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10399	----	The Story of Louis Riel The Rebel Chief by Joseph Edmond Collins Toronto, 1885 CHAPTER I. Along the banks of the Red River, over those fruitful plains brightened with wild flowers in summer, and swept with fierce storms in the winter-time, is written the life story of Louis Riel. Chance was not blind when she gave as a field to this man's ambition the plains whereon vengeful Chippewas and ferocious Sioux had waged their battles for so many centuries; a country dyed so often with blood that at last Red River came to be its name. But while our task is to present the career of this apostle of insurrection and unrest; stirred as we may be to feelings of horror for the misery, the tumult, the terror and the blood of which he has been the author, we must not neglect to do him, even him, the justice which is his right. He is not, as so many suppose, a half-breed, moved by the vengeful, irresponsible, savage blood in his veins. Mr. Edward Jack, [Footnote: I cannot make out what Mr. Jack's views are respecting Riel. When I asked him, he simply turned his face toward the sky and made some remark about the weather, I know that he has strong French proclivities, though the blood of a Scottish bailie is in his veins.] of New Brunswick, who is well informed on all Canadian matters, hands me some passages which he has translated from M. Tasse's book on Canadians in the North West; and from these I learn that Riel's father, whose name also was Louis, was born at the island of La Crosse, in the North-West Territories. This parent was the son of Jean Baptiste Riel, who was a French Canadian and a native of Berthier (_en haut_). His mother, that is the rebel's grandmother, was a Franco-Montagnaise Metis. From this it will be seen that instead of being a "half breed," Louis Riel is only one-eighth Indian, or is, if we might use the phrase employed in describing a mixture of Ethiopian and Caucasian blood, an Octoroon. Nay, more than this, we have it shown that our rebel can lay claim to no small share of respectability, as that word goes. During the summer of 1822, Riel's father, then in his fifth year, was brought to Canada by his parents, who caused the ceremony of baptism to be performed with much show at Berthier. In 1838 M. Riel _pere_ entered the service of the Hudson Bay Company, and left Lower Canada, where he had been attending school, for the North-West. He was stationed at Rainy Lake, but did not care for his occupation. He returned, therefore, to civilization and entered as a novice in the community of the Oblat Fathers, where he remained for two years. There was a strong yearning for the free, wild life of the boundless prairies in this man, and Red River, with its herds of roaming buffalo, its myriads of duck, and geese and prairie hens, began to beckon him home again. He followed his impulse and departed; joining the Metis hunters in their great biennial campaigns against the herds, over the rolling prairie. Many a buffalo fell upon the plain with Louis Riel's arrow quivering in his flank; many a feast was held around the giant pot at which no hunter received honours so marked as stolid male, and olive-skinned, bright-eyed, supple female, accorded him. Surfeited for the time of the luxury of the limitless plain, Riel took rest; and then a girl with the lustrous eyes of Normandy began to smile upon him, and to besiege his heart with all her mysterious force of coquetry. He was not proof; and the hunter soon lay entangled in the meshes of the brown girl of the plains. In the autumn of 1843 he married her. Her name was Julie de Lagimodiere, a daughter of Jean Baptiste de Lagimodiere. Louis _pere_ was now engaged as a carder of wool; and having much ability in contrivance he constructed a little model of a carding mill which, with much enthusiasm, he exhibited to some officers of the Hudson Bay Company. But the Company, though having a great body, possessed no soul, and the disappointed inventor returned to his waiting wife with sorrow in his eyes. He next betook himself to the cultivation of a farm upon the banks of the little Seine; and his good, patient wife, when the autumn came, toiled with him all day, with her sickle among the sheaves. Tilling the soil proved too laborious, and he determined to erect a grist mill; but the stream that ran through the clayey channel of the _Seine petite_ was too feeble to turn the ponderous wheels. So he was obliged to move twelve miles to the east, where flowed another small stream bearing the aesthetic name "Grease River." This was not large enough either for his purposes, so with stupendous enterprise he cut a canal nine miles long, and through it decoyed the waters of the little Seine into the arms of the "Greasy" paramour. At this mill was ground the grain that grew for many a mile around; and in a little while Louis Riel became known as the most enterprising and important settler in Red River. But he was not through all his career a man of peace. The most deadly feud had grown up through many long years between the Hudson Bay Company and the Metis settled upon their territory; and it is only bald justice to say that the, reprisals of the half-breeds, the revolts, the hatred of everything in official shape, were not altogether undeserved. Louis Riel was at the head of many a jarring discord. How such an unfortunate condition grew we shall see later on, and we may also be able to determine if there are any shoulders upon which we can lay blame for the murder and misery that since have blighted one of the fairest portions of Canada. Louis Riel the elder was in due time blessed with a son, the same about whom it is our painful duty to write this little book. Estimating at its fullest the value of education, the father was keenly anxious for an opportunity to send _Louis fils_ to a school; but fortune had not been liberal with him in later years, though the sweat was constantly upon his brow, and his good wife's fingers were never still. This son had unusual precocity, and strangers who looked upon him used to say that a great fire slumbered in his eye. He was bright, quick and piquant; and it is said that it was impossible to know the lad and not be pleased with his person and manners. One important eye had observed him many a time; and this was the great ecclesiastical dignitary of Red River, Monseigneur Tache. He conceived a strong affection for the lad and resolved to secure for him a sound education. His own purse was limited, but there was a lady whom he knew upon whose bounty he could count. I give the following extract, which I translate from M. Tasse's book, and I write it in italics that it may be the more clearly impressed upon the reader's mind when he comes to peruse the first story of blood which shall be related: _The father's resources did not permit him to undertake the expense of this education, but His Grace Archbishop Tache having been struck with the intellectual precocity of Louis, found a generous protector of proverbial munificence for him in the person of Madame Masson, of Terrebonne._ In later years it was reserved to the same bishop to go out as a mediator between Government and a band of rebels which had at its head a man whose hands were reddened with the blood of a settler. This rebel and murderer was the same lad upon whom the bishop had lavished his affection and his interest. Louis, the elder, was travelling upon the plain, when he met his son, bound for the civilized East, to enter upon his studies. He had pride in the lad, and said to his companions that one day he knew he would have occasion to glory in him. They said good-bye, the father seasoning the parting with wholesome words of advice, the son with filial submission receiving them, and storing them away in his heart. This was their last parting, and their last speaking. Before the son had been long at his studies he learned that his father was dead. His nature was deeply affectionate, and the painful intelligence overwhelmed him for many days. At school he was not distinguished for brilliancy, but his tutors observed that he had solid parts, and much intellectual subtlety. He was not a great favourite among his class-mates generally, because his manners were shy and reserved, and he shrank from, rather than courted, the popularity and leadership which are the darling aims of so many lads in their school-days. Yet he had many friends who were warmly attached to him; and to these he returned an equal affection. One of his comrades was stricken down with a loathsome and fatal malady, and all his comrades fled in fear away from his presence. But Louis Riel, the "half-breed," as the boys knew him, bravely went to the couch of his stricken friend, nursing, and bestowing all his attention and affection upon him, and offering consoling words. It is related that when the last moments came, the sufferer arose, and flinging his arms around Louis' neck, poured out his thanks and besought heaven to reward him. Then he fell backwards and died. Frequently young Riel's school-mates would ask him, "What do you intend doing when you leave school? Will you stay here, or do you go out again into the wilderness among the savages?" His eye would lighten with indignation at hearing the word "savages" applied to his people. "I will go out to the Red River," he would reply, to follow in the footsteps of my father. He has been a benefactor of our people, and I shall seek to be their benefactor too. When I tire of work, I can take my gun and go out for herds upon the plains with our people, whom you call "savages." I know not what you mean when you say "savages." We speak French as you do; our hearts are as kind, as noble, and as true as yours. When one of our people is in affliction the others give him sympathy and help. We are bound together by strong ties of fraternity; there is no jealousy among us, no tyranny of caste, but we all live in peace and love as the sisters and brothers in one great household. My eye deceives me if like this live you. You are divided into envious, brawling factions, each one of which tries to injure, and blight the reputation of the other. If one of you fall upon evil times he is left without the sympathy and succour of the others. In politics and in social grades you are divided, and in every respect you are such that I should mourn the day when our peaceable, simple, contented people on the banks of the Red River should in any respect choose your civilization for their model. He often spoke of a burning desire which he had to be a political as well as a social leader in the Colony of Red River. He frequently, likewise, muttered dark threats against the overbearing policy and dark injustice of "The Great Monopoly," as he used to characterize the Hudson Bay Company. Occasionally he would burst out into passionate words like these: "They treat us as they would blood thirsty savages upon the plains. They spurn us with their feet as dogs, and then they spit upon us. They mock at our customs, they regard with contempt that which to us is sacred and above price. They are not even deterred by the virtue of our women. Now witness, you God who made all men, the white man and the savage, I will, if the propitious day ever come, strike in vengeance, and my blow will be with an iron hand, whose one smiting shall wipe out all the injustice and the dishonour." Filled with these sentiments, when his school days came to an end, he packed his portmanteaus and took his way by stage and boat for the region that not many years hence was to ring and shudder with his name. CHAPTER II. Long before the vision of a confederation of the British Provinces entered into the brain of any man, Lord Selkirk, coming to the wilds of North America, found a tract of country fertile in soil, and fair to look upon. He arrived in this unknown wilderness when it was summer, and all the prairie extending over illimitable stretches till it was lost in the tranquil horizon, was burning with the blooms of a hundred varieties of flowers. Here the "tiger rose," like some savage queen of beauty, rose to his knees and breathed her sultry balm in his face. Aloof stood the shy wild rose, shedding its scent with delicate reserve; but the wild pea, and the convolvulus, and the augur flower, and the insipid daisy, ran riot through all the grass land, and surfeited his nostrils with their sweets. Here and there upon the mellow level stood a clump of poplars or white oaks, prim, like virgins without suitors, with their robes drawn close about them; but when over the unmeasured plain the wind blew, they bowed their heads: as if saluting the stranger who came to found a colony in the wilderness of which they were sentinels. Here too, in the hush, for the first time, the planter's ear heard a far-off, nigh indistinct, sound of galloping thunder. He knew not what it meant, and his followers surmised that it might be the tumult of some distant waterfall, borne hither now because a storm was at hand, and the denser air was a better carrier of the sound. And while they remained wondering what it could be, for the thunder was ever becoming louder, and, "Nearer clearer, deadlier than before" Lo! out of the west came what seemed as a dim shadow moving across the plain. With bated breath they watched the dark mass moving along like some destroying tempest with ten thousand devils at its core. Chained to the ground with a terrible awe they stood fast for many minutes till at last in the dim light, for the gloaming had come upon the plains, they see eye-balls that blaze like fire, heads crested with rugged, uncouth horns and shaggy manes; and then snouts thrust down, flaring nostrils, and rearing tails. My God, a buffalo herd, and we'll be trampled to death," almost shrieked one of the Earl's followers. "Peace! keep cool! Up, up instantly into these trees!" and the word was obeyed as if each man was an instrument of the leader's will. Beyond, in the south-east, a full moon, luscious seeming as some ripened, mellow fruit, was rising, and the yellow light was all over the plain. Then the tremendous mass, headed by maddened bulls, with blazing eyes and foaming nostrils, drove onward toward the south, like an unchained hurricane. Some of the terrified beasts ran against the trees, crushing horns and skull, and fell prone upon the plain, to be trampled into jelly by the hundreds of thousands in the rear. The tree upon which the earl had taken refuge received many a shock from a crazed bull; and it seemed to the party from the tree-branches as if all the face of the plains was being hurled toward the south in a condition of the wildest turmoil. Hell itself let loose could present no such spectacle as this myriad mass of brute life sweeping over the lonely plain under the wan, elfin light of the new-risen moon. Clouds of steam, wreathing itself into spectral shapes of sullen aspect, rose from the dusky, writhing mass, and the flaming of more than ten thousand eyeballs in the gloom presented a picture more terrible than ever came into the imagination of the writer of the Inferno. The spectacle, as observed by those some twenty feet from the ground, might be likened somewhat to a turbulent sea when a sturdy tide sets against the storm, and the mad waves tumble hither and thither, foiled, and impelled, yet for all the confusion and obstruction moving in one direction with a sweep and a force that no power could chain. Circling among and around the strange, dusk clouds of steam that went up from the herd were scores of turkey buzzards, their obscene heads bent downward, their sodden eyes gleaming with expectancy. Well they knew that many a gorgeous feast awaited them wherever boulder, tree, or swamp lay in the path of the mighty herd. At last the face of the prairie had ceased its surging; no lurid eyeball-light gleamed out of the dusk; and the tempest of cattle had passed the _voyageurs_ and went rolling out into the unbounded stretches of the dim, yellow plain. The morrow's sun revealed a strange spectacle. The great amplitude of rich, green grasses, warmed and beautified by the petals of flowers was as a ploughed field. The herbage had been literally crushed into mire, and this the innumerable hoofs had churned up with the soft, rich, dark soil of the prairie. The leguminous odours from decaying clover, and rank, matted masses of wild pease, the feverish exhalations of the tiger-lily, and of the rich blooded "buffalo lilac," together with the dank, earthy smell from the broken sod, were disagreeable and oppressive. Lord Selkirk's heart sank within him at seeing the ruin. "I fear me," he said, "to plant a colony here. A herd of these beasts coming upon a settlement would be worse than ten thousand spears." But some of his guides had before seen the impetuous rushing of the herds, and they assured him that this might not occur again in this portion of the prairie for a quarter of a century to come. "At any rate," they persisted, "the buffalo keeps away from regions that send up chimney-smoke. The chief regret by-and-by will be that the herds will not come near enough to us." And the Earl was reassured and proceeded with the steps preliminary to founding the colony. It need not be said that the place we have been describing was the prairie on the banks of the Red River. In a little while ships bearing numbers of sturdy Scotchmen began to cross the sea bound for this famous colony, where the land was ready for the plough, and mighty herds of wild cattle grazed knee-deep among gorgeous flowers and sweet grasses. They brought few white women with them, the larger number being young men who had bade their "Heeland" lassies good-bye with warm kisses, promising to come back for them when they had built homesteads for themselves in the far away wilds of the West. But when Lord Selkirk planted here his sturdy Scotchmen, wild beasts and game were not the only inhabitants of the plains. The Crees, a well-built, active, war-loving race, had from ages long forgotten roamed over these interminable meadows, fishing in the streams, and hunting buffalo. Here and there was to be found one of their "towns," a straggling congregation of tents made of the skins of the buffalo. Beautiful, dark-skinned girls, in bare brown, little feet, sat through the cool of evening in the summer days sewing beads upon the moccasins of their lovers, while the wrinkled dame limped about, forever quarrelling with the dogs, performing the household duties. But the Crees liked not the encroachment upon their territories by these foreign men with pale faces; and they held loud pow-wows, and brandished spears, and swept their knives about their heads till their sheen gleamed many miles over the prairie. Then preparing their paint they set out to learn from the pale-faced chief what was his justification for the invasion. "You cannot take lands without war and conquest," were the words of a young chief with a nose like a hawk's beak, and an eye like the eagle's, to Lord Selkirk. "You did not fight us; therefore you did not conquer us. How comes it then that you have our lands?" "Are you the owners of this territory?" calmly enquired the nobleman. "We are; no one else is the owner." "But I shall shew you that from two standpoints, first from my own, and afterwards from yours, it belongs not to you. Firstly, it belongs to our common Sovereign, the King of England. You belong to him; so likewise do the buffalo that graze upon the plains, and the fishes that swim in the rivers. Therefore our great and good Sovereign sayeth unto me, his devoted subject, 'Go you forth into my territories in the North of America, and select there a colony whereon to plant any of my faithful children who choose to go thither.' I have done so. Then, since you hold possession of these plains only by the bounty and sufferance of our good father the King, how can you object to your white brethren coming when they were permitted so to do?" Ugh; that was only the oily-tongued talk of the pale-faces. While seeming to speak fair, and smooth, and wise, their tongues were as crooked as the horn of the mountain-goat. Yet no chief could answer the Earl's contention, and they looked from one to another with some traces of confusion and defeat upon their faces. "But," continued Lord Selkirk, in the same grave and firm voice, "from your own standpoint you are not the proprietors of this territory. The Saulteux, with whom you wage your constant wars, have been upon these plains as long as you. In times of peace you have intermarried with them, and I now find in your wigwams many a squaw obtained from among the villages of your rivals." Ugh! They could not deny this. It was evident from their silence and the abject way in which they glanced from one to another that the case had gone against them. "But there is no reason for your jealousy or your hostility," Lord Selkirk continued; "our people come among you, not as conquerors, but as brothers. They shall not molest you but quietly till the fields and raise their crops. Instead of showing unfriendliness, I think you should take them by the hand and welcome them as brothers." These words at last prevailed, and the Crees put by their war paint, and came among the whites and offered them fish and buffalo steak. Thus was the colony founded. The grain grew well, and there was abundance in the new settlement, save that at intervals an army of locusts would come out of the west and destroy every green leaf. Then the settlers' needs were sore, and they were obliged to subsist upon roots and what fell to them from the chase. Many years rolled on, and the sturdy Scotch settlers had driven their roots fast into the ground. One alone of all the number who had kissed good-bye to his Scottish sweetheart returned to redeem his pledge. For the rest they soon forgot the rosy cheeks and bright blue eyes that they had left behind them, in the pleasures of the chase upon the plain, and the interest in their wide acres. But these perhaps were not the only reasons why they had forgotten their vows to the Scottish girls. Among the Crees were many beautiful maidens, with large, velvety eyes, black as the night when no moon is over the prairie, and shy as a fawn's. When first the white man came amongst them the girls were bashful; and when he went into the Crees' tent they would shrink away hiding their faces. But it soon became apparent that the shyness was not indifference; indeed many a time when the Scotch hunter passed a red man's tent he saw a pair of eyes looking languishingly after him. Little by little the timidity began to disappear, and sometimes the brown-skinned girls came in numbers to the white man's dwelling, and submitted themselves to be taught how to dance the cotillion and the eight-hand reel. Then followed the wooing among the flowery prairies; and the white men began to pledge their troths to the dusky girls. Many a brave hunter who had a score of scalps to dangle from his belt, sought, but sought in vain, a kind glance from some beautiful maiden of his tribe, who before the pale faces came would have deemed great indeed the honour of becoming the spouse of a warrior so distinguished. Jealousy began to fill the hearts of the Crees, but the mothers and wives, and the daughters too, were constant mediators, and never ceased to exert themselves for peace. "When," said they, "the white-faces first came among us, our chiefs and our young men all cried out, 'O they deem themselves to be a better race than we; they think their white blood is better than our red blood. They will not mingle with us although they will join with us in hunting our wild meat, or eating it after it has fallen to our arrow or spear. They will not consider one of our daughters fit for marriage with one of them; because it would blend their blood with our blood.' Now, O you chiefs and young men, that which you at the first considered a hardship if it did not come to pass, has come to pass, and yet you complain. 'The whites are above marrying our daughters,' you first cry; now you plan revenge because they want to marry, and do marry them." The arguments used by the women were too strong, and the brawny, eagle-eyed hunters were compelled to mate themselves with the ugly girls of the tents. It is asserted by some writers on the North-West that the beauty observed in the Metis women in after years was in great part to be attributed to the fact that the English settlers took to wife only the most beautiful of the Indian girls. Now and again too, the canny Scotch lad, with his gun on his shoulder and his retriever at his heel, would walk through a Saulteux settlement. The girls here were still shyer than their Cree cousins, but they were not a whit less lovely. They were not dumpy like so many Indian girls, but were slight of build, and willowy of motion. Their hair was long and black, but it was as fine as silk, and shone like the plumage of a blackbird. There was not that oily swarthiness in the complexion, which makes so many Indian women hideous in the eyes of a connoisseur of beauty; but the cheeks of these girls were a pale olive, and sometimes, when they were excited, a faint tinge of rose came out like the delicate pink flush that appears in the olive-grey of the morning. And these maidens, too, began to cast languishing eyes upon the pale-faced stranger; and sighed all the day while they sewed fringe upon their skirts and beads upon their moccasins. Their affections now were not for him who showed the largest number of wolves' tongues or enemies' scalps, but for the gracious stranger with his gentle manners and winning ways. They soon began to put themselves in his way when he came to shoot chicken or quail among the grasses; would point out to him passes leading around the swamps, and inform him where he might find elk or wild turkey. Then with half shy, yet half coquettish airs, and a lurking tenderness in their great dusk hazel eyes, they would twist a sprig off a crown of golden rod, and with their dainty little brown fingers pin it upon the hunter's coat. With shy curiosity they would smoothe the cloth woven in Paisley, forming in their minds a contrast between its elegance and that of the coats of their own red gallants made of the rough skin of the wolf or the bison. So it came to pass that in due season most of the pretty girls among the Jumping Indians had gone with triumph and great love in their hearts from the wigwam of their tribe to be the wives of the whites in their stately dwellings. In this way up-grew the settlement of Red River; by such intermarriages were the affections of the red men all over the plains, from the cold, gloomy regions of the North to the mellow plains of the South, won by their pale-faced neighbours. The savages had not shut their ears to what their women had so eloquently urged, and they would say: "The cause of these pale people is our cause; their interests are our interests; they have mingled their flesh and blood with ours; we shall be their faithful brothers to the death." It was this fact, not the wisdom of government Indian agents, nor the heaven-born insight of government itself into the management of tribes that so long preserved peace and good will throughout our North-West Territories. It was for this reason that enemies of government in the Republic could say after they had revealed the corruption of Red Cloud and Black Rock agents: "Observe the Canadian tribes, mighty in number, and warlike in their nature. They fight not, because they have been managed with wisdom and humanity. There is no corruption among the accredited officials; there is no sinister dealing towards them by the government." We do not charge our officials with corruption, neither do we believe that their administration has been feeble;--on the whole our attitude towards the Indian people has been fair; our policy has revealed ordinary sense,--and not much brilliancy. Probably half a dozen level-headed wood-choppers, endowed with authority to deal with the tribes, could have acquitted themselves as well; perhaps they might not have done so well, and it is probable that they might have exhibited a better showing. It was in this settlement that in after years appeared Louis Riel _pere_. For some generations the Hudson Bay Company had carried on an extensive trade in peltry, and numbers of their _employes_ were French peasants or _coureurs de bois_. Thousands of these people were scattered here and there over the territories; and they began to turn loving eyes toward the rich meadows along the banks of the Red River. Some of these had for wives squaws whom they had wooed and won during their engagement in the peltry trade. These finding that other whites had taken Indian girls for brides, felt drawn towards the new settlement by sentiments stronger than those of mere interest. Numbers of unmarried French took up farms in the new colony, and soon fell captive to the charms of the Cree girls. Now and again the history of the simple-hearted Scots was repeated; and a _coureur_ was presently seen to bring a shy, witching Saulteux maiden from the tents of the Jumping Indians. But the French, it must be said, were not so _dilettante_ in their taste for beauty as were their Scottish brethren; yet, as a rule, their wives were the prettiest girls in the tribes --after, of course, "braw John" had been satisfied--for an ugly maiden was content to have an Indian for her lord; and she tried no arts, plucked no bouquets from the prairie flowers, beaded no moccasins, and performed no tender little offices to catch the heart of the white man. "Pale face gets all the pretty squaws; suppose we must take 'em ugly ones. Ugh!" This was the speech, and the true speech of many a chief, or lion-hearted young man of the tribes under the new order at Red River. This may seem hard to the poor Indian, but perhaps it was just as well. It would have, indeed, been worse had the handsome maiden given her hand to the dusky Red, and afterwards, wooed by blue eyes, given her heart where her hand could never go. And the Indian woman is no better and no worse than her kind, no matter what the colour be. Happier, then, is the lot of the Indian with his homely affectionate wife, than with a bride with roses in her cheek, and sunlight in her eye, who cannot resist the pleading eye and the outstretched arms of one whose wooing is unlawful, and the result of which can be nought but wrong and misery. The population grew and comforts increased till eighteen or twenty thousand souls could be reckoned in the colony. The original whites had disappeared, and no face was to be seen but that of a Metis in any of the cosy dwellings in the settlement. These people had not yet learnt that amongst the whites, whose blood knew no alloy, they were regarded as a debased sort, and unfit socially to mix with those who had kept their race free from taint. The female fruitage of the mixture lost nothing by acquiring some of the Caucasian stock, but the men, in numerous cases, seemed to be inferior for the blending. In appearance they were inane, in speech laconic; they were shy in manners, and reserved, to boorishness, while in intellectual alertness they were inferior to the boisterous savage, or the shrewd, dignified white. But the woman perpetuated the shy, winning coyness of her red mother, and the arts, and somewhat of the refinements of her white father. The eye was not so dusk; it gleamed more: as if the ray from a star had been shot through it. There was the same olive cheek; but it was not so tawny, for the dawn of the white blood had appeared in it. She gained in symmetry too, being taller than her red mother, while she preserved the soft, willowy motion of the prairie-elk. But the women were not good housekeepers; and many a traveller has gone into the house of a Metis and seen there a bride witchingly beautiful, with her hair unkempt and disordered about her shoulders, her boots unlaced, and her stocking down revealing her bare, exquisitely-turned ankle. "A Cinderella!" he would exclaim, "but, by heaven, I swear, a thousand times more lovely!" If she had a child it would likely be found sprawling among the coals, and helping itself to handfuls of ashes. The little creature would be sure to escape the suspicion of ever having been washed. Ask the luminous-eyed mother for anything, for a knife to cut your tobacco, for a cup to get a drink of water, and the sweet sloven would be obliged to ransack two-thirds of the articles of the house to find what you sought. The dresses worn by herself, as well as by her husband or her brother, would not be less astonishing to the unaccustomed eye. The men wear a common blue capote a red belt and corduroy trousers. This, however, soon became the costume of every male in Red River, whether Metis or new-come Canadian. There, is however, a distinction in the manner of wearing. Lest the Canadian should be taken for a Metis he wears the red belt over the capote, while the half-breed wears it beneath. The women are fond of show, and like to attire themselves in dark skirts, and crimson bodices. Frequently, if the entire dress be dark, they tie a crimson or a magenta sash around their handsomely shapen waists; and they put a cap of some denomination of red upon their heads. Such colours, it need not be said, add to their beauty, and it is by no means uncertain that this is the reason why they adopt these colours. Some writers say that their love of glaring colours is derived from the savage side of their natures; but the Metis women have an artistic instinct of their own, and being for the greater part coquettes, it may very safely be said that according to the fitness of things is it that they attire themselves. But they are not able to shake off the superstitions of their race. If the young woman soon to be a mother, sees a hawk while crossing the fields in the morning, she comes home and tells among her female friends that her offspring is to be a son; and they all know that he is to be fleet and enduring in the chase, and that he will have the eyes of a hunter chief. But if a shy pigeon circle up from the croft, and cross her path, she sighs and returns not back to relate the omen; and it is only in undertones that her nearest friend learns a week afterwards that the promised addition to the household is to be a girl. The appearance of other birds and beasts, under similar circumstances, are likewise tokens; and though boys would be born, and girls too, if all the hawks and pigeons, and foxes and wild geese, and every other presaging bird and beast of the plains had fallen to the gun of huntsman and "sport," they cling to the belief; and the superstition will only die with the civilization that begat it. Many of the customs of their red mothers they still reverently perpetuate; but they are for all this deeply overlaid with Canadianism. Of all the women on the face of the earth, they are the greatest gossips. Not in their whole nature is there any impulse so strong as the love to talk. Therefore, when the morning's meal is ended, the pretty mother laces the boots around her shapely little ankles, puts her blanket about her, and sallies out to one of her friend's houses for the morning's gossip. In speaking of her dress, I neglected to state that although the Metis woman had for gown the costliest fabric ever woven in Cashmere, she would not be content, on the hottest summer day, in walking twenty paces to her neighbour's door, unless she had this blanket upon her. The hateful looking garment is the chief relic of her barbaric origin, and despite the desire which she always manifests to exhibit her personal charms at their best, she has no qualms in converting herself into a hideous, repulsive squaw, with this covering. If she be of a shy nature, she will cover her head with this garment when a stranger enters her abode; and many a curious visitor who has heard of the bright eyes and olive cheeks of the half-breed woman is sorely disappointed when drawing near to her on the prairie path, or in the village street, to see her pull the hideous blanket over her face while he passes her by. Not always will she do this, for the wild women of the plains, and the half breed beauties, find a strong charm in strange faces; and after she has received some little attentions, and a few trinkets or trifles, she will be ready enough to appoint a tryst upon the flowery prairie, under the mellow moon. We might forgive her for all this, if she could but restrain her tongue. From morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve, this unruly member goes on prattling about every conceivable thing, especially the affairs of her neighbours. We have seen that she goes out after she has eaten her breakfast; and she returns not till her appetite begins to be oppressive. She will then kiss her dusky little offspring, who, during her absence, has likely enough tried to stuff himself with coals, and then played with the pigs. In the evening one is pretty certain to find at some house a fiddler and a dancing party, which ends with a bountiful supper; though frequently, if the refreshments include whiskey, the party terminates with a regulation "Irish row." At nearly every such dance there is a white lad or two, and they are certain to monopolize the attention and the kisses of the prettiest girls. As the Indian had to sit by and see the white man come and take away the most beautiful of the wild girls, so too must the half-breed bear with meekness the preference of the Metis belle for the Caucasian stranger. The morals of the women are not over good, nor can they be said to be very bad. Amongst each other their virtue reaches a standard as high as that which prevails in our Canadian community. It is when the women are brought into contact with the white men that this standard lowers. Then comes the temptation, the sin, the domestic heartburnings, and the hatred towards those who tempted to the fall. The half-breed young men are fatally fond of show. The highest aim of their social existence seems to be to possess a dashing horse or two, and to drive a cariole. It is stated, on excellent authority, that a young man who wishes to figure as a _beau_, and to get the smiles of the pretty girls, will sometimes sell all his useful possessions to purchase a horse and cariole. But it must not be supposed that this sort of spirit pervades the entire community. A large portion of the people are thrifty and frugal, and maintain themselves by continuous, well-directed toil. The French half breeds profess the Roman Catholic religion, and they have a number of churches. At the head of the Roman communion is Archbishop Tache, of St. Boniface. This is the gentleman who provided the munificence for Louis Riel's education. He is the same bishop whose name so many hundreds of thousands of our people cannot recall without bitterness and indignation. CHAPTER III. Such, then, was the condition of Red River before the person who is the subject of this book appeared upon the scenes. But perhaps it is as well that I should relate one occurrence which fanned into bright flame the smouldering embers of discord between the half-breeds and their white neighbours. An officer of the Hudson Bay Company, living at an isolated post, had two daughters. As they began to arrive toward young-womanhood he was anxious that they should have an education, in order that they might, in proper season, be able to take their position in society. There were good schools at Red River, and thither the officer sent his daughters, placing them under the care of a guardian whom he knew would exercise an authority as judicious as his own. The two girls were remarkably handsome, and whenever they walked through the settlement, or drove abroad with their guardian, they attracted all the attention. Many a half-dusky heart was smitten of their white skin, which he would compare in colour to the pure snow that covers the plains. Now had the faces of the Red River beauties been Parian white, instead of dusky olive, the young _beaux_ of the settlement would not have found their hearts beating half so wildly about the two pale daughters of the Hudson Bay Company's officer. They would indeed have languished for chestnut eyes, and complexions of Spain and the southern vineyards of France. But here amongst their sturdy "tiger blossoms," and passionate prairie roses blew two fair cold lilies; and their hearts bounded beyond measure at the thought of winning a look or a kindly smile. But the guardian watched the two pale girls closely, and permitted them to do little beyond his _surveillance_. There were not many whites in the circle of their acquaintance, but of this few, nearly every one was a suitor for one or other of the girls, yet for all the advances their hearts were still whole and they moved, "In maiden meditation fancy free." Now in Red River was a young half-breed, almost effeminate in manners, handsome in face and form, and agreeable and gentle in his address. He was indeed a sort of Bunthorne of the plains, just such a person as a romantic, shallow girl is most apt for a rose's period to sigh out her soul about. You find his type in fashionable civilised circles, in the languid dude who displays his dreams in his eyes to captivate the hearts of the silly girls, and--discreetly --keeps his mouth shut, to conceal his lack of brains. The two white daughters of the Company's officer were girls of ordinary understanding, but one of them had gotten too much poetry into her sweet head, and stood on the verge of a dizzy steep that overlooked a gulf, the name of which was Love. At a party given by one of the foremost of the half-breed families, this girl met Alexander, the Scottish half-breed, whose person and manners have been just described. There was something in the dreamy, far-away expression of the young Metis' eyes, which stirred the blood in the veins of the romantic girl. When they rested upon her, the soul of their owner seemed to yearn out to her. The voiceless, tender, passionate appealing in the look she was unable to forget when she walked along the grassy lanes, or trod the flower-rimmed path of the prairie. Coming along in the hush of the summer evening, when only the lovemaking of the grasshoppers could be heard among the flowers, Alexander met her, He spoke no word, but there was the same tender, eloquent appealing in his eyes. He thought the young lady would not take it amiss of him, if he were to join her on her way over the fields; so he had taken the liberty. There was a flutter at her heart, and a great passion-rose bloomed in each cheek. No, she would not take it amiss. The walk was so pleasant! Indeed it was kind of him to join her. The dusky lover spake few words; but he indolently left the path and gathered some sprays of wild flowers, and offered them to the girl. His eyes had the same, wistful look, and his brown fingers trembled as he offered the bouquet. Receiving them, and pinning them under her throat, she said in a low tone, while her voice trembled a little, "When these fade, I shall press the petals in my book, and keep them always." "Do you consider the flowers I gave you worth preserving?" he asked, his low voice likewise trembling. "I do." "I would give more than that," he said, tenderly, "to your keeping." "Why," she enquired, with an unsuccessful attempt at displaying wonder, "what is it that you would give to my keeping?" "My heart," the young man answered, his indolent eyes lighting up in the gloaming. She said nothing, but hung her head. The swarthy lover saw that she took no offence at his declaration. Indeed he gathered from the quivering of her red, moist lips, and from the tenderness in her eye, that the avowal had more than pleased her. She continued for a few seconds to look bashfully down at the path; and then she raised her eyes and looked at him. No more encouragement was needed. "My beloved," he said, softly, and her head nestled upon his shoulder. There in the shadow of a small colony of poplars, on the verge of the boundless plain, shining under the full, ripe moon, each plighted troth to the other, and gave and received burning kisses. During the sweet, fast-fleeting hours on the calm plain, in her lover's arms, with no witness but the yellow moon, she took no heed of the barriers that lay between a union with her beloved; nor had he any foreboding of obstacles, but heard and declared vows of love, supremely happy. Woman is a sort of Pandora's Box, the lid whereof is being forever raised, revealing the secrets within. The plighted maiden was flushed of cheek and unusually bright of eye when she returned to her home that evening. She could give her guardian no satisfactory account of her long absence, and told a very confused story about two paths, "you know," that were "very much alike"; but that "one led away around a poplar wood and out upon a portion of the prairie" which she did "not know." Here the sweet pet had got astray, and wandered around, although "it was so silly," till the sound of the bells of St. Boniface tolling ten had apprised her of the hour and also let her know where she was. Her guardian took the explanation, and contented himself with observing that he hoped it would be her last evening upon the prairie, straying around like an elk that had lost her mate. "Jennie," said her sister, when they were alone, "you have not been telling the truth. You did not get astray on the prairie. Somebody has been courting you, and you are in love with him." "I am in love; and it is true that some one has been courting me. I had intended to tell you all about it, my heart is so full. Now can you tell me who may my lover be?" "I hope, Jennie," and the sister's eyes showed a blending of severity and sorrow, "that it is not Alexander." "It is Alexander. Why should it not be? Is he not handsome, and gentle, and good? Wherefore then not he?" "My God, do you know what such an alliance would cost you, would cost us all? Marriage with a half-breed would be a degradation; and a stain upon the whole family that never could be wiped out. O my poor unfortunate sister, ruin is what such a marriage would mean. Just that, my darling sister, and no less." "I care not for that. I love him with all my heart and soul, and pledged myself to-night a hundred times to be his. I never can love another man; and he only shall possess me. What care I for the degradation of which you speak, as measured against the crowning misery, or the supreme happiness of my life? No; when Alexander is ready to say to me, Come, I shall go to him, and no threat nor persuasion shall dissuade me." She spoke like all the heroic girls who afterwards meekly untie their bonnets just as they were ready to go to the church to wed against their keeper's will; and then sit down awaiting orders as to whom they must marry. Jennie was not the only girl who, in the first flush of passion, is prepared to go through fire, or die at the stake for the man she loves. Withal,--but that the proprieties forbid it--whenever young women make these dramatic declarations, the most appropriate course would be to give them a sound spanking, and put an end to the tragic business. Nellie thought it her duty, and I suppose it was, to tell her bear-like guardian what had befallen to her sister. He was less disturbed on hearing the intelligence than Nellie supposed, and merely expressed some cold-blooded surprise at the presumption of the half-breed. He sat at his desk, and taking a sheet of paper, wrote this letter: "To Alexander Saunders: "DEAR SIR,--Would you be good enough to call at my house this evening at eight o'clock? "Yours truly, "Thomas Brown." Having sealed and dispatched this note he resumed his work, without showing or feeling any further concern about the matter. When it was growing dark over the prairie that evening, the love-lorn Jennie saw her pleading-eyed lover pass along in the shadow of the poplars toward her guardian's house. She heard his ring at the door, and his step in the hall. Her heart was in a great flutter; but her sister was at her side giving her comfort. The doors were wide open, but everything was so husht, that the girls could plainly hear the following words spoken in the guardian's library: "I understand, Mr. Saunders, that you have been taking the astonishingly presumptuous course of soliciting the hand of one of my wards. I am not given to severity, or I do not exactly know how I ought to resent an act which exhibits such a forgetfulness of what your attitude should be towards a person in the station of my ward. You are merely a half-breed; you are half-Indian, and for that matter might as well be Indian altogether. My ward's position is such that the bare idea of such a union is revolting. She is a lady by birth and by education, and is destined for a social sphere into which you could never, and ought never, enter. You may now go, sir, but you must remember that your ignorance is the only palliation of your presumption. Laurie, show this young man the way out." "O, my God, what will become of me?" sobbed poor Jennie. "I cannot live! O, I will go after him! I will fly with him! I cannot endure this separation! O, sister, will you not intercede for my beloved? Tell uncle how noble and manly, and honourable he is! Can you not do anything for me? My God, what shall I do?" In this fashion did poor Jennie's grief find words, and we leave her alone with her sore heart, while we follow the rejected suitor. He walked swiftly down the lawn, turning not his eye, or he might have seen in the window his lover, stretching imploring arms toward him. All his blood was running madly in his veins, and it burned like fire. His heart was hot, and his temples throbbed. "So I am only a half-breed, and might as well be all Indian for that matter! O, God! A despised half-breed! They have shown the fangs at last. We now see how they regard us." And he went forth among his friends, and told the story of the insult and humiliation. A thousand half-breed hearts that night in Red River burned with vengeance against the white man; French Metis and English Metis alike had felt the sting of the indignity; and these two bodies, sundered before through petty cause, now united in a brotherhood of hate against the white population. It needs no further words to shew how ready these dusky people would be to rise and follow a crafty leader, who cried out: "We are despised by these white people. We want no social or political alliance with them. We shall live apart, rather than in ignominy and union with them." Louis Riel was not ready the next morning to rise and lead the people to revolt, for this occurred some years before his bloody star reached the zenith; but the same hatred was there years later, when he turned the governor sent to the colony by the Dominion out of the territories, and set up an authority of his own. Well might the French historian, cognisant of the fate of the luckless suitor, and the consequences of the rejection, cry out with the poet: "_Amour tu perdis Troie._" [Footnote: Love thou hast conquered even Troy.] As for poor Jennie, heroic Jennie, who would follow her lover to death itself, she submitted, after a few sleepless nights, and days that for her were without a breakfast, to the mandate of the guardian, and to the philosophy of her sister. A little later, a tall, ungainly young Highlander came, offered himself, and took to his home the poetic and tragic daughter of the Company's officer. Despite the blizards that sometimes come sweeping across the prairie, smothering belated travellers, and un-roofing dwellings, notwithstanding the frequent incursions from regions in the far west of myriad-hosts of locusts and grasshoppers, Red River settlement throve in wealth and population, till, when the period with which I shall now deal arrived, it numbered no fewer than 15,000 souls. Upon the completion of the great Act of the Confederation of the British North American Provinces in 1867, the attention of Canadian statesmen was turned to this distant colony, and negotiations were opened for the transfer of the Territory to the Dominion. The back of great monopolies had now been broken. In 1858, England had resumed its great Indian empire and extinguished John Company; and this act had paved the way for a similar resumption of the vast prairie domain granted by King Charles to "the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay." The transfer was to be effected, as one writer puts it, by a triangular sort of arrangement. All territorial rights claimed by the Hudson Bay Company --and Red River lay within the Company's dominions--were to be annulled on payment of 300,000 pounds by Canada, and the country would then be handed over by Royal proclamation to the Dominion Government, the Company being allowed to retain only certain parcels of land in the vicinity of its trading posts. I may as well go upon the authority of the same writer. [Footnote: Captain G. L. Huyshe.] The transfer was dated for the 1st of December, 1869; but the Dominion Cabinet, eager to secure the rich prize, appointed its Minister of Public Works, the Honourable William McDougall, C.B., to be Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Territories, and sent him off in the month of September, with instructions to proceed to Fort Garry "with all convenient speed" there to assist in the formal transfer of the Territories, and to "be ready to assume the Government" as soon as the transfer was completed. So far so well, but let us pause just here. There is something to be said even on the side of revolt and murder, and let us see what it is. Since the foundation of the colony the people had lived under the government according to the laws propounded by the Hudson Bay Company. The people had established a civilization of their own, and had customs and rules which were always observed with great reverence. When tidings reached them that they were to be transferred to the Dominion of Canada, they began to have some misgivings as to how they should fare under the new order. Of late years, too, there had come into prominence among them a man whom early in these pages we saw bid good-bye to his father upon the plains on his way to school in the East. The fire seen in young Riel at the school, and when he turned his face again for the prairies that he loved, had now reached full flame. He had never ceased to impress upon the people that the Hudson Bay Company was a heartless, soulless corporation, and that the treatment accorded to the Metis was no better than might have been given to the dogs upon the plains. There never was public peace after the tongue of this man had begun to make noise in the settlement. When, therefore, it became known that the Canadian Government had determined upon taking the colony to itself, an ambitious scheme of the highest daring entered into the brain of Louis Riel. He lost no time in beginning to sow seeds of discontent. "Canada," he said, "will absorb your colony, and as a people you will virtually be blotted out of existence. White officials will come here and lord it over you; the tax-gatherer will plunder the land for funds to build mighty docks, and canals, and bridges, and costly buildings, and numerous railroads in the East. The poor half-breed will be looked upon with contempt and curiosity: no custom that he regards as sacred will be respected; no right which is inherently his, will be acknowledged. They will send their own henchmen, who have no sympathy in common with the half-breeds, to rule over us; no complaint that the people make to the Central Government will be regarded; yea, this new rule will fasten itself upon us as some inexorable tyrant monster, driving deep its fangs into a soil that has been yours so long. Yes; you will be of _some_ interest to them. You have some handsome wives and pretty daughters, and those virtuous pale-faces from the East have a strong admiration for lovely women. In this respect, you shall receive their attention." The effect of such arguments among these credulous people, who saw not the wily traitor behind the rich, eloquent voice, quivering with indignation, was similar to that which would follow were you to fling a flaming torch upon the prairie in midsummer after a month of drought. Then the cunning deceiver went secretly to several of the leading half-breeds in Red River, and whispered certain proposals in their ear. Meanwhile, events were transpiring which furnished just the very fuel that Riel wanted for his fire. During the summer of 1869, a surveying party, under Colonel Dennis, had been engaged surveying the country, and dividing it into townships, etc., for future allotment by government. According to good authority, the proceedings of this party had given great offence to the Metis. The unsettled state of the half-breeds' land tenure not unnaturally excited apprehension in the minds of these poor ignorant people that their lands would be taken from them, and given to Canadian immigrants. Then they had the burning words of Louis Riel ringing in their ears saying that the thing _would_ be done. To lend colour to the mistrust, some members of the surveying party put up claims here and there to tracts of land to which they happened to take a fancy. But this was not all. Some of these gentlemen had the habit of giving the Indians drink till they became intoxicated, and then inducing them to make choice lands over to them. One could not pass through any superior tract of land without observing the stakes of some person or other of Colonel Dennis's party. "I foretold it," cried Riel. "Go out for yourselves and see the marks they have set up bounding their plunder." Nor was this the only grievance presented to the half-breeds. The very survey then being carried on they looked upon as an act of contempt towards themselves; for Riel had put it in this light. "The territory has not yet passed into the hands of the Canadian government"--and in saying this the Disturber was accurate--; "what right have they, therefore, to come here and lay down lines? It is as I have already told you: You are of as much importance in the eyes of the Canadian authorities, as would be so many dogs." Nor were these the only grievances either. A "big man," a white, living at the settlement, had made himself obnoxious to the whole of Red River. He well knew how the people hated him, and he retorted by saying: "Your scurvy race is almost run. Presently you will get into civilized hands, and be put through your facings. You disrespect me, but my counsels prevail at Ottawa. Only what I recommend, will the Government do; so that you see the settlement is very completely in my hands." This man was a valuable ally to Riel; for almost literally did he, while portending to speak for the Dominion authorities, corroborate the allegation of the arch agitator. Then two officials, Messrs Snow and Mair, sent out by Mr. McDougall, while he was yet Minister of Public Works, had established an intimacy with the obnoxious white man, received his hospitality, and given acquiescent ear to his advice. These two gentlemen looked upon the half-breeds as savages. They sent letters to the newspapers, describing Red River and its people in terms grossly unjust, and inaccurate. M. Riel got the communications and read them to the people. "This," he said, "is the manner in which they describe our customs, our social life, and the virtue of our women." The women tossed their heads haughtily. "We do what is right," they said, "and they can slander us if they will. We shall not prove, perhaps, so easy a prey to those white gallants as they seem to suppose." One high-spirited girl, and very beautiful, vowed that during the run of her life, she never would speak to a white man for this insult, or let him see her face. Yet, if the gossip is to be trusted, before the flowers bloomed thrice, after that, upon the prairie, she was sighing her sweet soul away, through her great gazelle eyes, for love of a sturdy young Englishman, who had taken up his abode upon the plains. And better than all the young fellow married her, and she is now one of the happiest, not to say one of the prettiest, women in Manitoba. Strong words of determination by a young woman are the most conclusive evidence that I know of the weakening of her resolve. But Messrs Snow and Mair went on with their creditable work, and to their other good deeds it was alleged they added that of grabbing choice plots of land. These two men were, of course, known to be the accredited agents of the Minister of Public Works; and Riel succeeded in convincing the credulous people that the Minister, indeed the whole government, were cognizant of their acts and approved of the same. "While public indignation was at its height, it was announced that a Lieutenant-Governor had been appointed for Red River, and that the man chosen was the very person through whom the chief indignity had been put upon the settlement. It was also shown with burning force by Riel that in a matter so important as the transfer of fifteen thousand people from one particular jurisdiction to another, they, the people transferred, had not been consulted. They had not, he also pointed out, been even formally apprised of the transfer. "This Canadian Government take Red River and its half-breeds over, just as they would take over Red River and fifteen thousand sheep." And some of the men swore terrible oaths that this change should not be without resistance, and resistance to the death. Riel said that the determination was good. CHAPTER IV. Having worked the unreasoning settlers to this pitch, Riel was satisfied. Public feeling needed but the fuse of some bold step of his to burst into instant flame. As the Lieutenant-Governor drew near the territory the agitator was almost beside himself with excitement. He neither ate nor slept but on foot or sleigh, was for ever moving from one to another perfecting plans, or inciting to tumult. At the house of a prominent half-breed, while the women sat about stitching, Riel met a number of the leading agitators, and thus addressed them: "There are two courses open to us now. One is to continue as an unorganized band of noisy disturbers; the other, to league ourselves into an organized body for the defence and government of our country." This proposal thrilled the veins of his listeners, and pouting, coral-coloured female lips, said softly, "Brava!" A sort of fitful reflection followed the first wild burst of enthusiasm, and one _bois brule_ arose and said: "Far be it from me to utter one word that might dampen your ardor, but let us try to take some account of the cost. Would not such a step be an act of Rebellion? and is not Rebellion a treasonable offence?" At this point Riel, foaming with rage, arose and stopped him. "We want no poltroonery, no alarmist sentiments here," he shouted. "Even though such an act were as you describe it, our duty as men, determined to guard their sacred rights, is to take the risk. But it would not be treason. The transfer of a people from one government to another is not constitutional without the people's consent. The Hudson's Bay Company have certain rights in the unsold lands of these regions; but no man, no corporation, no power, can sell, cede, or transfer that which is not his or its own property. Therefore the Hudson Bay Company has not the right to transfer our lands to the Dominion of Canada. And since we, the people of Red River, are not the chattels of the Company, they cannot transfer us. They have sold us to the Canadian government, but upon the ground between the two authorities will we stand, and create a province of our own. It may be that the Dominion Government will have justice enough to agree to this; if they oppose our rights, then I trust that there are men on Red River, who are not afraid to stand up for, yea to die for, their country." This speech was received with deafening acclamation. At once a Provisional Government was formed, and at the instigation of Riel, John Bruce, who was a mere cat's-paw, was declared President. Riel himself took the Secretaryship; and very promptly the Secretary raised his voice. "McDougall who sent his scourges here to plunder our land, and to ridicule our people, nears our border. There is no time to lose. _He must not enter_. I, therefore, move that the following letter be dispatched to him by a regularly constituted member of our Government: "St. Nobert, Red River, October 21st, 1869. "Sir,--The National Parliament of the Metis of Red River, hereby forbids you to enter the North-West Territories without a special permit from the National Government." This motion was carried with enthusiasm. The letter was signed by the President and Secretary, and dispatched to Pembina, which was situate on the border, to await the arrival at that point of the Governor Designate. The pomp and daring of these proceedings had such an effect upon the colonists, that little by little they began to grow blind to the fact that their action was in the face of Canadian authority, and an invitation to a collision of arms. If anyone expressed any fear he was either savagely silenced by Riel, or informed that there were men enough in Red River to hold the country in the face of any force that could be sent against them. And the military enthusiasm of the Metis gave some colour to this latter assertion. An armed force, sufficient for present necessities, was established on Scratching River, a place about fifteen miles from Fort Garry. Here a barrier was put across the road by which McDougall must travel to reach Fort Garry, and beyond this the half-breeds swore the pale face Governor should never pass. On the 30th day of October, Mr. McDougall arrived at Pembina. He was already aware that the country was seething with tumult; that Colonel Dennis had been turned out of the Territory; that Messrs. Snow & Mair had become hateful in the eyes of the half-breeds: yet he felt disposed to do little more than laugh at the whole affair. He had the assurance of his mischievous envoys that the matter was a mere temporary ebullition of feeling, and that his presence in the country would very soon calm the turbulent waters. So he said: "I shall take no notice of this impertinent letter. In fact it is impossible for me to recognise such a piece of presumption, and deal with a communication which would be the rankest insolence, but that it is so extremely ludicrous." So the gallant Lieutenant-Governor, with his officials, boldly crossed the line and proceeded towards Fort Garry. But they were met on their triumphant march by a detachment of fourteen armed half-breeds whose spokesman said: "You received an order from the Provisional Government not to enter these territories. When that order was passed it was the Government's intention to take care that it should be carried out. Yet you have forced yourself in here I give you till to-morrow morning to be clear of these territories." Mr. McDougall's lip began to hang a little low. The calm, even polite, tone of the spokesman of the party had impressed him more than bluster or rage. With the next morning came the same party. They made no noise, but quietly taking the horses of the Governor's party by the head, turned them around, and packed the whole of them back. In this way, and without so much as a loud word, was the Governor Designate turned out of the territories. Every success, however trivial, was fuel to the courage and enthusiasm of Riel's party. "I have begun this matter," the leader said to one of his followers, "and I do not mean to deal in half measures. Without stores we can do nothing. Fort Garry is worth our having just now, but we must move circumspectly in getting possession of it." So it was ordered that his followers should proceed in twos and threes, as if on no special mission, to the desired point. Presently, Governor McTavish saw in the shadow of the fort the rebel leader and a number of followers. "We are desirous of entering," Riel said. "Wherefore?" enquired the Governor. "We cannot tell you now," was the reply; "it is enough for me to say that a great danger threatens the fort." Without further explanation, the feeble-willed Hudson Bay officer permitted the rebel and his followers to enter. "Huzza!" they all shouted, when they found themselves inside the stockades, and glanced at tier upon tier of barrels of flour, and pork, and beef, and molasses; and upon the sacks of corn, and the warm clothing, and better than all, upon the arms and ammunition. "I am at last master in Red River," Riel said to one of his followers. "My men can fight now, for here we have at once a fortification and a base of supplies." Just a few words with reference to Mr. McDougall, and I shall dismiss him from these pages. He lived quietly at Pembina between the date of his expulsion from Red River and the first day of December. The latter date was fixed for the transfer of the new territory to the Dominion of Canada. So, towards midnight, on the 30th of November, the Governor-Designate and his party sallied, forth from the "line" and took formal possession of the territory in the name of the Government of Canada. There was no one stirring about the prairie on the night in question, for the glass shewed the thermometer to be 20 degrees below zero: so the gallant Governor was enabled to take possession without obstruction. Riel was now fairly intoxicated with success. Some of his followers would sometimes ask him if he had no fear that the Canadian Government would send out a large force of soldiers against him. His invariable reply was: "They never will do this. The way is too long, and the march too difficult. They will eventually make up their mind to let us rule this Province ourselves." "And do you propose to stand aloof as an independent colony?" "Perhaps! And, perhaps, we may, by and by, discuss the subject of annexation." For all the man's cunning and courage, he was almost as short-sighted as any savage upon the plain. And the small measure of Indian blood in him would assert itself in many ways. The people began to look upon him as another Napoleon triumphant, and to give him honour in every way that suggested itself. He made a great display of his importance, and would boast among his friends that he was as diplomatic and as able as any statesman in Canada, and that even his enemies admitted this. In his earlier days he sought, persistently, the smiles of the fair girls of the plains, but somehow or another he was never a very great favourite with the olive-skinned beauties. Now, however, the case was different with him. The Red River belles saw in him a hero and a statesman of the highest order, the ruler of a colony, and the defiant and triumphant enemy of the whole Dominion of Canada. So the poor, shallow pets began to ply their needles, and make for him presents of delicate things. One sewed gorgeous beads upon his hunting coat, and another set his jacket spangling with quills of the porcupine. The good priests of Red River, and their pious vicar, _pere_ Lestanc, whom Monseigneur had left in charge of the Diocese while he was attending the Ecumenical Council in Rome, came forward with their homage. These worthy gentlemen had been in the habit of reading from the Catechism ever since the time they were first able to tell their beads, or to make mud pies, these words: "He that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God; and they that (so) resist shall purchase to themselves damnation." Here was a madly ambitious adventurer "resisting the power," and, therefore, "resisting the ordinances of God;" but these precious divines saw no harm whatever in the act. Indeed, they were the most persistent abettors in the uprising, counselling their flock to be zealous and firm, and to follow the advice of their patriotic and able leader, M. Riel. The great swaggering, windy _pere_ Richot, took his coarse person from house to house denouncing the Canadian Government and inciting the people. "No harm can come to you," he would say; "you have in the Canadian Government a good friend in Mr. George E. Cartier. He will see that no hair of one of your heads is touched." And Riel went abroad giving the same assurance. Moreover, it was known to every thinking one of the fifteen thousand Metis that Riel was a _protege_ of Monseigneur Tache; that through this pious bishop it was he had received his education, and that His Lordship would not alone seek to minimize what his favourite had done, but would say that the uprising was a justifiable one. This was how the Catholic Church in Red River stimulated the diseased vanity and the lawless spirit of this thrice-dangerous Guiteau of the plains. I have already said that Bruce was put up by Riel as a mere figure-head. When the end of the pretence had been accomplished, this poor scare-crow was thrown down and Louis Riel assumed the presidency of the Provisional Government. Now he began to draw to himself all those men whom he knew would be faithful tools in carrying out any scheme of villainy, or even of blood that he proposed to them. The coarse and loud-mouthed O'Donoghue was duly installed as a confidential attendant with wide powers, and Lepine was made head of the military part of the insurrectionary body. It certainly was strange if the treasonable undertaking should not be successful with the acquisition of all the fearless and lawless personages that the half-breed community could produce, and the vicar-general and the swaggering father Richot offering up masses that it should prevail. It must not be supposed that there were no white people in this Red River region. There were very many indeed, and some of them held prominent places in the community through high character or through affluence. Most of these persons were loyal to the heart's core, and were of opinion that the rising had nothing justifiable in it, and regarded it as a criminal and treasonable rebellion. At meetings, held in the town of Winnipeg, some of these gentlemen were at no pains to give expression to their sentiments. But Riel's murderous eye was upon them; and he was revolving over divers plans of vengeance. There was no reason why he should hesitate in taking any step that promised help to the cause, for Holy Church was praying for its success, and working for it, too. The shedding of the blood of a few heretics was a matter of small consequence: indeed, the act would only hallow a cause that had patriotism under, and religion behind it. We shall leave Riel glaring with wolfish eyes upon the good men who raised their voices against lawlessness, and relate a story which will shed a new light upon the darkest deed of the dark career of the miscreant Rebel. CHAPTER V. Some time before the outbreak, Riel, in company with a half-breed, had gone in the autumn shooting chicken along the prairies. The hunting-ground was many miles distant from Riel's home, so that the intention of the sportsmen was to trust themselves to the hospitality of some farm-house in the neighbourhood. The settlers were all, with two or three exceptions, Metis; and the door of the half-breed is never shut against traveller or stranger. One late afternoon, as the two men were passing along the prairie footpath towards a little settlement, they heard at some distance over the plain, a girl singing. The song was exquisitely worded and touching, and the singer's voice was sweet and limpid as the notes of a bobolink. M. Riel, like Mohammed, El Mahdi, and other great patrons of race and religion, is strong of will; but he is weaker than a shorn Samson when a lovely woman chooses to essay a conquest. So he marvelled much to his companion as to who the singer might be, and proposed that both should leave the path and join the unknown fair one. A few minutes walk brought the two beyond a small poplar grove, and there, upon a fallen tree-bole, in the delicious cool of the autumn evening, they saw the songstress sitting. She was a maiden of about eighteen years, and her soft, silky-fine, dark hair was over her shoulders. In girlish fancy she had woven for herself a crown of flowers out of marigolds and daisies, and put it upon her head. She did not hear the footsteps of the men upon the soft prairie, and they did not at once reveal themselves, but stood a little way back listening to her. She had ceased her song, and was gazing beyond intently. On the naked limb of a desolate, thunder-riven tree that stood apart from its lush, green-boughed neighbours, sat a lonely thrush in seeming melancholy. Every few seconds he would utter a note of song. Sometimes it was low and sorrowful, then it was louder, with the same sad quality in it, as if the lonely bird were calling for some responsive voice from far away over the prairie. "Dear bird, you have lost your mate, and are crying out for her," the girl said, stretching out her little brown hand compassionately toward the low-crouching songster. "Your companions have gone to the South, and you wait here trusting that your mate will come back, and not journey to summer lands without you. Is not that so, my poor bird? Ah, would that I could go with you where there are always flowers, and ever can be heard the ripple of little brooks. Here the leaves will soon fall, ah, me! and the daisies wither, and instead of the delight of summer we shall have only the cry of hungry wolves, and the bellowing of bitter winds above the ghastly plains. But could I go to the South, there is no one who would sing over my absence one lamenting note, as you sing, my bird, for the mate with whom you had so many hours of sweet lovemaking in these prairie thickets. Nobody loves me woos me, cares for me, or sings about me. I am not even as the wild rose here, though it seems to be alone and is forbidden to take its walk: for it holds up its bright face and can see its lover; and he breathes back upon the kind, willing, breeze-puffs, through all the summer, sweet-scented love messages, tidings of a matrimony as delicious as that of the angels." She stood up, and raised her arms above her head yearningly. The autumn wind was cooing in her hair, and softly swaying its silken meshes. "Fare well, my desolate one: may your poor little heart be gladder soon. Could I but be a bird, arid you would have me for a companion, your lamenting should not be for long. We should journey loitering and love-making all the long sweet way, from here to the South, and have no repining." Turning around, she perceived two men standing close beside her. She became very confused, and clutched for the blanket to cover her face, but she had strayed away among the flowers without it. Very deeply she blushed that the strangers should have heard her; and she spake not. "Bon jour, ma belle fille." It was M. Riel who had addressed her. He drew closer, and she, in a very low voice, her olive face stained with a faint flush of crimson, answered, "Bon jour, Monsieur." "Be not abashed. We heard what you were saying to the bird, and I think the sentiments were very pretty." This but confused the little prairie beauty all the more. But the gallant stranger took no heed of her embarrassment. "With part of your declaration I cannot agree. A maiden with such charms as yours is not left long to sigh for a lover. Believe me, I should like to be that bird to whom you said you would, if you could, offer love and companionship." M. Riel made no disguise of his admiration for the beautiful girl of the plains. He stepped up by her side and was about to take her hand after delivering himself of this gallant speech, but she quickly drew it away. Passing through a covert as they neared the little settlement, Riel's sportsman companion walked ahead, leaving the other two some distance in the rear. The ravishing beauty of the girl was more than the amorously-disposed stranger could resist, and suddenly throwing his arms around her he sought to kiss her. But the soft-eyed fawn of the desert soon showed herself in the guise of a petit bete sauvage. With a startling scream she bounded away from his grasp. "How do you dare take this liberty with me, Monsieur," she said, her eyes kindled with anger and wounded pride. "You first meanly come and intrude upon my privacy; next you must turn what knowledge you gain by acting spy and eavesdropper, into a means of offering me insult. You have heard me say that I had no lover to sigh for me. I spoke the truth: I _have_ no such lover. But you I will not accept as one; your very sight is already hateful to me." And turning, with flushed cheek and gleaming eyes, she entered the cosy, cleanly-kept little cottage of her father. But she soon reflected that she had been guilty of an unpardonably inhospitable act in not asking the strangers to enter. Suddenly turning, she walked rapidly back, and overtook the crest-fallen wooer and his companion, and said in a voice from which every trace of her late anger had disappeared. "Entrez, Messieurs." M. Riel's countenance speedily lost its gloom, and, respectfully touching his hat, he said: "Oui, Mademoiselle, avec le plus grand plaisir." Tripping lightly ahead she announced the two strangers, and then returned, going to the bars where the cows were lowing, waiting to be milked. The persistent sportsman had not by any means made up his mind to desist in the wooing. "The colt shies," he murmured, "when she first sees the halter. Presently she becomes tractable enough." Then, while he sat waiting for the evening meal, blithely through the hush of the exquisite evening came the voice of the girl. She was singing from _La Claire Fontaine_: "A la claire fontaine Je m'allait promener, J'ai trouve l'eau si belle Que je me suis baigne." Her song ended with her work, and as she passed the strangers, with her two flowing pails of yellow milk, Riel whispered softly, as he touched her sweet little hand: "Ah, ma petite amie!" The same flash came in her eyes, the same proud blood mantled through the dusk of her cheek, but she restrained herself. He was a guest under her father's roof, and she would suffer the offence to pass. The persistent gallant was more crest-fallen by this last silent rebuke, than by the first with its angry words. The first, in his vanity, he had deemed an outburst of petulance, instead of an expression of personal dislike, especially as the girl had so suddenly calmed herself and extended hospitalities. He gnashed his teeth that a half-breed girl, in an obscure village, should resent his advances; he for whom, if his own understanding was to be trusted, so many bright eyes were languishing. At the evening meal he received courteous, kindly attention from Marie; but this was all. He related with much eloquence all that he had seen in the big world in the East during his school days, and took good care that his hosts should know how important a person he was in the colony of Red River. To his mortification he frequently observed in the midst of one of his most self-glorifying speeches that the girl's eyes were abstracted, as if her imagination were wandering. He was certain she was not interested in him, or in his exploits. "Can she have a lover?" he asked himself, a keen arrow of jealousy entering at his heart, and vibrating through all his veins. "No, this cannot be. She said in her musings on the prairie that she had nobody who would sing a sad song if she were to go to the South. Stop! She may love, and not find her passion requited. I shall stay about here some days, upon some pretext, and I shall see what is in the wind." The next morning, when breakfast was ended, he perceived Marie rush to the window, and then hastily, and with a dainty coyness withdraw her head from the pane. Simultaneously he heard a sprightly tune whistled, as if by some glad, young heart that knew no care. Looking now, he saw a tall, well-formed young whiteman, a gun on his back, and a dog at his heels, walking along the little meadow-path toward the cottage. "This is the lover," he muttered; "curses upon him." From that moment he hated with all the bitterness of his nature the man now striding carelessly up toward the cottage door. "Bon jour, mademoiselle et messieurs" the newcomer said in cheery tones, as he entered, making a low bow. "Bon jour, Monsieur Scott," was the reply. Louis Riel, intently watching, saw the girl's colour come and go as she spoke to the young man. This was the same Scott, the Thomas Scott, the tidings of whose fate, at the hands of the rebel and murderer, Louis Riel, in later years, sent the blood boiling through the veins of Western Canada. The young man stayed only for a few moments, and Riel observed that everybody in the house treated him as if in some way he had been the benefactor of all. When he arose to go, young Jean, who knew of every widgeon in the mere beyond the cottonwood grove, and where the last flock of quail had been seen to alight, followed him out the door, and very secretly communicated his knowledge. Marie had seen a large flock of turkeys upon the prairie a few moments walk south of the poplar grove, and perhaps they had not yet gone away. "When did you see them, ma chere mademoiselle Marie? enquired Scott. You know turkeys do not settle down like immigrants in one spot, and wait till we inhabitants of the plains come out and shoot them. Was it last week, or only the day before yesterday that you saw them?" There was a very merry twinkle in his eye as he went on with this banter. Marie affected to pout, but she answered. "This morning, while the dew was shining upon the grass, and you, I doubt not, were sleeping soundly, I was abroad on the plains for the cows. It was then I saw them. I am glad, however, that you have pointed out the difference between turkeys and immigrants. I did not know it before." He handed her a tiger lily which he had plucked on the way, saying, "There, for your valuable information, I give you that. Next time I come, if you are able to tell me where I can find several flocks, I shall bring you some coppers." With a world of mischief in his eyes, he disappeared, and Mary, in spite of herself, could not conceal from everybody in the house a quick little sigh at his departure. "It seems to me this Monsieur Scott is a great favourite with your folk, Monsieur?" Said M. Riel, when the young man had left the cottage. "Now I came with my friend also for sport, but no pretty eyes had seen any flocks to reserve for me." And he gave a somewhat sneering glance at poor Marie, who was pretending to be engaged in examining the petals of the tiger-lilly, although she was all the while thinking of the mischievous, manly, sunny-hearted lad who had given it to her. M. Riel's words and the sneer were lost, so far as she was concerned. Her ears were where her heart was, out on the plain beyond the cottonwood, where she could see the tall, straight, lithe figure of young Scott, with his dog at his heels, its head now bobbing up from the grass, and now its tail. "Oui, Monsieur," returned Marie's father, "Monsieur Scott is a very great favourite with our family. We are under an obligation to him that it will be difficult for us ever to repay." "Whence comes this benefactor," queried M. Riel, with an ugly sneer, "and how has he placed you under such obligation?" Then, reflecting that he was showing a bitterness respecting the young man which he could just then neither explain nor justify, he said: "Mais, pardonnez moi. Think me not rude for asking these questions. When pretty eyes are employed to see, and pretty lips to tell of, game for one sportsman in preference to another, the neglected one may be excused for seeking to know in what way fortune has been kind with his rival." "Shall I tell the whole story, Marie?" enquired the _pere_, "or will you do so?" "O I know that you will not leave anything out that can show, the bravery of Mr. Scott, so I shall leave you to tell it," replied the girl. "Well, last spring, Marie was spending some days with her aunt, a few miles up Red River. It was the flood time, and as you remember the river was swollen to a point higher than it had ever reached within the memory of any body in the settlement. Marie is venturesome, and since a child has shown a keen delight in going upon boats, or paddling a canoe; so one day, during the visit which I have mentioned, she got into a birch that swung in a little pond formed behind her uncle's premises by the over-flowing of the stream's channel. Untying the canoe, she seized the blade and began to paddle about in the lazy water. Presently she reached the eddies, which, since a child, she has always called the 'rings of the water-witches,' wherever she learned that term. Her cousin, Violette, was standing in the doorway, as she saw Marie move off, and she cried out to her to beware of the eddies; but my daughter, wayward and reckless, as it is her habit to be in such matters, merely replied with a laugh; and then, as the canoe began to turn round and round in the gurgling circles, she cried out, 'I am in the rings of the water-witches. C'est bon! bon! C'est magnifique! O I wish you were with me, Violette, ma chere. It is so delightful to go round and round.' A little way beyond, not more than twice the canoe's length, rushed by, roaring, the full tide of the river. 'Beware, Marie, beware, for the love of heaven, of the river. If you get a little further out, and these eddies will drag you out, you will be in the mad current, and no arm can paddle the canoe to land out of the flood. Then, dear, there is the fall below, and the fans of the mill. Come back, won't you!' But my daughter heeded not the words. She only laughed, and began dipping water up from the eddies with the paddle-blade, as if it were a spoon that she held in her hand. 'I am dipping water from the witches rings,' she cried. 'How the drops sparkle! Every one is a glittering jewel of priceless value. I wish you were here with me, Violette!' Suddenly, and in an altered tone, she cried, 'Mon Dieu! My paddle is gone.' The paddle had no sooner glided out into the rushing, turbulent waters than the canoe followed it, and Marie saw herself drifting on to her doom. Half a mile below was the fall, and at the side of the fall, went ever and ever around with tremendous violence, the rending fans of the water-mill. Marie knew full well that any drift boat, or log, or raft, carried down the river at freshet-flow, was always swept into the toils of the inexorable wheels. Yet, if she were reckless and without heed a few minutes before, I am told that now she was calm. As she is present, I must refrain from too much eulogy of her behaviour. Violette gave the alarm that Marie was adrift in the river without a paddle, and in a few seconds, every body living near had turned out, and were running down the shore. Several brought paddles, but it took hard running to keep up with the canoe, for the flood was racing at a speed of eight miles an hour. When they did get up in line each one flung out a paddle. But one fell too far out, and another not far enough. About fifteen men were about the banks in violent excitement, and every one of them saw nothing but doom for Marie. As the canoe neared a point about two hundred yards above the fall, a young white man--all the rest were bois-brules--rushed out upon the bank, with a paddle in his hand, and, without a word, leaped into the mad waters. With a few strokes, he was at the side of the canoe, and put the paddle into Marie's hand. 'Here,' he said, 'Keep away from the mill; that is your only danger, and steer sheer over the fall, getting as close as possible to the left bank.' The height of the fall, as you are aware, was not more than fifteen or eighteen feet, and there was plenty of water below, and not very much danger from rocks. 'Go you on shore now, and I will meet my doom, or achieve my safety,' Marie said; but the young man answered, 'Nay, I will go over the fall too: I can then be of some service to you.' So he swam along by the canoe's side directing my daughter, and shaping the course of the prow on the very brink of the fall. Then all shot over together. The canoe and Marie, and the young man were buried far under the terrible mass of water, but they soon came to the surface again, when the heroic stranger saved my daughter, and through the fury of the mad churning waters, landed her safe and unhurt upon the bank. The young man was Thomas Scott, whom you saw here this morning. Is it any wonder, think you, that when Marie sees wild turkeys upon the prairie, she keeps the knowledge of it to herself till she gets the ear of her deliverer? Think you, now, that it is strange he should be looked upon by us as a benefactor?" "A very brave act, indeed, on the part of this young man," replied the swarthy M. Riel. "He has excellent judgment, I perceive, or he would not so readily have calculated that no harm could come to any one who could swim well by being carried over the falls." Marie's eyes flashed indignantly at this cold blooded discounting of the generous, uncalculating bravery of her young preserver. "I doubt, Monsieur, she said, whether if you had been on the bank where Monsieur Scott jumped in, you would have looked upon the going over of the fall as an exploit so free of danger as you describe it now. As a matter of fact, there _were_ many half-breeds there, many of whom, no doubt, were as brave as yourself, but I should have perished in the fans of the mill if I had to depend upon the succour of any one of them." "Mademoiselle," he retorted with a fierce light in his eye, "I am not a half-breed." "O, pardonnez mois, I thought from your features and the straightness of your coal-black hair, that you were." Riel's blood was nigh unto boiling in his veins, but he had craft enough to preserve a tolerably unruffled exterior. "And in return for this great bravery, ma petite demoiselle has, I suppose, given her heart to her deliverer?" "I think Monsieur is impertinent; and I shall ask my father to forbid him to continue to address me in such a manner." "A thousand pardons; I did not mean to pain, but only to chaff, your brave daughter. I think that Monsieur Scott is most fortunate in having a friend, a beautiful friend, so loyal to him, and so jealous of his fair fame. But to pass to other matters. Have you had visits from any emissaries of the Canadian government during the autumn?" "Yes, Monsieur Mair came here one day in company with Monsieur Scott. They were both quail shooting. They stayed only for a little, and I was quite favourably impressed with the agreeableness and politeness of M. Mair's manners." "O, indeed! Monsieur Mair was here and with Mr. Scott! I am glad that you conceive an opinion so favourable of Monsieur Mair, but I regret that I am unable to share in the regard. I think I had better open your eyes somewhat to the character of this agreeable gentleman. Since coming to Red River, his chief occupation has been writing correspondence respecting our colony, and the civilization and morals of our people. I have been preserving carefully some of the communications for future use, and if you will permit me I shall read an extract from a late contribution of his to a newspaper printed in Ontario. You will, I think, be able to gather from it something of his opinion respecting the Metis women. Indeed, I am surprised that Mademoiselle's great friend and preserver," he looked sneeringly at Marie, "should have for so close a companion a person who entertains these views about our people." "I do not know that Monsieur Scott is so close a companion of Monsieur Mair," put in Marie. "I think Monsieur is now, as he has been doing all along, assuming quite too much." "I sincerely trust that I am doing so, but I shall read the extract," and he took from his pocket-book a newspaper slip. Smoothing the creases out of the same, he read, with the most malignant glee, the following paragraph, dwelling with emphasis upon every disparaging epithet:-- "Here I am in Red River settlement. What a paradise of a place it is. The mud, which is a beautiful dusky red, like the complexion of the Red River belles, does not rise much beyond my knees; and resembling the brown-skinned beauties in more than complexion, it affectionately clings to me, and do what I will, I cannot get rid of it." "That is a very flattering description of our Red River young women, I am sure, and from the pen of your great friend's friend, too. Now is it not? But there is more than this," and he proceeded to read further. "The other evening they had a pow-wow in the settlement, which they called a dance. I was invited, and being considered such a great man here, of course--I do not speak it boastingly--the hearts of all the tallow-complexioned girls throbbed at a great rate when I entered." "Tallow complexioned girls!" reiterated the reader. "Very complimentary, indeed, on the part of the friend of your greatest friend." "Monsieur will either please finish reading his slip, since he wishes to do so, although, for my part, I am not at all interested in it, or put it by. In any case, I must ask that he will cease addressing me in this insolent tone." "Then, since Mademoiselle wills it so, I shall finish the very truthful and complimentary paragraph without further comment." "Such a bear garden as that dance was; yet I somewhat enjoyed the languishing glances of the bright-eyed damsels. But, ugh! the savages never can be made to wash themselves. When the dance had continued for three or four hours, the dancers began to pair off like pigeons and in each nook you could observe a half-breed and his girl, sometimes the demoiselle nursing her beau with arms about his neck, or _vice versa_. ... The women are all slatterns, and as a rule they exhibit about as much morality as is found among the female elk of the prairies. A white man here who is at all successful in winning female attention, needs but to whistle, or to raise his finger, to have half a dozen of the dusky beauties running after him. While I write this letter I see two maidens passing under my window. I no longer take pride or fun in the matter. To me they have become a nuisance." CHAPTER VI. "Now, Monsieur," said M. Riel, folding his newspaper slip and putting it back again into his greasy pocket-book, "you well perceive that this Monsieur Mair is not exactly the sort of gentleman who ought to be the recipient of your hospitalities. I do not say that Monsieur Scott, who went over the little waterfall with your daughter, holds the same opinion respecting us, as as does his friend Monsieur Mair; I only know that upon matters of this kind bosom friends are very apt to be of the same mind. "Who, let me ask again, has informed the gallant and generous Monsieur that these two young white men are bosom friends? Monsieur Mair was at this house once, and Monsieur Scott was with him. I understood that they had only met the day before; and it is only a week ago since Monsieur told me that he had not since seen his new friend. Monsieur has been sarcastic in his reference to Monsieur Scott, I think without much excuse." "Is not this, Monsieur Scott, an employe of the Vampire Snow, who is making surveys through our territories in our despite, and in the face of law and justice?" Marie's father replied: "Il est, Monsieur." "So I had been informed. Now Monsieur, I have some serious business to talk to you about. As you are no doubt aware, the authorities at the Canadian Capital are at this moment discussing the project of buying the North-West Territories from the Hudson Bay Company, converting Red River into a Dominion Colony of the Confederation, and setting to rule it a governor and officials chosen from among Canadians, who hold opinions respecting us as a people, quite similar to those entertained by Monsieur Mair, and those who have the honour of being his friend." This with a malignant glance toward Marie, who merely retorted with a scornful flash in her fine, proud eyes. "Well, Monsieur, I have decided that Red River shall not pass over to the hands of alien officials. I shall call upon every true colonist to rise and aid me in asserting our rights as free men, and as the proprietors of the soil we have tilled for so many years. As for your friend Mr. Scott, Mademoiselle"--turning with a hideous look toward Marie--"I am very sorry to interfere with his good fortune, but before the set of to-morrow's sun, I intend packing Mr. Snow and his followers out of our territories. Nay more, I shall keep a very sharp look out for this young man who went with you over the chute petite. Indeed it may be interesting for you to hear that I know something of his antecedents already. He delights to call himself a 'loyalist,' and has declared that the people of Red River have no right to protest against the transfer to the Canadian Government." "I do not know what Monsieur Scott's views are upon this question," replied the girl. "Whatever they are I presume that he is as much entitled to hold them as you are to maintain yours." "I am not so certain on this point as ma belle Mademoiselle seems to be," he retorted with a sneer like the hiss of a cobra. "This is our country, and any man who opposes its welfare is a traitor and a common enemy. But now, Monsieur,"--turning to Marie's father--"you must permit me to say that I view with strong disapproval the intimacy of any of our people with aliens and enemies. Therefore I find it necessary to forbid for the future any further visit of this young man Scott to your house. Nay, more, I shall not permit any communication between your family and him; as I have good reason to believe that he is a paid spy of Mr. Snow and the Government of Canada." "Monsieur," quietly retorted Marie, with a curl of infinite contempt upon her soft, red-ripe, moist lips, "You are a coward, and a snake." "Hush, Marie! Monsieur must not take heed of the ready tongue of my daughter," the poor terrified and over-credulous father put in with much trepidation. "Mon pere need not apologize to Monsieur Riel for sa fille," the girl said, giving her father a glance of mild reproach. "I think that I am not unaware of the reason why Monsieur Riel's patriotism and vigilance have taken their present generous, honourable and manly form. And as I have now to go out and attend to my work, I would desire to say before leaving, that Monsieur has addressed his last words to me. I do not wish to see him ever again at our house. Should he insist on coming--and I know he has high spirit and honourable feeling enough to even so insist and force himself where he is not welcome--it shall be to my greatest repugnance. I have been to you, mon pere, a faithful and loving child. I do not think that I have ever before this day made any important request of you. But I make one now: it is that you request this Monsieur Riel to never enter our doors again. Pray, mon pere," she said going to him and looking into his face with the intensest pleading in her great eyes, "do not refuse me this request." "Monsieur has heard my daughter's request? I cannot deny it to her." The only reply from M. Riel was a sneer that sounded like an envenomed hiss. "About the matter of visits, Monsieur, I shall consult my own taste and convenience." Marie went out from the house as regal in her bearing, and as beautiful as any princess that has ever trod the court of Caliph. Riel followed the retreating form of the lovely girl with eyes that showed the rage and desire of a wild beast. When she was out of sight he calmed himself, and assuming a changed mood, turned to her father. "Monsieur, there is no reason why you and I should quarrel; is there?" "No Monsieur; no reason." "On the contrary, it would be well, if in these troublous times, when duties so momentous await every loyal heart in the colony, that we should be friends. Is this not so?" "Oui, Monsieur." "Then we can, if you will, be friends. I am prepared to forgive the indignity put upon, me by your daughter. I will not hesitate to take your hand, and forgive you for the insult which you have just offered me. And now hear what I have to say. Coming yonder through the prairie, yesterday, I heard your daughter singing. The very sound of her voice thrilled me as I had never been delighted in all my life before. But when I saw her, sitting alone, a d heard her holding converse with a solitary bird which had lost its mate, I was ravished by her beauty, and made a vow that I would win her heart. I presently perceived that the impression I made upon her was not favourable. I took her hand in mine, but she snatched it away as if an aspek's tongue had touched it. A moment later, in the madness of my passion for her, I suddenly strained her in my arms. After this I knew that she detested me. This knowledge I could have borne, trusting to time, and to the aid of fortune, to make her look less indifferently upon me. Great achievement lies almost ready at my hand; and my end attained, she would have seen in me one who stood above all others in Red River in brilliancy of attainment and strength of character. And while in this way I was endeavouring to cool the fire that was burning me, I perceived that her heart was given to another; to one who, so far as I can judge, does not return her affection." "And who, pray Monsieur, may this rival be?" "The young man who rescued your daughter--Thomas Scott." "Mon Dieu, I hope that it is not as you say, for I do not want my daughter, much as I am indebted to this young man, to give to him her affection. If he be, as you say, a spy of Government and an enemy of our people, a marriage with him would be out of the question." "Bon, bon! Monsieur." And M. Riel, in the exuberance of his loyalty, having succeeded in the vital point, grasped the hand of Marie's father and shook and wrung it several times. "Now, Monsieur, we agree on the main point. I shall name the other conditions upon which we may be friends. I have sworn to overcome your daughter's repugnance to me. Will you assist me in the direction of accomplishing this object?" "Oui, Monsieur, by every _fair_ means." "C'est bien. By every fair means. Only fair means will I ask you to employ. I shall now tell you what I desire you to do. You must keep Mademoiselle under your strictest surveillance. She must not see Monsieur Scott, or communicate with him. When his name is introduced into conversation, you must show that the subject is displeasing to you. You will be asked why it is so, and you shall answer that you have indisputable proof, and such proof you may take my _word_ to be, that the young man is not in sympathy with the cause of the Metis, and that he is actually a secret and paid agent of the Canadian Government. That your course may seem more reasonable, and appear to be the outcome of your own inclination, you will on such occasions be able to say that you are under obligation to him for his readiness and gallantry--always use these words--when your daughter was in the brimming river; but that your gratitude can be only a, memory, since he has leagued himself against a cause so near to the heart, and so supremely in the interest, of every man and woman and child in the colony of Red River. You must at the very first convenient moment, and without letting Marie perceive that I have prompted you to this step, inform her that she must banish from her mind at once any tender fancies regarding the young man which she may possess. Point out to her that in any case it would be unwise in her to cherish feelings which very evidently are not reciprocated. Lastly, you will have to teach her cautiously, and without the semblance of coercion, but constantly, to think of me. You must show her how great is the promise which lies before me; how I am the leader of the people and ruler-predestined of all the land. Nor must you forget to show her that if I have seemed rude in her presence, and given way to anger or bitterness, it was because of my all-consuming love for her, and that henceforth the great aim of my life, through all the turbulent deeds that this tumultous time may have in store for me, shall be to win her approbation, to hear at the close of the din, and when achievement shall have crowned me master, a 'Brava, Monsieur' from her sweet lips.' "Most faithfully, Monsieur, I swear to you," answered the old man, taking the Rebel's hand in his, "will your wishes be carried out. More than this, I can almost promise you that I shall succeed." And then he went to fetch a bottle, in which he had some choice old rye. While he was away, M. Riel, who was alone--for all were absent in the fields, and his comrade had been abroad since the grey dawn--began to muse in this wise: "So he believes that he can triumph--that Marie will yield!" Then he ground his teeth like a wild beast and swore a terrible oath. "If she yield--ah! but it is a feast for me to contemplate my revenge. Raise her to the dignity of wife to share my social honours and triumph. No; elle sera ma maitresse; and I shall cast her off among the worthless and degraded ones of her sex." Then Marie's father entered with the liquor, and pledged his fealty to Monsieur with many "salutes" and "bonne santes" After M. Riel had taken sufficient liquor to make him thoroughly daring, he said with a sinister tone: "Although it may not be your honour ever to call me your son-in-law, your duty in persuading your daughter remains the same. We have formed a compact of friendship and mutual understanding; yet I must say to you that your own personal safety depends upon your compliance; depends" he repeated, raising his voice till it sounded like the bellowing of an infuriated bull, "_upon your success_. Your intimacy with this man Scott, together with the visit paid to your house by the man Mair, places you entirely at my mercy. Before many days I shall call again to see how far you have succeeded. I shall expect a report of some progress. When I call after that I shall be satisfied with nothing short of _triumph_. I now go, leaving my warning to ring in your ears till you see me again." And with an air of insolent mastery, and a gross light in his eye, he seized his fowling-piece, and strode out the door, followed by his dog. "Mon Dieu!" gasped the terrified half-breed, "I thought that we had become friends, but he goes from my door like an enemy, filling my ears with threats of vengeance. May the Virgin protect my Marie and me from his power." "Has that terrible man gone, mon pere?" enquired Marie, who now entered with sorrow and agitation in her face. "Yes; but you must not speak against him. O, how I fear him; that is to say, ma petite fille, he is a very powerful man, a great man, and will one day rule all the people, and be in eminence like unto one of the Canadian Governors: therefore, it is that it was unfortunate the young man Scott should ever have been at our house." "Ah, mon pere! wherefore? Do you regret having extended a trifling hospitality, not better than you would accord to a wandering savage, to a brave, honest, honourable young man, who, at the risk, of his own life, saved the life of your child? O, surely you have not received into your ears the poison of this man's cunning and malice;" and she threw her arms about her father's neck and sobbed, and sobbed there as if her heart would burst. Old Jean was moved to deep grief at the affliction of his daughter, yet he could offer her no word of comfort. "Monsieur has poured no poison into my ear, ma chere. He is a powerful man and a great patriot. The people all love him; and, although he spoke rudely and bitterly to you, we must forgive him. This we shall not find difficult to do, when we remember that his display of ill-feeling was because of his all-consuming love for you." "All-consuming _love!_" and her eyes blazed with indignation. "All-consuming, all debasing, low passion; not love. No, no; love is a sacred thing, whose divine name is polluted when uttered by such lips as his." "Be reasonable, ma Marie; don't suffer hastily formed dislikes to sway your judgment and good sense. There is not a girl on all the prairies who would not be proud to be wooed by Monsieur Riel. Wherefore should you not be? If you have any other affection in your heart banish it. It may be that you have cherished a tender regard for the young man Scott, who is, let me see what he is, who is ready and gallant--no, that is not it--who is quick, and brave, yes, I think that is it----." "Mon Dieu; cease, mon pere. Has this tempter gone so far as to actually put in your mouth the words to be employed in winning me to his hateful, loathsome arms. Mon Dieu, Mon Dieu;" and she pressed her little brown fingers over her throbbing temples. Has my own father leagued himself against my happiness and, and--my _honour!_" And, with a loud, heart-rending cry, she fell to the floor, pale and motionless. "Is she dead! Mon Dieu! Ma chere fille, speak to me." And then raising her death-pale head a little, he poured some of the spirits into her mouth. This restored her, but there was an almost vacant look in her eye for many minutes, which wrung his heart. "Sit up my pet and we will talk together. I will no longer play the inhuman monster by disguises and deceit." "Then you will be frank?" she said, her eyes brightening. "I swear it. Now this man has conceived a violent passion for you, and I am to press his suit, to alienate your affections from Monsieur Scott, if you entertain such feelings, and to win you over to Monsieur Riel. He is to visit us within a brief period, and when he comes he will expect me to be able to report marked progress. He will make a second visit, and he has sworn that triumph alone will satisfy him then. If things fall not out in this wise, I am promised his vengeance. He declares that our intimacy with young Scott, and the visit paid us by the homme mauvais Mair, who is an unscrupulous agent of the Canadian Government, would justify extreme measures against us; and if I mistake not the man, his intention is to arm hundreds of our people, proclaim a martial law, and establish himself as head and judge. I am certain that he would not hesitate to take the most lawless steps. Indeed, I should not regard as safe either my own life or your honour. Such then being the facts, what are we to do?" "God is good; let us first of all put our trust in Him. Then let us examine the means which He has given us to meet the evil. Now, my plan is that I shall in the first instance affect to yield with grief to such proposals as you at first make to me. Let there be a surrender of Monsieur Scott--" Here she blushed so deeply that all her sweet-rounded cheek, and her neck, and her delicious little shell-like ears, became a crimson, deep as her bodice--"and a consent to entertain as favourably as I can the suit of M. Riel. Meanwhile we can see what is the next best step. I do not think that we have much to dread by leaving Red River. We can go to your brother who lives across the border, and I am certain that he will be delighted to harbour us till the tempest blows over. I believe that this rising will rage for a brief season only, when it must yield to the arm of the Canadian authorities. M. Riel is a fanatic, and counts not the perilousness of his undertaking. He will succeed at the first, I doubt not. You will hear of slaughtered whites, and others who have incurred his private vengeance. He will lord it over all like a tyrant, till he sees the bayonets from Canada, when he will take good care to get out of the way." Her father saw that her views were sound, and consented to take her advice; but who was to acquaint his brother with their needs, and to learn if he could afford a harbourage? "Paul can go. He can take the pony and ride the distance in twelve hours." So it was agreed, and Marie busied herself with the linen of her brother, and sewed missing buttons upon his clothes. In the evening, when all were seated at supper, a young half-breed who had long been an intimate friend at the house of Marie's father, and who cast many a languishing eye upon the piquant Violette, came in. There was much concern in his face, and it was some time before he knew how to begin to break the news which he possessed. "Monsieur Riel was at my father's house to-day, and he talked long there. He is not your friend," looking at Jean. "He declares that you are in league with the enemies of our colony, and has asked my father to keep a strict watch on the doings of every member of your family. I know that he talked in the same strain at every house he visited; and I think there is no threshold in our settlement that he hasn't crossed. About twenty-five young men have declared their willingness to follow him in any exploit. They met upon a field this afternoon and drilled for a couple of hours. One of them told me,"--the speaker now turned his gaze half toward Marie--"not an hour ago that their first business would be to settle affairs with Messieurs Mair and Scott, whom they declare are enemies of Red River, and spies of the Canadian government. I should not wonder if these two men were secured to-night; and if this be so, and I am any judge of human malevolence, Riel will have them shot." The colour had gone out of Marie's cheek, and there was a terrified gleam in her eye. "Can nothing be done," she asked, "to apprise them of the miscreant's designs?" "I regret that I can do nothing; you know how gladly I would were it in my power. Every man between twenty-one and sixty years in our settlement, has been called out to attend a meeting to be held during the evening in the school-house, to discuss the situation. One Lepine, a bosom friend of Monsieur Riel, is to tell us what we are to do. I, therefore, will have to be present." "I shall go," said young Paul. "I can reach Willow grove long before the moon is up, and give warning to Monsieur Scott. But Monsieur Mair has to take care of himself. I would very gladly assist in his capture, or for that matter be well pleased to be one of a firing party to dispatch his insolent, insulting life." The young lad's cheeks were burning with indignation. "I think Monsieur Riel is an impostor, although the cause which he has espoused is a holy one. But this Mair, after receiving our hospitalities turns and holds us up to the ridicule, contempt and pity of the world. Under obligation must we ever remain to Monsieur Scott, but beyond this, he is a true gentleman, and incapable of the remotest sympathy with the mean unmanliness of this Monsieur Mair." Paul, was a tall, handsome lad, with large, spirited, brown eyes. He was in his eighteenth year, but had the manly address of twenty-one. His sister's gratitude gleamed in her eyes. When he was ready to go out to saddle his pony, she put her arms about him and kissed him. "Que Dieu benisse, mon bon frere. Bon voyage!" and she watched him, I doubt not praying, though her ruby lips moved not, for him, and for her lover, till the flitting figure of himself and his fleet-limbed pony was lost in the dusk that had already gathered over the plain... That evening when Paul returned he came not alone. Another steed and rider were there, and beyond, in the shadow of a grove of cottonwood stood a party of a dozen horsemen. Marie heard the double tramp, and with some terror drew to the window to see who was approaching. But her apprehensions suddenly vanished, and a flush came over her face. CHAPTER VII. "Mon pere, it is Paul, and there is with him Monsieur Scott; why, I wonder, has he come?" While the question yet remained unanswered, Paul entered the room accompanied by young Scott. "Monsieur will explain the cause of his visit," Paul said. "Monsieur and mademoiselle," young Scott began, inclining his head first to the father and then to the daughter, "as you may expect, only great urgency brought me here under these circumstances. A half-breed to whom I did a kindness since coming to the territories, is one of Monsieur Riel's agents, and is in the confidence of that dangerous person. He tells me that this very night, probably before the rise of the moon, a party is to surround your house, and make you and your daughter captives. The charge against you is, that you are both in league with Canadian spies, and enemies of Red River. One of the said spies is myself! It appears that you are to be taken to the common jail; and mademoiselle Marie is to be lodged in the house of a Metis hag, who is a depraved instrument of Riel's will. Therefore, I have brought hither an escort sufficient to accomplish your safe retreat to some refuge beyond the American frontier. Paul tells me that you had proposed going to your brother's. I do not consider this a safe plan. Your malignant persecutor will very speedily learn from your neighbours all information respecting the existence of relatives, and where they reside. You would be no safer from the vengeance of this monster in adjacent, thinly settled American territory, than you would be in Red River. Will you therefore come with me to my uncle's in a town not far beyond the line?--only too happy will he be to serve you in your need." The proposal was very gladly accepted. Tears stood in old Jean's eyes; and I doubt not that they came there when he began to reflect that, but for Marie, he should now have been acting in league with his miscreant persecutor against this noble, generous-hearted young fellow. Within an hour, most of the little valuables in the dear old homestead, which neither Jean nor Marie ever again expected to see, were made up into small packs, each one to be carried by one of the escorts. With a deep sigh Marie looked at the home of her happy youth, drowsing in the deep shadow of the oaks, and then mounted her horse. All that night she rode by her lover's side, and stole many a glance of admiring pride at his handsome, manly figure. When they were a couple of hours out, a dusky yellow appeared in the south-east, and then the bright, greenish-yellow rim of the Autumn moon appeared, and began to flood the illimitable prairie with a thick, wizard light. "So this miscreant has been hunting you, Marie?" said the young man, for both had unconsciously dropped in rear. "I did not like his glances this morning, and had resolved to keep my eyes upon him. I suppose, ma petite, if I had the right to keep you from the fans of water-mills, that I also hold the right of endeavouring to preserve you from a man whose arms would be worse than the rending wheel?" She said nothing, but there was gratitude enough in her eye to reward for the most daring risk that man ever run. "You do not love this sooty persecutor, do you, ma chere?"--and then, seeing that such a question pained and confused her, he said, "Hush now, ma petite fille; I shall not tease you any more." The confusion passed away, and her little olive face brightened, as does the moon when the cloud drifts off its disc. "I am very glad. O, if you only knew how I shudder at the sound of his name!" "There now, let us forget about him, I can protect you from him; can I not?" and he reined his horse closer to hers, and leaned tenderly over towards the girl. She said nothing, for she was very much confused. But the confusion was less embarrassment than a bewildered feeling of delight. But for the dull thud, thud of the hoofs upon the sod, her escort might plainly enough have heard the riotous beating of the little maiden's heart. "And now, about that flower which I gave you this morning. What did you do with it?" "Ah, Monsieur, where were your eyes? I have worn it in my hair all day. It is there now; it was there when you came to our cottage this evening." "Ah, I see. I am concerned with your head,--not with your heart. Is that it, ma petite bright eye? You know our white girls wear the flowers we give them under their throats, or upon their bosom. This they do as a sign that the donor occupies a place in their heart." He did not perceive in the dusky moonlight, that he was covering her with confusion. Upon no point was this little maiden so sensitive, as when it was revealed to her that a particular habit or act of hers differed from that of the civilized white girl. Her dear little heart was almost bursting with shame, and this thought was running through her mind. "Oh! what a savage I must seem in his eyes." Her own unspoken words seemed to burn through her whole body. "But how could I know where to wear my rose? I have read in English books that gentle ladies wear them there." And these lines of Tennyson came running through her head. "She went by dale, and she went by down, With a single rose in her hair." And they gave her some relief, for she thought, after all, that he might be only joking When the blood had gone back from her forehead, she turned towards her lover, who had been looking at her since speaking with somewhat of a tender expression in his mischievous eyes. "Do white girls never wear roses in their hair? I thought they did. Can it be wrong for me to wear mine in the same place?" "Ah, my little barbarian, you do not understand me. If an old bachelor, whose head shone like the moon there in the sky, were to give to some blithe young belle a rose or a lily, she would, most likely, twist it in her hair; but if some other hand had presented the flower, one whose eye was brighter, whose step was quicker, whose laugh was cheerier, whose years were fewer; in short, ma chere Marie, if some one for whom she cared just a little bit more than for any other man that walked over the face of creation, had presented it to her, she would not put it in her hair. No, my little unsophisticated one, she would feel about with her unerring fingers, for the spot nearest her heart, and there she would fasten the gift. Now, ma Marie, suppose you had possessed all this information this morning when I gave you the flower, where would you have pinned it?" "Nobody has ever done so much for me as has Monsieur. He leaped into the flood, risking his life to save mine. I would be an ungrateful girl, then, if I did not think more of him than of any other man; therefore, I would have pinned your flower on the spot nearest my heart," Then, deftly, and before he could determine what her supple arms and nimble little brown fingers were about, she had disengaged the lily from her hair, and pinned it upon her bosom. "There now, Monsieur, is it in the right place?" and she looked at him with a glance exhibiting the most curious commingling of innocence and coquetry. "I cannot answer. I do not think that you understand me yet. If the act of saving you from drowning were to determine the place you should wear the rose, then the head, as you first chose, was the proper spot, Do you know what the word love means?" "O, I could guess, perhaps, if I don't know. I have heard a good deal about it, and Violette, who is desperately fond of a handsome young Frenchman, has explained it so fully to me, that I think I know. Yes, Monsieur, I _do_ know." "Well, you little rogue, it takes one a long time to find out whether you do or not. In fact I am not yet quite satisfied on the point. However, let me suppose that you do know what love is; the all-consuming sort, the kind that sighs like the very furnace. Well, that part of the statement is clear. Then, supposing that a flower is worn over the heart only to express love, of the sort I mentioned, for the donor, where would you, with full knowledge of this fact, have pinned the flower that I plucked for you this morning?" "Since I do not understand the meaning of the word love with very great clearness,--I think Monsieur has expressed the doubt that I do understand it--I would not have known where to pin the flower. I would not have worn it at all. I would, Monsieur, have set it in a goblet, and taking my stitching, would have gazed upon it all the day, and prayed my guardian angel to give me some hint as to where I ought to put it on." "You little savage, you have eluded me again. Do you remember me telling you that some day, if you found out for me a couple of good flocks of turkeys, I would bring you some coppers?" "I do." "Well, if you discovered a hundred flocks now, I would not give you one." And then he leaned towards her again as if his lips yearned for hers; but his love of mischief was too strong for every other desire. For her part, she took him exactly as she should have done. She never pouted;--If she had done so, I fancy that there would have been soon an end of the wild, boyish, sunny raillery. "Hallo! Little one, we are away, away in the rear. Set your pony going, for we must keep up with our escort." Away they went over the level plain, through flowers of every name and dye, the fresh, exquisite, autumn breeze bearing the scent of the myriad petals upon their faces. After a sharp gallop over about three miles of plain, they overtook the main body of the escort. They now reached the border, and the pavements of the little town of Pembina rang with the hoofs of their horses. Away still to the south, they rode through the glorious autumn night, under the calm, bountiful moon. "Now, Monsieur Riel, I think we are some distance from your foul talons," Scott said, as turning in his saddle, he saw the steeples of Pembina, gloom-wrapped, almost sunk in the horizon. "I fancy I can hear the curses of his willing tools in the air, after they swooped down upon your cottage, Marie, and found the inmates flown." "What is your uncle's cottage like, Monsieur Scott?" "It is not unlike your own. It is in a grove of pines, and a happy brook goes chattering by it all the summer. Will you come fishing in it with me, ma petite?" "Oui, avec le plus grand plaisir, Monsieur," and she looked so happy, there was so much sun in her eyes, so many divine little dimples in her cheek, in contemplation of all the promised happiness, that it would not require much keenness to discover the secret of the dear little maiden. "Of course, you shall fish with a pin-hook. I am not going to see you catch yourself with one of the barbed hooks, like those which I shall use." "O, Monsieur Scott! Why will you always treat me as a baby!" and there was the most delicate, yet an utterly indescribable sort of reproach in her voice and attitude, as she spoke these words. "Then it is not a baby by any means," and he looked with undisguised admiration upon the maiden, with all the mystic grace and perfect development of her young womanhood. "It is a woman, a perfect little woman, a fairer a sweeter, my own mignonette, than any girl ever seen in this part of the plains since first appeared here human footprint." "O, Monsieur is now gone to the other extreme. He is talking dangerously; for he will make me vain." "Does the ceaseless wooing of the sweet wild rose by soft winds, make that blossom vain? or is the moon spoilt because all the summer night ten thousand streams running under it sing to it unnumbered praises? As easy, ma Marie, to make vain the rose or the moon as to turn your head by telling your perfections." "Monsieur covers me with confusion!" and the little sweet told the truth. But it was a confusion very exquisite to her. It sang like entrancing music through her veins; and gave her a delightful delirium about the temples, flow fair all the glorious great round of the night, and the broad earth lit by the moon, seemed to her now, with the music of his words coursing through her being. Everything was transfigured by a holy beauty, for Love had sanctified it, and clothed it with his own mystic, wonderful garments. It was with poor Marie, then, as it has some time or other been with us all: when every bird that sang, every leaf that whispered, had in its tone a cadence caught from the one loved voice. I have seen the steeple strain, and rock, and heard the bells peal out in all their clangourous melody, and I have fancied that this delirious ecstasy of sound that bathed the earth and went up to heaven was the voice of one slim girl with dimples and sea-green eyes. The mischievous young Scotchman had grown more serious than Marie had ever seen him before. "I hope, my child, that you will be happy here; the customs of the people differ from yours, but your nature is receptive to everything good and elevated, so that I am certain you will soon grow to cherish our civilization." I must say here for the benefit of the drivelling, cantankerous critic, with a squint in his eye, who never looks for anything good in a piece of writing, but is always on the search for a flaw, that I send passages from Tennyson floating through my Marie's brain with good justification. She had received a very fair education at a convent in Red River. She could speak and write both French and English with tolerable accuracy; and she could with her supple, tawny little fingers, produce a nice sketch of a prairie tree-clump, upon a sheet of cartridge paper, or a piece of birch rind. Young Scott was all the while growing more serious, and even becoming pathetic, which is a sign of something very delicious, and not uncommon, when you are travelling under a bewitching moon, in company with a more bewitching maiden. "I wish I could be with you during the early part of your stay here, for I could do much toward reconciling you to your new life." "And are you not going to stay with us?" Her voice sounded somewhat like a restrained cry of pain. "No Marie, my child, I have to return to the territories." "But that wicked man will work his vengeance upon you." "It is just to meet that wicked man upon his own ground that I go back. It is to thwart him, to cast in my strength on the side of peace, in the interest of those fertile plains, that I return. You do not suppose that this licentious fanatic can ultimately prevail against the will of the people of Canada, against the military force of the Empire of Great Britain. The sovereign of our mighty realm tolerates in no land any dispute of her authority, and this mad uprising will be crushed as I might stamp put the feeble splutter of a bed-room taper. There are without the intervention of outside force at all, enough of brave and loyal whitemen to overthrow this scurvy miscreant; and my immediate task is to do the little that lies in my power to incite them to their duty. When my work is done, when the plains are cleared of the mutinous, blind, unreasoning hordes whom this cunning, vainglorious upstart has called away from their peaceful homesteads, I will return, my darling little girl, with the tidings; and I shall bring you back to the spot where you grew up pure and artless as the lily that brightens the pond upon which we have so often paddled our birch together. What the days after that may have in store for us I know not." "Ah, I shall be very dreary in your absence, Monsieur Scott." "And I, my dear girl, shall be not less dreary without you. I believe you have regarded yourself as a mere plaything in my eyes. Why, ma chere, all of my heart you have wholly and irrevocably. One of your dear hands is more precious, more sacred to me, than any other girl whom mine eyes have ever seen. Do you remember the definition of love that I tried to give you? Well, I gave it from my own experience. With such a love, my prairie flower, do I love you. It is fit now, that we are so soon to part, that I should tell you this: and you will, know that every blow I strike, every noble deed I do shall be for the approbation of the dear heart distant from me in American territory. I have said that the hours of absence will be dreary; but there will be beyond the the darkest of them one hope which shall blaze like a star through the night, and that is that I shall soon be able to call my Marie my sweet, sweet bride. Now, my beloved, if that wished for time had come, and I were to say, 'Will you be mine, Marie,' what would you answer?" "I did not think that it would be necessary for Monsieur to ask me that question," she answered shyly, her beautiful eyes cast down; "I thought he knew." "My own little hunted pet!" He checked his horse, and seized the bridle of Marie's pony, till the two animals stood close together. Then he kissed the girl upon her sweet virgin lips, murmuring low, "My love." The next morning he was away, and Marie sat sad by the strange brook that ho had told her about. Old Jean was very contented, but now that he had nought to do, ha babbled all day about the wars; and thanked the Virgin that himself and his child had escaped the clutches of the Rebel leader. Paul speedily obtained employment harvesting on a large farm near by, and after a little old Jean began to be extremely useful to his kind host. But tying sheaves was not the occupation, at this tumultuous time, that young Paul's heart would have chosen. For how he longed to be in the fray! to stand, side by side, with his young comrade, Luc, fighting for the honour and independence of Riviere Rouge. It was only, after the most tedious argument, that he could be prevailed upon to stay; and it was Thomas Scott, who had so overcome him. "You know the designs that this monster harbours," that young man had said to Paul. "You are foolish enough to count now on his patriotism, and to imagine that he would welcome you to his ranks. He would act far differently: he would probably spare you, provided that you lent yourself to his evil designs. If you refused to do this, he would very probably shoot you as a traitor to your country." As for Riel, it may seem that his conduct in deciding in one hour, to use Marie's father as a tool, and, during the next, projecting a plan which defeated the very end which he had in view, was absolutely illogical, and unreasonable; and that it is the narrator whose skill is at fault. But I have been at pains to give this occurrence at length, for the very purpose of revealing the unstaid, unreasoning character of Riel, and how far passion and impulse will carry him away from sound understanding. As for the Arch-agitator, the spirits taken at the house of old Jean, had raised the savage part of his blood to the highest pitch of unreasoning and confident passion. All obstacles seemed to disappear, and he saw with the same glance the gratification of his passion and of his revenge. "Take the horses," he had said to his confidant, "before the moon rises. Approach the house softly, and carefully surround it. The girl must be treated with respect. You know where to leave her." "Oui, Monsieur," and the slavish fanatic went to do the vile bidding. For some hours M. Riel went among the Metis, perfecting his plans, but towards midnight he ordered his horse, and, with a lurid light in his eye, set off for the hut of the half-breed hag where he expected his ruffianly emissaries would have placed Marie before his arrival. But the cabin was desolate, save for the figure of an ill-featured old woman, who, when she heard hoof-beats approach, came to the door peering out into the night. "Has the expected yet arrived?" he asked, a half-puzzled expression in his face. "No, Monsieur." "Curses! What can have happened? They should have been here two hours ago. It is now three o'clock." Then he alighted and strode about for half an hour over the dim-lit sward, thrusting out his head every few seconds, in the direction from which the party should come. But still no sound, no sight, of any horseman. He now began to storm and blaspheme, and would remind anybody who saw him of some wild beast foiled of his prey. Presently, he observed a long distance off upon the plain, a figure which he believed was moving. Was this only a poplar or a cotton-wood tree? He got upon his knees, and put his ear to the ground; the soft thud of a horse's hoof vibrated under his ear, and he was satisfied. "But there is only one horseman. What can it mean?" He could not bear the suspense, and flinging himself upon his horse, he galloped out to meet the advancing stranger. It was soon told. The inmates had escaped, evidently long before the party got to the dwelling. The embers were very low on the hearth. Every article of value had been removed, and there were the prints of many hoofs near the cottage. "Scott has foiled me!" and the outwitted tyrant-libertine swore the most terrible oaths, that he would be revenged. "Off," he said to his confidant. "You must scour Red River over to find these fugitives. Wherever you see the girl, seize her, and bring her hither. The people must all know that she is a spy, and leagued with our most deadly enemies to thwart our cause. As for the father, catch him too, though I should not fret, if, in the capture, a stray bullet or two went singing through his head. Above all, Scott must be captured," and this was to himself, "let me lay hands upon him!" The horseman was riding off. "Stop! This old Jean has relatives in the territory; and with one of these he may be taking refuge." "I do not think that this is likely, Monsieur. But I learnt, and it was the prosecution of these enquiries among Jean's nearest neighbours, that kept me late in reaching you, that he has a brother in Pembina. Now in that direction did the hoof-marks of the party lead." "I see. He has gone there, counting on safety beyond the lines; but he leans upon a hollow reed. Let me see: to-morrow at the convention, next day at the grand parade of arms. Yes, on Tuesday evening, take with you forty men to Pembina. Of course, you go there with all speed, and locate the residence. Then on Tuesday night, when you enter the city, surround the house by a sortie You will have nothing to fear from the citizens, they have no force there to oppose yours, and if they had you could accomplish your mission so suddenly that you might be on the prairie with your prize before they had their arms in their hands." The horseman rode off, and the Rebel was alone. We have seen that Mr. McDougall had appointed his Deputy Colonel Dennis, as Conservator of the peace, and authorized him to organize a force, and put down the Rebellion. The English and Scotch settlers, almost to a man, sympathized with the interdicted governor; yet they did not care to bring themselves into conflict with men, with whom, for years past, they had lived in the most friendly relationship, unless some great necessity arose. As for Riel, they regarded him as an ambitious, short-sighted demagogue, who palmed off his low cunning for brilliant leadership, upon the credulous half-breeds. Nevertheless, a large number of these settlers declared their readiness to march under Colonel Dennis, and disperse the nest of rebels at Fort Garry. I need hardly say that most of the Irish settlers were heart and soul with Riel. It was not that they had any particular grievance to resent, or any grievance at all for that matter. It was as natural to them to rise in revolt, since the rising meant resistance to the lawful authority, as it is for the little duck first cast into the pond, to swim. A red haired, pug-nosed Irishman, coming to New York, leaped ashore and asked, "Is there a guvernment in this counthry?" "There is." "Thin I'm opposed to it." Much the same was it in the North-West, and the violent, blustering ruffian O'Donoghue was the mouthpiece, the leader, the type of that class of the people. A number of loyal Scotch and English, therefore, did arise, and they were known as the Portage party. This was some months after the night that we last saw Riel thwarted upon the prairies. In that connection it only remains to be said that the mission of the confidant to Pembina was fruitless; and the Rebel gnashed his teeth that his desires and his revenge had all been baulked. He had heard, however, that Thomas Scott was abroad through his territories; and that he had enlisted under the banner of Colonel Dennis,--which was the truth. What galled him most was, that in case he should succeed in getting Scott into his hands, he had no proofs that would be regarded as sufficient evidence upon which to proceed with the extreme of vengeance toward him. Yet his orders stood unchanged: "Wherever you find Thomas Scott seize him; and convey him to Fort Garry." On the sixth of December the confidant came into the tyrant's presence and said: "We have caught Scott." [Footnote: I take the following from Begg's "History of the North-West Rebellion," p. 161: "About this time (6th December), the French arrested and imprisoned Mr. Thomas Scott, Mr. A. McArthur, and Mr. Wm. Hallet. Mr. Scott, it appears, had been one of the party assembled in Schultz's house, but had afterwards left; and no other reason for his arrest is known, except his having enrolled under Colonel Dennis. Mr. McArthur, was, it is said, confined on suspicion of acting secretly on behalf of Mr. McDougall; and Mr. Hallet, for his activity in assisting and advising Colonel Dennis." ] The Rebel leader's eye gleamed with a wolfish light. "Is he in the Fort?" "Yes." "Bon! I shall be there presently." So without any delay he proceeded to the Fort, and entered the apartment where young Scott was confined. "Ah, Monsieur! This is where you are?" "Yes, you tyrannical ruffian. But I shall not be here for long." Riel curbed the mad blood which had leaped to his temples. "Monsieur shall not be here long, if he chooses to accept conditions upon which he may be free." "Come, for curiosity sake, let us hear the proposals; I am certain that they are foul. Yet, as I say, I am anxious to hear them." "Monsieur must be reasonable. There is no good purpose to be served by railing at me." "That is true. You are too infamous a miscreant to be shamed or made better by reproaches." "Nevertheless, I shall proceed to business, Monsieur. Do you know where old Jean and his daughter have taken up their abode?" "I do." "So I suspected. If you will let me know their place of abode, that I may give them my guarantee for their personal safety if they return to their home--as I understand that through some unfounded fear of me they fled, and I am anxious to stand well in the affections of all my people--I shall permit you forthwith to leave this Fort." "Contemptible villain, liar and tyrant, I will _not_ reveal to you. Begone. By heaven! if you stand there I shall bury my hands in your foul, craven throat." "Take care, Monsieur," was all M. Riel said, as he left Scott's presence. But his eye burned like a fiend's. The agitator, with a spirit of the most devilish rage consuming him, nevertheless went on to forward the general movement. His first great step was against the followers of Colonel Dennis, who had banded together and posted themselves in the house of Dr. Schultz, a very prominent settler. They had gathered here with arms in their hands, but they seemed like a lot of little children, without any purpose. There was no moral cohesion among them, and there was no force either to lead or to drive them. They were not long thus ridiculously impounded, when they began to look at one another, as if to ask: "_Quis furores o cives?_" They were not alone unprepared and undetermined to go up to Fort Garry, and fight the greasy Rebel and his followers, but they were by no means certain as to what they should do were the enemy to come against them. And this is just the very thing that the enterprising Monsieur Riel proposed to do. It is said that about this time he was often found reading books describing the sudden and unexpected military movements of Napoleon. And I have not the remotest doubt that the diseased vanity of the presumptuous crank enabled him to see a likeness in himself to the Scourge of Nations. So he said to his men: "We shall go down and capture this Dennis' geese-pound. Better turn out in good force, with your arms, though I am quite certain that you can capture the whole caboose with broom-sticks." So the Metis thronged after his heels, and surrounded the Schultz mansion with its "congregation of war spirits." Of course there is something to be said for the gathering together of these loyal people here, as there is for the issuing of the proclamation by the citizens of London, per the mouth of the three tailors. Beyond was Fort Garry, unlawfully seized by Riel, and now unlawfully invested by his troops. This was, therefore, a menace to the unlawful combination at the fort. At once the agitator began to dictate terms. If they would come out of their ridiculous hive, and surrender their arms, he would suffer no harm whatever to befall them; but content himself with merely taking them all in a lump, and locking them up prisoners in the fort. He would, however, insist upon other formalities; and, therefore, exhibited a declaration which he would ask them to sign. By this document each man would bind himself to rise no more, but to submit to the authority of the Provisional Government. There was very little parleying. Each brave loyalist took the paper, and put his name to it. [Footnote *] Dr. O'Donnell was the first to sign his name, and after he had done the rest followed and with much credit to the celerity of their penmanship. Then they all moved out and were escorted up to Fort Garry, where they were held for a considerable period, despite the prayers of prominent persons who had taken no active part on either side, for their liberation. [* Footnote: I take the following from Mr. Begg's History of the Rebellion: "In the meantime, there were from two to three hundred armed French half-breeds, as well as a number of lookers-on, around and outside the building; and it is said that a couple of mounted cannon (six pounders) were drawn outside the walls of Fort Garry, ready to be used in case of an assault upon the besieged premises. "When all those in the house had signed, and the surrender handed to Riel, he said that there were two signatures not on the list, which ought to be there--and which he insisted upon having. These were the names of James Mulligan and Charles Garrett. A guard from the French party was therefore sent to hunt up those two men; and in a short time they returned with the individuals they had been in search of. As soon as this had been done, the prisoners were taken out and marched to Fort Garry; and the following ladies, who, during the siege, had nobly resolved upon remaining by the side of their husbands, also insisted upon accompanying them to Fort Garry. "The following are the names of the ladies: Mrs. Schultz, Mrs. Mair, Mrs. O'Donnell; and as the first named lady was ill, probably from the excitement of the past few days, a sleigh was procured, and Dr. Schultz himself drew her along in it, behind the rest of the prisoners. When they reached Fort Garry, Mr. J. H. McTavish, accountant in the Hudson Bay Company service, kindly offered to give up his private quarters for the use of the married men and their families, and thus made things more comfortable for the ladies."] CHAPTER VIII. In the meantime, the Government at Ottawa had convinced itself that affairs were in a pretty bad mess in the North-West. Therefore they dispatched, with olive branches, two commissioners to treat with the malcontents. It is hardly worth while to mention the names of these two gentlemen, though I may as well do so. They were Vicar-General Thibeault, this prelate, I understand, being a relative of the gentleman who produced the life of Sir Charles Tupper, and Colonel DeSalaberry. Mr. Donald A. Smith, the chief officer of the Hudson Bay Company, was also dispatched. He was instructed to inquire into and report upon the cause of the disturbances and also to assist Governor McTavish, or to relieve him, altogether of duties should ill health have incapacitated him. Mr. Smith arrived in due season at the settlement, and sought an interview with the Rebel leader in Fort Garry. M. Riel very readily admitted him; and then turned the keys upon him. It was a very great pity that it was not upon some members of the beautiful government at Ottawa that he had the opportunity of fastening the locks! There were now about sixty prisoners in the fort; the British ensign had been hauled down, and the flag of the Provisional Government, a combination of fleurs de-lys and shamrocks, hoisted in its stead. When the news got abroad that an agent had come from Canada to treat with the people on behalf of the Canadian Government, that Mr. McDougall was in disfavour with the Dominion ministry, and had returned to Ottawa, M. Riel's influence began to diminish sensibly. "Let us hear what Donald Smith has to say to us," they began to cry; and the Arch Rebel was fain to consent. A monster meeting of 1,100 people was held in the open air, with the thermometer twenty degrees below zero. Riel and his followers were not satisfied with the terms of the Dominion agent; and the arch disturber had made up his mind not to be satisfied. Yet he was not secure in his position, for there was much writhing among hosts of his followers under his tyrannical caprices. Sometimes he broke loose from all civilized restraint, and acted like a mad savage. Governor McTavish, who was reaching the last stages of consumption, for some reason incurred the ill-will of the autocrat. One might have supposed that a man tottering on the grave's brink would have been secure from violence and insult; but the heartless Rebel ruffian was insensible to every human impulse. Bursting into the chamber of the sick man, he raged like a wild bull, stamped upon the floor, and declared that he would have him shot before midnight. Then telling off a guard he sent them to invest the house. His rage cooled down after a little, and the murderous threat was not carried into execution. I have said that the loyalty and obedience of his entire followers were, so far, by no means assured. Hundreds who sympathized with the uprising, and in the beginning expressed admiration for his courage and daring, began to be shocked at his tyranny, and to hold aloof. This was the reason, we may be sure, that some of the revengeful threats which he, about this time made, were not carried into effect. He held long counsel with his military leader, Lepine. "How does the sentiment of the settlement go now? Do they disapprove of my severe measures?" "They do, Monsieur; and I am inclined to think that you will be obliged to show some generosity, even toward your worst enemies, to maintain the confidence and sympathy of your followers." "Suppose I release these prisoners?" "I know of nothing more popular that you could do." "But Scott? He is my deadliest enemy. It is to give a colour of justification to my attitude towards him that I have incarcerated the rest." "Even him, Monsieur, I think it would be advisable now to let him depart with the rest. I am quite certain that he will before long, moved by his hatred of yourself, commit some act that will justify you in according to him very stern sort of punishment. "Be it so. I shall let them all go. But remember: you never must allow this man to pass from under your eye." Meanwhile poor Marie was far away, sighing all the day for some word from her lover. She had heard that they had captured him and locked him in a dungeon. A terrible fever seized her, and she cried out in her delirium to take her to her lover. For many days after the fire of her illness had cooled, she lay between life and death like some fitful shadow; but when a letter came to her, in the dear writing that she so well knew, announcing that he was once more free, the enfeebled blood began to stir in her veins, and a faint tint of rose began to appear on the wasted cheek. "I will run over and see my little love during the first breathing time that offers," he wrote. "I hope, ma amie, you are not sorrowing at my absence. No hour passes over me, whether wake or dreaming, that I do not sigh for my darling Marie; but I am consoled with the thought that when the turmoil is ended, when this land of tumult and tyranny has become a region of peace and fruitful industry, I will be able to bring my darling back to her dear old home; and in a little wed her there, and then take her to my arms for ever." This was very sweet tidings to the desolate girl. She read the letter over and over till she could repeat every word of the eight large pages which it contained. When she began to grow stronger she would keep it in her lap all day, and touch it tenderly as a young mother would her sleeping babe. Before blowing out her lamp in the night she would kiss the letter, and put it under her pillow. When she opened her large bright eyes in the morning she would take it, kiss it, and read it once again. During all this time the fire of Riel's two-fold passion was not burning lower:--nay, it was growing stronger. His aim now was to make himself such a ruler and master in the settlement that every word of his should be as law, and that no man, not all the people, might disobey his command or censure his action. "So Thomas Scott is to marry her, when the strife ends," he would speculate. "Ah, Monsieur Scott, if to that time you defer your nuptials, they shall take place in heaven --or in hell." For the furtherance of his diabolical personal aims he now began to assume a benignant, fatherly tone, and when he issued his famous "Proclamation to the people of the North-West," everybody was struck by the calmness, the restraint, and even the dignity of its language. [Footnote *1] He likewise endeavoured to show that he was not a disturber whose only mission was to pull down. Through his instrumentality, and at his suggestion in every one of its details, a Bill of Rights, [Footnote *2] was drawn up, and published to the people. This document set forth little more than what would be regarded as legitimate requests. [*1 Footnote: This document was as follows:--"Let the assembly of twenty-eight representatives, which met on the 9th March, be dear to the people of Red River! That assembly has shown itself worthy of great confidence. It has worked in union. The members devoted themselves to the public interests, and yielded only to sentiments of good will, duty and generosity. Thanks to that noble conduct, public authority is now strong. That strength will be employed to sustain and protect the people of the country. "To-day the Government pardons all those whom political differences led astray only for a time. Amnesty will be generously accorded to all those who will submit to the Government; who will discountenance or inform against dangerous gatherings. "From this day forth the public highways are open. "The Hudson Bay Company can now resume business. Themselves contributing to the public good, they circulate their money as of old. They pledge themselves to that course. "The attention of the Government is also directed very specially to the northern part of the country, in order that trade there may not receive any serious check, and peace in the Indian districts may thereby he all the more securely maintained. "The disastrous war which at one time threatened us, has left among us fears and various deplorable results. But let the people feel reassured. "Elevated by the Grace of Providence and the suffrages of my fellow-citizens to the highest position in the Government of my country, I proclaim that peace reigns in our midst this day. The Government will take every precaution to prevent this peace from being disturbed. "While internally all is thus returning to order, externally, also, matters are looking favourable. Canada invites the Red River people to an amicable arrangement. She offers to guarantee us our rights, and to give us a place in the Confederation equal to that of any other Province. "Identified with the Provisional Government, our national will, based upon justice, shall be respected. "Happy country, to have escaped many misfortunes that were prepared for her! In seeing her children on the point of a war, she recollects the old friendship which used to bind them, and by the ties of the same patriotism she has re-united them again for the sake of preserving their lives, their liberties, and their happiness. "Let us remain united and we shall be happy. With strength of unity we shall retain prosperity. "O, my fellow-countrymen, without distinction of language, or without distinction of creed--keep my words in your hearts! If ever the time should unhappily come when another division should take place amongst us, such as foreigners heretofore sought to create, that will be the signal for all the disasters which we have had the happiness to avoid. "In order to prevent similar calamities, the Government will treat with all the severity of the law those who will dare again to compromise the public security. It is ready to act against the disorder of parties as well as against that of individuals. But let us hope rather that extreme measures will be unknown and that the lessons of the past will guide us in the future. "LOUIS RIEL. "Government House, "Fort Garry, April 9th, 1870."] [*2 Footnote: This document claimed:-- "1st. The right to elect our own Legislature. "2. The Legislature to have power to pass all laws, local to the Territory, over the veto of the Executive, by a two-thirds vote. "3. No Act of the Dominion Parliament (local to this Territory) to be binding on the people until sanctioned by their representatives. "4. All sheriffs, magistrates, constables, &c., &c., to be elected by the people--a free homestead pre-emption law. "5. A portion of the public lands to be appropriated to the benefit of schools, the building of roads, bridges, and parish buildings. "6. A guarantee to connect Winnipeg by rail with the nearest line of railroad--the land grant for such road or roads to be subject to the Legislature of the Territory. "7. For four years the public expenses of the Territory, civil, military and municipal, to be paid out of the Dominion Treasury. "8. The military to be composed of the people now existing in the Territory. "9. The French and English language to be common in the Legislature and Council, and all public documents and Acts of Legislature to be published in both languages. "10. That the Judge of the Superior Court speak French and English. "11. Treaties to be concluded and ratified between the Government and several tribes of Indians of this Territory, calculated to I insure peace in the future. "12. That all privileges, customs and usages existing at the time of the transfer, be respected. "13. That these rights be guaranteed by Mr. McDougall before he be admitted into this Territory. "14. If he have not the power himself to grant them, he must get an Act of Parliament passed expressly securing us these rights: and, until such Act be obtained, he must stay outside the Territory."] His followers soon began to forget his late manifestation of tyranny and violence, and his enemies found themselves silenced by his restraint, and the wisdom of his declarations. Yet the rebel leader for many reasons, one of which is very well known to the reader, was one of the unhappiest of men. Besides the matter at his heart he lived hourly in mortal dread of bodily harm. In the dead of night he would waken, start suddenly from his bed and clutch at some garment hanging upon the wall, deeming the thing to be an assassin. Mr. Begg says that one day he went out to call upon one Charles Nolin, for the purpose of effecting a reconciliation. While he was sitting in the house eating supper, a man having a gun passed the window; upon which Riel suddenly threw down his knife and fork, and declared that he was about to be shot. Nolin answered that he never would be shot in his house, and immediately went out to see who the man was. It appears that he was an Indian, seeking the way to a comrade's lodge, and perfectly innocent of any murderous intention. Almost immediately after this had occurred, about forty men from the Fort arrived, and accompanied Riel back to his quarters. His terror was so oppressive, that he was threatened with an attack of brain fever. Sixty miles from Fort Garry was a settlement known as Prairie Portage. The inhabitants to a considerable extent consisted of whitemen, and English and Scotch half-breeds. When news reached this community that the Disturber had taken sixty prisoners and locked them up in Fort Garry, a feeling of the deepest indignation took possession of all. A number of the settlers called upon Major Boulton, a gentleman who had at one time been a captain in the 10th Regiment, and spoke to him in this wise: "We can muster here 400 good fighting men, and if I you will lead us we shall march against this scoundrel, I liberate the people whom he has shut up in the Fort, and put an end to the rebellion." "You hold out a very fair prospect," Major Boulton answered, "but I have very grave doubts that the thing can be accomplished as easily as you imagine." "We have the arms, and we are determined to move against that presumptuous nest of domineering banditti. If you do not lead us, then the command will have to fall upon one of ourselves, and there is no man amongst us who has had any experience in leadership." "How are your numbers made up?" "We have nearly a hundred immigrants, and about double that number of English-speaking half-breeds." "I consent to your request, but you must distinctly know that I do so altogether against my own judgment. Against my _judgment_ only, however, not against my inclinations." Very speedily the force was marshalled together, and organised in rough shape. Winter now reigned in all its severity upon the plains. Recently snow had fallen, and without snow shoes it was next to impossible to march. The arms of this crudely-disciplined band, as may be imagined, were not of the most approved pattern. Some of the half-breeds had flint-locks, and their highest average of "going-off" capacity was about 33 1/3 per cent. That is to say, out of three snaps you got the piece "off" once. The miscarriages were made up of "missing fire" and "burning prime." Now, while this dangerous army was marching toward Fort Garry, Riel, on the advice of his military chief, Lepine, had liberated the prisoners. Many of the latter tarried not long on the shadow of the rebel stronghold. Thomas Scott learned, on leaving the stockade, that a heavy force was proceeding to the Fort to overthrow the rebels, and made all haste to join the loyalists. Major Boulton was not without some definite and even commendable plan of procedure, much as he has been criticised by those who always show their wisdom _after_ the event. To young Scott he detailed his programme. "My ambition is," he said, "to delude the rebels as to my movements, by affecting a desire to treat with them. Therefore, I shall halt with my forces a short march from Fort Garry, and when I have lulled suspicion, I will make a dash, in the night, trusting to the suddenness and vigour of the onset for success." Such a proceeding Scott strongly approved, and Major Boulton found that the young man's knowledge of the rebels' condition would be of the greatest value to the enterprise. So with considerable enthusiasm the force marched on. Now, however, the sky became a sullen indigo, and flakes of spitting snow began to drive out of the east. "I have some fear of that sky," the commander said to his followers. "If more snow comes, there is an end of the march." All day, and through the night and during the next day, the storm raged, covering the prairie with four feet of soft snow. Riel's scouts had given warning of the approach of the loyalists, and every man in the fort seized a fire arm, ready to march instantly upon the besiegers. The ruffianly O'Donoghue was fairly in his element. "Boy hivins and airth," he said, "but it's moyself that's itching to get at those lick-shpittle loyalists. Veeve lah Republeekh," he shouted, tossing his filthy hat, "and God save Oirland." "We must return, my men," Major Boulton said. "If these well-armed rebels were to come against us now, they would butcher us like sheep." With hearts full of disappointment, the force disbanded, and the men began to retrace their steps homeward. A portion of it, however, remained together. Some in sleighs and others on foot verged off across the prairie from St. John's school-house, in this way endeavouring to avoid Fort Garry. But Riel's eyes had been upon them, and big, unwashed O'Donoghue, mounting his horse, shouted-- "We've got thim. Veeve lah Republeekh; God save Oirland," and set out over the plain, followed by a host of little Frenchmen, bristling like porcupines, with their war-like inclinations. "Surround the lick-shpittles, Mounsieurs," shouted the big, red Irishman. "Veeve lah, Veeve lah!" he screamed, and beat the flanks of his horse with his monster feet. The big ruffian was fairly delirious for a fight. "Thim are the min. Mounsieurs," he shouted, "that robbed my counthrey of her liberty. Him thim in, Mounsieurs." In this way he continued to shout, his voice sounding over the snowy waste like the bellowing of a bull. As he neared the portage detachment, he perceived Major Boulton, whom he knew. "Oha," he bellowed, "Mr. Chief Sassenach. Veeve lah Republeekh, God save Oirland! Surrender me brave lick-shpittle. What's this? Tare en nouns, if it isn't Tom Shkott. Divil resaive me you'll not get off this time. Lay down your arms, traitors and crown worshippers. Lay thim down. Drop thim in the shnow. There, don't be too nice. Down wid thim. Or will ye foight? But it's meself that would loike a bit of a shindy wid ye." Thereupon he took his rifle, loaded it, and pointed it at the head of Major Boulton. "Major," he shouted, "your eye is covered. Divil resaive me if I couldn't knock it out quicker nor you could wink." Then he lowered his piece, waved his greasy hat around his big sorrel head and yelled, "Veeve lah! Capture thim all, even to that cratur," pointing to a little, thin, spiteful-looking man, with a face much like a weasel's. His skin was the colour of the leaf of the silver poplar, his eyes were very quick, and they snapped and scintillated upon the smallest provocation. He was one of the most cantankerous, self-willed men in the whole company, and was under the impression that his advice was worth the combined wisdom of all the rest. He had heard the contemptuous reference made to himself by O'Donoghue, and his little eyes fairly blazed. "Yes, me take you also," a big, sodden half-breed said, advancing close to the little man. "Take me? damn your impertinence! Take me?" and quick as thought itself he drew his pistol and snapped it once, twice, three times in the Metis face. He fairly danced with rage. "Take me?" he screamed out once again, and, running at the Metis, who had grown alarmed and backed off several paces, he ran the barrel of the pistol down his throat. "Now, you filthy, red-headed rascal," he said, turning toward the leader, "if you will come down from your horse, I will settle you in the same way," and running over, he stabbed O'Donoghue in the knee with the muzzle of his pistol, and afterwards punched the horse in the ribs. O'Donoghue quickly turned his horse around and, with a sudden movement, squirted a jet of tobacco juice in the eyes of the tempestuous little loyalist. "Now, take him up to the fort, my min, wid the rest. Forward, march. Veeve lah Republeekh, and God save Oirland, Major Boulton," delivering the latter part of the sentence close to the ear of the captive leader. [Footnote: The following description of this ridiculous episode in the history of the rebellion is given by Mr. Begg in his history of the troubles:-- "On the morning of the 17th, word was received that the English settlers had disbanded, and were returning to their homes. Soon after this, a small party of men--some in sleighs and others on foot, were seen to verge off across the prairie, from St. John's school-house, appearing as if they wished to avoid the town. As soon as this party was discovered, a body of horsemen emerged from Fort Garry, and started out for the purpose of intercepting them. People in the town, crowded every available spot overlooking the prairie. Faces thronged the windows. Wood piles and fences were crowded with sightseers, all expecting to behold a miniature battle. When the Portage party discovered the French coming out of the Fort they halted, and appeared to hold a consultation; after which, they moved slowly on--the depth of snow impeding their progress. The French, at the head of whom was O'Donoghue, continued to gallop over the snow drifts, halting now and again for stragglers. At last the two parties met, but instead of a fight, they mixed together for some minutes, and then they all started in the direction of Fort Garry. They have been taken prisoners, was the conclusion by the lookers-on, and so, indeed, it turned out to be. Several of the Portage party refused at first to give up their arms; but ultimately they consented to do so, and were all taken to Fort Garry, where they were imprisoned in the same rooms which had only recently been vacated by the first lot of prisoners. It is said that the Portage party gave themselves up, on the understanding that Riel merely wished to speak to them and explain matters. If this is the case, they were not justly dealt by, for immediately upon their arrival at Fort Garry, they were put in prison, and Major Boulton, their leader, placed in irons. What a singular change in affairs this occasioned;--twenty-four prisoners liberated on the 15th,--forty-eight prisoners taken on the 17th."] Let us now return to the vengeful Riel. Never steady of purpose, or resting his faith upon logic, he had begun to curse himself for taking Lepine's advice and suffering Scott to depart. "After all, he may elude me, go out of the territory, and marry the girl. Curses, a thousand curses upon my own head for following the advice. Malediction upon Lepine's head for having given it to me." Just at this moment, the door opened, and Lepine entered. "I bring Monsieur good news." "Ah, what is it? Any tidings of Scott?" "He is at this very moment in the fort; having been caught among Major Boulton's party. He was most insolent to myself and O'Donoghue, and used very abusive language respecting yourself. I think, Monsieur, you have cause sufficient against him now." "Bon! bon! Yes,--he shall not escape me this time," and rising, he began to stride up and down the floor, his eyes flaming with hate and vengeance. "Now, Monsieur Lepine, give me your attention. At once go and put Boulton in irons. I shall attend presently, and declare that he is to be shot to-morrow. Suppliants will come beseeching me to spare his life, but at first I will refuse to do so, and say that I am determined to carry out my threat. At the last I will yield. So far, so good. I do not know, now, whether you understand my methods or not." [Footnote: The following is Mr. Begg's version of this part of the affair:--"Riel granted the lives of three, but Major Boulton, he said, would have to die that night. It now began to look very serious. Archdeacon McLean was called upon to attend the condemned man during his last moments, and a feeling of oppression was felt by all at the thought of a human being to be thus sent to his last account on such short notice, at midnight, too (the hour appointed for the execution)--midnight--the very thought of a man being brought out in the stillness of the night to be shot like a dog was horrible in the extreme. Still there were no lack of interceders, although little hope was now entertained of Major Boulton being spared. People retired to their homes that evening with mingled feelings of hope and Uncertainty, mixed with horror at the deed about to be committed. And how was the prisoner during all this time? Calm and resigned to his fate. After writing a few lines to his friends in Canada, he called for a basin of water and a towel with which to wash his face and hands, and a glass of wine to prevent him, if possible, from shivering when passing into the cold night air, in case people might attribute it to fear. He spoke quietly and calmly of the fate before him, and acted altogether as a soldier should do in the face of death. In the meantime the French councillors were sitting in deliberation on Boulton's sentence, the result being that his life was spared. This was communicated at once to the prisoner who received the information as calmly as he had done the sentence of death."] "I think I do Monsieur," and there was a knowing twinkle in the eye of the wily scoundrel. "Well, this Scott has an unbridled tongue, and is pretty certain to use it. If he does not, a little judicious goading will soon set him in his most abusive mood. If possible, it would be well for one of the guards to provoke him to commit an assault. Could you rely upon any one of your men for such a bit of business?" "Oui, Monsieur, I have such a man." "Bon, let him be so provoked, and after his violence has been thoroughly trumpeted through the fort, make a declaration of the same formally to me. I will then direct you to try him by court martial. You are aware of how I desire him to be disposed of. When the news gets abroad that he is to be shot, some will be incredulous, and others will come to sue for his life. I shall reply to them: 'This is a matter of discipline. The man has deserved death, or the court martial would not have sentenced him. I spared Boulton's life, and already I have as fruits of my leniency, increased turbulence and disrespect. The government of this colony must be respected, and the only way to teach its enemies that it must be, is to make an example of one of the greatest offenders.' Lose no time in completing the work. We know not what chance may work, and rob our hands of the scoundrel. You understand? I am least of all mixed up in the matter, being more concerned with weightier affairs." "Oui, Monsieur," and making an obeisance, the murderous tool departed. Exactly as it had been planned, it all fell out. Major Boulton was put in irons, and Riel declared that for the sake of peace and the prosperity of the colony, he must be shot. Dozens of people came and implored him to spare the condemned man's life; but he was inexorable. At last, however, "at the eleventh hour," as the newspapers put it, yielding to Mr. Donald A. Smith he said: "He is spared." Lepine presented himself before his leader. "Monsieur, I think that it will not be at all necessary to employ any stratagem to work our man into violence. He has been showering reproaches upon the guards, and loading your name with every sort of ignominious reproach. The guards knew my feelings respecting the man, so during the night they decided to put chains upon him. As the foremost one advanced with the manacles, the prisoner raised his arm, and dealt him a blow on the head which felled him to the ground." "Bon! Bon!" Riel cried, while he rubbed his hands with satisfaction. "Without applying the little goad at all, he fulfils our will." "Well, not in the strictest sense, Monsieur. Luc had certain private instructions from me, and he carried them out in a very skilful manner." "N'importe, Monsieur, N'importe how the thing came about; we have the cause against him, and that suffices. What do you now propose to do, for you are aware Monsieur--" there was now a tone of diabolical raillery in his words--" that this is a matter in which I cannot concern myself, you being the best judge of what is due rebellious military prisoners?" "Merci, Monsieur! I shall endeavour to merit your further regard. My intention is to proceed forthwith to try him. Already, I have summoned the witnesses of his guilt; and he and you shall know our decision before another hour has passed." Then the faithful Monsieur Lepine was gone. "No, ma Marie. You shall never deck your nuptial chamber with daisies for Monsieur Thomas Scott. You will find occupation for your sweet little fingers in putting fresh roses upon the mound that covers him. For a _feu-de-joie_ and the peal of glad marriage bells, I will give you, ma petite chere, the sullen toll that calls him to his open coffin, and the rattle of musketry that stills the tongue which uttered to you the last love pledge." For an hour did he pace up and down the floor gloating over his revenge. Meanwhile I shall leave him, and follow the "adjutant-general," as M. Lepine was known under the Provisional Government. He proceeded to the private room of the military quarters, and entering found his subordinate officers assembled there. "Messieurs," he said, "We know what our business is. We must lose no time in dispatching it. But before commencing, let me say a few words. Monsieur Riel is so overweighted with other affairs that the matter of dealing with the man Scott rests entirely in our hands. I have just left him, after endeavouring in vain to induce him to be present at the trial; but he could not spare the time to come. By skilfully sounding him, however, I discovered that his sentiment respecting the prisoner are exactly the same as those entertained by myself. What these are, I need hardly say. It is now a struggle between the authority of the Provisional Government and a horde of rebellious persons of which the defendant is the most dangerous. The eyes of our followers are upon us; and if we permit the authority of government to be defied, its officers reviled, and insult heaped upon us, depend upon it we shall speedily lose the hold which we have gained after so many bitter struggles; and become ridiculous, and a prey to the conspiracy which our enemies are so actively engaged in promoting against us. The very fact of this man Scott having leagued himself with our enemies, within a few hours after his release from confinement, is in itself an offence worthy of death; but I shall ask these persons who are here as witnesses to show you that since his capture he has merited death ten times over at our hands. With your permission gentlemen, I will proceed: "Thomas Scott of Red River Settlement stands charged before this court-martial with treasonable revolt against the peace and welfare of the colony; with having leagued himself with an armed party, whose object was the overthrow of authority as vested in our Provisional Government. He is likewise charged with having attempted criminal violence upon lawfully delegated guards appointed over him, during his incarceration; and likewise with inciting his fellow-prisoners to insubordination and tumult, contrary to the order and well being of authority as established in Red River." "Luc Lestang." This person came forward. "Relate all you know in the conduct of the prisoner Scott that may be regarded as treasonable and criminal, within the past fourteen days." "On the 17th ultimo, I was present at his capture, a short distance from Fort Garry. He was armed, and was in company with a number of other armed persons who had leagued themselves under one Major Boulton, with the object of capturing Fort Garry, and overthrowing the Provisional Government as established in this colony." "Have you seen him since his imprisonment in the Fort?" "I have seen him every day since." "Will you please state what have been his demeanour and conduct as a prisoner?" "He has been insulting and disorderly in the last degree." "Will you specify a few particular examples?" "I have frequently heard him describe the Provisional Government and its supporters as a band of mongrel rough-scruffs, a greasy, insolent, nest of traitors; and a lot of looting, riotous, unwashed savages. He has used language of this sort ever since his entry into the Fort. Likewise, I have heard him say, that he would have the pleasure of assisting in hanging Monsieur Riel to a prairie poplar; and in putting tar and feathers upon his unwashed, hungry followers." "Has he been guilty of any acts of violence?" "He has been guilty of acts of violence. When he became unbearably insubordinate I found it to be my duty to put irons upon him. As I approached him with the handcuffs he smote me twice in the face, and I yet carry the mark that he gave me. [Here the precious half-breed pointed to his right eye, which was a dusky purple.] This black eye I received from one of his blows." "That will do, Luc." Another witness with the movements of a snake, and eyes as black as sloes, was called; and he gave evidence which tallied exactly with that sworn to by Luc Lestang. This, of course, was not a very extraordinary coincidence, for he had been present while the first miscreant was giving his evidence. But poor Scott, whose life was the issue of all the swearing, was not permitted to be present, but was kept without in a distant room, chained there like a wild beast. "The Court," said the adjutant-general, "has heard the accusation against this man; and its duty now is to consider whether or not the safety, the peace, the well-being of the government and the state, demands that the extreme penalty should be visited upon this common disturber and enemy both. The question is, whether he is worthy of Death, or not. You will retire gentlemen,--" there were four of them, exclusive of witnesses, and the clerk--"and find your verdict." They were absent about two minutes. The foreman then advancing said: "Monsieur Adjutant, WE FIND THE PRISONER SCOTT, GUILTY." Then drawing upon his head a black cap, the adjutant said: "After due and deliberate trial by this Court, it has been found that the prisoner Thomas Scott, is 'Guilty.' _I do, therefore, declare the sentence of this court martial to be, that the prisoner be taken forth this day, at one o'clock, and shot._ And may God in His infinite mercy, have mercy upon his soul." Monsieur Riel had been all this while pacing up and down his room. A tap came upon his door. "Entrez. Ah, it is you, mon adjutant!" "Oui, mon president." "What tidings?" "C'est accompli. The court-martial has found the prisoner guilty; and he is condemned to be shot at one o'clock this day." "Monsieur is expeditious! Monsieur is zealous. C'est bon, c'est bon; merci, Monsieur." And the miscreant walked about delirious with the exuberance of his gratification. Then he came over to where his adjutant stood, and shook his hand; then he thrust his fingers through his hair, and half bellowed, his voice resembling that of some foul beast. "La patrie has reason to be proud of her zealous son," and he again shook the hand of his infamous lieutenant. Then with a very low bow M. Lepine left the room, saying as he departed, "I shall endeavour to merit to the fullest the kindly eulogy which Monsieur President bestows upon me." The news of Scott's sentence spread like fire around the settlement. Some believed that the penalty would not be carried out, while others declared that they thought otherwise. "If this prisoner is pardoned, people will begin to treat the sentences of the Provisional Authorities as good jokes. Riel must be aware of this; therefore Scott is likely to suffer the full penalty." Several persons called upon the tyrant, and besought him to extend mercy to the condemned man, but he merely shrugged his shoulders! "This prisoner has been twice rebellious. He has set bad example among the prisoners, assaulted his keeper, and loaded the Provisional Government with opprobrium. I may say to you, Messieurs, however, that I have really nothing to do with the man's case. In this time of tumult, when the operation of all laws is suspended, the Court-Martial is the only tribunal to which serious offenders can be referred. This young man, Scott, has had fair trial, as fair as a British Court-Martial would have given him, and he has been sentenced to death. I assume that he would not have received such a sentence if he had not deserved it. Therefore I shall not interfere. There is no use, Messieurs, in pressing me upon the matter. At heart, I shall grieve as much as you to see the young man cut off, but his death I believe necessary now, as an example to the hundreds who are desirous of overthrowing the authority, which we have established in the colony." The petitioners left the tyrant with sorrowful faces. "My God!" one of them exclaimed, "it is frightful to murder this young man, whose only offence is resistance to probable insult from his debased, half-breed keeper. Is there nothing to be done?" No, there was nothing to be done. The greasy, vindictive tyrant was lord and master of the situation When Riel was alone, he began once more to walk up and down the room, and thus mused aloud: "I shall go down to his cell. Perhaps, if I pretend that I will spare his life, he may tell me where resides Marie. "Yes," he was sure that he would succeed, "I shall get his secret by promising pardon; then I will spit upon his face and say 'die dog, I'll not spare you.'" So forth he sallied, and made his way to the cell where the young man sat in chains. "Well, malignant tyrant, what do you here? Whatever your business is, let it be dispatched quickly, for your presence stifles me. What dishonourable proposal have you now to make?" "Monsieur Scott, it seems to be a positive pleasure to you to revile me. Yet have I sought to serve you;--Yea, I would have been, would now be, your friend." "Peace; let me hear what it is that you now propose?" "You are aware that it is ordered by Court-Martial, of which, I was not a member, that you are to be shot at one o'clock this day? It is now just forty-five minutes of one. I can spare your life, and I will do it, upon one condition." "Pray let me hear what dishonour it is that you propose? I ask the question now, for the same reason that I made a similar query during my first incarceration, out of a curiosity to learn, if possible, a little more of your meanness and infamy." "And I reply to you as I answered before, that I shall take no notice of your revilings, but make my proposal. I simply ask you to state to me where Jean and his daughter Marie have taken up their abode?" "Where you will never find them. That's my answer, villain and tyrant, and now begone." "Perhaps you imagine that the sentence will not be carried out. I ask you to choose between life and liberty, and an almost immediate ignominious death." "I care not for your revenge, or your mercy. Once more I say, get you gone." Then the ruffian turned round, rushed at the chained prisoner, and dealt him a terrific kick in the side, after which he spat upon his face. "She shall be mine!" he hissed, "when your corpse lies mouldering in a dishonoured traitor's grave." The young man was chained to a heavy table, but with a sudden wrench, he freed himself, raised both arms, and was about bringing down his manacled hands upon the tyrant miscreant --and that blow would have ended the rebellion at Red River,--when Luc burst into the room, seized the prisoner, and threw him. While his brute knee was on the young man's breast, and his greasy hand held the victim's throat, Riel made his escape, and turned back to his own quarters. As for poor Scott, when the tyrant, and the brutal guard had left the cell, he began to pace up and down, sorely disturbed. All along he had cherished the hope that the tyrant would be induced to commute the sentence to lengthy imprisonment. But the diabolical vengeance which he had seen in the tyrant's eye now began to undermine his hope of life. Some friends were admitted to his cell, and they informed him that they had pleaded for him, but in vain. "And do you think that he will really perpetrate this murderous deed?" he asked. "Most assuredly he will; and now nothing remains for you but to prepare to meet your doom like a true man. You are not the first who has suffered in like manner in a cause which history will ever associate with your name. The tyrant who prevails over you, will not triumph for long. Ignominious will be the atonement that he must pay. But you have to show that for the sacred cause of loyalty you know _how_ to die. You have made your peace with God, and there is nought then that you have to fear. You sorrow at going alone, leaving all the world after you, but we go hence too, in a little; and every hour the clock tells, yields a thousand souls to eternity." "Ah, my friends, this is all true, but I am young, and I had cherished one very sweet hope." "This has been the fate of tens of thousands." "I should not have shrunk from death six months ago, had he set me up as a target for his half-breed murderers. I should have uttered no word of repining, but it is different now: O God, it is very different." All hung down their heads. They were vainly trying to hide their tears. "And even for myself, under the new condition which has arisen, I would not care. It is because of _her_--because of my pure, beautiful love, my Marie, whom this fiend has so persecuted, that I cannot look upon my doom with calmness. I had thought that there was such a happy future in store for us, for her and me, when this tumult was ended!" Then he took paper and pen and wrote a letter, which, when he had sealed it, he gave into the hands of the clergyman. "That address must be known only to one," he said. "It is not safe to post the letter anywhere in Canada; but, as a dying request, I ask that you have it put in the post at Pembina." "I shall with my own hand deliver it. I shall set out to-morrow." "May God, sir, send you comfort in your affliction. Pray remain as long as you can with my darling;--tell her, for it will help her better to bear the blow, that I was cheerful, and that I said I had no fear but that she and I would meet it heaven, and that when I went there I would pray to my God in her behalf every day. She has no token of mine. Take this ring and give it to her, and my scarf-pin, which in her sweet, childish fancy she used so to admire. Tell her that I died--I have told her in my letter--but repeat it to her, with my heart full, O so full! of love for her." There was now a rude bustling at the door; the rusty key was plied, and with a harsh scream the bolt flew back. Then the evil-looking Luc entered, followed by five or six others, all of whom were partially intoxicated. "Your hour has come, young man," he said, in a brutal voice. "Let us be going." "My God, this is a cold-blooded murder," poor Scott said, turning to Mr. Donald A. Smith and the Rev. Mr. Young. Then he bade good-bye to the visitors and to his fellow prisoners, and walked forth with the guard closely accompanied by Mr. Young. Before they got outside the prison door the miscreant leader said, "Stop a moment." Then taking a white handkerchief he tied it round the victim's eyes. Regarding it for a moment, he said, "That will do, I guess. Here, two of you men, take him by the arms." During this time the prisoner was engaged in deep prayer, and remained so till he reached the place of execution. This was a few yards distant, upon the snow, where a coffin had been placed to receive his body. Addressing Mr. Young, he said: "Shall I stand or kneel?" "Kneel," the clergyman answered in a low voice. "Farewell," [Footnote: I get the details of the execution from a report of the occurrence by Hon. Donald A. Smith. The extract is likewise to be found in Captain Huyshe's Bed River Expedition, pp. 18-19.--The Author.] he said, to Mr. Young, then "My poor Marie!" While these words were upon his lips there were several rifle reports, and this high-spirited, sunny-hearted young fellow, fell backwards into his coffin, pierced by three bullets. Mr. Young returned to the body but found the victim was still alive. He groaned several times and moved his hands; whereupon one of the party approached with a pistol and discharged it into the sufferer's face. The bullet entered at the eye and passed round the head. Then the body was straightened out in the coffin and the lid nailed down. The whole affair was so revoltingly cruel that it is with pain one is obliged to write about it. It is said, and upon authority that there is little room to question, that even after the cover had been put upon the coffin, the young man was still heard to groan, and even to cry. Mr. Young then asked that he might be permitted to take the body and give it interment in the burying ground of the Presbyterian Congregation, but his request was not granted, and a similar favour was refused to the Bishop of Rupert's Land. The body was taken inside the Fort where Lepine declared it was to be buried; and where an actual burial did take place before a number of spectators. The coffin, afterwards exhumed, was found to contain only stones and rubbish. What the fate of the body was no one has since discovered, but it has been conjectured that it was taken during the night by Riel's bloodhounds and dropped through the ice into the river. Mr. Young was faithful to his pledge. On the following day he set out over the bitter, snowy wastes for Pembina, and thence through storm, and over pathless stretches he held his way till he reached the settlement where abode Marie and her father. She was sitting at the window-pane thinking of her lover when the stranger passed; and she opened the door to the clergyman's knock. There could be no mistaking who this girl was, and the clergyman's heart was numb as he looked upon her. "Did he send me any message?" And then reflecting that this man was a stranger who may never have seen her lover, she blushed deeply. But she recovered herself in a moment. "Where does Monsieur come from?" "From Winnipeg." "O, then," she thought, "he perhaps _does_ know my beloved. Is there peace there now," she asked, "or is that wicked man still at his evil deeds?" "There is not peace at Red River, my child. Come in;--it is to speak to you about events at Red River that I have come all the way from that far settlement." She learnt her doom, and the good clergyman sat by her trying to afford some consolation. But she seemed not to understand the meaning of his words, or even to hear them. The blow had been too overwhelming for mortal tongue to fashion words that could convey aught of comfort. She sat there, her face like a stone, her eyes tearless. Yes, she read his letter and kissed his presents. She would fold the letter sometimes and lay it away near to her heart. Then she would open it again, spread it upon her lap, and sit half the day alternately looking at, and tenderly handling it. A few days and nights were spent during which she spake no word, eat no food, nor took any sleep. At the end of the fourth day they found her on a little seat beside the door where _he_ had said good-bye to her. She had his letter in her hand and his ring upon her finger. But she was dead. CHAPTER IX. After the return of Mr. McDougall to Ottawa, and while the Government press busied itself in laying upon that gentleman's shoulders the blame which should have been debited to the blundering of the administration, steps were being taken to have an armed force sent at once to the scene of tumult, to restore the authority of the Queen. Sir Garnet Wolseley, who has since earned distinction in bush and desert fighting, was the officer put in charge of the expedition. Before this step had been taken, however, the government had set the wheels of a totally different sort of force in motion. Monseigneur Tache, to whom I have already referred, was absent in Rome attending the Ecumenical Council, when the disturbance broke out. Sir John went to M. George E. Cartier then, and said: "My idea is that the man who can do more to settle this matter than all the wisdom of the Government combined, is Monseigneur Tache. What think you--would it not be well to represent the case to him by cable, and ask him to return?" "Oui, Sir John,--the suggestion is good." So the bishop was cabled for, and he came home. "Well, Messieurs," he said, "what function is it with which you would endow me? With what have I to deal?" "The people are in open, armed rebellion. They do not want to come into the confederation; and there is an extensive desire for annexation. The head of the movement is Louis Riel, and he is president of the Provisional Government. He has seized and invested Fort Garry, set up laws for himself, and is feeding and supplying his troops with the property of the Hudson's Bay Company." [Let it be borne in mind that, at this time, the murder of Scott had not been committed, and Riel and his followers were only known to be guilty of having risen in armed revolt, and consumed much of the stores of the Hudson's Bay Company]. "Well, Messieurs, the case is made plain. Now, with what authority do you endow me?" "We authorize you to say to the Rebels, on behalf of the Government, that if they will peaceably depart to their homes, and submit to the authority of the Queen, as represented by the Government of Canada, no harm will come to them. We authorize you further, to assure them that the Government will stand between them and the Hudson's Bay Company, should the latter seek recompense for stores consumed, or property appropriated. Finally, for the offences committed--and which we have specified --you shall, on our behalf, extend pardon to each and all." Armed with this authority, the bishop set out. Before he reached Winnipeg the blood-thirsty president had murdered Scott. I hope the reader has not forgotten that Monseigneur was the same divine who used to look with delight upon Louis Riel when a child, and stroke his glossy, black hair. That he was the same gentleman who found for the lad a benefactress in the person of Madame Masson. The stars were fighting for the murderer, and he knew it when he heard that his personal friend and warm admirer was coming. His Lordship was not nearly as badly shocked as most humane people might suppose, when he heard that Thomas Scott had been butchered like a dog upon the snow. Indeed, there is some authority to say that he was not shocked at all. His good priest, Pere Richot, who got the bishop's ear, took a highly moral and humane view of the matter. "Shooting served the fellow right, Monseigneur," [Footnote: Captain Huyshe and several other writers of high repute, are my authority for this statement.] he said. "He was a disturber, and it was good to make an example of him." In a little, we may be sure, the Monseigneur's opinion did not differ very widely from that of the "crocmitaine" priest. "Let the people all assemble," the bishop proclaimed: "I have important declarations to make to them." They obeyed his mandate, and he said: "I am authorized by the Government of Canada, to inform you that if you forthwith depart to your lawful habitations in peace, you will have nothing to fear. Your rebellious deeds will be forgiven to you; the other unfortunate event will likewise be overlooked, and the Hudson Bay Company, whose provisions you have eaten and whose property you have appropriated, will be indemnified by government, if they take steps to obtain restitution for the same." One month later, years afterwards, this precious divine maintained that the authority with which he had been clothed by the Government--and I have given that authority _substantially_--endowed him with the power to grant pardon for the murder of Scott! Without tiring the reader, let me say that it was by means of the discussion and the perplexities which subsequently arose upon this point, that the miscreant-fiend escaped the vengeance of the law. _Monseigneur had not lost his interest or affection yet for the lad for whom he had procured an education!_ The bloody Guiteau, however, did not consider the pardon a very great act of liberality. On the contrary, he was inclined to regard the discussion of his guilt, the guilt of the president of an independent colony! who was law-maker and law-dispenser in himself, as somewhat of an impertinence. He still continued to administer the government, and to live sumptuously in the house of Governor McTavish. About him here he had gathered some of his most powerful followers, one of which was the big fenian, O'Donoghue. These ate and drank to their heart's content, but from their wallowing and disgusting habits the residence soon resembled a filthy lair where pigs lie down. Yet the Rebel Chief had spared no pains to make it luxurious; conveying thither, with other plunder, the effects of the house of Dr. Schultz. When it was at first told Riel that Sir Garnet Wolseley, at the head of a large force, was marching against him, he refused to believe it. It was not till he actually with his own eyes, saw the troops that he was convinced. Then with hysterical precipitation the greasy murderer scurried out of the Fort, mounted a horse, and rode away in mortal terror. Later, he was reduced to the necessity of walking, and when his boots were worn off his feet, there was blood in his foot-prints. In this plight he met a follower who used to tremble before him in the days of his power, and to be like unto Caius Marius, he said to this man: "Go back and tell your friends that you have met Louis Riel, a fugitive, barefooted, without a roof above his head, and no where to go." This beastly, murderous tyrant did actually imagine himself to be a hero! Later on he was supplied with money by Sir John Macdonald to keep out of the country. The amount was not paid to him in a lump, but his good friend, the whilome bishop, and now archbishop, paid it out whenever the worthless, vagabond rascal came and represented himself as being very needy. He often, in his fallen days, would go about sighing for Marie, and declaring that, with all his vengeful feelings towards her, she was the only maiden whom he had ever really loved. Old Jean came back and settled with a sad heart, in the little cottage where had grown up his sweet Marie. It was very desolate for his old heart now. The ivy wreathed itself about the little wicker house, as was its wont, but Marie was not there. The cows came as usual to the bars to be milked, but there was a lamenting in their lowing call. They missed the small, soft hand that used to milk them, and never more heard the blithe, glad voice singing from _La Claire Fontaine_. Paul worked bravely and strove to cheer his father; and Violette, with her bright, quick eyes, just a little like Marie's, would come down and sing to him, and bring him cool, pink, dew-bathed roses. He thanked them all; but their love was not sufficient. His heart was across the prairies by a grave upon which the violets were growing. Before the leaves fell he was lying by her side. A cypress marks the graves, and the little brook goes by all the summer. CHAPTER X. We left the murderer upon the plains making speeches like Marius on the ruins of Carthage. The self-imposed banishment did not endure for long; and the swarthy face of Louis Riel was once more seen in Riviere Rouge. When tidings of the murder got abroad, English-speaking Canada cried out that the felon should be handed over to justice. I say English-speaking Canada, for the French people almost to a man gave their sympathy to the man whose hands were red with the blood of his fellow creature. They could not be induced to look upon the slaying as an act of inhuman, bloody, ferocity, with which the question of race or religion had not the remotest connection. "It is because Riel, a Frenchman and a Roman Catholic, shot Thomas Scott, an Englishman and a Protestant, that all this crying for vengeance is heard over the land. Now, had the cases been reversed, we would hear no English lamentings over a murdered Riel." This was in effect what they said, impossible, almost, as it might seem for one to be able to credit it. For illiterate persons, who could see no treason in the uprising, to condone the tumult and havoc, and regard even the murder justifiable, was what might have been expected. But what shall be said for M. George E. Cartier, the "enlightened statesman," for Pere Richot, the "crocmitaine," for Pere Lastanc, the Vicar-General, and finally, for Monseigneur himself? Nothing can be said! We can only as Canadians all hang down our heads in shame, that any section of our common country should make such an exhibition of itself in the sight of humanity. The protege of the Hierarchy was not long to mope about the plains like another dumb and fallen Saturn. No less proportions than that of un Dieu hors de combat, a very God overthrown, would the deluded followers accord to the overwhelmed chief. The clergy never suffered any aspersion to be thrown upon "le grand homme" for by no less appellation was he known. "He has been your benefactor," the coarse "crocmitaine" Richot would say. "Had he not risen and compelled Government to grant you your rights, you would forever have been down-trodden by Canadian tyrants. When the rage of the heretics in Ontario shall have cooled down we must send Le Bienfaiteur to Parliament. And the time did actually come when the murderer appeared upon the hustings in the West soliciting the votes of the people. Nor did he appeal in vain. _He was elected._ Nay, more than this, he set out for Ottawa, entered that city, and in the open light of day walked up to the Parliament Buildings, and in the eyes of officials and of the public subscribed his name to the Members' roll. Thousands have been in the habit of denouncing Sir John for permitting an unhung felon to go about as a free man, but when he came red-handed and presuming to Ottawa and enrolled his name, the Reformers were in power." Before this date, however, the criminal had secured some official eulogy in the West. And it happened in this wise. Some time after the appointment of Mr. Archibald to the Lieutenant-Governorship of Manitoba, several bands of Fenians threatened to invade the territory, and set up above the plains a green flag with a harp and a shamrock upon it. Mr. Archibald had at hand no force to resist the threatened attack, and he became almost delirious with alarm. So he sent a messenger to M. Riel, the untried felon, whose crime was at the time the subject of voluminous correspondence between Canada and the Colonial Office, accepting a proposal made by the ex-Rebel to call out the half-breeds in defence of the new Province. The Fenians did not carry out their threat, but it was much the same for the murderer of poor Scott as if they had. When the danger was blown over the Lieutenant-Governor walked in front of the ex-Rebel lines, expressed his gratitude to the men, and warmly shook hands with Riel and Lepine. The presence of Riel was yet a standing menace to peace among the half-breeds beyond the limits of the new province. The Canadian Government began to devise means of getting him out of the country. They tried persuasion, but this was not an effective mode. It was at this juncture that a sum was put into the hands of Archbishop Tache to pay the felon in consideration of his withdrawal. All this time Ontario was crying out for the capture of the man; and it was while the amount was being placed to the murderer's credit with the Archbishop, that Sir John raised his eyes toward heaven and said: "I wish to God I could catch him!" So Riel took himself out of Canada, and traversed American territory till he found a district it Montana, thickly inhabited by half-breeds. Here he established himself in a sort of a fashion, sometimes tilling the soil, frequently hunting, but all the while talking about Red River. He soon began to forget Marie, and to cast languishing eyes upon some of the half-breed girls living upon the airy uplands. [Footnote: It is stated upon certain authority, how good I don't know, that the brave M. Riel rejoices in the possession of three wives. One is said to be a French Metis, the other a Scotch half-breed, and the third a beautiful Cree squaw with large dusky eyes.] He was regarded as a great hero by these maidens, for long before his coming the daring, brilliancy, and great achievements of Monsieur Riel had been told with enthusiasm at the fireside of every half-breed in Montana. We shall leave M. Riel in Montana, sometimes working, sometimes hunting, always wooing, and take a very brief glance at the causes which led up to the present outbreak. Under the new legislation for the territories, only those half-breeds within the bounds of the new province were guaranteed secure possession of their land. Under the principle that all territory not granted in specific form to individuals by the Ministers of the Crown, is the property of the Crown, each half-breed who occupied a lot of land under the Hudson Bay Company's rule, was regarded as a squatter under the new regime. To make such holding valid, therefore, the Government issued patents to _bona fide_ squatters, who then found themselves on the same footing as the white immigrants. But beyond Manitoba, and chiefly in Prince Albert, there were large numbers of half-breeds settled over the prairie. So long as no immigrant came prying about for choice land the half-breeds had naught to complain about, but the rapid influx of population soon altered the whole face of the matter. Several squatters who had toiled for many a long year upon holdings, were obliged to make way for strangers who had "friends at court"--for even in the North West wilderness there is, in this sense, a court--and who took a fancy to the particular piece of land upon which "these lazy half-breeds" were squatting. Newspapers, whose business it is to keep the skirts of government clean in the matter, deny this altogether. But, unfortunately, there is no use in denying it. It is but too true, and it is with a feeling of very great regret that I myself, a Conservative, and a warm well-wisher of the administration, affirm it. It is true that in many and many a case, in a greater number of instances than even opponents of the administration suppose, a half-breed who has toiled for a number of years upon a lot, effecting improvements and taking pride in his property, has been dispossessed by an incomer because he could not show a patent from the Interior Department. But almost as fruitful a source of dissatisfaction as these heartless and dishonest displacements has been the difficulty which the unfortunate squatter has experienced in obtaining his patent. The mills of the gods in the Interior Department grind very slowly. The obtaining of a patent by a deserving squatter as a general rule is about as difficult, and as worthy of applause when achieved, as is the task which lies before a farmer's boy who has decided to become a member of parliament, by first earning money enough to go to school to prepare for a third class teachership, by then teaching school till he has a sufficient competency to study medicine, and by then practising his profession till he finds himself able to capture the riding. Of course there is some excuse, and we must not forget to produce it, for the Department of the Interior. It would be undignified if it were to move with any degree of rapidity. According to etiquette, and the rule is very proper, when the application of the half-breed comes to the office, it must remain for at least four weeks in the drawer set apart for "correspondence to be read." After it has been read it receives one or two marks with a red-lead pencil, after which it is deposited in pigeon-hole No. 1. Now no document ever lodges for a shorter time than a month in pigeon-hole No. 1; and if at the end of that period it should happen to be removed, the clerk lays by his novel or tooth-pick, as the case may be, and puts one or two blue marks upon the back of it. When we consider that there are all the way from six to twenty pigeon-holes, by a simple process of arithmetic we can get approximately near the period which it takes the poor half-breed's prayer to get from pigeon-hole Alpha to pigeon-hole Omega. But during the process the back of the squatter's application has become a work of art. It is simply delightful to look upon. It not alone contains memoranda and hieroglyphics made in red and blue pen-pencil but it is also beautified by marks made upon it in carmine ink, in ink "la brillanza," an azure blue ink, in myrtle green ink, in violette noire; but never, it must be said to the credit of the department, in common black. But all these colours are worthless indeed, viewed from any point of view, compared with its other acquisitions. Solomon himself in all his glory was never decked out more gorgeously than this poor half-breed's greasy sheet of foolscap is at the end of its journey through the pigeon-holes. The prime minister of the Crown in all his pomp of imperial orders has not so many ribbons as this poor vagabond's claim. Sometimes it is swathed in crimson tyings, sometimes in scarlet, now and again in magenta; and I am very happy to be able to say that pink and two very exquisite shades of blue known as birds-egg and cobalt have lately been introduced. Of course the half-breed complains when the weeks have swelled into months, and the months have got out of their teens, that he has heard no answer to his prayer; but the rascal should try to consider that his document has to make its voyage through the pigeon holes. In this way there has been much heartburning, and many curses against officialdom and red-tape. While the back of the application is being turned out a christmas card, a stray immigrant comes along, and the squatter half-breed has once more to go back for a new camping-ground. But there is something to be said--this time I am serious--for the Department in the matter, though not a very great deal. A number of the half-breeds, though a small, a very, very small proportion of the whole, are restless vagabonds, who squat upon lands with no intention of remaining permanently, but only with the object of speculation by selling their scrip, leaving the neighbourhood, taking up another lot, and receiving in like manner disposable scrip again. But the officers of the North-West must know that the half-breed people, _in general_, are constant-working, and are desirous of achieving comfort, and of affluence. Yet because of the acts of a few unprincipled, lazy wanderers, some will seek to convey the impression that the conduct of the small few is a type of the methods of all. There is still, among the many irritating causes, all of which my limits will not permit me to dwell upon, one which must not go unnoticed. Mr. Dewdney is not the gentleman who ought to have the immediate administration of North-West affairs in his hands. He has neither the understanding nor the inclination to make him a suitable administrator. Before all things he is there for himself; and he has even figured in the respectable role of land-grabbing. I am sure that if the gentleman is to be provided for by the public no objection would be raised if Sir John were to propose that he be recalled, and receive his salary all the same in consideration of the position he holds in the regard of the prime-minister, and of those who are not exactly prime-ministers or ministers. Mr. Dewdney has not alone got it into his head that an Indian has no understanding; but he must also endow himself with the conviction that he has no nostrils. A friend of Mr. Dewdney got some meat, but the article stank, and the importer knew not how to dispose of it. "O sell it to the Indians," the Governor said; and, "Lo! to the poor Indian" it was sold; and sold at tenderloin prices. "We can't eat em meat. He stinks," the poor savage said. "Em charge too much. Meat very bad." "Let Indians eat their meat," the just Mr. Dewdney retorted; "or starve and be damned." What right has an Indian to complain of foul meat, and to say that he has been charged too high a price for it? He is only a savage! Let Sir John take care. Well, this was the state of affairs when Louis Riel, about a year ago, left off his wooing for a little while, and returned to the old theatre of his crimes. He found the people chafing under official injustice, and delays that were almost equivalent to a denial of justice. He did not care a fig for the condition of "his people!" but like the long-winged petrel, he is a bad weather bird, and here was his opportunity. He went abroad among the people, fomenting the discord, and assuring them that if all other means failed they would obtain their rights by rising against the authorities. But the plain object of this plausible disturber was cash. The lazy rascal had failed to earn a livelihood among the half-breeds of Montana; and now was resolved to get some help from the Dominion Treasury. Presently intimations began to reach the Canadian Government that if they made it worth M. Riel's while, he would leave the disaffected people and return to American territory. The sum of $5,000, it was learnt, a little later, would make it "worth his while" to go back. This, if Sir John's statement in the House of Commons is to be trusted, the administration refused to pay. And now some good priests made up their valises, and travelled out of the North-West, and all the way to Ottawa, to present the grievances of their people to the ministry. Archbishop Tache likewise showed himself at the capital on the same mission. "For God's sake," these men said, "give earnest, careful, prompt attention to affairs in the North-West. The people have sore grievances, and they do not get the redress which is their due. If you would prevent mischief and misery, lose no time." And as in duty bound the politicians said: "The government will give the matter its most serious consideration." M. Royal and the priests returned to the North-West down-spirited enough, and Mr. Macpherson sailed for England, while the half-breeds were making up their minds to obtain by force the rights which they had failed to obtain through peaceable means and persistent prayer. CHAPTER XI. The region known as Prince Albert was the chief seat of the disturbance. It has been already pointed out in these pages, that the connecting link between the Indian and the whiteman, is the half-breed. It is not to be wondered at then, that as soon as the Metis began to mutter vengeance against the authorities, the Indians began to hunt up their war paint. The writer is not seeking to put blame upon the Government, or upon the Department delegated especially to attend to Indian affairs, with respect to its management of the tribes. Any one who has studied the question at all, must know that there is nothing to be laid at the door of the Government in this regard. A very clear statement of the whole question of Indian management, and of the assumption of the North-West Territories, may be found in Mr. Henry J. Morgan's Annual Register for 1878; while the same admirable work, gives from year to year, a capital _resume_ of the condition of the tribes. Some divines, recently in the North-west, have been discussing the Indian question in some of the religious newspapers of Toronto, but they have treated the question in the spirit of inexperienced spinsters. The Government has been most criminally remiss in their treatment of the half-breeds, but, let it be repeated, their Indian policy gives no ground for condemnation. Yet when the half-breeds of Prince Albert, incited by Riel, began to collect fire-arms, and to drill in each others barns, the Indians began to sing and dance, and to brandish their tomahawks. Their way of living during late years has been altogether too slow, too dead-and-alive, too unlike the ways of their ancestors, when once at least in each year, every warrior returned to his lodge with scalp locks dangling at his belt. Les Gros-Ventres for the time, forgot their corporosity, and began to dance and howl, and declare that they would fight till all their blood was spilt with M. Riel, or his adjutant M. Dumont. The Blackfeet began to hold pow-wows, and tell their squaws that there would soon be good feasts. For many a day they had been casting covetous eyes upon the fat cattle of their white neighbours. Along too, came the feeble remnant of the once agile Salteaux, inquiring if it was to be war; and if so, would there be big feasts. "O, big feasts, big feasts," was the reply. "Plenty fat cattle in the corals; and heaps of mange in the store." So the Salteaux were happy, and, somewhat in their old fashion, went vaulting homewards. Tidings of fight, and feast, and turmoil reached the Crees, and they sallied out from the tents, while the large-eyed squaws sat silently reclining, marvelling what was to come of it all. High into the air the Nez Perce thrust his nostril; for he had got the scent of the battle from afar. And last, but not least, came the remnant of that tribe whose chief had shot Custer, in the Black Hills. The Sioux only required to be shown where the enemy lay; but in his enthusiasm he did not lose sight of the fat cattle grazing upon the prairies. These, however, were only the first impulses of the tribes. Many of them now began to remember that the Government had shown them many kindnesses, given them tea and tobacco, and blankets; and provided them with implements to plough the lands, and oxen to draw the ploughs. And some of the chiefs came forward and said "You must not fight against the Great Mother. She loves the Indians. The red man is well treated here better than away south. Ask the Sioux who lived down there; they tell you maybe." Such advice served to set the Indians reflecting; but many hundreds of them preferred to hear Louis Riel's words, which were:-- "Indians have been badly treated. The Canadian Government has taken away their lands; the buffalo are nearly all gone, and Government sees the red men die of starvation without any concern. If you fight now you will make them dread you; and then they will be more liberal with you. Besides, during the war, you can have plenty of feasting among the fat cattle." A hellish war-whoop of approval always greeted such words. At length the rising came. Gabriel Dumont, Riel's lieutenant, a courageous, skilful half-breed, possessed of a sound set of brains, had drilled several hundreds of the Indians and half-breeds. Armed with all sorts of guns, they collected, and stationed themselves near Duck Lake. "My men," Dumont said, "You may not have to fight, for the officers may agree to the demand which I shall make of them on behalf of the Indians and the half-breed people. But if they refuse, and insist on passing, you know for what purpose you have taken arms into your hands. Let every shot be fired only after deliberate aim. Look to it that you fire low. After you have strewn the plain with their dead, they will go away with some respect for us. Then they will send out Commissioners to make terms with us. In the meantime the success of our attack, will bring hundreds of timid persons to our standard." This harangue was received with deafening cheers. So the rebels posted themselves in the woods, and filled a sturdily built house near by, waiting for the approach of Major Crosier and his force. At last they were seen out upon the cold snow-covered prairie. A wild shout went up from the inmates of the house, and it was answered from tree to tree through all the wintry wood. In the exuberance of his delight, one Indian would yelp like a hungry wolf who sighted his prey; and another would hoot like an owl in the middle of the night. At last the police and civilians were close at hand. The meeting took place in a hollow. Beyond was the dim illimitable prairie, on either hand were clumps of naked, dismal poplar, and clusters of white oak. Snow was everywhere, and when a man moved the crunching of the crust could be heard far upon the chill air. Signals were made for a parley, when some of the men from each side approached the line of demarcation. Joe McKay was the interpreter, and while he was speaking, an Indian, named Little Chief, grabbed at his revolver and tried to wrest it from him. A struggle ensued in which the Indian was worsted. Then raising his weapon McKay fired at the red skin, who dropped dead. This was the signal for battle. The voice of Dumont could be heard ringing through the hollow and over the hills. With perfect regularity his force spread out over a commanding bluff. Each man threw himself flat upon the ground, either shielding his body in the deep snow, or getting behind a tree or boulder. Major Crozier's force then drew their sleds across the trail, and the police threw themselves down behind it. Then came the words "Begin, my men," from the commander; --and immediately the crackle of rifles startled the hush of the wilderness. The police were lying down, yet they were not completely sheltered; but the civilians were standing. "My God, I'm shot," said one, and he fell upon the snow, not moving again. Then, with a cry, another fell, and another. From the woods on every hand came the whistling shot, and the rushing slugs of the rebels. Every tree had behind it a rebel, with deadly aim. But the murderous bullets seemed to come out of the inanimate wilderness, for not no much as the hand that pulled the deadly trigger could be seen. The police had a mountain gun, which Major Crozier now ordered them to bring to bear on the rebels, but the policeman who loaded it was so confused that he put the lead in before the powder. In forty minutes the bloody fray was ended. Seven of the loyalists were dead in their blood upon the snow, two lay dying, eleven others were wounded and bleeding profusely, Then came the word to retire, when the Major's force drew off. From the bluff and out of all the woods now came diabolical yells and jeering shouts. The day belonged to the rebels. When the police had moved away, the Indians and half-breeds came out from their ambush and began to hold rejoicings over the dead. They kicked the bodies, and then began to plunder them, getting, among other booty, two gold watches. Two of the fallen loyalists they observed still breathed, and these they shot through the head. So closely did they hold the muzzles of their murderous guns that the victims' faces were afterwards found discoloured with powder. Then returning to camp, they secured seven prisoners whom they had captured, and, leading them to the battle-field, make them look at the stark bodies of the loyalists, at the same time heaping all manner of savage insult upon the dead. A couple of days later the bodies of the victims were buried upon the plain, by the order of Riel. A little later the snow fell, and gave the poor fellows' grave a white, cold, coverlet. When tidings of the battle, and of the defeat of our men, reached the east, the wildest excitement prevailed. At once the Minister of Militia began to take stock of his forces, and some regiments were ordered out. The volunteers needed no urging, but promptly offered their services for the front. Their loyalty was cheered to the echo, and thousands assembled at every railway station to see them depart and say "God speed." CHAPTER XII. While General Middleton, Colonel Otter, and others of our military officers, were hastening to the scene of tumult, tidings of the most startling kind were received from Frog Lake. Frog Lake is a small settlement, about forty miles north of Fort Pitt, and here a number of thrifty settlers had established themselves, tilling the soil. Latterly, however, some enterprising persons came there to erect a saw and grist mill, for much lumber fringes the lake, and a considerable quantity of grain is produced upon the prairie round about. There were only a few white settlers here, all the rest being half-breeds. Not far away lived detachments of various tribes of Indians, who frequently came into the little settlement, and smoked their pipes among the inhabitants. Here, as elsewhere, the most bitter feelings were entertained by the half-breeds and Indians against the Government, and chief of all against Governor Dewdney. Every one with white skin, and all those who in any way were in the service of the Government, soon came to be regarded as enemies to the common cause. Therefore, when night came down upon the settlement, Indians, smeared in hideous, raw, earthy-smelling paint, would creep about among dwellings, and peer, with eyes gleaming with hate, through the window-frames at the innocent and unsuspecting inmates. At last one chief, with a diabolical face, said, "Brothers, we must be avenged upon every white man and woman here. We will shoot them like dogs. No harm can come to us; for the great man has said so." (Alluding to Riel.) "When they are all shot the Government will get a big fright, and give the Indians and half-breeds what they ask for." The answer to this harangue was the clanking of barbaric instruments of music, the brandishing of tomahawks, and the gleam of hunting-knives. Secretly the Indians went among the half-breeds squatting about, and revealed their plans; but some of these people shrank with fear from the proposal. Others, however, said, "We shall join you. Let us with one blow wipe out the injustices done to us, and teach the Government that if they deny us our rights, we will fight for them; and murder those who are the agents of its will." So the plan was arranged, and it was not very long before it was carried out. And now runners were everywhere on the plains, telling that Dumont had a mighty army made up of most of the brave Indians of the prairies, and comprising all the dead shots among the half-breeds; that he had encountered heavy forces of police and armed civilians, and overthrown them without losing a single man. They likewise declared that he had hosts of prisoners, and that the whole of Canada was trembling with fear at the mention of the names of Riel and Dumont. "Now is our time to strike," said the Indian with the fiendish face, and the wolf-like eyes. Therefore, the 2nd day of April was fixed for the holding of the conference between the Indians and the white settlers. The malignant chief had settled the plan. "When the white faces come to our lodge, they will expect no harm. Ugh! Then the red man will have his vengeance." So every Indian was instructed to have his rifle at hand in the lodge. The white folk wondered why the Indians had arranged for a conference. "We can do nothing to help their case," they said, "we ourselves find it difficult enough to get the ear of Government. It will only waste time to go." Many of them, therefore, remained at home, occupying themselves with their various duties, while the rest, merely for the sake of agreeableness, and of shewing the Indians that they were interested in their affairs, proceeded to the place appointed for the pow-wow. "We hope to smoke our pipes before our white brothers go away from us," was what the treacherous chief, with wolfish eyes, had said, in order to put the settlers off their guard. The morning of the 2nd opened gloomily, as if it could not look cheerily down upon the bloody events planned in this distant wilderness. Low, indigo clouds looked down over the hills, but there was not a stir in all the air. Nor was any living thing to be seen stirring, save that troops of blue-jays went scolding from tree to tree before the settlers as they proceeded to the conference, and they perceived a few half-famished, yellow, and black and yellow dogs, with small heads and long scraggy hair, sculking about the fields and among the wigwams of the Indians in search for food. The lodge where the parley was to be held stood in a hollow. Behind was a tall bluff, crowned with timber; round about it green poplar, white oak, and some firs, while in front rolled by a swift stream, which had just burst its winter fetters. Unsuspecting aught of harm, two priests of the settlement, Oblat Fathers, named Fafard and La Marchand, were the first at the spot. "What a gloomy day," Pere Fafard said, "and this lodge set here in this desolate spot seems to make it more gloomy still. What, I wonder, is the nature of the business?" Then they knocked, and the voice of the chief was heard to say, "Entrez." Opening the door, the two good priests walked in, and turned to look for seats. Ah! what was the sight presented to them! Eyes like those of wild beasts, aflame with hate and ferocity, gleamed at them from the gloom of the back portion of the room. The priests were amazed. They knew not what all this meant. Then a wild shriek was given, and the chief cried, "Enemies to the red man, you have come to your doom." Then raising his rifle, he fired at Father Marchand. The levelling of his rifle was the general signal. A dozen other muzzles were pointed, and in a far briefer space of time than it takes to relate it, the two priests lay weltering in their blood, pierced each by half a dozen bullets. "Clear away these corpses," shouted the chief, "and be ready for the next." There was soon another knock at the door, and the same wolfish voice replied as before, saying, "Entrez." This time a full, manly-looking young fellow, named Charles Gowan, opened the door and entered. Always on the alert for Indian treachery, he had his suspicion now, before entering he suspected strongly that all was not right. He had only reached the settlement that morning, and had he returned sooner he would have counselled the settlers to pay no heed to the invitation. He was assured that several had already gone up to the pow-wow, so being brave and unselfish, he said, "If there is any danger afoot, and my friends are at the meeting-lodge, that is the place for me, not here." He had no sooner entered than his worst convictions were realized. With one quick glance he saw the bloodpools, the wolfish eyes, the rows of ready rifles. "Hell hounds!" he cried, "what bloody work have you on hand? What means this?" pointing to the floor. "It means," replied the chief, "that some of your pale-face brethren have been losing their heart's blood there. It also means that the same fate awaits you." Resolved to sell his life as dearly as lay in his power, he sprang forward with a Colt's revolver, and discharged it twice. One Indian fell, and another set up a cry like the bellowing of a bull. But poor Gowan did not fire a third shot. A tall savage approached him from behind, and striking him upon the head with his rifle-stock felled him to the earth. Then the savages fired five or six shots into him as he lay upon the floor. The body was dragged away and the blood-thirsty fiends sat waiting for the approach of another victim. Half an hour passed, and no other rap came upon the door. An hour went, and still no sound of foot-fall. All this while the savages sat mute as stones, each holding his murderous rifle in readiness for instant use. "Ugh!" grunted the chief, "no more coming. We go down and shoot em at em houses." Then the fiend divided his warriors into four companies, each one of which was assigned a couple of murders. One party proceeded toward the house of Mr. Gowanlock, of the firm of Gowanlock & Laurie, who had a large saw and grist mill in course of erection; creeping stealthily along, and concealing their approach by walking among the trees they were within forty yards of the house without being perceived. Then Mrs. Gowanlock, a young woman, recently married, walked out of the house, and gathering some kindling-wood in her apron, returned again. When the Indians saw her, they threw themselves upon their faces, and so escaped observation. Little did the inmates know the deadly danger that so closely menaced them. They went on talking cheerfully, dreaming of no harm. Gowanlock, as I have said, had been recently married, and himself and his young wife were buoyant with hope, for the future had already begun to promise them much. Mr. Gowanlock had gathered the wood with which to make biscuits; and W. C. Gilchrist, and Williscroft, two fine young men, both in Mr. Gowanlock's employ, were chatting with him on general matters. No one happened to be looking out of the window after Mrs. Gowanlock came in; but about half a minute afterwards some shadow flitted by the window, and immediately afterwards six or seven painted Indians, with rifles cocked, and uttering diabolical yells, burst into the house. The chief was with this party; and aiming his rifle, shot poor Gowanlock dead, another aimed at Gilchrist, but Mrs. Gowanlock heroically seized the savage's arms from behind, and prevented him for a moment or two; but the vile murderer shook her off, and falling back a pace or two, fired at her, killing her instantly. Three had now fallen, and as the poor young wife fell crying, "my God!" Croft fell pierced by two or three bullets. Lest the work might not have been sufficiently done, the murderers fired once more at the fallen victims, and then came away from the house. One of the most deserving of the settlers, but at the same time one of the most bitterly hated, was Dunn, the Indian agent. He was a half-breed, and had for a wife a very pretty Cree woman. For some days past, it is said, that she had been aware that the massacre had been planned; but uttered no word of warning. Stealthily the blood-thirsty band approached the dwelling of Dunn, for they knew him to be a brave man, who would sell his life very dearly. They were aware that in the Minnesota massacre which happened some years ago, that he had fought as if his life were charmed, and escaped with a few trifling wounds. The doomed man was alone on this terrible day, his wife having taken her blanket at an early hour and gone abroad to "talk" with some Cree maidens. Poor Dunn was busy in the little yard behind his house, putting handles in some of his farming implements, and did not perceive the approach of the murderers at all. There were five Indians in the party, and they crept up to within a dozen paces of where the unsuspecting man was at his work. Then, while he whistled a merry tune, they silently raised their rifles and took aim. The unfortunate man fell, pierced with all their bullets and made no stir. Another detachment of the bloodhounds directed their steps towards the residence of Barnez Fremoine, the Belgian rancher. He was a tall, magnificently-built man, and when the savages got in sight of his house they perceived that he was engaged oiling the axle of his waggon. Aided by the shelter of an outhouse, they approached within twenty yards of this victim; raised their arms and arrows and fired. He fell likewise without uttering a cry, and made no stir. When found afterwards there were two bullet holes in his head, and an arrow lay lodged in his breast. [Footnote: This fact I get from correspondence to the Ottawa _Free Press_, a newspaper which, under the great journalistic enterprise of Mr. J. T. Hawke, has kept the people at the Capital well informed from day to day on affairs at the scene of tumult.] Two other persons were surprised in the same way, and shot down like dogs, making a total of eleven slaughtered. The first official confirmation of the dreadful tragedy was given in a despatch, sent from Fort Pitt to Sir John Macdonald, by police inspector Dickens, a son of the immortal novelist. CHAPTER XIII. Perhaps, of all the acts of bravery recorded during this late Rebellion, not one stands out more prominently than that of Inspector Dickens, in resisting, with his little force, a large band of blood-thirsty Crees, till he would, with advantage and honour, retire from his ground. Fort Pitt stands in the centre of the Cree country, and was the scene of the treaty between the Government and the Crees, Chippewayans, Assinniboines and the Chippewas. There was great difficulty at the time in concluding the terms of the treaty. Big Bear, who reigns supreme in the district, and who was spokesman at the treaty, maintained that hanging ought to be abolished, and the buffalo protected. On the whole, he accepted the conditions of the treaty, but, as his people were not present, he would not sign it, although he did sign it in the following year. Big Bear is a noisy, meddlesome savage, who is never in his glory save when he is the centre of some disturbance. He has always shown much delight in talking about war; and he would go without his meals to listen to a good story about fighting. He has the habit to, when the reciter of the story has finished, of trying to discount what he has heard, and to make his auditors believe that some exploits of his own have been far more thrilling. When everything is peaceable, even when there are plenty of buffalo and peltry to be had, this savage is not satisfied; but still goes around asking if there is any news about trouble being about to take place anywhere. If he is told: "No, everything is quiet; the Indians are all satisfied, because they are doing well." Big Bear will reply, while knowingly closing one eye: "Me know better than that. There will soon be bloody work. Government break em treaty with Injuns. Lots of Injuns now ready to go out and scalp servants of the Government and white men." When, therefore, tidings reached the land of the Stoney Indians that the half-breeds, with Louis Riel at their head, had broken into revolt, Big Bear pulled off his feathered cap and threw it several times into the air. He went to his wives, a goodly number of which he is in the habit of keeping, and informed them that he would soon bring them home some scalps. He was so elated, that he ordered several of the young men to go and fetch him several white dogs to make a feast. So a large fire was built upon the prairie, a short distance from the chief's lodge, and the huge festival pot was suspended from a crane over the roaring flames. First, about fifteen gallons of water were put into this pot; then Big Bear's wives, some of whom were old and wrinkled, and others of which were lithe as fawns, plump and bright-eyed, busied themselves gathering herbs. Some digged deep into the marsh for roots of the "dog-bane," others searched among the knotted roots for the little nut-like tuber that clings to the root of the flag, while others brought to the pot wild parsnips, and the dried stalks of the prairie pusley. A coy little maiden, whom many a hunter had wooed but failed to win, had in her sweet little brown hands a tangle of winter-green, and maiden-hair. Then came striding along the young hunters, with the dogs. Each dog selected for the feast was white as the driven snow. If a black hair, or a blue hair, or a brown hair, was discovered anywhere upon his body he was taken away; but if he were _sans reproche_ he was put, just as he was, head, and hide, and paws, and tail on--his throat simply having been cut--into the pot, Six dogs were thrown in, and the roots and stalks of the prairie plants, together with salt, and bunches of the wild pepper-plant, and of swamp mustard were thrown in for seasoning. Through the reserves round about for many miles swarth heralds proclaimed that the great Chief Big Bear was giving a White Dog feast to his braves before summoning them to follow him upon the war-path. The feast was, in Indian experience, a magnificent one, and before the young men departed they swore to Big Bear that they returned only for their war-paint and arms, and that before the set of the next sun they would be back at his side. True to their word the Indians came, hideous in their yellow paint. If you stood to leeward of them upon the plain a mile away you could clearly get the raw, earthy smell of the ochre upon their hands and faces. Some had black bars streaked across their cheeks, and hideous crimson circles about their eyes. Some, likewise, had stars in pipe-clay painted upon the forehead. Now the immediate object of the warlike enthusiasm of all these young men was the capture of Fort Pitt, an undertaking which they hardly considered worth shouldering their rifles for. But when it came to the actual taking it was a somewhat different matter. There were twenty-one policemen in the Fort and they had at their head an intrepid chief, Mr. Inspector Dickens, already referred to in this chapter. It was useless to fire bullets at the solid stockades; massacre was out of the question, for keen eyes peered ever from the Fort. Big Bear now had grown very ambitious. "Fort Pitt hardly worth bothering about," he said to his braves. "Plenty of big fighting everywhere. We'll go with Monsieur Riel. But we must have guns; good guns; and plenty of powder and shot and ball. So taking a number of his braves he approached the Fort and began to bellow that he wanted to have a talk. Inspector Dickens appeared, calling out, "Well, what does Big Bear want?" "We want guns, and powder, and shot, and ball." "Pray, what does Big Bear want with them?" "His young men are suffering of hunger, and they want to go shoot some elk and bear." "Big Bear is talking with a crooked tongue. He must not have any rifles, or powder or shot, or ball. I advise him to return peaceably to his reserve; and if there is anything that the Government can do for himself, or his people, I am sure they will do it. He will only make matters worse by creating a disturbance." "Ugh! The great police chief also talks with a crooked tongue; and if he does not give what the Indians ask for, they will burn down the fort, and murder himself and his followers, not sparing either the women or the children." "If this be your intention, you shall not find us unprepared." Just at this moment two mounted police, who had been out upon the plains as scouts, came in sight, at once Inspector Dickens perceived that the savages meant mischief. A number of rifles were raised at the unsuspecting policemen, then several shots were heard. Constable Cowan fell from his horse dead, pierced by several bullets; Constable Lousby was hit by a couple of bullets, but got into the fort before the savages could prevail. "Now, my men," shouted Inspector Dickens, "show these insolent savages that you can defy them." At once a raking fire was poured into the rebels. Four of the rebels fell dead, and some scores of others were wounded. The conduct of some of the savages who received slight wounds was exceedingly ludicrous. One who had been shot, _in running away_, began to yell in the most pitiable way; and he ran about the plain kicking up his heels and grabbing at the wounded spot, which, it is to be inferred, must have been stinging him very badly. I must not omit to speak that before the _recontre_, chief factor MacLean, who had always been held in high regard among the Indians, went out of the fort to have a parley with Big Bear. Arriving at the door of the chief's lodge, he knocked. Big Bear admitted him with the greatest pleasure, and after he had done so, said: "Guess me keep you, since me's get you." So the chief factor found himself a prisoner. Then Big Bear informed his captive that if he would write a letter to the rest of the civilians in the fort, asking them to withdraw, and enter into the Indian lodge, he would treat them civilly; but that if they refused, he would set fire to the fort, and they would perish in the flames. This MacLean consented to do, and in a little while there went out from the fort to the Indian prison, Mr. MacLean's family, consisting of eight, James Simpson, Stanley Simpson, W. B. Cameron, one Dufresne, Rev. C. Quinn, and his wife, and Mr. and Mrs. Mann, with their three children. Since that date, these people have been prisoners in Big Bear's camp, and every now and again the tidings come that they are receiving barbarous, and even brutal, treatment. After Big Bear had got possession of all these, he said to his chief young men: "'Spose we take em in, too, Mounted Police. No harm Get their guns. Keep them here for a spell, and then let 'em go." When he coolly presented himself before the stockades and proposed to Inspector Dickens to come right over to his lodges, assuring him that he would not allow the hair of one of his men's heads to be harmed, Inspector Dickens laughed: "You are a very presumptuous savage." After the fight which I have described, Inspector Dickens, studying the situation, regarded it in this light: "The civilians have gone to the Indians, so there is now no object to be attained by keeping my force here. In the battle with the savages I was successful. Therefore, may retreat with honour." Fitting up a York boat, he had it provisioned for the journey, and then destroying everything in the shape of supplies, arms and ammunition Which he could not take away, they started down the river, and after a tedious journey arrived at Battleford, worn with anxious watching, exposure and fatigue, but otherwise safe and well, save for the wounded constable. The brave Inspector was received at Battleford with ringing acclamations. Here, in a little, he was appointed to the command of the Police, superseding Lt.-Colonel Morris. Altogether there is not in the whole campaign an instance in which good judgment and bravery stand out so prominently as in this record of the conduct of the son of our great English novelist. CHAPTER XIV. No accident in the whole history of the present rebellion so ill bears to be written about as does this of the sacking of Battleford. This is a town of considerable importance, and it has a strongly-built fort, garrisoned by mounted police. It stands close to a large Cree reserve, and the prairie around it being very fertile, the population latterly had been growing rapidly. When first the disturbance broke out, it was feared that there would be trouble with the Stoney Crees in this region; for Poundmaker, a great brawling Indian chief, is always ready, like his boastful brother, Big Bear, to join in any revolt against authority, Poundmaker, for many a year, has done little save to smoke, drink tea among the squaws, and tell lies, as long as the Saskatchewan river, about all the battles he fought when he was a young man, and how terrible was his name over all the plains. Poundmaker has always been successful as a boaster, and there is hardly a squaw on the whole reserve who does not think him to be one of the most illustrious and mighty men alive. Therefore he has never sued in vain for the hand of a pretty maiden without success; and he has now no fewer than a score of wives, whom he is not able to support, and who are therefore compelled to go on their bare brown feet among the marshes in the summer, killing frogs and muskrats. The lazy rascal never works, but sits at home drinking strong tea, smoking and telling lies, while his wives, young ones and old ones, and his brawling papooses go abroad looking for something to eat. Now besides Poundmaker, there were among those Stoney Crees two other mischief-loving half-and-half Chiefs. One delighted in the name of Lucky Man, and the other of Little Pine. These two vagabonds leagued themselves with Poundmaker, when the first tidings of the the outbreak reached them, and painting their faces, went abroad among the young men, inciting them to revolt. They reminded them, that if they arose they would have plenty of big feasts, for the prairie was full of the white men's cattle. And Little Pine glanced with snaky eyes toward the town of Battleford. "May be by-em-by, get fine things out of stores. Go in and frighten away 'em people, then take heaps o' nice things; get squaws, may be, to help 'em to carry 'em away." This was just the sort of incentive that the young men wanted; and the Indian girls screamed with delight at the prospect of red shawls, and heaps of ribbons, and boxes of brass rings, and pretty red and white stockings, and boots with buttons on them. Presently Big Bear, and Little Pine, and Lucky Man began to get their forces in motion. Armed with bows and arrows, spears, and tomahawks, shot-guns and flint-muskets, and followed by gew-gaw-loving girls, squalling pappooses, and half starved yellow dogs, the Crees, with the three beauties just mentioned at their head, marched toward the town. The people, apprised of the intended attack, had fled to the police barracks; so that when the savages entered the town, the streets were deserted. Then commenced the work of pillage. According to a correspondent of the _Montreal Star_, "house after house was visited in quick succession, the squaws loudly acclaiming and shouting as the bucks smashed in the doors with axes. Firearms were the first things sought for by the braves, while the females ransacked each dwelling from top to bottom, in search of such articles as delighted the feminine eye, Soon the hitherto quiet and peaceful town of Battleford was transformed into a veritable place of destruction. Torn carpets, chairs, bedsteads and empty trunks were thrown into the streets, which were thronged by at least 500 Indians, who, made hideous with war paint, shouted and discharged their rifles simultaneously, creating a perfect pandemonium. When the pillagers had accomplished their work, they commenced the attack on the barracks, but were repulsed with a trifling loss. Some young bucks got rolls of carpet, which they extended along the street, and then mounting their ponies rode up and down over the aesthetic patterns. The squaws got fineries enough to deck themselves in for the next year; and the amount of brass rings that they carried away was enough to make glad the heart of all Indian-dom. After having surfeited themselves with destruction, they returned, each one laden to his and her utmost capacity with booty. Several places were gutted and demolished; in other cases property was destroyed, and some establishments were set on fire." All this while Major Morris and his police, and nearly two hundred able bodied men, with 200 rifles and plenty of ammunition were cooped up in the Fort, peeping out at the squaws pillaging the town. It seems a little illogical that we should call out our young men from Halifax, from Quebec, from Montreal, from Kingston, from Ottawa, and from the other cities that put forces into the field, to go out into the far wilderness to protect property, when able-bodied men with arms in their hands stood by and watched unmoved a body of savages and squaws pillage their town, and give their property to the flames. It was to relieve this town that Colonel Otter made the brilliant march, upon which writers and orators have not been able to bestow enough of eulogy. CHAPTER XV. After the defeat of the police and civilians at Duck Lake, Riel and Dumont felt thoroughly confident of being able to deal with the forces which they were apprised the Canadian Government would send into the field against them. They held many long consultations together, and in every case it was Dumont who laid down the details of the military campaign. "These Canadian soldiers," he would say, "can not fight us here. We will entrench ourselves in positions against which they may fire cannon or gatling guns in vain. They are not used to bush-fighting, and will all the time expose themselves to our bullets. Besides, distances here are deceptive; and in their confusion they will make the wildest sort of shooting." It was decided that the rebel forces should make their main stand at an advantageous position, which Dumont had accidentally observed one day when he was out elk-stalking three years ago. This place, he assured his chief seemed to be intended by nature for a post of defence. It lay a short distance from Batoche's Crossing. "But my idea is to engage them several times with portions of my force; gradually to fall back, and then fight at my final ground the battle which shall decide who is master in these territories, the half-breeds or the Canadian volunteers." All this while General Middleton, with his brave fellows, had been making one of the most laborious marches recorded in modern wars. Perhaps the worst portion of the march was around the dismal reaches of Lake Superior. I take an extract from correspondence to the Toronto _Mail_. "But the most severe trial was last night's, in a march from Red Rock to Nepigon, a distance of only seven miles across the ice, yet it took nearly five hours to do it. After leaving the cars the battalion paraded in line. A couple of camp fires served to make the darkness visible. All the men were anxious to start, and when the word was given to march, it was greeted with cheers. It was impossible to march in fours, therefore an order was given for left turn, quick march. We turned, obedient to the order, but the march was anything but quick. Then into the solemn darkness of the pines and hemlock the column slowly moved. Each side being snow four feet deep, it was almost impossible to keep the track, and a misstep buried the unfortunate individual up to his neck. Then it began raining, and for three mortal hours there was a continuous down pour. The lake was reached at last, to the extreme pleasure of the corps. The wildness of the afternoon and the rain turned the snow into slush, at every step the men sank half a foot. All attempts to preserve distance were soon abandoned by the men, who clasped hands to prevent falling. The officers struggled on, arms linked, for the same purpose. Now and then men would drop in the ranks, the fact only being discovered by those in the rear stumbling over them. Some actually fell asleep as they marched. One brave fellow had plodded on without a murmur for three days. He had been suffering, but through the fear of being left behind in the hospital refrained from making his case known. He tramped half-way across last night's march reeling like a drunken man, but nature gave out at last, and with a groan he fell on the snow. There he lay, the pitiless rain beating on a boyish upturned face, until a passing sleigh stopped behind him. The driver, flashing his lantern in the upturned face, said he was dead. 'Not yet, old man,' was the reply of the youth, as he opened his eyes. 'I'm not even a candidate for the hospital yet.'" The following description of the Great Salt Plains, as given by a _Globe_ correspondent, is also worth reproducing: "The Great Salt Plains open out like broad, dreary marsh or arm of the sea, from which the tide has gone out. For about thirty-five miles the trail stretches in a north-westerly course across this dismal expanse, and away to the south-west, as far as the eye can reach, nothing save marsh grass, flags, bullrushes, and occasionally clumps of marsh willows can be seen. North-east of the trail scattering bluffs of stunted grey willows cluster along the horizon, and at one point along the trail, about midway of the plain, is found a small, solitary clump of stoneberry bushes, not more than thirty yards long, five or six feet in width, and only three or four feet high." The objective point of Major-General Middleton's march was Batoche's Crossing, where Riel had several large pits sunk, and fortifications thrown up, for a grand and final encounter with our troops. The line of march lay sometimes along the Saskatchewan's banks, but more frequently through the open prairie. The position of the rebels prior to the battle was this: Dumont, with 250 half-breeds and Indians, had been retreating slowly before General Middleton's right column on the east bank of the river, their scouts keeping them informed of the General's movements. Dumont appears to have thought of waiting for the troops to attack him on Thursday night; at least that is the belief of the scouts, who saw some of his mounted men signalling to him all afternoon on Thursday. However that may be, he lay waiting for our men at the edge of a big _coulee_ near Fish Creek, early on Friday morning, his forces being snugly stowed away behind boulders, or concealed in the dense everglades of hazel, birch, and poplar. From day to day, almost from hour to hour, this veteran buffalo hunter had learned every tidings of the General's troops that keen observation made from clumps of bush along the prairie could give him. So when he learnt that the General himself, with his officers, were near at hand, his eyes fairly gleamed with enthusiasm. "My men," he said, as he went from covert to covert, from bluff to bluff, "you know the work that lies before you; I need not repeat it to you. Do not expose yourself, and do not fire unless you have a tolerable target." Then he arranged a system of signals, chiefly low whistles and calls, by which the men would be able to know when to advance, retire, lie close, make a dash, or move from one part of the ground to another. "They will at first fall into an ambush," he said, "then, my men, be nimble. In the panic there will be a rich harvest for you. Bring down the General if you can. Wherever an officer is in range, let him have a taste of your lead in preference to the privates." Then he lay close and watched, and listened, many times putting his ear to the ground. At last he gave an exclamation. It was in a whisper; but the silent rebels who lay there, mute as the husht trees around them, could well hear the words, "they come!" Let me now briefly describe the position which the rebel had chosen for himself. About five miles from McIntosh's stand two bluffs, about five hundred yards apart, thickly wooded on the top. Between these bluffs is a level open prairie that extends backward about a thousand yards, across which there runs a deep ravine, thickly timbered at the bottom. Now, on the morning of Friday, the twenty-fourth of April, General Middleton, who was still on the march to Batoche's, was riding with his staff, well in front. With him was Major Boulton's Horse, who acted as scouts. As they were passing the two bluffs named, suddenly the crack of musketry rang out upon the prairie. Major Boulton now perceived that he had fallen into an ambush. At the same time that deadly balls and buck-shot came whistling and cutting spitefully through the air, there arose from both bluffs the most diabolical yelling. For miles over the silent prairies could these murderous yells be heard. Nor were the rebel balls fired without effect. Captain Gardner fell bleeding upon the ground, and several of the men had also fallen. General Middleton, who had been some little distance in the rear was speedily apprised of the surprise, and dashing on toward the rebels' hold he met Boulton's Horse retiring for reinforcements. Then "A" Battery, the 90th regiment, and "C" Company, Toronto, with enthusiastic cheering, began to cry out: "Show us the rebels!" In a little while the firing became general, and our men struck out extending their formation as they neared the edge of the _coulee_, from which puffs of smoke were already curling up. Twenty of Dumont's men, with Winchesters, fired over a natural shelf or parapet protected by big boulders. The column was divided into two wings, the left consisting of "B" and "F" Companies of the 90th, with Boulton's mounted corps, and the right of the rest of the 90th, "A" Battery, and "C" School of Infantry. The left wing, "F" company leading, came under fire first. As the men were passing by him; Gen. Middleton shouted out: "Men of the 90th, don't bend your heads; you will soon be there; go in, and I know you'll do your duty." The men were bending down, partly to avoid the shots and partly because they were running over the uneven, scrubby ground. Colour-Sergeant Mitchell, of "F" company (one of the famous Wimbledon Mitchells), displayed great coolness, and afterwards did good execution with a rifle when the troops had entered the bush. "A," "C," and "D" Companies of the 90th, with "A" Battery and the School of Infantry, were on the right, the whole force forming a huge half-moon around the mouth of the _coulee_. The brush was densely thick, and as rain was falling, the smoke hung in clouds a few feet off the muzzles of the rifles. Here the 90th lost heavily. Ferguson was the first to fall. The bandsmen came up and carried off the injured to the rear, where Dr. Whiteford and other surgeons had extemporized a small camp, the men being laid some on camp-stretchers and some on rude beds of branches and blankets. "E" company of the 90th, under Capt. Whitla, guarded the wounded and the ammunition. General Middleton appeared to be highly pleased with the bearing of the 90th as they pushed on, and repeatedly expressed his admiration. He seemed to think, however, that the men exposed themselves unnecessarily. When they got near the _coulee_ in skirmishing order, they fired while lying prostrate, but some of them either through nervousness or a desire to get nearer the unseen enemy, kept rising to their feet, and the moment they did so Dumont's men dropped them with bullets or buckshot. The rebels, on the other hand, kept low. They loaded, most of them having powder and shot bags below the edge of the ravine or behind the thicket, and then popped up for an instant and fired. They had not time to take aim except at the outset, when the troops were advancing. Meanwhile the right wing had gone into action also. Two guns of "A" Battery, under Capt. Peters, dashed up at 10:40 o'clock, and at once opened on the _coulee_. A couple of old barns far back to the right were knocked into splinters at the outset, it being supposed that rebels were concealed there; and three haystacks were bowled over and subsequently set on fire by the shells or fuses. Attention was then centred on the ravine. At first, however, the battery's fire had no effect, as from the elevation on which the guns stood, the shot went whizzing over it. Dumont had sent thirty men to a small bluff, covered with boulder and scrub, within 450 yards of the battery, and these opened a sharp fire. The battery could not fire into this bluff without running the risk of killing some of the 90th, who had worked their way up towards the right of it. Several men of "A" were struck here. The rebels saw that their sharpshooters were causing confusion in this quarter, and about twenty of them ran clear from the back of the ravine past the fire of "C" and "D" companies to the bluff, and joined their comrades in a rattling fusillade on "A." Fortunately, only a few of them, had Winchesters. "A" moved forward a little, and soon got the measure of the ravine. The shrapnel screeched in the air, and burst right in among the brush and boulders, smashing the scraggy trees, and tearing up the moss that covered the ground in patches. The rebels at once saw that the game was up in this quarter, though they kept up a bold front and seldom stopped firing except when they were dodging back into new cover. In doing this they rarely exposed themselves, either creeping on all fours or else running a few yards in the shelter of the thicket and then throwing themselves flat on the ground again, bobbing up only when they raised their heads and elbows to fire. The shrapnel was too much for them, and they began to bolt towards the other side of the ravine, where our left wing was peppering them. This move was the first symptom of weakness they had exhibited, and Gen. Middleton at once took advantage of it and ordered the whole force to close in upon them, his object apparently being to surround them. The rebel commander, however, was not to be caught in that way. Instead of bunching all his forces on the left away from the fire of the artillery, he sent only a portion of it there to keep our men busy while the rest filled off to the north, retiring slowly as our two wings closed on them. Dumont was evidently on the look-out for the appearance of Col. Montizambert's force from the other side of the river. The general advance began at 11.45 a.m., Major Buchan of the 90th leading the right wing, and Major Boswell of the same corps the left. When the rebels saw this a number of them rushed forward on the left of the ravine, and the fighting for a time was carried on at close quarters, the enemy not being over sixty yards away. An old log hut and a number of barricades, formed by placing old trees and brushwood between the boulders, enabled them to make it exceedingly warm for our men for a time. At this point several of the 90th were wounded, and General Middleton himself had a narrow escape, a bullet going through his fur hat. Captains Wise and Doucet, of Montreal, the General's Aide-de-camps, were wounded about this time. "C" infantry behaved remarkably well all through, and bore the brunt of the general advance for some time, the buckshot from the rebels doing much damage. The rebel front was soon driven back, but neither here nor at any other time could the rebels' loss be ascertained. The Indians among them, who were armed with guns, appeared to devote themselves mainly to shooting the horses. A good many Indians were hit, and every time one of them was struck the others near him raised a loud shout, as if cheering. The troops pressed on gallantly, and the rebel fire slackened, and after a time died away, though now and then their front riflemen made a splurge, while the others made their way back. Captain Forrest, of the 90th, headed the advance at this point, Lieutenant Hugh J. Macdonald (son of Sir John Macdonald), of this company, who had done excellent service all day, kept well up with Forrest, the two being ahead of their men, and coming in for a fair share of attention from the retreating rebels. Macdonald was first reported as killed and then as wounded, but he was not injured, though struck on the shoulder by spent buckshot. Forrest's hat was shot off. At 12.50 the rebels were far out of range, going towards Batoche's, and the Battle of Fish Creek was practically over. [Footnote: I am chiefly indebted to the Toronto _Mail_ for the foregoing account of the battle.] During the battle, many instances of the greatest bravery are recorded. Private Ainsworth, of the 90th, was seen to leap upon the shoulders of a savage, who, in company with another, had endeavoured to cross the flat land and get shelter, wresting his gun and felling him to the earth with the butt of it, then securing the rifle firing at and killing the other Indian. While doing this, he was exposed to the fire of a score of guns, getting riddled with buck-shot and being struck with bullets. But the greatest daring and bravery were exhibited by Watson, of the Toronto School of Infantry. Finding it impossible to dislodge the enemy, he rushed headlong for the ambuscaded half-breeds, followed by a score of his comrades whom it was impossible to control. The war-cries of the Indians, the huzzas of the troops, and the rattle of musketry fairly echoed for miles, as evidenced by the statements of the west side contingent upon arriving on the scene. Watson paid the penalty of his daring by death, while the narrow escape of many others were remarkable. The utmost bravery all the while was displayed by our troops. When a man fell his comrade would pause for a moment, and say: "I hope you are not badly hurt," and then again look out for the enemy. Some of the men who received only slight wounds were anxious to remain in the fight, but their officers insisted that they should be taken to the rear, and attended to by the surgeons. Upon couches made of boughs, and covered with blankets, the brave young fellows were placed; and many of them submitted to probings and painful management of wounds without making a murmur. They seemed not to be concerned for themselves, but went on all the while enquiring as to how it was "going with the boys." General Middleton, himself a veteran soldier, expressed as I have already stated, his admiration for the bravery of all the men who were engaged. There was no bolting, even in the face of heavy fire; no shrinking, although _one man in every eight_ had been struck by the enemy's shot or bullets. Major Boulton had many narrow escapes, while he was standing for a moment, a hail of buckshot came whistling by his ear, burying itself into his horse, which was killed instantly. The Scouts, known as Boulton's Horse, under this brave officer, bore very gallantly their portion of the battle's brunt. Half-breads and Indians had orders from their leaders to shoot down horses as well as men; and Dumont frequently said, that the mounted men were the only ones of the force of the enemy for which he cared anything. Several of the horses were shot, and many of the men were riddled with buck-shot, but they bravely stood their ground. In the night, when the weary were sleeping after the hard day's work, dusky forms could be seen by the light of the moon, creeping stealthily towards where slept the gallant Scouts. The Guard heard a crackle, and turning, perceived three pairs of eyes gleaming with ferocity in the shadow of a clump of poplars. "Qui vive?" he cried, and raised his rifle; but before he could take aim, three shots rang out through the still night, and he fell dead, pierced by as many bullets. There was a general alarm through the camp, but no eye could detect the form of a Rebel. They were safe among the shadows in the ravine. In the few moments of silent horror that ensued after the commission of the murder, three diabolical yells sounded from the ravine, and far over the moon-lit prairies. Then divers voices were heard in the bluffs, and down in the gorge. These came from Dumont's men, who jeered, and cried that they hoped the soldiers enjoyed the pastime of watching their dead. On the following day, the bodies of the brave young fellows who had fallen, after being decently, and decorously disposed in death, were brought to the graves hollowed out in this far-away wilderness by the hands of old comrades. It was a very sad spectacle indeed. The death of brave soldiers is always mournful to contemplate; but war is the _trade_ of regulars, and they expect death, and burials in distant sod. But war is not the trade of our volunteer soldiers. They are mere young fellows, of various pursuits of life, and death and burial away from home lose nothing of their sorrowful surroundings, because the taking off has been at the hands of rebel murderers. General Middleton conducted the ceremonies; and here upon the wide, husht prairie, which will soon deck the graves with flowers, they were laid away. The brave young fellows who faced the Rebels' shot and ball without failing, faltered now, and many of them wept copious tears. On the following day, General Middleton began to make ready for his march toward Batoche's, where the Rebels' stronghold is located. Meanwhile the following sick and wounded have been left at the hospital at dark's Crossing, under the care of Dr. Orton: Captain Clark; Privates Hislop, Harris, Stovel, Matthews, Code Jarvis, Canniff, Lethbridge, Kemp, Bruce; Captain Gardner; Privates Perrin, King, Dunn, McDonald, Cummings, Jones, R. Jones, Wilson, Morrison, Woodman, Imrie, Asseline, Lailor; Sergeant Mawhinney, Private Wainwright. The following is a list of the killed and wounded from the outbreak of the Rebellion to the close of Colonel Otter's engagement with Pound maker, Big Bear and other Indian bands:-- Killed at Prince Albert:-- Constable T. G. Gibson; Constable G. P. Arnold; Constable Garrett; Capt. John Morton; W. Napier; C. Page; James Blakey; J. Napier Elliott; Robert Middleton; D. Mackenzie; D. McPhail; Charles Newitt; Joseph Anderson; Alexander Fisher. Wounded at Prince Albert:-- Capt. Moore; A. MacNab; Alex. Stewart; Inspector J. Howe; Corporal Gilchrist; S. F. Gordon; A. W. Smith; J. J. Moore; A. Miller. Killed at Frog Lake:-- T. T. Quinn, Indian Agent at Frog Lake; Father Fafard; Father Marchand; John Delaney, Farm Inspector; J. A. Gowanlock; Mrs. Gowanlock; Charles Gouin; William Gilchrist; Two Lay Brothers; John Williscraft; James K. Simpson, and two Hudson Bay men made prisoners, and probably murdered by Frog Lake Indians. Killed at Fort Pitt:-- Constable Cowan, N. W. M. P. Wounded at Fort Pitt:-- Constable Lonsley, N. W. M. P Killed at Fish Creek:-- Lieut. Swinford, 90th; Private Hutchinson, No. 1 Company, 90th; Private Ferguson, No. 1 Company, 90th; Private Ennis, No. 4 Company, 90th; Gunner Demanolly, "A" Battery; Arthur Watson, School of Infantry; D'Arcy Baker, Mounted Infantry; Gunner Cook, "A" Battery; Wheeler, 90th; Ainsworth, "A" Battery, Wounded at Fish Creek:-- Capt. Clarke, 90th; Capt. Wise, A. D. C.; Lieut. Doucett, A.D.C; Lieut. Bruce, M. I.; Capt. Gardner, M. I.; Private C. F. King, M. I.; Private H. P. Porin, M. I.; Private J. Langford, M. I.; Gunner Asseline, "A" Battery; Gunner Emeye, "A" Battery; Bombardier Taylor, "A" Battery; Sergeant-Major Mawhinney, "A" Battery; Driver Harrison; Private H. P. Wilson; Private E. Mannsell; Private Walter Woodman; Private R. H. Dunn, School of Infantry; Private H. Jones, School of Infantry; Private R. Jones, School of Infantry; Col.-Sergt. Cummings, School of Infantry; Corporal Lethbridge, 90th; Private Kemp; Corporal Code; Private Hartop; Private Blackwood; Private Canniff; Private W. W. Matthews; Private Lovell; Private Cane, 10th Royals; Private Wheeeling, 10th Royals, knee dislocated; Private Hislop, 90th; Private Chambers, 90th; Corporal Thecker, 90th; Private Bouchette, 90th; Private Swan 90th; Corporal Brown. Killed at Battleford:-- Frank Smart, shot on picket. Killed by Indians:-- John Walkinshaw and Albert Harkness. Killings and Woundings elsewhere:-- Sergeant Snyder, injured by explosion at Peterboro; Lieut. Morrow, accidentally shot; Private Moberley, broken arm; Kelsey, Midland Battalion, jumped from train, probably lost; G. H. Douglass, injured by fall from horse; Marwich, Halifax Battalion, died from exposure, a member of the 9th (Quebec) Battalion, died from exposure; Farm Instructor Payne; Barnez Fremont, rancher, Achille Blois, 9th Quebec, died from fever. Killed at Poundmaker's Reserve:-- Private Arthur Dobbs, Battleford Rifles; Bugler Foulks, School of Infantry; Corporals Laurie and Sleight, and Trumpeter Burke, Mounted Police; Privates Rogers and Osgoode, Governor-General's Foot Guards; Teamster Winder, of Regina. Wounded at Poundmaker's Reserve:-- Col-Sergt. Cooper, in the hip, Private G. Varey, in the shoulder, Private Lloyd, in the shoulder, and Private G. Watts, in the thigh, Queen's Own Rifles. Lieut. Pelletier, in the thigh, Sergt. Gaffney, in the arm, Corporal Morton, in the groin, and Gunner Reynolds, in the arm, "B" Battery. Sergt. Winters, in the face, Private McQuillan, in the side, Governor-General's Foot Guards. Sergt. Ward, in the shoulder, Mounted Police. Sergt.-Major Spackman, in the arm, Bugler Gilbert, in the arm, Infantry School. Killed at Batoche:-- Gunner Wm. Phillips, "A" Battery, Quebec; Private T, Moor, No. 3 company, Royal Grenadiers, Toronto; Capt. John French, scout; Capt. Brown, scout; Lieut. Fitch, 10th Royal Grenadiers, shot through the heart; W. P. Krippen, of Perth, a surveyor; Private Haidisty, 90th Winnipeg Battalion; Private Fraser, 90th Winnipeg Battalion. Of the foregoing the last six were killed on Monday, the first on Saturday, and Private Moor on Sunday. Wounded at Batoche:-- Tenth Royal Grenadiers:--Major Dawson, slightly in the ankle, able to limp about; Capt. Manley slightly in the foot; Capt. Mason flesh wound in the thigh; Staff Sergt. T. M. Mitchell, slight wound in the eye; Private R. Cook in the arm; Private G. Barbour, slight scratch in the head; Private G. W, Quigley, flesh wound in the arm; Private J. Marshall in the calf; Private H. Wilson, slight wound across the back; Bugler, M. Vaughan, in the finger; Private Scovell, slight flesh wound; Private Stead, slight flesh wound; Private Cantwell. The 90th Battalion:--Corp. Gillies, Sergt.-Major Watson, Private O. A. Wheeler, Private Young, Sergt. Jackes, Private M. Erickson, Private Kemp. Surveyor Scouts:--Lieut Garden. Capt. French's Scouts:--Trooper Cook. "A" Battery:--Driver Jas. Stout, Gunner Fairbanks, Gunner Charpentier, Gunner Twohey. Midland Battalion:--Lieut. Geo. Laidlaw, Lieut. Helliwell, Corp. Helliwell, Private Barton. Meanwhile the campaign goes on, and we know not what tidings any day may bring forth. There is no use now in having long discussions as to whose shoulders should bear the responsibility of all the devastation, terror, misery and blood; the duty of the hour is to put an end to the Rebellion. Riel must be captured at any cost; so, too, must Dumont. Men so strongly a menace to public peace as Riel and his bad and fearless ally, Dumont, must not be given the opportunity again of covering the land with blood. There must be a pretty wholesome hanging in the North-West, and the gentlemen whom the authorities must give first attention to are the two villains just named, Poundmaker, Big Bear, Little Pine, Lucky Man, and those bloody wolves who perpetrated the butcheries at Frog Lake. I have said that this is not the place to discuss at length the question of the Government's responsibility for this blood, and sorrow, and misery. Neither is it. Yet one and all believe, though thousands will belie their convictions, that there has been a criminal mismanagement of these half-breed people by the authorities at Ottawa. I have been obliged to show that in the past, many of our French co-patriots bestowed a most astonishing and unjustifiable sympathy for Riel. I am glad to be able to say that in the present case, while censuring the Government for its indifference to the grievances of the half-breeds, they have no word of justification for the murderous apostle of tumult. Bishop Langevin, brother of the Hon the Minister of Public Works, issued a pastoral, in which there was no uncertain sound. He called upon the faithful sons of the country within his diocese to come forward and join hands against a cause of tumult, destruction and murder. THE TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF LOUIS RIEL. On the 20th of July the Court met, when Riel was formally arraigned, the clerk reading the long indictment. In reply to the interrogation whether the prisoner pled guilty to the charge of treason, his counsel rose and took exception to the jurisdiction of the Court. The plea entered by the defence was to the affect that the presiding stipendiary magistrate was incompetent to try a case involving the death penalty, and urged that Riel should be tried by one of the duly constituted courts in Ontario or in British Columbia. Mr. Christopher Robinson, Q.C., for the Crown, asked for an adjournment for eight days, to prepare a reply to the plea, which was granted. The Court then adjourned to the 28th instant. On the re-opening of the Court, counsel expressed themselves ready to proceed. Only a few minutes were taken up in selecting a jury. Twelve persons were called, five of whom were peremptorily challenged by the defence, and one by the Crown. The remaining six were sworn in to try the prisoner at the bar. Their names are as follows: --H. J. Painter, E. Everett, E. J. Brooks, J. W. Merryfield, H. Dean, and F. Crosgrove. During the selection of the jury, it is observed by a correspondent of _The Mail_, to whom we shall be indebted for the reports of the trial, in making the present abstract, "that Riel anxiously watched the face of every man as he was selected and sworn, as though he could read their inmost thoughts as they took the oath." After reading the indictment to the jury, Mr. B. B. Osler, Q.C., opened the case for the Crown, in which he explained the nature of the charge against the prisoner, whose career he traced through the successive steps of the rebellion, and indicated the weight and character of the evidence to be brought against its wicked instigator and chief leader. The plea of the defence of the incompetence of the Court to try the case, was first answered by the learned counsel, who remarked, that the character, and composition of the Court, as well as the provision for the trial of capital offences by a jury of six men instead of twelve, were in harmony with the Dominion Law enacted for the Government of the Territories, and that the Dominion Parliament had the right, under the British North America Act, to make that law. "The absence of the Grand Jury was explained, on the ground that such juries were essentially county organizations, and were impossible in large districts with small and scattered populations." The same reason explained the limiting of the jury to half the usual number. It was also stated that the Crown deemed it unwise, if indeed it were not impossible, to issue a Special Commission for the trial of the prisoner. Mr. Osler proceeding said, that Riel not only aided and abetted the illegal acts of the rebels, but directed these acts. "The testimony he claimed," says a writer in _The Illustrated War News_, "was abundantly sufficient to bring home to the prisoner his guilt in the charges against him. He (Mr. Osler) read the document in Riel's handwriting to Crozier, in which Riel threatened a war of extermination against the whites, and traced the prisoner's conduct afterwards to show that he had tried to carry out that threat. It was no constructive treason that was sought to be proved, but treason involving the shedding of brave men's blood. The accused had been led on, not by the desire to aid his friends in a lawful agitation for redress of a grievance, but by his inordinate vanity and desire for power and wealth." "The first overt act of treason was committed," continued Mr. Osler, "when the French half-breeds were requested by Riel to bring their arms with them to a meeting to be held at Batoche on March 3rd. This indicated that the prisoner intended to resort to violence. On the 18th instant they find him (Riel) sending out armed men and taking prisoners, including Mr. Lash, the Indian agent of the St. Lament region, and others, also looting the stores at and near Batoche, stopping freighters and appropriating their freight. A few days later the French half-breeds were under arms, and were joined by the Indians of the neighbourhood, who were incited to rise by the prisoner. On the 21st inst. Major Crozier did all he could to get the armed men to disperse, but directed by Riel, they refused to do so, and taking their orders from him, they continued in rebellion. He held a document in his hands, in the prisoner's handwriting," added Mr. Osler, "which contained the terms on which Fort Carlton would be spared attack by the surrender and march out of Major Crozier and the mounted police. This document was never delivered, but was found with other papers in the rebel council chamber after the taking of Batoche. It was said in this notification to Crozier that the rebels would attack the police if they did not vacate Carlton, and would commence a war of extermination of the white race. This document was direct evidence of the treasonable intentions of the prisoner. Ten days previously Riel declared himself determined to rule or perish, and the declaration was followed by this demand. It would be said that, at last, when a clash of arms was imminent, Riel objected to forcible measures; but this document was a refutation of that assertion. At Duck Lake the prisoner had taken upon himself the responsibility of ordering his men to fire on the police. At Fish Creek, if Riel was not there, he directed the movement, and was therefore responsible. On the day of the fight he went back to Batoche to finish the rifle-pits. In the contest at Batoche the prisoner was seen bearing arms, and giving such directions as would show that he was the main mover. His treatment of the prisoners, his letters to Middleton, and other documents would show Riel's leadership. A letter found in Poundmaker's camp would show his deliberate intention of bringing on this country the calamity of an Indian war. All this would be proven, and it would be shown that the prisoner had not come here to aid his friends in the redress of grievances, but in order to use the half-breeds for his own selfish ends." Mr. Osler closed with a reference to the death and suffering which had been caused by the ambition of one man, and impressed upon the jury the grave responsibility they were charged with in bringing his crime home to the prisoner. The first witness called by the Crown was DR. WILLOUGHBY, of SASKATOON. After having been sworn, witness said that the prisoner had stated to him that the Fort Garry trouble, when Scott had been shot, was nothing to what was going to take place. He said that the Indians only waited for him to strike the first blow to join him, and that he had the United States at his back. He seemed greatly excited, and said:--"It is time, doctor, that the breeds should assert their rights, and it will be well for those who have lived good lives." A party of armed men then drove up, and Riel said, pointing to them, "My people intend striking a blow for their rights. They have petitioned the Government over and over again, the only reply being an increase of the police force each time." The Indians, he said, had arranged their plans, and when the first blow was struck they would be joined by the American Indians. They would issue a proclamation, and assert that the time had arrived for him to rule the country or perish in the attempt. He promised to divide the country into seven equal portions, one of which was to be the new Ireland of the new North-West. He said the rebellion of fifteen years ago was not a patch on what this would be. THOS. McKAY, a loyal half-breed, was next called, who testified that he joined the Volunteer contingent from Prince Albert which formed part of Major Crozier's command at Duck Lake. Previous to that engagement he accompanied Mr. Hillyard Mitchell in his mission to Batoche, where the rebels had their headquarters. His object in going to Batoche was to point cut to the French half-breeds the danger they were getting into in taking up arms. On arriving at the village he was met by an armed guard who conducted him, with Mr. Mitchell, to the rebel council room, where he was introduced to Riel "as one of Her Majesty's soldiers." We here quote part of the examination, by Mr. Christopher Robinson, of this Witness. Q.--Who introduced you to the prisoner? A.--Mr. Mitchell introduced me to Mr. Riel as one of Her Majesty's soldiers. Q.--That is Mr. Hillyard Mitchell? A.--Yes. I shook hands with Mr. Riel and had a talk with him. I said, "There appears be great excitement here, Mr. Riel." He said, "No, there is no excitement at all; it was simply that the people were trying to redress their grievances, as they had asked repeatedly for their rights; that they had decided to make a demonstration." I told him it was a very dangerous thing to resort to arms. He said he had been waiting fifteen long years and that they had been imposed upon, and it was time now, after they had waited patiently that their rights should be given, as the poor half-breeds had been imposed upon. I disputed his wisdom and advised him to adopt different measures. Q.--Did he speak of himself at all in the matter? A.--He accused me of having neglected my people. He said if it was not for men like me their grievances would have been redressed long ago, that as no one took an interest in these people he had decided to take the lead in the matter. Q.--Well? A.--He accused me of neglecting them. I told him it was simply a matter of opinion, that I had certainly taken an interest in them, and my interest in the country was the same as theirs, and that I had advised them time and again, and that I had not neglected them. I also said that he had neglected them a long time if he took as deep an interest as he professed to. He became very excited, and got up and said, "You don't know what we are after--it is blood, blood; we want blood; it is a war of extermination. Everybody that is against us is to be driven out of the country." There were two curses in the country--the Government and the Hudson Bay Co. He further said the first blood they wanted was mine. There were some little dishes on the table, and he got hold of a spoon and said, "You have no blood, you are a traitor to your people, your blood is frozen, and all the little blood you have will be there in five minutes"--putting the spoon up to my face, and pointing to it. I said, "If you think you are benefiting your cause by taking my blood, you are quite welcome to it." He called his people and the committee, and wanted to put me on trial for my life, and Garnot got up and went to the table with a sheet of paper, and Gabriel Dumont took a chair on a syrup keg, and Riel called up the witnesses against me. At this juncture Riel was called away to attend a committee meeting of the rebel government. Subsequently, by the mediation of Hillyard Mitchell, Riel's wrath at McKay was placated, and he was allowed to return to Fort Carlton with his intercessor. Before leaving, Riel apologized to McKay for what he had said to him, and asked him to join the insurgents, which witness, of course, would not do, being a loyal half-breed and a volunteer in the ranks of the Prince Albert contingent with Crozier at Fort Carlton. McKay then detailed the incidents of the disastrous engagement with the rebels at Duck Lake, and gave strong testimony to criminate Riel, which the counsel for the defence utterly failed to shake. The next witness WAS JOHN ASTLEY, surveyor of PRINCE ALBERT, who was long prisoner of Riel's at Batoche, and the rebel chief's messenger on the day of the taking of the village by the loyal forces under Middleton. The witness gave a vivid description of his capture and imprisonment by Riel, and his subsequent release by the volunteers at Batoche. Riel acknowledged to him that he ordered his men in the name of the Almighty to fire at Duck Lake. He did not do so, however until, as he thought, the police had fired. Riel told him he must have another fight with the soldiers to secure better terms of surrender from Gen. Middleton. SECOND DAY OF THE TRIAL. The second day of the Riel trial brought out sufficient evidence to incriminate the prisoner, and to lead the Crown prosecutors to waive the calling of other witnesses. During the proceedings the prisoner, it is reported, manifested more interest than he did on the first day of the trial, and his dark penetrating eye restlessly wandered from witness to counsel, and from bench to jury. "All day long a couple of medical men sat watching his actions, to discover, if possible, whether his mind was affected or not." His disagreement with his counsel towards the close of the day, caused an exciting break in the proceedings. GEORGE KERR, of Kerr Brothers, BATOCHE, was the first witness sworn. He testified that on the 18th of March, Riel, with some fifty armed half-breeds, came to his store, and demanded, and obtained, all his guns and ammunition. His store was sacked, and later on he was himself taken prisoner, but was subsequently released. Riel, he testified, directed the rebel movements in concert with Gabriel Dumont. HARRY WALTERS, another storekeeper at BATOCHE, was then examined, and gave similar testimony as to the sacking of his store, and of Riel's demand for arms and ammunition. On his refusing to accede to the demand of the prisoner and the breeds with him, Riel said, "You had better do it quietly. If we succeed, I will pay you; if not, the Dominion Government will." I refused, said Walters, and they forced themselves in and took the arms. I was arrested shortly after. Riel said the movement was for the freedom of the people. The country, if they succeeded, was to be divided, giving a seventh to the half-breeds, a seventh to the Indians, a seventh to church and schools, the remainder to be Crown Lands. I was kept prisoner three days, being liberated by Riel. Riel said, God was with their people, and that if the whites ever struck a blow, a thunderbolt would destroy them. They took everything out of my store before morning, the prisoner superintending the removal of the goods. HILLYARD MITCHELL sworn, was examined by Mr. Osler. He said--I am an Indian trader, have a store at Duck Lake; heard there was an intention by rebels to take my store. I went to Fort Carlton and saw Major Crozier on the Thursday prior to the Duck Lake fight; saw prisoner on that Thursday at Batoche. Saw some people at the river armed. At the village I saw some English half-breed freighters who had been taken prisoners by Riel, and their freight also taken. Philip Garnot took me to the priest's house. I saw the prisoner there with Charles Nolin, Guardupuy and others. I think this was on the 19th of March. I told Riel that I had come to give some advice to the half-breeds. Riel said the Government had always answered their demands by sending more police. They were willing to fight 500 police. He said he had been trampled on and kept out of the country, and he would bring the Government and Sir Jonn Macdonald to their knees. THOMAS E. JACKSON was next examined by Mr. Osler, and deposed that he was a druggist, at Prince Albert, and a brother of Wm. Henry Jackson, an insane prisoner of Riel's. Riel, witness testified, asked him to write to the eastern papers, placing a favourable construction on his (Riel's) actions. Riel had made an application to Government for $35,000 as indemnity for loss of property; he showed the greatest hatred to the English, and his motives were those of revenge for ill-treatment at the time of the Red River rebellion. Having questioned Riel's present motives and plans, witness was taken prisoner and placed in close confinement. Riel afterwards accused me of having advised an English half-breed to desert. When Middleton was attacking Batoche, Riel came to witness and told him if Middleton killed any of their women and children he would massacre the prisoners. He wrote a message to Middleton to that effect, and I carried it to the General. (The message was produced and identified by witness). I did not return to the rebel camp. Saw the prisoner armed once after the Fish Creek fight. Riel was in command at Batoche, Dumont being in immediate command of the men. I know prisoner's handwriting. (The original summons to Major Crozier to surrender, the letter to Crozier asking him to come and take away the dead after Duck Lake fight, a letter to "dear relatives" at Fort Qu'Appelle, a letter to the half-breeds and Indians about Battleford, a letter to Poundmaker, and other documents were put in and identified by witness as being in Riel's handwriting). Cross-examined by Mr. Fitzpatrick--The agitation was for provincial rights and their claims under the Manitoba treaty, and I was in sympathy with it. Riel was brought into the country by the French half-breeds. I attended a meeting at Prince Albert immediately after Riel's arrival in June, 1884. Riel said what they wanted was a constitutional agitation, and if they could not accomplish their ends in five years they would take ten to do it. Riel was their adviser; was not a member of the Executive Committee. Up to March last, from all I heard prisoner say or discovered otherwise, I believed Riel meant simply a constitutional agitation, as was being carried on by the other settlers. Riel had told him the priests were opposed to him, and that they were all wrong. Heard Riel talk of dividing up the country to be bestowed on the half-breeds, Poles, Hungarians, Bavarians, etc. When I was Riel's prisoner I heard him talk of this division, which I thought meant a division of the proceeds of sale of lands in a scheme of immigration. This was altogether different from what he had all along proposed at the meetings. All the documents Riel signed that I know of were signed "Exovide" (one of the flock). Riel explained that his new religion was a liberal form of Roman Catholicism, and that the Pope had no power in Canada. Think Riel wanted to exercise the power of the Pope himself. These expressions were made by Riel after the rebellious movement was begun. GENERAL MIDDLETON was now called, and was examined by Mr. C. Robinson, Q.C. He testified that he was sent by the Minister of Militia to quell the outbreak on the Saskatchewan, and gave the well-known details of his encounter with the rebels at Fish Creek, and of his subsequent movement on Batoche. He testified to receiving two letters from Riel on the day of the capture of Batoche, in one of which Riel threatened to massacre the prisoners in his possession if he (Middleton) fired upon the half-breed women and children. The letter was produced in Court, and identified by the General. CAPT. GEO. H. YOUNG, of the Winnipeg Field Battery, deposed that he was present at Batoche as Brigade Major under the last witness, and was in the charge at the close. Witness was first in the rebel council chamber after the capture of the village, and found and took possession of the rebel archives. A number of documents were produced, which witness recognised as those he had secured. After Riel's surrender he was given into witness's custody and taken to Regina. MAJOR JARVIS, in command of the Winnipeg Field Battery during the campaign, and to whom the charge of the papers found at Batoche was confided, identified the papers produced in Court. MAJOR CROZIER, of the N.-W. Mounted Police, was next sworn, and detailed the fact that he was met by an armed force of rebels at Duck Lake and fired upon, losing many of his command in killed and wounded. He testified that, subsequent to this engagement, a man named Sanderson brought him a letter from Riel asking him to come and remove his dead from the field. CHARLES NOLIN was next called, and was examined by Mr. Casgrain in French. The deposition of this witness we take from the Toronto _Globe_. Nolin deposed that he lived in St. Laurent and formerly in Manitoba. He knew when Riel came to this country in July, 1884. And met him many times. Riel showed him a book he had written in which he said he would destroy England, and also Rome and the Pope. Riel spoke to him of his plans in December, expressing his wish for money, a sum between ten and fifteen thousand dollars. Riel had no plan to get it, but he wanted to claim an indemnity from the Dominion Government; that they owed him $100,000. Riel told him he had had an interview with Father Andre, and at that time he was at open war with the clergy, but had made peace with Father Andre in order to gain his ends. Riel went into the church with Father Andre and other priests, and promised to do nothing against them, and Father Andre had promised to use his influence with the Government to secure an indemnity of $35,000. This was in the beginning of December, 1884, the agreement being made at St. Laurent. Between December and February 14th, witness had taken part in seven meetings. Riel said if he could get the money from the Government he would go wherever the Government would send him--to the Province of Quebec or elsewhere. Otherwise, he said, before the grass was very long, they would see foreign armies in Canada. He would begin with subduing Manitoba, and afterwards turn against the North-West. Prisoner afterwards prepared to go to the United States, and told the people it would look well if they attempted to prevent him from going. Riel never had the intention of leaving the country, but wanted witness to get the people to tell him not to go. Witness was chairman of a meeting which was held, and brought the matter up. On the 2nd March a meeting was held at the settlement between Riel and Father Andre. There were seven or eight half-breeds there. Prisoner appeared to be very excited, and told Father Andre he must give him permission to proclaim a Provisional Government before 12 o'clock. On the 3rd March a meeting was held for the English half-breeds. About forty armed French-half-breeds came there. Riel spoke and said the police wanted to arrest him, but he had the real police. Witness spoke also at the meeting on the 5th of March. Riel afterwards told witness he had decided to take up arms and induce the people to take up arms for the glory of God, the good of the Church, and the saving of their souls. About twenty days before the prisoner took up arms witness broke entirely from him. On the 19th witness was made prisoner by four of Riel's men and taken to the church, where he found some half-breeds and Indians armed. That night he was taken before the council and was acquitted. Riel protested against the decision. Witness was condemned to death, and he was thus forced to join the rebels to save his life. The conditions of surrender to Crozier were put in his hands to be delivered to Crozier, but he did not deliver the letter. Riel was present at the Duck Lake fight, on the 26th March, and was one of the first to go out to meet the police, carrying a cross in his hands. Cross examined by Mr. Lemieux.--I have taken an active part in political affairs of the country. In 1869 I was in Manitoba. In 1884 Riel was living in Montana with his wife and children. I participated in the movement to bring Riel here; believed Riel would be of advantage in obtaining redress of the grievances. The clergy had not taken part in the political movement, but had assisted them in obtaining their rights. They thought it was necessary to have Riel as a point to rally round. Delegates were sent to invite Riel to come, and he came with his wife and family. A constitutional political movement was made, in which the half-breeds of all creeds took part, and the whites, though they were not active promoters, were sympathizers. Did not believe Riel ever wanted to return to Montana, although he spoke of it. After the Government refused to grant the indemnity to Riel witness did not believe he would be useful as a constitutional leader. It was after the indemnity was refused that Riel spoke of going away. Witness denied that in 1869 he started an agitation with Riel, and then, as in the present case, abandoned him. He only went as far as was constitutional. He had heard prisoner say he considered himself a prophet, and said he had inspiration in his liver and in every other part of his body. He wrote upon a piece of paper that he was inspired. He showed witness a book written with buffalo blood, which was a plan that after Riel had taken England and Canada, Quebec was to be given to the Prussians, Ontario to the Irish, and the North-West to be divided among the various nationalities of Europe, the Jews, Hungarians, and Bavarians included. The rebel council had first condemned witness to death, and afterwards liberated him, and he accepted a position in the council in order to save his life. Witness said that whenever the word police was mentioned Riel became very excited, having heard that the Government had answered their petitions for redress by sending 500 extra police. At this part of the cross-examination of Nolin, the proceedings were interrupted by an excited clamour of Riel, to be allowed to interrogate the prisoner, and to assist personally in the conduct of his case. This the Court could only allow with the consent of prisoner's counsel. His counsel objected, and urged that such a proceeding would prejudice their client's case; but Riel persisted, and the rest of the day was wasted in fruitless altercation, which neither the Court nor the counsel for the Crown could allay. The chief cause of Riel's excitement seemed to be the determination of his counsel to press the plea of insanity, a plea which, throughout the trial, Riel strongly objected to be urged on his behalf. The Court in the midst of the altercation, adjourned. THIRD DAY OF THE TRIAL. [Footnote: In preparing this abstract of the day's proceedings, the writer acknowledges to have drawn from the reports published in the Toronto _Globe_ and _Mail_, and the Montreal _Gazette_ And _Star_.] The Riel trial was resumed at Regina, on the morning of July 30th, by MR. GREEN SHIELDS' addressing the jury for the defence. The Court-room was again filled to its utmost capacity. After referring to the difficulty counsel had met, in the prisoner's endeavour to obstruct their conduct of the case, Mr. Greenshields dwelt upon the history of the Indians and half-breeds in the North-West Territories, pointing out their rights to the soil. In this Court they had a different procedure from that in other parts of the Dominion, and while not desiring to be understood that the prisoner would not receive as fair a trial as the machinery provided made possible, he questioned whether a jury of six men, nominated by the presiding magistrate, was sufficient to satisfy the demands of Magna Charta,--the great bulwark of the rights and liberties of all British subjects. He believed any of the older Provinces would rebel against such an encroachment on their rights, and he did not see why such a condition of things should obtain here. For years the half-breeds had been making futile efforts to obtain their rights. All these efforts had been met by rebuffs, or had received no attention whatever from the Federal Government, and those very rights for which the half-breeds were supplicating and petitioning were being handed over to railway corporations, colonization companies, and like concerns. He would not say that the action of the Government justified armed rebellion--the shedding of blood--but it left in these poor people those smouldering fires of discontent that were so easily fanned into rebellion by a madman such as Riel. The prisoner had been invited by the half-breeds to come among them from a foreign country to assist them in making a proper representation of their grievances to the Government. They were unlettered and required an active sympathizer, with education sufficient to properly conduct the agitation. Riel was the man they chose, and there was no evidence to show that when Riel came to this country he came with any intention of inciting the people to armed rebellion. His work was begun and carried on up till January in a perfectly constitutional manner. After that time, as the jury had seen in the cross-examination of the witnesses for the prosecution, no effort was made by the defence to deny that overt acts of treason had been committed in the presence of the prisoner; but evidence would be brought to show that at the time these acts were countenanced by the prisoner, he was of unsound mind and not responsible for what he did. The peculiar disease of the prisoner was called by men learned in diseases of the mind, "megalomania." This species of mental disease developed two delusions--one the desire for and belief that the patient could obtain great power in political matters to rule or govern, another his desire to found a great church. That the prisoner was possessed of these delusions, the evidence abundantly proved. The jury might consider, with some grounds for the belief, that the evidence of Charles Nolin, who swore that the prisoner was willing to leave the country if he obtained from the Government a gratuity of $35,000, was inconsistent with the real existence of such a monomania as the prisoner was afflicted with. But not one isolated portion, but the whole, of Nolin's evidence should be considered. Other portions of his testimony, for instance, prisoner's opinions on religious matters, and his intention to divide up the country between various foreign nationalities, were conclusive proof of the prisoner's insanity. This was a great State trial, the speaker said, and he warned the jury to throw aside the influence of heated public opinion, as it was expressed at present. There were many people executed for having taken part in the rebellion of 1837, and it was questionable if there could be found anyone now who would justify those executions. The beat of private feeling had died away, and the jury should be careful that no hasty conclusion in this case should leave posterity a chance to say that their verdict had been a wrong one. They should, if possible, look at the case with the calmness of the historian, throwing aside all preconceived notions of the case that interfered with the evidence given in the Court, and build up their verdict on the testimony brought out here. In the course of his remarks, Mr. Greenshields said, that he accused no Government in particular for neglecting the claims of the breeds; but if the authorities had paid attention to the petitions which had been addressed to them, the rebellion would never have occurred. He paid a glowing tribute to the volunteers, who left their private occupations and came from all parts of the Dominion to suppress the outbreak. At the conclusion of Mr. Greenshield's address, FATHER ANDRE, Superior of the Oblat Fathers in the district of Carlton, was called for the defence. He said he had been intimately associated with the breeds for a quarter of a century. Riel had been induced to come to this country by the settlers to assist them. The witness had a thorough knowledge of what was going on amongst the settlers. He had no knowledge of petitions having been sent to the Government during the agitation; but he had himself indirectly communicated with the Government last December, with the object of getting the prisoner out of the country. The pretensions or claims of the breeds changed frequently. After Riel's arrival the Government had been notified three or four times of what was transpiring. The Government had promised to take the matter into consideration. The Government had replied to one petition by telegram, conceding the old survey. This was an important concession. At Batoche three scrips had been issued, and at Duck Lake forty were given. The witness never liked talking with the prisoner on religion or politics. On these subjects Riel's language frightened the witness, who considered him undoubtedly crazy on these subjects, while on all other points he was sane enough. Once, at a meeting of priests, the advisability of allowing such a man to perform religious duties was discussed, and it was unanimously agreed that the man was insane. The discussion of religious or political subjects with him was like dangling a red flag in front of a bull. PHILIP GARNEAU, of Batoche, but at present a prisoner in Regina gaol, was now sworn and deposed as follows:--I saw Riel at Batoche last fall; had seen him several times before January. During the trouble I talked with him at my house on religious matters. He said the spirit of Elias, the prophet, was in him. He wanted the people to believe that. He often said the Spirit of God told him to do this or that. During his stay at my house Riel prayed aloud all night; never heard such prayers before; prisoner must have made them up. He could not stand to be contradicted, and was very irritable. Heard him declare he was representing St. Peter. Heard him talking of the country being divided into seven Provinces, and he was going to bring in seven different nationalities to occupy them. I did not believe he would succeed in that. He expected the assistance of the Jews and other nationalities, to whom he was going to award a Province each for their aid. Riel said he was sure to succeed, it was a divine mission, and God was the chief of the movement; only met him once before the trouble. I thought the man was crazy. Cross-examined by Mr. Robinson--I followed Riel solely because he forced me with armed men. He had great influence over the half-breeds, who listened to and followed his advice, FATHER FOURMAND sworn, examined by Mr. Lemieux in French--I am a priest of St. Laurent; went there in 1875. Have had conversations with Riel since the time of the rebellion. Often conversed with him on political and religious subjects. I was present at the meeting of priests at which Riel's sanity was questioned. I knew the facts upon which the question arose. Before the rebellion Riel was a polite and pleasant man to me. When he was not contradicted about political affairs he was quiet, but when opposed he was violent. As soon as the rebellion commenced he lost all control of himself, and threatened to burn all the churches. He believed there was only one God; that Christ the Son was not God, neither was the Holy Ghost, and in consequence the Virgin Mary was not the mother of God, but of the Son of God. He changed the song beginning "Hail Mary, mother of God," to "Hail Mary, mother of the Son of God." He denied the real presence of God in the Host, it was a man of six feet. Riel said he was going to Quebec, France and Italy, and would overthrow the Pope and choose a Pope or appoint himself. We finally concluded there was no other way of explaining his conduct than that he was insane. Noticed a great change in prisoner as the agitation progressed. When the fathers opposed him he attacked them. Witness was brought before the rebel council by the prisoner, to give an account of his conduct. He called me a little tiger, being very excited. Never showed me a book of his prophecies written in buffalo blood, although I heard of it. Cross-examined by Mr. Casgrain--Most of the half-breeds followed Riel in his religious views; some opposed them. The prisoner was relatively sane before the rebellion. The prisoner proclaimed the rebellion on March 18th. I promised to occupy a position of neutrality towards the provisional Government. He could better explain prisoner's conduct on the ground of insanity than that of great criminality. Witness naturally had a strong friendship towards the prisoner. The afternoon was devoted to expert testimony respecting the prisoner's sanity. MEDICAL TESTIMONY. DR. ROY, of the Beauport Asylum, Quebec, said the prisoner was an inmate of that institution for nineteen months. He was discharged in January, 1878. He suffered from ambitious mania. One of the distinguishing characteristics of that form of insanity is that, so long as the particular hobby is not touched, the patient appears perfectly sane. From what he heard the witnesses say, and from the prisoner's actions yesterday, he had no hesitation in pronouncing the man insane, and he believed him not to be responsible for his acts. DR. CLARKE, of Toronto, was the next witness. He said he was the Superintendent of the Toronto Lunatic Asylum. He has had nine or ten years' experience in treating lunatics. He examined the prisoner twice yesterday and once this morning. From what evidence he had heard and from his own examination, provided the witnesses told the truth and the prisoner was not malingering, there was no doubt of his being insane. Cross-examined by Mr. Osler--It is impossible for any man to say that a person like Riel, who is sharp and well-educated, is either insane or sane. He (the witness) would require to have him under his notice for months to form an opinion. The man's actions are consistent with fraud. Thinks he knows the difference between right and wrong, subject to his delusion. DR. WALLACE was next called. He said he was Superintendent of the Insane Asylum at Hamilton. He had listened to the evidence in this case. He saw the prisoner alone for half an hour. He has formed the opinion that there is no indication of insanity about him. He thinks the prisoner knows the difference between right and wrong. The person suffering from megalomania often imagines he is a king, divinely inspired, has the world at his feet--supreme egotism in fact. It is one of the complications of paralytic insanity. DR. JUKES, of the Mounted Police, would not say the prisoner was not insane. He had seen him daily since May, and noticed no traces of insanity. The Court adjourned at five o'clock. RIEL'S ADDRESS TO THE JURY. At the outset, writes W. A. H., correspondent of the Montreal _Star_, Riel spoke in a quiet and low tone, many of his statements carrying home conviction to his hearers. "At any rate," was the subsequent comment, "Riel speaks with the belief that he is right." Gradually as he proceeded and got fairly launched into his subject, his eyes sparkled, his body swayed to and fro as if strongly agitated, and his hands accomplished a series of wonderful gestures as he warmed up and spoke with impassioned eloquence. His hearers were spell-bound, and well they might, as each concluding assertion with terrible earnestness was uttered with the effect and force of a trumpet blast. That every soul in Court was impressed is not untrue, and many ladies were moved to tears. The following is an epitome of what he said:-- "Your Honour, and gentlemen of the jury--It would be an easy matter for me to-day, to play the _role_ of a lunatic, because the circumstances are such as to excite any ordinary man subject to natural excitement after what has transpired to-day. The natural excitement, or may I add anxiety, which my trial causes me is enough to justify me in acting in the manner of a demented man; but I hope, with the help of God, that I will maintain a calm exterior and act with the decorum that suits this honourable Court. You have, no doubt, seen by the papers produced by the Crown, that I was not a man disposed to think of God at the beginning. Gentlemen, I don't want to play the part of a lunatic. "Oh, my God, help me through the grace and divine influence of Jesus. Oh, my God bless me, bless this Court, bless this jury, and bless my good lawyers, who at great sacrifice have came nearly 700 leagues to defend me. Bless the lawyers for the Crown, for they have done what they considered their duty. God grant that fairness be shown. Oh, Jesus, change the curiosity of the ladies and others here to sanctity. The day of my birth I was helpless, and my mother was helpless. Somebody helped her. I lived, and although a man I am as helpless to-day as I was a babe on my mother's breast. But the North-West is also my mother: although the North-West is sick and confined, there is some one to take care of her. I am sure that my mother will not kill me after forty-years life. My mother cannot take my life. She will be indulgent and will forget. "When I came here from Montana, in July, 1884, I found the Indians starving. The state of affairs was terrible. The half-breeds were subsisting on the rotten pork of the Hudson Bay Company. This was the condition, this was the pride, of responsible Government! What did Louis Riel do? I did not equally forget the whites. I directed my attention to assist all classes, irrespective of creed, colour or nationality. We have made petitions to the Canadian Government, asking them to relieve the state of affairs. We took time. Those who know me, know we took time with the object of uniting all classes, even if I may speak it, all parties. Those who know me know I have suffered. I tried to come to an understanding with the authorities on different points. I believe I have done my duty. It was said that I was egotistical. A man cannot generalize himself unless he is imputed with the taint. After the Canadian Government, through the honourable under-secretary of state, replied to my letter regarding the half-breeds, then, and not till then, did I look after my private affairs. A good deal can be said of the distribution of land. I don't know if my dignity would permit me to mention what you term my foreign policy, but if I was allowed to explain or question certain witnesses, those things would have looked different. My lawyers are good, but they don't understand the circumstances. Be it understood that I appreciate their services. Were I to go into details, I could safely say what Captain Young has told you regarding my mission, to bring about practical results. I have writings; my career, is perhaps nearly run, but after dissolution my spirit will still bring about practical results." Striking his breast he added: "No one need say that the North-West is not suffering. The Saskatchewan was especially afflicted, but what have I done to bring about practical results? For ten years I have been aware that I had a mission to perform; now what encourages me is the fact that I still have a mission to perform. God is with me, He is in this dock, and God is with my lawyers, the same as he was with me in the battles of the Saskatchewan. I have not assumed my mission. In Manitoba, to-day, I have a mission to perform. To-day I am forgotten by the Manitobans as dead. Did I not obtain for that province a constitutional government notwithstanding the opposition of the Ottawa authorities? That was the cause of my banishment." I thank the glorious General Middleton for his testimony that I possess my mental faculties. I felt that God was blessing me when those words were pronounced. I was in Beauport Asylum; Dr. Roy over there knows it, but I thank the Crown for destroying his testimony. I was in the Lunatic Asylum at Longue Pointe, near Montreal, also; and would like to see my old friends, Dr. Lachapelle and Dr. Howard, who treated me so charitably. Even if I am to die, I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I will not be regarded by all men as an insane person. TO THE COURT.--"Your honour and gentlemen of the jury, my reputation, my life, my liberty, are in your hands, and are at your discretion. I am so confident in your high sense of duty that I have no anxiety as to the verdict. My calmness does not arise from the presumption that you will acquit me. Although you are only half a jury, only a shred of that proud old British constitution, I respect you. I can only trust, Judge and gentlemen, that good and practical results will arise from your judgment conscientiously rendered. I would call your attention to one or two points. The first is that the House of Commons, Senate and Ministry, which make the laws, do not respect the interests of the North-West. My second point is that the North-West Council has the defect of its parent. There are practically no elections, and it is a sham legislature." Then, as if wandering from his subject, Riel broke forth and said: "I was ready at Batoche; I fired and wounded your soldiers. Bear in mind, is my crime, committed in self-defence, so enormous? Oh, Jesus Christ! help me, for they are trying to tear me into pieces. Jurors, if you support the plea of insanity, otherwise acquit me all the same. Console yourselves with the reflection that you will be doing justice to one who has suffered for fifteen years, to my family, and to the North-West." Riel concluded as follows, his language containing a strange admixture of the words applied to him by the medical experts, which he ingeniously turned against the Government: "Your honours and gentlemen of the jury:--I am taking the circumstances of my trial as they are. The only thing to which I would respectfully call your attention before you retire to deliberate is the irresponsibility of the Government. It is a fact that the Government possesses an absolute lack of responsibility, an insanity complicated with analysis. A monster of irresponsible, insane government, and its little North-West council, had made up their minds to answer my petitions by surrounding me, and by suddenly attempting to jump at me and my people in the fertile valley of the Saskatchewan. You are perfectly justified in declaring that having my reason and sound mind, I acted reasonably and in self-defence, while the Government, my aggressor, being irresponsible, and consequently insane, cannot but have acted madly and wrong; and if high treason there is, it must be on its side, not on my part." At the conclusion of Riel's lengthy address, MR. CHRISTOPHER ROBINSON, Q.C., closed the case for the Crown in a powerful speech, which went far to counteract the sympathetic effect produced by Riel's disconnected but eloquent oration. Mr. Robinson pointed out that no evidence was produced to show that the prisoner had not committed the acts he was charged with. From the evidence it was quite clear the prisoner was neither a patriot nor a lunatic. If prisoner was not responsible for the rebellion, who was? The speaker went over the evidence and showed that Riel's acts were not those of a lunatic, but well considered in all their bearings, and the deliberate acts of a particularly sound mind. The evidence as to Riel's confinement in an asylum nine years ago was not satisfactory. Why was he sent there under an assumed name? Why was the record of his case not produced along with the other papers, and a statement of his condition when leaving the asylum? Medical men were not always the best judges of insanity. Taking up the evidence against the prisoner, Mr. Robinson went over it in detail, and said no mercy should be shown one who had committed such acts. He pictured the terrible results if Riel had succeeded in his effort to rouse the Indians, The reason the prisoners Poundmaker and Big Bear had not been put in the witness box, was that they could not be asked to give evidence that would incriminate themselves. MR. JUSTICE RICHARDSON then read over the evidence to the jury, after which the court adjourned. THIRD DAY'S PROCEEDINGS. [Footnote: This abstract of the final day's proceedings we take from the Toronto _Mail_.] The court resumed its sittings on the morning of the 1st of August, at the usual hour, and Col. Richardson continued his charge to the jury He read all the principal evidence, commenting thereon, and finally charged the jury to do their duty without fear or favour. THE VERDICT. When the jury returned with the verdict at 3.15 p.m., after exactly one hour's deliberation, the prisoner, who had been on his knees in the dock praying incessantly, rose and stood facing the six men who came in bearing for him the message of life or death. The CLERK of the Court, amid a silence so intense that, like the darkness of Egypt, it could be felt, asked if the gentlemen of the jury had agreed upon their verdict? MR. COSGROVE, the foreman, answered in a low tone, but heard distinctly in the general hush, "We have!" The CLERK then asked: "Is the prisoner guilty or not guilty?" Everyone but the prisoner seemed anxious. He alone of all those present, eager to hear the message of fate, was calm. The Foreman replied: "Guilty, with a recommendation to mercy!" Riel smiled as if the sentence in no way affected him, and bowed gracefully to the jury. THE PRISONER'S SPEECH. COL. RICHARDSON asked the prisoner if he had anything to say why the sentence of the Court should not be passed upon him? RIEL replied: Yes, your honour. Then he began, in a low, calm voice to detail the story of the half-breeds in Manitoba, and spoke at length of the rebellion of '69. He said that if he had to die for what had taken place, it would be a consolation to his wife and to his friends to know that he had not died in vain. In years to come people will look at Manitoba and say that Riel helped the dwellers of those fertile plains to obtain the benefits they now enjoy. He said it would be an easy thing for him to make an incendiary speech, but he would refrain. He said that God had given him a mission to perform, and if suffering was part of that mission, he bowed respectfully to the Divine will, and he was ready to accept the task, even if the end should be death. Like David, he had suffered, but he lacked two years of the time that David suffered. The prisoner then went into the history of the Red River rebellion at great length. He claimed that he had ruled the country for two months for the Government, and his only reward was a sentence of exile. The troubles in the Saskatchewan, he said, were but a continuation of the troubles of the Red River, and the breeds feel that they are being robbed by the Government, which has failed to carry out the treaty promises that had been made to them. The breeds sustained their rights in '69 by arms, and the people of Manitoba are enjoying the results to-day. The people of Saskatchewan only followed the same precedent, and he trusted that the same results would follow. He then spoke at great length of the part played by Sir John Macdonald, Sir George Cartier, and Bishop Tache in the Red River rebellion. The money that had been given to him and to Lepine on leaving the country had been accepted, he said, as part of what was justly their due. The whites were gradually crowding out the Indians and the Metis, and what was more natural and just than for them to take up arms in defence of their rights? He justified his claims to $35,000 by saying that it was offered to him to keep out of the country for three years. The English constitution, he said, had been perfected for the happiness of the world, and his wish to have the representatives of the different nations here was to give people from the countries of the Old World an opportunity of enjoying the blessings God had given England. God had given England great glory, but she must work for that glory or it would surely pass away. The Roman Empire was four hundred years in declining from its proud pre-eminence, and England would be in the same position; but before England faded away a grander England would be built up in this immense country. His heart, while it beat, would not abandon the idea of having a new Ireland, a new Germany, a new France here; and the people of those countries would enjoy liberties under the British constitution which they did not obtain at home. If he must die for his principles, if the brave men who were with him must die, he hoped the French-Canadians would come and help the people to get back what was being unjustly wrenched from them. Peace had always been uppermost in his thoughts, and it was to save the country from being deluged with blood later on that they strove for their rights now. He concluded by objecting to the jury and the decision of the Court, and asked that he be not tried for the alleged offences of this season, but that his whole career be put on trial, and the jury asked to give a decision as to whether his life and acts have in any way benefited the country or not. THE SENTENCE. Mr. CHRISTOPHER ROBINSON moved for the sentence of the Court. Judge RICHARDSON then said: "Louis Riel, you are charged with treason. You let loose the flood gates of rapine and bloodshed, and brought ruin and death to many families, who, if let alone, were in comfort and a fair way of affluence. For what you did you have been given a fair and impartial trial. Your remarks are no excuse for your acts. You committed acts that the law demands an account for at your hands. The jury coupled with their verdict a recommendation to mercy. I can hold out no prospect for you, and I would recommend you to make your peace with God. For me, only one duty and a painful one to perform remains. It is to pass sentence upon you. If your life is spared, no one will feel more gratified than myself, but I can hold out no hope. The sentence of this Court upon you, Louis Riel, is that you be taken to the guard-room of the Mounted Police of Regina, whence you came, and kept there until September the eighteenth, and from thence to the place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck until dead, and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul!" Riel never moved a muscle, but, bowing to the Court, said:--"Is that on Friday, your Honour?" He was then taken from the Court-room, and a few minutes after was driven back, under strong escort, to the guard-room, AN APPEAL. After sentence had been passed upon Riel, Mr. Fitzgerald, one of prisoner's counsel, gave notice of appeal for a new trial to the Court of Queen's Bench, Manitoba. The appeal case was heard at Winnipeg on the 3rd and 4th days of September before Chief Justice Wallbridge and Mr. Justice T. W. Taylor. M. LEMIEUX, chief counsel for Riel, raised the old issue as to informality of the trial before the Stipendiary Magistrate at Regina, and contended that the magistrate was incompetent to try the case. Mr. FITZPATRICK followed. He held that the Treason-Felony Act was one of Imperial jurisdiction, and he questioned if it had delegated any power to the colonial authorities to legislate away any rights enjoyed by the subjects of the British Empire. He dwelt strongly upon the insanity question, and said the jury were convinced of the prisoner's lunacy, hence their recommendation to mercy. Mr. EWART also strongly questioned the jurisdiction of the Court at Regina and cited several authorities in support of his argument. Mr. ROBINSON, on behalf of the Crown, in an able address, strongly combated the idea that the Court at Regina was not legally constituted, and cited cases in support of his contention. He also dwelt at length on the insanity plea, showing the absurdity of the contention that Riel was insane. Mr. Osler and Mr. Aikens followed on the same side, supplementing the arguments of the previous speaker as to the constitutionality of the Court, and cited a number of authorities adverse to the insanity plea. NEW TRIAL REFUSED. At Winnipeg, on the 9th September, at a sitting of the full Court of the Queen's Bench of the Province of Manitoba, judgment was delivered in the appeal for a new trial for the prisoner Riel. His Lordship Chief Justice Wallbridge first delivered judgment. He referred briefly to the facts brought before the Court and the statutes by which the stipendiary magistrates are appointed in the North-West and to the powers given them for the trial of the cases before them alone, and to the cases, including treason, which have to be tried before a magistrate with a justice of the peace and a jury of six. His Lordship held that the constitutionality of the Court is established by the statutes passed, which he cited. If the Act passed by the Dominion Parliament was, as claimed by the defence, _ultra vires_, it was clearly confirmed by the Imperial Act subsequently passed, which made the Dominion Act equal to an Imperial Act. The objections were to his mind purely technical and therefore not valid. His opinion therefore was that a new trial should be refused, and the conviction of the Superior Court was therefore confirmed. Mr. Justice Taylor followed, dealing fully with the arguments brought forward by the prisoner's counsel. On the question of the delegation of the power to legislate given to the Dominion Parliament, he held that the Dominion Parliament has plenary powers on all subjects committed to it. He reviewed fully all the facts relating to the admission of Rupert's Land to the Dominion, and to the statutes passed for the government of Rupert's Land and Manitoba when formed as a province. After a critical examination of the evidence in the case, he was unable to come to any other conclusion than that to which the jury had come. The evidence entirely fails to relieve the prisoner from responsibility for his acts. A new trial must be refused and the conviction must be confirmed. Mr. Justice Killam next followed at some length, concurring in the views of his brother judges. With these proceedings the trial of the rebel chief was concluded, though counsel for Riel has notified the Executive that they will appeal the case to the Privy Council in England. Riel will, meantime, be respited. RIEL'S EXECUTION. The execution of Louis David Riel took place at Regina, on the 16th November, 1885. He met his fate bravely, and displayed more fortitude than had been thought possible. He abstained from speech-making, and confined himself entirely, on the advice of Father Andre, who has been his constant companion throughout, to spiritual matters. Riel never slept after receiving intelligence that the execution would take place that morning, and throughout the night was constant in his devotions. At seven o'clock he had a light supper, and at five in the morning mass was celebrated, followed two hours later by the administration of the last sacrament. Riel, towards the last, almost entirely dropped his new religious idiosyncrasies and decided to die a devout catholic. The hour fixed for the execution was eight o'clock, but it was fifteen minutes past that hour before those who had passes from the sheriff were admitted to the guard-room. Here was found the prisoner, kneeling on the floor of an upper room, from which he was to step to the gallows, It was a sad scene. Around him were gathered numbers of mounted police, Sheriff Chapleau, Deputy-Sheriff Gibson, and a few others. The room was illuminated by a small window, covered with a rime of frost through which the sun, now risen but a few hours, shot a few weak rays. Riel now knelt beside the open window, through which the gallows could be seen, and prayed incessantly for fully half an hour. Fathers McWilliams and Andre conducted the service for the doomed man in French, Riel repeating the responses in a clear voice, which could be heard distinctly above the murmurs of the priests' whispering tones. Riel wore a loose woollen surtout, grey trousers, and woollen shirt. On his feet were moccasins, the only feature of his dress that partook of the Indian that was in him. He received the notice to proceed to the scaffold in the same composed manner he had shown the preceding night on receiving warning of his fate. His face was full of colour, and he appeared to have complete self-possession, still responding to the service in a clear tone. The prisoner decided only a moment before starting for the scaffold not to make a speech. This was owing to the earnest solicitations of both the priests attending him. He displayed an inclination at the last moment to make an address, but Father Andre reminded him of his promise. The hangman, who on a former occasion had been in the hands of Riel as a prisoner, commenced the work of pinioning the doomed man, and then the melancholy procession soon began to wend its way toward the scaffold, which had been erected for Khonnors, the Hebrew, and soon came in sight of the noose. Deputy-Sheriff Gibson went ahead, then came Father McWilliams, next Riel, then Father Andre, Dr. Jukes, and others. As he stood on the trap-door Riel continued invoking the aid of Jesus, Mary, and the saints, during his last agonies. "Courage, pere," he said, addressing Father Andre, and then he addressed Father McWilliams in the same words. The latter priest kissed Riel, who said, "I believe still in God." "To the last," said Father Andre. "Yes, the very last," answered Riel: "I believe and trust in Him. Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on me." Dr. Jukes shook hands with the prisoner, who said in English: "Thank you, doctor." Then he continued: "Jesus, Marie, Joseph, assistez moi en ce dernier moment." Deputy-Sheriff Gibson then said, "Louis Riel, have you anything to say before death?" Riel answered "No." He was given two minutes to pray, and he repeated the Lord's prayer, Father McWilliams leading, while the cap was being drawn over his face and the rope adjusted. At the words "Lead me not into temptation" the hangman sprang the bolt, at twenty-eight minutes past eight, and Riel shot downward with a terrible crash. For a second he did not move. A slight twitching of the limbs was noticed, but instantly all was still again. In two minutes after the fall, Louis Riel was no more. His conduct on the scaffold was very courageous. He was pale but firm, and kept up his courage by constant prayer, thus diverting his thoughts from the terrible death before him. His neck was broken by the fall; the doctors say he could have experienced no physical suffering. For a second or two his limbs twitched slightly, then a convulsive shudder ran through his frame, and all was over. In less than three minutes Dr. Dodds pronounced him dead. Few persons were present. The only people on the scaffold, besides the condemned man and the hangman, were Deputy-Sheriff Gibson, Dr. Jukes, of the Mounted Police, Father Andre, Father McWilliams, and the press representatives. After death the coroner's jury was empanelled by Dr Dodds, and a verdict of death by hanging rendered. The hair of the deceased was cut off one side of both head and face. All the buttons torn off the coat, the moccasins removed from the feet, and even the suspenders cut into pieces for persons to obtain mementos of the deceased. He was placed in a plain deal coffin to await the plans of the Government as to interment. His own wish was to be buried at St. Boniface, and his friends are particularly anxious that his wishes in this respect be complied with, as his father and other friends repose in that place, as all the bodies of the convicts here have been stolen from the burying ground in less than a week. END 
