DASHES AT LIFE WITH A FREE PENCIL. N. P. .WILLIS. " Armado. How hast thou purchased this experience ? Moth. By my penny of observation." SHAKSPERK. THIRD EDITION. NEW YORK: J. S. REDFIELD, CLINTON HALL, CORNER OF NASSAU AND BEEKMAN STREETS. STEREOTYPED BY REDFIELD AND SAVAGE, 13 CHAMBERS ST., N. T. 1845. V V x , V* . Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1845, BY N. P. WILLIS, in the Clerk s Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York. P3? PREFACE. IT has been with difficult submission to marketableness that the author has broken up his statues at the joints, and furnished each fragment with head and legs to walk alone. Continually accumulating material, with the desire to produce a work of fiction, he was as continually tempted by extravagant prices to shape these separate forms of society and char acter into tales for periodicals ; and between two persuaders the law of copyright, on the one hand, providing that American books at fair prices should compete with books to be had for nothing, and necessity on the other hand, pleading much more potently than the ambition for an adult stature in literary fame he has gone on acquiring a habit of dashing off for a magazine any chance view of life that turned up to him, and selling in fragmentary chapters what should have been kept together and moulded into a proportionate work of im agination. So has gradually accumulated the large collection of tales which follow literally dashes at life with a free pencil each one, though a true copy of a part, conveying, of course, no portion of the meaning and moral of a whole. It is as a parcel of fragments as a portfolio of sketches for a picture never paint ed that he offers them to the public. Their lack of what an English critic cleverly calls the "ponderous goodness of a didactic purpose," must be balanced, if at all, by their truth to life, for they have been drawn mostly from impres sions freshly made, and with no record of what they were a part of. In proportion to his pow er of imagination, the reader will supply the back-ground and adjuncts some, no doubt (if the author may judge by himself), preferring the sketch to the finished picture. A word explanatory of the character of Part I. Most of the stories in it are illustrative of the distinctions of English society. As a re publican visiting a monarchical country for the first time, and traversing the barriers of differ ent ranks with a stranger s privilege, the au thor s curiosity was most on the alert to know how nature s nobility held its own against no bility by inheritance, and how heart and judg ment were modified in their action by the thin air at the summit of refinement. Circumstances in the career of men of genius now living, and feelings in titled and exclusive circles which the author had opportunities to study, furnished hints for the storied illustrations of the dis tinctions that interested him, and he has thought it worth while to present these together, as bearing upon those relations of aristocratic life which first interest republican curiosity abroad. With these explanations, the author commits his book to the reader s kind allowance. 082 % HIGH LIFE IN EUROPE, LEAVES FROM THE HEART-BOOK OF ERNEST CLAY, CHAPTER I. IN a small room, second floor, front, No. South Audley street, Grosvenor square, on one of the latter days of May, five or six years ago, there stood an inkstand, of which you may buy the like for three halfpence in most small shops in Soho. It was stuck in the centre of the table, like the largest of the Azores, on a schoolboy s amateur map a large blot surrounded by innumerable smaller blotlings. On the top of a small leather portmanteau near by, stood two pair of varnished-leather boots of a sump tuous expensiveness, slender, elegant, and without spot, except the leaf of a crushed orange blossom clinging to one of the heels. Between the inkstand and the boots sat the young and then fashionable au thor of , and the boots and the ink stand were tolerable exponents of his two opposite but closely woven existences. It was two o clock, P. M., and the author was stir ring his tea. He had been stirring it with the same velocity three quarters of an hour for when that cup should be drank, inevitably the next thing was to write the first sentence of an article for the New Month. Mag., and he was prolonging his breakfast, as a criminal his last prayer. The "fatigued" sugar and milk were still flying round the edge of the cup in a whity blue concave, when the " maid of all work" of his landlord the baker, knocked at the door with a note. 13 G M street. "DEAR SIR: " Has there been any mistake in the two-penny post delivery, that I have not received your article for this month ? If so, please send me the rough draught by the bearer (who waits), and the compositors will try to make it out. Yours, truly, " P. S. If the tale is not finished, please send me the title and motto, that we may print the contents during the delay." The tea, which, for some minutes, had turned off a decreasing ripple from the edge of the arrested spoon, came to a standstill at the same moment, with the author s wits. He had seized his pen and com menced : " DEAR SIR : " The tale of this month will be called " As it was not yet conceived, he found a difficulty in baptizing it. Ills eyebrows descended like the bars of a knight s visor ; his mouth, which had ex pressed only lassitude and melancholy, shut close, and curved downward, and he sat for some minutes dipping his pen in the ink, and, at each dip, adding a new shoal to the banks of the inky Azores. A long sigh of relief, and an expansion of every line of his face into a look of brightening thought gave token presently that the incubation had been success ful. The gilded note-paper was pushed aside, a broad and fair sheet of " foreign post" was hastily drawn j from his blotting-book, and forgetful alike of the un achieved cup of tea, and the waiting "devil" of Marl- borough street, the felicitous author dashed the first magic word on mid-page, and without title or motto, traced rapidly line after line, his face clearing of las situde, and his eyes of their troubled languor, as the erasures became fewer, and his punctuations farther between. " Any answer to the note, sir?" said the maid-ser vant, who had entered unnoticed, and stood close at his elbow, wondering at the flying velocity of his pen. He was at the bottom of the fourth page, and in the middle of a sentence. Handing the wet and blot ted sheet to the servant, with an order for the messen ger to call the following morning for the remainder, he threw down his pen and .abandoned himself to the most delicious of an author s pleasures revery in the mood of composition. He forgot work. Work is to put such reveries into words. His imagination flew on like a horse without his rider gloriously and ex- ultingly, but to no goal. The very waste made his indolence sweeter the very nearness of his task brightened his imaginative idleness. The ink dried upon his pen. Some capricious association soon drew back his thoughts to himself. His eye dulled. His lips resumed their mingled expression of pride and voluptuousness. He started to find himself idle, remembered that had sent oft" the sheet with a bro ken sentence, without retaining even the concluding word, and with a sigh more of relief than vexation, lie drew on his boots. Presto ! the world of which his penny-half-penny inkstand was the immortal cen tre the world of heaven-born imagination melted from about him ! He stood in patent leather hu man, handsome, and liable to debt! And thus fugitive and easy of decoy, thus compul sory, irresolute, and brief, is the unchastised toil of genius the earning of the "fancy-bread" of poets! It would be hard if a man who has " made himself a name" (beside being paternally christened), should want one in a story so, if you please, I will name my hero in the next sentence. Ernest Clay was dressed to walk to Marlborough street to apply for his " guinea-a-page" in advance, and find out the con cluding word of his MS., when there was heard a foot man s rap at the street door. The baker on the (ground floor ran to pick up his penny loaves jarred i from the shelves by the tremendous rat-a-tat-tat, and jjthe rn;u d ran herself out of her shoes to inform Mr. ||CIay that Lady Mildred wished to speak with him. Neither maid nor baker were displeased at being put to inconvenience, nor was the baker s hysterical ERNEST CLAY. mother disposed to murmur at the outrageous clat ter which shattered her nerves for a week. There is a spell to a Londoner in a coronetted carnage which changes the noise and impudence of the unwhipped varlets who ride behind it, into music and condescen sion. "You were going out," said Lady Mildred ; " can I take you anywhere?" "You can take me," said Clay, spreading out his hands in an attitude of surrender, " when and where you please ; but I was going to my publisher s." The chariot-steps rattled down, and his foot was on the crimson carpet, when a plain family carriage sud denly turned out of Grosvenor square, and pulled up as near his own door as the obstruction permitted. Ernest changed color slightly, and Lady Mildred, after a glance through the window behind her, stamp ed her little foot and said " Come !" "One moment!" was his insufficient apology as he sprang to the window of the other carnage, and with a manner almost infantile in its cordial simplicity, ex pressed his delight at meeting the two ladies who sat within. "Have you set up a chariot, Ernest?" said the younger, laying her hand upon the dark mass of curls on his temple, and pushing his head gently back that she might see what equipage stopped the way. He hesitated a moment, but there was no escape from the truth. " It is Lady Mildred, who has just " Is she alone ?" The question was asked by the elder lady with a look that expressed a painfully sad wish to hear him answer, "No." While he hesitated, the more forgiving voice next him hurriedly broke the silence. " We are forgetting our errand, Ernest. Can you come to Ashurst to-morrow?" "With all my heart." "Do not fail! My uncle wishes to see you. Stay I have brought you a note from him. Good- by ! Are you going to the rout at Mrs. Rothschild s to-night?" " I was not but if you are going, I will." "Till this evening, then?" The heavy vehicle rolled away, and Ernest crushed the note in his hand unread, and with a slower step than suited the impatience of Lady Mildred, returned to the chariot. The coachman, with that mysterious instinct that coachmen have, let fall his silk upon the backs of his spirited horses, and drove in time with his master s quickened pulses ; and at the corner of Chesterfield street, as the family carriage rolled slowly on its way to Howell and James s (on an errand con nected with bridal pearls), the lofty-stepping bays of Lady Mildred dashed by as if all the anger and scorn of a whole descent of coronets were breathing from their arched nostrils. What a boon from nature to aristocracy was the pride of the horse ! *#.***** Lady Mildred was a widow of two years weeds, thirty-two, and of a certain kind of talent, which will be explained in the course of this story. She had no per sonal charms, except such as are indispensably neces sary to lady-likeness indispensably necessary, for that very reason, to any control over the fancy of a man of imagination. Her upper lip was short enough to express scorn, and her feet and hands were ex quisitely small. Some men of fancy would exact these attractions and great many more. But without these, no woman ever secured even the most transient homage of a poet. She had one of those faces you never find yourself at leisure to criticise, or rather she had one of those siren voices, that, if you heard her speak before you had found leisure to look at her features, you had lost your opportunity for ever. Her voice expressed the presence of beauty, as much as a carol in a tree expresses the presence of a bird, and though you saw not the beauty, as you may not see the bird, it was impossible to doubt it was there. Yet with all this enchantment in her voice it was the most changeable music on earth for hear it when you would, if she were in earnest, you might be sure it was the softened echo of the voice to which she was replying. She never spoke first. She never led the conversation. She had not (or never used) the talent which many very common-place women have, of giving a direction to the feelings and controlling even the course of thought of superior men who may ad mire them. In everything she played a second. She was silent through all your greetings, through all your compliments; smiled and listened, if it was for hours, till your lighter spirits were exhausted and you came down to the true under tone of your heart ; and by the first-struck chord of feeling and earnest (and her skill in detecting it was an infallible instinct), she modulated her voice and took up the strain, and from the echo of your own soul and the flow of the most throbbing vein in your own heart, she drew your enchantment and intoxication. Her manners were a necessary part of such a character. Her limbs seemed always en chanted into stillness. When you gazed at her more earnestly, her eyes gradually drooped, and, again her enlarged orbs brightened and grew eager as your gaze retreated. With her slight forefinger laid upon her cheek, and her gloved hand supporting her arm, she sat stirless and rapt, and by an indescribable magnetism you felt that there was not a nerve in your eye, nor a flutter toward change in the expression of your face, that was not linked to hers, nerve for nerve, pulsation for pulsation. Whether this charm would work on common men it is difficult to say for Lady Mildred s passions were invariably men of genius. You may not have seen such a woman as Lady Mildred but you have seen girls like Eve Gore. There are many lilies, though each one, new-found, seems to the finder the miracle of nature. She was a pure, serene-hearted, and very beautiful girl of seven teen. Her life had been hitherto the growth of love and care, as the lily she resembled is the growth of sunshine and dew ; and, flower-like, all she had ever known or felt had turned to spotless loveliness. She had met the gifted author of her favorite romance at a country-house where they were guests together, and I could not. short of a chapter of metaphysics, tell you how natural it was for these two apparently uncon genial persons to mingle, like drops of dew. I will merely say now, that strongly marked as seems the character of every man of genius, his very capability of tracking the mazes of human nature, makes him the very chameleon and Proteus of his species, and that after he has assimilated himself by turns to every variety of mankind, his masks never fall off without disclosing the very soul and type of the most infantine simplicity. Other men s disguises, too, become a second nature. Those of genius are worn to their last day, as loosely as the mantles of the gods. The kind of man called " a penetrating observer," if he had been in the habit of meeting Mr. Clay in London circles, and had afterward seen him rambling through the woods of Park with Eve Gore, natural, playful sometimes, and sometimes sad, his manner the reflex of hers, even his voice almost as feminine as hers, in his fine sympathy with her charac ter and attractions one of these shrewd people I say would have shaken his head and whispered, "poor girl, how little she understands him!" But of all the wise and worldly, gentle and simple, who had ever crossed the path of Ernest Clay, the same child-like girl was the only creature to whom he appeared utterly himself for whom he wore no disguise to whose ERNEST CLAY. plummet of simple truth he opened the seldom-sound ed depths of his prodigal and passionate heart. Lady Mildred knew his weaknesses and his genius. Eve Gore knew his better and brighter nature. And both loved him. And now, dear reader, having drawn you the portraits of my two heroines, I shall go ou with a disembarras sed narrative to the end. CHAPTER II. LADY Mildred s bays panced proudly up Bond street, and kept on their way to the publisher s, at whose door they fretted and champed the bit they and their high-born mistress in attendance upon the poor author who in this moment of despondency com plained of the misappreciation of the world. Of the scores of people who knew him and his companion as London celebrities, and who followed the showy equipage with their eyes, how many, think you, look ed on Mr. Ernest Clay as a misappreciated man ? How many, had they known that the whole errand of this expensive turn out was to call on the publisher for the price of a single magazine paper, would have reckoned those sixteen guineas and the chariot of a noble lady to come for the payment five hundred pounds for your romance, and a welcome to all the best houses and costliest entertainments of England a hundred pounds for your poem and the attention of a thousand eager admirers these are some of the " lengthening shadows" to the author s profits which the author does not reckon, but which the world does. To the rest of mankind these are " chattels" priced and paid for. Twenty thousand a year would hardly buy for Mr. Clay, simple and uncelebrated, what Mr. Clay, author, etc., has freely with five hundred. To whose credit shall the remaining nineteen thousand five hundred be set down ? Common people who pay for these things are not believers in fairy gifts. They see the author in a station of society unattainable ex cept by the wealthiest and best born, with all that profuse wealth could purchase as completely at his service as if the bills of cost were to be brought in to him at Christmas ; and besides all this (once more " into the bargain") caressed and flattered as no " golden dulness" ever was or could be. To rate the revenue of such a pampered idol of fortune, what man in his senses would inquire merely into the profits of his book ! And in this lies the whole secret of the envy and malice which is the peculiar inheritance of genius. Generous-minded men, all women, the great and rich who arc too high themselves to feel envy, and the poor and humble who are too low to feel aught but wonder and grateful admiration these are the fosterers and flatterers, the paymasters of the real wealth and the receivers of the choicest fruits of genius. The aspi ring mediocrity, the slighted and eclipsed pretenders to genius^ are a large class, to whose eyes all bright ness is black, and the great mass of men toil their lives and utmost energies away for the hundredth part of what the child of genius wins by his unseen pen by the toil which neither hardens his hands nor trenches on his hours of pleasure. They see a man no come- lier nor better born than they idle apparently, as the most spoilt minion of wealth, vying with the best born in the favor of beautiful and proud women, using all the goodsof fortune with a ptofuse carelessness, which the possession of the lamp of Aladdin could not more than inspire, and by bitter criticism, by ingenious slander, by continual depreciation, ridicule, and ex aggeration of every pretty foible, they attempt to level the inequalities of fortune, and repair the flagrant in justice of the blind goddess to themselves. Upon the class generally, they are avenged. Their malice poisons the joy and cripples the fine-winged fancy of nineteen in the score. But the twentieth is born proud and elastic, and the shaft his scorn does not fling back, his light-heartedness eludes, and his is the destiny which, more than that of kings or saints, proves the wide inequality in human lot. I trust, dear reader, that you have been more amused than Lady Mildred at this half hour s delay at the publisher s. While I have been condensing into a theory by scattered observations of London authors, her ladyship has been musing upon the apparition of the family carriage of the Gores at Mr. Clay s lodgings. Lady Mildred s position in society, though she had the entree to all the best houses in London, precluded an intimate acquaintance with any unmarried girl but she had seen Eve Gore and knew and dreaded her loveliness. A match of mere interest would have given her no uneasiness, but she could see far enough into the nature of this beautiful and fresh-hearted girl to know that hers would be no divided empire. All women are conscious that a single-minded, concentra ted, pure affection, melting the whole character into the heart, is omnipotent in perpetuating fidelity. " Ernest," said Lady Mildred, as the chariot sped from the publisher s door, and took its way to the Park, " you are grown ceremonious. Am I so new a friend that you can not open a note in my presence ?" Clay placed the crushed letter in her hand. "1 will have no secrets from you, dear Lady Mildred. There is probably much in that note that will surprise you. Break the seal, however, and give me your ad vice. I will not promise to follow it." The blood flushed to the temples of Lady Mildred as she read- but her lips, though pale and trembling, were compressed by a strong effort of self control. She turned back and read the note again in a murmur ing undertone: " DEAR MR. CLAY : From causes which you will probably understand, I have been induced to recon sider your proposal of marriage to my niece. Impru dent as I must still consider your union, I find myself in such a situation that, should you persevere, I must decide in its favor, as the least of two evils. You will forgive my anxious care, however, if I exact of you, before taking any decided step, a full and fair state ment of your pecuniary embarrassments (which I understand are considerable) and your present income and prospects. 1 think it proper to inform you that Miss Gore s expectations, beyond an annuity of =300 a year, are very distant, and that all your calculations should be confined to that amount. With this under standing, I should be pleased to see you at Ashurst to-morrow morning. Yours, truly, " THOMAS GORE." " Hear me before you condemn, dear Lady Mildred," passionately exclaimed Ernest, as she clasped her hands over the letter and her tears fell fast upon them: " I was wrong to leave the discovery of this to chance I should have dealt more frankly with you indeed, if I had had the opportunity Lady Mildred looked up, as if to reproach him for ! the evasion half uttered. " I have seen you daily, it is true, but every hour is ! not an hour for confession like this, and besides, my i new love was a surprise, and what I have to confess is a change in my feelings still more recent a constant- i ly brightening vision of a life (pardon me, Lady Mil dred !) deeper a thousand fold, and a thousand times sweeter and more engrossing than ours." " You are frank," said his pale listener, who had re- j covered her self-possession, and seemed bent now, 39 i usual, only on listening and entering into his feelings. " I would he so, indeed," he resumed ; " but I have 10 ERNEST CLAY. not yet come to my confession. Life is too short, Lady Mildred, and youth too vanishing, to waste feel ing on delusion." " Such as your love, do you mean, Ernest ?" " Pardon me ! Were you my wife " Lady Mildred made a slight motion of impatience with her hand, and unconsciously raised the expressive arching of her lip. " I must name this forbidden subject to be under stood. See what a false position is mine ! You are too proud to marry, but have not escaped loving me, and you wish me to be contented with a perfume on the breeze, to feel a property in a bird in the sky. It was very sweet to begin to love you, to win and join step by step, to have food for hope in what was refused me. But I am checked, and you are still free. Island at an impassable barrier, and you demand that I should feel united to you." " You are ungrateful, Ernest !" " If I were your slave, I am, for you load me with favors but as your lover, no ! It does not fill my heart to open your house to me, to devote to me your dining hours, your horses and servants, to let the world know that you love me, to make me your romance yet have all the common interests of life apart, have a station in society apart, and ambition not mine, a name not mine, and hearth not mine. You share my wild passions, and my fashionable negations, not my homely feelings and everyday sorrows. I have a whole existence into which you never enter. I am something besides a fashionable author but not to you. I have a common human heart a pillow upon which lies down no fancy a morning which is not spent in sleep or listlessness, but in the earning of my bread I have dulness and taciturnity and caprice and in all these you have no share. I am a butterfly and an earth-worm, by turns, and you know me only on the wing. You do not answer me !" Lady Mildred, as I have said before, was an admirer of genius, and though Ernest was excusing an infideli ty to herself, the novelty of his distinctions opened to her a new chapter in the book of love, and she was interested far beyond resentment. He was talking from his heart, .too, and every one who has listened to a murmur of affection, knows what sweetness the breath ings of those deeper veins of feeling infuse into the voice. To a palled Sybarite like Lady Mildred, there was a wild-flower freshness in all this that was irresisti bly captivating. A smile stole through her lips instead of the reproach and anger that he expected. " I do not answer you, my dear Ernest, for the same reason I would not tear a leaf out of one of your books unread. I quite enter into your feelings. I wish I could hear you talk of them hours longer. Their simplicity and truth enchant me but I confess I can not see what you propose to yourself. Do you think to reconcileand blend all these contradictory moods by an imprudent marriage ? Or do you mean to vow your butterfly to celibacy, and marry your worm-fly alone, and grovel in sympathy rather than take love with you when you soar, and keep your grovelling to yourself." " I think Eve Gore would love me, soaring or creep ing, Lady Mildred! She would be happier sitting by my table while I wrote, than driving in this gay crowd with her chariot. She would lose the light of her life in absence from me, like a cloud receding from the moon, whatever stars sparkled around her. She xvould be with me at all hours of the day and the night, sharing every thought that could spring to my lips, and reflecting my own soul for ever. You will forgive me for finding out this want, this void, while you loved me. But I have felt it sickeningly in your bright rooms, with music and perfume, and the touch of your hand all conspiring to enchant me. In the very hours when most men on earth would have envied me, I have felt the humbler chambers of my heart ache with loneliness. I have longed for some still and dark re treat, where the beating of my pulse would be protes tation enough, and where she who loved me was blest to overflowing with my presence only. Affection is a glow-worm light, dear Lady Mildred ! It pales amid splendor." "But you should have a glow-worm s habits to relish it, my dear poet. You can not live on a blade of grass, nor shine brightest out of doors in the rain. Let us look at it without these Claude Lorraine glasses, and see the truth. Mr. Thomas Gore offers you d300 a year with his neice. Your own income, the moment you marry, is converted from pocket- money into subsistence from the purchase of gloves and Hungary water into butcher s meat and groceries. You retire to a small house in one of the cheaper streets. You have been accustomed to drive out continually, and for several years you have not only been free from the trouble and expense of your own dinner, but you have pampered your taste with the varied chefs d ceuvre of all the best cooks of London. You dine at home now, feeding several mouths beside your own, on what is called a family dinner say, as a good specimen, a beefsteak and potatoes, with a Yorkshire pudding. Instead of retiring after your coffee to a brilliantly lighted drawning-room, where collision with some portion of the most gifted society of London dis ciplines your intellect and polishes your wit and fancy, you sit down by your wife s work-table, and grow sleepy over your plans of economy, sigh for the gay scenes you once moved in, and go to bed to be rid of your regrets." " But why should I be exiled from society, my dear Lady Mildred ? What circle in London would not take a new grace from the presence of such a woman as Eve Gore ?" "Oh, marvellous simplicity ! If men kept the gates of society, a la bonne heure ! for then a party would i consist of one man (the host), and a hundred pretty women. But the "free list" of society, you know, as well as I, my love-blind friend, is exclusively mas culine. Woman keeps the door, and easy as turns the hinge to the other sex, it swings reluctant to her own. You may name a hundred men in your circle whose return for the hospitality of fashionable houses it would be impossible to guess at, but you can not point me out one married woman, whose price of admission is not as well known and as rigidly exacted, as the cost of an opera-box. Those who do not give sumptuous parties in their turn (and even |hese must be well bred and born people), are in the first place very ornamental; but, besides being pretty, they must either sing or flirt. There are but two classes of women in fashionable society the leaders or party- givers, and the decoys to young men. There is the pretty Mrs. , for example, whose habitation nobody knows but as a card with an address; and why is she everywhere ? Simply, because she draws four or five fashionable young men, who would find no in ducement to come if she were not there. Then there is Mrs. , who sings enchantingly, and Mrs. , who is pretty, and a linguist, and entertains stupid foreigners, and Mrs. , who is clever at charades, and plays quadrilles, and what would Mrs. Clay do? Is she musical ?" " She is beautiful !" " Well she must flirt. With three or four fash ionable lovers " "Lady Mildred!" "Pardon me, I was thinking aloud. Well I will suppose you an exception to this Mede-and-Persian law of the beau monde, and allow for a moment that. Mrs. Clay, with an income of five or six hundred a year, with no eyes for anybody but her husband, poor, pretty, and innocent (what a marvel it would be ERNEST CLAY. 11 in May Fair, by-the-way !), becomes as indispensable to a partie fine as was Mr. Clay while in unmarried celebrity. Mind, I am not talking of routs and balls, where anybody can go, because there must be a crowd, but of petits soupcrs, select dinners, and entertain ments where every guest is invited as an ingredient to a well-studied cup of pleasure. I will suppose for an instant, that a connubial and happy pair could be de sirable in such circles. What part of your income of five or six hundred a year, do you suppose, would dress and jewel your wife, keep carriage and servants, and pay for your concert-tickets and opera-boxes all absolutely indispensable to people who go out ? Why, my dear Ernest, your whole income would not suffice for the half. You must live shy, go about in hack ney-coaches, dress economically (which is execrable in a woman), and endure the neglects and mortifica tions which our pampered servants inevitably inflict on shabby people. Your life would be one succes sion of bitter mortifications, difficulties, and heart burnings. Believe me, there is no creature on earth so exquisitely wretched as a man with a fashionable wife and small means." Lady Mildred had been too much accustomed to the management of men, not to leave Ernest, after this homily, to his own thoughts. A woman of less knowledge and tact would have followed up this argu ment with an appeal to his feelings. But beside that, she wished the seed she had thus thrown into his mind to germinate with thought. She knew that it was a wise principle in the art of love to be cold by daylight. Ernest sat silent, with his eyes cast musing ly down to the corner of the chariot, where the smal lest foot and prettiest chaussure conceivable was play ing with the tassel of the window-pull ; and reserving her more effective game of feeling for the evening, when they were to meet at Mrs. R s, she set him down at his clubhouse with a calm and cold adieu, and drove home to bathe, dine alone, sleep, and re fresh body and spirit for the struggle against love and Eve Gore. CHAPTER 111. GENIUS is lord of the world. Men labor at the foundation of society, while the lowly lark, unseen and little prized, sits, hard by, in his nest on the earth, gathering strength to bear his song up to the sun. Slowly rise basement and monumental aisle, column and architrave, dome and lofty tower; and when the cloud-piercing spire is burnished with gold, and the fabric stands perfect and wondrous, up springs the for gotten lark, with airy wheel to the pinnacle, and standing poised and unwondering on his giddy perch, he pours out his celestial music till his bright footing trembles with harmony. And when the song is done, and mounting thence, he soars away to fill his ex hausted heart at the fountains of the sun, the dwel lers in the towers below look up to the gilded spire and shout not to the burnished shaft, but to the lark lost from it in the sky. " Mr. Clay !" repeated the last footman on Mrs. K s flower-laden staircase. I have let you down as gently as possible, dear reader; but here we are in one of the most fashion able houses in May Fair. Pardon me a moment ! Did I say I had let you down 1 What pyramid of the Nile is piled up like the gradations between complete insignificance and the effect of that footman s announcement? On the heels of Ernest, and named with the next breath of the menial s lips, came the bearer of a title laden with the emblazoned honors of descent. Had he en- | tered a hall of statuary, he could not have been less regarded. All eyes were on the pale forehead and calm lips that had entered before him ; and the blood of the warrior who made the name, and of the states men and nobles who had borne it, and the accumu lated honor and renown of centuries of unsullied dis tinctions all these concentrated glories in the midst of the most polished and discriminating circle on earth, paled before the lamp of yesterday, burning in the eye of genius. Where is distinction felt ? In secret, amid splendor ? No ! In the street and the vulgar gaze ? No ! In the bosom of love ? She only remembers it. W^here, then, is the intoxicating cup of homage the delirious draught for which brain, soul, and nerve, are tasked, tortured, and spent where is it lifted to the lips? The answer brings me back. Eyes shining from amid jewels, voices softened with gentle breeding, smiles awaken ing beneath costly lamps an atmosphere of perfume, splendor, and courtesy these form the poet s Hebe, and the hero s Ganymede. These pour for ambition the draught that slakes his fever these hold the cup to lips, drinking eagerly, that would turn away in sol itude, from the ambrosia of the gods ! Clay s walk through the sumptuous rooms of Mrs. R was like a Roman triumph. He was borne on from lip to lip those before him anticipating his greeting, and those he left, still sending their bright and kind words after him. He breathed incense. Suddenly, behind him, he heard the voice of Eve Gore. She was making the tour of the rooms on the arm of a friend, and following Ernest, had insensibly tried to get nearer to him, and had become flushed and troubled in the effort. They had never before met in a large party, and her pride, in the universal attention he attracted, still more flushed her eyelids and injured her beauty. She gave him her hand as he turned ; but the greeting that sprang to her lips was checked by a sudden consciousness that many eyes were on her, and she hesitated, murmured some broken words, and was silent. The immediate atten tion that Clay had given to her, interrupted at the same moment the undertoned murmur around him, and there was a minute s silence, in which the inevit able thought flashed across his mind that he had over rated her loveliness. Still the trembling and clinging clasp of her hand, and the appealing earnestness of her look, told him what was in her heart and when was ever genius ungrateful for love ! He made a strong effort to reason down his disappointment, and had the embarrassed girl resumed instantly her natu ral ease and playfulness, his sensitive imagination would have been conquered, and its recoil forgotten. But love, that lends us words, smiles, tears, all we want, in solitude, robs us in the gay crowd of every thing but what we can not use tears ! As the man she worshipped led her on through those bright rooms, Eve Gore, though she knew not why, felt the large drops ache behind her eyes. She would have sobbed if she had tried to speak. Clay had given her his arm, and resumed his barter of compliment with the crowd, and with it a manner she had never before seen. He had been a boy, fresh, frank, ardent, and unsuspicious, at Annesley Park. She saw him now in the cold and polished armor of a man who has been wounded as well as flattered by the world, and who presents his shield even to a smile. Impossible as it was that he should play the lover now, she felt wronged and hurt by his addressing the same tone of elegant trifling and raillery which was the key of the conversation around them. She knew, too, that she herself was appearing to disadvantage ; and before a brief hour had elapsed, she had become a prey to an other feeling the bitter avarice which is the curse of all affection for the gifted or the beautiful an ava- arice that makes every smile given back for admiration, 12 ERNEST CLAY. a germ torn from us every word, even of thanks for courtesy, a life-drop of our hearts drank away. " The moon looks On many brooks, The brook can see no moon but this," contains the mordent secret of most hearts vowed to the love of remarkable genius or beauty. The supper-rooms had been some time open; from these and the dancing hall, the half-weary guests were coming back to the deep fauteuils, the fresher air, and the graver society of the library, which had served as an apartment of reception. With a clouded brow, thoughtful and silent, Eve Gore sat with her mother in a recess near the entrance, and Clay, who had kept near them, though their conversation had long since languished, stood in the centre of a small group of fashionable men, much more brilliant and far louder in his gayety than he would have been with a heart at ease. It was one of those nights of declining May, when the new foliage of the season seems to have exhausted the air, and though it was near morning, there came through the open windows neither coolness nor vitality. Fans, faded wreaths, and flushed faces, were universal. A footman stood suddenly in the vacant door. " Lady Mildred !" The announcements had been over for hours, and ev ery eye was turned on the apparition of so late a comer. Quietly, but with a step as elastic as the nod of a water-lily, Lady Mildred glided into the room, and the high tones and unharmonized voices of the differ ent groups suddenly ceased, and were succeeded by a low and sustained murmur of admiration. A white dress of faultless freshness of fold, a snowy turban, from which hung on either temple a cluster of crim son camelias still wet with the night dew ; long raven curls of undisturbed grace falling on shoulders of that undescribable and dewy coolness which follows a morning bath, giving the skin the texture and the opaque whiteness of the lily ; lips and skin redolent of the repose and purity, and the downcast but wake ful eye so expressive of recent solitude, and so pecu liar to one who has not spoken since she slept. These were attractions which, in contrast with the paled glories around, elevated Lady Mildred at once into the predominant star of the night. "What news from the bottom of the sea, most adorable Venus ?" said a celebrated artist, standing out from the group and drawing a line through the air with his finger as if he were sketching the flowing outline of her form. Lady Mildred laid her small hand on Clay s, and with a smile, but no greeting else, passed on. The bantering question of the great painter told her that her spell worked to a miracle, and she was too shrewd an enchantress to dissolve it by the utterance of a word. She glided on like a spirit of coolness, calm, silent, and graceful, and, standing a moment on the threshold of the apartment beyond, disappeared, with every eye fixed on her vanishing form in won dering admiration. Purity was the effect she had pro duced purity in contrast with the flowers in the room purity (Ernest Clay felt and wondered at it), even in contrast with Eve Gore ! There was silence in the library for an instant, and then, one by one, the gay group around our hero followed in search of the new star of the hour, and he was left standing alone. He turned to speak to his silent friends, but the man ner of Mrs. Gore was restrained, and Eve sat pale and tearful within the curtain of the recess, and looked as if her heart was breaking. " I should like I should like to go home, mother !" she said presently, with a difficult articulation. " I think I am not well. Mr. Clay Ernest will see, perhaps, if our carriage is here." "You will find us in the shawl-room," said Mrs. Gore, following him to the staircase, and looking after him with troubled eyes. The carriage was at the end of the line, and could not come up for an hour. Day was dawning, and Ernest had need of solitude and thought. He crossed to the park, and strode off through the wet grass, bathing his forehead with handfuls of dew. Alas ! the fevered eyes and pallid lips he had last seen were less in harmony with the calm stillness of the dawn than the vision his conscience whispered him was charmed for his destruction. As the cool air brought back his reason, he remembered Eve s embarrassed address and his wearisome and vain efforts to amuse her. He remembered her mother s reproving eye, her own colder utterance of his name, and then in powerful relief came up the pictures he had brooded on since his conversation in the chariot with Lady Mildred, visions of self-denial and loss of caste op posed to the enchantments of passion without re straint or calculation, and his head and heart became wild with conflicting emotions. One thing was cer tain. He must decide now. He must speak to Eve Gore before parting, and in the tone of his voice, if it were but a word, there must be that which her love would interpret as a bright promise or a farewell. He turned back. At the gate of the park stood one of the guilty wanderers of the streets, who seized him by the sleeve and implored charity. " Who are you ?" exclaimed Clay, scarce knowing what he uttered. "As good as she is," screamed the woman, pointing to Lady Mildred s carriage, "only not so rich! Oh, we could change places, if all s true." Ernest stood still as if his better angel had spoken through those painted lips. He gasped with the weight that rose slowly from his heart ; and purcha sing his release from the unfortunate wretch who had arrested his steps, he crossed slowly to the door crowded with the menials of the gay throng within. " Lady Mildred s carriage stops the way !" shouted a footman, as he entered. He crossed the hall, and at the door of the shawl-room he was met by Lady Mildred herself, descending from the hall, surrounded with a troop of admirers. Clay drew back to let her pass ; but while he looked into her face, it became radiant with the happiness of meeting him, and the temptation to join her seemed irresistible. She en tered the room, followed by her gay suite, and last of all by Ernest, who saw with the first glance at the Gores that he was believed to have been with her du ring the half-hour that had elapsed. He approached Eve; but the sense of an injustice he could not im mediately remove, checked the warm impulse with which he was coming to pour out his heart, and against every wish and feeling of his soul, he was constrained and cold. " No, indeed !" exclaimed Lady Mildred, her voice suddenly becoming audible, " I shall set down Mr. Clay, whose door I pass. Lord George, ask Mr. Clay if he is ready." Eve Gore suddenly laid her hand on his arm, as if a spirit had whispered that her last chance for happi ness was poised on that moment s lapse. " Ernest," she said, in a voice so unnaturally low that it made his veins creep with the fear that her reason was unseated, " I am lost if you go with her. Stay, dear Ernest ! She can not love you as I do ! I implore you remember that my life my life " " Beg pardon," said Lord George, laying his hand familiarly on Clay s shoulder, and drawing him away, " Lady Mildred waits for you !" " I will return in an instant, dearest Eve," he said, springing again to her side, " I will apologize and be with you. One instant only one " ERNEST CLAY. "Thank God!" said the poor girl, sinking into a chair and bursting into tears. Lady Mildred sat in her chariot, but her head drooped on her breast, and her arm hung lifeless at her side. "She is surely ill," said Lord George; "jump in, Clay, my fine fellow. Get her home. Shut, the door, Thomas! Go on, coachman!" And away sped the fleet horses of Lady Mildred, but not homeward. Clay lifted her head and spoke to her, but receiving no answer, he busied himself chafing her hands, and the carriage-blinds being drawn, he thought mo mently he should be rid of his charge by their arrival in Grosvenor square. But the minutes elapsed, and still the carriage sped on ; and surprised at last into suspicion, he raised his hand to the checkstring, but the small fingers he had been chafing so earnestly ar rested his arm. " No, no !" said Lady Mildred, rising from his shoulder, and throwing her arms passionately around his neck, " you must go blindfold, and go with me ! Ernest ! Ernest !" she continued, as he struggled an instant to reach the string; but he felt her tears on his breast, and his better angel ceased to contend with him. He sank back in the chariot with those fragile arms wound around him, and, with fever in his brain, and leaden sadness at his heart, suffered that swift chariot to speed on its guilty way. In a small maison de plaisance, which he well knew, in one of the most romantic dells of Devon, built with exquisite taste by Lady Mildred, and filled with all that art and wealth could minister to luxury, Er nest Clay passed the remainder of the summer, for getful of everything beyond his prison of pleasure, except a voice full of bitter remorse, which some times, in the midst of his abandonment, whispered the name of Eve Gore. CHAPTER IV. THE rain poured in torrents from the broad leads and Gothic battlements of Castle, and the dull and plashing echoes, sent up with steady reverberation from the stone pavement of the terrace and courts, lulled to a late sleep one of most gay and fashionable parties assembled out of London. It was verging toward noon, and, startled from a dream of music, by the entrance of a servant, Ernest Clay drew back the heavy bed-curtains and looked irresolutely around his luxurious chamber. The coals in the bright fire widened their smoking cracks and parted with an in dolent effort, the well-trained menial glided stealthily about, arranging the preparations for the author s toilet,, the gray daylight came in grayer and softer through the draped folds which fell over the windows, and if there was temptation to get up, it extended no farther than to the deeply cushioned and spacious chair, over which was flung a dressing-gown of the loose and flowing fashion, and gorgeous stuff of the Orient. " Thomas, what stars are visible to the naked eye this morning?" said the couchant poet with a heavy yawn. "Sir!" " I asked if Lady Grace was at breakfast?" " Her ladyship took breakfast in her own room, I believe, sir!" " Qualis rex, tails grex. Bring mine !" " Beg pardon, sir ?" "I said I would have an egg and a spatchcock, Thomas ! And, Thomas, see if the duke has done with the Morning Post." " I could have been unusually agreeable to Lady Grace," soliloquized the author, as he completed his toilet; "I feel both gregarious and brilliant this morning and should have breakfasted below. Strange that one feels so dexterous-minded sometimes after a hard drink! Bacchus waking like Aurora! Thomas, you forgot the claret ! I could coin this efflux of soul, now, into burning words, and I will. What is the cook s name, Thomas ? Gone ? So has the builder of this glorious spatchcock narrowly escaped immortality ! Fairest Lady Grace, the sonnet shall be yours at the rebound ! A sonnet ? N n no ! But I could write such a love-letter this morning ! Morning Post. Died at Brighton Mr. William Brown. 1 Brown Brown what was that pretty girl s name that married a Brown a rich William Brown. Beverley was her name Julia Beverley a flower for the garden of Epicurus a mate for Leontium! I loved her till I was stopped by Mr. Brown loved her? by Jove, I loved her as well as I loved anybody that year. Suppose she were now the widow Brown ? If I thought so, faith ! I would write her such a te- miniscent epistle Why not as it is on the supposi tion ? Egad, if it is not her William Brown, it is no fault of mine. Here goes at a venture ! " To her who was JULIA BEVERLEY " Your dark eye rests on this once familiar hand writing. If your pulse could articulate at this moment, it would murmur he loved me well ! He who writes to you now, after years of silence, parted from you with your tears upon his lips parted from you as the last shadow parts from the sun, with a darkness that must deepen till morn again. I begin boldly, but the usage of the world is based upon forgetfulness in absence, and I have not forgotten. Yet this is not to be a love- letter. " I am turning back a leaf in my heart. Turn to it in yours ! On a night in June, within the shadow of the cypress by the fountain of Ceres, in the ducal gardens of Florence, at thefesla of the duke s birth- night, I first whispered to you of love. Is it so writ in your tablet ? Or were those broken words, and those dark tresses drooped on my breast, mockeries of a night flung from remembrance with the flowers you wore? Flowers, said I? Oh, Heaven ! how beautiful you were with those lotus-stems braided in your hair, and the white chalices gleaming through your ringlets as if pouring their perfume over your shoulders ! How rosy-pale, like light through alabaster, showed the cheek that shrank from me beneath the betraying brightness of the moon! How musical above the murmur of the fountain rose the trembling wonder at my avowal, and the few faint syllables of forgiveness and love. I strained you wildly to my heart ! Oh, can that be forgotten ! "With the news that your husband was dead, rush ed back these memories in a whirlwind. For one brief, one delirious moment, 1 fancied you might yet be mine. I write because the delirium is over. Had it not been, I should be now weeping at your feet my life upon your lips ! "I will try to explain to you, calmly, a feeling that I have. We met in the aisle of Santa Croce strangers. There was a winged lightness in your step, and a lithe wave in the outline of your form, as you moved through the sombre light, which thrilled me like the awakening to life of some piece of aerial sculpture. I watched you to your carriage, and re turned to trace that shadowy aisle for hours, breathing the same air, and trying to conjure up to my imagina tion the radiant vision lost to me, I feared, for ever. That night your necklace parted and fell at my feet, in the crowd at the Pitti, and as I returned the warm jewel to your hand, I recognised the haunting features which 1 seemed to live but to see again. By the first syllable of acknowledgment I knew yovfor in your voice there was that profound sweetness tfcat comes 14 ERNEST CLAY. only from a heart thought-saddened, and therefore careless of the cold fashion of the world. In the em bayed window looking out on the moonlit terrace of the garden, I joined you with the confidence of a familiar friend, and in the low undertone of earnest and sincerity we talked of the thousand themes with which the walls of that palace of pilgrimage breathe and kindle. Chance-guided and ignorant even of each other s names, we met on the galleries of art, in the gardens of noble palaces, in the thronged re sorts open to all in that land of the sun, and my heart expanded to you like a flower, and love entered it with the fulness of light. Again, I say, we dwelt but upon themes of intellect, and I had not breathed to you of the passion that grew hour by hour. "We met for the last time on the night of the duke s festa in that same glorious palace where we had first blended thought and imagination, or the wondrous miracles of art. You were sad and lower-voiced than even your wont, and when I drew you from the crowd, and wandering with you through the flowering alleys of the garden, stood at last by that murmuring fountain, and ceased suddenly to speak there was the threshold of love. Did you forbid me to enter? You fell on my bosom and wept ! " Had I brought you to this by love-making? Did I flatterer plead rny way into your heart ? Were you wooed or importuned ? It is true your presence drew my better angel closer to my side, but I was myself such as your brother might be to you such as you would have found me through life ; and for this for being what I was with no art or effort to win affec tion, you drew the veil from between us you tempted from my bosom the bird that cornes never back you suffered me to love you, helplessly and wildly, when you knew that love such as mine impoverishes life for ever. The only illimitable trust, the only bound less belief on earth, is first love ! What had I done to be robbed of this irrecoverable gem to be sent wander ing through the world, a hopeless infidel in woman ? " I have become a celebrity since we parted, and perhaps you have looked into my books, thinking I might have woven into some one of my many-colored woofs the bright thread you broke so suddenly. You found no trace of it, and you thought, perhaps, thai all memory of those simpler hours was drowned in the intoxicating cup of fame. I have accounted in this way for your never writing to cheer or congratulate me. But if this conjecture be true, how little you know the heart you threw away how little you know of the thrice-locked, light-shining, care-hidden casket in which is treasured up the refused gold of a first love. What else is there on earth worth hiding and brooding over? Should I wing such treasures with words and lose them ? " And now you ask, why, after years of healing silence, I open this wound afresh, and write to you. Is it to prove to you that I love you ? to prepare the way to see you again, to woo and win you ? No though I was worthy of you once ! No though I feel living in my soul a passion that with long silence and imprisonment has become well-nigh uncontrolla ble. I am not worthy of you now! My nature is soiled and world-polluted. I am prosperous and famous, and could give you the station you never won, though you trod on my heart to reach it but the lamp is out on my altar of truth I love by my lips I mock at faith I marvel at belief in vows or fidelity I would not trust you, no, if you were mine, I would not trust you though I held every vein of your bosom like a hound s leash. Till you can re buke whim, till you can chain imagination, till you can fetter blood, 1 will not believe in woman. Yet this is your work ! " Would you know why I write to you ? Why has God given us the instinct of outcry in agony, but to inflict on those who wound us a portion of our pain ? I would tell you that the fire you kindled so wantonly burns on that after years of distracting ambition, fame, and pleasure, I still taste the bitterness you threw into my cup that in secret when musing on my triumphs, in the crowd when sick with adulation, in this lordly castle when lapt in luxury and regard in all hours and phazes of a life brilliant and exciting above that of most men, I mourn over that betrayed affection, I see that averted face, I worship in bitter despair that surpassing loveliness which should have been mine in its glory and flower. " I have made my moan. I have given voice to my agony. Farewell !" When Mr. Clay had concluded this "airing of his vocabulary," he enclosed it in a hasty note to his friend, the secretary of legation at the court of Tuscany, requesting him to call on " two abominable old maids, by the name of Buggins or Bridgins," who represented the scan. mag. of Florence, and could doubtless, tell him how to forward his letter to " the Browns ;" and the castle-bell sounding as he achieved the superscription, he descended to lunch, very much lightened of his ennui, but with no more memory of the " faithless Julia," than of the claret which had supplied some of the " intensity" of his style. The letter began as a mystification, or, if it had an object beyond the amusement of an idle hour, intended as a whimsical revenge for Miss Beverley s preference of a rich husband to her then undistinguished admirer had, in the heat of composition, and quite uncon sciously to Clay, enlisted real feelings, totally discon nected with the fair Julia, but not the less easily fused into shape and probability by the facile alcbymy of genius. The reader will see at once that the feelings expressed in it could never be the work of imagination. Truth and bitter suffering show through every line, and all its falsehood or fancy lay in its capricious ad dress to a woman who had really noi the slightest share in contributing to its material. The irreparable mischief it occasioned, will be seen in the sequel. CHAPTER V. WHILE the ambassador s bag is steadily posting over the hills of Burgundy with Mr. Clay s letter to Julia Beverley, the reader must be content to gain a little upon her majesty s courier and look in upon a family party assembled in the terraced front of a villa in the neighborhood of Fiesole. The evening was Italian and autumnal, of a ripe, golden glory, and the air was tempered to the blood, as daylight is to the eye so fitly as to be a forgotten blessing. A well-made, well-dressed, robust gentleman, who might be forty-five, or a well-preserved sixty, sat at a stone table on the westward edge of the terrace. The London Times lay on his lap, and a bottle of sherry and a single glass stood at his right hand, and he was dozing quietly after his dinner. Near a fountain be low, two fair English children played with clusters of ripe grapes. An Italian nurse, forgetting her charge, stood with folded arms leaning against a rough garden statue, and looked vacantly at the sunset sky, while up and down a level and flowering alley in the slope of the garden, paced slowly and gracefully Mrs. William Brown, the mother of these children, the wife of the gentleman sleeping over his newspaper, and the heroine of this story. Julia Beverley had been married five years, and for three years at least she had relinquished the habit of dressing her fine person to advantage. Yet in that untransparent sleeve was hidden an arm of statuary roundness and polish, and in those carelessly fitted ERNEST CLAY. Ifi shoes were disguised feet of a plump diminutiveness and arched instep worthy to be the theme of a new Cenerentola. The voluptuous chisel of the Greek never moulded shoulders and bust of more exquisite beauty, yet if she had not become unconscious of the possession of these charms altogether, she had so far lost the vanity of her girlhood that the prudery of a quakeress would not have altered a fold of her cash mere. Her bonnet, as she walked, had fallen back, and, holding it by one string over her shoulder, she put away behind her "pearl-round ear" the dark and heavy ringlet it had tangled in its fall, and, with its fellow shading her cheek and shoulder in broken masses of auburn, she presented a picture of luxurious and yet neglected beauty such as the undress pencil of Grenze would have revelled in portraying. The care of such silken fringes as veiled her indolent eyes is not left to mortals, and the covert loves who curve these soft cradles and sleep in them, had kept Julia Beverley s with the fidelity of fairy culture. The Beverleys had married their daughter to Mr. Brown with the usual parental care as to his fortune, and the usual parental forgetfulness of everything else. There was a better chance for happiness, it is true, than in most matches of convenience, for the bride groom, though past his meridian, was a sensible and very presentable sort of man, and the bride was natural ly indolent, and therefore likely to travel the road shaped out for her by the very marked hedges of ex pectation and duty. What she had felt for Mr. Clay during their casual and brief intimacy, will be seen by- and-by, but it had made no barrier to her union with Mr. Brown. With a luxurious house, fine horses, and her own way, the stream of life, for the first year of marriage, ran smoothly off. The second year was chequered with misgivings that she had thrown her self away, and nights of bitter weeping over a destiny in which no one of her bright dreams of love seemed possible to be realized, nnd still habit riveted its thou sand chains, her children grew attractive and attach ing, and by the time at which our story commences, the warm images of a life of passionate devotion had ceased to haunt her dreams, sleeping or waking, and she bade fair to live and die one of the happy many about whom " there is no story to tell." Mr. Brown at this period occupied a villa in the neighborhood of Florence, and on the arrival of Mr. Clay s letter at English Embassy, it was at once for warded to Fiesole, where it intruded like the serpent of old on the domestic paradise to which the reader has been introduced. Weak and ill-regulated as was the mind of Mrs. Brown, her first feeling after reading the ardent epistle of Mr. Clay, was unmingled resentment at its freedom. Her husband s back was turned to her as he sat on the terrace, and, ascending the garden steps, she threw the letter on the table. " Here is a letter of condolence on your death," she said, the blood mantling in her cheek, and her lips arched into an expression of wounded pride and indignation. Alas for the slight pivot on which turns the balance of destiny her husband slept ! " William!" she said again, but the tone was fainter and the hand she raised to touch him, stayed suspend ed above the fated letter. Waiting one instant more for an answer, and bending over her husband to be sure that his sleep was real, she hastily placed the letter in her bosom, and, with pale brow and limbs trembling beneath her, fled to her chamber. Memory had required but an instant to call up the past, and in that instant, too, the honeyed flatteries she had glanced over in such haste, had burnt into her imagination, effacing all else, even the object for which he had written, and the reproaches he had lavished OH her unfaithfulness. With locked doors, and curtains dropped between her and the glowing twilight, she reperused the worshipping picture of herself, drawn so covertly under the sem blance of complaint, and the feeling of conscious beauty so long forgotten, stole back into her veins like the reincarnation of a departed spirit. With a flashing glance at the tall mirror before her, she stood up, arching her white neck and threading her fingers through the loosened masses of her hair. She felt that she was beautiful still superbly beautiful. She advanced to the mirror. Her bright lips, her pliant motion, the smooth trans parence of her skin, the fulness of vein and limb, all mingled in one assurance of youth, in a wild desire for admiration, in a strange, restless, feverish im patience to be away where she could be seen and loved away to fulfil that destiny of the heart which seemed now the one object of life, though for years so unaccountably forgotten ! "I was born to be loved!" she wildly exclaimed, pacing her chamber, and wondering at her own beauty as the mirror gave back her kindling features and animated grace of movement ; "How could I have forgotten that I was beautiful ?" But at that instant her husband s voice, cold, harsh, and unimaginative, forced its way to her ear, and, convulsed with a tumultuous misery, she could neither struggle with nor define, she throw herself on her bed and abandoned herself to an uncontrolled agony of tears. Let those smile at this paroxysm of feeling whose " dream has come to pass!" Let those wonder who have never been startled from their common-place existence with the heart s bitter question Is this all! Reader ! are you loved ? loved as you dreamed in youth you might and must be loved by the matchless creature you painted in your imagination, lofty-hearted, confiding, and radiantly fair? Have you spent your treasure ? Have you lavished the boundless wealth of your affection ? Have you beggared heart and soul by the wild abandonment to love, of which you once felt capable ? Lady ! of you I ask : Is the golden flow of your youth coined as it melts away ? Are your truth and fervor, your delicacy and devotedness, your unutter able depths of tenderness and tears are they named on another s lips? are they made the incense to Heaven of another s nightly prayer? Your beauty is in its pride and flower. Who lays back with idola trous caress the soft parting of your hair? Who smiles when your cheek mantles, and shudders when it is pale? Who sits with your slender fingers clasped in his, dumb because there are bounds to lan guage, and trembling because death will divide you ? Oh, the ray of light wasted on the ocean, and the ray caught and made priceless in a king s diamond the wild-flower perishing in the woods, and its sister culled for culture in the garden of a poet are not wider apart in their destiny than the loved and the neglected ! " Blessed are the beloved," should read a new beatitude " for theirs is the foretaste of Paradise!" CHAPTER VI. THE autumn following found Mr. Clay a pilgrim for health to the shores of the Mediterranean. Ex hausted, body and soul, with the life of alternate gayety and passion into which his celebrity had drawn him, he had accepted, with a sense of exquisite relief, the offer of a cruise among the Greek Isles in a friend s yacht, and in the pure stillness of those bright sea s, I with a single companion and his books, he idled away the summer in a luxury of repose and enjoyment such as only the pleasure-weary can understand. Recruited in health, and with a mind beginning to yearn once 10 ERNEST CLAY. more for the long foregone stimulus of society, he landed at Naples in the beginning of October. " We are not very gay just now," said the English minister with whom he hastened to renew an ac quaintance commenced in his former travels, "but the prettiest woman in the world is at home to-night, and if you are as susceptible as most of the cavaliers of the Chiaja, you will find Naples attractive enough after you have seen her." "English?" " Yes but you can not have known her, for I think she was never heard of till she came to Naples." " Her name?" "Why, you should hear that after seeing her. Call her Queen Giovanna and she will come nearer your prepossession. By-the-by, what have you to do this morning ?" " I am at your excellency s disposal," " Come with me to the atelier of a very clever artist then, and I will show you her picture. It should be the man s chcf-d eeuvre, for he has lost his wits in painting it." "Literally, do you mean ?" " It would seem so for though the picture was finished some months since, he has never taken it off his easel, and is generally found looking at it. Besides, he has neither cleaned pallet nor brush since the last day she sat to him." " If he were young and handsome " " So he is and so are scores of the lady s devoted admirers ; but she is either prudent or cold to a degree that effectually repels hope, and the painter pines with the rest." A few minutes walk brought them to a large room near the Corso, tenanted by the Venetian artist, Ippolito Incontri. The minister presented his friend, and Clay forgot their errand in admiration of the magnificent brigand face and figure of the painter, who, after a cold salutation, retreated into the darkest corner of the point of view, and stood gazing past them at his easel, silent and unconscious of observation. "I have seen your wonder," said Clay, turning to the picture with a smile, and at the first glance only remarking its resemblance to a face that should be familiar to him. " I am surprised that I can not name her at once, for I am sure I know her well. But, stay! the light grows on my eye no! with that expression, certainly not I am sure, now, that I have not seen her. Wonderful beauty ! Yet there was a superficial likeness ! Have you ever remarked, Signor Incontri, that, through very intellectual faces, such as this, you can sometimes see what the counte nance would have been in other circumstances with out the advantages of education, I mean ?" No answer. The painter was absorbed in his pic ture, and Clay turned to the ambassador. " I have seen somewhere a face, and a very lovely one, too, that was strangely like these features; yet, not only without the soul that is here, but incapable, I should think, of acquiring it by any discipline, ei ther of thought or feeling." " Perhaps it was the original of this, and the painter has given the soul !" " He could as soon warm a statue into life as do it. Invent that look! Oh, he would be a god, not a painter! Raphael copied, and this man copies; but nature did the original of this, as he did of Raphael s immortal beauties; and the departure of the most vanishing shadow from the truth would be a blot irre mediable." Clay lost himself in the picture and was silent. Veil after veil fell away from the expression as he gazed, and the woman seemed melting out from the canvass into life. The pose and drapery were nothing. It was the portrait of a female standing still perhaps looking idly out on the sea lost in revery perhaps perhaps just feeling the breath of a coming thought, the stirring of some lost memory that would presently awake. The lips were slightly unclosed. The heavy eyelashes were wakeful yet couchant in their expres sion. The large dark orbs lustrous and suffused, looked of the depth and intense stillness of the mid night sky close to the silver rim of a moon high in heaven. The coloring was warm and Italian, but every vein of the transparent temple was steeped in calmness; and even through the bright pomegranate richness of a mouth full of the capability of passion, there seemed to breathe the slumberous fragrance of a flower motionless under its night-burthen of dew. It portrayed no rank in life. The drapery might have been a queen s or a contadina s. It was a woman sto len to the canvass from her inmost cell of privacy, with her soul unstartled by a human look, and mere life and freedom from pain or care expressed in her form and countenance yet, with all this, a radiance of beauty, and a sustained loftiness of feeling, as ap parent as the altitude of the stars. It was a match less woman incomparably painted ; and though not a man to fall in love with a semblance, Clay felt and struggled in vain against the feeling, that the creature drawn in that portrait controlled the next and perhaps the most eventful revolution of his many-sphered ex istence. The next five hours have (for this tale) no history. "I have perplexed myself in vain since I left you," Clay said to the ambassador, as they rolled on their way to the palace of the fair Englishwoman; "but when I yield to the secret conviction that I have seen the adorable original of the picture, I am lost in a greater mystery how I ever could have forgotten her. The coining five minutes will undo the Sphinx s riddle for me." " My life on it you have never seen her," said his friend, as the carriage turned through a reverberating archway, and rapidly making the circuit of a large court, stopped at the door of a palace blazing with light. An opening was made through the crowd, as the ambassador s name was announced, and Clay followed him through the brilliant rooms with an agitation to which he had long been a stranger. Taste, as well as sumptuous expensiveness, was stamped on every thing around, and there was that indefinable expres- sioH in the assembly, which no one could detect or appreciate better than Clay, and which is composed, among other things, of a perfect conviction on the part of the guests, that their time, presence, and ap probation, are well bestowed where they are. At the curtained door of a small boudoir, draped like a tent, a Neapolitan noble of high rank turned smiling to the ambassador and placed his finger on his -lip. The silken pavilion was crowded, and only uniforms and heads, fixed in attention, could be seen by those without ; but from the arching folds of the curtain came a female voice of the deepest and sweet est melodiousness, reading in low and finely-measured cadence from an English poem. " Do you know the voice ?" asked the ambassador, as Clay stood like a man fixed to marble, eagerly listening. " Perfectly ! I implore you tell me who reads !" "No ! though your twofold recognisance is singu lar. You shall see her before you hear her name. What is she reading ?" " My own poetry, by Heaven ! and yet I can not "name her! This passes belief. I have heard that voice sob sob convulsively, and with accents of love I have heard it whisper and entreat you look incred ulous, but it is true. If she do not know me nay, if she has not " he would have said " loved me" but the look of scrutiny and surprise on the counte nance of the ambassador checked the imprudent ERNEST CLAY. 17 avowal, and he became aware that he was on danger ous ground. He relapsed into silence, and crowding close to the tent, heard the numbers he had long ago linked and forgotten, breathing in music from those mysterious lips, and, possessed as he was by suspense and curiosity, he could have wished that sweet mo ment to have lasted for ever. I call upon the poet, if there be one who reads this idle tale, to tell me if there is a flattery more exquisite on earth, if there is a deeper-sinking plummet of pride ever dropped into the profound bosom of the bard, than the listening to thoughts born in pain and silence, articulate in the honeyed accents of woman! Answer me, poet! Answer me, women beloved of poets, who have breathed their worshipping incense, and know by what its bright censor was kindled ! The voice ceased, and there was one moment of stillness, and then the rooms echoed with acclamation. "Crown her!" cried a tall old man, who stood near the entrance covered with military orders. "Crown | are true only of the common-place and unimaginative. j The rich gifts of affection, which surfeit the cold bosom of the dull, fall upon the fiery heart of genius like spice-wood and incense, and long after the giver s prodigality has ceased, the mouldering embers lie warm beneath the ashes of silence, and a breath will uncover and rekindle them. The love of common men is a world without moon or stars. When the meridian is passed, the shadows lengthen, and the light departs, and the night that follows is dark indeed. But as the twilight closes on the bright and warm pns- sion of the poet, memory lights her pale lamp, like the moon, and brightens as the darkness deepens ; and the warm sacrifices made in love s noon and eve, go up to their places like stars, and with the light treasur ed from that fervid day, shine in the still heaven of the past, steadfast though silent. If there is a feature of the human soul in which more than in all others, the fiend is manifest, it is the masculine ingratitude for love. What wrongs, what agonies, what unutter her!" repeated every tongue; and from a vase thatjj hung suspended in the centre of the pavilion, the fresh flowers were snatched by eager hands and wreathed into a chaplet. But those without became clamorous to see the imposition of the crown; and, clearing a way through the entrance, the old man took the chaplet from the busy hands that had entwined it, and crying out with Italian enthusiasm, " A triumph ! a triumph !" led forth the majestic Corinna to the crowd. The ambassador looked at Clay. He had shrunk behind the statue of a winged cupid, and though his eyes were fixed with a gaze of stone on the magnifi cent creature who was the centre of all regards, he seemed by his open lips and heaving chest, to be gasp ing with some powerful emotion. "Give me the chaplet !" suddenly exclaimed the magnificent idol of the crowd. And with no apparent emotion, except a glowing spot in her temples, and a quicker throb in the snowy curve of her neck and bosom, she waved back the throng upon her right, and advanced with majestic steps to the statue of Love. "Welcome, Ernest!" she said in a low voice, taking him by the hand, and losing, for a scarce per ceptible moment, the smile from her lips. " Here, my friends!" she exclaimed, turning again, and lead ing him from his concealment, "honor to whom hon or is due ! A crown for the poet of my country, Er nest Clay !" " Clay, the poet !" " The English poet!" "The author of the poem!" were explanations that ran quickly through the room, and as the crowd pressed closer around, murmuring the enthusiasm native to that southern clime, Julia Beverley sprang upon an ot toman, and standing in her magnificent beauty con spicuous above all, she placed the crown upon^Clay s head, and bending gracefully and smilingly over him, impressed a kiss on his forehead, and said, " This for the poet . " And of the many lovers of this superb woman who saw that kiss, not one showed a frown or turned away, so natural to the warm impulse of the hour did it I seem so pure an expression of admiration of genius so mere a tribute of welcome from Italy to the bard, by an inspiration born of its sunny air. Surrounded I with eager claimants for his acquaintance, intoxicated 1 with flattery, giddy with indefinable emotions of love | and pleasure, Ernest Clay lost sight for a moment of the face that had beamed on him, and in that moment she had made an apology of fatigue and retired, leav ing her guests to their pleasures. CHAPTER VII. " Un amour rechauffe ne vaut jamais n en," is one of those common-places in the book of love, which 2 able sorrows are the reward of lavished affection, of generous self-abandonment, of unhesitating and idola trous trust ! Yet who are the ungrateful? Men lack ing the imagination which can reclose the faded form in its youthful beauty ! Men dead to the past with no perception but sight and touch to whom woman is a flower and no more fair to look on and sweet to pluck in her pride and perfume but scarce possessed ere trampled on and forgotten ! Genius alone treasures the perishing flower and remembers its dew and fra grance, and so, immemorially and well, poets have been beloved of women. I am recording the passions of genius. Let me sny to you, lady ! (reading this tale understand ingly, for you have been beloved by a poet), trust neither absence, nor silence, nor untoward circumstances ! He has loved you once. Let not your eye rest on him when you meet and if you speak, speak coldly ! For, with a passion strengthened and embellished tenfold by a memory all imagination, he will love you again ! The hours you passed with him the caresses you gave him, the tears you shed, and the beauty with which you bewildered him. have been hallowed in poetry, and glorified in revery and dream, and he will come back to you as he would spring into para dise were it so lost and recovered! But to my story ! Clay s memory had now become the home of an all- | absorbing passion. By a succession of mischances, or by management so adroit as never to alarm his pride, a week passed over, and he had found no opportunity of speaking alone to the object of his adoration. She favored him in public, talked to him at the opera, leaned on his arm in the crowd, caressed his genius with exquisite flattery, and seemed at moments to escape narrowly from a phrase too tender or a subject that would lead to the past yet without a violation of the most palpable tact, love was still an impossible topic. That he could have held her hand in his, un- forbidden that he could have pressed her to his bosom while she wept that she could have loved him ever, though but for an hour seemed to him sometimes an incredible dream, sometimes a most passionate happiness only to (relieve. He left her at night to pace the sands of the bay till morning, re membering for ever remembering the scene by the fountain at Florence ; and he passed his day between her palace and the picture of poor Incontri, who loved her more hopelessly than himself, but found a sym pathy in the growing melancholy of the poet. " She has no heart," said the painter; but Clay had felt it beat against his own, and he fed his love in silence on that remembrance. They sat upon the rocks by the gate of the Villa Real. The sun was just setting and as the waves formed near the shore aud rode in upon the glassy 18 ERNEST CLAY. swell of the bay, there seemed to writhe on each wavy back a golden serpent, who broke on the sands at their feet in sparkles of fire. At a little distance lay the swallow-like yacht, in which Clay had threaded the Archipelago, and as the wish to feel the little craft bounding once more beneath him, was checked by the anchor-like heaviness of his heart, an equestrian party stopped suddenly on the chiaja. " There is Mr. Clay !" said the thrilling voice of Julia Beverley, " perhaps he will take us over in the yacht. Sorrento looks so blue and tempting in the distance." Without waiting for a repetition of the wish he had overheard, Clay sprang upon a rock, and made signal for the boat, and before the crimson of the de parting day had faded from the sky, the fair Julia and her party of cavaliers, were standing on the deck of the swift vessel, bound on a moonlight voyage to Sorrento, and watching on their lee the reddening ribs and lurid eruption of the volcano. The night was Neapolitan, and the air was the food of love. It was a voyage of silence, for the sweetness of life in such an atmosphere and in the midstof that match less bay, lay like a voluptuous burthen in the heart, and the ripple under the clearing prow was language enough for all. Incontri leaned against the mast, watching the moonlit features of the signora with his melancholy but idolizing gaze, and Clay lay on the deck at her feet, trying with pressed-downlids to recall the tearful eyes of the Julia Beverley he had loved at the fountain. It was midnight when the breath of the orange groves of Sorrento, stealing seaward, slackened the way of the little craft, and running in close under the rocky foundations of the house of Tasso, Clay dropped his anchor, and landed his silent party at their haven. Incontri was sent forward to the inn to prepare their apartments, and leaning on Clay s arm and her hus band s, the superb Englishwoman ascended to the overhanging balcony of the dwelling of the Italian bard, and in a few words of eloquent sympathy in the homage paid by the world to these shrines of genius, added to the overflowing heart of her gifted lover one more intoxicating drop of flattery and fascination. They strolled onward to the inn, and he bade her good night at the gate, for he could no longer endure the fetter of another s presence, and the emotion stifled in his heart and lips. 1 have forgotten the name of that pleasant inn at Sorrento, built against the side of its mountain shore, with terraced orange-groves piled above its roof, and the golden fruit nodding in at its windows. From the principal floor, you will remember, projects a broad verandah, jutting upon one of these fruit-darkened alleys. If you have ever slept there after a scramble over Scaricatoja, you have risen, even from your fatigued slumber, to go out and pace awhile that over hanging garden, oppressed with the heavy perfume of the orange flowers. Strange that I should forget the name of that inn ! I thought, when the busy part of my life should be well over, I should go back and die there. The sea had long closed over the orbed forehead of the moon, and still Clay restlessly hovered around the garden of the inn. Mounting at last to the alley on a level with the principal chambers of the house, he saw outlined in shadow upon the curtain of a long window, a female figure holding a book, with her cheek resting on her hand. He threw himself on the grass and gazed steadily. The hand moved from the cheek, and raised a pencil from the table, and wrote upon the margin of the volume, and then the pencil was laid down, and the slender fingers raised the masses of fallen hair from the shoulder, and threaded the wavy ringlets indolently as she read : From the slightest motion of that statuary hand, from the most fragmented outline of that bird-like neck, Clay would have known Julia Beverley ; and as he watched her graceful shadow, the repressed and pent-up feelings of that evening of restraint, fed as they had been by every voluptuous influence known beneath the moon, rose to a height that absorbed brain and soul in one wild tumult of emotion. He sprang to his feet to rush into her presence, but at that instant a footstep started from the darkness of a tree, at the extremity of the alley. He paused and the shadow arose, and laying aside the book, leaned back, and lifted the tapering arms, and wound up the long masses of fallen hair, and then kneeling, remained a few minutes motion less, with the face buried in the hands. Clay trembled and felt rebuked. Once more the flowing drapery swept across the curtain, the light was extinguished, and the window thrown open to the night air; and then all was still. Clay walked to and fro in an agitation bordering on delirium. " I must speak to her!" he said, murmur ing audibly, and advancing toward the window. But hurried footsteps started again from the shndow of the pine, and he stopped to listen. All was silent, and he stood a moment pressing his hands on his brow, and trying to struggle with the wild impulse in his brain. His closed eves brought back instantly the unfading picture of Julia Beverley, weeping on his breast at the fountain, and with one rapid movement he divided the curtains and stood breathless in her chamber. The heavy breathing of the unconscious husband | fell like music on his ear. " Julia !" he exclaimed in a hoarse whisper, "I am here Ernest Clay!" "You are frantic, Ernest!" said a voice so calm that it fell on his ear like an assurance of despair. " I have no feeling for you that answers to this free dom. Leave my chamber !" 44 No !" said Clay, dropping the curtain behind him, and advancing into the room, " wake your husband if I you will this is the only spot on earth where I can breathe, and if you are relentless, here will I die Was it false when you said you loved me ? Speak, Julia !" "Ernest !" she said, in a less assured tone, "I have done wrong not to check this wild passion earlier, and I have that to say to you which, perhaps, had better be said now. I will come to you in the garden." " My vessel waits, and in an hour " "Nay, nay, you mistake me. But go! I will follow instantly !" Vesuvius was burning with an almost smokeless flame when Clay stood again in the night-air, and every object was illuminated with the clearness of a confla gration. At the first glance around, he fancied he | saw figures gliding behind the lurid body of a pine opposite the window, but in the next moment the cur tain again parted, and Julia Beverley, wrapped in a cloak, stood beside him on the verandah. " Stand back !" she said, as he endeavored to put his arm around her, " I have more than one defender within call, and I must speak to you where- I am. Will you listen to me, Ernest ?" Clay s breast heaved ; but he folded his arms and leaned against the slender column of the verandah in silence. " Were it any other person who had so far forgot ten himself," she continued, "it would be sufficient to say, I can never love you, and leave my privacy to be defended by my natural protector. But I wish to show to you, Ernest, not only that you can have no hope in loving me, but that you have made me the mischievous woman I have become. From an hum ble wife to a dangerous coquette, the change may well seem startling but it is of your working." " Mine, madam !" said Clay, whose pride was ERNEST CLAY. aroused with the calm self-possession and repulse of her tone and manner. "I have never answered the letter you wrote me." " Pardon and spare me !" said Clay, who remem bered at the instant only the whim under which it was written. " It awoke me to a new existence," she continued, without heeding his confusion, " for it first made me aware that I could ever be the theme of eloquent ad miration. I had never been praised but in idle com pliment, and by those whose intellect I despised; and though as a girl I had a vague feeling that I was slighted and unappreciated, I yielded gradually to the conviction that the world was right, and that women sung by poets and described in the glowing language of romance, were of another mould, I scarce rea soned upon it. I remember, on first arriving in Italy, drawing a comparison favorable to myself between j my own beauty and the Fornarina s, and the portraits j of Laura and Leonora D Este ; but as I was loved by j neither painters nor poets, 1 accused myself of pre- i sumption, and with a sigh, returned to my humility. I My life seemed more vacant than it should be, and I sometimes wept from an unhappiness I could not de fine ; and I once or twice met persons who seemed to have begun to love me, and appreciate my beauty as I wished, and in this lies the history of my heart up to the time of your writing to me. That letter, Ernest " " You believed that I loved you then !" passion- | ately interrupted her listener, " you know now that I i loved you ! Tell me so, I implore you !" " My dear poet," said the self-possessed beauty, j with a smile expressive of as much mischief as frank ness, " let us be honest. You never loved me ! I never believed it but for one silly hour ! Stay ! j stay ! you shall not answer me ! I have not left my j bed at this unseasonable hour to listen to protesta- ! tions. At least, let me first conclude the hislory of , my metempsychosis! I can tell it to nobody else, j| and like the Ancient Mariner s, it is a tale that must j be told. Revenons ! Your very brilliant letter awoke [ me from the most profound lethargy by which beauty such as mine was ever overtaken. A moment s in- \ ventory of rny attractions satisfied me that your ex- | quisite description (written, I have since suspected, | to amuse an idle hour, but done, nevertheless, with j the fine memory and graphic power of genius) was j neither fanciful nor over-colored, and for the first time j in my life I felt beautiful. You are an anatomist of j the heart, and I may say to you that I looked at my j own dark eyes and fine features and person with the I admiration and wonder of a blind beauty restored to | sight and beholding herself in a mirror. You will j think, perhaps, that love for the writer of this magic letter should have been the inevitable sequel. * But I arn here to avert the consequences of my coquetry, and I will be frank with you. I forgot you in a day ! In the almost insane desire to be seen and appreciated, painted, sung, and loved, which took possession of me | when the tumult of my first feeling had passed away, j your self-controlled and manageable passion seemed i to me frivolous and shallow." " Have you been better loved?" coldly asked Clay. 41 I will answer that question before we part. I did not suffer myself to think of a love that could be returned for I had husband and children and though I felt that a mutual passion such as I could ! imagine, would have absorbed, under happier circum stances, every energy of my soul, I had no disposition to make a wreck of another s happiness and honor, whatever the temptation. Still I must be loved I must come out from my obscurity and shine I must be the idol of some gifted circle I must control the painter s pencil and the poet s pen and the statesman s scheme I must sun my beauty in men s eyes, and be caressed and conspicuous I must use my gift and fulfil my destiny ! 1 told my husband this. He se cured my devotion to his peace and honor for ever, by giving me unlimited control over his fortune and him self. We came to Naples, and my star, hitherto clouded in its own humility, sprang at once to the as cendant. The " attraction of unconscious beauty" is a poet s fiction, believe me! Set it down in your books, Ernest we are our own nomenclators the belle as well as the hero ! I claimed to be beautiful, and queened it to the top of my bent and all Naples is at my feet! Oh, Ernest! it is a delicious power to hold human happiness in your control to be the loadstar of eminent men and bright intellects! Per haps a woman who is absorbed in one passion, finds in her lover s character and fame room enough for her pride and her thirst for influence; but to me, giving nothing in return but the light of my eyes, there seems scarce in the world celebrity, rank, genius enough, to limit my ambition. I would be Helen! I would be Mary of Scots ! I would have my beauty as undisputed and renowned as the Apollo s! Am I insane or heartless?" Clay smiled at the abrupt naivete of the question, but his eyes were full of visible admiration of the glowing pictures before him. "You are beautiful!" was his answer. "Am I not ! Shall I be celebrated hereafter, Er nest? I should be willing to grow old, if my beauty were * in amber if by some burning line in your book, some wondrous touch of the pencil, some bold novelty in sculpture, my beauty would live on men s lips for ever! Incontri s picture is beautiful and like, but it is not, if you understand, a conception it is not a memoir of the woman as the Cenei s is it does not embody a complete fame in itself, like the Bella of Titian, or the Wife of Giorgione. If you loved me, Ernest" "If you loved me, Julia!" echoed Clay, with a tone rather of mockery than sincerity. "Ah, but you threw me away; and even with my own consent, I could never be recovered ! Believe me, Ernest, there never was a coquette, who, in some one of her earlier preferences, had not made a des perate and single venture of her whole heart s devo tion. That wrecked, she was lost to love. I em barked with you, soul and heart, and you left to the mercy of the chance wind a freight that no tide could bring to port again !" "You forget the obstacles." " A poet! and talk of obstacles in love ! Did you even ask me to run away with you, Ernest! I would have gone! Ay coldly as I talk to you now, 1 would have followed you to a hovel for it was first love to me. Had it been first love to both of us, I should now be your wife sharer of your fame ! And oh, how jealous !" " With your beauty, jealous?" " Not of flesh-and-blood women, Ernest ! With a wife s opportunities, I could outcharm, with half my beauty, the whole troop of Circe. I was thinking of the favors of your pen ! Who would I let you de scribe ! What eyes, what hair, what form but mine what character, what name, would I even suffer you to make immortal ! Paul Veronese had a wife with my avarice. In his hundred pictures there is the same blue-eyed, golden-haired woman, as much link ed to his fame as Laura to Petrarch s. If he had drawn her but once, she would have been known as the woman Paul Veronese painted ! She is known now as the woman he loved. Delicious immortality !" " Yet she could not have exacted it. That would have required an intellect which looked abroad and poets love no women who are not like birds, content with the summer around them, and with every thought in their nest. Paul Veronese s Bionda, with her soft 20 ERNEST CLAY. mild eyes and fair hair, is the very type of such a woman, and she would uot have foregone a caress for twenty immortalities." "May I ask what was my attraction, then?" said the proud beauty, with a tone of pique. " Julia Beverley, unconscious and unintellectual !" answered Clay, drawing on his gloves with the air of a man who has got through with an interview. " You have explained your metempsychosis, but I was in love with the form you have cast off. The night grows chill. Sweet dreams to you !" " Slay, Mr. Clay ! You asked me if I had been better loved, and I promised you an answer. What think you of a lover who has forgotten the occupation that gave him bread, abandoned his ambition, and at all hours of the night is an unrewarded and hopeless watcher beneath my window ?" " To-night excepted," said Clay, looking around. " Incontri !" called Mrs. Brown, without raising her voice. Clay started and frowned, as the painter sprang from the shadow of the pine-tree which had before attracted his attention. Falling on his knee, the un happy lover kissed the jewelled fingers extended to him, and giving Clay his hand in rising, the poet sprang back, for he had elapsed the handle of a stiletto ! " Fear not she does not love you !" said Incontri, remarking his surprise, and concealing the weapon in his sleeve. " I was destined to be cured of my love, either way," said Clay, bowing himself oft" the verandah with half a shudder and half a smile. The curtain closed at the same moment over the retreating form of Julia Beverley, and so turned another leaf of Clay s voluminous book of love. CHAPTER VIII. CLAY threw the volume aside, in which he had been reading, and taking up " the red book," looked for the county address of Sir Harry Freer, the exponent (only) of Lady Fanny Freer, who, though the "nicest possible creature," is not the heroine of this story. Sir Harry s ancestral domain turned out to be a por tion of the earth s surface in that county of England where the old gentry look down upon very famous lords as too new, and proportionately upon all other families that have not degenerated since William the conqueror. Sir Harry had married an earl s daughter ; but as the earldom was not only the fruit of two generations of public and political eminence, Sir Harry was not considered in Cheshire as having made more than a tolerable match ; and if she passed for a " Cheshire cheese in London, he passed for but the rind in the county. In the county therefore there was a lord paramount of Freer Hall, and in town, a lady par amount of Brook-street ; and it was under the town dynasty that Miss Blanch Beaufin was invited up from Cheshire to pass a first winter in London Miss Beaufin being the daughter of a descendant of a Nor man retainer of the first Sir Harry, and the relative position of the families having been rigidly kept up to the existing epoch. The address found in the red book was described upon the following letter: " DEAR LADY FANNY : If you have anything be side the ghost-room vacant at Freer Hall, I will run down to you. Should you, by chance, be alone, ask up the curate for a week to keep Sir Harry off my hands ; and, as you don t flirt, provide me with some- 5ouy more pretty than yourself for our mutual security. As my autograph sells for eighteen pence, you will excuse the brevity of Yours truly, " ERNEST CLAY. " N. B. Tell me in your answer if Blanch Beaufin is within a morning s ride." Lady Fanny was a warm-hearted, extravagant, beautiful creature of impulse, a passionate friend of Clay s (for such women there are), without a spice of flirtation. She was a perennial belle in London; and he had begun his acquaintance with her by throwing himself at her head in the approved fashion in love to the degree of rose-asking and sonnet-writing. As she did not laugh when he sighed, however, but only told him very seriously that she was not a bit in love with him, and thought he was throwing away his time, he easily forgave her insensibility, and they be came very warm allies. Spoiled favorite as he was of London society, Clay had qualities for a very sin cere friendship; and Lady Fanny, full of irregular talent, had also a strong vein of common sense, and perfectly understood him. This explanation to the reader. It would have saved some trouble and "pain, if it had been made by some good angel to Sir Harry Freer. As the London coach rattled under the bridged gate of the gloomy old town of Chester, Lady Fanny s I dashing ponies were almost on their haunches with j her impetuous pull-up at the hotel; and returning I with a nod the coachman s respectful bow, she put j her long whip in at the coach window to shake hands i with Clay, and in a few minutes they were again off J the pavements, and taking the road at her ladyship s | usual speed. " Steady, Flash ! steady !" (she ran on, talking to Clay, and her ponies in the same breath), " doleful ride down, isn t it? (keep up, Tom, you villain!) very good of you to come, I m sure, dear Ernest, and you ll stay; how long will you stay ? (down, Flash!) Oh, Miss Beaufin ! I ve something to say to you [ about Blanch Beaufin ! I didn t answer your Nota Bene (go along, Tom ! that pony wants blooding) because to tell the truth, it s a delicate subject at Freer Hall, and 1 would rather talk than write about it. You see (will you be done, Flash !) the Beaufins. though very nice people, and Blanch quite a love (go along, lazy Tom !) the Beaufins, I say, are rated rather crockery in Cheshire. And I am ashamed to own, really quite ashamed, I have not been near them in a month. Shameful, isn t it ? There s good action, Ernest ! Look at that nigh pony ; not a blemish in him; and such a goer in sin gle harness! Well, I ll go around by the Beaufins now." " Pray consider, Lady Fanny !" interrupted Clay deprecatingly, "eighteen hours in a coach." " Not to go in ! oh, not to go in ! Blanch is very ill, and sees nobody ; and (come, Tom! come !) I only heard of it this morning (there s for your laziness, you stupid horse !, We ll, just call and ask how she is, though Sir Harry " " Is she very ill, then ?" asked Clay, with a concern which made Lady Fanny turn her eyes from her ponies ears to look at him. " They say, very ! Of course, Sir Harry can t for bid a visit to the sick." " Surely he does not forbid you to call on Blanch Beaufin!" " Not forbid precisely; that wouldn t do (gently, sweet Flash ! now, Tom ! now, lazy ! trot fair through ihe hollow!) but I invited her to pass the winter with me without consulting him, and he liked it well enough, till he got back among his stupid neighbors (well done, Flash ! plague take that bothering whipple-tree!) and they and their awkward daughters, whom I might have invited (whoa ! Flash !) if 1 ERNEST CLAY. 21 hail wanted a menagerie, set him to looking into her pedigree. There s the house; the old house with the vines over it yonder! So then, Sir Harry such a sweet girl, too set his face against the acquaintance. Here we are ! (Whoa, bays ! whoa !) Hold the reins a moment while I run in!" More to quell a vague and apprehensive feeling of remorse than to wile away idle time, Clay passed the reins back to the stripling in gray livery behind, and walked round Lady Fanny s ponies, expressing his admiration of them and the turnout altogether. " Yes, sir," said the lad, who seemed to have caught some of the cleverness of his mistress, for he scarce j looked fourteen, " they re a touch above anything in j Cheshire ! Look at the forehand of that nigh uu, 1 sir! arm and withers like a greyhound, and yet what j a quarter for trotting, sir ! Quite the tight thing all j over ! Carries his flag that way quite natural ; never - was nicked, sir ! Did you take notice, begging your | pardon, sir, how milady put through that hollow ? j Wasn t it fine, sir ? Tother s a goodish nag, too, but, nothing to Flash ; can t spread, somehow ; that s Sir Harry s picking up, and never was a match; no [ blood in Tom, sir! Look at his fetlock : underbred, but a jimpy nag for a roadster, if a man wanted work ; out on him. See how he blows, sir, and Flash as j still as a stopped wheel !" Lady Fanny s reappearance at the door of the : house interrupted her page s eulogy on the bays; and j with a very altered expression of countenance she re sumed the reins, and drove slowly homeward. " She is very ill, very ill ! but she wishes to see you, and you must go there ; but not to-morrow. She is passing a crisis now, and her physician says, will be easier if not better, after to-morrow. Poor girl! dear Blanch! Ah, Clay ! but no no matter; I shall talk about it with more composure by-and-by poor Blanch !" Lady Fanny s tears rained upon her two hands as she let out her impatient horses to be sooner at home, j and, in half an hour, Clay was alone in his luxurious ! quarters, under Sir Harry s roof, with two hours to | dinner, and more than thoughts enough, and very sad j ones, to make him glad of time and solitude. Freer Hall was full of company Sir Harry s com pany and Clay, with the quiet assurance of a London star, used to the dominant, took his station by Lady Fanny on entering the drawing-room, and when din- ; ner was announced, gave her his arm, without troubling himself to remember that there was a baronet who had claim to the honor, and of whom he must simply make a mortal enemy. At table, the conversation ran main- j ly in Sir Harry s vein, hunting, and Clay did not even | take the listener s part ; but, in a low tone, talked of London to Lady Fanny her ladyship (unaccountably i to her husband and his friends, who were^used to [ furnish her more merriment than revery) pensive J and out of spirits. With the announcement of coffee j in the drawing-room, Clay disappeared with her, and j their evening was tete-a-tcte, for Sir Harry and his friends were three-bottle men, and commonly bade good-night to ladies when the ladies left the table, If there had been a second thought in the convivial i| squirearchy, they would have troubled their heads, less about a man who did not exhibit the first symptom j of love for the wife civility to the husband. But I this is a hand-to-mouth world in the way of knowl- edge, and nothing is stored but experiences, lifetime by lifetime. Another day passed and another, and mystery seem ed the ruling spirit of the hour, for there were enigmas for all. Regularly, morning and afternoon, the high stepping ponies were ordered round, and Lady Fanny (with Mr. Clay for company to the gate) visited the , Beaufins, now against positive orders from the irate ; Sir Harry, and daily, Clay s reserve with his beautiful hostess increased, and his distress of mind with it, for both he and she were alarmed with the one piece of unexplained intelligence between them MissBeaufin would see Mr. Clay when she should be dying! Not before for worlds not before and of the phy sician constantly in attendance (Lady Fanny often present), Clay knew that the poor girl besought with an eagerness, to the last degree touching and ear nest, to know when hope could be given over. She was indulged, unquestioned, as a dying daughter; and, whatever might be her secret, Lady Fanny promised that at the turning hour, come what would of distressing and painful, she would herself come with Mr. Clay to her death-bed. Sir Harry and his friends were in the billiard-room, and Lady Fanny and Clay breakfasting together, when a note was brought in by one of the footmen, who waited for an answer. " Say that I will come," said Lady Fanny, " and stay, George ! See that my ponies are harnessed im mediately ; put the head of the phaeton up, and let it stand in the coach-house. And, Timson !" she added to the butler who stood at the side-table, " if Sir Harry inquires for me, say that I am gone to visit a sick friend." Lady Fanny walked to the window. It rained in torrents. There was no need of explanation to Clay; he understood the note and its meaning. 