mournful romance, connected with the origin of Moione’s family, that pointed at possible realizations in another country, through inheritance, that would be as gorgeous as the creations of Aladdin’s lamp. They talked of these prospects as of facts assumed, and of all the high-thoughted enterprises of the day which promised to be of true benefit to mankind, as already achieved, through their aid; and, with magnanimous simplicity, were already distributing hoarded and rusting millions to bless the world withal. These were gay day-dreams; but they were innocent, and, although they may never be realized, they gave them joy—inspired the yet feeble Manton with a future.

There could be but one result to all this. His health was rapidly restored; and when Manton married Moione, which he soon did, his soul now first found rest. The last that was spoken between them concerning Elna was in a conversation soon after, when she casually asked him—

“Did Elna show you my drawings, when you came back from the North?”

“Your drawings? your drawings? She showed me some, the delicacy and calm precision of which, I remember, vainly intoxicated me with delight. But why do you ask, dear?”

“Why, she carried off from me, about that time, certain studies of human anatomy, which I had elaborated much, and which I valued. As I have never been able to recover them, after repeatedly requesting their return, I thought, perhaps, she might have shown them to you, and then thrown them aside, through forgetfulness.”

“Ah! ha!” said Manton, “I remember now. They were assiduously paraded before me by her as her own. In spite of my recognition of the fact, that she did not possess originally, and must have very suddenly acquired, the constitutional steadiness and delicacy of touch necessary to accomplish drawings so fine and exquisitely accurate, I never dreamed of imposition, of course; and thus, with fatal credulity, set down to her credit, from what she had stolen of you, a new and infinitely significant attribute, which I had heretofore, specially and hopelessly, in spite of my passion, denied to her.”

“Let us forget it now,” was the quiet response. “She is only harmful to either of us, as you may remember morbidly the relations which have existed between you; the delusion is over.”

Such was the fact, indeed. Manton had at last found his artist-wife, and a true and wondrous artist did she prove indeed, realising his fond, high dream. Under this blessed and holy guardianship, he had returned fully to the realities of a true existence. He now saw, felt, and understood all that had occurred in that long shuddering dream; and this reality he had attained seemed only the more unutterably precious.

When the calm Moione revealed to him all the secret of the bleak and poverty-stricken desolation, in which he found her living, he was not at all astonished to find that her mother, who was a generous, trusting, noble-hearted zealot of Water-cure, had been another of the many victims of Boanerges Phospher, the “Spiritual Professor.” He had not only stripped her widowed isolation of all the appliances of household comfort, which years of devoted and self-sacrificing labor had enabled her to collect and throw together, in respectable defence between her helpless children and common want, but had absolutely turned her out of doors, without even spoon, or knife, or fork left her, of all this little property which she had thrown in rashly, perhaps, but earnestly, and with a noble dedication of her widow’s mite, towards furnishing a Water-cure establishment.

The cause was one that she revered for the good that she knew, practically, it might accomplish; and Boanerges, who was in this case, as usual, profoundly ignorant of what he had undertaken to do, had availed himself of her well-known experience and knowledge of Water-cure, just so long as sufficed to collect around him again a hirsute confederacy of faithful Amazons; the strength of which he thought would be sufficient to over-ride all opposition, and sustain him in the valorous assault upon helpless widowhood intended. He then openly claimed her property as his own, and the proud, uncomplaining mother of Moione was, of course, plundered of her all—victimised!

The sainted Boanerges soon met with a just retribution. The partner, to whom he had assigned, in trust, to stave off his creditors, all his claims upon this illustrious institution, and who, from the late chrysalis of a vulgar tailor, had suddenly been emancipated into an M. D. of Water-cure, at once sprung upon him his legal rights, under the transfer, and he was reduced again to beggary.

Some method wrested from his puerile studies of Swedenborg, has no doubt, by this time, and upon some other tack, suggested to the “Spiritual Professor” just enough of wisdom to enable him to persevere in “saving” the elderly New-Lights of the land.

We wish Boanerges happiness in his new enterprises; for, certainly, his versatility at least commands respect.

CHAPTER XXVII. THE “SECRET CONCLAVE.”