28445	----	Makers of History Madame Roland BY JOHN S. C. ABBOTT WITH ENGRAVINGS NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 1904 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty, by HARPER & BROTHERS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. Copyright, 1878, by JANE W. ABBOTT. [Illustration: MADAME ROLAND.] PREFACE. The history of Madame Roland embraces the most interesting events of the French Revolution, that most instructive tragedy which time has yet enacted. There is, perhaps, contained in the memoirs of no other woman so much to invigorate the mind with the desire for high intellectual culture, and so much to animate the spirit heroically to meet all the ills of this eventful life. Notwithstanding her experience of the heaviest temporal calamities, she found, in the opulence of her own intellectual treasures, an unfailing resource. These inward joys peopled her solitude with society, and dispelled even from the dungeon its gloom. I know not where to look for a career more full of suggestive thought. CONTENTS. Chapter Page I. CHILDHOOD 13 II. YOUTH 33 III. MAIDENHOOD 57 IV. MARRIAGE 80 V. THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY 105 VI. THE MINISTRY OF M. ROLAND 130 VII. MADAME ROLAND AND THE JACOBINS 155 VIII. LAST STRUGGLE OF THE GIRONDISTS 178 IX. ARREST OF MADAME ROLAND 201 X. FATE OF THE GIRONDISTS 224 XI. PRISON LIFE 252 XII. TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF MADAME ROLAND 277 ENGRAVINGS. Page MADAME ROLAND _Frontispiece._ THE VISIT 40 LA PLATIÈRE 97 ROBESPIERRE 116 THE LIBRARY 145 EXECUTION OF THE GIRONDISTS 247 MADAME ROLAND IN PRISON 259 EXECUTION OF MADAME ROLAND 301 MADAME ROLAND CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD. 1754-1767 Characters developed by the French Revolution.--Madame Roland.--Gratien Phlippon.--His repinings at his lot.--Views of Phlippon.--His hostility to the Church.--Origin of the French Revolution.--Character of Madame Phlippon.--Birth of Jane Maria.--Adored by her parents.--Discontent of Phlippon.--His complainings to his child.--Early traits of character.--Love of books.--Jane's thirst for reading.--Her love of flowers.--Jane's personal appearance.--Thirst for knowledge.--Intellectual gifts.--A walk on the Boulevards.--Phlippon's talk to his child.--Youthful dreams.--Influence of Jane's parents over her.--Education in convents.--Jane sent to a convent.--Parting with her mother.--Madame Roland's account of her first night in the convent.--Jane's books of study.--Her proficiency in music and drawing.--Scenes in the convent.--Impressions made by them.--Poetic enthusiasms.--Taking the veil.--Taking the black veil.--Effect upon Jane.--Lofty aspirations.--Remark of Napoleon.--Jane's contempt of ease and luxury.--Her self-denial. Many characters of unusual grandeur were developed by the French Revolution. Among them all, there are few more illustrious, or more worthy of notice, than that of Madame Roland. The eventful story of her life contains much to inspire the mind with admiration and with enthusiasm, and to stimulate one to live worthily of those capabilities with which every human heart is endowed. No person can read the record of her lofty spirit and of her heroic acts without a higher appreciation of woman's power, and of the mighty influence one may wield, who combines the charms of a noble and highly-cultivated mind with the fascinations of female delicacy and loveliness. To understand the secret of the almost miraculous influence she exerted, it is necessary to trace her career, with some degree of minuteness, from the cradle to the hour of her sublime and heroic death. In the year 1754, there was living, in an obscure workshop in Paris, on the crowded Quai des Orfevres, an engraver by the name of Gratien Phlippon. He had married a very beautiful woman, whose placid temperament and cheerful content contrasted strikingly with the restlessness and ceaseless repinings of her husband. The comfortable yet humble apartments of the engraver were over the shop where he plied his daily toil. He was much dissatisfied with his lowly condition in life, and that his family, in the enjoyment of frugal competence alone, were debarred from those luxuries which were so profusely showered upon others. Bitterly and unceasingly he murmured that his lot had been cast in the ranks of obscurity and of unsparing labor, while others, by a more fortunate, although no better merited destiny, were born to ease and affluence, and honor and luxury. This thought of the unjust inequality in man's condition, which soon broke forth with all the volcanic energy of the French Revolution, already began to ferment in the bosoms of the laboring classes, and no one pondered these wide diversities with a more restless spirit, or murmured more loudly and more incessantly than Phlippon. When the day's toil was ended, he loved to gather around him associates whose feelings harmonized with his own, and to descant upon their own grievous oppression and upon the arrogance of aristocratic greatness. With an eloquence which often deeply moved his sympathizing auditory, and fanned to greater intensity the fires which were consuming his own heart, he contrasted their doom of sleepless labor and of comparative penury with the brilliance of the courtly throng, living in idle luxury, and squandering millions in the amusements at Versailles, and sweeping in charioted splendor through the Champs Elysée. Phlippon was a philosopher, not a Christian. Submission was a virtue he had never learned, and never wished to learn. Christianity, as he saw it developed before him only in the powerful enginery of the Roman Catholic Church, was, in his view, but a formidable barrier against the liberty and the elevation of the people--a bulwark, bristling with superstition and bayonets, behind which nobles and kings were securely intrenched. He consequently became as hostile to the doctrines of the Church as he was to the institutions of the state. The monarch was, in his eye, a tyrant, and God a delusion. The enfranchisement of the people, in his judgment, required the overthrow of both the earthly and the celestial monarch. In these ideas, agitating the heart of Phlippon, behold the origin of the French Revolution. They were diffused in pamphlets and daily papers in theaters and _cafés_. They were urged by workmen in their shops, by students in their closets. They became the inspiring spirit of science in encyclopedias and reviews, and formed the chorus in all the songs of revelry and libertinism. These sentiments spread from heart to heart, through Paris, through the provinces, till France rose like a demon in its wrath, and the very globe trembled beneath its gigantic and indignant tread. Madame Phlippon was just the reverse of her husband. She was a woman in whom faith, and trust, and submission predominated. She surrendered her will, without questioning, to all the teachings of the Church of Rome. She was placid, contented, and cheerful, and, though uninquiring in her devotion, undoubtedly sincere in her piety. In every event of life she recognized the overruling hand of Providence, and feeling that the comparatively humble lot assigned her was in accordance with the will of God, she indulged in no repinings, and envied not the more brilliant destiny of lords and ladies. An industrious housewife, she hummed the hymns of contentment and peace from morning till evening. In the cheerful performance of her daily toil, she was ever pouring the balm of her peaceful spirit upon the restless heart of her spouse. Phlippon loved his wife, and often felt the superiority of her Christian temperament. Of eight children born to these parents, one only, Jeanne Manon, or _Jane Mary_, survived the hour of birth. Her father first received her to his arms in 1754, and she became the object of his painful and most passionate adoration. Her mother pressed the coveted treasure to her bosom with maternal love, more calm, and deep, and enduring. And now Jane became the central star in this domestic system. Both parents lived in her and for her. She was their earthly all. The mother wished to train her for the Church and for heaven, that she might become an angel and dwell by the throne of God. These bright hopes gilded a prayerful mother's hours of toil and care. The father bitterly repined. Why should his bright and beautiful child--who even in these her infantile years was giving indication of the most brilliant intellect--why should she be doomed to a life of obscurity and toil, while the garden of the Tuileries and the Elysian Fields were thronged with children, neither so beautiful nor so intelligent, who were reveling in boundless wealth, and living in a world of luxury and splendor which, to Phlippon's imagination, seemed more alluring than any idea he could form of heaven? These thoughts were a consuming fire in the bosom of the ambitious father. They burned with inextinguishable flame. The fond parent made the sprightly and fascinating child his daily companion. He led her by the hand, and confided to her infantile spirit all his thoughts, his illusions, his day-dreams. To her listening ear he told the story of the arrogance of nobles, of the pride of kings, and of the oppression by which he deemed himself unjustly doomed to a life of penury and toil. The light-hearted child was often weary of these complainings, and turned for relief to the placidity and cheerfulness of her mother's mind. Here she found repose--a soothing, calm, and holy submission. Still the gloom of her father's spirit cast a pensive shade over her own feelings, and infused a tone of melancholy and an air of unnatural reflection into her character. By nature, Jane was endowed with a soul of unusual delicacy. From early childhood, all that is beautiful or sublime in nature, in literature, in character, had charms to rivet her entranced attention. She loved to sit alone at her chamber window in the evening of a summer's day, to gaze upon the gorgeous hues of sunset. As her imagination roved through those portals of a brighter world, which seemed thus, through far-reaching vistas of glory, to be opened to her, she peopled the sun-lit expanse with the creations of her own fancy, and often wept in uncontrollable emotion through the influence of these gathering thoughts. Books of impassioned poetry, and descriptions of heroic character and achievements, were her especial delight. Plutarch's Lives, that book which, more than any other, appears to be the incentive of early genius, was hid beneath her pillow, and read and re-read with tireless avidity. Those illustrious heroes of antiquity became the companions of her solitude and of her hourly thoughts. She adored them and loved them as her own most intimate personal friends. Her character became insensibly molded to their forms, and she was inspired with restless enthusiasm to imitate their deeds. When but twelve years of age, her father found her, one day, weeping that she was not born a Roman maiden. Little did she then imagine that, by talent, by suffering, and by heroism, she was to display a character the history of which would eclipse the proudest narratives in Greek or Roman story. Jane appears never to have known the frivolity and thoughtlessness of childhood. Before she had entered the fourth year of her age she knew how to read. From that time her thirst for reading was so great, that her parents found no little difficulty in furnishing her with a sufficient supply. She not only read with eagerness every book which met her eye, but pursued this uninterrupted miscellaneous reading to singular advantage, treasuring up all important facts in her retentive memory. So entirely absorbed was she in her books, that the only successful mode of withdrawing her from them was by offering her flowers, of which she was passionately fond. Books and flowers continued, through all the vicissitudes of her life, even till the hour of her death, to afford her the most exquisite pleasure. She had no playmates, and thought no more of play than did her father and mother, who were her only and her constant companions. From infancy she was accustomed to the thoughts and the emotions of mature minds. In personal appearance she was, in earliest childhood and through life, peculiarly interesting rather than beautiful. As mature years perfected her features and her form, there was in the contour of her graceful figure, and her intellectual countenance, that air of thoughtfulness, of pensiveness, of glowing tenderness and delicacy, which gave her a power of fascination over all hearts. She sought not this power; she thought not of it; but an almost resistless attraction and persuasion accompanied all her words and actions. It was, perhaps, the absence of playmates, and the habitual converse with mature minds, which, at so early an age, inspired Jane with that insatiate thirst for knowledge which she ever manifested. Books were her only resource in every unoccupied hour. From her walks with her father, and her domestic employments with her mother, she turned to her little library and to her chamber window, and lost herself in the limitless realms of thought. It is often imagined that character is the result of accident--that there is a native and inherent tendency, which triumphs over circumstances, and works out its own results. Without denying that there may be different intellectual gifts with which the soul may be endowed as it comes from the hand of the Creator, it surely is not difficult to perceive that the peculiar training through which the childhood of Jane was conducted was calculated to form the peculiar character which she developed. In a bright summer's afternoon she might be seen sauntering along the Boulevards, led by her father's hand, gazing upon that scene of gayety with which the eye is never wearied. A gilded coach, drawn by the most beautiful horses in the richest trappings, sweeps along the streets--a gorgeous vision. Servants in showy livery, and out-riders proudly mounted, invest the spectacle with a degree of grandeur, beneath which the imagination of a child sinks exhausted. Phlippon takes his little daughter in his arms to show her the sight, and, as she gazes in infantile wonder and delight, the discontented father says, "Look at that lord, and lady, and child, lolling so voluptuously in their coach. They have no right there. Why must I and my child walk on this hot pavement, while they repose on velvet cushions and revel in all luxury? Oppressive laws compel me to pay a portion of my hard earnings to support them in their pride and indolence. But a time will come when the people will awake to the consciousness of their wrongs, and their tyrants will tremble before them." He continues his walk in moody silence, brooding over his sense of injustice. They return to their home. Jane wishes that her father kept a carriage, and liveried servants and out-riders. She thinks of politics, and of the tyranny of kings and nobles, and of the unjust inequalities of man. She retires to the solitude of her loved chamber window, and reads of Aristides the Just, of Themistocles with his Spartan virtues, of Brutus, and of the mother of the Gracchi. Greece and Rome rise before her in all their ancient renown. She despises the frivolity of Paris, the effeminacy of the moderns, and her youthful bosom throbs with the desire of being noble in spirit and of achieving great exploits. Thus, when other children of her age were playing with their dolls, she was dreaming of the prostration of nobles and of the overthrow of thrones--of liberty, and fraternity, and equality among mankind. Strange dreams for a child, but still more strange in their fulfillment. The infidelity of her father and the piety of her mother contended, like counter currents of the ocean, in her bosom. Her active intellect and love of freedom sympathized with the speculations of the so-called philosopher. Her amiable and affectionate disposition and her pensive meditations led her to seek repose in the sublime conceptions and in the soul-soothing consolations of the Christian. Her parents were deeply interested in her education, and were desirous of giving her every advantage for securing the highest attainments. The education of young ladies, at that time, in France, was conducted almost exclusively by nuns in convents. The idea of the silence and solitude of the cloister inspired the highly-imaginative girl with a blaze of enthusiasm. Fondly as she loved her home, she was impatient for the hour to arrive when, with heroic self-sacrifice, she could withdraw from the world and its pleasures, and devote her whole soul to devotion, to meditation, and to study. Her mother's spirit of religion was exerting a powerful influence over her, and one evening she fell at her feet, and, bursting into tears, besought that she might be sent to a convent to prepare to receive her first Christian communion in a suitable frame of mind. The convent of the sisterhood of the Congregation in Paris was selected for Jane. In the review of her life which she subsequently wrote while immured in the dungeons of the Conciergerie, she says, in relation to this event, "While pressing my dear mother in my arms, at the moment of parting with her for the first time in my life, I thought my heart would have broken; but I was acting in obedience to the voice of God, and I passed the threshold of the cloister, tearfully offering up to him the greatest sacrifice I was capable of making. This was on the 7th of May, 1765, when I was eleven years and two months old. In the gloom of a prison, in the midst of political storms which ravage my country, and sweep away all that is dear to me, how shall I recall to my mind, and how describe the rapture and tranquillity I enjoyed at this period of my life? What lively colors can express the soft emotions of a young heart endued with tenderness and sensibility, greedy of happiness, beginning to be alive to the beauties of nature, and perceiving the Deity alone? The first night I spent in the convent was a night of agitation. I was no longer under the paternal roof. I was at a distance from that kind mother, who was doubtless thinking of me with affectionate emotion. A dim light diffused itself through the room in which I had been put to bed with four children of my own age. I stole softly from my couch, and drew near the window, the light of the moon enabling me to distinguish the garden, which it overlooked. The deepest silence prevailed around, and I listened to it, if I may use the expression, with a sort of respect. Lofty trees cast their gigantic shadows along the ground, and promised a secure asylum to peaceful meditation. I lifted up my eyes to the heavens; they were unclouded and serene. I imagined that I felt the presence of the Deity smiling upon my sacrifice, and already offering me a reward in the consolatory hope of a celestial abode. Tears of delight flowed down my cheeks. I repeated my vows with holy ecstasy, and went to bed again to taste the slumber of God's chosen children." Her thirst for knowledge was insatiate, and with untiring assiduity she pursued her studies. Every hour of the day had its appropriate employment, and time flew upon its swiftest wings. Every book which fell in her way she eagerly perused, and treasured its knowledge or its literary beauties in her memory. Heraldry and books of romance, lives of the saints and fairy legends, biography, travels, history, political philosophy, poetry, and treatises upon morals, were all read and meditated upon by this young child. She had no taste for any childish amusements; and in the hours of recreation, when the mirthful girls around her were forgetting study and care in those games appropriate to their years, she would walk alone in the garden, admiring the flowers, and gazing upon the fleecy clouds in the sky. In all the beauties of nature her eye ever recognized the hand of God, and she ever took pleasure in those sublime thoughts of infinity and eternity which must engross every noble mind. Her teachers had but little to do. Whatever study she engaged in was pursued with such spontaneous zeal, that success had crowned her efforts before others had hardly made a beginning. In music and drawing she made great proficiency. She was even more fond of all that is beautiful and graceful in the accomplishments of a highly-cultivated mind, than in those more solid studies which she nevertheless pursued with so much energy and interest. The scenes which she witnessed in the convent were peculiarly calculated to produce an indelible impression upon a mind so imaginative. The chapel for prayer, with its somber twilight and its dimly-burning tapers; the dirges which the organ breathed upon the trembling ear; the imposing pageant of prayer and praise, with the blended costumes of monks and hooded nuns; the knell which tolled the requiem of a departed sister, as, in the gloom of night and by the light of torches, she was conveyed to her burial--all these concomitants of that system of pageantry, arranged so skillfully to impress the senses of the young and the imaginative, fanned to the highest elevation the flames of that poetic temperament she so eminently possessed. God thus became in Jane's mind a vision of poetic beauty. Religion was the inspiration of enthusiasm and of sentiment. The worship of the Deity was blended with all that was ennobling and beautiful. Moved by these glowing fancies, her susceptible spirit, in these tender years, turned away from atheism, from infidelity, from irreligion, as from that which was unrefined, revolting, vulgar. The consciousness of the presence of God, the adoration of his being, became a passion of her soul. This state of mind was poetry, not religion. It involved no sense of the spirituality of the Divine Law, no consciousness of unworthiness, no need of a Savior. It was an emotion sublime and beautiful, yet merely such an emotion as any one of susceptible temperament might feel when standing in the Vale of Chamouni at midnight, or when listening to the crash of thunder as the tempest wrecks the sky, or when one gazes entranced upon the fair face of nature in a mild and lovely morning of June, when no cloud appears in the blue canopy above us, and no breeze ruffles the leaves of the grove or the glassy surface of the lake, and the songs of birds and the perfume of flowers fill the air. Many mistake the highly poetic enthusiasm which such scenes excite for the spirit of piety. While Jane was an inmate of the convent, a very interesting young lady, from some disappointment weary of the world, took the veil. When one enters a convent with the intention of becoming a nun, she first takes the white veil, which is an expression of her intention, and thus enters the grade of a novice. During the period of her novitiate, which continues for several months, she is exposed to the severest discipline of vigils, and fastings, and solitude, and prayer, that she may distinctly understand the life of weariness and self-denial upon which she has entered. If, unintimidated by these hardships, she still persists in her determination, she then takes the black veil, and utters her solemn and irrevocable vows to bury herself in the gloom of the cloister, never again to emerge. From this step there is no return. The throbbing heart, which neither cowls nor veils can still, finds in the taper-lighted cell its living tomb, till it sleeps in death. No one with even an ordinary share of sensibility can witness a ceremony involving such consequences without the deepest emotion. The scene produced an effect upon the spirit of Jane which was never effaced. The wreath of flowers which crowned the beautiful victim; the veil enveloping her person; the solemn and dirge-like chant, the requiem of her burial to all the pleasures of sense and time; the pall which overspread her, emblematic of her consignment to a living tomb, all so deeply affected the impassioned child, that, burying her face in her hands, she wept with uncontrollable emotion. The thought of the magnitude of the sacrifice which the young novice was making appealed irresistibly to her admiration of the morally sublime. There was in that relinquishment of all the joys of earth a self-surrender to a passionless life of mortification, and penance, and prayer, an apparent heroism, which reminded Jane of her much-admired Roman maidens and matrons. She aspired with most romantic ardor to do, herself, something great and noble. While her sound judgment could not but condemn this abandonment of life, she was inspired with the loftiest enthusiasm to enter, in some worthy way, upon a life of endurance, of sacrifice, and of martyrdom. She felt that she was born for the performance of some great deeds, and she looked down with contempt upon all the ordinary vocations of every-day life. These were the dreams of a romantic girl. They were not, however, the fleeting visions of a sickly and sentimental mind, but the deep, soul-moving aspirations of one of the strongest intellects over which imagination has ever swayed its scepter. One is reminded by these early developments of character of the remark of Napoleon, when some one said, in his presence, "It is nothing but imagination." "Nothing but imagination!" replied this sagacious observer; "_imagination rules the world!_" These dim visions of greatness, these lofty aspirations, not for renown, but for the inward consciousness of intellectual elevation, of moral sublimity, of heroism, had no influence, as is ordinarily the case with day-dreams, to give Jane a distaste for life's energetic duties. They did not enervate her character, or convert her into a mere visionary; on the contrary, they but roused and invigorated her to alacrity in the discharge of every duty. They led her to despise ease and luxury, to rejoice in self-denial, and to cultivate, to the highest possible degree, all her faculties of body and of mind, that she might be prepared for any possible destiny. Wild as, at times, her imaginings might have been, her most vivid fancy never could have pictured a career so extraordinary as that to which reality introduced her; and in all the annals of ancient story, she could find no record of sufferings and privations more severe than those which she was called upon to endure. And neither heroine nor hero of any age has shed greater luster upon human nature by the cheerful fortitude with which adversity has been braved. CHAPTER II. YOUTH. Convent life.--Its influence upon Jane.--Jane leaves the convent.--Her attachment to one of the nuns.--Jane partakes of the Lord's Supper.--Preparations for the solemnity.--Jane's delight in meditation.--Departure from the convent.--Jane goes to live with her grandmother.--Character of the latter.--Jane's intellectual progress.--Her father's delight.--Jane learns to engrave.--Her mother impatient for her return.--The visit to Madame De Boismorel.--Remarks of servants.--Appearance of Madame De Boismorel.--Her reception of the visitors.--Madame De Boismorel's volubility.--Jane's dignified rejoinders.--Jane's indignation.--She visits Versailles.--Jane's disgust at palace life.--She resorts to the gardens.--Characteristic remark.--Jane's meditations.--Jane returns home.--Her manner of reading.--Jane devotes herself to domestic duties.--She goes to market.--Jane's aptitude for domestic duties.--From the study to the kitchen.--Domestic education.--Dissolute lives of the Catholic clergy.--New emotions.--Insolence of the aristocracy.--Jane's indignation.--New acquaintances.--Jane's contempt for their ignorance and pride.--A noble but illiterate lady.--Deference paid to her.--Habits of reflection. The influence of those intense emotions which were excited in the bosom of Jane by the scenes which she witnessed in her childhood in the nunnery were never effaced from her imaginative mind. Nothing can be conceived more strongly calculated to impress the feelings of a romantic girl, than the poetic attractions which are thrown around the Roman Catholic religion by nuns, and cloisters, and dimly-lighted chapels, and faintly-burning tapers, and matins, and vespers, and midnight dirges. Jane had just the spirit to be most deeply captivated by such enchantments. She reveled in those imaginings which clustered in the dim shades of the cloister, in an ecstasy of luxurious enjoyment. The ordinary motives which influence young girls of her age seem to have had no control over her. Her joys were most highly intellectual and spiritual, and her aspirations were far above the usual conceptions of childhood. She, for a time, became entirely fascinated by the novel scenes around her, and surrendered her whole soul to the dominion of the associations with which she was engrossed. In subsequent years, by the energies of a vigorous philosophy, she disenfranchised her intellect from these illusions, and, proceeding to another extreme, wandered in the midst of the cheerless mazes of unbelief; but her fancy retained the traces of these early impressions until the hour of her death. Christianity, even when most heavily encumbered with earthly corruption, is infinitely preferable to no religion at all. Even papacy has never swayed so bloody a scepter as infidelity. Jane remained in the convent one year, and then, with deep regret, left the nuns, to whom she had become extremely attached. With one of the sisters, who was allied to the nobility, she formed a strong friendship, which continued through life. For many years she kept up a constant correspondence with this friend, and to this correspondence she attributes, in a great degree, that facility in writing which contributed so much to her subsequent celebrity. This letter-writing is one of the best schools of composition, and the parent who is emulous of the improvement of his children in that respect, will do all in his power to encourage the constant use of the pen in these familiar epistles. Thus the most important study, the study of the power of expression, is converted into a pleasure, and is pursued with an avidity which will infallibly secure success. It is a sad mistake to frown upon such efforts as a waste of time. While in the convent, she, for the first time, partook of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Her spirit was most deeply impressed and overawed by the sacredness of the ceremony. During several weeks previous to her reception of this solemn ordinance, by solitude, self-examination, and prayer, she endeavored to prepare herself for that sacred engagement, which she deemed the pledge of her union to God, and of her eternal felicity. When the hour arrived, her feelings were so intensely excited that she wept convulsively, and she was entirely incapable of walking to the altar. She was borne in the arms of two of the nuns. This depth of emotion was entirely unaffected, and secured for her the peculiar reverence of the sacred sisters. That spirit of pensive reverie, so dangerous and yet so fascinating, to which she loved to surrender herself, was peculiarly in harmony with all the influences with which she was surrounded in the convent, and constituted the very soul of the piety of its inmates. She was encouraged by the commendations of all the sisters to deliver her mind up to the dominion of these day-dreams, with whose intoxicating power every heart is more or less familiar. She loved to retire to the solitude of the cloisters, when the twilight was deepening into darkness, and alone, with measured steps, to pace to and fro, listening to the monotonous echoes of her own footfall, which alone disturbed the solemn silence. At the tomb of a departed sister she would often linger, and, indulging in those melancholy meditations which had for her so many charms, long for her own departure to the bosom of her heavenly Father, where she might enjoy that perfect happiness for which, at times, her spirit glowed with such intense aspirations. At the close of the year Jane left the peaceful retreat where she had enjoyed so much, and where she had received so many impressions never to be effaced. Her parents, engrossed with care, were unable to pay that attention to their child which her expanding mind required, and she was sent to pass her thirteenth year with her paternal grandmother and her aunt Angelieu. Her grandmother was a dignified lady of much refinement of mind and gracefulness of demeanor, who laid great stress upon all the courtesies of life and the elegances of manners and address. Her aunt was gentle and warm-hearted, and her spirit was deeply imbued with that humble and docile piety, which has so often shone out with pure luster even through all the encumbrances of the Roman Catholic Church. With them she spent a year, in a seclusion from the world almost as entire as that which she found in the solitude of the convent. An occasional visit to her parents, and to her old friends the nuns, was all that interrupted the quiet routine of daily duties. Books continued still her employment and her delight. Her habits of reverie continued unbroken. Her lofty dreams gained a daily increasing ascendency over her character. She thus continued to dwell in the boundless regions of the intellect and the affections. Even the most commonplace duties of life were rendered attractive to her by investing them with a mysterious connection with her own limitless being. Absorbed in her own thoughts, ever communing with herself, with nature, with the Deity, as the object of her highest sentiment and aspirations, though she did not despise those of a more humble mental organization, she gave them not a thought. The evening twilight of every fine day still found her at her chamber window, admiring the glories of the setting sun, and feeding her impassioned spirit with those visions of future splendor and happiness which the scene appeared to reveal. She fancied she could almost see the wings of angels gleaming in the purple sunlight. Through those gorgeous avenues, where clouds were piled on golden clouds, she imagined, far away, the mansions of the blessed. These emotions glowing within her, gave themselves utterance in prayers earnest and ardent, while the tears of irrepressible feeling filled her eyes as she thought of that exalted Being, so worthy of her pure and intensest homage. The father of Jane was delighted with all these indications of a marked and elevated character, and did all in his power to stimulate her to greater zeal in her lofty studies and meditations. Jane became his idol, and the more her imaginative mind became imbued with the spirit of romantic aspirations, the better was he pleased. The ardor of her zeal enabled her to succeed in every thing which she undertook. Invincible industry and energy were united with these dreams. She was ambitious of knowing every thing; and when her father placed in her hands the _burin_, wishing to teach her to engrave, she immediately acquired such skill as to astonish both of her parents. And she afterward passed many pleasant hours in engraving, on highly-polished plates of brass, beautiful emblems of flowers as tokens of affection for her friends. The mother of Jane, with far better judgment, endeavored to call back her daughter from that unreal world in which she loved to dwell, and to interest her in the practical duties of life. She began to be impatient for her return home, that she might introduce her to those household employments, the knowledge of which is of such unspeakable importance to every lady. In this she was far from being unsuccessful; for while Jane continued to dream in accordance with the encouragement of her father, she also cordially recognized the good sense of her mother's counsels, and held herself ever in readiness to co-operate with her in all her plans. [Illustration: THE VISIT.] A little incident which took place at this time strikingly illustrates the reflective maturity which her character had already acquired. Before the French Revolution, the haughty demeanor of the nobility of France assumed such an aspect as an American, at the present day, can but feebly conceive. One morning, the grandmother of Jane, a woman of dignity and cultivated mind, took her to the house of Madame De Boismorel, a lady of noble rank, whose children she had partly educated. It was a great event, and Jane was dressed with the utmost care to visit the aristocratic mansion. The aspiring girl, with no disposition to come down to the level of those beneath her, and with still less willingness to do homage to those above her, was entirely unconscious of the mortifying condescension with which she was to be received. The porter at the door saluted Madame Phlippon with politeness, and all the servants whom she met in the hall addressed her with civility. She replied to each with courtesy and with dignity. The grandmother was proud of her grand-daughter, and the servants paid the young lady many compliments. The instinctive pride of Jane took instant alarm. She felt that _servants_ had no right to presume to pay _her_ compliments--that they were thus assuming that she was upon their level. Alas! for poor human nature. All love to ascend. Few are willing to favor equality by stepping down. A tall footman announced them at the door of the magnificent saloon. All the furnishing and arrangements of this aristocratic apartment were calculated to dazzle the eye and bewilder the mind of one unaccustomed to such splendor. Madame De Boismorel, dressed with the most ostentatious display of wealth, was seated upon an ottoman, in stately dignity, employing her fingers with fancy needle-work. Her face was thickly covered with rouge, and, as her guests were announced, she raised her eyes from her embroidery, and fixing a cold and unfeeling glance upon them, without rising to receive them, or even making the slightest inclination of her body, in a very patronizing and condescending tone said to the grandmother, "Ah! _Miss_ Phlippon, good morning to you!" Jane, who was far from pleased with her reception in the hall, was exceedingly displeased with her reception in the saloon. The pride of the Roman maiden rose in her bosom, and indignantly she exclaimed to herself, "So my grandmother is called _Miss_ in this house!" "I am very glad to see you," continued Madame De Boismorel; "and who is this fine girl? your grand-daughter, I suppose? She will make a very pretty woman. Come here, my dear. Ah! I see she is a little bashful. How old is your grand-daughter, Miss Phlippon? Her complexion is rather brown, to be sure, but her skin is clear, and will grow fairer in a few years. She is quite a woman already." Thus she rattled on for some time, waiting for no answers. At length, turning again to Jane, who had hardly ventured to raise her eyes from the floor, she said, "What a beautiful hand you have got. That hand must be a lucky one. Did you ever venture in a lottery my dear?" "Never, madam," replied Jane, promptly. "I am not fond of gaming." "What an admirable voice!" exclaimed the lady. "So sweet and yet so full-toned! But how grave she is! Pray, my dear, are you not a little of a devotee?" "I know my duty to God," replied Jane, "and I endeavor to fulfill it." "That's a good girl," the noble lady rejoined. "You wish to take the veil, do you not?" "I do not know what may be my destination, neither am I at present anxious to conjecture it." "How very sententious!" Madame De Boismorel replied. "Your grand-daughter reads a great deal, does she not, Miss Phlippon?" "Yes, madam, reading is her greatest delight." "Ay, ay," rejoined the lady; "I see how it is. But have a care that she does not turn author. That would be a pity indeed." During this conversation the cheeks of Jane were flushed with wounded pride, and her heart throbbed most violently. She felt indignant and degraded, and was exceedingly impatient to escape from the humiliating visit. Conscious that she was, in spirit, in no respect inferior to the maidens of Greece and Rome who had so engrossed her admiration, she as instinctively recoiled from the arrogance of the haughty occupant of the parlor as she had repelled the affected equality of the servants in the hall. A short time after this she was taken to pass a week at the luxurious abodes of Maria Antoinette. Versailles was in itself a city of palaces and of courtiers, where all that could dazzle the eye in regal pomp and princely voluptuousness was concentered. Most girls of her age would have been enchanted and bewildered by this display of royal grandeur. Jane was permitted to witness, and partially to share, all the pomp of luxuriously-spread tables, and presentations, and court balls, and illuminations, and the gilded equipages of embassadors and princes. But this maiden, just emerging from the period of childhood and the seclusion of the cloister, undazzled by all this brilliance, looked sadly on the scene with the condemning eye of a philosopher. The servility of the courtiers excited her contempt. She contrasted the boundless profusion and extravagance which filled these palaces with the absence of comfort in the dwellings of the over-taxed poor, and pondered deeply the value of that regal despotism, which starved the millions to pander to the dissolute indulgence of the few. Her personal pride was also severely stung by perceiving that her own attractions, mental and physical, were entirely overlooked by the crowds which were bowing before the shrines of rank and power. She soon became weary of the painful spectacle. Disgusted with the frivolity of the living, she sought solace for her wounded feelings in companionship with the illustrious dead. She chose the gardens for her resort, and, lingering around the statues which embellished these scenes of almost fairy enchantment, surrendered herself to the luxury of those oft-indulged dreams, which lured her thoughts away from the trivialities around her to heroic character and brilliant exploits. "How do you enjoy your visit, my daughter?" inquired her mother. "I shall be glad when it is ended," was the characteristic reply, "else, in a few more days, I shall so detest all the persons I see that I shall not know what to do with my hatred." "Why, what harm have these persons done you, my child?" "They make me feel injustice and look upon absurdity," replied this philosopher of thirteen. Thus early did she commence her political meditations, and here were planted the germs of that enthusiasm which subsequently nerved her to such exertions for the disenthralment of the people, and the establishment of republican power upon the ruin of the throne of the Bourbons. She thought of the ancient republics, encircled by a halo of visionary glory, and of the heroes and heroines who had been the martyrs of liberty; or, to use her own energetic language, "I sighed at the recollection of Athens, where I could have enjoyed the fine arts without being annoyed at the sight of despotism. I was out of all patience at being a French-woman. Enchanted with the golden period of the Grecian republic, I passed over the storms by which it had been agitated. I forgot the exile of Aristides, the death of Socrates, and the condemnation of Phocion. I little thought that Heaven reserved me to be a witness of similar errors, to profess the same principles, and to participate in the glory of the same persecutions." Soon after Jane had entered her fourteenth year, she left her grandmother's and returned to her parental home. Her father, though far from opulence, was equally removed from poverty, and, without difficulty, provided his family with a frugal competence. Jane now pursued her studies and her limitless reading with unabated ardor. Her mind, demanding reality and truth as basis for thought, in the developments of character as revealed in biography, in the rise and fall of empires as portrayed in history, in the facts of science, and in the principles of mental and physical philosophy, found its congenial aliment. She accustomed herself to read with her pen in her hand, taking copious abstracts of facts and sentiments which particularly interested her. Not having a large library of her own, many of the books which she read were borrowed, and she carefully extracted from them and treasured in her commonplace book those passages which particularly interested her, that she might read them again and again. With these abstracts and extracts there were freely intermingled her own reflections, and thus all that she read was carefully stored up in her own mind and became a portion of her own intellectual being. Jane's mother, conscious of the importance to her child of a knowledge of domestic duties, took her to the market to obtain meat and vegetables, and occasionally placed upon her the responsibility of most of the family purchases; and yet the unaffected, queenly dignity with which the imaginative girl yielded herself to these most useful yet prosaic avocations was such, that when she entered the market, the fruit-women hastened to serve her before the other customers. The first comers, instead of being offended by this neglect, stepped aside, struck by those indescribable indications of superiority which ever gave her such a resistless influence over other minds. It is quite remarkable that Jane, apparently, never turned with repugnance from these humble avocations of domestic life. It speaks most highly in behalf of the intelligence and sound judgment of her mother, that she was enabled thus successfully to allure her daughter from her proud imaginings and her realms of romance to those unattractive practical duties which our daily necessities demand. At one hour, this ardent and impassioned maiden might have been seen in her little chamber absorbed in studies of deepest research. The highest themes which can elevate or engross the mind of man claimed her profound and delighted reveries. The next hour she might be seen in the kitchen, under the guidance of her placid and pious mother, receiving from her judicious lips lessons upon frugality, and industry, and economy. The white apron was bound around her waist, and her hands, which, but a few moments before, were busy with the circles of the celestial globe, were now occupied in preparing vegetables for dinner. There was thus united in the character of Jane the appreciation of all that is beautiful, chivalric, and sublime in the world of fact and the world of imagination, and also domestic skill and practical common sense. She was thus prepared to fascinate by the graces and elegances of a refined and polished mind, and to create for herself, in the midst of all the vicissitudes of life, a region of loveliness in which her spirit could ever dwell; and, at the same time, she possessed that sagacity and tact, and those habits of usefulness, which prepared her to meet calmly all the changes of fortune, and over them all to triumph. With that self-appreciation, the expression of which, with her, was frankness rather than vanity, she subsequently writes, "This mixture of serious studies, agreeable relaxations, and domestic cares, was rendered pleasant by my mother's good management, and fitted me for every thing. It seemed to forebode the vicissitudes of future life, and enabled me to bear them. In every place I am at home. I can prepare my own dinner with as much address as Philopoemen cut wood; but no one seeing me thus engaged would think it an office in which I ought to be employed." Jane was thus prepared by Providence for that career which she rendered so illustrious through her talents and her sufferings. At this early period there were struggling in her bosom those very emotions which soon after agitated every mind in France, and which overthrew in chaotic ruin both the altar and the throne. The dissolute lives of many of the Catholic clergy, and their indolence and luxury, began to alarm her faith. The unceasing denunciations of her father gave additional impulse to every such suggestion. She could not but see that the pride and power of the state were sustained by the superstitious terrors wielded by the Church. She could not be blind to the trickery by which money was wrested from tortured consciences, and from ignorance, imbecility, and dotage. She could not but admire her mother's placid piety, neither could she conceal from herself that her faith was feeling, her principles sentiments. Deeply as her own feelings had been impressed in the convent, and much as she loved the gentle sisters there, she sought in vain for a foundation for the gigantic fabric of spiritual dominion towering above her. She looked upon the gorgeous pomp of papal worship, with its gormandizing pastors and its starving flocks, with its pageants to excite the sense and to paralyze the mind, with its friars and monks loitering in sloth and uselessness, and often in the grossest dissipation, and her reason gradually began to condemn it as a gigantic superstition for the enthrallment of mankind. Still, the influence of Christian sentiments, like a guardian angel, ever hovered around her, and when her bewildered mind was groping amid the labyrinths of unbelief, her _heart_ still clung to all that is pure in Christian morals, and to all that is consolatory in the hopes of immortality; and even when benighted in the most painful atheistic doubts, _conscience_ became her deity; its voice she most reverently obeyed. She turned from the Church to the state. She saw the sons and the daughters of aristocratic pride, glittering in gilded chariots, and surrounded by insolent menials, sweep by her, through the Elysian Fields, while she trod the dusty pathway. Her proud spirit revolted, more and more, at the apparent injustice. She had studied the organization of society. She was familiar with the modes of popular oppression. She understood the operation of that system of taxes, so ingeniously devised to sink the mass of the people in poverty and degradation, that princes and nobles might revel in voluptuous splendor. Indignation nerved her spirit as she reflected upon the usurpation thus ostentatiously displayed. The seclusion in which she lived encouraged deep musings upon these vast inequalities of life. Piety had not taught her submission. Philosophy had not yet taught her the impossibility of adjusting these allotments of our earthly state, so as to distribute the gifts of fortune in accordance with merit. Little, however, did the proud grandees imagine, as in courtly splendor they swept by the plebeian maiden, enveloping her in the dust of their chariots, that her voice would yet aid to upheave their castles from their foundations, and whelm the monarchy and the aristocracy of France in one common ruin. At this time circumstances brought her in contact with several ladies connected with noble families. The ignorance of these ladies, their pride, their arrogance, excited in Jane's mind deep contempt. She could not but feel her own immeasurable superiority over them, and yet she perceived with indignation that the accident of birth invested them with a factitious dignity, which enabled them to look down upon her with condescension. A lady of noble birth, who had lost fortune and friends through the fraud and dissipation of those connected with her, came to board for a short time in her father's family. This lady was forty years of age, insufferably proud of her pedigree, and in her manners stiff and repulsive. She was exceedingly illiterate and uninformed, being unable to write a line with correctness, and having no knowledge beyond that which may be picked up in the ball-room and the theater. There was nothing in her character to win esteem. She was trying, by a law-suit, to recover a portion of her lost fortune. Jane wrote petitions for her, and letters, and sometimes went with her to make interest with persons whose influence would be important. She perceived that, notwithstanding her deficiency in every personal quality to inspire esteem or love, she was treated, in consequence of her birth, with the most marked deference. Whenever she mentioned the names of her high-born ancestry--and those names were ever upon her lips--she was listened to with the greatest respect. Jane contrasted the reception which this illiterate descendant of nobility enjoyed with the reception which her grandmother encountered in the visit to Madame De Boismorel, and it appeared to her that the world was exceedingly unjust, and that the institutions of society were highly absurd. Thus was her mind training for activity in the arena of revolution. She was pondering deeply all the abuses of society. She had become enamored of the republican liberty of antiquity. She was ready to embrace with enthusiasm any hopes of change. All the games and amusements of girlhood appeared to her frivolous, as, day after day, her whole mental powers were engrossed by these profound contemplations, and by aspirations for the elevation of herself and of mankind. CHAPTER III. MAIDENHOOD. 1770-1775 First emotions of love.--A youthful artist.--Maiden timidity.--Number of suitors.--Jane as a letter writer.--Her sentiments adopted by the French ministry.--A rich meat merchant proposes for Jane's hand.--Conversation between Jane and her father about matrimony.--Views of Jane in regard to marriage.--Jane's objections to a tradesman.--She is immovable.--The young physician as a lover.--Curious interview.--The physician taken on trial.--The connection broken off.--Illness of Jane's mother.--The jeweler.--Jane's views of congeniality between man and wife.--Her mother's death.--Jane's father becomes dissipated.--Meekness of her mother.--Excursion to the country.--Delusive hopes.--Death of Madame Phlippon.--Effects upon Jane.--Recovery of Jane.--Character of her mother.--Jane's melancholy.--She resorts to writing.--Development of character.--Letter from M. Boismorel.--Reply to M. De Boismorel.--Translation.--Character of M. De Boismorel.--Jane introduced to the nobility.--Jane's contempt for the aristocracy.--Her good taste.--M. Phlippon's progress in dissipation.--Jane's painful situation.--Jane secures a small income.--Consolations of literature. A soul so active, so imaginative, and so full of feeling as that of Jane, could not long slumber unconscious of the emotion of love. In the unaffected and touching narrative which she gives of her own character, in the Journal which she subsequently wrote in the gloom of a prison, she alludes to the first rising of that mysterious passion in her bosom. With that frankness which ever marked her character, she describes the strange fluttering of her heart, the embarrassment, the attraction, and the instinctive diffidence she experienced when in the presence of a young man who had, all unconsciously, interested her affections. It seems that there was a youthful painter named Taboral, of pale, and pensive, and intellectual countenance--an artist with soul-inspired enthusiasm beaming from his eye--who occasionally called upon her father. Jane had just been reading the Heloise of Rousseau, that gushing fountain of sentimentality. Her young heart took fire. His features mingled insensibly in her dreamings and her visions, and dwelt, a welcome guest, in her castles in the air. The diffident young man, with all the sensitiveness of genius, could not speak to the daughter, of whose accomplishments the father was so justly proud, without blushing like a girl. When Jane heard him in the shop, she always contrived to make some errand to go in. There was a pencil or something else to be sought for. But the moment she was in the presence of Taboral, instinctive embarrassment drove her away, and she retired more rapidly than she entered, and with a palpitating heart ran to hide herself in her little chamber. This emotion, however, was fleeting and transient, and soon forgotten. Indeed, highly imaginative as was Jane, her imagination was vigorous and intellectual, and her tastes led her far away from those enervating love-dreams in which a weaker mind would have indulged. A young lady so fascinating in mind and person could not but attract much attention. Many suitors began to appear, one after another, but she manifested no interest in any of them. The customs of society in France were such at that time, that it was difficult for any one who sought the hand of Jane to obtain an introduction to her. Consequently, the expedient was usually adopted of writing first to her parents. These letters were always immediately shown to Jane. She judged of the character of the writer by the character of the epistles. Her father, knowing her intellectual superiority, looked to her as his secretary to reply to all these letters. She consequently wrote the answers, which her father carefully copied, and sent in his own name. She was often amused with the gravity with which she, as the father of herself, with parental prudence discussed her own interests. In subsequent years she wrote to kings and to cabinets in the name of her husband; and the sentiments which flowed from her pen, adopted by the ministry of France as their own, guided the councils of nations. Her father, regarding commerce as the source of wealth, and wealth as the source of power and dignity, was very anxious that his daughter should accept some of the lucrative offers she was receiving from young men of the family acquaintance who were engaged in trade. But Jane had no such thought. Her proud spirit revolted from such a connection. From her sublimated position among the ancient heroes, and her ambitious aspirings to dwell in the loftiest regions of intellect, she could not think of allying her soul with those whose energies were expended in buying and selling; and she declared that she would have no husband but one with whom she could cherish congenial sympathies. At one time a rich meat merchant of the neighborhood solicited her hand. Her father, allured by his wealth, was very anxious that his daughter should accept the offer. In reply to his urgency Jane firmly replied, "I can not, dear father, descend from my noble imaginings. What I want in a husband is a _soul_, not a _fortune_. I will die single rather than prostitute my own mind in a union with a being with whom I have no sympathies. Brought up from my infancy in connection with the great men of all ages--familiar with lofty ideas and illustrious examples--have I lived with Plato, with all the philosophers, all the poets, all the politicians of antiquity, merely to unite myself with a shop-keeper, who will neither appreciate nor feel any thing as I do? Why have you suffered me, father, to contract these intellectual habits and tastes, if you wish me to form such an alliance? I know not whom I may marry; but it must be one who can share my thoughts and sympathize with my pursuits." "But, my daughter, there are many men of business who have extensive information and polished manners." "That may be," Jane answered, "but they do not possess the kind of information, and the character of mind, and the intellectual tastes which I wish any one who is my husband to possess." "Do you not suppose," rejoined her father, "that Mr. ---- and his wife are happy? He has just retired from business with an ample fortune. They have a beautiful house, and receive the best of company." "I am no judge," was the reply, "of other people's happiness. But my own heart is not fixed on riches. I conceive that the strictest union of affection is requisite to conjugal felicity. I can not connect myself with any man whose tastes and sympathies are not in accordance with my own. My husband must be my superior. Since both nature and the laws give him the pre-eminence, I should be ashamed if he did not really deserve it." "I suppose, then, you want a counselor for your husband. But ladies are seldom happy with these learned gentlemen. They have a great deal of pride, and very little money." "Father," Jane earnestly replied, "I care not about the profession. I wish only to marry a man whom I can love." "But you persist in thinking such a man will never be found in trade. You will find it, however, a very pleasant thing to sit at ease in your own parlor while your husband is accumulating a fortune. Now there is Madame Dargens: she understands diamonds as well as her husband. She can make good bargains in his absence, and could carry on all his business perfectly well if she were left a widow. You are intelligent. You perfectly understand that branch of business since you studied the treatise on precious stones. You might do whatever you please. You would have led a very happy life if you could but have fancied Delorme, Dabrieul, or--" "Father," earnestly exclaimed Jane, "I have discovered that the only way to make a fortune in trade is by selling dear that which has been bought cheap; by overcharging the customer, and beating down the poor workman. I could never descend to such practices; nor could I respect a man who made them his occupation from morning till night." "Do you then suppose that there are no honest tradesmen?" "I presume that there are," was the reply; "but the number is not large; and among them I am not likely to find a husband who will sympathize with me." "And what will you do if you do not find the idol of your imagination?" "I will live single." "Perhaps you will not find that as pleasant as you imagine. You may think that there is time enough yet. But weariness will come at last. The crowd of lovers will soon pass away and you know the fable." "Well, then, by meriting happiness, I will take revenge upon the injustice which would deprive me of it." "Oh! now you are in the clouds again, my child. It is very pleasant to soar to such a height, but it is not easy to keep the elevation." The judicious mother of Jane, anxious to see her daughter settled in life, endeavored to form a match for her with a young physician. Much maneuvering was necessary to bring about the desired result. The young practitioner was nothing loth to lend his aid. The pecuniary arrangements were all made, and the bargain completed, before Jane knew any thing of the matter. The mother and daughter went out one morning to make a call upon a friend, at whose house the prospective husband of Jane, by previous appointment, was accidentally to be. It was a curious interview. The friends so overacted their part, that Jane immediately saw through the plot. Her mother was pensive and anxious. Her friends were voluble, and prodigal of sly intimations. The young gentleman was very lavish of his powers of pleasing, loaded Jane with flippant compliments, devoured confectionary with high relish, and chattered most flippantly in the most approved style of fashionable inanition. The high-spirited girl had no idea of being thus disposed of in the matrimonial bazaar. The profession of the doctor was pleasing to her, as it promised an enlightened mind, and she was willing to consent to make his acquaintance. Her mother urged her to decide at once. "What, mother!" she exclaimed, "would you have me take one for my husband upon the strength of a single interview?" "It is not exactly so," she replied. "This young gentleman's intimacy with our friends enables us to judge of his conduct and way of life. We know his disposition. These are the main points. You have attained the proper age to be settled in the world. You have refused many offers from tradesmen, and it is from that class alone that you are likely to receive addresses. You seem fully resolved never to marry a man in business. You may never have another such offer. The present match is very eligible in every external point of view. Beware how you reject it too lightly." Jane, thus urged, consented to see the young physician at her father's house, that she might become acquainted with him. She, however, determined that no earthly power should induce her to marry him, unless she found in him a congenial spirit. Fortunately, she was saved all further trouble in the matter by a dispute which arose between her lover and her father respecting the pecuniary arrangements, and which broke off all further connection between the parties. Her mother's health now began rapidly to decline. A stroke of palsy deprived her of her accustomed elasticity of spirits, and, secluding herself from society, she became silent and sad. In view of approaching death, she often lamented that she could not see her daughter well married before she left the world. An offer which Jane received from a very honest, industrious, and thrifty jeweler, aroused anew a mother's maternal solicitude. "Why," she exclaimed, with melancholy earnestness, "will you reject this young man? He has an amiable disposition, and high reputation for integrity and sobriety. He is already in easy circumstances, and is in a fair way of soon acquiring a brilliant fortune. He knows that you have a superior mind. He professes great esteem for you, and will be proud of following your advice. You might lead him in any way you like." "But, my dear mother, I do not want a husband who is to be led. He would be too cumbersome a child for me to take care of." "Do you know that you are a very whimsical girl, my child? And how do you think you would like a husband who was your master and tyrant?" "I certainly," Jane replied, "should not like a man who assumed airs of authority, for that would only provoke me to resist. But I am sure that I could never love a husband whom it was necessary for me to govern. I should be ashamed of my own power." "I understand you, Jane. You would like to have a man _think_ himself the master, while he obeyed you in every particular." "No, mother, it is not that either. I hate servitude; but empire would only embarrass me. I wish to gain the affections of a man who would make his happiness consist in contributing to mine, as his good sense and regard for me should dictate." "But, my daughter, there would be hardly such a thing in the world as a happy couple, if happiness could not exist without that perfect congeniality of taste and opinions which you imagine to be so necessary." "I do not know, mother, of a single person whose happiness I envy." "Very well; but among those matches which you do not envy, there may be some far preferable to remaining always single. I may be called out of the world sooner than you imagine. Your father is still young. I can not tell you all the disagreeable things my fondness for you makes me fear. I should be indeed happy, could I see you united to some worthy man before I die." This was the first time that the idea of her mother's death ever seriously entered the mind of Jane. With an eager gaze, she fixed her eye upon her pale and wasted cheek and her emaciate frame, and the dreadful truth, with the suddenness of a revelation, burst upon her. Her whole frame shook with emotion, and she burst into a flood of tears. Her mother, much moved, tried to console her. "Do not be alarmed, my dear child," said she, tenderly. "I am not dangerously ill. But in forming our plans, we should take into consideration all chances. A worthy man offers you his hand. You have now attained your twentieth year. You can not expect as many suitors as you have had for the last five years. I may be suddenly taken from you. Do not, then, reject a husband who, it is true, has not all the refinement you could desire, but who will love you, and with whom you can be happy." "Yes, my dear mother," exclaimed Jane, with a deep and impassioned sigh, "as happy as _you_ have been." The expression escaped her in the excitement of the moment. Never before had she ventured in the remotest way to allude to the total want of congeniality which she could not but perceive existed between her father and her mother. Indeed, her mother's character for patience and placid submission was so remarkable, that Jane did not know how deeply she had suffered, nor what a life of martyrdom she was leading. The effect of Jane's unpremeditated remark opened her eyes to the sad reality. Her mother was greatly disconcerted. Her cheek changed color. Her lip trembled. She made no reply. She never again opened her lips upon the subject of the marriage of her child. The father of Jane, with no religious belief to control his passions or guide his conduct, was gradually falling into those habits of dissipation to which he was peculiarly exposed by the character of the times. He neglected his business. He formed disreputable acquaintances. He became irritable and domineering over his wife, and was often absent from home, with convivial clubs, until a late hour of the night. Neither mother nor daughter ever uttered one word to each other in reference to the failings of the husband and father. Jane, however, had so powerful an influence over him, that she often, by her persuasive skill, averted the storm which was about to descend upon her meek and unresisting parent. The poor mother, in silence and sorrow, was sinking to the tomb far more rapidly than Jane imagined. One summer's day, the father, mother, and daughter took a short excursion into the country. The day was warm and beautiful. In a little boat they glided over the pleasant waters of the Seine, feasting their eyes with the beauties of nature and art which fringed the shores. The pale cheek of the dying wife became flushed with animation as she once again breathed the invigorating air of the country, and the daughter beguiled her fears with the delusive hope that it was the flush of returning health. When they reached their home, Madame Phlippon, fatigued with the excursion, retired to her chamber for rest. Jane, accompanied by her maid, went to the convent to call upon her old friends the nuns. She made a very short call. "Why are you in such haste?" inquired Sister Agatha. "I am anxious to return to my mother." "But you told me that she was better." "She is much better than usual. But I have a strange feeling of solicitude about her. I shall not feel easy until I see her again." She hurried home, and was met at the door by a little girl, who informed her that her mother was very dangerously ill. She flew to the room, and found her almost lifeless. Another stroke of paralysis had done its work, and she was dying. She raised her languid eyes to her child, but her palsied tongue could speak no word of tenderness. One arm only obeyed the impulse of her will. She raised it, and affectionately patted the cheek of her beloved daughter, and wiped the tears which were flowing down her cheeks. The priest came to administer the last consolations of religion. Jane, with her eyes riveted upon her dying parent, endeavored to hold the light. Overpowered with anguish, the light suddenly dropped from her hand, and she fell senseless upon the floor. When she recovered from this swoon her mother was dead. Jane was entirely overwhelmed with uncontrollable and delirious sorrow. For many days it was apprehended that her own life would fall a sacrifice to the blow which her affections had received. Instead of being a support to the family in this hour of trial, she added to the burden and the care. The Abbé Legrand, who stood by her bedside as her whole frame was shaken by convulsions, very sensibly remarked, "It is a good thing to possess sensibility. It is very unfortunate to have so much of it." Gradually Jane regained composure, but life, to her, was darkened. She now began to realize all those evils which her fond mother had apprehended. Speaking of her departed parent, she says, "The world never contained a better or a more amiable woman. There was nothing brilliant in her character, but she possessed every quality to endear her to all by whom she was known. Naturally endowed with the sweetest disposition, virtue seemed never to cost her any effort. Her pure and tranquil spirit pursued its even course like the docile stream that bathes with equal gentleness, the foot of the rock which holds it captive, and the valley which it at once enriches and adorns. With her death was concluded the tranquillity of my youth, which till then was passed in the enjoyment of blissful affections and beloved occupations." Jane soon found her parental home, indeed, a melancholy abode. She was truly alone in the world. Her father now began to advance with more rapid footsteps in the career of dissipation. A victim to that infidelity which presents no obstacle to crime, he yielded himself a willing captive to the dominion of passion, and disorder reigned through the desolated household. Jane had the mortification of seeing a woman received into the family to take her mother's place, in a union unsanctified by the laws of God. A deep melancholy settled down upon the mind of the wounded girl, and she felt that she was desolate and an alien in her own home. She shut herself up in her chamber with her thoughts and her books. All the chords of her sensitive nature now vibrated only responsive to those melancholy tones which are the dirges of the broken heart. As there never was genius untinged by melancholy, so may it be doubted whether there ever was greatness of character which had not been nurtured in the school of great affliction. Her heart now began to feel irrepressible longings for the sympathy of some congenial friend, upon whose supporting bosom she could lean her aching head. In lonely musings she solaced herself, and nurtured her own thoughts by writing. Her pen became her friend, and the resource of every weary hour. She freely gave utterance in her diary to all her feelings and all her emotions. Her manuscripts of abstracts, and extracts, and original thoughts, became quite voluminous. In this way she was daily cultivating that power of expression and that force of eloquence which so often, in subsequent life, astonished and charmed her friends. In every development of character in her most eventful future career, one can distinctly trace the influence of these vicissitudes of early life, and of these impressions thus powerfully stamped upon her nature. Philosophy, romance, and religious sentiment, an impassioned mind and a glowing heart, admiration of heroism, and emulation of martyrdom in some noble cause, all conspired to give her sovereignty over the affections of others, and to enable her to sway human wills almost at pleasure. M. Boismorel, husband of the aristocratic lady to whom Jane once paid so disagreeable a visit, called one day at the shop of M. Phlippon, and the proud father could not refrain from showing him some of the writings of Jane. The nobleman had sense enough to be very much pleased with the talent which they displayed, and wrote her a very flattering letter, offering her the free use of his very valuable library, and urging her to devote her life to literary pursuits, and at once to commence authorship. Jane was highly gratified by this commendation, and most eagerly availed herself of his most valuable offer. In reply to his suggestion respecting authorship, she inclosed the following lines: "Aux hommes ouvrant la carrière Des grands et des nobles talents, Ils n'ont mis aucune barrière A leurs plus sublimes èlans. "De mon sexe foible et sensible, Ils ne veulent que des vertus; Nous pouvons imiter Titus, Mais dans un sentier moins penible. "Joussiez du bien d'être admis A toutes ces sortes de glorie Pour nous le temple de mémoire Est dans le coeurs de nos amis." These lines have been thus vigorously translated in the interesting sketch given by Mrs. Child of Madame Roland: "To man's aspiring sex 'tis given To climb the highest hill of fame; To tread the shortest road to heaven, And gain by death a deathless name. "Of well-fought fields and trophies won The memory lives while ages pass; Graven on everlasting stone, Or written on retentive brass. "But to poor feeble womankind The meed of glory is denied; Within a narrow sphere confined. The lowly virtues are their pride. "Yet not deciduous is their fame, Ending where frail existence ends; A sacred temple holds their name-- The heart of their surviving friends." A friendly correspondence ensued between Jane and M. De Boismorel, which continued through his life. He was a very worthy and intelligent man, and became so much interested in his young friend, that he wished to connect her in marriage with his son. This young man was indolent and irresolute in character, and his father thought that he would be greatly benefited by a wife of decision and judgment. Jane, however, was no more disposed to fall in love with rank than with wealth, and took no fancy whatever to the characterless young nobleman. The judicious father saw that it would be utterly unavailing to urge the suit, and the matter was dropped. Through the friendship of M. De Boismorel, she was often introduced to the great world of lords and ladies. Even his formal and haughty wife became much interested in the fascinating young lady, and her brilliant talents and accomplishments secured her invitations to many social interviews to which she would not have been entitled by her birth. This slight acquaintance with the nobility of France did not, however, elevate them in her esteem. She found the conversation of the old marquises and antiquated dowagers who frequented the salons of Madame De Boismorel more insipid and illiterate than that of the tradespeople who visited her father's shop, and upon whom those nobles looked down with such contempt. Jane was also disgusted with the many indications she saw, not only of indolence and voluptuousness, but of dissipation and utter want of principle. Her good sense enabled her to move among these people as a studious observer of this aspect of human nature, neither adopting their costume nor imitating their manners. She was very unostentatious and simple in her style of dress, and never, in the slightest degree, affected the mannerism of mindless and heartless fashion. Madame De Boismorel, at one time eulogizing her taste in these respects, remarked, "You do not love feathers, do you, Miss Phlippon? How very different you are from the giddy-headed girls around us!" "I never wear feathers," Jane replied, "because I do not think that they would correspond with the condition in life of an artist's daughter who is going about on foot." "But, were you in a different situation in life, would you then wear feathers?" "I do not know what I should do in that case. I attach very slight importance to such trifles. I merely consider what is suitable for myself, and should be very sorry to judge of others by the superficial information afforded by their dress." M. Phlippon now began to advance more rapidly in the career of dissipation. Jane did every thing in her power to lure him to love his home. All her efforts were entirely unavailing. Night after night he was absent until the latest hours at convivial clubs and card-parties. He formed acquaintance with those with whom Jane could not only have no congeniality of taste, but who must have excited in her emotions of the deepest repugnance. These companions were often at his house; and the comfortable property which M. Phlippon possessed, under this course of dissipation was fast melting away. Jane's situation was now painful in the extreme. Her mother, who had been the guardian angel of her life, was sleeping in the grave. Her father was advancing with the most rapid strides in the road to ruin. Jane was in danger of soon being left an orphan and utterly penniless. Her father was daily becoming more neglectful and unkind to his daughter, as he became more dissatisfied with himself and with the world. Under these circumstances, Jane, by the advice of friends, had resort to a legal process, by which there was secured to her, from the wreck of her mother's fortune, an annual income of about one hundred dollars. In these gloomy hours which clouded the morning of life's tempestuous day, Jane found an unfailing resource and solace in her love of literature. With pen in hand, extracting beautiful passages and expanding suggested thoughts, she forgot her griefs and beguiled many hours, which would otherwise have been burdened with intolerable wretchedness. Maria Antoinette, woe-worn and weary, in tones of despair uttered the exclamation, "Oh! what a resource, amid the casualties of life, must there be in a highly-cultivated mind." The plebeian maiden could utter the same exclamation in accents of joyfulness. CHAPTER IV. MARRIAGE. 1776-1785 Sophia Cannet.--Roland de la Platière.--M. Roland.--His personal appearance.--Character of M. Roland.--First impressions.--Jane's appreciation of M. Roland.--Minds and hearts.--Journal of M. Roland.--His notes on Italy.--The light in which Jane and M. Roland regard each other.--M. Roland professes his attachment.--Feelings of Jane.--M. Roland writes to Jane's father.--Insulting letter of M. Phlippon.--Jane retires to a convent.--Her mode of life there.--Correspondence with M. Roland.--He returns to Paris.--M. Roland renews his offers to Jane.--They are married.--First year of married life.--Madame Roland's devotion to her husband.--Birth of a daughter.--Literary pursuits.--Application for letters-patent of nobility.--Visit to England.--Removal to Lyons.--La Platière and its inmates.--Death of M. Roland's mother.--Situation of La Platière.--Description of La Platière.--Surrounding scenery.--Years of happiness.--Mode of life.--Eudora.--Domestic duties.--Literary employments.--Pleasant rambles.--Distinguished guests.--Rural pleasures.--Knowledge of medicine.--Kindness to the peasantry.--Gratitude of the peasantry.--Popular rights. When Jane was in the convent, she became acquainted with a young lady from Amiens, Sophia Cannet. They formed for each other a strong attachment, and commenced a correspondence which continued for many years. There was a gentleman in Amiens by the name of Roland de la Platière, born of an opulent family, and holding the quite important office of inspector of manufactures. His time was mainly occupied in traveling and study. Being deeply interested in all subjects relating to political economy, he had devoted much attention to that noble science, and had written several treatises upon commerce, mechanics, and agriculture, which had given him, in the literary and scientific world, no little celebrity. He frequently visited the father of Sophia. She often spoke to him of her friend Jane, showed him her portrait, and read to him extracts from her glowing letters. The calm philosopher became very much interested in the enthusiastic maiden, and entreated Sophia to give him a letter of introduction to her, upon one of his annual visits to Paris. Sophia had also often written to Jane of her father's friend, whom she regarded with so much reverence. One day Jane was sitting alone in her desolate home, absorbed in pensive musings, when M. Roland entered, bearing a letter of introduction to her from Sophia. "You will receive this letter," her friend wrote, "by the hand of the philosopher of whom I have so often written to you. M. Roland is an enlightened man, of antique manners, without reproach, except for his passion for the ancients, his contempt for the moderns, and his too high estimation of his own virtue." The gentleman thus introduced to her was about forty years old. He was tall, slender, and well formed, with a little stoop in his gait, and manifested in his manners that self-possession which is the result of conscious worth and intellectual power, while, at the same time, he exhibited that slight and not displeasing awkwardness which one unavoidably acquires in hours devoted to silence and study. Still, Madame Roland says, in her description of his person, that he was courteous and winning; and though his manners did not possess all the easy elegance of the man of fashion, they united the politeness of the well-bred man with the unostentatious gravity of the philosopher. He was thin, with a complexion much tanned. His broad and intellectual brow, covered with but few hairs, added to the imposing attractiveness of his features. When listening, his countenance had an expression of deep thoughtfulness, and almost of sadness; but when excited in speaking, a smile of great cheerfulness spread over his animated features. His voice was rich and sonorous; his mode of speech brief and sententious; his conversation full of information, and rich in suggestive thought. Jane, the enthusiastic, romantic Jane, saw in the serene philosopher one of the sages of antiquity, and almost literally bowed and worshiped. All the sentiments of M. Roland were in accordance with the most cherished emotions which glowed in her own mind. She found what she had ever been seeking, but had never found before, a truly sympathetic soul. She thought not of love. She looked up to M. Roland as to a superior being--to an oracle, by whose decisions she could judge whether her own opinions were right or wrong. It is true that M. Roland, cool and unimpassioned in all his mental operations, never entered those airy realms of beauty and those visionary regions of romance where Jane loved, at times, to revel. And perhaps Jane venerated him still more for his more stern and unimaginative philosophy. But his meditative wisdom, his abstraction from the frivolous pursuits of life, his high ambition, his elevated pleasures, his consciousness of superiority over the mass of his fellow-men, and his sleepless desire to be a benefactor of humanity, were all traits of character which resistlessly attracted the admiration of Jane. She adored him as a disciple adores his master. She listened eagerly to all his words, and loved communion with his thoughts. M. Roland was by no means insensible to this homage, and though he looked upon her with none of the emotions of a lover, he was charmed with her society because she was so delighted with his own conversation. By the faculty of attentively listening to what others had to say, Madame Roland affirms that she made more friends than by any remarks she ever made of her own. The two _minds_, not _hearts_, were at once united; but this platonic union soon led to one more tender. M. Roland had recently been traveling in Germany, and had written a copious journal of his tour. As he was about to depart from Paris for Italy, he left this journal, with other manuscripts, in the hands of Jane. "These manuscripts," she writes, "made me better acquainted with him, during the eighteen months he passed in Italy, than frequent visits could have done. They consisted of travels, reflections, plans of literary works, and personal anecdotes. A strong mind, strict principles, and personal taste, were evident in every page." He also introduced Jane to his brother, a Benedictine monk. During the eighteen months of his absence from Paris, he was traveling in Italy, Switzerland, Sicily, and Malta, and writing notes upon those countries, which he afterward published. These notes he communicated to his brother the monk, and he transmitted them to Jane. She read them with intense interest. At length he returned again to Paris, and their acquaintance was renewed. M. Roland submitted to her his literary projects, and was much gratified in finding that she approved of all that he did and all that he contemplated. She found in him an invaluable friend. His gravity, his intellectual life, his almost stoical philosophy impressed her imagination and captivated her understanding. Two or three years passed away ere either of them seemed to have thought of the other in the light of a lover. She regarded him as a guide and friend. There was no ardor of youthful love warming her heart. There were no impassioned affections glowing in her bosom and impelling her to his side. Intellectual enthusiasm alone animated her in welcoming an intellectual union with a noble mind. M. Roland, on the other hand, looked with placid and paternal admiration upon the brilliant girl. He was captivated by her genius and the charms of her conversation, and, above all, by her profound admiration of himself. They were mutually happy in each other's society, and were glad to meet and loth to part. They conversed upon literary projects, upon political reforms, upon speculations in philosophy and science. M. Roland was naturally self-confident, opinionated, and domineering. Jane regarded him with so much reverence that she received his opinions for law. Thus he was flattered and she was happy. M. Roland returned to his official post at Amiens, and engaged in preparing his work on Italy for the press. They carried on a voluminous and regular correspondence. He forwarded to her, in manuscript, all the sheets of his proposed publication, and she returned them with the accompanying thoughts which their perusal elicited. Now and then an expression of decorous endearment would escape from each pen in the midst of philosophic discussions and political speculations. It was several years after their acquaintance commenced before M. Roland made an avowal of his attachment. Jane knew very well the pride of the Roland family, and that her worldly circumstances were such that, in their estimation, the connection would not seem an advantageous one. She also was too proud to enter into a family who might feel dishonored by the alliance. She therefore frankly told him that she felt much honored by his addresses, and that she esteemed him more highly than any other man she had ever met. She assured him that she should be most happy to make him a full return for his affection, but that her father was a ruined man, and that, by his increasing debts and his errors of character, still deeper disgrace might be entailed upon all connected with him; and she therefore could not think of allowing M. Roland to make his generosity to her a source of future mortification to himself. This was not the spirit most likely to repel the philosophic lover. The more she manifested this elevation of soul, in which Jane was perfectly sincere, the more earnestly did M. Roland persist in his plea. At last Jane, influenced by his entreaties, consented that he should make proposals to her father. He wrote to M. Phlippon. In reply, he received an insulting letter, containing a blunt refusal. M. Phlippon declared that he had no idea of having for a son-in-law a man of such rigid principles, who would ever be reproaching him for all his little errors. He also told his daughter that she would find in a man of such austere virtue, not a companion and an equal, but a censor and a tyrant. Jane laid this refusal of her father deeply to heart, and, resolving that if she could not marry the man of her choice, she would marry no one else, she wrote to M. Roland, requesting him to abandon his design, and not to expose himself to any further affronts. She then requested permission of her father to retire to a convent. Her reception at the convent, where she was already held in such high esteem, was cordial in the extreme. The scanty income she had saved from her mother's property rendered it necessary for her to live with the utmost frugality. She determined to regulate her expenses in accordance with this small sum. Potatoes, rice, and beans, with a little salt, and occasionally the luxury of a little butter, were her only food. She allowed herself to leave the convent but twice a week: once, to call, for an hour, upon a relative, and once to visit her father, and look over his linen. She had a little room under the roof, in the attic, where the pattering of the rain upon the tiles soothed to pensive thought, and lulled her to sleep by night. She carefully secluded herself from association with the other inmates of the convent, receiving only a visit of an hour each evening from the much-loved Sister Agatha. Her time she devoted, with unremitting diligence, to those literary avocations in which she found so much delight. The quiet and seclusion of this life had many charms for Jane. Indeed, a person with such resources for enjoyment within herself could never be very weary. The votaries of fashion and gayety are they to whom existence grows languid and life a burden. Several months thus glided away in tranquillity. She occasionally walked in the garden, at hours when no one else was there. The spirit of resignation, which she had so long cultivated; the peaceful conscience she enjoyed, in view of duty performed; the elevation of spirit, which enabled her to rise superior to misfortune; the methodical arrangement of time, which assigned to each hour its appropriate duty; the habit of close application, which riveted her attention to her studies; the highly-cultivated taste and buoyantly-winged imagination, which opened before her all the fairy realms of fancy, were treasures which gilded her cell and enriched her heart. She passed, it is true, some melancholy hours; but even that melancholy had its charms, and was more rich in enjoyment than the most mirthful moments through which the unreflecting flutter. M. Roland continued a very constant and kind correspondence with Jane, but she was not a little wounded by the philosophic resignation with which he submitted to her father's stern refusal. In the course of five or six months he again visited Paris, and called at the convent to see Jane. He saw her pale and pensive face behind a grating, and the sight of one who had suffered so much from her faithful love for him, and the sound of her voice, which ever possessed a peculiar charm, revived in his mind those impressions which had been somewhat fading away. He again renewed his offer, and entreated her to allow the marriage ceremony at once to be performed by his brother the prior. Jane was in much perplexity. She did not feel that her father was in a situation longer to control her, and she was a little mortified by the want of ardor which her philosophical lover had displayed. The illusion of romantic love was entirely dispelled from her mind, and, at the same time, she felt flattered by his perseverance, by the evidence that his most mature judgment approved of his choice, and by his readiness to encounter all the unpleasant circumstances in which he might be involved by his alliance with her. Jane, without much delay, yielded to his appeals. They were married in the winter of 1780. Jane was then twenty-five years of age. Her husband was twenty years her senior. The first year of their marriage life they passed in Paris. It was to Madame Roland a year of great enjoyment. Her husband was publishing a work upon the arts, and she, with all the energy of her enthusiastic mind, entered into all his literary enterprises. With great care and accuracy, she prepared his manuscripts for the press, and corrected the proofs. She lived in the study with him, became the companion of all his thoughts, and his assistant in all his labors. The only recreations in which she indulged, during the winter, were to attend a course of lectures upon natural history and botany. M. Roland had hired ready-furnished lodgings. She, well instructed by her mother in domestic duties, observing that all kinds of cooking did not agree with him, took pleasure in preparing his food with her own hands. Her husband engrossed her whole time, and, being naturally rather austere and imperious, he wished so to seclude her from the society of others as to monopolize all her capabilities of friendly feeling. She submitted to the exaction without a murmur, though there were hours in which she felt that she had made, indeed, a serious sacrifice of her youthful and buoyant affections. Madame Roland devoted herself so entirely to the studies in which her husband was engaged that her health was seriously impaired. Accustomed as she was to share in all his pursuits, he began to think that he could not do without her at any time or on any occasion. At the close of the year M. Roland returned to Amiens with his wife. She soon gave birth to a daughter, her only child, whom she nurtured with the most assiduous care. Her literary labors were, however, unremitted, and, though a mother and a nurse, she still lived in the study with her books and her pen. M. Roland was writing several articles for an encyclopedia. She aided most efficiently in collecting the materials and arranging the matter. Indeed, she wielded a far more vigorous pen than he did. Her copiousness of language, her facility of expression, and the play of her fancy, gave her the command of a very fascinating style; and M. Roland obtained the credit for many passages rich in diction and beautiful in imagery for which he was indebted to the glowing imagination of his wife. Frequent sickness of her husband alarmed her for his life. The tenderness with which she watched over him strengthened the tie which united them. He could not but love a young and beautiful wife so devoted to him. She could not but love one upon whom she was conferring such rich blessings. They remained in Amiens for four years. Their little daughter Eudora was a source of great delight to the fond parents, and Madame Roland took the deepest interest in the developments of her infantile mind. The office of M. Roland was highly lucrative, and his literary projects successful; and their position in society was that of an opulent family of illustrious descent--for the ancestors of M. Roland had been nobles. He now, with his accumulated wealth, was desirous of being reinstated in that ancestral rank which the family had lost with the loss of fortune. Neither must we blame our republican heroine too much that, under this change of circumstances, she was not unwilling that he should resume that exalted social position to which she believed him to be so richly entitled. It could hardly be unpleasant to her to be addressed as _Lady_ Roland. It is the infirmity of our frail nature that it is more agreeable to ascend to the heights of those who are above us, than to aid those below to reach the level we have attained. Encountering some embarrassments in their application for letters-patent of nobility, the subject was set aside for the time, and was never after renewed. The attempt, however, subsequently exposed them to great ridicule from their democratic opponents. About this time they visited England. They were received with much attention, and Madame Roland admired exceedingly the comparatively free institutions of that country. She felt that the English, as a nation, were immeasurably superior to the French, and returned to her own home more than ever dissatisfied with the despotic monarchy by which the people of France were oppressed. From Amiens, M. Roland removed to the city of Lyons, his native place, in which wider sphere he continued the duties of his office as Inspector General of Commerce and Manufactures. In the winter they resided in the city. During the summer they retired to M. Roland's paternal estate, La Platière, a very beautiful rural retreat but a few miles from Lyons. The mother of M. Roland and an elder brother resided on the same estate. They constituted the ingredient of bitterness in their cup of joy. It seems that in this life it must ever be that each pleasure shall have its pain. No happiness can come unalloyed. La Platière possessed for Madame Roland all the essentials of an earthly paradise; but those trials which are the unvarying lot of fallen humanity obtained entrance there. Her mother-in-law was proud, imperious, ignorant, petulant, and disagreeable in every development of character. There are few greater annoyances of life than an irritable woman, rendered doubly morose by the infirmities of years. The brother was coarse and arrogant, without any delicacy of feeling himself, and apparently unconscious that others could be troubled by any such sensitiveness. The disciplined spirit of Madame Roland triumphed over even these annoyances, and she gradually infused through the discordant household, by her own cheerful spirit, a great improvement in harmony and peace. It is not, however, possible that Madame Roland should have shed many tears when, on one bright autumnal day, this hasty tongue and turbulent spirit were hushed in that repose from which there is no awaking. Immediately after this event, attracted by the quiet of this secluded retreat, they took up their abode there for both summer and winter. [Illustration: LA PLATIÈRE.] La Platière, the paternal inheritance of M. Roland, was an estate situated at the base of the mountains of Beaujolais, in the valley of the Saône. It is a region solitary and wild, with rivulets, meandering down from the mountains, fringed with willows and poplars, and threading their way through narrow, yet smooth and fertile meadows, luxuriant with vineyards. A large, square stone house, with regular windows, and a roof, nearly flat, of red tiles, constituted the comfortable, spacious, and substantial mansion. The eaves projected quite a distance beyond the walls, to protect the windows from the summer's sun and the winter's rain and snow. The external walls, straight, and entirely unornamented, were covered with white plaster, which, in many places, the storms of years had cracked and peeled off. The house stood elevated from the ground, and the front door was entered by ascending five massive stone steps, which were surmounted by a rusty iron balustrade. Barns, wine-presses, dove-cotes and sheep-pens were clustered about, so that the farm-house, with its out-buildings, almost presented the aspect of a little village. A vegetable garden; a flower garden, with serpentine walks and arbors embowered in odoriferous and flowering shrubs; an orchard, casting the shade of a great variety of fruit-trees over the closely-mown greensward, and a vineyard, with long lines of low-trimmed grape vines, gave a finish to this most rural and attractive picture. In the distance was seen the rugged range of the mountains of Beaujolais, while still further in the distance rose towering above them the snow-capped summits of the Alps. Here, in this social solitude, in this harmony of silence, in this wide expanse of nature, Madame Roland passed five of the happiest years of her life--five such years as few mortals enjoy on earth. She, whose spirit had been so often exhilarated by the view of the tree tops and the few square yards of blue sky which were visible from the window of her city home, was enchanted with the exuberance of the prospect of mountain and meadow, water and sky, so lavishly spread out before her. The expanse, apparently so limitless, open to her view, invited her fancy to a range equally boundless. Nature and imagination were her friends, and in their realms she found her home. Enjoying an ample income, engaged constantly in the most ennobling literary pursuits, rejoicing in the society of her husband and her little Eudora, and superintending her domestic concerns with an ease and skill which made that superintendence a pleasure, time flew upon its swiftest wings. Her mode of life during these five calm and sunny years which intervened between the cloudy morning and the tempestuous evening of her days, must have been exceedingly attractive. She rose with the sun, devoted sundry attentions to her husband and child, and personally superintended the arrangements for breakfast, taking an affectionate pleasure in preparing very nicely her husband's frugal food with her own hands. That social meal, ever, in a loving family, the most joyous interview of the day, being passed, M. Roland entered the library for his intellectual toil, taking with him, for his silent companion, the idolized little Eudora. She amused herself with her pencil, or reading, or other studies, which her father and mother superintended. Madame Roland, in the mean time, devoted herself, with most systematic energy, to her domestic concerns. She was a perfect housekeeper, and each morning all the interests of her family, from the cellar to the garret, passed under her eye. She superintended the preservation of the fruit, the storage of the wine, the sorting of the linen, and those other details of domestic life which engross the attention of a good housewife. The systematic division of time, which seemed to be an instinctive principle of her nature, enabled her to accomplish all this in two hours. She had faithful and devoted servants to do the work. The superintendence was all that was required. This genius to superintend and be the head, while others contribute the hands, is not the most common of human endowments. Madame Roland, having thus attended to her domestic concerns, laid aside those cares for the remainder of the day, and entered the study to join her husband in his labors there. These intellectual employments ever possessed for her peculiar attractions. The scientific celebrity of M. Roland, and his political position, attracted many visitors to La Platière; consequently, they had, almost invariably, company to dine. At the close of the literary labors of the morning, Madame Roland dressed for dinner, and, with all that fascination of mind and manners so peculiarly her own, met her guests at the dinner-table. The labor of the day was then over. The repast was prolonged with social converse. After dinner, they walked in the garden, sauntered through the vineyard, and looked at the innumerable objects of interest which are ever to be found in the yard of a spacious farm. Madame Roland frequently retired to the library, to write letters to her friends, or to superintend the lessons of Eudora. Occasionally, of a fine day, leaning upon her husband's arm, she would walk for several miles, calling at the cottages of the peasantry, whom she greatly endeared to her by her unvarying kindness. In the evening, after tea, they again resorted to the library. Guests of distinguished name and influence were frequently with them, and the hours glided swiftly, cheered by the brilliance of philosophy and genius. The journals of the day were read, Madame Roland being usually called upon as reader. When not thus reading, she usually sat at her work-table, employing her fingers with her needle, while she took a quiet and unobtrusive part in the conversation. "This kind of life," says Madame Roland, "would be very austere, were not my husband a man of great merit, whom I love with my whole heart. Tender friendship and unbounded confidence mark every moment of existence, and stamp a value upon all things, which nothing without them would have. It is the life most favorable to virtue and happiness. I appreciate its worth. I congratulate myself on enjoying it; and I exert my best endeavors to make it last." Again she draws the captivating picture of rural pleasures. "I am preserving pears, which will be delicious. We are drying raisins and prunes. We make our breakfast upon wine; overlook the servants busy in the vineyard; repose in the shady groves, and on the green meadows; gather walnuts from the trees; and, having collected our stock of fruit for the winter, spread it in the garret to dry. After breakfast this morning, we are all going in a body to gather almonds. Throw off, then, dear friend, your fetters for a while, and come and join us in our retreat. You will find here true friendship and real simplicity of heart." Madame Roland, among her other innumerable accomplishments, had acquired no little skill in the science of medicine. Situated in a region where the poor peasants had no access to physicians, she was not only liberal in distributing among them many little comforts, but, with the most self-denying assiduity, she visited them in sickness, and prescribed for their maladies. She was often sent for, to go a distance of ten or twelve miles to visit the sick. From such appeals she never turned away. On Sundays, her court-yard was filled with peasants, who had assembled from all the region round, some as invalids, to seek relief, and others who came with such little tokens of their gratitude as their poverty enabled them to bring. Here appears a little rosy-cheeked boy with a basket of chestnuts; or a care-worn mother, pale and thin, but with a grateful eye presenting to her benefactrice a few small, fragrant cheeses, made of goat's milk; and there is an old man, hobbling upon crutches, with a basket of apples from his orchard. She was delighted with these indications of gratitude and sensibility on the part of the unenlightened and lowly peasantry. Her republican notions, which she had cherished so fondly in her early years, but from which she had somewhat swerved when seeking a patent of nobility for her husband, began now to revive in her bosom with new ardor. She was regarded as peculiarly the friend of the poor and the humble; and at all the hearth-fires in the cottages of that retired valley, her name was pronounced in tones almost of adoration. More and more Madame Roland and her husband began to identify their interests with those of the poor around them, and to plead with tongue and pen for popular rights. Her intercourse with the poor led her to feel more deeply the oppression of laws, framed to indulge the few in luxury, while the many were consigned to penury and hopeless ignorance. She acquired boundless faith in the virtue of the people, and thought that their disenthralment would usher in a millennium of unalloyed happiness. She now saw the ocean of human passions reposing in its perfect calm. She afterward saw that same ocean when lashed by the tempest. CHAPTER V. THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY. 1791-1792 Portentous mutterings.--Welcomed as blessings.--Enthusiasm of Madame Roland.--Louis XVI.--Maria Antoinette.--Character of Maria Antoinette.--Character of Louis.--M. Roland elected to the Assembly.--Ardor of his wife.--Popularity of the Rolands.--They go to Paris.--Reception of the Rolands at Paris.--Sittings of the Assembly.--Tastes and principles.--Conflict for power.--The Girondists.--The Jacobins.--Meetings at Madame Roland's.--Appearance of Robespierre.--His character.--Remains of the court party.--Influence of Madame Roland.--Madame Roland's mode of action.--Her delicacy.--Robespierre at Madame Roland's.--Horrors of the Revolution.--Fears of the Girondists.--Violence of the Jacobins.--Resolution of the Girondists.--Warning of Madame Roland.--Danger of Robespierre.--He is concealed by Madame Roland.--Baseness of Robespierre.--The Assembly dissolved.--The Rolands again at La Platière.--They return to Paris.--Plots and counterplots.--Political maneuvering.--Massacres and conflagrations.--The king insulted and a prisoner.--The king surrenders.--M. Roland Minister of the Interior.--Madame Roland in a palace.--M. Roland's first appearance at court.--Horror of the courtiers.--M. Roland's opinion of the king.--Madame Roland's advice.--Her opinion of kings and courtiers. Madame Roland was thus living at La Platière, in the enjoyment of all that this world can give of peace and happiness, when the first portentous mutterings of that terrible moral tempest, the French Revolution, fell upon her ears. She eagerly caught the sounds, and, believing them the precursor of the most signal political and social blessings, rejoiced in the assurance that the hour was approaching when long-oppressed humanity would reassert its rights and achieve its triumph. Little did she dream of the woes which in surging billows were to roll over her country, and which were to ingulf her, and all whom she loved, in their resistless tide. She dreamed--a very pardonable dream for a philanthropic lady--that an ignorant and enslaved people could be led from Egyptian bondage to the promised land without the weary sufferings of the wilderness and the desert. Her faith in the regenerative capabilities of human nature was so strong, that she could foresee no obstacles and no dangers in the way of immediate and universal disfranchisement from every custom, and from all laws and usages which her judgment disapproved. Her whole soul was aroused, and she devoted all her affections and every energy of her mind to the welfare of the human race. It is hardly to be supposed, human nature being such as it is, but that the mortifications she met in early life from the arrogance of those above her, and the difficulties she encountered in obtaining letters-patent of nobility, exerted some influence in animating her zeal. Her enthusiastic devotion stimulated the ardor of her less excitable spouse; and all her friends, by her fascinating powers of eloquence both of voice and pen, were gradually inspired by the same intense emotions which had absorbed her whole being. Louis XVI. and Maria Antoinette had but recently inherited the throne of the Bourbons. Louis was benevolent, but destitute of the decision of character requisite to hold the reins of government in so stormy a period. Maria Antoinette had neither culture of mind nor knowledge of the world. She was an amiable but spoiled child, with great native nobleness of character, but with those defects which are the natural and inevitable consequence of the frivolous education she had received. She thought never of duty and responsibility; always and only of pleasure. It was her misfortune rather than her fault, that the idea never entered her mind that kings and queens had aught else to do than to indulge in luxury. It would be hardly possible to conceive of two characters less qualified to occupy the throne in stormy times than were Louis and Maria. The people were slowly, but with resistless power, rising against the abuses, enormous and hoary with age, of the aristocracy and the monarchy. Louis, a man of unblemished kindness, integrity, and purity, was made the scape-goat for the sins of haughty, oppressive, profligate princes, who for centuries had trodden, with iron hoofs, upon the necks of their subjects. The accumulated hate of ages was poured upon his devoted head. The irresolute monarch had no conception of his position. The king, in pursuance of his system of conciliation, as the clamors of discontent swelled louder and longer from all parts of France, convened the National Assembly. This body consisted of the nobility, the higher clergy, and representatives, chosen by the people from all parts of France. M. Roland, who was quite an idol with the populace of Lyons and its vicinity, and who now was beginning to lose caste with the aristocracy, was chosen, by a very strong vote, as the representative to the Assembly from the city of Lyons. In that busy city the revolutionary movement had commenced with great power, and the name of Roland was the rallying point of the people now struggling to escape from ages of oppression. M. Roland spent some time in his city residence, drawn thither by the intense interest of the times, and in the saloon of Madame Roland meetings were every evening held by the most influential gentlemen of the revolutionary party. Her ardor stimulated their zeal, and her well-stored mind and fascinating conversational eloquence guided their councils. The impetuous young men of the city gathered around this impassioned woman, from whose lips words of liberty fell so enchantingly upon their ears, and with chivalric devotion surrendered themselves to the guidance of her mind. In this rising conflict between plebeian and patrician, between democrat and aristocrat, the position in which M. Roland and wife were placed, as most conspicuous and influential members of the revolutionary party, arrayed against them, with daily increasing animosity, all the aristocratic community of Lyons. Each day their names were pronounced by the advocates of reform with more enthusiasm, and by their opponents with deepening hostility. The applause and the censure alike invigorated Madame Roland, and her whole soul became absorbed in the one idea of popular liberty. This object became her passion, and she devoted herself to it with the concentration of every energy of mind and heart. On the 20th of February, 1791, Madame Roland accompanied her husband to Paris, as he took his seat, with a name already prominent, in the National Assembly. Five years before, she had left the metropolis in obscurity and depression. She now returned with wealth, with elevated rank, with brilliant reputation, and exulting in conscious power. Her persuasive influence was dictating those measures which were driving the ancient nobility of France from their chateaux, and her vigorous mind was guiding those blows before which the throne of the Bourbons trembled. The unblemished and incorruptible integrity of M. Roland, his simplicity of manners and acknowledged ability, invested him immediately with much authority among his associates. The brilliance of his wife, and her most fascinating colloquial powers, also reflected much luster upon his name. Madame Roland, with her glowing zeal, had just written a pamphlet upon the new order of things, in language so powerful and impressive that more than sixty thousand copies had been sold--an enormous number, considering the comparative fewness of readers at that time. She, of course, was received with the most flattering attention, and great deference was paid to her opinions. She attended daily the sittings of the Assembly, and listened with the deepest interest to the debates. The king and queen had already been torn from their palaces at Versailles, and were virtually prisoners in the Tuileries. Many of the nobles had fled from the perils which seemed to be gathering around them, and had joined the army of emigrants at Coblentz. A few, however, of the nobility, and many of the higher clergy, remained heroically at their posts, and, as members of the Assembly, made valiant but unavailing efforts to defend the ancient prerogatives of the crown and of the Church. Madame Roland witnessed with mortification, which she could neither repress nor conceal, the decided superiority of the court party in dignity, and polish of manners, and in general intellectual culture, over those of plebeian origin, who were struggling, with the energy of an infant Hercules, for the overthrow of despotic power. All her _tastes_ were with the ancient nobility and their defenders. All her _principles_ were with the people. And as she contrasted the unrefined exterior and clumsy speech of the democratic leaders with the courtly bearing and elegant diction of those who rallied around the throne, she was aroused to a more vehement desire for the social and intellectual elevation of those with whom she had cast in her lot. The conflict with the nobles was of short continuance. The energy of rising democracy soon vanquished them. Violence took the place of law. And now the conflict for power arose between those of the Republicans who were _more_ and those who were _less_ radical in their plans of reform. The most moderate party, consisting of those who would sustain the throne, but limit its powers by a free constitution, retaining many of the institutions and customs which antiquity had rendered venerable, was called the _Girondist party_. It was so called because their most prominent leaders were from the department of the Gironde. They would deprive the king of many of his prerogatives, but not of his crown. They would take from him his despotic power, but not his life. They would raise the mass of the people to the enjoyment of liberty, but to liberty controlled by vigorous law. Opposed to them were the Jacobins--far more radical in their views of reform. They would overthrow both throne and altar, break down all privileged orders, confiscate the property of the nobles, and place prince and beggar on the footing of equality. These were the two great parties into which revolutionary France was divided and the conflict between them was the most fierce and implacable earth has ever witnessed. M. Roland and wife, occupying a residence in Paris, which was a convenient place of rendezvous, by their attractions gathered around them every evening many of the most influential members of the Assembly. They attached themselves, with all their zeal and energy, to the Girondists. Four evenings of every week, the leaders of this party met in the saloon of Madame Roland, to deliberate respecting their measures. Among them there was a young lawyer from the country, with a stupid expression of countenance, sallow complexion, and ungainly gestures, who had made himself excessively unpopular by the prosy speeches with which he was ever wearying the Assembly. He had often been floored by argument and coughed down by contempt, but he seemed alike insensible to sarcasm and to insult. Alone in the Assembly, without a friend, he attacked all parties alike, and was by all disregarded. But he possessed an indomitable energy, and unwavering fixedness of purpose, a profound contempt for luxury and wealth, and a stoical indifference to reputation and to personal indulgence, which secured to him more and more of an ascendency, until, at the name of Robespierre, all France trembled. This young man, silent and moody, appeared with others in the saloon of Madame Roland. She was struck with his singularity, and impressed with an instinctive consciousness of his peculiar genius. He was captivated by those charms of conversation in which Madame Roland was unrivaled. Silently--for he had no conversational powers--he lingered around her chair, treasured up her spontaneous tropes and metaphors, and absorbed her sentiments. He had a clear perception of the state of the times, was perhaps a sincere patriot, and had no ties of friendship, no scruples of conscience, no instincts of mercy, to turn him aside from any measures of blood or woe which might accomplish his plans. [Illustration: ROBESPIERRE.] Though the Girondists and the Jacobins were the two great parties now contending in the tumultuous arena of French revolution, there still remained the enfeebled and broken remains of the court party, with their insulted and humiliated king at their head, and also numerous cliques and minor divisions of those struggling for power. At the political evening reunions in the saloon of Madame Roland, she was invariably present, not as a prominent actor in the scenes, taking a conspicuous part in the social debates, but as a quiet and modest lady, of well-known intellectual supremacy, whose active mind took the liveliest interest in the agitations of the hour. The influence she exerted was the polished, refined, attractive influence of an accomplished woman, who moved in her own appropriate sphere. She made no Amazonian speeches. She mingled not with men in the clamor of debate. With an invisible hand she gently and winningly touched the springs of action in other hearts. With feminine conversational eloquence, she threw out sagacious suggestions, which others eagerly adopted, and advocated, and carried into vigorous execution. She did no violence to that delicacy of perception which is woman's tower and strength. She moved not from that sphere where woman reigns so resistlessly, and dreamed not of laying aside the graceful and polished weapons of her own sex, to grasp the heavier and coarser armor of man, which no woman can wield. By such an endeavor, one does but excite the repugnance of all except the unfortunate few, who can see no peculiar sacredness in woman's person, mind, or heart. As the gentlemen assembled in the retired parlor, or rather library and study, appropriated to these confidential interviews, Madame Roland took her seat at a little work-table, aside from the circle where her husband and his friends were discussing their political measures. Busy with her needle or with her pen, she listened to every word that was uttered, and often bit her lips to check the almost irrepressible desire to speak out in condemnation of some feeble proposal or to urge some bolder action. At the close of the evening, when frank and social converse ensued, her voice was heard in low, but sweet and winning tones, as one after another of the members were attracted to her side. Robespierre, at such times silent and thoughtful, was ever bending over her chair. He studied Madame Roland with even more of stoical apathy than another man would study a book which he admires. The next day his companions would smile at the effrontery with which Robespierre would give utterance, in the Assembly, not only to the sentiments, but even to the very words and phrases which he had so carefully garnered from the exuberant diction of his eloquent instructress. Occasionally, every eye would be riveted upon him, and every ear attentive, as he gave utterance to some lofty sentiment, in impassioned language, which had been heard before, in sweeter tones, from more persuasive lips. But the Revolution, like a spirit of destruction, was now careering onward with resistless power. Liberty was becoming lawlessness. Mobs rioted through the streets, burned chateaux, demolished convents, hunted, even to death, priests and nobles, sacked the palaces of the king, and defiled the altars of religion. The Girondists, illustrious, eloquent, patriotic men, sincerely desirous of breaking the arm of despotism and of introducing a well-regulated liberty, now began to tremble. They saw that a spirit was evoked which might trample every thing sacred in the dust. Their opponents, the Jacobins, rallying the populace around them with the cry, "Kill, burn, destroy," were for rushing onward in this career of demolition, till every vestige of gradations of rank and every restraint of religion should be swept from the land. The Girondists paused in deep embarrassment. They could not retrace their steps and try to re-establish the throne. The endeavor would not only be utterly unavailing, but would, with certainty, involve them in speedy and retrieveless ruin. They could not unite with the Jacobins in their reckless onset upon every thing which time had rendered venerable, and substitute for decency, and law, and order, the capricious volitions of an insolent, ignorant, and degraded mob. The only hope that remained for them was to struggle to continue firm in the position which they had already assumed. It was the only hope for France. The restoration of the monarchy was impossible. The triumph of the Jacobins was ruin. Which of these two parties in the Assembly shall array around its banners the millions of the populace of France, now aroused to the full consciousness of their power? Which can bid highest for the popular vote? Which can pander most successfully to the popular palate? The Girondists had talent, and integrity, and incorruptible patriotism. They foresaw their peril, but they resolved to meet it, and, if they must perish, to perish with their armor on. No one discerned this danger at an earlier period than Madame Roland. She warned her friends of its approach, even before they were conscious of the gulf to which they were tending. She urged the adoption of precautionary measures, by which a retreat might be effected when their post should be no longer tenable. "I once thought," said Madame Roland, "that there were no evils worse than regal despotism. I now see that there are other calamities vastly more to be dreaded." Robespierre, who had associated with the Girondists with rather a sullen and Ishmaelitish spirit, holding himself in readiness to go here or there, as events might indicate to be politic, began now to incline toward the more popular party, of which he subsequently became the inspiring demon. Though he was daily attracting more attention, he had not yet risen to popularity. On one occasion, being accused of advocating some unpopular measure, the clamors of the multitude were raised against him, and vows of vengeance were uttered, loud and deep, through the streets of Paris. His enemies in the Assembly took advantage of this to bring an act of accusation against him, which would relieve them of his presence by the decisive energy of the ax of the guillotine. Robespierre's danger was most imminent, and he was obliged to conceal himself. Madame Roland, inspired by those courageous impulses which ever ennobled her, went at midnight, accompanied by her husband, to his retreat, to invite him to a more secure asylum in their own house. Madame Roland then hastened to a very influential friend, M. Busot, allowing no weariness to interrupt her philanthropy, and entreated him to hasten immediately and endeavor to exculpate Robespierre, before an act of accusation should be issued against him. M. Busot hesitated, but, unable to resist the earnest appeal of Madame Roland, replied, "I will do all in my power to save this unfortunate young man, although I am far from partaking the opinion of many respecting him. He thinks too much of himself to love liberty; but he serves it, and that is enough for me. I will defend him." Thus was the life of Robespierre saved. He lived to reward his benefactors by consigning them all to prison and to death. Says Lamartine sublimely, "Beneath the dungeons of the Conciergerie, Madame Roland remembered that night with satisfaction. If Robespierre recalled it in his power, this memory must have fallen colder upon his heart than the ax of the headsman." The powerful influence which Madame Roland was thus exerting could not be concealed. Her husband became more illustrious through that brilliance she was ever anxious to reflect upon him. She appeared to have no ambition for personal renown. She sought only to elevate the position and expand the celebrity of her companion. It was whispered from ear to ear, and now and then openly asserted in the Assembly, that the bold and decisive measures of the Girondists received their impulse from the youthful and lovely wife of M. Roland. In September, 1791, the Assembly was dissolved, and M. and Madame Roland returned to the rural quiet of La Platière. But in pruning the vines, and feeding the poultry, and cultivating the flowers which so peacefully bloomed in their garden, they could not forget the exciting scenes through which they had passed, and the still more exciting scenes which they foresaw were to come. She kept up a constant correspondence with Robespierre and Busot, and furnished many very able articles for a widely-circulated journal, established by the Girondists for the advocacy of their political views. The question now arose between herself and her husband whether they should relinquish the agitations and the perils of a political life in these stormy times, and cloister themselves in rural seclusion, in the calm luxury of literary and scientific enterprise, or launch forth again upon the storm-swept ocean of revolution and anarchy. Few who understand the human heart will doubt of the decision to which they came. The chickens were left in the yard, the rabbits in the warren, and the flowers were abandoned to bloom in solitude; and before the snows of December had whitened the hills, they were again installed in tumultuous Paris. A new Assembly had just been convened, from which all the members of the one but recently dissolved were by law excluded. Their friends were rapidly assembling in Paris from their summer retreats, and influential men, from all parts of the empire, were gathering in the metropolis, to watch the progress of affairs. Clubs were formed to discuss the great questions of the day, to mold public opinion, and to overawe the Assembly. It was a period of darkness and of gloom; but there is something so intoxicating in the draughts of homage and power, that those who have once quaffed them find all milder stimulants stale and insipid. No sooner were M. and Madame Roland established in their city residence, than they were involved in all the plots and the counterplots of the Revolution. M. Roland was grave, taciturn, oracular. He had no brilliance of talent to excite envy. He displayed no ostentation in dress, or equipage, or manners, to provoke the desire in others to humble him. His reputation for stoical virtue gave a wide sweep to his influence. His very silence invested him with a mysterious wisdom. Consequently, no one feared him as a rival, and he was freely thrust forward as the unobjectionable head of a party by all who hoped through him to promote their own interests. He was what we call in America an _available_ candidate. Madame Roland, on the contrary, was animated and brilliant. Her genius was universally admired. Her bold suggestions, her shrewd counsel, her lively repartee, her capability of cutting sarcasm, rarely exercised, her deep and impassioned benevolence, her unvarying cheerfulness, the sincerity and enthusiasm of her philanthropy, and the unrivaled brilliance of her conversational powers, made her the center of a system around which the brightest intellects were revolving. Vergniaud, Pétion, Brissot, and others, whose names were then comparatively unknown, but whose fame has since resounded through the civilized world, loved to do her homage. The spirit of the Revolution was still advancing with gigantic strides, and the already shattered throne was reeling beneath the redoubled blows of the insurgent people. Massacres were rife all over the kingdom. The sky was nightly illumined by conflagrations. The nobles were abandoning their estates, and escaping from perils and death to take refuge in the bosom of the little army of emigrants at Coblentz. The king, insulted and a prisoner, reigned but in name. Under these circumstances, Louis was compelled to dismiss his ministry and to call in another more acceptable to the people. The king hoped, by the appointment of a Republican ministry, to pacify the democratic spirit. There was no other resource left him but abdication. It was a bitter cup for him to drink. His proud and spirited queen declared that she would rather die than throw herself into the arms of _Republicans_ for protection. He yielded to the pressure, dismissed his ministers, and surrendered himself to the Girondists for the appointment of a new ministry. The Girondists called upon M. Roland to take the important post of Minister of the Interior. It was a perilous position to fill, but what danger will not ambition face? In the present posture of affairs, the Minister of the Interior was the monarch of France. M. Roland, whose quiet and hidden ambition had been feeding upon its success, smiled nervously at the power which, thus unsolicited, was passing into his hands. Madame Roland, whose all-absorbing passion it now was to elevate her husband to the highest summits of greatness, was gratified in view of the honor and agitated in view of the peril; but, to her exalted spirit, the greater the danger, the more heroic the act. "The burden is heavy," she said; "but Roland has a great consciousness of his own powers, and would derive fresh strength from the feeling of being useful to liberty and his country." In March, 1792, he entered upon his arduous and exalted office. The palace formerly occupied by the Controller General of Finance, most gorgeously furnished by Madame Necker in the days of her glory, was appropriated to their use. Madame Roland entered this splendid establishment, and, elevated in social eminence above the most exalted nobles of France, fulfilled all the complicated duties of her station with a grace and dignity which have never been surpassed. Thus had Jane risen from that humble position in which the daughter of the engraver, in solitude, communed with her books, to be the mistress of a palace of aristocratic grandeur, and the associate of statesmen and princes. When M. Roland made his first appearance at court as the minister of his royal master, instead of arraying himself in the court-dress which the customs of the times required, he affected, in his costume, the simplicity of his principles. He wished to appear in his exalted station still the man of the people. He had not forgotten the impression produced in France by Franklin, as in the most republican simplicity of dress he moved among the glittering throng at Versailles. He accordingly presented himself at the Tuileries in a plain black coat, with a round hat, and dusty shoes fastened with ribbons instead of buckles. The courtiers were indignant. The king was highly displeased at what he considered an act of disrespect. The master of ceremonies was in consternation, and exclaimed with a look of horror to General Damuriez, "My dear sir, he has not even buckles in his shoes!" "Mercy upon us!" exclaimed the old general, with the most laughable expression of affected gravity, "we shall then all go to ruin together!" The king, however, soon forgot the neglect of etiquette in the momentous questions which were pressing upon his attention. He felt the importance of securing the confidence and good will of his ministers, and he approached them with the utmost affability and conciliation. M. Roland returned from his first interview with the monarch quite enchanted with his excellent disposition and his patriotic spirit. He assured his wife that the community had formed a totally erroneous estimate of the king; that he was sincerely a friend to the reforms which were taking place, and was a hearty supporter of the Constitution which had been apparently forced upon him. The prompt reply of Madame Roland displayed even more than her characteristic sagacity. "If Louis is sincerely a friend of the Constitution, he must be virtuous beyond the common race of mortals. Mistrust your own virtue, M. Roland. You are only an honest countryman wandering amid a crowd of courtiers--virtue in danger amid a myriad of vices. They speak our language; we do not know theirs. No! Louis _can not_ love the chains that fetter him. He may feign to caress them. He thinks only of how he can spurn them. Fallen greatness loves not its decadence. No man likes his humiliation. Trust in human nature; that never deceives. Distrust courts. Your virtue is too elevated to see the snares which courtiers spread beneath your feet." CHAPTER VI. THE MINISTRY OF M. ROLAND. 1792 Parlor of Madame Roland.--Vacillation of Louis.--Measures of the Girondists.--Their perilous position.--Rumors of invasion.--The rabble.--Danger of the Girondists.--Their demand of the king.--Letter to the king.--Its character.--Refusal of the king.--Dismissal of M. Roland.--The letter read to the Assembly.--Its celebrity.--Increasing influence of the Rolands.--Barbaroux.--Project of a republic.--Seconded by Madame Roland.--Barbaroux's opinion of the Rolands.--The Girondists desert the king.--Madame Roland's influence over the Girondists.--Buzot adores her.--Madame Roland's opinion of Buzot.--Effect of her death.--Danton at Madame Roland's.--New scenes of violence.--Outrages of the mob.--Recall of M. Roland.--Perilous situation of M. Roland.--His wife's mode of living.--Library of Madame Roland.--Meetings there.--Striking contrast.--Labors of Madame Roland.--French artists at Rome.--Letter to the pope.--Anecdote.--Reverses of fortune.--Increasing anarchy.--Baseness of the Jacobins.--The throne demolished.--Cry for a republic.--The Republic.--Waning of M. Roland's power.--Madame Roland's disgust at the horrors of the Revolution. From all the spacious apartments of the magnificent mansion allotted as the residence of the Minister of the Interior, Madame Roland selected a small and retired parlor, which she had furnished with every attraction as a library and a study. This was her much-loved retreat, and here M. Roland, in the presence of his wife, was accustomed to see his friends in all their confidential intercourse. Thus she was not only made acquainted with all the important occurrences of the times, but she formed an intimate personal acquaintance with the leading actors in these eventful movements. Louis, adopting a vacillating policy, in his endeavors to conciliate each party was losing the confidence and the support of all. The Girondists, foreseeing the danger which threatened the king and all the institutions of government, were anxious that he should be persuaded to abandon these mistaken measures, and firmly and openly advocate the reforms which had already taken place. They felt that if he would energetically take his stand in the position which the Girondists had assumed, there was still safety for himself and the nation. The Girondists, at this time, wished to sustain the throne, but they wished to limit its power and surround it by the institutions of republican liberty. The king, animated by his far more strong-minded, energetic, and ambitious queen, was slowly and reluctantly surrendering point by point as the pressure of the multitude compelled, while he was continually hoping that some change in affairs would enable him to regain his lost power. The position of the Girondists began to be more and more perilous. The army of emigrant nobles at Coblentz, within the dominions of the King of Prussia, was rapidly increasing in numbers. Frederic was threatening, in alliance with all the most powerful crowns of Europe, to march with a resistless army to Paris, reinstate the king in his lost authority, and take signal vengeance upon the leaders of the Revolution. There were hundreds of thousands in France, the most illustrious in rank and opulence, who would join such an army. The Roman Catholic priesthood, to a man, would lend to it the influence of all its spiritual authority. Paris was every hour agitated by rumors of the approach of the armies of invasion. The people all believed that Louis wished to escape from Paris and head that army. The king was spiritless, undecided, and ever vacillating in his plans. Maria Antoinette would have gone through fire and blood to have rallied those hosts around her banner. Such was the position of the Girondists in reference to the Royalists. They were ready to adopt the most energetic measures to repel the interference of this armed confederacy. On the other hand, they saw another party, noisy, turbulent, sanguinary, rising beneath them, and threatening with destruction all connected in any way with the execrated throne. This new party, now emerging from the lowest strata of society, upheaving all its superincumbent masses, consisted of the wan, the starving, the haggard, the reckless. All of the abandoned and the dissolute rallied beneath its banners. They called themselves the people. Amazonian fish-women; overgrown boys, with the faces and the hearts of demons; men and girls, who had no homes but the kennels of Paris, in countless thousands swelled its demonstrations of power, whenever it pleased its leaders to call them out. This was the Jacobin party. The Girondists trembled before this mysterious apparition now looming up before them, and clamoring for the overthrow of all human distinctions. The crown had been struck from the head of the king, and was snatched at by the most menial and degraded of his subjects. The Girondists, through Madame Roland, urged the Minister of the Interior that he should demand of the king an immediate proclamation of war against the emigrants and their supporters, and that he should also issue a decree against the Catholic clergy who would not support the measures of the Revolution. It was, indeed, a bitter draught for the king to drink. Louis declared that he would rather die than sign such a decree. The pressure of the populace was so tremendous, displayed in mobs, and conflagrations, and massacres, that these decisive measures seemed absolutely indispensable for the preservation of the Girondist party and the safety of the king. M. Roland was urged to present to the throne a most earnest letter of expostulation and advice. Madame Roland sat down at her desk and wrote the letter for her husband. It was expressed in that glowing and impassioned style so eminently at her command. Its fervid eloquence was inspired by the foresight she had of impending perils. M. Roland, impressed by its eloquence, yet almost trembling in view of its boldness and its truths, presented the letter to the king. Its last paragraphs will give one some idea of its character. "Love, serve the Revolution, and the people will love it and serve it in you. Deposed priests agitate the provinces. Ratify the measures to extirpate their fanaticism. Paris trembles in view of its danger. Surround its walls with an army of defense. Delay longer, and you will be deemed a conspirator and an accomplice. Just Heaven! hast thou stricken kings with blindness? I know that truth is rarely welcomed at the foot of thrones. I know, too, that the withholding of truth from kings renders revolutions so often necessary. As a citizen, a minister, I owe truth to the king, and nothing shall prevent me from making it reach his ear." The advice contained in this letter was most unpalatable to the enfeebled monarch. The adoption of the course it recommended was apparently his only chance of refuge from certain destruction. We must respect the magnanimity of the king in refusing to sign the decree against the firmest friends of his throne, and we must also respect those who were struggling against despotic power for the establishment of civil and religious freedom. When we think of the king and his suffering family, our sympathies are so enlisted in behalf of their woes that we condemn the letter as harsh and unfeeling. When we think for how many ages the people of France had been crushed into poverty and debasement, we rejoice to hear stern and uncompromising truth fall upon the ear of royalty. And yet Madame Roland's letter rather excites our admiration for her wonderful abilities than allures us to her by developments of female loveliness. This celebrated letter was presented to the king on the 11th of June, 1792. On the same day M. Roland received a letter from the king informing him that he was dismissed from office. It is impossible to refrain from applauding the king for this manifestation of spirit and self-respect. Had he exhibited more of this energy, he might at least have had the honor of dying more gloriously; but, as the intrepid wife of the minister dictated the letter to the king, we can not doubt that it was the imperious wife of the king who dictated the dismissal in reply. Maria Antoinette and Madame Roland met as Greek meets Greek. "Here am I, dismissed from office," was M. Roland's exclamation to his wife on his return home. "Present your letter to the Assembly, that the nation may see for what counsel you have been dismissed," replied the undaunted wife. M. Roland did so. He was received as a martyr to patriotism. The letter was read amid the loudest applauses. It was ordered to be printed, and circulated by tens of thousands through the eighty-three departments of the kingdom; and from all those departments there came rolling back upon the metropolis the echo of the most tumultuous indignation and applause. The famous letter was read by all France--nay, more, by all Europe. Roland was a hero. The plaudits of the million fell upon the ear of the defeated minister, while the execrations of the million rose more loudly and ominously around the tottering throne. This blow, struck by Madame Roland, was by far the heaviest the throne of France had yet received. She who so loved to play the part of a heroine was not at all dismayed by defeat, when it came with such an aggrandizement of power. Upon this wave of enthusiastic popularity Madame Roland and her husband retired from the magnificent palace where they had dwelt for so short a time, and, with a little pardonable ostentation, selected for their retreat very humble apartments in an apparently obscure street of the agitated metropolis. It was the retirement of a philosopher proud of the gloom of his garret. But M. Roland and wife were more powerful now than ever before. The famous letter had placed them in the front ranks of the friends of reform, and enshrined them in the hearts of the ever fickle populace. Even the Jacobins were compelled to swell the universal voice of commendation. M. Roland's apartments were ever thronged. All important plans were discussed and shaped by him and his wife before they were presented in the Assembly. There was a young statesman then in Paris named Barbaroux, of remarkable beauty of person, and of the richest mental endowments. The elegance of his stature and the pensive melancholy of his classic features invested him with a peculiar power of fascination. Between him and Madame Roland there existed the most pure, though the strongest friendship. One day he was sitting with M. Roland and wife, in social conference upon the desperate troubles of the times, when the dismissed minister said to him, "What is to be done to save France? There is no army upon which we can rely to resist invasion. Unless we can circumvent the plots of the court, all we have gained is lost. In six weeks the Austrians will be at Paris. Have we, then, labored at the most glorious of revolutions for so many years, to see it overthrown in a single day? If liberty dies in France, it is lost forever to mankind. All the hopes of philosophy are deceived. Prejudice and tyranny will again grasp the world. Let us prevent this misfortune. If the armies of despotism overrun the north of France, let us retire to the southern provinces, and there establish a _republic_ of freemen." The tears glistened in the eyes of his wife as she listened to this bold proposal, so heroic in its conception, so full of hazard, and demanding such miracles of self-sacrifice and devotion. Madame Roland, who perhaps originally suggested the idea to her husband, urged it with all her impassioned energy. Barbaroux was just the man to have his whole soul inflamed by an enterprise of such grandeur. He drew a rapid sketch of the resources and hopes of liberty in the south, and, taking a map, traced the limits of the republic, from the Doubs, the Aire, and the Rhone, to La Dordogne; and from the inaccessible mountains of Auvergne, to Durance and the sea. A serene joy passed over the features of the three, thus quietly originating a plan which was, with an earthquake's power, to make every throne in Europe totter, and to convulse Christendom to its very center. Barbaroux left them deeply impressed with a sense of the grandeur and the perils of the enterprise, and remarked to a friend, "Of all the men of modern times, Roland seems to me most to resemble Cato; but it must be owned that it is to his wife that his courage and talents are due." Previous to this hour the Girondists had wished to sustain the throne, and merely to surround it with free institutions. They had taken the government of England for their model. From this day the Girondists, freed from all obligations to the king, conspired secretly in Madame Roland's chamber, and publicly in the tribune, for the entire overthrow of the monarchy, and the establishment of a republic like that of the United States. They rivaled the Jacobins in the endeavor to see who could strike the heaviest blows against the throne. It was now a struggle between life and death. The triumph of the invading army would be the utter destruction of all connected with the revolutionary movement. And thus did Madame Roland exert an influence more powerful, perhaps, than that of any other one mind in the demolition of the Bourbon despotism. Her influence over the Girondist party was such as no _man_ ever can exert. Her conduct, frank and open-hearted, was irreproachable, ever above even the slightest suspicion of indiscretion. She could not be insensible to the homage, the admiration of those she gathered around her. Buzot adored Madame Roland as the inspiration of his mind, as the idol of his worship. She had involuntarily gained that entire ascendency over his whole being which made her the world to him. The secret of this resistless enchantment was concealed until her death; it was then disclosed, and revealed the mystery of a spiritual conflict such as few can comprehend. She writes of Buzot, "Sensible, ardent, melancholy, he seems born to give and share happiness. This man would forget the universe in the sweetness of private virtues. Capable of sublime impulses and unvarying affections, the vulgar, who like to depreciate what it can not equal, accuse him of being a dreamer. Of sweet countenance, elegant figure, there is always in his attire that care, neatness, and propriety which announce the respect of self as well as of others. While the dregs of the nation elevate the flatterers and corrupters of the people to station--while cut-throats swear, drink, and clothe themselves in rags, in order to fraternize with the populace, Buzot possesses the morality of Socrates, and maintains the decorum of Scipio. So they pull down his house, and banish him as they did Aristides. I am astonished that they have not issued a decree that his name should be forgotten." These words Madame Roland wrote in her dungeon the night before her execution. Buzot was then an exile, pursued by unrelenting fury, and concealed in the caves of St. Emilion. When the tidings reached him of the death of Madame Roland, he fell to the ground as if struck by lightning. For many days he was in a state of phrensy, and was never again restored to cheerfulness. Danton now appeared in the saloon of Madame Roland, with his gigantic stature, and shaggy hair, and voice of thunder, and crouched at the feet of this mistress of hearts, whom his sagacity perceived was soon again to be the dispenser of power. She comprehended at a glance his herculean abilities, and the important aid he could render the Republican cause. She wished to win his co-operation, and at first tried to conciliate him, "as a woman would pat a lion;" but soon, convinced of his heartlessness and utter want of principle, she spurned him with abhorrence. He subsequently endeavored, again and again, to reinstate himself in her favor, but in vain. Every hour scenes of new violence were being enacted in Paris and throughout all France. Roland was the idol of the nation. The famous letter was the subject of universal admiration. The outcry against his dismission was falling in thunder tones on the ear of the king. This act had fanned to increased intensity those flames of revolutionary phrensy which were now glaring with portentous flashes in every part of France. The people, intoxicated and maddened by the discovery of their power, were now arrayed, with irresistible thirstings for destruction and blood, against the king, the court, and the nobility. The royal family, imprisoned in the Tuileries, were each day drinking of the cup of humiliation to its lowest dregs. Austria and Prussia, united with the emigrants at Coblentz, prepared to march to Paris to reinstate the king upon his throne. Excitement, consternation, phrensy, pervaded all hearts. A vast assemblage of countless thousands of women, and boys, and wan and starving men, gathered in the streets of Paris. Harangues against the king and the aristocrats rendered them delirious with rage. They crowded all the avenues to the Tuileries, burst through the gates and over the walls, dashed down the doors and stove in the windows, and, with obscene ribaldry, rioted through all the apartments sacred to royalty. They thrust the dirty red cap of Jacobinism upon the head of the King. They poured into the ear of the humiliated queen the most revolting and loathsome execrations. There was no hope for Louis but in the recall of M. Roland. The court party could give him no protection. The Jacobins were upon him in locust legions. M. Roland alone could bring the Girondists, as a shield, between the throne and the mob. He was recalled, and again moved, in calm triumph, from his obscure chambers to the regal palace of the minister. If Madame Roland's letter dismissed him from office, her letter also restored him again with an enormous accumulation of power. [Illustration: THE LIBRARY.] His situation was not an enviable one. Elevated as it was in dignity and influence, it was full of perplexity, toil, and peril. The spirit of revolution was now rampant, and no earthly power could stay it. It was inevitable that those who would not recklessly ride upon its billows must be overwhelmed by its resistless surges. Madame Roland was far more conscious of the peril than her husband. With intense emotion, but calmly and firmly, she looked upon the gathering storm. The peculiarity of her character, and her great moral courage, was illustrated by the mode of life she vigorously adopted. Raised from obscurity to a position so commanding, with rank and wealth bowing obsequiously around her, she was entirely undazzled, and resolved that, consecrating all her energies to the demands of the tempestuous times, she would waste no time in fashionable parties and heartless visits. "My love of study," she said, "is as great as my detestation of cards, and the society of silly people affords me no amusement." Twice a week she gave a dinner to the members of the ministry, and other influential men in the political world, with whom her husband wished to converse. The palace was furnished to their hands by its former occupants with Oriental luxury. Selecting for her own use, as before, one of the smallest parlors, she furnished it as her library. Here she lived, engrossed in study, busy with her pen, and taking an unostentatious and unseen, but most active part, in all those measures which were literally agitating the whole civilized world. Her little library was the sanctuary for all confidential conversation upon matters of state. Here her husband met his political friends to mature their measures. The gentlemen gathered, evening after evening, around the table in the center of the room, M. Roland, with his serene, reflective brow, presiding at their head, while Madame Roland, at her work-table by the fireside, employed herself with her needle or her pen. Her mind, however, was absorbed by the conversation which was passing. M. Roland, in fact, in giving his own views, was but recapitulating those sentiments with which his mind was imbued from previous conference with his companion. It is not possible that one endowed with the ardent and glowing imagination of Madame Roland should not, at times, feel inwardly the spirit of exultation in the consciousness of this vast power. From the windows of her palace she looked down upon the shop of the mechanic where her infancy was cradled, and upon those dusty streets where she had walked an obscure child, while proud aristocracy swept by her in splendor--that very aristocracy looking now imploringly to her for a smile. She possessed that peculiar tact, which enabled her often to guide the course of political measures without appearing to do so. She was only anxious to promote the glory of her husband, and was never more happy than when he was receiving plaudits for works which she had performed. She wrote many of his proclamations, his letters, his state papers, and with all the glowing fervor of an enthusiastic woman. "Without me," she writes, "my husband would have been quite as good a minister, for his knowledge, his activity, his integrity were all his own; but with me he attracted more attention, because I infused into his writings that mixture of spirit and gentleness, of authoritative reason and seducing sentiment, which is, perhaps, only to be found in the language of a woman who has a clear head and a feeling heart." This frank avowal of just self-appreciation is not vanity. A _vain_ woman could not have won the love and homage of so many of the noblest men of France. A curious circumstance occurred at this time, which forcibly and even ludicrously struck Madame Roland's mind, as she reflected upon the wonderful changes of life, and the peculiar position which she now occupied. Some French artists had been imprisoned by the pope at Rome. The Executive Council of France wished to remonstrate and demand their release. Madame Roland sat down to write the letter, severe and authoritative, to his holiness, threatening him with the severest vengeance if he refused to comply with the request. As in her little library she prepared this communication to the head of the Papal States and of the Catholic Church, she paused, with her pen in her hand, and reflected upon her situation but a few years before as the humble daughter of an engraver. She recalled to mind the emotions of superstitious awe and adoration with which, in the nunnery, she had regarded his holiness as next to the Deity, and almost his equal. She read over some of the imperious passages which she had now addressed to the pope in the unaffected dignity of conscious power, and the contrast was so striking, and struck her as so ludicrous, that she burst into an uncontrollable paroxysm of laughter. When Jane was a diffident maiden of seventeen, she went once with her aunt to the residence of a nobleman of exalted rank and vast wealth, and had there been invited to dine _with the servants_. The proud spirit of Jane was touched to the quick. With a burning brow she sat down in the servants' hall, with stewards, and butlers, and cooks, and footmen, and _valet de chambres_, and ladies' maids of every degree, all dressed in tawdry finery, and assuming the most disgusting airs of self-importance. She went home despising in her heart both lords and menials, and dreaming, with new aspirations, of her Roman republic. One day, when Madame Roland was in power, she had just passed from her splendid dining-room, where she had been entertaining the most distinguished men of the empire, into her drawing-room, when a gray-headed gentleman entered, and bowing profoundly and most obsequiously before her, entreated the honor of an introduction to the Minister of the Interior. This gentleman was M. Haudry, with whose servants she had been invited to dine. This once proud aristocrat, who, in the wreck of the Revolution, had lost both wealth and rank, now saw Madame Roland elevated as far above him as he had formerly been exalted above her. She remembered the many scenes in which her spirit had been humiliated by haughty assumptions. She could not but feel the triumph to which circumstances had borne her, though magnanimity restrained its manifestation. Anarchy now reigned throughout France. The king and the royal family were imprisoned in the Temple. The Girondists in the Legislative Assembly, which had now assumed the name of the National Convention, and M. Roland at the head of the ministry, were struggling, with herculean exertions, to restore the dominion of law, and, if possible, to save the life of the king. The Jacobins, who, unable to resist the boundless popularity of M. Roland, had, for a time, co-operated with the Girondists, now began to separate themselves again more and more widely from them. They flattered the mob. They encouraged every possible demonstration of lawless violence. They pandered to the passions of the multitude by affecting grossness and vulgarity in person, and language, and manners; by clamoring for the division of property, and for the death of the king. In tones daily increasing in boldness and efficiency, they declared the Girondists to be the friends of the monarch, and the enemies of popular liberty. Upon this tumultuous wave of polluted democracy, now rising with resistless and crested billow, Danton and Robespierre were riding into their terrific power. Humanity shut its eyes in view of the hideous apparition of wan and haggard beggary and crime. The deep mutterings of this rising storm, which no earthly hand might stay, rolled heavily upon the ear of Europe. Christendom looked astounded upon the spectacle of a barbarian invasion bursting forth from the cellars and garrets of Paris. Oppressed and degraded humanity was about to take vengeance for its ages of accumulated wrongs. The throne was demolished. The insulted royal family, in rags and almost in starvation, were in a dungeon. The universal cry from the masses of the people was now for a republic. Jacobins and Girondists united in this cry; but the Jacobins accused the Girondists of being insincere, and of secretly plotting for the restoration of the king. Madame Roland, in the name of her husband, drew up for the Convention the plan of a republic as a substitute for the throne. From childhood she had yearned for a republic, with its liberty and purity, fascinated by the ideal of Roman virtue, from which her lively imagination had banished all human corruption. But now that the throne and hereditary rank were virtually abolished, and all France clamoring for a republic, and the pen in her hand to present to the National Assembly a Constitution of popular liberty, her heart misgave her. Her husband was nominally Minister of the Interior, but his power was gone. The mob of Paris had usurped the place of king, and Constitution, and law. The Jacobins were attaining the decided ascendency. The guillotine was daily crimsoned with the blood of the noblest citizens of France. The streets and the prisons were polluted with the massacre of the innocent. The soul of Madame Roland recoiled with horror at the scenes she daily witnessed. The Girondists struggled in vain to resist the torrent, but they were swept before it. The time had been when the proclamation of a republic would have filled her soul with inexpressible joy. Now she could see no gleam of hope for her country. The restoration of the monarchy was impossible. The substitution of a republic was inevitable. No earthly power could prevent it. In that republic she saw only the precursor of her own ruin, the ruin of all dear to her, and general anarchy. With a dejected spirit she wrote to a friend, "We are under the knife of Robespierre and Marat. You know my enthusiasm for the Revolution. I am ashamed of it now. It has been sullied by monsters. It is hideous." CHAPTER VII. MADAME ROLAND AND THE JACOBINS. 1792 Advance of the allies.--Hopes of the king's friends.--Consternation at Paris.--Speech of Danton.--Despotic measures.--Domiciliary visits.--Opening of the catacombs.--Terror of the people.--Scenes of terror.--Vain attempts at concealment.--Numbers arrested.--The priests.--A human fiend.--Butchery of the priests.--Arrival at the prison.--Prison tribunal.--Massacre in the prisons.--Fiendish orgies.--Female spectators.--Character of the victims.--The Bicetre.--Numbers massacred.--Girls sent to the guillotine.--Their heroism.--The assassins rewarded.--They threaten their instigators.--Ascendency of the mob.--Peril of the Girondists.--The Assembly surrounded.--Adroitness of the Jacobins.--Advance of the allies.--Robespierre and Danton.--Bold measures proposed by Madame Roland.--Decisive stand taken by MM. Roland and Vergniaud.--The Girondists defeated.--Resignation of M. Roland.--Attacks upon Madame Roland.--How received in the Assembly.--Letter from M. Roland.--Its lofty tone.--Danton seeks a reconciliation.--His failure.--Plans of the Jacobins.--Fearlessness of Madame Roland. The Prussians were now advancing on their march to Paris. One after another of the frontier cities of France were capitulating to the invaders as the storm of bomb-shells, from the batteries of the allied army, was rained down upon their roofs. The French were retreating before their triumphant adversaries. Sanguine hopes sprung up in the bosoms of the friends of the monarchy that the artillery of the Prussians would soon demolish the iron doors of the Temple, where the king and the royal family were imprisoned, and reinstate the captive monarch upon his throne. The Revolutionists were almost frantic in view of their peril. They knew that there were tens of thousands in Paris, of the most wealthy and the most influential, and hundreds of thousands in France, who would, at the slightest prospect of success, welcome the Prussians as their deliverers. Should the king thus prove victorious, the leaders in the revolutionary movement had sinned too deeply to hope for pardon. Death was their inevitable doom. Consternation pervaded the metropolis. The magnitude of this peril united all the revolutionary parties for their common defense. Even Vergniaud, the most eloquent leader of the Girondists, proposed a decree of death against every citizen of a besieged city who should speak of surrender. It was midnight in the Assembly. The most extraordinary and despotic measures were adopted by acclamation to meet the fearful emergency. "We must rouse the whole populace of France," exclaimed Danton, in those tones which now began to thrill so portentously upon the ear of Europe, "and hurl them, _en masse_, upon our invaders. There are traitors in Paris, ready to join our foes. We must arrest them all, however numerous they may be. The peril is imminent. The precautions adopted must be correspondingly prompt and decisive. With the morning sun we must visit every dwelling in Paris, and imprison those whom we have reason to fear will join the enemies of the nation, even though they be thirty thousand in number." The decree passed without hesitation. The gates of Paris were to be locked, that none might escape. Carriages were to be excluded from the streets. All citizens were ordered to be at home. The sections, the tribunals, the clubs were to suspend their sittings, that the public attention might not be distracted. All houses were to be brilliantly lighted in the evening, that the search might be more effectually conducted. Commissaries, accompanied by armed soldiers, were, in the name of the law, to enter every dwelling. Each citizen should show what arms he had. If any thing excited suspicion, the individual and his premises were to be searched with the utmost vigilance. If the slightest deception had been practiced, in denying or in not fully confessing any suspicious appearances, the person was to be arrested and imprisoned. If a person were found in any dwelling but his own, he was to be imprisoned as under suspicion. Guards were to be placed in all unoccupied houses. A double cordon of soldiers were stationed around the walls, to arrest all who should attempt to escape. Armed boats floated upon the Seine, at the two extremities of Paris, that every possible passage of escape might be closed. Gardens, groves, promenades, all were to be searched. With so much energy was this work conducted, that that very night a body of workmen were sent, with torches and suitable tools, to open an access to the subterranean burial-grounds extending under a portion of Paris, that a speedy disposal might be made of the anticipated multitude of dead bodies. The decree, conveying terror to ten thousand bosoms, spread with the rapidity of lightning through the streets and the dwellings of Paris. Every one who had expressed a sentiment of loyalty; every one who had a friend who was an emigrant or a loyalist; every one who had uttered a word of censure in reference to the sanguinary atrocities of the Revolution; every one who inherited an illustrious name, or who had an unfriendly neighbor or an inimical servant, trembled at the swift approach of the impending doom. Bands of men, armed with pikes, brought into power from the dregs of society, insolent, merciless, and resistless, accompanied by martial music, traversed the streets in all directions. As the commissaries knocked at a door, the family within were pale and paralyzed with terror. The brutal inquisitors appeared to delight in the anguish which their stern office extorted, and the more refined the family in culture or the more elevated in rank, the more severely did vulgarity in power trample them in the dust of humiliation. They took with them workmen acquainted with all possible modes of concealment. They broke locks, burst in panels, cut open beds and mattresses, tore up floors, sounded wells, explored garrets and cellars for secret doors and vaults, and could they find in any house an individual whom affection or hospitality had sheltered, a rusty gun, an old picture of any member of the royal family, a button with the royal arms, a letter from a suspected person, or containing a sentiment against the "Reign of Terror," the father was instantly and rudely torn from his home, his wife, his children, and hurried with ignominious violence, as a traitor unfit to live, through the streets, to the prison. It was a night of woe in Paris. The friends of the monarchy soon found all efforts at concealment unavailing. They had at first crept into chimneys, from which they were soon smoked out. They had concealed themselves behind tapestry. But pikes and bayonets were with derision thrust through their bodies. They had burrowed in holes in the cellars, and endeavored to blind the eye of pursuit by coverings of barrels, or lumber, or wood, or coal. But the stratagems of affection were equally matched by the sagacity of revolutionary phrensy, and the doomed were dragged to light. Many of the Royalists had fled to the hospitals, where, in the wards of infection, they shared the beds of the dead and the dying. But even there they were followed and arrested. The domiciliary visits were continued for three days. "The whole city was like a prisoner, whose limbs are held while he is searched and fettered." Ten thousand suspected persons were seized and committed to the prisons. Many were massacred in their dwellings or in the streets. Some were subsequently liberated, as having been unjustly arrested. Thirty priests were dragged into a room at the Hotel de Ville. Five coaches, each containing six of the obnoxious prisoners, started to convey them to the prison of the Abbayé. A countless mob gathered around them as an alarm-gun gave the signal for the coaches to proceed on their way. The windows were open that the populace might see those whom they deemed traitors to their country, and whom they believed to be ready to join the army of invasion, now so triumphantly approaching. Every moment the mob increased in density, and with difficulty the coaches wormed their way through the tumultuous gatherings. Oaths and execrations rose on every side. Gestures and threats of violence were fearfully increasing, when a vast multitude of men, and women, and boys came roaring down a cross-street, and so completely blocked up the way that a peaceful passage was impossible. The carriages stopped. A man with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and a glittering saber in his hand, forced his way through the escort, and, deliberately standing upon the steps of one of the coaches, clinging with one hand to the door, plunged again, and again, and again his saber into the bodies of the priests, wherever chance might direct it. He drew it out reeking with blood, and waved it before the people. A hideous yell of applause rose from the multitude, and again he plunged his saber into the carriage. The assassin then passed to the next coach, and again enacted the same act of horrid butchery upon the struggling priests crowded into the carriages, with no shield and with no escape. Thus he went, from one to the other, through the whole line of coaches, while the armed escort looked on with derisive laughter, and shouts of fiendish exultation rose from the phrensied multitude. The mounted troops slowly forced open a passage for the carriages, and they moved along, marking their passage by the streams of blood which dripped, from their dead and dying inmates, upon the pavements. When they arrived at the prison, eight dead bodies were dragged from the floor of the vehicles, and many of those not dead were horridly mutilated and clotted with gore. The wretched victims precipitated themselves with the utmost consternation into the prison, as a retreat from the billows of rage surging and roaring around them. But the scene within was still more terrible than that without. In the spacious hall opening into the court-yard of the prison there was a table, around which sat twelve men. Their brawny limbs, and coarse and brutal countenances, proclaimed them familiar with debauch and blood. Their attire was that of the lowest class in society, with woolen caps on their heads, shirt sleeves rolled up, unembarrassed by either vest or coat, and butchers' aprons bound around them. At the head of the table sat Maillard, at that time the idol of the blood-thirsty mob of Paris. These men composed a self-constituted tribunal to award life or instant death to those brought before them. First appeared one hundred and fifty Swiss officers and soldiers who had been in the employ of the king. They were brought _en masse_ before the tribunal. "You have assassinated the people," said Maillard, "and they demand vengeance." The door was open. The assassins in the court-yard, with weapons reeking with blood, were howling for their prey. The soldiers were driven into the yard, and they fell beneath the blows of bayonets, sabers, and clubs, and their gory bodies were piled up, a hideous mound, in the corners of the court. The priests, without delay, met with the same fate. A moment sufficed for trial, and verdict, and execution. Night came. Brandy and excitement had roused the demon in the human heart. Life was a plaything, murder a pastime. Torches were lighted, refreshments introduced, songs of mirth and joviality rose upon the night air, and still the horrid carnage continued unabated. Now and then, from caprice, one was liberated; but the innocent and the guilty fell alike. Suspicion was crime. An illustrious name was guilt. There was no time for defense. A frown from the judge was followed by a blow from the assassin. A similar scene was transpiring in all the prisons of Paris. Carts were continually arriving to remove the dead bodies, which accumulated much faster than they could be borne away. The court-yards became wet and slippery with blood. Straw was brought in and strewn thickly over the stones, and benches were placed against the walls to accommodate those women who wished to gaze upon the butchery. The benches were immediately filled with females, exulting in the death of all whom they deemed tainted with aristocracy, and rejoicing to see the exalted and the refined falling beneath the clubs of the ragged and the degraded. The murderers made use of the bodies of the dead for seats, upon which they drank their brandy mingled with gunpowder, and smoked their pipes. In the nine prisons of Paris these horrors continued unabated till they were emptied of their victims. Men most illustrious in philanthropy, rank, and virtue, were brained with clubs by overgrown boys, who accompanied their blows with fiendish laughter. Ladies of the highest accomplishments, of exalted beauty and of spotless purity, were hacked in pieces by the lowest wretches who had crawled from the dens of pollution, and their dismembered limbs were borne on the points of pikes in derision through the streets of the metropolis. Children, even, were involved in this blind slaughter. They were called the cubs of aristocracy. We can not enter more minutely into the details of these sickening scenes, for the soul turns from them weary of life; and yet thus far we must go, for it is important that all eyes should read this dreadful yet instructive lesson--that all may _know_ that there is no despotism so dreadful as the despotism of anarchy--that there are no laws more to be abhorred than the absence of all law. In the prison of the Bicetre there were three thousand five hundred captives. The ruffians forced the gates, drove in the dungeon doors with cannon, and for five days and five nights continued the slaughter. The phrensy of the intoxicated mob increased each day, and hordes came pouring out from all the foul dens of pollution greedy for carnage. The fevered thirst for blood was inextinguishable. No tongue can now tell the number of the victims. The mangled bodies were hurried to the catacombs, and thrown into an indiscriminate heap of corruption. By many it is estimated that more than ten thousand fell during these massacres. The tidings of these outrages spread through all the provinces of France, and stimulated to similar atrocities the mob in every city. At Orleans the houses of merchants were sacked, the merchants and others of wealth or high standing massacred, while some who had offered resistance were burned at slow fires. In one town, in the vicinity of the Prussian army, some Loyalist gentlemen, sanguine in view of the success of their friends, got up an entertainment in honor of their victories. At this entertainment their daughters danced. The young ladies were all arrested, fourteen in number, and taken in a cart to the guillotine. These young and beautiful girls, all between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, and from the most refined and opulent families, were beheaded. The group of youth and innocence stood clustered at the foot of the scaffold, while, one by one, their companions ascended, were bound to the plank, the ax fell, and their heads dropped into the basket. It seems that there must have been some supernatural power of support to have sustained children under so awful an ordeal. There were no faintings, no loud lamentations, no shrieks of despair. With the serenity of martyrs they met their fate, each one emulous of showing to her companions how much like a heroine she could die. These scenes were enacted at the instigation of the Jacobins. Danton and Marat urged on these merciless measures of lawless violence. "We must," said they, "strike _terror_ into the hearts of our foes. It is our only safety." They sent agents into the most degraded quarters of the city to rouse and direct the mob. They voted abundant supplies to the wretched assassins who had broken into the prisons, and involved youth and age, and innocence and guilt, in indiscriminate carnage. The murderers, reeking in intoxication and besmeared with blood, came in crowds to the door of the municipality to claim their reward. "Do you think," said a brawny, gigantic wretch, with tucked-up sleeves, in the garb of a butcher, and with his whole person bespattered with blood and brains, "do you think that I have earned but twenty-four francs to-day? I have killed forty aristocrats with my own hands!" The money was soon exhausted, and still the crowd of assassins thronged the committee. Indignant that their claims were not instantly discharged, they presented their bloody weapons at the throats of their instigators, and threatened them with immediate death if the money were not furnished. Thus urged, the committee succeeded in paying one half the sum, and gave bonds for the rest. M. Roland was almost frantic in view of these horrors, which he had no power to quell. The mob, headed by the Jacobins, had now the complete ascendency, and he was minister but in name. He urged upon the Assembly the adoption of immediate and energetic measures to arrest these execrable deeds of lawless violence. Many of the Girondists in the Assembly gave vehement but unavailing utterance to their execration of the massacres. Others were intimidated by the weapon which the Jacobins were now so effectually wielding; for they knew that it might not be very difficult so to direct the fury of the mob as to turn those sharp blades, now dripping with blood, from the prisons into the hall of Assembly, and upon the throats of all obnoxious to Jacobin power. The Girondists trembled in view of their danger. They had aided in opening the sluice-ways of a torrent which was now sweeping every thing before it. Madame Roland distinctly saw and deeply felt the peril to which she and her friends were exposed. She knew, and they all knew, that defeat was death. The great struggle now in the Assembly was for the popular voice. The Girondists hoped, though almost in despair, that it was not yet too late to show the people the horrors of anarchy, and to rally around themselves the multitude to sustain a well-established and law-revering republic. The Jacobins determined to send their opponents to the scaffold, and by the aid of the terrors of the mob, now enlisted on their side, resistlessly to carry all their measures. A hint from the Jacobin leaders surrounded the Assembly with the hideous howlings of a haggard concourse of beings just as merciless and demoniac as lost spirits. They exhibited these allies to the Girondists as a bull-dog shows his teeth. In speeches, and placards, and proclamations they declared the Girondists to be, in heart, the enemies of the Republic. They accused them of hating the Revolution in consequence of its necessary severity, and of plotting in secret for the restoration of the king. With great adroitness, they introduced measures which the Girondists must either support, and thus aid the Jacobins, or oppose, and increase the suspicion of the populace, and rouse their rage against them. The allied army, with seven thousand French emigrants and over a hundred thousand highly-disciplined troops, under the most able and experienced generals, was slowly but surely advancing toward Paris, to release the king, replace him on the throne, and avenge the insults to royalty. The booming of their artillery was heard reverberating among the hills of France, ever drawing nearer and nearer to the insurgent metropolis, and sending consternation into all hearts. Under these circumstances, the Jacobins, having massacred those deemed the friends of the aristocrats, now gathered their strength to sweep before them all their adversaries. They passed a decree ordering every man in Paris, capable of bearing arms, to shoulder his musket and march to the frontiers to meet the invaders. If money was wanted, it was only necessary to send to the guillotine the aristocrat who possessed it, and to confiscate his estate. Robespierre and Danton had now broken off all intimacy with Madame Roland and her friends. They no longer appeared in the little library where the Girondist leaders so often met, but, placing themselves at the head of the unorganized and tumultuous party now so rapidly gaining the ascendency, they were swept before it as the crest is borne by the billow. Madame Roland urged most strenuously upon her friends that those persons in the Assembly, the leaders of the Jacobin party, who had instigated the massacres in the prisons, should be accused, and brought to trial and punishment. It required peculiar boldness, at that hour, to accuse Robespierre and Danton of crime. Though thousands in France were horror-stricken at these outrages, the mob, who now ruled Paris, would rally instantaneously at the sound of the tocsin for the protection of their idols. Madame Roland was one evening urging Vergniaud to take that heroic and desperate stand. "The only hope for France," said she "is in the sacredness of law. This atrocious carnage causes thousands of bosoms to thrill with horror, and all the wise and the good in France and in the world will rise to sustain those who expose their own hearts as a barrier to arrest such enormities." "Of what avail," was the reply, in tones of sadness, "can such exertions be? The assassins are supported by all the power of the street. Such a conflict must necessarily terminate in a street fight. The cannon are with our foes. The most prominent of the friends of order are massacred. Terror will restrain the rest. We shall only provoke our own destruction." "Of what use is life," rejoins the intrepid woman, "if we must live in this base subjection to a degraded mob? Let us contend for the right, and if we must die, let us rejoice to die with dignity and with heroism." Though despairing of success, and apprehensive that their own doom was already sealed, M. Roland and Vergniaud, roused to action by this ruling spirit, the next day made their appearance in the Assembly with the heroic resolve to throw themselves before the torrent now rushing so wildly. They stood there, however, but the representatives of Madame Roland, inspired by her energies, and giving utterance to those eloquent sentiments which had burst from her lips. The Assembly listened in silence as M. Roland, in an energetic discourse, proclaimed the true principles of law and order, and called upon the Assembly to defend its own dignity against popular violence, and to raise an armed force consecrated to the security of liberty and justice. Encouraged by these appearances of returning moderation, others of the Girondists rose, and, with great boldness and vehemence, urged decisive action. "It requires some courage," said Kersaint, "to rise up here against assassins, but it is time to erect scaffolds for those who provoke assassination." The strife continued for two or three days, with that intense excitement which a conflict for life or death must necessarily engender. The question between the Girondist and the Jacobin was, "Who shall lie down on the guillotine?" For some time the issue of the struggle was uncertain. The Jacobins summoned their allies, the mob. They surrounded the doors and the windows of the Assembly, and with their howlings sustained their friends. "I have just passed through the crowd," said a member, "and have witnessed its excitement. If the act of accusation is carried, many a head will lie low before another morning dawns." The Girondists found themselves, at the close of the struggle, defeated, yet not so decidedly but that they still clung to hope. M. Roland, who had not yet entirely lost, with the people, that popularity which swept him, on so triumphant a billow, again into the office of Minister of the Interior, now, conscious of his utter impotency, presented to the Assembly his resignation of power which was merely nominal. Great efforts had for some time been made, by his adversaries, to turn the tide of popular hatred against him, and especially against his wife, whom Danton and Robespierre recognized and proclaimed as the animating and inspiring soul of the Girondist party. The friends of Roland urged, with high encomiums upon his character, that he should be invited to retain his post. The sentiment of the Assembly was wavering in his favor. Danton, excessively annoyed, arose and said, with a sneer, "I oppose the invitation. Nobody appreciates M. Roland more justly than myself. But if you give him this invitation, you must give his wife one also. Every one knows that M. Roland is not alone in his department. As for myself, in my department I am alone. I have no wife to help me." These indecorous and malicious allusions were received with shouts of derisive laughter from the Jacobin benches. The majority, however, frowned upon Danton with deep reproaches for such an attack upon a lady. One of the Girondists immediately ascended the tribune. "What signifies it to the country," said he, "whether Roland possesses an intelligent wife, who inspires him with her additional energy, or whether he acts from his own resolution alone?" The defense was received with much applause. The next day, Roland, as Minister of the Interior, presented a letter to the Convention, expressing his determination to continue in office. It was written by Madame Roland in strains of most glowing eloquence, and in the spirit of the loftiest heroism and the most dignified defiance. "The Convention is wise," said this letter, "in not giving a solemn invitation to a man to remain in the ministry. It would attach too great importance to a name. But the _deliberation_ honors me, and clearly pronounces the desire of the Convention. That wish satisfies me. It opens to me the career. I espouse it with courage. I remain in the ministry. I remain because there are perils to face. I am not blind to them, but I brave them fearlessly. The salvation of my country is the object in view. To that I devote myself, even to death. I am accused of wanting courage. Is no courage requisite in these times in denouncing the protectors of assassins?" Thus Madame Roland, sheltered in the seclusion of her library, met, in spirit, in the fierce struggle of the tribune, Robespierre, Danton, and Marat. They knew from whose shafts these keen arrows were shot. The Girondists knew to whom they were indebted for many of the most skillful parries and retaliatory blows. The one party looked to her almost with adoration; the other, with implacable hate. Never before, probably, in the history of the world, has a woman occupied such a position, and never by a woman will such a position be occupied again. Danton began to recoil from the gulf opening before him, and wished to return to alliance with the Girondists. He expressed the most profound admiration for the talents, energy, and sagacity of Madame Roland. "We must act together," said he, "or the wave of the Revolution will overwhelm us all. United, we can stem it. Disunited, it will overpower us." Again he appeared in the library of Madame Roland, in a last interview with the Girondists. He desired a coalition. They could not agree. Danton insisted that they must overlook the massacres, and give at least an implied assent to their necessity. "We will agree to all," said the Girondists, "except impunity to murderers and their accomplices." The conference was broken up. Danton, irritated, withdrew, and placed himself by the side of Robespierre. Again the Jacobins and the Girondists prepared for the renewal of their struggle. It was not a struggle for power merely, but for life. The Girondists, knowing that the fury of the Revolution would soon sweep over every thing, unless they could bring back the people to a sense of justice--would punish with the scaffold those who had incited the massacre of thousands of uncondemned citizens. The Jacobins would rid themselves of their adversaries by overwhelming them in the same carnage to which they had consigned the Loyalists. Madame Roland might have fled from these perils, and have retired with her husband to regions of tranquillity and of safety but she urged M. Roland to remain at his post and resolved to remain herself and meet her destiny, whatever it might be. Never did a mortal face danger, with a full appreciation of its magnitude, with more stoicism than was exhibited by this most ardent and enthusiastic of women. CHAPTER VIII. LAST STRUGGLES OF THE GIRONDISTS. 1792-1793 The Jacobins resolve to bring the king to trial.--Famine in Paris.--Suspicions against the Girondists.--Baseness of the Jacobins.--Peril of the Girondists.--Anxious deliberations.--Vile intrigue of the Jacobins.--Madame Roland accused.--Madame Roland before the Assembly.--Her dignified demeanor.--Madame Roland's defense of herself.--She is acquitted by acclamation.--Madame Roland's triumph.--Chagrin of her enemies.--Festival of the Girondists.--Toast of Vergniaud.--Classical allusion.--Clamors for the king's death.--The king brought before the Convention.--Dismal day.--Menaces of the mob.--Danton, Marat, and Robespierre.--Trial of the king.--Proposition of Robespierre.--Vote of Vergniaud.--Vote of the Girondists.--Indignation at the king's death.--The Revolutionary Tribunal.--Unlimited powers of the Revolutionary Tribunal.--Atrocious cruelties.--Embarrassments of M. Roland.--He sends in his resignation.--Attempts to assassinate the Rolands.--Entreaties of friends.--Firmness of Madame Roland.--Roland's influence in the departments.--Plots against the Girondists.--Meetings at Madame Roland's.--Insurrections in favor of the monarchy.--Jacobin insurrection.--Portentous mutterings.--Precautions of the Girondists.--Intrepidity of Vergniaud.--Power of prayer.--"Horrible hope."--The power of the Girondists gone. The Jacobins now resolved to bring the king to trial. By placards posted in the streets, by inflammatory speeches in the Convention, in public gatherings, and in the clubs, by false assertions and slanders of every conceivable nature, they had roused the ignorant populace to the full conviction that the king was the author of every calamity now impending. The storm of the Revolution had swept desolation through all the walks of peaceful industry. Starvation, gaunt and terrible, began to stare the population of Paris directly in the face. The infuriated mob hung the bakers upon the lamp-posts before their own doors for refusing to supply them with bread. The peasant dared not carry provisions into the city, for he was sure of being robbed by the sovereign people, who had attained the freedom of committing all crimes with impunity. The multitude fully believed that there was a conspiracy formed by the king in his prison, and by the friends of royalty, to starve the people into subjection. Portentous murmurs were now also borne on every breeze, uttered by a thousand unseen voices, that the Girondists were accomplices in this conspiracy; that they hated the Revolution; that they wished to save the life of the king; that they would welcome the army of invasion, as affording them an opportunity to reinstate Louis upon the throne. The Jacobins, it was declared, were the only true friends of the people. The Girondists were accused of being in league with the aristocrats. These suspicions rose and floated over Paris like the mist of the ocean. They were every where encountered, and yet presented no resistance to be assailed. They were intimated in the Jacobin journals; they were suggested, with daily increasing distinctness, at the _tribune_. And in those multitudinous gatherings, where Marat stood in filth and rags to harangue the miserable, and the vicious, and the starving, they were proclaimed loudly, and with execrations. The Jacobins rejoiced that they had now, by the force of circumstances, crowded their adversaries into a position from which they could not easily extricate themselves. Should the Girondists vote for the death of the king, they would thus support the Jacobins in those sanguinary measures, so popular with the mob, which had now become the right arm of Jacobin power. The glory would also all redound to the Jacobins, for it would not be difficult to convince the multitude that the Girondists merely submitted to a measure which they were unable to resist. Should the Girondists, on the other hand, true to their instinctive abhorrence of these deeds of blood, dare to vote against the death of the king, they would be ruined irretrievably. They would then stand unmasked before the people as traitors to the Republic and the friends of royalty. Like noxious beasts, they would be hunted through the streets and massacred at their own firesides. The Girondists perceived distinctly the vortex of destruction toward which they were so rapidly circling. Many and anxious were their deliberations, night after night, in the library of Madame Roland. In the midst of the fearful peril, it was not easy to decide what either duty or apparent policy required. The Jacobins now made a direct and infamous attempt to turn the rage of the populace against Madame Roland. Achille Viard, one of those unprincipled adventurers with which the stormy times had filled the metropolis, was employed, as a spy, to feign attachment to the Girondist party, and to seek the acquaintance, and insinuate himself into the confidence of Madame Roland. By perversions and exaggerations of her language, he was to fabricate an accusation against her which would bring her head to the scaffold. Madame Roland instantly penetrated his character, and he was repulsed from her presence by the most contemptuous neglect. He, however, appeared before the Assembly as her accuser, and charged her with carrying on a secret correspondence with persons of influence at home and abroad, to protect the king. She was summoned to present herself before the Convention, to confront her accuser, and defend herself from the scaffold. Her gentle yet imperial spirit was undaunted by the magnitude of the peril. Her name had often been mentioned in the Assembly as the inspiring genius of the most influential and eloquent party which had risen up amid the storms of the Revolution. Her talents, her accomplishments, her fascinating conversational eloquence, had spread her renown widely through Europe. A large number of the most illustrious men in that legislative hall, both ardent young men and those venerable with age, regarded her with the most profound admiration--almost with religious homage. Others, conscious of her power, and often foiled by her sagacity, hated her with implacable hatred, and determined, either by the ax of the guillotine or by the poniard of the assassin, to remove her from their way. The aspect of a young and beautiful woman, combining in her person and mind all the attractions of nature and genius, with her cheek glowing with heroic resolution, and her demeanor exhibiting the most perfect feminine loveliness and modesty, entering this vast assembly of irritated men to speak in defense of her life, at once hushed the clamor of hoarse voices, and subdued the rage of angry disputants. Silence the most respectful instantly filled the hall. Every eye was fixed upon her. The hearts of her friends throbbed with sympathy and with love. Her enemies were more than half disarmed, and wished that they, also, were honored as her friends. She stood before the bar. "What is your name?" inquired the president. She paused for a moment, and then, fixing her eye calmly upon her interrogator, in those clear and liquid tones which left their vibration upon the ear long after her voice was hushed in death, answered, "Roland! a name of which I am proud, for it is that of a good and an honorable man." "Do you know Achille Viard?" the president inquired. "I have once, and but once, seen him." "What has passed between you?" "Twice he has written to me, soliciting an interview. Once I saw him. After a short conversation, I perceived that he was a spy, and dismissed him with the contempt he deserved." The calm dignity of her replies, the ingenuous frankness of her manners, and the manifest malice and falsehood of Viard's accusation, made even her enemies ashamed of their unchivalrous prosecution. Briefly, in tremulous tones of voice, but with a spirit of firmness which no terrors could daunt, she entered upon her defense. It was the first time that a female voice had been heard in the midst of the clamor of these enraged combatants. The Assembly, unused to such a scene, were fascinated by her attractive eloquence. Viard, convicted of meanness, and treachery, and falsehood, dared not open his lips. Madame Roland was acquitted by acclamation. Upon the spot the president proposed that the marked respect of the Convention be conferred upon Madame Roland. With enthusiasm the resolution was carried. As she retired from the hall, her bosom glowing with the excitement of the perfect triumph she had won, her ear was greeted with the enthusiastic applause of the whole assembly. The eyes of all France had been attracted to her as she thus defended herself and her friends, and confounded her enemies. Marat gnashed his teeth with rage. Danton was gloomy and silent. Robespierre, vanquished by charms which had so often before enthralled him, expressed his contempt for the conspiracy, and, for the last time, smiled upon his early friend, whom he soon, with the most stoical indifference, dragged to the scaffold. The evening after the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the Republic, when there was still some faint hope that there might yet be found intelligence and virtue in the people to sustain the Constitution, the Girondists met at Madame Roland's, and celebrated, with trembling exultation, the birth of popular liberty. The Constitution of the United States was the _beau ideal_ of the Girondists, and, vainly dreaming that the institutions which Washington and his compatriots had established in Christian America were now firmly planted in infidel France, they endeavored to cast the veil of oblivion over the past, and to spread over the future the illusions of hope. The men here assembled were the most illustrious of the nation. Noble sentiments passed from mind to mind. Madame Roland, pale with emotion, conscious of the perils which were so portentously rising around them, shone with a preternatural brilliance in the solemn rejoicing of that evening. The aged Roland gazed with tears of fond affection and of gratified pride upon his lovely wife, as if in spirit asking her if all the loftiest aspirations of their souls were not now answered. The victorious Republicans hardly knew whether to sing triumphant songs or funeral dirges. Vergniaud, the renowned orator of the party, was prominent above them all. With a pale cheek, and a serene and pensive smile, he sat in silence, his mind evidently wandering among the rising apparitions of the future. At the close of the supper he filled his glass, and rising, proposed to drink to the eternity of the Republic. Madame Roland, whose mind was ever filled with classic recollections, scattered from a bouquet which she held in her hand, some rose leaves on the wine in his glass. Vergniaud drank the wine, and then said, in a low voice, "We should quaff cypress leaves, not rose leaves, in our wine to-night. In drinking to a republic, stained, at its birth, with the blood of massacre, who knows but that we drink to our own death. But no matter. Were this wine my own blood, I would drain it to liberty and equality." All the guests, with enthusiasm, responded, "_Vive la Republique!_" After dinner, Roland read to the company a paper drawn up by himself and wife in reference to the state of the Republic, which views were to be presented the next day to the Convention. The royal family were still in the dungeons of the Temple, lingering through the dreary hours of the most desolate imprisonment. Phrensied mobs, rioting through the streets of Paris, and overawing all law, demanded, with loudest execrations, the death of the king. A man having ventured to say that he thought that the Republic might be established without shedding the blood of Louis, was immediately stabbed to the heart, and his mutilated remains were dragged through the streets of Paris in fiendish revelry. A poor vendor of pamphlets and newspapers, coming out of a reading-room, was accused of selling books favorable to royalty. The suspicion was crime, and he fell, pierced by thirty daggers. Such warnings as these were significant and impressive, and few dared utter a word in favor of the king. It was the month of January, 1793, when the imprisoned monarch was brought into the hall of the Convention for his trial. It was a gloomy day for France, and all external nature seemed shrouded in darkness and sorrow. Clouds of mist were sweeping through the chill air, and a few feeble lamps glimmered along the narrow avenues and gloomy passages, which were darkened by the approach of a winter's night. Armed soldiers surrounded the building. Heavy pieces of artillery faced every approach. Cannoneers, with lighted matches, stood at their side, ready to scatter a storm of grape-shot upon every foe. A mob of countless thousands were surging to and fro through all the neighboring streets. The deep, dull murmurings of the multitude swelled in unison with the sighings of the storm rising upon the somber night. It was with no little difficulty that the deputies could force their way through the ocean of human beings surrounding the Assembly. The coarse garb, the angry features, the harsh voices, the fierce and significant gestures, proclaimed too clearly that the mob had determined to have the life of the king, and that, unless the deputies should vote his death, both king and deputies should perish together. As each deputy threaded his way through the thronging masses, he heard, in threatening tones, muttered into his ear deep and emphatic, "_His death or thine!_" Persons who were familiar with the faces of all the members were stationed at particular points, and called out aloud to the multitude the names of the deputies as they elbowed their way through the surging multitudes. At the names of Danton, Marat, Robespierre, the ranks opened to make way for these idols of the populace, and shouts of the most enthusiastic greeting fell upon their ears. When the names of Vergniaud, Brissot, and others of the leading Girondists were mentioned, clinched fists, brandished daggers, and angry menaces declared that those who refused to obey the wishes of the people should encounter dire revenge. The very sentinels placed to guard the deputies encouraged the mob to insult and violence. The lobbies were filled with the most sanguinary ruffians of Paris. The interior of the hall was dimly lighted. A chandelier, suspended from the center of the ceiling, illuminated certain portions of the room, while the more distant parts remained in deep obscurity. That all might act under the full sense of their responsibility to the mob, Robespierre had proposed and carried the vote that the silent form of ballot should be rejected, and that each deputy, in his turn, should ascend the tribune, and, with a distinct voice, announce his sentence. For some time after the voting commenced it was quite uncertain how the decision would turn. In the alternate record of the vote, _death_ and _exile_ appeared to be equally balanced. All now depended upon the course which the Girondists should pursue. If they should vote for death, the doom of the king was sealed. Vergniaud was the first of that party to be called to record his sentence. It was well known that he looked with repugnance and horror upon the sanguinary scenes with which the Revolution had been deformed, and that he had often avowed his sympathy for the hard fate of a prince whose greatest crime was weakness. His vote would unquestionably be the index of that of the whole party, and thus the life or death of the king appeared to be suspended from his lips. It was known that the very evening before, while supping with a lady who expressed much commiseration for the captives in the Temple, he had declared that he would save the life of the king. The courage of Vergniaud was above suspicion, and his integrity above reproach. Difficult as it was to judge impartially, with the cannon and the pikes of the mob leveled at his breast, it was not doubted that he would vote conscientiously. As the name of Vergniaud was called, all conversation instantly ceased. Perfect silence pervaded the hall, and every eye was riveted upon him. Slowly he ascended the steps of the tribune. His brow was calm, but his mouth closely compressed, as if to sustain some firm resolve. He paused for a moment, and the Assembly was breathless with suspense. He contracted his eyebrows, as if again reflecting upon his decision, and then, in a low, solemn, firm voice, uttered the word "_Death_." The most profound silence reigned for a moment, and then again the low murmur of suppressed conversation filled the hall. Vergniaud descended from the tribune and disappeared in the crowd. All hope for the king was now gone. The rest of the Girondists also voted for death, and Louis was condemned to the scaffold. This united vote upon the death of the king for a short time mingled together again the Girondists and the Jacobins. But the dominant party, elated by the victory which they had gained over their adversaries, were encouraged to fresh extortions. Perils increased. Europe was rising in arms against the blood-stained Republic. The execution of the king aroused emotions of unconquerable detestation in the bosoms of thousands who had previously looked upon the Revolution with favor. Those who had any opulence to forfeit, or any position in society to maintain, were ready to welcome as deliverers the allied army of invasion. It was then, to meet this emergency, that that terrible Revolutionary Tribunal was organized, which raised the ax of the guillotine as the one all-potent instrument of government, and which shed such oceans of innocent blood. "Two hundred and sixty thousand heads," said Marat, "must fall before France will be safe from internal foes." Danton, Marat, and Robespierre were now in the ascendency, riding with resistless power upon the billows of mob violence. Whenever they wished to carry any measure, they sent forth their agents to the dens and lurking-places of degradation and crime, and surrounded and filled the hall of the Assembly with blood-thirsty assassins. "Those who call themselves _respectable_," said Marat, "wish to give laws to those whom they call the _rabble_. We will teach them that the time is come in which the _rabble_ is to reign." This Revolutionary Tribunal, consisting of five judges, a jury, and a public accuser, all appointed by the Convention, was proposed and decreed on the same evening. It possessed unlimited powers to confiscate property and take life. The Girondists dared not vote against this tribunal. The public voice would pronounce them the worst of traitors. France was now a charnel-house. Blood flowed in streams which were never dry. Innocence had no protection. Virtue was suspicion, suspicion a crime, the guillotine the penalty, and the confiscated estate the bribe to accusation. Thus there was erected, in the name of liberty and popular rights, over the ruins of the French monarchy, a system of despotism the most atrocious and merciless under which humanity has ever groaned. Again and again had the Jacobins called the mob into the Assembly, and compelled the members to vote with the poniards of assassins at their breasts. Madame Roland now despaired of liberty. Calumny, instead of gratitude, was unsparingly heaped upon herself and her husband. This requital, so unexpected, was more dreadful to her than the scaffold. All the promised fruits of the Revolution had disappeared, and desolation and crime alone were realized. The Girondists still met in Madame Roland's library to deliberate concerning measures for averting the impending ruin. All was unavailing. The most distressing embarrassments now surrounded M. Roland. He could not abandon power without abandoning himself and his supporters in the Assembly to the guillotine; and while continuing in power, he was compelled to witness deeds of atrocity from which not only his soul revolted, but to which it was necessary for him apparently to give his sanction. His cheek grew pale and wan with care. He could neither eat nor sleep. The Republic had proved an utter failure, and France was but a tempest-tossed ocean of anarchy. Thus situated, M. Roland, with the most melancholy forebodings, sent in his final resignation. He retired to humble lodgings in one of the obscure streets of Paris. Here, anxiously watching the progress of events, he began to make preparations to leave the mob-enthralled metropolis, and seek a retreat, in the calm seclusion of La Platière, from these storms which no human power could allay. Still, the influence of Roland and his wife was feared by those who were directing the terrible enginery of lawless violence. It was well known by them both that assassins had been employed to silence them with the poniard. Madame Roland seemed, however, perfectly insensible to personal fear. She thought only of her husband and her child. Desperate men were seen lurking about the house, and their friends urged them to remove as speedily as possible from the perils by which they were surrounded. Neither the sacredness of law nor the weapons of their friends could longer afford them any protection. The danger became so imminent that the friends of Madame Roland brought her the dress of a peasant girl, and entreated her to put it on, as a disguise, and escape by night, that her husband might follow after her, unencumbered by his family; but she proudly repelled that which she deemed a cowardly artifice. She threw the dress aside, exclaiming, "I am ashamed to resort to any such expedient. I will neither disguise myself, nor make any attempt at secret escape. My enemies may find me always in my place. If I am assassinated, it shall be in my own home. I owe my country an example of firmness, and I will give it." She, however, was so fully aware of her peril, and each night was burdened with such atrocities, that she placed loaded pistols under her pillow, to defend herself from those outrages, worse than death, of which the Revolution afforded so many examples. While the influence of the Girondists was entirely overborne by the clamors of the mob in Paris, in the more virtuous rural districts, far removed from the corruption of the capital, their influence was on the increase. The name of M. Roland, uttered with execrations in the metropolis by the vagabonds swarming from all parts of Europe, was spoken in tones of veneration in the departments, where husbandmen tilled the soil, and loved the reign of law and peace. Hence the Jacobins had serious cause to fear a reaction, and determined to silence their voices by the slide of the guillotine. The most desperate measures were now adopted for the destruction of the Girondists. One conspiracy was formed to collect the mob, ever ready to obey a signal from Marat, around the Assembly, to incite them to burst in at the doors and the windows, and fill the hall with confusion, while picked men were to poniard the Girondists in their seats. The conspiracy was detected and exposed but a few hours before its appointed execution. The Jacobin leaders, protected by their savage allies, were raised above the power of law, and set all punishment at defiance. A night was again designated, in which bands of armed men were to surround the dwelling of each Girondist, and assassinate these foes of Jacobin domination in their beds. This plot also was revealed to the Girondists but a few hours before its destined catastrophe, and it was with the utmost difficulty that the doomed victims obtained extrication from the toils which had been wound around them. Disastrous news was now daily arriving from the frontiers. The most alarming tidings came of insurrections in La Vendee, and other important portions of France, in favor of the restoration of the monarchy. These gathering perils threw terror into the hearts of the Jacobins, and roused them to deeds of desperation. Though Madame Roland was now in comparative obscurity, night after night the most illustrious men of France, battling for liberty and for life in the Convention, ascended the dark staircase to her secluded room, hidden in the depth of a court of the Rue de la Harpe, and there talked over the scenes of the day, and deliberated respecting the morrow. The Jacobins now planned one of those horrible insurrections which sent a thrill of terror into every bosom in Paris. Assembling the multitudinous throng of demoniac men and women which the troubled times had collected from every portion of Christendom, they gathered them around the hall of the Assembly to enforce their demands. It was three o'clock in the morning of the 31st of May, 1793, when the dismal sounds of the alarm bells, spreading from belfry to belfry, and the deep booming of the insurrection gun, reverberating through the streets, aroused the citizens from their slumbers, producing universal excitement and consternation. A cold and freezing wind swept clouds of mist through the gloomy air, and the moaning storm seemed the appropriate requiem of a sorrow-stricken world. The Hotel de Ville was the appointed place of rendezvous for the swarming multitudes. The affrighted citizens, knowing but too well to what scenes of violence and blood these demonstrations were the precursors, threw up their windows, and looked out with fainting hearts upon the dusky forms crowding by like apparitions of darkness. The rumbling of the wheels of heavy artillery, the flash of powder, with the frequent report of firearms, and the uproar and the clamor of countless voices, were fearful omens of a day to dawn in blacker darkness than the night. The Girondists had recently been called in the journals and inflammatory speeches of their adversaries the Rolandists. The name was given them in recognition of the prominent position of Madame Roland in the party, and with the endeavor to cast reproach upon her and her husband. Through all the portentous mutterings of this rising storm could be heard deep and significant execrations and menaces, coupled with the names of leading members of the Girondist party. "Down with the aristocrats, the traitors, the Rolandists!" shouted incessantly hoarse voices and shrill voices, of drunken men, of reckless boys, of fiendish women. The Girondists, apprehensive of some movement of this kind, had generally taken the precaution not to sleep that night in their own dwellings. The intrepid Vergniaud alone refused to adopt any measure of safety. "What signifies life to me now?" said he; "my blood may be more eloquent than my words in awakening and saving my country. I am ready for the sacrifice." One of the Girondists, M. Rabout, a man of deep, reflective piety, hearing these noises, rose from his bed, listened a moment at his window to the tumult swelling up from every street of the vast metropolis, and calmly exclaiming, "Illa suprema dies," _it is our last day_, prostrated himself at the foot of his bed, and invoked aloud the Divine protection upon his companions, his country, and himself. Many of his friends were with him, friends who knew not the power of prayer. But there are hours in which every soul instinctively craves the mercy of its Creator. They all bowed reverently, and were profoundly affected by the supplications of their Christian friend. Fortified and tranquilized by the potency of prayer, and determining to die, if die they must, at the post of duty, at six o'clock they descended into the street, with pistols and daggers concealed beneath their clothes. They succeeded, unrecognized, in reaching the Convention in safety. One or two of the Jacobin party were assembled there at that early hour, and Danton, pale with the excitement of a sleepless night, walking to and fro in nervous agitation, greeted his old friends with a wan and melancholy smile. "Do you see," said Louvet to Gaudet, "what horrible hope shines upon that hideous face?" The members rapidly collected. The hall was soon filled. The Girondists were now helpless, their sinews of power were cut, and the struggle was virtually over. All that remained for them was to meet their fate heroically and with an unvanquished spirit. CHAPTER IX. ARREST OF MADAME ROLAND. 1793 The Convention, the mob, the Jacobins.--Robespierre, Danton, Marat.--Aspect of the mob.--The Jacobins' sword of justice.--The Convention invaded.--Triumph of the mob.--Fraternizing with the mob.--Paris illuminated.--Arrest of the Girondists.--Suspense of the Rolands.--Arrest of M. Roland.--Prompt action of Madame Roland.--Madame Roland in the petitioners' hall.--Uproar in the Assembly.--Madame Roland's letter.--The messenger--Interview with Vergniaud.--Hope vanishes.--Escape of M. Roland.--Scene at the Tuileries.--The deputies embraced by the mob.--Anecdote.--Madame Roland returns home.--A mother's tears.--Arrest of Madame Roland.--Her composure.--Insults of the mob.--Conversation with officers.--The Abbayé.--Kindness of the jailer's wife.--Madame Roland enters her cell.--Her first night there.--Embarrassment of M. Roland.--His escape from Paris.--The re-arrest and escape.--Cheerful philosophy of Madame Roland.--The cell made a study.--Delight of the jailer and his wife.--Prison regulations.--Coarse fare.--Prison employment.--Madame Roland's serenity of spirit.--Intellectual pastime.--Visit from commissioners.--Madame Roland's heroism accounted a crime. France was now governed by the Convention. The Convention was governed by the mob of Paris. The Jacobins were the head of this mob. They roused its rage, and guided its fury, when and where they listed. The friendship of the mob was secured and retained by ever pandering to their passions. The Jacobins claimed to be exclusively the friends of the people, and advocated all those measures which tended to crush the elevated and flatter the degraded. Robespierre, Danton, Marat, were now the idols of the populace. On the morning of the 30th of May, 1793, the streets of Paris were darkened with a dismal storm of low, scudding clouds, and chilling winds, and sleet and rain. Pools of water stood in the miry streets, and every aspect of nature was cheerless and desolate. But there was another storm raging in those streets, more terrible than any elemental warfare. In locust legions, the deformed, the haggard, the brutalized in form, in features, in mind, in heart--demoniac men, satanic women, boys burly, sensual, blood-thirsty, like imps of darkness rioted along toward the Convention, an interminable multitude whom no one could count. Their hideous howlings thrilled upon the ear, and sent panic to the heart. There was no power to resist them. There was no protection from their violence. And thousands wished that they might call up even the most despotic king who ever sat upon the throne of France, from his grave, to drive back that most terrible of all earthly despotisms, the despotism of a mob. This was the power with which the Jacobins backed their arguments. This was the gory blade which they waved before their adversaries, and called the sword of justice. The Assembly consisted of about eight hundred members. There were twenty-two illustrious men who were considered the leaders of the Girondist party. The Jacobins had resolved that they should be accused of treason, arrested, and condemned. The Convention had refused to submit to the arbitrary and bloody demand. The mob were now assembled to coerce submission. The melancholy tocsin, and the thunders of the alarm gun, resounded through the air, as the countless throng came pouring along like ocean billows, with a resistlessness which no power could stay. They surrounded the Assembly on every side, forced their way into the hall, filled every vacant space, clambered upon the benches, crowded the speaker in his chair, brandished their daggers, and mingled their oaths and imprecations with the fierce debate. Even the Jacobins were terrified by the frightful spirits whom they had evoked. "Down with the Girondists!" "Death to the traitors!" the assassins shouted. The clamor of the mob silenced the Girondists, and they hardly made an attempt to speak in their defense. They sat upon their benches, pale with the emotions which the fearful scenes excited, yet firm and unwavering. As Couthon, a Jacobin orator, was uttering deep denunciations, he became breathless with the vehemence of his passionate speech. He turned to a waiter for a glass of water. "Take to Couthon a glass of blood," said Vergniaud; "he is thirsting for it." The decree of accusation was proposed, and carried, without debate, beneath the poniards of uncounted thousands of assassins. The mob was triumphant. By acclamation it was then voted that all Paris should be joyfully illuminated, in celebration of the triumph of the people over those who would arrest the onward career of the Revolution; and every citizen of Paris well knew the doom which awaited him if brilliant lights were not burning at his windows. It was then voted, and with enthusiasm, that the Convention should go out and fraternize with the multitude. Who would have the temerity, in such an hour, to oppose the affectionate demonstration? The degraded Assembly obeyed the mandate of the mob, and marched into the streets, where they were hugged in the unclean arms and pressed to the foul bosoms of beggary, and infamy, and pollution. Louis was avenged. The hours of the day had now passed; night had come; but it was noonday light in the brilliantly-illuminated streets of the metropolis. The Convention, surrounded by torch-bearers, and an innumerable concourse of drunken men and women, rioting in hideous orgies, traversed, in compulsory procession, the principal streets of the city. The Girondists were led as captives to grace the triumph. "Which do you prefer," said a Jacobin to Vergniaud, "this ovation or the scaffold?" "It is all the same to me," replied Vergniaud, with stoical indifference. "There is no choice between this walk and the guillotine. It conducts us to it." The twenty-two Girondists were arrested and committed to prison. During this dreadful day, while these scenes were passing in the Assembly, Madame Roland and her husband were in their solitary room, oppressed with the most painful suspense. The cry and the uproar of the insurgent city, the tolling of bells and thundering of cannon, were borne upon the wailings of the gloomy storm, and sent consternation even to the stoutest hearts. There was now no room for escape, for the barriers were closed and carefully watched. Madame Roland knew perfectly well that if her friends fell she must fall with them. She had shared their principles; she had guided their measures, and she wished to participate in their doom. It was this honorable feeling which led her to refuse to provide for her own safety, and which induced her to abide, in the midst of ever increasing danger, with her associates. No person obnoxious to suspicion could enter the street without fearful peril, though, through the lingering hours of the day, friends brought them tidings of the current of events. Nothing remained to be done but to await, as patiently as possible, the blow that was inevitably to fall. The twilight was darkening into night, when six armed men ascended the stairs and burst into Roland's apartment. The philosopher looked calmly upon them as, in the name of the Convention, they informed him of his arrest. "I do not recognize the authority of your warrant," said M. Roland, "and shall not voluntarily follow you. I can only oppose the resistance of my gray hairs, but I will protest against it with my last breath." The leader of the party replied, "I have no orders to use violence. I will go and report your answer to the council, leaving, in the mean time, a guard to secure your person." This was an hour to rouse all the energy and heroic resolution of Madame Roland. She immediately sat down, and, with that rapidity of action which her highly-disciplined mind had attained, wrote, in a few moments, a letter to the Convention. Leaving a friend who was in the house with her husband, she ordered a hackney coach, and drove as fast as possible to the Tuileries, where the Assembly was in session. The garden of the Tuileries was filled with the tumultuary concourse. She forced her way through the crowd till she arrived at the doors of the outer halls. Sentinels were stationed at all the passages, who would not allow her to enter. "Citizens," said she, at last adroitly adopting the vernacular of the Jacobins, "in this day of salvation for our country, in the midst of those traitors who threaten us, you know not the importance of some notes which I have to transmit to the president." These words were a talisman. The doors were thrown open, and she entered the petitioners' hall. "I wish to see one of the messengers of the House," she said to one of the inner sentinels. "Wait till one comes out," was the gruff reply. She waited for a quarter of an hour in burning impatience. Her ear was almost stunned with the deafening clamor of debate, of applause, of execrations, which now in dying murmurs, and again in thundering reverberations, awakening responsive echoes along the thronged streets, swelled upon the night air. Of all human sounds, the uproar of a countless multitude of maddened human voices is the most awful. At last she caught a glimpse of the messenger who had summoned her to appear before the bar of the Assembly in reply to the accusations of Viard, informed him of their peril, and implored him to hand her letter to the president. The messenger, M. Rôze, took the paper, and, elbowing his way through the throng, disappeared. An hour elapsed, which seemed an age. The tumult within continued unabated. At length M. Rôze reappeared. "Well!" said Madame Roland, eagerly, "what has been done with my letter?" "I have given it to the president," was the reply, "but nothing has been done with it as yet. Indescribable confusion prevails. The mob demand the accusation of the Girondists. I have just assisted one to escape by a private way. Others are endeavoring, concealed by the tumult, to effect their escape. There is no knowing what is to happen." "Alas!" Madame Roland replied, "my letter will not be read. Do send some deputy to me, with whom I can speak a few words." "Whom shall I send?" "Indeed I have but little acquaintance with any, and but little esteem for any, except those who are proscribed. Tell Vergniaud that I am inquiring for him." Vergniaud, notwithstanding the terrific agitations of the hour, immediately attended the summons of Madame Roland. She implored him to try to get her admission to the bar, that she might speak in defense of her husband and her friends. "In the present state of the Assembly," said Vergniaud, "it would be impossible, and if possible, of no avail. The Convention has lost all power. It has become but the weapon of the rabble. Your words can do no good." "They may do much good," replied Madame Roland. "I can venture to say that which you could not say without exposing yourself to accusation. I fear nothing. If I can not save Roland, I will utter with energy truths which may be useful to the Republic. An example of courage may shame the nation." "Think how unavailing the attempt," replied Vergniaud. "Your letter can not possibly be read for two or three hours. A crowd of petitioners throng the bar. Noise, and confusion, and violence fill the House." Madame Roland paused for a moment, and replied, "I must then hasten home, and ascertain what has become of my husband. I will immediately return. Tell our friends so." Vergniaud sadly pressed her hand, as if for a last farewell, and returned, invigorated by her courage, to encounter the storm which was hailed upon him in the Assembly. She hastened to her dwelling, and found that her husband had succeeded in eluding the surveillance of his guards, and, escaping by a back passage, had taken refuge in the house of a friend. After a short search she found him in his asylum, and, too deeply moved to weep, threw herself into his arms, informed him of what she had done, rejoiced at his safety, and heroically returned to the Convention, resolved, if possible, to obtain admission there. It was now near midnight. The streets were brilliant with illuminations; but Madame Roland knew not of which party these illuminations celebrated the triumph. On her arrival at the court of the Tuileries, which had so recently been thronged by a mob of forty thousand men, she found it silent and deserted. The sitting was ended. The members, accompanied by the populace with whom they had fraternized, were traversing the streets. A few sentinels stood shivering in the cold and drizzling rain around the doors of the national palace. A group of rough-looking men were gathered before a cannon. Madame Roland approached them. "Citizens," inquired she, "has every thing gone well to-night?" "Oh! wonderfully well," was the reply. "The deputies and the people embraced, and sung the Marseilles Hymn, there, under the tree of liberty." "And what has become of the twenty-two Girondists?" "They are all to be arrested." Madame Roland was almost stunned by the blow. Hastily crossing the court, she arrived at her hackney-coach. A very pretty dog, which had lost its master, followed her. "Is the poor little creature yours?" inquired the coachman. The tones of kindness with which he spoke called up the first tears which had moistened the eyes of Madame Roland that eventful night. "I should like him for my little boy," said the coachman. Madame Roland, gratified to have, at such an hour, for a driver, a father and a man of feeling, said, "Put him into the coach, and I will take care of him for you. Drive immediately to the galleries of the Louvre." Madame Roland caressed the affectionate animal, and, weary of the passions of man, longed for retirement from the world, and to seclude herself with those animals who would repay kindness with gratitude. She sank back in her seat, exclaiming, "O that we could escape from France, and find a home in the law-governed republic of America." Alighting at the Louvre, she called upon a friend, with whom she wished to consult upon the means of effecting M. Roland's escape from the city. He had just gone to bed, but arose, conversed about various plans, and made an appointment to meet her at seven o'clock the next morning. Entirely unmindful of herself, she thought only of the rescue of her friends. Exhausted with excitement and toil, she returned to her desolated home, bent over the sleeping form of her child, and gave vent to a mother's gushing love in a flood of tears. Recovering her fortitude, she sat down and wrote to M. Roland a minute account of all her proceedings. It would have periled his safety had she attempted to share his asylum. The gray of a dull and somber morning was just beginning to appear as Madame Roland threw herself upon a bed for a few moments of repose. Overwhelmed by sorrow and fatigue, she had just fallen asleep, when a band of armed men rudely broke into her house, and demanded to be conducted to her apartment. She knew too well the object of the summons. The order for her arrest was presented her. She calmly read it, and requested permission to write to a friend. The request was granted. When the note was finished, the officer informed her that it would be necessary for him to be made acquainted with its contents. She quietly tore it into fragments, and cast it into the fire. Then, imprinting her last kiss upon the cheek of her unconscious child, with the composure which such a catastrophe would naturally produce in so heroic a mind, she left her home for the prison. Blood had been flowing too freely in Paris, the guillotine had been too active in its operations, for Madame Roland to entertain any doubts whither the path she now trod was tending. It was early in the morning of a bleak and dismal day as Madame Roland accompanied the officers through the hall of her dwelling, where she had been the object of such enthusiastic admiration and affection. The servants gathered around her, and filled the house with their lamentations. Even the hardened soldiers were moved by the scene, and one of them exclaimed, "How much you _are beloved_!" Madame Roland, who alone was tranquil in this hour of trial, calmly replied, "_Because I love._" As she was led from the house by the gens d'armes, a vast crowd collected around the door, who, believing her to be a traitor to her country, and in league with their enemies, shouted, "_A la guillotine!_" Unmoved by their cries, she looked calmly and compassionately upon the populace, without gesture or reply. One of the officers, to relieve her from the insults to which she was exposed, asked her if she wished to have the windows of the carriage closed. "No!" she replied; "oppressed innocence should not assume the attitude of crime and shame. I do not fear the looks of honest men, and I brave those of my enemies." "You have very great resolution," was the reply, "thus calmly to await justice." "Justice!" she exclaimed; "were justice done I should not be here. But I shall go to the scaffold as fearlessly as I now proceed to the prison." "Roland's flight," said one of the officers, brutally, "is a proof of his guilt." She indignantly replied, "It is so atrocious to persecute a man who has rendered such services to the cause of liberty. His conduct has been so open and his accounts so clear, that he is perfectly justifiable in avoiding the last outrages of envy and malice. Just as Aristides and inflexible as Cato, he is indebted to his virtues for his enemies. Let them satiate their fury upon me. I defy their power, and devote myself to death. _He_ ought to save himself for the sake of his country, to which he may yet do good." When they arrived at the prison of the Abbayé, Madame Roland was first conducted into a large, dark, gloomy room, which was occupied by a number of men, who, in attitudes of the deepest melancholy, were either pacing the floor or reclining upon some miserable pallets. From this room she ascended a narrow and dirty staircase to the jailer's apartment. The jailer's wife was a kind woman, and immediately felt the power of the attractions of her fascinating prisoner. As no cell was yet provided for her, she permitted her to remain in her room for the rest of the day. The commissioners who had brought her to the prison gave orders that she should receive no indulgence, but be treated with the utmost rigor. The instructions, however, being merely verbal, were but little regarded. She was furnished with comfortable refreshment instead of the repulsive prison fare, and, after breakfast, was permitted to write a letter to the National Assembly upon her illegal arrest. Thus passed the day. At ten o'clock in the evening, her cell being prepared, she entered it for the first time. It was a cold, bare room, with walls blackened by the dust and damp of ages. There was a small fire-place in the room, and a narrow window, with a double iron grating, which admitted but a dim twilight even at noon day. In one corner there was a pallet of straw. The chill night air crept in at the unglazed window, and the dismal tolling of the tocsin proclaimed that the metropolis was still the scene of tumult and of violence. Madame Roland threw herself upon her humble bed, and was so overpowered by fatigue and exhaustion that she woke not from her dreamless slumber until twelve o'clock of the next day. Eudora, who had been left by her mother in the care of weeping domestics, was taken by a friend, and watched over and protected with maternal care. Though Madame Roland never saw her idolized child again, her heart was comforted in the prison by the assurance that she had found a home with those who, for her mother's sake, would love and cherish her. The tidings of the arrest and imprisonment of Madame Roland soon reached the ears of her unfortunate husband in his retreat. His embarrassment was most agonizing. To remain and participate in her doom, whatever that doom might be, would only diminish her chances of escape and magnify her peril; and yet it seemed not magnanimous to abandon his noble wife to encounter her merciless foes alone. The triumphant Jacobins were now, with the eagerness of blood-hounds, searching every nook and corner in Paris, to drag the fallen minister from his concealment. It soon became evident that no dark hiding-place in the metropolis could long conceal him from the vigilant search which was commenced, and that he must seek safety in precipitate flight. His friends obtained for him the tattered garb of a peasant. In a dark night, alone and trembling, he stole from his retreat, and commenced a journey on foot, by a circuitous and unfrequented route, to gain the frontiers of Switzerland. He hoped to find a temporary refuge by burying himself among the lonely passes of the Alps. A man can _face_ his foes with a spirit undaunted and unyielding, but he can not _fly from them_ without trembling as he looks behind. For two or three days, with blistered feet, and a heart agitated even beyond all his powers of stoical endurance, he toiled painfully along his dreary journey. As he was entering Moulines, his marked features were recognized. He was arrested, taken back to Paris, and cast into prison, where he languished for some time. He subsequently again made his escape, and was concealed by some friends in the vicinity of Rouen, where he remained in a state of indescribable suspense and anguish until the death of his wife. When Madame Roland awoke from her long sleep, instead of yielding to despair and surrendering herself to useless repinings, she immediately began to arrange her cell as comfortably as possible, and to look around for such sources of comfort and enjoyment as might yet be obtained. The course she pursued most beautifully illustrates the power of a contented and cheerful spirit not only to alleviate the pangs of severest affliction, but to gild with comfort even the darkest of earthly sorrows. With those smiles of unaffected affability which won to her all hearts, she obtained the favor of a small table, and then of a neat white spread to cover it. This she placed near the window to serve for her writing-desk. To keep this table, which she prized so highly, unsoiled, she smilingly told her keeper that she should make a dining-table of her stove. A rusty dining-table indeed it was. Two hair-pins, which she drew from her own clustering ringlets, she drove into a shelf for pegs to hang her clothes upon. These arrangements she made as cheerfully as when superintending the disposition of the gorgeous furniture in the palace over which she had presided with so much elegance and grace. Having thus provided her study, her next care was to obtain a few books. She happened to have Thomson's Seasons, a favorite volume of hers, in her pocket. Through the jailer's wife she succeeded in obtaining Plutarch's Lives and Sheridan's Dictionary. The jailer and his wife were both charmed with their prisoner, and invited her to dine with them that day. In the solitude of her cell she could distinctly hear the rolling of drums, the tolling of bells, and all those sounds of tumult which announced that the storm of popular insurrection was still sweeping through the streets. One of her faithful servants called to see her, and, on beholding her mistress in such a situation, the poor girl burst into tears. Madame Roland was, for a moment, overcome by this sensibility; she, however, soon again regained her self-command. She endeavored to banish from her mind all painful thoughts of her husband and her child, and to accommodate herself as heroically as possible to her situation. The prison regulations were very severe. The government allowed twenty pence per day for the support of each prisoner. Ten pence was to be paid to the jailer for the furniture he put into the cell; ten pence only remained for food. The prisoners were, however, allowed to purchase such food as they pleased from their own purse. Madame Roland, with that stoicism which enabled her to triumph over all ordinary ills, resolved to conform to the prison allowance. She took bread and water alone for breakfast. The dinner was coarse meat and vegetables. The money she saved by this great frugality she distributed among the poorer prisoners. The only indulgence she allowed herself was in the purchase of books and flowers. In reading and with her pen she beguiled the weary days of her imprisonment. And though at times her spirit was overwhelmed with anguish in view of her desolate home and blighted hopes, she still found great solace in the warm affections which sprang up around her, even in the uncongenial atmosphere of a prison. Though she had been compelled to abandon all the enthusiastic dreams of her youth, she still retained confidence in her faith that these dark storms would ere long disappear from the political horizon, and that a brighter day would soon dawn upon the nations. No misfortunes could disturb the serenity of her soul, and no accumulating perils could daunt her courage. She immediately made a methodical arrangement of her time, so as to appropriate stated employment to every hour. She cheered herself with the reflection that her husband was safe in his retreat, with kind friends ready to minister to all his wants. She felt assured that her daughter was received with maternal love by one who would ever watch over her with the tenderest care. The agitation of the terrible conflict was over. She submitted with calmness and quietude to her lot. After having been so long tossed by storms, she seemed to find a peaceful harbor in her prison cell, and her spirit wandered back to those days, so serene and happy, which she spent with her books in the little chamber beneath her father's roof. She however, made every effort in her power to regain her freedom. She wrote to the Assembly, protesting against her illegal arrest. She found all these efforts unavailing. Still, she gave way to no despondency, and uttered no murmurs. Most of her time she employed in writing historic notices of the scenes through which she had passed. These papers she intrusted, for preservation, to a friend, who occasionally gained access to her. These articles, written with great eloquence and feeling, were subsequently published with her memoirs. Having such resources in her own highly-cultivated mind, even the hours of imprisonment glided rapidly and happily along. Time had no tardy flight, and there probably might have been found many a lady in Europe lolling in a sumptuous carriage, or reclining upon a silken couch, who had far fewer hours of enjoyment. One day some commissioners called at her cell, hoping to extort from her the secret of her husband's retreat. She looked them calmly in the face, and said, "Gentlemen, I know perfectly well where my husband is. I scorn to tell you a lie. I know also my own strength. And I assure you that there is no earthly power which can induce me to betray him." The commissioners withdrew, admiring her heroism, and convinced that she was still able to wield an influence which might yet bring the guillotine upon their own necks. Her doom was sealed. Her heroism was her crime. She was too illustrious to live. CHAPTER X. FATE OF THE GIRONDISTS. 1793 Fate of the Girondists.--Their heroic courage.--The Girondists in the Conciergerie.--Their miserable condition.--Youthful hopes cut short.--State of Paris.--Books and friends.--Anecdote of Vergniaud.--Sentiments of the Girondists inscribed on the prison walls.--La Source and Sillery.--Their evening dirge.--The day of trial.--The misnamed Halls of Justice.--Precautions of the Jacobins.--Demeanor of the prisoners.--The trial and condemnation.--Death of Valazé.--Various emotions.--Return to the Conciergerie.--The Girondists exultingly sing the Marseillaise Hymn.--The Girondists prepare for the last scene.--Brutal decree.--Last feast of the Girondists.--Strange scene.--The Abbé Lambert.--His memoranda.--Vergniaud presides at the feast.--Unnatural gayety.--Last thoughts.--Religion, philosophy, and infidelity.--Eloquence of Vergniaud.--Argument for immortality.--Last preparations.--Arrival of the executioners.--Souvenirs to friends.--The carts of the condemned.--Enthusiasm of the Girondists.--The last embrace.--The execution.--Fortitude of Vergniaud.--Burial of the bodies.--Errors of the Girondists.--Escape of Gaudet and others.--The Jacobins clamor for more blood.--More Girondists executed.--Fate of Pétion and Buzot.--Mystery attending the death of Pétion and Buzot. As the fate of the Girondist party, of which Madame Roland was the soul, is so intimately connected with her history, we must leave her in the prison, while we turn aside to contemplate the doom of her companions. The portentous thunders of the approaching storm had given such warning to the Girondists, that many had effected their escape from Paris, and in various disguises, in friendlessness and poverty, were wandering over Europe. Others, however, were too proud to fly. Conscious of the most elevated patriotic sentiments, and with no criminations of conscience, except for sacrificing too much in love for their country, they resolved to remain firm at their post, and to face their foes. Calmly and sternly they awaited the onset. This heroic courage did but arouse and invigorate their foes. Mercy had long since died in France. Immediately after the tumult of that dreadful night in which the Convention was inundated with assassins clamoring for blood, twenty-one of the Girondists were arrested and thrown into the dungeons of the Conciergerie. Imprisoned together, and fully conscious that their trial would be but a mockery, and that their doom was already sealed, they fortified one another with all the consolations which philosophy and the pride of magnanimity could administer. In those gloomy cells, beneath the level of the street, into whose deep and grated windows the rays of the noonday sun could but feebly penetrate, their faces soon grew wan, and wasted, and haggard, from confinement, the foul prison air, and woe. There is no sight more deplorable than that of an accomplished man of intellectual tastes, accustomed to all the refinements of polished life, plunged into those depths of misery from which the decencies even of our social being are excluded. These illustrious statesmen and eloquent orators, whose words had vibrated upon the ear of Europe, were transformed into the most revolting aspect of beggared and haggard misery. Their clothes, ruined by the humid filth of their dungeons, moldered to decay. Unwashed, unshorn, in the loss almost of the aspect of humanity, they became repulsive to each other. Unsupported by any of those consolations which religion affords, many hours of the blackest gloom must have enveloped them. Not a few of the deputies were young men, in the morning of their energetic being, their bosoms glowing with all the passions of this tumultuous world, buoyant with hope, stimulated by love, invigorated by perfect health. And they found themselves thus suddenly plunged from the heights of honor and power to the dismal darkness of the dungeon, from whence they could emerge only to be led to the scaffold. All the bright hopes of life had gone down amid the gloom of midnight darkness. Several months lingered slowly away while these men were awaiting their trial. Day after day they heard the tolling of the tocsin, the reverberations of the alarm gun, and the beating of the insurrection drum, as the demon of lawless violence rioted through the streets of the blood-stained metropolis. The execrations of the mob, loud and fiend-like, accompanied the cart of the condemned, as it rumbled upon the pavements above their heads, bearing the victims of popular fury to the guillotine; and still, most stoically, they struggled to nerve their souls with fortitude to meet their fate. From these massive stone walls, guarded by triple doors of iron and watched by numerous sentinels, answerable for the safe custody of their prisoners with their lives, there was no possibility of escape. The rigor of their imprisonment was, consequently, somewhat softened as weeks passed on, and they were occasionally permitted to see their friends through the iron wicket. Books, also, aided to relieve the tedium of confinement. The brother-in-law of Vergniaud came to visit him, and brought with him his son, a child ten years of age. The features of the fair boy reminded Vergniaud of his beloved sister, and awoke mournfully in his heart the remembrance of departed joys. When the child saw his uncle imprisoned like a malefactor, his cheeks haggard and sunken, his matted hair straggling over his forehead, his long beard disfiguring his face, and his clothes hanging in tatters, he clung to his father, affrighted by the sad sight, and burst into tears. "My child," said Vergniaud, kindly, taking him in his arms, "look well at me. When you are a man, you can say that you saw Vergniaud, the founder of the Republic, at the most glorious period, and in the most splendid costume he ever wore--that in which he suffered unmerited persecution, and in which he prepared to die for liberty." These words produced a deep impression upon the mind of the child. He remembered them to repeat them after the lapse of half a century. The cells in which they were imprisoned still remain as they were left on the morning in which these illustrious men were led to their execution. On the dingy walls of stone are still recorded those sentiments which they had inscribed there, and which indicate the nature of those emotions which animated and sustained them. These proverbial maxims and heroic expressions, gleaned from French tragedies or the classic page, were written with the blood which they had drawn from their own veins. In one place is carefully written, "Quand il n'a pu sauver la liberté de Rome, Caton est libre encore et suit mourir en homme." "_When he no longer had power to preserve the liberty of Rome Cato still was free, and knew how to die for man._" Again, "Cui virtus non deest Ille nunquam omnino miser." _"He who retains his integrity Can never be wholly miserable."_ In another place, "La vraie liberté est celle de l'ame." _"True liberty is that of the soul."_ On a beam was written, "Dignum certe Deo spectaculum fortem virum cum calamitate colluctantem." _"Even God may look with pleasure upon a brave man struggling against adversity."_ Again, "Quels solides appui dans le malheur suprême! J'ai pour moi ma vertu, l'équité, Dieu même." _"How substantial the consolation in the greatest calamity I have for mine, my virtue, justice, God himself."_ Beneath this was written, "Le jour n'est pas plus pur que le fond de mon coeur." _"The day is not more pure than the depths of my heart."_ In large letters of blood there was inscribed, in the hand-writing of Vergniaud, "Potius mori quam foedari." _"Death is preferable to dishonor."_ But one sentence is recorded there which could be considered strictly of a religious character. It was taken from the "Imitation of Christ." "Remember that you are not called to a life of indulgence and pleasure, but to toil and to suffer." La Source and Sillery, two very devoted friends, occupied a cell together. La Source was a devoted Christian, and found, in the consolations of piety, an unfailing support. Sillery possessed a feeling heart, and was soothed and comforted by the devotion of his friend. La Source composed a beautiful hymn, adapted to a sweet and solemn air, which they called their evening service. Night after night this mournful dirge was heard gently issuing from the darkness of their cell, in tones so melodious and plaintive that they never died away from the memory of those who heard them. It is difficult to conceive of any thing more affecting than this knell, so softly uttered at midnight in those dark and dismal dungeons. "Calm all the tumults that invade Our souls, and lend thy powerful aid. Oh! source of mercy! soothe our pains, And break, O break our cruel chains! To Thee the captive pours his cry, To Thee the mourner loves to fly. The incense of our tears receive-- 'Tis all the incense we can give. "Eternal Power! our cause defend, O God! of innocence the friend. Near Thee forever she resides, In Thee forever she confides. Thou know'st the secrets of the breast: Thou know'st the oppressor and the oppress'd. Do thou our wrongs with pity see, Avert a doom offending thee. "But should the murderer's arm prevail; Should tyranny our lives assail; Unmoved, triumphant, scorning death, We'll bless Thee with our latest breath. The hour, the glorious hour will come, That consecrates the patriots' tomb; And with the pang our memory claims, Our country will avenge our names." Summer had come and gone while these distinguished prisoners were awaiting their doom. World-weary and sick at heart, they still struggled to sustain each other, and to meet their dreadful fate with heroic constancy. The day for their trial at length arrived. It was the 20th of October, 1793. They had long been held up before the mob, by placards and impassioned harangues, as traitors to their country, and the populace of Paris were clamorous for their consignment to the guillotine. They were led from the dungeons of the Conciergerie to the misnamed Halls of Justice. A vast concourse of angry men surrounded the tribunal, and filled the air with execrations. Paris that day presented the aspect of a camp. The Jacobins, conscious that there were still thousands of the most influential of the citizens who regarded the Girondists with veneration as incorruptible patriots, determined to prevent the possibility of a rescue. They had some cause to apprehend a counter revolution. They therefore gathered around the scene of trial all that imposing military array which they had at their disposal. Cavalry, with plumes, and helmets, and naked sabers, were sweeping the streets, that no accumulations of the multitude might gather force. The pavements trembled beneath the rumbling wheels of heavy artillery, ready to belch forth their storm of grape-shot upon any opposing foe. Long lines of infantry, with loaded muskets and glittering bayonets, guarded all the avenues to the tribunal, where rancorous passion sat enthroned in mockery upon the seat of justice. The prisoners had nerved themselves sternly to meet this crisis of their doom. Two by two, in solemn procession, they marched to the bar of judgment, and took their seat upon benches surrounded by gens d'armes and a frowning populace, and arraigned before judges already determined upon their doom. The eyes of the world were, however, upon them. The accused were illustrious in integrity, in rank, in talent. In the distant provinces there were thousands who were their friends. It was necessary to go through the formality of a trial. A few of the accused still clung to the hope of life. They vainly dreamed it possible that, by silence, and the abandonment of themselves to the resistless power by which they were crushed, some mercy might be elicited. It was a weakness unworthy of these great men. But there are few minds which can remain firm while immured for months in the wasting misery of a dungeon. In those glooms the sinews of mental energy wither with dying hope. The trial continued for a week. On the 30th of October, at eleven o'clock at night, the verdict was brought in. They were all declared guilty of having conspired against the Republic, and were condemned to death. With the light of the next morning's sun they were to be led to the guillotine. As the sentence was pronounced, one of the accused, M. Valazé, made a motion with his hand, as if to tear his garment, and fell from his seat upon the floor. "What, Valazé," said Brissot, striving to support him, "are you losing your courage?" "No," replied Valazé, faintly, "I am dying;" and he expired, with his hand still grasping the hilt of the dagger with which he had pierced his heart. For a moment it was a scene of unutterable horror. The condemned gathered sadly around the remains of their lifeless companion. Some, who had confidently expected acquittal, overcome by the near approach of death, yielded to momentary weakness, and gave utterance to reproaches and lamentations. Others, pale and stupefied, gazed around in moody silence. One, in the delirium of enthusiasm, throwing his arms above his head, shouted, "This is the most glorious day of my life!" Vergniaud, seated upon the highest bench, with the composure of philosophy and piety combined, looked upon the scene, exulting in the victory his own spirit had achieved over peril and death. The weakness which a few displayed was but momentary. They rallied their energies boldly to meet their inevitable doom. They gathered for a moment around the corpse of their lifeless companion, and were then formed in procession, to march back to their cells. It was midnight as the condemned Girondists were led from the bar of the Palace of Justice back to the dungeons of the Conciergerie, there to wait till the swift-winged hours should bring the dawn which was to guide their steps to the guillotine. Their presence of mind had now returned, and their bosoms glowed with the loftiest enthusiasm. In fulfillment of a promise they had made their fellow-prisoners, to inform them of their fate by the echoes of their voices, they burst into the Marseillaise Hymn. The vaults of the Conciergerie rang with the song as they shouted, in tones of exultant energy, "Allons, enfans de la patrie, Le jour de glorie est arrivé, Contre nous de la tyrannie L'étendard sanglant est levé. "Come! children of your country, come! The day of glory dawns on high, And tyranny has wide unfurl'd Her blood-stain'd banner in the sky." It was their death-knell. As they were slowly led along through the gloomy corridors of their prison to the cells, these dirge-like wailings of a triumphant song penetrated the remotest dungeons of that dismal abode, and roused every wretched head from its pallet. The arms of the guard clattered along the stone floor of the subterranean caverns, and the unhappy victims of the Revolution, roused from the temporary oblivion of sleep, or from dreams of the homes of refinement and luxury from which they had been torn, glared through the iron gratings upon the melancholy procession, and uttered last words of adieu to those whose fate they almost envied. The acquittal of the Girondists would have given them some little hope that they also might find mercy. Now they sunk back upon their pillows in despair, and lamentations and wailings filled the prison. The condemned, now that their fate was sealed, had laid aside all weakness, and, mutually encouraging one another, prepared as martyrs to encounter the last stern trial. They were all placed in one large room opening into several cells, and the lifeless body of their companion was deposited in one of the corners. By a decree of the tribunal, the still warm and bleeding remains of Valazé were to be carried back to the cell, and to be conveyed the next morning, in the same cart with the prisoners, to the guillotine. The ax was to sever the head from the lifeless body, and all the headless trunks were to be interred together. A wealthy friend, who had escaped proscription, and was concealed in Paris, had agreed to send them a sumptuous banquet the night after their trial, which banquet was to prove to them a funeral repast or a triumphant feast, according to the verdict of acquittal or condemnation. Their friend kept his word. Soon after the prisoners were remanded to their cell, a table was spread, and preparations were made for their last supper. There was a large oaken table in the prison, where those awaiting their trial, and those awaiting their execution, met for their coarse prison fare. A rich cloth was spread upon that table. Servants entered, bearing brilliant lamps, which illuminated the dismal vault with an unnatural luster, and spread the glare of noonday light upon the miserable pallets of straw, the rusty iron gratings and chains, and the stone walls weeping with moisture, which no ray of the sun or warmth of fire ever dried away. It was a strange scene, that brilliant festival, in the midst of the glooms of the most dismal dungeon, with one dead body lying upon the floor, and those for whom the feast was prepared waiting only for the early dawn to light them to their death and burial. The richest viands of meats and wines were brought in and placed before the condemned. Vases of flowers diffused their fragrance and expanded their beauty where flowers were never seen to bloom before. Wan and haggard faces, unwashed and unshorn, gazed upon the unwonted spectacle, as dazzling flambeaux, and rich table furniture, and bouquets, and costly dishes appeared, one after another, until the board was covered with luxury and splendor. In silence the condemned took their places at the table. They were men of brilliant intellects, of enthusiastic eloquence, thrown suddenly from the heights of power to the foot of the scaffold. A priest, the Abbé Lambert, the intimate personal friend of several of the most eminent of the Girondists, had obtained admittance into the prison to accompany his friends to the guillotine, and to administer to them the last consolations of religion. He stood in the corridor, looking through the open door upon those assembled around the table, and, with his pencil in his hand, noted down their words, their gestures, their sighs--their weakness and their strength. It is to him that we are indebted for all knowledge of the sublime scenes enacted at the last supper of the Girondists. The repast was prolonged until the dawn of morning began to steal faintly in at the grated windows of the prison and the gathering tumult without announced the preparations to conduct them to their execution. Vergniaud, the most prominent and the most eloquent of their number, presided at the feast. He had little, save the love of glory, to bind him to life, for he had neither father nor mother, wife nor child; and he doubted not that posterity would do him justice, and that his death would be the most glorious act of his life. No one could imagine, from the calm and subdued conversation, and the quiet appetite with which these distinguished men partook of the entertainment, that this was their last repast, and but the prelude to a violent death. But when the cloth was removed, and the fruits, the wines, and the flowers alone remained, the conversation became animated, gay, and at times rose to hilarity. Several of the youngest men of the party, in sallies of wit and outbursts of laughter, endeavored to repel the gloom which darkened their spirits in view of death on the morrow. It was unnatural gayety, unreal, unworthy of the men. Death is not a jest, and no one can honor himself by trying to make it so. A spirit truly noble can encounter this king of terrors with fortitude, but never with levity. Still, now and then, shouts of laughter and songs of merriment burst from the lips of these young men, as they endeavored, with a kind of hysterical energy, to nerve themselves to show to their enemies their contempt of life and of death. Others were more thoughtful, serene, and truly brave. "What shall we be doing to-morrow at this time?" said Ducos. All paused. Religion had its hopes, philosophy its dreams, infidelity its dreary blank. Each answered according to his faith. "We shall sleep after the fatigues of the day," said some, "to wake no more." Atheism had darkened their minds. "Death is an eternal sleep," had become their gloomy creed. They looked forward to the slide of the guillotine as ending all thought, and consigning them back to that non-existence from which they had emerged at their creation. "No!" replied Fauchet, Carru, and others, "annihilation is not our destiny. We are immortal. These bodies may perish. These living thoughts, these boundless aspirations, can never die. To-morrow, far away in other worlds, we shall think, and feel, and act and solve the problems of the immaterial destiny of the human mind." Immortality was the theme. The song was hushed upon these dying lips. The forced laughter fainted away. Standing upon the brink of that dread abyss from whence no one has returned with tidings, every soul felt a longing for immortality. They turned to Vergniaud, whose brilliant intellect, whose soul-moving eloquence, whose spotless life commanded their reverence, and appealed to him for light, and truth, and consolation. His words are lost. The effect of his discourse alone is described. "Never," said the abbé "had his look, his gesture, his language, and his voice more profoundly affected his hearers." In the conclusion of a discourse which is described as one of almost superhuman eloquence, during which some were aroused to the most exalted enthusiasm, all were deeply moved, and many wept, Vergniaud exclaimed, "Death is but the greatest act of life, since it gives birth to a higher state of existence. Were it not thus there would be something greater than God. It would be the just man immolating himself uselessly and hopelessly for his country. This supposition is a folly of blasphemy, and I repel it with contempt and horror. No! Vergniaud is not greater than God, but God is more just than Vergniaud; and He will not to-morrow suffer him to ascend a scaffold but to justify and avenge him in future ages." And now the light of day began to stream in at the windows. "Let us go to bed," said one, "and sleep until we are called to go forth to our last sleep. Life is a thing so trifling that it is not worth the hour of sleep we lose in regretting it." "Let us rather watch," said another, "during the few moments which remain to us. Eternity is so certain and so terrible that a thousand lives would not suffice to prepare for it." They rose from the table, and most of them retired to their cells and threw themselves upon their beds for a few moments of bodily repose and meditation. Thirteen, however, remained in the larger apartment, finding a certain kind of support in society. In a low tone of voice they conversed with each other. They were worn out with excitement, fatigue, and want of sleep. Some wept. Sleep kindly came to some, and lulled their spirits into momentary oblivion. At ten o'clock the iron doors grated on their hinges, and the tramp of the gens d'armes, with the clattering of their sabers, was heard reverberating through the gloomy corridors and vaults of their dungeon, as they came, with the executioners, to lead the condemned to the scaffold. Their long hair was cut from their necks, that the ax, with unobstructed edge, might do its work. Each one left some simple and affecting souvenir to friends. Gensonné picked up a lock of his black hair, and gave it to the Abbé Lambert to give to his wife. "Tell her," said he, "that it is the only memorial of my love which I can transmit to her, and that my last thoughts in death were hers." Vergniaud drew from his pocket his watch, and, with his knife, scratched upon the case a few lines of tender remembrance, and sent the token to a young lady to whom he was devotedly attached, and to whom he was ere long to have been married. Each gave to the abbé some legacy of affection to be conveyed to loved ones who were to be left behind. Few emotions are stronger in the hour of death than the desire to be embalmed in the affections of those who are dear to us. All being ready, the gens d'armes marched the condemned, in a column, into the prison-yard, where five rude carts were awaiting them, to convey them to the scaffold. The countless thousands of Paris were swarming around the prison, filling the court, and rolling, like ocean tides, into every adjacent avenue. Each cart contained five persons, with the exception of the last, into which the dead body of Valazé had been cast with four of his living companions. And now came to the Girondists their hour of triumph. Heroism rose exultant over all ills. The brilliant sun and the elastic air of an October morning invigorated their bodies, and the scene of sublimity through which they were passing stimulated their spirits to the highest pitch of enthusiasm. As the carts moved from the court-yard, with one simultaneous voice, clear and sonorous, the Girondists burst into the Marseillaise Hymn. The crowd gazed in silence as this funereal chant, not like the wailings of a dirge, but like the strains of an exultant song, swelled and died away upon the air. Here and there some friendly voice among the populace ventured to swell the volume of sound as the significant words were uttered, "Contre nous de la tyrannie L'étendard sanglant est levé." "And tyranny has wide unfurl'd Her blood-stain'd banner in the sky." At the end of each verse their voices sank for a moment into silence. The strain was then again renewed, loud and sonorous. On arriving at the scaffold, they all embraced in one long, last adieu. It was a token of their communion in death as in life. They then, in concert, loudly and firmly resumed their funereal chant. One ascended the scaffold, continuing the song with his companions. He was bound to the plank. Still his voice was heard full and strong. The plank slowly fell. Still his voice, without a tremor, joined in the triumphant chorus. The glittering ax glided like lightning down the groove. His head fell into the basket, and one voice was hushed forever. Another ascended, and another, and another, each with the song bursting loudly from his lips, till death ended the strain. There was no weakness. No step trembled, no cheek paled, no voice faltered. But each succeeding moment the song grew more faint as head after head fell, and the bleeding bodies were piled side by side. At last one voice alone continued the song. It was that of Vergniaud, the most illustrious of them all. Long confinement had spread deathly pallor over his intellectual features, but firm and dauntless, and with a voice of surpassing richness, he continued the solo into which the chorus had now died away. Without the tremor of a nerve, he mounted the scaffold. For a moment he stood in silence, as he looked down upon the lifeless bodies of his friends, and around upon the overawed multitude gazing in silent admiration upon this heroic enthusiasm. As he then surrendered himself to the executioner, he commenced anew the strain, "Allons! enfans de la patrie, Le jour de glorie est arrivé." "Come! children of your country, come! The day of glory dawns on high." In the midst of the exultant tones, the ax glided on its bloody mission, and those lips, which had guided the storm of revolution, and whose patriotic appeals had thrilled upon the ear of France, were silent in death. Thus perished the Girondists, the founders of the Republic and its victims. Their votes consigned Louis and Maria to the guillotine, and they were the first to follow them. One cart conveyed the twenty-one bodies away, and they were thrown into one pit, by the side of the grave of Louis XVI. [Illustration: EXECUTION OF THE GIRONDISTS.] They committed many errors. Few minds could discern distinctly the path of truth and duty through the clouds and vapors of those stormy times. But they were most sincerely devoted to the liberties of France. They overthrew the monarchy, and established the Republic. They died because they refused to open those sluice-ways of blood which the people demanded. A few of the Girondists had made their escape. Pétion, Buzot, Barbaroux, and Gaudet wandered in disguise, and hid themselves in the caves of wild and unfrequented mountains. La Fayette, who was one of the most noble and illustrious apostles of this creed, was saved from the guillotine by weary years of imprisonment in the dungeons of Olmutz. Madame Roland lingered in her cell, striving to maintain serenity, while her soul was tortured with the tidings of carnage and woe which every morning's dawn brought to her ears. The Jacobins were now more and more clamorous for blood. They strove to tear La Fayette from his dungeon, that they might triumph in his death. They pursued, with implacable vigilance, the Girondists who had escaped from their fury. They trained blood-hounds to scent them out in their wild retreats, where they were suffering, from cold and starvation, all that human nature can possibly endure. For a time, five of them lived together in a cavern, thirty feet in depth. This cavern had a secret communication with the cellar of a house. Their generous hostess, periling her own life for them, daily supplied them with food. She could furnish them only with the most scanty fare, lest she should be betrayed by the purchase of provisions necessary for so many mouths. It was mid-winter. No fire warmed them in their damp and gloomy vault, and this living burial must have been worse than death. The search became so rigid that it was necessary for them to disperse. One directed his steps toward the Pyrenees. He was arrested and executed. Three toiled along by night, through cold, and snow, and rain, the keen wind piercing their tattered garments, till their sufferings made them reckless of life. They were arrested, and found, in the blade of the guillotine, a refuge from their woes. At last all were taken and executed but Pétion and Buzot. Their fate is involved in mystery. None can tell what their sufferings were during the days and the nights of their weary wanderings, when no eye but that of God could see them. Some peasants found among the mountains, where they had taken refuge, human remains rent in pieces by the wolves. The tattered garments were scattered around where the teeth of the ferocious animals had left them. They were all that was left of the noble Pétion and Buzot. But how did they die? Worn out by suffering and abandoned to despair, did they fall by their own hands? Did they perish from exposure to hunger and exhaustion, and the freezing blasts of winter? Or, in their weakness, were they attacked by the famished wolves of the mountains? The dying scene of Pétion and Buzot is involved in impenetrable obscurity. Its tragic accompaniments can only be revealed when all mysteries shall be unfolded. CHAPTER XI. PRISON LIFE. 1793 Liberation of Madame Roland.--She is re-arrested.--Infamous cruelty of the Jacobins.--Anguish of Madame Roland.--Madame Roland recovers her composure.--Intellectual enjoyments.--More comfortable apartments.--Kindness of the jailer's wife.--Madame Roland entreated to escape.--Rigorous treatment.--Visit of an English lady.--Kindness of the jailers.--Cheerful aspect of Madame Roland's cell.--Henriette Cannet.--Vain entreaties.--Robespierre in the zenith of his power.--Madame Roland's letter to Robespierre.--Supports of philosophy.--Influence of the Roman Catholic religion.--Energy of Madame Roland.--She prepares for voluntary death.--Madame Roland's prayer.--Notes to her husband and child.--Apostrophe to friends.--Farewell to Nature.--Maternal love triumphs.--The struggle ended.--Descriptions of Tacitus.--Madame Roland writes her memoirs.--The spirit wanders among happier scenes.--Striking contrasts.--Madame Roland conveyed to the Conciergerie.--Dismal cell.--Description of the Conciergerie.--Narrow courts.--Quadrangular tower.--The daughter of the Cæsars.--The daughter of the artisan. Madame Roland remained for four months in the Abbayé prison. On the 24th day of her imprisonment, to her inexpressible astonishment, an officer entered her cell, and informed her that she was liberated, as no charge could be found against her. Hardly crediting her senses--fearing that she should wake up and find her freedom but the blissful delirium of a dream--she took a coach and hastened to her own door. Her eyes were full of tears of joy, and her heart almost bursting with the throbbings of delight, in the anticipation of again pressing her idolized child to her bosom. Her hand was upon the door latch--she had not yet passed the threshold--when two men, who had watched at the door of her dwelling, again seized her in the name of the law. In spite of her tears and supplications, they conveyed her to the prison of St. Pélagié. This loathsome receptacle of crime was filled with the abandoned females who had been swept, in impurity and degradation, from the streets of Paris. It was, apparently, a studied humiliation, to compel their victim to associate with beings from whom her soul shrunk with loathing. She had resigned herself to die, but not to the society of infamy and pollution. The Jacobins, conscious of the illegality of her first arrest, and dreading her power, were anxious to secure her upon a more legal footing. They adopted, therefore, this measure of liberating her and arresting her a second time. Even her firm and resigned spirit was for a moment vanquished by this cruel blow. Her blissful dream of happiness was so instantaneously converted into the blackness of despair, that she buried her face in her hands, and, in the anguish of a bruised and broken heart, wept aloud. The struggle, though short, was very violent ere she regained her wonted composure. She soon, however, won the compassionate sympathy of her jailers, and was removed from this degrading companionship to a narrow cell, where she could enjoy the luxury of being alone. An humble bed was spread for her in one corner, and a small table was placed near the few rays of light which stole feebly in through the iron grating of the inaccessible window. Summoning all her fortitude to her aid, she again resumed her usual occupations, allotting to each hour of the day its regular employment. She engaged vigorously in the study of the English language, and passed some hours every day in drawing, of which accomplishment she was very fond. She had no patterns to copy; but her imagination wandered through the green fields and by the murmuring brooks of her rural home. Now she roved with free footsteps through the vineyards which sprang up beneath her creative pencil. Now she floated upon the placid lake, reclining upon the bosom of her husband and caressing her child, beneath the tranquil sublimity of the evening sky. Again she sat down at the humble fireside of the peasant, ministering to the wants of the needy, and receiving the recompense of grateful hearts. Thus, on the free wing of imagination, she penetrated all scenes of beauty, and spread them out in vivid reality before her eye. At times she almost forgot that she was a captive. Well might she have exclaimed, in the language of Maria Antoinette, "What a resource, amid the calamities of life, is a highly-cultivated mind!" A few devoted friends periled their own lives by gaining occasional access to her. During the dark hours of that reign of terror and of blood, no crime was more unpardonable than the manifestation of sympathy for the accused. These friends, calling as often as prudence would allow, brought to her presents of fruit and of flowers. At last the jailer's wife, unable to resist the pleadings of her own heart for one whom she could not but love and admire, ventured to remove her to a more comfortable apartment, where the daylight shone brightly in through the iron bars of the window. Here she could see the clouds and the birds soaring in the free air. She was even allowed, through her friends, to procure a piano-forte, which afforded her many hours of recreation. Music, drawing, and flowers were the embellishments of her life. Madame Bouchaud, the wife of the jailer, conceived for her prisoner the kindest affection, and daily visited her, doing every thing in her power to alleviate the bitterness of her imprisonment. At last her sympathies were so aroused, that, regardless of all prudential considerations, she offered to aid her in making her escape. Madame Roland was deeply moved by this proof of devotion, and, though she was fully aware that she must soon place her head upon the scaffold, she firmly refused all entreaties to escape in any way which might endanger her friend. Others united with Madame Bouchaud in entreating her to accept of her generous offer. Their efforts were entirely unavailing. She preferred to die herself rather than to incur the possibility of exposing those who loved her to the guillotine. The kindness with which Madame Roland was treated was soon spied out by those in power. The jailer was severely reprimanded, and ordered immediately to remove the piano-forte from the room, and to confine Madame Roland rigorously in her cell. This change did not disturb the equanimity of her spirit. She had studied so deeply and admired so profoundly all that was noble in the most illustrious characters of antiquity, that her mind instinctively assumed the same model. She found elevated enjoyment in triumphing over every earthly ill. An English lady, then residing in France, who had often visited her in the days of her power, when her home presented all that earth could give of splendor, and when wealth and rank were bowing obsequiously around her, thus describes a visit which she paid to her cell in these dark days of adversity. "I visited her in the prison of Sainte Pélagié, where her soul, superior to circumstances, retained its accustomed serenity, and she conversed with the same animated cheerfulness in her cheerless dudgeon as she used to do in the hotel of the minister. She had provided herself with a few books, and I found her reading Plutarch. She told me that she expected to die, and the look of placid resignation with which she said it convinced me that she was prepared to meet death with a firmness worthy of her exalted character. When I inquired after her daughter, an only child of thirteen years of age, she burst into tears; and, at the overwhelming recollection of her husband and child, the courage of the victim of liberty was lost in the feelings of the wife and the mother." The merciless commissioners had ordered her to be incarcerated in a cell which no beam of light could penetrate. But her compassionate keepers ventured to misunderstand the orders, and to place her in a room where a few rays of the morning sun could struggle through the grated windows, and where the light of day, though seen but dimly, might still, in some degree, cheer those eyes so soon to be closed forever. The soul, instinctively appreciative of beauty, will under the most adverse circumstances, evoke congenial visions. Her friends brought her flowers, of which from childhood she had been most passionately fond. These cherished plants seemed to comprehend and requite unaffected love. At the iron window of her prison they appeared to grow with the joy and luxuriance of gratitude. With intertwining leaf and blossom, they concealed the rusty bars, till they changed the aspect of the grated cell into a garden bower, where birds might nestle and sing, and poets might love to linger. [Illustration: MADAME ROLAND IN PRISON.] When in the convent, she had formed a strong attachment for one of her companions, which the lapse of time had not diminished. Through all the vicissitudes of their lives they had kept up a constant correspondence. This friend, Henriette Cannet, one day obtained access to her prison, and, in the exercise of that romantic friendship of which this world can present but few parallels, urged Madame Roland to exchange garments with her, and thus escape from prison and the scaffold. "If you remain," said Henriette, "your death is inevitable. If I remain in your place, they will not take my life, but, after a short imprisonment, I shall be liberated. None fear me, and I am too obscure to attract attention in these troubled times. I," she continued, "am a widow, and childless. There are no responsibilities which claim my time. You have a husband, advanced in years, and a lovely little child, both needing your utmost care." Thus she pleaded with her to exchange attire, and endeavor to escape. But neither prayers nor tears availed. "They would kill thee, my good Henriette!" exclaimed Madame Roland, embracing her friend with tears of emotion. "Thy blood would ever rest on me. Sooner would I suffer a thousand deaths than reproach myself with thine." Henriette, finding all her entreaties in vain, sadly bade her adieu, and was never permitted to see her more. Robespierre was now in the zenith of his power. He was the arbiter of life and death. One word from him would restore Madame Roland to liberty. But he had steeled his heart against every sentiment of humanity, and was not willing to deprive the guillotine of a single victim. One day Madame Roland was lying sick in the infirmary of the prison. A physician attended her, who styled himself the friend of Robespierre. The mention of his name recalled to her remembrance their early friendship, and her own exertions to save his life when it was in imminent peril. This suggested to her the idea of writing to him. She obeyed the impulse, and wrote as follows: "Robespierre! I am about to put you to the proof, and to repeat to you what I said respecting your character to the friend who has undertaken to deliver this letter. You may be very sure that it is no suppliant who addresses you. I never asked a favor yet of any human being, and it is not from the depths of a prison I would supplicate him who could, if he pleased, restore me to liberty. No! prayers and entreaties belong to the guilty or to slaves. Neither would murmurs or complaints accord with my nature. I know how to bear all. I also well know that at the beginning of every republic the revolutions which effected them have invariably selected the principal actors in the change as their victims. It is their fate to experience this, as it becomes the task of the historian to avenge their memories. Still I am at a loss to imagine how I, a mere woman, should be exposed to the fury of a storm, ordinarily suffered to expend itself upon the great leaders of a revolution. You, Robespierre, were well acquainted with my husband, and I defy you to say that you ever thought him other than an honorable man. He had all the roughness of virtue, even as Cato possessed its asperity. Disgusted with business, irritated by persecution, weary of the world, and worn out with years and exertions, he desired only to bury himself and his troubles in some unknown spot, and to conceal himself there to save the age he lived in from the commission of a crime. "My pretended confederacy would be amusing, were it not too serious a matter for a jest. Whence, then, arises that degree of animosity manifested toward me? I never injured a creature in my life, and can not find it in my heart to wish evil even to those who injure and oppress me. Brought up in solitude, my mind directed to serious studies, of simple tastes, an enthusiastic admirer of the Revolution--excluded, by my sex, from participating in public affairs, yet taking delight in conversing of them--I despised the first calumnies circulated respecting me, attributing them to the envy felt by the ignorant and low-minded at what they were pleased to style my elevated position, but to which I infinitely preferred the peaceful obscurity in which I had passed so many happy days. "Yet I have now been for five months the inhabitant of a prison, torn from my beloved child, whose innocent head may never more be pillowed upon a mother's breast; far from all I hold dear; the mark for the invectives of a mistaken people; constrained to hear the very sentinels, as they keep watch beneath my windows, discussing the subject of my approaching execution, and outraged by reading the violent and disgusting diatribes poured forth against me by hirelings of the press, who have never once beheld me. I have wearied no one with requests, petitions, or demands. On the contrary, I feel proudly equal to battle with my own ill fortune, and it may be to trample it under my feet. "Robespierre! I send not this softened picture of my condition to excite your pity. No! such a sentiment, expressed by you, would not only offend me, but be rejected as it deserves. I write for your edification. Fortune is fickle--popular favor equally so. Look at the fate of those who led on the revolutions of former ages--the idols of the people, and afterward their governors--from Vitellius to Cæsar, or from Hippo, the orator of Syracuse, down to our Parisian speakers. Scylla and Marius proscribed thousands of knights and senators, besides a vast number of other unfortunate beings; but were they enabled to prevent history from handing down their names to the just execration of posterity, and did they themselves enjoy happiness? Whatever may be the fate awarded to me, I shall know how to submit to it in a manner worthy of myself, or to anticipate it should I deem it advisable. After receiving the honors of persecution, am I to expect the still greater one of martyrdom? Speak! It is something to know your fate, and a spirit such as mine can boldly face it, be it as it may. Should you bestow upon my letter a fair and impartial perusal, it will neither be useless to you nor to my country. But, under any circumstances, this I say, Robespierre--and you can not deny the truth of my assertion--none who have ever known me can persecute me without a feeling of remorse." Madame Roland preferred to die rather than to owe her life to the _compassion_ of her enemies. Could she obtain a triumphant acquittal, through the force of her own integrity, she would greatly exult. But her imperial spirit would not stoop to the acceptance of a pardon from those who deserved the execrations of mankind; such a pardon she would have torn in fragments, and have stepped resolutely upon the scaffold. There is something cold and chilling in the supports which pride and philosophy alone can afford under the calamities of life. Madame Roland had met with Christianity only as it appeared in the pomp and parade of the Catholic Church, and in the openly-dissolute lives of its ignorant or voluptuous priesthood. While her poetic temperament was moved by the sublime conception of a God ruling over the world of matter and the world of mind, revealed religion, as her spirit encountered it, consisted only in gorgeous pageants, and ridiculous dogmas, and puerile traditions. The spirit of piety and pure devotion she could admire. Her natural temperament was serious, reflective, and prayerful. Her mind, so far as religion was concerned, was very much in the state of that of any intellectual, high-minded, uncorruptible Roman, who renounced, without opposing, the idolatry of the benighted multitude; who groped painfully for some revelation of God and of truth; who at times believed fully in a superintending providence, and again had fears whether there were any God or any immortality. In the processions, the relics, the grotesque garb, and the spiritual terrors wielded by the Roman Catholic priesthood, she could behold but barefaced deception. The papal system appeared to her but as a colossal monster, oppressing the people with hideous superstition, and sustaining, with its superhuman energies, the corruption of the nobles and of the throne. In rejecting this system, she had no friend to conduct her to the warm, sheltered, and congenial retreats of evangelical piety. She was led almost inevitably, by the philosophy of the times, to those chilling, barren, storm-swept heights, where the soul can find no shelter but in its own indomitable energies of endurance. These energies Madame Roland displayed in such a degree as to give her a name among the very first of those in any age who by _heroism_ have shed luster upon human nature. Under the influence of these feelings, she came to the conclusion that it would be more honorable for her to die by her own hand than to be dragged to the guillotine by her foes. She obtained some poison, and sat down calmly to write her last thoughts, and her last messages of love, before she should plunge into the deep mystery of the unknown. There is something exceedingly affecting in the vague and shadowy prayer which she offered on this occasion. It betrays a painful uncertainty whether there were any superintending Deity to hear her cry, and yet it was the soul's instinctive breathing for a support higher and holier than could be found within itself. "Divinity! Supreme Being! Spirit of the Universe! great principle of all that I feel great, or good, or immortal within myself--whose existence I believe in, because I must have emanated from something superior to that by which I am surrounded--I am about to reunite myself to thy essence." In her farewell note to her husband, she writes, "Forgive me, my esteemed and justly-honored husband, for taking upon myself to dispose of a life I had consecrated to you. Believe me, I could have loved life and you better for your misfortunes, had I been permitted to share them with you. At present, by my death, you are only freed from a useless object of unavailing anguish." All the fountains of a mother's love gush forth as she writes to her idolized Eudora: "Pardon me, my beloved child, my sweet daughter, whose gentle image dwells within my heart, and whose very remembrance shakes my sternest resolution. Never would your fond mother have left you helpless in the world, could she but have remained to guide and guard you." Then, apostrophizing her friends, she exclaims, "And you, my cherished friends, transfer to my motherless child the affection you have ever manifested for me. Grieve not at a resolution which ends my many and severe trials. You know me too well to believe that weakness or terror have instigated the step I am about to take." She made her will, bequeathing such trifling souvenirs of affection as still remained in her possession to her daughter, her friends, and her servants. She then reverted to all she had loved and admired of the beauties of nature, and which she was now to leave forever. "Farewell!" she wrote, "farewell, glorious sun! that never failed to gild my windows with thy golden rays, ere thou hiddest thy brightness in the heavens. Adieu, ye lonely banks of the Saône, whose wild beauty could fill my heart with such deep delight. And you too, poor but honest people of Thizy, whose labors I lightened, whose distress I relieved, and whose sick beds I tended--farewell! Adieu, oh! peaceful chambers of my childhood, where I learned to love virtue and truth--where my imagination found in books and study the food to delight it, and where I learned in silence to command my passions and to despise my vanity. Again farewell, my child! Remember your mother. Doubtless your fate will be less severe than hers. Adieu, beloved child! whom I nourished at my breast, and earnestly desired to imbue with every feeling and opinion I myself entertained." The cup of poison was in her hand. In her heart there was no consciousness that she should violate the command of any higher power by drinking it. But love for her child triumphed. The smile of Eudora rose before her, and for her sake she clung to life. She threw away the poison, resolved never again to think of a voluntary withdrawal from the cares and sorrows of her earthly lot, but with unwavering fortitude to surrender herself to those influences over which she could no longer exert any control. This brief conflict ended, she resumed her wonted composure and cheerfulness. Tacitus was now her favorite author. Hours and days she passed in studying his glowing descriptions of heroic character and deeds. Heroism became her religion; magnanimity and fortitude the idols of her soul. With a glistening eye and a bosom throbbing with lofty emotion, she meditated upon his graphic paintings of the martyrdom of patriots and philosophers, where the soul, by its inherent energies, triumphed over obloquy, and pain, and death. Anticipating that each day might conduct her to the scaffold, she led her spirit through all the possible particulars of the tragic drama, that she might become familiar with terror, and look upon the block and the ax with an undaunted eye. Many hours of every day she beguiled in writing the memoirs of her own life. It was an eloquent and a touching narrative, written with the expectation that each sentence might be interrupted by the entrance of the executioners to conduct her to trial and to the guillotine. In this unveiling of the heart to the world, one sees a noble nature, generous and strong, animated to benevolence by native generosity, and nerved to resignation by fatalism. The consciousness of spiritual elevation constituted her only religion and her only solace. The anticipation of a lofty reputation after death was her only heaven. The Christian must pity while he must admire. No one can read the thoughts she penned but with the deepest emotion. Now her mind wanders to the hours of her precocious and dreamy childhood, and lingers in her little chamber, gazing upon the golden sunset, and her eye is bathed in tears as she reflects upon her early home, desolated by death, and still more desolated by that unhonored union which the infidelity of the times tolerated, when one took the position of the wife unblessed by the sanction of Heaven. Again her spirit wings its flight through the gloomy bars of the prison to the beautiful rural home to which her bridal introduced her, where she spent her happiest years, and she forgets the iron, and the stone, and the dungeon-glooms which surround her, as in imagination she walks again among her flowers and through the green fields, and, at the vintage, eats the rich, ripe clusters of the grape. Her pleasant household cares, her dairy, the domestic fowls recognizing her voice, and fed from her own hand; her library and her congenial intellectual pursuits rise before her, an entrancing vision, and she mourns, like Eve, the loss of Eden. The days of celebrity and of power engross her thoughts. Her husband is again minister of the king. The most influential statesmen and brilliant orators are gathered around her chair. Her mind is guiding the surging billows of the Revolution, and influencing the decisions of the proudest thrones of Europe. The slightest movement dispels the illusion. From dreams she awakes to reality. She is a prisoner in a gloomy cell of stone and iron, from which there is no possible extrication. A bloody death awaits her. Her husband is a fugitive, pursued by human blood-hounds more merciless than the brute. Her daughter, the object of her most idolatrous love, is left fatherless and motherless in this cold world. The guillotine has already consigned many of those whom she loved best to the grave. But a few more days of sorrow can dimly struggle through her prison windows ere she must be conducted to the scaffold. Woman's nature triumphs over philosophic fortitude, and she finds momentary relief in a flood of tears. The Girondists were led from their dungeons in the Conciergerie to their execution on the 31st of October, 1793. Upon that very day Madame Roland was conveyed from the prison of St. Pélagié to the same gloomy cells vacated by the death of her friends. She was cast into a bare and miserable dungeon, in that subterranean receptacle of woe, where there was not even a bed. Another prisoner, moved with compassion, drew his own pallet into her cell, that she might not be compelled to throw herself for repose upon the cold, wet stones. The chill air of winter had now come, and yet no covering was allowed her. Through the long night she shivered with the cold. The prison of the Conciergerie consists of a series of dark and damp subterranean vaults situated beneath the floor of the Palace of Justice. Imagination can conceive of nothing more dismal than these somber caverns, with long and winding galleries opening into cells as dark as the tomb. You descend by a flight of massive stone steps into this sepulchral abode, and, passing through double doors, whose iron strength time has deformed but not weakened, you enter upon the vast labyrinthine prison, where the imagination wanders affrighted through intricate mazes of halls, and arches, and vaults, and dungeons, rendered only more appalling by the dim light which struggles through those grated orifices which pierced the massive walls. The Seine flows by upon one side, separated only by the high way of the quays. The bed of the Seine is above the floor of the prison. The surrounding earth was consequently saturated with water, and the oozing moisture diffused over the walls and the floors the humidity of the sepulcher. The plash of the river; the rumbling of carts upon the pavements overhead; the heavy tramp of countless footfalls, as the multitude poured into and out of the halls of justice, mingled with the moaning of the prisoners in those solitary cells. There were one or two narrow courts scattered in this vast structure, where the prisoners could look up the precipitous walls, as of a well, towering high above them, and see a few square yards of sky. The gigantic quadrangular tower, reared above these firm foundations, was formerly the imperial palace from which issued all power and law. Here the French kings reveled in voluptuousness, with their prisoners groaning beneath their feet. This strong-hold of feudalism had now become the tomb of the monarchy. In one of the most loathsome of these cells, Maria Antoinette, the daughter of the Cæsars, had languished in misery as profound as mortals can suffer, till, in the endurance of every conceivable insult, she was dragged to the guillotine. It was into a cell adjoining that which the hapless queen had occupied that Madame Roland was cast. Here the proud daughter of the emperors of Austria and the humble child of the artisan, each, after a career of unexampled vicissitudes, found their paths to meet but a few steps from the scaffold. The victim of the monarchy and the victim of the Revolution were conducted to the same dungeons and perished on the same block. They met as antagonists in the stormy arena of the French Revolution. They were nearly of equal age. The one possessed the prestige of wealth, and rank, and ancestral power; the other, the energy of a vigorous and cultivated mind. Both were endowed with unusual attractions of person, spirits invigorated by enthusiasm, and the loftiest heroism. From the antagonism of life they met in death. CHAPTER XII TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF MADAME ROLAND. 1793 Examination of Madame Roland.--Her esteem for the Girondists.--Eloquent defence of Madame Roland.--Madame Roland's reasons for not escaping.--Madame Roland's opinion of the Girondists.--Madame Roland's opinion of the Revolution.--Madame Roland's estimate of her husband.--Madame Roland's correspondence with Duperret.--Effects of prejudices and violent animosities.--Madame Roland avows her opinions.--Madame Roland's apostrophe to Liberty.--Repeated examinations.--Madame Roland's self-possession.--Madame Roland's enthusiasm.--Her influence upon the prisoners.--Madame Roland's addresses to the prisoners.--Effects of her eloquence.--Madame Roland's musical voice.--Her friendship for the Girondists.--Charming character of Madame Roland.--She is loved and esteemed.--Madame Roland's advocate.--Her appearance at the tribunal.--Demand of the president.--Madame Roland's refusal.--The sentence.--Madame Roland's dignity and calmness.--She returns to her cell.--Madame Roland's requiem.--She attires herself for the bridal of death.--The passage to the guillotine.--Horrible pastime.--Madame Roland's appearance in the cart.--She addresses the mob.--Powerful emotions of Madame Roland.--Work of the executioners.--Scene at the scaffold.--Execution of the old man.--Situation of the guillotine.--Death of Madame Roland.--Wonderful attachment.--Grief of M. Roland.--Death of M. Roland.--Subsequent life of Eudora. The day after Madame Roland was placed in the Conciergerie, she was visited by one of the notorious officers of the revolutionary party, and very closely questioned concerning the friendship she had entertained for the Girondists. She frankly avowed the elevated affection and esteem with which she cherished their memory, but she declared that she and they were the cordial friends of republican liberty; that they wished to preserve, not to destroy, the Constitution. The examination was vexatious and intolerant in the extreme. It lasted for three hours, and consisted in an incessant torrent of criminations, to which she was hardly permitted to offer one word in reply. This examination taught her the nature of the accusations which would be brought against her. She sat down in her cell that very night, and, with a rapid pen, sketched that defense which has been pronounced one of the most eloquent and touching monuments of the Revolution. It so beautifully illustrates the heroism of her character, the serenity of her spirit, and the beauty and energy of her mental operations, that it will ever be read with the liveliest interest. "I am accused," she writes, "of being the accomplice of men called conspirators. My intimacy with a few of these gentlemen is of much older date than the occurrences in consequence of which they are now deemed rebels. Our correspondence, since they left Paris, has been entirely foreign to public affairs. Properly speaking, I have been engaged in no political correspondence whatever, and in that respect I might confine myself to a simple denial. I certainly can not be called upon to give an account of my particular affections. I have, however, the right to be proud of these friendships. I glory in them. I wish to conceal nothing. I acknowledge that, with expressions of regret at my confinement, I received an intimation that Duperret had two letters for me, whether written by one or by two of my friends, before or after their leaving Paris, I can not say. Duperret had delivered them into other hands, and they never came to mine. Another time I received a pressing invitation to break my chains, and an offer of services, to assist me in effecting my escape in any way I might think proper, and to convey me whithersoever I might afterward wish to go. I was dissuaded from listening to such proposals by duty and by honor: by duty, that I might not endanger the safety of those to whose care I was confided; and by honor, because I preferred the risk of an unjust trial to exposing myself to the suspicion of guilt by a flight unworthy of me. When I consented to my arrest, it was not with the intention of afterward making my escape. Without doubt, if all means of communication had not been cut off, or if I had not been prevented by confinement, I should have endeavored to learn what had become of my friends. I know of no law by which my doing so is forbidden. In what age or in what nation was it ever considered a crime to be faithful to those sentiments of esteem and brotherly affection which bind man to man? "I do not pretend to judge of the measures of those who have been proscribed, but I will never believe in the evil intentions of men of whose probity and patriotism I am thoroughly convinced. If they erred, it was unintentionally. They fall without being abased, and I regard them as being unfortunate without being liable to blame. I am perfectly easy as to their glory, and willingly consent to participate in the honor of being oppressed by their enemies. They are accused of having conspired against their country, but I know that they were firm friends of the Republic. They were, however, humane men, and were persuaded that good laws were necessary to procure the Republic the good will of persons who doubted whether the Republic could be maintained. It is more difficult to conciliate than to kill. The history of every age proves that it requires great talents to lead men to virtue by wise institutions, while force suffices to oppress them by terror, or to annihilate them by death. I have often heard them assert that abundance, as well as happiness, can only proceed from an equitable, protecting, and beneficent government. The omnipotence of the bayonet may produce fear, but not bread. I have seen them animated by the most lively enthusiasm for the good of the people, disdaining to flatter them, and resolved rather to fall victims to their delusion than to be the means of keeping it up. I confess that these principles and this conduct appeared to me totally different from the sentiments and proceedings of tyrants, or ambitious men, who seek to please the people to effect their subjugation. It inspired me with the highest esteem for those generous men. This error, if an error it be, will accompany me to the grave, whither I shall be proud of following those whom I was not permitted to accompany. "My defense is more important for those who wish for the truth than it is for myself. Calm and contented in the consciousness of having done my duty, I look forward to futurity with perfect peace of mind. My serious turn and studious habits have preserved me alike from the follies of dissipation and from the bustle of intrigue. A friend to liberty, on which reflection had taught me to set a just value, I beheld the Revolution with delight, persuaded it was destined to put an end to the arbitrary power I detested, and to the abuses I had so often lamented, when reflecting with pity upon the indigent classes of society. I took an interest in the progress of the Revolution, and spoke with warmth of public affairs, but I did not pass the bounds prescribed by my sex. Some small talents, a considerable share of philosophy, a degree of courage more uncommon, and which did not permit me to weaken my husband's energy in dangerous times--such, perhaps, are the qualities which those who know me may have indiscreetly extolled, and which may have made me enemies among those to whom I am unknown. M. Roland sometimes employed me as a secretary, and the famous letter to the king, for instance, is copied entirely in my hand-writing. This would be an excellent item to add to my indictment, if the _Austrians_ were trying me, and if they should have thought fit to extend a minister's responsibility to his wife. But M. Roland long ago manifested his knowledge of, and his attachment to, the great principles of political economy. The proof is to be found in his numerous works published during the last fifteen years. His learning and his probity are all his own. He stood in no need of a wife to make him an able minister. Never were secret councils held at his house. His colleagues and a few friends met once a week at his table, and there conversed, in a public manner, on matters in which every body was concerned. His writings, which breathe throughout a love of order and peace, and which enforce the best principles of public prosperity and morals, will forever attest his wisdom. His accounts prove his integrity. "As to the offense imputed to me, I observe that I never was intimate with Duperret. I saw him occasionally at the time of M. Roland's administration. He never came to our house during the six months that my husband was no longer in office. The same remark will apply to other members, our friends, which surely does not accord with the plots and conspiracies laid to our charge. It is evident, by my first letter to Duperret, I only wrote to him because I knew not to whom else to address myself, and because I imagined he would readily consent to oblige me. My correspondence with him could not, then, be concerted. It could not be the consequence of any previous intimacy, and could have only one object in view. It gave me afterward an opportunity of receiving accounts from those who had just absented themselves, and with whom I was connected by the ties of friendship, independently of all political considerations. The latter were totally out of the question in the kind of correspondence I kept up with them during the early part of their absence. No written memorial bears witness against me in that respect. Those adduced only lead to the belief that I partook of the opinions and sentiments of the persons called conspirators. This deduction is well founded. I confess it without reserve. I am proud of the conformity. But I never manifested my opinion in a way which can be construed into a crime, or which tended to occasion any disturbance. Now, to become an accomplice in any plan whatever, it is necessary to give advice, or to furnish means of execution. I have done neither. There is no law to condemn me. "I know that, in revolutions, law as well as justice is often forgotten, and the proof of it is that I am here. I owe my trial to nothing but the prejudices and violent animosities which arise in times of great agitation, and which are generally directed against those who have been placed in conspicuous situations, or are known to possess any energy or spirit. It would have been easy for my courage to put me out of the reach of the sentence which I foresaw would be pronounced against me. But I thought it rather became me to undergo that sentence. I thought that I owed the example to my country. I thought that if I were to be condemned, it must be right to leave to tyranny all the odium of sacrificing a woman, whose crime is that of possessing some small talent, which she never misapplied, a zealous desire to promote the welfare of mankind, and courage enough to acknowledge her friends when in misfortune, and to do homage to virtue at the risk of life. Minds which have any claim to greatness are capable of divesting themselves of selfish considerations. They feel that they belong to the whole human race. Their views are directed to posterity. I am the wife of a virtuous man exposed to persecution. I was the friend of men who have been proscribed and immolated by delusion, and the hatred of jealous mediocrity. It is necessary that I should perish in my turn, because it is a rule with tyranny to sacrifice those whom it has grievously oppressed, and to annihilate the very witnesses of its misdeeds. I have this double claim to death at your hands, and I expect it. When innocence walks to the scaffold at the command of error and perversity, every step she takes is an advance toward glory. May I be the last victim sacrificed to the furious spirit of party. I shall leave with joy this unfortunate earth, which swallows up the friends of virtue and drinks the blood of the just. "Truth! friendship! my country! sacred objects, sentiments dear to my heart, accept my last sacrifice. My life was devoted to you, and you will render my death easy and glorious. "Just Heaven! enlighten this unfortunate people for whom I desired liberty. Liberty! it is for noble minds, who despise death, and who know how, upon occasion, to give it to themselves. It is not for weak beings, who enter into a composition with guilt, and cover selfishness and cowardice with the name of prudence. It is not for corrupt wretches, who rise from the bed of debauchery, or from the mire of indigence, to feast their eyes upon the blood that streams from the scaffold. It is the portion of a people who delight in humanity, practice justice, despise their flatterers, and respect the truth. While you are not such a people, O my fellow-citizens! you will talk in vain of liberty. Instead of liberty you will have licentiousness, to which you will all fall victims in your turn. You will ask for bread; dead bodies will be given you, and you at last will bow down your own necks to the yoke. "I have neither concealed my sentiments nor my opinions. I know that a Roman lady was sent to the scaffold for lamenting the death of her son. I know that, in times of delusion and party rage, he who dares avow himself the friend of the condemned or of the proscribed exposes himself to their fate. But I have no fear of death. I never feared any thing but guilt, and I will not purchase life at the expense of a base subterfuge. Woe to the times! woe to the people among whom doing homage to disregarded truth can be attended with danger; and happy is he who, in such circumstances, is bold enough to brave it. "It is now your part to see whether it answer your purpose to condemn me without proof upon mere matter of opinion, and without the support or justification of any law." Having concluded this magnanimous defense, which she wrote in one evening with the rapidity which characterized all her mental operations, she retired to rest, and slept with the serenity of a child. She was called upon several times by committees sent from the revolutionary tribunal for examination. They were resolved to take her life, but were anxious to do it, if possible, under the forms of law. She passed through all their examinations with the most perfect composure and the most dignified self-possession. Her enemies could not withhold their expressions of admiration as they saw her in her sepulchral cell of stone and of iron, cheerful, fascinating, and perfectly at ease. She knew that she was to be led from that cell to a violent death, and yet no faltering of soul could be detected. Her spirit had apparently achieved a perfect victory over all earthly ills. The upper part of the door of her cell was an iron grating. The surrounding cells were filled with the most illustrious ladies and gentlemen of France. As the hour of death drew near, her courage and animation seemed to increase. Her features glowed with enthusiasm; her thoughts and expressions were refulgent with sublimity, and her whole aspect assumed the impress of one appointed to fill some great and lofty destiny. She remained but a few days in the Conciergerie before she was led to the scaffold. During those few days, by her example and her encouraging words, she spread among the numerous prisoners there an enthusiasm and a spirit of heroism which elevated, above the fear of the scaffold, even the most timid and depressed. This glow of feeling and exhilaration gave a new impress of sweetness and fascination to her beauty. The length of her captivity, the calmness with which she contemplated the certain approach of death, gave to her voice that depth of tone and slight tremulousness of utterance which sent her eloquent words home with thrilling power to every heart. Those who were walking in the corridor, or who were the occupants of adjoining cells, often called for her to speak to them words of encouragement and consolation. Standing upon a stool at the door of her own cell, she grasped with her hands the iron grating which separated her from her audience. This was her tribune. The melodious accents of her voice floated along the labyrinthine avenues of those dismal dungeons, penetrating cell after cell, and arousing energy in hearts which had been abandoned to despair. It was, indeed, a strange scene which was thus witnessed in these sepulchral caverns. The silence, as of the grave, reigned there, while the clear and musical tones of Madame Roland, as of an angel of consolation, vibrated through the rusty bars, and along the dark, damp cloisters. One who was at that time an inmate of the prison, and survived those dreadful scenes, has described, in glowing terms, the almost miraculous effects of her soul-moving eloquence. She was already past the prime of life, but she was still fascinating. Combined with the most wonderful power of expression, she possessed a voice so exquisitely musical, that, long after her lips were silenced in death, its tones vibrated in lingering strains in the souls of those by whom they had ever been heard. The prisoners listened with the most profound attention to her glowing words, and regarded her almost as a celestial spirit, who had come to animate them to heroic deeds. She often spoke of the Girondists who had already perished upon the guillotine. With perfect fearlessness she avowed her friendship for them, and ever spoke of them as _our friends_. She, however, was careful never to utter a word which would bring tears into the eye. She wished to avoid herself all the weakness of tender emotions, and to lure the thoughts of her companions away from every contemplation which could enervate their energies. Occasionally, in the solitude of her cell, as the image of her husband and of her child rose before her, and her imagination dwelt upon her desolated home and her blighted hopes--her husband denounced and pursued by lawless violence, and her child soon to be an orphan--woman's tenderness would triumph over the heroine's stoicism. Burying, for a moment, her face in her hands, she would burst into a flood of tears. Immediately struggling to regain composure, she would brush her tears away, and dress her countenance in its accustomed smiles. She remained in the Conciergerie but one week, and during that time so endeared herself to all as to become the prominent object of attention and love. Her case is one of the most extraordinary the history of the world has presented, in which the very highest degree of heroism is combined with the most resistless charms of feminine loveliness. An unfeminine woman can never be _loved_ by men. She may be respected for her talents, she may be honored for her philanthropy, but she can not win the warmer emotions of the heart. But Madame Roland, with an energy of will, an infallibility of purpose, a firmness of stoical endurance which no mortal man has ever exceeded, combined that gentleness, and tenderness, and affection--that instinctive sense of the proprieties of her sex--which gathered around her a love as pure and as enthusiastic as woman ever excited. And while her friends, many of whom were the most illustrious men in France, had enthroned her as an idol in their hearts, the breath of slander never ventured to intimate that she was guilty even of an impropriety. The day before her trial, her advocate, Chauveau de la Garde, visited her to consult respecting her defense. She, well aware that no one could speak a word in her favor but at the peril of his own life, and also fully conscious that her doom was already sealed, drew a ring from her finger, and said to him, "To-morrow I shall be no more. I know the fate which awaits me. Your kind assistance can not avail aught for me, and would but endanger you. I pray you, therefore, not to come to the tribunal, but to accept of this last testimony of my regard." The next day she was led to her trial. She attired herself in a white robe, as a symbol of her innocence, and her long dark hair fell in thick curls on her neck and shoulders. She emerged from her dungeon a vision of unusual loveliness. The prisoners who were walking in the corridors gathered around her, and with smiles and words of encouragement she infused energy into their hearts. Calm and invincible she met her judges. She was accused of the crimes of being the wife of M. Roland and the friend of his friends. Proudly she acknowledged herself guilty of both those charges. Whenever she attempted to utter a word in her defense, she was brow-beaten by the judges, and silenced by the clamors of the mob which filled the tribunal. The mob now ruled with undisputed sway in both legislative and executive halls. The serenity of her eye was untroubled, and the composure of her disciplined spirit unmoved, save by the exaltation of enthusiasm, as she noted the progress of the trial, which was bearing her rapidly and resistlessly to the scaffold. It was, however, difficult to bring any accusation against her by which, under the form of law, she could be condemned. France, even in its darkest hour, was rather ashamed to behead a woman, upon whom the eyes of all Europe were fixed, simply for being the _wife of her husband and the friend of his friends_. At last the president demanded of her that she should reveal her husband's asylum. She proudly replied, "I do not know of any law by which I can be obliged to violate the strongest feelings of nature." This was sufficient, and she was immediately condemned. Her sentence was thus expressed: "The public accuser has drawn up the present indictment against Jane Mary Phlippon, the wife of Roland, late Minister of the Interior for having wickedly and designedly aided and assisted in the conspiracy which existed against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic, against the liberty and safety of the French people, by assembling, at her house, in secret council, the principal chiefs of that conspiracy, and by keeping up a correspondence tending to facilitate their treasonable designs. The tribunal, having heard the public accuser deliver his reasons concerning the application of the law, condemns Jane Mary Phlippon, wife of Roland, to the punishment of death." She listened calmly to her sentence, and then, rising, bowed with dignity to her judges, and, smiling, said, "I thank you, gentlemen, for thinking me worthy of sharing the fate of the great men whom you have assassinated. I shall endeavor to imitate their firmness on the scaffold." With the buoyant step of a child, and with a rapidity which almost betokened joy, she passed beneath the narrow portal, and descended to her cell, from which she was to be led, with the morning light, to a bloody death. The prisoners had assembled to greet her on her return, and anxiously gathered around her. She looked upon them with a smile of perfect tranquillity, and, drawing her hand across her neck, made a sign expressive of her doom. But a few hours elapsed between her sentence and her execution. She retired to her cell, wrote a few words of parting to her friends, played, upon a harp which had found its way into the prison, her requiem, in tones so wild and mournful, that, floating, in the dark hours of the night, through those sepulchral caverns, they fell like unearthly music upon the despairing souls there incarcerated. The morning of the 10th of November, 1793, dawned gloomily upon Paris. It was one of the darkest days of that reign of terror which, for so long a period, enveloped France in its somber shades. The ponderous gates of the court-yard of the Conciergerie opened that morning to a long procession of carts loaded with victims for the guillotine. Madame Roland had contemplated her fate too long, and had disciplined her spirit too severely, to fail of fortitude in this last hour of trial. She came from her cell scrupulously attired for the bridal of death. A serene smile was upon her cheek, and the glow of joyous animation lighted up her features as she waved an adieu to the weeping prisoners who gathered around her. The last cart was assigned to Madame Roland. She entered it with a step as light and elastic as if it were a carriage for a pleasant morning's drive. By her side stood an infirm old man, M. La Marche. He was pale and trembling, and his fainting heart, in view of the approaching terror, almost ceased to beat. She sustained him by her arm, and addressed to him words of consolation and encouragement, in cheerful accents and with a benignant smile. The poor old man felt that God had sent an angel to strengthen him in the dark hour of death. As the cart heavily rumbled along the pavement, drawing nearer and nearer to the guillotine, two or three times, by her cheerful words, she even caused a smile faintly to play upon his pallid lips. The guillotine was now the principal instrument of amusement for the populace of Paris. It was so elevated that all could have a good view of the spectacle it presented. To witness the conduct of nobles and of ladies, of boys and of girls, while passing through the horrors of a sanguinary death, was far more exciting than the unreal and bombastic tragedies of the theater, or the conflicts of the cock-pit and the bear garden. A countless throng flooded the streets, men, women, and children, shouting, laughing, execrating. The celebrity of Madame Roland, her extraordinary grace and beauty, and her aspect, not only of heroic fearlessness, but of joyous exhilaration, made her the prominent object of the public gaze. A white robe gracefully enveloped her perfect form, and her black and glossy hair, which for some reason the executioners had neglected to cut, fell in rich profusion to her waist. A keen November blast swept the streets, under the influence of which, and the excitement of the scene, her animated countenance glowed with all the ruddy bloom of youth. She stood firmly in the cart, looking with a serene eye upon the crowds which lined the streets, and listening with unruffled serenity to the clamor which filled the air. A large crowd surrounded the cart in which Madame Roland stood, shouting, "To the guillotine! to the guillotine!" She looked kindly upon them, and, bending over the railing of the cart, said to them, in tones as placid as if she were addressing her own child, "My friends, I _am_ going to the guillotine. In a few moments I shall be there. They who send me thither will ere long follow me. I go innocent. They will come stained with blood. You who now applaud our execution will then applaud theirs with equal zeal." Madame Roland had continued writing her memoirs until the hour in which she left her cell for the scaffold. When the cart had almost arrived at the foot of the guillotine, her spirit was so deeply moved by the tragic scene--such emotions came rushing in upon her soul from departing time and opening eternity, that she could not repress the desire to pen down her glowing thoughts. She entreated an officer to furnish her for a moment with pen and paper. The request was refused. It is much to be regretted that we are thus deprived of that unwritten chapter of her life. It can not be doubted that the words she would then have written would have long vibrated upon the ear of a listening world. Soul-utterances will force their way over mountains, and valleys, and oceans. Despotism can not arrest them. Time can not enfeeble them. The long procession arrived at the guillotine, and the bloody work commenced. The victims were dragged from the carts, and the ax rose and fell with unceasing rapidity. Head after head fell into the basket, and the pile of bleeding trunks rapidly increased in size. The executioners approached the cart where Madame Roland stood by the side of her fainting companion. With an animated countenance and a cheerful smile, she was all engrossed in endeavoring to infuse fortitude into his soul. The executioner grasped her by the arm. "Stay," said she, slightly resisting his grasp; "I have one favor to ask, and that is not for myself. I beseech you grant it me." Then turning to the old man, she said, "Do you precede me to the scaffold. To see my blood flow would make you suffer the bitterness of death twice over. I must spare you the pain of witnessing my execution." The stern officer gave a surly refusal, replying, "My orders are to take you first." With that winning smile and that fascinating grace which were almost resistless, she rejoined, "You can not, surely, refuse a woman her last request." The hard-hearted executor of the law was brought within the influence of her enchantment. He paused, looked at her for a moment in slight bewilderment, and yielded. The poor old man, more dead than alive, was conducted upon the scaffold and placed beneath the fatal ax. Madame Roland, without the slightest change of color, or the apparent tremor of a nerve, saw the ponderous instrument, with its glittering edge, glide upon its deadly mission, and the decapitated trunk of her friend was thrown aside to give place for her. With a placid countenance and a buoyant step, she ascended the platform. The guillotine was erected upon the vacant spot between the gardens of the Tuileries and the Elysian Fields, then known as the Place de la Revolution. This spot is now called the Place de la Concorde. It is unsurpassed by any other place in Europe. Two marble fountains now embellish the spot. The blood-stained guillotine, from which crimson rivulets were ever flowing, then occupied the space upon which one of these fountains has been erected; and a clay statue to Liberty reared its hypocritical front where the Egyptian obelisk now rises. Madame Roland stood for a moment upon the elevated platform, looked calmly around upon the vast concourse, and then bowing before the colossal statue, exclaimed, "O Liberty! Liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name." She surrendered herself to the executioner, and was bound to the plank. The plank fell to its horizontal position, bringing her head under the fatal ax. The glittering steel glided through the groove, and the head of Madame Roland was severed from her body. [Illustration: EXECUTION OF MADAME ROLAND.] Thus died Madame Roland, in the thirty-ninth year of her age. Her death oppressed all who had known her with the deepest grief. Her intimate friend Buzot, who was then a fugitive, on hearing the tidings, was thrown into a state of perfect delirium, from which he did not recover for many days. Her faithful female servant was so overwhelmed with grief, that she presented herself before the tribunal, and implored them to let her die upon the same scaffold where her beloved mistress had perished. The tribunal, amazed at such transports of attachment, declared that she was mad, and ordered her to be removed from their presence. A man-servant made the same application, and was sent to the guillotine. The grief of M. Roland, when apprised of the event, was unbounded. For a time he entirely lost his senses. Life to him was no longer endurable. He knew not of any consolations of religion. Philosophy could only nerve him to stoicism. Privately he left, by night, the kind friends who had hospitably concealed him for six months, and wandered to such a distance from his asylum as to secure his protectors from any danger on his account. Through the long hours of the winter's night he continued his dreary walk, till the first gray of the morning appeared in the east. Drawing a long stiletto from the inside of his walking-stick, he placed the head of it against the trunk of a tree, and threw himself upon the sharp weapon. The point pierced his heart, and he fell lifeless upon the frozen ground. Some peasants passing by discovered his body. A piece of paper was pinned to the breast of his coat, upon which there were written these words: "Whoever thou art that findest these remains, respect them as those of a virtuous man. After hearing of my wife's death, I would not stay another day in a world so stained with crime." The daughter of Madame Roland succeeded in escaping the fury of the tyrants of the Revolution. She lived surrounded by kind protectors, and in subsequent years was married to M. Champeneaux, the son of one of her mother's intimate friends. Such was the wonderful career of Madame Roland. It is a history full of instruction, and ever reminds us that truth is stranger than fiction. THE END. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: 1. Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors, and to ensure consistent spelling and punctuation in this etext; otherwise, every effort has been made to remain true to the original book. 2. The sidenotes used in this text were originally published as banners in the page headers, and have been collected at the beginning of each chapter for the reader's convenience. 