11 The offices connect with the stables by a covered way," she said, " and we will get in there. Shall you be ready in a few minutes ?" " Quite, dear Lady Fanny ! I am ready now." " The rain is rather fortunate than otherwise," she added, in going out, " for Sir Harry will not see us go; and he might throw an obstacle in the way, and make it difficult to manage. Wrap well up, Ernest !" The butler looked inquisitively at Clay and his mis tress, but both were preoccupied, and in ten minutes the rapid phaeton was on its way, the ponies pressing on the bit as if the eagerness of the two hearts beating behind them was communicated through the reins, and Lady Fanny, contrary to her wont, driving in un- encouraging silence. The three or four miles between Freer Hall and their destination were soon traversed, and under the small porte-cochere of the ancient man sion the ponies stood panting and sheltered. " Kind Lady Fanny! God bless you !" said a tall, dark man, of a very striking exterior, coming out to the phaeton. " And you, sir, are welcome !" They followed him into the little parlor, where Clay was presented by Lady Fanny to the mother of Miss Beaufin, a singularly yet sadly sweet woman in voice, person, and address; to the old, white-haired vicar, and to the physician, who returned his bow with a cold and very formal salute. "There is no time to be lost." said he, " and at the request of MissBeaufin, Lady Fanny and this gentle man will please go to her chamber without us. 1 can trust your ladyship to see that her remainder of life is not shortened nor harassed by needless agitation." Clay s heart beat violently. At the extremity of the. long and dimly-lighted passage thrown open by the father to Lady Fanny, he saw a while curtained bed the death-bed, he knew, of the gay and fair flower of a London season, the wonder and idol of difficult fashion, and unadmiring rank. Blanch Beaufin had appeared like a marvel in the brilliant circles of Lady Fanny s acquaintance, a distinguished, uncon scious, dazzling girl, of whom her fair introductress (either in mischief or good nature) would say nothing but that she was her neighbor in Cheshire, though all that nature could lavish on one human creature seemed hers, with all that high birth could stamp on mien, countenance, and manners. Clay paid her his tribute with the rest the hundred who flattered and followed her; but she was a proud girl, and though 22 ERNEST CLAY. he seized every opportunity of being near her, nothing in her manner betrayed to him that he was not counted among the hundred. A London season fleets fast, and, taken by surprise with Lady Fanny s early de parture for the country, her farewells were written on the corners of cards, and with a secret deep buried in the heart, she was brought back to the retirement of home. Brief history of the breaking of a heart ! Lady Fanny started slightly on entering the cham ber. The sick girl sat propped in an arm chair, dressed in snowy white ; even her slight foot appear ing beneath the edge of her dress in a slipper of white satin. Her brown hair fell in profuse ringlets over her shoulders ; but it was gathered behind into a knot, and from it depended a white veil, the diamonds which fastened it, pressing to the glossy curve of her head, a slender stem of orange-flowers. Her features were of that slight -mould which shows sickness by little except higher transparency of the blue veins, and brighter redness in the lips, and as she smiled with suffused cheek, and held out her gloved hand to Clay, with a vain effort to articulate, he passed his hands across his eyes and looked inquiringly at his friend. He had expected, though he had never realized, that she would be altered. She looked almost as he had left her. He remembered her only as he had oftenest seen her dressed for ball or party, and but for the solemnity of the preparation he had gone through, he might have thought his feelings had been played upon only; that Blanch Beaufin was well still beautiful and well ; that he should again see her in the brilliant circles of London; still love her as he secretly did, and receive what he now felt would be under any circumstances a gift of Heaven, the assurance of a return. This and a world of confused emotion, tumultuously and in an instant, rushed through his heart ; for there are moments in which we live lives of feeling and thought; moments, glances, whichsupply years of secret or bitter memory. This is but a sketch but an outline of a tale over true. Were there space, were there time to follow out the traverse thread of its mere mournful incidents, we might write the reverse side of a leaf of life ever read partially and wrong the life of the gay and un- lamenting. Sickness and death had here broken down a wall of adamant between two creatures, every way formed for each other. In health and ordinary regularity of circumstances, they would have loved as truly and deeply as those in humbler or in more for tunate relative positions ; but they probably would never have been united. It is the system, the neces sary system of the class to which Clay belonged, to turn adroitly and gayly off every shaft to the heart ; to take advantage of no opening to affection; to smother all preference that would lead to an inter change of hallowed vows ; to profess insensibility equally polished and hardened on the subject of pure love ; to forswear marriage, and make of it a mock and an impossibility. And whose handiwork is this unnatural order of society? Was it established by the fortunate and joyous by the wealthy and un trammelled, at liberty to range the world if they liked, and marry where they chose, but preferring gayety to happiness, and lawless liberty to virtuous love ? No, indeed ! not by these ! Show me one such man, and I will show you a rare perversion of common feeling a man who under any circumstances would have been cold and eccentric. It is not to those able to marry where they will, that the class of London gay men owe their system of mocking opinions. But it is to the companions of fortunate men gifted like them, in all but fortune, and holding their caste by the tenure of forsworn ties abiding in the paradise of aristocracy, with pure love for the forbidden fruit ! Are such men insensible to love ? Has this forbidden joy this one thing hallowed in a bad world ; has it no temptation for the gay man ? Is his better nature quite dead within him ? Is he never ill and sad where gayety can not reach him ? Does he envy the rich young lord (his friend), everything but his blushing and pure bride ? Is he poet or wit, or the mirror of taste and elegance, yet incapable of discerning the qualities of a true love ; the celestial refinement of a maiden passion, lawful and fearless, devoted because spotless, and enduring because made up half of prayer and gratitude to her Maker ? Does he not know dis tinctions of feeling, as he knows character in a play ? Does he not discriminate between purity and guilt in love, as he does in his nice judgment of honor and taste ? Is he gayly dead to the deepest and most elevated cravings of nature love, passionate, single- hearted, and holy ? Trust me, there is a bitterness whose depths we can only fathom by refinement ! To move among creatures embellished and elevated to the last point of human attainment, lovely and un sullied, and know yourself (as to all but gazing on and appreciating them) a pariah and an outcast ! to breathe their air, and be the companion and apparent equal of those for whose bliss they are created, and to whom they are offered for choice, with the profusion of flowers in a garden (the chooser and possessor of the brightest your inferior in all else) to live thus ; to suffer thus, and still smile and call it choice and your own way to happiness this is mockery indeed ! He who now stood in the death-room of Blanch Beaufin, had felt it in its bitterest intensity ! " Mr. Clay ! Ernest !" said the now pale creature, breaking the silence with a strong effort, for he had dropped on his knee at her side in ungovernable emo tion, and, as yet, had but articulated her name "Er nest! I have but little time for anything least of all for disguise or ceremony. I am assured that I am dy ing. I am convinced," she added firmly, taking up the watch that lay beside her, " that I have been told the truth, and that when this hourhand comes round again, I shall be dead. I will conceal nothing. They have given me cordials that will support me one hour, and for that hour and for eternity I wish if I may be so blest if God will permit to be your wife !" Lady Fanny Freer rose and came to her with rapid steps, and Clay sprang to his feet, and in a passion of tears exclaimed, "Oh God! can this be true !" " Answer me quickly !" she continued, in a voice raised, but breaking through sobs, " an hour is short oh how short, when it is the last ! I can not stay with you long, were you a thousand limes mine. Tell me, Ernest ! shall it be ? shall I be wedded ere I die? wedded now?" A passionate gesture to Lady Fanny was all the answer Clay could make, and in another moment the aged vicar was in the chamber, with her parents and the physician, to all of whom a few words explained a mystery which her bridal attire had already half un ravelled. Blanch spoke quickly " Shall he proceed, Er nest?" Her prayer-book was open on her knee, and Clay gave it to the vicar, who, with a quick sense of sym pathy, and with but a glance at the weeping and si lent parents, read without delay the hallowed ceremo nial. Clay s countenance elevated and cleared as he pro ceeded, and Blanch, with her large suffused eyes fixed on his, listened with a smile, serene, but expressive of unspeakable rapture. Her beauty had never been so radiant, so angelic. In heaven, on her bridal night, beatified spirit as she was, she could not have been more beautiful ! One instant of embarrassment occurred, unobserved by the dying bride, but, with the thoughtfulness of womanly generosity, Lady Fanny had foreseen it, and, ERNEST CLAY. 23 drawing off her own wedding-ring, she passed it into Ernest s hand ere the interruption became apparent. Alas ! the emaciated haud ungloved to recei That wasted finger pointed indeed to heaven! Till then, Clay had felt almost in a dream. But here was suffering sickness death ! This told what the hec tic brightness and the faultless features would fain deny what the fragrant and still unwithering flowers upon her temples would seem to mock! But the hectic was already fading, and the flowers outlived the light in the dark eyes they shaded ! "The vicar joined their hands with the solemn ad juration, "Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder ;" and Clay rose from his knees, and pressing his first kiss upon her lips, strained her passionately to his heart. " Mine in heaven!" she cried, giving way at last to her tears, as she closed her slight arms over his neck ; "mine in heaven! Is it not so, mother! father! is he not mine now ? There is no giving in marriage in heaven, but the ties, hallowed here, are not forgotten there! Tell me they are not! Speak to me, my husband! Press me to your heart, Ernest ! Your wife oh, I thank God !" The physician sprang forward and laid his hand upon her pulse. She fell back upon her pillows, and with a smile upon her lips, and the tears still wet upon her long and drooping lashes, lay dead. Lady Fanny took the mother by the arm, and with a gesture to the father and the physician to follow, they retired and left the bridegroom alone. ******* Life is full of sudden transitions ; and the next event in that of Ernest Clay, was a duel with Sir Har ry Freer if the Morning Post was to be believed ".occasioned by the indiscretion of Lady Fanny, who, in a giddy moment, it appears, had given to her ad mirer, Sir Harry s opponent, her wedding-ring!" CHAPTER IX. LATE one night in June two gentlemen arrived at the Villa Hotel of the Baths of Lucca. They stop ped the low britzka in which they travelled, and, leav ing a servant to make arrangements for their lodging, linked arms and strolled up the road toward the banks of the Lima. The moon was chequered at the mo ment with the poised leaf of a treetop, and as it pas sed from her face, she arose and stood alone in the j steel-blue of the unclouded heavens a luminous and tremulous plate of gold. And you know how beau tiful must have been the night, a June night in Italy, with a moon at the full ! A lady, with a servant following her at a little dis tance, passed the travellers on the bridge of trie Lima. She dropped her veil and went by in silence. But | the Freyherr felt the arm of his friend tremble within his own. "Do you know her, then?" asked Von Leisten. "By the thrill in my veins we have met before," said Clay; "but whether this involuntary sensation was pleasurable or painful, I have not yet decided. There are none I care to meet none who can be here." He added the last few words after a moment s pause, and sadly. They walked on in silence to the base of the moun tain, busy each with such coloring as the moonlight threw on their thoughts, but neither of them was happy. Clay was humane, and a lover of nature a poet, that is to say and, in a world so beautiful, could nev er be a prey to disgust ; but he was satiated with the common emotions of life. His heart, forever over- j flowing, had filled many a cup with love, but with strange tenacity he turned back for ever to the first. He was weary of the beginnings of love weary of its probations and changes. He had passed the pe riod of life when inconstancy was tempting. He longed now for an affection that would continue into another world holy and pure enough to pass a gate guarded by angels. And his first love recklessly as he had thrown it away was now the thirst of his ex istence. It was two o clock at night. The moon lay broad upon the southern balconies of the hoiel, and every casement was open to its luminous and fragrant still ness. Clay and the Freyherr Von Leisten, each in his apartment, were awake, unwilling to lose the lux ury of the night. And there was one other under that roof waking, with her eyes fixed on the moon. As Clay leaned his head on his hand, and looked outward to the sky, his heart began to be troubled. There was a point in the path of the moon s rays where his spirit turned back. There was an influence abroad in the dissolving moonlight around him which resistlessly awakened the past the sealed but unfor- gotten past. He could not single out the emotion. He knew not whether it was fear or hope pain or pleasure. He called, through the open window, to Von Leisten. The Freyherr, like himself, and like all who have, outlived the" effervescence of life, was enamored of the night. A moment of unfathomable moonlight was dearer to him than hours disenchanted with the sun. He, too, had been looking outward and upward but with no trouble at his heart. " The night is inconceivably sweet," he said, as he entered, " and your voice called in my thought and sense from the intoxication of a revel. What would you, my friend ?" " I am restless, Von Leisten! There is some one near us whose glances cross mine on the moonlight, and agitate and perplex me. Yet there was but one on earth deep enough in the life-blood of my being to move me thus even were she here ! And she is not here !" His voice trembled and softened, and the last word was scarce audible on his closing lips, for the Frey herr had passed his hands over him while he spoke, and he had fallen into the trance of the spirit-world. Clay and Von Leisten had retired from the active passions of life together, and had met and mingled at that moment of void and thirst when each supplied the want of the other. The Freyherr was a German noble, of a character passionately poetic, and of sin gular acquirement in the mystic fields of knowledge. Too wealthy to need labor, and too proud to submit his thoughts or his attainments to the criticism or judgment of the world, he lavished on his own life, and on those linked to him in friendship, the strange powers he had acquired, and the prodigal overthrow of his daily thought and feeling. Clay was his superior, perhaps, in genius, and necessity had driven him to develop the type of his inner soul, and leave its im press on the time. But he was inferior to Von Leis ten in the power of will, and he lay in his control like a child in its mother s. Four years they had passed together, much of it in the secluded castle of Von Leisten, busied with the occult studies to which the Freyherr was secretly devoted; but travelling down to Italy to meet the luxurious summer, and dividing their lives between the enjoyment of nature and the ideal world they had unlocked. Von Leisten had lost, by death, the human altar on which his heart could alone burn the incense of love; and Clay had flung aside in an hour of intoxicating passion the one pure affection in which his happiness was sealed and both were desolate. But in the world of the past, Von Leisten, though more irrevocably lonely, was more tranquilly blest. The Freyherr released the entranced spirit of his 24 ERNEST CLAY. friend, and bade him follow back the rays of the moon to the source of his agitation. A smile crept slowly over the speaker s lips. In an apartment flooded with the silver lustre of the night, reclined, in an invalid s chair, propped with pil- Jows, a woman of singular, though most fragile beauty. Books and music lay strewn around, and a lamp, sub dued to the tone of the moonlight by an orb of ala baster, burned beside her. She lay bathing her blue eyes in the round chalice of the moon. A profusion of brown ringlets fell over the white dress that envel oped her, and her oval cheek lay supported on the palm of her hand, and her bright red lips were parted. The pure, yet passionate spell of that soft night pos sessed her. Over her leaned the disembodied spirit of him who had once loved her praying to God that his soul might be so purified as to mingle unstartingly, unre- pulsively, in hallowed harmony with hers. And pres ently he felt the coming of angels toward him, breath ing into the deepest abysses of his existence a tearful and purifying sadness. And with a trembling aspira tion of grateful humility to his Maker, he stooped to her forehead, and with his impalpable lips impressed upon its snowy tablet a kiss. It seemed to Eve Gore a thought of the past that brought the blood suddenly to her cheek. She started fromherrecliningposition, and, removing theobscuring shade from her lamp, arose and crossed her hands upon her wrists, and paced thoughtfully to and fro. Her lips murmured inarticulately. But the thought, painfully though it came, changed unaccountably to melancholy sweetness ; and, subduing her lamp again, she resumed her steadfast gaze upon the moon. Ernest knelt beside her, and with his invisible brow bowed upon her hand, poured forth, in the voiceless language of the soul, his memories of the past, his hope, his repentance, his pure and passionate adora tion at the present hour. And thinking she had been in a sweet dream, yet wondering at its truthfulness and power, Eve wept, silently and long. As the morning touched the east, slumber weighed upon her moistened eyelids, and kneeling by her bedside she murmured her gratitude to God for a heart relieved of a burden long borne, and so went peacefully to her sleep. * * * It was in the following year, and in the beginning of May. The gay world of England was concentra ted in London, and at the entertainments of noble houses there were many beautiful women and many marked men. The Freyherr Von Leisten, after years of absence, had appeared again, his mysterious and undeniable superiority of mien and influence again yielded to, as before, and again bringing to his feet the homage and deference of the crowd he moved among. To h is inscrutable power the game of so ciety was easy, and he walked where he would through its barriers of form. He stood one night looking on at a dance. ""A" lady of a noble air was near him, and both were watching the movements of the loveliest woman present, a crea ture in radiant health, apparently about twenty-three, and of matchless fascination of person and manner. Von Leisten turned to the lady near him to inquire her name, but his attention was arrested by the re semblance between her and the object of his admiring curiosity, and he was silent. The lady had bowed before he withdrew his gaze, however. "I think we have met before! 1 she said; but at the next instant a slight flush of displeasure came to her cheek, and she seemed regretting that she had spoken. "Pardon me!" said Von Leisten, "but if the question be not rude do you remember where ?" She hesitated a moment. " I have recalled it since I have spoken," she con tinued ; " but as the remembrance of the person who accompanied you always gives me pain, I would wil lingly have unsaid it. One evening of last year, cros sing the bridge of the Lima, you were walking with Mr. Clay. Pardon me but, though I left Lucca with my daughter on the following morning, and saw you no more, the association, or your appearance, I had imprinted the circumstance on my mind." "And is that Eve Gore?" said Von Leisten, mu singly, gazing oti the beautiful creature now gliding with light step to her mother s side. But the Freyherr s heart was gone to his friend. As the burst of the waltz broke in upon the closing of the quadrille, he offered his hand to the fair girl, and as they moved round to the entrancing music, he murmured in her ear, " He who came to you in the moonlight of Italy will be with you again, if you are alone, at the rising of to-night s late moon. Believe the voice that then speaks to you !" * * * It was with implacable determination that Mrs. Gore refused, to the entreaties of Von Leisten, a re newal of Clay s acquaintance with her daughter. Resentment for the apparent recklessness with which he had once sacrificed her maiden love for an unlaw ful passion scornful unbelief of any change in his character distrust of the future tendency of the powers TSf hi^ genius all mingled together in a hos tility pro^f against persuasion. She had expressed this with all the positiveness of language, when her daughter suddenly entered the room. It was the morning after the ball, and she had risen late. But though subdued and pensive in her air, Von Leisten saw at a glance that she was happy. " Can you bring him to me ?" said Eve, letting her hand remain in Von Leisten s, and bending her deep blue eyes inquiringly on his. And with no argument but tears and caresses, and an unexplained assurance of her conviction of the re pentant purity and love of him to whom her heart was once given, the confiding and strong-hearted girl bent, at last, the stern will that forbade her happi ness. Her mother unclasped the slight arms from her neck, and gave her hand in silent consent to Von Leisten. The Freyherr stood a moment with his eyes fixed on the ground. The color fled from his cheeks, and his brow moistened. "I have called him," he said " he will be here !" An hour elapsed, and Clay entered the house. He had risen from a bed of sickness, and came, pale and in terror for the spirit-summons was powerful. But Von Leisten welcomed him at the door with a smile, and withdrew the mother from the room, and left Er nest alone with his future bride the first union, save in spirit, after years of separation. THE MARQUIS IN PETTICOATS. 25 THE MARQUIS IN PETTICOATS (THE OUTLINE FROM A FRENCH MEMOIR.) I INTRODUCE you at once to the Marquis de la Che tardie a diplomatist who figured largely in the gay age of Louis XV. and the story is but one of the illuminated pages of the dark book of diplomacy. Charles de la Chetardie appeared for the first time to the eyes of the king at a masquerade ball, given at head of the beautiful stranger, appointed her, by one of those sudden whims of preference against which her ministers had so much trouble to guard, lectrice intime et particuliere in short, confidential personal attendant. The blushes of the confused marquis, who g...^.. ~v was unprepared for so affectionate a reception, served Versailles, under the auspices of la belle Pompadour, rather to heighten the disguise, and old Bestucheff He was dressed as a young lady of high rank, making her debut ; and, so perfect was his acting, and the de ception altogether, that Louis became enamored of the disguised marquis, and violently excited the jealousy of " Madame," by his amorous attentions. An eclaircissement, of course, took place, and the re sult was a great partiality for the marquis s society, and his subsequent employment, in and out of petti- bowed himself out with a compliment to the beauty of Mademoiselle de Beaumont, veiled in a diplomatic congratulation to her imperial mistress. Elizabeth was forty and a little passee, but she still had pretensions, and was particularly fond of beauty in her attendants, female as well as male. Her favor ite, of her personal suite, at the time of the arrival of the marquis, was an exquisite little creature who had coats, in many a scheme of state diplomacy and royal | been sent to her, as a compliment to this particular taste, by the Dutchess of Mecklenberg-Strelitz a kind of German "Fenella," or " Mignon," by the name of Nadege Stein. Not much below the middle size, Nadege was a model of symmetrical proportion, and amusement. La Chetardie was at this time just eighteen. He was very slight, and had remarkably small hands and feet, and the radiant fairness of his skin and the luxu riant softness of his profuse chestnut curls, might justly have been the envy of the most delicate woman. He was, at first, subjected to some ridicule for his effeminacy, but the merry courtiers were soon made aware, that, under this velvet fragility lay concealed the strength and ferocity of the tiger. The grasp of his small hand was like an iron vice, and his singular activity, and the cool courage which afterward gave [ him a brilliant career on the battle-field, established I f very extraordinary beauty. She had been carefully educated for her present situation, and was highly accomplished ; a fine reader, and a singularly sweet musician and dancer. The tzarine s passion for this lovely attendant was excessive, and the arrival of a new favorite of the same sex was looked upon with some pleasure by the eclipsed remainder of the palace idlers. Elizabeth summoned Nadege, and committed Mad- him, in a very short time, as the most formidable |j emoiselle de Beaumont temporarily to her charge; swordsman of the court. His ferocity, however, lay deeply concealed in his character, and, unprovoked, he was the gayest and most brilliant of merry com panions. This was the age of occult and treacherous diplo macy, and the court of Russia, where Louis would fain have exercised an influence (private as well as po litical in its results), was guarded by an implacable Argus, in the person of the prime minister, Bestucheff. Aided by Sir Hambuiy Williams, the English ambas sador, one of the craftiest men of that crafty period, he had succeeded for some years in defeating every at tempt at access to the imperial ear by the secret emis saries of France. The sudden appearance of La Chetardie, his cool self-command, and his successful personation of a female, suggested a new hope to the king, however; and, called to Versailles by royal man date, the young marquis was taken into cabinet confi dence, and a secret mission to St. Petersburg!), in petticoats, proposed to him and accepted. With his instructions and secret despatches stitched into his corsets, and under the ostensible protection of a scientific man, who was to present him to the tzarine as a Mademoiselle de Beaumont, desirous of entering the service of Elizabeth, the marquis reached St. Pe tersburg without accident or adventure. The young lady s guardian requested an audience through Bestu cheff, and having delivered the open letters recom mending her for her accomplishments to the imperial protection, he begged leave to continue on his scien tific tour to the central regions of Russia. Conge was immediately granted, and on the disap pearance of the savant, and before the departure of Bestucheff, the tzarine threw off all ceremony, and pinching the cheeks and imprinting a kiss on the fore- but the same mysterious magnetism which had reached the heart of the tzarine, seemed to kindle, quite as promptly, the affections of her attendant. Nadege was no sooner alone with her new friend, than she jumped to her neck, smothered her with kisses, called her by every endearing epithet, and overwhelmed her with questions, mingled with the most childlike ex clamations of wonder at her own inexplicable love for a stranger. In an hour, she had shown to the new demoiselle all the contents of the little boudoir in which she lived ; talked to her of her loves and hates at the Russian court ; of her home in Mecklenberg, and her present situation in short, poured out her heart with the naif abandon of a child. The young marquis had never seen so lovely a creature; and, responsibly as he felt his difficult and delicate situation, he returned the affection so innocently lavished upon him, and by the end of this first fatal hour, was irrecoverably in love. And, gay as his life had been at the French court, it was the first, and subsequently proved to be the deep est, passion of his life. On the tzarine s return to her private apartment, she summoned her new favorite, and superintended, with condescending solicitude, the arrangements for hei palace lodging. Nadege inhabited a small tower ad joining the bedroom of her mistress, and above this was an unoccupied room, which, at the present sug gestion of the fairy little attendant, was allotted to the new-comer. The staircase opened by one door into the private gardens, and by the opposite, into the cor ridor leading immediately to the imperial chamber. The marquis s delicacy would fain have made some objection to this very intimate location ; but he could hazard nothing against the interests of his sovereign, I and be trusted to a speedy termination of his disguise THE MARQUIS IN PETTICOATS. with the attainment of his object. Meantime, the close neighborhood of the fair Nadege was not the j most intolerable of necessities. The marquis s task was a very difficult one. He I was instructed, before abandoning his disguise and de livering his secret despatches, to awaken the interest of the tzarine on the two subjects to which the docu ments had reference : viz., a former partiality of her j majesty for Louis, and a formerly discussed project of seating the Prince de Conti on the throne of Poland. Bestucheff had so long succeeded in cutting off all approach of these topics to the ear of the tzarine, that j her majesty had probably forgotten them altogether. W^eks passed, and the opportunities to broach these delicate subjects had been inauspiciously rare. Mad emoiselle de Beaumont, it is true, had completely eclipsed the favorite Nadege; and Elizabeth, in her hours of relaxation from state affairs, exacted the con stant attendance of the new favorite in her private apartments. But the almost constant presence of some other of the maids of honor, opposed continual obstacles and interruptions, and the tzarine herself was not always disposed to talk of matters more seri ous than the current trifles of the hour. She was extremely indolent in her personal habits; and often reclining at length upon cushions on the floor of her boudoir, she laid her imperial head in the lap of the embarrassed demoiselle, and was soothed to sleep by reading and the bathing of her temples. And during this period, she exacted frequently of the marquis, with a kind of instinctive mistrust, promises of continuance for life in her personal service. But there were sweeter hours for the enamored La Chetardie than those passed in the presence of his partial and imperial mistress. Encircled by sentinels, and guarded from all intrusion of other eyes, in the inviolable sanctuary of royalty, the beautiful Nadege, impassioned she knew not why, in her love for her new companion, was ever within call, and happy in devoting to him all her faculties of caressing endear ment. He had not yet dared to risk the interests of his sovereign by a disclosure of his sex, even in the confidence of love. He could not trust Nadege to play so difficult a part as that of possessor of so em barrassing a secret in the presence of the shrewd and observing tzarine. A betrayal, too, would at once put an end to his happiness. With the slight arm of the fair and relying creature about his waist, and her head pressed close against his breast, they passed the balmy- nights of the Russian summer in pacing the flowery alleys of the imperial garden, discoursing, with but one reserve, on every subject that floated to their lips. It required, however, all the self-control of La Che tardie, and all the favoring darkness of the night, to con ceal his smiles at the naive confessions of the uncon scious girl, and her wonderings at the peculiarity of her feelings. She had thought, hitherto, that there were affections in her nature which could only be called forth by a lover. Yet now, the thought of caressing another than her friend of repeating to any human ear, least of all to a man, those new-born vows of love filled her with alarm and horror. She felt that she had given her heart irrevocably away and to a woman ! Ah, with what delirious, though silent passion, La Chetardie drew her to his bosom, and, with the pres sure of his lips upon hers, interrupted those sweet confessions ! Yet the time at last drew near for the waking from this celestial dream. The disguised diplomatist had found his opportunity, and had successfully awakened in Elizabeth s mind both curiosity and interest as to the subjects of the despatches still sewed safely in his corsets. There remained nothing for him now but to seize a favorable opportunity, and, with the delivery of his missives, to declare his sex to the tzarine. There was risk to life and liberty in this, but the marquis knew not fear, and he thought but of its consequences to his love. In La Chetardie s last interview with the savant who conducted him to Russia, his male attire had been successfully transferred from one portmanteau to the other, and it was now in his possession, ready for the moment of need. With his plans brought to within a single night of the denouement, he parted from the tzarine, having asked the imperial permission for an hour s private interview on the morrow, and, with gen tle force excluding Nadege from his apartment, he dressed himself in his proper costume, and cut open the warm envelope of his despatches. This done, he threw his cloak over him, and, with a dark lantern in his hand, sought Nadege in the garden. He had de termined to disclose himself to her, renew his vows of love in his proper guise, and arrange, while he had access and opportunity, some means for uniting their destinies hereafter. As he opened the door of the turret, Nadege flew up the stair to meet him, and observing the cloak in the faint glimmer of the stars, she playfully endeavored to envelope herself in it. But, seizing her hands, La Chetardie turned and glided backward, drawing her after him toward a small pavilion in the remoter part of the garden. Here they had never been inter rupted, the empress alone having the power to intrude upon them, and La Chetardie felt safe in devoting this place and time to the double disclosure of his secret and his suppressed passion. Persuading her with difficulty to desist from putting her arms about him and sit down without a caress, he retreated a few steps, and in the darkness of the pa vilion, shook down his imprisoned locks to their mas- I culine abandon, threw off his cloak, and drew up the j blind of his lantern. The scream of surprise, which | instantly parted from the lips of Nadege, made him regret his imprudence in not having prepared her for I the transformation, but her second thought was mirth, [ for she could believe it of course to be nothing but a playful masquerade; and with delighted laughter she I sprang to his neck, and overwhelmed him with her kisses another voice, however, joining very unexpect edly in the laughter ! The empress stood before them ! For an instant, with all his self-possession, La Che tardie was confounded and dismayed. Siberia, the knout, the scaffold, flitted before his eyes, and Nadege was the sufferer ! But a glance at the face of the tzarine reassured him. She, too, took it for a girlish, masquerade ! But the empress, unfortunately, was not disposed to have a partner in her enjoyment of the society of this I new apparition of "hose and doublet." She ordered Nadege to her turret, with one of those petulant com mands which her attendants understood to admit of no delay, and while the eclipsed favorite disappeared with the tears of unwilling submission in her soft eyes, La Chetardie looked after her with the anguish of eternal separation at his heart, for a presentiment crowded irresistibly upon him that he should never see her more ! The empress was in slippers and role de nuit, and, as if fate had determined that this well-kept secret should not survive the hour, her majesty laid her arm within that of her supposed masquerader, and led the way to the palace. She was wakeful, and wished to be read to sleep. And, with many a compliment to the beauty of her favorite in male attire, and many a playful caress, she arrived at the door of her chamber. But the marquis could go no farther. He had hith erto been spared the embarrassment of passing this sacred threshold, for the passce empress had secrets of toilet for the embellishment of her person, which she trusted only to the eyes of an antiquated attend ant. La Chetardie had never passed beyond the bow- THE MARQUIS IN PETTICOATS. 27 doir which was between the antechamber and the bed room, and the time had come for the disclosure of his secret. He fell on his knees and announced himself a man! Fortunately they were alone. Incredulous at first, the empress listened to his asseverations, however, with more amusement than displeasure, and the im mediate delivery of the despatches, with the commen dations of the disguised ambassador by his royal mas ter to the forgiveness and kindness of the empress, amply secured his pardon. But it was on condition that he should resume his disguise and remain in her service. Alone in his tower (for Nadege had disappeared, and he knew enough of the cruelty of Elizabeth to dread the consequences to the poor girl of venturing on di rect inquiries as to her fate), La Chetardie after a few weeks fell ill ; and fortunate, even at this price, to escape from the silken fetters of the enamored tzarine, he departed under the care of the imperial physician, for the more genial climate of France not without reiterated promises of return, however, and offers, in that event, of unlimited wealth and advancement. But, as the marquis made his way slowly toward Vienna, a gleam of light dawned on his sadness. The Princess Sophia Charlotte was newly affianced to George the Third of England, and this daughter of the house of Mecklenberg had been the playmate of Nadege Stein, from infancy till the time when Nadege was sent to the tzarine by the Dutchess of Mecklen berg. Making a confidant of the kind physician who accompanied him, La Chetardie was confirmed, by the good man s better experience and knowledge, in the belief that Nadege had shared the same fate of every female of the court who had ever awakened the jeal ousy of the empress. She was doubtless exiled to Siberia; but, as she had committed no voluntary fault, it was probably without other punishment ; and, with a playmate on the throne of England, she might be demanded and recovered ere long, in all her freshness and beauty. Yet the recent fate of the fair Eudoxie Lapoukin, who, for an offence but little more distaste ful to the tzarine, had been pierced through the tongue with hot iron, whipped with the knout, and exiled for life to Siberia, hung like a cloud of evil augury over his mind. The marquis suddenly determined that he would see the affianced princess, and plead with her for her friend, before the splendors of a throne should make her in accessible. The excitement of this hope had given him new life, and he easily persuaded his attendant, as they entered the gates of Vienna, that he required his attendance no farther. Alone with his own servants, he resumed his female attire, and directed his course to Mecklenberg-Strelitz. The princess had maintained an intimate .corre- spoudence with her playmate up to the time of her betrothal, and the name of Mademoiselle de Beau mont was passport enough. La Chetardie had sent forward his servant, on arriving at the town, in the neighborhood of the ducal residence, and the reply to his missive was brought back by one of the officers in attendance, with orders to conduct the demoiselle to apartments in the castle. He was received with all honor at the palace-gate by a chamberlain in waiting, who led the way to a suite of rooms adjoining those of the princess, where, after being left alone for a few minutes, he was familiarly visited by the betrothed girl, and overwhelmed, as formerly by her friend, with most embarrassing caresses. In the next moment, however, the door was hastily flung open, and Nadege, like a stream of light, fled through the room, hung upon the neck of the speechless and overjoyed mar quis, and ended with convulsions of mingled tears and laughter. The moment that he could disengage him- | self from her arms, La Chetardie requested to be left I for a moment alone. He felt the danger and impro- I priety of longer maintaining his disguise. He closed his door on the unwilling demoiselles, hastily changed his dress, and, with his sword at his side, entered the I adjoining reception-room of the princess, where Made- j moiselle de Beaumont was impatiently awaited. The scene which followed, the mingled confusion and joy of Nadege, the subsequent hilarity and mas querading at the castle, and the particulars of the marriage of the Marquis de la Chetardie to his fair I fellow maid-of-honor, must be left to the reader s im- ; agination. We have room only to explain the reap- ! pearance of Nadege at Mecklenberg. Nadege retired to her turret at the imperative com- j mand of the empress, sad and troubled ; but waited I vvakefully and anxiously for the re-entrance of her dis- ! guised companion. In the course of an hour, how- j ever, the sound of a sentinel s musket, set down at her I door, informed her that she was a prisoner. She knew I Elizabeth, and the Dutchess of Mecklenberg, with an j equal knowledge of the tzarine s character, had provi- i ded her with a resource against the imperial cruelty, I should she have occasion to use it. She crept to the [ battlements of the tower, and fastened a handkerchief ij to the side looking over the public square. The following morning, at daylight, Nadege was n summoned to prepare for a journey, and, in an hour, j she was led between soldiers to a carriage at tbe pal- | ace-gate, and departed by the northern egress of the j city, with a guard of three mounted cossacks. In two I hours from that time, the carnage was overtaken, the ! guard overpowered, and the horses heads turned in j the direction of Moscow. After many difficulties and i dangers, during which she found herself under the I charge of a Mecklenbergian officer in the service of | the tzarine, she reached Vienna in safety, and was im- j mediately concealed by her friends in the neighbor- | hood of the palace at Mecklenberg, to remain hidden j till inquiry should be over. The arrival of Mademoi- | selle de Beaumont, for the loss of whose life or liberty j she had incessantly wept with dread and apprehension, : was joyfully communicated to her by her friends ; and j| so the reader knows some of the passages in the early |j life of the far-famed beauty in the French court in j the time of Louis XV. the Marchioness de la Che- i! tardie. 28 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST." "BEAUTY AND THE BEAST;" OR, HANDSOME MRS. TITTON AND HER PLAIN HUSBAND. 1 That man i the world who shall report he ha A better wife, let him in naught be trusted For speaking false in that." Henry VIII. I HAVE always been very fond of the society of portrait-painters. Whether it is, that the pursuit of a beautiful and liberal art softens their natural quali ties, or that, from the habit of conversing while en grossed with the pencil, they like best that touch-and- go talk which takes care of itself; or, more probably still, whether the freedom with which they are ad mitted behind the curtains of vanity and affection gives a certain freshness and truth to their views of things around them certain it is, that, in all countries, their rooms are the most agreeable of haunts, and they themselves most enjoyable of cronies. I had chanced in Italy to make the acquaintance of S , an English artist of considerable cleverness in his profession, but more remarkable for his frank good breeding and his abundant good nature. Four years after, I had the pleasure of renewing my inter course with him in London, where he was flourishing, quite up to his deserving, as a portrait-painter. His rooms were hard by one of the principal thorough fares, and, from making an occasional visit, I grew to frequenting them daily, often joining him at his early breakfast, and often taking him out with me to drive whenever we changed to tire of our twilight stroll. While rambling in Hyde Park, one evening, I men tioned for the twentieth time, a singularly ill-assorted couple I had once or twice met at his room a woman of superb beauty attended by a very inferior-looking and ill-dressed man. S had, previously, with a smile at my speculations, dismissed the subject rather crisply ; but, on this occasion, 1 went into some surmises as to the probable results of such " pairing without matching," and he either felt called upon to defend the lady, or made my misapprehension of her character an excuse for telling me what he knew about her. He began the story in the Park, and ended it over a bottle of wine in the Hayinarket of course with many interruptions and digressions. Let me see if I can tie his broken threads together. "That lady is Mrs. Fortescue Titton, and the gentleman you so much disparage is, if you please, the incumbrance to ten thousand a year the money as much at her service as the husband by whom she gets it. Whether he could have won her had he been " Bereft and gelded of his patrimony," I will not assert, especially to one who looks on them as Beauty and the Beast; but that she loves him, or at least prefers to him no handsomer man, I may say I have been brought to believe, in the way of my profession." "You have painted her, then?" I asked rather eagerly, thinking I might get a sketch of her face to take with me to another country. " No, but I have painted him and for her and it is not a case of Titania and Bottom, either. She is quite aware he is a monster, and wanted his picture for a reason you would never divine. But I must be gin at the beginning. " After you left me in Italy, I was employed by the earl of , to copy one or two of his favorite pictures in the Vatican, and that brought me rather well acquainted with his son. Lord George was a gay youth, and a very look-and-die style of fellow, and, I as much from admiration of his beauty as anything else, I asked him to sit to me, on our return to Lon- j don. I painted him very fantastically in an Albanian I cap and oriental morning-gown and slippers, smoking a narghile the room in which he sat, by the way, being a correct portrait of his own den, a perfect museum of costly luxury. It was a pretty gorgeous t\irn-out in the way of color, and was saverely criticised, but still a good deal noticed for I sent it to the ex hibition. " I was one day going into Somerset-house, when Lord George hailed me from his cab. He wished to suggest some alteration in his picture, or to tell me of some criticism upon it, I forget exactly what; but we went up together. Directly before the portrait, gazing at it with marked abstraction, stood a beautiful woman, quite alone ; and as she occupied the only point where the light was favorable, we waited a mo ment till she should pass on Lord George, of course, rather disposed to shrink from being recognised as the original. The woman s interest in the picture seemed rather to increase, however, and what with variations of the posture of her head, and pulling at her glove fingers, and other female indications of restlessness and enthusiasm, I thought I was doing her no injus tice by turning to my companion with a congratulatory smile. " It seems a case, by Jove ! said Lord George, try ing to look as if it was a matter of very simple occur rence ; and she s as fine a creature as I ve seen this season! Eh, old boy? we must run her down, and see where she burrows and there s nobody with her, by good luck! "A party entered just then, and passed between her and the picture. She looked annoyed, 1 thought, but started forward and borrowed a catalogue of a little girl, and we could see that she turned to the last page, on which the portrait was numbered, with, of course, the name and address of the painter. She made a memorandum on one of her cards, and left the house. Lord George followed, and I too, as far as the door, where I saw her get into a very stylishly appointed carriage and drive away, followed closely by the cab of my friend, whom I had declined to accompany. "You wouldn t have given very heavy odds against his chance, would you?" said S , after a mo ment pause. " No, indeed !" I answered quite sincerely. " Well, I was at work, the next morning, glazing a picture I had just finished, when the servant brought up the card of Mrs. Fortescue Titton. I chanced to be alone, so the lady was shown at once into my paint ing room, and lo ! the incognita of Somerset-House. The plot thickens, thought I ! She sat down in my subject chair, and, faith! her beauty quite dazzled me ! Her first smile but you have seen her, so I ll not bore you with a description. " Mrs. Titton blushed on opening her errand to me, first inquiring if 1 was the painter of No 403 in the exhibition, and saying some very civil things about the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST." 29 picture. I mentioned that it was a portrait of Lord George (for his name was not in the catalogue), and I thought she blushed still more confusedly but that, I think now. was fancy, or at any rate had nothing to do with feeling for his lordship. It was natural enough for me to be mistaken, for she was very particular in her inquiries as to the costume, furniture, and little belongings of the picture, and asked me among other things, whether it was a flattered like ness ;_this last question very pointedly, too ! " She arose to go. Was I at leisure, and could J sketch a head for her, and when ? " I appointed the next day, expecting of course that the subject was the lady herself, and scarcely slept with thinking of it, and siarved myself at breakfast to have a clear eye, and a hand wide awake. And at ten she came, with her Mr. Fortescue Titton! I was sorry to see that she had a husband, for 1 had indulged myself wjth a vague presentiment that she was a widow ; but I begged him to take a chair, and prepar ed the platform for my beautiful subject. " Will you take your seat ? I asked, with all my suavity, when my palette was ready. " My dear, said she, turning to her husband, and pointing to the chair, Mr. S is ready for you. " I begged pardon for a moment, crossed over to Verey s and bolted a beef-steak ! A cup of coffee, and a glass of Cura^oa, and a little walk round Hanover- square, and I recovered from the shock a little. It went very hard, I give you my word. " I returned, and took a look, for the first time, at Mr. Titton. You have seen him, and have some idea of what his portrait might be, considered as a pleasure to the artist what it might promise, 1 should rather say, for, after all, I ultimately enjoyed working at it, quite aside from the presence of Mrs. Titton. It was the ugliest face in the world, but full of good-nature ; and, as I looked closer into it, I saw, among its coarse features, lines of almost feminine delicacy, and capa bilities of enthusiasm of which the man himself was probably unconscious. Then a certain helpless style of dress was a wet blanket to him. Rich from his cradle, I suppose his qualities had never been needed on the surface. His wife knew them. " From time to time, as I worked, Mrs. Titton came and looked over my shoulder. With a natural desire to please her, I, here and there, softened a harsh line, and was going on to flatter the likeness not as suc cessful as I could wish, however, for it is much easier to get a faithful likeness than to flatter without destroy ing it. " Mr. S , said she, laying her hand on my arm as I thinned away the lumpy rim of his nostril, I want, first, a literal copy of my husband s features. Suppose, with this idea, you take a fresh canvass ? " Thoroughly mystified by the whole busmess, I did as she requested : and, in two sittings, made a j likeness of Titton which would have given you a face- j ache. He shrugged his shoulders at it, and seemed ; very glad when the bore of sitting was over; but they | seemed to understand each other very well, or, if not, | he reserved hisquestions till there could be no restraint upon the answer. He seemed a capital fellow, and I liked him exceedingly. "I asked if I should frame the picture and send it j home ? No ! I was to do neither. If I would be kind | enough not to show it, nor to mention it to any one, j and come the next day and dine with them enfamillc., \ Mrs. Titton would feel very much obliged to me. And this dinner was followed up by breakfasts and lunches and suppers, and, for a fortnight, I really lived with the Tittons and pleas;inter people to live with, by Jove, you haven t seen in your travels, though you are a picked man of countries ! " I should mention, by the way, that I was always placed opposite Titton at table, and that he was a good deal with me, one way and another, taking me out, as you do, for a stroll, calling and sitting with me when I was at work, etc. And as to Mrs. Titton if I did not mistrust your arriere pensec, I would enlarge a little on my intimacy with Mrs. Titton! But, believe me when I tell you, that, without a ray of flirtation, we became as cozily intimate as brother and sister." " And what of Lord George, all this time ?" I asked. " Oh, Lord George ! Well, Lord George of course had no difficulty in making Mrs. Titton s acquaintance, though they were not quite in the same circle, and he had been presented to her, and had seen her at a party or two, where he managed to be invited on purpose but of this, for a while, I heard nothing. She had not yet seen him at her own house, and I had not chanced to encounter him. But let me go on with my story. " Mrs. Titton sent for me to come to her, one morning rather early. I found her in her boudoir, in a neglige morning-dress, and looking adorably beauti ful, and as pure as beautiful, you smiling villain ! She seemed to have something on her mind about which she was a little embarrassed, but I knew her too well to lay any unction to my soul. We chatted about the weather a few moments, and she came to the point. You will see that she was a woman of some talent, mon ami ! " Have you looked at my husband s portrait since you finished it ? she asked. " No, indeed! I replied rather hastily but im mediately apologized. " Oh, if I had not been certain you would not, she said with a smile, 1 should have requested it, for I wished you to forget it, as far as possible. And now I let me tell you what I want of you! You have got, i on canvass, a likeness of Fortescue as the world sees j him. Since taking it, however, you have seen him I more intimately, and and like his face better, do | you not ? " Certainly ! certainly ! I exclaimed, in all sincerity. " Thank you ! If I mistake not, then, you do not, ! when thinking of him, call up to your mind the i features in your portrait, but a face formed rather of i his good qualities, as you have learned to trace them j in his expression. " True, I said, very true ! " Now, then, she continued, leaning over to me very earnestly, I want you to paint a new picture, and without departing from the real likeness, which you will have to guide you, breathe into it the expres sion you have in your ideal likeness. Add, to what the world sees, what I see, what you see, what all who | love him see, in his plain features. Idealize it, spiritualize it and without lessening the resemblance. Can this be done ? " 1 thought it could. I promised to do my utmost. " 1 shall call and see you as you progress in it, she said, and now, if you have nothing better to do, i stay to lunch, and come out with me in the carriage. I want a little of your foreign taste in the selection of some pretty nothings for a gentleman s toilet. " We passed the morning in making what I should consider very extravagent purchases for anybody but a prince royal, winding up with some delicious cabinet pictures and some gems of statuary all suited only, 1 should say, to the apartments of a fastidious luxuriast. I was not yet at the bottom of her secret. "T went to work upon the new picture with the zeal always given to an artist by an appreciative and 1 confiding employer. She called every day and made important suggestions, and at last I finished it to her satisfaction and mine; and, without speaking of it as a work of art, I may give you my opinion that Titton , will scarcely be more embellished in the other world t i ia t is, if it be true, as the divines tell us, that our mortal likeness will be so far preserved, though im proved upon, that we shall be recognisable by our friends. Still I was to paint a third picture a cabinet 30 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST." full length and for this the other two were but studies, and so intended by Mrs. Fortescue Titton. It was to be an improvement upon Lord George s portrait (which of course had given her the idea), and was to represent her husband in a very costly, and an exceed ingly recherche morning costume dressing-gown, slippers, waistcoat, and neckcloth, worn with perfect elegance, and representing a Titton with a faultless attitude (in a fauteuil, reading), a faultless exterior, and around him the most sumptuous appliances of dressing-room luxury. This picture cost me a great deal of vexation and labor, for it was emphatically a fancy picture poor Titton never having appeared in that character, even by particular desire. I finished it however, and again, to her satisfaction. I afterward added some finishing touches to the other two, and sent them home, appropriately framed according to very minute instructions." " How long ago was this ?" I asked. " Three years," replied S , musing over his wine. " Well the sequel ?" said I, a little impatient. " I was thinking how I should let it break upon you, as it took effect upon her acquaintances for, under stand, Mrs. Titton is too much of a diplomatist to do anything obviously dramatic in this age of ridicule. She knows very well that any sudden flare-up of her husband s consequence any new light on his charac ter obviously calling for attention would awaken speculation and set to work the watchful anatomizers of the body fashionable. Let me see! I will tell you what I should have known about it, had I been only an ordinary acquaintance not in the secret, and not the painter of the pictures. " Some six months after the finishing of the last portrait, I was at a large ball at their house. Mrs. Titton s beauty, I should have told you, and the style in which they lived, and very possibly a little of Lord George s good will, had elevated them from the wealthy and respectable level of society to the fashionable and exclusive. All the best people went there. As I was going in, I overtook, at the head of the stairs, a very clever little widow, an acquaintance of mine, and she honored me by taking my arm and keeping it for a promenade through the rooms. We made our bow to Mrs. Titton and strolled across the reception room, where the most conspicuous object, dead facing us, with a flood of light upon it, was my first veracious portrait of Titton ! As I was not known as the artist, I indulged myself in some commonplace exclamations of horror. " Do not look at that, said the widow, you will distress poor Mrs. Titton. What a quiz that clever husband of hers must be to insist on exposing such a caricature! " How insist upon it ? I asked. " Why, have you never seen the one in her boudoir? Come with me! " We made our way through the apartments to the little retreat lined with silk, which the morning lounge of the fair mistress of the house. There was but one picture, with a curtain drawn carefully across it my second portrait! We sat down on the luxurious cushions, and the widow went off into a discussion of it and the original, pronouncing it a perfect likeness, not at all flattered, and very soon begging me to re draw the curtain, lest we should be surprised by Mr. Titton himself. " And suppose we were? said I. " Why, he is such an oddity ! replied the widow lowering her tone. They say that in this very house he has a suite of apartments entirely to himself, furnish ed with a taste and luxury really wonderful ! There are two Mr. Tittons, my dear friend ! one a perfect Sybarite, very elegant in his dress when he chooses to be, excessively accomplished and fastidious, and brilliant and fascinating to a degree ! (and in this character they say he won that superb creature for a wife), and the other Mr. Titton is just the slovenly monster that everybody sees ! Isn t it odd ! " Queer enough ! said I, affecting great astonish ment ; pray, have you ever been into these mysterious apartments ? " No ! they say only his wife and himself and one confidential servant ever pass the threshold. Mrs. I Titton don t like to talk about it though one would think she could scarcely object to her husband s being thought better of. It s pride on his part sheer pride and I can understand the feeling very well ! He s a very superior man, and he has made up his mind that the world thinks him very awkward and ugly, and he takes a pleasure in showing the world that he don t care a rush for its opinion, and has re sources quite sufficient within himself. That s the reason that atrocious portrait is hung up in the best room, and this good-looking one covered up with a curtain ! I suppose lids wouldn t be here if he could have his own way, and if his wife wasn t so much in love with him ! " This, I assure you," said S , " is the im pression throughout their circle of acquaintances. The Tittons themselves maintain a complete silence on the subject. Mr. Fortescue Titton is considered a very accomplished man, with a very proud and very secret contempt for the opinions of the world dressing badly on purpose, silent and simple by design, and only caring to show himself in his real character to his beautiful wife, who is thought to be completely in love with him, and quite excusable for it ! What do you think of the woman s diplomatic talents?" " I think I should like to know her," said I; " but what says Lord George to all this ?" " I had a call from Lord George not long ago," replied S , " and for the first time since our chat at Somerset-House, the conversation turned upon the Tittons. "Devilish sly of you ! said his lordship, turning to me half angry, why did you pretend not to know the woman at Somerset-House ? You might have saved me lots of trouble and money, for I was a month or two finding out what sort of people they were feeing the servants and getting them called on and invited here and there all with the idea that it was a rich donkey with a fine toy that didn t belong to him !" " Well! exclaimed I " Well! not at all well ! I made a great ninny of myself, with that satirical slyboots, old Titton, laughing at me all the time, when you, that had painted him in his proper character and knew what a deep devil he was, might have saved me with but half a hint ! " You have been in the lady s boudoir then ! "Yes, and in the gentleman s sanctum sanctorum! Mrs. Titton sent for me about some trumpery thing or other, and when I called, the servant showed me in there by mistake. There was a great row in the house about it, but I was there long enough to see what a monstrous nice time the fellow has of it, all to him- ij self, and to see your picture of him in his private I character. The picture you made of me was only a jl copy of that, you sly traitor! And I suppose Mrs. j Titton didn t like your stealing from hers, did she | for, I take it that was what ailed her at the exhibition, : when you allowed me to be so humbugged ! " I had a good laugh, but it was as much at (he ! quiet success of Mrs. Titton s tactics as at Lord j George s discomfiture. Of course, I could not un- !| deceive him. And now," continued S , very good-naturedly, "just ring for a pen and ink, and I ll write a note to Mrs. Titton, asking leave to bring you there this evening, for it s her night at home, and sta s worth seeing, if my pictures, which you will see there, are not." BROWN S DAY WITH THE MIMPSONS. 31 BROWN S DAY WITH THE MIMPSONS. WE got down from an omnibus in Charing-Cross. " Sovereign or ha penny ?" said the cad, rubbing the coin between his thumb and finger. " Sovereign, of course !" said B confidently, pocketing the change which the man had ready for the emergency in a bit of brown paper. It was a muggy, misty, London twilight. I was other sort of people. of engagements required some little variation. There s a toujours perdrix, even among lords and ladies, par ticularly when you belong as much to their sphere, and are as likely to become a part of it, as the fly re volving in aristocratic dust on the wheel of my lord s carriage. I thought, perhaps, I had better see some coming up to town from Blackheath, and in the crowded vehicle had chanced to encounter my com patriot B (call it Brown), who had been lion izing the Thames tunnel. In the course of conver sation, it came out that we were both on the town for our dinner, and as we were both guests at the Trav eller s Club, we had pulled the omnibus-string at the nearest point, and, after the brief dialogue recorded above, strolled together down Pall Mall. As we sat waiting for our fish, one of us made a re- I had, under a presse papier on the table, about a hundred letters of introduction the condemned re mainder, after the selection, by advice, of four or five only. I determined to cut this heap like a pack of cards, and follow up the trump. -"John Mimpson, Esq., House of Mimpson and Phipps, Mark s Lane, London. " The gods had devoted me to the acquaintance of Mr. (and probably Mrs.) John Mimpson. After turn- ng over a deal of rubbish in my mind, I remembered mark as to" the" difference o f/cel between gold and that the letter had been given me five years before by copper coin, and Brown, fishing in his pocket for||an American merchant probably the correspondent money to try the experiment, discovered that the doubt" of the cad was well founded, for he had uncon sciously passed a halfpenny for a sovereign. " People are very apt to take your coin at your own valuation!" said Brown, with a smile of some mean ing, "and when they are in the dark as to your original coinage (as the English are with regard to Americans abroad), it is as easy to pass for gold as for copper. Indeed, you may pass for both in a day, as I have lately had experience. Remind me presently to tell you how. Here comes the fried sole, and it s trouble some talking when there are bones to fight shy of the flow of sole 1 to the contrary notwithstanding." I will take advantage of the hiatus to give the reader a slight idea of my friend, as a preparation for his story. Brown was the mirror of courtesy." He was also the mirror of vulgarity. And he was the of everything els of Englishmen, from peers to green-gro he had a visit to England in prospect, he garty. n e was e mrror He had that facility of adapta to the society he was in, which made him seem born for that society, and that only ; and, without cal culation or forethought by an unconscious instinct, indeed he cleverly reflected the man and manners before him. The result was a popularity of a most varied quality. Brown was a man of moderate for tune and no profession. He had travelled for some years on the continent, and had encountered all classes rocers, and as seldom part ed from the most chance acquaintance without a vol unteer of letters of introduction, exchange of addres ses, and similar tokens of having "pricked through his caslle wall." When he did arrive in London, at last, it was with a budget like the postman s on Val entine s day, and he had only to deliver one letter in a score to be put on velvet in any street or square within the bills of mortality. Sagacious enough to know that the gradations of English society have the facility of a cat s back (smooth enough from the head downward), he began with a most noble duke, and at the date of his introduction to the reader, was on the dinner-list of most of the patricians of May Fair. Presuming that you see your man, dear reader, let us come at once to the removal of the cloth. "As I was calling myself to account, the other day, over my breakfast," said Brown, filling his glass and of the firm in Mark s Lane. It was a sealed letter, and said in brackets on the back, Introducing Mr. BrownS I had a mind to give it up and cut again, for I could not guess on what footing I was intro duced, nor did I know what had become of the wri ter nor had I a very clear idea how long a letter of recommendation will hold its virtue. It struck me again that these difficulties rather gave it a zest, and I would abide by the oracle. I dressed, and, as the day was fine, started to stroll leisurely through the Strand and Fleet street, and look into the shop-win dows on my way assuring myself, at least, thus much of diversion in my adventure. " Somewhere about two o clock, I left daylight be hind, and plunged into Mark s Lane. Up one side and down the other Mimpson and Co. at last, on a small brass plate, set in a green baize door. With my unbuttoned coat nearly wiped oft my shoulder by the strength of the pulley, I shoved through, and emerged in a large room, with twenty or thirty clerks perched on high stools, like monkeys in a menagerie. " First door right ! said the nearest man, without raising his eyes from the desk, in reply to my inquiry for Mr. Mimpson. " I entered a closet, lighted by a slanting skylight, in which sat my man. " Mr. John Mimpson ? " Mr. John Mimpson ! " After this brief dialogue of accost, I produced my letter, and had a second s leisure to examine my new friend while he ran his eye over the contents. He was a rosy, well-conditioned, tight-skinned little man, with black hair, and looked like a pear on a chair. (Hang the bothering rhymes!) His legs were com pletely hid under the desk, so that the ascending eye bean with his equaiory line, and whether he had no shoulders or no neck, I could not well decide but it was a tolerably smooth plane from his seat to the top curl of his sinciput. He was scrupulously well dress ed, and had that highly washed look which marks the ! city man in London bent on not betraying his dig- gins by his complexion. "I answered Mr. Mimpson s inquiries about our ; mutual friend with rather a hazardous particularity, ! and assured him he was quite well (I have since dis- 1 covered that he has been dead three years), and con- pushing the bottle , " it occurred to me that my round ji versatiou warmed between us for ten minutes, till we BROWN S DAY WITH THE MIMPSONS. were ready to part sworn friends. I rose to go, anc the merchant seemed very much perplexed. " To-morrow, said he, rubbing the two great busi ness bumps over his eyebrows no yes that is to say, Mrs. Mimpson well, it shall be to-morrow Can you come out to Rose Lodge, and spend the da} to -morrow? " With great pleasure, said I, for I was determinec to follow my trump letter to extremities. " Mrs. Mimpson, he next went on to say, as he wrote down the geography of Rose Lodge Mrs Mimpson expects some friends to-morrow indeed some of her very choice friends. If you come early, you will see more of her than if you just save your dinner. Bring your carpetbag, of course, and stay over night. Lunch at two dine at seven. I can t be there to receive you myself, but I will prepare M Mimpson to save you all trouble of introduction. Hampstead road. Good morning, my dear sir. " So, I am in for a suburban bucolic, thought I, as I regained daylight in the neighborhood of the Mansion House. "It turned out a beautiful day, sunny and warm; and had I been sure of my navigation, and sure of my disposition to stay all night, I should have gone out Oy the Hampstead coach, and made the best of my way, carpetbag in hand. I went into Newman s for a postchaise, however, and on showing him the written address, was agreeably surprised to find he knew Rose Lodge. His boys had all been there. "Away I went through the Regent s park, behind the blood-posters, blue jacket and white hat, and, somewhere about one o clock, mounted Hampstead Hill, and in ten minutes thence was at my destination. The postboy was about driving in at the open gate, but I dismounted and sent him back to the inn to leave his horses, and then depositing my bag at the porter s lodge, walked up the avenue. It was a much finer place, altogether, than I expected to see. "Mrs. Mimpson was in the garden. The dashing footman who gave me the information, led me through a superb drawing-room and out at a glass door upon the lawn, and left me to make my own way to the la dy s presence. "It was a delicious spot, and I should have been very glad to ramble about by myself till dinner, but, at a turn in the grand-walk, I came suddenly upon two ladies. " I made my bow, and begged leave to introduce myself as Mr. Brown. "With a very slight inclination of the head, and no smile whatever, one of the ladies asked me if I had walked from town, and begged her companion (with out introducing me to her) to show me in to lunch. The spokester was a stout and tall woman, who had rather an aristocratic nose, and was not handsome, but, to give her her due, she had made a narrow escape of it. She was dressed very showily, and evi dently had great pretensions; but, that she was not at all glad to see Mr. Brown, was as apparent as was at all necessary. As the other, and younger lady, who was to accompany me, however, was very pretty, though dressed very plainly, and had, withal, a look in her eye which assured me she was amused with my unwelcome apparition, I determined, as I should not otherwise have done, to stay it out, and accepted her convoy with submissive civility very much in clined, however, to be impudent to somebody, some how. "The lunch was on a tray in a side-room, and I rang the bell and ordered a bottle of champagne. The servant looked surprised, but brought it, and mean time I was getting through the weather and the other commonplaces, and the lady saying little, was watch ing me very calmly. I liked her looks, however, and was sure she was not a Mimpson. " Hand this to Miss Armstrong ! said I to the foot man, pouring out a glass of champagne. " Miss Bellamy, you mean, sir. " I rose and bowed, and, with as grave a courtesy as I could command, expressed my pleasure at my first introduction to Miss Bellamy through Thomas, the footman! Miss Bellamy burst into a laugh, and was pleased to compliment my American manners, and in ten minutes we were a very merry pair of friends, and she accepted my arm for a stroll through the grounds, carefully avoiding the frigid neighbor hood of Mrs. Mimpson. "Of course I set about picking Miss Bellamy s brains for what information I wanted. She turned out quite the nicest creature I had seen in England | fresh, joyous, natural, and clever ; and as I was deliv- j ered over to her bodily, by her keeper and feeder, she made no scruple of promenading me through the grounds till the dressing-bell four of the most agree able hours I have to record in my travels. "By Miss Bellamy s account, my advent that day was looked upon by Mrs. Mimpson as an enraging calamity. Mrs. Mimpson was, herself, fourth cousin to a Scotch lord, and the plague of her life was the drawback to the gentility of her parties in Mimpson s mercantile acquaintance. She had married the little man for his money, and had thought, by living out of town, to choose her own society, with her hus band for her only incumbrance; but Mimpson vowed that he should be ruined in Mark s Lane, if he did not house and dine his mercantile fraternity and their envoys at Rose Lodge, and they had at last compro mised the matter. No Yankee clerk, or German agent, or person of any description, defiled by trade, was to be invited to the Lodge without a three days premonition to Mrs. Mimpson, and no additions were to be made, whatever, by Mr. M., to Mrs. M s din ners, soirees, matinees, archery parties, suppers, de jeuners, tableaux, or private theatricals. This holy treaty, Mrs. Mimpson presumed, was written with a gad of steel on a leaf of brass inviolable as her cous in s coat-of-arms. "But there was still Ossa on Pelion. The din ner of that day had a diplomatic aim. Miss Mimp son (whom I had not yet seen) was ready to come out, and her mother had embarked her whole soul in the enterprise of bringing about that debut at Al- mack s. Her best card was a certain Lady S , who chanced to be passing a few days in the neigh borhood, and this dinner was in her honor the com pany chosen to impress her with the exclusiveness of the Mimpsons, and the prayer for her ladyship s in fluence (to procure vouchers from one of the patron esses) was to be made, when she was dieted to their request. And all had hitherto worked to a charm. Lady S had accepted Ude had sent his best cook from Crockford s the Belgian charge, and a Swedish attache were coming the day was beautiful, and the Lodge was sitting for its picture ; and on the very morning, when every chair at the table was ticketed and devoted, what should Mr. Mimpson do, but send back a special messenger from the city, to say that he had forgotten to mention to Mrs. M. at breakfast, that he had invited Mr. Brown ! Of course he had forgot ten it, though it would have been as much as his eyes were worth to mention it in person to Mrs. Mimpson. "To this information, which 1 give you in a lump, but which came to light in the course of rather a de sultory conversation, Miss Bellamy thought I had some title, from the rudeness of my reception. It was given in the shape of a very clever banter, it is true, but she was evidently interested to set me right with regard to Mr. Mimpson s good intentions in my behalf, and, as far as that and her own civilities would do it. to apologise for the inhospitality of Rose Lodge. BROWN S DAY WITH THE MIMPSONS. 33 Very kind of the girl for I was passing, recollect, at a most ha penny valuation. "I had made some casual remark touching the ab surdity of Almack s aspirations in general, and Mrs. Mimpson s in particular, and my fair friend, who of course fancied an Almack s ticket as much out of Mr. Brown s reach as the horn of the new moon, took up the defence of Mrs. Mimpson on that point, and un dertook to dazzle my untutored imagination by a pic ture of this seventh heaven as she had heard it de scribed for to herself, she freely confessed, it was not even within the limits of dream-land. I knew this was true of herself, and thousands of highly-educated and charming girls in England; but still, looking at her while she spoke, and seeing what an ornament she would be to any ballroom in the world, I realized, with more repugnance than I had ever felt before, the arbitrary barriers of fashion and aristocracy. As ac cident had placed me in a position to look on the re verse of the shield, I determined, if possible, to 1 let Miss Bellamy judge of its color with the same ad vantage. It is not often that a plebeian like myself has the authority to * Bid the pebbles on the hungry beach Fillip the stars. We were near the open window of the library, and I stepped in and wrote a note to Lady (one of the lady patronesses, and the kindest friend I have in England), asking for three vouchers for the next ball. I had had occasion once or twice before to apply for similar favors, for the countrywomen of my own, passing through London on their travels, and J knew that her ladyship thought no more of granting them than of returning bows in Hyde Park. 1 did not name the ladies for whom the three tickets were intended, wishing to reserve the privilege of handing one to Miss Mimpson, should she turn out civil and presentable. The third, of course, was to Miss Bel lamy s chaperon, whoever that might be, and the party miht be extended to a quartette by the Mon sieur De Trop of the hour cela selon. Quite a dra matic plot wasn t it ? " I knew that Lady was not very well, and would be found at home by the messenger (my post boy), and there was time enough between soup and coffee to go to London and back, even without the spur in his pocket. "The bell rang, and Miss Bellamy took herself off to dress. I went to my carpetbag in the bachelor quarters of the house, and through a discreet entretien with the maid who brought me hot water, became somewhat informed as to my fair friend s position in the family. She was the daughter of a gentleman who had seen better days. They lived in a retired cottage in the neighborhood; and, as Miss Bellamy* and a younger sister were both very highly accomplished, they were usually asked to the Lodge, whenever there was company to be entertained with their music. " I was early in the drawing-room, and found there Mrs. Mimpson and a tall dragoon of a young lady I presumed to be her daughter. She did not introduce me. I had hardly achieved my salutary salaam when Miss Bellamy came in opportunely, and took me off their hands, and as they addressed no conversation to us, we turned over music, and chatted in the corner while the people came in. It was twilight in the re ception-room, and I hoped, by getting on the same side of the table with Lady S (whom I had the honor of knowing), to escape recognizance till we joined the ladies in the drawing-room after dinner. As the guests arrived, they were formally introduced to Miss Mimpson by the mother, and everybody but myself was formally presented to Lady S , the exception not noticeable, of course, among thirty people. Mr. Mimpson came late from the city, poa- 3 jj sibly anxious to avoid a skirmish on the subject of his friend Brown, and he entered the room barely in time to hand Lady S in to dinner. " My tactics were ably seconded by my unconscious ally. I placed myself in such a position at table, that, by a little management, I kept Miss Bellamy s head between me and Lady S , and my name was not so remarkable as to draw attention to me | when called on to take wine with the peccant spouse i J of the Scotch lord s cousin. Meantime I was very | charmingly entertained Miss Bellamy not having, at j all, the fear of Mrs. Mimpson before her eyes, and apparently finding the Yankee supercargo, or cotton clerk, or whatever he might be, quite worth trying her hand upoo. The provender was good, and the wine was enough to verily the apocrypha at least for the il night a man remembering neither sorrow nor debt i| with such glorious claret. " As I was vis-a-vis to Miss Mimpson, and only two plates removed from her mother, I was within reach j of some syllable or some civility, and one would have jj thought that good-breeding might exact some slight notice for the devil himself, under one s own roof by invitation; but the large eyes of Miss Aurelia and her mamma passed over me as if I had on the invisible ring of Gyges. I wonder, by-the-way, whether the ambitious youths who go to London and Paris with samples, and come back and sport the complete var- I nish of a man acquired in foreign society I wonder \ whether they take these rubs to be part of their pol- I ishing! "The ladies rose and left us, and as I had no more I occasion to dodge heads, or trouble myself with hu- jj mility, I took Lady S s place at old Mimpson s right hand, and was immediately recognised with great !l empressement by the Belgian cltargc, who had met me j very often, in very agreeable society. Mimpson stared, and evidently took it for a bit of flummery or i; a mistake ; but he presently stared again, for the but ler came in with a coronetted note on his silver tray, and the seal side up, and presented it to me with a most deferential bend of his white coat. I felt the vouchers within, and pocketed it without opening, and we soon after rose and went to the drawing-room for our coffee. " Lady S sat with her back to the door, be sieged by Mrs. Mimpson ; and at the piano, beside !! Miss Bellamy, who was preparing to play, stood one j of the loveliest young creatures possibly to fancy. A pale and high-bred looking lady in widow s weeds sat I 1 near them, and I had no difficulty in making out who I were the after-dinner additions to the party. I joined | them, and was immediately introduced by Miss Bel- j lamy to her mother and sister, with whom (after a brilliant duet by the sisters) I strolled out upon the I 1 lawn for an hour for it was a clear night, and the i moon and soft air almost took me back to Italy. And ,i (perhaps by a hint from Miss Bellamy) I was allowed I) to get on very expeditiously in my acquaintance with i her mother and sister. "My new friends returned to the drawing-room, i and as the adjoining library was lighted, I went in and | filled up the blank vouchers with the names of Mrs. j Bellamy and her daughters. I listened a moment to : | the conversation in the next room. The subject was i Almack s, and was discussed with great animation. | Lady S , who seemed to me trying to escape I the trap they had baited for her, was quietly setting j forth the difficulties of procuring vouchers, and rec ommending to Mrs. Mimpson not to subject herself 1 to the mortification of a refusal. Old Mimpson I backed up this advice with a stout approval, and this , brought Mrs. Mimpson out horse and foot, and she I) declared that she would submit to anything, do any thing, give anything, rather than fail in this darling object of her ambition. She would feel under eternal, 34 MR. AND MRS. FOLLETT. inexpressible obligations to any friend who would pro cure, for herself and daughter, admission for but one night to Almack s. "And then came in the sweet voice of Miss Bel lamy, who knew it was both wrong and silly, but she would give ten years of her life to go to one of Al mack s balls, and in a long conversation she had had with Mr. Brown on the subject that morning " AhJ interrupted Lady S , if it had been the Mr. Brown, you would have had very little trouble about it. " And who is the Mr. Brown? asked Mrs. Mimpson. " The pet and protege of the only lady patroness I do not visit, said Lady S , and unluckily, too, the only one who thinks the vouchers great rub bish, and gives them away without thought or scruple. " At that moment I entered the room. " Good heavens! screamed Lady S , is that his ghost? Why, Mr. Brown ! she gasped, giv ing me her hand very cautiously, do you appear when you are talked of like like like " Like the devil? No! But I am here in the body, and very much at your ladyship s service, said I, for of course you are going to the duke s to-night, and so am I. Will you take me with you, or shall my po-chay follow where I belong in your train ?" " I ll take you, of course, said her ladyship, rising, but first about these vouchers. You have just come, and didn t hear our discussion. Mrs. Mimpson is ex tremely anxious that her daughter should come out at Almack s, and as I happened to say, the moment before you entered, that you were the very person to procure the tickets from Lady . How very odd that you should come in just then ! But tell us can you? " A dead silence followed the question. Mrs. Mimpson sat with her eyes on the floor, the picture of dismay and mortification. Miss Mimpson blushed and twisted her handkerchief, and Miss Bellamy looked at her hostess, half amused and half dis tressed. "I handed the three vouchers to Miss Bellamy, and begged her acceptance of them, and then turning to Lady S , without waiting for a reply, regret ted that, not having had the pleasure of being pre sented to Mrs. Mimpson, I had not felt authorized to include her in my effort to oblige Miss Bellamy. "And what with old Mimpson s astonishment, and Lady S s immediate tact in covering, by the I bustle of departure, what she did not quite under- j stand, though she knew it was some awkward contre temps or other, I found time to receive Miss Bella my s thanks, and get permission from the mother to | call and arrange this unexpected party, and in ten ! minutes I was on my way to London with Lady I S , amusing her almost into fits with my expla nations of the Mimpson mystery. "Lady S was to be still at Hampstead for a few days, and, at my request, she called with me on the Bellamys, and invited the girls up to town. Rose Bellamy, the younger, is at this moment one of the new stars of the season accordingly, and Miss Bel lamy and I carry on the war, weekly, at Almack s, and nightly at some waxlight paradise or other, and Lady S has fallen in love with them both, and treats them like daughters. "So you see, though I passed for a ha penny with the Mimpsons, I turned out a sovereign to the Bel lamys. " Pass the bottle !" MR, AND MRS, FOLLETT; OR, THE DANGERS OF MEDDLING WITH MARRIED PEOPLE. THERK are two commodities, much used by gentle men, neither of which will bear tinkering or tampering with matrimony and patent leather. Their necessi ties are fair weather and untroubled wear and tear. Ponder on the following melancholy example ! My friend Follett married a lady contrary to my advice. I gave the advice contrary to my wont and against my will. He would have it. The lady was a tolerably pretty woman, on whose original destiny it was never written that she should be a belle. How she became one is not much matter; but nature being thoroughly taken by surprise with her success, had neglected to provide the counterpoise. I say it is no great matter how she became a belle nor is it for if such things were to be accounted for to the satisfaction of the sex, the world have little time for other specu lations ; but I will devote a single paragraph to the elucidation of this one of many mysteries, for a reason I have. Fcenam kabet in cornu. Poets are the least fastidious, and the least discrim inating of men, in their admiration of women (vide Byron), partly because their imagination, like sun shine, glorifies all that turns to it, and partly because the voluptuous heart, without which they were not. poets, is both indolent and imperial, from both causes waiting always to be sought. In some circles, bards are rather comets than stars, and the one whose orbit for a few days intersected that of Miss Adele Burnham, was the exclusive marvel of the hour. Like other po ets, the one of which I speak was concentrative in his attentions, and he chose (why, the gods knew better than the belles of the season) to have neither eyes nor ears, flowers, flatteries, nor verses, for any other than Miss Burnham. He went on his way, but the incense, in which he had enveloped the blest Adele, lingered like a magic atmosphere about her, and Tom Follett and all his tribe breathed it in blind adoration. I trust the fair reader has here nodded her head, in evidence that this history of the belleship of Miss Burnham is no less brief than natural and satisfactory. When Follett came to me with the astounding in formation that he intended to propose to Miss Burn- ham (he had already proposed and been accepted, the traitor) ! my fancy at once took the prophetic stride so natural on the first breaking of such news, and in the five minutes which I took for reflection, I had travelled far into that land of few delusions holy matrimony. Before me, in all the changeful variety of a magic mirror, came and went the many phases of which that multiform creature, woman, is susceptible. I saw her in diamonds and satin, and in kitchen-apron and curl papers; in delight, and in the dumps; in supplication, and in resistance ; shod like a fairy in French shoes, and slip-shod (as perhaps fairies are, too, in their bed rooms and dairies). I saw her approaching the cli macteric of age, and receding from it a mother, a nurse, an invalid mum over her breakfast, chatty over her tea doing the honors at Tom s table, and mend- MR. AND MRS. FOLLETT. ing with sober diligence Tom s straps and suspenders. | The kaleidoscope of fancy exhausted its combinations. " Tom !" said I (looking up affectionately, for he j was one of my weaknesses, was Tom, and I indulged myself in loving him without a reason), "Miss Burn- ham is in the best light where she is. If she cease to be a belle, as of course she will, should she mar ry " " Of course !" interrupted Tom very gravely. "Well, in that case, she lays oJf the goddess, trust me ! You will like her to dress plainly " "Quite plain !" "And stripped of her plumage, your bird of paradise would be nothing but a very indifferent hen with the disadvantage of remembering that she had been a bird of paradise." "But it was not her dress that attracted the brilliant author of " Possibly not. But as the false gods of mythology are only known by their insignia, Jupiter by his thun derbolt, and Mercury by his talaria and caduceus, so a woman, worshipped by accident, will find a change of exterior nothing less than a laying aside of her di vinity. That s a didactic sentence, but you will know what I mean, when I tell you that I myself can not see a pair of coral ear-rings without a sickness of the heart, though the woman who once wore them, and who slighted me twenty years ago, sits before me in church, without diverting a thought from the sermon. Don t marry her, Tom !" Six weeks after this conversation, I was at the wed ding, and the reader will please pass to the rear the six succeeding months short lime as it seems to record a change in the bland sky of matrimony. It was an ellipse in our friendship as well ; for advice (con trary to our wishes and intentions) is apt to be resent ed, and I fancied, from the northerly bows I received from Mrs. Follett, that my friend had made a merit to her of having married contrary to my counsel. At the end of this period Tom called on me. Follett, I should have said, was a man of that unde cided exterior which is perfectly at the mercy of a cra vat or waistcoat. He looked "snob" or "nob," ac cording to the care with which he had made his toilet. While a bachelor, of course, he could never afford in public a negligence or a mistake, and was invariably an elegant man, harmonious and " pin-point" from straps to whiskers. But alas! the security of wedded life ! When Tom entered my room, I perused him as a walking homily. His coat, still made on the old measure, was buttoned only at the top, the waist being rather snug, and his waistcoat pockets loaded with the copper which in his gayer days he always left on the counter. His satin cravat was frayed and brownish, with the tie slipped almost under his ear. The heel of his right boot (he trod straight on the othfer foot) almost looked him in the face. His pantaloons (the one article of dress in which there are no gradations nothing, if not perfect) were bulged and strained. He wore a frightfully new hat, no gloves, and carried a baggy brown umbrella, which was,, in itself, a most ex pressive portrait of "gone to seed. 1 Tom entered with his usual uppish carriage, and, through the how- d ye-dos, and the getting into his chair, carried off the old manner to a charm. In talking of the weather, a moment after, his eye fell on his stumpy umbrella, which, with an unconscious memory of an old affecta tion with his cane, he was balancing on the toe of his boot, and the married look slid over him like a mist. Down went his head between his shoulders, and down went the corners of his mouth down the inflation of his chest like a collapsed balloon; and down, in its youth and expression it seemed to me, every muscle of his face. He had assumed in a minute the style and countenance of a man ten years older. I smiled. How could I but smile ! " Then you have heard of it !" exclaimed Tom, suddenly starting to his feet, and flushing purple to the roots of his hair. "Heard of what?" My look of surprise evidently took him aback ; and, seating himself again with confused apologies, Tom proceeded to " make a clean breast," on a subject which I had not anticipated. It seemed that, far from moulting her feathers after marriage, according to my prediction, Mrs. Follett clearly thought that she had not yet "strutted her hour," and, though everything Tom could wish behind the curtain, in society she had flaunted and flirted, not merely with no diminution of zest from the wedding- day, but, her husband was of opinion, with a ratio alarmingly increasing. Her present alliance was with a certain Count Hautenbas, the lion of the moment, and though doubtless one in which vanity alone was active, Tom s sense of connubial propriety was at its last gasp. He could stand it no longer. He wished my advice in the choice between two courses. Should he call out the Frenchman, or should he take advan tage of the law s construction of "moral insanity," and shut her up in a mad-house. My advice had been of so little avail in the first in stance, that I shrank from troubling Tom with any more of it, and certainly should have evaded it alto gether, but for an experiment I wished to make, as much for my own satisfaction as for the benefit of that large class, the unhappy married. "Your wife is out every night, I suppose, Tom ?" "Every night when she has no party at home." "Do you go with her always ?" " I go for her usually but the truth is, that since I married, parties bore me, and after seeing my wife off, I commonly smoke and snooze, or read, or run into Bob Thomas s and talk horse, till I have just time to be in at the death." "And when you get there, you don t dance ?" "Not I, faith ! I haven t danced since I was mar ried !" "But you used to be the best waltzer of the day." "Well, the music sometimes gets into my heels now, but, when I remember I am married, the fit cools off. The deuce take it ! a married man shouldn t be seen whirling round the room with a girl in his arms !" "I presume that were you still single, you would fancy your chance to be as good for ladies favors as any French count s that ever came over ?" " Ehem ! why yes !" Tom pulled up his collar. "And if you had access to her society all day and all night, and the Frenchman only an hour or two in the evening, any given lady being the object, you would bet freely on your own head . " "I see your drift," said Tom, with a melancholy smile, "but it won t do !" " No, indeed it is what would have done. You had at the start a much better chance with your wife than Count Hautenbas ; but husbands and lovers are the hare, and the tortoise of the fable. We must resort now to other means. Will you follow my advice, as well as take it, should I be willing again to burn my fingers in your affairs ?" The eagerness of Tom s protestations quite made the amende to my mortified self-complacency, and I entered zealousy into my little plot for his happiness. At this moment I heartily wish I had sent him and his affairs to the devil, and (lest I should forget it at the close of this tale) I here caution all men, single and double, against "meddling or making," marring or mending, in matrimonial matters. The alliteration may, perhaps, impress this salutary counsel on the mind of the reader. I passed the remainder of the day in repairing the damage of Tom s person. I had his whiskers curled 36 MR. AND MRS. FOLLETT. and trimmed even (his left whisker was an inch nearer his nose than the right), and his teeth looked to by the dentist. I stood by, to be sure that there was no care lessness in his selection of patent leathers, and on his assuring me that he was otherwise well provided, I suffered him to go home to dress, engaging him to dine with me at seven. He was punctual to the hour. By Jove, I could scarce believe it was the same man. The conscious ness of being well dressed seemed to have brightened his eyes and lips, as it certainly changed altogether his address and movements. He had a narrow escape of being handsome. After all, it is only a " man of mark," or an Apollo, who can well afford to neglect the outer man ; and a judicious negligence, or a judicious plain ness, is probably worth the attention of both the man of mark and the Apollo. Tom was quite another or der of creature a butterfly that was just no w a worm and would have been treated with more consideration in consequence, even by those least tolerant of "the pomps and vanities." We dined temperately, and I superseded the bottle by a cup of strong green tea, at an early moment after the removal of the cloth, deter mined to have Tom s wits in as full dress as his per son. Without being at all a brilliant man, he was the next best thing a steady absorbent; and as most women are more fond of giving than receiving in all things, but particularly in conversation, I was not un easy as to his power of making himself agreeable. Nor was he, faith ! The ball of the night was at the house of an old friend of my own, and Mr. and Mrs. Follett were but newly introduced to the circle. I had the company very clearly in my eye, therefore, while casting about for dramatis persorxe, and fixing upon Mrs. Beverly Fairlie, for the prominent character, I assured suc cess, though being very much in love with that co quettish widow myself, I had occasion for some self- denial in the matter. Of Mrs. Fairlie s weak points (on which it seemed necessary that I should enlighten Tom), I had information not to be acquired short of summering and wintering her, and with my eye solely directed to its effect upon Mrs. Follett, I put the clues into my friend s hands in a long after-dinner conversa tion. As he seemed impatient to open the campaign after getting these definite and valuable instructions, I augured well for his success, and we entered the ball room in high spirits. It was quite enough to say to the mischievous widow that another woman was to be piqued by any attentions j she might choose to pay Mr. Follett. Having said thus much, and presented Tom, I sought out Mrs. Follett myself, with the double purpose of breaking up the monopoly of Mons. Hautenbas, and of direct ing her attention, should it be necessary, to the suavi ties between Tom and the widow. It was a superb ball, and the music, as Tom said, went to the heels. The thing he did well was waltz ing, and after taking a turn or two with Mrs. Fairlie, the rustic dame ran up to Mrs. Follett with the most innocent air imaginable, and begged the loan of her husband for the rest of the evening ! I did not half like the look of earnest with which she entered into the affair, indeed, and there was little need of my taking much trouble to enlighten Mrs. Follett ; for a woman so surprised with a six months husband I never saw. They were so capitally matched, Tom and the widow, in size, motion, style of waltzing, and all, that not we only, but the whole parly, were occupied with observing and admiring them. Mrs. Follett and I (for a secret sympathy, somehow, drew us together, as the thing went on) kept up a broken conversation, in which the count was even less interested than we ; and after a few ineffectual attempts to draw her into the tea room, the Frenchman left us in pique, and we gave ourselves up to the observation of the couple who (we presumed) severally belonged to us. They carried on the war famously, to be sure ! Mrs. Fairlie was a woman who could do as she liked, because she would ; and she cared not a sfrraw for the very pronounce dem onstration of engrossing one man for all the quadrilles, waltzes, and galopades, beside being with him to sup per. Once or twice I tried to find an excuse for leav ing Mrs. Follett, to put in an oar for myself; but the little woman clung to me as if she had not the courage to undertake another person s amusement, and, new and sudden as the feeling must have been, she was pale and wretched, with a jealousy more bitter proba bly than mine. Tom never gave me a look after the first waltz ; and as to the widow, she played her part with rather more zeal than we set down for her. I passed altogether an uncomfortable night, for a gay one, and it was a great relief to me when Mrs. Follett asked me to send Tom for the car riage. "Be so kind as to send a servant for it," said Fol lett, very coolly, " and say to Mrs. Follett, that I will join her at home. I am going to sup, or rather break fast, with Mrs. Beverly Fairlie !" Here was a mess ! " Shall I send the count for your shawl ?" I asked, after giving this message, and wishing to know whether she was this side of pride in her unhappiness. The little woman burst into tears. " I will sit in the cloak-room till my husband is ready," she said ; " go to him, if you please, and im plore him to come and speak to me." As I said before, I wished the whole plot to the devil. We had achieved our object, it is true and so did the man who knocked the breath out of his friend s body, in killing a fly on his back. Tom is now (this was years ago) a married flirt of some celeb rity, for after coming out of the widow s hands with a three months education, he had quite forgot to be troubled about Mrs. Follett ; and instead of neglect ing his dress, which was his only sin when I took him in hand, he now neglects his wife, who sees him, as women are apt to see their husbands, through other women s eyes. I presume they are doomed to quite as much unhappiness as would have fallen to their lot, had I let them alone had Mrs. Follett ran away with the Frenchman, and had Tom died a divorced sloven. But when I think that, beside achieving little for them, I was the direct means of spoiling Mrs. Beverly Fair- lie for myself, I think I may write myself down as a warning to meddlers in matrimony. THE COUNTESS NYSCHRIEM. 