The Editor finds that here the connected narrative of Etherial Softdown breaks off. Though there are many fragmentary notes, which he found in Yieger’s Cabinet, which bear a clear, yet somewhat disconnected relation, to the past and future of the scenes and actors already described; these he has thought proper to collate, and throw together into something as nearly approaching order as their desultory character will permit.

This man Yieger seems to have been an enthusiast of a very unusual stamp. He has, however, left so little concerning himself, that we can only say, he appears to have made it his business to follow up, in a quiet and unsuspected way, a certain series of investigations, the purport and tendency of which was to unveil a class of crimes, which, from being secret, were enabled to work and worm their way nearest to the core of the social state.

Thus, in addition to the monstrous and unimagined vices described by him in the preceding chapters, he seems to have discovered secret combinations, the possibilities of which have probably never entered before into human brains, but the results of which were as prodigious as the causes were unsuspected. These were composed of no mystic demagogues of humanitarianism, who sheltered mere partisan and personal designs, under the broad curtain of secret rituals symbolising philanthropic aims; no bald enthusiasts, who softly sunk their individualities in an Order, and sold their god-like birthrights of universal benevolence, of world-wide charity, for the golden shackles of a pretentious benevolence, the selfish code of which was, mutual protection first, and—nobody else afterwards!

These were wise, bold, hardened men—hardened in the rough contests by the highways of life—who had seen all, felt all, and known all, that life could give or take. They were prepared for any of its extremes, but had outlived its sympathies. They were incarnations of pure intellection; the accomplishment of the object was their conscience—they despised allegories, and they trampled upon symbols. Nothing was mysterious to them, but an undigested purpose. For them there was no law but that might be eluded—no sanctities, but as they might be used—no religion but necessity, which was, to them, achievement!

When such men organised, they merely came together,—ten or a dozen of them,—they required no oaths, no pledges—they knew each other! “We hold such and such opinions upon one point only; and that one point is, mutual interest, and under that, 1st, that we can govern this nation; 2d, that to govern it, we must subvert its institutions; and, 3d, subvert them we will! It is our interest; this is our only bond. Capital must have expansion. This hybrid republicanism saps the power of our great agent by its obstinate competition. We must demoralise the republic. We must make public virtue a by-word and a mockery, and private infamy to be honor. Beginning with the people, through our agents, we shall corrupt the State.

“We must pamper superstition, and pension energetic fanaticism—as on ‘Change we degrade commercial honor, and make ‘success’ the idol. We may fairly and reasonably calculate, that within a succeeding generation, even our theoretical schemes of republican subversion may be accomplished, and upon its ruins be erected that noble Oligarchy of caste and wealth for which we all conspire, as affording the only true protection to capital.

“Beside these general views, we may in a thousand other ways apply our combined capital to immediate advantage. We may buy up, through our agents, claims upon litigated estates, upon confiscated bonds, mortgages upon embarrassed property, land-claims, Government contracts, that have fallen into weak hands, and all those floating operations, constantly within hail, in which ready-money is eagerly grasped as the equivalent for enormous prospective gains.

“In addition, through our monopoly of the manufacturing interest, by a rigorous and impartial system of discipline, we shall soon be able to fill the masses of operators and producers with such distrust of each other, and fear of us, as to disintegrate their radical combinations, and bring them to our feet. Governing on ‘Change, we rule in politics; governing in politics, we are the despots in trade; ruling in trade, we subjugate production; production conquered, we domineer over labor. This is the common-sense view of our interests—of the interests of capital, which we represent. In the promotion of this object, we appoint and pension our secret agents, who are everywhere on the lookout for our interests. We arrange correspondence, in cipher, throughout the civilized world; we pension our editors and our reporters; we bribe our legislators, and, last of all, we establish and pay our secret police, local, and travelling, whose business it is, not alone to report to us the conduct of agents already employed, but to find and report to us others, who may be useful in such capacity.

“We punish treachery by death!”

Such is a partial schedule of the terms of one of these terrible confederacies, as furnished in a detached note by Yieger, which held its secret sessions in New York city. He seems to have obtained a sight of some of their records, but by what means, the most daring could only conjecture. He appears to have regarded this particular organisation as the most formidable of all, and to have traced many of its ramifications, in their covert results, with a singularly dogged tenacity.