59376	----	THE PATRIOT BY CHARLES L. FONTENAY _Earth was through with war. And while it is right that man have peace, it is also right that he have freedom. But Mars was in slavery, and to Mars Cornel Lorensse dedicated his life and his talent...._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, August 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] _The Martianne_ is heard occasionally these days as a stirring concert or band selection. But there was a time when its playing was punishable by death--and its defiant strains challenged the harried police in tavern and drawing room all over the Earth. In the days just before one _marche militaire_ changed two worlds, Earth was weary of war, afraid of war, and desired to put behind it all reminders of war. The psychosociologists said uniforms of policemen, of postmen, of airline pilots, of lodge brethren, of theater ushers, were militaristic, and they were abolished. The psychosociologists said the march rhythm in music was nationalistic and instigated combative feelings, and it was banned. The scenes, the sounds, the sights of antagonisms between men were forbidden. The _Polonaise_, the _Marseillaise_, the _March of the Toys_, all suffered the same fate. Sousa's marches and Tschaikovsky's _1812 Overture_ went the same way. _Dixie_ and the _Hawaiian War Chant_ were treated alike. All were relegated to tape in dusty archives, and their sale or public performance forbidden on pain of fine and prison sentence. Whatever unlawful violence there might be on faraway Mars, Earth was through with all forms of war and its trappings. Into these circumstances, Cornel Lorensse intruded on the night of December 6, 2010. He pressed his thin face against the steam-misted window of _The Avatar_ in Nuyork and saw a piano standing idle inside. _The Avatar_ was one of those small restaurants sunk a few feet below sidewalk level, which catered with exotic dishes to the tastes of a select group. It was well-populated at this hour, and Cornel licked his lips hungrily at the epicurean delights unveiled at each table. He felt in the pocket of his worn coveralls. A single coin answered the exploration of his fingers. He was down to his last resource, and he was no nearer to finding the Friends than he had been when he landed. He looked again at the piano, hesitated, then went down the three steps to the restaurant's door, pushed it open and went in. It was his good fortune that Wan Ti, owner of _The Avatar_ was receiving his guests in person at the moment. "I'll play you a concert for a meal," said Cornel, gesturing toward the piano. Wan Ti's dark eyes swept over him, taking in the battered coveralls, the earnest face, the untrimmed blond hair, the slender hands. Wan Ti's yellow countenance remained bland. "I have a piano player," said Wan Ti. Cornel laughed, with a note of desperation in his tone. "Let me play one selection," he urged. "If you want to stop me then, you can kick me out." What Wan Ti thought could not be gauged from his expression, but he had not built his clientele against fierce competition by turning his face away from the unusual. He inclined his head slightly, and waved Cornel to the piano. Cornel sat down at the keyboard, brushed his hair back from his eyes, and flexed his long fingers. Thrusting the tantalizing aroma of food to the back of his mind, he played. The murmur of conversation in _The Avatar_ faltered and died as the fervid melody of Beethoven's _Sonata Appassionata_ filled the air. It was unusual music to people accustomed to hearing the more modern compositions of Schonberg, Harris and Westine. The comparison of Cornel's inspired touch to the mechanical renditions of Wan Ti's regular piano player was noticeable even to those who were unfamiliar with music. When the final movements of the _allegro ma non troppo_ faded, Cornel sat back and looked toward Wan Ti. The proprietor cocked an ear toward the rare applause, smiled and nodded slightly. Exultantly, Cornel swung into Chopin's _Fantasie-Impromptu_ and followed it, not pausing, with Liszt's _Waldesrauschen_ and Schubert's _Serenade_. The applause was just as enthusiastic, but by now the hum of voices and the click of eating utensils had begun to rise again. Frowning slightly, Cornel hunched his shoulders and began a composition the most musical of his audience had never heard before. Like the molten notes of the nightingale, the music floated and throbbed above the diners, almost a physical thing. The people in the restaurant paused with food halfway to their lips. They turned to see the artist, carefully, so that no chair would scrape. The waiters stopped with trays in their hands. Wan Ti stopped a newly arriving couple, his fingers at his lips. In the midst of the applause that roared through the room when Cornel had finished, a waiter tapped his shoulder. "Excuse me, sir," he said. "Miss Meta Erosine asks that you join her at her table." Rising and bowing to his audience, Cornel followed the man to a table at the rear of the room, where a woman sat with her escort. Meta Erosine's pale, heart-shaped face, with its mop of short black hair and luminous black eyes, was widely known on Earth, but Cornel had never been to Earth before. Her vibrant beauty blazed on a victim unprepared for it. She was clad in the cretan-can-can style just then becoming popular, with breasts exposed over a tight bodice and a short, ruffled skirt gathered in front to reveal the knees. She smoked a long-stemmed, tiny-bowled pipe, studded with jewels. Beside her sat a sleek, mustached young man in ruffled lavender shirt and pink tights, his fingers covered with rings. "Sit down and eat with me, musician," invited Meta. Somewhat dubiously, Cornel took a seat at her right, across the table from the beruffled escort. "Meta, I wish you wouldn't demean yourself by taking up with tramps and guttersnipes," objected her companion, wrinkling his nose. "Leave me, Passo," she ordered, waving an imperious hand. "Why should I sup with painted popinjays when I can adore genius?" Passo flushed and his mouth fell open. But he arose and slunk quietly away. "Now, musician," said Meta, leaning over the table so that her powdered breasts brushed the glassware, "tell me, what was that last number you played?" "One of my own compositions," he said diffidently. The odor of food was too much for him, and he leaned across the table to appropriate Passo's untouched salad. "Its name is _Wind in the Canals_." "It should be _Le Vent dans les Canals_," she said. "You should title your compositions in French--they will be more fashionable." "I don't know French," he said, munching a stick of celery. "We don't speak French on Mars." She laughed, a laugh like the music of his playing. "You will, my genius," she promised him. Her eyes ran over his lean face, his unkempt hair. "You look as though you could use shelter and clothing. Come home with me tonight. I shall give your genius to the world." * * * * * Cornel never had experienced such luxury as was his in the apartment Meta assigned to him in her magnificent home in Jersi. He had his personal servant. New clothes were waiting for him. A barber cut his hair when he had finished a hot, scented bath, and the big bed in which he slept was soft as down. Meta asked no information of him until they met at a late breakfast the next morning. There, beautiful in translucent white negligee, she sipped her coffee and asked questions. "I came from Mars to get help for my people," he said. "We need guns and supplies, food and oxygen equipment." "You're one of the Charax rebels?" she asked. "Rebels?" He snorted. "We're free people, fighting for our freedom. We want self-government, we want to own our land and our homes, we want the right to rule our own lives." "That's guaranteed in the Constitution," said Meta. "Earth's Constitution. Mars isn't Earth. The Mars Corporation controls both spaceports. It owns all business and industry on Mars. It's milking the planet dry of resources and profits, and it's set up a company government that makes the people of Mars no better than slaves." He smiled a bitter smile. "Earth's government protects the freedom of Earth's people," he said, "but the people of Earth don't know what's happening on Mars. The Mars Corporation has its senators and representatives, bought and paid for, so the Earth government sends troops and supplies to Mars to fight the battles of the Mars Corporation. We aren't rebels, we're fighting for our just freedom." "If the Mars Corporation controls the spaceports, how did you get to Earth?" she demanded. "We have three battered ships hidden in the desert near Syrtis Major," said Cornel. "It takes a long time for us to get fuel to take one of them up, but they thought it worthwhile if I could get to Earth and get help for my people." "Why you?" "My music is well known on Mars, and my people know that the people of Earth love music. Here on Earth, where there is peace and prosperity, people pay to hear good music and good musicians. Our plan was for me to give great concerts and at each concert ask the people of Earth to help their Martian brothers gain their freedom." "A good way to get arrested," said Meta dryly. "You'd be convicted of inciting military action and sentenced to prison in any court of Earth." "I didn't know that, but I suppose the Friends would have a way." "The Friends?" "The Friends of Mars. It's an organization of Earth people trying to help us. I suppose it must be a secret and illegal organization, for I found that the man I was supposed to get in touch with had been arrested, and I haven't been able to find out anything more about the Friends." "Such an organization would be illegal on Earth," said Meta. "Come here, Cornel. I want to show you something." Taking him by the arm, she led him from the breakfast room to a terrace overlooking a snowy valley. She moved closer to him in the chill wind that billowed her thin garments around her, and waved her hand at the scene below them. "This is Earth," she said. "Look at those mountain peaks, the blue sky and the white clouds. In summer, this valley is clothed with green, and warm breezes bring the scent of flowers to this terrace. Have you ever seen anything like this on Mars?" "No," he said softly. "Mars is always cold and dusty, and the sky is nearly black." "Cornel," she said softly, you're a great musician. Mars is rough frontier territory, and the frontier has no place for music. Last night you saw what your music could mean here. "Forget Mars. You belong to Earth." * * * * * The meteoric rise of Cornel Lorensse to fame in 2011 and 2012 now commands a full column in the _Encyclopaedia Terrestriana_. Brushed off in a single sentence in the encyclopaedia, but much discussed in that day, was his close relationship with Meta Erosine, his patroness. For half a decade, wealthy, beautiful Meta Erosine had been the toast of Earth. She was an actress, a painter, a singer, a socialite, and she had changed men almost as often as she changed the dresses she wore. Her face was familiar in newspapers and on television screens, her husky songs were on a million recording tapes, her colorful antics were the grist for magazine articles and the subject of denunciations from the pulpit. In Cornel she seemed to have found a vehicle for all the burning fire of her energy. She pushed him, she groomed him, she threw the power of her wealth behind him. His slender figure clad in a black velvet suit sat at polished pianos on a hundred stages; and for each concert, the auditoriums and the audiences were bigger. Meta was with him on these concert tours; and between tours he stayed in seclusion at the big house in Jersi, putting into music his memories of his native Mars. Each tour introduced to the world the new compositions of Cornel Lorensse. What he wrote and played was the haunting music of the deserts, the canals and the marches. Into his music he poured the loneliness of the red sands and the violence of the desert winds, the beauty of sable skies jeweled with enormous stars, the happiness of the helmeted traveler when he reaches the green valleys of the canals, the hopes and joys of human lovers gathered in bubble-like domes amid the chill wastelands. He did not, as Meta had wanted to, give his compositions French titles. He named them as he would have named them on Mars: _The Desert Wanderer_, _Swift Phobos_, _Marsh Gardens_, names that were strange to Earth, but were familiar themes of his own people. His melodies took music-loving Earth by storm. They burst upon a world in which 20th century dissonance had strangled 19th century romanticism, like flowers in a garden of crystal. It was Cornel Lorensse and those pioneer composers who avidly aped him who began the 21st century Renaissance in music. Without shame, Cornel lived on the largesse of his patroness, for his growing fees and royalties all went for one purpose. He had found the society called the Friends of Mars, and everything that he earned he poured into their coffers to finance privateer space vessels able to elude the Mars Corporation's company-owned warships and to keep a thin line of supplies flowing to the Free Martian people scattered in their desert strongholds. Like any secret society in a hostile culture, the Friends of Mars maintained dissociated chapters, connected by the slenderest and most carefully guarded lines of communication. Cornel knew of only one chapter, in Nuyork, and to this he took his contributions when he was between concert tours. During one of those visits, late in the summer of 2012, Javan Tomlin, chief of the chapter, told him that all he contributed was still not enough for Mars to become free. "Our base of support isn't broad enough," said Javan. "Ships cost money, fuel costs money, supplies cost money. Guns and ammunition are most expensive of all, because military weapons are illegal. No one man can support such an operation, even when he makes the kind of money you're making." There were half a dozen of the Friends of Mars, besides Cornel and Javan, in the meeting room. The others nodded agreement at Javan's words. "None of us are wealthy and we can't contribute much but our time and work," said one of them. "The wealthy people all sympathize with the Mars Corporation." "That's too much of a blanket indictment," said Javan. "The Mars Corporation controls the spacelines to Mars, and what little information comes back to Earth is censored and heavily propagandized in their favor. Most people don't know what's happening on Mars. Our people need a powerful radio transmitter to broadcast to Earth, Cornel." Cornel shook his head. "What information the people of Earth get must be disseminated on Earth," he said. "Powerful radio equipment would take up space and weight needed for arms. Besides, the Mars Corporation forces have air power and directional finders. They'd bomb a permanent installation before it had a chance to send out its second broadcast." "All we can do is work and hope," said Javan gloomily. "If we had a fleet of about a dozen good ships, we might be able to swing it, but we have only two and a third abuilding." "There are three on Mars," Cornel pointed out. "One was blasted in space last week, and they're too old to lift more than half cargo, anyhow," said Javan. "The corporation controls the Earth space stations, through the government, and we have to use direct drive stage-rockets." Cornel left, not feeling very optimistic. At the curb outside the club, he looked up and down the street for a cab to take him to the heliport where his copter was parked. There was no cab in sight, but from a side street a little distance away a long black limousine swung into the boulevard, sped swiftly to the club entrance and halted. The back door opened and Meta leaned out, beckoning. "Get in, quick!" she urged. "We've got to get away from here!" Not understanding, Cornel got in. The car roared away with a burst of acceleration that thrust him back on the cushions beside her. "What in Saturn?" he demanded and turned to look out the rear window. A squad of police cars was converging on the club he had just left. Sirens screaming, they pulled up, blocking the street, and armed officers in plain clothes leaped out and hurried into the club. Meta put her arms around his neck and drew his head down to her lap. "They're raiding the Friends of Mars," she said, and a soothing note crept into her tone. "You're safe, darling. They don't know you were there." "But how did they know? How did you know?" he demanded, struggling unsuccessfully to free himself from the imprisonment of her embrace. The sound of the sirens had died in the distance behind them. "I told them," Meta said firmly. "Where do you think I get the wealth you've been living on, darling? I own a fourth of the stock of the Mars Corporation." * * * * * The next morning, Cornel had disappeared. Meta was frantic. Every available agency was pressed into service, but Nuyork was a city of fifteen million people and Cornel had vanished. It was two weeks before he returned. When he did, he was gaunt and grim and dirty as he had been the night Meta had first seen him in _The Avatar_. "Darling, why did you run away?" she asked, holding him close in her arms. "I came back because I love you," he answered tiredly. "But I came back, too, because I love Mars more, Meta. I had to go away and think what I was to do." "It's all right now," she soothed. "You understand that the odds against your rebels are just too heavy. You have a life on Earth to live." "Yes," he said in a low voice. "But there'll be no concerts this season, Meta." "Cornel, you can't cancel now! The schedule's all arranged." "I shall cancel," he said firmly. "You want me to live on Earth, so you must let me learn about Earth. I intend to spend this winter studying psychosociology and terrestrial law--and composing." Her brow cleared. "If you'll continue your composing, it's all right," she said. "Next season's concerts can be the greatest ever. I'll pay off the promoters, darling." So it was done. That season the admirers of Cornel Lorensse's music had to content themselves with recordings. Cornel himself spent his time quietly at Nuyork University and at the house in Jersi. As she had said, the 2013 concert season was Cornel's greatest, right from the start. In part it was due to Meta's own efforts, for she spent tremendous sums of money and utilized her own famous personality to great advantage in promotional work. Across the nation, across the the world, the tour swept, snowballing constantly. Christmas of 2013, and Cornel Lorensse introduced a great new hymn, _From the Polar Caps_. New Year's Day, 2014, and _The Years to Come_ was introduced by radio and television at a thousand parties. There had been some quibbling at the beginning of the season, because the business directors of the tour had wanted to combine the drawing power of Cornel's name with that of well-known concert orchestras. Cornel insisted on using his own orchestra, built up carefully during his year of study. As the season progressed, it became apparent that Cornel's name alone was enough of a drawing card. February, March, 2014, and every network had bought into the schedule. When Cornel Lorensse's weekly concerts were on the air, there was nothing else on radio or television, anywhere in the world, except on the non-affiliated local stations. April passed triumphantly, and the final concert was scheduled for May 15 in Rome. The D'Annunzio Colosseum, built in 1971, was filled to capacity. Careful staging was necessary, to care for all the cameras and microphones of the various television and radio networks. The program was not a long one: Debussy's _Clair de Lune_, Lorensse's _Swift Phobos_, Beethoven's _Moonlight Sonata_, Waco's _Variations on a Theme by Altdown_--and the words "To be announced." It was a familiar phrase, and it always meant the introduction of a new composition by Cornel Lorensse. The concert went smoothly before--how many listeners? Fifty million? A hundred million? Two hundred million? On the great, brightly lighted stage Cornel played the concert grand with superb mastery and bowed to the applause, a pale, solemn figure in black. When he had acknowledged the acclamation after the Waco piece, the audience waited in hushed silence for his announcement of the final number on the program. "The composition I am about to play is the culmination of my musical career," Cornel said quietly into the microphones. "It is a product of my studies, not only of music, but of psychosociology and law. "In hypnoschool last year, I studied the effects of music on the human mind. It is a new field, and many of you are aware of it only through the fact that certain kinds of music are forbidden by law as dangerous to peace on Earth. "I have tried to go into it much more deeply than that." He smiled bitterly. "Most of you know that I am a Martian, one of the so-called Martian rebels," he said. "I think much of the appeal of my music to you has been its Martian quality. To the people of Earth, most of whom have never seen Mars, it has pictured my planet. "My latest composition will do so even more graphically, for it has been composed on a deliberate psychological foundation. This song will show Mars to you. It will show you my people, and what my people want. "I may add that I have studied the law carefully, and I can assure you that this composition is not military in nature. "Ladies and gentlemen of Earth, accompanied by the orchestra I shall now play _The Martianne_." In the control rooms of the auditorium and of relay points throughout the world, censors, vaguely alarmed by Cornel's words, hovered with their fingers on cutoff keys. Then they relaxed. Cornel had told the truth. There was nothing of a military nature in the opening bars of _The Martianne_. It was a theme handled, but less competently, in some of his other compositions. The woodwinds began on a soft, sad note, gradually rising in power, like the thin winds that moaned across the Martian desert sands. Into this, almost inaudibly at first, crept the clear piano notes that marked the cautious, wondering intrusion of humanity on an alien world. The drums beat the construction of the domes, the horns blared the landing of the spaceships, the violins cried the hopes of the men and women who went to Mars to find a new life. It was a picture in music, so skilfully drawn that when the first discordance crept in, every listener could identify it instantly as the age-old greed of man seeking to subvert frontier freedoms to his own selfish ends. When the blare of trumpets and the ruffle of drums thundered into the final militant theme of _The Martianne_, every listener knew it bespoke the valiant fight of men for freedom against an oppressor. Every listener knew what he heard was music that had been prohibited on Earth for a decade--yet they listened. The censors, shocked, galvanized, started to act, to cut off the broadcast--and could not. The powerful music had crept insidiously into their minds, and their fingers were paralyzed above the keys while _The Martianne_ flamed triumphant through the air of Earth. When the final note had died away, Cornel stood up at his piano and said into the microphones: "That is the music of Mars. Remember it, people of Earth." It was a brief trial. Cornel was admittedly guilty of violating the law against inciting the public to military action, but because of Meta's influence and the temper of the people, he was not sentenced to prison. He was deported to Mars, freed to return to his own people. Spurred by the Mars Corporation, the Earth government acted quickly. _The Martianne_ was the most dangerous of any music the psychosociologists had banned. Its performance was prohibited on pain of death, possession of a tape of it was punishable by fine and imprisonment. But too many tapes had been home-recorded on the night of Cornel's last concert. Too many people remembered the basic strains, the theme of _The Martianne_. Laws could not confine it. It was hummed, at first secretly, then openly and defiantly. And too many people had hung on every televised instant of Cornel's trial and had heard him say, simply and earnestly, why he had violated the laws designed to protect the peace of Earth, why he had willingly endangered his life. "It is right that men should have peace," said Cornel on the witness stand, "but first, it is right that they should have freedom." At first secretly, then openly and defiantly, the Friends of Mars grew into an organization that poured the contributions of the people of Earth into ships and guns for the free people of Mars. Every Martian year they play it formally now, on the anniversary of the signing of the Mars Charter. In solemn ceremonies, the military band of Mars plays _The Martianne_ before the imposing edifice erected at Charax by Meta Erosine in memory of Cornel Lorensse, the patriot who died in action during the final siege of Mars City. 
51184	----	INSIDE EARTH By POUL ANDERSON Illustrated by DAVID STONE [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Obviously, no conqueror wants his subjects to revolt against his rule. Obviously? This one would go to any lengths to start a rebellion! I The biotechnicians had been very thorough. I was already a little undersized, which meant that my height and build were suitable--I could pass for a big Earthling. And of course my face and hands and so on were all right, the Earthlings being a remarkably humanoid race. But the technicians had had to remodel my ears, blunting the tips and grafting on lobes and cutting the muscles that move them. My crest had to go and a scalp covered with revolting hair was now on the top of my skull. Finally, and most difficult, there had been the matter of skin color. It just wasn't possible to eliminate my natural coppery pigmentation. So they had injected a substance akin to melanin, together with a virus which would manufacture it in my body, the result being a leathery brown. I could pass for a member of the so-called "white" subspecies, one who had spent most of his life in the open. The mimicry was perfect. I hardly recognized the creature that looked out of the mirror. My lean, square, blunt-nosed face, gray eyes, and big hands were the same or nearly so. But my black crest had been replaced with a shock of blond hair, my ears were small and immobile, my skin a dull bronze, and several of Earth's languages were hypnotically implanted in my brain--together with a set of habits and reflexes making up a pseudo-personality which should be immune to any tests that the rebels could think of. I _was_ Earthling! And the disguise was self-perpetuating: the hair grew and the skin color was kept permanent by the artificial "disease." The biotechnicians had told me that if I kept the disguise long enough, till I began to age--say, in a century or so--the hair would actually thin and turn white as it did with the natives. It was reassuring to think that once my job was over, I could be restored to normal. It would need another series of operations and as much time as the original transformation, but it would be as complete and scarless. I'd be human again. I put on the clothes they had furnished me, typical Earthly garments--rough trousers and shirt of bleached plant fibers, jacket and heavy shoes of animal skin, a battered old hat of matted fur known as felt. There were objects in my pockets, the usual money and papers, a claspknife, the pipe and tobacco I had trained myself to smoke and even to like. It all fitted into my character of a wandering, outdoors sort of man, an educated atavist. I went out of the hospital with the long swinging stride of one accustomed to walking great distances. * * * * * The Center was busy around me. Behind me, the hospital and laboratories occupied a fairly small building, some eighty stories of stone and steel and plastic. On either side loomed the great warehouses, military barracks, officers' apartments, civilian concessions, filled with the vigorous life of the starways. Behind the monstrous wall, a mile to my right, was the spaceport, and I knew that a troopship had just lately dropped gravs from Valgolia herself. The Center swarmed with young recruits off duty, gaping at the sights, swaggering in their new uniforms. Their skins shone like polished copper in the blistering sunlight, and their crests were beginning to wilt a little. All Earth is not the tropical jungle most Valgolians think it is--northern Europe is very pleasant, and Greenland is even a little on the cold side--but it gets hot enough at North America Center in midsummer to fry a shilast. A cosmopolitan throng filled the walkways. Soldiers predominated--huge, shy Dacors, little slant-eyed Yangtusans, brawling Gorrads, all the manhood of Valgolia. Then there were other races, blue-skinned Vegans, furry Proximans, completely non-humanoid Sirians and Antarians. They were here as traders, observers, tourists, whatever else of a non-military nature one can imagine. I made an absent-minded way through the crowds. A sudden crack on the side of my head, nearly bowling me over, brought me to awareness. I looked up into the arrogant face of one of the new recruits and heard him rasp, "Watch where you're going, Terrie!" The young blood in the Valgolian military is deliberately trained to harshness, even brutality, for our militarism must impress such backward colonies as Earth. It goes against our grain, but it is necessary. At another time this might have annoyed me. I could have pulled rank on him. Not only was I an officer, but such treatment must be used with intellectual deliberation. The occasional young garrison trooper who comes here with the idea that the natives are an inferior breed to be kicked around misses the whole point of Empire. If, indeed, Earth's millions were an inferior breed, I wouldn't have been here at all. Valgol needs an economic empire, but if all we had in mind was serfdom we'd be perfectly content with the plodding animal life of Deneb VII or a hundred other worlds. I cringed appropriately, as if I didn't understand Valgolian Universal, and slunk past him. But it griped me to be taken for a Terrie. If I was to become an Earthling, I would at least be a self-respecting one. * * * * * There were plenty of Terries--Terrestrials--around, of course, moving with their odd combination of slavish deference toward Valgolians and arrogant superiority toward mere Earthlings. They have adopted the habits and customs of civilization, entered the Imperial service, speak Valgolian even with their families. Many of them shave their heads save for a scalp lock, in imitation of the crest, and wear white robes suggesting those of civil functionaries at home. I've always felt a little sorry for the class. They work, and study, and toady to us, and try so hard to be like us. It's frustrating, because that's exactly what we don't want. Valgolians are Valgolians and Earthlings are men of Earth. Well, Terries are important to the ultimate aims of the Empire, but not in the way they think they are. They serve as another symbol of Valgolian conquest for Earth to hate. I entered the Administration Building. They expected me there and took me at once to the office of General Vorka, who's a general only as far as this solar system is concerned. Had there been any Earthlings around, I would have saluted to conform to the show of militarism, but General Vorka sat alone behind his desk, and I merely said, "Hello, Coordinator." The sleeves of his tunic rolled up, the heat of North America beading his forehead with sweat, the big man looked up at me. "Ah, yes. I'm glad you're finally prepared. The sooner we get this thing started--" He extended a silver galla-dust box. "Sniff? Have a seat, Conru." I inhaled gratefully and relaxed. The Coordinator picked up a sheaf of papers on his desk and leafed through them. "Umm-mm, only fifty-two years old and a captain already. Remarkably able, a young man like you. And your work hitherto has been outstanding. That Vegan business...." I said yes, I knew, but could he please get down to business. You couldn't blame me for being a bit anxious to begin. Disguised as I was as an Earthman, I felt uncomfortable, embarrassed, almost, at being with my ex-countrymen. The Coordinator shrugged. "Well, if you can carry this business off--fine. If you fail, you may die quite unpleasantly. That's their trouble, Conru: you wouldn't be regarded as an individual, but as a Valgolian. Did you know that they even make such distinctions among themselves? I mean races and sub-races and social castes and the like; it's keeping them divided and impotent, Conru. It's also keeping them out of the Empire. A shame." * * * * * I knew all that, of course, but I merely nodded. Coordinator Vorka was a wonderful man in his field, and if he tended to be on the garrulous side, what could I do? I said, "I know that, sir. I also know I was picked for a dangerous job because you thought I could fill the role. But I still don't know exactly what the job is." Coordinator Vorka smiled. "I'm afraid I can't tell you much more than you must already have guessed," he said. "The anarch movement here--the rebels, that is--is getting no place, primarily because of internal difficulties. When members of the same group spit epithets at each other referring to what they consider racial or national distinctions which determine superiority or inferiority, the group is bound to be an insecure one. Such insecurity just does not make for a strong rebellion, Conru. They try, and we goad them--but dissention splits them constantly and their revolutions fizzle out. "They just can't unite against us, can't unite at all. Conru, you know how we've tried to educate them. It's worked, too, to some extent. But you can't educate three billion people who have a whole cultural pattern behind them." I winced. "Three billion?" "Certainly. Earth is a rich planet, Conru, and a fairly crowded one at the same time. Bickering is inevitable. It's a part of their culture, as much as cooperation has been a part of ours." I nodded. "We learned the hard way. The old Valgol was a poor planet and we had to unite to conquer space or we could not have survived." The Coordinator sniffed again at his silver box. "Of course. And we're trying to help these people unite. They don't have to make the same mistakes we did, long ago. They don't have to at all. Get them to hate us enough, get them to hate us until all their own clannish hatreds don't count at all.... Well, you know what happened on Samtrak." I knew. The Samtraks are now the entrepreneurs of the Empire, really ingenious traders, but within the memory of some of our older men they were a sore-spot. They didn't understand the meaning of Empire any more than Earth does, and they never did understand it until we goaded them into open rebellion. The very reverse of divide and rule, you might say, and it worked. We withdrew trading privileges one by one, until they revolted successfully, thus educating themselves sociologically in only a few generations. * * * * * Vorka said, "The problem of Earth is not quite that simple." He leaned back, made a bridge of his fingers, and peered across them at me. "Do you know precisely what a provocateur job is, Conru?" I said that I did, but only in a hazy way, because until now my work had been pretty much restricted to social relations on the more advanced Empire planets. However, I told him that I did know the idea was to provoke discontent and, ultimately, rebellion. The Coordinator smiled. "Well, that's just the starter, Conru. It's a lot more complex than that. Each planet has its own special problems. The Samtraks, for example, had a whole background of cutthroat competition. That was easy: we eliminated that by showing them what _real_ cutthroat competition could be like. But Earth is different. Look at it this way. They fight among themselves. Because of their mythical distinctions, not realizing that there are no inferior races, only more or less advanced ones, and that individuals must be judged as individuals, not as members of groups, nations or races. A planet like Earth can be immensely valuable to the Empire, but not if it has to be garrisoned. Its contribution must be voluntary and whole-hearted." "A difficult problem," I said. "My opinion is that we should treat all exactly alike--_force_ them to abandon their unrealistic differences." "Exactly!" The Coordinator seemed pleased, but, actually, this was pretty elementary stuff. "We're never too rough on the eager lads who come here from Valgol and kick the natives around a bit. We even encourage it when the spirit of rebelliousness dies down." I told him I had met one. "Irritating, wasn't it, Conru? Humiliating. Of course, these lads will be reconditioned to civilization when they finish their military service and prepare for more specialized work. Yes, treating all Earthlings alike is the solution. We put restrictions on these colonials; they can't hold top jobs, and so on. And we encourage wild stories about brutality on our part. Not enough to make everybody mad at us, or even a majority--the rumored tyranny has always happened to someone else. But there's a certain class of beings who'll get fighting mad, and that's the class we want." "The leaders," I chimed in. "The idealists. Brave, intelligent, patriotic. The kind who probably wouldn't be a part of this racial bickering, anyway." "Right," said the Coordinator. "We'll give them the ammunition for their propaganda. We've _been_ doing it. Result: the leaders get mad. Races, religions, nationalities, they hate us worse than they hate each other." * * * * * The way he painted it, I was hardly needed at all. I told him that. "Ideally, that would be the situation, Conru. Only it doesn't work that way." He took out a soft cloth and wiped his forehead. "Even the leaders are too involved in this myth of differences and they can't concentrate all their efforts. Luron, of course, would be the other alternative--" That was a very logical statement, but sometimes logic has a way of making you laugh, and I was laughing now. Luron considered itself our arch-enemy. With a few dozen allies on a path of conquest, Luron thought it could wrest Empire from our hands. Well, we let them play. And each time Luron swooped down on one of the more primitive planets, we let them, for Luron would serve as well as ourselves in goading backward peoples to unite and advance. Perhaps Luron, as a social entity, grew wiser each time. Certainly the primitive colonials did. Luron had started a chain reaction which threatened to overthrow the tyranny of superstition on a hundred planets. Good old Luron, our arch-enemy, would see the light itself some day. The Coordinator shook his head. "Can't use Luron here. Technologies are entirely too similar. It might shatter both planets, and we wouldn't want that." "So what do we use?" "You, Conru. You get in with the revolutionaries, you make sure that they want to fight, you--" "I see," I told him. "Then I try to stop it at the last minute. Not so soon that the rebellion doesn't help at all--" The Coordinator put his hand down flat. "Nothing of the sort. They _must_ fight. And they must be defeated, again and again, if necessary, until they are ready to succeed. That will be, of course, when they are _totally_ against us." I stood up. "I understand." He waved me back into the chair. "You'll be lucky to understand it by the time you're finished with this assignment and transferred to another ... that is, if you come out of this one alive." I smiled a bit sheepishly and told him to go ahead. "We have some influence in the underground movement, as you might logically expect. The leader is a man we worked very hard to have elected." "A member of one of the despised races?" I guessed. "The best we could do at this point was to help elect someone from a minority sub-group of the dominant white race. The leader's name is Levinsohn. He is of the white sub-group known as Jews." * * * * * "How well is this Levinsohn accepted by the movement?" "Considerable resistance and hostility," the Coordinator said. "That's to be expected. However, we've made sure that there is no other organization the minority-haters can join, so they have to follow him or quit. He's able, all right; one of the most able men they have, which helps our aims. Even those who discriminate against Jews reluctantly admire him. He's moved the headquarters of the movement out into space, and the man's so brilliant that we don't even know where. We'll find out, mainly through you, I hope, but that isn't the important thing." "What is?" I asked, baffled. "To report on the unification of Earth. It's possible that the anarch movement can achieve it under Levinsohn. In that case, we'll make sure they win, or think they win, and will gladly sign a treaty giving Earth equal planetary status in the Empire." "And if unity hasn't been achieved?" "We simply crush this rebellion and make them start all over again. They'll have learned some degree of unity from this revolt and so the next one will be more successful." He stood up and I got out of my chair to face him. "That's for the future, though. We'll work out our plans from the results of this campaign." "But isn't there a lot of danger in the policy of fomenting rebellion against us?" I asked. He lifted his shoulders. "Evolution is always painful, forced evolution even more so. Yes, there are great dangers, but advance information from you and other agents can reduce the risk. It's a chance we must take, Conru." "Conrad," I corrected him, smiling. "Plain Mr. Conrad Haugen ... of Earth." II A few days later, I left North America Center, and in spite of the ominous need to hurry, my eastward journey was a ramble. The anarchs would be sure to check my movements as far back as they could, and my story had better ring true. For the present, I must _be_ my role, a vagabond. The city was soon behind me. It was far from other settlement--it is good policy to keep the Centers rather isolated, and we could always contact our garrisons in native towns quickly enough. Before long I was alone in the mountains. I liked that part of the trip. The Rockies are huge and serene, a fresh cold wind blows from their peaks and roars in the pines, brawling rivers foam through their dales and canyons--it is a big landscape, clean and strong and lonely. It speaks with silence. I hitched a ride for some hundreds of miles with one of the great truck-trains that dominate the western highways. The driver was Earthling, and though he complained much about the Valgolian tyranny he looked well-fed, healthy, secure. I thought of the wars which had been laying the planet waste, the social ruin and economic collapse which the Empire had mended, and wondered if Terra would ever be fit to rule itself. I came out of the enormous mountainlands into the sage plains of Nevada. For a few days I worked at a native ranch, listening to the talk and keeping my mouth shut. Yes, there was discontent! "Their taxes are killing me," said the owner. "What the hell incentive do I have to produce if they take it away from me?" I nodded, but thought: _Your kind was paying more taxes in the old days, and had less to show for it. Here you get your money back in public works and universal security. No one on Earth is cold or hungry. Can you only produce for your own private gain, Earthling?_ "The labor draft got my kid the other day," said the foreman. "He'll spend two good years of his life working for them, and prob'ly come back hopheaded about the good o' the Empire." _There was a time_, I thought, _when millions of Earthlings clamored for work, or spent years fighting their wars, gave their youth to a god of battle who only clamored for more blood. And how can we have a stable society without educating its members to respect it?_ "I _want_ another kid," said the female cook. "Two ain't really enough. They're good boys, but I want a girl too. Only the Eridanian law says if I go over my quota, if I have one more, they'll sterilize me! And they'd do it, the meddling devils." _A billion Earthlings are all the Solar System can hold under decent standards of living without exhausting what natural resources their own culture left us_, I thought. _We aren't ready to permit emigration; our own people must come first. But these beings can live well here. Only now that we've eliminated famine, plague, and war, they'd breed beyond reason, breed till all the old evils came back to throttle them, if we didn't have strict population control._ * * * * * "Yeah," said her husband bitterly. "They never even let my cousin have kids. Sterilized him damn near right after he was born." _Then he's a moron, or carries hemophilia, or has some other hereditary taint_, I thought. _Can't they see we're doing it for their own good? It costs us fantastically in money and trouble, but the goal is a level of health and sanity such as this race never in its history dreamed possible._ "They're stranglin' faith," muttered someone else. _Anyone in the Empire may worship as he chooses, but should permission be granted to preach demonstrable falsehoods, archaic superstitions, or antisocial nonsense? The old "free" Earth was not noted for liberalism._ "We want to be free." _Free? Free for what? To loose the thousand Earthly races and creeds and nationalisms on each other--and on the Galaxy--to wallow in barbarism and slaughter and misery as before we came? To let our works and culture be thrown in the dust, the labor of a century be demolished, not because it is good or bad but simply because it is Valgolian? Epsilon Eridanian!_ "We'll be free. Not too long to wait, either--" _That's up to nobody else but you!_ I couldn't get much specific information, but then I hadn't expected to. I collected my pay and drifted on eastward, talking to people of all classes--farmers, mechanics, shopowners, tramps, and such data as I gathered tallied with those of Intelligence. About twenty-five per cent of the population, in North America at least--it was higher in the Orient and Africa--was satisfied with the Imperium, felt they were better off than they would have been in the old days. "The Eridanians are pretty decent, on the whole. Some of 'em come in here and act nice and human as you please." Some fifty per cent was vaguely dissatisfied, wanted "freedom" without troubling to define the term, didn't like the taxes or the labor draft or the enforced disarmament or the legal and social superiority of Valgolians or some such thing, had perhaps suffered in the reconquest. But this group constituted no real threat. It would tend to be passive whatever happened. Its greatest contribution would be sporadic rioting. The remaining twenty-five per cent was bitter, waiting its chance, muttering of a day of revenge--and some portion of this segment was spreading propaganda, secretly manufacturing and distributing weapons, engaging in clandestine military drill, and maintaining contact with the shadowy Legion of Freedom. Childish, melodramatic name! But it had been well chosen to appeal to a certain type of mind. The real, organized core of the anarch movement was highly efficient. In those months I spent wandering and waiting, its activities mounted almost daily. * * * * * The illegal radio carried unending programs, propaganda, fabricated stories of Valgolian brutality. I knew from personal experience that some were false, and I knew the whole Imperial system well enough to spot most of the rest at least partly invented. I realized we couldn't trace such a well-organized setup of mobile and coordinated units, and jamming would have been poor tactics, but even so-- _The day is coming.... Earthmen, free men, be ready to throw off your shackles.... Stand by for freedom!_ I stuck to my role. When autumn came, I drifted into one of the native cities, New Chicago, a warren of buildings near the remains of the old settlement, the same gigantic slum that its predecessor had been. I got a room in a cheap hotel and a job in a steel mill. I was Conrad Haugen, Norwegian-American, assigned to a spaceship by the labor draft and liking it well enough to re-enlist when my term was up. I had wandered through much of the Empire and had had a great deal of contact with Eridanians, but was most emphatically not a Terrie. In fact, I thought it would be well if the redskin yoke could be thrown off, both because of liberty and the good pickings to be had in the Galaxy if the Empire should collapse. I had risen to second mate on an interstellar tramp, but could get no further because of the law that the two highest officers must be Valgolian. That had embittered me and I returned to Earth, foot-loose and looking for trouble. * * * * * I found it. With officer's training and the strength due to a home planet with a gravity half again that of Earth, I had no difficulty at all becoming a foreman. There was a big fellow named Mike Riley who thought he was entitled to the job. We settled it behind a shed, with the workmen looking on, and I beat him unconscious as fast as possible. The raw, sweating savagery of it made me feel ill inside. _They'd let_ this _loose among the stars_! After that I was one of the boys and Riley was my best friend. We went out together, wenching and drinking, raising hell in the cold dirty canyons of steel and stone which the natives called streets. _Valgolia, Valgolia, the clean bare windswept heights of your mountains, soughing trees and thunderous waters and Maara waiting for me to come home!_ Riley often proposed that we find an Eridanian and beat him to death, and I would agree, hiccupping, because I knew they didn't go alone into native quarters any more. I sat in the smoky reek of the bars, half deafened by the clatter and raucousness called music, trying not to think of a certain low-ceilinged, quiet tavern amid the gardens of Kalariho, and sobbed the bitterness of Conrad Haugen into my beer. "Dirty redskins," I muttered. "Dirty, stinking, bald-headed, sons of bitches. Them and their god-damn Empire. Why, y'know, if 't hadn' been f' their laws I'd be skipper o' my own ship now. I knew more'n that slob o' a captain. But he was born Eridanian--God, to get my hands on his throat!" Riley nodded. Through the haze of smoke I saw that his eyes were narrowed. He wasn't drunk when he didn't want to be, and at times like this he was suddenly as sober as I was, and that in spite of not having a Valgolian liver. I bided my time, not too obviously anxious to contact the Legion. I just thought they were swell fellows, the only brave men left in the rotten, stinking Empire; I'd sure be on their side when the day came. I worked in the mill, and when out with the boys lamented the fact that we were really producing for the damned Eridanians, we couldn't even keep the products of our own sweat. I wasn't obtrusive about it, of course. Most of the time we were just boozing. But when the talk came to the Empire, I made it clear just where I stood. * * * * * The winter went. I continued the dreary round of days, wondering how long it would take, wondering how much time was left. If the Legion was at all interested, they would be checking my background right now. Let them. There wouldn't be much to check, but what there was had been carefully manufactured by the experts of the Intelligence Service. Riley came into my room one evening. His face was tight, and he plunged to business. "Con, do you really mean all you've said about the Empire?" "Why, of course. I--" I glanced out the window, as if expecting to see a spy. If there were any, I knew he would be native. The Empire just doesn't have enough men for a secret police, even if we wanted to indulge in that sort of historically ineffective control. "You'd like to fight them? Like really to help the Legion of Freedom when they strike?" "You bet your obscenity life!" I snarled. "When they land on Earth, I'll get a gun somewhere and be right there in the middle of the battle with them!" "Yeah." Riley puffed a cigaret for a while. Then he said, "Look, I can't tell you much. I'm taking a chance just telling you this. It could mean my life if you passed it on to the Eridanians." "I won't." His eyes were bleak. "You damn well better not. If you're caught at that--" He drew a finger sharply across his throat. "Quit talking like a B-class stereo," I bristled. "If you've got something to tell me, let's have it. Otherwise get out." "Yeah, sure. We checked up on you, Con, and we think you're as good a prospect as we ever came across. If you want to fight the Eridanians now--_join the Legion_ now--here's your chance." "My God, you know I do! But who--" "I can't tell you a thing. But if you really want to join, memorize this." Riley gave me a small card on which was written a name and address. "Destroy it, thoroughly. Then quit at the mill and drift to this other place, as if you'd gotten tired of your work and wanted to hit the road again. Take your time, don't make a beeline for it. When you do arrive, they'll take care of you." I nodded, grimly. "I'll do it, Mike. And thanks!" "Just my job." He smiled, relaxing, and pulled a flask from his overcoat. "Okay, Con, that's that. We'd better not go out to drink, after this, but nothing's to stop us from getting stinko here." III Spring had come and almost gone when I wandered into the little Maine town which was my destination. It lay out of the way, with forested hills behind it and the sea at its foot. Most of the houses were old, solidly built, almost like parts of the land, and the inhabitants were slow-spoken, steady folk, fishermen and artisans and the like, settled here and at home with the darkling woods and the restless sea and the high windy sky. I walked down a narrow street with a cool salt breeze ruffling my hair and decided that I liked Portsboro. It reminded me of my own home, twenty light-years away on the wide beaches of Kealvigh. I made my way to Nat Hawkins' store and asked for work like any drifter. But when we were alone in the back room, I told him, "I'm Conrad Haugen. Mike Riley said you'd be looking for me." He nodded calmly. "I've been expecting you. You can work here a few days, sleep at my house, and we'll run the tests after dark." He was old for an Earthling, well over sixty, with white hair and lined leathery face. But his blue eyes were as keen and steady, his gnarled hands as strong and sure as those of any young man. He spoke softly and steadily, around the pipe which rarely left his mouth, and there was a serenity in him which I could hardly associate with anarch fanaticism. But the first night he led me into his cellar, and through a well-hidden trapdoor to a room below, and there he had a complete psychological laboratory. I gaped at the gleaming apparatus. "How off Earth--" "It came piece by piece, much of it from Epsilon Eridani itself," he smiled. "There is, after all, no ban on humans owning such material. But to play safe, we spread the purchases over several years, and made them in the names of many people." "But you--" "I took a degree in psychiatry once. I can handle this." He could. He put me through the mill in the next few nights--intelligence tests, psychometry, encephalography, narcosis, psycho-probing, everything his machines and his skill could cover. He did not find out anything we hadn't meant to be found out. The Service had ways of guarding its agents with counter-blocks. But he got a very thorough picture of Conrad Haugen. In the end he said, still calmly, "This is amazing. You have an IQ well over the borderline of genius, an astonishing variety of assorted knowledge about the Empire and about technical subjects, and an implacable hatred of Eridanian rule--based on personal pique and containing self-seeking elements, but no less firm for that. You're out for yourself, but you'll stand by your comrades and your cause. We'd never hoped for more recruits of your caliber." "When do I start?" I asked impatiently. "Easy, easy," he smiled. "There's time. We've waited fifty years; we can wait a while longer." He riffled through the dossier. "Actually, the difficulty is where to assign you. A man who knows astrogation, the use of weapons and machines, and the Empire, who is physically strong as a bull, can lead men, and has a dozen other accomplishments, really seems wasted on any single job. I'm not sure, but I think you'll do best as a roving agent, operating between Main Base and the planets where we have cells, and helping with the work at the base when you're there." * * * * * My heart fairly leaped into my throat. This was more than _I_ had dared hope for! "I think," said Nat Hawkins, "you'd better just drop out of sight now. Go to Hood Island and stay there till the spaceship comes next time. You can spend the interval profitably, resting and getting a little fattened up; you look half starved. And Barbara can tell you about the Legion." His leather face smiled itself into a mesh of fine wrinkles. "I think you deserve that, Conrad. And so does Barbara." Mentally, I shrugged. My stay in New Chicago had pretty well convinced me that all Earthling females were sluts. And what of it? The following night, Hawkins and I rowed out to Hood Island. It lay about a mile offshore, a wooded, rocky piece of land on which a moon-whitened surf boomed and rattled. The place had belonged to the Hood family since the first settlements here, but Barbara was the last of them. Hawkins' voice came softly to me above the crash of surf, the surge of waves and windy roar of trees as we neared the dock. "She has more reason than most to hate the Eridanians. The Hoods used to be great people around here. They were just about ruined when the redskins first came a-conquering, space bombardment wiped out their holdings, but they made a new start. Then her grandfather and all his brothers were killed in the revolt. Ten years ago, her father was caught while trying to hijack a jetload of guns, and her mother didn't live long after that. Then her brother was drafted into a road crew and reported killed in an accident. Since then she hasn't lived for much except the Legion." "I don't blame her," I said. My voice was a little tight, for indeed I didn't. But somebody has to suffer; civilization has a heavy price. I couldn't help adding, "But the Empire's lately begun paying pensions to cases like that." "I know. She draws hers, too, and uses it for the Legion." _That, of course, was the reason for the pensions._ The boat bumped against the dock. Hawkins threw the painter up to the man who suddenly emerged from the shadow. I saw the cold silver moonlight gleam off the rifle in his hand. "You know me, Eb," said Hawkins. "This here's Con Haugen. I slipped you the word about him." "Glad to know you, Con." Eb's horny palm clasped mine. I liked his looks, as I did those of most of the higher-up Legionnaires. They were altogether different from the low-caste barbarians who were all the rebels I'd seen before. They had a great load of ignorance to drag with them. We went up a garden path to a rambling stone house. Inside, it was long and low and filled with the memoirs of more gracious days, art and fine furniture, books lining the walls, a fire crackling ruddily in the living room. "Barbara Hood--Conrad Haugen." * * * * * Almost, I gaped at her. I had expected some gaunt, dowdy fanatic, a little mad perhaps. But she was--well, she was tall and supple and clad in a long dark-blue evening gown that shimmered against her white skin. She was not conventionally pretty, her face was too strong for all of its fine lines, but she had huge blue eyes and a wide soft mouth and a stubborn chin. The light glowed gold on the hair that tumbled to her shoulders. I blurted something out and she smiled, with a curious little twist that somehow caught in me, and said merely, "Hello, Conrad." "Glad to be here," I mumbled. "The spaceship should arrive in a month or so," she went on. "I'll teach you as much as I can in that time. And you'd better get your own special knowledge onto a record wire, just in case. I understand you've been in the Vegan System, for instance, which nobody else in the Legion knows very much about." Her tone was cool and business-like, but with an underlying warmth. It was like the sea wind which blew over the islands, and as reviving. I recovered myself and helped mix some drinks. The rest of the evening passed very pleasantly. Later a servant showed me to my room, a big one overlooking the water. I lay for a while listening to the waves, thinking drowsily how rebellion, when its motives were honest, drew in the best natives of any world, and presently I fell asleep. The month passed all too quickly and agreeably. I learned things which Intelligence had spent the last three years trying to find out, and dared not attempt to transmit the information. That was maddening, though I knew there was time. But otherwise-- I puttered about the place. There were only three servants, old family retainers who had also joined the anarchs. They had little modern machinery, and of course Earthlings weren't allowed robots, so there was need for an extra man or two. I cut wood and repaired the roof and painted the boathouse, spaded the garden and cleared out brush and set up a new picket fence. It was good to use my hands and muscles again. And then Barbara was around to help with most of what I did. In jeans and jersey, the sun ablaze on her hair, laughing at my clumsy jokes or frowning over some tough bit of work, she was another being than the cool, lovely woman who talked books and music and history with me in the evenings, or the crisp bitter anarch who spat facts and figures at me like an angry machine. And yet they were all her. I remembered Ydis, who was dead, and the old pain stirred again. But Barbara was alive. She was more alive to me than most of Valgolia. I make no apologies for my feelings. I had been away from anything resembling home for some two years now. But I was careful to remain merely friendly with Barbara. * * * * * She didn't know a great deal about the rebel movement--no one agent on Earth did--but her knowledge was still considerable. There was a fortified base somewhere out in space, built up over a period of four years with the help of certain unnamed elements or planets outside the Empire. I suspected several rival states of that! Weapons of all kinds were manufactured there in quantities sufficient to arm the million or so rebels of the "regular" force, the twenty million or so in the Solar System and elsewhere who held secret drills and conducted terrorist activities, and the many millions more who were expected to rise spontaneously when the rebel fleet struck. There was close coordination and a central command at Main Base for the undergrounds of all dissatisfied planets--a new and formidable feature which had not been present in the earlier uprisings. There were rumors of a new and terrible weapon being developed. In any case, the plan was to assault Epsilon Eridani itself simultaneously with the uprisings in the colonies, so that the Imperial fleet would be recalled to defend the mother world. The anarchs hoped to blast Valgolia to ruin in a few swift blows, and expected that the Empire's jealous neighbors would sweep in to complete the wreckage. This gentle girl spoke of the smashing of worlds, the blasting of helpless humans, and the destruction of a culture as if it were a matter of insect extermination. "Have you ever thought," I asked casually once, "that the Juranians and the Slighs and our other hypothetical allies may not respect the integrity of Sol any more than the Eridanians do?" "We can handle them," she answered confidently. "Oh, it won't be easy, that time of transition. But we'll be free." "And what then?" I went on. "I don't want to be defeatist, Barbara, but you know as well as I do that the Eridanians didn't conquer all mankind at a single swoop. When they invented the interstellar engine and arrived here, man was tearing the Solar System apart in a war between super-nations that was rapidly reducing him to barbarism. The redskins traded for a while, sold arms, some of their adventurers took sides in the conflict, the government stepped in to protect Eridanian citizens and investments--the side which the Eridanians helped won the war, then found its allies were running things and tried to revolt against the protectorate--and without really meaning to, the strangers were conquering and ruling Earth. "But the different factions of man still hate each other's guts. There are still capitalists and communists, blacks, whites and Browns, Hindus and Moslems, Germans and Frenchmen, city people and country people--a million petty divisions. There'll be civil war as soon as the Eridanians are gone." "Some, perhaps," she agreed. "But I think it can be handled. If we have to have civil wars, well, let's get them over with and live as free men." Personally, I could see nothing in the sort of military dictatorship that would inevitably arise which was preferable to an alien, firm, but just rule that insured stability and a reasonable degree of individual liberty. But I didn't say that aloud. * * * * * Another time we talked of the de-industrialization of Earth. Barbara was, of course, venomous about it. "We were rich once," she said. "All Earth was. We have one of the richest planets in the Galaxy. But because their own world is poor, the redskins have to take the natural resources of their conquests. Earth is a granary and a lumberyard for Valgolia, and the iron of Mars and the petrolite of Venus go back to their industry. What few factories they allow us, they take their fat percentage of the product." "Certainly they've made us economically dependent," I said, "and their standard of living is undoubtedly higher than ours. But ours has, on the whole, gone up since the conquest. We eat better, we're healthier, we aren't burdened with the cost of past and present and future wars. Our natural resources aren't being squandered. The forests and watersheds and farmlands we ruined are coming back under Eridanian supervision." She gave me an odd look. "I thought you didn't like the Empire." "I don't," I growled. "I don't want to be held back just because I'm white-skinned. But I've known enough reddies personally so that I try to be fair." "It's all right with me," she said. "I can see your point, intellectually, though I can't really _feel_ it. But not many of the people will out at Main Base." "Free men," I muttered sardonically. We went fishing, and swam in the tumbling surf, and stretched lazily on the beach with the sun pouring over us. Or we might go tramping off into the woods on a picnic, to run laughing back when a sudden rain rushed out of the sky, and afterward sit with beer and cheese sandwiches listening to a wire of Beethoven or Mozart or Tchaikovsky--the old Earthlings could write music, if they did nothing else!--and to the rain shouting on the roof. We might have a little highly illegal target practice, or a game of chess, or long conversations which wandered off every which way. I began to have a sneaking hope that the spaceship would be delayed. We went out one day in Barbara's little catboat. The waves danced around us, chuckling against the hull, glittering with sunlight, and the sail was like a snow mountain against the sky. For a while we chatted dreamily, ate our lunch, threw the scraps to the hovering gulls. Then Barbara fell silent. "What's the matter?" I asked. "Oh, nothing. Touch of _Weltschmerz_, maybe." She smiled at me. "You know, Con, you don't really belong in the Legion." "How so?" I raised my eyebrows. "You--well, you're so darned honest, so really decent under that carefully rough surface, so--reasonable. You'll never make a good fanatic." _Honest!_ I looked away from her. The bright day seemed suddenly to darken. IV Spaceships from Main Base had little trouble coming to Earth with their cargoes of guns, propaganda, instructors, and whatever else the rebels on the planet needed. They would take up an orbit just beyond the atmosphere and send boats to the surface after dark. There was little danger of their being detected if they took the usual precautions; a world is simply too big to blockade completely. Ours dropped on noiseless gravitic beams into the nighted island woods. We had been watching for it the last few days, and now Eb came running to tell us it was here. The pilot followed after him. "Harry Kane, Conrad Haugen," Barbara introduced us. I shook hands, sizing him up. He was tall for an Earthling, almost as big as I, dark-haired, with good-looking young features. He wore some approximation of a uniform, dark-blue tunic and breeches, peaked cap, captain's insignia, which gave him a rather dashing look. It shouldn't have made any difference to me, of course, but I didn't like the way he smiled at Barbara. She explained my presence, and he nodded eagerly. "Glad to have you, Haugen. We need good men, and badly." Then to her: "Get Hawkins. You and he are recalled to Main Base." "What? But--" A dark exultation lit his face. "The time for action is near--very near! We're pulling all our best agents off the planets. They can work more effectively with the fleet now." I tried to look as savagely gleeful as they, but inwardly I groaned. How in all the hells was I going to contact Vorka? If I were stranded out in space when the fleet got under way--no, they must have an ultrabeam. I'd manage somehow to call on that even if they caught me at it. We sent Eb in a boat to get Hawkins while Barbara and I packed a few necessities. Kane paced back and forth, spilling out the news from Main Base, word of mighty forces gathering, rumors of help promised from outside, it was like the thunder which mutters just before a gale. Presently Hawkins arrived. The old man's calm was undisturbed: he puffed his pipe and said quietly, "I called up my housekeeper, told her my sister in California was suddenly taken sick and I was leaving at once for the transcontinental jetport. Just to account for disappearing, you know. There aren't any Eridanians or Terries hereabouts, but we desperate characters--" he grinned, briefly--"can't be too careful. Brought my equipment along, of course. I suppose they want me to do psychometry on fleet personnel?" "Something on that order. I don't know." We made our way through a fine drizzle of rain to the little torpedo of the spaceboat. I looked around into the misty dark and breathed a deep lungful of the cool wet wind. And I saw that Barbara was doing the same. * * * * * She smiled up at me through the night and the thin sad rain. "Earth is a beautiful world, Con," she whispered. "I wonder if we'll ever see it again." I squeezed her hand, silently, and we crowded into the boat. Kane made a smooth takeoff. In minutes we were beyond the atmosphere, Earth was a great glowing shield of cloudy blue behind us, and the stars were bitter bright against darkness. We sent a coded call signal and got a directional beam from the ship. Before long we were approaching it. I studied the lean black cruiser. She seemed to be of about the same design as the old Solarian interplanetary ships, modified somewhat to accommodate the star drive. Apparently, she was one of those built at Main Base. Her bow guns were dark shadows against the clotted cold silver of the Milky Way. I thought of the death and the ruin which could flame from them, I thought of the hell she and her kind bore--atomic bombs, radiodust bombs, chemical bombs, disease bombs, gravity snatchers, needle beams, disintegrative shells, darkness and doom and the new barbarism--and felt a stiffening within me. Fostering this murderousness was a frightful risk. The main defense against it was Intelligence, and that depended on agents like myself. Perhaps _only_ myself. The crew was rather small, no battles being anticipated. But they were well disciplined, uniformed and trained, a new Solarian army built up from the fragments of the old. The captain was a stiff gray German who had been a leader in the earlier revolt and since fled to space, but most of the officers, such as Kane, were young and violent in their eagerness. We orbited around the planet for another day or so till all the boats had returned. There was tension in the ship--if the Imperial navy should happen to spot us, we were done. Off duty, we would sit around talking, smoking, playing games with little concentration. Kane spent most of his free hours with Barbara. They had much to talk about. I swallowed a certain irrational jealousy and wandered around cautiously pumping as many men as I could. We got under way at last. By this time I had learned that Main Base was a planet, but no more. Only the highest leadership of the Legion knew its location, and they were pledged to swallow the poison they always carried if there seemed to be any danger of capture. For several days by the clocks we ran outward, roughly toward Draco. Our velocity was not revealed, and the slow shift in the outside view didn't help much. I guess that we had come perhaps ten parsecs, but that was only a guess. "_Approaching Main Base. Stand by._" * * * * * When the call rang hollowly down the ship's passageways, I could feel the weariness and tautness easing, I could see homecoming in the faces around me. I stole a glance at Barbara. Her eyes were wide and her lips parted, she looked ahead as if to stare through the metal walls. She had never been here either, here where all her dreams came home. So we landed, we slipped down out of the dark and the cold and the void, and I heard the rattle and groan of metal easing into place. When the ship's interior grav-field was turned off, I felt a sudden heaviness; this world had almost a quarter again the pull of Earth. But people got used to that quickly enough. It was the landscape which was hard to bear. They had told us that even though Boreas had a breathable atmosphere and a temperature not always fatally low, it was a bleak place. But to one who had never been far from the lovely lands of Earth, its impact was like a blow in the face. Barbara shuddered close to me as we came out of the airlock, and I put an arm about her waist, knowing the sudden feeling of loneliness which rose in her. * * * * * Save for the spaceport and other installations, Main Base was underground. There was no city to relieve the grimness of the scene. We were in a narrow valley between sheer, ragged cliffs that soared crazily into a murky sky. The sun was low, a smouldering disc of dull red like curdling blood; its sullen light glimmered on the undying snow and ice and seemed only to make the land darker. Stars glittered here and there in the dusky heavens, hard and bright and cruel, almost, as in space. Dark sky, dark land, dark world, with the sheer terrible mountains climbing gauntly for the upper gloom, crags and glaciers like fangs against the dizzy cliffs, with the great shadows marching across the bloody snow toward us, with a crazed wind muttering and whining and chewing at our flesh. It was cold. The cold was like a knife. Pain stung with every breath and eyes watered with tears that froze on suddenly numb cheeks. A great shudder ripped through us and we ran toward the entrance to the city. The snow crunched dry and old under our boots, the cold ate up through the soles, and the wind whistled its scorn. Even when an elevator had taken us a mile down into the warmth and light of the base, we could not forget. It was a city for a million men and other beings and more than a few women and children, a city of long streets and small neat apartments, hydroponic farms and food synthesizers, schools, shops and amusement places, factories, military barracks and arsenals, even an occasional little flower garden. Its people could live here almost indefinitely, working and waiting for their day of rising. There was little formality in the civilian areas. Everyone who had come this far was trusted. A man came up to us new arrivals from Earth, asked about conditions there, and then said he would show us to our quarters. Later we would be told to whom we should report for duty. "Let's go, then, Con," said Barbara, and slipped a cool little hand into mine. I could not refrain from casting a smug backward glance at the somewhat chapfallen Kane. V We slipped quickly into the routine of the place. It was a taut-nerved, hard-working daily round. I could feel the savage expectancy building up like a physical force, but intelligent life is adaptable and we got used to it. There was work to do. Hawkins was second in command of the psychological service, testing and screening and treating personnel, working on training and indoctrination, and with a voice in the general staff where problems of unit coordination and psychological warfare were concerned. Barbara worked under him, secretary and records keeper and general trouble-shooter. Those were high posts, but both were allowed to retain the nominally civilian status which they preferred. Their influence and my own test scores got me appointed assistant supervisor of the shipyards. That suited me very well--I was reasonably free from direct orders and discipline, with authority to come and go pretty much as I pleased. They kept me busy; sometimes I worked the clock around, and I did my best to further production of the weapons which might destroy my planet. For whatever I did would make little difference at this late date. A good deal of my time also went to drill with the armed forces of which, like every able-bodied younger man, I was a reserve member. They put me in an engineer unit and I soon had command of it. I did my best here too, whipping my grim young charges into a sapper group comparable to the Empire's, for I had to be above all suspicion, even of incompetence. We worked at our learning. We went topside and shivered and manned our guns, set our mines and threw up our bridges, in the racking cold of Boreas. Over ancient snow and ice we trotted, lost in the jumbled wilderness of cruel peaks and railing wind, peeling the skin from our fingers when we touched metal, camped under scornful stars and a lash of drifting ice-dust--but we learned! My own, more private education went on apace. I found where we were. It was a forgotten red dwarf star out near the shadowy border of the Empire, listed in the catalogues as having one Class III planet of no interest or value. That was a good choice; no spaceship would ever happen into this system by accident or exploration. The anarchs had built their hopes on the one lonely planet, and had named it Boreas after the god of the north wind in one of their mythologies. My company called it less complimentary things. The base, including the attached city, was under military command which ultimately led up to the general staff of the Legion. This was a council of officers from half a score of rebellious planets, though Earthlings predominated and, of course, Simon Levinsohn held the supreme authority. I met him a few times, a gaunt, lonely man, enormously able, ridden by his cause as by a nightmare, but not unkindly on a personal level. With just that indomitable heart, the Maccabees had faced Rome's iron legions--Valgolia was greatly interested in the ancient history of a conquered province, knowing how often it held the key to current problems. There was also a liaison officer from Luron sitting at staff meetings. Luron! * * * * * When I first saw him, this Colonel Wergil, I stood stiff and cold and felt the bristling along my spine. He looked as humanoid as most of the races at the base. Hairless, faintly scaled greenish-yellow skin, six fingers to a hand, and flat chinless face don't make that breed hideous to me; I have reckoned Ganolons and Mergri among my friends. But Luron--the old and deadly rival, the lesser empire watching its chance to pounce on us, hating us for the check we are on the ambitions of their militarists, Luron. I have no race prejudices and am willing to take the word of our comparative psychologists that there is no more inherent evil in the Luronians than in any other stock, that the peculiar cold viciousness of their civilization is a matter of unfortunate cultural rather than biological evolution and could be changed in time. But none of this alters the fact that at present they are what they are, brilliant, greedy, heartless, and a menace to the peace of the Galaxy. I have been too long engaged in the struggle between my nation and theirs to think otherwise. Other states had sent some clandestine help to the Legion, weapons and money and vague promises. Luron, I soon found, had said it would attack us in full strength if the uprising showed a good chance of success, and meanwhile, they gave assistance, credits and materiel and the still more important machine tools, and Wergil's military advice was useful. I know now, as I suspected even then, that Levinsohn and his associates were not fooled as to Luron's ultimate intentions. Indeed, they planned to make common cause with what remained of Valgolia, as well as certain other traditional foes of their present ally, as soon as they had gained their objectives of independence, and stop any threat of aggression from Luron. It was shrewdly planned, but such a shaky coalition, still bleeding with the hurts and hatreds of a struggle just ended, would be weaker than the Empire, and Luron almost certainly would have sowed further dissension in it and waited for its decay before striking. The Earthlings have a proverb to the effect that he who sups with the Devil must use a long spoon. But they seemed to have forgotten it now. The attack, I learned, was scheduled for about four months from the time the agents were recalled. The rebels were counting on the Valgolian power being spread too thinly over the Empire to stand off their massed assault on a few key points. Then, with the home planet a radioactive ruin, with revolt in a score of planetary systems and the ensuing chaos and communications breakdown, and with the Luronians invading, the Imperial fleet and military would have to make terms with the anarchs. * * * * * It would work. I knew with a dark chill that it would work. Unless somehow I could get a warning out. That had to be done for more than the protection of Epsilon Eridani, which, even in a surprise attack could defend itself better than these conspirators realized. But all bloodshed should be spared, if possible--and the rebellion did not yet deserve to succeed, for the unity achieved thus far had been the unity of a snake pit against a temporary enemy. Did it all rest on me? God of space, had the whole burden of history suddenly fallen on _my_ shoulders? I didn't dare think about it. I forced the consequences of failure out of my forebrain, back down into the unconscious, the breeding ground of nightmares, and lived from one day to the next. I worked, and waited, learned what I could and watched for my chance. But it was not all grimness and concentration. It couldn't be; intelligent life just isn't built that way. We had our social activities, small gatherings or big parties, we relaxed and played. At first I found that gratifying, for it gave me a chance to pump the others. Then I found it maddening, because it kept me from snooping and laying plans. Finally it began to hurt--I was coming to know the anarchs. They lived and laughed and loved even as humans do. They were basically as decent and reasonable as any similar group of Valgolians. Many were as tormented as I by the thought of the slaughter they readied. There were embittered ones, who had lost all they held dear, and I realized that, while civilization has its price, you can't be objective about it when you are the one who must pay. There were others who had been well off and had chucked all their hopes to join a desperate cause in which they happened to believe. There were children--and what had they done to deserve having their parents gambling away life? In spite of their appearance, to which I was now accustomed, they were _human_. When I had laughed and talked and sung and drunk beer and danced and arranged entertainments with them, they were my friends. Moodily, I began to see that I would be one of the price-payers. I saw most of Hawkins and Barbara, and after them--because of her--Kane. The old psychologist and I got along famously. He would drop into my room for a smoke and a cup of coffee and a drawled conversation whenever he had the chance. His slow gentle voice, his trenchancy, the way the little crinkles appeared around his eyes when he smiled, reminded me of my father. I often wish those two could have met. They would have enjoyed each other. Then Barbara would stop by on her way from work, or, better yet, she would ask me over to her apartment for a home-cooked dinner. Yes, she could cook too. We would sometimes take long walks down the corridors of the city, we even went up once in a while to the surface for a breath of cold air and loneliness, and it was the most natural thing in the world for us to go hand in hand. There was no sunlight underground. But when the fluorotube glow shone on her hair, I thought of sunlight on Earth, the high keen light of the Colorado plateaus, the morning light stealing through the trees of Hood Island. _Ydis, Ydis, I said, once your violet eyes were like the skies over Kalariho, over Kealvigh, our home, pasture land of winds. But it has been so long. It has been ten years since you died--_ I fought. May all the gods bear witness that I fought myself. And I thought I was winning. VI I will never forget one certain evening. Hawkins and I had come over to Barbara's for supper, and the three of us were sitting now, talking. Wieniawski's Violin Concerto cried its sorrow, muted in the background, and the serene home she had made of the bare little functional apartment folded itself around us. Then Kane dropped in as he often did, with a casualness that fooled nobody, and sat with all his soul in his eyes, looking at Barbara. He was a nice kid. I didn't know why he should annoy me so. The talk shifted to Valgolia. I found myself taking the side of my race. It wasn't that I hoped to convert anyone, but--well, it was wrong that we should be monsters in the sight of these friends. "Brutes," said Kane. "Two-legged animals. Damned bald-headed, copper-skinned giants. Wouldn't be quite so bad if they were octopi or insects, but they're just enough different from us to be a caricature. It's obscene." "Sartons look like a dirty joke on mankind," I said. "Why don't you object to them?" "They're in the same boat as us." "Then why mix political and esthetic prejudices? And have you ever thought that you look just as funny to an Eridanian?" "No race should look odd to another," said Nat Hawkins. He puffed blue clouds. "Even by our standards, the redskins are handsome, in a more spectacular way than humans, maybe." "And Barbara," I smiled, with a curious little pang inside me, "would look good to any humanoid." "I should think so," said Kane sulkily. "The redskins took enough of our women." "Well," I said, "their original conquistadores were young and healthy, very far from home, and had just finished a hard campaign where they lost many friends. At least there were no half-breeds afterward. And since the reconquest none of their soldiers has been permitted to have anything to do with an Earthwoman against her consent. It's not their fault if the consent is forthcoming oftener than you idealists think." "That sort of thing was more or less standard procedure at home with them, wasn't it?" asked Hawkins. * * * * * I nodded. "The harshness of their native world forced them to develop their technology faster than on Earth, so they kept a lot of barbarian customs well into the industrial age. For instance, the rulers of the state that finally conquered all the others and unified the planet took the title _Waelsing_, Emperor, and it's still a monarchy in theory. But a limited monarchy these days, with parliamentary democracy and even local self-government of the town-meeting sort. They're highly civilized now." "I wouldn't call that spree of conquest they went on exactly civilized." "Well, just for argument's sake, let's try to look at it from their side," I answered. "Here their explorers arrived at Sol, found a system richer than they could well imagine--and all the wealth being burned up in fratricidal war. Their technical power was sufficiently beyond ours so that any band of adventurers could do pretty much as it wanted in the Solar System, and all native states were begging for their help. It was inevitable that they'd mix in. "Sure, the Eridanians have been exploiting Solarian resources, though perhaps more wisely than we did. Sure, they garrison unwilling planets. But from their point of view, they're slowly civilizing a race of atomic-powered savages, and taking no more than their just reward for it. Sure, they've done hideous things, or were supposed to have, but there've been plenty of reforms in their policy since our last revolt. They've adopted the--the red man's burden." "Could be. But Sol wasn't their only conquest." "Oh, well, of course they had their time of all-out imperialism. There are still plenty of the old school around, starward the course of empire, keep the lesser breeds in their place, and so on. That's one reason why the highest posts are still reserved for members of their own race, another being that even the liberal ones don't trust us that far, yet. "Their first fifty years or so saw plenty of aggression. But then they stabilized. They had as much as they could manage. To put it baldly, the Empire is glutted. And now, without actually admitting they ever did wrong, they're trying to make up what they did to many of their victims." "They could do that easily enough. Just let us go free." * * * * * "I've already told you why they don't dare. Apart from fearing us, they're economically and militarily dependent on their colonies. You're an American, Nat. Why didn't our nation let the South go its own way when it wanted to secede? Why don't we all go back to Europe and let the Indians have our country? "And, of course, Epsilon Eridani honestly thinks it has a great civilizing mission, and is much better for the natives than any lesser independence could ever be. In some cases, you've got to admit they're right. Have you ever seen a real simon-pure native king in action? Or read the history of nations like Germany and Russia? And why do we have to segregate races and minorities even in our own organization to prevent clashes?" "We're getting there," said Nat Hawkins. "It's not easy, but we'll make it." _Only you're not there yet_, I thought, _and for that reason you must be stopped_. "You claim they're sated," said Barbara. "But they've kept on conquering here and there, to this very day." "Believe it or not, but with rare exceptions that's been done reluctantly. Peripheral systems have learned how to build star ships, become nuisances or outright menaces, and the Empire has had to swallow them. Modern technology is simply too deadly for anarchy. A full-scale war can sterilize whole planets. That's another function of empire, so the Eridanians claim--just to keep civilization going till something better can be worked out." "Such as what?" "Well, several worlds already have _donagangor_ status--self-government under the Emperor, representatives in the Imperial Council, and no restrictions on personal advancement of their citizens. Virtual equality with the Valgolians. And their policy is to grant such status to any colony they think is ready for it." Hawkins shook his head. "Won't do, Con. It sounds nice, but old Tom Jefferson had the right idea. 'If men must wait in slavery until they are ready for freedom, they will wait long indeed.'" "Who said we were slaves--" I began. "You talk like a damned reddie yourself," said Kane. "You seem to think pretty highly of the Empire." * * * * * I gave him a cold look. "What do you think I'm doing here?" I snapped. "Yeah. Yeah, sorry. I'm kind of tired. Maybe I'd better go now." Before long Kane made some rather moody good nights and went out. Nat Hawkins twinkled at me. "I'm a little bushed myself," he said. "Guess I'll hit the bunk too." When he was gone, I sat smoking and trying to gather up the will to leave. There was a darkness in me. What, after all, _was_ I doing here? Gods, I believed I was in the right, but why is right so pitiless? On Earth they represent the goddess of justice as blind. On Valgolia she has fangs. Barbara came over and sat on the arm of my chair. "What's the matter, Con?" she asked. "You look pretty grim these days." "My work's developing some complications," I said tonelessly. My mind added: _It sure is. No way to call headquarters, the rebellion gathering enormous momentum, and on a basis of treachery and racial hatred._ Barbara's fingers rumpled my hair, the grafted hair which by now felt more a part of me than my own lost crest. "You're an odd fellow," she said quietly. "On the surface so frank and friendly and cheerful, and down underneath you're hiding yourself and your private unhappiness." "Why," I looked up at her, astonished, "even the psychologists--" "They're limited, Con. They can measure, but they can't feel. Not the way--" She stopped, and the light glowed in her hair and her eyes were wide and serious on mine and one small hand stole over to touch my fingers. Blindly, I wrenched my face away. Her voice was low. "It's some other woman, isn't it?" "Other--? Well, no. There was one, but she's dead now. She died ten years ago." _Ydis, Ydis!_ "Your wife?" I nodded. "We were only married for three years. My daughter is still alive; she's going on twelve now. But I haven't seen her for over two years. She's not on Earth. I wonder if she even thinks of me." "Con," said Barbara, very softly and gravely, "you can't go on mourning a woman forever." "I'm not. Forget it. I shouldn't have spoken about it." "You needed to. That's all right." "My girl ought to have a mother--" The words came of themselves. What followed thereafter seemed also to happen without my willing it. Presently Barbara stood back from me. She was laughing, low and sweet and joyous. "Con, you old sourpuss, cheer up! It isn't that bad, you know!" I managed a wry grin, though it seemed to need all the energies left in me. "You look so happy your fool self that I have to counter-balance it." "Con, if you knew how I'd been hoping!" We talked for a long time, but she did most of it--the plans, the hopes, the trip we were going to take and the house we were going to build down by the seashore--"Mary," my daughter, was going to have a home, along with the dozen brothers and sisters she'd have in due course--after the war. After the war. I left, finally, stumbling like a blind man toward my quarters. Oh, yes, I loved her and she loved me and we were going to have a home and a sailboat and a dozen children, after the war, when Earth was free. What more could a man ask for? It had been many years since I'd needed autohypnosis to put myself to sleep, but I used it now. VII A month passed. The delay was partly due to the slowness with which I had to work, even after a plan had been laid. I could only do a little at a time, and the times had to be well separated. Each day brought the moment of onslaught closer, but I dared not hurry myself. If they caught me at my work, there would be an end of all things. But I cannot swear that my own mind did not prompt me to an unnatural slowness and caution. I was only human, and every day was one more memory. They had all been very good to us; our friends had a party to celebrate our engagement and we were universally congratulated and all the rest of it. Yes, Kane was there too, shaking my hand and wishing me all the luck in the world. Afterward he went back to his work and his pilot's practice with a strange fierceness. If at times I fell into glum abstraction, well, I had always been a little moody and Barbara could tease me out of it. Most of the times I was with her, I didn't think about the future at all. There had been a certain deep inward coldness to her. She had carried the old wound of her losses with bitter dignity. But as the days went on, I saw less and less of it. She would even admit that individual Valgolians might be fine fellows and that the Empire had done a few constructive things for Earth. But it was more than a change of attitude. She was thawing after a long winter, she laughed more, she was wholly human now. _Human_-- We sat one evening, she and I, in one of the big lounges the base had for its personnel. There were only one or two muted lights in the long quiet room, a breathing of music, snatches of whispering like our own. She sat close against me, and my lips kept straying down to brush her hair and her cheek. "When we're married--" she said dreamily. Then all at once: "Con, what are we waiting for?" * * * * * I looked at her in some surprise. "Con, why do we assume we can't get married before the war's over?" Her voice was low and hurried, shaking just a little. "The base here has chaplains. It's less than a month now till the business starts. God knows what'll happen then. Either of us might be killed." I heard her gulp. "Con, if they killed you--" "They won't," I said. "I'm kill-proof." "No, no. We have so little time, and it may be all we'll ever have. Marry me now, darling, dearest, and at least there'll be something to remember. Whatever comes, we'll have had that while." "I tell you," I insisted, with a sudden hideous dismay, "there's nothing to worry about. Forget it." "Oh, I'm not asking for pity. I've more happiness now than is right. Maybe that's why I'm afraid. But, Con, they killed my father and they killed my mother and they killed Jimmy, and if they take you too, it'll be more than I can stand." The savage woe of an old Earthly poet lanced through my brain: The time is out of joint O cursèd spite, That ever I was born To set it right! And then, for just a moment, there came the notion of yielding. _You love the girl, Conru. You love her so much it's a pain in you. Well, take her! Marry her!_ No. I was not excessively tender of heart or conscience, but neither was I that kind of scoundrel. I kissed her words away. Afterward, alone in the darkness of my room, I realized that Conrad Haugen had no good reason to hang back. It was true, all she said was true, and no other couple was waiting for an uncertain future. It was the time for action. * * * * * I had been ready for days now, postponing the moment. And those days were marching to the time of war, the rebels were quivering to go, a scant few weeks at most lay between me and the ruin of Valgolian plans and work and hope. In my steadily expanding official capacity, I could go anywhere and do almost anything in an engineering line. So, bit by bit, I had tinkered with the base's general alarm system. We had scoutships posted, of course, but by the very nature of things they had to be close to the planet or an approaching enemy would slip between them without detection. And the substantial vibrations of a ship traveling faster than light do not arrive much ahead of the ship itself. Whatever warning we had of a hypothetical assault would be very short. It would be signaled to all of us by a siren on the intercommunications system, and after that it would be battle stations, naval units to their ships and all others to such ground defenses as we had. But modern warfare is all to the offense. There is no way of stopping an attack from space except by meeting it and annihilating it before it gets to its destination. The rebels were counting on that fact to aid them when they struck, but it would, of course, work against them if their enemy should happen to hit first. Everyone was understandably nervous about the chance of our being discovered and assailed. Working a little at a time, I had put a special switch in the general alarm circuit. It showed up merely as one of many on a sector call board near my room; no one was likely to notice it. And my quarters were not those originally given me. I had moved to a smaller place farther from Barbara, ostensibly to be near my work at the shipyards, actually to be near the base's ultrabeam shack. Now it was time to act. I needed an excuse for not going to the gun turret where I was assigned. That involved faking a serious fever, but like all Intelligence men, I had been trained to full psychosomatic integration. The same neural forces that in hysteria produce paralysis, stigmata, and other real symptoms were under my conscious control. I thought myself sick. By morning I was half delirious and my veins were on fire. The surgeon general came to see me. "What the hell's the trouble?" he wondered. "This place is supposed to be sterile." "Maybe it's too damn sterile," I murmured with a perfectly genuine weakness. Then, fighting the light-headedness that hummed and buzzed in me: "_Tsitbu_ fever, Doc. I'm sure that's what it is." "Can't say I've ever heard of it." "You'll find it in your medical books." He would, too. "It's found on the planet Sirius V, where I once visited. Filter-passing virus, transmitted by airborne spores. Not contagious here. In humans it becomes chronic; no ill effects except a few days' fever like this every few years. Now go 'way and lemme die in peace." I closed my eyes on the distorted and unreal world of sickness. * * * * * Later Barbara came in, pale and with her hair like a rumpled halo. I had to assure her many times that I was all right and would be on my feet in two or three days. Then she smiled and sat down on the bunk and passed a cool palm over my forehead. "Poor Con," she said. "Poor squarehead." "I feel fine as long as you're here," I whispered. "Don't talk," she said. "Just go to sleep." She kissed me and sat quiet. Hers was the rare gift of being a definite personality even when silent and motionless. I clasped her hand and pretended to fall into uneasy sleep. After a while she kissed me again, very softly, and went out. I told my body to recover. It took time, hours of time, while the stubborn cells retreated to a normal level of activity. I lay there thinking of many things, most of them unpleasant. It was well into the night, the logical time to act even if the factories did go on a twenty-four hour basis. I got up, still swaying a little with weakness, the dregs of the fever ringing in my head. After I had vomited and swallowed a stimulant tablet, I felt better. I put on my uniform, but substituted a plain service jacket without insignia of rank for the tunic. That should make me fairly inconspicuous in the confusion. Strength came. I glanced cautiously along the dim-lit corridor, and it was empty and silent. I stole out and hurried toward the ultrabeam shack. My hidden switch was on the way; I threw it and ran on with lowered head. The siren screamed behind me, before me, around me, the howling of all the devils in hell--_Hoo! hoo! Battle stations! Strange ships approaching! Battle stations! All hands to battle stations! Hoo-oo!_ I could imagine the pandemonium that erupted, men boiling out of factories and rooms, cursing and yelling and dashing frantically for their posts--children screaming in terror, women white-faced with sudden numbness--weapons manned, instruments sweeping the skies, spaceships roaring heavenward, incoherent yelling on the intercoms to find out who had given that signal. With luck, I would have fifteen minutes or half an hour of safe insanity. A few men raced by me, on their way to the nearest missile rack. They paid me no heed, and I hurried along my own path. The winding stair leading up to the ultrabeam shack loomed before me. I went its length, three steps at a time, bounding and gasping with my haste, up to the transmitter. It was the tenuous link binding together a score of rebel planets, the only communication with the stars that glittered so coldly overhead. The ultrabeam does not have an infinite velocity, but it does have an unlimited speed, one depending solely on the frequency of the generating equipment, and since it only goes to such receivers as are tuned to its pattern--there must be at least one such tuned unit for the generator to work--it has a virtually infinite range. So men can talk between the stars, but are their words the wiser for that? * * * * * Up and up and up, round and round, up and up, metal clanging underfoot and always the demon screech of the siren--up! I sprang from the head of the stairs and crossed the areaway in one leap to the open door of the shack. There was only one operator on duty, a slim boyish figure before the glittering panel. He didn't hear me as I came behind him. I knocked him out with a calculated blow to the base of the skull. He'd be unconscious for at least fifteen minutes and that was time enough. I heaved his body out of the chair and sat down. The unit was set for the complicated secret scrambler pattern of the Legion, one which was changed periodically just in case. I twirled the dials, adjusting for the pattern of the set I knew was kept tuned for me at Vorka's headquarters. The set hummed, warming up. I lifted my eyes and stared into the naked face of Boreas. The shack was above ground, itself dominated by the skeletal tower of the transmitter, and a broad port revealed land and sky. Overhead the stars were glittering, bright and hard and cruel, flashing and flashing out of the crystal dark. The peaks rose on every side, soaring dizziness of cliffs and ragged snarl of crags, hemming us in with our tiny works and struggles. It was bitterly, ringingly cold out there; the snow screamed when you walked on it; the snapping thunder of frost-split rock woke the dull roar of avalanches, and there was the wind, the old immortal wind, moaning and blowing and wandering under the stars. I saw them running, little antlike men spilling from their nest and racing across the snow before they froze. I saw the ships rise one after the other and rush darkly skyward. The base had come alive and was reaching up to defy the haughty stars. The set buzzed and whistled, warming up, muttering with the cosmic interference whose source nobody knows. I began to speak into the microphone, softly and urgently: "Calling Intelligence HQ, Sol III, North America Center. Captain Halgan Conru calling North America Center. Come in, Center, come in." * * * * * The receiver rustled with the thin dry voice of the stars. Dimly, I could hear the wind outside, snarling around the walls. "Come in, Center. Come in, Center." "Captain Halgan!" The voice rattled into the waiting stillness of the shack. "Captain Halgan, is it really you?" "Get General Vorka at once," I said. "Meanwhile, are you recording? All right, be sure you get this." I told them everything I knew. I told them what planet this was, and where we were on its surface, and what our strength and plans were. I gave them the disposition of the scoutship pickets, as far as those were known to me, and the standard Legion recognition signals. I finished with an account of the savage differences still existing between Earthman and Earthman, and Earth and its treacherous allies. And all the time I was talking to a recording machine. Nobody was listening. When I was through, I waited a minute, not feeling any particular emotion. I was too tired. I sat there, listening to the wind and the interstellar whistling, till Vorka spoke to me. "Halgan! Halgan, you've done it!" "Shut up," I said. "What's coming now?" "I checked the Fleet units. We have a Supernova with escort at Bramgar, about fifteen light-years from where you are. You are at their base, aren't you? Can you hold out for two days more?" "I think so." "Better get into the hills. We may have to bombard." "Go to hell." I turned off the set. Now to get back. They must already know it was a trick; they must be scouring the base for the saboteur. As soon as all loyal men were back, the hunt would really be on. I had, of course, worn gloves. There would be no fingerprints. And the operator wouldn't know who had attacked him. I changed the scrambler setting to one picked at random. And in a corner, as if it had fallen there by accident, I dropped a handkerchief stolen from Wergil of Luron. The tiny fragments of tissue which adhere to such a thing could easily be proven to be from him or one of his associates, for the basic Luronian life-molecules are all levo-rotatory. It might help. I slipped back down the stairs, quickly and quietly. It was over. The base was as good as taken. But there was more to be done. Apart from the saving of my own life, there was still a desperate need for secrecy. For if the rebels knew what was coming, they might choose to stand and fight, or they might flee into the roadless wildernesses of space. Whichever it was, all our work and sacrifice would have gone for little. * * * * * The provocateur policy is the boldest and most farsighted enterprise ever undertaken. It is the first attempt to make history as we choose, to control the great social forces we are only dimly beginning to understand, so that intelligence may ultimately be its own master. Sure. Very fine and idealistic, and no doubt fairly true as well. But there is death and treachery in it, loneliness and heartbreak, and the bitterness of the betrayed. Have we the right to set ourselves up as God? Can we really say, in our omniscience, that everyone but us is wrong? There were sane, decent, intelligent folk here on Boreas, the ones we needed so desperately for all civilization. Did we have to make them our enemies, so that their grandchildren might be our friends? I didn't know. Wherever I turned, there were treason and injustice. However hard I tried to do right, I had to wrong somebody. I ran on, back to my cabin. I peeled off my clothes and dived into bed, and by the time they looked in on me I had worked back most of my fever. Don't think, Conru. Don't think of this new victory and the safety of the Empire. And, perhaps, a step closer to the harshly won unity of Earth. Don't think of the way the light catches in Barbara's hair and gets turned into molten gold. You've got a fever to create, man. You've got to think yourself sick again. That ought to be easy. VIII Barbara came in. She was white and still, and presently she leaned her head against my breast and cried quietly, for a long time. "There is a spy here," she told me. "I heard about it." I stroked her hair and held her to me, clumsily. "Do you know who it was?" "I don't know. Somehow, they seem to think the Luronians may be guilty, but they aren't sure. They arrested them, and two were killed resisting. Colonel Wergil is in the brig now, while they decide if Luron can still be trusted." "It can't," I said. "Earth must win alone." "We'll win," she said dauntlessly. "With Luron or without it, we'll win." Then, like a little frightened girl, creeping close to me: "But we needed that help so much." I kissed her and remained silent. The next day I got on my feet again, weak but recovered. I wandered aimlessly around the base, waiting for Barbara to get through work, listening to people talk. It was ugly, the fear and tension and wolfish watchfulness. _Whom can we trust? Who is the enemy?_ Mostly, they thought the Luronians were guilty. After all, those were the only beings on the planet who had not had to pass a rigorous investigation and psychological examination. But nobody was sure. Levinsohn spoke over the televisor. His gaunt, lined face had grown very tired, yet there was metal in his voice. The new situation necessitated a change of plans, but the time of assault would, if anything, be moved ahead. "Be of good heart. Stand by your comrades. We'll still be free!" I went to Barbara's apartment and we sat up very late. But even in this private record I do not wish to say what we talked about. * * * * * And the next day the Empire came. There was one Supernova ship with light escort, but that was enough. Such vessels have the mass of a large asteroid, and one of them can sterilize a planet; two or three can take it apart. Theoretically, a task force comprising twenty Nova-class battleships with escorts can reduce one of those monsters if it is willing to lose most of its units. But nothing less can even do significant damage, and the rebel base did not have that much. Nor could they get even what they had into full action. The ships rushed out of interstellar space, flashing the recognition signals I had given. Before the picket vessels suspected what was wrong, the Valgolians were on them. One managed to bleat a call to base and the alarm screamed again, men rushed to battle stations. Then the Imperials blanketed all communications with a snarl of interference through which nothing the rebels had could drive. So naturally they were thought to have been annihilated in a few swift blazes of fire and steel, a quick clean death and forgetfulness of defeat. But only the drivers were crippled, and then the Supernova yanked the vessels to its titan flanks and held them in unbreakable gravity beams. The crews would be taken later, with narcotic gas or paralyzer beams--alive. For the Empire needs its rebels. I knew the uselessness of going to battle stations, so I hung behind, seeking out Barbara, whose place was with the missile computer bank. I met her and Kane in the hallway. The boy's face was white, and there were tears running down his cheeks. "This is the end," he said. "They've found us out, and there's nothing left but to die. Good by, Barbara." He kissed her, wildly, and ran for his ship. Moodily, I watched him go. He expected death, and he would get only capture, and afterward-- "What are you doing here, Con?" asked Barbara. "I'm too shaky to be any good in the artillery. Let me go with you, I can punch a computer." She nodded silently, and we went off together. * * * * * The floor shook under us, and a crash of rock roared down the halls. The heavy weapons on the Supernova were bloodlessly reducing our ground installations and our ships not yet in action to smashed rubble. They would kill not a single one of us, except by uncontrollable accident, and save many Valgolian and Earth lives that way, but it wasn't pleasant to be slugged. The girl and I staggered ahead. When the lights went out, I stopped and held her. "It's no use," I said. "They've got us." "Let me go!" she cried. I hung on, and suddenly she collapsed against me, crying and shaking. We stood there with the city rumbling and shivering around us, waiting. Presently the Valgolian commander released the interference and contacted Levinsohn, offering terms of surrender. It seemed to Levinsohn, and it was meant to seem, that further resistance would be useless butchery. His ships were gone and his foes need only bombard him to ruin. He capitulated, and one by one we laid down our arms and filed to meet the victors. The terms, as announced by messengers--the intercom was out of action--were generous. Leading rebels and those judged potentially "dangerous" would go to penal colonies on various Earthlike planets. Except that they weren't penal colonies at all, but, of course, the Earthlings wouldn't know this. They were indoctrination centers, and, with all my bitterness, I still longed to observe a man like Levinsohn after five years in one of the centers. He'd see things in a different perspective. He'd see the Empire for what it was--even if I sometimes had a little trouble seeing that now--and he'd be a better rebel for it. Someday Levinsohn and his kind would be back on Earth, the new leaders ready to lead the way to a new tomorrow. And I would be with them. I'd be back with Levinsohn and the rest, and with Barbara, too, and we'd try to pave the way to the peace and friendship. But meanwhile there'd be other revolutions--striving and hoping and breaking their hearts daring what they thought would be death to win what they called freedom and what we hoped would be evolution. It was the fire to temper a new civilization. We walked down the hall, Barbara and I, hand in hand, alone in spite of all the people who were shuffling the same way. Most of them were weeping. But Barbara's head was high now. "What will happen to us?" she asked. "I don't know," I said. "But, Barbara, whatever happens after this, remember that I love you. Remember that I'll always love you." "I love you too," she smiled, and kissed me. "We'll be together, Con. That's all that matters. We'll be together." That was important--and it made me feel good. Yes, we'd be together; I'd see to that. But for a while Barbara would hate me through all the long years of the indoctrination. Someday, perhaps, she would understand ... the indoctrination could do it, and I could help. But by the gods of space, how would it be to take that hate all that while? * * * * * We came out into the central chamber where the prisoners were gathering to be herded up to the ships. Armed Valgolian guards stood under the glare of improvised lights. Other Imperials were going through the city, flushing out those who might be hiding and removing whatever our armed forces could use. The equipment would do no one any good here, and Boreas would be left to its darkness. It was cold in the vast shadowy room. The heating plant had broken down and the ancient cold of Boreas was seeping in. Barbara shivered and I held her close to me. Nat Hawkins moved over to join us, wordlessly. I was questioned in a locked room by one of the big Valgolian officers. He looked at a stereograph in his hand and he took me aside, but it was not unusual. Many of the starbound prisoners were being questioned by their guards, and I was merely one of them. "Colonel Halgan?" the officer asked with an eagerness close to hero-worship. He was obviously fresh from school and military terminology came from his lips as if it really meant something to a Valgolian. The colonel, of course, meant that in a titular sense I had been elevated for my work. Funny, if you use the language enough, you get to believe it yourself. "Sir," the young officer continued, "this is one of the greatest pieces of work I've ever seen. I am to extend the official congratulations of--" I let him talk for a while and then I raised my hand peremptorily and I told him that the girl with the Earthling Hawkins was to go along for indoctrination, despite the fact that her name did not appear on his lists. He nodded, and I went back to Barbara, but half a dozen men had come between us. Levinsohn and five guards. The man's carriage was still erect, the old unbreakable pride and courage were still in him. Someone among the prisoners broke loose and rushed at him, cursing, till the Valgolians thrust him back into line. "Levinsohn!" screamed the man. "Levinsohn, you dirty Jew, you sold us out!" There you see why this rebellion had to be crushed. Earth still had a long way to go. The Levinsohns, the Barbaras, the more promising of the anarchs would be educated and returned and the civilizing process would go on. Earth's best and bravest would unite and fight us, and with each defeat they would learn something of what we had to teach them, that all races, however divergent, must respect each other and work together, learn it with an intensity which the merely intellectual teaching of schools and propaganda could not achieve alone--or, at any rate, soon enough. Valgolia is the great and lonely enemy, the self-appointed Devil since none of us can be angels. It is the source of challenge and adversity such as has always driven intelligence onward and upward, in spite of itself. Sooner or later, generations hence, perhaps, all the subject worlds will have attained internal unity, forgetting their very species in a common bond of intelligence. And on that day Valgolia's work will be done. She and her few friends, her _donagangors_, will seemingly capitulate without a fight and become simply part of a union of free and truly civilized planets. And such a union will be firmer and more enduring than all the tyrant empires of the past. It will have the strength of a thousand or more races, working together in the harmony which they achieved in struggling against us. * * * * * That is the goal, but it is a long way ahead; there may be centuries needed, and meanwhile Valgolia is alone. Barbara would understand. In time she would understand what she as yet did not even know. But first would be the hatred, the cold stark hatred that must come of knowing who and what I really am. I could only wait for that hatred to come after she learned, and then wait for it to go, slowly, slowly.... Lines of the Earthlings were filing forward, and, with Nat Hawkins, Barbara waited for me. I walked to her and took her hand. Her head was high, as high as Levinsohn's. She expected all of us to die, but she'd meet the relatives and friends she thought were dead. It would be a great, a crushing humiliation, to know one's martyrs were alive and being well treated and intensively educated by the foe, who was supporting and encouraging one's supposedly dangerous revolution. "It won't be so bad as long as we're together, darling," I said. She smiled, misunderstanding, and kissed me defiantly before our Valgolian guards. 
16559	----	THE LIFE STORY OF AN OLD REBEL BY JOHN DENVIR AUTHOR OF "THE IRISH IN BRITAIN" "THE BRANDONS" ETC. DUBLIN SEALY, BRYERS & WALKER 86 MIDDLE ABBEY STREET 1910 [Illustration: John Denvir] CONTENTS. CHAP. I.--Early Recollections--"Coming Over" from Ireland II.--Distinguished Irishmen--"The Nation" News-paper--"The Hibernians" III.--Ireland Revisited IV.--O'Connell in Liverpool--Terence Bellew MacManus and the Repeal Hall--The Great Irish Famine V.--The "No-Popery" Mania--The Tenant League--The Curragh Camp VI.--The Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood--Escape of James Stephens--Projected Raid on Chester Castle--Corydon the Informer VII.--The Rising of 1867--Arrest and Rescue of Kelly and Deasy--The Manchester Martyrdom VIII.--A Digression--T.D. Sullivan--A National Anthem--The Emerald Minstrels--"The Spirit of the Nation" IX.--A Fenian Conference at Paris--The Revolvers for the Manchester Rescue--Michael Davitt sent to Penal Servitude X.--Rescue of the Military Fenians XI.--The Home Rule Movement XII.--The Franco-Prussian War--An Irish Ambulance Corps--The French Foreign Legion XIII.--The Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain XIV.--Biggar and Parnell--The "United Irishman"--The O'Connell Centenary XV.--Home Rule in Local Elections--Parnell succeeds Butt as President of the Irish Organisation in Great Britain XVI.--Michael Davitt's Return from Penal Servitude--Parnell and the "Advanced" Organisation XVII.--Blockade Running--Attempted Suppression of "United Ireland"--William O'Brien and his Staff in Jail--How Pat Egan kept the flag flying XVIII.--Patrick Egan XIX.--General Election of 1885--Parnell a Candidate for Exchange Division--Retires in favour of O'Shea--T.P. O'Connor elected for Scotland Division of Liverpool XX.--Gladstone's "Flowing Tide" XXI.--The "Times" Forgeries Commission XXII.--Disruption of the Irish Party--Home Rule carried in the Commons--Unity of Parliamentary Party Restored--Mr. John Redmond becomes Leader XXIII.--The Gaelic Revival--Thomas Davis--Charles Gavan Duffy--Anglo-Irish Literature--The Irish Drama, Dramatists, and Actors XXIV.--"How is Old Ireland and how does She Stand?" ~THE LIFE STORY OF AN OLD REBEL~ * * * * * CHAPTER I. EARLY RECOLLECTIONS--"COMING OVER" FROM IRELAND. I owe both the title of this book and the existence of the book itself to the suggestion of friends. I suppose a man of 76 may be called "old," although I have by no means given up the idea that I can still be of use to my country. And a Rebel? Yes! Anything of the nature of injustice or oppression has always stirred me to resentment, and--is it to be wondered at?--most of all when the victims of that injustice and oppression have been my own people. And why not? If there were no rebels against wrong-doing, wrong-doing would prosper. To an Irishman, who is a fighter by temperament, and a fighter by choice against those in high places, life is sure to provide plenty of excitement; and that, no doubt, is why my friends have thought my recollections worth printing. The curious thing is that my share in the struggle for Irish self-government has been almost entirely what I might call outpost work, for I have lived all my life in England. Indeed, it seemed but a stroke of good luck that I was born in Ireland at all. My father (John, son of James Denvir, of Ballywalter, Lecale) came to England in the early part of the last century, and settled in Liverpool, where my eldest brother was born. It was during a brief period, when our family returned to Ireland, that I and a younger brother were born there. My father was engaged for about three years as clerk of the works for the erection of a castle for Sir Francis Macnaghten, near Bushmills, County Antrim. This must be one of the least Catholic parts of Ireland, for there was no resident priest, and I had to be taken a long distance to be christened. There was a decent Catholic workman at the castle, James MacGowan, who was my god-father, and my Aunt Kitty had to come all the way from "our own place" in the County Down to be my god-mother. Brought to England, my earliest remembrances are of Liverpool, which has a more compact and politically important Irish population than any other town in Great Britain. Anyone who has mixed much among our fellow-countrymen in England, Scotland and Wales knows that, generally, the children and grandchildren of Irish-born parents consider themselves just as much Irish as those born on "the old sod" itself. No part of our race has shown more determination and enthusiasm in the cause of Irish nationality. As a rule the Irish of Great Britain have been well organised, and, during the last sixty years and more, have been brought into constant contact with a host of distinguished Irishmen--including the leaders of the constitutional political organisations--from Daniel O'Connell to John Redmond. I have taken an active part in the various Irish movements of my time, and it so happens that, while I know so little personally of Ireland itself, there are few, if any, living Irishmen who have had such experience, from actual personal contact with them, as I have had of our people in every part of Great Britain. As will be seen, too, in the course of these recollections, circumstances have brought me into intimate connection with most of the Irish political leaders. My father came to England in one of the sloops in which our people used to "come over" in the old days. They sometimes took a week in crossing. The steamers which superseded them, though an immense improvement as regards speed, had often less accommodation for the deck passengers than for the cattle they brought over. Most of the Irish immigration to Liverpool came through the Clarence Dock, where the steamers used to land our people from all parts. Since the Railway Company diverted a good deal of the Irish traffic through the Holyhead route, there are not so many of these steamers coming to Liverpool as formerly. The first object that used to meet the eyes of those who had just "come over," as they looked across the Clarence Dock wall, was an effigy of St. Patrick, with a shamrock in his hand, as if welcoming them from "the old sod." This was placed high upon the wall of a public house kept by a retired Irish pugilist, Jack Langan. In the thirties and forties of the last century, up to 1846, when he died, leaving over £20,000 to his children, Langan's house was a very popular resort of Irishmen, more particularly as, besides being a decent, warm-hearted, open-handed man, he was a strong supporter of creed and country. I am old enough to remember hearing Mass in what was an interesting relic in Liverpool of the Penal days. This was the old building known to our people as "Lumber Street Chapel." Of course, the present Protestant Church of St. Nicholas (known as "the old church") is a Catholic foundation. Lumber Street chapel was not, however, the first of our places of worship built during the Penal days, for the Jesuits had a small chapel not far off, erected early in the eighteenth century, but destroyed by a No-Popery mob in 1746. St. Mary's, Lumber Street, too, was originally a Jesuit mission, but, in 1783, it was handed over to the Benedictines, who have had charge of it ever since. Father John Price, S.J., built a chapel in Sir Thomas's Buildings in 1788. I can recollect this building since my earliest days, but Mass was never said in it during my time. Lancashire is the only part of England where there are any great number of the native population who have always kept the faith. I once spent a few weeks in one of these Catholic districts. My employer had an alteration to make in the house of a gentleman at Lydiate, near Ormskirk. I used to come home to Liverpool for the Sundays, but for the rest of the week I had lodgings in the house of a Catholic family at Lydiate. There was an old ruin, which they called Lydiate Abbey, but I found it was the chapel of St. Catherine, erected in the fifteenth century. The priest of the mission had charge of the chapel which, though unroofed, was the most perfect ecclesiastical ruin in Catholic hands in South Lancashire. During the time I was at Lydiate there came a Holiday of Obligation, when I heard Mass in the house of a Catholic farmer named Rimmer. This was a fine old half-timbered building of Elizabethan days, and here, all through the Penal times, Mass had been kept up, a priest to say it being always in hiding somewhere in the district. The priest in charge of Lydiate at the time I was there told me he was collecting for a regular church or chapel, and hoped soon to make a commencement of the building. Some years later he was able to do so. Our church choir at Copperas Hill, Liverpool, was then considered one of the best in the diocese. The choirmaster and organist, John Richardson, was a distinguished composer of Catholic church music, and held in such high esteem that, for any important celebration, he could always secure the services of the chief members of the musical profession in and about Liverpool. In this way, on one occasion Miss Santley came to help us. She was accompanied by her brother, then a boy, who has since risen to the highest position in the musical world--the eminent baritone, Sir Charles Santley. St. Nicholas' was, as it is yet, the pro-Cathedral of the diocese, and whenever a new church had to be opened, or there was any important ceremonial anywhere in Lancashire, our choir was generally invited. In this way I was delighted to go to the opening of the new church at Lydiate, so that I was taking part in the third stage of the Catholic history of the diocese--having said a prayer in the old ruin, and attended Mass in Rimmer's, and now assisting at the solemn High Mass at the opening of the Church of our Lady, not far from the old chapel of St. Catherine. At the time I went to Mass in Lumber Street Chapel, Liverpool, which is nearly 70 years since, there were but four other _chapels_, as they were generally called then, in the town--Copperas Hill (St. Nicholas'), Seel Street (St. Peter's), St. Anthony's and St. Patrick's. It must have been a custom acquired in the Penal days to call the older Catholic places of worship rather after the names of the streets in which they were situated than of the saint to whom they were dedicated. During the Famine years the bishops and clergy must have found it extremely difficult to provide for the tremendous influx of our people. I have seen them crowded out into the chapel yards and into the open streets; satisfied if they could get even a glimpse of the inside of the sacred building through an open window. I see by the Catholic Directory there are at the time I now write thirty-nine churches and chapels in Liverpool. The schools have increased in a like proportion. The progress in numbers, wealth and influence of the Irish people may be pretty well marked by the gradual increase in the number of churches and schools, which have been built for the most part by the Irish and their descendants. All honour to the noble-hearted, hard-handed toilers who have contributed to such work, and greater glory still to the humble men who, after a hard week's work in a ship's hold at the docks, or perhaps in the "jigger loft" of a warehouse eight stories high, turn out every Sunday morning to act as "collectors," and go in pairs from door to door, one with the book and the other with the bag in hand, to raise the means of erecting the noble churches and schools that everywhere meet our view in Liverpool to-day. With regard to the social position our people occupy in Liverpool, there have been many Irishmen who have come well to the front in the race of life, some of whom have occupied the foremost positions in connection with the public life of the town. On the other hand; a large number of our fellow-countrymen in Liverpool are by no means in that enviable condition. Many of them have set out from Ireland, intending to go to America, but, their little means failing them, have been obliged to remain in Liverpool. Here they considered themselves fortunate if they met someone from the same part of the country as themselves to give them a helping hand, for it is a fine trait in the Irish character--and "over here in England" the trait has not been lost--that, however poor, they are always ready to befriend what seems to them a still poorer neighbour. Those who have lived here some time are glad to see someone from their "own place," and, amid the squalor of an English city, the imaginative Celt--as he listens to the gossip about the changes, the marriages, and the deaths that have taken place since he left "home "--for a brief moment lives once more upon "the old sod," and sees visions of the little cabin by the wood side where dwelt those he loved, of the mountain chapel where he worshipped, of a bright-eyed Irish girl beloved in the golden days of youth. These and a host of other associations of the past come floating back upon his memory, as he hears the tidings brought by Terence, or Michael, or Maurya, who has just "come over." It often so happens that, from the very goodness of the Irish heart, the newcomers are frequently drawn into the same miserable mode of life as the friends who have come to England before them may have fallen into. Irish intellect and Irish courage have in thousands of cases brought our people to their proper place in the social scale, but it is only too often the case that adverse circumstances compel the great bulk of them to have recourse to the hardest, the most precarious, and the worst paid employments to be found in the British labour market. In the large towns, in the poorer streets in which our people live, a stranger would be struck by the swarms of children, and of an evening, at the number of grown-up people sitting on the doorsteps of their wretched habitations. John Barry once told me that a friend of his asked one of these how they could live in such places? "Because," was the reply, "we live so much _out_ of them." The answer showed, at any rate, that their lot was borne cheerfully. Nevertheless, there are Irishmen too--men who know how to keep what they have earned--who, by degrees, get into the higher circles of the commercial world, so that I have seen among the merchant princes "on 'Change" in Liverpool men who, themselves, or whose fathers before them, commenced life in the humblest avocations. Liverpool has, on the whole, been a "stony-hearted stepmother" to its Irish colony, which largely built its granite sea-walls, and for many years humbly did the laborious work on which the huge commerce of the port rested. But, perhaps, in years to come Liverpool will realise the value of the wealth of human brains and human hearts which it held for so long unregarded or despised in its midst. CHAPTER II. DISTINGUISHED IRISHMEN--"THE NATION" NEWSPAPER--"THE HIBERNIANS." I have met, as I have said elsewhere, most of the Irish political leaders of my time in Liverpool, but I will always remember with what pleasure I listened to a distinguished Irishman of another type, Samuel Lover, when he was travelling with an entertainment consisting of sketches from his own works and selections from his songs. Few men were more versatile than Lover, for he was a painter, musician, composer, novelist, poet, and dramatist. When I saw him in one of the public halls he sang his own songs, told his own stories, and was his own accompanist. His was one of a series of performances, very popular in Liverpool for many years, called the "Saturday Evening Concerts." He was a little man, with what might be called something of a "Frenchified" style about him, but having with it all a bright eye and thoroughly Irish face which, with all his bodily movements, displayed great animation. I can readily believe his biographers, who say he excelled in all the arts he cultivated, for his was a most charming entertainment. Lover undoubtedly had patriotism of a kind, and some of his songs show it. It certainly was not up to the mark of the "Young Irelanders," one of whom attacked him on one occasion, when he made the clever retort that "the fount from which _he_ drew his patriotism was a more genuine source than a fount of Irish type"--alluding to the plentiful use of the Gaelic characters in "The Spirit of the Nation," the world-famed collection of songs by the Young Ireland contributors to the "Nation" newspaper. There are passages in Lover's novel of "Rory O'More" and his "He Would be a Gentleman" that show he was a sincere lover of his country. I agree in the main with what the "Nation" said of him in 1843--"Though he often fell into ludicrous exaggerations and burlesques in describing Irish life, there is a good national spirit running through the majority of his works, for which he has not received due credit." One of his stories, "Rory O'More," achieved universal popularity also as a play, a song and an air. In it there is a passage which, when I first read it, I looked upon as an exaggeration, and as somewhat reflecting upon the dignity of a great national movement like that of the United Irishmen. Lover brings his hero, Rory, into somewhat questionable surroundings in a Munster town--intended for Cork or some other seaport--to meet a French emissary. One would think that a struggle for the freedom of Ireland should be carried on amongst the most lofty surroundings. But I found in after life that the incidents described by Lover were not so exaggerated as might be supposed, for, as "necessity has no law," during a later revolutionary struggle we had often to meet in strange and unromantic places, as I shall describe later, for most important projects. Lover's wit was spontaneous, and bubbled over in his ordinary conversation with friends. An English lady friend, deeply interested in Ireland, once said to him--"I believe I was intended for an Irishwoman." Lover gallantly replied--"Cross over to Ireland and they will swear you were intended for an Irishman." A famous Irishman, whom I saw in Liverpool when I was a boy, was the Apostle of Temperance, Father Mathew. At this time he visited many centres of Irishmen in Great Britain, and administered the pledge of total abstinence from intoxicating drink to many thousands of his fellow-countrymen. In London alone over 70,000 took the pledge. As in Ireland, this brought about a great social revolution. The temperance movement certainly helped O'Connell's Repeal agitation, which was in its full flood about this time. My remembrance of Father Mathew was that of a man of portly figure, rather under than above the middle height, with a handsome, pleasant face. He had a fine powerful voice, which could be heard at the furthest extremity of his gatherings, which often numbered several thousands. As he gave out the words of the pledge to abstain, with the Divine assistance, from all intoxicating liquors, he laid great emphasis on the word "liquors," pronouncing the last syllable of the word with almost exaggerated distinctness. After this he would go round the ring of those kneeling to take the pledge, and put round the neck of each the ribbon with the medal attached. I ought to remember his visit to Liverpool, for I took the pledge from him three times during his stay in the town. My mother took the whole family, and, wherever he was--at St. Patrick's, or in a great field on one side of Crown Street, or at St. Anthony's--there she was with her family. She was a woman with the strong Irish faith in the supernatural, and in the power of God and His Church, that can "move mountains." A younger brother of mine had a running in his foot which the doctors could not cure. She determined to take Bernard to Father Mathew and get him to lay his hands on her boy. At St. Patrick's, with her children kneeling around her, she asked the good Father to touch her son. He, no doubt thinking it would be presumptuous on his part to claim any supernatural gift, passed on without complying with her request. Father Mathew's next gathering was in the Crown Street fields. I was a boy of about nine years, attending Copperas Hill schools. Mr. Connolly, who was in charge, was a very good master, but there was nothing very Irish in his teaching. Some idea of this may be formed when I mention that--though there were not a dozen boys in the school who were not Irish or of Irish extraction--the first map of Ireland I ever saw was on the back of one of O'Connell's Repeal cards. It was not until the Christian Brothers came, a few years afterwards, that this was changed. I shall always be grateful to that noble body of men, not only for the religious but for the national training they gave. We had Brothers Thornton and Swan--the latter since the Superior of the Order in Ireland. Under them we not only had a good map of Ireland, but they taught us, in our geography lessons, the correct Irish pronunciation of the names of places, such as (spelling phonetically) "Carrawn Thooal," "Croogh Phaudhrig," and similar words. But our old master, Mr. Connolly, was a good man too, according to his lights. Hearing of Father Mathew's visit, he asked how many of the boys would go to Crown Street to "take the pledge"--their parents being willing? Out of some 250 boys there were about a dozen who did not hold up their hands. It is unnecessary for me to say that my mother was there again with her afflicted boy and the rest of her children, and again she pleaded in vain. She was a courageous woman, with great force of character--and a _third_ time she went to Father Mathew's gathering. This was in St. Anthony's chapel yard, and amongst the thousands there to hear him and to take the pledge she awaited her turn. Again she besought him to touch her boy's foot. He knew her again, and, deeply moved by her importunity and great faith he, at length, to her great joy, put his hand on my brother's foot and gave him his blessing. My mother's faith in the power of God, through His minister, was rewarded, for the foot was healed. I had an aunt--my mother's sister--married to a good patriotic Irishman, Hugh, or, as he was more generally called, Hughey, Roney, who kept a public house in Crosbie Street. The street is now gone, but it stood on part of what is now the goods station of the London & North Western Railway. Nearly all in Crosbie Street were from the West of Ireland, and, amongst them, there was scarcely anything but Irish spoken. I have often thought since of the splendid opportunity let slip by O'Connell and the Repealers in neglecting to revive, as they could so easily have then done, so strong a factor in nationality as the native tongue of our people. My Aunt Nancy could speak the Northern Irish fluently, and, in the course of her business, acquired the Connaught Irish and accent. After a time Hughey Roney retired, and the house was carried on by his daughter and her husband, John McArdle, a good, decent patriotic Irishman, much respected by his Connaught neighbours, though he was from the "Black North." It used to be a great treat to hear John McArdle, on a Sunday night, reading the "Nation," which then cost sixpence, and was, therefore, not so easily accessible, to an admiring audience, of whom I was sometimes one, and his son, John Francis McArdle, another. This younger McArdle, originally intended for the Church, became in after life a brilliant journalist, and was for a time on the staff of the "Nation," the teaching of which he had so early imbibed. The elder McArdle was a big, imposing looking man, with a voice to match, who gave the speeches of O'Connell and the other orators of Conciliation Hall with such effect that the applause was always given exactly in the right places, and with as much heartiness as if greeting the original speakers. After Father Mathew's visit, their trade fell away to such an extent that John McArdle, determined to hold his ground--while still keeping the public house open, though the business was all but gone--broke another door into the street, and made his parlour into a grocery and provision store. This enterprise on his part was only necessary for a short time, as the abnormal enthusiasm in the cause of temperance which, for the time being, had swept all before it, had subsided to such an extent that McArdle, after a time, turned the room to its original purpose, and was able to resume his readings from the "Nation" to admiring audiences, as heretofore. Yet, though so many fell away from their temporary exaltation, there were still large numbers who remained firm, and the lasting good from Father Mathew's work was undeniable. So popular was John McArdle's house, that it was used as one of the lodges of the Ancient Order of Hibernians--then very strong in Liverpool, and stout champions of country and creed. In regard to this organisation, I find in the "Irish World" of New York a high tribute paid to them by the Very Rev. Thomas J. Shahan, of the Catholic University of America. In his paper on "Hibernianism" he said there was a tradition in the Ancient Order that they first started in Ireland in the Penal days as a bodyguard to their poor parish priest when he said Mass in the open air. Anyone who has spent most of his life in England, as I have done, can well understand that this is not simply an effort of this good priest's imagination, for, over and over again I have seen the Hibernians among the first to come forward in defence of their priests and churches when these were threatened. In the course of his paper Dr. Shahan quoted a letter from the Brethren in Ireland, Scotland and England to the Brethren in New York. It sent instructions and authority to the few brothers in New York to establish branches of their Society in America. These were the qualifications laid down: Members must be Catholic and Irish, or of Irish descent. They must be of good moral character, and were not to join in any secret societies contrary to the laws of the Catholic Church. They were to exercise hospitality towards their emigrant brothers and to protect their emigrant sisters from all harm and temptation, so that they should still be known for their chastity all over the world. The members of the Order in America were to be at liberty to make laws for the welfare of the Society, but these must be in accord with the teaching of the Church, and their working must be submitted to a Catholic priest. The letter says--"We send you these instructions, as we promised to do, with a young man that works on the ship and who called on you before." Directing that a copy of the document should be sent to another friend, then working in Pennsylvania, the letter concluded--"Hoping the bearer and this copy will land safe and that you will treat him right, we remain your brothers in the true bond of friendship this 4th day of May, in the year of our Lord, 1837"-- "PATRICK M'GUIRE, County Fermanagh. "JOHN REILLY, County Cavan. "PATRICK M'KENNA, County Monaghan. "JOHN DURKIN, County Mayo. "PATRICK REILLY, County Derry. "PATRICK DOYLE, County Sligo. "JOHN FARRELL, County Meath. "THOMAS O'RORKE, County Leitrim. "JAMES M'MANUS, County Leitrim. "JOHN M'MAHON, County Longford. "PATRICK DUNN, County Tyrone "PATRICK HAMILL, County Westmeath. "DANIEL GALLAGHER, Glasgow. "JOHN MURPHY, Liverpool." It will be noticed that of the twelve Irish counties represented above, six are in the province of Ulster, three in Connaught, and three in Leinster, so that the Hibernians appear to have had their stronghold in the Northern province and the adjoining counties in Connaught and Leinster. This is exactly as one might expect, seeing the necessity for a defensive organisation against the Orangemen of Ulster. The Order took deep root in Glasgow and Liverpool on account of the convenience of access by sea from Ireland to these cities. I was too young to have known John Murphy, who signed the letter for the Liverpool Hibernians, but, from what I knew of these afterwards, it is likely that he was a dock labourer. As I will show, these men, over and over again, to my own knowledge, gave splendid proofs of their courage and love of creed and country. Their love of learning, too, has been equal to that of their fathers in the days when our country was "The Island of Saints and Scholars." Some of these poor men may not have had much learning themselves, but they made great and noble sacrifices that their children should have it. I noted with interest in the Irish papers recently that the name of the Secretary of the Hibernian Order at the Bridge of Mayo, County Down, was "Brother Denvir." Our country sent over to Liverpool, besides sterling Nationalists, as bitter a colony of Irishmen--I suppose we can scarcely deny the name to men born in Ireland--as were, perhaps, to be found anywhere in the world. These were the Orangemen. If there was one place more obnoxious to them than another it was the club room of the Hibernians in Crosbie Street. But though in their frequent conflicts with the "Papishes" they wrecked houses and even killed several Irishmen--for they frequently used deadly weapons against unarmed Catholics--they were never able to make a successful attack on McArdle's. One of my earliest experiences was being on the spot on the occasion of a contemplated assault on the Hibernian club room on the day of an Orange anniversary. This was in 1843. Parallel to Crosbie Street, where the club room was situated, was Blundell Street, where my uncle, Hughey Roney, lived in a house immediately behind McArdle's--the back door of the one house facing the back door of the other. This side of the street, with the whole of Crosbie Street, has long since been absorbed by the railway company before mentioned. I cannot imagine why my mother chose this particular day to take me to see our relatives, except it was the inveterate longing which her early surroundings and training had given her to assist at the "batin' of an Orangeman," or why I should have been the chosen one of the family to come, unless it was that she thought I was the one most after her own heart in her warlike propensities. However this may have been, there we were in the first-floor front room of my Uncle Hughey's. Every room, from cellar to garret, was crowded with stalwart dock labourers--at that time these were almost to a man Irish--prepared to support another contingent of Hibernians who garrisoned McArdle's in a similar manner. Hearing outside the cry--"he Orangemen!" I looked out of the window and up the street, and there, sure enough, was a strong body of them marching down, armed with guns, swords, and ship carpenters' hatchets. At once the word was passed to the contingent in Crosbie Street to be prepared to meet the threatened attack. Nearer and nearer the Orangemen came. They had got within some thirty yards of Roneys when, between them and the object of their attack, out of Simpson street, which at this point crosses Blundell Street at right angles, there intervened the head of a column of police, under the Liverpool Chief Constable, an Irishman, Michael James Whitty. There was a desperate engagement, but, notwithstanding their murderous weapons, the Orangemen were utterly routed, flying before the disciplined charge of the police, who freely used their batons on their retreating opponents. A few words about Michael James Whitty, who led the charge with right good will, may not be inappropriate here. Many years afterwards, when we were both engaged in the profession of journalism, I had the pleasure of making his acquaintance through my reviewing in the "Catholic Times" a very able book of his, a "Life of Robert Emmet." He asked Mr. Thomas Gregson, his private secretary, a friend of mine: Who had written this review? Upon hearing who it was, he asked Mr. Gregson to bring us together. When we met, he told me how pleased he was with my review, and that there was somebody on the "Catholic Times" who could appreciate his book. He became Chief Constable of Liverpool in 1828. About this time Messrs. Rockliffs published a weekly newspaper called the "Liverpool Journal," which came into the hands of Mr. Whitty after he had resigned the office of head constable. An offshoot of the "Journal" was the "Daily Post," which, in Mr. Whitty's hands was (and indeed has been ever since under the direction of Sir Edward Russell, who still holds the reins) a powerful organ of Liberalism. One of Whitty's sub-editors on the "Daily Post" was Stephen Joseph Meany, a somewhat prominent figure in the Young Ireland and Fenian movements. As showing the power of the Press, there is no doubt that Whitty and Meany, in the "Journal" and "Post," and through their influence otherwise, did much to secure recognition of a great Irish actor. This was Barry Sullivan, who was, I think, the finest tragedian I have ever seen. He is still remembered with appreciation by many in England, and, I am sure, in Ireland too. He was a patriotic Irishman, and once offered himself to our committee as a Nationalist candidate for the Parliamentary representation of Liverpool. This was in the days when it was a three-membered constituency. It was only the belief that the sacrifice which he thus offered to make for his country would have injured his career as an actor that prevented us from accepting his offer. In my boyhood a great feature in Liverpool was the annual procession of one or other of the local societies. The great Irish and Catholic procession, of which the Hibernians formed the largest contingent, was, of course, on St. Patrick's Day. A considerable portion of the processionists were dock labourers; a fine body of men, who were at this time, as I have already said, mostly Irish. The Orange processions in Liverpool were often the occasion of bloodshed, for in them they carried guns, hatchets, and other deadly weapons, as if they were always prepared for deeds of violence. The ship carpenters were the most numerous body in the Orange processions. Indeed, they formed such a large proportion that, by many, the 12th of July was called "Carpenter's Day." Shipbuilding used to flourish in Liverpool, and, as none of the firms engaged in it would take a Catholic apprentice, it was quite an Orange preserve. This became somewhat changed when the Chalenors, an English Catholic family, who were already extensive timber merchants, commenced ship-building, and, of course, took Catholic apprentices. The Orange ring was thus gradually broken up, and, as iron ships superseded wooden ones, ultimately the shipbuilding trade almost vanished from Liverpool. The ship carpenters, for the most part, found their occupation gone, and many of them ended their days in the workhouse. A further instance of the decline of rabid Orangeism might be cited. It was not an altogether uncommon thing for people to be fired at from the windows of Orange lodges. I see, according to the "Nation" of July 20th, 1850, that "an innkeeper of Liverpool named Wright fired out of his house and wounded three people." In justification of this he stated that "a crowd of Ribbonmen assembled round his house." At one time there used to be a notorious Orange lodge held in a public house called "The Wheat Sheaf" in Scotland Road. The members of this body thought nothing of firing upon an unarmed and peaceable crowd from the windows, and I remember an Irishman being shot dead upon one of these occasions. The change that has taken place in this district can be best realized from the facts that, in after years, the landlord of "The Wheatsheaf" bore the name of Patrick Finegan, that, at the present moment, Scotland Road is, as it has been for many years, represented in the City Council by a sterling body of Irish Nationalists, and that the Scotland Division of the Borough of Liverpool is the _one_ place in Great Britain where an Irish Home Ruler, _as such_, can be returned to Parliament against all comers, as Mr. T.P. O'Connor has been, ever since the Division became a separate constituency. To return to the St. Patrick's Day processions. I used to look forward to them with delight in my childhood, and, even now, cannot help lingering lovingly on their memory. They were splendid displays, which I can remember much better than many things which occurred, so to speak, but yesterday. "Our street," which was close to Russell Street, Rodney Street, and other thoroughfares through which the procession passed, was by no means what you would call an Irish street. Indeed, the most influential man in it was a retired sea captain named Jamieson, who, if not an Orangeman "all out," was certainly at one time an Orange sympathiser. He and my mother often had political discussions, which usually ended in fierce quarrels, and when he would swear he would have us "run out of the street," she used to threaten to bring up the men from the docks and leave not a stone upon a stone of his house. Whether it was through his being impressed by her terrible earnestness as a member of the Church militant, or whatever else was the reason, Jamieson in the end became a Catholic, and died a most edifying death. Before his conversion, however, as well as after--Jamieson to the contrary notwithstanding--"our street" always took a lively and neighbourly interest in the St. Patrick's procession, and used to turn out to a man, to a baby it would, perhaps, be more correct to say, for was not one of the chief sights of the procession their decent neighbour, Timothy, or, as he was more generally called, "Thade" Crowley, the pork butcher, at the corner? There were splendid pictures and devices on the banners--I can see them all most vividly now--St. Patrick, Brian Bora, Sarsfield, O'Connell, the Irish Wolf Dog, with the motto "Gentle when stroked, fierce when provoked," and harps and shamrocks _galore_, but Thade Crowley was in all our eyes the finest figure in the procession. Among his greatest admirers were a Jewish family named Hyman, who lived next door to him. Though the Jews are supposed to hold what was Crowley's stock-in-trade in abomination, the two old ladies--Mrs. Crowley, who used to say she was of "Cork's own town and God's own people," and Mrs. Hyman, who came from Cork, too, though, needless to say, without a drop of Irish blood in her veins--were great cronies. As a consequence, the Hymans were among the most eager of the spectators to get the first glimpse of honest Thade Crowley as he walked in front of his own particular lodge of the Hibernians. He was a portly, well-built man, of ruddy complexion, and open, genial countenance. He wore buckskin breeches, top boots, green tabinet double-breasted waistcoat, bottle-green coat with brass buttons, and beaver hat. The Crowleys were very popular in the neighbourhood, as they never had but a kindly word for everybody. When I was a small boy, about 9 or 10 years old, I often listened with delight to Mrs. Crowley, who had a fluent tongue, expatiating on the glories of her native city-- By the pleasant waters of the River Lee. and I have heard her exclaiming, I at the time believing it most implicitly: "Sin, is it? Sure. I never heard of sin till I came to Liverpool; there's no sin in Cor-r-k!" And she rattled the "r" with a strong rising inflexion, greatly impressing me with the high character of Ireland and of Cork in particular. At that time I had never seen Ireland but as an infant at my mother's breast. CHAPTER III. IRELAND RE-VISITED. I was a boy of about 12 when I first re-visited Ireland; and, as the steamer entered Carlingford Lough, which to my mind almost equals Killarney's beauty--but that, perhaps, is a Northman's prejudice--with the noble range of the Mourne mountains on the one side and the Carlingford Hills on the other, it seemed to my young imagination like a glimpse of fairy land. Carlingford reminded me of what my old masters, the Christian Brothers, used to teach us, that those places ending in "ford" had at one time been Norse settlements. There is not the slightest trace, I should say, of people of Norse descent along this coast now, unless we accept the theory that would regard as such the descendants of the Norman De Courcy's followers, who can be recognised by their names, and are still to be found, side by side, and intermingling with those of the original Celtic children of the soil in the barony of Lecale. It is astonishing, by the way, how you still find in Ireland, after centuries of successive confiscations, the old names in their old tribal lands, mingled in places, as in Lecale, with the Norman names; the two races being now thoroughly amalgamated--as distinguished from the case of King James's Planters in Ulster, who, to this day are, as a rule, as distinct from the population amongst whom they live--whether of pure Celtic strain or with a Norman admixture--as when first they came. There was an idea in our family that I had a vocation for the priesthood, and I was being sent to my uncle, Father Michael O'Loughlin, parish priest of Dromgoolan, County Down, who placed me in charge of Mr. Johnson, a somewhat noted classical teacher in the neighbouring little town of Castlewellan. I have seen but little of Ireland, but during the few months I was here on this occasion I made the best use of my time. I could have had no better guide and preceptor than "Priest Mick," as my mother used to call my uncle. I imagine that the term "Priest," which, in the North of Ireland, was formerly so much used as a prefix to the name of the Catholic clergyman, must have arisen amongst those not of his own flock, and was probably not intended to have exactly a respectful meaning. Father Michael sometimes came to see his relatives in Liverpool, who were very numerous. He called them the "Tribe of Brian" (his father's name) and he made a point of visiting them all, down to the very latest arrival--indeed, I think he was the only one who knew the whole of the ramifications of "the Tribe." He used to say that his father--the aforesaid Brian--had one of the largest noses in the country. There was only another man, he said, who could approach him in that respect. If the two men met in a very narrow "loanan "--what they call a "boreen" in other parts of Ireland--the other man, who was a bit of a wag, would put his hand to his nose, and make a motion of putting it aside, as if there was not sufficient room for two such organs, and call out with a kind of snuffle: "Pass, Brian!" The late Mgr. O'Laverty, in his "History of the Dioceses of Down and Connor," says: "From a government official survey in 1766 there were fifteen families in Castlewellan, of whom two only (Hagans and O'Donnells) were Catholics." Up to that date there must have been, during this century, a considerable clearance of the Catholic population from the best land of this district, for I should say--judging from King James's Army List and other authorities--that the Magennises (who, with the MacCartans, were the chief territorial families of the old race in Down) still held land in the neighbourhood up to the end of the seventeenth century. As still further showing this, it will be found that "Eiver Magennis of Castlewellan" was one of the members for the County Down in what Thomas Davis truly describes as "The Patriot Parliament" of 1689. The learned historian of Down and Connor gives an interesting account of the only Norman colony of any extent in the province of Ulster. I have already spoken of this. Notwithstanding the very small Norman admixture, in the main the Catholics of the North are the most pure-blooded Celts in Ireland. And even in the case of Lecale, the original Celtic population intermingled with the descendants of the Norman settlers, who, like the older native population have ever remained true to the old faith. The preponderance of the Celtic element in the Catholics of Ulster must be overwhelming. What is called "Protestant Ulster" is practically a foreign importation, which the native population never absorbed, as they did the earlier invaders. Speaking of the Rev. Cornelius (or, as he was oftener called, Corney) Denvir, a relative of ours, who afterwards became Bishop of Down and Connor, Father O'Laverty says: "The Denvirs are a Norman race, brought to Lecale by De Courcy. The late bishop observed the name in several of the towns in Normandy." I only met Bishop Denvir once, when my father--who was his second cousin--took me to see him at the Grecian Hotel, Liverpool, when he was on his way either to or from Rome. I once, when a small boy, incurred my father's displeasure by criticising adversely (from what I had read in the "Nation") Dr. Denvir's support of what was called the "Bequest Bill." There were some strictures in the "Nation" on the favour shown to this Bill by three of the Irish Hierarchy, Archbishops Crolly and Murray, and Bishop Denvir. The last was a man of great learning. An edition of the Bible was published under his auspices by Sims and McIntyre, of Belfast. During my stay in Ireland, I lived in the house of my uncle, Owen (or Oiney, as he was commonly called) Bannon, in the townland of Ballymagenaghy, where my mother was born. No boy could have had a better object lesson in the part of Irish history embracing the Plantation of Ulster than Ballymagenaghy. It is eminently typical of the kind of rocky and barren land to which the children of the soil were driven--land which would hardly bear cultivation. I need scarcely say that the people were "Papishes" to a man. There was a hill behind my Uncle Oiney's house called Carraig (pronounced "Corrig"), in English "rock," and the name might well apply to most of the townland, in which the chief productions seemed to be stones and rocks. Carraig was a kind of shoulder of what I heard the people calling "My lord's mountain." This was part of Lord Annesley's domain, and separated from Carraig and several small farms by a wall, which ran down to a sheet of water at the foot--Castlewellan Lough. I, as a student of the "Nation," was not at all satisfied that an Irish mountain should be called by such a name, which spoke volumes for the state of serfdom into which the people had fallen. I was not long in finding the real name--Sliab na Slat (mountain of Rods). I often looked with admiration at the view from its highest point. Underneath, the side of the mountain was clothed with trees down to the edge of the lough, which mirrored the wooded eminences of exquisite beauty surrounding it. Looking eastward you could see Dundrum Bay and the white sails of the fishing boats.(They used to sing a mournful lament around the turf fires of Ballymagenaghy of "The loss of the Mourne Fishermen" in a great storm off this coast). Further off you might see an occasional large sailing vessel or steamer, and, further still, in the dim distance, you could just discern the Isle of Man. Southward the eye took in the noble range of the Mourne mountains, running from east to west, from where, at Newcastle, the Irish sea comes to kiss the foot of the lofty Slieve Donard, towering in majesty over all his fellows--rugged sentinels of the hills and vales of Down. Lying, as if nestling under the Mourne range, was a small, well-wooded hill, part of the domain of Lord Roden, who held high rank among the Orange ascendancy faction, and, as will be seen later, may be said to have held the lives and liberties of his Catholic fellow-countrymen in this district in his hands. In Ballymagenaghy I was oftener called by my mother's name than my father's. In those days, as often as not, when a girl got married she was still called by her friends by her maiden name. So, on the first Sunday after my arrival, when I was taken over to Leitrim chapel, where I served my uncle's Mass, I found myself referred to as "Peggy Loughlin's wee boy." It did not seem at all strange to me, for I scarcely ever heard her called by any other name. Indeed, some forty years afterwards--when I was organising for the Irish National League--I met a County Down man in Cumberland. He was, as I soon found, from "our own place," as they affectionately call it. He was trying to trace out what family I belonged to. At last he had it--"Oh" he said, "You would be a son of Margaret O'Loughlin?" I hesitated for moment, when Edward McConvey, the local organiser--a County Down man, too--who had introduced us, laughed heartily as he said: "Here's a quare man; doesn't know his own mother's name!" In fact, I had so seldom heard my mother called anything else but "Peggy" that the proper name sounded strange for the moment. Indeed, it had evidently taken our friend some time to remember the name of "Margaret," which he, no doubt, thought the more polite one to use in speaking of my mother. Her family did not generally use the prefix "O" in her younger days. It was only after her two brothers, Bernard and Michael, became priests, and always called and signed themselves "O'Loughlin," that the prefix was resumed. This is a common experience in other Irish families. Many of the small holdings in Ballymagenaghy would not support in anything approaching to comfort the large families with which the sturdy and industrious people were blessed. This was certainly the case with the Bannons, but they were not entirely dependent on the land they tilled, as several of the family were employed in weaving in a portion of the house, the looms being their own. I have often admired the beautiful damask table-cloths produced in the homes of these "mountainy" people, the webs, when finished, being taken to Banbridge, to the warehouses of the manufacturers, and the yarn and the patterns for the next lot being brought back on the return journey. I believe that these cottage industries no longer exist, and that the beautiful fabrics, for which our northern province is famous, are now produced by steam power in Banbridge and other Ulster towns. As the young men and boys of the Bannons worked at their looms, and the women and girls at their spinning and "flowering," when not wanted to help on the land, the father, Oiney, would occasionally go over to England as a travelling packman, and so increase the family store. I have known in late years other Ulstermen doing this--amongst others my old friend Bernard MacAnulty, of whom I shall have more to say later. I had often, at my home in Liverpool, heard of Irish hospitality. Here in Ballymagenaghy I had many practical illustrations of this in the way they treated the "poor man" or "poor woman" as they called them--they never called them beggars--who came to their doors. Indeed, it seemed to me that these had no occasion to _ask_ for help, for more than once I have seen a "poor woman" coming in with her bed upon her back, putting it down in the warmest corner behind the chimney breast, and making herself at home as a matter of course, without going through the formality of asking for a night's lodging. Of the enormous number of harvestmen who passed every year through Liverpool, except from the County Donegal, there were not so many from the northern province. The majority were from Connaught. They generally landed at the Clarence Dock, Liverpool, a wiry, hardy-looking lot, with frieze coats, corduroy breeches, clean white shirts with high collars, and blackthorn sticks. I have seen them filling the breadth of Prescot Street, as they left the town, marching up like an army on foot to the various parts of England they were bound for. This was before special cheap trains were run for harvestmen. At night, in my Irish mountain home, after I had prepared my Latin lessons for the following day, and my uncle, aunt, and cousins had left off work, I joined with great enjoyment in the family group around the turf fire, and listened with rapt attention to songs and stories; my favourite among the latter being the adventures of Barney Henvey among the fairies in the old rath, or "forth," as they called it, of Ballymagenaghy. I may say that, up to this moment, I have a certain liking for such stories--of course _as_ fairy stories. But, being a boy of enquiring mind, I wanted to get at the whole theory of the existence of these beings, and, accordingly, this is what I gathered as to the origin, present existence, and future state of the "good people," as they called them. In "The Irish Fairy Legends," a number of my "Penny Irish Library," I find I have dealt with the subject. As the passage gives the explanation I got at my uncle Oiney's more correctly than I can trust to my memory to give it now, after a lapse of some sixty years, I may be excused for giving the following extract:-- The belief is that, in the great rebellion of Lucifer, of the spirits who fell from heaven, some, not so guilty as those who "went further and fared worse," fell upon our earth, and into the air and water that surround it. These are the _Fairies_, who have their various dispositions, like mortals, and like them, at the day of judgment, will be rewarded or punished according to their deserts. In the "Fairy Legends" I have also given the story of "Barney Henvey" mentioned above. There is something like it in the "Ingoldsby Legends," and, no doubt, in the fairy mythologies of other nations, but my story is of Irish origin. Heaven only knows through how many ages it has been handed down to us. It is one of the fairy stories my mother and grandmother used to tell us as long ago as I can remember. I have a little grandson who, when smaller, used sometimes to insist when put to bed after he had said his "lying-down prayers," upon hearing "Barney Henvey" before he went to sleep; and so it will, no doubt, go on, and such stories may be told in ages to come, not only in Ireland--"A Nation once again"--but in every settlement of the Clan-na-Gael throughout the world. Friends and neighbours would come to my uncle Oiney's from beside Castlewellan Lough, and over from Dolly's Brae and Ballymagrehan, who, after the day's work, enjoyed going "a cailey." I hope my Gaelic League friends will forgive me if I don't give the correct sound of this word, but that is my remembrance of how they pronounced it some sixty years ago in the County Down. Sometimes at our little gatherings, the "wee boy from England," as the neighbours called me, would be asked to read from the "Nation" a speech of the Liberator--the title his countrymen gave O'Connell after Catholic emancipation. I was always delighted with this; entering as fully and enthusiastically into the spirit of what I read as any of the company. As often as not, in Ballymagenaghy there would be sung, to the accompaniment of fiddle, flute or clarionet, one of those stirring songs which, week after week, appeared about this time in the "Nation" from the pens of Thomas Davis, and the brilliant young men in O'Connell's movement known as the "Young Irelanders "--songs "racy of the soil," like the "Nation" itself, which stirred the hearts of the Irish race like the blast of a trumpet, songs which are still sung by Irish Nationalists the world over. On the Sundays, the Bannons and their next neighbours, the Finegans, MacCartans, and MacKays, with their fiddles, flutes, and clarionets, supplied the chief part of the instrumental music of the choir--for there was no organ--at the little mountain chapel at Leitrim, where my uncle, Father Michael, officiated. The happy remembrances of those Sundays of my boyhood are always brought back to me whenever I read T.D. Sullivan's "Dear Old Ireland," which is equally characteristic of this corner of the "black North" as of the raciest part of Munster--more especially where he sings:-- And happy and bright are the groups that pass From their peaceful homes for miles, O'er fields, and roads, and hills to Mass, When Sunday morning smiles; And deep the zeal their true hearts feel When low they kneel and pray! Oh, dear old Ireland! Blest old Ireland! Ireland, boys, hurrah! But nothing excited my boyish enthusiasm more than the stories of the Insurrection of 1798. I was too young to understand much of what my grandmother used to tell us about these times before she died. My mother was born in 1799, and was the youngest daughter of her family, but her eldest sister, my Aunt Mary, wife of Oiny Bannon, was 12 or 14 years old at the time of the Rising, and could describe more vividly what she saw connected with it than I can now recall incidents in the Repeal and Young Ireland Movements. Listening to her, I could almost fancy I could see my grandfather, Brian O'Loughlin, leaving his home with the other Ballymagenaghy men, with their pikes and such guns as they could muster, to join the United Irish forces previous to the battles of Saintfield and Ballinahinch. At the time of my visit to my mother's birthplace, my grandfather's house was in the occupation of the family of his youngest son, Edward, and, as a pilgrim visiting a sacred spot, I have stood on its floor, as I afterwards did on the field of Ballinahinch itself. My Aunt Mary used to speak of an incident which I have never read of in any account of the battle, but I am inclined to believe there was some foundation for what she used to tell us. In one part of the engagement it seemed as if the bravery of the insurgents would have been crowned with a victory as decisive as they had gained at Saintfield, when, by some untoward circumstance, the fortunes of the day turned, and, in the end, the United Men were defeated. Perhaps what my Aunt Mary told me may be some explanation of the turn in the tide of battle. She used to say that when it looked as if the United Men were carrying all before them, a portion of their forces called out for a "Presbyterian ('Prispatairan' she used to call it) Government," that this caused some hesitation among the Catholics, that after this the battle went against them, and that the day ended in disaster. The story seems somewhat improbable, as it might be asked how, in the excitement of a battle, men of one religion could be distinguished from those of another? But this will not seem so unlikely if the circumstances arising out of the Ulster Plantation of King James I. be remembered. As a consequence of this you will find townlands and parishes and whole districts, where the soil is poorest, where the people are almost exclusively Catholic, and others where the non-Catholic population are in an overwhelming majority. In the United forces the men of each locality would have been drilled and trained together, and, in the same way would, no doubt, act together on the field of battle, so that, without any actual arrangement for that purpose, the Catholic or the Presbyterian would, most likely, find himself among his own co-religionists. It is wonderful how the memories of '98 were handed down from one generation to another, not only in Ireland, but wherever our people have made their homes. This has been brought home to me in the most forcible possible manner by a circumstance which has come to my knowledge only a few months since--so to speak--after a lapse of over a hundred years. This is that General James William Denver--after whom, for his distinguished career, the capital of the State of Colorado was called Denver City--had for his grandfather Patrick Denvir, who did a man's share in the insurrection of '98, and, for his connection with it, had to fly from his native Down to America. This information I had from General Denver's daughter, replying on behalf of her brother, to whom I had written to find if the family were of Irish origin. I had some doubt about this, seeing that they spell their name with an "e" in the last syllable, whereas we and all of the name in the County Down use an "i." The lady's letter was not only interesting but most welcome, as showing that they were not only of Irish but of patriotic origin. They evidently continue to take an interest in the land from which they have sprung, for the lady made some enquiries about the late Bishop Denvir, of whom I have already spoken. Most of the United Irish leaders and a large proportion of the rank and file in the '98 Rising were Presbyterians, and fought and bled for Ireland with the same heroism as their Catholic neighbours, amongst whom no name is more cherished in the County Down than that of the Protestant General Monroe, who, my Aunt Mary used to tell us, was hanged at his own door in 1798. How is it that the sons of the men of 1782 and of Grattan's Parliament, and of 1798 were not as good Irishmen as their fathers? I think I can give a kind of explanation. It must be remembered that the era of Grattan's Parliament and of the Volunteer movement of 1782, of which present-day Nationalists are so proud, was also the era of the Penal laws. Since then the Protestants have seen the Irish Catholic rising from the dust of serfdom and standing in the attitude of manhood. They have seen him gradually obtaining a share in the making of the laws of the land, and, naturally, becoming the predominant political power in Ireland--the Catholics being the majority of the population. I may be wrong, but I have a theory that many of the Protestants of Ireland--who once had all the political power in their hands, and did not always use it too mercifully in their treatment of the rest of their countrymen--are afraid that if they assisted in getting self-government for Ireland the power in the hands of the enfranchised majority might be used against them. That this is a groundless fear is shown from the fact that no men have been more honoured in Ireland than such Protestant leaders as William Smith O'Brien, Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, John Martin, Isaac Butt, and Charles Stewart Parnell. The same feeling is constantly shown at this moment towards distinguished Protestants among the present Irish Parliamentary Party. What has fostered the Anti-Irish feeling among Irish Protestants for the last hundred years has undoubtedly been the fell system of Orangeism, which has caused so much hatred and bloodshed among men who, whatever their race or creed, are now children of the one common soil. The Orangeman looked upon himself as part of a foreign garrison, holding the "Papishes" in subjection. He was armed with deadly weapons; consequently, the defenceless Catholic was almost entirely at his mercy, and the Orangeman was but too often backed up in his lawlessness by the law and its administrators. This almost necessitated the existence, as a kind of defence against Orangeism, of a body I used to hear them speaking of when I was a boy in Ballymagenaghy, called the "Thrashers," which, I imagine, must have been some kind of a secret society. It must have been a sort of survival of these "Thrashers" that my friend, Michael Davitt, many years afterwards, came across somewhere in the North of England. The incident, as described by him, was both amusing and saddening. He addressed them in his capacity as a Fenian Organiser. After they had heard him patiently, an old man, the spokesman, said: "Tell me--do you have Prodestans in this Society of yours?" "Certainly," Davitt answered. "We invite all Irishmen." "Then we'll have nothing to do with yez!" As my Aunt Mary could relate thrilling stories of '98, so could my own mother tell me all about the savagery of Orangemen in her days. She used to describe to me the attempts of an Orange procession to pass through Dolly's Brae, when she was a young girl, before she left Ireland. Dolly's Brae is a kind of rugged defile through which passes the road from the town of Castlewellan, which, running westward, divides the townlands of Ballymagenaghy and Ballymagrehan. It is an entirely Catholic district, and not at all on the ordinary route by which the processionists would reach their homes. Yet, in a spirit of aggression, and well-armed, as usual, with Orange banners waving, drums beating, and bands playing "Croppies lie down," "The Boyne Water," and similar airs, this was the district they sought to march through. It so happened that the proposed hostile parade was not altogether unexpected. In any case, their approach was heralded by the firing over "Papish" houses, as the processionists came towards Dolly's Brae. From the heights above they were seen--my mother being one of the watchers--in sufficient time to have the people of the immediate neighbourhood warned of the threatened Orange incursion. The defenders of Dolly's Brae had no firearms, as their opponents had, but they gathered up any weapons they could to repel the invaders. The Orangemen came on, expecting an easy victory. They had got well into the defile, and were firing at their opponents, who were in sight before them at some distance on the road, and into the houses on each side, when they were thrown into confusion by a storm of large stones and pieces of rock hurled down the steep sides of the defile upon them by assailants who had been up till then invisible. According to the description of my mother, who was always a militant Catholic of the most orthodox description, and a strong physical force Irishwoman as well, the Dolly's Brae engagement must have borne some resemblance to the battle of Limerick, as described by Thomas Davis:-- "The women fought before the men; Each man became a match for ten; So back they pushed the villains then From the city of Luimneach Lionnglas". She ought to know, for she was in the thick of the fight. The confusion of the Orangemen was turned into a complete rout, and they fled, leaving their banners and other trophies in the hands of the mountainy men. For many years the Orangemen never attempted to go near the place, but, with the connivance and active aid of the guardians of the peace, they did at last, many years afterwards, appear on the scene again. The Orange anniversary was celebrated at Tollymore Park, the seat of Lord Roden, who was a sort of Orange deity at the time. Tollymore Park is some four or five miles south-east of Dolly's Brae, which is in the heart of the Catholic district, and, as I have said, far out of the direct road of the Orangemen returning to their own homes. Yet they deliberately took this route. They were a formidable body, well armed with guns. At their head was one Beers, the agent of Lord Roden, and a magistrate who, for the "protection" of the Orangemen, had under his command a strong body of the constabulary and a detachment of soldiers. The ordinary Englishman, who knows the police as they are in his country as the guardians of the public peace, must not confound them with those in Ireland. The Irish constabulary are simply the permanent British army of occupation, well armed and drilled, and, physically, as fine a body of men as any in the world. These were the forces under the command of Lord Roden's agent, for the invasion, for such it was, of a peaceful Catholic district. When the people sought to defend themselves from this invasion as best they could, Beers, in his capacity as a magistrate, gave the police and soldiers under his command the order to fire--which they did--upon the people and into their houses. Consequently, what followed was nothing short of a butchery, under cover of which the Orangemen wrecked the Catholic houses in the glen. I shall never forget the grief of my mother, at this time residing in Liverpool, at reading in the newspapers the names of the victims who had been murdered outright or wounded. They were all her next door neighbours "at home"--people she had known from childhood. The horrible outrage roused universal indignation. In Parliament the Irish members demanded a full official enquiry as to how this murderous business came to be carried out by a Government official. As a result Lord Roden and his agent were deprived of the Commission of the Peace--their offence was too glaring to be entirely overlooked. But to the friends of those who had been legally murdered, and the innocent people whose houses had been wrecked, this was a cruel mockery. Had the criminals been Catholic peasants, they would have been put upon their trial for their lives, and, at the very least, sent into penal servitude. What confidence could the Catholics of Ulster have in the administration of the law, knowing, as they did, that even where they were more than able to hold their own against the Orangemen, they were sure to be sufferers in the long run, seeing that their opponents would be backed up by the forces that should go to preserve law and order. It is thirty-five years since I last re-visited the County Down. I took my son with me. He was nearly of the same age as I was myself when I lived in Ballymagenaghy, but I could only show him the site of Oiney Bannon's house. It was not the too common case of an eviction, for the Annesleys had the reputation of being tolerably good landlords. The land, as I have said, was very poor, in fact, if the people got it for nothing it would hardly repay cultivation. But it was picturesque, and therefore Lord Annesley took some of it into his domain, and these barren hills and rocks, when planted with trees, added to the beauty of the scenery. The dispossessed tenants got land from him in Clarkhill, not far off. Since that time, judging from the Irish newspapers, there seems to have been progress in the right direction, for the little town of Castlewellan, where for a short time I went to school, from being a place where, in the Penal days, a Catholic was scarcely allowed to live, seems to have become a strong Nationalist centre for South Down. This was my mother's part of the country. I have seen similar paragraphs which proved to me that, in the barony of Lecale, County Down, my father's part, the people, though not so demonstrative as the "mountainy men," can still, as ever, be relied upon to stand as firm as Slieve Donard itself for creed and country. CHAPTER IV. O'CONNELL IN LIVERPOOL--TERENCE BELLEW MACMANUS AND THE REPEAL HALL--THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE. O'Connell, when passing through Liverpool on his way to Parliament, always made the Adelphi Hotel his headquarters, and used to hear Mass not far off at the Church of St. Nicholas, or, as it was more generally called, "Copperas Hill Chapel," where I used to serve as an altar boy. I must have been a very small boy at the time when I first remember the Liberator coming to Mass at our Church, for, on one occasion, on stretching up to the altar to remove the Missal it was so difficult for me to reach that I let it fall over my head. Without being by any means what is termed a "votheen," O'Connell was a faithful and devout son of the Catholic Church. During the many years when he was passing through Liverpool, going to and returning from Parliament, and on other occasions when he came to Irish gatherings in the town, he attended Mass daily whenever possible, and frequently approached Holy Communion. O'Connell spoke several times from the balcony of the Adelphi Hotel. From my earliest days I was an earnest politician, and one of my most cherished remembrances is of having been brought by my father to one of these gatherings. The Liberator addressed a great multitude, who filled the whole square in front, and overflowed into the adjoining streets. My recollection of him on this occasion is that of a big man, in a long cloak, wearing what appeared to me some kind of a cap with a gold band on it. This must have been the famous "Repeal Cap" designed by the Irish sculptor, Hogan, who, when investing O'Connell with it at the great gathering at Mullaghmast, said: "Sir, I only regret this cap is not of gold." As in our later Irish movements, we frequently had meetings in one or other of the Liverpool theatres. O'Connell was, as often as his attendance could be secured, the central figure, and drew enormous gatherings. At one of these meetings at the Royal Amphitheatre there was an attempt by an armed body of Orangemen to storm the platform, on which were all our leading Irishmen. Among the most active of these was Terence Bellew MacManus, who had all his lifetime been a devoted follower and admirer of O'Connell. On this particular night, which was long before the unfortunate split into "Old Ireland" and "Young Ireland," he had a fine opportunity of displaying his "physical force" proclivities in defence of the "moral force" leader. The Orange attack was of short duration. They were simply cleared out as if by an irresistible whirlwind. We have always been able to hold our own in Liverpool, when it came to physical encounters against all comers. We have generally had some organisation or another--whether constitutional or unconstitutional--but, apart from this, the nature of the employment of our working-men, especially in O'Connell's time, brought them together in such a way that large numbers of them knew each other, and could act together in case of emergency. MacManus, who had command of the stewards on the night of the attack, knew a number of men like Mick Digney, who was what was called a "lumper"--that is, a contractor in a small way who took work in the "lump" and employed men for loading and unloading ships. Digney and other friends would find their way for consultation and the making of the necessary arrangements beforehand on occasions like this to MacManus, whose place of business--he was an extensive forwarding agent--was one of those half-offices, half-warehouses, which used to be in North John Street. Another class of men who were reliable for such occasions were the bricklayers' labourers. Of course, it is different now--and a sure sign that our people are rising in the social scale--but in those years, and long afterwards, I never knew a bricklayers' labourer who was not an Irishman. The frequent mention at these gatherings of a sterling Irishman I knew well in after years, Patrick O'Hanlon, reminds me of two friends of my father of the same name who belonged to another class of men, the wood-sawyers, who, at that time, were mostly Irish. They had not exactly the same name as Patrick, for it was not so customary to use the O' or Mac in those days as it has since become. Not that Hughey and Ned Hanlon did not know that they were entitled to the honourable Gaelic prefix, but, with the good nature which is rather too characteristic of Irishmen sometimes, those who had preceded them had allowed other people to drop the O' in using their name, until it became rather difficult to resume it. Needless to say that Hughey and Ned Hanlon, John Green, Mike Doolan, and other wood-sawyers were at the Royal Amphitheatre among MacManus's volunteers. The Hanlons, in particular, were fine lathy men, without an ounce of spare flesh, but they had sinews of iron. Hughey used to come to our house with other neighbours every week to hear the "Nation" read, and the songs in it sung to the accompaniment of Harry Starkey's or my Uncle John's fiddle. The Hanlons were North of Ireland men, and Hughey often used to proudly tell us that the O'Hanlons were the Ulster standard-bearers. At that time, besides the Amphitheatre, where during those years several Irish demonstrations were held, a popular place for our gatherings was the Adelphi Theatre (previously the "Queen's"), which was in somewhat better standing then than afterwards, though it, too, has had within its walls most of the Irish leaders of the last half century. I remember one occasion in particular when O'Connell was, of course, the hero of the day, which impressed itself upon my youthful mind the more forcibly on account of the presence on the platform of Jack Langan--of whom I have already spoken--a warm-hearted and generous supporter of the great Dan, and the Cause of Repeal. Indeed, we boys regarded the Irish champion boxer with the admiration we would have bestowed upon Finn MacCool or some other of the ancient Fenians, could they have appeared in bodily form amongst us. Little we then thought that we should be welcoming on the same platform the Fenians of our own days. That meeting in the Adelphi has also been frequently brought back to my mind since, because for a long time the "leading man" in the stock company at that theatre was Edmond O'Rourke (stage name Falconer), a sterling Nationalist, with whom I made a closer acquaintance in later years. I was often brought by my father to the weekly gatherings in the Repeal Hall, Paradise Street, where, among the speakers on the Sunday nights I can best remember were Terence Bellew MacManus, Patrick O'Hanlon, Dr. Reynolds, George Smyth, and George Archdeacon. MacManus and Smyth (the latter of whom I knew well in after years), besides being prominent workers in O'Connell's agitation for Repeal of the Union between Ireland and Great Britain, took active parts in the "Young Ireland" movement. Dr. Reynolds was another of the Young Irelanders. So also was Archdeacon, who, in addition, still showed his belief in physical force by his connection with Fenianism, for which he suffered imprisonment. Young as I was, I shall never forget the days of the Famine, for Liverpool, more than any other place outside of Ireland itself, felt its appalling effects. It was the main artery through which the flying people poured to escape from what seemed a doomed land. Many thousands could get no further, and the condition of the already overcrowded parts of the town in which our people lived became terrible, for the wretched people brought with them the dreaded Famine Fever, and Liverpool became a plague-stricken city. Never was heroism greater than was shown by the devoted priests--English as well as Irish--in ministering to the sick and dying. So terrible was the mortality amongst them that several of the churches lost their priests twice over. Our own family were nearly left orphans, for both father and mother were stricken down by the fever, but happily recovered. It will not be wondered at that one who saw these things, even though he was only a boy, should feel it a duty stronger than life itself to reverse the system of misgovernment which was responsible. There was, no doubt, a good deal of English sympathy for the famine-stricken people, and there were some remedial measures by Parliament--totally inadequate, however, but I am afraid that the "Times" and "Punch," two great organs of public opinion, but too faithfully represented the feelings of many of our rulers. The "Times" actually gloated over what appeared to be the impending extinction of our race. Young as I then was, but learning my weekly lessons from the "Nation," I can remember how my blood boiled one day when I saw in a shop window a cartoon of "Punch"--a large potato, which was a caricature of O'Connell's head and face, with the title--"The Real Potato Blight." At the time of the Rising of 1848 I was commencing my apprenticeship with a firm of builders, who were also my father's employers. They were successors to the firm through whose agency he had been sent to Ireland as clerk of the works, just previous to my birth there. It was the custom of the firm, when a boy came to commence his apprenticeship to be a joiner, to keep him in the office for a time as office boy. I was employed in the office at the time of the Rising, but one of the partners in this firm of builders, who was also an architect, seeing that I had had a good education, and, through attending evening classes at the Catholic Institute and Liverpool Institute, had a considerable knowledge of mathematics and architectural drawing, gave me employment which was more profitable to the firm and congenial to me than that of an ordinary office boy or junior clerk. Besides helping in the ordinary clerical work in the office, I was put to copying and making tracings of ground plans, elevations and sections of buildings, and working drawings for the use of the artizans, besides assisting in surveying. I was about three years employed in this way before entering into the joiners' workshop. The firm was most anxious that I should remain in the office altogether, and I have often thought since that my father made a mistake in insisting that I should learn the trade of a joiner, which he considered a more certain living than that of an architect or draughtsman, unless one had influential connections. It was from the upper window of the office where I was at the work I have described that I could see the men belonging to our firm drilling as special constables in the school yard opposite, in anticipation of trouble in connection with an Irish Rising. The authorities were evidently preparing for a formidable outbreak in Liverpool, for there was a large military camp at Everton--a suburb of the city--and three gunboats in the river ready for action, in case any part of the town fell into the hands of the Irish Confederates. Special constables, as in the case of our own firm, were being sworn in all over the town, and the larger firms were putting pressure upon their employees to be enrolled. Indeed, some 500 dock labourers were discharged because they would not be sworn in. My father declined to be a special constable, but suffered no further from this than becoming a suspect--his services being too valuable to be dispensed with by his employers. He was a genuinely patriotic Irishman, steadfast in his political creed, though unostentatious in his professions, being more a man of action than of words. My mother, as I think I have already sufficiently indicated, was, on the other hand, more demonstrative. I think she must have had a positive genius for conspiracy. Whatever the movement was she must have a hand in it. On one occasion--I forget exactly what it was--some compromising documents had to be got out of the way for the time being. In those days sloops used to come over from Ireland with potatoes, and the cargoes used to be sold on the quay at the King's Dock. She often bought a load of potatoes here to supply a small general shop which she kept to help out my father's earnings. It was under such a load of potatoes that she had brought home that she concealed the dangerous documents. It was in June, 1848, in the columns of the "Nation" that I first met with the name of Bernard MacAnulty. In after years I worked in successive national movements with him, and ever found him a dear friend and most active and enthusiastic colleague. As showing that he was a man of advanced proclivities, I may mention that he wrote to the "Nation" suggesting the formation of the "Felon Repeal Club" in Newcastle-on-Tyne. From then up to the last day of his life he was the same generous whole-souled Irishman he had been from the beginning. His stalwart frame and pleasant, genial face were well known during the whole of the Home Rule movement, in which I was thrown into frequent contact with him, when we were both members of the Executive of the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain. He was a North man, from the County Down, a successful merchant--having started life as a packman--in Newcastle-on-Tyne, and so won the respect of all classes that he was elected a member of the Town Council, in which he served with great credit. The northern Catholic, who is so often a pure Celt, is sometimes credited with having acquired some of the qualities of his Presbyterian neighbours of Lowland Scots extraction. But this is only on the surface, and Bernard MacAnulty was a typical example of this. No braver or more generous Irishman ever breathed, and he had a fund of humour which would have done credit to the quickest-witted Connaughtman or Munsterman that ever lived. Though the Ulster accent is generally regarded as a hard one, I never thought it was so with my friend. Perhaps this is owing to my partiality as a County Down man, which, though born in Antrim, I always consider myself, Down being the native place of my people from time immemorial. I have always thought that the people born and reared, as Bernard was, among the Mourne Mountains and their surroundings have anything but an unmusical accent. In connection with the Fenian movement my dear old friend was a strong, active, and generous sympathiser. His purse was always available for every good National object, whether "legal" or "illegal," and I know as a fact that many a good fellow "on the run" found shelter under his roof, and never went away empty-handed. CHAPTER V. THE "NO-POPERY" MANIA--THE TENANT LEAGUE--THE CURRAGH CAMP. The restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy, September 29th, 1850, brought on what appeared to us one of John Bull's periodical fits of lunacy. I witnessed many scenes of mob violence at the time, when, in deference to the prevailing bigotry in opposing what they termed "Papal Aggression" a part of the Penal Laws were revived in Lord John Russell's Ecclesiastical Titles Act. In due course John got over his paroxysm, and the Act was repealed. But for a time the storm of bigotry raged fiercely, and, as the following incident will show, while the mania lasted even the police were not entirely free from it. The site of the noble Gothic edifice, Holy Cross Church, Great Crosshall Street, Liverpool, was, at this time, occupied by a ramshackle place made into a temporary chapel out of a number of old houses. It was so constructed that from any part you could see the altar, if you could not always hear Mass. This was not, however, an unusual thing in Liverpool in the old days, particularly in the Famine years, when our panic-stricken people came into Liverpool like the wreck of a routed army. The chief feature of the old Holy Cross Chapel was a long narrow flight of stairs, leading from Standish Street, the side street off Great Crosshall Street, up to a higher part of the building which served the purpose of a gallery. The famous Dr. Cahill came to Holy Cross to preach, and every part of the building was crowded to suffocation. In the middle of the sermon an alarm was raised of a broken beam or something of the kind, and the people commenced to rush down the narrow stairs in a state of panic. Such of them as could crush their way out, instead of being assisted, were set upon and assaulted with their batons by several policemen, who were in the street outside. So great was the indignation in the town, that a public inquiry was held, and it was proved that the police not only brutally struck men, women and children, but even a blind man who was trying to grope his way out. They also used foul expressions about "Popery" and the "bloody Papists," and it was afterwards proved that these very men had themselves raised the alarm, apparently to get an excuse for breaking the heads of the unfortunate people. An honest police official, whose duty it afterwards became to make a report of what had occurred, came upon the scene, and did what he could to stop the brutality. When Dowling, the head constable, came to the police office next morning, and saw the official report in the book kept for the purpose, he caused the leaf containing it to be torn out, and another report by one Sergeant Tomlinson to be substituted for it. Mr. Mansfield, the stipendiary magistrate, who conducted the inquiry, denounced Dowling and Tomlinson for what he called "the disgraceful and discreditable suppression of the report which," he added, "was no doubt true. He had never heard of more disgraceful proceedings in his life." Pending a fuller investigation, the police office books were impounded, and, as a result of the inquiry, several of the police were suspended. Dowling was dismissed from his post as head constable of Liverpool, and lost a retiring pension which, if all had been well with him, he would have come in for a short time afterwards. An amusing story is told of a Liverpool daily paper in those days. It was struggling with adversity, and the manager, a worthy Scotsman, sat in his office on Monday morning with the weekly statement before him, showing increasing expense and decreasing revenue. To him entered a Liverpool parson--very determined and very menacing. He had asked for the editor, but that gentleman had not yet come down, and the manager was the only person in authority visible, so he had to make shift with him. "I am here," the parson said, "as the mouthpiece of a large number of people who are not satisfied with the attitude of the 'Liverpool ----' on the great question of the hour--Whether Popery is to dominate our liberties or are we to crush Popery?" "Yes," said the manager, wearily, his mind still on the balance sheet. "What do you complain of?" "I wish to tell you, sir," said the parson, with impressive emphasis, "that only this morning I have heard the belief expressed by merchants on 'Change that the 'Liverpool ----' is actually in the pay of the Pope of Rome!" In a second a ray of light seemed to irradiate the gloom of the manager's soul, as he contemplated in a flash of thought the untold treasures of the Vatican-- "Man!" he exclaimed fervently, "I wish to Heaven it was!" But the numerous exhibitions of bigotry stirred up in connection with Lord John Russell's Ecclesiastical Titles Act were of trifling consequence compared with the injury done to the Irish people arising out of the same Act. For it led to the ruin of the Tenant Right agitation in Ireland, in which the Irish people, Protestant as well as Catholic, had been united as they had not been since 1798 and the days of Grattan's Parliament. For the Tenant League and the Irish Party in Parliament had in their ranks some of the greatest rascals who had ever disgraced Irish politics. These, while posing as the champions of Catholicity in opposing Lord John Russell's bill, were simply working for their own base ends, and were afterwards known and execrated as the Sadlier-Keogh gang. Their infamous betrayal of the Irish tenantry dashed the hopes and destroyed the union of North and South from which so much was expected, besides creating a distrust in constitutional agitation which lasted for nearly a generation. The after fate of the Sadlier-Keogh gang--including the suicide of John Sadlier and the scarcely less wretched end of Keogh--have ever since been terrible object-lessons to the Irish people. In his later years I enjoyed the friendship of one of the most distinguished of the Tenant Right leaders, who had also played a prominent and honourable part in the Repeal and Young Ireland movements. This was Charles Gavan Duffy, whom I met after his return from Australia. It was the Sadlier-Keogh treason, their selling themselves to the Government after the most solemn promises to the contrary, and the way in which their conduct had been condoned by so many of the hierarchy, clergy and people of Ireland, that caused Gavan Duffy to lose heart for the time, and to declare, as he left the country, in memorable words--"that there was no more hope for Ireland than for a corpse on the dissecting table." But, as I learned from his own lips on his return to this country, he never lost sight of the National movement while in Australia, where he became first Minister of the Crown in a self-governing colony; and, on his return, his old hope for the success of our Cause had, he assured me, revived. Charles Gavan Duffy having sailed for Australia on the 6th of November, 1855, John Cashel Hoey succeeded him as editor of the "Nation," he having, as one of his colleagues, Alexander Martin Sullivan, who afterwards became sole proprietor and responsible editor. "A.M." Sullivan, as he was always called, was an upright man, who had a very clear conception of his own policy in Irish matters. He frankly accepted the British constitution, and worked inside those lines. To me, when my country was concerned, the British constitution (with the making of which neither I nor my people had ever had anything to do) was a matter of very little moment. Any work for Ireland that commended itself to my conscience and was practicable was good enough. Nevertheless, it will ever be to me a source of pride that, from the moment when we first knew each other to the hour of his death, we were the closest friends. In connexion with the "Papal aggression" mania, Cardinal Wiseman was the central figure against whom the storm of bigotry was chiefly directed. I remember with pleasure that I took part in the reception given to him in Liverpool by Father Nugent and the students of the Liverpool Catholic Institute, by whom the Cardinal's fine play of "The Hidden Gem" was performed in the Hall of the Institute during his stay in town. The bringing of the Cardinal to Liverpool was only one of the many occasions when the good Father was the medium through whom, from time to time, a number of distinguished Catholics and Irishmen were brought into intimate contact with their co-religionists and fellow-countrymen in the town for the advancement of some worthy object connected with creed or nationality--most frequently with both. I have described the St. Patrick's Day annual processions in Liverpool. Notwithstanding some grand features in connection with them, they were, unfortunately, sometimes the occasion of rioting and intemperance. Father Nugent was of Irish parentage and sympathies, and possessed of great zeal, capacity, energy and eloquence. He determined to make a new departure in celebrating the national anniversary, for though the processions were magnificent displays, and it was not the fault of their promoters if ever there was any scandal arising out of them, still there was much that was inconsistent with a worthy celebration of the feast of the national saint of Ireland. Calling a number of young Irishmen together, of whom I was one, he, with their help, organised on a grand scale a festival which was held in one of the large public halls of the town. So successful was the first of these that they became an annual institution, which superseded the previous out-door celebrations. On these occasions there were selections of Irish music and song, and oratory from some distinguished Irishman, with an eloquent and stirring panegyric on St. Patrick from Father Nugent himself, making a more creditable and enjoyable celebration of the national festival than had ever been held in the town before. Such celebrations as these (which have for many years past been held under the auspices of the Irish national political organisation of the day), have become common in the Irish centres of Great Britain. Indeed, it has become one of the recognised duties of the members of the Irish Parliamentary Party to hold themselves in readiness to be drafted off to one or another of these gatherings, which are the means of keeping steadily burning the fire of patriotism in the breasts of our people. And what is of consequence from a financial point of view, the proceeds of these gatherings help to provide the sinews of war for carrying on the Home Rule campaign in Great Britain. For over half a century, from the time when I assisted Father Nugent with his first celebration, I took an active part in organising these gatherings in many places. I said at the commencement that I knew little of Ireland from personal contact with it. Born there, I was too young to remember being brought to England. For some months I was there again, as I have already mentioned, as a boy of twelve, under the care of my uncle, the Rev. Michael O'Loughlin. I had often desired to see more of Ireland, and, singularly enough, it was the Crimean War that gave me the opportunity of spending another three months there in the summer of 1855. A large firm in Liverpool had part of the contract for erecting the wooden houses and other buildings at the camp being erected on the Curragh of Kildare at the time of the war. I made application, and, with my brother Bernard, was employed to go there. Reaching the Curragh, we found that many of the men slept in the huts they were erecting, being supplied by the contractors with the requisite bed and bedding. The contractors also erected a large "canteen," to be used afterwards by the military where the workmen could be supplied with food and drink--too much drink sometimes. These arrangements for food and sleeping were somewhat necessary, as the nearest towns, Kildare, Kilcullen, and Newbridge were each some three miles off. But we were anxious to see as much of the country and of the people as we could, and, besides, did not care for the mixed company sleeping in the huts. We therefore managed to secure lodgings with the Widow Walsh, on the road leading from the Curragh to Suncroft. The widow's husband had but recently died, leaving her a pretty good farm, and, with the aid of her family--one of them a fine, grown-up young man--she was able to hold on to the land. But the ready cash she got from the Curragh men who came to lodge with her was useful too. It was a good big house of the kind, and the widow made use of every available inch of it, so that she had about a dozen of us in all. Mrs. Walsh, though an easy-going soul herself, had a fine bouncing girl to help her, but, with a dozen hungry men coming with a rush at night, it used to be a scramble for the cooking utensils, as we were largely left to our own devices. We used to leave early in the morning for our work on the Curragh, taking with us the materials for our breakfasts and dinners. As to the cooking, some went to the canteen, while others got their meals wherever they happened to be working. As there were plenty of chips and small cuttings of wood, only fit for that purpose, we used to make of these big fires on the short grass, and we boiled our water for tea or coffee and our eggs, and frizzled our chops or bacon at the end of a long stick. I have mentioned before that whenever one finds work particularly laborious he is fairly certain to find Irishmen at it. It was so at the Curragh. When a carpenter or joiner lays down the boarding of a floor, if there is only a small quantity of it he planes it down himself to make an even surface. But if there is a large quantity this does not pay, and the contractor brings in another artist called a "flogger," who, in nine cases out of ten, in my time, was an Irishman. It was generally given out as "piece work" to one man, the "master-flogger," as you might term him, who employed the others. One of these, a very decent Irishman, Tom Cassidy, whom I had known in Liverpool, had the contract for the work at the Curragh Camp, and he had about a score of his fellow-countrymen working for him. Going back to Liverpool for a holiday, while my brother and I were still at the Curragh, honest Tom called on my father and mother, who knew him well. They were glad to hear that he was lodging at the Widow Walsh's, and could tell them all about their boys. This he could do most truthfully without letting his imagination run away with him. "Aye, indeed," he said, "Barney and John are lodging in the one house with me, with a decent widow woman, and many a glass we had together at Igoe's." Tom had put in this bit of "local colouring" about Igoe's to show the good fellowship between us, but as their sons were both teetotalers, the old people knew that this could not be true, and the rest of his story was somewhat discredited in consequence. Igoe's was a public house just on the corner of the road leading from the Curragh to Suncroft. What between the workmen at the Camp and the soldiers and the militia, Igoe's must have been doing a roaring trade at this time. Which reminds me that I one day saw John O'Connell (son of the Liberator), then a captain in the Dublin militia, trying to get a lot of his men, who were the worse for liquor, out of Igoe's. It could not be said that he did not give an edifying example to his men, for I saw him, on another occasion, going to Holy Communion, at the Soldiers' Mass, where the altar was fixed up under a verandah in the officers' quarter, the men being assembled in the open square in front. He was a well-meaning man, and tried to carry on the Repeal Association after his father's death, but it soon collapsed, for the mantle of Dan was altogether too big for John. Although he generally showed himself bitterly opposed to the Young Irelanders, he was a poetical contributor to the "Nation," where I find him represented by two very fine pieces--"Was it a Dream?" and "What's my Thought Like?" In the latter piece he pictures Ireland-- No longer slave to England! but her sister if she will-- Prompt to give friendly aid at need, and to forget all ill! But holding high her head, and, with serenest brow, Claiming, amid earth's nations all, her fitting station now. I never met his brother Maurice, but I could imagine his a more congenial spirit with the "Young Irelanders" than any other of the O'Connell family. He, too, is represented in "The Spirit of the Nation" by his rousing "Recruiting Song of the Irish Brigade" which, sung to the air of "The White Cockade," has always been a favourite of mine. A fine, genial old priest, full of gossip and old-time stories, was Father MacMahon, of Suncroft. If he met one of us on the road he would stop to have a gossip, and was always delighted when he found, as he often did, along with an English tongue an Irish heart. From him it was I heard the legend of St. Brigid's miraculous mantle and the origin of the Curragh--how the saint, to get "as much land as would graze a poor man's cow" made the very modest request from the king for as much ground as her mantle would cover; how he agreed, and she laid her mantle down on the "short grass;" how, to the king's astonishment, it spread and spread, until it covered the whole of the ground of what is now the Curragh; and how it would have spread over all Ireland but that it met with a red-haired woman, and that, as everybody knows, is unlucky. Whenever, in our rambles along the country roads we afterwards met a red-haired woman, we used to wonder was she a descendant of the female who stopped the growth of the Curragh of Kildare. Father MacMahon could also tell us of the gallant fight made by the men of Kildare, and the massacre of the unarmed people on the Curragh in 1798. Many of the men from the Curragh used to come to Mass on Sundays at Suncroft, and often in his sermons--which were none the less edifying because they were given in the same free and easy style as his gossips with us on the road--he would tell his people of the talks he had had with the men from the Camp, and what good Irishmen he found among them. They, in their turn, were very fond of the good father, and most of them took a practical way of showing their feeling when it came to the offertory. Dear old Father MacMahon! I took up an Irish Church Directory the other day and looked for the little village of Suncroft, in the dioceses of Kildare and Leighlin, to see if your name was still there, foolishly forgetting that it is over fifty years since we met--you an old man and I a young one. I am an old man now, and you--you dear good old soul--must have gone to your reward long ago, where you in your turn will be hearing from St. Brigid herself, and from the fine old Irish king who gave the Curragh, the true story of the miraculous mantle; and how the king did not make such a bad bargain after all, for, in exchange for his gift, he now, doubtless, has what St. Brigid promised, a kingdom far greater than even her mantle would cover--the Kingdom of Heaven. On Sundays we used to have long walks. We did not often go near Newbridge--it was too much like an ordinary English military station. We preferred going to Kildare, where stands the first Irish Round Tower I ever saw, and where the fine old ruined church of St. Brigid put us in mind of the patron saint of Ireland; or to Kilcullen, where the brave Kildare pikemen routed General Dundas in 1798; and to others of the neighbouring places. We reviewed, too, every part of the famous Curragh itself, so full of memories--glorious and sad--of Irish history. As fast as we finished them, the huts we were building were occupied by the military, and, whether regulars or militia, I found among them, driven to wear the uniform by stress of circumstances, as good Irishmen as I ever met. Coming home from work one evening, I met on the road to the Curragh a party of them, carrying, for want of a better banner, a big green bush, and singing "The Green Flag." Then, as they came in sight of the famous plain itself, a man struck up:-- Where will they have their camp? Says the _Shan Van Voct_ When, as if moved by one impulse, all joined in:-- On the Curragh of Kildare, And the boys will all be there, With their pikes in good repair-- Says the _Shan Van Voct_! "Igoe's porter!" a cynic might say. True, there may have been a glass or two and a little harmless rejoicing, but this was too spontaneous to be anything but the outpouring of the good, honest warm hearts of the poor fellows, burning with love for the land that bore them. Peter Maughan, who, like myself, was a house joiner, working at the Curragh, had similar experiences. Indeed, you might say that he was then qualifying himself for the part he very efficiently filled some years later in the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, as recruiting officer among the soldiery of Britain. Of course, he found scoundrels amongst them too, for, as the history of the Fenian movement shows, he was himself betrayed and sent to penal servitude. Before I returned to England I had a most interesting tour through the South of Ireland, that being, I may say, the most I have ever actually seen of my own country. Having a taste for drawing, I took sketches of the various noted places I visited, which I preserved for many years--the most cherished remembrances of my visit to the "old sod." After returning from the Curragh to Liverpool, I married there and carried on business on my own account for several years as a joiner and builder, before taking service with Father Nugent, first as secretary of his Boy's Refuge, and then as conductor for some three years of his newspaper, the "Northern Press and Catholic Times." CHAPTER VI. THE IRISH REVOLUTIONARY BROTHERHOOD--ESCAPE OF JAMES STEPHENS--PROJECTED RAID ON CHESTER CASTLE--CORYDON THE INFORMER. The trials in 1859, following the arrests in connection with the Phoenix movement, with which the name of Jeremiah O'Donovan (called also "Rossa," after his native place) was identified, were the first public manifestations of what developed into the great organisation known in America as the Fenian Brotherhood, and, on this side of the Atlantic as the I.R.B., or Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood. Many years afterwards "Rossa" called at the office of the Irish National League in London, to see his old fellow-conspirator, James Francis Xavier O'Brien, then General Secretary of the constitutional organisation for the attainment of "Home Rule." As I was chief organiser for the League in Great Britain, and was in the, office at the time, I was introduced to his old comrade (who had, he said, often heard of me) by "J.F.X.," as we used to call him, and it was to me a delightful experience to hear the two old warriors, who had done and suffered so much for Ireland, fighting their battles over again. I was sitting in my office in Father Nugent's Refuge one day, about the beginning of 1866, when my old friend, John Ryan, was shown in to me. As we had not seen each other for several years, our greeting was a most cordial one. Though we had not met, I had heard of him from mutual friends from time to time as being actively connected with the physical force movement for the freedom of Ireland. During this time I had often wished to see him, and I found that exactly the same idea had been in _his_ mind regarding me; our object being the same--my initiation into the ranks of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, of which he was an organiser. A word perhaps is due here--for I wish to pay respect to the opinion of every man--to those Irishmen who call themselves loyalists. On close analysis their language and arguments appear to me to be meaningless. A study of the history of the world and of the origins of civil power show that there is only one thing that is recognisable as giving a good and stable title to any government, and that is the consent of the governed. A man who is a member of a community owes a duty to the community in return for the benefit arising out of his membership, but his duty--which he may call loyalty if he pleases--is proportionate to the share which he possesses in the imposition of responsibilities upon himself. The application of this to Ireland is obvious, and it explains why in so many cases a man who has been a rebel in Ireland has afterwards risen to the highest place in the self-governing communities which are called British colonies. To put it in another way, a community of intelligent men must be self-governing, or else it will be a forcing-house for rebels. I don't see any third way. As I have before suggested, the two questions that have always presented themselves to me in connection with work for Ireland have been--first, is it right? Second, is it practicable? In joining the I.R.B. I had no doubt on either ground. As to the first, the misgovernment of Ireland, of which I had seen the hideous fruits in the Famine years and emigration, was ample justification. As to the second, there was every likelihood of the success of the movement. It will be remembered that during these years the great Civil War in America was going on, in which many thousands of our fellow-countrymen, were engaged on both sides, mostly, however, for the North. A great number of these had entered into this service chiefly with the object of acquiring the military training intended to be used in fighting on Irish soil for their country's freedom. Such an opportunity seemed likely to arise, for during this time the "Alabama Claims" and other matters brought America and England to the verge of war. Had such a conflict arisen, one result of it, as Mr. Gladstone and other British statesmen could not but have foreseen, would probably be the severance of the connexion, once for all, between Ireland and Great Britain. John Ryan, knowing me so well, felt tolerably assured that no argument from him would be required to induce me to join the I.R.B.; consequently, one of the first things he did was, at my request, to administer to me the oath of allegiance to the Irish Republic, as the saying went, "now virtually established." After this we had a long _seanchus_, I telling him of all that had happened among our friends during his frequent absences from Liverpool, and he describing to me many of the adventures of himself and other prominent men in the movement, which were to me both interesting and exciting. Among these were his assistance in the escape of James Stephens, of which I will speak later. Before we parted, he arranged with me for my acting in Liverpool as a medium of communication in the organisation. In this way I was, for several years, brought into constant contact with the leaders, nearly all of whom I met from time to time. I think the most capable Irishmen I ever met were the various members of the Breslin family, with several of whom I was intimately acquainted. Bravest among the brave, as they proved themselves at many a critical moment, there were none more prudent. John Breslin was hospital steward in Richmond Prison when James Stephens, the Fenian chief, was imprisoned there awaiting his trial. John Devoy was the man who successfully carried through, under the direction of Colonel Kelly, the outside arrangements in connection with the escape of the C.O.I.R. (Chief Organiser of the Irish Republic), as he was called, in the early morning of the 24th of November, 1865. But John Breslin it was who, with the assistance of Daniel Byrne, night watchman, actually set Stephens free. Byrne was arrested and put upon his trial for aiding the escape of Stephens, but nothing could be brought home to him, and, after two successive juries had disagreed on his case, he was released. Breslin, the chief instrument in the rescue, was not suspected. He simply bided his time until he took his annual holiday, from which he never returned, leaving the country before there was any suspicion of him. Michael Breslin, his brother, held a responsible position in the Dublin police, and was the means of frustrating many a well-laid scheme of the Castle, so that if the Government had its creatures in the revolutionary camp, the I.R.B. had agents in theirs. Another, as I have already mentioned, who took part in the Stephens rescue was my friend John Ryan, better known in the Brotherhood as Captain O'Doherty. At our interview in Liverpool on the occasion of my initiation, he gave me a full account of this among other incidents. He was, like Peter Maughan, an old schoolfellow of mine with the Christian Brothers in Liverpool. He was one of the men picked out by Colonel Kelly to be on guard when the "old man"--one of Stephens' pet nick-names--came over the prison wall. Ryan was a fine type of an Irishman, morally, intellectually and physically. As Stephens slipped down from the wall, holding on to the rope, he came with such force on my friend's shoulders as almost to bear him to the ground. In my "Irish in Britain" I have described in detail how Breslin got a key made for Stephens' cell, and how he and Byrne helped the C.O.I.R. over the prison wall to where his friends awaited him, and also the adventures of the Fenian leader after his escape from Richmond. The man who made the key for Stephens' cell, from a mould taken by John Breslin, was Michael Lambert, a trusted member of the I.R.B. Though his name was well known to the initiated at the time, it never was mentioned until later years, he being always referred to previously as "the optician." After remaining in concealment several months Stephens got away from Ireland. The craft in which he escaped was one of a fleet of fishing hookers which sailed from Howth and Kinsale when engaged in their regular work. The owner, who was delighted to have a hand in such an enterprise, was a warm-hearted and patriotic Irishman, Patrick De Lacy Garton, for whom I acted as conducting agent, when he was returned by the votes of his fellow-countrymen to the Liverpool Town Council, where he sat as a Home Ruler. I met several times, during 1866 and later, one of the most remarkable men connected with the organisation. He was known as "Beecher," and was a man of singular astuteness, as he required to be, particularly at the time when, unknown to his colleagues, Corydon was giving information to the police. If at any time Beecher had fallen into their hands, they might have made a splendid haul, which would have paralysed the movement on this side of the Atlantic, for he was the "Paymaster." Captain Michael O'Rorke--otherwise "Beecher"--was a well-balanced combination of sagacity, cautiousness and daring, as you could not fail to see, if brought into contact with him a few times. Stephens had the most abounding confidence in him, and it was well deserved. A native of Roscommon, he emigrated to America when a boy of thirteen. When the Civil War broke out he joined the Federal Army, and served with much distinction. He was a member of the Fenian Brotherhood, and was greatly pleased to be called upon for active service in Ireland, and, sailing from New York, he reached Dublin on the 27th of July, 1865, when he reported himself to the C.O.I.R. He was entrusted with the payment of the American officers then in Ireland and Great Britain, which duty, I need scarcely say, involved his keeping in constant touch with them. In this way I, from time to time, came in contact with him in Liverpool, and was much impressed with the perfect way in which he carried out his arduous duties. Before Stephens left for America, in March, 1866, he directed Captain O'Rorke to send all the officers not arrested, and then in Ireland, over to England. This was a proper measure of prudence, as the Irish Americans would be less objects of suspicion, and less liable to arrest here than in Ireland. He had fifty officers, and sometimes more, to provide for as Paymaster, or, as the informers and detectives had it, the "Fenian Paymaster." He had to visit in this way at various times all parts of the British organisation, sometimes paying his men personally, and at other times by letter, forwarded through trusted Irishmen in various places who had not laid themselves open to suspicion. But he had to run his head into the lion's mouth occasionally, too, for it was part of his duty to visit Dublin at least once a month. As a matter of precaution, there were but few who knew of any address where he might be found. At a time when Corydon had started to give information, but before "Beecher" actually knew of it, the informer gave an address of his where he thought the "Paymaster" was to be found to the Liverpool police. Major Greig, the chief constable, and a strong body of his men, surrounded the house, but the bird had flown. After that, he was more cautious than ever, only letting his whereabouts be known when it was absolutely necessary. A noted man among the Fenians was "Pagan O'Leary." Jack Ryan told me of how he rather surprised the prison officials when they came to classify him under the head "Religion." Being asked what he was, he said he was a Pagan. No, they said, they could not accept that--they had headings _in their books_, "Roman Catholic," "Protestant," and "Presbyterian," but not "Pagans." "Well," he said, "You have two kinds, the 'Robbers' (meaning Protestants) and the 'Beggars' (Catholics), and if I must choose, put me down a 'Beggar.'" A startling incident in connection with the Fenian movement, the daring plan to seize Chester Castle, will enable me to introduce two exceedingly interesting characters with whom I came in contact at this time. The idea was to bring sufficient men from various parts of England, armed with concealed revolvers, to overpower the garrison, which at the time was a very weak one, and to seize the large store of arms then in the Castle. In connection with this, arrangements had been made for the cutting of wires, the taking up of rails, and the seizure of sufficient engines and waggons to convey the captured arms to Holyhead, whence, a steamer having been seized there for the purpose, the arms were to be taken to Ireland, and the standard of insurrection raised. Of John Ryan, one of the leaders of this raid, I have already spoken. Another of them, Captain John McCafferty, was one of the Irish-American officers who had crossed the Atlantic to take part in the projected rising in Ireland. I met him several times in Liverpool in company with John Ryan, and, from his own lips, got an account of his adventurous career up to that time. Most of the American officers I came in contact with during these years had served in the Federal Army, but McCafferty fought on the side of the South in the American Civil War. He was a thorough type of a guerilla leader. With his well-proportioned and strongly-knit frame, and handsome resolute-looking bronzed face, you could imagine him just the man for any dashing and daring enterprise. I frequently met John Flood, too, whose name, with that of McCafferty, is associated with the Chester raid. He was then about thirty years of age, a fine, handsome man, tall and strong, wearing a full and flowing tawny-coloured beard. He had a genial-looking face, and, in your intercourse with him, you found him just as genial as he looked. He was a man of distinguished bearing, who you could imagine would fill with grace and dignity the post of Irish Ambassador to some friendly power. He was a Wexford man, full of the glorious traditions of '98. He took an active part in aiding the escape of James Stephens from Ireland. With Colonel Kelly he was aboard the hooker in which the C.O.I.R. escaped, and to his skill and courage and rare presence of mind was largely due the fact that Stephens did not again fall into the hands of his enemies. From then up to the time immediately preceding the Chester raid, he frequently called on me in Liverpool in company with John Ryan. Father McCormick, of Wigan, a patriotic Irish priest, used to tell me, too, of the men coming to confession to him on their way to Chester, and afterwards to Ireland, for the rising on Shrove Tuesday. And yet these were the kind of men for whom, according to a certain Irish bishop, "Hell was not hot enough nor Eternity long enough." When John Ryan informed me of the plans that were being matured for the seizure of the arms and ammunition in Chester Castle, I volunteered for any duty that might be allotted to me. It was settled that I should hold myself in readiness to carry out when called upon certain mechanical arrangements in connection with the raid with a view to prevent reinforcements from reaching Chester. These arrangements were to consist of the taking up of the rails on certain railway lines and the cutting of the telegraphic wires leading into Chester. I, therefore, surveyed the ground, and besides the required personal assistance, had in readiness crowbars, sledges, and, among other implements, the wrenches for unscrewing the nuts of the bolts fastening the fishplates which bound together the rails, end to end. I now held myself prepared for the moment when the call to action would reach me. This, however, never came, for I found afterwards that the leaders had learned in time of Corydon's betrayal of the project, and made their arrangements accordingly. I heard nothing further of the projected Chester expedition until Monday, February 11th, 1867. My employment was at this time in Liverpool, but I lived on the opposite bank of the Mersey, at New Ferry. Anybody who has to travel in and out of town, as I did by the ferry boat, to his employment gets so accustomed to his fellow-passengers that he knows most of them by sight. But this morning it was different. In a sense some of those I saw were strangers to me, but I had a kind of instinct that they were my own people. They were fine, athletic-looking young men, and had a travel-stained appearance, as if they had been walking some distance over dusty roads. When I reached the landing stage and saw the morning's papers I got the explanation--the police had heard of the projected raid. These were our men returning from Chester, having been stopped on the road by friends posted there for the purpose, and turned back--and were now on their way through Liverpool to their homes in various parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire. It seemed that the information of the project being abandoned had not reached them in time to prevent many of the men leaving their homes for Chester. I heard from John Ryan, whom I saw a few days afterwards, that the word had been sent round to a certain number of circles in the North of England and the Midlands to move a number of picked men, some on the Sunday night and some early on the Monday morning, and that the promptness and cheerfulness with which the order was obeyed was astonishing; so that, probably, not less than two thousand men were, by different routes, quietly converging on Chester. Among these was Michael Davitt and others, from Haslingden as well as from several other Lancashire towns. But it was promptly discovered that information had been given to the police authorities almost at the last moment. Those, therefore, who had already reached Chester were sent back, and men were placed at the railway stations and on the roads leading to Chester to stop those who were coming. In this way the whole of the men forming the expedition dispersed as silently as they had come. Corydon had given the information to Major Greig, the Liverpool Head Constable, who at once communicated with Chester, where prompt measures were taken to meet the threatened invasion. According to his own evidence in the subsequent trial, Corydon had been giving information to the police since the previous September. There had been some suspicious circumstances in connection with him. A man resembling him in appearance, and evidently disguised, had been seen in company with individuals supposed to be police agents. But as there was a man belonging to the organisation named Arthur Anderson, who strongly resembled Corydon, the real informer, suspicion fell upon Anderson. After Corydon had thrown off the mask and openly appeared as an informer, I had an opportunity of seeing him, and, so far as my memory serves me, this is what he was like: At first sight you might set him down as a third-rate actor or circus performer. He wore a frock coat, buttoned tightly, to set off a by no means contemptible figure, and carried himself with a jaunty, swaggering air, after the conventional style of a theatrical "professional." He was about the middle height, of wiry, active build, with features clearly cut, thin face, large round forehead, a high aquiline nose, thick and curly hair, decidedly "sandy" in colour, and heavy moustache of the same tinge. His cheeks and chin were denuded of beard. It was in the Liverpool Police Court I saw John Joseph Corydon, as the newspapers spelled his name--if it were his name, which is very doubtful, for it was said in Liverpool that he was the son of an abandoned woman of that town. There was at that time a reporter named Sylvester Redmond, whom I knew very well, a very decent Irishman, who made a special feature of giving humorous descriptions of the cases in the police court. I was told by someone in Court that the man whose hand Sylvester was so cordially shaking was the noted informer, Corydon. I was very much disgusted with the old gentleman, until I heard afterwards that some wag among the police had introduced the informer to him as a distinguished fellow-countryman. After the collapse of the Chester scheme, McCafferty and Flood made their way to Ireland to be ready for the Rising, but were arrested in Dublin, charged with being concerned in the raid on Chester. They were both in due course put upon their trials, and sent into penal servitude. I find, from a graphic sketch written for my "Irish Library" by William James Ryan, that in the convict ship that took John Flood into penal servitude was another distinguished Irishman, John Boyle O'Reilly, whose offence against British rule was his successful recruiting for the I.R.B. among the soldiery. Another lieutenant of John Devoy, who had charge of the organisation of the British army, was an old schoolfellow of mine with the Liverpool Christian Brothers, Peter Maughan, of whom I have already spoken as a fellow-workman at the Curragh. Before joining the I.R.B. Peter had been a member of the "Brotherhood of St. Patrick," an organisation which furnished many members to the "Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood." Most of the Fenian prisoners were amnestied before the completion of their full terms. I have a letter in my possession from John McCafferty to our mutual friend, William Hogan, written from Millbank Prison, 6th June, 1871. In this he regrets that the terms of his release will not allow of his paying Hogan a visit. He says:-- I know there are many who would like to shake my hand and bid me a kind farewell. God bless you before my departure. My route will afford me no opportunity of seeing the iron-bound coast of the home of my forefathers. Still God may allow me to see that isle again--Yes, and then perhaps I may meet somebody on the hills. He concludes with love to William Hogan's family and "Kind regard to each and every friend." McCafferty did, I know, see the "iron-bound" coast of Ireland again, for a few years after this an extremely mild and inoffensive-looking, dark-complexioned person, with black side whiskers, came into my place--I was carrying on a printing and newsagency business--in Byron Street, Liverpool, and, though I did not recognise him at first, I was pleased to find that this Mr. Patterson, as he called himself, was no other than my old friend John McCafferty. The mission he was engaged on was one that can only be described by the word amazing. So daring was it, so hedged around with apparent impossibilities, that to the ordinary man its very conception would be incredible. But McCafferty was perfectly serious and determined about it, and to him it seemed practicable enough, provided only he could get a few more men like himself: and indeed if the collection of just such a company of conspirators _were_ practicable, no doubt the impossible might become possible enough. But the hypothesis is fatal, for the McCafferty strain is a rare one indeed, so that his project never got further than an idea. I think, however, that I cannot be accused of exaggeration in saying that if he had been successful in carrying out his idea, his achievement would have formed the most extraordinary chapter in English history--for it was no less than the abduction of the then Prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward VII., and the holding of him as a hostage for a purpose of the Fenian organisation. The plan was to take him to sea in a sailing vessel, and to keep him there, until the Fenian prisoners still at that time unreleased were set at liberty. He was to be treated with the utmost consideration and--the recollection is not without its humorous side--McCafferty had a memorandum to spare no pains in finding what were the favourite amusements of the Prince, so that he might have a "real good time" on board. CHAPTER VII. THE RISING OF 1867--ARREST AND RESCUE OF KELLY AND DEASY--THE MANCHESTER MARTYRDOM. Although the Rising of 1867 had somewhat the character of "a flash in the pan," there were some heroic incidents in connexion with it. With one of the Fenian leaders, James Francis Xavier O'Brien, I was brought into intimate connection many years after the Rising, when we were both officials, he as General Secretary and I as Chief Organiser, of the Home Rule organisation in Great Britain. When put upon his trial there was evidence against him in connection with the taking of a police barrack, he being in command of the insurgents. It was proved that he not only acted with courage, but with a humanity that was commended by the judge, in seeing that the women and children were got out safely before the place was set on fire. This, however, did not save him from being condemned to death--he was the last man sentenced in the old barbarous fashion to be hanged, drawn and quartered--this sentence being afterwards commuted to penal servitude. Certainly, whether on the field or facing the scaffold for Ireland there was no more gallant figure among the Fenian leaders than James Francis Xavier O'Brien. Few knew of his sterling worth as I did. For several years after his return to liberty I was in close daily contact with this white-haired mild-looking old gentleman--still tolerably active and supple, though--who could blaze up and fight to the death over what he considered a matter of principle. The most admirable feature in his character was that, in all things you found him _straight_. One of the Fenian chiefs I met in Liverpool was General Halpin, who, on the night of the Rising, was in command of the district around Dublin. The first of the insurgents who reached Tallaght, the place of rendezvous on the night of the 5th of March, 1867, were received by a volley from the police and dispersed. One party had captured the police barracks at Glencullen and Stepaside, and disarmed the police, but on approaching Tallaght, and hearing that all was over, they too dispersed. While most of the Irish-American officers bore the marks of their profession rather too prominently for safety against the observance of a trained detective, General Halpin was the last man in the world anyone would, from his appearance, take to be a soldier. He looked far more like a comfortable Irish parish priest. And yet he was, perhaps, the most thoroughly scientific soldier of all those that crossed the Atlantic at this time. Reading the evidence of Corydon in one of the trials, I find he described Edmond O'Donovan as helping Halpin to make maps for use when the Rising would take place. Knowing both men so well, I can say that none better could be found for planning out a campaign. They were thoroughly scientific men, and always anxious to impart their knowledge to other Irishmen for the good of the Cause. I remember Halpin one night, at what was a kind of select social gathering, giving a number of us enthusiastic young men a lecture on the construction of fortifications and earthworks. We bade him farewell when he was leaving Liverpool after the Rising, and thought he had got safely away to America, but, unfortunately, he was identified at Queenstown in the outgoing steamer. He was arrested, put upon his trial, and met the same fate as so many of his comrades. Among the men I knew long ago, who afterwards became connected with Fenianism, was Stephen Joseph Meany. He was for many years a journalist in Liverpool, having been sub-editor of the "Daily Post" under Michael James Whitty. He was an earnest and active Repealer and Young Irelander. When I first came in contact with him he was starting the "Lancashire Free Press," which, after passing through several hands and several changes, of name, ultimately became the "Catholic Times," which was for three years, when Father Nugent became the proprietor, under my direction. Meany was a man of fine presence and handsome countenance, a brilliant writer and an eloquent speaker. He went to America in 1860, where he followed his original profession of journalism for several years. He returned to this country again, and was arrested in 1867 on a charge of Fenianism, and sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. Liverpool was flooded with refugees after the Rising, and it took us all our time to find employment for them, or to get them away to America. We had then in Liverpool a corps of volunteers known as "The Irish Brigade." Whatever Nationalist organisation might exist in the town always strongly condemned young Irishmen for joining the corps. All we could urge against it, however, could not prevent our young men who were coming over from Ireland at this time from joining the "Brigade" for the purpose, they said, of learning and perfecting themselves in the use of arms. Colonel Bidwell and the officers must have had a shrewd suspicion of the truth, and there was a common remark in the town upon the improved physical appearance of the "Brigade." This was, of course, owing to the number of fine soldier-like young Irishmen who at this time filled its ranks. During the two years that followed the escape of Stephens, I met Colonel Kelly several times in Liverpool. When I first saw him he would be about thirty years of age. This is my remembrance of his personal appearance: His forehead was broad and square, with the thick dark hair carefully disposed about it. He had somewhat high cheek bones, and wore a pointed moustache over a tolerably full beard. The general impression of his face seemed to me slightly cynical, and he had a constant smile that betokened self-possession and confidence. He sometimes wore a frock coat, a light waistcoat buttoned high up, a black fashionable necktie, and light well-made trousers. After surveying him in detail, you would come to the conclusion that he was a man of daring enough to involve himself in danger of life, and with sufficient address to extricate himself from the peril. He was undoubtedly a man capable of winning the confidence and even devotion of others, as was shown when, falling into the hands of the Government, he was snatched from their grasp in the open day on the streets of Manchester. I met him some weeks after the Rising. The place of meeting reminded me of the incident in one of Samuel Lover's stories--"Rory O'More"--to which I have already alluded, for, in our later revolutionary movements, as in 1798, projects of great importance had sometimes to be discussed in public houses. A few of the Liverpool men came to meet the leaders in a very humble beer shop, kept by a decent County Down man, Owen McGrady, in one of the poorer streets off Scotland Road. Here were met on this particular night a notable company, which included, if I remember rightly, Colonel Kelly, Colonel Rickard Burke, Captains Condon, Murphy, Deasy and O'Brien, all American officers who had crossed the Atlantic for the Rising, and still remained, hoping for another opportunity. There were about half a dozen of the Liverpool men there. Of these I can remember a tall, fine-looking young man, a schoolmaster from the North of Ireland, whom I then met for the first time, my old school-fellow, John Ryan, and John Meagher, a tailor, possessing the amount of eloquence you generally find in Irish members of the craft. There was also present, if I remember rightly, Tom Gates, of Newcastle. Although the Rising had collapsed almost as soon as it commenced, the determination to fight on Irish soil had by no means been given up by the leaders in America. That was why the American officers on this side remained at their posts, ready for active service at a moment's notice. At the meeting we learned that there was at that moment an "Expedition," as it was termed, on the sea to co-operate with and bring arms for another Rising in Ireland, should such be found practicable. It was notorious that, notwithstanding all the efforts of active agents, comparatively few arms had been got into Ireland. Indeed, my friend John Ryan, who was in a position to know, estimated that there were not more than a couple of thousands of rifles in Ireland at the time of the Rising. Let us see what became of the Expedition. This was, of course, what has since become a matter of history--the secret despatch from New York of the brigantine "Erin's Hope," having on board several Irish-American officers, 5,000 stand of arms, three pieces of field artillery, and 200,000 cartridges. About the middle of May the vessel arrived in Irish waters, agents going aboard at various points off the coast, including Sligo Bay, which she reached on the 20th of May, 1867. By that time it was found that the chances of another Rising were but slender, and the "Erin's Hope" returned to America with her cargo, entirely unmolested by the British cruisers, which were plentiful enough around the Irish coast. The expedition certainly proved that sufficient weapons to commence an insurrection with could be thrown into Ireland, providing there was the necessary co-operation at the time and places required. I have often thought since of what became of those present in Owen McGrady's beer house the night we met there to prepare for the reception of the "Erin's Hope." The arrest and rescue of Kelly and Deasy, two of these, in the following September, and the fate of their gallant rescuers, formed the most striking and startling chapter of Irish history during the nineteenth century. That such a scheme as the rescue of the two Fenian chiefs should be successfully carried out, not in Ireland amid sympathisers, but in the heart of a great English city, surrounded by a hostile population, showed unexpected capacity and daring on the part of the revolutionary organisation, and produced consternation in the British Government. At this time the organisation of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood in Great Britain had been placed in the hands of three of the Irish-American officers, Captain Murphy, who had charge in Scotland, Colonel Rickard Burke in the southern part of England, and Captain Edward O'Meagher Condon in the northern counties. Previous to the arrest of the two leaders on the morning of September 11th they, with Captain Michael O'Brien, had been staying with Condon, upon whom now devolved the command, the capture of Kelly and Deasy having taken place in his district. He at once arranged for their food while in prison, for their defence in the law courts, and for their rescue, in which latter enterprise he was enthusiastically supported by the chief men of the Manchester circles. But, whatever their good will and courage, they were deficient both in money and arms for such a daring undertaking. Condon had, therefore, a difficult task to accomplish. Money was soon raised, for our people are ever generous and equal to the occasion when it arises. Daniel Darragh--about whom I shall have more to say later--was sent to Birmingham, where by the aid of William Hogan he purchased and brought back with him sufficient revolvers to arm the volunteers for the rescue. These last were picked men, the cream of the Manchester circles, and there was some jealousy afterwards among many who had not been selected. I need scarcely say that the utmost secrecy was required in connection with such a perilous enterprise. To Edward O'Meagher Condon belongs the credit of having organised, managed, and carried out the Manchester Rescue, at the cost to himself, as it turned out, of years of penal servitude, and almost of his life. Though with the aid of Michael O'Brien and his Manchester friends he had made all the arrangements, selecting the spot where the prison van was to be stopped, assigning to every man his post, and providing for every contingency, including the possibility of the rescuing party being taken in the rear from Belle Vue prison, he wired for the assistance of Captain Murphy and Colonel Burke, the message being that "his uncle was dying." Murphy was from home, but Burke came on to Manchester, and with Michael O'Brien accompanied Condon on September 17th, the night before the rescue, to meet the men chosen for the daring enterprise, when the arms were distributed, each man's post on the following day allotted to him, and the final arrangements made. The two Fenian chiefs stayed with Condon that night, fighting their old campaigns over again, e'er they retired to rest, not to meet again till eleven years after the Manchester Rescue, when Condon and Burke came across each other in New York, each having suffered in the interval a long term of imprisonment, and it was the last night that Burke and Condon passed on earth with Michael O'Brien, whose memory Irishmen, the world over, honour as one of the "noble-hearted three"--the Manchester Martyrs--who died for Ireland on the scaffold. The secret of the intended rescue was closely guarded, and though the Mayor of Manchester did get a warning wire from Dublin Castle, it reached too late, and the birds had flown. When Kelly and Deasy were brought before the city magistrates they were remanded. "They were," said the "Daily News," "placed in a cell with a view to removal to the city jail at Belle Vue. At this time the police noticed outside the court house two men hanging about whom they suspected to be Fenians, and a policeman made a rush at one of them to arrest him, in which he succeeded, but not until the man had drawn a dagger and attempted to stab him, the blow being warded off. The other made his escape." As to the incident just related, it seems that a patriotic but imprudent man belonging to one of the Manchester circles had got to hear of the intended rescue, and was indignant at being left out. His suspicious conduct outside the court house drew the attention of the police--as we have seen--with the result, as the paper said, that the authorities became alarmed. Kelly and Deasy were put in irons on their removal, and a strong body of police were sent with the van intended to take them to Belle Vue Prison. It was the custom for a policeman to ride outside the van, on the step behind, but, on this occasion, owing to the incident just described, Brett, the officer in charge, went _inside_ the van. The door was then locked, and the keys handed to him through the ventilator. It is certain that, up to this point, the Manchester police had no suspicion of the intended rescue, and it was only the imprudent behaviour of the man whom the police had arrested that caused additional precautions to be taken. Certain it is that if the Manchester authorities had had any information of the probability of an attempted rescue there would have been a formidable escort of the police and military. With so much false swearing at the trials with regard to the facts of the Manchester Rescue, it is important that the information given in books for the benefit of the present and future generations of Irishmen should be correct. It is serious that in some of our best books so important a matter as the actual scene of the rescue is incorrectly given. One book says: "The van drove off for the _County jail at Salford_." In another description it is stated: "Just as the van passed under the arch that spans Hyde Road at Belle Vue, a _point midway between the city police office and the Salford Jail,_ etc." Following this, one of our ablest writers, apparently quoting from the previous descriptions, falls into the same error. I can readily understand how these errors have arisen--the writers concerned have confounded the place of the execution of the Manchester Martyrs, Salford Jail, with the prison, Belle Vue, to which the prisoners were being taken on being remanded. The point chosen by Condon as the most suitable for the attack was certainly where the railway bridge crosses Hyde Road, but if the van had been going to Salford Jail it would have been in a totally different direction. Since writing the above, I find it still more necessary I should correct the mis-statement as to the scene of the rescue, for the error seems to be getting perpetuated. I find in one of the leading Irish-American newspapers, in a description of the death of Colonel Kelly on February 5, 1909, the scene of the rescue is given as "_midway between the police office and Salford Jail_." This is evidently taken from the erroneous statement in the books I have referred to. After this slight digression, may I resume my narrative. At the police court a man appointed for the purpose took a cab in advance of the van. When sufficiently close to them he waved a white handkerchief as a signal to the men in ambush. Just as the van passed under the railway arch two men with revolvers barred the way. "Stop the van!" one cried. But the driver took no heed. A bullet fired over his head and another into one of the horses effectually stopped the van. At the sound of the shots the rest of the rescuers came from their ambush behind the walls that lined the road, and from the shadow of the abutments of the railway arch. The police fled panic-stricken at the first volley fired over their heads by the Fenians, for these wanted to release their chiefs without bloodshed if possible. One portion of the assailants, carrying out a pre-arranged plan, formed an extended circle around the van, and kept the police and mob who had rallied to their assistance at bay, while a second party set themselves to effecting an entrance to the van. This was more difficult than had been expected, for had Brett ridden on the step behind as usual the keys could readily have been taken from him. The rescuing party were, however, equal to the occasion, and the military precision with which the work was carried out displayed the discipline of the men and the able direction of the leaders. Indeed, the fullest testimony is borne to this by a great English newspaper, the "Daily News," which, while showing the most intense hostility to the men and their daring act, is thus compelled to recognise the courage and discipline of the devoted band of Fenians:--"The more astonishing, therefore, is it to read of the appearance of the public enemy in the heart of one of our greatest cities, organised and armed, overpowering, wounding and murdering the guardians of public order, and releasing prisoners of state. There is a distinctness of aim, a tenacity of purpose, a resolution in execution about the Fenian attack upon the police van which is very impressive. The blow was sudden and swift, and effected its object. In the presence of a small but compact body of Fenians, provided with repeating firearms, the police were powerless, and the release of Kelly and Deasy was quickly effected." An unfortunate accident was the killing of Brett, the policeman, by a shot fired with the intention of breaking the lock of the van. A female prisoner then handed out the keys on the demand of the Fenians outside, and the door was quickly opened, and the two leaders brought out, their safe retreat being guarded by their rescuers. As Captain Condon had anticipated and provided for, some of the warders from Belle Vue quickly came upon the scene, as it was but a short distance across what were then brickfields from the prison to the scene of action. But, when they saw the determined men who were guarding the leaders' retreat, they, too, like the police, kept at a safe distance from the Fenian revolvers, and devoted themselves to picking up any stragglers who had got separated from the main body of Irishmen. In this way a number of arrests were made, and, later on, Condon himself was taken, but the main object had been accomplished, and Kelly and Deasy got safely away, and, ultimately, as we shall see, out of the country. Following the rescue, there was a perfect reign of terror, the police authorities striking out wildly in all directions to gather into their net enough Irish victims to satisfy their baffled vengeance. There were numerous arrests and no lack of witnesses to swear anything to secure convictions. Every detail of the attack on the van while on the way from the courthouse to the prison, and of the release of the prisoners was sworn to with the utmost minuteness, as the witnesses professed to identify one after another of the men in the dock, some of whom had no connection or sympathy with the rescue at all. In Liverpool, men whom I knew were arrested who were at work all that day at the docks, and yet were sworn to by numerous witnesses as having assisted in the attack on the van in Hyde Road, Manchester, the most minute details being given. I have mentioned a case of the kind in my "Irish in Britain." William Murphy, of Manchester, a man whom I knew well, was convicted and sent into penal servitude as having taken part in the rescue. On his liberation I was surprised to learn from his own lips that, although he would gladly have borne his part if detailed for the duty, he was not present at the rescue of the Fenian leaders. With the authorities in such a panic, it can readily be understood that it behoved any of us in Lancashire who were in any way regarded as "suspects" to be ready with very solid testimony as to where we were on the day in question. In a recent letter I have had from Captain Condon--from whom communications reach me from all parts of America, for he is constantly travelling, holding as he does the post of Inspector of Public Buildings in connection with the Treasury Department of the U.S.A.--he tells me something about William Murphy that I never heard before. He says: "When Allen, Larkin, O'Brien, myself, and the other men were sentenced, Digby Seymour (one of the counsel for the prisoners) went down to a large cell in the court house basement where all the others were kept together. He urged them all to plead 'guilty' and throw themselves upon the mercy of the court, declaring that, if they refused to do this all would be convicted and executed. "There was an instant's hesitation among the prisoners, but William Murphy, who was later sentenced to seven years penal servitude, addressed his comrades, urging them to stand fast together, imitate our example, and die like men, rather than live like dogs, for as such they would be regarded by all true Irishmen if they pleaded 'guilty.' "To a man the whole twenty-two shouted out--'We will never plead guilty!' "And Seymour, baffled and irritated, went away without accomplishing his purpose." Of the men convicted for taking part in the rescue, five--Allen, Larkin, O'Brien, Condon and Maguire--were sentenced to death. Condon was reprieved, really on account of his American citizenship, and Maguire, who was a marine, because the authorities discovered in time that the evidence against him was false. A number of others were sent to penal servitude for various terms. The execution of Allen, Larkin and O'Brien, so far from striking terror, but gave new life to the cause of Irish Freedom, and to-day, over the world, no names in the long roll of those who have suffered and died for Ireland are more honoured than those of the "Manchester Martyrs," while the determination has become all the stronger that, in the words of our National Anthem--founded on Condon's defiant shout in the dock of "God Save Ireland!":-- On the cause must go Amidst joy or weal or woe, Till we've made our isle a Nation free and grand. It is not generally known how Colonel Kelly got out of the country after the rescue. He lay concealed in the house of an Irish professional man for some weeks, and then, all the railway stations being closely and constantly watched night and day, he was driven in a conveyance by road all the way from Manchester to Liverpool. It was a patriotic foreman ship-joiner, whom I knew well, who actually got him away to America. My friend Egan had charge of the fitting up of the berths aboard the steamer in which Colonel Kelly sailed. In emigrant steamers the usual practice was for temporary compartments to be made and taken down at the end of the voyage. I had fitted up such berths myself, and therefore perfectly understood what my friend had done to secure Colonel Kelly's escape when he described it to me afterwards at my place in Byrom Street. Egan actually built a small secret compartment, so constructed as to attract no notice, and when Kelly was smuggled aboard at the last moment--he might be supposed to be one of Egan's men--he was put into it and actually boarded up, sufficient provisions being left with him, until the steamer got clear of British waters, when he could come out with safety. Deasy also made his way to America. In speaking of the after-career of those assembled that night at McGrady's, I have sufficiently accounted for Michael O'Brien. Rickard Burke, who also assisted at the same gathering, was a remarkable personality, and one of the most astute men I ever met. He was a graduate of Queen's College, Cork, and an accomplished linguist. He was a skilful engineer, and had served with distinction in the American Civil War. When I knew him he was about thirty-five years of age, tall and of fine presence. To him was deputed the work of purchasing arms for the intended Rising in Ireland. After many adventures, he fell into the hands of the police, was convicted, and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. It was with the idea of effecting his rescue that the Clerkenwell Prison wall was blown up on December 13th, 1867, this insane plan causing the death and mutilation of a number of people. Burke himself would probably have been killed had he happened to be confined in that part of the jail that was blown up. While in Chatham prison he was reported as having lost his reason, and was removed to Woking. The matter was brought before the House of Commons by Mr. McCarthy Downing, who suggested that Burke's insanity had been caused by his treatment in prison. He was released on Sunday, July 9th, 1871. Captain Murphy, another of the company in our Scotland Road rendezvous, whom I had often met before, was a gentlemanly, genial man of portly presence, and an exceedingly pleasant companion. After some time he found his way back to America. Edward O'Meagher Condon was one of the American officers I most frequently came in contact with in Liverpool, previous to and after the Rising. Since his return to America, after his release from penal servitude in 1878, we have frequently corresponded with each other. From a report of a Manchester Martyr's Commemoration in a newspaper which accompanied one of his letters, and conversations I had with him when I was delighted to have him as my guest during his recent visit to this country, I find he has just the same sanguine temperament as on that night at McGrady's, when the chances of another Rising were being discussed. In the report I refer to he says, "Had the Irish people been furnished with the necessary arms and munitions of war, which ought and could have been provided, they would have proved victors in the contest." I have no doubt but that, in propounding this view, he had in his mind the probability there was at one point of England being embroiled in a quarrel with America. None knew better than he, at the time, of the enormous number of Irishmen in the American armies, on both sides, during the Civil War who, with their military training, longed for the task of sweeping English rule from the soil of Ireland. It will be remembered that it was Condon who, when sentenced to death, concluded his speech in the dock with the prayer, "God save Ireland!" the words which have since become the rallying cry of the whole Irish race, and have given us a National Anthem. In his letters to me since his first return to America, I have been gratified to hear that he always took a warm interest in my publications. I am pleased, too, to find from the newspaper reports he has sent me that he is, as ever, an eminently practical man, and believes in using the means nearest to hand for the advancement of the Irish Cause. While giving his experiences in connection with the revolutionary movement, he declares that no one can blame the Irish people for having recourse to any means which may enable them to remain on their native soil. They have, he says, to use whatever means have been left to save themselves from extermination and Ireland from becoming a desert. He, therefore, declares his sympathy with the later movements of the Irish people--the Land League, the National League, and the United Irish League, while never abandoning the principles of '98, '48 and '67. I referred to two Liverpool men as being present at the meeting at McGrady's. One of these, John Ryan, my dear old schoolfellow, one of the rescuers of James Stephens, has been dead many years--God rest his soul! He was a noble character, and would have risen to the top in any walk of life, but though he had a good home--his father was a prosperous merchant of Liverpool--he gave his whole life to Ireland. I often heard from him of his adventures, for he always looked me up whenever he came to Liverpool, and how, sometimes, he and his friends had to fare very badly indeed. It was most extraordinary that, while constantly Tunning risks, for he was a man of great daring, he never once was arrested, though he had some hair-breadth escapes. On one occasion, about the time of the Rising, a good, honest, Protestant member of the Brotherhood, Sam Clampitt, was taken out of the same bedroom in which he was sleeping with Ryan, who was left, the police little thinking of the bigger fish they had allowed to escape from their net, the noted Fenian leader, "Captain O'Doherty." I forget his precise name at this particular time, but it was a very Saxon one, for he was supposed to be an English artist sketching in Ireland. Questioned by the police, he was able to satisfy them of his _bona fides_. He had a friend in Liverpool, an old schoolfellow like myself, Richard Richards--"Double Dick" we used to call him--a patriotic Liverpool-born Irishman. He was an exceedingly able artist, making rapid progress in his profession, and, about this time, having some very fine pictures, for which he got good prices, on the walls of the Liverpool Academy Exhibition. Richards supplied all the trappings for the part that Ryan was playing, and also sent him letters of a somewhat humorous character, which he sometimes read to me before sending off. In these he was anticipating all sorts of adventures for his friend in the then disturbed state of Ireland. As John Ryan had much artistic taste, and was himself a fair draughtsman, and well up in all the necessary technicalities, and as Richards' letters, which he always carried for emergencies like this, were strong evidences in his favour, he had not much difficulty in convincing the Dublin police he was what he represented himself to be. Some of Jack Ryan's reminiscences had their droll sides, for he had a keen sense of humour. One of his stories was in connection with the well-known old tradition of the Gaels--both Irish and Scottish--that wherever the "_Lia Fail_" or "Stone of Destiny" may be must be the seat of Government. There is some doubt, as is well known, as to where the real stone now is. At all events, the stone which is under the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey is that which was taken from Scone by King Edward, and that on which the Scottish monarchs were crowned, having been originally brought from Ireland, the cradle of the Gaelic race. The tradition is still, as it happens, borne out by the fact that Westminster is _now_ the seat of Government. Now two of John Ryan's Fenian friends, Irish-American officers, stranded in London--a not unusual circumstance--just when affairs looked very black indeed, conceived the brilliant idea of _stealing the stone_, bringing it over to Ireland, and, once for all, settling the Irish question. This, notwithstanding their oath to "The Irish _Republic_ now virtually (virtuously some of our friends used to say) established," for it did not seem to strike them that they were proposing to bring to Ireland an emblem of royalty. I never heard if they took any actual steps to accomplish their object. Perhaps they were impressed by the mechanical difficulties, as I was myself one day, when standing with David Barrett, an Irish National League organiser, in Edward the Confessor's Chapel, in front of the famous "_Lia Fail_." It is a rough-hewn stone, about two feet each way, and ten inches deep. I was telling my friend the story of the plot to carry off the "Stone of Destiny," and was making a calculation, based on the weight of a cubic foot of stone, of what might be its weight. "We'll soon see," said David, and, in a moment, he had vaulted over the railing, and taken hold of a corner of the stone. But, so closely is this national treasure watched, that instantaneously a couple of attendants appeared, and broke up peremptorily our proposed committee of enquiry. An archaeological friend of mine suggests that, one day, when Ireland is making her own laws and able to enter on equal terms into a contract with England, a reasonable stipulation would be the restoration of that stone--unless the Scottish Gaels can prove a stronger claim to it. From John Ryan I heard of the mode of living of many of the Fenian organisers and of the Irish-American officers,--very different from the slanderous statements of their "living in luxury upon the wages of Irish servant girls in America." John was of a cheery disposition, never complaining, but always sanguine, and loving to look at the bright side of things. Yet I could see for myself, each time I saw him, how the life of hardship he was leading was telling upon his once splendid constitution, and, I felt sure, shortening his days. John Ryan, I have often said, is dead for Ireland, for though he did not perish on the battlefield or on the scaffold, as would have been his glory, I most certainly believe he would have been alive to-day but for the hardships suffered in doing his unostentatious work for Ireland. There is one other friend I mentioned as having been present that night at Owen McGrady's--the school master. You will ask what became of him? Almost the last time I spoke to him--not very long before these lines were written--was in the inner lobby of the British House of Commons, for he has been for many years a member of Parliament. Now some of my most cherished friends are or have been members of Parliament, and I would be sorry to think any of them worse Irishmen than myself on that account. Their taking the oath of allegiance to the British sovereign was a matter for their own consciences, but I never could bring myself to do it. Mr. Parnell would, I know, have been pleased to see me in Parliament, but he knew that I never would take the oath, and respected my conscientious objections to swear allegiance to any but my own country. With the exception of a few, whose names I forget, I have accounted for the whole of the company comprising the Council of War at McGrady's public house. Summed up as follows, nothing in the pages of romance could be more startling than the after fate of these men:-- CAPTAIN MICHAEL O'BRIEN.--Hanged at Manchester. R.I.P. COLONEL RICKARD BURKE.--Sent to Penal Servitude--Returned to America. COLONEL THOMAS KELLY, CAPTAIN TIMOTHY DEASY.--Rescued from Prison Van in Manchester. CAPTAIN EDWARD O'MEAGHER-CONDON.--Sentenced to death for the Manchester Rescues, but reprieved and sent to Penal Servitude--Returned to America. CAPTAIN MURPHY.--Returned to America. Died a few years since. THE SCHOOLMASTER.--A Member of Parliament. JOHN RYAN.--Dead--God rest his soul. CHAPTER VIII. A DIGRESSION--T.D. SULLIVAN--A NATIONAL ANTHEM--THE EMERALD MINSTRELS--"THE SPIRIT OF THE NATION." If it were for nothing else, it will be sufficient fame for T.D. Sullivan for all time that he is the author of "God Save Ireland." He had no idea himself, as he used to tell me, that the anthem would have been taken up so instantaneously and enthusiastically as it was. A National Anthem can never be made to order. It must grow spontaneously out of some stirring incident of the hour. Never in those days were our people so deeply moved as by the Manchester Martyrdom. There is no grander episode in all Irish history. The song of "God Save Ireland," embodying the cry raised by Edward O'Meagher Condon, and taken up by his doomed companions in the dock, so expressed the feelings of all hearts that it was at once accepted by Irishmen the world over as the National Anthem. I sympathise with the ground taken up by our friends of the Gaelic League that a National Anthem should be in the national tongue. That objection has to some extent been met by the very fine translation of "God Save Ireland" into Gaelic by Daniel Lynch. This appeared in one of my publications, and is the version now frequently sung at Irish patriotic gatherings. With regard to the objection that the air--"Tramp, tramp, the boys are marching"--to which T.D. wrote the song is of American origin, I was under the impression that Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, the famous Irish-American bandmaster, was the composer of it, and that, therefore, we could claim the air of "God Save Ireland" as being Irish as well as the words. To place the matter beyond doubt, Gilmore himself being dead, I wrote to his daughter, Mary Sarsfield Gilmore, a distinguished poetical contributor to the "Irish World," to ascertain the facts. I got from her a most interesting reply, in which she said, "I am more than sorry to disappoint you by my answer, but my father was _not_ the composer of the air you mention." I have heard it suggested that McCann's famous war song "O'Donnell Aboo!" should be adopted as our National Anthem instead of "God Save Ireland," and I have heard of it being given as a _finale_ at Gaelic League concerts. Without doubt it is a fine song, and the air to which it is generally sung is a noble one. A distinguished Irish poet tells me he is of opinion that "what will be universally taken up as the Irish National Anthem has never yet been written." My friend may be right, but let us see what claim "O'Donnell Aboo!'"