37 THE COUNTESS NYSCHRIEM, AND THE HANDSOME ARTIST. THAT favored portion of the light of one summer s morning that was destined to be the transparent bath of the master-pieces on the walls of the Pitti, was pouring in a languishing flood through the massive windows of the palace. The ghosts of the painters i (who, ministering to the eye only, walk the world from cock-crowing to sunset) were haunting invisibly the sumptuous rooms made famous by their pictures ; and the pictures themselves, conscious of the presence of the fountain of soul from which gushed the soul that is in them, glowed with intoxicated mellowness and splendor, and amazed the living students of the gallery with effects of light and color till that moment undiscovered. [And now, dear reader, having paid you the com- j plirnent of commencing my story in your vein (poetical), . let me come down to a little every-day brick-and-mor- \ tar, and build up a fair and square common-sense j foundation.] Graeme McDonald was a young highlander from Rob Roy s country, come to Florence to study the old masters. He was an athletic, wholesome, hand some fellow, who had probably made a narrow escape j of being simply a fine animal ; and, as it was, you ; never would have picked him from a crowd as any- thing but a hussar out of uniform, or a brigand per verted to honest life. His peculiarity was (and this I ; foresee is to be an ugly sentence), that he had pecu- | liarities which did not seem peculiar. He was full of genius for his art, but the canvass which served him him as a vent, gave him no more anxiety than his ! pocket-handkerchief. He painted in the palace, or J wiped his forehead on a warm day with equally small care, to all appearance, and he had brought his mother ! and two sisters to Italy, and supported them by a most ; heroic economy and industry all the while looking as if the " silver moon" and all the small change of the j stars would scarce serve him for a day s pocket-money, j Indeed, the more 1 knew of McDonald, the more I ! became convinced that there was another man built over him. The painter was inside. And if he had free thoroughfare and use of the outer man s windows and ivory door, he was at any rate barred from hang- , ing out the smallest sign or indication of being at any time " within." Think as hard as he would devise, combine, study, or glow with enthusiasm the pro- prietor of the front door exhibited the same careless and smiling bravery of mien, behaving invariably as if he had the whole tenement to himself, and was neither proud of, nor interested in the doings of his more r ritual inmate leading you to suppose, almost, it the latter, though billeted upon him, had not been properly introduced. The thatch of this com mon tenement was of jetty black hair, curling in most opulent prodigality, and, altogether, it was a house that Hadad, the fallen spirit, might have chosen, when becoming incarnate to tempt the sister of Absalom. Perhaps you have been in Florence, dear reader, and know by what royal liberality artists are permitted to bring their easels into the splendid apartments of the palace, and copy from the priceless pictxires on the walls. At the time I have my eye upon (some few years ago), McDonald was making a beginning of a copy of Titian s Bella, and near him stood the easel of a female artist who was copying from the glorious picture of " Judith and Holofernes," in the same apartment. Mademoiselle Folie (so she was called by the elderly lady who always accompanied her) was a small and very gracefully-formed creature, i with the plainest face in which attraction could possi bly reside. She was a passionate student of her art, pouring upon it apparently the entire fulness of her I life, and as unconsciously forgetful of her personal | impressions on those around her, as if she wore the I invisible ring of Gyges. The deference with which | she was treated by her staid companion drew some j notice upon her, however, and her progress, in the copy she was making, occasionally gathered the artists about her easel ; and, altogether, her position among the silent and patient company at work in the different halls of the palace, was one of affectionate and tacit respect. McDonald was her nearest neighbor, and they frequently looked over each other s pictures, but, as they were both foreigners in Florence (she of Polish birth, as he understood), their conversation was in French or Italian, neither of which languages were fluently familiar to Graeme, and it was limited gene- ! rally to expressions of courtesy or brief criticism of | each other s labors. As I said before, it was a " proof-impression" of a celestial summer s morning, and the thermometer stood at heavenly idleness. McDonald sat with his maul-stick across his knees, drinking from Titian s picture. An artist, who had lounged in from the I next room, had hung himself by the crook of his arm \ over a high peg, in his comrade s easel, and every now ! and then he volunteered an observation to which he | expected no particular answer. " When I remember how little beauty 1 have seen ! in the world," said Ingarde (this artist), " I am inclined to believe with Saturninus, that there is no resurrec tion of bodies, and that only the spirits of the good return into the body of the Godhead for what is ugliness to do in heaven !" McDonald only said, " hm hm !" " Or rather," said Ingarde again, " I should like to fashion a creed for myself, and believe that nothing II was immortal but what was heavenly, and that the j I good among men and the beautiful among women || would be the only reproductions hereafter. How will i this little plain woman look in the streets of the New II Jerusalem, for example ? Yet she expects, as we all || do, to be recognisable by her friends in Heaven, and, ! of ceurse, to have the same irredeemably plain face ! I (Does she understand English, by the way for ^ she might not be altogether pleased with my theory !") "I have spoken to her very often," said McDonald, "and I think English is Hebrew to her but my theo ry of beauty crosses at least one corner of your argu ment, my friend ! I believe that the original type ot every human face is beautiful, and that every human being could be made beautiful, without, in any essential particular, destroying the visible identity. The like ness preserved in the faces of a family through several i generations is modified by the bad mental qualities, i and the bad health of those who hand is down. Re- j move these modifications, and, without destroying the I family likeness, you would take away all that mars the THE COUNTESS NYSCHRIEM- beauty of its particular type. An individual coun tenance is an integral work of God s making, and God saw that it was good when he made it. Ugliness, as you phrase it, is the damage that type of countenance has received from the sin and suffering of life. But the type can be restored, and will be, doubtless, in Heaven !" " And you think that little woman s face could be made beautiful ?" " I know it." "Try it, then! Here is your copy of Titian s Bella, all finished but the face. Make an apotheosis portrait of your neighbor, and while it harmonizes with the body of Titian s beauty, still leave it recogni sable as her portrait, and I ll give in to your theory believing in all other miracles, if you like, at the same time !" Ingarde laughed, as he went back to his own picture, and McDonald, after sitting a few minutes lost in revery, turned his easel so as to get a painter s view of his female neighbor. He thought she colored slightly as he fixed his eyes upon her ; but, if so, she apparently became very soon unconscious of his gaze, and he was soon absorbed himself in the task to which his friend had so mockingly challenged him. II. [Excuse me, dear reader, while with two epistles I build a bridge over which you can cross a chasm of a month in my story.] " To GRAEME MO-DONALD. "Sir: I am intrusted with a delicate commission, which I know not how to broach to you, except by simple proposal. Will you forgive my abrupt brevity, if I inform you, without further preface, that the Countess Nyschriem, a Polish lady of high birth and ample fortune, does you the honor to propose for your hand. If you are disengaged, and your affections are not irrevocably given to another, I can conceive no sufficient obstacle to your acceptance of this brilliant connexion. The countess is twenty-two, and not beautiful, it must in fairness be said ; but she has j high qualities of head and heart, and is worthy of any man s respect and affection. She has seen you, of course, and conceived a passion for you, of which this is the result. I am directed to add, that should you ! consent, the following conditions are imposed that j you marry her within four days, making no inquiry except as to her age, rank, and property, and that, ; without previous interview, she come veiled to the altar. "An answer is requested in the course of to-morrow, addressed to The Count Hanswald, minister of his majesty the king of Prussia. "I have the honor, &c., &c. "HANSWALD." McDonald s answer was as follows : "To HIS EXCELLENCY, HANSWALD, &c., &c. "You will pardon me that I have taken two days to consider the extraordinary proposition made me in your letter. The subject, since it is to be entertained a moment, requires, perhaps, still further reflection but my reply shall be definite, and as prompt as I can bring myself to be, in a matter so important. " My first impulse was to return your letter, declining the honor you would do me, and thanking the lady for the compliment of her choice. My first reflection was the relief and happiness which an independence would bring to a mother and two sisters dependant, now, on the precarious profits of my pencil. And I first consented to ponder the matter with this view, and I now consent to marry (frankly) for this advan tage. But still I have a condition to propose. " In the studies I have had the opportunity to make of the happiness of imaginative men in matrimony, I have observed that their two worlds of fact and fancy were seldom under the control of one mistress. It must be a very extraordinary woman of course, who, with the sweet domestic qualities needful for common life, possesses at the same time the elevation and spirituality requisite for the ideal of the poet and painter. And I am not certain, in any case, whethei the romance of some secret passion, fed and pursued in the imagination only, be not the inseparable neces sity of a poetical nature. For the imagination is in capable of being chained, and it is at once disenchant ed and set roaming by the very possession and cer taiiity, which are the charms of matrimony. Whethei exclusive devotion of all the faculties of mind and bodjf be the fidelity exacted in marriage, is a question every woman should consider before making a husband of an imaginative man. As I have not seen the countess, I can generalize on the subject without offence, and she is the best judge whether she can chain my fancy as well as my affections, or yield to an imaginative mistress the devotion of so predominant a quality of my nature. I can only promise her the constancy of a husband. " Still if this were taken for only vague specula tion she might be deceived. I must declare, frankly, that I am, at present, completely possessed with an imaginative passion. The object of it is probably as poor as I, and I could never marry her were I to con tinue free. Probably, too, the high-born countess- would be but little jealous of her rival, for she has no pretensions to beauty, and is an humble artist. But, in painting this lady s portrait (a chance experiment, to try whether so plain a face could be made lovely) I have penetrated to so beautiful an inner counten ance (so to speak) I have found charms of impres sion so subtly masked to the common eye I have traced such exquisite lineament of soul and feeling, visible, for the present, I believe, to my eye only that, while I live, I shall do irresistible homage to her as the embodiment of my fancy s want, the very spirit and essence suitable to rule over my unseen world of imagination. Marry whom I will, and be true to her as I shall, this lady will (perhaps unknown to herself) be my mistress in dream-land and revery. " This inevitable license allowed my ideal world and its devotions, that is to say, left entirely to myself I am ready to accept the honor of the countess s hand. If, at the altar, she should hear me murmur another name with her own (for the bride of my fancy must be present when I wed, and I shall link the vows to both in one ceremony)- let her not fear for my constancy to herself, but let her remember that it is not to offend her hereafter, if the name of the other come to my lip in dreams. " Your excellency may command my time and presence. With high consideration, &c. GRAEME MCDONALD." Rather agitated than surprised seemed Mademoiselle Folie, when, the next day, as she arranged her brushes upon the shelf of her easel, her handsome neighbor commenced, in the most fluent Italian he could com mand, to invite her to his wedding. Very much surprised was McDonald when she interrupted him in English, and begged him to use his native tongue, as madatne, her attendant, would not then understand him. He went on delightedly in his own honest language, and explained to her his imaginative ad miration, though he felt compunctious, somewhat, that so unreal a sentiment should bring the blood into her cheek. She thanked him drew the cloth from the upper part of her own picture, and showed him an admirable portrait of his handsome features, substituted for the masculine head of Judith in the original from which she copied and promised to be at his wedding, MY ONE ADVENTURE AS A BRIGAND. and to listen sharply for her murmured name in his vow at the altar. He chanced to wear at the moment a ring of red cornelian, and he agreed with her" that she should stand where he could see her, and, at the moment of his putting the marriage ring upon the bride s fingers, that she should put on this, and for ever after wear it, as a token of having received his spiritual vows of devotion. The day came, and the splendid equipage of the countess dashed into the square of Santa Maria, with a veiled bride and a cold bridegroom, and deposited them at the steps of the church. And they were fol lowed by other coroneted equipages, and gayly dress ed from each the mother and sisters of the bride groom gayly dressed, among them, but looking pale with incertitude and dread. The veiled bride was small, but she moved grace fully up the aisle, and met her future husband at the altar with a low courtesy, and madia sign to the priest to proceed with the ceremony. McDonald was color less, but firm, and indeed showed little interest, except by an anxious look now and then among the crowd of spectators at the sides of the altar. He pronounced with a steady voice, but when the ring was to be put on, he looked around for an instant, and then sudden ly, and to the great scandal of the church, clasped his bride with a passionate ejaculation to his bosom. The cornelian ring was on her finger and the Countess Nyschriem and Mademoiselle Folie his bride and his fancy queen were one. This curious event happened in Florence some eight years since as all people then there will re member and it was prophesied of the countess that she would have but a short lease of her handsome and gay husband. But time does not say so. A more constant husband than McDonald to his plain and titled wife, and one more continuously in love, does not travel and buy pictures, and patronize artists though few except yourself and I, dear reader, know the philosophy of it! MY ONE ADVENTURE AS A BRIGAND, I WAS standing in a hostelry, at Geneva, making a bargain with an Italian for a place in a return carriage to Florence, when an Englishman, who had been in the same steamer with me on Lake Leman, the day before, came in and stood listening to the conversa tion. We had been the only two passengers on board, but had passed six hours in each other s company without speaking. The road to an Englishman s friendship is to have shown yourself perfectly indiffer ent to his acquaintance, and, as I liked him from the first, we were now ready to be conscious of each oth er s existence. " I beg pardon," said he, advancing in a pause of the vetturino s oration, "will you allow me to engage a place with you? 1 am going to Florence, and, if agreeable to you, we will take the carriage to our selves." I agreed very willingly, and in two hours we were free of the gates of Geneva, and keeping along the edge of the lake in the cool twilight of one of the love liest of heaven s summer evenings. The carriage was spaciously contrived for four; and, with the curtains up all around, our feet on the forward seat, my com panion smoking, and conversation bubbling up to please itself, we rolled over the smooth road, gliding into the first chapter of our acquaintance as tuanquilly as Geoffrey Crayon and his reader into the first chap ter of anything he has written. My companion (Mr. St. John Elmslie, as put down in his passport) seemed to have something to think of beside propitiating my good will, but he was consid erate and winning, from evident high breeding, and quite open, himself, to my most scrutinizing study. He was about thirty, and, without any definite beauty, was a fine specimen of a man. Probably most per sons would have called him handsome. I liked him better, probably, from the subdued melancholy with which he brooded on his secret thought, whatever it might be sad men, in this world of boisterous gayety or selfish ill-humor, interesting me always. From that something, on which his memory fed in quiet but constant revery, nothing aroused my com panion except the passing of a travelling carriage, go ing in the other direction, on our own arrival at an inn. I began to suspect, indeed, after a little while, that Elmslie had some understanding with our vetturino, for, on the approach of any vehicle of pleasure, our horses became restiff, and, with a sudden pull-up, stood directly across the way. Out jumped my friend to assist in controlling the restift animals, and, in the five minutes during which the strangers were obliged to wait, we generally saw their heads once or twice thrust inquiringly from the carriage window. This done, our own vehicle was again wheeled about, and the travellers allowed to proceed. We had arrived at Bologna with but one interruption to the quiet friendliness of our intercourse. Apropos of some vein of speculation, I had asked my companion if he were married. He was silent for a moment, and then, in a jocose tone of voice, which was new to me, replied, " 1 believe I have a wife somewhere in Scot land." But though Elmslie had determined to show me that he was neither annoyed nor offended at my inquisitiveness, his manner changed. He grew cere monious. For the remainder of that day, I felt un comfortable, I scarce knew why; and I silently deter mined that if my friend continued so exceedingly well- bred in his manner for another day, I should find an excuse for leaving him at Bologna. But we had left Bologna, and, at sunset of a warm day, were slowly toiling up the Apennines. The inn to which we were bound was in sight, a mile or two above us, and, as the vetturiuo stopped to breathe his horses, Elmslie jumped from the carriage and started to walk on. I took advantage of his absence to stretch myself over the vacated cushions, and, on our arrival at the inn, was soundly asleep. My friend s voice, in an unusual tone, awoke me, and, by his face, as he looked in at the carriage win dow, 1 saw that he was under some extraordinary ex citement. This I observed by the light of the stable- lantern for the hostelry, Italian fashion, occupied the lower story of the inn, and our carriage was driven under the archway, where the faint light from without I made but little impression on the darkness. I followed Elmslie s beckoning finger, and climbing after him up the stairway of stone, stood in a large refectory occu- | pying the whole of the second story of the building. At the first glance I saw that there was an English I party in the house. An Italian inn of the lower order i has no provision for private parties, and few, except I] English travellers, object to joining the common even- 40 MY ONE ADVENTURE AS A BRIGAND. ing meal. The hall was dark with the twilight, but a large curtain was suspended across the farther ex tremity, and, by the glimmer of lights, and an occa sional sound of a knife, a party was within supping in silence. " If you speak, speak in Italian," whispered Elms- lie, taking me by the arm, and leading me on tiptoe to one of the corners of the curtain. I looked in and saw two persons seated at a table a bold and soldierly-looking man of fifty, and a young lady, evidently his daughter. The beauty of the last- mentioned person was so extraordinary that I nearly committed the indiscretion of an exclamation in Eng lish. She was slight, but of full and well-rounded proportions, and she sat and moved with an emi nent grace and ladylikeness altogether captivating. Though her face expressed a settled sadness, it was of unworn and faultless youth and loveliness, and while her heavily-fringed eyes would have done, in their expression, for a Niobe, Hebe s lips were not more ripe, nor Juno s arched more proudly. She was a blonde, with eyes and eyelashes darker than her hair a kind of beauty almost peculiar to England. The passing in of a tall footman, in a plain livery of gray, interrupted my gaze, and Elmslie drew me away by the arm, and led me into the road in front of the locanda. The night had now fallen, and we strolled up and down in the glimmer of the starlight. My companion was evidently much disturbed, and we made several turns after I had seen very plainly that he was making up his mind to communicate to me the secret. "1 have a request to make of you," he said, at last; " a service to exact, rather, to which there were no hope that you would listen for a moment if I did not first tell you a very singular story. Have a little pa tience with me,, and I will make it as brief as I can the briefer, that I have no little pain in recalling it with the distinctness of description." I expressed my interest in all that concerned my new friend, and begged him to go on. "Hardly six years ago," said Elmslie, pressing my arm gently in acknowledgment of my sympathy, " I left college and joined my regiment, for the first time, in Scotland. By the way, I should re-introduce my self to you as Viscount S , of the title of which, then, I was in prospect. My story hinges somewhat upon the fact that, as an honorable captain, a noble man in expectancy, I was an object of some extrane ous interest to the ladies who did the flirting for the garrison. God forgive me for speaking lightly on the subject ! " A few evenings after my arrival, we had been dining rather freely at mess, and the major announced to us that we were invited to take tea with a linen-draper, whose house was a popular resort of the officers of the regiment. The man had three or four daughters, who, as the phrase goes, gave you a great deal for your money, and, for romping and frolicking, they had good looks and spirit enough. The youngest was really very pretty, but the eldest, to whom I was ex clusively presented by the major, as a sort of quiz on a new-comer, was a sharp and sneering old maid, red headed, freckled, and somewhat lame. Not to be out done in frolic by my persecutor, I commenced making love to Miss Jacky in mock heroics, and we were soon marching up and down the room, to the infinite enter tainment of my brother officers, lavishing on each other every possible term of endearment. "In the midst of this, the major came up to me with rather a serious face. " Whatever you do, said he, for God s sake don t call the old girl your wife. The joke might be seri ous. " It was quite enough that I was desired not to do anything in the reign of misrule then prevailing. I immediately assumed a connubial air, to the best of my dramatic ability, begged Miss Jacky to join me in the frolic, and made the rounds of the room, introdu cing the old girl as Mrs. Elmslie, and receiving from her quite as many tendernesses as were bearable by myself or the company present. I observed that the lynx-eyed linen-draper watched this piece of fun very closely, and my friend, the major, seemed distressed and grave about it. But we carried it out till the party broke up, and the next day the regiment was ordered over to Ireland, and I thought no more, for awhile, either of Miss Jacky or my own absurdity. "Two years afterward, I was, at a drawing-room at St. James s, presented, for the first time, by the name which I bear. It was not a very agreeable event to me, as our family fortunes were inadequate to the proper support of the title, and on the generosity of a maternal uncle, who had been at mortal variance with my father, depended our hopes*>f restoration to prosperity. From the mood of bitter melancholy in which I had gone through the ceremony of an introduction, I was aroused by the murmur in the crowd at the approach of a young girl just presented to the king. She was following a lady whom I slightly knew, and had evidently been presented by her; and, before I had begun to recover from my astonishment at her beauty, I was requested by this lady to give her jjrotege an arm and follow to a less crowded apartment of the palace. "Ah, my friend! the exquisite beauty of Lady Meiicent but you have seen her. She is here, and I must fold her in my arms to-night, or perish in the attempt. Pardon me!" he added, as I was about to inter rupt him with an explanation. " She has been she s my wife ! She loved me and married me, making ife a heaven of constant ecstacy for I worshipped her with every fibre of my existence." He paused and gave me his story brokenly, and I waited for him to go on without questioning. "We had lived together in absolute and unclouded bappiness for eight months, in lover-like seclusion at ber father s house, and I was looking forward to the airth of my child with anxiety and transport, when the death of my uncle left me heir to his immense fortune, and I parted from my greater treasure to go and pay the fitting respect at his burial. " I returned, after a week s absence, with an impa tience and ardor almost intolerable, and found the door closed against me. " There were two letters for me at the porter s lodge one from Lord A , my wife s father, informing me that the Lady Meiicent had miscarried and was dangerously ill, and enjoining upon me as a man of honor and delicacy, never to attempt to see her again ; ind another from Scotland, claiming a fitting support or rny lawful wife, the daughter of the linen-draper. The proofs of the marriage, duly sworn to and certi fied by the witnesses of my fatal frolic, were enclosed, and on my recovery, six weeks after, from the delirium nto which these multiplied horrors precipitated me, I bund that, by the Scotch law, the first marriage was valid, and my ruin was irrevocable." "And how long since was this ?" I inquired, break- ng in upon his narration for the first time. "A year and a month and till to-night I have not seen her. But I must break through this dreadful eparation now and I must speak to her, and press icr to my breast and you will aid me 1" "To the last drop of my blood, assuredly. But how ?" " Come to the inn ! You have not supped, and we 11 devise as you eat. And you must lend me your nvention, for my heart and brain seem to me going rild." Two hours after, with a pair of loaded pistols in my reast, we went to the chamber of the host, and bound WIGWAM VERSUS ALMACK S. 41 him and his wife to the posts of their beds. There was but one man about the house, the hostler, and we had made him intoxicated with our travelling flask of brandy. Lord A and his daughter were still sit ting up, and she, at her chamber window, was watch ing the just risen moon, over which the clouds were drifting very rapidly. Our business was, now, only with them, as, in their footman, my companion had found an attached creature, who remembered him, and willingly agreed to offer no interruption. After taking a pull at the brandy-flask myself (for, in spite of my blackened face and the slouched hat of the hostler, I required some fortification of the mus cles of my face before doing violence to an English nobleman), I opened the door of the chamber which must be passed to gain access to that of Lady Meli- cent. It was Lord A s sleeping-room, and, though the light was extinguished, I could see that he was still up, and sitting at the window. Turning my lan tern inward, I entered the room and set it down, and, to my relief, Lord A soliloquized in English, that it was the host with a hint that it was time to go to bed. My friend was at the door, according to my ar- ! rangement, ready to assist me should I find any diffi culty; but, from the dread of premature discovery of ! the person, he was to let me manage it alone if pos- sible. Lord A sat unsuspectingly in his chair, with his head turned half way over his shoulders to see why the officious host did not depart. I sprung suddenly upon him, drew him backward and threw him on his \ face, and, with my haud over his mouth, threatened , him with death, in my choicest Italian, if he did not remain passive till his portmanteau had been looked into. I thought he might submit, with the idea that it was only a robbery, and so it proved. He allowed me, after a short struggle, to tie his hands behind him, and march him down to his carriage, before the muz zle of my pistol. The hostelry was still as death, and, shutting his carriage door upon his lordship, I mount ed guard. The night seemed to me very long, but morning dawned, and, with the earliest gray, the postillions came knocking at the outer door of the locanda. My friend went out to them, while I marched back Lord A to his chamber, and, by immense bribing, the horses were all put to our carriage a half hour after, and the outraged nobleman was left without the means of pursuit till their return. We reached Florence iu safety, and pushed on immediately to Leghorn, where we took the steamer for Marseilles and eluded arrest, very much to my most agreeable surprise. By a Providence that does not always indulge mor tals with removing those they wish in another world, Lord S has lately been freed from his harrowing chain by the death of his so-called lady; and, having re-married Lady Melicent, their happiness is renewed and perfect. In his letter to me, announcing it, he gives me liberty to tell the story, as the secret was di vulged to Lord A on the day of his second nup tials. He said nothing, however, of his lordship s forgiveness for my rude handling of his person, and, in ceasing to be considered a brigand, possibly I am ; responsible as a gentleman. WIGWAM versus ALMACK S, CHAPTER I. IN one of the years not long since passed to your account and mine by the recording angel, gentle read er, I was taking my fill of a delicious American June, as Ducrow takes his bottle of wine, on the back of a beloved horse. In the expressive language of the raftsmen on the streams of the West, I was " follow ing" the Chemung a river whose wild and peculiar loveliness is destined to be told in undying song, when ever America can find leisure to look up her poets. Such bathing of the feet of precipices, such kissing of flowery slopes, such winding in and out of the bo soms of round meadows, such frowning amid Broken rocks, and smiling through smooth valleys, you would never believe could go in this out-of-doors world, unvisited and uncelebrated. Not far from the ruins of a fortification, said to have been built by the Spaniards before the settlement of New-England by the English, the road along the Che mung dwindles into a mere ledge at the foot of a precipice, the river wearing into the rock at this spot j by a black and deep eddy. At the height of your lip ! above the carriage track, there gushes from the rock a stream of the size and steady clearness of a glass rod, and all around it in the small rocky lap which it ; has worn away, there grows a bed of fragrant mint, kept by the shade and moisture of a perpetual green, bright as emerald. Here stops every traveller who is not upon an errand of life or death, and while his horse stands up to his fetlocks in the river, he parts the dewy stems of the mint, and drinks, for once in \ his life, like a fay or a poet. It is one of those ex quisite spots which paint their own picture insensibly in the memory, even while you look on them, natural " Daguerrotypes," as it were ; and you are surprised, years afterward, to find yourself remembering every leaf and stone, and the song of every bird that sung in the pine-trees overhead while you were watching the curve of the spring-leap. As I said before, it will be sung and celebrated, when America sits down weary with her first century of toil, and calls for her min strels, now toiling with her in the fields. Within a mile of this spot, to which I had been looking forward with delight for some hours, I over took a horseman. Before coming up with him I had at once decided he was an Indian. His relaxed limbs swaying to every motion of his horse with the grace and ease of a wreath of smoke, his neck and shoulders so cleanly shaped, and a certain watchful look about his ears which I cannot define, but which you see in a spirited horse were infallible marks of the race whom we have driven from the fair land of our inde pendence. He was mounted upon a small black horse of the breed commonly called Indian ponies, now not very common so near the Atlantic and rode with a slack rein and air, I thought, rather more dispirited than indolent. The kind of morning I have described, is, as every one must remember, of a sweetness so communicative that one would think two birds could scarce meet on the wing without exchanging a carol; and I involun tarily raised my bridle after a minute s study of the traveller before me, and in a brief gallop was at his side. With the sound of my horse s feet, however, he changed in all his characteristics to another man sat erect in his saddle, and assumed the earnest air of an American who never rides but upon some errand ; 42 WIGWAM VERSUS ALMACK S. and, on his giving me back my " good morning" in the unexceptionable accent of the country, 1 presum ed I had mistaken my man. He was dark, but not darker than a Spaniard, of features singularly hand some and regular, dressed with no peculiarity except an otter-skin cap of a silky and golden-colored fur, too j expensive and rare for any but a fanciful, as well as a |j luxurious purchaser. A slight wave in the black hair which escaped from it, and fell back from his temples, confirmed me in the conviction that his blood was of European origin. We rode on together with some indifferent conver sation, till we arrived at the spring-leap T have de scribed, and here my companion, throwing his right leg over the neck of his poney, jumped to the ground very actively, and applying his lips to the spring, drank a free draught. His horse seemed to know the spot, and, with the reins on his neck, trotted on to a shal lower ledge in the river and stood with the water to his knees, and his quick eye turned on his master with an expressive look of satisfaction. "You have been here before," I said, tying my less disciplined horse to the branch of an overhanging shrub. " Yes often !" was his reply, with a tone so quick and rude, however, that, but for the softening quality j of the day, I should have abandoned there all thought j of further acquaintance. I took a small valise from the pommel of my sad dle, and while my fellow-traveller sat on the rock-side looking moodily into the river, I drew forth a flask of I wins and a leathern cup, a cold pigeon wrapped in a cool cabbage leaf, the bigger end of a large loaf, and i as much salt as could be tied up in the cup of a large | water-lily a set-out of provender which owed its daintiness to the fair hands of my hostess of the night before. The stranger s first resemblance to an Indian had : probably given a color to my thoughts, for, as I hand ed him a cup of wine, I said, "I wish the Shawanee chief to whose tribe this valley belongs, were here to get a cup of my wine." The young man sprang to his feet with a sudden flash through his eyes, and while he looked at me, he seemed to stand taller than, from my previous impres sion of his height, I should have thought possible. Surprised as I was at the effect of my remark, I did not withdraw the cup, and with a moment s searching look into my face, he changed his attitude, begged pardon rather confusedly, and, draining the cup, said with a faint smile, " The Shawanee chief thanks you !" " Do you know the price of land in the valley?" I asked, handing him a slice of bread with the half pigeon upon it, and beginning to think it was best to stick to commonplace subjects with a stranger. " Yes !" he said, his brow clouding over again. " It was bought from the Shawanee chief you speak of for a string of beads the acre. The tribe had their burial- place on the Susquehannah, some twenty miles from this, and they cared little about a strip of a valley which, now, I would rather have for my inheritance than the fortune of any white man in the land." " Throw in the landlord s daughter at the village below," said I, " and I would take it before any half- dozen of the German principalities. Have you heard the news of her inheritance ?" Another moody look and a very crisp " Yes," put a stop to all desire on my part to make further advan ces in my companion s acquaintance. Gathering my pigeon bones together, therefore, and putting them on the top of a stone where they would be seen by the j first "lucky dog" that passed, flinging my emptied water-lily on the river, and strappingiip cup and flask once more in my valise, I mounted, and with a crusty good morning, set off at a hand-gallop down the river. My last unsuccessful topic was, at the time I write of, the subject of conversation all through the neigh borhood of the village toward which I was travelling. The most old-fashioned and comfortable inn on the Susquehannah, or Chemung, was kept at the junction of these two noble rivers, by a certain Robert Plymton, who had "one fair daughter and no more." He was a plain farmer of Connecticut, who had married the grand-daughter of an English emigrant, and got, with his wife, a chest of old papers, which he thought had better be used to mend a broken pane or wrap up gro ceries, but which his wife, on her death-bed, told him " might turn out worth something." With this slen der thread of expectation, he had kept the little chest under his bed, thinking of it perhaps once a year, and satisfying his daughter s inquisitive queries with a shake of his head, and something about " her poor mother s tantrums," concluding usually with some reminder to keep the parlor in order, or mind her housekeeping. Ruth Plymton had had some sixteen " winters schooling," and was known to be much " smarter" (Anglice, cleverer), than was quite neces sary for the fulfilment of her manifold duties. Since twelve years of age (the period of her mother s death) she had officiated with more and more success as bar maid and host s daughter to the most frequented inn of the village, till now, at eighteen, she was the only ostensible keeper of the inn, the old man usually be ing absent in the fields with his men, or embarking his grain in an " ark," to take advantage of the first freshet. She was civil to all comers, but her manner was such as to make it perfectly plain even to the rudest raftsman and hunter, that the highest respect they knew how to render to a woman was her due. She was rather unpopular with the girls of the village from what they called her pride and "keeping to her self," but the truth was, that the cheap editions of romances which Ruth took instead of money for the lodging of the itinerant book-pedlars, were more agreeable companions to her than the girls of the vil lage ; and the long summer forenoons, and half the long winter nights, were little enough for the busy young hostess, who, seated on her bed, devoured tales of high-life which harmonized with some secret long ing in her breast she knew not and scarce thought of asking herself why. I had been twice at Athens (by this classical name is known the village I speak of), and each time had prolonged my stay at Plymton s inn for a day longer than my horse or my repose strictly exacted. The scenery at the junction is magnificent, but it was scarce that. And I cannot say that it, was altogther admiration of the host s daughter; for though I break fasted late for the sake of having a clean parlor while I ate my broiled chicken, and, having been once to Italy, Miss Plymton liked to pour out my tea and hear me talk of St. Peter s and the Carnival, yet there was that marked rctenu and decision in her manner that made me feel quite too much like a culprit at school, and large and black as her eyes were, and light and airy as were all her motions, 1 mixed up with my pro pensity for her society, a sort of dislike. In short, I never felt a tenderness for a woman who could "queen it" so easily, and I went heart-whole on my journey, though always with a high respect for Ruth Plymton, and a pleasant remembrance of her conversation. The story which 1 had heard farther up the river was, briefly, that there had arrived at Athens an Eng lishman, who had found in Miss Ruth Plymton, the last surviving descendant of the family of her mother; that she was the heiress to a large fortune, if the proof of her descent were complete, and that the con tents of the little chest had been the subject of a week s hard study by the stranger, who had departed after a vain attempt to persuade old Plymton to ac company him to England with his daughter. This WIGWAM VERSUS ALMACK S. 43 was the rumor, the allusion to which had been re ceived with such repulsive coldness by my dark com panion at the spring-leap. America is so much of an asylum for despairing younger sons and the proud and starving branches of great families, that a discovery of heirs to property among people of very inferior condition, is by no means uncommon. It is a species of romance in real life, however, which we never believe upon hearsay, and I rode on to the village, expecting my usual re ception by the fair damsel of the inn. The old sign still hung askew as I approached, and the pillars of the old wooden "stoop" or portico, were as much off their perpendicular as before, and true to my augury, out stepped my fair acquaintance at the sound of my horse s feet, and called to Reuben the ostler, and gave me an unchanged welcome. The old man was down at the river side, and the key of the grated bar hung at the hostess s girdle, and with these signs of times as they were, my belief in the marvellous tale vanish ed into thin air. " So you are not gone to England to take posses sion ?" I said. Her serious " No !" unsoftened by any other re mark, put a stop to the subject again, and taking my self to task for having been all day stumbling on mal-apropos subjects, I asked to be shown to my room, and spent the hour or two before dinner in watching the chickens from the window, and wondering a great deal as to the " whereabouts" of my friend in the otter-skin cap. The evening of that day was unusually warm, and I strolled down to the bank of the Susquehannah, to bathe. The moon was nearly full and half way to the zenith, and between the lingering sunset and the clear splendor of the moonlight, the dusk of the " folding hour" was forgotten, and the night went on almost as radiant as day. I swam across the river, delighting myself with the gold rims of the ripples before my breast, and was within a yard or two of the shore on my return, when I heard a woman s voice approaching in earnest conversation. I shot forward and drew my self in beneath a large clump of alders, and with only my head out of water, lay in perfect concealment. " You are not just, Shahatan !" were the first words I distinguished, in a voice I immediately recognised as that of my fair hostess. "You are not just. As far as I know myself I love you better than any one I ever saw but" As she hesitated, the deep low voice of my com panion at the spring-leap, uttered in a suppressed and impatient guttural, "But what?" He stood still with his back to the moon, and while the light fell full on her face, she withdrew her arm from his and went on. " I was going to say that I do not yet know myself or the world sufficiently to decide that I shall always love you. I would not be too hasty in so important a thins*, Shahatan ! We have talked of it before, and therefore I may say to you, now, that the prejudices of my father and all my friends are against it." " My blood" interrupted the young man, with a movement of impatience. She laid her hand on his arm. " Stay ! the objec tion is not mine. Your Spanish mother, besides shows more in your look and features than the blood of your father. But it would still be said I married an Indian, and though I care little for what the village would say, yet I must be certain that I shall love you with all my heart and till death, before I set my face with yours against the prejudices of every white man and woman in my native land ! You have urged me for my secret, and there it is. I feel relieved to have unburthened my heart of it." 41 That secret is but a summer old !" said he, half turning on his heel, and looking from her upon the moon s path across the river. " Shame !" she replied ; " you know that long be fore this news came, I talked with you constantly of other lands, and of my irresistible desire to see the people of great cities, and satisfy myself whether I was like them. That curiosity, Shahatan, is, I fear, even stronger than my love, or at least, it is more im patient ; and now that I have the opportunity fallen to me like a star out of the sky, shall I not go ? I must. Indeed I must." The lover felt that all had been said, or was too proud to answer, for they fell into the path again, side by side, in silence, and at a slow step were soon out of my sight and hearing. I emerged from my compul sory hiding-place wiser than I went in, dressed and I strolled back to the village, and finding the old land- j lord smoking his pipe alone under the portico, I light- I ed a cigar, and sat down to pick his brains of the little information I wanted to fill out the story. I took my leave of Athens on the following morn ing, paying my bill duly to Miss Plymton, from whom i I requested a receipt in writing, for I foresaw without | any very sagacious augury beside what the old man told me, that it might be an amusing document by- and-by. You shall judge by the sequel of the story, i dear reader, whether you would like it in your book of autographs. Not long after the adventure described in the pre ceding chapter, I embarked for a ramble in Europe. Among the newspapers which were lying about in the cabin of the packet, was one which contained this paragraph, extracted from a New-Orleans Gazette. The American reader will at once remember it : "Extraordinary attachment to savage life. The of ficers at Fort (one of the most distant outposts of human habitation in the west), extended their hos pitality lately to one of the young proteges of govern ment, a young Shawanee chief, who has been educated at public expense for the purpose of aiding in the civilization of his tribe. This youth, the son of a Shawanee chief by a Spanish mother, was put to a preparatory school in a small village on the Susque hannah, and subsequently was graduated at College with the first honors of his class. He had become a most accomplished gentleman, was appa rently fond of society, and, except in a scarce distin guishable tinge of copper color in his skin, retained no trace of his savage origin. Singular to relate, however, he disappeared suddenly from the fort, leav ing behind him the clothes in which he had arrived, and several articles of a gentleman s toilet ; and as the sentry on duty was passed at dawn of the same day by a mounted Indian in the usual savage dress, who gave the pass-word in issuing from the gate, it is presumed it was no other than the young Shahatan, and that he has joined his tribe, who were removed some years since beyond the Mississippi." The reader will agree with me that I possessed the ! key to the mystery. As no one thinks of the thread that disappears in an ] intricate embroidery till it comes out again on the surface, I was too busy in weaving my own less inter- ! esting woof of adventure for the two years following, to give Shahatan and his love even a passing thought. On a summer s night in 18 , however, I found my self on a banquette at an Almack s ball, seated beside a friend who, since we had met last at Almack s, had given up the white rose of girlhood for the diamonds of the dame, timidity and blushes for self-possession and serene sweetness, dancing for conversation, and the promise of beautiful and admired seventeen for the perfection of more lovely and adorable twenty-two. She was there as chaperon to a younger sister, and it was delightful in that whirl of giddy motion, and more giddy thought, to sit beside a tranquil and unfevered 44 WIGWAM VERSUS ALMACK S. mind and talk with her of what was passing, without either bewilderment or effort. " What is it," she said, " that constitutes aristocratic beauty ? for it is often remarked that it is seen no where in such perfection as at Almack s; yet, I have for a half-hour looked in vain among these handsome faces for a regular profile, or even a perfect figure. It is not symmetry, surely, that gives a look of high breeding nor regularity of feature." 44 If you will take a leaf out of a traveller s book," I replied, "we may at least have the advantage of a comparison. I remember recording, when travel ling in the East, that for months I had not seen an irregular nose or forehead in a female face ; and, al most universally, the mouth and chin of the Orientals are, as well as the upper features, of the most classic correctness. Yet where, in civilized countries, do women look lower-born or more degraded?" "Then it is not in the features," said my friend. 44 No, nor in the figure, strictly," I went on to say, 44 for the French and Italian women (vide the same book ofmems), are generally remarkable for shape and fine contour of limb, and the French are, we all know (begging your pardon), much better dancers, and more graceful in their movements, than all other nations. Yet what is more rare than a thorough-bred looking Frenchwoman ?" 41 We are coming to a conclusion very fast," she said, smiling. " Perhaps we shall find the great secret in delicacy of skin, after all." 44 Not unless you will agree that Broadway in New- York is the l pralo fiarito, of aristocratic beauty for nowhere on the face of the earth do you see such complexions. Yet, my fair countrywomen stoop too much, and are rather too dressy in their tastes to con vey very generally the impression of high birth." 44 Stay!" interrupted my companion, laying her hand on my arm with a look of more meaning than I quite understood ; "before you commit yourself far ther on that point, look at this tall girl coming up the floor, and tell me what you think of her, apropos to the subject." 44 Why, that she is the very forth-shadowing of noble parentage," I replied, " in step, air, form every thing. But surely the face is familiar to me." " It is the Miss Trevanion whom you said you had never met. Yet she is an American, and with such a fortune as hers, I wonder you should not have heard of her at least." 44 Miss Trevanion ! I never knew anybody of the name, I am perfectly sure yet that face I have seen before, and I would stake my life I have known the lady, and not casually either." My eyes were riveted to the beautiful woman who now sailed past with a grace and stateliness that were the subject of universal admiration, and I eagerly at tempted to catch her eye ; but on the other side of her walked one of the most agreeable flatterers of the hour, and the crowd prevented my approaching her, even if I had solved the mystery so far as to know in what terms to address her. Yet it was marvellous that I could ever have seen such beauty and forgotten the when and where, or that such fine and "unusually lustrous eyes could ever have shone on me without inscribing well in my memory their 4l whereabout" and history. 44 Well!" said my friend, "are you making out your theory, or are you 4 struck home with the first impression, like many another dancer here to-night?" " Pardon me ! I shall find out presently, who" Miss Trevanion is but, meantime, revenous. I will tell you where I think lies the secret of the aristocratic beauty of England. It is in the lofty maintien of the h#ad and bust the proud carriage; if you remark, in all these women the head set back, the chest eleva ted and expanded, and the whole port and expression, that of pride and conscious superiority. This, mind you, though the result of qualities in the character, is not the fcork of a day, nor perhaps of a single gener ation. The effect of expanding the breast and pre serving the back straight, and the posture generally erect, is the high health and consequent beauty of those portions of the frame ; and the physical advan tage, handed down with the pride which produced it, from mother to child, the race gradually has become perfect in those points, and the look of pride and high- bearing is now easy, natural, and unconscious. Glance your eye around and you will see that there is not a defective bust, and hardly a head ill set on, in the room. In an assembly in any other part of the world, to find a perfect bust with a gracefully carried head, is as difficult as here to find the exception." 41 What a proud race you make us out, to be sure," said my companion, rather dissentingly. 44 And so you are, eminently and emphatically proud," I replied. "What English family does not revolt from any proposition of marriage from a for eigner ? For an English girl to marry a Frenchman or an Italian, a German or a Russian, Greek, Turk, or Spaniard, is to forfeit a certain degree of respectabili ty, let the match be as brilliant as it may. The first feeling on hearing of it is against the girl s sense of delicacy. It extends to everything else. Your sol diers, your sailors, your tradesmen, your gentlemen, your common people, and your nobles, are all (who ever doubted it, you are mentally asking) out of all comparison better than the same ranks and professions in any other country. John Bull is literally surprised if any one doubts this nay, he does not believe that any one does doubt it. Yet you call the Americans ridiculously vain because they believe their institutions better than yours, that their ships fight as well, their women are as fair, and their men as gentlemanly aa any in the world. The 4 vanity of the French, who believe in themselves, just as the English do, only in a less blind entireness of self-glorification, is a common theme of ridicule in English newspapers ; and the French and the Americans, for a twentieth part of English intolerance and self-exaggeration, are written down daily by the English, as the two vainest nations on earth." 41 Stop!" said my fair listener, who was beginning to smile at my digression from female beauty to na tional pride, "let me make a distinction there. As the English and French are quite indifferent to the opin ion of other nations on these points, and not at all shaken in their self-admiration by foreign incredulity, theirs may fairly be dignified by the name of pride. But what shall I say of the Americans, who are in a perpetual fever at the ridicule of English newspapers, and who receive, I understand, with a general convul sion throughout the states, the least slur in a review, or the smallest expression of disparagement in a tory newspaper. This is not pride, but vanity." 44 1 atn hit, I grant you. A home thrust that I wish I could foil. But here comes Miss Trevanion, again, and I must make her out, or smother of curiosity. I leave you a victor." The drawing of the cord which encloses the dan cers, narrowed the path of the promenaders so effect ually, that I could easily take my stand in such a position that Miss Trevanion could not pass without seeing me. With my back to one of the slight pil lars of the orchestra, I stood facing her as she came down the room ; and within a foot or two of my po- ition, yet with several persons between us, her eye I for the first time rested on me. There was a sudden flush, a look of embarrassed but momentary curiosity, and the beautiful features cleared up, and I saw, with vexatious mortification, that she had the advantage of me, and was even pleased to remember where we had met. She held out her hand the next moment, WIGWAM VERSUS ALMACK S. but evidently understood my reserve, for, with a mis chievous compression ol the lips, she leaned over, and said in a voice intended only Cor my ear, "Reuben! take the gentleman s horse !" My sensations were very much those of the Irish man who fell into a pit in a dark night, and catching a straggling root in his descent, hung suspended by incredible exertion and strength of arm till morning, when daylight disclosed the bottom, at just one inch below the points of his toes. So easy seemed the solution after it was discovered. Mis Trevanion (ci-devant Plymton) took my arm. Her companion was engaged to dance. Our meeting at Almack s was certainlv one of the last events either could have expected when we parted but Almack s is not the place to express strong emotions. We walked leisurely down the sides of the quadrilles to the tea-room, and between her bows and greetings to her acquaintances, she put me au coaranl of her movements for the last two years Miss Trevanion being the name she had inherited with the fortune from her mother s family, and her mother s high but distant connexions having recognised and taken her by the hand in England. She had come abroad with the representative of her country, who had been at the trouble to see her installed in her rights, and had but lately left her on his return to America. A house in May Fair, and a chaperon in the shape of a card- playing and aristocratic aunt, were the other principal points in her parenthetical narration. Her communi cativeness, of course, was very gracious, and indeed her whole manner was softened and mellowed down, from the sharpness and hauteur of Miss Plymton. Prosperity had improved even her voice. As she bent over her tea, in the ante-room, I could not but remark how beautiful she was by the change usually wrought by the soft moisture of the English air, on persons from dry climates Americans particu larly. That filling out and rounding of the features, and renewing and freshening of the skin, becoming and improving to all, had to her been like Juno s bath. Then who does not know the miracles of dress? A circlet of diamonds whose "water" was light itself, followed the fine bend on either side back ward from her brows, supporting, at the parting of her hair, one large emerald. And on what neck (ay even of age) is not a diamond necklace beautiful ? Miss Trevanion was superb. The house in Grosvenor Place, at which I knocked the next morning, 1 well remembered as one of the most elegant and sumptuous in London. Lady L had ruined herself in completing and furnishing it, and her parties "in my time" were called, by the most apathetic blase, truly delightful. . " I bought this house of Lady L ," said Miss Trevanion, as we sat down to breakfast, " with all its furniture, pictures, books, incumbrances, and trifles, even to the horses in the stables, and the coachman in his wig ; for I had too many things to learn, to study furniture and appointments, and in this very short life, time is sadly wasted in beginnings. People are for ever gelling ready to live. What think you ? Is it not true in everything?" " Not in love, certainly." "Ah! very true!" And she became suddenly thoughtful, and for some minutes sipped her coffee in silence. I did not interrupt it, for I was thinking of Shahatan, and our thoughts very possibly were on the same long journey. " You are quite right," said I, looking round at the exquisitely-furnished room in which we were break- lasting, "you have bought these things at their intrin sic value, and you have all Lady L s taste, trouble, and vexatiou for twenty years, thrown into the bar gain. It is a matter of a lifetime to complete a house like this, and just as it is all done, Lady L re tires, an old woman, and you come all the way from a country-inn on the Susquehannah to enjoy it. What a whimsical world we live in !" "Yes!" she said, in a sort of soliloquizing tone, " I do enjoy it. It is a delightful sensation to take a long stride at once in the art of life to have lived for years believing that the wants you felt could only be supplied in fairy-land, and suddenly to change your sphere, and discover that not only these wants, but a thousand others, more unreasonable, and more im aginary, had been the subject of human ingenuity and talent, till those who live in luxury have no wants that science and chymistry and mechanics have left no nerve in the human system, no recess in human sense, unquestioned of its desire, and that every de sire is supplied ! What mistaken ideas most people have of luxury! They fancy the senses of the rich are over-pampered, that their zest of pleasure is al ways dull with too much gratification, that their health is ruined with excess, and their tempers spoiled with ease and subserviency. It is a picture drawn by the poets in times when money could buy nothing but excess, and when those who were prodigal could only be gaudy and intemperate. It was necessary to prac tise upon the reverse, too ; and hence all the world is convinced of the superior happiness of the plough man, the absolute necessity of early rising and coarse food to health, and the pride that must come with the flaunting of silk and satin." I could not but smile at this cool upset of all the received philosophy of the poets. "You laugh," she continued, "but is it not true that in England, at this moment, luxury is the sci ence of keeping up the zest of the senses rather than of pampering them that the children of the wealthy are the healthiest and fairest, and the sons of the aris tocracy are the most athletic and rational, as well as the most carefully nurtured and expensive of all clas ses that the most costly dinners are the most digesti ble, the most expensive wines the least injurious, the most sumptuous houses the best ventilated and whole some, and the most aristocratic habits of life the most conducive to the preservation of the constitution and consequent long life. There will be excesses, of course, in all spheres, but is not this true ?" " I am wondering how so gay a life as yours could furnish such very grave reflections." " Pshaw ! I am the very person to make them. My aunt (who, by-the-way, never rises till four in the af ternoon) has always lived in this sublimated sphere, and takes all these luxuries to be matters of course, as much as I take them to be miracles. She thinks a good cook as natural a circumstance as a fine tree, and would be as much surprised and shocked at the absence of wax candles, as she would at the going out of the stars. She talks as if good dentists, good mil liners, opera-singers, perfumers, etc., were the com mon supply of nature, like dew and sunshine to the flowers. My surprise and delight amuse her, as the child s wonder at the moon amuses the nurse." "Yet you call this dull unconsciousness the per fection of civilized life." "I think my aunt altogether is not a bad specimen of it, certainly. You have seen her, I think." "Frequently." "Well, you will allow that she is still a very haud- I some woman. She is past fifty, and has every fac- I ulty in perfect preservation; an erect figure, undimin- j ished delicacy and quickness in all her senses and tastes, and is still an ornament to society, and an at- i tractive person in appearance and conversation. Con- | trast her (and she is but one of a class) with the j women past fifty in the middle and lower walks of life I in America. At that age, with us, they are old 46 WIGWAM VERSUS ALMACK S. Avomen in the commonest acceptation of the term. Their teeth are gone or defective from neglect, their faces are wrinkled, their backs bent, ther feet enlarged, their voices cracked, their senses impaired, their rel ish in the joys of the young entirely gone by. What makes the difference ? Costly care. The physician has watched over her health at a guinea a visit. The dentist has examined her teeth at twenty guineas a year. Expensive annual visits to the seaside have re newed her skin. The friction of the weary hands of her maid has kept down the swelling of her feet and preserved their delicacy of shape. Close and open carriages at will, have given her daily exercise, either protected from the damp, or refreshed with the fine sir of the country. A good cook has kept her diges tion untaxed, and good wines have invigorated with out poisoning her constitution." " This is taking very unusual care of oneself, how ever." " Not at all. My aunt gives it no more thought than the drawing on of her glove. It is another ad vantage of wealth, too, that your physician and den tist are distinguished persons who meet you in society, and call on you unprofessionally, see when they are needed, and detect the approach of disease before you are aware of it yourself. My aunt, though nat urally delicate, has never been ill. She was watched in childhood with great cost and pains, and, with the habit of common caution herself, she is taken such care of by her physician and servants, that nothing but some extraordinary fatality could bring disease near her." " Blessed are the rich, by your showing." " Why, the beatitudes were not written in our times. If long life, prolonged youth and beauty, and almost perennial health, are blessings, certainly, now-a-days, blessed are the rich." "But is there no drawback to all this? Where people have surrounded themselves with such costly and indispensable luxuries, are they not made selfish by the necessity of preserving them? Would any exigence of hospitality, for instance, induce your aunt to give up her bed, and the comforts of her own room, to a stranger?" " Oh dear, no !" "Would she eat her dinner cold for the sake of listening to an appeal to her charity ?" "How can you fancy such a thing?" "Would she take a wet and dirty, but perishing beggar-woman into her chariot on her way to a din ner-party, to save her from dying by the roadside?" "Um why, I fear she would be very nearsighted till she got fairly by." " Yet these are charities that require no great ef fort in those whose chambers are less costly, whose stomachs are less carefully watched, and whose car riages and dresses are of a plainer fashion." "Very true!" " So far, then, blessed are the poor! But is not the heart slower in all its sympathies among the rich? Are not friends chosen and discarded, because their friendship is convenient or the contrary ? Are not many worthy people ineligible acquaintances, many near relations unwelcome visitors, because they are out of keeping with these costly circumstances, or involve some sacrifice of personal luxury ? Are not people, who would not preserve their circle choice and aristocratic, obliged to inflict cruel insults on sensitive minds, to slight, to repulse, to neglect, to equivocate and play the unfeeling and ungrateful, at the same time that to their superiors they must often sacrifice dignity, and contrive, and flatter, and de ceive all to preserve the magic charm of the life you have painted so attractive and enviable?" " Heigho ! it s a bad world, I believe !" said Miss Trevanion, betraying by that ready sigh, that even while drawing the attractions of high life, she had not been blind to this more unfavorable side of the pic ture. " And, rather more important query still, for an heiress," I said, "does not an intimate acquaintance with these luxurious necessities, and the habit of thinking them indispensable, make all lovers in this class mercenary, and their admiration, where there is wealth, subject, at least, to scrutiny and suspicion?" A quick flush almost crimsoned Miss Trevanion s face, and she fixed her eyes upon me so inquisitively as to leave me in no doubt that I had inadvertently touched upon a delicate subject. Embarrassed by a searching look, and not seeing how I could explain that 1 meant no allusion, I said hastily, " I was think ing of swimming across the Susquehannah by moon light." "Puck is at the door, if you please, miss!" said the butler, entering at the moment. " Perhaps while I am putting on my riding-hat," said Miss Trevanion, with a laugh, "I may discover the connexion between your last two observations. It certainly is not very clear at present." I took up my hat. "Stay you must ride with me. You shall have the groom s horse, and we will go without him. I hate to be chased through the park by a flying ser vant one English fashion, at least, that I think un comfortable. They manage it better where 1 learned to ride," she added with a laugh. "Yes, indeed! I do not know which they would first starve to death in the backwoods the master for his insolence in requiring the servant to follow him, or the servant for being such a slave as to obey." I never remember to have seen a more beautiful animal than the highbred blood-mare on which my ci-devant hostess of the Plymton inn rode through the park gates, and took the serpentine path at a free gallop. I was as well mounted myself as I had ever been in my life, and delighted, for once, not to fret a hundred yards behind ; the ambitious animal seemed to have wings to his feet. " Who ever rode such a horse as this," said my companion, " without confessing the happiness of riches! It is the one luxury of this new life that I should find it misery to forego. Look at the eager ness of his ears ! See his fine limbs as he strikes for ward ! What nostrils ! What glossy shoulders ! What bounding lightness of action ! Beautiful Puck ! I could never live without you! What a shame to nature that there are no such horses in the wilder ness!" " I remember seeing an Indian pony," said I, watch ing her face for the effect of my observation, "which had as many fine qualities, though of a different kind at least when his master was on him." She looked at me inquiringly. "By-the-way. too, it was at your house on the Sus quehannah," I added, "you must remember the horse a black, double-jointed " "Yes, yes! I know. I remember. Shall we quicken our pace? I henr some one overtaking us, and to be passed with such horses as ours were a shame indeed." We loosed our bridles and flew away like the wind; but a bright tear was presently tossed from her dark eyelash, and fell glittering on the dappled shoul der of her horse. " Her heart is Shahatan s," thought I, " whatever chance there may be that the gay hon- orabJe who is at our heels may dazzle her into throw ing away her hand." Mounted on a magnificent hunter, whose powerful and straightforward "leaps soon told against the lavish and high action of our more showy horses, the Hon. Charles (the gentleman who had engrossed the attention of Miss Trevanion the night before at WIGWAM VERSUS ALMACK S. 47 Almack s) was soon beside my companion, and leaning from his saddle, was taking pains to address conversa tion to her in a tone not meant for my ear. As the lady picked out her path with a marked preference for his side of the road, I of course rode with a free rein on the other, rather discontented, however, I must own, to be playing Monsieur de Trop. The Hon. Charles, I very well knew, was enjoying a tem porary relief from the most pressing of his acquaint ances by the prospect of his marrying; an heiress, and in a two years gay life in London 1 had traversed his threads too often to believe that he had a heart to be redeemed from dissipation, or a soul to appreciate the virtues of a high-minded woman. I found myself, besides, without wishing if, attorney for Shahatan in the case. Observing that I " sulked," Miss Trevanion, in the next round, turned her horse s .head toward the Ser pentine Bridge, and we entered into Kensington Gar dens. The band was playing on the other side of the ha-ha, and fashionable London was divided between the equestrians on the road, and the promenaders on the greensward. We drew up in the thickest of the crowd, and presuming that, by Miss Trevanion s tac tics, I was to find some other acquaintance to chat with while our horses drew breath, I spurred to a lit tle distance, and sat mum in my saddle with forty or fifty horsemen between me and herself. Her other companion had put his horse as close by the side of Puck as possible; but there were other dancers at Almack s who had an eye upon the heiress, and their tete-d-tetc was interrupted presently by the how-d ye- do s and attentions of half a dozen of the gayest men about town. After looking black at them for a mo ment, Charles drew bridle, and backing out of the press rather unceremoniously, rode to the side of a lady who sat in her saddle with a mounted servant behind her, separated from me by only the trunk of a superb lime-tree. I was fated to see all the workings of Miss Trevanion s destiny. "You see what I endure for you!" he said, as a flush came and went in his pale face. "You are false!" was the answer. "I saw you ride in your eyes fastened to hers your lips open with watching for her words your horse in a foam with your agitated and nervous riding. Never call her a giraffe, or laugh at her again, Charles! She is handsome enough to be loved for herself, and you love her !" " No, by Heaven !" The lady made a gesture of impatience and whipped her stirrup through the folds of her riding-dress till it | was heard even above the tinkling triangle of the band. ; "No !" he continued, "and you are less clever than [ you think, if you interpret my excitement into love. I am excited most eager in my chase after this wo man. You, shall know why. But for herself good heavens ! why, you have never heard her speak ! She is never done wondering at silver forks, never done with ecstatics about finger-glasses and pastilles. She is a boor and you are silly enough to put her beside yourself!" The lady s frown softened, and she gave him her whip to hold while she reimprisoned a stray ringlet. "Keep an eye on her, while J am talking to you," j he continued, " for I must stick to her like her shad ow. She is full of mistrust, and if I lose her by the want of attention for a single hour, that hour will cost me yourself, dearest, first and most important of all, and it will cost me England or my liberty for failing this, I have not a chance." " Go ! go !" said the lady, in a new and now anx ious tone, touching his horse at the same time with the whip he had just restored to her, "she is off! Adieu !" And with half a dozen attendants, Miss Trevanion took the road at a gallop, while her contented rival followed at a pensive amble, apparently quite content to waste the time as she best might till dinner. The handsome fortune-hunter watched his opportunity and regained his place at Miss Trevanion s side, and with an acquaintance, who was one of her self-select ed troop, I kept in the rear, chatting of the opera, and enjoying the movement of a horse of as free and admirable action as I had ever felt communicated, like inspiration, through my blood. I was resumed as sole cavalier and attendant at Hyde Park gate. "Do you know the Baroness ?" I asked, as we walked our horses slowly down Grosvenor Place. "Not personally," she replied, " but I have heard my aunt speak of her, and I know she is a woman of most seductive manners, though said to be one of very bad morals. But from what Mr. Charles tells me, I fancy high play is her only vice. And meantime she is received everywhere." "I fancy," said I, "that the Hon. Charles is good authority for the number of her vices, and beg ging you, as a parting request, to make this remark the key to your next month s observation, I have the honor to return this fine horse to you, and make my I adieux." "But you will come to dinner! And, by-the-by, I you have not explained to me what you meant by j swimming across the Susquehannah, in the middle iof your breakfast, this morning." While Miss Trevanion gathered up her dress to mount the steps, I told her the story which I have j already told the reader, of my involuntary discovery, | while lying in that moonlit river, of Shahatan s unfor- j tunate passion. Violently agitated by the few words i in which I conveyed it, she insisted on my entering ! the house, and waiting while she recovered herself sufficiently to talk to me on the subject. But I had no fancy for match-making or breaking. I reiterated my caution touching the intimacy of her fashionable admirer with the baroness, and said a word of praise of the noble savage who loved her. CHAPTER II. IN the autumn of the year after the events outlined in the previous chapter, I received a visit at my resi dence on the Susquehannah, from a friend I had never before seen a mile from St. James s street a May-fair man of fashion who took me in his way back from Santa Fe. He stayed a few days to brush the cob webs from a fishing-rod and gun which he found in inglorious retirement in the lumber-room of my cot tage, and, over our dinners, embellished with his trout and woodcock, the relations of his adventures (com pared, as everything was, with London experience ex clusively) were as delightful to me as the tales of Scheherezade to the calif. "I have saved to the last," he said, pushing me the ! bottle, the evening before his departure, "a bit of ro mance which I stumbled over in the prairie, and I | dare swear it will surprise you as much as it did me, ! for I think you will remember having seen the heroine at A.lmack s." "At Almack s ?" "You may well stare. I have been afraid to tell you the story, lest you should think I drew too long a bow. I certainly should never be believed in Lon don." Well the story?" " I told you of my leaving St. Louis with a trading party for Santa Fe. Our leader was a rough chap, big-boned, and ill put together, but honestly fond of fight, and never content with a stranger till he had 48 WIGWAM VERSUS ALMACK S. settled the question of which was the better man. He refused at first to take me into his party, assuring me that his exclusive services and those of his company had been engaged at a high price, by another gentle man. By dint of drinking juleps with him, how ever, and giving him a thorough mill (for though strong as a rhinoceros, he knew nothing of the sci ence ), he at last elected me to the honor of his friend ship, and took me into the party as one of his own men. " I bought a strong horse, and on a bright May morning the party set forward, bag and baggage, the leader having stolen a march upon us, however, anc gone ahead with the person who hired his guidance It was fine fun at first, as I have told you, to galloj away over the prairie without fence or ditch, but 1 soon tired of the slow pace and the monotony of the scenery, and began to wonder why the deuce our leader kept himself so carefully out of sight for i three days travel I had seen him but once^ and the at our bivouac fire on the second evening. The men knew or would tell nothing, except that he had one man and a packhorse with him, and that the gentle man and he encamped farther on. I was under prom ise to perform only the part of one of the hired carriers of the party, or I should soon have made a push to penetrate the gentleman s mystery. " I think it was on the tenth day of our travels that the men began to talk of falling in with a tribe of In dians, whose hunting-grounds we were close upon, and at whose village, upon the bank of a river, they usually got fish and bufialo-huinp, and other luxuries not picked up on the wing. We encamped about sunset that night as usual, and after picketing my horse, I strolled off to a round mound not far from the fire, and sat down upon the top to see the moon rise. The east was brightening, and the evening was de licious. "Up came the moon, looking like one of the duke of Devonshire s gold plates (excuse the poetry of the comparison), and still the rosy color hung on in the west, and turning my eyes from one to the other, I at last perceived, over the southwestern horizon, a mist slowly coming up, which indicated the course of a river. It was just in our track, and the whim struck me to saddle my horse and ride on in search of the Indian village, which, by their description, must be on its banks. " The men were singing songs over their supper, and with a flask of brandy in my pocket, I got off un observed, and was soon in a flourishing gallop over the wild prairie, without guide or compass. It was a silly freak, and might have ended in an unpleasant adven ture. Pass the bottle and have no apprehensions, however. " For an hour or so, I was very much elated with my independence, and my horse too seemed delighted to get out of the slow pace of the caravan. It was as light as day with the wonderful clearness of the atmo sphere, and the full moon and the coolness of the evening air made exercise very exhilarating. I rode on, looking up occasionally to the mist, which retreat ed long after I thought I should have reached the river, till I began to feel uneasy at last, and wondered whether I had not embarked in a very mad adventure. As I had lost sight of our own fires, and might miss my way in trying to retrace my steps, I determined to push on. " My horse was in a walk, and I was beginning to feel very grave, when suddenly the beast pricked up his ears and gave a loud neigh. I rose in my stirrups, and looked round in vain for the secret of his improved spirits, till with a second glance forward, I discovered what seemed the faint light reflected upon the smoke of a concealed fire. The horse took his own counsel, and set up a sharp gallop for the spot, and a few min- utes brought me in sight of a fire half concealed by a clump of shrubs, and a white object near it, which to my surprise developed to a tent. Two horses picketed near, and a man sitting by the fire with his hands crossed before his shins, and his chin on his knees, completed the very agreeable picture. " Who goes there ? shouted this chap, springing to his rifle as he heard my horse s feet sliding through the grass. " I gave the name of the leader, comprehending at once that this was the advanced guard of our party ; but though the fellow lowered his rifle, he gave me a very scant welcome, and motioned me away from the tent-side of the fire. There was no turning a man out of doors in the midst of a prairie ; so, without cere mony, I tethered my horse to his stake, and getting out my dried beef and brandy, made a second supper with quite as good an appetite as had done honor to the first. " My brandy-flask opened the lips of my sulky friend after a while, though he kept his carcass very obsti nately between me and the tent, and I learned that the leader (his name was Rolfe, by-the-by), had gone on to the Indian village, and that the gentleman had dropped the curtain of his tent at my approach, and was probably asleep. My word of honor to Rolfe that I would cut no capers (his own phrase in adminis tering the obligation), kept down my excited curiosity, and prevented me, of course, from even pumping the man beside me, though I might have done so with a little more of the contents of my flask. " The moon was pretty well overhead when Rolfe returned, and found me fast asleep by the fire. I awoke with the trampling and neighing of horses, and, spring ing to my feet, I saw an Indian dismounting, and Rolfe and the fire-tender conversing together while picketing their horses. The Indian had a tall feather in his cap, and trinkets on his breast, which glittered in the moon light ; but he was dressed otherwise like a white man, with a hunting-frock and very loose large trowsers. By the way, he had moccasins, too, and a wampum belt ; but he was a clean-limbed, lithe, agile-looking devil, with an eye like a coal of fire. " You ve broke your contract, mister! said Rolfe, coming up to me; but stand by and say nothing. " He then went to the tent, gave an ehem"! by way of a knock, and entered " It s a fine night ! said the Indian, coming up to the fire and touching a brand with the toe of his moc casin. " I was so surprised at the honest English in which he delivered himself, that I stared at him without an swer. " Do you speak English ? he said. " Tolerably well, said I, but I beg your pardon for being so surprised at your own accent that I forgot to reply to you. And now I look at you more closely, I see that you are rather Spanish than Indian. " My mother s blood, he answered rather coldly, but my father was an Indian, and I am a chief. " Well, Rolfe, he continued, turning the next in stant to the trader, who came toward us, who is this that would see Shahatan ? " The trader pointed to the lent. The curtain was put aside, and a smart-looking youth, in a blue cap and cloak, stepped out and took his way off into the prairie, motioning to the chief to follow. Go along ! he won t eat ye ! said Rolfe, as the Indian hesitated, from pride or distrust, and laid his hand on his tomahawk. I wish I could tell you what was said at that in terview, for my curiosity was never so strongly excited. Rolfe seemed bent on preventing both interference and observation, however, and in his loud and coarse voice commenced singing and making preparations for his supper; and, persuading rne into the drinking part of WIGWAM VERSUS ALMACK S. 49 it, I listened to his stories and toasted my shins till I was too sleepy to feel either romance or curiosity; and leaving the moon to waste its silver on the wilder ness, and the mysterious colloquists to ramble and finish their conference as they liked, I rolled over on my buffalo-skin and dropped off to sleep. " The next morning I rubbed my eyes to discover whether all 1 have been telling you was not a dream, for tent and demoiselle had evaporated, and I lay with my feet to the smouldering fire, and all the trading party preparing for breakfast around me. Alarmed at my absence, they had made a start before sunrise to overtake Rolfe, and had come up while I slept. The the trader found himself apparently among old ac quaintances. The chief sent a lad with my horse down into the plain to be picketed where the grass was better, and took me into a small hut, where I treated myself to a little more of a toilet than I had been ac customed to of late, in compliment to the unusual prospect of supping with a lady. The hut was lined with bark, and seemed used by the chief for the same purpose, as there were sundry articles of dress and other civilized refinements hanging to the bracing- poles, and covering a rude table in the corner. " Fancy my surprise, on coming out, to meet the chief strolling up and down his prairie shelf with, not leader after a while gave me a slip of paper from the one lady, but half a dozen a respectable looking gen chief, saying that he should be happy to give me a ! tleman in black (I speak of his coat), and a bevy of specimen of Indian hospitality at the Shawanee vil- | nice-looking girls, with our Almack s acquaintance in lage, on my return from Santa Fe a neat hint that I j| the centre the whole party, except the chief, dressed was not to intrude upon him at present." " Which you took ?" " Rolfe seemed to have had a hint which was prob ably in some more decided shape, since he took it for us all. The men grumbled at passing the village with out stopping for fish, but the leader was inexorable, and we left it to the riht and made tracks, as the hunters say, for our destination. Two days from there we saw a buffalo - " " Which you demolished. You told me that story last night. Come," get back to the Shawanees ! You called on the village at your return ?" " Yes, and an odd place it was. We came upon it from the west, Rolfe having made a bend to the west n a way that would pass muster in any village in Eng land. Shahatan wore the Indian s blanket, modified with a large mantle of fine blue cloth, and crossed over his handsome bare chest something after the style of a Hieland tartan. I really never saw a better made or more magnificent looking fellow, though I am not sure that his easy and picturesque dress would not have im proved a plainer man. " I remembered directly that Rolfe had said some thing to me about missionaries living among the Shaw anees, and I was not surprised to hear that the gende- man in a black coat was a reverend, and the ladies the sisterhood of the mission. Miss Trevanion seemed rather in haste to inform me of the presence of the irom me west, none Having maae a oenu 10 itie wesi- . inm^i m ward, on his return back. We had been travelling all cloth, and in the next breath claimed my congratula- day over a long plain, wooded in clumps, looking very much like an immense park, and I began to think that the trader intended to cheat me out of mv visit for tions on her marriage ! She had been a chieftainess for two months. We strolled up and down the grassy terrace, divi- he said we should sup with the Shawanees that night, | ding our attention between the effects of the sunset on an3 I did not in the least recognise the outline of the [ the prairie below and the preparations for OIH supper, country. We struck the bed of a small and very beau tiful river, presently, however, and after following it through a wood for a mile, came to a sharp brow where the river suddenly descended to a plain at least two hundred feet lower than the table-land on which we had been travelling. The country below looked as if it might have been the bed of an immense lake, and we stood on the shore of it. I sat on my horse geologizing in fancy about thi which was going on by the light of pine-knots stuck in the clefts of the rock in the rear. A dozen Indian girls were crossing and recrossing before the fires, and with the bright glare upon the precipice, and the moving figures, wigwams, &c., it was like a picture of Salvator Rosa s. The fair chieftainess, as she glided across occasionally to look after the people, with a step as light as her stately figure would allow, was not the least beautiful feature of the scene. We lost a fine singular formation of land, till, hearing a shout, I !| creature when we let her slip through our fingers, my found the party had gone on, and Rolfe was hallooing to me to follow. As I was trying to get a glimpse of him through the trees, up rode my old acquaintance Shahatan, with his rifle across his thigh, and gave me a very cordial welcome. He then rode on to show me the way. We left the river, which was foaming among some fine rapids, and by a zig-zag side-path through the woods, descended about half way to the plain, where we rounded a huge rock, and stood suddenly in the village of the Shawanees. You can not fancy any thing so picturesque. On the left, for a quarter of a mile, extended a natural steppe, or terrace, a hundred yards wide, and rounding in a crescent to the south. The river came in toward it on the right in a superb cascade, visible from the whole of the platform, and against the rocky wall at the back, and around on the edge overlooking the plain, were built the wigwams and log-huts of the tribe, in front of which lounged men, women, and children, enjoying the cool of the summer evening. Not far from the base of the hill the river reappeared from the woods, and I distin guished some fields planted with corn along its banks, and horses and cattle grazing. What, with the pleas ant sound of the falls, and the beauty of the scene al together, it was to me more like the primitive Arcadia we dream about, than anything I ever saw. " Well, Rolfe and his party reached the village pres- ! ently, for the chief had brought me by a shorter cut, and in a moment the whole tribe was about us, HU, and i dear fellow ! " Thereby hangs a tale, have little doubt, and I can give you some data for a good guess at it but as the nigger song has it " Tell us what dey had for supper Black-eyed pease, or bread and butter ?" "We had everything the wilderness could produce appetites included. Lying in the track of the tra ding-parties, Shahatan, of course, made what additions he liked to the Indian mode of living, and except that our table was a huge buffalo-skin stretched upon stakes, the supper might have been a traveller s meal among Turks or Arabs, for all that was peculiar about it. I should except, perhaps, that no Turk or Arab ever saw so pretty a creature as the chiefs sister, who was my neighbor at the feast." So another romance !" " No, indeed ! For though her eyes were eloquent enough to persuade one to forswear the world and turn Shawanee, she had no tongue for a stranger. What little English she had learned of the missionaries she was too sly to use, and our flirtation was a very unsat isfactory pantomime. I parted from her at night in the big wigwam, without having been out of ear-shot of the chief for a single moment; and as Rolfe was in exorable about getting off with the daybreak the next morning, it was the last I saw of the little fawn. But to tell you the truth, I had forty minds between that MISS JONES S SON. and St. Louis to turn about and have another look at her. " The big wigwam, I should tell you, was as large as a common breakfast-room in London. It was built of bark very ingeniously sewed together, and lined throughout with the most costly furs, even the floor covered with highly-dressed bear-skins. After finish ing our supper in the open air, the large curtain at the door, which was made of the most superb gold-colored otters, was thrown up to let in the blaze of the pine torches stuck in the rock opposite, and, as the evening was getting cool, we followed the chieftainess to her savage drawing-room, and took coffee and chatted till a late hour, lounging on the rude, fur-covered couch es. I had not much chance to talk with our old friend, but I gathered from what little she said that she had been disgusted with the heartlessness of Lon don, and preferred the wilderness with one of nature s nobility to all the splendors of matrimony in high-life. She said, however, that she should try to induce Sha- hatan to travel abroad for a year or two, and after that, she thought their time would be agreeably spent in such a mixture of savage and civilized life as her for tune and his control over the tribe would enable them to manage." When my friend had concluded his story, I threw what little light I possessed upon the undeveloped springs of Miss Trevanion s extraordinary movements, and we ended our philosophizings on the subject by promising ourselves a trip to the Shawanees some day together. Now that we are together in London, how ever, and have had the benefit of Mrs. Melicent s ad ditional chapter, with the still later news that Shahatan and his wife were travelling by the last accounts in the east, we have limited our programme to meeting them in England, and have no little curiosity to see whether the young savage will decide like his wife in the ques tion of "Wigwam versus Almack s." MISS JONES S SON, ONE night, toward the close of the London season the last week in August, or thereabouts the Dept- ford omnibus set down a gentleman at one of the small brick-block cottages on the Kent road. He was a very quietly disposed person, with a face rather in scrutable to a common eye, and might, or might not, pass for what he was a man of mark. His age was perhaps thirty, and his manners and movements had that cool security which can come only from con versance with a class of society that is beyond being laughed at. He was handsome but when the style of a man is well pronounced, that is an unobserved trifle. Perhaps the reader will step in to No. 10, Verandah Row, without further ceremony. The room scarce more than a squirrel-box from back to front was divided by folding doors, and the furniture was fanciful and neatly kept. The canary- bird, in a very small cage, in the corner, seemed rather an intruder on such small quarters. You could scarce give a guess what style of lady was the tenant of such miniature gentility. The omnibus passenger sat down in one of the little cane-bottomed and straight backed chairs, and present ly the door opened and a stout elderly woman, whose skirts really filled up the remaining void of the little parlor, entered with a cordial exclamation, and an affectionate embrace was exchanged between them. " Well, my dear mother !" said the visiter, " I am off to-morrow to Warwickshire to pass the shooting season, and I came to wind up your household clock work, to go for a month (ticking, 1 am sorry to say!) What do you want ? How is the tea-caddy ?" " Out of green, James, but the black will do till you come back. La! don t talk of such matters when you are just going to leave me. I ll step up stairs and make you out a list of my wants presently. Tell me where are you going in Warwickshire ? I went to school in Warwickshire. Dear me ! the lovers I had there ! Well, well ! Where did you say you were going?" " To the marquis of Headfort Headfort court, I think his place is called a post and a half from Strat ford. Were you ever there, mother ?" " I there, indeed ! no, my son ! But I had a lover near Stratford young Sir Humphrey Fencher, he was then old Sir Humphrey now ! I m sure he re members me, long as it is since I saw him and, James, I ll give you a letter to him. Yes I should like to know how he looks, and what he will say to my grown up boy. I ll go and write it now, and I ll look over the groceries at the same time. If you move your chair, James, don t crush the canary-bird !" The mention of the letter of introduction lingered in the ear of the gentleman left in the parlor, and smiling to himself with a look of covert humor, he drew from his pocket a letter of which it reminded him the letter of introduction, on the strength of which he was going to Warwickshire. As this and the one which was being written up stairs, were the two pieces of ordnance destined to propel the incidents of our story, the reader will excuse us for presenting them as a " make ready." " Crochford s, Monday. " DEAR FRED : Nothing going on in town, except a little affair of my own, which I can t leave to go down to you. Dull even at Crocky s nobody plays this hot weather. And now, as to your commissions. You will receive Dupree, the cook, by to-night s mail. Grisi won t come to you without her man twasn t thus when we were boys." so I send you a figurante, and you must do tableaux. I was luckier in finding you a wit. S will be withyou to-morrow, though, by the way, it is only on condition of meeting Lady Midge Bellasys, for whom, if she is not with you, you must exert your inveiglements. This, by way only of shuttlecock and battledore, however, for they play at wit together nothing more, on her part at least. Look out for this devilish fellow, my lord Fred ! and live thin till you see the last of him for he ll laugh you into your second apoplexy with the danger ous ease of a hair-trigger. I coRld amuse you with a turn or two in my late adventures, but black and white are bad confidants, though very well as a busi ness firm. And, mentioning them, I have drawn on you for a temporary c500, which please lump with my other loan, and oblige " Yours, faithfully, " VAURIEN." And here follows the letter of Mrs. S to her ancient lover, the baronet of Warwickshire : " No. 10, Verandah Row, Kent Road. "DEAR SIR HUMPHREY : Perhaps you will scarce remember Jane Jones, to whom you presented the MISS JONES S SON. brush of your first fox. This was thirty years ago. I was then at school in the little village near Tally-ho hall. Dear me ! how well I remember it ! On hear ing of your marriage, I accepted an offer from my late husband, Mr. S , and our union was blessed with one boy, who, I must say, is an angel of good ness. Out of his small income, my dear James fur nished and rented this very genteel house, and he tells me I shall have it for life, and provides me one servant, and everything I could possibly want. Thrice a week he comes out to spend the day and dine with me, and, in short, he is the pattern of good sons. As this dear boy is going down to Warwickshire, I can not resist the desire I have that you should know him, and that he should bring me back an account of my lover in days gone by. Any attention to him, dear Sir Humphrey, will very much oblige one whom you once was happy to oblige, and still " Your sincere friend, JANE S , "Formerly JONES." It was a morning astray from paradise when S awoke at Stratford. Ringing for his breakfast, he re quested that the famous hostess of the red horse would grace him so far as to join him over a muffin and a cup of coffee, and between the pauses of his toilet, he indited a note, enclosing his mother s letter of introduction to Sir Humphrey. Enter dame hostess, prim and respectful, and as breakfast proceeded, S easily informed himself of the geography of Tally-ho hall, and the existing branch and foliage of the family tree. Sir Humphrey s domestic circle consisted of a daughter and a neice (his only son having gone with his regiment to the Canada wars), and the hall lay half way to Headfort court the Fenchers his lordship s nearest neighbors, Mrs. Boniface was inclined to think. S divided his morning very delightfully be tween the banks of the Avon, and the be-scribbled localities of Shakspere s birth and residence, and by two o clock the messenger had returned with this note from Sir Humphrey : "DEAR SIR: I remember Miss Jones very well, God bless me, I thought she had been dead many years. I am sure I shall be very happy to see her son. Will you come out and dine with us ? dinner at seven. Your ob t servant, "HUMPHREY FENCHER. "James S , Esq." As the crack wit and diner-out of his time, S was as well known to the brilliant society of London as the face of the "gold stick in waiting" at St. James s, and, with his very common name, he was a little likely to be recognised out of his peculiar sphere as the noble lord, when walking in Cheapside, to be recognised as the " stick," so often mentioned in the Court Journal. He had delayed his visit to Headfort court for a day, and undertaken to deliver his mother s letter, and look up her lang-syne lover, very much as he would stop in the Strand to purchase her a parcel of snuff purely from the filial habit of always doing her bidding, even in whims. He had very little curiosi ty to see a Warwickshire Nimrod, and, till his post- chaise stopped at the lodge-gate of Tally-ho hall, it had never entered his head to speculate upon the ground of his introduction to Sir Humphrey, nor to anticipate the nature of his reception. His nmne had been so long to him an " open sesame," that he had no doubt of its potency, and least of all when he pro nounced it at an inferior gate in the barriers of society. The dressing-bell had rang, and S was shown into the vacant drawing-room, where he buried him self in the deepest chair he could find, and sat looking at the wall with the composure of a barber s customer waiting to be shaved. There presently entered two young ladies, very showily dressed, who called him Mr. "Jones," in replying to his salutation, and im mediately fell to promenading between the two old mirrors at the extremities of the room, discoursing upon topics evidently chosen to exclude the new comer from the conversation. With rather a feeling that it was their loss, not his, S --- recomposed himself in the leathern chair and resumed the perusal of the oaken ceiling. The neglect sat upon him a little uncomfortable withal. " How d ye do, young man ! What ! you are Miss Jones s son, eh ?" was the salutation of a burly old gentleman, who now entered and shook hands with the great incognito. " Here, Bel ! Fan ! Mr. Jones, My daughter and my niece, Mr. Jones !" S - was too indignant for a moment to explain that Miss Jones had changed her name before his birth, and on second thought, finding that this real character was not suspected, and that he represented to Sir Humphrey simply the obscure son of an obscure girl, pretty, thirty years ago, he fell quietly into the role expected of him, and walked patiently in to dinner with Miss Fencher, who accepted his arm for that purpose, but forgot to take it ! It was hard to be witty as a Mr. Jones, but the habit was strong and the opportunities were good, and S -- , warming with his first glass of sherry, struck out some sparks that would have passed for gems of the first water, with choicer listeners ; but wit is slowly recognised when not expected, and though now and then the young ladies stared, and now and then the old baronet chuckled and said " egad ! very well ! there was evidently no material rise in the value of Mr. Jones, and he at last confined his social talents exclusively to his wine-glass and nut-picker, feeling. spite of himself, as stupid as he seemed. Relieved of the burden of replying to their guess, the young ladies now took up a subject which evident ly lay nearest their hearts a series of dejeuners, the first of which was to come off the following morning at Headfort court. As if by way of caveat, in case Mr. Jones should fancy that he could be invited to accompany Sir Humphrey, Miss Fencher took the trouble to explain that these were, by no means, com mon country entertainments, but exclusive and select arties, under the patronage of the beautiful and witty ady Imogen Bellasys, now a guest at Headfort. Her ladyship had not only stipulated for societe choisie, but had invited down a celebrated London wit, a great friend of her own, to do the mottoes and keep up the spirit of the masques and tableaux. Indeed, Miss Fencher considered herself as more particularly the guest and ally of Lady Imogen, never having been permitted during her mother s life to visit Headfort (though she did not see what the marquis s private character had to do with his visiting list), and she ex pected to be called upon to serve as a sort of maid of honor, or in some way to assist Lady Imogen, who had invited her very affectionately, after church, on Sunday. She thought, perhaps, she had better wake up Sir Humphrey while she thought of it (and while papa was good natured,as he always was after dinner), and exact of him a promise that the great London i Mr., what d ye call itn, should be invited to pass a week at Tally-ho hall for, of course, as mutual allies of Lady Imogen, Miss Feucher and he would become rather well acquainted. To this enliahtenment, of which we have given only a brief resumer, Mr. Jones listened attentively, as he I was expected to do, and was very graciously answered, ! when by way of feeling one of the remote pulses of his celebrity, he ventured to ask for some further par- i ticulars about the London wit aforementioned. He j learned, somewhat to his disgust, that his name was either Brown or Simpson, some very common name, however, but that he had a wonderful talent for writing ! impromptuepigrams on people and singing them after- I ward to impromptu music on the piano, and that he pa L 52 MISS JONES S SON. was supposed to be a natural son of Talleyrand or Lord Byron, Miss Fencher had forgotten which. He had written something, but Miss Fencher had for gotten what. He was very handsome no, very plain indeed, Miss Fencher had forgotten which but it was one or the other. At this crisis of the conversation Sir Humphrey roused from his post-prandial snooze, and begged Mr. Jones to pa,ss the port and open the door for the ladies. By the time the gloves were rescued from under the table, the worthy baronet had drained a bumper, and, with his descending glass, dropped his eyes to the level of his daughter s face, where they rested with paternal admiration. Miss Fencher was far from ill-looking, and she well knew that her father waxed affectionate over his wine. "Papa!" said she, coming behind him, and looking down his throat, as he strained his head backward, leaving his reluctant double chin resting on his cravat. " I have a favor to ask, my dear papa !" " He shall go, my dear! he shall go ! I have been thinking of it I ll arrange it, Bel, I ll arrange it ! Go your ways, chick, and send me my slippers !" gurgled the baronet, with his usual rapid brevity, when slight ly elevated. Miss Fencher turned quite pale. "Pa pa!" she exclaimed, with horror in her voice, coming round front, " pa pa ! good gracious ! Do you know it is the most exclusive however, papa ! let us talk that over in the other room. What I wish to ask is quite another matter. You know that Mr. Mr." " The gentleman you mean is probably James S ," interrupted Mr. Jones. " Thank you, sir, so it is !" continued Miss Fencher, putting her hand upon the Baronet s mouth, who was about to speak " It is Mr. James S ; and what I wish, papa, is, to have Mr. James S in vited to pass a week with us. You know, papa, we shall be very intimate James S and I both ; of us assisting Lady Imogen, you know, papa ! and and stay till I get some note-paper will you, dear papa ?" " You will have your way, chick, you will have your way," sighed Sir Humphrey, getting his specta cles out of a very tight pocket on his hip. "But, bless me, I can t write in the evening. Mr. Jones perhaps Mr. Jones will write the note for me just present my compliments to Mr. S , and request the honor, and all that can you do it, Mr. Jones?" S rapidly indited a polite note to himself, | which he handed to Miss Fencher for her approba- ! tion, and meantime entered the butler with the coffee, j " Stuggins !" cried Sir Humphrey " I wish Mr. Jones " " Good Heavens! papa !" exclaimed Miss Fencher, ending the remainder of her objurgation in a whisper in her father s ear. But the baronet was not in a mood to be controlled. " My love! Bel, I say ! he shall go. You d-d.-d- diddedent see Miss Jones sletter. He sap-p-p-pattern of filial duty ! he gives his mother a house, and all she wants! he s a good son, I tell you! St-Stuggins, come here ! Pass the port, Jones, my good fellow!" Stuggins stepped forward a pace, and presented his white waistcoat, and Miss Fencher flounced out of the room in a passion. " Stuggins!" said the old man, a little more tran quilly, since he had no fear now of being interrupted, " I wish my friend, Mr. Jones, here, to see this cock- a-hoop business to-morrow. It ll be a fine sight, they tell me. I want him to see it, Stuggins ! You under stand me. His mother, Miss Jones, was a pretty girl, Stuggins ! And she ll be very glad to hear that her boy has seen such a fine show eh, Jones ? eh, Stug gins ? Well, you know what I want. The Headfort tenants will have a place provided for them, of course some shrubbery, eh ? some gallery some place behind the musicians, where they are out of the way, but can see isn t it so ? eh ? eh ?" "Yes, Sir Humphrey no doubt, Sir Humphrey !" acceded Stuggins, with his ears still open to know how the details were to be managed. " Well very well and you ll take Jones with you in the dickey eh ? Thomas will go on the box eh? Will that do ? and Mr. Jones will stay with us to-nighl, and perhaps you ll show him his room, now, and talk it over, eh, Stuggins ? good night, Mr. Jones ! good night, Jones, my good fellow !" And Sir Humphrey, having done this act of grate ful reminiscence for his old sweetheart, managed to find his way into the next room unaided. S had begun, by this time, to see " straw for his bricks," in the course matters were taking ; and instead of throwing a decanter after Sir Humphrey, and knocking down the butler for calling him Mr. Jones, he accepted Stuggins s convoy to the house keeper s room, and with his droll stories and funny ways, kept the maids and footmen in convulsions of laughter till break of day. Such a merry time had not come off in servants hall for many a day, and of many a precious morsel of the high life below stairs of Tally-ho hall did he pick the brains of the delight ed Abigails. The ladies, busied with their toilets, had their breakfasts in their own rooms, and Mr. Jones did not make his appearance till after the baronet had achieved his red herring and seltzer. The carriage came round at twelve, and the ladies stepped in, dressed for triumph, tumbled after by burly Sir Humphrey, who required one side of the vehicle to himself Mr. Jones outside, on the dickey with Stuggins, as previously arranged. Half way up the long avenue of Headfort court, Stuggins relinquished the dickey to its rightful oc cupant, Thomas, and, with Mr. Jones, turned off by a side path that led to the dairy and offices the latter barely saving his legs, however, for the manoeuvre was performed servant fashion, while the carriage kept its way. Lord Headfort was a widower, and his niece, Lady Imogen Bellasys, the wittiest and loveliest girl in England, stood upon the lawn for the mistress of the festivities. She had occasion for a petticoat aid-de- camj), and she knew that Lord Headfort wished to propitiate his Warwickshire neighbors; and as Miss Fencher was a fine grenadier looking girl, she pro moted her to that office immediately on her arrival, decking her for the nonce with a broad blue riband of authority. Miss Fencher made the best use of her powers of self congratulation, and thanked God private ly besides, that Sir Humphrey had provided an eclipse for Mr. Jones ; for with the drawback of presenting such a superfluous acquaintance of their own to the fastidious eyes of Lady Imogen, she felt assured that her new honors would never have arrived to her. She had had a hint, moreover, from her dressing- maid, of Mr. Jones comicalities below stairs ; and the fact that he was a person who could be funny in a kitchen, was quite enough to confirm the aristocratic instinct by which she had at once pronounced upon his condition. If her papa/;(/ been gay in his youth, there was no reason why every Miss Jones should send her child to him to be made a gentleman of! "Filial pattern," indeed ! The gayeties began. The French figurante, de spatched by Lord Vaurien from the opera, made up her tableaux from the beauties, and those who had ugly faces, but good figures, tried their attitudes on the archery-lawn, and those whose complexions would stand the aggravation, tripped to the dancing tents, and the falcon was flown, and the greyhounds were coursed, and a few couple of Warwickshire lads tried MISS JONES S SON. their backs at a wrestling fall, and the time wore on. But to Lady Imogen s shrewd apprehension, it wore on very heavily. There was no wit afloat. Nobody seemed gayer than he meant to be. The bubble w;is wanting to their champagne of enjoyment. Miss Fencher s blue riband went to and fro like a pendulum, perpetually crossing the lawn between Lady Imogen and the footman in waiting, to inquire if a post-chaise had arrived from London. " I will never forgive that James S , never !" pettishly vowed her ladyship, as Miss Fencher came back for the fiftieth time with no news of his arrival. "Better feed your menagerie at once !" whispered Lord Headfort to his niece, as he caught a glance at her vexed face in passing. The decision with which the order was given to serve breakfast, seemed to hurry the very heat of the kitchen fires, for in an incredibly short time, the hot soups and delicate entremets of Monsieur Dupres were on the tables, and breakfast was announced. The band played a march, the games were abandoned, Miss Fencher followed close upon the heels of her chef, to secure a seat in her neighborhood, and in ten minutes a hundred questions of precedence were settled, and Sir Humphrey, somewhat to his surprise, and as much to his delight, was called to the left hand of the mar quis. Tally-ho hall was in the ascendant. During the first assault upon the soups, the band played a delicious set of waltzes, terminating with the clatter of changing plates. But at the same moment, above all the ring of impinging china, arose a shout of laughter from a party somewhere without the pavilion, and so sustained and hearty was the peal, that the servants stood petrified with their dishes, and the guests sat in wondering silence. The steward was instantly despatched to enforce order, and Lord Headfort explained, that the tenants were feasted on beef and ale, in the thicket beyond, though he could scarce imagine what should amuse them so uncom monly. 14 They have promised to maintain order, my lord!" said the steward, returning, and stooping to his master s ear, " but there is a droll gentleman among them, my lord !" "Then I dare swear it s better fun than this!" mumbled his lordship for the steward s hearing, as he looked round upon the unamused faces in his neighborhood. " Headfort," cried Lady Imogen, presently, from the other end of the table, "did you send to Stratford for S , or did you not? Let us know whether there is a chance of his coming !" 