Among the extraordinary papers contained in the Cabinet he has left, are to be found short notes, containing what are clearly reports and proceedings of this formidable conclave. Its mysterious signature, Regulus, seems to have been known throughout the world; and even he, though clearly a fierce and relentless foe, never writes it, but with the involuntary concession of respect, which large, clear letters, underscored, would seem to convey.

Having now presented such an outline of the character and designs of this secret conclave, as the means of information furnished him have enabled him to do, the Editor will proceed with the promised extracts from its proceedings, such as relate to those in regard to whom the reader may be supposed to have some curiosity.

First, we have here

CHAPTER XXVIII. REPORTS OF THE “SECRET CONCLAVE.”

We continue our reports of the police of the “Conclave,” so far as we find them relating to Etherial Softdown and her friends.

This report says of Eusedora Polypheme:—“This woman is between thirty and thirty-five years of age. She is of New England birth, and commenced her education at what we consider the female high-schools of demoralisation on the Continent—’the factories.’

“These establishments are especially patronised by the ‘Council of Disorganisation,’ who consider them of vast efficiency, on account of the well-understood certainty with which the results we aim at are achieved, under this system. So great is this certainty, indeed, that we may always safely calculate that eight-tenths of the females who seek employment in them come forth, if they ever do alive, inoculated with just such principles and habits as we desire to have spread among the rural population to which the majority of them return. Corrupted themselves, they act as admirable mediums and conductors of corruption to the class from whom they went forth innocent, and which receives them again without suspicion.

“Besides the spinal diseases, affections of the lungs, twisted bodies, and deformed limbs, which the greater number of these girls take home with them, all the foolish romanticism of girlhood has been thoroughly crushed out of them, by the morale which we have promoted in these institutions, and their minds and tastes have become even more vitiated than their bodies.

“It will thus be seen that this factory system is our chef-d’œuvre of demoralisation of the simple agricultural classes.

“But in yet another aspect the results, it will be perceived, are still more brilliant. We soon found the necessity of creating a public sentiment in favor of our system, which would put a stop to officious investigation and interference with our plans. We accordingly established a defensive literature, in the shape of dainty serials, announced as being edited by the factory-girls themselves. These were filled with sentimental effusions, written principally to order, outside the factories, the general burden of which consisted in poetico-rural pictures of the joys brought home by the patient and industrious factory-girl, to some hipshotten father or bedridden grand-papa. These little incidents were studiously invested with all that charming unexpectedness and die-away bathos, which is so attractive to girlish imaginations, and so satisfactory to elder philanthropists. Then there was still another class of romances, cultivated with yet more fervid unction. These consisted in stories of a lovely young girl, who, all for ‘love of independence,’ gave up a home of luxury, to come to the factories and make a living for herself, independent of her natural guardians. How this stout-hearted young lady one day attracted, by her beauty, the attention of a handsome young gentleman of romantic appearance, who visited the mills along with a party of other strangers. How the romantic young gentleman was very much struck, while the strong-minded Angelina was rendered nervous; how the heart-stricken, after many trials, succeeded in moving upon the heart of the ‘sleepless gryphon’ of morality with whom Angelina boarded, to permit him to have an interview—at least in said gryphon’s presence; how that then and there the young gentleman, in the most ‘proper’ way declared himself, sought Angelina’s hand, and was accepted; and how he turned out to be the son of a Southern nabob, and Angelina, from a poor factory-girl, became one of the foremost ladies of the land; and how, though, she never forgot her dear and happy companions of the factory. This same susceptible young Southerner is the standing hero of four-fifths of these girls, and, as he does not come every year to make them all rich, we may congratulate ourselves upon the general morals consequent upon such reasonable expectations.

“Out of one or two thousand girls, there are usually a few who exhibit some sprightliness. In the ratio of the ductility of their characters, are they sure to be selected, and brought forward by our managers; and in proportion as they exhibit their availability, are they readily promoted to editorships. They receive private salaries, and are released from any other than nominal participation in the routine of factory labor. From this distinguished caste of young ladies of the factory, Eusedora Polypheme originated.

“We expect gratitude from all such favored parties; and Eusedora proved the most grateful of the grateful. She as readily took to the shallow limpidity of Mr. Little, alias Tommy Moore, as ever did callow cygnet to the drains of a Holland flat.