--song or air--has upon us for adoption as our National Anthem. To do this I must go back in my narrative to the time when I made the acquaintance of Mr. Michael Joseph McCann, its author. This was a few years before "God Save Ireland" was written, and over twenty years after "O'Donnell Aboo!" appeared in the "Nation." A party of young Irishmen from Liverpool engaged the Rotunda, Dublin, for a week. They called themselves the "Emerald Minstrels," and gave an entertainment--"Terence's Fireside; or the Irish Peasant at Home." I was one of the minstrels. The entertainment consisted of Irish national songs and harmonized choruses, interspersed with stories such as might be told around an Irish fireside. There was a sketch at the finish, winding up with a jig. At my suggestion, one of the pieces in our programme was "O'Donnell Aboo!" which first appeared in the "Nation" of January 28th, 1843, under the title of "The Clan-Connell War Song--A.D. 1597," the air to which it was to be sung being given as "Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu," This was the name of the boat song commencing "Hail to the Chief," from Sir Walter Scott's poem of "The Lady of the Lake." This was published in 1810, and set to music for three voices soon afterwards by Count Joseph Mazzinghi, a distinguished composer of Italian extraction, born in London. As "Roderigh Vich Alpine" was the air given by Mr. McCann himself as that to which his song was to be sung, we, of course, used Mazzinghi's music in our entertainment. One night--I think it was our first--at the close of our entertainment in Dublin, a gentleman came behind to see us. It was Mr. McCann. He was pleased, he said, we were singing his song, but would like us to use an air to which it was being sung in Ireland, and which _he had put to it himself_. He also told us he had made some alterations in the _words_ of the song, and was good enough to write into my "Spirit of the Nation" the changes he had made. This copy is the original folio edition, with music, published in 1845. It was presented to me by the members of St. Nicholas's Boys' Guild, Liverpool. I have that book still, and value it all the more as containing the handwriting of the distinguished poet. (I should say, however, that most of my friends do not consider the alterations in the song to be improvements.) The measure and style of "O'Donnell Aboo!" were evidently imitated from Sir Walter Scott's boat song. Besides this strong resemblance, there is the fact that Mr. McCann gave as the air to which his song was to be sung, "Roderigh Vich Alpine," part of the burden of Sir Walter's song. But not only is there a resemblance in the words and general style, but in the music. Indeed, it seems to me that most of the fine air of "O'Donnell Aboo!" as it is now sung is based on Mazzinghi's music--either that for the first, second, or bass voice, or upon the concerted part for the three voices at the end of each verse. Another fact is worthy of mention. Since meeting Mr. McCann I have often noticed in Irish papers that when the air, as adapted by him, was played at national gatherings, it was often given by the name of Scott's song and Mazzinghi's composition. And when Mr. Parnell was in the height of his popularity and attended demonstrations in Ireland, the air used to be played as being applicable to the Irish leader, and given in some papers as "Hail to the Chief," while others described the same air as "O'Donnell Aboo!" But if we cannot claim as an original Irish air McCann's song as it is now sung, the same critical examination which brings out its resemblance to Mazzinghi's music, also shows that the Italian composer most probably got his inspiration from the music of the Irish or Scottish Gaels, as being most suitable for his theme. So that, perhaps, we may take the same pride in the present air as our island mother might in some of her children who had been on the _shaughraun_ for a time, but had again come back to the "old sod." It may be that even before the era of Irish independence some inspired poet may write, to some old or new Irish melody, a song which, by its transcendent merits, may spring at once into the first place. But until that happens, or till "we've made our isle a nation free and grand" I think we may very well rest content with "God Save Ireland." It has been suggested to me that it might form an interesting portion of these recollections if I were to give some account of how we came to start the "Emerald Minstrels," and what we did while that company was in existence. I may say without hesitation that we got our inspiration from the teaching of Young Ireland and the "Spirit of the Nation." We called our entertainment "Terence's Fireside; or The Irish Peasant at Home." We had most of us been boys in the old Copperas Hill school, then in the Young Men's Guild connected with the church, and some of us members of the choir. At the Guild meetings on Sunday nights, the chaplain, Father Nugent, an Irishman, but, like most of ourselves, born out of his own country, used to delight in teaching us elocution, and encouraging us to write essays, besides putting other means of culture in our way. After a time he founded an educational establishment, the Catholic Institute, where, when he left Copperas Hill, many of us followed him and joined the evening classes. About this good priest I shall have more to say in this narrative, and, though he was no politician, I don't think any man ever did so much to elevate the condition of the Irish people of his native town, and make them both respectable--in the best sense--and respected, as Father Nugent. We started the "Emerald Minstrels" at a time when there was a lull in Irish politics; our objects being the cultivation of Irish music, poetry and the drama; Irish literature generally, Irish pastimes and customs; and, above all, Irish Nationality. Father Nugent's training from the time we were young boys had been invaluable. We numbered ten, the most brilliant member of our body, and the one who did most in organising our entertainments, being John Francis McArdle. Besides our main objects, already stated, we considered we were doing good work by elevating the tastes of our people, who had, through sheer good nature, so long tolerated an objectionable class of so-called Irish songs, as well as the still more objectionable "Stage Irishman." Some items from the programme will give an idea of our entertainment. We opened with a prologue, originally written by myself, but re-cast and very much improved by John McArdle. I may say that we two often did a considerable amount of journalistic work in that way in after years. I can just remember a little of the prologue. These were the opening lines:-- Sons of green Erin, we greet you this night! And you, too, her daughters--how welcome the sight! We come here before you, a minstrel band, To carol the lays of our native land. There was one particularly daring couplet in it, the contribution of John McArdle:-- In your own Irish way give us one hearty cheer. Just to show us at once that you welcome us here. Had mine been the task to speak these lines, I must inevitably have failed to get the required response, but in the mouth of the regular reciter they never once missed fire. This was Mr. Barry Aylmer. He afterwards adopted the stage as a profession, and became recognised as a very fine actor, chiefly in Irish parts, as might be expected. He also travelled with a very successful entertainment of his own, and it is but a short time since he informed me that he spoke our identical "Emerald Minstrel" prologue in New York and other cities in America, adapting it, of course, to the circumstances of the occasion. I found that during the many years which had elapsed since I had previously seen him until I met him again quite recently he had been a great traveller, not only in this country and America, but also in South Africa and Australia. We had a number of harmonized choruses, including several of Moore's melodies, Banim's "Soggarth Aroon," "Native Music," by Lover; McCann's "O'Donnell Aboo!" and others. "Killarney," words by Falconer, music by Balfe, was sung by James McArdle, who had a fine tenor voice. Richard Campbell was our principal humorous singer. He used chiefly to give selections from Lover's songs, and one song written for him by John McArdle, "Pat Delany's Christenin'." John had an instinctive grasp of stage effect. A hint of the possibilities of an idea was enough for him. On my return from the Curragh I told him of how I had heard the militia men and soldiers singing the "Shan Van Vocht" on the road. He decided that this should be our _finale_, the climax of the first part of our minstrel entertainment. We had a drop scene representing the Lower Lake of Killarney. When it was raised it disclosed the interior of the living room of a comfortable Irish homestead, with the large projecting open chimney, the turf fire on the hearth, and the usual pious and patriotic pictures proper to such an interior--Terence's Fireside. Ours was a very self-contained company. Each had some special line as singer, musician, elocutionist, story teller or dancer. John Clarke was our chief actor. He excelled in "character parts," and, when well "made up" as an old man made a capital "Terence" in the first part of the entertainment, besides giving a fine rendering of Lefanu's "Shemus O'Brien" between the parts. In the miscellaneous part there was a rattling Irish jig by Joseph Ward and Barry Aylmer. The latter, being of somewhat slight figure and a good-looking youth, made a bouncing Irish colleen. These two made a point of studying from nature, not only in their dancing, but in their acting and singing, so that their performances were always true to life, without an atom of exaggeration. They were always received with great enthusiasm, particularly by the old people, who seemed transported back, as by the touch of a magic wand, to the scenes of their youth. We finished the evening with a sketch, written by John McArdle, called "Phil Foley's Frolics"--he was fond of alliteration. Noticing that Joseph Ward had made a special study of the comfortable old Irish _vanithee_, and had many of her quaint and humorous sayings, he added to the characters a special part for him--"Mrs. Casey,"--to which he did full justice. Indeed, so incessant was the laughter that followed each sally, that he and Barry Aylmer, who was the Phil Foley, sometimes found it difficult to get the words of the dialogue in between. We had another sketch, "Pat Houlahan's Ghost," which used to go very well. The first part of the entertainment, showing old Terence in the chimney corner and the others singing songs and telling stories, almost necessitated our sitting around in a semi-circular formation. This gave us much the appearance of a nigger troupe. To depart from this somewhat, we occasionally introduced a trifling plot. We made it that one of the sons of the house entered while the family were engaged in their usual avocations, having unexpectedly returned from America. Then came the affectionate family greeting, and the bringing in of the friends and neighbours, who formed a group sitting around the turf fire, making a merry night of it. The services of the "Emerald Minstrels" were in great demand, and were always cheerfully given for Catholic, National and charitable objects. While our own people mostly furnished our audiences, our entertainment was appreciated by the general public. The best proof of this was that Mr. Calderwood, Secretary of the Concert Hall, Lord Nelson Street, gave us several engagements for the "Saturday Evening Concerts," in which, from time to time, Samuel Lover, Henry Russell, The English Glee and Madrigal Union, and other well-known popular entertainers, appeared. Mr. Calderwood told us he was well pleased to have in the town a company like ours, upon whom he could always rely for a successful entertainment. CHAPTER IX. A FENIAN CONFERENCE AT PARIS--THE REVOLVERS FOR THE MANCHESTER RESCUE--MICHAEL DAVITT SENT TO PENAL SERVITUDE. I have referred to Michael Breslin in speaking of his brother John. Michael was not suspected of any complicity with the revolutionary movement until after the rising on the 5th of March, 1867, when he found it prudent to get out of the country. He was, as the saying is, "on his keeping," and stayed with me at my father's house in Liverpool for a short time, until he found a favourable opportunity of getting away to America. This was by no means an easy task, as all the ports were closely watched, and as, like his brother John, he was a fine handsome man, of splendid physique, and well known, of course, to the Irish police, it required all his caution successfully to run the gauntlet; but this eventually he did. The next I heard from him was that he was coming to Paris to a conference between the representatives of the two parties of American Fenians--what were known as the Stephens and Roberts wings. Michael Breslin was sent as a representative of the Stephens party. There were prominent members of the I.R.B. in this country, also friends of Breslin, who were anxious that the two parties should join. I wrote to him on their behalf, asking him to work towards that end. For greater safety the letters for Breslin were sent under cover through my cousin, Father Bernard O'Loughlin, Superior of the Passionist Fathers in Paris. He, of course, knew nothing of the nature of the communications he was handing to Breslin, who did his best to bring about the desired unity; but his action was repudiated by his principals in America. He came over to England, and had a narrow escape from falling into the hands of the police. When William Hogan was arrested in Birmingham, charged with supplying the arms used in the Manchester Rescue, Michael Breslin was in the house at the time. Questioned by the police, he described himself as a traveller in the tea trade for Mr. James Lysaght Finigan, of Liverpool. As he had his proper credentials (samples, etc., from James Finigan, who, anticipating an emergency of this kind, had given them for this express purpose), he was allowed by the police to go on his way. James Lysaght Finigan was a good type of the Liverpool-born Irishman, educated by the Christian Brothers. With other members of his family he was at the time engaged in the tea trade; but he was of an adventurous disposition, and afterwards served in the French Foreign Legion in the Franco-Prussian War. Later still he became a member of the Irish Party in the House of Commons. In connection with Breslin's narrow escape, the sequel, as regards our friend Hogan, is worth relating. Those who ever met William Hogan will agree with me that a more warm-hearted and enthusiastic Irishman never lived. He was a good-looking man, of imposing presence--a director of an Insurance Company, for which he was also the resident manager in Birmingham. Living in that town, he was of great assistance to the various agents entrusted with the task of procuring arms for the revolutionary movement. It speaks much for his sagacity that a man of his impulsive and generous temperament should so long have escaped arrest in connection with such hazardous undertakings. Hogan, however, like Shemus O'Brien, "was taken at last." Some of the revolvers brought from Birmingham by Daniel Darragh, which had been used at the Hyde Road action, had been picked up from the ground afterwards by the police. It was for supplying these that Hogan was put upon his trial. The maker of the revolvers was brought from Birmingham, and put in the witness box. He swore that a revolver produced was one of his own make, which he had sold to the prisoner. Thus, fortunately for Hogan, the whole case against him turned on this point--not a very strong one, as it was obviously possible for the Crown witness to be mistaken. Hogan's counsel produced a similar revolver, and asked the witness if he could identify it as his manufacture? The witness unhesitatingly did so. The counsel, when his turn came, called another witness--a decent-looking man of the artizan class. The barrister handed him the revolver. "Do you recognise it?" he asked. "I do--I made it myself." The Court was astonished. The prosecuting counsel asked:-- "How do you know it is yours?" "By certain marks on it," the man replied, and these he proceeded to describe. As the description was found to be correct, and as the other witness, who had sworn that _he_ had made the weapon, had not described any such marks, the case against Hogan broke down, and he was acquitted. A few days afterwards he called on me, and explained how the thing had happened. When he was arrested, his friends in Birmingham, having still on hand some of the revolvers he had purchased, had an exact copy of one of them made by a gunsmith whom they could trust, with instructions to put his own private marks upon it, which he could afterwards identify. It was this weapon that had deceived the witness for the prosecution to such an extent that he wrongly swore to it as being his own manufacture. Daniel Darragh, who was also put upon his trial for supplying the weapons for the Manchester Rescue, was not so fortunate as his friend Hogan, for he was convicted. He was sent into penal servitude on April 15th, 1869, but, being in delicate health, did not long survive, for he died in Portland Prison on June 28th of the following year. William Hogan, as the fulfilment of a sacred duty, brought the body of his friend home to Ireland, to be buried among his own kith and kin, in the Catholic cemetery of Ballycastle, Co. Antrim; and Edward O'Meagher Condon, when recently visiting this country, considered it a no less sacred duty to visit the grave. It will be seen that William Hogan, with all his acuteness, had a very narrow escape from falling into the hands of the law and suffering its penalties. Still, it has been my experience, that men like him, who have stood their ground, following their usual legitimate occupations, were always less liable to be molested than what might be termed birds of passage, such as Rickard Burke, Arthur Forrester, or Michael Davitt. Such, I consider, was the case of my friend, John Barry, when he was a resident in Newcastle-on-Tyne, in connection with an incident which he related to me a short time since. Some arms were addressed to him "to be called for," under the name of "Kershaw," a well-known north-country name, not at all likely to be borne by an Irishman. By some means the police got wind of the nature of the consignment, and the arms were held at the station, waiting for Mr. Kershaw to claim them. But it was a case of plot and counterplot; and when John was actually on the way to the railway station, he was warned in time by a railway employé, an Irish Protestant member of the I.R.B., and did not finish his journey. As "Kershaw" did not turn up, the case of arms was sent off to London to be produced at a trial then impending. _John Barry_ was at that time a commercial traveller, and, strangely enough, on one of his trips, he found himself in the same railway carriage with two detectives who were in charge of the arms on their way to the metropolis. John, as everybody acquainted with him knows, "has the music on the tip of his tongue;" the racy accent acquired in his childhood in his native Wexford. But he can put it off when the occasion requires it; and the two police officers were quite charmed with the social qualities of the genial commercial "gent" who was their fellow-traveller, never suspecting him to be an Irishman. They chatted together in the most agreeable manner, making no secret of their mission to London, and letting drop a few facts which proved useful to the counsel for the defence in the subsequent trial. Reaching London, they asked the commercial "gent" to spend a social evening with them and some of the witnesses in the case, which had some connection with the arms intended for "Mr. Kershaw." He could not do so, he said, as he had a previous engagement--which happened to be with Arthur Forrester and some witnesses on the other side. But, he continued, he would be glad to see them on the following day. Where could he see them? At Scotland Yard; and at Scotland Yard, accordingly, he met them, where they showed him, as an evidence of the desperate characters they had to deal with--his own case of arms! They told him of the pleasant evening he had missed, the only drawback being, they said, that one of the witnesses, named Corydon, got drunk and was very troublesome. This reminds me of another case, in connection with which I, at the time, fully expected to be arrested. The reader can form his own conclusion, but my impression was, and is, that I owed my safety to a gentleman I shall now introduce. Detective Superintendent Laurence Kehoe, of Liverpool, was a very decent man in his way. He was by no means of the type of John Boyle O'Reilly or the Breslins, who have shown that in the British army and in the police force there have been men, mostly compelled by adverse circumstances, who have for a time worn the blue, or green, or scarlet coat of Britain without changing the Irish heart beneath. No; Larry (as he was generally called) was nothing of the kind. Still, I believe he faithfully did his duty according to his lights, in the service in which he was engaged. He was a conscientious Catholic, and a son of his is a most respected priest in the diocese of Liverpool. He was a kind-hearted, charitable man, always ready to do a good turn, particularly for a fellow-countryman. If an Irish policeman called his attention to some poor waif of an Irish child who had lost its parents, or was in evil surroundings--having parents worse than none, or in danger of losing its faith--Laurence Kehoe would take the matter in hand. He would not always go through the formality of bringing the case of such child under the notice of the managers of one or other of the Catholic orphanages. When I was Secretary of Father Nugent's Boys' Refuge, he brought one of these waifs to the Brother Director, and claimed admittance for him. The place was full, the Brother said--it could not be done. Without another word Kehoe left the child on the doorstep, and simply saying, "Good-night," left Brother Tertullian sorely perplexed, but with no alternative but to take the child in. Now, Laurence Kehoe must have known that I was a notorious suspect--for it was his duty to know--but we were good friends, never, however, talking politics by any possible chance. I cannot, of course, state for certain how it was, but the reader, from what I am going to describe, may possibly come to the conclusion that Detective Superintendent Kehoe may have shut both eyes and ears in my particular case. To Rickard Burke was entrusted the critical and dangerous task of buying and distributing arms for the revolutionary movement. _Exit_ Rickard Burke, in the usual way, through the prison gate. _Enter_ Arthur Forrester, who, in due course, found his way also--though but for a short time--within prison walls. Then, following in quick succession, came Michael Davitt, engaged in the same task as Burke and Forrester. Forrester was a young man of great eloquence, and, like his mother and sister, a poet. Mrs. Ellen Forrester's "Widow's Message to her Son" is, I think, one of the finest and most heart-stirring poems we possess. I have often listened with pleasure to Arthur Forrester, when he used to come to address the "boys" in Liverpool. On one of those occasions Michael Davitt was with him, a modest, unassuming young man, with but little to say, although he was to make afterwards a more important figure in the world than his friend. Forrester was a young fellow full of pluck, and made a desperate resistance when, a boy, he was first arrested in Dublin. One night, just before Christmas, 1869, he left fifty revolvers with me. Early next morning I read in a daily paper that he had been arrested the previous night in a Temperance Hotel where he had been staying. There were no arms found upon him or among his belongings. He had left them with me;--indeed, as I read the account of his arrest, they were still in my possession. You may depend upon it I quickly got them into safer hands than my own. Some compromising documents were found in Forrester's possession, including a certain letter with which Michael Davitt's name was connected. This same letter was brought forward in evidence some years afterwards, in the famous "_Times_ Forgeries Commission," with a view to showing that the Irish leaders had incited to murder. As I expected, I was not long without a visit from Laurence Kehoe's lieutenants. Horn and Cousens, detective officers, called upon me to make enquiries about the revolvers which, they said, "Arthur had left with me." I need scarcely say they gained nothing by their visitation. I fully expected that the matter would not end here, and that I was likely to find myself in the dock along with Forrester. The same evening I had a visit from my sister-in-law, Miss Naughton. She had a friend, a Miss Cameron, who was sister to the wife of Lawrence Kehoe. Miss Cameron lived in the house of the Detective Superintendent, along with her sister, Mrs. Kehoe. In the middle of the previous night--Miss Cameron told Miss Naughton--her room being on the same landing as Kehoe's--she heard him called, and a man's voice saying:-- "We've taken Forrester. Shall we go to Denvir?" There was a pause; then Kehoe said, "No," adding some words to the effect that he did not think that I was implicated. I dare say, after the manner of some pious people I know, he had persuaded himself that such was the case. After he had worked out his full term in Purgatory (for he is dead many years, God rest his soul!), I don't think St. Peter can have kept the Heavenly gates closed on Larry Kehoe for whatever he said about me that night. Nay, let us hope that it was even put down to his credit. Forrester's explanation, when he was arrested, as to his employment was that he was a hawker. He had his licence, all quite regular, to show. Under this he could sell his revolvers. There was nothing illegal in that, unless a connection were established with the revolutionary movement. This, it appeared, they were not able to make out; but he was kept in custody, evidently with a view to gain time to establish such a connection. In fact, his case was the same as Davitt's, who took up the work of procuring and distributing arms, after Forrester had become too well known to the police in connection with it. Davitt, too, had a hawker's licence; and, at first, there was really no evidence to connect him with the Fenian movement. The farce was gone through of bringing Corydon to identify him--not a very difficult task in the case of a one-armed man--though this was the first time Corydon had ever seen Davitt. The evident explanation of Forrester being kept in custody, and remanded, as he was, from day to day, without being charged with any offence, was that a similar connection might be established, to prove which a little perjury would not stand in the way. Michael Davitt, who had not yet come under the notice of the police, came to me, along with Arthur Forrester's mother, on hearing of the arrest. They had tea with us, and, I need scarcely say, were warmly welcomed in our little family circle, those in the house who were but small children then being in after years proud to remember that they had had such noble characters under their roof. Mrs. Ellen Forrester was a homely, sweet-looking, little North of Ireland woman. She was a native of the County Monaghan, and, at this time, about forty years of age. Her maiden name was Magennis. Her father was a schoolmaster, which would, no doubt, account for her literary tastes. Songs and poems of hers appeared in the "Nation" and "Dundalk Democrat." She was quite young when she came to England, and settled first in Liverpool, and then in Manchester. She married Michael Forrester, a stonemason, and had five children. It was quite evident there was a poetic strain in the Magennis blood, for two of her daughters, and her son Arthur, inherited the gift, which her brother Bernard also possessed. She produced "Simple Strains" and (in conjunction with her son Arthur) "Songs of the Rising Nation," and other poems. She was a frequent contributor to the English press, her work being much appreciated. Arthur Forrester, whose release we were trying to effect, was, at this time, only nineteen years old, though he looked much older. Besides the poetic strain which he inherited from his mother, he must also have had that fiery and unconquerable spirit which displayed itself in the determined resistance he made against the police who came to arrest him in 1867, in Dublin, where he had found his way for the projected rising. He was a young Revolutionist truly--being then only seventeen. He was not long kept in prison that time, there being no evidence to connect him with Fenianism, nor, indeed, was there now, when he had fallen into the hands of the police in Liverpool, though they were doing their best to manufacture some. His warlike proclivities seem to have been ever uppermost, as will be seen later, where we find him joining the French "Foreign Legion" during the Franco-Prussian War. Besides the "Songs of the Rising Nation" in connection with his mother, he produced "An Irish Crazy Quilt," prose and verse, and was a frequent contributor to the "Irish People" and other papers over the signature of "Angus" and "William Tell." It is too bad of me to be keeping poor Arthur in durance vile while I am going into these particulars; but I want to show what kind of people these Forresters were, and what the rebelly Ulster Magennis strain in their blood let them into. Together, Davitt and I called upon several Liverpool Irishmen to get bail for Forrester. There was no difficulty--we could easily get the necessary security; but, name after name, good, substantial bail, was refused by the police on one pretence or another. Ultimately, on Christmas Eve, when the prisoner was again brought before the stipendiary magistrate, Mr. Raffles, a very just and high-minded man, Dr. Commins, barrister, acting for Forrester, claimed that no charge, but a mere matter of suspicion, being forthcoming against him, the bail offered should be accepted. The magistrate agreed to accept two sureties of £100 each, "to keep the peace for one year," and Arthur Forrester was released. It is interesting to know that while one of the bails was William Russell, a patriotic Irishman, having an extensive business, the other was Arthur Doran, a wholesale newsagent. He was a decent Irishman, of Liverpool birth, who took no part in politics. He had been induced to go bail by one of the greatest scoundrels Ireland ever produced--Richard Pigott, Doran being an agent for Pigott's papers, the "Irishman" and "Flag of Ireland." Let this one good act, at all events, be put down to Pigott's credit. To return to Forrester. After such a close shave as he had in Liverpool, with the eyes of the police now upon him, his occupation was gone, and Michael Davitt took up the work. I am afraid that Davitt's visit to Liverpool on this occasion brought him under the notice of the police, and may probably have led to his arrest a few months afterwards. This took place on May 14th, 1870, at Paddington Station, London, with him being arrested also John Wilson, a Birmingham gunsmith. Davitt had £150 in his possession, and Wilson had fifty revolvers, it being suggested that the gunsmith was about to deliver the weapons in exchange for the money. So far--Davitt having a hawker's licence, as in the case of Forrester--this would have been perfectly legitimate. What was wanted by the authorities was evidence to show a connection with the Fenian conspiracy. They really had no such evidence, but as Davitt was a marked man, and as it was necessary to have him removed, Corydon was brought to identify him, and, of course, had no difficulty, when a number of men were brought into the corridor, in picking out the one-armed man from among them. At the trial Corydon swore, among other things, that Davitt took part in the Chester raid. Now, Michael himself told me afterwards that Corydon had never seen him before he "identified" him in prison; and that though he really was at Chester, Corydon could not have known this. Michael Davitt and John Wilson were convicted of treason-felony. As showing the man's noble character, it should not be forgotten that the Irishman made an earnest appeal for the Englishman, declaring that Wilson knew nothing of the object for which the weapons were wanted, and asking that whatever sentence was to be passed on the gunsmith might be added to his own. This was quite worthy of Davitt's chivalrous and unselfish nature, and I can well imagine his tall and commanding figure in the dock, with his strongly marked features and dark, bright eyes--while utterly defiant of what the law might do to himself--making this appeal for the man who stood beside him. Davitt was, on July 11th, 1870, sentenced to fifteen years, and Wilson to seven years penal servitude. Michael Davitt will appear in these pages as the founder of another organisation, the results of which seem likely to make the Irish people more the real possessors of their own soil than they have ever been since the Norman invasion. About this time I had started a printing and publishing business in Liverpool, and commenced to realise what I had long projected as a useful work for Ireland. This was the issue of my "Irish Library," consisting chiefly of penny books of biographies, stories, songs, and stirring episodes of Irish history. In their production and afterwards, when I continued the issue of these booklets in London, I had valuable assistance from various friends, including Rev. Father Ambrose, Rev. Father O'Laverty, Michael Davitt, Daniel Crilly, T.D. Sullivan, Timothy McSweeney, Hugh Heinrick, William J. Ryan, Francis Fahy, William P. Ryan, Alfred Perceval Graves, Michael O'Mahony, John J. Sheehan, Thomas Boyd, Thomas Flannery, John Hand, James Lysaght Finigan, and other well-known writers on Irish subjects. Some of the penny books were from my own pen, in addition to which I wrote "The Brandons," a story of Irish life in England, and other books, of which my most ambitious work was "The Irish in Britain." CHAPTER X. RESCUE OF THE MILITARY FENIANS. Before concluding the section of my Recollections connected with Fenianism, I must re-introduce John Breslin, the rescuer of James Stephens. Though the episode I am about to describe took place some six years after the commencement of the constitutional Home Rule agitation, I think it well, as it was connected with Fenianism, for the sake of compactness, to introduce it here. My excuse for introducing it as part of _my_ recollections will be seen further on. It will be remembered that John Breslin, when a warder in Richmond Prison, was the man who actually opened the door of James Stephens's cell, and, with the aid of Byrne, another warder, helped the Head Centre over the prison wall, and left him in charge of John Ryan and other friends outside. It was no wonder, then, that, when a similar perilous and even more arduous undertaking was projected, John Breslin should be the man chosen as the chief instrument to carry it out. This was the rescue of six military Fenians from Freemantle, in Western Australia, which was ultimately effected on Easter Monday, 17th April, 1876. The enterprise was projected in America, among its most active promoters being John Devoy. Associated with him were John Boyle O'Reilly (himself an escaped Fenian convict) and Captain Hathaway, City Marshal of New Bedford. An American barque, of 202 tons, the _Catalpa_, was bought, and converted into a whaler, but was intended to be used in carrying off the convicts. She was ready for sea in March, 1875. It was more than a year before she took the prisoners away from Australia, and a further four months before she reached New York with the rescued men. The ship was taken out by Captain S. Anthony, an American, to whom was confided the object of the mission. The only Irishman on board among the crew was Denis Duggan, the carpenter, a sterling Nationalist, to whom also was made known the mission on which they were bound. As John Breslin was now in America, obviously he was the man of all others to entrust with the command of the daring project of carrying off the prisoners. Happily he was available for the work, and entered into it heartily. He sent me the narrative of the rescue himself--through his brother Michael--on his return to America, after having successfully accomplished his mission. He and Captain Desmond sailed from San Francisco on the 13th of September, 1875, and reached Freemantle on 16th of November. They were not long in opening up communications with the prisoners, so as to be in readiness for the arrival of the _Catalpa_. In the meantime two more men joined the expedition--John King, who brought a supply of money from New Zealand, which was most useful, and Thomas Brennan, who arrived at the last moment, just as the _Catalpa_ appeared off the coast, and had got into communication with Breslin. Everything being arranged, it was determined to carry off the following prisoners--Martin Harrington, Thomas Darragh, James Wilson, Martin Joseph Hogan, Robert Cranston, and Thomas Henry Hassett. They were at work outside the prison walls, or at other employment equally accessible, when they were taken away in two traps from Freemantle, about nine o'clock in the morning of the 17th of April, 1876. By the time the news of their flight, and of the direction they had taken, was known in the prison, the party had reached Rockingham, and were on the sea in the whale-boat which was to take them to the _Catalpa_. The gunboat _Conflict_, which was usually stationed at King George's Sound, was telegraphed for by the authorities, but it was found that the wires had been cut the previous night, and by the time they were repaired the vessel had gone on a cruise. After some hours' delay, the governor engaged the passenger steamer _Georgette_ to go in pursuit. It was nine o'clock that evening before she left Freemantle. The police boat was cruising about also, looking for the whaler and her boat. The _Georgette_ came up with the _Catalpa_ about 8 o'clock on the following (Tuesday) morning. A demand to go on board and search the barque was refused. As it was found there was a short supply aboard the _Georgette_, she returned to Freemantle to coal, leaving the police boat to watch the _Catalpa_, and to look out for the whale boat containing the rescued men, which had not yet appeared, although, as it turned out, not far off at the time. The boat had been vainly searching for the _Catalpa_ all night, and had only now discovered her. The party in the boat had actually seen the _Georgette_ overhauling the _Catalpa_, and had yet themselves remained undiscovered. In order to keep clear of falling into the hands of the _Georgette_ they stood off from the ship, and it was about half-past two o'clock in the afternoon before the boat containing the rescued men approached the _Catalpa_ again. They then saw the police boat making for the ship at about the same distance from her on the land side as the whale boat was to the seaward. The men scrambled aboard just as the police boat was coming up on the other side. Breslin says:--"As soon as my feet struck the deck over the quarter rail, Mr. Smith, the first mate, called out to me, 'What shall I do now, Mr. Collins (this was the name Breslin went by); what shall I do?' I replied, 'Hoist the flag, and stand out to sea;' and never was a manoeuvre executed in a more prompt and seamanlike manner." The police boat did not attempt to board the vessel, but made its way back to Freemantle to report. There the _Georgette_ had been fully coaled and provisioned, and had taken aboard, in addition to the pensioners and police, a twelve-pounder field-piece. At 11 o'clock the same night (Tuesday) she steamed out once more. At daylight on the following morning she came up with the _Catalpa_ again, and fired a round shot across her bows. After some parleying, Captain Anthony being prompted by Breslin, the _Georgette_ hailed that if the _Catalpa_ did not heave to, the masts would be blown out of her. "Tell them," said Breslin to the captain, "that's the American flag; you are on the high seas; and if he fires on the ship, he fires on the American flag." Preparations were made to give the armed party on the _Georgette_ a warm reception should they attempt to board the whaler. But the pursuers had a wholesome fear of coming into conflict with a vessel sailing under the Stars and Stripes, and, after some further parleying, left the _Catalpa_ to pursue her homeward voyage unmolested. I was fortunate enough to get the account of _both_ expeditions--for there were two--for the rescue of the military Fenians in each case direct from the man having the command. I have already given John Breslin's account, which, it will, perhaps, be remembered I published at the time as a number of my penny "Irish Library." I had the pleasure of hearing John Walsh, who had charge of the expedition from this country, relating the part he and his friend bore in assisting the Irish-American rescuers. He told the story at a very select gathering in Liverpool, at which I was present. On the 13th of January, he said, two men, of whom he was one, left this country with money and clothing to carry out the rescue. They landed on the 28th of February at King George's Sound, whence a sailing vessel took them to Freemantle. They soon got into communication with the two men who had come from America, and had been on the spot since November, 1875--John Breslin and J. Desmond, the latter of whom worked as a coach-builder at Perth. Walsh and his friend offered their co-operation to the men from America in any capacity, and arrangements were made accordingly. They lent the Americans arms, and they cut the telegraph wires from Perth to King George's Sound, where a man-of-war was stationed. It will be seen from Breslin's account that this was why the man-of-war was not available to deal with the _Catalpa_; for when the telegraphic communication was restored, it was found that the gunboat _Conflict_ had left on a cruise. Walsh and his friend were on the ground on the morning when the prisoners started to escape, and if a fight took place, they were to fight and fly with their friends. If there was no fight, they were to remain behind. If the _Catalpa_ failed, they were to fly to the bush, with the exception of some who were to remain behind to succour those in the bush. John Walsh described how, when the rescued men were being driven in two traps from Freemantle to Rockingham, to be taken on the whale-boat to the _Catalpa_, which was lying off the coast awaiting them, he and his friend started with them, and remained behind to stop pursuit. He also described the attempt to recapture the escaped men, as told in Breslin's narrative, and how the attempt failed. My own connection with this incident was that the funds, or some part of them, for John Walsh's expedition passed through my hands between their collection and their distribution. On Monday, August 21st, 1876, while we were holding the Annual Convention of the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, in the Rotunda, Dublin, the joyful news reached us that the _Catalpa_, having on board the rescued men and their rescuers, had safely reached New York. The news was received with the wildest enthusiasm. The terrible strain of the last four months had passed, and we were relieved from the constant dread that, after the gallant rescue, the men might again fall into the hands of the enemy. A few more words about the Breslins before finishing this chapter. Michael went back to America after his escape from arrest in Birmingham. I have corresponded with him from time to time ever since. A letter of mine to Michael, written after he finally went to America, came back to me in a very curious manner. A gentleman came into my place of business in Liverpool one day, and presented to me, as an introduction, a letter I had sent to my friend about a month previously. I was somewhat suspicious about this. I told him there was nothing to show that my letter had ever been in Breslin's hands at all. The gentleman agreed that I was right, and said he would merely ask to be allowed to leave his luggage for a short time. I got a careful watch kept on his movements in Liverpool, but nothing more suspicious was reported than that he had been seen to enter a Catholic church, where he had gone to Confession. My friend William Hogan was in my place when my messenger returned, and when he heard this, exclaimed, in his usual impetuous style--"He's a spy!" The deduction might not seem obvious, but, doubtless Hogan had in his mind one or two of the worst cases of the anti-Fenian informers, who made a parade of great piety a cloak for their treachery. The gentleman returned and reclaimed his luggage, and I heard nothing further of him for about a month afterwards, when I had a letter from Michael Breslin, saying that his friend, whom I had treated with such suspicion and such scant hospitality, was Mr. John B. Holland, the famous submarine inventor. He was, I believe, in this country in connection with his invention. It may be asked, after all, what did Fenianism do for Ireland? To those who ask the question I would answer that no honest effort for liberty has ever been made in vain. If Fenianism did nothing else, it kept alive the tradition and the spirit of freedom among Irishmen, and handed them on to the next generation. In so far as the men who took part in it were unselfish, were whole-souled lovers of their country, and prepared to risk life and liberty for their country's sake--and I think with pride of the thousands of such men I knew or knew of--then the whole Irish race was ennobled and lifted up from the mire of serfdom. But it did more than merely make martyrs. Its strength, its spontaneity, and the devotion of its adherents were such that they undoubtedly awakened not merely some alarm, but also some sense of justice in England. Gladstone admitted that what first prompted him to set in motion the movement for the disestablishment of the Irish Church was "the intensity of Fenianism." But the result did not end there. For many an Englishman was moved to the belief that surely there must be something wrong with a system which provoked such a movement, something not wholly bad about a cause for which men went with calm, proud confidence to the felon's cell or the scaffold. And, even to-day, England--with all her secret service facilities--does not know one-half of the danger from which she escaped; nor can I repeat much of what I myself could say of Fenianism in England. There are men who have made large fortunes in business; there are eminent men in many of the professions, whose former connection with Fenianism is unsuspected, who, at the time, if the call had been made upon them, would cheerfully have thrown aside their careers and taken their places in the ranks. Once again "a soul came into Ireland," and men were capable then of high enterprises which to-day seem to belong to another age. Even for myself, I have many times marvelled how light-heartedly in those days I took the risks of conspiracy--how little it troubled me that there were dozens of men who bore my liberty, and perhaps my life, in their hands. But I never doubted them--and I was right! CHAPTER XI. THE HOME RULE MOVEMENT. It now becomes my business to record the formation and progress of another organisation--one which appealed to me precisely on the same grounds as Fenianism, namely, first, that it was based on justice; and, secondly, that it was practicable. This was the constitutional movement for what was known as Home Rule. My principles have never altered, and I can see nothing inconsistent in my adapting myself to changed conditions. I and those who thought like me were driven into Fenianism because it seemed likely to achieve success, and what was call "constitutional agitation" seemed hopeless. Now the position was reversed. On the one hand Fenianism had collapsed, and on the other there seemed a prospect, partly owing to the change wrought by Fenianism, that a constitutional movement might succeed. This constitutional movement had been going on for some six years previous to the rescue of the military Fenians, having been inaugurated at a meeting in the Bilton Hotel, Dublin, on the 19th May, 1870, five days after the arrest of Michael Davitt, and his disappearance for a season from the stage of Irish history. In the pages which are to follow I shall have occasion to introduce some of those who took part in that first Home Rule gathering in Dublin. It was a hopeful beginning, as there were assembled men who were of various creeds and politics--Catholics, Protestants, Fenian sympathisers, Repealers, Liberals, and Tories--but all of whom had in view the happiness and prosperity of their common country. There they established the "Home Government Association of Ireland," the first resolution passed being:-- This Association is formed for the purpose of attaining for Ireland the right of self-government by means of a National Parliament. The fact was that the "intensity of Fenianism" had forced thinking men of every shade of opinion to realise that government of Ireland by outsiders was an abject failure. Even Englishmen themselves began to realise that they were engaged in an impossible task, or, at all events, one in which they were quite at sea. A humorous story is attributed to Mr. T.W. Russell on this point. It is that a certain Englishman, who was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, went to an English official of experience in Dublin, and said-- "You know what I mean to do first of all, is to get at the facts--the facts--then I shall be on sure ground." "My dear sir," said the official wearily, "there are no facts in Ireland." The conclusion was not a surprising one for a man who had for years been in touch with the "official sources" of information. While all honour is due to the men who initiated the new movement, the names of those who carried on the constitutional struggle during the years that preceded this date should not be forgotten. Of all the men I ever came into contact with in the course of my experience of constitutional agitation, I think the Sullivans--especially T.D. and A.M.--deserve the most credit, for they kept the flag flying in the columns of the "Nation" and in other ways during all the gloomy years that followed after Charles Gavan Duffy left the country in despair. I am always proud to have reckoned these two men among my dearest and most trusted friends. Another great admirer of the Sullivans was Alfred Crilly, brother to Daniel Crilly, and father of Frederick Lucas Crilly, the present respected and able General Secretary of the United Irish League of Great Britain. Alfred was one of the most brilliant Irishmen we ever had in Liverpool, and no man did better service for the cause in that city during his lifetime. It was always a pleasure to me to work in harness with him, as I did on many public occasions; for whatever was the national organisation going on in Ireland for the time being we two--Alfred Crilly and myself--always did our best to have its counterpart in Liverpool. Indeed it became the case that for many years our people there invariably looked to us to take the initiative in every national movement. Whenever A.M. Sullivan came over to our demonstrations it did not need our assurance to convince him that every pulsation of the national heart in Ireland was as warmly and as strongly felt on this side of the Channel as though we still formed part of our mother island. Indeed, the evidence of his own eyes, the enthusiasm he saw when he came amongst us, caused him to declare at a vast gathering in the Amphitheatre that he felt as if he were not out of Ireland at all, but on a piece cut from the "old sod" itself. I felt proud when two young men of my training, John McArdle, who had been with me on the "Catholic Times"; and afterwards Daniel Crilly, on the "United Irishman," were appointed to the literary staff of the "Nation," for which they were well fitted, seeing that, with their brilliant gifts, they had, from their earliest days, been imbued with the doctrines of that newspaper. T.D., like his brother, often came to Liverpool, and used to be equally delighted with the enthusiastic receptions he got from his fellow-countrymen. On one occasion he said to me he was at a loss how to show his appreciation. I told him how to do this. "Write us a song," I said. He did so; and with that admirable tact which is so characteristic of him he chose for his theme--"Erin's Sons in England," a song which, written to the air of "The Shamrock," has, for many years, been sung at our Irish festivals in Great Britain. As a personal favour to myself he wrote it for one of the penny books of my "Irish Library". I need make no apology for introducing T.D. Sullivan's song here. It will be seen that he sings our praise with no uncertain note; and, in return, I may say on their behalf that he had no warmer admirers than among the Irish of England. ERIN'S SONS IN ENGLAND. _Air--"Oh, the Shamrock_." On every shore, the wide world o'er, The newest and the oldest, The sons are found of Erin's ground Among the best and boldest. But soul and will are turning still To Ireland o'er the ocean, And well I know where aye they glow With most intense devotion. CHORUS:--Over here in England, Up and down through England, Fond and true and fearless too, Are Erin's sons in England. Where toil is hard, in mill and yard, Their hands are strong to bear it; Where genius bright would wing its flight, The mind is theirs to dare it; But high or low, in joy or woe, With any fate before them, The sweetest bliss they know, is this-- To aid the land that bore them. CHORUS:--Over here in England, &c. By many a sign from Thames to Tyne, From Holyhead to Dover, The eye may trace the deathless race Our gallant land sent over. Midst beech and oak, midst flame and smoke. Up springs the cross-tipped steeple That, far and wide, tells where abide The faithful Irish people. CHORUS:--Over here in England, &c. And this I say--on any day That help of theirs is needed, Dear Ireland's call will never fall On their true hearts unheeded They'll plainly show to friend and foe. If e'er the need arises Her arm is long, and stout and strong, To work some strange surprises! CHORUS:--Over here in England, &c. It will be remembered that T.D. never allowed himself to be bound by conventionalities. There was always a refreshing thoroughness and heartiness in what he did. For instance, when he was Lord Mayor of Dublin, he on one occasion "opened" a public bath by stripping and swimming round it--the Town Clerk and other officials following his example. I have mentioned the good work done in Liverpool by Father Nugent, and that I had the pleasure of co-operating with him in some of his undertakings. At the time of the Home Rule movement connected with the name of Isaac Butt, and for some years previously, I had been brought into still closer contact with him, first, as secretary of his refuge for destitute and homeless boys, and then as manager and acting editor of the "Northern Press and Catholic Times," after that paper had come into his hands. I also assisted him in the temperance movement which he started in Liverpool. When Father Nugent asked me to take charge of the "Catholic Times," I entered upon the work literally single-handed, like some of the editors we read of a generation or so ago in the Western States of America; for, when he left me for a nine months' tour in the States, I constituted in my own person the whole staff. We afterwards had some able men on the paper. Among these was John McArdle, who left us, as I have said, to join the "Nation." He became later a well-known dramatic author, his chief works being burlesques and pantomimes. We also had James Lysaght Finigan, of whom I speak elsewhere. While Father Nugent was in America, we used to get great help from a fine old Jesuit priest and good Irish Nationalist, Father James McSwiney, then of St. Francis Xavier's, Liverpool. He was never happier than when smoking his short pipe by the fire in our inner office. With his help we created a much admired feature in the "Catholic Times" in our "Answers to Correspondents." With the view of drawing on real enquiries, he used to concoct and then answer questions on points of doctrine, etc. Some people were astonished at the profound knowledge--and others at what they considered "the impudence"--displayed by Jack McArdle and John Denvir in answering any theological posers that might be put to us, never dreaming we had behind us one of the ablest theologians of the Jesuit order. When Father Nugent took the paper in hands, the readers had such confidence in it that, from being merely a local paper, we were able before long to make it a leading Catholic organ for the whole country. The reverend father was chaplain of the Liverpool Borough jail. He was respected by all classes, Protestant as well as Catholic, not only for what he did for the unfortunate creatures who came under his ministrations, but as a public-spirited citizen and benefactor of the town. It would be wrong if I did not pay a high tribute to the splendid service done by him in Liverpool towards elevating the condition of our own people. I would be ungrateful, too, if I failed to recognise the great educational work he did in giving opportunities for culture to many Liverpool Irishmen, myself among the number, which afterwards aided their advancement in the battle of life. That is why I never regretted that I gave Father Nugent, when conducting the "Catholic Times" for him, three of the best years of my life. I never regretted my experiences in connection with that paper, particularly in the reporting department, for they were often very pleasant ones. Among these was my having been introduced to the great Archbishop MacHale, when I went to St. Nicholas's to report his sermon. I have many vivid remembrances arising out of my connection with the "Catholic Times." It was during the time I was in charge of it that we started the Irish national organisation on this side of the Channel--the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, formed at our first annual convention held in Manchester, at which I was elected as the first General Secretary of the organisation. I was at the same time secretary of the Liverpool Catholic Club, and in that capacity I assisted in entertaining the Canadian Papal Zouaves when passing through Liverpool on their way home, after their gallant but unsuccessful struggle to uphold the power of the Pope against the revolutionaries. In the same way it became my duty as secretary of the club to organise the Catholic vote in Liverpool on the occasion of the first School Board Election. The Irish and those of Irish extraction in Liverpool being reckoned as about one-third of the population, the Catholic body is correspondingly numerous. We surprised both friend and foe in the results. There were fifteen members to be elected, and we asked our people to give three votes for each of our five candidates. They were not only elected, but the votes actually given for them--on the cumulative principle--could have elected eight out of the fifteen members of the Board. Father Nugent, though immensely popular with all classes, was not, I think, a _persona grata_, any more than myself, with Canon Fisher, the Vicar-General of the diocese, who was very anti-Irish, and, so far as he could, prevented anyone connected with the "Catholic Times" coming into personal contact with Bishop Goss, who was a typical Englishman of the best kind. The bishop had a blunt, hitting-out-from-the-shoulder style of speaking in his sermons that compelled attention. But you could hardly call them sermons at all; they were rather powerful discourses upon social topics, which, from a newspaper point of view, made splendid "copy." Accordingly, during the year before his death, I followed him all over the diocese to get his sermon for each week's paper. There is no doubt that Dr. Goss's sermons helped materially to put a backbone into the "Catholic Times" and greatly to increase its circulation. In one of the rural districts the bishop was giving an illustration of the meaning of "Tradition," and, very much to my embarrassment, I found him taking me for his text. He said--"So far as I know, there were no newspapers in Our Lord's days; there was nobody taking down _His_ sermons, as there is to-day taking mine; so that _His_ teaching had to be by word of mouth, and much of it has come down to us as Tradition." In the interest of the paper, Father Nugent was anxious that I should be introduced to the Bishop. But he knew, as well as I did, that the difficulty in the way of this was what might be called the Grand Vizier, Canon Fisher. "You should push forward, Denvir," Father Nugent would say, "after Mass is over, and ask to see the Bishop." Over and over again I did so, but was always met at the vestry door by Canon Fisher, with his suave smile. "Well, Mr. Denvir, what can I do for you?" "I would like to see his lordship," I would say. No use. The Canon would say--"No, no; don't trouble the Bishop; I can give you all the information you want;" and so it went on, and I was baffled in my attempts. I ought to say that, though Canon Fisher was able to keep me from coming into personal contact with Bishop Goss, Father Nugent was too strong for him in the end; for, eventually, we got into communication with the Bishop regularly every week on the subject of his sermons. Each Monday as soon as my copy was set up, we sent him a proof, which he would read and correct and return. But his "corrections" often included the addition of altogether new matter, which made the sermon the more interesting and valuable to us. Indeed, on several occasions, we used his new matter, with slight alterations, as leaders. The very week he died we had one of these leaders in type, and it appeared in the same issue which announced his death. When Cardinal Vaughan became Bishop of Salford, Father Nugent succeeded in getting his support and influence for the "Catholic Times," a most valuable thing for us, seeing that Manchester, though with a smaller Catholic population than Liverpool, was of more importance from a publishing point of view, as from that city can be more readily reached a number of large manufacturing towns, of which it is the centre. Again it was--"Denvir, you must see the Bishop." But this time there was no difficulty, as an appointment had been made for me. Accordingly, by arrangement, I reached Manchester one morning between six and seven o'clock, that being the most convenient time for him that Bishop Vaughan could give me, and together we discussed the best means of forwarding the interests of the paper in the diocese of Salford. I found him, besides being a man of courtly presence, as we all know, most broad-minded and genial, and keenly alive to the influence which a good newspaper would have upon his people. Whenever I see the "Catholic Times," I feel gratified at its very existence, as a proof that my three years with Father Nugent were not altogether spent in vain. For when he placed its control in my hands on his departure for America, I found it with a very small circulation, and anything but a paying concern; whereas, when I yielded up the trust into his hands, I had the satisfaction of handing over to him a substantial amount of cash in hand, a statement of assets and liabilities showing a satisfactory balance on the right side, and a paper with a largely increased and paying circulation. For many years previous to his death, I did not come into contact with him. Indeed it was only the year before he died that I had the pleasure--and it was all the more a pleasure as we had differed strongly during previous years on some points--of meeting him at his house in Formby. This was before his last visit to America, where he contracted the illness which terminated in his death soon after his return to England. CHAPTER XII. THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR--AN IRISH AMBULANCE CORPS--THE FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out, the sympathy of Ireland was naturally, for historic reasons, on the side of France. It was not surprising, then, that many young Irishmen who had served in America, or in the ranks of the Papal Volunteers, or had borne a share in the Fenian movement, were anxious to show their sympathy in a practical way, and at the same time to gratify the national propensity for a fight --in any good cause at all. I happened to number among my friends some of these young Irishmen, of whom I may mention Captain Martin Kirwan, James Lysaght Finigan, Edmond O'Donovan, Arthur Forrester, Frank Byrne, and James O'Kelly. There was a strong feeling in Ireland to send a considerable body of men to France, but the law stood in the way. It was evaded by the formation of an Ambulance Corps, and for this generous subscriptions flowed in, along with numerous applications from volunteers. These were all medically examined, as if for a regular army, and in this way as fine a body of young men as ever left Ireland was picked from those who had volunteered. The ambulance service was equipped in the most perfect manner, and presented to the French nation. On arriving in France, there were (as was, of course, intended) more men than were required for the ambulance duties, and these at once volunteered for service as soldiers. They were formed into a company under the command of Captain Kirwan, one of the sergeants being Frank Byrne, who was afterwards Kirwan's colleague as an official of the Irish constitutional organisation in Great Britain. The company might have developed into a regiment, and even into a brigade, had the movement started earlier to get men over to France by various means. This could have been done, notwithstanding the Foreign Enlistment Act; and towards the end of the war, French agents were in this country providing for the sending over of large numbers of men to France, when the capitulation of Paris caused the collapse of their arrangements. The men of the Irish Ambulance Corps did their work so well as to show that not only did Irishmen make good soldiers, but that, possessing the sympathetic Celtic nature, their services were highly appreciated by the wounded who fell to their charge. Captain Kirwan's company fought bravely, sustaining the credit of their country through the whole campaign, and, under Bourbaki, were among those who actually struck the last blow the Germans received on French soil. Arthur Forrester, who joined the French Foreign Legion, was severely wounded in the foot. After the war he came into the office of the "Catholic Times," when I was manager and John McArdle editor of that paper. We welcomed him, of course, not only as an old friend and brother journalist, but as one who had been fighting for France. In his "Camp Fires of the Legion" written for my "Irish Library," James Lysaght Finigan tells of his adventures in the war. He found his way to Lille, in the north of France, and, with several hundreds of other Irishmen became enrolled in the ranks of the Foreign Legion. In Lieutenant Elliott he was delighted to recognise Edmond O'Donovan, who had figured so prominently in the Fenian movement, and whose incarceration in Ireland and exile in America were fresh in his memory. "The Legion," Finigan says, "showed itself worthy of its predecessors, the Irish Brigades of former days, during the reverses that constantly befel the armies of France." He gives graphic accounts of the battles they were engaged in, and how, in the defence of Orleans, he and a number of his comrades were taken prisoners, among those being his friend O'Donovan, who had been wounded by a piece of shell. The Foreign Legion must have borne the brunt of the fighting. The fourth battalion was cut to pieces at Woerth, Gravelotte, and Sedan; the fifth battalion was reduced from 3,000 to some 300; the sixth battalion retook Orleans, was compelled to abandon it, and covered itself with glory at Le Mans and elsewhere; and the seventh was interned with Bourbaki in Switzerland until the end of the war. Although I often heard from him afterwards, the last time I met Edmond O'Donovan, if I remember rightly, was in a North Lancashire town, in which John O'Connor Power had been lecturing the same night. I forget exactly who else of the "boys" were there--I think William Hogan was one--but there were some choice spirits, and we made just such an Irish night of it as Finigan describes they had when he and O'Donovan fought in the Foreign Legion. Edmond O'Donovan was the son of the famous Irish scholar and antiquary, John O'Donovan, the translator from the Gaelic--with O'Curry and Petrie--of that great Irish history, "The Annals of the Four Masters," and other manuscripts. The elder O'Donovan had made the acquaintance of Sir Thomas Larcom, when both were young men together on the staff of the Ordnance Survey. John O'Donovan appointed his friend Larcom to be guardian of his children in case of his death. It was Larcom's duty, as an official of the Government, to hunt down the Fenians, both native and foreign, so that he had undertaken a serious and perplexing charge. For O'Donovan's elder sons were strong Nationalists and Fenians; so that, on the death of his old friend, Larcom was like an old hen having charge of a brood of ducklings who could not be kept from the troubled waters of Fenianism. There is no doubt that Larcom's influence kept them from or saved them from a lot of trouble. The O'Donovans were an accomplished family, the one I knew best, besides Edmond, being Richard, who has held a responsible mercantile position for some years, and who furnished me with much valuable information about his father, when Thomas Flannery--one of our best Gaelic scholars--was writing a life of Dr. John O'Donovan for my "Irish Library" series. Besides being thoroughly acquainted with several languages, Edmond O'Donovan had an excellent scientific training, which was brought into requisition in connection with the projected Fenian military movements in Ireland. While a thorough classical scholar, the poems he liked best were the songs of Thomas Davis and the Young Irelanders. He was slender of figure and had a handsome oval face. In speaking, whether in private or before an audience, he had an animated and expressive manner, with a good deal of gesture, such as a Frenchman or Italian would use. I have heard him singing songs like "Clare's Dragoons" with much fire and fervour, throwing his whole soul into it in a way I can never forget. In 1877-1878 he was a special correspondent in the Russo-Turkish war with the Turkish army, and he sent home powerful and graphic accounts of every battle and siege. His intimate knowledge of Arabic stood to him in these and in the Egyptian campaigns in which he afterwards took part. In 1879 he went through Russia to the shores of the Caspian Sea, travelled through the north of Persia and the adjacent territory of Khorassan, to the land of the Tekke Turcomans, and to Merv, thus penetrating the mysteries of Central Asia as no European traveller had ever done so perfectly before. In 1881 he returned to England, and published his book, "The Merv Oasis," and afterwards read a paper before the Royal Geographical Society on "Merv and its surroundings." Finally, in 1883, he went as special correspondent to the Soudan, and there this brilliant Irishman perished with the whole of Hicks Pasha's army. No tidings ever came of how Edmond O'Donovan met his death, but those who knew him best feel that he must have yielded up his gallant spirit to its Creator with a courage and fortitude worthy of an Irishman. In January, 1906, I had occasion to call upon his brother Richard in Liverpool, and asked if they had ever got any trace of Edmond. Nothing had been heard of how he had actually perished, but an authentic relic of him had fallen into the hands of a priest in the Soudan. This was a blood-stained garment, which was proved beyond doubt to have belonged to him. I have mentioned another name in connection with the Franco-Prussian War--that of James O'Kelly. His career, like that of O'Donovan, had been stormy and adventurous. I had previously met him in connection with the Fenian movement. He had been in the French army, and served in the campaign which was so disastrous to the Mexican Emperor Maximilian. His adventurous temperament led him again to join the French service during the Franco-Prussian war. He was employed on the confidential mission of raising a force of Irishmen for the war. I have described the formation of the company under Kirwan, which was the outcome of the Ambulance Corps. It will be seen, too, that there were a considerable number of Irishmen in the Foreign Legion. But, after all, these did not amount to a number sufficient to have much appreciable result on the ultimate fortunes of the war. The French military authorities, knowing what splendid fighting materials Irishmen would make, commissioned O'Kelly to raise a large force. For this purpose he made Liverpool his headquarters, and I was pleased to see him again when he called upon me at the office of the "Catholic Times" My sympathies were strongly with France, and I gave him what assistance I could in furthering the object of his mission. At my suggestion, therefore, he took up his abode at the hotel opposite our office, at the corner of Moorfields and Dale Street. A large number of volunteers were got from among the advanced element in Liverpool and surrounding towns, who wanted to learn the use of arms in real warfare--their ultimate object I need not mention. From other quarters in Ireland as well as England there were volunteers for the French army. I had arranged through an emigration agent, Mr. Michael Francis Duffy, a much respected and patriotic Irishman of singular culture, for the charter of two steamers to take the men to Havre; but just then Paris fell, after a long siege; the war ended, and the Irish Legion project collapsed. In 1872 James O'Kelly turned his attention to journalism as a profession. He got his first opening on the "New York Herald," partly through his thorough knowledge of the military profession, but still more by that singular tact that never failed him under the most trying circumstances. Some years after, he called on me again in Liverpool, and I heard from him of some stirring incidents in his career. Amongst those were his perilous experiences in connection with the fighting in Cuba, from which he narrowly escaped with his life. Since then he has entered Parliament. He was a staunch supporter from the first of Mr. Parnell. When the unfortunate "split" came, he took the side of the "Chief," but none is more pleased than he to be a member of the now re-united Irish Party. In connection with the Franco-Prussian war I may be allowed to refer here to a non-combatant, who, with his brother priests, remained at their post during the terrible siege of Paris, ministering to the sick and dying. This was my cousin, Father Bernard O'Loughlin, Superior of the Passionist Order in Paris. And yet, notwithstanding their noble services to humanity on this and other occasions, the Passionist Fathers have since been driven out of the country by the French Government. The announcement of the danger of this, when it was first threatened, caused consternation in the foreign Catholic colony of Paris, to whom the Passionist Fathers had endeared themselves by their labours on behalf of needy and stranded English-speaking people, and their devoted spiritual ministrations. The Passionist mission in Paris was founded some forty years ago by Father Bernard, with his friend, Father Ignatius Spencer, also a Passionist, and uncle of the present Earl Spencer. The Archbishop of Paris had invited the Passionists to establish a church in Paris, on account of the number of Irish, American, and English Catholics requiring religious ministrations, few of the French clergy being able to speak English. Father O'Loughlin first commenced his labours in the Church of St. Nicholas, in the Rue Saint Honoré, where he remained three years. After this a sum of 200,000 francs was subscribed, chiefly by Irish, American, and English residents, for the site and building of a church. Father Bernard was soon joined by several other members of the order sent from England, and there were always four or five Passionist Fathers attached as chaplains to the church. The following distinguished prelates have preached in this Church--Cardinal Manning, Cardinal Newman, Cardinal Richard, Archbishop Ireland, Archbishop Spalding, and Archbishop Passadière. Mrs. Mackay was the most generous of the supporters of the order in Paris; and, in 1903, when the fathers found themselves unable to pay the tax created by the French "Loi d'accroissement," she paid down the 20,000 francs required to save the church. Their devotion in remaining faithful to their flock during the long and terrible siege of Paris in 1870 ought to have recommended them to the sympathies of all patriotic Frenchmen. The Passionists not only ministered to the spiritual but to the temporal wants of those coming under their charge. They visited the sick and poor, relieved the age in need, provided for orphans, and assisted stranded Irish and English governesses, irrespective of creed, who had come to Paris in search of situations. Those who suffered most from the withdrawal of the Passionists were the poor and afflicted. The Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, the American Embassy, and the British Ambassador, addressed the French Government on their behalf, pointing out that the services of the Passionists were indispensable--but in vain. It is humiliating that the government of what is supposed to be a great Catholic nation like France should be appealed to in such a cause, fruitlessly, by the ambassador of non-Catholic England. Father Bernard O'Loughlin's name in the world was John, after his father, my mother's brother, John O'Loughlin. The elder John was a brewer's traveller, and often came to our house in Liverpool, bringing his violin with him. He had a wide knowledge of old Irish airs, and to his accompaniment we had many a genuine Irish night, singing the stirring songs then appearing in the "Nation." CHAPTER XIII. THE HOME RULE CONFEDERATION OF GREAT BRITAIN. In the previous chapter it will be seen that I have somewhat anticipated the course of events described in this narrative in order to give brief sketches of some of my friends who took part, in various capacities, in the Franco-Prussian war, and incidents arising out of it. I have also, for the sake of compactness, briefly touched on their subsequent careers. I shall here now resume my recollections of the Home Rule movement from its inception in 1870. From the first everything pointed to Isaac Butt as its leader. His splendid abilities, even when ranged against us in the celebrated debate in the Dublin Corporation with O'Connell, excited the admiration of his fellow-countrymen; but now, when he had come over to the popular side, he was welcomed with acclamation, the more so that his genial and loveable nature was bound to win the hearts of a susceptible people like ours. Moreover, his joining the popular side was due to the impression made upon him by the Fenian leaders, so many of whom he defended in the trials from '67 onward; and he has left on record a remarkable testimony to the purity of their principles and the nobility of their ideals. He was lacking in certain qualities, the want of which in his character prevented him being such a strong leader as O'Connell or Parnell. But, all the same, while he led he gave splendid services--which can never be forgotten--to the cause. As I have said, Alfred Crilly and I were generally expected to take the initiative in any new Irish movement in Liverpool. Accordingly, towards the end of 1871, we were asked to make a move in connection with the new organisation in Ireland. We formed a small committee, and invited Isaac Butt to our projected opening demonstration. He was not able to come to our first gathering, but we had many opportunities during the years that followed of making his acquaintance; and, personally, I received many kindnesses at his hands. With Alfred Crilly I was sent to Dublin by the Committee to find influential speakers for our public inaugural Liverpool demonstration, to be held on the 3rd of January, 1872, our association having been opened some months previously. We secured the services of Mr. A.M. Sullivan and Professor Galbraith of Trinity College. When we returned to Liverpool it became our duty to find a chairman for our meeting worthy of the occasion. Mr. Charles Russell, who was first asked, suggested that we should get some one of more influence than himself. "Why not ask Dr. Commins?" he said. Dr. Commins was a barrister on the same circuit as Charles Russell. We did ask him. He cheerfully consented, and from that hour he was for a long time the leading figure in the struggle for Home Rule in Great Britain, being for several years President of the organisation. There is no more homely and unassuming man, ever accessible to the humblest of his fellow-countrymen, than "the Doctor," as his friends affectionately call him. He had a brilliant university career, and was a man of such wide attainments that I think there was a general belief amongst Liverpool Irishmen that he knew _everything_. Accordingly, they used frequently to go to him to settle some knotty point beyond the ordinary conception, and they seldom came away unsatisfied. Dr. Commins is an accomplished poet, and was for many years a contributor to the columns of the "Nation" and the "United Irishman" (of Liverpool). In 1876 he was elected as a Home Ruler to represent Vauxhall Ward in the Liverpool Town Council. He has ever since been a member of that body, being now an Alderman of the city. In due time he became a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party, of which several other Liverpool Irishmen have been members. Liverpool was not alone in forming its Home Rule Association; most of the large towns had them in due course, but for some time there was no bond of union between them. This, however, was formed in due time, the man to take the first step in bringing us together being John Barry, then residing in Manchester, and the chief man in our organisation there. John was, therefore, practically the founder of the great organisation which, under its various names--of the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain. Irish National Land League of Great Britain, Irish National League of Great Britain, and United Irish League of Great Britain--has been in existence since 1873, working in accordance with and taking the name of whatever has been the recognised organisation for the time being in Ireland. John Barry, who had borne an active share in the struggle for self-government--irrespective of the methods being constitutional or unconstitutional--was a man of attractive personality and an indefatigable worker and organiser. He was the Secretary of the Manchester Home Rule Association, and, seeing the want of some body in which the various associations in Great Britain would be represented, he, in the name and with the authority of his branch, issued invitations to the associations then known to exist to send delegates to a Convention to be held in Manchester. To give importance to the occasion, and the necessary authority, Isaac Butt was invited to preside, and to attend a great demonstration in the Free Trade Hall, on the night of the Convention, January 18th, 1873. Although I bore an active part in the organising of that first Home Rule Convention of Great Britain, it is only a short time since, after a lapse of over thirty years, that I heard from John Barry himself the difficulty he had in securing the presence of the Home Rule leader. It was a long time since we had seen each other, but I found him the same cheery, warm-hearted, generous, and patriotic John Barry as ever. It was in the office of his firm in London we met, and took advantage of the opportunity to fight our battles over again; and he reminded me of the sort of inner circle of the I.R.B. to which he and I, and others who have since been prominent in Irish politics, belonged. He was always, however, a practical patriot, and would use every legitimate method to serve Ireland. That was why he threw himself with such ardour into the Home Rule movement. He told me of how he went over to Dublin to secure the promise of Isaac Butt to preside at the projected Convention, and to attend the demonstration in the evening. He got the requisite promise, and the announcement was made in all good faith in Manchester. So far all looked promising; but what was his alarm to hear, within three days of the event, that Isaac Butt's professional engagements would prevent his being able to attend. Added to this he had heard that Butt, who was of a somewhat irresolute temperament, was being warned that he was falling into the hands of a "Fenian gang." Barry spent all the money he had in sending to the Irish leader a telegram as earnest, hot, and forcible as he was capable of, beseeching him to come, and pointing out to him the serious consequences to the Cause in Great Britain of his failure to do so. This telegraphic budget reached Butt in Court; and, as he turned over leaf after leaf of the message, he said to a friend sitting alongside of him--"This man's in earnest, at any rate," and immediately wired back--"Will go, if alive." Apart from the offensiveness of styling us a "gang," those who had warned Butt of the hands into which he was falling may not, probably, have been far astray as regards some of those from whom he had received the invitation; seeing that when the organisation for Great Britain was duly formed, John Barry, John Ryan, John Walsh, and myself were elected on the Executive; but, at all events, Isaac Butt turned up. Some twenty Home Rule Associations responded to the invitation by sending delegates to the Convention. There is a remarkable contrast between this, the first of these Conventions, and those held every year since; for, at some of those, several hundreds of branches have been represented--showing the growth of the organisation since 1873. At this Manchester Convention, at which Mr. Butt presided, it was resolved to form a central body from the existing local associations, to be called the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain. Isaac Butt himself was elected the first President. I was elected the first General Secretary, and it became my duty to find out the existing associations which had not sent delegates to Manchester, and to invite them, as well as those who had been represented at the present gathering, to a supplementary convention. It was decided to hold this in Birmingham, to complete the arrangements made in Manchester for the future working of the organisation. On the night of the Manchester Convention Mr. Butt was the chief speaker at the public demonstration. Mr. John Ferguson, of Glasgow, was our Chairman. He was a sterling Ulster Protestant Nationalist. Many used to think he was a Scot. Indeed, I thought at one time myself he must be of Scottish extraction at all events, there being, I thought, more Scottish Fergusons than Irish. Speaking to him on the subject, I was reminded by him of the Irish king, Fergus, the founder of the Scottish monarchy; and he claimed to be of genuine Irish descent. He often used to call on me when I was conducting the "Catholic Times." At that time he was travelling for his firm of Cameron & Ferguson, who published a good many popular works on Irish subjects. We were both pleased to hear of the initiative John Barry had taken towards the formation of the Irish organisation of Great Britain. If I remember rightly, John Ferguson was in Liverpool at the time, and we went to Manchester together to attend this our first Annual Convention. After the Manchester Convention, I found there were considerably more Home Rule Associations in existence than had been represented at our first gathering. As a consequence we had a much larger and more representative attendance at our adjourned Convention in Birmingham. Mr. Butt presided in the morning and Mr. A.M. Sullivan in the afternoon. The Chairman at the public demonstration at night was Father Sherlock, one of the finest specimens of the good old "soggarth aroon" type it has ever been my privilege to meet. Several years afterwards, when I was organiser for the League in the Birmingham district, I was right glad to have the opportunity of renewing my acquaintance with him. The very contact with Father John Sherlock was elevating and inspiring, so transparent were the simplicity and purity of his life. Here was a saint, I thought, if ever there was one on earth. In my experience I have generally found that the men who have taken the lead in most places have been professional men rather than traders. This was true of Birmingham as well as elsewhere. There were no men who did better service than Hugh Heinrick, an able journalist (who afterwards became editor of the "United Irishman," the organ of our Confederation), and Professor Bertram Windle. I was glad to see in the newspapers the announcement of such a genuine Irishman as Dr. Windle being appointed President of the University College, Cork. Professor Windle is an honour to his new position, and is as devoted to the cause of creed and country as he was when one of the Professors of the Queen's University, Birmingham. During the years when I was organiser for the League in Birmingham; I became intimately acquainted with him. I found him not only a man of great learning, but an earnest Catholic and devoted Irish Nationalist. No man in our organisation did better service, and he was always ready to go at a moment's notice to speak or lecture wherever required. As a further illustration of what I have said about the aid given to the cause by professional men, I ought to mention Dr. James Mullin, of Cardiff. He was a leading and active man in his district when I travelled in South Wales as an organiser. His talent as a poet has made him well known in Wales, and his accounts of travels in many lands have found many admiring readers. His heart is as warm as his brain is active, which is saying much. CHAPTER XIV. BIGGAR AND PARNELL--THE "UNITED IRISHMAN "--THE O'CONNELL CENTENARY. The General Election of 1874 was remarkable as the first since the Union which had clearly and distinctly returned a majority of Irish members of Parliament as Home Rulers. Previously most of them had been returned as Liberals or Tories. It is memorable in my eyes, as it was the occasion when two of my personal friends, Alexander Martin Sullivan and Joseph Gillis Biggar, first entered Parliament. It was in the year after he was elected that Mr. Biggar made his _debut_ as an "obstructionist." Charles Stewart Parnell having been, in the spring of 1875, elected as successor in the representation of Meath to "honest John Martin," it was not long before the famous "Biggar and Parnell" combination, which was destined to revolutionize the whole system of Parliamentary procedure, was created. Feeling the necessity for a newspaper representing the views of the Home Rule Confederation and chronicling its work from week to week, the Executive promoted the formation of a limited liability company for the purpose, and the outcome was the issue of the "United Irishman," the first number of which appeared on June 4th, 1875. I was appointed manager, and was also the publisher, the paper being produced at my place of business, 68 Byrom Street, Liverpool. The following were the Directors--Andrew Commins, LL.D., Chairman; and John Barry, Joseph Gillis Biggar, M.P., John Ferguson, Richard Mangan, Bernard MacAnulty, and Peter McKinley. William John Oliver was Honorary Secretary, with Hugh Heinrick as Editor at the commencement, and Daniel Crilly afterwards. The newspaper was fortunate in its Honorary Secretary, for William John Oliver was one of the most enthusiastic workers we ever had in the Home Rule movement. He was at this time engaged in commerce in Liverpool, having previously been an officer in the Royal Navy. He was ever willing to be "the man in the gap" in case of an emergency, and that was how he became for a time the Honorary General Secretary of the Home Rule Confederation. He was always a cheery and, at the same time, an eminently practical man. He took a leading part in our local elections in Liverpool from the time we began to fight them on Home Rule principles--when the necessity arose, as I have elsewhere explained, to have public men who were not afraid to identify themselves with the national cause. Hugh Heinrick, our editor, was a brilliant writer, who had, for several years, been a strenuous worker in the Home Rule cause. He was a frequent contributor of poetry to the "Nation" and other national journals, generally over the signature of "Hugh Mac Erin." He was born in the County Wexford in 1831. Before taking up the editorship of the "United Irishman" he was for many years resident in Birmingham, where he was a schoolmaster. He died in 1887. Daniel Crilly, one of the most active and eloquent advocates of the Irish cause in Liverpool, succeeded him--this being his maiden effort in journalism. He was afterwards on the staff of the "Nation," and also did good service while a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party. Among other contributors to the "United Irishman" were Isaac Butt, Dr. Commins, Frank Hugh O'Donnell, Michael Clarke, Captain Kirwan, and Frank Byrne. Our poetry was a strong point with us--Dr. Commins, Frank Fox, John Hand, Patrick Clarke, Heber MacMahon, and Miss Bessie Murphy being among the contributors. When the "United Irishman" was started, the offices of the Home Rule Confederation, which had previously been in Manchester, were for convenience removed to my place of business. As the executive meetings and the meetings of the newspaper directors were held there, I frequently had the pleasure of meeting under my own roof Irishmen who either then were or afterwards became prominent members of the Irish Parliamentary Party, including Isaac Butt, Charles Stewart Parnell, and Joseph Biggar. Mr. Biggar and I were always great friends. He had the reputation of being close-fisted and penurious; but that this was not so I knew from many circumstances, though it is quite true he would not allow himself to be defrauded of a penny. He became a Catholic in his later days. Though such of us as were of the household of the faith welcomed him into the fold, his conversion did not increase his value in our eyes--indeed, from a political point of view, he was of more service to the cause as an Irish Protestant, there being too few of them in our ranks. He had a fresh, pleasant, shrewd-looking face, and spoke with a decided northern accent, which had somewhat of a metallic ring. Some of his brother Members of Parliament thought his "obstruction" methods highly ungentlemanly, but he believed in fighting England with her own weapons. If good Irish measures were not allowed to pass, he would throw every obstacle in the way of English measures being carried. The tempest of rage that assailed him in the "House" only added to his popularity outside. Not only was he an immense favourite amongst Irishmen, but with democratic Englishmen also; and at great mass meetings of English miners and agricultural labourers he could always get resolutions carried by the honest, hard-handed sons of toil in favour of the restoration of Ireland's rights. Biggar used to get many letters approving of the attitude he and Parnell had taken up in Parliament. One in particular, from a warm admirer, he used to show to his friends with great glee. It was a song in the old "Come-all-ye" style. A few lines I can remember sang in words of high commendation of-- --Joseph Biggar, That man of rigour, Whose form and figure Do foes appal! My place being the head-quarters of the Confederation at this time, the fact of my being known to be generally on the spot made me a kind of "man in the gap," to fill up engagements likely to fall through for want of a speaker. In this way I was often rushed off to distant parts of the country at the shortest notice. The most important Irish event in 1875 was the celebration of the O'Connell Centenary in Dublin, on Friday, August 6th. Our Confederation was well represented in the processions, there being, as might be expected from its proximity, a large contingent from Liverpool. So great was the rush to cross the Channel for the celebration that we chartered several of the fine steamers of the City of Dublin Company, and kept them for several days fully employed in crossing and recrossing. The pity of it was that there should be two processions--the magnificent display organised by the official Centenary Committee and the procession got up by the Amnesty Association. The speeches of Messrs. Butt, Sullivan, and Power on the platform erected in what was then Sackville Street, when the outdoor display broke up, explained why the Amnesty Committee and their friends considered that a protest was necessary and justifiable--hence the second procession. The chief objections to the action of the official committee were that, while all honour was to be paid to the memory of O'Connell as the Liberator of his Catholic fellow-countrymen, his services as the champion of the political freedom of the Irish people were being kept in the background. Also--and that was why the Amnesty Association for the release of political prisoners took the initiative in the protest against the action of the Centenary Committee--because, on a great national occasion like this, the very existence of the martyrs for freedom, who were suffering in English prisons, appeared to be forgotten. Such forgetfulness was considered at the least highly inappropriate. There was much indignation, too, that Lord O'Hagan should have been chosen to speak the panegyric on O'Connell, seeing that he had actually sentenced some of those very prisoners. The Irish organisation in Great Britain sympathised with these views, and the various branches sending contingents showed their feelings by throwing in their part with the Amnesty Association. The contingent from Great Britain was, on the proposition of Mr. Patrick Egan, given the place of honour in front of the amnesty procession which, on the morning of the Centenary celebration, the 6th of August, 1875, started from Beresford Place, near the Custom House. The banners of the three Liverpool branches were a picturesque feature in the procession, as also was the Sarsfield Band, a body of fine young Liverpool Irishmen who headed our contingent. CHAPTER XV. HOME RULE IN LOCAL ELECTIONS--PARNELL SUCCEEDS BUTT AS PRESIDENT OF THE IRISH ORGANISATION IN GREAT BRITAIN. It was at the Liverpool Municipal Elections of 1875 that we first introduced the question of Home Rule into local politics. When we were holding our inaugural meeting to establish the Home Rule organisation in the town, we could not get any of our Irish public men to take the chair. The reason was that these had not been elected as Irishmen but as Liberals. As a matter of fact, we had in Dr. Commins a man immensely superior to any of them. But we thought that men who had been elected to public positions mainly by Irish votes should not refuse to identify themselves with the national movement, and to help it by whatever influence they possessed. We therefore decided to _make_ some public men. In Scotland and Vauxhall Wards we had a clear majority, but though the Irish vote in these wards was expected for Liberal candidates, who were not Irish or Catholic, in no other ward could a Catholic or Irishman be elected. We, therefore, commenced to make a change by putting forward for Scotland Ward one of our own men, Lawrence Connolly, as a Home Ruler, and elected him _as such_. He afterwards sat in the Imperial Parliament for an Irish constituency. His election was followed in succeeding years by that of other Home Rulers, so that there was soon a considerable Nationalist Party in the City Council, and no lack of public men to do the honours for the Irishmen of Liverpool when any distinguished fellow-countryman came amongst them. Their civic utility was very great. Though I have been over twenty years out of Liverpool, I have never lost sight of what has been going on there, and I am pleased to find that the younger generation--men whom we, the elders, have borne some share in training--have improved upon our work, and that there are now considerably more aldermen and city councillors than in our time. That they are doing good work I am well satisfied, and nothing gives me greater pleasure than to read from time to time in the papers such items as a recent one--the presentation of a congratulatory address from the local branches of the United Irish League to Councillor Thomas Burke on the occasion of his being made a magistrate of the city of Liverpool. I am somewhat proud of Tom Burke. I remember having charge of some election that was going on, and his coming to me, a very small boy, from Blundell Street, to offer his services. I put him in harness at once, and he has been at work in the Cause ever since, and it is with pleasure that I recognise the fact that he is a good type of numerous Irishmen who were either born in Liverpool or spent most of their lives in that city. There was a dear old _Soggarth_ at St. Joseph's, who did good service for us in our first municipal election in Scotland Ward. He had, previous to this, been a fellow priest with my uncle, Father Bernard O'Loughlin, in the Isle of Man. As Father Peter McGrath was a good Irish scholar, he was soon able to make himself understood by such of the Manx people as still retained their native speech, its basis being, like the language spoken in the Scottish Highlands, practically--making allowance for provincialisms--the Gaelic spoken in Ireland. This was a great help to him and his brother priest in disarming prejudice. Before I met Father McGrath in Liverpool I had heard from my uncle of his delightful and saintly character. He was a ministering angel among our people in his district, which was one of the poorest in Liverpool. His charity was unbounded. Going on a sick call and being at the end of his monetary resources--for let his friends give him ever so much he would never leave himself a penny--he had been known to give away his own underclothing, and even to carry away his bed-clothes to relieve some case of abject poverty. He was a thorough Nationalist, and was delighted when we first raised the banner of Home Rule in Scotland Ward and made honest Lawrence Connolly our standard bearer. As part of the Ward was in his district, he was by far the best canvasser we had. Day by day he used to call on me to hear of the progress we were making. With the active personal help and the prayers of a saintly man like Father McGrath how could we lose? The return of a Home Ruler at an English municipal election was the forerunner of a still greater victory won in the same Scotland Ward, which as a Division of the Parliamentary Borough of Liverpool returned to Parliament some ten years afterwards the only Irish Home Ruler who, _as such_, sits for a British constituency--Mr. T.P. O'Connor. At the Annual Convention of the Home Rule Confederation, held in the Rotunda, Dublin, August 21st, 1876, Dr. Commins in the chair, a vote of confidence in Mr. Butt was passed. At the same time what was known as the "Obstruction" policy was endorsed, though Mr. Butt had given its chief exponents, Biggar and Parnell, no countenance. It was also resolved to remove the headquarters of the Confederation from Liverpool to London. Although, out of respect for his distinguished services, Mr. Butt was allowed to remain as the nominal leader up to the time of his death, it is quite evident that our people favoured the more active policy of the younger men. At a banquet given on the night of this Convention in the Ancient Concert Room, Mr. Butt, as chairman, gave the toast of "The Queen, Lords and Commons of Ireland." It will be seen elsewhere that I have always objected to join in this toast on the ground that it implies an acceptance of the existing condition of government in Ireland. Finding it on the list, I remained away, but I am afraid my friends, who knew my views, were scandalized at seeing in the newspaper report my name given as having been present. How it occurred was through the reporter, desiring, no doubt, to save himself the trouble of making out a new list, giving the names of those who had been present at the Convention as having attended the banquet. I had a somewhat similar experience at a Newcastle-on-Tyne Convention--sixteen years later. The Newcastle men, in the interval between the Convention and the banquet, asked my opinion about the toast list. I gave them a sketch of what I thought a good one, but said, "Don't have the Queen." They said they wouldn't, and I went to the banquet. I was surprised to hear the chairman giving "The Queen, Lords and Commons of Ireland." There was nothing for me to do but walk out. In Mr. Parnell Mr. Biggar found a colleague after his own heart in working the "Obstruction" policy. From the time when I made the acquaintance of Parnell, when he came amongst us, a shy-looking young man, under the wing of Isaac Butt, we were drawn towards each other--he because he looked upon me, from my life-long experience of them, as an authority upon our people in this country, and I because I was impressed by the terrible earnestness that I soon recognised underlying the young man's apparently impassive and unemotional exterior. I was one of the first he came in contact with in this country, and I believe he unbent himself and showed more of his really enthusiastic nature to me than he did to most men. He used to speak unreservedly to me. He knew my views as to Irishmen taking the oath of allegiance and entering the British Parliament, of which he was at that time a member. He knew that, holding these views, I could not enter the British Parliament myself, though he would have liked to see me there. With me it was a matter of conscience; I could not take an oath of allegiance to any but an Irish Government. At the same time, I have always been practical, and willing to fight Ireland's battles with the weapons that come readiest to my hand. I, therefore, always gave what support I could to the Irish Parliamentary Party, who could conscientiously enter the House of Commons, and to the recognised Irish organisations for the time being. It is not to be expected that every Irishman, even every Irish Nationalist, will be of one mind as to which way his duty lies in serving his country. After all, a man who can honestly say "I am an Irishman and I love my country" is already nine-tenths of the way to being a Nationalist. If such a man tries to do his best, according to his lights, for Ireland, he is entitled to all possible sympathy from even those who are working on other lines. On one occasion, when Parnell had returned from a special mission to America, I had a long discussion with him on these points, and was bound to admit that the British Government would have been much better pleased to encounter an insurrection in Ireland, which they could easily put down, than the policy of the so-called "Obstructionists" in Parliament. Again, I said, there was another fact which I recognised. This was that his being sent on a mission to America, whence he was then returning, showed the value of having a man holding such a well-recognised position as a member of Parliament, elected by the votes of his fellow-countrymen, in case we had to send a representative to speak in the name of Ireland to some other nation, a circumstance which had happened before and might again. I said this, even taking into account the apparent failure of the mission to America, from which he was returning, for circumstances might arise in which the head of a State might be glad to recognise an embassy like theirs. He told me that was exactly how he viewed the subject. It was in Dr. Commins' office that we had this conversation, and at our request Mr. Parnell postponed his departure to Ireland in order to attend a celebration we were having that night of Home Rule victories we had achieved in two wards of the town, in Vauxhall by the return of Dr. Commins to the Town Council, and in Scotland Ward by the election of Dr. Alexander Bligh. Parnell's appearance at our festival, which was held on Monday, November 13th, 1876, was a pleasing surprise to those present, who were not aware of his return from America, and this added to the intensity of the outburst of joy and enthusiastic applause which greeted him. One of the most important of our Annual Conventions in Great Britain was that held in Liverpool on 27th August, 1877. Everything showed that, while our people in Ireland and here still loved the old leader, they favoured the policy of "Obstruction." At this Convention there was no intention of displacing Mr. Butt from his position as President of the organisation. They would have retained him on account of his distinguished services and eminently lovable character. But the old man himself could see plainly enough that the people wanted to move faster than he was willing to lead, and, notwithstanding the appeals made to him, insisted upon resigning his position. The Convention being compelled to accept his resignation, Charles Stewart Parnell was elected President of the organisation in his place. This was an indication of what was likely to follow, for though Mr. Butt retained the nominal leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party up to the time of his death, Parnell was the real leader, and eventually, after a short interval, when Mr. Shaw held the office, became the Chairman of the Irish Parliamentary Party. John Ferguson was, I think, the first man publicly to indicate Parnell as the probable successor of Butt. But so great is the dread in our people of even the semblance of disunion, that many, myself among the number, expostulated with him for this. Events, however, showed he was right, and Mr. Butt himself plainly felt that it was inevitable. But at the Convention, when Butt had distinctly refused to hold the office of President any longer, nothing could be finer than the tribute paid to our retiring leader by Mr. John Ferguson in proposing the election of Mr. Parnell as his successor. As I was asked to take the official account of that Convention, and have kept a record of it, I here give a few words of his and some of the other speeches. He said:-- It is my intention to propose Mr. Parnell as the head of the Confederation. At the same time I feel the greatest possible regret that our grand old chieftain who, in trying times, raised the Irish banner, who has so long guided us, and who has been with us in so many hard fights, is to retire from amongst us. We are grateful to Issac Butt for leading us so far, but we are going to try a more determined policy, and Mr. Butt holds views different from those we are determined to carry out. I hope, though, he will take counsel with the true and earnest men of the Party, and that, after a time, he will return to lead us at this side of the water. Mr. John Barry, Mr. Biggar and others spoke in the same strain. So also did Mr. Parnell, who, concluding his speech seconding the vote of thanks to Mr. Butt, said:-- I must confess to not having Mr. Butt's confidence in English justice and sense of right. It is not too late for him to see a way to deal with England that will obtain freedom for our country--a way that will show England that, if she will dare to trifle with Irish demands, it will be at the risk of endangering those institutions she feels so proud of, but which Irishmen have no reason to respect. To Mr. Butt is due a debt of gratitude by the Irish people which they can never repay, for he has taught them self-reliance and knowledge of their power. If I have felt it my duty to put myself in antagonism with Mr. Butt I hope he will forgive me. If I have said or written harsh things I have never said more nor less than was due to the gravity of the occasion. Mr. O'Donnell, who expressed a wish that the next session might find Mr. Butt at the head of a United Irish Party, supported the vote of thanks to Mr. Butt, which was carried unanimously, and with all sincerity and depth of feeling. Mr. Butt replied, saying he would be ashamed of himself if he were unmoved by that vote, and the manner in which it had been passed. He hoped that the wish expressed by Mr. O'Donnell might be realized, and it would not be his fault if they had not a United Irish Party in the House of Commons. After expressing his good wishes for the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, which he hoped might long continue to assert the power of the Irish people in this country, he took his farewell. Mr. Parnell was then elected President. The Convention of 1877 ended with the adoption of a resolution, on the motion of Mr. Peter Mulhall (Liverpool), seconded by Mr. Ryan (Bolton):-- That this Convention of the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain hereby endorses the vigorous policy of the Home Rule Parliamentary Party who are termed "Obstructionists." Mr. Mulhall just mentioned was an active worker in the National ranks in Liverpool, and even a more valuable adherent a little later was his younger brother James, one of the most thorough, sincere, and upright of our young men, who never spared himself when there was good work to do. Before the venerable figure of Isaac Butt disappears from the scene, let me say a few words about his eminently agreeable personality. There was not an atom of selfishness about him. I remember his making little of the difficulties some people used to raise in connection with the planning of a Home Rule Bill, and saying, "Three men sitting round a table could in a short time draw up a plan of Home Rule for Ireland that would act, providing people all round meant honestly." He used to tell us humorous anecdotes of his experiences in the courts, of which I can recollect the following one: "A man came before a magistrate to have a neighbour bound over to keep the peace. In his deposition he stated after the usual preamble: 'That said Barney Trainor at said time and place threatened to send said deponent's soul to the lowest pit of Hell, and this deponent veribly believes that had it not been for the interference of the bystanders the aforesaid Barney Trainor would have accomplished his horrible purpose.'" Another story that I remember him telling was as to the origin of "Bog Latin." A sheriff's officer was sent to serve a writ, but the object of his search took refuge in a bog. The sheriff's officer, determined to do the thing properly, endorsed his writ "Non comeatibus in swampo," and in Irish legal circles the term "Bog Latin" was thereafter used to describe any mode of caricature of the ancient tongue. In something less than two years after Charles Stewart Parnell had succeeded him as our President, Isaac Butt died, on the 5th of May, 1879, mourned by Ireland as one of the most brilliant, patriotic, and self-sacrificing men she had ever nurtured. Of the members of Parliament and embryo members present at the 1877 Convention, I should say a word of Tim Healy, by which name he is most frequently known, who, since then, has been on many occasions one of the most prominent figures in Irish politics. From the day when I first met him, a keen, quick-witted, enthusiastic Irish lad of about 18, from Newcastle-on-Tyne, until this 1877 Convention and later, he did good work for the Cause. Great as is my affection for him, my pain at his attitude in recent years has been as great. From the time we began to work together in the Home Rule movement I should say that Timothy Healy had not left his native place, Bantry, more than a couple of years. He is related to the Sullivan family, the connection being still closer from the fact that his wife is a daughter of our veteran poet, T.D. Sullivan, for whom I have always had the warmest admiration. Like myself, Healy had a leaning towards journalism, and we had a common ground in our admiration of the "Nation" newspaper, not only the "Nation" of O'Connell and the Young Irelanders, but of the Sullivans. Nothing, therefore, could be more congenial to him than to fill the post of London letter writer to that paper. He made his mark at once, as being a worthy scholar of the "Nation" school, both past and present, and no one recognised this more quickly than Charles Stewart Parnell. It was no doubt this appreciation that prompted the new Irish leader to ask Tim Healy to become his private secretary. Parnell possessed in a remarkable degree a gift which was of great service to him during his political career as the successor of Isaac Butt. This was the faculty of weighing up the special qualities of the various members of the Irish Party and using them accordingly. Without attempting for a moment to underrate Parnell as a great leader of men, I must say that there were members of the Party far abler in many respects than he was, and, no doubt, in looking around for someone to supply the qualities in which he, himself, was wanting, he could see that Healy was the very man for his purpose. When he was in America he wired to Tim offering him the post, which offer was at once accepted, and, in the shortest possible time, Parnell's new secretary had crossed the Atlantic, and was by his side ready to be put in harness at once. It was an excellent combination, and there can be no doubt but that, during the time that the connection existed between them, Parnell owed much towards the successful carrying on of the national struggle to his young secretary's inspiration. Michael Davitt, in his "Fall of Feudalism," pays a high tribute to Healy's splendid service in connection with Gladstone's Land Act. Undoubtedly his was the credit for what became known as the "Healy Clause," which provided that no rent should be payable for land on improvements made by the tenant himself or his immediate predecessor. Not only was this credit conceded to him of being the author of this clause by distinguished fellow-countrymen like Michael Davitt and Lord Russell of Killowen, but by Mr. Gladstone himself. As I have referred to the opinions expressed on Healy in Michael Davitt's book, perhaps I may be forgiven if I go out of my way somewhat in referring to another passage in the same book, in which he pays a well-deserved tribute to a noble Irishman, Patrick Ford, of the New York "Irish World," with which, in common with Irish Nationalists the world over, I cordially agree. There are some men whom you may never have seen in the flesh, but whom you feel, through correspondence with them and in other ways, that you know none the less thoroughly all the same. Such a man is Patrick Ford. It is nearly forty years since I first made his acquaintance, and the years that have passed have only increased my regard for him. I had the pleasure of welcoming in the columns of the "Catholic Times," which was then under my direction, the first number of the "Irish World." I could feel at once that the paper and the man who edited it had for me a congenial ring about them. I am deeply indebted for the kindly and generous interest which Patrick Ford has so long personally and in the columns of the "Irish World" shewn in the success of my Irish publications, and I am delighted to have the opportunity of joining in the tribute paid to him by Michael Davitt. CHAPTER XVI. MICHAEL DAVITT'S RETURN FROM PENAL SERVITUDE--PARNELL AND THE "ADVANCED" ORGANISATION. In the year following the Liverpool Home Rule Convention of 1877, I had the pleasure of welcoming back to freedom my old friend, Michael Davitt, after he had been in penal servitude close upon eight years. He had been released, along with other Fenian prisoners, and, with Corporal Chambers, came on April 28th, 1878, to a gathering we organised and held in the Adelphi Theatre, Liverpool, for the benefit of the liberated men, John O'Connor Power being the lecturer for the occasion, and Dr. Commins our chairman. Michael Davitt, on rising to speak, was received with a terrific outburst of cheering, again and again repeated. I was sitting immediately behind him on the platform, and I noticed, while he was speaking, a constant nervous twitching of his hand, which he held behind his back, and he was evidently in a state of highly-strung excitement. I was not surprised when we had that day a painful proof of how the prison treatment had undermined his constitution. After the gathering we brought the released prisoners and the principal speakers to be entertained at the house of Patrick Byrne, a warm-hearted, patriotic Irishman, and were much alarmed when Davitt fell into a deep faint, from which he only recovered through the ministrations of one of our most respected Liverpool Nationalists, Dr. Bligh, who fortunately was present. For a few moments it seemed as if he never would revive. There is no doubt but that their treatment during their long term of penal servitude seriously affected the health of several of the Irish political prisoners. It was only three months previous to his visit to us in Liverpool that Davitt reached Dublin, with three others of the released prisoners--Sergeant McCarthy, Corporal Chambers, and John O'Brien. To the consternation of his friends, McCarthy died suddenly at Morrison's Hotel, on January 15th, the cause, it was believed, being heart disease. This caused such a shock to Chambers that his life, too, was put in danger. I was pleased to see him restored to health after this when he called on me in Liverpool with his brother, with whom I was well acquainted. The shock of the sudden death of his friend McCarthy must have affected Michael Davitt too, as we found from the report of our friend, Dr. Bligh, in what a precarious state of health he must have been at the time. It will be remembered that Rickard Burke became insane, it was thought, and stated in Parliament, owing to his treatment while in Chatham Prison. Following our Liverpool gathering, we had on Sunday, May 5th, a meeting in the St. Helens Theatre for the same object. At this Parnell as well as Davitt was present. Speaking that day by desire of our St. Helens friends, I called attention to the appropriateness of our addressing the assembly from the boards of a theatre on which there had been the mimic representation of many a stirring drama. But no play the audience had ever witnessed on those boards could exceed in dramatic interest the life of the released convict, Michael Davitt. Nay, more, the grudging terms on which he had been released enabled him to appear that day in the real living character of a "Ticket-of-Leave-Man," which, no doubt, they had seen impersonated on those boards by some clever actor in the play of the same name. I am reminded of that St. Helens meeting by a passage in Michael Davitt's book "The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland." I travelled from Liverpool to St. Helens to attend the meeting in the same carriage with Mr. Parnell. As I could always speak unreservedly to him I knew that though he would not actually join the advanced organisation, he regarded it as a useful force behind the constitutional movement. In the carriage, which it so happened we had to ourselves, we discussed the probabilities of the result of a resort to physical force for securing Irish freedom, should circumstances justify such a course, for Parnell would not have shrunk from taking the field if there had been a reasonable hope of success. Singularly enough, I find in Michael Davitt's book that he himself, on the day of that same St. Helens meeting, made an advance to Parnell with a view to getting him to join the revolutionary organisation, should the conditions be somewhat modified. Up till then I had seen more of Parnell than Davitt had and had enjoyed his full confidence. I had, therefore, come to the conclusion, from my conversations with him, that he was of far more service to the Irish cause as he was than if he had actually joined the revolutionary movement. I am not surprised, therefore, at Parnell's answer to Davitt: "No, I will never join any political secret society, oath bound or otherwise. My belief is that useful things for our Cause can be done in the British Parliament." Nevertheless, I remember one public utterance of his which always struck me as most statesmanlike. After a frank statement that he was in favour of constitutional Home Rule, he, with equal frankness, declined to subscribe to the entire finality of that solution of the Irish problem. How, he asked, could he or any man put bounds to the progress of a nation? Seeing that Gladstone gave as one reason for the disestablishing of the Irish Church "the intensity of Fenianism," so, in the same way, no one recognised more than Parnell did that the existence of a physical force movement was a strong argument for those engaged in the moral force agitation. Therefore he was always anxious to conciliate and even cultivate the advanced element. Of this I will here give one illustration, out of many I could mention, and this in connection with the custom of drinking what was called "the loyal toast," which at one time used to be observed at some Home Rule celebrations. It is a matter on which I have already explained my point of view. On one occasion Mr. Parnell was invited by the Liverpool branches to a St. Patrick's Day banquet at the Adelphi Hotel, where the drinking of the "loyal" toast was part of the programme. With the rest of the committee I met him at the railway station on his arrival, and came with him to the hotel. After some conversation I was bidding him "good-night!" when he asked, as he took my hand, "Where are you going, Denvir? Are you not going to stay for the banquet?" I had not intended mentioning it, but as he asked me so pointedly, I felt bound to tell him my objection to being present. He did not attempt to controvert what I said, but still asked where I was going. I then told him I had been invited to a St. Patrick's celebration where the toast was _not_ to be drunk, the gathering being one of our advanced Nationalist friends. He at once said "I should like to go there." I told him I was sure they would be delighted to see him, and that, as theirs was a dance, and it would be kept up pretty late, I would come back for him after the banquet, and take him to the other celebration. Our friends were well pleased at his wish to attend, and asked me to go back and bring him to where a hearty _cead mile failte_ awaited him. In due time I brought him over, and they gave him an enthusiastic reception, he being quite as delighted to be present as they were to receive him, and they were still more pleased when he addressed a few words to them. But that was as far as Parnell would go, and his answer to Davitt that day at St. Helens pretty well indicated the course he intended to pursue in connection with the cause of Ireland. Indeed, it is on record that in later years Michael Davitt altered his own view to such an extent that he would no longer have made that proposition to Parnell. There was no man whose regard I more valued than that of Michael Davitt. Amongst all the vicissitudes of Irish politics our friendship was an unbroken one. He was little more than a boy when I first met him at a small gathering to which none but the initiated were admitted. From the first I was strongly drawn towards that tall, dark-complexioned, bright-eyed, modest youth, with his typical Celtic face and figure. He was in company with Arthur Forrester, who was a fluent speaker and writer, and who on this occasion did most of the talking, Davitt only throwing in some shrewd remark from time to time. We know since that he had in him the natural gift of oratory, though it was not that so much as other qualities which gave him the commanding position in Irish politics which he afterwards reached. He had then spent several of the best years of his life in penal servitude for his connection with the physical force movement. Thinking long and hard in the solitude of his prison cell, Davitt resolved that the first vital need of Ireland was to plant firmly in the soil of Ireland the people who were being uprooted--in other words, the land system must be changed. The result of his convictions was the formation of the Irish National Land League, which dated its birth from the great meeting projected by Davitt and held at Irishtown in April, 1879. Mr. Parnell was elected President of the new organisation, Mr. Patrick Egan treasurer, and Michael Davitt was one of the secretaries. He has been justly called the "Father" of the Land League. One of the earliest acts of the Land League was to endeavour to stop the tide of emigration from Ireland. In this connection, as certain emigration schemes had been set on foot in England, a branch of the League was founded in Liverpool at my request by Parnell and Davitt. In consequence of the prevailing distress and impending famine, Mr. Parnell was asked by the Irish National League to go to America to get the assistance of our people there, and Mr. John Dillon was asked to accompany him. Though there was little done by the Government to relieve the distress, the Irish people could always get coercion without stint, and Messrs. Davitt, Daly and Killen were arrested for "seditious" speeches in connection with the Land League agitation. To protest against this, Mr. Parnell, previous to his departure for America, attended a great open-air demonstration in Liverpool. The gathering was held in the open space in front of St. George's Hall, and it was computed that about 50,000 people were present. When the meeting was publicly announced, there was a proclamation from the Orange Society, calling upon the brethren to put down the "Seditious gathering." Upon this our committee took the precaution of enrolling stalwart "stewards" to preserve order. Among those who offered their services were a large number of the Irish Volunteer Corps, under the command of Sergeant James MacDonnell, a County Down man of fine proportions and shrewd brain. To him was entrusted the direction of the whole body of our men on the day of the meeting. The advanced party also gave their services, and non-commissioned officers and men of the other volunteer corps besides the Irish, skilled in military movements, gave valuable help. Round the platform were a select body of nearly a thousand men, many of them carrying revolvers in their pockets, ready for action. The Orange body must have heard of our elaborate preparations, and finding "discretion the better part of valour," they countermanded their proclamation to break up the meeting. The authorities of the town made full preparations to cope with possible disturbances, and inside St. George's Hall they had, carefully kept out of view, a large body of the town police, armed with revolvers in addition to their batons. In a window of the North Western Hotel, overlooking the meeting, was the chief constable, and with him were magistrates, prepared to read the Riot Act if necessary. It was arranged that as I was at that time probably the best known man in the Irish body in Liverpool, I should be stationed on a prominent part of the platform, which consisted of two lorries, in view of all, and alongside me, our general, Sergeant MacDonnell. As showing how well in hand was that immense body of people it was remarked that when the carriage of Dr. John Bligh, whose guest Mr. Parnell was, drew up in the street, facing the platform, and when I made a motion with both hands, to show where a passage was to be made for Mr. Parnell from the street to the platform, how quickly and accurately the opening was made in that dense and apparently impenetrable body of people. In Ireland, at this time, men were being prosecuted for what were termed "seditious" speeches. When Mr. Parnell stood up to speak he stepped upon a chair, that he might be the better seen, and said "I am going to make a seditious speech." A strong motion was passed at this meeting condemnatory of coercion in Ireland. On the same evening a great demonstration was held in the League Hall. The authorities must have considered the St. George's Hall meeting a very serious business, and it was evidently made note of by the police for use afterwards. At the "_Times_ Forgeries Commission," Mr. Parnell was questioned about this gathering, and about several on the platform who were mentioned by name. Asked if this one or that one were connected with the Fenian movement, he generally answered he did not think so. When my name was put to him by the Attorney-General (now the Lord Chief Justice), who was cross-examining him, he replied "He might have been." In a short time after the Liverpool demonstration Messrs. Parnell and Dillon went to America, as had been arranged. They were everywhere received with enthusiasm, and obtained sympathy and substantial help as the ambassadors of Ireland. CHAPTER XVII. BLOCKADE RUNNING--ATTEMPTED SUPPRESSION OF "UNITED IRELAND"--WILLIAM O'BRIEN AND HIS STAFF IN JAIL--HOW PAT EGAN KEPT THE FLAG FLYING. "United Ireland suppressed" was the chief headline in the morning papers on the Friday before the Christmas of 1881. In point of fact, what had happened was that the detectives, acting under the extraordinary powers given by the special "law" in force in Ireland, had invaded the offices of the Land League organ the night before, and seized all the copies of the paper found on the premises. It was a bungled job, for the country edition had already gone out, including the supplies for England and Scotland, so that the only copies seized were those intended for Dublin and the suburbs. Nothing indicated the intensity of the struggle going on between the government and the people more than the dead set which was being made against "United Ireland." Its editor was in jail, its sub-editor was in jail, most of its contributors were in jail, even the commercial and mechanical staffs had been seized, one by one, and in the paper each week the names and descriptions of the victims appeared, prominently set out in tabular form, in the place where the first leading article had previously been printed. But, in spite of these difficulties, the paper appeared regularly each week, its fiery spirit not a whit abated, and its outspoken exposure of Mr. "Buckshot" Forster and his methods in no way curtailed. Confronted with this open failure, the government swallowed the last vestige of its regard for appearances, and made the bold attack on the liberty of the press involved in the seizure and attempted suppression of "United Ireland." It was not the first time (nor has it been the last) in Ireland that a national organ was thus attacked. From the days of the United Irishmen, towards the close of the 18th century, to those of 1867, there had been a long series of suppressions, of which, perhaps, John Mitchel's "United Irishman" (1847) and the Fenian "Irish People" are the best remembered instances. In this case, however, the leaders of the popular movement determined that they would not be put down, but would use all "the resources of civilization"--to quote Mr. Gladstone's famous phrase--to keep the flag flying. I am very proud of the fact that they invited me to be their instrument. What happened was that two members of the printing staff, Mr. Edward Donnelly, foreman, and Mr. William MacDonnell, assistant foreman, escaped to England, taking with them stereo plates of the "suppressed" issue. From these plates, my own jobbing machines not being big enough to print a full-sized newspaper, I got a local firm to print sufficient copies to cover the Dublin supply, which, as I have explained, had been the only part of the issue which fell into the hands of the police. A quantity of these papers, made up in innocent looking parcels, my son, then a schoolboy, took over with him in the steamer from Liverpool to Dublin, as personal luggage. He was to take them to the address which had been given to him of a member of the staff who was then "on his keeping." I was alarmed the following morning, Christmas Eve, 1881, to read in the newspapers of the arrest of this gentleman, and feared that my son would also fall into the hands of the police. But he had acted with wariness. Leaving the luggage behind him in the steamer, until he found how the land lay, he saw the people of the house, heard of the arrest, and at once made his own arrangements for supplying the Dublin newsagents, in which task he received invaluable help from two gentlemen on the "Nation" staff, Daniel Crilly and Eugene O'Sullivan. Thus the _whole_ of the issue of the "suppressed" number actually reached its destination. For future issues arrangements were made between my old friend Mr. Patrick Egan, Treasurer of the Land League, who was then in Paris, and myself. Our letters were never addressed direct, but always through third persons, the intermediary in Paris being Mr. James Vincent Taaffe, and, in Liverpool, Miss Kate Swift. Mr. Egan had been sent to Paris to keep the League Funds out of the hands of Dublin Castle, and to maintain intact the machinery of the League, for, it must be remembered, Parnell, Davitt, William O'Brien, and most of our prominent men were at the time in jail. Although illegal in Ireland, there was nothing in the ordinary law to prevent the printing and circulation of "United Ireland" in Great Britain. Arrangements were, therefore, made with the Metropolitan Printing Works, London, for the future production of the paper. For several weeks the papers were printed by that firm, and sent to my place of business in Byrom Street, Liverpool. As I had, in ordinary course, to supply the whole of the newsagents in England, Wales and Scotland, the police, by whom my place was, by day and night, closely watched, could not know if in the quantity sent to me from London I was getting a supply for Ireland. The parcels for Ireland I could not send direct from Byrom Street, as they would be followed by the police and traced. Therefore, for packing and forwarding to Ireland, we used a fish-curing shed, not far from Byrom Street, lent for the purpose by a patriotic Irishman, Patrick De Lacy Garton, at that time a member of the Liverpool City Council. With so many friends in Liverpool willing to assist, it was not difficult to get the parcels of papers, through one channel or another, into our depot each week. I engaged the services of Mr. Michael Wolohan, to go to Ireland, and act as forwarding agent. It was his task to get people in various parts of the country to receive parcels of "United Ireland," the papers being packed in such fashion as to correspond with the business of the person to whom each consignment was made. For instance, the edition for the week ending December 31st was packed in hampers provided by Mr. Garton, who advised me to send the lot as dried fish, and found a reliable consignee for them in Ireland. The "dried fish" arrived safely, and then the most arduous part of Michael Wolohan's work began. For it was difficult to get the actual parcels of "United Ireland" into the hands of the agents and sub-agents unknown to the police, but this he did with consummate address, and on the whole very successfully. On one occasion Michael wrote me he had a good consignee for "woollen goods." Nothing easier, for here was Edward Purcell, a clothier, one of our own young men, who afterwards became a city alderman, having a good business in Byrom Street, Liverpool. Besides helping actively with the "blockade running" in other ways, he at once gave us the necessary wrappers in which he had got his own goods from his woollen merchants, and assisted in packing our "woollen goods" in the correct fashion. Needless to say, these safely reached the consignee in Ireland. Although there was no illegality in printing "United Ireland" in London, the printers were perpetually harassed by the police to frighten them into giving up the job. The parcels for the British newsagents could not legally be stopped, but with the watchful eye of the police all over Ireland on the look-out for the proscribed paper, it is not surprising that individual parcels fell into their hands. For that reason we took care to send the various kinds of goods in the names of mercantile firms whose loyalty was unquestionable. I should say that to this day these firms have no idea of the large Irish trade they were doing at this particular time. But Liverpool became much too suspicious a place to send from. I therefore adopted the plan of sending parcels, made up as various kinds of merchandise, to friends in Manchester, from which city there was regular communication with inland towns in Ireland, and these friends sent on the parcels to their destinations more safely than if going direct from Liverpool. This scheme was working smoothly enough, but eventually the London printers were frightened into giving up the contract, and the printing had to be transferred to Paris. It is needless to say that, during this time, Michael Wolohan, our agent in Ireland (whose name had for the time being become Brownrigg), had the utmost difficulty in escaping the attention of the police. Some parcels he was sending by the Broadstone terminus were detected and seized. What troubled him most was that, as he paid a considerable sum for carriage on these, and as the railway company had not forwarded them, he was entitled to have the money returned, But the police were on the look out for the so-called Brownrigg, and it was thought best that he should not venture near the station. It happened that week that my son arrived in Dublin with some more of the kind of luggage he had brought over at Christmas, and, with the recklessness of youth, he went to the station, and, as Brownrigg, got the money returned. "United Ireland" for the week ending January 28th, 1882, was printed in Paris, in a section of a printing office rented by Patrick Egan, and sent, addressed to me, for circulation in Ireland and Great Britain. The parcels were seized on their arrival at Folkestone and Dover, and though the seizure was illegal and I applied for the parcels as being my property (a question being also asked in Parliament) we could get no satisfaction. But, notwithstanding the seizures made from time to time, it was determined to keep the flag flying, and no matter what might be the difficulty encountered in the production of "United Ireland," not an issue was missed. Of course, as a natural consequence of these difficulties, the paper was sometimes hard to be got, so that, taking advantage of this, some of the newsvendors and all the newsboys in Dublin were reaping a rich harvest, as, owing to the anxiety of the people to get copies, they were frequently sold on the streets of the cities and towns in Ireland at from 6d. to 2s. 6d. a copy. The continued presence of the paper all over Ireland did perhaps more than anything else to keep heart in the people. Accordingly, it must be kept going at all hazards. The type for the paper continued to be set up in Paris, and, after a certain quantity had been printed off each week, for transmission by post and otherwise, the matrices from the type were brought over to me by carefully selected agents from Paris. From these stereotype plates of the pages were cast. As my own machine was not big enough, I arranged with a Liverpool firm of printers to machine the paper for me each week. Accordingly, they printed the papers for the week ending February 4th, and delivered the bulk of them to us, so that we got our parcels for that week sent off. The police must have got one of the copies being sold by the Liverpool agents, and finding it had no imprint (which was illegal) went to the printers referred to, who, on this being pointed out, handed over to them the few remaining copies. As every printing firm was now afraid to touch "United Ireland," it only remained for me to endeavour to print it with my own somewhat limited appliances. It was now, therefore, reduced in size to four pages. Every week, as before, the matrices were brought to me, and, from the castings taken from these, I printed the papers on my own small machine, and sent them to their various destinations. And so the fight with the police went on with varying fortune. It was true, as regards size, half our flag had in a manner been shot away, but we still kept it flying, and the Government, with their standing army of police, were never able to suppress "United Ireland." As I expected, I was prosecuted for printing and publishing without an imprint. Mr. Poland, Q.C., chief prosecuting counsel to the Treasury, was sent down to conduct the case against me for the technical breach of the law involved in the matter of the imprint, and I was fined a sum amounting with costs to £25. I announced my intention in court of continuing the publication, so the Government got very little satisfaction out of their action. Of the various editions of the paper produced in Ireland at this time I shall not speak in detail, as in this narrative I only describe what came within my own personal knowledge. Mr. William O'Brien in a later issue referred to the mysterious and unconquerable fashion in which one town after another saw its edition of "United Ireland" appear, and then, when police and spies were hot upon its track, as mysteriously pass away. This was, of course, a picturesque exaggeration, but it had a considerable basis of truth. The paper was actually printed more than once in the old office in Dublin under the noses of the police, and on one occasion Mr. Wolohan set up a printing machine in a private house in Derry, and, assisted by my son, actually worked off the copies of the paper next door to the house of the resident magistrate. Ultimately, there came the period of the "Kilmainham Treaty," and most of the political prisoners were released. The issue of "United Ireland" for March 11th did not appear as on previous occasions. I produced an issue, which I sent in charge of my son to Dublin, putting it at the disposal of Mr. O'Brien. It was not, however, published, though I received a long and interesting letter from Mr. William O'Brien--still in Kilmainham jail--expressing the appreciation of the Irish leaders for the work I had done in these words:-- ~We are all deeply sensible of your extraordinary energy and courage in this matter.~ I am prevented from giving this letter, which explains the reasons for the stoppage of the paper, as Mr. O'Brien has endorsed it "Private and Confidential." A few weeks later "United Ireland" appeared in its old publishing office in Abbey Street. Mr. O'Brien was set free on April 15th, Messrs. Parnell, Dillon and O'Kelly were released on May 2nd, and Michael Davitt and others soon afterwards. CHAPTER XVIII. PATRICK EGAN. It will be seen that when "United Ireland" was "on the shaughraun" during the time that William O'Brien was in prison, though he was able to send communications out regularly, the direction very largely devolved upon Patrick Egan, who had taken up his quarters in Paris for that and other purposes of the Land League. I may say that I have been in frequent communication with Mr. Egan ever since, and it is but recently that I got a letter from him touching upon this matter. In making some valuable suggestions as to the contents of this book, he says, "There just occurs to me as I write, a point that you might introduce as an added feature, namely--all the leading articles that appeared in 'U.I.' during those fateful months (or almost all of them) were written by William O'Brien _in Kilmainham Prison, smuggled out by the underground railroad, which ran upon regular scheduled time_, and were despatched by trusty messengers to me in Paris, which messengers brought back on their return journey the matrices to which you refer for the next issue of 'United Ireland.' "There were four messengers, in order to avoid attracting attention--two of them the Misses Stritch, whose father had been a resident magistrate in Ireland. They were fine patriotic girls, and active members of Miss Anna Parnell's Ladies' Land League. Both are now dead." After a time Patrick Egan returned from Paris to Ireland, calling upon me in Liverpool on his way home. On more than one occasion he has visited me at my home in Liverpool. It was always with sincere pleasure that I saw the alert figure, the keen yet smiling eyes, the trim moustache and beard, which were the first impressions one got of his personality. His unvarying suavity and politeness might have deceived a casual observer into supposing that he was not a man of abnormal strength of character; they were only the silken glove to conceal the hand of iron. Emphatically a man of determination and practical common sense, he united to these qualities a remarkable degree of tact. In addition to much routine matter, which need not be specified here, although grave enough at the time, our meetings were concerned with important work in which we were engaged, as, for instance, the O'Connell Centenary, the political prisoners, and combating the measures being taken to swell the tide of emigration from Ireland. In dealing with the eventful career of Patrick Egan may I be allowed to go both backward and forward in my dates, in order to bring the story of his life into, as far as possible, one consecutive narrative. Born in County Longford, he was brought to Dublin by his parents when quite young. His shrewd business qualities enabled him to make his mark early in life, and his fine administrative abilities admirably fitted him for the post he attained as managing director to the most extensive flour milling company in Ireland. He has always been a practical patriot, always ready to work for Ireland by every honourable means that came to his hand, whether the means were those of moral or physical force. Consequently, he was an active worker in the ranks of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood from the early sixties. He was one of the founders of the Amnesty Movement for the release of the political prisoners of '65 and '67. When the Home Rule movement was started in Ireland he entered into it heartily, and was elected a member of the Council. He enjoyed the confidence of Butt, John Martin, Justin McCarthy, and all the other leaders of the movement, besides being trusted by Nationalists of all shades of opinion. Like most of us, without abating in the least his love and esteem for Isaac Butt, he soon recognised the coming leader in Charles Stewart Parnell, who used to refer to him in private conversation as his "political godfather" on account of the prominent part he had played in securing his first election to Parliament for the County Meath, in succession to John Martin. During the early part of the Land League agitation he was three times nominated, for King's County, Meath, and Tipperary, for Parliament, but he refused election, on the ground of being an advanced Nationalist. I have more than once talked this matter over with Pat Egan, and, as I may say in everything else, we were in complete accord; we neither of us could bring ourselves to swear allegiance to what we considered a foreign power. At the same time, as practical patriots, we helped every movement, inside the constitution as well as outside of it, calculated to benefit Ireland. When the Land League movement was started in 1879, Egan became at once one of the most prominent figures in it, and, besides acting as Trustee along with Joseph Biggar and William H. O'Sullivan, he was Honorary Treasurer. In the famous trial of the Land League Executive, in 1880-1881, he and Mr. Parnell and eleven others were prosecuted, the jury being ten to two for acquittal. In February, 1881, when coercion was so rampant in Ireland, he left his business in the sole charge of his partner, James Rourke, and went to Paris, by desire of Parnell, Dillon and the other leaders, to keep the League Funds out of the hands of the enemy. While he was there I was brought into close relations with him in my endeavours, as I have already described in this narrative, to carry out the honourable part allotted to me by our leaders of keeping "United Ireland" in circulation in every corner of the land, notwithstanding the watchfulness of the entire British garrison. In October, 1882, a National Convention passed a unanimous vote, thanking him for his distinguished services and sacrifices as Treasurer of the League, he having given gratuitously to the Cause three entire years of his life, something like a million and a quarter of dollars having passed through his hands during that time. These and many other circumstances that came to my knowledge abundantly prove that no man has more deserved the confidence and gratitude of the Irish race. In February, 1883, Michael Davitt tells us "In order to avoid the machinations of agents in the pay of Dublin Castle, he left Ireland." I don't know if I shall ever meet my friend again, and for that reason I shall always remember, as I am sure he will, our last meeting in Liverpool on his return from Paris, when we fought our battles with the forces of the Government over again, and had many a hearty laugh at some of the humorous episodes that cropped up in connection with it. Neither of us then thought that, before long, he would have to leave his home again for another period of exile. Up to this point I can include the chief incidents in Patrick Egan's career, either directly or indirectly, in my own personal recollections. In order not to break the continuity of this sketch of a noble life, I will briefly speak of his career in America. It will be found, therefore, that in some particulars I have had to anticipate the ordinary course of this narrative. On arriving in America in 1883, he settled in Nebraska, where he soon established a large and prosperous business in grain. In 1884, at a Convention in Faneuil Hall, Boston, surrounded by some of the most distinguished of our race in America, he was presented with a service of plate sent from Ireland, with a beautifully illuminated address, paying tribute to the magnificent services he had given to his country, and signed by three hundred of the national leaders in Ireland, including the Lord Mayor of Dublin (Charles Dawson), Parnell, Davitt, Dillon, Biggar. Justin McCarthy, Healy, William O'Brien, Sexton, Harrington and others. From 1884 to 1886 he was President of the Irish National League of America, during which time 360,000 dollars were collected and sent to Ireland. The salary of the President of the League was 3,000 dollars a year. At the end of his term Patrick Egan returned to his successor in the office 6,000 dollars as his personal contribution to the Fund. His career in America has been no less honourable than his services to the Irish Cause on this side of the Atlantic. Irishmen everywhere felt proud when he was sent to represent the great American Republic as Ambassador to Chili. They took it not only as an honour to the man himself, but to his nationality. We who knew him best followed with confidence his record during the four years of storm and stress in Chili, the most troublous, perhaps, that country had ever seen. That our confidence in him was not misplaced was proved by the tribute of admiration paid him by President Harrison in his message to Congress in December, 1891, for the splendid manner in which he had protected the important interests confided to his care, and for his defence of the honour of the flag of the United States, and the rights and dignity of American citizenship. All this was endorsed in the most emphatic manner by the leading statesmen and naval and military commanders of America, including Secretary of State James G. Blaine, Rear Admiral Evans, Admiral Brown, Rear-Admiral McCann, and numerous other officers of the army and navy. The strongest eulogies of Mr. Egan's conduct of the Chilian legation were written by the ex-President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, who, in 1892, gave a dinner at his home in Washington, D.C., in his honour. In a public letter Mr. Roosevelt said, "Minister Egan has acted as an American representative in a way that proves that he deserves well of all Americans, and I earnestly hope that his career in our diplomatic service may be long, and that in it he may rise to the highest positions." When I started a new series of my "Irish Library" in January, 1902, I received words of encouragement from John Redmond, from Michael Davitt, and from other distinguished Irishmen, but there was none I valued more highly than the letter of appreciation of my works from Pat Egan. Of these he asked me to send him a set, including my "Irish in Britain." In a letter he sent me in the May following, I could see the yearning of the exile for news from the "old sod" when he said "Write me a line to say how you are, and how goes the good old cause. I often think with much interest of the last time I had the pleasure of seeing you in Liverpool." I have made my references to Patrick Egan somewhat lengthy, perhaps, but it is because in no work that I have ever seen has an adequate tribute been paid to his services to Ireland. Unlike other men who are better known, he was little seen and not much heard of in the Land League movement, but his influence in shaping the movement was second only to that of Davitt. He was eminently the practical patriot, and his motto was "deeds not words." If she had had in the past many men like Egan, Ireland would be both free and prosperous to-day. CHAPTER XIX. GENERAL ELECTION OF 1885--PARNELL A CANDIDATE FOR EXCHANGE DIVISION--RETIRES IN FAVOUR OF O'SHEA--T.P. O'CONNOR ELECTED FOR SCOTLAND DIVISION OF LIVERPOOL. The Franchise and Re-Distribution Acts of 1884 and 1885, besides placing, for the first time, the Parliamentary representation in the hands of the great bulk of the people of Ireland, added greatly to our political power in England, Scotland and Wales. Many thousands of Irish householders obtained votes where formerly, under the restricted franchise, such a thing as an Irish county voter was extremely rare. At the General Election of 1885, Mr. Parnell made Liverpool his headquarters. The Re-Distribution Act had given Liverpool nine Parliamentary Divisions, in one of which (Scotland Division) we had sufficient votes to return a Nationalist. As Mr. T.P. O'Connor was the candidate chosen, and was, besides, the President of the organisation in Great Britain, he, also, was on the spot. A central committee room was engaged in the North-Western Hotel, where Mr. Parnell and Mr. T.P. O'Connor were staying. I was detailed to act as secretary to them, and, as the electoral campaign all over the country was directed from this centre, I was kept busy from early morning until late in the night answering the letters which poured in from all parts of the country. Mr. T.P. O'Connor having recently been married, Mrs. O'Connor also was staying in the North-Western. She presided at our luncheon every day, and made a charming hostess. I have some pleasant remembrances of those days in Liverpool, when I was assisting Mr. Parnell in carrying on the electoral campaign. One day, as we stood together looking out of the window across Lime Street, he pointed to the hotel on the opposite side of the street, reminding me that it was there we first met. This was when he came amongst us, a promising young recruit, under the wing of Isaac Butt. I remembered it well, and the number of questions he asked me about the condition of our people, social and political, in this country, for he knew that I had had opportunities of acquiring a closer knowledge of them than most people. He often afterwards sought from me such information. To me, from first to last, he was always most open and friendly, and I never found him so "stand-off" and unapproachable as was the very common opinion about him. In the Exchange Division of Liverpool, a Mr. Stephens, the official Liberal candidate, had, for some reason, been replaced by Captain O'Shea, who got the full support of the Liberal party. Following instructions from headquarters, the Irish Nationalists had denounced the candidate of the Liberals, who, when recently in power, had coerced Ireland, and O'Shea was condemned more unmercifully than any of them, as being, besides, a renegade Irishman. When Parnell himself came on the scene as a candidate for Exchange Division, Captain O'Shea was denounced more fiercely than ever. Mr. Parnell, however, withdrew on the nomination day, and at a great meeting on the same night, much to the astonishment of all, asked, in a very halting and hesitating manner, that O'Shea's candidature should be supported. So great was his power and prestige at the time that, whatever apprehension might be felt, no attempt was made to question his action. On the morning of the election I went to the North-Western. Mr. O'Connor was somewhat late in getting to work. Parnell, noticing, I suppose, that I seemed uneasy about something, asked, "What's amiss with you, Denvir?" "We would like to see Mr. O'Connor on the ground in Scotland Division," I said. He shook his head: "Ah, that's the way with him since he got married." I smiled and observed "We'll be losing you that way some time." "No," he replied, as I thought somewhat sadly, "I lost my chance long ago." All that day Parnell worked with desperate energy for O'Shea. He even took some of our men from Scotland Division to help in Exchange. I expostulated with him, saying, "You'll be losing T.P.'s election for us." As a matter of fact, we won Scotland Division by 1,350 votes. In point of fact, if O'Shea had got the whole Irish vote he would have won, but Mr. Parnell's vehement efforts could kindle no enthusiasm among the Irish electors, and there was a small but determined section which--while unwilling to let any public evidence of disagreement with Mr. Parnell appear--absolutely refused to support O'Shea. This lost him the seat. There was great jubilation in the League Hall that night at the winning of a seat in England by an Irish Home Ruler, elected _as such_, Mr. T.P. O'Connor having been returned that day for the Scotland Division of Liverpool. Since that time there have been several Home Rulers, Irish by birth or descent, returned to Parliament for English constituencies. These belong to the Labour Party. Besides T.P. O'Connor, Liverpool has provided for Parliament quite a number of men who at one time or another have represented or still represent Irish constituencies. These are Dr. Commins, Daniel Crilly, Lawrence Connolly, Michael Conway, Joseph Nolan, Patrick O'Brien, William O'Malley, James Lysaght Finigan, and Garrett Byrne. At the League Hall demonstration on the night of the election, Mr. Parnell appeared to have caught the high spirit and enthusiasm of his audience, and in a more powerful address than I had ever before heard from him, he said:-- Ireland has been knocking at the English door long enough with kid gloves. I tell the English people to beware, and be wise in time. Ireland will soon throw off the kid gloves, and she will knock with a mailed hand. In this General Election, the Irish vote of Great Britain, in accordance with the League manifesto, generally went for the Tories, who came into office, but with a majority so small that they were turned out at the opening of the Session of 1886, and Mr. Gladstone again came into power. Seeing that 85 out of the 103 Irish members of Parliament had been returned pledged to National self-government, he came to the conclusion to drop coercion, and no longer to attempt to rule the country against the wishes of the people. He, therefore, introduced his Home Rule Bill on the 8th of April, 1886, but, failing to carry the whole of his party with him, he was defeated on the second reading by 30 votes. His defeat at the polls at the General Election which followed seemed even more crushing than his defeat in Parliament, for, of the members elected, there was a majority against him of 118. Mr. Gladstone, looking more closely into the figures of the General Election, was not disheartened, and as the British public became educated on the Irish question, bye-election after bye-election proved triumphantly the truth of his famous saying that the "Flowing Tide" was carrying the cause of Home Rule on to victory. Nor were _we_ disheartened, for, counting up the whole of about two and a half millions of votes given, we found that the Unionists, as the Tories and Dissentient Liberals called themselves, had a majority of less than 80,000 votes at the polls. During this time I had become general organiser of the recognised Irish political organisation of Great Britain, and upon me chiefly devolved the duty of directing the work of registration of our Irish voters. A close study of the local conditions in the various constituencies showed that the mere bringing up of the neglected Irish vote to something approaching its proper strength would _alone_ be sufficient to effect the necessary gain. We threw ourselves into the task--and we succeeded. I shall always remember with pride my share in increasing and organising the Irish vote throughout Great Britain, and its result in bringing Mr. Gladstone back to power, and enabling him to carry the Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons. It was my duty to visit every part of Great Britain to see that the various districts and branches were kept in a high state of efficiency, and at the end of that period of hard and unremitting work from 1886 to 1892 I was able to show our Executive from the books and figures in our possession that we had accomplished our aim. CHAPTER XX. GLADSTONE'S "FLOWING TIDE." I was present at most of the bye-elections that led up to Gladstone's great victory at the General Election of 1892. In this way I was brought to many places interesting to us as Catholics as well as Irishmen. No spot in Great Britain is more sacred to us than Iona, an island off the West coast of Scotland, which our great typical Irish saint, Columba, made his home and centre when bringing the light of faith to those regions. It will, therefore, be one of the memories of my life most dear to me that I had the blessing of taking part in the famous Pilgrimage to Iona on June 13th, 1888. The town of Oban, on the mainland of Scotland, is generally made the point of departure for Iona, which is not far off. Oban is one of the five Ayr burghs which, combined, send a member to Parliament, and it was singular that, at this time, there was a bye-election going on. As creed and country have always gone together with me, I did not think it at all inappropriate that I should do a little work for Irish self-government while on this Pilgrimage. On the contrary. Was not St. Columba himself a champion of Home Rule, for was it not through his eloquent advocacy of their cause before the great Irish National Assembly that the Scots of Alba, as distinguished from the Scots of Erin, obtained the right of self-government? One of the best numbers of my Irish Library was the "Life of St. Columbkille," written for me by Michael O'Mahony, one of a band of young Irishmen, members of the Irish Literary Institute of Liverpool, who did splendid service for the Cause in that city. Michael was, of these, perhaps the one possessing the most characteristic Irish gifts. He has written some admirable stories of Irish life, and is a poet, although he has not written as much as I would like to see from his pen. There are no Irish residents in Iona itself, but I found a few in Oban, on whom I called to secure their votes for Home Rule. To hear Mass on the spot made sacred by the feet of our great Irish saint, in the building, then a ruin, erected by his successors to replace that which he himself had raised here as a centre of his great missionary labours, was an experience to treasure until one's latest day. What made the celebration the more memorable was the sermon in Gaelic by Bishop MacDonald of Argyll and the Isles. I had the pleasure, after Mass, of having dinner with him, and some most interesting conversation. I told him I had read with great interest a pastoral of his, issued some five years before, in which he said that an interesting peculiarity of his diocese, in respect of which it stood almost alone in the country, was that its Catholicity was almost exclusively represented by districts which had always clung to the faith, places where in the Penal days no priest dared show himself in public, but visited the Catholic centres in turn as a layman by night and gathered the children together to instruct them as far as he was able. This was, he said, of extraordinary interest on a day like that, when we were specially honouring the memory of the great saint who had sown the seeds which had continued to bear fruit through so many centuries. We also spoke of the singular fact that he had that day preached on the spot on which St. Columba himself had stood, and in the same language that he spoke, a language which had been in existence long before the present English tongue was spoken. As showing that the Scottish and Irish Gaelic were practically the same, as distinguished from the Celtic tongue spoken by the Welsh and Bretons, Bishop MacDonald told me he could read quite easily a book printed in the Irish characters. As a bye-election brought me to the sacred scene of the labours of our great Irish saint, Columba, so did another bye-election bring me to the spot where a martyr for Ireland suffered in 1798--Father O'Coigly. There was a bye-election at Maidstone, where the martyr priest had been tried for treason, and near it is Pennenden Heath, where he was executed, so that both places will for ever be held sacred by patriotic Irishmen. Besides securing a pledge for Home Rule from one of the candidates, and organising the small Irish vote in his favour, I took the opportunity of inaugurating a movement for the erection of a memorial to Father O'Coigly. With the co-operation of the London branches of the United Irish League the movement was brought to a successful issue. On two succeeding years there were Pilgrimages to the spot where Father O'Coigly was executed, at which Mr. James Francis Xavier O'Brien, who himself had been sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, was the chief speaker one year, and Mr. John Murphy, M.P., on the other. Besides this, chiefly through the exertions of Mr. John Brady, District Organiser, funds were raised, and there have been erected in the Catholic Church at Maidstone a Celtic Cross and three beautiful stained-glass windows, of Irish manufacture, to commemorate the martyrdom of Father O'Coigly. A gratifying thing in connection with our Pilgrimage was, I reminded those I addressed on Pennenden Heath, that a man pledged to support self-government for Ireland, the Cause for which Father O'Coigly had suffered, had been elected to Parliament for Maidstone. In the bye-elections about this time, we often got the most satisfactory results from places where the Irish vote was but small. I have before my mind the Carnarvon Boroughs bye election of 1890. Here the seat had been held by a Tory, and the Irish vote in the five towns, all told, was not much more than 50. I was sent to the constituency by our Executive to use every exertion to get our people to poll for David Lloyd-George, a thorough-going Home Ruler, at that time an unknown man, though he has since risen to the first political and ministerial rank. It was then I made his acquaintance, and time has only increased the friendly feeling between us. Our meeting happened rather curiously. While on my round I came across an unpretentious-looking young man who, I discovered, was also working on the same side. We had chatted together for some time when I happened to make some reference to the candidate. "Oh," he said, with a laugh, "I am the candidate." It was Mr. Lloyd-George. We worked together with all the more ardour being brother Celts. I frequently expressed to him my admiration for a striking feature in their great meetings during the election campaign. This was the singing in their native tongue of songs calculated to rouse the enthusiasm of an emotional people like the Welsh, the climax being reached at the end of each meeting with their noble national anthem, sung in the native tongue of course, "Land of my Fathers." Since that time it is gratifying to realize the great progress which has been made in the revival of _our_ native tongue through the instrumentality of the Gaelic League. The success of our friends in this direction ought to be an encouragement to us. The old Cymric tongue is almost universal throughout Wales, side by side with the English, so that it is not all visionary to think that a day may come when ours, too, may become a bi-lingual people. Mr. Edmund Vesey Knox, an Ulster Protestant Home Ruler, who was then a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party, came to assist in the return of Mr. Lloyd-George. At one of their great gatherings he told his audience how much he was impressed by the enthusiasm created by their native music and song. This reminded him, he said, that one of their great Irish poets, Thomas Davis, was partially of Welsh descent, which no doubt inspired one of his noblest songs "Cymric Rule and Cymric Rulers," written to their soul-stirring Welsh air, "The March of the Men of Harlech." After Mr. Knox, more singing, and then came a delightful address from a distinguished Irish lady, Mrs. Bryant, who did splendid service at many of these bye elections. Doctor Sophie Bryant, to give her full title, is a lady of great learning and eloquence, and not only a thorough Nationalist in sentiment, but an energetic worker in the Cause. A literary lady colleague thus sums up her chief qualities: "She is more learned than any man I know; more tender than any woman I have ever met." Mr. Lloyd-George was elected by the bare majority of 18 votes, so that without the small Irish vote in the Carnarvon Boroughs he could not have been returned at his first election for the constituency. Nor did he forget the fact. On one occasion we were speaking together in the lobby of the House of Commons when a friend of his came up. "This," said Mr. Lloyd-George, slapping me on the shoulder, "is the man who brought me here." In a sense it was true, so that I might claim to have assisted in making a British Chancellor of the Exchequer. I have spoken of the series of bye-elections which Mr. Gladstone described as the "Flowing Tide" which had set in for Home Rule. I remember with special pleasure one of these--that for the Rossendale Division of Lancashire. It was a sample of all the other bye-elections in 1892. The registration had been well done, and we knew to a man the strength of the Irish vote. We had 438 on the Register. This was no mere estimate, and we could give the figures at the time with equal accuracy for most places where we had an Irish population. Every voter of ours living in Rossendale had been visited. If he had removed from place to place inside the district it was noted. If he had gone out of the district he was communicated with, if possible through the medium of the branch of his new location. We knew where to find them all, and it was astonishing from what distant places men turned up to vote on the election day, through the agency of the local branches of the places to which the voters had gone. In this Rossendale election I had two of the most capable lieutenants a man need wish to have, Patrick Murphy and Daniel Boyle, both then organisers of our League. Dan Boyle (now Alderman Boyle, M.P.) took the Bacup end of the Division; Pat Murphy took Rawtenstall; and I made my headquarters at Haslingden, for I had a _grah_ for the place, on account of its connection with my old friend, Michael Davitt. There can be no better test of a man's sterling qualities than the opinions held of him by the friends of his youth. Several times I had had occasion to visit Haslingden, the little factory town in North-East Lancashire, where Martin Davitt, the father of Michael, and his family lived when they came to this country after being evicted from their home in Mayo. Here I met Mr. Cockcroft, the bookseller, who gave Michael employment after he had lost his arm in the factory, and he and his family bore the Irish lad in kindly remembrance. But it was among his own people--those who had been the companions and friends of his youth--that I found the greatest admiration for "Mick," as they familiarly called him. I need scarcely say that they watched with pride the noble career of one who had grown to manhood in their midst. I was able to turn that feeling to good account on the occasion of this Rossendale election. I asked the Liberal candidate, Mr. Maden, a young and wealthy cotton spinner of Rossendale, who had given us satisfactory pledges on Home Rule, to invite Michael Davitt's assistance. He did so. I backed up the request by a personal appeal, which he never refused if it lay in his power to do what I wished. He came, and words fail to describe his loving and enthusiastic reception by his own people. I have alluded to the perfect way in which the Irish Vote had been organised. Michael Davitt came into our committee room one day, and it was with intense pride he turned over the leaves of our books to show Mr. Maden, the candidate, how well we were prepared to poll every Irish vote on the election day. Davitt was a tower of strength to us in this election, not only amongst our own people, but amongst the English factory operatives, who form the majority in Rossendale. As in other bye-elections which had preceded it, we won the Division by a handsome majority. I was at once amused and amazed some time ago to hear of a so-called biography of Davitt, the keynote of which was a suggestion that he was, first and foremost, an "Anti-Clerical." The idea is an absurd one. He was an intense lover of right, and one who scorned to be an opportunist. Consequently, he never hesitated to speak out, no matter who opposed him, priest or layman. But none knew better than he that there have been times when the priests were the only friends the Irish peasantry had; and no one knew better than he that the influence they have had they have, on the whole, used wisely. If individual clerics have gone out of their proper sphere of influence it is certain they would have found Davitt in opposition to them where he thought them wrong. I have been placed in the same unpleasant position myself, but I too have always carefully distinguished between the individual priest who needed remonstrance, and his wiser colleague; and also between the legitimate use of a priest's influence and its abuse. So that to classify Davitt as an "Anti-cleric" deserves a strong protest from one who loved him as well and as long as I did. As I have said, when I asked him to come to Rossendale to help to further the cause of self-government for Ireland, he never refused a request of mine if it lay in his power to grant it, and, in this way, he wrote for me one of the books of my "Irish Library"--"Ireland's Appeal to America." Michael has gone to his reward, and there are two things I shall always cherish as mementoes of him. One is a bunch of shamrocks sent to me, with the message: "With Michael Davitt's compliments, "Richmond Prison, Patrickstide, 1883" The other is his last letter to me, written not long before his death. It was dated "St. Justin's, Dalkey, Co. Dublin, 7th March, 1906." In this he said: "I hope you are in good health and not growing too old. I shall be 60! on the 25th inst.!!!" Was this a premonition that his end was near? He died on May 31st, within three months of the time he wrote the letter. I have spoken of the necessity for our organisation doing registration work at least as effectually as the Liberals and Tories do. It is not always men of the highest intellectual attainments who make the best registration agents. This fact came home to me very forcibly when reading a biography of Thomas Davis. It was stated that in the Revision Court he was not able to hold his own against the Tory agent. It is just what I would have imagined, considering the sensitive nature of Davis. A man with a face of brass, who _might_ be an able man, but who, on the other hand, might be some low ignorant fellow, might easily do better than Thomas Davis with his fine intellect and varied learning. At the same time, I have known men of the highest attainments who have made excellent agents, such a man as John Renwick Seager, who has for many years been connected with the London Liberal organisation. Just such another we have in our own ranks in Daniel Crilly who, before he became a journalist or entered Parliament, was a very successful agent in the Liverpool Courts. One of the most efficient and conscientious of registration and electioneering agents I ever met was John Mogan, of Liverpool. Besides the annual registration work he was engaged on our side in nearly every election of importance in Liverpool for over 30 years. He was so engrossed in his work that, during an election he would, if required, sit up several nights in succession to have his work properly done; indeed, I was often tempted to think that John never considered any election complete without at least _one_ "all night sitting." We believed in fighting the enemy with his own weapons. On election days in Liverpool there were shipowners who made it a practice of getting their vessels coaled in the river. As, unlike the Liffey at Dublin or the Thames at London, the Mersey at Liverpool is over a mile wide, and as most of the coal heavers were Irishmen, this move of the shipowners was to keep our men from voting. We were successful, to some extent, in counteracting this, for owing to the patriotism of a sterling Irishman, John Prendiville, the steam tugs which he owned were often used, on the day of an election, to take our men ashore. Sometimes the Revision Courts gave us the opportunity of teaching a little Irish history. In South Wales most of our people hail from Munster. In one of the Courts there was the case of Owen O'Donovan being objected to, on the ground that he had left the qualifying property, and that _Eugene_ O'Donovan was now the occupier. I explained to the Barrister that in the South of Ireland the names of Owen and Eugene were often applied to the same man, Eugene being the Latinized form of Owen. I gave as an illustration our national hero, Owen Roe O'Neill, who, in letters written to him in Latin, was styled Eugenius Rufus. A Welsh official in Court suggested that O'Donovan was anxious to become a Welshman by calling himself Owen. I replied that the name Owen was just as Irish as it was Welsh, coming no doubt from the same Celtic stock, and that, as a matter of fact, our man preferred being on the Register as Owen. The Barrister, being satisfied that both names applied to the same man, allowed the vote, and our voter would appear on the Register as Owen O'Donovan. In looking up our people to have them put upon the Register, or in connection with an election, our canvassers are often able to form a good judgment of the creed, or nationality, or politics of the people of the house they are calling at by the pictures on the walls. If they see a picture of St. Patrick, or the Pope, or Robert Emmet, they assume they are in an Irish house of the right sort. One of my own apprentices, when I was in business, came across a bewildering complication on one occasion, for on one side of the room was the Pope, which seemed all right, but facing him was a gorgeous picture of King William crossing the Boyne. It was the woman of the house he saw, a good, decent Irishwoman and a Catholic, who explained the apparent inconsistency. Her husband was an Orangeman, "as good a man as ever broke bread" all the year round, till it came near the twelfth of July, when the Orange fever began to come on. (Our people at home in the County Down, as my father used to tell us, often found it so with otherwise decent Protestant neighbours.) He would come home from a lodge meeting some night, a little the worse for drink, and smash the Pope to smithereens. The wife was a sensible body, and knew it was no use interfering while the fit was on him. When she knew it had safely passed away, she would take King William to the pawnshop round the corner and get as much on him as would buy a new Pope. He was too fond of his wife, "Papish" and all as she was, to make any fuss about it, and would just go and redeem his idol, and set him up again, facing the Pope, for another twelve months at all events. CHAPTER XXI. THE "TIMES" FORGERIES COMMISSION. When the "Times" on the 18th of April, 1887 published what purported to be the _fac simile_ of a letter from Mr. Parnell, and suggested that it was written to Mr. Patrick Egan in justification of the Phoenix Park assassinations, I at once, like many others, guessed who the forger must be. I had from time to time come into contact with Pigott, and I was satisfied that he was the one man capable of such a production. When the company was formed in 1875 for the starting of a newspaper in connection with the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, there was an idea of buying Pigott's papers, "The Irishman," "Flag of Ireland," and "Shamrock," which always seemed to be in the market, whether to the Government or the Nationalists after events showed to be a matter of perfect indifference to him. Mr. John Barry and I were sent over to Dublin to treat with him. Mr. Barry went over the books and I went over the plant. What he wanted seemed reasonable enough, we thought. The Directors of our Company did not, however, close with Pigott, but concluded to start a paper of their own, "The United Irishman," the production and direction of which, as I have stated, they placed in my hands. During these years I had many opportunities of getting a knowledge of Pigott's true character. From time to time money had been subscribed through Pigott's papers for various national funds. Michael Davitt told me that when the political prisoners were released the committee appointed to raise a fund for them, to give them a start in life, applied for what had been sent through the "Irishman" and "Flag," that the whole of the funds subscribed through the various channels might be publicly presented to the men. There was considerable difficulty in getting this money from Pigott, but ultimately it was squeezed out of him. An employe of the "Irishman," David Murphy, was shot--he survived his wound--in a mysterious manner. This was ascribed, and from all we know of the man, correctly, to Pigott, who, it was thought, fearing that Murphy might know too much about the sums coming into his hands and the sources whence they came, had tried to get him put out of the way. There was a still more serious aspect of this attempted assassination. The revelations of the "Times" Forgeries Commission afterwards proved that all this time Pigott was giving information to the police and getting paid for it. To my own personal knowledge David Murphy held an important position in the advanced organisation, for I once brought a young friend of mine, a printer, a sterling Irishman I had known from his early boyhood in Liverpool, from Wexford, where he was at the time employed, specially to introduce him to Murphy. From the information given to the police by Pigott, it would soon be found there was some leakage, which would, no doubt, be traced to the "Irishman" office. It would, of course, be Pigott's cue to put the blame on the shoulders of Murphy, hence probably his attempted assassination. It was not unreasonable, then, in looking round for the actual forger of the famous _fac simile_ letter, that I and others who knew him should single out a man with such a bad record as Richard Pigott as the actual criminal. The collapse of the conspiracy against the Irish leaders, and the suicide of the wretched Pigott on the 1st of March, 1889, are matters of history. For the complete way in which the conspiracy was smashed up great credit was due to the distinguished Irish advocate, Sir Charles Russell. In his early days I knew him well, and was often thrown into contact with him, when he was a young barrister practising on the Northern circuit, and making Liverpool his headquarters. He was a member of the Liverpool Catholic Club when I was secretary of that body. The Club, before the Home Rule organisation superseded it in Liverpool, generally supported the Liberals in Parliamentary elections, but on one occasion there was, from a Catholic point of view, a very undesirable Liberal candidate, whom it was determined not to support. Pressure had, therefore, to be put upon the Liberals to withdraw this man. They were obstinate, though they had not the ghost of a chance without the Irish and Catholic vote, which formed fully half the strength they could generally count upon. On the other hand, _we_ could not carry the seat by our own unaided vote. But, to show the Liberals that we would not have their man under any circumstances, it was arranged that if he were willing we should put Charles Russell forward as our candidate. As secretary it became my duty to ask him to place himself in our hands. He agreed, on the understanding that he was to be withdrawn if our action had the effect of forcing the Liberals to get a candidate more acceptable to us. We succeeded, and, of course, withdrew our man. When we started the Home Rule organisation in Liverpool, we asked Charles Russell to be chairman of our inaugural public meeting. He had been contesting Dundalk as a Home Ruler, so we thought he was the very man to preside at our meeting, and gave that as our reason for asking him. He received the deputation--my friend, Alfred Crilly and myself--with that geniality and courtesy which were so characteristic of him. As it happened that the three of us were County Down men, who are somewhat clannish, we soon got talking about the people "at home." He knew both our families in Ireland, and had served his time with a solicitor of my name in Newry, Cornelius Denvir, before he had entered the other branch of the legal profession. We also got talking of the barony of Lecale, which he, as well as my own people, had sprung from, and how it had been the only Norman colony in Ulster; how many of the descendants of De Courcy's followers were still there, as might be seen from their names--Russells, Savages, Mandevilles. Dorrians, Denvirs, and others, whose fathers, intermarrying with the original Celtic population, MacCartans, Magennises, MacRorys, and so on, had become like the Burkes, Fitzgeralds, and other Norman clans, "More Irish than the Irish themselves." This was all very well, and very interesting, but it did not get us our chairman. Charles Russell was too wary, and, perhaps, too far-seeing, who can tell? for that. It was quite true, he said, he had contested Dundalk as a Home Ruler, and, of course, he was a Home Ruler, but he advised us to ask Dr. Commins to be our chairman, as being so much better known than himself. We did ask "The Doctor," and, kindly and genial as we ever found him, he at once consented. Nearly forty years have passed since then, and I really believe that these two, then comparatively young men, practically made choice of their respective after-careers on that occasion. Dr. Commins, who, like Charles Russell, was a practising barrister on the Northern circuit, held for some years the highest position his fellow-countrymen could give him as President of the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, and became a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party. Charles Russell, though always a Home Ruler and sincere lover of his country, made a brilliant career for himself as a great lawyer and Liberal statesman. I have often wondered since, if he had become chairman of our meeting in 1872, and had then identified himself with the Home Rule movement, if his statue would be to-day as it is in the London Law Courts, or if he would ever have been Lord Chief Justice of England and Lord Russell of Killowen? I think not. The "Times" Forgeries Commission, though got up to do deadly damage to the Irish Cause, had not, even before the final collapse of the conspiracy, had that effect, as bye-election after bye-election proved. For instance, when the Commission appointed to deal with the "Times" charges against the Irish leaders re-opened, after a short vacation at Christmas, the Govan election was going on, and, on the 19th of January, 1889, the Liberal Home Ruler won the seat by a majority of over 1,000. After the exposure of the plot, Mr. Gladstone's "Flowing Tide" swept on with increased velocity, and, wherever there was a bye-election, there was an enormous demand for our members of Parliament. During this period, when the Irish vote in Great Britain was more fully organised than it ever had been before, I attended most of these elections. It was keenly felt, as had been proved on several occasions, that _no_ place, however small the number of Irish voters, should be overlooked, especially at a time when British parties had become once more pretty evenly balanced. CHAPTER XXII. DISRUPTION OF THE IRISH PARTY--HOME RULE CARRIED IN THE COMMONS--UNITY OF PARLIAMENTARY PARTY RESTORED--MR. JOHN REDMOND BECOMES LEADER. There is nothing more bitter than a family quarrel. The unfortunate disruption in the Irish Parliamentary Party and the fierce quarrel that arose among the Irish people near the end of 1890, would be to me such a painful theme that I must ask my readers to pardon me if I pass on as quickly as possible towards the happier times which find us practically a re-united people, while the Irish Party in Parliament is a solid working force under the able leadership of Mr. John Redmond. In accordance with the demands of the branches of the Irish organisation in Great Britain, a special Convention was called and held in Newcastle-on-Tyne on Saturday, 16th May, 1891. Delegates from all parts of Great Britain attended, and elected a new Executive in harmony with the bulk of the League, with Mr. T.P. O'Connor, President, as before. Provision was also made for carrying on the fight for Home Rule in the constituencies, which had been somewhat relaxed by the unhappy split in our ranks. This was imperative, in view of the necessity for assisting to return to Parliament a sufficient majority to enable Mr. Gladstone to carry his Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons. The result of the General Election of 1892 was the return to power of Mr. Gladstone. His majority was the best proof to friend and foe of the value of the work done by our organisation during the previous years in adding to the Irish vote in Great Britain. It also showed we had the power and the influence in the constituencies we had claimed. Indeed, the books in the offices of the League could show, by the figures for every constituency, that without the Irish vote Mr. Gladstone would have had no majority at all. When we come to consider the terrible crisis we were passing through, the result was magnificent. Although, as we all expected, Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill was thrown out by the House of Lords, the fact that a Bill conferring self-government on Ireland had been passed in the Commons was recognised as a step towards that end which could never be receded from, and that it was but a question of time when the Home Rule Cause would be won. Moreover, the event proved that our grievance was no longer against the English democracy, but against the class which misgoverned us, just as it, to a lesser extent, misgoverned them. Most of us have, no doubt, taken part in a family gathering on some joyous occasion when the mother realizes that _all_ her children are not around her, and is overcome with sadness. So it was with us. Well might mother Ireland ask why were not _all_ her children in the one fold, to be one with her and with each other in the hour of rejoicing, as they had been loyally with her in all her sorrows? Why was the bitter feud over the leadership of the Irish Party so long kept up? Why was the happy reconciliation so long delayed? While the majority, it is true, were arrayed on one side, the fact remained that on the other side there were men of undoubted patriotism and great ability, not only members of Parliament such as John and William Redmond or Timothy Harrington, but some of our best men all over the country, who had done splendid service for the Cause, and were either in fierce antagonism or holding aloof. It was during this sad time that I met that distinguished orator, Thomas Sexton, to whom John Barry was good enough to introduce me. Sexton came specially from Ireland on this occasion in the interests of peace. Actuated by the same motive was Patrick James Foley, another member of the Party and of the Executive of the League, who, while holding strongly to his own conscientious opinions, was always most courteous to those differing from him. I attended the great Irish Race Convention, held in the Leinster Hall, Dublin, on the first three days of September, 1896. The Most Reverend Patrick O'Donnell, Bishop of Raphoe, a noble representative of old Tyrconnell, and a tower of strength to our Cause, presided, and it was, undoubtedly, one of the most representative gatherings of the Irish race from all parts of the world ever held. Two admirable resolutions were passed with great enthusiasm and perfect unanimity, and there is no doubt but that this Convention was the first great step towards the reunion of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which has been since so happily effected. It was more than three years after the Race Convention before the long-desired re-union of the Irish Party and the Irish people all over the world was accomplished at a Conference of members of Parliament of both parties held in Committee Room 15 of the House of Commons, on Tuesday, January 30th, 1900. CHAPTER XXIII. THE GAELIC REVIVAL--THOMAS DAVIS--CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY--ANGLO-IRISH LITERATURE--THE IRISH DRAMA--DRAMATISTS AND ACTORS. One effect of the disturbance in political work caused by the split seemed to be the impetus given to existing movements which, so far as politics were concerned, were neutral ground. Chief amongst these was the Gaelic League, which from its foundation advanced by leaps and bounds and brought to the front many fine characters. Francis Fahy was one of the first Presidents of the Gaelic League of London, and there is no doubt but the Irish language movement in the metropolis owes much to his influence and indefatigable exertions. I first made his acquaintance over twenty-five years ago, when he was doing such splendid Irish propagandism in the Southwark Irish Literary Club, of which, although he had able and enthusiastic helpers, he was the life and soul. He has written many songs and poems, which have been collected and published. What is, perhaps, one of the raciest and most admired of his songs, "The Quid Plaid Shawl," first appeared in the "Nationalist" for February 7th, 1885, a weekly periodical which I was publishing at the time. Several stirring songs of great merit by other members of the society also appeared in its pages. Indeed, the members came to look upon the "Nationalist" as their own special organ, and ably written and animated accounts of their proceedings appeared regularly in its columns. I also published a song book for them, compiled by Francis Fahy, chiefly for the use of their younger members. An active Gaelic Leaguer, who did much for the success of the movement in London, was William Patrick Ryan. He wrote a "Life of Thomas Davis" for "Denvir's Monthly," a sort of revival of my "Irish Library." This book was very favourably received by the press. The "Liverpool Daily Post" gave it more than a column of admirable criticism, evidently from the pen of the editor himself, Sir Edward Russell. In it was the following kindly reference to myself: "Our present pleasing duty is to recognise the labours of Mr. Denvir--efforts in such a cause are always touchingly beautiful--as an inculcator of national sentiment; to illustrate the genuine literary interest and value of the first booklet of his new library; and to wish the library a long and useful, and in every way successful vogue." Another active man in the language movement in London, whose acquaintance I was glad to renew when I first came to the metropolis, is Doctor Mark Ryan. It is nearly forty years since we first knew each other in connection with another organisation. He then lived in a North Lancashire town, and was studying medicine, not being at that time a fully qualified doctor. If I remember rightly, our interview had no connexion with the healing art, indeed quite the contrary, for besides qualifying for the medical profession, he was graduating in the same school as Rickard Burke, Arthur Forrester, and Michael Davitt, but, like myself, was more fortunate than Burke and Davitt, inasmuch as he escaped their fate of being sent into penal servitude. Although Mark Ryan was for a long time resident in Lancashire, he there lost nothing, nor has he since, of the fluent Gaelic speech of his native Galway, for I heard him quite recently delivering an eloquent speech in Irish at a gathering of the Gaelic League. Speaking of Dr. Mark Ryan reminds me of how often I have noticed in my travels through Great Britain, what a number of Irish doctors there are, and also that they are almost invariably patriotic. They are of great service to the cause, for it frequently happens that, in some districts, they are almost the only men of culture, and are not generally slow to take the lead among their humbler fellow-countrymen. One of the finest Irish scholars in the Gaelic League was Mr. Thomas Flannery. He, too, was a valued contributor to my "Monthly Irish Library," two of the best books in the series, "Dr. John O'Donovan," and "Archbishop MacHale," being from his pen. In fact, he and Timothy MacSweeny I might almost look upon as having been the Gaelic editors of the "Monthly." I once, when in business in Liverpool, printed a Scottish Gaelic Prayer-Book for Father Campbell, one of the Jesuit priests of that city, for use among the Catholic congregations in the highlands and islands of Scotland. John Rogers, like Timothy MacSweeny, a ripe Irish scholar, called on me while it was in progress, and was delighted to know that such a book was being issued. To Mr. MacSweeny I also sent a copy, and they both could read the Scottish Gaelic easily, showing, of course, how closely the Irish and Scottish Gaels were, with the Manx, united in one branch of the Celtic race, as distinguished from the Bretons and Welsh. I have always had an intense admiration for the poetry of "Young Ireland." I used to call it Irish literature until I found myself corrected, very properly, by my Gaelic League friends, who maintained that, not being in the Irish tongue, its proper designation was Anglo-Irish literature. I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of one of the leading young Irelanders, Charles Gavan Duffy, after his return to this country, when he assisted at the inauguration of our London Irish Literary Society, which has been a credit to the Irishmen of the metropolis. Much of the success of the Society is due to Alfred Perceval Graves, author of the well-known song "Father O'Flynn," a faithful picture of a genuine Irish _soggarth_. Among others of the members of the society who have made their mark in Irish literature is Mr. Richard Barry O'Brien, the President, the author of several valuable works of history and biography. It was at the opening of our Literary Society that I first met Duffy in the flesh, but I had known and admired him in spirit from my earliest boyhood. I was greatly pleased when he told me he had been much interested in my publications, not only those issued more recently, but those of many years before. I afterwards had a letter from him in reference to my "Irish in Britain," in which he said: "I saw long ago some of the little Irish books you published in Liverpool, and know you for an old and zealous worker in the national seed field." His son, George Gavan Duffy, is a solicitor, practising in London, and an active worker in the national cause. His wife is a daughter of the late A.M. Sullivan, and is as zealous a Nationalist as was her father, and as patriotic as her husband. The first book of National poetry I ever read was one compiled by Charles Gavan Duffy--"The Ballad Poetry of Ireland." I should say that this has been one of the most popular books ever issued. There are none of his own songs in this volume. The few he did write are in the "Spirit of the Nation" and other collections. These make us regret he did not write more, for, in the whole range of our poetry, I think there is nothing finer or more soul-stirring than his "Inishowen," "The Irish Rapparees," and "The Men of the North." It is unfortunate that we have nothing from the pen of Thomas Davis on the subject of the Irish drama and dramatists, for among the most delightful and valuable contributions to the Anglo-Irish literature of the nineteenth century were his "Literary and Historical Essays." For students, historians, journalists, lecturers, and public speakers, they have been an inexhaustible mine, since they first appeared week by week in the "Nation" during the Repeal and Young Ireland movements. As sources of inspiration they have been of still more practical value to the Irish poet, painter, musician and sculptor. Though he was apparently in good health up to a few days of his death, which was quite unexpected, Davis, in giving to his country these unsurpassed essays, might have had some idea that his life would not be a long one, and that, if he could not himself accomplish all he had projected, he would at least sketch out a programme for his brother workers in the national field, and for those coming after them. A glance at the contents of Davis's Essays will show how fully he has covered almost every field in which Irishmen are or ought to be interested. We have Irish History, Antiquities, Monuments, Architecture, Ethnology, Oratory, Resources, Topography, Commerce, Art, Language, Our People of all classes, Music and Poetry dealt with in an attractive as well as in a practical manner. Anyone who has ever gone to these Essays, as I have over and over again, for information, has always found Davis completely master of every subject that he touched. His "Hints to Irish Painters" are illustrations of the value of the advice he gives in connection with his varied themes. Those of the generations since his time who have profited by his teaching know best how valuable would have been his views in connection with the Irish Drama. Knowing as we do how _thorough_ Davis was in everything he took up, the reason he did not deal with it was, probably, that he had not had the same opportunities of getting information on this as upon the other wonderfully varied subjects in his Essays. I have in my mind at this moment one Irish dramatist, Edmond O'Rourke, who would have appreciated anything Davis would have written on the subject, and would certainly have profited by it. O'Rourke, better known by his stage name of Falconer, was an actor as well as a dramatist. He was "leading man" when I first saw him in the stock company of the Adelphi Theatre, Liverpool, and used to play the whole round of Shakespearean characters, his favourite parts being the popular ones of Macbeth, Hamlet, and Richard the Third. He was a dark-complexioned man of average height, somewhat spare in form and features. Though his performances were intellectual creations, we boys used to make somewhat unfavourable comparisons between him and Barry Sullivan, another of our fellow-countrymen. Barry was by no means superior to Falconer in his conception of the various parts, but he greatly surpassed him in voice, physique, and general bearing on the stage, in which respects I think he had no equal in our times. After Falconer went to London he became manager of the Lyceum Theatre, where several of his pieces were performed, including the well-known Irish drama, "Peep o' Day," which had an enormously successful run. With this he also produced a magnificent panorama of Killarney, to illustrate which he wrote the well-known song of "Killarney" which, with the music of Balfe, our Irish composer, at once became very popular, as it ever since has been. Madame Anna Whitty, the distinguished vocalist, who first sang "Killarney," was a daughter of Michael James Whitty, of whom I have spoken elsewhere. In going through my papers I have just come across a letter from O'Rourke, dated from the Princess's Theatre, Manchester, August 19th, 1872, in which he tells me of the great success in Manchester of another play of his, "Eileen Oge." This also he produced at the Lyceum Theatre, London, where it had a long and successful run. Edmund O'Rourke was a patriotic Irishman, and in this respect I could never have made the same comparison between the patriotism of the two men, Barry Sullivan and him, as I did between them as actors. _Both_ were patriotic Irishmen. It will be remembered that in an early chapter of this book I have mentioned that Barry Sullivan once offered himself to our committee as an Irish Nationalist candidate for the parliamentary representation of Liverpool. Dion Boucicault, too, is one, I am sure, who would have profited by anything Thomas Davis might have written on the subject of the drama. I am quite satisfied that though he was severely criticised for the wake scene in his play of "The Shaughraun" at the time it was first produced, the objectionable features in this were more the fault of the actors than of the dramatist; but the subject was an exceedingly risky one, even for a man like Boucicault, and would have been better avoided altogether. Besides Barry Sullivan and Falconer, other Irish actors I knew were Barry Aylmer, James Foster O'Neill, and Hubert O'Grady. They were impersonators of what were known as "Irish parts," and being genuine Irish Nationalists, as well as actors, did much to elevate the character of such performances. For with them, all the wit and drollery were retained, while they helped, by their example, to banish the buffoonery that used to characterise the "Stage Irishman." I am reminded by a criticism on one of his pieces in a London daily paper that we can claim, as a fellow-countryman, perhaps the most brilliant writer at the present time for the British stage--George Bernard Shaw. From a conversation I had with him once, I would certainly gather that he was a patriotic Irishman. I have done something in the way of dramatic production myself, one of the pieces I wrote being at the request of Father Nugent, to assist him in the great temperance movement he had started in Liverpool. He engaged a large hall in Bevington Bush, where every Monday night he gave the total abstinence pledge against intoxicating liquors to large numbers of people. I was then carrying on the "Catholic Times" for him, and he asked me to be the first to take the pledge from him at his public inauguration of the movement. Although, as he was aware, I was already a pledged teetotaler to Father Mathew, I was greatly pleased to agree to assist him all I could in his great work. He believed in providing a counter-attraction to the public house, and each Monday night, in the Bevington Hall, he provided a concert or some other kind of entertainment; giving, in the interval between the first and second part a stirring address and the temperance pledge. As there was a stage and scenery in the hall, we often had dramatic sketches. The drama I wrote for Father Nugent had a temperance moral. It was called "The Germans of Glenmore." It was played several Monday nights in succession, and was well received. Some years afterwards I made it into a story, calling it "The Reapers of Kilbride." This appeared over a frequent signature of mine, "Slieve Donard," in the "United Irishman," the organ of the Home Rule Confederation. Singularly enough, I found that part of it had been changed back again into the first act of a drama by Mr. Hubert O'Grady, the well-known Irish comedian. That gentleman was giving a performance for the benefit of the newly released political prisoners at one of our Liverpool theatres. Being somewhat late, I was making my way upstairs in company with Michael Davitt, and the play had commenced. I could hear on the stage part of the dialogue, which seemed familiar to me, and, sure enough, when I took my seat and listened to the rest of the act, the dialogue was pretty nearly, word for word, from "The Reapers of Kilbride." The compiler of the play being acted had also drawn upon another drama of mine for his last act, "Rosaleen Dhu, or the Twelve Pins of Bin-a-Bola." The play we were witnessing was very cleverly constructed, for Mr. O'Grady, with his strong dramatic instincts and experience, could tell exactly what would go well, and could use material accordingly. The transformation of the story as it appeared in the "United Irishman" back again into a play would be easily effected, as, leaving out the descriptive part, the dialogue itself, with the necessary stage directions, told the story. This, no doubt, Mr. O'Grady had perceived. Later still, I carried out a similar transformation with another of my own productions. I have a piece in three acts which, as a play, has never been published or performed. It is called "The Curse of Columbkille." This drama I changed into a story, which has appeared in the series of 6d. novels published by Messrs. Sealy, Bryers and Walker. The most striking character in it is Olaf, a Dane, who believes himself to be a re-incarnation of one of the old Danish sea rovers. A member of the firm, the late Mr. George Bryers, a sterling Irishman, called my attention to the opinion of the professional reader to the firm that it would be advisable to call the story "Olaf the Dane; or the Curse of Columbkille." I accepted the suggestion, and accordingly the book has been published with that title. I have seen with much interest the movement inaugurated by the Irish Theatre Company in Dublin, and have been present at some of their performances in London. In spite of some false starts and a tendency to imitate certain undesirable foreign influences, the movement should certainly help to foster the Irish drama. CHAPTER XXIV. "HOW IS OLD IRELAND AND HOW DOES SHE STAND?" Summing up these pages, how shall I answer the question asked by Napper Tandy in "The Wearin' of the Green" over a hundred years ago--"How is old Ireland, and how does she stand?" Let us see what changes, for the better or for the worse, there have been during the period--nearly seventy years--covered by these recollections. Catholic Emancipation had, five years before I was born, allowed our people to raise their voices, and give their votes through their representatives in an alien Parliament. I am not one to say that no benefit for Ireland has arisen through legislation at Westminster, but the system that allowed our people to perish of starvation has always been, to my mind, the one great justification for our struggle for self-government by every practicable method. It has been a struggle for sheer existence. If Ireland had had the making of her own laws when the potato crop failed, not a single human being would have perished from starvation. That I am justified in introducing the terrible Irish Famine and its consequences into these recollections as part of my own experiences I think I have shown in my description of its effects upon our people when passing through Liverpool as emigrants or as settlers in England. I have always endeavoured to look upon the most hopeful aspects of the Irish question. But with the appalling tragedy of the Famine half way in the last century, with half our people gone and the population still diminishing, one is bound to admit that the nineteenth century was one of the most disastrous in Irish history. Is it surprising that, during my time, driven desperate at the sight of a perishing people in one of the most fruitful lands on earth, we should have made two attempts at rebellion? In 1848 the means were totally inadequate. In 1867 the movement looked more hopeful in many respects. The revolutionary organisation had a large number of enrolled members on both sides of the Atlantic. Among them were hundreds in the British army, and many thousands of Irish-American veterans trained in the Civil War, eager to wipe off the score of centuries in a conflict, on something like equal terms, with the olden oppressor of their race. But the real hope of success lay in the prospect of a war between America and England, which at one time seemed imminent, and justified the action of the Fenian chiefs in their preparations. It was, however, the very existence of Fenianism which, more than any other cause, prevented war. For none knew better than far-seeing statesmen like Mr. Gladstone (who declared that he was prompted to remedial measures for Ireland by "the intensity of Fenianism") that within a month of the commencement of a war between America and England, Ireland would be lost to the British crown for ever. That is why English statesmen would have grovelled in the dust before America, rather than engage in a conflict with her. The generous way in which the Irish exiles in America have poured their wealth into the lap of their island mother, and the determination they have shown to shed their blood for her just as freely, should the opportunity only come, are the features which to some extent counterbalance the tragedy of the Famine. For that terrible calamity, by driving our people out in millions, raised a power on the side of Ireland which her oppressors could not touch, a power which is no doubt among the means intended by Providence to hasten our coming day of freedom. Nevertheless, emigration, the most unanswerable proof of English misgovernment, is a terrible drain on our country's life-blood, and no entirely hopeful view of Ireland's future can be held until this is stopped. What, however, are the reflections which bring encouragement? One is that the time cannot be far distant when some statesman of the type of Gladstone will try to avert the danger threatening the British empire through an ever-discontented Ireland, by conceding to her at least the amount of self-government possessed by Canada and Australia. To this one section of Englishmen will say "Never!" Students of history have many times heard the "Never" of English statesmen, and know how often it has proved futile. Before I was born they were saying "Never" to Catholic Emancipation. Later on they said "Never" to the demand for tenant-right. A few years ago, when fighting the Boers, they said "Never" to the suggestion that the war should be ended on conditions. Even now economic causes and the competition of rival powers are at work in such a way that it is plain that the existence of the British Empire is at stake. England's one chance lies in the possibility of the friendship of the free democratic commonwealths which are at present her colonies--and of Ireland. The establishing of County Councils in Ireland and Great Britain was an acceptance of the principle of Home Rule. Their successful working has caused the belief in that principle to gain ground. Their administration in Ireland has shown that in no part of the British empire does there exist a greater capacity for self-government. All creeds and classes there have found the material benefit arising from them, for instead of their finances being managed by irresponsible boards, the money of the people is now wisely spent by their elected representatives. Moreover, if there is one thing that is certain, it is that the _future_ is on our side. In my own time I have seen a most startling change come over the attitude of the working classes of England towards Ireland as they progressed in knowledge and political power themselves. They are the certain rulers of England to-morrow, the men whose democratic ideals are our own, and who have in fact largely been trained by us. Their rise means the fall of the system that has mis-governed Ireland. Thus every day brings nearer the triumph of our ideal, the ideal of freedom, which will probably be worked out in the form of Ireland governing herself and working harmoniously with a democratic self-governing England. The unquestionable growing desire among the people of Wales and Scotland to manage their own affairs proceeds largely from their having felt the benefits of _local_ self-government in their County Councils. Their prejudice against _National_ self-government for Ireland, and for themselves, too, should they desire it, is rapidly breaking down. In this connection, too, we must never forget what an enormous power we have in the two millions and more of Irishmen and men of Irish extraction in Great Britain, and that, under ordinary circumstances, they hold the balance of power between British parties in about 150 Parliamentary constituencies. With regard to the Irish land question, we have every reason to be hopeful of the final and complete success of the great movement commenced by the organisation founded by Michael Davitt. We have had, since the days of Strongbow, many conquests and confiscations and settlements, the main object of each being the acquisition of the land of Ireland. Is it not marvellous, notwithstanding all the attempts to destroy our people, how they have clung to the soil and so absorbed the foreign element that you still so often find the old tribal names in the old tribal lands? Apart from this, we have, in the descendants of the various invaders, what would be a most valuable element in a self-governing Ireland, for whatever be the creed or the race from which men have sprung, it is but natural that all should love alike the land of their birth. As a result of Michael Davitt's labours, that land is to-day more nearly than it has been for centuries the property of the people, and it seems now, humanly speaking, impossible that they should ever be dispossessed of it again. Then there is the improvement in education. At one time it was banned and hunted along with religion and patriotism. Then it was permitted, with a view of turning it into a lever against the other two elements. Concessions have so far been wrung from the British parliament that there is now a university to which Irish youths can be sent. Here there is a great factor for good, for while, on the one hand, knowledge is power, on the other hand the thirst for knowledge has always been ineradicable in the Irish character. There are also the beginnings of technical training so long badly needed. Under self-government we should have been a couple of generations earlier in the race than we are, but it is not too late. Lastly, in reckoning up the conditions from which we can take hope and comfort there is this: In the darkest hour we have never lost faith in ourselves and our Cause. To find a parallel for such tenacity in the pages of the history of any land would be difficult. We come of a race that, through the long, dreary centuries, has never known despair, nor shall we despair now. I am assured that, before long, the drain on our life blood that has gone on for sixty years will stop, and that we shall stand on solid ground at last, ready for an upward spring. And so, to the young men of Ireland I would say: Be true to yourselves; hold fast to the ideals which your fathers preserved through the centuries, in spite of savage force and unscrupulous statecraft. The times are changing; new impulses are constantly shaping the destinies of the nations; have confidence in God and your country; and who shall dare to say that the future of Ireland may not yet be a glorious recompense for the heroism with which she has borne the sufferings of the past. THE END. INDEX. A. Alabama Claims, 75. Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien condemned and executed, 104. Ambulances, Irish, for Franco-Prussian War, 160, 161. Amnesty Association and O'Connell Centenary, 183. Ancient Fenians, 52. Anderson, Arthur, resembled Corydon, 85. "Annesley's Mountain, Lord," 31, 47. Answers to Correspondents, 154. Antrim, my birthplace, 2. Archbishops Crolly and Murray support the Bequest Act, 30. Archdeacon, George, 52. Architectural Drawing and Surveying, employed at these, 54. Arms for Rising of 1867. Inadequate supply, 94. Arrest and rescue of Kelly and Deasy, 95. Aunt Kitty, my godmother, 2. ----Mary, 38. ----Nancy, 15. Aylmer, Barry, adopts the stage as profession, 119. B. Ballad Poetry of Ireland, 260. Ballymagenaghy, my mother's birthplace, 31. ----rocky soil, 31. Ballymagenaghy, "Papishes to a man," 31. ----cottage industries, 33, 34. ----large families, 33. Ballymagrehan, 36. Ballywalter, my father's birthplace, 2. Ballinahinch, Battle of, 38, 39. Banbridge, weaving industries by steam, 34. Bannon, Oiney, 31. Barrett, David, examines the _Lia Fail_, 110. "Barney Henvey" and the Fairies, 35, 36. Barry, John, 8, 127. ----calls us together to form Home Rule Confederation of ----Great Britain, 173. Barry Sullivan, a great Irish actor, 22. Beers, Lord Roden's agent in Dolly's Brae massacre, 45. Beecher (Captain Michael O'Rorke), "The Fenian Paymaster," 78, 79. Belle Vue Prison, Manchester, near the scene of rescue, 101. Benedictines, 4. Biggar, Joseph, 180, 181, 193. ----Catholic, becomes a, 181. ----"Obstruction." enters upon, 182. ----Parliament, enters, 179. ----Parnell, combination with, 179. Birmingham, supplementary Convention, 176. "Black North," The, 15. Bligh, M.D., Alderman Alexander, 200. Bligh, M.D., John, 207. Blockade, running of "United Ireland," 209, 215. Boer War, The, 271. "_Bog Latin_," Mr. Butt gives the origin of it, 195. Boucicault, Dion, 263. Bourbaki, our men in Foreign Legion with him struck last blow in --Franco-German War, 161. Boyle, M.P., Alderman Daniel, 239. Brady, John, 236. Breslin, John, 76. ----aids in escape of military Fenians, 140. Breslin, Michael, "on his keeping," 77, 123. Breslin, Michael, narrowly escapes arrest, 124. Brett (sergeant of police) shot in Manchester rescue, 101. "Brian, Tribe of," 28. Brian O'Loughlin in '98, 38. Brotherhood of St. Patrick, the forerunner of Fenianism and --Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, 87. Bryant, Mrs. Dr. Sophie, 238. Bryers, George, 266. "Buckshot Foster," 210. Burke, Rickard, meets a notable company, 93. ----purchases arms, 105. ----Clerkenwell explosion an attempt to rescue him, 106. ----sent to penal servitude, 106. ----returned to America, 112. Burke, Thomas, J.P., of Liverpool, 186. Bushmills, Co. Antrim, my birthplace, 2. Butt, Isaac, presides at the first Annual Convention of the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, and becomes its --first President, 173. ----a contributor to "United Irishman," 181. ----gives no countenance to obstruction, 188. ----1876 Convention votes confidence in him, 188. ----resigns presidency of organisation, and succeeded by Parnell, 192. ----his death, 195. Byrom Street, Liverpool, my house for a time the headquarters of Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, 181. ----frequently met Butt, Parnell, Biggar, and other leaders there, 181. Byrne, Daniel, Richmond Prison warder, 77. Byrne, Frank, 160, 181. Byrne, M.P., Garrett, 230. Byrne, Patrick, 199. C. Cahill, Rev. Dr., a great preacher, 59. Camp in Everton, in view of expected rising in Liverpool, 55. Campbell, Richard, a humorous Irish singer, 120. "Camp Fires of the Legion," by James Finigan, 162. Carlingford Lough, vies with Killarney in beauty, 27. Carnarvon Borough election, where I first met Lloyd George, 237. _Carraig_ Mountain, 31 Cassidy, Tom, "a flogger," 67. Castlewellan, Eiver Magennis its member in King James's Parliament, 29. Castlewellan, a Nationalist centre for South Down, 47. "Catalpa" carries off the military Fenians, 140. ----lands them safely in New York, 145. Catholic Emancipation, 268. Catholic Hierarchy, Restoration of, 58. Catholic Institute, 54. "Catholic Times," I review in it "Life of Robert Emmet," by Michael James Whitty, 21. ----carrying it on single-handed, 153. Celtic Race, the Catholics of Ulster the most Celtic part of --Ireland, 30. 57. Chambers, Corporal, 200. Chester Castle, plot to seize, 81. ----I volunteer for the raid, 82. Christian Brothers, The, 14, 27. Churches, increase rapidly in Liverpool, 6. Clampit, Sam, a good, honest Protestant Fenian, is arrested, 108. Clan Connell War Song--O'Donnell Aboo, 115. Clan na nGael, 36. Clarence Dock, Liverpool, 3. ----where the harvest men landed, 35. Clarke, Michael, 180. Clarke, Patrick, 180. Clarkhill, Co. Down, 47. Coming over from Ireland, 3. Commins, Dr. Andrew, his record, 172. ----becomes head of Home Rule Organisation in Great Britain, 171, 172. Conciliation Hall, Dublin, 16. Condon, Captain Edward O'Meagher, 93. Condon, plans rescue of Kelly and Deasy, 96. ----is himself arrested, 102. Condon, his defiant shout in the dock of "God save Ireland," 104. ----returned to America, and has been since helping the Cause there and here, 106, 107, and 112. Confederates, Irish, 55. Connolly, Lawrence, 185. Connaught, 35. Convention of 1876 votes confidence in Isaac Butt, 188. Copperas Hill Chapel, 5. ----Schools, 13. Cork, "No sin in Cor-r-r-k," 26. Corydon, the informer, what he was like, 85. ----throws off the mask, 85. Cottage Industries in Ulster, 33. Council of Fenian Leaders, 93. Cousens, a Liverpool detective, 131. Cranston, Robert, escaped military Fenian, 141. Crilly, Alfred, a brilliant Irishman, who did good service for the Cause, 150, 171. Crilly, Daniel, brother of Alfred, 150, 211. ----on staff of "Nation," 151. ----registration agent, 243. ----editor of "United Irishman," 180. ----Member of Parliament, 180. Crilly, Frederick Lucas, General Secretary of United Irish League --of Great Britain, 150. Crimean War, The, 65. Crosbie Street, mostly spoke Connaught Irish, 15. Crowley, Thade, the Cork pork butcher, 25, 26. Cumberland, 33. Curragh of Kildare, I help at the building of camp there, 65. D. "Daily News," The, describes the rescue of Kelly and Deasy, and acknowledges the courage and skill of the rescuers, 101. "Daily Post," Liverpool, 21. Darragh, Daniel, brings the arms from Birmingham for Manchester Rescue, 96. ----dies in Portland Prison, 126. ----Hogan brings his remains to Ireland, and Condon visits his grave, 127. Darragh, Thomas, escaped military Fenian, 141. Davis, Thomas, as registration agent, 242. ----his "Literary and Historical Essays," 261. Davitt, Martin, father of Michael, 240. Davitt, Michael, takes up Forrester's work of supplying arms, 132. ----is arrested and convicted on Corydon's testimony, 136. ----returns from penal servitude, 199. ----formation of the Land League, 205. ----his "Fall of Feudalism," 197. ----tries to get Parnell to join advanced movement, 202. "Dear Old Ireland," T.D. Sullivan's Song, 38. Denvir's "Monthly" and "Irish Library," 257. De Courcy, 27, 29. Denvir, Bishop, Bible, 30. ----see Father O'Laverty, 30. ----I met him with my father, 3. Denvir, General Denver's daughter enquires after him, 41. Denver City, the Capital of Colorado, named after General James --William Denver, descended from Patrick Denvir, a '98 Insurgent, 40. Desmond, Captain, one of the rescuers of the military Fenians, 140. Devoy, John, he aided the escape of James Stephens, 76, and of the --military Fenians, 140. Dillon, John, M.P., 205. Distinguished Irishmen I have met, 10. Disestablishment of the Irish Church prompted by Gladstone's recognition --of "the intensity of Fenianism," 147. Disruption of the Irish Party, 252. Doctors and other professional men excellent helpers in the National Cause, 177, 258. Dock labourers' love of learning, 19. Dolly's Brae Fight, 44. ----massacre, 45. Donnelly, Edward, foreman printer of "United Ireland," brings me the --stereos, 210. Doran, Arthur, an Irish newsagent, becomes bail for Forrester, 135. Dowling, chief constable of Liverpool, dismissed, 60. Down, County, 2, 29, 47. ----cottage industries, 33. Drumgoolan, my uncle's parish, 28. Dublin Castle wires warning of Manchester Rescue--too late, 97. Duffy, Michael Francis, 166. Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, loses heart for a time, 62. Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, his old hopes revive, 62. Dundas, General, routed by the Kilcullen pikemen in '98. Dundrum Bay, 32. E. Egan, Patrick, 184. ----sustains "United Ireland" against attempted suppression, 215. ----his life story, 219. ----always a practical patriot, 221. ----attitude towards Parliament, 221. ----President of Irish National League of America, 224. ----American ambassador to Chili, 224. ----President Harrison's tribute, 224. Elizabethan days, 5. "Emerald Minstrels," The, 115, 116, 117. ----inspired by "Spirit of the Nation," 118. "Erin's Hope," with Irish-American officers, arms, and ammunition, --reaches Sligo Bay, 94. ----returns to America, 95. "Erin's Sons in England," racy song by T.D. Sullivan, 152. F. Fahy, Francis, poet. 137 Falconer (Edmond O'Rourke), a famous Irish actor and dramatist, --author of "Peep o' Day," "Killarney," etc., 52, 263. Famine, The great Irish, 6. ----heroism of the clergy, 53. ----the greatest disaster in Irish history, 269. "Felon Repeal Club" in Newcastle-on-Tyne, 56. Fenian Brotherhood, The, 52, 73. ----the two wings, 123. ----Conference in Paris, Michael Breslin attends, 123. ----gathering, which Parnell attends at my invitation, 203. "Fenian Paymaster" (Captain O'Rorke), known as "Beecher," 78. Fenian leaders in England take counsel, 93. Fenianism.--What did it do for Ireland? 146. Ferguson, John, assists at foundation of Home Rule Confederation of --Great Britain, 176. ----indicates Parnell as future leader, 192. ----director of "United Irishman," 180. Finigan, James Lysaght, his adventurous career, 124. ----in the Franco-German War, 160. Finn MacCool and the ancient Fenians, 52. Flannery, Thomas, an able Irish scholar, 164, 258. Flood, John, and the Chester raid, 82. "Flowering," girls employed at, 34. "Flowing Tide," 233. Foley, Patrick James, 254. Ford, Patrick, Michael Davitt's tribute to him, 198. ----I welcome the "Irish World" in the "Catholic Times," 198. Forrester, Arthur, he brings me revolvers, 131. ----I am visited by detectives, 131. ----they can make out no case against him, and he is released, 135. Forrester, Arthur, he joins the French Foreign Legion, 134, 160, 162. Forrester, Mrs. Ellen, comes with Michael Davitt, 133. ----like others of her family, she wrote poetry, 134. Fox, Frank, one of our poets, 181. "Fount of patriotism," 11. Franco-Prussian War, 160. Freemantle, rescue from of the military Fenians, 139. "Frolics of Phil Foley," a sketch by John F. McArdle, 121. G. Gaelic characters, the, 11. Gaelic League Revival, 256. Gaelic Prayer Book (Scotch), printed by me for Father Campbell, S.J., for use in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, 259. Garton, Patrick De Lacy, Stephens escapes in his hooker, 78. ----he helps the blockade-running of "United Ireland." "Georgette," ----passenger steamer, pursues the military Fenians, 143. ----fires a round shot across the bows of the "Catalpa," in which they ----are escaping, 143. Gilmore, Patrick Sarsfield, a distinguished Irish-American composer --and musician, 114. Gilmore, Mary Sarsfield, his daughter, an able contributor to --"Irish World," 114. Gladstone, William Ewart, introduces Home Rule Bill, 231. ----"Flowing Tide," 233. ----returned to power through aid of Irish vote, 232. "God Save Ireland," Condon gives us a rallying cry and a --National Anthem, 104. "Gormans of Glenmore," The, 265. Goss, Bishop, a typical Englishman of the best kind. Blunt-hitting-out-from-the-shoulder style of speaking, 156. Grattan's Parliament, 41. Graves, Alfred Perceval, 138, 259. Gunboats in river Mersey in view of expected rising in Liverpool, 55. H. "Hail to the Chief" (from the "Lady of the Lake"), 118. ----played as salute to Parnell, 117. Halpin, General, a scientific soldier, 90. ----in command at the rising, 90. ----gives us lecture on fortifications and earthworks, 91. ----arrested at Queenstown, 91. "Hamlet" played by Falconer, 262. Hand, John, one of our poets, 181. Hanlons, Hughey and Ned, 51. Harrington, Martin, escaped military Fenian, 141. Harvestmen from Connaught and Donegal, a hardy lot, 35. Haslingden, the home of Davitt, 84. Hassett, Thomas Henry, escaped military Fenian, 141. Healy, T.M., when I first met him, 196. ----becomes Parnell's secretary, 197. Heinrick, Hugh, editor of "United Irishman," 180. Hibernians, Ancient Order of, strong in Liverpool, and stout champions --of country and creed, 16. ----a bodyguard for the priests in penal days, 17. ----their stronghold in northern Irish counties and counties adjoining, 18. ----in America, Rev. Thomas Shahan pays tribute to the Order, 16, 17. "Hidden Gem," a play by Cardinal Wiseman, 63. Hierarchy restored, 58. Highlands of Scotland, the Gaelic spoken there, 187. Hints from Thomas Davis to Irish painters, students, historians, --lecturers, journalists, public speakers, and others, 261. Hogan, the Irish sculptor, crowns O'Connell with Repeal cap, 49. Hogan, Martin Joseph, escaped military Fenian, 141. Hogan, William, a friend of Captain John M'Cafferty, 87. ----helps Darragh to get the revolvers for Manchester rescue, 96. ----is arrested for this, tried, and acquitted, 124, 125. Holyhead, wagons and carriages for there to be seized, 81. Holy Cross Chapel, Liverpool, as it was, 58. ----the chief of police countenances the getting up of a panic there, 60. Holland, of the submarine, 145. Home Rule Organisation, formation in Ireland, various sections assist, 148. ----John Barry calls us together to form Home Rule Confederation ----of Great Britain, 173. Home Rule Organisation, I become its first secretary, 155. Hyde Road, the scene of the Manchester rescue, 99. Hymans, Jewish admirers of Thade Crowley, 25. I. Igoe's publichouse at the Curragh, 67. "Inishowen," noble song by Charles Gavan Duffy, 260. Insurrection in Ireland considered easier to put down than "Obstruction," 190. Iona Pilgrimage, 233. Irish-American officers to leave Ireland for England, 79. Irish Brigade of Liverpool, 92. "Irish Library," I start it, 35. "Irish in Britain," The, 78, 102. Irish National League organiser, Edward M'Convey, 33. Irish Parliamentary Party, disruption and reunion of, 252. Irish Race Convention, 254. "Irish Rapparees," by Gavan Duffy, 260. Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, 73. 74. Irish of Great Britain compact and politically important, 2. "Irish World," The, 198. Isle of Man, 32, 187. J. Jack Langan, an Irish boxer, 4. "Jigger Loft," where our men work, 7. Journalism, 21. Johnson, my classical teacher, 28. K. Kehoe, Inspector Lawrence.--Did he shut his eyes in my case? 129. Kelly, Col. Thomas, his personal appearance, 92. ----directs rescue of James Stephens, 76, 77, 78. ----I meet him in Liverpool, 92, 93. ----his arrest in Manchester with Captain Deasy, 95. ----rescue, 100, 101. ----how he escaped from the country, 105. Kildare, gallant fight of the men of Kildare in '98, 69. King Edward VII., plot for his abduction when Prince of Wales, 88. Kirwan, Captain Martin Walter, in the Franco-Prussian War, 160. ----afterwards general secretary of Irish organisation in Great Britain. Knox, Edmund Vesey, a Protestant Member of Parliament, who did --good service at Lloyd George's election and elsewhere, 238. L. Lambert, Michael, makes key to fit James Stephens' cell, 78. "Lancashire Free Press," 91. Land League, The, its formation in April, 1879, with Davitt recognised --as its "Father," 205. Larkin, Michael, 103, 104. Lecale, Celtic and Norman admixture since De Courcy's time, 27. Leitrim Chapel, where I served Mass for my uncle, 32. ----band of fiddles, flutes, and clarionets, 37. _Lia Fail_ (Stone of Destiny), 109, the stone to be stolen, 110. _Lia Fail_, David Barrett, League organiser, tries to test its weight. --Is stopped by its guardians, 111. Liberator, The (O'Connell), frequently passed through Liverpool, 43. Lloyd-George, David, Chancellor of the Exchequer, I help --in his first Election, 237. London Irish Literary Society, 259. Lost opportunity for Irish tongue, 15. Lover, Samuel, painter, poet, musician, composer, novelist, --and dramatist, 10. ----his patriotism, 10, 11. ----his wit, 12. Loyal toasts, 188, 189, 203. Lumber Street Chapel, 4. Lynch,. Daniel, translates "God Save Ireland" into Irish, 113. M. McAnulty, Bernard, a strong Home Ruler and Fenian sympathiser, 34, 56, 180. McArdle, John, 15, 16. McArdle, John F., the most brilliant of the Emerald Minstrels, 118. McCann, Michael Joseph, author of "O'Donnell Aboo," I make --his acquaintance, 114, 115. McCafferty, John, had fought for the South in the American Civil War. --His plot to seize Chester Castle, 81. ----his scheme (as Mr. Patterson) to abduct the Prince of Wales, 88. McCartans, The, 29. McCarthy, Sergeant, his sudden death, 200. M'Cormick, Father, of Wigan, men on way to Chester raid go to Confession --to him, 82. McDonald, Bishop of Argyll and the Isles, preached at Iona in Gaelic --on the life of St. Columbkille, 234. McDonnell, Sergeant James, 206 McGrady, Owen, conference at his house to arrange for reception of --expedition then on the sea, 93. McGrath, Father Peter, 187. McGowan, James, my godfather, 2. McHale, Archbishop, I report his sermon, 155. McKinley, Peter, 180. MacMahon, Father, of Suncroft, gives the Curragh men a good character, 70. ----he tells us of St. Brigid's miraculous mantle, 69. ----and of the gallant Kildare men in '98, 69. McMahon, Heber, 181. MacManus, Terence Bellew, 49, 52. McNaghten, Sir Francis, 2. McSwiney, Father, S.J., and the "Catholic Times," 154. "Macbeth" played by Falconer, 262. Magennis, Eiver (see Castlewellan), 29. Maguire, the marine, wrongly charged at Manchester, 104. Manchester, first Convention of Home Rule Confederation held there, 173. Manchester Martyrs, place of rescue confounded with place of execution, 99. Mangan, Richard, 180. Mass in Penal times, 5. Massacre at Dolly's Brae, 45. Mathew, Father, Apostle of Temperance, what he was like, 13. Maughan, Peter, recruiting agent for the I.R.B. among --the British soldiery, 72, 86. Mazzinghi, Count, composer of "Hail to the Chief," 115. Meany, Stephen Joseph, a journalist, 91. ----in Young Ireland movement, 22. ----starts "Lancashire Free Press," 91. ----imprisoned for Fenianism, 91. "Men of the North, The," stirring ballad by Charles Gavan Duffy, 260. Military Fenians, their rescue, chiefly by John Breslin, --going from America, and John Walsh from this side, 139 to 145. Millbank Prison, M'Cafferty writes from there to William Hogan, 87. Mogan, John, a capable man at registration and electioneering, 243. Monroe, General, a Presbyterian leader, hanged at his own door in '98, 41. Mourne Mountains, 27, 32, 57. Mulhall, Peter and James, 194. Mullaghmast, 49. Mullin, Dr. James, 177, 178. Murphy, Bessie, 181. Murphy, Captain, 93, 112. Murphy, David, supposed to have been shot by connivance of Pigott, 247. Murphy, Patrick, 239. Murphy, William, sent to penal servitude for attack on the van --at Manchester, though not there, 102. Murray, Archbishop, 30. N. "Nation" newspaper, readings from it, 15. ----"O'Donnell Aboo" appears in it, 115. "Nation once again, A," 36. National Anthem of "God Save Ireland," Condon's defiant shout --in the dock the origin of it, 104. "Nationalist" The, 256. Naughton, Miss, 132. "Ninety-eight" memories, many of the leaders Presbyterians, 41. "No Popery" mob, A, 4. "No Popery" mania over "Papal aggression," 58. Normans in Ireland, The, 27. "Northern Press and Catholic Times," 72. Norse settlements, 27. Nugent, Father, and the Catholic Institute, 63. ----St. Patrick's celebrations, 64. ----proprietor of "Catholic Times," which I conducted for him, 91. ----after a long interval, am pleased to meet him just before ---- his death, 159. O. Oates, Tom, of Newcastle, 94. Oath of allegiance, Parnell and my view on this, 112. "O," the prefix, 33. O'Brien, Captain Michael, is hanged at Manchester, 104, 112. O'Brien, John, released prisoner, 200. O'Brien, James Francis Xavier, introduces me to O'Donovan (Rossa), 73. ----No more gallant figure among the Fenian leaders than J.F.X. O'Brien. ----In all things _straight_, 89, 90. O'Brien, M.P., Patrick, 230. O'Brien, Richard Barry, 259. O'Brien, William, 212, &c. "Obstruction," the 1877 Convention endorses the policy, 104. O'Coigly, Father, Pilgrimage, 235. O'Connell Centenary, 183, 184. O'Connell in Liverpool, 48. ----a faithful son of the Church, 48. ----enormous attendance at his meetings, 49. ----Orange attack repelled by McManus and his friends, 49. O'Connell, John (son of the Liberator, Daniel O'Connell), --a British militia officer at the Curragh; gives good example --to his men by going to Holy Communion, 68. ----he wrote fine verses, 68. O'Connell, Maurice, wrote "Recruiting Song of the Irish Brigade," 69. O'Connell Centenary, 183. O'Connor, M.P., T.P., the only Home Rule Member of Parliament for --Great Britain elected _as such_, 24, 188, 230. O'Donovan, Edmund, son of John O'Donovan, 90. ----in French Foreign Legion, 160, 162. ----special correspondent in Russo-Turkish War, 164. ----Merv, 165. ----perishes in the Soudan, 165. O'Donovan, Jeremiah (Rossa), 73. O'Donovan, John, the distinguished Irish scholar, 163. ----memoir of him by Thomas Flannery, 164. O'Donnell, Bishop, 254. "O'Donnell Aboo" as our national anthem? 114, 115. ----no claim, 116. O'Donnell, F.H., 181, 193. O'Grady, Hubert, 265. O'Hagan, Lord, 184. O'Hanlons, The, the Ulster standard bearers, 51. O'Kelly, James, in Mexican campaign, 165. ----recruits for the French army until fall of Paris, 166. ----adopts journalism, 167. ----enters Parliament, 167. "Olaf, the Dane, or the Curse of Columbkille," 266. Oliver, William John, 180. O'Laverty, Father, historian of Down and Connor, 29, 30. O'Loughlin, Brian, 38. O'Loughlin, Father Bernard, my uncle, 33. ----Father Bernard. Passionist, of Paris 169. ----John, my uncle, 169. ----Michael, Father, my uncle, 28, 33. ----Margaret, my mother, 33. O'Mahony, Michael, writes "Life of St. Columbkille" for me, 234. O'Malley, M.P., William, 230. Opening of a bath by swimming in it, by T.D. Sullivan, when --Lord Mayor of Dublin, 153. Orangeism, 19, 20, 22, 23. O'Reilly, John Boyle, his "Life" in our Library, 86. ----helps escape of the military Fenians, 140. O'Rorke, Captain Michael (Beecher), the Fenian paymaster, 78, 79. O'Rourke, Edmund (Falconer), actor and dramatist, 52, 263. O'Shea, Captain, a candidate for Parliament, 228. O'Sullivan, Eugene, 211. ----Eugene or "Owen," a Welsh registration case, 244. P. Packmen from Ulster, Oiney Bannon, Bernard McAnulty, 34. "Pagan O'Leary," "Beggars and Robbers," 80. "Papal aggression," 58. Papal Volunteers, we entertain them, 155. "Papishes," 19. Parnell, Charles Stewart, enters Parliament, 179, 181. ----becomes chairman of Irish Parliamentary Party, 192. ----could weigh men's capabilities, 197. ----Davitt cannot induce Parnell to join the advanced organisation, 202. ----Parnell and the I.R.B. men, 203. ----with Dillon, goes to America for relief of Irish distress, 208. ----collapse of the "Times" Forgeries against Parnell, 248. ----disruption in the Party, 252. ----reunion, January 30th, 1900, 255. "Patriot Parliament of 1689," by Thomas Davis, 29. Patterson, Mr. (Captain McCafferty), calls on me, 88. "Peggy Loughlin's wee boy," 32. Penal days in Liverpool, 4, 5. Phoenix movement and trials, 73. Pictures at election times, "the Pope," "Robert Emmet," "King William," 245. Plantation of Ulster, 31, 39. Power, John O'Connor, lectures at Davitt's meeting, 199. "Punch" and "Times" seemed to gloat over probable extinction of --Irish race, 53. "Punch's" caricature of O'Connell, 54. Purcell, Edward, helps blockade running of "United Ireland," 213. Prendiville, John, his steamers used to bring voters from the river, 244. "Presbyterian Government," was there a call for this at Ballinahinch? 39. Price, Father John, S.J., 4. "Protestant Ulster" chiefly an importation, 30. Q. "Quare man doesn't know his own mother's name," 33. R. Race Convention in Ireland, 254. Rails to Chester to be taken up, 81. "Rapparees, The Irish," Charles Gavan Duffy's fine song, 260. Readings from the "Nation," 15. "Reapers of Kilbride," 265, 266. "Rebel, An Old," 1. Red-haired woman stops the growth of the Curragh, 69. Redmond, John, 3, 252. Redmond, Sylvester, 86. Refugees of the '67 Rising, 92. Repeal Hall, 52. "Repeal Cap," 49. Rescue of Kelly and Deasy. ----Incidents of the arrest and rescue described in page 95 ----and following pages. Reunion of the Parliamentary Party, January 30th, 1900, 255. Revisiting Ireland, 27. Revolvers for Manchester, 96. Revolvers from Forrester, 131. Reynolds, Dr., 52. Ribbonmen, 23. Richards, Richard ("Double Dick"), 109. Richardson, John, 5. "Richard III." played by Falconer, 262. Rising of 1848, drilling to oppose it, 55. Rising of 1867, 89. Roden, Lord, 32. ----Dolly's Brae massacre, 45. "Roderick Vich Alpine Dhu," 115. Rogers, John, a Gaelic scholar, 259. Roney, Hughey, his house threatened by Orangemen, 15, 20. "Rory O'More," by Lover, 11. ----a scene from it reenacted, 12. "Rosaleen Dhu," 266. Rotunda, Dublin, 155. Round Towers, Kildare, &c., 70. Russell, Lord John, his Ecclesiastical Titles Act, 58, 61. Russell, Charles (Lord Russell of Killowen), willing to become our candidate --for Parliament to induce Liberals to withdraw objectionable man. --This has desired effect, 249. ----we ask him to take the chair for our first Home Rule meeting. ----He advises us to get Dr. Commins, 171. Russell, Sir Edward, of "Liverpool Daily Post," 21, 257. Ryan, John (Capn. O'Doherty), calls on me; I join the I.R.B., 74. Ryan, John (Capn. O'Doherty), ----he describes to me the escape of Stephens, in which he assisted, 77, 78. ----now dead many years, 68, 112. Ryan, Wm. James, his "Life of John Boyle O'Reilly," 86. Ryan, William Patrick, 257. Ryan, Dr. Mark, an Irish scholar, 257. S. Sadlier, John, his suicide, 62. Sadlier-Keogh gang, their betrayal of the cause of the Irish --tenants, 61, 62. Saintfield, battle, in '98, 38. Salford Gaol, 99. Santley, Sir Charles, 5. Sarsfield Band, 184. Saturday Evening Concerts, 10. School Board Election, Liverpool, our votes enough to elect 8 out of --the 15 members, 156. Schoolmaster, The, 93, 111. Scone, 110. Scott, Sir Walter, author of "Hail to the Chief," 115. Scotland Ward and Division in Liverpool, an Irish stronghold, --both Municipal and Parliamentary, 24, 185. Seager, John Renwick, 243. Servant girls, Irish-American, 111. Sexton, Thomas, 254. Shahan, Father, on "Hibernianism," 16, 17. "Shan Van Vocht," on the "Curragh of Kildare," sung by the --"Emerald Minstrels," 71. Shaw, George Bernard, 264. "Shemus O'Brien," 121. Sherlock, Father, a saintly man, presides at our first Birmingham Convention --demonstration, 175, 177. Slieve Donard, 32, 265. Slieve na Slat ("Mountain of rods"), 31. Sloops from Ireland, 3. Smyth, George, 52. "Spirit of the Nation," 11. Stephens, James, his escape from Richmond, 76, 77. St. Brigid's mantle, Father MacMahon tells the legend of, 69. "Stage Irishman," discountenanced, 119, 264. Strongbow, 272. Saint Columbkille, 233. St. George's Hall, Liverpool, great gathering addressed by Parnell, 206. St. Helens meeting, Parnell and Davitt attend, 201. St. Mary's, Lumber Street, 4. St. Nicholas's, Liverpool, 4, 6. St. Patrick's effigy, as if addressing our people from Ireland, 3. St. Patrick's Day processions, 22, 24, 64. ----celebrations, 64, 65. Steamers for O'Connell Centenary, 183. Sullivan Brothers, 150. Sullivan, A.M. becomes proprietor and editor of the "Nation," 63. ----presides at adjourned initial Convention of Home Rule Confederation ----of Great Britain, 176. Sullivan, T.D., author of our national anthem, 113. ----he writes, "Erin's Sons in England" for me, 152. Supernatural, Irish faith in the, 13. Swift, Miss Kate, 211. T. Taaffe, James Vincent, 211. Tenant Right Agitation, 62. "Terence's Fireside," 115. "Thrashers," The, 42. "Times" Forgeries Commission, 207, 246. Tollymore Park, seat of Lord Roden, 45. Tribal names still in tribal lands, 27, 273. "Tribe of Brian," 28. Tragedy of the Famine, The, 6. U. Ulster Catholics, the most pure-blooded Celts in Ireland, 30. Ulster, plantation of in King James I.'s time, 39. "United Ireland," attempted suppression, 210. ----sent out as "dried fish," 212. ----not an issue missed, 215. ----I am prosecuted by Government, 216. ----printed once in Derry, 217. ----re-appeared in old office, 218. Union of North and South destroyed, 61. "United Irishman," organ of Home Rule Confederation of --Great Britain, 177, 181, 265. United Irishmen of 1798, 11, 41. V. Vaughan, Cardinal, Bishop of Salford, I get his support for --"Catholic Times," 158. Vauxhall Ward, Liverpool, 185. Volunteers of 1782, The, 41. "Vatican, The Treasures of," 61. W. Walsh, John, informs a select gathering how he and a friend from this --side helped to rescue the military Fenians, 143. Warders from Belle Vue Prison interfere in the Manchester --Rescue--no use, 101. Ward, Joseph, 121. Widow Walsh welcomes her lodgers at the Curragh of Kildare, 66. Whitty, Michael James, Liverpool head Constable, afterwards editor --of the "Daily Post," 20, 21, 22, 91. Wilson, James, escaped military Fenian, 141. Wilson, John, a Birmingham gunsmith, 136. Windle, Dr. Bertram, President of University College, Cork, 177. Wiseman, Cardinal, "Papal aggression" mania directed against him, 63. ----his fine play of "The Hidden Gem" given by Father Nugent's students ----at the Catholic Institute, Liverpool, 63. Wolohan, Michael, the "blockade runner" for "United Ireland," 212. "Woollen Goods" (for "United Ireland"), 213. Y. "Young Ireland," 11, 52. 
61858	----	REVOLT ON IO By NELSON BOND Death stalked the _Libra_. The Io-plunging space liner freighted a secret weapon, and the rebel Kreuther had vowed it should not arrive. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The ship's clock bonged drowsily three times. Bud Chandler, the junior watch, glared at it languidly. "Thus," he yawned, "endeth the lobster patrol. Three bells, my fine bucko--and the soft, warm hay for you. Or--" There was a hopeful note in his voice. "Or would you like to finish out my trick for me? I'll stand double for _you_ some night." Dan Mallory said, "Comets to you, sailor!" And he rose, stretching the kinks out of weary muscles. His collar was open at the throat, his back ached from five solid hours in the bucket-shaped control chair. His eyes were strained. That was from peering alternately at glowing panels, through a _perilens_ plate into the murky, blue-black space before the void-hurtling _Libra_, and back to the panels again. "There's a little thing called sleep which I'm going to grab some of. As soon as Norton shows up. Where the pink Cepheids--?" "Tell you what. Finish my trick tonight, Dan, and I'll double for you _twice_. That's fair enough, isn't it?" "Fair enough," said Mallory, "but not sufficiently enticing. Like an albino on a desert planetoid. Ah, here's our hero now! Welcome, Sir Relief! Dump it into the basket and let poppa go seek the arms of Morpheus." "Who's she?" growled Rick Norton, Third Mate. His eyes were puffy; he squinted and glared at the bright lights of the control turret. "Hell's howling acres, I'm tired! I just about got to sleep when--Oh, well. Log in order?" "Directly." Mallory shot a curious glance at Norton. "Just got to sleep? How come? What were you doing up so late?" "It wasn't official business," answered the junior officer curtly, "so it's none of yours. Let's have your log sheet." He slumped into the control chair, squinted through the _perilens_ and made a few tiny course corrections. Across the room, Bud Chandler's shoulders shrugged a reply to Dan's swift lift of the eyebrows. The Second Mate's lips formed a word. "Sore-head!" Mallory nodded. Norton _was_ a surly son-of-a-spacewrangler. But that wasn't any skin off his nose. He went to the chart table. Footsteps clattered up the Jacob's ladder, the door flew open and the Old Man stomped onto the bridge. He snapped, "'Zuwere!" and glowered over Mallory's shoulder, shrewd, space-faded eyes reading sense into the senior lieutenant's neat, precise columns. He jabbed a horny finger at one line of figures. "Sure o' that, Mallory? Velocity that high?" Mallory said respectfully, "Yes, sir. All figures have been checked and double checked. We're point oh-oh-one on course. Forced speed, point thirty-nine above normal." "Checked and double checked," said Captain Algase, "is good enough most of the time. But this trip is special. And vitally important. Forty thousand innocent lives depend on our reaching Io damn soon! Remember that, Mallory. All of you remember that." The stern lines of his face eased a trifle. "It's been a hard shuttle, I know. A brutal, punishing trip. And we've all been under a terrific strain. But our difficulties are nothing compared to those of the garrison and the honest colonists of New Fresno. They're looking to us for aid, and we're bringing them aid. "That is, someone aboard this ship is. I honestly don't know who that person is. No one knows except the man himself, the commander of the SSP Intelligence Department on Earth, and maybe someone at New Fresno. But he _is_ on board, either an officer, sailor or passenger, and he _is_ carrying to Io the plans for the new ray weapon recently perfected by the SSP Ordnance Bureau. "Those plans will enable our New Fresno garrison to subdue this mysterious uprising on Io. That's why the _Libra_ is traveling at forced speed. That's why we must redouble every normal precaution to insure our reaching the Io colony. That's why, too, we must keep our eyes open; watch even each other. What's the matter with you, Norton?" * * * * * Norton had started suddenly. Now he muttered, red-faced, "Sorry, sir. Sudden light in the visiplate. It looked like a meteoride." "There's nothing there now," said the skipper. But Chandler repeated, "Watch each other, Captain? I don't get it. We're all pledged and trusted members of the Solar Space Patrol, aren't we? We all live by the SSP motto. I don't see--" He fingered his breast insignia, that tiny, golden rocket emblazoned with the words, _Order out of Chaos_. "I don't see why we should--" "Because," explained the skipper grimly, "wherever there's an uprising there are converts to the new cause, traitors to the old. Where there are plans, there are spies to steal them. That's not a warning from H.Q.; that's plain, old-fashioned horse-sense. I fought through the Rollie Rebellion, you know. After the Grantland massacre I discovered that one of my own messmates was in the pay of the Mercurians. "I won't say for sure that there is a spy aboard the _Libra_. But if there is, we must give him no opportunity to learn anything. Weary or not, we must remain on the alert at all times. But I needn't say any more. Finished, Mallory?" "Yes, sir. Log in order, sir." "Very good. You may retire. Chandler, you seem to be fagged." Bud said, "One more yawn and I'll be a zombie." "A gabby zombie?" sniffed the Old Man. "I'll finish your trick for you. Go get some rest." Still glowering, he plumped himself into the seat vacated by Chandler, cut in the intercommunications board, audioed the radio turret. "Is that you, Sparks? Wake up, you lazy scut! Any news from the Earth? Or Mars Central?" The radioman's voice clacked metallically, "No, sir. I can't get through to any station. The rebel forces at New Fresno are still jamming the ether with static interference on all wave bands." "Well, keep trying. Let me know if you get through. Well?" The skipper glanced back over his shoulder. "Well, I thought you two were tired? What are you waiting for? Want to stand another trick apiece?" "No, sir!" said both men hastily. "We're leaving, sir!" They fled. "Ain't he a whipper, though?" asked Chandler affectionately. "He growls like a terrier pup, but he's got no more bite than a cup custard. 'Scuse me!" A gigantic yawn split his grin in two. "Must have been something I et!" "The hell of it is," said Mallory ruefully, "now I'm off duty, I'm not a bit tired. I wasn't tired at all, really. Just had hardening of the panties from squatting in that seat so long. Got a cigarette?" Chandler tossed him a package. "And don't swipe the coupon, either. Six thousand more and I get an electronic microscope. Well, you can do what you like. I'm going bye-bye and try to forget the waffles that bucket-seat has pressed into my hip pockets. 'Night, pal!" His footsteps rang sharp little echoes on the metal flooring, echoes that hollowed as he disappeared down a corridor leading to the sleeping quarters and Mallory turned toward the observation deck. * * * * * The tall First Mate leaned against the heavy quartzite pane staring into the depths of space through which the _Libra_ scudded. The sight was no novelty to him, but as ever it wakened in his heart a sense of awe, a feeling of weird instability, a sort of pride in Man that he, of all the many, strange life-forms experimenting nature had devised, should so far be the only one whose imagination was so great, whose curiosity was so strong, that he had found a way to fling himself at blinding speed across the broad, unfathomable reaches of the void. It was disheartening to realize that even though he had attained the stars, Man had not yet sloughed off the instincts and habits of the ape from which he sprang. Man's genius had blazed a path across the spaceways, Man's bravery had established new colonies from scorching Mercury to frozen Uranus. SSP lightships bridged the chasms between and beyond; even now the concentrated rays of faraway Sol were steaming the rimy crust off Pluto that Earth's miners might extract the valuable ores revealed by the spectroscope. But with the growth of the colonies, Man's ever latent cupidity had come into play. This past half century, thought Dan Mallory with a sort of savage anger, had been nothing but one long, bloody era of warfare between the forces of law and the outlawry of the greedy. Now there was this uprising on the first satellite of Jupiter; Io. A charming little world. A pleasant Earth-like orb, spinning quietly about its gigantic parent. Up to this time, its natives had never been troublesome. Squat, muscular creatures, more or less anthropoid, except for the fact that their complexions had a pale, greenish cast and their eyes were double-lidded like those of snakes. They had an intelligence of .63 on the Solar Constant scale. Within a century or so the control board meant to award them autonomy; toward this end educators had been working ever since Io had been removed from the British Imperial Protectorate in 2221. Trouble had sprung, both literally and figuratively, like a bolt from the blue. A cosmic _blitzkrieg_. One moment there had been peace and sweet content on Io; the next came a frantic, garbled message about "a rebel army ... natives ... led by...." The rest had been drowned in an ear-drum blasting burst of electronic static that had rendered all further communication impossible. "Kreuther!" said Mallory thoughtfully. The affair sounded like one of Kreuther's moves. That power-mad genius, exiled from Earth after the thwarted Lunar Campaign of 2234, was accustomed to strike in just this fashion. He alone, of all avowed SSP enemies, had the persuasive ability to win to his cause a horde of normally contented Ionians, the wealth with which to set into motion war's red machinery, the genius with which to disrupt interplanetary communications. "But if it is Kreuther," thought Mallory consolingly, "this time he's bitten off more than he can chew. That new weapon--" He wondered, briefly, which officer, sailor, passenger, had been entrusted with the secret of the new ray gun's construction. Then he cast the thought from his mind. It was none of his business. It were better he didn't know. It was at that stage of his reverie that a sudden byplay of movement captured his attention. In an instant he had cupped his cigarette into his palm, stepped into a dark patch of shadow. A figure had glided from the passageway that led to the sleeping quarters, was now peering uncertainly into the observation deck. It was David Wilmot, one of the six passengers aboard the _Libra_. Wilmot's thin face was pinched with nervousness; he coughed, a thin little hacking sound in the muted quiet, then put the back of his hand to his mouth. Dan stood motionless, his dark uniform blending perfectly with the drapes that concealed him. As he waited, watching, the door at the far end of the deck opened, a short, plump man in night-robe entered. Wilmot sprang forward eagerly. His whisper carried to Dan's keen ears. "Have you got them, Doctor?" "Quiet, you fool!" Dr. Bonetti's forehead creased angrily; his eyeglasses reflected a subdued light owlishly. He fumbled in his pocket, passed something white to the other man. "Here! But not a word, about this, mind you!" "I know. I know." Wilmot seized the papers avidly, turned and fled down the corridor whence he had emerged. The doctor stared after him for a moment, shook his head regretfully, then disappeared. The door closed behind him softly. "_That's why, too, we must keep our eyes open--._" The skipper's words echoed in Dan Mallory's memory as he stepped from his hiding place, brow furrowed. What the devil was going on here? Could Bonetti have been the bearer of the secret plans; could Wilmot have been the spy? Had he just witnessed the sell-out of a traitor? But before he could get his jumbled thoughts into order, a voice addressed him from behind, gravely, quietly. "Rather confusing, eh, Lieutenant?" Dan whirled to look into the face of Garland Smith, another of the _Libra's_ passengers. He said, half pettishly, "You, Captain? What are _you_ doing up at this time of night?" * * * * * The one-time officer of the SSP, now on the retired list, shot a swift glance at the glittering panorama visible through the quartzite plates. "Night, Lieutenant? Night and day are nothing but quirks of speech out here, sleep a matter of habit. When you have lifted gravs as many years as _I_ have--" He sighed. "I was restless. And perhaps it is just as well. I witnessed the same thing you did. And strange things are going on aboard the _Libra_." Mallory said cautiously, "Perhaps you're too apprehensive, Captain. Just because two passengers are sleepless like yourself, meet in the observation chamber--" "They're not the only two who are still awake. The whole slumbering ship stirs with movement, my boy. A moment or so before you arrived I saw Albert Lemming stealing down the No. 2 corridor--and 'stealing' is the only word that describes his progress. Before that, Mrs. Wilmot had a secret rendezvous with some one in the smoking room; I don't know who her companion was. And Lady Alice has not been in her cabin all night." The older man's eyes sought Mallory's, his gaze was piercing. "My boy, I realize that I no longer rank you. But not so long ago, I was your senior. Once a Patrolman, always a Patrolman, you know. I feel we are in the midst of an intrigue too weighty for one man to solve. Perhaps the experience of an old officer may help. Tell me, is it true what I have heard? That someone aboard this vessel is carrying to the New Fresno garrison the secret of Earth's new ray weapon? If so, the mysterious actions we've witnessed may be espionage, agents of the Kreuther forces--" Mallory said respectfully, "I'm very sorry, sir. I am not permitted to say anything. But I would suggest that in the morning you speak to Captain Algase. I'm sure he'll welcome your offer of assistance." His face clouded. Slowly he said, "Lady Alice. Where did you see her last?" "In the reading room." Mallory saluted, turned and went to the ship's library. As he walked he found himself hoping, why, he did not try to explain to himself, that he would find the room empty. But it was not. A single lamp was lighted inside. As Mallory pressed open the door, shadows danced on the farther wall; the wavering, unidimensional symbol of an upright figure spun and made swift, jabbing motions, dropped. There was a sound of paper rustling, the rough scrape of calfskin on buckram. Then he was in the room, and Lady Alice was seated beside the refectory table, ostensibly reading a book. She glanced up with a little movement of surprise. "Why, Lieutenant, what a pleasant surprise!" Mallory stifled the impulse to say, "Pleasant?" He stared at the girl curiously, reminding himself for the hundredth time since she had come aboard this ship, six days ago, that as man and woman they had no common meeting ground, they lived on planes inordinately diverse. He was Dan Mallory, a Lieutenant of the Solar Space Patrol, a respectable, if underpaid, watchdog of law and order in man's widening circle of influence. Moreover, he was a _young_ lieutenant. It would be years before he earned a major brevet, became an acceptable social figure. Even if a miracle were to happen, if he were to be selected into the envied corps of Lensmen, he would only be a super-cop. While she.... She was Lady Alice Charwell, possessor of a name and title respected for more than eight hundred years. Of course the title was now one of courtesy only; there was no Duchy of Io since the cession of that satellite to the World Council. But once her father had been manor lord of the entire globe; in the _Almanach de Gotha_ her family name and crest still figured prominently. All of which had little to do with the fact that her eyes were blue as the morning mists of Venus, that her limbs were white and straight and supple, softly feminine despite the mannish slack and shirt ensemble she affected, that her hair was a seine of sunlight gold that snared Dan Mallory's heart and quickened his breath. He forced his voice to calmness. He said, "Lady Alice, don't you think it would be better if you were to go to bed? This--this staying up at night--" Her laughter was warm and delicious. "But, Lieutenant! Surely there's no harm in my reading myself to sleep?" "Not a bit," agreed Mallory. He bit his lip. "I might suggest, though, that unless you're reading a book in the Lower Venusian language, it would be easier to read if the book were right side up. And--" He walked past her, swiftly, stared at the book which, hastily thrust back into the bookcase, still jutted out beyond its fellows. "And you might find more interesting reading matter than a tactical survey of Ionian military resources." The girl's face was scarlet. She came to her feet indignantly. "Really, Lieutenant, you go too far! I don't see that it is any of your business." "Lady Alice," said Mallory pleadingly, "a state of war exists on Io. Strange things are happening aboard the _Libra_, things the exact nature of which I am not at liberty to explain. If you will try to forget, for a moment, that I am a space officer--just think of me as a man--will you allow me to make the suggestion that you do absolutely nothing to lay your actions, your motives, open to any sort of suspicion? "I realize that as one who inherited a claim to the title, 'Duchess of Io,' you are deeply interested in current affairs on that colony. Others may read another meaning into your actions, though. At least one person has already hinted that you--" Lady Alice's breathing was swift. "Who?" she demanded. "Who is this person?" "I'm sorry. I can't say. But will you do as I suggest?" There was a moment of silence. Then the girl shut the book on her lap, laid it on the table, rose. "Very well, Lieutenant. I'm a rather poor deceiver, aren't I? Nevertheless, I thank you for your well-meant advice." She moved toward the doorway, grace and poise in her every stride. And she turned there to smile back at him, her voice soft and unamused. "Lieutenant," she said, "you should lay aside your shoulder-straps more often. The man beneath is most--interesting." Then she was gone, leaving behind her a red-faced, speechless, utterly chaotic Dan Mallory. * * * * * At breakfast, Mallory presided at the head of the table. Bud Chandler, arriving a few minutes late, stared at his comrade surprisedly. "Why, Skipper!" he said, "What this trip is doing for your complexion! You look thirty years younger. Where did you get them pretty pink cheeks?" Mallory growled, "Sit down, pal, and shut up. The Old Man's grabbing forty, and he deserves 'em. He and Norton ran into a loft-bound vacuole last night, had a hell of a time pulling out. Didn't you hear the commotion?" "All I heard," complained Bud, "was somebody in my room snoring. It woke me up once, and what made me maddest was when I found out it was me." He nodded to the assembled passengers, sat down and made wry faces over his grapefruit juice. Albert Lemming, the swarthy-skinned jewel merchant en route to his company's headquarters in New Fresno, stared at the acting-Captain curiously. "A vacuole, Lieutenant? What's that?" "A hole in space. Something like an air-pocket in the ether. They aren't particularly dangerous, but the one we ran into was whirling in the wrong direction; if Captain Algase hadn't pulled us out, we'd have lost time on our trip to Io." Mrs. Wilmot looked up. She was not, thought Mallory, a bad looking dame--if you went for that sharp, peaked sort of beauty. But there was a touch of cruelty to the cut of her lips, a pinched look about the nostrils, he didn't go for. And her eyes were too close together. She said, "That would be unfortunate, wouldn't it, Lieutenant? Losing time, I mean?" There was a touch of some subtler meaning behind her words; Mallory couldn't decide just what it was. Maybe it was sarcasm, maybe it was fear, maybe it was mockery. He said, "I think we all share the desire to reach New Fresno as soon as possible, don't we?" Her answer was unexpectedly sharp. "I don't care if we never reach there. I'd rather die peacefully in space than--" "_Susan!_" Her husband's voice sheared the end of the sentence into silence. Her eyes glared defiance at him for a moment, then she returned to the business of eating. Lemming looked embarrassed. Dr. Bonetti shook his head. Captain Smith coughed, suggested mildly, "Captain Algase must be an excellent astronavigator, Lieutenant. I didn't notice a single jarring motion. In _my_ day, escape from a vacuole was a tedious, ship-wracking process. Of course--" His eyes wandered about the table querulously, "Of course there are so many new inventions nowadays. Improvements in all lines. Spacecraft, air-modifiers, armament--" Mallory rose suddenly. He was half angry with the ex-space officer. Smith wasn't being very subtle in his effort to help matters. No doubt the old duck meant well, but-- He said, "If you'll excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I must go to the bridge. Ready, Bud?" Bud Chandler gulped, "Ssswllwmcffy! Ulp!" "What?" "I said, 'As soon as I swallow my coffee!'" repeated the Second Mate aggrievedly. "Can't you understand English? Let's go." Lemming intercepted them as they passed his end of the table. He asked, "Lieutenant, I've been wanting to ask for several days--might I be permitted to visit the bridge? This is my first spaceflight, you know. I've always wanted to see how the controls are operated." "Speak to Captain Algase," suggested Dan. "That's not within my power--Yes, Billy?" The mess-boy had just raced in from the outer deck, trayless, almost breathless. "Y're wanted on the bridge immejitely, Lootenant! Cap'n orders!" His eyes were as big as saucers. "Sparks just got a message through. A message from New Fresno!" Dan had just time to notice, out of the corner of one eye, how this bald pronouncement affected the passengers. He saw the concerted motion that dragged them all to their feet as if they were puppets on a single string; saw the sudden gleam in Wilmot's eye, the worried frown that creased Bonetti's forehead, heard the swift, startled gasp from Lady Alice and intercepted Captain Smith's darting glances from one to another of the listeners. Lemming's voice quavered, "A--a message from New Fresno!" and Susan Wilmot laughed, a short, strident, triumphant burst of sound. Then Dan Mallory saw no more. For with Chandler at his heels, he was pounding through the corridors to the Jacob's ladder that fed the control turret. * * * * * Captain Algase was no beauty even when garbed in his officer's blues; in pajamas and slippers he was something out of a nightmare. His bare legs were like cylindrical hair mattresses, his pajama slacks bulged at the equator as if he were concealing there a half watermelon. His eyes were red and gummy, his temper like something that could be poured out of a cruet. As Dan and Bud entered the control turret he was battering the bewildered radioman's defenses into oblivion with a salvo of verbal thermite. "Message!" he was howling. "You call this thing a message! I'll have you stewed in slow gravy for waking me up like this, Sparks! Of all the damn, dumb--" He saw his two lieutenants. "Never mind, you two. Go back and finish your breakfast. False alarm." "We've finished, Skipper," said Dan. "What's all the commotion?" "This _&![oe])$$[oe]09_!--" began Algase. Sparks said miserably, "But it was Marlowe's hand on the keys, Cap'n! I swear it was. I know the message don't make sense, but you can't fool a bug-pounder. Every radioman has a distinctive sending style. Ask anybody. Even one of them wise-cracking Donovan boys. They'll tell you. And this was Marlowe's hand--" "Let's see," said Mallory. He took the flimsy from his senior's fingers, frowned as he ran an eye over the cryptic symbols. "Numerals! All numerals. Sparks--?" "It was like this. The static interference is still going on. The audio wouldn't bring in voice at all. But as I was twisting the dials, I got this power wave from Lunar III, Joe Marlowe's station. It had a--a sort of cadence. I began putting down the things it sounded like, and--and that's what come out." Chandler, peering over his comrade's shoulder, said, "Well, hell's bells, are you all nuts? It must be a code of some sort. Sparks, we use several numerical codes, don't we?" "Yes." Meekly. "But that ain't one of them, Lieutenant. That don't fit no code in the reg book." Mallory continued to stare at the message. It was long, and undeniably confusing. It read: 83.7-152-232.12-167.64-31.02-16-184-167.64-9.02-1-126.92-144.27- 186.31-50.95-16-175-47.9-16-14.008-4.002-39.944-50.95-173.04-19- 16-10.25-69.87-14.008-16-184-232.12-186.31-39.944-127.61-14.008- 20.183-184-19-186.31-118.70-16-1-74.91-127.61-14.008-74.91-28.06- 32.06-181.4-14.008-140.13-138-92-20.183-184-39.944-222.-32.06- 138.92-162.46-26.97-126.92-140.13-40.08-10.82-26.97-32.06-31.02- 88.92-14.008-16-184-16-14.008-6.94-79.916-39.944-40.08-195.23- 39.944-114.76-150.43-126.92-232.12-114.76-127.61-14.008-32.06- 126.92-19-88.92-140.92-16-127.61-12-47.9-16-14.008-16-19-20.183- 184-78.96-52.01-16.721-225.97-88.92-- "--and there it began all over again," said Sparks. "The same sequence. I agree, it's a code. But what good is a code when we ain't got the key to it. It ain't a simple word substitution cryptogram or a five-by-five. I studied them in the Academy, and tried them all before I brought this to the Captain. In other words, it ain't no good to us unless we've got the clue--and we ain't got the clue!" * * * * * Mallory said, "Billy said this was a message from New Fresno?" "Well, he was wrong, as usual." Determinedly. "It come from Earth's moon. I know Joe Marlowe's fingers when I hear 'em. Damn, we was classmates for three years. Before I got crazy and gave up chemistry for key-pushing--" "Chemistry!" Mallory started. "Did you say chemistry? Did you and Marlowe study chemistry together?" "Yeah. Why?" "Why! Because that's the answer. Marlowe is nobody's fool. He knew you were the radioman aboard the _Libra_, prepared a special code, the key to which would lie in your brain as the 'memory of auld lang syne'--Bud, look at these figures again. You notice the number '16' appearing over and over? Even in that thick skull of yours, '16' suggests--?" "Oxygen," declared Chandler promptly. "The atomic weight of oxygen." "And eighty-three point seven? Forty-seven, nine?" "Krypton. And--let's see--titanium?" "Right! Grab a pencil, pal! I think we've got a solution here. Jot these down--krypton, europium, thorium, erbium--Hold it!" He looked at his companion disgustedly. "Just the symbols, you dope! Don't you see? The symbols of the various elements employ every letter in the English language except 'j' and 'q'--and those are the two least commonly used, anyway. Start over. Krypton--" "Kr," said Bud. "Europium--" "Eu." "Thorium. Erbium--" "'Kreuther'!" howled Bud. "That's it, Dan! Keep going!" * * * * * The message slowly scrawled its way onto paper. A word appeared, another, another. Then: "Ten point twenty-five!" said Mallory. "Followed by 69.87! What the hell are they?" Bud said, "Maybe he made a mistake? Boron's 10.82. Lithium's 6.94--" "No. That's not it," said Mallory. He frowned. Captain Algase had long since wakened completely, was listening to his two juniors with glowing pride. Now he cut the Gordian knot. "Chromium," he suggested, "is fifty-two point one, Dan. The reverse of the number that stumps you." "Right! That's it, Skipper! And the meaning must be that the symbol is to be written in reverse. 'Rc' instead of 'Cr.' There aren't enough combinations to spell every word in the language unless you use some subterfuges like that." "Which makes the word," said Bud, "'forces.' Go on, pal...." Mallory plunged into the heart of the coded letter. "39.944--" "Argon," said Bud, "'A.'" "114.76. Indium. 150.43--" "Samarium. 'Sa.' Next?" "Iodine." "'I.'" The message was finished. Bud handed it to Captain Algase. Mallory's curiosity was at fever pitch. He had not been able to piece the letters together as he went along; he had gained but a smattering here and there. He waited. The skipper read slowly, breaking the message up into coherent sentences. "'Kreuther power behind revolution. Heavy forces now threatening New Fresno--'" "Kreuther, huh?" growled Bud. "I thought so." "'Hasten assistance. Lane warns--'" The captain stopped, stared a moment, glanced swiftly at Mallory. There was a tight note in his voice. "'Lane warns Lady Alice, cabal spy, now in _Libra_--'" "Lady Alice!" blurted Mallory. The warmth of the control turret suddenly weighed down upon him; his brow felt hot, oppressed, as if some gigantic hand had descended upon his temples. "'Captain saith,'" continued Algase, "'intensify protection of new secret ray.'" He crumpled the paper. "And that is all, gentlemen. Mallory--" "Yes, sir?" "Our fears were justified. There _is_ a spy on the _Libra_. We must take no chances. You will arrest Lady Alice Charwell, place her under lock and key for the duration of the voyage." Bud Chandler muttered, "Where does Marlowe get that Old English stuff? 'Saith!' Why didn't he say, 'Says'?" "Because," Mallory answered mechanically, "there is no 'ys' combination in the elemental vocabulary. He had to say it that way." The recollection of his unpleasant duty flooded back on him; with it came protest. "But it can't be true, Captain! There must be some mistake. Surely Lady Alice wouldn't be--" "On the contrary, Daniel," Algase's voice was unusually gentle, "she would be. Once her family owned all of Io. It is more than likely that she should want to see the globe freed of Board control; regain her lost property. She could well be in league with Kreuther to overthrow the present government. According to this, she _is_." "Yes, sir," acknowledged Dan dully. He was thinking of Captain Smith's warning. Of the book Lady Alice had been reading, the book on military tactics. "Shall I make the--the arrest now, sir?" "Yes, Lieutenant." "Very good, sir!" He turned and left the room. His jaw was white and rigid; a dull hurt was behind his eyes.... * * * * * A strained assemblage awaited his return to the mess hall. As he entered the room all conversation ended abruptly; an almost audible silence fell upon the group of passengers. Lemming half rose from his seat, opened his mouth as though to say something, closed it again, his lips a white slit against the green pallor of his cheeks. Lady Alice's eyes were tense, expectant. Captain Smith moved forward to meet him. The ex-space officer's heavy frame was poised and ready; there was a note of subdued eagerness in his voice. He said stridently, "Well, Lieutenant--?" Dan Mallory's patience with the older man was quite exhausted. He said curtly, but in a voice that did not reach the ears of the others, "Captain, I must remind you that you have no authority whatsoever on this ship! I appreciate your willingness to help, but--" Angrily. "For God's sake, man, stop acting like the hero of a Twenty-second century dime novel! Stop fingering your needle-gun, and--" Smith looked embarrassed. His heavy shoulders sagged, and swift contrition swept over Mallory as the one-time officer said, "I--I'm sorry, Lieutenant." Lemming had found words at last. He asked, shakily, "The--the message, Lieutenant? Was it--?" He had to arrest Lady Alice, thought Dan Mallory. But he didn't have to humiliate her. To brand her eternally as a traitor in the eyes of her associates. And he still held doggedly to the hope that somehow, somewhere, had been made a dreadful mistake. He said, "The message was a routine transmission, Mr. Lemming. Of no great importance. Now, will you all be kind enough to disband, quietly?" No one moved. Mallory, glancing at the faces about him, felt again that conviction that an interwoven webbing of intrigue entangled these passengers. He said, firmly, "That is not a request, but a command! You will all retire to the observation deck at once!" The little group stirred. Mallory sought the side of Lady Alice, said, "I've been wanting to show you the ship, Lady Alice. Wouldn't you like to see it now?" Her look of pleased surprise burned him. She said, "Why, Lieutenant, how nice! I would enjoy it." They moved in a direction opposite that of the rest of the passengers. Even so, they did not escape unnoticed. From the corner of his eye Dan Mallory caught the glitter of Dr. Bonetti's spectacles, realized that the dumpy man was watching them shrewdly. And for a moment his eye met that of Captain Garland Smith; the old officer's head was nodding in mused speculation. He, too, had guessed Mallory's concealed purpose. Only the girl herself seemed unaware that this was not merely a pleasantry. Her shoulder brushed that of Mallory as they pressed through a narrow doorway; the soft, feminine warmth of her heaped reproach on the young lieutenant, as did her words. "Lieutenant, I see you can take advice as well as give it. I had no idea, last night, when I suggested that you reveal the man beneath the uniform more often, that you would actually--" They were alone now. And Mallory turned to face her, his voice purposely hard and impersonal. "If you please, Lady Alice! It is my painful duty to inform you that you are under arrest!" "Under ar--!" Her gasp ended in a burst of light laughter. She brought her hand to her forehead in mock salute. "Aye, Lieutenant! Brig, ho! But if I'm not too inquisitive, what charges are preferred against me? Murder? Of course, I _do_ kill time most horribly, but these long trips--or could it be theft? I'm sure I've stolen nothing. Unless you mean--" She paused in sudden confusion; her eyes lifted to his; there was something written there, something breathtaking. Mallory had to hold tight. "The charge," he said tersely, "is--treason! That message was from Lunar III, Lady Alice. It bore a warning from the commander of the Intelligence Division there, advising us that you had been discovered to be a member of Igor Kreuther's organization!" * * * * * The light died from the girl's eyes, the smile on her lips turned to ice. Her slim body stiffened, straightened. And for an instant Dan Mallory saw, with swift prescience, that this girl was not all charm and allure; that beneath her tempting softness there was a core, steel-strong, of strength and daring. "Treason! Treason, you--you blind fool!" she spat. "You dare accuse _me_, Lady Alice Charwell, Grand Duchess of Io, Lady of the Rocket and Globe, Maid of the Golden Crest, of--of treason! Sir! My family ruled Io when that dominion was first discovered. For almost three hundred years the Charwell crest has--" "Please, Lady Alice!" pleaded Mallory. "I know how you feel about it. To your mind, your actions were not treasonable. But Io is no longer yours; it is under the guardianship of the Control Board. And you mustn't talk this way. I will be called to testify against you; anything you say will be convicting evidence--" He touched her shoulder as though the warmth of his hand might melt its icy stiffness. She shrugged herself loose disdainfully. "I think we can dispense with the amenities, Lieutenant. The smile on the lips ... the gracious invitation to 'see the ship' ... the friendly hand of comfort...." There was scorn, anger, pain in her eyes. "It is my right to demand the privilege of communicating with my accusers, is it not? Those on Earth who--?" "I'm sorry. No audio transmission is possible because of the blanket-static. The message came through in a code." "I see. I must wait, then, until we reach New Fresno. Never mind, Lieutenant Mallory. You have said enough. I presume you are placing me under guard? Where--in my own quarters? Very well. If you will be kind enough to escort me there!" She laughed brittlely. "But, of course, you will. You couldn't let a traitor out of your sight, could you?" In throbbing, bitter silence they moved down the corridors to Lady Alice's stateroom. There she spoke for the last time. "The message that accused me, Lieutenant. Might I be permitted to hear the damning evidence? What did it say?" There was no harm, thought Mallory miserably, in telling her that. The words were like acid, etched into his brain. He repeated them. She listened intently, frowned--and then a new, curious look stole into her eyes. She said, "But--" "Yes?" said Mallory. "Yes?" The look faded. She laughed scornfully. "Hoping to hear more 'convicting evidence,' Lieutenant? I'm so sorry to disappoint you. Now, will you lock the door after me, please?" Dan Mallory made a last try. It would cost him his rocket if anyone heard his words, but-- "Lady Alice," he pleaded, "I'm honestly sorry about this. I don't believe you are guilty. If you'll trust me, tell me your side of the story, I'll do everything in my power to--" "You have done," said the girl tightly, "more than enough right now. Guard me well, Lieutenant!" With a short, mocking laugh she slipped through the door, Mallory waited a long minute, then turned the key in the lock. Its grate was a taunting sneer. He returned to the bridge.... * * * * * He couldn't help overhearing the end of that conversation. The runway that fed the control turret was narrow and metal-walled; it formed a perfect soundbox. Moreover, the door was ajar. The voice was Captain Algase reached his ears perfectly as he approached the room. "--don't want to have to remind you again, Norton, that it is highly unethical for a space officer to become involved with a woman passenger. Especially with a married woman." And the surly voice of Third Mate Rick Norton saying, "Very well, sir!" Then footsteps approaching the door, a figure confronting his squarely, Norton flushing, snarling, "Getting an earful, Mallory?" Dan was in no mood for bickering. He said, "Don't mind me, Norton. I've known for months you were a skirt-chaser. I don't consider it any of my business." Norton's cheeks flamed. He said insultingly, "And I suppose you stand behind your stripes as you say that?" "Forget the stripes." Mallory looked at his fists. "I stand behind these." "Good!" Norton swung. He was a well-built man, a strong man. His blow packed dynamite--but it needed a target to set off the percussion cap. It found no target but a moving one. Mallory ducked, rolled with the punch, came up inside the Third Mate's guard to land a short, jabbing left to the midsection, a blasting right to the point of Norton's jaw. Norton gasped and collapsed soggily. Arms behind him reached out to support his falling weight; other lips behind Mallory whistled softly as Bud Chandler, coming up to serve his trick, witnessed the swift, decisive exchange of blows. And Captain Algase, releasing Norton's inert form, glared at Mallory. "Well! Well, Lieutenant, I think you know we have rules against brawling?" "Aye, sir!" "But--" Captain Algase stroked his jaw speculatively, "In this case--Chandler, get him below! It served him right. Maybe he'll spend this rest period sleeping, instead of stirring up trouble amongst the passengers. Dan, my boy--" He led the way back into the turret, completed the log record for the previous trick, handed it to Mallory, who had slipped into the control bucket. "Twenty-four more Earth hours and we'll be there," he said. "And, believe me, I'll be glad when this trip ends. Trouble. Nothing but trouble from beginning to end. Long tricks and short tempers. Norton getting mixed up with that Wilmot dame--a damn' hussy if I ever saw one, and her husband a neurotic wreck. Smith bothering the blistering Hades out of me, wanting to 'help' catch spies and a thousand other--" He glanced at Mallory, who had stiffened at the word. His glance was sympathetic. "I'm sorry I had to ask you to arrest her, Daniel. But it's experiences like that that make strong men out of space officers. "You have to be hard in this business. Crime hides beneath strange disguises. The sweetest smiles, the friendliest hand-shakes, the most honeyed words, may conceal--" "If you please, sir!" said Dan Mallory, white-lipped. "I know, lad. I've seen the way you looked at her. But remember--forty thousand innocent lives! Had she learned the secret of that new weapon, our voyage might have been disastrous. From this distance she could have made a flight to Io in one of the auxiliary safety rockets, given the plans to Kreuther's forces. The very weapon we look to for salvation would have been used against us. Io might have become a nest of rebellion, instead of a peaceful member of the solar family. Now that we've snared our spy, the messenger--whoever he is--will be safe." On the visiplate it was a glowing red spark, but in the _perilens_ before him it was a gigantic orb dominating the heavens through which the _Libra_ hurtled. Jupiter; monster of Sol's scattered brood, untamed sphere of writhing gases and vague mystery, itself a pseudo-parent emanating enough heat to make its far-flung satellites livable worlds. Soon they would fling themselves, they aboard the _Libra_, halfway around that gigantic orb, settle to the small body now wanly visible as a silver crescent. * * * * * Dan Mallory punched a control-key savagely, felt the _Libra_ shake itself into a slightly changed curve, turned to his superior. "I'm not so sure of that, sir. Oh, I'm not trying to defend Lady Alice. Earth's Intelligence officers don't make mistakes--not mistakes of that magnitude, anyway. But there are other passengers I don't trust. Lemming. Wilmot. Dr. Bonetti. Why are they aboard the _Libra_? Why were they so excited when they heard we'd received a message from Lunar III? Suppose one of them is also a spy?" "Or suppose," said the skipper, "one of them bears the secret of the new ray weapon. Wouldn't that one naturally be excited?" "But the others?" Mallory inquired. "I don't know. You may have something there, Daniel. I'm still taking no chances. I've put Aiken on guard at Lady Alice's door. If anyone tries to liberate her--What _is_ it, Sparks?" He snapped the query at the intercommunications box which was spluttering and growling. The radioman's tone was weary. "It's Mr. Wilmot again, sir. He insists on talking to you." "Tell Mr. Wilmot I will see him at midday mess." Sparks was stubborn about it. "But he insists his message is important, sir. He demands to see you at once. Says--" "_Demands!_" The skipper's jowls reddened. "Please tell Mr. Wilmot passengers do not _demand_ favors of spaceship officers. I will see him at mess. That is all!" And he cut the communications board; turned to Mallory angrily. "That's why I didn't put you on report for slugging Norton. Wilmot's mad as a hornet and I don't blame him. Norton catting around after his wife--" Chandler appeared, grinning. He said to Mallory, "What a sock, pal, what a sock! If that guy counts sheep in his sleep, he's going to wake up allergic to mutton. Wish I had done it. He's a grouchy son-of-a-- What's biting you?" Mallory said, "That's just it, damn it! I don't quite know. It just came upon me like a flash that someone said something funny ... something that didn't ring true ... but I can't remember what it was. If I could--" "See, Skipper? It's got him, too. We're all going to be candidates for the straitjacket squad when we finish this trip." Algase smiled sourly. "Well, don't lift gravs for the next twenty-four hours, that's all I ask. See you later, boys." He turned to leave; was interrupted by the buzz of the intercommunications box. "What, again! Yes, Sparks--what is it this time? If it's Wilmot again, tell him to go beat his brains out with a rusty bar! I'll see him at--" Sparks' voice was harsh with excitement. "It is Wilmot, sir! But I can't tell him anything. He's dead, sir! Murdered!" * * * * * Chandler said, "Murdered? Mi-god!" Captain Algase said a more effective and less printable thing which ended in, "Come on!" And he and Chandler pounded down the runway, their footsteps ringing on the Jacob's-ladder, disappearing in the distance. Dan Mallory, his thoughts chaotic, sat chained to his bucket seat by the obligation of guiding the spaceship through the treacherous void. His fingers played over the control keys automatically; slowly the chaos left his brain and cold, clear, reasoning thought took its place. Wilmot dead. Why? The first thought that suggested itself was Norton. Motive--jealousy. The desire to get Susan Wilmot's husband out of the way so-- But that was illogical. Norton was a skirt-chaser and a quixotic fool, but he wasn't a criminal. Murder was not in his line. Why else, then? Because Wilmot had been the bearer of the formula? Had he been slain by a spy? And if so, by whom? Lady Alice was in her cabin, or at least--with a swift constriction of the throat--Dan hoped she was. He pressed the intercommunications button hurriedly; Sparks' face appeared before him on the visiplate. "Get me the M-13 plate, Sparks! The one in the stateroom passageway!" The scene shifted. Aiken, a space gob, looked up as the audio before him glowed into life, touched his forelock respectfully. "Lieutenant Mallory?" "The prisoner is in her stateroom?" "Aye, sir." "She hasn't been out?" "Not for a moment, sir." The sailor added, "Might I ask the lootenant what the h--I mean, what's going on?" "Plenty!" snapped Dan. "That's all, sailor. Carry on!" The glow faded. Mallory shook his head. No dice on that hunch. Then what else--? The thought came so suddenly, so breathtakingly, that it literally lifted him out of his chair. There was but one possible answer! The reverse of his former theory. Wilmot was neither the bearer of the precious secret nor a spy. He was the "innocent bystander"; the traditional victim who, from time immemorial, has always been the one to get bopped. Somehow the nervous, jittery little man had learned _who_ the spy was. He had attempted to communicate his knowledge to Captain Algase; the petulance of his own nature had rendered this impossible. And the spy, knowing that Wilmot had learned his secret, had-- Again he pressed the button. This time Sparks said, "Lieutenant Mallory? Have you seen Mr. Lemming? The captain wants to question him, but he can't be found anywhere--" "Never mind that!" rapped Mallory. "Sparks, I want to know this. How was Wilmot killed?" "Rayed, sir. Needled." "I thought as much. And who was the first to find him?" "Dr. Bonetti, sir. He's being held under suspicion. He confesses to having supplied Wilmot with drugs, sir. _Teklin-root_, sir. (That would be, thought Mallory swiftly, the package surreptitiously exchanged in the observation room.) But he claims he didn't kill Wilmot--" "Quick, man! Was Captain Smith anywhere around the radio turret when this happened?" "Why--why, he _had_ been, sir. But he left before Mr. Wilmot did--" Captain Algase's face appeared in the visiplate beside that of Sparks. "Daniel, my boy, keep your eye peeled for Lemming. He's disappeared. Susan Wilmot has told us he isn't a jewel merchant at all; he's a jewel thief! Fleeing Earth to gain settler's amnesty on Io. Wilmot knew his secret, tried to blackmail him. Lemming threatened--" "You're after the wrong man!" screamed Dan Mallory. "Captain, I see it all, now! The whole story. These other things have confused us. Sparks, swiftly--get me that M-13 plate again!" * * * * * The scene spun, changed dizzily. Once again Mallory was gazing down the corridor where Aiken had stood guard. But Aiken no longer stood before Lady Alice Charwell's door. He lay there, limp, still forever. A smoking hole charred his broad chest, crimson stirred sluggishly from the needle-ray's telltale trail. The door of the stateroom was open. A hoarse bellow told Dan that the captain was seeing the same scene. "_She_ did it! She killed him and escaped!" "No!" roared Mallory. "_Smith_ did it! The man we should have suspected all the time; the man who _admitted_ his guilt, but I was too blind to see it. Kreuther's spy. The renegade space officer--Captain, did you feel that?" His space-trained senses had felt the swift, tiny moment of jarring repercussion that meant only one thing--that from one of the escape ports a life-skiff, an auxiliary safety rocket, had slipped from its base on the _Libra_, taken off into space! "He's escaping! He's kidnaped her and taken off in a life-skiff. Bud! Take over! I'm lifting gravs!" And for the first time in his career as an officer of the SSP, Lieutenant Daniel Mallory violated, deliberately, a rule of the Space Patrol handbook. He rammed the _Libra's_ controls into the robot hands of the Iron Mike, and abandoned his post in mid-flight! * * * * * It was not that he considered himself more capable than his captain or the second mate. His move was dominated by only one thing, the urgent need for haste. Safety rockets are, as everyone knows, blindingly fast. Much faster than the heavier, sturdier, cruising vessels that bear them like so many unfledged wallabies in a pouch. Give Smith a flying start and he would never be apprehended. And _he_, Dan Mallory, was much nearer a life-skiff port than the other officers up in the loft of the radio turret. Slipping, skidding, stumbling in his haste, he raced to the nearest port, flung open the control-bar, threw himself into the small, tear-shaped vehicle lying there. There were regulations demanding that air, food, water supplies be ascertained before flight in one of these was attempted. But there was no time for such nonsense now. Each second seemed an hour as Mallory warmed the hypatomic motors of the skiff, rammed the button that opened the _Libra's_ outer shell, struck another that catapulted the safety-rocket away from its parent craft. Then the dark of the womblike casing was gone, and he was blasting, under his own power, through space illumined with the candle-gleams of a trillion galactic motes. He set his range-finder and attractor--but even as their needles found their objective, his searching eyes located it. A tiny, silvery gleam against the tawny night ahead--a gleam from the stern of which flared burst upon flaming burst of superheated light. The rockets of Smith's skiff, hell-bent for Io! Minutes _had_ been precious! Vitally so. Already the little craft was countless thousands of miles before him. It was a wide margin that separated him; and in that margin lay the difference between freedom and peonage for forty thousand Earth-men, millions of Ionians, the difference between life and death for the girl Smith had kidnaped, the difference between victory and defeat for the Solar Patrolmen. There was only one way to catch Smith. Recognizing the fact, Dan Mallory bit his lip, set his jaw stubbornly. Acceleration! Acceleration great enough to fling him across the yawning void, enable him to snare his quarry in tensiles.... And he was not strapped! No safety corset to hold tight the straining cords of his viscera, no yards of gauze padding to keep his wracked body from literally flinging itself to shreds. No-- He glanced about him hurriedly. There were piles of cushions, soft, plump, airy, scattered about the metallic cockpit. He jammed a dozen of these behind him, under him, about him. There was an oxy-helmet in its container beside him; he thrust this over his head. Its rubberoid halter settled about his chest, his shoulders. At least his straining eyes would not bulge from their sockets; by adjustment--if he could raise a hand--he could compensate accelerative force with pressure. He drew a deep breath. Then, recklessly, wrenched the dial of the motor to full acceleration! * * * * * It was as though ten thousand fiery demons tore at his body with claws of flame. A weight, massive, imponderable, kicked the breath out of his lungs, forced it from his gaping mouth and flared nostrils into the helmet he wore. He gulped and strangled, fighting to draw into a shrunken chest a breach of fleeing life. One hand moved--or tried to--to his throat in an instinctive gesture of distress. The hand moved a half inch from his knee, flung itself back into his stomach like a leaden weight. The quick burst of nausea saved his life, because tortured ductless glands released a stream of adrenalin into his churning blood-stream, the miraculously adaptable body of Man rose once again above its normal limitations. Air crept into his lungs, his heart's tumultuous pounding no longer throbbed a threnody in his eardrums. Still he could move with only the greatest of effort--but he could move! And his eyes, no longer blinded by the red mist that had drowned their sockets, saw the rocket-flares before him seem to literally stop in mid-flight, race back toward him! A great exultation seized him. He was hardly aware that bright blood had burst from his nostrils, and that as he opened his lips to shout hoarsely the corners of his mouth drooled red. The craft he pursued whirled fiercely toward him; like flame-riding charioteers they jockeyed across the cosmic wastes. Smith knew he was there. Must know. But--Mallory's grin was the grimace of a gargoyle--he didn't have the guts to duplicate the young lieutenant's mad burst of speed. He was depending on other weapons. Even as Mallory experienced the thought, a stabbing beam spat backward from the other rocket, a coruscating ray of silver that bore sudden death. But Mallory had anticipated the move; his slow hand had been straining for seconds to forestall it. He pressed a lever--the ship slid into a dive. Another and the terrible pressure lifted from his limbs, his body felt suddenly light and buoyant, strength surged back to him with singing sweetness. Again that stabbing ray searched for him. But Dan Mallory was no novice at the art of space warfare. He spun his craft into a cycloid Laegland arc, the lethal ray spent itself on indestructible space, and when Mallory came out of his maneuver he was within scant miles of his objective. Grinning savagely, his hand sought the button that would smash Smith's ship into oblivion--then stayed! Lady Alice! He could not destroy her with Smith. Because now he knew, certainly and surely, two things. One of which was that she must be the bearer of the secret ray formula to Io. In no other way could you account for the fact that Smith had dared everything to kidnap her. She carried the secret, not in papers, but in her mind. Were she to die--and might the gods of space forbid that his hand should destroy her loveliness!--Kreuther would still be the victor. For with her would perish the final hope of the besieged New Fresno garrison. The other thing he realized was-- But there was no time for that now. His fingers spurned the ray button; found another. A jolt shivered the space-skiff from fore-quartz to rocket as his tensile beam reached across the closing miles, fastened its grip on Smith's craft. Mallory's grin tightened. He cut motors. His tensile beam would contract like a rubber band, drawing the two ships together. Smith, feeling that beam upon him, unable to sheer it off, would not be able to turn a lethal radiation upon him now. For the tensile beam was a perfect conduction ray. To destroy one ship meant to destroy both. There was a groan behind him. Shocked, he turned. From the storage bin, bleeding from nose, ears, mouth, body twisted as though wrung through some gigantic mangler, crawled the missing jewel thief--Albert Lemming! * * * * * Mallory choked, sickened. "Lord, man! How did you get aboard here? Why--" Liquid breath gurgled in Lemming's throat. Glaze filmed his eyeballs. "Tried to--" he panted, "--stow away. Wilmot dead--knew suspect me--hid--" His head fell forward to the floor. Dan fingered his pulse, found there not the feeblest stir of life. Lemming, fleeing the dreaded breath of suspicion, had lost the more important breath of life. The miracle was that he had survived, even so long, the tremendous acceleration that had taxed all Mallory's space-trained, protected faculties. And the two space-skiffs closed inexorably the gap between them. Mallory's quick brain leaped to the final problem. But before he could solve it, the small skiff audio burst into speech. "Well done, whoever you are!" said the voice from the other skiff. "But you realize it won't do you any good?" Mallory rasped, "I'm coming alongside in a minute, Smith. Stand by to surrender peaceably, or--" "Or?" mocked the ex-space officer. "So it's you, Lieutenant? I might have guessed it. Your valor is exceeded only by your lack of foresight. I repeat, your hectic pursuit has done you no good." "Never mind the talk. Stand by. This is the end," said Mallory. "This is checkmate, Smith." "Not checkmate, my gallant young friend," corrected Smith. "_Stalemate._ True, you hold me captive in your beam. But to what end? You can't hope to take me alive. Whenever I choose, I can blast you and myself into atoms. And with us goes--" he paused significantly--"Lady Alice! Ah, you are silent, Lieutenant? I thought you would be. Of course, I'm an old man. These youthful romancings no longer interest me. But--bless us, she's much too beautiful to die, isn't she, Lieutenant?" Lady Alice's voice interrupted. "Take him, Dan! Don't think about me. I'm not afraid to--" "You hear, Lieutenant? The girl's gallantry is a fit match for your own. But by this time, surely, you have realized that if she dies, the secret of the new ray weapon dies with her. I think my leader's forces will have taken New Fresno before a second messenger reaches Io." It was the truth. Knowing that, Dan Mallory groaned. This was a deadlock; one that neither force could break. He said slowly, "Well, Captain? What is your price for Lady Alice's safety?" "My own," replied the renegade spaceman promptly, "and the secret she bears. I'm not an unreasonable man, Lieutenant. Even though--" bitterness edged his words--"even though the Solar Space Patrol did take the best years of my life, squeeze the heart out of me, throw my aging body into the discard like a dried pulp. No, I'm not unreasonable--" So that was it. The self-pity of an aging man, perhaps a man gone off his gravs from the letdown after active years. That was why Smith had renounced his SSP pledge, gone over to the other side. Captain Algase's words rang in Dan's memory. "Where there are new causes, there are traitors to the old--" Even a spaceman was not exempt from human weakness. "If Lady Alice will surrender her secret to me," the renegade captain was continuing, "with convincing proof that the formula she gives me is no lie, I will permit you both to live. I will allow you to keep one of these ships, return to safety--" Mallory thought feverishly. It was against his every scruple to parley thus with the other man. But he could gain nothing by destroying himself and Lady Alice. Alive, there was always a chance they might win through to the New Fresno fort, carry their message, howsoever belated. If they died, Kreuther and his hirelings would surely win. He said, "Very well, Smith. I accept. Give him the formula, Lady Alice." Her answer was tense, vivid. "No! No, Dan, don't trust him! He won't keep his promise. I know he won't!" "We must take that chance." Grimly. "Tell him!" * * * * * The audio went dead. Mallory waited impatiently. Somewhere, lost in the immensity that engulfed them, the _Libra_ surged through space on a mission now in the hands of the deadlocked three. So near that it was more sunlike than Sol, Jupiter swung in its titanic orbit about Man's luminary. The endless night was spangled with an infinitude of stars. The stars toward which Man, yearning, groped--while Man's feet still stumbled through the muck and mire of deceit.... And the audio woke to life again. Smith's voice was triumphant. "Very well, Lieutenant. I am satisfied. I have finished the demolition of power and arms units in this ship. Its radio, however, still operates. I think it will sustain life for you until your friends arrive. I am ready to board your ship." Lady Alice's cry broke in, "Be careful, Dan! He'll kill you! He--" There was the sound of flesh upon flesh, a silence. Then, "Well, Lieutenant?" Dan said, "Come ahead." "You will take your place," said Smith, "in the pilot's seat where I can see you from the moment I enter the lock. Put your hands above your head. Do not move or turn as I enter. If you do--" "Come ahead," repeated Dan. The audio disconnected. Dan sprang into motion. He believed Lady Alice's warning. And he was prepared to meet subtlety with subtlety; deceit with deceit. Not yet had Smith won. He bent and lifted the broken body of Albert Lemming. Hurriedly he jammed the oxy-helmet down over the dead man's bloody features. He grunted, "Sorry, pal!" as he hoisted Lemming into the pilot's chair, forced stiffening arms back and up in token of surrender. The high back of the chair, the padded cushions made the form hold its position. He finished just in time. There was a scraping at the airlock. The two ships had drifted side to side now, and entry was a simple matter. Mallory ducked back into the compartment from which Lemming had emerged. His needle gun was in his hand, poised, ready.... Smith entered quietly. He glanced once at the figure in the pilot's chair, said, "Don't move, Lieutenant--" and his arm raised. The girl's warning had been all too true. There was rankest treachery in the leveling of that gun, in the fiery needle dart that hurled across the chamber, burying itself in Lemming's defenseless head. The stench of charred flesh filled the room. The dead body wobbled, lurched to the floor. And-- "Now, _you_ stand still, Smith!" gritted Mallory. Smith whirled, his jaw dropping open. In his eyes dawned horror, disappointment, rage. He cried out once, raised his gun. That was how he died. With his traitorous fingers lifted for the last time against a man who wore the uniform he had once worn ... and had disgraced.... * * * * * Afterward, as they stood in the control turret of the _Libra_, watching a sober-faced Rick Norton plot the landing that would bring new life to the Ionian colonists, swift retribution to the fomenters of the uprising, Bud Chandler whaled his comrade's back enthusiastically. "Guy," he said, "in words of one syllable, you're terrific!" "That's not one syllable," grinned Mallory. "All right, then, you're a lallapalooza! But how the blue asteroids did you get onto the fact Smith was the guy?" Dan said, "It came to me almost too late. It had been worrying me subconsciously ever since I had to--" here he flushed--"had to arrest Lady Alice. I knew that someone had, in conversation with me, said something that didn't ring true. And when Wilmot was killed for having discovered the truth about Smith, I suddenly remembered what it was. "The night before we got the message from Lunar III, assuring us that Kreuther was behind the revolution, Smith had mentioned to me, quite casually, that he suspected there were on the _Libra_ 'espionage agents of the Kreuther forces.' What he was attempting to do, of course, was ally himself with us in order to divert suspicion. But he tipped his hand by that little slip of the tongue." Lady Alice smiled. She said, "Well, you're not awfully smart. Any of you. I knew he was the spy as soon as I heard the message from Earth." Captain Algase interrupted, "Yeah, that message! I'm going to raise an assortment of hell about that. Causing us to arrest the one person on board we could really trust." "And all," smiled the girl, "because of one, small, chemical symbol that you misread. Oh, yes, I understand now. I've seen the original. Bud--you went to the Academy, didn't you?" "Why--why, yes." "Your professor there must have been quite an old man. I mean your chemistry prof." "He was. Ancient. But what has that got to do with it?" "Everything. He taught you the old, the original chemical symbol for the element samarium. 'Sa.' The more common symbol, the generally accepted one, is 'Sm.' Now you see what a great difference that one little error makes in the meaning of the message. You read it: "'Lane warns Lady Alice, cabal spy, now on _Libra_. Captain saith intensify protection of new secret ray.'" "And it should have been read," broke in Dan Mallory, understanding at last, "'Lane warns Lady Alice cabal spy now on _Libra_--Captain Smith! Intensify protection--' and so on. It was a warning _to_ you, not about you!" "Exactly. Naturally, I was--well, indignant when I was placed under arrest. Afterward, I began to think it a good idea. Confined to my quarters, guarded, I would be completely safe. But unfortunately Captain Smith guessed, when I was arrested, that _I_ was the bearer of the formula. So he killed my guard, seized the skiff, and kidnaped me. "Saith!" grunted Bud Chandler disgustedly. "I told you that word was phony. Joe Marlowe never used good English in his life when a cuss-word would do just as well. Hey! Where are you two going?" It is doubtful whether Dan Mallory heard the question. There was one other little matter that needed clearing up--but soon! That was the way Lady Alice Charwell, in the moment of their mutual peril, had hurdled the amenities of speech, addressed him not as "Lieutenant," or even as plain "Mallory," but as-- "Dan," he said. "You called me 'Dan.' It's not right, Lady Alice. You shouldn't do things like that unless you mean them. And I--" "Suppose," she asked, "I like that part of your name best. It is a nice name, you know." Dan Mallory's big hands pawed futilely at the blue of his uniform. "So," he croaked, "is Mallory. And--and I guess I'm completely crazy. I couldn't ask you to share a name like that. I'm just a space cop. And you're a Lady. A titled Lady." She said softly, "A Lady, Dan? There is no Duchy of Io any more. That's a thing of the past, and my title is only a courtesy. And, oh--I'm so tired of courtesies. I'm a space cop, too, now. There's nothing in the rules to keep two cops from teaming up, is there? Oh, you big, damn, dumb idiot--!" Her face, smiling up at his, was inclined at just the right angle. They told him afterward that Rick Norton made a swell landing. He didn't believe it. For it seemed to Dan Mallory that the whole cosmos was swirling and dancing and twisting upside down in a delirium of delight.... 