44 Upon my honor, Lady Imogen, my own chariot has been at the Stratford inn, waiting for him since morning," was the marquis s answer. " Vaurien wrote that he had booked him by the mail of the night be fore ! I d give a thousand pounds if he were nere !" Bursts of laughter, breaking through all efforts to suppress them, again rose from the offending quarter. "It s a Mr. Jones, my lord," said the steward, speaking between the marquis and Sir Humphrey;!! he s a friend of Sir Humphrey s butler and if you will excuse me, my lord Stuggins says he is the son of a Miss Jones, formerly an acquaintance of Sir Humphrey s !" Red as a turkey-cock grew the old baronet in a moment. " I beg ten thousand pardons for having intruded him here, my lord !" said Sir Humphrey ; 44 it s a poor lad that brought me a letter from his mother, and I told Stuggins " But here Stuggins approached with a couple of notes for his master, and, begging permission of the marquis, Sir Humphrey put on his spectacles to read. The guests at the table, meantime, were passing the wine very slowly, and conversation more slowly still, and, with the tranquillity that reigned in the pavilion, the continued though half-smothered merriment of the other party was provokingly audible. "Can t we borrow a little fun from those merry people ?" cried Lady Imogen, throwing up her eyes despairingly as the marquis exchanged looks with her. " If we could persuade Sir Humphrey to introduce his friend, Jones, to us " "7 introduce him!" exclaimed the fuming baronet, tearing off his spectacles in a rage, 4t read that before you condescend to talk of noticing suchTa varlet ! Faith ! I think he s the clown from a theatre, or the waiter from a pot-house !" The marquis read : 44 DEAR NUNCLE : It s hard on to six o clock, and I m engaged at seven to a junketing at the 4 Hen and chickens, with Stuggins and the maids. If you in tend to make me acquainted with your great lord, now is the time. If you don t, I shall walk in presently, and introduce myself; for I know how to make my own way, nuncle ask Miss Bel s maid, and the other girls you introduced me to at Tally-ho hall! Be in, a hurry, I m just outside. Yours, " JO.VES. " Sir Humphrey Fencher." The excitement of Sir Humphrey, and the amused face of the marquis as he read, had drawn Lady Imogen from her seat, and as he read aloud, at her request, die urgent epistle of Mr. Jones, she clapped her hands with delight, and insisted on having him in. Sir Humphrey declared he should take it as an affront if the thing was insisted on, and Miss Fencher, who had followed to her father s chair, and heard the reading of the note, looked the picture of surprised indignation. "Insolent! vulgar! abominable!" was all the com pliment she ventured upon, however. " Will you let me look at Mr. Jones s note ?" said Lady Imogen. " Good Heavens!" she exclaimed, after glancing at it an instant, " I was sure it must be he !" And out ran the beautiful queen of the festivities, and the next moment, to Sir Humphrey s amazement, and Miss Fencher s utter dismay, she returned, drag ging in, with her own scarf around his body, and her own wreath of roses around his head, the friend of Stuggins the abominable Jones ! Up jumped the marquis, and called him by name (not Jones), and seized him by both hands, and up jumped with de lighted acclamation half a dozen other of the more distinguished guests at table, and the merriment was now on the other side of the thicket. It was five or ten minutes before they were again seated at table, S on Lady Imogen s right hand, but there were two vacant chairs, for Sir Humphrey and his daughter had taken advantage of the confusion to disappear, and the field was open, therefore, for a full account of Mr. Jones s adventures above and below stairs at Tally-ho hall. A better subject never fell into the hand of that inimitable humorist, and glorious ly he made use of it. As he concluded, amid convulsions of laughter, the butler brought in a note addressed to James S , Esq., which had been given him by Stuggins early in the day his own autograph invitation to the hospi talities of Tally-ho hall ! 54 LADY RACHEL. LADY RACHEL Beauty, alone, is lost, too warily kept. I ONCE had a long conversation with a fellow-trav eller in the coupe of a French diligence. It was a bright moonlight night, early in June not at all the scene or season for talking long on very dry topics and with a mutual abandon which must be explained by some theory of the silent sympathies, we fell to chatting rather confidentially on the subject of love. He gave me some hints as to a passage in his life which seemed to me, when he told it, a definite and interesting story ; but in recalling it to mind after ward, I was surprised to find how little he really said, and how much, from seeing the man and hearing his voice, I was enabled without effort to supply. To save roundabout, I ll tell the story in the first person, as it was told to me, begging the reader to take my place in the coupe and listen to a very gentlemanly man, of very loveable voice and manners; supplying, also, as I did, by the imagination, much more than is told in the narration. " I am inclined to think that we are sometimes best loved by those whom we least suspect of being inter ested in us ; and while a sudden laying open of hearts would give the lie to many a love professed, it would, here and there, disclose a passion which, in the or dinary course of things, would never have been be trayed. I was once a" litlle surprised with a circum stance of the kind I allude to. " I had become completely domesticated in a fam ily living in the neighborhood of London I can scarce tell you how, even if it were worth while. A chance introduction, as a stranger in the country, first made me acquainted with them, and we had gone on, from one degree of friendship to another, till I was as much at home at Lilybank as any one of the children. It was one of those little English paradises, rural and luxurious, where love, confidence, simplicity, and refineiiient, seem natural to the atmosphere, and I thought, when I was there, that I was probably as near to perfect happiness as I was likely to be in the course of my life. But I had my annoyance even there. "Mr. Fleming (the name is fictitious, of course) was a man of sufficient fortune, living, without a pro fession, on his means. He was avowedly of the mid dle class, but his wife, a very beautiful specimen of the young English mother, was very highly connect ed, and might have moved in what society she pleased. , She chose to find her happiness at home, and leave society to come to her by its own natural impulse and affinity a sensible choice, which shows you at once the simple and rational character of the woman. Fleming and his wife were very fond of each other, but, at the same time, very fond of the companion ship of those who were under their roof; and between them and their three or four lovely children, I could have been almost contented to have been a prisoner at Lilybank, and to have seen nobody but its charm ing inmates for years together. "I had become acquainted with the Flemings, how ever, during the absence of one of the members of the family. Without being at all aware of any new arrival in the course of the morning, I went late to j dinner after a long and solitary ride on horseback, and was presented to Lady Rachel , a tall and re served-looking person, sitting on Fleming s right hand. Seeing no reason to abate any of my outward \\ show of happiness, or to put any restraint on the nat ural impulse of my attentions, I took my accustomed seat by the sweet mistress of the house, wrapped up my entire heart, as usual, in every word and look that I sent toward her, and played the schoolboy that I felt myself, uncloudedly frank and happy. Fleming laughed and mingled in our chat occasionally, as he was wont to do, but a glance now and then at his stately right-hand neighbor, made me aware that I was looked upon with some coolness, if not with a marked disapproval. I tried the usual peace-offer ings of deference and marked courtesy, and lessened somewhat the outward show of my happiness, but Lady Rachel was apparently not propitiated. You know what it is to have one link cold in the chain of sympathy around a table. " The next morning I announced my intention of returning to town. I had hitherto come and gone at my pleasure. This time the Flemings showed a de termined opposition to my departure. They seemed aware that my enjoyment under their roof had been, for the first time, clouded over, and they were not willing I should leave till the accustomed sunshine was restored. I felt that I owed them too much to resist any persuasion of theirs against my own feelings merely, and I remained. "But I determined to overcome Lady Rachel s aversion a little from pique, I may as well confess, but mostly for the gratification I knew it would give to my sweet friends and entertainers. The saddle is my favorite thinking-place. I mounted a beautiful hunter which Fleming always put at my disposal while I stayed with them, and went off for a long gal op. I dismounted at an inn, some miles off, called or black wax, and writing myself a letter, despatched t to Lilybank. To play my part well, you will easily conceive, it was necessary that my kind friends should not be in the secret. " The short road to the heart of a proud woman, I well knew, was pity. I came to dinner that day a changed man. It was known through the family, of course, that a letter sealed with black had arrived for me, during my ride, and it gave me the apology I needed for a sudden alteration of manner. Delicacy would prevent any one, except Mrs. Fleming, from alluding to it, and she would reserve the inquiry till we were alone. I had the evening before me, of course. " Lady Rachel, I had remarked, showed her supe riority by habitually pitching her voice a note or two below that of the persons around her as if the re pose of her calm mind was beyond the plummet of their superficial gayety. I had also observed, how ever, that if she succeeded in rebuking now and then the high spirits of her friends, and lowered the gen eral diapason till it harmonized with her own voice, she was more gratified than by any direct compliment or attention. I ate my soup in silence, and while the children, and a chance guest or two, were carrying on some agreeable banter in a merry key, I waited for the first opening of Lady Rachel s lips, and, when she spoke, took her tone like an echo. Without look ing at her, I commenced a subdued and pensive de scription of my morning s ride, like a man uncon sciously awakened from his revery by a sympathetic voice, and betraying, by the tone in which he spoke, LADY RACHEL. the chord to which he responded. A newer guest had taken my place, next to Mrs. Fleming, and I wis opposite Lady Rachel. I could feel her eyes sud denly fixed on me as 1 spoke. For the first time, she addressed a remark to me, in a pause of my descrip tion. I raised my eyes to her with as much earnest ness and deference as I could summon into them, and, when I had listened to her and answered her ob servation, kept them fastened on her lips, as if I hoped she would speak to me again yet without a smile, and with an expression that I meant should be that of sadness, forgetful of usages, and intent only on an eager longing for sympathy. Lady Rachel showed her woman s heart, by an almost immediate change of countenance and manner. She leaned slightly over the table toward me, with her brows lifted from her large dark eyes, and the conversation between us became continuous and exclusive. After a little while, my kind host, finding that he was cut off from his other guests by the fear of interrupting us, proposed to give me the head of the table, and I took his place at the left hand of Lady Rachel. Her dinner was forgotten. She introduced topics of conversation such as she thought harmonized with my feelings, and while I listened, with my eyes alternately cast down or raised timidly to hers, she opened her heart to me on the subject of death, the loss of friends, the vanity of the world, and the charm, to herself, of sad ness and melancholy. She seemed unconscious of the presence of others as she talked. The tears suffused her fine eyes, and her lips quivered, and I found, to my surprise, that she was a woman, under that mask of haughtiness, of the keenest sensibility and feeling. When Mrs. Fleming left the table, Lady Rachel pressed my hand, and, instead of following into the drawing-room, went out by the low window upon the lawn. I had laid up some little food for reflection as you may conceive, and I sat the next hour looking into my wineglass, wondering at the success of my manoeuvre, but a little out of humor with my own hy pocrisy, notwithstanding. "Mrs. Fleming s tender kindness to me when I joined her at the tea-table, made me again regret the sacred feelings upon which I had drawn for my experiment. But there was no retreat. I ex cused myself hastily, anrl went out in search of Lady Rachel, meeting her ladyship, as I expected, slowly pacing the dark avenues of the garden. The dimness of the starlight relieved me from the effort of keeping sadness in my countenance, and I easily played out my part till midnight, listening to an outpouring of mingled kindness and melancholy, for the waste of which I felt some need to be forgiven. "Another day of this, however, was all that I could bring my mind to support. Fleming and his wife had entirely lost sight in sympathy with my presumed affliction of the object of detaining me at Ltlybank, and I took my leave, hating myself for the tender pressure of the hand, and the sad and sympathizing farewells which I was obliged to receive from them. I did not dare to tell them of my unworthy ruse. Lady Rachel parted from me as kindly as the rest, and I had gained my point with the loss of my self- esteem. With a prayer that, notwithstanding this de ceit and misuse, I might find pity when I should in deed stand in need of it, I drove from the door. "A month passed away, and I wrote, once more, to my friends at Lilybank, that I would pass a week with them. An occurrence, in the course of that month, however, had thrown another mask over my face, and I went there again with a part to play and, as if by a retributive Providence, it was now my need of sympathy that I was most forced to conceal. An affair which I saw no possibility of compromising, had compelled me to call out a man who was well known as a practical duelist. The particulars would not in terest you. In accepting the challenge, my antago nist asked a week s delay, to complete some import ant business from which he could not withdraw his at tention. And that week 1 passed with the Flemings. " The gayety of Lilybank was resumed with the smile I brought back, and chat and occupation took their natural course. Lady Rachel, though kind and courteous, seemed to have relapsed into her reserve, and, finding society an effort, I rode out daily alone, seeing my friends only at dinner and in the evening. They took it to be an indulgence of some remainder of my former grief, and left me consequently to the I disposition of my own time. " The last evening before the duel arrived, and I i bade my friends good-night as usual, though with I some suppressed emotion. My second, who was to ! come from town and take me up at Lilybank on his i way to the ground, had written to me that, from what ! he could gather, my best way was to be prepared for j the worst, and, looking upon it as very probably the last night of my life, I determined to pass it waking, i and writing to my friends at a distance. I sat down 1 1 to it, accordingly, without undressing. " It was toward three in the morning that I sealed ! up my last letter. My bedroom was on the ground- | floor, with a long window opening into the garden; j and, as I lifted my head up from leaning over the seal, i I saw a white object standing just before the casement, I but at some little distance, and half buried in the dark- ! ness. My mind was in a fit mood for a superstitious i feeling, and my blood crept cold for a moment; I j passed my hand across my eyes looked again. The figure moved slowly away. " To direct my thoughts, I took up a book and read. But, on looking up, the figure was there again, and, with an irresistible impulse, I rushed out to the | garden. The figure came toward me, but, with its i first movement, I recognised the stately step of Lady j Rachel. " Confused at having intruded on her privacy, for I i presumed that she was abroad for solitude, and with i no thought of being disturbed, I turned to retire. j She called to me, however, and, sinking upon a gar- j den-seat, covered her face with her hands. I stood ( before her, for a moment, in embarrassed silence. " You keep late hours, she said, at last, with a tremulous voice, but rising at the same time and, with her arm put through mine, leading me to the thickly- shaded walk. " To-night I do, I replied; letters I could not I well defer " Listen to me! interrupted Lady Rachel. I know your business for the morning " I involuntarily released my arm and started back. The chance of an interruption that would seem dis honorable flashed across my mind. " Stay ! she continued ; I am the only one in the family who knows of it, and my errand with you is not to hinder this dreadful meeting. The circum stances are such, that, with society as it is, you could not avoid it with honor. " J pressed her arm with a feeling of gratified jus tification which quite overcame, for the moment, my curiosity as to the source of her knowledge of the affair. " You must forgive me, she said, that I come to you like a bird of ill omen. I can not spare the pre cious moments to tell you how I came by my infor mation as to your design. I have walked the night away, before your window, not daring to interrupt you in what was probably the performance of sacred du ties. But I know your antagonist I know his de moniac nature, and pardon me! I dread the worst. 1 " I still walked by her side in silence. She re sumed, though strongly agitated. " I have said that I justify you ia an intention THE PHANTOM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE. which will probably cost you your life. Yet, but for a feeling which I am about to disclose to you, I should lose no time and spare no pains in preventing this meeting. Under such circumstances, your honor would be less dear to me than now, and I should be acting as one of my sex who had but a share of in terest in resisting and striving to correct this murder ous exaction of public opinion. I would condemn duelling in argument avoid the duellist in society make any sacrifice with others to suppress it in the abstract but, till the feeling changes in reference to it, I could not bring myself to sacrifice, in the honor of the man I loved, my world of happiness for my share only. "And mean you to say I began, but, as the light broke upon my mind, amazement stopped my utterance. " Yes that I love you ! that I love you ! mur mured Lady Rachel, throwing herself into my arms, and fastening her lips to mine in a long and passion ate kiss that I love you, and, in this last hour of your life, must breathe to you what I never before breathed to mortal ! " She sank to the ground, and, with handfuls of dew, swept up from the grass of the lawn, I bathed her temples, as she leaned senseless against my knee. The moon had risen above the trees, and poured its full radiance on her pale face and closed eyes. Her hair loosened and fell in heavy masses over her shoul ders and bosom, and, for the first time, I realized Lady Rachel s extraordinary beauty. Her features were without a fault, her skin was of marble fairness and paleness, and her abandonment to passionate feel ing had removed, for the instant, a hateful cloud of pride and superciliousness that, at all other times, had obscured her loveliness. With a newborn emotion in my heart, I seized the first instant of returning consciousness, and pressed her, with a convulsive ea gerness, to my bosom. " The sound of wheels aroused me from this de lirious dream, and, looking up, I saw the gray of the dawn struggling with the moonlight. I tore my self from her arms, and the moment after was whirl ing away to the appointed place of meeting. "I was in my room, at Lilybank, dressing, at eleven of that same day. My honor was safe, and the affair was over, and now my whole soul was bent on this new and unexpected vision of love. True I was but twenty-five, and Lady Rachel probably twenty years older but she loved me she was highborn and beautiful and love is not so often brought to the lip in this world, that we can cavil at the cup which holds it. With these thoughts and feelings wrangling tu- multuously in my heated blood, I took the following note from a servant at my door. " Lady Rachel buries in entire oblivion the last night past. Feelings over which she has full con trol in ordinary circumstances, have found utterance under the conviction that they were words to the dy ing. They would never have been betrayed without impending death, and they will never, till death be near to one of us, find voice, or give token of exist ence again. Delicacy and honor will prompt you to visit Lilybank no more. " Lady Rachel kept her room till I left, and I have never visited Lilybank, nor seen her since." THE PHANTOM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE, CHAPTER I. SHOWING THE HUMILIATIONS OF THE BARRIERS OF HIGH-LIFE. THERE is no aristocracy in the time o night. It was punctually ten o clock, in Berkeley square. It rained on the nobleman s roof. It rained on the beg gar s head. The lamps, for all that was visible except themselves, might as well have been half way to the moon, but even that was not particular to Berkeley square. A hack cabriolet groped in from Bruton street. " Shall I ring any bell for you, sir ?" said the cab man, pulling aside the wet leather curtain. " No ! I ll get out anywhere ! Pull up to the side walk !" But the passenger s mind changed while paying his shilling. "On second thoughts, my good fellow, you may knock at the large door on the right." The driver scrambled up the high steps and gave a single knock such a knock as the drivers of only the poor and unfashionable are expected to give, in well- regulated England. The door was opened only to a crack, and a glitter ing livery peered through. But the passenger was close behind, and setting his foot against the door, he drove back the suspicious menial and walked in. Three men, powdered and emblazoned in blue and gold, started to their feet, and came toward the appa rent intruder. He took the wet cap from his head, deliberately flung his well-worn cloak into the arms of the nearest man, and beckoning to another, pointed to his overshoes. With a suppressed titter, two of the footmen disappeared through a side-door, and the third, mumbling something about sending up one of the stable-boys, turned to follow them. The new-comer s hand passed suddenly into the footman s white cravat, and, by a powerful and sud den throw, the man was brought to his knee. " Oblige me by unbuckling that shoe " said the stranger in a tone of imperturbable coolness, setting his foot upon the upright knee of the astonished me nial. The shoe was taken off. and the other set in its place upon the plush-covered leg, and unbuckled, as obediently. " Keep them until I call you to put them on again !" said the wearer, taking his gloves from his pockets, as the man arose, and slowly walking up and down the hall while he drew them leisurely on. From the wet and muddy overshoes had been de livered two slight and well-appointed feet, however, shining in pliable and unexceptionable jet. With a second look, and the foul-weather toggery laid aside, the humbled footman saw that he had been in error, and that, hack-cab and dirty overshoes to the contrary notwithstanding, the economising guest of "my lord" would appear, on the other side of the drawing-room door, only at home on " velvet of three pile" an ele gant of undepreciable water! " Shall I announce you, sir ?" respectfully inquired the servant. " If Lord Aymarhas come up from the dinner ta bleyes! If the ladies ar aloo no !" THE PHANTOM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE. 57 Coffee has just gone in to the ladies, sir !" " Then I ll find my own way !" Lady Ayraar was jamming the projecting diamond of a bracelet through and through the thick white leaf of an Egyptian kala, lost apparently in an eclipse of revery possibly in a swoon of slumberous diges tion. By the drawing-room light, in her negligent posture, she looked of a ripeness of beauty not yet sapped by one autumnal minute plump, drowsy, and voluptuous. She looked up as the door opened. " Spiridion !" " Sappho !" "Don t be silly! how are you, Count Pallardos? And how like a ghost you come in, unannounced! Suppose I had been tying my shoe, or anything ?" " Is your ladyship quite well ?" " I will take coffee and wake up to tell you ! Was I asleep when you opened the door? They were all so dull at dinner. Ah me ! stupid or agreeable, we grow old all the same! How am I looking, Spiri dion?" " Ravishingly ! Where is Lady Angelica?" * Give me another lump of sugar ! La ! don t you take coffee ?" " There are but two cups, and this was meant for a lip of more celestial earth has she been gone long ?" The door opened, and the rustling dress of Lady Angelica Aymar made music in the room. Oh, how gloriously beautiful she was, and how changed was Count Spiridion Pallardos by her coming in ! A minute before so inconsequent, so careless and com plimentary now so timid, so deferential, so almost awkward in every motion! The name of " Greek count" has been for a long time, in Europe, the synonym for " adventurer" a worse pendant to a man s name, in high life at least, than " pirate" or " robber." Not that a man is pecu liar who is trying to make the most out of society and would prefer an heiress to a governess, but that it is a disgrace to be so labelled ! An adventurer is the same as any other gentleman who is not rich, only without a mask. Count Pallardos was lately arrived from Constanti nople, and was recognised and received by Lord Aymar as the son of a reduced Greek noble who had been the dragoman to the English embassy when his lord ship was ambassador to the Porte. With a prompt ness a little singular in one whose patronage was so difficult to secure, Lord Aymar had immediately pro cured, for the son of his old dependant, a small em ployment as translator in the Foreign office, and with its most limited stipend for his means, the young count had commenced his experience of English life. His acquaintance with the ladies of Lord Aymar s family was two stages in advance of this, however. Lady Aymar remembered him well as the beatitiful child of the lovely Countess Pallardos, the playfellow of her daughter Angelica on the shore of the Bos- phorus; and on his first arrival in England, hearing that the family of his patron was on the coast for sea bathing, Spiridion had prepared to report himself first to the female portion of it. Away from society in a retired cottage ornee upon the seashore, they had re ceived him with no hinderance to their appreciation or hospitality ; and he had thus been subjected, by acci dent, to a month s unshared intoxication with the beauty of the Lady Angelica. The arrival of the young Greek had been made known to Lord Aymar by his lady s letters, and the situation had been pro cured for him ; but Pallardos had seen his lordship but once, and this was his first visit to the town estab lishment of the family. The butler came in with a petit verre of Curagoa for Miladi, and was not surprised, as the footmen would have been, to see Lady Angelica on her knee, and Count Pallardos imprisoning a japonica in the knot a la Grecque of that head of Heaven s most heavenly moulding. Brother and sister, Cupid and Psyche, could not have been grouped with a more playful familiarity. " Spiridion I" said Lady Aymar " I shall call you Spiridion till the men come up how are you lodged, my dear ! Have you a bath in your dressing-room ?" " Pitcher and bowl of the purest crockery, my dear lady ! May I venture to draw this braid a little closer, Angelica to correct the line of this raven mass on your cheek ? It robs us now of a rose-leaf s breadth at least flat burglary, my sweet friend !" But the Lady Angelica sprang to her feet, for a voice was heard of some one ascending from the dining-room. She flung herself into a dormeuse, Spiridion twirled his two fingers at the fire, as if bodi ly warmth was the uppermost necessity of the moment, and enter Lord Aymar, followed by a great statesman, 1 a famous poet, one sprig of unsurpassed nobility, and one wealthy dandy commoner. Lord Aymar nodded to his protege, but the gentle men grouped themselves, for a moment, around a silver easel, upon which stood a Correggio, a late purchase of which his lordship had been discoursing, and iu that minute or two the name and quality of the stran ger were communicated to the party probably, for they took their coffee without further consciousness of his presence. The statesman paired off to a corner with his host to talk politics, the poet took the punctured flower from the lap of Lady Aymar, and commenced mend ing, with patent wax wafers, from the ormolu desk near by, the holes in the white leaves ; and the two in- effables lingered a moment longer over their Curacoa. Pallardos drew a chair within conversation-reacnof Lady Angelica, and commenced an unskilful discus sion of the opera of the night before. He felt angry, insulted, unseated from his self-possession, yet he could not have told why. The two young men lounged leisurely across the room, and the careless Lord Fred erick drew his chair partly between Pallardos and Lady Angelica, while Mr. Townley Manners reclined upon an ottoman behind her and brought his lips within whisper-shot of her ear, and, with ease and un forced nonsense, not audible nor intended to be audible to the " Greek adventurer," they inevitably engrossed the noble beauty. The blood of Count Spiridion ran round his heart like a snake coiled to strike. He turned to a portfolio of drawings for a cover to self-control and self-com muning, for he felt that he had need of summoning his keenest and coldest judgment, his boldest and wariest courage of conduct and endurance, to submit to, and outnerve and overmaster, his humiliating po sition. He was under a roof of which he well knew that the pride and joy of it, the fair Lady Angelica, the daughter of the proud earl, had given him her heart. He well knew that he had needed reserve and management to avoid becoming too much the favorite of the lady mistress of that mansion ; yet, in it, he had been twice insulted grossly, cuttingly, but in both cases unresentably once by unpunishable menials, of whom he could not even complain without expo sing and degrading himself, and once by the supercil ious competitors for the heart he knew was his own and they too, unpunishable! At this moment, at a sign from Lady Aymar, her lord swung open the door of a conservatory to give the room "air, and the long mirror, set in the panel, showed to Spiridion his own pale and lowering fea tures. He thanked Heaven for the chance ! To see himself once more was what he bitterly needed ! to see whether his head had shrunk between his shoul ders whether his back was crouched whether his eyes and lips had lost their fearlessness and pride ! He 58 THE PHANTOM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE. had feared so felt so ! He almost wondered that he did not look like a dependant and a slave ! But oh, no ! The large mirror showed the grouped figures of the drawing-room, his own the noblest among them by nature s undeniable confession ! His clear, statua ry outline of features the finely-cut arches of his lips the bold, calm darkness of his passionate eyes his graceful and high-born mien, all apparent enough to his own eye when seen in the contrast of that mir rored picture he was not changed ! not a slave not metamorphosed by that hour s humiliation ! He clenched his right hand, once, till the nails were dri ven through his glove into the clammy palm, and then rose with a soft smile on his features, like the remain der of a look of pleasure. " I have found," said he, in a composed and musical tone, "I have found what we were looking for, Lady Angelica !" He raised the large portfolio from the print-stand, and setting it open on his knee, directly between Lord Frederick and Lady Angelica, cut off that nobleman s communication with her ladyship very effectually, while he pointed out a view of the Acropolis at Athens. Her ladyship was still expressing her admiration of the drawing, when Spiridion turned to the astonished gen tleman at her ear. "Perhaps, sir," said he, " in a lady s service, I may venture to dispossess you of that ottoman! Will you be kind enough to rise?" With a stare of astonishment, the elegant Mr. Townley Manners reluctantly complied ; and Spiri dion, drawing the ottoman in front of Lady Angelica, set the broad portfolio upon it, and seating himself at her feet upon the outer edge, commenced a detailed account of the antiquities of the grand capitol. The lady listened with an amused look of mischief in her eye, Lord Frederick walked once around her chair humming an air very rudely, Mr. Manners attempted in vain to call Lady Angelica to look at something wonderful in the conservatory, and Spiridion s triumph was complete. He laid aside the portfolio after a mo ment or two, drew the ottoman back to its advantageous position, and, self-assured and at his ease, engrossed fully and agreeably the attention of his heart s mistress. Half an hour elapsed. Lord Aymar took a kind of dismission attitude before the fire, and the guests one and all took their leave. They were all cloaking together in the entry, when his lordship leaned over the bannister. "Have you your chariot, Lord Frederick?" he asked. " Yes it s at the door now !" " Lady Aymar suggests that perhaps you ll set down Count Pallardos, on your way !" " Why ah, certainly, certainly !" replied Lord Frederick, with some hesitation. "My thanks to Lady Aymar," said Spiridion very quietly, " but say to her ladyship that I am provided with overshoes and umbrella ! Shall I offer your lord ship half of the latter ?" added he in another key, leaning with cool mock-earnestness toward Lord Frederick, who only stared a reply as he passed out to his chariot. And marvelling who would undergo such humilia tions and such antagonism as had been his lot that evening, for anything else than the love of a Lady Angelica, Count Spiridion stepped forth into the rain to grope his way to his obscure lodgings in Parlia ment street. CHAPTER II. SHOWING A GENTLEMAN S NEED OF A HORSE. IT was the hour when the sun in heaven is sup posed to be least promiscuous the hour when the five hundred fashionables of London West-End re ceive his visit in the open air, to the entire exclusion (it is presumed) of the remaining population of the globe. The cabs and jarveys, the vehicles of the de spised public, rolled past the forbidden gate of Hyde park, and the echo stationed in the arched portal an nounced the coroneted carriage* as they nicely nibbled the pleased gravel in passing under. A plebeian or two stood outside to get a look at the superior beings whose daily list of company to dine is the news most carefully furnished to the" instructed public. The birds (having " fine feathers ) flew over the iron rail ing unchallenged by the gate-keeper. Four o clock went up to Heaven s gate with the souls of those who had died since three, and with the hour s report of the world s sins and good deeds ; and at the same moment a chariot rolled into the park, holding between its claret panels the embellished flesh and olood of Lady Ayrnar and her incomparable daughter. A group of gay men on horseback stood at the bend of "Rotten Row," watching the comers-in; and within the inner railing of the park, among the promenaders on foot, was distinguishable the slight figure of Count Pallardos, pacing to and fro with step somewhat irreg ular. As Lady Aymar s chariot went by, he bowed with a frank and ready smile, but the smile was quickly banished by a flushed cheek and lowering brow, for, from the group of mounted dandies, dashed out Lord Frederick Beauchief, upon a horse of unparalleled beauty, and with a short gallop took and kept his place close at the chariot window. Pallardos watched them till the turn of the ring took them from his sight. The fitness of the group the evident suitableness of Lord Frederick s position at that chariot window, filled him with a jealousy he could no longer stifle. The contest was all unequal, it was too palpable to deny. He, himself, whatever his per son or qualities, was, when on foot, in the place allot ted to him by his fortunes not only unnoticed by the contagious admiration of the crowd, but unable even to obey his mistress, though beckoned by her smile to follow her ! That superb animal, the very type of pride and beauty, arching his glossy neck and tossing his spirited head before the eyes of Lady Angelica, was one of those unanalyzed, undisputed vouchers for the owner s superiority, which make wealth the devil s gift irresistible but by the penetrating and cold judg ment of superior beings. How should a woman, born with the susceptible weaknesses of her sex, most im pressible by that which is most showy and beautiful how should she be expected to reason coldly and with philosophic discrimination on this subject ? how sep arate from Lord Frederick, the mere man, his subser vient accompaniments of wealth, attendance, homage from others, and infatuated presumption in himself? Nay what presumption in Spiridion Pallardos (so he felt, with his teeth set together in despair, as he walked rapidly along) to suppose that he could con tend successfully against this and a thousand such ad vantages and opportunities, with only his unpriced, unproved love to offer her, with a hand of poverty ! His heart ran drowningly over with the bitterness of conviction ! After a few steps, Pallardos turned back with an in stinctive though inexplicable desire to hasten the pang of once more meeting them as they came round the ring of the park. Coming toward him, was one of the honorable officials of Downing street, with whom he had been thrown in contact, a conceited and well born diner-out, mounted on a handsome cob, but with his servant behind him on a blood hunter. Mr. Dallinger was walking his horse slowly along the fence, and, as he came opposite Pallardos, he drew rein. " Count !" said he, in that patronising tone which is tossed over the head of the patronised like a swan a THE PHANTOM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE. 59 neck over the worm about to be gobbled, "a a a do you know Spanish ?" " Yes. Why ?" "A a I ve a job for you ! You know Moreno, the Spanish secretary well, his wife sheivill persist in disguising her billet-doux in that stilted language, and you know what I want suppose you come and breakfast with me to-morrow morning ?" Pallardos was mentally crowding his contemptuous refusal into the smallest phrase that could convey re pulse to insolence, when the high-stepping and foam- spattered forelegs of Lady Aymar s bays appeared un der the drooping branch of the tree beyond him. The next instant, Lord Frederick s easily-carried head danced into sight a smile of perfect self-satisfaction on his face, and his magnificent horse, excited by the constant check, prancing at his proudest. At the mo ment they passed, Dallinger s groom, attempting to restrain the impatience of the spirited hunter he was upon, drew the curb a little too violently, and the man was thrown. The sight of the empty saddle sent a thought through the brain of Pallardos like a shaft. " May I take a little of the nonsense out of that horse for you ?" said he quickly, springing over the railing, and seizing the rein, to which the man still held, while the frighted horse backed and reared toward his master. " A a yes, if you like !" Pallardos sprang into the saddle, loosened the rein and leaned forward, and with three or four powerful bounds, the horse was at the other window of the chariot. Away, with the bursted trammels of heart and brain, went all thoughts of the horse s owner, and all design, if any had flashed on his mind, of time or place for restoring him. Bred in a half-civilized coun try, where the bold hand was often paramount to law, the Greek had no habit of mind likely to recognise in a moment of passion even stronger barriers of propri ety than he was now violating ; and, to control his countenance and his tongue, and summon his resour ces for an apparently careless and smiling contest of attraction with his untroubled rival, was work enough for the whole mind and memory, as well as for all the nerve and spirit of the excited Greek. He laid his hand on the chariot window, and thinking no more of the horse he was subduing than the air he breathed, broke up his powerful gallop to a pace that suited him, and played the lover to the best of his coolness and ability. " We saw you walking just now, and were lament ing that you were not on horseback," said Lady Ay- mar, "for it is a sweet evening, and we thought of driving out for a stroll in old Sir John Chasteney s grounds at Bayswater. Will you come, Spiridion ? Tell White to drive there!" Lord Frederick kept his place, and with its double escort, the equipage of the Aymars sped on its vtoy to Bayswater. Spiridion was the handsomer man, and the more graceful rider, and, without forcing the dim- cult part of keeping up a conversation with those within the chariot, he soon found his uneasiness dis- , placed by a glow of hope and happiness; for Lady Angelica, leaning far back in her seat, and completely hidden from Lord Frederick, kept her eyes watchfully and steadily upon the opposite side where rode her less confident lover. The evening was of summer s softest and richest glory, breezy, and fragrant; and as the sun grew golden, the party alighted at the gates of Chas- teney park in tune for love, it must needs be, if ever conspiring smiles in nature could compel accord in human affections. Ah, happy Sp,iridion Pallardos ! The Lady Ange lica called him to disengage her dress from the step of the carriage, and her arm was in his when he arose, placed there as confidingly as a bride s, and with a gentle pressure that was half love and half mischief for she quite comprehended that Lord Frederick s ride to Bayswater was not for the pleasure of a twilight stroll through Chasteney park with her mother ! That mother, fortunately, was no duenna. She had pre tensions of her own to admiration, and she was only particular as to the quantity. Her daughter s division with her of the homage of their male acquaintances, was an evil she indolently submitted to, but she was pleased in proportion as it was not obtruded upon her notice. As Pallardos and the Lady Angelica turned into one of the winding alleys of the grounds, Lady Aymar bent her large eyes very fixedly upon another, and where such beautiful eyes went before, her small feet were very sure to follow. The twilight threw its first blur over the embowering foliage as the parties lost sight of each other, and, of the pair who are the hero and heroine of this story, it can only be disclosed that they found a heaven (embalmed, for their partic ular use, in the golden dusk of that evening s twi light), and returned to the park gate in the latest min ute before dark, sworn lovers, let come what would ! But meantime, the happy man s horse had disap peared, as well he might have been expected to do, his bridle having been thrown over a bush by the en grossed Pallardos, when called upon to assist Lady Angelica from her carriage, and milord s groom and miladi s footman having no sovereign reasons for se curing him. Lord Frederick laughed till the count accepted the offer of Lady Aymar to take him home, bodkin-wise, between herself and her daughter; and for the happiness of being close pressed to the loving side of the Lady Angelica for one hour more, Pallardos would willingly have lost a thousand horses his own or the honorable Mr. Dallinger s. And, by the way, of Mr. Dallinger and his wrath, and his horseless groom, Spiridion began now to have a thought or two of an uncomfortable pertinacity of intrusion. CHAPTER III. SHOWING WHAT MAKES A HORSE-STEALER A GEiNTLE- MAIf. IT was the first day of September, and most of the gold threads were drawn from the tangled and vari colored woof of London society. " The season" was over. Two gentlemen stood in the window of Crock- ford s, one a Jew barrister (kersey enough for more russet company by birth and character, but admitted to the society of "costly stuff" for the equivalent he gave as a purveyor of scandal), and the other a com moner, whose wealth and fashion gave him the privi lege of out-staying the season in town, without pub lishing in the Morning Post a better reason than incli nation for so unnatural a procedure. Count Spiridion Pallardos was seen to stroll slowly up St. James street, on the opposite side. "Look there, Abrams!" said Mr. Townley Man ners, " there s the Greek who was taken up at one time by the Aymars. I thought he was transported." "No! he still goes to the Aymars, though he is in Coventry everywhere else. Dallinger had him arrested for horse-stealing, wasn t it ? The officer nabbed him as he was handing Lady Angelica out of her carriage in Berkeley square. 1 remember hearing of it two months ago. What a chop-fallen blackguard it looks !" " Blackguard i Come, come, man ! give the devil his due !" deprecated the more liberal commoner ; " may be it s from not having seen a gentleman for the last week, but, hang me if I don t think that same horse-stcaler turning the corner is as crack-looking a man as I ever saw from this window. What s o clock ?" " Half-past four," replied the scandal-monger, swal- 60 THE PHANTOM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE. lowing, with a bland smile, what there was to swallmv in Manners s two-edged remark, and turning suddenly on his heel. Pallardos slowly took his way along Picadilly, and was presently in Berkeley square, at the door of the Aymars. The porter admitted him without question, and he mounted, unannounced, to the drawing-room. The ladies sat by the window, looking out upon the garden. "Is it you, Spiridion?" said Lady Aymar, "I had hoped you would not come to-day!" " Oh, mamma!" appealed Lady Angelica. "Welcome all other days of the year, my dear Pallardos warmly welcome, of course" continued Lady Aymar, " but to-day oh God ! you have no idea what the first of September is to us to my husband !" Lady Aymar covered her face with her hands, and the tears streamed through her fingers. " Pardon me," said Pallardos " pardon me, my dear lady, but I am here by the earl s invitation, to dine at six." Lady Aymar sprang from her seat in astonishment. " By the earl s invitation, did you say ? Angelica, what can that mean ? Was it bv note, Count Pal lardos?" " By note," he replied. " I am amazed !" she said, " truly amazed! Does he mean to have a confidant for his family secret ? Is his insanity on one point affecting his reason on all ? What shall we do, Angelica ?" "We may surely confide in Spiridion, whatever the meaning of it, or the result" gently murmured Lady Angelica. " We may we may !" said Lady Aymar. "Prepare him for it as you will. I pray Heaven to help me through with this day without upsetting my own reason. I shall meet you at dinner, Spiridion." With her hands twisted together in a convulsive knot, Lady Aymar slowly and musingly passed into the conservatory on her way to her own room, leaving to themselves two lovers who had much to talk of beside dwelling upon a mystery which, even to Lady Angelica, who knew most of it, was wholly inexpli cable. Yet it was partially explained by the trembling girl explained as a case of monomania, and with the brevity of a disagreeable subject, but listened to by her lover with a different feeling a conviction as of a verified dream, and a vague, inexplicable terror which he could neither reason down nor account for.. But the lovers must be left to themselves, by the reader as well as by Lady Aymar; and meantime, till the dinner hour, when our story begins again, we may glance at a note which was received, and replied to, by Lord Aymar in the library below. " MY DEAR LORD : In the belief that a frank com munication would be best under the circumstances, I wish to make an inquiry, prefacing it with the assu rance that my only hope of happiness has been for some time staked upon the successful issue of my suit for your daughter s hand. It is commonly under stood, I believe, that the bulk of your lordship s for tune is separate from the entail, and may be disposed of at your pleasure. May I inquire its amount, or rather, may I ask what fortune goes with the hand of Lady Angelica. The Beauchief estates are unfortu nately much embarrassed, and my own debts (I may frankly confess) are very considerable. You will at once see, my lord, that, in justice to your daughter, as well as to myself, I could not do otherwise than make this frank inquiry before pushing my suit to extremity. Begging your indulgence and an immediate answer, I remain, my dear lord, Yours very faithfully, " FREDERICK BEAUCHIEF. "The EARL OF AYMAR." (REPLY.) " DEAR LORD FREDERICK : I trust you will not accuse me of a want of candor in declining a direct answer to your question. Though I freely own to a friendly wish for your success in your efforts to engage the affections of Lady Angelica, with a view to mar riage, it can only be in the irrevocable process of a marriage settlement that her situation, as to the prob able disposal of my fortune, can be disclosed. I may admit to you, however, that, upon the events of this day on which you have written (it so chances), may depend the question whether I should encourage you to pursue further your addresses to Lady Angelica. " Yours very faithfully, " AYMAR. " Lord FREDERICK BEAUCHIEF." It seemed like the first day after a death, in the house of Lord Aymar. An unaccountable hush pre vailed through the servants offices ; the gray-headed old butler crept noiselessly about, making his prepa rations for dinner, and the doors, that were opened and shut, betrayed the careful touch of apprehension. With penetrating and glassy clearness, the kitchen clock, seldom heard above stairs, resounded through the house, striking six. In the same neglected attire which she had worn in the morning, Lady Aymar re-entered the drawing- room. The lids were drawn up around her large eyes with a look of unresisting distress, and she walked with relaxed steps, and had, altogether, an air absent and full of dread. The interrupted lovers ceased talking as she approached, but she did not remark the silence, and walked, errandless, from corner to corner. The butler announced dinner. " May I give your ladyship an arm ?" asked Pal lardos. " Oh God ! is it dinner-time already !" she exclaimed with a voice of terror. " Williams ! is Lord Aymar below?" "In the dining-room, miladi." She took Spiridion s arm, and they descended the stairs. As they approached the dining-room, her arm trembled so violently in his that he turned to her with the fear that she was about to fall. He did not speak. A vague dread, which was more than he had caught from her looks a something unaccountably heavy at his own heart made his voice cling to his throat. He bowed to Lord Aymar. His noble host stood leaning upon the mantel-piece, pale, but seeming less stern and cold than suffering and nerved to bear pain. " I am glad to see you, my dear count !" he said, giving him his hand with an affectionateness that he had never before manifested. " Are you quite well ?" he added, scrutinizing his features closely with the question " for, like myself, you seem to have grown pale upon this September dulness." I am commonly less well in this month than in any other," said Pallardos, " and now I think of it I had forgotten that I arose this morning with a depression of spirits as singular as it was unendurable. I forgot it, when I received your lordship s note, in the happiness the day was to bring me." The lovers exchanged looks, unremarked, appa rently, by either Lord or Lady Aymar, and the con versation relapsed into the commonplaces of dinner- table civility. Spiridion observed that the footmen were excluded, the old butler alone serving them at table ; and that the shutters, of which he got a chance glimpse between the curtains, were carefully closed. Once or twice Pallardos roused himself with the thought that he was ill playing the part of an agree able guest, and proposed some question that might lead to discussion ; but the spirits of Lady Angelica seemed frighted to silence, and Lord and Lady Aymar THE PHANTOM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE. were wholly absorbed, or were at "least unconscious of their singular incommunicativeness. Dinner dragged on slowly Lady Aymar retarding every remove with terrified and flurried eagerness. Pallardos remarked that she did not eat, but she asked to be helped agaiu from every dish before its removal. Her fork rattled on the plate with the trembling of her hand, and, once or twice, an outbreak of hysterical tears was evidently prevented by a stern word and look from Lord Aymar. The butler leaned over to his mistress s ear. " No no no ! Not yet not yet !" she exclaimed, in a hurried voice, " oue minute more !" But the clock at that instant struck seven, counted by that table company in breathless silence. Pallardos felt his heart sink, he knew not why. Lord Aymar spoke quickly and hoarsely. " Turn the key, Williams." Lady Aymar screamed and covered her face with her hands. " Remove the cloth !" he again ordered precipi tately. The butler s hand trembled. He fumbled with the corner of the cloth a moment, and seemed to want strength or courage to fulfil his office. With a sudden effort Lord Aymar seized and threw the cloth to the other end of the apartment. " There !" cried he, starting to his feet, and point ing to the bare table, "there! there!" he repeated, seizing the hand of Lady Angelica, as she arose terrifi ed upon her feet. " See you nothing ? Do you see nothing? 1 With a look, at her father, of blank inquiry a look of pity at her mother, sunk helpless upon the arm of her chair a look at Pallardos, who with open mouth, and eyes starting from their sockets, stood gazing upon the table, heedless of all present she answered " Nothing my dear father ! nothing !" He flung her arm suddenly from his hand. " I knew it," said he, with angry emphasis. " Take her, shameless woman ! Take your child, and be gone !" But Pallardos laid his hand upon the earl s arm. " My lord ! my lord !" he said, in a tone of fearful suppression of outcry, " can we not remove this hideous object ! How it glares at you ! at me ! Why does it look at me ! What is it, Lord Aymar? What brings that ghastly head here 1 Oh God ! oh God ! I have seen it so often !" " You 1 you have seen it ?" suddenly asked Lady Aymar in a whisper. " Is there anything to see ? Do you see the same dreadful si^ht, Spiridion ?" Her voice rose with the last question to a scream. Pallardos did not answer. He had forgotten the presence of them all. He struggled a moment, gasp ing and choking for self-control, and then, with a^ud- deu movement, clutched at the bare table. His empty hand slowly opened, and his strength sufficed to pass his finger across the palm. He staggered backward with an idiotic laugh, and was received in his fall by the trembling arms of Lady Angelica. A motion . from Lord Aymar conveyed to his faithful servant | that the phantom was vanishing ! The door was flung open and the household summoned. " Count Pallardos has fainted from the heat of the room," s;iid Lord Aymar. " Place him upon my ! bed! And Lady Aymar! will you step into the library I would speak with you a moment !" There was humility and beseechingness in the last few words of Lord Aymar, which fell strangely on the ear of the affrighted and guilty woman. Her mind had been too fearfully tasked to comprehend the meaning of that changed tone, but, with a vague feeling of relief, she staggered through the hall, and the door of the library closed behind her. CHAPTER IV. A letter from Lord Aymar to Lady Angelica will put the story forward a little : " MY DKAR ANGELICA : I am happy to know thr.t there are circumstances which will turn aside much of the poignancy of the communication I am about to make to you. If I am not mistaken at least, in be lieving a mutual attachment to exist between your self and Count Pallardos, you will at once compre hend the ground of my mental relief, and perhaps, in a measure, anticipate what I am about to say. " I have never spoken to you of the fearful in heritance in the blood of the Aymars. This would appear a singular omission between two members of one family, but I had strong reasons for my silence, one of which was your possible sympathy with your mother s obstinate incredulity. Now since yester day s appalling proof you can no longer doubt the inheritance of me phantom head the fearful record of some nameless deed of guilt, which is doomed to haunt out festal table as often as the murderous day shall come around to a descendant of our blood. Fortunately mercifully, I shall perhaps say, we are not visited by this dread avenger till the maturity of manhood gives us the courage to combat with its horror. The Septembers, since my twentieth year, have brought it with fatal certainty to me. God alone knows how long I shall be able to withstand the taint it gives to my thoughts when waking, and to the dreams upon my haunted pillow. " You will readily see, in what I have said, another reason for my silence toward you on this subject. In the strong sympathy and sensitive imagination of a woman, might easily be bred, by too vivid picturing, a fancy which would be as palpable almost as the reality ; and I Wished you to arrive at woman s years with a belief that it was but a monomaniac affection of my own brain a disease to pity but not to share ! You are now twenty. The females of my family have invariably seen the phantom at seventeen ! Do you anticipate the painful inference 1 draw from the fact that this spectre is invisible to you ! " No, Angelica! you are not my daughter! The Aymar blood does not run in your veins, and I know not how much it will soften the knowledge of your mother s frailty to know, that you are spared the dread inheritance that would have been yours with a legiti macy of honor. I had grounds for this belief at your birth, but I thought it due to the hallowed character of woman and wife to summon courage to wait for confirmation. Had I acted out the impulse, then almost uncontrollable within me, I.should have profit ed by the lawless land in which I resided to add more weight to the errand of this phantom avenger. But time and reason have done their work upon me. Your mother is safe from open retribution. May God pardon her ! "You will have said, here, that since Count Pallar dos has- been revealed by the same pursuing Provi dence to be my son, I may well refrain from appear ing as my wile s accuser. I have no wish to profit by the difference the world makes between infidelity in man, and infidelity in woman; nor to look, for an apology, into the law of nature upon which so general and undisputed a distinction must needs be founded. I confess the justice of Heaven s vengeance upon the crime visited upon me, I fearfully believe, in the unconscious retaliation which gave you birth. Yet I can not, for this, treat you as the daughter of my blood. " And this brings me to the object of my letter. With the care of years, I have separated, from the GETTING TO WINDWARD. entail of Aymar, the bulk of my fortune. God has denied me a legitimate male heir, and I have Ion"" ago determined, to leave, to its natural conflict with cir cumstances, the character of a child I knew to be mine, and to adopt its destiny, if it proved worthy, should my fears as to your own parentage be confirm ed by the undeniable testimony of our spectral curse. Count Pallardos is that child. Fate drew him here, without my interference, as the crisis of your destiny turned against you. The innocent was not to be punished for the guilty, and the inheritance he takes from you goes back to you with his love in wedlock ! So, at least, appearances have led me to believe, and so would seem to be made apparent the kind provisions of Heaven against our resentful injustices. I must confess that I shall weep tears of joy if it be so, for, j dear Angelica, you have wound yourself around my heart, nearer to its core than the coil of this serpent of revenge. 1 shall find it to be so, I am sadly sure, if I prove incorrect in my suppositions as to your at tachment. "I have now to submit to you, I%ust only as a matter of form, two offers for your hand one from Mr. Townley Manners, and the other (conditional, however, with your fortune) from Lord Frederick Beauchief. An annuity of five hundred a year would be all you would receive for a fortune, and your choice, of course, is free. As the countess Pallardos, | you would share a very large fortune (my gifts to my son, by a transfer to be executed this day), and to that destiny, if need be, I tearfully urge you. " Affectionately yours, my dear Angelica, " AYMAR." With one more letter, perhaps, the story will be sufficiently told. "DEAR COUNT: You will wonder at receiving a friendly note from me after my refusal, two months since, to meet you over pistols and coffee ; but rep aration rnay not be too late, and this is to say, that you have your choice between two modes of settle ment, viz : to accept for your stable the hunter you stole from me (vide police report) and allow me to take a glass of wine with you at my own table and bury the hatchet, or, to shoot at me if you like, according to your original design. Manners and Beauchief hope you will select the latter, as they owe you a grudge for the possession of your incomparable bride and her fortune ; but I trust you will prefer the horse, which (if I am rightly informed) bore you to the declaration of love at Chasteney. Reply to Crockford s. " Yours ever (if you like), " POMFEET DALLJNGER. "Count PALLARDOS." Is the story told ? I think so ! GETTING TO WINDWARD, CHAPTER I. LONDON is an abominable place to dine. I mean, of course, unless you are free of a club, invited out, or pay a ridiculous price for a French dinner. The un known stranger, adrift on the streets, with a traveller s notions of the worth of things to eat, is much worse off, as to his venture for a meal, than he would be in the worst town of the worst province of France much worse off than he would be in New York or New Or leans. There is a " Very s," it is true, and there are one or two restaurants, so called, in the Haymarket; but it is true, notwithstanding, that short of a two- guinea dinner at the Clarendon", or some hotel of this class, the next, best thing is a simple pointed steak with potatoes, at a chop-house. The admirable club-sys tem (admirable for club-members) has absorbed all the intermediate degrees of eating-houses, and the travel ler s chance and solitary meal must be either absurdly expensive, or dismally furnished and attended. The only real liberty one ever enjoys in a metropo lis is the interval (longer or shorter, as one is more or less a philosopher) between his arrival and the deliv ery of his letters of introduction. While perfectly unknown, dreading no rencontre of acquaintances, sub ject to no care of dress, equipage, or demeanor, the stranger feels, what he never feels afterward, a com plete abandon to what, immediately surrounds him, a complete willingness to be amused in any shape which chance pleases to offer, and, his desponding loneliness serving him like the dark depths of a well, he sees lights invisible from the higher level of amusement. lired of my solitary meals in the parlor of a hotel during my first week in London, I made the round of such dming-places as I could inquire out at the West .knd of course, from the reserved habits of the coun try toward strangers, making no acquaintances, and scarce once exchanging a glance with the scores who sat at the tables around me. Observation was my only amusement, and J felt afterward indebted to those si lent studies of character for more acquaintance with the under-crust of John Bull, than can be gathered from books or closer intercourse. It is foreign to my present purpose, however, to tell why his pride should seem want of curiosity, and why his caution and deli cacy should show like insensibility and coldness. I am straying from my story. The covered promenade of the Burlington Arcade is, on rainy days, a great allure for a small chop-house hard by, called " The Blue Posts." This is a snug little tavern, with the rear of its two stories cut into a I single dining-room, where chops, steaks, ale, and punch, may be had in unusual perfection. It is frequented ordinarily by a class of men peculiar, I should think, to England taciturn, methodical in their habits, and highly respectable in their appearance men who seem to have no amusements and no circle of friends, but who come in at six and sit over their punch and the newspapers till bed time, without speaking a syllable, except to the waiter, and apparently turning a cold shoulder of discouragement to any one in the room who may be disposed to offer a passing remark. They hang their hats daily on the same peg, daily sit at the same table (where the chair is turned down for them by Villiam, the short waiter), daily drink a small pitcher of punch after their half-pint of sherry, and daily read, from beginning to end, the Herald, Post, and Times, with the variation of the Athenamm and Spectator, on Saturdays and Sundays. I at first hazarded various conjectures as to their condition in life. They were evidently unmarried, and men of easy though limited means men of no great care, and no high hopes, and in a fixed station ; yet of that degree of intelligence and firm self-respect which, in other countries (the GETTING TO WINDWARD. United States, certainly, at least), would have made them sought for in some more social and higher sphere than that with which they seemed content. I after ward obtained something of a clue to the mystery of the "Blue Posts" society, by discovering two of the most respectable looking of its customers in the exer cise of their daily vocations. One, a man of fine phre nological development, rather bald, and altogether very intellectual in his "os sublime, " I met at the rooms of a fashionable friend, taking his measure for pantaloons. He was the foreman of a celebrated Bond-street tailor. The other was the head-shopman of a famous haber dasher in Regent street ; and either might have passed for Godwin the novelist, or Babbidge the calculator with those who had seen those great intellects only in their imaginations. It is only in England, that men who, like these, have read or educated themselves far above their situations in life, would quietly submit to the arbitrary disqualifications of their pursuits, and agree unresistingly to the sentence of exile from the society suited to their mental grade. But here again I am getting away from my story. It was the close of a London rainy day. Weary of pacing my solitary room, I sallied out as usual, to the Burlington Arcade ([ say as usual, for in a metropolis where it rains nine days out of ten, rainy-weather re sorts become habitual). The little shops on either side were brightly lit, the rain pattered on the glass roof overhead, and to one who had not a single ac quaintance in so vast a city, even the passing of the crowd and the glittering of lights seemed a kind of society. I began to speculate on the characters of those who passed and repassed me in the turns of the short gallery; and the dinner-hours coining round, and the men gradually thinning off from the crowd, I ad journed to the Blue Posts with very much the feeling of a reader interrupted in the progress of a novel. One of the faces that had most interested me was that of a foreigner, who, with a very dejected air, leaned on the arm of an older man, and seemed promenading to kill time, without any hope of killing his ennui. On seat ing myself at one of the small tables, I was agreeably surprised to find the two foreigners my close neigh bors, and in the national silence of the company pres ent, broken only by the clatter of knives and forks, it was impossible to avoid overhearing every word spoken by either. After a look at me, as if to satisfy them selves that I, too, was a John Bull, they went on with their conversation in French, which, so long as it was confined to topics of drink and platter, weather and news, I did not care to interrupt. But with their progress through a second pint of sherry, personal top ics came up, and as they seemed to be conversing with an impression that their language was not understood, I felt obliged to remind them that I was overhearing unwillingly what they probably meant for a private conversation. With a frankness which I scarcely ex pected, they at once requested me to transfer my glass to their table, and culling for a pitcher of punch, they extended their confidence by explaining to me the grounds of the remarks I had heard, and continuing to converse freely on the subject. Through this means, and a subsequent most agreeable acquaintance, I pos sessed myself of the circumstances of the following story, and having thus shown the reader (rather di- gressively, I must own) how I came by it, I proceed in the third person, trusting that my narration will not now seem like the "coinage of the brain." The two gentlemen dining at the Blue Posts on the rainy day just mentioned, were Frenchmen, and polit ical exiles. With the fortunes of the younger, this story has chiefly to do. He was a man past the senti mental age, perhaps nearer thirty-seven than thirty- five, less handsome than distinguished in his appear ance, yet with one of those variable faces which are handsome for single instants once in a half hour, more or less. His companion called him Be- laccueil. " I could come down to my circumstances," he said to Monsieur St. Leger, his friend, "if I knew how. It is not courage that is wanting. I would do anything for a livelihood. But what is the first step ? What is the next step from this ? This last dinner this last night s lodging I am at the end of my means ; and unless [ accept of charity from you, which I will not, to-morrow must begin my descent. Where to put my foot ?" He stopped and looked down into his glass, with the air of a man who only expects an answer to refute its reasoning. " My dear Belaccueil," said the other, after a mo ment s hesitation, "you were famous in your better days for almost universal accomplishment. Mimic, dancer, musician, cook what was there in our merry carnival-time, to which you did not descend with suc cess, for mere amusement ? Why not now for that independence of livelihood to which you adhere so pertinaciously^" "You will be amused to find," he answered, "how well I have sounded the depths of every one of these resources. The French theatre of London has re fused me, point-blank, all engagement, spite of the most humiliating exhibitions of my powers of mimicry before the stage-manager and a fifth-rate actress. I am not musician enough for a professor, though very well for an amateur, and have advertised in vain for employment as a teacher of music, and what was your other vocation ! cook ! Oh no ! I have just science enough to mend a bad dinner and spoil a good one, though I declare to you, I would willingly don the white cap and apron and dive for life to the base ment. No, my friend, I have even offered myself as assistant dancing-master, and failed ! Is not that enough ? If it is not, let me tell you, that I would sweep the crossings, if my appearance would not ex cite curiosity, or turn dustman, if I were strong enough for the labor. Come down ! Show me how to come down, and see whether I am not prepared to do it. But you do not know the difficulty of earning a penny in London. Do you suppose, with all the influence and accomplishments I possess, I could get the place of this scrubby waiter who brings us our cigars ? No, indeed ! His situation is a perfect castle impregna ble to those below him. There are hundreds of poor wretches within a mile of us who would think them selves in paradise to get his situation. How easy it is for the rich to say, go and work ! and how difficult to know how and where !" Belaccueil looked at his friend as if he felt that he had justified his own despair, and expected no com fort. "Why not try matrimony?" said St. Leger. "I can provide you the means for a six months siege, and you have better qualification for success than nine tenths of the adventurers who have succeeded." Why I could do even that for with all hope of prosperity, I have of course given up all idea of a ro mantic -love. But I could not practise deceit, and without pretending to some little fortune of my own, the chances are small. Besides, you remember my ill luck at Naples." "Ah, that was a love affair, and you were too hon- 63 " Not for the girl, God bless her ! She would have married me, penniless as I was, but through the inter ference of that officious and purse-proud Englishman, her friends put me liors dc combat." "What was his name ? Was he a relative ?" "A mere chance acquaintance of their own, but he 1 entered at once upon the office of family adviser. He was rich, and he had it in his power to call me an ad venturer. 1 did not discover his interference till some G4 GETTING TO WINDWARD. time after, or he would perhaps have paid dearly for his nomenclature." " Who did you say it was ?" " Hitchings ! Mr. Plantagenet Hitchings, of Hitch ing Park, Devonshire and the one point, to which I cling, of a gentleman s privileges, is that of calling him to account, should I ever meet him." St. Leger smiled and sat thoughtfully silent for a while. Belaccueil pulled apart the stems of a bunch of grapes on his plate, and was silent with a very dif ferent expression. " You are willing," said the former, at last, " to teach music and dancing, for a proper compensation." " Parbleu ! Yes !" "And if you could unite this mode of support with a very pretty revenge upon Mr. Plantagenet Hitch ings (with whom, by the way, I am very well acquaint ed), you would not object to the two-fold thread in your destiny ?" "They would be threads of gold, man ami!" said the surprised Belaccueil. St. Leger called for pen, ink, and paper, and wrote H letter at the Blue Posts, which the reader will follow to its destination, as the next step in this story. CHAPTER II. A GREEN angel (I mean an angel ignorant of the world) would probably suppose that the feeding of these animal bodies of ours, if not done in secret, must at least be the one act of human life separated entirely from the more heavenly emotions. Yet the dinner is a meal dear to lovers ; and novelists and tale-tellers choose the moments stolen from fork and plate for the birth and interchange of the most delicious and tender sentiments of our existence. Miss Hitchings, while unconsciously shocking Monsieur Sansou by tilting her soup-plate for the last spoonful of vermicelli, was controlling the beating of a heart full of feminine and delicate tenderness; and as the tutor was careful never to direct his regards to the other end of the table (for reasons of his own), Miss Henrietta laid the unction to her soul that such indifference to the prettiest girl who had ever honored them as a guest, proved the strength of her own magnet, and put her more at ease on the subject of Monsieur Sansou s admiration. He, indeed, was committing the common fault of men whose manners are naturally agreeable playing that passive and grateful game of courtesy and attention so easy to the object of regard, and so delightful to wo man, who is never so blest as in bestowing. Besides, he had an object in suppressing his voice to the lowest audible pitch, and the rich and deep tone, sunk only to escape the ear of another, sounded, to the watchful and desiring sense of her to whom it was addressed, like the very key-note and harmony of affection. At a table so surrounded with secrets, conversation flagged, of course. Mr. Hitchings thought it very up-hill work to entertain Miss Hervey, whose heart and senses were completely absorbed in the riddle of Belaccueil s disguise and presence; Mr. Hervey, the uncle, found old Mrs. Plantagenet rather absent, for the smitten dame had eyes for every movement of Monsieur Sansou ; and the tutor himself, with his re sentment toward his host, and his suspicions of the ove of his daughter, his reviving passion for Miss Hervey, and his designs on Mrs. Plantagenet, had enough to render him as silent as the latter could wish, and as apparently insensible to the attraction of the fair stranger. How little we know what is in the bosoms of those around us ! How natural it is, however, to feel and act as if we knew to account for all that appears on the surface by the limited acquaintance we have with circumstances and feelings to resent an indifference of which we know not the cause to approve or con demn, without allowance for chagrin, or despair, or love, or hope, or distress any of the deep undercur rents for ever at work in the depths of human bosoms. The young man at your side at a dinner-party may have a duel on his hands for the morning, or a disgrace imminent in credit or honor, or a refused heart or an accepted one, newly crushed or newly made happy ; or (more common still, and less allowed for) he may feel the first impression of disease, or the consequen ces of an indigestion ; and, for his agreeableness or disagreeableness, you try to account by something in yourself, some feeling toward yourself as if you and you only could affect his spirits or give a color to his mood of manners. The old man s thought of death, the mother s overwhelming interest in her child, the woman s up-spring of emotion or love, are visiters to the soul that come unbidden and out of time, and you can neither feast nor mourn, secure against their in terruption. It would explain many a coldness, could we look into the heart concealed from us. We should often pity when we hate, love when we think we can not even forgive, admire where we curl the lip with scorn and indignation. To judge without reserve of any human action is a culpable temerity, of all our sins the most unfeeling and frequent. I will deal frankly with you, dear reader. I have arrived at a stage of my story which, of all the stages of story-writing, I detest the most cordially. Poets have written about the difficulty of beginning a story (vide Byron) Ca ne me coute pas ; others of the end ing. That I do with facility, joy, and rejoicing. But the love pathos of a story the place where the reader ! is expected to sigh, weep, or otherwise express his | emotion that is the point, I confess, the most diffi- I cult to write, and the most unsatisfactory when written. I " Pourquoy, Sir Knight ?" Not because it is difficult I to write love-scenes according to the received mode not that it is difficult to please those (a large majority) who never truly loved, and whose ideas, therefore, of love and its making, are transcendentalized out of all truth and nature not that it would be more labor to do this than to copy a circular, or write a love-letter for a modest swain (this last my besetting occupation) but because, just over the inkstand there peers a face, sometimes of a man of forty, past the nonsense of life, but oftener of some friend, a woman who has loved, and this last more particularly Tcnoivs that true love is never readable or sensible that if its lan guage be truly written, it is never in polished phrase i or musical cadence that it is silly, but for its con- l cealed meaning, embarrassed and blind, but for the j interpreting and wakeful heart of one listener that love, in short, is the god of unintelligibility, mystery, and adorable nonsense, and, of course, that which 1 have written (if readable and sensible) is out of taste j and out of sympathy, and none but fancy-lovers and enamored brains (not hearts) will approve or believe it. D Israeli the younger is one of the few men of ge- njus who, having seen truth without a veil, dare to re- veal the vision ; and he has written Henrietta Temple the silliest yet truest love-book of modern time. The critics (not an amative race) have given him a ! benefit of the "besom" of ridicule, but D Israeli, far j from being the effeminate intellect they would make | him, is one of the most original and intrepid men of | genius living, and whether the theme be "wine, wo- man, or war," he writes with fearless truth, piquancy, and grace. Books on love, however, should be read by lovers only, and pity it is, that there is not an ink in chemistry, invisible save to the eye kindled with am atory fire. But "to our muttons." It was not leap-year, but Monsieur Belaccueil, on the day of the dinner-party at Hitchings park, was made aware (I will not say by proposals, for ladies make GETTING TO WINDWARD. 65 known their inclinations in ways much less formidable) i; he was made aware, I say, that the hearts of three of the parly wore within the flight of his arrow. Prob ably his humble situation reversed the usual relative position of the sexes in the minds of the dame and damsels and certainly there is no power woman exer cises so willingly as a usurpation of the masculine privilege. I have stated my objection to detail the dialogue between Miss Hitchings and her tutor at the diuner-table. To be recorded faithfully, the clatter of silver forks on China, the gurgle of wine, the inter- nipiions of the footmen with champagne and vegeta bles, should all be literally interspersed for to all the broken sentences (so pathetic when properly punctu ated vide Neal s novels) these were the sequels and the accompaniments: "No, thank you !" and "If you please," and " May I fill your glass ?" have filled out, to the perfect satisfaction of the lady, many an unfin ished sentence upon which depended the whole des tiny of her affections; and, as I said before, the truth is not faithfully rendered when these interstices are unsupplied. It was dark when the ladies left the dinner-table, followed by Monsieur Sansou, and, at the distance of a few feet from the windows opening on the lawn, the air was black and impenetrable. There were no stars visible and no moon, but the clouds which were gath ering after a drought, seemed to hush the air with their long expected approach, and it was one of those soft, still, yet murky and fragrant nights when the earth seems to breathe only without light, sound, or motion. What lover does not remember such a night ? Oppressed with the glaring lights and the company of people she cared nothing about, Miss Hervey stepped out upon the lawn, and with her face lifted as if to draw deeper inhalations of the dew and freshness, she strolled leisurely over the smooth carpet of grass. At a slight turn to avoid a clump of shrubbery, she encountered Belaccueil, who was apologizing and about to pass her, when she called him by his name, and passing her arm through his, led him on to the extremity of the lawn. A wire fence arrested their progress, and leaning against it, Miss Hervey inquired into the cause of the disguise she had penetrated, and softened and emboldened by the fragrant darkness, said all that a woman might say of tenderness and en couragement. Belaccueil s heart beat with pride and gratified amour propre, but he confined himself to the expression of this feeling, and leaving the subject open, took advantage of Mis. Plantagenet s call to Miss Hervey from the window, to leave her and resume his ramble through the grounds. The supper tray had been brought in, and the party were just taking their candles to separate, when the tutor entered at the glass door and arrested the steps of Mrs. Plantagenet. She set down her candl* and courtesied a good-night to the ladies (Mr.Hitchings had gone to bed, for wine made him sleepy, and Mr. Her vey always retired early where he was bored), and closing the windows, mixed a glass of negus for Mon sieur Sansou ; and, herself pulling a sandwich to pieces, deliberately, and it must be confessed, some what patronisingly, invited the Frenchman to become her lord. And after a conversation, which (la verite avant tout) turned mainly on will and investments, the window dame sailed blissfully to bed, and Belaccueil wrote the following letter to his friend and adviser : " MY DEAR ST. LKUKR : Enclosed you have the only surviving lock of my grizzled wig sign and sym bol that my disguises are over and my object attained. The wig burns at this instant in the grate, item my hand-ruffles, item sundry embroidered cravats a la vielle cour, item (this last not without some trouble at my heart) a solitary love-token from Coustantia Her vey. One faded rose given me at Paestum, the day before I was driven disgraced from her presence by 5 the interference of this insolent fool one faded rose has crisped and faded into smoke with the rest. And so fled from the world the last hope of a warm and passionate heart, which never gave up its destiny till now never felt that it was made in vain, guarded, re fined, cherished in vain, till that long-loved flower lay in ashes. I am accustomed to strip emotion of its drapery determined to feel nothing but what is real yet this moment, turn it and strip it, and deny its illu sions as I will, is anguish. Self-inflicted, you smile and say ! "You will marvel what stars will not come into conjunction, when I tell you that Miss Hervey is at this moment under the same roof with me and my affianced bride, and you will marvel what good turn I have done the devil, that he should, in one day, offer me my enemy s daughter, my enemy s fortune (with the drawback of an incumbrance), and the woman who I thought had spurned me. After all, it is a devil s gift for in choosing that to which I am most impelled, I crush hope, and inflict pain, and darken my own heart for ever. I could not have done this once. Manhood and poverty have embittered me. " Miss Hitchings has chosen to fall in love with her tutor. She is seventeen, a sweet blonde, with large, suffused eyes, tender, innocent, and (without talent) singularly earnest and confiding. I could be very happy with such a woman, and it would have been a very tolerable revenge (failing the other) to have stolen her from her father. But he would have disinherited and forgotten us, and I have had enough of poverty, and can not afford to be forgotten by my enemy. "You never saw Miss Hervey. It is not much to tell you she is the most beautiful woman I have met. If she were not beautiful, her manners would win all hearts. If her manners were less fascinating, her sin gular talents would make her remarkable. She is not appreciated, because her beauty blinds people to her talents, and her manners make them forget her beauty. She is something in the style of the Giorgione we adored at Venice a transparently dark beauty, with unfathomable eyes and lashes that sweep her cheek ; her person tall and full, and her neck set on like Ze- nobia s. Yet she is not a proud woman I think she is not. She is too natural and true to do anything which looks like pride, save walk like an empress. She says everything rightly penetrates instantly to the core of meaning sings, dances, talks, with the ease, confidence, grace, faithlessness, with which a swallow flies. Perfection in all things is her nature. I am jotting down her qualities now as they are al lowed by the world. I will not write of them like a lover. Oh, my friend, with what plummet can you fathom the depth of my resentments, when, for them, I forego possession of this woman ! She offered me, two hours since, the unqualified control of her desti ny ! She asked me with tremulous voice to forgive her for the wrong done me in Italy. She dropped that faultless and superb head on my bosom, and told me that she loved me and I never answered ! The serpent in my heart tied up my tongue, and with cold thanks "and fiend-like resistance to the bliss of even once pressing her to my bosom, I left her. I do not know myself when I remember that 1 have done this. I am possessed driven out by some hard and bitter spirit who neither acts nor speaks like me. Yet could I not undo what I have done. "To-morrow morning will disappear Monsieur San sou from Hitchings park, and, on the brief condition of a brief ceremony, the law, the omnipotent law, will deliver into my hands the lands, tenements, goods, chattels, and liberty of my enemy for even so deeply has he sunk into the open pocket of Mrs. Plantage net ! She holds mortgages on all he has, for money advanced, and all that is hers will be mine, without reserve. The roof I have been living in degradation 66 THE WIFE BEQUEATHED AND RESUMED. under, will be to-morrow my own. The man who called me an adventurer, who stood between me and my love, who thrust me from my heaven without cause or provocation the meddling fool who boasts that he saved a countrywoman from a French swindler (he has recurred to it often in my presence), will be to morrow my dependant, beggar for shelter, suppli ant for his liberty and subsistence ! Do you ask if that outweighs the love of the woman I have lost ? Alas ! yes. " You are older, and have less taste for sentiment even than I. I will not bore you with my crowd of new feelings in this situation. My future wife is amia ble and good. She is also vain, unattractive, and old. I shall be kind to her and endeavor that she shall not be disenchanted, and if I can make her happy, it may mollify my penance for the devil with which I am pos sessed. Miss Hitchings will lose nothing by having loved me, for she shall be the heiress of my wealth, and her father but I will not soil my heart by thinking of an alleviation to his downfall. "Farewell, mon ami. Congratulate and pily me. "AooLPHE BELACCUEIL." In one of the most fashionable squares of London lives, "in the season," Monsieur Belaccueil, one of the most hospitable foreigners in that great metropo lis. He is a pensive and rather melancholy-looking man by day; but society, which he seems to seek like an opiate to restless feeling, changes him to a gay man, the most mirth-loving of Amphytrions. His establishment is presided over by his wife, who, as his | society is mostly French, preserves a respectable si- ! lence, but seems contented with her lot and proud of her husband ; while in Miss Plantagenet (ci-devant Hitchings) his guests find his table s chief attraction one of the prettiest heiresses and most loveable girls in j London. How deeply MonsieurBelaccueil still rejoices I at his success in "getting to windward," is matter of | problem. Certainly there is one chariot which passes i him in his solitary ride in the park, to which he bows j with a pang of unabating and miserable anguish. And if the occupant of that plain chariot share at all in his suffering, she has not the consolation to which he flies in society for a more secluded and lonely woman lives not in the great solitude of London, than Con- stantia Hervey. THE WIFE BEQUEATHED AND RESUMED, THE following story was told to the writer by a lady in France told during supper at a ball, and of course only partially. The interstices have been supplied in writing it, and the main thread of the narrative may be relied on as fact. The names are fictitious : A beautiful girl of seventeen, in the convent-parlor of Saint Agatha. She is dressed as a novice, and the light breaks off from the curve of the raven hair put away under the close-fitting cap breaks off almost in sparkles. For so it may as an artist knows. Her eyes are like hounds in the leash fiery and eager. And if, in those ever-parted and forward-pressing lips there is a possibility of languid repose, the proof of it lies in the future. They are sleepless and dreamless, as yet, with a thirst unnamed and irrepressible, for the passions of life. Her name is Zelie. But we can not make the past into the present. Change the tense for Zelie is dead now, or we could not record her strange story. There was a ring at the convent door, and presently entered Colonel Count Montalembert, true to his ap pointment. He had written to the lady-abbess to request an interview with the daughter of his com rade, dead on the frozen track of the retreat from Moscow. Flaliault was to him, as his right hand to his left, and as he covered up the stiffened body with snow, he had sworn to devote his life to that child whose name was last on the lips closed for ever. The Count Montalembert was past fifty, and a constant sufferer from, his wounds; and his physicians had warned him that death was not far off. His bearing was still noble and soldierly, however, and his frank and clear eye had lost little of its lustre. " I wrote to you the particulars of your father s death, my child," said the colonel, after the abbess had left them alone, at his request. "I could not dwell on it again without more emotion than is well j for me. I must be brief even with what I have to say to his daughter for that, too, will move me overmuch. You are very lovely, Zelie." " You are very kind !" answered the novice, blush ing, and dropping her long lashes upon her cheek. "Very lovely, I say, and must love and be beloved. j It is a woman s destiny, and your destiny more than most women s." The count gazed into the deep eyes of his eager listener, and seemed embarrassed to know how to pro ceed. " Hear me through," he said, " before you form an [ opinion of my motives. And first answer me a bold question. Have you any attachment have you ever seen a man you could love and marry ?" " No !" murmured the blushing novice, after a mo ment s hesitation. " But you are likely to love, soon and rashly, once I free in the world and that is one evil against which I I will make myself your shield. And there is another which I am only sorry that I need your permission and aid in averting." Zelie looked up inquiringly. " Poverty the grave of love the palsy of the heart the oblivion of beauty and grace ! To avert this from you, I have a sacrifice to demand at your hands." Again the count stopped in embarrassment almost painful, and Mademoiselle Montalembtrt with diffi culty suppressed her impatience. "My physicians tell me," he resumed, in a tone lower and calmer, "that my lease of life is wearing rapidly to a close. A year hence lies its utmost and inevitable limit. Could you live in the world, without love, for one year, Zelie?" "Monsieur !" was her surprised exclamation. "Then listen to my proposal. I have a fortune while I live, large enough for your most ambitious desires. But it is left to me with conditions which forbid my conveying it through any link save mar riage, and to my widow only for life. To give it you, I regret deeply for your sake to say, I must wed | you. You start do not answer me now. I leave you to revolve this in your mind till to-morrow. Remem ber that I shall not trouble you long, and that the name of Montalembert is as noble as your own, and that you require a year, perhaps more than a year, to j recover from your first dizzy gaze upon the world. 1 THE WIFE BEQUEATHED AND RESUMED. 17 shall put no restraint upon you. I have no wish but to fulfil my duty to my dead comrade in arms, and to die, knowing that you will well bestow your heart when I am gone. Adieu !" The count disappeared, and, with her clasped hands pressed to her forehead, the novice paced the convent- parlor until the refectory bell rang for dinner. * * * It was an evening of June, in the gardens of Ver sailles. It was an evening of June, also, in the pest- house of St. Lazarus, and in the cell of the condemned felon in St. Pelagie. Time, even in his holyday dress, visits indiscriminately the levelling caitiff ! Have the unhappy any business with June ? But the gardens of Versailles were beginning to illuminate, and the sky faded, with a glory more fes tal than sunlight, with the radiance of a myriad of glittering lamps, embellishing even the trees and flow ers beyond the meaning of nature. The work of the architect and the statuary at once stood idealized, and draped in an atmosphere of fairy-land, and the most beautiful woman of the imperial court became more beautiful as she stepped into the glare of the alley of fountains. And who should that be the fairest flower of French nobility but the young Countess Monta- lembert, just blooming through the close of her first year of wedlock ! The Count Montalembert stepped with her from the shade of the orange-grove, and, without her arm, fell behind scarce perceptibly, that he might keep his eye filled with the grace of her motion, without seeming to worship her before the world. With every salient flow of that cloud-like drapery onward with every twinkling step of those feet of airy lightness the dark eyelashes benenth the soldier s brow lifted and drooped again, as if his pulse of life and vision were alone governed by her swan-like motion. The count had forgotten that he was to die. The year allotted to him by his physicians had passed, and, far from falling gradually to his doom, his figure had straightened, and his step grown firm, and his cheek and lip and eye had brightened with returning health. He hnd drank life ,from love. The superb Zelie had proved grateful and devoted, and at the chateau of Montalembert, in southern France, she had seemeS content to live with him, and him only, the most assiduous of nurses in all her glorious beauty. But though this was Para dise to the count, his reason, not his heart, told him it was imprisonment to her, and he had now been a month at the sumptuous court of Napoleon, an at tendant upon a wife who was the star of the time the beloved of all the ceurt s gay beholders. As the Montalemberts strolled toward the chateau, which was now emitting floods of light from its many windows, a young soldier, with a slight mustache just shading his Grecian lip, joined them from a side-path, and claimed the hand of the countess for a (v-.dtz. The mercurial music at the same instant fled through the air, and under an exclamation at its thrilling sweetness, the countess concealed from her husband an emotion which the trembling of her slight hand betrayed instantly to her partner. With a bow of af fected gayety to the count, she quickened her pace, and in another moment stood blushing in the daz/Iing ring of waltzers, the focus herself of all eyes open to novelty and beauty. De Mornay, the countess s partner, was but an en sign in the imperial guard. He had but his sword. Not likely to be called handsome, or to be looked upon as attractive or dangerous by any but the most penetrating of his own sex, he had that philtre, that inexplicable something, which at once commended him to woman. His air was all earnest. The sup pressed devotion of life and honor breathed in his voice. He seemed ever hiding his heart with pain shamed with betrayed adoration calm by the force of a respect that rebuked passion. He professed no gal lantries. He professed nothing. His eyes alone, large, steadfast, imploring, conveyed language of love. An hour of that absorbing regard an apparently calm, 1 unimpassioncd hour of the intercourse common to those newly met sufficed to awaken in the bosom of the countess an interest alarming to himself, and dan gerous to her content as the wife of another. Strange she thought it, that, as the low and deferential tones of De Mornay fell on her ear, they seemed to expel from her heart all she had hitherto treasured ambi tion for the splendors of the court, passion for admi ration, and even her gratitude for her husband. A hut in the forest, with De Mornay only, was the Para dise now most present to the dreams and fancy of the proud wife of Montalembert. As his wife left him, the count thrust his hand into his breast with a gesture of controlled emotion, and turned aside, as if to seek once more the retired covert he had left. But his steps were faltering. At the entrance of the alley he turned again, and walking rapidly to the chateau, entered the saloon trembling to the measured motion of the dancers. Waiting for an opportunity to float into the giddy ring, De Mornay stood with his arm around the waist of the countess. Montalembert s face flushed, but he stepped to a column which supported the orchestra, and looked on unobserved. Her transparent cheek was so near to the lips of her partner, thai his breath must warm it. Her hand was pressed ay, by the bend of her gloved wrist, pressed hard upon the shoulder of De Mornay. Her bosom throbbed per- : ceptibly in its jewelled vest. She leaned toward him ! with a slight sway of her symmetrical waist, and 1 away, like two smoke wreaths uniting, away in volup- tuous harmony of movement, gazing into each other s | eyes, murmuring inaudibly to the crowd lips, cheeks, and eyes, in passionate neighborhood away floated the wife and friend of Montalembert in the authorized commerce of the gay world. Their feet chased each other, advancing, retreating, amid the velvet folds of her dress. Her waist was drawn close to his side in the more exciting passages of the music. Her luxu riant tresses floated from her temples to his. She curved her swan-like neck backward, and, with a look of pleasure, which was not a smile, gave herself up to the thrilling wedlock of music and motion, her eyes half-drooped and bathed in the eager gaze of De Mornay s. Montalembert s face was pallid and his eye on fire. The cold sweat stood on his forehead. He felt wronged, though the world saw all. With his concealed hand he clenched his breast till he drew blood. There was a pause in the music, and with a sudden agony at the thought of receiving his wife again from the hands of De Mornay, Montalembert fled on to the open air. An hour elapsed. "I ask a Heaven for myself, it is true, but not much for you to give !" said a voice approaching through the shadowy alley of the garden. The count lay on the ground with his forehead pressed to the marble pedestal of a statue, and he lieard, with the voice, the rustling of a female dress, and the rattling of a sabre-chain and spurs. " But one ringlet, sacred to me" continued the voice, in a tone almost feminine with its pleading ear nestness; "not given to me. no, no! that were a child s desire ! nut mine, though still playing on this ivory shoulder, and still lying neatly beneath that vein ed temple mine with your knowledge only, and caressed and cared for, morn and night, with the thought that it is mine ! Oh, Zelie ! there is no wrong to Montalembert in this ! Keep it from his touch! Let him not breathe upon it! Let not the wind blow that one ringlet toward him ! And when it kisses your cheek, and plays with the envied breeze upon your bosom think think of the soul of De 68 THE WIFE BEQUEATHED AND RESUMED. Mornay, bound in it ! Oh, God ! why am I made capable of love like this !" There was no reply, and long ere Montalembert had recovered from his amazement at these daring words, the sound of their footsteps had died away. Pass two years. It is enough to wait on Time in the Present. In the Past and Future, the graybeard, like other ministers out of place, must do without usher and secretary. It was a summer s noon on the Quai D Orsay, of Paris. The liveried lacqueys of the princely hotels were lounging by the heavy gateM ays of stone, or leaning over the massy parapet of the river. And, true to his wont, the old soldier came with the noon, creeping from the " Invalides," to take his seat under the carved lion of the Montalemberts. He had served under the late count, and the memory of his house was dear to the old veteran. The sabre-cut which had disfigured his face, was received, he said, while fight ing between Montalembert and Flahault, and to see the daughter of the one, and the gay heir of the other s wife and fortune, he made a dai ly pilgrimage to the Quai, and sat in the sun till the countess drove out in her chariot. By the will of the first husband of Zelie de Fla hault, the young De Mornay, to become her husband and share her fortune, was compelled to take the name and title of Count Montalembert, subject to the imperial accord. Napoleon had given the rank un willingly, and as a mark of respect to the last will of a brave man who had embellished the title for the eagle-eye of the Corsican read the soul of De Mor nay like an illuminated book, and knew the use he would make of fortune and power. In the quadrangle of the hotel Montalembert, there were two carriage-landings, or two persons, and the apartments were separated into two entirely distinct establishments. In one suite the young count chose to live at his pleasure, en garcon, and in the other the mixed hospitalities of the house were given, and the countess was there, and there only, at home. At this moment the court was ringing with the merry laugh- i ter of the count s convives, for he had a bachelor party i to breakfast, and the wine seemed, even at that early hour of the day, to have taken the ascendant. The carriages of the bacchanalians lined one side of the | court, and the modest chariot of the countess stood alone at the door on the other; for it was near the hour for promenade in the Champs Elysees. It was an hour after noon when the countess de scended. She came slowly, drawing on her glove, and the old soldier at the gate rose quickly to his feet, and leaned forward to gaze on her. She had changed since the death of her father s friend the brave Mon talembert, to whom she owed her fortune. But she was still eminently beautiful. Thought, perhaps sad ness, had dimmed to a sweet melancholy the bright sparkle of her glance, and her mouth, no longer fiercely spirited, was firm but gentle. Her curtains of sable lashes moved languidly over her drooping eye. She looked like one who was subdued in her hopes, not in her courage, and like one who had shut the door of her heart upon its unextinguishable fires to let them burn on, but in secret. She was dressed more proudly than gayly, and she wore upon her breast one memorial of her first husband his own black cross that he had worn in bartle, and in the few happy days of his wedlock, and which he had sent her from his death-bed. At the moment the countess stepped from her threshold, the door on the opposite side of the quad rangle was thrown open, and, with a boisterous laugh, the count sprang into his phaeton, calling to one of his party to follow him. His companion shrank back on seeing the countess, and in that moment s delay the door of the carriage was closed and the coachman ordered to drive on. The count s whip had waved over his spirited horses, however, and as they stood rearing and threatening to escape from their excited master, his friend sprang to his side, the reins were suddenly loosed, and with a plunge which threatened to tear the harness from their backs, they leaped for ward. In the next moment, the horses of both vehicles were drawn upon their haunches, half locked together in the narrow gateway, and with a blow from the crutch of the old veteran who rushed from the porter s lodge, the phaeton was driven back against the wall, the pole broken, and the count and his friend precipitated upon the pavement. The liberated horses flew wildly through the gate, and then followed a stillness like that of midnight in the court for on the pavement, betrayed by her profusion of fair locks, loosened by the fall, lay a woman in man s attire, the dissolute companion of the count, in his daylight revel. Un injured himself, the count stood a moment, abashed and motionless, but the old soldier, with folded arms and the remnant of his broken crutch in his hand, looked sternly on the scene, and as the servants start ed from their stupor to raise the insensible woman, the countess, reading her husband s impulse in his looks, sprang from the open door of the chariot, and interposed between him and his intended victim. With the high-born grace of noble, the soldierly in valid accepted her protection, and followed her to her chariot ; and, ordered to drive to the Hospital of the Invalides, the coachman once more turned slowly to the gateway. The night following, at the opera. Paris was on the qui vive of expectation, for a new prima donna was to make her debut before the emperor. Paris was also on the qui vive for the upshot of a certain matter of scandal. The eclaircissement at the hotel Montalembert had been followed, it is said, by open war between the count and countess ; and, de termined to carry out his defiance, the dissolute hus band had declared to his associates that he would produce at the opera, in a box opposite to his wife, the same person whose appearance she had resented, and in the same attire. It was presumed, by the graver courtiers wher had heard this, that the actors in this brutal scene, if it should be carried out, would be immediately arrested by the imperial guard. The overture commenced to a crowded house, and before it was half played, the presence of the count and his companion, in a conspicuous box on the left of the circle, drew the attention of every eye. The Montalemberts were the one subject of conversation. The sudden disappearance of the old count, his death in a distant province, his will relative to his widow and De Mornay all the particulars of that curious inher itance of wife and fortune, by written testament were passed from lip to lip. There was a pause at the close of the overture. The house was silent, occupied partly in looking at the audacious count and his companion, partly in watching for the entrance of the injured countess. A sudden light illuminated the empty box, shed from the lobby lamps upon the curtains at the open ing of the door, and the Countess Montalembert en tered, with every eye in that vast assembly bent anxiously upon her. But how radiantly beautiful, and how strangely dressed ! Her toilet was that of a bride. Orange-flowers were woven into her long raven tresses, and her robe of spotless white was fold ed across her bust with the simplicity of girlhood. A white rose-bud breathed on her bosom, and bracelets of pearls encircled her wrists of alabaster. And her smile, as she took her seat and looked around upon her friends oh ! that was bridal too ! unlike any look known lately upon her face joyous, radiant, blissful, as the first hour of acknowledged love. Nev er had Zelie- de Flahault looked so triumphantly A REVELATION OF A PREVIOUS LIFE. G9 beautiful. The opera-glasses from every corner of the house remained fixed upon her. A murmur arose gradually, a murmur of admiration succeeding the silent wonder of her first entrance; and but for the sudden burst of music from the orchestra, heralding the approach of the emperor, it would have risen into a shout of spontaneotis homage. The emperor came in. But who is there ! at the right hand of Napoleon smiled upon by the emperor, as the emperor seldom smiled, decorated with the noblest orders of France a star on his breast? MO.NTALEMBERT! " Montalembert! ^lontalembert !" resounded from a thousand voices. Was he risen from the dead ? Was this an appa rition the indignant apparition of the first husband j risen to rebuke the unmanly brutality of the second ? Would the countess start at the sight of him ? Look ! she turns to the illuminated box of the em peror ! She smiles with a radiant blush of joy and | happiness she smiles she lifts that ungloved and ; unjewelled hand, decorated only with a plain gold ring, and waves it to the waved" hand of Montalem bert ! the brave, true, romantic Montalembert. For, with the quickness of French divination, the whole story is understood by the audience. And there is not a brain so dull as not to know, that the audacious invalid veteran was the disguised count, watching over the happiness of her whose destiny of love he had too rashly undertaken to make cloudless make cloudless at the expense of a crushed heart, and a usurped hearth, and asecretdeath and burial, if so much were necessary. But he is a happy bridegroom now. And Adolphe de Mornay is once more an untitled ensign plucked for ever from the chaste heart and bosom of the de voted wife of Montalembert. And Montalembert f whose springs of life were fed only by love died when that fountain of love was broken ; for his wife died in childbed one year after his return to her, and he followed her in one day. Never man was more loved than he. Surely never man more deserved it. A REVELATION OF A PREVIOUS LIFE, 1 Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, The soul that rises in us, our life s star, Has had elsewhere its setting-, And conieth from afar." WORDSWORTH. THE death of a lady, in a foreign land, leaves me at liberty to narrate the circumstances which follow. A few words of previous explanation, however. I am inclined to believe, from conversations on the subject with many sensible persons, that there are few men who have not had, at different intervals in their lives, sudden emotions, currents of thought, affections of mind and body, which, not only were wholly dis connected with the course of life thus interrupted, but seemed to belong to a wholly different being. Perhaps I shall somewhere touch the reader s expe rience by describing rather minutely, and in the first person, some sensations of this kind not unusual to myself. Walking in a crowded street, for example, in perfect health, with every faculty gayly alive, I suddenly lose the sense of neighborhood. I see I hear but I feel as if I had become invisible where I stand, and was, at the same time, present and visible elsewhere. I know everything that passes around me, but I seem disconnected and (magnetically speaking) itnlinked from the human beings near. If spoken to at such a moment, I answer with difficulty. The person who speaks seems addressing me from a world to which I no longer belong. At the same time, I have an irre- ! sistible inner consciousness of being present in another j scene of every-day life where there are streets, and houses, and people where I am looked on without surprise as a familiar object where I have cares, fears, objects to attain a different scene altogether, and a different life, from the scene and life of which I was a moment before conscious. I have a dull ache at the back of my eyes for the minute or two that this trance lasts, and then, slowly and reluctantly, my absent soul seems creeping back, the magnetic links of conscious neighborhood, one by one, re-attach, and I resume my ordinary life, but with an irrepressible feeling of sadness. It is in vain that I try to fix these shadows as they recede. I have struggled a thousand times in vain to particularize and note down what I saw in the strange j city to which I was translated. The memory glides from my grasp with preternatural evasiveness. In a book called " The Man of Two Lives," similar i sensations to these are made the basis of the story. I Indeed, till I saw that book, the fear of having my sanity suspected sealed my lips on the subject. I have still a reserve in my confession. I have been conscious, since boyhood, of a mental peculiarity which I fear to name while I doubt that it i* possessed by others than myself which I should not allude to now, but that it forms a strange link of identity | between me and another being to be mentioned in this story. I may say, also, without attaching any importance to it, except as it bears upon this same identity, that, of those things which I have no occasion to be taught, or which I did, as the common phrase is, by intuition, drawing was the easiest and most passionately followed of my boyish pursuits. With these preliminaries, and probably some simi lar experience of his own, the reader may happily form a woof on which to embroider the following circum stances. Travelling through Styria, some years since, I j chanced to have, for a fellow-occupant of the coupe of a diligence, a very courteous and well-bred person, a gentleman of Gratz. As we rolled slowly along on the banks of the Muer, approaching his native town, he very kindly invited me to remain with him a day or two, offering me, as an inducement, a presentation at the soiree of a certain lady of consequence, whoVas to receive, on-the night of our arrival, and at whose house I should see some fair specimens of the beauty of Styria. Accepted. It was a lovely summer s night, when we strolled through the principal street toward our gay destina tion, and as I drew upon my friend s arm to stop him while the military band of the fortress finished a deli- 1 cious waltz (they were playing in the public square), I he pointed out to me the spacious balconies of the A REVELATION OF A PREVIOUS LIFE, countess s palace, whither we were going, crowded with the well-dressed company, listening silently to the same enchanting music. We entered, and after an interchange of compliments with the hostess, I availed myself of my friend s second introduction to take a stand in one of the balconies beside the person I was presented to, and under cover of her favor, to hear out the unfinished music of the band. As the evening darkened, the lights gleamed out from the illuminated rooms more brightly, and most of the guests deserted the balconies and joined the gayer circles within. The music ceased at the beat of the drum. My companion in the balcony was a very quiet young lady, and, like myself, she seemed subdued by the sweet harmonies we had listened to, and willing to remain without the shadow of the cur tain. We were not alone there, however. A tall lady, of very stately presence, and with the remains of remarkable beauty, stood on the opposite side of the balcony, and she, too, seemed to shrink from the glare within, and cling to the dewy darkness oTthe summer night. After the cessation of the music, there was no longer an excuse for intermittent conversation, and, starting a subject which afforded rather freer scope, I did my best to credit my friend s flattering introduc tion. I had discoursed away for half an hour very unreservedly, before I discovered that, with her hand upon her side, in an attitude of repressed emotion, the tall lady was earnestly listening to me. A third person embarrasses even the most indifferent dialogue. The conversation languished, and my companion rose and took my arm for a promenade through the rooms. Later in the evening, my friend came in search of me to the supper-room. " Mon ami . " he said, " a great honor has fallen out of the sky for you. I am sent to bring you to the beau reste of the handsomest woman of Styria Margaret, Baroness R , whose chateau I pointed out to you in the gold light of yesterday s sunset. She wishes to know you u hy I can not wholly divine for it is the first sign of ordinary feeling that she has given in twenty years. But she seems agitated, and sits alone itt the countess s boudoir. Allons-yV As we made our way through the crowd, he hastily sketched me an outline of the lady s history : "At seventeen taken from a convent for a" forced marriage with the baron whose name she bears ; at eighteen a widow, and, for the first time, in love the subject of her passion a young artist of Vienna on his way to Italy. The ariist died at her chateau they were to have been married she has ever since worn weeds for him. And the remainder you must imagine for here we are !" The baroness leaned with her elbow upon a small table of or molu, and her position was so taken that I seated myself necessarily in a strong light, while her features were in shadow. Still, the light was suffi cient to show me the expression of her countenance. She was a woman apparently about forty-five, of noble physiognomy, and a peculiar fulness of the eyelid something like to which I thought. I remembered to have seen in a portrait of a young girl, many years before. The resemblance troubled me somewhat. " You will pardon me this freedom," said the bar oness with forced composure, " when I tell you that a friend whom 1 have mourned twenty-five years seems present to me when you speak." I was silent, for I knew not what to say. The bar oness shaded her eyes with her hand, and sat silent for a few moments, gazing at me. " You are not like him in a single feature," she resumed, " yet the expression of your face, strangely, very strangely, is the same. He was darker slighter" Of my age ?" 