“She possessed, indeed, a marvellous gift of sentiment—a sacchariferous faculty, that would have caused Cerberus himself to have licked his jagged lips. She was accordingly encouraged to cultivate transcendental tendencies, exchanged with the Dial, and, after a few months’ exercise, she spoke like a veritable Pythoness.

“Considering that she had now made herself sufficiently familiar with

to make her of value to us abroad, we placed her on our pension-list, and turned her loose upon society.

“This step the Committee have never had cause to regret. She leaped upon the social stage, a specimen of what the factory system could produce—achieved the lioness at once, and had the honour of being hailed in all circles, a phenomenon, a lusus naturæ—the world was undecided which, considering she was nothing but a factory-girl. They must be eminent institutions surely, since they could turn out young ladies who talked so ‘divinely,’ possessed ‘such’ command of language, and were such favorites with the gentlemen!

“There was a society, too, not very far off from this, into which she had forced her way, and which haughtily called itself ‘the best,’ that held its court in houses with dingy outsides, that lined the back-alleys; but, amidst garish and sickening splendors within, the ‘highly intellectual’ character of the hollow-eyed and painted queens who presided there, was equally owing to the educations they had received at the same ‘eminent’ institutions—only they had had more soul and less cunning than Eusedora Polypheme, and would not, therefore, have been so available to the Committee.

“When a class is already sunk as low as it can sink, it is not our policy to go aside to interfere with them, for they are sure to fecundate in degradation fast enough; our sole aim is to drag the grades above down to their level, which we consider a safe one.

“There is nothing so dangerous to the designs of the Committee of Disorganisation, as soul—what the world calls heart. To an executive power, these are always considered intrusive and distasteful superfluities; and it was because Eusedora has managed, by some surprisingly efficient process, to rid herself of both, that she is to be so trusted.

“Besides parading her accomplishments everywhere, as merely a fair average of the education of a factory-girl, she very soon mapped out for herself a very peculiar field for operations. She became the leader of a new school of Platonic Sentimentalism, in New England. This was an achievement—a decided triumph. She soon gathered around her a host of feminine disciples—principally young and unmarried, with premature wrinkles on their brows.

“After years of close observation of the operations of this sect, its police would beg to express to the Committee their unqualified admiration of the results obtained. The increase of the number of suicides has been gratifying. The number of young men and girls rendered worthless for life; the number of elderly men plundered and cajoled out of their means and driven into dotage, is only equalled by the surprising rapidity with which the fanaticism has spread; indeed, it would seem as if the first step towards all the popular forms of fanaticism, is through Platonic Sentimentalism.

“It seems, that it is through the teachings of this school, of which Eusedora Polypheme is now the acknowledged priestess, that the hollowness and unsatisfactory character of all our natural sentiments and passions is first perceived. This illumination achieved, it becomes necessary that their place be supplied by what the world would call morbid sentimentality and unnatural passions, but which Eusedora Polypheme aptly terms, ‘spherical illuminations’ and ‘divine ecstacies.’ But since we know, as well as Eusedora, that flesh is flesh, and blood is blood, we can therefore calculate, with great precision, whither such mystifications must lead.

“Hardened and sharpened in mind and temper, by a graduation in this school, its disciples pass, not from it, but through it, into other, and, to us, not less important fields of activity. Hence come the fiercest and most unscrupulous partisans of Infidelity, Abolitionism, and Woman’s Rights. Having learned both theoretically and practically to disbelieve in themselves, by the most natural transition in the world, they become infidel of all other truths, and scorn all other sacrednesses alike. They are then prepared to be of use to us in a variety of ways. The spirit of antagonism, the love of strife and notoriety, have assumed in them the sense of duty, justice, and modesty; a spiritual diablerie has possessed itself of the emasculated remains of womanhood left in them. Only give them a chance for martyrdom—only give them an excuse for the cry of persecution, and upon whatever theme or theory, ology or ism, that may promise to afford them such healthful and natural excitements, they will at once seize, and, hugging the dear abstraction to their bosoms, do battle for the same, with a cunning and unscrupulous ferocity that has no parallel.

“But for their thorough training under the teaching of Eusedora Polypheme, they might, perhaps, be sometimes disposed to pause, and inquire if there might not be two sides to every question; whether they might not have made some slight mistake in crying out ‘Eureka’ so soon. But, fortunately, they are never troubled with this weakness; and, as their capacity for mischief is not, therefore, liable to be impaired by any maudlin conscientiousness, or feeble questioning of their own infallibility, or that of their teachers, they are from the beginning as valuable as trained veterans.