37587	----	THE KATIPUNAN An Illustrated Historical and Biographical Study of the Society which Brought about the Insurrection of 1896-98 & 1899 Taken From Spanish State Documents By FRANCIS ST. CLAIR Manila Tip. "Amigos del Pais," Palacio 258 1902 THE KATIPUNAN Or The Rise and Fall of the Filipino Commune By FRANCIS ST. CLAIR Manila Tip. "Amigos del Pais," Palacio 258 1902 TO THE HONORABLE FILIPINOS Who, True to the Principles of Patriotism have not harbored in their hearts sentiments of ingratitude toward that noble Nation which raised them to the level of civilization to which they have attained, not have at any time conspired against the lawfully constituted authorities, Spanish or American, of this Archipelago. To such honorable Filipinos as these, it gives me the greatest pleasure to dedicate this small work, as a token of the genuine respect in which they are held by The Author. INTRODUCTION «Manila, 21st (Aug. '96).--The Governor General to the Colonial Minister: Vast organization of secret societies discovered with anti-national tendencies. Twenty-two persons detained, among them the Gran Oriente (of Philippine freemasonry) of the Philippines, and others of importance..................................................... ............................................................... Immediate action taken and special judge will be designated for greater activity in the proceedings............................ ............................................................... --Blanco. Such was the telegram sent by Gen. Blanco and read by Sr. Castellano in the Spanish Camara, announcing the discovery of the revolutionary movement headed by the Katipunan, the bastard child of Filipino freemasonry. Freemasonry in the Philippines was but a pretext: under this pretext the enemies of Spain, in days of Spanish rule, and the enemies of the U. S. in these days of American rule, put themselves into close and secret communion, to earn out plans of revolt. This Filipino masonry cast its net far and wide, and in its meshes were caught many fish of all classes and conditions; some of them men of money who sought in masonry what money could easily purchase,--honors and titles, grand crosses and medals; others were men whose pockets were more or less replete, and whose aims were of a great variety of natures; whilst others were men whose treasuries were more or less empty and who sought in masonry what they did not care to earn by honest labor--a livelihood. Masonry was imported into the Archipelago, shortly after the Spanish Revolution, and was, during the first years of its life, confined to Spaniards; but later on it opened its doors to half-castes and indians. In 1887 it extended by leaps and bounds; but upon the coming of Gen. Weyler to the Archipelago, as Governor General, in 1888, it dwindled away almost into nothingness. Gen. Weyler was, and has ever shown himself, a patriotic Spaniard; and he would not permit the existence here, under his Governorship, of anything which tended to the detriment of his country. Well did the masons of the Philippines and elsewhere know this, and hence the vicious and cruel campaign they carried on against him both in the Peninsular and Cuba, but more especially in the U. S. of America. The Katipunan, the bastard child of filipino masonry, that ungrateful offspring which was unfaithful even to the mother which brought it forth, was a society within the bosom of which was redeveloped the malay instinct which had lain dormant for some three centuries. This instinct, brutal, savage, intensely ignorant, immoral, ungodly; an instinct found still among some of the uncivilized tribes of the mountain fastnesses of Luzon; an instinct once almost blotted out after many years of most difficult labor and self-sacrifice on the part of the Religious Orders, once again burst forth in all its strength. The indian left to himself, deprived of the curbing influence of the christian religion, speedily falls back into the condition of depravity in which Urdaneta and Legazpi found him. The malay instinct, like the volcano, vomits forth when least expected; the history of the revolt of the Tagalogs gives overabundant proof of it. Take one by one the many leading characters in the revolution, and the instinct will be found so plainly marked, that it is unmistakable. Take for instance Marcelo H. del Pilar, in whose brain was conceived the plot of the Katipunan farsical-tragedy; Andrés Bonifacio, whose duty was the materializing of the plot; the Lunas, Juan especially, who had some time previous, in Paris, given an example of how easily the malay burned through the veneer of civilization to which the Filipino indian is susceptible; and so on, including the Aguinaldos, the Mabinis, the Agoncillos and even many of those, who in these days boast in public of their americanist ideas, and in private plot with treacherous zeal to overthrow the government of those they call their deliverers from Spanish tyranny. In them all may be traced the strange instinct of the old time filipino indian. Entering the fold of freemasonry, they threw off the bridle of religion which restrained them; loosing respect for Almighty God and for their faith they soon lost respect for others and for themselves. The result is well known. History, the history of the last five or six years, has shown it to us. It is of this society of notables--for such is the meaning of the full title of the Katipunan--that I wish to say a few words in the following pages. I have taken as a foundation for my study, a very concise statement of the whole situation, drawn up by Capt. Olegario Diaz, Commander of the Guardia Civil Veterana de Manila. This document being an official statement, is of vital interest in the study of the birth, life and internal corruption of that diabolical association which, gigantic though it was, comparatively speaking, could, by reason of its infantility, have been easily stifled, had it been dealt with, with a strong hand. I have taken the document as a base, and by a series of notes in the form of a somewhat more lengthy appendix, have endeavored to provide my readers with a file of interesting items of historical value. This pamphlet is not intended to be a history of the rebellion; I have endeavored to confine myself to the society which brought about the revolt, and if at any time I have strayed from the path I laid out for myself, it has been because there was by the wayside some flower I wished to pluck to add to the bouquet I herewith present to you. STATEMENT OF CAPT. OLEGARIO DIAZ [1] FREEMASONRY It is fully proved that freemasonry has been the principal factor for the development in these islands, not only of advanced (2) and anti-religious ideas, but chiefly for the foundation of secret societies, possessing a character especially separatist (3). This conviction I have come to after the examination of a countless number of documents, and the much correspondence this Corps (4) fell in with, after laborious work and investigations, in the possession of several well known filibusters (5) who are at the present time prisoners; these documents and parcels of correspondence were included in the military suit tried before Colonel D. Francisco Olive (6). «Some 20 years ago, there was installed in this country, a lodge dependent upon the Gr. Or. Español (7): a lodge which was inoffensive in its beginning because it was composed of peninsular Spaniards, with the absolute exclusion of the native element of the Archipelago. In this form it developed languidly until the year 1890. «During this epoch, the Filipino colony resident in Madrid, Hong-Kong and Paris, in the which figured as exalted separatists José Rizal (8), Marcelo H. del Pilar (9), Graciano Lopez, Mariano Ponce, Eduardo Lete, Antonio and Juan Luna (10), Julio Llorente, Salvador V. del Rosario, Doroteo Cortés (11), José Baza, Pedro Serrano (12), Moisés Salvador, Galicano Apacible and many others, who were in communication with the seditious elements of Manila, strove hard to influence don Miguel Morayta (13), (Grand master of the Oriente Español), in Madrid, and with whom they sustained close relations, to the end that the statutes should be reformed so that the native element might be affiliated, and even more, that lodges of a character exclusively Tagalog (14), might be created in the Archipelago. Conferences, general gatherings, and finally compromises of certain magnitude decided in the favor of the Filipinos, Morayta thus, unconsciously sowing the seed, the fruit of which we are to-day gathering. «D. Alejandro Roji, resident in this capital, Captain of Engineers, was nominated general delegate to direct the works, and with ample powers from Morayta, came the native school-teacher Pedro Serrano, who enjoyed in Manila the confidence and protection of the said Colonel, assisted by the Flores, lieutenants of Infantry, Numeriano Adriano, Ambrosio Rianzares, Juan Zulueta, Faustino Villaruel (15), Agustin de la Rosa, Ambrosio Salvador, Andrés Bonifacio (16), Apolinario Mabini (17), Estanislao Legaspi Domingo Franco (18), Román Basa, Deodato Arellano, Antonio Salazar, Felipe Zamora, Nazario Constantino, Bonifacio Arevalo, Pedro Casimiro, Dionisio Ferraz, Timoteo Paez and a thousand others, all indians, but having a career or a comfortable social position; they commenced a silent and tenacious propaganda which resulted in 180 Tagalog lodges, extended throughout the territory of Luzon and part of the Bisayas, being constituted in 5 years. The character of the native (19), so propitious to all the mysterious and symbolic, easily accustomed itself to the ridiculous practices of freemasonry: the initiations (20), the proofs (21), the oaths (22), attributes, signs and pass words, and the pseudonyms, all and everything surrounded by shade and mystery, appealed to the native and served him as an educative ladder which prepared his mind for his entry into other associations of graver transcendencies, according as the initiators and apostles of filibusterism, Rizal, Pilar, López, Cortés and Zulueta had forseen, as can be proved by that correspondence which has come to my hands. «In order to direct the organization of the lodges dependant upon the Gran Oriente Español, there was constituted by Morayta, a Gran Consejo Regional (23) which received its instructions from him, and which was presided over by Ambrosio Flores (h. Muza), and formed of Adriano, Villaruel, Flores (A), Mabini, Paez, Zamora, Mariano and Salazar. The newspaper La Solidaridad (24) which, in the previous year had been founded in Barcelona by M. Pilar, as a delegate of the propaganda of Manila, and the publishing centre of which was later on translated to Madrid, was declared the official organ of all Filipino masonry; and in its collaboration, all the Filipinos of a medium culture resident in the capital, took a hand, under the auspices and direction of its new proprietor, the oft-mentioned and ill-starred Morayta. «In 1893 the Gran Oriente Nacional, of which the Grand Master is Sr. Pantoja, reporter of the highest tribunal of justice, conceded powers to the lieutenant military councillor Sr. Lacasa, and the sergeant of Infantry, José Martin, to carry on propaganda in these islands among the native element, and in competition with the other Oriente. The result did not correspond to the efforts of the propagandists, who only succeeded in creating some few lodges in the Capital, in Cavite, Cagayan, Iloilo and Negros. How could it be expected to prosper, when the Gran Oriente Español had already catechized the masses of the country! «It must be declared, although it makes one blush to do so, that many peninsular Spaniards, and among them some holding important official positions in the country, have contributed to this propaganda, scandalous, and from all points of view, aimed at the integrity of the nation (25). Only candor can exculpate them. May the country pardon them. «From the first moments, both in the organ of Filipino freemasonry, La Solidaridad, and in the circulars which the Gran Oriente sent to Spain for the information of the brethren there resident, was commenced a coarse and shameless campaign against the Monastic Orders (26), and of scoffing and ridicule of religion. Later on, this campaign acquired a political character, attacking the government of the metropolis, and the authorities of the archipelago, demanding liberal reforms for the country, such as representation in the Cortes, the colonial Cámara, municipal autonomy, increase of individual rights etc. etc., Let anyone with half an eye examine carefully the collections of the cited paper, and he will certainly meet with something contrary to the national unity, artfully and modestly hidden. Let him read the almost countless number of documents (27) pertaining to the Tagalog lodges, and sent by me to the judge, Señor Olive, which were united to the charges, and the most incredulous will be convinced that the lodges and their aids and abettors devoted themselves to something more than the propaganda of freemasonry. There is not a single one of the chiefs and organizers of the filibuster organizations up to this time discovered, who is not a freemason.» «LA PROPAGANDA» AND THE «ASOCIACION HISPANO-FILIPINA.» At the end of the year 1888, Marcelo del Pilar, a lawyer of Bulacán, and a frenetic filibuster, considering himself in peril of deportation in consequence of juridical proceedings formed against him in the said province, decided to translate his residence to Spain, under the shelter of a certain element of the country (28). In those days was created in Manila a committee of propaganda (29) formed by Doroteo Cortés, Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista, Pedro Serrano and Deodato Arellano, under the presidency of the first named, its mission being the gathering from among the better class and more wealthy element, funds for the propagation throughout the Archipelago, of all classes of pamphlets and proclamations written to depreciate and cast slurs upon the Monastic Orders (30), and upon Religion; and likewise for the implantation in the country democratic doctrines; finally the nomination was agreed to of a delegation which should depend directly upon the committee recently constituted, and which should have its residence in Barcelona, its duty being to make overtures to the public authorities for the concession to the Archipelago of greater liberties and of representation in the Cortes in the first place. And in order to sustain and defend these ideals together with some few more, the foundation was authorized of a bi-monthly newspaper. «The committee of propaganda fully fulfilled its mission; it overcame all the wealthy element of Luzon (31), gathered grand quantities, and Marcelo del Pilar set off for the Peninsular, installing himself comfortably in the «Ciudad Condal» [2] at the expense of his countrymen (32). «In January 1889, he commenced the campaign in union with his companion of the delegation Mariano Ponce. They founded the paper La Solidaridad and constituted the Hispano-Filipino association, into which were drawn a large number of the native students residing in Barcelona [3]. The committee made great progress in Manila, added to the number of its followers and collected funds in return for subscriptions to La Solidaridad which, day by day, had more readers; it distributed books, pamphlets and proclamations of the worst class, for which a good price was collected. «The association had increased hand over hand; its aspirations (33) were most radical; and considering its action limited in Barcelona, it determined to translate its headquarters to Madrid, where it would have a wider field for its pretensions. About this same time Serrano, Rizal, Luna, López etc., were united to the delegation and they succeeded in implanting Tagalog masonry in their country (34), and from this precise moment, commenced their relations with Morayta. «In January 1890 the «Asociacion Hispano-Filipina,» [4] the delegation, and the paper La Solidaridad were installed in Madrid. Morayta accepted the presidency of the Association and became proprietor of the newspaper from which such good results were expected, it counting with an increased output to supply enforced subscriptions among masons and their associates at the rate of a peso a head. «From that moment Morayta was made the idol of the turbulent indians, who considered him as their redeemer; no one is ignorant of the labors undertaken by the said personage in Spain, both in the realms of journalism and around and about the powers that be, on behalf of the securing representation in the Cortes, the liberty of association (35) and that of the press, municipal autonomy and even under a hidden guise, of that of the colony; in the memory of all is preserved the remembrance of the banquet given by the Filipinos inspired by Morayta, to Sr. Labra, the autonomist deputy for Cuba, and no one has forgotten the proposition presented to the Congress by Sr. Junoy, the republican deputy, also inspired by the Association and the delegation presided over and protected by Morayta. And who finally, does not feel indignation upon calling to mind the articles published in La Solidaridad by the Filipinos Kalipulako (M. Ponce), Jaena (G. Lopez), Dimas-Alang (José Rizal), Eduardo Lete, Taga-Ilog (Antonio Luna), Juan Totoo (J. Zulueta) and Kupang or Maitalagá (M. del Pilar)? «What Spaniard is not fired to anger, upon reading the books and pamphlets written by Rizal, Luna and Lopez and the infinite number of printed libels which circulate here full of falsities and loathsome calumnies against the most sacred and venerated, the Fatherland? Have we forgotten, perhaps, Dr. Blumentritt (36) who repaid our most generous hospitality by making common cause with our enemies? Do we not call to mind, peradventure, that all the filipino colony in Spain and a good portion of that here resident, sympathised with that ungrateful man, conferring upon him the honor of banqueting him and extending to him their congratulations? «Fortunately these labors obtained no practical result in the peninsula (37), but they caused the native element of some amount of culture to harbor imaginary ills and want of confidence in the Metropolis, covert discontent with the authorities of the islands (38), and finally, sowed the seed of aspirations which could never be realized [5]. but a seed which is to-day, unfortunately, bearing fruit. «A casino of recreation known as the Centro Filipino, was also organized in Madrid: a revolutionary club was the only thing to which that center could be compared. There Spain was discussed, criticized and slandered under the shelter of the law of association which prevails in the Peninsula, and shielded by the hypocrisy and deception so proper of cowards. «Personal rivalries and the want of morality in the administration of the funds (39) remitted from Manila by the committee of propaganda, gave rise to a grave disagreement between the two apostles of filipino filibusterism, Rizal and Pilar; with the former sided the young and impetuous element; with the latter the mature and thoughtful (40). Both elaborated the same material, but each using a different process; the one boldly insolent and hostile, the other masked with hypocrisy and calm. Both being ambitious, each found the world too small to contain him. This state of things ceased with the coming of Rizal to these islands in 1892 (41), Pilar remaining the absolute possessor of the field at Madrid. «In the meanwhile the committee of propaganda was not inactive. It created delegations throughout the archipelago, and by their means introduced the La Solidaridad and all kinds of revolutionary printed matter into the utmost corners of the archipelago. THE «LIGA FILIPINA» «Rizal, magnanimously pardoned by His Excellency the Captain General of the Archipelago, D. Eulogio Despujol (42), after the making of a thousand and one lying protests of repentance, reached this capital in May 1892, being received by his countrymen with extraordinary proofs of enthusiasm and rejoicing; and converting himself into an apostle of filibusterism, commenced a campaign of scandalous propaganda. «Three days after his arrival he convoked a large reunion (43) in the house of the Chinese half-caste Ongjungco in Tondo, and under his presidentship there gathered Franco, property owner; Flores, Lieutenant of Infantry; Rianzares, lawyer; Zulueta, government employee; Adriano, notary; Reyes, tailor; Paez, business agent; Francisco, industrial; Serrano, school-teacher; A. Salvador, contractor; Salazar, industrial; Mariano, property owner; Legaspi, industrial; José, property owner; Bonifacio, warehouse porter; Plata, curial; Villareal, tailor; Rosa, book-keeper; Arellano, military employee; M. Salvador, industrial; Arévalo, dentist; Rosario, merchant; Santillán, industrial; Ramos, industrial; Joven, property owner; Villaruel, merchant; Mabini, lawyer; Nacpil, silversmith; and many other Filipinos well known by their ideas. To this assembly Rizal made known the motive which had inspired him to call it together, which was no other than the creation of a secret society to be known as the «Liga Filipina», founded for the purpose of fomenting the advancement and culture of the country and the attaining, later on, of emancipation from Spain (44). He read out a list of provisional regulations drawn up by himself; these regulations were unanimously approved; a commission formed of Ambrosio Salvador and Deodato Arellano as president and secretary respectively, was at once nominated for the studying and development of Rizal's project, and the reunion was dissolved till it should be again convoked. «The opportune deportation of Rizal (45), Cortes and Salvador, upset the plans of the «oath bound» conspirators and the panic thus brought about dispersed them for the moment. In the beginning of the year 1893 they re-assumed the work (46), sometimes in the house of Domingo Franco, and at others in that of Deodato Arellano; and after it had been agreed that they should be ruled by the regulations of Rizal, and votes having been cast, the Supreme Council of the «Liga» was constituted in the following form: President Franco. Secretary & Treasurer Arellano. Fiscal Francisco. / Zulueta. | Legaspi. | Paez. | Bonifacio. Councillors + Nacpil. | Adriano. | Mabini. | Rianzares. \ Flores. «Before continuing, and in order that the facts which follow may be better understood, I will give some idea of the «Liga» according to the mentioned regulations. Its determined ends (47), were the independence of the islands; its means, the propaganda of advanced political ideas (48), availing themselves of conferences, books, pamphlets and the paper «La Solidaridad» which was declared the official organ of the association; the culture of the country by means of study, and its material advancement by stimulating the creation of large enterprises and industries; and, as a final means, armed rebellion (49). The catechised or initiated submitted themselves to a solemn oath before a human skull, which they afterwards kissed, signing with their own blood (50) a compromising document, after making the corresponding incision in one of their arms. «All those initiated incurred the duty of making propaganda (51) by all means in their power, and of increasing the number of the associates, of preserving under severest penalties, the most impenetrable silence on all matters relating to the «Liga» and blind obedience to their superiors. The association was governed by a Supreme Council with residence in Manila, and composed of a President, a Treasurer, a Fiscal, a Secretary and twelve Councillors; for the Peninsular and Hong-Kong, the delegations composed of Marcelo del Pilar and Ildefonso Laurel [6]. "In each province was formed a provincial council with the same organizations as the Supreme Council, but with only six councillors, who, in their turn, had under their orders as many popular councils as there should be pueblos in the province in which the council should be constituted. The popular councils with analogous organization to the provincial councils, had jurisdiction within the demarcation of a pueblo; they depended directly upon the respective provincial council and the provincial upon the Supreme. "All the members of the Supreme Council were to constitute in the capital of Manila a popular council formed of their converts within the zone of their residences; and all the members had to recruit among the natives of some culture, till the society should be thoroughly developed. "Each treasurer collected a peso as entrance fee from the initiated and a medio (half) peso, as a monthly subscription for each member. With the said funds there was created a central deposit in the treasury of the Supreme Council, for the covering of the expenses of the delegations, and the sustainment of the Solidaridad; and it was agreed that once there should be sufficient capital, great enterprises, of a nature undetermined, should be undertaken. "The eternal question of money in this class of organizations (52) gave rise to a serious falling out between Rizal and the Liga (53), on which account their official relations were severed. The subscriptions were badly collected, and those encharged with the custody and turning in of what few funds did exist misapplied them (54); this was what brought about the decadence of the league and the cause of its falling into discredit and disrepute and for its not prospering, in spite of the fact that among those who aided it with their moral and metalic aid, but without formal or written compromise (55), were a number of shameless filibusters, so much the more repugnant as the brilliant social position they held under the protection of Spain was elevated. Among many others may be cited the wealthy proprietors Pedro and Francisco Roxas (56), Mariano Linjap, Telesforo Chuidian, Luis R. Yangco, Antonio and Juan Luna, Felipe Zamora, Eduardo Litonjua, Marcelino de los Santos, Máximo Paterno (57) and Nazario Constantino (58). "Of the members of the Supreme Council, only the following succeeded in forming popular councils: Estanislao Legaspi who organized one in Tondo, known as Talang Bakero; Andrés Bonifacio, one in Trozo, known as Mayon; and Francisco Nacpil, one in Santa Cruz, known as Mactan (59). The rest of the members of the Supreme Council only succeeded in forming the following fruitless sections: Flores, one in Ermita and Malate; Zulueta in Binondo; Rianzares in San Nicolás; Francisco in Quiapo; Adriano and Mabini in Sampaloc and Nagtajan, and Salvador in Pandacan. "In the provinces also the Liga enjoyed such slow progress, that it was not possible to organize to popular councils, but sections only, and these were organized in the Laguna, by Vicente Reyes; in Batangas by Felipe Agoncillo (60); in Nueva Ecija, Bentus and Natividad; in Tarlac the notary del Rosario, and in Bulacán, Pampanga and other provinces wealthy persons of the same. In time, there was not a Filipino of wealth or career or of medium social position, who did not pertain to, or aid and abet the Liga, apart from a few most honorable exceptions (61) which it pleases me to recognize. "At the commencement of the year 1894 and when the league had reached the age of one year, the members agreed to the dissolution of the society, both on account of the discords which continually sprung up in its bosom, and for the fear of discovery by the authorities which had already perceived something of the goings on (62). A grand assembly of the leaders was called together and it was determined to gather in as many documents as had been drawn up or circulated, and make a bonfire of them, so that all compromising indications should be made to disappear. The society became dissolved but it took a form more hypocritical. The popular councils re-entered the masonic lodges, and these took up the work of the Liga, a thing very easy to accomplish, when we remember that there was not a single member of the society who was not a freemason. "There remained however, as a living remembrance of the Liga, a committee formed of the lawyer Numeriano Adriano and Deodato Arellano (a brother-in-law of Pilar) president and secretary, who had at their orders some 20 or 30 members from among the most important of the defunct Liga and who were known under the name of the compromisarios (63). These enjoyed no special organization and worked with almost entire independence. Their mission was the propagation of the La Solidaridad and the gathering of funds for the sustainment of the paper, and of the delegations in the Peninsula and elsewhere, with which they sustained active political correspondence. The work was continued with greater cunning by the lodges and by the compromisarios; and they succeeded in keeping alive the spirit of protest in a good part (the most influential) of the native element till the end of the year 1895. «About this time the populous empire of China was defeated by the Japanese, and the Japanese Empire, having won the laurels of victory so easily, began to consider the weaving of a net of preponderance in the Occident. The Filipinos who followed with interest and satisfaction our contrarieties in Cuba, considered the occasion propitious for the Empire of the Rising Sun to copy in these islands the conduct of the Americans in the Antilles. Japan became the fashion in the Archipelago and its inhabitants were chosen as models of culture (64), wealth, of liberty and strength. They sighed for their protection and assistance, and to the attaining of it they uselessly directed their efforts. Doroteo Cortés emigrated to Yokohama (65), and with him Ramos, Baza, Español and others, where they established a separatist committee in correspondence with that of Manila. Marcelo del Pilar prepared to leave Madrid to join them, but died suddenly in Barcelona and finally the foolish political schemers dreamed of the liberation of Rizal (66) who had been deported to Dapitan, in order that he also should follow Cortés and the others. From Manila there departed frequently parties of wealthy Filipinos who went to Japan under the pretext of making recreative, instructive or artistic voyages, but in reality to conspire, and it is assured that they were listened to by some of the official element of that nation (67). The Japanese corvette Kongo (68) arrived in Manila in the month of May and no one could explain its sudden appearance in the bay; but on the other hand the officers were mysteriously banqueted by a commission of Filipinos in the Bazar Japones (69) where they lodged. Causalities perhaps, but.... K. K. K. N. M. A. N. B. KATAASTAASANG KALAGAYAN KATIPUNAN NANG MANGA ANAK NANG BAYAN. Supreme Society of the Sons of the People [7]. Whilst Rizal, in Manila, was engaged in the organization of the "Liga Filipina" into which only the well-to-do or educated classes could enter (70), an attempt which, for that time, failed on account of his immediate deportation, Marcelo H. del Pilar, from Madrid, in July 1892, advised the creation of another association, which was to be similar thereto, but which was to include the agricultural laborers and persons of little or no education and instruction (71), but who directed in the localities by the caciques and chiefs, were to form an enormous nucleus which should, at the proper time, give forth the cry of rebellion. He (Pilar) provided minute instructions concerning the organization and forwarded a project of regulations. "Deodato Arellano (brother in-law of Marcelo), Andrés Bonifacio, Ladislao Dina and Teodoro Plata where those commissioned to carry into practice the project of Pilar (72); they discussed the regulations and added to them making them still more terrifying, agreeing that they should all immediately proceed with the preparatory works, and they were not interrupted till the conspiracy was discovered on the 19th of August of this year (1896). Both the said organizers and the others who composed the first Supreme Council, belonged to the «Liga filipina». "The organization given to the society was analogous to that enjoyed by the «Liga» (73) but amplified to the extent of anarchism, swearing hatred and destruction to everything of a character or nature Spanish (74), and sowing the seed of a race-hatred which has developed to a great extent (75). The Supreme, the Provincial and the popular Councils, the sections and the delegations ruled this horrible association. The first governed the whole Tagalog Katipunan (76); the second, that corresponding to a pueblo and the sections were sub-divisions or fractions into which the popular councils were divided. Those commissioned to form sections were called delegations, and whilst they remained unconstituted, they depended directly upon the Supreme Council. Every associate paid an entrance fee of a medio peso, and a monthly subscription of a real. The collections were made by the respective treasurers and passed into the central treasury of the Supreme Council. The funds so gathered were utilized for the succor of the brethren in their afflictions and sicknesses, for the covering the expenses of the works of propaganda, and for the secret acquisition of fire and other arms (77). «As in freemasonry, the initiations (78) were performed with a wealth of the ridiculous, and with unending extravagances; but of such a nature, that the ignorant indian was fascinated and became converted into a slave of his oath. «The initiated were masked (79) as also was the person to be initiated; before a table was placed a skull and crossbones, a triangle and two candles; the person about to be initiated was told that the object of the Katipunan [8] was the liberating of the Tagalog people, and the expulsion of the Spaniards from the archipelago, or their destruction (80); following this, came a series of questions and replies in the which the martyrdom of Gomez, Burgos and Zamora (81), native priests judged and condemned for their part in the rebellion of Cavite in 1872 was exalted, and they passed on to the proofs (82) which consisted in imitating an assassination, a suicide, etc. This was followed by the taking of an oath of striving to effect the liberation of the people till death, an oath which demanded a blind obedience to the commands of the superior and the preservation of the secrets of the association under the pain of death (83). Finally, to terminate the ceremony, they made with a dagger especially adapted to that use, an incision in the arm of the person initiated and with the blood which flowed from the wound thus made, the new katipunero signed his compromise (see note 50.) «The initiated were called brethren and had their «sacred words» and their special signs of recognition. They were ruled by a code which established punishments ranging from whipping till death (84) and received no orders from anyone, or had no intercourse with anyone, except with their immediate superiors. The details which might be made mention of are infinite and curious, but it would make this short memorial unending to speak of them all. "All the matters of importance and organization were dealt with in assemblies (85) constituted by the Supreme Councils and all the presidents of the provincial and popular councils. The accords were taken and discussions decided by a nominal votation and at least by a majority of votes. "Both the Supreme, the provincial and the popular Councils and the sections held their periodical sessions in the which were discussed a thousand different affairs, and the decisions of the Councils had to be submitted to the approval of the immediate superior. The gatherings were always held in different houses and localities, no day being set aside as fixed, but the days of festivities or those upon which was observed some ecclesiastical feast were chosen for that purpose (86), under the pretext of banquets or dances in which the authorities had no suspicion, and because on the said days these semi-public rejoicings were permitted without the necessity of seeking the license of the governing authorities. «Both the provincial and the popular councils and the sections were known by special names; the initiated were "baptized" with symbolic appellations; and the documents were drawn up in the Tagalog dialect, the most important being in secret code. "The first Supreme Council was constituted on the 15th of July 1892, and was as follows: President Deodato Arellano. Secretary Andrés Bonifacio. Treasurer Valentin Diaz. / Ladislao Dina. Councillors + Bricio Pantas. \ Teodoro Plata. Delegates were immediately appointed to establish sections in Tondo, Binondo, Trozo, Sta. Cruz, Nagtajan, Sampaloc, Quiapo, Dilao (Paco) and Intramuros. Commissioners set out with all rapidity to the neighboring pueblos and provinces, and in a few weeks councils were in working order in Caloocan, Malabon, Mandaloyan, San Juan del Monte, Pandacan, Sta. Ana, and Pasay. In the Capital of Cavite was constituted a popular council, and sections in Noveleta, Cavite Viejo and Imus. The same occurred in San Isidro, Gapan and several other pueblos of these provinces. 'Andrés Bonifacio, Secretary of the Supreme Council, displayed a notable audacity and energy, and this united to a clear intelligence, gave him a great predominance over his companions. This predominance he asserted, and in 1893 brought about the destitution from the presidency, of Deodato Arellano, Román Baza (87), chief clerk of the Comandancia General de Marina being elevated to that office. On account of the want of character and initiative on the part of the new president, Bonifacio decided, by a coup-d'état if we may so call it, to depose him also, putting himself in that office and becoming the «dictator» of the Katipunan. "Under the Presidency of Bonifacio, the society commenced an era of febrile activity; the greater number of the tribunales of the pueblos were converted into centres of propaganda, which were directed by the municipalities. Pamphlets and proclamations against the friars and the whole Spanish element were circulated in profusion (88). Injuries and outrages were invented, and by these and a thousand and one other infamous means, little by little, hatred and revenge were inculcated into the mind of the indian. "In 1895 Bonifacio took the first decisive steps towards the organizing of an armed rebellion; he sent different delegations to Dapitan to confer with Rizal and receive his advice and instruction (89); he opened negotiations with the Japanese Government (90), but did not succeed therein. But with his immense ascendancy over the popular masses, an ascendancy beyond imagination, he declared himself dictator. The secret aiders of the Katipunan who pertained to the upper classes, offered funds of considerable amount, with the which were acquired a good number of arms which were landed on the coast of Cavite and Batangas with the aid of wealthy persons (91). «In August of this year (1896) exaltation among the masses reached its full height, and Bonifacio realizing the fact, prepared what was necessary in order that in a short time, the conspiracy which was to take effect on the same day and hour in almost all Luzon, should be in readiness. The plan of the attack and taking of Manila was coarsely conceived but it might have been successful and massacre, sacking and pillage would have crowned the iniquitous work. "At this time the Supreme Council was was composed as follows. President Andrés Bonifacio. Secretary Emilio Jacinto. Treasurer Enrique Pacheco. Fiscal Pío Valenzuela (92). / Hermenegildo Reyes. | Teodoro Plata. | Balbino Florentino. | Bricio Pantas. | Pantaleón Torres. Councillors + José Trinidad. | Francisco Carreón. | Aguedo del Rosario. | Vicente Molina. | Alejandro Santiago. \ José T. Santiago. "In Tondo existed the popular Council Catagalugan presided over by Alejandro Santiago; and the sections Cabuhayan, Catotohanan, Pagtibain, Calingaan and Bagongsilang, presided over by Hilarion Cruz, Braulio Rivera, Cipriano Pacheco, Nicolás Rivera, and Deogracias Fajardo. "In Sta. Cruz the popular Council Laonlaan presided over by Julian Nepomuceno, and the sections Tanglao and Dimas Alang [9] by Procopio Bonifacio and Restituto Javier. "In Trozo the popular Council Dapitan [10] presided over by Francisco Carreón, and the sections Silanganan and Alapaap, by Juan de la Cruz and R. Concha. "In Binondo the popular Council Ilog Pasig by Faustino Mañalac. "In Concepción and Dilao (Paco) the popular Council Mahiganti, presided over by Rafael Gutiérrez, and the sections Panday and Ilog with a delegation in Ermita. "But why continue? It would not be exaggerating to assert that the fourth of the native population pertained to the Katipunan, and the task of consigning more names would be useless, as nothing new would be discovered. "Astounding is the number of the initiated; in Manila and its province alone they exceed 14,000, and in the provinces of Cavite, Batangas, Laguna and Nueva Ecija there are no less than 20,000. Adding to this number those of the remainder of Luzon, the total will ascend to an enormous mass of "illusioned" who bowed in obedience to an inquisitous schemer. It must be recognized, however, that Bonifacio is not a common man; of active character, energetic and bold, gifted with a facility of expression in his language which suggested itself to his countrymen; of a criterion clear but badly cultivated by the reading of books of an elevated style and a pernicious character [11] and possessed of an unfathomable ambition--such was the warehouse porter who had charge of the store house of the foreign commercial house of Fressel and Co. in Calle Nueva, Binondo [12]. "His proclamations, pamphlets, and circulars although not a model of literature were possessed of a certain amount of culture. "In Calle Clavel, in the dwelling house of Alejandro Santiago, the Katipunan possessed a secret printing establishment, in which were prepared many most injurious and insulting publications. There also was edited and published the paper Kalayaan (Liberty) (93) which only twice saw the light and which was supposed to have been printed in Yokohama, (it bearing the name of that town as the place of publication) and was published over the signature of Marcelo H. del Pilar. This was all false, all studied out for the purpose of throwing dust in the eyes of the local authorities. The paper was edited by Bonifacio, his brother-in-law Teodoro Plata and the secretary of the Supreme Council, Emilio Jacinto, a young student of law, of no scanty intelligence. "On the 19th of August last (1896) the conspiracy was denounced and a great number of imprisonments were made by this Corps. Bonifacio and those more closely connected with him in his schemes, fled aghast to the neighboring pueblo of Caloocan and there remained hidden in the house of the Capitan Municipal (a native) and in that of the Capitán Pasado (also a native) Adriano de J, father-in-law to Andrés Bonifacio. On the 23rd Bonifacio set out for the barrio of Balintauac, followed by some 200 inhabitants of Caloocan; on the 24th they were combatted by the Civil Guard in the fields of the said pueblo and fled to their former hiding place. "The Supreme Council convoked a large assembly to be held on the following day in the said barrio, to which gathered more than 500 members; there a discussion took place concerning the steps which would have to be taken in view of the failure of the conspiracy, and of the imprisonments which were being made. Some, feeling repentant, desired to return to a legal status, submitting to the Spanish authority but the president Bonifacio protested, proposing immediate rebellion. Both propositions were put to the vote, and as a result, that of the president gained by an immense majority; so much for the prestige of Andrés Bonifacio! (94). "The orders were circulated with rapidity throughout Manila, Cavite, Nueva Ecija and other provinces, commanding that armed rebellion should commence at day-break of Sunday the 30th. The day and hour assigned finally arrived, and the whole province of Manila broke out; the rebels committing a thousand and one abuses and crimes upon as many Europeans and loyal natives as were encountered. Like wild beasts they attacked the waterworks and the powder station situated at San Juan del Monte from whence they were valiantly driven back by a section of artillery and another of the 70th regiment. Simultaneously they attempted to invade the suburb of Sampaloc by way of Santa Mesa and there also they were combatted and dispersed by 60 Veteran Guards who prevented, by their defence, a day of mourning for the city of Manila. All Cavite, except the capital, arose in insurrection on the afternoon of the 31st., assassinating and disarming the whole of the Civil Guard of the province, after an heroic defence on the part of the latter. They assaulted the convents and estates of the Religious Orders and murdered the defenseless ministers of the Lord (95). On the 3rd of September the capital of Nueva Ecija was attacked by large masses of rebels, and the colony [13] and the Civil Guard heroically resisted until the arrival, from Manila, of a column which combatted the enemy and saved that handful of Spaniards from a certain death. But why continue to relate events so well known to all [14]. DENOUNCEMENT OF THE CONSPIRACY AND ITS DISCOVERER. "Teodoro Patiño. A name which all Spaniards should pronounce with pleasure, because, by his repentance, inspired by divine Providence (96), Spain was saved from an unending series of bitter experiences. "Patiño, a workman in the printing establishment of the Diario de Manila, pertained to the Katipunan of Tondo, as did also the majority of the compositors and book binders of the said establishment. "Repentant and fearful of the increase of the association, and of the criminal projects it pursued, he decided to denounce it to his sister, a student of the College of Looban, directed by the learned and virtuous Sisters of Mercy (97). His sister made known the denunciation to her Superior who called Patiño into her presence; and realizing the gravity which surrounded the matter, sent him to the Rev. P. Mariano Gil, parish priest of Tondo (98), a suburb of Manila; to this Rev. Father, Patiño repeated all that he had manifested, and all that he could know, he being only a simple initiated member. He affirmed that in the printing establishment of the Diario receipts and proclamations were printed, and daggers were secretly made for the Katipunan, and he offered, moreover, to make known where the lithographic stones used for the printing were hidden. "Srs. Grund and Cortés, lieutenants of the sub-division of the Veterana of that district, were called to the convent by P. Gil, who expounded to them all that had occurred. These officers made known the facts to their chiefs, and constituted themselves into a "cuartelillo". That same night there fell into the power of P. Gil the lithographic stones, some receipts and printed regulations of the Katipunan: objects which were placed at the disposition of this Corps. In the "cuartelillo" Patiño was minutely examined, and immediate proceedings were commenced for the arrest of 22 oath bound katipuneros, whose houses were also searched. In this search an abundance of documents and effects which justified the denunciation were encountered. From that time no stone was left unturned by the officers and guards of this Corps, who for 15 days worked unceasingly and untiringly that their labor might be crowned with the greatest success. "More than 500 prisoners of importance, among those who were convicted and among those who confessed, were handed over to the Courts of Justice together with all the documents, books, pamphlets, seals, attributes and the archives of the Supreme Council. The back of the vast conspiracy was broken; some of the guilty have already expiated their crimes (99), many have suffered deportation, (100) whilst no few still remain in prison awaiting the decision of human justice. "If with our aid we have contributed to the salvation of this portion of Spanish territory, what better recompense and reward for this Section of the Guardia Civil Veterana? "Manila, 28th October 1896--Olegario Diaz--Signed--The document bears a seal which reads: Sección de Guardia Civil Veterana.--Manila. Here ends the document which forms the text. In continuation follow the notes with their corresponding numbers. NOTES. These notes are, as regards historical matter, chiefly taken from Spanish official documents drawn up as a result of juridical procee- dings against certain individuals accused of treason. Note 2. In that period of time in which the evil effects of freemasonry began to tell upon the public and private life of the government officials and upon the morals of the people in general, the Civil Governor of Manila, D. Justo Martin Lunas (1886), gave a ball to which the cream of Manila society was invited. Among the selections for the evening was an extravagant item, nothing more or less than ... a can-can! This in itself was enough; but what made the matter so much the worse was that the governor had invited the venerable Archbishop of Manila to the ball. The news of the innovation spread far and wide, and very soon the whole city was in a state of wild excitement. In the defense of public morals the Archbishop deemed it necessary to issue a pastoral letter condemning such spectacles. Although not directed at that particular "school of scandal", this pastoral was interpreted by all those concerned, as well as by the public in general, as a severe lesson for Sr. Lunas and those who had gathered in the government house to dance the can-can or to take pleasure therein. Hence Sr. Luna and his party considered themselves offended, and did not hesitate to take revenge when an opportunity occurred, upon the aged and infirm Archbishop who did all he had done, in defense of the morals of his flock. From this event sprung the seed which gave rise, later on, to the famous, or rather infamous manifestation of '88: an insensate campaign inspired against the Religious Orders by these offended ones and their followers (See note 30). The Civil Governor at that time was D. José Centeno y García an active propagator of freemasonry, holding the 33rd degree. He, together with Sr. Quiroja, fostered and godfathered the "manifestation". In this semi-official insult to Archbishop Payo, an insult so ably analysed by Sr. Retana [15], we have one of the best examples that could be furnished of the methods adopted by the masonic enemies of the Catholic faith in this archipelago. This manifestation, fostered by a governor who drew down upon himself the righteous ire of all honorable men and women by reason of his protection of the houses of ill-fame in and about the city, was a truly masonic invention by which many, in fact some 98% of those who signed it, were grossly deceived. The following notes taken from the analysis of Sr. Retana, will give an idea of the real value of the "manifestation" and the part the people had therein. In the Suburb of Sta. Cruz there were 144 people who signed the document, that is to say there were 144 names. Of these no less than 56 were unknown, 3 were minors and 3 did not recognize their signatures; 52 were natives and 8 were Chinese half-castes. In Sampaloc: 61 signatures, all of which were of indians none of whom followed trades or professions which necessitated the use of brain power. In Malate: 38 signatures, 31 of indians, only 15 of whom understood Spanish. In Binondo: 41, 31 of whom were indians; five minors. In Sta. Ana, out of 104, the number of minors was 14, and 50 did not understand Spanish; 66 were indians. In Caloocan: 80 signatures of which 55 were indians who did not understand Spanish; 38 were laborers, 7 were minors. In Navotas: 140 signatures; 49 laborers, and 49 fishermen; 127 did not understand Spanish. In Mariquina: 68, 38 of whom were laborers, 51 did not understand Spanish. In San Fernando de Dilao (Paco): 35; 6 minors and all indians. In San Mateo, 50 signatures; 39 laborers, 45 indians, 41 of whom did not understand Spanish. In San Miguel 49; and here comes the crowning piece of the magnificent work, for of these 49 no fewer than 16 had died! yes died previous to the drawing up of the document and therefore could not possibly have signed it; moreover 7 did not recognize their signatures, and all were indians. In recapitulation; there were 810 signatures; of these 85 did not declare on examination, 56 were unknown, 39 were minors, 22 did not recognize their signatures and 16 had died previous to the drawing up of the document (Feb. 20th 1888). This brings the 810 down to 592. Of these 592 signatures 208 were of laborers, 50 of fishermen, 31 of carpenters, 7 washermen and 5 barbers: a total of 301 persons whose occupations called for no particular amount of education, and whose interest and concern in such a movement as this may be judged from their social standing. Deducting these 301 from the remaining 592 we have 291 left for further analysis. Of these 25 were of tailors, 4 singers (!) and 3 school masters; 58 escribientes whose occupation it is to make clean copies of documents and other manuscript, the most that can be said of the majority of them being that they can write well, not an uncommon thing anyhow for a filipino; 11 of musicians, men who lead the life of crickets, enjoying hunger by day and noise by night; 9 type-setters, men who after having set a dozen columns of material could not tell you anything of the subject they were composing, in other words, men who like the escribientes reproduce mechanically without knowing what they are reproducing; this gives us 107 of another grade leaving 184 to be divided among the many odds and ends of occupations followed by the native to earn his "fish and rice". No less than 384 of the number did not understand Spanish and 13 could not write. In the matter of races: ONE was a Spaniard, Enrique Rodriguez de los Palacios who called himself a merchant and was domiciled in Binondo. Upon investigation it turned out that he also had been fooled and that he had signed the protest because he had been told that other Spaniards had also signed it; as to its contents he affirmed that he knew nothing. One was a Spanish mestizo, 66 were Chinese half-castes and 524 were indians. So much for the famous manifestation which resulted in giving a most decisive blow to the moral and social standing of those who prepared and those who signed it. Those concerned therein learned the bitter lesson that "they who dig pits for their neighbors are apt to fall therein themselves." The common opinion has always been that the document in question was drawn up by Doroteo Cortés (see note 11) who had on several occasions been under police vigilance; had been expelled from Navotas and compelled to reside within the walled city, later on pardoned, but still kept under police surveillance. But however that may be, the document was infamous in the extreme, and was the precursor of the modern campaign against the Religious Orders. From that time to this present, this campaign has continued to spread, and is still being fostered by the Federal Party. Another of the advanced ideas which saw the light of day during the interim governorship of D. José Centeno y Garcia, a 33rd degree freemason and a stout republican, was the toleration, for the first time in the history of the Archipelago, of houses of prostitution. Centeno was a governor who, having erred considerably during his governorship, attempted some years later to regain public confidence by the publication of an insulting pamphlet against the Religious Orders. This novelty of semi-official houses of ill-fame was, for Manila, a most genuine expression of modern democracy. Scandals until then unheard of or undreamed of in Manila, became the order of the day. White girls imported or inveigled, were hired out by their mistresses to pander to the sensual appetites of blacks, merely because the said black-skinned sensualists were wealthy enough to pay the price demanded. What edification! Fundicion street became a centre in which the scandals daily increased in number and importance. The native weaned after many long years of careful training at the hands of the Religious Orders, from the vices in which he was found submerged at the time of the Spanish Conquest, was brought face to face with the same scandalous surroundings, introduced by people of the same white race which had removed his forefathers therefrom. Gradually but surely this leaven of corruption has eaten its way into the customs of the people, and to-day we are witnesses of its terrible effects. A comparison of the public morals of to-day with those of 20 years or so ago, would reveal facts which would astound many of those who are at a loss to account for the reason of the existence of the "querida" evil among so many of the Filipinos of modern Manila. A quarter of a century ago Manila was a paradise to what it is to-day, crimes so common in these days that they are scarcely worth recording, were unheard of; and even drunkenness was almost entirely confined to foreign sailors. What Manila is to-day it owes to the advanced and anti religious ideas introduced by freemasonry and modern democracy. Note 3. Separatism, vulgarly called filibusterism, has always, in the Philippines, been marked by essential characteristics. It was always, under the circumstances by which it was surrounded, necessarily anti-patriotic. One thing which helped to give it the robust life it enjoyed among the middle class of people, was the supposition of the existence of a Tagalog civilization anterior to the discovery of the archipelago by the famous Magallanes. This fantastic doctrine was preached and propagated principally by two of the more prominent Filipinos, Pedro Paterno and José Rizal. The former, much less cultured than Rizal, was the one to whom the most insensate ideas on this subject were owing, and this because although Rizal upheld the idea, he was led to do so by his perverse character rather than by his belief; whilst Paterno really believes in this pre-Spanish civilization, and that to such a degree that many of his own country-men call him a fool and ridicule him. Another essential mark was the enmity demonstrated against the Religious Orders. But few, if any at all of the propagators of the doctrines of separatism labored outside of the four walls of the masonic lodge room. In other words they were freemasons. Masonry was to them a medium through which they might carry on their conspiracies; it was an excuse for the creation of the spirit of association, till then unknown in the Philippines. The aims of separatism may be classed as direct and indirect. The indirect aim was the independence of the country from the yoke of Spain. At the best this idea of independence was but second hand, a lesson learned by heart by a scholar whose power of thought was insufficient to enable him to grasp the true meaning of the words of the lesson. The average Filipino lacks the sentiment of nationality; hence in the minds of the majority of the people independence is but the enjoyment of the unbridled liberty to do as they please, in fact to revert to the times of their ancestors when everyone who could exert an authority was a king, a prince or a ruler of some description. To the Filipino it is of little importance whether his sovereign or his supreme ruler be the King of Spain or the President of the U. S. of America, as long as he is protected from his "friends" and from his own country-men and may enjoy his cock-fighting and have the necessary supply of rice and fish for his daily sustenance. The direct aims of the separatists were those they sought in public, viz: representation in the Spanish Cortes, the expulsion of the Religious Orders, etc., etc. The result of representation in the Cortes would have been a veritable comedy; that of the expulsion of the Friars a decided tragedy for Spain, in as much as the Religious was ever the backbone of the administration of the colony. The consequences of the independence of the country would have been equally disastrous. There would have been the tremendous preponderance of the black over the white and eventually inter-tribal disputes and even armed struggles for the mastery. This would entail the complete stagnation of the moral and material progress of the people, who would gradually but surely drift back into the savage ways of their ancestors. And at last, who knows but that Japan or perhaps China would have to step in to save the inhabitants from becoming cannibals. This doctrine of separatism was the doctrine disseminated by Filipino masonry, a daughter of Spanish freemasonry. Filipino freemasonry however, was to a great extent addicted to views not held or sustained by the Gr. Or. Español, and hence did not make common cause with Universal Freemasonry, although it used its ritual, its signs and its name, to shield from public view those of its labors which could not be allowed to see the light of day. Hence the diving into the subject of Universal Freemasonry is somewhat irrelevant to our present study, suffice it to say that the brotherhood, universal as it is, suffers no other division than that into families. Its aim is one; its methods one; its doctrine one [16]; it is the worldly imitation of the unparalleled Catholic unity of divine foundation. The Spanish family was founded in 1811 by the Count de Grasse-Tilley. On the 21st of February 1804 the Supreme Council of Charleston issued a circular to the Count in which it said among other things which demonstrate the aim of the foundation: "Above the idea of country is the idea of humanity"; "frontiers are capricious demarcations imposed by the use of force." And others of the same nature. When the Count set forth to found the Spanish Supreme Council he was armed with a letters patent issued by the Supreme Council of Charleston containing this sentence: "the masonic solidity will never be effective whilst the brethren do not recognize one only power, as is one only the earth we inhabit, and one also the horizon we contemplate.... To unify, therefore, the masonic labors we all journey to the one end to which the work of this Supreme Council is directed, and hence what we have pointed out to Spain as one of the points in which is more necessary than elsewhere the one direction to which we refer." In 1882 Spanish freemasons were divided into different Orientes each of which claimed continuity with the institution of Grasse-Tilley; the matter was finally settled by the Supreme Council of Charleston. Opinion is divided on the question of the responsibility of the Spanish freemason lodges or rather the ruling "Oriente" for the beliefs and practices of their filipino brethren. That they were indirectly responsible is more than certain; and oft-times they were so indirectly. D. Manuel Sastrón ex-Deputy to the Spanish Cortes, ex-Civil Governor of the Philippines, speaking on this subject says: "It is not possible for us on any account to fall in line with these suspicious reasonings: never have we had a disposition to form a part of such a sect, because we are old time Christians; but we repeat that we cannot believe nor do we imagine that any masonic centre composed of peninsular Spaniards could tolerate, and much less foment consciously, the propagation of doctrines which, whatever masonry brought about in the Philippines, could have given origin to the congregation of separatist elements." "Nevertheless side by side with this firm conviction we repeat what we tersely maintained, viz: that freemasonry has been the medium which marshalled the element which generalled the Filipino insurrection. Filibusterism knew how to exploit it to a fine point." "We do not find it inconvenient to affirm, but just the opposite, we repeat with pleasure and absolute belief that Spanish freemasonry was ignorant of the true ends of the Filipino masons. But it is proved to our way of thinking, to the point of evidence, that Filipino masonry pursued no other ends than the independence of those islands (the Philippines.)" [17] It must be noted that this is the opinion of a Spanish patriot, for a patriot Sastrón certainly was, and what is more natural than that a true patriot should doubt the possibility of his own countrymen mixing themselves up in anti-patriotic movements: Yet while Sastrón and other writers would redeem their fellow countrymen from such a stain as that of treason, I am inclined to believe that the asserted ignorance of the Spanish freemason was too often official, that is to say it was not genuine, but limited to the members of the society who enjoyed the privileges of the lower degrees. There are two sides to every question, however, and that the "other side" may be given a fair hearing, I will quote a declaration of Antonio Luna on this subject. Luna, among the many statements made before the Lieut. Col. in command of the Cuartel de Caballeria, on the 8th of October 1896, confessed that "in the year 1890 or 91, of his own free-will, he formed a masonic project based on Spanish masonry: a project which might, at its proper time be applied to filibuster conspiracy. This project was discussed and approved by the Oriente Español in Madrid; but that center did not know the secondary ends to which it would be applied.... Of his own free-will he manifested that his ideas were, when he formed the project, anti-Spanish...." With rare exceptions the Filipinos who left their native soil to finish their education in the Spanish peninsula, were those to whom the real work of separatism is owing. The Filipino at home who has fallen into line with his foreign educated brother is but a blind worker. And the Filipino who went to Spain was as a rule, a very general rule, taken under the sheltering care of Miguel Morayta (see note 13). The responsibility therefore for the ideas inculcated into the minds of those "students" lies, and that heavily, upon Morayta, the chief of that family of freemasonry which claims ignorance of the aims of its filipino membership. The only logical excuse that can be brought forwards is that filipino freemasonry degenerated. When once it took root in the Archipelago it spread with wonderful rapidity. The adepts were for the most part Chinese half-castes; and little by little that strange train of thought of the native, whether he be full blooded or mixed, a train of thought which, like the filipino pony is accustomed to walk backwards when it should go forwards, or like the patient carabao which too often lies down just at the moment when its services are the most needed to drag a load over a mud hole, carried the would-be citizens of an independent country to the verge of political insanity. Certain it is that as the idea of separation became more and more developed the Spanish masons who were member of the Filipino lodges severed their connection therewith. But yet it does not appear within the limits of common sense to believe that the Spanish masons were ignorant; the greater probability is that they were too indulgent, too confiding. To hold too fast to the excuse of ignorance is to profess oneself very ignorant. But whether it was ignorance or the wanting of even that species of patriotism which one expects to find in beasts of burden (for every horse knows his own stables) the black fact still remains that Spanish masonry gave birth to, and fostered, Filipino freemasonry or in other words, the katipunan. However, be the degree of ignorance what it may, we cannot overlook the fact that the actions of the Tagalog freemasons, the katipunan if you will, for the one and the other are the same thing under different names, were the cause of no little surprise to the Grand Oriente Español. The filipino mason was a traitor to the mother which gave him being and nourished him into activity: a traitor who used the cover of the freemason lodge only that he might the easier and safer hatch out his plot to gain, by the most brutal means imaginable, the independence of his country. In his declaration made in the presence of Colonel Francisco Olive y Garcia and others on the 23rd of September 1896, Moises Salvador Francisco, of Quiapo (Manila) stated that "in April 1891 he came to Manila bringing with him a copy of the agreements arrived at by the Junta of Madrid, and these he handed over to Timoteo Paez to see if masonic lodges could be established as a commencement of the work. In the following year of 1892 Pedro Serrano arrived from Spain and then Masonry (native) was introduced into the Philippines, the first lodge instituted being the Nilad." To give some idea of the separatist aims which gave life and nourishment to the Tagalog revolt, I will quote a few extracts taken from masonic documents, and from the declarations, made by persons complicated in the conspiracy. These declarations were made in the presence of the appointed judge, Col. D. Francisco Olive y Garcia, and others, and are of capital interest in the study of the rise and fall of the filipino "commune". The citations are as follows: I. In an act of Session of the Katipunan Sur at the commencement of the year 1896, the session being opened, the president don Agustin Tantoko, a native priest [18], invited the membership present to express its opinion concerning the questions proposed, viz: how ought we to act towards society; towards ourselves; and how ought we to act in case of surprise. Mariano Kalisan considered, dealing with the first question, that "as their principal object was not to leave alive any Spaniard in all the future Filipino republic" they should procure to make friends with them as much as possible in order to be able to carry out their plans with more surety when the time should arrive to give the cry of independence. D. Gabino Tantoko, brother of the president, considered that the said principle should be carried out especially in dealing with the members of the Religious Orders. Both propositions were accepted. As regards the second question, Epifanio Ramos proposed that meetings should be held as seldom as possible "in order to avoid scandals". In case of surprise, Hermenegildo García considered that "the strongest fort lay in denial." The brothers Tantoko remarked that such surprise was almost impossible seeing that they had determined "not to leave alive any of those who might surprise them." The president moreover remarked that, from that time forward, in case of danger, "they should destroy all the papers they held in their power, such as acts, receipts, letters, plans and especially the arms they held, in case the blow they were to deal in Manila should not succeed." This was accepted unanimously. In reply to a question, the president affirmed that "all the sections of Katipunan existing in the future Filipino republic pursued the same end: viz: the independence of the Filipino people, the release from the yoke of the step-mother [19] Spain." II. In a document dated the 12th of June 1896 and giving instructions to those who should carry out the proposed slaughter of all the Spaniards in Manila, we read: "2nd. Once the signal is given every bro. shall fulfill the duty imposed upon him by this Gr. Reg. Log. without considerations of any kind, neither of parentage, friendship nor of gratitude, etc." "4th. The blow having been struck at the Captain General and the other Spanish Authorities, the loyals shall attack the convents and shall behead their infamous inhabitants, respecting the wealth contained in the said convents; this shall be gathered ... etc." "6th. On the following day the bbro. designated shall bury all the bodies of their hateful oppressors in the field of Bagumbayan together with their wives and children, and on the site shall later on be raised a monument commemorative of the independence of the G. N. F. (Gran Nación Filipina)." "7th. The bodies of the members of the Religious Orders shall not be buried, but burned in just payment for the felonies (sic) which they committed during life against the Filipino nation during the three hundred years of their nefarious domination." [20] This infamous document is signed by the president of the executive commission by the Gr. Mast. adj. Giordano Bruno, and the Gr. Sec. Galileo. [21] III. In his declaration made before Col. Olive y García, the second Lieutenant D. Benedicto Nijaga y Polonis, a native of Carbeyeng, province of Samar, stated that the conspiracy was entered into for the purpose of securing from Spain, by peaceful means, or by the process of revolution, the independence of the country. He affirmed moreover that, in the case of revolution, the aid of Japan was to be sought and that the co-operation of the native troops was expected: and that the plan of campaign of the rebels who were in San Mateo, was to "fall upon Manila", the native infantry sent out to meet the attack to pass over to the rebel ranks. IV. In his declaration made in Manila before the same judge, Pio Valenzuela y Alejandrino stated that he was one of the members of the Interior Supreme Council of the Katipunan, the aim of which was to collect a large amount of money and promote a general rising in order to declare the independence of the islands under the protectorate of the Empire of Japan. Further on he stated that the rising was to have taken place at 7 o'clock p. m. on the 29th of August, entry being made into Manila and its suburbs, the rebels "killing the Spaniards, and the natives and Chinese who did not wish to follow them, and then devoting themselves to the sacking of the town, to robbery and incendiarism and the violation of women." V. Romualdo de J., sculptor of Sta. Cruz, Manila, declared that he had founded the Katipunan in 1888, the year in which the manifestation against the Archbishop was made; he defined the aim of the society to be "the killing of all the Spaniards and the taking possession of the islands." VI. In his declaration made in Cavite, September 3, 1896, Alfonso Ocampo affirmed that according to the plans formulated, they were "to make the assault, killing and robbing all the peninsular Spaniards." And moreover, that "the rebellion had for its object the assassination of all the peninsular Spaniards, the violation and beheading afterwards of their wives and of their children even to the youngest." Many others might be cited; with these six samples an idea may be gathered of the progressive idea advocated or fostered by Rizal, Pilar, Lopez, Ponce, the Lunas, Rosario, Cortés, and others who were inspired by Morayta, the Grand Master of the Gran Oriente Español. Note 4. The then Civil Governor of Manila, in a report to the Colonial Minister concerning what was taking place in Manila says, speaking of this Corps: "... this Corps of Vigilance which, although composed of no more than 45 persons including the inspectors of the same ... renders a service (to the Government in secret service work) which should be confided to 100 persons, considering the nature and the amount of the work undertaken and performed daily, from the day of the formation of the Corps to this day: a period of about a year. The interesting body of police which under my orders has performed such valuable services, is that which has attained greatest success in the fruitful labor of making clear the vandalistic events we have been experiencing." Note 5. Filibusters: more properly called separatists. Noah Webster describes a filibuster as a "lawless military adventurer, especially one in quest of plunder; a free-booter, a pirate." Hence, taken in its true meaning, the word does not apply to the separatists of the Philippines. Retana classifies the filibuster in three groups: the first: he who, thinking little or nothing of the independence of his country, showed more or less aversion to the peninsular Spaniards. 2. He who, under the pretext or without it, of illustrating his countrymen, inculcated into their minds political ideas which, without meriting the qualification of subversive, tended to incite them against supposed oppressions of the Spaniards; against all things which appeared behind the times, hence according to their way of arguing, against the Religious Corporations, to which they owed everything except their anti-Spaniardism. As a rule those belonging to this group professed great love for the mother-country and did not preach ideas of independence; they held the belief that theirs was the duty to prepare the way for the emancipation which should be attained by their grandchildren. And 3. Those whose aim was to attain the emancipation of their country as soon as possible. This latter group were the true separatists. It is however difficult to distinguish between the filibuster so called, and the true separatist; perhaps the only admissible distinction is that the separatist is a man of peaceful methods whilst the filibuster is a man of struggles. Rizal was more or less a separatist, Andrés Bonifacio a veritable filibuster. Note 6. Sr. Olive was a gentleman who well deserved the respect and honor paid to him by his nation, and the hatred of those whose plans of treachery he thwarted and who, in spiteful revenge, have gone so far as to accuse him of using torture and other forcible means of extorting confessions, many of which they claim to have been false. Sr. Olive was too kind-hearted a man to stoop to such methods even had the circumstances demanded the use of moderate physical persuasion. At one time Sr. Olive was the Governor of the Marianas Islands concerning the which he wrote and published a very interesting memoir. He was at that time Lieut. Colonel. Later on he was made Colonel and as such was placed at the head of one of the sections of the Guardia Civil of Manila. He was secretary of the sub-inspection of arms of the Philippines. When a state of war was declared, the charges which were at that time being prepared in connection with the insurrection, were handed over to Sr. Olive, who with a zeal worthy of praise, and an energy too seldom exerted, commenced to deal out strict justice to the enemies of their country. About a year and a half ago Sr. Olive was made General of Brigade. Note 7. According to a pamphlet written by a pseudonymous freemason and printed in Paris in 1896, the first lodge founded in the Philippines was that established in Cavite about 1860 under the name of Luz Filipina and subject to the Gr. Or. Lusitian, enjoying immediate correspondence with the Portuguese lodges of Macao and Hong-Kong which served as intermediaries between that lodge and those of other neighboring countries. Another statement however, from the pen of Sr. Nicolas Diaz y Pérez who formed his data from the original documents of the lodges, places the first foundation at the end of the year 1834. At this time, says Sr. Diaz, D. Mariano Marti, who died twenty-seven years later, whilst on his return to Spain, founded, together with others, lodges in various parts of the Archipelago, but they did not prosper and soon dissolved. The epoch of intrigues which produced so much disquietude and perversion of moral customs and ideas, more especially in the Tagal provinces, commenced about 1868. The masonic activity at that time was owing greatly to the political intriguers who were deported from Spain to this archipelago, where their influence was felt in no small degree, to the detriment of public morals. About 1872, during the interim government of Gen. Blanco Valderrama, a lodge was founded in Sampaloc, subject to the Gr. Or. Esp., and composed entirely of peninsular Spaniards with the exclusion of natives. In the same year D. Rufino Pascual Torrejón reached Manila and united his efforts to those of Marti, founding lodges purely Spanish. On the first of March 1874 was created the lodge "Luz de Oriente" under the obedience of the Gr. Or. de Esp., the Gr. Comend. being D. Juan de la Somera. This was really the first successful establishment of masonry in the Philippines. The cited Sr. Diaz y Pérez says on this point; "It may be said that freemasonry regularly constituted in the Philippines, dates from the 1st. of March 1874, with the creation of the lodge Luz de Oriente...." On the 1st of March 1875 was installed the Gr. L. Departmental, D. Rufino Pascual Torrejon being the Gr. President. Up to the year 1884 the lodges of the Philippines did not admit to their membership either indians or half-castes; but since that time, and upon the initiative of the Gr. Mast. of the Gr. Or. Esp. the doors of the lodges were opened to all indians and half-castes who could read or write. Later on purely native lodges were founded and from that time Spain lost, little by little but surely, her hold upon the people, with the result that she eventually lost her colony. What masonry has accomplished in other parts of the world it also accomplished here very effectually. It laid the foundation for the undermining of society, bringing forth a generation of traitors and building up a kingdom for anti-Christ. As has been proved over and over again by the many masonic documents which have been discovered, freemasonry was ever anti-Catholic in the Philippines; but it was not until it had degenerated into filibusterism that the anti-Spanish spirit really took shape. Year by year this spirit spread and more, especially among the natives and half-castes of less intellectual capacity. Among this element, separatist ideas spread with marvelous rapidity owing to the peculiarity of the character of the native and of the half-caste, more especially the Chinese half-caste. (See note 19). Up to 1890, even Filipino masonry enjoyed but insignificant development. By 1892, however, it had spread widely, and in the following year Manila was gifted with a female lodge founded on the 18th of July of that year, under the name of "La Semilla", of which Rosario Villareal, the daughter of Faustino Villareal, was declared the Ven. Gr. Mistress. From this time the element of politico-social decomposition gained ground among the native and half-caste population. New ideas continually gave place to the old and as the aims and purposes of the lodges degenerated, these centers of anti-catholic propaganda became more and more anti-Spanish. Isabelo de los Reyes, in an attempted defense of his "friends", makes the important confession that "Filipino freemasonry was not so inoffensive as it was believed.... The "Liga" at least was a school of conspiracy, and in truth, the Filipinos did not turn out bad pupils." Another demonstration of the inoffensiveness of freemasonry is the following series of facts taken from a pamphlet published in 1896 in Paris by Antonio Regidor under the pseudonym of Francisco Engracio Vergara. Regidor was a distinguished figure in the attempted revolt of 1872, and hence may justly be supposed to know something of the matter of which he speaks. He says: "By reason of the rising of Cavite many Filipinos characterized as progressives were deported to Marianas.... To the masons of Hong-Kong was owing the flight of several Filipinos...." "The foreign masons distributed arms in Negros, Mindanao and Jolo. The official bank of Singapore distributed in Cebu, Leyte and Bohol over £80,000 stg., and that of Hong-Kong more than £200,000 in Panay and Negros.... The French freemasons at the petition of brother Paraiso, went to aid also the escape of the deported in Marianas." Note 8. Rizal and others: Of this group Rizal, Pilar, the Lunas and Cortés, formed the more guilty part, they being men of superior education and more enlightened minds. Rizal was the center upon which almost everything connected with the revolt turned. During his younger days he lived with his parents in Calamba, where they occupied a stretch of land owned by the Dominican Corporation. The Rizal family was one of those most favored by the Dominicans [22], and one of those ungrateful ones too, which commenced law-suit against the said Corporation to unjustly possess themselves of the land they held at rent. Rizal received his secondary education at the Ateneo Municipal conducted by the Jesuit Fathers, and was always a bright attentive and successful pupil. At that time he was secretary of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin and Promoter of the Apostleship of Prayer. Whilst he remained true to the traditions of Catholic Spain, he was an upright pious youth. Much of his time he spent in carving wooden images of the Blessed Virgin and of the Sacred Heart, and in writing compositions, some of them remarkable for their beauty, in which were reflected a pure love for Spain. Having attained the degree of Bachelor he left the Ateneo and passed to the University of Manila, continuing his studies under the Dominican Fathers. There he studied medicine with great success for some years, and at length went to Europe to terminate his career and take his degrees. Rizal left school like so many other filipino students, overloaded with science he was unable to direct, full of pride because of his accomplishments, and very ambitious. He terminated his studies in Madrid and Germany, in both of which places he fell in with a class of people who utilized him as a tool to accomplish an end at that time unknown to him. They filled his head with new and false ideas, making him vain promises which appealed to his pride, and by their dark arts made of him a separatist. He also studied English and German, his studies in this latter language making him enthusiastic in the things of Germany and, in an extraordinary degree, with those of protestantism. Among his own people he was the possessor of an exceptional intelligence and talent but outside his own circle his most famous accomplishments are but poor to the student of Literature. His sadly famous Noli me tangere and El Filibusterismo cannot pass for more than very second-hand for their ingenuity and literary taste, but they possess the quality of being a mirror in which is reflected the inclinations, character and perverse moral sense of their author. In them he is reflected as a restless spirit anxious for human glory, haughty and above all, anti-Spanish and ungrateful in the extreme. It was in Berlin that he published his Noli in 1886. That this novel was written by Rizal there in no doubt, but that the ideas therein expressed came directly from his own head is more than doubtful. Like the vast majority of Filipino productions, it is but a copy taken from models which had struck the fancy of the author. The pictures he draws therein of the disadvantages suffered by the Filipinos who have become españolized, are but reproductions prepared in his own coarse and crude way of thinking, of the most scurrilous anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic works of propaganda produced by the Bible Societies and spread abroad throughout the world as gospel truth. Taking away the insults hurled against the Church and the Religious Orders, and against Spain, there is absolutely nothing new in the novel. Its object was to attack the friars and the chiefs of the Guardia Civil, both of which the author well knew to be the sustainment and guarantee of peace and order in the Archipelago and consequently the strongest support of the Spanish sovereignty in the Philippines, a sovereignty he wished to overthrow. To a reader whose library consists of a half a dozen books of insignificant literary value, the noli of Rizal is a masterpiece; but to the reader who has seen a book with a cover, who has had some experience of that portion of the world which lies outside the limits of the town of his birth, and who is gifted with more or less ability to think for himself, and sift the wheat from the straw in a literary composition, noli me tangere is but a half-tone picture cut from a newspaper and colored with water-colors by a ... school-boy. Towards the end of 1887, Rizal returned to the Archipelago, remaining about two months, during the which he made active propaganda of the ideas and fancies he had picked up in Europe: ideas which he himself could not really understand. In February 1888 he left Manila for Japan, from whence he returned to Europe, living for a while in Paris and later on in London. In 1892 Rizal, relying upon the generous character of D. Eulogio Despujols, the then Governor General of the Archipelago, decided to return to Manila. From Hong-Kong where he was then residing, he wrote to the governor, asking permission to return to his home; the Governor replied by means of the Spanish Consul at Hong-Kong, that he had no reason to prohibit him from returning, and that he could do so when it so pleased him, providing he came with no intention to disturb the peace then reigning in the Islands. This Rizal lost no time in doing; he arrived together with his sister. The baggage of both was carefully examined and in one of the trunks was discovered a bundle of leaflets in the form of anti-friar proclamations which indicated the bad faith of a traitor. These were handed over to Despujols unknown to Rizal. The Governor preserved them in his desk for future reference. In an interview with the Governor, Rizal begged pardon for his father who was under sentence of deportation for certain events which had taken place in Calamba; this was granted him without reserve. Our hero soon forgot the aims he professed to the Governor; instead of thinking about his folks and making his arrangements for the colonizing scheme he professed to have worked out in Borneo, he set to work to stir up disrespect towards the authorities, and the spirit of political unrest. He together with Doroteo Cortés and José Basa were the objects of careful vigilance on the part of the secret police. After a few days a prolonged conference took place between the Governor General and Rizal. During this conference the latter made patent his political feelings, at the same time making protestations of respect for Spain. His political programme however was not in keeping with his protestations of patriotism, and this fact so angered Despujols, who now saw that Rizal's idea was to fool him, that he took from his drawer the proclamations discovered in the agitator's baggage and thrusting them under the nose of the traitor, said: --And these proclamations; what are they, what do they mean? Rizal taken by surprise and confounded, cowardly declared that they were the property of his sister, a declaration which only enraged the General the more, and he ordered his detention in Fort Santiago; on the following day he decreed his deportation to Dapitan. Whilst in exile his opinion and advice were sought concerning the advisability of immediate armed rebellion. But he, crafty, more or less far seeing and, above all, jealous of Bonifacio's increasing ascendancy over the people, refused to countenance the idea. Granting the unselfish desire he professed of seeking merely the independence of his country, Rizal's jealousy was justified. Bonifacio's one great idea was the presidency; Rizal's: the honor and glory of having prepared the way for, and eventually, by his labors accomplishing his country's deliverance from what he was pleased to call the oppression of the Spanish Government. Had such oppression existed, Rizal's idea would have been worthy of classifying as noble. George Washington well deserved the name of the "Father of his Country," for he, laying aside all selfish aims and desires, led a handful of men against a horde of mercenaries sent by a cruel monarch who oppressed his people, not only in the colonies but in the mother-country also. Washington was a man who deserved and received the respect of those against whom he fought, for he fought for a principle. Such an honor never has, and never can be received by Rizal from his own countrymen. The campaign Rizal fought was inspired by and worked out in the freemason lodges which used our "hero" as a willing tool. Rizal was a Filipino Garibaldi, never a Filipino Washington, and hence the honors paid to his memory as a "patriot" must emanate from the lodge rooms which made him what he was, and not from the people of his country. In Dapitan the Filipino agitator was not inactive. On one occasion he directed a letter (which never reached its destination on account of its having fallen into the hands of Spanish authorities) to the Capitan Municipal of the province of Batangas, giving him information of the work of filibusterism which was at that time being carried on. Rizal, tiring of his position in Dapitan, eventually asked permission of the Governor General, Gen. Blanco, to be sent to Cuba as physician to the Spanish forces there. Blanco agreed to the proposition and ordered his return to Manila in preparation for the voyage to Spain, where he was to be sent and placed at the disposition of the Minister of War. From Spain came word, however, that the petition could not be accepted; and for a very good reason. Rizal's idea of becoming an army surgeon, was a manifest pretence, his real aim was to aid the separatist movement there, if he ever got there, but primarily to make his escape at an intermediate port, Singapore probably, if opportunity occurred. Moreover, it having come to the ears of the authorities that certain people of Pampanga and Bulacan were preparing a reception for the agitator, the Governor ordered that he should not be allowed to leave Dapitan, and that should he have left there, he should not be allowed to land in Manila on his arrival, but be transferred to another ship which should carry him back to Mindanao. It happened that he had left Dapitan on board the S. S. España, and in due time he arrived at Manila. At 11 a. m. on the 6th of August the ship on which he came anchored in the bay and everyone landed except Rizal. A lieutenant of the Veterana went aboard and took possession of the person of Rizal, holding him as a prisoner till 7:30 p. m., at which time, through an error in the delivery of an order, he was allowed to disembark. This he did in company with his sister Narcisa, and they made their way to the office of the Captain of the Port and later on to the Comandancia of the Veterana. His sister not having been under sentence of deportation, was allowed to go to the home of her relatives. During the evening of the same day Gen. Blanco gave a reception at Malacañang at which were present the Archbishop of Manila, the Illust. Sr. Bernardino Nozaleda; Sr. Echaluce; Sr. Fernandez Victorio, President of Audiencia; Sr. Bores Romero, the Civil Director and others. During the reception Gen. Blanco received a telegram from the Governor of the province of Batangas stating that in the pueblo of Taal, in the house of the brother of the filibuster Felipe Agoncillo, had been discovered a quantity of arms and ammunition, among other things being 10 revolvers, 10 winchesters, 10 other guns, a case of explosive bullets, a quantity of dynamite, a Japanese flag, another composed of red and blue with a representation of the sun in the center surrounded by seven stars--the flag of the future Filipino republic. Blanco realizing the importance of the news, formed a committee from among those present, choosing those who were members of the Junta of Authorities, to take steps in the matter. Orders were immediately given that Rizal should be placed on board the cruiser Castilla which was stationed at Cavite; this was carried out, the start from Manila being made at 11 p. m. the same night. This action was considered necessary, in as much as the news of the landing of Rizal spread fast and caused no little stir among his followers. Whilst Rizal was on board the cruiser Castilla which was awaiting orders, the Katipunan revolt broke out in Manila and the suburbs. Very soon afterwards his voyage Spainwards was commenced on board the S. S. Colon, the insurrection becoming more and more wide-spread daily. On finding to what an extent Rizal was complicated in the work of the revolution, his return to the Archipelago, as a prisoner, was demanded, and so our "hero" returned to be judged as were so many of his fellow agitators, for the crimes for which he was morally and physically responsible. A council of war was constituted under the presidency of Lieut. Col. Tabares, Capt. Tavil de Andrade taking charge of the defense of the prisoner. The accusation preferred against him was that he was the chief organizer of the revolution. The trial took place in the hall of the Cuartel de España in the presence of a large audience among whom were his sister and the woman with whom he had been living in Dapitan. The charge having been read out, several declarations were made by Rizal, some before his voyage to Spain and others since his return were also read. During his trial Rizal denied the knowledge of several persons who were his intimate friends and co-workers; among them Maximo Inocencio and Mariano Linjap, and others with whom he had been in almost continual communication. He denied knowledge of the "Liga Filipina" stating that not only did he not found it, but that he was not aware of its existence. He affirmed ignorance of who Valenzuela was, and almost immediately afterwards stated that he had held an interview with him in Dapitan when that individual had been sent there by Bonifacio to consult him on the subject of armed rebellion. Throughout the whole trial he pursued the same tactics, proving that, of himself, he was but an ordinary Filipino indian who, when left to himself to stand on his own merits, gave no signs of particular judgement or power of thought. The Filipino on trial, even for some significant affair, cannot tell a lie to advantage: Rizal was no exception even in this. The trial being ended he was condemned to execution. Previous to meeting his death he confessed and received the Holy Communion from the hands of the Jesuit Fathers having after long consideration, made the following retraction of his errors: "I declare myself Catholic and in this religion in which I was born and educated I wish to live and die. I retract with all my heart all my words, writings and actions that have been contrary to my condition as a son of the Catholic Church. I believe and profess whatever She teaches and I submit to whatever She demands. I abominate masonry as an enemy of the Church and as a society condemned by the Church. "The diocesan prelate, as superior ecclesiastical authority, may make public this spontaneous manifestation, to make reparation for the scandals which may have been caused by my works, and that God and my fellow-men may pardon me." "Manila 29th December 1896.--José Rizal.--Witnesses: Juan del Fresno, Chief of Picket.--Eloy Maure, Adjutant." He also entered the holy bonds of matrimony with the young woman with whom he had been living for some time in Mindanao. On the way to the place of his execution he remarked to one of the Fathers who accompanied him. Father, it is my pride that has brought me here." Of the political error committed by the Spanish Authorities in the execution of Rizal, I do not hold myself up as a judge. All governments, like human beings, commit mistakes and at times grave ones. The Spanish authorities, feeling themselves justified in so doing, ordered the execution of the prisoner who was responsible for one of the most bloody revolts since the time of the French revolution: the pattern taken by the Filipino leaders, for the means of the foundation of the Filipino republic. Rizal was executed on the Luneta. To assert that he was offered up as a victim to gratify the wishes of the Religious Orders is but a crude and vicious argument worthy of its inventors and propagators. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can be brought forward to prove such an assertion, but on the contrary, those members of the Religious Orders who concerned themselves in the stirring affairs of the revolution were, as a very general rule, opposed to harsh and extreme measures being taken; and among these was the Illustrious Archbishop of Manila, Sr. Nozaleda, a noble, tenderhearted and compassionate prelate, a prelate who has been dubbed by Foreman as "the blood-thirsty Archbishop". Had the friars held the reins of government as they are stated to have done, history would not have to record the names of so many, many people who were executed: people who were scarcely to be held as guilty, in as much as they were but sheep who thoughtlessly followed their shepherds without even looking to see where the road they trod would lead them. In politics Rizal had his party composed of a number of insignificant petty-lawyers, petty-doctors and others possessing academic titles and a semi-formed cerebral power. These were backed by a mass of the people of Calamba, Rizal's birthplace. In their eyes he was a "Messiah", a "Mahdi", their prophet and redeemer. As an individual he was bright and intelligent, and had he not been led astray by those who made a "cat's paw" of him, and who cruelly deserted him in his hour of need, he would doubtless have been one of the foremost Filipinos of to-day in that sphere of life in which God had placed him. A Spanish proverb says: "In blind man's land the one eyed man is a king." Rizal was a king. Note 9. Marcelo Hilario del Pilar y Gatmaytan was a native of Bulacan. He was, by profession, a lawyer, and had been enabled to complete his studies in that direction through the good offices of the Augustinian Fathers of Manila, who had given him the money necessary to matriculate and to pay the cost of his title of "abogado." [23] Pilar left Manila for the peninsula about the end of '88 for fear of deportation: a punishment at that time staring him in the face. He was one of the earliest workers on the "La Solidaridad", the official organ of Filipino freemasonry in all its sections. He later on became its director. Pilar was another of the many malays whose ways were beyond human comprehension. Spaniards who have lived a life-time among the indians and studied them carefully from all points of view agree that the deeper one studies the native character the more incomprehensible it becomes. That is, the study of the average filipino: Pilar was one of the average. He was not gifted with the education enjoyed by Rizal, nor was he such a stupid visionary as Pedro Paterno; he possessed touches of the character of both. Like so many of those Filipinos who fed at the hands of the Religious Orders, he eventually turned to bite the hand that fed him. As in the case of the others who had done the like, he did so, not because he had cause to, but because he fell, as did they, under the evil influence of those who utilized them to work out their schemes of treachery. Pilar was sent to Spain as a delegate of the Committee of propaganda. Owing to this position of chief of the delegation in Madrid, and by reason of his intimate friendship with Morayta, he occupied a position from which neither Rizal nor even the whole of the progressive indians combined, could drive him. He held, for some time, high office in the Gr. Or. Esp. as will be seen from the following clipping taken from page 107 of the Annual of that Orient for the year 1894-95. "GRAN CONS. DE LA ORDEN 1894-1895 Muy Ven. Gran Maestre Presidente Ven. H. Miguel Morayta y Sagrario, Gr. 33 ................................... Ven. Gran Orador Adjunto V. Marcelo H. del Pilar Gr. 33" (h. Kupang) It was Pilar who conceived the plan of the Katipunan; and yet after all it was not his conception, for the scheme he formed was at the best, a piece of patch work made up of the plans worked out in the various revolutions which had taken place in some part of the world. What Pilar's ambition was, it is hard to say; from his actions and writings one is almost driven to the supposition that he had none in particular, but was led to the separatist labors he performed by force of compromise. When the time was ripe for action Pilar determined to leave Madrid and make his way to Japan. He commenced the journey arriving at Barcelona, from whence he was to make his way east. There, however, he was taken suddenly ill, and died on the 4th of June 1896, in the Hospital of that city. In many things Pilar was superior to Rizal. Unlike that agitator, Pilar was not a sneaking, skulking petty-politician; he was straight-forward and had the courage of his opinions. What Pilar would have done if placed in the same circumstances as Rizal it is hard to say, but we may be assured that he would not have acted the coward as did Rizal. Note 10. Antonio and Juan Luna were two of four brothers. The former was a bacteriologist, the latter an artist who at one time, whilst he followed the instruction, and remained under the guidance of his master, showed no little talent. Antonio went to Spain in '88, and later on passed to Paris where he lived with his brother Juan who supported him. There he devoted himself to the study which made him famous; this he did in the laboratory of Dr. Roux. He became an assistant editor of the Solidaridad, the official organ of filipino freemasonry, and wrote many vicious articles in its columns over the pseudonym of Taga-Ilog. As a member of the freemason fraternity he was known as Gay Lussac. On his return to Manila he established, for a livelihood, a school of fencing, and like the vain, insensate "magpie in borrowed plumes" that he was, he once sent his seconds to a Spanish officer, inviting him to a duel! During the second half of the rebellion of '96, Aguinaldo offered Antonio the position of director of the War Department with the grade of General of Brigade. This honor, however, he declined. The Independencia speaking on this incident, says:-- "The military knowledge of Sr. Luna, acquired during his captivity (sic) in the prisons of the peninsula (Spain), is to be found condensed in two small works, one concerning the organization of the army, having as its base the idea of obligatory service in which he demonstrates that Luzon might put on a war footing 250,000 to 400,000 men, and the whole archipelago as many as from 800,000 to 900,000. The other work is a practical course in field fortifications as adopted by the French and German armies." [24] Juan, from childhood, was of an artistic turn of mind and found among his many protectors those who sent him to Spain to study art. In Spain he met with Sr. Alejo Vera, a noteworthy artist, under whom he studied, receiving an exceptional education both in art and in morals, Sr. Vera being a Christian gentleman. Later on he went to Rome, and there formed part of the Spanish artistic colony. After some two or three years of study there he sent to Spain his first painting [25]. Being an artistic production of a Filipino indian it was received with open hands and given a reception greater than it really deserved, as a result of the influence of Luna's friends. From Rome he went to Paris. It was in that city that he committed the fiendish double murder which so startled and shocked his friends and acquaintances, his victims being his wife and his mother-in-law, sister and mother of a prominent political aspirant of modern Manila. The result of the trial was that the courts of Justice of Paris absolved him. He then returned to Madrid, and soon after, to Manila. What Spain did for the Filipino brought forth fruit in only a few of the people who fell under her beneficent christian influence. The Lunas were among the few. They, like so many other ungrateful children, repaid their benefactors by becoming leaders of the insensate and inexcusable revolt against them: a revolt, the first act of which was to be the brutal murder of all Spaniards irrespective of parentage or other claims of consideration. Both the brothers suffered arrest by the Spanish authorities for rebellion and sedition, but in spite of the degree to which they were complicated, they remained practically free from punishment, and ever at the right hand of the imbecile General Blanco, himself a freemason, and friend of the enemies of his country. Eventually the two brothers left the ante-chamber of the Governor to enter the security of the military prison. Both brothers eventually retracted their errors only to fall into them again as soon as the lying protests of repentance had fallen from their lips. Juan died in Hong-Kong; Antonio, after a career of militarism succumbed to the same unprincipled ambition which carried Andrés Bonifacio to an untimely grave. Note 11. Doroteo Cortés was banished by Governor Despujol in the year 1893, to the province of La Union where he founded in San Fernando, the Capital, aided by Arturo Dancel, the lodge "Rousseau" and two others in the pueblos of San Juan and Agoó. He was a lawyer and became the president of the committee of Propaganda which was formed with the idea of gathering pecuniary resources for covering the expense of the distribution of all classes of pamphlets and anti-Religious proclamations. He was at one time the president of the Superior Supreme Council of the Katipunan [26], and received the funds collected for the payment of the expenses of the political commission sent to Japan to seek the aid and protection of that power. Cortés was a co-worker with Andrés Bonifacio and whilst the former devoted his efforts to the enlistment of people for the general rising throughout the country, the latter continued his negotiations with Japan to the end of forcing some international struggle between Spain and that Power [27]. By order of the Superior Council Cortés went to Japan to join Ramos and aid in the purchase of arms. Shortly after his arrival he communicated by letter with Ambrosio Bautista informing him that he had seen and spoken on the subject with the Japanese ministers of State and of Foreign Affairs [28], and that the said ministers "demanded guarantees" of the probable success of the undertaking before entering into the scheme. According to a statement of Isabelo de los Reyes, Cortés was "the first person of means and position who came to the decision of attacking, in the Philippines, the Religious Corporations. He was the soul of the manifestation of '88." (See appendix B.) At the time of the American occupation of the Archipelago the Cortés family showed themselves friendly to the new sovereignty and aided in many ways the establishment of good feeling between the two peoples. Note 12. Pedro Serrano, symbolic name Panday-Pira, was a 24th degree mason. He was a school-master of the municipal school of Quiapo. After having done considerable work of propaganda in masonry he abjured it. He was the cause of the entry into the lodges of hundreds of indian and half-caste clerks, laborers, employees, petty merchants and others of all classes and employments. He was accused by his fellow masons of exploiting the society [29] and of treason, of frequenting the Palace of the Archbishop and the College of San Juan de Letran, and of many things unbecoming a mason. In a document dated the 31st of March 1894, dispatched by the G. Cons. Reg. of Filipino masonry to the lodge Modestia, Serrano was denounced, and all masons were urged to flee from him. In the said document, a translation of which will be found in Appendix C, is poured forth the complaint of the president of the Gr. Cons. (h. Muza) of a leakage somewhere in the treasury in which were stored up the secrets of the treasonable labors being carried out in the Filipino lodges. By way of specific charges the president denounces Panday-Pira because he had the courage to give vent to his opinions concerning the doings of the Filipino lodges, to a foreign mason; because he was known to have, for some reason or other, visited the Archbishop's palace and Dominican College; that he had demanded the possession of certain documents, threatening the possessors if they did not give them up, etc. etc. On this account he was denounced as a traitor and dubbed "reptile", the pot calling the kettle black. Note 13. Morayta, the famous Don Miguel, the "papa" of the rebellious Filipinos! It is an almost world-wide belief that the number 13 is an unlucky number. If this be so, then Miguel Morayta well deserves his name, for in it there are thirteen letters; the first letter of each word commences with the thirteenth letter of the alphabet and it happens also that this miserable individual falls to note 13. I will therefore complete the coincidence by saying all I have to say of this person in thirteen lines. Morayta was at one time Gr. Master of the Gr. Or. de España, but was later on expelled therefrom, according to a masonic publication. In 1888 he founded the Gr. Or. Español, the mother of the Katipunan. In 1890 he took over the proprietorship of La Solidaridad then published by Marcelo del Pilar for separatist ends. Morayta was the idol of the Filipino students who sought education in the Peninsula. Using him as a means towards an end they aimed at, they banquetted him and thus assiduously attacking his stomach they finally captured him. Note 14. Tagalog: The Tagalogs are a branch of the Malay family which, in former times, dominated from Madagascar to the ends of the Pacific. They form part of what we might call the Malay-Chinee race, i. e. the cross between the female on the Malay side and the Chinee on the side of the male. This cross has been taking place from time immemorial, commencing long before the islands were discovered by the Spanish explorers. The present Tagalog indian enjoys more of the characteristics of the Chinee than of the Malay on account of the potency of the Chinee blood over the Malay. Going back to ancient times the probability is that the original Malay first became modified by its crossing with the inhabitants proper of the archipelago--the Negritos--marks of which mixture are still discernible in many of the Tagalogs. A second modification came through the mixture between the Malay-Negrito and the Indonesian, traces of which are seen in the light color of the skin in a portion, although small, of the Tagalogs. Another modification, the most marked, originated from the crossing of the Malay-Negrito-Indonesian with the Chinee, the Chinee being marked by the increase in stature, the elevation of the skull and other minor marks. During the last three centuries this hybrid Tagalog has undergone another small and gradual change by reason of a limited crossing with Spanish blood. This latter mixture however is insignificant in extent but always produces a superior type. As a people the Tagalogs number about one and a half millions, and inhabit the regions around about Manila. The traits of character of the four principal trunks from which the Tagalog of to-day is derived are, although still present in a greater or lesser degree, considerably modified by climatological and historical circumstances. At the coming of the Spaniards the Tagalogs, like the remaining native peoples of the archipelago, were met with in the depths of the savage ages, and were to a certain extent, of cannibalistic tendencies. The average Tagalog is not wanting in courage, a fact he has often displayed, but this courage is never seen to advantage except when the indian is under the leadership of a person of exceptional valor or a strict disciplinarian. Like most peoples derived from the Malay stock, the Tagalog indian is subject to strange fits of mental aberration, the fits taking different forms, generally innocent ones, the worst being a homicide under the influence of a "hot head". At least that is what might have been said of him 8 or 10 years ago, previous to the time in which he became fanaticised by freemasonry. He is not even yet apt to run amok as is usual among the Malays and this is undoubtedly due to the civilizing religious influence which has been brought to bear upon him during the three centuries of Spanish rule in the Archipelago. It is a noteworthy fact that in the same degree as the influence of religion, of the Religious Orders if you will, became lesser, in exactly equal degree did crime increase. Explain this as you will the fact remains that during the four years or so that the indian has been under the care and protection of a government indifferent to all religion, crime has increased a hundred fold, perhaps arithmetically so also, and crimes unheard of in days gone by, have become so common as scarcely to merit mention in the columns of Manila's yellow journalism. What the Tagalog indian is equal to when free from the restraint of the Catholic religion, has been seen from the fearful crimes and barbarities committed against Spaniards and against Americans during the insurrection. The brutalities committed upon the unfortunate prisoners who fell into their hands were unheard of even among the savage Arab hordes of the Soudan, nor have the records of the ferocity of the Chinese boxers yet told us of things equal to the fearful events which took place in the province of Cavite and elsewhere. And for all this the Tagalog indian is responsible: the Tagalog for whom Pedro Paterno claims a pre-Spanish civilization on the plan of the Aztec and ancient Peruvian indians. Like all oriental peoples the Tagalog is superstitious and loves demonstration, symbolism and things grotesque. About the only thing left to him of his ancient civilization as Paterno calls it, barbarism we generally say, is his mythology. In it everything is more or less connected with spirits. Their faith in what they call their anting anting [30] is unbreakable. Rizal was supposed to be under the protection of the anting-anting but the leaden missiles which took away his life carried away the anting-anting also: and yet there are thousands upon thousands of indians, some of them men of enlightenment, who still cling to the belief that Rizal still lives, thanks to the influence of his protecting amulet. Nor did anting anting avail Aguinaldo who now probably believes far more in the protection of his American prison than in that offered by his anting anting charms. Their mythology has, like their ancient character, been greatly modified in the vast majority, by the influence of the civilization implanted by Spain. This is one point in which Spain has differed from most nations in methods of civilization and colonization. However we may judge her in respect to her colonial administration in the Philippines, we cannot deny that she has been distinguished from other nations by her aim of preserving the native races of the archipelago, the destruction consequent upon the radical change undergone in everything, being limited to the savage customs and immoralities in which the native peoples were found submerged. The masonic lodges spoken of in the text which were asked of Morayta, were established, although they were not exclusively Tagalog in their membership. As a result of the petition of the Filipino colony mentioned in the same text, the theories and practices of Masonry were carried to the Tagalogs but instead of the needy brethren being aided by the wealthy ones, they were subjected to a contribution in exchange for which they received a gaudy regalia; in other words they were bought over with strings of beads and with tinsel truck as were the indians discovered by Capt. Cook in the South Sea Islands, with the exception that Capt. Cook and those who followed him carried civilization to the natives, whilst the founders of the Katipunan carried to the Tagalogs and the other indians of the archipelago misery and demoralization. Note 15. Faustino Villaruel Gomara was a Spanish half-caste, a native of Pandaran, living in Binondo. He was the founder of the lodge "La Patria" of which he was also the Ven. Gr. Master with grade 18. He also founded a lodge of female freemasons, for the foundation of which he committed the nefarious crime of prostituting his daughter, handing her over, in the period of her innocence and candor, to the ridiculous workings and practices of freemasonry. Rosario Villaruel (Minerva), thus sacrificed by her father, was initiated in Hong-Kong and made venerable of the first lodge of female masons in Manila, drawing in after her a large number of her half-caste friends, young folk of bare instruction. This lodge was known as "La Semilla". Its composition was: Sisters: Carlota Zamora, of Calle Crespo; María Teresa Bordas, of Tabaco, province of Albay; Fabiana Robledo, wife of Sixto Celis; Lorenza Nepomuceno, of Calle San José, Trozo; Angelica Lopez, Calle Jolo; Narcisa Rizal; María Dizon, Calle Trozo, and other fanatic females. Villaruel was the Gr. Oriente of filipino masonry, a deluded fanatic, a man of but scarce intellectual endowments, an instrument of those who knew more and were shrewder than he. By laying hands upon him the Spanish Authorities laid hands also upon a large number of incriminating documents which were the means of connecting many prominent business men of Manila with the bloody programme of the Katipunan. Among these was Francisco L. Roxas. Besides these documents were a large number of loose papers written in Tagalog, in which were discovered many threatening phrases and the expression of hopes in the success of an event to take place in the near future. Masks and other masonic implements, including a heavily made and sharply pointed dagger were also discovered. Previous to suffering the penalty of his treason he made and signed a public abjuration, for the copy of which see Appendix E. Note 16. Andrés Bonifacio was the soul of the Katipunan movement; he was the President of the "Council of Ministers of the Supreme Popular Council." His social condition was of a low grade, that grade from which many of the most fanatical pseudo-reformers have come; he was a warehouseman, a porter. In this capacity he was employed in the establishment of Messrs Fressel and Co., and was one of the humblest of the employees. Bonifacio was, however, very vain and quixotic. He was, too, a man of sanguinary character, and held the people over whom he attained ascendancy, in awe. His ambition was the cause of his ignominious downfall and brutal murder at the hands of another self-asserted dictator of the filipino Commune. Like most of his kind, he was a great reader, and by those who knew him best he was likened to Don Quixote, for like that worthy he passed many a night burning away oil and candles, and sacrificing needed sleep in reading, until his brain was turned and his whole mind given up to ideas of revolutions. His favorite study was the French Revolution, from the which he learned many lessons which he utilized in his projects, the principal of which was the formation of a government after the style of the French Commune. He was astute and comparatively intelligent, and spoke the Tagalog dialect well. For the carrying out of his plans he had agents in every nook and corner. No place where information might be gathered or the work of propaganda done, was over-looked. The offices of the Civil Government had their quota of his spies, as also did the Intendencia, the Maestraza de Artilleria and the other large centers. Nor were the Convents and Colleges overlooked, nor even the big business Corporations. Bonifacio enjoyed an envied ascendancy over the lower classes and the ignorant. Like others of similar tendencies, Bonifacio knew how to exploit the "membership". He was at one time treasurer of the Katipunan, and upon one occasion after the examination of the books by the president of the society Andrés was denounced as an exploiter, the accounts being found in a very bad condition. A series of mutual squabbles and insults passed between the president Roman Basa, and Bonifacio, the whole affair ending up in a re-election of officers, Bonifacio being chosen as president. This occurred towards the end of the year 1893. The vanity of Bonifacio was comparable only to that of Aguinaldo. Among the number of chief workers of the Katipunan was a certain Valenzuela, a doctor who had, according to his own confession, been forced into the membership by Bonifacio, on the strength of a "love" affair; he was given the choice of membership or death. He chose the former but later on resigned. Whilst a member he enjoyed a salary of 30 pesos a month as medical officer, but only with difficulty could he collect his pay. He claimed to have been exploited by Bonifacio who, whilst merely a porter, could thus have at his command the free services of a real doctor, spurning the services of the petty physicians which abound in Manila. Nor was this all. His own (Bonifacio's) house having been burned down, he went, on the strength of this same "love" affair, to live in the house of the said doctor (see foot-note p. 48), taking with him his paramour, the doctor paying the greater part of the expenses thus incurred. At the time of the organization of the popular Supreme Councils, Bonifacio was chosen president of the Council of Trozo; but in consequence of internal troubles occasioned by his rebelliousness, the Supreme Council decided to dissolve the local Council. Bonifacio, true to his colors, disregarded this order and continued working on his own account, taking upon himself the faculties of the Supreme Council. He preserved in a case which was found in the warehouse of Messrs Fressel and Co., the organization of the "Filipino Republic" which was to be, as well as a number of regulations, codes, decrees of nominations, etc., all drawn up in Tagalog (see foot-note p. 49.) Upon the discovery, on the 19th of August 1896, by the Augustinian Padre fray Mariano Gil, parish priest of Tondo, of the plot of the Katipuneros, Bonifacio and his immediate assistants fled from Manila to Caloocan. From that point he sent orders to the provinces of Manila, Cavite and Nueva Ecija that a general rising should take place on the 30th of that month. These orders were given out of revenge for the failure of the blood-thirsty plot whereby every Spaniard, man, woman or child should share in the sufferings which his diseased brain had concocted for those who should fall into his hands. Bonifacio issued special orders concerning the Governor General, his plan being that he and the other Spanish authorities of any importance should be taken prisoners, but not killed, it being intended to hold their persons as security for the granting of their demands. He called together the members of the Junta Superior and nominated a general-in-chief, a general of division and other officials. These however refused to step into the places he had prepared for them and Bonifacio angered thereat threatened to have the head removed from the shoulders of anyone who dared to disobey him. The general-in-chief Teodoro Plata, a cousin of Bonifacio, fled during the night following his nomination, whereupon Bonifacio issued orders for his capture, commanding his death wherever he should be found. Sometime previous to this, about the month of May, Bonifacio sent Pio Valenzuela to Dapitan to hold a conference with Rizal concerning the convenience of immediate rebellion against Spain. Rizal would not consent to the projected revolt but opposed the idea most strenuously, being thrown into such a bad humor by the information he received of Bonifacio, that Valenzuela, who had gone to Dapitan intending to spend a month there, determined to return on the following day. On his return to Manila he recounted to Bonifacio the result of his mission. Bonifacio who knew Rizal's influence over the people to be greater than his own, had been living in hopes of receiving Rizal's consent which would be the surrendering to him of the whole responsibility and glory of the bloody enterprise. Bonifacio aspired to the absolute, like all the so-called leaders of the revolt; so when he realized the stand taken by Rizal, who was willing to wait patiently till the poison with which he had inoculated the people should work of itself, he flew into a rage like a spoilt child, declaring Rizal to be a coward and imposing upon Valenzuela, his messenger, implicit silence on this subject, prohibiting him from manifesting to anyone what he considered to be the bad exit of the consultation. No methods were too underhand for Bonifacio; to gain his end he lied to the people over whom he held sway as only a Filipino can lie. On one occasion he affirmed that in Coregidor was a vessel loaded with arms and ammunition for the rebels, and by this means he animated them, a very necessary thing at that time, as they were but scantily armed with bolos and were no match against those they intended to assail. Taking him all in all, Bonifacio was a first class organizer for such an enterprise as that aimed at by the Katipunan, and upon his shoulders lies the weight of the greater part of the iniquities of the diabolical society. He ordered the outbreak and in a skillful manner pulled the strings which worked the figures which formed the performers in the marionette revolution. He had rivals in the field however, the most powerful being Aguinaldo, the would be president of the mushroom republic. After the encounter at San Juan del Monte in which the insurgents suffered the loss of 95 killed and 42 taken prisoners in the first instance, and shortly afterwards of 200 more, Bonifacio escaped, carrying with him the funds of the Katipunan, some 20,000 pfs. [31] He was supposed to be in hiding in the most inaccessible parts of the mountains of San Mateo, in as much as he had told Pio Valenzuela that in case the movement were unsuccessful he had determined to retire to that point to devote himself to highway robbery [32], to foot-padding, an idea gotten from some modern French novel probably. He worked his way eventually into Cavite, and, according to information gotten from Pedro Gonzalez, he fell into the disfavor of Aguinaldo who saw his own superiority in danger of being supplanted; the generalisimo therefore put a price upon his head [33]. A party was sent in search for the runaway and upon his capture he was subjected to most brutal treatment, and at last fell a victim to the unprincipled ambition of the Dictator. Had Bonifacio lived he would have made a splendid acquisition to the Partido Federal, he being a man who could, like many of the self-asserted leaders of to-day, plan and follow out any double-faced policy that might be needed under the circumstances. Note 17. This note not being ready at the time of the printing of the pages of this section, it has been reserved for note 101, which see. Note 18. Domingo Franco y Tuason was a native of Mambusao, Province of Capiz. He was the president of the first junta called by Rizal in 1892 for the formation of the "Liga Filipina". Till that time he was like many others of the same class almost unknown. Note 19. The character of the native: this is a subject upon which one might write many volumes without conveying to the minds of his readers more than a faint idea of what that strange character is. More mysterious than the most profound mystery of Religion, his most striking trait of character being a decided tendency to retrogression, the Malay stands out among the numerous divisions of the human family as a man with a marked propensity to the mysterious, to the prodigious. He is accustomed to give a blind obedience to his superiors and more so to his own caciques, he is docile as a general rule, and shows but little resentment to abusive language, although he will sometimes carefully guard the remembrance of some insignificant insult or blow, and take a cruel revenge, a thousand times greater than the injury he received, after a period, at times, of years. Other peculiarities of the native are his delight in gambling and cockfighting, his aversion to manual labor, his infantile but excessive vanity, his lack of the power of thought in matters of moment, his well developed imagination, his instability from all points of view and his liability to complete and radical changes. The average indian is to-day virtuous, honest and grateful for favors received, tomorrow he is vicious, thieving and shows an ingratitude not to be found even in the brute creation. This very marked trait of character may be found in many of the Filipinos who have held and still hold some of the highest official positions in the islands. To sum up the Filipino indian in a few words: he is inexplicable. There have been those who have spent their lives in the study of the indian, but in spite of all that man can do to study man, the problem remains unsolved. Only those "globe trotters" who have studied the native from the muchacho who waited upon them at the hotel at which they stayed during their few days visit, and the cochero who had the honor of conducting such savants to and from the Luneta, have so far been able to demonstrate what is this character which has puzzled men of common sense and lifelong experience, for centuries. Being by nature credulous, ignorant and superstitious, the indian fell an easy victim to the mysteries of freemasonry, which served him as are introduction to the semi-savage methods of the "Liga Filipina" and the barbarous practices of the Katipunan, the pacto-de-sangre of which, carried him back to the savage times of his remote ancestors who were drawn from their mountain and forest lairs and domesticated by the Religious Orders. Notes 20, 21, 22. The initiations, proofs, oaths etc., of Universal freemasonry were utilized by the Filipino lodges to serve as a ceremonial, a very essential thing to the success of any association among orientals. Nothing suited the taste of the Filipino better than the awe inspiring solemnity of his initiation. These ceremonies however fell into abuse, and by the time they became utilized by the Katipunan they had reached the verge of the grossest superstition and absurdity. Note 23. The G. Cons. Reg. was installed in 1893. A masonic document bearing a seal "Gr. Consejo Regional de Filipinas. G. Secretaria", and purporting to be a copy of two paragraphs from a letter of the illustrious bro. Kupang (Marcelo H. del Pilar) dated from Madrid on the 17th December 1894, says: "D. Miguel (Morayta) has a very poor opinion of the Reg. (Regional Council).... He says that this Council continues working well for some few months, at the end of which all the enthusiasm of the founders vanishes and.... Oh, if we could only by our acts give the lie to this pessimism. Morayta was the founder of the Council. Note 24. La Solidaridad was the official organ of Filipino freemasonry in all its branches. Although it was published in the peninsula its circulation was intended for the Philippines. Its editors were the leaders of the disaffection against the metropolis and stout advocates, indirectly, of an impossible independence. The chief aim of the paper was to mortify everything Spanish, and to this end its columns were continually full of seditious articles aimed, not merely at individuals but at the State. Its diatribes against the Government of the Metropolis were of the bitterest nature, and therefore but little publicity was given to the sheet in Madrid, where it was printed. It enjoyed no exchange with the periodicals of importance of the city, had no street sales, nor was it exposed for sale publicly. The libraries did not carry it on their tables and it never reached the hands of the public authorities. In fact the people of the official element know nothing of its existence. In the office of this bi-monthly paper was established a freemason lodge bearing the same name as the paper; all the members of the Association Hispano-Filipina became members of the lodge. Being the organ of masonry as well as of separatism it was introduced into the Archipelago and secured a free circulation in all parts of the principal islands where its calumnies against the Religious Orders had the effect of producing a decided effect upon the maintenance of public order. The statement that the bi-monthly was founded by Pilar is erroneous; it was first published by Lopez Jaena in Barcelona where it enjoyed its enforced life till it reached its number 18, of October 1889, when it suddenly ceased publication on account of the seizure by the authorities of a number of incriminating documents and pamphlets. It recommenced publication in Madrid on the 15th of November of the same year. It was later on acquired by Pilar and Morayta. It was in reality a vent for the spleen of its writers against Spain and things Spanish; it was a precursor of the Independencia [34] the official organ of the Revolution against the U. S., and of the La Democracia its daughter, the official organ of the Federal Party, the dregs of the old revolutionary government of Malolos. [35] Note 25. One of the first propagators of Filipino masonry was Sr. Centeno, Civil Governor of Manila, a man of anything but happy memory for this country [36]. Centeno and Quiroga Ballesteros worked hard to undermine the beneficial influence of the Clergy, an influence which was the safe-guard of law and order. Their most famous piece of work was the manifestation of '88 against Archbishop Payo (See note 2). In that manifestation was conceived the cry of sedition which was later on to ring throughout the archipelago and tear down the banner of the fatherland to replace it with the red flag of anarchy; a flag which well nigh brought the people of a would be independent country to the verge of political and moral destruction. Note 26. No sooner had Almighty God consummated the grand work of the creation, the culmination of which was the breathing into man of an immortal soul, than the devil, the father of evil, jealous of the attributes given by God to man, made his bold attempt to destroy God's immortal work. From that moment to this present the spirits of evil have carried on an unceasing warfare against what has been for the glory of God. The Monastic Orders ever since the days of their birth have had to contend against these powers of evil; and there is therefore little necessity for surprise that those who were employed in such work as were the unscrupulous persons who came to the archipelago to sow ruin in the consciences of the people and scandal in society, should carry on a bitter campaign against the Religious Orders to whom was owing every jot and tittle of the civilization and culture enjoyed by the Filipinos. The Monastic Orders have ever been the bulwark of Christianity, and as such have had to bear the brunt of the battle. Europe owes the solid foundation of its political, social and religious life to the Religious Orders, which, during the ages in which the Huns, Goths and other barbarians overran and devastated those lands, hoarded up in the nooks and corners of their monastic dwellings the seed which, when afterwards sown, was to become the stout tree of civilization which should spread its sheltering branches to the four corners of the earth. One of these branches drawing its fullness of life and vigor directly from the trunk, extended to these far off islands and, casting its shade over the embruted mankind here existing at that time, wrought a change over it no less marked than that wrought over the European peoples. From the day in which Father Urdaneta, that intrepid Augustinian, set foot upon Philippine soil, till the day upon which the hydra-headed Katipunan appeared in the land, the Monastic Orders have been the one great source of all that was really useful and beneficial to the inhabitants of the archipelago, although at times the moral interests of the people were not the commercial interests of the country. The "friar" so much slandered by those who wish to overthrow his beneficent influence, ever carried the banner of his country enlaced with the Cross of the Redeemer. He came to the Archipelago as a messenger of peace and order, and was the strongest supporter of the sovereignty of his nation. The "friar" was hated because he was the one who best knew and understood the indian, and from his intimate knowledge of his parishioners, could the more easily detect anything on their part which tended to the detriment of the integrity of the Spanish sovereignty. The campaign against the Religious Orders was the attack of the battering-rams against the city to be captured. By piercing the wall the entry into the city could be the easier made; and this the separatist element well knew, hence all their efforts were directed against the stout wall which defended from its assaults the treasure of the metropolis. For three hundred years the Philippines remained submitted to Spain exclusively by reason of the moral influence of the Clergy. Whilst the banner of Spain, floated over the Archipelago, the Religious formed the strongest guard for its protection; when it fell, strung by the ingratitude and treachery of those who had sworn to defend it to the last drop of their blood, and lay dishonored in the dust, it was the Religious who bowed his head in the deepest grief and who shed the bitterest tears. When the flag of the conquerer was hauled up to the height from which once gloriously floated the symbol of Spanish authority, the Religious, obedient to the commands of his superiors, withdrew to the solicitude of his convent, to await in patience, the passing of the storm. He looks out upon the clouded political horizon, as Noah looked out from the window of the ark upon the vast sea of waters which hid from his view the fearful destruction which had overcome the world, patiently awaiting the time when he should, at God's will, go forth to commence again the work of reconstruction. Often have I heard the opinion expressed that the Government's worst enemy is the "friar", that it is the "friar" who keeps alive the spirit of rebellion. Let those who think thus, ponder over one small thought: what has the friar to gain in sustaining a rebellion which has caused him more moral and material damage, than has been caused to any other entity in the Philippines? To those who are able and willing to utilize the power of thought with which God has endowed them, it is sufficiently clear that the Religious has nothing to gain by such tactics, but, on the contrary, all to lose. In Spanish times the native enemies of the Religious Orders were the enemies of Spain and in these days, the enemy of the friar is by no means a real friend, whatever he may claim to be, of the Government of of the U. S. The Spanish masons and the Filipino separatists found the friar to be the greatest obstacle to be encountered. "The friar," wrote Governor D. Francisco Borrero, to Sr. Canovas, in a memoir concerning the Archipelago, "knowing the language, spirit, and tendencies of the natives, is considered as the principal obstacle for the realization of the filibuster idea, and hence arises their aspiration (that of the enemies of Spain) that the Religious Orders should be eliminated, because such a step being taken, they believe they will have travelled half the journey...." The propaganda of Universal freemasonry, of Filipino freemasonry, of the Liga Filipina, of the Compromisarios, was aimed principally at the Religious Orders, but the results attained were but introductory to the real work of the Katipunan, which, finding itself cornered by the discovery of the plot it had concocted against the Government, showed its hand. Its aim was anti-Spanish and not merely anti-friar, as is sufficiently clear from the fact that in all the documents of the diabolical association it is death to all the Spaniards, and not to this or that class. Moreover in many cases the same Katipuneros saved their parish priests from a sure death whilst they dealt out anything but kind treatment to those of the Civil Guard (Filipinos) and the Spanish troops who fell into their hands. The friars who were murdered by the rebels were not murdered for being friars but because they were Spaniards. The documents captured, the result of the trials held in judgement of persons guilty of treason, show clearly that the revolution was for the purpose of gaining the independence of the country from Spain, and not merely to bring about the expulsion of the Religious Orders. Aguinaldo, the leader of the Katipunan hordes, desired to send the friars who fell prisoners into his hands, over to Hong-Kong, where they would be at liberty to return to their own country; but this merciful desire of his was overruled by his advisers, among whom were numbered Mabini his right hand man, Pardo de Tavera, Legarda and Buencamino, all three of them traitors to the cause of independence. To-day they stand in positions of honor, honor which they have done nothing to deserve, whilst Aguinaldo who was the tool of political schemers, their play-thing, is cast into disgrace and kept in the background, a scape-goat for the sins and shortcomings of men whose names disgrace the darkest pages of Philippine history. Note 27. Vast numbers of these documents were later on destroyed in the hope that certain affairs of an anti-patriotic nature might be hushed up, and many persons of a high official standing saved from scandal. Padre Mariano Gil, O. S. A., who made known to the public authorities the fearful plot of the Katipunan in time to prevent the brutal murder of hundreds of Spaniards, was granted certified copies of a large number (all the principal ones) of the documents and these have been since preserved with the greatest care, and remain to-day as a standing proof of the duplicity of many persons who live in ignorance of the fact of the existence of the said certified copies. Note 28. The element here spoken of was the Filipino colony (all of them separatists) and Morayta the "papa" of the said Filipinos of separatist tendencies. Note 29. This committee, although not exclusively masonic, was essentially revolutionary, and had for its duty the distribution of works of propaganda. Its delegate in Europe was Marcelo H. del Pilar. Note 30. See note 26. The campaign at this present carried on by some of the filipino and Spanish papers, and, in contradiction to the fundamental principles of Americanism, by the local American press also, is but a sequel to the work of this committee of propaganda. The calumnies which are literally crammed into the columns of Manila's English speaking daily and weekly press are but a poor reproduction of the vicious publications distributed throughout the archipelago since the year 1888. For fourteen years have these calumnies been published, but in spite of countless challenges, never have the statements brought forward been backed up with even the shadow of proof. When almighty God completed his creation by the making of man and woman, he led them to Eden, placing them under his law. Then it was that the devil beguiled them with lying words: "For God doth know that in that day that you shall eat thereof (of the forbidden fruit) your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as Gods knowing good and evil." From that day to this, this same argument that the devil used to try to prove that God was withholding from the people what was to their benefit, is being to-day used by certain of the offspring of that evil spirit against the element of good, against the Religious Orders, the servants of God, claiming that they held from the people of this Archipelago that which was for their good and advancement. Adam and Eve found to their bitter cost that the devil lied: those who are to-day being misled by anti-friar calumny will make the same discovery in due time. Note 31. This statement is erroneous. The opinion of the author was formed from statements made by those charged with treason. Many of those under this charge gave false testimony, as was later on proved, and in that testimony implicated honorable Filipinos who had never harbored such ideas in their hearts as those they were accused of. Many of the wealthy element of Luzon and other islands of the group, were forced by threats and compromises into position they had no desire to occupy. Of these the great majority were either insular Spaniards, that is sons of Spanish parents, but born in the Philippines, or they were Spanish mestizos or indians. Some 90% of the wealthy revolutionists were Chinese half-castes. Note 32. And at what a cost! Think of the thousands of hard earned dollars which went to swell the funds gathered to feed and clothe and to satisfy the fads and fancies of those exploiters. And what has the poor indian who provided the money gained in the deal? Four or five years of bloodshed and disaster he has surely gained; but what is of more importance to him is that he barely escaped falling into the hands of his own countrymen! He fell out of the frying-pan and almost fell into the fire! Note 33. The aspirations of the association were, to say the least, anti-patriotic; they were always underhand; they were the aspirations of the "Liga", of the "Compromisarios" and of the Katipunan. Note 34. "In the following year, Pedro Serrano arrived from Spain and then was masonry introduced into the Philippines, the first lodge instituted being the "Nilad" [37] its first Venerable being José Ramos." Testimony of Moises Salvador y Francisco (fol. 1,138 to 1,143). According to the testimony of Antonio Salazar (fol. 1,118 to 1,129) "In 1892 Pedro Serrano came from Spain and in union with José Ramos joined a lodge of peninsular Spaniards, and commenced the propaganda of masonry exclusively among Filipinos, in a short time establishing the mother lodge known as the Nilad ... the number of members becoming excessive, other lodges were established in the suburbs...." Into this lodge Nilad or the lodges formed therefrom, passed all the members of the committee of propaganda and of the local delegations, the work of the propaganda of masonry and that of separatism being carried on in the same lodge room. The plea that masonry had no connection with the Katipunan fails to stand good in face of this testimony, added to which may be mentioned letters of M. del Pilar to La Modestia concerning the organization and labors of separatism; as well as other letters, rich in masonic jargon, to the lodges and to individuals connected with the double work of propagating masonry and spreading among the people ideas of the basest of ingratitude. To the lodge Nilad, the Gr. Sec. of the Gr. Or. Esp. wrote from Madrid, June 8th 1892: AL. G. D. G. A. D. U. Liberty.--Equality.--Fraternity. Universal Freemasonry. Spanish Family. The Resp. Log. Nilad, No. 144 of A. L. and A. masons of the Philippines regularly constituted in the Federation of the Gr. Or. Español (seat in Madrid). The letter goes on to speak of the new foundation and the number of initiations. "It pleases us much," says the Gr. Sec. "to see the activity and zeal which you employ in the labors, and for it we greet you. Nevertheless, we must remind you always of the greatest care in the election of the laborers. Not all men, although they profess our ideas and doctrines, serve for good masons,..." Morayta, writing on the 12th of June 1892 to bro. Panday Pira, says: "... But do not forget an advice which I believe Ruiz gave you also: be very careful; do not open your arms to any except they be of full confidence.... Remember that, even though things have changed there (in the Philippines) you run all the danger consequent upon the domination (sic) of the friar and of the General." The general was Despujols, an upright, honest and sincere man who was too apt to measure other people's corn by his own bushel. The filibusters took advantage of the fact, and by their lying protests of love for Spain, captivated him and fooled him out and out for a time. Note 35. At that time liberty of association was not allowed by law in the Archipelago. To attain their ends this was the thing most necessary for the separatists. Without the shelter of the law of association nothing could be done except by stealth. It was for want of this privilege that the shelter of the masonic lodge room was sought. Note 36. Blumentritt, Fernando; of German race, Austrian by nationality, resident in Bohemia and therefore spoken of by various writers sometimes as a German, at others as a Bohemian or an Austrian. Like Foreman [38], Blumentritt claimed to be a fervent Catholic and yet was an open enemy of the Church. He claimed moreover to be a great friend of Spain and yet openly sided with her enemies. He was one of the collaborators of the La Solidaridad. Isabelo de los Reyes writes of him: "The savant (sic) Blumentritt the brother of the Filipinos, has always served us with disinterest (except in what concerned his pocket) and opportuneness. He was the first who did us justice by publishing many valuable articles to demonstrate, under all points of view, the superiority of the Filipino (Isabelo does not say over what) and defending our cause against the ambition of the imperialists (that is the Spaniards)." Blumentritt was a member of the society known as the "Amigos del Pais" [39], and remained so till his actions and writings caused well thinking Spaniards and Philippinos [40] to call for his dismissal from its membership. The patriotic outcry against him caused him to resign on the 14th of November 1889; the Solidaridad of the 31st of December of the same year published his resignation. The press of Manila was exceptionally bitter against him and only such Filipinos as those who continue up to the present time forming part of the juntas in Hong-Kong, Madrid, Paris, London and other places looked up to him for the assistance they could not find at home. Note 37. It was naturally in the Peninsula where the chief work of the propaganda had to be carried on, and it was there also that the propaganda had the least effect. The principal instrument for the dissemination of the seed of separatist aspirations was the Solidaridad (See note 24). The Filipinos here, who gave their subscriptions and other sums of money for the support of the bi-monthly, were kept under the impression that the official organ was making a great noise in Madrid; but as it never reached the official world it was supposed to influence, its publication was practically useless. In the Philippines it served the same purpose as the La Independencia: that is, it served to keep alive the spirit of unrest, and by the lies it published, made the people believe that their leaders were going to lead them to a promised land which "flowed with milk and honey." They eventually got into the promised land, only to find that the milk was very much "condensed", and that the honey was only to be got after those who secured it had been exposed to the very unpleasant operation of being stung by the bees which produced it. Instead of serving to keep together the subjects and their rulers in a bond of peace and tranquility, and helping them to come to a mutual understanding, in which state the progress and advancement of the islands and their inhabitants could be the easier and the better accomplished, the separatist element, by their propaganda, caused more and more strife by attacking national institutions and by casting slurs upon national honor. The discontent stirred up against the Spanish authorities was identical to that which, until the passing of the law of sedition and even since that time, was stirred up against the American sovereignty. In its propaganda against the Religious Orders, inciting the native clergy against the lawful authority of their Bishops, it was the precursor of modern Manila's American press. History tells us what was the result of the lessening of the moral influence of the Religious Orders in the days of Spanish rule, and to-day History repeats itself. The inciting of the native clergy against their Bishops is encouraging the natives, as a whole, to resist lawful authority. The cry to-day is "down with the friar," tomorrow it will be "down with the American." In 1888 it was down with the Religious Orders, in 1896 it had become "death to all Spaniards". In 1898 the American was blessed as a deliverer from oppression, in 1899 cursed as an intruder. To-day...? Who knows the opinion of the people? Who but a few ignorantes trust the great men of the late revolution? In Spain the work of the separatists produced no effect upon the people; a few here and there of the least patriotic of the scum of Barcelona and Madrid aided them but apart from these and the Bible Societies, no one interested themselves in their cause. Note 39. From the earliest to the latest days of the period of the revolt, that is from '88 to '98, this was one of the greatest obstacles to be overcome. Money was collected for propaganda in Spain and in Japan; what became of it all? Money was collected for the purpose of releasing or stealing away Rizal; what became of it? Funds were collected for the purchase of rifles and ammunition for the Katipunan, and, at the last moment, Andrés Bonifacio fled with some 20,000 pesos. This continual squabble over the administration of the funds is a proof clear enough, of the existence of organized exploiters whose pockets were of more concern to them than were the interests of their country. Note 40. It is almost needless to say that this latter was in the minority; later on Pilar suffered a marked change of temperament and became more decidedly separatist than Rizal. Rizal was willing to give the goose a chance to lay her golden eggs; Pilar becoming impatient killed the goose with the scheme of the Katipunan. Note 41. "Previous to his return to Manila Rizal lived some time in Hong-Kong. From there he forwarded to Moises Salvador Francisco the statutes and instructions for the "Liga Filipina"."--Testimony of the said Francisco. (fols. 1,138-1,143.) Note 42. "It resulting that after some years of voluntary expatriation ... a Spanish citizen (Rizal) born in the Philippines, directed a first letter, dated some months back in Hong-Kong, to the superior Authorities, offering his aid and assistance for the better government and progress of the Philippines, at the same time in which his latest book commenced circulation, for which reason no reply was given; and in a second letter dated in the month of May, in which, recognizing the policy of generous attraction, of morality and justice here implanted ... announced his intention of returning to his native soil to dispose, together with his friends, of the property they possessed, and to go with their families to found, in Borneo, a filipino agricultural colony under English protection...." "A few days afterwards, the Spanish citizen ... disembarked with his sister in Manila...." (See also note 8.) Extracts from the Decree of Deportation issued against Rizal by Governor Despujols, 7th July 1892. Note 43. "In the year 1892, Rizal being in Manila, recently arrived from Europe, several people of the country were gathered together, among them Andrés Bonifacio, Numeriano Adriano, Timoteo Paez and Estanislao Legaspi, in a wooden house in calle Dulumbayan, were a society known as the "Liga Filipina" was founded." Testimony of Valentin Diaz, native of Panay, Ilocos Norte. "In May or June 1892 José Rizal reached Manila; and encharged by him, Paez and Serrano invited a large number of persons to gather on a certain day ... in the house of Doroteo Ongjungco where Rizal manifested to those present, among whom was the witness, that it was necessary to form an association which should be called the "Liga Filipina", the object and of which should be the attainment of the separation of these islands from Spain." Moises Salvador y Francisco (fols. 1,296-1,299). "The reunion was called by Rizal, and the witness was invited by Timoteo Paez, who conducted him to the house of Doroteo Ongjungco.... That José Rizal addressed those present, manifesting the convenience of establishing an association under the name of the "Liga Filipina" with the object of collecting funds by different means, to the end of securing opportunely the independence of these islands".... Testimony of Domingo Franco y Tuason (fols. 1299-1303). Note 44. It was not the aim which Rizal had in his mind, of delivering his country from disabilities but the manner in which he set to work to accomplish that end, to which objection must be raised. When a people suffer under the oppression of its rulers, all the world admires the man who rises to throw off the hateful yoke. But when the oppression is imaginary and when the so-called hero is but a marionette in the hands of political schemers who seek their own advantage under the shelter of a pretence to throw off a yoke which does not exist, one cannot admire the part played by the deluded "tool". The emancipation from the mother-country was the key-note of the revolt. It was the aim of the Filipino freemasons, of the Liga Filipina, of the Compromisarios and of the Katipunan. Note 45. Rizal was deported to Dapitan, in the island of Mindanao, by decree of Governor Despujols, part of which has been quoted in note 42. The decree goes on to say that, by reason of the fact that "the veil under which, up this present, he has succeeded in hiding his true intentions has been torn asunder," ... "that he adduces no other defence but useless denials, having recourse to throwing the blame of the discovery of the leaflets upon his own sister (see page 99)...." "In fulfillment of the high duties which devolve upon me as your General and Vice Royal Patron ... I decree the following:..." "1st: that José Rizal shall be deported to one of the islands of the south...." "The responsibility of these vigorous measures which a painful duty imposes upon me, falls entirely upon those who by their imprudent aims and ungrateful proceedings come to disturb the paternal cares of this general government making the ordinate march of Philippine progress the more difficult." [41] "Manila, 7th July 1892.--Despujols. Note 46. "In the month of April 1893, upon the initiative and invitation Juan Zulueta, now dead, and of Deodato Arellano, cousin of Marcelo del Pilar, a new gathering was called in the house of Deodato Arellano, with the object of establishing anew the Liga Filipina under the same bases and for the same ends...." Note 47. The determinate ends of the separatists have already been spoken of in note 3, which see. Note 48. See note 102. Note 49. "The object of the society (the Liga) is the establishment of shops, workshops, businesses, industries and even a bank if possible, with the end in view of collecting funds for an armed rising."--Testimony of Juan Dizon Matanza, (fols. 1,132-1,138.) Note 50. The ceremonies practiced by the Liga differed but little from those practiced by the Katipunan. The chief difference lay in the fact that the ceremonial of the Katipunan partook more of the grotesque, of the absurd, of paganism. Pio Valenzuela in recounting the forms and ceremonies practiced upon his initiation, said: "Once in the house [42], they spoke of many things, en résumé, that the aim of the association was to obtain the independence of the Philippines, oppressed and enslaved by the Spaniards. Placing, later on, a dagger at his breast, they obliged him to throw himself upon it, a thing which the witness could not pluck up courage enough to do; whereupon they placed it in his hand, leading him to a man whom he recognized to be seated, and ordered him (the witness) to strike him with the dagger, a thing which he dare not do either. He was then conducted into a room and addressed by a person he knew to be Bonifacio by the voice, who informed him that he could not retrace his steps because he knew of the existence of the society, but he could not assist at the juntas nor could they teach him the signs of recognition till he had been re-initiated; they moreover made him sign two sheets of blank paper, causing him to swear never to reveal the existence of the society to anyone, under the pain of assassination. They then removed the bandage which he was blindfolded and he saw around him eight or nine individuals dressed in cloaks and hoods; he signed the two sheets of paper and was again blindfolded and conducted to a considerable distance from the house where the bandage was again removed. Another member of the Katipunan in his declaration made on the 22nd of September 1896, stated that during the month of February 1893, one Sunday morning, a certain Estanislao Legaspi entered his store, telling him to accompany him in a calesa. He listened to tirades against the Spanish Government till their arrival at the house of a certain Tranquilino Torres, in calle Elcano. Here "his eyes were bandaged by Legaspi and he was handed over to the care of another individual who conducted him to the upper story of the house and made him sit down; he then heard a person whom he knew to be Legaspi by his voice speak, saying several things against the Spanish Government, demanding of him an oath of blind obedience, and a defense of the Philippines till the shedding of the last drop of his blood, threatening him with fearful punishments if he should turn traitor. This ceremony being terminated, his eyes were unbound and he saw, on a table, a skull which they made him kiss, and Legaspi handed him a lance commanding him to wound himself in the arm; but he felt a feeling of faintheartedness come over him, and manifested to those present that he had not courage enough to wound himself and wished that the oath he had taken be enough; he was dispensed from the operation. When the bandage was removed the eight individuals composing the junta were masked with black hoods, but after he kissed the skull and attempted to wound himself they removed the hoods and he then recognized Estanislao Legaspi who presided, Mariano de Vera, Teodoro Plata and Juan de la Cruz who was a clerk of the Tabacalera, and who had led him upstairs; he did not know the other three. The witness paid two pesos as entrance fee promising to pay 50 cents monthly. He asked Legaspi what association it was, and he replied that it was the Liga Filipina." In the daily report of the secret police department made to General Blanco on the 30th of June 1896, is the following notice: "Herewith is given translated most faithfully from Tagalog, the result of an interview held with a well-to-do indian who belonged to the most popular of the masonic lodges, who tried to draw into it a friend. Questioned upon certain affairs, he said: "In the masonic lodges of San Juan del Monte and of Pandacan, the whole pueblo, rich and poor, is inscribed." "In the reunions the brethren attend blind-folded, and the chiefs with the face covered." "The person who desires to enter the lodge is obliged to have his face covered and his eyes bandaged in sign of blind obedience; the proofs are carried out and signature made as follows. The person receiving the initiated takes a dagger and gives it to him saying to him: do you swear to be steel like that which you hold in your hand and not to bend in the exigencies which oppress and vex us, and to labor in pro of the independence of your enslaved country? I swear answers the person to be initiated. Do you swear not to have father, mother, wife, child nor any relative but the revenging arm which shall sleep and live with you? I swear. They then surround him with arms of all classes and say to him: here is thy family, thy only work, and may it give thee thy life and open thy eyes for thy good of the country. They then make a small incision in the form of a cross in the right arm near the shoulder." "At present our meetings are held at night and in the most lonely fields, with the object of not being surprised." ................................................................... "It is well known among us masons that Rizal is attributed with the faculty of being able to translate his person instantaneously from one point to another." ................................................................... Note 51. Juan Castañeda testified on the 21st of September 1896 before the Chief Inspector of the Corps of Vigilance that "he was recommended to make the greatest amount of propaganda possible, of Japanese ideas in the pueblo of Imus." The Japanese ideas here spoken of were those of the foundation of the Japanese protectorate. Note 52. Money! money!! money!!! was the great cry in the majority of the masonic correspondence between the workers in Spain and those who had to supply the funds here. On the 8th of June 1892 Morayta wrote to bro. Panday-Pira informing him (a favorite custom of Morayta's) that what was wanted was "money to invite journalists (to dine or take a drink) and to pay articles in the papers." Morayta, probably with tears in his eyes, in ending his letter, heaves a sigh, whilst his fingers itching for the touch of gold, nervously clutch the pen which scrawls these words: "if we only had here a good administrator with funds then you would see how we should advance!" On the 22nd of June 1892 the secretary of the Gr. Or. Esp. wrote to the same explaining how "in a few meetings, a couple of banquets and a few presents made at the right time" much could be accomplished. Note 53. Rizal had money troubles previously with Pilar in Madrid (see note 39). The excessive earnest and zeal displayed at the time of the foundation of the Liga by Rizal died away on his deportation. This zeal was owing to the captivating manner in which the founder demonstrated to his audience the brilliant future to be attained by such an undertaking. Rizal had the advantage of a ready oratory and like Bonifacio, drew his hearers to his cause in spite of themselves. And then again, the same as in masonry, the association was secret, and its true end and aim were but whispered; and whilst many of the associated were laboring to assist, as they thought, in the fomentation of the culture and advancement of the country, they were in reality playing with the toy allotted to them by the society, whilst the chief members, those members best suited to be masons, as says the Gr. Sec. of the Gr. Or. Esp. [43], carried on the true work of the Liga. As in the lower degrees of any secret society, and of masonry in particular, the members are unaware of what is aimed at in the degrees to which they have not attained, to which all cannot attain, and the secrets of which are zealously guarded, so it was in the Liga. Upon its re-establishment the Liga counted among its members several who aimed at the leadership. The absence of Rizal, deported to Dapitan, left open the door for unbridled ambition. Everyone wanted to be the head. This together with money troubles brought about considerable ill feeling between the absent founder and those continuing the work of the association. Rizal had so far kept up a continual secret communication with the Liga, thanks to the liberty allowed him by his keepers in Mindanao, who guarded him with scandalous carelessness; and thanks also to the emissaries sent to him from Manila in search of instructions and advice. The result of the ill-feeling thus brought about was the rupture in official relations between the Liga and its founder. Note 54. See note 39. Note 55. One of the facts clearly developed in the trials of those suspected of treason, was that the guilty ones had taken the utmost care not to leave behind them traces of their work. This was principally the case with Rizal and the other chief workers of the revolt, and of those who formed the association of Compromisarios. Note 56. Both Pedro and Francisco Roxas were honorary councillors of the Administration. On the 19th of September 1896 Blanco published the following decrees: "In as much as Sr. D. Francisco Roxas, honorary councillor of the Administration is found under process in the courts of law: in the use of the faculties in me invested, I decree that he cease from the exercise of his functions etc., etc." And on the 30th of September the following: "In as much as the Excellent Sr. D. Pedro P. Roxas, honorary councillor of the Administration has been found under process in the courts of law, for rebellion; in the use of my faculties, etc., etc." Moises Salvador y Francisco testified (fols. 1138-1143) that "among the persons who sympathised with the cause and who aided it with their means for its realization, he remembered D. Pedro Roxas and D. Francisco Roxas ... (and others); and there existed in the provinces others whose names he could not remember." Domingo Franco y Tuason testified on the 30th of September 1896 (fols. 1332-1337) that "in another of the several interviews he had with Francisco L. Roxas, he asked him if in the circle of his relations (with the association) he counted with persons who had offered to aid the objects and ends of the Liga. Sr. Roxas replied: Yes. And in proof thereof he drew from a drawer in his desk a record which he read, and among the names he read the witness remembered those of don P. Roxas and others." When Francisco Roxas found himself in danger of arrest, he attempted to flee to Hong-Kong, but was captured on board the ship which was to carry him there. From the ship he was conducted under arrest to the Comendancia of the Veterana where he remained several days, at the end of which he was transferred to the Fort of Santiago. Francisco was a millionaire who had received from Spain a name and reputation superior to his personal merits, and yet in spite of all that the mother-country had done for him in raising him up to a position to which he could never have attained without her aid, he was found to have placed himself in the vanguard of the bitterest enemies of his country. He was the director of the workings of separatism and was the chief provider of arms for the revolt, as was testified by innumerable witnesses. [44] On the eve of his execution for treason Francisco penned the following abjuration: "I, Francisco L. Roxas, on the eve of my death, in reparation for what in my words and actions may have offended my neighbor; for warning of others of my person and in order to satisfy my conscience, to the end that no one, and especially my children, fall into the net of freemasonry, or of any other secret society, all of which I detest and curse, and be not in a day to come ungrateful sons of our Mother Spain, beg pardon for all my faults and bad example." "I die in the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic faith in which I was born and educated in a christian manner. I admit all that she admits and condemn all that she condemns." "This I sign with my own hand with entire liberty." Jany. 10th 1897 in Manila, Royal Fort of Santiago.--F. L. Roxas:--Witnesses: Antonio Pardo and Felix García. On January 11th Gov. Gen. Polavieja telegraphed to Madrid as follows: "Sentenced by council of War, to-day there have been executed (shot) twelve persons guilty of treason ... among them Francisco Roxas, Councillor of Administration; Nijaga, Lieut. of native infantry; Villaroel, Villareal, Moises Salvador and others." Pedro Roxas was also a millionaire who inherited a good fortune, which, under the shelter of official protection multiplied considerably. Spain honored him with the grand cross of Isabela la Católica. Like Francisco he was a Councillor of Administration. He possessed a large estate in Nasugbu which, when the revolt broke out, became an insurgent hornet's nest. There the rebels had a cannon, three falconettes and a large number of arms. After having been deprived of his office by decree previously mentioned, Pedro Roxas secured in some way or other from Blanco, permission to go to Spain. On arrival at Singapore he landed and remained there. Later on he was defended in the Spanish Cortés by Sr. Romero Robledo [45]. In Manila, to those who could judge of the facts on the spot, this defence came as a thunderbolt. However, the Spanish paper El Correo in the issue of August 15th said: "The conduct of Sr. Roxas results satisfactorily cleared, so that no doubt remains in respect to his complete disconnection with the revolt." Among the separatist element Pedro Roxas was known as the Emperor Pedro I. Note 57. Maximo M. A. Paterno was the father of the well known Pedro Paterno. Maximo was in his latter days the leading spirit of the celebrations held in honor of the amnesty proclaimed in 1900, by the late President McKinley. He died at the age of 76, just before the celebrations took place. This amnesty celebration, like most things attempted by Filipinos alone, turned but a fiasco, the speeches which were to be delivered on the occasion not being in any way in keeping with the oath of allegiance taken by the speakers. The speeches contemplated were in advocation of practically the same thing as that for which the rebels had been keeping up an armed struggle, and so, when the U. S. Commission was invited by Pedro Paterno to be present thereat, it naturally was unable to accept the invitation. The whole celebration was an abortive attempt on the part of its organizers to antagonize the Military and Civil authorities. Mr. Taft, as president of the Commission, at first accepted the invitation extended, supposing the speeches to be given, had been censored by the proper authorities, at that time the military; but on finding that this was not so, he declined in the name of the other members of the Commission, and thus avoided the unpleasantness of being present at a banquet at which both the Military and the Civil authorities would be insulted and the Government of the U. S. defied. On the 28th of July 1900, the day of the banquet, Mr. Taft on behalf of his fellow Commissioners, addressed a letter to Pedro Paterno on the subject. See Appendix J. Pedro Paterno was one of those who for a considerable time refused to take the oath of allegiance; with him were others, Mabini in particular. Maximo Paterno had received from Spain the Cross of Knight of the Royal and American Order of Isabela La Católica. Note 58. And others: Among the names mentioned in many of the documents I have consulted on the subject of the trials of those guilty of treason, I have frequently come across those of Linjap (Mariano), Chidian (Telesforo), Yangco (Luis R.), and others. Of this latter Domingo Franco was asked during his trial, if Luis R. Yangco had assisted at any reunion of the compromisarios, to which he replied that he (Yangco) had not assisted at any session (fols. 1381-1382). As I have already remarked in another note, many of those charged with complicity in the affairs of the revolt were latter on proved to be innocent. That considerable number of the wealthy natives and half-castes sympathised more or less with the idea of greater liberality in government, is undoubtedly true, but that they extended their sympathies to the aims of the hordes of cut-throats led by Bonifacio is absurd. The leading Filipinos and many insular Spaniards sighed for privileges which the Government of Madrid did not deem well to concede. To bring pressure upon the Government some of these combined to support in the metropolis, some of their number who should keep up the work of agitation. This agitation however took a form displeasing to many, who thereupon ceased to lend it their aid and consent. But few of the leaders of the people, especially of the wealthy ones, desired to cut themselves adrift from Spain, and not till a few insignificant beings such as Aguinaldo, Bonifacio, Mabini, and Pilar (Pio del) and Buencamino came upon the scene did the idea of independence of the island really take form. A faint idea of such a thing as independence did exist formerly, but the enlightened Filipinos saw, only too clearly, the probable result. The wealthy proprietors here cited, no doubt sympathised more or less with the Liga Filipina in its beginning, whilst it was under the complete control of its founder Rizal; but as the Liga lost the character given to it by Rizal, and underwent the change it did, it is only natural to suppose that many of its former supporters left it as they would a sinking ship. However the fact that they were identified with the original Liga seems to have been taken as a proof of their connection with the revolt. This is certainly the opinion expressed by Sr. Diaz. Note 59. Mactan is the name of the island upon which Magallanes, the famous explorer, met his death at the hands of the savage hordes who at that time peopled the land. Names of places and persons associated with the disasters suffered by Spain, were greatly admired among the separatists. Surely Mactan, an island peopled by savages at the time of its chief notoriety, and Mayon, the site of a destructive volcano, are very suitable names to give to such centers as were the popular councils of Trozo and Sta. Cruz. Note 60. On the 30th of August 1895, the Civil Governor of Batangas asked of the commander of the Guardia Civil of Lemery, information concerning "persons in the pueblo of Taal who were distinguished for their separatists opinions". The said commander replied that a report on all such persons would be unending, and proceeded to cite the case of Felipe Agoncillo to personify the said separatist element, as follows: "Among the group of the chief ones and as chief of them, stands Felipe Agoncillo, proprietor and lawyer." He then goes on to explain how Agoncillo imposed his will upon every one in the pueblo, even upon the Municipality, no law or regulation sent even by the highest authorities going into force until it had been passed upon by him. "It would be difficult," says he, "for me to collect any perfect proof of his anti-Spanish tendencies which are, however, self-evident to the Spanish element of this province." This report, which was a sufficient warning of danger, was sent to the Gov. of Batangas on the 18th of September 1895. He immediately forwarded it to Gen. Blanco. About three months afterwards Blanco looked into the matter, circumstances demanding that some steps should be taken to preserve national honor; and he decided to deport six of the separatists as an example to the remainder. Of these six one was Agoncillo. This industrious filibuster had influential and watchful friends in Manila, who, upon seeing the turn things were taking, telegraphed him "Café en baja; fuera existencias." This was warning sufficient and Agoncillo accompanied by Ramon Atienza succeeded in escaping. On the 14th of April the Japanese Mail Steamer Hiorine left Manila. On this steamer Agoncillo fled, hidden it is said, in a coal bunk. The Heraldo de Madrid of the 16th of September 1896, in speaking of the affair says: "Agoncillo gave the captain of the ship the sum of 350 pesos as gratification and on this account had placed at his disposal upon arrival at Kobe, a ship's boat, whilst the remaining passengers had to hire their transportation." On the 2nd of May 1896, the secret police of Manila reported to Gen. Blanco, as follows: "Notice is hereby given of the sailing for Japan of Felipe Agoncillo, property-owner of the province of Batangas, who goes to put himself at the disposition of the junta magna (in Japan), carrying with him some 80,000 pesos collected in Lipa, Taal and other pueblos, for the sustainment of anti-Spanish propaganda." Like most of the leaders of the separatist campaign, Agoncillo was astute. He partook of that peculiar trait of the native character: a sharpness of perception, a cuteness which one not acquainted with the indian would take for intelligence. An Indian will often do something remarkable, but in spite of its appearance of being an extraordinary action, a result of a well thought out plan, it proceeds in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, from instinct rather from intelligence. Native peoples are more accustomed to use their common-sense than most of us and hence arises the fact, that frequently the Filipino has outwitted both the military and the civil authorities. England learned this lesson in dealing with the Oriental in India, Spain learned it here, and America has yet to discover the same truth. Mr. Wildman [46], the late U. S. Consul at Hong-Kong, once affirmed of Agoncillo, "Sr. Agoncillo is a very intelligent and daring diplomat (the Government later on found him to be far more daring than intelligent), and could fill the position of chief of any department of State in any civilized country." But then, it was nothing strange for Wildman to make such breaks! Note 61. Among these honorable exceptions which Sr. Diaz says he has great pleasure in recognizing, might be mentioned several who were falsely accused and whose names have gone down to the reading public in the works of various writers who wrote in good faith, branded with the mark of ingratitude which characterized and still characterizes so many natives and half-castes. It gives a careful student of the subject more than passing pleasure to be able to give the lie to those who in their testimony classified as members of the infernal plot to "cut the throats of every Spaniard, without regard even to parentage", the names of some of the most prominent Filipinos of to-day, men who although they have not grovelled in the dust before the conqueror and accepted positions under the new Government, are more truly prominent than those who assert themselves as the "leaders" of the people. Among these honorable exceptions there were many who although they came to form part of the so-called Revolutionary Government, did so only when Spanish rule had ceased to exist, and when the accepted opinion was that a government elected by the people would be recognized by the U. S. These, however, were never traitors to the mother country; they were men who treated Spain as every honorable man should treat his country. These were not men who changed their religion as they changed their clothes: to suit the occasion. They were not men who concealed their titles to freemason degrees, at the bottom of their trunks, and exposed them with pride upon the change of sovereignty. These men were never perjurers, never traitors. Born and raised in the bosom of the Catholic faith they remained faithful to it, and faithful to the traditions of the country which gave them their political being; and it is with great pleasure that, with Sr. Diaz, I also can say, that I have great pleasure in recognizing these honorable exceptions, and in proof thereof have I dedicated this small historical sketch to them. Note 62. Day by day the morality in the administration of the funds became worse, and so intense did the ill-feeling engendered by pride become, that the members forgot all about the fomentation of the culture and advancement of the country. Like a nursery full of willful children, they all wanted their own way, and when they could not have it, some cried: "now I shan't play," "now I'll go and tell ma;" this perhaps was the chief cause of the dissolution of the association, for some did go and tell "ma;" and the wealthy members, and those who had anything to lose, were immediately overcome with abject fear lest "ma" should punish them with a good spanking. "In the month of October 1893, the Superior Council becoming aware that some documents pertaining, to the Liga had been handed over to the offices of the General Government, the dissolution of the society was determined."--Testimony of Domingo Franco y Tuason. (fols. 1,299-1,303). On the 25th of May 1896, notice was given by the secret police to Governor General Blanco, as follows: "Notice is herewith given of the existence in Manila, of a Society named La Liga Filipina, to which are affiliated a large number of individuals...." Note 63. The testimony given by many of the political prisoners as to the foundation, aims and work of the Compromisarios is somewhat conflicting. For instance: Antonio Salazar, (fols. 1,008-1,013) testified that on account of the mal-administration of the funds, "the subscription on behalf of La Propaganda ceased, and under the name of Compromisarios was founded an association composed of ... (here follow names of members), and seeing that they could not gather sufficient funds, they agreed to increase the subscription and seek persons to associate with them." On another occasion the same witness testified (fols. 1,014-1,018) that certain persons whom he named were the "Compromisarios, who were in communion with Marcelo (del Pilar), and who remitted money to him." He also stated that "on account of the bad conduct observed in Madrid by Pilar, ... some of the Compromisarios refused to send him resources." In reply to a question as to the relationship between the Compromisarios and the Katipunan, he gave as his opinion, that "there could be no doubt that both societies aimed at the same end." At fols. 1118-1129 the same witness affirmed that "as the partisans of Rizal and Pilar ... saw that neither masonry nor the Liga could hope for funds [47], they formed the society of Compromisarios among wealthy persons of Manila and the Provinces." Domingo Franco affirmed that the outbreak of the revolt came as a great surprise to the Compromisarios. As to the aims of the society, Moisés Salvador y Francisco is authority for the statement that: "in one of the juntas they treated of the provision of arms and other material of war; and it was agreed, moreover, to gather funds for the said expenses, and as the junta replied that it was impossible at that time, a committee was appointed, composed of José Ramos, Doroteo Cortés and Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista, to draw up a petition for the aid of Japan." Moisés also affirmed (fols. 1,296-1,299) that the Supreme Council of the Compromisarios was formed as follows: President Domingo Franco. Secretary Apolinario Mabini. Treasurer Bonifacio Arévalo. / Numeriano Adriano. Vocales + Ambrosio Bautista. \ Moisés Salvador. Domingo Franco (fol. 1,299-1,303) testified that upon the dissolution of the Liga, and in the month of October 1894, there gathered together in a house of the witness, Numeriano Adriano, Apolinario Mabini, Isidoro Francisco, Deodato Arellano and the witness, and it was decided to constitute the association known as the Compromisarios, endeavouring to gather as many as forty members, each paying a monthly subscription of 5 pesos, for the sustainment of the La Solidaridad. The same witness also testified (fols. 1,332-1,337) that "The Liga and the Katipunan were constituted in three groups, viz.: the Supreme Council or the aristocracy, under the presidency of Francisco L. Roxas; the Compromisarios or middle classes, divided into juntas or local councils.... The third aggregation was the Katipunan under the presidency of Andrés Bonifacio, and was composed of the lower classes. From all this we gather that the association of Compromisarios was founded with the idea of collecting funds to continue the work commenced by masonry and the Liga. The association was, practically, a committee formed to take up the work of the Liga, but formed in such a manner as to avoid suspicion, and all compromise with the late Liga. In its formation, its duties and its methods, it differed from both the Liga and from the Katipunan, but whilst differing from them it formed a tie between them, carrying on a work which the Katipunan could not carry on of itself. The Liga died; and its mantle fell upon the Compromisarios. This society inspired, watched over and protected the labor of its successor, the Katipunan, the fighting machine of the separatist or filibuster element. Note 64. The idea which appeared to pervade the minds of the so-called progressive Filipinos was that with a code of laws á la Europea, the adoption of some or other new fangled idea imported from France, Germany or anywhere but the Peninsular, the Filipino would immediately attain the advancement and culture enjoyed among the Japanese. To anyone not acquainted with either the Filipino or the Japanese, such an idea might be acceptable; but no student of Oriental races, nor even the mere casual observer of these two peoples, would venture to predict than even with all the advantages of modernism the Filipino now enjoys, will he, as a people, attain to such a state of culture as that enjoyed by the sons of the Empire of the Rising Sun even in a hundred years. Among the European peoples the progress of civilization and regeneration was slow but it was none the less decisive. Among Orientals it is, as a rule, quick but not lasting. Among almost all Oriental peoples the rising generation is bright and gives signs of great possibilities; but these youths after having passed with honors through college and university, too often end their lives as they began them--as children. What the Oriental lacks is stability. Nothing is more common in the Philippines than to find that your cook or coachman has completed four-fifths of his studies as lawyer, doctor or something else. The Filipino who has reached the age of thirty and has not, in these days, been bata [48] in a convent or with a private family, been cochero, cook, collector of accounts for some business house, letter-carrier, postman, policeman, musician in a church choir, fireman, and connected with a few other employments of more or less importance, is by no means a rara avis, to say nothing of the many who have also been majors and generals in the insurgent "army", and without stopping to consider a pair of very prominent natives who from batas in the University of Sto. Tomás have, after a series of political intrigues, risen to positions of law-tinkers over a people, the vast majority of whom hate and despise them. As a matter of fact the very best of the filipino politicians and other local men of fame, bright, learned and progressive though they be, would count but little side by side with the foremost sons of the Flowery Kingdom. To find in Yokohama, or even in Nagasaki or Kobe, or any other city of Japan, a hundred Rizals, a hundred Pilars (Marcelos, Pios or Gregorios), a hundred Apacibles, or Mabinis, or Aguinaldos, or Buencaminos or Taveras would be an easy task. But to find in the Philippines a Marquis Ito, a Mutsu, a Yamata or a Matsugata,--that is the question. And why? Because at the time when Spain discovered these islands, finding the people in a state of social and moral degradation, without formal government or any social organization beyond the tribal system (and that but limited) common to almost all savage peoples, the Japanese had already counted with more than 1000 years of more or less stable government, always organized, and with a social organization and a firm national unity. The people of Japan, at that time, cultivated the arts and sciences, enjoyed the fruits of prosperous industries and of external commerce. They had a religion and a language which could be written and understood when written. Three hundred years ago, when the Filipinos were just commencing to learn the difference between man and beast, the Japanese was enjoying a relative civilization not yet attained by the Chinese, much less by the partisans of the separatist leaders of Luzon and the Visayas. No country has ever done for her colonial children what Spain did for the Filipinos during the three centuries she held control over the Archipelago; and yet how far are the people from the state of culture of the Japanese! Well might the leaders of the people look to Japan as a model! Note 65. Domingo Franco (fols. 1,332-1,337) testified that on a certain day "he went to see Francisco L. Roxas and asked him if it were certain that he had been to the house of Cortés, and had arranged matters in respect to the Commission which should go to Japan; to which Sr. Roxas replied, yes; and that it was agreed that Cortés should go, commissioned to ask of the Japanese Government, help and protection for these islands, (the Filipino Government) handing over as a guarantee, one of the islands near Luzón, which the witness believed to be Mindoro on account of its large size and small population. "Antonio Salazar (fol. 1,118-1,129) stated that "of the junta of compromisarios there formed part: Cortés, Español and Ramos, who were then in Japan petitioning that Empire to aid them with arms, ships and money...." Isabelo de los Reyes, in telling the Governor General, Primo de Rivera, what he affirmed to be the truth of the situation in 1897, stated that "the Filipino burguesses had nominated a commission composed of Doroteo Cortés, Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista, José A. Ramos and Marcelo H. del Pilar, the latter of whom died in Barcelona whilst on his way to Japan. This commission had for its object the securing of the protection of that empire; Cortés, as president, gathered funds to sustain Ramos and Isabelo Artacho Vicos, who were his agents in that country." Note 66. Antonio Salazar (fols. 1,008-1,013) testified that "The year previous he met Timoteo Paez in Calle Echague, and enquired of him if he had moved his residence to Quiapo; Paez replied that he had transferred the members of his family to a house of strong materials, not wishing to leave them in a nipa [49] house in Tondo, as he was going to Singapore, and after encharging the witness to preserve secrecy, told him that he was going there to engage a steamer which was to make a trip to Dapitan to steal away Rizal from that place; moreover that the date upon which Paez went to Singapore might be known by enquiring at the house of Echeita and Co., where the said Paez was engaged, and which conceded him permission to go." On another occasion this same individual testified (fols. 1,118-1,129) that "the Compromisarios agreed to employ the sum (of money gathered for another purpose) for the purpose of aiding the stealing away of the person of Rizal from Dapitan, for which purpose they sent it (the money) to Timoteo Paez, at Singapore that he might engage a steamer which should go to Dapitan; and as they could not realize the undertaking, they sent the money to José Baza who lived in Hong-Kong, and Baza sent the money to Sandakan (in Borneo) so that a ship might be engaged there for the purpose. On the 13th of January 1895, the Gr. Pres. of the Gr. Cons. Reg., bro. Musa, gr. 18, wrote to the lodge Modestia, as follows: "A. L. G. D. G. A. D. U. A la Resp. Log. Modestia No. 199. S. F. U. Ven. Maes. Pres. "Our very beloved bro. Dimas-Alang (José Rizal, see foot-note, page 47), who for some time has been, as you know, expiating in Dapitan, faults he has not committed [50], is authorized to change his residence, under the condition that it be in some part of Spain and not in the Archipelago." "Together with this notice we have received another that the said bro. lacks absolutely the resources for such a long voyage ... etc." ................................................................ "In virtue of this, I write to you that, bearing in mind what I have explained, you may arrange to be collected from the members, the pecuniary aid they wish and are able to contribute for the meritorious work in question." The Gr. Pres., Muza. José Dison Matanza testified (fols. 1,132-1,138) that "the Secret Camara of the Katipunan gathered together and decided upon another plan, which was, as Bonifacio told the witness, to embark a large number of people as passengers on a ship which was to go to Dapitan; and these when they were upon the high seas, were to surprise the crew and take possession of the ship; they should then steal away Rizal from Dapitan and take him wherever they could." Note 67. If elsewhere in the history of the workings of separatism in the Philippines, proof were wanting of the cruel deceit practiced by the filibuster leaders upon the ignorants who formed the mass of the secret associations of masonic origin, here in this instance it would be found in abundance. Taking the whole question of the part played by Japan or by individual Japanese in the separatist movement from beginning to end I am strongly of the opinion that the supposed assistance, whether in the form of arms and ammunition, or in that of financial or moral support was a deliberate imposture, and that those credulous persons who contributed with their hard-earned money towards the sums said to have been utilized for propaganda in Japan, were defrauded, not only out of the money they gave to the funds, but also of what they might legitimately hope for as a result of the expenditure of the said funds. It is a well known fact that the hopes of the people were kept up by many statements which were absolutely unfounded [51]; the assertions of Cortés, Ramos and others who performed the duties of the embassy to Japan, were most probably of this nature. The person who, during the trials of those accused of treason, gave the most interesting testimony relative to this matter, was Juan Castañeda. He affirmed that "on account of family troubles, and for questions arising from losses at gambling, and in view of his having robbed his mother, he decided to leave for Hong-Kong, embarking on the SS. Esmeralda, on the 31st of July 1895" [52]. He went on to describe how he there met his friend, the native ex-priest Severo Buenaventura; how the said Buenaventura initiated him into the secrets of freemasonry, and how this native ex-priest had been himself initiated by Ambrosio Flores [53]. That they later on decided to go to Japan sailing on the SS. Natal. That on their arrival at Yokohama they lodged at the house of José Ramos, where there also lived Artacho. "During the first days of their stay Ramos and Artacho seemed to look upon them with want of confidence, and hid from them their conversations." He affirmed also that among the visitors to the house of Ramos were a Mr. Hirata, a professor of law, intermediary between Ramos and Prince Konoy, resident in Tokyo, and also, a Mr. Yósida, merchant. He stated also that "to excuse their frequent absence, Ramos and Artacho assured him that they had been to Tokyo to interview the dignitaries of the Empire, Prince Konoy, General Yamagata and the count of Tokogana, one of the ministers who had been Japanese ambassador to the court of Italy. Ramos assured them that, with these Japanese politicians they were arranging the securing of the independence of the Philippines, to which end the Japanese offered to land here 100,000 rifles with their ammunition, the cost of which should be paid for in a fixed number of years ... etc., etc." Isabelo de los Reyes [54] says on this point: "According to what is said, Ramos interviewed, on several occasions, Prince Konoy, General Yamagata and the Count of Tokogana, who was then a minister. These gentlemen, it seems, were sympathizers with the idea of our independence under the protectorate of Japan, as in Korea, and that they proposed, as a means of gaining it, the fomentation of Japanese immigration in the Philippines, and that when once this was attained, the seeking of a conflict with Spain." Further on he states that: "Some days before the insurrection broke out, Isabelo Artacho brought me a letter from José A. Ramos, in which he gave me an account of the efforts they were exerting to influence the leading politicians of Japan, to the end that they should aid us to secure our independence. Artacho told me verbally the details and that he knew that the liberal party of Japan, which then was the opposition, sympathized with the idea, and proposed as a means of attaining it, the seeking of a cause of conflict with Spain, introducing Japanese emigrants to that end." Moisés Salvador (fols. 1,138-1,143) stated that according to letters received by Bonifacio Arévalo from Cortés and Ramos, these two had been received by the Japanese minister of foreign affairs, to whom they expounded the object of their journey; and as the minister asked them what money they had to cover the expenses of the enterprise, they replied that they would pay their way with the money they should seize, pertaining to the Religions Orders and to the Treasury [55]; and being satisfied, the Japanese minister told them they might prepare themselves, for he would send them arms in June or July, to the coast of Luzon, to be disembarked near the island of Polillo...." That the separatists hoped for, and aimed to secure the aid of Japan is certain; many testified to the fact; but this testimony was more or less hearsay. Certain leading separatists went to Japan to concoct the scheme and were, no doubt, listened to by some more or less prominent persons. This is all the more probable when we remember that the credentials carried by the Commission took the form of a petition signed by some 22,000 Filipinos, that is, it bore that number of signatures. [56] The work of propaganda carried on by certain Filipinos cannot be called into question; but what is very uncertain is whether or not the Japanese extended the wished and hoped for assistance. To be received in interview, and to be heard with attention, are two very different things. A father listens to the idle prattle of his child, but the childish words leave no other impression on his mind than their cuteness merits at the time. This is probably what occurred between Cortes and Ramos and the so-called "official" element of Japan. Notes 68 and 69. Pio Valenzuela testified (fols. 582-605) that "in the month of May, a student of Law Daniel Aria y Tirona, came to his house and invited him to go to salute the commander of the Japanese cruiser the Kongo [57]. That at an hour fixed, there gathered at the Bazar [58], with the witness, Andrés Bonifacio, Emilio Jacinto, José Dizon and others, who were received by the commander of the cruiser with an air of indifference, and of apparent ridicule.... Bonifacio saluted and welcomed him to the islands, offering his services. The commander replied, thanking them and inviting them to take a voyage to Japan to visit the towns of that country, and enjoy its beautiful climate. Later on they directed a letter to the Commander, Jacinto drawing it up and Bonifacio, Dizon and himself and others signing it; its text was a salutation to the Emperor and Empress of Japan, and a manifestation of a desire to form a part of the said Empire, etc.... With the letter were presented twelve water-melons [59] sent by Emilio Aguinaldo, capitan municipal of Cavite Viejo, and a quantity of mangoes purchased by Cipriano Pacheco, and also a picture." José Dizón Matanza questioned on the same subject, affirmed (fols. 1,132-1,138) that he was invited to the "Bazar Japonés," to salute and welcome the commander of the cruiser (Kongo).... When he arrived they gave him iced water.... About an hour afterwards there arrived an officer of the ship who said he was the doctor, and soon after the commander arrived; all saluted him.... On the evening of the same day Bonifacio, Valenzuela and the witness went to Nagtajan to the house where lived the Japanese who kept the Bazar.... Bonifacio told them they had a letter to give them. Three or four days later on, Valenzuela presented himself at the house of the witness with a letter in Tagalo which read more or less as follows: (here follows what the witness remembered of the letter.) Bonifacio signed it as president of the Supreme Council of the Katipunan, Jacinto as secretary, Valenzuela as Fiscal and the witness with the name of José Talin.... After the departure of the Commander, the witness enquired of Bonifacio what result the letter had obtained, Andrés replying that the Commander had taken a copy of it, returning the original, because the persons signing it were not representative; but that the said officer was very pleased with the pictures given in the name of the Katipunan, and with the melons and mangoes sent from Cavite." Isabelo de los Reyes affirms that: "When the Japanese cruiser Kongo visited the port of Manila in May 1896, the Supreme Council of the Katipunan went to salute its commander in the upstairs of the Bazar Japonés, situated in the plaza del Padre Moraga, and handed him a manuscript setting forth their desire for the aid and assistance of Japan towards the gaining of independence for the Philippines. They also offered him a picture and some native fruits." "The commander received them well and even regaled them with iced drinks and coffee, but did not dare to accept the document, limiting himself to the taking of a copy of it and promising to transmit their desires to the Emperor; he also invited them to make a voyage to his country. Nothing has since been heard of the commander." So much for the testimony given concerning the Kongo and its commander. Information I have obtained from Japanese semi-official sources on this point, shows that the Kongo steamed into Manila bay in 1896 in the same manner as it did recently, on a non-official visit. As was customary, the Japanese Commander and other officers visited the Japanese Bazaar in Plaza Moraga as well as other Japanese business houses. The Bazar Japonés was a center to which friends and acquaintances gathered to salute the visiting officers. Upstairs were prepared iced drinks, etc. for those who cared to take them. Bonifacio and others, uninvited, walked in and presented themselves and their petition and offerings. The latter the commander accepted; the petition he did not accept: in this he showed good sense. As to the supposed copy which he promised to take, evidence goes to show that it was not taken, but that the said commander merely made a few notes of it on a scrap of paper. The proprietors of the Bazar ridicule the idea that the commander favored the petition or received the so-called commission with pleasure; their opinion is that to which any investigator of the affair would come, that the Commander was a gentleman and did not wish to hurt the feelings, by his refusal, of even such ignorantes as those who at that time forced themselves upon him. Note 70. The idea that the Liga was but an introduction to the Katipunan is not borne out by the facts of the case. The Liga Filipina was a foundation of Rizal, whilst the Katipunan was a conception of Pilar who, finding Rizal was carrying all before him, determined not to be out-done by his former companion. The very fact of the enmity existing between the two leaders is proof enough that the two societies were not one and the same thing, although after their foundation they walked arm in arm. The Liga, as an association, was eventually dissolved, and from it was formed the Compromisarios (see note 63) and this body continued its functions till the outbreak of the revolt. The vicissitudes of the Liga did not lessen Rizal's influence. Ever ready to tell a lie or act one if it were to his own advantage, Rizal permitted the free use of his name in connection with the Katipunan also. To the vast majority of the oath-bound, the Katipunan was but the Liga under another form; and in order that the people should not know of the rivalry existing between himself and Pilar, Rizal gave no signs of disfavor towards the foundation of the new society; in fact he rather favored it, seeing that under the circumstances it would make him figure as its "hero," and he would thus be enabled to take the wind out of Pilar's sails. The only objection raised by Rizal to the work of the Katipunan, was that which he made to Valenzuela: that the time had not yet come for armed rebellion. As long as he held supreme influence Rizal was satisfied; but as the separatist element was becoming weary at the long absence of its "Moses" and had begun to worship the "calf" (not a golden one, by the way) "Moses" got angry and threw down, in disgust, the "tables of the law." In its beginning, Rizal was the idol of the Katipunan, in the same way as Morayta (note 13) was the idol of the rebellious Filipinos in Madrid, and others parts of the Peninsular. Isabelo de los Reyes [60] would have us believe that the foundation of the Katipunan was a result of the indignation of the people, consequent upon the deportation of Rizal. This, in the face of facts, is a very poor argument and demonstrates either the ignorance or the bad faith of Reyes. And he himself contradicts it a few lines further on by saying "that without knowing Rizal, the Katipunan acclaimed him its honorary President." This latter they certainly did but not "without knowing" him. They did so because they knew nothing of his disagreement with Pilar, the real founder of their society, and because the aim of the two societies was practically one. Note 71. The similarity of character between the Liga and the Katipunan has always been a matter of discussion. Some writers would draw a hard and fast line between the two, considering them as oil and water, two bodies enemies one of the other; others looking upon them as two oils, the one vegetable and the other mineral which, although differing in nature, mix together thoroughly. Reyes, in his oft-quoted "Memoria" to the then Gov. General, Primo de Rivera, in a mad attempt to prove that the insurrection was owing to the "friars" and that they attempted to invent the Katipunan plot to cover up their treason, says: "Above all, the friars committed the criminal and suicidal infamy of calumniously including in the Katipunan the millionaire and aristocratic element, and the middle classes, the fact being that they had nothing in common with the plebeian association which they not only despised for its low condition, but which the few who knew of its existence must have hated, if not for egotism, for the socialistic tendencies of the said group." Such assertions scarcely deserve comment, for from beginning to end, the proceedings against the separatists were in the hands of the civil authorities, the members of the Religious Orders having no influence whatever in the matter, although it was they who, by their watchfulness over the interests of the country had detected symptoms which they, as true patriots, made known to the civil authorities. True it is also that a friar, Padre Mariano Gil, made known, at a critical moment, the plot of the diabolical society, in time to prevent the bloodthirsty fiends rising in a night and cutting the throats of those who had been their benefactors; but the "friar" was never a secret service agent of the Government. What he did was what every patriotic Spaniard would have done under the circumstances. It was the civil authorities who, upon the discovery of the plot, caused the arrest of those complicated, and who tried and passed judgement upon the guilty. If millionaires and others were counted among the members of the Katipunan it was because they were guilty of the same treason as the katipuneros and not because they were "included" by the "friar". "... Association which they not only despised for its low condition, but which the few who knew of its existence must have hated, if not for egotism, for the socialistic tendencies of the said group." So says Isabelo de los Reyes, the founder of the late Filipino Democratic Party, and the Workman's Democratic Union, the most socialist movement in the history of the Philippines. So much for the Liberty, Equality and Fraternity which they all professed. Another writer, C. de Valdez, a nom-de-plume under which I recognize as hidden one whose knowledge on this subject was very extensive, who for the study of the question had at his disposition innumerable documents of vital importance, gives as his opinion: "It has been said that the Liga was a society into the which there entered only elements of a certain culture, and the people of money; whilst the Katipunan was formed for the poor and laboring classes. If by this it is intended to signify that they were two close societies, the one which should comprehend what we might call the aristocracy and the other the common people, we cannot agree with the opinion, because it is in contradiction with the facts. There existed a free communication between both societies and the prominent personages of the Liga mixed with the humble ones of the Katipunan, taking active part in the labors and forming part of the reunions and assemblies [61]; in the same way the individuals of common class entered the files of the Liga without any distinction of class being drawn between them." The writer goes on to show that the three main things needed for the Revolution were 1st: an active propaganda of separatist ideas; 2nd: funds to cover expenses and to purchase arms, and 3rd: a considerable number of persons ready to take up arms in the field. The first two of these main things were to be attended to by the Liga and the third by the Katipunan. "In the greatest utility in attaining the ultimate end of the initiators and directors of the conspiracy, must be sought the distinction between the Liga and the Katipunan, and the difference which the one or the other society enjoyed." "In all other things, both societies, or both organisms of the same society, co-exist, and display their activity jointly, the campaign of the Katipunan or that of the Liga being the most active; according as the necessities with which the one or the other were preferentially encharged to satisfy the final triumph of the revolt, might be of the greatest urgency or immediate utility." The fact is that the Liga and the Katipunan were the distinct foundations of two personal enemies, both of whom wished to hold for himself the position of supreme chief of the movement. (See note 70). D. Manuel Luengo, Civil Governor of Manila, in a report to the Minister of Foreign affairs, speaking on the subject of the Katipunan, says: "To carry to a head their fearful and criminal idea, they found it necessary to recruit many people of all classes and from all the provinces, seeking a useful means to facilitate the conjuration. And the indian being by reason of his ignorance and his barbarianism, like all peoples of his kind, easily fanaticised, they set to work to fanaticise the masses, these hordes of childish people, these ignorant laborers; and they fanaticised them by means of the pacto-de-sangre, making them swear war to the death to Spaniards, practicing an incision in the left arm, and with the blood which flowed from the wound made them sign their frightful oath." "The masonic attributes discovered, and the "apron" [62] upon which appeared the head of a Spaniard suspended by the hair, by the hand of a criminal indian, whilst with the other hand a dagger was plunged into the throat, evidenced, in a notorious manner, that this Society was found well provided with masonic rites." Note 72. Deodato Arellano, Bonifacio, Dina and Plata, it will be remembered, were energetic workers of the Liga. They had entered into the scheme of Rizal's association before Pilar's idea of a similar society had become known. Two months or so after the foundation of the Liga, at the time when its founder was deported to Dapitan, it was decided to take up Pilar's project and see what could be done towards carrying it to a successful issue. José Dizon y Matanza (fols. 1,129-1,131) testified that "on the same day in which General Despujols ordered the publication in the Gaceta of the deportation of Rizal, there gathered in a house in calle Ilaya, Bonifacio, Arellano, Valentin Diaz, Teodoro Plata, Dina and the witness; and they agreed to form a society to be known as the Katipunan, the object and ends of which were to be filibusterism, or, in other words, the liberty of the country from Spanish rule; the six persons present immediately proceeded to perform upon themselves the incision of the pacto-de-sangre, signing with their own blood a blank paper, placing after the signature, the symbolic name each chose for himself. They then drew up the programme of the Society. This programme was composed of 6 articles, viz.: 1st: to constitute a secret society known as the Katipunan; 2nd: that the organization was to be by triangles, to the end that no more than three members should know one another; 3rd: that the initiated should pay one real entrance fee, and a half real as a monthly subscription; 4th: that as the number of the members increased they should found one or more balangay in each district; 5th: to try to gather funds to carry out the purposes of the society; 6th: that when the opportunity occurred they should reform these articles. They also agreed upon the form of oath which should be taken by the initiated, which was to promise to shed even the last drop of blood for the liberty of the Philippines. The Katipunan was founded upon masonic usage adapted to the character of the association. Its formation was one of triangles, each new Katipunero being bound to attract to the association, two others to occupy the opposite angles. This formation was eventually changed on account of the extent to which the society extended, its management becoming very difficult. The particular triangles were broken up and the association formed in three degrees. The first degree was composed of the recently initiated members. These each possessed a mask and some form of arm, either fire-arm or bolo, the cost of which was borne by the member possessing it. The members who enjoyed the second degree also possessed masks and wore as a regalia a ribbon to which was attached a medal bearing a letter (equivalent to K) of the old-time form of script of the pre-Spanish filipino; also a sword and banner crossed. The third degree members possessed red masks, the color being distinctive of the degree, in the same way as the color of the second degree was green, and that of first, black. These colors were symbolic: green signified hope, and red, war. Black was but a general color common to bandits all the world over. The masks of the third degree bore a triangle with three K's in the upper part, in the ancient Filipino script, and at the base the letters Z. Ll. B. (see at commencement of book). The inferior inscription signified "sons of the people." Each degree had its pass words and the members only knew those of their own degree. This was the latter form of the Katipunan in which it differed somewhat from the Liga. Pilar's plan was revolutionary; Bonifacio's truly anarchistic. Among the "chosen people" who testified before the Schurman Commission were two of the three native members of the present U. S. Commission, Tavera and Legarda. Both of these, among many other statements which will not hold water, had something to say on the subject of the Katipunan. Legarda stated that: (see Report of the Philippine Commission, 1900; vol. II page 377.) "This Society of Filipinos (the separatist element) united itself to the masonic society in Spain, and they established branches here; and this masonic society which was a true masonic society with all the characteristics of Masonry, converted itself afterwards into the Katipunan society. This society, the Katipunan, made great progress here in the Philippines, for they had to do greatly with the common people; they never had anything to do, or mixed at at all, with the higher class of people here in the Philippines [63]. As a result of this the society gained much credit and power, and undermined the forces which were in existence, especially the native regiments of Tagalogs. This was in 1896; the Revolution broke out at San Juan del Monte in August. A curious fact that must be noted was that a friar, who was the priest of Tondo, was the cause of its breaking out; for Gen. Blanco knew of this movement of the people and what was going on [64], and was in favor of making concessions to the people. This friar denounced the society, for he had a very intimate friend who was a filipino, and he caused this friend to be introduced into the Katipunan society [65], and this friend afterwards became the leader of the revolution himself. This Filipino was named Andrés Bonifacio, and later on he was chief of the revolution and chief of the Katipunan society. He took refuge in Cavite, and all that province rose up. Aguinaldo who was Municipal Captain in Cavite Viejo that time, was also a member of the Katipunan. When he heard that the Civil Guard was going to arrest him, he revolted too. He met a man who was his superior in the society--that is, Bonifacio--and as his ambition was his moving spirit, he caused Bonifacio to be shot." Tavera gave his opinion as follows: (see same Report, page 399. Vol II). "The conviction was strong among the Filipinos that they would not succeed in attaining anything by any other means than force. This being the case, the idea occurred to some Filipinos to found a system of masonry here. There were some lodges of the masonic order here, and the idea presented itself to form a sort of political masonry, which was created and called the Katipunan. This Katipunan society was naturally a secret society and had, I think, about 400,000 members, principally in the Tagalog provinces and of the people of the valley of the Pasig River. I think in Manila and in the valley of the Pasig there were 80,000, naturally, as there were so many, and as they were so strong, the idea of a revolution was a natural consequence. The principal agitator of all this movement was a man named Andrés Bonifacio, who stirred up and directed it. The political movement in the Philippines was started, as was natural, by the aristocracy of wealth and of intelligence, but the Katipunan society was formed entirely of the elements from the lowest class of society. Bonifacio was a man without education. He was employed in one of the business houses at a small salary, of perhaps $30 or $40 (Mexican) a month. They went on arranging their affairs very quietly and very secretly, awaiting a proper moment for action, which they believed would be the time of General Blanco's departure from the Philippines. Gen. Blanco was a man who was well thought of here [66], for he had a great deal of tolerance for the people [67]. He did tolerate masonry, and they believed that he also tolerated the existence of the Katipunan society. One day the priest of Tondo, Padre Gil, through the confession of a woman [68], learned of the existence of the Katipunan society, for the woman's husband was a member [69]. This Father Gil informed the General, so the Katipunan society was discovered. As the reader can easily see for himself there is considerable difference between the statements of these two persons; a comparison of these with the real facts of the case will show how easy it is for a certain element to distort truth when it serves its purpose. I have quoted these two "chosen" people, not that their statements may go down to posterity as history (which has been distorted sufficiently), but because both Tavera and Legarda formed part of Aguinaldo's mock government--the Filipino Commune; and therefore both of them had plenty of occasion to know the real facts of the case, facts they evidently desired, for some reason, to distort. Note 73. See notes 70 and 71. Note 74. Herein the katipuneros showed their madness. So fanaticised did they become that nothing of a nature or character Spanish was allowed to remain. They carried this anti-Españolism to the utmost extreme. Those of the native clergy who sympathised with the Katipunan frequently tore down the images of the saints in the churches, merely because the said saints were Spanish or painted them black in order to work the easier upon the imagination of the people. It was this hatred for things Spanish that gave rise to the bitterness demonstrated against the Religious Orders. The friar was a Spaniard, the most Spanish, as a general rule, of all the Spaniards in the Archipelago, and as such became the principal target. (See page 148). Note 75. The revolution ever showed unmistakable signs of a bitter race hatred. When the revolt first broke forth this race hatred was confined to Spaniards; and it was not until the breaking out of the insurrection against the lawful authority of the U. S. that it became general. Till then anyone but a Spaniard could go from end to end of the Archipelago without molestation; but when the promises of independence and other things of a like nature, made by the American Consuls of Hong-Kong and Singapore, and other irresponsible persons, failed to materialize, the self-asserted leaders of the people lost confidence in the white man and race hatred commenced to include all white people. When Aguinaldo's hordes of semi-savages commenced their attack upon the American forces, the effects of this race-hatred were felt more than ever before in the history of the country. Not only was the white man to be destroyed, but all those who sympathised with him--the Filipinos determined to "stagger humanity." And how they were going to do it is demonstrated in a document signed by Aguinaldo, captured by the American forces and published by the War Department of the U. S. on the 5th of September 1900. The following are a few extracts from it: "Malolos, Jan. 9, 1899--Instructions to the Brave Soldiers of Sandtahan of Manila. "Article 1. All Filipinos should observe our fellow-countrymen in order to see whether they are American sympathizers. They shall take care to work with them in order to inspire them with confidence of the strength of the holy cause of their country. Whenever they are assured of the loyalty of the converts they shall instruct them to continue in the character of an American sympathizer in order that they may receive good pay, but without prejudicing the cause of our country. In this way they can serve themselves, and at the same time serve the public by communicating to the committee of chiefs, and of our army, whatever news of importance they may have [70]. GIFTS AS COVERS FOR ATTACK. "Art. 2. All of the chiefs and Filipino brothers should be ready and courageous for the combat, and should take advantage of the opportunity to study well the situation of the American outposts and headquarters, observing especially secret places where they can approach and surprise the enemy. "Art. 3. The chief of those who go to attack the barracks should send in first, four men with a good present for the American commander. Immediately after will follow four others, who will make a pretense of looking for the same officer for some reason and a larger group shall be concealed in the corners or houses in order to aid the other groups at the first signal. This wherever it is possible at the moment of attack. TO MURDER IN WOMAN'S DISGUISE. "Art. 4. They should not, prior to the attack, look at the Americans in a threatening manner. On the contrary, the attack on the barracks by the Sandtahan should be a complete surprise and with decision and courage. One should go alone in advance in order to kill the sentinel. In order to deceive the sentinel this one should dress as a woman, and must take great care that the sentinel is not able to discharge his piece, thus calling the attention of those in the barracks. This will enable his companions who are approaching to assist in the general attack. "Art. 5. At the moment of the attack the Sandtahan should not attempt to secure rifles from their dead enemies, but shall pursue, slashing right and left with bolos until the Americans surrender, and after there remains no enemy who can injure, they may take the rifles in one hand and the ammunition in the other. FIREBRANDS FROM THE HOUSETOPS "Art. 6. The officers shall take care that on the top of the houses along the streets where the American forces shall pass there shall be placed four to six men, who shall be prepared with stones, timbers, red hot iron, heavy furniture, as well as boiling water, oil and molasses, rags soaked in coal-oil ready to be lit and thrown down, and any other hard and heavy objects that they can throw on the passing American troops. At the same time in the lower parts of the houses will be concealed the Sandtahan, who will attack immediately. "Great care should be taken not to throw glass in the streets, as the greater part of our soldiers go barefooted. On these houses there will, if possible, be arranged in addition to the objects to be thrown down, a number of the Sandtahan, in order to cover a retreat or to follow up a rout of the enemy's column, so that we may be sure of the destruction of all the opposing forces. WOMEN TO PREPARE "BOMBS" "Art. 9. In addition to the instructions given in paragraph 6, there shall be in the houses vessels filled with boiling water, tallow, molasses and other liquids, which shall be thrown as bombs on the Americans who pass in front of their houses, or they can make use of syringes or tubes of bamboo. In these houses shall be the Sandtahan, who shall hurl the liquids that shall be passed to them by women and children. "Art. 10. In place of bolos or daggers if they do not possess the same, the Sandtahan can provide themselves with lances and arrows with long sharp heads, and these should be shot with great force in order that they may penetrate well into the bodies of the enemy. And they should be so made that in withdrawal from the body the head will remain in the flesh. "Emilio Aguinaldo" The following official notice posted up in Sta. Cruz, Laguna, is another interesting example of the extent to which this race hatred spread: NOTICE. The traitor Honorato Quisunbin, who in an evil moment denied his country, died yesterday. To-day, one no less a traitor and renegade to his mother country, has also died. He who has been the cause of so many husband-less wives and fatherless children, has received a punishment for his crimes which will prevent him from repeating them. We will allot to-morrow, for the punishment of the remainder if they do not change their conduct, but continue to follow the steps of the above mentioned. For this reason, beloved compatriots now that you have witnessed the punishment given to those who have left the path marked by our authority which our government conferred on us although we are unworthy of it, but as we have been appointed, we have forcibly to obey all the decrees published, for the crimes which are punishable by death and which are as follows: 1st. All those who have any public or private communication with the enemy and serve them as guides; 2nd. All those who attack and rob in a band; 3rd. Violation or abuse; 4th. Incendiarism; 5th. All those who receive any position or employment in the service of the enemy. (Signed) THE COMPATRIOTS. This race hatred is illustrated very clearly in the definition of the Katipunan given by Romualdo Teodoro de J., when he said that its aim was to kill all Spaniards and take possession of the islands. No particular hatred was shown to any class; it was all Spaniards of all classes and conditions who were to be assassinated. It is also clearly depicted in the Act of Session of the Katipunan Sur already quoted (See page 81; also foot-note page 80). Note 76. What Sr. Diaz intends by Tagalog Katipunan is not quite clear. The whole society was practically confined to the Tagalog provinces and was insignificant in extent even beyond the city of Manila and its suburbs. There was no other Katipunan. In November 1895 the assembly of the Katipunan was composed of ten individuals of the Supreme Council, and the presidents of the popular sections who were entitled to assist in virtue of holding some office therein. In January of the following year of 1896, after the annual election, the assembly was composed as follows: President Andrés Bonifacio. Secretary Emilio Jacinto. / Vicente Molina. Treasurer + Pantaleón Torres. \ Hermenegildo Reyes. / Francisco Carreón. | José Trinidad. Councillors + Balbino Florentino. \ Aguedo del Rosario. Fiscal Pio Valenzuela. Note 77. The question of the amount and the source of the supply of arms possessed by the Katipunan has always been one of dispute. Some suppose the rebels to have been well armed, whilst others reckon the number of serviceable guns to have been very small. Among the papers and documents belonging to the Katipunan Sur, seized by the Spanish authorities, is the following: "Commissioned for the purchase of arms: D. Gabino \ D. Juan + Tantoko D. Antonio | D. Ezequiel / D. Epifanio Ramos. D. Victoriano Luis for the distinct armories of Manila." In a letter of the Secretary to the President D. Agustin Tantoko (a native priest; see page 79): "I believe we can obtain the dynamite by bribing some of the harbor employees." This letter has a foot-note which says: "When you have read this, destroy it." Numeriano Adriano testified (fols. 1,309-1,312) that Andrés Bonifacio had collected 10,000 pesos for the purchase, in Japan, of 4,000 rifles with abundant ammunition. He also stated that the arms had been purchased and were to be landed near by the mountains of San Mateo and in the Batanes islands, from whence they would be brought to Manila. That "Andrés Bonifacio went to San Mateo with men to receive and arrange arms, whilst Deodato Arellano and Timoteo Paez were encharged to send people to Batanes to the same end." Also that "It is said that many of the insurgents in the province of Cavite bear arms of different systems, and he supposed that they must have been acquired by the rich and wealthy persons of that province, such as Francisco Osario and others, who knowing perhaps of the existence of the Liga of Manila, its form and object, had formed their own also, in the said province, in order to unite to that of Manila and make common cause therewith." Domingo Franco declared (fols. 1,381-1,382), in answer to a question during his trial, as to what he knew in reference to the purchase of arms and ammunition, that "all he knew was that arms and ammunition had been purchased, because at the end of 1895, or the beginning of 1896, he saw Francisco L. Rojas in his office in Calle Jolo, and the said Rojas told him that he had received a quantity of arms and ammunition." He stated moreover, that he did not know the make or number, nor where they had been landed. Tomas Prieto of Nueva Caceres mentioned the receipt of 50 arms from Bato. He also stated that Mariano Melgarejo, according to references from Macario Valentin, received a load of arms in eleven cases from Pasacao." Pio Valenzuela affirmed that the arms borne by the rebels were for the most part domestic bolos [71] and lances, and that the chiefs were armed with revolvers." These revolvers were, he affirmed, acquired from the Maestranzi de Artilleria. Juan Castañeda declared that "the Japanese offered to land here 100,000 rifles with their ammunition, the expense of which should be paid in a fixed number of years." Numeriano Adriano also affirmed that it had been decided to purchase arms in Japan and that one of the islands of the Archipelago should be given to Japan in exchange for its aid. Domingo Abella affirmed that he had visited Francisco Rojas in his office for the purpose of finding out if the arms which the tailor Luis Villareal had ordered for the society, had arrived; and that although Francisco Rojas did not belong to the society, he was encharged to portion out the arms and commissioned to bring them to Manila. Francisco told him that he could not provide him with any as they were all sold. The net cost of the arms and ammunition necessary to carry out the revolt was considerable, and as their introduction into the country would have to be very carefully planned, and be carried out with the greatest secrecy, the original cost would be considerably increased. Large sums of money were therefore necessary to cover expenses. Although the entrance fees and monthly subscriptions were considerable they could not produce the amount necessary to provide for the revolution, especially when there existed such a wide spread tendency among those who handled the funds, to absorb them as a sponge absorbs water. Castillo in his work concerning this association and its funds says [72]: "Undoubtedly it (the Katipunan) possessed large sums of money, only the most insignificant part of which, according to report, was discovered in the possession of Pio Valenzuela, preserved in gold and amounting, we believe, to less than 30,000 pesos. These resources could not cover the extraordinary expenses of the propaganda, that of the Commissioners sent to Japan to treat with that power on the question of a protectorate, and that of the coming war expenses which were without doubt, very considerable. "The Indian is not so selfish or so patriotic that he would, without immediate advantage to himself permit himself the extravagance of abandoning the sedentary life he usually leads, to launch out into the field of adventures of doubtful result. Those who from the headquarters of the revolution directed those torpid masses must have realised this, and to make sure of the exit, caused money to be distributed to all the affiliated and to their families, giving them at the same time rice in abundance. "On the morning of the events which took place at San Juan del Monte, two women who live in the Santa Mesa road, were engaged in giving money to the taos [73] who passed that way, advising them to unite themselves with the insurrectos to the end of killing all the Spaniards.... ................................................................ "This money set aside for distribution in San Juan del Monte, in Pasig and in the pueblos on the banks of the river, must have come from a well stocked treasury...................................... .................................................................." A little further on, the author gives a very broad hint as to one probable source of funds when he asks the question, where is the million and a half pesos which constitute the default in the public treasury of Manila? "It would be a curious coincidence," says the author, "if part of this amount perhaps the greater part should have served as funds from which the expenses of the revolution and the war were paid." Note 78. The initiations into the Katipunan were grotesque in the extreme. The person introduced for initiation was placed in a room draped in black, with its walls hung with mottoes in Tagalog dialect such as: "If you have courage you may continue," "If you have been brought here by your curiosity, retire." Upon a table was placed a skull, a loaded revolver and a bolo. A paper upon which were written three questions lay also upon the table. These questions were: "In what state did the Spaniards find the Tagalog people at the time of the conquest? In what state are they found now? What future can it hope for? The initiated previously instructed by his god-father, or by the person who catechised him, was to reply that, at the time of the arrival of the Spaniards, the Filipinos living on the coasts enjoyed a certain amount of civilization, since they already had cannons and silk dresses, that they enjoyed political liberty, sustained diplomatic (sic) relations and commerce with the neighboring countries of Asia; had their own religion and writing; in a word, lived happy with their independence. A certain amount of civilization may be. Let us see what that certain amount was: "Barely clothed, and more often naked, revelling day and night in drunkenness, given to the practice of infanticide, holding virginity as a dishonor, having among them people who practiced defloration as a profession, ignorant of the value and uses of money, making use of men, women and children to pay debts, in continual warfare with one another and enslaving their prisoners, practicing wholesale murder of slaves on the death of a chief or important personage, adoring and sacrificing to rocks, trees, crocodiles and idols of wood; lacking religion, but having in its stead most bestial and absurd superstitions; without temples, monuments or even literature, although they possessed a species of written language. The only human ideas they possessed were adopted from the Chinese, Japanese and Borneo Mohammedans whom they imitated after the manner of apes. This, historians tell us, was the condition of this people 340 years ago! when the missionaries planted the Cross on Philippine soil, and brought to the benighted natives the gospel." So much for the certain amount of civilization. Cannons and silk dresses: of a kind; as to the cannons, where did they all come from? Bought from or exchanged with the Borneo moros probably. As to these and the silk dresses, the savages of the south-sea islands enjoyed the use of such things and enjoyed them with better knowledge of how to use them! They enjoyed political liberty; let us see what Morga the historian who speaks most glowingly of the ancient civilization of the Filipino peoples, has to say on this point. He says: "In all these islands the people had neither kings nor lords to dominate them as in other kingdoms and provinces. But in each island were many chiefs from among the same natives, some greater than others each one with his subjects, by groups and families, who obeyed and respected them. Sometimes these chiefs were at peace with one another and some times at war.... The superiority which these chiefs had over the people of their group was such that they held them as subjects, with power to treat them well or ill, disposing of their persons, children and estates at their will, without resistance or the necessity of giving account to anyone, and for very slight offences they killed and wounded them and made slaves of them; and if it happened that one of the chiefs were bathing in the river and a native passed in front of him or looked upon him with want of respect, and for other similar things, they made slaves of them for ever." This is a good and practical kind of political liberty, just the kind of liberty the country would enjoy if in the hands of the leaders of the Federal Party, so anxious for liberties for themselves and coercion for those who do not agree with their way of thinking. Diplomatic relations and commerce with the neighboring countries of Asia: As to the diplomatic relations the mere idea of such a thing is preposterous. If we are to concede the use of diplomatic relations to the ancient Tagalog people, then we must consider as diplomatic relations such customs as the passing of the "peace pipe" practiced by the indian of the United States, and the giving and accepting of young women for sensual convenience practiced in many of the islands of the Pacific up to the present day. As to their foreign commerce let us listen once more to Morga. "Their contracts and negotiations were as a rule illicit, each one considering the best way to come off successful in his business." Their own religion: For a religious system they worshiped their ancestors and performed human sacrifices. The Spaniards found in these islands less than a million inhabitants, who were divided into innumerable tribes governed by rulers who had no more title of sovereignty than that they were enabled to impose upon the people by brute force and untold cruelties. The inhabitants formed a jumble of inferior races some more or less pure in blood, others intermixed; people speaking many dialects. They all lacked religion, in the proper sense of the word; they lacked morals, in fact they were wanting in everything that raises man above the level of the brute creation. As to their own writing, certain it is that they possessed a crude and very inefficient manner of writing, but what is very remarkable is, that in spite of their possessing a system of script, not a single piece of their literary work has yet been discovered nor even a written tradition. This goes to prove that either the Filipinos were at that time too deep in the savage ages to realise the importance of writing, or that the form of script was useless for practical purposes. To the second question the initiated replied that the friar missionaries had done nothing to civilize the Filipinos, as they considered the civilization and illustration of the country to be incompatible with their interests [74]. To the third question the initiated was to reply that they had faith, courage and constancy to aid them to remedy these evils in the future. [75] The master of ceremonies warned him that he was taking a very important and very solemn step, and he was recommended to retire if he did not feel courage enough to continue since he would uselessly expose his life. If the initiated insisted in continuing with the mysteries of the initiation he was presented to the reunion of the brethren to be tried by the proofs assigned, which were very similar to those adopted in universal masonry, but surrounded with more paganism, if that be possible. He was blindfolded and made to discharge a revolver against an imaginary enemy, a person he was made to believe really was present and awaiting there the executionary bullet which should make him pay the penalty of a treason. If he passed through the proofs successfully he was introduced into the hall of oaths and there with his own blood, drawn by means of an incision made in the left arm between the shoulder and the elbow, he signed the oath. Note 79. See note 50, pages 171, 173 and 174. Note 80. The liberty of the Tagalog people; the chief aim which gave rise to the revolt. The first thing the separatists desired was to get rid of the Peninsular Spaniard; the next to go would have been the insular Spaniard, then the Spanish mestizo, then the Chinee half-caste and the Chinee; after which would come the gradual extinction of the various tribes. In the mean time the country would suffer considerably and at last...? See page 69, last four lines of the first paragraph. It is well nigh impossible to imagine to what the liberty of the Tagalog people would mean if it were put into practice. If the South American states which are recognized as independent, are unable to govern themselves in spite of the political superiority of the people inhabiting them over the peoples of this archipelago, without an unending series of revolutions, what might we expect from the Philippines? Give the country independence with one of the native "commissioners" as president of the republic and how long do you suppose it would be before Pedro Paterno at the head of some 5 or 6,000 men would march into Manila to depose the president and proclaim himself Emperor Pedro I? And before the new Emperor could install himself in Malacañan he would have at his heels a thousand and one petty chiefs, princes, kings and perhaps even a few ambitious queens! It is over a half a century ago since the South American Republics became independent, and at that time the rest of the world cared but little for the consequences of such a step. But this indifference of the nations can never exist here in the Orient at the commencement of this XX Century. It would never suit the rest of the world to see independence declared in the Philippines and especially if that independence left the reins of government in the hands of the Tagalog people. The question of the expulsion from the country or the destruction of the Spaniards has been spoken of under several notes; the idea was, doubtless, a semi-savage interpretation of the preachings and teachings spread abroad by the Bible societies in all parts and especially in Spanish countries. And this becomes the more probable when we call to mind what the El Imparcial of the 26th of August 1896 published concerning this identical point. Speaking of the state of the country in general as a result of the insurrection, it says: "The minister of Foreign affairs received a telegram yesterday from General Blanco manifesting that more arrests had been made......... ................................................................... The conjuration had ramifications in various parts of the Archipelago, and in it figured not only masonic societies but also Bible societies.......................................................... ................................................................... The propaganda of filibusterism is encharged to the colporteurs of evangelical books, who wander all over the Archipelago selling protestant publications." Note 81. These three native priests were among the prime movers of the rebellion of 1872, a revolt which was planned out in the houses of Joaquin Pardo de Tavera and Jacinto Zamora. The three priests were executed by the garrote together with Francisco Saldua. Gomez left the sum of 200,000 pesos to his natural son, born to him before he entered the priesthood. In his will he strongly counselled his son to be ever faithful to the Spanish authorities. I had intended to give a brief outline of the revolt of '72 but space will not permit. Taking it as a whole, it differed little from the revolt of '96 with the exception that it was directly brought about by the propagators of revolutionary ideas then rampant in Spain, and by the emissaries of the revolutionary government then established. Note 82.--See note 20. Note 83. The oath taken by the katipuneros was as follows: K. K. K. N. M. A. N. B. Section.... I declare that on account of my entrance into the K. K. K. of the A. N. B. I have sworn a solemn oath in my native pueblo and in the presence of a superior of the Junta of the Katipunan, to do away with everything that is possible and even with that which is to me most near and dear and appreciated in this life, and to defend the cause to victory or to death. And in truth of this I swear also to be obedient in everything and to follow in the fight wherever I am led. And in proof of what I have said I place my true name with the blood of my veins at the foot of this declaration." Note 84. Pio Valenzuela, who gave some of the most interesting and reliable information concerning the inner life of the Katipunan, testified (fols. 1,663-1,673) that on the 30th of November 1895, the birthday of Bonifacio, a meeting was held in Caloocan, in a house situated in the rice fields, some thirty five or forty individuals assisting thereat, among them being the witness. This meeting continued all day and all night till the following day, the first of December. At this meeting they pronounced the death sentence upon the tailor Guzman for publishing the secrets of the Katipunan; this sentence was signed by all present including the witness, after he had made many observations against it, observations the rest would not listen to. One of the lighter punishments meted out was the public exposition in the lodge rooms of the picture of the person punished, with the word traitor written over or under it. Note 85. The Katipunan enjoyed a peculiar and special organization, which was given to it in order to avoid surprises and treachery. The assemblies were always held in secluded places and under the cover of the greatest secrecy. Sometimes they were held at midnight in the open cornfields so as not to attract the attention of those indians who were not members of the society. Valenzuela relates how a secret meeting was held in the pueblo of Pasig at midnight, on one occasion to arrange the matter of the annexation of the Islands to Japan in case that nation did not care to declare a protectorate over them. The Council of Ministers of the Supreme popular Council was as follows: President Andrés Bonifacio. War Teodoro Plata. State Emilio Jacinto. Interior Aguedo del Rosario. Justice Birecio Pantas. Finance Enrique Pacheco. Note 86. Pio Valenzuela mentioned one occasion upon which such a meeting of the society was held, he himself assisting thereat, in the house of Andrés Bonifacio. It was a supper given in honor of the baptism of a child to which the said Valenzuela was god-father. After the supper, which served as a shield under the which the work of the lodge was to be done, an election was held for the Supreme and the Popular Councils, and the sections. Some thirty members were present. Another case he mentioned was that of a meeting held on the birthday of Bonifacio 30th of November 1895. The Katipunan moreover had its own festivals. This is how Valenzuela describes them: "The Katipunan held its festival, according as Andrés Bonifacio had told the witness, on the 7th of July, anniversary of the foundation of the society; it also celebrated another anniversary on the 28th of February, the date of the execution of the three native priests, Burgos, Gomez and Zamora (see note 81). On that day a catafalque draped with black cloth, was erected in each one of the popular Councils, having four hachones [76], one in each of its four angles, adorned with crowns made with plants named Macabuhay [77]. All the members filed before the funeral pile, reciting prayers for the dead and swearing to avenge the death of the three priests. Note 87. Roman Baza, who was one of the many who suffered the death penalty for his treason, undertook to educate in ultra-democratic ideas, (as Isabelo de los Reyes is doing in our days), all he came in contact with. He printed and spread abroad the "rights of man" of the French revolution. He was at one time president of the Katipunan (see p. 44) but being a man little suited to carry out to a successful issue the set plans of the society, Bonifacio determined to remove him, by what Sr. Diaz terms a coup-d'etat, but more properly called an underhand trick. Bonifacio, at that time treasurer, forced a conflict on the subject of the financial conditions of the society, being denounced as an exploiter for his pains. The quarrel was settled by an election, Bonifacio by his unholy influence carrying all before him. It was during the presidency of Baza that the Katipunan society for women was founded, "the object of which was mutual succor (!). The institution serving at the same time to dissimulate the meetings of the male Katipuneros. Whilst the latter were holding their sessions in a retired room, the women were in the salon with some young men dancing, singing or eating. The presidentess of this society of mutual succorers was Mariana Dizon. To secure admission it was necessary to be a daughter or sister of one of the male members. Mariana Dizon later on married José Turiano Santiago, and as a result, the female Katipunan, as an organization was broken up, the late members however continuing to shield as before, the labors of the Katipunan reunions. Note 88. See notes 74, 75 and 93. Part of the local and provincial Spanish press has not failed to give the public a rehash from time to time, of the greater part of the inventions of the separatists. It is needless to say, however, that in this it has failed to receive the support of representative Spaniards who look upon such an action as little to the honor of the good name of Spain. As to the corresponding English-speaking press in this connection, the less said the better for the good name of American journalism. Note 89. José Dizon Matanza stated during his trial (fols. 1,132-1,138) "that Pio Valenzuela sought money from the wealthy, and as he (the prisoner) understood, from a statement of Bonifacio, had collected over a thousand pesos for the object of covering the expenses of the trip which he made to Dapitan to confer with Rizal; and in order to fool the authorities he took with him a blind individual with his guide, that Rizal might perform a cure or some operation upon the blind man. The motive of the conference was the proposition to Rizal of the armed rebellion, etc., etc." Valenzuela himself spoke of this trip to Dapitan (see note 16, p. 133) as follows:-- "In the month of May of that year 1896, a reunion was held in Pasig and there it was agreed to send a commission to Japan ... and it was agreed also to commence the armed rebellion, settling the manner in which it should be carried out, but it was decided that, previous to taking action it would be wise to consult with Rizal, the witness being chosen as emissary. The schoolmaster of Cavite Viejo, by name Santos, proposed that a blind man named Raymundo Mata should accompany Valenzuela that Rizal might cure him. The witness embarked on the S. S. Venus at the end of May, meeting on board, one of Rizal's sisters, and his (Rizal's) querida, an American or English woman named Josefina; and arriving at Dapitan, the witness went ashore with the two women and a servant that accompanied them, making their way to the house of Rizal, etc., etc." According to a statement of Isabelo de los Reyes, "Rizal, as has been clearly proved at the trials (of traitors) advised them to wait another two years, as they lacked arms." I wonder if Rizal foresaw the war to break out two years later between Spain and the United States! His intense desire to go to Cuba would give one that idea. Note 90. Negotiations indeed! Who can imagine the circumspect and formal little nation of Japan admitting negotiations with a warehouse porter, a man who was representative only of the worst of the lowest classes! Sr. Diaz probably made this statement from hearsay por boca de ganso as they say in Spanish. If any negotiations took place between Bonifacio and the Japanese Government they were on a par with those between the late U. S. Consuls of Singapore and Hong-Kong, and a few other irresponsible people, and Aguinaldo, the leader of the Katipunan. Note 91. As has been seen in the foregoing notes, it was the intention of the separatists to make purchases of arms and their necessary ammunition in Japan. Those wealthy Filipinos who were owners of steamships were looked to as the chief assistance in the transportation and landing of the said arms, etc. The date of the arrival of the arms, according as appeared from evidence given during the trial of Francisco L. Roxas, was to have been the 31st of December 1896. Lorenzo de la Paz, however, stated that it was the 1st of September of the said year. Others claimed it to be the 13th of September or the 30th of November. As may be easily seen, there was no lack of disagreement among the chiefs of the revolt, and perhaps, as far as the majority were concerned, still more exploitation. Note 92. Pio Valenzuela y Alejandrino was a licentiate of Medicine, and one of the members of the inferior Supreme Council of the Katipunan. According to his own story he entered the files of the society under compulsion at the hands of Andrés Bonifacio, who on the strength of a love affair, gave him the alternative of death or membership in the Katipunan (see p. 132). In his declaration during his trial (fol. 142-147) on the 6th of September 1896, he recorded how on the 30 day of November, S. Andrew's day of the year 1895, he was presented by Andrés Bonifacio to various Katipuneros as "brother" Medico (Doctor), Bonifacio stating that from that time he (Valenzuela) would be the doctor of the society. He also stated how, in the following month of January and in another meeting, he was nominated Fiscal, and official doctor with a salary of thirty pesos monthly, a salary he had no little difficulty in collecting. He was commissioned in May 1896 to go to Dapitan to hold a conference with Rizal concerning armed rising against the supreme authority of Spain in the Archipelago; but Rizal was shrewder and more far-sighted than the others and would not consent to the carrying out of the scheme as proposed by Bonifacio. On the return of Valenzuela Bonifacio imposed upon him a strict silence concerning the outcome of the conference; but being pressed by certain members of the society, among whom were Emilio Jacinto, Secretary of the Supreme Council, and capita Ramon of Pandacan, he revealed the secret of Rizal's opposition to a plan he feared would be abortive. When once the cat was out of the bag the facts soon became public among the principal members, with the result that many who had promised funds for the purchase of arms etc. in Japan, refused to pay the amounts promised. Among these was a colonel of Malabon who had promised 500 pesos for the said object. This breach of confidence on the part of Valenzuela brought about the separation of himself and Bonifacio, and the former presented his resignation as doctor and fiscal of the society. Bonifacio opposed the idea of his resignation but it was finally accepted, and the former friends parted company each to work in his own sphere. Valenzuela was in fact one of the chief movers of the rebellion; this was confessed by Domingo Franco, the late president of the then defunct Liga Filipina. "The rebellion," says he, "was produced by a foolish child, whose name it would dirty the tongue to pronounce, because after being the author of all (this however is somewhat inexact) has given himself up to the authorities to denounce those he has succeeded in misleading." During his trial in the Bilibid prison, before Col. Francisco Olive y García on the 2nd of September 1896, he gave some of the most interesting and reliable information that has yet been gathered concerning the interior workings and doings of the Katipunan. When the Guardia Civil set out from Manila to break up Bonifacio's party in Caloocan, several of those forming the leadership fled, and among them Valenzuela. He entered Manila by way of Sampaloc, passing through Quiapo to the Escolta and down the Pasaje de Pérez, embarking there on one of the lake steamers. On arrival at Biñang he went to the house of the co-adjutor D. Silvino Manaol (native priest), to whom he recounted what had taken place. The co-adjutor asked of the parish priest the proclamation of the Governor General conceding pardon to those who should present themselves [78]. Having read it with care and under the advice of the co-adjutor, he set out for the capital disembarking at the Ayala bridge from whence he took a quiles and went immediately to the palace of the Governor to present himself to him. The Governor General was not at home so Valenzuela at once started for the offices of the Military Government. Speaking of this giving up of himself of Valenzuela, Sr. José M. del Castillo y Jimenez says: "The forty-eight hours conceded by the proclamation of the Governor Blanco were about to close when there reached the palace of Sta. Potenciana, worn out, bathed in perspiration, and almost in a period of agony, Pio Valenzuela, an important person of revolution he being in such a condition that it was necessary to assist him previous to his passing into the presence of Gov. Blanco. When he had come to himself and was in a condition to make an explicit and ample confession he had two hours conference with the Governor, giving information of as such as he knew." ................................................................... "Valenzuela and Rosario were of great utility in clarifying the facts and especially in the explanation of the cipher documents discovered in the house of Villaruel and others." SPECIAL NOTE. The reader's attention is called to paragraph 3 on the following page of the text (p. 47). Apart from the Councils spoken of in this and the former paragraphs there were others formed at a later date. These were more properly variations and were as follows: Trozo: Popular Council Maypagasa with four sections, Dapitan, Silanganan, Dimasagaran, and Dimas-Alang. Palomar: Popular Council Pinkian with two sections. Tondo: Council Katagalugan with the sections Katutuhanan, Kabuhayan, Pagtibayan, Kalingaan and Bagong-sinag under the presidency of Alejandro Santiago, Braulio Rivera, Hilarion Cruz, Cipriano Pacheco, Nicolás Rivera and Deogracias Fajardo. Conception and Dilao (Paco): the Council Mahaganti presided over by Rafael Gutiérrez; and the sections Panday and Ilog, with a delegation in Ermita. In Cavite was the popular Council Kawit the president of which was Emilio Aguinaldo [79] the capitan municipal of the pueblo of Cavite Viejo and later on the dictator of the Filipino Commune. This Council comprehended Imus, Noveleta, Silang, Naic, Maragondon and other pueblos. Imus was presided over by Juan Castañeda, Noveleta by Alejandro Crisóstomo. In Bacoor was a Popular Council presided over by Genaro Valdes with three sections Dimagpatantan (not to leave in peace), Ditutugutan (not to rest till the end is reached), and Pananginginigan (formidable). Note 93. The Kalayaan was intended to be a monthly review. Its first number consisted of thirty-two pages in quarto. The price of each number was 50c (Mexican). It was a most rabid anti-Spanish publication and advocated separatism openly, and yet in spite of the press censorship it circulated freely in the Archipelago. As the common belief was that this paper was published in Japan, as would appear from the paper itself, General Blanco decided to send a special delegate to Japan to investigate the matter of its impression, its publishers, authors, etc., that steps might be taken to put a stop to its impression or at least that a check be put on its entry and circulation into the Philippines. Don Alfredo Villeta was chosen; but on account of some hitch in the arrangements, he never started on his errand. Some say that the paper did not reach its second number, but it is certain that it did not reach its third. The heading was as under: KALAYAAN Issued at the end of each month. 1st year. Yokohama. January 1896. No. 1. Price of subscription, Articles must be signed If purchased will cost 3 months 1 peso; by their authors. 2 reales per number. in advance. The headings of the principal articles were as follows: To the Compatriots. Manifesto; by Dimas-Alang (José Rizal.) What the indian ought to know and understand; by Agapito Bagumbayan. This latter article is a mirror in which the purpose of the paper is reflected; it reads remarkably like a composition of Pedro Paterno, the visionary who claims for the peoples of the Archipelago a glorious pre-Spanish history and civilization. The following citations from the article will give some idea of the whole publication. "In these islands, which were previously cared for by our true neighbors of Malaysia at a time when the Spaniards had not as yet set foot upon the land, there existed a complete abundance and a state of welfare. Our friends the neighboring kingdoms, and especially Japan, brought commerce to our shores which formed the most abundant market, and there was found everything necessary, wherefore it was the richest country and its customs were all very good [80]. Everyone, youths and advanced in years and even the women, could read and write according to our manner of script." The article goes on to say that upon the arrival of the Spaniards the natives only made friends with them after that Legazpi had performed the ceremonies of the pacto-de-Sangre [81] with one of the indio petty sovereigns. "The Spaniards," says the writer, "have perverted us with their bad customs and have destroyed and obliged us to forget the noble and beautiful customs of our country." Noble and beautiful customs: Compulsory defloration of young girls, as a result of the belief that a girl who died a virgin could not enter heaven! Could anything be more noble and beautiful? Kalayaan purported to be and was always considered as the soul of the defunct Solidaridad (see note 24). It was printed in the Tagalog dialect and died, as it was born and had lived--in shame. Note 94. Pio Valenzuela testified (fols. 582-591) that on the 22nd of August he was informed by Josefa Dizon that her son José together with Bonifacio had fled from Manila. Valenzuela thereupon fled also, following them, and reaching Caloocan about 8 p. m. There he found Bonifacio with some twenty others. Andrés informed them that they must not separate as it was now time to commence the armed rebellion, the plot of the Katipunan having been discovered. From Caloocan they went to Balintauac arriving about 11 p. m. Here they met a certain Laong with a group of men. They remained in the pueblo Sunday, Monday and Tuesday preparing for the onslaught they were to make upon the Spaniards, which was fixed for the 29th of the same month, the plans being that they should advance in groups upon Manila, killing the Spaniards and also the indians and Chinese who refused to follow them, "dedicating themselves to the sacking of the city, robbery and incendiarism and to the violation of women." Many Chinese were murdered and their stores robbed. Whilst in the fields of Balintauac distribution was made of bolos and ten revolvers, the latter stolen from the Maestranza of Manila. On Tuesday evening preparations were made to meet the attack of the Spanish troops which had been sent out in persecution of the rebels, and the first conflict took place. Valenzuela also stated that the greater part of the people who formed the rebel forces were drawn, catechised and initiated all in a moment by the fanatic Laong, who was practically the active chief of the revolt, and who directed in person the attack upon the Chinese stores. About 5 pm. on the 29th five hundred men under a "leader of Pasig" appeared on the scene at the waterworks. They at once took possession of the building and of the persons of the workmen. Their first intention was to stop the machinery so that no one need be left in charge thereof when orders should be received for a start for Manila. The engineer however, reminded the chief that if such a thing was done their brethren in Manila would die of thirst. This excuse carried the day and the chief decided to leave some workmen there under the condition that the engineer and others who wore moustaches should shave, and that all should dress like indians, and that the engineer's wife should dress like a native woman and prepare food for his men. The party finally set out on their way. They tried to avoid an encounter with the troops composed of artillery and infantry, 65 men in all, stationed at the powder works. In avoiding this handful of defenders they fell afoul of other troops which gave them a good sharp reception. As to those who, repenting, desired to return to a legal status, it is difficult to form an opinion, on account of the contrary evidence adduced in connection therewith. Isabelo de los Reyes already cited, in a futile attempt to justify the acts of the Katipuneros, claims that some of the chiefs opposed the plan of the armed resistance as contained in the propositions of Bonifacio, claiming that it would be a great and useless sacrifice, to say nothing of the imprudence of such an act, to launch forth against an armed force without possessing better arms than a few bolos and lances. He claims that Bonifacio listened to the advice and was on the point of acting upon it, but was compelled to take the step he did in declaring the revolt, by the attitude of his 500 followers. The authority for this statement was Pedro Nicodemus, who was the commander of the said group, a man who was as ignorant as he was blood-thirsty. Further on Isabelo states that "in the famous reunion of Balintauac, in the solemn moment of the breaking forth of the revolt (August, 26th 1896) Andrés Bonifacio as president of the Supreme Council of the Katipunan, explained that the plot had been discovered, and that in order to save those who were compromised and who had not up to that time been arrested, it was necessary to launch forth to the fight, although the arms with which they should fight had not yet arrived from Japan." Granted however the character of Bonifacio, his aims and the methods he adopted to carry out his ideas, such an excuse as that of Reyes argue but little in pro of the good judgement or better said the good faith of its author. Bonifacio was anxious for the first blow of the revolt to be struck that he might not lose the confidence of those who had intrusted him with the undertaking and who had been fooled into the idea that the Katipunan forces were so powerful that nothing could resist their onward course once they had been started on their way. And to suppose that Bonifacio was to be so easily influenced by a few petty chiefs is to show a complete ignorance of the character of the hero of the Katipunan. If the opposition of the said petty chiefs really occurred it was probably inspired more by fear of the consequences than by the true spirit of repentance, for if the cruelties and abuses said to have been committed by the Spaniards were the cause of the revolt, what need was there of such a repentance? The prestige enjoyed by Bonifacio among the katipuneros was natural enough, in as much as he was the father of the Katipunan, the illegitimate offspring of filipino freemasonry, itself a legitimate child of the Spanish family of universal freemasonry. "The Katipunan," says the author of an exposition to Congress, dated 1900 and published at the printing office of the El Liberal, "the worthy and legitimate [82] child of Andrés Bonifacio, was founded in his own house in calle Sagunto (Tondo) between six and seven in the evening of the 7th of July 1892. Andrés Bonifacio gathered together his best friends, Teodoro Plata, Valentin Díaz, Ladislao Dina, Deodato Arellano, and Ildefonso Laurel, to whom he proposed the necessity of the creation of that Superior Association of the Sons of the People, whose only aim should be that of the independence of the people under a Spanish protectorate or in default of that, of Japan. Those assembled took to the idea with great enthusiasm and at once commenced the propaganda of the same. Note 95. One thing which clearly demonstrates the state of fanaticism and moral degradation to which the Katipunan fell, was the savage manner in which they treated the Religious prisoners who fell into their hands. Disrespect for all authority and especially that of the clergy, was one of the chief fruits of the work of propaganda carried on by Rizal and other of the separatist element, aided and abetted by the Bible societies who gave moral as well as practical assistance to their labors. As fanaticism increased, this want of respect became more intense and eventually led to a thirst for the blood of those whose greatest crime was the excessive favor they had extended to the indian, to whom such a thing as gratitude was unknown [83]. As we have seen, the intention of the Katipuneros was the annihilation of the Spaniards, irrespective of class or condition. The parish priest being the strongest support of the administration was the target for the bitterest treatment at the hands of the rebels. Among the number of those parish priests murdered by the Tagalog rebels were P. Toribio Moreno; Recolet, parish priest of Silang; P. Toribio Mateo, Recolet and parish priest of Perez Dasmariñas; and the lay brothers: fray Luis Garbayo and Julian Umbon, these latter were murdered in San Francisco de Malabon. Upon the Estate of Imus, then property of the Recolet Corporation, now in the possession of a large London Syndicate, were most brutally murdered the following Recolets: P. José Ma. Learte, ex-Provincial and parish priest of Imus, P. Simeon Marin, ex-Definitor and parish priest of Maragondon, P. Agipito Echegoyen, parish priest of Amadeo, P. Faustino Lizasoain, parish priest of Bailen, and the lay-brothers: Roman Caballero, Jorge Zueco del Rosario, Damaso Goñi, Bernardo Angos, Victoriano López. It is affirmed by eye-witnesses that these victims to Tagalog fanaticism were saturated with petroleum and burned alive. Fear was entertained for the safety of of several Dominican Fathers who held parishes near by, and therefore P. Buenaventura Campa, P. Francisco Cabeñas and fray Natalio Esparza immediately set out in search for them. Regardless of the great risk they ran in falling into the hands of the bloodthirsty Katipuneros, these three heroic Dominicans casting aside all thought for self and all care for their own welfare [84] set out for Naic in the steam launch Mariposa. Difficulties were encountered from the start. The native captain and engineer conspired to prevent the carrying out of the attempted rescue. P. Buenaventura calling up the refractory captain told him that he and his companions were firm in their purpose and that progress must be made. The captain pleaded inability for want of coal. Then hoist the sails, said P. Campa. There are none replied the captain. Then take my habit and those of my companions and make sails of them, thundered the Padre. The captain gave in and the journey was continued. Naic was reached; they failed to find their companions but were in time to save the unfortunate wife and children of Lieut. Perez Herrero; they discovered them barefooted and wellnigh mad with terror, dressed in native clothes and hidden in a nipa shack. P. Galo Minguez, parish priest of Naic, Padres Nicolás Peña and José Digne and the laybrothers Saturnino García and José Pedida had succeeded in escaping from the clutches of the rebellious Tagalogs, having fled to Labay from whence they made their way to Corregidor, meeting there those who had come to seek them in the Mariposa. The Augustinian Father P. Piernavieja was another victim to fanaticism. This Father has been termed medio loco [85] and in all truth he was so if the possession of a presence of mind such as that shown by P. Piernavieja is to be termed craziness. True it is that he was at times gifted with a strange turn of mind. He had, during the many years he administered the parish, established therein a christian communism. When the revolt broke out he was held as a prisoner and obliged to invest himself with the authority of an Archbishop. Had the revolt prospered and P. Piernavieja lived, undoubtedly he would have been made Archbishop of Manila by the Tagalog discontents. P. Piernavieja was shrewd enough to take well to his new office. He was once called upon to anoint the chiefs and rulers, as the kings and emperors of olden time were anointed by the Church. Padre Piernavieja told them that olive oil was not suitable for such a purpose and therefore proceeded to anoint them with cocoanut oil such as is used by the natives for their lamps! Under pretext of his office of Bishop this strange old man claimed liberty to make his pastoral visits and when he succeeded in securing this liberty which was readily granted to him, he overran all that part of the province in the hands of the insurgents, secretly collecting all kinds of information, which he immediately sent his superiors in Manila. This information reached the military authorities and would have become of utility to them for the carrying out of the campaign had it been prosecuted as a military campaign should have been. But the Padre's messenger was eventually captured with messages in his possession. When questioned as to the source of the information, and where he was taking it, he told all, and as a result Padre Piernavieja was condemned to death as a traitor to a cause to which he had never held allegiance. As a punishment he was tied to a tree exposed to the burning rays of the tropical sun, and thus left to the mercy of the voracious birds and insects, dying of hunger, thirst and of terror in the midst of inconceivable torments. Padre David Veras, Dominican, was another of the many victims of the Katipuneros. He was the parish priest of the pueblo of Hermosa in the province of Bataan. When the insurgents attacked the pueblo they captured P. David, and after cutting off both his hands, dragged him to the most distant of the ten barrios of that pueblo, and there hacked him to death with bolos and hatchets mutilating his body in a horrible manner, and throwing the corpse on to a dung heap. In the early dawn of the 25th of December 1896, in Morong province of Bataan, Padre Domingo Cabrejas, Recolet, was murdered at the altar while offering up the holy sacrifice of the Mass, his blood staining the sacred linen and the steps of the altar. The katipunero murderers hurriedly hid the body in the church and fled. Padre José Sanjuan, also Recolet and parish priest of Bagac was another victim. To name all those who suffered barbarous treatment at the merciful hands of the insurgents would be a well-nigh impossible task. Recalling the acts of those fanaticised sectarians, one might almost recall the barbarities and brutalities of the diabolical Nero. Certainly the ancient Chinese and Japanese were scarcely more excessive in their treatment of the unfortunate missionaries they tortured in their attempt to stamp out the christian faith; and even the Chinese boxers of our days could have taken lessons from the disciples of Filipino freemasonry. Many, many are the unfortunate missionaries whose blood cries to heaven for vengeance and this vengeance of the God of Justice will one day fall upon this people. Even in our own days we cannot shut our eyes to the fact of the existence of the well marked track of the hand of Divine Justice as it passes here and there throughout the land, calling now upon this one, now upon that, to pay his debt even to the last farthing. The track of the finger of God has been remarkably distinct in this archipelago and many are the cases in which that finger moving slowly and silently along has pointed out the unfruitful tree which the scythe of death shall cut down. "For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God; visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children until the third and fourth generation." Note 96. Some there are who see in every event which takes place, the protecting or avenging hand of Providence. Others there are who laugh to scorn the idea that Providence should concern itself in such matters. The hand of Providence surely has manifested itself of late in this archipelago, here protecting the one from a cruel torture, there permitting the sacrifice of a martyr to the faith or a martyr to duty and honor, and the integrity of the Spanish nation. Here giving one over to a just punishment, there pointing out another as an object for Divine vengeance. Is proof needed perhaps that the finger of the avenging hand of Divine justice has left its well-marked path in the Philippines? Then we have a notable case before us. A few months ago, a steamer, the Rio de Janeiro, left the Orient bound for the port of San Francisco, Cal. Within sight of the city, almost within sight of the crowds who stood upon the wharf in expectation of the ship's arrival, the good vessel, by the will of God who rules over all things, went to the bottom, carrying with her, among other passengers, a man who was morally and physically responsible for the greater part of the barbarities practiced upon the long suffering Spanish prisoners, Religious, Civil and Military, at the hands of the Tagalog revolutionists. With that man disappeared from the land of the living his whole family, together with state and private papers of unknown value. How often before in the past history of the world has the God of Justice obliterated whole families and even whole nations! And who shall say that the hand of Divine Justice has not protected as well as avenged. For many months the katipuneros had woven a fine-meshed net around the Spanish population of the Philippines, a labor the more easily accomplished in the same degree as the scandalous carelessness of the Blanco administration became more and more marked. Blanco himself was a freemason [86] and was always, like our present civil administration, surrounded by friends of his own choice, people who at no time suffered from an excess of patriotism; and the few honorable exceptions which did exist were, unfortunately, persons whose good moral influence was powerless to better a situation which day by day became worse [87]. This net already woven was set, and it needed but the given signal for its string to be tightly drawn and the unsuspecting prey would immediately fall into its folds, to be redeemed only by a barbarous, cruel death. But providence is merciful as well as just, and in her own time opened up a way of escape for the coveted prize of the katipunero savages. This opening was no other than Teodoro Patiño, himself a member of the diabolical society, the plot of which he was to reveal. Patiño was one of the many compositors in the printing establishment of the Diario de Manila. He was an indian of but little importance both as regards his abilities as a workman or as a katipunero: he was one of the thousands of unknowns from which have sprung so many of those sadly famous ignorantes and others of our own days. But he was destined to act an important part in the society to which he belonged: a part however not in the programme of proceedings drawn up by the society. A discussion took place one day as to the subscription the said Patiño should pay into the common funds of the society, and heated words passed between him and his companions on the subject. From words they came to blows; and as Patiño was one against many he came out of the tussle second best, having received a good sound thrashing for daring to differ from the majority. To satisfy his injured feelings he looked around him for some one from whom he could expect sympathy, and he bethought himself of his sister who was a pupil of the College of Mandaloya, under the care of the Augustinian Nuns. To his sister he repaired and to her he told his tale of woe, making mention at the same time of a certain society to which he and his assailants belonged. The sister startled by what her brother related, questioned him closely, as only a woman can question when she wishes to get to the bottom of anything. Having been a pupil of the Augustinian Nuns for a considerable time and preserving in her heart sentiments of gratitude little known among the peoples of the Archipelago, she was much hurt to hear of the plans mapped out by the Katipunan for the brutal destruction of those who had always been so good and kind to her and her brother. And before Patiño could tell all his tale, his sister had bidden him good-bye and gone off in search of the Mother Superior of the College, to whom she immediately told all she knew of the affair. The two women trembling with fear for the safety of the lives of so many hundreds of innocent victims, hurriedly sought the presence of the Rev. Padre Mariano Gil, Augustinian, and parish priest of Tondo. This Rev. Father, realizing the enormity of the Katipunan plot, advised them to send Patiño to him without delay. Patiño presented himself at the convento and underwent a close examination at the hands of Padre Mariano. At first little progress was made, as Patiño feared both the anger of the authorities and that of his fellow katipuneros, who would doubtless take revenge upon him according to the laws of the society, for his tale-telling. And in spite of the fact that he tried at every turn to avoid telling the naked truth, and to escape here and there by professions of ignorance, he eventually manifested to P. Mariano Gil all he knew of the society, of its plans and of its resources. After a long and tedious conversation, the patriotic Augustinian was gratified with the knowledge of where to lay his hands upon hidden documents etc., which would throw much light upon the purposes of the society of cut-throats. P. Gil immediately set to work to disclose the hidden secrets. "Without losing a moment," writes P. Mariano Gil, to a friend who had asked of him the true story of what took place on that memorable occasion, "I sent notice to the Lieut. of the Veterana of this sub-division, D. José Cortés, to whom in the presence of the denouncer, Patiño, I communicated the most necessary data, giving him at the same time the names of all those persons in the printing establishment who were compromised, commencing with the two who signed the receipts, Policarpo Tarla and Braulio Rivera, indicating to him the manner of procedure for the detention of all those complicated. ................................................................... ... "I decided, confiding in God, to go alone to the printing establishment, at a time when none of the workmen should be present." The writer goes on to explain how he made known his mission to D. Ramón Montes and two other Spaniards who, astonished at the news, aided in the search for the documents, stones etc. After a half hour's search the lithographic stone was discovered, and like a tiger springing upon its prey, the zealous son of St. Augustine pounced upon it, as though he feared that the very roof of the building should fall in upon it and bury it beneath its rubbish out of reach of his hands. A proof was taken from the said stone, of the Katipunero receipts, and P. Gil immediately set off in the direction of the Veterana of Tondo where he met Patiño, who recognized the receipt as authentic, and two hours later the Patriotic Augustinian saw his efforts crowned with the confession of guilt of the delinquents, the two previously named, figuring at the head of the list. Having performed this, P. Gil humbly wended his way back to his parochial dwelling, satisfied to have been an instrument of divine Providence for the unravelling of one of the most bloodthirsty plots ever invented by the perverse mind of embruted mankind. At midnight was discovered in the locker of Policarpo Tarla, in the same place, a dagger, the regulations of the Katipunan and several documents having connection with the said society, all of which, together with the famous lithographic stone, were handed over by Sr. Montes to the Veterana. On the following day P. Gil discovered in the house of one of his parishioners a dagger identical to the one mentioned, also several receipts in Tagalog with the key of the symbolic language in which they were printed. "This", affirms P. Gil, "is the truth of the discovery." There can be little doubt that Patiño was directly inspired more by the thrashing he received than by providence, although it is not possible to deny that the thrashing and the consequent divulging of the secrets of the Katipunan were providential. And as regards to his repentance, I doubt judging from the character of the average indian, whether he really felt repentant till the enormity of the crime to which he was an abettor was brought home to him by P. Mariano Gil. Be that as it may. The ways of Providence are hidden from us and we can seldom see, with our human eyes, more than the actions of the human reason. Yet the truth remains, that whether directly or indirectly inspired by providence it was Patiño's action which saved Spain "from an unending series of bitter experiences." Note 97. What has, up to this present, been written concerning these stirring events has been taken chiefly from the reports made by Gen. Blanco to Sr. Canovas. Whether from ignorance or from malice, these reports contained about as many errors as words. From these Sr. Diaz evidently took the statement that the sister of Patiño was a pupil in the College of Looban, whereas P. Mariano Gil himself states that it was that known as the Orphan Asylum for Girls at Mandaloya. Note 98. The following sketch of P. Mariano Gil is taken from the Heraldo de Madrid which in its number of the 6th October 1896, said: "P. Gil was born in Carreon de los Condes (Palencia) on the 2nd of July 1849. Whilst still young he entered the Augustinian College of Valladolid. His studies concluded, he passed to the Philippines where he filled the duties of parish priest in several Tagalog pueblos. Till recently he has been holding the position of parish priest of Tondo, a suburb of Manila. He was fortunate enough to discover the plot of the insurrection on the 19th of August last, denouncing it at an opportune moment. The Spaniards gathered in manifestation to the palace of the Governor General; Sr. Blanco did not condescend to receive them and they therefore went at once to pay their respects to P. Gil and the Archbishop, both of whom congratulated them for their patriotic attitude. A newspaper of Manila, El Español, published the picture of the parish priest of Tondo; but scarcely had the first copies of the paper appeared on the street, than General Blanco ordered their suppression, commanding that a new edition be printed omitting the said picture and the laudatory phrases which the El Español had dedicated to the eminent Augustinian, from this time a note-worthy patriot to whom the public did a justice which General Blanco either did not know how, or did not wish to do him." Speaking of this patriotic Padre, Sr. Castillo y Jimenez [88] says: "His character is gruff; he asks nothing, he demands; he does not beseech, he asks; and what he demands and asks is just and lawful, because it bears in its essence the benefit of mankind, aiding the unfortunate, warding off their dangers, delivering them from the attacks which envy and vengeance might deal out to pacific and humble people. He is inflexible with the reprobate and disloyal, magnanimous with those who have been deceived; proud with the haughty and humble with the weak, and in his generous life has wiped away many tears, distributed much bread to the poor, and many times proportioned assistance to the needy that they should not fall into want." The good work done in the discovery of the diabolical plot of the Katipunan, has very naturally been the object of a great amount of bitter criticism at the hands of the separatist element, which has never pardoned the valiant Augustinian for springing their carefully laid traps. He was denounced in the lodge rooms of Filipino freemasonry, from one of which was despatched a letter directed to him and bearing his picture, as will be seen in the accompanying illustration. His discovery was depreciated and belittled, and made to appear a farce. His patriotism was called into question and his very life was placed in imminent danger. However the torrents of lies that have poured forth against him have not, and can not obliterate the truth. Isabelo de los Reyes to belittle the labors of discovery of P. Gil, affirms that Antonio Luna notified Blanco of the existence of the association previous to the discovery of P. Gil. Be that as it may; the secret police had also notified Blanco of what was going on. Three times did the Archbishop of Manila do the same, and so also did the other prelates of Manila and Prior of the Convent of Guadalupe, and Lieut. Sityer [89]. But this does not lessen the value of Padre Gil's discovery, but rather adds to its importance. For whilst Blanco was sufficiently posted on the matter to be able to judge of the necessity of taking immediate proceedings, there was wanting that healthy stimulus which was given by P. Gil. A stubborn carbuncle often needs the aid of the lance: P. Gil's discovery was the lance which brought to the surface the putrid matter which nature could not, of herself, eject. This putrid matter extending itself, would have brought about the mortification of the whole body, had not the surgeon applied his lance in good time. And although the lance of the surgeon brought pain to the patient it saved her for the time, giving back to her a state of relative health. Note 99. The first executions which took place were those of four rebels captured in flagrante in San Juan del Monte. These were Sancho Valenzuela, Eugenio Silvestre, Modesto Sarmiento and Ramón Peralta. Of these Valenzuela was the only one of any importance. Sarmiento was a cabeza de barangay [90] of Santa Ana where he owned a small nipa house which he rented out, performing at the same time the office of cook and house boy to the tenant. On the way to execution he met his tenant-master and, in a nonchalant manner, greeted him with as pleasant a Buenos dias Señor, as if he were on the way to some joyous function or a grand "meet" at the cock-pit. Before his execution Valenzuela also showed a spirit of coolness and serenity, signing his last will and testament with a firm hand, and smiling. Both showed the spirit of men thoroughly fascinated by some superior power, neither realizing the crime they had committed nor the punishment they were to undergo. The second execution took place in Cavite, thirteen rebels being shot. These were Francisco Osorio, Maximo Inocencio, Luis Aguado, Victoriano Luciano, Hugo Pérez, José Lallana, Antonio San Agustin, Agapito Conchu, Feliciano Cabuco, Mariano Gregorio, Eugenio Cabezas and two constables of the public prison of the province. These constables had pressed into their traitorous service a number of the muchachos of the prison. Francisco Osorio was a very wealthy Chinese half-caste. He had been honored by Spain with several honors, among them the Grand Cross of Carlos III. He was very intimate with the authorities in Cavite. His father, a wealthy Chinee, and his cousin, a doctor, both denounced him at the moment of his execution. "After the reading of the sentence," says an eye-witness, "in front of the square which we formed, he commenced to cry, asking pardon of the General and of all Spaniards; he affirmed that he was a Spaniard and that he would never conspire again against the country in which he had been educated, and he cursed the freemasons who in Madrid had initiated him into the hatred of religion and the fatherland. The doctor his cousin, turning to him, said: Silence Osorio! don't cry so; what will the Spaniards benefit from your repentance; but the miserable fellow paid no attention to him, and asked to be allowed to kiss the Spanish flag before he died. This permission was not granted." Maximo Inocencio was the proprietor of a large store and was a contractor to the Arsenal. He had been previously arrested for implication in the revolt in Cavite in 1872. At that time he escaped but was afterwards pardoned; the signal rocket was to be fired from his storehouse in Cavite. Luis Aguado was also a contractor for the Arsenal. Victoriano Luciano, a chemist, was a wealthy half-caste who had not lived long in Cavite. Hugo Pérez, was an indio. He was the venerable of the masonic lodge. In his house were discovered two large photographs in which the majority of the thirteen persons executed were photographed in the form of a triangle; a book with a triangle and other masonic insignia on its front page, and four important letters of anti-Spanish masonic propaganda. Lallana was a tailor, and some say a peninsular Spaniard. For a while he was chief of police of Cavite and had been a corporal of Marines. Antonio San Agustin was an indian, a petty merchant and a man who could scarcely bear the sight of a Spaniard. Agapito Conchu was a master of a primary school, and a half-caste. He had once been detained in the time of Despujols but granted his liberty. Apart from his school, he gave lessons to some of the children of the Spanish families of the town, including the daughter of the Governor of Cavite. Cabuco was an escribiente [91] of the administration of State; and Eugenio Cabezas a watch-tinker. These executions were followed by that of a member of the Guardia Civil, Mariano Magno, in Nueva Ecija. Magno had always been noted for his lack of obedience to his superiors, his hatred of discipline and ill-feeling in general towards Spaniards. Fifteen others were shot in Iligan on the 28th of October of the same year. Many others suffered the like penalty in different parts of the Archipelago. Note 100. Those sentenced to deportation were, for the most part, sent to Jolo, Puerta Princesa, Balabac and to the penitentiary colonies. To the first named place were sent 69 persons of all kinds and conditions, trades and occupations. Among them was a Juan Cuadra, a chemist in Ermita. To Puerta Princesa went 53, and to Balabac 56 both lots well assorted. Those most compromised in the insurrection were sent to Fernando Poo, these numbering some 200. Three hundred more were sent to Mindanao. Among the 200 sent to Fernando Poo were merchants, compositors, silversmiths, book-binders, carriage painters, laundrymen, escribientes, a clerk of the Puerta del Sol on the Escolta, hat-makers, tailors, laborers, students, lawyers and among them the irrepressible jack-in-the-box, Thomas William of the Rosary (Tomas G. del Rosario); telephone operators, school-teachers and three members of the secret police; among the rag and tag of the good-for-nothings, and as chief of them, was the famous translator of the scriptures, Pascual H. Poblete [92]. Note 101. Apolinario Mabini was born in the pueblo of Tanauan, province of Batangas, and was the son of parents of the poorer and lower classes. He came to Manila as a lad and received his secondary education in the College of San Juan de Letran at the hands of the Dominican Fathers, taking the degree of professor. Later on he was employed in the Intendencia and by careful saving and by steady application he continued his studies for law and concluded his course at the University of Santo Tomas also at the hands of the Dominicans who spared no efforts on behalf of his success. From the University he received the title of Licentiate of Law in 1895. He entered the office of the notary Numeriano Adriano to practice law, and whilst there employed, was drawn by Adriano into the net of masonry, joining the lodge Balagtas which was one of those founded from the overflow of the original Filipino lodge Nilad. Adriano was the venerable of the said lodge. When the Liga Filipina was formed and had gotten well into working order Mabini was named a councillor of the superior Council (see page 28). According to the testimony of Moises Salvador (see page 296) Mabini was also secretary of the Association of Compromisarios. He was arrested as one of the chief instigators of the revolt and after due trial was sentenced to death. The Spanish authorities however, took compassion upon him because of his pitiful condition, he being paralysed in the lower parts of the body [93]; so instead of including his name in the list of those who expiated their treason on the field of Bagumbayan, they foolishly gave him his liberty. Once more free, Mabini left Manila for his own pueblo of Tanauan where he lived quietly till Aguinaldo was brought over in 1898 by Admiral Dewey to serve as a bush-beater to the American forces. Mabini was thereupon carried from Tanauan to Cavite where he joined the faithless Magdalo. In Cavite he drew up a project of a constitutional law for the Philippines. In the first page of this he affirmed that the precepts of the Ten Commandments were an invention of the friars! And yet Mabini was the Filipino Solomon. He instructed the people that they ought not to believe in the said decalogue or practice what it commanded, but that they should only practice the precepts of the Verdadero Decálogo which he prepared and gave to the public as their spiritual guide. Mabini very soon became radical and decidedly anti-American in his ideas, and succeeded in attaining such moral ascendancy over Aguinaldo that the latter ceased to be the leader of the people and the true dictator of the Filipino republic, becoming a toy in the hands of a man who could twist and turn him here and there at his will. Mabini refused to take the oath of allegiance and was, on the 7th of January 1901 deported under General Order No. 4 to the island of Guam, as one of the persons "whose acts clearly demonstrate them to be favorers or sympathizers with the insurrection." Note 102. The advanced political ideas held and propagated by the separatists were not bad in themselves; no particular objection can be raised against them as political ideas. But when we consider by whom and for whom these "reforms" were asked, we begin to appreciate the necessity to which the indian was put of endeavoring to attain them by armed struggle. Taking away the revolutionary basis upon which the plans of the Liga were raised, nothing remains but the empty walls of a roofless building. These walls or ideas are contained in the plans of reforms drawn up by almost every jackanapes in the Liga who could write down his thoughts with any amount of clearness. These plans agreed upon certain points, chiefly representation in the Spanish parliament and the expulsion of the Religious Orders. These two points appear to have been the essence of the direct aims of the separatists (see p. 69). Others called for the Spanish constitution with its consequences: the liberty of the press and the liberty of associations. Liberty of the press was ever an unknown quantity in the Philippines. The idea of the liberty of the press is very beautiful when its liberties are not abused; it was the abuse of what little liberty the press enjoyed, in the latter days of Spanish rule, that induced the authorities to impose such a close censure upon it as they did. Whatever may be said in its favor, press censorship and such sedition laws as we enjoy to-day in this nondescript piece of the world's surface, are more proper of absolute monarchies than of territory of the U. S. of America, although in our particular case we might as well be under the despotic, ever deteriorating rule of Aguinaldo, as that of a body of men whose intentions however good and sincere they may be, fall short, when put into practice, of the proverbial ingenuity in governing, of the famous Sancho Panza in his island of Barataria. Freedom of the press is at times a blessing, and at others a curse. From 1888 to 1896 it would have been more of the latter than of the former; for giving such a liberty to the separatists who asked it, would be arming the enemy with the best arms. As to liberty of associations. People in the Temperance world often ask themselves, does prohibition prohibit? Some make themselves believe that it does; but practice has shown what common sense tells each and every one of us, that it does not; for if a man (and I do not wish to be so ungallant as to exclude the ladies) cannot get what he wants legally, he as a rule sees that he gets it somehow. And so with the Filipinos who, denied the liberty of association, defied the authorities and held their gatherings in secret and secluded places. All these various political ideas were decidedly advanced in as much as they had relation to a people in no way prepared to receive them. No father would put a loaded revolver or an open razor into the hands of his child; but those were the very things the separatists were howling for. APPENDIX A. A. L. G. D. A. M. G. R. Log. SUNT. "The executive Commission sends to the V. Masters D. Deg. O. O. T. and O. G. O. S. of the L. Log. of the Obedience. L. T. M. "Venerable Masters and beloved brethren. After our circular of the 28th of May last it would seem unnecessary to remind you, that you give the most exact fulfillment to those points which the same embraces, the which were approved by the Grand Assembly celebrated on the 15th of the same month; but nevertheless, as the time of our cause has assured and all provision is but little in the present moments, it has appeared well to us to direct this other circular to you in order to fix more correctly the points which have to be the object of the most exact fulfillment. We will now pass on to the enumeration of the same. First: The triangles will perform strictly all and every one of the dispositions dictated by their respective presidents, and venerable honorary brethren, not allowing the least or most insignificant point to slip their observation, for even when it seems to our venerable brethren otherwise, it is of the greatest transcendency. "The smallest omission in these dispositions might prejudice in a great manner our labors, the fruit of many years of constancy and hope of a sure triumph. "Second: Once the signal is given every bro. shall fulfill the duty imposed upon him by this Gr. Reg. Log. without considerations of any kind, neither of parentage, friendship or gratitude, etc. "Third: Those who on account of debility, cowardice or other considerations do not fulfill their duty, already know the tremendous punishment they will incur for disloyalty and disobedience to this G. R. Log. Fourth: The blow having been struck at the Captain General and the other Spanish Authorities, the loyals shall attack the convents and shall behead their infamous inhabitants, respecting the wealth contained in the said convents; this shall be gathered by the commissions named for that purpose by the G. R. Log. and it shall not be lawful for any of our brethren to possess themselves of what justly belongs to the treasury of the G. N. F. (Grand Filipino Nation) "Fifth: Those who fail to carry out what is set forth in the foregoing paragraph shall be held as malefactors and subjected to exemplary punishment by this G. R. Log. "Sixth: On the following day the bro. designated shall bury all the bodies of their hateful oppressors in the field of Bagumbayan together with their wives and children, and on the site shall later on be raised a monument commemorative of the independence of the G. N. F. "Seventh: The bodies of the members of the Religious Orders shall not be buried, but burned in just payment of the felonies which they committed during life against Filipino nation during the three hundred years of their nefarious domination. (see note 26.) "And whilst awaiting the day of our redemption this executive commission shall continue giving the sure guide which we all have to follow in the presence of the facts to the end that none of our brethren shall be able to say that they were unwarned. "In the G. R. Log. in Manila, the 12th of June 1896.--The first of the long desired independence of the Philippines.--The President of the executive Commission, Bolivar. The Gr. Mast. Adj. Giordano Bruno.--The Gr. Sec. Galileo. APPENDIX B. Under the title of "My part in the Revolution," Isabelo de los Reyes in an artful attempt to defend himself before those who considered him a coward because of his ever shirking that part of the task of the revolt which naturally fell to him, gives his readers the following information: "When it was desired to effect the manifestation of 1888, (see p. 60), Ramos took me to the palace of Malacañan, to express to Gen. Terrero verbally the complaints of the "country"; but I do not know why, but on that day the manifestation did not come off...." "From the palace of Malacañan we went to the house of Doroteo Cortes, who instructed me in the object of the manifestation, thus: "... We reckon with the pleasure of the Civil Governor Sr. Centeno (see note 2) to make a manifestation against the friars, who oppress us with their abuses, and oppose the progress of the country." "--Very good indeed I replied full of enthusiasm. "But my enthusiasm disappeared entirely when Cortes told me with the greatest frankness, that they asked and were sure of attaining their wish, that the Archbishop should be deported, merely for having failed to assist at the religious functions dedicated to the King [94]. "I then doubted the ability [95] of the directors of the manifestation, and believed that they would be irremissibly crushed by the friars, who were very astute and powerful, as in fact it so happened. "I retired leaving Ramos in that house. "I immediately went to see his father and said to him: The manifestation has fallen flat. I have come to tell you that in my opinion, your son ought not to sign the instance of the manifestos. Let all those who like do so, but it would be a pity that your son who, in the time to come, may be able to render signal services to the country should now fall crushed by the friars. Now that Cortés says that he reckons with the authorities, your son's signature is not very necessary. "And neither Cortés nor Ramos signed it." APPENDIX C. Confidential. A L. G. D. G. A. D. U. Liberty Equality Fraternity. Universal Freemasonry Spanish Family. Sends S. F. S. to the Rep. Log. Modestia No. 199. "Seeing that there have circulated rumors among us that in spite of the masonic secret, in spite of the secrecy of our works, there exist in the hands of our enemies, lists of masons more or less correct, more or less extensive, public opinion has shown itself anxious to know whether we have been vilely sold.... And when the La Política de España en Filipinas has commenced to publish correspondence which ought to have been carefully and sacredly guarded, this anxiety reached its highest point, embracing the desire to discover the author or authors although it would appear that the source of leakage has been found, even though the form and details are unknown. "The presidency of the Cons. Reg. has not been able to remain indifferent before the scandal which is developing ..; on the contrary it has from the first endeavored to discover the truth.... .................................................................. "I am sorry to have to confess that the hour of the revelation has not yet sounded.... But incidental discoveries oblige me to break silence giving the voice of alarm; and to what point this determination is justified, you shall judge by the facts I am about to relate. "1st. Pedro Serrano, symbolic name Panday Pira, gr. 24, in his anxiety to discredit local masonry, since this refuses to be exploited has permitted himself to make calumnious affirmations to a foreign mason concerning this Federation, manifesting at the same time pretensions which are a sure sign of perverse intentions. "2nd. It is known that the same Serrano frequents the Archbishop's palace and the College of San Juan de Letran with the peculiarity that in both establishments his symbolic name in known, and he has manifested in the formed establishment that he is a man whose companionship is to be avoided because he occupies himself with giving information. "3rd. It happened later on that the said Serrano presented himself in the house of Sr. Marte, gr. 3, late secretary of the lodge Nilad, demanding the handing over of documents of the secretaryship which he said belonged to him, threatening that otherwise he would report the matter to General Blanco, and the extraction of the documents would be made by the friar parish priest of the said suburb. "4th. Lastly: in the meeting of the parochial clergy held in the Archbishop's palace--the morning of the 13th of this month-- ... masonry and masons were discussed; and the Archbishop said to the parish priest of Quiapo: you must tell the school-master of your suburb that it is not sufficient to have abjured his masonic beliefs, but that it is also necessary to fulfill the conditions agreed upon. "Consequently it will be convenient that you gather together the Cam. del Medio and read therein the present document, adding the explanation and comments you deem necessary, and that with respect to the other CCam. you limit yourselves to giving account of the fact, demonstrating its enormity, pointing out its author and taking what steps are necessary to prevent contagion. Receive Ven. Mast. and G. bro. the fraternal embrace of peace we send you. Manila 31st November 1894. The Gr. Pres. Musa (Ambrosio Flores). APPENDIX D. Anting-antings constitute the remnants of what was once, what might be called the religion of the peoples of the Philippines. They are most commonly met with in the form of amulets which their possessors carry about with them to ward off dangers of all kinds. There are amulets for protection against fire arms, against sword thrust or bolo slash; against diseases of all parts of the body; amulets against the bursting of fire arms or to prevent them making a noise when discharged by the wearer of the amulet; against snakes and their bites, against lightning; amulets to protect their wearers against the courts of justice and against the authorities when they pursue them for robbery. In a word amulets or anting-anting against everything. As a rules these amulets consist of small booklets containing prayers composed of Latin and Spanish words mixed with words and abbreviations of the native dialects. Some times they are stones or mineral deposits found in the bodies of animals, or the seed portion of petrified fruits, or even parts of the skeletons of children. Although one would suppose that such superstitions had long since ceased to exist among the indians of the archipelago such is not the case; and it is more than probable that the majority of the members of the federal party and may be two out of the three native members of the Commission carry their anting-anting carefully guarded in one of their pockets. However their use is most common among native doctors, that is those who have not studied medicine, but who dabble in the art for what they can get out of it, and by tulisanes or armed robbers. They were also much in vogue among the enlightened officers and men of the insurgent ranks, many of whom considered themselves perfectly safe from the bullets of their enemies when they carried in their person an amulet or anting-anting. The following are samples of pages of one of the booklets found on the person of a wounded tulisan. The first of these two pages contains a prayer against fire-arms, and the second a conglomeration which no one has never been able to decipher. +---------------------------+ +-----------------------------+ | talis misererenobis | | | | Amin. | | Prele queno niar en res | | | | tom Domi nom nos tom | | Oracion de S. Pablo | | | | contra armas de foigo | | | | ip. Ntro. y Av. | | h [+] a | | | | [+] [+] [+] | | Jesús S. Pablo Ponitom | | Q [+] n | | quiter Deus Salucam tuam, | | | | Amin. | | | +---------------------------+ +-----------------------------+ Anting-anting is also found in other forms, sometimes merely a strip of paper bearing some inscription, and which receives its virtue from some action performed over it, such as the saying of the mass whilst the paper is on the altar. A parish priest of a pueblo in a neighboring province once related to me the discovery of one such an anting-anting in his church. He approached the altar to recite the Mass, and upon genuflecting at the centre of the altar noticed that there was something unusual, although small, under the altar cloth. He put his hand under the cloth to see what it was and found there a slip of paper bearing three crosses, thus: + + + This paper had been carelessly folded and placed where he found it, upon the altar stone. Had it remained undisturbed and the service of Mass been said over it, it would have, in the belief of the indian who put it there, become infused with marvelous virtues and could have protected its wearer from the dangers to be incurred in the armed rising against the Spaniards which they were about to attempt. In all probability Buencamino carried some anting-anting with him to Washington to protect him from assassination or from ... nausea. APPENDIX E. Manila, 10th January 1897. "I Faustino Villaruel y Zapanta, 52 years of age, publicly declare that as I was born so wish I to die--a Spaniard, a christian, a Roman Apostolic Catholic; and that I detest with my whole soul any rebellion or treason against our beloved mother Spain. "I also repent of having belonged to masonry and of having devoted myself to its propaganda in these islands and having been such a bigoted mason that I caused my two children to enter also into the society I now curse. I counsel my children and all my friends to renounce the said society, and beg pardon of God, as I do now, it being condemned by the Church. "I beseech the most Excellent and Illustrious Archbishop to make public this my spontaneous and free retraction.--Faustino Villaruel. Witnesses:--the official guard of the Chapel, Antonio Pardo.--the sergeant of the Guard, Felix Garcia." APPENDIX F. G. H. I. J. These latter appendices have been suppressed in this first edition for want of space. NOTES [1] The numbers which will be found throughout this document signify notes to be found in the appendix. The letters in brackets signify footnotes of minor importance. [2] Barcelona. [3] About this same time a lodge composed of Filipinos was formed in Madrid, and known as the Solidaridad. There it was that steps were taken to catechize the masses of the Filipinos in their own homes. [4] In the Official Bulletin of the Gr. Or. Esp. for Sept. 1896, Morayta, speaking of this association of separatists said: "It was born strong,--the filipino colony numbered then more than 70 members, by the side of whom labored several peninsular Spaniards." It is a pity Morayta did not classify these peninsular Spaniards, for had he done so we might perhaps have found among their number some of the social outcasts who have since aided the insurgent element against the legitimate authority of the United States. [5] These aspirations almost all turned upon the idea of independence. The ability of the natives to govern themselves has had many tests. During the last days of Spanish rule a taste of this privilege in minor grade was allowed the native as a test, and it needed but a drop of the independence tincture to put the patient into a burning fever. It truly takes a visionary to claim for the Filipino the ability to govern his own country. In the Filipino family the woman "wears the breeches" and in the pueblo all is subservient to the "boss", the presidente. The aspirations of the pre-American Filipinos are the same as the aspirations of the Federal Party: aspirations which can never be realized till the character of the aspirant radically changes. "Filipinas" yet awaits in expectation to find the Filipino who can govern his own household! [6] The executive committee of the Liga was composed of Moises Salvador, Ambrosio Flores, Apolinario Mabini, Domingo Franco, Numeriano Adriano, Timoteo Paez, Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista, and the brothers Venancio and Alejandro Reyes. Testimony of Antonio Salazar. (fols. 1118 to 1129). [7] The words Supreme Society express the idea of supreme social situation, of a society formed of noteworthy people. A well-read writer on the subject of "El Katipunan ó el filibusterismo en Filipinas," says, speaking of this union of such notable folk: "A reunion of people who meet to concoct assassinations, cannot be a reunion of noteworthy people but should rather be called a reunion of noteworthy criminals." There is not the shadow of a doubt that this is the best and, in fact, the only title to which such a society as the katipunan can justly lay claim. Opinion is divided as to the origin of the word katipunan, and as to the manner in which it should be written. Some spell it with C whilst the majority use K. As to the derivation: the root word is undoubtedly Tipon which, prefixed with the particle ca and terminated with an gives us a word, which signifies very select association. The word is however generally written with K so as to be in keeping with the Tagalog way of spelling, as they (that is to say the "redimidos" have taken to the use of K for C whenever C has a hard sound as in cat. In like manner, to the insurgent and his sympathisers, Cavite should be Kawite. The K and W are Blumentrittisms, i. e. of German descent. [8] See note 49. [9] The pseudonym of Rizal. By this name he is mentioned in almost all the masonic documents relating to him and over this same name he wrote in the La Solidaridad and the Kalayaan. [10] The place of Rizal's banishment. [11] Pio Valenzuela y Alejandro, a near companion of Bonifacio in matters relative to the Katipunan, testified in his evidence in the courts of Justice, (fols 1,663 to 1,673), that Andrés Bonifacio had read much, and possessed a library which was destroyed when his house caught fire. (See note 16) That he would pass the night in reading instead of sleeping, and that from such an excess of reading there had happened to him the same as happened to Don Quixote--his brain had become turned. Thus it was that Andrés was ever dreaming of the presidency and speaking of the French Revolution. [12] It was in the warehouse of this German firm that the Spanish authorities discovered the documentary evidence which Valenzuela testified had been hidden there by Bonifacio. It had been determined by the Katipunan to destroy all documents, but evidently Bonifacio overtaken suddenly by the unexpected discovery of the plot he was developing, had not sufficient presence of mind, or what is more probable still, enough time to put them out of existence, and he therefore hid them as has been said, hoping no doubt, to be thus enabled to put the authorities off the track in case they should happen to get possession of them. [13] That is to say the Spanish population. [14] As the events here spoken of do not fall within the scope of this sketch, no note has here been made of them. As was pointed out in the introduction, this review is not intended as a history of the revolution, but as a brief sketch of the society which gave rise to it. [15] Avisos y profecias, Madrid 1892. pp. 286-308. [16] Concerning the doctrines of Universal Freemasonry D. Gabriel Jogand-Pagés says writing on the subject of freemasonry in Spain: "The teaching which according to the ritual of the 33rd degree is the synthesis of freemasonry, is well worthy of being borne in mind." "In the reception to the 33rd degree, the Grand Master turning to the person to be received, ends his discourse with the following significant exhortation: "I owe you, Illustrious brother, an explanation which it is necessary to give to our rituals." "Masonry being nothing else than active revolution, permanent conspiracy against political and religious despotism,...." "The Grand Master innocent, you have already seen, is man ... man who was born innocent because he was born unconsciously." "Our Grand Master Innocent was born to be happy and to enjoy in all their fullness all his rights without exception: But he fell, struck with the blows of three assassins: of three infamous beings who placed formidable obstacles in the way of his happiness, and against his rights...." "These three infamous assassins are: the Law, Property and Religion". "The Law because it is not in harmony with the rights of the individual man and the duties of the man who lives in society: rights which all acquire in all their integrity...." "Property: because the earth is the property of no one and its products pertain to all in the measure for each one of the true necessities for his welfare." "Religion: because religions are no more than the philosophies of men of talent, which the people have adopted...." "Neither the Law, Property nor Religion can impose themselves upon man, and as they deprive him of his most precious rights they are assassins against whom we have sworn to exercise the utmost vengeance. "Of these three infamous enemies, Religion ought to be the object of our constant mortal attacks, because a people never have survived their religion, and destroying religion we have at our disposition the law and property and we can then regenerate society, establishing over the ruins, masonic Religion, masonic Law and masonic property." [17] "Insurreccion en Filipinas"; vol. I. p. 109. [18] One not acquainted with the seducing nature of the masonic operation and the peculiarity of the native character, would wonder to find the name of a Catholic priest so intimately connected with freemasonry and its offspring, especially in a country in which the Church wages close and continual warfare with the evil. There is little need for surprise however, when we consider the seductive influence of the one hand and the simplicity and childishness of the native character on the other. Many of the native clergy were body and soul wrapt up in the workings of freemasonry and were Spain's worst and most crafty enemies. In Nueva Caceres, Inocencio Herrera, Severo Estrada and Severino Diaz, three native priests of the Cathedral of that diocese, headed the conspiracy against the Government. They formed a deposit of arms and ammunition in the organ of the Cathedral and, according to the plan they had prepared, one of their first steps was to murder the Bishop of the diocese. On this point it will be interesting to quote the testimony of Tomás Prieto, of Nueva Caceres, who, whilst on board the S. S. Isarog, on the 20th of September 1896, testified in the presence of the captain of the Ship and other witnesses that he had received 50 rifles, 10 of which he had given into the care of Manuel Abella, a millionaire of that province who was eventually executed for treason; the remainder he had distributed among other persons, 3 being placed in the care of Severino Diaz, parish priest of the Cathedral of Nueva Caceres.... As to their plans of action, he testified that the intention was to kill all the Spaniards, the mentioned parish priest of the Cathedral, the coadjutor Inocencio and Severo Estrada, all natives, having promised to aid personally to secure the success of the affair. He also declared that "on the 9th of July of the same year, a reunion was celebrated in the house of Manuel Abella, and among those present were Gabriel Prieto, a native priest and brother of the witness, Severino Diaz and others; it was in this reunion that it was decided to carry out the programme above mentioned." In both provinces of the Camarines many were mixed up in some of the dirtiest work of the revolt. Innumerable cases might be mentioned also in which the native clergy have exerted considerable influence against the American Government, inciting the rebels to resist its lawful authority, much to the detriment of the interests of the Church and bringing down upon the clergy in general accusations of sedition and treachery. Juan Castañeda testified that he had been initiated into the mysteries of freemasonry by Severo Buenaventura, a native priest, coadjutor of Imus. Buenaventura received his initiation from Ambrosio Flores, now the Governor of the province of Rizal; he possessed three grades and enjoyed the use of the symbolic name of "cuitib" (the name of a small ant which bites furiously). Nine native priests were sent to Manila from Vigan and La Union; all of these were convicted of treason. [19] The word in the original Spanish is madrasta which, apart from that of step-mother, has the meaning of "anything disagreeable." [20] See note 26. [21] For the complete document see appendix A. [22] A contract was made between the administrator of the estate in question, situated at Calamba, and Francisco Mercado Rizal, father of the subject of this note, for the land the Rizal family occupied and cultivated. This land measured some 500 hectares and was clear and clean, the tenant having merely to give it three or four turns with the plow in order to prepare it for use. To show the treatment meted out to the tenant, it will be sufficient to say that the contract agreed that the tenant should have the entire use of the land and its product for four harvests or five years RENT FREE. As great as this advantage was to the Rizal family it is but a little of what was done by the Dominicans for that ungrateful family of filibusters. [23] Lawyer. [24] "La Independencia" was a revolutionary daily of four pages, published in the Orphan Asylum of Malabon, property of the Augustinian Corporation and stolen and eventually totally destroyed by the "ever destructive" Tagalog rebels during the revolution. The first number was published on Saturday, 3rd Sept. 1898. Its leading article is an exposition of the purpose of the publication of the paper, which was the defense of the independence of the Philippines. "We defend, says the writer of the article, the independence of the Philippines because it is the aspiration of the country which has come of age; and when a people rise as a man to protest, arm in hand, against a policy of oppression and injustice, it manifests sufficient vitality to live free." This is a fair sample of the style of the conduct of the paper. It is worthy of note that the history of the revolt has clearly shown that, in the first place, independence was not the aspiration of the people, but a fanciful hope of a handful of exploiters; secondly that the country has not come of age, not having even reached the age of puberty; thirdly that the people did not rise as a man but that the Tagal "discontents" were the body and soul of the whole insurrection both against Spain and against the U. S.; and finally, that the "policy of oppression and injustice" was imaginary, the same complaint having since been made against the Government of Washington as was then made against the Government of Madrid. The quotation concerning Luna is taken from No. 2 of the paper published on the 5th of Sept. 1898. [25] The principal works of Juan Luna are: The death of Cleopatra for which he received a silver medal; this was painted under the tutorship of Sr. Vera. Under the same master he painted the Spoliarium for which he was rewarded a gold medal, but this not really for the merit of the picture but in order to put an end to a rivalry between two Spanish painters. On his own account he painted and gave forth The Battle of Lepanto; this was received almost with hisses and was heartily criticized. Also the Profanation of the Tombs; if anything this was worse. As the savage nature which lay dormant in his breast became more and more awakened his paintings became more and more decadescent: his Pacto-de-Sangre, in the which he inspired the return to one of the most barbarous customs of pre-Spanish times in the archipelago, rubs off the last touches of the veneer of civilization which formed the dividing line between the indian of the city and the indian of the mountain and forest. [26] "Andrés Bonifacio told the witness that he communicated with the president of the Superior Supreme Council, who was Francisco L. Roxas latterly, and Doroteo Cortés formerly; ... "Testimony of Pio Valenzuela (fols. 591 to 597). [27] "... Doroteo Cortés and a certain Artacho were those who were in understanding with the Japanese Government, which would find a way to send people of the laboring classes to the Philippines, to the end of seeking motives which might give excuse for a war between Spain and that Power". Testimony of Pio Valenzuela (fols. 1,663 to 1,673). [28] "... The Supreme Council (of the Liga) decided to purchase arms and ammunition in Japan, sending to that country at the proper time, a commission to ask of that Government its aid and protection for the Philippines, under the condition that some islands of the Archipelago should be ceded to that nation as a recompense; ... Cortés, Ambrosio Bautista and others being chosen to form the commission." Testimony of Numeriano Adriano (fols. 1,309 to 1,312). [29] "It the having been known for some time that Pedro Serrano had malverted the money gathered for Rizal, and for the funds of the Propaganda, the associates of Masonry stopped the individual payment of the 50 cents per month for La Propaganda...." Extract from the testimony of Antonio Salazar y San Agustin (fols. 1,118 to 1,129 Sept. 22, 1896). [30] For a description of anting-anting see appendix D. [31] Pedro Gonzales, a native who was captured whilst carrying dispatches and letters to and fro between Manila and the insurgent camp, was a man well posted in the doings of the rebels and was able to give much interesting and valuable information to the Authorities. The most interesting portions of his evidence will be found in appendix F. In this matter of the flight of Bonifacio he stated that "it was not exact as had been said, that Andrés Bonifacio was in Cavite (at that particular time), for after the defeat at San Juan del Monte he disappeared with the funds of the Katipunan, which amounted to some 20,000 pesos, as he had been assured." [32] Having been asked during his trial whether he was aware of the hiding place of Bonifacio, Valenzuela (fol. 600 to 605) stated that "he was not aware of the place in which Bonifacio and others were to be met with; that he merely supposed that Bonifacio could be found in the mountains of San Mateo, in Tapusi, in other words in the most inaccessible part of the said mountain range; because the witness heard him say that he would retire to that point to dedicate himself to highway robbery if the movement should not be successful. [33] "The generalisimo, captain Emilio, is very indignant with the conduct of Andrés Bonifacio, upon whose head he has set a price, offering a good recompense to the one who will present him dead or alive, for he says that he cannot consent to such a desertion after he had been the principal promoter of the popular rebellion". From the statement of Pedro Gonzalez previously quoted. [34] See foot-note page 114. [35] The head offices of the La Democracia in Manila are situated on Calle Villalobos, a name which put into English signifies wolf village. For the headquarters of such a scurrilous sheet and for such a political party no better place could be found, for taking the two at their very best they are veritable "wolves in sheep's clothing". [36] See page 60. [37] Nilad is the name of a plant, from which is derived the name of Manila. [38] In an interesting pamphlet entitled "Vexata Questio", giving a brief sketch of three centuries of history in the Philippines, published in Manila in 1901, the author, in a foot note to page 28, says of Foreman: "It should be remarked that this writer, in the first edition of his work, claims to be an earnest Catholic. Dean Worcester, who copies from Foreman's book some of the most drivelling paragraphs, lays particular stress upon this fact. I leave it to the common sense of any one who has read Foreman's history, or what Worcester stoops so low to copy therefrom, whether a man whose Alpha and Omega is truly anti-Catholic and often anti-christian, and the ink of whose pen savors of Catholic blood shed upon the altars of Freemasonry can be a Catholic, at least an honorable one." Foreman was a traveller in machinery and as such was enabled to get to all the principal parts of the Archipelago. He was, as he himself confesses, always well received in the pueblos, and greeted by the parish priests (friars) and lodged in the convents free of cost. Although Foreman did not perform vile practical jokes upon unsuspecting and inoffensive hosts as did the now "commissioner" Worcester in his travels, he did many things no honorable man would have done. Although he professed himself a Catholic it was only for "business" purposes; one has only to read the preface to his book to find that out. Foreman was an Englishman, disliked by the English, despised by everyone he came in contact with; and if the things said of him by his intimate acquaintances, are true, then he well deserved the snubs he has lately received all round. On the 17th of April 1899, before the members of the Schurman Commission, Neil Macleod testified of Foreman, as follows: Questioned by Worcester: Q. Have you read Foreman's book? A. Yes; I know him personally. Q. Was he a Catholic? A. I do not know. Q. He says so? A. Yes. Q. He is an engineer, isn't he? A. He has been here frequently travelling all over the country, selling machinery. Q. You know he attacks the Church? A. He attacks the church very much, and he ought to be very thankful to the priests, for they have been very good to him; ............... .................................................................... considering that he availed himself of their services and hospitality all over the country, he should have thought twice before putting a thing like that (his history) into print." Worcester was fishing for trout and caught a crab. He got enough and the subject ... suddenly changed. [39] See Appendix G. [40] Philippinos: insular Spaniards, or Spaniards born in the Philippines. Filipino: more commonly known as indio: that is, an indian native of the Archipelago. [41] For this decree see Appendix H. [42] He was conducted from calle Iris blindfolded in a quilez (a vehicle of the country) to a house which he later on discovered to be that of Bonifacio, situated in calle Oroquieta. [43] In an official letter of the Grand Secretary of the Oriente Español to the Lodge Nilad, dated Madrid 8th of June 1892, the secretary, warning the said lodge to be careful in the performance of its labors says: "... not all men, although they profess our ideas and doctrines, serve for good masons." [44] "The oath bound (the Katipuneros) as well as the militares (the rebel army) were to be supported and equipped by several wealthy persons of Manila, among them D. Francisco Roxas who was in charge of the maintenance of the rebel army." Testimony of 2nd Lieut Benedicto Nijaga y Polonio. (fols. 222-224) [45] See Appendix I. [46] Wildman will probably be long remembered by many who suffered brutalities and tortures at the hands of Aguinaldo's horde of cut-throats, inspired by the late Consul's advise. Correspondence took place between Aguinaldo and Wildman concerning the Spanish prisoners. In reply to a request of the Dictator, Wildman wrote: "Never mind feeding them. A meal every day, of course, and water will be a good diet. They have been living too high during the last few years. As the Spaniards want more bloodshed in the Philippines, I trust you will let them have a taste of real war. Do not be so tender with them, etc., etc." Little did Wildman think that the day would come when these words of his would inspire equal or greater barbarity against his own countrymen. The publication of the valuable papers in Wildman's possession at the time of his death in the shipwreck which occurred almost at the very door of his home would doubtless throw much light upon the past four years of Philippine history. The shipment of tons upon tons of ammunition, a large shipment of which left London on the "Inaba Maru," on the 25th of September 1899, addressed to the "American Consul", Hong-Kong, have yet to be accounted for. [47] There were always plenty of funds, but the money too often stuck to the fingers of those who had the handling of it. [48] A name given among Spaniards, to young servant boys or girls. The word signifies servant and is used as such in the same manner as in British Oriental colonies the word boy is used,--irrespective of age. [49] Nipa.--Nipa fructificans.--Nipa is a small palm which grows in salt water. From it the natives make a species of wine and vinegar, whilst its leaves serve to thatch their houses. It is one of the plants of most utility to the indian. [50] The reason for Rizal's deportation is set forth clearly in the decree of Deportation which is given entire in Appendix. [51] As a sample of these statements I will quote the following document, which is one of a number copied from a book of decrees received by the Revolutionary authorities of the pueblo of Mendez Nuñez, province of Cavite, "K. K. K." "Chiefs of each pueblo" "In the urgent letter received to-day from the General (Aguinaldo) concrete notice is given that to-day there have anchored the warships proceeding from Japan to our assistance, and it is said, that they are now just on the other side of the island of Corregidor...." This document is dated 11th September 1896, and is signed by El capitan comandante, Crisòstomo Riel. [52] What a fine president he would have made for the Federal Party! Castañeda was worthy of an office in the Ayuntamiento with a sign over the door--Hon. Juan Castañeda, Native Commissioner. [53] Ambrosio Flores: (bro. musa) was the Gr. Pres. of the Gr. Cons. Reg. of the Philippines. (See note 23)--Moises Salvador stated of him in his declaration (fols. 1,138-1,143), in reply to a question as to the manner in which Flores was affiliated to filibusterism, that "by reason of his high position in freemasonry, he aided the ends of the filibusters, making propaganda among those affiliated to the lodges." He stated, at the same time that Flores, in no concept, formed part of the Liga or Compromisarios. It was Ambrosio Flores who, at the opportune moment let fall the masonic sledge hammer upon the back of Pedro Serrano, charging him with being a traitor (see note 12) to the cause. [54] I have frequently quoted the "Memoria" of Isabelo de los Reyes, because I consider that whilst in it he exaggerates and lies considerably, there are yet points upon which what he says has all the probability of the truth, in as much as when he finds it pays to tell the truth he tells it. In this particular point, however, it is "according to what is said." [55] How much this reminds me of the story of the little boy who went to the grocer's and asked for 10 cents worth of molasses. The shop-keeper measured out the molasses into the jug and asked the little boy for the dime, receiving the reply: "its at the bottom of the jug." And that's just where the other little boy's money would have been. [56] In the official extract of advice given by the Secret Service to the Gov. Gen. Blanco, we read: "Aug 1. Notice is hereby given that, by references from Japan, the Gov. Gen. has received from the Emperor of that nation some messages which had been directed to him by some 22,000 Filipinos in representation of the native inhabitants of these islands, and in the which, after congratulating him for his triumphs over the Chinese Empire, asks his protection and shelter for this Archipelago, and its annexation to the Japanese Empire." [57] The word Kongo signifies Imperial diamond. [58] The Bazar Japonés situated in Plaza Moraga. [59] Typical of the heads of the twelve apostles of filibusterism. [60] In his "Memoria". [61] I am inclined to differ somewhat with this opinion. What is more probable is that as regards the actual membership there existed a gulf between the wealthy and the lower classes which was bridged by the representatives of either association. I have not come across any concrete evidence that the two elements really mixed, the one with the other; the inborn pride of the Chinese half caste, the class from which, the majority of the wealthy elements came, and of the indio of money or political "pull", would not permit such a mixture of the two associations Señor Valdés supposes. [62] See appendix A. [63] See note 56; also foot-note, page 180. [64] The witness might have added that Blanco as a mason did more than "know" of it: he took no steps to counter-act it, till circumstances demanded that harsh measures should be taken to maintain national honor. [65] In plain English, this is a lie and no one could know it better than the witness. [66] By an element. Even would-be-president Bryan has his followers here. [67] In other words: he allowed a certain wealthy and influential class of people to lead him around wherever they would, by the nose. [68] This statement is the result of either ignorance or malice. (See note 97, 98.) This account also materially differs from the "faked up" story of Legarda. How little some people know of the truth when they do not wish to tell it! [69] This is another. Now that Tavera and Legarda are side by side in the U. S. Commission they might compare their testimony with advantage: it might aid them to preserve somewhat of the truth in future. [70] It would be interesting to know just how many of the late insurgents who now hold position of importance under the Government, are following up this piece of advice of Aguinaldo. [71] Domestic: i. e., made for household use, for cutting up meat, cutting down bamboos, and in fact for every use for which a knife or chopper is needed. [72] Castillo y Jimenez; El Katipunan ó el filibusterismo en Filipinas: pp. 128-129. [73] That is men of the lower classes, laborers. [74] It is difficult to determine whether such statements are due to ignorance or to malice. The real truth of the situation is that although the friar came to the Philippines to perform sacerdotal duties and preach the Gospel, his beneficial influence was not confined to the mere preaching of the Gospel. "What most honors the whole membership past and present of the Religious Orders is the intense zeal shown in the temporal as well as the spiritual welfare of their parishioners. To merely defeat and drive out the bad that was in them was not sufficient, for Satan finds mischief for idle hands, and when one devil is driven out of a man he roams around seeking other devils with whom he returns and re-enters the soul and "the last state of that man becomes worse than the first." So to thoroughly carry out their christianizing and civilizing purpose they did their best to instruct their converts to occupy their time in the fields, in the building of houses, of churches, of structures of all kinds necessary. They taught them to be self-supporting and to build up happy homes around them. The few industries, if the little then done by the natives in the way of manual labor can be classed as industry, that existed among the people at that time were copied from the Chinese and Mohammedan traders who visited and traded with them. These industries however were but crude as a rule; and moreover the connection with these anti-christian influences had to be cut for the moral protection of the indian and therefore the friar missionary, ever on the alert for his children's welfare, instructed them in industries which, whilst occupying their time formerly spent in abject laziness, also gave them the advantage of money making. "As soon as the natives had become accustomed to living after the manner of civilized beings, the friars taught them the art of making lime, mortar and bricks and of utilizing these materials in buildings and fortifications for the common protection against their enemies. They instructed them in the method of tilling the virgin and fertile soil, of utilizing the many streams of water that nature had provided." And yet there are those who would make us believe that the friar missionary has done nothing to civilize the Filipinos. To whom then do they owe the civilization they enjoy? [75] Faith in their anting-anting; courage to maltreat and murder the helpless and sometimes dying prisoners that fell into their hands; and as to constancy...? The majority of the leaders eventually became traitors to the most cherished ideas of independence. Three figures alone stand out as really constant throughout the whole rebellion, and these three are Aguinaldo, Mabini, and Pio del Pilar; and of these three the most constant was Aguinaldo, a misguided man who deserves far more honor than those who deserted him and who never thought of raising a finger to alleviate his hard lot, a lot for which they are morally responsible. [76] A kind of altar on which bonfires are lighted for illumination. [77] The name of this plant signifies that it possesses the power to bring to life again--to resuscitate. [78] This granting of pardon to those who should present themselves is contained in Art. 7. of the proclamation of the Governor General Blanco, issued on the 30th of August 1896, and which reads as follows: "Art. 7. The rebels who present themselves to the authorities within 48 hours after the publication of this proclamation, shall be exempt from punishment for rebellion, with the exception of the chiefs of the seditious groups and those who relapse into those crimes. The chiefs to whom reference is made shall be pardoned of the punishment due them if they surrender within the fixed time suffering a punishment immediately inferior according to grade." [79] Previous to 1896 Aguinaldo was an almost unknown indio. He was at that time about 23 or 24 years of age, and like the far greater majority of the indios of the archipelago had forgotten what little he had learned at school. He was a lavandero ((Washerman.)) for the Arsenal at Cavite, and possessed little command over the Spanish language, speaking it after the Cavite style, de cocina as the Spaniards say. He was the son of Carlos Aguinaldo who had several times held office under the Spanish Government, and who was at heart a bitter anti-Spaniard. Like the remainder of his fellow Tagalogs, Aguinaldo demonstrates a different character in connection with each event which takes place in his life. As capitan municipal in 1896 he was very Spanish in dealing with the authorities, but in dealing with his own people quite the reverse. Like the Taveras, the Legardas and the Buencaminos etc., he was an adept at political lightning changes. Buencamino in one of his absurd articles to the Filipino press (La Independencia, Sept. 6th 1896) speaking of him says: "... all the Filipinos unconditionally obey the president Aguinaldo seeing in him the messenger of God sent to redeem the Filipino people from all foreign domination, and because they see in the said chief the great virtues of fortitude, honor and magnanimity which ought to adorn all saviors of their country." The belief among some Filipinos that Aguinaldo was a semi-God was not uncommon at one time, and many hold to it even in these days. A certain Bray (apparently related very closely to the bray of an ass) went a step further in an article to the French Revue de Revues and compared Aguinaldo to Christ, to Alexander the Great, to Mahomet, to Caesar, to Napoleon and others! Aguinaldo certainly demonstrated fortitude, and did not sell his sword to those he considered his enemies. His misfortune was that he fell into the hands of such advisers as Buencamino and others, who, after working up his stupid pride, deserted him in his hour of need. Aguinaldo showed fortitude and was never a traitor to what he considered the honor of his country. Honor to Aguinaldo in this respect. [80] As to the goodness of customs read the testimony of the most reliable chroniclers and historians of the earliest days of Spanish history. [81] The pacto de sangre was performed thus: a wound was made in the body of each person who was to form a party to the treaty about to be made, and the blood that flowed from the wounds thus made was mixed in a receptacle prepared for the occasion; each then drank a portion of the blood thus mixed. It is needless to say that Legaspi refused to perform such a savage, cannibalistic ceremony. [82] Worthy perhaps but certainly not legitimate. The Katipunan was illegitimate from all points of view; nor was it a child really of Bonifacio. The conception was of Pilar (Marcelo H.) and Bonifacio was but the foster father encharged with the bringing up of the child. [83] A people's language is the expression of its sentiments. There are in this archipelago, native languages in which no word exists to express "thank you." [84] F. Buenaventura Campa was one of the two Dominican Fathers who willingly devoted themselves to the care of the sufferers stricken with the cholera plague which has carried off so many people both in Manila and the provinces. He, together with his companion, P. Cándido, bore with remarkable patience and self-abnegation the troubles and trials consequent upon the extraordinary plans adopted by an inexperienced Sanitary Department for the treatment of the dread enemy. [85] Half mad. [86] Juan Utor y Fernandez (bro. Espartero) confessed that Blanco was a freemason; he affirmed also that his masonic name was bro. Barcelona. Lacasa, Lieut. Auditor of war, and one of the heads of freemasonry in the Philippines declared that among the freemasons of the archipelago was counted Sr. D. Ramon Blanco, Capt Gen. of the Army and Gov. Gen. of the Islands. [87] The following interesting notes will give some idea of what the Blanco administration was like. In the report of the secret police for the 3rd of June 1896, appears the following:-- "Notice is hereby given of the confidential information given by a freemason in respect to the reason why the masonic lodges are at rest, and the attitude of Generals Blanco and Echaluce in regard to the same. "This freemason, Juan Merchan, says: "we are now sleeping; we cannot work; we are tutored by the experience of the persecution directed against us by General Echaluce. Until General Blanco returns from Mindanao we can do nothing, for he at least does not disturb us, and even helps us. The proof of this is that during the previous voyage to Mindanao (of Blanco) Gen. Echaluce commenced to deport people; but when Blanco got to know of it, he wrote to him ordering him not to deport anyone without his consent, and not to do anything in the matter till his return from Mindanao." [88] El Katipunan, etc.; p. 89. [89] Blanco, whether because he was bound by compromise, or because of fear, heeded not the warnings of the approaching danger. As a soldier face to face with an enemy Blanco was not lacking in courage; but when the enemy was invisible, and more tact than courage was needed in the combat, Blanco was like a little child in the dark, frightened at the least sound--chicken hearted. It is certainly a remarkable thing that bro. Barcelona had the courage to pass through the ordeals of his initiation into freemasonry. [90] The head of a pueblo. The most ancient form of rule in the Archipelago. [91] See page 63. [92] Pascual H. Poblete: a pobre diablo who speaks Spanish like a chino and writes it far worse. Poblete is greatly devoted to cock-fighting; but being as reckless in the enjoyment of this sport as he is in everything else he undertakes, he finds his pocket always more or less empty. To fill this pocket he is ever hunting up schemes to make money in the easiest way possible. The subscription lists he has started for various pious or patriotic objects are well nigh innumerable. The Heraldo de Madrid, of the 19th of November 1896, says of this charlatan: "Well paired with Tomás del Rosario, the indio who, by literary fraud gained from Señor Nuñez de Arce a good position in the Philippines, is Pascual H. Poblete also an indio ((If I am not in error, Poblete is a Chinee halfcaste.)) and a person of history too. "His first steps in work in the newspapers of his country were as translator of the Spanish text of a bilingual review into Tagalog. "He propagated political themes widely, but above all, those articles of the Civil and Penal code favorable to his countrymen; to these articles he added comments.... Under the pretext of competing with the Chinese he founded a cooperative association which was the subject of much talk. It was really nothing else than an association distinctly political and eminently anti-Spanish. He however succeeded in dissimulating, and when he created the newspaper El Resumen, placed a peninsular Spaniard, a native of Aragon, at its head. He then did all he could to gain the confidence of Despujols, whom he visited every once in a while. "As Despujols step by step lost favor with the European element, Poblete praised him more and more and this was, in itself, a good sign of the direction in which was going this Poblete, a man lacking talent, lacking wit, and enjoying nothing but an insane intention. During the last years he made continuous anti-Spanish propaganda, and was a bitter enemy of the Spaniards, excepting some few degenerates who yet believed in the good faith of this pobre diablo." In later days he changed his religion--that is if he ever had one to change, and devoted himself to sponging upon the Bible Societies and the protestant and Mormon missionaries who came to the Philippines. On one occasion he translated from Spanish into Tagalog the Holy Scriptures, and seeing that never in his life had he been a successful translator even of newspaper paragraphs, but could only succeed in giving little more than a very general idea of what was contained in the Spanish text, it was not to be wondered at that, as a famous literary critic well versed in the Tagalog once said: "Poblete's Tagalog bible reads more like a badly written chronicle than a version of the sacred Scriptures. If I thought that our Lord and his Apostles preached and taught what Poblete puts into their mouths, I would go to China and become a disciple of Confucius." In the latter days of Spanish rule Poblete was always more or less under the eyes of the authorities, and on the 17th of April 1896 the Secret Police asked of General Blanco the necessary permission to search the houses of several highly suspicious people, among them that of Pascual H. Poblete. Our hero figured at one time as an expert in the raising of subscriptions for monuments and if I am not very much mistaken, he once had a hand in the raising of money for the coming monument to Rizal the hero and martyr of the Filipino Libre party. It would be very interesting to know what became of all the funds that passed through his hands: the majority apparently went to back his favorite birds at the cock-pits. Since the American occupation Poblete's chief enterprise, apart from cock-fighting and "sponging upon the ignorantes who listened to his ravings with more or less favor because he was a protestant, was the editing and publishing of a dirty little "sheet" known as the Ang Kapatid nang Bayan." In this so called newspaper Poblete aired his radical political ideas with such vigor that the Provost Marshal was compelled to call him down. The pobre diablo then turned his attention to another pastime which would combine the advantages of demonstrating his unsurpassable abilities, of airing his opinions and, last mentioned but of the greatest importance, the quality of putting into his pocket a goodly number of easily earned dollars. This pastime took the shape of a theatrical enterprise: Constancia, the daughter of the said mountebank "composed and wrote" a play entitled Ang Pag Ibig Sa Lupang Tinubinan: For the Love of Country. Poblete's better half (which is not saying much) played the part of the heroine. The whole play was incendiary in the extreme and the audience being Tagalogs of the lowest and most ignorant class, the result was that they were thrown into a state of the greatest frenzy. Poblete put this play on the boards of the Teatro Oriental. All went well in the first acts; and following out the "plot" of the play, the town of Imus was supposed to have been taken by the rebels. Dramatic shouts of Viva La Independencia; were raised from time to time by the actors, followed by shouts from the audience of Viva Filipinas! Viva Aguinaldo! Suddenly there rushed from the "wings" a gaudy looking creature who ought to have been the Tondo market selling cockles and crabs; this turned out to be the heroine. In one hand she held a revolutionary flag and in the other a bolo. Viva La Independencia was the shout which almost raised the roof; but as fate would have it Poblete was doomed to be humbled to the dust. Just as he was promising himself a fine string of dollars from his new enterprise Capt. Lara and a number of police appeared on the scene, and Poblete, his katipunan banners and bolos etc., were seized and the house cleared of its fanatical occupants. To-day he amuses himself in fitting out bands of little boys who on "state" occasions parade the streets with American flags and Japanese lanterns, and placards with various inscriptions, the chief ones being petitions for an amnesty on behalf of all those who have "done what they ought not to have done". Poblete would open the doors of the prisons of the Archipelago and let loose all their occupants. The result? A political boom for Poblete, an increase in the membership of the Partido Nacionalista and an increase of crime to a thousand fold, not only in Manila but throughout the whole archipelago. Poor Poblete a pobre infeliz, a stain upon the good name of the filipino. But then, what would Filipinas be without her Poblete; almost like a cat without fleas. [93] Cruz Herrera, now alcalde of Manila, was another upon whom the authorities took pity on account of the rheumatism from which he suffered to such an extent that he could scarcely walk. [94] This was Alfonso XII. the anniversary of whose death fell of the 25th of November. Archbishop Payo had been suffering for a considerable time from dysentery. Apart from this, the bitterness of the official relations at that time between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities had completely incapacitated the venerable prelate from attending to his official duties. Consequently, acting upon the advice of his physician, the Archbishop left Manila for Navotas for a few days of complete rest. The departure of the Archbishop happened to almost coincide with the anniversary of the death of the King; but as the prelate was physically unable to attend to the pontifical ceremonies which were to be held on that day and to the other functions consequent upon such a solemn occasion, he was wisely advised to absent himself from the city. Freemasonry ever on the watch, saw in this an opportunity to attack the Religious Orders, and taking advantage of it, demanded: "The insult committed by the archbishop being therefore very culpable, and having caused the greatest indignation to the government, to the nation, and in particular to those of this country, as devoted to their king; it is indispensable to expel him from this soil, imposing upon him the penalty of temporary banishment marked out by article 142 of the penal code. [95] To judge from his writing, Isabelo held the idea that he alone was able to direct everything connected with the revolt. Isabelo takes upon himself the intellectual work of the affair leaving to others the dirty work. 