1 inquired, to break my own silence. For there was something in her voice which gave me the sensation of a voice heard in a dream. " Oh God ! that voice ! that voice !" she exclaimed wildly, burying her face in her hands, and giving way to a passionate burst of tears. " Rodolph," she resumed, recovering herself with a strong effort, " Rodolph died with the promise on his lips that death should not divide us. And I have seen him ! Not in dreams not in revery not at times when my fancy could delude me. I have seen him suddenly before me in the street in Vienna here at home at noonday for minutes together, gazing on me. It is more in latter years that I have been visited by him ; and a hope" has latterly sprung into being in my heart I know not how that in person, palpable and breathing, I should again hold converse with him fold him living to my bosom. Pardon me ! You will think me mad !" I might well pardon her ; for, as she talked, a vague sense of familiarity with her voice, a memory, pow erful, though indistinct, of having before dwelt on those majestic features, an impulse of tearful passion- ateness to rush to her embrace, well nigh overpowered me. She turned to me again. " You are an artist ?" she said, inquiringly. " No ; though intended for one, I believe, by na ture." "And you were born in the year ." " I was !" With a scream she added the day of my birth, and waiting an instant for my assent, dropped to the floor and clung convulsively and weeping to my knees. " Rodolph ! Rodolph !" she murmured faintly, as her long gray tresses fell over her shoulders, and her head dropped insensible upon her breast. Her cry had been heard, and several persons entered the room. I rushed out of doors. I had need to be in darkness and alone. It was an hour after midnight when I re-entered my hotel. A chasseur stood sentry at the door of my apartment with a letter in his hand. He called me by name, gave me his missive, and disappeared. It was from the baroness, and ran thus: " You did not retire from me to sleep. This letter will find you waking. And I must write, for my heart and brain are overflowing. " Shall I write to you as a stranger ? you whom I have strained so often to my bosom you whom I have loved and still love with the utmost idolatry of mortal passion you who have once given me the soul that, like a gem long lost, is found again, but in a newer casket ! Mine still for did we not swear to love for ever ! " But I am taking counsel of my own heart only. You may still be unconvinced. You may think that a few singular coincidences have driven me mad. You may think that, though born in the same hour that my Rodolph died, possessing the same voice, the same countenance, the same gifts though by irresist ible consciousness I know you to be him my lost lover returned in another body to life you may still think the evidence incomplete you may, perhaps, even now, be smiling in pity at my delusion. Indulge me one moment. " The Rodolph Isenberg whom I lost, possessed a faculty of mind, which, if you are he, answers with the voice of an angel to my appeal. In that soul resided, and wherever it be, must now reside, the singular power" * * * * * a ***** (The reader must be content with my omission of this fragment of the letter. It contained a secret never before clothed in language a secret that will die with me, unless betrayed by what indeed it may lead to madness ! As I saw it in writing defined accu rately and inevitably in the words of another 1 felt as A REVELATION OF A PREVIOUS LIFE. if the innermost chamber of my soul was suddenly laid open to the day I abandoned doubt I answered to the name by which she called me I believed in the previous existence of which my whole life, no less than these extraordinary circumstances, had furnished me with repeated evidence. But, to resume the letter.) "And now that we know each other again now that I can call you by name, as in the past, and be sure that your inmost consciousness must reply a new terror seizes me! Your soul comes back, youthfully and newly clad, while mine, though of unfading freshness and youthfulness within, shows to your eye the same outer garment, grown dull with mourning and faded with the wear of time. Am I grown distasteful ? Is it with the sight only of this new body that you look upon rne ? Rodolph ! spirit that was my devoted and passionate admirer! soul that was sworn to me for ever ! am I the same Mar garet, refound and recognised, grown repulsive? Oh God ! What a bitter answer would this be to my prayers for your return to me ! " I will trust in Him whose benign goodness smiles upon fidelity in love. I will prepare a fitter meeting for two who parted as lovers. You shall not see me again in the house of a stranger and in a mourning attire. When this letter is written, I will depart at once for the scene of our love. I hear my horses already in the court-yard, and while you read this I am speeding swiftly home. The bridal dress you were secretly shown the day before death came between us, is still freshly kept. The room where we sat the bowers by the stream the walks where we projected our sweet promise of a future they shall all be made ready. They shall be as they were! And I oh Rodolph, I shall be the same! My heart is not grown old, Rodolph ! Believe me, I am unchanged in soul ! And I will strive to be I will strive to look God help me to look and be as of yore! " Farewell now ! T leave horses and servants to wait on you till I send to bring you to me. Alas, for any delay ! but we will pass this life and all other time together. We have seen that a vow of eternal union may be kept that death can not divide those who will to love for ever ! Farewell now ! " MARGARET." Circumstances compelled me to read this letter with but one feeling, exquisite pain ! Love lasts till death, but it is mortal ! The affections, however intense and faithful (I now know), are part of the perishable coil, forgotten in the grave. With the memory of this love of another life, haunting me through my youth, and keeping its vow of visitation, I had given the whole heart of my second youth to another! Affianced to her, waited for by her, bound to her by vows which death had not divided, I had but one course to pursue. I left Gratz in an hour, never to return. A few days since I was walking alone in the crowded thoroughfare of the city where I live. Sud denly my sense of presence there fell off me. I walked on, but my inward sight absorbed all my con sciousness. A room which was familiar to me shut me in, and a bed hung in mourning became apparent. In another instant a figure laid out in a winding-sheet, and partially covered with a velvet pall, grew distinct through the dimness, and in the low-laid head I rec ognised, what a presentiment had already betrayed to me, the features of Margaret, Baroness R . It will be still months before I can see the announce ment of her death. But she is dead. AMERICAN LIFE. COUNT POTT S STRATEGY. 1 L Espnt est un faux monnayeur, qui change continuellement les gros sous en louis d or, et qui souvent fait de ses louis d or des THERK were five hundred guardian angels (and of course as many evil spirits), in and about the merry premises of Congress Hall. Each gay guest had his pair; but though each pair had their special ministry (and there was here and there a guest who would not have objected to transform his, for the time being, into a pair of trotting ponies), the attention of the cherubic ; troop, it may fairly be presumed, was directed mainly j to the momentous flirtations of Miss C. Sophy On thank, the dread disposer of the destinies of eighty thousand innocent little dollars. Miss Chittaline Sophy (though this is blabbing, for that mysterious " C." was generally condemned to travel in domino) Miss Chittaline Sophy, besides her good and evil spirit already referred to, was under the additional watch and ward of a pair of bombazine aunts, Miss Charity Onthank and Miss Sophy the same, of whom she was the united namesake. " Chittaline" being the embellished diminutive of "Charity." These Hesperian dragons of old maids were cut after the common pattern of such utensils, and of course would not dignify a description; though this disparaging remark (we must stop long enough to say) is not at all to the prejudice of that occasional love-of-an-old-maid that one docs sometimes see that four-leaved clover of virginity that star apart in the spilled milk of the Via Lactea : " For now and then you find one who could rally At forty, and go back to twenty-three A handsome, plump, affectionate Aunt Sally, With no rage for cuts, flannel, and Bohea." But the two elderly Misses Onthank were not of this category. By the absence of that Junonic assurance, common to those ladies who are born and bred heiresses, Miss C. Sophy s autograph had not long been an object of interest at the bank. She had all the air of having been "brought up at the trough," as the French phrase it, " Round as a cipher, simple as good day," and her belle-ship was still a surprise to her. Like the red-haired and freckled who find, when they get to Italy, that their flaming peculiarities are considered as captivating signs of a skiu too delicate for exposure, she received with a slight incredulity the homage to her unseen charms homage not the less welcome for exacting from the giver an exercise of faith and im agination. The same faith and imagination, she was free to suppose, might find a Venus within her girdle, as the sculptor sees one in the goodly block of marble, lacking only the removal of its clumsy covering by chisel and sandpaper. With no visible waist, she was as tall as a pump, and riotously rosy like a flowering rhododendron. Hair brown and plenty of it. Teeth white and all at home. And her voice, with but one semitone higher, would have been an approved con tralto. Having thus compressed into a couple of paragraphs what would have served a novelist for his first ten chapters, permit us, without the bother of intermediate mortar or moralizing (though this is rather a mixed figure), to lay on the next brick in the shape of a hint at the character of Miss Onthank s two prominent admirers. Mr. Greville Seville was a New York beau. He had all the refinement that could possibly be imported. He had seen those who had seen all that is visible in the fashionable man of London and Paris, and he was well versed in the conduits through which theit several peculiarities found their way across the Atlantic. Faultlessly booted, pantalooned, waistcoated, and shirt- ed, he could afford to trust his coat and scarf to Provi dence, and his hat to Warnock or Leary. He wore a slightly restrained whisker, and a faint smut of an imperial, and his gloves fitted him inexorably. His figure was a matter of course. He was brought up in New York, and was one of the four hundred thousand results (more or less) of its drastic waters washy and short. And he had as good a heart as is compatible with the above personal advantages. It would very much have surprised the " company" at Congress Hall, to have seen Mr. Chesterfield Potts put down as No. 2, in the emulous contest for the two hands of Miss Onthank. The count (he was com monly called " Count Potts," a compliment to good manners not unusual in America), was, by his own label, a man of " thirty and upward" by the parish register possibly sixty-two. He was an upright, well- preserved, stylish looking man, with an expensive wig, fine teeth (commonly supposed not to be indigenous), and a lavish outlay of cotton batting, covering the re treat of such of his muscular forces as were inclined to retire from the field. What his native qualities might be was a branch of knowledge long since lost to the world. His politeness had superseded the neces sity of any particular inquiry into the matter; indeed, we are inclined to believe his politeness had superseded his character altogether. He was as incapable of the impolite virtues (of which there are several) as of the impolite vices. Like cricketing, punning, political speech making, and other mechanical arts, compli menting may be brought to a high degree of dexteri ty, and Count Potts, after a practice of many years, could, over most kinds of female platitude, spread a flattering unction humbugative to the most suspicious incredulity. As he told no stories, made no puns, volunteered but little conversation, and had the air of a modest man wishing to avoid notice, the blockheads and the very young girls stoutly denied his fascination. COUNT POTT S STRATEGY. 73 But in the memory of the riper belles, as they went to sleep night after night, lay snugly lodged and care- j fully treasured, some timely compliment, some sooth- ! ing word, and, though credited to " old Potts," the j smile wi|h which it was gracefully re-acknowledged ! the next morning at breakfast, would have been warm enough for young Ascanius. "Nice old Potts!" was ! the faint murmur of many a bright lip turning down- | ward to the pillow in the "last position." And now. dear reader, you have an idea of the forces in the field, and you probably know how "the war is j carried on" at Saratoga. Two aunts and a guardian j angel versus an evil spirit and two lovers Miss On- j thank s hand, the (well-covered) bone of contention, j Whether the citadel would speedily yield, and which ! of these two rival knights would bear away the palm \ of victory, were questions upon which the majority of lookers-on were doomed to make erroneous predic tions. The reader of course is in the sagacious j minority. Mr. Potts income was a net answer to his morning prayer. It provided his "daily bread" but no proven der for a horse. He probably coveted Miss Onthank as much for her accompanying oats as for her personal j day, Miss Onthank," or, "As you were al avoirdupois, since the only complaint with which he when T interrupted you." If he touched ever troubled his acquaintances, was one touching his was "so small he didn t see it." If she inability to keep an equipage. Man is instinctively a centaur, he used to say, and when you cut him off from his horse and reduce him to his simple trunk | (and a trunk was all the count s worldly furniture), he is but a mutilated remainder, robbed of his natural j locomotive. It was not authenticated in Wall street that Mr. | Greville Seville was reasonably entitled to horse-flesh ! and caparison ; but he had a trotting wagon and two : delicious cropped sorrels ; and those who drove in his company were obliged to " down with the dust" (a , bon mot of Count Potts ). Science explains many of | the enigmas of common life, however, and the secret ; of Mr. Seville s equipment and other means of going j on swimmingly, lay in his unusually large organ of j hope. He was simply anticipating the arrival of 1840, ; a year in which he had reason to believe there would be paid in to the credit of the present Miss Onthank a sufficient sum to cover his loosest expenditure. The intermediate transfer to himself of her rights to the same, was a mere filling up of an outline, his mind \ being entirely made up as to the conditional incum- j brance of the lady s person. He was now paying her some attentions in advance, and he felt justified in charging his expenses on the estate. She herself ; would wish it, doubtless, if she could look into the ; future with his eyes. By all the common data of matrimonial skirmish- j ing, a lover with horses easily outstrips a lover with none. Miss C. Sophy, besides, was particularly fond of driving, and Seville was an accomplished whip. There was no lack of the " golden opportunity" of Ictc-d-te/e, for, with a deaf aunt and somebody else on the back for there was no making love, parbleu ! Miss Chitta- line Onthank was of a stratum of human nature sus ceptible of no sentiment less substantial than a kiss, and when the news, and the weather, and the virtues of the sorrel ponies, were exhausted, the talk came to a stand-still. The heiress began to remember with alarm that her education had been neglected, and that it was a relief to get back to old Potts and the portico. Fresh from his nap and warm bath, the perfumed count stepped out from the group he had purposely collected, gave her his hand with a deferential inquiry, spread the loungers to the right and left like an " usher of the black rod," and with some well-studied im promptu compliment, waited on her to her chamber door. He received her again after her toilet, and for the remainder of the day devoted his utmost powers to her aggrandizement. If talking alone with her, it was to provoke her to some passage of school-girl autobiography, and listen like a charmed stone to the harp of Orpheus. If others were near, it was to catch her stupidities half uttered and twist them into sense before they came to the ground. His own clever nesses were prefaced with " As you remarked yester- Ou were about to say her foot, it uttered an | irredeemable and immitigable absurdity, he covered its retreat with some sudden exclamation. He called her pensive, when she was sleepy and vacant. He called her romantic, when he couldn t understand her. In short, her vanity was embodied turned into a magician and slave and in the shape of Count Ches terfield, Potts ministered to her indefatigably. But the summer solstice began to wane. A week more was all that was allotted to Saratoga by that great American commander, General Consent. Count Potts came to breakfast in a shawl cravat! "Off, Potts?" " Are you flitting, my dear count ?" "What going away, dear Mr. Potts?" " Gracious me ! don t go, Mr. Potts !" The last exclamation was sent across the table in a tone of alarm by Miss C. Sophy, and responded to only by a bow of obsequious melancholy. Breakfast was over, and Potts arose. His baggage was at the door. He sought no interview with Miss Onthank. He did not even honor the two bombazini- ties with a farewell. He stepped up to the group of belles, airing their demi-toilettes on the portico, said " Ladies ! au revoir!" took the heiress s hand and put it gallantly toward his lips, and walked oft with his umbrella, requesting the driver to pick him up at the spring. " He has been refused !" said one. " He has given Seville a clear field in despair !" said another. And this was the general opinion. The day crept on. But there was an emptiness without Potts. Seville had the field to himself, and as there was no fear of a new squatter, he thought he might dispense with tillage. They had a very dull n the seat, he had Miss Onthank to himself on the driving box, and could talk to his horses in the embarrassing ! drive and a very dull dinner, and pauses. It looked a clear case to most observers ; and as to Seville, he had studied out a livery for his future footman and tiger, and would not have taken an insurance at a quarter per cent. But Potts ah ! Potts had traced back the wires of woman s weaknesses. The heiress had no conversa tion (why should she have it and money too?), and the part of her daily drive which she remembered with most pleasure, was the flourish of starting and return ing managed by Potts with a pomp and circumstance that would have done honor to the goings and comings enmg, as j there was no ball, Seville went off to play billiards. 1 Miss Onthank was surrounded, as usual, by the belles and beaux, but she was down flat unmagnetized, un- galvanized. The magician was gone. Her stupid things "stayed put." She was like a glass bead lost from a kaleidoscope. That weary week was spent in lamentations over Potts. Everybody praised him. Everybody com plimented Miss Onthank on her exclusive power of monopoly over such porcelain ware. The two aunts were his main glorifiers ; for, as Potts knew, they of Queen Victoria. Once away from the portico, it j was a monotonous drag through the dust for two or , three hours, and as most ladies know, it takes a great j deal of chit-chat to butter so large a slice of time ; were of that leathery toughness that only shines on you with rough usage. We have said little, as yet, of MissOnthank s capa bilities in the love line. We doubt, indeed, whethei 74 THE FEMALE WARD. she rightly understood the difference between loving! I and being born again. As to giving awny her heart, j] she believed she could do what her mother did before | her, but she would rather it would be one of her back teeth, if that would do as well. She liked Mr. Potts because he never made any difficulty about such things. Seville considered himself accepted, though he had made no direct proposition. He had asked whether i she preferred to live in country or town she said j " town." He had asked if she would leave the choice and management of horses and equipages to him she said " be sure !" He had asked if she had any objection to his giving bachelor dinners occasionally | she said " la ! no !" As he understood it, the whole j thing was most comfortably arranged, and he lent | money to several of his friends on the strength of it giving his note, this is to say. On a certain morning, some ten days after the de parture of the count from Saratoga, Miss Onthank and her two aunts sat up in state in their parlor at the City hotel. They always went to the City hotel j because Willard remembered their names, and asked after their uncle the major. Mr. Seville s ponies and jl wagon were at the door, and Mr. Seville s father, | mother, seven sisters, and two small brothers, were in the progress of a betrothal visit calling on the future Mrs. Greville Seville. All of a sudden the door was thrown open, and enter Count Potts ! Up jumped the enchanted Chittaline Sophy. " How do you do, Mr. Potts?" "Good morning, Mr. Potts!" said the aunts in a breath. "D ye-do, Potts !"said Seville, giving him his fore finger, with the air of a man rising from winning at cards. Potts made his compliments all round. He was about sailing for Carolina, he said, and had come to ask permission of Miss Onthank to leave her sweet society for a few_years of exile. But as this was the last of his days of pleasure, at least till he saw Miss Onthank again, he wished to be graced with the honor of her arm for a promenade in Broadway. The ladies and Mr. Seville doubtless would excuse her if she put on her bonnet without further ceremony. Now Potts s politenesses had such an air of irresisti ble authority that people fell into heir track like cars after a locomotive. While Miss Onthank was bonnet ing and shawling, the count entertained the entire party most gayly, though the Sevilles thought it rather unceremonious in the affianced miss to leave them in the midst of a first visit, and Mr. Greville Seville had arranged to send his mother home on foot, and drive Miss Onthank out to Harlem. " I ll keep my horses here till you come back !" he shouted after them, as she tripped gayly down stairs on the count s arm. And so he did. Though it was two hours before she appeared again, the impatient youth kept the old aunts company, and would have stayed till night, sorrels and all for in that drive he meant to "name the day," and put his creditors at ease. "I wouldn t even go up stairs, my dear!" said the count, handing her to the wagon, and sending up the groom for his master, " it s but an hour to dine, and you ll like the air after your fatigue. Ah. Seville, I ve brought her back ! Take good care of her for my sake, my good fellow!" " What the devil has his sake to do with it, I won der ?" said Seville, letting his horses off like two rockets in harness. And away they went toward Harlem ; and in about an hour, very much to the surprise of the old aunts, who were looking out of the parlor window, the young lady dismounted from an omnibus ! Count Potts had come to dine with them, and he tripped down to meet her with uncommon agility. " Why, do you know, aunties," she exclaimed, as she came up stairs, out of breath, "do you know that Mr. Seville, when I told him I was married already to Mr. Potts, stopped his wagon, and p-p-put me into an omnibus !" " Married to Mr. Potts !" screamed Aunt Charity. " Married to Mr. Potts !" screamed Aunt Sophy. " Why yes, aunties ; he said he must go south, if I didn t !" drawled out the bride, with only a very little blush indeed. " Tell aunties all about it, Mr. Potts!" And Mr. Potts, with the same smile of infallible propriety, which seemed a warrant for everything he said or did, gave a very sketchy account of his morning s work, which, like all he undertook, had been exceed ingly well done properly witnessed, certified, &c., &c., &c. All of which shows the very sound policy of first making yourself indispensable to people you wish to manage. Or, put it receipt-wise : To marry a flat : First, raise her up till she is giddy. Second, go away, and let her down. Third, come back, and offer to support her, if she will give you her hand. " Simple comme lonjour " as Balsac says. THE FEMALE WARD, MOST men have two or more souls, and Jem Thal- imer was a doublet, with sets of manners correspond ing. Indeed one identity could never have served the pair of him ! When sad that is to say, when in dis grace or out of money he had the air of a good man with a broken heart. When gay flush in pocket and happy in his little ambitions you would have thought him a dangerous companion for his grand mother. The last impression did him more injustice than the first, for he was really very amiably disposed when depressed, and not always wicked when gay but he made friends in both characters. People sel dom forgive us for compelling them to correct their first impressions of us, and as this was uniformly the case with Jem, whether he had begun as saint or sin ner, he was commonly reckoned a deep-water fish ; and, where there were young ladies in the case, early warned off the premises. The remarkable exception to this rule, in the incident I am about to relate, arose, as may naturally be supposed, from his appearing, du- ring a certain period, in one character only. To begin my story fairly, I must go back for a mo ment to our junior Jem in college, showing, by a lit tle passage in our adventures, how Thalimer and I THE FEMALE WARD. 7;; became acquainted with the confiding gentleman to be referred to. A college suspension, very agreeably timed, in June, left my friend Jem and myself masters of our travels for an uncertain period ; and as our purse was always in common, like our shirts, love-letters, and disgraces, our several borrowings were thrust into a wallet which was sometimes in his pocket, sometimes in mine, as each took the turn to be paymaster. With the (in tercepted) letters in our pockets, informing the gov ernors of our degraded position, we travelled very prosperously on bound to Niagara, but very ready to fall into any obliquity by the way. We arrived at Albany, Thalimer chancing to be purser, and as this function tacitly conferred; on the holder, all other responsibil ities, I made myself comfortable at the hotel for the second day and the third up to the seventh rather wondering at Jem s depressed spirits and the sudden falling off of his enthusiasm for Niagara, but con tent to stay if he liked, and amusing myself^jn the side-hill city passably well. It was during my ram bles without him in this week that he made the ac quaintance of a bilious-looking person lodging at the same hotel a Louisianian on a tour of health. This gentleman, whom he introduced to me by the name of Dauchy, seemed to have formed a sudden attach ment to my friend, and as Jem had a " secret sorrow" | unusual to him, and the other an unusual secretion of bile, there was of course between them that "se- j cret sympathy" which is the basis of many tender friendships. I rather liked Mr. Dauchy. He seemed one of those chivalric, polysyllabic southerners, inca pable of a short word or a mean action, and, interested that Jem should retain his friendship, I w\\s not sorry to find our departure follow close on the recovery of his spirits. We went on toward Niagara, and in the irresistible confidence of canal travelling I made out the secret of my fulus achatcs. He had attempted to alleviate the hardship of a deck-passage for a bright-eyed girl on board the steamer, and, on going below to his berth, left her his greatcoat for a pillow. The stuffed wallet, which somewhat distended the breast-pocket, was probably in the way of her downy cheek, and Jem supposed that she simply forgot to return the " removed deposite" but he did not miss his money till twelve hours after, and then, between lack of means to pursue her, and shame at the sentiment he had wasted, he kept the disaster to himself, and passed a melancholy week in devising means for replenishing. Through this penscroso vein, however, lay his way out of the difficulty, for he thus touched the soul and funds of Mr. Dauchy. The correspondence (commenced by the repayment of the loan) was kept up stragglingly for several years, bolstered somewhat j by barrels of marmalade, boxes of sugar, hommony, &c., till finally it ended in the unlooked-for consign ment which forms the subject of my story. Jem and myself had been a year out of college, and were passing through that "tight place" in life, com monly understood in New England as " the going in at the little end of the horn." Expected by our pa rents to take to money-making like ducks to swim ming, deprived at once of college allowance, called on to be men because our education was paid for, and frowned upon at every manifestation of a lingering taste for pleasure it was not surprising that we some times gave tokens of feeling "crowded," and obtained somewhat the reputation of " bad subjects" (using this expressive phrase quite literally). Jem s share of this odor of wickedness was much the greater, his unlucky deviltry of countenance doing him its usual disservice ; but like the gentleman to whom he was attributed as a favorite protege, he was " not so black as he was painted." We had been so fortunate as to find one believer in the fbture culmination of our clouded stars Galla gher, "mine host * and for value to be received when our brains should fructify, his white soup and " fed- stiing Madeira," his game, turtle, and all the forth comings of the best restaurant of our epoch, were served lovingly and charged, moderately. Peace be with the ashes of William Gallagher ! " The brains" have fructified, and "the value" has been received but his name and memory are not " filed away" with the receipt ; and though years have gone over his grave, his modest welcome, and generous dispensation of entertainment and service, are, by one at least of those who enjoyed them*, gratefully and freshly re membered ! We were to dine as usual at Gallagher s at six one May day which I well remember. I was just addres sing myself to my day s work, when Jem broke into my room with a letter in his hand#and an expression on his face of mingled embarrassment and fear. " What the deuce to do with her!" said he, hand, ing me the letter. " A new scrape, Jem?" I asked, as I looked for an instant at the Dauchy coat-of-arms on a seal as big as a dollar. " Scrape ? yes, it is a scrape ! for I shall never get out of it reputably. What a dunce old Dauchy must be to send me a girl to educate ! / a young lady s guardian! Why, I shall be the laugh of the town ! What say ? Isn t it a good one ?" I had been carefully perusing the letter while Thal imer walked soliloquizing about the room. It was from his old friend of marmalades and sugars, and in the most confiding and grave terms, as if Jem and he had been a couple of contemporaneous old bachelors, it consigned to his guardianship and friendly counsel, Miss Adelmine Lasacque, the only daughter of a neighboring planter ! Mr. Lasacque having no friends at the north, had applied to Mr. Dauchy for his gui dance in the selection of a proper person to superin tend her education, and as Thalimer was the only cor respondent with whom Mr. Dauchy had relations of i friendship, and was, moreover, " fitted admirably for | the trust by his impressive and dignified address," (?) ! he had "taken the liberty," &c., &c. " Have you seen her?" I asked, after a long laugh, in which Jem joined but partially. " No, indeed ! She arrived last night in the New j Orleans packet, and the captain brought me this let- ! ter at daylight, with the young lady s compliments. The old seadog looked a little astounded when 1 an nounced myself. Well he might, faith ! I don t look like a young lady s guardian, do I?" "Well you are to go on board and fetch her is that it ?" " Fetch her! Where shall I fetch her ? Who is ! to take a young lady of my fetching? I can t find a j female academy that I can approve " I burst into a roar of laughter, for Jem was in ear- j nest with his scruples, and looked the picture of un- 1 happiness. " I say I can t find one in a minute don t Jaugli, you blackguard ! and where to lodge her meantime ? What should I say to the hotel-keepers ? They all know me 1 It looks devilish odd, let me tell you, to bring a young girl, without matron or other acquamt- ances than myself, and lodge her at a pubhc house. "Your mother must take your charge off your ia " Of course that was the first thing I thought of. You know my mother ! She don t half believe the story, in the first place. If there is such a man as , Mr Dauchy, she says, and if this is a Miss L,a- sacque, all the way from Louisiana, there is but one thin* to do send her back in the packet she came in ! She ll have nothing to do with it* There s more in it than I am willing to explain. I never THE FEMALE WARD. mentioned this Mr. Dauchy before. Mischief will corne of it! Abduction s a dreadful thing! If I will make myself notorious, I need not think to involve my mother and sisters ! That s the way she talks about it." "But couldn t we mollify your mother? for, after all, her countenance in the matter will be expected." "Not a chance of it !" " The money part of it is all right ?" " Turn the letter over. Credit for a large amount on the Robinsons, payable to my order only !" "Faith! it s a very hard case if a nice girl with plenty of money can t be permitted to land in Boston! You didn t ask the captain if she was pretty?" "No, indeed! But pretty or plain, I must get her ashore and be civil to her. I must ask her to dine ! I must do something besides hand her over to a boarding-school ! Will you come down to the ship with me?" My curiosity was quite aroused, and I dressed im mediately. On our way down we stopped at Gallagher s, j to request a little embellishment to our ordinary dinner. ! It was quite clear, for a variety of reasons, that she must dine with her guardian there, or nowhere. Gallagher looked surprised, to say the least, at our proposition j to bring a young lady to dine with us, but he made no ! comment beyond a respectful remark that " No. 2 was very private !" We had gone but a few steps from Devonshire street when Jem stopped in the middle of the side walk. " We have not decided yet what we are to do with Miss Lasacque all day, nor where we shall send her baggage, nor where she is to lodge to-night. For Heaven s sake, suggest something!" added Jem, quite out of temper. "Why, as you say, it would be heavy work to walk her about the streets from now till dinner-time eight hours or more ! Gallagher s is only an eating-house, unluckily, and you are so well known at all the ho tels, that, to take her to one of them without a chap eron, would, to say the least, give occasion for remark. But here, around the corner, is one of the best board ing-houses in town, kept by the two old Misses Smith. You might offer to put her under their protection. Let s try." The Misses Smith were a couple of reduced gen tlewomen, who charged a very good price for board and lodging, and piqued themselves on entertaining only very good company. Begging Jem to assume the confident tone which the virtuous character of his errand required, I rang at the door, and in answer to our inquiry for the ladies of the house, we were shown into the basement parlor, where the eldest Miss Smith sat with her spectacles on, adding new vinegar to some pots of pickles. Our business was very briefly stated. Miss Smith had plenty of spare room. Would we wait a moment till she tied on the covers to her pickle- jars ? The cordiality of the venerable demoiselle evidently put Thalimer in spirits. He gave me a glance which said very plainly, " You see we needn t have troubled our heads about this ." but the sequel was to come. Miss Smith led the way to the second story, where were two very comfortable unoccupied bedrooms. "A single lady?" she asked. " Yes," said Jem, " a Miss Lasacque of Louisiana." "Young, did you say ?" " Seventeen, or thereabout, I fancy." (This was a guess, but Jem chose to appear to know all about her.) "And ehem ! and quite alone?" " Quite alone she is come here to go to school." " Oh, to go to school ! Pray will she pass her vacationswith your mother?" "No! said Jem, coughing, and looking rather em barrassed. Indeed ! She is with Mrs. Thalimer at present, I presume." No she is still on shipboard ! Why, my dear madam, she only arrived from New Orleans this morning." And your mother has not had time to see her? I understand. Mrs. Thalimer will accompany her here, of course." Jem began to see the end of the old maid s cate chism, and thought it best to volunteer the remainder of the information. "My mother is not acquainted with this young la dy s friends," he said,; " and, in fact, she comes intro duced only to myself." She has a guardian, surely ?" said Miss Smith, drawing back into her Elizabethan ruff with more dignity than she had hitherto worn. " I am her guardian!" replied Jem, looking as red and guilty as if he had really abducted the young la dy, and was ashamed of his errand. The spinster bit her lips and looked out of the window. " Will you walk down stairs for a moment, gentle men," she resumed, "and let me speak to my sister. I should have told you that the rooms might possibly be engaged. I am not quite sure indeed ehem pray walk down and be seated a moment!" Very much to the vexation of my discomfited friend, I burst into a laugh as we closed the door of the basement parlor behind us. " You don t realize my confoundedly awkward po sition," said he. " I am responsible for every step I take, to the girl s father in the first place, and then to my friend Dauchy, one of the most chivalric old cocks in the world, who, at the same time, could nev er understand why there was any difficulty in the matter ! And it does seem strange, that in a city with eighty thousand inhabitants, it should be nxtto impos sible to find lodging for a virtuous lady, a stranger!" I was contriving how to tell Thalimer that " there was no objection to the camel but for the dead cat hung upon its neck," when a maidservant opened the door with a message " Miss Smith s compliments, and she was very sorry she had no room to spare !" " Pleasant !" said Jem, " very pleasant ! I suppose every other keeper of a respectable house will be equally sorry. Meantime, it s getting on toward noon, and that poor girl is moping on shipboard, wondering whether she is ever to be taken ashore ! Do you think she might sleep at Gallagher s ?" " Certainly not! He has, probably, no accommo dations for a lady, and, to lodge in a restaurant, after dining with you there, would be an indiscreet first step, in a strange city, to say the least. But let us make our visit to your fair ward, my dear Jem! Per haps she has a face innocent enough to tell its own story like the lady who walked through Erin with the snow-white wand. " The vessel had lain in the stream all night, and was just hauling up to the wharf with the moving tide. A crowd of spectators stood at the end of her moor ing cable, and, as she warped in, universal attention seemed to be given to a single object. Upon a heap of cotton-bales, the highest point of the confused lumber of the deck, sat a lady under a sky-blue par asol. Her gown was of pink silk ; and by the volume of this showy material which was presented to the eye, the wearer, when standing, promised to turn out of rather conspicuous stature. White gloves, a pair of superb amethyst bracelets, a string of gold beads on her neck, and shoulders quite naked enough for a ball, were all the disclosures made for a while by the envious parasol, if we except a little object in blue, which seemed the extremity of something she was sitting on, held in her left hand and which turned out to be her right foot in a blue satin slipper ! THE FEMALE WARD. 77 I turned to Thalimer. He was literally pale with consternation. " Hadn t you better send for a carriage to take your ward away ?" I suggested. " You don t believe that to be Miss Lasacque, sure ly !" exclaimed Jem, turning upon me with an implo ring look. "Such is my foreboding," I replied; "but wait a moment. Her face may be pretty, and you, of course, in your guardian capacity, may suggest a simplifica tion of her toilet. Consider! the poor girl was never before off the plantation at least, so says old Daucliy s letter." The sailors now began to pull upon the sternline, and, as the ship came round, the face of the unconscious object of curiosity stole inio view. Most of the spec tators, after a single glance, turned their attention elsewhere with a smile, and Jem, putting his hands into his two coat-pocUets behind him, walked off tow ard the end of the pier, whistling to himself very en ergetically. She was an exaggeration of the peculiar physiognomy of the south lean rather than slight, sallow rather than pale. Yet I thought her eyes fine. Thalimer joined me as the ship touched the dock, and we stepped on board together. The cabinboy confirmed our expectations as to the lady s identity, and putting on the very insinuating manner which was part of his objectionable exterior, Jem advanced and begged to know if he had the honor of addressing Miss Lasacque. Without loosing her hold upon her right foot, the lady nodded. "Then, madam!" said Jem, "permit me to intro duce to you your guardian, Mr. Thalimer !" "What, that old gentleman coming this way?" asked Miss Lasacque, fixing her eyes on a custom house officer who was walking the deck. Jem handed the lady his card. " That is my name," said he, " and I should be happy to know how I can begin the duties of my of fice !" "Dear me!" said the astonished damsel, dropping her foot to take his hand, " isn t there an older Mr. James Thalimer? Mr. Dauchy said it was a gentle man near his own age!" "I grow older, as you know me longer!" Jem re plied apologetically ; but his ward was too well satis fied with his appearance, to need even this remarka ble fact to console her. She came down with a slide from her cotton-bag elevation, called to the cook to bring the bandbox with the bonnet in it, and mean time gave us a brief history of the inconveniences she had suffered in consequence of the loss of her slave, Dinah, who had died of sea-sickness three days out. This, to me, was bad news, for I had trusted to a " la dy s maid" for the preservation of appearance*, and the scandal threatening Jem s guardianship looked, in consequence, very imminent. " I am dying to get my feet on land again !" said Miss Lasacque, putting her arm in her guardian s, and turning toward the gangway her bonnet not tied, nor her neck covered, and thin blue satin slip pers, though her feet were small, showing forth in contrast with her pink silk gown, with frightful con- spicuousness ! Jem resisted the shoreward pull, and stood motionless and aghast. " Your baggage," he stammered at last. " Here, cook !" cried the lady, " tell the captain, when he comes aboard, to send my trunks to Mr. Thalimer s ! They are down in the hold, and he told me he couldn t get at em till to-morrow," she added, by way of explanation to Thalimcr. I felt constrained to come to the rescue. " Pardon me, madam !" said I, " there is a little peculiarity in our climate, of which you probably are not advised. An east wind commonly sets in about noon, which makes a shawl very necessary. In con- ; sequence, too, of the bronchitis which this sudden change is apt to give people of tender constitutions, ; i the ladies of Boston are obliged to sacrifice what is i | becoming, and wear their dresses very high in the ; throat." " La !" said the astonished damsel, putting her hand upon her bare neck, " is it sore throat that you mean ? I m very subject to it, indeed ! Cook ! bring me that fur-tippet out of the cabin ! I m so sorry my dresses are all made so low, and I haven t a shawl un packed either! dear! dear!" Jem and I exchanged a look of hopeless resigna tion, as the cook appeared with the chinchilli tippet. A bold man might have hesitated to share the con- spicuousness of such a figure in a noon promenade, but we each gave her an arm when she had tied the soiled riband around her throat, and silently set for ward. It was a bright and very warm day, and there seem ed a conspiracy among our acquaintances, to cross our path. Once in the street, it was not remarkable that they looked at us, for the towering height at | which the lady carried her very showy bonnet, the ! I flashy material of her dress, the jewels and the chin- chilli tippet, formed an ensemble which caught the eye like a rainbow; and truly people did gaze, and the || boys, spite of the unconscious look which we attempt- |j ed, did give rather disagreeable evidence of being amused. 1 had various misgivings, myself, as to the necessity for my own share in the performance, and, at every corner, felt soiely tempted to bid guardian and ward good morning ; but friendship and pity pre vailed. By streets and lanes not calculated to give Miss Lasacque a very favorable first impression of Boston, we reached Washington street, and made an intrepid dash across it, to the Marlborough hotel. Of this public house, Thalimer had asked my opin ion during our walk, by way of introducing an apolo gy to Miss Lasacque for not taking her to his own home. She had made it quite clear that she expected this, and Jem had nothing for it but to draw such a picture of the decrepitude of Mr. Thalimer, senior, and the bedridden condition of his mother (as stout a couple as ever plodded to church !) as would satisfy the lady for his short- comings in hospitality. This had passed off very smoothly, and Miss Lasacque en tered the Marlboro , quite prepared to lodge there, but very little aware (poor girl !) of the objections to receiving her as a lodger. Mr. , the proprietor, had stood in the arch- :j way as we entered. Seeing no baggage in the lady s | train, however, he had not followed us in, supposing, | probably, that we were callers on some of his guests. j Jem left us in the drawing-room, and went upon his errand to the proprietor, but after half an hour s ab- I sence, came back, looking very angry, and informed 1 1 us that no rooms were to be had ! Instead of taking H the rooms without explanation, he had been unwise :! enough to " make a clean breast" to Mr. , and i! the story of the lady s being his "ward," and come :i from Louisiana to go to school, rather staggered that i ; discreet person s credulity. Jem beckoned me out, and we held a little council of war in the entry. Alas! I had nothing to suggest. | I knew the puritan metropolis very well I knew its ! phobia was " the appearance of evil." In Jem s care- II for-nothing face lay the leprosy which closed all doors : against us^ Kven if we had succeeded, by a coup-de- ; main, in lodging Miss Lasacque at the Marlboro , her I guardian s daily visits would have procured for her, in i hr first week, some intimation that she could no I j longer be accommodated. " We had best go and dine upon it," said I ; " worst , come to the worst^ we can find some sort of dormitory |j for her at Gallagher s, and to-morrow she must be put 78 THE FEMALE WARD. to school, out of the reach of your pleasant, but wrong society. " "I hope to Heaven she ll stay put, " said Jem, with a long sigh. We got Miss Lasacque again under way, and avoid ing the now crowded pave of Washington street, made a short cut by Theatre Alley to Devonshire street and Gallagher s. Safely landed in "No. 2," we drew a long breath of relief. Jem rang the bell. "Dinner, waiter, as soon as possible." "The same that was ordered at six, sir?" "Yes, only more champagne, and bring it imme diately. Excuse me, Miss Lasacque," added Jem, with a grave bow, " but the non-appearance of that east wind my friend spoke of, has given me an unnat ural thirst. Will you join me in some champagne after your hot walk ?" " No, thank you," said the lady, untying her tip pet, " but, if you please, I will go to my room before dinner!" Here was trouble, again ! It had never occurred to either of us, that ladies must go to their rooms before bedtime. " Stop !" cried Jem, as she laid her hand on the bell to ring for the chamber-maid, "excuse me I must first speak to the landlord the room the room is not ready, probably !" He seized his hat, and made his exit, probably wish ing all confiding friends, with their neighbor s daugh ters, in a better world ! He had to do with a man of sense, however. Gallagher had but one bedroom in the house, which was not a servant s room, and that was his own. In ten minutes it was ready, and at the lady s service. A black scullion was promoted for the nonce, to the post of chamber-maid, and, fortunately, the plantation-bred girl had not been long enough I from home to be particular. She came to dinner as I radiant as a summer-squash. With the door shut, and the soup before us, Tha- I limer s spirits and mino flung off their burthens to- j gether. Jem was the pleasantest table-companion in the world, and he chatted and made the amiable to his ward, as if he owed her some amends for the awkward position of which she was so blessedly unconscious. I Your "dangerous man" (such as he was voted), in spires, of course, no distrust in those to whom he chooses to be agreeable. Miss Lasacque grew, every minute, more delighted with him. She, too, improved on acquaintance. Come to look at her closely, Nature meant her for a fine showy creature, and she was " out of condition," as the jockeys say that was all! Her features were good, though gambosed by a southern climate, and the fever-and-ague had flatten ed what should be round and ripe lips, and reduced to the mere frame, what should be the bust and neck of a Die Vernon. I am not sure I saw all this at the time. Her subsequent chrysalis and emergence into a beautiful woman, naturally color my description now. But I did see, then, that her eyes were large and lustrous, and that naturally she had high spirit, good abilities, and was a thorough woman in senti ment, though deplorably neglected for, at the age of twenty, she could hardly read and write ! It was not surprising that she was pleased with us ! She was the only lady present, and we were the first coxcombs she had ever seen, and the day was summery, and the dinner in Gallagher s best style. We treated her like a princess ; and the more agreeable man of the two being her guardian, and responsible for the propriety of the whole affair, there was no chance for a failure. We lingered over our coffee ; and we lingered over our chassecafc; and we lingered over our tea; and, when the old South struck twelve, we were still at the table in " No. 2," quite too much delighted with each other to have thought of separating. It was the ven erated guardian who made the first move, and, after jj ringing up the waiter to discover that the scullion had, six hours before, made her nightly disappearance, the lady was respectfully dismissed with only a candle for her chamber-maid, and Mr. Gallagher s room for her destination wherever that might be ! We dined together every successive day for a week, and during this time the plot rapidly thickened. Tha- limer, of course, vexed soul and body, to obtain for Miss Lasacque a less objectionable lodging urged scarcely more by his sense of propriety than by a feeling for her good-natured host, who, meantime, slept on a sofa. But the unlucky first step of dining and lodging a young lady at a restaurant, inevitable as it was, gave a fatal assurance to the predisposed scandal of the affair, and every day s events heighten ed its glaring complexion. Miss Lasacque had ideas of her own, and very independent ones, as to the amusement of her leisure hours. She had never been before where there were shops, and she spent her first two or three mornings in perambulating Washington street, dressed in a style perfectly amazing to behold ers, and purchasing every description of gay trumpe ry the parcels, of course, sent to Gallagher s, and the bills to James Thalimer, Esq. ! To keep her out of the street, Jem took her, on the third day, to the riding-school, leaving her (safely enough, he thought), in charge of the authoritative Mr. Roulstone, while he besieged some school-mistress or other to under take her ciphering and geography. She was all but born on horseback, however, and soon tired of riding round the ring. The street-door was set open for a moment, leaving exposed a tempting tangent to the circle, and out flew Miss Lasacque, saving her " Leg horn flat" by a bend to the saddle-bow, that would have done credit to a dragoon, and no more was seen, (or hours, of the " bonnie black mare" and her rider. The deepening of Miss Lasacque s passion for Jem, would not interest the reader. She loved like other omen, timidly and pensively. Young as the passion was, however, it came too late to affect her manners before public opinion had pronounced on them. There was neither boarding-house nor private female acad emy" within ten miles, into which "Mr. Thalimer s young lady" would have been permitted to set her foot small as was the foot, and innocent as was the pulse to which it stepped. Uncomfortable as was this state of suspense, and anxious as we were to fall into the track marked virtuous," if virtue would only permit; public opin- on seemed to think we were enjoying ourselves quite oo prosperously. On the morning of the seventh day of our guardianship, I had two calls after breakfast, ne from poor Gallagher, who reported that he had jeen threatened with a prosecution of his establish ment as a nuisance, and another from poorer Jem, ivhose father had threatened to take the lady out of :iis hands, and lodge her in the insane asylum ! " Not that I don t wish she was there," added Jem, for it is a very fine place, with a nice garden, and tixurious enough for those who can pay for them, and aith, I believe it s the only lodging-house I ve not ap- )lied to !" I must shorten my story. Jem anticipated his ather, by riding over, and showing his papers con- itituting him the guardian of Miss Lasacque, in which rapacity, lie was, of course, authorized to put his vard under the charge of keepers. Everybody who tnows Massachusetts, knows that its insane asylums re sometimes brought to bear on irregular morals, as ell as on diseased intellects, and as the presiding of ficer of the institution was quite well assured that iss Lasacque was well qualified to become a patient, "em had no course left but to profit by the error. The poor girl was invited, that afternoon, to take a Irive in the country, and we came back and dined ithout her. in abominable spirits, I must say TWO BUCKETS IN A WELL. 7 J Provided with the best instruction, the best of care taken of her health, and the most exemplary of ma trons interesting herself in lier patient s improvements, Miss Lasacque rapidly improved more rapidly, no doubt, than she ever could have done by control less rigid and inevitable. Her father, by the advice of the matron, was not informed of her location for a year, I and at the end of that time he came on, accompanied by his friend, Mi. Dauchy. He found his daughter sufficiently improved in health, manners, and beauty, I to be quite satisfied with Jem s discharge of his trust, j and we all dined very pleasantly in " No. 2 ;" Miss I Lasacque declining, with a blush, my invitation to her ! to make one of the party. TWO BUCKETS IN A WELL, " FIVE hundred dollars a year!" echoed Fanny | Bellairs, as the first silver gray of the twilight spread ! over her picture. "And my art," modestly added the painter, prying \ into his bright copy of the lips pronouncing upon j his destiny. " And how much may that be at the present rate | of patronage one picture a year painted for love!" " Fanny, how can you be so calculating !" "By the bumps over my eyebrows, I suppose. Why, my dear coz, we have another state of existence to look forward to old man-age and old woman-age ! What am I to do with five hundred dollars a year, when my old frame wants gilding (to use one of your own similes) I shan t always be pretty Fanny Bellairs!" " But, good Heavens ! we shall grow old together!" ! exclaimed the painter, sitting down at her feet, " and ! what will you care for other admiration, if your husband j see you still beautiful, with the eyes of memory and habit." "Even if I were sure he would so look upon me !" answered Miss Bellairs more seriously, " I can not but dread an old age without great means of embellish ment. Old people, except in poetry and in very primitive society, are dishonored by wants and cares. And, indeed, before we are old when neither young nor old we want horses and ottomans, kalydor and conservatories, books, pictures, and silk curtains all quite out of the range of your little allowance, don t j you see !" "You do not love me, Fanny !" " I do and will marry you, Philip as I, long ago, with my whole heart promised. But I wish to be happy with you as happy, quite as happy, as is at all possible, with our best efforts and coolest, discreetest management. I laugh the matter over sometimes, but I may tell yon, since you are determined to be in earnest, that 1 have treated it, in my solitary thought, as the one important event of tny life (so indeed it is !) and, as such, worthy of all fore-thought, patience, self-denial, and calculation. To inevitable ills I can make up my mind like other people. If your art were your only hope of subsistence why [ don t know i (should 1 look well as a page?) I don t know that I > couldn t run your errands and grind your paints in ; hose and doublet. But there is another door open j for you a counting-house door, to be sure leading to opulence and all the appliances of dignity and happi ness, and through this door, my dear Philip, the art you would live by comes to pay tribute and beg for patronage. Now, out of your hundred and twenty reasons, give me the two stoutest and best, why you should refuse your brother s golden offer of partner ship my share, in your alternative of poverty, left for the moment out of the question." Rnther overborne bv the confident decision of his beautiful cousin, and having probably made up his mind that he must ultimately yield to her, Philip re plied in a lower and more dejected tone : " If you were not to be a sharer in my renown, should I be so fortunate as to acquire it, I should feel as if it were selfish to dwell so much on my passion for distinction and my devotion to my pencil as the means of winning it. My heart is full of you but it is full of ambition too, paradox though it be. I can not live ignoble. I should not have felt worthy to press my love upon you worthy to possess you except with the prospect of celebrity in my art. You make the world dark to me, Fanny ! You closedown the sky, when you shut out this hope ! Yet it shall be so." Philip paused a moment and the silence was unin terrupted. " There was another feeling I had, upon which I have not insisted," he continued. "By my brother s project, I am to reside almost wholly abroad. Even the little stipend I have to offer you now, is absorbed of course by the investment of my property in his trading capital, and marriage, till I have partly enrich ed myself, would be even more hopeless than at present. Say the interval were five years and five years of separation !" " With happiness in prospect, it would soon pass, my dear Philip !" "But is there nothing wasted in this time ? My life is yours the gift of love. Are not these coin ing five years the very flower of it ? a mutual loss, too. for are they not, even more emphatically, the very flower of yours 1 Eighteen and twenty-five are ages at which to marry, not ages to defer. During this time the entire flow of my existence is at its crowning fulness passion, thought, joy, tenderness, susceptibility to beauty and sweetness all I have that can be diminish ed or tarnished or made dull by advancing age and contact with the world, is thrown away for its spring and summer. Will the autumn of life repay us for this? Will it even if we are rich and blest with health, and as capable of an unblemished union as now ? Think of this a moment, dear Fanny !" " I do it is full of force and meaning, and could we marry now, with a tolerable prospect of competen cy, it would be irresistible. But poverty in wedlock, Philip" " What do you call poverty ! If we can suffice for each other, and have the necessaiies of life, we are not poor ! My art will bring us consideration enough which is the main end of wealth, after all and of society, speaking for myself only, I want nothing. Luxuries for yourself, Fanny, means for your dear comfort and pleasure, you should not want if the world held them, and surely the unbounded devotion of one man to the support of the one woman he loves, ought to suffice for the task ! I am strong I am so TWO BUCKETS IN A WELL. capable of labor I have limbs to toil, if my genius and my present means fail me, and, oh, Heaven, you could not want !" " No, no, no ! I thought not of want !" murmured Miss Bellairs, "I thought only But she was not permitted to finish the sentence. " Then my bright picture for the future may be realized !" exclaimed Philip, knitting his hands to gether in a transport of hope. " I rnay build up a reputation, with you for the constant partner of its triumphs and excitements! I may go through the world and have some care in life besides subsistence, how I shall sleep, and eat, and accumulate gold ; some companion, who, from the threshold of manhood, shared every thought and knew every feeling some pure and present angel who walked with me and puri fied my motives and ennobled my ambitions, and re ceived from my lips and eyes, and from the beating of my heart, against her own, all the love I had to give in a lifetime. Tell me, Fanny! tell me, my sweet cousin ! is not this a picture of bliss, which, combined with success in my noble art, might make a Paradise on earth for you and me ?" The hand of Fanny Bellairs rested on the upturned forehead of her lover as he sat at her feet in the deepening twilight, and she answered him with such sweet words as are linked together by spells known only to woman but his palette and pencils were, nevertheless, burned in solemn holocaust that very night, and the lady carried her point, as ladies must. And to the importation of silks from Lyons was de voted, thenceforth, the genius of a Raphael perhaps I Who knows ? The reader will naturally have gathered from this dialogue that Miss Fanny Bellairs had black eyes, and was rather below the middle stature. She was a belle, and it is only belle-metal of this particular description which is not fusible by " burning words." She had mind enough to appreciate fully the romance and enthusiasm of her cousin, Philip Ballister, and knew precisely the phenomena which a tall blonde (this complexion of woman being soluble in love and tears), would have exhibited under a similar experi ment. While the fire of her love glowed, therefore, she opposed little resistance and seemed softened and yielding, but her purpose remained unaltered, and she rang out " no !" the next morning, with a tone as little changed as a convent-bell from matins to vespers, though it has passed meantime through the furnace of an Italian noon. Fanny was not a designing girl, either. She might have found a wealthier customer for her heart than her cousin Philip. And she loved this cousin as truly ] and well as her nature would admit, or as need be, indeed. But two things had conspired to give her the unmalleable quality just described a natural dis position to confide, first and foremost, on all occasions, in her own sagacity, and a vivid impression made upon her mind by a childhood of poverty. At the age of twelve she had been transferred from the distressed fireside of her mother, Mrs. Bellairs, to the luxurious roof of her aunt, Mrs. Ballister, and her mother dying soon after, the orphan girl was adopted and treated as a child ; but the memory of the troubled health at which she had first learned to observe and reason, colored all the purposes and affections, thoughts, impulses and wishes of the ripening girl, and to think of happiness in any proximity to privation seemed to her impossible, even though it were in the bosom of Jove. Seeing no reason to give her cousin credit for any knowledge of the world beyond his own experience, she decided to think for him as well as love him, and not being so much pressed as the enthusiastic painter by the " besoin d aimer et de se faire aimer" she very composedly prefixed, to the possession of her hand, the trifling achievement of getting rich quite sure that if he knew as much as she, he would willingly run that race without the incumbrance of matrimony. The death of Mr. Ballister, senior, had left the widow and her two boys more slenderly provided for than was anticipated Phil s portion, after leaving college, producing the moderate income before men tioned. The elder brother had embarked in his father s business, and it was thought best on all hands for the younger Ballister to follow his example. But Philip, whose college leisure had been devoted to poetry and painting, and whose genius for the latter, certainly, was very decided, brought down his habits by a res olute economy to the limits of his income, and took up the pencil for a profession. With passionate en thusiasm, great purity of character, distaste for all society not in harmony with his favorite pursuit, and an industry very much concentrated and rendered effective by abstemious habits, Philip Ballister was very likely to develop what genius might lie between his head and hand, and his progress in the first year had been allowed by eminent artists to give very unusual promise. The Ballisters were still together under the maternal roof, and the painter s studies were the portraits of the family, and Fanny s picture of course much the most difficult to finish. It would be very hard if a painter s portrait of his liege mistress, the lady of his heart, were not a good picture, and Fanny Bellairs on canvass was divine accordingly. If the copy had more softness of expression than the original (as it was thought to have), it only proves that wise men have for some time suspected, that love is more dumb than blind, and the faults of our faultless idols are noted, however unconsciously. Neither thumb-screws nor hot coals nothing probably but re pentance after matrimony would have drawn from Philip Ballister, in words, the same confession of his mistress s foible that had oozed out through his treacherous pencil ! Cupid is often drawn as a stranger pleading to be "taken in, "but it is a miracle that he is not invariably drawn as a portrait-painter. A bird tied to the muzzle of a gun an enemy who has written a book an Indian prince under the protection of Giovanni Bulletto (Tus can for John Bull), is not more close upon demoli tion, one would think, than the heart of a lady deliver ed over to a painter s eyes, posed, draped and lighted with the one object of studying her beauty. If there be any magnetism in isolated attention, any in stead fast gazing, any in passes of the hand hither and thither if there be any magic in ce doux demi-jour so loved in France, in stuff for flattery ready pointed and feather ed, in freedom of admiration, "and all in the way of business" then is a loveable sitter to a love-like painter in " parlous" vicinity (as the new school would phrase it), to sweet-heart-land ! Pleasure in a voca tion has no offset in political economy as honor has (" the more honor the less profit,") or portrait-painters would be poorer than poets. And malgre his consciousness of the quality which required softening in his cousin s beauty, and malgre his rare advantages for obtaining over her a lover s proper ascendency, Mr. Philip Ballister bowed to the stronger will of Miss Fanny Bellairs, and sailed for France on his apprenticeship to Mammon. The reader will please to advance five years. Be fore proceeding thence with our story, however, let us take a Parthian glance at the overstepped interval. Philip Ballister had left New York with the triple vow that he would enslave every faculty of his mind and body to business, that he would not return till he had made a fortune, and that such interstices as might occur in the building up of this chateau for felicity should be filled with sweet reveries about Fanny Bel lairs. The forsworn painter had genius, as we have TWO BUCKETS IN A WELL. ft] before hinted, and genius is (as much as it is any one thing), the power of concentration. He entered upon his duties accordingly with a force, and patience of application, which soon made him master of what are called business habits, and, once in possession of the details, his natural cleverness gave him a speedy insight to all the scope and tactics of his particular field of rade. Under his guidance, the affairs of the house .vere soon in a much more prosperous train, and after a year s residence at Lyons, Philip saw his way very clear to manage them with a long arm and take up his quarters in Paris. " Les fats sont les seuls kommes qui aient soin d eux tnemes" says a French novelist, but there is a period, early or late, in the lives of the cleverest men, when ihey become suddenly curious as to their capacity for the graces. Paris, to a stranger who does not visit in the Faubourg St. Germain, is a republic of personal exterior, where the degree of privilege depends with Utopian impartiality on the style of the outer man ; and Paris, therefore, if he is not already a Bachelor of Arts (qu? beau s Arts), usually serves the traveller as an Alma Mater of the pomps and vanities. Phil. Ballister, up to the time of his matriculation in Ckaussee D Antin, was a romantic-looking sloven. From this to a very dashing coxcomb is but half a step, and to be rid of the coxcombry and retain a look of fashion, is still within the easy limits of imitation. But to obtain superiority of presence with no apparent aid from dress and no describable manner, and to dis play at the same time every natural advantage in ef fective relief, and, withal, to adapt this subtle philtre, not only to the approbation of the critical and censori ous, but to the taste of fair women gifted with judg ment as God pleases this is a finish not born with any man (though unsuccessful if it do not seem to be), and never reached in the apprenticeship of life, and never reached at all by men not much above their fellows. He who has it, has " bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germa ny, and his behavior everywhere," for he must know, as a chart of quicksands, the pronounced models of other nations ; but to be a " picked man of countries," and to have been a coxcomb and a man of fashion, are, as a painter would say, but the setting of the palette toward the making of the chef-d <euvre. Business prospered and the facilities of leisure in creased, while Ballister passed through these transi tions of taste, and he found intervals to travel, and time to read, and opportunity to indulge ; as far as he could with the eye only, his passion for knowledge in the arts. To all that appertained to the refinement of himself, he applied the fine feelers of a delicate and passionate construction, physical and mental, and, as (he reader will already have included, wasted on culture comparatively unprofitable, faculties that would* have eeen better employed but for the meddling of Miss fanny Bellairs. Ballister s return from France was heralded by the arrival of statuary and pictures, books, furniture, and numberless articles of tasteful and costly luxury. The reception of these by the family at home threw rather < new light on the probable changes in the long-absent brother, for, from the signal success of the business he had managed, they had very naturally supposed that it was the result only of unremitted and plodding care. Vague rumors of changes in his personal ap pearance had reached them, such as might be expected from conformity to foreign fashions, but those who had seen Philip Ballister in France, and called subse quently on the family in New York, were not people qualified to judge of the man, either from their own powers of observation or from any confidence he was likely to put forward while in their society. His letters had been delightful, but they were confined to third-person topics, descriptions of things likely to in terest them, &c., and Fanny had few addressed per sonally to herself, having thought it worth while, for the experiment s sake or for some other reason, to see whether love would subsist without its usual pabulum of tender correspondence, and a veto on love-letters having served her for a parting injunction at Phil s embarkation for Havre. However varied by their different fancies, the transformation looked for by the whole family was substantially the same the romantic artist sobered down to a practical, plain man of busi ness. And Fanny herself had an occasional misgiving as to her relish for his counting-house virtues and manners; though, on the detection of the feeling, she immediately closed her eyes upon it, and drummed up her delinquent constancy for " parade and inspec tion." All bustles are very much alike (we use the word as defined in Johnson), and the reader will appreciate our delicacy, besides, in not intruding on the first re union of relatives and lovers long separated. The morning after Philip Ballister s arrival, the family sat long at breakfast. The mother s gaze fastened untiringly on the features of her son still her boy prying into them with a vain effort to reconcile the face of the man with the cherished picture of the child with sunny locks, and noting little else than the work of inward change upon the countenance and ex pression. The brother, with the predominant feeling of respect for the intelligence and industry of one who had made the fortunes of the house, read only subdued sagacity in the perfect simplicity of his whole exterior. And Fanny Fanny was puzzled. The bourgeoisie and leger-bred hardness of manner which she had looked for were not there, nor any variety of the "foreign slip-slop" common to travelled youth, nor any superciliousness, nor (faith !) any wear and tear of youth or good looks nothing that she expected nothing ! Not even a French guard-chain ! What there was in her cousin s manners and ex- ! terior, however, was much more difficult to define by I Miss Bellairs than what there was not. She began the renewal of their intercourse with very high spirits, herself the simple nature and unpretendingness of his address awakening only an unembarrassed pleasure at seeing him again but she soon began to suspect there was an exquisite refinement in this very sim plicity, and to wonder at "the trick of it;" and after the first day passed in his society, her heart beat when he spoke to her, as it did not use to beat when she was sitting to him for her picture, and listening to his passionate love-making. And with all her faculties she studied him. What was the charm of his presence! He was himself, and himself only. He seemed perfect, but he seemed to have arrived at perfection like a statue, not like a picture by what had been taken away, not by what had been laid on. He was as natural as a bird, and as graceful and unembarrassed. He neither forced conversation, nor pressed the little attentions of the draw ing-room, and his attitudes were full of repose ; yet she was completely absorbed in what he said, and she had been impressed imperceptibly with his high-bred polite ness, and the singular elegance of his person. Fanny felt there was a change in her relative position to her cousin. In what it consisted, or which had the ad vantage, she was perplexed to discover but she bit her lips as she caught herself thinking that if she were not engaged to marry Philip Ballister, she should suspect that she had just fallen irrecoverably in love with him. It would have been a novelty in the history of Miss Bellairs that any event to which she had once con sented, should admit of reconsideration ; and the Ballister family, used to her strong will, were confirm ed fatalists as to the coming about of her ends and aims. Her marriage with Philip, therefore, was S2 TWO BUCKETS IN A WELL. discussed, cceur ouvert, from his first arrival, and, in deed, in her usual fashion of saving others the trouble of making up their minds. " herself had named the day." This, it is true, was before his landing, and was then, an effort of considerable magnanimity, as the expectant Penelope was not yet advised of her lover s state of preservation or damages by cares and keeping. If Philip had not found his wedding-day fixed on his arrival, however, he probably would have had a voice in the naming of it, for with Fanny s new inspirations as to his character, there hnd grown up a new flower in her garden of beauties timidity ! What bird of the air had sown the seed in such a soil was a problem to herself but true it was! the con fident belle had grown a blushing trembler! She would as soon have thought of bespeaking her wings for the sky, as to have ventured on naming the day in a short week after. The day was named, however, and the preparations went on nem. con. the person most interested (after herself) accepting every congratulation and allusion, touching the event, with the most impenetrable suavity. The marbles and pictures, upholstery and services, were delivered over to the order of Miss Bellairs, and Philip, disposed, apparently, to be very much a recluse in his rooms, or at other times, engrossed by troops of welcoming friends, saw much less of his bride elect than suited her wishes, and saw her seldom alone. By particular request, also, he took no part in the plenish ing and embellishing of the new abode not permitted j even to inquire where it was situated, and under this ; cover, besides the pleasure of having her own way, ! Fanny concealed a little secret, which, when disclosed, she now felt, would figure forth to Philip s comprehen- j sion, her whole scheme of future happiness. She hnd taken the elder brother into her counsels a fortnight after Philip s return, and, with his aid and consent, had abandoned the original idea of a house in town, purchased a beautifully-secluded estate and cottage ornee, on the East river, and transferred thither all the [ objects of art, furniture, &c. One room only of the ! maternal mansion was permitted to contribute its quota to the completion of the bridal dwelling the wing, never since inhabited, in which Philip had made his essay as a painter and without variation of a cob web, and with whimsical care and effort on the part of Miss Fanny, this apartment was reproduced at Revedere her own picture on the easel, as it stood on the night of his abandonment of his art, and palette, pencils and colors in tempting readiness on the table, j Even the fire-grate of the old studio had been re-set in the new, and the cottage throughout had been re fitted with a view to occupation in the winter. And to sundry hints on the part of the elder brother, that some thought should be given to a city residence for the Christinas holydays, at least Fanny replied, through a blush, that she should never wish to see the town with Philip at Revedere! Five years had ripened and mellowed the beauty of Fanny Bellairs, and the sairafr summer-time of youth had turned into fruit the feeling left by Philip in bud and flower. She was ready now for love. She had felt the variable temper of society, and there was a presentiment in the heart of receding flatteries, and the winter of life. It was with mournful self-reproach that she thought of the years wasted in separation, of her own choosing, from the man she loved, and with the power to recall time, she would have thanked God with tears of joy for the privilege of retracing the chain of life to that link of parting. Not worth a day of those lost years, she bitterly confessed to her self, was the wealth they had purchased. It lacked as little as one week of <; the happy day," when the workmen were withdrawn from Revedere, and the preparations for a family breakfast, to be suc ceeded by the agreeable surprise to Philip of inform ing him he was at home, were finally completed. One or two very intimate friends were added to the party, and the invitations (from the elder Ballister) proposed simply a dejeuner sur I herbe in the grounds of an un occupied villa, the property of an acquaintance. With the subsiding of the excitement of return, the early associations which had temporarily confused and colored the feelings of Philip Ballister, settled gradu ally away, leaving uppermost once more the fastidious refinement of the Parisian. Through this medium, thin and cold, the bubbles from the breathing of the heart of youth, rose rarely and reluctantly. The Bal- listers held a good station in society, without caring for much beyond the easy conveniences of life, and Fanny, though capable of any degree of elegance, had not seen the expediency of raising the tone of her manners above that of her immediate friends. With out being positively distasteful to Philip, the family circle, Fanny included, left him much to desire in the way of society, and unwilling to abate the warmth of his attentions while with them, he had latterly pleaded occupation more frequently, and passed his time in the more congenial company of his library of art. This was the less noticed that it gave Miss Bellairs the opportunity to make frequent visits to the work men at Revedere, and in the polished devotion of her betrothed, when with her, Fanny saw nothing reflected but her own daily increasing tenderness and admira tion. The morning of the fete came in like the air in an overture a harmony of all the instruments of sum mer. The party were at the gate of Revedere by ten, and the drive through the avenue to the lawn drew a burst of delighted admiration from all. The place was exquisite, and seen in its glory, and Fanny s heart was brimming with gratified pride and exultation. She assumed at once the dispensation of the honors, and beautiful she looked with her snowy dress and raven ringlets flitting across the lawn, and queening it like Perdita among the flowers. Having narrowly escaped bursting into tears of joy when Philip pronounced the place prettier than anything he had seen in his travels, she was, for the rest of the day, calmly happy, and with the grateful shade, the delicious breakfast in the grove, the rambling and boating on the river, the hours passed oft like dreams, and no one even hinted a re gret that the house itself was under lock and bar. And so the sun set, and the twilight came on, and the guests were permitted to order round their carriages and depart, the Ballisters accompanying them to the gate. And, on the return of the family through the avenue, excuses were made for idling hither and thith er, till lights began to show through the trees, and by the time of their arrival at the lawn, the low windows of the cottage poured forth streams of light, and the open doors, and servants busy within, completed a scene more like magic than reality. Philip was led in by the excited girl who was the fairy of the spell, and his astonishment at the discovery of his statuary and pictures, books and furniture, arranged in complete order within, was fed upon with the passionate delight of love in authority. When an hour had been spent in examining and admiring the different apartments, an inner room was thrown open, in which supper was prepared, and this fourth act in the day s drama was lingered over in un tiring happiness by the family. Mrs. Ballister, the mother, rose and retired, and Philip pleaded indisposition, and begged to be shown to the room allotted to him. This was ringing-up the curtain for the last act sooner than had been planned by Fanny, but she announced herself as his chamberlain, and witli her hands affectionately crossed on his arm, led him to a suite of rooms in a wing still unvisited, and with a good-night kiss left him at the open door of the revived studio, furnished for the night with a TWO BUCKETS IN A WELL. bachelor s bed. Turning upon the threshold, he closed the door with a parting wish of sweet dreams, and Fanny, after listening a moment with a vain hope of overhearing some expression of pleasure, and lin gering again on her way back, to be overtaken by her surprised lover, sought her own bed without rejoining the circle, and passed a sleepless and happy night of tears and joy. Breakfast was served the next morning on a terrace overlooking the river, and it was voted by acclamation, that Fanny never before looked so lovely. As none but the family were to be present, she had stolen a inarch on her marriage wardrobe, and added to her demi-toilet a morning cap of exquisite becoming-ness. Altogether, she looked deliciously wife-like, and did the honors of the breakfast-table with a grace and sweetness that warmed out love and compliments even from the sober soil of household intimacy. Philip had not yet made his appearance, and they lingered long at table, till at last a suggestion that he might be ill started Fanny to her feet, and she ran to his door before a servant could be summoned. The rooms were open, and the bed had not been occupied. The candle was burned to the socket, and on the easel, resting against the picture, was a letter addressed " Miss Fanny Bellairs." THE LETTER. " I have followed up to this hour, my fair cousin, in the path you have marked out for me. It has brought me back, in this chamber, to the point from which I started under your guidance, and if it had brought me back unchanged if it restored me my energy, my hope, and my prospect of fame, I should pray Heaven that it would also give me back my love, and be con tent more than content, if it gave me back also my poverty. The sight of my easel, and of the surround ings of my boyish dreams of glory, have made my heart bitter. They have given form and voice to a vague unhappiness, which has haunted me through all these absent years years of degrading pursuits and wasted powers and it now impels me from you, kind and lovely as you are, with an aversion I can not con- ! trol. I can not forgive you. You have thwarted my i destiny. You have extinguished with sordid cares a \ lamp within me that might, by this time, have shone through the world. And what am I, since your wishes are accomplished ? Enriched in pocket, and bankrupt in happiness and self-respect. "With a heart sick, and a brain aching for distinc tion, I have come to an unhonored stand-still at thirty ! j I am a successful tradesman, and in this character I ! shall probably die. Could I begin to be a painter now, ! say you ? Alas ! my knowledge of the art is too great for patience with the slow hand ! I could not draw a line without despair. The pliant fingers and the plas tic mind must keep pace to make progress in art. My | taste is fixed, and my imagination uncreative, because chained down by certainties; and the shortsighted ar dor and daring experiment which are indispensable to sustain and advance the follower in Raphael s foot steps, are too far behind for my resuming. The tide ebbed from me at the accursed burning of my pencils by your pitiless hand, and from that hour I have felt hope receding. Could I be happy with you, stranded here in ignoble idleness, and owing to you the loss of my whole venture of opportunity ? No, Fanny ! surely no ! " I would not be unnecessarily harsh. I am sensi ble of your affection and constancy. I have deferred this explanation unwisely, till the time and place make it seem more cruel. You are at this very moment, I well know, awake in your chamber, devoting to me the vigils of a heart overflowing with tenderness. And 1 : would if it were possible if it were not utterly be yond my powers of self-sacrifice and concealment I would affect a devotion I can not feel, and carry out this error through a life of artifice and monotony. But here, again, the work is your own, and my feelings re vert bitterly to your interference. If there were no other obstacle to my marrying you if you were not associated repulsively with the dark cloud on my life, you are not the woman I could now enthrone in my j bosom. We have diverged since the separation which I pleaded against, and which you commanded. I need for my idolatry, now, a creature to whom the sordid cares you have sacrificed me to, are utterly unknown a woman born and educated in circumstances where want is never feared, and where calculation never en ters. I must lavish my wealth, if I fulfil my desire, on one who accepts it like the air she breathes, and who knows the value of nothing but love a bird with a human soul and form, believing herself free of all the world is rich in, and careful only for pleasure and the happiness of those who belong to her. Such women, beautiful and highly educated, are found only in ranks of society between which and my own I have been increasing in distance nay, building an impassa ble barrier, in obedience to your control. Where I stop, interdicted by the stain of trade, the successful artist is free to enter. You have stamped me plebeian you would not share my slow progress toward a higher sphere, and you have disqualified me for attain ing it alone. In your mercenary and immoveable will, and in that only, lies the secret of our twofold unhap piness. " I leave you, to return to Europe. My brother and i my friends will tell you I am mad and inexcusable, and j look upon you as a victim. They will say that, to have been a painter, were nothing to the career that 1 might mark out for my ambition, if ambition 1 must ! have, in politics. Politics in a country where distinc- | tion is a pillory ! But I could not live here. It is my misfortune that my tastes are so modified by that long and compulsory exile, that life, here, would be a per petual penance. This unmixed air of merchandise suffocates me. Our own home is tinctured black with j it. You yourself, in this rural paradise you have con jured up, move in it like a cloud. The counting- house rings in your voice, calculation draws together your brows, you look on everything as a means, and know its cost; and the calm and means-forgetting//-M- ition, which forms the charm and dignity of superior life, is utterly unknown to you. What would be my happiness with such a wife ? What would be yours with such a husband ? Yet I consider the incompat ibility between us as no advantage on my part on the contrary, a punishment, and of your inflicting. What shall I be anywhere but a Tantalus a fastidious en- nuye, with a thirst for the inaccessible burning in my bosom continually ! " I pray you let us avoid another meeting before my departure. Though I can not forgive you as a lover, I can think of you with pleasure as a cousin, and I give you, as your due ("damages," the law would phrase it), the "portion of myself which you thought most important when I offered you my all. You would not take me without the fortune, but perhaps you will be content with the fortune without me. I shall immediately take steps to convey to you this property of Revedere, with an income sufficient to maintain it, and I trust soon to hear that you have found a husband better worthy of you than your cousin "PHILIP BALLISTER." LIGHT VERVAIN. LIGHT VERVAIN, " And thou light vervain, too thou next come after, Provoking souls to mirth and easy laughter." Old Somebody. ROME, May 30, 1832. DINED with F , the artist, at a trattoria. F is a man of genius, very adventurous and imaginative in his art, but never caring to show the least touch of these qualities in his conversation. His pictures have given him great vogue and consideration at Rome, so that his daily experience furnishes staple enough for his evening s chit-chat, and he seems, of course, to be always talking of himself. He is very generally set down as an egotist. His impulse to talk, however, springs from no wish for self-glorification, but rather from an indolent aptness to lay hands on the readiest and most familiar topic, and that is a kind of egotism to which I have very little objection particularly with the mind fatigued, as it commonly is in Rome, by a long day s study of works of art. I had passed the morning at the Barberini palace with a party of picture-hunters, and 1 made some remark as to the variety of impressions made upon the minds of different people by the same picture. Apropos of this remark, F told me a little anecdote, which I must try to put down by way of a new shoal in the chart of human nature. " It is very much the same with everything else," said F ; "no two people see with the same eyes, physically or morally ; and faith, we might save our selves a great deal of care and bother if we did but keep it in mind." " As how ?" I asked, for I saw that this vague remark was premonitory of an illustration. " I think I introduced young Skyring to you at a party somewhere?" "A youth with a gay waistcoat and nothing to say ? Yes." " Well your observation just now reminded me of the different estimate put by that gentleman and myself upon something, and if I could give you any idea of my month s work in his behalf you would agree with me that I might have spared myself some trouble keeping in mind, as I said before, the differ ence in optics. "I was copying a bit of foreshortening from a pic ture in the Vatican, one day, when this youth passed without observing me. I did not immediately recol lect him. He was dressed like a figure in a tailor s widow, and with Mrs. Stark in his hand was hunting up the pictures marked with four notes of admiration, and I, with a smile at the waxy dandyism of the man. turned to my work and forgot him. Presently his face recurred to me, or rather his sister s face, which some family likeness had insensibly recalled, and gejting another look, I recognised in him an old, though not very intimate playmate of my boyish days. It immediately occurred to me that I could serve him a very good turn by giving him the entree to society here, and quite as immediately, it occurred to me to doubt whether it was worth my while." " And what changed your mind," I asked, " for of course you came to the conclusion that it was not ?" "Oh, for his sake alone I should have left him as he was, a hermit in his varnished boots for he had not an acquaintance in the city but Kate Skyring had given me roses when roses were to me, each a world; and for her sake, though I was a rejected lover, I thought better of my demurrer. Then I had a little pique to gratify for the Skyrings had rather given me the dc haul en bas in declining the honor of my alliance (lucky for me, since it brought me here and made me what I am), and I was not indisposed to show that the power to serve, to say the least, was now on my side." "Two sufficient, as well as dramatic reasons for being civil to a man." " Only arrived at, however, by a night s deliberation, for it cost me some trouble of thought and memory to get back into my chrysalis and imagine myself at all subject to people so much below my present vogue whatever that is worth ! Of course I don t think of Kate in this comparison, for a woman one has once loved is below nothing. We ll drink her health, God bless her!" (A bottle of Lagrima.) " I left my card on Mr. Skyring the next morning, with a note enclosing three or four invitations which I had been at some trouble to procure, and a hope from myself of the honor of his company to a quiet dinner. He took it as a statue would take a shower-bath, wrote me a note in the third person in reply to mine in the first, and came in ball-dress and sulphur gloves at pre cisely the canonical fifteen minutes past the hour. Good old Thorwalsden dined with me, and an English viscount for whom I was painting a picture, and between my talking Italian to the venerable sculptor, and Skyring s belording and belordshipping the good- natured nobleman, the dinner went trippingly off the Little Pedlington of our mutual nativity furnishing less than its share to the conversation. " We drove, all together, to the Palazzo Rossi, for its was the night of the Marchesa s soiree. As spon sor, I looked with some satisfaction at Skyring in the ante-room, his toggery being quite unexceptionable, and his maintien very uppish and assured. I presented him to our fair hostess, who surveyed him as he approached with a satisfactory look of approval, and no one else chancing to be near, I left him to improve what was rather a rare opportunity a tete-a-tete with the prettiest woman in Rome. Five minutes after I returned to reconnoitre, and there he stood, stroking down his velvet waistcoat and looking from the carpet to the ceiling, while the marchioness was quite red with embarrassment and vexation. He had not opened his lips ! She had tried him in French and Italian (the dunce had told me that he spoke French too), and finally she had ventured upon English, which she knew very little of, and still he neither spoke nor ran away ! " Perhaps Monsieur would like to dance, said the marchioness, gliding away from him with a look of inexpressible relief, and trusting to me to find him a partner. "I had no difficulty in finding him a partner, for (that far) his waistcoat put him on velvet but I could not trust him alone again ; so, having presented him to a very pretty woman and got them vis-a-vis in the quadrille, I stood by to supply the shortcomings. And little of a sinecure it was ! The man had nothing to say ; nor, confound him, had he any embarrassment on the subject. He looked at his varnished pumps, and coaxed his coat to his waist, and set back his neck like a goose bolting a grasshopper, and took as much LIGHT VERVAIN. interest in the conversation as a footman behind your chair deaf and dumb apparently, but perfectly at his ease. He evidently had no idea that there was any distinction between men except in dress, and was per suaded that he was entirely successful as far as he had gone : and as to my efforts in his behalf, he clearly took them as gratuitous on my part probably thinking, from the difference in our exteriors, that I paid myself in the glory of introducing him. " Well I had begun so liberally that T could scarce refuse to find my friend another partner, and after that another and another I, to avoid the odium of inflict ing a bore on my fair acquaintances, feeling compelled to continue my service as chorus in the pantomime and, you will scarce believe me when I tell you that I submitted to this bore nightly for a month ! I could not get rid of him. He would not be let go. With out offending him mortally, and so undoing all my sentimental outlay for Kate Skyring and her short sighted papa, I had nothing for it but to go on till he should go off ridden to death with him in every con ceivable variety of bore." " And is he gone ?" " Gone. And now, what thanks do you suppose I got for all this ?" " A present of a pencil-case ?" " No, indeed ! but a lesson in human nature that will stick by me much longer. He called at my studio yesterday morning to say good-by. Through all my sense of his boredom and relief at the prospect of being rid of him, I felt embarrassed when he came in, thinking how difficult it would be for him to express properly his sense of the obligation he was under to me. After half an hour s monologue (by myself) on pictures, &c., he .started up and said he must go. And by-the-by, said he, coloring a little, there is one thing I want to say to you, Mr. F ! Hang it, it has stuck in my throat ever since I met you ! You ve been very polite and I m obliged to you, of course but I don t like your devilish patronizing manner ! Good-by, Mr. F ! " ****** The foregoing is a leaf from a private diary which I kept at Rome. In making a daily entry of such passing stuff as interests us, we sometimes, amid much that should be ticketed for oblivion, record that which has a bearing, important or amusing, on the future; and a late renewal of my acquaintance with Mr. F , followed by a knowledge of some fortunate changes in his worldly condition, has given that interest to this otherwise unimportant scrap of diary which will be made apparent presently to the reader. A vague recollection that I had something in an old book which referred to him, induced me to look it up, and I was surprised to find that I had noted down, in this trifling anecdote, what turned out to be the mainspring of his destiny. F returned to his native country after five years study of the great masters of Italy. "His first pictures painted at Rome procured for him, as is stated in the diary I have quoted, a high reputation. He carried with him a style of his own which was merely stimu lated and heightened by his first year s walk through the galleries of Florence, and the originality and bold ness of his manner of coloring seemed to promise a sustained novelty in the art. Gradually, however, the awe of the great masters seemed to overshadow his confidence in himself, and as he travelled and deep ened his knowledge of painting, he threw aside feature after feature of his own peculiar style, till at last he fell into the track of the great army of imitators, who follow the immortals of the Vatican as doomed ships follow the Flying Dutchman. Arrived at home, and depending solely on his art for a subsistence, F commenced the profession to which be had served so long an apprenticeship. But his pictures sadly disappointed his friends. After the first specimens of his acquired style in the annual ex hibitions, the calls at his rooms became fewer and farther between, and his best works were returned from the galleries unsold. Too proud to humor the popular taste by returning to what he considered an inferior stage of his art, he stood still with his reputa tion ebbing from him, and as his means, of course, depended on the tide of public favor, he was soon in volved in troubles before which his once-brilliant hopes rapidly faded. At this juncture he received the following letter: " You will be surprised on glancing at the signature to this letter. You will be still more surprised when you are reminded that it is a reply to an unanswered one of your own written years ago. That letter lies by me, expressed with all the diffidence of boyish feeling. And it seems as if its diffidence would en courage me in what I wish to say. Yet I write far ! more tremblingly than you could have done. " Let me try to prepare the way by some explana- | tion of the past. "You were my first lover. I was not forbidden, at ji fourteen, to express the pleasure I felt at your admi- J! ration, and you can not have forgotten the ardor and j simplicity with which I returned it. I remember 1 1 giving you roses better than I remember anything so long ago. Now writing to you with the same feel- j| ing warm at my heart it seems to me as if it needed ; but a rose, could I give it you in the same garden, to !1 make us lovers again. Yet I know you must be changed. I scarce know whether I should go on with ; this letter. "But I owe you reparation. I owe you an answer to this which lies before me : and if I err in answer ing it as my heart burns to do, you will at least be made happier by knowing that when treated with j neglect and repulsion, you were still beloved. " I think it was not long before the receipt of this j letter that my father first spoke to me of our attach ment. Till then I had only thought of loving you. That you were graceful and manly, that your voice was sweet, and that your smile made me happy, was all I could have told of you withoutj-eflection. I had never reasoned upon your qualities of mind, though I had taken an unconscious pride in your superiority to your companions, and least of all had I asked myself whether those abilities for making your way in the world which my father denied you, were among your boyish energies. With a silent conviction that you had no equal among your companions, in anything, I listened to my father s disparagement of you, bewil dered and overawed, the very novelty and unexpected ness of the light in which he spoke of you, sealing my lips completely. Perhaps resistance to his will would have been of no avail, but had I been better prepared to reason upon what he urged, I might have expressed to you the unwillingness of my acquies cence. I was prevented from seeing you till your letter came, and then all intercourse with you was formally forbidden. My father said he would himself reply to your proposal. But it was addressed to me, and I have only recovered possession of it by his death. " Though it may seem like reproaching you for yielding me without an effort, I must say, to complete the history of my own feelings, that I nursed a vague hope of hearing from you until your departure for Italy, and that this hope was extinguished not without bitter tears. The partial resentment that mingled with this unhappiness aided me doubtless in making up my mind to forget you, and for a while, for years I may say, I was possessed by other excitements and feel ings. It is strange, however, that, though scarce remembering you when waking, I still saw you per petually in my dreams. 