“The jargon of the sect, which they acquire with wonderful facility, constitutes their logic; and their efficiency in the use of this weapon, consists in the savage, waspish, and persevering iteration of its phrases, at all times and on all occasions.

“It is astonishing, the ease with which the majority of mankind can be bullied, especially from within the bulwark of petticoats. But when at once the terrible aspect is hid behind the mask of Circe, as the followers of Polypheme know so well to accomplish, the power becomes resistless indeed.

“The principal weapons of offence used by the followers of Polypheme, in all their subsequent metamorphoses, are, first and foremost, what is technically termed the ‘electrical eye.’ This is the most brilliant and effective of their weapons. It is not by any means necessary that the spiritual Amazon should have been gifted by Nature, in this respect; for the arts of Polypheme were clearly inspired from

“After long practice, the power is acquired of dilating or straining the eyes wide open, and suffusing them at the same time. The moisture gives them a marvellous effect of electrical splendor. As this habitual tension can only be sustained for a few seconds at a time, Polypheme happily offsets it by the modest habit of dropping her eyes towards the floor, or a flower or book in her hand; then up go the

‘Downy windows close,’

and out leaps another humid flash, to electrify her audience.

“Great energy and activity of gesticulation is recommended, in order to distract attention, as much as possible, from the fact, that these cruelly-worked eyes sometimes run over with the ‘salt-rheum’—of any thing but ‘grief.’ A loud voice, too, is especially recommended—as, without it, somebody else might be heard in the room.

“Secondly, a thorough knowledge of the minor dramatics of emphasis is also suggested. Sneers should be thoroughly practised before the glass, as well as interjections, exclamations, shrieks of wonder and surprise. The grimaces of rage, worked up with great ferocity, without the slightest regard to the poor victim. Scorn should be lofty and incredibly superb; archness, irresistible, taking care not to pucker the wrinkles in the brow too much; sentiment, nothing short of the white rolling-up of two huge spheres in spasm. Childlike simplicity requires great practice in the dancing-room; it is very effective, when artistically done. Favorite poets—Petrarch, Shelley, Mrs. Elizabeth Brownson, and her husband, ‘poor Keats.’ Gods—Tom Moore, Byron, and Author of Festus. High-priest of the Arcana—Emerson. Priestess—Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Apocalypse—The Dial, &c., &c.

“Travelling should be studied as an art. The many correspondences held in different portions of the country should be made the dutiful occasion of sentimental visits, which, as they may be protracted for a month or two, will, no doubt, result in the effectual ‘saving’ of some half-dozen, at the very least, of both sexes. Neither scrip nor money need be provided for the journey; for is not the laborer worthy of his hire? Besides, who ever heard of a lioness carrying a purse? The world owes all its benefactors a living.

“It is necessary to be an authoress—abundantly prolific and intensely literary: to write dashing, slashing, graceful letters, in which your own superb horsewomanship shall always figure most prominently; next, your own disinterestedness; next, your own amiability, and dangerous powers of attraction; and, last, the dashing, slashing, graceful character of your own wit; your romantic love-affairs, by brook and meadow, on highway and in byway, by ocean-side or in greenwood.

“These, with a lofty scorn of the commonplace, a darling love of the arts—that is, you must know the names of the pictures, and what they are all about, but most particularly the names of the painters. And if somebody says the picture is a good one, be on terms of intimacy with the painter, or at least in close correspondence with him; and be sure he is a ‘noble spirit,’ a ‘divine creature,’ one of the ‘elect of genius,’ whose ‘eyes have been unsealed to the touch of the Promethean fire.’

“Must know French, Italian, German, and Spanish phrases, out of the Pronouncing Dictionary. Quote these occasionally, but very guardedly, when you are certain there are no apeish foreigners or troublesome old fogy scholars present.

“Thus panoplied, the novitiate will be, in every sense, the equal of Eusedora Polypheme herself, and entitled to go upon the pension-list of the Committee. Indeed, we are booking them rapidly, and sending out missionaries in every direction.

“The disciples of this school are among the chief favorites of the ‘Committee of Disorganisation.’”