63304	----	DOUBLECROSS by JAMES Mac CREIGH Revolt was brewing on Venus, led by the descendant of the first Earthmen to land. Svan was the leader making the final plans--plotting them a bit too well. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The Officer of the Deck was pleased as he returned to the main lock. There was no reason why everything shouldn't have been functioning perfectly, of course, but he was pleased to have it confirmed, all the same. The Executive Officer was moodily smoking a cigarette in the open lock, staring out over the dank Venusian terrain at the native town. He turned. "Everything shipshape, I take it!" he commented. The OD nodded. "I'll have a blank log if this keeps up," he said. "Every man accounted for except the delegation, cargo stowed, drivers ready to lift as soon as they come back." The Exec tossed away his cigarette. "_If_ they come back." "Is there any question?" The Exec shrugged. "I don't know, Lowry," he said. "This is a funny place. I don't trust the natives." Lowry lifted his eyebrows. "Oh? But after all, they're human beings, just like us--" "Not any more. Four or five generations ago they were. Lord, they don't even look human any more. Those white, flabby skins--I don't like them." "Acclimation," Lowry said scientifically. "They had to acclimate themselves to Venus's climate. They're friendly enough." The Exec shrugged again. He stared at the wooden shacks that were the outskirts of the native city, dimly visible through the ever-present Venusian mist. The native guard of honor, posted a hundred yards from the Earth-ship, stood stolidly at attention with their old-fashioned proton-rifles slung over their backs. A few natives were gazing wonderingly at the great ship, but made no move to pass the line of guards. "Of course," Lowry said suddenly, "there's a minority who are afraid of us. I was in town yesterday, and I talked with some of the natives. They think there will be hordes of immigrants from Earth, now that we know Venus is habitable. And there's some sort of a paltry underground group that is spreading the word that the immigrants will drive the native Venusians--the descendants of the first expedition, that is--right down into the mud. Well--" he laughed--"maybe they will. After all, the fittest survive. That's a basic law of--" The annunciator over the open lock clanged vigorously, and a metallic voice rasped: "Officer of the Deck! Post Number One! Instruments reports a spy ray focused on the main lock!" Lowry, interrupted in the middle of a word, jerked his head back and stared unbelievingly at the tell-tale next to the annunciator. Sure enough, it was glowing red--might have been glowing for minutes. He snatched at the hand-phone dangling from the wall, shouted into it. "Set up a screen! Notify the delegation! Alert a landing party!" But even while he was giving orders, the warning light flickered suddenly and went out. Stricken, Lowry turned to the Exec. The Executive Officer nodded gloomily. He said, "You see!" * * * * * "You see?" Svan clicked off the listening-machine and turned around. The five others in the room looked apprehensive. "You see?" Svan repeated. "From their own mouths you have heard it. The Council was right." The younger of the two women sighed. She might have been beautiful, in spite of her dead-white skin, if there had been a scrap of hair on her head. "Svan, I'm afraid," she said. "Who are we to decide if this is a good thing? Our parents came from Earth. Perhaps there will be trouble at first, if colonists come, but we are of the same blood." Svan laughed harshly. "_They_ don't think so. You heard them. We are not human any more. The officer said it." The other woman spoke unexpectedly. "The Council was right," she agreed. "Svan, what must we do?" Svan raised his hand, thoughtfully. "One moment. Ingra, do you still object?" The younger woman shrank back before the glare in his eyes. She looked around at the others, found them reluctant and uneasy, but visibly convinced by Svan. "No," she said slowly. "I do not object." "And the rest of us? Does any of us object?" Svan eyed them, each in turn. There was a slow but unanimous gesture of assent. "Good," said Svan. "Then we must act. The Council has told us that we alone will decide our course of action. We have agreed that, if the Earth-ship returns, it means disaster for Venus. Therefore, it must not return." An old man shifted restlessly. "But they are strong, Svan," he complained. "They have weapons. We cannot force them to stay." Svan nodded. "No. They will leave. But they will never get back to Earth." "Never get back to Earth?" the old man gasped. "Has the Council authorized--murder?" Svan shrugged. "The Council did not know what we would face. The Councilmen could not come to the city and see what strength the Earth-ship has." He paused dangerously. "Toller," he said, "do you object?" Like the girl, the old man retreated before his eyes. His voice was dull. "What is your plan?" he asked. Svan smiled, and it was like a dark flame. He reached to a box at his feet, held up a shiny metal globe. "One of us will plant this in the ship. It will be set by means of this dial--" he touched a spot on the surface of the globe with a pallid finger--"to do nothing for forty hours. Then--it will explode. Atomite." He grinned triumphantly, looking from face to face. The grin faded uncertainly as he saw what was in their eyes--uncertainty, irresolution. Abruptly he set the bomb down, savagely ripped six leaves off a writing tablet on the table next him. He took a pencil and made a mark on one of them, held it up. "We will let chance decide who is to do the work," he said angrily. "Is there anyone here who is afraid? There will be danger, I think...." No answer. Svan jerked his head. "Good," he said. "Ingra, bring me that bowl." Silently the girl picked up an opaque glass bowl from the broad arm of her chair. It had held Venus-tobacco cigarettes; there were a few left. She shook them out and handed the bowl to Svan, who was rapidly creasing the six fatal slips. He dropped them in the bowl, stirred it with his hand, offered it to the girl. "You first, Ingra," he said. She reached in mechanically, her eyes intent on his, took out a slip and held it without opening it. The bowl went the rounds, till Svan himself took the last. All eyes were on him. No one had looked at their slips. Svan, too, had left his unopened. He sat at the table, facing them. "This is the plan," he said. "We will go, all six of us, in my ground car, to look at the Earth-ship. No one will suspect--the whole city has been to see it already. One will get out, at the best point we can find. It is almost dusk now. He can hide, surely, in the vegetation. The other five will start back. Something will go wrong with the car--perhaps it will run off the road, start to sink in the swamp. The guards will be called. There will be commotion--that is easy enough, after all; a hysterical woman, a few screams, that's all there is to it. And the sixth person will have his chance to steal to the side of the ship. The bomb is magnetic. It will not be noticed in the dark--they will take off before sunrise, because they must travel away from the sun to return--in forty hours the danger is removed." There was comprehension in their eyes, Svan saw ... but still that uncertainty. Impatiently, he crackled: "Look at the slips!" Though he had willed his eyes away from it, his fingers had rebelled. Instinctively they had opened the slip, turned it over and over, striving to detect if it was the fatal one. They had felt nothing.... And his eyes saw nothing. The slip was blank. He gave it but a second's glance, then looked up to see who had won the lethal game of chance. Almost he was disappointed. Each of the others had looked in that same second. And each was looking up now, around at his neighbors. Svan waited impatiently for the chosen one to announce it--a second, ten seconds.... Then gray understanding came to him. _A traitor!_ his subconscious whispered. _A coward!_ He stared at them in a new light, saw their indecision magnified, became opposition. Svan thought faster than ever before in his life. If there was a coward, it would do no good to unmask him. All were wavering, any might be the one who had drawn the fatal slip. He could insist on inspecting every one, but--suppose the coward, cornered, fought back? In fractions of a second, Svan had considered the evidence and reached his decision. Masked by the table, his hand, still holding the pencil, moved swiftly beneath the table, marked his own slip. In the palm of his hand, Svan held up the slip he had just marked in secret. His voice was very tired as he said, "I will plant the bomb." * * * * * The six conspirators in Svan's old ground car moved slowly along the main street of the native town. Two Earth-ship sailors, unarmed except for deceptively flimsy-looking pistols at their hips, stood before the entrance to the town's Hall of Justice. "Good," said Svan, observing them. "The delegation is still here. We have ample time." He half turned in the broad front seat next to the driver, searching the faces of the others in the car. Which was the coward? he wondered. Ingra? Her aunt? One of the men? The right answer leaped up at him. _They all are_, he thought. _Not one of them understands what this means. They're afraid._ He clamped his lips. "Go faster, Ingra," he ordered the girl who was driving. "Let's get this done with." She looked at him, and he was surprised to find compassion in her eyes. Silently she nodded, advanced the fuel-handle so that the clumsy car jolted a trace more rapidly over the corduroy road. It was quite dark now. The car's driving light flared yellowishly in front of them, illuminating the narrow road and the pale, distorted vegetation of the jungle that surrounded them. Svan noticed it was raining a little. The present shower would deepen and intensify until midnight, then fall off again, to halt before morning. But before then they would be done. A proton-bolt lanced across the road in front of them. In the silence that followed its thunderous crash, a man's voice bellowed: "Halt!" The girl, Ingra, gasped something indistinguishable, slammed on the brakes. A Venusian in the trappings of the State Guard advanced on them from the side of the road, proton-rifle held ready to fire again. "Where are you going?" he growled. Svan spoke up. "We want to look at the Earth-ship," he said. He opened the door beside him and stepped out, careless of the drizzle. "We heard it was leaving tonight," he continued, "and we have not seen it. Is that not permitted?" The guard shook his head sourly. "No one is allowed near the ship. The order was just issued. It is thought there is danger." Svan stepped closer, his teeth bared in what passed for a smile. "It is urgent," he purred. His right hand flashed across his chest in a complicated gesture. "Do you understand?" Confusion furrowed the guard's hairless brows, then was replaced by a sudden flare of understanding--and fear. "The Council!" he roared. "By heaven, yes, I understand! You are the swine that caused this--" He strove instinctively to bring the clumsy rifle up, but Svan was faster. His gamble had failed; there was only one course remaining. He hurled his gross white bulk at the guard, bowled him over against the splintery logs of the road. The proton-rifle went flying, and Svan savagely tore at the throat of the guard. Knees, elbows and claw-like nails--Svan battered at the astonished man with every ounce of strength in his body. The guard was as big as Svan, but Svan had the initial advantage ... and it was only a matter of seconds before the guard lay unconscious, his skull a mass of gore at the back where Svan had ruthlessly pounded it against the road. [Illustration: _Svan grunted as his fingers constricted brutally._] Svan rose, panting, stared around. No one else was in sight, save the petrified five and the ground car. Svan glared at them contemptuously, then reached down and heaved on the senseless body of the guard. Over the shoulder of the road the body went, onto the damp swampland of the jungle. Even while Svan watched the body began to sink. There would be no trace. Svan strode back to the car. "Hurry up," he gasped to the girl. "Now there is danger for all of us, if they discover he is missing. And keep a watch for other guards." * * * * * Venus has no moon, and no star can shine through its vast cloud layer. Ensign Lowry, staring anxiously out through the astro-dome in the bow of the Earth-ship, cursed the blackness. "Can't see a thing," he complained to the Exec, steadily writing away at the computer's table. "Look--are those lights over there?" The Exec looked up wearily. He shrugged. "Probably the guards. Of course, you can't tell. Might be a raiding party." Lowry, stung, looked to see if the Exec was smiling, but found no answer in his stolid face. "Don't joke about it," he said. "Suppose something happens to the delegation?" "Then we're in the soup," the Exec said philosophically. "I told you the natives were dangerous. Spy-rays! They've been prohibited for the last three hundred years." "It isn't all the natives," Lowry said. "Look how they've doubled the guard around us. The administration is co-operating every way they know how. You heard the delegation's report on the intercom. It's this secret group they call the Council." "And how do you know the guards themselves don't belong to it?" the Exec retorted. "They're all the same to me.... Look, your light's gone out now. Must have been the guard. They're on the wrong side to be coming from the town, anyhow...." * * * * * Svan hesitated only a fraction of a second after the girl turned the lights out and stopped the car. Then he reached in the compartment under the seat. If he took a little longer than seemed necessary to get the atomite bomb out of the compartment, none of the others noticed. Certainly it did not occur to them that there had been _two_ bombs in the compartment, though Svan's hand emerged with only one. He got out of the car, holding the sphere. "This will do for me," he said. "They won't be expecting anyone to come from behind the ship--we were wise to circle around. Now, you know what you must do?" Ingra nodded, while the others remained mute. "We must circle back again," she parroted. "We are to wait five minutes, then drive the car into the swamp. We will create a commotion, attract the guards." Svan, listening, thought: _It's not much of a plan. The guards would not be drawn away. I am glad I can't trust these five any more. If they must be destroyed, it is good that their destruction will serve a purpose._ Aloud, he said, "You understand. If I get through, I will return to the city on foot. No one will suspect anything if I am not caught, because the bomb will not explode until the ship is far out in space. Remember, you are in no danger from the guards." _From the guards_, his mind echoed. He smiled. At least, they would feel no pain, never know what happened. With the amount of atomite in that bomb in the compartment, they would merely be obliterated in a ground-shaking crash. Abruptly he swallowed, reminded of the bomb that was silently counting off the seconds. "Go ahead," he ordered. "I will wait here." "Svan." The girl, Ingra, leaned over to him. Impulsively she reached for him, kissed him. "Good luck to you, Svan," she said. "Good luck," repeated the others. Then silently the electric motor of the car took hold. Skilfully the girl backed it up, turned it around, sent it lumbering back down the road. Only after she had traveled a few hundred feet by the feel of the road did she turn the lights on again. Svan looked after them. The kiss had surprised him. What did it mean? Was it an error that the girl should die with the others? There was an instant of doubt in his steel-shackled mind, then it was driven away. Perhaps she was loyal, yet certainly she was weak. And since he could not know which was the one who had received the marked slip, and feared to admit it, it was better they all should die. He advanced along the midnight road to where the ground rose and the jungle plants thinned out. Ahead, on an elevation, were the rain-dimmed lights of the Earth-ship, set down in the center of a clearing made by its own fierce rockets. Svan's mist-trained eyes spotted the circling figures of sentries, and knew that these would be the ship's own. They would not be as easily overcome as the natives, not with those slim-shafted blasters they carried. Only deceit could get him to the side of the ship. Svan settled himself at the side of the road, waiting for his chance. He had perhaps three minutes to wait; he reckoned. His fingers went absently to the pouch in his wide belt, closed on the slip of paper. He turned it over without looking at it, wondering who had drawn the first cross, and been a coward. Ingra? One of the men? * * * * * He became abruptly conscious of a commotion behind him. A ground car was racing along the road. He spun around and was caught in the glare of its blinding driving-light, as it bumped to a slithering stop. Paralyzed, he heard the girl's voice. "Svan! They're coming! They found the guard's rifle, and they're looking for us! Thirty Earthmen, Svan, with those frightful guns. They fired at us, but we got away and came for you. We must flee!" He stared unseeingly at the light. "Go away!" he croaked unbelievingly. Then his muscles jerked into action. The time was almost up--the bomb in the car-- "Go away!" he shrieked, and turned to run. His fists clenched and swinging at his side, he made a dozen floundering steps before something immense pounded at him from behind. He felt himself lifted from the road, sailing, swooping, dropping with annihilating force onto the hard, charred earth of the clearing. Only then did he hear the sound of the explosion, and as the immense echoes died away he began to feel the pain seeping into him from his hideously racked body.... The Flight Surgeon rose from beside him. "He's still alive," he said callously to Lowry, who had just come up. "It won't last long, though. What've you got there?" Lowry, a bewildered expression on his beardless face, held out the two halves of a metallic sphere. Dangling ends of wires showed where a connection had been broken. "He had a bomb," he said. "A magnetic-type, delayed-action atomite bomb. There must have been another in the car, and it went off. They--they were planning to bomb us." "Amazing," the surgeon said dryly. "Well, they won't do any bombing now." Lowry was staring at the huddled, mutilated form of Svan. He shuddered. The surgeon, seeing the shudder, grasped his shoulder. "Better them than us," he said. "It's poetic justice if I ever saw it. They had it coming...." He paused thoughtfully, staring at a piece of paper between his fingers. "This is the only part I don't get," he said. "What's that?" Lowry craned his neck. "A piece of paper with a cross on it? What about it?" The surgeon shrugged. "He had it clenched in his hand," he said. "Had the devil of a time getting it loose from him." He turned it over slowly, displayed the other side. "Now what in the world would he be doing carrying a scrap of paper with a cross marked on both sides?" 
62546	----	Prey of the Space Falcon By WILBUR S. PEACOCK The Administrators of the Solar System were as deadly as a Hydra-monster to those who sought freedom. Then came the Falcon and his outlaw Brood, fighting with the strangest weapon the Universe had ever seen--only to find that their existence lay in the slender hands of a girl with a Judas kiss. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Curt Varga watched lazily from a shadowed corner of the Martian _gailang_ night club, his space-tanned left hand toying with a frosted glass of _cahnde_, and his right hand making cryptic marks with a radi-stylus upon the scrap of gold paper before him. Music was a lilting swirl in the air, and his booted foot tapped unconsciously with the muted rhythm. He smiled at the great-chested Martians squatted about the dance floor, wondering for the hundredth time what enjoyment they received from swaying to music they understood only as a series of harmonic vibrations. Over by the circular bar, four Venusians drank stiffly and stolidly of Venusian _cahnde_, as they stood knee-deep in their water tanks. Their skins were wet and slimy, eternally soaked with the fluids flowing from the glands in their reptilian skins. They watched the good-natured crowd from beneath nictilian lids, their gazes blank and eerily aloof. Curt Varga's throat muscles tightened as he sent his inaudible questions to his brother in the curtained booth across the room. "Is there any suspicion that you are working with me?" he asked. "If so, then this arrangement must be broken; I can't ruin your career, too." The bean-sized amplifier imbedded so cunningly in the living bone at his right temple vibrated lightly from the mocking laughter. "I think they do, Falcon," Val Varga said lightly. "But it doesn't matter; somebody has to do the undercover work--and I happen to be in a position where I can do it with the least suspicion." The voice softened. "Careers _aren't_ important, anyway. I seem to remember that Dad had quite a reputation as a bio-chemist, until the Food Administrators decided his work threatened their dictatorial monopoly. And as a Commander of the IP, you were slated to go rather high." Curt Varga grinned, and suddenly all of the deadly grimness was gone from his tanned face, and there was only the laughter in his cool grey eyes and the hint of a swashbuckling swagger to the tilt of his head to betoken the man. "OQ!" he said inaudibly into the amplifier unit. "Now, give me a few facts." "Well," Val's voice steadied, "the IP is still searching for the Falcon's base; they've got direct orders from Vandor to smash it within a month, Earth time. The situation is getting rather desperate; gardens have been found on half a dozen worlds, and the revenue from sale of vitamins and energy tablets has fallen alarmingly. Unless the base is found and destroyed, the IP is due for a general shake-up in command and personnel." "Hold it!" Curt said brusquely, glanced at the Martian waiter who padded along the wall toward him. The waiter, grotesquely-chested, round-headed, with his antennae curled on either side of his great single eye, threaded his way through the tables, stood solicitously over the Falcon's table. His right antennae uncurled, its tip lightly darting out to touch the Earthman's wrist. "Another _cahnde_," Curt Varga said loudly. "And a _pulnik_ capsule." "_Five IP agents just entered_," the Martian said, the nerve impulse emanating from the antennae and travelling along Curt's arm to his brain, where the impulse was changed into familiar English. "_I think they know you are here._" "Thank you, Yen Dal," the Falcon said evenly. "That will do fine." * * * * * He leaned indolently back in his chair, his clear gaze utterly guileless, a lazy hint of careless laughter lifting the corners of his mobile lips. He tightened the muscles of his belly, shifting the gun-belt a bit until the dis-gun lay flat along his thigh. He felt mocking laughter bubbling in his throat, when he saw the IP men moving inconspicuously about the night club, their keen gaze searching patiently and eagerly every shadowed corner. The Martian padded silently away. "Things are getting hot, Val," he said into his throat mike. "Yen Dal just told me that five IP men are searching the place. Better get out of here before a fight starts." "I heard your conversation." Val's voice grew tight and hurried. "Now listen, Curt," he finished. "As far as I have been able to learn, the headquarters of the _Smothalene_ Smugglers lies somewhere in the Sargasso. An Earth renegade, Duke Ringo, is the boss. You've got to smash those smugglers, and do it quickly, for the worlds are beginning to believe that the Falcon is the man behind the _smothalene_ smuggling." Curt Varga scowled unconsciously, swirled the liquid about in the bottom of his _cahnde_ glass. He felt the first pulsings of anger in his heart, and his grey eyes were no longer cool. "I know," he answered brittlely. "Two of my ships rocketed into a trap on Jupiter's moons last week. They were carrying cargoes of oranges to the _Dahkils_, and some woman whose son had died of _smothalene_ gave information to the IP." "I hadn't heard that," Val said slowly, his voice grave. "Now, here's the situation," the Falcon said tautly, watching the unhurried movements of an IP man walking along the long bar. "I have sold almost enough fruit and vegetables the past three months to finance buying three more Kent-Horter needle-rockets. My fleet is almost complete, lacking but a dozen or so ships that I figure will be the minimum needed to whip the IP. I won't contact you again here, but will let you know where to meet me later. This place is getting too hot; I've got a hunch somebody tipped the fact that I use this as headquarters on Mars. Get out of here as inconspicuously as you can; then I'll make a run for it, if necessary." "OQ, Curt!" Val's voice with subdued. "But take it easy; your job is too big to be destroyed because you insist on taking chances." "Forget it, kid." The Falcon finished the liquor in the first glass, sipped slowly at the fresh _cahnde_ set before him by a noiseless waiter. Deep in his mind sang a tiny warning voice of danger. But he sat still, waiting for an opportunity to make a silent escape from the night club that was fast becoming an IP trap. His keen gaze flicked about the room, finding and identifying the agents scattered through the crowd. He broke the _pulnik_ capsule, rolled the fragrant tobacco in a fresh paper, lit it with his pocket lighter. He smoked slowly, the glow shadowing the flat planes of his face, lighting the rugged, almost brutal, sweep of his jaw. He edged his chair back quietly, tensing the great muscles of his legs, estimated the distance to the rear door. Other than that, he didn't move, for he saw that he was watched by two agents converging on him from both sides of the swaying dancers on the floor. He smiled slightly, sat cool and debonair, the leather vest and silk singlet accenting the wedge of his deep chest and shoulders. "_Any minute now, Val_," he said into his throat amplifier. * * * * * The _Kaana_ four-piece orchestra swung into the soft lazy melody of a century before. Glasses clinked at the bar, and the soft rustle of laughing conversation made the room seem intimate and warm. Nostalgia bit at Curt Varga's heart, when he remembered the days not so many years before when his life had been an ordered thing, when he had not been a hunted outlaw prowling the spaceways, a price on his head. In those days, before his mind had fully matured, he had thought his life full and untrammelled. He had worn his uniform as an IP Commander with the bullying swagger his superiors affected. With dis-guns and a brutal carelessness, he had enforced the commands of Jason Vandor, Dak Yar and Mezo Yong, the Food Administrators, had forced obedience from recalcitrant people of a dozen worlds, had been the leader of the shock-troops that pillaged city after city because they had incurred the anger of the Triumvirate whose hands controlled the food supplies of the Solar System. Then in his twenty-fifth year, he had seen the foulness of the system that broke the lives and courage of the inhabitated worlds. He had seen his father blasted to death for daring to raise his voice against the tyranny of the Food Administrators. He had seen his older brother die while fighting to save their father. And a conflict had raged within him for days; he had fought against the training that had been instilled within him from the day of his birth. From musty records, he had reread the histories of the worlds, had really _understood_ for the first time the true meaning of freedom. And in that hour, he had thrown aside all that had been his life, and had striven to build a new one. In a stolen Kent-Horter, he had prowled the spaceways, striking at small freighters for supplies and wealth. In the cold of space, he had stooped like the Falcon for whom he had been named, and stolen the Food Administrators' supplies time and again. And as ever when a leader arises, other men and women came to him as filings are attracted to a lodestone. Some were renegades, the scum of the spacelanes, whose only desire was to pillage and rob those who could not fight back. But others were the peoples of a dozen worlds in whose minds flowed the desire for freedom, whose only wish was to aid in a seemingly-hopeless fight against the oppressors. And still others were the great minds of science and art and living whose lives had been stifled by rigid rules of living imposed by the Food Administrators. Plan after plan had been made and discarded, until one was left that showed the clever brilliance of its creators. Unlimited wealth was the one thing needed for a revolution, and the plan showed clearly that way in which it could be obtained. Because they controlled all energy-tablet and vitamin factories, the Food Administrators held a whip hand over all the worlds. Starvation was the answer to any trouble that might arise. And should the trouble become too large to handle with the starvation threat, then the degenerate remnants of the famous Interplanetary Patrol used their weapons and brutal methods to enforce the laws. The plan reasoned out by Curt Varga and his board of strategy had been clever enough to avoid all obstacles. In a great asteroid, used by the Falcon for his first base, great rooms had been hollowed by gargantuan dis-guns. These rooms had been converted into living quarters for the men and women. Once established there, the men and women had worked for two years to hollow out more caverns for the growing of fruit and vegetables by hydropony. Still more rooms were manufactured for the workshops and hangars for the fitting of a huge space fleet with which the Falcon hoped to smash for all time the IP and the three men who controlled it. And in the passing four years the gigantic task had almost reached fruition. Dead-black freighters raced the starways, carrying contraband food to all planets, there unloading, and then returning with all monies collected to buy more space equipment for the fight that was to come. The Falcon's luck had been phenomenal; he had lost less than two percent of his men and fleet since the day his plans had been carefully organized. While IP ships had been blasted out of existence at the alarming rate of over five per cent a year. Of course there had been trouble. There had been the internal revolution created by the rotten elements of his pirate gang. Blood had been spilled, and the war had been a deadly one that lasted for ninety days. Then the Falcon's men had conquered the others by clever maneuvering, had quashed the civil war at the cost of hundreds of lives. Telepathy and hypnotism had been used on all of the survivors, driving all thoughts of greed from their minds, fitting their mentalities for the task that was a common purpose. And there had been the time when the IP had almost closed a trap over the Food Smugglers' leaders. Only a lucky chance had sprung the trap too soon, permitting Curt Varga and most of his board of strategy to escape. * * * * * But those things lay in the past. Now a new situation had arisen that promised to be more destructive to their plans than any IP plot or internal strife. _Smothalene_ smugglers had begun to operate again on each planet. Once, the drug had been outlawed, all sources of the Venusian _lanka_ plant, from which it was derived, had been blasted from existence. But now the drug had reappeared, was being smuggled from some secret base, and its origin could not be found. The inhabitated worlds were slowly becoming convinced that the Falcon and his men were distributing the drug; and such was the horror and agony the drug inflicted on its users, the peoples of the worlds had forgotten the good done by the Falcon's men, and were giving information to the IP as to the movements of the Food Smugglers. It had become a war of survival for the Falcon; he had to stamp out the _smothalene_ smugglers so as to protect himself, his great plan, and the lives of those who had entrusted their futures to his capable hands. Progress had been slow, for the _smothalene_ ring had been so carefully organized that only the barest of information was obtainable. But Curt Varga's organization, too, was carefully organized. His spies and agents had been working for weeks, ferreting out trivial bits of information, then relaying it back to headquarters where it was sifted and fitted with exquisite skill and patience. For days, the Falcon had prowled the planets, contacting his agents, obtaining first-hand reports, doing two men's work himself. Now, he had the clue given him by his brother, and he felt a thrill of success touching his mind as he thought over his plans for invading the Sargasso of Space, where the drug ring's headquarters were supposed to be. But the pressing problem of the moment was not the _smothalene_ smugglers, but rather the saving of himself from the IP men who were advancing so grimly on his table. The Falcon shifted his glance indolently about the room, giving only an uninterested cursory scrutiny to the agents, then relaxed, his cigarette canted debonairly between his lips. He glanced about in faked surprise, when one of the agents seated himself at the table. "What the hell do you want?" he asked pleasantly. "There are plenty of empty tables; when I want company, I'll send out invitations!" The agent said nothing; his eyes made a quick inventory of Curt's lounging body, widening imperceptibly when they saw the casual wornness of the dis-gun's butt. He nodded at his companion, and the man ranged himself at the Falcon's left side. Curt Varga straightened, feigning anger. "Listen," he said coldly, "I don't know you, so beat it!" The agent at the table opened his hand; a small shield glowed dully in the palm. "What's your number, Earthman?" he asked heavily. The Falcon shrugged, held out his wrist. The agent standing beside the table lifted a pocket fluorscope tube, trained it on the exposed wrist. The flesh seemed to dissolve, and numbers glowed bluely from the ulna bone. "X three five one four eight L T," the agent read impersonally. He twitched off the fluorscope beam; the flesh magically came back into being. The second agent spoke the numerals and letters into a pocket vocoder. "Hell," the Falcon said, "why didn't you tell me you were IP men? I haven't done anything wrong!" "Who are you, and why the gun?" Curt Varga shrugged. "I'm a scavenger, just in for a couple of days. I always carry a gun; I've got a permit from the IP here on Mars." He dry-washed his hands nervously. "Look, I don't want any trouble; I'll help any way I can, if you'll tell me what you want." "Shut up!" the seated agent said brittlely, listened to the tinny voice coming from his vocoder. Then he pocketed the tiny unit, stood slowly. "Your numbers check," he said slowly. "But don't leave this place without my permission." Without another word, he and his partner walked back to the bar. Curt Varga sat silently for a moment, feeling the cold sweat on his spine, breathing a bit fast. He grinned slightly, mockingly, remembering the hours of pain that had been his when the surgeons of his hidden base had grafted the ulna of a slain Earthman into his arm after removing the natural bone. Unconsciously, his right hand lifted, and the forefinger traced the invisible scars left on his face by the surgeon whose plastic surgery had changed the shape of his features. "I think I passed all right, Val," he said into the microphone imbedded in the cartilage of his throat. "Take it easy." "OQ, Curt," Val answered. "I'm about to get the once over, too." * * * * * The Falcon's fingers dipped into his pocket, found a bill. He laid it on the table, came lithely to his feet. He stood there for silent seconds, watching the crowd that swayed to the music. Then he walked toward the bar; and there was in the unconscious swagger of his stride a love of life and laughter, a hint of the adventurer's blood that made his home the great sweeps of starway that stretched to the far horizons of the universe. He skirted the swaying dancers on the dance floor, thrust out a steadying hand to the weaving figure of a Martian _boiloong_ who had evidently been inhaling _gailang_ gas for too long a period in the rooms below. The _boiloong_ embraced him drunkenly with a couple of tentacles, then staggered benignly away, hiccoughing loudly from two of his three mouths. "_Cahnde_," Curt said to the bartender. The music piled in tiny swirls of melody in the air, and he absently hummed several notes of it. He accepted the frosted glass from the bartender, turned, braced his elbows on the bar. He stood silently, his nerves like taut wire. He watched the crowd, permitting his eyes to lift to the alcove in which his brother sat. He felt a surge of affection for the man who dared to fight at his side for a principle he did not clearly understand. They met but once or twice a year, and then surreptitiously, for Val was on the chemi-staff of the Food Administrators' greatest vitamin plant. They knew they played a deadly game, in which the probable reward was death; but such was the mettle of the brothers, they gave no heed. An IP agent jerked the curtain aside on the booth, spoke to the seated man. The Falcon could barely make out the words, the speech coming through the amplifier grafted into Val's throat, as they were grafted into all key man of the Falcon's brood. "Declare yourself," the agent snapped. "Jak Denton, five four three M R S two nine, on special furlough from the chemi-staff at Luhr." Val Varga's voice was submissive, resigned, as befitted those who knew the power of the IP. Tiny sparks of anger flared in the depths of the Falcon's grey eyes, and the muscles swelled across his wide back. But he made no outward move. "It checks," he heard the agent declare a moment later, and then the agent stepped from the booth. The Falcon smiled slightly, drank slowly from his glass. Then his fingers tightened spasmodically, and he felt shock traveling over his lithe body in a nerve-tightening shroud. "Get out of here, Val," he snapped earnestly into his throat-mike. "The showdown is coming." * * * * * Time was frozen for the moment. The music dwindled to flat discords, and the dancers were only a blur at the edge of his line of sight. The Falcon straightened, set the glass on the bar without turning around, and braced his wide-spread booted feet. He felt a surge of fear in his heart, and the muscles of his gun hand were tight and strained. He knew then that the trap was sprung; it was too late to run. Yen Dal, the Martian waiter, was on his knees, his mouth gaping in soundless agony, held there by a numbing paralysis beam in the hands of the IP man who had questioned Curt. His single eye rolled in the ecstasy of pain, and his antennae twisted and writhed with an uncanny life, as the paralysis beam ripped along each nerve with exquisite agony. Then a whistle of pain came from his lung orifice, scaled until it was almost inaudible--and his body threshed in an intolerable spasm that was horrible to see. The Falcon stepped from the bar, circled noiselessly toward the rear exit, felt panic eating at his nerves, for he knew that Yen Dal could not hold out much longer. He stopped in the shadow of a pillar, seeing the IP agent beside the door. He turned a bit, gasped, when he saw that the paralysis beam had been turned off, and that the Martian's antennae was wrapped tightly about the agent's wrist. Then the agent whirled, and his shrill whistle ripped the music to scattered shreds. "_Get that man!_" he bellowed. "_He's the Falcon!_" Curt Varga went whirling to one side, and the dis-gun leaped into his fingers. A needle-ray brushed at his back, and he scythed the agent down with a withering blast from the dis-gun. Smoke surged from a naming drapery, where a ray slashed, and then the curtain flaked into nothingness. A Venusian screamed in a high thin whistle, dropped below the surface of the water in which he stood. The music stilled in broken fragments, and women screamed their fear in panic-stricken voice. Vibrations from a hundred sets of antennae filled the air with a solid sense of knowing dread. "Shoot that man!" the first agent screamed again, and his voice died in a choking burbling sound, as the Falcon's shot caught him squarely in the throat. Curt fired without conscious thought, his hand following the dictates of instinctive thinking, the blazing energy of his gun's discharges hissing in a blurred stream at the agents firing from behind pillars and overturned tables. An agent came erect, sighed deliberately, died, his head blown completely from his shoulders by a shot winging from a side booth. "Get out of here, Curt!" Val Varga's voice rang high and exalted. "I'll keep them busy." His gun sang again in his hand, and there was something simple and heroic about the manner in which he stood before the booth on his crippled twisted legs. He was not a cripple then, not the remnant of a man the IP had crushed and left for dead years before when he had stood fighting at his father's side. He was, instead, bright and formidable, like the licking blade of a cause that fought against superstitious greed and intolerance. "This is my way, Falcon," he called clearly. "Don't let me down." Curt Varga sobbed deep in his throat, seeing that last gallant stand of the man whose deformities and keen brain had made him able to act as a spy in the Food Adminstrators' stronghold. He spun on his heel, smashed a Martian to one side with a sweep of his gun-hand, then rayed an agent to death with a brutal callousness utterly foreign to his nature. He plowed through the tables, scattering them and their screaming occupants, hoping to get to his brother's side before the man was killed. He cursed in a vicious steady whisper, darted through the crowd, firing without sighting at the men behind him. He ducked instinctively, and a network of rays crossed the spot where his head had been, burning the very air, filling all the room with the stench of ozone. And then he was at Val's side, towering over him, and their guns wove a barrage before whom Death walked with a steady implacable stride. An IP agent screamed, pawed blindly at the shattered remains of his face, his gun singing an undirected arc of death about the room. Bodies were lanced with the ray, and the cries of the dead made a ghastly overtone to the sound of the firing. And then Val sagged, caught through the chest with a ray bolt that held him erect for a fleeting moment. He fell, his free hand clutching Curt's arm, almost dragging him from his feet. He smiled a bit as he died, and his voice was barely audible. "_Make it a good world, Curt_," he said, and he was dead. * * * * * The Falcon straightened, and there was no mercy in his eyes then; there was only a bleak grief and a hate for those whose utter blind stupidity and cruelty had brought about such a situation. He went forward lightly, his gun blazing in his hand, his face craggy and stone-like. He never looked back at the huddle which had been his brother. An IP man died in a blast of searing energy that sought him out behind a pillar, surging through the wood, and then withering him into a charred and blackened mass. Another agent turned to run, and the bolt of Curt's dis-gun skewered his back, pinned him to a wall for a fleeting second, then dropped him in a silent heap. Curt whirled, darted toward the rear door. His gun menaced the entire room, and he was a shifting fading figure as he fled from that room of death. His eyes were blurred with tears, and his throat was constricted with grief. At the door, he hesitated briefly, then surged ahead. He heard the shrill whistles of other IP men in the street before the night club, and his nerves were tense for the slightest of sounds betokening hidden watchers in the alleyway. He slammed the door behind him, raced down the alley. He tripped, rolled like a prowling cat, came lithely to his feet again. His hand brushed at a wall to steady himself, missed its hold, and he lurched to one side. That misstep saved his life. A blazing bolt from a dis-rifle sprayed molten rock from the alley's floor, swung, tried to catch him in its range. He fired twice, shooting instinctively, feeling a gladness in him when he heard the choking death-rattle of the man who had fired. He twisted about a corner, ran with a desperate speed, hearing the growing sounds of pursuit behind. He knew a place of comparative safety a block away, and he plunged toward it through the moon-lit night. Feet were pounding in the street, when he came to a manhole that led into the unused conduit system of the city. He knew he was watched but he knew also that he had to make his escape as best he could. He kicked the rusted latch of the manhole cover free, lifted the lid, shoved one leg through. Sitting on the manhole rim, he lifted his other leg through the hole, then braced his hands, and lowered himself so fast he almost fell. The single shot melted the edge of the conduit opening, flecked briefly at the side of his head, dropped him squarely into a blaze of flame that seemed to grow out of nowhere and fold him in its embrace. II The Falcon landed in a sprawling heap, cramped with vertigo, his mind numb with the shock of the shot that had slapped at the side of his head. He groped blindly for support, felt the skin ripping from his hands on the rough metal of the pipe. For seconds, he fought to retain his senses, finally forced the black shadow of unconsciousness back from his mind. His eyes focused slowly, made out the glow cast through the open manhole. Only a moment could have passed, for he still heard the excited calling of his pursuers, and felt the vibrations of men climbing the outside of the pipe. He went at a staggering run down the pipe, guiding himself by the beam of the radi-light torch he fumbled from his belt. Echoes drummed along the metal tube from his running feet, and the dull pounding in his head raced with the sound. He whirled around a bend in the pipe, stopped, braced himself momentarily on the curved wall. Then, the ringing in his head slowing, and his mind clearing, he ran again at a faster pace. The yells of his pursuers rocketed through the tube, slowly gaining. But a thin smile twisted the Falcon's mouth; he had a bolt-hole or two that were unknown to any but him, holes that had saved his life before. He slipped now and then in the greasy seepage at the pipe's bottom, came again to his feet, feeling strength draining from him, realizing that the shot had almost put a partial stasis on his nervous system. He ran slower now, utterly unable to keep up the headlong pace. His breath was hot and dry in his throat, and a heart-pain in his side cramped his belly. He staggered again and again, until at last he could move only at a fast walk. The agents gained, crying their pack call like Martian _ganths_ running a lowland creature to death in a canal bottom. Their boots slammed driving echoes from the pipe, growing louder with each passing second. The Falcon knew that he could run no further; he leaned against the wall, checked the charge in his gun. A mirthless laugh grated in his throat, and he felt futility beating at his heart for the first time in years. "_Make it a good world, Curt!_" Val had said. Curt Varga fought then, fought the dizziness in his mind, struggled with the defeat he felt in his heart. He had a task to do; not for himself, not for his martyred brothers and father--but for a dozen worlds to whom he and his brood had become a symbol of hope in a blackened century. * * * * * He spun about, seeking a manhole opening, saw none. He did not know where he was, for there were no identifying marks in the tube. He thought swiftly, but his thoughts seemed to move with a treacly slowness. Then he lifted his gun, flicked it to full force, blasted a hole through the side of the conduit. Metal flowed in a crimson stream, grew turgid, hardened with the queerness of the native iron. Great blisters reared on the Falcon's hands as he clawed his way from the tube. He fell to the ground outside, blinked, tried to find his directions by some distinctive landmark. He gasped, whirled back to the pipe. He had come squarely into the parking plaza at the rear of the spaceport at the edge of the city. Before him, guards had whirled, were running toward him, already clawing for the guns at their waists. And even as he turned, he heard the excited cries of the agents inside the conduit pipe. He ran at a zig-zag pace, hugging the shadow of the pipe, toward a fleet tiny cruiser rolling into its parking place. Darting across a cleared space of ground, he tugged at the inset port-handle. The port surged open from the weight of the air-pressure inside, and the Falcon dived through, pulling the port shut again. Still in a crouch, he spun the gun in his hand, jammed it into the side of the single passenger. "Get out of here," he snarled. "Gully-hop this ship--and do it fast." "Listen, you--" the pilot began. "Either you do--or I do. Now, get going." The Falcon's face was utterly bleak and cruel, his eyes blazing with the trapped lust of a cornered wolf. Shots slammed against the impervium hull, bounced harmlessly away. The vizi-screen glowed greenly, and the reflection of the Port Authority appeared. "_Take off, and we'll ray you down._" The Falcon growled deep in his throat, slammed into the dual control seat, snapped the control-switch to his side. With a single twitch of his right hand, he sent the ship flipping skyward. The cruiser whipped through the night, inertia momentarily pinning its passengers to their seats. A beam lanced out from the spaceport, instantly winked off. The Falcon's hands made lightning adjustments on the board, and the ship scooted back toward the ground, fled, barely a hundred feet above the rusty sand. The vizi-screen was dull now, reflecting the interior of the port office--and the Port Authority's voice sang through the speaker. "Five IP ships take off. Catch that pleasure cruiser. Use tractors to bring it down; it isn't armed. Watch out for the man aboard--he's the Falcon." "_The Falcon!_" Fear was in the voice; the words were barely breathed. Curt Varga smiled savagely, glanced around, fully saw his companion for the first time. He felt a certain sense of amazement; but so much had happened to him in the past hour, he no longer had the capacity for complete surprise. She was tiny, and the synthesilk dress gloved the soft curves of her body. Her nose was impudent against the red of her mouth, and fright was in her bluish-green eyes momentarily. Then she stiffened, and her eyes were hard with a calculating coldness. "I thought kidnaping went out with the dark ages," she said quietly. "Miss, this is _shipnapping_." Ironical humor softened the brutal harshness of Curt Varga's jaw for the moment. And then there was no time for talk, for he was weaving the ship in a manner that only a space-master could do, flipping the cruiser about until metal sang in a dozen tones, evading the bluish rays that fingered from the ships behind. He gained the night shadow, circled about on muffled jets, watched the IP ships flash past him in hot pursuit of their quarry. Then he sent the cruiser straight back toward the city, angling after a time toward the mountains to the north. Not a word was spoken until after he had landed the cruiser close to his own rocket hidden beneath the overhang of a rusty bluff. "Now what?" the girl asked. The Falcon killed the rockets, turned about on the seat, conscious for the first time that he still held his dis-gun against her side with his left hand. He thought fast then, made plans and discarded them with a speed that raced them kaleidoscopically through his mind. He could leave the girl tied in the cruiser--but she had seen him, could identify him to the IP men. Or he could--he shrank from the thought; he was brutal in a dispassionate way, but he was no murderer. "Get out," he snapped. Color surged into the girl's face, then faded, leaving the skin a sickly white. She shrank from him, pressing against the far wall. "I read it in your eyes," she whispered. "You were thinking of _killing_ me!" The Falcon flushed angrily, more at himself than at the girl, hating himself for thinking such thoughts, hating the twisted years that had warped him to the point that he acted like the scum he had weeded from among his men. "Get out," he said again, and his voice was softer. "I mean you no harm." He flicked a glance from the port, toward the sky where the violet beams of mass-detectors probed the sky and earth. She slid from the seat, took the two steps to the port, opened it with a surge of lithe strength. She dropped to the ground, followed by the Falcon. There was a puzzled fear in her eyes, a fear that grew by the moment as she saw the sleek Kent-Horter quiescent on the sand. The Falcon stepped lithely about his prisoner, whistled with a queerly distorted note, and the port came automatically open. He gestured with the gun, impatience flaming in his eyes as she hesitated. "Walk--or be carried," he warned grimly. * * * * * The girl scrambled into the pirate ship. Curt Varga stepped in behind her, dogged the door shut with almost casual flicks of his right hand. He urged the girl before him with the gun, waved her into a sleeping cubicle, then pulled the door shut, locked it. Holstering the dis-gun, he raced to the pilot room, slid into the pilot's seat. He warmed the rockets with brief twitches of his fingers on the control studs, then pulled the drive switch a third of the way back. He felt the thrust of the rockets against his body, saw the brief flicker of the girl's ship whipping past the port. Then his ship was fleeing with accelerating speed into the tenuous atmosphere. A dis-cannon rolled the ship, almost sent it on beam's end. He straightened her, poured the power into the Kent converters, flicked out of range with amazing ease. Air whistled through the purifying-system, and he cut the rheostat down a bit when the reading gave an Earth-norm. Then, and only then, did he relax. He set a reading into the calculator, flicked on the robot control, and walked slowly back to the sleeping cubicle he had momentarily made into a cell. "Come on out, now," he said, swung the door fully open. She had been crying, and the defiant gesture with which she tried to hide that fact built a tiny warm glow in Curt Varga's heart. But he didn't permit that feeling to show; he knew he had to keep the girl more or less cowed, if he were to have no trouble with her. "Come on," he said again. "We'll declare a truce for the time." She stepped past him, walked toward the pilot's room. He followed, liking her unconscious swagger which matched his own. She refused to sit, and he took one empty seat, regarded her quizzically, as he rolled a _pulnik_ cigarette. "Who are you?" he said at last. Puzzlement kindled in the girl's eyes, was as quickly erased. "I'm Jean--Harlon," she said slowly. She gestured about the ship. "Why did you kidnap me?" The Falcon laughed, and youth was in his face again, some of the bitter lines softening and erasing utterly away. "It wasn't planned," he admitted. "I was being chased--I saw your ship taxiing into a parking place--and I commandeered it." He shrugged. "You just happened to be the ship's pilot." Amusement lifted the girl's mouth for a moment, then concern deepened the blue of her eyes. She glanced at the calculator, saw that a course had been set, and a tiny muscle twitched in her throat. "I'm going with you!" It was a statement. Curt Varga nodded. "Sorry," he said, "but that's the way it has to be. Only two men knew my identity--and they're dead. The few IP's who saw me tonight are also dead. It's a safety measure." Jean Harlon stiffened slightly. "I could give my word," she said slowly. The Falcon shook his head. "Sorry, but the stakes are too big for me to risk another's word." He nodded at the empty seat. "Sit down," he finished kindly. "In some ways, I'm not quite as bad as I am painted." Curt Varga tensed, felt the probing finger of thought digging at his mind. He threw up a mind-shield almost casually, grinned mockingly. "A _telepath_?" he said conversationally. * * * * * Irritation colored the girl's cheeks; then reluctant admiration came into her eyes. She accepted a _pulnik_ capsule, deftly rolled a cigarette, before answering. "Not many could dismiss me that easily," she asserted. "I had five years at NYU, on Earth." She accepted a light for the cigarette. Curt Varga nodded. "Old habit," he disclaimed. "I used to play space-rocketry with the thought-men of Pluto; the guy with an unshielded mind never had a chance." Jean Harlon's gaze was speculative. "What happened?" she said. "Or am I stepping on your toes?" The Falcon's face was twisted then with a show of emotion that brought a glance of disbelief from the girl. And then resolve flared in the set of his shoulders, and his voice was steady. "I was making agent-contacts. One of my men must have tipped the IP, for they came into my 'headquarters' and made a quiet search. I would have got away, but for the fact they used that diabolic paralysis beam on a friend of mine. He pointed me out." Curt shrugged. "I had to fight my way from the trap. My brother was killed. I escaped through the conduit system, came out on the spaceport. You know the rest." "Your brother was killed!" Loathing was in Jean Harlon's eyes. "And you can sit there, and talk calmly about it?" Anger and grief unsteadied the Falcon's voice for a moment. "What the hell should I do--beat my chest and swear vengeance! Val knew the cards were stacked against us; he knew that both of us had lived past our appointed times. He played the game as he saw it, and died with few regrets. Hell, yes, I can talk calmly; now I've got a job to do, I've got to finish the thing for which he and hundreds of thousands of others have died!" He turned to the space-scanner, saw that the Kent-Horter had escaped the IP ships, felt the burning of unshed tears in his eyes. He sat silently for a moment, then whipped about as the girl's words caught at his mind. "--dreaming fools," she was saying. "What _more_ could they ask than they already have. They eat, they sleep, they have amusements and medical care. Their lives are as perfect as science can make them." "_Science!_" Curt Varga's tone flicked like a whip-lash. "You can't run people's lives as though they were bits of unfeeling machinery. Every man has the right to control his own destiny." Anger was in Jean Harlon's face then, too. "You blind atavistic fool," she blazed, "people cannot rule themselves! Read your histories, find in them the truth about self-government. Why, until science took the reins of power, millions died in ghastly wars for fanatical leaders whose greed for world dictatorial power was an insane fixation." The Falcon's face was like chiseled granite. He silenced the girl with a brief motion of his hand. His voice was grave with the strength of his heart-felt belief in the thing he had made his life. "I have no desire to convert you," he said quietly. "Conversion comes to but a few. You've got to know deep in your heart that what I say is the truth. There were wars, holocausts started by the mad dictators of the Twentieth Century. But when they were over, then democracy began to win the long struggle that had always been hers. And although other wars came through the years, always life became better for all peoples. But then science became a _master_ instead of a _servant_, and the few rulers of science became the rulers of the universe. That would have been all right, had the rule been a beneficient one--but it was twisted and distorted by the descendants of our hereditary Food Administrators until it throttled and murdered all initiative and ambition and free-thinking. It strangled God-given _freedom_." Curt Varga went suddenly silent, feeling the red creeping upward from his collar. He avoided the girl's eyes, crushed out the still butt of his cigarette. "Sorry," he said. "I guess speech-making is getting to be a habit." Jean Harlon did not move, but her eyes searched every plane of the pirate's face. "You really _believe_ that, don't you?" she said wonderingly. "I do!" The Falcon's voice was calm. "And so do millions of others throughout the planets. And soon the day will come when all peoples shall rule themselves. I'm not the man who will bring about the change; I am but the nucleus, that about which the change is centered. When I am gone, another will take my place, and another, and another, until people shall be free, their eyes to the sun." Jean Harlon moved slowly, breaking the Falcon's words. There was neither belief nor disbelief in her eyes; there was only the warm awareness that before her sat a man whose heart held an ideal and his mind a plan. "You are a strange man, Falcon," she breathed. "But you're not quite the same as I had pictured you in my mind. Oddly enough, I am not afraid of you now." * * * * * Curt Varga grinned. "That's a point in my favor, anyway," he said. "I've never kidnapped a girl before; I wasn't certain just what I'd have to do to calm you." He shrugged. "You will go through a certain amount of discomfort," he finished, "but you will be safe--and I'll notify your family of your safety." Jean Harlon's eyes were suddenly hooded. "I have no relatives," she admitted. "So I'll just string along with you, until you realize I'm perfectly harmless and permit me to return to Earth or Mars." "That will be--" the Falcon began, then whipped about to the port, as the ship rocked as though shaken by a gust of wind. "What's wrong?" Jean asked anxiously, peered out, too. "Why, it's a tractor beam--coming from that bare asteroid!" "Watch!" the Falcon said quietly. The pale-green beam lanced like a misty cone from the rough surface of a craggy boulder that sprang upward from the asteroid like a towering skyscraper. The pocked, rubbled surface of the asteroid glittered metallically in the faint sun-glow, great rocky spires rearing fantastically, mountainous boulders perched in reckless confusion over the pitted surface of the ground. Weight was almost instantly doubled in the ship, as the tractor beam caught the ship in its grip. Curt adjusted the gravity shield to counteract the beam's force on himself and Jean. The rockets had stopped their steady drumming, and the Falcon explained. "It's a variation of the standard inertia-tractor beam. Energy of flight is nullified by the inertia beam, which neutralizes all rocket power. And the tractor beam is swinging us toward the asteroid." Jean shivered. "It happened so fast!" she said slowly. The seconds slipped by, and there was the sensation of falling. The cruiser swung more and more toward the great boulder, descending swiftly. There was no sound, only the steady dragging of gravity on the ship from the pale beam. Absently, the Falcon cleared the board before him, cutting all switches. And then a giant hole flowed open in the top of the huge boulder, and the pirate ship was whisked into a slanting radi-lighted tunnel. "_Hollow!_" Jean said. "So this is the Pirate's Base!" She frowned. "But if it is hollow, why doesn't gravitic stress rip it to pieces?" The Falcon still peered from the port. "We use a neutron-weld invented by Schutler. Using the weld, the skin of the Base could be but a foot thick, and still would not rupture nor permit the atmosphere to leak." "Schutler! But he was executed five years ago." Curt Varga shook his head. "No, Schutler is still alive; his twin brother took his place before the firing squad." Horror was in the girl's eyes. "You mean that you _forced_ him to sacrifice his life?" The Falcon's tone was grimly brooding. "A man does what he thinks is right." "But such a thing _isn't right_," Jean Harlon said defiantly. Curt Varga turned, his face like chiseled granite. "Do you know why Schutler was sentenced to be executed?" "Of course--treason." The Falcon's grin was raw savagery. "He invented a growth-stimulator which brought plants to full maturity in five days from seed-planting. The Food Administrators' empire might have toppled." Jean Harlon stepped back, anger in her face. "I don't believe it," she declared. "I happen to know the true factor." The Falcon shrugged, glanced again through the port. Slowly the anger fled Jean's face--and a brooding puzzlement remained. The cruiser settled with a tiny jar, lurched slightly, came to rest. Metal rasped outside, and the entrance port began to open. The Falcon came from his seat, nodded toward the port. "Was that the truth?" Jean Harlon asked. "Of course! I have no reason for lying. Now, let's get out of here; I've a report to make." * * * * * Three men waited outside the open port; and the first, a massive bearded giant, caught Curt in a casual hug that whitened his smeared face. "You lucky devil!" he roared. "Been in another scrap--and got away by the skin of your teeth. Damn, but I'd like a good fight!" The Falcon grinned, shoved his way from the giant's arms. "Damn it, Schutler," he snapped affectionately, "you'll kill me some day with those hugs of yours!" Schutler laughed, tugged at his beard. "Come on," he said. "I've got an experi--" "Wait a minute, squirt," the second man said. "Now, listen, Curt, did you make the contacts you--" The negro brushed the others impatiently aside, tugged at Curt's arm. He smiled, and his teeth were a solid bar of white across ebony. "Come on with me, Boss," he ordered. "You've got some cleaning up to do." "Dammit, Curt--" Schutler began petulantly. "Curt, those reports mus--" the second man said impatiently. The Falcon gestured wearily. "That can wait for a time, Crandal. Right now, I need food and a bit of medical care." He grinned. "Anyway, I've a guest to show around the Base." "A guest?" Schutler asked. "Come out, Jean," Curt Varga called. Jean Harlon stepped from the lock, utterly lovely and feminine. She stared with puzzled eyes at the men standing with the Falcon. "Why do you _permit_ such liberties with the men you rule?" she asked. Schutler laughed delightedly, the sound rolling and booming. "A new convert, Curt?" he said, then laughed again, and swept the startled girl into the circle of his arms. "Welcome to the snake's den," he finished happily. Jean gasped in amazement, fought unsuccessfully to free herself from the burly arms, then subsided in a gale of infectious laughter. The Falcon grinned, tugged her free. "You've met Schutler," he said. "This bald-headed old space-buzzard is Crandal, better known as the Encyclopedia. And this other is Jericho Jones, my number one mate." The wizened man bobbed his head nervously. "Glad to know you, Miss," he said. "Now, Curt, about those reports." "Howdedo, Miss," Jericho said, smiled toothily. Schutler shoved forward. "How was the kid brother, Curt? Is he still dishing out the--" His voice trailed away, his gaze flicking about the group. "Sorry, Curt," he finished gently. "He was a good man." The Falcon swallowed painfully, forced a smile, wincing a bit from the hands of the men where they touched his arms. "He made his choice," he said slowly, and the words were like an eulogy. He shrugged. "Take Jean to the women's quarters, Schutler," he finished unemotionally. "Later, she and I will dine together." He made an almost imperceptible gesture with one hand, and the giant's eyes widened in surprise. "Sure, Curt," Schutler agreed. "We'll walk part-way with you." "I don't think--" Jean began, then fell silent. The Falcon grinned. "Everything's under control," he said reassuringly. "There are plenty of Earth women there. They'll fix you up with clothes or whatever you need." "Thank you, Falcon," Jean said, but fear was flickering again in her blue-green eyes. They walked down a gentle ramp, crossed on a suspended walk to a web-tier that hugged one wall of the gigantic room. Jean peered about in quiet excitement, open amazement in her face when she saw the hundreds of fighting ships cradled in rows. She watched the men that worked with a methodical thoroughness upon the gleaming hulls, fitting the coppery muzzles of space-cannon into place. Carts darted here and there on soundless wheels, carrying supplies to piles that never grew, because other men immediately and without hurry emptied the piles in steady streams into the holds of waiting ships. Long radi-light tubes striped the ceiling three hundred feet overhead, filled the room with the clear yellow glow of Earth sunlight. There was an air of competence and efficiency about the scene that was compellingly impressive. "A _throg_!" Jean gasped in sudden terror. * * * * * Curt glanced down at the spider man who minced daintily along on his fragile hairy legs. His double-facetted eyes glanced toward the suspension-walk, and two of his legs lifted in salute. A piercing vibrational whistle followed. Curt grinned, whistled an answer in a series of flatted notes, waved. "That's Lilth," he explained. "He's a good guy, even if he is a Ganymedian. His family starved to death because they could not mine enough _xalthium_." He gestured toward a gigantic slug inching along the floor, pulling a loaded cart. "That's a Venusian _gastod_," he finished. "He is utterly helpless and harmless. He is also the only _gastod_ not in captivity. His race exuded pure vitamin K from their bodies, so the Food Administrators imprisoned the entire race. He is a pirate here and does what he can--for oddly enough he has a brain and a soul." They had crossed the bridge and walked slowly down a lighted tunnel. The tube debouched into a great amphitheater, at the mouth of which the group halted for a moment. Shouts, whistles, hissings came from the groups of men before them. In a gigantic pool of steaming water, Venusian reptile-men swam with loud splashing. On the field at the right of the pool, Earthmen played space-ball, their tiny hand-tractors lancing pale-green rays at a floating gravity-neutralized sphere. The beams made a network of power that spun the copper ball like an air bubble in a whirlpool. Spider men sat side by side, curling their legs beneath their globular bodies, then nipping them out again, a few at a time. Gravely they compared the numbers flipped out, then paid their wagers from piles of money at their sides. Cat men from the tombs of Mars played Martian chess with their traditional enemies, the big-chested Upland _boiloongs_ whose tentacles were like living ropes of steel. Creatures from a dozen worlds watched or played or rested, singly and in groups, about the gargantuan room. "They're my men," The Falcon said proudly, feelingly. "And regardless of body-form, each is a _man_. They're the Falcon's Brood." He led the way again, returning hearty greetings in a dozen tongues, waving, laughing, answering a hundred questions. At the edge of the room, near a tunnel's mouth, he turned to the girl who was strangely silent. "I'll meet you for dinner in an hour," he promised. "Then I'll show you through the gardens." "Fine!" Jean smiled, turned to follow the solicitous Schutler. Crandal watched her go. "So she is not a convert," he said. "Then why bring her along?" "She recognized me," the Falcon said simply, nodded good-bye, followed Jericho down another tunnel to his living quarters. He walked into the three-room apartment, strode directly to the vocoder. Flicking a switch, he spoke quietly. "A trap on Mars was set for me; have you heard any reports." A voice answered with the methodical thoroughness of a trained agent. "Yen Dal died an hour ago of nerve shock caused by an IP's paralysis beam. The man who informed the IP was executed by our Martian agent thirty minutes later. That is all." "Good!" the Falcon said grimly, closed the switch. He turned to the silent negro. "A _cahnde_, Jericho," he finished tiredly. "Then we'll doctor me up a bit." He sagged in a chair, utterly spent and tired, worn from the constant strain that was his life every hour of the day. He was no longer the debonair flashing Falcon; he was only a man to whom life became grimmer and more danger-filled day by day; a man whose life was in no way his own. III Jean Harlon leaned back from the table, sighed blissfully. "I never knew," she said, "that such wonderful food existed. Why, that watermelon was the most delicious thing I've eaten in my life." Curt Varga smiled, shoved back his chair. "Let's take a quick look at the gardens before getting some sleep," he said. "I'll show you such things as the ordinary person has not seen in more than a century." "Swell!" Jean Harlon nodded. They walked from the dining hall, entered a side tunnel, followed a winding ramp toward the center of the asteroid. They chatted aimlessly, speaking of nothing in particular; and Curt felt a vague pleasure in him when her eyes reflected her astonishment when she found that he was educated beyond the average of most men. There was a tang to living at the moment, and his lithe body felt good and strength-filled, ready to follow any dictate of his mind. They turned right, stepped through a side door, and Jean's tiny gasp of awe was ample reward for all that Curt had done. The air was warm and moist, heady with the oxygen of growing plants. Great tiers of water tanks rose along the walls, their surfaces thick with the green and yellow and bright colors of fruits and vegetables growing in the vitamin-charged hydroponic baths. They seemed to grow visibly, even as the Earthpeople watched. Pipes as thick as a man's arm, bank upon bank, were braced in rows through the center of the immense room, and thousands of clear bubbles of water clung to them. The light of gravitic-stasis bulbs glowed deep in each bubble, and the surfaces of all were threaded with the tender shoots of growing seedling plants. "How utterly incredibly marvelous!" Jean whispered. The Falcon nodded proudly. "Ten thousand tons of food go out of this cavern every day, taken to the starving people of a dozen worlds. It is not a one man job; it is a tremendous task for hundreds of thousands of men and women." He pointed to the workers between the rows. "Those are the ones who are doing the job; those are my people, my friends. They and all people like them are what I fight for." "It's gallant," Jean admitted slowly. "But it's also so incredibly foolish. A few hundred thousand, or even millions, cannot change the world we live in. It is far better to take things as they are." She shuddered involuntarily, as a snake-man glided effortlessly across the path. "After all, creatures like that shouldn't be permitted to live like Earthmen." The Falcon shrugged, some of the good feeling going from his mind. Then he plucked a handful of rich dark grapes. "Try these," he said. "We've still a lot of sightseeing to do." For another hour they walked and talked, meeting the men and women with whom the Falcon worked. Nowhere was there a fawning attitude because he was the one whose word was law. There was a tangible feeling of equality among all the people, a feeling that the girl had never seen anywhere before. She spoke but little, until she saw the great storeroom where the wealth of a hundred nations was piled in orderly stacks. She saw that the door had neither lock nor bolt, and her eyes were startled when she glanced at the tall man at her side. "There's no need," he said, understandingly. "This is communal property. And there are no thieves in the Base. Anyway, if a thief did appear, he could not escape--an inertia-tractor beam would bring any ship back before it could get away." Jean nodded, and they strolled toward the exit that led to their apartments. Neither spoke now; both were silent with their thoughts. A vocoder light was on at a corner box, and the Falcon flicked the switch. "Yes?" he said quietly. "A report has just come in, sir," the mechanical voice said evenly. "The girl whose ship you stole is--" The Falcon whirled, feeling the ripping of his dis-gun from his holster. He whirled in a sudden spin that almost caught Jean Harlon; and then he came to a sudden halt, the last words of the vocoder ringing in his mind. "--Jean Vandor, the daughter of Jason Vandor, the Food Administrator. She was attending a dance given by--" The Falcon moved with a desperate tigerish speed, his hand lancing out to snatch the menacing gun. Then the softened ray caught him squarely in the chest, and the world blanked out. * * * * * He came to slowly, then with a rush of surging emotions that were like icewater to his brain. He rolled to his feet, wobbled unsteadily for a moment, then darted down the tunnel, running toward the comptroller's office. Tunnel after tunnel passed behind him, and he could feel the ragged pounding of his heart, as he raced across the last few yards of the entrance room. He slammed through the door of the office, felt dismay and anger fill his mind when he saw the dissed wreck of the tractor beam board. Then he knelt, helped the comptroller to a chair, where the man sagged groggily. The man shook his head. "The girl you came with burst in, demanded to know which were the tractor controls. I wouldn't tell, but she must have known, for she rayed them, and then blanked me out." The Falcon snarled a curse. "She's a _telepath_," he said. "She read your mind." He whirled to a window, peered at the rocket runway that led into the escape tube. "One ship is gone," he finished harshly. "Without a tractor to bring her back, she'll take the news straight to her father. We can't fight the IP with half-gunned ships. I'll have to run her down." "Your ship's been refueled and is ready to go. New radi-batteries are in the tractor gear." The comptroller roused himself with an effort. "You sure you're all right?" Curt asked anxiously. "I'm fine." "Then tell Schutler and Crandal where I've gone. Tell them my orders are to triple the men outfitting the ships. I'll be back as soon as I can--but no move is to be made without my okay. Understand?" "Yes, sir." The Falcon whipped about, darted from the office. He ran at top speed, fitting the dis-gun he had grabbed from a wall rack into his belt holster. He raced to the conveyor belt, slipped into a seat, flipped the control to high speed. An instant later, he was hurtling toward his cradled ship, wind sighing past his face. "Damn all women!" he thought. "Especially this one!" The walls whizzed by in a grey blur, and thirty seconds later the conveyor jarred to a bone-shaking stop. Curt flipped the safety belt aside, dashed for the small cruiser resting in the cradle. He impatiently brushed aside a slow-moving workman, stepped through the port. He closed the port entrance, screwed it shut with powerful heavings of his shoulders, then darted to the control cabin. Sinking into the seat, he automatically checked the controls. "Clear ways," he snapped into the vizi-screen, waited for the "all clear" signal. A green light flashed to his right, and he closed five stud switches in close succession. The ship lurched slightly, steadied, then fled with a rush of displaced air. The inertia gate closed behind the ship, and the entrance hole flowed open. Ahead was the empty blackness of space. The next instant, the planetoid was far behind, and speed was piling at a terrific rate. Curt was grateful then to the man who had invented the stasis force-screen, for at the initial acceleration he had achieved, he should have been dead. But with all atoms of the ship and its contents building speed at the same rate, he felt no discomfort. He bent toward the vision-port, scanned the Void with slitted eyes. Stars gleamed with a cold brightness far away. The Sun was at his back, and far to his right whirled Earth and Mars. Venus and Mercury fled their celestial ways far below and behind him. He swore lightly, built up power in the vision-port, sent a scanner beam whirling. He missed the stolen ship on the first round of the beam, caught it on the second try. It was nothing but a tiny spearhead of yellow flame far ahead. The rockets drummed with an increasing roar and muted vibration, as his fingers flicked the switches and studs before him. And despite the stasis-field, he felt the slightest sensation of travelling at an incredible rate of speed. The freight ship was obviously moving at top speed, and was fully eighty thousand miles away. It fled in a parabola, travelling above the plane of the ecliptic, its speed now so great that it could not make a sharp turn so as to double back to Earth at Jean Vandor's touch on the controls. Curt grinned. His ship was a cruiser, built for speed, a model that could outrace the other within a few minutes. He flicked close the last switch, sank back in his seat, watching the freight ship gradually drawing closer. He lit a _pulnik_ cigarette, waited, knowing there was nothing else that he could do for moments. Then he frowned, leaned forward. His hands grew white on the control board from the stress of his emotions, and he felt dull panic striking at his heart. For the freight ship had swerved, had swung about in an abnormal way, its rocket flow spinning in a flaming arc. * * * * * Curt watched with the sickness eating at his heart, for he knew what had happened. Inexperienced as she was, Jean had permitted her ship to be caught within the conflicting tides of gravity in space, and even now was being pulled in the Sargasso of Space. She could not escape; there was no record of anybody ever escaping the tides. Her only hope lay in Curt Varga, the tractor rays of his cruiser, and the superior power of his ship. He watched the futile struggle of the girl to tear the freighter loose, saw the ship whip about in a series of surging dives and evolutions that finally ceased as the ship slowly but surely was dragged into the midst of the whirlpool. And now the two ships were but a few thousands of miles apart. Already, the gravity streams were tugging at the cruiser, striving to turn its flight into a diving plunge for the maelstrom's heart. Curt worked with a desperate calculating intensity, playing the power of the ship against the tides, as a master machinist judges the power of his tools. He sent the cruiser to the left, flicked on the tractor ray, flashed its probing beam toward the freighter. The beam caught, whipped by, then flicked back. Curt could feel the instant tugging. He increased power, felt the shrill whine of the ray-machine building icy fingers in his brain. Then the sound was past the audible. The tides swept over the cruiser, flipped it about like a leaf in a breeze, almost caused him to lose contact with the freighter. But the shimmering thread of the tractor's light did not break; the ships were locked together. Curt coaxed the last bit of power from his rockets, sent his ship in a spiralling drive for free space. He smiled thinly, grimly, when the tossing of the cruiser lessened. He glanced from the vision port, wondering if they would get free. * * * * * A smashing blow struck the ship, drove it back, set metal to singing. Curt swore harshly. Space was filled with floating debris captured by the gravitic tides. Small chunks of meteoric rock flashed by, followed by clouds of dust as fine as gravel. The bloated, ruptured body of a space-ship rushed by in the opposite direction, hurled nowhere in its constant swinging about the area of dead space. Curt winced, when he caught the starshine on the bulgered bodies that trailed in its wake like a meteor cloud. He wondered, irrelevantly, who the men were. And then from the darkness of space came a great sweeping clot of debris, the gutter rubbish of the space lanes. Ships that had been caught in the tides, meteors, rocks, all the flotsam that had been gathered through the ages. But Curt had no time for that. He felt his ship winning free, sent it whipping to the left again, wondering if his rockets would burn out under the stupendous strain. And relief filled him, when he realized that he was pulling the other ship from its death-bed of gravity. And even as he laughed, he felt all power cease in his ship. He swore brittlely, fought with the controls. All of them were dead. Panicky, he stared from the vision port, and dull wonder filled his mind. Twin tractor-beams were lancing from the clot of space debris below the ship, each centered on a different ship. The beams were almost white in their intensity, so great was their power. "What the hell!" Curt Varga said audibly, relaxed momentarily. And then the cruiser was hurtling toward the clot, sucked there by the tractor beam, moved with an incredible titanic force such as was only possible from a mighty generator. Curt swerved his gaze to the freighter, saw that it, too, was trapped. He thought then of the words that his brother had spoken to him on Mars before, of the information that had come through about the base of the drug-smuggling ring being in the Sargasso. He cursed the utter blind stupidity that had made him discount the words even as they were spoken. And then puzzlement grew within him, for it was an established fact that, once caught within the Sargasso, nothing could escape. How, then, could this be the _smothalene_ smuggling headquarters; the smuggling ships could not escape the drag of the knitted gravities? But he had no more time for thinking. The cruiser jarred squarely into the center of the clot of debris, was sucked through it. Metal jarred and strained, and a light flickered into life on the board, indicating that a plate had been sprung in number Three hold. Curt darted for the wall closet, unzipped it, tugged at his bulger. He slid into it, closed it, left the quartzite face-plate open until the control room was actually ruptured and the need for air from the shoulder tank was necessary. Outside, rubbish flashed by the ports in a rush of whirling objects. Except for the crash and clatter of the cruiser forcing its way through the churning maelstrom, there was no sound. The cruiser landed with a jar that threw Curt to one side, dazing him for a moment. He braced his feet, flipped a dis-gun from the wall rack, went slowly toward the port. He heard it unscrewing before he got there, and he cogged his head plate shut, switched on the flow of oxygen. The port came open, and a radio signal buzzed within Curt's helmet. He felt the rushing of air from the ship into the Void. "Come on out, with your hands up," a heavy voice snapped authoritatively. * * * * * The Falcon paused irresolutely, then shrugged, shoved the dis-gun into a pocket of his bulger. Bending a bit, he stepped from the port, was menaced instantly by five dis-guns held in the hands of bulger-suited Earthmen. The leader moved forward, disarmed Curt, stared at him through the face plate of his spacesuit. "I've been hoping we'd meet," he said in surprise. "But I never figured you'd come popping in like this!" He gestured about. "I'm Duke Ringo; these are some of my men." Curt gazed about, recognized that he stood in the freight hold of a great liner. The metal was twisted and torn with gravitational strain, with only one wall intact. Even now, he was being herded toward that wall. "I'm Davis, Kemp Davis," Curt said slowly. "I've been scavenging the lanes. I was trying to save that freighter, figuring salvage rates, when your ray brought me in." He affected a dead-face expression. "What are you men doing here, were you sucked in by the tides?" Duke Ringo laughed scornfully. "To hell with that stuff, Falcon!" he said. "We know who you are; some of us have seen you. And we've got a--" He broke off, swung about to face another group clambering into the hold. "Who is it?" he snapped. Curt's heart missed a beat; he took an instinctive step forward, stopped before the menace of a dis-gun. He heard Ringo's voice echoing tinnily in his earphones, heard another man's answer. "It's a _girl_, Duke." "Who, damn it!" Jean's voice came dear and cool. "I'm Jean Vandor, daughter of Jason Vandor. If you have charge of these men, make them take their hands from me." The second group slowly approached the first. The girl evidently recognized Curt, for her voice held a triumphant ring. "I see you've captured him," she said. "That's good. The reward for him will make all of you men rich. He's Curt Varga, Chief of the Food and Smothalene Pirates." "Who'da thought it!" Duke Ringo said in mock amazement, turned away. "Come on, we'll get back to where it's comfortable." "Nice going, Jean," Curt Varga said bitterly. "Because of your sheer stupidity, we're in a jam that made your former one look infantile. These boys are part of the _smothalene_ smugglers; we haven't got a chance." "Shut up, Varga," Duke Ringo said curtly. Curt subsided, went slowly forward. They entered a small compression compartment, and Duke cogged a door shut. Air hissed from vents in the walls, and the pressure gradually mounted. Thirty seconds later, Duke Ringo unzippered his suit, motioned for the others to do the same. He lifted a box from one corner of the chamber, handed small nitration masks about. "Stick these on," he said to Curt and Jean. "Otherwise you may find yourself aging pretty rapidly." Curt fitted his mask to his nose, clamped his lips, his eyes flicking over the group of men. They were tough, as tough as any men he had ever seen in space. And he felt queasiness in his stomach when he saw the sheer cold brutality in their eyes when they looked at him. His fists tightened when he saw the manner in which they regarded Jean. "All right, Ringo," Curt said. "Now what's the play?" Duke Ringo turned slowly. He was fully as tall as Curt, but he was bulkier, heavier. He surveyed Curt deliberately out of expressionless eyes, then turned his gaze to Jean. "The young lady," he said, "will be confined to a cabin for a few days. You, I think, will earn your keep by working at a drier." A smuggler laughed openly, subsided when Curt spun toward him. "I'm making no threats," Curt said finally. "But don't go looking for trouble. My men know where I am; they'll be looking for me. You can't afford to buck them." Duke Ringo chuckled. "Don't be childish, Varga," he said. "Your men wouldn't have a chance in the tides; I only found out how to enter and get back, by accident. Play nice, and you won't get hurt. Try getting tough, and--" He spread expressive hands. Curt took a stubborn step forward. "Listen, Ringo," he said earnestly, "my work is important; I've got to get back. I'll make a deal with you." Jean pushed forward. "I'll _double_ any bribe he offers you," she told Ringo, "if you keep him a prisoner for the IP. And I'll _triple_ the reward, if you get me back to Earth within the next six days." "Tsk, tsk, tsk!" Duke Ringo clucked his tongue. "Maybe I'll collect a reward bigger than you think--for turning both of you in later." "How much ransom?" the Falcon said resignedly. Duke Ringo pondered. "Not much," he admitted. "I just want to take over your base, your ships, your food-supply." He grinned, opened and shut his hands. "It looks as if I will." Curt leaned forward, drove his right hand with every bit of strength in his rangy body. He forgot the issues at stake, in the blind rage of the moment; he thought only of his dreams he saw shattered beneath the grinding heel of the other's desire. He slashed with a desperate fury, and skin split on the knuckles of his hand. * * * * * Duke Ringo went sprawling backward upon the wall, a thin trickle of blood oozing from a swelling mouth. He swore nastily, came blasting forward, his right hand catching Curt high on the chest, his left darting in, smashing at Curt's jaw. Curt rolled with the punch, sagging backward, then side-stepping. He lashed with both hands, felt a blind gladness in him when his fists drew gasps of pain from the other. He waded forward, both hands pistoning, taking blows to his own face that sent curtains of red pain spinning through his brain. And then a savage driving punch caught Duke Ringo squarely in the throat. He sagged, pawed with both hands at his battered larynx. He gasped, unable to speak, his face purpling from the effort to breathe. Curt darted in, flicked out a hand, caught the exposed dis-gun at Ringo's belt. He flipped the gun free, whirled, menaced the remaining men with its flaring muzzle. "Back," he snarled, "or I'll cut you down." He nodded at Jean. "Get behind me," he finished savagely. "This is our only chance to get free." He was the Falcon then, deadly, dangerous, a light burning in his eyes. Jean moved hesitantly toward Curt, edged around him. The smugglers said nothing, apparently waiting for the slightest opening in Curt's offensive. Duke Ringo straightened, his face puffed, air whistling into his bruised throat. "You'll never make it," Ringo said harshly. "Put down that gun." Curt laughed mockingly. "I'll take my chances," he said. And went cold with horror. For Jean lunged forward, swept the gun aside, and clung panting to his arm. The next instant, Duke leaned forward, and clubbed with his knotted fist. The blow caught Curt in the temple, hurled him to one side. He tried to turn, to spin, even as he was falling, but the girl's clutch on his arm tripped him. He went to his knees, his free hand shoving at the floor. And then two of the smugglers had dropped on him, were smashing with heavy fists. Curt drew his legs beneath him, tore his arm free, came hurtling upward. In the midst of the movement, he saw the boot lashing at his face. He sobbed deep in his throat, knowing the blow could not miss. He tensed the muscles of his neck, rolled his head. And the boot smashed just below his right ear. He felt the coolness of the metal flooring on his face, but there was only a grey blankness before his eyes. He tried to force his body to his feet, but there was no strength in his arms. "Take him below," he heard Duke Ringo say. "Stick him at a drier. And because he likes to play tough, we'll see just how tough he is. _Make him work without a mask._" The Falcon called out, but his voice was only a whisper in his mind. He felt oblivion reaching for him with talon-like fingers, felt panicky terror constricting his heart. He knew what the last order meant; and horror filled his brain. Then hands gripped his body, swung it high. He tried to fight, and the entire world collapsed in a blaze of white-hot light. IV The Falcon was drunk, completely, hilariously drunk. He sang a song about a girl with golden hair who rode a moonbeam in a race with the Venusian express, and he stopped now and then to breathe deeply, completely oblivious of the glances given him by the guards patrolling the catwalks above the manufacturing room. He pressed the slender shoots of _lanka_ weed into the cutters, drunkenly raked the chopped remnants into a basket. Lurching, he turned to the great kiln drier, dumped the basket load into the hopper, and closed the door. He adjusted the rheostat until a needle backed another on a dial, then went back to the cutter. He leaned against the machine, idly scratched the back of his neck with one hand, gazed blearily about the room. Then he slipped several vitamin and energy capsules from his pocket and swallowed them. He felt their quick power sealing through his body, felt the cloudy numbness lifting from his brain. He fought with a desperate effort to think clearly and concisely, for he knew that another few weeks in the _smothalene_ factory would kill him. He waited patiently, felt strength coming back to his mind. Men watched him with a blind calm curiosity, their faces, behind their filtration masks, indicating their wonder that he should still be as well as he was after several days in the polluted air of the factory. Duke Ringo had kept his threat; the Falcon had been compelled to work at the _lanka_ weed cutter without a mask. And those seven work periods had taken their toll of his rugged lithe strength. He was lucky that the machine filters permitted only the barest trace of the powder to get into the air, for a breath of the pure drug would kill him instantly, knotting his body with muscle-ripping cramps. The drug, _smothalene_, was the deadliest aphrodisiac discovered in more than a century. Its action was swift and diabolic, raising the rate of metabolism to an incredible height, literally burning the flesh from the body of the users. Such was its action, the user consumed fifty times his normal usage of oxygen, and consequently went on an oxygen-drunk that was more satisfying, more habit-forming, than any drug that could be found. Its final effect came in a spasmodic, hideous moment, when the cumulative effects of the drug literally exploded in a surge of unleashed power. Every bit of energy and life was sucked from the body, and the corpse became nothing but a desiccated mummy. The Falcon thought of that and many things, remembering the brushes his men had had with the smugglers, recalling the bodies of the _smothalene_ users he had seen. And he remembered, too, the accusations hurled at him and his brood, wild accusations that placed him and his men in the roles of mass murderers--as the _smothalene_ smugglers. He gripped the machine edge tightly with whitening hands. He could feel the life being burned from his body from the tiny bit of the drug his body had assimilated, sensed the coolness coming to his heated muscles as the energy tablets fed the speeded metabolism. He knew instinctively that he had not grown so accustomed to the drug that he could not break its lecherous hold. All that he needed was a greatly supplemented diet for the next few days, and then, except for the natural deterioration of his body during the _smothalene_ binge, he would be as perfectly conditioned as before. A guard leaned over the edge of the catwalk, gestured with a paralysis gun. "Snap into it, Varga," he roared. "Your period isn't up yet." The Falcon nodded, lifted new weeds into the hopper. Benton, the Earthman working at his side, flicked his gaze warily at the guards, and his voice was a quiet whisper. "Don't be a sap, Falcon," he said. "Walk into a paralysis ray, get it over with in a hurry." Curt Varga shook his head. "Sorry," he said softly, "I've got other plans." Benton smiled derisively. "Yeah? Well, a couple of others thought they had, too. They got a converter burial in the energy room." The Falcon swayed a bit, felt drunkenness creeping into his mind again. He found and swallowed the last of his energy tablets. "Look," he said, "I need the help of everybody in here. I've got a plan that might work--but this _smothalene_ is burning me so I can't really think. Collect all the energy tablets the men can spare for me; I'll use them to stay sober until I bust the place wide open." Benton shook his head. The Falcon raked weeds into the cutter, glanced about. "The guards think I'm drunk all of the time," he whispered. "They don't worry about me any more; I can do damned near as I please. Get me those energy tablets, so my mind won't blank out at the last moment, and I'll guarantee freedom for all of us." The Earthman considered gravely for a moment, then nodded doubtfully. "I'll do what I can, Falcon, only because of your reputation. If your idea doesn't work, there's little lost, anyway." Slowly, he turned, caught up a great oil-can, drifted among the machines. He talked quietly with worker after worker, finally returned and handed Varga a double handful of tablets. "That's all I could get," he said. "Now what happens?" "Watch for your cue." The Falcon dropped the tablets into his pocket, retaining about a dozen. He swallowed them, felt their cool rush of energy almost immediately. He unscrewed a vial from beneath a jet. Then he proceeded to get very drunk. * * * * * His face went slack, his muscles rubbery. He sang in a cracked tenor, weaved carelessly through the machines, going toward the steps that led to the catwalk. He staggered drunkenly, almost belligerently righted himself again and again. "Get back to work, Falcon," a guard called, grinned at the slackness of the pirate's once-erect body. "I don' wanna work!" Curt Varga said nastily. "I'm gonna be sick." "All right!" The guard jerked his head toward the rest-room. "Be sick, and then get back to your job." He grinned, as the Falcon came laboriously up the stairs. The Falcon staggered drunkenly toward the rest-room, shoved through the door, dropped his pretense the moment he was alone. He went swiftly toward the air-intake grill, worked at its fastenings with a screwdriver secreted in his boot-top. And as he worked, he thought. "_Jean_," he thought, and his face went white from concentration. "_Jean, this is the Falcon. Listen to me. In a few minutes, I'm going to release smothalene into the air-system. Put on your mask, and be ready to run for it._" He sent the message again and again, wishing that he had had the telepathic training to receive as well as send. He had no way of knowing if the girl could get his message; he had no way of knowing whether or not she would tell Duke Ringo of his plans. The grill plate came loose in his hands, and he lifted the vial of _smothalene_ powder into the hole revealed. For a second, his hand remained there, and then he felt the sickness of futility come over him. He had no mask. He stepped back from the wall, pocketed the vial, went toward the door. He hesitated for a moment, then pulled the door ajar, beckoned drunkenly to the nearest guard. "Cummere," he said melodramatically. "I got somethin' to show you." "What's the matter?" the guard asked suspiciously, and his gun was bright in his hand. "Thieves, that's what it is," the Falcon asserted solemnly. "Cummon, I'll show you." He opened the door wide, turned his back, walked toward the gaping grill-hole. The guard entered suspiciously. "All right," the guard said. "What's up?" "See!" the Falcon said, pointed. The guard gaped. "Who in hell did that?" he swore angrily. "Now I've gotta--" He swung about, momentarily forgetting the man with him. The Falcon swung with a delicate precision, striking with the death-blow of a trained IP agent. The guard was dead before his sagging body was caught in the pirate's strong arms. He never moved. The Falcon laid the body gently on the floor, removed the filtration mask, fitted it to his face. He pulled the coat from the slack arms and shoulders, carried it with him to the wall. Carefully, he emptied his vial of the _smothalene_ crystals into the air-tube, covered the hole with the muffling coat. He stood that way for several minutes, until he was certain that the dust had been carefully sucked along the pipe. Then he darted back to the guard, took his gun, and stepped to the door. He shot the approaching guard squarely through the throat, the gun singing its piercing note of death, the instant cry of the guard disappearing with his throat. Then the Falcon hurdled the body, raced along the catwalk. "Benton," he yelled, "_this is it_." A guard shouted in brief anger, his ray searing a burning streak of agony along Curt's side. Then the Falcon whirled, dropped to one knee on the metal flooring, and his gun sang a song of death that didn't cease. Rays lanced from the patrolling guards, and their cries were startled angry sounds. One went down from the Falcon's ray; another lined his gun with a deliberate slowness. A thrown spanner-wrench crushed in the side of his head, and Benton raced up the catwalk's steps. He waved two more wrenches at the Falcon. "Let's go, Varga," he shouted. The Falcon rayed the last two guards to death with a single sweeping shot that cut them down as though before a scythe. Then he was running toward the exit. "Stay here and organize the men," he yelled back. "Follow as quickly as possible, and mop up the smugglers still alive." * * * * * Then he had plunged through the door and was racing down the corridor. He gagged in sheer horror when he saw the bodies of the smugglers in the hall and adjacent rooms. They were sere and brown, withered mummies dressed in clothes sizes too large. Some still twitched feebly in their last throes. _Smothalene_ had dropped them with their first deep breaths of the virulent drug. He raced on, his feet pounding deafening echoes from the floor, his gun gripped tightly in his hand. He prayed silently as he ran. And then he was at the control cabin, skidding to a stop, his gun swivelling to menace the room. It was empty, except for the sere mummy of a man at the astrogation table. "Damn!" the Falcon swore, swerved about as a footstep sounded at the door. Then he was holding Jean in his arms, soothing the shaking of her slender shoulders. "Ringo escaped!" the girl cried. "He was making me broadcast a ransom demand to my father, when I got your message. I grabbed a mask, and ran. He must have suspected something, for he didn't chase me. I hid, and watched him running toward the escape hatch. He was wearing a bulger." She glanced at the mummified man at the table, shuddered, tears flooding her eyes. The Falcon shoved her aside, sprang to the control board. He flicked a switch, grinned tautly when a needle leaped to instant life. He sat in the seat, laid his gun aside. Flicking on the vizi-beam, he sent its scanner ray swirling about outside the dead ship. Almost instantly he found the tiny cruiser boring toward the outside of the clot of space debris. His hands darted to two levers on the board, drew them back. Tractor rays leaped into sudden life, spun in pursuit of the fleeing cruiser. Secondary rays fended off the rubbish that tended to be sucked into the tractor beams. Then the tractors caught the cruiser, caught and held it immovable. It swung about, almost stopping its direct flight. It bucked and plunged like a fish on a line, rockets flaring with incredible power to break the hold. But Curt's hands never gave it a chance. The rays grew whiter by the second, became almost invisible in their power. And the cruiser wheeled over, began sinking slowly toward the headquarter's ship. The vizi-screen grew silvery, then green, and a face appeared on its surface. "Clever, weren't you, Falcon," Duke Ringo said viciously. "I should have killed you when I had the chance." His eyes were mad pits of reddish hell. "I knew something was wrong when the girl made a dash from me with a mask, but I didn't have time to warn the men, for I wasn't certain what was happening. Then the _smothalene_ dropped my mate, and I barely got into a bulger before I had to take a breath. I had to run for it; I couldn't have fought your entire crowd." The Falcon's face was stony and bleak, his eyes impersonal. "I'm bringing you back, Ringo, and turning you in." "To hell with you, Falcon," Duke Ringo snarled. "When I go out, you go, too." He laughed. "_All right, I'm coming in!_" The vizi-screen went momentarily black, then the scanner ray cut back in. Duke Ringo's ship had ceased its futile efforts to escape; now it was turning, the needle prow centered directly on the smuggling headquarters. In that one flashing second, the Falcon felt a surge of admiration for the brutal bravery of the man. But there was no time for thinking; there were only a few seconds in which to act with an instinctive blinding speed. Duke Ringo's ship was smashing downward now, driving at full-speed throttle, speeding with the combined power of the tractor rays and the surging drone of its rockets. It flashed with a speed that increased by the second, became a diving bullet that could not miss its mark. Curt Varga cursed deep in his throat, switched off the tractor beams, watched the ship smashing in. He cringed from the explosion he knew was coming, felt terror deep in his mind. Then sanity reasserted itself, and his hands moved with a flowing speed. He flicked on the tractor rays again, sent them spiralling to one side. They touched a fifty-foot meteor, caught it, spun it into the path of the hurtling death-ship. Duke Ringo tried to swerve the cruiser, failed, for the ship and meteor struck in a titanic slanting blow. White heat flared for a soundless moment, force waves pushing outward in the burst of energy. Then the ship and meteor were one, and in their place was only a fused lump of metallic refuse that spun endlessly in the Sargasso of Space. The Falcon cut all switches, turned slowly about on his seat. He stared at Benton and the other prisoners who had crowded into the room. He felt the nearness of the girl at his side, cursed himself for becoming a sentimental fool. "The show's over," he said quietly. "Ringo's dead." V Fourteen hours later, the Falcon stood before the control board of his sleek pirate cruiser. Jean was at his side, and they faced the vizi-screen. Except for a certain amount of lethargy because of the tiny amount of drug he had inhaled in the _smothalene_ factory, the Falcon felt all right again. He was dressed in fresh clothes, a new gun was buckled at his waist. And through the blackness of his hair were threaded bits of silver the past few days had brought. Jean was dressed becomingly in some of the Falcon's spare clothes, appearing much like a rather pretty boy playing in his father's garments. "Benton and the others," the Falcon said, "have their orders and directions for finding the Base. Those of you who did not care to join me may go where your fancies dictate. Now, don't forget. To free yourself of the Sargasso, you merely have to hold your ships to the debris clot with a tractor, and race at full throttle in as large a circle as you can. When maximum speed is reached, cut the tractor, and centrifugal force will throw you free. Has everybody got that?" Acknowledgments came piling in from the thirty ships gathered about the Falcon's ship. "Then let's go," the Falcon said, and sat at the controls. He flipped switches, built up speed, finally cut loose, and the Sargasso fled back behind them. The Falcon set the robot-control, sighed relievedly. He grinned at the girl beside him, liked what he saw in her eyes. "I'm doing this against my better judgment, Jean," he said half-mockingly, half-seriously, "but since you've given me your solemn oath, I'm willing to take a chance. Anyway, you owe me your life; for that, you should be willing to keep the Base's location a secret." Jean Vandor nodded. "I shall keep my word," she said slowly, then she sank into a seat, caught at the Falcon's arm. "Please, Curt," she finished swiftly, "please forget this mad plan of yours! I don't say you're right or wrong, I just say that the odds are too great for you to win. Come with me to Earth; my father will see that you are given a good job where you can be wealthy and respected. I promise you that." The Falcon fashioned two _pulnik_ cigarettes, handed one to the girl. He shook his head slightly, wryly. "Sorry," he said, "but I couldn't, even if I wanted to. I owe too much to the people who trust me. And I have a certain sense of integrity that wouldn't let me sleep nights, should I quit now." He smiled with the quickening exuberance of a man ten years younger. "Put in a good word for me, though; I'll maybe need it, if things go wrong." Jean Vandor smoked her cigarette silently. "They will go wrong," she said finally. "It's a chance worth taking." The Falcon shrugged. "But tell me of Ringo's ransom demands; this is the first real chance we've had to talk, what with wrecking the smuggling headquarters, plundering the dead ships of the Sargasso, and then making our escape." He grinned. "I thank you for that, anyway; if you hadn't heard Ringo telling his men how to escape the gravitic tides, we'd be there, yet." Jean nodded. "I heard him give the order when a new recruit was about to take a ship out. As for the ransom demand; well, Ringo demanded immunity from the Administrators, and a license to sell _smothalene_ throughout the system, in return for my release. But as he told me, he planned to keep me prisoner until all the drug now manufactured was sold. With myself as a hostage, my father would be helpless to fight back." The Falcon turned to the control board, made minute adjustments, tried to force a casual tone. He could feel the flush stealing upward from his open collar. "What do you plan to do, once back on Earth?" "Nothing, I suppose, just the things I did before--well, this entire affair happened." "Are you--" The Falcon came to his feet, walked to the door. "Nothing," he finished. "I think I'll get a bit of sleep before we land." Not waiting for a reply, he walked down the corridor. He hated himself at the moment, hated himself and the life he lead. In his mind grew the first nucleus of a doubt that he might be wrong. In all probability, what he should do, what was the logical thing to do, was to accept Jean's offer, forget his past, and try to settle back into the ordered routine of life the Administrator's plans had mapped for twenty billion people. Entering his cabin, he threw himself on the bunk, smoked interminable cigarettes. And as the hours passed, coherence came to his thoughts, and the bitterness faded. After a time, he slept. * * * * * He woke only when the light tap came on his cabin door. "We're landing, Falcon," Jean said breathlessly. "I talked with father, and he has promised a truce for the period you are on Earth." "I'll be right out," Curt Varga said, felt the vague prickle of a premonitory thrill along his spine. Then he shrugged, climbed from the bunk, did quick ablutions. Five minutes later, his hand was on the controls when the cruiser glided to a landing at the spaceport. Jason Vandor waited on the field, his purple robe bright in the midst of his personal bodyguard. He caught Jean in his arms, and the Falcon felt a certain sense of gladness when he saw the open affection of the man toward his daughter. Despite his faults, the man was truly a father. "So you're the Falcon," Vandor said at last, staring at the pirate from eyes as blue and chill as ice. Curt Varga grinned. "I'm the Falcon," he said calmly. "But I never thought to meet you under these circumstances." "Nor I. But I do offer you thanks, anyway." "You owe me nothing; I am here under truce. When I leave, our battle starts again." Vandor smiled. "But you see, Falcon, that is where you are wrong. I thank you for bringing my daughter back, yes; but I also thank you for saving my men the trouble of running you down." His hand made a sharp imperative gesture. "_Blank him out_," he ordered. There was no time to move, no time to think; there was only the split second of consciousness when he saw the smile of triumph on Vandor's face, and its mocking echo on the girl's. Then the dis-gun blast caught the Falcon squarely in its glow, sucked away all thought and dropped him into a blackened abyss that had no bottom. * * * * * The Falcon moved groggily, felt nausea cramping at his belly. He groaned, shook his head, forced himself erect. Chains clanked loudly, and he felt the coolness of their metal on his arms and legs. "Hell!" he said feelingly, felt despair eating at his heart. Jason Vandor moved slightly, sighed, then stood from where he sat across the cell. His grey hair was almost white in the gloom, and his face was hard and merciless. "I want to talk to you, Falcon," he said harshly. Curt Varga blinked away his dizziness, searched the cell with his eyes. Except for two bunks, it was empty. The chains he wore were welded to the bunk upon which he sat. "Go ahead," he said finally. "You seem to have the whip hand." "It's about Jean." There was a tiny thread of fear running through the dictator's voice. "All right, what about her?" "I want you to do something. She and I just had a terrible fight, the first I can remember having with her since she was a child. She seems to think that I was wrong in capturing you while I had a chance. Now, I know such a request is strange, I know you hate me, but I want you to talk with her, and convince her that I was in the right. You know our fight is to the death; you know that neither of us asks quarter; you know you would have done the same thing had you been in my place. I'm not asking this for myself; I'm asking for her peace of mind. Her life will be wrecked, if she hates me as long as she lives." The Falcon laughed, and the sound was ugly and ironic in the semi-darkness. He had met strange situations in his years as a freebooter of space, but none of them had been as fantastic as this. "You honestly mean that you want me, the man you intend to execute, to intercede for you with your daughter?" Panic tightened Jason Vandor's voice. "I'll make it worth your while, Falcon," he said. "I'll see that you are not executed; I'll see that you get life. I'll even see that you have all requests granted." "To hell with you," the Falcon said dispassionately. "Falcon, you've got to listen to me, you've go to. Jean is a girl, she's been brought up differently than either of us. You and I know what fighting and death are; you and I have no illusions to temper our judgments--we are cold intellects. But Jean is young, she has ideals, and they must not be destroyed. You have appealed to her instincts for romance; she has colored your actions of the past few days until you seem to be what you pretend to be. Now I want you to make her understand that your real desire to crush me and the other Administrators has nothing romantic about it; you must make her realize your real purpose--that you plan to become dictator in the Administrator's place. Will you do that, Falcon?" Curt Varga sagged back against the wall, stared blindly at the man before him. Thoughts were chaotic in his mind. "You _believe_ that, don't you, Vandor?" he said slowly. "Of course, what else can I believe? Self-government, freedom, bah! The cattle of the worlds wouldn't know what to do with either." The Falcon shifted. "Where is Jean?" he asked. "On her way to Mars, where I sent her." Jason Vandor's tone grew harsh and strained. "I'm making a request, Falcon," he finished, "and I can be generous in return. But make me force you to talk to her, and I can do to you just what you would do to me." He laughed without mirth. "A pitcheblend mine, wearing no protection, might be much worse than agreeing." Curt Varga nodded. "I don't understand you, fully. You're a merciless butcher--yet you think enough of your daughter to bargain with your enemy. But I'll do what you say--for my freedom." Jason Vandor shook his head. "Not that," he said brittlely. "I have no desire to fight you a running battle until the final showdown. You're dead, as far as your past is concerned. But you have your choice of death; either a slow one in prison, or a hideous one in a mine. Either way, you will fight me no more." "What would I say?" "Practically nothing. She swore she would believe what I said, only if you told her that my statements were the truth. Tell her that over a vizi-beam, and I promise you a decent prison life." "I've sampled your promises." "I swear I shall not go back on my word. Jean is the only thing in life I love; I'll do anything for her." Vandor's words were bitter and brooding. "All right." The Falcon nodded. "I'll speak your pretty little speech. Not for you; I wouldn't give you water in hell. But for Jean; who at least hates and fights cleanly and openly." He spat. "Now get me out of here before I change my mind." Jason Vandor stepped forward, tossed a key into Varga's lap. His concealed hand came from beneath his robe, and a gun glinted dully in his fist. "Cross me, Falcon," he said quietly, "and for every minute of mental torture you give me, I'll give you a year of the same." The Falcon unlocked his chains, stood erect. "I'll speak your piece," he answered. "But don't make threats." * * * * * He walked before the menace of the gun through the open door, followed the line of radi-lights down the stone corridor. He felt nothing but a dull apathy within his mind, and he cared nothing for the future. He knew there was no escape, and the knowledge left him unemotional. But then the thought came that Jean had fought on his side, and he felt warmness spreading through his heart. There was a gulf between them, a space that would never be spanned. Yet he felt closer to the girl now than he had felt toward any person other than his brother in years. "This way, Falcon," Jason Vandor said. They walked a corridor, turned right, entered the vizi-beam room where operators sat before the machines that connected with all planets. Jason Vandor stopped beside a machine. "Get the _Ardeth_ on the beam," he ordered. "Yes, your Lordship!" The beam-man's fingers made clicking contacts with the machine's controls. The vizi-screen became silvery, slowly turned green. Life grew on the screen. Color swirled, then merged, and Jean Vandor frowned from the screen. "Yes?" she asked. Jason Vandor forced the Falcon to the screen with his gun. The Falcon was conscious then of the utter quiet in the room, as though all were afraid to breathe. He could feel the pounding of his heart as he stepped forward. "Can you hear me, Jean?" he asked quietly. "I can hear you, Curt." The Falcon forced all feeling from his voice. "Jean, answer me truthfully; did you plot that I should be captured?" Tears welled in the girl's eyes, and her head shook slightly. "No, Curt." Curt Varga sighed then, and the ache in his heart was a tangible thing that hurt with an agony he had not thought possible for a man to feel. "Remember the things I told you, Jean? Remember the hopes and dreams and plans I had?" "I remember." "Then, Jean, this is the truth. Remember this all of your life; fight for it, never let it die. _Men are born to be free; no man can place himself in the role of God, there to dictate what--_" The blow of the gun barrel smashed him to his knees. He knelt there for seconds, laughing into Jason Vandor's face. "I'm a _small_ man, Vandor," the Falcon said. "I can hate and I can love. But I am true to myself, if nothing else. Get somebody else to do your lying." Jason Vandor's face was a chiseled mask of evil rage. He saw then the crumbling of the life he had built, saw then the truth that lay in the Falcon. He knew then that all of the treasures and powers of a hundred worlds could not replace that which he had lost in those fleeting seconds. He lifted his gun to shoot the defenseless Falcon to death--and died that way, a dis-ray scything him down in a huddled heap. "By damn, a fight at last!" a great voice roared from the doorway, and Schutler sprang into the room. His laughter was mad with the richness of the moment, and the twin guns were almost buried in the greatness of his fists. Crandal was at his side, his bald head gleaming, his gun lancing flame like a jet of glowing water. And behind both, shoving them forward, came Jericho, his ebony face agleam, a great sword in one hand, a gun in another. "_Falcon!_" Jericho cried, and his gun made an arc through the air, was caught deftly in the Falcon's reaching hand. * * * * * Then hell broke loose in that great room, a hell of a dozen darting crossing rays of death, a holocaust of power that surged and twisted and searched for the lives of the men within. A guard went down, his gun still holstered, his face blown away by the left gun of the laughing giant at the door. Crandal darted sideways like a crab, gun-flame licking out, precisely, almost daintily, never wasting energy on the wall or air. And Jericho moved like a black whirlwind, countering the dis-flame of a single guard by touching it with his sword-blade, and grounding the energy in his power-glove. And the Falcon was on his feet, his laughter ringing as in the days of old, when a fight had been the thing to set a man's blood to pounding, when to live was a zestful thing of promise, when the future was bright and the past a gay memory. He raced to the side of his men, cutting a guard from his side, raying a second even as he was lining his gun on Jericho. The Negro grinned, and his swinging sword fled through the neck of a guard, followed about and dropped a hand from the wrist of a screaming second. Schutler went down, his beard flaming where a bolt had grazed his chin. He roared like an angry bull, pawed at the flame and smoke of his burning beard, swept his other hand as a man sprays water. Guards dropped like flies beneath a poison spray. A shot caught Crandal in one leg, dropped him to his knee. His face went even whiter, and sweat was on his head. The Falcon sprang to Crandal's side, caught him up with his left arm, raised a barrage of shots with the gun in his right. His teeth were white against the tan of his face, and the cold of his grey eyes was strange against the laughter that filled his face. And the four were together, and no man could stand against them. They were courage and brains and strength and agility, all together, yet separate in themselves. Apart, they could be downed; but together, all hell itself brought mad rich laughter to their throats, and a flame to their eyes. They stood together, and their guns made singing sounds that were like those from a harp of death. And before those notes men sank and died, one by one, and two by two, until only living stood beside the door, and there was no other life. "Come, man," Schutler boomed, "before others hear the fight and stick their noses in!" He fingered the stubble of his beard. "Are you all right, Jim?" the Falcon asked Crandal, and the man grinned with a white-faced smile. Jericho caught up the wounded man, ignoring a ray burn that raced like a livid purple snake across the blackness of his shoulders. He jerked his head at the door. "We come in by a secret passage," he explained in a rush of words. "We didn't find you in the cells, so we come hunting." The Falcon choked back the lump in his throat, and his eyes were misty as he looked at the men to whom loyalty was neither a word nor a gesture, only a thing that was in them when the need arose. "How--?" he began. "I did it, Curt," Jean's voice said. Jean was crying then, crying like a child whose first dreams are gone, crying like one whose new dreams are but the faintest of sounds in her consciousness. Through the vizi-screen she had seen all that had happened, and the sickness in her eyes would be long leaving. "Jean," the Falcon said. "Please, Jean--" She was smiling then, smiling through the tears that would not stop. And the Falcon, watching her features on the screen, knew the torture that was hers. "I'll be waiting, Curt," she said. "But hurry--Oh, please hurry!" "Wait for me, Jean, _wait for me_." And the Falcon and his brood were running down the hall, running toward the secret spot where a pirate ship waited to take them back to their fight and their loves and their freedom--and to the far horizons of their starway destiny. 
3783	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 3783-h.htm or 3783-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3783/3783-h/3783-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3783/3783-h.zip) [Illustration: "With somber faces ... their muscles stiff from insufficient sleep."] MOTHER by MAXIM GORKY With Eight Illustrations by Sigmund De Ivanowski New York and London D. Appleton and Company 1911 Copyright, 1906, 1907, by D. Appleton and Company LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE "With somber faces ... their muscles stiff with insufficient sleep" _Frontispiece_ "The mother ... strained her untrained mind to listen" 34 "It seemed to Vlasova that the officer was but waiting for her tears" 92 "Taking out one package of books after the other, she shoved them into the hands of the brothers" 116 "The mother's heart quivered with impatience" 142 "'Listen, for the sake of Christ'" 232 "The men listened in silence" 296 "'Run, run!' whispered the mother" 428 PART I CHAPTER I Every day the factory whistle bellowed forth its shrill, roaring, trembling noises into the smoke-begrimed and greasy atmosphere of the workingmen's suburb; and obedient to the summons of the power of steam, people poured out of little gray houses into the street. With somber faces they hastened forward like frightened roaches, their muscles stiff from insufficient sleep. In the chill morning twilight they walked through the narrow, unpaved street to the tall stone cage that waited for them with cold assurance, illumining their muddy road with scores of greasy, yellow, square eyes. The mud plashed under their feet as if in mocking commiseration. Hoarse exclamations of sleepy voices were heard; irritated, peevish, abusive language rent the air with malice; and, to welcome the people, deafening sounds floated about--the heavy whir of machinery, the dissatisfied snort of steam. Stern and somber, the black chimneys stretched their huge, thick sticks high above the village. In the evening, when the sun was setting, and red rays languidly glimmered upon the windows of the houses, the factory ejected its people like burned-out ashes, and again they walked through the streets, with black, smoke-covered faces, radiating the sticky odor of machine oil, and showing the gleam of hungry teeth. But now there was animation in their voices, and even gladness. The servitude of hard toil was over for the day. Supper awaited them at home, and respite. The day was swallowed up by the factory; the machine sucked out of men's muscles as much vigor as it needed. The day was blotted out from life, not a trace of it left. Man made another imperceptible step toward his grave; but he saw close before him the delights of rest, the joys of the odorous tavern, and he was satisfied. On holidays the workers slept until about ten o'clock. Then the staid and married people dressed themselves in their best clothes and, after duly scolding the young folks for their indifference to church, went to hear mass. When they returned from church, they ate pirogs, the Russian national pastry, and again lay down to sleep until the evening. The accumulated exhaustion of years had robbed them of their appetites, and to be able to eat they drank, long and deep, goading on their feeble stomachs with the biting, burning lash of vodka. In the evening they amused themselves idly on the street; and those who had overshoes put them on, even if it was dry, and those who had umbrellas carried them, even if the sun was shining. Not everybody has overshoes and an umbrella, but everybody desires in some way, however small, to appear more important than his neighbor. Meeting one another they spoke about the factory and the machines, had their fling against their foreman, conversed and thought only of matters closely and manifestly connected with their work. Only rarely, and then but faintly, did solitary sparks of impotent thought glimmer in the wearisome monotony of their talk. Returning home they quarreled with their wives, and often beat them, unsparing of their fists. The young people sat in the taverns, or enjoyed evening parties at one another's houses, played the accordion, sang vulgar songs devoid of beauty, danced, talked ribaldry, and drank. Exhausted with toil, men drank swiftly, and in every heart there awoke and grew an incomprehensible, sickly irritation. It demanded an outlet. Clutching tenaciously at every pretext for unloading themselves of this disquieting sensation, they fell on one another for mere trifles, with the spiteful ferocity of beasts, breaking into bloody quarrels which sometimes ended in serious injury and on rare occasions even in murder. This lurking malice steadily increased, inveterate as the incurable weariness in their muscles. They were born with this disease of the soul inherited from their fathers. Like a black shadow it accompanied them to their graves, spurring on their lives to crime, hideous in its aimless cruelty and brutality. On holidays the young people came home late at night, dirty and dusty, their clothes torn, their faces bruised, boasting maliciously of the blows they had struck their companions, or the insults they had inflicted upon them; enraged or in tears over the indignities they themselves had suffered; drunken and piteous, unfortunate and repulsive. Sometimes the boys would be brought home by the mother or the father, who had picked them up in the street or in a tavern, drunk to insensibility. The parents scolded and swore at them peevishly, and beat their spongelike bodies, soaked with liquor; then more or less systematically put them to bed, in order to rouse them to work early next morning, when the bellow of the whistle should sullenly course through the air. They scolded and beat the children soundly, notwithstanding the fact that drunkenness and brawls among young folk appeared perfectly legitimate to the old people. When they were young they, too, had drunk and fought; they, too, had been beaten by their mothers and fathers. Life had always been like that. It flowed on monotonously and slowly somewhere down the muddy, turbid stream, year after year; and it was all bound up in strong ancient customs and habits that led them to do one and the same thing day in and day out. None of them, it seemed, had either the time or the desire to attempt to change this state of life. Once in a long while a stranger would come to the village. At first he attracted attention merely because he was a stranger. Then he aroused a light, superficial interest by the stories of the places where he had worked. Afterwards the novelty wore off, the people got used to him, and he remained unnoticed. From his stories it was clear that the life of the workingmen was the same everywhere. And if so, then what was there to talk about? Occasionally, however, some stranger spoke curious things never heard of in the suburb. The men did not argue with him, but listened to his odd speeches with incredulity. His words aroused blind irritation in some, perplexed alarm in others, while still others were disturbed by a feeble, shadowy glimmer of the hope of something, they knew not what. And they all began to drink more in order to drive away the unnecessary, meddlesome excitement. Noticing in the stranger something unusual, the villagers cherished it long against him and treated the man who was not like them with unaccountable apprehension. It was as if they feared he would throw something into their life which would disturb its straight, dismal course. Sad and difficult, it was yet even in its tenor. People were accustomed to the fact that life always oppressed them with the same power. Unhopeful of any turn for the better, they regarded every change as capable only of increasing their burden. And the workingmen of the suburb tacitly avoided people who spoke unusual things to them. Then these people disappeared again, going off elsewhere, and those who remained in the factory lived apart, if they could not blend and make one whole with the monotonous mass in the village. Living a life like that for some fifty years, a workman died. * * * * * Thus also lived Michael Vlasov, a gloomy, sullen man, with little eyes which looked at everybody from under his thick eyebrows suspiciously, with a mistrustful, evil smile. He was the best locksmith in the factory, and the strongest man in the village. But he was insolent and disrespectful toward the foreman and the superintendent, and therefore earned little; every holiday he beat somebody, and everyone disliked and feared him. More than one attempt was made to beat him in turn, but without success. When Vlasov found himself threatened with attack, he caught a stone in his hand, or a piece of wood or iron, and spreading out his legs stood waiting in silence for the enemy. His face overgrown with a dark beard from his eyes to his neck, and his hands thickly covered with woolly hair, inspired everybody with fear. People were especially afraid of his eyes. Small and keen, they seemed to bore through a man like steel gimlets, and everyone who met their gaze felt he was confronting a beast, a savage power, inaccessible to fear, ready to strike unmercifully. "Well, pack off, dirty vermin!" he said gruffly. His coarse, yellow teeth glistened terribly through the thick hair on his face. The men walked off uttering coward abuse. "Dirty vermin!" he snapped at them, and his eyes gleamed with a smile sharp as an awl. Then holding his head in an attitude of direct challenge, with a short, thick pipe between his teeth, he walked behind them, and now and then called out: "Well, who wants death?" No one wanted it. He spoke little, and "dirty vermin" was his favorite expression. It was the name he used for the authorities of the factory, and the police, and it was the epithet with which he addressed his wife: "Look, you dirty vermin, don't you see my clothes are torn?" When Pavel, his son, was a boy of fourteen, Vlasov was one day seized with the desire to pull him by the hair once more. But Pavel grasped a heavy hammer, and said curtly: "Don't touch me!" "What!" demanded his father, bending over the tall, slender figure of his son like a shadow on a birch tree. "Enough!" said Pavel. "I am not going to give myself up any more." And opening his dark eyes wide, he waved the hammer in the air. His father looked at him, folded his shaggy hands on his back, and, smiling, said: "All right." Then he drew a heavy breath and added: "Ah, you dirty vermin!" Shortly after this he said to his wife: "Don't ask me for money any more. Pasha will feed you now." "And you will drink up everything?" she ventured to ask. "None of your business, dirty vermin!" From that time, for three years, until his death, he did not notice, and did not speak to his son. Vlasov had a dog as big and shaggy as himself. She accompanied him to the factory every morning, and every evening she waited for him at the gate. On holidays Vlasov started off on his round of the taverns. He walked in silence, and stared into people's faces as if looking for somebody. His dog trotted after him the whole day long. Returning home drunk he sat down to supper, and gave his dog to eat from his own bowl. He never beat her, never scolded, and never petted her. After supper he flung the dishes from the table--if his wife was not quick enough to remove them in time--put a bottle of whisky before him, and leaning his back against the wall, began in a hoarse voice that spread anguish about him to bawl a song, his mouth wide open and his eyes closed. The doleful sounds got entangled in his mustache, knocking off the crumbs of bread. He smoothed down the hair of his beard and mustache with his thick fingers and sang--sang unintelligible words, long drawn out. The melody recalled the wintry howl of wolves. He sang as long as there was whisky in the bottle, then he dropped on his side upon the bench, or let his head sink on the table, and slept in this way until the whistle began to blow. The dog lay at his side. When he died, he died hard. For five days, turned all black, he rolled in his bed, gnashing his teeth, his eyes tightly closed. Sometimes he would say to his wife: "Give me arsenic. Poison me." She called a physician. He ordered hot poultices, but said an operation was necessary and the patient must be taken at once to the hospital. "Go to the devil! I will die by myself, dirty vermin!" said Michael. And when the physician had left, and his wife with tears in her eyes began to insist on an operation, he clenched his fists and announced threateningly: "Don't you dare! It will be worse for you if I get well." He died in the morning at the moment when the whistle called the men to work. He lay in the coffin with open mouth, his eyebrows knit as if in a scowl. He was buried by his wife, his son, the dog, an old drunkard and thief, Daniel Vyesovshchikov, a discharged smelter, and a few beggars of the suburb. His wife wept a little and quietly; Pavel did not weep at all. The villagers who met the funeral in the street stopped, crossed themselves, and said to one another: "Guess Pelagueya is glad he died!" And some corrected: "He didn't die; he rotted away like a beast." When the body was put in the ground, the people went away, but the dog remained for a long time, and sitting silently on the fresh soil, she sniffed at the grave. CHAPTER II Two weeks after the death of his father, on a Sunday, Pavel came home very drunk. Staggering he crawled to a corner in the front of the room, and striking his fist on the table as his father used to do, shouted to his mother: "Supper!" The mother walked up to him, sat down at his side, and with her arm around her son, drew his head upon her breast. With his hand on her shoulder he pushed her away and shouted: "Mother, quick!" "You foolish boy!" said the mother in a sad and affectionate voice, trying to overcome his resistance. "I am going to smoke, too. Give me father's pipe," mumbled Pavel indistinctly, wagging his tongue heavily. It was the first time he had been drunk. The alcohol weakened his body, but it did not quench his consciousness, and the question knocked at his brain: "Drunk? Drunk?" The fondling of his mother troubled him, and he was touched by the sadness in her eyes. He wanted to weep, and in order to overcome this desire he endeavored to appear more drunk than he actually was. The mother stroked his tangled hair, and said in a low voice: "Why did you do it? You oughtn't to have done it." He began to feel sick, and after a violent attack of nausea the mother put him to bed, and laid a wet towel over his pale forehead. He sobered a little, but under and around him everything seemed to be rocking; his eyelids grew heavy; he felt a bad, sour taste in his mouth; he looked through his eyelashes on his mother's large face, and thought disjointedly: "It seems it's too early for me. Others drink and nothing happens--and I feel sick." Somewhere from a distance came the mother's soft voice: "What sort of a breadgiver will you be to me if you begin to drink?" He shut his eyes tightly and answered: "Everybody drinks." The mother sighed. He was right. She herself knew that besides the tavern there was no place where people could enjoy themselves; besides the taste of whisky there was no other gratification. Nevertheless she said: "But don't you drink. Your father drank for both of you. And he made enough misery for me. Take pity on your mother, then, will you not?" Listening to the soft, pitiful words of his mother, Pavel remembered that in his father's lifetime she had remained unnoticed in the house. She had been silent and had always lived in anxious expectation of blows. Desiring to avoid his father, he had been home very little of late; he had become almost unaccustomed to his mother, and now, as he gradually sobered up, he looked at her fixedly. She was tall and somewhat stooping. Her heavy body, broken down with long years of toil and the beatings of her husband, moved about noiselessly and inclined to one side, as if she were in constant fear of knocking up against something. Her broad oval face, wrinkled and puffy, was lighted up with a pair of dark eyes, troubled and melancholy as those of most of the women in the village. On her right eyebrow was a deep scar, which turned the eyebrow upward a little; her right ear, too, seemed to be higher than the left, which gave her face the appearance of alarmed listening. Gray locks glistened in her thick, dark hair, like the imprints of heavy blows. Altogether she was soft, melancholy, and submissive. Tears slowly trickled down her cheeks. "Wait, don't cry!" begged the son in a soft voice. "Give me a drink." She rose and said: "I'll give you some ice water." But when she returned he was already asleep. She stood over him for a minute, trying to breathe lightly. The cup in her hand trembled, and the ice knocked against the tin. Then, setting the cup on the table, she knelt before the sacred image upon the wall, and began to pray in silence. The sounds of dark, drunken life beat against the window panes; an accordion screeched in the misty darkness of the autumn night; some one sang a loud song; some one was swearing with ugly, vile oaths, and the excited sounds of women's irritated, weary voices cut the air. * * * * * Life in the little house of the Vlasovs flowed on monotonously, but more calmly and undisturbed than before, and somewhat different from everywhere else in the suburb. The house stood at the edge of the village, by a low but steep and muddy declivity. A third of the house was occupied by the kitchen and a small room used for the mother's bedroom, separated from the kitchen by a partition reaching partially to the ceiling. The other two thirds formed a square room with two windows. In one corner stood Pavel's bed, in front a table and two benches. Some chairs, a washstand with a small looking-glass over it, a trunk with clothes, a clock on the wall, and two ikons--this was the entire outfit of the household. Pavel tried to live like the rest. He did all a young lad should do--bought himself an accordion, a shirt with a starched front, a loud-colored necktie, overshoes, and a cane. Externally he became like all the other youths of his age. He went to evening parties and learned to dance a quadrille and a polka. On holidays he came home drunk, and always suffered greatly from the effects of liquor. In the morning his head ached, he was tormented by heartburns, his face was pale and dull. Once his mother asked him: "Well, did you have a good time yesterday?" He answered dismally and with irritation: "Oh, dreary as a graveyard! Everybody is like a machine. I'd better go fishing or buy myself a gun." He worked faithfully, without intermission and without incurring fines. He was taciturn, and his eyes, blue and large like his mother's, looked out discontentedly. He did not buy a gun, nor did he go a-fishing; but he gradually began to avoid the beaten path trodden by all. His attendance at parties became less and less frequent, and although he went out somewhere on holidays, he always returned home sober. His mother watched him unobtrusively but closely, and saw the tawny face of her son grow keener and keener, and his eyes more serious. She noticed that his lips were compressed in a peculiar manner, imparting an odd expression of austerity to his face. It seemed as if he were always angry at something, or as if a canker gnawed at him. At first his friends came to visit him, but never finding him at home, they remained away. The mother was glad to see her son turning out different from all the other factory youth; but a feeling of anxiety and apprehension stirred in her heart when she observed that he was obstinately and resolutely directing his life into obscure paths leading away from the routine existence about him--that he turned in his career neither to the right nor the left. He began to bring books home with him. At first he tried to escape attention when reading them; and after he had finished a book, he hid it. Sometimes he copied a passage on a piece of paper, and hid that also. "Aren't you well, Pavlusha?" the mother asked once. "I'm all right," he answered. "You are so thin," said the mother with a sigh. He was silent. They spoke infrequently, and saw each other very little. In the morning he drank tea in silence, and went off to work; at noon he came for dinner, a few insignificant remarks were passed at the table, and he again disappeared until the evening. And in the evening, the day's work ended, he washed himself, took supper, and then fell to his books, and read for a long time. On holidays he left home in the morning and returned late at night. She knew he went to the city and the theater; but nobody from the city ever came to visit him. It seemed to her that with the lapse of time her son spoke less and less; and at the same time she noticed that occasionally and with increasing frequency he used new words unintelligible to her, and that the coarse, rude, and hard expressions dropped from his speech. In his general conduct, also, certain traits appeared, forcing themselves upon his mother's attention. He ceased to affect the dandy, but became more attentive to the cleanliness of his body and dress, and moved more freely and alertly. The increasing softness and simplicity of his manner aroused a disquieting interest in his mother. Once he brought a picture and hung it on the wall. It represented three persons walking lightly and boldly, and conversing. "This is Christ risen from the dead, and going to Emmaus," explained Pavel. The mother liked the picture, but she thought: "You respect Christ, and yet you do not go to church." Then more pictures appeared on the walls, and the number of books increased on the shelves neatly made for him by one of his carpenter friends. The room began to look like a home. He addressed his mother with the reverential plural "you," and called her "mother" instead of "mamma." But sometimes he turned to her suddenly, and briefly used the simple and familiar form of the singular: "Mamma, please be not thou disturbed if I come home late to-night." This pleased her; in such words she felt something serious and strong. But her uneasiness increased. Since her son's strangeness was not clarified with time, her heart became more and more sharply troubled with a foreboding of something unusual. Every now and then she felt a certain dissatisfaction with him, and she thought: "All people are like people, and he is like a monk. He is so stern. It's not according to his years." At other times she thought: "Maybe he has become interested in some sort of a girl down there." But to go about with girls, money is needed, and he gave almost all his earnings to her. Thus weeks and months elapsed; and imperceptibly two years slipped by, two years of a strange, silent life, full of disquieting thoughts and anxieties that kept continually increasing. Once, when after supper Pavel drew the curtain over the window, sat down in a corner, and began to read, his tin lamp hanging on the wall over his head, the mother, after removing the dishes, came out from the kitchen and carefully walked up to him. He raised his head, and without speaking looked at her with a questioning expression. "Nothing, Pasha, just so!" she said hastily, and walked away, moving her eyebrows agitatedly. But after standing in the kitchen for a moment, motionless, thoughtful, deeply preoccupied, she washed her hands and approached her son again. "I want to ask you," she said in a low, soft voice, "what you read all the time." He put his book aside and said to her: "Sit down, mother." The mother sat down heavily at his side, and straightening herself into an attitude of intense, painful expectation waited for something momentous. Without looking at her, Pavel spoke, not loudly, but for some reason very sternly: "I am reading forbidden books. They are forbidden to be read because they tell the truth about our--about the workingmen's life. They are printed in secret, and if I am found with them I will be put in prison--I will be put in prison because I want to know the truth." Breathing suddenly became difficult for her. Opening her eyes wide she looked at her son, and he seemed to her new, as if a stranger. His voice was different, lower, deeper, more sonorous. He pinched his thin, downy mustache, and looked oddly askance into the corner. She grew anxious for her son and pitied him. "Why do you do this, Pasha?" He raised his head, looked at her, and said in a low, calm voice: "I want to know the truth." His voice sounded placid, but firm; and his eyes flashed resolution. She understood with her heart that her son had consecrated himself forever to something mysterious and awful. Everything in life had always appeared to her inevitable; she was accustomed to submit without thought, and now, too, she only wept softly, finding no words, but in her heart she was oppressed with sorrow and distress. "Don't cry," said Pavel, kindly and softly; and it seemed to her that he was bidding her farewell. "Think what kind of a life you are leading. You are forty years old, and have you lived? Father beat you. I understand now that he avenged his wretchedness on your body, the wretchedness of his life. It pressed upon him, and he did not know whence it came. He worked for thirty years; he began to work when the whole factory occupied but two buildings; now there are seven of them. The mills grow, and people die, working for them." She listened to him eagerly and awestruck. His eyes burned with a beautiful radiance. Leaning forward on the table he moved nearer to his mother, and looking straight into her face, wet with tears, he delivered his first speech to her about the truth which he had now come to understand. With the _naïveté_ of youth, and the ardor of a young student proud of his knowledge, religiously confiding in its truth, he spoke about everything that was clear to him, and spoke not so much for his mother as to verify and strengthen his own opinions. At times he halted, finding no words, and then he saw before him a disturbed face, in which dimly shone a pair of kind eyes clouded with tears. They looked on with awe and perplexity. He was sorry for his mother, and began to speak again, about herself and her life. "What joys did you know?" he asked. "What sort of a past can you recall?" She listened and shook her head dolefully, feeling something new, unknown to her, both sorrowful and gladsome, like a caress to her troubled and aching heart. It was the first time she had heard such language about herself, her own life. It awakened in her misty, dim thoughts, long dormant; gently roused an almost extinct feeling of rebellion, perplexed dissatisfaction--thoughts and feelings of a remote youth. She often discussed life with her neighbors, spoke a great deal about everything; but all, herself included, only complained; no one explained why life was so hard and burdensome. And now her son sat before her; and what he said about her--his eyes, his face, his words--it all clutched at her heart, filling her with a sense of pride for her son, who truly understood the life of his mother, and spoke the truth about her and her sufferings, and pitied her. Mothers are not pitied. She knew it. She did not understand Pavel when speaking about matters not pertaining to herself, but all he said about her own woman's existence was bitterly familiar and true. Hence it seemed to her that every word of his was perfectly true, and her bosom throbbed with a gentle sensation which warmed it more and more with an unknown, kindly caress. "What do you want to do, then?" she asked, interrupting his speech. "Study and then teach others. We workingmen must study. We must learn, we must understand why life is so hard for us." It was sweet to her to see that his blue eyes, always so serious and stern, now glowed with warmth, softly illuminating something new within him. A soft, contented smile played around her lips, although the tears still trembled in the wrinkles of her face. She wavered between two feelings: pride in her son who desired the good of all people, had pity for all, and understood the sorrow and affliction of life; and the involuntary regret for his youth, because he did not speak like everybody else, because he resolved to enter alone into a fight against the life to which all, including herself, were accustomed. She wanted to say to him: "My dear, what can you do? People will crush you. You will perish." But it was pleasant to her to listen to his speeches, and she feared to disturb her delight in her son, who suddenly revealed himself so new and wise, even if somewhat strange. Pavel saw the smile around his mother's lips, the attention in her face, the love in her eyes; and it seemed to him that he compelled her to understand his truth; and youthful pride in the power of his word heightened his faith in himself. Seized with enthusiasm, he continued to talk, now smiling, now frowning. Occasionally hatred sounded in his words; and when his mother heard its bitter, harsh accents she shook her head, frightened, and asked in a low voice: "Is it so, Pasha?" "It is so!" he answered firmly. And he told her about people who wanted the good of men, and who sowed truth among them; and because of this the enemies of life hunted them down like beasts, thrust them into prisons, and exiled them, and set them to hard labor. "I have seen such people!" he exclaimed passionately. "They are the best people on earth!" These people filled the mother with terror, and she wanted to ask her son: "Is it so, Pasha?" But she hesitated, and leaning back she listened to the stories of people incomprehensible to her, who taught her son to speak and think words and thoughts so dangerous to him. Finally she said: "It will soon be daylight. You ought to go to bed. You've got to go to work." "Yes, I'll go to bed at once," he assented. "Did you understand me?" "I did," she said, drawing a deep breath. Tears rolled down from her eyes again, and breaking into sobs she added: "You will perish, my son!" Pavel walked up and down the room. "Well, now you know what I am doing and where I am going. I told you all. I beg of you, mother, if you love me, do not hinder me!" "My darling, my beloved!" she cried, "maybe it would be better for me not to have known anything!" He took her hand and pressed it firmly in his. The word "mother," pronounced by him with feverish emphasis, and that clasp of the hand so new and strange, moved her. "I will do nothing!" she said in a broken voice. "Only be on your guard! Be on your guard!" Not knowing what he should be on his guard against, nor how to warn him, she added mournfully: "You are getting so thin." And with a look of affectionate warmth, which seemed to embrace his firm, well-shaped body, she said hastily, and in a low voice: "God be with you! Live as you want to. I will not hinder you. One thing only I beg of you--do not speak to people unguardedly! You must be on the watch with people; they all hate one another. They live in greed and envy; all are glad to do injury; people persecute out of sheer amusement. When you begin to accuse them and to judge them, they will hate you, and will hound you to destruction!" Pavel stood in the doorway listening to the melancholy speech, and when the mother had finished he said with a smile: "Yes, people are sorry creatures; but when I came to recognize that there is truth in the world, people became better." He smiled again and added: "I do not know how it happened myself! From childhood I feared everybody; as I grew up I began to hate everybody, some for their meanness, others--well, I do not know why--just so! And now I see all the people in a different way. I am grieved for them all! I cannot understand it; but my heart turned softer when I recognized that there is truth in men, and that not all are to blame for their foulness and filth." He was silent as if listening to something within himself. Then he said in a low voice and thoughtfully: "That's how truth lives." She looked at him tenderly. "May God protect you!" she sighed. "It is a dangerous change that has come upon you." When he had fallen asleep, the mother rose carefully from her bed and came gently into her son's room. Pavel's swarthy, resolute, stern face was clearly outlined against the white pillow. Pressing her hand to her bosom, the mother stood at his bedside. Her lips moved mutely, and great tears rolled down her cheeks. CHAPTER III Again they lived in silence, distant and yet near to each other. Once, in the middle of the week, on a holiday, as he was preparing to leave the house he said to his mother: "I expect some people here on Saturday." "What people?" she asked. "Some people from our village, and others from the city." "From the city?" repeated the mother, shaking her head. And suddenly she broke into sobs. "Now, mother, why this?" cried Pavel resentfully. "What for?" Drying her face with her apron, she answered quietly: "I don't know, but it is the way I feel." He paced up and down the room, then halting before her, said: "Are you afraid?" "I am afraid," she acknowledged. "Those people from the city--who knows them?" He bent down to look in her face, and said in an offended tone, and, it seemed to her, angrily, like his father: "This fear is what is the ruin of us all. And some dominate us; they take advantage of our fear and frighten us still more. Mark this: as long as people are afraid, they will rot like the birches in the marsh. We must grow bold; it is time! "It's all the same," he said, as he turned from her; "they'll meet in my house, anyway." "Don't be angry with me!" the mother begged sadly. "How can I help being afraid? All my life I have lived in fear!" "Forgive me!" was his gentler reply, "but I cannot do otherwise," and he walked away. For three days her heart was in a tremble, sinking in fright each time she remembered that strange people were soon to come to her house. She could not picture them to herself, but it seemed to her they were terrible people. It was they who had shown her son the road he was going. On Saturday night Pavel came from the factory, washed himself, put on clean clothes, and when walking out of the house said to his mother without looking at her: "When they come, tell them I'll be back soon. Let them wait a while. And please don't be afraid. They are people like all other people." She sank into her seat almost fainting. Her son looked at her soberly. "Maybe you'd better go away somewhere," he suggested. The thought offended her. Shaking her head in dissent, she said: "No, it's all the same. What for?" It was the end of November. During the day a dry, fine snow had fallen upon the frozen earth, and now she heard it crunching outside the window under her son's feet as he walked away. A dense crust of darkness settled immovably upon the window panes, and seemed to lie in hostile watch for something. Supporting herself on the bench, the mother sat and waited, looking at the door. It seemed to her that people were stealthily and watchfully walking about the house in the darkness, stooping and looking about on all sides, strangely attired and silent. There around the house some one was already coming, fumbling with his hands along the wall. A whistle was heard. It circled around like the notes of a fine chord, sad and melodious, wandered musingly into the wilderness of darkness, and seemed to be searching for something. It came nearer. Suddenly it died away under the window, as if it had entered into the wood of the wall. The noise of feet was heard on the porch. The mother started, and rose with a strained, frightened look in her eyes. The door opened. At first a head with a big, shaggy hat thrust itself into the room; then a slender, bending body crawled in, straightened itself out, and deliberately raised its right hand. "Good evening!" said the man, in a thick, bass voice, breathing heavily. The mother bowed in silence. "Pavel is not at home yet?" The stranger leisurely removed his short fur jacket, raised one foot, whipped the snow from his boot with his hat, then did the same with the other foot, flung his hat into a corner, and rocking on his thin legs walked into the room, looking back at the imprints he left on the floor. He approached the table, examined it as if to satisfy himself of its solidity, and finally sat down and, covering his mouth with his hand, yawned. His head was perfectly round and close-cropped, his face shaven except for a thin mustache, the ends of which pointed downward. After carefully scrutinizing the room with his large, gray, protuberant eyes, he crossed his legs, and, leaning his head over the table, inquired: "Is this your own house, or do you rent it?" The mother, sitting opposite him, answered: "We rent it." "Not a very fine house," he remarked. "Pasha will soon be here; wait," said the mother quietly. "Why, yes, I am waiting," said the man. His calmness, his deep, sympathetic voice, and the candor and simplicity of his face encouraged the mother. He looked at her openly and kindly, and a merry sparkle played in the depths of his transparent eyes. In the entire angular, stooping figure, with its thin legs, there was something comical, yet winning. He was dressed in a blue shirt, and dark, loose trousers thrust into his boots. She was seized with the desire to ask him who he was, whence he came, and whether he had known her son long. But suddenly he himself put a question, leaning forward with a swing of his whole body. "Who made that hole in your forehead, mother?" His question was uttered in a kind voice and with a noticeable smile in his eyes; but the woman was offended by the sally. She pressed her lips together tightly, and after a pause rejoined with cold civility: "And what business is it of yours, sir?" With the same swing of his whole body toward her, he said: "Now, don't get angry! I ask because my foster mother had her head smashed just exactly like yours. It was her man who did it for her once, with a last--he was a shoemaker, you see. She was a washerwoman and he was a shoemaker. It was after she had taken me as her son that she found him somewhere, a drunkard, and married him, to her great misfortune. He beat her--I tell you, my skin almost burst with terror." The mother felt herself disarmed by his openness. Moreover, it occurred to her that perhaps her son would be displeased with her harsh reply to this odd personage. Smiling guiltily she said: "I am not angry, but--you see--you asked so very soon. It was my good man, God rest his soul! who treated me to the cut. Are you a Tartar?" The stranger stretched out his feet, and smiled so broad a smile that the ends of his mustache traveled to the nape of his neck. Then he said seriously: "Not yet. I'm not a Tartar yet." "I asked because I rather thought the way you spoke was not exactly Russian," she explained, catching his joke. "I am better than a Russian, I am!" said the guest laughingly. "I am a Little Russian from the city of Kanyev." "And have you been here long?" "I lived in the city about a month, and I came to your factory about a month ago. I found some good people, your son and a few others. I will live here for a while," he said, twirling his mustache. The man pleased the mother, and, yielding to the impulse to repay him in some way for his kind words about her son, she questioned again: "Maybe you'd like to have a glass of tea?" "What! An entertainment all to myself!" he answered, raising his shoulders. "I'll wait for the honor until we are all here." This allusion to the coming of others recalled her fear to her. "If they all are only like this one!" was her ardent wish. Again steps were heard on the porch. The door opened quickly, and the mother rose. This time she was taken completely aback by the newcomer in her kitchen--a poorly and lightly dressed girl of medium height, with the simple face of a peasant woman, and a head of thick, dark hair. Smiling she said in a low voice: "Am I late?" "Why, no!" answered the Little Russian, looking out of the living room. "Come on foot?" "Of course! Are you the mother of Pavel Vlasov? Good evening! My name is Natasha." "And your other name?" inquired the mother. "Vasilyevna. And yours?" "Pelagueya Nilovna." "So here we are all acquainted." "Yes," said the mother, breathing more easily, as if relieved, and looking at the girl with a smile. The Little Russian helped her off with her cloak, and inquired: "Is it cold?" "Out in the open, very! The wind--goodness!" Her voice was musical and clear, her mouth small and smiling, her body round and vigorous. Removing her wraps, she rubbed her ruddy cheeks briskly with her little hands, red with the cold, and walking lightly and quickly she passed into the room, the heels of her shoes rapping sharply on the floor. "She goes without overshoes," the mother noted silently. "Indeed it is cold," repeated the girl. "I'm frozen through--ooh!" "I'll warm up the samovar for you!" the mother said, bustling and solicitous. "Ready in a moment," she called from the kitchen. Somehow it seemed to her she had known the girl long, and even loved her with the tender, compassionate love of a mother. She was glad to see her; and recalling her guest's bright blue eyes, she smiled contentedly, as she prepared the samovar and listened to the conversation in the room. "Why so gloomy, Nakhodka?" asked the girl. "The widow has good eyes," answered the Little Russian. "I was thinking maybe my mother has such eyes. You know, I keep thinking of her as alive." "You said she was dead?" "That's my adopted mother. I am speaking now of my real mother. It seems to me that perhaps she may be somewhere in Kiev begging alms and drinking whisky." "Why do you think such awful things?" "I don't know. And the policemen pick her up on the street drunk and beat her." "Oh, you poor soul," thought the mother, and sighed. Natasha muttered something hotly and rapidly; and again the sonorous voice of the Little Russian was heard. "Ah, you are young yet, comrade," he said. "You haven't eaten enough onions yet. Everyone has a mother, none the less people are bad. For although it is hard to rear children, it is still harder to teach a man to be good." "What strange ideas he has," the mother thought, and for a moment she felt like contradicting the Little Russian and telling him that here was she who would have been glad to teach her son good, but knew nothing herself. The door, however, opened and in came Nikolay Vyesovshchikov, the son of the old thief Daniel, known in the village as a misanthrope. He always kept at a sullen distance from people, who retaliated by making sport of him. "You, Nikolay! How's that?" she asked in surprise. Without replying he merely looked at the mother with his little gray eyes, and wiped his pockmarked, high-cheeked face with the broad palm of his hand. "Is Pavel at home?" he asked hoarsely. "No." He looked into the room and said: "Good evening, comrades." "He, too. Is it possible?" wondered the mother resentfully, and was greatly surprised to see Natasha put her hand out to him in a kind, glad welcome. The next to come were two young men, scarcely more than boys. One of them the mother knew. He was Yakob, the son of the factory watchman, Somov. The other, with a sharp-featured face, high forehead, and curly hair, was unknown to her; but he, too, was not terrible. Finally Pavel appeared, and with him two men, both of whose faces she recognized as those of workmen in the factory. "You've prepared the samovar! That's fine. Thank you!" said Pavel as he saw what his mother had done. "Perhaps I should get some vodka," she suggested, not knowing how to express her gratitude to him for something which as yet she did not understand. "No, we don't need it!" he responded, removing his coat and smiling affectionately at her. It suddenly occurred to her that her son, by way of jest, had purposely exaggerated the danger of the gathering. "Are these the ones they call illegal people?" she whispered. "The very ones!" answered Pavel, and passed into the room. She looked lovingly after him and thought to herself condescendingly: "Mere children!" When the samovar boiled, and she brought it into the room, she found the guests sitting in a close circle around the table, and Natasha installed in the corner under the lamp with a book in her hands. "In order to understand why people live so badly," said Natasha. "And why they are themselves so bad," put in the Little Russian. "It is necessary to see how they began to live----" "See, my dears, see!" mumbled the mother, making the tea. They all stopped talking. "What is the matter, mother?" asked Pavel, knitting his brows. "What?" She looked around, and seeing the eyes of all upon her she explained with embarrassment, "I was just speaking to myself." Natasha laughed and Pavel smiled, but the Little Russian said: "Thank you for the tea, mother." "Hasn't drunk it yet and thanks me already," she commented inwardly. Looking at her son, she asked: "I am not in your way?" "How can the hostess in her own home be in the way of her guests?" replied Natasha, and then continuing with childish plaintiveness: "Mother dear, give me tea quick! I am shivering with cold; my feet are all frozen." "In a moment, in a moment!" exclaimed the mother, hurrying. Having drunk a cup of tea, Natasha drew a long breath, brushed her hair back from her forehead, and began to read from a large yellow-covered book with pictures. The mother, careful not to make a noise with the dishes, poured tea into the glasses, and strained her untrained mind to listen to the girl's fluent reading. The melodious voice blended with the thin, musical hum of the samovar. The clear, simple narrative of savage people who lived in caves and killed the beasts with stones floated and quivered like a dainty ribbon in the room. It sounded like a tale, and the mother looked up to her son occasionally, wishing to ask him what was illegal in the story about wild men. But she soon ceased to follow the narrative and began to scrutinize the guests, unnoticed by them or her son. [Illustration: "The mother ... strained her untrained mind to listen."] Pavel sat at Natasha's side. He was the handsomest of them all. Natasha bent down very low over the book. At times she tossed back the thin curls that kept running down over her forehead, and lowered her voice to say something not in the book, with a kind look at the faces of her auditors. The Little Russian bent his broad chest over a corner of the table, and squinted his eyes in the effort to see the worn ends of his mustache, which he constantly twirled. Vyesovshchikov sat on his chair straight as a pole, his palms resting on his knees, and his pockmarked face, browless and thin-lipped, immobile as a mask. He kept his narrow-eyed gaze stubbornly fixed upon the reflection of his face in the glittering brass of the samovar. He seemed not even to breathe. Little Somov moved his lips mutely, as if repeating to himself the words in the book; and his curly-haired companion, with bent body, elbows on knees, his face supported on his hands, smiled abstractedly. One of the men who had entered at the same time as Pavel, a slender young chap with red, curly hair and merry green eyes, apparently wanted to say something; for he kept turning around impatiently. The other, light-haired and closely cropped, stroked his head with his hand and looked down on the floor so that his face remained invisible. It was warm in the room, and the atmosphere was genial. The mother responded to this peculiar charm, which she had never before felt. She was affected by the purling of Natasha's voice, mingled with the quavering hum of the samovar, and recalled the noisy evening parties of her youth--the coarseness of the young men, whose breath always smelled of vodka--their cynical jokes. She remembered all this, and an oppressive sense of pity for her own self gently stirred her worn, outraged heart. Before her rose the scene of the wooing of her husband. At one of the parties he had seized her in a dark porch, and pressing her with his whole body to the wall asked in a gruff, vexed voice: "Will you marry me?" She had been pained and had felt offended; but he rudely dug his fingers into her flesh, snorted heavily, and breathed his hot, humid breath into her face. She struggled to tear herself out of his grasp. "Hold on!" he roared. "Answer me! Well?" Out of breath, shamed and insulted, she remained silent. "Don't put on airs now, you fool! I know your kind. You are mighty pleased." Some one opened the door. He let her go leisurely, saying: "I will send a matchmaker to you next Sunday." And he did. The mother covered her eyes and heaved a deep sigh. * * * * * "I do not want to know how people used to live, but how they ought to live!" The dull, dissatisfied voice of Vyesovshchikov was heard in the room. "That's it!" corroborated the red-headed man, rising. "And I disagree!" cried Somov. "If we are to go forward, we must know everything." "True, true!" said the curly-headed youth in a low tone. A heated discussion ensued; and the words flashed like tongues of fire in a wood pile. The mother did not understand what they were shouting about. All faces glowed in an aureole of animation, but none grew angry, no one spoke the harsh, offensive words so familiar to her. "They restrain themselves on account of a woman's presence," she concluded. The serious face of Natasha pleased her. The young woman looked at all these young men so considerately, with the air of an elder person toward children. "Wait, comrades," she broke out suddenly. And they all grew silent and turned their eyes upon her. "Those who say that we ought to know everything are right. We ought to illumine ourselves with the light of reason, so that the people in the dark may see us; we ought to be able to answer every question honestly and truly. We must know all the truth, all the falsehood." The Little Russian listened and nodded his head in accompaniment to her words. Vyesovshchikov, the red-haired fellow, and the other factory worker, who had come with Pavel, stood in a close circle of three. For some reason the mother did not like them. When Natasha ceased talking, Pavel arose and asked calmly: "Is filling our stomachs the only thing we want?" "No!" he answered himself, looking hard in the direction of the three. "We want to be people. We must show those who sit on our necks, and cover up our eyes, that we see everything, that we are not foolish, we are not animals, and that we do not want merely to eat, but also to live like decent human beings. We must show our enemies that our life of servitude, of hard toil which they impose upon us, does not hinder us from measuring up to them in intellect, and as to spirit, that we rise far above them!" The mother listened to his words, and a feeling of pride in her son stirred her bosom--how eloquently he spoke! "People with well-filled stomachs are, after all, not a few, but honest people there are none," said the Little Russian. "We ought to build a bridge across the bog of this rotten life to a future of soulful goodness. That's our task, that's what we have to do, comrades!" "When the time is come to fight, it's not the time to cure the finger," said Vyesovshchikov dully. "There will be enough breaking of our bones before we get to fighting!" the Little Russian put in merrily. It was already past midnight when the group began to break up. The first to go were Vyesovshchikov and the red-haired man--which again displeased the mother. "Hm! How they hurry!" she thought, nodding them a not very friendly farewell. "Will you see me home, Nakhodka?" asked Natasha. "Why, of course," answered the Little Russian. When Natasha put on her wraps in the kitchen, the mother said to her: "Your stockings are too thin for this time of the year. Let me knit some woolen ones for you, will you, please?" "Thank you, Pelagueya Nilovna. Woolen stockings scratch," Natasha answered, smiling. "I'll make them so they won't scratch." Natasha looked at her rather perplexedly, and her fixed serious glance hurt the mother. "Pardon me my stupidity; like my good will, it's from my heart, you know," she added in a low voice. "How kind you are!" Natasha answered in the same voice, giving her a hasty pressure of the hand and walking out. "Good night, mother!" said the Little Russian, looking into her eyes. His bending body followed Natasha out to the porch. The mother looked at her son. He stood in the room at the door and smiled. "The evening was fine," he declared, nodding his head energetically. "It was fine! But now I think you'd better go to bed; it's time." "And it's time for you, too. I'm going in a minute." She busied herself about the table gathering the dishes together, satisfied and even glowing with a pleasurable agitation. She was glad that everything had gone so well and had ended peaceably. "You arranged it nicely, Pavlusha. They certainly are good people. The Little Russian is such a hearty fellow. And the young lady, what a bright, wise girl she is! Who is she?" "A teacher," answered Pavel, pacing up and down the room. "Ah! Such a poor thing! Dressed so poorly! Ah, so poorly! It doesn't take long to catch a cold. And where are her relatives?" "In Moscow," said Pavel, stopping before his mother. "Look! her father is a rich man; he is in the hardware business, and owns much property. He drove her out of the house because she got into this movement. She grew up in comfort and warmth, she was coddled and indulged in everything she desired--and now she walks four miles at night all by herself." The mother was shocked. She stood in the middle of the room, and looked mutely at her son. Then she asked quietly: "Is she going to the city?" "Yes." "And is she not afraid?" "No," said Pavel smiling. "Why did she go? She could have stayed here overnight, and slept with me." "That wouldn't do. She might have been seen here to-morrow morning, and we don't want that; nor does she." The mother recollected her previous anxieties, looked thoughtfully through the window, and asked: "I cannot understand, Pasha, what there is dangerous in all this, or illegal. Why, you are not doing anything bad, are you?" She was not quite assured of the safety and propriety of his conduct, and was eager for a confirmation from her son. But he looked calmly into her eyes, and declared in a firm voice: "There is nothing bad in what we're doing, and there's not going to be. And yet the prison is awaiting us all. You may as well know it." Her hands trembled. "Maybe God will grant you escape somehow," she said with sunken voice. "No," said the son kindly, but decidedly. "I cannot lie to you. We will not escape." He smiled. "Now go to bed. You are tired. Good night." Left alone, she walked up to the window, and stood there looking into the street. Outside it was cold and cheerless. The wind howled, blowing the snow from the roofs of the little sleeping houses. Striking against the walls and whispering something, quickly it fell upon the ground and drifted the white clouds of dry snowflakes across the street. "O Christ in heaven, have mercy upon us!" prayed the mother. The tears began to gather in her eyes, as fear returned persistently to her heart, and like a moth in the night she seemed to see fluttering the woe of which her son spoke with such composure and assurance. Before her eyes as she gazed a smooth plain of snow spread out in the distance. The wind, carrying white, shaggy masses, raced over the plain, piping cold, shrill whistles. Across the snowy expanse moved a girl's figure, dark and solitary, rocking to and fro. The wind fluttered her dress, clogged her footsteps, and drove pricking snowflakes into her face. Walking was difficult; the little feet sank into the snow. Cold and fearful the girl bent forward, like a blade of grass, the sport of the wanton wind. To the right of her on the marsh stood the dark wall of the forest; the bare birches and aspens quivered and rustled with a mournful cry. Yonder in the distance, before her, the lights of the city glimmered dimly. "Lord in heaven, have mercy!" the mother muttered again, shuddering with the cold and horror of an unformed fear. CHAPTER IV The days glided by one after the other, like the beads of a rosary, and grew into weeks and months. Every Saturday Pavel's friends gathered in his house; and each meeting formed a step up a long stairway, which led somewhere into the distance, gradually lifting the people higher and higher. But its top remained invisible. New people kept coming. The small room of the Vlasovs became crowded and close. Natasha arrived every Saturday night, cold and tired, but always fresh and lively, in inexhaustible good spirits. The mother made stockings, and herself put them on the little feet. Natasha laughed at first; but suddenly grew silent and thoughtful, and said in a low voice to the mother: "I had a nurse who was also ever so kind. How strange, Pelagueya Nilovna! The workingmen live such a hard, outraged life, and yet there is more heart, more goodness in them than in--those!" And she waved her hand, pointing somewhere far, very far from herself. "See what sort of a person you are," the older woman answered. "You have left your own family and everything--" She was unable to finish her thought, and heaving a sigh looked silently into Natasha's face with a feeling of gratitude to the girl for she knew not what. She sat on the floor before Natasha, who smiled and fell to musing. "I have abandoned my family?" she repeated, bending her head down. "That's nothing. My father is a stupid, coarse man--my brother also--and a drunkard, besides. My oldest sister--unhappy, wretched thing--married a man much older than herself, very rich, a bore and greedy. But my mother I am sorry for! She's a simple woman like you, a beaten-down, frightened creature, so tiny, like a little mouse--she runs so quickly and is afraid of everybody. And sometimes I want to see her so--my mother!" "My poor thing!" said the mother sadly, shaking her head. The girl quickly threw up her head and cried out: "Oh, no! At times I feel such joy, such happiness!" Her face paled and her blue eyes gleamed. Placing her hands on the mother's shoulders she said with a deep voice issuing from her very heart, quietly as if in an ecstasy: "If you knew--if you but understood what a great, joyous work we are doing! You will come to feel it!" she exclaimed with conviction. A feeling akin to envy touched the heart of the mother. Rising from the floor she said plaintively: "I am too old for that--ignorant and old." Pavel spoke more and more often and at greater length, discussed more and more hotly, and--grew thinner and thinner. It seemed to his mother that when he spoke to Natasha or looked at her his eyes turned softer, his voice sounded fonder, and his entire bearing became simpler. "Heaven grant!" she thought; and imagining Natasha as her daughter-in-law, she smiled inwardly. Whenever at the meetings the disputes waxed too hot and stormy, the Little Russian stood up, and rocking himself to and fro like the tongue of a bell, he spoke in his sonorous, resonant voice simple and good words which allayed their excitement and recalled them to their purpose. Vyesovshchikov always kept hurrying everybody on somewhere. He and the red-haired youth called Samoylov were the first to begin all disputes. On their side were always Ivan Bukin, with the round head and the white eyebrows and lashes, who looked as if he had been hung out to dry, or washed out with lye; and the curly-headed, lofty-browed Fedya Mazin. Modest Yakob Somov, always smoothly combed and clean, spoke little and briefly, with a quiet, serious voice, and always took sides with Pavel and the Little Russian. Sometimes, instead of Natasha, Alexey Ivanovich, a native of some remote government, came from the city. He wore eyeglasses, his beard was shiny, and he spoke with a peculiar singing voice. He produced the impression of a stranger from a far-distant land. He spoke about simple matters--about family life, about children, about commerce, the police, the price of bread and meat--about everything by which people live from day to day; and in everything he discovered fraud, confusion, and stupidity, sometimes setting these matters in a humorous light, but always showing their decided disadvantage to the people. To the mother, too, it seemed that he had come from far away, from another country, where all the people lived a simple, honest, easy life, and that here everything was strange to him, that he could not get accustomed to this life and accept it as inevitable, that it displeased him, and that it aroused in him a calm determination to rearrange it after his own model. His face was yellowish, with thin, radiate wrinkles around his eyes, his voice low, and his hands always warm. In greeting the mother he would enfold her entire hand in his long, powerful fingers, and after such a vigorous hand clasp she felt more at ease and lighter of heart. Other people came from the city, oftenest among them a tall, well-built young girl with large eyes set in a thin, pale face. She was called Sashenka. There was something manly in her walk and movements; she knit her thick, dark eyebrows in a frown, and when she spoke the thin nostrils of her straight nose quivered. She was the first to say, "We are socialists!" Her voice when she said it was loud and strident. When the mother heard this word, she stared in dumb fright into the girl's face. But Sashenka, half closing her eyes, said sternly and resolutely: "We must give up all our forces to the cause of the regeneration of life; we must realize that we will receive no recompense." The mother understood that the socialists had killed the Czar. It had happened in the days of her youth; and people had then said that the landlords, wishing to revenge themselves on the Czar for liberating the peasant serfs, had vowed not to cut their hair until the Czar should be killed. These were the persons who had been called socialists. And now she could not understand why it was that her son and his friends were socialists. When they had all departed, she asked Pavel: "Pavlusha, are you a socialist?" "Yes," he said, standing before her, straight and stalwart as always. "Why?" The mother heaved a heavy sigh, and lowering her eyes, said: "So, Pavlusha? Why, they are against the Czar; they killed one." Pavel walked up and down the room, ran his hand across his face, and, smiling, said: "We don't need to do that!" He spoke to her for a long while in a low, serious voice. She looked into his face and thought: "He will do nothing bad; he is incapable of doing bad!" And thereafter the terrible word was repeated with increasing frequency; its sharpness wore off, and it became as familiar to her ear as scores of other words unintelligible to her. But Sashenka did not please her, and when she came the mother felt troubled and ill at ease. Once she said to the Little Russian, with an expression of dissatisfaction about the mouth: "What a stern person this Sashenka is! Flings her commands around!--You must do this and you must do that!" The Little Russian laughed aloud. "Well said, mother! You struck the nail right on the head! Hey, Pavel?" And with a wink to the mother, he said with a jovial gleam in his eyes: "You can't drain the blue blood out of a person even with a pump!" Pavel remarked dryly: "She is a good woman!" His face glowered. "And that's true, too!" the Little Russian corroborated. "Only she does not understand that she ought to----" They started up an argument about something the mother did not understand. The mother noticed, also, that Sashenka was most stern with Pavel, and that sometimes she even scolded him. Pavel smiled, was silent, and looked in the girl's face with that soft look he had formerly given Natasha. This likewise displeased the mother. The gatherings increased in number, and began to be held twice a week; and when the mother observed with what avidity the young people listened to the speeches of her son and the Little Russian, to the interesting stories of Sashenka, Natasha, Alexey Ivanovich, and the other people from the city, she forgot her fears and shook her head sadly as she recalled the days of her youth. Sometimes they sang songs, the simple, familiar melodies, aloud and merrily. But often they sang new songs, the words and music in perfect accord, sad and quaint in tune. These they sang in an undertone, pensively and seriously as church hymns are chanted. Their faces grew pale, yet hot, and a mighty force made itself felt in their ringing words. "It is time for us to sing these songs in the street," said Vyesovshchikov somberly. And sometimes the mother was struck by the spirit of lively, boisterous hilarity that took sudden possession of them. It was incomprehensible to her. It usually happened on the evenings when they read in the papers about the working people in other countries. Then their eyes sparkled with bold, animated joy; they became strangely, childishly happy; the room rang with merry peals of laughter, and they struck one another on the shoulder affectionately. "Capital fellows, our comrades the French!" cried some one, as if intoxicated with his own mirth. "Long live our comrades, the workingmen of Italy!" they shouted another time. And sending these calls into the remote distance to friends who did not know them, who could not have understood their language, they seemed to feel confident that these people unknown to them heard and comprehended their enthusiasm and their ecstasy. The Little Russian spoke, his eyes beaming, his love larger than the love of the others: "Comrades, it would be well to write to them over there! Let them know that they have friends living in far-away Russia, workingmen who confess and believe in the same religion as they, comrades who pursue the same aims as they, and who rejoice in their victories!" And all, with smiles on their faces dreamily spoke at length of the Germans, the Italians, the Englishmen, and the Swedes, of the working people of all countries, as of their friends, as of people near to their hearts, whom without seeing they loved and respected, whose joys they shared, whose pain they felt. In the small room a vast feeling was born of the universal kinship of the workers of the world, at the same time its masters and its slaves, who had already been freed from the bondage of prejudice and who felt themselves the new masters of life. This feeling blended all into a single soul; it moved the mother, and, although inaccessible to her, it straightened and emboldened her, as it were, with its force, with its joys, with its triumphant, youthful vigor, intoxicating, caressing, full of hope. "What queer people you are!" said the mother to the Little Russian one day. "All are your comrades--the Armenians and the Jews and the Austrians. You speak about all as of your friends; you grieve for all, and you rejoice for all!" "For all, mother dear, for all! The world is ours! The world is for the workers! For us there is no nation, no race. For us there are only comrades and foes. All the workingmen are our comrades; all the rich, all the authorities are our foes. When you see how numerous we workingmen are, how tremendous the power of the spirit in us, then your heart is seized with such joy, such happiness, such a great holiday sings in your bosom! And, mother, the Frenchman and the German feel the same way when they look upon life, and the Italian also. We are all children of one mother--the great, invincible idea of the brotherhood of the workers of all countries over all the earth. This idea grows, it warms us like the sun; it is a second sun in the heaven of justice, and this heaven resides in the workingman's heart. Whoever he be, whatever his name, a socialist is our brother in spirit now and always, and through all the ages forever and ever!" This intoxicated and childish joy, this bright and firm faith came over the company more and more frequently; and it grew ever stronger, ever mightier. And when the mother saw this, she felt that in very truth a great dazzling light had been born into the world like the sun in the sky and visible to her eyes. On occasions when his father had stolen something again and was in prison, Nikolay would announce to his comrades: "Now we can hold our meetings at our house. The police will think us thieves, and they love thieves!" Almost every evening after work one of Pavel's comrades came to his house, read with him, and copied something from the books. So greatly occupied were they that they hardly even took the time to wash. They ate their supper and drank tea with the books in their hands; and their talks became less and less intelligible to the mother. "We must have a newspaper!" Pavel said frequently. Life grew ever more hurried and feverish; there was a constant rushing from house to house, a passing from one book to another, like the flirting of bees from flower to flower. "They are talking about us!" said Vyesovshchikov once. "We must get away soon." "What's a quail for but to be caught in the snare?" retorted the Little Russian. Vlasova liked the Little Russian more and more. When he called her "mother," it was like a child's hand patting her on the cheek. On Sunday, if Pavel had no time, he chopped wood for her; once he came with a board on his shoulder, and quickly and skillfully replaced the rotten step on the porch. Another time he repaired the tottering fence with just as little ado. He whistled as he worked. It was a beautifully sad and wistful whistle. Once the mother said to the son: "Suppose we take the Little Russian in as a boarder. It will be better for both of you. You won't have to run to each other so much!" "Why need you trouble and crowd yourself?" asked Pavel, shrugging his shoulders. "There you have it! All my life I've had trouble for I don't know what. For a good person it's worth the while." "Do as you please. If he comes I'll be glad." And the Little Russian moved into their home. CHAPTER V The little house at the edge of the village aroused attention. Its walls already felt the regard of scores of suspecting eyes. The motley wings of rumor hovered restlessly above them. People tried to surprise the secret hidden within the house by the ravine. They peeped into the windows at night. Now and then somebody would rap on the pane, and quickly take to his heels in fright. Once the tavern keeper stopped Vlasova on the street. He was a dapper old man, who always wore a black silk neckerchief around his red, flabby neck, and a thick, lilac-colored waistcoat of velvet around his body. On his sharp, glistening nose there always sat a pair of glasses with tortoise-shell rims, which secured him the sobriquet of "bony eyes." In a single breath and without awaiting an answer, he plied Vlasova with dry, crackling words: "How are you, Pelagueya Nilovna, how are you? How is your son? Thinking of marrying him off, hey? He's a youth full ripe for matrimony. The sooner a son is married off, the safer it is for his folks. A man with a family preserves himself better both in the spirit and the flesh. With a family he is like mushrooms in vinegar. If I were in your place I would marry him off. Our times require a strict watch over the animal called man; people are beginning to live in their brains. Men have run amuck with their thoughts, and they do things that are positively criminal. The church of God is avoided by the young folk; they shun the public places, and assemble in secret in out-of-the-way corners. They speak in whispers. Why speak in whispers, pray? All this they don't dare say before people in the tavern, for example. What is it, I ask? A secret? The secret place is our holy church, as old as the apostles. All the other secrets hatched in the corners are the offspring of delusions. I wish you good health." Raising his hand in an affected manner, he lifted his cap, and waving it in the air, walked away, leaving the mother to her perplexity. Vlasova's neighbor, Marya Korsunova, the blacksmith's widow, who sold food at the factory, on meeting the mother in the market place also said to her: "Look out for your son, Pelagueya!" "What's the matter?" "They're talking!" Marya tendered the information in a hushed voice. "And they don't say any good, mother of mine! They speak as if he's getting up a sort of union, something like those Flagellants--sects, that's the name! They'll whip one another like the Flagellants----" "Stop babbling nonsense, Marya! Enough!" "I'm not babbling nonsense! I talk because I know." The mother communicated all these conversations to her son. He shrugged his shoulders in silence, and the Little Russian laughed with his thick, soft laugh. "The girls also have a crow to pick with you!" she said. "You'd make enviable bridegrooms for any of them; you're all good workers, and you don't drink--but you don't pay any attention to them. Besides, people are saying that girls of questionable character come to you." "Well, of course!" exclaimed Pavel, his brow contracting in a frown of disgust. "In the bog everything smells of rottenness!" said the Little Russian with a sigh. "Why don't you, mother, explain to the foolish girls what it is to be married, so that they shouldn't be in such a hurry to get their bones broken?" "Oh, well," said the mother, "they see the misery in store for them, they understand, but what can they do? They have no other choice!" "It's a queer way they have of understanding, else they'd find a choice," observed Pavel. The mother looked into his austere face. "Why don't you teach them? Why don't you invite some of the cleverer ones?" "That won't do!" the son replied dryly. "Suppose we try?" said the Little Russian. After a short silence Pavel said: "Couples will be formed; couples will walk together; then some will get married, and that's all." The mother became thoughtful. Pavel's austerity worried her. She saw that his advice was taken even by his older comrades, such as the Little Russian; but it seemed to her that all were afraid of him, and no one loved him because he was so stern. Once when she had lain down to sleep, and her son and the Little Russian were still reading, she overheard their low conversation through the thin partition. "You know I like Natasha," suddenly ejaculated the Little Russian in an undertone. "I know," answered Pavel after a pause. "Yes!" The mother heard the Little Russian rise and begin to walk. The tread of his bare feet sounded on the floor, and a low, mournful whistle was heard. Then he spoke again: "And does she notice it?" Pavel was silent. "What do you think?" the Little Russian asked, lowering his voice. "She does," replied Pavel. "That's why she has refused to attend our meetings." The Little Russian dragged his feet heavily over the floor, and again his low whistle quivered in the room. Then he asked: "And if I tell her?" "What?" The brief question shot from Pavel like the discharge of a gun. "That I am--" began the Little Russian in a subdued voice. "Why?" Pavel interrupted. The mother heard the Little Russian stop, and she felt that he smiled. "Yes, you see, I consider that if you love a girl you must tell her about it; else there'll be no sense to it!" Pavel clapped the book shut with a bang. "And what sense do you expect?" Both were silent for a long while. "Well?" asked the Little Russian. "You must be clear in your mind, Andrey, as to what you want to do," said Pavel slowly. "Let us assume that she loves you, too--I do not think so, but let us assume it. Well, you get married. An interesting union--the intellectual with the workingman! Children come along; you will have to work all by yourself and very hard. Your life will become the ordinary life of a struggle for a piece of bread and a shelter for yourself and children. For the cause, you will become nonexistent, both of you!" Silence ensued. Then Pavel began to speak again in a voice that sounded softer: "You had better drop all this, Andrey. Keep quiet, and don't worry her. That's the more honest way." "And do you remember what Alexey Ivanovich said about the necessity for a man to live a complete life--with all the power of his soul and body--do you remember?" "That's not for us! How can you attain completion? It does not exist for you. If you love the future you must renounce everything in the present--everything, brother!" "That's hard for a man!" said the Little Russian in a lowered voice. "What else can be done? Think!" The indifferent pendulum of the clock kept chopping off the seconds of life, calmly and precisely. At last the Little Russian said: "Half the heart loves, and the other half hates! Is that a heart?" "I ask you, what else can we do?" The pages of a book rustled. Apparently Pavel had begun to read again. The mother lay with closed eyes, and was afraid to stir. She was ready to weep with pity for the Little Russian; but she was grieved still more for her son. "My dear son! My consecrated one!" she thought. Suddenly the Little Russian asked: "So I am to keep quiet?" "That's more honest, Andrey," answered Pavel softly. "All right! That's the road we will travel." And in a few seconds he added, in a sad and subdued voice: "It will be hard for you, Pasha, when you get to that yourself." "It is hard for me already." "Yes?" "Yes." The wind brushed along the walls of the house, and the pendulum marked the passing time. "Um," said the Little Russian leisurely, at last. "That's too bad." The mother buried her head in the pillow and wept inaudibly. In the morning Andrey seemed to her to be lower in stature and all the more winning. But her son towered thin, straight, and taciturn as ever. She had always called the Little Russian Andrey Stepanovich, in formal address, but now, all at once, involuntarily and unconsciously she said to him: "Say, Andriusha, you had better get your boots mended. You are apt to catch cold." "On pay day, mother, I'll buy myself a new pair," he answered, smiling. Then suddenly placing his long hand on her shoulder, he added: "You know, you are my real mother. Only you don't want to acknowledge it to people because I am so ugly." She patted him on the hand without speaking. She would have liked to say many endearing things, but her heart was wrung with pity, and the words would not leave her tongue. * * * * * They spoke in the village about the socialists who distributed broadcast leaflets in blue ink. In these leaflets the conditions prevailing in the factory were trenchantly and pointedly depicted, as well as the strikes in St. Petersburg and southern Russia; and the workingmen were called upon to unite and fight for their interests. The staid people who earned good pay waxed wroth as they read the literature, and said abusively: "Breeders of rebellion! For such business they ought to get their eyes blacked." And they carried the pamphlets to the office. The young people read the proclamations eagerly, and said excitedly: "It's all true!" The majority, broken down with their work, and indifferent to everything, said lazily: "Nothing will come of it. It is impossible!" But the leaflets made a stir among the people, and when a week passed without their getting any, they said to one another: "None again to-day! It seems the printing must have stopped." Then on Monday the leaflets appeared again; and again there was a dull buzz of talk among the workingmen. In the taverns and the factory strangers were noticed, men whom no one knew. They asked questions, scrutinized everything and everybody; looked around, ferreted about, and at once attracted universal attention, some by their suspicious watchfulness, others by their excessive obtrusiveness. The mother knew that all this commotion was due to the work of her son Pavel. She saw how all the people were drawn together about him. He was not alone, and therefore it was not so dangerous. But pride in her son mingled with her apprehension for his fate; it was his secret labors that discharged themselves in fresh currents into the narrow, turbid stream of life. One evening Marya Korsunova rapped at the window from the street, and when the mother opened it, she said in a loud whisper: "Now, take care, Pelagueya; the boys have gotten themselves into a nice mess! It's been decided to make a search to-night in your house, and Mazin's and Vyesovshchikov's----" The mother heard only the beginning of the woman's talk; all the rest of the words flowed together in one stream of ill-boding, hoarse sounds. Marya's thick lips flapped hastily one against the other. Snorts issued from her fleshy nose, her eyes blinked and turned from side to side as if on the lookout for somebody in the street. "And, mark you, I do not know anything, and I did not say anything to you, mother dear, and did not even see you to-day, you understand?" Then she disappeared. The mother closed the window and slowly dropped on a chair, her strength gone from her, her brain a desolate void. But the consciousness of the danger threatening her son quickly brought her to her feet again. She dressed hastily, for some reason wrapped her shawl tightly around her head, and ran to Fedya Mazin, who, she knew, was sick and not working. She found him sitting at the window reading a book, and moving his right hand to and fro with his left, his thumb spread out. On learning the news he jumped up nervously, his lips trembled, and his face paled. "There you are! And I have an abscess on my finger!" he mumbled. "What are we to do?" asked Vlasova, wiping the perspiration from her face with a hand that trembled nervously. "Wait a while! Don't be afraid," answered Fedya, running his sound hand through his curly hair. "But you are afraid yourself!" "I?" He reddened and smiled in embarrassment. "Yes--h-m-- I had a fit of cowardice, the devil take it! We must let Pavel know. I'll send my little sister to him. You go home. Never mind! They're not going to beat us." On returning home she gathered together all the books, and pressing them to her bosom walked about the house for a long time, looking into the oven, under the oven, into the pipe of the samovar, and even into the water vat. She thought Pavel would at once drop work and come home; but he did not come. Finally she sat down exhausted on the bench in the kitchen, putting the books under her; and she remained in that position, afraid to rise, until Pavel and the Little Russian returned from the factory. "Do you know?" she exclaimed without rising. "We know!" said Pavel with a composed smile. "Are you afraid?" "Oh, I'm so afraid, so afraid!" "You needn't be afraid," said the Little Russian. "That won't help anybody." "Didn't even prepare the samovar," remarked Pavel. The mother rose, and pointed to the books with a guilty air. "You see, it was on account of them--all the time--I was----" The son and the Little Russian burst into laughter; and this relieved her. Then Pavel picked out some books and carried them out into the yard to hide them, while the Little Russian remained to prepare the samovar. "There's nothing terrible at all in this, mother. It's only a shame for people to occupy themselves with such nonsense. Grown-up men in gray come in with sabers at their sides, with spurs on their feet, and rummage around, and dig up and search everything. They look under the bed, and climb up to the garret; if there is a cellar they crawl down into it. The cobwebs get on their faces, and they puff and snort. They are bored and ashamed. That's why they put on the appearance of being very wicked and very mad with us. It's dirty work, and they understand it, of course they do! Once they turned everything topsy-turvy in my place, and went away abashed, that's all. Another time they took me along with them. Well, they put me in prison, and I stayed there with them for about four months. You sit and sit, then you're called out, taken to the street under an escort of soldiers, and you're asked certain questions. They're stupid people, they talk such incoherent stuff. When they're done with you, they tell the soldiers to take you back to prison. So they lead you here, and they lead you there--they've got to justify their salaries somehow. And then they let you go free. That's all." "How you always do speak, Andriusha!" exclaimed the mother involuntarily. Kneeling before the samovar he diligently blew into the pipe; but presently he turned his face, red with exertion, toward her, and smoothing his mustache with both hands inquired: "And how do I speak, pray?" "As if nobody had ever done you any wrong." He rose, approached her, and shaking his head, said: "Is there an unwronged soul anywhere in the wide world? But I have been wronged so much that I have ceased to feel wronged. What's to be done if people cannot help acting as they do? The wrongs I undergo hinder me greatly in my work. It is impossible to avoid them. But to stop and pay attention to them is useless waste of time. Such a life! Formerly I would occasionally get angry--but I thought to myself: all around me I see people broken in heart. It seemed as if each one were afraid that his neighbor would strike him, and so he tried to get ahead and strike the other first. Such a life it is, mother dear." His speech flowed on serenely. He resolutely distracted her mind from alarm at the expected police search. His luminous, protuberant eyes smiled sadly. Though ungainly, he seemed made of stuff that bends but never breaks. The mother sighed and uttered the warm wish: "May God grant you happiness, Andriusha!" The Little Russian stalked to the samovar with long strides, sat in front of it again on his heels, and mumbled: "If he gives me happiness, I will not decline it; ask for it I won't, to seek it I have no time." And he began to whistle. Pavel came in from the yard and said confidently: "They won't find them!" He started to wash himself. Then carefully rubbing his hands dry, he added: "If you show them, mother, that you are frightened, they will think there must be something in this house because you tremble. And we have done nothing as yet, nothing! You know that we don't want anything bad; on our side is truth, and we will work for it all our lives. This is our entire guilt. Why, then, need we fear?" "I will pull myself together, Pasha!" she assured him. And the next moment, unable to repress her anxiety, she exclaimed: "I wish they'd come soon, and it would all be over!" But they did not come that night, and in the morning, in anticipation of the fun that would probably be poked at her for her alarm, the mother began to joke at herself. CHAPTER VI The searchers appeared at the very time they were not expected, nearly a month after this anxious night. Nikolay Vyesovshchikov was at Pavel's house talking with him and Andrey about their newspaper. It was late, about midnight. The mother was already in bed. Half awake, half asleep, she listened to the low, busy voices. Presently Andrey got up and carefully picked his way through and out of the kitchen, quietly shutting the door after him. The noise of the iron bucket was heard on the porch. Suddenly the door was flung wide open; the Little Russian entered the kitchen, and announced in a loud whisper: "I hear the jingling of spurs in the street!" The mother jumped out of bed, catching at her dress with a trembling hand; but Pavel came to the door and said calmly: "You stay in bed; you're not feeling well." A cautious, stealthy sound was heard on the porch. Pavel went to the door and knocking at it with his hand asked: "Who's there?" A tall, gray figure tumultuously precipitated itself through the doorway; after it another; two gendarmes pushed Pavel back, and stationed themselves on either side of him, and a loud mocking voice called out: "No one you expect, eh?" The words came from a tall, lank officer, with a thin, black mustache. The village policeman, Fedyakin, appeared at the bedside of the mother, and, raising one hand to his cap, pointed the other at her face and, making terrible eyes, said: "This is his mother, your honor!" Then, waving his hand toward Pavel: "And this is he himself." "Pavel Vlasov?" inquired the officer, screwing up his eyes; and when Pavel silently nodded his head, he announced, twirling his mustache: "I have to make a search in your house. Get up, old woman!" "Who is there?" he asked, turning suddenly and making a dash for the door. "Your name?" His voice was heard from the other room. Two other men came in from the porch: the old smelter Tveryakov and his lodger, the stoker Rybin, a staid, dark-colored peasant. He said in a thick, loud voice: "Good evening, Nilovna." She dressed herself, all the while speaking to herself in a low voice, so as to give herself courage: "What sort of a thing is this? They come at night. People are asleep and they come----" The room was close, and for some reason smelled strongly of shoe blacking. Two gendarmes and the village police commissioner, Ryskin, their heavy tread resounding on the floor, removed the books from the shelves and put them on the table before the officer. Two others rapped on the walls with their fists, and looked under the chairs. One man clumsily clambered up on the stove in the corner. Nikolay's pockmarked face became covered with red patches, and his little gray eyes were steadfastly fixed upon the officer. The Little Russian curled his mustache, and when the mother entered the room, he smiled and gave her an affectionate nod of the head. Striving to suppress her fear, she walked, not sideways as always, but erect, her chest thrown out, which gave her figure a droll, stilted air of importance. Her shoes made a knocking sound on the floor, and her brows trembled. The officer quickly seized the books with the long fingers of his white hand, turned over the pages, shook them, and with a dexterous movement of the wrist flung them aside. Sometimes a book fell to the floor with a light thud. All were silent. The heavy breathing of the perspiring gendarmes was audible; the spurs clanked, and sometimes the low question was heard: "Did you look here?" The mother stood by Pavel's side against the wall. She folded her arms over her bosom, like her son, and both regarded the officer. The mother felt her knees trembling, and her eyes became covered with a dry mist. Suddenly the piercing voice of Nikolay cut into the silence: "Why is it necessary to throw the books on the floor?" The mother trembled. Tveryakov rocked his head as if he had been struck on the back. Rybin uttered a peculiar cluck, and regarded Nikolay attentively. The officer threw up his head, screwed up his eyes, and fixed them for a second upon the pockmarked, mottled, immobile face. His fingers began to turn the leaves of the books still more rapidly. His face was yellow and pale; he twisted his lips continually. At times he opened his large gray eyes wide, as if he suffered from an intolerable pain, and was ready to scream out in impotent anguish. "Soldier!" Vyesovshchikov called out again. "Pick the books up!" All the gendarmes turned their eyes on him, then looked at the officer. He again raised his head, and taking in the broad figure of Nikolay with a searching stare, he drawled: "Well, well, pick up the books." One gendarme bent down, and, looking slantwise at Vyesovshchikov, began to collect the books scattered on the floor. "Why doesn't Nikolay keep quiet?" the mother whispered to Pavel. He shrugged his shoulders. The Little Russian drooped his head. "What's the whispering there? Silence, please! Who reads the Bible?" "I!" said Pavel. "Aha! And whose books are all these?" "Mine!" answered Pavel. "So!" exclaimed the officer, throwing himself on the back of the chair. He made the bones of his slender hand crack, stretched his legs under the table, and adjusting his mustache, asked Nikolay: "Are you Andrey Nakhodka?" "Yes!" answered Nikolay, moving forward. The Little Russian put out his hand, took him by the shoulder, and pulled him back. "He made a mistake; I am Andrey!" The officer raised his hand, and threatening Vyesovshchikov with his little finger, said: "Take care!" He began to search among his papers. From the street the bright, moonlit night looked on through the window with soulless eyes. Some one was loafing about outside the window, and the snow crunched under his tread. "You, Nakhodka, you have been searched for political offenses before?" asked the officer. "Yes, I was searched in Rostov and Saratov. Only there the gendarmes addressed me as 'Mr.'" The officer winked his right eye, rubbed it, and showing his fine teeth, said: "And do you happen to know, _Mr._ Nakhodka--yes, you, _Mr._ Nakhodka--who those scoundrels are who distribute criminal proclamations and books in the factory, eh?" The Little Russian swayed his body, and with a broad smile on his face was about to say something, when the irritating voice of Nikolay again rang out: "This is the first time we have seen scoundrels here!" Silence ensued. There was a moment of breathless suspense. The scar on the mother's face whitened, and her right eyebrow traveled upward. Rybin's black beard quivered strangely. He dropped his eyes, and slowly scratched one hand with the other. "Take this dog out of here!" said the officer. Two gendarmes seized Nikolay under the arm and rudely pulled him into the kitchen. There he planted his feet firmly on the floor and shouted: "Stop! I am going to put my coat on." The police commissioner came in from the yard and said: "There is nothing out there. We searched everywhere!" "Well, of course!" exclaimed the officer, laughing. "I knew it! There's an experienced man here, it goes without saying." The mother listened to his thin, dry voice, and looking with terror into the yellow face, felt an enemy in this man, an enemy without pity, with a heart full of aristocratic disdain of the people. Formerly she had but rarely seen such persons, and now she had almost forgotten they existed. "Then this is the man whom Pavel and his friends have provoked," she thought. "I place you, _Mr._ Andrey Onisimov Nakhodka, under arrest." "What for?" asked the Little Russian composedly. "I will tell you later!" answered the officer with spiteful civility, and turning to Vlasova, he shouted: "Say, can you read or write?" "No!" answered Pavel. "I didn't ask you!" said the officer sternly, and repeated: "Say, old woman, can you read or write?" The mother involuntarily gave way to a feeling of hatred for the man. She was seized with a sudden fit of trembling, as if she had jumped into cold water. She straightened herself, her scar turned purple, and her brow drooped low. "Don't shout!" she said, flinging out her hand toward him. "You are a young man still; you don't know misery or sorrow----" "Calm yourself, mother!" Pavel intervened. "In this business, mother, you've got to take your heart between your teeth and hold it there tight," said the Little Russian. "Wait a moment, Pasha!" cried the mother, rushing to the table and then addressing the officer: "Why do you snatch people away thus?" "That does not concern you. Silence!" shouted the officer, rising. "Bring in the prisoner Vyesovshchikov!" he commanded, and began to read aloud a document which he raised to his face. Nikolay was brought into the room. "Hats off!" shouted the officer, interrupting his reading. Rybin went up to Vlasova, and patting her on the back, said in an undertone: "Don't get excited, mother!" "How can I take my hat off if they hold my hands?" asked Nikolay, drowning the reading. The officer flung the paper on the table. "Sign!" he said curtly. The mother saw how everyone signed the document, and her excitement died down, a softer feeling taking possession of her heart. Her eyes filled with tears--burning tears of insult and impotence--such tears she had wept for twenty years of her married life, but lately she had almost forgotten their acid, heart-corroding taste. The officer regarded her contemptuously. He scowled and remarked: "You bawl ahead of time, my lady! Look out, or you won't have tears left for the future!" "A mother has enough tears for everything, everything! If you have a mother, she knows it!" The officer hastily put the papers into his new portfolio with its shining lock. "How independent they all are in your place!" He turned to the police commissioner. "An impudent pack!" mumbled the commissioner. "March!" commanded the officer. "Good-by, Andrey! Good-by, Nikolay!" said Pavel warmly and softly, pressing his comrades' hands. "That's it! Until we meet again!" the officer scoffed. Vyesovshchikov silently pressed Pavel's hands with his short fingers and breathed heavily. The blood mounted to his thick neck; his eyes flashed with rancor. The Little Russian's face beamed with a sunny smile. He nodded his head, and said something to the mother; she made the sign of the cross over him. "God sees the righteous," she murmured. At length the throng of people in the gray coats tumbled out on the porch, and their spurs jingled as they disappeared. Rybin went last. He regarded Pavel with an attentive look of his dark eyes and said thoughtfully: "Well, well--good-by!" and coughing in his beard he leisurely walked out on the porch. Folding his hands behind his back, Pavel slowly paced up and down the room, stepping over the books and clothes tumbled about on the floor. At last he said somberly: "You see how it's done! With insult--disgustingly--yes! They left me behind." Looking perplexedly at the disorder in the room, the mother whispered sadly: "They will take you, too, be sure they will. Why did Nikolay speak to them the way he did?" "He got frightened, I suppose," said Pavel quietly. "Yes--It's impossible to speak to them, absolutely impossible! They cannot understand!" "They came, snatched, and carried off!" mumbled the mother, waving her hands. As her son remained at home, her heart began to beat more lightly. Her mind stubbornly halted before one fact and refused to be moved. "How he scoffs at us, that yellow ruffian! How he threatens us!" "All right, mamma!" Pavel suddenly said with resolution. "Let us pick all this up!" He called her "mamma," the word he used only when he came nearer to her. She approached him, looked into his face, and asked softly: "Did they insult you?" "Yes," he answered. "That's--hard! I would rather have gone with them." It seemed to her that she saw tears in his eyes, and wishing to soothe him, with an indistinct sense of his pain, she said with a sigh: "Wait a while--they'll take you, too!" "They will!" he replied. After a pause the mother remarked sorrowfully: "How hard you are, Pasha! If you'd only reassure me once in a while! But you don't. When I say something horrible, you say something worse." He looked at her, moved closer to her, and said gently: "I cannot, mamma! I cannot lie! You have to get used to it." CHAPTER VII The next day they knew that Bukin, Samoylov, Somov, and five more had been arrested. In the evening Fedya Mazin came running in upon them. A search had been made in his house also. He felt himself a hero. "Were you afraid, Fedya?" asked the mother. He turned pale, his face sharpened, and his nostrils quivered. "I was afraid the officer might strike me. He has a black beard, he's stout, his fingers are hairy, and he wears dark glasses, so that he looks as if he were without eyes. He shouted and stamped his feet. He said I'd rot in prison. And I've never been beaten either by my father or mother; they love me because I'm their only son. Everyone gets beaten everywhere, but I never!" He closed his eyes for a moment, compressed his lips, tossed his hair back with a quick gesture of both hands, and looking at Pavel with reddening eyes, said: "If anybody ever strikes me, I will thrust my whole body into him like a knife--I will bite my teeth into him--I'd rather he'd kill me at once and be done!" "To defend yourself is your right," said Pavel. "But take care not to attack!" "You are delicate and thin," observed the mother. "What do you want with fighting?" "I _will_ fight!" answered Fedya in a low voice. When he left, the mother said to Pavel: "This young man will go down sooner than all the rest." Pavel was silent. A few minutes later the kitchen door opened slowly and Rybin entered. "Good evening!" he said, smiling. "Here I am again. Yesterday they brought me here; to-day I come of my own accord. Yes, yes!" He gave Pavel a vigorous handshake, then put his hand on the mother's shoulder, and asked: "Will you give me tea?" Pavel silently regarded his swarthy, broad countenance, his thick, black beard, and dark, intelligent eyes. A certain gravity spoke out of their calm gaze; his stalwart figure inspired confidence. The mother went into the kitchen to prepare the samovar. Rybin sat down, stroked his beard, and placing his elbows on the table, scanned Pavel with his dark look. "That's the way it is," he said, as if continuing an interrupted conversation. "I must have a frank talk with you. I observed you long before I came. We live almost next door to each other. I see many people come to you, and no drunkenness, no carrying on. That's the main thing. If people don't raise the devil, they immediately attract attention. What's that? There you are! That's why all eyes are on me, because I live apart and give no offense." His speech flowed along evenly and freely. It had a ring that won him confidence. "So. Everybody prates about you. My masters call you a heretic; you don't go to church. I don't, either. Then the papers appeared, those leaflets. Was it you that thought them out?" "Yes, I!" answered Pavel, without taking his eyes off Rybin's face. Rybin also looked steadily into Pavel's eyes. "You alone!" exclaimed the mother, coming into the room. "It wasn't you alone." Pavel smiled; Rybin also. The mother sniffed, and walked away, somewhat offended because they did not pay attention to her words. "Those leaflets are well thought out. They stir the people up. There were twelve of them, weren't there?" "Yes." "I have read them all! Yes, yes. Sometimes they are not clear, and some things are superfluous. But when a man speaks a great deal, it's natural he should occasionally say things out of the way." Rybin smiled. His teeth were white and strong. "Then the search. That won me over to you more than anything else. You and the Little Russian and Nikolay, you all got caught!" He paused for the right word and looked at the window, rapping the table with his fingers. "They discovered your resolve. You attend to your business, your honor, you say, and we'll attend to ours. The Little Russian's a fine fellow, too. The other day I heard how he speaks in the factory, and thinks I to myself: that man isn't going to be vanquished; it's only one thing will knock him out, and that's death! A sturdy chap! Do you trust me, Pavel?" "Yes, I trust you!" said Pavel, nodding. "That's right. Look! I am forty years old; I am twice as old as you, and I've seen twenty times as much as you. For three years long I wore my feet to the bone marching in the army. I have been married twice. I've been in the Caucasus, I know the Dukhobors. They're not masters of life, no, they aren't!" The mother listened eagerly to his direct speech. It pleased her to have an older man come to her son and speak to him just as if he were confessing to him. But Pavel seemed to treat the guest too curtly, and the mother, to introduce a softer element, asked Rybin: "Maybe you'll have something to eat." "Thank you, mother! I've had my supper already. So then, Pavel, you think that life does not go as it should?" Pavel arose and began to pace the room, folding his hands behind his back. "It goes all right," he said. "Just now, for instance, it has brought you here to me with an open heart. We who work our whole life long--it unites us gradually and more and more every day. The time will come when we shall all be united. Life is arranged unjustly for us and is made a burden. At the same time, however, life itself is opening our eyes to its bitter meaning and is itself showing man the way to accelerate its pace. We all of us think just as we live." "True. But wait!" Rybin stopped him. "Man ought to be renovated--that's what I think! When a man grows scabby, take him to the bath, give him a thorough cleaning, put clean clothes on him--and he will get well. Isn't it so? And if the heart grows scabby, take its skin off, even if it bleeds, wash it, and dress it up all afresh. Isn't it so? How else can you clean the inner man? There now!" Pavel began to speak hotly and bitterly about God, about the Czar, about the government authorities, about the factory, and how in foreign countries the workingmen stand up for their rights. Rybin smiled occasionally; sometimes he struck a finger on the table as if punctuating a period. Now and then he cried out briefly: "So!" And once, laughing out, he said quietly: "You're young. You know people but little!" Pavel stopping before him said seriously: "Let's not talk of being old or being young. Let us rather see whose thoughts are truer." "That is, according to you, we've been fooled about God also. So! I, too, think that our religion is false and injurious to us." Here the mother intervened. When her son spoke about God and about everything that she connected with her faith in him, which was dear and sacred to her, she sought to meet his eyes, she wanted to ask her son mutely not to chafe her heart with the sharp, bitter words of his unbelief. And she felt that Rybin, an older man, would also be displeased and offended. But when Rybin calmly put his question to Pavel, she could no longer contain herself, and said firmly: "When you speak of God, I wish you were more careful. You can do whatever you like. You have your compensation in your work." Catching her breath she continued with still greater vehemence: "But I, an old woman, I will have nothing to lean upon in my distress if you take my God away from me." Her eyes filled with tears. She was washing the dishes, and her fingers trembled. "You did not understand us, mother!" Pavel said softly and kindly. "Beg your pardon, mother!" Rybin added in a slow, thick voice. He looked at Pavel and smiled. "I forgot that you're too old to cut out your warts." "I did not speak," continued Pavel, "about that good and gracious God in whom you believe, but about the God with whom the priests threaten us as with a stick, about the God in whose name they want to force all of us to the evil will of the few." "That's it, right you are!" exclaimed Rybin, striking his fingers upon the table. "They have mutilated even our God for us, they have turned everything in their hands against us. Mark you, mother, God created man in his own image and after his own likeness. Therefore he is like man if man is like him. But we have become, not like God, but like wild beasts! In the churches they set up a scarecrow before us. We have got to change our God, mother; we must cleanse him! They have dressed him up in falsehood and calumny; they have distorted his face in order to destroy our souls!" He talked composedly and very distinctly and intelligibly. Every word of his speech fell upon the mother's ears like a blow. And his face set in the frame of his black beard, his broad face attired, as it were, in mourning, frightened her. The dark gleam of his eyes was insupportable to her. He aroused in her a sense of anguish, and filled her heart with terror. "No, I'd better go away," she said, shaking her head in negation. "It's not in my power to listen to this. I cannot!" And she quickly walked into the kitchen followed by the words of Rybin: "There you have it, Pavel! It begins not in the head, but in the heart. The heart is such a place that nothing else will grow in it." "Only reason," said Pavel firmly, "only reason will free mankind." "Reason does not give strength!" retorted Rybin emphatically. "The heart gives strength, and not the head, I tell you." The mother undressed and lay down in bed without saying her prayer. She felt cold and miserable. And Rybin, who at first seemed such a staid, wise man, now aroused in her a blind hostility. "Heretic! Sedition-maker!" she thought, listening to his even voice flowing resonantly from his deep chest. He, too, had come--he was indispensable. He spoke confidently and composedly: "The holy place must not be empty. The spot where God dwells is a place of pain; and if he drops out from the heart, there will be a wound in it, mark my word! It is necessary, Pavel, to invent a new faith; it is necessary to create a God for all. Not a judge, not a warrior, but a God who shall be the friend of the people." "You had one! There was Christ!" "Wait a moment! Christ was not strong in spirit. 'Let the cup pass from me,' he said. And he recognized Cæsar. God cannot recognize human powers. He himself is the whole of power. He does not divide his soul saying: so much for the godly, so much for the human. If Christ came to affirm the divine he had no need for anything human. But he recognized trade, and he recognized marriage. And it was unjust of him to condemn the fig tree. Was it of its own will that it was barren of fruit? Neither is the soul barren of good of its own accord. Have I sown the evil in it myself? Of course not!" The two voices hummed continuously in the room, as if clutching at each other and wrestling in exciting play. Pavel walked hurriedly up and down the room; the floor cracked under his feet. When he spoke all other sounds were drowned by his voice; but above the slow, calm flow of Rybin's dull utterance were heard the strokes of the pendulum and the low creaking of the frost, as of sharp claws scratching the walls of the house. "I will speak to you in my own way, in the words of a stoker. God is like fire. He does not strengthen anything. He cannot. He merely burns and fuses when he gives light. He burns down churches, he does not raise them. He lives in the heart." "And in the mind!" insisted Pavel. "That's it! In the heart and in the mind. There's the rub. It's this that makes all the trouble and misery and misfortune. We have severed ourselves from our own selves. The heart was severed from the mind, and the mind has disappeared. Man is not a unit. It is God that makes him a unit, that makes him a round, circular thing. God always makes things round. Such is the earth and all the stars and everything visible to the eye. The sharp, angular things are the work of men." The mother fell asleep and did not hear Rybin depart. But he began to come often, and if any of Pavel's comrades were present, Rybin sat in a corner and was silent, only occasionally interjecting: "That's so!" And once looking at everybody from his corner with his dark glance he said somberly: "We must speak about that which is; that which will be is unknown to us. When the people have freed themselves, they will see for themselves what is best. Enough, quite enough of what they do not want at all has been knocked into their heads. Let there be an end of this! Let them contrive for themselves. Maybe they will want to reject everything, all life, and all knowledge; maybe they will see that everything is arranged against them. You just deliver all the books into their hands, and they will find an answer for themselves, depend upon it! Only let them remember that the tighter the collar round the horse's neck, the worse the work." But when Pavel was alone with Rybin they at once began an endless but always calm disputation, to which the mother listened anxiously, following their words in silence, and endeavoring to understand. Sometimes it seemed to her as if the broad-shouldered, black-bearded peasant and her well-built, sturdy son had both gone blind. In that little room, in the darkness, they seemed to be knocking about from side to side in search of light and an outlet, to be grasping out with powerful but blind hands; they seemed to fall upon the floor, and having fallen, to scrape and fumble with their feet. They hit against everything, groped about for everything, and flung it away, calm and composed, losing neither faith nor hope. They got her accustomed to listen to a great many words, terrible in their directness and boldness; and these words had now ceased to weigh down on her so heavily as at first. She learned to push them away from her ears. And although Rybin still displeased her as before, he no longer inspired her with hostility. Once a week she carried underwear and books to the Little Russian in prison. On one occasion they allowed her to see him and talk to him; and on returning home she related enthusiastically: "He is as if he were at home there, too! He is good and kind to everybody; everybody jokes with him; just as if there were a holiday in his heart all the time. His lot is hard and heavy, but he does not want to show it." "That's right! That's the way one should act," observed Rybin. "We are all enveloped in misery as in our skins. We breathe misery, we wear misery. But that's nothing to brag about. Not all people are blind; some close their eyes of their own accord, indeed! And if you are stupid you have to suffer for it." CHAPTER VIII The little old gray house of the Vlasovs attracted the attention of the village more and more; and although there was much suspicious chariness and unconscious hostility in this notice, yet at the same time a confiding curiosity grew up also. Now and then some one would come over, and looking carefully about him would say to Pavel: "Well, brother, you are reading books here, and you know the laws. Explain to me, then----" And he would tell Pavel about some injustice of the police or the factory administration. In complicated cases Pavel would give the man a note to a lawyer friend in the city, and when he could, he would explain the case himself. Gradually people began to look with respect upon this young, serious man, who spoke about everything simply and boldly, and almost never laughed, who looked at everybody and listened to everybody with an attention which searched stubbornly into every circumstance, and always found a certain general and endless thread binding people together by a thousand tightly drawn knots. Vlasova saw how her son had grown up; she strove to understand his work, and when she succeeded, she rejoiced with a childlike joy. Pavel rose particularly in the esteem of the people after the appearance of his story about the "Muddy Penny." Back of the factory, almost encircling it with a ring of putrescence, stretched a vast marsh grown over with fir trees and birches. In the summer it was covered with thick yellow and green scum, and swarms of mosquitoes flew from it over the village, spreading fever in their course. The marsh belonged to the factory, and the new manager, wishing to extract profit from it, conceived the plan of draining it and incidentally gathering in a fine harvest of peat. Representing to the workingmen how much this measure would contribute to the sanitation of the locality and the improvement of the general condition of all, the manager gave orders to deduct a kopeck from every ruble of their earnings, in order to cover the expense of draining the marsh. The workingmen rebelled; they especially resented the fact that the office clerks were exempted from paying the new tax. Pavel was ill on the Saturday when posters were hung up announcing the manager's order in regard to the toll. He had not gone to work and he knew nothing about it. The next day, after mass, a dapper old man, the smelter Sizov, and the tall, vicious-looking locksmith Makhotin, came to him and told him of the manager's decision. "A few of us older ones got together," said Sizov, speaking sedately, "talked the matter over, and our comrades, you see, sent us over to you, as you are a knowing man among us. Is there such a law as gives our manager the right to make war upon mosquitoes with our kopecks?" "Think!" said Makhotin, with a glimmer in his narrow eyes. "Three years ago these sharpers collected a tax to build a bath house. Three thousand eight hundred rubles is what they gathered in. Where are those rubles? And where is the bath house?" Pavel explained the injustice of the tax, and the obvious advantage of such a procedure to the factory owners; and both of his visitors went away in a surly mood. The mother, who had gone with them to the door, said, laughing: "Now, Pasha, the old people have also begun to come to seek wisdom from you." Without replying, Pavel sat down at the table with a busy air and began to write. In a few minutes he said to her: "Please go to the city immediately and deliver this note." "Is it dangerous?" she asked. "Yes! A newspaper is being published for us down there! That 'Muddy Penny' story must go into the next issue." "I'll go at once," she replied, beginning hurriedly to put on her wraps. This was the first commission her son had given her. She was happy that he spoke to her so openly about the matter, and that she might be useful to him in his work. "I understand all about it, Pasha," she said. "It's a piece of robbery. What's the name of the man? Yegor Ivanovich?" "Yes," said Pavel, smiling kindly. She returned late in the evening, exhausted but contented. "I saw Sashenka," she told her son. "She sends you her regards. And this Yegor Ivanovich is such a simple fellow, such a joker! He speaks so comically." "I'm glad you like them," said Pavel softly. "They are simple people, Pasha. It's good when people are simple. And they all respect you." Again, Monday, Pavel did not go to work. His head ached. But at dinner time Fedya Mazin came running in, excited, out of breath, happy, and tired. "Come! The whole factory has arisen! They've sent for you. Sizov and Makhotin say you can explain better than anybody else. My! What a hullabaloo!" Pavel began to dress himself silently. "A crowd of women are gathered there; they are screaming!" "I'll go, too," declared the mother. "You're not well, and--what are they doing? I'm going, too." "Come," Pavel said briefly. They walked along the street quickly and silently. The mother panted with the exertion of the rapid gait and her excitement. She felt that something big was happening. At the factory gates a throng of women were discussing the affair in shrill voices. When the three pushed into the yard, they found themselves in the thick of a crowd buzzing and humming in excitement. The mother saw that all heads were turned in the same direction, toward the blacksmith's wall, where Sizov, Makhotin, Vyalov, and five or six influential, solid workingmen were standing on a high pile of old iron heaped on the red brick paving of the court, and waving their hands. "Vlasov is coming!" somebody shouted. "Vlasov? Bring him along!" Pavel was seized and pushed forward, and the mother was left alone. "Silence!" came the shout from various directions. Near by the even voice of Rybin was heard: "We must make a stand, not for the kopeck, but for justice. What is dear to us is not our kopeck, because it's no rounder than any other kopeck; it's only heavier; there's more human blood in it than in the manager's ruble. That's the truth!" The words fell forcibly on the crowd and stirred the men to hot responses: "That's right! Good, Rybin!" "Silence! The devil take you!" "Vlasov's come!" The voices mingled in a confused uproar, drowning the ponderous whir of the machinery, the sharp snorts of the steam, and the flapping of the leather belts. From all sides people came running, waving their hands; they fell into arguments, and excited one another with burning, stinging words. The irritation that had found no vent, that had always lain dormant in tired breasts, had awakened, demanded an outlet, and burst from their mouths in a volley of words. It soared into the air like a great bird spreading its motley wings ever wider and wider, clutching people and dragging them after it, and striking them against one another. It lived anew, transformed into flaming wrath. A cloud of dust and soot hung over the crowd; their faces were all afire, and black drops of sweat trickled down their cheeks. Their eyes gleamed from darkened countenances; their teeth glistened. Pavel appeared on the spot where Sizov and Makhotin were standing, and his voice rang out: "Comrades!" The mother saw that his face paled and his lips trembled; she involuntarily pushed forward, shoving her way through the crowd. "Where are you going, old woman?" She heard the angry question, and the people pushed her, but she would not stop, thrusting the crowd aside with her shoulders and elbows. She slowly forced her way nearer to her son, yielding to the desire to stand by his side. When Pavel had thrown out the word to which he was wont to attach a deep and significant meaning, his throat contracted in a sharp spasm of the joy of fight. He was seized with an invincible desire to give himself up to the strength of his faith; to throw his heart to the people. His heart kindled with the dream of truth. "Comrades!" he repeated, extracting power and rapture from the word. "We are the people who build churches and factories, forge chains and coin money, make toys and machines. We are that living force which feeds and amuses the world from the cradle to the grave." "There!" Rybin exclaimed. "Always and everywhere we are first in work but last in life. Who cares for us? Who wishes us good? Who regards us as human beings? No one!" "No one!" echoed from the crowd. Pavel, mastering himself, began to talk more simply and calmly; the crowd slowly drew about him, blending into one dark, thick, thousand-headed body. It looked into his face with hundreds of attentive eyes; it sucked in his words in silent, strained attention. "We will not attain to a better life until we feel ourselves as comrades, as one family of friends firmly bound together by one desire--the desire to fight for our rights." "Get down to business!" somebody standing near the mother shouted rudely. "Don't interrupt!" "Shut up!" The two muffled exclamations were heard in different places. The soot-covered faces frowned in sulky incredulity; scores of eyes looked into Pavel's face thoughtfully and seriously. "A socialist, but no fool!" somebody observed. "I say, he does speak boldly!" said a tall, crippled workingman, tapping the mother on the shoulder. "It is time, comrades, to take a stand against the greedy power that lives by our labor. It is time to defend ourselves; we must all understand that no one except ourselves will help us. One for all and all for one--this is our law, if we want to crush the foe!" "He's right, boys!" Makhotin shouted. "Listen to the truth!" And, with a broad sweep of his arm, he shook his fist in the air. "We must call out the manager at once," said Pavel. "We must ask him." As if struck by a tornado, the crowd rocked to and fro; scores of voices shouted: "The manager! The manager! Let him come! Let him explain!" "Send delegates for him! Bring him here!" "No, don't; it's not necessary!" The mother pushed her way to the front and looked up at her son. She was filled with pride. Her son stood among the old, respected workingmen; all listened to him and agreed with him! She was pleased that he was so calm and talked so simply; not angrily, not swearing, like the others. Broken exclamations, wrathful words and oaths descended like hail on iron. Pavel looked down on the people from his elevation, and with wide-open eyes seemed to be seeking something among them. "Delegates!" "Let Sizov speak!" "Vlasov!" "Rybin! He has a terrible tongue!" Finally Sizov, Rybin, and Pavel were chosen for the interview with the manager. When just about to send for the manager, suddenly low exclamations were heard in the crowd: "Here he comes himself!" "The manager?" "Ah!" The crowd opened to make way for a tall, spare man with a pointed beard, an elongated face and blinking eyes. "Permit me," he said, as he pushed the people aside with a short motion of his hand, without touching them. With the experienced look of a ruler of people, he scanned the workingmen's faces with a searching gaze. They took their hats off and bowed to him. He walked past them without acknowledging their greetings. His presence silenced and confused the crowd, and evoked embarrassed smiles and low exclamations, as of repentant children who had already come to regret their prank. Now he passed by the mother, casting a stern glance at her face, and stopped before the pile of iron. Somebody from above extended a hand to him; he did not take it, but with an easy, powerful movement of his body he clambered up and stationed himself in front of Pavel and Sizov. Looking around the silent crowd, he asked: "What's the meaning of this crowd? Why have you dropped your work?" For a few seconds silence reigned. Sizov waved his cap in the air, shrugged his shoulders, and dropped his head. "I am asking you a question!" continued the manager. Pavel moved alongside of him and said in a low voice, pointing to Sizov and Rybin: "We three are authorized by all the comrades to ask you to revoke your order about the kopeck discount." "Why?" asked the manager, without looking at Pavel. "We do not consider such a tax just!" Pavel replied loudly. "So, in my plan to drain the marsh you see only a desire to exploit the workingmen and not a desire to better their conditions; is that it?" "Yes!" Pavel replied. "And you, also?" the manager asked Rybin. "The very same!" "How about you, my worthy friend?" The manager turned to Sizov. "I, too, want to ask you to let us keep our kopecks." And drooping his head again, Sizov smiled guiltily. The manager slowly bent his look upon the crowd again, shrugged his shoulders, and then, regarding Pavel searchingly, observed: "You appear to be a fairly intelligent man. Do you not understand the usefulness of this measure?" Pavel replied loudly: "If the factory should drain the marsh at its own expense, we would all understand it!" "This factory is not in the philanthropy business!" remarked the manager dryly. "I order you all to start work at once!" And he began to descend, cautiously feeling the iron with his feet, and without looking at anyone. A dissatisfied hum was heard in the crowd. "What!" asked the manager, halting. All were silent; then from the distance came a solitary voice: "You go to work yourself!" "If in fifteen minutes you do not start work, I'll order every single one of you to be discharged!" the manager announced dryly and distinctly. He again proceeded through the crowd, but now an indistinct murmur followed him, and the shouting grew louder as his figure receded. "Speak to him!" "That's what you call justice! Worse luck!" Some turned to Pavel and shouted: "Say, you great lawyer, you, what's to be done now? You talked and talked, but the moment he came it all went up in the air!" "Well, Vlasov, what now?" When the shouts became more insistent, Pavel raised his hand and said: "Comrades, I propose that we quit work until he gives up that kopeck!" Excited voices burst out: "He thinks we're fools!" "We ought to do it!" "A strike?" "For one kopeck?" "Why not? Why not strike?" "We'll all be discharged!" "And who is going to do the work?" "There are others!" "Who? Judases?" "Every year I would have to give three rubles and sixty kopecks to the mosquitoes!" "All of us would have to give it!" Pavel walked down and stood at the side of his mother. No one paid any attention to him now. They were all yelling and debating hotly with one another. "You cannot get them to strike!" said Rybin, coming up to Pavel. "Greedy as these people are for a penny, they are too cowardly. You may, perhaps, induce about three hundred of them to follow you, no more. It's a heap of dung you won't lift with one toss of the pitchfork, I tell you!" Pavel was silent. In front of him the huge black face of the crowd was rocking wildly, and fixed on him an importunate stare. His heart beat in alarm. It seemed to him as if all the words he had spoken vanished in the crowd without leaving any trace, like scattered drops of rain falling on parched soil. One after the other, workmen approached him praising his speech, but doubting the success of a strike, and complaining how little the people understood their own interests and realized their own strength. Pavel had a sense of injury and disappointment as to his own power. His head ached; he felt desolate. Hitherto, whenever he pictured the triumph of his truth, he wanted to cry with the delight that seized his heart. But here he had spoken his truth to the people, and behold! when clothed in words it appeared so pale, so powerless, so incapable of affecting anyone. He blamed himself; it seemed to him that he had concealed his dream in a poor, disfiguring garment and no one could, therefore, detect its beauty. He went home, tired and moody. He was followed by his mother and Sizov, while Rybin walked alongside, buzzing into his ear: "You speak well, but you don't speak to the heart! That's the trouble! The spark must be thrown into the heart, into its very depths!" "It's time we lived and were guided by reason," Pavel said in a low voice. "The boot does not fit the foot; it's too thin and narrow! The foot won't get in! And if it does, it will wear the boot out mighty quick. That is the trouble." Sizov, meanwhile, talked to the mother. "It's time for us old folks to get into our graves. Nilovna! A new people is coming. What sort of a life have we lived? We crawled on our knees, and always crouched on the ground! But here are the new people. They have either come to their senses, or else are blundering worse than we; but they are not like us, anyway. Just look at those youngsters talking to the manager as to their equal! Yes, ma'am! Oh, if only my son Matvey were alive! Good-by, Pavel Vlasov! You stand up for the people all right, brother. God grant you his favor! Perhaps you'll find a way out. God grant it!" And he walked away. "Yes, you may as well die straight off!" murmured Rybin. "You are no men, now. You are only putty--good to fill cracks with, that's all! Did you see, Pavel, who it was that shouted to make you a delegate? It was those who call you socialist--agitator--yes!--thinking you'd be discharged, and it would serve you right!" "They are right, according to their lights!" said Pavel. "So are wolves when they tear one another to pieces!" Rybin's face was sullen, his voice unusually tremulous. The whole day Pavel felt ill at ease, as if he had lost something, he did not know what, and anticipated a further loss. At night when the mother was asleep and he was reading in bed, gendarmes appeared and began to search everywhere--in the yard, in the attic. They were sullen; the yellow-faced officer conducted himself as on the first occasion, insultingly, derisively, delighting in abuse, endeavoring to cut down to the very heart. The mother, in a corner, maintained silence, never removing her eyes from her son's face. He made every effort not to betray his emotion; but whenever the officer laughed, his fingers twitched strangely, and the old woman felt how hard it was for him not to reply, and to bear the jesting. This time the affair was not so terrorizing to her as at the first search. She felt a greater hatred to these gray, spurred night callers, and her hatred swallowed up her alarm. Pavel managed to whisper: "They'll arrest me." Inclining her head, she quietly replied: "I understand." She did understand--they would put him in jail for what he had said to the workingmen that day. But since all agreed with what he had said, and all ought to stand up for him, he would not be detained long. She longed to embrace him and cry over him; but there stood the officer, watching her with a malevolent squint of his eyes. His lips trembled, his mustache twitched. It seemed to Vlasova that the officer was but waiting for her tears, complaints, and supplications. With a supreme effort endeavoring to say as little as possible, she pressed her son's hand, and holding her breath said slowly, in a low tone: [Illustration: "It seemed to Vlasova that the officer was but waiting for her tears."] "Good-by, Pasha. Did you take everything you need?" "Everything. Don't worry!" "Christ be with you!" CHAPTER IX When the police had led Pavel away, the mother sat down on the bench, and closing her eyes began to weep quietly. She leaned her back against the wall, as her husband used to do, her head thrown backward. Bound up in her grief and the injured sense of her impotence, she cried long, gently, and monotonously, pouring out all the pain of her wounded heart in her sobs. And before her, like an irremovable stain, hung that yellow face with the scant mustache, and the squinting eyes staring at her with malicious pleasure. Resentment and bitterness were winding themselves about her breast like black threads on a spool; resentment and bitterness toward those who tear a son away from his mother because he is seeking truth. It was cold; the rain pattered against the window panes; something seemed to be creeping along the walls. She thought she heard, walking watchfully around the house, gray, heavy figures, with broad, red faces, without eyes, and with long arms. It seemed to her that she almost heard the jingling of their spurs. "I wish they had taken me, too!" she thought. The whistle blew, calling the people to work. This time its sounds were low, indistinct, uncertain. The door opened and Rybin entered. He stood before her, wiping the raindrops from his beard. "They snatched him away, did they?" he asked. "Yes, they did, the dogs!" she replied, sighing. "That's how it is," said Rybin, with a smile; "they searched me, too; went all through me--yes! Abused me to their heart's content, but did me no harm beyond that. So they carried off Pavel, did they? The manager tipped the wink, the gendarme said 'Amen!' and lo! a man has disappeared. They certainly are thick together. One goes through the people's pockets while the other holds the gun." "You ought to stand up for Pavel!" cried the mother, rising to her feet. "It's for you all that he's gone!" "Who ought to stand up for him?" asked Rybin. "All of you!" "You want too much! We'll do nothing of the kind! Our masters have been gathering strength for thousands of years; they have driven our hearts full of nails. We cannot unite at once. We must first extract from ourselves, each from the other, the iron spikes that prevent us from standing close to one another." And thus he departed, with his heavy gait, leaving the mother to her grief, aggravated by the stern hopelessness of his words. The day passed in a thick mist of empty, senseless longing. She made no fire, cooked no dinner, drank no tea, and only late in the evening ate a piece of bread. When she went to bed it occurred to her that her life had never yet been so humiliating, so lonely and void. During the last years she had become accustomed to live constantly in the expectation of something momentous, something good. Young people were circling around her, noisy, vigorous, full of life. Her son's thoughtful and earnest face was always before her, and he seemed to be the master and creator of this thrilling and noble life. Now he was gone, everything was gone. In the whole day, no one except the disagreeable Rybin had called. Beyond the window, the dense, cold rain was sighing and knocking at the panes. The rain and the drippings from the roof filled the air with a doleful, wailing melody. The whole house appeared to be rocking gently to and fro, and everything around her seemed aimless and unnecessary. A gentle rap was heard at the door. It came once, and then a second time. She had grown accustomed to these noises; they no longer frightened her. A soft, joyous sensation thrilled her heart, and a vague hope quickly brought her to her feet. Throwing a shawl over her shoulders, she hurried to the door and opened it. Samoylov walked in, followed by another man with his face hidden behind the collar of his overcoat and under a hat thrust over his eyebrows. "Did we wake you?" asked Samoylov, without greeting the mother, his face gloomy and thoughtful, contrary to his wont. "I was not asleep," she said, looking at them with expectant eyes. Samoylov's companion took off his hat, and breathing heavily and hoarsely said in a friendly basso, like an old acquaintance, giving her his broad, short-fingered hand: "Good evening, granny! You don't recognize me?" "Is it you?" exclaimed Nilovna, with a sudden access of delight. "Yegor Ivanovich?" "The very same identical one!" replied he, bowing his large head with its long hair. There was a good-natured smile on his face, and a clear, caressing look in his small gray eyes. He was like a samovar--rotund, short, with thick neck and short arms. His face was shiny and glossy, with high cheek bones. He breathed noisily, and his chest kept up a continuous low wheeze. "Step into the room. I'll be dressed in a minute," the mother said. "We have come to you on business," said Samoylov thoughtfully, looking at her out of the corner of his eyes. Yegor Ivanovich passed into the room, and from there said: "Nikolay got out of jail this morning, granny. You know him?" "How long was he there?" she asked. "Five months and eleven days. He saw the Little Russian there, who sends you his regards, and Pavel, who also sends you his regards and begs you not to be alarmed. As a man travels on his way, he says, the jails constitute his resting places, established and maintained by the solicitous authorities! Now, granny, let us get to the point. Do you know how many people were arrested yesterday?" "I do not. Why, were there any others arrested besides Pavel?" she exclaimed. "He was the forty-ninth!" calmly interjected Yegor Ivanovich. "And we may expect about ten more to be taken! This gentleman here, for example." "Yes; me, too!" said Samoylov with a frown. Nilovna somehow felt relieved. "He isn't there alone," she thought. When she had dressed herself, she entered the room and, smiling bravely, said: "I guess they won't detain them long, if they arrested so many." "You are right," assented Yegor Ivanovich; "and if we can manage to spoil this mess for them, we can make them look altogether like fools. This is the way it is, granny. If we were now to cease smuggling our literature into the factory, the gendarmes would take advantage of such a regrettable circumstance, and would use it against Pavel and his comrades in jail." "How is that? Why should they?" the mother cried in alarm. "It's very plain, granny," said Yegor Ivanovich softly. "Sometimes even gendarmes reason correctly. Just think! Pavel was, and there were books and there were papers; Pavel is not, and no books and no papers! Ergo, it was Pavel who distributed these books! Aha! Then they'll begin to eat them all alive. Those gendarmes dearly love so to unman a man that what remains of him is only a shred of himself, and a touching memory." "I see, I see," said the mother dejectedly. "O God! What's to be done, then?" "They have trapped them all, the devil take them!" came Samoylov's voice from the kitchen. "Now we must continue our work the same as before, and not only for the cause itself, but also to save our comrades!" "And there is no one to do the work," added Yegor, smiling. "We have first-rate literature. I saw to that myself. But how to get it into the factory, that's the question!" "They search everybody at the gates now," said Samoylov. The mother divined that something was expected of her. She understood that she could be useful to her son, and she hastened to ask: "Well, now? What are we to do?" Samoylov stood in the doorway to answer. "Pelagueya Nilovna, you know Marya Korsunova, the peddler." "I do. Well?" "Speak to her; see if you can't get her to smuggle in our wares." "We could pay her, you know," interjected Yegor. The mother waved her hands in negation. "Oh, no! The woman is a chatterbox. No! If they find out it comes from me, from this house--oh, no!" Then, inspired by a sudden idea, she began gladly and in a low voice: "Give it to me, give it to me. I'll manage it myself. I'll find a way. I will ask Marya to make me her assistant. I have to earn my living, I have to work. Don't I? Well, then, I'll carry dinners to the factory. Yes, I'll manage it!" Pressing her hands to her bosom, she gave hurried assurances that she would carry out her mission well and escape detection. Finally she exclaimed in triumph: "They'll find out--Pavel Vlasov is away, but his arm reaches out even from jail. They'll find out!" All three became animated. Briskly rubbing his hands, Yegor smiled and said: "It's wonderful, stupendous! I say, granny, it's superb--simply magnificent!" "I'll sit in jail as in an armchair, if this succeeds," said Samoylov, laughing and rubbing his hands. "You are fine, granny!" Yegor hoarsely cried. The mother smiled. It was evident to her that if the leaflets should continue to appear in the factory, the authorities would be forced to recognize that it was not her son who distributed them. And feeling assured of success, she began to quiver all over with joy. "When you go to see Pavel," said Yegor, "tell him he has a good mother." "I'll see him very soon, I assure you," said Samoylov, smiling. The mother grasped his hand and said earnestly: "Tell him that I'll do everything, everything necessary. I want him to know it." "And suppose they don't put him in prison?" asked Yegor, pointing at Samoylov. The mother sighed and said sadly: "Well, then, it can't be helped!" Both of them burst out laughing. And when she realized her ridiculous blunder, she also began to laugh in embarrassment, and lowering her eyes said somewhat slyly: "Bothering about your own folk keeps you from seeing other people straight." "That's natural!" exclaimed Yegor. "And as to Pavel, you need not worry about him. He'll come out of prison a still better man. The prison is our place of rest and study--things we have no time for when we are at large. I was in prison three times, and each time, although I got scant pleasure, I certainly derived benefit for my heart and mind." "You breathe with difficulty," she said, looking affectionately at his open face. "There are special reasons for that," he replied, raising his finger. "So the matter's settled, granny? Yes? To-morrow we'll deliver the matter to you--and the wheels that grind the centuried darkness to destruction will again start a-rolling. Long live free speech! And long live a mother's heart! And in the meantime, good-by." "Good-by," said Samoylov, giving her a vigorous handshake. "To my mother, I don't dare even hint about such matters. Oh, no!" "Everybody will understand in time," said Nilovna, wishing to please him. "Everybody will understand." When they left, she locked the door, and kneeling in the middle of the room began to pray, to the accompaniment of the patter of the rain. It was a prayer without words, one great thought of men, of all those people whom Pavel introduced into her life. It was as if they passed between her and the ikons upon which she held her eyes riveted. And they all looked so simple, so strangely near to one another, yet so lone in life. Early next morning the mother went to Marya Korsunova. The peddler, noisy and greasy as usual, greeted her with friendly sympathy. "You are grieving?" Marya asked, patting the mother on the back. "Now, don't. They just took him, carried him off. Where is the calamity? There is no harm in it. It used to be that men were thrown into dungeons for stealing, now they are there for telling the truth. Pavel may have said something wrong, but he stood up for all, and they all know it. Don't worry! They don't all say so, but they all know a good man when they see him. I was going to call on you right along, but had no time. I am always cooking and selling, but will end my days a beggar, I guess, all the same. My needs get the best of me, confound them! They keep nibbling and nibbling like mice at a piece of cheese. No sooner do I manage to scrape together ten rubles or so, when along comes some heathen, and makes away with all my money. Yes. It's hard to be a woman! It's a wretched business! To live alone is hard, to live with anyone, still harder!" "And I came to ask you to take me as your assistant," Vlasova broke in, interrupting her prattle. "How is that?" asked Marya. And after hearing her friend's explanation, she nodded her head assentingly. "That's possible! You remember how you used to hide me from my husband? Well, now I am going to hide you from want. Everyone ought to help you, for your son is perishing for the public cause. He is a fine chap, your son is! They all say so, every blessed soul of them. And they all pity him. I'll tell you something. No good is going to come to the authorities from these arrests, mark my word! Look what's going on in the factory! Hear them talk! They are in an ugly mood, my dear! The officials imagine that when they've bitten at a man's heel, he won't be able to go far. But it turns out that when ten men are hit, a hundred men get angry. A workman must be handled with care! He may go on patiently enduring and suffering everything that's heaped upon him for a long, long time, but then he can also explode all of a sudden!" CHAPTER X The upshot of the conversation was that the next day at noon the mother was seen in the factory yard with two pots of eatables from Marya's culinary establishment, while Marya herself transferred her base of operations to the market place. The workmen immediately noticed their new caterer. Some of them approached her and said approvingly: "Gone into business, Nilovna?" They comforted her, arguing that Pavel would certainly be released soon because his cause was a good one. Others filled her sad heart with alarm by their cautious condolence, while still others awoke a responsive echo in her by openly and bitterly abusing the manager and the gendarmes. Some there were who looked at her with a vindictive expression, among them Isay Gorbov, who, speaking through his teeth, said: "If I were the governor, I would have your son hanged! Let him not mislead the people!" This vicious threat went through her like the chill blast of death. She made no reply, glanced at his small, freckled face, and with a sigh cast down her eyes. She observed considerable agitation in the factory; the workmen gathered in small groups and talked in an undertone, with great animation; the foremen walked about with careworn faces, poking their noses into everything; here and there were heard angry oaths and irritated laughter. Two policemen escorted Samoylov past her. He walked with one hand in his pocket, the other smoothing his red hair. A crowd of about a hundred workmen followed him, and plied the policemen with oaths and banter. "Going to take a promenade, Grisha?" shouted one. "They do honor to us fellows!" chimed in another. "When we go to promenading, we have a bodyguard to escort us," said a third, and uttered a harsh oath. "It does not seem to pay any longer to catch thieves!" exclaimed a tall, one-eyed workingman in a loud, bitter voice. "So they take to arresting honest people." "They don't even do it at night!" broke in another. "They come and drag them away in broad daylight, without shame, the impudent scoundrels!" The policemen walked on rapidly and sullenly, trying to avoid the sight of the crowd, and feigning not to hear the angry exclamations showered upon them from all sides. Three workmen carrying a big iron bar happened to come in front of them, and thrusting the bar against them, shouted: "Look out there, fishermen!" As he passed Nilovna, Samoylov nodded to her, and smiling, said: "Behold, this is Gregory, the servant of God, being arrested." She made a low bow to him in silence. These men, so young, sober, and clever, who went to jail with a smile, moved her, and she unconsciously felt for them the pitying affection of a mother. It pleased her to hear the sharp comments leveled against the authorities. She saw therein her son's influence. Leaving the factory, she passed the remainder of the day at Marya's house, assisting her in her work, and listening to her chatter. Late in the evening she returned home and found it bare, chilly and disagreeable. She moved about from corner to corner, unable to find a resting place, and not knowing what to do with herself. Night was fast approaching, and she grew worried, because Yegor Ivanovich had not yet come and brought her the literature which he had promised. Behind the window, gray, heavy flakes of spring snow fluttered and settled softly and noiselessly upon the pane. Sliding down and melting, they left a watery track in their course. The mother thought of her son. A cautious rap was heard. She rushed to the door, lifted the latch, and admitted Sashenka. She had not seen her for a long while, and the first thing that caught her eye was the girl's unnatural stoutness. "Good evening!" she said, happy to have a visitor at such a time, to relieve her solitude for a part of the night. "You haven't been around for a long while! Were you away?" "No, I was in prison," replied the girl, smiling, "with Nikolay Ivanovich. Do you remember him?" "I should think I do!" exclaimed the mother. "Yegor Ivanovich told me yesterday that he had been released, but I knew nothing about you. Nobody told me that you were there." "What's the good of telling? I should like to change my dress before Yegor Ivanovich comes!" said the girl, looking around. "You are all wet." "I've brought the booklets." "Give them here, give them to me!" cried the mother impatiently. "Directly," replied the girl. She untied her skirt and shook it, and like leaves from a tree, down fluttered a lot of thin paper parcels on the floor around her. The mother picked them up, laughing, and said: "I was wondering what made you so stout. Oh, what a heap of them you have brought! Did you come on foot?" "Yes," said Sashenka. She was again her graceful, slender self. The mother noticed that her cheeks were shrunken, and that dark rings were under her unnaturally large eyes. "You are just out of prison. You ought to rest, and there you are carrying a load like that for seven versts!" said the mother, sighing and shaking her head. "It's got to be done!" said the girl. "Tell me, how is Pavel? Did he stand it all right? He wasn't very much worried, was he?" Sashenka asked the question without looking at the mother. She bent her head and her fingers trembled as she arranged her hair. "All right," replied the mother. "You can rest assured he won't betray himself." "How strong he is!" murmured the girl quietly. "He has never been sick," replied the mother. "Why, you are all in a shiver! I'll get you some tea, and some raspberry jam." "That's fine!" exclaimed the girl with a faint smile. "But don't you trouble! It's too late. Let me do it myself." "What! Tired as you are?" the mother reproached her, hurrying into the kitchen, where she busied herself with the samovar. The girl followed into the kitchen, sat down on the bench, and folded her hands behind her head before she replied: "Yes, I'm very tired! After all, the prison makes one weak. The awful thing about it is the enforced inactivity. There is nothing more tormenting. We stay a week, five weeks. We know how much there is to be done. The people are waiting for knowledge. We're in a position to satisfy their wants, and there we are locked up in a cage like animals! That's what is so trying, that's what dries up the heart!" "Who will reward you for all this?" asked the mother; and with a sigh she answered the question herself. "No one but God! Of course you don't believe in Him either?" "No!" said the girl briefly, shaking her head. "And I don't believe you!" the mother ejaculated in a sudden burst of excitement. Quickly wiping her charcoal-blackened hands on her apron she continued, with deep conviction in her voice: "You don't understand your own faith! How could you live the kind of life you are living, without faith in God?" A loud stamping of feet and a murmur of voices were heard on the porch. The mother started; the girl quickly rose to her feet, and whispered hurriedly: "Don't open the door! If it's the gendarmes, you don't know me. I walked into the wrong house, came here by accident, fainted away, you undressed me, and found the books around me. You understand?" "Why, my dear, what for?" asked the mother tenderly. "Wait a while!" said Sashenka listening. "I think it's Yegor." It was Yegor, wet and out of breath. "Aha! The samovar!" he cried. "That's the best thing in life, granny! You here already, Sashenka?" His hoarse voice filled the little kitchen. He slowly removed his heavy ulster, talking all the time. "Here, granny, is a girl who is a thorn in the flesh of the police! Insulted by the overseer of the prison, she declared that she would starve herself to death if he did not ask her pardon. And for eight days she went without eating, and came within a hair's breadth of dying. It's not bad! She must have a mighty strong little stomach." "Is it possible you took no food for eight days in succession?" asked the mother in amazement. "I had to get him to beg my pardon," answered the girl with a stoical shrug of her shoulders. Her composure and her stern persistence seemed almost like a reproach to the mother. "And suppose you had died?" she asked again. "Well, what can one do?" the girl said quietly. "He did beg my pardon after all. One ought never to forgive an insult, never!" "Ye-es!" responded the mother slowly. "Here are we women who are insulted all our lives long." "I have unloaded myself!" announced Yegor from the other room. "Is the samovar ready? Let me take it in!" He lifted the samovar and talked as he carried it. "My own father used to drink not less than twenty glasses of tea a day, wherefor his days upon earth were long, peaceful, and strong; for he lived to be seventy-three years old, never having suffered from any ailment whatsoever. In weight he reached the respectable figure of three hundred and twenty pounds, and by profession he was a sexton in the village of Voskresensk." "Are you Ivan's son?" exclaimed the mother. "I am that very mortal. How did you know his name?" "Why, I am a Voskresenskian myself!" "A fellow countrywoman! Who were your people?" "Your neighbors. I am a Sereguin." "Are you a daughter of Nil the Lame? I thought your face was familiar! Why, I had my ears pulled by him many and many a time!" They stood face to face plying each other with questions and laughing. Sashenka looked at them and smiled, and began to prepare the tea. The clatter of the dishes recalled the mother to the realities of the present. "Oh, excuse me! I quite forgot myself, talking about old times. It is so sweet to recall your youth." "It's I who ought to beg your pardon for carrying on like this in your house!" said Sashenka. "But it is eleven o'clock already, and I have so far to go." "Go where? To the city?" the mother asked in surprise. "Yes." "What are you talking about! It's dark and wet, and you are so tired. Stay here overnight. Yegor Ivanovich will sleep in the kitchen, and you and I here." "No, I must go," said the girl simply. "Yes, countrywoman, she must go. The young lady must disappear. It would be bad if she were to be seen on the street to-morrow." "But how can she go? By herself?" "By herself," said Yegor, laughing. The girl poured tea for herself, took a piece of rye bread, salted it, and started to eat, looking at the mother contemplatively. "How can you go that way? Both you and Natasha. I wouldn't. I'm afraid!" "She's afraid, too," said Yegor. "Aren't you afraid, Sasha?" "Of course!" The mother looked at her, then at Yegor, and said in a low voice, "What strange----" "Give me a glass of tea, granny," Yegor interrupted her. When Sashenka had drunk her glass of tea, she pressed Yegor's hand in silence, and walked out into the kitchen. The mother followed her. In the kitchen Sashenka said: "When you see Pavel, give him my regards, please." And taking hold of the latch, she suddenly turned around, and asked in a low voice: "May I kiss you?" The mother embraced her in silence, and kissed her warmly. "Thank you!" said the girl, and nodding her head, walked out. Returning to the room, the mother peered anxiously through the window. Wet flakes of snow fluttered through the dense, moist darkness. "And do you remember Prozorov, the storekeeper?" asked Yegor. "He used to sit with his feet sprawling, and blow noisily into his glass of tea. He had a red, satisfied, sweet-covered face." "I remember, I remember," said the mother, coming back to the table. She sat down, and looking at Yegor with a mournful expression in her eyes, she spoke pityingly: "Poor Sashenka! How will she ever get to the city?" "She will be very much worn out," Yegor agreed. "The prison has shaken her health badly. She was stronger before. Besides, she has had a delicate bringing up. It seems to me she has already ruined her lungs. There is something in her face that reminds one of consumption." "Who is she?" "The daughter of a landlord. Her father is a rich man and a big scoundrel, according to what she says. I suppose you know, granny, that they want to marry?" "Who?" "She and Pavel. Yes, indeed! But so far they have not yet been able. When he is free, she is in prison, and _vice versa_." Yegor laughed. "I didn't know it!" the mother replied after a pause. "Pasha never speaks about himself." Now she felt a still greater pity for the girl, and looking at her guest with involuntary hostility, she said: "You ought to have seen her home." "Impossible!" Yegor answered calmly. "I have a heap of work to do here, and the whole day to-morrow, from early morning, I shall have to walk and walk and walk. No easy job, considering my asthma." "She's a fine girl!" said the mother, vaguely thinking of what Yegor had told her. She felt hurt that the news should have come to her, not from her son, but from a stranger, and she pressed her lips together tightly, and lowered her eyebrows. "Yes, a fine girl!" Yegor nodded assent. "There's a bit of the noblewoman in her yet, but it's growing less and less all the time. You are sorry for her, I see. What's the use? You won't find heart enough, if you start to grieve for all of us rebels, granny dear. Life is not made very easy for us, I admit. There, for instance, is the case of a friend of mine who returned a short while ago from exile. When he went through Novgorod, his wife and child awaited him in Smolensk, and when he arrived in Smolensk, they were already in prison in Moscow. Now it's the wife's turn to go to Siberia. To be a revolutionary and to be married is a very inconvenient arrangement--inconvenient for the husband, inconvenient for the wife and in the end for the cause also! I, too, had a wife, an excellent woman, but five years of this kind of life landed her in the grave." He emptied the glass of tea at one gulp, and continued his narrative. He enumerated the years and months he had passed in prison and in exile, told of various accidents and misfortunes, of the slaughters in prisons, and of hunger in Siberia. The mother looked at him, listened with wonderment to the simple way in which he spoke of this life, so full of suffering, of persecution, of wrong, and abuse of men. "Well, let's get down to business!" His voice changed, and his face grew more serious. He asked questions about the way in which the mother intended to smuggle the literature into the factory, and she marveled at his clear knowledge of all the details. Then they returned to reminiscences of their native village. He joked, and her mind roved thoughtfully through her past. It seemed to her strangely like a quagmire uniformly strewn with hillocks, which were covered with poplars trembling in constant fear; with low firs, and with white birches straying between the hillocks. The birches grew slowly, and after standing for five years on the unstable, putrescent soil, they dried up, fell down, and rotted away. She looked at this picture, and a vague feeling of insufferable sadness overcame her. The figure of a girl with a sharp, determined face stood before her. Now the figure walks somewhere in the darkness amid the snowflakes, solitary, weary. And her son sits in a little cell, with iron gratings over the window. Perhaps he is not yet asleep, and is thinking. But he is thinking not of his mother. He has one nearer to him than herself. Heavy, chaotic thoughts, like a tangled mass of clouds, crept over her, and encompassed her and oppressed her bosom. "You are tired, granny! Let's go to bed!" said Yegor, smiling. She bade him good night, and sidled carefully into the kitchen, carrying away a bitter, caustic feeling in her heart. In the morning, after breakfast, Yegor asked her: "Suppose they catch you and ask you where you got all these heretical books from. What will you say?" "I'll say, 'It's none of your business!'" she answered, smiling. "You'll never convince them of that!" Yegor replied confidently. "On the contrary, they are profoundly convinced that this is precisely their business. They will question you very, very diligently, and very, very long!" "I won't tell, though!" "They'll put you in prison!" "Well, what of it? Thank God that I am good at least for that," she said with a sigh. "Thank God! Who needs me? Nobody!" "H'm!" said Yegor, fixing his look upon her. "A good person ought to take care of himself." "I couldn't learn that from you, even if I were good," the mother replied, laughing. Yegor was silent, and paced up and down the room; then he walked up to her and said: "This is hard, countrywoman! I feel it, it's very hard for you!" "It's hard for everybody," she answered, with a wave of her hand. "Maybe only for those who understand, it's easier. But I understand a little, too. I understand what it is the good people want." "If you do understand, granny, then it means that everybody needs you, everybody!" said Yegor earnestly and solemnly. She looked at him and laughed without saying anything. CHAPTER XI At noon, calmly and in a businesslike way she put the books around her bosom, and so skillfully and snugly that Yegor announced, smacking his lips with satisfaction: "_Sehr gut!