86 NORA MEHIDY. "And, so far, this is a cold and easy recital. How shall I describe to you the next change, the re-awaken ing of this smothered and slumbering affection ! How shall I evade your contempt when I tell you that it awoke with your renown ! But my first feeling was not one of love. When your name began to come to us in the letters of travellers and in the rumor of lit erary circles, I felt as if something that belonged to me was praised and honored ; a pride, an exulting and gratified pride, that feeling seemed to be, as if the heart of my childhood had been staked on your aspi rations, and was borne up with you, a part and a par taker of your fame. With all my soul I drank in the news of your successes in the art ; I wrote to those who came home from Italy; I questioned those likely to have heard of you, as critics and connoisseurs ; I devoted all my reading to the literature of the arts, and the history of painters, for my life was poured into yours irresistibly, by a power I could not, and cannot now, control. My own imagination turned painter, indeed, for I lived on revery, calling up, with endless variations, pictures of yourself amid ihe works of your pencil, visited and honored as I knew you were, yet unchanged in the graceful and boyish beauty I remembered. I was proud of having loved you, of having been the object of the earliest and purest pref erence of a creature of genius ; and through this pride, supplanting and overflowing it, crept and strengthened a warmer feeling, the love I have the hardihood to avow. Oh ! what will you think of this boldness ! Yet to conceal my love were now a se verer task than to wait the hazard of your contempt. "One explanation a palliative, perhaps you will allow it to be, if you are generous remains to be given. The immediate impulse of this letter was in formation from my brother, long withheld, of your kindness to him in Rome. From some perverseness which I hardly understand, he has never before hinted in my presence that he had seen you in Italy, and it was only by needing it as an illustration of some feel ing which seemed to have piqued him, and which he was expressing to a friend, that he gave the particulars of your month of devotion to him. Knowing the dif ference between your characters, and the entire want of sympathy between your pursuits and my brother s, to what motive could I attribute your unusual and self-sacrificing kindness ? " Did I err was I presumptuous, in believing that it was from a forgiving and tender memory of myself? " You are prepared now, if you can be, for what I would say. We are left alone, my brother and I, or phan heirs to the large fortune of my father. I have no one to control my wishes, no one s permission to ask for any disposition of my hand and fortune. Will you have them ? In this question is answered the sweet, and long-treasured, though long-neglected let ter lying beside me. " KATHERINE SKYRING." Mrs. F , as will be seen from the style of her let ter, is a woman of decision and cleverness, and of such a helpmeet, in the way of his profession as well as in the tenderer relations of life, F was sorely in need. By her common-sense counsels and persuasion, he has gone back with his knowledge of the art to the first lights of his own powerful genius, and with means to command leisure and experiment, he is, without submitting the process to the world, perfect ing a manner which will more than redeem his early promise. As his career, though not very uncommon or dra matic, hinged for its more fortunate events on an act of high-spirited politeness, I have thought, that in this age of departed chivalry, the story was worth preserving for its lesson. NORA MEHIDY; OR, THE STRANGE ROAD TO THE HEART OF MR. HYPOLET LEATHERS. Now, Heaven rest the Phoenicians for their pleasant invention of the art of travel. This is to be a story of love and pride, and the he ro s name is Hypolet Leathers. You have smiled prematurely, my friend and reader, if you "think you see" Mr. Leathers foreshadowed, as it were, in his name. (Three mortal times have I mended this son of a goose of a pen, and it will not as you see by the three unavailing attempts recorded above it will not commence, for me, this tale, with a practicable begin ning.) The sun was rising (I think this promises well) leisurely rising was the sun on the opposite side of the Susquehannah. The tall corn endeavored to lift its silk tassel out of the sloppy fog that had taken upon itself to rise from the water and prognosticate a hot fair day, and the driver of the Binghamton stage drew over his legs a two-bushel bag as he cleared the street of the village, and thought that, for a summer s morn ing, it was " very cold" wholly unaware, however, that, in murmuring thus, he was expressing himself as Hamlet did while waiting for his father s ghost upon the platform. Inside the coach were three passengers. A gentle man sat by the window on the middle seat, with his cloak over his lap, watching the going to heaven of the fog that had fulfilled its destiny. His mind was melancholy partly for the contrast he could not but draw between this exemplary vapor and himself, who was "but a vapor,"* and partly that his pancreas be gan to apprehend some interruption of the thorough fare above or, in other words, that he was hungry for his breakfast, having gone supperless to bed. He mused as he rode. He was a young man, about : twenty-five, and had inherited from his father, John I Leathers, a gentleman s fortune, with the two draw backs of a name troublesome to Phcebus ("Phoebus! what a name!"), and premature gray hair. He was, in all other respects, a finished and well-conditioned hero tall, comely, courtly, and accomplished and had seen the sight-worthy portions of the world, and knew their differences. Travel, indeed, had become a kind of diseased necessity with him for he fled from the knowledge of his name, and from the obser vation of his gray hair, like a man fleer.ig from two fell phantoms/ He was now returning from Niagara, * " Man s but a vapor, Full of woes, Cuts a caper, And down he goes." .Fam?7/<w Ballads. NORA MEHIDY. 87 and left the Mohawk route to see where the Susque- hannah makes its Great Bend in taking final leave of Mr. Cooper, who lives above; and at the village of the Great Bend he was to eat that day s breakfast. On the back seat, upon the leather cushion, behind I Mr. Leathers, sat two other chilly persons, a middle- < aged man and a girl of sixteen the latter with her shawl drawn close ^to her arms, and her dark eyes bent upon her knees, as if to warm them (as unquestion- ably they did). Her black curls swung out from her bonnet, like ripe grapes from the top of an arbor heavy, slumberous, bulky, prodigal black curls oh, j how beautiful! And I do not know that it would be j a " trick worth an egg" to make any mysiery of these two persons. The gentleman was John Mehidy, the | widowed tailor of Binghamton, and the lady was Nora j Mehidy, his daughter ; and they were on their way to I New York to change the scene, Mrs. Mehidy having j left the painful legacy of love her presence behind her. For, ill as he could afford the journey, Mr. Me- j hidy thought the fire of Nora s dark eyes might be i put out with water, and he must go where every ! patch and shred would not set her a weeping. She | " took it hard," as they describe grief for the dead in ; the country. The Great Bend is a scene you may look at with pleasure, even while waiting for procrastinated prog, j and Hypolet Leathers had been standing for ten min- | utes on the high bank around which the Susquehan- nah sweeps, like a train of silver tissue after a queen i turning a corner, when past him suddenly tripped No ra Mehidy bonnetless, and stood gazing on the river j from the outer edge of the precipice. Leathers s vis ual consciousness dropped into thai mass of cluster ing hair like a ring into the sea, and disappeared. His soul dived after it, and left him with no sense or | remembrance of how his outer orbs were amusing i themselves. Of what unpatented texture of velvet, and of what sifting of diamond dust were those lights I and shadows manufactured ! What immeasurable thickness in those black flakes compared, with all locks that he had ever seen, as an edge of cocoa- meat, fragrantly and newly broken, to a torn leaf, limp ! with wilting. Nora stood motionless, absorbed in the incomparable splendor of that silver hook bent into j the forest Leathers as motionless, absorbed in her i wilderness of jetty locks till the barkeeper rang the bell for them to come to breakfast. Ah, Hypolet! Hypolet! what dark thought came to share, with that innocent beefsteak, your morning s digestion ! That tailors have, and why they have, the hand- i somest daughters, in all countries, have been points of observation and speculation for physiology, written and unwritten. Most men know the fact. Some writers have ventured to guess at the occult secret. But I think "it needs no ghost, come from the^rave," to unravel the matter. Their vocaiion is the embel lishmentpartly indeed the creation of material beauty. If philosophy sit on their shears (as it should ever), there are questions to decide which discipline the sense of beauty the degree in which fashion should be sacrificed to becomingness, and the resist ance to the invasion of the poetical by whim and usage, for example and as a man thinketh to a cer tain degree so is his daughter. Beauty is the busi ness-thought of every day, and the desire to know how best to remedy its defects is the ache and agony of the tailor s soul, if he be ambitious. Why should not this have its exponent on the features of the race, as other strong emotions have plastic and malleable as the human body is, by habit and practice. Shak- spere, by-the-way, says Tis use that breeds a habit in a man, and I own to the dulness of never till now apprehend ing that this remarkable passage typifies the steeping of superfine broadcloth (made into superfine habits) into the woof and warp of the tailor s idiosyncracy. Q. E. D. Nora Mehidy had ways with her that, if the world had not been thrown into a muss by Eve and Adam, would doubtless have been kept for queens. Leath ers was particularly struck with her never lifting up her eyelids till she was ready. If she chanced to be looking thoughtfully down when he spoke to her, which was her habit of sadness just now, she heard what he had to say and commenced replying and then, slowly, up went the lids, combing the loving air with their long lashes, and no more hurried than the twilight taking its fringes off the stars. It was ado rable altogether adorable ! And her hands and lips, and feet and shoulders, had the same contemptuous and delicious deliberateness. On the second evening, at half-past five just half an hour too late for the "Highlander" steamer the " Binghamton stage" slid down the mountain into Newburgh. The next boat was to touch at the pier at midnight, and Leathers had six capacious hours to work on the mind of John Mehidy. What was the process of that fiendish temptation, what the lure and the resistance, is a secret locked up with Moloch but it was successful ! The glorious chevelure of the victim (sweet descriptive word chevelure. ) the matchless locks that the matchlocks of armies should have defended went down in the same boat with No ra Mehidy, but tied up in Mr. Leathers linen pocket- handkerchief! And, in one week from that day, the head of Hypolet Leathers was shaven nude, and the black curls of Nora Mehidy were placed upon its irritated organs in an incomparable WIG ! ! A year had elapsed. It was a warm day, in No. 77 of the Astor, and Hypolet Leathers, Esq., arrived a week before by the Great Western, sat aiding the evaporation from his brain by lotions of iced lavender. His wig stood before him, on the blockhead that was now his inseparable companion, the back toward him; and, as the wind chased of the volatile lavender from the pores of his skull, he toyed thoughtfully with the lustrous curls of Nora Mehidy. His heart was on that wooden block ! He dressed his own wig habit ually, and by dint of perfuming, combing, and cares sing those finger-like ringlets he had tangled up his heart in their meshes. A phantom, with the superb face of the owner, stayed with the separated locks, and it grew hourly more palpable and controlling. The sample had made him sick at heart for the remainder. He wanted the rest of Nora Mehidy. He had come over for her. He had found John Mehidy, following his trade obscurely in a narrow lane, and he had asked for Nora s hand. But though this was not the whole of his daughter, and he had already sold part of her to Leathers, he shook his head over his shiny shears. Even if Nora could be propitiated after the sacrifice , she had made (which he did not believe she could be), I he would as lief put her in the world of spirits as in a world above him. She was his life, and he would not give "his life willingly to a stranger who would take it from him, or make it too fine for his using. Oh, no Nora must marry a tailor, if she marry at all and this was the adamantine resolution, stern and without appeal, of John Mehidy. Some six weeks after this, a new tailoring estab lishment of great outlay and magnificence was opened in Broadway. The show-window was like a new rev elation of stuff for trowsers, and resplendent, but not gaudy, were the neckcloths and waistcoatings for absolute taste reigned over all. There was not an ar ticle on show possible to William street not a waist coat that, seen in Maiden lane, would not have been as unsphered as the Lost Pleiad in Botany Bay. It was quite clear that there was some one of the firm THE PHARISEE AND THE BARBER. of " Mehidy & Co." (the new sign) who exercised his taste " from within, out," as the Germans say of the process of true poetry. He began inside a gen tleman, that is to say, to guess at what was wanted for a gentleman s outside. He was a tailor-gentleman, and was therefore, and by that .quality only, fitted to be a gentleman s tailor. The dandies flocked to Mehidy & Co. They could not be measured immediately oh no ! The gentleman to be built was requested to walk about the shop for a half hour, till the foreman got him well in his eye, and then to call again in a week. Meantime he would mark his customer in the street, to see how he performed. Mehidy & Co. never ventured to take measure for terra incognita. The man s gait, shrug, speed, style, and quality, were all to be allowed for, and these were not seen in a minute. And a very sharp and stylish looking fellow seemed that foreman to be. There was evidently spoiled some very capa ble stuff for a lord when he was made a tailor. " His leaf, By some o er hasty angel, was misplaced In Fate s eternal volume." And, faith ! it was a study to see him take a custom er s measure! The quiet contempt with which he overruled the man s indigenous idea of a coat ! the rather satirical comments on his peculiarities of wear ing his kerseymere ! the cool survey of the adult to be embellished, as if he were inspecting him for ad mission to the grenadiers ! On the whole, it was a nervous business to be measured for a coat by that fellow with the devilish fine head of black hair! And, with the hair upon his head, from which Nora had once no secrets with the curls upon his cheek and temples which had once slumbered peacefully over hers, Hypolet Leathers, the foreman of " Mehi dy & Co.," made persevering love to the tailor s mag nificent daughter. For she u>as magnificent! She had just taken that long stride from girl to woman, and her person had filled out to the imperial and vo luptuous model indicated by her deliberate eyes. With a dusky glow in her cheek, that looked like a peach feinted by a rosy twilight, her mouth, up to the crimson edge of its bow of Cupid, was moulded with the slumberous fairness of newly wrought sculpture, and gloriously beautiful in expression. She was a creature for whom a butterfly might do worm over again to whose condition in life, if need be, a prince might proudly come down. Ah, queenly Nora Me hidy ! But the wooing alas! the wooing throve slowly ! That lovely head was covered again with prodigal locks, in short and massive clusters, but Leathers was pertinacious as to his property in the wig, and its be- comingness and indispensableness and to be made love to by a man in her own hair! to be obliged to keep her own dark curls at a respectful distance! to forbid all intercourse between them and their chil dren-ringlets, as it were it roughened the course of Leathers s true love that Nora must needs be obliged to reason on such singular dilemmas. For, though a tailor s daughter, she had been furnished by nature with an imagination ! But virtue, if nothing more and no sooner, is its own reward, and in time " to save its bacon." John Mehidy s fortune was pretty well assured in the course of two years, and made, in his own line, by his pro posed son-in-law, and he could no longer refuse to throw into the scale the paternal authority. Nora s hair was, by this time, too, restored to its pristine length and luxuriousness, and, on condition that Hyp olet would not exact a new wig from his new posses sions, Nora, one summer s night, made over to him the remainder. The long-exiled locks revisited their natal soil, during the caresses which sealed the com pact, and a very good tailor was spoiled the week after, for the married Leathers became once more a gentleman at large, having bought, in two instalments, at an expense of a hundred dollars, a heart, and two years of service, one of the finest properties of which Heaven and a gold ring ever gave mortal the copy hold ! THE PHARISEE AND THE BARBER, ISHEAFE LANE, in Boston, is an almost unmention able and plebeian thoroughfare, between two very mentionable and patrician streets. It is mainly used by bakers, butchers, urchins going to school, and j clerks carrying home parcels in short, by those who I care less for the beauty of the road than for economy | of time and shoe-leather. If you please, it is a shabby hole. Children are born there, however, and people j die and marry there, and are happy and sad there, and i the great events of life, more important than our liking or disliking of Sheafe lane, take place in it i continually. It used not to be a very savory place. Yet it has an indirect share of such glory as attaches to the birth-places of men above the common. The (present) great light of the Unitarian church was born at one end of Sheafe lane, and one of the most accom plished merchant -gentlemen in the gay world of New York was born at the other. And in the old Hay- market (a kind of cul-de-sac, buried in the side of Sheaf lane), stood the dusty lists of chivalric old Roulstone, a gallant horseman, who in other days would have been a knight of noble devoir, though in the degeneracy of a Yankee lustrum, he devoted his soldierly abilities to the teaching of young ladies how to ride. Are you in Sheafe lane ? (as the magnetisers in quire). Please to step back twenty-odd years, and take the hand of a lad with a rosy face (ourself for we lived in Sheafe lane twenty-odd years ago), and come to a small house, dingy yellow, with a white i gate. The yard is below the level of the street. I Mind the step. The family are at breakfast in the small parlor fronting on the street. But come up this dark stair case, to the bedroom over the parlor a very neat room, plainly furnished ; and the windows are cur tained, and there is one large easy chair, and a stand with a bible open upon it. In the bed lies an old man of seventy, deaf, nearly blind, and bed-ridden. We have now shown you what comes out of the shadows to us, when we remember the circumstances we are about to body forth in a sketch, for it can scarcely be called a story. It wanted an hour to noon. The Boylston clock struck eleven, and close on the heel of the last stroke followed the tap of the barber s knuckle on the door THE PHARISEE AND THE BARBER. 89 of the yellow house in Sheafe lane. Before answering to the rap, the maid-of-all-work filled a tin can from the simmering kettle, and surveying herself in a three- cornered bit of looking-glass, fastened on a pane of the kitchen window ; then, with a very soft and sweet " good morning," to Rosier, the barber, she led the way to the old man s room. "He looks worse to-day," said the barber, as the skinny hand of the old man crept up tremblingly to his face, conscious of the daily office about to be per formed for him. " They think so below slairs," said Harriet, " and one of the church is coming to pray with him to-night. Shall I raise him up now?" The barber nodded, and the girl seated herself near the pillow, and lifting the old man, drew him upon her breast, and as the operation went rather lingeringly on, the two chatted together very earnestly. Rosier was a youth of about twenty-one, talkative aiul caressing, as all barbers are; and what with his curly hair and ready smile, and the smell of soap that seemed to be one of his natural properties, he was a man to be thought of over a kitchen fire. Besides, he was thriving in his trade, and not a bad match. All of which was duly considered by the family with which Harriet lived, for they loved the poor girl. Poor girl, I say. But she was not poor, at least if it be true that as a woman thinketh so is she. Most people would have described her as a romantic girl. together, and the girl seemed very tranquilly happy in her prospect of marriage. At four o clock on the afternoon of the day before mentioned, Mr. Flint was to make a spiritual visit to the old man. Let us first introduce him to the reader. Mr. Asa Flint was a bachelor of about forty-five, and an "active member" of a church famed for its zeal. He was a tall man, with a little bend in his back, and commonly walked with his eyes upon the ground, like one intent on meditation. His complex- ! ion was sallow, and his eyes dark and deeply set ; but ) by dint of good teeth, and a little " wintry redness in ! his cheek," he was good-looking enough for all his ! ends. He dressed in black, as all religious men must (in Boston), and wore shoes with black stockings the year round. In his worldly condition, Mr. Flint had always been prospered. He spent five hundred dollars a year in his personal expenses, and made five thou sand in his business, and subscribed, say two hundred dollars a year to such societies as printed the name of the donors. Mr. Flint had no worldly acquaintances. He lived in a pious boarding-house, and sold all his goods to the members of the country churches in communion with his own. He " loved the brethren," for he wished to converse with no one who did not see heaven and the church at his back himself in the foreground, and the other two accessories in the per spective. Piety apart, he had found out at twenty-five, that, as a sinner he would pass through the world And so she was, but without deserving a breath of the || simply Asa Flint as a saint, he would be Asa Flint "idicule commonly attached to the word. She was j| plus eternity and the respect of a large congregation, uneducated, too, if any child of New England can be M He was a shrewd man, and chose the better part. called uneducated. Beyond school-books and the Bible, she had read nothing but the Scottish Chiefs, and this novel was to her what the works of God are to others. It could never become familiar. It must be the gate of dream-land; what the moon is to a poet, what a grove is to a man of revery, what sun shine is to all the world. And she mentioned it as seldom as people praise sunshine, and lived in it as unconsciously. Harriet had never before been out to service. She was a farmer s daughter, new from the country. If she was not ignorant of the degradation of her condi tion in life, she forgot it habitually. A cheerful and thoughtful smile was perpetually on her lips, and the hardships of her daily routine were encountered as things of course, as clouds in the sky, as pebbles in the inevitable path. Her attention seemed to belong to her body, but her consciousness only to her imagination. In her voice and eyes there was no touch or taint of her laborious servitude, and if she had suddenly been " made a lady," there would have been nothing but her hard hands to redeem from her low condition. Then, hard-working creature as she was, she was touchingly beautiful. A coatue eye would have passed her without notice, perhaps, but a Also, he remembered, sin is more expensive than | sanctity. At four o clock Mr. Flint knocked at the door. At ! the same hour there was a maternal prayer-meeting at the vestry, and of course it was to be numbered among his petty trials that he must find the mistress ; of the house absent from home. He walked up i stairs, and after a look into the room of the sick man, despatched the lad who had opened the door for him, to request the " help" of the family to be present at | the devotions. Harriet had a rather pleasing recollection of Mr. j Flint. He had offered her his arm, a week before, in j coming out from a conference meeting, and had " pre sumed that she was a young lady on a visit" to the mistress ! She arranged her kerchief and took the kettle off the fire. Mr. Flint was standing by the bedside with folded hands. The old man lay looking at him with a kind of uneasy terror in his face, which changed, as Harriet ! entered, to a smile of relief. She retired modestly to li the foot of the bed, and, hidden by the curtain, open ! only at the side, she waited the commencement of the I! prayer. "Kneel there, little boy !" said Mr. Flint, pointing and painter would not. She was of a fragile shape, and had to a chair on the other side of the light-stand, " a slight stoop, but her head was small and exquisitely |j you, my dear, kneel here by me ! Let us pray !" moulded, and her slender neck, round, graceful, and j polished, was set upon her shoulders with the fluent grace of a bird s. Her hair was profuse, and of a tinge almost yellow in the sun, but her eyes were of a blue, deep almost to blackness, and her heavy eye lashes darkened them still more deeply. She had the least possible color in her cheeks. Her features were soft and unmarked, and expressed delicacy and repose, though her nostrils were capable of dilating with an energy of expression that seemed wholly foreign to her character. Rosier had first seen Harriet when called in to the old man, six months before, and they were now sup posed by the family to be engaged lovers, waiting only for a little more sunshine on the barber s fortune. Meantime, they saw each other at least half an hour every morning, and commonly passed their evenings Harriet had dropped upon her knees near the cor ner of the bed, and Mr. Flint dropped upon his, on the other side of the post, so that after raising his hands in the first adjuration, they descended gradually, and quite naturally, upon the folded hands of the neighbor and there they remained. She dared not withdraw them, but as his body rocked to and fro in his devout exercise, she drew back her head to avoid coming into farther contact, and escaped with only his breath upon her temples. It was a very eloquent prayer. Mr. Flint s voice, in a worldly man, would have been called insinuating, but its kind of covert sweetness, low and soft, seemed, in a prayer, only the subdued monotony of reverence and devotion. But it won upon the ear all the same. He began, with a repetition of all the most sublime ascriptions of the psalmist, filling the room, it appeared THE PHARISEE AND THE BARBER. to Harriet, with a superhuman presence. She trem bled to be so near him with his words of awe. Grad ually he took up the more affecting and lender pas sages of scripture, and drew the tears into her eyes with the pathos of his tone and the touching images he wove together. His hand grew moist upon hers, and he leaned closer to her. He began, after a short pause, to pray for her especially that her remarkable beauty might not be a snare to her that her dove- like eyes might beam only on the saddened faces of the saints that she might be enabled to shun the company of the worldly, and consort only with God s people and that the tones of prayer now in her ears might sink deep into her heart as the voice of one who would never cease to feel an interest in her tem poral and eternal welfare. His hand tightened its grasp upon hers, and his face turned more toward her; and as Harriet, blushing, spite of the awe weighing on her heart, stole a look at the devout man, she met the full gaze of his coal-black eyes fixed unwinkingly upon her. She was entranced. She dared not stir, and she dared not take her eyes from his. And when he came to his amen, she sank back upon the ground, and covered her face with her hands. And presently she remembered, with some wonder, that the old man, for whom Mr. Flint had come to pray, had not been even mentioned in the prayer. The lad left the room after the amen, and Mr. FliiH raised Harriet from the floor and seated her upon a chair out of the old man s sight, and pulled a hymn- book from his pocket, and sat down beside her. She was a very enthusiastic singer, to say the least, and he commonly led the singing at the conferences, and so, holding her hand that she might beat the time with him, he passed an hour in what he would call very sweet communion. And by this time the mistress of- the family came home, and Mr. Flint took his leave. From that evening, Mr. Flint fairly undertook the " eternal welfare" of the beautiful girl. From her kind mistress he easily procured for her the indul gence due to an awakened sinner, and she had permis sion to frequent the nightly conference, Mr. Flint always charging himself with the duty of seeing her safely home. He called sometimes in the afternoon, and had a private interview to ascertain the " state of her mind," and under a strong " conviction" of some thing or other, the excited girl lived now in a constant revery, and required as much looking after as a child. She was spoiled as a servant, but Mr. Flint had only done his duty by her. This seemed all wrong to Rosier, the barber, how ever. The bright, sweet face of the girl he thought to marry, had grown sad, and her work went all amiss he could see that. She had no smile, and almost no word, for him. He liked little her going out at dusk when he could not accompany her, and coming home late with the same man always, though a very good man, no doubt. Then, once lately, when he had spoken of the future, she had murmured some thing which Mr. Flint had said about " marrying with unbelievers," and it stuck in Rosier s mind and trou bled him. Harriet grew thin and haggard besides, though she paid more attention to her dress, and dressed more ambitiously than she used to do. We are reaching back over a score or more of years for the scenes we are describing, and memory j drops here and there a circumstance by the way. The reader can perhaps restore the lost fragments, if we j give what we remember of the outline. The old man died, and Rosier performed the last of his offices to fit him for the grave, and that, if we j remember rightly, was the last of his visits, but one, to the white house in Sheafe lane. The bed was scarce vacated by the dead, ere it was required again for another object of pity. Harriet was put into it with a brain fever. She was ill for many weeks, and called constantly on Mr. Flint s name in her delirium; and when the fever left her, she seemed to have but one desire on earth that he should come and see her. Message after message was secretly carried to him by the lad, whom she had attached to her with her uniform kindness and sweet temper, but he never came. She relapsed after a while into a state of stu por, like idiocy, and when day after day passed with out amendment, it was thought necessary to sendflfr her father to take her home. A venerable looking old farmer, with white hairs, drove his rough wagon into Sheafe lane one evening, we well remember. Slowly, with the aid of his long staff, he crept up the narrow staircase to his daugh ter s room, and stood a long time, looking at her in silence. She did not speak to him. He slept upon a bed made up at the side of hers, upon the floor, and the next morning he went out early for his horse, and she was taken up and dressed for the journey. She spoke to no one, and when the old man had breakfasted, she quietly submitted to be carried toward the door. The sight of the street first seemed to awaken some recollection, and suddenly in a whisper she called to Mr. Flint. " Who is Mr. Flint ?" asked the old man. Rosier was at the gate, standing there with his hat off to bid her farewell. She stopped upon the side walk, and looked around hurriedly. "He is not here I ll wait for him." cried Harriet, in a troubled voice, and she let go her father s arm and stepped back. They took hold of her and drew her toward the wagon, but she struggled to get free, and moaned like a child in grief. Rosier took her by the hand and tried to speak to her, but he choked, and the tears came to his eyes. Apparently she did not know him. A few passers-by gathered around now, and it was necessary to lift her into the wagon by force, for the distressed father was confused and embarrassed with her struggles, and the novel scene around him. At the suggestion of the mistress of the family, Rosier lifted her in his arms and seated hsr in the chair in tended for her, but her screams began to draw a crowd around, and her struggles to free herself were so vio lent, that it was evident the old man could never take her home alone. Rosier kindly offered to accompany him, and as he held her in her seat and tried to sooth her, the unhappy father got in beside her and drove away. She reached home, Rosier informed us, in a state of dreadful exhaustion, still calling on the name that haunted her; and we heard soon after, that she re lapsed into a brain fever, and death soon came to her with a timely deliverance from her trouble. MRS. PASSABLE TROTT. ai MRS, PASSABLE TROTT, n aime pas qtte les autr THE temerity with which I hovered on the brink || mourning should be over the very day the very of matrimony when a very young man could only be |i hour her first love should be ready for her, good as appreciated by a fatuitous credulity. The number! new! of very fat mothers of very plain families who can jl I have said nothing of any evidences of continued point me out to their respectable offspring as their ! attachment on the part of Mrs. Trott. She was a once imminent papa, is ludicrously improbable. The j discreet person, and not likely to compromise Mr. P. truth was that I had a powerful imagination in my Trott till she knew the strength of his constitution, early youth, and no "realizing sense." A ""- 1 """ - But there was one evidence of lingering preference which I built upon like a rock. I had not visited her during these fifteen years. Trott liked me not you can guess why ! But I had a nephew, five years old when Miss Balch was my " privately engaged," and as like me, that boy, as could be copied by nature. A coral neck lace, warm from the wearer a shoe with a little round stam in the sole anything flannel a biften rosebud with the mark of a tooth upon it a rose, a glove, a thimble either of these was agony, ecstasy ! To any thing with curls and skirts, and especially if encircled by a sky-blue sash, my heart was as prodigal as a II He was our unsuspecting messenger of love, going to Croton hydrant. Ah me ! jl play in old Batch s garden when I was forbidden the But, of all my short eternal attachments, Fidelia 1 1 house, unconscious of the billet-doux in the pocket Balch (since Mrs. P. Trott) was the kindest and fair- of his pinafore ; and to this boy, after our separation, seemed Fidelia to cling. He grew up to a youth of mind and manners, and^ still she" cherished him. He all but lived at old Trott s, petted and made much of her constant companion reading, walking, riding indeed, when home from college, her sole society. Are you surprised that, in all this, there was a tender- est. Faithless of course she was, since my name does not begin with a T. but if she did not continue to love me P. Trott or no P. Trott she was shock ingly forsworn, as can be proved by several stars, usually considered very attentive listeners. I rather pitied poor Trott for ] knew " Her heart it was another s," and he was rich and forty-odd. But they seemed to live very harmoniously, and if I availed myself of such little consolations as fell in my way, it was the result of philosophy. I never forgot the faithless Fidelia. This is to be a disembowelled narrative, dear reader skipping from the maidenhood of my heroine to her widowhood, fifteen years yet I would have you supply here and there a betweenity. My own suffer ings at seeing my adored Fidelia go daily into another man s house and shut the door after her, you can easily conceive. Though not in the habit of rebelling against human institutions, it did seem to me that the marriage ceremony had no business to give old Trott quite so much for his money. But the aggravating part of it was to come ! Mrs. P. Trott grew prettier every day, and of course three hundred and sixty- five noticeable degrees prettier every year! She seemed incapable of, or not liable to, wear and tear ; and probably old Trott was a man, in-doors, of tery even behavior. And, it should be said too, in expla nation, that, as Miss Balch, Fidelia was a shade too fat for her model. She embellished as her dimples ness of reminiscence that touched and assured me ? Ah " On revient toujours A ses premiers amours !" I thought it delicate, and best, to let silence do it3 work during that year of mourning. I did not whis per even to my nephew Bob the secret of my happi ness. I left one card of condolence after old Trott s funeral, and lived private, counting the hours. The slowest kind of eternity it appeared ! The morning never seemed to me to break with so much difficulty and reluctance as on the anniversary of the demise of Mr. Passable Trott June 2, 1840. Time is a comparative thing, I well know, but the minutes seemed to stick, on that interminable morn ing. I began to dress for breakfast at four but de tails are tiresome. Let me assure you that twelve o clock, A. M., did arrive ! The clocks struck it, and the shadows verified it. I could not have borne an accidental " not at home," and I resolved not to run the risk of it. Lovers, be sides, are not tied to knockers and ceremony. I bribed the gardener. Fidelia s boudoir, I knew, opened upon the lawn, and it seemed more like love to walk in. grew shallower. Trifle by trifle, like the progress of jj She knew I knew Fate and circumstance knew and a statue, the superfluity fell away from nature s ori- I had ordained that that morning was to be ibovedilp, inal Miss Balch (as designed in Heaven), and when 1 joined on, and dovetailed to our last separatio time between was to be a blank. Of ex pected me. The garden door was ajnr as paid for The Of course she ex- I entered, wrsed the vegetable beds, tripped through the flow- -walk, and-oh bliss . -the window was open! I old Passable died (and no one knew what that P. stood for, till it was betrayed by the indiscreet plate on his coffin) Mrs. Trott, thirty-three years old, was at her maximum of beauty. Plump, taper, transpa- j; tn rently fair, with an arm like a high-conditioned Venus, j er--a.n., ....- --- - and a neck set on like the swell of a French horn, !| could just see the Egyptian urn on its pedestal of he was consumedly srood-looking. When I saw in || sphinxes, into which I knew (per Bob) she threw all the paper, " Died, Mr. P. Trott," I went out and i! her fading roses. I glided near. I looked in at the walked passed the house, with overpowering emotions. \ window. Thanks to a "rent many refusals, / had been faithful ! Ah, that picture ! She sat with her back to nie- / could bring hw the same heart, unused and undam- ! her arm-that arm of rosy alabaster-thrown careless- aged, which I had offered her before! / could || ly over her chair her egg-shell chin resting o generously overlook Mr. Trott s temporary occupa- other thumb and forefinger-hereyehds sweeping her tion (since he had lft us his money !)-and when her cheek-and a white-yes ! a white bow in her hair . THE SPIRIT-LOVE OP " IONE And her dress was of snowy lawn white, bridal white ! Adieu, old Passable Trott ! I wiped ray eyes and looked again. Old Trott s portrail hung on the wall, but that was nothing. Her guitar Iny on the table, and did I see aright ? a miniature just beside it ! Perhaps of old Trott ta ken out for the last time. Well well ! He was a very respectable man, and had been very kind to her, most likely. " Ehem !" said I, stepping over the sill, " Fidelia!" She started and turned, and certainly looked sur prised. " Mr. G !" said she. " It is long since we parted !" I said, helping my self to a chair. " Quite long !" said Fidelia. " So long that you have forgotten the name of G ?" I asked tremulously. " Oh no !" she replied, covering up the miniature on the table by a careless movement of her scarf. " And may I hope that that name has not grown distasteful to you ?" I summoned courage to say. "N , no! I do not know that it has, Mr. G !" The blood returned to my fainting heart ! I felt as in days of yore. "Fidelia !" said I, " let me not waste the precious moments. You loved me at twenty may I hope that I may stand to you in a nearer relation ! May I ven ture to think that our family is not unworthy of a union with the Balches ? that, as Mrs. G , you could be happy ?" Fidelia looked hesitated took up the miniature, and clasped it to her breast. " Do 1 understand you rightly, Mr. G !" she tremulously exclaimed. "But I think I do! I re member well what you were at twenty ! This picture is like what you were then with differences, it is true, but still like! Dear picture!" she exclaimed again, kissing it with rapture. (How could she have got my miniature? but no matter taken by stealth, I presume. Sweet and ea ger anticipation!) "And Robert has returned from college, then ?" she said, inquiringly. "Not that I know of," said I. " Indeed ! then he has written to you !" " Not recently !" " Ah, poor boy ! he anticipated ! Well, Mr. G ! 1 will not affect to be coy where my heart has been so long interested." (I stood ready to clasp her to my bosom.) " Tell Robert my mourning is over tell him his name" (the name of G , of course) " is the mu sic of my life, and that I will marry whenever he pleases !" A horrid suspicion crossed my mind. "Pardon me!" said I ; "whenever he pleases, did you say ? Why, particularly, when he pleases?" " La ! his not being of age is no impediment, I hope!" said Mrs. Trott, with some surprise. "Look at his miniature, Mr. G ! It has a boyish look, it s true but so had you at twenty !" Hope sank within me ! I would have given worlds to be away. The truth was apparent to me perfect ly apparent. She loved that boy Bob that child that mere child and meant to marry him ! Yet how could it be possible ! I might be yes I must be, mistaken. Fidelia Balch who was a woman when he was an urchin in petticoats ! she to think of mar rying that boy ! I wronged her oh I wronged her ! But. worst come to the worst, there was no harm in having it perfectly understood. "Pardon me!" said I, putting on a look as if I expected a shout of laughter for the mere supposi tion, " I should gather (categorically, mind you ! only categorically) I should gather from what you said just now (had I been a third person listening, that is to say with no knowledge of the parties) I should really have gathered that Bob little Bob was the happy man, and not I ! Now don t laugh at me!" " You the happy man ! Oh Mr. G ! you are joking! Oh no! pardon me if I have unintentionally misled you but if I marry again, Mr. G , it will be a young man! ! ! In short, not to mince the mat ter, Mr. G ! your nephew is to become my hus band (nothing unforeseen turning up), in the course of the next week ! We shall have the pleasure of seeing you at the wedding, of course Oh no ! You! I should fancy that no woman would make two une qual marriages, Mr. G ! Good morning, Mr. I was left alone, and to return as I pleased, by the vegetable garden or the front door. I chose the lat ter, being somewhat piqued as well as inexpressibly grieved and disappointed. But philosophy came to my aid, and I soon fell into a mood of speculation. " Fidelia is constant!" said I to myself " constant, after all ! She made up her mouth for me at twenty. But I did not stay twenty! Oh no! I, unadvisedly, and without preparatively cultivating her taste for thirty-five, became thirty-five. And now what was she to do ? Her taste was not at all embarked in Passa ble Trott, and it stayed just as it was waiting to be called up and used. She locks it up decently till old Trott dies, and then reproduces what? Why, just what she locked up a taste for a young man at twenty and just such a young man as she loved when she was twenty ! Bob of course ! Bob is like me Bob is twenty ! Be Bob her husband ! But I cannot say I quite like such constancy ! THE SPIRIT-LOVE OF "IONE (SINCE DISCOVERED TO BE MISS JONES.) NOT long ago, but before poetry and pin-money were discovered to be cause and effect, Miss Phebe Jane Jones was one of the most charming contributors to a certain periodical now gone over " Lethe s wharf." Her signature was "lone S !" a neat anagram, out of which few would have picked the monosyllable engraved upon her father s brass knocker. She wrote mostly in verse ; but her prose, of which you will presently see a specimen or two, was her better vein as being more easily embroidered, and not cramped with the inexorable fetters of rhyme. Miss Jones abandoned authorship before the New Mirror was es tablished, or she would, doubtless, have been one of its paid contributors as much ("we" flatter ourselves) as could well be said of her abilities. The beauty of hectics and hollow chests has been written out of fashion ; so I may venture upon the simple imagery of truth and nature. Miss Jones was- THE SPIRIT-LOVE OF " IONE S- as handsome as a prize heifer. She was a compact, I plump, wholesome, clean-limbed, beautifully-marked animal, with eyes like inkstands running over; and a mouth that looked, when she smiled, as if it had never j been opened before, the teeth seemed so fresh and un- handled. Her voice had a tone clear as the ring of a j silver dollar ; and her lungs must have been as sound j as a pippin, for when she laughed (which she never did unless she was surprised into it, for she loved mel ancholy), it was like the gurgling of a brook over the pebbles. The bran-new people made by Deucalion and Pyrrha, when it cleared up after the flood, were j probably in Miss Jones s style. But do you suppose tint "lone S " cared any thing for her looks ! What value the poor perishing tenement in which nature had chosen to lodge her intellectual and spiritual part ! What care for her covering of clay ! What waste thought on the chain that kept her from the Pleiades, of which, perhaps, she was the lost sister (who knows) ? And, more than all oh gracious ! to be loved for this trumpery-dra pery of her immortal essence ! Yes infra dig. as it may seem to record such an unworthy trifle the celestial Phebe had the superflu ity of an every-day lover. Gideon Flimmins was wil ling to take her on her outer inventory alone. He loved her cheeks he did not hesitate to admit ! He loved her lips he could not help specifying ! He had been known to name her shoulders ! And, in taking out a thorn for her with a pair of tweezers one day, he had literally exclaimed with rapture that she had a heavenly little pink thumb! But of " lone S " he had never spoken a word. No, though she read him faithfully every eft usion that appeared asked his j opinion of every separate stanza talked of "lone S " as the person on earth she most wished to see (for she kept her literary incog.) Gideon had never alluded to her a second time, and perseveringly, hate fully, atrociously, and with mundane motive only, he made industrious love to the outside and visible Phe be ! Well! well! Contiguity is something, in love ; and the Flim- minses were neighbors of the Joneses. Gideon had another advantage for Ophelia Flimmins, his eldest sister, was Miss Jones s eternally attached friend. To explain this, I must trouble the reader to take notice that there were two streaks in the Flimmins family. Fat Mrs. Flimmins, the mother (who had been dead a year), was a thorough " man of business," and it was | to her downright and upright management of her hus band s wholesale and retail hat-lining establishment, ! that the family owed its prosperity ; for Herodotus Flimmins, whose name was on the sign, was a flimsy- ! ish kind of sighing-dying man, and nobody could ever find out what on earth he wanted. Gideon and the . two fleshy Miss Flimminses took after their mother; ; but Ophelia, whose semi-translucent frame was the ! envy of her faithful Phebe, was, with very trifling ex ceptions, the perfect model of her sire. She devotedly i loved the moon. She had her preferences among the stars of heaven. She abominated the garish sun. And she and Phebe met by night on the sidewalk around ; their mutual nearest corner deeply veiled to conceal their emotion from the intruding gaze of such stars as they were not acquainted with and there they com muned ! I never knew, nor have I any, the remotest suspicion of the reasoning by which these commingled spirits arrived at the conclusion that there was a want in their delicious union. They might have known, indeed, ; that the chain of bliss, ever so far extended, breaks off j at last with an imperfect link that though mustard > and ham may turn two slices of innocent bread into a sandwich, there will still be an unbuttered outside. But they were young they were sanguine. Phebe, at least, believed that in the regions of space there ex isted "wandering but not lost" the aching worser half of which she was the "better" some lofty intel lect, capable of sounding the unfathomable abysses of hers some male essence, all soul and romance, with whom she coald soar finally, arm-in-arm, to their na tive star, with no changes of any consequence between their earthly and their astral communion. It occurred to her at last that a letter addressed to him, through her favorite periodical, might possibly reach his eye. The following (which the reader may very likely re member to have seen) appeared in the paper of the following Saturday : " To my spirit-husband, greeting : " Where art thou, bridegroom of my soul ? Thy lone S calls to thee from the aching void of her lonely spirit ! What name bearest thou ? What path walkest thou ? How can I, glow-worm like, lift my wings and show thee my lamp of guiding love ? Thus wing I these words to thy dwelling-place (for thou art, perhaps, a subscriber to the M r). Go truants ! Rest not till ye meet his eye. "But I must speak to thee after the manner of this world. " I am a poetess of eighteen summers. Eighteen weary years have I worn this prison-house of flesh, in which, when torn from thee, I was condemned to wan der. But my soul is untamed by its cage of dark ness ! I remember, and remember only, the lost hus band of my spirit-world. I perform, coldly and scorn fully, the unheavenly necessities of this temporary existence ; and from the windows of my prison (black like the glimpses of the midnight heaven they let in) I look out for the coming of my spirit-lord. Lonely ! lonely ! " Thou wouldst know, perhaps, what semblance 1 bear since my mortal separation from thee. Alas ! the rose, not the lily, reigns upon my cheek ! I would not disappoint thee, though of that there is little fear, for thou lovest for the spirit only. But believe not, because health holds me rudely down, and I seem not fragile and ready to depart believe not, oh bridegroom of my soul ! that I bear willingly my fleshly fetter, or endure with patience the degrading homage to its beauty. For there are soulless worms who think me fair. Ay in the strength and freshness of my corpo real covering, there are those who icjoice ! Oh ! mockery ! mockery ! " List to me, Ithuriel (for I must have a name to call thee by, and, till thou breathest thy own seraphic name into my ear, be thou Ithuriel) ! List ! I would meet thee in the darkness only ! Thou shall not see me with thy mortal eyes ! Penetrate the past, and remember the smoke-curl of wavy lightness in which I floated to thy embrace ! Remember the sunset- cloud to which we retired; the starry lamps that hung over our slumbers! And on the softest whisper of our voices let thy thoughts pass to mine! Speak not aloud! Murmur! murmur! murmur! "Dost thou know, Ilhuriel, I would fain prove to thee my freedom from the trammels of this world ? In what chance shape thy accident of clay may be cast, I know not. Ay, and I care not ! I would thou wert a hunchback, Ithuriel ! I would thou wert disguised as a monster, my spirit-husband ! So would I prove to thee my elevation above mortality ! So would I show thee, that in the range of eternity for which we are wedded, a moment s covering darkens thee not that, like a star sailing through a cloud, thy brightness is remembered while it is eclipsed that thy lone would recognise thy voice, be aware of thy presence, adore thee, as she was celestially wont ay, though thou wert imprisoned in the likeness of a reptile ! lone care for mortal beauty ! Ha ! ha ! ha ! Ha. ha! ha! " Come to me, Ithuriel ! My heart writhes in its THE SPIRIT-LOVE OF " IONE S- cell for converse with thee ! I am sick-thoughted ! My spirit wrings its thin fingers to play with thy ethe real hair ! My earthly cheek, though it obstinately refuses to pale, tingles with fever for thy coming. Glide to me in the shadow of eve softly ! softly ! "Address P. at the M r office. "Thine, "loNES ." ****** There came a letter to "P." ****** It was an inky night. The moon was in her private chamber. The stars had drawn over their heads the coverlet of clouds and pretended to sleep. The street lamps heartlessly burned on. Twelve struck with "damnable iteration." On tiptoe and with beating heart Phebe Jane left her father s area. Ophelia Flimmins followed her at a little distance, for lone was going to meet her spirit- bridegroom, and receive a renewal of his ante-vital vows; and she wished her friend, the echo of her soul, to overhear and witness them. For oh if words were anything if the soul could be melted and poured, lava-like, upon " satin post" if there was truth in feel ings magnetic and prophetic then was he who had responded to, and corresponded with, lone S (she writing to "I," and he to "P"), the ideal for whom she had so long sighed the lost half of the whole so mournfully incomplete her soul s missing and once spiritually Siamesed twin ! His sweet letters had echoed every sentiment of her heart. He had agreed with her that outside was nothing that earthly beauty was poor, perishing, pitiful that nothing that could be seen, touched, or described, had anything to do with the spiritually-passionate intercourse to which their respective essences achingly yearned that, un seen, unheard, save in whispers fainl as a rose s sigh when languishing at noon, they might meet in com munion blissful, superhuman, and satisfactory. Yet where fittingly to meet oh agony ! agony ! The street-lamps two squares off had been taken up to lay down gas. Ophelia Flirnmins had inwardly marked it. Between No. 12G and No. 132, more par ticularly, the echoing sidewalk was bathed in unfath omable night for there were vacant lots occupied as a repository for used-up omnibuses. At the most lonely point there stood a tree, and, fortunately, this night, in the gutter beneath the tree, stood a newly- disabled bus of the Knickerbocker line and (sweet omen !) it was blue ! In this covert could the witness ing Ophelia lie perdu, observing unseen through the open door; and beneath this tree was to take place the meeting of souls the re-interchange of sky-born vows the immaterial union of Ithuriel and lone ! Bliss ! bliss ! exquisite to anguish. But oh incontinent vessel Ophelia had blabbed ! The two fat Miss Flimminses were in the secret nay, more they were in the omnibus ! Ay deeply in, and portentously silent, they sat, warm and won dering, on either side of the lamp probably extin guished for ever! They knew not well what was to be. But whatever sort of thing was a "marriage of soul," and whether " Ithuriel" was body or nobody mortal man or angel in a blue scarf the Miss Flim minses wished to see him. Half an hour before the trysting-time they had fanned their way thither, for a thunder-storm was in the air and the night was intol erably close; and, climbing into the omnibus, they re ciprocally loosened each other s upper hook, and with their moistened collars laid starchless in their laps, awaited the opening of the mystery. Enter Ophelia, as expected. She laid her thin hand upon the leather string, and, drawing the door after j her, leaned out of its open window in breathless sus- [ pense and agitation. lone s step was now audible, returning from 132. I Slowly she came, but invisibly, for it had grown sud denly pitch-dark ; and only the far-off lamps, up and I down the street, served to guide her footsteps. But hark ! the sound of a heel ! He came ! They j met ! He passed his arm around her and drew her beneath the tree and with whispers, soft and low, leaned breathing to her ear. He was tall. He was in a cloak. And, oh ecstasy, lie was thin ! But thinkest thou to know, oh reader of dust, what passed on those ethereal whispers? Futile futile curiosity ! Even to I Ophelia s straining ear, those whispers were inaudible. But hark ! a rumble ! Something wrong in the bowels of the sky ! And pash ! pash ! on the re sounding roof of the omnibus fell drops of rain fit fully ! fitfully! " My dear !" whispered Ophelia (for lone had bor rowed her chip hat, the better to elude recognition), "ask Ithuriel to step in." Ithuriel started to find a witness near, but a whisper from lone reassured him, and gathering his cloak around his face, he followed his spirit-bride into the bus. The fat Miss Flimminses contracted their orbed shapes, and made themselves small against the padded extremity of the vehicle ; Ophelia retreated to the mid- j die, and, next the door, on either side, sat the starry bride and bridegroom all breathlessly silent. Yet there was a murmur for five hearts beat within that bus s duodecimal womb; and the rain pelted on the j roof, pailsful-like and unpityingly. But slap! dash! whew! heavens! In rushed a I youth, dripping, dripping ! " Get out !" cried lone, over whose knees he drew himself like an eel pulled through a basket of con torted other eels. " Come, come, young man !" said a deep bass voice, of which everybody had some faint remembrance. " Oh !" cried one fat Miss Flimmins. " Ah !" screamed the other. " What ? dad !" exclaimed Gideon Flimmins, who had dashed into the sheltering bus to save his new hat "dad here with a girl !" But the fat Flimminses were both in convulsions. Scream ! scream ! scream ! A moment of confusion ! The next moment a sud den light ! A watchman with his lantern stood at the door. "Papa !" ejaculated three of the ladies. "Old Flimmins! my heart will burst !" murmured lone. The two fat girls hurried on their collars; and Gid eon, all amazement at finding himself in such a family party at midnight in a lonely bus, stepped out and en tered into converse with the guardian of the night. The rain stopped suddenly, and the omnibus gave up its homogeneous contents. Old Flimmins, who was in a violent perspiration, gave Gideon his cloak to carry, and his two arms to his two pinguid adult pledges. Gideon took Ophelia and Phebe, and they mizzled. Mockery ! mockery ! lone is not yet gone to the spirit-sphere kept here partly by the strength of the fleshy fetter over which she mourned, and partly by the dove-tailed duties con sequent upon annual Flimminses. Gideon loves her after the manner of this world but she sighs "when she hears sweet music," that her better part is still unappreciated unfathomed "cabined, cribbed, con fined !" MABEL WYNNE. MABEL WYNNE, MABEL WYNNE was the topmost sparkle on the crest of the first wave of luxury that swept over New York. Up to her time, the aristocratic houses were furnished with high bullets, high-backed and hair- bottomed mahogany chairs, one or two family portraits, and a silver tray on the side board, containing cordials and brandy for morning-callers. In the centre of the room hung a chandelier of colored lamps, and the I lighting of this and the hiring of three negroes (to i h say, a clarinet, a baseviol, "fatigue," as the French say, a clarinet, a baseviol, j and a violin) were the only preparations necessary for j the most distinguished ball. About the time that j Mabel left school, however, some adventurous pointer of the Dutch haul ton ventured upon lamp-stands for the corners of the rooms, stuffed red benches along , the walls, and chaHied floors; and upon this a French family of great beauty, residing in the lower part of Broadway, ventured upon a fancy ball with wax-candles instead of lamps, French dishes and sweetmeats in stead of pickled oysters and pink champagne ; and, the door thus opened, luxury came in like a flood. Houses were built on a new plan of sumptuous ar rangement, the ceiling stained in fresco, and the columns of the doors within painted in imitation of bronze and marble; and at last the climax was topped by Mr. Wynne, who sent the dimensions of every room in his new house to an upholsterer in Paris, would show better the humbler her surroundings. As Perdita upon the greensward, and open to a shep- j herd s wooing, I should inevitably sling my heart upou a crook " "And forswear that formidable, impregnable vow of celibacy ?" interrupted Miss Wynne. " I am only supposing a case, and you are not likely to be a shepherdess on the green." But Mr. Blythe s smile ended in a look of clouded revery, and, after a few minutes conversation, ill sustained by the gen tlemen, who seemed each in the other s way, they rose and took their leave Mr. Bellallure lingering last, for he was a lover avowed. As the door closed upon her admirer, Miss Wynne drew a letter from her portfolio, and turning it over and over with a smile of abstracted curiosity, opened and read it for the second time. She had received it that morning from an unknown source, and as it was rather a striking communication, perhaps the reader had better know something of it before we go on. It commenced without preface, thus: " On a summer morning, twelve years ago, a chimney-sweep, after doing his work and singing his song, commenced his descent. It was the chimney of a large house, and becoming embarrassed among the flues, he lost his way and found himself on the with carle blanche as to costliness and style, and the , hearth of a sleeping-chamber occupied by a child. fournisscur to come out himself and see to the arrange- jj The sun was just breaking through the curtains of ment and decoration. r 16 roorn a vacate d bed showed that some one had Jt was Manhattan tea-time, old style, and while risen lately, probably the nurse, and the sweep, with Mr. Wynne, who had the luxury of a little plain h an irresistible impulse, approached the unconscious furniture in the basement, was comfortably taking his j little sleeper. She lay with her head upon a round toast and hyson below stairs, Miss Wynne was just announced as "at home," by the black footman, and two of her admirers made their highly-scented entree. They were led through a suite of superb rooms, light ed with lamps hid in ahbaster vases, and ushered in at a mirror-door beyond, where, in a tent of fluted silk, with ottomans and draperies of the same stuff, ex quisitely arranged, the imperious Mabel held her court of teens. Mabel Wynne was one of those accidents of sover eign beauty which nature seems to take delight in mis placing in the world like the superb lobelia flashing among the sedges, or the golden oriole pluming his dazzling wings in the depth of a wilderness. She was no less than royal in all her belongings. Her features expressed consciousness of sway a sway whose dictates had been from infancy anticipated. arm buried in flaxen curls, and* the smile of a dream on her rosy and parted lips. It was a picture of singular loveliness, and something in the heart of that boy-sweep, as he stood and looked upon the child, knelt to it with an agony of worship. The tears gush ed to his eyes. He stripped the sooty blanket from his breast, and looked at the skin white upon his side. j The contrast between his condition and that of the fair child sleeping before him brought the blood to his blackened brow with the hot rush of lava. He knelt j beside the bed on which she slept, took her hand in j his sooty grasp, and with a kiss upon the white and ! dewy fingers poured his whole soul with passionate earnestness into a resolve. " Hereafter you may learn, if you wish, the first struggles of that boy in the attempt to diminish the distance between yourself and him for you will have Never a surprise had startled those languishing eyelids j understood that you were the beautiful child he saw from their deliberateness never a suffusion other than | j asleep. *I repeat that it is twelve years since he stood the humid cloud of a tender and pensive hour had 1 1 in your chamber. He has seen you almost daily since dimmed those adorable dark eyes. Or, so at least it i then watched your going out and coming in fed his I eyes and heart on your expanding beauty, and inlorm- ed himself of every change and development in your With this intimate knowledge seemed ! She was a fine creature, nevertheless Mabel Wynne ! But she looked to others like a specimen of such fragile and costly workmanship that nothing beneath a palace would be a becoming home for her. " For the present," said Mr. Bellallure, one of the gentlemen who entered, " the bird has a fitting cage." Miss Wynne only smiled in reply, and the other gentleman took upon himself to be the interpreter of her unexpressed thought. " The cage is the accessory not the bird," said Mr. Blythe, " and, for iny part, 1 think Miss Wynne I mind and character. of you, and with the expansion of his own intellect, his passion has deepened and strengthened. It pos sesses him now as life does his heait, and will endure as long. But his views with regard to you have changed, nevertheless. " You will pardon the presumption of my first feeling that to attain my wishes I had only to be come your equal. It was a natural error for my agony at realizing the difference of our conditions iu MABEL WYNNE. life was enough to absorb me at the time but it is surprising to me how long that delusion lasted. I am rich now. I have lately added to my fortune the last acquisition I thought desirable. B ut with the thought of the next thing to be done, came like a thunderbolt upon me the feai* that after all my efforts you might be destined for another! The thought is simple enough. You would think that it would have haunted me from the beginning. But I have either uncon sciously shut my eyes to it, or I have been so absorbed in educating and enriching myself that that goal only was visible to me. It was perhaps fortunate for my perseverance that I was so blinded. Of my midnight studies, of my labors, of all my plans, self-denials, and anxieties, you have seemed the reward ! I have never gained a thought, never learned a refinement, never turned over gold and silver, that it was not a step nearer to Mabel Wynne. And now, that in worldly advantages, after twelve years of effort and trial, I stand by your side at last, a thousand men who never thought of you till yesterday are equal competitors with me for your hand ! "But, as I said, my views with regard to you have changed. I have, with bitter effort, conquered the selfishness of this one lifetime ambition. I am devo ted to you, as I have been from the moment I first saw you life and fortune. These are still yours but without the price at which you might spurn them. My person is plain and unattractive. You have seen me, and shown me no preference. There are others whom you receive with favor. And with your glorious beauty, and sweet, admirably sweet qualities of char acter, it would be an outrage to nature that you should not choose freely, and be mated with something of your kind. Of those who now surround you I see no one worthy of you but he may come ! Jealousy shall not blind me to his merits. The first mark of your favor (and I shall be aware of it) will turn upon him my closest, yet most candid scrutiny. He must love you well for I shall measure his love by my own. He must have manly beauty, and delicacy, and honor he must be worthy of you, in short but he need not be rich. He who steps between me and you takes the fortune I hadamassed for you. 1 tell you this that you may have no limit in your choice for the worthiest of a woman s lovers is often barred from her by poverty. "Of course I have made no vow against seeking your favor. On the contrary, I shall lose no oppor tunity of making myself agreeable to you. It is against my nature to abandon hope, though I am painfully conscious of my inferiority to other men in the quali ties which please a woman. All I have done is to deprive my pursuit of its selfishness to make it sub servient to your happiness purely as it still would be were I the object of your preference. You will hear from me at any crisis of your feelings. Pardon my being a spy upon you. I know you well enough to be sure that this letter will be a secret since 1 wish it. Adieu." Mabel laid her cheek in the hollow of her hand and mused long on this singular communication. It stirred her romance, but it wakened still more her curiosity. Who was he? She had "seen him and shown him no preference !" Which could it be of the hundred of herchance-made acquaintances ? She conjectured at some disadvantage, for " she had come out" within the past year only, and her mother having long been dead, the visiters to the house were all but recently made known to her. She could set aside two thirds of them, as sons of families well known, but there were at least a score of others, any one of whom might, twelve years before, have been as obscure as her anonymous lover. Whoever he might be, Mabel thought he could hardly come into her presence again without betraying himself, and, with a pleased smile at the thought of the discovery, she again locked up the letter. Those were days (to be regretted or not, as you please, dear reader !) when the notable society of New York revolved in one self-complacent and clear ly-defined circle. Call it a wheel, and say that the centre was a belle and the radii were beaux (the periphery of course composed of those who could "down with the dust"). And on the fifteenth of July, regularly and imperatively, this fashionable wheel rolled off to Saratoga. " Mabel ! my daughter !" said old Wynne, as he bade her good night the evening before starting for the springs, " it is useless to be blind to the fact that among your many admirers you have several very pressing lovers suiters for your hand I may safely say. Now, I do not wish to put any unnecessary re- i straint upon your choice, but as you are going to a | gay place, where you are likely to decide the matter j in your own mind, I wish to express an opinion. You j may give it what weight you think a father s judg- j ment should have in such matters. I do not like Mr. ! Bellallure for, beside my prejudice against the man, we know nothing of his previous life, and he may be a swindler or anything else. I do like Mr. Blythe j for I have known him many years, he comes of a ! most respectable family, and he is wealthy and worthy. j These two seem to me the most in earnest, and you apparently give them the most of your time. Ifthede- I cision is to be between them, you have my choice. Good night, my love !" Some people think it is owing to the Saratoga water. I differ from them. The water is an "altera tive," it is true but I think people do not so much alter as develop at Saratoga. The fact is clear enough that at the springs we change our opinionsof almost everybody but (though it seems a bold supposition at first glance) I am inclined to believe it is because we see so much more of them ! Knowing people in the city and knowing them at the springs is very much in the same line of proof as tasting wine and drinking a bottle. Why, what is a week s history of a city ac quaintance? A morning call thrice a week, a diurnal bow in Broadway, and perhaps a quadrille or two in the party season. What chance in that to ruffle a temper or try a weakness? At the springs, now, dear lady, you wear a man all day like a shoe. Down at the platform with him to drink the waters before break fast strolls on the portico with him till ten drives with him to Barheight s till dinner lounges in the draw ing-room with him till tea dancing and promenading with him till midnight very little short altogether of absolute matrimony ; and, like matrimony, it is a very severe trial. Your " best fellow" is sure, to be found out, and so is your plausible fellow, your egotist, and I your "spoon." Mr. Beverly Bellallure had cultivated the male I attractions with marked success. At times he proba- [ bly thought himself a plain man, and an artist who should only paint what could be measured with a rule, I would have made a plain portrait of Mr. Bellallure. But the atmosphere of the man ! There is a phys iognomy in movement there is aspect in the har monious link between mood and posture there is ex pression in the face of which the features are as much a portrait as a bagpipe is a copy of a Scotch song. Beauty, my dear artist, can not always be translated by canvass and oils. You must paint " the magnetic fluid" to get a portrait of some men. Sir Thomas Lawrence seldom painted anything else as you may see by his picture of Lady Blessington, which is like her without having copied a single feature of her face. Yet an artist would be very much surprised if you should offer to sit to him for your magnetic atmo sphere though it expresses (does it not?) exactly MABEL WYNNE. what you want when you order a picture ! You wish to be painted as your appear to those who love you a picture altogether unrecognisable by those who love you not. Mr. Bellallure, then, was magnetically handsome positively plain. He dressed with an art beyond detection. He spent his money as if he could dip it at will out of Pactolus. He was intimate with nobody, and so nobody knew his history ; but he wrote him self on the register of Congress hall as "from New York," and he threw all his forces into one unmista kable demonstration the pursuit of Miss Mabel Wynne. But Mr. Bellallure had a formidable rival. Mr. Blythe was as much in earnest as he, though he play ed his game with a touch-and-go freedom, as if he was prepared to lose it. And Mr. Blythe had very much surprised those people at Saratoga who did not know that between a very plain man and a very elegant man there is often but the adding of the rose-leaf to the brimming jar. fie was perhaps a little gayer than in New York, certainly a little more dressed, certainly a little more prominent in general conversa tion but without any difference that you could swear to, Mr. Blythe, the plain and reliable business man, whom everybody esteemed without particularly ad miring, had become Mr. Blythe the model of ele gance and ease, the gentleman and conversationist par excellence. And nobody could tell how the statue could have Iain so long unsuspected in the marble. The race for Miss Wynne s hand and fortune was a general sweepstakes, and there were a hundred men at the springs ready to take advantage of any falling back on the part of the two on the lead ; but with Blythe and Bellallure Miss Wynne herself seemed fully occupied. The latter had a " friend at court" the belief, kept secret in the fair Mabel s heart, that he was the romantic lover of whose life and fortune she had been the inspiration. She was an eminently romantic girl with all her strong sense ; and the devo tion which had proved itself so deep and controlling was in reality the dominant spell upon her heart. She felt that she must love that man, whatever his outside might be, and she construed the impenetrable silence with which Bellallure received her occasional hints as to his identity, into a magnanimous deter mination to win her without any advantage from the romance of his position. Yet she sometimes wished it had been Mr. Blythe! The opinion of her father had great weight with her; but, more than that, she felt instinctively that he was the safer man to be intrusted with a woman s happi ness. If there had been a doubt if her father had not assured her that " Mr. Blythe came of a most respectable family" if the secret had wavered be tween them she would have given up to BeMallure without a sigh. Blythe was everything she admired and wished for in a husband but the man who had made himself for her, by a devotion unparalleled even in her reading of fiction, held captive her dazzled im agination, if not her grateful heart. She made con stant efforts to think only of Bellallure, but the efforts were .preceded ominously with a sigh. And now Bellallure sstar seemed in theascendant for urgent business called Mr. Wynne to the city, and on the succeeding day Mr. Blythe followed him, though with an assurance of speedy return. Mabel was left under the care of an indulgent chaperon, who took a pleasure in promoting the happiness of the supposed lovers ; and driving, lounging, waltzing, and promenading, Bellallure pushed his suit with ardor unremitted. He was a skilful master of the art of wooing, and it would have been a difficult woman in deed who would not have been pleased with his soci etybut the secret in Mabel s breast was the spell by which he held her. 7 A week elapsed, and Bellallure pleaded the receipt of unexpected news, and left suddenly for New York to Mabel s surprise exacting no promise at parting, though she felt that she should have given it with re luctance. The mail of the second day following brought her a brief letter from her father, requesting her immediate return; and more important still, a note from her incognito lover. It ran thus: " You will recognise my handwriting again. I have little to say for I abandon the intention I had formed to comment on your apparent preference. Your hap piness is iu your own hands. Circumstances which will be explained to you, and which will excuse this abrupt forwardness, compel me to urge you to an im mediate choice. On your arrival at home, you will meet me in your father s house, where I shall call to await you. I confess tremblingly, that I still cherish a hope. If I am not deceived if you can consent to love me if my long devotion is to be rewarded take my hand when you meet me. That moment will de cide the value of my life. But be prepared also to name another if you love him for there is a neces sity, which I can not explain to you till you have chosen your husband, that this choice should be made on your arrival. Trust and forgive one who has so long loved you!" Mabel pondered long on this strange letter. Her spirit at moments revolted against its apparent dicta tion, but there was the assurance, which she could not resist trusting, that it could be explained and for given. At all events, she was at liberty to fulfil its requisitions or not and she would decide when the time came. Happy was Mabel unconsciously hap py in the generosity and delicacy of her unnamed lover! Her father, by one of the sudden reverses of mercantile fortune, had been stripped of his wealth in a day! Stunned and heart-broken, he knew not how to break it to his daughter, but he had written for her to return. His sumptuous house had been sold over his head, yet the purchaser, whom lie did not know, had liberally offered the use of it till his affairs were settled. And, meantime, his ruin was made public. The news of it, indeed, had reached Saratoga before the departure of Mabel but there | were none willing to wound her by speaking of it. The day was one of the sweetest of summer, and | as the boat ploughed her way down the Hudson, Ma- j bel sat on the deck lost in thought. Her father s opinion of Bellallure, and his probable displeasure at . her choice, weighed uncomfortably on her mind, i She turned her thoughts upon Mr. Blythe, and felt sur- j prised at the pleasure with which she remembered his j kind manners and his trust-inspiring look. She be- j gan to reason with herself more calmly than she had i power to do with her lovers around her. She con- fessed to herself that Bellallure might have the ro mantic perseverance shown in the career of the chim ney-sweep, and still be deficient in qualities necessary to domestic happiness. There seemed to her some thing false about Bellallure. She could not say in what but he had so impressed her. A long day s silent "reflection deepened this impression, and Mabel j arrived at the city with changed feelings. She pre pared herself to meet him at her father s house, and j show him by her manner that she could accept nei ther his hand nor his fortune. Mr. Wynne was at the door to receive his daughter, and Mabel felt relieved, for she thought that his pres- sence would bar all explanation between herself and Bellallure. The old man embraced her with an effu sion of tears which she did not quite understand, but he led her to the drawing-room and closed the door. Mr. Blythe stood before her ! Forgetting the letter dissociated wholly as it was, in her mind, with Mr. Blythe Mabel ran to him with frank cordiality and gave him her hand ! Blythe 98 THE GHOST-BALL AT CONGRESS HALL. stood a moment his hand trembling in hers and as a suspicion of the truth flashed suddenly on Mabel s mind, the generous Jover drew her to his bosom and folded her passionately in his embrace. Mabel s struggles were slight, and her happiness unexpectedly complete. The marriage was like other marriages. Mr. Wynne had drawn a little on his imagination in recommending Mr. Blythe to his daughter as "a young man of most respectable family." | Mr. Blythe was the purchaser of Mr. Wynne s su perb house, and the old man ended his days under its roof happy to the last in the society of the Blythes, j large and little. Mr. Bellallure turned out to be a clever adventurer, and had Mabel married him, she would have been Mrs. Bellallure No. 2 possibly No. 4. He thought himself too nice a young man for monopoly. I think my story is told if your imagination has I rilled up the interstices, that is to say. THE GHOST-BALL AT CONGRESS HALL, IT was the last week of September, and the keeper of " Congress hall" stood on his deserted colonnade. Ths dusty street of Saratoga was asleep in the still ness of village afternoon. The whittlings of the stage- runners at the corners, and around the leaning posts, were fading into dingy undistinguishableness. Stiff and dry hung the slop-cloths at the door of the livery stable, and drearily clean was doorway and stall. " The season" was over. " Well, Mr. B !" said the Boniface of the great caravansary, to a gentlemanly-looking invalid, crossing over from the village tavern on his way to Congress spring, " this looks like the end of it ! A slimmish season, though, Mr. B ! Gad, things isn t as they used to be in your time ! Three months we used to have of it, in them days, and the same people coming and going all summer, and folks own horses, and all the ladies drinking champagne ! And every hop was as good as a ball, and a ball when do you ever see such balls now-a-days ? Why, here s all my best wines in the cellar; and as to beauty pooh! they re done coming here, any how, are the belles, such as belles was!" " You may say that, mine host, you may say that!" replied the damaged Corydon, leaning heavily on his cane, " what they re all gone, now, eh nobody at the United States ? " "Not a soul and here s weather like August! capital weather for young ladies to walk out evenings, and, for a drive to Barheight s nothing like it ! It s a sin, /say, to pass such weather in the city ! Why shouldn t they come to the springs in the Indian summer, Mr. B ?" Coming events seemed to have cast their shadows before. As Boniface turned his eyes instinctively toward the sand hill, whose cloud of dust was the precursor of new pilgrims to the waters, and the sign for the black boy to ring the bell of arrival, behold, on its summit, gleaming through the nebulous pyramid, like a lobster through the steam of the fisherman s pot, one of the red coaches of " the People s Line." And another! And another! And another! Down the sandy descent came the first, while the driver s horn, intermittent with the crack of his whip, set to bobbing every pine cone of the adjacent wil derness. " Prrr ru te too toot pash ! crack ! snap ! prrrr r rut rut nut ! ! G lang ! Hip !" Boniface laid his hand on the pull of the porter s bell, but the thought flashed through his mind that he might have been dreaming was he awake ? And, marvel upon wonder ! a horn of arrival from the other end of the village ! And as he turned his eyes in that direction, he saw the dingier turnouts from Lake Sacrament extras, wagons every variety of rattletrap conveyance pouring in like an Irish I funeral on the return, and making (oh, climax more ; satisfactory !) straight, all, for Congress Hall ! Events now grew precipitate Ladies were helped out with green veils parasols and baskets -were handed after them baggage was chalked and distributed (and parasols, baskets, and ! baggage, be it noted, were all of the complexion that I innkeepers love, the indefinable look which betrays the owner s addictedness to extras) and now there I was ringing of bells ; and there were orders for the I woodcocks to be dressed with pork chemises, and for | the champagne to be iced, the sherry not and ;j through the arid corridors of Congress hall floated | a delicious toilet air of cold cream and lavender and i ladies maids came down to press out white dresses, I while the cook heated the curling irons and up and I down the stairs flitted, with the blest confusion of : | other days, boots and iced sangarees, hot water, towels, | i and mint-julepsall delightful, but all incomprehen- I sible ! Was the summer encored, or had the Jews | gone back to Jerusalem? To the keeper of Con- I gress hall the restoration of the millenium would have | been a rush-light to this second advent of fun-and- \ fashion-dom ! Thus far we have looked through the eves of the : person (pocket-ually speaking) most interested in the singular event we wished to describe. Let us now i (tea being over, and your astonishment having had | time to breathe) take the devil s place at the elbow of the invalided dandy beforementioned, and follow him over to Congress Hall. It was a mild night and, as I said before (or meant to, if I did not), August, having been prematurely cut off by his raining successor, seemed up again, like Hamlet s governor, and bent on i walking out his time. Rice (you remember Rice famous for his lemon ades with a corrective) Rice, having nearly ignited I 1 his forefinger with charging wines at dinner, was out || to cool on the colonnade, and B , not strong enough to stand about, drew a chair near the drawing- room window, and begged the rosy barkeeper to throw what light he could upon this multitudinous appari tion. Rice could only feed the fire of his wonder with the fuel of additional circumstances. Coaches had been arriving from every direction till the house was full. The departed black band had been stopped at Albany, and sent back. There seemed no married people in the party at least, judging by dress and flirtation. Here and there a belle, a little on the wane, but all most juvenescent in gayety, and (Rice THE GHOST-BALL AT CONGRESS HALL. 99 thought) handsomer girls than had been at Congress hall since the days of the Albany regency (the regency of beauty), ten years ago ! Indeed, it struck Rice that he had seen the faces of these lovely girls before, though they whom he thought they resembled had long since gone off the stage grandmothers, some of them, now! Rice had been told, also, that there was an extraor dinary and overwhelming arrival of children and nurses at the Pavilion Hotel, but he thought the eport smelt rather like a jealous figment of the Pavilioners. Odd, if true that s all ! Mr. B had taken his seat on the colonnade, as Shakspere expresses it, "about cock-shut time" twilight and in the darkness made visible of the rooms within, he could only distinguish the outline of some very exquisite, and exquisitely plump figures gliding to and fro, winged, each one, with a pair of rather stoutish, but most attentive admirers. As the curfew hour stole away, however, the ladies stole away with it, to dress; and at ten o clock the sudden out break of the full band in a mazurka, drew Mr. B s attention to the dining-room frontage of the colonnade, and, moving his chair to one of the win dows, the cockles of his heart warmed to see the orchestra in its glory of old thirteen black Orpheuses perched on a throne of dining-tables, and the black veins on their shining temples strained to the crack j of mortality with their zealous execution. The waiters, meantime, were lighting the tinBriareus (that spermaciti monster so destructive to broadcloth), and the side-sconces and stand-lamps, and presently a I blaze of light flooded the dusty evergreens of the j facade, and nothing was wanting but some fashionable Curtius to plunge first into the void some adventu rous Benton, " to set the ball in motion." Wrapped carefully from the night-air in his cloak and belcher, B sat, looking earnestly into the room, and to his excited senses there seemed, about all this supplement to the summer s gayety, a weird mysteriousness, an atmosphere of magic, which was observable, he thought, evefi in* the burning of the I candles! And as to Johnson, the sable leader of the j band " God s-my-life," as Bottom says, how like a! tormented fiend writhed the cremona betwixt his chin and white waistcoat ! Such music, from instruments so vexed, had never split the ears of the Saratoga groundlings since the rule of Saint Dominick (in whose hands even wine sparkled to song) no, not since the golden age of the Springs, when that lord of harmony and the nabobs of lower Broadway made, of Congress hall, a paradise for the unmarried ? Was Johnson bewitched ? Was Congress hall repossessed by the spirits of the past ? If ever Mr. B -, sitting in other years on that resounding colonnade, had felt \ the magnetic atmosphere of people he knew to Be up stairs, he felt it now ! If ever he had been contented, knowing that certain bright creatures would presently glide into the visual radius of black Johnson, he felt contented, inexplicably, from the same cause nmo expecting, as if such music could only be their herald, the entrance of the same bright creatures, no older, and as bright after years of matrimony. And now and then B pressed his hand to his head for he was not quite sure that he might not be a little wandering in his mind. But suddenly the band struck up a march! The first bar was played through, and B looked at the door, sighing that this sweet hallucination this waking dream of other days was now to be scattered by reality He could have filliped that mercenary Ethiopian i n the nose for playing such music to such falling off from the past as he now looked to see enter. A lady crossed the threshold on a gentleman s arm. " Ha ! ha!" said B , trying with a wild effort to laugh, and pinching his arm into a blood-blister, " come this is too good ! Helen K ! oh, no ! Not quite crazy yet, I hope not so far gone yet ! Yet it is! I swear it is! And not changed either ! j Beautiful as ever, by all that is wonderful ! Psha ! I ll not be mad ! Rice ! are you there? Why, who are these coming after her? Julia L ! Anna K , and my friend Fanny ! The D s ! The M s! Nay, I m dreaming, silly fool that I am! I ll call for a light! Waiter!! Where the devil s the bell ?" And as poor B insisted on finding himself in I bed, reached out his hand to find the bell-pull, one of | the waiters of Congress hall came to his summons. j The gentleman wanted nothing, and the waiter j thought he had cried out in his nap ; and rather i embarrassed to explain his wants, but still unconvinced I of his freedom from dream-land, B drew his hat over his eyes, and his cloak around him, and screwed < up his courage to look again into the enchanted ball room. The quadrilles were formed, and the lady at the | head of the first set was spreading her skirts for the i ai ant- deux. She was a tall woman, superbly hand some, and moved with the grace of a frigate at sea with a nine-knot breeze. Eyes capable of taking in lodgers (hearts, that is to say) of any and every calibre and quality, a bust fora Cornelia, a shape all love and lightness, and a smile like a temptation of Eblis there she was and there were fifty like her not like her, exactly, either, but of her constellation belles, every one of them, who will be remembered by old men, and used for the disparagement of degenerated younglings splendid women of Mr. B s time, and of the palmy time of Congress hall " The past the past the past !" Out on your staring and unsheltered lantern of brick your " United States hotel," stiff, modern, and promiscuous! Whoever passed a comfortable hour in its glaring cross-lights, or breathed a gentle senti ment in its unsubdued air and townish open-to-dusti- ness ! What is it to the leafy dimness, the cool shad ows, the perpetual and pensive dcmi-jour what to the ten thousand associations of Congress hall ! Who has not lost a heart (or two) on the boards of that primitive wilderness of a colonnade ! Whose first adorations, whose sighs, hopes, strategies, and flirta tions, are not ground into that warped and slipper- polished floor, like heartache and avarice into the bricks of Wall street! Lord bless you, madam! don t desert old Congress hall ! We have done going to the Springs (we) and wouldn t go there again for anything, but a good price for a pang (that is, except to see such a sight as we are describing) but we can not bear, in our midsummer flit through the Astor, to see charming girls bound for Saratoga, and hear no talk of Congress hall ! What ! no lounge on those proposal sofas no pluck at the bright green leaves of those luxuriant creepers while listening to " the veice of the charmer" no dawdle on the steps to the spring (mamma gone on before) no hunting for that glow-worm in the shrubbery by the music- room no swing no billiards no morning gossips with the few privileged beaux admitted to the up stairs entry, ladies wing ? " I d sooner be set quick i the earth. And bowled to death with turnips," than assist or mingle in such ungrateful forgetfulness of pleasure-land ! But what do we with a digression in a ghost-story ? The ball went on. Champagne of the "exploded" color (pink) was freely circulated between the dances (rosy wine suited to the bright days when all things were tinted rose) and wit. exploded, too, in these 100 THE GHOST-BALL AT CONGRESS HALL. leaden times, went round with the wine; and as a flass of the bright vintage was handed up to old ohnson, B stretched his neck over the window- sill in an agony of expectation, confident that the black ghost, if ghost he were, would fail to recognise the leaders of fashion, as he was wont of old, and to bow respectfully to them before drinking in their pres ence. Oh, murder ! not he ! Down went his black poll to the music-stand, and up, and down again, and height s, and back in time for ball and supper; and the day after there was a most hilarious and memora ble fishing-party to Saratoga lake, and all back again in high force for the ball and supper ; and so like a long gala-day, like a short summer carnival, all frolic, sped the week away. Boniface, by the third day, had rallied his recollections, and with many a scrape and compliment, he renewed his acquaintance with the belles and beaux of a brighter period of beauty and at every dip, the white roller of that unctuous eye was gallantry. And if there was any mystery remaining brought to bear upon some well-remembered star of the ascendant ! He saw them as B did ! He was not playing to an unrecognised company of late comers to Saratoga anybodies from any place! He, in the old functionary s mind as to the identity and miracle of their presence and reunion, it was on the one point of the ladies unfaded loveliness for, saving a half inch aggregation in the waist, which was rather the unimaginative African, believed evidently that j an improvement than otherwise, and a little more ful- they were there in flesh Helen, the glorious, and all her fair troop of contemporaries ! and that with them had come back their old lovers, the gay and gallant Lotharios of the time of Johnson s first blushing honors of renown ! The big drops of agonized horror and incredulity rolled off the forehead of Mr. B ! But suddenly the waiters radiated to the side-doors, and with the celestial felicity of star-rising and mor ning-breaking, a waltz was found playing in the ears of the revellers ! Perfect, yet when it did begin ! "Waltzed every brain and vein, waltzed every swim ming eye within the reach of its magic vibrations ! Gently away floated couple after couple, and as they circled round to his point of observation, B could have called every waltzer by name but his heart was in his throat, but his eyeballs were hot with the stony immovableness of his long gazing. Another change in the music ! Spirits of bedevil- ment ! could not that waltz have been spared ! Boni face stood waltzing his head from shoulder to shoulder Rice twirled the head-chambermaid in the entry the black and white boys spun round on the colonnade the wall-flowers in the ball-room crowded their chairs to the wall the candles flared embracingly ghosts or no ghosts, dream or hallucination, B could endure no more ! He flung off his cloak and hat, and jumped in at the window. The divine Emily C had that moment risen from tying her shoe. With a nod to her partner, and a smile to herself, B encircled her round waist, and away he flew like Ariel, light on the toe, but his face pallid and wild, and his emaciated legs playing like sticks in his unfilled trousers. Twice he made the circuit of the room, exciting apparently less surprise than pleasure by his sudden appearance ; then, with a wavering halt, and his hand laid tremulously to his forehead, he flew at the hall-door at a ness in the bust, which was a most embellishing dif ference, the ten years that had gone over them had made no mark on the lady portion of his guests ; and as to the gentlemen but that is neither here nor there. They were "men of mark," young or old, and their wear and tear is, as Flute says, " a thing of naught." It was revealed by the keeper of the Pavilion, after the departure of the late-come revellers of Congress hall, that there had been constant and secret visita tions by the belles of the latter sojourn, to the numer ous infantine lodgers of the former. Such a troop of babies and boys, and all so lovely, had seldom gladdened even the eyes of angels, out of the cheru bic choir (let alone the Saratoga Pavilion), and though, in their white dresses and rose-buds, the belles afore spoken of looked like beautiful elder sisters to those motherless younglings, yet when they came in, moth ers confessed, on the morning of departure, openly to superintend the preparations for travel, they had so put off the untroubled maiden look from their coun tenances, and so put on the indescribable growing- old-iness of married life in their dress, that, to the eye of an observer, they might well have passed for the mothers of the girls they had themselves seemed to be, the day before, only. Who devised, planned, and brought about, this prac tical comment on thj2 wgedlessness of the American haste to be old, we are not at liberty to mention. The reader will have surmised, however, that it was some I one who had observed the more enduring quality of i beauty in other lands, and on returning to his own, j looked in vain for those who, by every law of nature, should be still embellishing the society of which he I had left them the budding flower and ornament. To get them together again, only with their contempora ries, in one of their familiar haunts of pleasure to tangent, and rushing through suggest the exclusion of everything but youthful servants and spectators, dashed across the portico, and disappeared in the darkness ! A fortnight s brain-fever deprived him of the opportunity of repeating this re markable flourish, and his subsequent sanity was es tablished through some critical hazard. There was some inquiry at supper about " old B ," but the lady who waltzed with him knew as little of his coming and going as the managers; and, by one belle, who had been at some trouble in other days to quench his ardor, it was solemnly be lieved to be his persevering apparition. The next day there was a drive and dinner at Bar- I in dress, amusement, and occupation to bring to meet them their old admirers, married like themselves, but entering the field once more for their smiles against their rejuvenescent husbands to array them as belles again, and see whether it was any falling off in beauty or the power of pleasing which had driven them from j their prominent places in social life this was the ob- I vious best way of doing his immediate circles of j friends the service his feelings exacted of him; the j only way, indeed, of convincing these bright creatures that they had far anticipated the fading hour of bloom j and youthfulness. Pensez-y ! BORN TO LOVE PIGS AND CHICKENS. 