CHAPTER XXIX. REPORTS CONTINUED—REGINA STRAIGHTBACK

CHAPTER XXX. HUMILITY BAREBONES STOUT.

The report goes on to say—

“But what the circumscribed wits of Etherial Softdown, the divine languishments of Eusedora Polypheme, the defiant unscrupulousness of Regina Straightback, failed to accomplish, namely, the convulsing of all Christendom, by one dexterous jugglery of cant, was left to be achieved by our at present most honored agent, Humility Barebones Stout.

“It will be seen, by her genealogical tree, as indicated in her middle name, that she came, as it were, prepared, through a long table of evangelical descent, for the work before her. Nothing could be conceived more apropos: the blood of the Covenanters in the veins of the modern ‘New-Light.’ Sharpened in its passage through New England Puritanism, it has now become as professionally capable of splitting hairs, as it formerly was of splitting heads. And then there was a time-honored nasal, in which it

‘Poured its dolors forth;’

the preservation of the exact intonations of which does marvellous credit to the antiquarian proclivities of this distinguished line. Then there is a characteristic command of doggerel snatches, confessedly without rhythm, because they were inspired,—for which the Fathers Barebones and Poundtext were peculiarly noted in their day,—which seems to have been transmitted, without the slightest deterioration of manner or emphasis. And, in addition, there was an ecstaticism of textology, to which these revered fathers uniformly resigned themselves, about the time they had reached their ‘sixteenthlies,’ the facilities of which seem to have been more than improved upon by their modern representative. In a word, no reach of nasal effect,

‘From coughing trombone down to hoarsened pipe’—

no fecundant sprightliness of doggerel—no illuminated aptitude of text, betwixt Daniel in the lion’s den, and Death on the pale horse—no syllogistic or aphoristic touch of bedridden theology that has been in vogue since the time of Luther, but is at the tongue’s end of this Cyclopean daughter of the ‘Fathers of the Covenant.’

“Admirable! admirable! What was to prevent Humility Barebones Stout from using these rightfully-derived and extraordinary gifts for the good of humanity? Not that she had thought anything more philosophically about it, than that the good of humanity ought to consist with the claims of her inherited renown, her caste, and her prescriptive rights. Not that she cared particularly who suffered; but being of a hysterical and exacting temperament, she had come to the conclusion that her own, the white race, had conspired against her—that they were jealous of her—would never yield to her ancestral claims a fair precedence.

“Her pride would not permit her to cry persecution for herself and in her own name; for she had been, lo! these many days! a tireless scribbler and notoriety-seeker, in appeals to her own race, through the legitimate channels of current literature, on the simple basis of her own individual experiences and the inspirations proper to her sex and grade. These having failed to attract any attention beyond the day’s notoriety, and from the additional fact of the most labored of them having been consigned to oblivion through the pages of silly annuals, she turned herself about in wrath, to avenge her wrongs. Her heart was filled with bitterness.

“She had known Etherial Softdown, with jealous unction; she had communed with Eusedora Polypheme, in hopeless emulation of spirit; she had shrunk before the lioness moods of the triumphing Regina Straightback. She felt that she was displaced—that she had been left behind. She saw that they were all too proud, or too far advanced, to condescend to use the rusty weapons which had fallen to her by inheritance; that they had set their feet above her, on the platform of progress; that they at least called the semblances of science and philosophy, through their terminalogies, to aid them, while they left cant to their menials.

“She felt that she was as bold as they. In what, then, consisted her weakness? Could the fault be in her ‘stars,’ that she was still an ‘underling’? ‘Ha! ha! ha! Cant! cant! cant!’ and she laughed out, with the exultation of Softdown’s first ‘Eureka!’ ’Cant! cant! I have it! It descended to me from Barebones, my illustrious ancestor. Insolent beldames! I will show them! They affect to quote the pure strains of philosophy—

“To imitate the graces of the gods.”

We shall see! we shall see! I hate my own race; it has not appreciated me. What care I for white-slavery and its abuses—for fairness, for truth? Cant! cant! By its magic, I shall

“Show as a snowy dove trooping with crows.”

Eureka! Eureka!’

Etherial! ah, Etherial! the race hath not been to the swift, nor the battle to the strong—thou hast been overshadowed!

THE END.

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