_ as the German says when he has drunk a keg of beer. Literature has not changed you, granny. You still remain the good, tall, portly, elderly woman. May all the numberless gods grant you their blessings on your enterprise!" Within half an hour she stood at the factory gate, bent with the weight of her burden, calm and assured. Two guards, irritated by the oaths and raillery of the workingmen, examined all who entered the gate, handling them roughly and swearing at them. A policeman and a thin-legged man with a red face and alert eyes stood at one side. The mother, shifting the rod resting on her shoulders, with a pail suspended from either end of it, watched the man from the corner of her eye. She divined that he was a spy. A tall, curly-headed fellow with his hat thrown back over his neck, cried to the guardsmen who searched him: "Search the head and not the pockets, you devils!" "There is nothing but lice on your head," retorted one of the guardsmen. "Catching lice is an occupation more suited to you than hunting human game!" rejoined the workman. The spy scanned him with a rapid glance. "Will you let me in?" asked the mother. "See, I'm bent double with my heavy load. My back is almost breaking." "Go in! Go in!" cried the guard sullenly. "She comes with arguments, too." The mother walked to her place, set her pails on the ground, and wiping the perspiration from her face looked around her. The Gusev brothers, the locksmiths, instantly came up to her, and the older of them, Vasily, asked aloud, knitting his eyebrows: "Got any pirogs?" "I'll bring them to-morrow," she answered. This was the password agreed upon. The faces of the brothers brightened. Ivan, unable to restrain himself, exclaimed: "Oh, you jewel of a mother!" Vasily squatted down on his heels, looked into the pot, and a bundle of books disappeared into his bosom. "Ivan!" he said aloud. "Let's not go home, let's get our dinner here from her!" And he quickly shoved the books into the legs of his boots. "We must give our new peddler a lift, don't you think so?" "Yes, indeed!" Ivan assented, and laughed aloud. The mother looked carefully about her, and called out: "Sour cabbage soup! Hot vermicelli soup! Roast meat!" Then deftly and secretly taking out one package of books after the other, she shoved them into the hands of the brothers. Each time a bundle disappeared from her hands, the sickly, sneering face of the officer of gendarmes flashed up before her like a yellow stain, like the flame of a match in a dark room, and she said to him in her mind, with a feeling of malicious pleasure: "Take this, sir!" And when she handed over the last package she added with an air of satisfaction: "And here is some more, take it!" [Illustration: "Taking out one package of books after the other, she shoved them into the hands of the brothers."] Workmen came up to her with cups in their hands, and when they were near Ivan and Vasily, they began to laugh aloud. The mother calmly suspended the transfer of the books, and poured sour soup and vermicelli soup, while the Gusevs joked her. "How cleverly Nilovna does her work!" "Necessity drives one even to catching mice," remarked a stoker somberly. "They have snatched away your breadgiver, the scoundrels! Well, give us three cents' worth of vermicelli. Never mind, mother! You'll pull through!" "Thanks for the good word!" she returned, smiling. He walked off to one side and mumbled, "It doesn't cost me much to say a good word!" "But there's no one to say it to!" observed a blacksmith, with a smile, and shrugging his shoulders in surprise added: "There's a life for you, fellows! There's no one to say a good word to; no one is worth it. Yes, sir!" Vasily Gusev rose, wrapped his coat tightly around him, and exclaimed: "What I ate was hot, and yet I feel cold." Then he walked away. Ivan also rose, and ran off whistling merrily. Cheerful and smiling, Nilovna kept on calling her wares: "Hot! Hot! Sour soup! Vermicelli soup! Porridge!" She thought of how she would tell her son about her first experience; and the yellow face of the officer was still standing before her, perplexed and spiteful. His black mustache twitched uneasily, and his upper lip turned up nervously, showing the gleaming white enamel of his clenched teeth. A keen joy beat and sang in her heart like a bird, her eyebrows quivered, and continuing deftly to serve her customers she muttered to herself: "There's more! There's more!" Through the whole day she felt a sensation of delightful newness which embraced her heart as with a fondling caress. And in the evening, when she had concluded her work at Marya's house, and was drinking tea, the splash of horses' hoofs in the mud was heard, and the call of a familiar voice. She jumped up, hurried into the kitchen, and made straight for the door. Somebody walked quickly through the porch; her eyes grew dim, and leaning against the doorpost, she pushed the door open with her foot. "Good evening, mother!" a familiar, melodious voice rang out, and a pair of dry, long hands were laid on her shoulders. The joy of seeing Andrey was mingled in her bosom with the sadness of disappointment; and the two contrary feelings blended into one burning sensation which embraced her like a hot wave. She buried her face in Andrey's bosom. He pressed her tightly to himself, his hands trembled. The mother wept quietly without speaking, while he stroked her hair, and spoke in his musical voice: "Don't cry, mother. Don't wring my heart. Upon my honest word, they will let him out soon! They haven't a thing against him; all the boys will keep quiet as cooked fish." Putting his long arm around the mother's shoulders he led her into the room, and nestling up against him with the quick gesture of a squirrel, she wiped the tears from her face, while her heart greedily drank in his tender words. "Pavel sends you his love. He is as well and cheerful as can be. It's very crowded in the prison. They have thrown in more than a hundred of our people, both from here and from the city. Three and four persons have been put into one cell. The prison officials are rather a good set. They are exhausted with the quantity of work the gendarmes have been giving them. The prison authorities are not extremely rigorous, they don't order you about roughly. They simply say: 'Be quiet as you can, gentlemen. Don't put us in an awkward position!' So everything goes well. We talk with one another, we give books to one another, and we share our food. It's a good prison! Old and dirty, but so soft and so light. The criminals are also nice people; they help us a good deal. Bukin, four others, and myself were released. It got too crowded. They'll let Pavel go soon, too. I'm telling you the truth, believe me. Vyesovshchikov will be detained the longest. They are very angry at him. He scolds and swears at everybody all the time. The gendarmes can't bear to look at him. I guess he'll get himself into court, or receive a sound thrashing some day. Pavel tries to dissuade him. 'Stop, Nikolay!' he says to him. 'Your swearing won't reform them.' But he bawls: 'Wipe them off the face of the earth like a pest!' Pavel conducts himself finely out there; he treats all alike, and is as firm as a rock! They'll soon let him go." "Soon?" said the mother, relieved now and smiling. "I know he'll be let out soon!" "Well, if you know, it's all right! Give me tea, mother. Tell me how you've been, how you've passed your time." He looked at her, smiling all over, and seemed so near to her, such a splendid fellow. A loving, somewhat melancholy gleam flashed from the depths of his round, blue eyes. "I love you dearly, Andriusha!" the mother said, heaving a deep sigh, as she looked at his thin face grotesquely covered with tufts of hair. "People are satisfied with little from me! I know you love me; you are capable of loving everybody; you have a great heart," said the Little Russian, rocking in his chair, his eyes straying about the room. "No, I love you very differently!" insisted the mother. "If you had a mother, people would envy her because she had such a son." The Little Russian swayed his head, and rubbed it vigorously with both hands. "I have a mother, somewhere!" he said in a low voice. "Do you know what I did to-day?" she exclaimed, and reddening a little, her voice choking with satisfaction, she quickly recounted how she had smuggled literature into the factory. For a moment he looked at her in amazement with his eyes wide open; then he burst out into a loud guffaw, stamped his feet, thumped his head with his fingers, and cried joyously: "Oho! That's no joke any more! That's business! Won't Pavel be glad, though! Oh, you're a trump. That's good, mother! You have no idea _how_ good it is! Both for Pavel and all who were arrested with him!" He snapped his fingers in ecstasy, whistled, and fairly doubled over, all radiant with joy. His delight evoked a vigorous response from the mother. "My dear, my Andriusha!" she began, as if her heart had burst open, and gushed over merrily with a limpid stream of living words full of serene joy. "I've thought all my life, 'Lord Christ in heaven! what did I live for?' Beatings, work! I saw nothing except my husband. I knew nothing but fear! And how Pasha grew I did not see, and I hardly know whether I loved him when my husband was alive. All my concerns, all my thoughts were centered upon one thing--to feed my beast, to propitiate the master of my life with enough food, pleasing to his palate, and served on time, so as not to incur his displeasure, so as to escape the terrors of a beating, to get him to spare me but once! But I do not remember that he ever did spare me. He beat me so--not as a wife is beaten, but as one whom you hate and detest. Twenty years I lived like that, and what was up to the time of my marriage I do not recall. I remember certain things, but I see nothing! I am as a blind person. Yegor Ivanovich was here--we are from the same village--and he spoke about this and about that. I remember the houses, the people, but how they lived, what they spoke about, what happened to this one and what to that one--I forget, I do not see! I remember fires--two fires. It seems that everything has been beaten out of me, that my soul has been locked up and sealed tight. It's grown blind, it does not hear!" Her quick-drawn breath was almost a sob. She bent forward, and continued in a lowered voice: "When my husband died I turned to my son; but he went into this business, and I was seized with a pity for him, such a yearning pity--for if he should perish, how was I to live alone? What dread, what fright I have undergone! My heart was rent when I thought of his fate. "Our woman's love is not a pure love! We love that which we need. And here are you! You are grieving about your mother. What do you want her for? And all the others go and suffer for the people, they go to prison, to Siberia, they die for them, many are hung. Young girls walk alone at night, in the snow, in the mud, in the rain. They walk seven versts from the city to our place. Who drives them? Who pursues them? They love! You see, theirs is pure love! They believe! Yes, indeed, they believe, Andriusha! But here am I--I can't love like that! I love my own, the near ones!" "Yes, you can!" said the Little Russian, and turning away his face from her, he rubbed his head, face, and eyes vigorously as was his wont. "Everybody loves those who are near," he continued. "To a large heart, what is far is also near. You, mother, are capable of a great deal. You have a large capacity of motherliness!" "God grant it!" she said quietly. "I feel that it is good to live like that! Here are you, for instance, whom I love. Maybe I love you better than I do Pasha. He is always so silent. Here he wants to get married to Sashenka, for example, and he never told me, his mother, a thing about it." "That's not true," the Little Russian retorted abruptly. "I know it isn't true. It's true he loves her, and she loves him. But marry? No, they are not going to marry! She'd want to, but Pavel--he can't! He doesn't want to!" "See how you are!" said the mother quietly, and she fixed her eyes sadly and musingly on the Little Russian's face. "You see how you are! You offer up your own selves!" "Pavel is a rare man!" the Little Russian uttered in a low voice. "He is a man of iron!" "Now he sits in prison," continued the mother reflectively. "It's awful, it's terrible! It's not as it used to be before! Life altogether is not as it used to be, and the terror is different from the old terror. You feel a pity for everybody, and you are alarmed for everybody! And the heart is different. The soul has opened its eyes, it looks on, and is sad and glad at the same time. There's much I do not understand, and I feel so bitter and hurt that you do not believe in the Lord God. Well, I guess I can't help that! But I see and know that you are good people. And you have consecrated yourselves to a stern life for the sake of the people, to a life of hardship for the sake of truth. The truth you stand for, I comprehend: as long as there will be the rich, the people will get nothing, neither truth nor happiness, nothing! Indeed, that's so, Andriusha! Here am I living among you, while all this is going on. Sometimes at night my thoughts wander off to my past. I think of my youthful strength trampled under foot, of my young heart torn and beaten, and I feel sorry for myself and embittered. But for all that I live better now, I see myself more and more, I feel myself more." The Little Russian arose, and trying not to scrape with his feet, began to walk carefully up and down the room, tall, lean, absorbed in thought. "Well said!" he exclaimed in a low voice. "Very well! There was a young Jew in Kerch who wrote verses, and once he wrote: "And the innocently slain, Truth will raise to life again. "He himself was killed by the police in Kerch, but that's not the point. He knew the truth and did a great deal to spread it among the people. So here you are one of the innocently slain. He spoke the truth!" "There, I am talking now," the mother continued. "I talk and do not hear myself, don't believe my own ears! All my life I was silent, I always thought of one thing--how to live through the day apart, how to pass it without being noticed, so that nobody should touch me! And now I think about everything. Maybe I don't understand your affairs so very well; but all are near me, I feel sorry for all, and I wish well to all. And to you, Andriusha, more than all the rest." He took her hand in his, pressed it tightly, and quickly turned aside. Fatigued with emotion and agitation, the mother leisurely and silently washed the cups; and her breast gently glowed with a bold feeling that warmed her heart. Walking up and down the room the Little Russian said: "Mother, why don't you sometimes try to befriend Vyesovshchikov and be kind to him? He is a fellow that needs it. His father sits in prison--a nasty little old man. Nikolay sometimes catches sight of him through the window and he begins to swear at him. That's bad, you know. He is a good fellow, Nikolay is. He is fond of dogs, mice, and all sorts of animals, but he does not like people. That's the pass to which a man can be brought." "His mother disappeared without a trace, his father is a thief and a drunkard," said Nilovna pensively. When Andrey left to go to bed, the mother, without being noticed, made the sign of the cross over him, and after about half an hour, she asked quietly, "Are you asleep, Andriusha?" "No. Why?" "Nothing! Good night!" "Thank you, mother, thank you!" he answered gently. CHAPTER XII The next day when Nilovna came up to the gates of the factory with her load, the guides stopped her roughly, and ordering her to put the pails down on the ground, made a careful examination. "My eatables will get cold," she observed calmly, as they felt around her dress. "Shut up!" said a guard sullenly. Another one, tapping her lightly on the shoulder, said with assurance: "Those books are thrown across the fence, I say!" Old man Sizov came up to her and looking around said in an undertone: "Did you hear, mother?" "What?" "About the pamphlets. They've appeared again. They've just scattered them all over like salt over bread. Much good those arrests and searches have done! My nephew Mazin has been hauled away to prison, your son's been taken. Now it's plain it isn't he!" And stroking his beard Sizov concluded, "It's not people, but thoughts, and thoughts are not fleas; you can't catch them!" He gathered his beard in his hand, looked at her, and said as he walked away: "Why don't you come to see me some time? I guess you are lonely all by yourself." She thanked him, and calling her wares, she sharply observed the unusual animation in the factory. The workmen were all elated, they formed little circles, then parted, and ran from one group to another. Animated voices and happy, satisfied faces all around! The soot-filled atmosphere was astir and palpitating with something bold and daring. Now here, now there, approving ejaculations were heard, mockery, and sometimes threats. "Aha! It seems truth doesn't agree with them," she heard one say. The younger men were in especially good spirits, while the elder workmen had cautious smiles on their faces. The authorities walked about with a troubled expression, and the police ran from place to place. When the workingmen saw them, they dispersed, and walked away slowly, or if they remained standing, they stopped their conversation, looking silently at the agitated, angry faces. The workingmen seemed for some reason to be all washed and clean. The figure of Gusev loomed high, and his brother stalked about like a drake, and roared with laughter. The joiner's foreman, Vavilov, and the record clerk, Isay, walked slowly past the mother. The little, wizened clerk, throwing up his head and turning his neck to the left, looked at the frowning face of the foreman, and said quickly, shaking his reddish beard: "They laugh, Ivan Ivanovich. It's fun to them. They are pleased, although it's no less a matter than the destruction of the government, as the manager said. What must be done here, Ivan Ivanovich, is not merely to weed but to plow!" Vavilov walked with his hands folded behind his back, and his fingers tightly clasped. "You print there what you please, you blackguards!" he cried aloud. "But don't you dare say a word about me!" Vasily Gusev came up to Nilovna and declared: "I am going to eat with you again. Is it good to-day?" And lowering his head and screwing up his eyes, he added in an undertone: "You see? It hit exactly! Good! Oh, mother, very good!" She nodded her head affably to him, flattered that Gusev, the sauciest fellow in the village, addressed her with a respectful plural "you," as he talked to her in secret. The general stir and animation in the factory also pleased her, and she thought to herself: "What would they do without me?" Three common laborers stopped at a short distance from her, and one of them said with disappointment in his voice: "I couldn't find any anywhere!" Another remarked: "I'd like to hear it, though. I can't read myself, but I understand it hits them just in the right place." The third man looked around him, and said: "Let's go into the boiler room. I'll read it for you there!" "It works!" Gusev whispered, a wink lurking in his eye. Nilovna came home in gay spirits. She had now seen for herself how people are moved by books. "The people down there are sorry they can't read," she said to Andrey, "and here am I who could when I was young, but have forgotten." "Learn over again, then," suggested the Little Russian. "At my age? What do you want to make fun of me for?" Andrey, however, took a book from the shelf and pointing with the tip of a knife at a letter on the cover, asked: "What's this?" "R," she answered, laughing. "And this?" "A." She felt awkward, hurt, and offended. It seemed to her that Andrey's eyes were laughing at her, and she avoided their look. But his voice sounded soft and calm in her ears. She looked askance at his face, once, and a second time. It was earnest and serious. "Do you really wish to teach me to read?" she asked with an involuntary smile. "Why not?" he responded. "Try! If you once knew how to read, it will come back to you easily. 'If no miracle it's no ill, and if a miracle better still!'" "But they say that one does not become a saint by looking at a sacred image!" "Eh," said the Little Russian, nodding his head. "There are proverbs galore! For example: 'The less you know, the better you sleep'--isn't that it? Proverbs are the material the stomach thinks with; it makes bridles for the soul, to be able to control it better. What the stomach needs is a rest, and the soul needs freedom. What letter is this?" "M." "Yes, see how it sprawls. And this?" Straining her eyes and moving her eyebrows heavily, she recalled with an effort the forgotten letters, and unconsciously yielding to the force of her exertions, she was carried away by them, and forgot herself. But soon her eyes grew tired. At first they became moist with tears of fatigue; and then tears of sorrow rapidly dropped down on the page. "I'm learning to read," she said, sobbing. "It's time for me to die, and I'm just learning to read!" "You mustn't cry," said the Little Russian gently. "It wasn't your fault you lived the way you did; and yet you understand that you lived badly. There are thousands of people who could live better than you, but who live like cattle and then boast of how well they live. But what is good in their lives? To-day, their day's work over, they eat, and to-morrow, their day's work over, they eat, and so on through all their years--work and eat, work and eat! Along with this they bring forth children, and at first amuse themselves with them, but when they, too, begin to eat much, they grow surly and scold: 'Come on, you gluttons! Hurry along! Grow up quick! It's time you get to work!' and they would like to make beasts of burden of their children. But the children begin to work for their own stomachs, and drag their lives along as a thief drags a worthless stolen mop. Their souls are never stirred with joy, never quickened with a thought that melts the heart. Some live like mendicants--always begging; some like thieves--always snatching out of the hands of others. They've made thieves' laws, placed men with sticks over the people, and said to them: 'Guard our laws; they are very convenient laws; they permit us to suck the blood out of the people!' They try to squeeze the people from the outside, but the people resist, and so they drive the rules inside so as to crush the reason, too." Leaning his elbows on the table and looking into the mother's face with pensive eyes, he continued in an even, flowing voice: "Only those are men who strike the chains from off man's body and from off his reason. And now you, too, are going into this work according to the best of your ability." "I? Now, now! How can I?" "Why not? It's just like rain. Every drop goes to nourish the seed! And when you are able to read, then--" He stopped and began to laugh; then rose and paced up and down the room. "Yes, you must learn to read! And when Pavel gets back, won't you surprise him, eh?" "Oh, Andriusha! For a young man everything is simple and easy! But when you have lived to my age, you have lots of trouble, little strength, and no mind at all left." In the evening the Little Russian went out. The mother lit a lamp and sat down at a table to knit stockings. But soon she rose again, walked irresolutely into the kitchen, bolted the outer door, and straining her eyebrows walked back into the living room. She pulled down the window curtains, and taking a book from the shelf, sat down at the table again, looked around, bent down over the book, and began to move her lips. When she heard a noise on the street, she started, clapped the book shut with the palm of her hand, and listened intently. And again, now closing, now opening her eyes, she whispered: "E--z--a." With even precision and stern regularity the dull tick of the pendulum marked the dying seconds. A knock at the door was heard; the mother jumped quickly to her feet, thrust the book on the shelf, and walking up to the door asked anxiously: "Who's there?" CHAPTER XIII Rybin came in, greeted her, and stroking his beard in a dignified manner and peeping into the room with his dark eyes, remarked: "You used to let people into your house before, without inquiring who they were. Are you alone?" "Yes." "You are? I thought the Little Russian was here. I saw him to-day. The prison doesn't spoil a man. Stupidity, that's what spoils most of all." He walked into the room, sat down and said to the mother: "Let's have a talk together. I have something to tell you. I have a theory!" There was a significant and mysterious expression in his face as he said this. It filled the mother with a sense of foreboding. She sat down opposite him and waited in mute anxiety for him to speak. "Everything costs money!" he began in his gruff, heavy voice. "It takes money to be born; it takes money to die. Books and leaflets cost money, too. Now, then, do you know where all this money for the books comes from?" "No, I don't know," replied the mother in a low voice, anticipating danger. "Nor do I! Another question I've got to ask is: Who writes those books? The educated folks. The masters!" Rybin spoke curtly and decisively, his voice grew gruffer and gruffer, and his bearded face reddened as with the strain of exertion. "Now, then, the masters write the books and distribute them. But the writings in the books are against these very masters. Now, tell me, why do they spend their money and their time to stir up the people against themselves? Eh?" Nilovna blinked, then opened her eyes wide and exclaimed in fright: "What do you think? Tell me." "Aha!" exclaimed Rybin, turning in his chair like a bear. "There you are! When I reached that thought I was seized with a cold shiver, too." "Now what is it? Tell me! Did you find out anything?" "Deception! Fraud! I feel it. It's deception. I know nothing, but I feel sure there's deception in it. Yes! The masters are up to some clever trick, and I want nothing of it. I want the truth. I understand what it is; I understand it. But I will not go hand in hand with the masters. They'll push me to the front when it suits them, and then walk over my bones as over a bridge to get where they want to." At the sound of his morose words, uttered in a stubborn, thick, and forceful voice, the mother's heart contracted in pain. "Good Lord!" she exclaimed in anguish. "Where is the truth? Can it be that Pavel does not understand? And all those who come here from the city--is it possible that they don't understand?" The serious, honest faces of Yegor, Nikolay Ivanovich, and Sashenka passed before her mind, and her heart fluttered. "No, no!" she said, shaking her head as if to dismiss the thought. "I can't believe it. They are for truth and honor and conscience; they have no evil designs; oh, no!" "Whom are you talking about?" asked Rybin thoughtfully. "About all of them! Every single one I met. They are not the people who will traffic in human blood, oh, no!" Perspiration burst out on her face, and her fingers trembled. "You are not looking in the right place, mother; look farther back," said Rybin, drooping his head. "Those who are directly working in the movement may not know anything about it themselves. They think it must be so; they have the truth at heart. But there may be people behind them who are looking out only for their own selfish interests. Men won't go against themselves." And with the firm conviction of a peasant fed on centuries of distrust, he added: "No good will ever come from the masters! Take my word for it!" "What concoction has your brain put together?" the mother asked, again seized with anxious misgiving. "I?" Rybin looked at her, was silent for a while, then repeated: "Keep away from the masters! That's what!" He grew morosely silent again, and seemed to shrink within himself. "I'll go away, mother," he said after a pause. "I wanted to join the fellows, to work along with them. I'm fit for the work. I can read and write. I'm persevering and not a fool. And the main thing is, I know what to say to people. But now I will go. I can't believe, and therefore I must go. I know, mother, that the people's souls are foul and besmirched. All live on envy, all want to gorge themselves; and since there's little to eat, each seeks to eat the other up." He let his head droop, and remained absorbed in thought for a while. Finally he said: "I'll go all by myself through village and hamlet and stir the people up. It's necessary that the people should take the matter in their own hands and get to work themselves. Let them but understand--they'll find a way themselves. And so, I'm going to try to make them understand. There is no hope for them except in themselves; there's no understanding for them except in their own understanding! And that's the truth!" "They will seize you!" said the mother in a low voice. "They will seize me, and let me out again. And then I'll go ahead again!" "The peasants themselves will bind you, and you will be thrown into jail." "Well, I'll stay in jail for a time, then be released, and I'll go on again. As for the peasants, they'll bind me once, twice, and then they will understand that they ought not to bind me, but listen to me. I'll tell them: "I don't ask you to believe me; I want you just to listen to me!" And if they listen, they will believe." Both the mother and Rybin spoke slowly, as if testing every word before uttering it. "There's little joy for me in this, mother," said Rybin. "I have lived here of late, and gobbled up a deal of stuff. Yes; I understand some, too! And now I feel as if I were burying a child." "You'll perish, Mikhaïl Ivanych!" said the mother, shaking her head sadly. His dark, deep eyes looked at her with a questioning, expectant look. His powerful body bent forward, propped by his hands resting on the seat of the chair, and his swarthy face seemed pale in the black frame of his beard. "Did you hear what Christ said about the seed? 'Thou shalt not die, but rise to life again in the new ear.' I don't regard myself as near death at all. I am shrewd. I follow a straighter course than the others. You can get further that way. Only, you see, I feel sorry--I don't know why." He fidgeted on his chair, then slowly rose. "I'll go to the tavern and be with the people a while. The Little Russian is not coming. Has he gotten busy already?" "Yes!" The mother smiled. "No sooner out of prison than they rush to their work." "That's the way it should be. Tell him about me." They walked together slowly into the kitchen, and without looking at each other exchanged brief remarks: "I'll tell him," she promised. "Well, good-by!" "Good-by! When do you quit your job?" "I have already." "When are you going?" "To-morrow, early in the morning. Good-by!" He bent his head and crawled off the porch reluctantly, it seemed, and clumsily. The mother stood for a moment at the door listening to the heavy departing footsteps and to the doubts that stirred in her heart. Then she noiselessly turned away into the room, and drawing the curtain peered through the window. Black darkness stood behind, motionless, waiting, gaping, with its flat, abysmal mouth. "I live in the night!" she thought. "In the night forever!" She felt a pity for the black-bearded, sedate peasant. He was so broad and strong--and yet there was a certain helplessness about him, as about all the people. Presently Andrey came in gay and vivacious. When the mother told him about Rybin, he exclaimed: "Going, is he? Well, let him go through the villages. Let him ring forth the word of truth. Let him arouse the people. It's hard for him here with us." "He was talking about the masters. Is there anything in it?" she inquired circumspectly. "Isn't it possible that they want to deceive you?" "It bothers you, mother, doesn't it?" The Little Russian laughed. "Oh, mother dear--money! If we only had money! We are still living on charity. Take, for instance, Nikolay Ivanych. He earns seventy-five rubles a month, and gives us fifty! And others do the same. And the hungry students send us money sometimes, which they collect penny by penny. And as to the masters, of course there are different kinds among them. Some of them will deceive us, and some will leave us; but the best will stay with us and march with us up to our holiday." He clapped his hands, and rubbing them vigorously against each other continued: "But not even the flight of an eagle's wings will enable anyone to reach that holiday, so we'll make a little one for the first of May. It will be jolly." His words and his vivacity dispelled the alarm excited in the mother's heart by Rybin. The Little Russian walked up and down the room, his feet sounding on the floor. He rubbed his head with one hand and his chest with the other, and spoke looking at the floor: "You know, sometimes you have a wonderful feeling living in your heart. It seems to you that wherever you go, all men are comrades; all burn with one and the same fire; all are merry; all are good. Without words they all understand one another; and no one wants to hinder or insult the other. No one feels the need of it. All live in unison, but each heart sings its own song. And the songs flow like brooks into one stream, swelling into a huge river of bright joys, rolling free and wide down its course. And when you think that this will be--that it cannot help being if we so wish it--then the wonderstruck heart melts with joy. You feel like weeping--you feel so happy." He spoke and looked as if he were searching something within himself. The mother listened and tried not to stir, so as not to disturb him and interrupt his speech. She always listened to him with more attention than to anybody else. He spoke more simply than all the rest, and his words gripped her heart more powerfully. Pavel, too, was probably looking to the future. How could it be otherwise, when one is following such a course of life? But when he looked into the remote future it was always by himself; he never spoke of what he saw. This Little Russian, however, it seemed to her, was always there with a part of his heart; the legend of the future holiday for all upon earth, always sounded in his speech. This legend rendered the meaning of her son's life, of his work, and that of all of his comrades, clear to the mother. "And when you wake up," continued the Little Russian, tossing his head and letting his hands drop alongside his body, "and look around, you see it's all filthy and cold. All are tired and angry; human life is all churned up like mud on a busy highway, and trodden underfoot!" He stopped in front of the mother, and with deep sorrow in his eyes, and shaking his head, added in a low, sad voice: "Yes, it hurts, but you must--you must distrust man; you must fear him, and even hate him! Man is divided, he is cut in two by life. You'd like only to love him; but how is it possible? How can you forgive a man if he goes against you like a wild beast, does not recognize that there is a living soul in you, and kicks your face--a human face! You must not forgive. It's not for yourself that you mustn't. I'd stand all the insults as far as I myself am concerned; but I don't want to show indulgence for insults. I don't want to let them learn on my back how to beat others!" His eyes now sparkled with a cold gleam; he inclined his head doggedly, and continued in a more resolute tone: "I must not forgive anything that is noxious, even though it does not hurt! I'm not alone in the world. If I allow myself to be insulted to-day--maybe I can afford to laugh at the insult, maybe it doesn't sting me at all--but, having tested his strength on me, the offender will proceed to flay some one else the next day! That's why one is compelled to discriminate between people, to keep a firm grip on one's heart, and to classify mankind--these belong to me, those are strangers." The mother thought of the officer and Sashenka, and said with a sigh: "What sort of bread can you expect from unbolted meal?" "That's it; that's the trouble!" the Little Russian exclaimed. "You must look with two kinds of eyes; two hearts throb in your bosom. The one loves all; the other says: 'Halt! You mustn't!'" The figure of her husband, somber and ponderous, like a huge moss-covered stone, now rose in her memory. She made a mental image for herself of the Little Russian as married to Natasha, and her son as the husband of Sashenka. "And why?" asked the Little Russian, warming up. "It's so plainly evident that it's downright ridiculous--simply because men don't stand on an equal footing. Then let's equalize them, put them all in one row! Let's divide equally all that's produced by the brains and all that's made by the hands. Let's not keep one another in the slavery of fear and envy, in the thraldom of greed and stupidity!" The mother and the Little Russian now began to carry on such conversations with each other frequently. He was again taken into the factory. He turned over all his earnings to the mother, and she took the money from him with as little fuss as from Pavel. Sometimes Andrey would suggest with a twinkle in his eyes: "Shall we read a little, mother, eh?" She would invariably refuse, playfully but resolutely. The twinkle in his eyes discomfited her, and she thought to herself, with a slight feeling of offense: "If you laugh at me, then why do you ask me to read with you?" He noticed that the mother began to ask him with increasing frequency for the meaning of this or that book word. She always looked aside when asking for such information, and spoke in a monotonous tone of indifference. He divined that she was studying by herself in secret, understood her bashfulness, and ceased to invite her to read with him. Shortly afterwards she said to him: "My eyes are getting weak, Andriusha. I guess I need glasses." "All right! Next Sunday I'll take you to a physician in the city, a friend of mine, and you shall have glasses!" She had already been three times in the prison to ask for a meeting with Pavel, and each time the general of the gendarmes, a gray old man with purple cheeks and a huge nose, turned her gently away. "In about a week, little mother, not before! A week from now we shall see, but at present it's impossible!" He was a round, well-fed creature, and somehow reminded her of a ripe plum, somewhat spoiled by too long keeping, and already covered with a downy mold. He kept constantly picking his small, white teeth with a sharp yellow toothpick. There was a little smile in his small greenish eyes, and his voice had a friendly, caressing sound. "Polite!" said the mother to the Little Russian with a thoughtful air. "Always with a smile on him. I don't think it's right. When a man is tending to affairs like these, I don't think he ought to grin." "Yes, yes. They are so gentle, always smiling. If they should be told: 'Look here, this man is honest and wise, he is dangerous to us; hang him!' they would still smile and hang him, and keep on smiling." "The one who made the search in our place is the better of the two; he is simpler. You can see at once that he is a dog." "None of them are human beings; they are used to stun the people and render them insensible. They are tools, the means wherewith our kind is rendered more convenient to the state. They themselves have already been so fixed that they have become convenient instruments in the hand that governs us. They can do whatever they are told to do without thought, without asking why it is necessary to do it." At last Vlasova got permission to see her son, and one Sunday she was sitting modestly in a corner of the prison office, a low, narrow, dingy apartment, where a few more people were sitting and waiting for permission to see their relatives and friends. Evidently it was not the first time they were here, for they knew one another and in a low voice kept up a lazy, languid conversation. "Have you heard?" said a stout woman with a wizened face and a traveling bag on her lap. "At early mass to-day the church regent again ripped up the ear of one of the choir boys." An elderly man in the uniform of a retired soldier coughed aloud and remarked: "These choir boys are such loafers!" A short, bald, little man with short legs, long arms, and protruding jaw, ran officiously up and down the room. Without stopping he said in a cracked, agitated voice: "The cost of living is getting higher and higher. An inferior quality of beef, fourteen cents; bread has again risen to two and a half." Now and then prisoners came into the room--gray, monotonous, with coarse, heavy, leather shoes. They blinked as they entered; iron chains rattled at the feet of one of them. The quiet and calm and simplicity all around produced a strange, uncouth impression. It seemed as if all had grown accustomed to their situation. Some sat there quietly, others looked on idly, while still others seemed to pay their regular visits with a sense of weariness. The mother's heart quivered with impatience, and she looked with a puzzled air at everything around her, amazed at the oppressive simplicity of life in this corner of the world. [Illustration: "The mother's heart quivered with impatience."] Next to Vlasova sat a little old woman with a wrinkled face, but youthful eyes. She kept her thin neck turned to listen to the conversation, and looked about on all sides with a strange expression of eagerness in her face. "Whom have you here?" Vlasova asked softly. "A son, a student," answered the old woman in a loud, brusque voice. "And you?" "A son, also. A workingman." "What's the name?" "Vlasov." "Never heard of him. How long has he been in prison?" "Seven weeks." "And mine has been in for ten months," said the old woman, with a strange note of pride in her voice which did not escape the notice of the mother. A tall lady dressed in black, with a thin, pale face, said lingeringly: "They'll soon put all the decent people in prison. They can't endure them, they loathe them!" "Yes, yes!" said the little old bald man, speaking rapidly. "All patience is disappearing. Everybody is excited; everybody is clamoring, and prices are mounting higher and higher. As a consequence the value of men is depreciating. And there is not a single, conciliatory voice heard, not one!" "Perfectly true!" said the retired military man. "It's monstrous! What's wanted is a voice, a firm voice to cry, 'Silence!' Yes, that's what we want--a firm voice!" The conversation became more general and animated. Everybody was in a hurry to give his opinion about life; but all spoke in a half-subdued voice, and the mother noticed a tone of hostility in all, which was new to her. At home they spoke differently, more intelligibly, more simply, and more loudly. The fat warden with a square red beard called out her name, looked her over from head to foot, and telling her to follow him, walked off limping. She followed him, and felt like pushing him to make him go faster. Pavel stood in a small room, and on seeing his mother smiled and put out his hand to her. She grasped it, laughed, blinked swiftly, and at a loss for words merely asked softly: "How are you? How are you?" "Compose yourself, mother." Pavel pressed her hand. "It's all right! It's all right!" "Mother," said the warden, fetching a sigh, "suppose you move away from each other a bit. Let there be some distance between you." He yawned aloud. Pavel asked the mother about her health and about home. She waited for some other questions, sought them in her son's eyes, but could not find them. He was calm as usual, although his face had grown paler, and his eyes seemed larger. "Sasha sends you her regards," she said. Pavel's eyelids quivered and fell. His face became softer and brightened with a clear, open smile. A poignant bitterness smote the mother's heart. "Will they let you out soon?" she inquired in a tone of sudden injury and agitation. "Why have they put you in prison? Those papers and pamphlets have appeared in the factory again, anyway." Pavel's eyes flashed with delight. "Have they? When? Many of them?" "It is forbidden to talk about this subject!" the warden lazily announced. "You may talk only of family matters." "And isn't this a family matter?" retorted the mother. "I don't know. I only know it's forbidden. You may talk about his wash and underwear and food, but nothing else!" insisted the warden, his voice, however, expressing utter indifference. "All right," said Pavel. "Keep to domestic affairs, mother. What are you doing?" She answered boldly, seized with youthful ardor: "I carry all this to the factory." She paused with a smile and continued: "Sour soup, gruel, all Marya's cookery, and other stuff." Pavel understood. The muscles of his face quivered with restrained laughter. He ran his fingers through his hair and said in a tender tone, such as she had never heard him use: "My own dear mother! That's good! It's good you've found something to do, so it isn't tedious for you. You don't feel lonesome, do you, mother?" "When the leaflets appeared, they searched me, too," she said, not without a certain pride. "Again on this subject!" said the warden in an offended tone. "I tell you it's forbidden, it's not allowed. They have deprived him of liberty so that he shouldn't know anything about it; and here you are with your news. You ought to know it's forbidden!" "Well, leave it, mother," said Pavel. "Matvey Ivanovich is a good man. You mustn't do anything to provoke him. We get along together very well. It's by chance he's here to-day with us. Usually, it's the assistant superintendent who is present on such occasions. That's why Matvey Ivanovich is afraid you will say something you oughtn't to." "Time's up!" announced the warden looking at his watch. "Take your leave!" "Well, thank you," said Pavel. "Thank you, my darling mother! Don't worry now. They'll let me out soon." He embraced her, pressed her warmly to his bosom, and kissed her. Touched by his endearments, and happy, she burst into tears. "Now separate!" said the warden, and as he walked off with the mother he mumbled: "Don't cry! They'll let him out; they'll let everybody out. It's too crowded here." At home the mother told the Little Russian of her conversation with Pavel, and her face wore a broad smile. "I told him! Yes, indeed! And cleverly, too. He understood!" and, heaving a melancholy sigh: "Oh, yes, he understood; otherwise he wouldn't have been so tender and affectionate. He has never been that way before." "Oh, mother!" the Little Russian laughed. "No matter what other people may want, a mother always wants affection. You certainly have a heart plenty big enough for one man!" "But those people! Just think, Andriusha!" she suddenly exclaimed, amazement in her tone. "How used they get to all this! Their children are taken away from them, are thrown into dungeons, and, mind you, it's as nothing to them! They come, sit about, wait, and talk. What do you think of that? If intelligent people are that way, if they can so easily get accustomed to a thing like that, then what's to be said about the common people?" "That's natural," said the Little Russian with his usual smile. "The law after all is not so harsh toward them as toward us. And they need the law more than we do. So that when the law hits them on the head, although they cry out they do not cry very loud. Your own stick does not fall upon you so heavily. For them the laws are to some extent a protection, but for us they are only chains to keep us bound so we can't kick." Three days afterwards in the evening, when the mother sat at the table knitting stockings and the Little Russian was reading to her from a book about the revolt of the Roman slaves, a loud knock was heard at the door. The Little Russian went to open it and admitted Vyesovshchikov with a bundle under his arm, his hat pushed back on his head, and mud up to his knees. "I was passing by, and seeing a light in your house, I dropped in to ask you how you are. I've come straight from the prison." He spoke in a strange voice. He seized Vlasov's hand and wrung it violently as he added: "Pavel sends you his regards." Irresolutely seating himself in a chair he scanned the room with his gloomy, suspicious look. The mother was not fond of him. There was something in his angular, close-cropped head and in his small eyes that always scared her; but now she was glad to see him, and with a broad smile lighting her face she said in a tender, animated voice: "How thin you've become! Say, Andriusha, let's dose him with tea." "I'm putting up the samovar already!" the Little Russian called from the kitchen. "How is Pavel? Have they let anybody else out besides yourself?" Nikolay bent his head and answered: "I'm the only one they've let go." He raised his eyes to the mother's face and said slowly, speaking through his teeth with ponderous emphasis: "I told them: 'Enough! Let me go! Else I'll kill some one here, and myself, too!' So they let me go!" "Hm, hm--ye-es," said the mother, recoiling from him and involuntarily blinking when her gaze met his sharp, narrow eyes. "And how is Fedya Mazin?" shouted the Little Russian from the kitchen. "Writing poetry, is he?" "Yes! I don't understand it," said Nikolay, shaking his head. "They've put him in a cage and he sings. There's only one thing I'm sure about, and that is I have no desire to go home." "Why should you want to go home? What's there to attract you?" said the mother pensively. "It's empty, there's no fire burning, and it's chilly all over." Vyesovshchikov sat silent, his eyes screwed up. Taking a box of cigarettes from his pocket he leisurely lit one of them, and looking at the gray curl of smoke dissolve before him he grinned like a big, surly dog. "Yes, I guess it's cold. And the floor is filled with frozen cockroaches, and even the mice are frozen, too, I suppose. Pelagueya Nilovna, will you let me sleep here to-night, please?" he asked hoarsely without looking at her. "Why, of course, Nikolay! You needn't even ask it!" the mother quickly replied. She felt embarrassed and ill at ease in Nikolay's presence, and did not know what to speak to him about. But he himself went on to talk in a strangely broken voice. "We live in a time when children are ashamed of their own parents." "What!" exclaimed the mother, starting. He glanced up at her and closed his eyes. His pockmarked face looked like that of a blind man. "I say that children have to be ashamed of their parents," he repeated, sighing aloud. "Now, don't you be afraid. It's not meant for you. Pavel will never be ashamed of you. But I am ashamed of my father, and shall never enter his house again. I have no father, no home! They have put me under the surveillance of the police, else I'd go to Siberia. I think a man who won't spare himself could do a great deal in Siberia. I would free convicts there and arrange for their escape." The mother understood, with her ready feelings, what agony this man must be undergoing, but his pain awoke no sympathetic response in her. "Well, of course, if that's the case, then it's better for you to go," she said, in order not to offend him by silence. Andrey came in from the kitchen, and said, smiling: "Well, are you sermonizing, eh?" The mother rose and walked away, saying: "I'm going to get something to eat." Vyesovshchikov looked at the Little Russian fixedly and suddenly declared: "I think that some people ought to be killed off!" "Oho! And pray what for?" asked the Little Russian calmly. "So they cease to be." "Ahem! And have you the right to make corpses out of living people?" "Yes, I have." "Where did you get it from?" "The people themselves gave it to me." The Little Russian stood in the middle of the room, tall and spare, swaying on his legs, with his hands thrust in his pockets, and looked down on Nikolay. Nikolay sat firmly in his chair, enveloped in clouds of smoke, with red spots on his face showing through. "The people gave it to me!" he repeated clenching his fist. "If they kick me I have the right to strike them and punch their eyes out! Don't touch me, and I won't touch you! Let me live as I please, and I'll live in peace and not touch anybody. Maybe I'd prefer to live in the woods. I'd build myself a cabin in the ravine by the brook and live there. At any rate, I'd live alone." "Well, go and live that way, if it pleases you," said the Little Russian, shrugging his shoulders. "Now?" asked Nikolay. He shook his head in negation and replied, striking his fist on his knee: "Now it's impossible!" "Who's in your way?" "The people!" Vyesovshchikov retorted brusquely. "I'm hitched to them even unto death. They've hedged my heart around with hatred and tied me to themselves with evil. That's a strong tie! I hate them, and I will not go away; no, never! I'll be in their way. I'll harass their lives. They are in my way, I'll be in theirs. I'll answer only for myself, only for myself, and for no one else. And if my father is a thief----" "Oh!" said the Little Russian in a low voice, moving up to Nikolay. "And as for Isay Gorbov, I'll wring his head off! You shall see!" "What for?" asked the Little Russian in a quiet, earnest voice. "He shouldn't be a spy; he shouldn't go about denouncing people. It's through him my father's gone to the dogs, and it's owing to him that he now is aiming to become a spy," said Vyesovshchikov, looking at Andrey with a dark, hostile scowl. "Oh, that's it!" exclaimed the Little Russian. "And pray, who'd blame you for that? Fools!" "Both the fools and the wise are smeared with the same oil!" said Nikolay heavily. "Here are you a wise fellow, and Pavel, too. And do you mean to say that I am the same to you as Fedya Mazin or Samoylov, or as you two are to each other? Don't lie! I won't believe you, anyway. You all push me aside to a place apart, all by myself." "Your heart is aching, Nikolay!" said the Little Russian softly and tenderly sitting down beside him. "Yes, it's aching, and so is your heart. But your aches seem nobler to you than mine. We are all scoundrels toward one another, that's what I say. And what have you to say to that?" He fixed his sharp gaze on Andrey, and waited with set teeth. His mottled face remained immobile, and a quiver passed over his thick lips, as if scorched by a flame. "I have nothing to say!" said the Little Russian, meeting Vyesovshchikov's hostile glance with a bright, warm, yet melancholy look of his blue eyes. "I know that to argue with a man at a time when all the wounds of his heart are bleeding, is only to insult him. I know it, brother." "It's impossible to argue with me; I can't," mumbled Nikolay, lowering his eyes. "I think," continued the Little Russian, "that each of us has gone through that, each of us has walked with bare feet over broken glass, each of us in his dark hour has gasped for breath as you are now." "You have nothing to tell me!" said Vyesovshchikov slowly. "Nothing! My heart is so--it seems to me as if wolves were howling there!" "And I don't want to say anything to you. Only I know that you'll get over this, perhaps not entirely, but you'll get over it!" He smiled, and added, tapping Nikolay on the back: "Why, man, this is a children's disease, something like measles! We all suffer from it, the strong less, the weak more. It comes upon a man at the period when he has found himself, but does not yet understand life, and his own place in life. And when you do not see your place, and are unable to appraise your own value, it seems that you are the only, the inimitable cucumber on the face of the earth, and that no one can measure, no one can fathom your worth, and that all are eager only to eat you up. After a while you'll find out that the hearts in other people's breasts are no worse than a good part of your own heart, and you'll begin to feel better. And somewhat ashamed, too! Why should you climb up to the belfry tower, when your bell is so small that it can't be heard in the great peal of the holiday bells? Moreover, you'll see that in chorus the sound of your bell will be heard, too, but by itself the old church bells will drown it in their rumble as a fly is drowned in oil. Do you understand what I am saying?" "Maybe I understand," Nikolay said, nodding his head. "Only I don't believe it." The Little Russian broke into a laugh, jumped to his feet, and began to run noisily up and down the room. "I didn't believe it either. Ah, you--wagonload!" "Why a wagonload?" Nikolay asked with a sad smile, looking at the Little Russian. "Because there's a resemblance!" Suddenly Nikolay broke into a loud guffaw, his mouth opening wide. "What is it?" the Little Russian asked in surprise, stopping in front of him. "It struck me that he'd be a fool who'd want to insult you!" Nikolay declared, shaking his head. "Why, how can you insult me?" asked the Little Russian, shrugging his shoulders. "I don't know," said Vyesovshchikov, grinning good-naturedly or perhaps condescendingly. "I only wanted to say that a man must feel mighty ashamed of himself after he'd insulted you." "There now! See where you got to!" laughed the Little Russian. "Andriusha!" the mother called from the kitchen. "Come get the samovar. It's ready!" Andrey walked out of the room, and Vyesovshchikov, left alone, looked about, stretched out his foot sheathed in a coarse, heavy boot, looked at it, bent down, and felt the stout calf of his legs. Then he raised one hand to his face, carefully examined the palm, and turned it around. His short-fingered hand was thick, and covered with yellowish hair. He waved it in the air, and arose. When Andrey brought in the samovar, Vyesovshchikov was standing before the mirror, and greeted him with these words: "It's a long time since I've seen my face." Then he laughed and added: "It's an ugly face I have!" "What's that to you?" asked Andrey, turning a curious look upon him. "Sashenka says the face is the mirror of the heart!" Nikolay replied, bringing out the words slowly. "It's not true, though!" the little Russian ejaculated. "She has a nose like a mushroom, cheek bones like a pair of scissors; yet her heart is like a bright little star." They sat down to drink tea. Vyesovshchikov took a big potato, heavily salted a slice of bread, and began to chew slowly and deliberately, like an ox. "And how are matters here?" he asked, with his mouth full. When Andrey cheerfully recounted to him the growth of the socialist propaganda in the factory, he again grew morose and remarked dully: "It takes too long! Too long, entirely! It ought to go faster!" The mother regarded him, and was seized with a feeling of hostility toward this man. "Life is not a horse; you can't set it galloping with a whip," said Andrey. But Vyesovshchikov stubbornly shook his head, and proceeded: "It's slow! I haven't the patience. What am I to do?" He opened his arms in a gesture of helplessness, and waited for a response. "We all must learn and teach others. That's our business!" said Andrey, bending his head. Vyesovshchikov asked: "And when are we going to fight?" "There'll be more than one butchery of us up to that time, that I know!" answered the Little Russian with a smile. "But when we shall be called on to fight, that I don't know! First, you see, we must equip the head, and then the hand. That's what I think." "The heart!" said Nikolay laconically. "And the heart, too." Nikolay became silent, and began to eat again. From the corner of her eye the mother stealthily regarded his broad, pockmarked face, endeavoring to find something in it to reconcile her to the unwieldy, square figure of Vyesovshchikov. Her eyebrows fluttered whenever she encountered the shooting glance of his little eyes. Andrey held his head in his hands; he became restless--he suddenly laughed, and then abruptly stopped, and began to whistle. It seemed to the mother that she understood his disquietude. Nikolay sat at the table without saying anything; and when the Little Russian addressed a question to him, he answered briefly, with evident reluctance. The little room became too narrow and stifling for its two occupants, and they glanced, now the one, now the other, at their guest. At length Nikolay rose and said: "I'd like to go to bed. I sat and sat in prison--suddenly they let me go; I'm off!--I'm tired!" He went into the kitchen and stirred about for a while. Then a sudden stillness settled down. The mother listened for a sound, and whispered to Andrey: "He has something terrible in his mind!" "Yes, he's hard to understand!" the Little Russian assented, shaking his head. "But you go to bed, mother, I am going to stay and read a while." She went to the corner where the bed was hidden from view by chintz curtains. Andrey, sitting at the table, for a long while listened to the warm murmur of her prayers and sighs. Quickly turning the pages of the book Andrey nervously rubbed his lips, twitched his mustache with his long fingers, and scraped his feet on the floor. Ticktock, ticktock went the pendulum of the clock; and the wind moaned as it swept past the window. Then the mother's low voice was heard: "Oh, God! How many people there are in the world, and each one wails in his own way. Where, then, are those who feel rejoiced?" "Soon there will be such, too, soon!" announced the Little Russian. CHAPTER XIV Life flowed on swiftly. The days were diversified and full of color. Each one brought with it something new, and the new ceased to alarm the mother. Strangers came to the house in the evening more and more frequently, and they talked with Andrey in subdued voices with an engrossed air. Late at night they went out into the darkness, their collars up, their hats thrust low over their faces, noiselessly, cautiously. All seemed to feel a feverish excitement, which they kept under restraint, and had the air of wanting to sing and laugh if they only had the time. They were all in a perpetual hurry. All of them--the mocking and the serious, the frank, jovial youth with effervescing strength, the thoughtful and quiet--all of them in the eyes of the mother were identical in the persistent faith that characterized them; and although each had his own peculiar cast of countenance, for her all their faces blended into one thin, composed, resolute face with a profound expression in its dark eyes, kind yet stern, like the look in Christ's eyes on his way to Emmaus. The mother counted them, and mentally gathered them together into a group around Pavel. In that throng he became invisible to the eyes of the enemy. One day a vivacious, curly-haired girl appeared from the city, bringing some parcel for Andrey; and on leaving she said to Vlasova, with a gleam in her merry eyes: "Good-by, comrade!" "Good-by!" the mother answered, restraining a smile. After seeing the girl to the door, she walked to the window and, smiling, looked out on the street to watch her comrade as she trotted away, nimbly raising and dropping her little feet, fresh as a spring flower and light as a butterfly. "Comrade!" said the mother when her guest had disappeared from her view. "Oh, you dear! God grant you a comrade for all your life!" She often noticed in all the people from the city a certain childishness, for which she had the indulgent smile of an elderly person; but at the same time she was touched and joyously surprised by their faith, the profundity of which she began to realize more and more clearly. Their visions of the triumph of justice captivated her and warmed her heart. As she listened to their recital of future victories, she involuntarily sighed with an unknown sorrow. But what touched her above all was their simplicity, their beautiful, grand, generous unconcern for themselves. She had already come to understand a great deal of what was said about life. She felt they had in reality discovered the true source of the people's misfortune, and it became a habit with her to agree with their thoughts. But at the bottom of her heart she did not believe that they could remake the whole of life according to their idea, or that they would have strength enough to gather all the working people about their fire. Everyone, she knew, wants to fill his stomach to-day, and no one wants to put his dinner off even for a week, if he can eat it up at once. Not many would consent to travel the long and difficult road; and not all eyes could see at the end the promised kingdom where all men are brothers. That's why all these good people, despite their beards and worn faces, seemed to her mere children. "My dear ones!" she thought, shaking her head. But they all now lived a good, earnest, and sensible life; they all spoke of the common weal; and in their desire to teach other people what they knew, they did not spare themselves. She understood that it was possible to love such a life, despite its dangers; and with a sigh she looked back to bygone days in which her past dragged along flatly and monotonously, a thin, black thread. Imperceptibly she grew conscious of her usefulness in this new life--a consciousness that gave her poise and assurance. She had never before felt herself necessary to anybody. When she had lived with her husband, she knew that if she died he would marry another woman. It was all the same to him whether a dark-haired or a red-haired woman lived with him and prepared his meals. When Pavel grew up and began to run about in the street, she saw that she was not needed by him. But now she felt that she was helping a good work. It was new to her and pleasant. It set her head erect on her shoulders. She considered it her duty to carry the books regularly to the factory. Indeed, she elaborated a number of devices for escaping detection. The spies, grown accustomed to her presence on the factory premises, ceased to pay attention to her. She was searched several times, but always the day after the appearance of the leaflets in the factory. When she had no literature about her, she knew how to arouse the suspicion of the guards and spies. They would halt her, and she would pretend to feel insulted, and would remonstrate with them, and then walk off blushing, proud of her clever ruse. She began to enjoy the fun of the game. Vyesovshchikov was not taken back to the factory, and went to work for a lumberman. The whole day long he drove about the village with a pair of black horses pulling planks and beams after them. The mother saw him almost daily with the horses as they plodded along the road, their feet trembling under the strain and dropping heavily upon the ground. They were both old and bare-boned, their heads shook wearily and sadly, and their dull, jaded eyes blinked heavily. Behind them jerkingly trailed a long beam, or a pile of boards clattering loudly. And by their side Nikolay trudged along, holding the slackened reins in his hand, ragged, dirty, with heavy boots, his hat thrust back, uncouth as a stump just turned up from the ground. He, too, shook his head and looked down at his feet, refusing to see anything. His horses blindly ran into the people and wagons going the opposite direction. Angry oaths buzzed about him like hornets, and sinister shouts rent the air. He did not raise his head, did not answer them, but went on, whistling a sharp, shrill whistle, mumbling dully to the horses. Every time that Andrey's comrades gathered at the mother's house to read pamphlets or the new issue of the foreign papers, Nikolay came also, sat down in a corner, and listened in silence for an hour or two. When the reading was over the young people entered into long discussions; but Vyesovshchikov took no part in the arguments. He remained longer than the rest, and when alone, face to face with Andrey, he glumly put to him the question: "And who is the most to blame? The Czar?" "The one to blame is he who first said: 'This is mine.' That man has now been dead some several thousand years, and it's not worth the while to bear him a grudge," said the Little Russian, jesting. His eyes, however, had a perturbed expression. "And how about the rich, and those who stand up for them? Are they right?" The Little Russian clapped his hands to his head; then pulled his mustache, and spoke for a long time in simple language about life and about the people. But from his talk it always appeared as if all the people were to blame, and this did not satisfy Nikolay. Compressing his thick lips tightly, he shook his head in demur, and declared that he could not believe it was so, and that he did not understand it. He left dissatisfied and gloomy. Once he said: "No, there must be people to blame! I'm sure there are! I tell you, we must plow over the whole of life like a weedy field, showing no mercy!" "That's what Isay, the record clerk, once said about us!" the mother said. For a while the two were silent. "Isay?" "Yes, he's a bad man. He spies after everybody, fishes about everywhere for information. He has begun to frequent this street, and peers into our windows." "Peers into your windows?" The mother was already in bed and did not see his face. But she understood that she had said too much, because the Little Russian hastened to interpose in order to conciliate Nikolay. "Let him peer! He has leisure. That's his way of killing time." "No hold on!" said Nikolay. "_There!_ He is to blame!" "To blame for what?" the Little Russian asked brusquely. "Because he's a fool?" But Vyesovshchikov did not stop to answer and walked away. The Little Russian began to pace up and down the room, slowly and languidly. He had taken off his boots as he always did when the mother was in bed in order not to disturb her. But she was not asleep, and when Nikolay had left she said anxiously: "I'm so afraid of that man. He's just like an overheated oven. He does not warm things, but scorches them." "Yes, yes!" the Little Russian drawled. "He's an irascible boy. I wouldn't talk to him about Isay, mother. That fellow Isay is really spying and getting paid for it, too." "What's so strange in that? His godfather is a gendarme," observed the mother. "Well, Nikolay will give him a dressing. What of it?" the Little Russian continued uneasily. "See what hard feelings the rulers of our life have produced in the rank and file? When such people as Nikolay come to recognize their wrong and lose their patience, what will happen then? The sky will be sprinkled with blood, and the earth will froth and foam with it like the suds of soap water." "It's terrible, Andriusha!" the mother exclaimed in a low voice. "They have swallowed flies, and have to vomit them now!" said Andrey after a pause. "And after all, mother, every drop of their blood that may be shed will have been washed in seas of the people's tears." Suddenly he broke into a low laugh and added: "That's true; but it's no comfort!" Once on a holiday the mother, on returning home from a store, opened the door of the porch, and remained fixed to the spot, suddenly bathed in the sunshine of joy. From the room she heard the sound of Pavel's voice. "There she is!" cried the Little Russian. The mother saw Pavel turn about quickly, and saw how his face lighted up with a feeling that held out the promise of something great to her. "There you are--come home!" she mumbled, staggered by the unexpectedness of the event. She sat down. He bent down to her with a pale face, little tears glistened brightly in the corners of his eyes, and his lips trembled. For a moment he was silent. The mother looked at him, and was silent also. The Little Russian, whistling softly, passed by them with bent head and walked out into the yard. "Thank you, mother," said Pavel in a deep, low voice, pressing her hand with his trembling fingers. "Thank you, my dear, my own mother!" Rejoiced at the agitated expression of her son's face and the touching sound of his voice, she stroked his hair and tried to restrain the palpitation of her heart. She murmured softly: "Christ be with you! What have I done for you? It isn't I who have made you what you are. It's you yourself----" "Thank you for helping our great cause!" he said. "When a man can call his mother his own in spirit also--that's rare fortune!" She said nothing, and greedily swallowed his words. She admired her son as he stood before her so radiant and so near. "I was silent, mother dear. I saw that many things in my life hurt you. I was sorry for you, and yet I could not help it. I was powerless! I thought you could never get reconciled to us, that you could never adopt our ideas as yours, but that you would suffer in silence as you had suffered all your life long. It was hard." "Andriusha made me understand many things!" she declared, in her desire to turn her son's attention to his comrade. "Yes, he told me about you," said Pavel, laughing. "And Yegor, too! He is a countryman of mine, you know. Andriusha wanted to teach me to read, also." "And you got offended, and began to study by yourself in secret." "Oh, so he found me out!" she exclaimed in embarrassment. Then troubled by this abundance of joy which filled her heart she again suggested to Pavel: "Shan't we call him in? He went out on purpose, so as not to disturb us. He has no mother." "Andrey!" shouted Pavel, opening the door to the porch. "Where are you?" "Here. I want to chop some wood." "Never mind! There's time enough! Come here!" "All right! I'm coming!" But he did not come at once; and on entering the kitchen he said in a housekeeper-like fashion: "We must tell Nikolay to bring us wood. We have very little wood left. You see, mother, how well Pavel looks? Instead of punishing the rebels, the government only fattens them." The mother laughed. Her heart was still leaping with joy. She was fairly intoxicated with happiness. But a certain, cautious, chary feeling already called forth in her the wish to see her son calm as he always was. She wanted this first joy in her life to remain fixed in her heart forever as live and strong as at first. In order to guard against the diminution of her happiness, she hastened to hide it, as a fowler secrets some rare bird that has happened to fall into his hands. "Let's have dinner! Pasha, haven't you had anything to eat yet?" she asked with anxious haste. "No. I learned yesterday from the warden that I was to be released, and I couldn't eat or drink anything to-day." "The first person I met here was Sizov," Pavel communicated to Andrey. "He caught sight of me and crossed the street to greet me. I told him that he ought to be more careful now, as I was a dangerous man under the surveillance of the police. But he said: 'Never mind!' and you ought to have heard him inquire about his nephew! 'Did Fedor conduct himself properly in prison?' I wanted to know what is meant by proper behavior in prison, and he declared: 'Well, did he blab anything he shouldn't have against his comrades?' And when I told him that Fedya was an honest and wise young man, he stroked his beard and declared proudly: 'We, the Sizovs, have no trash in our family.'" "He's a brainy old man!" said the Little Russian, nodding his head. "We often have talks with him. He's a fine peasant. Will they let Fedya out soon?" "Yes, one of these days, I suppose. They'll let out all, I think. They have no evidence except Isay's, and what can he say?" The mother walked up and down the room, and looked at her son. Andrey stood at the window with his hands clasped behind his back, listening to Pavel's narrative. Pavel also paced up and down the room. His beard had grown, and small ringlets of thin, dark hair curled in a dense growth around his cheeks, softening the swarthy color of his face. His dark eyes had their stern expression. "Sit down!" said the mother, serving a hot dish. At dinner Andrey told Pavel about Rybin. When he had concluded Pavel exclaimed regretfully: "If I had been home, I would not have let him go that way. What did he take along with him? A feeling of discontent and a muddle in his head!" "Well," said Andrey, laughing, "when a man's grown to the age of forty and has fought so long with the bears in his heart, it's hard to make him over." Pavel looked at him sternly and asked: "Do you think it's impossible for enlightenment to destroy all the rubbish that's been crammed into a man's brains?" "Don't fly up into the air at once, Pavel! Your flight will knock you up against the belfry tower and break your wings," said the Little Russian in admonition. And they started one of those discussions in which words were used that were unintelligible to the mother. The dinner was already at an end, but they still continued a vehement debate, flinging at each other veritable rattling hailstones of big words. Sometimes their language was simpler: "We must keep straight on our path, turning neither to the right nor to the left!" Pavel asserted firmly. "And run headlong into millions of people who will regard us as their enemies!" "You can't avoid that!" "And what, my dear sir, becomes of your enlightenment?" The mother listened to the dispute, and understood that Pavel did not care for the peasants, but that the Little Russian stood up for them, and tried to show that the peasants, too, must be taught to comprehend the good. She understood Andrey better, and he seemed to her to be in the right; but every time he spoke she waited with strained ears and bated breath for her son's answer to find out whether the Little Russian had offended Pavel. But although they shouted at the top of their voices, they gave each other no offense. Occasionally the mother asked: "Is it so, Pavel?" And he answered with a smile: "Yes, it's so." "Say, my dear sir," the Little Russian said with a good-natured sneer, "you have eaten well, but you have chewed your food up badly, and a piece has remained sticking in your throat. You had better gargle." "Don't go fooling now!" said Pavel. "I am as solemn as a funeral." The mother laughed quietly and shook her head. CHAPTER XV Spring was rapidly drawing near; the snow melted and laid bare the mud and the soot of the factory chimneys. Mud, mud! Wherever the villagers looked--mud! Every day more mud! The entire village seemed unwashed and dressed in rags and tatters. During the day the water dripped monotonously from the roofs, and damp, weary exhalations emanated from the gray walls of the houses. Toward night whitish icicles glistened everywhere in dim outline. The sun appeared in the heavens more frequently, and the brooks began to murmur hesitatingly on their way to the marsh. At noon the throbbing song of spring hopes hung tremblingly and caressingly over the village. They were preparing to celebrate the first of May. Leaflets appeared in the factory explaining the significance of this holiday, and even the young men not affected by the propaganda said, as they read them: "Yes, we must arrange a holiday!" Vyesovshchikov exclaimed with a sullen grin: "It's time! Time we stopped playing hide and seek!" Fedya Mazin was in high spirits. He had grown very thin. With his nervous, jerky gestures, and the trepidation in his speech, he was like a caged lark. He was always with Yakob Somov, taciturn and serious beyond his years. Samoylov, who had grown still redder in prison, Vasily Gusev, curly-haired Dragunov, and a number of others argued that it was necessary to come out armed, but Pavel and the Little Russian, Somov, and others said it was not. Yegor always came tired, perspiring, short of breath, but always joking. "The work of changing the present order of things, comrades, is a great work, but in order to advance it more rapidly, I must buy myself a pair of boots!" he said, pointing to his wet, torn shoes. "My overshoes, too, are torn beyond the hope of redemption, and I get my feet wet every day. I have no intention of migrating from the earth even to the nearest planet before we have publicly and openly renounced the old order of things; and I am therefore absolutely opposed to comrade Samoylov's motion for an armed demonstration. I amend the motion to read that I be armed with a pair of strong boots, inasmuch as I am profoundly convinced that this will be of greater service for the ultimate triumph of socialism than even a grand exhibition of fisticuffs and black eyes!" In the same playfully pretentious language, he told the workingmen the story of how in various foreign countries the people strove to lighten the burden of their lives. The mother loved to listen to his tales, and carried away a strange impression from them. She conceived the shrewdest enemies of the people, those who deceived them most frequently and most cruelly, as little, big-bellied, red-faced creatures, unprincipled and greedy, cunning and heartless. When life was hard for them under the domination of the czars, they would incite the common people against the ruler; and when the people arose and wrested the power from him, these little creatures got it into their own hands by deceit, and drove the people off to their holes; and if the people remonstrated, they killed them by the hundreds and thousands. Once she summoned up courage and told him of the picture she had formed of life from his tales, and asked him: "Is it so, Yegor Ivanovich?" He burst into a guffaw, turned up his eyes, gasped for breath, and rubbed his chest. "Exactly, granny! You caught the idea to a dot! Yes, yes! You've placed some ornaments on the canvas of history, you've added some flourishes, but that does not interfere with the correctness of the whole. It's these very little, pot-bellied creatures who are the chief sinners and deceivers and the most poisonous insects that harass the human race. The Frenchmen call them '_bourgeois_.' Remember that word, dear granny--_bourgeois_! Brr! How they chew us and grind us and suck the life out of us!" "The rich, you mean?" "Yes, the rich. And that's their misfortune. You see, if you keep adding copper bit by bit to a child's food, you prevent the growth of its bones, and he'll be a dwarf; and if from his youth up you poison a man with gold, you deaden his soul." Once, speaking about Yegor, Pavel said: "Do you know, Andrey, the people whose hearts are always aching are the ones who joke most?" The Little Russian was silent a while, and then answered, blinking his eyes: "No, that's not true. If it were, then the whole of Russia would split its sides with laughter." Natasha made her appearance again. She, too, had been in prison, in another city, but she had not changed. The mother noticed that in her presence the Little Russian grew more cheerful, was full of jokes, poked fun at everybody, and kept her laughing merrily. But after she had left he would whistle his endless songs sadly, and pace up and down the room for a long time, wearily dragging his feet along the floor. Sashenka came running in frequently, always gloomy, always in haste, and for some reason more and more angular and stiff. Once when Pavel accompanied her out onto the porch, the mother overheard their abrupt conversation. "Will you carry the banner?" the girl asked in a low voice. "Yes." "Is it settled?" "Yes, it's my right." "To prison again?" Pavel was silent. "Is it not possible for you--" She stopped. "What?" "To give it up to somebody else?" "No!" he said aloud. "Think of it! You're a man of such influence; you are so much liked--you and Nakhodka are the two foremost revolutionary workers here. Think how much you could accomplish for the cause of freedom! You know that for this they'll send you off far, far, and for a long time!" Nilovna thought she heard in the girl's voice the familiar sound of fear and anguish, and her words fell upon the mother's heart like heavy, icy drops of water. "No, I have made up my mind. Nothing can make me give it up!" "Not even if I beg you--if I----" Pavel suddenly began to speak rapidly with a peculiar sternness. "You ought not to speak that way. Why you? You ought not!" "I am a human being!" she said in an undertone. "A good human being, too!" he said also in an undertone, and in a peculiar voice, as if unable to catch his breath. "You are a dear human being to me, yes! And that's why--why you mustn't talk that way!" "Good-by!" said the girl. The mother heard the sound of her departing footsteps, and knew that she was walking away very fast, nay, almost running. Pavel followed her into the yard. A heavy oppressive fear fell like a load on the mother's breast. She did not understand what they had been talking about, but she felt that a new misfortune was in store for her, a great and sad misfortune. And her thoughts halted at the question, "What does he want to do?" Her thoughts halted, and were driven into her brain like a nail. She stood in the kitchen by the oven, and looked through the window into the profound, starry heaven. Pavel walked in from the yard with Andrey, and the Little Russian said, shaking his head: "Oh, Isay, Isay! What's to be done with him?" "We must advise him to give up his project," said Pavel glumly. "Then he'll hand over those who speak to him to the authorities," said the Little Russian, flinging his hat away in a corner. "Pasha, what do you want to do?" asked the mother, drooping her head. "When? Now?" "The first of May--the first of May." "Aha!" exclaimed Pavel, lowering his voice. "You heard! I am going to carry our banner. I will march with it at the head of the procession. I suppose they'll put me in prison for it again." The mother's eyes began to burn. An unpleasant, dry feeling came into her mouth. Pavel took her hand and stroked it. "I must do it! Please understand me! It is my happiness!" "I'm not saying anything," she answered, slowly raising her head; but when her eyes met the resolute gleam in his, she again lowered it. He released her hand, and with a sigh said reproachfully: "You oughtn't to be grieved. You ought to feel rejoiced. When are we going to have mothers who will rejoice in sending their children even to death?" "Hopp! Hopp!" mumbled the Little Russian. "How you gallop away!" "Why; do I say anything to you?" the mother repeated. "I don't interfere with you. And if I'm sorry for you--well, that's a mother's way." Pavel drew away from her, and she heard his sharp, harsh words: "There is a love that interferes with a man's very life." She began to tremble, and fearing that he might deal another blow at her heart by saying something stern, she rejoined quickly: "Don't, Pasha! Why should you? I understand. You can't act otherwise, you must do it for your comrades." "No!" he replied. "I am doing it for myself. For their sake I can go without carrying the banner, but I'm going to do it!" Andrey stationed himself in the doorway. It was too low for him, and he had to bend his knees oddly. He stood there as in a frame, one shoulder leaning against the jamb, his head and other shoulder thrust forward. "I wish you would stop palavering, my dear sir," he said with a frown, fixing his protuberant eyes on Pavel's face. He looked like a lizard in the crevice of a stone wall. The mother was overcome with a desire to weep, but she did not want her son to see her tears, and suddenly mumbled: "Oh, dear!--I forgot--" and walked out to the porch. There, her head in a corner, she wept noiselessly; and her copious tears weakened her, as though blood oozed from her heart along with them. Through the door standing ajar the hollow sound of disputing voices reached her ear. "Well, do you admire yourself for having tortured her?" "You have no right to speak like that!" shouted Pavel. "A fine comrade I'd be to you if I kept quiet when I see you making a fool of yourself. Why did you say all that to your mother?" "A man must always speak firmly and without equivocation. He must be clear and definite when he says 'Yes.' He must be clear and definite when he says 'No.'" "To her--to her must you speak that way?" "To everybody! I want no love, I want no friendship which gets between my feet and holds me back." "Bravo! You're a hero! Go say all this to Sashenka. You should have said that to her." "I have!" "You have! The way you spoke to your mother? You have not! To her you spoke softly; you spoke gently and tenderly to her. I did not hear you, but I know it! But you trot out your heroism before your mother. Of course! Your heroism is not worth a cent." Vlasova began to wipe the tears from her face in haste. For fear a serious quarrel should break out between the Little Russian and Pavel, she quickly opened the door and entered the kitchen, shivering, terrified, and distressed. "Ugh! How cold! And it's spring, too!" She aimlessly removed various things in the kitchen from one place to another, and in order to drown the subdued voices in the room, she continued in a louder voice: "Everything's changed. People have grown hotter and the weather colder. At this time of the year it used to get warm; the sky would clear, and the sun would be out." Silence ensued in the room. The mother stood waiting in the middle of the floor. "Did you hear?" came the low sound of the Little Russian's voice. "You must understand it, the devil take it! That's richer than yours." "Will you have some tea?" the mother called with a trembling voice, and without waiting for an answer she exclaimed, in order to excuse the tremor in her voice: "How cold I am!" Pavel came up slowly to her, looking at her from the corners of his eyes, a guilty smile quivering on his lips. "Forgive me, mother!" he said softly. "I am still a boy, a fool." "You mustn't hurt me!" she cried in a sorrowful voice, pressing his head to her bosom. "Say nothing! God be with you. Your life is your own! But don't wound my heart. How can a mother help sorrowing for her son? Impossible! I am sorry for all of you. You are all dear to me as my own flesh and blood; you are all such good people! And who will be sorry for you if I am not? You go and others follow you. They have all left everything behind them, Pasha, and gone into this thing. It's just like a sacred procession." A great ardent thought burned in her bosom, animating her heart with an exalted feeling of sad, tormenting joy; but she could find no words, and she waved her hands with the pang of muteness. She looked into her son's face with eyes in which a bright, sharp pain had lit its fires. "Very well, mother! Forgive me. I see all now!" he muttered, lowering his head. Glancing at her with a light smile, he added, embarrassed but happy: "I will not forget this, mother, upon my word." She pushed him from her, and looking into the room she said to Andrey in a good-natured tone of entreaty: "Andriusha, please don't you shout at him so! Of course, you are older than he, and so you----" The Little Russian was standing with his back toward her. He sang out drolly without turning around to face her: "Oh, oh, oh! I'll bawl at him, be sure! And I'll beat him some day, too." She walked up slowly to him, with outstretched hand, and said: "My dear, dear man!" The Little Russian turned around, bent his head like an ox, and folding his hands behind his back walked past her into the kitchen. Thence his voice issued in a tone of mock sullenness: "You had better go away, Pavel, so I shan't bite your head off! I am only joking, mother; don't believe it! I want to prepare the samovar. What coals these are! Wet, the devil take them!" He became silent, and when the mother walked into the kitchen he was sitting on the floor, blowing the coals in the samovar. Without looking at her the Little Russian began again: "Yes, mother, don't be afraid. I won't touch him. You know, I'm a good-natured chap, soft as a stewed turnip. And then--you hero out there, don't listen--I love him! But I don't like the waistcoat he wears. You see, he has put on a new waistcoat, and he likes it very much, so he goes strutting about, and pushes everybody, crying: 'See, see what a waistcoat I have on!' It's true, it's a fine waistcoat. But what's the use of pushing people? It's hot enough for us without it." Pavel smiled and asked: "How long do you mean to keep up your jabbering? You gave me one thrashing with your tongue. That's enough!" Sitting on the floor, the Little Russian spread his legs around the samovar, and regarded Pavel. The mother stood at the door, and fixed a sad, affectionate gaze at Andrey's long, bent neck and the round back of his head. He threw his body back, supporting himself with his hands on the floor, looked at the mother and at the son with his slightly reddened and blinking eyes, and said in a low, hearty voice: "You are good people, yes, you are!" Pavel bent down and grasped his hand. "Don't pull my hand," said the Little Russian gruffly. "You'll let go and I'll fall. Go away!" "Why are you so shy?" the mother said pensively. "You'd better embrace and kiss. Press hard, hard!" "Do you want to?" asked Pavel softly. "We--ell, why not?" answered the Little Russian, rising. Pavel dropped on his knees, and grasping each other firmly, they sank for a moment into each other's embrace--two bodies and one soul passionately and evenly burning with a profound feeling of friendship. Tears ran down the mother's face, but this time they were easy tears. Drying them she said in embarrassment: "A woman likes to cry. She cries when she is in sorrow; she cries when she is in joy!" The Little Russian pushed Pavel away, and with a light movement, also wiping his eyes with his fingers, he said: "Enough! When the calves have had their frolic, they must go to the shambles. What beastly coal this is! I blew and blew on it, and got some of the dust in my eyes." Pavel sat at the window with bent head, and said mildly: "You needn't be ashamed of such tears." The mother walked up to him, and sat down beside him. Her heart was wrapped in a soft, warm, daring feeling. She felt sad, but pleasant and at ease. "It's all the same!" she thought, stroking her son's hand. "It can't be helped; it must be so!" She recalled other such commonplace words, to which she had been accustomed for a long time; but they did not give adequate expression to all she had lived through that moment. "I'll put the dishes on the table; you stay where you are, mother," said the Little Russian, rising from the floor, and going into the room. "Rest a while. Your heart has been worn out with such blows!" And from the room his singing voice, raised to a higher pitch, was heard. "It's not a nice thing to boast of, yet I must say we tasted the right life just now, real, human, loving life. It does us good." "Yes," said Pavel, looking at the mother. "It's all different now," she returned. "The sorrow is different, and the joy is different. I do not know anything, of course! I do not understand what it is I live by--and I can't express my feelings in words!" "This is the way it ought to be!" said the Little Russian, returning. "Because, mark you, mother dear, a new heart is coming into existence, a new heart is growing up in life. All hearts are smitten in the conflict of interests, all are consumed with a blind greed, eaten up with envy, stricken, wounded, and dripping with filth, falsehood, and cowardice. All people are sick; they are afraid to live; they wander about as in a mist. Everyone feels only his own toothache. But lo, and behold! Here is a Man coming and illuminating life with the light of reason, and he shouts: 'Oh, ho! you straying roaches! It's time, high time, for you to understand that all your interests are one, that everyone has the need to live, everyone has the desire to grow!' The Man who shouts this is alone, and therefore he cries aloud; he needs comrades, he feels dreary in his loneliness, dreary and cold. And at his call the stanch hearts unite into one great, strong heart, deep and sensitive as a silver bell not yet cast. And hark! This bell rings forth the message: 'Men of all countries, unite into one family! Love is the mother of life, not hate!' My brothers! I hear this message sounding through the world!" "And I do, too!" cried Pavel. The mother compressed her lips to keep them from trembling, and shut her eyes tight so as not to cry. "When I lie in bed at night or am out walking alone--everywhere I hear this sound, and my heart rejoices. And the earth, too--I know it--weary of injustice and sorrow, rings out like a bell, responding to the call, and trembles benignly, greeting the new sun arising in the breast of Man." Pavel rose, lifted his hand, and was about to say something, but the mother took his other hand, and pulling him down whispered in his ear: "Don't disturb him!" "Do you know?" said the Little Russian, standing in the doorway, his eyes aglow with a bright flame, "there is still much suffering in store for the people, much of their blood will yet flow, squeezed out by the hands of greed; but all that--all my suffering, all my blood, is a small price for that which is already stirring in my breast, in my mind, in the marrow of my bones! I am already rich, as a star is rich in golden rays. And I will bear all, I will suffer all, because there is within me a joy which no one, which nothing can ever stifle! In this joy there is a world of strength!" They drank tea and sat around the table until midnight, and conversed heart to heart and harmoniously about life, about people, and about the future. CHAPTER XVI Whenever a thought was clear to the mother, she would find confirmation of the idea by drawing upon some of her rude, coarse experiences. She now felt as on that day when her father said to her roughly: "What are you making a wry face about? A fool has been found who wants to marry you. Marry him! All girls must get husbands; all women must bear children, and all children become a burden to their parents!" After these words she saw before her an unavoidable path running for some inexplicable reason through a dark, dreary waste. Thus it was at the present moment. In anticipation of a new approaching misfortune, she uttered speechless words, addressing some imaginary person. This lightened her mute pain, which reverberated in her heart like a tight chord. The next day, early in the morning, very soon after Pavel and Andrey had left, Korsunova knocked at the door alarmingly, and called out hastily: "Isay is killed! Come, quick!" The mother trembled; the name of the assassin flashed through her mind. "Who did it?" she asked curtly, throwing a shawl over her shoulders. "The man's not sitting out there mourning over Isay. He knocked him down and fled!" On the street Marya said: "Now they'll begin to rummage about again and look for the murderer. It's a good thing your folks were at home last night. I can bear witness to that. I walked past here after midnight and glanced into the window, and saw all of you sitting around the table." "What are you talking about, Marya? Why, who could dream of such a thing about them?" the mother ejaculated in fright. "Well, who killed him? Some one from among your people, of course!" said Korsunova, regarding the idea as a matter to be taken for granted. "Everybody knows he spied on them." The mother stopped to fetch breath, and put her hand to her bosom. "What are you going on that way for? Don't be afraid! Whoever it is will reap the harvest of his own rashness. Let's go quick, or else they'll take him away!" The mother walked on without asking herself why she went, and shaken by the thought of Vyesovshchikov. "There--he's done it!" Her mind was held fast by the one idea. Not far from the factory walls, on the grounds of a building recently burned down, a crowd was gathered, tramping down the coal and stirring up ash dust. It hummed and buzzed like a swarm of bees. There were many women in the crowd, even more children, and storekeepers, tavern waiters, policemen, and the gendarme Petlin, a tall old man with a woolly, silvery beard, and decorations on his breast. Isay half reclined on the ground, his back resting against a burned joist, his bare head hanging over his right shoulder, his right hand in his trousers' pocket, and the fingers of his left hand clutching the soil. The mother looked at Isay's face. One eye, wide open, had its dim glance fixed upon his hat lying between his lazily outstretched legs. His mouth was half open in astonishment, his little shriveled body, with its pointed head and bony face, seemed to be resting. The mother crossed herself and heaved a sigh. He had been repulsive to her when alive, but now she felt a mild pity for him. "No blood!" some one remarked in an undertone. "He was evidently knocked down with a fist blow." A stout woman, tugging at the gendarme's hand, asked: "Maybe he is still alive?" "Go away!" the gendarme shouted not very loudly, withdrawing his hand. "The doctor was here and said it was all over," somebody said to the woman. A sarcastic, malicious voice cried aloud: "They've choked up a denouncer's mouth. Serves him right!" The gendarme pushed aside the women, who were crowded close about him, and asked in a threatening tone: "Who was that? Who made that remark?" The people scattered before him as he thrust them aside. A number took quickly to their heels, and some one in the crowd broke into a mocking laugh. The mother went home. "No one is sorry," she thought. The broad figure of Nikolay stood before her like a shadow, his narrow eyes had a cold, cruel look, and he wrung his right hand as if it had been hurt. When Pavel and Andrey came to dinner, her first question was: "Well? Did they arrest anybody for Isay's murder?" "We haven't heard anything about it," answered the Little Russian. She saw that they were both downhearted and sullen. "Nothing is said about Nikolay?" the mother questioned again in a low voice. Pavel fixed his stern eyes on the mother, and said distinctly: "No, there is no talk of him. He is not even thought of in connection with this affair. He is away. He went off on the river yesterday, and hasn't returned yet. I inquired for him." "Thank God!" said the mother with a sigh of relief. "Thank God!" The Little Russian looked at her, and drooped his head. "He lies there," the mother recounted pensively, "and looks as though he were surprised; that's the way his face looks. And no one pities him; no one bestows a good word on him. He is such a tiny bit of a fellow, such a wretched-looking thing, like a bit of broken china. It seems as if he had slipped on something and fallen, and there he lies!" At dinner Pavel suddenly dropped his spoon and exclaimed: "That's what I don't understand!" "What?" asked the Little Russian, who had been sitting at the table dismal and silent. "To kill anything living because one wants to eat, that's ugly enough. To kill a beast--a beast of prey--that I can understand. I think I myself could kill a man who had turned into a beast preying upon mankind. But to kill such a disgusting, pitiful creature--I don't understand how anyone could lift his hand for an act like that!" The Little Russian raised his shoulders and dropped them again; then said: "He was no less noxious than a beast." "I know." "We kill a mosquito for sucking just a tiny bit of our blood," the Little Russian added in a low voice. "Well, yes, I am not saying anything about that. I only mean to say it's so disgusting." "What can you do?" returned Andrey with another shrug of his shoulders. After a long pause Pavel asked: "Could you kill a fellow like that?" The Little Russian regarded him with his round eyes, threw a glance at the mother, and said sadly, but firmly: "For myself, I wouldn't touch a living thing. But for comrades, for the cause, I am capable of everything. I'd even kill. I'd kill my own son." "Oh, Andriusha!" the mother exclaimed under her breath. He smiled and said: "It can't be helped! Such is our life!" "Ye-es," Pavel drawled. "Such is our life." With sudden excitation, as if obeying some impulse from within, Andrey arose, waved his hands, and said: "How can a man help it? It so happens that we sometimes must abhor a certain person in order to hasten the time when it will be possible only to take delight in one another. You must destroy those who hinder the progress of life, who sell human beings for money in order to buy quiet or esteem for themselves. If a Judas stands in the way of honest people, lying in wait to betray them, I should be a Judas myself if I did not destroy him. It's sinful, you say? And do they, these masters of life, do they have the right to keep soldiers and executioners, public houses and prisons, places of penal servitude, and all that vile abomination by which they hold themselves in quiet security and in comfort? If it happens sometimes that I am compelled to take their stick into my own hands, what am I to do then? Why, I am going to take it, of course. I will not decline. They kill us out by the tens and hundreds. That gives me the right to raise my hand and level it against one of the enemy, against that one of their number who comes closest to me, and makes himself more directly noxious to the work of my life than the others. This is logic; but I go against logic for once. I do not need your logic now. I know that their blood can bring no results, I know that their blood is barren, fruitless! Truth grows well only on the soil irrigated with the copious rain of our own blood, and their putrid blood goes to waste, without a trace left. I know it! But I take the sin upon myself. I'll kill, if I see a need for it! I speak only for myself, mind you. My crime dies with me. It will not remain a blot upon the future. It will sully no one but myself--no one but myself." He walked to and fro in the room, waving his hands in front of him, as if he were cutting something in the air out of his way. The mother looked at him with an expression of melancholy and alarm. She felt as though something had hit him, and that he was pained. The dangerous thoughts about murder left her. If Vyesovshchikov had not killed Isay, none of Pavel's comrades could have done the deed. Pavel listened to the Little Russian with drooping head, and Andrey stubbornly continued in a forceful tone: "In your forward march it sometimes chances that you must go against your very own self. You must be able to give up everything--your heart and all. To give your life, to die for the cause--that's simple. Give more! Give that which is dearer to you than your life! Then you will see that grow with a vigorous growth which is dearest to you--your truth!" He stopped in the middle of the room, his face grown pale and his eyes half closed. Raising his hand and shaking it, he began slowly in a solemn tone of assurance with faith and with strength: "There will come a time, I know, when people will take delight in one another, when each will be like a star to the other, and when each will listen to his fellow as to music. The free men will walk upon the earth, men great in their freedom. They will walk with open hearts, and the heart of each will be pure of envy and greed, and therefore all mankind will be without malice, and there will be nothing to divorce the heart from reason. Then life will be one great service to man! His figure will be raised to lofty heights--for to free men all heights are attainable. Then we shall live in truth and freedom and in beauty, and those will be accounted the best who will the more widely embrace the world with their hearts, and whose love of it will be the profoundest; those will be the best who will be the freest; for in them is the greatest beauty. Then will life be great, and the people will be great who live that life." He ceased and straightened himself. Then swinging to and fro like the tongue of a bell, he added in a resonant voice that seemed to issue from the depths of his breast: "So for the sake of this life I am prepared for everything! I will tear my heart out, if necessary, and will trample it with my own feet!" His face quivered and stiffened with excitement, and great, heavy tears rolled down one after the other. Pavel raised his head and looked at him with a pale face and wide-open eyes. The mother raised herself a little over the table with a feeling that something great was growing and impending. "What is the matter with you, Andrey?" Pavel asked softly. The Little Russian shook his head, stretched himself like a violin string, and said, looking at the mother: "I struck Isay." She rose, and quickly walked up to him, all in a tremble, and seized his hands. He tried to free his right hand, but she held it firmly in her grasp and whispered hotly: "My dear, my own, hush! It's nothing--it's nothing--nothing, Pasha! Andriushenka--oh, what a calamity! You sufferer! My darling heart!" "Wait, mother," the Little Russian muttered hoarsely. "I'll tell you how it happened." "Don't!" she whispered, looking at him with tears in her eyes. "Don't, Andriusha! It isn't our business. It's God's affair!" Pavel came up to him slowly, looking at his comrade with moist eyes. He was pale, and his lips trembled. With a strange smile he said softly and slowly: "Come, give me your hand, Andrey. I want to shake hands with you. Upon my word, I understand how hard it is for you!" "Wait!" said the Little Russian without looking at them, shaking his head, and tearing himself away from their grasp. When he succeeded in freeing his right hand from the mother's, Pavel caught it, pressing it vigorously and wringing it. "And you mean to tell me you killed that man?" said the mother. "No, _you_ didn't do it! If I saw it with my own eyes I wouldn't believe it." "Stop, Andrey! Mother is right. This thing is beyond our judgment." With one hand pressing Andrey's, Pavel laid the other on his shoulder, as if wishing to stop the tremor in his tall body. The Little Russian bent his head down toward him, and said in a broken, mournful voice: "I didn't want to do it, you know, Pavel. It happened when you walked ahead, and I remained behind with Ivan Gusev. Isay came from around a corner and stopped to look at us, and smiled at us. Ivan walked off home, and I went on toward the factory--Isay at my side!" Andrey stopped, heaved a deep sigh, and continued: "No one ever insulted me in such an ugly way as that dog!" The mother pulled the Little Russian by the hand toward the table, gave him a shove, and finally succeeded in seating him on a chair. She sat down at his side close to him, shoulder to shoulder. Pavel stood in front of them, holding Andrey's hand in his and pressing it. "I understand how hard it is for you," he said. "He told me that they know us all, that we are all on the gendarme's record, and that we are going to be dragged in before the first of May. I didn't answer, I laughed, but my blood boiled. He began to tell me that I was a clever fellow, and that I oughtn't to go on the way I was going, but that I should rather----" The Little Russian stopped, wiped his face with his right hand, shook his head, and a dry gleam flashed in his eyes. "I understand!" said Pavel. "Yes," he said, "I should rather enter the service of the law." The Little Russian waved his hand, and swung his clenched fist. "The law!--curse his soul!" he hissed between his teeth. "It would have been better if he had struck me in the face. It would have been easier for me, and better for him, perhaps, too! But when he spit his dirty thought into my heart that way, I could not bear it." Andrey pulled his hand convulsively from Pavel's, and said more hoarsely with disgust in his face: "I dealt him a back-hand blow like that, downward and aslant, and walked away. I didn't even stop to look at him; I heard him fall. He dropped and was silent. I didn't dream of anything serious. I walked on peacefully, just as if I had done no more than kick a frog with my foot. And then--what's all this? I started to work, and I heard them shouting: 'Isay is killed!' I didn't even believe it, but my hand grew numb--and I felt awkward in working with it. It didn't hurt me, but it seemed to have grown shorter." He looked at his hand obliquely and said: "All my life, I suppose, I won't be able to wash off that dirty stain from it." "If only your heart is pure, my dear boy!" the mother said softly, bursting into tears. "I don't regard myself as guilty; no, I don't!" said the Little Russian firmly. "But it's disgust. It disgusts me to carry such dirt inside of me. I had no need of it. It wasn't called for." "What do you think of doing?" asked Pavel, giving him a suspicious look. "What am I going to do?" the Little Russian repeated thoughtfully, drooping his head. Then raising it again he said with a smile: "I am not afraid, of course, to say that it was I who struck him. But I am ashamed to say it. I am ashamed to go to prison, and even to hard labor, maybe, for such a--nothing. If some one else is accused, then I'll go and confess. But otherwise, go all of my own accord--I cannot!" He waved his hands, rose, and repeated: "I cannot! I am ashamed!" The whistle blew. The Little Russian, bending his head to one side, listened to the powerful roar, and shaking himself, said: "I am not going to work." "Nor I," said Pavel. "I'll go to the bath house," said the Little Russian, smiling. He got ready in silence and walked off, sullen and low-spirited. The mother followed him with a compassionate look. "Say what you please, Pasha, I cannot believe him! And even if I did believe him, I wouldn't lay any blame on him. No, I would not. I know it's sinful to kill a man; I believe in God and in the Lord Jesus Christ, but still I don't think Andrey guilty. I'm sorry for Isay. He's such a tiny bit of a manikin. He lies there in astonishment. When I looked at him I remembered how he threatened to have you hanged. And yet I neither felt hatred toward him nor joy because he was dead. I simply felt sorry. But now that I know by whose hand he fell I am not even sorry for him." She suddenly became silent, reflected a while, and with a smile of surprise, exclaimed: "Lord Jesus Christ! Do you hear what I am saying, Pasha?" Pavel apparently had not heard her. Slowly pacing up and down the room with drooping head, he said pensively and with exasperation: "Andrey won't forgive himself soon, if he'll forgive himself at all! There is life for you, mother. You see the position in which people are placed toward one another. You don't want to, but you must strike! And strike whom? Such a helpless being. He is more wretched even than you because he is stupid. The police, the gendarmes, the soldiers, the spies--they are all our enemies, and yet they are all such people as we are. Their blood is sucked out of them just as ours is, and they are no more regarded as human beings than we are. That's the way it is. But they have set one part of the people against the other, blinded them with fear, bound them all hand and foot, squeezed them, and drained their blood, and used some as clubs against the others. They've turned men into weapons, into sticks and stones, and called it civilization, government." He walked up to his mother and said to her firmly: "That's crime, mother! The heinous crime of killing millions of people, the murder of millions of souls! You understand--they kill the soul! You see the difference between them and us. He killed a man unwittingly. He feels disgusted, ashamed, sick--the main thing is he feels disgusted! But they kill off thousands calmly, without a qualm, without pity, without a shudder of the heart. They kill with pleasure and with delight. And why? They stifle everybody and everything to death merely to keep the timber of their houses secure, their furniture, their silver, their gold, their worthless papers--all that cheap trash which gives them control over the people. Think, it's not for their own selves, for their persons, that they protect themselves thus, using murder and the mutilation of souls as a means--it's not for themselves they do it, but for the sake of their possessions. They do not guard themselves from within, but from without." He bent over to her, took her hands, and shaking them said: "If you felt the abomination of it all, the disgrace and rottenness, you would understand our truth; you would then perceive how great it is, how glorious!" The mother arose agitated, full of a desire to sink her heart into the heart of her son, and to join them in one burning, flaming torch. "Wait, Pasha, wait!" she muttered, panting for breath. "I am a human being. I feel. Wait." There was a loud noise of some one entering the porch. Both of them started and looked at each other. "If it's the police coming for Andrey--" Pavel whispered. "I know nothing--nothing!" the mother whispered back. "Oh, God!" CHAPTER XVII The door opened slowly, and bending to pass through, Rybin strode in heavily. "Here I am!" he said, raising his head and smiling. He wore a short fur overcoat, all stained with tar, a pair of dark mittens stuck from his belt, and his head was covered with a shaggy fur cap. "Are you well? Have they let you out of prison, Pavel? So, how are you, Nilovna?" "Why, you? How glad I am to see you!" Slowly removing his overclothes, Rybin said: "Yes, I've turned muzhik again. You're gradually turning gentlemen, and I am turning the other way. That's it!" Pulling his ticking shirt straight, he passed through the room, examined it attentively, and remarked: "You can see your property has not increased, but you've grown richer in books. So! That's the dearest possession, books are, it's true. Well, tell me how things are going with you." "Things are going forward," said Pavel. "Yes," said Rybin. "We plow and we sow, All high and low, Boasting is cheap, But the harvest we reap, A feast we'll make, And a rest we'll take." "Will you have some tea?" asked the mother. "Yes, I'll have some tea, and I'll take a sip of vodka, too; and if you'll give me something to eat, I won't decline it, either. I am glad to see you--that's what!" "How's the world wagging with you, Mikhaïl Ivanych?" Pavel inquired, taking a seat opposite Rybin. "So, so. Fairly well. I settled at Edilgeyev. Have you ever heard of Edilgeyev? It's a fine village. There are two fairs a year there; over two thousand inhabitants. The people are an evil pack. There's no land. It's leased out in lots. Poor soil!" "Do you talk to them?" asked Pavel, becoming animated. "I don't keep mum. You know I have all your leaflets with me. I grabbed them away from here--thirty-four of them. But I carry on my propaganda chiefly with the Bible. You can get something out of it. It's a thick book. It's a government book. It's published by the Holy Synod. It's easy to believe!" He gave Pavel a wink, and continued with a laugh: "But that's not enough! I have come here to you to get books. Yefim is here, too. We are transporting tar; and so we turned aside to stop at your house. You stock me up with books before Yefim comes. He doesn't have to know too much!" "Mother," said Pavel, "go get some books! They'll know what to give you. Tell them it's for the country." "All right. The samovar will be ready in a moment, and then I'll go." "You have gone into this movement, too, Nilovna?" asked Rybin with a smile. "Very well. We have lots of eager candidates for books. There's a teacher there who creates a desire for them. He's a fine fellow, they say, although he belongs to the clergy. We have a woman teacher, too, about seven versts from the village. But they don't work with illegal books; they're a 'law and order' crowd out there; they're afraid. But I want forbidden books--sharp, pointed books. I'll slip them through their fingers. When the police commissioners or the priest see that they are illegal books, they'll think it's the teachers who circulate them. And in the meantime I'll remain in the background." Well content with his hard, practical sense, he grinned merrily. "Hm!" thought the mother. "He looks like a bear and behaves like a fox." Pavel rose, and pacing up and down the room with even steps, said reproachfully: "We'll let you have the books, but what you want to do is not right, Mikhaïl Ivanovich." "Why is it not right?" asked Rybin, opening his eyes in astonishment. "You yourself ought to answer for what you do. It is not right to manage matters so that others should suffer for what you do." Pavel spoke sternly. Rybin looked at the floor, shook his head, and said: "I don't understand you." "If the teachers are suspected," said Pavel, stationing himself in front of Rybin, "of distributing illegal books, don't you think they'll be put in jail for it?" "Yes. Well, what if they are?" "But it's you who distribute the books, not they. Then it's you that ought to go to prison." "What a strange fellow you are!" said Rybin with a smile, striking his hand on his knee. "Who would suspect me, a muzhik, of occupying myself with such matters? Why, does such a thing happen? Books are affairs of the masters, and it's for them to answer for them." The mother felt that Pavel did not understand Rybin, and she saw that he was screwing up his eyes--a sign of anger. So she interjected in a cautious, soft voice: "Mikhaïl Ivanovich wants to fix it so that he should be able to go on with his work, and that others should take the punishment for it." "That's it!" said Rybin, stroking his beard. "Mother," Pavel asked dryly, "suppose some of our people, Andrey, for example, did something behind my back, and I were put in prison for it, what would you say to that?" The mother started, looked at her son in perplexity, and said, shaking her head in negation: "Why, is it possible to act that way toward a comrade?" "Aha! Yes!" Rybin drawled. "I understand you, Pavel." And with a comical wink toward the mother, he added: "This is a delicate matter, mother." And again turning to Pavel he held forth in a didactic manner: "Your ideas on this subject are very green, brother. In secret work there is no honor. Think! In the first place, they'll put those persons in prison on whom they find the books, and not the teachers. That's number one! Secondly, even though the teachers give the people only legal books to read, you know that they contain prohibited things just the same as in the forbidden books; only they are put in a different language. The truths are fewer. That's number two. I mean to say, they want the same thing that I do; only they proceed by side paths, while I travel on the broad highway. And thirdly, brother, what business have I with them? How can a traveler on foot strike up friendship with a man on horseback? Toward a muzhik, maybe, I wouldn't want to act that way. But these people, one a clergyman, the other the daughter of a land proprietor, why they want to uplift the people, I cannot understand. Their ideas, the ideas of the masters, are unintelligible to me, a muzhik. What I do myself, I know, but what they are after I cannot tell. For thousands of years they have punctiliously and consistently pursued the business of being masters, and have fleeced and flayed the skins of the muzhiks; and all of a sudden they wake up and want to open the muzhik's eyes. I am not a man for fairy tales, brother, and that's in the nature of a fairy tale. That's why I can't get interested in them. The ways of the masters are strange to me. You travel in winter, and you see some living creature in front of you. But what it is--a wolf, a fox, or just a plain dog--you don't know." The mother glanced at her son. His face wore a gloomy expression. Rybin's eyes sparkled with a dark gleam. He looked at Pavel, combing down his beard with his fingers. His air was at once complacent and excited. "I have no time to flirt," he said. "Life is a stern matter. We live in dog houses, not in sheep pens, and every pack barks after its own fashion." "There are some masters," said the mother, recalling certain familiar faces, "who die for the people, and let themselves be tortured all their lives in prison." "Their calculations are different, and their deserts are different," said Rybin. "The muzhik grown rich turns into a gentleman, and the gentleman grown poor goes to the muzhik. Willy-nilly, he must have a pure soul, if his purse is empty. Do you remember, Pavel, you explained to me that as a man lives, so he also thinks, and that if the workingman says 'Yes,' the master must say 'No,' and if the workingman says 'No,' the master, because of the nature of the beast, is bound to cry 'Yes.' So you see, their natures are different one from the other. The muzhik has his nature, and the gentleman has his. When the peasant has a full stomach, the gentleman passes sleepless nights. Of course, every fold has its black sheep, and I have no desire to defend the peasants wholesale." Rybin rose to his feet somber and powerful. His face darkened, his beard quivered as if he ground his teeth inaudibly, and he continued in a lowered voice: "For five years I beat about from factory to factory, and got unaccustomed to the village. Then I went to the village again, looked around, and I found I could not live like that any more! You understand? I _can't_. You live here, you don't know hunger, you don't see such outrages. There hunger stalks after a man all his life like a shadow, and he has no hope for bread--no hope! Hunger destroys the soul of the people; the very image of man is effaced from their countenances. They do not live, they rot in dire unavoidable want. And around them the government authorities watch like ravens to see if a crumb is not left over. And if they do find a crumb, they snatch that away, too, and give you a punch in the face besides." Rybin looked around, bent down to Pavel, his hand resting on the table: "I even got sick and faint when I saw that life again. I looked around me--but I couldn't! However, I conquered my repulsion. 'Fiddlesticks!' I said. 'I won't let my feelings get the better of me. I'll stay here. I won't get your bread for you; but I'll cook you a pretty mess, I will.' I carry within me the wrongs of my people and hatred of the oppressor. I feel these wrongs like a knife constantly cutting at my heart." Perspiration broke out on his forehead; he shrugged his shoulders and slowly bent toward Pavel, laying a tremulous hand on his shoulder: "Give me your help! Let me have books--such books that when a man has read them he will not be able to rest. Put a prickly hedgehog to his brains. Tell those city folks who write for you to write for the villagers also. Let them write such hot truth that it will scald the village, that the people will even rush to their death." He raised his hand, and laying emphasis on each word, he said hoarsely: "Let death make amends for death. That is, die so that the people should arise to life again. And let thousands die in order that hosts of people all over the earth may arise to life again. That's it! It's easy to die--but let the people rise to life again! That's a different thing! Let them rise up in rebellion!" The mother brought in the samovar, looking askance at Rybin. His strong, heavy words oppressed her. Something in him reminded her of her husband. He, too, showed his teeth, waved his hands, and rolled up his sleeves; in him, too, there was that impatient wrath, impatient but dumb. Rybin was not dumb; he was not silent; he spoke, and therefore was less terrible. "That's necessary," said Pavel, nodding his head. "We need a newspaper for the villages, too. Give us material, and we'll print you a newspaper." The mother looked at her son with a smile, and shook her head. She had quietly put on her wraps and now went out of the house. "Yes, do it. We'll give you everything. Write as simply as possible, so that even calves could understand," Rybin cried. Then, suddenly stepping back from Pavel, he said, as he shook his head: "Ah, me, if I were a Jew! The Jew, my dear boy, is the most believing man in the world! Isaiah, the prophet, or Job, the patient, believed more strongly than Christ's apostles. They could say words to make a man's hair stand on end. But the apostles, you see, Pavel, couldn't. The prophets believed not in the church, but in themselves; they had their God in themselves. The apostles--they built churches; and the church is law. Man must believe in himself, not in law. Man carries the truth of God in his soul; he is not a police captain on earth, nor a slave! All the laws are in myself." The kitchen door opened, and somebody walked in. "It's Yefim," said Rybin, looking into the kitchen. "Come here, Yefim. As for you, Pavel, think! Think a whole lot. There is a great deal to think about. This is Yefim. And this man's name is Pavel. I told you about him." A light-haired, broad-faced young fellow in a short fur overcoat, well built and evidently strong, stood before Pavel, holding his cap in both hands and looking at him from the corners of his gray eyes. "How do you do?" he said hoarsely, as he shook hands with Pavel, and stroked his curly hair with both hands. He looked around the room, immediately spied the bookshelf, and walked over to it slowly. "Went straight to them!" Rybin said, winking to Pavel. Yefim started to examine the books, and said: "A whole lot of reading here! But I suppose you haven't much time for it. Down in the village they have more time for reading." "But less desire?" Pavel asked. "Why? They have the desire, too," answered the fellow, rubbing his chin. "The times are so now that if you don't think, you might as well lie down and die. But the people don't want to die; and so they've begun to make their brains work. 'Geology'--what's that?" Pavel explained. "We don't need it!" Yefim said, replacing the book on the shelf. Rybin sighed noisily, and said: "The peasant is not so much interested to know where the land came from as where it's gone to, how it's been snatched from underneath his feet by the gentry. It doesn't matter to him whether it's fixed or whether it revolves--that's of no importance--you can hang it on a rope, if you want to, provided it feeds him; you can nail it to the skies, provided it gives him enough to eat." "'The History of Slavery,'" Yefim read out again, and asked Pavel: "Is it about us?" "Here's an account of Russian serfdom, too," said Pavel, giving him another book. Yefim took it, turned it in his hands, and putting it aside, said calmly: "That's out of date." "Have you an apportionment of land for yourself?" inquired Pavel. "We? Yes, we have. We are three brothers, and our portion is about ten acres and a half--all sand--good for polishing brass, but poor for making bread." After a pause he continued: "I've freed myself from the soil. What's the use? It does not feed; it ties one's hands. This is the fourth year that I'm working as a hired man. I've got to become a soldier this fall. Uncle Mikhaïl says: 'Don't go. Now,' he says, 'the soldiers are being sent to beat the people.' However, I think I'll go. The army existed at the time of Stepan Timofeyevich Razin and Pugachev. The time has come to make an end of it. Don't you think so?" he asked, looking firmly at Pavel. "Yes, the time has come." The answer was accompanied by a smile. "But it's hard. You must know what to say to soldiers, and how to say it." "We'll learn; we'll know how," Yefim said. "And if the superiors catch you at it, they may shoot you down," Pavel concluded, looking curiously at Yefim. "They will show no mercy," the peasant assented calmly, and resumed his examination of the books. "Drink your tea, Yefim; we've got to leave soon," said Rybin. "Directly." And Yefim asked again: "Revolution is an uprising, isn't it?" Andrey came, red, perspiring, and dejected. He shook Yefim's hand without saying anything, sat down by Rybin's side, and smiled as he looked at him. "What's the trouble? Why so blue?" Rybin asked, tapping his knee. "Nothing." "Are you a workingman, too?" asked Yefim, nodding his head toward the Little Russian. "Yes," Andrey answered. "Why?" "This is the first time he's seen factory workmen," explained Rybin. "He says they're different from others." "How so?" Pavel asked. Yefim looked carefully at Andrey and said: "You have sharp bones; peasants' bones are rounder." "The peasant stands more firmly on his feet," Rybin supplemented. "He feels the ground under him although he does not possess it. Yet he feels the earth. But the factory workingman is something like a bird. He has no home. To-day he's here, to-morrow there. Even his wife can't attach him to the same spot. At the least provocation--farewell, my dear! and off he goes to look for something better. But the peasant wants to improve himself just where he is without moving off the spot. There's your mother!" And Rybin went out into the kitchen. Yefim approached Pavel, and with embarrassment asked: "Perhaps you will give me a book?" "Certainly." The peasant's eyes flashed, and he said rapidly: "I'll return it. Some of our folks bring tar not far from here. They will return it for me. Thank you! Nowadays a book is like a candle in the night to us." Rybin, already dressed and tightly girt, came in and said to Yefim: "Come, it's time for us to go." "Now, I have something to read!" exclaimed Yefim, pointing to the book and smiling inwardly. When he had gone, Pavel animatedly said, turning to Andrey: "Did you notice those fellows?" "Y-yes!" slowly uttered the Little Russian. "Like clouds in the sunset--thick, dark clouds, moving slowly." "Mikhaïl!" exclaimed the mother. "He looks as if he had never been in a factory! A peasant again. And how formidable he looks!" "I'm sorry you weren't here," said Pavel to Andrey, who was sitting at the table, staring gloomily into his glass of tea. "You could have seen the play of hearts. You always talk about the heart. Rybin got up a lot of steam; he upset me, crushed me. I couldn't even reply to him. How distrustful he is of people, and how cheaply he values them! Mother is right. That man has a formidable power in him." "I noticed it," the Little Russian replied glumly. "They have poisoned people. When the peasants rise up, they'll overturn absolutely everything! They need bare land, and they will lay it bare, tear down everything." He spoke slowly, and it was evident that his mind was on something else. The mother cautiously tapped him on the shoulder. "Pull yourself together, Andriusha." "Wait a little, my dear mother, my own!" he begged softly and kindly. "All this is so ugly--although I didn't mean to do any harm. Wait!" And suddenly rousing himself, he said, striking the table with his hand: "Yes, Pavel, the peasant will lay the land bare for himself when he rises to his feet. He will burn everything up, as if after a plague, so that all traces of his wrongs will vanish in ashes." "And then he will get in our way," Pavel observed softly. "It's our business to prevent that. We are nearer to him; he trusts us; he will follow us." "Do you know, Rybin proposes that we should publish a newspaper for the village?" "We must do it, too. As soon as possible." Pavel laughed and said: "I feel bad I didn't argue with him." "We'll have a chance to argue with him still," the Little Russian rejoined. "You keep on playing your flute; whoever has gay feet, if they haven't grown into the ground, will dance to your tune. Rybin would probably have said that we don't feel the ground under us, and need not, either. Therefore it's our business to shake it. Shake it once, and the people will be loosened from it; shake it once more, and they'll tear themselves away." The mother smiled. "Everything seems to be simple to you, Andriusha." "Yes, yes, it's simple," said the Little Russian, and added gloomily: "Like life." A few minutes later he said: "I'll go take a walk in the field." "After the bath? The wind will blow through you," the mother warned. "Well, I need a good airing." "Look out, you'll catch a cold," Pavel said affectionately. "You'd better lie down and try to sleep." "No, I'm going." He put on his wraps, and went out without speaking. "It's hard for him," the mother sighed. "You know what?" Pavel observed to her. "It's very good that you started to say 'thou' to him after that." She looked at him in astonishment, and after reflecting a moment, said: "Um, I didn't even notice how it came. It came all of itself. He has grown so near to me. I can't tell you in words just how I feel. Oh, such a misfortune!" "You have a good heart, mamma," Pavel said softly. "I'm very glad if I have. If I could only help you in some way, all of you. If I only could!" "Don't fear, you will." She laughed softly: "I can't help fearing; that's exactly what I can't help. But thank you for the good word, my dear son." "All right, mother; don't let's talk about it any more. Know that I love you; and I thank you most heartily." She walked into the kitchen in order not to annoy him with her tears. CHAPTER XVIII Several days later Vyesovshchikov came in, as shabby, untidy, and disgruntled as ever. "Haven't you heard who killed Isay?" He stopped in his clumsy pacing of the room to turn to Pavel. "No!" Pavel answered briefly. "There you got a man who wasn't squeamish about the job! And I'd always been preparing to do it myself. It was my job--just the thing for me!" "Don't talk nonsense, Nikolay," Pavel said in a friendly manner. "Now, really, what's the matter with you?" interposed the mother kindly. "You have a soft heart, and yet you keep barking like a vicious dog. What do you go on that way for?" At this moment she was actually pleased to see Nikolay. Even his pockmarked face looked more agreeable to her. She pitied him as never before. "Well, I'm not fit for anything but jobs like that!" said Nikolay dully, shrugging his shoulders. "I keep thinking, and thinking where my place in the world is. There is no place for me! The people require to be spoken to, and I cannot. I see everything; I feel all the people's wrongs; but I cannot express myself: I have a dumb soul." He went over to Pavel with drooping head; and scraping his fingers on the table, he said plaintively, and so unlike himself, childishly, sadly: "Give me some hard work to do, comrade. I can't live this life any longer. It's so senseless, so useless. You are all working in the movement, and I see that it is growing, and I'm outside of it all. I haul boards and beams. Is it possible to live for the sake of hauling timber? Give me some hard work." Pavel clasped his hand, pulling him toward himself. "We will!" From behind the curtains resounded the Little Russian's voice: "Nikolay, I'll teach you typesetting, and you'll work as a compositor for us. Yes?" Nikolay went over to him and said: "If you'll teach me that, I'll give you my knife." "To the devil with your knife!" exclaimed the Little Russian and burst out laughing. "It's a good knife," Nikolay insisted. Pavel laughed, too. Vyesovshchikov stopped in the middle of the room and asked: "Are you laughing at me?" "Of course," replied the Little Russian, jumping out of bed. "I'll tell you what! Let's take a walk in the fields! The night is fine; there's bright moonshine. Let's go!" "All right," said Pavel. "And I'll go with you, too!" declared Nikolay. "I like to hear you laugh, Little Russian." "And I like to hear you promise presents," answered the Little Russian, smiling. While Andrey was dressing in the kitchen, the mother scolded him: "Dress warmer! You'll get sick." And when they all had left, she watched them through the window; then looked at the ikon, and said softly: "God help them!" She turned off the lamp and began to pray alone in the moonlit room. * * * * * The days flew by in such rapid succession that the mother could not give much thought to the first of May. Only at night, when, exhausted by the noise and the exciting bustle of the day, she went to bed, tired and worn out, her heart would begin to ache. "Oh, dear, if it would only be over soon!" At dawn, when the factory whistle blew, the son and the Little Russian, after hastily drinking tea and snatching a bite, would go, leaving a dozen or so small commissions for the mother. The whole day long she would move around like a squirrel in a wheel, cook dinner, and boil lilac-colored gelatin and glue for the proclamations. Some people would come, leave notes with her to deliver to Pavel, and disappear, infecting her with their excitement. The leaflets appealing to the working people to celebrate the first of May flooded the village and the factory. Every night they were posted on the fences, even on the doors of the police station; and every day they were found in the factory. In the mornings the police would go around, swearing, tearing down and scraping off the lilac-covered bills from the fences. At noon, however, these bills would fly over the streets again, rolling to the feet of the passers-by. Spies were sent from the city to stand at the street corners and carefully scan the working people on their gay passages from and to the factory at dinner time. Everybody was pleased to see the impotence of the police, and even the elder workingmen would smile at one another: "Things are happening, aren't they?" All over, people would cluster into groups hotly discussing the stirring appeals. Life was at boiling point. This spring it held more of interest to everybody, it brought forth something new to all; for some it was a good excuse to excite themselves--they could pour out their malicious oaths on the agitators; to others, it brought perplexed anxiety as well as hope; to others again, the minority, an acute delight in the consciousness of being the power that set the village astir. Pavel and Andrey scarcely ever went to bed. They came home just before the morning whistle sounded, tired, hoarse, and pale. The mother knew that they held meetings in the woods and the marsh; that squads of mounted police galloped around the village, that spies were crawling all over, holding up and searching single workingmen, dispersing groups, and sometimes making an arrest. She understood that her son and Andrey might be arrested any night. Sometimes she thought that this would be the best thing for them. Strangely enough, the investigation of the murder of Isay, the record clerk, suddenly ceased. For two days the local police questioned the people in regard to the matter, examining about ten men or so, and finally lost interest in the affair. Marya Korsunova, in a chat with the mother, reflected the opinion of the police, with whom she associated as amicably as with everybody: "How is it possible to find the guilty man? That morning some hundred people met Isay, and ninety of them, if not more, might have given him the blow. During these eight years he has galled everybody." The Little Russian changed considerably. His face became hollow-cheeked; his eyelids got heavy and drooped over his round eyes, half covering them. His smiles were wrung from him unwillingly, and two thin wrinkles were drawn from his nostrils to the corners of his lips. He talked less about everyday matters; on the other hand, he was more frequently enkindled with a passionate fire; and he intoxicated his listeners with his ecstatic words about the future, about the bright, beautiful holiday, when they would celebrate the triumph of freedom and reason. Listening to his words, the mother felt that he had gone further than anybody else toward the great, glorious day, and that he saw the joys of that future more vividly than the rest. When the investigations of Isay's murder ceased, he said in disgust and smiling sadly: "It's not only the people they treat like trash, but even the very men whom they set on the people like dogs. They have no concern for their faithful Judases, they care only for their shekels--only for them." And after a sullen silence, he added: "And I pity that man the more I think of him. I didn't intend to kill him--didn't want to!" "Enough, Andrey," said Pavel severely. "You happened to knock against something rotten, and it fell to pieces," added the mother in a low voice. "You're right--but that's no consolation." He often spoke in this way. In his mouth the words assumed a peculiar, universal significance, bitter and corrosive. At last, it was the first of May! The whistle shrilled as usual, powerful and peremptory. The mother, who hadn't slept a minute during the night, jumped out of bed, made a fire in the samovar, which had been prepared the evening before, and was about, as always, to knock at the door of her son's and Andrey's room, when, with a wave of her hand she recollected the day, and went to seat herself at the window, leaning her cheek on her hand. Clusters of light clouds, white and rosy, sailed swiftly across the pale blue sky, like huge birds frightened by the piercing shriek of the escaping steam. The mother watched the clouds, absorbed in herself. Her head was heavy, her eyes dry and inflamed from the sleepless night. A strange calm possessed her breast, her heart was beating evenly, and her mind dwelt on only common, everyday things. "I prepared the samovar too early; it will boil away. Let them sleep longer to-day; they've worn themselves out, both of them." A cheerful ray of sun looked into the room. She held her hand out to it, and with the other gently patted the bright young beam, smiling kindly and thoughtfully. Then she rose, removed the pipe from the samovar, trying not to make a noise, washed herself, and began to pray, crossing herself piously, and noiselessly moving her lips. Her face was radiant, and her right eyebrow kept rising gradually and suddenly dropping. The second whistle blew more softly with less assurance, a tremor in its thick and mellow sound. It seemed to the mother that the whistle lasted longer to-day than ever. The clear, musical voice of the Little Russian sounded in the room: "Pavel, do you hear? They're calling." The mother heard the patter of bare feet on the floor and some one yawn with gusto. "The samovar is ready," she cried. "We're getting up," Pavel answered merrily. "The sun is rising," said the Little Russian. "The clouds are racing; they're out of place to-day." He went into the kitchen all disheveled but jolly after his sleep. "Good morning, mother dear; how did you sleep?" The mother went to him and whispered: "Andriusha, keep close to him." "Certainly. As long as it depends on us, we'll always stick to each other, you may be sure." "What's that whispering about?" Pavel asked. "Nothing. She told me to wash myself better, so the girls will look at me," replied the Little Russian, going out on the porch to wash himself. "'Rise up, awake, you workingmen,'" Pavel sang softly. As the day grew, the clouds dispersed, chased by the wind. The mother got the dishes ready for the tea, shaking her head over the thought of how strange it was for both of them to be joking and smiling all the time on this morning, when who knew what would befall them in the afternoon. Yet, curiously enough, she felt herself calm, almost happy. They sat a long time over the tea to while away the hours of expectation. Pavel, as was his wont, slowly and scrupulously mixed the sugar in the glass with his spoon, and accurately salted his favorite crust from the end of the loaf. The Little Russian moved his feet under the table--he never could at once settle his feet comfortably--and looked at the rays of sunlight playing on the wall and ceiling. "When I was a youngster of ten years," he recounted, "I wanted to catch the sun in a glass. So I took the glass, stole to the wall, and bang! I cut my hand and got a licking to boot. After the licking I went out in the yard and saw the sun in a puddle. So I started to trample the mud with my feet. I covered myself with mud, and got another drubbing. What was I to do? I screamed to the sun: 'It doesn't hurt me, you red devil; it doesn't hurt me!' and stuck out my tongue at him. And I felt comforted." "Why did the sun seem red to you?" Pavel asked, laughing. "There was a blacksmith opposite our house, with fine red cheeks, and a huge red beard. I thought the sun resembled him." The mother lost patience and said: "You'd better talk about your arrangements for the procession." "Everything's been arranged," said Pavel. "No use talking of things once decided upon. It only confuses the mind," the Little Russian added. "If we are all arrested, Nikolay Ivanovich will come and tell you what to do. He will help you in every way." "All right," said the mother with a heavy sigh. "Let's go out," said Pavel dreamily. "No, rather stay indoors," replied Andrey. "No need to annoy the eyes of the police so often. They know you well enough." Fedya Mazin came running in, all aglow, with red spots on his cheeks, quivering with youthful joy. His animation dispelled the tedium of expectation for them. "It's begun!" he reported. "The people are all out on the street, their faces sharp as the edge of an ax. Vyesovshchikov, the Gusevs, and Samoylov have been standing at the factory gates all the time, and have been making speeches. Most of the people went back from the factory, and returned home. Let's go! It's just time! It's ten o'clock already." "I'm going!" said Pavel decidedly. "You'll see," Fedya assured them, "the whole factory will rise up after dinner." And he hurried away, followed by the quiet words of the mother: "Burning like a wax candle in the wind." She rose and went into the kitchen to dress. "Where are you going, mother?" "With you," she said. Andrey looked at Pavel pulling his mustache. Pavel arranged his hair with a quick gesture, and went to his mother. "Mother, I will not tell you anything; and don't you tell me anything, either. Right, mother?" "All right, all right! God bless you!" she murmured. When she went out and heard the holiday hum of the people's voices--an anxious and expectant hum--when she saw everywhere, at the gates and windows, crowds of people staring at Andrey and her son, a blur quivered before her eyes, changes from a transparent green to a muddy gray. People greeted them--there was something peculiar in their greetings. She caught whispered, broken remarks: "Here they are, the leaders!" "We don't know who the leaders are!" "Why, I didn't say anything wrong." At another place some one in a yard shouted excitedly: "The police will get them, and that'll be the end of them!" "What if they do?" retorted another voice. Farther on a crying woman's voice leaped frightened from the window to the street: "Consider! Are you a single man, are you? They are bachelors and don't care!" When they passed the house of Zosimov, the man without legs, who received a monthly allowance from the factory because of his mutilation, he stuck his head through the window and cried out: "Pavel, you scoundrel, they'll wring your head off for your doings, you'll see!" The mother trembled and stopped. The exclamation aroused in her a sharp sensation of anger. She looked up at the thick, bloated face of the cripple, and he hid himself, cursing. Then she quickened her pace, overtook her son, and tried not to fall behind again. He and Andrey seemed not to notice anything, not to hear the outcries that pursued them. They moved calmly, without haste, and talked loudly about commonplaces. They were stopped by Mironov, a modest, elderly man, respected by everybody for his clean, sober life. "Not working either, Daniïl Ivanovich?" Pavel asked. "My wife is going to be confined. Well, and such an exciting day, too," Mironov responded, staring fixedly at the comrades. He said to them in an undertone: "Boys, I hear you're going to make an awful row--smash the superintendent's windows." "Why, are we drunk?" exclaimed Pavel. "We are simply going to march along the streets with flags, and sing songs," said the Little Russian. "You'll have a chance to hear our songs. They're our confession of faith." "I know your confession of faith," said Mironov thoughtfully. "I read your papers. You, Nilovna," he exclaimed, smiling at the mother with knowing eyes, "are you going to revolt, too?" "Well, even if it's only before death, I want to walk shoulder to shoulder with the truth." "I declare!" said Mironov. "I guess they were telling the truth when they said you carried forbidden books to the factory." "Who said so?" asked Pavel. "Oh, people. Well, good-by! Behave yourselves!" The mother laughed softly; she was pleased to hear that such things were said of her. Pavel smilingly turned to her: "Oh, you'll get into prison, mother!" "I don't mind," she murmured. The sun rose higher, pouring warmth into the bracing freshness of the spring day. The clouds floated more slowly, their shadows grew thinner and more transparent, and crawled gently over the streets and roofs. The bright sunlight seemed to clean the village, to wipe the dust and dirt from the walls and the tedium from the faces. Everything assumed a more cheerful aspect; the voices sounded louder, drowning the far-off rumble and heavings of the factory machines. Again, from all sides, from the windows and the yards, different words and voices, now uneasy and malicious, now thoughtful and gay, found their way to the mother's ears. But this time she felt a desire to retort, to thank, to explain, to participate in the strangely variegated life of the day. Off a corner of the main thoroughfare, in a narrow by-street, a crowd of about a hundred people had gathered, and from its depths resounded Vyesovshchikov's voice: "They squeeze our blood like juice from huckleberries." His words fell like hammer blows on the people. "That's true!" the resonant cry rang out simultaneously from a number of throats. "The boy is doing his best," said the Little Russian. "I'll go help him." He bent low and before Pavel had time to stop him he twisted his tall, flexible body into the crowd like a corkscrew into a cork, and soon his singing voice rang out: "Comrades! They say there are various races on the earth--Jews and Germans, English and Tartars. But I don't believe it. There are only two nations, two irreconcilable tribes--the rich and the poor. People dress differently and speak differently; but look at the rich Frenchman, the rich German, or the rich Englishman, you'll see that they are all Tartars in the way they treat their workingman--a plague on them!" A laugh broke out in the crowd. "On the other hand, we can see the French workingmen, the Tartar workingmen, the Turkish workingmen, all lead the same dog's life, as we--we, the Russian workingmen." More and more people joined the crowd; one after the other they thronged into the by-street, silent, stepping on tiptoe, and craning their necks. Andrey raised his voice: "The workingmen of foreign countries have already learned this simple truth, and to-day, on this bright first of May, the foreign working people fraternize with one another. They quit their work, and go out into the streets to look at themselves, to take stock of their immense power. On this day, the workingmen out there throb with one heart; for all hearts are lighted with the consciousness of the might of the working people; all hearts beat with comradeship, each and every one of them is ready to lay down his life in the war for the happiness of all, for freedom and truth to all--comrades!" "The police!" some one shouted. CHAPTER XIX From the main street four mounted policemen flourishing their knouts came riding into the by-street directly at the crowd. "Disperse!" "What sort of talking is going on?" "Who's speaking?" The people scowled, giving way to the horses unwillingly. Some climbed up on fences; raillery was heard here and there. "They put pigs on horses; they grunt: 'Here we are, leaders, too!'" resounded a sonorous, provoking voice. The Little Russian was left alone in the middle of the street; two horses shaking their manes pressed at him. He stepped aside, and at the same time the mother grasped his hand, pulling him away grumbling: "You promised to stick to Pasha; and here you are running up against the edge of a knife all by yourself." "I plead guilty," said the Little Russian, smiling at Pavel. "Ugh! What a force of police there is in the world!" "All right," murmured the mother. An alarming, crushing exhaustion came over her. It rose from within her and made her dizzy. There was a strange alternation of sadness and joy in her heart. She wished the afternoon whistle would sound. They reached the square where the church stood. Around the church within the paling a thick crowd was sitting and standing. There were some five hundred gay youth and bustling women with children darting around the groups like butterflies. The crowd swung from side to side. The people raised their heads and looked into the distance in different directions, waiting impatiently. "Mitenka!" softly vibrated a woman's voice. "Have pity on yourself!" "Stop!" rang out the response. And the grave Sizov spoke calmly, persuasively: "No, we mustn't abandon our children. They have grown wiser than ourselves; they live more boldly. Who saved our cent for the marshes? They did. We must remember that. For doing it they were dragged to prison; but we derived the benefit. The benefit was for all." The whistle blew, drowning the talk of the crowd. The people started. Those sitting rose to their feet. For a moment the silence of death prevailed; all became watchful, and many faces grew pale. "Comrades!" resounded Pavel's voice, ringing and firm. A dry, hot haze burned the mother's eyes, and with a single movement of her body, suddenly strengthened, she stood behind her son. All turned toward Pavel, and drew up to him, like iron filings attracted by a magnet. "Brothers! The hour has come to give up this life of ours, this life of greed, hatred, and darkness, this life of violence and falsehood, this life where there is no place for us, where we are no human beings." He stopped, and everybody maintained silence, moving still closer to him. The mother stared at her son. She saw only his eyes, his proud, brave, burning eyes. "Comrades! We have decided to declare openly who we are; we raise our banner to-day, the banner of reason, of truth, of liberty! And now I raise it!" A flag pole, white and slender, flashed in the air, bent down, cleaving the crowd. For a moment it was lost from sight; then over the uplifted faces the broad canvas of the working people's flag spread its wings like a red bird. Pavel raised his hand--the pole swung, and a dozen hands caught the smooth white rod. Among them was the mother's hand. "Long live the working people!" he shouted. Hundreds of voices responded to his sonorous call. "Long live the Social Democratic Workingmen's Party, our party, comrades, our spiritual mother." The crowd seethed and hummed. Those who understood the meaning of the flag squeezed their way up to it. Mazin, Samoylov, and the Gusevs stood close at Pavel's side. Nikolay with bent head pushed his way through the crowd. Some other people unknown to the mother, young and with burning eyes, jostled her. "Long live the working people of all countries!" shouted Pavel. And ever increasing in force and joy, a thousand-mouthed echo responded in a soul-stirring acclaim. The mother clasped Pavel's hand, and somebody else's, too. She was breathless with tears, yet refrained from shedding them. Her legs trembled, and with quivering lips she cried: "Oh, my dear boys, that's true. There you are now----" A broad smile spread over Nikolay's pockmarked face; he stared at the flag and, stretching his hand toward it, roared out something; then caught the mother around the neck with the same hand, kissed her, and laughed. "Comrades!" sang out the Little Russian, subduing the noise of the crowd with his mellow voice. "Comrades! We have now started a holy procession in the name of the new God, the God of Truth and Light, the God of Reason and Goodness. We march in this holy procession, comrades, over a long and hard road. Our goal is far, far away, and the crown of thorns is near! Those who don't believe in the might of truth, who have not the courage to stand up for it even unto death, who do not believe in themselves and are afraid of suffering--such of you, step aside! We call upon those only who believe in our triumph. Those who cannot see our goal, let them not walk with us; only misery is in store for them! Fall into line, comrades! Long live the first of May, the holiday of freemen!" The crowd drew closer. Pavel waved the flag. It spread out in the air and sailed forward, sunlit, smiling, red, and glowing. "Let us renounce the old world!" resounded Fedya Mazin's ringing voice; and scores of voices took up the cry. It floated as on a mighty wave. "Let us shake its dust from our feet." The mother marched behind Mazin with a smile on her dry lips, and looked over his head at her son and the flag. Everywhere, around her, was the sparkle of fresh young cheerful faces, the glimmer of many-colored eyes; and at the head of all--her son and Andrey. She heard their voices, Andrey's, soft and humid, mingled in friendly accord with the heavy bass of her son: "Rise up, awake, you workingmen! On, on, to war, you hungry hosts!" Men ran toward the red flag, raising a clamor; then joining the others, they marched along, their shouts lost in the broad sounds of the song of the revolution. The mother had heard that song before. It had often been sung in a subdued tone; and the Little Russian had often whistled it. But now she seemed for the first time to hear this appeal to unite in the struggle. "We march to join our suffering mates." The song flowed on, embracing the people. Some one's face, alarmed yet joyous, moved along beside the mother's, and a trembling voice spoke, sobbing: "Mitya! Where are you going?" The mother interfered without stopping: "Let him go! Don't be alarmed! Don't fear! I myself was afraid at first, too. Mine is right at the head--he who bears the standard--that's my son!" "Murderers! Where are you going? There are soldiers over there!" And suddenly clasping the mother's hand in her bony hands, the tall, thin woman exclaimed: "My dear! How they sing! Oh, the sectarians! And Mitya is singing!" "Don't be troubled!" murmured the mother. "It's a sacred thing. Think of it! Christ would not have been, either, if men hadn't perished for his sake." This thought had flashed across the mother's mind all of a sudden and struck her by its simple, clear truth. She stared at the woman, who held her hand firmly in her clasp, and repeated, smiling: "Christ would not have been, either, if men hadn't suffered for his sake." Sizov appeared at her side. He took off his hat and waving it to the measure of the song, said: "They're marching openly, eh, mother? And composed a song, too! What a song, mother, eh?" "The Czar for the army soldiers must have, Then give him your sons----" "They're not afraid of anything," said Sizov. "And my son is in the grave. The factory crushed him to death, yes!" The mother's heart beat rapidly, and she began to lag behind. She was soon pushed aside hard against a fence, and the close-packed crowd went streaming past her. She saw that there were many people, and she was pleased. "Rise up, awake, you workingmen!" It seemed as if the blare of a mighty brass trumpet were rousing men and stirring in some hearts the willingness to fight, in other hearts a vague joy, a premonition of something new, and a burning curiosity; in still others a confused tremor of hope and curiosity. The song was an outlet, too, for the stinging bitterness accumulated during years. The people looked ahead, where the red banner was swinging and streaming in the air. All were saying something and shouting; but the individual voice was lost in the song--the new song, in which the old note of mournful meditation was absent. It was not the utterance of a soul wandering in solitude along the dark paths of melancholy perplexity, of a soul beaten down by want, burdened with fear, deprived of individuality, and colorless. It breathed no sighs of a strength hungering for space; it shouted no provoking cries of irritated courage ready to crush both the good and the bad indiscriminately. It did not voice the elemental instinct of the animal to snatch freedom for freedom's sake, nor the feeling of wrong or vengeance capable of destroying everything and powerless to build up anything. In this song there was nothing from the old, slavish world. It floated along directly, evenly; it proclaimed an iron virility, a calm threat. Simple, clear, it swept the people after it along an endless path leading to the far distant future; and it spoke frankly about the hardships of the way. In its steady fire a heavy clod seemed to burn and melt--the sufferings they had endured, the dark load of their habitual feelings, their cursed dread of what was coming. "They all join in!" somebody roared exultantly. "Well done, boys!" Apparently the man felt something vast, to which he could not give expression in ordinary words, so he uttered a stiff oath. Yet the malice, the blind dark malice of a slave also streamed hotly through his teeth. Disturbed by the light shed upon it, it hissed like a snake, writhing in venomous words. "Heretics!" a man with a broken voice shouted from a window, shaking his fist threateningly. A piercing scream importunately bored into the mother's ears--"Rioting against the emperor, against his Majesty the Czar? No, no?" Agitated people flashed quickly past her, a dark lava stream of men and women, carried along by this song, which cleared every obstacle out of its path. Growing in the mother's breast was the mighty desire to shout to the crowd: "Oh, my dear people!" There, far away from her, was the red banner--she saw her son without seeing him--his bronzed forehead, his eyes burning with the bright fire of faith. Now she was in the tail of the crowd among the people who walked without hurrying, indifferent, looking ahead with the cold curiosity of spectators who know beforehand how the show will end. They spoke softly with confidence. "One company of infantry is near the school, and the other near the factory." "The governor has come." "Is that so?" "I saw him myself. He's here." Some one swore jovially and said: "They've begun to fear our fellows, after all, haven't they? The soldiers have come and the governor----" "Dear boys!" throbbed in the breast of the mother. But the words around her sounded dead and cold. She hastened her steps to get away from these people, and it was not difficult for her to outstrip their lurching gait. Suddenly the head of the crowd, as it were, bumped against something; its body swung backward with an alarming, low hum. The song trembled, then flowed on more rapidly and louder; but again the dense wave of sounds hesitated in its forward course. Voices fell out of the chorus one after the other. Here and there a voice was raised in the effort to bring the song to its previous height, to push it forward: "Rise up, awake, you workingmen! On, on, to war, you hungry hosts!" Though she saw nothing and was ignorant of what was happening there in front, the mother divined, and elbowed her way rapidly through the crowd. CHAPTER XX "Comrades!" the voice of Pavel was heard. "Soldiers are people the same as ourselves. They will not strike us! Why should they beat us? Because we bear the truth necessary for all? This our truth is necessary to them, too. Just now they do not understand this; but the time is nearing when they will rise with us, when they will march, not under the banner of robbers and murderers, the banner which the liars and beasts order them to call the banner of glory and honor, but under our banner of freedom and goodness! We ought to go forward so that they should understand our truth the sooner. Forward, comrades! Ever forward!" Pavel's voice sounded firm, the words rang in the air distinctly. But the crowd fell asunder; one after the other the people dropped off to the right or to the left, going toward their homes, or leaning against the fences. Now the crowd had the shape of a wedge, and its point was Pavel, over whose head the banner of the laboring people was burning red. At the end of the street, closing the exit to the square, the mother saw a low, gray wall of men, one just like the other, without faces. On the shoulder of each a bayonet was smiling its thin, chill smile; and from this entire immobile wall a cold gust blew down on the workmen, striking the breast of the mother and penetrating her heart. She forced her way into the crowd among people familiar to her, and, as it were, leaned on them. She pressed closely against a tall, lame man with a clean-shaven face. In order to look at her, he had to turn his head stiffly. "What do you want? Who are you?" he asked her. "The mother of Pavel Vlasov," she answered, her knees trembling beneath her, her lower lip involuntarily dropping. "Ha-ha!" said the lame man. "Very well!" "Comrades!" Pavel cried. "Onward all your lives. There is no other way for us! Sing!" The atmosphere grew tense. The flag rose and rocked and waved over the heads of the people, gliding toward the gray wall of soldiers. The mother trembled. She closed her eyes, and cried: "Oh--oh!" None but Pavel, Andrey, Samoylov, and Mazin advanced beyond the crowd. The limpid voice of Fedya Mazin slowly quivered in the air. "'In mortal strife--'" he began the song. "'You victims fell--'" answered thick, subdued voices. The words dropped in two heavy sighs. People stepped forward, each footfall audible. A new song, determined and resolute, burst out: "You yielded up your lives for them." Fedya's voice wreathed and curled like a bright ribbon. "A-ha-ha-ha!" some one exclaimed derisively. "They've struck up a funeral song, the dirty dogs!" "Beat him!" came the angry response. The mother clasped her hands to her breast, looked about, and saw that the crowd, before so dense, was now standing irresolute, watching the comrades walk away from them with the banner, followed by about a dozen people, one of whom, however, at every forward move, jumped aside as if the path in the middle of the street were red hot and burned his soles. "The tyranny will fall--" sounded the prophetic song from the lips of Fedya. "And the people will rise!" the chorus of powerful voices seconded confidently and menacingly. But the harmonious flow of the song was broken by the quiet words: "He is giving orders." "Charge bayonets!" came the piercing order from the front. The bayonets curved in the air, and glittered sharply; then fell and stretched out to confront the banner. "Ma-arch!" "They're coming!" said the lame man, and thrusting his hands into his pockets made a long step to one side. The mother, without blinking, looked on. The gray line of soldiers tossed to and fro, and spread out over the entire width of the street. It moved on evenly, coolly, carrying in front of itself a fine-toothed comb of sparkling bayonets. Then it came to a stand. The mother took long steps to get nearer to her son. She saw how Andrey strode ahead of Pavel and fenced him off with his long body. "Get alongside of me!" Pavel shouted sharply. Andrey was singing, his hands clasped behind his back, his head uplifted. Pavel pushed him with his shoulder, and again cried: "At my side! Let the banner be in front!" "Disperse!" called a little officer in a thin voice, brandishing a white saber. He lifted his feet high, and without bending his knees struck his soles on the ground irritably. The high polish on his boots caught the eyes of the mother. To one side and somewhat behind him walked a tall, clean-shaven man, with a thick, gray mustache. He wore a long gray overcoat with a red underlining, and yellow stripes on his trousers. His gait was heavy, and like the Little Russian, he clasped his hands behind his back. He regarded Pavel, raising his thick gray eyebrows. The mother seemed to be looking into infinity. At each breath her breast was ready to burst with a loud cry. It choked her, but for some reason she restrained it. Her hands clutched at her bosom. She staggered from repeated thrusts. She walked onward without thought, almost without consciousness. She felt that behind her the crowd was getting thinner; a cold wind had blown on them and scattered them like autumn leaves. The men around the red banner moved closer and closer together. The faces of the soldiers were clearly seen across the entire width of the street, monstrously flattened, stretched out in a dirty yellowish band. In it were unevenly set variously colored eyes, and in front the sharp bayonets glittered crudely. Directed against the breasts of the people, although not yet touching them, they drove them apart, pushing one man after the other away from the crowd and breaking it up. Behind her the mother heard the trampling noise of those who were running away. Suppressed, excited voices cried: "Disperse, boys!" "Vlasov, run!" "Back, Pavel!" "Drop the banner, Pavel!" Vyesovshchikov said glumly. "Give it to me! I'll hide it!" He grabbed the pole with his hand; the flag rocked backward. "Let go!" thundered Pavel. Nikolay drew his hand back as if it had been burned. The song died away. Some persons crowded solidly around Pavel; but he cut through to the front. A sudden silence fell. Around the banner some twenty men were grouped, not more, but they stood firmly. The mother felt drawn to them by awe and by a confused desire to say something to them. "Take this thing away from him, lieutenant." The even voice of the tall old man was heard. He pointed to the banner. A little officer jumped up to Pavel, snatched at the flag pole, and shouted shrilly: "Drop it!" The red flag trembled in the air, moving to the right and to the left, then rose again. The little officer jumped back and sat down. Nikolay darted by the mother, shaking his outstretched fist. "Seize them!" the old man roared, stamping his feet. A few soldiers jumped to the front, one of them flourishing the butt end of his gun. The banner trembled, dropped, and disappeared in a gray mass of soldiers. "Oh!" somebody groaned aloud. And the mother yelled like a wild animal. But the clear voice of Pavel answered her from out of the crowd of soldiers: "Good-by, mother! Good-by, dear!" "He's alive! He remembered!" were the two strokes at the mother's heart. "Good-by, mother dear!" came from Andrey. Waving her hands, she raised herself on tiptoe, and tried to see them. There was the round face of Andrey above the soldiers' heads. He was smiling and bowing to her. "Oh, my dear ones! Andriusha! Pasha!" she shouted. "Good-by, comrades!" they called from among the soldiers. A broken, manifold echo responded to them. It resounded from the windows and the roofs. The mother felt some one pushing her breast. Through the mist in her eyes she saw the little officer. His face was red and strained, and he was shouting to her: "Clear out of here, old woman!" She looked down on him, and at his feet saw the flag pole broken in two parts, a piece of red cloth on one of them. She bent down and picked it up. The officer snatched it out of her hands, threw it aside, and shouted again, stamping his feet: "Clear out of here, I tell you!" A song sprang up and floated from among the soldiers: "Arise, awake, you workingmen!" Everything was whirling, rocking, trembling. A thick, alarming noise, resembling the dull hum of telegraph wires, filled the air. The officer jumped back, screaming angrily: "Stop the singing, Sergeant Kraynov!" The mother staggered to the fragment of the pole, which he had thrown down, and picked it up again. "Gag them!" The song became confused, trembled, expired. Somebody took the mother by the shoulders, turned her around, and shoved her from the back. "Go, go! Clear the street!" shouted the officer. About ten paces from her, the mother again saw a thick crowd of people. They were howling, grumbling, whistling, as they backed down the street. The yards were drawing in a number of them. "Go, you devil!" a young soldier with a big mustache shouted right into the mother's ear. He brushed against her and shoved her onto the sidewalk. She moved away, leaning on the flag pole. She went quickly and lightly, but her legs bent under her. In order not to fall she clung to walls and fences. People in front were falling back alongside of her, and behind her were soldiers, shouting: "Go, go!" The soldiers got ahead of her; she stopped and looked around. Down the end of the street she saw them again scattered in a thin chain, blocking the entrance to the square, which was empty. Farther down were more gray figures slowly moving against the people. She wanted to go back; but uncalculatingly went forward again, and came to a narrow, empty by-street into which she turned. She stopped again. She sighed painfully, and listened. Somewhere ahead she heard the hum of voices. Leaning on the pole she resumed her walk. Her eyebrows moved up and down, and she suddenly broke into a sweat; her lips quivered; she waved her hands, and certain words flashed up in her heart like sparks, kindling in her a strong, stubborn desire to speak them, to shout them. The by-street turned abruptly to the left; and around the corner the mother saw a large, dense crowd of people. Somebody's voice was speaking loudly and firmly: "They don't go to meet the bayonets from sheer audacity. Remember that!" "Just look at them. Soldiers advance against them, and they stand before them without fear. Y-yes!" "Think of Pasha Vlasov!" "And how about the Little Russian?" "Hands behind his back and smiling, the devil!" "My dear ones! My people!" the mother shouted, pushing into the crowd. They cleared the way for her respectfully. Somebody laughed: "Look at her with the flag in her hand!" "Shut up!" said another man sternly. The mother with a broad sweep of her arms cried out: "Listen for the sake of Christ! You are all dear people, you are all good people. Open up your hearts. Look around without fear, without terror. Our children are going into the world. Our children are going, our blood is going for the truth; with honesty in their hearts they open the gates of the new road--a straight, wide road for all. For all of you, for the sake of your young ones, they have devoted themselves to the sacred cause. They seek the sun of new days that shall always be bright. They want another life, the life of truth and justice, of goodness for all." [Illustration: "'Listen for the sake of Christ.'"] Her heart was rent asunder, her breast contracted, her throat was hot and dry. Deep inside of her, words were being born, words of a great, all-embracing love. They burned her tongue, moving it more powerfully and more freely. She saw that the people were listening to her words. All were silent. She felt that they were thinking as they surrounded her closely; and the desire grew in her, now a clear desire, to drive these people to follow her son, to follow Andrey, to follow all those who had fallen into the soldiers' hands, all those who were left entirely alone, all those who were abandoned. Looking at the sullen, attentive faces around her, she resumed with soft force: "Our children are going in the world toward happiness. They went for the sake of all, and for Christ's truth--against all with which our malicious, false, avaricious ones have captured, tied, and crushed us. My dear ones--why it is for you that our young blood rose--for all the people, for all the world, for all the workingmen, they went! Then don't go away from them, don't renounce, don't forsake them, don't leave your children on a lonely path--they went just for the purpose of showing you all the path to truth, to take all on that path! Pity yourselves! Love them! Understand the children's hearts. Believe your sons' hearts; they have brought forth the truth; it burns in them; they perish for it. Believe them!" Her voice broke down, she staggered, her strength gone. Somebody seized her under the arms. "She is speaking God's words!" a man shouted hoarsely and excitedly. "God's words, good people! Listen to her!" Another man said in pity of her: "Look how she's hurting herself!" "She's not hurting herself, but hitting us, fools, understand that!" was the reproachful reply. A high-pitched, quavering voice rose up over the crowd: "Oh, people of the true faith! My Mitya, pure soul, what has he done? He went after his dear comrades. She speaks truth--why did we forsake our children? What harm have they done us?" The mother trembled at these words and replied with soft tears. "Go home, Nilovna! Go, mother! You're all worn out," said Sizov loudly. He was pale, his disheveled beard shook. Suddenly knitting his brows he threw a stern glance about him on all, drew himself up to his full height, and said distinctly: "My son Matvey was crushed in the factory. You know it! But were he alive, I myself would have sent him into the lines of those--along with them. I myself would have told him: 'Go you, too, Matvey! That's the right cause, that's the honest cause!'" He stopped abruptly, and a sullen silence fell on all, in the powerful grip of something huge and new, but something that no longer frightened them. Sizov lifted his hand, shook it, and continued: "It's an old man who is speaking to you. You know me! I've been working here thirty-nine years, and I've been alive fifty-three years. To-day they've arrested my nephew, a pure and intelligent boy. He, too, was in the front, side by side with Vlasov; right at the banner." Sizov made a motion with his hand, shrank together, and said as he took the mother's hand: "This woman spoke the truth. Our children want to live honorably, according to reason, and we have abandoned them; we walked away, yes! Go, Nilovna!" "My dear ones!" she said, looking at them all with tearful eyes. "The life is for our children and the earth is for them." "Go, Nilovna, take this staff and lean upon it!" said Sizov, giving her the fragment of the flag pole. All looked at the mother with sadness and respect. A hum of sympathy accompanied her. Sizov silently put the people out of her way, and they silently moved aside, obeying a blind impulse to follow her. They walked after her slowly, exchanging brief, subdued remarks on the way. Arrived at the gate of her house, she turned to them, leaning on the fragment of the flag pole, and bowed in gratitude. "Thank you!" she said softly. And recalling the thought which she fancied had been born in her heart, she said: "Our Lord Jesus Christ would not have been, either, if people had not perished for his sake." The crowd looked at her in silence. She bowed to the people again, and went into her house, and Sizov, drooping his head, went in with her. The people stood at the gates and talked. Then they began to depart slowly and quietly. PART II CHAPTER I The day passed in a motley blur of recollections, in a depressing state of exhaustion, which tightly clutched at the mother's body and soul. The faces of the young men flashed before her mental vision, the banner blazed, the songs clamored at her ear, the little officer skipped about, a gray stain before her eyes, and through the whirlwind of the procession she saw the gleam of Pavel's bronzed face and the smiling sky-blue eyes of Andrey. She walked up and down the room, sat at the window, looked out into the street, and walked away again with lowered eyebrows. Every now and then she started, and looked about in an aimless search for something. She drank water, but could not slake her thirst, nor quench the smoldering fire of anguish and injury in her bosom. The day was chopped in two. It began full of meaning and content, but now it dribbled away into a dismal waste, which stretched before her endlessly. The question swung to and fro in her barren, perplexed mind: "What now?" Korsunova came in. Waving her hands, she shouted, wept, and went into raptures; stamped her feet, suggested this and that, made promises, and threw out threats against somebody. All this failed to impress the mother. "Aha!" she heard the squeaking voice of Marya. "So the people have been stirred up! At last the whole factory has arisen! All have arisen!" "Yes, yes!" said the mother in a low voice, shaking her head. Her eyes were fixed on something that had already fallen into the past, had departed from her along with Andrey and Pavel. She was unable to weep. Her heart was dried up, her lips, too, were dry, and her mouth was parched. Her hands shook, and a cold, fine shiver ran down her back, setting her skin aquiver. In the evening the gendarmes came. She met them without surprise and without fear. They entered noisily, with a peculiarly jaunty air, and with a look of gayety and satisfaction in their faces. The yellow-faced officer said, displaying his teeth: "Well, how are you? The third time I have the honor, eh?" She was silent, passing her dry tongue along her lips. The officer talked a great deal, delivering a homily to her. The mother realized what pleasure he derived from his words. But they did not reach her; they did not disturb her; they were like the insistent chirp of a cricket. It was only when he said: "It's your own fault, little mother, that you weren't able to inspire your son with reverence for God and the Czar," that she answered dully, standing at the door and looking at him: "Yes, our children are our judges. They visit just punishment upon us for abandoning them on such a road." "Wha-at?" shouted the officer. "Louder!" "I say, the children are our judges," the mother repeated with a sigh. He said something quickly and angrily, but his words buzzed around her without touching her. Marya Korsunova was a witness. She stood beside the mother, but did not look at her; and when the officer turned to her with a question, she invariably answered with a hasty, low bow: "I don't know, your Honor. I am just a simple, ignorant woman. I make my living by peddling, stupid as I am, and I know nothing." "Shut up, then!" commanded the officer. She was ordered to search Vlasova. She blinked her eyes, then opened them wide on the officer, and said in fright: "I can't, your Honor!" The officer stamped his feet and began to shout. Marya lowered her eyes, and pleaded with the mother softly: "Well, what can be done? You have to submit, Pelagueya Nilovna." As she searched and felt the mother's dress, the blood mounting to her face, she murmured: "Oh, the dogs!" "What are you jabbering about there?" the officer cried rudely, looking into the corner where she was making the search. "It's about women's affairs, your Honor," mumbled Marya, terrorized. On his order to sign the search warrant the mother, with unskilled hand, traced on the paper in printed shining letters: "Pelagueya Nilovna, widow of a workingman." They went away, and the mother remained standing at the window. With her hands folded over her breast, she gazed into vacancy without winking, her eyebrows raised. Her lips were compressed, her jaws so tightly set that her teeth began to pain her. The oil burned down in the lamp, the light flared up for a moment, and then went out. She blew on it, and remained in the dark. She felt no malice, she harbored no sense of injury in her heart. A dark, cold cloud of melancholy settled on her breast, and impeded the beating of her heart. Her mind was a void. She stood at the window a long time; her feet and eyes grew weary. She heard Marya stop at the window, and shout: "Are you asleep, Pelagueya? You unfortunate, suffering woman, sleep! They abuse everybody, the heretics!" At last she dropped into bed without undressing, and quickly fell into a heavy sleep, as if she had plunged into a deep abyss. She dreamed she saw a yellow sandy mound beyond the marsh on the road to the city. At the edge, which descended perpendicularly to the ditch, from which sand was being taken, stood Pavel singing softly and sonorously with the voice of Andrey: "Rise up, awake, you workingmen!" She walked past the mound along the road to the city, and putting her hand to her forehead looked at her son. His figure was clearly and sharply outlined against the sky. She could not make up her mind to go up to him. She was ashamed because she was pregnant. And she held an infant in her arms, besides. She walked farther on. Children were playing ball in the field. There were many of them, and the ball was a red one. The infant threw himself forward out of her arms toward them, and began to cry aloud. She gave him the breast, and turned back. Now soldiers were already at the mound, and they turned the bayonets against her. She ran quickly to the church standing in the middle of the field, the white, light church that seemed to be constructed out of clouds, and was immeasurably high. A funeral was going on there. The coffin was wide, black, and tightly covered with a lid. The priest and deacon walked around in white canonicals and sang: "Christ has arisen from the dead." The deacon carried the incense, bowed to her, and smiled. His hair was glaringly red, and his face jovial, like Samoylov's. From the top of the dome broad sunbeams descended to the ground. In both choirs the boys sang softly: "Christ has arisen from the dead." "Arrest them!" the priest suddenly cried, standing up in the middle of the church. His vestments vanished from his body, and a gray, stern mustache appeared on his face. All the people started to run, and the deacon, flinging the censer aside, rushed forward, seizing his head in his hands like the Little Russian. The mother dropped the infant on the ground at the feet of the people. They ran to the side of her, timidly regarding the naked little body. She fell on her knees and shouted to them: "Don't abandon the child! Take it with you!" "Christ has arisen from the dead," the Little Russian sang, holding his hands behind his back, and smiling. He bent down, took the child, and put it on the wagon loaded with timber, at the side of which Nikolay was walking slowly, shaking with laughter. He said: "They have given me hard work." The street was muddy, the people thrust their faces from the windows of the houses, and whistled, shouted, waved their hands. The day was clear, the sun shone brightly, and there was not a single shadow anywhere. "Sing, mother!" said the Little Russian. "Oh, what a life!" And he sang, drowning all the other sounds with his kind, laughing voice. The mother walked behind him, and complained: "Why does he make fun of me?" But suddenly she stumbled and fell in a bottomless abyss. Fearful shrieks met her in her descent. She awoke, shivering and yet perspiring. She put her ear, as it were, to her own breast, and marveled at the emptiness that prevailed there. The whistle blew insistently. From its sound she realized that it was already the second summons. The room was all in disorder; the books and clothes lay about in confusion; everything was turned upside down, and dirt was trampled over the entire floor. She arose, and without washing or praying began to set the room in order. In the kitchen she caught sight of the stick with the piece of red cloth. She seized it angrily, and was about to throw it away under the oven, but instead, with a sigh, removed the remnant of the flag from the pole, folded it carefully, and put it in her pocket. Then she began to wash the windows with cold water, next the floor, and finally herself; then dressed herself and prepared the samovar. She sat down at the window in the kitchen, and once more the question came to her: "What now? What am I to do now?" Recollecting that she had not yet said her prayers, she walked up to the images, and after standing before them for a few seconds, she sat down again. Her heart was empty. The pendulum, which always beat with an energy seeming to say: "I must get to the goal! I must get to the goal!" slackened its hasty ticking. The flies buzzed irresolutely, as if pondering a certain plan of action. Suddenly she recalled a picture she had once seen in the days of her youth. In the old park of the Zansaylovs, there was a large pond densely overgrown with water lilies. One gray day in the fall, while walking along the pond, she had seen a boat in the middle of it. The pond was dark and calm, and the boat seemed glued to the black water, thickly strewn with yellow leaves. Profound sadness and a vague sense of misfortune were wafted from that boat without a rower and without oars, standing alone and motionless out there on the dull water amid the dead leaves. The mother had stood a long time at the edge of the pond meditating as to who had pushed the boat from the shore and why. Now it seemed to her that she herself was like that boat, which at the time had reminded her of a coffin waiting for its dead. In the evening of the same day she had learned that the wife of one of Zansaylov's clerks had been drowned in the pond--a little woman with black disheveled hair, who always walked at a brisk gait. The mother passed her hands over her eyes as if to rub her reminiscences away, and her thoughts fluttered like a varicolored ribbon. Overcome by her impressions of the day before, she sat for a long time, her eyes fixed upon the cup of tea grown cold. Gradually the desire came to see some wise, simple person, speak to him, and ask him many things. As if in answer to her wish, Nikolay Ivanovich came in after dinner. When she saw him, however, she was suddenly seized with alarm, and failed to respond to his greeting. "Oh, my friend," she said softly, "there was no use for you to come here. If they arrest you here, too, then that will be the end of Pasha altogether. It's very careless of you! They'll take you without fail if they see you here." He clasped her hand tightly, adjusted his glasses on his nose, and bending his face close to her, explained to her in haste: "I made an agreement with Pavel and Andrey, that if they were arrested, I must see that you move over to the city the very next day." He spoke kindly, but with a troubled air. "Did they make a search in your house?" "They did. They rummaged, searched, and nosed around. Those people have no shame, no conscience!" exclaimed the mother indignantly. "What do they need shame for?" said Nikolay with a shrug of his shoulders, and explained to her the necessity of her going to the city. His friendly, solicitous talk moved and agitated her. She looked at him with a pale smile, and wondered at the kindly feeling of confidence he inspired in her. "If Pasha wants it, and I'll be no inconvenience to you----" "Don't be uneasy on that score. I live all alone; my sister comes over only rarely." "I'm not going to eat my head off for nothing," she said, thinking aloud. "If you want to work, you'll find something to do." Her conception of work was now indissolubly connected with the work that her son, Andrey, and their comrades were doing. She moved a little toward Nikolay, and looking in his eyes, asked: "Yes? You say work will be found for me?" "My household is a small one, I am a bachelor----" "I'm not talking about that, not about housework," she said quietly. "I mean world work." And she heaved a melancholy sigh, stung and repelled by his failure to understand her. He rose, and bending toward her, with a smile in his nearsighted eyes, he said thoughtfully, "You'll find a place for yourself in the work world, too, if you want it." Her mind quickly formulated the simple and clear thought: "Once I was able to help Pavel; perhaps I will succeed again. The greater the number of those who work for his cause, the clearer will his truth come out before the people." But these thoughts did not fully express the whole force and complexity of her desire. "What could I do?" she asked quietly. He thought a while, and then began to explain the technical details of the revolutionary work. Among other things, he said: "If, when you go to see Pavel in prison, you tried to find out from him the address of the peasant who asked for a newspaper----" "I know it!" exclaimed the mother in delight. "I know where they are, and who they are. Give me the papers, I'll deliver them. I'll find the peasants, and do everything just as you say. Who will think that I carry illegal books? I carried books to the factory. I smuggled in more than a hundred pounds, Heaven be praised!" The desire came upon her to travel along the road, through forests and villages, with a birch-bark sack over her shoulders, and a staff in her hand. "Now, you dear, dear man, you just arrange it for me, arrange it so that I can work in this movement. I'll go everywhere for you! I'll keep going summer and winter, down to my very grave, a pilgrim for the sake of truth. Why, isn't that a splendid lot for a woman like me? The wanderer's life is a good life. He goes about through the world, he has nothing, he needs nothing except bread, no one abuses him, and so, quietly, unnoticed, he roves over the earth. And so I'll go, too; I'll go to Andrey, to Pasha, wherever they live." She was seized with sadness when she saw herself homeless, begging for alms, in the name of Christ, at the windows of the village cottages. Nikolay took her hand gently, and stroked it with his warm hand. Then, looking at the watch, he said: "We'll speak about that later. You are taking a dangerous burden upon your shoulders. You must consider very carefully what you intend doing." "My dear man, what have I to consider? What have I to live for if not for this cause? Of what use am I to anybody? A tree grows, it gives shade; it's split into wood, and it warms people. Even a mere dumb tree is helpful to life, and I am a human being. The children, the best blood of man, the best there is of our hearts, give up their liberty and their lives, perish without pity for themselves! And I, a mother--am I to stand by and do nothing?" The picture of her son marching at the head of the crowd with the banner in his hands flashed before her mind. "Why should I lie idle when my son gives up his life for the sake of truth? I know now--I know that he is working for the truth. It's the fifth year now that I live beside the woodpile. My heart has melted and begun to burn. I understand what you are striving for. I see what a burden you all carry on your shoulders. Take me to you, too, for the sake of Christ, that I may be able to help my son! Take me to you!" Nikolay's face grew pale; he heaved a deep sigh, and smiling, said, looking at her with sympathetic attention: "This is the first time I've heard such words." "What can I say?" she replied, shaking her head sadly, and spreading her hands in a gesture of impotence. "If I had the words to express my mother's heart--" She arose, lifted by the power that waxed in her breast, intoxicated her, and gave her the words to express her indignation. "Then many and many a one would weep, and even the wicked, the men without conscience would tremble! I would make them taste gall, even as they made Christ drink of the cup of bitterness, and as they now do our children. They have bruised a mother's heart!" Nikolay rose, and pulling his little beard with trembling fingers, he said slowly in an unfamiliar tone of voice: "Some day you will speak to them, I think!" He started, looked at his watch again, and asked in a hurry: "So it's settled? You'll come over to me in the city?" She silently nodded her head. "When? Try to do it as soon as possible." And he added in a tender voice: "I'll be anxious for you; yes, indeed!" She looked at him in surprise. What was she to him? With bent head, smiling in embarrassment, he stood before her, dressed in a simple black jacket, stooping, nearsighted. "Have you money?" he asked, dropping his eyes. "No." He quickly whipped his purse out of his pocket, opened it, and handed it to her. "Here, please take some." She smiled involuntarily, and shaking her head, observed: "Everything about all of you is different from other people. Even money has no value for you. People do anything to get money; they kill their souls for it. But for you money is so many little pieces of paper, little bits of copper. You seem to keep it by you just out of kindness to people." Nikolay Ivanovich laughed softly. "It's an awfully bothersome article, money is. Both to take it and to give it is embarrassing." He caught her hand, pressed it warmly, and asked again: "So you will try to come soon, won't you?" And he walked away quietly, as was his wont. She got herself ready to go to him on the fourth day after his visit. When the cart with her two trunks rolled out of the village into the open country, she turned her head back, and suddenly had the feeling that she was leaving the place forever--the place where she had passed the darkest and most burdensome period of her life, the place where that other varied life had begun, in which the next day swallowed up the day before, and each was filled by an abundance of new sorrows and new joys, new thoughts and new feelings. The factory spread itself like a huge, clumsy, dark-red spider, raising its lofty smokestacks high up into the sky. The small one-storied houses pressed against it, gray, flattened out on the soot-covered ground, and crowded up in close clusters on the edge of the marsh. They looked sorrowfully at one another with their little dull windows. Above them rose the church, also dark red like the factory. The belfry, it seemed to her, was lower than the factory chimneys. The mother sighed, and adjusted the collar of her dress, which choked her. She felt sad, but it was a dry sadness like the dust of the hot day. "Gee!" mumbled the driver, shaking the reins over the horse. He was a bow-legged man of uncertain height, with sparse, faded hair on his face and head, and faded eyes. Swinging from side to side he walked alongside the wagon. It was evidently a matter of indifference to him whether he went to the right or the left. "Gee!" he called in a colorless voice, with a comical forward stride of his crooked legs clothed in heavy boots, to which clods of mud were clinging. The mother looked around. The country was as bleak and dreary as her soul. "You'll never escape want, no matter where you go, auntie," the driver said dully. "There's no road leading away from poverty; all roads lead to it, and none out of it." Shaking its head dejectedly the horse sank its feet heavily into the deep sun-dried sand, which crackled softly under its tread. The rickety wagon creaked for lack of greasing. CHAPTER II Nikolay Ivanovich lived on a quiet, deserted street, in a little green wing annexed to a black two-storied structure swollen with age. In front of the wing was a thickly grown little garden, and branches of lilac bushes, acacias, and silvery young poplars looked benignly and freshly into the windows of the three rooms occupied by Nikolay. It was quiet and tidy in his place. The shadows trembled mutely on the floor, shelves closely set with books stretched across the walls, and portraits of stern, serious persons hung over them. "Do you think you'll find it convenient here?" asked Nikolay, leading the mother into a little room with one window giving on the garden and another on the grass-grown yard. In this room, too, the walls were lined with bookcases and bookshelves. "I'd rather be in the kitchen," she said. "The little kitchen is bright and clean." It seemed to her that he grew rather frightened. And when she yielded to his awkward and embarrassed persuasions to take the room, he immediately cheered up. There was a peculiar atmosphere pervading all the three rooms. It was easy and pleasant to breathe in them; but one's voice involuntarily dropped a note in the wish not to speak aloud and intrude upon the peaceful thoughtfulness of the people who sent down a concentrated look from the walls. "The flowers need watering," said the mother, feeling the earth in the flowerpots in the windows. "Yes, yes," said the master guiltily. "I love them very much, but I have no time to take care of them." The mother noticed that Nikolay walked about in his own comfortable quarters just as carefully and as noiselessly as if he were a stranger, and as if all that surrounded him were remote from him. He would pick up and examine some small article, such as a bust, bring it close to his face, and scrutinize it minutely, adjusting his glasses with the thin finger of his right hand, and screwing up his eyes. He had the appearance of just having entered the rooms for the first time, and everything seemed as unfamiliar and strange to him as to the mother. Consequently, the mother at once felt herself at home. She followed Nikolay, observing where each thing stood, and inquiring about his ways and habits of life. He answered with the guilty air of a man who knows he is all the time doing things as they ought not to be done, but cannot help himself. After she had watered the flowers and arranged the sheets of music scattered in disorder over the piano, she looked at the samovar, and remarked, "It needs polishing." Nikolay ran his finger over the dull metal, then stuck the finger close to his nose. He looked at the mother so seriously that she could not restrain a good-natured smile. When she lay down to sleep and thought of the day just past, she raised her head from the pillow in astonishment and looked around. For the first time in her life she was in the house of a stranger, and she did not experience the least constraint. Her mind dwelt solicitously on Nikolay. She had a distinct desire to do the best she could for him, and to introduce more warmth into his lonely life. She was stirred and affected by his embarrassed awkwardness and droll ignorance, and smiled to herself with a sigh. Then her thoughts leaped to her son and to Andrey. She recalled the high-pitched, sparkling voice of Fedya, and gradually the whole day of the first of May unrolled itself before her, clothed in new sounds, reflecting new thoughts. The trials of the day were peculiar as the day itself. They did not bring her head to the ground as with the dull, stunning blow of the fist. They stabbed the heart with a thousand pricks, and called forth in her a quiet wrath, opening her eyes and straightening her backbone. "Children go in the world," she thought as she listened to the unfamiliar nocturnal sounds of the city. They crept through the open window like a sigh from afar, stirring the leaves in the garden and faintly expiring in the room. Early in the morning she polished up the samovar, made a fire in it, and filled it with water, and noiselessly placed the dishes on the table. Then she sat down in the kitchen and waited for Nikolay to rise. Presently she heard him cough. He appeared at the door, holding his glasses in one hand, the other hand at his throat. She responded to his greeting, and brought the samovar into the room. He began to wash himself, splashing the water on the floor, dropping the soap and his toothbrush, and grumbling in dissatisfaction at himself. When they sat down to drink tea, he said to the mother: "I am employed in the Zemstvo board--a very sad occupation. I see the way our peasants are going to ruin." And smiling he repeated guiltily: "It's literally so--I see! People go hungry, they lie down in their graves prematurely, starved to death, children are born feeble and sick, and drop like flies in autumn--we know all this, we know the causes of this wretchedness, and for observing it we receive a good salary. But that's all we do, really; truly all we do." "And what are you, a student?" "No. I'm a village teacher. My father was superintendent in a mill in Vyatka, and I became a teacher. But I began to give books to the peasants in the village, and was put in prison for it. When I came out of prison I became clerk in a bookstore, but not behaving carefully enough I got myself into prison again, and was then exiled to Archangel. There I also got into trouble with the governor, and they sent me to the White Sea coast, where I lived for five years." His talk sounded calm and even in the bright room flooded with sunlight. The mother had already heard many such stories; but she could never understand why they were related with such composure, why no blame was laid on anybody for the suffering the people had gone through, why these sufferings were regarded as so inevitable. "My sister is coming to-day," he announced. "Is she married?" "She's a widow. Her husband was exiled to Siberia; but he escaped, caught a severe cold on the way, and died abroad two years ago." "Is she younger than you?" "Six years older. I owe a great deal to her. Wait, and you'll hear how she plays. That's her piano. There are a whole lot of her things here, my books----" "Where does she live?" "Everywhere," he answered with a smile. "Wherever a brave soul is needed, there's where you'll find her." "Also in this movement?" "Yes, of course." He soon left to go to work, and the mother fell to thinking of "that movement" for which the people worked, day in, day out, calmly and resolutely. When confronting them she seemed to stand before a mountain looming in the dark. About noon a tall, well-built lady came. When the mother opened the door for her she threw a little yellow valise on the floor, and quickly seizing Vlasova's hand, asked: "Are you the mother of Pavel Mikhaylovich?" "Yes, I am," the mother replied, embarrassed by the lady's rich appearance. "That's the way I imagined you," said the lady, removing her hat in front of the mirror. "We have been friends of Pavel Mikhaylovich a long time. He spoke about you often." Her voice was somewhat dull, and she spoke slowly; but her movements were quick and vigorous. Her large, limpid gray eyes smiled youthfully; on her temples, however, thin radiate wrinkles were already limned, and silver hairs glistened over her ears. "I'm hungry; can I have a cup of coffee?" "I'll make it for you at once." The mother took down the coffee apparatus from the shelf and quietly asked: "_Did_ Pasha speak about me?" "Yes, indeed, a great deal." The lady took out a little leather cigarette case, lighted a cigarette, and inquired: "You're extremely uneasy about him, aren't you?" The mother smiled, watching the blue, quivering flame of the spirit lamp. Her embarrassment at the presence of the lady vanished in the depths of her joy. "So he talks about me, my dear son!" she thought. "You asked me whether I'm uneasy? Of course, it's not easy for me. But it would have been worse some time ago; now I know that he's not alone, and that even I am not alone." Looking into the lady's face, she asked: "What is your name?" "Sofya," the lady answered, and began to speak in a businesslike way. "The most important thing is that they should not stay in prison long, but that the trial should come off very soon. The moment they are exiled, we'll arrange an escape for Pavel Mikhaylovich. There's nothing for him to do in Siberia, and he's indispensable here." The mother incredulously regarded Sofya, who was searching about for a place into which to drop her cigarette stump, and finally threw it in a flowerpot. "That'll spoil the flowers," the mother remarked mechanically. "Excuse me," said Sofya simply. "Nikolay always tells me the same thing." She picked up the stump and threw it out of the window. The mother looked at her in embarrassment, and said guiltily: "You must excuse me. I said it without thinking. Is it in my place to teach you?" "Why not? Why not teach me, if I'm a sloven?" Sofya calmly queried with a shrug. "I know it; but I always forget--the worse for me. It's an ugly habit--to throw cigarette stumps any and everywhere, and to litter up places with ashes--particularly in a woman. Cleanliness in a room is the result of work, and all work ought to be respected. Is the coffee ready? Thank you! Why one cup? Won't you have any?" Suddenly seizing the mother by the shoulder, she drew her to herself, and looking into her eyes asked in surprise: "Why, are you embarrassed?" The mother answered with a smile: "I just blamed you for throwing the cigarette stump away--does that look as if I were embarrassed?" Her surprise was unconcealed. "I came to your house only yesterday, but I behave as if I were at home, and as if I had known you a long time. I'm afraid of nothing; I say anything. I even find fault." "That's the way it ought to be." "My head's in a whirl. I seem to be a stranger to myself. Formerly I didn't dare speak out from my heart until I'd been with a person a long, long time. And now my heart is always open, and I at once say things I wouldn't have dreamed of before, and a lot of things, too." Sofya lit another cigarette, turning the kind glance of her gray eyes on the mother. "Yes, you speak of arranging an escape. But how will he be able to live as a fugitive?" The mother finally gave expression to the thought that was agitating her. "That's a trifle," Sofya remarked, pouring out a cup of coffee for herself. "He'll live as scores of other fugitives live. I just met one, and saw him off. Another very valuable man, who worked for the movement in the south. He was exiled for five years, but remained only three and a half months. That's why I look such a _grande dame_. Do you think I always dress this way? I can't bear this fine toggery, this sumptuous rustle. A human being is simple by nature, and should dress simply--beautifully but simply." The mother looked at her fixedly, smiled, and shaking her head meditatively said: "No, it seems that day, the first of May, has changed me. I feel awkward somehow or other, as if I were walking on two roads at the same time. At one moment I understand everything; the next moment I am plunged into a mist. Here are you! I see you a lady; you occupy yourself with this movement, you know Pasha, and you esteem him. Thank you!" "Why, you ought to be thanked!" Sofya laughed. "I? I didn't teach him about the movement," the mother said with a sigh. "As I speak now," she continued stubbornly, "everything seems simple and near. Then, all of a sudden, I cannot understand this simplicity. Again, I'm calm. In a second I grow fearful, because I _am_ calm. I always used to be afraid, my whole life long; but now that there's a great deal to be afraid of, I have very little fear. Why is it? I cannot understand." She stopped, at a loss for words. Sofya looked at her seriously, and waited; but seeing that the mother was agitated, unable to find the expression she wanted, she herself took up the conversation. "A time will come when you'll understand everything. The chief thing that gives a person power and faith in himself is when he begins to love a certain cause with all his heart, and knows it is a good cause of use to everybody. There is such a love. There's everything. There's no human being too mean to love. But it's time for me to be getting out of all this magnificence." Putting the stump of her cigarette in the saucer, she shook her head. Her golden hair fell back in thick waves. She walked away smiling. The mother followed her with her eyes, sighed, and looked around. Her thoughts came to a halt, and in a half-drowsy, oppressive condition of quiet, she began to get the dishes together. At four o'clock Nikolay appeared. Then they dined. Sofya, laughing at times, told how she met and concealed the fugitive, how she feared the spies, and saw one in every person she met, and how comically the fugitive conducted himself. Something in her tone reminded the mother of the boasting of a workingman who had completed a difficult piece of work to his own satisfaction. She was now dressed in a flowing, dove-colored robe, which fell from her shoulders to her feet in warm waves. The effect was soft and noiseless. She appeared to be taller in this dress; her eyes seemed darker, and her movements less nervous. "Now, Sofya," said Nikolay after dinner, "here's another job for you. You know we undertook to publish a newspaper for the village. But our connection with the people there was broken, thanks to the latest arrests. No one but Pelagueya Nilovna can show us the man who will undertake the distribution of the newspapers. You go with her. Do it as soon as possible." "Very well," said Sofya. "We'll go, Pelagueya Nilovna." "Yes, we'll go." "Is it far?" "About fifty miles." "Splendid! And now I'm going to play a little. Do you mind listening to music, Pelagueya Nilovna?" "Don't bother about me. Act as if I weren't here," said the mother, seating herself in the corner of the sofa. She saw that the brother and the sister went on with their affairs without giving heed to her; yet, at the same time, she seemed involuntarily to mix in their conversation, imperceptibly drawn into it by them. "Listen to this, Nikolay. It's by Grieg. I brought it to-day. Shut the window." She opened the piano, and struck the keys lightly with her left hand. The strings sang out a thick, juicy melody. Another note, breathing a deep, full breath, joined itself to the first, and together they formed a vast fullness of sound that trembled beneath its own weight. Strange, limpid notes rang out from under the fingers of her right hand, and darted off in an alarming flight, swaying and rocking and beating against one another like a swarm of frightened birds. And in the dark background the low notes sang in measured, harmonious cadence like the waves of the sea exhausted by the storm. Some one cried out, a loud, agitated, woeful cry of rebellion, questioned and appealed in impotent anguish, and, losing hope, grew silent; and then again sang his rueful plaints, now resonant and clear, now subdued and dejected. In response to this song came the thick waves of dark sound, broad and resonant, indifferent and hopeless. They drowned by their depth and force the swarm of ringing wails; questions, appeals, groans blended in the alarming song. At times the music seemed to take a desperate upward flight, sobbing and lamenting, and again precipitated itself, crept low, swung hither and thither on the dense, vibratory current of bass notes, foundered, and disappeared in them; and once more breaking through to an even cadence, in a hopeless, calm rumble, it grew in volume, pealed forth, and melted and dissolved in the broad flourish of humid notes--which continued to sigh with equal force and calmness, never wearying. At first the sounds failed to touch the mother. They were incomprehensible to her, nothing but a ringing chaos. Her ear could not gather a melody from the intricate mass of notes. Half asleep she looked at Nikolay sitting with his feet crossed under him at the other end of the long sofa, and at the severe profile of Sofya with her head enveloped in a mass of golden hair. The sun shone into the room. A single ray, trembling pensively, at first lighted up her hair and shoulder, then settled upon the keys of the piano, and quivered under the pressure of her fingers. The branches of the acacia rocked to and fro outside the window. The room became music-filled, and unawares to her, the mother's heart was stirred. Three notes of nearly the same pitch, resonant as the voice of Fedya Mazin, sparkled in the stream of sounds, like three silvery fish in a brook. At times another note united with these in a simple song, which enfolded the heart in a kind yet sad caress. She began to watch for them, to await their warble, and she heard only their music, distinguished from the tumultuous chaos of sound, to which her ears gradually became deaf. And for some reason there rose before her out of the obscure depths of her past, wrongs long forgotten. Once her husband came home late, extremely intoxicated. He grasped her hand, threw her from the bed to the floor, kicked her in the side with his foot, and said: "Get out! I'm sick of you! Get out!" In order to protect herself from his blows, she quickly gathered her two-year-old son into her arms, and kneeling covered herself with his body as with a shield. He cried, struggled in her arms, frightened, naked, and warm. "Get out!" bellowed her husband. She jumped to her feet, rushed into the kitchen, threw a jacket over her shoulders, wrapped the baby in a shawl, and silently, without outcries or complaints, barefoot, in nothing but a shirt under her jacket, walked out into the street. It was in the month of May, and the night was fresh. The cold, damp dust of the street stuck to her feet, and got between her toes. The child wept and struggled. She opened her breast, pressed her son to her body, and pursued by fear walked down the street, quietly lulling the baby. It began to grow light. She was afraid and ashamed lest some one come out on the street and see her half naked. She turned toward the marsh, and sat down on the ground under a thick group of aspens. She sat there for a long time, embraced by the night, motionless, looking into the darkness with wide-open eyes, and timidly wailing a lullaby--a lullaby for her baby, which had fallen asleep, and a lullaby for her outraged heart. A gray bird darted over her head, and flew far away. It awakened her, and brought her to her feet. Then, shivering with cold, she walked home to confront the horror of blows and new insults. For the last time a heavy and resonant chord heaved a deep breath, indifferent and cold; it sighed and died away. Sofya turned around, and asked her brother softly: "Did you like it?" "Very much," he said, nodding his head. "Very much." Sofya looked at the mother's face, but said nothing. "They say," said Nikolay thoughtfully, throwing himself deeper back on the sofa, "that you should listen to music without thinking. But I can't." "Nor can I," said Sofya, striking a melodious chord. "I listened, and it seemed to me that people were putting their questions to nature, that they grieved and groaned, and protested angrily, and shouted, 'Why?' Nature does not answer, but goes on calmly creating, incessantly, forever. In her silence is heard her answer: 'I do not know.'" The mother listened to Nikolay's quiet words without understanding them, and without desiring to understand. Her bosom echoed with her reminiscences, and she wanted more music. Side by side with her memories the thought unfolded itself before her: "Here live people, a brother and sister, in friendship; they live peacefully and calmly--they have music and books--they don't swear at each other--they don't drink whisky--they don't quarrel for a relish--they have no desire to insult each other, the way all the people at the bottom do." Sofya quickly lighted a cigarette; she smoked almost without intermission. "This used to be the favorite piece of Kostya," she said, as a veil of smoke quickly enveloped her. She again struck a low mournful chord. "How I used to love to play for him! You remember how well he translated music into language?" She paused and smiled. "How sensitive he was! What fine feelings he had--so responsive to everything--so fully a man!" "She must be recalling memories of her husband," the mother noted, "and she smiles!" "How much happiness that man gave me!" said Sofya in a low voice, accompanying her words with light sounds on the keys. "What a capacity he had for living! He was always aglow with joy, buoyant, childlike joy!" "Childlike," repeated the mother to herself, and shook her head as if agreeing with something. "Ye-es," said Nikolay, pulling his beard, "his soul was always singing." "When I played this piece for him the first time, he put it in these words." Sofya turned her face to her brother, and slowly stretched out her arms. Encircled with blue streaks of smoke, she spoke in a low, rapturous voice. "In a barren sea of the far north, under the gray canopy of the cold heavens, stands a lonely black island, an unpeopled rock, covered with ice; the smoothly polished shore descends abruptly into the gray, foaming billows. The transparently blue blocks of ice inhospitably float on the shaking cold water and press against the dark rock of the island. Their knocking resounds mournfully in the dead stillness of the barren sea. They have been floating a long time on the bottomless depths, and the waves splashing about them have quietly borne them toward the lonely rock in the midst of the sea. The sound is grewsome as they break against the shore and against one another, sadly inquiring: 'Why?'" Sofya flung away the cigarette she had begun to smoke, turned to the piano, and again began to play the ringing plaints, the plaints of the lonely blocks of ice by the shore of the barren island in the sea of the far north. The mother was overcome with unendurable sadness as she listened to the simple sketch. It blended strangely with her past, into which her recollections kept boring deeper and deeper. "In music one can hear everything," said Nikolay quietly. Sofya turned toward the mother, and asked: "Do you mind my noise?" The mother was unable to restrain her slight irritation. "I told you not to pay any attention to me. I sit here and listen and think about myself." "No, you ought to understand," said Sofya. "A woman can't help understanding music, especially when in grief." She struck the keys powerfully, and a loud shout went forth, as if some one had suddenly heard horrible news, which pierced him to the heart, and wrenched from him this troubled sound. Young voices trembled in affright, people rushed about in haste, pellmell. Again a loud, angry voice shouted out, drowning all other sounds. Apparently a catastrophe had occurred, in which the chief source of pain was an affront offered to some one. It evoked not complaints, but wrath. Then some kindly and powerful person appeared, who began to sing, just like Andrey, a simple beautiful song, a song of exhortation and summons to himself. The voices of the bass notes grumbled in a dull, offended tone. Sofya played a long time. The music disquieted the mother, and aroused in her a desire to ask of what it was speaking. Indistinct sensations and thoughts passed through her mind in quick succession. Sadness and anxiety gave place to moments of calm joy. A swarm of unseen birds seemed to be flying about in the room, penetrating everywhere, touching the heart with caressing wings, soothing and at the same time alarming it. The feelings in the mother's breast could not be fixed in words. They emboldened her heart with perplexed hopes, they fondled it in a fresh and firm embrace. A kindly impulse came to her to say something good both to these two persons and to all people in general. She smiled softly, intoxicated by the music, feeling herself capable of doing work helpful to the brother and sister. Her eyes roved about in search of something to do for them. She saw nothing but to walk out into the kitchen quietly, and prepare the samovar. But this did not satisfy her desire. It struggled stubbornly in her breast, and as she poured out the tea she began to speak excitedly with an agitated smile. She seemed to bestow the words as a warm caress impartially on Sofya and Nikolay and on herself. "We people at the bottom feel everything; but it is hard for us to speak out our hearts. Our thoughts float about in us. We are ashamed because, although we understand, we are not able to express them; and often from shame we are angry at our thoughts, and at those who inspire them. We drive them away from ourselves. For life, you see, is so troublesome. From all sides we get blows and beatings; we want rest, and there come the thoughts that rouse our souls and demand things of us." Nikolay listened, and nodded his head, rubbing his eyeglasses briskly, while Sofya looked at her, her large eyes wide open and the forgotten cigarette burning to ashes. She sat half turned from the piano, supple and shapely, at times touching the keys lightly with the slender fingers of her right hand. The pensive chord blended delicately with the speech of the mother, as she quickly invested her new feelings and thoughts in simple, hearty words. "Now I am able to say something about myself, about my people, because I understand life. I began to understand it when I was able to make comparisons. Before that time there was nobody to compare myself with. In our state, you see, all lead the same life, and now that I see how others live, I look back at my life, and the recollection is hard and bitter. But it is impossible to return, and even if you could, you wouldn't find your youth again. And I think I understand a great deal. Here, I am looking at you, and I recollect all your people whom I've seen." She lowered her voice and continued: "Maybe I don't say things right, and I needn't say them, because you know them yourself; but I'm just speaking for myself. You at once set me alongside of you. You don't need anything of me; you can't make use of me; you can't get any enjoyment out of me, I know it. And day after day my heart grows, thank God! It grows in goodness, and I wish good for everybody. This is my thanks that I'm saying to you." Tears of happy gratitude affected her voice, and looking at them with a smile in her eyes, she went on: "I want to open my heart before you, so that you may see how I wish your welfare." "We see it," said Nikolay in a low voice. "You're making a holiday for us." "What do you think I imagined?" the mother asked with a smile and lowering her voice. "I imagined I found a treasure, and became rich, and I could endow everybody. Maybe it's only my stupidity that's run away with me." "Don't speak like that," said Sofya seriously. "You mustn't be ashamed." The mother began to speak again, telling Sofya and Nikolay of herself, her poor life, her wrongs, and patient sufferings. Suddenly she stopped in her narrative. It seemed to her that she was turning aside, away from herself, and speaking about somebody else. In simple words, without malice, with a sad smile on her lips, she drew the monotonous, gray sketch of sorrowful days. She enumerated the beatings she had received from her husband; and herself marveled at the trifling causes that led to them and her own inability to avert them. The brother and sister listened to her in attentive silence, impressed by the deep significance of the unadorned story of a human being, who was regarded as cattle are regarded, and who, without a murmur, for a long time felt herself to be that which she was held to be. It seemed to them as if thousands, nay millions, of lives spoke through her mouth. Her existence had been commonplace and simple; but such is the simple, ordinary existence of multitudes, and her story, assuming ever larger proportions in their eyes, took on the significance of a symbol. Nikolay, his elbows on the table, and his head leaning on his hands, looked at her through his glasses without moving, his eyes screwed up intently. Sofya flung herself back on her chair. Sometimes she trembled, and at times muttered to herself, shaking her head in disapproval. Her face grew paler. Her eyes deepened. "Once I thought myself unhappy. My life seemed a fever," said Sofya, inclining her head. "That was when I was in exile. It was in a small district town. There was nothing to do, nothing to think about except myself. I swept all my misfortunes together into one heap, and weighed them, from lack of anything better to do. Then I quarreled with my father, whom I loved. I was expelled from the gymnasium, and insulted--the prison, the treachery of a comrade near to me, the arrest of my husband, again prison and exile, the death of my husband. But all my misfortunes, and ten times their number, are not worth a month of your life, Pelagueya Nilovna. Your torture continued daily through years. From where do the people draw their power to suffer?" "They get used to it," responded the mother with a sigh. "I thought I knew that life," said Nikolay softly. "But when I hear it spoken of--not when my books, not when my incomplete impressions speak about it, but she herself with a living tongue--it is horrible. And the details are horrible, the inanities, the seconds of which the years are made." The conversation sped along, thoughtfully and quietly. It branched out and embraced the whole of common life on all sides. The mother became absorbed in her recollections. From her dim past she drew to light each daily wrong, and gave a massive picture of the huge, dumb horror in which her youth had been sunk. Finally she said: "Oh! How I've been chattering to you! It's time for you to rest. I'll never be able to tell you all." The brother and sister took leave of her in silence. Nikolay seemed to the mother to bow lower to her than ever before and to press her hand more firmly. Sofya accompanied her to her room, and stopping at the door said softly: "Now rest. I hope you have a good night." Her voice blew a warm breath on the mother, and her gray eyes embraced the mother's face in a caress. She took Sofya's hand and pressing it in hers, answered: "Thank you! You are good people." CHAPTER III Three days passed in incessant conversations with Sofya and Nikolay. The mother continued to recount tales of the past, which stubbornly arose from the depths of her awakened soul, and disturbed even herself. Her past demanded an explanation. The attention with which the brother and sister listened to her opened her heart more and more widely, freeing her from the narrow, dark cage of her former life. On the fourth day, early in the morning, she and Sofya appeared before Nikolay as burgher women, poorly clad in worn chintz skirts and blouses, with birch-bark sacks on their shoulders, and canes in their hands. This costume reduced Sofya's height and gave a yet sterner appearance to her pale face. "You look as if you had walked about monasteries all your life," observed Nikolay on taking leave of his sister, and pressed her hand warmly. The mother again remarked the simplicity and calmness of their relation to each other. It was hard for her to get used to it. No kissing, no affectionate words passed between them; but they behaved so sincerely, so amicably and solicitously toward each other. In the life she had been accustomed to, people kissed a great deal and uttered many sentimental words, but always bit at one another like hungry dogs. The women walked down the street in silence, reached the open country, and strode on side by side along the wide beaten road between a double row of birches. "Won't you get tired?" the mother asked. "Do you think I haven't done much walking? All this is an old story to me." With a merry smile, as if speaking of some glorious childhood frolics, Sofya began to tell the mother of her revolutionary work. She had had to live under a changed name, use counterfeit documents, disguise herself in various costumes in order to hide from spies, carry hundreds and hundreds of pounds of illegal books through various cities, arrange escapes for comrades in exile, and escort them abroad. She had had a printing press fixed up in her quarters, and when on learning of it the gendarmes appeared to make a search, she succeeded in a minute's time before their arrival in dressing as a servant, and walking out of the house just as her guests were entering at the gate. She met them there. Without an outer wrap, a light kerchief on her head, a tin kerosene can in her hand, she traversed the city from one end to the other in the biting cold of a winter's day. Another time she had just arrived in a strange city to pay a visit to friends. When she was already on the stairs leading to their quarters, she noticed that a search was being conducted in their apartments. To turn back was too late. Without a second's hesitation she boldly rang the bell at the door of a lower floor, and walked in with her traveling bag to unknown people. She frankly explained the position she was in. "You can hand me over to the gendarmes if you want to; but I don't think you will," she said confidently. The people were greatly frightened, and did not sleep the whole night. Every minute they expected the sound of the gendarmes knocking at the door. Nevertheless, they could not make up their minds to deliver her over to them, and the next morning they had a hearty laugh with her over the gendarmes. And once, dressed as a nun, she traveled in the same railroad coach, in fact, sat on the very same seat, with a spy, then in search of her. He boasted of his skill, and told her how he was conducting his search. He was certain she was riding on the same train as himself, in a second-class coach; but at every stop, after walking out, he came back saying: "Not to be seen. She must have gone to bed. They, too, get tired. Their life is a hard one, just like ours." The mother listening to her stories laughed, and regarded her affectionately. Tall and dry, Sofya strode along the road lightly and firmly, at an even gait. In her walk, her words, and the very sound of her voice--although a bit dull, it was yet bold--in all her straight and stolid figure, there was much of robust strength, jovial daring, and thirst for space and freedom. Her eyes looked at everything with a youthful glance. She constantly spied something that gladdened her heart with childlike joy. "See what a splendid pine!" she exclaimed, pointing out a tree to the mother. The mother looked and stopped. It was a pine neither higher nor thicker than others. "Ye-es, ye-es, a good tree," she said, smiling. "Do you hear? A lark!" Sofya raised her head, and looked into the blue expanse of the sky for the merry songster. Her gray eyes flashed with a fond glance, and her body seemed to rise from the ground to meet the music ringing from an unseen source in the far-distant height. At times bending over, she plucked a field flower, and with light touches of her slender, agile fingers, she fondly stroked the quivering petals and hummed quietly and prettily. Over them burned the kindly spring sun. The blue depths flashed softly. At the sides of the road stretched a dark pine forest. The fields were verdant, birds sang, and the thick, resinous atmosphere stroked the face warmly and tenderly. All this moved the mother's heart nearer to the woman with the bright eyes and the bright soul; and, trying to keep even pace with her, she involuntarily pressed close to Sofya, as if desiring to draw into herself her hearty boldness and freshness. "How young you are!" the mother sighed. "I'm thirty-two years old already!" Vlasova smiled. "I'm not talking about that. To judge by your face, one would say you're older; but one wonders that your eyes, your voice are so fresh, so springlike, as if you were a young girl. Your life is so hard and troubled, yet your heart is smiling." "The heart is smiling," repeated Sofya thoughtfully. "How well you speak--simple and good. A hard life, you say? But I don't feel that it is hard, and I cannot imagine a better, a more interesting life than this." "What pleases me more than anything else is to see how you all know the roads to a human being's heart. Everything in a person opens itself out to you without fear or caution--just so, all of itself, the heart throws itself open to meet you. I'm thinking of all of you. You overcome the evil in the world--overcome it absolutely." "We shall be victorious, because we are with the working people," said Sofya with assurance. "Our power to work, our faith in the victory of truth we obtain from you, from the people; and the people is the inexhaustible source of spiritual and physical strength. In the people are vested all possibilities, and with them everything is attainable. It's necessary only to arouse their consciousness, their soul, the great soul of a child, who is not given the liberty to grow." She spoke softly and simply, and looked pensively before her down the winding depths of the road, where a bright haze was quivering. Sofya's words awakened a complex feeling in the mother's heart. For some reason she felt sorry for her. Her pity, however, was not offensive; not bred of familiarity. She marveled that here was a lady walking on foot and carrying a dangerous burden on her back. "Who's going to reward you for your labors?" Sofya answered the mother's thought with pride: "We are already rewarded for everything. We have found a life that satisfies us; we live broadly and fully, with all the power of our souls. What else can we desire?" Filling their lungs with the aromatic air, they paced along, not swiftly, but at a good, round gait. The mother felt she was on a pilgrimage. She recollected her childhood, the fine joy with which she used to leave the village on holidays to go to a distant monastery, where there was a wonder-working icon. Sometimes Sofya would hum some new unfamiliar songs about the sky and about love, or suddenly she would begin to recite poems about the fields and forests and the Volga. The mother listened, a smile on her face, swinging her head to the measure of the tune or rhythm, involuntarily yielding to the music. Her breast was pervaded by a soft, melancholy warmth, like the atmosphere in a little old garden on a summer night. On the third day they arrived at the village, and the mother inquired of a peasant at work in the field where the tar works were. Soon they were descending a steep woody path, on which the exposed roots of the trees formed steps through a small, round glade, which was choked up with coal and chips of wood caked with tar. Outside a shack built of poles and branches, at a table formed simply of three unplaned boards laid on a trestle stuck firmly into the ground, sat Rybin, all blackened, his shirt open at his breast, Yefim, and two other young men. They were just dining. Rybin was the first to notice the women. Shading his eyes with his hand, he waited in silence. "How do you do, brother Mikhaïl?" shouted the mother from afar. He arose and leisurely walked to meet them. When he recognized the mother, he stopped and smiled and stroked his beard with his black hand. "We are on a pilgrimage," said the mother, approaching him. "And so I thought I would stop in and see my brother. This is my friend Anna." Proud of her resourcefulness she looked askance at Sofya's serious, stern face. "How are you?" said Rybin, smiling grimly. He shook her hand, bowed to Sofya, and continued: "Don't lie. This isn't the city. No need of lies. These are all our own people, good people." Yefim, sitting at the table, looked sharply at the pilgrims, and whispered something to his comrades. When the women walked up to the table, he arose and silently bowed to them. His comrades didn't stir, seeming to take no notice of the guests. "We live here like monks," said Rybin, tapping the mother lightly on the shoulder. "No one comes to us; our master is not in the village; the mistress was taken to the hospital. And now I'm a sort of superintendent. Sit down at the table. Maybe you're hungry. Yefim, bring some milk." Without hurrying, Yefim walked into the shack. The travelers removed the sacks from their shoulders, and one of the men, a tall, lank fellow, rose from the table to help them. Another one, resting his elbows thoughtfully on the table, looked at them, scratching his head and quietly humming a song. The pungent odor of the fresh tar blended with the stifling smell of decaying leaves dizzied the newcomers. "This fellow is Yakob," said Rybin, pointing to the tall man, "and that one Ignaty. Well, how's your son?" "He's in prison," the mother sighed. "In prison again? He likes it, I suppose." Ignaty stopped humming; Yakob took the staff from the mother's hand, and said: "Sit down, little mother." "Yes, why don't you sit down?" Rybin extended the invitation to Sofya. She sat down on the stump of a tree, scrutinizing Rybin seriously and attentively. "When did they take him?" asked Rybin, sitting down opposite the mother, and shaking his head. "You've bad luck, Nilovna." "Oh, well!" "You're getting used to it?" "I'm not used to it, but I see it's not to be helped." "That's right. Well, tell us the story." Yefim brought a pitcher of milk, took a cup from the table, rinsed it with water, and after filling it shoved it across the table to Sofya. He moved about noiselessly, listening to the mother's narrative. When the mother had concluded her short account, all were silent for a moment, looking at one another. Ignaty, sitting at the table, drew a pattern with his nails on the boards. Yefim stood behind Rybin, resting his elbows on his shoulders. Yakob leaned against the trunk of a tree, his hands folded over his chest, his head inclined. Sofya observed the peasants from the corner of her eye. "Yes," Rybin drawled sullenly. "That's the course of action they've decided on--to go out openly." "If we were to arrange such a parade here," said Yefim, with a surly smile, "they'd hack the peasants to death." "They certainly would," Ignaty assented, nodding his head. "No, I'll go to the factory. It's better there." "You say Pavel's going to be tried?" asked Rybin. "Yes. They've decided on a trial." "Well, what'll he get? Have you heard?" "Hard labor, or exile to Siberia for life," answered the mother softly. The three young men simultaneously turned their look on her, and Rybin, lowering his head, asked slowly: "And when he got this affair up, did he know what was in store for him?" "I don't know. I suppose he did." "He did," said Sofya aloud. All were silent, motionless, as if congealed by one cold thought. "So," continued Rybin slowly and gravely. "I, too, think he knew. A serious man looks before he leaps. There, boys, you see, the man knew that he might be struck with a bayonet, or exiled to hard labor; but he went. He felt it was necessary for him to go, and he went. If his mother had lain across his path, he would have stepped over her body and gone his way. Wouldn't he have stepped over you, Nilovna?" "He would," said the mother shuddering and looking around. She heaved a heavy sigh. Sofya silently stroked her hand. "There's a man for you!" said Rybin in a subdued voice, his dark eyes roving about the company. They all became silent again. The thin rays of the sun trembled like golden ribbons in the thick, odorous atmosphere. Somewhere a crow cawed with bold assurance. The mother looked around, troubled by her recollections of the first of May, and grieving for her son and Andrey. Broken barrels lay about in confusion in the small, crowded glade. Uprooted stumps stretched out their dead, scraggy roots, and chips of wood littered the ground. Dense oaks and birches encircled the clearing, and drooped over it slightly on all sides as if desiring to sweep away and destroy this offensive rubbish and dirt. Suddenly Yakob moved forward from the tree, stepped to one side, stopped, and shaking his head observed dryly: "So, when we're in the army with Yefim, it's on such men as Pavel Mikhaylovich that they'll set us." "Against whom did you think they'd make you go?" retorted Rybin glumly. "They choke us with our own hands. That's where the jugglery comes in." "I'll join the army all the same," announced Yefim obstinately. "Who's trying to dissuade you?" exclaimed Ignaty. "Go!" He looked Yefim straight in the face, and said with a smile: "If you're going to shoot at me, aim at the head. Don't just wound me; kill me at once." "I hear what you're saying," Yefim replied sharply. "Listen, boys," said Rybin, letting his glance stray about the little assembly with a deliberate, grave gesture of his raised hand. "Here's a woman," pointing to the mother, "whose son is surely done for now." "Why are you saying this?" the mother asked in a low, sorrowful voice. "It's necessary," he answered sullenly. "It's necessary that your hair shouldn't turn gray in vain, that your heart shouldn't ache for nothing. Behold, boys! She's lost her son, but what of it? Has it killed her? Nilovna, did you bring books?" The mother looked at him, and after a pause said: "I did." "That's it," said Rybin, striking the table with the palm of his hand. "I knew it at once when I saw you. Why need you have come here, if not for that?" He again measured the young men with his eyes, and continued, solemnly knitting his eyebrows: "Do you see? They thrust the son out of the ranks, and the mother drops into his place." He suddenly struck the table with both hands, and straightening himself said with an air that seemed to augur ill: "Those----"--here he flung out a terrible oath--"those people don't know what their blind hands are sowing. They _will_ know when our power is complete and we begin to mow down their cursed grass. They'll know it then!" The mother was frightened. She looked at him, and saw that Mikhaïl's face had changed greatly. He had grown thinner; his beard was roughened, and his cheek bones seemed to have sharpened. The bluish whites of his eyes were threaded with thin red fibers, as if he had gone without sleep for a long time. His nose, less fleshy than formerly, had acquired a rapacious crook. His open, tar-saturated collar, attached to a shirt that had once been red, exposed his dry collar bones and the thick black hair on his breast. About his whole figure there was something more tragic than before. Red sparks seemed to fly from his inflamed eyes and light the lean, dark face with the fire of unconquerable, melancholy rage. Sofya paled and was silent, her gaze riveted on the peasant. Ignaty shook his head and screwed up his eyes, and Yakob, standing at the wall again, angrily tore splinters from the boards with his blackened fingers. Yefim, behind the mother, slowly paced up and down along the length of the table. "The other day," continued Rybin, "a government official called me up, and, says he, 'You blackguard, what did you say to the priest?' 'Why am I a blackguard?' I say. 'I earn my bread in the sweat of my brow, and I don't do anything bad to people.' That's what I said. He bawled out at me, and hit me in the face. For three days and three nights I sat in the lockup." Rybin grew infuriated. "That's the way you speak to the people, is it?" he cried. "Don't expect pardon, you devils. My wrong will be avenged, if not by me, then by another, if not on you, then on your children. Remember! The greed in your breasts has harrowed the people with iron claws. You have sowed malice; don't expect mercy!" The wrath in Rybin seethed and bubbled; his voice shook with sounds that frightened the mother. "And what had I said to the priest?" he continued in a lighter tone. "After the village assembly he sits with the peasants in the street, and tells them something. 'The people are a flock,' says he, 'and they always need a shepherd.' And I joke. 'If,' I say, 'they make the fox the chief in the forest, there'll be lots of feathers but no birds.' He looks at me sidewise and speaks about how the people ought to be patient and pray more to God to give them the power to be patient. And I say that the people pray, but evidently God has no time, because he doesn't listen to them. The priest begins to cavil with me as to what prayers I pray. I tell him I use one prayer, like all the people, 'O Lord, teach the masters to carry bricks, eat stones, and spit wood.' He wouldn't even let me finish my sentence.--Are you a lady?" Rybin asked Sofya, suddenly breaking off his story. "Why do you think I'm a lady?" she asked quickly, startled by the unexpectedness of his question. "Why?" laughed Rybin. "That's the star under which you were born. That's why. You think a chintz kerchief can conceal the blot of the nobleman from the eyes of the people? We'll recognize a priest even if he's wrapped in sackcloth. Here, for instance, you put your elbows on a wet table, and you started and frowned. Besides, your back is too straight for a working woman." Fearing he would insult Sofya with his heavy voice and his raillery, the mother said quickly and sternly: "She's my friend, Mikhaïl Ivanovich. She's a good woman. Working in this movement has turned her hair gray. You're not very----" Rybin fetched a deep breath. "Why, was what I said insulting?" Sofya looked at him dryly and queried: "You wanted to say something to me?" "I? Not long ago a new man came here, a cousin of Yakob. He's sick with consumption; but he's learned a thing or two. Shall we call him?" "Call him! Why not?" answered Sofya. Rybin looked at her, screwing up his eyes. "Yefim," he said in a lowered voice, "you go over to him, and tell him to come here in the evening." Yefim went into the shack to get his cap; then silently, without looking at anybody, he walked off at a leisurely pace and disappeared in the woods. Rybin nodded his head in the direction he was going, saying dully: "He's suffering torments. He's stubborn. He has to go into the army, he and Yakob, here. Yakob simply says, 'I can't.' And that fellow can't either; but he wants to; he has an object in view. He thinks he can stir the soldiers. My opinion is, you can't break through a wall with your forehead. Bayonets in their hands, off they go--where? They don't see--they're going against themselves. Yes, he's suffering. And Ignaty worries him uselessly." "No, not at all!" said Ignaty. He knit his eyebrows, and kept his eyes turned away from Rybin. "They'll change him, and he'll become just like all the other soldiers." "No, hardly," Rybin answered meditatively. "But, of course, it's better to run away from the army. Russia is large. Where will you find the fellow? He gets himself a passport, and goes from village to village." "That's what I'm going to do, too," remarked Yakob, tapping his foot with a chip of wood. "Once you've made up your mind to go against the government, go straight." The conversation dropped off. The bees and wasps circled busily around humming in the stifling atmosphere. The birds chirped, and somewhere at a distance a song was heard straying through the fields. After a pause Rybin said: "Well, we've got to get to work. Do you want to rest? There are boards inside the shanty. Pick up some dry leaves for them, Yakob. And you, mother, give us the books. Where are they?" The mother and Sofya began to untie their sacks. Rybin bent down over them, and said with satisfaction: "That's it! Well, well--not a few, I see. Have you been in this business a long time? What's your name?" he turned toward Sofya. "Anna Ivanovna. Twelve years. Why?" "Nothing." "Have you been in prison?" "I have." He was silent, taking a pile of books in his hand, and said to her, showing his teeth: "Don't take offense at the way I speak. A peasant and a nobleman are like tar and water. It's hard for them to mix. They jump away from each other." "I'm not a lady. I'm a human being," Sofya retorted with a quiet laugh. "That may be. It's hard for me to believe it; but they say it happens. They say that a dog was once a wolf. Now I'll hide these books." Ignaty and Yakob walked up to him, and both stretched out their hands. "Give us some." "Are they all the same?" Rybin asked of Sofya. "No, they're different. There's a newspaper here, too." "Oh!" The three men quickly walked into the shack. "The peasant is on fire," said the mother in a low voice, looking after Rybin thoughtfully. "Yes," answered Sofya. "I've never seen such a face as his--such a martyrlike face. Let's go inside, too. I want to look at them." When the women reached the door they found the men already engrossed in the newspapers. Ignaty was sitting on the board, the newspaper spread on his knees, and his fingers run through his hair. He raised his head, gave the women a rapid glance, and bent over his paper again. Rybin was standing to let the ray of sun that penetrated a chink in the roof fall on his paper. He moved his lips as he read. Ignaty read kneeling, with his breast against the edge of the board. Sofya felt the eagerness of the men for the word of truth. Her face brightened with a joyful smile. Walking carefully over to a corner, she sat down next to the mother, her arm on the mother's shoulder, and gazed about silently. "Uncle Mikhaïl, they're rough on us peasants," muttered Yakob without turning. Rybin looked around at him, and answered with a smile: "For love of us. He who loves does not insult, no matter what he says." Ignaty drew a deep breath, raised his head, smiled satirically, and closing his eyes said with a scowl: "Here it says: 'The peasant has ceased to be a human being.' Of course he has." Over his simple, open face glided a shadow of offense. "Well, try to wear my skin for a day or so, and turn around in it, and then we'll see what you'll be like, you wiseacre, you!" "I'm going to lie down," said the mother quietly. "I got tired, after all. My head is going around. And you?" she asked Sofya. "I don't want to." The mother stretched herself on the board and soon fell asleep. Sofya sat over her looking at the people reading. When the bees buzzed about the mother's face, she solicitously drove them away. Rybin came up and asked: "Is she asleep?" "Yes." He was silent for a moment, looked fixedly at the calm sleeping face, and said softly: "She is probably the first mother who has followed in the footsteps of her son--the first." "Let's not disturb her; let's go away," suggested Sofya. "Well, we have to work. I'd like to have a chat with you; but we'll put it off until evening. Come, boys." CHAPTER IV The three men walked away, leaving Sofya in the cabin. Then from a distance came the sound of the ax blows, the echo straying through the foliage. In a half-dreamy condition of repose, intoxicated with the spicy odor of the forest, Sofya sat just outside the door, humming a song, and watching the approach of evening, which gradually enfolded the forest. Her gray eyes smiled softly at some one. The reddening rays of the sun fell more and more aslant. The busy chirping of the birds died away. The forest darkened, and seemed to grow denser. The trees moved in more closely about the choked-up glade, and gave it a more friendly embrace, covering it with shadows. Cows were lowing in the distance. The tar men came, all four together, content that the work was ended. Awakened by their voices the mother walked out from the cabin, yawning and smiling. Rybin was calmer and less gloomy. The surplus of his excitement was drowned in exhaustion. "Ignaty," he said, "let's have our tea. We do housekeeping here by turns. To-day Ignaty provides us with food and drink." "To-day I'd be glad to yield my turn," remarked Ignaty, gathering up pieces of wood and branches for an open-air fire. "We're all interested in our guests," said Yefim, sitting down by Sofya's side. "I'll help you," said Yakob softly. He brought out a big loaf of bread baked in hot ashes, and began to cut it and place the pieces on the table. "Listen!" exclaimed Yefim. "Do you hear that cough?" Rybin listened, and nodded. "Yes, he's coming," he said to Sofya. "The witness is coming. I would lead him through cities, put him in public squares, for the people to hear him. He always says the same thing. But everybody ought to hear it." The shadows grew closer, the twilight thickened, and the voices sounded softer. Sofya and the mother watched the actions of the peasants. They all moved slowly and heavily with a strange sort of cautiousness. They, too, constantly followed the women with their eyes, listening attentively to their conversation. A tall, stooping man came out of the woods into the glade, and walked slowly, firmly supporting himself on a cane. His heavy, raucous breathing was audible. "There is Savely!" exclaimed Yakob. "Here I am," said the man hoarsely. He stopped, and began to cough. A shabby coat hung over him down to his very heels. From under his round, crumpled hat straggled thin, limp tufts of dry, straight, yellowish hair. His light, sparse beard grew unevenly upon his yellow, bony face; his mouth stood half-open; his eyes were sunk deep beneath his forehead, and glittered feverishly in their dark hollows. When Rybin introduced him to Sofya he said to her: "I heard you brought books for the people." "I did." "Thank you in the name of the people. They themselves cannot yet understand the book of truth. They cannot yet thank; so I, who have learned to understand it, render you thanks in their behalf." He breathed quickly, with short, eager breaths, strangely drawing in the air through his dry lips. His voice broke. The bony fingers of his feeble hands crept along his breast trying to button his coat. "It's bad for you to be in the woods so late; it's damp and close here," remarked Sofya. "Nothing is good for me any more," he answered, out of breath. "Only death!" It was painful to listen to him. His entire figure inspired a futile pity that recognized its own powerlessness, and gave way to a sullen feeling of discomfort. The wood pile blazed up; everything round about trembled and shook; the scorched shadows flung themselves into the woods in fright. The round face of Ignaty with its inflated cheeks shone over the fire. The flames died down, and the air began to smell of smoke. Again the trees seemed to draw close and unite with the mist on the glade, listening in strained attention to the hoarse words of the sick man. "But as a witness of the crime, I can still bring good to the people. Look at me! I'm twenty-eight years old; but I'm dying. About ten years ago I could lift five hundred pounds on my shoulders without an effort. With such strength I thought I could go on for seventy years without dropping into the grave, and I've lived for only ten years, and can't go on any more. The masters have robbed me; they've torn forty years of my life from me; they've stolen forty years from me." "There, that's his song," said Rybin dully. The fire blazed up again, but now it was stronger and more vivid. Again the shadows leaped into the woods, and again darted back to the fire, quivering about it in a mute, astonished dance. The wood crackled, and the leaves of the trees rustled softly. Alarmed by the waves of the heated atmosphere, the merry, vivacious tongues of fire, yellow and red, in sportive embrace, soared aloft, sowing sparks. The burning leaves flew, and the stars in the sky smiled to the sparks, luring them up to themselves. "That's not _my_ song. Thousands of people sing it. But they sing it to themselves, not realizing what a salutary lesson their unfortunate lives hold for all. How many men, tormented to death by work, miserable cripples, maimed, die silently from hunger! It is necessary to shout it aloud, brothers, it is necessary to shout it aloud!" He fell into a fit of coughing, bending and all a-shiver. "Why?" asked Yefim. "My misery is my own affair. Just look at my joy." "Don't interrupt," Rybin admonished. "You yourself said a man mustn't boast of his misfortune," observed Yefim with a frown. "That's a different thing. Savely's misfortune is a general affair, not merely his own. It's very different," said Rybin solemnly. "Here you have a man who has gone down to the depths and been suffocated. Now he shouts to the world, 'Look out, don't go there!'" Yakob put a pail of cider on the table, dropped a bundle of green branches, and said to the sick man: "Come, Savely, I've brought you some milk." Savely shook his head in declination, but Yakob took him under the arm, lifted him, and made him walk to the table. "Listen," said Sofya softly to Rybin. She was troubled and reproached him. "Why did you invite him here? He may die any minute." "He may," retorted Rybin. "Let him die among people. That's easier than to die alone. In the meantime let him speak. He lost his life for trifles. Let him suffer a little longer for the sake of the people. It's all right!" "You seem to take particular delight in it," exclaimed Sofya. "It's the masters who take pleasure in Christ as he groans on the cross. But what we want is to learn from a man, and make you learn something, too." At the table the sick man began to speak again: "They destroy lives with work. What for? They rob men of their lives. What for, I ask? My master--I lost my life in the textile mill of Nefidov--my master presented one prima donna with a golden wash basin. Every one of her toilet articles was gold. That basin holds my life-blood, my very life. That's for what my life went! A man killed me with work in order to comfort his mistress with my blood. He bought her a gold wash basin with my blood." "Man is created in the image of God," said Yefim, smiling. "And that's the use to which they put the image. Fine!" "Well, then don't be silent!" exclaimed Rybin, striking his palm on the table. "Don't suffer it," added Yakob softly. Ignaty laughed. The mother observed that all three men spoke little, but listened with the insatiable attention of hungry souls, and every time that Rybin spoke they looked into his face with watchful eyes. Savely's talk produced a strange, sharp smile on their faces. No feeling of pity for the sick man was to be detected in their manner. Bending toward Sofya the mother whispered: "Is it possible that what he says is true?" Sofya answered aloud: "Yes, it's true. The newspapers tell about such gifts. It happened in Moscow." "And the man wasn't executed for it?" asked Rybin dully. "But he should have been executed, he should have been led out before the people and torn to pieces. His vile, dirty flesh should have been thrown to the dogs. The people will perform great executions when once they arise. They'll shed much blood to wash away their wrongs. This blood is theirs; it has been drained from their veins; they are its masters." "It's cold," said the sick man. Yakob helped him to rise, and led him to the fire. The wood pile burned evenly and glaringly, and the faceless shadows quivered around it. Savely sat down on a stump, and stretched his dry, transparent hands toward the fire, coughing. Rybin nodded his head to one side, and said to Sofya in an undertone: "That's sharper than books. That ought to be known. When they tear a workingman's hand in a machine or kill him, you can understand--the workingman himself is at fault. But in a case like this, when they suck a man's blood out of him and throw him away like a carcass--that can't be explained in any way. I can comprehend every murder; but torturing for mere sport I can't comprehend. And why do they torture the people? To what purpose do they torture us all? For fun, for mere amusement, so that they can live pleasantly on the earth; so that they can buy everything with the blood of the people, a prima donna, horses, silver knives, golden dishes, expensive toys for their children. _You_ work, work, work, work more and more, and _I'll_ hoard money by your labor and give my mistress a golden wash basin." The mother listened, looked, and once again, before her in the darkness, stretched the bright streak of the road that Pavel was going, and all those with whom he walked. When they had concluded their supper, they sat around the fire, which consumed the wood quickly. Behind them hung the darkness, embracing forest and sky. The sick man with wide-open eyes looked into the fire, coughed incessantly, and shivered all over. The remnants of his life seemed to be tearing themselves from his bosom impatiently, hastening to forsake the dry body, drained by sickness. "Maybe you'd better go into the shanty, Savely?" Yakob asked, bending over him. "Why?" he answered with an effort. "I'll sit here. I haven't much time left to stay with people, very little time." He paused, let his eyes rove about the entire group, then with a pale smile, continued: "I feel good when I'm with you. I look at you, and think, 'Maybe you will avenge the wrongs of all who were robbed, of all the people destroyed because of greed.'" No one replied, and he soon fell into a doze, his head limply hanging over his chest. Rybin looked at him, and said in a dull voice: "He comes to us, sits here, and always speaks of the same thing, of this mockery of man. This is his entire soul; he feels nothing else." "What more do you want?" said the mother thoughtfully. "If people are killed by the thousands day after day working so that their masters may throw money away for sport, what else do you want?" "It's endlessly wearying to listen to him," said Ignaty in a low voice. "When you hear this sort of thing once, you never forget it, and he keeps harping on it all the time." "But everything is crowded into this one thing. It's his entire life, remember," remarked Rybin sullenly. The sick man turned, opened his eyes, and lay down on the ground. Yakob rose noiselessly, walked into the cabin, brought out two short overcoats, and wrapped them about his cousin. Then he sat down beside Sofya. The merry, ruddy face of the fire smiled irritatingly as it illumined the dark figures about it; and the voices blended mournfully with the soft rustle and crackle of the flames. Sofya began to tell about the universal struggle of the people for the right to life, about the conflicts of the German peasants in the olden times, about the misfortunes of the Irish, about the great exploits of the workingmen of France in their frequent battling for freedom. In the forest clothed in the velvet of night, in the little glade bounded by the dumb trees, before the sportive face of the fire, the events that shook the world rose to life again; one nation of the earth after the other passed in review, drained of its blood, exhausted by combats; the names of the great soldiers for freedom and truth were recalled. The somewhat dull voice of the woman seemed to echo softly from the remoteness of the past. It aroused hope, it carried conviction; and the company listened in silence to its music, to the great story of their brethren in spirit. They looked into her face, lean and pale, and smiled in response to the smile of her gray eyes. Before them the cause of all the people of the world, the endless war for freedom and equality, became more vivid and assumed a greater holiness. They saw their desires and thoughts in the distance, overhung with the dark, bloody curtain of the past, amid strangers unknown to them; and inwardly, both in mind and heart, they became united with the world, seeing in it friends even in olden times, friends who had unanimously resolved to obtain right upon the earth, and had consecrated their resolve with measureless suffering, and shed rivers of their own blood. With this blood, mankind dedicated itself to a new life, bright and cheerful. A feeling arose and grew of the spiritual nearness of each unto each. A new heart was born on the earth, full of hot striving to embrace all and to unite all in itself. "A day is coming when the workingmen of all countries will raise their heads, and firmly declare, 'Enough! We want no more of this life.'" Sofya's low but powerful voice rang with assurance. "And then the fantastic power of those who are mighty by their greed will crumble; the earth will vanish from under their feet, and their support will be gone." "That's how it will be," said Rybin, bending his head. "Don't pity yourselves, and you will conquer everything." The men listened in silence, motionless, endeavoring in no way to break the even flow of the narrative, fearing to cut the bright thread that bound them to the world. Only occasionally some one would carefully put a piece of wood in the fire, and when a stream of sparks and smoke rose from the pile he would drive them away from the woman with a wave of his hand. [Illustration: "The men listened in silence."] Once Yakob rose and said: "Wait a moment, please." He ran into the shack and brought out wraps. With Ignaty's help he folded them about the shoulders and feet of the women. And again Sofya spoke, picturing the day of victory, inspiring people with faith in their power, arousing in them a consciousness of their oneness with all who give away their lives to barren toil for the amusement of the satiated. At break of dawn, exhausted, she grew silent, and smiling she looked around at the thoughtful, illumined faces. "It's time for us to go," said the mother. "Yes, it's time," said Sofya wearily. Some one breathed a noisy sigh. "I am sorry you're going," said Rybin in an unusually mild tone. "You speak well. This great cause will unite people. When you know that millions want the same as you do, your heart becomes better, and in goodness there is great power." "You offer goodness, and get the stake in return," said Yefim with a low laugh, and quickly jumped to his feet. "But they ought to go, Uncle Mikhaïl, before anybody sees them. We'll distribute the books among the people; the authorities will begin to wonder where they came from; then some one will remember having seen the pilgrims here." "Well, thank you, mother, for your trouble," said Rybin, interrupting Yefim. "I always think of Pavel when I look at you, and you've gone the right way." He stood before the mother, softened, with a broad, good-natured smile on his face. The atmosphere was raw, but he wore only one shirt, his collar was unbuttoned, and his breast was bared low. The mother looked at his large figure, and smiling also, advised: "You'd better put on something; it's cold." "There's a fire inside of me." The three young men standing at the burning pile conversed in a low voice. At their feet the sick man lay as if dead, covered with the short fur coats. The sky paled, the shadows dissolved, the leaves shivered softly, awaiting the sun. "Well, then, we must say good-by," said Rybin, pressing Sofya's hand. "How are you to be found in the city?" "You must look for me," said the mother. The young men in a close group walked up to Sofya, and silently pressed her hand with awkward kindness. In each of them was evident grateful and friendly satisfaction, though they attempted to conceal the feeling which apparently embarrassed them by its novelty. Smiling with eyes dry with the sleepless night, they looked in silence into Sofya's eyes, shifting from one foot to the other. "Won't you drink some milk before you go?" asked Yakob. "Is there any?" queried Yefim. "There's a little." Ignaty, stroking his hair in confusion, announced: "No, there isn't; I spilled it." All three laughed. They spoke about milk, but the mother and Sofya felt that they were thinking of something else, and without words were wishing them well. This touched Sofya, and produced in her, too, embarrassment and modest reserve, which prevented her from saying anything more than a quiet and warm "Thank you, comrades." They exchanged glances, as if the word "comrade" had given them a mild shock. The dull cough of the sick man was heard. The embers of the burning woodpile died out. "Good-by," the peasants said in subdued tones; and the sad word rang in the women's ears a long time. They walked without haste, in the twilight of the dawn, along the wood path. The mother striding behind Sofya said: "All this is good, just as in a dream--so good! People want to know the truth, my dear; yes, they want to know the truth. It's like being in a church on the morning of a great holiday, when the priest has not yet arrived, and it's dark and quiet; then it's raw, and the people are already gathering. Here the candles are lighted before the images, and there the lamps are lighted; and little by little, they drive away the darkness, illumining the House of God." "True," answered Sofya. "Only here the House of God is the whole earth." "The whole earth," the mother repeated, shaking her head thoughtfully. "It's so good that it's hard to believe." They walked and talked about Rybin, about the sick man, about the young peasants who were so attentively silent, and who so awkwardly but eloquently expressed a feeling of grateful friendship by little attentions to the women. They came out into the open field; the sun rose to meet them. As yet invisible, he spread out over the sky a transparent fan of rosy rays, and the dewdrops in the grass glittered with the many-colored gems of brave spring joy. The birds awoke fresh from their slumber, vivifying the morning with their merry, impetuous voices. The crows flew about croaking, and flapping their wings heavily. The black rooks jumped about in the winter wheat, conversing in abrupt accents. Somewhere the orioles whistled mournfully, a note of alarm in their song. The larks sang, soaring up to meet the sun. The distance opened up, the nocturnal shadows lifting from the hills. "Sometimes a man will speak and speak to you, and you won't understand him until he succeeds in telling you some simple word; and this one word will suddenly lighten up everything," the mother said thoughtfully. "There's that sick man, for instance; I've heard and known myself how the workingmen in the factories and everywhere are squeezed; but you get used to it from childhood on, and it doesn't touch your heart much. But he suddenly tells you such an outrageous, vile thing! O Lord! Can it be that people give their whole lives away to work in order that the masters may permit themselves pleasure? That's without justification." The thoughts of the mother were arrested by this fact. Its dull, impudent gleam threw light upon a series of similar facts, at one time known to her, but now forgotten. "It's evident that they are satiated with everything. I know one country officer who compelled the peasants to salute his horse when it was led through the village; and he arrested everyone who failed to salute it. Now, what need had he of that? It's impossible to understand." After a pause she sighed: "The poor people are stupid from poverty, and the rich from greed." Sofya began to hum a song bold as the morning. CHAPTER V The life of Nilovna flowed on with strange placidity. This calmness sometimes astonished her. There was her son immured in prison. She knew that a severe sentence awaited him, yet every time the idea of it came to her mind her thoughts strayed to Andrey, Fedya, and an endless series of other people she had never seen, but only heard of. The figure of her son appeared to her absorbing all the people into his own destiny. The contemplative feeling aroused in her involuntarily and unnoticeably diverted her inward gaze away from him to all sides. Like thin, uneven rays it touched upon everything, tried to throw light everywhere, and make one picture of the whole. Her mind was hindered from dwelling upon some one thing. Sofya soon went off somewhere, and reappeared in about five days, merry and vivacious. Then, in a few hours, she vanished again, and returned within a couple of weeks. It seemed as if she were borne along in life in wide circles. Nikolay, always occupied, lived a monotonous, methodical existence. At eight o'clock in the morning he drank tea, read the newspapers, and recounted the news to the mother. He repeated the speeches of the merchants in the Douma without malice, and clearly depicted the life in the city. Listening to him the mother saw with transparent clearness the mechanism of this life pitilessly grinding the people in the millstones of money. At nine o'clock he went off to the office. She tidied the rooms, prepared dinner, washed herself, put on a clean dress, and then sat in her room to examine the pictures and the books. She had already learned to read, but the effort of reading quickly exhausted her; and she ceased to understand the meaning of the words. But the pictures were a constant astonishment to her. They opened up before her a clear, almost tangible world of new and marvelous things. Huge cities arose before her, beautiful structures, machines, ships, monuments, and infinite wealth, created by the people, overwhelming the mind by the variety of nature's products. Life widened endlessly; each day brought some new, huge wonders. The awakened hungry soul of the woman was more and more strongly aroused to the multitude of riches in the world, its countless beauties. She especially loved to look through the great folios of the zoölogical atlas, and although the text was written in a foreign language, it gave her the clearest conception of the beauty, wealth, and vastness of the earth. "It's an immense world," she said to Nikolay at dinner. "Yes, and yet the people are crowded for space." The insects, particularly the butterflies, astonished her most. "What beauty, Nikolay Ivanovich," she observed. "And how much of this fascinating beauty there is everywhere, but all covered up from us; it all flies by without our seeing it. People toss about, they know nothing, they are unable to take delight in anything, they have no inclination for it. How many could take happiness to themselves if they knew how rich the earth is, how many wonderful things live in it!" Nikolay listened to her raptures, smiled, and brought her new illustrated books. In the evening visitors often gathered in his house--Alexey Vasilyevich, a handsome man, pale-faced, black-bearded, sedate, and taciturn; Roman Petrovich, a pimply, round-headed individual always smacking his lips regretfully; Ivan Danilovich, a short, lean fellow with a pointed beard and thin hair, impetuous, vociferous, and sharp as an awl, and Yegor, always joking with his comrades about his sickness. Sometimes other people were present who had come from various distant cities. The long conversations always turned on one and the same thing, on the working people of the world. The comrades discussed the workingmen, got into arguments about them, became heated, waved their hands, and drank much tea; while Nikolay, in the noise of the conversation, silently composed proclamations. Then he read them to the comrades, who copied them on the spot in printed letters. The mother carefully collected the pieces of the torn, rough copies, and burned them. She poured out tea for them, and wondered at the warmth with which they discussed life and the working-people, the means whereby to sow truth among them the sooner and the better, and how to elevate their spirit. These problems were always agitating the comrades; their lives revolved about them. Often they angrily disagreed, blamed one another for something, got offended, and again discussed. The mother felt that she knew the life of the workingmen better than these people, and saw more clearly than they the enormity of the task they assumed. She could look upon them with the somewhat melancholy indulgence of a grown-up person toward children who play man and wife without understanding the drama of the relation. Sometimes Sashenka came. She never stayed long, and always spoke in a businesslike way without smiling. She did not once fail to ask on leaving how Pavel Mikhaylovich was. "Is he well?" she would ask. "Thank God! So, so. He's in good spirits." "Give him my regards," the girl would request, and then disappear. Sometimes the mother complained to Sashenka because Pavel was detained so long and no date was yet set for his trial. Sashenka looked gloomy, and maintained silence, her fingers twitching. Nilovna was tempted to say to her: "My dear girl, why, I know you love him, I know." But Sashenka's austere face, her compressed lips, and her dry, businesslike manner, which seemed to betoken a desire for silence as soon as possible, forbade any demonstration of sentiment. With a sigh the mother mutely clasped the hand that the girl extended to her, and thought: "My unhappy girl!" Once Natasha came. She showed great delight at seeing the mother, kissed her, and among other things announced to her quietly, as if she had just thought of the thing: "My mother died. Poor woman, she's dead!" She wiped her eyes with a rapid gesture of her hands, and continued: "I'm sorry for her. She was not yet fifty. She had a long life before her still. But when you look at it from the other side you can't help thinking that death is easier than such a life--always alone, a stranger to everybody, needed by no one, scared by the shouts of my father. Can you call that living? People live waiting for something good, and she had nothing to expect except insults." "You're right, Natasha," said the mother musingly. "People live expecting some good, and if there's nothing to expect, what sort of a life is it?" Kindly stroking Natasha's hand, she asked: "So you're alone now?" "Alone!" the girl rejoined lightly. The mother was silent, then suddenly remarked with a smile: "Never mind! A good person does not live alone. People will always attach themselves to a good person." Natasha was now a teacher in a little town where there was a textile mill, and Nilovna occasionally procured illegal books, proclamations, and newspapers for her. The distribution of literature, in fact, became the mother's occupation. Several times a month, dressed as a nun or as a peddler of laces or small linen articles, as a rich merchant's wife or a religious pilgrim, she rode or walked about with a sack on her back, or a valise in her hand. Everywhere, in the train, in the steamers, in hotels and inns, she behaved simply and unobtrusively. She was the first to enter into conversations with strangers, fearlessly drawing attention to herself by her kind, sociable talk and the confident manner of an experienced person who has seen and heard much. She liked to speak to people, liked to listen to their stories of life, their complaints, their perplexities, and lamentations. Her heart was bathed in joy each time she noticed in anybody poignant discontent with life, that discontent which, protesting against the blows of fate, earnestly seeks to find an answer to its questions. Before her the picture of human life unrolled itself ever wider and more varicolored, that restless, anxious life passed in the struggle to fill the stomach. Everywhere she clearly saw the coarse, bare striving, insolent in its openness, deceiving man, robbing him, pressing out of him as much sap as possible, draining him of his very life-blood. She realized that there was plenty of everything upon earth, but that the people were in want, and lived half starved, surrounded by inexhaustible wealth. In the cities stood churches filled with gold and silver, not needed by God, and at the entrance to the churches shivered the beggars vainly awaiting a little copper coin to be thrust into their hands. Formerly she had seen this, too--rich churches, priestly vestments sewed with gold threads, and the hovels of the poor, their ignominious rags. But at that time the thing had seemed natural; now the contrast was irreconcilable and insulting to the poor, to whom, she knew, the churches were both nearer and more necessary than to the rich. From the pictures and stories of Christ, she knew also that he was a friend of the poor, that he dressed simply. But in the churches, where poverty came to him for consolation, she saw him nailed to the cross with insolent gold, she saw silks and satins flaunting in the face of want. The words of Rybin occurred to her: "They have mutilated even our God for us, they have turned everything in their hands against us. In the churches they set up a scarecrow before us. They have dressed God up in falsehood and calumny; they have distorted His face in order to destroy our souls!" Without being herself aware of it, she prayed less; yet, at the same time, she meditated more and more upon Christ and the people who, without mentioning his name, as though ignorant of him, lived, it seemed to her, according to his will, and, like him, regarded the earth as the kingdom of the poor, and wanted to divide all the wealth of the earth among the poor. Her reflections grew in her soul, deepening and embracing everything she saw and heard. They grew and assumed the bright aspect of a prayer, suffusing an even glow over the entire dark world, the whole of life, and all people. And it seemed to her that Christ himself, whom she had always loved with a perplexed love, with a complicated feeling in which fear was closely bound up with hope, and joyful emotion with melancholy, now came nearer to her, and was different from what he had been. His position was loftier, and he was more clearly visible to her. His aspect turned brighter and more cheerful. Now his eyes smiled on her with assurance, and with a live inward power, as if he had in reality risen to life for mankind, washed and vivified by the hot blood lavishly shed in his name. Yet those who had lost their blood modestly refrained from mentioning the name of the unfortunate friend of the people. The mother always returned to Nikolay from her travels delightfully exhilarated by what she had seen and heard on the road, bold and satisfied with the work she had accomplished. "It's good to go everywhere, and to see much," she said to Nikolay in the evening. "You understand how life is arranged. They brush the people aside and fling them to the edge. The people, hurt and wounded, keep moving about, even though they don't want to, and though they keep thinking: 'What for? Why do they drive us away? Why must we go hungry when there is so much of everything? And how much intellect there is everywhere! Nevertheless, we must remain in stupidity and darkness. And where is He, the merciful God, in whose eyes there are no rich nor poor, but all are children dear to His heart.' The people are gradually revolting against this life. They feel that untruth will stifle them if they don't take thought of themselves." And in her leisure hours she sat down to the books, and again looked over the pictures, each time finding something new, ever widening the panorama of life before her eyes, unfolding the beauties of nature and the vigorous creative capacity of man. Nikolay often found her poring over the pictures. He would smile and always tell her something wonderful. Struck by man's daring, she would ask him incredulously, "Is it possible?" Quietly, with unshakable confidence in the truth of his prophecies, Nikolay peered with his kind eyes through his glasses into the mother's face, and told her stories of the future. "There is no measure to the desires of man; and his power is inexhaustible," he said. "But the world, after all, is still very slow in acquiring spiritual wealth. Because nowadays everyone desiring to free himself from dependence is compelled to hoard, not knowledge but money. However, when the people will have exterminated greed and will have freed themselves from the bondage of enslaving labor----" She listened to him with strained attention. Though she but rarely understood the meaning of his words, yet the calm faith animating them penetrated her more and more deeply. "There are extremely few free men in the world--that's its misfortune," he said. This the mother understood. She knew men who had emancipated themselves from greed and evil; she understood that if there were more such people, the dark, incomprehensible, and awful face of life would become more kindly and simple, better and brighter. "A man must perforce be cruel," said Nikolay dismally. The mother nodded her head in confirmation. She recalled the sayings of the Little Russian. CHAPTER VI Once Nikolay, usually so punctual, came from his work much later than was his wont, and said, excitedly rubbing his hands: "Do you know, Nilovna, to-day at the visiting hour one of our comrades disappeared from prison? But we have not succeeded in finding out who." The mother's body swayed, overpowered by excitement. She sat down on a chair and asked with forced quiet: "Maybe it's Pasha?" "Possibly. But the question is how to find him, how to help him keep in concealment. Just now I was walking about the streets to see if I couldn't detect him. It was a stupid thing of me to do, but I had to do something. I'm going out again." "I'll go, too," said the mother, rising. "You go to Yegor, and see if he doesn't know anything about it," Nikolay suggested, and quickly walked away. She threw a kerchief on her head, and, seized with hope, swiftly sped along the streets. Her eyes dimmed and her heart beat faster. Her head drooped; she saw nothing about her. It was hot. The mother lost breath, and when she reached the stairway leading to Yegor's quarters, she stopped, too faint to proceed farther. She turned around and uttered an amazed, low cry, closing her eyes for a second. It seemed to her that Nikolay Vyesovshchikov was standing at the gate, his hands thrust into his pockets, regarding her with a smile. But when she looked again nobody was there. "I imagined I saw him," she said to herself, slowly walking up the steps and listening. She caught the sound of slow steps, and stopping at a turn in the stairway, she bent over to look below, and again saw the pockmarked face smiling up at her. "Nikolay! Nikolay!" she whispered, and ran down to meet him. Her heart, stung by disappointment, ached for her son. "Go, go!" he answered in an undertone, waving his hand. She quickly ran up the stairs, walked into Yegor's room, and found him lying on the sofa. She gasped in a whisper: "Nikolay is out of prison!" "Which Nikolay?" asked Yegor, raising his head from the pillow. "There are two there." "Vyesovshchikov. He's coming here!" "Fine! But I can't rise to meet him." Vyesovshchikov had already come into the room. He locked the door after him, and taking off his hat laughed quietly, stroking his hair. Yegor raised himself on his elbows. "Please, signor, make yourself at home," he said with a nod. Without saying anything, a broad smile on his face, Nikolay walked up to the mother and grasped her hand. "If I had not seen you I might as well have returned to prison. I know nobody in the city. If I had gone to the suburbs they would have seized me at once. So I walked about, and thought what a fool I was--why had I escaped? Suddenly I see Nilovna running; off I am, after you." "How did you make your escape?" Vyesovshchikov sat down awkwardly on the edge of the sofa and pressed Yegor's hand. "I don't know how," he said in an embarrassed manner. "Simply a chance. I was taking my airing, and the prisoners began to beat the overseer of the jail. There's one overseer there who was expelled from the gendarmerie for stealing. He's a spy, an informer, and tortures the life out of everybody. They gave him a drubbing, there was a hubbub, the overseers got frightened and blew their whistles. I noticed the gates open. I walked up and saw an open square and the city. It drew me forward and I went away without haste, as if in sleep. I walked a little and bethought myself: 'Where am I to go?' I looked around and the gates of the prison were already closed. I began to feel awkward. I was sorry for the comrades in general. It was stupid somehow. I hadn't thought of going away." "Hm!" said Yegor. "Why, sir, you should have turned back, respectfully knocked at the prison door, and begged for admission. 