101 BORN TO LOVE PIGS AND CHICKENS, THE guests at the Astor House were looking mourn fully out of the drawing-room windows, on a certain rainy day of an October passed over to history. No shopping no visiting! The, morning must be passed in-doors. And it was some consolation to those who were in town for a few days to see the world, that their time was not quite lost, for the assemblage in the large drawing-room was numerous and gay. A very dressy affair is the drawing-room of the Astor, and as full of eyes as a peacock s tail (which, by the way, is also a very dressy affair). Strangers who wish to see and be seen (and especially "be seen") on rainy days, as well as on sunny days, in their visits to New York, should, as the phrase goes, " patronize" the Astor. As if there was any patronage in getting the worth of your money ! Well the people in the drawing-room looked a little out of the windows, and a great deal at each other. Unfortunately, it is only among angels and underbred persons that introductions can be dispensed ! with, and as the guests of that day at the Astor House were mostly strangers to each other, conversation was ] very fitful and guarded, and any movement whatever extremely conspicuous. There were four very silent ; ladies on the sofa, two very silent ladies in each of the j j windows, silent ladies on the ottomans, silent ladies in | the chairs at the corners, and one silent lady, very highly dressed, sitting on the music-stool, with her back to the piano. There was here and there a gen tleman in the room, weather-bound and silent; but we have only to do with one of these, and with the last-mentioned much-embellished young lady. " Well, I can t sit on this soft chair all day, cousin Meg !" said the gentleman. " Sh ! call me Margaret, if you must speak so loud," said the lady. "And what would you do out of doors this rainy day ? I m sure it s very pleasant here." " Not for me. I d rather be thrashing in the barn. But there must be some rainy-weather work in the city as well as the country. There s some fun, / know, that s kept for a wet day, as we keep corn-shelling and grinding the tools." " Dear me!" .Well what now?" " Oh, nothing ! but I do wish you wouldn febring the stable with you to the Astor House." The gentleman slightly elevated his eyebrows, and took a leaf of music from the piano, and commenced | diligently reading the mystic dots and lines. We have ten minutes to spare before the entrance of another ! person upon the scene, and we will make use of the ] silence to conjure up for you, in our magic mirror, j the semblance of the two whose familiar dialogue we \ have just jotted down. Miss Margaret Pifflit was a young lady who had a large share of what the French call la beaute du dia- ble youth and freshness. (Though, why the devil should have the credit of what never belonged to him, it takes a Frenchman, perhaps, to explain.) To look at, she was certainly a human being in very high per fection. Her cheeks were like two sound apples; her { waist was as round as a stove-pipe ; her shoulders had i two dimples just at the back, that looked as if they I defied punching to make them any deeper; her eyes j looked as if they were just made, they were so bright 1 and new ; her voice sounded like " C sharp" in a new piano ; and her teeth were like a fresh break in a cocoa-nut. She was inexorably, unabatedly, despe rately healthy. This fact, and the difficulty of uniting all the fashions of all the magazines in one dress, were her two principal afflictions in this world of care. She had an ideal model, to which she aspired with constant longings a model resembling in figure the high-born creatures whose never-varied face is seen in all the plates of fashion, yet, if possible, paler and more disdainful. If Miss Pifflit could have bent her short wrist with the curve invariably given to the well- gloved extremities of that mysterious and nameless beauty ; if she could but have sat with her back to her friends, and thrown her head languishingly over her shoulder without dislocating her neck ; if she could but have protruded from the flounce of her dress a foot more like a mincing little muscle-shell, and less like a jolly fat clam ; in brief, if she could have drawn out her figure like the enviable joints of a spy-glass, whittled off more taperly her four extremi ties, sold all her uproarious and indomitable roses for a pot of carmine, and compelled the publishers of the magazines to refrain from the distracting multiplicity of their monthly fashions with these little changes in her allotment, Miss Pifflit would havf realized all her maiden aspirations up to the present hour. A glimpse will give you an idea of the gentleman in question. He was not much more than he looked to be a compact, athletic young man of twenty one, with clear, honest blue eyes, brown face, where it was not shaded by the rim of his hat, curling brown hair, and an expression of fearless qualities, dashed just now by a tinge of rustic bashfulness. His dress was a little more expensive and gayer than was necessary, and he wore his clothes in a way which betrayed Chat he would be more at home in shirt-sleeves. His hands were rough, and his attitude that of a man who was accustomed to fling himself down on the nearest bench, or swing his legs from the top rail of a fence, or the box of a wagon. We speak with caution of his rusticity, however, for he had a printed card, " Mr. Ephraim Bracely," and he was a subscriber to the " Spirit of the Times." We shall find time to say a thing or two about him as we get on. "Eph." Bracely and "Meg" Pifflit were "enga ged." With the young lady it was, as the French say, faule de micux, for her beau-ideal (or, in plain English, her ideal beau) was a tall, pale young gentle man, with white gloves, in a rapid consumption. She and Eph. were second cousins, however, and as she was art orphan, and had lived since childhood with his father, and, moreover, had inherited the Pifflit farm, which adjoined that of the Bracelys, and, moreover, had been told to " kiss her little husband, and love him always" by the dying breath of her mother, and (moreover third) had been " let be" his sweetheart by the unanimous consent of the neighborhood, why, it I seemed one of those matches made in Heaven, and ! not intended to be travestied on earth. It was under stood that they were to be married as soon as the young man s savings should enable him to pull down the old Pifflit house and build a cottage, and, with a fair season, that might be done in another year. Meantime, Eph. was a loyal keeper of his troth, though never having the trouble to win the young 102 BORN TO LOVE PIGS AND CHICKENS, lady, he was not fully aware of the necessity of court ship, whether or no ; and was, besides, somewhat un susceptible of the charms of moonlight, after a hard day s work at haying or harvesting. The neighbors thought it proof enough of his love that he never " went sparking" elsewhere, and as he would rather talk of his gun or his fishing-rod, his horse or his crop, pigs, politics, or anything else, than of love or matrimony, his companions took his engagement with his cousin to be a subject upon which he felt too deeply to banter, and they neither invaded his domain by attentions to his sweetheart, nor suggested thought by allusions to her. It was in the progress of this even tenor of engagement, that some law business had called old Farmer Bracely to New York, and the young couple had managed to accompany him. And of course nothing would do for Miss Piflh t but " the Astor." And now, perhaps, the reader is ready to be told whose carriage is at the Vesey street door, and who sends up a dripping servant to inquire for Miss Pifflit. It is allotted to the destiny of every country-girl to have one fashionable female friend in the city some body to correspond with, somebody to quote, some body to write her the particulars of the last elopement, somebody to send her patterns of collars, and the rise and fall of tournures, and such other things as are not entered into by the monthly magazines. How these apparently unlikely acquaintances are formed, is as much a mystery as the eternal youth of post-boys, and the eternal duration of donkeys. Far be it from me to pry irreverently into those pokerish corners of j the machinery of the world. I go no farther than the fact, that Miss Julia Hampson was an acquaintance of Miss Pifflit s. Everybody knows " Hampson and Co." Miss Hampson was a good deal what the Fates had tried to make her. If she had not been admirably well dressed, it would have been by violent opposition to the united zeal and talent of dressmakers and mil liners. These important vicegerents of the Hand that reserves to itself the dressing of the butterfly and lily, make distinctions in the" exercise of their voca tion. Wo be to an unloveable woman, if she be not endowed with taste supreme. She may buy all the stuffs of France, and all the colors of the rainbow, but she will never get from those keen judges of fit ness the loving hint, the admiring and selective per suasion, with which they delight to influence the embellishment of sweetness and loveliness. They who talk of " anything s looking well on a pretty woman," have not reflected on the lesser providence of dressmakers and milliners. Woman is never mer cenary but in monstrous exceptions, and no trades woman of the fashion will sell taste or counsel; and, in the superior style of all charming women, you see, not the influence of manners upon dress, but the af fectionate tribute of these dispensers of elegance to the qualities they admire. Let him who doubts, go shopping with his dressy old aunt to-day, and to-mor row with his dear little cousin. Miss Hampson, to whom the supplies of elegance came as naturally as bread and butter, and occasioned as little speculation as to the whence or how, was as unconsciously elegant, of course, as a well-dressed lily. She was abstractly a very beautiful girl, though in a very delicate and unconspicuous style ; and by dint of absolute fitness in dressing, the merit of her beauty, by common observers at least, would be half given to her fashionable air and unexceptionable toilet. The damsel and her choice array, indeed, seemed the harmonious work of the same maker. How much was nature s gift, and how much was bought in Broad way, was probably never duly understood by even her most discriminate admirer. But we have kept Miss Hampson too long upon the stairs. The two young ladies met with a kiss, in which (to the surprise of those who had previously observed Miss Mifflit) there was no smack of the latest fashion. "My dear Julia!" " My dear Margerine!" (This was a romantic va riation of Meg s, which she had forced upon her intimate friends at the point of the bayonet.) Eph. twitched, remindingly, the jupon of his cousin, and she introduced him with the formula which she had found in one of Miss Austin s novels. " Oh, but there was a mock respectfulness in that deep courtesy," thought Eph. (and so there was for Miss Hampson took an irresistible cue from the in flated ceremoniousness of the introduction). Eph. made a bow as cold and stiff as a frozen horse- blanket. And if he could have commanded the blood in his face, it would have been as dignified and resentful as the eloquence of Red Jacket but that rustic blush, up to his hair, was like a mask dropped over his features. "A bashful country-boy," thought Miss Hampson, as she looked compassionately upon his redhot fore head, and forthwith dismissed him entirely from her thoughts. With a consciousness that he had better leave the room, and walk off his mortification under an um brella, Eph. took his seat, and silently listened to the conversation of the young ladies. Miss Hampson had come to pass the morning with her friend, and she took off her bonnet, and showered down upon her dazzling neck a profusion of the most adorable brown ringlets. Spite of his angry humiliation, the young farmer felt a thrill run through his veins as the heavy curls fell indolently about her shoulders. He had never before looked upon a woman with emotion. He hated her oh, yes ! for she had given him a look that could never be forgiven but for somebody, she must be the angel of the world. Eph. would have given all his sheep and horses, cows, crops, and hay stacks, to have seen the man she would fancy to be her equal. He could not give even a guess at the height of that conscious superiority from which she individually looked down upon him; but it would have satisfied a thirst which almost made him scream, to measure himself by a man with whom she could be familiar. Where was his inferiority? What was it? Why had he been blind toil till now? Was there no surgeon s knife, no caustic, that could carve out, or cut away, burn or scarify, the vulgarities she looked upon so contemptuously ? But the devil take her superciliousness, nevertheless! It was a bitter morning to Eph. Bracely, but still it went like a dream. The hptel parlor was no longer a stupid place. His cousin Meg had gained a con sequence in his eyes, for she was the object of caress from this superior creature she was the link which kept her within his observation. He was too full of other feelings just now to do more than acknowledge the superiority of this girl to his cousin. He felt it in his after thoughts, and his destiny then, for the first time, seemed crossed and inadequate to his wishes. ******* (We hereby draw upon your imagination for six months, courteous reader. Please allow the teller to show you into the middle of the following July.) Bracely farm, ten o clock of a glorious summer morning Miss Pifflit extended upon a sofa in despair. But let us go back a little. A week before, a letter had been received from Miss Hampson, who, to the delight and surprise of her friend Margerine, had taken the whim to pass a month with her. She was at Rockaway, and was sick and tired of waltzing and the sea. Had Farmer Bracely a spare corner for a poor girl ? BORN TO LOVE PIGS AND CHICKENS. 103 But Miss Pifflit s "sober second thought" was utter consternation. How to lodge fitly the elegant Julia Hampson? No French bed in the house, no bou doir, no ottomans, no pastilles, no baths, no Psyche to dress by. What vulgar wretches they would seem to her. What insupportable horror she would feel at the dreadful inelegance of the farm. Meg was pale with terror and dismay as she went into the details of anticipation. Something must be done, however. A sleepless night of reflection and contrivance sufficed to give some shape to the capabilities of the case, and by daylight the next morning the whole house was in commotion. Meg had fortunately a large bump of constructiveness, very much enlarged by her habitual dilemmas-toilet. A boudoir must be constructed. Fanner Bracely slept in the dried apple-room, on the lower floor, and he was no sooner out of his bed than his bag and baggage were tumbled up stairs, his gun and Sunday whip were taken down from their nails, and the floor scoured, and the ceiling white washed. Eph. was by this time returned from the village with all the chintz that could be bought, and a paper of tacks, and some new straw carpeting; and by ten o clock that night the four walls of the apartment were covered with the gayly-flowered material, the carpet was nailed down, and old Farmer Bracely thought it a mighty nice, cool-looking place. Eph. was a bit of a carpenter, and he soon knocked togeth er some boxes, which, when covered with chintz, and stuffed with wool, looked very like ottomans; and, with a handsome cloth on the round-table, geraniums in the windows, and a chintz curtain to subdue the light, it was not far from a very charming boudoir, and Meg began to breathe more freely. But Eph. had heard this news with the blood hot in his temples. Was that proud woman coming to look again upon him with contempt, and here, too, where the rusticity, which he presumed to be the object of her scorn, would be a thousand times more flagrant and visible? And yet, with the entreaty on his lip that his cousin would refuse to receive her, his heart had checked the utterance for an irresistible desire sprung suddenly within him to see her, even at the bitter cost of tenfold his former mortification. Yet, as the preparations for receiving Miss Hamp son went on, other thoughts took possession of his mind. Eph. was not a man, indeed, to come off sec ond best in the long pull of wrestling with a weak ness. His pride began to show its colors. He re membered his independence as a farmer, dependant on no man, and a little comparison between his pur suits, and life, such as he knew it to be, in a city, soon put him, in his own consciousness at least, on a par with Miss Hampson s connexions. This point once attained, Eph. cleared his brow, and went whistling about the farm as usual receiving without reply, however, a suggestion of his cousin Meg s, that he had better burn his old straw hat, for, in a fit of ab sence, he might possibly put it on while Miss Hamp son was there. Well, it was ten o clock on the morning after Miss Hampson s arrival at Bracely farm, and, as we said before, Miss Pifllit was in despair. Presuming that her friend would be fatigued with her journey, she had determined not to wake her, but to order breakfast in the boudoir at eleven. Farmer Bracely and Eph. must have their breakfast at seven, however, and what was the dismay of Meg, who was pouring out their coffee as usual, to see the elegant Julia rush into the first kitchen, courtesy very sweetly to the old man, pull up a chair to the table, apologise for being late, and end this extraordinary scene by producing two newly-hatched chickens from her bosom! She had been up since sunrise, and out at the barn, down by the river, and up in the haymow, and was perfectly enchanted with everything, especially the dear little pigs and chickens ! "A very sweet young lady!" thought old Farmer Bracely. "Very well but hang your condescension!" thought Eph.. distrustfully. "Mercy on me ! to like pigs and chickens!" men tally ejaculated the disturbed and bewildred Miss Pif- flit. But with her two chicks pressed to her breast with one hand, Miss Hampson managed her coffee and bread and butter with the other, and chattered away like a child let out of school. The air was so delicious, and the hay smelt so sweet, and the trees in the meadow were so beautiful, and there were no stiff sidewalks, and no brick houses, and no iron railings, and so many dear speckled hens, and funny little chickens, and kind-looking old cows, and colts, and calves, and ducks, and turkeys it was delicious it was enchanting it was worth a thousand Saratogas and Rockaways. How anybody could prefer the city to the country, was to Miss Hampson matter of in credulous wonder. "Will you come into the boudoir?" asked Miss Piffiit, with a languishing air, as her friend Julia rose from breakfast. "Boudoir!" exclaimed the city damsel, to the in finite delight of old Bracely, "no, dear! I d rather go out to the barn! Are you going anywhere with the | oxen to-day, sir?" she added, going up to the gray- headed farmer caressingly, " I should so like to ride in that great cart!" Eph. was a little suspicious of all this unexpected agreeableness, but he was naturally too courteous not to give way to a lady s whims. He put on his old straw hat, and tied his handkerchief over his shoulder (not to imitate the broad riband of a royal order, but | to wipe the sweat off handily while mowing), and of fering Miss Hampson a rake which stood outside the door, he begged her to be ready when he came by with the team. He and his father were bound to the far meadow, where they were cutting hay, and would like her assistance in raking. It was a "specimen" morning, as the magazines say, for the air was temperate, and the whole country was laden with the smell of the new hay, which some how or other, as everybody knows, never hinders or overpowers the perfume of the flowers. Oh, that winding green lane between the bushes was like an avenue to paradise. The old cart jolted along through the ruts, and Miss Hampson, standing up and holding on to old Farmer Bracely, watched the great oxen crowding their sides together, and looked | oft over the fields, and exclaimed, as she saw glimpses of the river between the trees, and seemed veritably and unaffectedly enchanted. The old farmer, at least, had no doubt of her sincerity, and he watched her, and listened to her, with a broad honest smile of ad miration on his weather-browned countenance. The oxen were turned up to the fence, while the dew dried off the hay, and Eph. and his father turned to mewing, leaving "Miss Hampson to ramble about over the meadow, and gather flowers by the river-side. In the course of an hour, they began to rake up, and she came to offer her promised assistance, and stoutly | followed Eph. up and down several of the long swaths, till! her face glowed under her sunbonnet as it never had glowed with waltzing. Heated and tired at last, she made herself a seat with the new hay under a large elm, and, with her back to the tree, watched the labors of her companions. Eph. was a well-built and manly figure, and all he did in the way of his vocation, he did with a fine dis play of muscular power, and (a sculptor would have thought) no little grace. Julia watched him as he stepped along after his rake on the elastic sward, anl 104 THE WIDOW BY BREVET. she thought, for the first time, what a very handsome man was young Bracely, and how much more finely a man looked when raking hay, than a dandy when waltzing. And for an hour she sat watching his mo tion, admiring the strength with which he pitched up the hay, and the grace and ease of all his movements and- postures; and, after a while, she began to feel drowsy with fatigue, and pulling up the hay into a fra grant pillow, she lay down and fell fast asleep. It was now the middle of the forenoon, and the old farmer, who, of late years, had fallen into the habit of taking a short nap before dinner, came to the big j elm to pick up his waistcoat and go home. As he ap- j proached the tree, he stopped, and beckoned to his son. Eph. came up and stood at a little distance, looking at the lovely picture before him. With one delicate hand under her cheek, and a smile of angelic content and enjoyment on her finely cut lips, Julia Hampson slept soundly in the shade. One small foot escaped from her dress, and one shoulder of faultless polish and whiteness showed between her kerchief and her sleeve. Her slight waist bent to the swell of the hay, throwing her delicate and well-moulded bust into high relief; and all over her neck, and in large clus ters on the tumbled hay, lay those glossy brown ring lets, admirably beautiful and luxuriant. And as Eph. looked on that dangerous picture of loveliness, the passion, already lying perdu in his bosom, sprung to the throne of heart and reason. (We have not room to do more than hint at the consequences of this visit of Miss Hampson to the country. It would require the third volume of a novel to describe all the emotions of that month at Bracely farm, and bring the reader, point by point, gingerly and softly, to the close. We must touch here and there a point only, giving the reader s im agination some gleaning to do after we have been over the ground.) Eph. Bracely s awakened pride served him the good turn of making him appear simply in his natural char acter during the whole of Miss Hampson s visit. By the old man s advice, however, he devoted himself to the amusement of the ladies after the haying was over; and what with fishing, and riding, and scenery- hunting in the neighborhood, the young people were together from morning till night. Miss Piffiit came down unwillingly to plain Meg, in her attendance on her friend in her rustic occupations, and Miss Hamp son saw as little as possible of the inside of the bou doir. The barn, and the troops of chickens, and all the out-door belongings of the farm, interested her daily, and with no diminution of her zeal. She seemed, indeed, to have found her natural sphere in the simple and affectionate life which her friend Mar- gerine held in such superfine contempt; and Eph., who was the natural mate to such a spirit, and him self, in his own home, most unconsciously worthy of love and admiration, gave himself up irresistibly to his new passion. And this new passion became apparent, at last, to the incredulous eyes of his cousin. And that it was timidly, but fondly returned by her elegant and high bred friend, was also very apparent to Miss Pifflit. And after a few jealous struggles, and a night or two of weeping, she gave up to it tranquilly for, a city life and a city husband, truth to say, had long been her secret longing and secret hope, and she never had fairly looked in the face a burial in the country with the "pigs and chickens." She is not married yet, Meg Pifflit but the rich merchant, Mr. Hampson, wrecked completely with the disastrous times, has found a kindly and pleasant asylum for his old age with his daughter. Mrs. Brace ly. And a better or lovelier farmer s wife than Julia, or a happier farmer than Eph., can scarce be founJ in the valley of the Susquehannah. THE WIDOW BY BREVET, LET me introduce the courteous reader to two la dies. Miss Picklin, a tall young lady of twenty-one, near enough to good-looking to permit of a delusion on the subject (of which, however, she had an entire monop oly), with cheeks always red in a small spot, lips not so red as the cheeks, and rather thin, sharpish nose, and waist very slender; and last (not least important), a very long neck, scalded on either side into a resem blance to a scroll of shrivelled parchment, which might or might not be considered as a mis-fortune serving her as a title-deed to twenty thousand dollars. The scald was inflicted, and the fortune left in consequence, > by a maiden aunt who, in the babyhood of Miss Pick- [ lin, attempted to cure the child s sore throat by an ap- j plication of cabbage-leaves steeped in hot vinegar. Miss Euphemia Picklin, commonly called Phemie a good-humored girl, rather inclined to be fat, but j gifted with several points of beauty of which she was | not at all aware, very much a pet among her female friends, and admitting, with perfect sincerity and sub mission, her sister s exclusive right to the admiration of the gentlemen of their acquaintance. Captain Isaiah Picklin, the father of these ladies, was a merchant of Salem, an importer of figs and opi um, and once master of the brig "Simple Susan," which still plied between his warehouse and Constan tinople- nails and codfish the cargo outward. I have not Miss Picklin s permission to mention the precise date of the events I am about to record, and leaving that point alone to the imagination of the reader, I shall set down the other particulars and impediments in her "course of true love" with historital fidelity. Ever since she had been of sufficient age to turn her attention exclusively to matrimony, Miss Picklin had nourished a presentiment that her destiny was exotic; that the soil of Salem was too poor, and the indigenous lovers too mean; and that, potted in her twenty thou sand dollars, she was a choice production, set aside for flowering in a foreign clime, and destined to be trans planted by a foreign lover. With this secret in her bosom, she had refused one or two gentlemen of mid dle age, recommended by her father, beside sundry score of young gentlemen of slender revenues in her own set of acquaintances, till, if there had been any thing beside poetry in Shakspere s assertion that it is " Broom groves Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves," the neighboring "brush" barrens" of Saugus would have sold in lots at a premium. It was possibly from the want of nightingales, to whose complaining notes the gentleman of Verona "turned his distresses," that the discarded of Salem preferred the consolations of Phemie Picklin. News to the Picklins ! Hassan Keni, the son of old THE WIDOW BY BREVET. 105 Abdoul Keui, was coming out in the " Simple Susan !" A Turk a live Turk a young Turk, and the son of her father s rich correspondeut in Turkey ! " Ah me !" thought Miss Picklin. The captain himself was rather taken aback. He had known old Abdoul for many years, had traded and ! smoked with him in the cafes of Galata, had gone out ! with him on Sundays to lounge on the tombstones at j Scutari, and had never thought twice about his yellow j gown and red trowsers ; but what the deuce would be Miss Picklin s disappointment had to be slept upon, for she had made great outlay of imagination upon the pomp and circumstance of wedding a white Othello in the eyes of wondering Salem; but Phemie s surprise took but five minutes to grow into a positive pleasure; and never suspecting, at any time, that she was visible to the naked eye dining the eclipsing presence of her sister, she sat with a very admiring smile upon her lips, and her soft eyes fixed earnestly on the stranger, till she had made out a full inventory of his features, thought of them in Salem ? True, it was his son ; proportions, manners, and other stuff available in but a Turk s clothes descend from father to son i dream-land. What might be Hassan s impression of through three generations; he knew that, from re- j the young ladies, could not be gathered from his man- membering this very boy all but smothered in a sort of i | ner ; for, in the first place, there was the reserve which saffron blanket, with sleeves like pillowcases his first assumption of the toga virilis (not that old Picklin knew Latin, but such was "his sentiment better ex pressed"). Then he had never been asked to the j house of the Stamboul merchant, not introduced to his wives nor his daughters (indeed, he had forgotten that old Keui was near cutting his throat for asking | after them) but of course it was very different in Sa- : lem. Young Keui must be the Picklin guest, fed and ; lodged, and the girls would want to give him a tea- j party. Would he sit on a chair, or want cushions on ; the floor ? Would he come to dinner with his breast bare, and leave his boots outside ? Would he eat rice \ pudding with his fingers ? Would he think it inde cent if the girls didn t wear linen cloths, Turkey fash- | ion, over their mouths and noses ? Would he bring his pipes ? Would he fall on his face and say his ; prayers four times a day, wherever he should be (with a clean place handy) ? What would the neighbors j say ? The captain worked himself into a violent per spiration with merely thinking of all this. The Salemites have a famous museum, and know "what manner of thing is your crocodile;" but a live Turk consigned to Captain Picklin ! It set the town in a fever ! It would leave an indelicate opening for a conjec ture as to Miss Picklin s present age, were I to state whether or not the arrival of the "Simple Susan" was reported by telegraph. She ran in with a fair wind one Sunday morning, and was immediately boarded by the harbor-master and Captain Picklin; and there, true to the prophetic boding of old Isaiah, the young Turk sat cross-legged on the quarter-deck, in a white tur ban and scarlet et ceteras, smoking his father s identical pipe no other, the captain would have taken his oath ! Up rose Hassan, when informed who was his visiter, and taking old Picklin s hand, put it to his forehead. The weather-stained sea-captain had bleached in the counting-house, and he had not, at first sight remem bered the old friend of his father. HR passed the pipe into Isaiah s hand and begged him to keep it as a me mento of Abdoul, for his father had died at the, last Ramazan. Hassan had come out to see the world, and secure a continuance of codfish and good-will from the house of Picklin, and the merchant got astride the tiller of his old craft, and smoked this news through his amber-mouthed legacy, while the youth went be low to get ready to go ashore. The reader of course would prefer to share the first impressions of the ladies as to the young Mussulman s personal appearance, and I pass at once, therefore, to their disappointment, surprise, mortification, and vex ation; when, as the bells were ringing for church, the front door opened, their father entered, and in followed a young gentleman in frockcoatand trowsers ! Yes, i and in his hand a hat a black hat and on his feet no ; yellow boots, but calfskin, mundane and common calf skin, and with no shaved head, and no twisted shawl around his waist ; nothing to be seen but a very hand some young man indeed, with teeth like a fresh slice of cocoa-nut meat, and a very deliberate pronunciation to his bad English. belonged to him as a Turk, and, in the second place, there was a violation of all oriental notions of modesty in their exposing their chins to the masculine obser vation; and though he could endure the exposure, it was of course with that diffidence of gaze which ac companies the consciousness of improper objects adding to his demeanor another shade of timidity. Miss Picklin s shoulders were not invaded quite to the limits of terra cognita by the cabbage-leaves which had exercised such an influence on her destiny; and as the scalds somewhat resembled two maps of South America (with Patagonia under each ear), she usu ally, in full dress, gave a clear view of the surrounding ocean wisely thinking it better to have the geogra phy of her disfigurement well understood, than, by covering a small extremity (as it were the isthmus of Darien), to leave an undiscovered North America to the imagination. She appeared accordingly at dinner in a costume not likely to diminish the modest embar rassment of Mr. Keui (as she chose to call him) ex tremely decollete, in a pink silk dress with short sleeves, and in a turban with a gold fringe the latter, of course, out of compliment to his country. "Money is power," even in family circles, and it was only Miss Picklin who exercised the privilege of full dress at a mid-day dinner. Phemie came to table dressed as at breakfast, and if she felt at all envious of her sister s pink gown and elbows to match, it did not appear in her pleasant face or sisterly attention. The captain would allow anything, and do almost anything, for his rich daughter; but as to dining with his coat on, in hot weather, company or no company, he would rather " be set quick i the earth, And bowled to death with turnips" though that is not the way he expressed it. The parti carre, therefore (for there was no Mrs. Picklin), was, in the matter of costume, rather incongruous, but, as the Turk took it for granted that it was all according to the custom of the country, the carving was achieved by the shirt-sleeved captain, and the pudding " helped" by his bare-armed daughter, with no particular com motion in the elements. Earthquakes do not invaria bly follow violations of etiquette particularly where nobody is offended. After the first day, things took their natural course as near as they were able. Hassan was not very quick at conversation, always taking at least five min utes to put together for delivery a sentence of Eng lish, but his laugh did not hang fire, nor did his nods and smiles ; and where ladies are voluble (as ladies sometimes are), this paucity of ammunition on the gentleman s part is no prelude to discomfiture. Then Phemie had a very fair smattering of Italian, and that being the business language of the Levant, Hassan took refuge in it whenever brought to a stand-still in English a refuge, by the way, of which he seemed inclined to avaif himself oftener than was consistent with Miss Picklin s exclusive property in his atten tion. Rebellious though Hassan might secretly have been to this authority over himself, Phemie was no ac- complice, natural modesty combining with the long 106 THE WIDOW BY BREVET. habit of subserviency to make her even anticipate the exactions of the heiress; and so Miss Picklin had "Mr. Keui" principally to herself, promenading him through the streets of Salem, and bestowing her sweetness upon him from his morning entrance to his evening exit; Phemie relieving guard very cheerfully, while her sister dressed for dinner. It was possibly from being permitted to converse in Italian during this half hour, that Hassan made it the only part of the day in which he talked of himself and his house on the Bosphorus, but that will not account also for Phe- mie s sighing while she listened never having sighed before in her life, not even while the same voice was talking English to her sister. Without going into a description of the Picklin tea- party, at which Hassan was induced to figure in his oriental costume, while Miss Picklin sat by him on a cushion, turbaned and (probably) cross-legged, a la Sultana, and without recording other signs satisfac tory to the Salemites, that the young Turk had fallen to the scalded heiress " As does the ospray to the fish, that takes it, By sovereignty of nature" - I must come plump to the fact that, on the Monday following (one week after his arrival), Hassan left Sa lem, ^accompanied by Miss Picklin. As he had asked for no private interview in the best parlor, and had made his final business arrangements with the captain, so that he could take passage from New York without returning, some people were inclined to fancy that Miss Picklin s demonstrations with regard to him had been a little premature. And "some people" chose to smile. But it was reserved for Miss Picklin to look round in church, in about one year from this event, and have her triumph over "some people;" for she was about to sail for Constantinople "sent for," as the captain rudely expressed it. But I must explain. The "Simple Susan" came in, heavily freighted with a consignment from the house of Keui to Picklin & Co., and a letter from the American consul at Con stantinople wrapped in the invoice. With the careful and ornate wording of an official epistle, it stated that Effendi Hassan Keui had called on the consul, and partly from the mistrust of his ability to express him self in English on so delicate a subject, but more par ticularly for the sake of approaching the object of his affections with proper deference and ceremony, he had requested that officer to prepare a document convey ing a proposal of marriage to the daughter of Captain Picklin. The incomplete slate of his mercantile ar rangements, while at Salem the previous year, would account for his silence on the subject at that time, but he trusted that his preference had been sufficiently manifest to the lady of his heart ; and as his prosper ity in business depended on his remaining at Constan tinople, enriching himself only for her sake, he was sure that the singular request appended to his offer would be taken as a mark of his prudence rather than as a presumption. The cabin of the " Simple Susan," as Captain Picklin knew, was engaged on her next pas sage to Constantinople by a party of missionaries, male and female, and the request was to the intent that, in case of an acceptance of his offer, the fair daughter of the owner would come out, under their sufficient pro tection, to be wedded, if she should so please, on the day of her arrival in the "Golden Horn. 1 As Miss Picklin had preserved a mysterious silence on the subject of " Mr. Keui s" attentions since his departure, and as a lady with twenty thousand dollars in her own right is, of course, quite independent of parental control, the captain, after running his eye hastily through the document, called to the boy who was weighing out a quintal of codfish, and bid him wrap the letter in a brown paper and run with it to Miss Picklin taking it for granted that she knew more about the matter than he did, and would explain it all, when he came home to dinner. In thinking the matter over, on his way home, it occurred to old Picklin that it was worded as if he had but one daughter. At any rate, he was quite sure that neither of his daughters was particularly specified, either by name or age. No doubt it was all right, however. The girls understood it. "So, it s you, miss!" he said, as Miss Picklin look ed round from the turban she was trying on before the glass. " Certainly, pa ! who else should it be?" And there ended the captain s doubts, for he never again got sight of the letter, and the turmoil of prep aration for Miss Picklin s voyage, made the house anything but a place for getting answers to impertinent questions. Phemie, whom the news had made silent and thoughtful, let drop a hint or two that she would like to see the letter ; but a mysterious air, and " La child, you wouldn t understand it," was check enough for her timid curiosity, and she plied her needle upon her sister s wedding dress with patient submission. The preparations for the voyage went on swimming ly. The missionaries were written to, and willingly consented to chaperon Miss Picklin over the seas, provided her union with a pagan was to be sanctified with a Christian ceremonial. Miss Picklin replied with virtuous promptitude that the cake for the wed ding was already soldered up in a tin case, and that she was to be married immediately on her arrival, under an awning on the brig s deck, and she hoped that four of the missionaries wives would oblige her by standing up as her bridesmaids. Many square feet of codfish were unladen from the " Simple Susan" to make room for boxes and bags, and one large case was finally shipped, the contents of which had been shopped for by ladies with families no book of orien tal travels making any allusion to the sale of such articles in Constantinople, though, in the natural course of things, they must be wanted as much in Turkey as in Salem. The brig was finally cleared and lay off in the stream, and on the evening before the embarkation the mis sionaries arrived and were invited to a tea-party at the Picklins. Miss Picklin had got up a little surprise for her friends with which to close the party a " walking tableau" as she termed it, in which she should suddenly make her apparition at one door, pass through the room, and go out at the other, dressed as a sultana, with a muslin kirtle and satin trowsers. She disappeared accordingly half an hour before the breaking up ; and, conversation rather languishing in her absence, the eldest of the mission aries rose to conclude the evening with a prayer, in the midst of which Miss Picklin passed through the room unperceived the faces of the company being turned to the wall. The next morning at daylight the " Simple Susan" put to sea with a fair wind, and at the usual hour for opening the store of Picklin and Co., she had drop ped below the horizon. Phemie sat upon the end of the wharf and watched her till she was out of sight, and the captain walked up and down between two puncheons of rum which stood at the distance of a quarter-deck s length from each other, and both father and daughter were silent. The captain had a confused thought or two besides the grief of parting, and Phemie had feelings quite as confused, which were not all made up of sorrow for the loss of her sister. Perhaps the reader will be at the trouble of spelling out their riddles while I try to let him down softly to the catas trophe of my story. Without confessing to any ailment whatever, the plump Phemie paled and thinned from the day of her sister s departure. Her spirits, too, seemed to keep THE WIDOW BY BREVET. 107 her flesh and color company, and at the end of a month the captain was told by one of the good dames of Salem that he had better ask a physician what ailed her. The doctor could make nothing out of it except that she might be fretting for the loss of her sister, and he recommended a change of scene and climate. That day Captain Brown, an old mate of Isaiah s, dropped in to eat a family dinner and say good-by, as he was about sailing in the new schooner Nancy for the Black sea his wife for his only passen ger. Of course he would be obliged to drop anchor . at Constantinople to wait for a fair wind up the I Bosphorus, and part of his errand was to offer to take l| letters and nicknackeries to Mrs. Keui. Old Picklin put the two things together, and over their glass of wine he proposed to Brown to take Phemie with Mrs. Brown to Constantinople, leave them both there on a visit to Mrs. Keui, till the return of the Nancy from the Black sea, and then re-embark them for Salem. Phemie came into the room just as they were touch ing glasses on the agreement, and when the trip was proposed to her she first colored violently, then grew pale and burst into tears ; but consented to go. And, with such preparations as she could make that even ing, she was quite ready at the appointed hour, and was off with the land-breeze the next morning, taking i leave of nobody but her father. And this time the old man wiped his eyes very often before the depart- j ing vessel was "hull down," and was heartily sorry he jj had let Phemie go without a great many presents and a great many more kisses. ******* A fine, breezy morning at Constantinople ! Rapidly down the Bosphorus shot the caique of Hassan Keui, bearing its master from his country- house at Dolma-batchi to his warehouses at Galata. Just before the sharp prow rounded away toward the Golden Horn, the merchant motioned to the caikjis to rest upon their oars, and, standing erect in the slender craft, he strained his gaze long and with anxi ous earnestness toward the sea of Marmora. Not a sail was to be seen coming from the west, except a man-of-war with a crescent flag at the peak, lying off toward Scutari from Seraglio point, and with a sigh that carried the cloud off his brow, Hassan gayly squatted once more to his cushions, and the caique sped merrily on. In and out, among the vessels at anchor, the airy bark threaded her way with the dex terous swiftness of a bird, when suddenly a cable rose beneath her and lifted her half out of the water. A vessel newly-arrived was hauling in to a close anchor age, and they had crossed her hawser as it rose to the surface. Pitched headlong into the lap of the nearest caikji, the Turk s snowy turban fell into the water and was carried by the eddy under the stern of the vessel rounding to, and as the caique was driven backward to regain it, the bareheaded owner sank back aghast SIMPLE SUSAN OF SALEM staring him in the fflce in golden capitals. " Oh! Mr. Keui ! how do you do !" cried a well- remembered voice, as he raised himself to fend off by the rudder of the brig. And there she stood within two feet of his lips Miss Picklin in her brida veil, waiting below in expectant modesty, and though surprised by his peep into the cabin windows, excusing it as a natural impatience in a bridegroom coming to his bride. The captain of the Susan, meantime, had looked over the tafferel and recognised his old passenger, and Hassan, who would have given a cargo of opium for an hour to compose himself, mounted the ladder which was thrown out to him, and stepped from the gangway into Miss Picklin s arms ! She had rushed up to receive him, dressed in her muslin kirtle and satin trousers, though, with her dramatic sense of propriety, she had intended to remain below till sum moned to the bridal. The captain, of course, kept back from delicacy, but the missionaries stood in a cluster gazing on the happy meeting, and the sailors looked over their shoulders as they heaved at the windlass. As Miss Picklin afterward remarked, "it would have been a tableau viiant if the deck had not been so very dirty !" Hassan wiped his eyes, for he had replaced his wet turban on his head, but what with his escape from drowning, and what with his surprise and embarrass ment (for he had a difficult part to play, as the.reader will presently understand), he had lost all memory of his little stock of English. Miss Picklin drew him gently by the hand to the quarter-deck, where, under an awning fringed with curtains partly drawn, stood a table with a loaf of wedding-cake upon it, and a bottle of wine and a bible. She nodded to the Rev. Mr. Griffin, who took hold of a chair and turned it round, and placing it against his legs with the back toward him, looked steadfastly at the happy couple. " Good morning good night your s\slcra*petla ! per amor 1 di Dio . " cried the bewildered Hassan, giving utterance to all the English he could re member, and seizing the bride by the arm. " These ladies are my bridesmaids," said Miss Picklin, pointing to the missionaries wives who stood by in their bonnets and shawls. " I dare say he ex pected my sister would come as my bridesmaid !" she added, turning to Mr. Griffin to explain the out break as she understood it. Hassan beat his hand upon his forehead, walked twice up and down the quarterdeck, looked around over the Golden Horn as if in search of an interpreter to his feelings, and finally walked up to Miss Picklin with a look of calm resignation, and addressed to her and to the Rev. Mr. Griffin a speech of three minutes, in Italian. At the close of it he made a very cere monious salaam, and offered his hand to the bride ; and, as no one present understood a syllable of what he had intended to convey in his address, it was re ceived as probably a welcome to Turkey, or perhaps a formal repetition of his offer of heart and hand. At any rate, Miss Picklin took it to be high time to blush and take off her glove, and the Rev. Mr. Griffin then bent across the back of the chair, joined their hands and went through the ceremony, ring and all. The ladies came up, one after another, and kissed the bride, and the gentlemen shook hands with Hassan, who received their good wishes with a curious look of unhappy resignation, and after cutting the cake and permitting the bride to retire for a moineiit to calm her feelings and put on her bonnet, the bridegroom made rather a peremptory movement of departure, and the happy couple went off in the caique toward Dolma-batchi amid much waving of handkerchiefs from the missionaries, and hurrahs from the Salem hands of the Simple Susan. And now, before giving the reader a translation of the speech of Hassan before the wedding, we must go back to some little events which had taken place one month previously at Constantinople. The Nancy arrived off Seraglio Point after a very ., remarkable passage, having still on her quarter the 1 1 northwest breeze which had stuck to her like a blood hound ever since leaving the harbor of Salem. She had brought it with her to Constantinople indeed, lor twenty or thirty vessels which had been long waiting i a favorable wind to encounter the adverse current of I the Bosphorus, were loosing sail and getting under i way and the pilot, knowing that the destination of the i Nancy was also to the Black sea, strongly dissuaded ; Captain Brown from dropping anchor in the horn, with a chance of losing the good luck, and lying, per haps a month, wind-bound in harbor. Understanding that the captain s only object in stopping was to leave the two ladies with Keui the opium-merchant, th pilot, who knew hiAesidence at Dolma-batchi, made 108 THOSE UNGRATEFUL BLIDGIMSES. signal for a caique, and kept up the Bosphorus. Arriving opposite the little village of which Has san s house was one of the chief ornaments, the la dies were lowered into the caique and sent ashore expecting of course to be received with open arms by Mrs. Keui and then, spreading all her canvass, the swift little schooner sped on her way to Trebi- sond. Hassan sat in the little pavilion of his house which looked out on the Bosphorus, eating his pillau, for it was the noon of a holytlay, and he had not been that morning to Galata. Hecognising at once the sweet face of Phemie as the caique came near the shore, he flew to meet her, supposing that the " Simple Susan" had arrived, and that the lady of his love had chosen to come and seek him. The reader will understand of course that there was no " Mrs. Keui." And now to shorten my story. Mrs. Brown and Phemie were in Hassan s own house, with no other acquaintance or protector on that side of the world, and there was no possibility of escaping a true explanation. The mistake was explained, and explained to Brown s satisfaction. Phemie was the "daughter" of Captain Picklin, to whom the offer was transmitted, and as, by blessed luck, the Nancy had outsailed the Simple Susan, Providence seemed to have chosen to set right for once, the traverse of true love. The English embassy was at Burgurlu, only six miles above, on the Bosphorus, and Hassan and his mother and sisters, and Mrs. Brown and Phemie were soon on their way thither in swift caiques, and the happy couple were wedded by the English chaplain. The arrival of the Simple Susan was of course looked for, by both Hassan and his bride, with no little dis may. She had met with contrary winds on the Atlantic, and had been caught in the Archipelago by a Levanter, and from the damage of the last she had been obliged to come to anchor off the little island of Paros and repair. This had been a job of six weeks, and meantime the Nancy had given them the go-by, and reached Constantinople. Hassan was daily on the look-out for the brig in his trips to town, and on the morning of her arrival, his mind being put at ease for the day by his glance toward the seaof Marmora, the stumbling so suddenly and so unprepared on the object of his dread, com pletely bewildered and unnerved him. Through all his confusion, however, and all the awkwardness of his situation, there ran a feeling of self-condemnation, as well as pity for Miss Picklin ; and this had driven him to the catastrophe described above. He felt that he owed her some reparation, and as the religion which he was educated did not forbid a plurality of wives, and there was no knowing but possibly she might be inclined to " do in Turkey as Turkeys do," he felt it incumbent on himself to state the fact of his previous marriage, and then offer her the privilege of becoming Mrs. Keui No. 2, if she chose to accept. As he had no English at his command, he stated his dilemma and made his offer in the best language he had Italian and with the results the reader has been made acquainted. Of the return passage of Miss Picklin, formerly Mrs. Keui, under the charge of Captain and Mrs. Brown, in the schooner Nancy, I have never learned the particulars. She arrived at Salem in very good health, however, and has since been distinguished principally by her sympathy for widows based on what, I can not very positively say. She resides at present in Salem with her father, Captain Picklin, who is still the consignee of the house of Keui, having made one voyage out to see the children of his daughter Phemie and strengthen the mercantile con nexion. His old age is creeping on him, undistinguish ed by anything except the little monomania of read ing the letters from his son-in-law at least a hundred times, and then wafering them up over the fireplace of his counting-room in doubt, apparently, whether he rightly understands the contents. THOSE UNGRATEFUL BLIDGIMSES, "For, look you, he hath as many friends as enemies; which friends, sir (as it were), durst not (look you, sir) show themselves (as we term it) his friends, while he s in directitude." Coriolanus. " Hermione. Our praises are our wages." Winter s Tale. F , the portrait-painter, was a considerable ally j of mine at one time. His success in his art brought him into contact with many people, and he made | friends as a fastidious lady buys shoes trying on a I great many that were destined to be thrown aside. It I was the prompting, no doubt, of a generous quality that of believing all people perfect till he discovered their faults but as he cut loose without ceremony from those whose faults were not to his mind, and as ill-fitting people are not as patient of rejection as ill- fitting shoes, the quality did not pass for its full value, and his abusers were " thick as leaves in Vallambro- sa." The friends who " wore his bleeding roses," however (and of these he had his share), fought his battles quite at their own charge. What with plenty I of pride, and as plentiful a lack of approbativeness, F took abuse as a duck s back takes rain buoy ant in the shower as in the sunshine. " Well, F !" I said, as I occupied his big chair oue morning while he was at wo^k, " there was great skirmishing about you last night at the tea-party !" " No ! really ? Who was the enemy ?" "Two ladies, who said they travelled with you through Italy, and knew all about you the Blid- gimses." "Oh, the dear old Blidgimses Crinny and Nin ny the ungrateful monsters ! Did I ever tell you of my nursing those two old girls through the chol era?" "No. But before you go off with a long story, tell me how you can stand such abominable back biting? It isn t once in a way, merely! you are their whole stock in trade, and they vilify you in ev ery house they set foot in. The mildest part of it is criminal slander, my good fellow ! Why not do the world a service, and show that slander is actionable, though it is committed in good society ?" " Pshaw ! What does it amount to ? The eagle suffers little birds to sing, And is not careful what they mean thereby, and in this particular instance, the jury would prob ably give the damages the other way for if thev THOSE UNGRATEFUL BLIDGIMSES. 109 hammer at me till doomsday, I have had my fun out of them my quid pro quo!" " Well, preface your story by telling me where you met them. I never knew by what perverse thread you were drawn together." "A thread that might have drawn me into much more desperate extremity a letter from the most lov able of women, charging me to become the trusty squire of these errant damsels wherever I should en counter them. 1 was then studying in Italy. They came to Florence, where I chanced to be, and were handed over to me without dog, cat, or waiting-maid, to Jacomo, the waiter, that Signorina Kafrina s high summons concerned only an overcharge of a penny in the eggs !" " And what said Jacomo ?" " Jacomo was incapable of an incivility, and begged pardon before stating that the usual practice of the house was to charge half a dollar a day for board and lodging, including a private parlor and bedroom, three meals and a bottle of wine. The ladies, however, had applied through an English gentleman (who chanced to call on them, and who spoke Italian), to have reductions made on their dispensing with two j-m*tiu, ijrivc icuuuuima iiiaua un tucir ui8|.>c:ijoiijg by a man who seemed ominously glad to be rid of ij dishes of meat out of three, drinking no wine, and them. As it was the ruralizing season, and all the Ij wanting no nuts and raisins. Their main extrava world was flocking to the baths of Lucca, close by, they went there till I could get ready to undertake them which I did, with the devotion of a courier in a new place, one fig-desiring evening of June." " Was there a delivery of the great seal ?" I asked, rather amused at F s circumstantial mention of his introitus to office. " Something very like it, indeed. I had not fairly- got the blood out of my face, after making my sa laam, when Miss Crinny Blidgims fished up from some deep place she had about her, a memorandum- book, with a well-thumbed brown paper cover, and gliding across the room, placed it in my hands as peo ple on the stage present pocket-books with a sort of dust-flapping parabola. Now if I have any partic ular antipathy, it is to the smell of old flannel, and as this equivocal-looking object descended before my nose faith! But I took it. It was the account- book of the eatables and drinkables furnished to the ladies in their travels, the prices of eggs, bread, figs, gance was in eggs, which they ate several times a day between meals, and wished to have cooked and served up at the price per dozen in the market. On this they had held conclave below stairs, and the re sult had not been communicated, because there was no common language ; but Jacomo wished, through j me, respectfully to represent, that the reductions from i the half dollar a day should be made as requested, I but that the eggs could not be bought, cooked, and ! served up (with salt and bread, and a clean napkin), for just their price in the market. And on this point the ladies were obstinate. And to settle this difficulty i between the high contracting parties, cost an argu- ! ment of a couple of hours, my first performance as translator in the service of the Blidgimses. Thence forward, I was as necessary to Crinny and Ninny (these were their familiar diminutives foi Corinna and Katrina) as necessary to Crinny as the gift of speech, j and to Ninny as the wig and abbo put together. Obe- | dient to the mandate of the fair hand which had con- et cetera, and I was to begin iny duties by having up j signed me to them, I gave myself up to their service, the head waiter of the lodging-house, and holding in- even keeping in my pocket their frowsy grocery- quisition on his charges. The Blidgimses spoke no Italian, and no servant in the house spoke English, and they were bursting for a translator to tell him that the eggs were over-charged, and that he must deduct threepence a day for wine, for they never touched it!" " What do the ladies wish ? inquired the dumb founded waiter, in civil Tuscan. " What does he say? what does he say? cried Miss Corinna, in resounding nasal. Tell the impudent fellow what eggs are in Dutch- ess county ! peppered out Miss Katrina, very sharply. " Of course I translated with a discretion. There was rather an incongruity between the looks of the damsels and what they were to be represented as say ing Katrina Blidgims living altogether in a blue op era-hat with a white feather." I interrupted F to say that the blue hat was immortal, for it was worn at the tea-party of the night before. " I had enough of the blue hat and its bandbo* be fore we parted. It was the one lifetime extravagance of the old maid, perpetrated in Paris, and as it cov ered the back seam of a wig (a subsequent discovery ;pmg book though not without some private outlay in I burnt vinegar. What penance a man will undergo for a pretty woman who cares nothing about him !" " But what could have started such a helpless pair I of old quizzes upon their travels ?" " I wondered myself till I knew them better. Crinny Blidgims had a tongue of the liveliness of an eel s tail. It would have wagged after she was skinned and roasted. She had, beside, a kind of pinchbeck smartness, and these two gifts, and perhaps the name of Corinna, had inspired her with the idea that she was an improvisalrice. So, how could she die without going to Italy ?" " And Ninny went for company?" " Oh, Miss Ninny Blidgims had a passion too ! She had come out to see Paris. She had heard that, in Paris, people could renew their youth, and she thought she had done it, with her abbo. She thought, too, that she must have manners to correspond. So, while travelling in her old bonnet, she blurted out her bad grammer as she had done for fifty years, but in her blue hat she simpered and frisked to the best of her recollection. Silly as that old girl was, however, of mine), she was never without it, except when bon- | she had the most pellucid set of ideas on the prices gr ideas neted to go out. She came to breakfast in it, mended her stockings in it, went to parties in it. I fancy it took some trouble to adjust it to the wig, and she de- of things to eat. There was no humbugging her on that subject, even in a foreign language. She filled her pockets with apples, usually, in our walks ; and voted to it the usual dressing-hours of morning and i the translating between her and a street-huckster, she dinner; for in private she wore a handkerchief ove it, pinned under her chin, which had only to be whip in her abbo and the apple-woman in Italian rags, w vexatious to endure, but very funny to rememjer. 1 , , - , ped off when company was announced, and this, per- j have thought of painting it, but, to under haps, is one of the secrets of its immaculate, yet picture, the spectator must make the acquaintance of Miss Fanny Blidgims rather a pill fora connoisseur! But by this time you are ready to approfond, as the French aptly say, the depths of my subsequent dis- She called it her abbo ." threadbare preservation. "Her what?" " You have heard of the famous Herbault, the man-milliner, of Paris? The bonnet was his pro duction, and called after him with great propriety. In Italy, where people dress according to their con- dition in life, this perpetual abbo was something a la\ princesse, and hence my embarrassment in explaining II " I had been abouka month at Lucca, when it was suddenly proposed b* Crinny that we should take a 110 THOSE UNGRATEFUL BLIDGIMSES. vetturino together, and go to Venice. Ninny and she had come down to dinner with a sudden disgust for the baths owing, perhaps, to the distinction they had received as the only strangers in the place who were not invited to the ball of a certain prince, our next-door neighbor. The Blidgimses and their economies, in fact, had become the joke of the season, and, as the interpreter in the egg-trades, I was mixed up in the omelette, and as glad to escape from my notoriety as they. So I set about looking up the conveyance with some alacrity. "By the mass, it was evidently a great saving of distance to cross the mountains to Modena. and of course a great saving of expense, as vetturinos are paid by the mile ; but the guide-books stated that the read was rough, and the inns abominable, and recom mended to all who cared for comfort to make a circum bendibus by the way of Florence and Bologna. Ninny declared she could live on bread and apples, however, and Crinny delighted in mountain air in short, economy carried it, and after three days chaf fering with the owner of a rattletrap vettura, we set off up the banks of the Lima without the blessing of Jacorno, the head waiter. " We soon left the bright little river, and struck into the mountains, and as the carriage crept on very slowly, I relieved the horses of my weight and walked on. The ladies did the same thing whenever they came in sight of an orchard, and for the first day Ninny munched the unripe apples and seemed getting along very comfortably. The first night s lodging was execrable, but as the driver assured us it was the best on the route, we saved our tempers for the worst, and the next day began to penetrate a country that looked deserted of man, and curst with uninhabitable sterility. Its effect upon my spirits, as I walked on alone, was as depressing as the news of some trying misfortune, and I was giving it credit for one redeem ing quality that of an opiate to a tongue like Crinny Blidgims s when both the ladies began to show symp toms of illness. It was not long after noon, and we were in the midst of a waste upland, the road bending over the horizon before and behind us, and neither shed nor shelter, bush, wall, or tree, within reach of the eye. The only habitation we had seen since morn ing was a wretched hovel where the horses were fed at noon, and the albergo, where we should pass the night, was distant several hours a long up-hill stretch, on which the pace of the horses could not possibly be mended. The ladies were bent double in the carriage, and said they could not possibly go on. Going back was out of the question. The readiest service I could proffer was to leave them and hurry on to the inn, to prepare for their reception. " Fortunately our team was unicorn-rigged one horse in advance of a pair. I took off the leader, and galloped away. " Well, the cholera was still lingering in Italy, and stomachs must be cholera-proof to stand a perpetual diet of green apples, even with no epidemic in the air. So I had a very clear idea of the remedies that would be required on their arrival. " At a hand-gallop I reached the albergo in a couple of hours. It was a large stone barrack, intended, no doubt, as was the road we had travelled, for military uses. A thick stone wall surrounded it, and it stood in the midst, in a pool of mud. From the last emi nence before arriving, not another object could be descried within a horizon of twenty miles diameter, and a whitish soil of baked clay, browned here and there by a bit of scanty herbage, was foreground and middle and background to the pleasant picture. The site of the barrack had probably been determined by the only spring within many miles, and by the dryness without and the mud within the walls, it was contrived foi a monopoly by the besieged. * "I cantered in at the unhinged gate, and roared out casa ! cameriere ! botega ! till I was fright ened at my own voice. " No answer. I threw my bridle over a projection of the stone steps, and mounted, from an empty stable which occupied the ground floor (Italian fashion), to the second story, which seemed equally uninhabited. Here were tables, however, and wooden settees, and dirty platters the first signs of life. On the hearth was an iron pot and a pair of tongs, and with these two musical instruments I played a tune which I was sure would find ears, if ears there were on the premises. And presently a heavy foot was heard on the stair above, and with a sonorous yawn descended mine host dirty and stolid a goodly pat tern of the fat weed on Lethe s wharf, as you would meet in a century. He had been taking his siesta, and his wife had had a colpo di sole, and was confined helplessly to her bed. The man John was out tend ing sheep, and he, the host, was vicariously, cook, waiter, and chambermaid. What might be the pleas ure of il signore ? " My pleasure was, first, to see the fire kindled and the pot put over, and then to fall into a brown study. " Two fine ladies with the cholera two days jour ney from a physician a fat old Italian landlord for nurse and sole counsellor nobody who could under stand a word they uttered, except myself, and not a drug nor a ministering petticoat within available limits ! Then the doors of the chambers were with out latches or hinges, and the little bed in each great room was the one article of furniture, and the house was so still in the midst of that great waste, that all sounds and movements whatever, must be of common cognisance ! Should I be discharging my duty to ladies under my care to leave them to this dirty old man ? Should I offer my own attendance as constant nurse, and would the service be accepted ? How, in the name of Robinson Crusoe, were these delicate damsels to be done for ? " As a matter of economy in dominos, as well as 10 have something Italian to bring home, I had bought at Naples the costume of a sister of charity, and in it I had done all my masquerading for three carnivals. It was among my baggage, and it occurred to me whether I had not better take the landlord into my confidence, and bribe him to wait upon the ladies, dis- - guised in coif and petticoat. No for he had a mus tache, and spoke nothing but Italian. Should 1 do it myself? "I paced up and down the stone floor in an agony of dilemma. " In the course of half an hour I had made up my mind. I called to Boniface, who was watching the boiling pot, and made a clean breast to him of my impending distresses, aiding his comprehension by such eye-water as landlords require. He readily un dertook the necessary lies, brought out his store of brandy, added a second bed to one of the apartments, and promised faithfully to bear my sex in mind, and treat me with the reverence due my cross and rosary. I then tore out a leaf of the grocery book, and wrote with my pencil a note to this effect, to be delivered to the ladies on their arrival : " DEAR Miss BLIDGIMS : Feeling quite indispo sed myself, and being firmly persuaded that we are three cases of cholera, I have taken advantage of a return calesino to hurry on to Modena for medical advice. The vehicle I take, brought hither a sister of charity, who assures me she will wait on you, even in the most malignant stage of your disease. She is collecting funds for an hospital, and will receive com pensation for her services in the form of a donation to this object. I shnll send you a physician by express THOSE UNGRATEFUL BLIDGIMSES. Ill from Modena, where it is still possible we may meet. With prayers, &c., &c. " \Tours very devotedly, " F. " P. S. Sister Benedetra understands French when spoken, though she speaks only Italian. " The delivery of this was subject, of course, to the condition of the ladies when they should arrive, though I had a presentiment they were in for a serious business. "And, true to my boding, they did arrive, exceed ingly ill. An hour earlier than I had looked for him, the vetturino came up with foaming horses at a tug ging trot, frightened half out of his senses. The ladies were dying, he swore by all the saints, before he dismounted. He tore open the carriage door, shouted for il signore and the landlord, and had carried both the groaning girls up stairs in his arms, before fat Boniface, who had been killing a sheep in the stable, could wash his hands and come out to him. To his violent indignation, the landlord s first care was to unstrap the baggage and take off my portmanteau, condescending to give him neither why nor wherefore, and as it mounted the stairs on the broad shoulders of my faithful ally, it was followed by a string of oaths such as can rattle off from nothing but the voluble tongue of an Italian. " I immediately despatched the note by the host, requesting him to come back and do my dress, and in half an hour sister Beuedetta s troublesome toilet was achieved, and my old Abigail walked around me, rubbing his hands, and swore I was a meraviqlia di belleza. The lower part of my face was covered by the linen coif, and the forehead was almost completely concealed ia the plain put-away of a false front ; and, unless the Blidgimses had reconnoitred my nose and eyes very carefully, I was sure of my disguise. The improvements in my figure were, unluckily, fixtures in the dress, for it was very hot ; but by the landlord s account they were very becoming. Do you believe the old dog tried to kiss me ? " The groans of Ninny, meantime, resounded through the house, for, as I expected, she had the worst of it. Her exclamations of pain were broken up, I could also hear, by sentences in a sort of spiteful monotone, answered in regular humphs ! by Crin- j ny Crinny never talking except to astonish, and being as habitually crisp to her half-witted sister as she was j fluent to those who were capable of surprise. Fear- j ing that some disapprobation of myself might find its ! way to Ninny s lips, and for several other reasons which occurred to me, I thought it best to give the back the lost chevelure ! ladies another half hour to themselves, and by way of testing my incognito, bustled about in the presence of the vetturiuo, warming oil and mixing brandies-and- water, and getting used to the suffocation of my petti coats for you have no idea how intolerably hot they are, with trowsers under. " Quite assured, at last, I knocked at the door. " That s his nun! said Ninny, after listening an as they relaxed their postures a little, I got one foot at a time hung over to me from the side of the bed into the pail of hot water, and set them to rubbing them selves with the warm oil, while I vigorously bathed their extremities. Crinny, as I very well knew, had but fivc-and-twenty words of French, just sufficient to hint at her wants, and Ninny spoke only such English as Heaven pleased, so I played the ministering angel in safe silence listening to my praises, however, for I handled Ninny s irregular doigls du pied with a ten derness that pleased her. "Well you know what the cholera is. I knew that at the Hotel Dieu at Paris, women who had not been intemperate were oftenest cured by whiskey punches, and as brandy toddies were the nearest ap proach of which the resources of the place admitted, I plied my patients with brandy toddy. In the weak state of their stomachs, it produced, of course, a de lirious intoxication, and as I began very early in the morning, there were no lucid intervals in which my incognito might be endangered. My ministrations were, consequently, very much facilitated, and after the second day (when I really thought the poor girls would die), we fell into a very regular course of hos pital life, and for one, I found it very entertaining. Quite impressed with the idea that sister Bellidettor (as Ninny called me) understood not a word of Eng lish, they discoursed to please themselves, and I was obliged to get a book, to excuse, even to their tipsy comprehension, my outbreaks of laughter. Crinny spouted poetry and sobbed about Washington Irving, who, she thought, should have been her lover, and Ninny sat up in bed, and, with a small glass she had in the back of a hair-brush, tried on her abbo at every possible angle, always ending by making signs to sister ig by m mb her Beilidettor to come and comb her hair! There was a long, slender, mustache remaining on the back of the bald crown, and after putting this into my hand, with the hair-brush, she sat with a smile of delight till she found my brushing did not come round to the front! " Why don t you brush this lock? she cried, this and this and this! making passes from her shining skull down to her waist, as if, in every one, she had a handful of hair ! And so, for an hour together, I threaded these imaginary locks, beginning where they were rooted long time ago, and passing the brush off to the length of my arm the cranium, when I had done, looking like a balloon of shot silk, its smooth surface was so purpled with the friction of the bristles. Poor Ninny ! She has great temptation to tipple, I think that is, if Macassar won t bring About the fifth day, the ladies began to show sians of convalescence, and it became necessary to reduce their potations. Of course they grew less entertaining, and 1 was obliged to be much more on my guard. Crinny fell from her inspiration, and jj Ninny from her complacency, and they came down to jl their previous condition of damaged spinsters, prim land peevish. Needs must that I should play out ;|the play. however, and I abated none of my petits Come in! that is to say, cntrct! feebly mm- . w jns for their comfort, laying out very large anticipa mured Crinny. " They were both in bed, rolled up like pocket- handkerchiefs ; but Ninny had found strength to band box her wig and abbo, and array herself in a nightcap with an exceedingly broad frill. But I must not trench upon the secrets of the prison-house. You are a bachelor, and the Blidgimses are still in a world of hope. tions of their grateful acknowledgments for my dra matic chivalry, devotion, and delicacy !" Well they are ungrateful !" said I, interrupting ; | F for the first time in his story. " Now, are not they ? They should at least, since ! they deny me my honors, pay me for my services as 1 inaid-of-all-work, nurse, hair- -dresser, and apothecary ! Well, "if I hear of their abusing me again, I ll send in 1 walked in and leaned over each of them, and jj ni y bills. Wouldn t you? But, to wind up this long whispered a benedicite, felt their pulses, and madeligtoiy. signs that I understood their complaints and they need ! ( thought that perhaps there might be some little not trouble themselves to explain ; and forthwith I c menced operations by giving them their grog (which ; they swallowed without making faces, by-the-by), and, i circumstances connected with my attentions which would look best at a distance, and that it would be more delicate to go on and take leave at Modena as 112 THOSE UNGRATEFUL BLIDGIMSES. sister Benedetta, and rejoin them the next morning in hose and doublet as before reserving to some future period the clearing up of my apparently recreant de sertion. On the seventh morning, therefore, I in structed old Giuseppe, the landlord, to send in his bill to the ladies while I was dressing, and give notice to the vetturino that he was to take the holy sister to Modena in the place of il signore, who had gone on before. " Crinny and Ninny were their own reciprocal dressing-maids, but Crinny s fingers had weakened by sickness much more than her sister s waist had dimin ished, and, in the midst of shaving, in my own room, I was called to finish doing Ninny, who backed up to me with her mouth full of pins, and the breath, for the time being, quite expelled from her body. As I was straining, very red in the face, at the critical hook, Giuseppe knocked at the door, with the bill, and the lack of an interpreter to dispute the charges, brought up the memory of the supposed absquatulator with no very grateful odor. Before I could finish Miss Ninny and get out of the room, I heard myself charged with more abominations, mental and personal, than the monster that would have made the fortune of Trinculo. Crinny counted down half the money, and attempted, by very expressive signs, to impress upon Giuseppe that it was enough ; but the oily palm of the old publican was patiently held out for more, and she at last paid the full demand, fairly crying with vex ation. " Quite sick of the new and divers functions to which I had been serving an apprenticeship in my black petticoat, I took my place in the vettura, and dropped veil, to be sulky in one lump as far as Mode- j na. I would willingly have stopped my ears, but after wearing out their indignation at the unabated charges of old Giuseppe, the ladies took up the subject of the expected donation to the charity-fund of sister Bene detta, and their expedients to get rid of it occupied (very amusingly to me) the greater part of a day s travel. They made up their minds at last, that half a dollar would be as much as I could expect for my week s attendance, and Crinny requested that she should not be interrupted while she thought out the French for saying as much when we should come to the parting. " I was sitting quietly in the corner of the vetlura, the next day, felicitating myself on the success of my masquerade, when we suddenly came to a halt at the gate of Modena, and the doganiere put his mustache in at the window, with passaporti, signore ! "Murder! thought I here s a difficulty I never provided for! " The ladies handed out their papers, and I thrust my -hand through the slit in the side of my dress and pulled mine from my pocket. As of course you know, it is the business of this gatekeeper to compare every traveller with the description given of him in his passport. He read those of the Blidgimses and looked at them all right. I sat still while he opened mine, thinking it possible he might not care to read the description of a sister of charity. But to my dis may he did and opened his eyes, and looked again into the carriage. " Aspetta, carol 1 said I, for I saw it was of no use. I gathered up my bombazine and stepped out into the road. There were a dozen soldiers and two or three loungers sitting on a long bench in the shade of the gate way. The officer read through the description once more, and then turned to me with the look of a func tionary who has detected a culprit. I began to pull up my petticoat. The soldiers took their pipes out of their mouths and uttered the Italian keck of surprise. When I had got as far as the knee, however, I came to the rolled-up trowsers, and the officer joined in the sudden uproar of laughter. I pulled my black petti coat over my head, and stood in my waistcoat and shirt-sleeves, and bowed to the merry official. The Blidgimses, to my surprise, uttered no exclamation, but I had forgotten my coif. When that was unpin ned, and my whiskers came to light, their screams became alarming. The vetturino ran for water, the soldiers started to their feet, and in the midst of the excitement, I ordered down my baggage and resumed my coat and cap, and repacked under lock and key the sister Benedetta. And not quite ready to en counter the Blidgimses, I walked on to the hotel and left the vetturino to bring on the ladies at his leisure. Of course I had no control over accidents, and this exposure was unlucky ; but if I had had time to let myself down softly on the subject, don t you see it would have been quite a different sort of an affair ? I parted company from the old girls at Modena, how ever, and they were obliged to hire a man-servant who spoke English and Italian, and probably the expense of that was added to my iniquities. Anyhow, abusing me this way is very ungrateful of these Blidgimses. Now, isn t it ?" DASHES AT LIFE WITH A FEEE PENCIL. PART II INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. PREFACE. THE following passages are extracts from the prefaces to the English editions of the two works included in this book" Inklings of Adventure" and " Loiterings of Travel :" It will be seen, by many marks in the narratives which follow, that they are not the work of ima gination. The dramas of real life are seldom well wound up, and the imperfectness of plot which might be objected to them as tales, will prove to the observant reader that they are drawn more from memory than fancy. It is because they are thus imperfect in dramatic accomplishment, that I have called them by the name under which they have been introduced. They are rather intima tions of what seemed to lead to a romantic termi nation than complete romances in short, they are Inklings of Adventure. The adventures were jotted down the events recorded the poems indited, and the letters despatched, while the thought was freshly born, or the incident freshly heard or re membered at the first place which afforded the leisure in short, during Loiterings of Travel. For the living portraitures of the book J have a word to say. That sketches of the whim of the hour, its manners, fashions, and those ephemeral trifles, which, slight as they are, constitute in a great measure its " form and pressure" that these, and familiar traits of persons distinguished in our time, are popular and amusing, I have the most weighty reasons certainly to know. They sell ""Are they innocent ?" is the next question. And to this I know no more discreet answer than that mine have offended nobody but the critics. It has been said that sketches of contemporary society require little talent, and belong to an inferior or der of literature. Perhaps. Yet they must be wel done to attract notice at all ; and if true and graphic they are not only excellent material for future biographers, but to all who live out of the magic circles of fashion and genius, they are more than amusing they are instructive. To such persons, living authors, orators, and statesmen, are as much characters of history, and society in cities is as much a subject of philosophic curiosity, as if a century had intervened. The critic who finds these matters " stale and unprofitable," lives in the circles described, and the pictures drawn at his elbow lack to his eye the effect of distance ; but the same critic would delight in a familiar sketch of a supper with " my lord of Leicester" in Eliz abeth s time, of an evening with Raleigh and Spenser, or perhaps he would be amused with a description by an eye-witness of Mary Queen of Scots, riding home to Holyrood with her train of admiring nobles. I have not named in the same sentence the ever-deplored blank in our knowledge of Shakspere s person and manners. What would not a trait by the most unskilful hand be worth now if it were nothing but how he gave the good-morrow to Ben Jonson in Eastcheap ? How far sketches of the living are a breach of courtesy committed by the author toward the per sons described, depends, of course, on the temper in which they are done. To select a subject for complimentary description is to pay the most un doubted tribute to celebrity, and, as far as I have observed, most distinguished persons sympathize with the public interest in them and their belong ings, and are willing to have their portraits drawn, either with pen or pencil, by as many as offer them the compliment. It would be ungracious to the admiring world if they were not. The outer man is a debtor for the homage paid to the soul which inhabits him, and he is bound, like a porter at the gate, to satisfy all reasonable PREFACE. curiosity as to the habits of the nobler and invis ible tenant. He owes his peculiarities to the world. For myself, I am free to confess that no age interests me like the present ; that no pictures of society since the world began, are half so enter taining to me as those of English society in our day ; and that, whatever comparison the living great men of England may sustain with those of other days, there is no doubt in my mind that Eng lish social life, at the present moment, is at a high er pitch of refinement and cultivation than it was ever here or elsewhere since the world began consequently it, and all who form and figure in it, are dignified and legitimate subjects of curiosity and speculation. The Count Mirabel and Lady Bellair of D Israeli s last romance, are, to my mind, the cleverest portraits, as well as the most entertaining characters, of modern novel-writing ; and D Israeli, by the way, is the only English au thor who seems to have the power of enlarging his horizon, and getting a perspective view of the times he lives in. His novels are far more popu lar in America than in England, because the At lantic is to us a century. We picture to ourselves England and Victoria as we picture to ourselves England and Elizabeth. We relish an anecdote of Sheridan Knowles as we should one of Ford or Marlowe. This immense ocean between us is like the distance of time ; and while all that is minute and bewildering is lost to us, the greater lights of the age and the prominent features of so* ciety stand out apart, and we judge of them like posterity. Much as I have myself lived in Eng land, I have never been able to remove this long perspective from between my eye and the great men of whom I read and thought on the other side of the Atlantic. When I find myself in the same room with the hero of Waterloo, my blood creeps as if I had seen Cromwell or Marlborough ; and I sit down afterward to describe how he looked, with the eagerness with which I should commu nicate to my friends some disinterred description of these renowned heroes by a contemporary writer. If Cornelius Agrippa were redivivus, in short, and would show rne his magic mirror, I should as soon call up Moore as Dryden Words worth or Wilson as soon as Pope or Crichton. INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. PEDLAR KARL, " Which manner of digression, however some dislike as frivo lous and impertinent, yet I am of Beroaldus his opinion, such di gressions do mightily delight and refresh a weary reader ; they are like sawce to a bad stomach, and I therefore do most willingly use them." BURTON. " Bienheureuses les imparfaites ; a elles appartient le royaume de 1 amour." L Evangilc des Femmes. I AM not sure whether Lebanon Springs, the scene of a romantic story I am about to tell, belong to New York or Massachusetts. It is not very important, to be sure, in a country where people take Vermont and Patagonia to be neighboring states, but I have a natu ral looseness in geography which I take pains to mor tify by exposure. Very odd that I should not remem ber more of the spot where I took my first lessons in philandering ! where I first saw you, brightest and most beautiful A. D. (not Anno Domini), in your white morning-frocks and black French aprons ! Lebanon Springs are the rage about once in three years. I must let you into the secret of these things, gentle reader, for perhaps I am the only individual existing who has penetrated the mysteries of the four dynasties of American fashion. In the fourteen mil lions of inhabitants in the United States, there are j precisely four authenticated and undisputed aristo- cratic families. There is one in Boston, one in New I York, one in Philadelphia, and one in Baltimore. By ! a blessed Providence they are not all in one state, or we should have a civil war and a monarchy in*no time. With two hundred miles interval between them, they agree passably, and generally meet at one or another of the three watering-places of Saratoga, Ballston, or \ Lebanon. Their meeting is as mysterious as the pro cess of crystallization, for it is not by agreement. You must explain it by some theory of homoeopathy or magnetism. As it is not known till the moment they , arrive, there is of course great excitement among the : hotel-keepers in these different parts of the country, and a village that has ten thousand transient inhabit ants one summer, has, for the next, scarcely as many I score. The vast and solitary temples of Paestum are gay in comparison with these halls of disappointment. ! As I make a point of dawdling away July and Au- gust in this locomotive metropolis of pleasure, and rather prefer Lebanon, it is always agreeable to me to hear that the nucleus is formed in that valley of hem locks. Not for its scenery, for really, my dear east- ern-hemispherian ! you that are accustomed to what is called nature in England (to wit, a soft park, with a gray ruin in the midst), have little idea how wearily upon heart and mind presses a waste wilderness of mere forest and water, without stone or story. Trees in England have characters and tongues ; if you see a fine one, you know whose father planted it, and for whose pleasure it was designed, and about what sum the man must possess to afford to let it stand. They are statistics, as it were so many trees, ergo so many owners so rich. In America, on the contrary, trees grow and waters run, as the stars shine, quite unmean ingly ; there may be ten thousand princely elms, and not a man within a hundred miles worth five pounds five. You ask, in England, who has the privilege of this water ? or you say of an oak, that it stood in such a man s time : but with us, water is an element un claimed and unrcnted, and a tree dabbles in the clouds as they go over, and is like a great idiot, without soul or responsibility. If Lebanon had a history, however, it would have been a spot for a pilgrimage, for its natural beauty. It is shaped like a lotus, with one leaf laid back by the wind. It is a great green cup, with a scoop for a drinking-place. As you walk in the long porticoes of the hotel, the dark forest mounts up before you like a leafy wall, and the clouds seem just to clear the pine- tops, and the eagles sail across from horizon to hori zon, without lifting their wings, as if you saw them from the bottom of a well. People born there think the world about two miles square, and hilly. The principal charm of Lebanon to me is the vil lage of " shakers," lying in a valley about three miles off. As Glaucus wondered at the inert tortoise of Pompeii, and loved it for its antipodal contrast to him self," so do I affection (a French verb that I beg leave to introduce to the English language) the shaking quakers. That two thousand men could be found in the New World, who would embrace a religion en joining a frozen and unsympathetic intercourse with the diviner sex, and that an equal number of females could be induced to live in the same community, with out locks or walls, in the cold and rigid observance of a creed of celibacy, is to me an inexplicable and grave wonder. My delight is to get into my stanhope after breakfast, and drive over and spend the forenoot in contemplating them at their work in the fields They have a peculiar and most expressive phvsiogno INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE, my ; the women are pale, or of a wintry redness in the cheek, and are all attenuated and spare. Gravity, deep and habitual, broods in every line of their thin faces. They go out to their labor in company with those serious men, and are never seen to smile ; their eyes are all hard and stony, their gait is precise and stiff, their voices are of a croaking hoarseness, and na ture seems dead in them. I would bake you such men and women in a brick-kiln. Do they think the world is coming to an end ? Are there to be no more children ? Is Cupid to be thrown out of business, like a coach proprietor on a railroad ? What can the shakers mean, I should be pleased to know ? The oddity is that most of them are young. Men of from twenty to thirty, and women from sixteen to twenty-five, and often, spite of their unbecoming dress, good-looking and shapely, meet you at every step. In dustrious, frugal, and self-denying, they certainly are, and there is every appearance that their tenets of difficult abstinence are kept to the letter. There is little temptation beyond principle to remain, and they are free to go and come as they list, yet there they live on in peace and unrepining industry, and a more thriving community does not exist in the republic. Many a time have I driven over on a Sunday, and watched those solemn virgins dropping in one after another to the church ; and when the fine-limbed and russet-faced brotherhood were swimming round the floor in their fanatical dance, I have watched their countenances for some look of preference, some be trayal of an ill suppressed impulse, till my eyes ached again. I have selected the youngest and fairest, and have not lost sight of her for two hours, and she might have been made of cheese-parings for any trace of emotion. There is food for speculation in it. Can we do without matrimony ? Can we "strike," and be independent of these dear delightful tyrants, for whom we " live and move and have our being ?" Will it ever be no blot on our escutcheon to have attained thirty-five as an unfructifying unit ? Is that fearful campaign, with all its embarrassments and awkward nesses, and inquisitions into your money and morals, its bullyings and backings-out is it inevitable ? Lebanon has one other charm. Within a morning drive of the springs lies the fairest village it has ever been my lot to see. It is English in its character, except that there is really nothing in this country so perfect of its kind. There are many towns in the United States more picturesquely situated, but this, before I had been abroad, always seemed to me the very ideal of English rural scenery, and the kind of place to set apart for either love or death for one s honeymoon or burial the two periods of life which I have always hoped would find me in the loveliest spot of nature. Stock bridge lies in a broad sunny valley, with mountains at exactly the right distance, and a river in its bosom that is as delicate in its wind ings, and as suited to the charms it wanders among, as a vein in the transparent neck of beauty. I am not going into a regular description, but I have car ried myself back to Lebanon ; and the remembrance of the leafy mornings of summer in which I have driven to that fair earthly paradise, and loitered under its elms, imagining myself amid the scenes of song and story in distant England, has a charm for me now. I have seen the mother-land ; I have rambled through park, woodland, and village, wherever the name was old and the scene lovely, and it pleases me to go back to my dreaming days and compare the reality with the anticipation. Most small towns in America have traces of newness about them. The stumps of a clearing, or freshly-boarded barns something that is the antipodes of romance meets your eye from every aspect. Stock- bridge, on the contrary, is an old town, and the houses are of a rural structure; the fields look soft and genial, the grass is swardlike, the bridges picturesque, the hedges old, and the elms, nowhere so many and so luxuriant, are full-grown and majestic. The village is embowered in foliage. Greatest attraction of all, the authoress of " Redwood" and " Hope Leslie," a novelist of whom America has the good sense to be proud, is the Miss Mitford of Stock- bridge. A man, though a distinguished one, may have little influence on the town he lives in, but a remarka ble woman is the invariable cynosure of s community, and irradiates it all. I think I could divine the presence of one almost by the growing of the trees and flowers. " Our Village" does not look like other villages. II. You will have forgotten that I had a story to tell. dear reader. I was at Lebanon in the summer of (perhaps you don t care about knowing exactly when it was, and in that case I would rather keep shy of dates. I please myself with the idea that time gets on faster than I). The Springs were thronged. The president s lady was there (this was under our admin istration, the Adams ), and all the four cliques spoken of above were amicably united each other s beaux dancing with each other s belles, and so on. If I were writing merely for American eyes, I should digress once more to describe the distinctive characters of the south, north, and central representations of beauty; but it would scarcely interest the general reader. I may say, in passing, that the Boston belles were a VAnglaise, rosy and riantes ; the New-Yorkers, like Parisians, cool, dangerous, and dressy ; and the Balti- moreans (and so south), like lonians or Romans, in dolent, passionate, lovely, and languishing. Men, women, and pine-apples, I am inclined to think, flour ish with a more kindly growth in the fervid latitudes. The campaign went on, and a pleasant campaign it was for the parties concerned had the management of their own affairs ; that is, they who had hearts to sell made the bargain for themselves (this was the greater number), and they who disposed of this com modity gratis, though necessarily young and ignorant of the world, made the transfer in the same manner, in person. This is your true republic. The trading in ffections by reference the applying to an old and selfish heart for the purchase of a young and ingenu ous one the swearing to your rents, and not to your faithful passion to your settlements, and not your constancy the cold distance between yourself and the young creature who is to lie in your bosom, till the purchase-money is secured and the hasty mar riage and sudden abandonment of a nature thus chilled and put on its guard, to a freedom with one almost a stranger, that can not but seem licentious, and can not but break down that sense of propriety in which modesty is most strongly intrenched this seems to me the one evil of your old worm-eaten mon archies this side the water, which touches the essen tial happiness of the well-bred individual. Taxation and oppression are but things he reads of in the morn- ng paper. This freedom of intercourse between unmarried people has a single disadvantage one gets so desper ately soon to the end of the chapter ! There shall be wo hundred young ladies at the Springs in a given season, and, by the difference in taste so wisely ar ranged by Providence, there will scarcely be, of course, more than four in that number whom any one gentle man at all difficult will find within the range of his beau ideal. With these four he may converse freely twelve hours in the day more, if he particularly de sires it. They may ride together, drive together, ram- ale together, sing together, be together from morning INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. till night, and at the end of a month passed in this way, if he escape a committal, as is possible, he will know all that are agreeable, in one large circle, at least, as well as he knows his sisters a state of things that is very likely to end in his going abroad soon, from a mere dearth of amusement. I have imagined, however, the case of an unmarrying idle man, a character too rare as yet in America to affect the general question. People marry as they die in that country when their time come. We must all marry is as much an axiom as we must all rffl, and eke as melancholy. Shall we go on with the story ? I had escaped for two blessed weeks, and was congratulating the sus ceptible gentleman under my waistcoat-pocket that we should never be in love with less than the whole sex again, when a German Baron Von arrived at the Springs with a lame daughter. She was eighteen, transparently fair, and, at first sight, so shrinkingly dependant, so delicate, so childlike, that attention to her assumed the form almost of pity, and sprang as naturally and unsuspectingly from the heart. The only womanly trait about her was her voice, which was so deeply soft and full, so earnest and yet so gen tle, so touched with subdued pathos and yet so melan choly calm, that if she spoke after a long silence, I turned to her involuntarily with the feeling that she was not the same as if some impassioned and elo quent woman had taken unaware the place of the simple and petted child. I am inclined to think there is a particular tender ness in the human breast for lame women. Any other deformity in the gentler sex is monstrous ; but lameness (the devil s defect) is "the devil." I picture to myself, to my own eye, now pacing those rickety colonnades at Lebanon with the gentle Meeta hanging he;ivily, and with the dependance inseparable from her infirmity, on my arm, while the moon (which was the moon of the Rhine to her, full of thrilling and un earthly influences) rode solemnly up above the moun tain-tops. And that strange voice filling like a flute with sweetness as the night advanced, and that irregu lar pressure of the small wrist in her forgotten lame ness, and my own (I thought) almost paternal feeling as she leaned more and more heavily, and turned her delicate and fair face confidingly up to mine, and that dangerous mixture altogether of childlikeness and womanly passion, of dependance and superiority, of reserve on the one subject of love, and absolute confi dence on every other if I had not a story to tell, I could prate of those June nights and their witcheries till you would think " Tutti gli alberi del mondo Fossero penne," and myself " bitten by the dipsas." We were walking one night late in the gallery run ning around the second story of the hotel. There was a ball on the floor below, and the music, deadened somewhat by the crowded room, came up softened and mellowed to the dark and solitary colonnade, and added to other influences in putting a certain lodger in my bosom beyond my temporary control. I told Meeta that I loved her. The building stands against the side of a steep moun tain high up above the valley, and the pines and hem locks at that time hung in their primeval blackness almost over the roof. As the most difficult and em barrassed sentence of which I had ever been delivered died on my lips, and Meeta, lightening her weight on my arm, walked in apparently offended silence by my side, a deep-toned guitar was suddenly struck in the woods, and a clear, manly voice broke forth in a song. It produced an instant and startling effect on my com panion. With the first word she quickly withdrew her arm ; and, after a moment s pause, listening with her hands raised in an attitude of the most intense ea gerness, she sprang to the extremity of the balustrade, and gazed breathlessly into the dark depths of the for est. The voice ceased, and she started back, and laid her hand hastily upon my arm. " I must go," she said, in a voice of hurried feeling ; " if you are generous, stay here and await me !" and in another moment she sprang along the bridge connect ing the gallery with the rising ground in the rear, and was lost in the shadows of the hemlocks. " I have made a declaration," thought I, "just five minutes too soon." I paced up and down the now too lonely colonnade, and picked up the fragments of my dream with what philosophy I might. By the time Meeta returned perhaps a half hour, perhaps an age, as you measure by her feelings or mine I had hatched up a very pret ty and heroical magnanimity. She would have spoken, but was breathless. " Explain nothing," I said, taking her arm within mine, " and let us mutually forget. If I can serve you better than by silence, command me entirely. I live but for your happiness even," I added after a pause, " though it spring from another." We were at her chamber-door. She pressed my hand with a strength of which I did not think those small, slight fingers capable, and vanished, leaving me, I am free to confess, less resigned than you would sup pose from my last speech. I had done the dramatic thing, thanks to much reading of you, dear Barry Cornwall ! but it was not in a play. I remained killed after the audience was gone. III. The next day a new character appeared on the stage. "Such a handsome pedlar !" said magnificent Hel en to me, as I gave my horse to the groom after a ride in search of hellebore, and joined the prome nade at the well : " and what do you think ? he sells only by rnffle ! It s so nice! All sorts of Berlin iron ornaments, and everything German and sweet ; and the pedlar s smile s worth more than the prizes ; and such a mustache ! See ! there he is ! and now, if j he has sold all his tickets will you come, Master Gravity ?" " I hear a voice you can not hear," thought I, as I gave the beauty my arm, and joined a crowd of people gathered about a pedlar s box in the centre of the parterre. The itinerant vender spread his wares in the midst of the gay assemblage, and the raffle went on. He was excessively handsome. A head of the sweet gen tleness of Raphael s, with locks flowing to his shoul ders in the fashion of German students, a soft brown mustache curving on a short Phidian upper lip, a i large blue eye expressive of enthusiasm rather than passion, and features altogether purely intellectual- formed a portrait of which even jealousy might con sole itself. Through all the disadvantages of a dress suited to his apparent vocation, an eye the least on the alert for a disguise would have penetrated his in a moment. The gay and thoughtless crowd about him, not accustomed to impostors who were more than they pretended to be, trusted him for a pedlar, but treated him with a respect far above his station insen sibly. Whatever his object was, so it were honorable, I inly determined to give him all the assistance in my power. A single glance at the face of Meeta, who joined the circle as the prizes were drawn a face so changed since yesterday, so flushed with hope and pleasure, and yet so saddened by doubt and fear, the small lips compressed, the soft black eye kindled aqd 8 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE, restless, and the red leaf on her cheek deepened to a feverish beauty left me no shadow of hesitation. I exchanged a look with her that I intended should say as much. IV. I know nothing that gives one such an elevated idea of human nature (in one s own person) as helping another man to a woman one loves. Oh last days of minority or thereabout ! oh primal manhood ! oh golden time, when we have let go all but the enthu siasm of the boy, and seized hold of all but the sel fishness of the man ! oh blessed interregnum of the evil and stronger genius ! why can we not bottle up thy hours like the wine of a better vintage, and enjoy them in the parched world-weariness of age ? In the tardy honeymoon of a bachelor (as mine will be, if it come ever, alas !) with what joy of paradise should we bring up from the cellars of the past a hamper of that sunny Hippocrene ! Pedlar Karl and "the gentleman in No. 10" would have been suspected in any other country of conspira cy. (How odd, that the highest crime of a monarchy the attempt to supplant the existing ruler becomes in a republic a creditable profession ! You are a trai tor here, a politician there !) We sat together from midnight onward, discoursing in low voices over sherry and sandwiches ; and in that crowded Babylon, his entrances and exits required a very conspirator-like management. Known as my friend, his trade and his disguise were up. As a pedlar, wandering about where he listed when not employed over his wares, his interviews with Mecta were easily contrived, and his lover s watch, gazing on her through the long hours of the ball from the crowd of villagers at the windows, hovering about her walks, and feeding his heart on the many, many chance looks of fondness given him every hour in that out-of-doors society, kept him com paratively happy. " The baron looked hard at you to-day," said I, as he closed the door in my little room, and sat down on the bed. " Yes ; he takes an interest in me as a countryman, but he does not know me. He is a dull observer, and hr.s seen me but once in Germany." " How, then, have you known Meeta so long ?" " I accompanied her brother home from the uni versity, when the baron was away, and for a long month we were seldom parted. Riding, boating on the Rhine, watching the sunset from the bartizan of the old castle- towers, reading in the old library, rambling in the park and forest it was a heaven, my friend, than which I can conceive none brighter." "And her brother?" " Alas ! changed ! We were both boys then, and a brother is slow to believe his sister s beauty dangerous. He was the first to shut the doors against me, when he heard that the poor student had dared to love his highborn Meeta." Karl covered his eyes with his hand, and brooded for a while in silence on the remembrances he had awakened. " Do you think the baron came to America pur posely to avoid you ?" " Partly, I have no doubt, for I entered the castle one night in my despair, when I had been forbidden entrance, and he found me at her feet in the old cor ridor. It was the only time he ever saw me, if, in deed, he saw me at all in the darkness : and he imme diately hastened his preparations for a long-contem plated journey., 1 knew not whither." " Did you follow him soon ?" " No, for my heart was crushed at first, and I de spaired. The possibility of following them in my wretched poverty did not even occur to me for months." " How did you track them hither, of all places in the world ?" " I sought them first in Italy. It is easy on the continent to find out where persons are not, and after two years wanderings, I heard of them in Paris. They had just sailed for America. I followed ; but in a country where there are no passports, and no espionage, it is difficult to trace the yaveller. It was probable only that they would be at a^lace of general resort, and I came here with no assurance but hope. Thanks to God, the first sight that greeted my eyes was my dear Meeta, whose irregular step, as she walked back and forth with you in the gallery, enabled me to recognise her in the darkness." Who shall say the days of romance are over ? The plot is not brought to the catastrophe, but we hope it is near. V. My aunt, Isabella Slingsby (now in heaven, with the "eleven thousand virgins," God rest her soul!), was at this time, as at all others, under my respecta ble charge. She would have said I was under hers but it amounts to the same thing we lived together in peace and harmony. She said what she pleased, for I loved her and I did what I pleased, for she loved me. When Karl told me that Meeta s principal obkjction to an elopement was the want of a matron, I snut the teeth of my resolution, as they say in Per sia, and inwardly vowed my unconscious aunt to this exigency. You should have seen Miss Isabella Slings by to know what a desperate man may be brought to resolve on. On a certain day, Count Von Raffle-off (as my witty friend and ally, Tom Fane, was pleased to call the handsome pedlar) departed with his pack and the hearts of all the dressing-maids and some of their mis tresses, on his way to New York. I drove down the road to take my leave of him out of sight, and give him my last instructions. How to attack my aunt was a subject about which I had many unsatisfactory thoughts. If there was one thing she disapproved of more than another, it was an elopement ; and with what face to propose to her to run away with a baron s only daughter, and leave her in the hands of a pedlar, taking upon herself, as she must, the whole sin and odium, was an enigma,! ate, drank, and slept upon, in vain. One thing at last be came very clear she would do it for nobody but me. Sequitur, I must play the lover myself. I commenced with a fit of illness. What was the matter ? For two days I was invisible. Dear Isabella ! it was the first time I had ever drawn seriously on thy fallow sympathies, and, how freely they flowed at my affected sorrows, I shame to remember ! Did ever woman so weep ? Did ever woman so take antipathy to man as she to that innocent old baron for his sup posed refusal of his daughter to Philip Slingsby ? This revival of the remembrance shall not be in vain. The mignonette and roses planted above thy grave, dearest aunt, shall be weeded anew ! . Oh that long week of management and hypocrisy ! The day came at last. "Aunt Bel!" "What, Philip, dear?" " I think I feel better to-day." - v* ; "Yes?" "Yes. What say you to a drive? There is the stanhope." " My dear Phil, don t mention that horrid stanhope. I am sure, if you valued my life " " Precisely, aunt (I had taken care to give her a INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. good fright the day before) but Tom Fane has offered me his ponies and Jersey wagon, and that, you know, is the most quiet thing in the world, and holds four. So, perhaps ehein ! you ll ask Meeta?" " Um ! Why, you see, Philip " I saw at once, that, if it got to an argument, I was steep mountain for ? Well ! the flowers are charming in these high regions ! " Don t you see my reason for coming, then, aunt Bella?" " Was it for that, dear Philip ?" said she, putting the wild flowers affectionately into her bosom, where perdu. Miss Slingsby, though a sincere Christian, j they bloomed like broidery on saffron tapestry ; "how never could keep her temper when she tried to reason. |; considerate of you !" And she drew her shawl around I knelt down on her footstool, smoothed away the false hair on her for^ead ; a nating endearrrwp: of i and kissed her. It was a fasci- nine, that I only resorted to on great emergencies. The hermit tooth in my aunt s mouth became gradually visible, heralding what in youth had been a smile ; and, as I assisted her in roll ing up her embroidery, she looked on me with an un suspecting affection that touched my heart. I made a silent vow that if she survived the scrape into which she was being inveigled, I would be to her and her dog Whimsiculo (the latter my foe and my aversion) the soul of exemplary kindness for the remainder of their natural lives. this vow was kept. My aunt blessed me shortly before she was called to " walk in white" (she had hitherto walked in yellow), and as it would have been unnatu ral in Whimsiculo to survive her, I considered his " natural life" as ended with hers, and had him peace fully strangled on the same day. He lies at her feet, as usual, a delicate attention of which (I trust in Swe- denborg) her spirit is aware. her, and was at peace with all the world. So easily j are the old made happy by the young ! Reader, I ; scent a moral in the air ! We were at the top of the hill. If I was sane, my j aunt was probably thinking, I should turn here, and ! go back. To descend the other side, and reascend and descend again to the Springs, was hardly a sort of thing one would do for pleasure. " Here s a good place to turn, Philip," said she, as we entered a smooth broad hollow on the top of the mountain. I dashed through it as if the ponies were shod with I lay the unction to my soul that jj talaria. My aunt said nothing, and luckily the road was very narrow for a mile, and she had a horror of a short turn. A new thought struck me. " Did you ever know, aunt, that there was a way back around the foot of the mountain ?" " Dear, no ; how delightful ! Is it far ?" "A couple of hours or so ; but I can do it in less. We ll try ;" and I gave the sure-footed Canadians the hip, and scampered down the hills rts if the rock of With the exception of " Tom Thumb" and " Rat tler," who were of the same double-jointed family, of y.ot p^r l Sisyphus had been rolling after us. j We were soon over the mountain-range, and the interminable wind and bottom, there was never p^r- l| road grew better and more level. Oh, how fast pat- haps such a pair of goers as Tom Fane s ponies. My !j tered those little hoofs, and how full of spirit, and aunt had a lurking hope, I believe, that the baron excitement looked those small ears, catching the would refuse Meeta permission to join us, but either jj lightest chirrup I could whisper, like the very spell of he did not think me a dangerous person (I have said jj swiftness ! Pines, hemlocks and cedars, farmhouses before he was a dull man), or he had no objection to || and milestones, flew back like shadows. My nunt sat me as a son-in-law, which my aunt and myself (against j speechless in the middle of the back seat, holding on the world) would have thought the natural construe- | with both hands, in apprehensive resignation! She expected soon to come in sight of the Springs, and had doubtless taken a mental resolution that if, please God, she once more found herself at home, she would never " tempt Providence" (it was a favorite expression of hers) by trusting herself again behind such a pair of fly-away demons. As I read this thought in her countenance by a stolen glar.ce over my shoulder, we rattled into a village distant from Lebanon twenty miles. " There, aunt," said I, as I pulled up at the door of the inn, " we have very nearly described a circle. j Now, don t speak ! if you do, you ll start the horses. Thei man s voice. Very i their mouths now, and be at home in the crack of a whip. Five miles more, only. Come !" Off we sped again like the wind, aunt Bel just vcn- i turing to wonderwhetherthe horses wouldn t rather go ] slower. Meeta had hardly spoken ; she had thoughts of her own to be busy with, and I pretended to be fully occupied with my driving. The nonsense I talked to tion upon his indifference. He came to the end of the colonnade to see us start, and as I eased the ribands and let the ponies off like a shot from a crossbow, I stole a look at Meeta. The color had fled from cheek and lip, and the tears streamed over them like rain. Aunt Bel was on the back seat, grace a Dicu ! We met Tom at the foot of the hill, and I pulled up. He was the best fellow, that Tom Fane ! " Ease both the bearing reins," said I, " I am going up the mountain." " jghe devil you are !" said Tom, doing my bidding, however ; " you ll find the road to the shakers much pleasanter. What an odd whim ! It s a perpendicu lar three miles, Miss Slingsby. I would as lief be hoisted up a well and let down again. Don t go that way, Phil, unless you are going to run away with Miss Von " " Many a shaft at random sent," thought I, and waving the tandem lash over the ears of the ponies, I brought up the silk on the cheek of their malaprop master, and spanked away up the hill, leaving him in a range likely to get a fresh supply of fuel by dinner-time. Tom was of a plethoric habit, and if I had not thought he could afford to burst a blood-vessel better than two lovers to break their hearts, I should not have ventured on the bold measure of borrowing his horses for an hour, and keeping them a week. We have shaken hands upon it since, but it is my private opinion that he has never forgiven ine in his heart. As we wound slowly up the mountain, I gave Meeta the reins, and jumped out to gather some wild flowers for my aunt. Dear old soul ! the attention reconciled her to what she considered a very unwarrantable ca price of mine. What I could wish to toil up that re s nothing they are so much afraid of as a wo- s voice. Very odd, isn t it ? We ll just sponge those horses, to do away the embarrassment of her si- lence, would convict me of insanity before any jury in the world. * The sun began to throw long shadows, and the short- legged ponies figured like (lying giraffes along the re tiring hedges. Luckily, my aunt had very little idea of conjecturing a course by the points of the compass. We sped on gloriously. " Philip, dear ! hav n t you lost your way ? It seems to me we ve come more than five miles since you stopped" (ten at least), " and I .don t see the moun tains about Lebanon at all !" " Don t be alarmed, aunty, dear ! We re very high, just here, and shall drop down on Lebanon, as it were. Are you afraid, Meeta ?" INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE, " Nein /" she answered. She was thinking in Ger man, poor girl, and heart and memory were wrapped up in the thought. I drove on almost cruelly. Tom s incomparable horses justified all his eulogiums ; they were indefati gable. The sun blazed a moment through the firs, and disappeared ; the gorgeous changes of eve came over the clouds ; the twilight stole through the damp air with its melancholy gray ; and the whippoorwills, birds of evening, came abroad, like gentlemen in debt, to flit about in the darkness. Everything was sad dening. My own volubility ceased ; the whiz of the lash, as I waved it over the heads of my foaming po nies, and an occasional " Steady !"as one or the other broke into a gallop, were the only interruptions to the silence. Meeta buried her face in the folds of her shawl, and sat closer to my side, and my aunt, soothed and flattered by turns, believed and doubted, and was finally persuaded, by my ingenious and well-inserted fibs, that it was only somewhat farther than I antici pated, and we should arrive " presently." Somewhere about eight o clock the lights of a town appeared in the distance, and, straining every nerve, the gallant beasts whirled us in through the streets, and I pulled up suddenly at the door of an hotel. " Why, Philip !" said my aunt in a tone of unut terable astonishment, looking about hey as if she had awoke from a dream, " this is Hudson !" It was too clear to be disputed. We were upon the North river, forty miles from Lebanon, and the steam er would touch at the pier in half an hour. My aunt was to be one of the passengers to New York, but she was, yet to be persuaded of it; the only thing now was to get her into the house, and enact the scene as soon as possible. I helped her out as tenderly as I knew how, and, as we went up stairs, I requested Meeta to sit down in a corner of the room, and cover her face with her hand kerchief. When the servant was locked out, I took my aunt into the recess of the window, and informed her, to her very great surprise, that she had run away with the baron s daughter. " Philip Slingsby !" My aunt was overcome. I had nothing for it but to be overcome too. She sunk into one chair, and I into I the other, and burying my face in my hands, I looked ! through my fingers to watch the effect. Five mortal I minutes lasted my aunt s wrath ; gradually, however, she began to steal a look at me, and the expression of ; resentment about her thin lips softened into something I like pity. " Philip !" said she, taking my hand, " My dear aunt !" "What is to be done?" I pointed to Meeta, who sat with her head on her bosom, pressed my hand to my heart, as if to suppress a pang, and proceeded to explain. It seemed impos sible for my aunt to forgive the deception of the thing. Unsophisticated Isabella ! If thou hadst known that I thou wert, even yet, one fold removed from the truth, | if thou couldst have divined that it was not for the darling of thy heart that thou wert yielding a point j only less dear to thee than thy maiden reputation if it could have entered thy region of possibilities that thine own house in town had been three days aired for the reception of a bride, run away with by thy os tensible connivance, and all for a German pedlar, in whose fortunes and loves thou hadst no shadow of interest I think the brain in thee would have turned, and the dry heart in thy bosom have broken with sur prise and grief! I wrote a note to Tom, left his horses at the inn, and at nine o clock we were steaming down the Hud son, my aunt in bed, and Meeta pacing the deck with me, and pouring forth her fears and her gratitude in a voice of music that made me almost repent my self- sacrificing enterprise. I have told the story gayly, gentle teader ! but there was a nerve ajar in my heart while its little events went on. How we sped thereafter, dear reader ! how the consul of his majesty of Prussia was persuaded by my aunt s respectability to legalize the wedding by his presence how my aunt fainted dead away when the parson arrived, and she discovered who was not to be the bridegroom and who was how ^^sersuaded her he had gone too far to recede, and worked on her ten derness once more how the weeping Karl, and his lame and lovely bride, lived with us till the old baron thought it fit to give Meeta his blessing and some money how Tom Fane wished no good to the ped lar s eyes and lastly, how Miss Isabella Slingsby lived and died wondering what earthly motive I could have for my absurd share in these events, are matters of which I spare you the particulars. NIAGARA-LAKE ONTARIO-THE ST. LAW RENCE, NO. I. NIAGARA. ^ was in my senior vacation, and I was bound to Niagara for the first time. My companion was a spe cimen of the human race found rarely in Vermont, and never elsewhere. He was nearly seven feet high, walked as if every joint in his body was in a hopeless state of dislocation, and was hideously, ludicrously, and painfully ugly. This whimsical exterior contained the conscious spirit of Apollo, and the poetical suscep tibility of Keats. He had left his plough in the Green mountains at the age of twenty-five, and entered as a poor student at the university, where, with the usual policy of the college government, he was allotted to me as a compulsory chum, on the principle of break ing in a colt with a cart-horse. 