'Excuse me,' you should have said,'I was tempted; but here I am.'" "Yes," continued Nikolay, smiling; "that would have been stupid, too, I understand. But for all that, it's not nice to the other comrades. I walk away without saying anything to anybody. Well, I kept on going, and I came across a child's funeral. I followed the hearse with my head bent down, looking at nobody. I sat down in the cemetery and enjoyed the fresh air. One thought came into my head----" "One?" asked Yegor. Fetching breath, he added: "I suppose it won't feel crowded there." Vyesovshchikov laughed without taking offense, and shook his head. "Well, my brain's not so empty now as it used to be. And you, Yegor Ivanovich, still sick?" "Each one does what he can. No one has a right to interfere with him." Yegor evaded an answer; he coughed hoarsely. "Continue." "Then I went to a public museum. I walked about there, looked around, and kept thinking all the time: 'Where am I to go next?' I even began to get angry with myself. Besides, I got dreadfully hungry. I walked into the street and kept on trotting. I felt very down in the mouth. And then I saw police officers looking at everybody closely. 'Well,' thinks I to myself, 'with my face I'll arrive at God's judgment seat pretty soon.' Suddenly Nilovna came running opposite me. I turned about, and off I went after her. That's all." "And I didn't even see you," said the mother guiltily. "The comrades are probably uneasy about me. They must be wondering where I am," said Nikolay, scratching his head. "Aren't you sorry for the officials? I guess they're uneasy, too," teased Yegor. He moved heavily on the sofa, and said seriously and solicitously: "However, jokes aside, we must hide you--by no means as easy as pleasant. If I could get up--" His breath gave out. He clapped his hand to his breast, and with a weak movement began to rub it. "You've gotten very sick, Yegor Ivanovich," said Nikolay gloomily, drooping his head. The mother sighed and cast an anxious glance about the little, crowded room. "That's my own affair. Granny, you ask about Pavel. No reason to feign indifference," said Yegor. Vyesovshchikov smiled broadly. "Pavel's all right; he's strong; he's like an elder among us; he converses with the officials and gives commands; he's respected. There's good reason for it." Vlasova nodded her head, listening, and looked sidewise at the swollen, bluish face of Yegor, congealed to immobility, devoid of expression. It seemed strangely flat, only the eyes flashed with animation and cheerfulness. "I wish you'd give me something to eat. I'm frightfully hungry," Nikolay cried out unexpectedly, and smiled sheepishly. "Granny, there's bread on the shelf--give it to him. Then go out in the corridor, to the second door on the left, and knock. A woman will open it, and you'll tell her to snatch up everything she has to eat and come here." "Why everything?" protested Nikolay. "Don't get excited. It's not much--maybe nothing at all." The mother went out and rapped at the door. She strained her ears for an answering sound, while thinking of Yegor with dread and grief. He was dying, she knew. "Who is it?" somebody asked on the other side of the door. "It's from Yegor Ivanovich," the mother whispered. "He asked you to come to him." "I'll come at once," the woman answered without opening the door. The mother waited a moment, and knocked again. This time the door opened quickly, and a tall woman wearing glasses stepped out into the hall, rapidly tidying the ruffled sleeves of her waist. She asked the mother harshly: "What do you want?" "I'm from Yegor Ivanovich." "Aha! Come! Oh, yes, I know you!" the woman exclaimed in a low voice. "How do you do? It's dark here." Nilovna looked at her and remembered that this woman had come to Nikolay's home on rare occasions. "All comrades!" flashed through her mind. The woman compelled Nilovna to walk in front. "Is he feeling bad?" "Yes; he's lying down. He asked you to bring something to eat." "Well, he doesn't need anything to eat." When they walked into Yegor's room they were met by the words: "I'm preparing to join my forefathers, my friend. Liudmila Vasilyevna, this man walked away from prison without the permission of the authorities--a bit of shameless audacity. Before all, feed him, then hide him somewhere for a day or two." The woman nodded her head and looked carefully at the sick man's face. "Stop your chattering, Yegor," she said sternly. "You know it's bad for you. You ought to have sent for me at once, as soon as they came. And I see you didn't take your medicine. What do you mean by such negligence? You yourself say it's easier for you to breathe after a dose. Comrade, come to my place. They'll soon call for Yegor from the hospital." "So I'm to go to the hospital, after all?" asked Yegor, puckering up his face. "Yes, I'll be there with you." "There, too?" "Hush!" As she talked she adjusted the blanket on Yegor's breast, looked fixedly at Nikolay, and with her eyes measured the quantity of medicine in the bottle. She spoke evenly, not loud, but in a resonant voice. Her movements were easy, her face was pale, with large blue circles around her eyes. Her black eyebrows almost met at the bridge of the nose, deepening the setting of her dark, stern eyes. Her face did not please the mother; it seemed haughty in its sternness and immobility, and her eyes were rayless. She always spoke in a tone of command. "We are going away," she continued. "I'll return soon. Give Yegor a tablespoon of this medicine." "Very well," said the mother. "And don't let him speak." She walked away, taking Nikolay with her. "Admirable woman!" said Yegor with a sigh. "Magnificent woman! You ought to be working with her, granny. You see, she gets very much worn out. It's she that does all the printing for us." "Don't speak. Here, you'd better take this medicine," the mother said gently. He swallowed the medicine and continued, for some reason screwing up one eye: "I'll die all the same, even if I don't speak." He looked into the mother's face with his other eye, and his lips slowly formed themselves into a smile. The mother bent her head, a sharp sensation of pity bringing tears into her eyes. "Never mind, granny. It's natural. The pleasure of living carries with it the obligation to die." The mother put her hand on his, and again said softly: "Keep quiet, please!" He shut his eyes as if listening to the rattle in his breast, and went on stubbornly. "It's senseless to keep quiet, granny. What'll I gain by keeping quiet? A few superfluous seconds of agony. And I'll lose the great pleasure of chattering with a good person. I think that in the next world there aren't such good people as here." The mother uneasily interrupted him. "The lady will come, and she'll scold me because you talk." "She's no lady. She's a revolutionist, the daughter of a village scribe, a teacher. She is sure to scold you anyhow, granny. She scolds everybody always." And, slowly moving his lips with an effort, Yegor began to relate the life history of his neighbor. His eyes smiled. The mother saw that he was bantering her purposely. As she regarded his face, covered with a moist blueness, she thought distressfully that he was near to death. Liudmila entered, and carefully closing the door after her, said, turning to Vlasova: "Your friend ought to change his clothes without fail, and leave here as soon as possible. So go at once; get him some clothes, and bring them here. I'm sorry Sofya's not here. Hiding people is her specialty." "She's coming to-morrow," remarked Vlasova, throwing her shawl over her shoulders. Every time she was given a commission the strong desire seized her to accomplish it promptly and well, and she was unable to think of anything but the task before her. Now, lowering her brows with an air of preoccupation, she asked zealously: "How should we dress him, do you think?" "It's all the same. It's night, you know." "At night it's worse. There are less people on the street, and the police spy around more; and, you know, he's rather awkward." Yegor laughed hoarsely. "You're a young girl yet, granny." "May I visit you in the hospital?" He nodded his head, coughing. Liudmila glanced at the mother with her dark eyes and suggested: "Do you want to take turns with me in attending him? Yes? Very well. And now go quickly." She vigorously seized Vlasova by the hand, with perfect good nature, however, and led her out of the door. "You mustn't be offended," she said softly, "because I dismiss you so abruptly. I know it's rude; but it's harmful for him to speak, and I still have hopes of his recovery." She pressed her hands together until the bones cracked. Her eyelids drooped wearily over her eyes. The explanation disturbed the mother. She murmured: "Don't talk that way. The idea! Who thought of rudeness? I'm going; good-by." "Look out for the spies!" whispered the woman. "I know," the mother answered with some pride. She stopped for a minute outside the gate to look around sharply under the pretext of adjusting her kerchief. She was already able to distinguish spies in a street crowd almost immediately. She recognized the exaggerated carelessness of their gait, their strained attempt to be free in their gestures, the expression of tedium on their faces, the wary, guilty glimmer of their restless, unpleasantly sharp gaze badly hidden behind their feigned candor. This time she did not notice any familiar faces, and walked along the street without hastening. She took a cab, and gave orders to be driven to the market place. When buying the clothes for Nikolay she bargained vigorously with the salespeople, all the while scolding at her drunken husband whom she had to dress anew every month. The tradespeople paid little attention to her talk, but she herself was greatly pleased with her ruse. On the road she had calculated that the police would, of course, understand the necessity for Nikolay to change his clothes, and would send spies to the market. With such naïve precautions, she returned to Yegor's quarters; then she had to escort Nikolay to the outskirts of the city. They took different sides of the street, and it was amusing to the mother to see how Vyesovshchikov strode along heavily, with bent head, his legs getting tangled in the long flaps of his russet-colored coat, his hat falling over his nose. In one of the deserted streets, Sashenka met them, and the mother, taking leave of Vyesovshchikov with a nod of her head, turned toward home with a sigh of relief. "And Pasha is in prison with Andriusha!" she thought sadly. Nikolay met her with an anxious exclamation: "You know that Yegor is in a very bad way, very bad! He was taken to the hospital. Liudmila was here. She asks you to come to her there." "At the hospital?" Adjusting his eyeglasses with a nervous gesture, Nikolay helped her on with her jacket and pressed her hand in a dry, hot grasp. His voice was low and tremulous. "Yes. Take this package with you. Have you disposed of Vyesovshchikov all right?" "Yes, all right." "I'll come to Yegor, too!" The mother's head was in a whirl with fatigue, and Nikolay's emotion aroused in her a sad premonition of the drama's end. "So he's dying--he's dying!" The dark thought knocked at her brain heavily and dully. But when she entered the bright, tidy little room of the hospital and saw Yegor sitting on the pallet propped against the wide bosom of the pillow, and heard him laugh with zest, she was at once relieved. She paused at the door, smiling, and listened to Yegor talk with the physician in a hoarse but lively voice. "A cure is a reform." "Don't talk nonsense!" the physician cried officiously in a thin voice. "And I'm a revolutionist! I detest reforms!" The physician, thoughtfully pulling his beard, felt the dropsical swelling on Yegor's face. The mother knew him well. He was Ivan Danilovich, one of the close comrades of Nikolay. She walked up to Yegor, who thrust forth his tongue by way of welcome to her. The physician turned around. "Ah, Nilovna! How are you? Sit down. What have you in your hand?" "It must be books." "He mustn't read." "The doctor wants to make an idiot of me," Yegor complained. "Keep quiet!" the physician commanded, and began to write in a little book. The short, heavy breaths, accompanied by rattling in his throat, fairly tore themselves from Yegor's breast, and his face became covered with thin perspiration. Slowly raising his swollen hand, he wiped his forehead with the palm. The strange immobility of his swollen cheeks denaturalized his broad, good face, all the features of which disappeared under the dead, bluish mask. Only his eyes, deeply sunk beneath the swellings, looked out clear and smiling benevolently. "Oh, Science, I'm tired! May I lie down?" "No, you mayn't." "But I'm going to lie down after you go." "Nilovna, please don't let him. It's bad for him." The mother nodded. The physician hurried off with short steps. Yegor threw back his head, closed his eyes and sank into a torpor, motionless save for the twitching of his fingers. The white walls of the little room seemed to radiate a dry coldness and a pale, faceless sadness. Through the large window peered the tufted tops of the lime trees, amid whose dark, dusty foliage yellow stains were blazing, the cold touches of approaching autumn. "Death is coming to me slowly, reluctantly," said Yegor without moving and without opening his eyes. "He seems to be a little sorry for me. I was such a fine, sociable chap." "You'd better keep quiet, Yegor Ivanovich!" the mother bade, quietly stroking his hand. "Wait, granny, I'll be silent soon." Losing breath every once in a while, enunciating the words with a mighty effort, he continued his talk, interrupted by long spells of faintness. "It's splendid to have you with me. It's pleasant to see your face, granny, and your eyes so alert, and your _naïveté_. 'How will it end?' I ask myself. It's sad to think that the prison, exile, and all sorts of vile outrages await you as everybody else. Are you afraid of prison?" "No," answered the mother softly. "But after all the prison is a mean place. It's the prison that knocked me up. To tell you the truth, I don't want to die." "Maybe you won't die yet," the mother was about to say, but a look at his face froze the words on her lips. "If I hadn't gotten sick I could have worked yet, not badly; but if you can't work there's nothing to live for, and it's stupid to live." "That's true, but it's no consolation." Andrey's words flashed into the mother's mind, and she heaved a deep sigh. She was greatly fatigued by the day, and hungry. The monotonous, humid, hoarse whisper of the sick man filled the room and crept helplessly along the smooth, cold, shining walls. At the windows the dark tops of the lime trees trembled quietly. It was growing dusk, and Yegor's face on the pillow turned dark. "How bad I feel," he said. He closed his eyes and became silent. The mother listened to his breathing, looked around, and sat for a few minutes motionless, seized by a cold sensation of sadness. Finally she dozed off. The muffled sound of a door being carefully shut awakened her, and she saw the kind, open eyes of Yegor. "I fell asleep; excuse me," she said quietly. "And you excuse me," he answered, also quietly. At the door was heard a rustle and Liudmila's voice. "They sit in the darkness and whisper. Where is the knob?" The room trembled and suddenly became filled with a white, unfriendly light. In the middle of the room stood Liudmila, all black, tall, straight, and serious. Yegor transferred his glance to her, and making a great effort to move his body, raised his hand to his breast. "What's the matter?" exclaimed Liudmila, running up to him. He looked at the mother with fixed eyes, and now they seemed large and strangely bright. "Wait!" he whispered. Opening his mouth wide, he raised his head and stretched his hand forward. The mother carefully held it up and caught her breath as she looked into his face. With a convulsive and powerful movement of his neck he flung his head back, and said aloud: "Give me air!" A quiver ran through his body; his head dropped limply on his shoulder, and in his wide open eyes the cold light of the lamp burning over the bed was reflected dully. "My darling!" whispered the mother, firmly pressing his hand, which suddenly grew heavy. Liudmila slowly walked away from the bed, stopped at the window and stared into space. "He's dead!" she said in an unusually loud voice unfamiliar to Vlasova. She bent down, put her elbows on the window sill, and repeated in dry, startled tones: "He's dead! He died calmly, like a man, without complaint." And suddenly, as if struck a blow on the head, she dropped faintly on her knees, covered her face, and gave vent to dull, stifled groans. CHAPTER VII The mother folded Yegor's hands over his breast and adjusted his head, which was strangely warm, on the pillow. Then silently wiping her eyes, she went to Liudmila, bent over her, and quietly stroked her thick hair. The woman slowly turned around to her, her dull eyes widened in a sickly way. She rose to her feet, and with trembling lips whispered: "I've known him for a long time. We were in exile together. We went there together on foot, we sat in prison together; at times it was intolerable, disgusting; many fell in spirit." Her dry, loud groans stuck in her throat. She overcame them with an effort, and bringing her face nearer to the mother's she continued in a quick whisper, moaning without tears: "Yet he was unconquerably jolly. He joked and laughed, and covered up his suffering in a manly way, always striving to encourage the weak. He was always good, alert, kind. There, in Siberia, idleness depraves people, and often calls forth ugly feelings toward life. How he mastered such feelings! What a comrade he was! If you only knew. His own life was hard and tormented; but I know that nobody ever heard him complain, not a soul--never! Here was I, nearer to him than others. I'm greatly indebted to his heart, to his mind. He gave me all he could of it; and though exhausted, he never asked either kindness or attention in return." She walked up to Yegor, bent down and kissed him. Her voice was husky as she said mournfully: "Comrade, my dear, dear friend, I thank you with all my heart! Good-by. I shall work as you worked--unassailed by doubt--all my life--good-by!" The dry, sharp groans shook her body, and gasping for breath she laid her head on the bed at Yegor's feet. The mother wept silent tears which seared her cheeks. For some reason she tried to restrain them. She wanted to fondle Liudmila, and wanted to speak about Yegor with words of love and grief. She looked through her tears at his swollen face, at his eyes calmly covered by his drooping eyelids as in sleep, and at his dark lips set in a light, serene smile. It was quiet, and a bleak brightness pervaded the room. Ivan Danilovich entered, as always, with short, hasty steps. He suddenly stopped in the middle of the room, and thrust his hands into his pockets with a quick gesture. "Did it happen long ago?" His voice was loud and nervous. Neither woman replied. He quietly swung about, and wiping his forehead went to Yegor, pressed his hand, and stepped to one side. "It's not strange--with his heart. It might have happened six months ago." His voice, high-pitched and jarringly loud for the occasion, suddenly broke off. Leaning his back against the wall, he twisted his beard with nimble fingers, and winking his eyes, rapidly looked at the group by the bed. "One more!" he muttered. Liudmila rose and walked over to the window. The mother raised her head and glanced around with a sigh. A minute afterwards they all three stood at the open window, pressing close against one another, and looked at the dusky face of the autumn night. On the black tops of the trees glittered the stars, endlessly deepening the distance of the sky. Liudmila took the mother by the hand, and silently pressed her head to her shoulders. The physician nervously bit his lips and wiped his eyeglasses with his handkerchief. In the stillness beyond the window the nocturnal noise of the city heaved wearily, and cold air blew on their faces and shoulders. Liudmila trembled; the mother saw tears running down her cheeks. From the corridor of the hospital floated confused, dismal sounds. The three stood motionless at the window, looking silently into the darkness. The mother felt herself not needed, and carefully freeing her hand, went to the door, bowing to Yegor. "Are you going?" the physician asked softly without looking around. "Yes." In the street she thought with pity of Liudmila, remembering her scant tears. She couldn't even have a good cry. Then she pictured to herself Liudmila and the physician in the extremely light white room, the dead eyes of Yegor behind them. A compassion for all people oppressed her. She sighed heavily, and hastened her pace, driven along by her tumultuous feelings. "I must hurry," she thought in obedience to a sad but encouraging power that jostled her from within. The whole of the following day the mother was busy with preparations for the funeral. In the evening when she, Nikolay, and Sofya were drinking tea, quietly talking about Yegor, Sashenka appeared, strangely brimming over with good spirits, her cheeks brilliantly red, her eyes beaming happily. She seemed to be filled with some joyous hope. Her animation contrasted sharply with the mournful gloom of the others. The discordant note disturbed them and dazzled them like a fire that suddenly flashes in the darkness. Nikolay thoughtfully struck his fingers on the table and smiled quietly. "You're not like yourself to-day, Sasha." "Perhaps," she laughed happily. The mother looked at her in mute remonstrance, and Sofya observed in a tone of admonishment: "And we were talking about Yegor Ivanovich." "What a wonderful fellow, isn't he?" she exclaimed. "Modest, proof against doubt, he probably never yielded to sorrow. I have never seen him without a joke on his lips; and what a worker! He is an artist of the revolution, a great master, who skillfully manipulates revolutionary thoughts. With what simplicity and power he always draws his pictures of falsehood, violence and untruth! And what a capacity he has for tempering the horrible with his gay humor which does not diminish the force of facts but only the more brightly illumines his inner thought! Always droll! I am greatly indebted to him, and I shall never forget his merry eyes, his fun. And I shall always feel the effect of his ideas upon me in the time of my doubts--I love him!" She spoke in a moderated voice, with a melancholy smile in her eyes. But the incomprehensible fire of her gaze was not extinguished; her exultation was apparent to everybody. People love their own feelings--sometimes the very feelings that are harmful to them--are enamored of them, and often derive keen pleasure even from grief, a pleasure that corrodes the heart. Nikolay, the mother, and Sofya were unwilling to let the sorrowful mood produced by the death of their comrade give way to the joy brought in by Sasha. Unconsciously defending their melancholy right to feed on their sadness, they tried to impose their feelings on the girl. "And now he's dead," announced Sofya, watching her carefully. Sasha glanced around quickly, with a questioning look. She knit her eyebrows and lowered her head. She was silent for a short time, smoothing her hair with slow strokes of her hand. "He's dead?" She again cast a searching glance into their faces. "It's hard for me to reconcile myself to the idea." "But it's a fact," said Nikolay with a smile. Sasha arose, walked up and down the room, and suddenly stopping, said in a strange voice: "What does 'to die' signify? What died? Did my respect for Yegor die? My love for him, a comrade? The memory of his mind's labor? Did that labor die? Did all our impressions of him as of a hero disappear without leaving a trace? Did all this die? This best in him will never die out of me, I know. It seems to me we're in too great a hurry to say of a man 'he's dead.' That's the reason we too soon forget that a man never dies if we don't wish our impressions of his manhood, his self-denying toil for the triumph of truth and happiness to disappear. We forget that everything should always be alive in living hearts. Don't be in a hurry to bury the eternally alive, the ever luminous, along with a man's body. The church is destroyed, but God is immortal." Carried away by her emotions she sat down, leaning her elbows on the table, and continued more thoughtfully in a lower voice, looking smilingly through mist-covered eyes at the faces of the comrades: "Maybe I'm talking nonsense. But life intoxicates me by its wonderful complexity, by the variety of its phenomena, which at times seem like a miracle to me. Perhaps we are too sparing in the expenditure of our feelings. We live a great deal in our thoughts, and that spoils us to a certain extent. We estimate, but we don't feel." "Did anything good happen to you?" asked Sofya with a smile. "Yes," said Sasha, nodding her head. "I had a whole night's talk with Vyesovshchikov. I didn't use to like him. He seemed rude and dull. Undoubtedly that's what he was. A dark, immovable irritation at everybody lived in him. He always used to place himself, as it were, like a dead weight in the center of things, and wrathfully say, 'I, I, I.' There was something bourgeois in this, low, and exasperating." She smiled, and again took in everybody with her burning look. "Now he says: 'Comrades'--and you ought to hear how he says it, with what a stirring, tender love. He has grown marvelously simple and open-hearted, and possessed with a desire to work. He has found himself, he has measured his power, and knows what he is not. But the main thing is, a true comradely feeling has been born in him, a broad, loving comradeship, which smiles in the face of every difficulty in life." Vlasova listened to Sasha attentively. She was glad to see this girl, always so stern, now softened, cheerful, and happy. Yet from some deeps of her soul arose the jealous thought: "And how about Pasha?" "He's entirely absorbed in thoughts of the comrades," continued Sasha. "And do you know of what he assures me? Of the necessity of arranging an escape for them. He says it's a very simple, easy matter." Sofya raised her head, and said animatedly: "And what do _you_ think, Sasha? Is it feasible?" The mother trembled as she set a cup of tea on the table. Sasha knit her brows, her animation gone from her. After a moment's silence, she said in a serious voice, but smiling in joyous confusion: "_He's_ convinced. If everything is really as he says, we ought to try. It's our duty." She blushed, dropped into a chair, and lapsed into silence. "My dear, dear girl!" the mother thought, smiling. Sofya also smiled, and Nikolay, looking tenderly into Sasha's face, laughed quietly. The girl raised her head with a stern glance for all. Then she paled, and her eyes flashed, and she said dryly, the offense she felt evident in her voice: "You're laughing. I understand you. You consider me personally interested in the case, don't you?" "Why, Sasha?" asked Sofya, rising and going over to her. Agitated, pale, the girl continued: "But I decline. I'll not take any part in deciding the question if you consider it." "Stop, Sasha," said Nikolay calmly. The mother understood the girl. She went to her and kissed her silently on her head. Sasha seized her hand, leaned her cheek on it, and raised her reddened face, looking into the mother's eyes, troubled and happy. The mother silently stroked her hair. She felt sad at heart. Sofya seated herself at Sasha's side, her arm over her shoulder, and said, smiling into the girl's eyes: "You're a strange person." "Yes, I think I've grown foolish," Sasha acknowledged. "But I don't like shadows." "That'll do," said Nikolay seriously, but immediately followed up the admonition by the businesslike remark: "There can't be two opinions as to the escape, if it's possible to arrange it. But before everything, we must know whether the comrades in prison want it." Sasha drooped her head. Sofya, lighting a cigarette, looked at her brother, and with a broad sweep of her arm dropped the match in a corner. "How is it possible they should not want it?" asked the mother with a sigh. Sofya nodded to her, smiling, and walked over to the window. The mother could not understand the failure of the others to respond, and looked at them in perplexity. She wanted so much to hear more about the possibility of an escape. "I must see Vyesovshchikov," said Nikolay. "All right. To-morrow I'll tell you when and where," replied Sasha. "What is he going to do?" asked Sofya, pacing through the room. "It's been decided to make him compositor in a new printing place. Until then he'll stay with the forester." Sasha's brow lowered. Her face assumed its usual severe expression. Her voice sounded caustic. Nikolay walked up to the mother, who was washing cups, and said to her: "You'll see Pasha day after to-morrow. Hand him a note when you're there. Do you understand? We must know." "I understand. I understand," the mother answered quickly. "I'll deliver it to him all right. That's my business." "I'm going," Sasha announced, and silently shook hands with everybody. She strode away, straight and dry-eyed, with a peculiarly heavy tread. "Poor girl!" said Sofya softly. "Ye-es," Nikolay drawled. Sofya put her hand on the mother's shoulder and gave her a gentle little shake as she sat in the chair. "Would you love such a daughter?" and Sofya looked into the mother's face. "Oh! If I could see them together, if only for one day!" exclaimed Nilovna, ready to weep. "Yes, a bit of happiness is good for everybody." "But there are no people who want only a bit of happiness," remarked Nikolay; "and when there's much of it, it becomes cheap." Sofya sat herself at the piano, and began to play something low and doleful. CHAPTER VIII The next morning a number of men and women stood at the gate of the hospital waiting for the coffin of their comrade to be carried out to the street. Spies watchfully circled about, their ears alert to catch each sound, noting faces, manners, and words. From the other side of the street a group of policemen with revolvers at their belts looked on. The impudence of the spies, the mocking smiles of the police ready to show their power, were strong provocatives to the crowd. Some joked to cover their excitement; others looked down on the ground sullenly, trying not to notice the affronts; still others, unable to restrain their wrath, laughed in sarcasm at the government, which feared people armed with nothing but words. The pale blue sky of autumn gleamed upon the round, gray paving stones of the streets, strewn with yellow leaves, which the wind kept whirling about under the people's feet. The mother stood in the crowd. She looked around at the familiar faces and thought with sadness: "There aren't many of you, not many." The gate opened, and the coffin, decorated with wreaths tied with red ribbons, was carried out. The people, as if inspired with one will, silently raised their hats. A tall officer of police with a thick black mustache on a red face unceremoniously jostled his way through the crowd, followed by the soldiers, whose heavy boots trampled loudly on the stones. They made a cordon around the coffin, and the officer said in a hoarse, commanding voice: "Remove the ribbons, please!" The men and women pressed closely about him. They called to him, waving their hands excitedly and trying to push past one another. The mother caught the flash of pale, agitated countenances, some of them with quivering lips and tears. "Down with violence!" a young voice shouted nervously. But the lonely outcry was lost in the general clamor. The mother also felt bitterness in her heart. She turned in indignation to her neighbor, a poorly dressed young man. "They don't permit a man's comrades even to bury him as they want to. What do they mean by it?" The hubbub increased and hostility waxed strong. The coffin rocked over the heads of the people. The silken rustling of the ribbons fluttering in the wind about the heads and faces of the carriers could be heard amid the noise of the strife. The mother was seized with a shuddering dread of the possible collision, and she quickly spoke in an undertone to her neighbors on the right and on the left: "Why not let them have their way if they're like that? The comrades ought to yield and remove the ribbons. What else can they do?" A loud, sharp voice subdued all the other noises: "We demand not to be disturbed in accompanying on his last journey one whom you tortured to death!" Somebody--apparently a girl--sang out in a high, piping voice: "In mortal strife your victims fell." "Remove the ribbons, please, Yakovlev! Cut them off!" A saber was heard issuing from its scabbard. The mother closed her eyes, awaiting shouts; but it grew quieter. The people growled like wolves at bay; then silently drooping their heads, crushed by the consciousness of impotence, they moved forward, filling the street with the noise of their tramping. Before them swayed the stripped cover of the coffin with the crumpled wreaths, and swinging from side to side rode the mounted police. The mother walked on the pavement; she was unable to see the coffin through the dense crowd surrounding it, which imperceptibly grew and filled the whole breadth of the street. Back of the crowd also rose the gray figures of the mounted police; at their sides, holding their hands on their sabers, marched the policemen on foot, and everywhere were the sharp eyes of the spies, familiar to the mother, carefully scanning the faces of the people. "Good-by, comrade, good-by!" plaintively sang two beautiful voices. "Don't!" a shout was heard. "We will be silent, comrades--for the present." The shout was stern and imposing; it carried an assuring threat, and it subdued the crowd. The sad songs broke off; the talking became lower; only the noise of heavy tramping on the stones filled the street with its dull, even sound. Over the heads of the people, into the transparent sky, and through the air it rose like the first peal of distant thunder. People silently bore grief and revolt in their breasts. Was it possible to carry on the war for freedom peacefully? A vain illusion! Hatred of violence, love of freedom blazed up and burned the last remnants of the illusion to ashes in the hearts that still cherished it. The steps became heavier, heads were raised, eyes looked cold and firm, and feeling, outstripping thought, brought forth resolve. The cold wind, waxing stronger and stronger, carried an unfriendly cloud of dust and street litter in front of the people. It blew through their garments and their hair, blinded their eyes and struck against their breasts. The mother was pained by these silent funerals without priests and heart-oppressing chants, with thoughtful faces, frowning brows, and the heavy tramp of the feet. Her slowly circling thoughts formulated her impression in the melancholy phrase: "There are not many of you who stand up for the truth, not many; and yet they fear you, they fear you!" Her head bent, she strode along without looking around. It seemed to her that they were burying, not Yegor, but something else unknown and incomprehensible to her. At the cemetery the procession for a long time moved in and out along the narrow paths amid the tombs until an open space was reached, which was sprinkled with wretched little crosses. The people gathered about the graves in silence. This austere silence of the living among the dead promised something strange, which caused the mother's heart to tremble and sink with expectation. The wind whistled and sighed among the graves. The flowers trembled on the lid of the coffin. The police, stretching out in a line, assumed an attitude of guard, their eyes on their captain. A tall, long-haired, black-browed, pale young man without a hat stood over the fresh grave. At the same time the hoarse voice of the captain was heard: "Ladies and gentlemen!" "Comrades!" began the black-browed man sonorously. "Permit me!" shouted the police captain. "In pursuance of the order of the chief of police I announce to you that I cannot permit a speech!" "I will say only a few words," the young man said calmly. "Comrades! over the grave of our teacher and friend let us vow in silence never to forget his will; let each one of us continue without ceasing to dig the grave for the source of our country's misfortune, the evil power that crushes it--the autocracy!" "Arrest him!" shouted the police captain. But his voice was drowned in the confused outburst of shouts. "Down with the autocracy!" The police rushed through the crowd toward the orator who, closely surrounded on all sides, shouted, waving his hand: "Long live liberty! We will live and die for it!" The mother shut her eyes in momentary fear. The boisterous tempest of confused sounds deafened her. The earth rocked under her feet; terror impeded her breathing. The startling whistles of the policemen pierced the air. The rude, commanding voice of the captain was heard; the women cried hysterically. The wooden fences cracked, and the heavy tread of many feet sounded dully on the dry ground. A sonorous voice, subduing all the other voices, blared like a war trumpet: "Comrades! Calm yourselves! Have more respect for yourselves! Let me go! Comrades, I insist, let me go!" The mother looked up, and uttered a low exclamation. A blind impulse carried her forward with outstretched hands. Not far from her, on a worn path between the graves, the policemen were surrounding the long-haired man and repelling the crowd that fell upon them from all sides. The unsheathed bayonets flashed white and cold in the air, flying over the heads of the people, and falling quickly again with a spiteful hiss. Broken bits of the fence were brandished; the baleful shouts of the struggling people rose wildly. The young man lifted his pale face, and his firm, calm voice sounded above the storm of irritated outcries: "Comrades! Why do you spend your strength? Our task is to arm the heads." He conquered. Throwing away their sticks, the people dropped out of the throng one after the other; and the mother pushed forward. She saw how Nikolay, with his hat fallen back on his neck, thrust aside the people, intoxicated with the commotion, and heard his reproachful voice: "Have you lost your senses? Calm yourselves!" It seemed to her that one of his hands was red. "Nikolay Ivanovich, go away!" she shouted, rushing toward him. "Where are you going? They'll strike you there!" She stopped. Seizing her by the shoulder, Sofya stood at her side, hatless, her jacket open, her other hand grasping a young, light-haired man, almost a boy. He held his hands to his bruised face, and he muttered with tremulous lips: "Let me go! It's nothing." "Take care of him! Take him home to us! Here's a handkerchief. Bandage his face!" Sofya gave the rapid orders, and putting his hand into the mother's ran away, saying: "Get out of this place quickly, else they'll arrest you!" The people scattered all over the cemetery. After them the policemen strode heavily among the graves, clumsily entangling themselves in the flaps of their military coats, cursing, and brandishing their bayonets. "Let's hurry!" said the mother, wiping the boy's face with the handkerchief. "What's your name?" "Ivan." Blood spurted from his mouth. "Don't be worried; I don't feel hurt. He hit me over the head with the handle of his saber, and I gave him such a blow with a stick that he howled," the boy concluded, shaking his blood-stained fist. "Wait--it'll be different. We'll choke you without a fight, when we arise, all the working people." "Quick--hurry!" The mother urged him on, walking swiftly toward the little wicket gate. It seemed to her that there, behind the fence in the field, the police were lying in wait for them, ready to pounce on them and beat them as soon as they went out. But on carefully opening the gate, and looking out over the field clothed in the gray garb of autumn dusk, its stillness and solitude at once gave her composure. "Let me bandage your face." "Never mind. I'm not ashamed to be seen with it as it is. The fight was honorable--he hit me--I hit him----" The mother hurriedly bandaged his wound. The sight of fresh, flowing blood filled her breast with terror and pity. Its humid warmth on her fingers sent a cold, fine tremor through her body. Then, holding his hand, she silently and quickly conducted the wounded youth through the field. Freeing his mouth of the bandage, he said with a smile: "But where are you taking me, comrade? I can go by myself." But the mother perceived that he was reeling with faintness, that his legs were unsteady, and his hands twitched. He spoke to her in a weak voice, and questioned her without waiting for an answer: "I'm a tinsmith, and who are you? There were three of us in Yegor Ivanovich's circle--three tinsmiths--and there were twelve men in all. We loved him very much--may he have eternal life!--although I don't believe in God--it's they, the dogs, that dupe us with God, so that we should obey the authorities and suffer life patiently without kicking." In one of the streets the mother hailed a cab and put Ivan into it. She whispered, "Now be silent," and carefully wrapped his face up in the handkerchief. He raised his hand to his face, but was no longer able to free his mouth. His hand fell feebly on his knees; nevertheless he continued to mutter through the bandages: "I won't forget those blows; I'll score them against you, my dear sirs! With Yegor there was another student, Titovich, who taught us political economy--he was a very stern, tedious fellow--he was arrested." The mother, drawing the boy to her, put his head on her bosom in order to muffle his voice. It was not necessary, however, for he suddenly grew heavy and silent. In awful fear, she looked about sidewise out of the corners of her eyes. She felt that the policemen would issue from some corner, would see Ivan's bandaged head, would seize him and kill him. "Been drinking?" asked the driver, turning on the box with a benignant smile. "Pretty full." "Your son?" "Yes, a shoemaker. I'm a cook." Shaking the whip over the horse, the driver again turned, and continued in a lowered voice: "I heard there was a row in the cemetery just now. You see, they were burying one of the politicals, one of those who are against the authorities. They have a crow to pick with the authorities. He was buried by fellows like him, his friends, it must be; and they up and begin to shout: 'Down with the authorities! They ruin the people.' The police began to beat them. It's said some were hewed down and killed. But the police got it, too." He was silent, shaking his head as if afflicted by some sorrow, and uttered in a strange voice: "They don't even let the dead alone; they even bother people in their graves." The cab rattled over the stones. Ivan's head jostled softly against the mother's bosom. The driver, sitting half-turned from his horse, mumbled thoughtfully: "The people are beginning to boil. Every now and then some disorder crops out. Yes! Last night the gendarmes came to our neighbors, and kept up an ado till morning, and in the morning they led away a blacksmith. It's said they'll take him to the river at night and drown him. And the blacksmith--well--he was a wise man--he understood a great deal--and to understand, it seems, is forbidden. He used to come to us and say: 'What sort of life is the cabman's life?' 'It's true,' we say, 'the life of a cabman is worse than a dog's.'" "Stop!" the mother said. Ivan awoke from the shock of the sudden halt, and groaned softly. "It shook him up!" remarked the driver. "Oh, whisky, whisky!" Ivan shifted his feet about with difficulty. His whole body swaying, he walked through the entrance, and said: "Nothing--comrade, I can get along." CHAPTER IX Sofya was already at home when they reached the house. She met the mother with a cigarette in her teeth. She was somewhat ruffled, but, as usual, bold and assured of manner. Putting the wounded man on the sofa, she deftly unbound his head, giving orders and screwing up her eyes from the smoke of her cigarette. "Ivan Danilovich!" she called out. "He's been brought here. You are tired, Nilovna. You've had enough fright, haven't you? Well, rest now. Nikolay, quick, give Nilovna some tea and a glass of port." Dizzied by her experience, the mother breathing heavily and feeling a sickly pricking in her breast, said: "Don't bother about me." But her entire anxious being begged for attention and kindnesses. From the next room entered Nikolay with a bandaged hand, and the doctor, Ivan Danilovich, all disheveled, his hair standing on end like the spines of a hedgehog. He quickly stepped to Ivan, bent over him, and said: "Water, Sofya Ivanovich, more water, clean linen strips, and cotton." The mother walked toward the kitchen; but Nikolay took her by the arm with his left hand, and led her into the dining room. "He didn't speak to you; he was speaking to Sofya. You've had enough suffering, my dear woman, haven't you?" The mother met Nikolay's fixed, sympathetic glance, and, pressing his head, exclaimed with a groan she could not restrain: "Oh, my darling, how fearful it was! They mowed the comrades down! They mowed them down!" "I saw it," said Nikolay, giving her a glass of wine, and nodding his head. "Both sides grew a little heated. But don't be uneasy; they used the flats of their swords, and it seems only one was seriously wounded. I saw him struck, and I myself carried him out of the crowd." His face and voice, and the warmth and brightness of the room quieted Vlasova. Looking gratefully at him, she asked: "Did they hit you, too?" "It seems to me that I myself through carelessness knocked my hand against something and tore off the skin. Drink some tea. The weather is cold and you're dressed lightly." She stretched out her hand for the cup and saw that her fingers were stained with dark clots of blood. She instinctively dropped her hands on her knees. Her skirt was damp. Ivan Danilovich came in in his vest, his shirt sleeves rolled up, and in response to Nikolay's mute question, said in his thin voice: "The wound on his face is slight. His skull, however, is fractured, but not very badly. He's a strong fellow, but he's lost a lot of blood. We'll take him over to the hospital." "Why? Let him stay here!" exclaimed Nikolay. "To-day he may; and--well--to-morrow, too; but after that it'll be more convenient for us to have him at the hospital. I have no time to pay visits. You'll write a leaflet about the affair at the cemetery, won't you?" "Of course!" The mother rose quietly and walked into the kitchen. "Where are you going, Nilovna?" Nikolay stopped her with solicitude. "Sofya can get along by herself." She looked at him and started and smiled strangely. "I'm all covered with blood." While changing her dress she once again thought of the calmness of these people, of their ability to recover from the horrible, an ability which clearly testified to their manly readiness to meet any demand made on them for work in the cause of truth. This thought, steadying the mother, drove fear from her heart. When she returned to the room where the sick man lay, she heard Sofya say, as she bent over him: "That's nonsense, comrade!" "Yes, I'll incommode you," he said faintly. "You keep still. That's better for you." The mother stood back of Sofya, and putting her hand on her shoulders peered with a smile into the face of the sick man. She related how he had raved in the presence of the cabman and frightened her by his lack of caution. Ivan heard her; his eyes turned feverishly, he smacked his lips, and at times exclaimed in a confused low voice: "Oh, what a fool I am!" "We'll leave you here," Sofya said, straightening out the blanket. "Rest." The mother and Sofya went to the dining room and conversed there in subdued voices about the events of the day. They already regarded the drama of the burial as something remote, and looked with assurance toward the future in deliberating on the work of the morrow. Their faces wore a weary expression, but their thoughts were bold. They spoke of their dissatisfaction with themselves. Nervously moving in his chair and gesticulating animatedly the physician, dulling his thin, sharp voice with an effort, said: "Propaganda! propaganda! There's too little of it now. The young workingmen are right. We must extend the field of agitation. The workingmen are right, I say." Nikolay answered somberly: "From everywhere come complaints of not enough literature, and we still cannot get a good printing establishment. Liudmila is wearing herself out. She'll get sick if we don't see that she gets assistance." "And Vyesovshchikov?" asked Sofya. "He cannot live in the city. He won't be able to go to work until he can enter the new printing establishment. And one man is still needed for it." "Won't I do?" the mother asked quietly. All three looked at her in silence for a short while. "No, it's too hard for you, Nilovna," said Nikolay. "You'll have to live outside the city and stop your visits to Pavel, and in general----" With a sigh the mother said: "For Pasha it won't be a great loss. And so far as I am concerned these visits, too, are a torment; they tear out my heart. I'm not allowed to speak of anything; I stand opposite my son like a fool. And they look into my mouth and wait to see something come out that oughtn't." Sofya groped for the mother's hand under the table and pressed it warmly with her thin fingers. Nikolay looked at the mother fixedly while explaining to her that she would have to serve in the new printing establishment as a protection to the workers. "I understand," she said. "I'll be a cook. I'll be able to do it; I can imagine what's needed." "How persistent you are!" remarked Sofya. The events of the last few days had exhausted the mother; and now as she heard of the possibility of living outside the city, away from its bustle, she greedily grasped at the chance. But Nikolay changed the subject of conversation. "What are you thinking about, Ivan?" He turned to the physician. Raising his head from the table, the physician answered sullenly: "There are too few of us. That's what I'm thinking of. We positively must begin to work more energetically, and we must persuade Pavel and Andrey to escape. They are both too invaluable to be sitting there idle." Nikolay lowered his brows and shook his head in doubt, darting a glance at the mother. As she realized the embarrassment they must feel in speaking of her son in her presence, she walked out into her own room. There, lying in bed with open eyes, the murmur of low talking in her ears, she gave herself up to anxious thoughts. She wanted to see her son at liberty, but at the same time the idea of freeing him frightened her. She felt that the struggle around her was growing keener and that a sharp collision was threatening. The silent patience of the people was wearing away, yielding to a strained expectation of something new. The excitement was growing perceptibly. Bitter words were tossed about. Something novel and stirring was wafted from all quarters; every proclamation evoked lively discussions in the market place, in the shops, among servants, among workingmen. Every arrest aroused a timid, uncomprehending, and sometimes unconscious sympathy when judgment regarding the causes of the arrest was expressed. She heard the words that had once frightened her--riot, socialism, politics--uttered more and more frequently among the simple folk, though accompanied by derision. However, behind their ridicule it was impossible to conceal an eagerness to understand, mingled with fear and hope, with hatred of the masters and threats against them. Agitation disturbed the settled, dark life of the people in slow but wide circles. Dormant thoughts awoke, and men were shaken from their usual forced calm attitude toward daily events. All this the mother saw more clearly than others, because she, better than they, knew the dismal, dead face of existence; she stood nearer to it, and now saw upon it the wrinkles of hesitation and turmoil, the vague hunger for the new. She both rejoiced over the change and feared it. She rejoiced because she regarded this as the cause of her son; she feared because she knew that if he emerged from prison he would stand at the head of all, in the most dangerous place, and--he would perish. She often felt great thoughts needful to everybody stirring in her bosom, but scarcely ever was able to make them live in words; and they oppressed her heart with a dumb, heavy sadness. Sometimes the image of her son grew before her until it assumed the proportions of a giant in the old fairy tales. He united within himself all the honest thoughts she had heard spoken, all the people that she liked, everything heroic of which she knew. Then, moved with delight in him, she exulted in quiet rapture. An indistinct hope filled her. "Everything will be well--everything!" Her love, the love of a mother, was fanned into a flame, a veritable pain to her heart. Then the motherly affection hindered the growth of the broader human feeling, burned it; and in place of a great sentiment a small, dismal thought beat faint-heartedly in the gray ashes of alarm: "He will perish; he will fall!" Late that night the mother sank into a heavy sleep, but rose early, her bones stiff, her head aching. At midday she was sitting in the prison office opposite Pavel and looking through a mist in her eyes at his bearded, swarthy face. She was watching for a chance to deliver to him the note she held tightly in her hand. "I am well and all are well," said Pavel in a moderated voice. "And how are you?" "So so. Yegor Ivanovich died," she said mechanically. "Yes?" exclaimed Pavel, and dropped his head. "At the funeral the police got up a fight and arrested one man," the mother continued in her simple-hearted way. The thin-lipped assistant overseer of the prison jumped from his chair and mumbled quickly: "Cut that out; it's forbidden! Why don't you understand? You know politics are prohibited." The mother also rose from her chair, and as if failing to comprehend him, she said guiltily: "I wasn't discussing politics. I was telling about a fight--and they did fight; that's true. They even broke one fellow's head." "All the same, please keep quiet--that is to say, keep quiet about everything that doesn't concern you personally--your family; in general, your home." Aware that his speech was confused, he sat down in his chair and arranged papers. "I'm responsible for what you say," he said sadly and wearily. The mother looked around and quickly thrust the note into Pavel's hand. She breathed a deep sigh of relief. "I don't know what to speak about." Pavel smiled: "I don't know either." "Then why pay visits?" said the overseer excitedly. "They have nothing to say, but they come here anyhow and bother me." "Will the trial take place soon?" asked the mother after a pause. "The procurator was here the other day, and he said it will come off soon." "You've been in prison half a year already!" They spoke to each other about matters of no significance to either. The mother saw Pavel's eyes look into her face softly and lovingly. Even and calm as before, he had not changed, save that his wrists were whiter, and his beard, grown long, made him look older. The mother experienced a strong desire to do something pleasant for him--tell him about Vyesovshchikov, for instance. So, without changing her tone, she continued in the same voice in which she spoke of the needless and uninteresting things. "I saw your godchild." Pavel fixed a silent questioning look on her eyes. She tapped her fingers on her cheeks to picture to him the pockmarked face of Vyesovshchikov. "He's all right! The boy is alive and well. He'll soon get his position--you remember how he always asked for hard work?" Pavel understood, and gratefully nodded his head. "Why, of course I remember!" he answered, with a cheery smile in his eyes. "Very well!" the mother uttered in a satisfied tone, content with herself and moved by his joy. On parting with her he held her hand in a firm clasp. "Thank you, mamma!" The joyous feeling of hearty nearness to him mounted to her head like a strong drink. Powerless to answer in words, she merely pressed his hand. At home she found Sasha. The girl usually came to Nilovna on the days when the mother had visited Pavel. "Well, how is he?" "He's well." "Did you hand him the note?" "Of course! I stuck it into his hands very cleverly." "Did he read it?" "On the spot? How could he?" "Oh, yes; I forgot! Let us wait another week, one week longer. Do you think he'll agree to it?" "I don't know--I think he will," the mother deliberated. "Why shouldn't he if he can do so without danger?" Sasha shook her head. "Do you know what the sick man is allowed to eat? He's asked for some food." "Anything at all. I'll get him something at once." The mother walked into the kitchen, slowly followed by Sasha. "Can I help you?" "Thank you! Why should you?" The mother bent at the oven to get a pot. The girl said in a low voice: "Wait!" Her face paled, her eyes opened sadly and her quivering lips whispered hotly with an effort: "I want to beg you--I know he will not agree--try to persuade him. He's needed. Tell him he's essential, absolutely necessary for the cause--tell him I fear he'll get sick. You see the date of the trial hasn't been set yet, and six months have already passed--I beg of you!" It was apparent that she spoke with difficulty. She stood up straight, in a tense attitude, and looked aside. Her voice sounded uneven, like the snapping of a taut string. Her eyelids drooping wearily, she bit her lips, and the fingers of her compressed hand cracked. The mother was ruffled by her outburst; but she understood it, and a sad emotion took possession of her. Softly embracing Sasha, she answered: "My dear, he will never listen to anybody except himself--never!" For a short while they were both silent in a close embrace. Then Sasha carefully removed the mother's hands from her shoulders. "Yes, you're right," she said in a tremble. "It's all stupidity and nerves. One gets so tired." And, suddenly growing serious, she concluded: "Anyway, let's give the sick man something to eat." In an instant she was sitting at Ivan's bed, kindly and solicitously inquiring, "Does your head ache badly?" "Not very. Only everything is muddled up, and I'm weak," answered Ivan in embarrassment. He pulled the blanket up to his chin, and screwed up his eyes as if dazzled by too brilliant a light. Noticing that she embarrassed him by her presence and that he could not make up his mind to eat, Sasha rose and walked away. Then Ivan sat up in bed and looked at the door through which she had left. "Be-au-tiful!" he murmured. His eyes were bright and merry; his teeth fine and compact; his young voice was not yet steady as an adult's. "How old are you?" the mother asked thoughtfully. "Seventeen years." "Where are your parents?" "In the village. I've been here since I was ten years old. I got through school and came here. And what is your name, comrade?" This word, when applied to her, always brought a smile to the mother's face and touched her. "Why do you want to know?" The youth, after an embarrassed pause, explained: "You see, a student of our circle, that is, a fellow who used to read to us, told us about Pavel's mother--a workingman, you know--and about the first of May demonstration." She nodded her head and pricked up her ears. "He was the first one who openly displayed the banner of our party," the youth declared with pride--a pride which found a response in the mother's heart. "I wasn't present; we were then thinking of making our own demonstration here in the city, but it fizzled out; we were too few of us then. But this year we will--you'll see!" He choked from agitation, having a foretaste of the future event. Then waving his spoon in the air, he continued: "So Vlasova--the mother, as I was telling you--she, too, got into the party after that. They say she's a wonder of an old woman." The mother smiled broadly. It was pleasant for her to hear the boy's enthusiastic praise--pleasant, yet embarrassing. She even had to restrain herself from telling him that she was Vlasova, and she thought sadly, in derision of herself: "Oh, you old fool!" "Eat more! Get well sooner for the sake of the cause!" She burst out all of a sudden, in agitation, bending toward him: "It awaits powerful young hands, clean hearts, honest minds. It lives by these forces! With them it holds aloof everything evil, everything mean!" The door opened, admitting a cold, damp, autumn draught. Sofya entered, bold, a smile on her face, reddened by the cold. "Upon my word, the spies are as attentive to me as a bridegroom to a rich bride! I must leave this place. Well, how are you, Vanya? All right? How's Pavel, Nilovna? What! is Sasha here?" Lighting a cigarette, she showered questions without waiting for answers, caressing the mother and the youth with merry glances of her gray eyes. The mother looked at her and smiled inwardly. "What good people I'm among!" she thought. She bent over Ivan again and gave him back his kindness twofold: "Get well! Now I must give you wine." She rose and walked into the dining room, where Sofya was saying to Sasha: "She has three hundred copies prepared already. She'll kill herself working so hard. There's heroism for you! Unseen, unnoticed, it finds its reward and its praise in itself. Do you know, Sasha, it's the greatest happiness to live among such people, to be their comrade, to work with them?" "Yes," answered the girl softly. In the evening at tea Sofya said to the mother: "Nilovna, you have to go to the village again." "Well, what of it? When?" "It would be good if you could go to-morrow. Can you?" "Yes." "Ride there," advised Nikolay. "Hire post horses, and please take a different route from before--across the district of Nikolsk." Nikolay's somber expression was alarming. "The way by Nikolsk is long, and it's expensive if you hire horses." "You see, I'm against this expedition in general. It's already begun to be unquiet there--some arrests have been made, a teacher was taken. Rybin escaped, that's certain. But we must be more careful. We ought to have waited a little while still." "That can't be avoided," said Nilovna. Sofya, tapping her fingers on the table, remarked: "It's important for us to keep spreading literature all the time. You're not afraid to go, are you, Nilovna?" The mother felt offended. "When have I ever been afraid? I was without fear even the first time. And now all of a sudden--" She drooped her head. Each time she was asked whether she was afraid, whether the thing was convenient for her, whether she could do this or that--she detected an appeal to her which placed her apart from the comrades, who seemed to behave differently toward her than toward one another. Moreover, when fuller days came, although at first disquieted by the commotion, by the rapidity of events, she soon grew accustomed to the bustle and responded, as it were, to the jolts she received from her impressions. She became filled with a zealous greed for work. This was her condition to-day; and, therefore, Sofya's question was all the more displeasing to her. "There's no use for you to ask me whether or not I'm afraid and various other things," she sighed. "I've nothing to be afraid of. Those people are afraid who have something. What have I? Only a son. I used to be afraid for him, and I used to fear torture for his sake. And if there is no torture--well, then?" "Are you offended?" exclaimed Sofya. "No. Only you don't ask each other whether you're afraid." Nikolay removed his glasses, adjusted them to his nose again, and looked fixedly at his sister's face. The embarrassed silence that followed disturbed the mother. She rose guiltily from her seat, wishing to say something to them, but Sofya stroked her hand, and said quietly: "Forgive me! I won't do it any more." The mother had to laugh, and in a few minutes the three were speaking busily and amicably about the trip to the village. CHAPTER X The next day, early in the morning, the mother was seated in the post chaise, jolting along the road washed by the autumn rain. A damp wind blew on her face, the mud splashed, and the coachman on the box, half-turned toward her, complained in a meditative snuffle: "I say to him--my brother, that is--let's go halves. We began to divide"--he suddenly whipped the left horse and shouted angrily: "Well, well, play, your mother is a witch." The stout autumn crows strode with a businesslike air through the bare fields. The wind whistled coldly, and the birds caught its buffets on their backs. It blew their feathers apart, and even lifted them off their feet, and, yielding to its force, they lazily flapped their wings and flew to a new spot. "But he cheated me; I see I have nothing----" The mother listened to the coachman's words as in a dream. A dumb thought grew in her heart. Memory brought before her a long series of events through which she had lived in the last years. On an examination of each event, she found she had actively participated in it. Formerly, life used to happen somewhere in the distance, remote from where she was, uncertain for whom and for what. Now, many things were accomplished before her eyes, with her help. The result in her was a confused feeling, compounded of distrust of herself, complacency, perplexity, and sadness. The scenery about her seemed to be slowly moving. Gray clouds floated in the sky, chasing each other heavily; wet trees flashed along the sides of the road, swinging their bare tops; little hills appeared and swam asunder. The whole turbid day seemed to be hastening to meet the sun--to be seeking it. The drawling voice of the coachman, the sound of the bells, the humid rustle and whistle of the wind, blended in a trembling, tortuous stream, which flowed on with a monotonous force, and roused the wind. "The rich man feels crowded, even in Paradise. That's the way it is. Once he begins to oppress, the government authorities are his friends," quoth the coachman, swaying on his seat. While unhitching the horses at the station he said to the mother in a hopeless voice: "If you gave me only enough for a drink----" She gave him a coin, and tossing it in the palm of his hand, he informed her in the same hopeless tone: "I'll take a drink for three coppers, and buy myself bread for two." In the afternoon the mother, shaken up by the ride and chilled, reached the large village of Nikolsk. She went to a tavern and asked for tea. After placing her heavy valise under the bench, she sat at a window and looked out into an open square, covered with yellow, trampled grass, and into the town hall, a long, old building with an overhanging roof. Swine were straggling about in the square, and on the steps of the town hall sat a bald, thin-bearded peasant smoking a pipe. The clouds swam overhead in dark masses, and piled up, one absorbing the other. It was dark, gloomy, and tedious. Life seemed to be in hiding. Suddenly the village sergeant galloped up to the square, stopped his sorrel at the steps of the town hall, and waving his whip in the air, shouted to the peasant. The shouts rattled against the window panes, but the words were indistinguishable. The peasant rose and stretched his hand, pointing to something. The sergeant jumped to the ground, reeled, threw the reins to the peasant, and seizing the rails with his hands, lifted himself heavily up the steps, and disappeared behind the doors of the town hall. Quiet reigned again. Only the horse struck the soft earth with the iron of his shoes. A girl came into the room. A short yellow braid lay on her neck, her face was round, and her eyes kind. She bit her lips with the effort of carrying a ragged-edged tray, with dishes, in her outstretched hands. She bowed, nodding her head. "How do you do, my good girl?" said the mother kindly. "How do you do?" Putting the plates and the china dishes on the table, she announced with animation: "They've just caught a thief. They're bringing him here." "Indeed? What sort of a thief?" "I don't know." "What did he do?" "I don't know. I only heard that they caught him. The watchman of the town hall ran off for the police commissioner, and shouted: 'They've caught him. They're bringing him here.'" The mother looked through the window. Peasants gathered in the square; some walked slowly, some quickly, while buttoning their overcoats. They stopped at the steps of the town hall, and all looked to the left. It was strangely quiet. The girl also went to the window to see the street, and then silently ran from the room, banging the door after her. The mother trembled, pushed her valise farther under the bench, and throwing her shawl over her head, hurried to the door. She had to restrain a sudden, incomprehensible desire to run. When she walked up the steps of the town hall a sharp cold struck her face and breast. She lost breath, and her legs stiffened. There, in the middle of the square, walked Rybin! His hands were bound behind his back, and on each side of him a policeman, rhythmically striking the ground with his club. At the steps stood a crowd waiting in silence. Unconscious of the bearing of the thing, the mother's gaze was riveted on Rybin. He said something; she heard his voice, but the words did not reach the dark emptiness of her heart. She recovered her senses, and took a deep breath. A peasant with a broad light beard was standing at the steps looking fixedly into her face with his blue eyes. Coughing and rubbing her throat with her hands, weak with fear, she asked him with an effort: "What's the matter?" "Well, look." The peasant turned away. Another peasant came up to her side. "Oh, thief! How horrible you look!" shouted a woman's voice. The policemen stepped in front of the crowd, which increased in size. Rybin's voice sounded thick: "Peasants, I'm not a thief; I don't steal; I don't set things on fire. I only fight against falsehood. That's why they seized me. Have you heard of the true books in which the truth is written about our peasant life? Well, it's because of these writings that I suffer. It's I who distributed them among the people." The crowd surrounded Rybin more closely. His voice steadied the mother. "Did you hear?" said a peasant in a low voice, nudging a blue-eyed neighbor, who did not answer but raised his head and again looked into the mother's face. The other peasant also looked at her. He was younger than he of the blue eyes, with a dark, sparse beard, and a lean freckled face. Then both of them turned away to the side of the steps. "They're afraid," the mother involuntarily noted. Her attention grew keener. From the elevation of the stoop she clearly saw the dark face of Rybin, distinguished the hot gleam of his eyes. She wanted that he, too, should see her, and raised herself on tiptoe and craned her neck. The people looked at him sullenly, distrustfully, and were silent. Only in the rear of the crowd subdued conversation was heard. "Peasants!" said Rybin aloud, in a peculiar full voice. "Believe these papers! I shall now, perhaps, get death on account of them. The authorities beat me, they tortured me, they wanted to find out from where I got them, and they're going to beat me more. For in these writings the truth is laid down. An honest world and the truth ought to be dearer to us than bread. That's what I say." "Why is he doing this?" softly exclaimed one of the peasants near the steps. He of the blue eyes answered: "Now it's all the same. He won't escape death, anyhow. And a man can't die twice." The sergeant suddenly appeared on the steps of the town hall, roaring in a drunken voice: "What is this crowd? Who's the fellow speaking?" Suddenly precipitating himself down the steps, he seized Rybin by the hair, and pulled his head backward and forward. "Is it you speaking, you damned scoundrel? Is it you?" The crowd, giving way, still maintained silence. The mother, in impotent grief, bowed her head; one of the peasants sighed. Rybin spoke again: "There! Look, good people!" "Silence!" and the sergeant struck his face. Rybin reeled. "They bind a man's hands and then torment him, and do with him whatever they please." "Policemen, take him! Disperse, people!" The sergeant, jumping and swinging in front of Rybin, struck him in his face, breast, and stomach. "Don't beat him!" some one shouted dully. "Why do you beat him?" another voice upheld the first. "Lazy, good-for-nothing beast!" "Come!" said the blue-eyed peasant, motioning with his head; and without hastening, the two walked toward the town hall, accompanied by a kind look from the mother. She sighed with relief. The sergeant again ran heavily up the steps, and shaking his fists in menace, bawled from his height vehemently: "Bring him here, officers, I say! I say----" "Don't!" a strong voice resounded in the crowd, and the mother knew it came from the blue-eyed peasant. "Boys! don't permit it! They'll take him in there and beat him to death, and then they'll say we killed him. Don't permit it!" "Peasants!" the powerful voice of Rybin roared, drowning the shouts of the sergeant. "Don't you understand your life? Don't you understand how they rob you--how they cheat you--how they drink your blood? You keep everything up; everything rests on you; you are all the power that is at the bottom of everything on earth--its whole power. And what rights have you? You have the right to starve--it's your only right!" "He's speaking the truth, I tell _you_!" Some men shouted: "Call the commissioner of police! Where is the commissioner of police?" "The sergeant has ridden away for him!" "It's not our business to call the authorities!" The noise increased as the crowd grew louder and louder. "Speak! We won't let them beat you!" "Officers, untie his hands!" "No, brothers; that's not necessary!" "Untie him!" "Look out you don't do something you'll be sorry for!" "I am sorry for my hands!" Rybin said evenly and resonantly, making himself heard above all the other voices. "I'll not escape, peasants. I cannot hide from my truth; it lives inside of me!" Several men walked away from the crowd, formed different circles, and with earnest faces and shaking their heads carried on conversations. Some smiled. More and more people came running up--excited, bearing marks of having dressed quickly. They seethed like black foam about Rybin, and he rocked to and fro in their midst. Raising his hands over his head and shaking them, he called into the crowd, which responded now by loud shouts, now by silent, greedy attention, to the unfamiliar, daring words: "Thank you, good people! Thank you! I stood up for you, for your lives!" He wiped his beard and again raised his blood-covered hand. "There's my blood! It flows for the sake of truth!" The mother, without considering, walked down the steps, but immediately returned, since on the ground she couldn't see Mikhaïl, hidden by the close-packed crowd. Something indistinctly joyous trembled in her bosom and warmed it. "Peasants! Keep your eyes open for those writings; read them. Don't believe the authorities and the priests when they tell you those people who carry truth to us are godless rioters. The truth travels over the earth secretly; it seeks a nest among the people. To the authorities it's like a knife in the fire. They cannot accept it. It will cut them and burn them. Truth is your good friend and a sworn enemy of the authorities--that's why it hides itself." "That's so; he's speaking the gospel!" shouted the blue-eyed peasant. "Ah, brother! You will perish--and soon, too!" "Who betrayed you?" "The priest!" said one of the police. Two peasants gave vent to hard oaths. "Look out, boys!" a somewhat subdued cry was heard in warning. The commissioner of police walked into the crowd--a tall, compact man, with a round, red face. His cap was cocked to one side; his mustache with one end turned up the other drooping made his face seem crooked, and it was disfigured by a dull, dead grin. His left hand held a saber, his right waved broadly in the air. His heavy, firm tramp was audible. The crowd gave way before him. Something sullen and crushed appeared in their faces, and the noise died away as if it had sunk into the ground. "What's the trouble?" asked the police commissioner, stopping in front of Rybin and measuring him with his eyes. "Why are his hands not bound? Officers, why? Bind them!" His voice was high and resonant, but colorless. "They were tied, but the people unbound them," answered one of the policemen. "The people! What people?" The police commissioner looked at the crowd standing in a half-circle before him. In the same monotonous, blank voice, neither elevating nor lowering it, he continued: "Who are the people?" With a back stroke he thrust the handle of his saber against the breast of the blue-eyed peasant. "Are you the people, Chumakov? Well, who else? You, Mishin?" and he pulled somebody's beard with his right hand. "Disperse, you curs!" Neither his voice nor face displayed the least agitation or threat. He spoke mechanically, with a dead calm, and with even movements of his strong, long hands, pushed the people back. The semicircle before him widened. Heads drooped, faces were turned aside. "Well," he addressed the policeman, "what's the matter with you? Bind him!" He uttered a cynical oath and again looked at Rybin, and said nonchalantly: "Your hands behind your back, you!" "I don't want my hands to be bound," said Rybin. "I'm not going to run away, and I'm not fighting. Why should my hands be bound?" "What?" exclaimed the police commissioner, striding up to him. "It's enough that you torture the people, you beasts!" continued Rybin in an elevated voice. "The red day will soon come for you, too. You'll be paid back for everything." The police commissioner stood before him, his mustached upper lip twitching. Then he drew back a step, and with a whistling voice sang out in surprise: "Um! you damned scoundrel! Wha-at? What do you mean by your words? People, you say? A-a----" Suddenly he dealt Rybin a quick, sharp blow in the face. "You won't kill the truth with your fist!" shouted Rybin, drawing on him. "And you have no right to beat me, you dog!" "I won't dare, I suppose?" the police commissioner drawled. Again he waved his hand, aiming at Rybin's head; Rybin ducked; the blow missed, and the police commissioner almost toppled over. Some one in the crowd gave a jeering snort, and the angry shout of Mikhaïl was heard: "Don't you dare to beat me, I say, you infernal devil! I'm no weaker than you! Look out!" The police commissioner looked around. The people shut down on him in a narrower circle, advancing sullenly. "Nikita!" the police commissioner called out, looking around. "Nikita, hey!" A squat peasant in a short fur overcoat emerged from the crowd. He looked on the ground, with his large disheveled head drooping. "Nikita," the police commissioner said deliberately, twirling his mustache, "give him a box on the ear--a good one!" The peasant stepped forward, stopped in front of Rybin and raised his hand. Staring him straight in the face, Rybin stammered out heavily: "Now look, people, how the beasts choke you with your own hands! Look! Look! Think! Why does he want to beat me--why? I ask." The peasant raised his hand and lazily struck Mikhaïl's face. "Ah, Nikita! don't forget God!" subdued shouts came from the crowd. "Strike, I say!" shouted the police commissioner, pushing the peasant on the back of his neck. The peasant stepped aside, and inclining his head, said sullenly: "I won't do it again." "What?" The face of the police commissioner quivered. He stamped his feet, and, cursing, suddenly flung himself upon Rybin. The blow whizzed through the air; Rybin staggered and waved his arms; with the second blow the police commissioner felled him to the ground, and, jumping around with a growl, he began to kick him on his breast, his side, and his head. The crowd set up a hostile hum, rocked, and advanced upon the police commissioner. He noticed it and jumped away, snatching his saber from its scabbard. "So that's what you're up to! You're rioting, are you?" His voice trembled and broke; it had grown husky. And he lost his composure along with his voice. He drew his shoulders up about his head, bent over, and turning his blank, bright eyes on all sides, he fell back, carefully feeling the ground behind him with his feet. As he withdrew he shouted hoarsely in great excitement: "All right; take him! I'm leaving! But now, do you know, you cursed dogs, that he is a political criminal; that he is going against our Czar; that he stirs up riots--do you know it?--against the Emperor, the Czar? And you protect him; you, too, are rebels. Aha--a----" Without budging, without moving her eyes, the strength of reason gone from her, the mother stood as if in a heavy sleep, overwhelmed by fear and pity. The outraged, sullen, wrathful shouts of the people buzzed like bees in her head. "If he has done something wrong, lead him to court." "And don't beat him!" "Forgive him, your Honor!" "Now, really, what does it mean? Without any law whatever!" "Why, is it possible? If they begin to beat everybody that way, what'll happen then?" "The devils! Our torturers!" The people fell into two groups--the one surrounding the police commissioner shouted and exhorted him; the other, less numerous, remained about the beaten man, humming and sullen. Several men lifted him from the ground. The policemen again wanted to bind his hands. "Wait a little while, you devils!" the people shouted. Rybin wiped the blood from his face and beard and looked about in silence. His gaze glided by the face of the mother. She started, stretched herself out to him, and instinctively waved her hand. He turned away; but in a few minutes his eyes again rested on her face. It seemed to her that he straightened himself and raised his head, that his blood-covered cheeks quivered. "Did he recognize me? I wonder if he did?" She nodded her head to him and started with a sorrowful, painful joy. But the next moment she saw that the blue-eyed peasant was standing near him and also looking at her. His gaze awakened her to the consciousness of the risk she was running. "What am I doing? They'll take me, too." The peasant said something to Rybin, who shook his head. "Never mind!" he exclaimed, his voice tremulous, but clear and bold. "I'm not alone in the world. They'll not capture all the truth. In the place where I was the memory of me will remain. That's it! Even though they destroy the nest, aren't there more friends and comrades there?" "He's saying this for me," the mother decided quickly. "The people will build other nests for the truth; and a day will come when the eagles will fly from them into freedom. The people will emancipate themselves." A woman brought a pail of water and, wailing and groaning, began to wash Rybin's face. Her thin, piteous voice mixed with Mikhaïl's words and hindered the mother from understanding them. A throng of peasants came up with the police commissioner in front of them. Some one shouted aloud: "Come; I'm going to make an arrest! Who's next?" Then the voice of the police commissioner was heard. It had changed--mortification now evident in its altered tone. "I may strike you, but you mayn't strike me. Don't you dare, you dunce!" "Is that so? And who are you, pray? A god?" A confused but subdued clamor drowned Rybin's voice. "Don't argue, uncle. You're up against the authorities." "Don't be angry, your Honor. The man's out of his wits." "Keep still, you funny fellow!" "Here, they'll soon take you to the city!" "There's more law there!" The shouts of the crowd sounded pacificatory, entreating; they blended into a thick, indistinct babel, in which there was something hopeless and pitiful. The policemen led Rybin up the steps of the town hall and disappeared with him behind the doors. People began to depart in a hurry. The mother saw the blue-eyed peasant go across the square and look at her sidewise. Her legs trembled under her knees. A dismal feeling of impotence and loneliness gnawed at her heart sickeningly. "I mustn't go away," she thought. "I mustn't!" and holding on to the rails firmly, she waited. The police commissioner walked up the steps of the town hall and said in a rebuking voice, which had assumed its former blankness and soullessness: "You're fools, you damned scoundrels! You don't understand a thing, and poke your noses into an affair like this--a government affair. Cattle! You ought to thank me, fall on your knees before me for my goodness! If I were to say so, you would all be put to hard labor." About a score of peasants stood with bared heads and listened in silence. It began to grow dusk; the clouds lowered. The blue-eyed peasant walked up to the steps, and said with a sigh: "That's the kind of business we have here!" "Ye-es," the mother rejoined quietly. He looked at her with an open gaze. "What's your occupation?" he asked after a pause. "I buy lace from the women, and linen, too." The peasant slowly stroked his beard. Then looking up at the town hall he said gloomily and softly: "You won't find anything of that kind here." The mother looked down on him, and waited for a more suitable moment to depart for the tavern. The peasant's face was thoughtful and handsome and his eyes were sad. Broad-shouldered and tall, he was dressed in a patched-up coat, in a clean chintz shirt, and reddish homespun trousers. His feet were stockingless. The mother for some reason drew a sigh of relief, and suddenly obeying an impulse from within, yielding to an instinct that got the better of her reason, she surprised herself by asking him: "Can I stay in your house overnight?" At the question everything in her muscles, her bones, tightened stiffly. She straightened herself, holding her breath, and fixed her eyes on the peasant. Pricking thoughts quickly flashed through her mind: "I'll ruin everybody--Nikolay Ivanovich, Sonyushka--I'll not see Pasha for a long time--they'll kill him----" Looking on the ground, the peasant answered deliberately, folding his coat over his breast: "Stay overnight? Yes, you can. Why not? Only my home is very poor!" "Never mind; I'm not used to luxury," the mother answered uncalculatingly. "You can stay with me overnight," the peasant repeated, measuring her with a searching glance. It had already grown dark, and in the twilight his eyes shone cold, his face seemed very pale. The mother looked around, and as if dropping under distress, she said in an undertone: "Then I'll go at once, and you'll take my valise." "All right!" He shrugged his shoulders, again folded his coat and said softly: "There goes the wagon!" In a few moments, after the crowd had begun to disperse, Rybin appeared again on the steps of the town hall. His hands were bound; his head and face were wrapped up in a gray cloth, and he was pushed into a waiting wagon. "Farewell, good people!" his voice rang out in the cold evening twilight. "Search for the truth. Guard it! Believe the man who will bring you the clean word; cherish him. Don't spare yourselves in the cause of truth!" "Silence, you dog!" shouted the voice of the police commissioner. "Policeman, start the horses up, you fool!" "What have you to be sorry for? What sort of life have you?" The wagon started. Sitting in it with a policeman on either side, Rybin shouted dully: "For the sake of what are you perishing--in hunger? Strive for freedom--it'll give you bread and--truth. Farewell, good people!" The hasty rumble of the wheels, the tramp of the horses, the shout of the police officer, enveloped his speech and muffled it. "It's done!" said the peasant, shaking his head. "You wait at the station a little while, and I'll come soon." CHAPTER XI The mother went to the room in the tavern, sat herself at the table in front of the samovar, took a piece of bread in her hand, looked at it, and slowly put it back on the plate. She was not hungry; the feeling in her breast rose again and flushed her with nausea. She grew faint and dizzy; the blood was sucked from her heart. Before her stood the face of the blue-eyed peasant. It was a face that expressed nothing and failed to arouse confidence. For some reason the mother did not want to tell herself in so many words that he would betray her. The suspicion lay deep in her breast--a dead weight, dull and motionless. "He scented me!" she thought idly and faintly. "He noticed--he guessed." Further than this her thoughts would not go, and she sank into an oppressive despondency. The nausea, the spiritless stillness beyond the window that replaced the noise, disclosed something huge, but subdued, something frightening, which sharpened her feeling of solitude, her consciousness of powerlessness, and filled her heart with ashen gloom. The young girl came in and stopped at the door. "Shall I bring you an omelette?" "No, thank you, I don't want it; the shouts frightened me." The girl walked up to the table and began to speak excitedly in hasty, terror-stricken tones: "How the police commissioner beat him! I stood near and could see. All his teeth were broken. He spit out and his teeth fell on the ground. The blood came thick--thick and dark. You couldn't see his eyes at all; they were swollen up. He's a tar man. The sergeant is in there in our place drunk, but he keeps on calling for whisky. They say there was a whole band of them, and that this bearded man was their elder, the hetman. Three were captured and one escaped. They seized a teacher, too; he was also with them. They don't believe in God, and they try to persuade others to rob all the churches. That's the kind of people they are; and our peasants, some of them pitied him--that fellow--and others say they should have settled him for good and all. We have such mean peasants here! Oh, my! oh, my!" The mother, by giving the girl's disconnected, rapid talk her fixed attention, tried to stifle her uneasiness, to dissipate her dismal forebodings. As for the girl, she must have rejoiced in an auditor. Her words fairly choked her and she babbled on in lowered voice with greater and greater animation: "Papa says it all comes from the poor crop. This is the second year we've had a bad harvest. The people are exhausted. That's the reason we have such peasants springing up now. What a shame! You ought to hear them shout and fight at the village assemblies. The other day when Vosynkov was sold out for arrears he dealt the starosta (bailiff) a cracking blow on the face. 'There are my arrears for you!' he says." Heavy steps were heard at the door. The mother rose to her feet with difficulty. The blue-eyed peasant came in, and taking off his hat asked: "Where is the baggage?" He lifted the valise lightly, shook it, and said: "Why, it's empty! Marya, show the guest the way to my house," and he walked off without looking around. "Are you going to stay here overnight?" asked the girl. "Yes. I'm after lace; I buy lace." "They don't make lace here. They make lace in Tinkov and in Daryina, but not among us." "I'm going there to-morrow; I'm tired." On paying for the tea she made the girl very happy by handing her three kopecks. On the road the girl's feet splashed quickly in the mud. "If you want to, I'll run over to Daryina, and I'll tell the women to bring their lace here. That'll save your going there. It's about eight miles." "That's not necessary, my dear." The cold air refreshed the mother as she stepped along beside the girl. A resolution slowly formulated itself in her mind--confused, but fraught with a promise. She wished to hasten its growth, and asked herself persistently: "How shall I behave? Suppose I come straight out with the truth?" It was dark, damp, and cold. The windows of the peasants' huts shone dimly with a motionless reddish light; the cattle lowed drowsily in the stillness, and short halloos reverberated through the fields. The village was clothed in darkness and an oppressive melancholy. "Here!" said the girl, "you've chosen a poor lodging for yourself. This peasant is very poor." She opened the door and shouted briskly into the hut: "Aunt Tatyana, a lodger has come!" She ran away, her "Good-by!" flying back from the darkness. The mother stopped at the threshold and peered about with her palm above her eyes. The hut was very small, but its cleanness and neatness caught the eye at once. From behind the stove a young woman bowed silently and disappeared. On a table in a corner toward the front of the room burned a lamp. The master of the hut sat at the table, tapping his fingers on its edge. He fixed his glance on the mother's eyes. "Come in!" he said, after a deliberate pause. "Tatyana, go call Pyotr. Quick!" The woman hastened away without looking at her guest. The mother seated herself on the bench opposite the peasant and looked around--her valise was not in sight. An oppressive stillness filled the hut, broken only by the scarcely audible sputtering of the lamplight. The face of the peasant, preoccupied and gloomy, wavered in vague outline before the eyes of the mother, and for some reason caused her dismal annoyance. "Well, why doesn't he say something? Quick!" "Where's my valise?" Her loud, stern question coming suddenly was a surprise to herself. The peasant shrugged his shoulders and thoughtfully gave the indefinite answer: "It's safe." He lowered his voice and continued gloomily: "Just now, in front of the girl, I said on purpose that it was empty. No, it's not empty. It's very heavily loaded." "Well, what of it?" The peasant rose, approached her, bent over her, and whispered: "Do you know that man?" The mother started, but answered firmly: "I do." Her laconic reply, as it were, kindled a light within her which rendered everything outside clear. She sighed in relief. Shifting her position on the bench, she settled herself more firmly on it, while the peasant laughed broadly. "I guessed it--when you made the sign--and he, too. I asked him, whispering in his ear, whether he knows the woman standing on the steps." "And what did he say?" "He? He says 'there are a great many of us.' Yes--'there are a great many of us,' he says." The peasant looked into the eyes of his guest questioningly, and, smiling again, he continued: "He's a man of great force, he is brave, he speaks straight out. They beat him, and he keeps on his own way." The peasant's uncertain, weak voice, his unfinished, but clear face, his open eyes, inspired the mother with more and more confidence. Instead of alarm and despondency, a sharp, shooting pity for Rybin filled her bosom. Overwhelmed by her feelings, unable to restrain herself, she suddenly burst out in bitter malice: "Robbers, bigots!" and she broke into sobs. The peasant walked away from her, sullenly nodding his head. "The authorities have hired a whole lot of assistants to do their dirty work for them. Yes, yes." He turned abruptly toward the mother again and said softly: "Here's what I guessed--that you have papers in the valise. Is that true?" "Yes," answered the mother simply, wiping away her tears. "I was bringing them to him." He lowered his brows, gathered his beard into his hand, and looking on the floor was silent for a time. "The papers reached us, too; some books, also. We need them all. They are so true. I can do very little reading myself, but I have a friend--he can. My wife also reads to me." The peasant pondered for a moment. "Now, then, what are you going to do with them--with the valise?" The mother looked at him. "I'll leave it to you." He was not surprised, did not protest, but only said curtly, "To us," and nodded his head in assent. He let go of his beard, but continued to comb it with his fingers as he sat down. With inexorable, stubborn persistency the mother's memory held up before her eyes the scene of Rybin's torture. His image extinguished all thoughts in her mind. The pain and injury she felt for the man obscured every other sensation. Forgotten was the valise with the books and newspapers. She had feelings only for Rybin. Tears flowed constantly; her face was gloomy; but her voice did not tremble when she said to her host: "They rob a man, they choke him, they trample him in the mud--the accursed! And when he says, 'What are you doing, you godless men?' they beat and torture him." "Power," returned the peasant. "They have great power." "From where do they get it?" exclaimed the mother, thoroughly aroused. "From us, from the people--they get everything from us." "Ye-es," drawled the peasant. "It's a wheel." He bent his head toward the door, listening attentively. "They're coming," he said softly. "Who?" "Our people, I suppose." His wife entered. A freckled peasant, stooping, strode into the hut after her. He threw his cap into a corner, and quickly went up to their host. "Well?" The host nodded in confirmation. "Stepan," said the wife, standing at the oven, "maybe our guest wants to eat something." "No, thank you, my dear." The freckled peasant moved toward the mother and said quietly, in a broken voice: "Now, then, permit me to introduce myself to you. My name is Pyotr Yegorov Ryabinin, nicknamed Shilo--the Awl. I understand something about your affairs. I can read and write. I'm no fool, so to speak." He grasped the hand the mother extended to him, and wringing it, turned to the master of the house. "There, Stepan, see, Varvara Nikolayevna is a good lady, true. But in regard to all this, she says it is nonsense, nothing but dreams. Boys and different students, she says, muddle the people's mind with absurdities. However, you saw just now a sober, steady man, as he ought to be, a peasant, arrested. Now, here is she, an elderly woman, and as to be seen, not of blue blood. Don't be offended--what's your station in life?" He spoke quickly and distinctly, without taking breath. His little beard shook nervously, and his dark eyes, which he screwed up, rapidly scanned the mother's face and figure. Ragged, crumpled, his hair disheveled, he seemed just to have come from a fight, in which he had vanquished his opponent, and still to be flushed with the joy of victory. He pleased the mother with his sprightliness and his simple talk, which at once went straight to the point. She gave him a kind look as she answered his question. He once more shook her hand vigorously, and laughed softly. "You see, Stepan, it's a clean business, an excellent business. I told you so. This is the way it is: the people, so to speak, are beginning to take things into their own hands. And as to the lady--she won't tell you the truth; it's harmful to her. I respect her, I must say; she's a good person, and wishes us well--well, a little bit, and provided it won't harm her any. But the people want to go straight, and they fear no loss and no harm--you see?--all life is harmful to them; they have no place to turn to; they have nothing all around except 'Stop!' which is shouted at them from all sides." "I see," said Stepan, nodding and immediately adding: "She's uneasy about her baggage." Pyotr gave the mother a shrewd wink, and again reassured her: "Don't be uneasy; it's all right. Everything will be all right, mother. Your valise is in my house. Just now when he told me about you--that you also participate in this work and that you know that man--I said to him: 'Take care, Stepan! In such a serious business you must keep your mouth shut.' Well, and you, too, mother, seem to have scented us when we stood near you. The faces of honest people can be told at once. Not many of them walk the streets, to speak frankly. Your valise is in my house." He sat down alongside of her and looked entreatingly into her eyes. "If you wish to empty it we'll help you, with pleasure. We need books." "She wants to give us everything," remarked Stepan. "First rate, mother! We'll find a place for all of it." He jumped to his feet, burst into a laugh, and quickly pacing up and down the room said contentedly: "The matter is perfectly simple: in one place it snaps, and in another it is tied up. Very well! And the newspaper, mother, is a good one, and does its work--it peels the people's eyes open; it's unpleasant to the masters. I do carpentry work for a lady about five miles from here--a good woman, I must admit. She gives me various books, sometimes very simple books. I read them over--I might as well fall asleep. In general we're thankful to her. But I showed her one book and a number of a newspaper; she was somewhat offended. 'Drop it, Pyotr!' she said. 'Yes, this,' she says, 'is the work of senseless youngsters; from such a business your troubles can only increase; prison and Siberia for this,' she says." He grew abruptly silent, reflected for a moment, and asked: "Tell me, mother, this man--is he a relative of yours?" "A stranger." Pyotr threw his head back and laughed noiselessly, very well satisfied with something. To the mother, however, it seemed the very next instant that, in reference to Rybin, the word "stranger" was not in place; it jarred upon her. "I'm not a relative of his; but I've known him for a long time, and I look up to him as to an elder brother." She was pained and displeased not to find the word she wanted, and she could not suppress a quiet groan. A sad stillness pervaded the hut. Pyotr leaned his head upon one shoulder; his little beard, narrow and sharp, stuck out comically on one side, and gave his shadow swinging on the wall the appearance of a man sticking out his tongue teasingly. Stepan sat with his elbows on the table, and beat a tattoo on the boards. His wife stood at the oven without stirring; the mother felt her look riveted upon herself and often glanced at the woman's face--oval, swarthy, with a straight nose, and a chin cut off short; her dark and thick eyebrows joined sternly, her eyelids drooped, and from under them her greenish eyes shone sharply and intently. "A friend, that is to say," said Pyotr quietly. "He has character, indeed he has; he esteems himself highly, as he ought to; he has put a high price on himself, as he ought to. There's a man, Tatyana! You say----" "Is he married?" Tatyana interposed, and compressed the thin lips of her small mouth. "He's a widower," answered the mother sadly. "That's why he's so brave," remarked Tatyana. Her utterance was low and difficult. "A married man like him wouldn't go--he'd be afraid." "And I? I'm married and everything, and yet--" exclaimed Pyotr. "Enough!" she said without looking at him and twisting her lips. "Well, what are you? You only talk a whole lot, and on rare occasions you read a book. It doesn't do people much good for you and Stepan to whisper to each other on the corners." "Why, sister, many people hear me," quietly retorted the peasant, offended. "I act as a sort of yeast here. It isn't fair in you to speak that way." Stepan looked at his wife silently and again drooped his head. "And why should a peasant marry?" asked Tatyana. "He needs a worker, they say. What work?" "You haven't enough? You want more?" Stepan interjected dully. "But what sense is there in the work we do? We go half-hungry from day to day anyhow. Children are born; there's no time to look after them on account of the work that doesn't give us bread." She walked up to the mother, sat down next to her, and spoke on stubbornly, no plaint nor mourning in her voice. "I had two children; one, when he was two years old, was boiled to death in hot water; the other was born dead--from this thrice-accursed work. Such a happy life! I say a peasant has no business to marry. He only binds his hands. If he were free he would work up to a system of life needed by everybody. He would come out directly and openly for the truth. Am I right, mother?" "You are. You're right, my dear. Otherwise we can't conquer life." "Have you a husband?" "He died. I have a son." "And where is he? Does he live with you?" "He's in prison." The mother suddenly felt a calm pride in these words, usually painful to her. "This is the second time--all because he came to understand God's truth and sowed it openly without sparing himself. He's a young man, handsome, intelligent; he planned a newspaper, and gave Mikhaïl Ivanovich a start on his way, although he's only half of Mikhaïl's age. Now they're going to try my son for all this, and sentence him; and he'll escape from Siberia and continue with his work." Her pride waxed as she spoke. It created the image of a hero, and demanded expression in words. The mother needed an offset--something fine and bright--to balance the gloomy incident she had witnessed that day, with its senseless horror and shameless cruelty. Instinctively yielding to this demand of a healthy soul, she reached out for everything she had seen that was pure and shining and heaped it into one dazzling, cleansing fire. "Many such people have already been born, more and more are being born, and they will all stand up for the freedom of the people, for the truth, to the very end of their lives." She forgot precaution, and although she did not mention names, she told everything known to her of the secret work for the emancipation of the people from the chains of greed. In depicting the personalities she put all her force into her words, all the abundance of love awakened in her so late by her rousing experiences. And she herself became warmly enamored of the images rising up in her memory, illumined and beautified by her feeling. "The common cause advances throughout the world in all the cities. There's no measuring the power of the good people. It keeps growing and growing, and it will grow until the hour of our victory, until the resurrection of truth." Her voice flowed on evenly, the words came to her readily, and she quickly strung them, like bright, varicolored beads, on strong threads of her desire to cleanse her heart of the blood and filth of that day. She saw that the three people were as if rooted to the spot where her speech found them, and that they looked at her without stirring. She heard the intermittent breathing of the woman sitting by her side, and all this magnified the power of her faith in what she said, and in what she promised these people. "All those who have a hard life, whom want and injustice crush--it's the rich and the servitors of the rich who have overpowered them. The whole people ought to go out to meet those who perish in the dungeons for them, and endure mortal torture. Without gain to themselves they show where the road to happiness for all people lies. They frankly admit it is a hard road, and they force no one to follow them. But once you take your position by their side you will never leave them. You will see it is the true, the right road. With such persons the people may travel. Such persons will not be reconciled to small achievements; they will not stop until they will vanquish all deceit, all evil and greed. They will not fold their hands until the people are welded into one soul, until the people will say in one voice: 'I am the ruler, and I myself will make the laws equal for all.'" She ceased from exhaustion, and looked about. Her words would not be wasted here, she felt assured. The silence lasted for a minute, while the peasants regarded her as if expecting more. Pyotr stood in the middle of the hut, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes screwed up, a smile quivering on his freckled face. Stepan was leaning one hand on the table; with his neck and entire body forward, he seemed still to be listening. A shadow on his face gave it more finish. His wife, sitting beside the mother, bent over, her elbows on her knees, and studied her feet. "That's how it is," whispered Pyotr, and carefully sat on the bench, shaking his head. Stepan slowly straightened himself, looked at his wife, and threw his hands in the air, as if grasping for something. "If a man takes up this work," he began thoughtfully in a moderated voice, "then his entire soul is needed." Pyotr timidly assented: "Yes, he mustn't look back." "The work has spread very widely," continued Stepan. "Over the whole earth," added Pyotr. They both spoke like men walking in darkness, groping for the way with their feet. The mother leaned against the wall, and throwing back her head listened to their careful utterances. Tatyana arose, looked around, and sat down again. Her green eyes gleamed dryly as she looked into the peasants' faces with dissatisfaction and contempt. "It seems you've been through a lot of misery," she said, suddenly turning to the mother. "I have." "You speak well. You draw--you draw the heart after your talk. It makes me think, it makes me think, 'God! If I could only take a peep at such people and at life through a chink!' How does one live? What life has one? The life of sheep. Here am I; I can read and write; I read books, I think a whole lot. Sometimes I don't even sleep the entire night because I think. And what sense is there in it? If I don't think, my existence is a purposeless existence; and if I do, it is also purposeless. And everything seems purposeless. There are the peasants, who work and tremble over a piece of bread for their homes, and they have nothing. It hurts them, enrages them; they drink, fight, and work again--work, work, work. But what comes of it? Nothing." She spoke with scorn in her eyes and in her voice, which was low and even, but at times broke off like a taut thread overstrained. The peasants were silent, the wind glided by the window panes, buzzed through the straw of the roofs, and at times whined softly down the chimney. A dog barked, and occasional drops of rain pattered on the window. Suddenly the light flared in the lamp, dimmed, but in a second sprang up again even and bright. "I listened to your talk, and I see what people live for now. It's so strange--I hear you, and I think, 'Why, I know all this.' And yet, until you said it, I hadn't heard such things, and I had no such thoughts. Yes." "I think we ought to take something to eat, and put out the lamp," said Stepan, somberly and slowly. "People will notice that at the Chumakovs' the light burned late. It's nothing for us, but it might turn out bad for the guest." Tatyana arose and walked to the oven. "Ye-es," Pyotr said softly, with a smile. "Now, friend, keep your ears pricked. When the papers appear among the people----" "I'm not speaking of myself. If they arrest me, it's no great matter." The wife came up to the table and asked Stepan to make room. He arose and watched her spread the table as he stood to one side. "The price of fellows of our kind is a nickel a bundle, a hundred in a bundle," he said with a smile. The mother suddenly pitied him. He now pleased her more. "You don't judge right, host," she said. "A man mustn't agree to the price put upon him by people from the outside, who need nothing of him except his blood. You, knowing yourself within, must put your own estimate on yourself--your price, not for your enemies, but for your friends." "What friends have we?" the peasant exclaimed softly. "Up to the first piece of bread." "And I say that the people have friends." "Yes, they have, but not here--that's the trouble," Stepan deliberated. "Well, then create them here." Stepan reflected a while. "We'll try." "Sit down at the table," Tatyana invited her. At supper, Pyotr, who had been subdued by the talk of the mother and appeared to be at a loss, began to speak again with animation: "Mother, you ought to get out of here as soon as possible, to escape notice. Go to the next station, not to the city--hire the post horses." "Why? I'm going to see her off!" said Stepan. "You mustn't. In case anything happens and they ask you whether she slept in your house--'She did.' 'When did she go?' 'I saw her off.' 'Aha! You did? Please come to prison!' Do you understand? And no one ought to be in a hurry to get into prison; everybody's turn will come. 'Even the Czar will die,' as the saying goes. But the other way: she simply spent the night in your house, hired horses, and went away. And what of it? Somebody passing through the village sleeps with somebody in the village. There's nothing in that." "Where did you learn to be afraid, Pyotr?" Tatyana scoffed. "A man must know everything, friend!" Pyotr exclaimed, striking his knee--"know how to fear, know how to be brave. You remember how a policeman lashed Vaganov for that newspaper? Now you'll not persuade Vaganov for any amount of money to take a book in his hand. Yes; you believe me, mother, I'm a sharp fellow for every sort of a trick--everybody knows it. I'm going to scatter these books and papers for you in the best shape and form, as much as you please. Of course, the people here are not educated; they've been intimidated. However, the times squeeze a man and wide open go his eyes, 'What's the matter?' And the book answers him in a perfectly simple way: 'That's what's the matter--Think! Unite! Nothing else is left for you to do!' There are examples of men who can't read or write and can understand more than the educated ones--especially if the educated ones have their stomachs full. I go about here everywhere; I see much. Well? It's possible to live; but you want brains and a lot of cleverness in order not to sit down in the cesspool at once. The authorities, too, smell a rat, as though a cold wind were blowing on them from the peasants. They see the peasant smiles very little, and altogether is not very kindly disposed and wants to disaccustom himself to the authorities. The other day in Smolyakov, a village not far from here, they came to extort the taxes; and your peasants got stubborn and flew into a passion. The police commissioner said straight out: 'Oh, you damned scoundrels! why, this is disobedience to the Czar!' There was one little peasant there, Spivakin, and says he: 'Off with you to the evil mother with your Czar! What kind of a Czar is he if he pulls the last shirt off your body?' That's how far it went, mother. Of course, they snatched Spivakin off to prison. But the word remained, and even the little boys know it. It lives! It shouts! And perhaps in our days the word is worth more than a man. People are stupefied and deadened by their absorption in breadwinning. Yes." Pyotr did not eat, but kept on talking in a quick whisper, his dark, roguish eyes gleaming merrily. He lavishly scattered before the mother innumerable little observations on the village life--they rolled from him like copper coins from a full purse. Stepan several times reminded him: "Why don't you eat?" Pyotr would then seize a piece of bread and a spoon and fall to talking and sputtering again like a goldfinch. Finally, after the meal, he jumped to his feet and announced: "Well, it's time for me to go home. Good-by, mother!" and he shook her hand and nodded his head. "Maybe we shall never see each other again. I must say to you that all this is very good--to meet you and hear your speeches--very good! Is there anything in your valise beside the printed matter? A shawl? Excellent! A shawl, remember, Stepan. He'll bring you the valise at once. Come, Stepan. Good-by. I wish everything good to you." After he had gone the crawling sound of the roaches became audible in the hut, the blowing of the wind over the roof and its knocking against the door in the chimney. A fine rain dripped monotonously on the window. Tatyana prepared a bed for the mother on the bench with clothing brought from the oven and the storeroom. "A lively man!" remarked the mother. The hostess looked at her sidewise. "A light fellow," she answered. "He rattles on and rattles on; you can't but hear the rattling at a great distance." "And how is your husband?" asked the mother. "So so. A good peasant; he doesn't drink; we live peacefully. So so. Only he has a weak character." She straightened herself, and after a pause asked: "Why, what is it that's wanted nowadays? What's wanted is that the people should be stirred up to revolt. Of course! Everybody thinks about it, but privately, for himself. And what's necessary is that he should speak out aloud. Some one person must be the first to decide to do it." She sat down on the bench and suddenly asked: "Tell me, do young ladies also occupy themselves with this? Do they go about with the workingmen and read? Aren't they squeamish and afraid?" She listened attentively to the mother's reply and fetched a deep sigh; then drooping her eyelids and inclining her head, she said: "In one book I read the words 'senseless life.' I understood them very well at once. I know such a life. Thoughts there are, but they're not connected, and they stray like stupid sheep without a shepherd. They stray and stray, with no one to bring them together. There's no understanding in people of what must be done. That's what a senseless life is. I'd like to run away from it without even looking around--such a severe pang one suffers when one understands something!" The mother perceived the pang in the dry gleam of the woman's green eyes, in her wizened face, in her voice. She wanted to pet and soothe her. "You understand, my dear, what to do----" Tatyana interrupted her softly: "A person must be able-- The bed's ready for you. Lie down and sleep." She went over to the oven and remained standing there erect, in silence, sternly centered in herself. The mother lay down without undressing. She began to feel the weariness in her bones and groaned softly. Tatyana walked up to the table, extinguished the lamp, and when darkness descended on the hut she resumed speech in her low, even voice, which seemed to erase something from the flat face of the oppressive darkness. "You do not pray? I, too, think there is no God, there are no miracles. All these things were contrived to frighten us, to make us stupid." The mother turned about on the bench uneasily; the dense darkness looked straight at her from the window, and the scarcely audible crawling of the roaches persistently disturbed the quiet. She began to speak almost in a whisper and fearfully: "In regard to God, I don't know; but I do believe in Christ, in the Little Father. I believe in his words, 'Love thy neighbor as thyself.' Yes, I believe in them." And suddenly she asked in perplexity: "But if there is a God, why did He withdraw his good power from us? Why did He allow the division of people into two worlds? Why, if He is merciful, does He permit human torture--the mockery of one man by another, all kinds of evil and beastliness?" Tatyana was silent. In the darkness the mother saw the faint outline of her straight figure--gray on the black background. She stood motionless. The mother closed her eyes in anguish. Then the groaning, cold voice sullenly broke in upon the stillness again: "The death of my children I will never forgive, neither God nor man--I will never forgive--_never_!" Nilovna uneasily rose from her bed; her heart understood the mightiness of the pain that evoked such words. "You are young; you will still have children," she said kindly. The woman did not answer immediately. Then she whispered: "No, no. I'm spoiled. The doctor says I'll never be able to have a child again." A mouse ran across the floor, something cracked--a flash of sound flaring up in the noiselessness. The autumn rain again rustled on the thatch like light thin fingers running over the roof. Large drops of water dismally fell to the ground, marking the slow course of the autumn night. Hollow steps on the street, then on the porch, awoke the mother from a heavy slumber. The door opened carefully. "Tatyana!" came the low call. "Are you in bed already?" "No." "Is she asleep?" "It seems she is." A light flared up, trembled, and sank into the darkness. The peasant walked over to the mother's bed, adjusted the sheepskin over her, and wrapped up her feet. The attention touched the mother in its simplicity. She closed her eyes again and smiled. Stepan undressed in silence, crept up to the loft, and all became quiet. CHAPTER XII The mother lay motionless, with ears strained in the drowsy stillness, and before her in the darkness wavered Rybin's face covered with blood. In the loft a dry whisper could be heard. "You see what sort of people go into this work? Even elderly people who have drunk the cup of misery to the bottom, who have worked, and for whom it is time to rest. And there they are! But you are young, sensible! Ah, Stepan!" The thick, moist voice of the peasant responded: "Such an affair--you mustn't take it up without thinking over it. Just wait a little while!" "I've heard you say so before." The sounds dropped, and rose again. The voice of Stepan rang out: "You must do it this way--at first you must take each peasant aside and speak to him by himself--for instance, to Makov Alesha, a lively man--can read and write--was wronged by the police; Shorin Sergey, also a sensible peasant; Knyazev, an honest, bold man, and that'll do to begin with. Then we'll get a group together, we look about us--yes. We must learn how to find her; and we ourselves must take a look at the people about whom she spoke. I'll shoulder my ax and go off to the city myself, making out I'm going there to earn money by splitting wood. You must proceed carefully in this matter. She's right when she says that the price a man has is according to his own estimate of himself--and this is an affair in which you must set a high value on yourself when once you take it up. There's that peasant! See! You can put him even before God, not to speak of before a police commissioner. He won't yield. He stands for his own firmly--up to his knees in it. And Nikita, why his honor was suddenly pricked--a marvel? No. If the people will set out in a friendly way to do something together, they'll draw everybody after them." "Friendly! They beat a man in front of your eyes, and you stand with your mouths wide open." "You just wait a little while. He ought to thank God we didn't beat him ourselves, that man. Yes, indeed. Sometimes the authorities compel you to beat, and you do beat. Maybe you weep inside yourself with pity, but still you beat. People don't dare to decline from beastliness--they'll be killed themselves for it. They command you, 'Be what I want you to be--a wolf, a pig'--but to be a man is prohibited. And a bold man they'll get rid of--send to the next world. No. You must contrive for many to get bold at once, and for all to arise suddenly." He whispered for a long time, now lowering his voice so that the mother scarcely could hear, and now bursting forth powerfully. Then the woman would stop him. "S-sh, you'll wake her." The mother fell into a heavy dreamless sleep. Tatyana awakened her in the early twilight, when the dusk still peered through the window with blank eyes, and when brazen sounds of the church bell floated and melted over the village in the gray, cold stillness. "I have prepared the samovar. Take some tea or you'll be cold if you go out immediately after getting up." Stepan, combing his tangled beard, asked the mother solicitously how to find her in the city. To-day the peasant's face seemed more finished to her. While they drank tea he remarked, smiling: "How wonderfully things happen!" "What?" asked Tatyana. "Why, this acquaintance--so simply." The mother said thoughtfully, but confidently: "In this affair there's a marvelous simplicity in everything." The host and hostess restrained themselves from demonstrativeness in parting with her; they were sparing of words, but lavish in little attentions for her comfort. Sitting in the post, the mother reflected that this peasant would begin to work carefully, noiselessly, like a mole, without cease, and that at his side the discontented voice of his wife would always sound, and the dry burning gleam in her green eyes would never die out of her so long as she cherished the revengeful wolfish anguish of a mother for lost children. The mother recalled Rybin--his blood, his face, his burning eyes, his words. Her heart was compressed again with a bitter feeling of impotence; and along the entire road to the city the powerful figure of black-bearded Mikhaïl with his torn shirt, his hands bound behind his back, his disheveled head, clothed in wrath and faith in his truth, stood out before her on the drab background of the gray day. And as she regarded the figure, she thought of the numberless villages timidly pressed to the ground; of the people, faint-heartedly and secretly awaiting the coming of truth; and of the thousands of people who senselessly and silently work their whole lifetime without awaiting the coming of anything. Life represented itself to her as an unplowed, hilly field, which mutely awaits the workers and promises a harvest to free and honest hands: "Fertilize me with seeds of reason and truth; I will return them to you a hundredfold." When from afar she saw the roofs and spires of the city, a warm joy animated and eased her perturbed, worn heart. The preoccupied faces of those people flashed up in her memory who, from day to day, without cease, in perfect confidence kindle the fire of thought and scatter the sparks over the whole earth. Her soul was flooded by the serene desire to give these people her entire force, and--doubly the love of a mother, awakened and animated by their thoughts. At home Nikolay opened the door for the mother. He was disheveled and held a book in his hand. "Already?" he exclaimed joyfully. "You've returned very quickly. Well, I'm glad, very glad." His eyes blinked kindly and briskly behind his glasses. He quickly helped her off with her wraps, and said with an affectionate smile: "And here in my place, as you see, there was a search last night. And I wondered what the reason for it could possibly be--whether something hadn't happened to you. But you were not arrested. If they had arrested you they wouldn't have let me go either." He led her into the dining room, and continued with animation: "However, they suggested that I should be discharged from my position. That doesn't distress me. I was sick, anyway, of counting the number of horseless peasants, and ashamed to receive money for it, too; for the money actually comes from them. It would have been awkward for me to leave the position of my own accord. I am under obligations to the comrades in regard to work. And now the matter has found its own solution. I'm satisfied!" The mother sat down and looked around. One would have supposed that some powerful man in a stupid fit of insolence had knocked the walls of the house from the outside until everything inside had been jolted down. The portraits were scattered on the floor; the wall paper was torn away and stuck out in tufts; a board was pulled out of the flooring; a window sill was ripped away; the floor by the oven was strewn with ashes. The mother shook her head at the sight of this familiar picture. "They wanted to show that they don't get money for nothing," remarked Nikolay. On the table stood a cold samovar, unwashed dishes, sausages, and cheese on paper, along with plates, crumbs of bread, books, and coals from the samovar. The mother smiled. Nikolay also laughed in embarrassment, following the look of her eyes. "It was I who didn't waste time in completing the picture of the upset. But never mind, Nilovna, never mind! I think they're going to come again. That's the reason I didn't pick it all up. Well, how was your trip?" The mother started at the question. Rybin arose before her; she felt guilty at not having told of him immediately. Bending over a chair, she moved up to Nikolay and began her narrative. She tried to preserve her calm in order not to omit something as a result of excitement. "They caught him!" A quiver shot across Nikolay's face. "They did? How?" The mother stopped his questions with a gesture of her hand, and continued as if she were sitting before the very face of justice and bringing in a complaint regarding the torture of a man. Nikolay threw himself back in his chair, grew pale, and listened, biting his lips. He slowly removed his glasses, put them on the table, and ran his hand over his face as if wiping away invisible cobwebs. The mother had never seen him wear so austere an expression. When she concluded he arose, and for a minute paced the floor in silence, his fists thrust deep into his pockets. Conquering his agitation he looked almost calmly with a hard gleam in his eyes into the face of the mother, which was covered with silent tears. "Nilovna, we mustn't waste time! Let us try, dear comrade, to take ourselves in hand." Then he remarked through his teeth: "He must be a remarkable fellow--such nobility! It'll be hard for him in prison. Men like him feel unhappy there." Stepping in front of the mother he exclaimed in a ringing voice: "Of course, all the commissioners and sergeants are nothings. They are sticks in the hands of a clever villain, a trainer of animals. But I would kill an animal for allowing itself to be turned into a brute!" He restrained his excitement, which, however, made itself felt to the mother's perceptions. Again he strode through the room, and spoke in wrath: "See what horror! A gang of stupid people, protesting their pernicious power over the people, beat, stifle, oppress everybody. Savagery grows apace; cruelty becomes the law of life. A whole nation is depraved. Think of it! One part beats and turns brute; from immunity to punishment, sickens itself with a voluptuous greed of torture--that disgusting disease of slaves licensed to display all the power of slavish feelings and cattle habits. Others are poisoned with the desire for vengeance. Still others, beaten down to stupidity, become dumb and blind. They deprave the nation, the whole nation!" He stopped, leaning his elbows against the doorpost. He clasped his head in both hands, and was silent, his teeth set. "You involuntarily turn a beast yourself in this beastly life!" Smiling sadly, he walked up to her, and bending over her asked, pressing her hand: "Where is your valise?" "In the kitchen." "A spy is standing at our gate. We won't be able to get such a big mass of papers out of the way unnoticed. There's no place to hide them in and I think they'll come again to-night. I don't want you to be arrested. So, however sorry we may be for the lost labor, let's burn the papers." "What?" "Everything in the valise!" She finally understood; and though sad, her pride in her success brought a complacent smile to her face. "There's nothing in it--no leaflets." With gradually increasing animation she told how she had placed them in the hands of sympathetic peasants after Rybin's departure. Nikolay listened, at first with an uneasy frown, then in surprise, and finally exclaimed, interrupting her story: "Say, that's capital! Nilovna, do you know--" He stammered, embarrassed, and pressing her hand, exclaimed quietly: "You touch me so by your faith in people, by your faith in the cause of their emancipation! You have such a good soul! I simply love you as I didn't love my own mother!" Embracing his neck, she burst into happy sobs, and pressed his head to her lips. "Maybe," he muttered, agitated and embarrassed by the newness of his feeling, "maybe I'm speaking nonsense; but, upon my honest word, you are a beautiful person, Nilovna--yes!" "My darling, I love you, too; and I love you all with my whole soul, every drop of my blood!" she said, choking with a wave of hot joy. The two voices blended into one throbbing speech, subdued and pulsating with the great feeling that was seizing the people. "Such a large, soft power is in you; it draws the heart toward you imperceptibly. How brightly you describe people! How well you see them!" "I see your life; I understand it, my dear!" "One loves you. And it's such a marvelous thing to love a person--it's so good, you know!" "It is you, you who raise the people from the dead to life again; you!" the mother whispered hotly, stroking his head. "My dear, I think I see there's much work for you, much patience needed. Your power must not be wasted. It's so necessary for life. Listen to what else happened: there was a woman there, the wife of that man----" Nikolay sat near her, his happy face bent aside in embarrassment, and stroked his hair. But soon he turned around again, and looking at the mother, listened greedily to her simple and clear story. "A miracle! Every possibility of your getting into prison and suddenly-- Yes, it's evident that the peasants, too, are beginning to stir. After all, it's natural. We ought to get special people for the villages. People! We haven't enough--nowhere. Life demands hundreds of hands!" "Now, if Pasha could be free--and Andriusha," said the mother softly. Nikolay looked at her and drooped his head. "You see, Nilovna, it'll be hard for you to hear; but I'll say it, anyway--I know Pavel well; he won't leave prison. He wants to be tried; he wants to rise in all his height. He won't give up a trial, and he needn't either. He will escape from Siberia." The mother sighed and answered softly: "Well, he knows what's best for the cause." Nikolay quickly jumped to his feet, suddenly seized with joy again. "Thank you, Nilovna! I've just lived through a magnificent moment--maybe the best moment of my life. Thank you! Now, come, let's give each other a good, strong kiss!" They embraced, looking into each other's eyes. And they gave each other firm, comradely kisses. "That's good!" he said softly. The mother unclasped her hands from about his neck and laughed quietly and happily. "Um!" said Nikolay the next minute. "If your peasant there would hurry up and come here! You see, we must be sure to write a leaflet about Rybin for the village. It won't hurt him once he's come out so boldly, and it will help the cause. I'll surely do it to-day. Liudmila will print it quickly. But then arises the question--how will it get to the village?" "I'll take it!" "No, thank you!" Nikolay exclaimed quietly. "I'm wondering whether Vyesovshchikov won't do for it. Shall I speak to him?" "Yes; suppose you try and instruct him." "What'll I do then?" "Don't worry!" Nikolay sat down to write, while the mother put the table in order, from time to time casting a look at him. She saw how his pen trembled in his hand. It traveled along the paper in straight lines. Sometimes the skin on his neck quivered; he threw back his head and shut his eyes. All this moved her. "Execute them!" she muttered under her breath. "Don't pity the villains!" "There! It's ready!" he said, rising. "Hide the paper somewhere on your body. But know that when the gendarmes come they'll search you, too!" "The dogs take them!" she answered calmly. In the evening Dr. Ivan Danilovich came. "What's gotten into the authorities all of a sudden?" he said, running about the room. "There were seven searches last night. Where's the patient?" "He left yesterday. To-day, you see, Saturday, he reads to working people. He couldn't bring it over himself to omit the reading." "That's stupid--to sit at readings with a fractured skull!" "I tried to prove it to him, but unsuccessfully." "He wanted to do a bit of boasting before the comrades," observed the mother. "Look! I've already shed my blood!" The physician looked at her, made a fierce face, and said with set teeth: "Ugh! ugh! you bloodthirsty person!" "Well, Ivan, you've nothing to do here, and we're expecting guests. Go away! Nilovna, give him the paper." "Another paper?" "There, take it and give it to the printer." "I've taken it; I'll deliver it. Is that all?" "That's all. There's a spy at the gate." "I noticed. At my door, too. Good-by! Good-by, you fierce woman! And do you know, friends, a squabble in a cemetery is a fine thing after all! The whole city's talking about it. It stirs the people up and compels them to think. Your article on that subject was excellent, and it came in time. I always said that a good fight is better than a bad peace." "All right. Go away now!" "You're polite! Let's shake hands, Nilovna. And that fellow--he certainly behaved stupidly. Do you know where he lives?" Nikolay gave him the address. "I must go to him to-morrow. He's a fine fellow, eh?" "Very!" "We must keep him alive; he has good brains. It's from just such fellows that the real proletarian intellectuals ought to grow up--men to take our places when we leave for the region where evidently there are no class antagonisms. But, after all, who knows?" "You've taken to chattering, Ivan." "I feel happy, that's why. Well, I'm going! So you're expecting prison? I hope you get a good rest there!" "Thank you, I'm not tired!" The mother listened to their conversation. Their solicitude in regard to the workingmen was pleasant to her; and, as always, the calm activity of these people which did not forsake them even before the gates of the prison, astonished her. After the physician left, Nikolay and the mother conversed quietly while awaiting their evening visitors. Then Nikolay told her at length of his comrades living in exile; of those who had already escaped and continued their work under assumed names. The bare walls of the room echoed the low sounds of his voice, as if listening in incredulous amazement to the stories of modest heroes who disinterestedly devoted all their powers to the great cause of liberty. A shadow kindly enveloped the woman, warming her heart with love for the unseen people, who in her imagination united into one huge person, full of inexhaustible, manly force. This giant slowly but incessantly strides over the earth, cleansing it, laying bare before the eyes of the people the simple and clear truth of life--the great truth that raises humanity from the dead, welcomes all equally, and promises all alike freedom from greed, from wickedness, and falsehood, the three monsters which enslaved and intimidated the whole world. The image evoked in the mother's soul a feeling similar to that with which she used to stand before an ikon. After she had offered her joyful, grateful prayer, the day had then seemed lighter than the other days of her life. Now she forgot those days. But the feeling left by them had broadened, had become brighter and better, had grown more deeply into her soul. It was more keenly alive and burned more luminously. "But the gendarmes aren't coming!" Nikolay exclaimed suddenly, interrupting his story. The mother looked at him, and after a pause answered in vexation: "Oh, well, let them go to the dogs!" "Of course! But it's time for you to go to bed, Nilovna. You must be desperately tired. You're wonderfully strong, I must say. So much commotion and disturbance, and you live through it all so lightly. Only your hair is turning gray very quickly. Now go and rest." They pressed each other's hand and parted. CHAPTER XIII The mother fell quickly into a calm sleep, and rose early in the morning, awakened by a subdued tap at the kitchen door. The knock was incessant and patiently persistent. It was still dark and quiet, and the rapping broke in alarmingly on the stillness. Dressing herself rapidly, she walked out into the kitchen, and standing at the door asked: "Who's there?" "I," answered an unfamiliar voice. "Who?" "Open." The quiet word was spoken in entreaty. The mother lifted the hook, pushed the door with her foot, and Ignaty entered, saying cheerfully: "Well, so I'm not mistaken. I'm at the right place." He was spattered with mud up to his belt. His face was gray, his eyes fallen. "We've gotten into trouble in our place," he whispered, locking the door behind him. "I know it." The reply astonished the young man. He blinked and asked: "How? Where from?" She explained in a few rapid words, and asked: "Did they take the other comrades, too?" "They weren't there. They had gone off to be recruited. Five were captured, including Rybin." He snuffled and said, smiling: "And I was left over. I guess they're looking for me. Let them look. I'm not going back there again, not for anything. There are other people there yet, some seven young men and a girl. Never mind! They're all reliable." "How did you find this place?" The mother smiled. The door from the room opened quietly. "I?" Seating himself on a bench and looking around, Ignaty exclaimed: "They crawled up at night, straight to the tar works. Well, a minute before they came the forester ran up to us and knocked on the window. 'Look out, boys,' says he, 'they're coming on you.'" He laughed softly, wiped his face with the flap of his coat, and continued: "Well, they can't stun Uncle Mikhaïl even with a hammer. At once he says to me, 'Ignaty, run away to the city, quick! You remember the elderly woman.' And he himself writes a note. 'There, go! Good-by, brother.' He pushed me in the back. I flung out of the hut. I scrambled along on all fours through the bushes, and I hear them coming. There must have been a lot of them. You could hear the rustling on all sides, the devils--like a moose around the tar works. I lay in the bushes. They passed by me. Then I rose and off I went; and for two nights and a whole day I walked without stopping. My feet'll ache for a week." He was evidently satisfied with himself. A smile shone in his hazel eyes. His full red lips quivered. "I'll set you up with some tea soon. You wash yourself while I get the samovar ready." "I'll give you the note." He raised his leg with difficulty, and frowning and groaning put his foot on the bench and began to untie the leg wrappings. "I got frightened. 'Well,' thinks I, 'I'm a goner.'" Nikolay appeared at the door. Ignaty in embarrassment dropped his foot to the floor and wanted to rise, but staggered and fell heavily on the bench, catching himself with his hands. "You sit still!" exclaimed the mother. "How do you do, comrade?" said Nikolay, screwing up his eyes good-naturedly and nodding his head. "Allow me, I'll help you." Kneeling on the floor in front of the peasant, he quickly unwound the dirty, damp wrappings. "Well!" the fellow exclaimed quietly, pulling back his foot and blinking in astonishment. He regarded the mother, who said, without paying attention to his look: "His legs ought to be rubbed down with alcohol." "Of course!" said Nikolay. Ignaty snorted in embarrassment. Nikolay found the note, straightened it out, looked at it, and handed the gray, crumpled piece of paper to the mother. "For you." "Read it." "'Mother, don't let the affair go without your attention. Tell the tall lady not to forget to have them write more for our cause, I beg of you. Good-by. Rybin.'" "My darling!" said the mother sadly. "They've already seized him by the throat, and he----" Nikolay slowly dropped his hand holding the note. "That's magnificent!" he said slowly and respectfully. "It both touches and teaches." Ignaty looked at them, and quietly shook his bared feet with his dirty hands. The mother, covering her tearful face, walked up to him with a basin of water, sat down on the floor, and stretched out her hands to his feet. But he quickly thrust them under the bench, exclaiming in fright: "What are you going to do?" "Give me your foot, quick!" "I'll bring the alcohol at once," said Nikolay. The young man shoved his foot still farther under the bench and mumbled: "What _are_ you going to do? It's not proper." Then the mother silently unbared his other foot. Ignaty's round face lengthened in amazement. He looked around helplessly with his wide-open eyes. "Why, it's going to tickle me!" "You'll be able to bear it," answered the mother, beginning to wash his feet. Ignaty snorted aloud, and moving his neck awkwardly looked down at her, comically drooping his under lip. "And do you know," she said tremulously, "that they beat Mikhaïl Ivanovich?" "What?" the peasant exclaimed in fright. "Yes; he had been beaten when they led him to the village, and in Nikolsk the sergeant beat him, the police commissioner beat him in the face and kicked him till he bled." The mother became silent, overwhelmed by her recollections. "They can do it," said the peasant, lowering his brows sullenly. His shoulders shook. "That is, I fear them like the devils. And the peasants--didn't the peasants beat him?" "One beat him. The police commissioner ordered him to. All the others were so so--they even took his part. 'You mustn't beat him!' they said." "Um! Yes, yes! The peasants are beginning to realize where a man stands, and for what he stands." "There are sensible people there, too." "Where can't you find sensible people? Necessity! They're everywhere; but it's hard to get at them. They hide themselves in chinks and crevices, and suck their hearts out each one for himself. Their resolution isn't strong enough to make them gather into a group." Nikolay brought a bottle of alcohol, put coals in the samovar, and walked away silently. Ignaty accompanied him with a curious look. "A gentleman?" "In this business there are no masters; they're all comrades!" "It's strange to me," said Ignaty with a skeptical but embarrassed smile. "What's strange?" "This: at one end they beat you in the face; at the other they wash your feet. Is there a middle of any kind?" The door of the room was flung open and Nikolay, standing on the threshold, said: "And in the middle stand the people who lick the hands of those who beat you in the face and suck the blood of those whose faces are beaten. That's the middle!" Ignaty looked at him respectfully, and after a pause said: "That's it!" The mother sighed. "Mikhaïl Ivanovich also always used to say, 'That's it!' like an ax blow." "Nilovna, you're evidently tired. Permit me--I----" The peasant pulled his feet uneasily. "That'll do;" said the mother, rising. "Well, Ignaty, now wash yourself." The young man arose, shifted his feet about, and stepped firmly on the floor. "They seem like new feet. Thank you! Many, many thanks!" He drew a wry face, his lips trembled, and his eyes reddened. After a pause, during which he regarded the basin of black water, he whispered softly: "I don't even know how to thank you!" Then they sat down to the table to drink tea. And Ignaty soberly began: "I was the distributer of literature, a very strong fellow at walking. Uncle Mikhaïl gave me the job. 'Distribute!' says he; 'and if you get caught you're alone.'" "Do many people read?" asked Nikolay. "All who can. Even some of the rich read. Of course, they don't get it from us. They'd clap us right into chains if they did! They understand that this is a slipknot for them in all ages." "Why a slipknot?" "What else!" exclaimed Ignaty in amazement. "Why, the peasants are themselves going to take the land from everyone else. They'll wash it out with their blood from under the gentry and the rich; that is to say, they themselves are going to divide it, and divide it so that there won't be masters or workingmen anymore. How then? What's the use of getting into a scrap if not for that?" Ignaty even seemed to be offended. He looked at Nikolay mistrustfully and skeptically. Nikolay smiled. "Don't get angry," said the mother jokingly. Nikolay thoughtfully exclaimed: "How shall we get the leaflets about Rybin's arrest to the village?" Ignaty grew attentive. "I'll speak to Vyesovshchikov to-day." "Is there a leaflet already?" asked Ignaty. "Yes." "Give it to me. I'll take it." Ignaty rubbed his hands at the suggestion, his eyes flashing. "I know where and how. Let me." The mother laughed quietly, without looking at him. "Why, you're tired and afraid, and you said you'd never go there again!" Ignaty smacked his lips and stroked his curly hair with his broad palm. "I'm tired; I'll rest; and of course I'm afraid!" His manner was businesslike and calm. "They beat a man until the blood comes, as you yourself say--then who wants to be mutilated? But I'll pull through somehow at night. Never mind! Give me the leaflets; this evening I'll get on the go." He was silent, thought a while, his eyebrows working. "I'll go to the forest; I'll hide the literature, and then I'll notify our fellows: 'Go get it.' That's better. If I myself should distribute them I might fall into the hands of the police, and it would be a pity for the leaflets. You must act carefully here. There are not many such leaflets!" "And how about your fear?" the mother observed again with a smile. This curly-haired, robust fellow put her into a good humor by his sincerity, which sounded in his every word, and shone from his round, determined face. "Fear is fear, and business is business!" he answered with a grin. "Why are you laughing at me, eh? You, too! Why, isn't it natural to be afraid in this matter? Well, and if it's necessary a man'll go into a fire. Such an affair, it requires it." "Ah, you, my child!" Ignaty, embarrassed, smiled. "Well, there you are--child!" he said. Nikolay began to speak, all the time looking good-naturedly with screwed-up eyes at the young peasant. "You're not going there!" "Then what'll I do? Where am I to be?" Ignaty asked uneasily. "Another fellow will go in place of you. And you'll tell him in detail what to do and how to do it." "All right!" said Ignaty. But his consent was not given at once, and then only reluctantly. "And for you we'll obtain a good passport and make you a forester." The young fellow quickly threw back his head and asked uneasily: "But if the peasants come there for wood, or there--in general--what'll I do? Bind them? That doesn't suit me." The mother laughed, and Nikolay, too. This again confused and vexed Ignaty. "Don't be uneasy!" Nikolay soothed him. "You won't have to bind peasants. You trust us." "Well, well," said Ignaty, set at ease, smiling at Nikolay with confidence and merriness in his eyes. "If you could get me to the factory. There, they say, the fellows are mighty smart." A fire seemed to be ever burning in his broad chest, unsteady as yet, not confident in its own power. It flashed brightly in his eyes, forced out from within; but suddenly it would nearly expire in fright and flicker behind the smoke of perplexed alarm and embarrassment. The mother rose from behind the table, and looking through the window reflected: "Ah, life! Five times in the day you laugh and five times you weep. All right. Well, are you through, Ignaty? Go to bed and sleep." "But I don't want to." "Go on, go on!" "You're stern in this place. Thank you for the tea, for the sugar, for the kindness." Lying down in the mother's bed he mumbled, scratching his head: "Now everything'll smell of tar in your place. Ah, it's all for nothing all this--plain coddling! I don't want to sleep. You're good people, yes. It's more than I can understand--as if I'd gotten a hundred thousand miles away from the village--how he hit it off about the middle--and in the middle are the people who lick the hands--of those who beat the faces--um, yes." And suddenly he gave a loud short snore and dropped off to sleep, with eyebrows raised high and half-open mouth. * * * * * Late at night he sat in a little room of a basement at a table opposite Vyesovshchikov. He said in a subdued tone, knitting his brows: "On the middle window, four times." "Four." "At first three times like this"--he counted aloud as he tapped thrice on the table with his forefinger. "Then waiting a little, once again." "I understand." "A red-haired peasant will open the door for you, and will ask you for the midwife. You'll tell him, 'Yes, from the boss.' Nothing else. He'll understand your business." They sat with heads bent toward each other, both robust fellows, conversing in half tones. The mother, with her arms folded on her bosom, stood at the table looking at them. All the secret tricks and passwords compelled her to smile inwardly as she thought, "Mere children still." A lamp burned on the wall, illuminating a dark spot of dampness and pictures from journals. On the floor old pails were lying around, fragments of slate iron. A large, bright star out in the high darkness shone into the window. The odor of mildew, paint, and damp earth filled the room. Ignaty was dressed in a thick autumn overcoat of shaggy material. It pleased him; the mother observed how he stroked it admiringly with the palm of his hand, how he looked at himself, clumsily turning his powerful neck. Her bosom beat tenderly with, "My dears, my children, my own." "There!" said Ignaty, rising. "You'll remember, then? First you go to Muratov and ask for grandfather." "I remember." But Ignaty was still distrustful of Nikolay's memory, and reiterated all the instructions, words, and signs, and finally extended his hand to him, saying: "That's all now. Good-by, comrade. Give my regards to them. I'm alive and strong. The people there are good--you'll see." He cast a satisfied glance down at himself, stroked the overcoat, and asked the mother, "Shall I go?" "Can you find the way?" "Yes. Good-by, then, dear comrades." He walked off, raising his shoulders high, thrusting out his chest, with his new hat cocked to one side, and his hands deep in his pockets in most dignified fashion. On his forehead and temples his bright, boyish curls danced gayly. "There, now, I have work, too," said Vyesovshchikov, going over to the mother quietly. "I'm bored already--jumped out of prison--what for? My only occupation is hiding--and there I was learning. Pavel so pressed your brains--it was one pure delight. And Andrey, too, polished us fellows zealously. Well, Nilovna, did you hear how they decided in regard to the escape? Will they arrange it?" "They'll find out day after to-morrow," she repeated, sighing involuntarily. "One day still--day after to-morrow." Laying his heavy hand on her shoulder, and bringing his face close to hers, Nikolay said animatedly: "You tell them, the older ones there--they'll listen to you. Why, it's very easy. You just see for yourself. There's the wall of the prison near the lamp-post; opposite is an empty lot, on the left the cemetery, on the right the streets--the city. The lamplighter goes to the lamp-post; by day he cleans the lamp; he puts the ladder against the wall, climbs up, screws hooks for a rope ladder onto the top of the wall, lets the rope ladder down into the prison yard, and off he goes. There inside the walls they know the time when this will be done, and will ask the criminals to arrange an uproar, or they'll arrange it themselves, and those who need it will go up the ladder over the wall--one, two, it's done. And they calmly proceed to the city because the chase throws itself first of all on the vacant lot and the cemetery." He gesticulated rapidly in front of the mother's face, drawing his plan, the details of which were clear, simple, and clever. She had known him as a clumsy fellow, and it was strange to her to see the pockmarked face with the high cheek bones, usually so gloomy, now lively and alert. The narrow gray eyes, formerly harsh and cold, looking at the world sullenly with malice and distrust, seemed to be chiseled anew, assuming an oval form and shining with an even, warm light that convinced and moved the mother. "You think of it--by day, without fail by day. To whom would it occur that a prisoner would make up his mind to escape by day in the eyes of the whole prison?" "And they'll shoot him down," the woman said trembling. "Who? There are no soldiers, and the overseers of the prison use their revolvers to drive nails in." "Why, it's very simple--all this." "And you'll see it'll all come out all right. No. You speak to them. I have everything prepared already--the rope ladder, the screw hooks; I spoke to my host, he'll be the lamplighter." Somebody stirred noisily at the door and coughed, and iron clanked. "There he is!" exclaimed Nikolay. At the open door a tin bathtub was thrust in, and a hoarse voice said: "Get in, you devil." Then a round, gray, hatless head appeared. It had protruding eyes and a mustache, and wore a good-natured expression. Nikolay helped the man in with the tub. A tall, stooping figure strode through the door. The man coughed, his shaven cheeks puffing up; he spat out and greeted hoarsely: "Good health to you!" "There! Ask him!" "Me? What about?" "About the escape." "Ah, ah!" said the host, wiping his mustache with black fingers. "There, Yakob Vasilyevich! She doesn't believe it's a simple matter!" "Hm! she doesn't believe! Not to believe means not to want to believe. You and I want to, and so we believe." The old man suddenly bent over and coughed hoarsely, rubbed his breast for a long time, while he stood in the middle of the room panting for breath and scanning the mother with wide-open eyes. "I'm not the one to decide, Nikolay." "But, mother, you talk with them. Tell them everything is ready. Ah, if I could only see them! I'd force them!" He threw out his hands with a broad gesture and pressed them together as if embracing something firmly, and his voice rang with hot feeling that astounded the mother by its power. "Hm! what a fellow you are!" she thought; but said aloud: "It's for Pasha and the comrades to decide." Nikolay thoughtfully inclined his head. "Who's this Pasha?" asked the host, seating himself. "My son." "What's the family?" "Vlasov." He nodded his head, got his tobacco pouch, whipped out his pipe and filled it with tobacco. He spoke brokenly: "I've heard of him. My nephew knows him. He, too, is in prison--my nephew Yevchenko. Have you heard of him? And my family is Godun. They'll soon shut all the young people in prison, and then there'll be plenty and comfort for us old folks. The gendarme assures me that my nephew will even be sent to Siberia. They'll exile him--the dogs!" Lighting his pipe, he turned to Nikolay, spitting frequently on the floor: "So she doesn't want to? Well, that's her affair! A person is free to feel as he wants to. Are you tired of sitting in prison? Go. Are you tired of going? Sit. They robbed you? Keep still. They beat you? Bear it. They have killed you? Stay dead. That's certain. And I'll carry off Savka; I'll carry him off!" His curt, barking phrases, full of good-natured irony, perplexed the mother. But his last words aroused envy in her. While walking along the street in the face of a cold wind and rain, she thought of Nikolay, "What a man he's become! Think of it!" And remembering Godun, she almost prayerfully reflected, "It seems I'm not the only one who lives for the new. It's a big fire if it so cleanses and burns all who see it." Then she thought of her son, "If he only agreed!" On Sunday, taking leave of Pavel in the waiting room of the prison, she felt a little lump of paper in her hand. She started as if it burned her skin, and cast a look of question and entreaty into her son's face. But she found no answer there. Pavel's blue eyes smiled with the usual composed smile familiar to her. "Good-by!" she sighed. The son again put out his hand to her, and a certain kindness and tenderness for her quivered on his face. "Good-by, mamma!" She waited without letting go of his hand. "Don't be uneasy--don't be angry," he said. These words and the stubborn folds between his brows answered her question. "Well, what do you mean?" she muttered, drooping her head. "What of it?" And she quickly walked away without looking at him, in order not to betray her feelings by the tears in her eyes and the quiver of her lips. On the road she thought that the bones of the hand which had pressed her son's hand ached and grew heavy, as if she had been struck on the shoulder. At home, after thrusting the note into Nikolay's hand, she stood before him, and waited while he smoothed out the tight little roll. She felt a tremor of hope again; but Nikolay said: "Of course, this is what he writes: 'We will not go away, comrade; we cannot, not one of us. We should lose respect for ourselves. Take into consideration the peasant recently arrested. He has merited your solicitude; he deserves that you expend much time and energy on him. It's very hard for him here--daily collisions with the authorities. He's already had the twenty-four hours of the dark cell. They torture him to death. We all intercede for him. Soothe and be kind to my mother; tell her; she'll understand all. Pavel.'" The mother straightened herself easily, and proudly tossed her head. "Well, what is there to tell me?" she said firmly. "I understand--they want to go straight at the authorities again--'there! condemn the truth!'" Nikolay quickly turned aside, took out his handkerchief, blew his nose aloud, and mumbled: "I've caught a cold, you see!" Covering his eyes with his hands, under the pretext of adjusting his glasses, he paced up and down the room, and said: "We shouldn't have been successful anyway." "Never mind; let the trial come off!" said the mother frowning. "Here, I've received a letter from a comrade in St. Petersburg----" "He can escape from Siberia, too, can't he?" "Of course! The comrade writes: 'The trial is appointed for the near future; the sentence is certain--exile for everybody!' You see, these petty cheats convert their court into the most trivial comedy. You understand? Sentence is pronounced in St. Petersburg before the trial." "Stop!" the mother said resolutely. "You needn't comfort me or explain to me. Pasha won't do what isn't right--he won't torture himself for nothing." She paused to catch breath. "Nor will he torture others, and he loves me, yes. You see, he thinks of me. 'Explain to her,' he writes; 'soothe her and comfort her,' eh?" Her heart beat quickly but boldly, and her head whirled slightly from excitement. "Your son's a splendid man! I respect and love him very much." "I tell you what--let's think of something in regard to Rybin," she suggested. She wanted to do something forthwith--go somewhere, walk till she dropped from exhaustion, and then fall asleep, content with the day's work. "Yes--very well!" said Nikolay, pacing through the room. "Why not? We ought to have Sashenka here!" "She'll be here soon. She always comes on my visiting day to Pasha." Thoughtfully drooping his head, biting his lips and twisting his beard, Nikolay sat on the sofa by the mother's side. "I'm sorry my sister isn't here. She ought to occupy herself with Rybin's case." "It would be well to arrange it at once, while Pasha is there. It would be pleasant for him." The bell rang. They looked at each other. "That's Sasha," Nikolay whispered. "How will you tell her?" the mother whispered back. "Yes--um!--it's hard!" "I pity her very much." The bell rang again, not so loud, as if the person on the other side of the door had also fallen to thinking and hesitated. Nikolay and the mother rose simultaneously, but at the kitchen door Nikolay turned aside. "You'd better do it," he said. "He's not willing?" the girl asked the moment the mother opened the door. "No." "I knew it!" Sasha's face paled. She unbuttoned her coat, fastened two buttons again, then tried to remove her coat, unsuccessfully, of course. "Dreadful weather--rain, wind; it's disgusting! Is he well?" "Yes." "Well and happy; always the same, and only this--" Her tone was disconsolate, and she regarded her hands. "He writes that Rybin ought to be freed." The mother kept her eyes turned from the girl. "Yes? It seems to me we ought to make use of this plan." "I think so, too," said Nikolay, appearing at the door. "How do you do, Sasha?" The girl asked, extending her hand to him: "What's the question about? Aren't all agreed that the plan is practicable? I know they are." "And who'll organize it? Everybody's occupied." "Give it to me," said Sasha, quickly jumping to her feet. "I have time!" "Take it. But you must ask others." "Very well, I will. I'll go at once." She began to button up her coat again with sure, thin fingers. "You ought to rest a little," the mother advised. Sasha smiled and answered in a softer voice: "Don't worry about me. I'm not tired." And silently pressing their hands, she left once more, cold and stern. CHAPTER XIV The mother and Nikolay, walking up to the window, watched the girl pass through the yard and disappear beyond the gate. Nikolay whistled quietly, sat down at the table and began to write. "She'll occupy herself with this affair, and it'll be easier for her," the mother reflected. "Yes, of course!" responded Nikolay, and turning around to the mother with a kind smile on his face, asked: "And how about you, Nilovna--did this cup of bitterness escape you? Did you never know the pangs for a beloved person?" "Well!" exclaimed the mother with a wave of her hand. "What sort of a pang? The fear they had whether they won't marry me off to this man or that man?" "And you liked no one?" She thought a little, and answered: "I don't recall, my dear! How can it be that I didn't like anybody? I suppose there was somebody I was fond of, but I don't remember." She looked at him, and concluded simply, with sad composure: "My husband beat me a lot; and everything that was before him was effaced from my soul." Nikolay turned back to the table; the mother walked out of the room for a minute. On her return Nikolay looked at her kindly and began to speak softly and lovingly. His reminiscences stroked her like a caress. "And I, you see, was like Sashenka. I loved a girl: a marvelous being, a wonder, a--guiding star; she was gentle and bright for me. I met her about twenty years ago, and from that time on I loved her. And I love her now, too, to speak the truth. I love her all so--with my whole soul--gratefully--forever!" Standing by his side the mother saw his eyes lighted from within by a clear, warm light. His hands folded over the back of the chair, and his head leaning on them, he looked into the distance; his whole body, lean and slender, but powerful, seemed to strive upward, like the stalk of a plant toward the sun. "Why didn't you marry? You should have!" "Oh, she's been married five years!" "And before that--what was the matter? Didn't she love you?" He thought a while, and answered: "Yes, apparently she loved me; I'm certain she did. But, you see, it was always this way: I was in prison, she was free; I was free, she was in prison or in exile. That's very much like Sasha's position, really. Finally they exiled her to Siberia for ten years. I wanted to follow her, but I was ashamed and she was ashamed, and I remained here. Then she met another man--a comrade of mine, a very good fellow, and they escaped together. Now they live abroad. Yes----" Nikolay took off his glasses, wiped them, held them up to the light and began to wipe them again. "Ah, you, my dear!" the mother exclaimed lovingly, shaking her head. She was sorry for him; at the same time something compelled her to smile a warm, motherly smile. He changed his pose, took the pen in his hand, and said, punctuating the rhythm of his speed with waves of his hand: "Family life always diminishes the energy of a revolutionist. Children must be maintained in security, and there's the need to work a great deal for one's bread. The revolutionist ought without cease to develop every iota of his energy; he must deepen and broaden it; but this demands time. He must always be at the head, because we--the workingmen--are called by the logic of history to destroy the old world, to create the new life; and if we stop, if we yield to exhaustion, or are attracted by the possibility of a little immediate conquest, it's bad--it's almost treachery to the cause. No revolutionist can adhere closely to an individual--walk through life side by side with another individual--without distorting his faith; and we must never forget that our aim is not little conquests, but only complete victory!" His voice became firm, his face paled, and his eyes kindled with the force that characterized him. The bell sounded again. It was Liudmila. She wore an overcoat too light for the season, her cheeks were purple with the cold. Removing her torn overshoes, she said in a vexed voice: "The date of the trial is appointed--in a week!" "Really?" shouted Nikolay from the room. The mother quickly walked up to him, not understanding whether fright or joy agitated her. Liudmila, keeping step with her, said, with irony in her low voice: "Yes, really! The assistant prosecuting attorney, Shostak, just now brought the incriminating acts. In the court they say, quite openly, that the sentence has already been fixed. What does it mean? Do the authorities fear that the judges will deal too mercifully with the enemies of the government? Having so long and so assiduously kept corrupting their servants, is the government still unassured of their readiness to be scoundrels?" Liudmila sat on the sofa, rubbing her lean cheeks with her palms; her dull eyes burned contemptuous scorn, and her voice filled with growing wrath. "You waste your powder for nothing, Liudmila!" Nikolay tried to soothe her. "They don't hear you." "Some day I'll compel them to hear me!" The black circles under her eyes trembled and threw an ominous shadow on her face. She bit her lips. "You go against me--that's your right; I'm your enemy. But in defending your power don't corrupt people; don't compel me to have instinctive contempt for them; don't dare to poison my soul with your cynicism!" Nikolay looked at her through his glasses, and screwing up his eyes, shook his head sadly. But she continued to speak as if those whom she detested stood before her. The mother listened with strained attention, understanding nothing, and instinctively repeating to herself one and the same words, "The trial--the trial will come off in a week!" She could not picture to herself what it would be like; how the judges would behave toward Pavel. Her thoughts muddled her brain, covered her eyes with a gray mist, and plunged her into something sticky, viscid, chilling and paining her body. The feeling grew, entered her blood, took possession of her heart, and weighed it down heavily, poisoning in it all that was alive and bold. Thus, in a cloud of perplexity and despondency under the load of painful expectations, she lived through one day, and a second day; but on the third day Sasha appeared and said to Nikolay: "Everything is ready--to-day, in an hour!" "Everything ready? So soon?" He was astonished. "Why shouldn't everything be ready? The only thing I had to do was to get a hiding place and clothes for Rybin. All the rest Godun took on himself. Rybin will have to go through only one ward of the city. Vyesovshchikov will meet him on the street, all disguised, of course. He'll throw an overcoat over him, give him a hat, and show him the way. I'll wait for him, change his clothes and lead him off." "Not bad! And who's this Godun?" "You've seen him! You gave talks to the locksmiths in his place." "Oh, I remember! A droll old man." "He's a soldier who served his time--a roofer, a man of little education, but with an inexhaustible fund of hatred for every kind of violence and for all men of violence. A bit of a philosopher!" The mother listened in silence to her, and something indistinct slowly dawned upon her. "Godun wants to free his nephew--you remember him? You liked Yevchenko, a blacksmith, quite a dude." Nikolay nodded his head. "Godun has arranged everything all right. But I'm beginning to doubt his success. The passages in the prison are used by all the inmates, and I think when the prisoners see the ladder many will want to run--" She closed her eyes and was silent for a while. The mother moved nearer to her. "They'll hinder one another." They all three stood before the window, the mother behind Nikolay and Sasha. Their rapid conversation roused in her a still stronger sense of uneasiness and anxiety. "I'm going there," the mother said suddenly. "Why?" asked Sasha. "Don't go, darling! Maybe you'll get caught. You mustn't!" Nikolay advised. The mother looked at them and softly, but persistently, repeated: "No; I'm going! I'm going!" They quickly exchanged glances, and Sasha, shrugging her shoulders, said: "Of course--hope is tenacious!" Turning to the mother she took her by the hand, leaned her head on her shoulder, and said in a new, simple voice, near to the heart of the mother: "But I'll tell you after all, mamma, you're waiting in vain--he won't try to escape!" "My dear darling!" exclaimed the mother, pressing Sasha to her tremulously. "Take me; I won't interfere with you; I don't believe it is possible--to escape!" "She'll go," said the girl simply to Nikolay. "That's your affair!" he answered, bowing his head. "We mustn't be together, mamma. You go to the garden in the lot. From there you can see the wall of the prison. But suppose they ask you what you are doing there?" Rejoiced, the mother answered confidently: "I'll think of what to say." "Don't forget that the overseers of the prison know you," said Sasha; "and if they see you there----" "They won't see me!" the mother laughed softly. An hour later she was in the lot by the prison. A sharp wind blew about her, pulled her dress, and beat against the frozen earth, rocked the old fence of the garden past which the woman walked, and rattled against the low wall of the prison; it flung up somebody's shouts from the court, scattered them in the air, and carried them up to the sky. There the clouds were racing quickly, little rifts opening in the blue height. Behind the mother lay the city; in front the cemetery; to the right, about seventy feet from her, the prison. Near the cemetery a soldier was leading a horse by a rein, and another soldier tramped noisily alongside him, shouted, whistled, and laughed. There was no one else near the prison. On the impulse of the moment the mother walked straight up to them. As she came near she shouted: "Soldiers! didn't you see a goat anywhere around here?" One of them answered: "No." She walked slowly past them, toward the fence of the cemetery, looking slantwise to the right and the back. Suddenly she felt her feet tremble and grow heavy, as if frozen to the ground. From the corner of the prison a man came along, walking quickly, like a lamplighter. He was a stooping man, with a little ladder on his shoulder. The mother, blinking in fright, quickly glanced at the soldiers; they were stamping their feet on one spot, and the horse was running around them. She looked at the ladder--he had already placed it against the wall and was climbing up without haste. He waved his hand in the courtyard, quickly let himself down, and disappeared around the corner. That very second the black head of Mikhaïl appeared on the wall, followed by his entire body. Another head, with a shaggy hat, emerged alongside of his. Two black lumps rolled to the ground; one disappeared around the corner; Mikhaïl straightened himself up and looked about. "Run, run!" whispered the mother, treading impatiently. Her ears were humming. Loud shouts were wafted to her. There on the wall appeared a third head. She clasped her hands in faintness. A light-haired head, without a beard, shook as if it wanted to tear itself away, but it suddenly disappeared behind the wall. The shouts came louder and louder, more and more boisterous. The wind scattered the thin trills of the whistles through the air. Mikhaïl walked along the wall--there! he was already beyond it, and traversed the open space between the prison and the houses of the city. It seemed to her as if he were walking very, very slowly, that he raised his head to no purpose. "Everyone who sees his face will remember it forever," and she whispered, "Faster! faster!" Behind the wall of the prison something slammed, the thin sound of broken glass was heard. One of the soldiers, planting his feet firmly on the ground, drew the horse to him, and the horse jumped. The other one, his fist at his mouth, shouted something in the direction of the prison, and as he shouted he turned his head sidewise, with his ear cocked. [Illustration: "'Run, run!' whispered the mother."] All attention, the mother turned her head in all directions, her eyes seeing everything, believing nothing. This thing which she had pictured as terrible and intricate was accomplished with extreme simplicity and rapidity, and the simpleness of the happenings stupefied her. Rybin was no longer to be seen--a tall man in a thin overcoat was walking there--a girl was running along. Three wardens jumped out from a corner of the prison; they ran side by side, stretching out their right hands. One of the soldiers rushed in front of them; the other ran around the horse, unsuccessfully trying to vault on the refractory animal, which kept jumping about. The whistles incessantly cut the air, their alarming, desperate shrieks aroused a consciousness of danger in the woman. Trembling, she walked along the fence of the cemetery, following the wardens; but they and the soldiers ran around the other corner of the prison and disappeared. They were followed at a run by the assistant overseer of the prison, whom she knew; his coat was unbuttoned. From somewhere policemen appeared, and people came running. The wind whistled, leaped about as if rejoicing, and carried the broken, confused shouts to the mother's ears. "It stands here all the time." "The ladder?" "What's the matter with you then? The devil take you!" "Arrest the soldiers!" "Policeman!" Whistles again. This hubbub delighted her and she strode on more boldly, thinking, "So, it's possible--_he_ could have done it!" But now pain for her son no longer entered her heart without pride in him also. And only fear for him weighed and oppressed her to stupefaction as before. From the corner of the fence opposite her a constable with a black, curly beard, and two policemen emerged. "Stop!" shouted the constable, breathing heavily. "Did you see--a man--with a beard--didn't he run by here?" She pointed to the garden and answered calmly: "He went that way!" "Yegorov, run! Whistle! Is it long ago?" "Yes--I should say--about a minute!" But the whistle drowned her voice. The constable, without waiting for an answer, precipitated himself in a gallop along the hillocky ground, waving his hands in the direction of the garden. After him, with bent head, and whistling, the policemen darted off. The mother nodded her head after them, and, satisfied with herself, went home. When she walked out of the field into the street a cab crossed her way. Raising her head she saw in the vehicle a young man with light mustache and a pale, worn face. He, too, regarded her. He sat slantwise. It must have been due to his position that his right shoulder was higher than his left. At home Nikolay met her joyously. "Alive? How did it go?" "It seems everything's been successful!" And slowly trying to reinstate all the details in her memory, she began to tell of the escape. Nikolay, too, was amazed at the success. "You see, we're lucky!" said Nikolay, rubbing his hands. "But how frightened I was on your account only God knows. You know what, Nilovna, take my friendly advice: don't be afraid of the trial. The sooner it's over and done with the sooner Pavel will be free. Believe me. I've already written to my sister to try to think what can be done for Pavel. Maybe he'll even escape on the road. And the trial is approximately like this." He began to describe to her the session of the court. She listened, and understood that he was afraid of something--that he wanted to inspirit her. "Maybe you think I'll say something to the judges?" she suddenly inquired. "That I'll beg them for something?" He jumped up, waved his hands at her, and said in an offended tone: "What are you talking about? You're insulting me!" "Excuse me, please; excuse me! I really _am_ afraid--of what I don't know." She was silent, letting her eyes wander about the room. "Sometimes it seems to me that they'll insult Pasha--scoff at him. 'Ah, you peasant!' they'll say. 'You son of a peasant! What's this mess you've cooked up?' And Pasha, proud as he is, he'll answer them so----! Or Andrey will laugh at them--and all the comrades there are hot-headed and honest. So I can't help thinking that something will suddenly happen. One of them will lose his patience, the others will support him, and the sentence will be so severe--you'll never see them again." Nikolay was silent, pulling his beard glumly as the mother continued: "It's impossible to drive this thought from my head. The trial is terrible to me. When they'll begin to take everything apart and weigh it--it's awful! It's not the sentence that's terrible, but the trial--I can't express it." She felt that Nikolay didn't understand her fear; and his inability to comprehend kept her from further analysis of her timidities, which, however, only increased and broadened during the three following days. Finally, on the day of the trial, she carried into the hall of the session a heavy dark load that bent her back and neck. In the street, acquaintances from the suburbs had greeted her. She had bowed in silence, rapidly making her way through the dense crowd in the corridor of the courthouse. In the hall she was met by relatives of the defendants, who also spoke to her in undertones. All the words seemed needless; she didn't understand them. Yet all the people were sullen, filled with the same mournful feeling which infected the mother and weighed her down. "Let's sit next to each other," suggested Sizov, going to a bench. She sat down obediently, settled her dress, and looked around. Green and crimson specks, with thin yellow threads between, slowly swam before her eyes. "Your son has ruined our Vasya," a woman sitting beside her said quietly. "You keep still, Natalya!" Sizov chided her angrily. Nilovna looked at the woman; it was the mother of Samoylov. Farther along sat her husband--bald-headed, bony-faced, dapper, with a large, bushy, reddish beard which trembled as he sat looking in front of himself, his eyes screwed up. A dull, immobile light entered through the high windows of the hall, outside of which snow glided and fell lingeringly on the ground. Between the windows hung a large portrait of the Czar in a massive frame of glaring gilt. Straight, austere folds of the heavy crimson window drapery dropped over either side of it. Before the portrait, across almost the entire breadth of the hall, stretched the table covered with green cloth. To the right of the wall, behind the grill, stood two wooden benches; to the left two rows of crimson armchairs. Attendants with green collars and yellow buttons on their abdomens ran noiselessly about the hall. A soft whisper hummed in the turbid atmosphere, and the odor was a composite of many odors as in a drug shop. All this--the colors, the glitter, the sounds and odors--pressed on the eyes and invaded the breast with each inhalation. It forced out live sensations, and filled the desolate heart with motionless, dismal awe. Suddenly one of the people said something aloud. The mother trembled. All arose; she, too, rose, seizing Sizov's hand. In the left corner of the hall a high door opened and an old man emerged, swinging to and fro. On his gray little face shook white, sparse whiskers; he wore eyeglasses; the upper lip, which was shaven, sank into his mouth as by suction; his sharp jawbones and his chin were supported by the high collar of his uniform; apparently there was no neck under the collar. He was supported under the arm from behind by a tall young man with a porcelain face, red and round. Following him three more men in uniforms embroidered in gold, and three garbed in civilian wear, moved in slowly. They stirred about the table for a long time and finally took seats in the armchairs. When they had sat down, one of them in unbuttoned uniform, with a sleepy, clean-shaven face, began to say something to the little old man, moving his puffy lips heavily and soundlessly. The old man listened, sitting strangely erect and immobile. Behind the glasses of his _pince-nez_ the mother saw two little colorless specks. At the end of the table, at the desk, stood a tall, bald man, who coughed and shoved papers about. The little old man swung forward and began to speak. He pronounced clearly the first words, but what followed seemed to creep without sound from his thin, gray lips. "I open----" "See!" whispered Sizov, nudging the mother softly and arising. In the wall behind the grill the door opened, a soldier came out with a bared saber on his shoulder; behind him appeared Pavel, Andrey, Fedya Mazin, the two Gusevs, Samoylov, Bukin, Somov, and five more young men whose names were unknown to the mother. Pavel smiled kindly; Andrey also, showing his teeth as he nodded to her. The hall, as it were, became lighter and simpler from their smile; the strained, unnatural silence was enlivened by their faces and movements. The greasy glitter of gold on the uniforms dimmed and softened. A waft of bold assurance, the breath of living power, reached the mother's heart and roused it. On the benches behind her, where up to that time the people had been waiting in crushed silence, a responsive, subdued hum was audible. "They're not trembling!" she heard Sizov whisper; and at her right side Samoylov's mother burst into soft sobs. "Silence!" came a stern shout. "I warn you beforehand," said the old man, "I shall have to----" CHAPTER XV Pavel and Andrey sat side by side; along with them on the first bench were Mazin, Samoylov, and the Gusevs. Andrey had shaved his beard, but his mustache had grown and hung down, and gave his round head the appearance of a seacow or walrus. Something new lay on his face; something sharp and biting in the folds about his mouth; something black in his eyes. On Mazin's upper lip two black streaks were limned, his face was fuller. Samoylov was just as curly-haired as before; and Ivan Gusev smiled just as broadly. "Ah, Fedka, Fedka!" whispered Sizov, drooping his head. The mother felt she could breathe more freely. She heard the indistinct questions of the old man, which he put without looking at the prisoners; and his head rested motionless on the collar of his uniform. She heard the calm, brief answers of her son. It seemed to her that the oldest judge and his associates could be neither evil nor cruel people. Looking carefully at their faces she tried to guess something, softly listening to the growth of a new hope in her breast. The porcelain-faced man read a paper indifferently; his even voice filled the hall with weariness, and the people, enfolded by it, sat motionless as if benumbed. Four lawyers softly but animatedly conversed with the prisoners. They all moved powerfully, briskly, and called to mind large blackbirds. On one side of the old man a judge with small, bleared eyes filled the armchair with his fat, bloated body. On the other side sat a stooping man with reddish mustache on his pale face. His head was wearily thrown on the back of the chair, his eyes, half-closed, he seemed to be reflecting over something. The face of the prosecuting attorney was also worn, bored, and unexpectant. Behind the judge sat the mayor of the city, a portly man, who meditatively stroked his cheek; the marshal of the nobility, a gray-haired, large-bearded, ruddy-faced man, with large, kind eyes; and the district elder, who wore a sleeveless peasant overcoat, and possessed a huge belly which apparently embarrassed him; he endeavored to cover it with the folds of his overcoat, but it always slid down and showed again. "There are no criminals here and no judges," Pavel's vigorous voice was heard. "There are only captives here, and conquerors!" Silence fell. For a few seconds the mother's ears heard only the thin, hasty scratch of the pen on the paper and the beating of her own heart. The oldest judge also seemed to be listening to something from afar. His associates stirred. Then he said: "Hm! yes--Andrey Nakhodka, do you admit----" Somebody whispered, "Rise!" Andrey slowly rose, straightened himself, and pulling his mustache looked at the old man from the corners of his eyes. "Yes! To what can I confess myself guilty?" said the Little Russian in his slow, surging voice, shrugging his shoulders. "I did not murder nor steal; I simply am not in agreement with an order of life in which people are compelled to rob and kill one another." "Answer briefly--yes or no?" the old man said with an effort, but distinctly. On the benches back of her the mother felt there was animation; the people began to whisper to one another about something and stirred, sighing as if freeing themselves from the cobweb spun about them by the gray words of the porcelain-faced man. "Do you hear how they speak?" whispered Sizov. "Yes." "Fedor Mazin, answer!" "I don't want to!" said Fedya clearly, jumping to his feet. His face reddened with excitation, his eyes sparkled. For some reason he hid his hands behind his back. Sizov groaned softly, and the mother opened her eyes wide in astonishment. "I declined a defense--I'm not going to say anything--I don't regard your court as legal! Who are you? Did the people give you the right to judge us? No, they did not! I don't know you." He sat down and concealed his heated face behind Andrey's shoulders. The fat judge inclined his head to the old judge and whispered something. The old judge, pale-faced, raised his eyelids and slanted his eyes at the prisoners, then extended his hand on the table, and wrote something in pencil on a piece of paper lying before him. The district elder swung his head, carefully shifting his feet, rested his abdomen on his knees, and his hands on his abdomen. Without moving his head the old judge turned his body to the red-mustached judge, and began to speak to him quickly. The red-mustached judge inclined his head to listen. The marshal of the nobility conversed with the prosecuting attorney; the mayor of the city listened and smiled, rubbing his cheek. Again the dull speech of the old judge was heard. All four lawyers listened attentively. The prisoners exchanged whispers with one another, and Fedya, smiling in confusion, hid his face. "How he cut them off! Straight, downright, better than all!" Sizov whispered in amazement in the ear of the mother. "Ah, you little boy!" The mother smiled in perplexity. The proceedings seemed to be nothing but the necessary preliminary to something terrible, which would appear and at once stifle everybody with its cold horror. But the calm words of Pavel and Andrey had sounded so fearless and firm, as if uttered in the little house of the suburb, and not in the presence of the court. Fedya's hot, youthful sally amused her; something bold and fresh grew up in the hall, and she guessed from the movement of the people back of her that she was not the only one who felt this. "Your opinion," said the old judge. The bald-headed prosecuting attorney arose, and, steadying himself on the desk with one hand, began to speak rapidly, quoting figures. In his voice nothing terrible was heard. At the same time, however, a sudden dry, shooting attack disturbed the heart of the mother. It was an uneasy suspicion of something hostile to her, which did not threaten, did not shout, but unfolded itself unseen, soundless, intangible. It swung lazily and dully about the judges, as if enveloping them with an impervious cloud, through which nothing from the outside could reach them. She looked at them. They were incomprehensible to her. They were not angry at Pavel or at Fedya; they did not shout at the young men, as she had expected; they did not abuse them in words, but put all their questions reluctantly, with the air of "What's the use?". It cost them an effort to hear the answers to the end. Apparently they lacked interest because they knew everything beforehand. There before her stood the gendarme, and spoke in a bass voice: "Pavel Vlasov was named as the ringleader." "And Nakhodka?" asked the fat judge in his lazy undertone. "He, too." "May I----" The old judge asked a question of somebody: "You have nothing?" All the judges seemed to the mother to be worn out and ill. A sickened weariness marked their poses and voices, a sickened weariness and a bored, gray _ennui_. It was an evident nuisance to them, all this--the uniforms, the hall, the gendarmes, the lawyers, the obligation to sit in armchairs, and to put questions concerning things perforce already known to them. The mother in general was but little acquainted with the masters; she had scarcely ever seen them; and now she regarded the faces of the judges as something altogether new and incomprehensible, deserving pity, however, rather than inspiring horror. The familiar, yellow-faced officer stood before them, and told about Pavel and Andrey, stretching the words with an air of importance. The mother involuntarily laughed, and thought: "You don't know much, my little father." And now, as she looked at the people behind the grill, she ceased to feel dread for them; they did not evoke alarm, pity was not for them; they one and all called forth in her only admiration and love, which warmly embraced her heart; the admiration was calm, the love joyously distinct. There they sat to one side, by the wall, young, sturdy, scarcely taking any part in the monotonous talk of the witnesses and judges, or in the disputes of the lawyers with the prosecuting attorney. They behaved as if the talk did not concern them in the least. Sometimes somebody would laugh contemptuously, and say something to the comrades, across whose faces, then, a sarcastic smile would also quickly pass. Andrey and Pavel conversed almost the entire time with one of their lawyers, whom the mother had seen the day before at Nikolay's, and had heard Nikolay address as comrade. Mazin, brisker and more animated than the others, listened to the conversation. Now and then Samoylov said something to Ivan Gusev; and the mother noticed that each time Ivan gave a slight elbow nudge to a comrade, he could scarcely restrain a laugh; his face would grow red, his cheeks would puff up, and he would have to incline his head. He had already sniffed a couple of times, and for several minutes afterward sat with blown cheeks trying to be serious. Thus, in each comrade his youth played and sparkled after his fashion, lightly bursting the restraint he endeavored to put upon its lively effervescence. She looked, compared, and reflected. She was unable to understand or express in words her uneasy feeling of hostility. Sizov touched her lightly with his elbow; she turned to him, and found a look of contentment and slight preoccupation on his face. "Just see how they've intrenched themselves in their defiance! Fine stuff in 'em! Eh? Barons, eh? Well, and yet they're going to be sentenced!" The mother listened, unconsciously repeating to herself: "Who will pass the sentence? Whom will they sentence?" The witnesses spoke quickly, in their colorless voices, the judges reluctantly and listlessly. Their bloodless, worn-out faces stared into space unconcernedly. They did not expect to see or hear anything new. At times the fat judge yawned, covering his smile with his puffy hand, while the red-mustached judge grew still paler, and sometimes raised his hand to press his finger tightly on the bone of his temple, as he looked up to the ceiling with sorrowful, widened eyes. The prosecuting attorney infrequently scribbled on his paper, and then resumed his soundless conversation with the marshal of the nobility, who stroked his gray beard, rolled his large, beautiful eyes, and smiled, nodding his head with importance. The city mayor sat with crossed legs, and beat a noiseless tattoo on his knee, giving the play of his fingers concentrated attention. The only one who listened to the monotonous murmur of the voices seemed to be the district elder, who sat with inclined head, supporting his abdomen on his knees and solicitously holding it up with his hands. The old judge, deep in his armchair, stuck there immovably. The proceedings continued to drag on in this way for a long, long time; and _ennui_ again numbed the people with its heavy, sticky embrace. The mother saw that this large hall was not yet pervaded by that cold, threatening justice which sternly uncovers the soul, examines it, and seeing everything estimates its value with incorruptible eyes, weighing it rigorously with honest hands. Here was nothing to frighten her by its power or majesty. "I declare--" said the old judge clearly, and arose as he crushed the following words with his thin lips. The noise of sighs and low exclamations, of coughing and scraping of feet, filled the hall as the court retired for a recess. The prisoners were led away. As they walked out, they nodded their heads to their relatives and familiars with a smile, and Ivan Gusev shouted to somebody in a modulated voice: "Don't lose courage, Yegor." The mother and Sizov walked out into the corridor. "Will you go to the tavern with me to take some tea?" the old man asked her solicitously. "We have an hour and a half's time." "I don't want to." "Well, then I won't go, either. No, say! What fellows those are! They act as if they were the only real people, and the rest nothing at all. They'll all go scot-free, I'm sure. Look at Fedka, eh?" Samoylov's father came up to them holding his hat in his hand. He smiled sullenly and said: "My Vasily! He declined a defense, and doesn't want to palaver. He was the first to have the idea. Yours, Pelagueya, stood for lawyers; and mine said: 'I don't want one.' And four declined after him. Hm, ye-es." At his side stood his wife. She blinked frequently, and wiped her nose with the end of her handkerchief. Samoylov took his beard in his hand, and continued looking at the floor. "Now, this is the queer thing about it: you look at them, those devils, and you think they got up all this at random--they're ruining themselves for nothing. And suddenly you begin to think: 'And maybe they're right!' You remember that in the factory more like them keep on coming, keep on coming. They always get caught; but they're not destroyed, no more than common fish in the river get destroyed. No. And again you think, 'And maybe power is with them, too.'" "It's hard for us, Stepan Petrov, to understand this affair," said Sizov. "It's hard, yes," agreed Samoylov. His wife noisily drawing in air through her nose remarked: "They're all strong, those imps!" With an unrestrained smile on her broad, wizened face, she continued: "You, Nilovna, don't be angry with me because I just now slapped you, when I said that your son is to blame. A dog can tell who's the more to blame, to tell you the truth. Look at the gendarmes and the spies, what they said about our Vasily! He has shown what he can do too!" She apparently was proud of her son, perhaps even without understanding her feeling; but the mother did understand her feeling, and answered with a kind smile and quiet words: "A young heart is always nearer to the truth." People rambled about the corridor, gathered into groups, speaking excitedly and thoughtfully in hollow voices. Scarcely anybody stood alone; all faces bore evidence of a desire to speak, to ask, to listen. In the narrow white passageway the people coiled about in sinuous curves, like dust carried in circles before a powerful wind. Everybody seemed to be seeking something hard and firm to stand upon. The older brother of Bukin, a tall, red-faced fellow, waved his hands and turned about rapidly in all directions. "The district elder Klepanov has no place in this case," he declared aloud. "Keep still, Konstantin!" his father, a little old man, tried to dissuade him, and looked around cautiously. "No; I'm going to speak out! There's a rumor afloat about him that last year he killed a clerk of his on account of the clerk's wife. What kind of a judge is he? permit me to ask. He lives with the wife of his clerk--what have you got to say to that? Besides, he's a well-known thief!" "Oh, my little father--Konstantin!" "True!" said Samoylov. "True, the court is not a very just one." Bukin heard his voice and quickly walked up to him, drawing the whole crowd after him. Red with excitement, he waved his hands and said: "For thievery, for murder, jurymen do the trying. They're common people, peasants, merchants, if you please; but for going against the authorities you're tried by the authorities. How's that?" "Konstantin! Why are they against the authorities? Ah, you! They----" "No, wait! Fedor Mazin said the truth. If you insult me, and I land you one on your jaw, and you try me for it, of course I'm going to turn out guilty. But the first offender--who was it? You? Of course, you!" The watchman, a gray man with a hooked nose and medals on his chest, pushed the crowd apart, and said to Bukin, shaking his finger at him: "Hey! don't shout! Don't you know where you are? Do you think this is a saloon?" "Permit me, my cavalier, I know where I am. Listen! If I strike you and you me, and I go and try you, what would you think?" "And I'll order you out," said the watchman sternly. "Where to? What for?" "Into the street, so that you shan't bawl." "The chief thing for them is that people should keep their mouths shut." "And what do you think?" the old man bawled. Bukin threw out his hands, and again measuring the public with his eyes, began to speak in a lower voice: "And again--why are the people not permitted to be at the trial, but only the relatives? If you judge righteously, then judge in front of everybody. What is there to be afraid of?" Samoylov repeated, but this time in a louder tone: "The trial is not altogether just, that's true." The mother wanted to say to him that she had heard from Nikolay of the dishonesty of the court; but she had not wholly comprehended Nikolay, and had forgotten some of his words. While trying to recall them she moved aside from the people, and noticed that somebody was looking at her--a young man with a light mustache. He held his right hand in the pocket of his trousers, which made his left shoulder seem lower than the right, and this peculiarity of his figure seemed familiar to the mother. But he turned from her, and she again lost herself in the endeavor to recollect, and forgot about him immediately. In a minute, however, her ear was caught by the low question: "This woman on the left?" And somebody in a louder voice cheerfully answered: "Yes." She looked around. The man with the uneven shoulders stood sidewise toward her, and said something to his neighbor, a black-bearded fellow with a short overcoat and boots up to his knees. Again her memory stirred uneasily, but did not yield any distinct results. The watchman opened the door of the hall, and shouted: "Relatives, enter; show your tickets!" A sullen voice said lazily: "Tickets! Like a circus!" All the people now showed signs of a dull excitement, an uneasy passion. They began to behave more freely, and hummed and disputed with the watchman. Sitting down on the bench, Sizov mumbled something to the mother. "What is it?" asked the mother. "Oh, nothing--the people are fools! They know nothing; they live groping about and groping about." The bellman rang; somebody announced indifferently: "The session has begun!" Again all arose, and again, in the same order, the judges filed in and sat down; then the prisoners were led in. "Pay attention!" whispered Sizov; "the prosecuting attorney is going to speak." The mother craned her neck and extended her whole body. She yielded anew to expectation of the horrible. Standing sidewise toward the judges, his head turned to them, leaning his elbow on the desk, the prosecuting attorney sighed, and abruptly waving his right hand in the air, began to speak: The mother could not make out the first words. The prosecuting attorney's voice was fluent, thick; it sped on unevenly, now a bit slower, now a bit faster. His words stretched out in a thin line, like a gray seam; suddenly they burst out quickly and whirled like a flock of black flies around a piece of sugar. But she did not find anything horrible in them, nothing threatening. Cold as snow, gray as ashes, they fell and fell, filling the hall with something which recalled a slushy day in early autumn. Scant in feeling, rich in words, the speech seemed not to reach Pavel and his comrades. Apparently it touched none of them; they all sat there quite composed, smiling at times as before, and conversed without sound. At times they frowned to cover up their smiles. "He lies!" whispered Sizov. She could not have said it. She understood that the prosecuting attorney charged all the comrades with guilt, not singling out any one of them. After having spoken about Pavel, he spoke about Fedya, and having put him side by side with Pavel, he persistently thrust Bukin up against them. It seemed as if he packed and sewed them into a sack, piling them up on top of one another. But the external sense of his words did not satisfy, did not touch, did not frighten her. She still waited for the horrible, and rigorously sought something beyond his words--something in his face, his eyes, his voice, in his white hand, which slowly glided in the air. Something terrible must be there; she felt it, but it was impalpable; it did not yield to her consciousness, which again covered her heart with a dry, pricking dust. She looked at the judges. There was no gainsaying that they were bored at having to listen to this speech. The lifeless, yellow faces expressed nothing. The sickly, the fat, or the extremely lean, motionless dead spots all grew dimmer and dimmer in the dull _ennui_ that filled the hall. The words of the prosecuting attorney spurted into the air like a haze imperceptible to the eye, growing and thickening around the judges, enveloping them more closely in a cloud of dry indifference, of weary waiting. At times one of them changed his pose; but the lazy movement of the tired body did not rouse their drowsy souls. The oldest judge did not stir at all; he was congealed in his erect position, and the gray blots behind the eyeglasses at times disappeared, seeming to spread over his whole face. The mother realized this dead indifference, this unconcern without malice in it, and asked herself in perplexity, "Are they judging?" The question pressed her heart, and gradually squeezed out of it her expectation of the horrible. It pinched her throat with a sharp feeling of wrong. The speech of the prosecuting attorney snapped off unexpectedly. He made a few quick, short steps, bowed to the judges, and sat down, rubbing his hands. The marshal of the nobility nodded his head to him, rolling his eyes; the city mayor extended his hand, and the district elder stroked his belly and smiled. But the judges apparently were not delighted by the speech, and did not stir. "The scabby devil!" Sizov whispered the oath. "Next," said the old judge, bringing the paper to his face, "lawyers for the defendants, Fedoseyev, Markov, Zagarov." The lawyer whom the mother had seen at Nikolay's arose. His face was broad and good-natured; his little eyes smiled radiantly and seemed to thrust out from under his eyebrows two sharp blades, which cut the air like scissors. He spoke without haste, resonantly, and clearly; but the mother was unable to listen to his speech. Sizov whispered in her ear: "Did you understand what he said? Did you understand? 'People,' he says, 'are poor, they are all upset, insensate.' Is that Fedor? He says they don't understand anything; they're savages." The feeling of wrong grew, and passed into revolt. Along with the quick, loud voice of the lawyer, time also passed more quickly. "A live, strong man having in his breast a sensitive, honest heart cannot help rebelling with all his force against this life so full of open cynicism, corruption, falsehood, and so blunted by vapidity. The eyes of honest people cannot help seeing such glaring contradictions----" The judge with the green face bent toward the president and whispered something to him; then the old man said dryly: "Please be more careful!" "Ha!" Sizov exclaimed softly. "Are they judging?" thought the mother, and the word seemed hollow and empty as an earthen vessel. It seemed to make sport of her fear of the terrible. "They're a sort of dead body," she answered the old man. "Don't fear; they're livening up." She looked at them, and she actually saw something like a shadow of uneasiness on the faces of the judges. Another man was already speaking, a little lawyer with a sharp, pale, satiric face. He spoke very respectfully: "With all due respect, I permit myself to call the attention of the court to the solid manner of the honorable prosecuting attorney, to the conduct of the safety department, or, as such people are called in common parlance, spies----" The judge with the green face again began to whisper something to the president. The prosecuting attorney jumped up. The lawyer continued without changing his voice: "The spy Gyman tells us about the witness: 'I frightened him.' The prosecuting attorney also, as the court has heard, frightened witnesses; as a result of which act, at the insistence of the defense, he called forth a rebuke from the presiding judge." The prosecuting attorney began to speak quickly and angrily; the old judge followed suit; the lawyer listened to them respectfully, inclining his head. Then he said: "I can even change the position of my words if the prosecuting attorney deems it is not in the right place; but that will not change the plan of my defense. However, I cannot understand the excitement of the prosecuting attorney." "Go for him!" said Sizov. "Go for him, tooth and nail! Pick him open down to his soul, wherever that may be!" The hall became animated; a fighting passion flared up; the defense attacked from all sides, provoking and disturbing the judges, driving away the cold haze that enveloped them, pricking the old skin of the judges with sharp words. The judges had the air of moving more closely to one another, or suddenly they would puff and swell, repulsing the sharp, caustic raps with the mass of their soft, mellow bodies. They acted as if they feared that the blow of the opponent might call forth an echo in their empty bosoms, might shake their resolution, which sprang not from their own will but from a will strange to them. Feeling this conflict, the people on the benches back of the mother sighed and whispered. But suddenly Pavel arose; tense quiet prevailed. The mother stretched her entire body forward. "A party man, I recognize only the court of my party and will not speak in my defense. According to the desire of my comrades, I, too, declined a defense. I will merely try to explain to you what you don't understand. The prosecuting attorney designated our coming out under the banner of the Social Democracy as an uprising against the superior power, and regarded us as nothing but rebels against the Czar. I must declare to you that to us the Czar is not the only chain that fetters the body of the country. We are obliged to tear off only the first and nearest chain from the people." The stillness deepened under the sound of the firm voice; it seemed to widen the space between the walls of the hall. Pavel, by his words, removed the people to a distance from himself, and thereby grew in the eyes of the mother. His stony, calm, proud face with the beard, his high forehead, and blue eyes, somewhat stern, all became more dazzling and more prominent. The judges began to stir heavily and uneasily; the marshal of the nobility was the first to whisper something to the judge with the indolent face. The judge nodded his head and turned to the old man; on the other side of him the sick judge was talking. Rocking back and forth in the armchair, the old judge spoke to Pavel, but his voice was drowned in the even, broad current of the young man's speech. "We are Socialists! That means we are enemies to private property, which separates people, arms them against one another, and brings forth an irreconcilable hostility of interests; brings forth lies that endeavor to cover up, or to justify, this conflict of interests, and corrupt all with falsehood, hypocrisy and malice. We maintain that a society that regards man only as a tool for its enrichment is anti-human; it is hostile to us; we cannot be reconciled to its morality; its double-faced and lying cynicism. Its cruel relation to individuals is repugnant to us. We want to fight, and will fight, every form of the physical and moral enslavement of man by such a society; we will fight every measure calculated to disintegrate society for the gratification of the interests of gain. We are workers--men by whose labor everything is created, from gigantic machines to childish toys. We are people devoid of the right to fight for our human dignity. Everyone strives to utilize us, and may utilize us, as tools for the attainment of his ends. Now we want to have as much freedom as will give us the possibility in time to come to conquer all the power. Our slogan is simple: 'All the power for the people; all the means of production for the people; work obligatory on all. Down with private property!' You see, we are not rebels." Pavel smiled, and the kindly fire of his blue eyes blazed forth more brilliantly. "Please, more to the point!" said the presiding judge distinctly and aloud. He turned his chest to Pavel, and regarded him. It seemed to the mother that his dim left eye began to burn with a sinister, greedy fire. The look all the judges cast on her son made her uneasy for him. She fancied that their eyes clung to his face, stuck to his body, thirsted for his blood, by which they might reanimate their own worn-out bodies. And he, erect and tall, standing firmly and vigorously, stretched out his hand to them while he spoke distinctly: "We are revolutionists, and will be such as long as private property exists, as long as some merely command, and as long as others merely work. We take stand against the society whose interests you are bidden to protect as your irreconcilable enemies, and reconciliation between us is impossible until we shall have been victorious. We will conquer--we workingmen! Your society is not at all so powerful as it thinks itself. That very property, for the production and preservation of which it sacrifices millions of people enslaved by it--that very force which gives it the power over us--stirs up discord within its own ranks, destroys them physically and morally. Property requires extremely great efforts for its protection; and in reality all of you, our rulers, are greater slaves than we--you are enslaved spiritually, we only physically. _You_ cannot withdraw from under the weight of your prejudices and habits, the weight which deadens you spiritually; nothing hinders _us_ from being inwardly free. The poisons with which you poison us are weaker than the antidote you unwittingly administer to our consciences. This antidote penetrates deeper and deeper into the body of workingmen; the flames mount higher and higher, sucking in the best forces, the spiritual powers, the healthy elements even from among you. Look! Not one of you can any longer fight for your power as an ideal! You have already expended all the arguments capable of guarding you against the pressure of historic justice. You can create nothing new in the domain of ideas; you are spiritually barren. Our ideas grow; they flare up ever more dazzling; they seize hold of the mass of the people, organizing them for the war of freedom. The consciousness of their great rôle unites all the workingmen of the world into one soul. You have no means whereby to hinder this renovating process in life except cruelty and cynicism. But your cynicism is very evident, your cruelty exasperates, and the hands with which you stifle us to-day will press our hands in comradeship to-morrow. Your energy, the mechanical energy of the increase of gold, separates you, too, into groups destined to devour one another. Our energy is a living power, founded on the ever-growing consciousness of the solidarity of all workingmen. Everything you do is criminal, for it is directed toward the enslavement of the people. Our work frees the world from the delusions and monsters which are produced by your malice and greed, and which intimidate the people. You have torn man away from life and disintegrated him. Socialism will unite the world, rent asunder by you, into one huge whole. And this will be!" Pavel stopped for a second, and repeated in a lower tone, with greater emphasis, "This will be!" The judges whispered to one another, making strange grimaces. And still their greedy looks were fastened on the body of Nilovna's son. The mother felt that their gaze tarnished this supple, vigorous body; that they envied its strength, power, freshness. The prisoners listened attentively to the speech of their comrade; their faces whitened, their eyes flashed joy. The mother drank in her son's words, which cut themselves into her memory in regular rows. The old judge stopped Pavel several times and explained something to him. Once he even smiled sadly. Pavel listened to him silently, and again began to speak in an austere but calm voice, compelling everybody to listen to him, subordinating the will of the judges to his will. This lasted for a long time. Finally, however, the old man shouted, extending his hand to Pavel, whose voice in response flowed on calmly, somewhat sarcastically. "I am reaching my conclusion. To insult you personally was not my desire; on the contrary, as an involuntary witness to this comedy which you call a court trial, I feel almost compassion for you, I may say. You are human beings after all; and it is saddening to see human beings, even our enemies, so shamefully debased in the service of violence, debased to such a degree that they lose consciousness of their human dignity." He sat down without looking at the judges. Andrey, all radiant with joy, pressed his hand firmly; Samoylov, Mazin, and the rest animatedly stretched toward him. He smiled, a bit embarrassed by the transport of his comrades. He looked toward his mother, and nodded his head as if asking, "Is it so?" She answered him all a-tremble, all suffused with warm joy. "There, now the trial has begun!" whispered Sizov. "How he gave it to them! Eh, mother?" CHAPTER XVI She silently nodded her head and smiled, satisfied that her son had spoken so bravely, perhaps still more satisfied that he had finished. The thought darted through her mind that the speech was likely to increase the dangers threatening Pavel; but her heart palpitated with pride, and his words seemed to settle in her bosom. Andrey arose, swung his body forward, looked at the judges sidewise, and said: "Gentlemen of the defense----" "The court is before you, and not the defense!" observed the judge of the sickly face angrily and loudly. By Andrey's expression the mother perceived that he wanted to tease them. His mustache quivered. A cunning, feline smirk familiar to her lighted up his eyes. He stroked his head with his long hands, and fetched a breath. "Is that so?" he said, swinging his head. "I think not. That you are not the judges, but only the defendants----" "I request you to adhere to what directly pertains to the case," remarked the old man dryly. "To what directly pertains to the case? Very well! I've already compelled myself to think that you are in reality judges, independent people, honest----" "The court has no need of your characterization." "It has no need of _such_ a characterization? Hey? Well, but after all I'm going to continue. You are men who make no distinction between your own and strangers. You are free people. Now, here two parties stand before you; one complains, 'He robbed me and did me up completely'; and the other answers, 'I have a right to rob and to do up because I have arms'----" "Please don't tell anecdotes." "Why, I've heard that old people like anecdotes--naughty ones in particular." "I'll prohibit you from speaking. You may say something about what directly pertains to the case. Speak, but without buffoonery, without unbecoming sallies." The Little Russian looked at the judges, silently rubbing his head. "About what directly pertains to the case?" he asked seriously. "Yes; but why should I speak to you about what directly pertains to the case? What you need to know my comrade has told you. The rest will be told you; the time will come, by others----" The old judge rose and declared: "I forbid you to speak. Vasily Samoylov!" Pressing his lips together firmly the Little Russian dropped down lazily on the bench, and Samoylov arose alongside of him, shaking his curly hair. "The prosecuting attorney called my comrades and me 'savages,' 'enemies of civilization'----" "You must speak only about that which pertains to your case." "This pertains to the case. There's nothing which does not pertain to honest men, and I ask you not to interrupt me. I ask you what sort of a thing is your civilization?" "We are not here for discussions with you. To the point!" said the old judge, showing his teeth. Andrey's demeanor had evidently changed the conduct of the judges; his words seemed to have wiped something away from them. Stains appeared on their gray faces. Cold, green sparks burned in their eyes. Pavel's speech had excited but subdued them; it restrained their agitation by its force, which involuntarily inspired respect. The Little Russian broke away this restraint and easily bared what lay underneath. They looked at Samoylov, and whispered to one another with strange, wry faces. They also began to move extremely quickly for them. They gave the impression of desiring to seize him and howl while torturing his body with voluptuous ecstasy. "You rear spies, you deprave women and girls, you put men in the position which forces them to thievery and murder; you corrupt them with whisky--international butchery, universal falsehood, depravity, and savagery--that's your civilization! Yes, we are enemies of this civilization!" "Please!" shouted the old judge, shaking his chin; but Samoylov, all red, his eyes flashing, also shouted: "But we respect and esteem another civilization, the creators of which you have persecuted, you have allowed to rot in dungeons, you have driven mad----" "I forbid you to speak! Hm-- Fedor Mazin!" Little Mazin popped up like a cork from a champagne bottle, and said in a staccato voice: "I--I swear!--I know you have convicted me----" He lost breath and paled; his eyes seemed to devour his entire face. He stretched out his hand and shouted: "I--upon my honest word! Wherever you send me--I'll escape--I'll return--I'll work always--all my life! Upon my honest word!" Sizov quacked aloud. The entire public, overcome by the mounting wave of excitement, hummed strangely and dully. One woman cried, some one choked and coughed. The gendarmes regarded the prisoners with dull surprise, the public with a sinister look. The judges shook, the old man shouted in a thin voice: "Ivan Gusev!" "I don't want to speak." "Vasily Gusev!" "Don't want to." "Fedor Bukin!" The whitish, faded fellow lifted himself heavily, and shaking his head slowly said in a thick voice: "You ought to be ashamed. I am a heavy man, and yet I understand--justice!" He raised his hand higher than his head and was silent, half-closing his eyes as if looking at something at a distance. "What is it?" shouted the old judge in excited astonishment, dropping back in his armchair. "Oh, well, what's the use?" Bukin sullenly let himself down on the bench. There was something big and serious in his dark eyes, something somberly reproachful and naïve. Everybody felt it; even the judges listened, as if waiting for an echo clearer than his words. On the public benches all commotion died down immediately; only a low weeping swung in the air. Then the prosecuting attorney, shrugging his shoulders, grinned and said something to the marshal of the nobility, and whispers gradually buzzed again excitedly through the hall. Weariness enveloped the mother's body with a stifling faintness. Small drops of perspiration stood on her forehead. Samoylov's mother stirred on the bench, nudging her with her shoulder and elbow, and said to her husband in a subdued whisper: "How is this, now? Is it possible?" "You see, it's possible." "But what is going to happen to him, to Vasily?" "Keep still. Stop." The public was jarred by something it did not understand. All blinked in perplexity with blinded eyes, as if dazzled by the sudden blazing up of an object, indistinct in outline, of unknown meaning, but with horrible drawing power. And since the people did not comprehend this great thing dawning on them, they contracted its significance into something small, the meaning of which was evident and clear to them. The elder Bukin, therefore, whispered aloud without constraint: "Say, please, why don't they permit them to talk? The prosecuting attorney can say everything, and as much as he wants to----" A functionary stood at the benches, and waving his hands at the people, said in a half voice: "Quiet, quiet!" The father of Samoylov threw himself back, and ejaculated broken words behind his wife's ear: "Of course--let us say they are guilty--but you'll let them explain. What is it they have gone against? Against everything--I wish to understand--I, too, have my interest." And suddenly: "Pavel says the truth, hey? I want to understand. Let them speak." "Keep still!" exclaimed the functionary, shaking his finger at him. Sizov nodded his head sullenly. But the mother kept her gaze fastened unwaveringly on the judges, and saw that they got more and more excited, conversing with one another in indistinct voices. The sound of their words, cold and tickling, touched her face, puckering the skin on it, and filling her mouth with a sickly, disgusting taste. The mother somehow conceived that they were all speaking of the bodies of her son and his comrades, their vigorous bare bodies, their muscles, their youthful limbs full of hot blood, of living force. These bodies kindled in the judges the sinister, impotent envy of the rich by the poor, the unwholesome greed felt by wasted and sick people for the strength of the healthy. Their mouths watered regretfully for these bodies, capable of working and enriching, of rejoicing and creating. The youths produced in the old judges the revengeful, painful excitement of an enfeebled beast which sees the fresh prey, but no longer has the power to seize it, and howls dismally at its powerlessness. This thought, rude and strange, grew more vivid the more attentively the mother scrutinized the judges. They seemed not to conceal their excited greed--the impotent vexation of the hungry who at one time had been able to consume in abundance. To her, a woman and a mother, to whom after all the body of her son is always dearer than that in him which is called a soul, to her it was horrible to see how these sticky, lightless eyes crept over his face, felt his chest, shoulders, hands, tore at the hot skin, as if seeking the possibility of taking fire, of warming the blood in their hardened brains and fatigued muscles--the brains and muscles of people already half dead, but now to some degree reanimated by the pricks of greed and envy of a young life that they presumed to sentence and remove to a distance from themselves. It seemed to her that her son, too, felt this damp, unpleasant tickling contact, and, shuddering, looked at her. He looked into the mother's face with somewhat fatigued eyes, but calmly, kindly, and warmly. At times he nodded his head to her, and smiled--she understood the smile. "Now quick!" she said. Resting his hand on the table the oldest judge arose. His head sunk in the collar of his uniform, standing motionless, he began to read a paper in a droning voice. "He's reading the sentence," said Sizov, listening. It became quiet again, and everybody looked at the old man, small, dry, straight, resembling the stick held in his unseen hand. The other judges also stood up. The district elder inclined his head on one shoulder, and looked up to the ceiling; the mayor of the city crossed his hands over his chest; the marshal of the nobility stroked his beard. The judge with the sickly face, his puffy neighbor, and the prosecuting attorney regarded the prisoners sidewise. And behind the judges the Czar in a red military coat, with an indifferent white face looked down from his portrait over their heads. On his face some insect was creeping, or a cobweb was trembling. "Exile!" Sizov said with a sigh of relief, dropping back on the bench. "Well, of course! Thank God! I heard that they were going to get hard labor. Never mind, mother, that's nothing." Fatigued by her thoughts and her immobility, she understood the joy of the old man, which boldly raised the soul dragged down by hopelessness. But it didn't enliven her much. "Why, I knew it," she answered. "But, after all, it's certain now. Who could have told beforehand what the authorities would do? But Fedya is a fine fellow, dear soul." They walked to the grill; the mother shed tears as she pressed the hand of her son. He and Fedya spoke kind words, smiled, and joked. All were excited, but light and cheerful. The women wept; but, like Vlasova, more from habit than grief. They did not experience the stunning pain produced by an unexpected blow on the head, but only the sad consciousness that they must part with the children. But even this consciousness was dimmed by the impressions of the day. The fathers and the mothers looked at their children with mingled sensations, in which the skepticism of parents toward their children and the habitual sense of the superiority of elders over youth blended strangely with the feeling of sheer respect for them, with the persistent melancholy thought that life had now become dull, and with the curiosity aroused by the young men who so bravely and fearlessly spoke of the possibility of a new life, which the elders did not comprehend but which seemed to promise something good. The very novelty and unusualness of the feeling rendered expression impossible. Words were spoken in plenty, but they referred only to common matters. The relatives spoke of linen and clothes, and begged the comrades to take care of their health, and not to provoke the authorities uselessly. "Everybody, brother, will grow weary, both we and they," said Samoylov to his son. And Bukin's brother, waving his hand, assured the younger brother: "Merely justice, and nothing else! That they cannot admit." The younger Bukin answered: "You look out for the starling. I love him." "Come back home, and you'll find him in perfect trim." "I've nothing to do there." And Sizov held his nephew's hand, and slowly said: "So, Fedor; so you've started on your trip. So." Fedya bent over, and whispered something in his ear, smiling roguishly. The convoy soldier also smiled; but he immediately assumed a stern expression, and shouted, "Go!" The mother spoke to Pavel, like the others, about the same things, about clothes, about his health, yet her breast was choked by a hundred questions concerning Sasha, concerning himself, and herself. Underneath all these emotions an almost burdensome feeling was slowly growing of the fullness of her love for her son--a strained desire to please him, to be near to his heart. The expectation of the terrible had died away, leaving behind it only a tremor at the recollection of the judges, and somewhere in a corner a dark impersonal thought regarding them. "Young people ought to be tried by young judges, and not by old ones," she said to her son. "It would be better to arrange life so that it should not force people to crime," answered Pavel. The mother, seeing the Little Russian converse with everybody and realizing that he needed affection more than Pavel, spoke to him. Andrey answered her gratefully, smiling, joking kindly, as always a bit droll, supple, sinewy. Around her the talk went on, crossing and intertwining. She heard everything, understood everybody, and secretly marveled at the vastness of her own heart, which took in everything with an even joy, and gave back a clear reflection of it, like a bright image on a deep, placid lake. Finally the prisoners were led away. The mother walked out of the court, and was surprised to see that night already hung over the city, with the lanterns alight in the streets, and the stars shining in the sky. Groups composed mainly of young men were crowding near the courthouse. The snow crunched in the frozen atmosphere; voices sounded. A man in a gray Caucasian cowl looked into Sizov's face and asked quickly: "What was the sentence?" "Exile." "For all?" "All." "Thank you." The man walked away. "You see," said Sizov. "They inquire." Suddenly they were surrounded by about ten men, youths, and girls, and explanations rained down, attracting still more people. The mother and Sizov stopped. They were questioned in regard to the sentence, as to how the prisoners behaved, who delivered the speeches, and what the speeches were about. All the voices rang with the same eager curiosity, sincere and warm, which aroused the desire to satisfy it. "People! This is the mother of Pavel Vlasov!" somebody shouted, and presently all became silent. "Permit me to shake your hand." Somebody's firm hand pressed the mother's fingers, somebody's voice said excitedly: "Your son will be an example of manhood for all of us." "Long live the Russian workingman!" a resonant voice rang out. "Long live the proletariat!" "Long live the revolution!" The shouts grew louder and increased in number, rising up on all sides. The people ran from every direction, pushing into the crowd around the mother and Sizov. The whistles of the police leaped through the air, but did not deafen the shouts. The old man smiled; and to the mother all this seemed like a pleasant dream. She smilingly pressed the hands extended to her and bowed, with joyous tears choking her throat. Near her somebody's clear voice said nervously: "Comrades, friends, the autocracy, the monster which devours the Russian people to-day again gulped into its bottomless, greedy mouth----" "However, mother, let's go," said Sizov. And at the same time Sasha appeared, caught the mother under her arm, and quickly dragged her away to the other side of the street. "Come! They're going to make arrests. What? Exile? To Siberia?" "Yes, yes." "And how did he speak? I know without your telling me. He was more powerful than any of the others, and more simple. And of course, sterner than all the rest. He's sensitive and soft, only he's ashamed to expose himself. And he's direct, clear, firm, like truth itself. He's very great, and there's everything in him, everything! But he often constrains himself for nothing, lest he might hinder the cause. I know it." Her hot half-whisper, the words of her love, calmed the mother's agitation, and restored her exhausted strength. "When will you go to him?" she asked Sasha, pressing her hand to her body. Looking confidently before her the girl answered: "As soon as I find somebody to take over my work. I have the money already, but I might go _per étappe_. You know I am also awaiting a sentence. Evidently they are going to send me to Siberia, too. I will then declare that I desire to be exiled to the same locality that he will be." Behind them was heard the voice of Sizov: "Then give him regards from me, from Sizov. He will know. I'm Fedya Mazin's uncle." Sasha stopped, turned around, extending her hand. "I'm acquainted with Fedya. My name is Alexandra." "And your patronymic?" She looked at him and answered: "I have no father." "He's dead, you mean?" "No, he's alive." Something stubborn, persistent, sounded in the girl's voice and appeared in her face. "He's a landowner, a chief of a country district. He robs the peasants and beats them. I cannot recognize him as my father." "S-s-o-o!" Sizov was taken aback. After a pause he said, looking at the girl sidewise: "Well, mother, good-by. I'm going off to the left. Stop in sometimes for a talk and a glass of tea. Good evening, lady. You're pretty hard on your father--of course, that's your business." "If your son were an ugly man, obnoxious to people, disgusting to you, wouldn't you say the same about him?" Sasha shouted terribly. "Well, I would," the old man answered after some hesitation. "That is to say that justice is dearer to you than your son; and to me it's dearer than my father." Sizov smiled, shaking his head; then he said with a sigh: "Well, well, you're clever. Good-by. I wish you all good things, and be better to people. Hey? Well, God be with you. Good-by, Nilovna. When you see Pavel tell him I heard his speech. I couldn't understand every bit of it; some things even seemed horrible; but tell him it's true. They've found the truth, yes." He raised his hat, and sedately turned around the corner of the street. "He seems to be a good man," remarked Sasha, accompanying him with a smile of her large eyes. "Such people can be useful to the cause. It would be good to hide literature with them, for instance." It seemed to the mother that to-day the girl's face was softer and kinder than usual, and hearing her remarks about Sizov, she thought: "Always about the cause. Even to-day. It's burned into her heart." CHAPTER XVII At home they sat on the sofa closely pressed together, and the mother resting in the quiet again began to speak about Sasha's going to Pavel. Thoughtfully raising her thick eyebrows, the girl looked into the distance with her large, dreamy eyes. A contemplative expression rested on her pale face. "Then, when children will be born to you, I will come to you and dandle them. We'll begin to live there no worse than here. Pasha will find work. He has golden hands." "Yes," answered Sasha thoughtfully. "That's good--" And suddenly starting, as if throwing something away, she began to speak simply in a modulated voice. "He won't commence to live there. He'll go away, of course." "And how will that be? Suppose, in case of children?" "I don't know. We'll see when we are there. In such a case he oughtn't to reckon with me, and I cannot constrain him. He's free at any moment. I am his comrade--a wife, of course. But the conditions of his work are such that for years and years I cannot regard our bond as a usual one, like that of others. It will be hard, I know it, to part with him; but, of course, I'll manage to. He knows that I'm not capable of regarding a man as my possession. I'm not going to constrain him, no." The mother understood her, felt that she believed what she said, that she was capable of carrying it out; and she was sorry for her. She embraced her. "My dear girl, it will be hard for you." Sasha smiled softly, nestling her body up to the mother's. Her voice sounded mild, but powerful. Red mounted to her face. "It's a long time till then; but don't think that I--that it is hard for me now. I'm making no sacrifices. I know what I'm doing, I know what I may expect. I'll be happy if I can make him happy. My aim, my desire is to increase his energy, to give him as much happiness and love as I can--a great deal. I love him very much and he me--I know it--what I bring to him, he will give back to me--we will enrich each other by all in our power; and, if necessary, we will part as friends." Sasha remained silent for a long time, during which the mother and the young woman sat in a corner of the room, tightly pressed against each other, thinking of the man whom they loved. It was quiet, melancholy, and warm. Nikolay entered, exhausted, but brisk. He immediately announced: "Well, Sashenka, betake yourself away from here, as long as you are sound. Two spies have been after me since this morning, and the attempt at concealment is so evident that it savors of an arrest. I feel it in my bones--somewhere something has happened. By the way, here I have the speech of Pavel. It's been decided to publish it at once. Take it to Liudmila. Pavel spoke well, Nilovna; and his speech will play a part. Look out for spies, Sasha. Wait a little while--hide these papers, too. You might give them to Ivan, for example." While he spoke, he vigorously rubbed his frozen hands, and quickly pulled out the drawers of his table, picking out papers, some of which he tore up, others he laid aside. His manner was absorbed, and his appearance all upset. "Do you suppose it was long ago that this place was cleared out? And look at this mass of stuff accumulated already! The devil! You see, Nilovna, it would be better for you, too, not to sleep here to-night. It's a sorry spectacle to witness, and they may arrest you, too. And you'll be needed for carrying Pavel's speech about from place to place." "Hm, what do they want me for? Maybe you're mistaken." Nikolay waved his forearm in front of his eyes, and said with conviction: "I have a keen scent. Besides, you can be of great help to Liudmila. Flee far from evil." The possibility of taking a part in the printing of her son's speech was pleasant to her, and she answered: "If so, I'll go. But don't think I'm afraid." "Very well. Now, tell me where my valise and my linen are. You've grabbed up everything into your rapacious hands, and I'm completely robbed of the possibility of disposing of my own private property. I'm making complete preparations--this will be unpleasant to them." Sasha burned the papers in silence, and carefully mixed their ashes with the other cinders in the stove. "Sasha, go," said Nikolay, putting out his hand to her. "Good-by. Don't forget books--if anything new and interesting appears. Well, good-by, dear comrade. Be more careful." "Do you think it's for long?" asked Sasha. "The devil knows them! Evidently. There's something against me. Nilovna, are you going with her? It's harder to track two people--all right?" "I'm going." The mother went to dress herself, and it occurred to her how little these people who were striving for the freedom of all cared for their personal freedom. The simplicity and the businesslike manner of Nikolay in expecting the arrest both astonished and touched her. She tried to observe his face carefully; she detected nothing but his air of absorption, overshadowing the usual kindly soft expression of his eyes. There was no sign of agitation in this man, dearer to her than the others; he made no fuss. Equally attentive to all, alike kind to all, always calmly the same, he seemed to her just as much a stranger as before to everybody and everything except his cause. He seemed remote, living a secret life within himself and somewhere ahead of people. Yet she felt that he resembled her more than any of the others, and she loved him with a love that was carefully observing and, as it were, did not believe in itself. Now she felt painfully sorry for him; but she restrained her feelings, knowing that to show them would disconcert Nikolay, that he would become, as always under such circumstances, somewhat ridiculous. When she returned to the room she found him pressing Sasha's hand and saying: "Admirable! I'm convinced of it. It's very good for him and for you. A little personal happiness does not do any harm; but--a little, you know, so as not to make him lose his value. Are you ready, Nilovna?" He walked up to her, smiling and adjusting his glasses. "Well, good-by. I want to think that for three months, four months--well, at most half a year--half a year is a great deal of a man's life. In half a year one can do a lot of things. Take care of yourself, please, eh? Come, let's embrace." Lean and thin he clasped her neck in his powerful arms, looked into her eyes, and smiled. "It seems to me I've fallen in love with you. I keep embracing you all the time." She was silent, kissing his forehead and cheeks, and her hands quivered. For fear he might notice it, she unclasped them. "Go. Very well. Be careful to-morrow. This is what you should do--send the boy in the morning--Liudmila has a boy for the purpose--let him go to the house porter and ask him whether I'm home or not. I'll forewarn the porter; he's a good fellow, and I'm a friend of his. Well, good-by, comrades. I wish you all good." On the street Sasha said quietly to the mother: "He'll go as simply as this to his death, if necessary. And apparently he'll hurry up a little in just the same way; when death stares him in the face he'll adjust his eyeglasses, and will say 'admirable,' and will die." "I love him," whispered the mother. "I'm filled with astonishment; but love him--no. I respect him highly. He's sort of dry, although good and even, if you please, sometimes soft; but not sufficiently human--it seems to me we're being followed. Come, let's part. Don't enter Liudmila's place if you think a spy is after you." "I know," said the mother. Sasha, however, persistently added: "Don't enter. In that case, come to me. Good-by for the present." She quickly turned around and walked back. The mother called "Good-by" after her. Within a few minutes she sat all frozen through at the stove in Liudmila's little room. Her hostess, Liudmila, in a black dress girded up with a strap, slowly paced up and down the room, filling it with a rustle and the sound of her commanding voice. A fire was crackling in the stove and drawing in the air from the room. The woman's voice sounded evenly. "People are a great deal more stupid than bad. They can see only what's near to them, what it's possible to grasp immediately; but everything that's near is cheap; what's distant is dear. Why, in reality, it would be more convenient and pleasanter for all if life were different, were lighter, and the people were more sensible. But to attain the distant you must disturb yourself for the immediate present----" Nilovna tried to guess where this woman did her printing. The room had three windows facing the street; there was a sofa and a bookcase, a table, chairs, a bed at the wall, in the corner near it a wash basin, in the other corner a stove; on the walls photographs and pictures. All was new, solid, clean; and over all the austere monastic figure of the mistress threw a cold shadow. Something concealed, something hidden, made itself felt; but where it lurked was incomprehensible. The mother looked at the doors; through one of them she had entered from the little antechamber. Near the stove was another door, narrow and high. "I have come to you on business," she said in embarrassment, noticing that the hostess was regarding her. "I know. Nobody comes to me for any other reason." Something strange seemed to be in Liudmila's voice. The mother looked in her face. Liudmila smiled with the corners of her thin lips, her dull eyes gleamed behind her glasses. Turning her glance aside, the mother handed her the speech of Pavel. "Here. They ask you to print it at once." And she began to tell of Nikolay's preparations for the arrest. Liudmila silently thrust the manuscript into her belt and sat down on a chair. A red gleam of the fire was reflected on her spectacles; its hot smile played on her motionless face. "When they come to me I'm going to shoot at them," she said with determination in her moderated voice. "I have the right to protect myself against violence; and I must fight with them if I call upon others to fight. I cannot understand calmness; I don't like it." The reflection of the fire glided across her face, and she again became austere, somewhat haughty. "Your life is not very pleasant," the mother thought kindly. Liudmila began to read Pavel's speech, at first reluctantly; then she bent lower and lower over the paper, quickly throwing aside the pages as she read them. When she had finished she rose, straightened herself, and walked up to the mother. "That's good. That's what I like; although here, too, there's calmness. But the speech is the sepulchral beat of a drum, and the drummer is a powerful man." She reflected a little while, lowering her head for a minute: "I didn't want to speak with you about your son; I have never met him, and I don't like sad subjects of conversation. I know what it means to have a near one go into exile. But I want to say to you, nevertheless, that your son must be a splendid man. He's young--that's evident; but he is a great soul. It must be good and terrible to have such a son." "Yes, it's good. And now it's no longer terrible." Liudmila settled her smoothly combed hair with her tawny hand and sighed softly. A light, warm shadow trembled on her cheeks, the shadow of a suppressed smile. "We are going to print it. Will you help me?" "Of course." "I'll set it up quickly. You lie down; you had a hard day; you're tired. Lie down here on the bed; I'm not going to sleep; and at night maybe I'll wake you up to help me. When you have lain down, put out the lamp." She threw two logs of wood into the stove, straightened herself, and passed through the narrow door near the stove, firmly closing it after her. The mother followed her with her eyes, and began to undress herself, thinking reluctantly of her hostess: "A stern person; and yet her heart burns. She can't conceal it. Everyone loves. If you don't love you can't live." Fatigue dizzied her brain; but her soul was strangely calm, and everything was illumined from within by a soft, kind light which quietly and evenly filled her breast. She was already acquainted with this calm; it had come to her after great agitation. At first it had slightly disturbed her; but now it only broadened her soul, strengthening it with a certain powerful but impalpable thought. Before her all the time appeared and disappeared the faces of her son, Andrey, Nikolay, Sasha. She took delight in them; they passed by without arousing thought, and only lightly and sadly touching her heart. Then she extinguished the lamp, lay down in the cold bed, shriveled up under the bed coverings, and suddenly sank into a heavy sleep. CHAPTER XVIII When she opened her eyes the room was filled by the cold, white glimmer of a clear wintry day. The hostess, with a book in her hand, lay on the sofa, and smiling unlike herself looked into her face. "Oh, father!" the mother exclaimed, for some reason embarrassed. "Just look! Have I been asleep a long time?" "Good morning!" answered Liudmila. "It'll soon be ten o'clock. Get up and we'll have tea." "Why didn't you wake me up?" "I wanted to. I walked up to you; but you were so fast asleep and smiled so in your sleep!" With a supple, powerful movement of her whole body she rose from the sofa, walked up to the bed, bent toward the face of the mother, and in her dull eyes the mother saw something dear, near, and comprehensible. "I was sorry to disturb you. Maybe you were seeing a happy vision." "I didn't see anything." "All the same--but your smile pleased me. It was so calm, so good--so great." Liudmila laughed, and her laugh sounded velvety. "I thought of you, of your life--your life is a hard one, isn't it?" The mother, moving her eyebrows, was silent and thoughtful. "Of course it's hard!" exclaimed Liudmila. "I don't know," said the mother carefully. "Sometimes it seems sort of hard; there's so much of all, it's all so serious, marvelous, and it moves along so quickly, one thing after the other--so quickly----" The wave of bold excitement familiar to her overflowed her breast, filling her heart with images and thoughts. She sat up in bed, quickly clothing her thoughts in words. "It goes, it goes, it goes all to one thing, to one side, and like a fire, when a house begins to burn, upward! Here it shoots forth, there it blazes out, ever brighter, ever more powerful. There's a great deal of hardship, you know. People suffer; they are beaten, cruelly beaten; and everyone is oppressed and watched. They hide, live like monks, and many joys are closed to them; it's very hard. And when you look at them well you see that the hard things, the evil and difficult, are around them, on the outside, and not within." Liudmila quickly threw up her head, looked at her with a deep, embracing look. The mother felt that her words did not exhaust her thoughts, which vexed and offended her. "You're not speaking about yourself," said her hostess softly. The mother looked at her, arose from the bed, and dressing asked: "Not about myself? Yes; you see in this, in all that I live now, it's hard to think of oneself; how can you withdraw into yourself when you love this thing, and that thing is dear to you, and you are afraid for everybody and are sorry for everybody? Everything crowds into your heart and draws you to all people. How can you step to one side? It's hard." Liudmila laughed, saying softly: "And maybe it's not necessary." "I don't know whether it's necessary or not; but this I do know--that people are becoming stronger than life, wiser than life; that's evident." Standing in the middle of the room, half-dressed, she fell to reflecting for a moment. Her real self suddenly appeared not to exist--the one who lived in anxiety and fear for her son, in thoughts for the safekeeping of his body. Such a person in herself was no longer; she had gone off to a great distance, and perhaps was altogether burned up by the fire of agitation. This had lightened and cleansed her soul, and had renovated her heart with a new power. She communed with herself, desiring to take a look into her own heart, and fearing lest she awaken some anxiety there. "What are you thinking about?" Liudmila asked kindly, walking up to her. "I don't know." The two women were silent, looking at each other. Both smiled; then Liudmila walked out of the room, saying: "What is my samovar doing?" The mother looked through the window. A cold, bracing day shone in the street; her breast, too, shone bright, but hot. She wanted to speak much about everything, joyfully, with a confused feeling of gratitude to somebody--she did not know whom--for all that came into her soul, and lighted it with a ruddy evening light. A desire to pray, which she had not felt for a long time, arose in her breast. Somebody's young face came to her memory, somebody's resonant voice shouted, "That's the mother of Pavel Vlasov!" Sasha's eyes flashed joyously and tenderly. Rybin's dark, tall figure loomed up, the bronzed, firm face of her son smiled. Nikolay blinked in embarrassment; and suddenly everything was stirred with a deep but light breath. "Nikolay was right," said Liudmila, entering again. "He must surely have been arrested. I sent the boy there, as you told me to. He said policemen are hiding in the yard; he did not see the house porter; but he saw the policeman who was hiding behind the gates. And spies are sauntering about; the boy knows them." "So?" The mother nodded her head. "Ah, poor fellow!" And she sighed, but without sadness, and was quietly surprised at herself. "Lately he's been reading a great deal to the city workingmen; and in general it was time for him to disappear," Liudmila said with a frown. "The comrades told him to go, but he didn't obey them. I think that in such cases you must compel and not try to persuade." A dark-haired, red-faced boy with beautiful eyes and a hooked nose appeared in the doorway. "Shall I bring in the samovar?" he asked in a ringing voice. "Yes, please, Seryozha. This is my pupil; have you never met him before?" "No." "He used to go to Nikolay sometimes; I sent him." Liudmila seemed to the mother to be different to-day--simpler and nearer to her. In the supple swaying of her stately figure there was much beauty and power; her sternness had mildened; the circles under her eyes had grown larger during the night, her face paler and leaner; her large eyes had deepened. One perceived a strained exertion in her, a tightly drawn chord in her soul. The boy brought in the samovar. "Let me introduce you: Seryozha--Pelagueya Nilovna, the mother of the workingman whom they sentenced yesterday." Seryozha bowed silently and pressed the mother's hand. Then he brought in bread, and sat down to the table. Liudmila persuaded the mother not to go home until they found out whom the police were waiting for there. "Maybe they are waiting for you. I'm sure they'll examine you." "Let them. And if they arrest me, no great harm. Only I'd like to have Pasha's speech sent off." "It's already in type. To-morrow it'll be possible to have it for the city and the suburb. We'll have some for the districts, too. Do you know Natasha?" "Of course!" "Then take it to her." The boy read the newspaper, and seemed not to be listening to the conversation; but at times his eyes looked from the pages of the newspaper into the face of the mother; and when she met their animated glance she felt pleased and smiled. She reproached herself for these smiles. Liudmila again mentioned Nikolay without any expression of regret for his arrest and, to the mother, it seemed in perfectly natural tones. The time passed more quickly than on the other days. When they had done drinking tea it was already near midday. "However!" exclaimed Liudmila, and at the same time a knock at the door was heard. The boy rose, looked inquiringly at Liudmila, prettily screwing up his eyes. "Open the door, Seryozha. Who do you suppose it is?" And with a composed gesture she let her hand into the pocket of the skirt, saying to the mother: "If it is the gendarmes, you, Pelagueya Nilovna, stand here in this corner, and you, Ser----" "I know. The dark passage," the little boy answered softly, disappearing. The mother smiled. These preparations did not disturb her; she had no premonition of a misfortune. The little physician walked in. He quickly said: "First of all, Nikolay is arrested. Aha! You here, Nilovna? They're interested in you, too. Weren't you there when he was arrested?" "He packed me off, and told me to come here." "Hm! I don't think it will be of any use to you. Secondly, last night several young people made about five hundred hektograph copies of Pavel's speech--not badly done, plain and clear. They want to scatter them throughout the city at night. I'm against it. Printed sheets are better for the city, and the hektograph copies ought to be sent off somewhere." "Here, I'll carry them to Natasha!" the mother exclaimed animatedly. "Give them to me." She was seized with a great desire to sow them broadcast, to spread Pavel's speech as soon as possible. She would have bestrewn the whole earth with the words of her son, and she looked into the doctor's face with eyes ready to beg. "The devil knows whether at this time you ought to take up this matter," the physician said irresolutely, and took out his watch. "It's now twelve minutes of twelve. The train leaves at 2.05, arrives there 5.15. You'll get there in the evening, but not sufficiently late--and that's not the point!" "That's not the point," repeated Liudmila, frowning. "What then?" asked the mother, drawing up to them. "The point is to do it well; and I'll do it all right." Liudmila looked fixedly at her, and chafing her forehead, remarked: "It's dangerous for you." "Why?" the mother challenged hotly. "That's why!" said the physician quickly and brokenly. "You disappeared from home an hour before Nikolay's arrest. You went away to the mill, where you are known as the teacher's aunt; after your arrival at the mill the naughty leaflets appear. All this will tie itself into a noose around your neck." "They won't notice me there," the mother assured them, warming to her desire. "When I return they'll arrest me, and ask me where I was." After a moment's pause she exclaimed: "I know what I'll say. From there I'll go straight to the suburb; I have a friend there--Sizov. So I'll say that I went there straight from the trial; grief took me there; and he, too, had the same misfortune, his nephew was sentenced; and I spent the whole time with him. He'll uphold me, too. Do you see?" The mother was aware that they were succumbing to the strength of her desire, and strove to induce them to give in as quickly as possible. She spoke more and more persistently, joy arising within her. And they yielded. "Well, go," the physician reluctantly assented. Liudmila was silent, pacing thoughtfully up and down the room. Her face clouded over and her cheeks fell in. The muscles of her neck stretched noticeably as if her head had suddenly grown heavy; it involuntarily dropped on her breast. The mother observed this. The physician's reluctant assent forced a sigh from her. "You all take care of me," the mother said, smiling. "You don't take care of yourselves." And the wave of joy mounted higher and higher. "It isn't true. We look out for ourselves. We ought to; and we very much upbraid those who uselessly waste their power. Ye-es. Now, this is the way you are to do. You will receive the speeches at the station." He explained to her how the matter would be arranged; then looking into her face, he said: "Well, I wish you success. You're happy, aren't you?" And he walked away still gloomy and dissatisfied. When the door closed behind him Liudmila walked up to the mother, smiling quietly. "You're a fine woman! I understand you." Taking her by the arm, she again walked up and down the room. "I have a son, too. He's already thirteen years old; but he lives with his father. My husband is an assistant prosecuting attorney. Maybe he's already prosecuting attorney. And the boy's with him. What is he going to be? I often think." Her humid, powerful voice trembled. Then her speech flowed on again thoughtfully and quietly. "He's being brought up by a professed enemy of those people who are near me, whom I regard as the best people on earth; and maybe the boy will grow up to be my enemy. He cannot live with me; I live under a strange name. I have not seen him for eight years. That's a long time--eight years!" Stopping at the window, she looked up at the pale, bleak sky, and continued: "If he were with me I would be stronger; I would not have this wound in my heart, the wound that always pains. And even if he were dead it would be easier for me--" She paused again, and added more firmly and loudly: "Then I would know he's merely dead, but not an enemy of that which is higher than the feeling of a mother, dearer and more necessary than life." "My darling," said the mother quietly, feeling as if something powerful were burning her heart. "Yes, you are happy," Liudmila said with a smile. "It's magnificent--the mother and the son side by side. It's rare!" The mother unexpectedly to herself exclaimed: "Yes, it is good!" and as if disclosing a secret, she continued in a lowered voice: "It is another life. All of you--Nikolay Ivanovich, all the people of the cause of truth--are also side by side. Suddenly people have become kin--I understand all--the words I don't understand; but everything else I understand, everything!" "That's how it is," Liudmila said. "That's how." The mother put her hand on Liudmila's breast, pressing her; she spoke almost in a whisper, as if herself meditating upon the words she spoke. "Children go through the world; that's what I understand; children go into the world, over all the earth, from everywhere toward one thing. The best hearts go; people of honest minds; they relentlessly attack all evil, all darkness. They go, they trample falsehood with heavy feet, understanding everything, justifying everybody--justifying everybody, they go. Young, strong, they carry their power, their invincible power, all toward one thing--toward justice. They go to conquer all human misery, they arm themselves to wipe away misfortune from the face of the earth; they go to subdue what is monstrous, and they will subdue it. We will kindle a new sun, somebody told me; and they will kindle it. We will create one heart in life, we will unite all the severed hearts into one--and they will unite them. We will cleanse the whole of life--and they will cleanse it." She waved her hand toward the sky. "There's the sun." And she struck her bosom. "Here the most glorious heavenly sun of human happiness will be kindled, and it will light up the earth forever--the whole of it, and all that live upon it--with the light of love, the love of every man toward all, and toward everything." The words of forgotten prayers recurred to her mind, inspiring a new faith. She threw them from her heart like sparks. "The children walking along the road of truth and reason carry love to all; and they clothe everything in new skies; they illumine everything with an incorruptible fire issuing from the depths of the soul. Thus, a new life comes into being, born of the children's love for the entire world; and who will extinguish this love--who? What power is higher than this? Who will subdue it? The earth has brought it forth; and all life desires its victory--all life. Shed rivers of blood, nay, seas of blood, you'll never extinguish it." She shook herself away from Liudmila, fatigued by her exaltation, and sat down, breathing heavily. Liudmila also withdrew from her, noiselessly, carefully, as if afraid of destroying something. With supple movement she walked about the room and looked in front of her with the deep gaze of her dim eyes. She seemed still taller, straighter, and thinner; her lean, stern face wore a concentrated expression, and her lips were nervously compressed. The stillness in the room soon calmed the mother, and noticing Liudmila's mood she asked guiltily and softly: "Maybe I said something that wasn't quite right?" Liudmila quickly turned around and looked at her as if in fright. "It's all right," she said rapidly, stretching out her hand to the mother as if desiring to arrest something. "But we'll not speak about it any more. Let it remain as it was said; let it remain. Yes." And in a calmer tone she continued: "It's time for you to start soon; it's far." "Yes, presently. I'm glad! Oh, how glad I am! If you only knew! I'm going to carry the word of my son, the word of my blood. Why, it's like one's own soul!" She smiled; but her smile did not find a clear reflection in the face of Liudmila. The mother felt that Liudmila chilled her joy by her restraint; and the stubborn desire suddenly arose in her to pour into that obstinate soul enveloped in misery her own fire, to burn her, too, let her, too, sound in unison with her own heart full of joy. She took Liudmila's hands and pressed them powerfully. "My dear, how good it is when you know that light for all the people already exists in life, and that there will be a time when they will begin to see it, when they will bathe their souls in it, and all, all, will take fire in its unquenchable flames." Her good, large face quivered; her eyes smiled radiantly; and her eyebrows trembled over them as if pinioning their flash. The great thoughts intoxicated her; she put into them everything that burned her heart, everything she had lived through; and she compressed the thoughts into firm, capacious crystals of luminous words. They grew up ever more powerful in the autumn heart, illuminated by the creative force of the spring sun; they blossomed and reddened in it ever more brightly. "Why, this is like a new god that's born to us, the people. Everything for all; all for everything; the whole of life in one, and the whole of life for everyone, and everyone for the whole of life! Thus I understand all of you; it is for this that you are on this earth, I see. You are in truth comrades all, kinsmen all, for you are all children of one mother, of truth. Truth has brought you forth; and by her power you live!" Again overcome by the wave of agitation, she stopped, fetched breath, and spread out her arms as if for an embrace. "And if I pronounce to myself that word 'comrades' then I hear with my heart--they are going! They are going from everywhere, the great multitude, all to one thing. I hear such a roaring, resonant and joyous, like the festive peal of the bells of all the churches of the world." She had arrived at what she desired. Liudmila's face flashed in amazement. Her lips quivered; and one after the other large transparent tears dropped from her dull eyes and rolled down her cheeks. The mother embraced her vigorously and laughed softly, lightly taking pride in the victory of her heart. When they took leave of each other Liudmila looked into the mother's face, and asked her softly: "Do you know that it is well with you?" And herself supplied the answer: "Very well. Like a morning on a high mountain." CHAPTER XIX In the street the frozen atmosphere enveloped her body invigoratingly, penetrated into her throat, tickled her nose, and for a second suppressed the breathing in her bosom. The mother stopped and looked around. Near to her, at the corner of the empty street, stood a cabman in a shaggy hat; at a slight distance a man was walking, bent, his head sunk in his shoulders; and in front of him a soldier was running in a jump, rubbing his ears. "The soldier must have been sent to the store," she thought, and walked off listening with satisfaction to the youthful crunching of the snow under her feet. She arrived at the station early; her train was not yet ready; but in the dirty waiting room of the third class, blackened with smoke, there were numerous people already. The cold drove in the railroad workmen; cabmen and some poorly dressed, homeless people came in to warm themselves; there were passengers, also a few peasants, a stout merchant in a raccoon overcoat, a priest and his daughter, a pockmarked girl, some five soldiers, and bustling tradesmen. The men smoked, talked, drank tea and whisky at the buffet; some one laughed boisterously; a wave of smoke was wafted overhead; the door squeaked as it opened, the windows rattled when the door was jammed to; the odor of tobacco, machine oil, and salt fish thickly beat into the nostrils. The mother sat near the entrance and waited. When the door opened a whiff of fresh air struck her, which was pleasant to her, and she took in deep breaths. Heavily dressed people came in with bundles in their hands; they clumsily pushed through the door, swore, mumbled, threw their things on the bench or on the floor, shook off the dry rime from the collars of their overcoats and their sleeves and wiped it off their beards and mustaches, all the time puffing and blowing. A young man entered with a yellow valise in his hand, quickly looked around, and walked straight to the mother. "To Moscow, to your niece?" he asked in a low voice. "Yes, to Tanya." "Very well." He put the valise on the bench near her, quickly whipped out a cigarette, lighted it, and raising his hat, silently walked toward the other door. The mother stroked the cold skin of the valise, leaned her elbows on it, and, satisfied, began again to look around at the people. In a few moments she arose and walked over to the other bench, nearer to the exit to the platform. She held the valise lightly in her hand; it was not large, and she walked with raised head, scanning the faces that flashed before her. One man in a short overcoat and its collar raised jostled against her and jumped back, silently waving his hand toward his head. Something familiar about him struck her; she glanced around and saw that he was looking at her with one eye gleaming out of his collar. This attentive eye pricked her; the hand in which she held the valise trembled; she felt a dull pain in her shoulder, and the load suddenly grew heavy. "I've seen him somewhere," she thought, and with the thought suppressed the unpleasant, confused feeling in her breast. She would not permit herself to define the cold sensation that already pressed her heart quietly but powerfully. It grew and rose in her throat, filling her mouth with a dry, bitter taste, and compelling her to turn around and look once more. As she turned he carefully shifted from one foot to the other, standing on the same spot; it seemed he wanted something, but could not decide what. His right hand was thrust between the buttons of his coat, the other he kept in his pocket. On account of this the right shoulder seemed higher than the left. Without hastening, she walked to the bench and sat down carefully, slowly, as if afraid of tearing something in herself or on herself. Her memory, aroused by a sharp premonition of misfortune, quickly presented this man twice to her imagination--once in the field outside the city, after the escape of Rybin; a second time in the evening in the court. There at his side stood the constable to whom she had pointed out the false way taken by Rybin. They knew her; they were tracking her--this was evident. "Am I caught?" she asked, and in the following second answered herself, starting: "Maybe there is still--" and immediately forcing herself with a great effort, she said sternly: "I'm caught. No use." She looked around, and her thoughts flashed up in sparks and expired in her brain one after the other. "Leave the valise? Go away?" But at the same time another spark darted up more glaringly: "How much will be lost? Drop the son's word in such hands?" She pressed the valise to herself trembling. "And to go away with it? Where? To run?" These thoughts seemed to her those of a stranger, somebody from the outside, who was pushing them on her by main force. They burned her, and their burns chopped her brain painfully, lashed her heart like fiery whipcords. They were an insult to the mother; they seemed to be driving her away from her own self, from Pavel, and everything which had grown to her heart. She felt that a stubborn, hostile force oppressed her, squeezed her shoulder and breast, lowered her stature, plunging her into a fatal fear. The veins on her temples began to pulsate vigorously, and the roots of her hair grew warm. Then with one great and sharp effort of her heart, which seemed to shake her entire being, she quenched all these cunning, petty, feeble little fires, saying sternly to herself: "Enough!" She at once began to feel better, and she grew strengthened altogether, adding: "Don't disgrace your son. Nobody's afraid." Several seconds of wavering seemed to have the effect of joining everything in her; her heart began to beat calmly. "What's going to happen now? How will they go about it with me?" she thought, her senses strung to a keener observation. The spy called a station guard, and whispered something to him, directing his look toward her. The guard glanced at him and moved back. Another guard came, listened, grinned, and lowered his brows. He was an old man, coarse-built, gray, unshaven. He nodded his head to the spy, and walked up to the bench where the mother sat. The spy quickly disappeared. The old man strode leisurely toward the mother, intently thrusting his angry eyes into the mother's face. She sat farther back on the bench, trembling. "If they only don't beat me, if they only don't beat me!" He stopped at her side; she raised her eyes to his face. "What are you looking at?" he asked in a moderated voice. "Nothing." "Hm! Thief! So old and yet----" It seemed to her that his words struck her face once, twice, rough and hoarse; they wounded her, as if they tore her cheeks, ripped out her eyes. "I'm not a thief! You lie!" she shouted with all the power of her chest; and everything before her jumped and began to whirl in a whirlwind of revolt, intoxicating her heart with the bitterness of insult. She jerked the valise, and it opened. "Look! look! All you people!" she shouted, standing up and waving the bundle of the proclamations she had quickly seized over her head. Through the noise in her ears she heard the exclamations of the people who came running up, and she saw them pouring in quickly from all directions. "What is it?" "There's a spy!" "What's the matter?" "She's a thief, they say!" "She?" "Would a thief shout?" "Such a respectable one! My, my, my!" "Whom did they catch?" "I'm not a thief," said the mother in a full voice, somewhat calmed at the sight of the people who pressed closely upon her from all sides. "Yesterday they tried the political prisoners; my son was one of them, Vlasov. He made a speech. Here it is. I'm carrying it to the people in order that they should read, think about the truth." One paper was carefully pulled from her hands. She waved the papers in the air and flung them into the crowd. "She won't get any praise for that, either!" somebody exclaimed in a frightened voice. "Whee-ee-w!" was the response. The mother saw that the papers were being snatched up, were being hidden in breasts and pockets. This again put her firmly on her feet; more composed than forceful, straining herself to her utmost, and feeling how agitated pride grew in her raising her high above the people, how subdued joy flamed up in her, she spoke, snatching bundles of papers from the valise and throwing them right and left into some person's quick, greedy hands. "For this they sentenced my son and all with him. Do you know? I will tell you, and you believe the heart of a mother; believe her gray hair. Yesterday they sentenced them because they carried to you, to all the people, the honest, sacred truth. How do you live?" The crowd grew silent in amazement, and noiselessly increased in size, pressing closer and closer together, surrounding the woman with a ring of living bodies. "Poverty, hunger, and sickness--that's what work gives to the poor people. This order of things pushes us to theft and to corruption; and over us, satiated and calm, live the rich. In order that we should obey the police, the authorities, the soldiers, all are in their hands, all are against us, everything is against us. We perish all our lives day after day in toil, always in filth, in deceit. And others enjoy themselves and gormandize themselves with our labor; and they hold us like dogs on chains, in ignorance. We know nothing, and in terror we fear everything. Our life is night, a dark night; it is a terrible dream. They have poisoned us with strong intoxicating poison, and they drink our blood. They glut themselves to corpulence, to vomiting--the servants of the devil of greed. Is it not so?" "It's so!" came a dull answer. Back of the crowd the mother noticed the spy and two gendarmes. She hastened to give away the last bundles; but when her hand let itself down into the valise it met another strange hand. "Take it, take it all!" she said, bending down. A dirty face raised itself to hers, and a low whisper reached her: "Whom shall I tell? Whom inform?" She did not answer. "In order to change this life, in order to free all the people, to raise them from the dead, as I have been raised, some persons have already come who secretly saw the truth in life; secretly, because, you know, no one can say the truth aloud. They hunt you down, they stifle you; they make you rot in prison, they mutilate you. Wealth is a force, not a friend to truth. Thus far truth is the sworn enemy to the power of the rich, an irreconcilable enemy forever! Our children are carrying the truth into the world. Bright people, clean people are carrying it to you. Thus far there are few of them; they are not powerful; but they grow in number every day. They put their young hearts into free truth, they are making it an invincible power. Along the route of their hearts it will enter into our hard life; it will warm us, enliven us, emancipate us from the oppression of the rich and from all who have sold their souls. Believe this." "Out of the way here!" shouted the gendarmes, pushing the people. They gave way to the jostling unwillingly, pressed the gendarmes with their mass, hindered them perhaps without desiring to do so. The gray-haired woman with the large, honest eyes in her kind face attracted them powerfully; and those whom life held asunder, whom it tore from one another, now blended into a whole, warmed by the fire of the fearless words which, perhaps, they had long been seeking and thirsting for in their hearts--their hearts insulted and revolted by the injustice of their severe life. Those who were near stood in silence. The mother saw their gloomy faces, their frowning brows, their eyes, and felt their warm breath on her face. "Get up on the bench," they said. "I'll be arrested immediately. It's not necessary." "Speak quicker! They're coming!" "Go to meet the honest people. Seek those who advise all the poor disinherited. Don't be reconciled, comrades, don't! Don't yield to the power of the powerful. Arise, you working people! you are the masters of life! All live by your labor; and only for your labor do they untie your hands. Behold! you are bound, and they have killed, robbed your soul. Unite with your heart and your mind into one power. It will overcome everything. You have no friends except yourselves. That's what their only friends say to the working people, their friends who go to them and perish on the road to prison. Not so would dishonest people speak, not so deceivers." "Out of the way! Disperse!" the shouts of the gendarmes came nearer and nearer. There were more of them already; they pushed more forcibly; and the people in front of the mother swayed, catching hold of one another. "Is that all you have in the valise?" whispered somebody. "Take it! Take all!" said the mother aloud, feeling that the words disposed themselves into a song in her breast, and noticing with pain that her voice did not hold out, that it was hoarse, trembled, and broke. "The word of my son is the honest word of a workingman, of an unsold soul. You will recognize its incorruptibility by its boldness. It is fearless, and if necessary it goes even against itself to meet the truth. It goes to you, working people, incorruptible, wise, fearless. Receive it with an open heart, feed on it; it will give you the power to understand everything, to fight against everything for the truth, for the freedom of mankind. Receive it, believe it, go with it toward the happiness of all the people, to a new life with great joy!" She received a blow on the chest; she staggered and fell on the bench. The gendarmes' hands darted over the heads of the people, and seizing collars and shoulders, threw them aside, tore off hats, flung them far away. Everything grew dark and began to whirl before the eyes of the mother. But overcoming her fatigue, she again shouted with the remnants of her power: "People, gather up your forces into one single force!" A large gendarme caught her collar with his red hand and shook her. "Keep quiet!" The nape of her neck struck the wall; her heart was enveloped for a second in the stifling smoke of terror; but it blazed forth again clearly, dispelling the smoke. "Go!" said the gendarme. "Fear nothing! There are no tortures worse than those which you endure all your lives!" "Silence, I say!" The gendarme took her by the arm and pulled her; another seized her by the other arm, and taking long steps, they led her away. "There are no tortures more bitter than those which quietly gnaw at your heart every day, waste your breast, and drain your power." The spy came running up, and shaking his fist in her face, shouted: "Silence, you old hag!" Her eyes widened, sparkled; her jaws quivered. Planting her feet firmly on the slippery stones of the floor, she shouted, gathering the last remnants of her strength: "The resuscitated soul they will not kill." "Dog!" The spy struck her face with a short swing of his hand. Something black and red blinded her eyes for a second. The salty taste of blood filled her mouth. A clear outburst of shouts animated her: "Don't dare to beat her!" "Boys!" "What is it?" "Oh, you scoundrel!" "Give it to him!" "They will not drown reason in blood; they will not extinguish its truth!" She was pushed in the neck and the back, beaten about the shoulders, on the head. Everything began to turn around, grow giddy in a dark whirlwind of shouts, howls, whistles. Something thick and deafening crept into her ear, beat in her throat, choked her. The floor under her feet began to shake, giving way. Her legs bent, her body trembled, burned with pain, grew heavy, and staggered powerless. But her eyes were not extinguished, and they saw many other eyes which flashed and gleamed with the bold sharp fire known to her, with the fire dear to her heart. She was pushed somewhere into a door. She snatched her hand away from the gendarmes and caught hold of the doorpost. "You will not drown the truth in seas of blood----" They struck her hand. "You heap up only malice on yourself, you unwise ones! It will fall on you----" Somebody seized her neck and began to choke her. There was a rattle in her throat. "You poor, sorry creatures----" * * * * * Transcriber's note: Page numbers referred to in the LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS correspond with the illustrations' original locations. Tags for illustrations have been moved to be closer to their mention in the text.