1 began with laughing at him, and ended with loving him. He rejoiced in the common appellation of Job Smith a synonymous soubriquet, as 1 have elsewhere remarked, which was substituted by his classmates for his baptismal name of Forbearance. ^ Getting Job away with infinite difficulty from a young Indian girl who was selling moccasins in the streets of Buffalo (a straight, slender creature of eigh teen, stepping about like a young leopard, cold, stern, and beautiful), we crossed the outlet of Lake Erie at the ferry, and took horses on the northern bank of Niagara river to ride to the falls. It was a noble stream, as broad as the Hellespont and as blue as the sky, and I could not look at it, hurrying on headlong- to its fearful leap, without a feeling almost of dread. There was only one thing to which Job was more susceptible than to the beauties of nature, and that was the beauty of woman. His romance had been stirred by the lynx-eyed Sioux, who took her money for the moccasins with such haughty and thankless superbia, and full five miles of the river, with all the gorgeous flowers and rich shrubs upon its rim, might as well have been Lethe for his admiration. He rode along, like the man of rags you see paraded on an ass in the carnival, his legs and arms dangling about in ludicrous obedience to the sidelong hitch of his pacer. The roar of the falls was soon audible, and Job s enthusiasm and my own, if the increased pace of our Narragansetponies meant anything, were fully aroused. The river broke into rapids, foaming furiously on its INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 11 course, and the subterranean thunder increased like a succession of earthquakes, each louder than the last. I had never heard a sound so broad and universal. It was impossible not to suspend the breath, and feel ab sorbed, to the exclusion of all other thoughts, in the great phenomenon with which the world seemed trem bling to its centre. A tall, misty cloud, changing its shape continually, as it felt the shocks of the air, rose up before us, and with our eyes fixed upon it, and our horses at a hard gallop, we found ourselves unexpect edly in front of aiP white hotel ! which sud denly interposed nMcwcen the cloud and our vision. Job slapped his legs against the sides of his panting beast, and urged him on, but a long fence on either side the immense building cut him oft from all ap proach ; and having assured ourselves that there was no access to Niagara except through the back-door of the gentleman s house, who stood with hat oft" to re ceive us, we wished no good to his majesty s province of Upper Canada, and dismounted. " Will you visit the falls before dinner, gentlemen ?" asked mine host. " No, sir !" thundered Job, in a voice that, for a mo ment, stopped the roar of the cataract. He was like an improvisatore who had been checked by some rude birbone in the very crisis of his elo quence. He would not have gone to the falls that night to have saved the world. We dined. As it was the first meal we had ever eaten under a monarchy, I proposed the health of the king ; but Job refused it. There was an impertinent profanity, he said, in fencing up the entrance to Niagara that was . greater encroachment on natural liberty than the stamp j act. He would drink to no king or parliament under | which such a thing could be conceived possible. I left j the table and walked to the window. " Job, come here ! Miss , by all that is love ly !" He flounced up, like a snake touched with a torpe do, and sprang to the window. Job had never seen the lady whose name produced such a sensation, but he had heard more of her than of Niagara. So had every soul of the fifteen millions of inhabitants between us and the gulf of Mexico. She was one of those mir acles of nature that occur, perhaps, once in the rise and fall of an empire a woman of the perfect beauty of an angel, with the most winning human sweetness of character and manner. She was kind, playful, un affected, and radiantly, gloriously beautiful. I am sor ry I may not mention her name, for in more chival rous times she would have been a character of history. Everybody who has been in America, however, will Know who I am describing, and I am sorry for those who have not. The country of Washington will be in its decadence before it sees such another. She had been to the fall and was returning with her mother and a troop of lovers, who, I will venturiS to presume, brought away a very imperfect impression of the scene. I would describe her as she came laugh ing up that green bank, unconscious of everything but the pleasure of life in a summer sunset ; but I leave it for a more skilful hand. The authoress of " Hope Leslie" will, perhaps, mould her image into one of her inimitable heroines. I presented my friend, and we passed the evening in her dangerous company. After making an engage ment to accompany her in the morning behind ih< sheet of the fall, we said "Good-night" at twelve one of us at least as many " fathom deep in love" as a thou sand Rosalinds. My poor chum ! The roar of the cataract that shook the very roof over thy head was less loud to thee that night than the beating of thine own heart, I warrant me ! I rose at sunrise to go alone to the fall, but Job was before me, and the angular outline of his gaunt figure, stretching up from Table Rock in strong relief against the white body of the spray, was the first object that caught my eye as I descended. As I came nearer the fall, a feeling of disappoint ment came over me. I had imagined Niagara a vast body of water descending as if from the clouds. The approach to most falls is from below, and we get an idea of them as of rivers pitching down to the plain from the brow of a hill or mountain. Niagara river, on the contrary, comes out from Lake Erie through a flat plain. The top of the cascade is ten feet perhaps below the level of the country around consequently invisible from any considerable distance. You walk to the bank of a broad and rapid river, and look over the edge of a rock, where the outlet flood of an inland sea seems to have broken through the crust of the earth, and, by its mere weight, plunged with an awful leap into an immeasurabh and resounding abyss. It seems to strike and thunder upon the very centre of I the world, and the ground beneath your feet quivers with the shock till you feel unsafe upon it. Other disappointment than this I can not conceive at Niagara. It is a spectacle so awful, so beyond the scope and power of every other phenomenon in the world, that I think people who are disappointed there mistake the incapacity of their own conception for the want of grandeur in the scene. The "hell of waters" below need but a little red ochre to out-Phlegethon Phlegethon. I can imagine the surprise of the gentle element, after sleeping away a se nnight of moonlight in the peaceful bosom of Lake Erie, at finding itself of a sudden in such a coil! A Mediterranean sea-gull, which had tossed out the whole of a January in the infernal " yeast" of the Archipelago (was I not all but wrecked every day be tween Troy and Malta in a score of successive hurri canes ?) I say, the most weather-beaten of sea-birds would look twice before he ventured upon the roaring caldron below Niagara. It is astonishing to see how far the descending mass is driven under the surface of the stream. As far down toward Lake Ontario as the eye can reach, the immense volumes of water rise like huge monsters to the light, boiling and flashing out in rings of foam, with an appearance of rage and anger that I have seen in no other cataract in the world. " A nice fall, as an Englishman would say, my dear Job." "Awful!" Halleck, the American poet (a better one never "strung pearls"), has writlen some admirable verses on Niagara, describing its effect on the different indi viduals of a mixed party, among whom was a tailor. The sea of incident that has broken over me in years of travel, has washed out of my memory all but the two lines descriptive of its impression upon Snip : " The tailor made one single note Gods ! what a place to sponge a coat ! " " Shall we go to breakfast, Job ?" " How slowly and solemnly they drop into the It was not an original remark of Mr. Smith s. Noth ing is so surprising to the observer as the extraordi nary deliberateness with which the waters of Niagara take their tremendous plunge. All hurry and foam and fret, till they reach the smooth limit of the curve and then the laws of gravitation seem suspended, and, like Cesar, they pause, and determine, since it is inevitable, to take the death-leap with becoming dig- 01 "Shall we go to breakfast, Job ?" I was obliged to raise my voice, to be hearJ, to a pitch rather exhaust ing to an empty stomach. His eyes remained fixed upon the shifting rainbows bending and vanishing in the spray. There was no moving him, and I gave in for another five minutes. 13 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. " Do you think it probable, Job, that the waters of Niagara strike on the axis of the world ?" No answer. " Job !" What ?" Do you think his majesty s half of the cataract is finer than ours ?" Much." For water, merely, perhaps. But look at the de licious verdure on the American shore, the glorious trees, the massed foliage, the luxuriant growth even to the very rim of the ravine ! By Jove ! it seems to me things grow better in a republic. Did you ever see a more barren and scraggy shore than the one you stand upon ?" " How exquisitely," said Job, soliloquizing, " that small green island divides the fnll ! What a rock it must be founded on, not to have been washed away in the ages that these waters have split against it !" " I ll lay you a bet it is washed away before the year two thousand payable in any currency with which we may then be conversant." " Don t trifle !" " With time, or geology, do you mean ? Isn t it perfectly clear from the looks of that ravine, that Ni agara has backed up all the way from Lake Ontario ? These rocks are not adamant, and the very precipice you stand on has cracked, and looks ready for the plunge.* It must gradually wear back to Lake Erie, and then there will be a sweep, I should like to live long enough to see. The instantaneous junction of two seas, with a difference of two hundred feet in their levels, will be a spectacle eh, Job?" " Tremendous !" " Do you intend to wait and see it, or will you come to breakfast ?" He was immoveable. I left him on the rock, went up to the hotel and ordered mutton-chops and coffee, and when they were on the table, gave two of the waiters a dollar each to bring him up nolens-volens. He arrived in a great rage, but with a good appetite, and we finished our breakfast just in time to meet Miss , as she stepped like Aurora from her chamber. It is necessary to a reputation for prowess in the United States to have been behind the sheet of the fall (supposing you to have been to Niagara). This achievement is equivalent to a hundred shower-baths, one severe cold, and being drowned twite but most people do it. We descended to the bottom of the precipice, at the side of the fall, where we found a small house, fur nished with coarse linen dresses for the purpose, and having arranged ourselves in habiliments not particu larly improving to our natural beauty, we reappeared only three out of a party often having had the courage to trust their attractions to such a trial. Miss looked like a fairy in disguise, and Job like the most ghostly and diabolical monster that ever stalked un- sepultured abroad. He would frighten a child in his best black suit but with a pair of wet linen trowsers scarcely reaching to his knees, a jacket with sleeves shrunk to the elbows, and a white cap, he was some thing supernaturally awful. The guide hesitated about going under the fall with him. It looked rather appalling. Our way lay through a dense descending sheet of water, along a slender pathway of rocks, broken into small fragments, with an overhanging wall on one side, and the boiling caldron of the cataract on the othfr. A false step, and you were a subject for the " shocking accident" maker. * It has since fallen into the abyss fortunately in the night, as visiters were always upon it during the day. The noise was heard at an incredible distance. The guide went frst, taking Miss right hand. She gave me her left, and Job brought up the rear, as they say in Connecticut, " on his own hook." We picked our way boldly up to the water. The wall leaned over so much, and the fragmented declivity was so narrow and steep, that if it had not been done before, I should have turned back at once. Two steps more, and the small hand in mine began to strug gle violently, and, in the same instant, the torrent beat into my eyes, mouth, and nostrils, .and I felt as if I was drowning. I staggered a blu^ktcp onward, but still the water poured into my nWmls, and the con viction rushed for a moment on my mind that we were lost. I struggled for breath, stumbled forward, and with a gasp that I thought was my last, sunk upon the rocks within the descending waters. Job tumbled over me the next instant, and as soon as I could clear my eyes sufficiently to look about me, I saw the guide sustaining Miss , who had been as nearly drowned as most of the subjects of the Humane So ciety, but was apparently in a state of resuscitation. None but the half-drowned know the pleasure of breathing. Here we were within a chamber that Undine might have coveted, a wall of rock at our back, and a trans parent curtain of shifting water between us and the world, having entitled ourselves a pcu prcs to the same reputation with Hylas and Leauder, for seduction by the Naiads. Whatever sister of Arethusa inhabits there, we could but congratulate her on the beauty of her abode. A lofty and well-lighted hall, shaped like a long pavil ion, extended as far as we could see through the spray, and with the two objections, that you could not have heard a pistol at your ear for the noise, and that the floor was somewhat precipitous, one could scarce im agine a more agreeable retreat for a gentleman who was disgusted with the world, and subject to dryness of the skin. In one respect it resembled the enchanted dwelling of the Witch of Atlas, where, Shelley tells us " The invisible rain did ever sing A silver music on the mossy lawn." It is lucky for Witches and Naiads that they are not subject to rheumatism. The air was scarcely breathable (if air it may be called, which streams down the face with the density of a shower from a watering-pot), and our footing upon the slippery rocks was so insecure, that the^exertion of continually wiping our eyes was attended with im minent danger. Our sight was valuable, for surely, never was such a brilliant curtain hung up to the sight of mortals, as spread apparently from the zenith to our feet, changing in thickness and lustre, but with a con stant and resplendent curve. It was what a child might imagine the arch of the sky to be where it bends over the edge of the horizon. The sublime is certainly very much diluted when one contemplates it with his back to a dripping and slimy rock, and his person saturated with a continual supply of water. From a dry window, I think the in fernal writhe and agony of the abyss into which we were continually liable to slip, would have been as fine a thing as I have seen in my travels ; but I am free to admit, that, at the moment, I would have exchanged my experience and all the honor attached to it, for a dry escape. The idea of drowning back through that thick column of water, was at least a damper to en thusiasm. We seemed cut off from the living. There was a death between us and the vital air and sunshine. I was screwing up my courage for the return, when the guide seized me by the shoulder. I looked around, and what was my horror to see Miss standing far in behind the sheet upon the last visible point of INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. rock, with the water pouring over her in torrents, and | pulling across, and you may get two or three of these a gulf of loam between us, which I could in no way lifts, which shove you st.aight into the air about ten understand how she had passed over. She seemed frightened and pale, and the guide ex plained to me by signs (for I could not distinguish a syllable through the roar of the cataract), that she had walked over a narrow ledge, which had broken with stiaig feet, and then drop you into the cup of an eddy, as if some long-armed Titan had his hand under the water, and were tossing you up and down for his amuse ment. It imports lovers to take heed how their mis tresses are seated, as all ladies, on these occasions, her weight. A long fresh mark upon the rock at the \ throw themselves into the arms of the nearest " hose foot of the precii^^s wall, made" it sufficiently evi dent : her positi^^Hs most alarming. I made a sign^^Hier to look well to her feet; for the little island on which she stood was green with slime and scarce larger than a hat, and an abyss of full six feet wide, foaming and unfathomable, raged be tween it and the nearest foothold. What was to be done? Had we a plank, even, there was no possible hold for the further extremity, and the shape of the rock was so conical, that its slippery surface evidently would not hold a rope for a moment. To jump to her, even if it were possible, would endanger her life, and while I was sinking and encouraging the beautiful j creature, as she stood trembling and pale on her dan- I gerous foothold, I felt my very heart sink within me. j The despairing guide said something which I could i not hear, and disappeared through the watery wall, and I fixed my eyes upon the lovely form, standing, like a spirit in the misty shroud of the spray, as if the intensity of my gaze could sustain her upon her dan gerous foothold. I would have given ten years of my life at that moment to have clasped her hand in mine. I had scarce thought of Job until I felt him trying and doublet. Job and I went over to dine on the American side and refresh our patriotism. \Ve dined under a hickory- tree on Goat island, just over the glassy curve of the cataract; and as we grew joyous with our champagne, we strolled up to the point where the waters divide for the American and British Falls; and Job ha rangued the "mistaken gentleman on his right," in eloquence that would have turned a division in the house of commons. The deluded multitude, how ever, rolled away in crowds for the monarchy, and at the close of his speech the British Fall was still, by a melancholy majority, the largest. We walked back to our bottle like foiled patriots, and soon after, hope less of our principles, went over to the other side too! I advise all people going to Niagara to suspend ma king a note in their journal till the last day of their visit. You might as well teach a child the magni tude of the heavens by pointing to the sky with your finger, as comprehend Niagara in a day. It has to create its own mighty place in your mind. You have no comparison through which it can enter. It is too vast. The imagination shrinks from it. It rolls in . to pass behind me. His hand was trembling as he j gradually, thunder upon thunder, and plunge upon laid it on my shoulder to steady his steps ; but there I plunge ; and the mind labors with it to an exhaustion was something in his ill-hewn features that shot an \- such" as is created only by the extremes! intellectual indefinable ray of hope through my mind. His sandy |; effort. I have seen men sit and gaze upon it in a cool hair was plastered over his forehead, and his scant , day of autumn, with the perspiration standing like a skin ; but though I recall their foreheads in large beads, from the unconsci dress clung to him his image now with a smile, I looked upon him with a feeling far enough from amusement then. God bless thee, my dear Job! wherever in this unfit world thy fine spirit may be fulfilling its destiny ! He crept down carefully to the edge of the foaming abyss, till he stood with the breaking bubbles at his knees. I was at a loss to know what he intended. She surely would not dare to attempt a jump to his arms from that slippery rock, and to reach her in any way seemed impossible. v The next instant he threw himself forward, and while I covered my eyes in horror, with the flashing conviction that he had gone mad and flung himself into the hopeless whirlpool to reach her^ she had crossed the awful gulf, and lay trembling and ex hausted at my feet I He had thrown himself over the chasm, caught the rock barely with the extremities of his fingers, and with certain death if he missed his hold or slipped from his uncertain tenure, had sus tained her with supernatural strength as she walked over his body ! The guide providentially returned with a rope in the same instant, and fastening it around one of his feet, we dragged him back through the whirlpool, and after a moment or two to recover from the suffocating immersion, he fell on his knees, and we joined him, I doubt not devoutly, in his inaudible thanks to God. II. LAKE ONTARIO. THE next bravest achievement to venturing behind the sheet of Niagara, is to cross the river in a small boat, at some distance below the Phlegethon of the abyss. I should imagine it was something like riding in a howdah on a swimming elephant. The im mense masses of water driven under by the Fall, rise splashing and fuming far down the river; and they are as unlike a common wave, to ride, as a horse and a camel. You are, perhaps, ten or fifteen minutes on rge beads, from the unconscious but toilsome agony of its conception. After haunting its precipices, and looking on its solemn waters for seven days, sleeping with its wind-played monotony in your ears, dreaming, and returning to it till it has grown the one object, as it will, of your perpetual thought, you feel, all at once, like one who has com passed the span of some almighty problem. It has stretched itself within you. Your capacity has at tained the gigantic standard, and you feel an elevation and breadth of nature that could measure girth and stature with a seraph. We had fairly " done" Niaga ra. We had seen it by sunrise, sunset, moonlight; from top and bottom ; fasting and full ; alone and to gether. We had learned by heart every green path on the island of perpetual dew, which is set like an imperial emerald on its front (a poetical idea of my own, much admired by Job) we had been grave, gay, tender, and sublime, in its mighty neighborhood, we had become so accustomed to the base of its broad thunder, that it seemed to us like a natural property in the air, and we were unconscious of it for hours; our voices had become so tuned to its key, and our thoughts so tinged by its grand and perpetual anthem, that I almost doubted if the air beyond the reach of its vibrations would not agonize us with its unnatural silence, and the common features of the world seem of an unutterable and frivolous littleness. We were eating our last breakfast there, in tender melancholy: mine for the Falls, and Job s for the Falls and Miss , to whom I had a half sus picion that he had made a declaration. "Job ." said I. He looked up from his egg. 44 My dear Job !" 44 Don t allude to it, my dear chum," said he, drop ping his spoon, and rushing to the window to hide his agitation. It was quite clear. I could scarce restrain a smile. Psyche in the em brace of a respectable giraffe would be the first thought 14 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. in anybody s mind who should see them together. And yet why should he not woo her and win her too ? He had saved her life in the extremes! peril, at the most extreme hazard of his own ; he had a heart as high and worthy, and as capable of an undying worship of her as she would find in a wilderness of lovers; he felt like a graceful man, and acted like a brave one, and was sans peur et sans reproche, and why should he not love like other men ? My dear Job ! I fear thou wilt go down to thy grave, and but one woman in this wide world will have loved thee thy mother ! Thou art the soul of a preux chevalier in the body of some worthy grave-digger, who is strut ting about the world, perhaps, in thy more proper car cass. These angels are so o er hasty in packing ! We got upon our horses, and had a pleasant amble before us of fifteen miles, on the British side of the river. We cantered off stoutly for a mile to settle our regrets, and then I pulled up, and requested Job to ride near me, as I had something to say to him. " You are entering," said I, " my dear Job, upon your first journey in a foreign land. You will see other manners than your own, which are not therefore laughable, and hear a different pronunciation from your own, which is not therefore vulgar. You are to mix with British subjects, whom you have attacked vigorously in your school declamations as the enemy. but who are not therefore to be bullied in their own country, and who have certain tastes of their own, upon which you had better reserve your judgment. We have no doubt that we are the greatest country that ever was, is, or ever shall be ; but, as this is an unpalatable piece of information to other nations, we will not stuff it into their teeth, unless by particular request. John Bull likes his coat too small. Let him wear it. John Bull prefers his beefsteak to a frican- deau. Let him eat it. John Bull will leave no stone unturned to serve you in his own country, if you will let him. Let him. John Bull will suffer you to find fault for ever with king, lords, and commons, if you do not compare them invidiously with other govern ments. Let the comparison alone. In short, my dear chum, as we insist that foreigners should adopt our manners while they are travelling in the United States, we had better adopt theirs when we return the visit. They are doubtless quite wOng throughout, but it is not worth while to bristle one s back against the opinions of some score mi lions." The foam disappeared frr,n the stream, as we fol lowed it on, and the roar jf the falls * * * " Now loud, now calm again, Like a ring of bells, whose sound the wind still alters, was soon faint in our ears, and like the regret of part ing, lessened with the increasing distance till it was lost. Job began to look around him, and see some thing else besides a lovely face in the turnings of the road, and the historian of this memorable journey, who never had but one sorrow that " would not budge with a fillip," rose in his stirrups as he descried the broad blue bosom of Lake Ontario, and gave vent to his feelings in (he begs the reader to believe) the most suitable quotation. Seeing any celebrated water for the first time was always, to me, an event. River, waterfall, or lake, if I have heard of it and thought of it for years, has a sensible presence, that I feel like the approach of a human being in whom I am interested. My heart flut ters to it. It is thereafter an acquaintance, and I de fend its beauty or its grandeur as I would the fair fame and worth of a woman that had shown me a prefer ence. My dear reader, do you love water? Not to drink, for I own it is detestable in small quantities but water, running or falling, sleeping or gliding, tin ged by the sunset glow, or silvered by the gentle al- chymist of the midnight heaven ? Do you love a lake? Do you love a river? Do you "affect" any one laughing and sparkling brook that has flashed on your eye like a fay overtaken by the cock-crowing, and tripping away slily to dream-land? As you see four sisters, and but one to love ; so, in the family of the elements, I have a tenderness for water. Lake Ontario spread away to the horizon, glittering in the summer sun, boundless to the eye as the Atlan tic ; and directly beneath us Uic small town of Fort Niagara, with the steame^Hphe pier, in which we promised ourselves a passaj^^own the St. Law rence. We rode on to the hotel, which we found to our surprise crowded with English officers, and having disposed of our Narragansets, we inquired the hour of departure, and what we could eat meantime, in as nearly the same breath as possible. " Cold leg of mutton and the steamboat s engaged, sir !" The mercury in Job s Britishometer fell plump to zero. The idea of a monopoly of the whole steamer by a colonel and his staff, and- no boat again for a week ! There was a government to live under ! We sat down to our mutton, and presently enter the waiter. "Colonel s compliments; hearing that two gentlemen have arrived who expected to go by the steamer, he is happy to offer them a passage if they can put up with rather crowded accommodations." "Well, Job! what do you think now of England, politically, morally, and religiously ? Has not the gentlemanlike courtesy of one individual materially changed your opinions upon every subject connected with the United Kingdom of Great Britain ?" " It has." " Then, my dear Job, I recommend you never again to read a book of travels without writing down on the margin of every bilious chapter, probably lost his passage in the steamer, or had no mustard to his mutton, or could find no ginger-nuts for the interest ing little traveller, or some similar annotation. De pend upon it, that dear delightful Mrs. Trollope would never have written so agreeable a book, if she had thriven with her bazar in Cincinnati." We paid our respects to the colonel, and at six o clock in the evening got on board. Part of an Irish regiment was bivouacked on the deck, and happier fellows I never saw. They had completed their nine years service on the three Canadian stations, and were returning to the ould country, wives, children, and all. A line was drawn across the deck, reserving the after quarter for the officers ; the sick were dis posed of among the women in the bows of the boat, and the band stood ready to play the farewell air to the cold shores of Upper Canada. The line was cast off, when a boy of thirteen rushed down to the pier, and springing on board with a desperate leap, flew from one end of the deck to the other, and flung himself at last upon the neck of 8 pretty girl sitting on the knee of one of the privates. " Mary, dear Mary !" was all he could utter. His sobs choked him. " Avast with the line, there !" shouted the captain who had no wish to carry off this unexpected passen ger. The boat was again swung to the wharf, and the boy very roughly ordered ashore. His only answer was to cling closer to the girl, and redouble his tears, and by this time the colonel had stepped aft, and the case seemed sure of a fair trial. The pretty Canadian, dropped her head on her bosom, and seemed divided between contending emotions, and the soldier stood ui) and raised his cap to his commanding officer, but hell firmly by her hand. The boy threw himself on his knees to the colonel, but tried in vain to speak. " Who s this, O Shane ?" asked the officer. " Sure, my swateheart, your honor." INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. " And how dare you bring her on board, sir ?" " Och, she ll go to ould Ireland wid us, your hon or." " No, no, no !" cried the convulsed boy, clasping the colonel s knees, and sobbing as if his heart would break; "she is my sister ! She isn t his wife! Fa- ther ll die if she does ! She can t go with him ! She sho ii t go with him !" Job began to snivel, and I felt warm about the eyes myself. ^^ " Have vni^K a wife, O Shane ?" asked the colonel. " Plase your honor, never a bit," said Paddy. He was a tight, good-looking fellow, by the way, as you would wish to see. " Well we ll settle this thing at once. Get up, my little fellow! Come here, my good girl! Do you love O Shane well enough to be his wife ?" " Indeed I do, sir !" said Mary, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, and stealing a look at the " six feet one" that stood as straight as a pike beside her. " O Shane ! I allow this girl to go with us only on condition that you marry her at the first place where we can find a priest. We will make her up a bit of a dowry, and I will look after her comfort as long as she follows the regiment. What do you say, sir? Will j you marry her?" O Shane began to waver in his military position, ! from a full front face getting to very nearly a right- j about. It was plain he was taken by surprise* The eyes of the company were on him, however, and pub- i lie opinion, which, in most human breasts, is consider ably stronger than conscience, had its effect. " I ll do it, your honor !" said he, bolting it out as a man volunteers upon a "forlorn hope." Tears might as well have been bespoken for the whole company. The boy was torn from his sister s neck, and set ashore in the arms of two sailors, and poor Mary, very much in doubt whether she was hap py or miserable, sank upon a heap of knapsacks, and buried her eyes in a cotton handkerchief with a map of London upon it, probably a gage d amour from the desaving O Shane. I did the same myself with silk one, and Job item. Item the colonel and several officers. The boat was shoved off, and the wheels spattered away, but as far as we could hear his voice, the cry came following on, " Mary, Mary !" It rung in my ears all night : " Mary, Mary !" I was up in the morning at sunrise, and was glad to escape from the confined cabin and get upon deck The steamer was booming on through a sea as calm as a mirror, and no land visible. The fresh dewiness of the morning air ashore played in my nostrils, and the smell of grass was perceptible in the mind, but in all else it was like a calm in mid ocean. The soldiers were asleep along the decks, with their wives and children, and the pretty runaway lay with her head on O Shane s bosom, her red eyes and soiled finery showing too plainly how she had passed the night. Poor Mary ! she has enough of following a soldier, by this, I fear. I stepped forward, and was not a little surprised to see standing against the railing on the larboard bow, the motionless figure of an Indian girl of sixteen. Her dark eye was fixed on the line of the horizon we were leaving behind, her arms were folded on her bosom, and she seemed not even to breathe. A com mon shawl was wrapped carelessly around her, and another glance betrayed to me that she was in a situ ation soon to become a mother. Her feet were pro tected by a pair of once gaudy but now shabby and torn moccasins, singularly small ; her hands were of a delicate thinness unusual to her race, and her hollow cheeks, and forehead marked with an expression of pain, told all I could have prophesied of the history of a white man s tender mercies. I approached very near, quite unperceived. A small burning spot was just perceptible in the centre of her dark cheek, and as I looked at her steadfastly, I could see a working of the muscles of her dusky brow, which betrayed, in one of a race so trained to stony calmness, an unusual fever of feeling. I looked around for the place in which she must have slept. A mantle of wampum-work, folded across a heap of confused baggage, partly oc cupied as a pillow by a brutal-looking and sleeping soldier, told at once the main part of her story. I felt or her, from my soul ! " You can hear the great waterfall no more," I said, touching her arm. " I hear it when I think of it," she replied, turning her eyes upon me as slowly, and with as little surprise, as if I had been talking to her an hour. I pointed to the sleeping soldier. "Are you going with him to his country ?" Yes." " Are you his wife ?" " My father gave me to him." " Has he sworn before the priest in the name of the Great Spirit to be your husband !" " No." She looked intently into my eyes as she answered, as if she tried in vain to read my meaning. " Is he kind to you ?" She smiled bitterly. " Why then did you follow him ?" Her eyes dropped upon the burden she bore at her heart. The answer could not have been clearer if written with a sunbeam. I said a few words of kind ness, and left her to turn over in my mind how I could best interfeie for her happiness. HI. THE ST. LAAVRENCE. ON the third evening we had entered upon the St. Lawrence, and were winding cautiously into the channel of the Thousand Isles. I think there is not, within the knowledge of the "all-beholding sun," a spot so singularly and exquisitely beautiful. Between the Mississippi and the Cimmerian Bosphorus, Iknoio there is not, for I have pic-nicked from the Symplegades westward. The Thousand Isles of the St. Lawrence are as imprinted on my mind as the stars of heaven. I could forget them as soon. The river is here as wide as a lake, while the chan nel just permits the passage of a steamer. The islands, more than a thousand in number, are a sin gular formation of flat, rectangular rock, split, as it were, by regular mathematical fissures, and over flowed nearly to the tops, which are loaded with a most luxuriant vegetation. They vary in size, but the generality of them would about accommodate a tea-party of six. The water is deep enough to float a large steamer directly at the edge, and an active deer ould leap across from one to the other in any direc tion. What is very singular, these little rocky plat- brms are covered with a rich loam, and carpeted with noss and flowers, while immense trees take root in the clefts, and interlace their branches with those of the leighboring islets, shadowing the water with the un sunned dimness of the wilderness. It is a very odd hing to glide through in a steamer. The luxuriant eaves sweep the deck, and the black funnel parts the drooping sprays as it keeps its way, and you may iluck the blossoms of the acacia, or the rich chestnut lowers, sitting on the taffrail, and, really, a magic pas sage in a witch s steamer, beneath the tree-tops of an untrodden forest, could not be more novel and start ing. Then the solitude and silence of the dim and itill waters are continually broken by the plunge and cap of the wild deer springing or swimming from one 16 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. island to another, and the swift and shadowy canoe of the Indian glides out from some unseen channel, and with a single stroke of his broad paddle he vanishes, and is lost again, even to the ear. If the beauty-sick and nature-searching spirit of Keats is abroad in the world, " my basnet to a prentice-cap" he passes his summers amid the thousand isles of the St. Law rence ! I would we were there with our tea-things, sweet Rosa Matilda ! We had dined on the quarter-deck, and were sitting over the colonel s wine, pulling the elm-leaves from the branches as they swept saucily over the table, and listening to the band, who were playing waltzes that probably ended in the confirmed insanity of every wild heron and red deer that happened that afternoon to come within ear-shot of the good steamer Queens- ton. The paddles began to slacken in their spattering, and the boat came to, at the sharp side of one of the largest of the shadowy islands. We were to stop an hour or two, and take in wood. Everybody was soon ashore for a ramble, leaving only the colonel, who was a cripple from a score of Waterloo tokens, and your servant, reader, who had something on his mind. " Colonel ! will you oblige me by sending for Ma- honey ? Steward ! call me that Indian girl sitting with her head on her knees in the boat s bow." They stood before us. " How is this ?" exclaimed the colonel ; " another ! good God ! these Irishmen ! Well, sir! what do you intend to do with this girl, now that you have ruined her?" Mahoney looked at her out of a corner of his eye with a libertine contempt that made my blood boil. The girl watched for his answer with an intense but calm gaze into his face, that if he had had a soul, would have killed him. Her lips were set firmly but not fiercely together, and as the private stood looking from one side to the other, unable or unwilling to an swer, she suppressed a rising emotion in her throat, and turned her look on the commanding officer with a proud coldness that would have become Medea. " Mahoney !" said the colonel, sternly, " will you marry this poor girl ?" " Never, I hope, your honor !" The wasted and noble creature raised her burdened form to its fullest height, and, with an inaudible mur mur bursting from her lips, walked back to the bow of the vessel. The colonel pursued his conversation with Mahoney, and the obstinate brute was still re fusing the only reparation he could make the poor Indian, when she suddenly reappeared. The shawl was no longer around her shoulders. A coarse blan ket was bound below her breast with a belt of wam pum, leaving her fine bust entirely bare, her small feet trod the deck with the elasticity of a leopard about to leap on his prey, and her dark, heavily- fringed eyes, glowed like coals of fire. She seized the colonel s hand, and imprinted a kiss upon it, another upon mine, and without a look at the father of her child, dived with a single leap over the gangway. She rose di rectly in the clear water, swam with powerful strokes to one of the most distant islands, and turning once more to wave her hand as she stood on the shore, strode on, and was lost in the tangles of the forest. THE CHEROKEE S THREAT, " Notre bonheur, tnon cher, se tiendra toujours entre la plante de nos pieds et notre occiput ; et qu il coute un million par an on cent louis, la perception intrinsique est la mgme au-dedans de nous." Le Pere Goriot, THERE were a hundred students in the new class matriculated at Yale College in Connecticut, ia the year 18 . They were young men of different ages and of all conditions in life, but less various in their mien and breeding than in the characteristics of the widely-separate states from which they came. It is not thought extraordinary in Europe that the French and English, the German, and the Italian, should pos sess distinct national traits : yet one American is sup posed to be like every other, though the two between whom the comparison is drawn were born and bred as far apart, and in as different latitu^fcas the Highland cateran and the brigand of Calabi^BL I looked around me with som^mterest, when, on the first morning of the term, the president, professors, and students of the University assembled in the college chapel at the sound of the prayer-bell, and, with my brother freshmen, I stood in the side aisle, closing up with our motley, and, as yet, unclassical heads and habiliments, the long files of the more initiated classes. The berry-brown tan of the sun of Georgia, unblanched by study, was still dark and deep on the cheek of one ; the look of command, breathing through the indolent attitude, betrayed, in another, the young Carolinian and slave-master ; a coat of green, garnished with fur and bright buttons, and shaped less by the tailor than by the Herculean and expansive frame over which it was strained, had a taste of Kentucky in its complex ion ; the white skin and red or sandy hair, cold ex pression, stiff black coat, and serious attention to the service, told of the puritan son of New Hampshire or Vermont ; and, perked up in his well-fitted coat, the exquisite of the class, stood the slight and metropolitan New-Yorker, with a firm belief in his tailor and him self written on his effeminate lip, and an occasional look at his neighbors coats and shoulders, that might have been construed into wonder upon what western river or mountain dwelt the builders of such coats and men ! Rather annoyed at last by the glances of one or two seniors, who were amusing themselves with my simple gaze of curiosity, I turned my attention to my more immediate neighborhood. A youth with close, curl ing, brown hair, rather under-size, but with a certain decision and nerve in his lip which struck me imme diately, and which seemed to express somehow a con fidence in himself which his limbs scarce bore out, stood with his back to the pulpit, and, with his foot on the seat and his elbow on his knee, seemed to have fallen at once into the habit of the place, and to be beyond surprise or interest. As it was the custom of the college to take places at prayers and recitation alphabetically, and he was likely to be my neighbor in chapel and hall for the next four years, I speculated rather more than I should else have done on his face and manner; and as the president came to his Amen, I came to the conclusion, that whatever might be Mr. "S. s" capacity for friendship, his ill-will would be very demonstrative and uncomfortable. The term went on, the politics of the little republic fermented, and as first appearances wore away, or peculiarities wore off by collision or developed by in timacy, the different members of the class rose or fell in the general estimation, and the graduation of talent and spirit became more just and definite. The " Southerners and Northerners," as they are called, soon discovered, like the classes that had gone before them, that they had no qualities in common, and, of the secret societies which exist among the students in that university, joined each that of his own compatri ots. The Carolinian or Georgian, who had passed his life on a plantation, secluded from the society of his equals, soon found out the value of his chivalrous de portment and graceful indolence in the gay society for which the town is remarkable ; while the Vermontese, or White-Mountaineer, " made unfashionably," and ill at ease on a carpet, took another line of ambition, and sat down with the advantage of constitutional patience INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 17 aud perseverance to the study which he would find in the end a " better contiuuer," even in the race for a lady s favor. It was the only republic I have ever known that class of freshmen. It was a fair arena; and neither: in politics, nor society, nor literature, nor love, nor re ligion, have I, in much searching through the world, found the same fair play or good feeling. Talk of out- own republic ! ^society is the very core and gali of the worst growtj^feuistocracy. Talk of the republic of letters ! the^ro graves by the pyramid of Cains Cestius laugh it to scorn. Of love! of religion. What is bought and sold like that which has the name of the first? What is made a snare and a tool by the designing like the last? But here with a govern ment over us ever kindly and paternal, no favor shown, and no privilege denied; every equality in the com petitors at all possible age, previous education, and, above all, worldly position it was an arena in which a generous spirit would wrestle with an abandon of heart and limb he might never know in the world again. Every individual rising or falling by the esti mation he exacts of his fellows, there is no such school of honor; each, of the many pahns of scholar ship, from the severest to the lightest, aiming at that which best suits his genius, and as welcome as another to the goal, there is no apology for the laggard. Of the feelings that stir the heart in our youth of the few, the very few, which have no recoil, and leave no repentance this leaping from the starting-post of mind this first spread of the encouraged wing in the free heaven of thought and knowledge is recorded in my own slender experience as the most joyous and the most unmingled. He who has soiled his bright h honor with the tools of political ambition he who has j leant his soul upon the charity of a sect in religion he who has loved, hoped, and trusted, in the greater \\ arena of life and manhood must look back on days j j like these as the broken-winged eagle to the sky as the Indian s subdued horse to the prairie. II. NEW HAVEN is not alone the seat of a university. It is a kind of metropolis of education. The excessive beauty of the town, with its embowered streets and sunny gardens, the refinement of its society, its cen tral position and accessibility, and the facilities for at tending the lectures of the college professors, render it a most desirable place of instruction in every de partment. Among others, the female schools of the place have a great reputation, and this which in Eu rope, or with a European state of society, would probably be an evil, is, from the simple and frank character of manners in America, a mutual aujd de cided advantage. The daughters of the first families of the country are sent here, committed for two, three, and four years, to the exclusive care of the head of the establishment, and (as one of the privileges and advantages of the school) associating freely with the general society of the town, the male part, of course, composed principally of students. A more easy and liberal intercourse exists in no society in the world, and in no society that I have ever seen is the tone of morals and manners so high and unexceptionable. Attachments are often formed, and little harm is thought of it; and unless it is a very strong case of disparity or objection, no obstacle is thrown in the way of the common intercourse between lovers ; and the lady returns to her family, and the gentleman senior disappears with his degree, and they meet and marry if they like. If they do not, the lady stands as well in the matrimonial market as ever, and the gentleman (unlike his" horse) is not damaged by hav ing been on his knees. Like " Le Noir Fain6ant," at the tournament, my friend St. John seemed more a looker-on than an actor in tlu: various pursuits of the university. A sudden interference in a quarrel, in which a brother freshman was contending against odds, enlightened the class as to his spirit and personal strength; he acquitted him self at recitations with the air of self-contempt for such easy excellence ; he dressed plainly, but with instinctive taste ; and at the end of the first term, having shrunk from all intimacy, and lived alone with his books and a kind of trapper s dog he had brought with him from the west, he had acquired an ascen dency in the opinion of the class for which no one could well account, but to which every one unhes itatingly assented. We returned after our first short vacation, and of my hundred class-mates there was but one whom I much cared to meet again. St. John had passed the vacation in his rooms, and my evident pleasure at meeting him, for the first time, seemed to open his heart to me. He invited me to breakfast with him. By favor seldom granted to a freshman, he had a lodg ing in the town the rest of the class being compelled to live with a chum in the college buildings. 1 found his rooms (I was the first of the class who had en tered them) more luxuriously furnished than I had expected from the simplicity of his appearance, but his books, not many, but select, and (what is in America an expensive luxury) in the best English editions and superbly bound, excited most my envy and surprise. How he should have acquired tastes of such ultra- civilization in the forests of the west was a mystery that remained to be solved. III. AT the extremity of a green lane in the outer skirt of the fashionable suburb of New Haven stood a ram bling old Dutch house, built probably when the cattle of Mynheer grazed over the present site of the town. It was a wilderness of irregular rooms, of no describa- ble shape in its exterior, and from its southern balcony, to use an expressive Gallicism, "gave upon the bay." Long Island sound, the great highway from the north ern Atlantic to New York, weltered in alternate lead and silver (oftener like the brighter metal, for the cli mate is divine), between the curving lip of the bay and the interminable and sandy shore of the island some six leagues distant ; the procession of ships and steam ers stole past with an imperceptible progress ; the ceaseless bells of the college chapel came deadened through the trees from behind, and (the day being one of golden autumn, and myself and St. John waiting while black Agatha answered the door-bell) the sun- steeped precipice of East Rock, with its tiara of blood- red maples flushing like a Turk s banner in the light, drew from us both a truant wish for a ramble and a holyday. I shall have more to say anon of the foliage of an American October: but just now, while I remem ber it, I wish to record a belief of my own, that if, as philosophy supposes, we have lived other lives if " our star Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar" it is surely in the days tempered like the one I am re membering and describing profoundly serene, sunny as the top of Olympus, heavenly pure, holy, and more invigorating and intoxicating than luxurious or balmy ; the sort of air that the visiting angels might have brought with them to the tent of Abraham it is on such days, I would record, that my own memory steps back over the dim threshold of life (so it seems to me), and on such days only. It is worth the translation of our youth and our household gods to a sunnier land, if it were alone for those immortal revelations. In a few minutes from this time were assembled in 18 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. Mrs. Ilfrington s drawing-room the six or seven young ladies of my more particular acquaintance among her pupils, of whom one was a newcomer, and the object of my mingled curiosity and admiration. It was the one day of the week when morning visiters were ad mitted, and I was there, in compliance with an unex pected request from my friend, to present him to the agreeable circle o-f Mrs. Ilfrington. As an habitue in her family, this excellent lady had taken occasion to introduce to me, a week or two before, the newcomer | of whom I have spoken above a departure from the j ordinary rule of the establishment, which I felt to be j a compliment, and which gave me, I presumed, a tacit j claim to mix myself up in that young lady s destiny j as deeply as I should find agreeable. The newcomer ! was the daughter of an Indian chief, and her name was Nunu. The wrongs of civilization to the noble aborigines ! of America are a subject of much poetical feeling in j the United States, and will ultimately become the po- ! etry of the nation. At present the sentiment takes occasionally a tangible shape, and the transmission of j the daughter of a Cherokee chief to New Haven, to j be educated at the expense of the government, and of j several young men of the same high birth to different ; colleges, will be recorded among the evidences in his tory that we did not plough the bones of their fathers j into our fields without some feelings of compunction. Nunu had come to the seaboard under the charge of a [ female missionary, whose pupil she had been in one j of the native schools of the west, and was destined, I though a chief s daughter, to return as a teacher to j her tribe when she should have mastered some of j the higher accomplishments of her sex. She was an j apt scholar, but her settled melancholy, when away I from her books, had determined Mrs. Ilfrington to try | the effect of a little society upon her, and hence my j privilege to ask for her appearance in the drawing- i room. As we strolled down in the alternate shade and sun- j shine of the road, I had been a little piqued at the want i of interest, and the manner of course, with which St. I John had received my animated descriptions of the personal beauty of the Cherokee. " I have hunted with the tribe," was his only an- i swer, " and know their features." . But she is not like them," I replied, with a tone J of some impatience ; " she is the beau ideal of a red ! skin, but it is with the softened features of an Arab or an Egyptian. She is more willowy than erect, and has no higher cheek-bones than the plaster Venus in your chambers. If it were not for the lambent fire in her eye, you might take her, in the sculptured pose of her attitudes, for an immortal bronze of Cleopatra. I tell you she is divine." St. John called to his dog, and we turned along the green bank above the beach, with Mrs. Ilfrington s house in view, and so opens a new chapter in my story. IV. In the united pictures of Paul Veronese and Ra phael, steeped as their colors seem to have been in the divinest age of Venetian and Roman female beauty, I have scarcely found so many lovely women, of so dif ferent models and so perfect, as were assembled during my sophomore year under the roof of Mrs. Ilfrington. , They went about in their evening walks, graceful and j angelic, but, like the virgin pearls of the sea, they poured the light of their loveliness on the vegeta ting oysters about them, and no diver of fashion had yet taught them their value. Ignorant myself in those days of the scale of beauty, their features are enam elled in my memory, and I have tried insensibly by that standard (and found wanting) of every court in Europe the dames most worshipped and highest born. Queen of the Sicilies, loveliest in your own realm of sunshine and passion ! Pale and transparent princess pearl of the court of Florence than whom the cre ations on the immortal walls of the Pitti less discipline our eye for the shapes of heaven ! Gipsy of the Pac- tolus ! Jewess of the Thracian Gallipolis ! Bright and gifted cynosure of the aristocracy of England ! ye are five women I have seen in as many years wan dering over the world, lived to gaze upon, and live to remember and admire a constella^n, I almost be lieve, that has absorbed all the inBfcest light of the beauty of a hemisphere yet, with your pictures col ored to life in my memory, and the pride of rank and state thrown over most of you like an elevating charm, I go back to the school of Mrs. Ilfrington, and (smile if you will !) they were as lovely, and stately, and as worthy of the worship of the world. I introduced St. John to the young ladies as they came in. Having never seen him, except in the pres ence of men, I was a little curious to know whether his singular aplomb would serve him as well with the other sex, of which I was aware he had had a very slender experience. My attention was distracted at the moment of mentioning his name to a lovely little Georgian (with eyes full of the liquid sunshine of the south), by a sudden bark of joy from the dog, who had been left in the hall ; and as the door opened, and the slight and graceful Indian girl entered the room, the usually unsocial animal sprang bounding in, lavishing caresses on her, and seemingly wild with the delight of a recognition. In the confusion of taking the dog from the room, I had again lost the moment of remarking St. John s manner, and on the entrance of Mrs. Ilfrington, Nunu was sitting calmly by the piano, and my friend was talking in a quiet undertone with the passionate Geor gian. " I must apologize for my dog," said St. John, bow ing gracefully to the mistress of the house; " he was bred by Indians, and the sight of a Cherokee remind ed him of happier days as it did his master." Nunu turned her eyes quickly upon him, but im mediately resumed her apparent deep study of the ab struse figures in the Kidderminster carpet. " You are well arrived, young gentlemen," said Mrs. Ilfrington ; " we press you into our service for a bo tanical ramble. Mr. Slingsby is at leisure, and will be delighted, I am sure. Shall I say as much for you, Mr. St. John ?" St. John bowed, and the ladies left the room for their bonnets Mrs. Ilfrington last. The door was scarcely closed when Nunu reappeared, and checking herself with a sudden feeling at the first step over the threshold, stood gazing at St. John, evidently under very powerful emotion. " Nunu !" he said, smiling slowly and unwillinsly, and holding out his hand with the air of one who for gives an offence. She sprang upon his bosom with the bound of a leveret, and between her fast kisses broke the endear ing epithets of her native tongue, in words that I onlv understood by their passionate and thrilling accent. The language of the heart is universal. The fair scholars came in one after another, and we were soon on our way through the green fields to the flowery mountain-side of East Rock ; Mrs. Ilfrington s arm and conversation having fallen to my share, and St. John rambling at large with the rest of the party, but more particularly beset by Miss Temple, whose Christian name was Isabella, and whose Christian char ity had no bowels for broken hearts. The most sociable individuals of the party fora while were Nunu and Lash ; the dog s recollections of the past seeming, like those of wiser animals, more agreea ble than the" present. The Cherokee astonished Mrs. Ilfrington by an abandonment to joy and frolic which INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 19 she had never displayed before sometimes fairly out running the dog at full speed, and sometimes sitting down breathless upon a green bank, while the rude creature overpowered her with his caresses. The scene gave origin to a grave discussion between that well-instructed lady and myself, upon the singular force of childish association the extraordinary intima cy between the Indian and the trapper s dog being explained satisfactorily (to her, at least) on that at tractive principle. Had she but seen Nunu spring into the bosom of my friend half an hour before, she might have added a material corollary to her proposi tion. If the dog and the chief s daughter were not old friends, the chief s daughter and St. John certain ly were. As well as I could judge by the motions of two people walking before me, St. John was advancing fast in the favor and acquaintance of the graceful Georgian. Her southern indolence was probably an apology in Mrs. Ilfrington s eyes for leaning heavily on her com panion s arm ; but, in a momentary halt, the capricious beauty disembarrassed herself of the bright scarf that had floated over her shoulders, and bound it playfully around his waist. This was rather strong on a first acquaintance, and Mrs. Ilfrington was of that opin ion. " Miss Temple !" said she, advancing to whisper a reproof in the beauty s ear. Before she had taken a second step, Nunu bounded over the low hedge, followed by the dog, with whom she had been chasing a butterfly, and springing upon St. John with eyes that flashed fire, she tore the scarf into shreds, and stood trembling and pale, with her feet on the silken fragments. 44 Madam!" said St. John, advancing to Mrs. Ilfring ton, after casting on the Cherokee a look of surprise and displeasure, " I should have told you before that your pupil and myself are not new acquaintances. Her father is my friend. I have hunted with the tribe, and have hitherto looked upon Nunu as a child. You will believe me, I trust, when I say her conduct surprises me, and I beg to assure you that any influence I may have over her will be in accordance with your own wishes exclusively." His tone was cold, and Nunu listened with fixed lips and frowning eyes. "Have you seen her before since her arrival ?" asked Mrs. Ilfrington. 44 My dog brought me yesterday the first intelligence that she was here: he returned from his morning ram ble with a string of wampum about his neck, which had the mark of the tribe. He was her gift," he added, patting the head of the dog, and looking with a soft ened expression at Nunu, who dropped her head upon her bosom, and walked on in tears. V. The chain of the Green mountains, after a gallop of some five hundred miles, from Canada to Connecticut, suddenly pulls up on the shore of Long-island sound, and stands rearing with a bristling mane of pine-trees, three hundred feet in air, as if checked in mid career by the sea. Standing on the brink of this bold preci pice, you have the bald face of the rock in a sheer per pendicular below you ; and, spreading away from the broken masses at its feet, lies an emerald meadow, in laid with a crystal and rambling river, across which, at a distance of a mile or two, rise the spires of the university, from what else were a thick-serried wilder ness of elms. Back from the edge of the precipice extends a wild forest of hemlock and fir, ploughed on its northern side by a mountain-torrent, whose bed of marl, dry and overhung with trees in the summer, serve as a path and a guide from the plain to the summit. It were a toilsome ascent but for that smooth and hard pavement, and the impervious and green thatch of pine tassels overhung. Antiquity in America extends no farther back than the days of Cromwell, and East Rock is traditionary ground with us for there harbored the regicides Whalley and Goffe, and many a breath-hushing tale is told of them over the smouldering log-fires of Con necticut. Not to rob the historian, I pass on to say that this cavernous path to the mountain-top was the resort in the holyday summer afternoons of most of the poetical and otherwise well-disposed gentlemen sopho mores, and, on the day of which I speak, of Mrs. Il frington and herseven-and-twenty lovely scholars. The kind mistress ascended with the assistance of my arm, and St. John drew stoutly between Miss Temple and a fat young lady with an incipient asthma. Nunu had not been seen since the first cluster of hanging flow- ; ers had hidden her from our sight, as she bounded j upward. The hour or two of slanting sunshine, poured in upon the summit of the precipice from the west, had been sufficient to induce a fine and silken moss to show its fibres and small blossoms above the carpet of pine-tassels ; and emerging from the brown shadow of the wood, you stood on a verdant platform, the foliage of sighing trees overhead, a fairies velvet beneath you, and a view below that you may as well (if you would not die in your ignorance) make a voyage over the water to see. We found Nunu lying thoughtfully near the brink of the precipice, and gazing off over the waters of the sound, as if she watched the coming or going of a friend under the white sails that spotted its bosom. We recovered our bteath in silence, I alone, perhaps, of that considerable company gazing with admiration at the lithe and unconscious figure of grace lying in the attitude of the Grecian Hermaphrodite on the brow of the rock before us. Her eyes were moist and mo tionless with abstraction, her lips just perceptibly curved in an expression of mingled pride and sorrow, her small hand buried and clinched in the moss, and her left foot and ankle, models of spirited symmetry, es caped carelessly from her dress, the high instep strained back as if recovering from a leap, with the tense con trol of emotion. The game of the coquettish Georgian was well played. With a true woman s pique, she had re- j doubled her attentions to my friend from the moment j that she found it gave pain to another of her sex ; and St. John, like most men, seemed not unwilling to see a new altar kindled to his vanity, though a heart he had already won was stifling with the incense. Miss Temple was very lovely. Her skin, of that teint of opaque and patrican white which is found oftenest in Asian latitudes, was just perceptibly warmed toward the centre of the cheek with a glow like sunshine through the thick white petal of a "magnolia; her eyes were hazel, with those inky lashes which enhance the expression a thousand-fold, either of passion or mel ancholy ; her teeth were like strips from the lily s heart ; and she was clever, captivating, graceful, and a thorough coquette. St. John was mysterious, roman tic-looking, superior, and, just now, the only victim in the way. He admired, as all men do, those qualities which, to her own sex, rendered the fair Isabella un- amiable ; and yielded himself, as all men will, a, satis fied prey to enchantments of which he knew the springs were the pique and vanity of the enchantress. How singular it is that the highest and best qualities of the female heart are those with whicn men are the least captivated ! A rib of the mountain formed a natural seat a little back from the pitch of the precipice, and here sat Miss Temple, triumphant in drawing all eyes upon herself and her tamed lion ; her lap full of flowers, which h, had fou,nd time to gather on the way, and fy 20 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. hands employed in arranging a bouquet, of which the destiny was yet a secret. Next to their own loves, ladies like nothing on earth like mending or marring the loves of others ; and while the violets and already- drooping wild flowers were coquettishly chosen or re jected by those slender fingers, the sun might have swung back to the east like a pendulum, and those seven-and-twenty misses would have watched their lovely schoolfellow the same. Nunu turned her head slowly around at last, and silently looked on. St. John lay at the feet of the Georgian, glancing from the flowers to her face, and from her face to the flow ers, with an admiration not at all equivocal. Mrs. Ilfrington sat apart, absorbed in finishing a sketch of New-Haven ; and I, interested painfully in watching the emotions of the Cherokee, sat with my back to the trunk of a hemlock the only spectator who comprehended the whole extent of the drama. A wild rose was set in the heart of the bouquet at last, a spear of riband-grass added to give it grace and point, and nothing was wanting but a string. Ret icules were searched, pockets turned inside out, and never a bit of riband to be found. The beauty was in despair. " Stay," said St. John, springing to his feet. " Lash ! Lash!" The dog came coursing in from the wood, and crouched to his master s hand. "Will a string of wampum do ?" he asked, feeling under the long hair on the dog s neck, and untying a fine and variegated thread of many-colored beads, worked exquisitely. The dog growled, and Nunu sprang into the mid dle of the circle with the fling of an adder, and seiz ing the wampum as he handed it to her rival, called the dog, and fastened it once more around his neck. The ladies rose in alarm ; the belle turned pale, and clung to St. John s arm ; the dog, with his hair brist ling upon his back, stood close to her feet in an atti tude of defiance ; and the superb Indian, the peculiar genius of her beauty developed by her indignation, her nostrils expanded, and her eyes almost showering fire in their flashes, stood before them like a young Pythoness, ready to strike them dead with a regard. St. John recovered from his astonishment after a moment, and leaving the arm of Miss Temple, ad vanced a step, and called to his dog. The Cherokee patted the animal on his back, and spoke to him in her own language ; and, as St. John still advanced, Nunu drew herself to her fullest height, placed herself before the dog, who slunk growling from his master, and said to him, as she folded her arms, " The wampum is mine." St. John colored to the temples with shame. " Lash !" he cried, stamping with his feet, and en deavoring to fright him from his protectress. The dog howled and crept away, half crouching with fear, toward the precipice ; and St. John shoot ing suddenly past Nunu, seized him on the brink, and held him down by the throat. The next instant, a scream of horror from Mrs. Il frington, followed by a terrific echo from every female present, started the rude Kentuckian to his feet. Clear over the abyss, hanging with one hand by an ashen sapling, the point of her tiny foot just poising on a projecting ledge of rock, swung the desperate Cherokee, sustaining herself with perfect ease, but with all the determination of her iron race collected in calm concentration on her lips. " Restore the wampum to his neck," she cried, with a voice that thrilled the very marrow with its subdued fierceness, " or my blood rest on your soul !" St. John flung it toward the dog, and clasped his hands in silent horror. The Cherokee bore down the sapling till its slender stem cracked with the tension, and rising lightly with the rebound, alit like a feather upon the rock. The subdued student sprang to her side ; but with scorn on her lip, and the flush of exertion already vanished from her cheek, she called to the dog, and with rapid strides took her way alone down the mountain. VI. Five years had elapsed. I had put to sea from the sheltered river of boyhood had encountered the storms of a first entrance into life had trimmed my boat, shortened sail, and, with a sharp eye to wind ward, was lying fairly on my course. Among others from whom I had parted company was Paul St. John, who had shaken hands with me at the university gate, leaving me, after four years intimacy, as much in doubt as to his real character and history as the first day we met. I had never heard him speak of either father or mother, nor had he, to my knowledge, re ceived a letter from the day of his matriculation. He passed his vacations at the university ; he had studied well, yet refused one of the highest college honors offered him with his degree ; he had shown many good qualities, yet some unaccountable faults ; and, all in all, was an enigma to myself and the class. I knew him, clever, accomplished, and conscious of superiority ; and my knowledge went no farther. The coach was at the gate, and I was there to see him off; and, after four years constant association, I had not an idea where he was going, or to what he was des tined. The driver blew his horn. " God bless you, Slingsby !" "God bless you, St. John " And so we parted. It was five years from this time, I say, and, in the | bitter struggles of first manhood, I had almost forgot- [ ten there was such a being in the world. Late in the j month of October, in 1829, I was on my way west- ! ward, giving myself a vacation from the law. I em barked, on a clear and delicious day, in the small j steamer which plies up and down the Cayuga lake, j looking forward to a calm feast of scenery, and caring ! little who were to be my fellow-passengers. As we ! got out of the little harbor of Cayuga, I walked astern | for the first time, and saw the not very unusual sight of a group of Indians standing motionless by the wheel. They were chiefs, returning from a diplomatic ; visit to Washington. I sat down by the companion-ladder, and opened ; soul and eye to the glorious scenery we were gliding : through. The first severe frost had come, and the I miraculous change had passed upon the leaves which i is known only in America. The blood-red sugar ma- ! pie, with a leaf brighter and more delicate than a Cir cassian lip, stood here and there in the forest like the Sultan s standard in a host the solitary and far-seen aristocrat of the wilderness ; the birch, with its spirit- like and amber leaves, ghosts of the departed summer, turned out along the edges of the woods like a lining of the palest gold ; the broad sycamore and the fan- like catalpa flaunted their saffron foliage in the sun, spotted with gold like the wings of a lady-bird; the kingly oak, with its summit shaken bare, still hid its majestic trunk in a drapery of sumptuous dyes, like a stricken monarch, gathering his robes of slate about him to die royally in his purple ; the tall poplar, with its minaret of silver leaves, stood blanched like a cow ard in the dying forest, burthening every breeze with its complainings ; the hickory paled through its en during green ; the bright berries of the mountain-ash flushed with a more sanguine glory in the unobstructed sun ; the gaudy tulip-tree, the Sybarite of vegetation, stripped of its golden cups, still drank the intoxicating light of noonday in leaves than which the lip of an Indian shell was never more delicately teinted ; the still deeper-dyed vines of the lavish wilderness, perish- INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. ing with the noble things whose summer they had shared, outshone them in their decline, as woman in her death is heavenlier than the being on whom in life she leaned ; and alone and unsympathizing in this universal decay, outlaws from Nature, stood the fir and the hemlock, their frowning and sombre heads darker and less lovely than ever, in contrast with the death-struck glory of their companions. The dull colors of English autumnal foliage give you no conception of this marvellous phenomenon. The change here is gradual ; in America it is the work of a night of a single frost ! Oh, to have seen the sun set on hills bright in the still green and lingering summer, and to wake in the morning to a spectacle like this! It is as if a myriad of rainbows were laced through ! the tree-tops as if the sunsets of a summer gold, pdrple, and crimson had been fused in the alembic of the west, and poured back in a new deluge of light |: and color over the wilderness. It is as if every leaf ;j in those countless trees had been painted to outflush ! the tulip as if. by some electric miracle, the dyes of || the earth s heart had struck upward, and her crystals and ores, her sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies, had let forth their imprisoned colors to mount through the!j roots of the forest, and, like the angels that in olden jj time entered the body of the dying, reanimate the per- jj ishing leaves, and revel an hour in their bravery. I was sitting by the companion-ladder, thinking to what on earth these masses of foliage could be resem bled, when a dog sprang upon my knees, and, the moment after, a hand was laid on my shoulder. "St. John? Impossible!" "Bodily!" answered my quondam classmate. I looked at him with astonishment. The soigne man of fashion I had once known was enveloped in a kind of hunter s frock, loose and large, and girded to his waist by a belt; his hat was exchanged for a cap of rich otter skin ; his pantaloons spread with a slov enly carelessness over his feet ; and, altogether, there was that in his air which told me at a glance that he had renounced the world. Lash had recovered his leanness, and, after wagging out his joy, he crouched between my feet, and lay looking into my face, as if he was brooding over the more idle days in which we had been acquainted. "And where are you bound?" I asked, having an swered the same question for myself. " Westward with the chiefs !" "For how long?" " The remainder of my life." I could not forbear an exclamation of surprise. "You would wonder less," said he, with an impa tient gesture, " if you knew more of me. And, by- the-way," he added with a smile, " I think } never told you the first half of the story my life up to the time I met you." " It was not for want of a catechist," I answered, settling myself in an attitude of attention. " No ; and I was often tempted to gratify your cu riosity : but from the little intercourse^! had had with the world, I had adopted some precocious principles; and one was, that a man s influence over others was vulgarized and diminished by a knowledge of his history." I smiled, and as the boat sped on her Avay over the calm waters of the Cayuga, St. John went on lei surely with a story which is scarce remarkable enough for a repetition. He believed himself the natural son of a western hunter, but only knew that he had passed his early youth on the borders of civilization, between vyhites and Indians, and that he had been more par ticularly indebted for protection to the father of Nunu. Mingled ambition and curiosity had led him eastward while still a lad, and a year or two of a most vagabond life in the different cities had taught him the caution and bitterness for which he was so remarkable. A fortunate experiment in lotteries supplied him with the means of education, and, with singular application in a youth of such wandering habits, he had applied himself to study under a private master, fitted him self for the university in half the usual time, and cul tivated, in addition, the literary taste which I have re marked upon. " This," he said, smiling at my look of astonish ment, " brings me up to the time when we met. I came to college at the age of eighteen, with a few hundred dollars in my pocket, some pregnant experi ence of the rough side of the world, great confidence in myself, and distrust of others, and, 1 believe, a kind of instinct of good manneis, which made me ambi tious of shilling in society. Yon were a witness to my debut. Miss Temple was the first highly-edu cated woman I had ever known, and you saw her effect on me." "And since we parted ?" 11 Oh, since we parted my life has been vulgar enough. I have ransacked civilized life to the bot tom, and found it a heap of unredeemed falsehoods. I do not say it from common disappointment, for I may say I succeeded in everything I undertook " "Except Miss Temple," 1 said, interrupting, at the hazard of wounding him. "No; she was a coquette, and I pursued her till I had my turn. You see me in my new character now. But a month ago I was the Apollo of Saratoga, play ing my own game with Miss Temple. I left her for a woman worth ten thousand of her and here she is." As Nunu came up the companion-way from the cabin, I thought I had never seen breathing creature so exquisitely lovely. With the exception of a pair of brilliant moccasins on her feet, she was dressed in the usual manner, but with the most absolute sim plicity. She had changed in those five years from the child to the woman, and, with a rouiul and well- developed fiuure, additional height, and manners at once gracious and dignified, she walked and looked the chieftain s daughter. St. John took her hand, and gazed on her with moisture in his eyes. " That I could ever have put a creature like this," he said, " into comparison with the dolls of civiliza tion!" We parted at Buffalo ; St. John with his wife and the chiefs to pursue their way westward by Lake Erie, and I to go moralizing on my way to Niagara. F, SMITH, Nature had made him for some other planet, And pressed his xonl into a human shape By accident or malice." COLEHIDOB. " I ! liave you chronicled, and chronicled, and cut-and-chron- iclnd, and sung in all-to-be-praised sonnets, and graved in new brave ballads, tliat all tongues shall troule you." PUILASTEE. IF you can imagine a buried Titan lying along the length of a continent with one arm stretched out into the midst of the sea, the place to which I would trans port you, reader mine ! would lie as it were in the palm of the giant s hand. The small promontory to which I refer, which becomes an island in certain states of the tide, is at the end of one of the long capes of Massachusetts, and is still called by its Indian name, Nuhant. Not to make you uncomfortable, I beg to introduce you at once to a pretentious hotel, "squat- like a toad" upon the unsheltered and highest point of this citadel in mid sea, and a very great resort for the metropolitan New-Englanders. Nahant is per- INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. haps, liberally measured, a square half-mile ; and it is distant from what may fairly be called mainland, per haps a league. Road to Nahant there is none. The oi pottm go there by steam ; but when the tide is down, you may drive there with a thousand chariots over the bottom of the sea. As I suppose there is not such another place in the known world, my tale will wait while I describe it more fully. If the Bible had been a fic tion (not to speak profanely), I should have thought the idea of the destruction of Pharaoh and his host had its origin in some such wonder of nature. Nahant is so far out into the ocean, that what is called the "ground swell," the majestic heave of its great bosom going on for ever like respiration (though its face may be like a mirror beneath the sun, and a wind may not have crisped its surface for days and weeks), is as broad and powerful within a rood of the shore as it is a thousand miles at sea. The promontory itself is never wholly left by the ebb ; but, from its western extremity, there runs a narrow ridge, scarce broad enough for a horse-path, impassible for tho rocks and sea-weed of which it is matted, and extending at just high-water mark fro.m Nahant to the mainland. Seaward from this ridge, which is the only connexion of the promontory with the continent, descends an expanse of sand, left bare six hours out of the twelve by the retreating sea, as smooth and hard as marble, and as broad and appa rently as level as the plain of the Hermus. For three miles it stretches away without shell or stone, a sur face of white, fine-grained sand, beaten so hard by the eternal hammer of the surf, that the hoof of a horse scarce marks it, and the heaviest wheel leaves it as printless as a floor of granite. This will be easily un derstood when you remember the tremendous rise and fall of the ocean swell, from the very bosom of which, in all its breadth and strength, roll in the waves of the flowing tide, breaking down on the beach, every one, with the thunder of a host precipitated from the bat tlements of a castle. Nothing could be more solemn and anthem-like than the succession of these plunging surges. And when the " tenth wave gathers, far out at sea, and rolls onward to the shore, first with a glassy and heaving swell as if some mighty monster were lurching inland beneath the water, and then, bursting up into foam, with a front like an endless and sparry crystal wall, advances and overwhelms every thing in its progress, till it breaks with a centupled thunder on the beach it has seemed to me, standing there, as if thus might have beaten the first surge on the shore after the fiat which " divided sea and land." I am no Cameronian, but the sea (myself on shore) always drives me to Scripture for an illustration of my feelings. The promontory of Nahant must be based on the earth s axle, else I can not imagine how ii should have lasted so long. In the mildest weather, the ground- swell of the sea gives it a fillip at every heave that would lay the " castled crag of Drachenfels" as low as Memphis. The wine trembles in your beaker of claret as you sit after dinner at the hotel ; and if you look out at the eastern balcony (for it is a wooden pagoda, with balconies, verandahs, and colonnades ad libitum), you will see the grass breathless in the sun shine upon the lawn, and the ocean as polished and calm as Miladi s brow beyond, and yet the spray and foam dashing fifty feet into the air between, and en veloping the "Devil s Pulpit" (a tall rock split off from the promontory s front) in a perpetual kaleidoscope of mist and rainbows. Take the trouble to transport yourself there ! I will do the remaining honors on the spot. A cavern as cool (not as silent) as those of Trophonius lies just under the brow of yonder preci pice, and the waiter shall come after us with our wine. You have dined with the Borromeo in the grotto of Isola Bella, I doubt not, and know the perfection of art I will show you that of nature. (I should like to transport you for a similar contrast from Terni to Niagara, or from San Giovanni Laterano to an aisle in a forest of Michigan ; but the Daedalian mystery, alas ! is unsolved. We "fly not yet.") Here we are, then, in the "Swallow s Cave." The floor descends by a g entle declivity to the sea, and from the long dark cleft stretching outward you look forth upon the broad Atlantic the shore of Ireland the first terra firma in the path of your eye. Here is a dark pool left by the retreating tide for a refrigerator, and with the champagne in the midst, we will recline about it like the soft Asiatics of whom we learned pleasure in the east, and drink to the small-featured and purple-lipped " Mignons" of Syria those fine- limbed and fiery slaves, adorable as Peris, and by turns languishing and stormy, whom you buy for a pinch of piastres (say 51. 5s.) in sunny Damascus. Your drowsy Circassian, faint and dreamy, or your crockery Georgian fit dolls for the sensual Turk is, to him who would buy soul, dear at a para the hecatomb. We recline, as it were, in an ebon pyramid, with a hundred feet of floor and sixty of wall, and the fourth side open to the sky. The light comes in mellow and dim, and the sharp edges of the rocky portal seem let into the pearly arch of heaven. The tide is at half- ebb, and the advancing and retreating waves, which at first just lifted the fringe of crimson dulse at the lip of the cavern, now dash their spray-pearls on the rock below, the "tenth" surge alone rallying as if in scorn of its retreating fellows, and, like the chieftain of Cul- loden Moor, rushing back singly to the contest. And now that the waters reach the entrance no more, come forward and look on the sea ! The swell lifts ! would you not think the bases of the earth rising beneath it? It falls ! would you not think the foundation of the deep had given way ? A plain, broad enough for the navies of the world to ride at large, heaves up evenly and steadily as if it would lie against the sky, rests a moment spell-bound in its place, and falls again as far the respiration of a sleeping child not more reg ular and full of slumber. It is only on the shore that it chafes. Blessed emblem ! it is at peace with itself! The rocks war with a nature so unlike their own, and the hoarse din of their border onsets resounds through the caverns they have rent open ; but beyond, in the calm bosom of the ocean, what heavenly dignity ! what godlike unconsciousness of alarm ! I did not think we should stumble on such a moral in the cave ! By the deeper base of its hoarse organ, the sea is now playing upon its lowest stops, and the tide is down. Hear! how it rushes in beneath the rocks, broken and stilled in its tortuous way, till it ends with a washing and dull hiss among the sea-weed, and, like a myriad of small tinkling bells, the dripping from the crags is audible. There is fine music in the sea ! And now the beach is bare. The cave begins to cool and darken, and the first gold teint of sunset is stealing into the sky, and the sea looks of a changing opal, green, purple, and white, as if its floor were paved with pearl, and the changing light struck up through the waters. And there heaves a ship into the horizon, like a white-winged bird lying with dark breast on the waves, abandoned of the sea-breeze within sight of port, and repelled even by the spicy breath that comes with a welcome off the shore. She comes from "merry England." She is freighted with more than merchandise. The home-sick exile will gaze on her snowy sail as she sets in with the morning breeze, and bless it ; for the wind that first filled it on its way swept through the green valley of his home ! What links of human affection brings she over the sea? How much comes in her that is not in her "bill of lading," yet worth, to the heart that is waiting for it, a thousand times the purchase of her whole venture ! INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. Mais montons nous! I hear the small hoofs of Thalaba; my stanhope waits; we will leave this half bottle of champagne, that " remainder biscuit," and the echoes of our philosophy, to the Naiads who have lent us their drawing-room. Undine, or Egeria! Lurly, or Arethusa! whatever thou art called, nympth of this shadowy cave! adieu! Slowly, Thalaba! Tread gingerly down this rocky descent ! So ! Here we are on the floor of the vasty deep! What a glorious race-course ! The polished and printless sand spreads away before you as far as the eye can see, the surf comes in below, breast-high ere it breaks, and the white fringe of the sliding wave shoots up the beach, but leaves room for the marching of a Persian phalanx on the sands it has deserted. Oh, how noiselessly runs the wheel, and how dreamily we glide along, feeling our motion but in the resist ance of the wind, and by the trout-like pull of the ribands by the excited animal before us. Mark the color of the sand! Whit Hence I speak not of the friends I made, rambling by lake or river. The lake and the river are there, but the friends are changed to themselves and me. I speak not of the lovely and loving ones that stood by me, looking on glen or waterfall. The glen and the waterfall are romantic still, but the form and the heart that breathed through it are no longer lovely or loving. I should renew my joys by the old mountain and j river, for, all they ever were I should find them still, I and never seem to myself grown old, or cankered of the world, or changed in form or spirit, while they reminded me but of my youth, with their familiar sunshine and beauty. But the friends that I knew as I knew them are dead. They look no longer the same ; they have another heart in them ; the kindness of the eye, the smilingness of the lip, are no more there. Philosophy tells me the material and living body changes and renews, particle by par ticle, with time ; and experience cold-blooded and it high-water mark, and j stony monitor tells me, in his frozen monotone, that thence deepening to a silvery gray as the water has heart and spirit change with it and renew ! But the evaporated less a slab of Egyptian granite in the I name remains, mockery that it is! and the memory obelisk of St. Peter s not more polished and unimpres- sible. Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is none ; and mar or deface its bright surface as you will, it is ever beaten down anew, and washed even of sometimes; and so these apparitions of the past that we almost fear to question when they encounter us, lest the change they have undergone should freeze our blood stare coldly on us, yet call us by name, and ! wish the grave of the past, with all that it contained nty | of kind or lovely, had been sealed for ever. The the dust of the foot of man, by the returning sea. I; answer, though coldly to their own, and have that You may write upon its fine-grained face with a crow- | terrible similitude to what they were, mingled with quill you may course over its dazzling expanse with j their unsympathizing and hollow mummery, that a troop of chariots. Most wondrous and beautiful of all, within twenty.. yards of the surf, or for an hour after the tide has left \. heart we have lain near before our birth (so read I the the sand, it holds the water without losing its firm- j book of human life) is the only one that can not for- ness, and is like a gray mirror, bright as the bosom of ;! get that it has loved us. Saith well and aflectiou- the sea. (By your leave, Thalaba!) And now lean !| ately an American poet, in some birth-day verses to over the dasher, and see those small fetlocks striking ! his mother up from beneath the flying mane, the thorough-bred j action, the small and expressive head, as perfect in j the reflection as in the reality; like Wordsworth s swan, he " Trots double, horse and shadow." You would swear you were skimming the surface of j the sea; and the delusion is more complete as the! white foam of the "tenth wave 1 skims in beneath! wheel and hoof, and you urge on with the treacherous element gliding away visibly beneath you. We seem not to have driven fast, yet three miles, fairly measured, are left behind, and Thalaba s blood is up. Fine creature! I would not give him ( Mother ! dear mother ! the feelings nurst As I hung at thy bosom, duns; round thee first Twas the earliest link in love s warm chain, Tis the only one that will long remain ; And as, yearly year, and day by day, Some friend, still trusted, drops away, Mother ! dear mother ! oh, dost thou see HoiL the shortened chain brings me nearer thee . " I have observed that of all the friends one has in the course of his life, the truest and most attached is ex actly the one who, from his dissimilarity to yourself, the world finds it very odd you should fancy. We hear sometimes of lovers who "are made for each For the best horse the Sun has in his stable." | other/ , , )Ut rardy of the game naturj| j match ^ f) . iend _ We have won champagne ere now, Thalaba, and I, I ship. It is no great marvel. In a world like this, trotting on this silvery beach ; and if ever old age I where we pluck so desperately at the fruit of pleasure, comes on me, and I intend it never shall on aught we prefer for company those who are not formed with save my mortal coil (my spirit vowed to perpetual precisely the same palate as ourselves. You will sel- youth), I think these vital breezes, and a trot on these l! dom go wrong, dear reader, if you refer any human exhilarating sands, would sooner renew my prime question about which you are in doubt to that icy than a rock in St. Hilary s cradle, or a dip in the well oracle selfishness. of Kanathos. May we try the experiment together, gentle reader! I am not settled in my own mind whether this de My shadow for many years was a gentle monster, whom "I have before mentioned, baptized by the name of Forbearance Smith. He was a Vermontese, a de ription of one of my favorite haunts in America scendant of one of the puritan pilgrims, and the first was written most to introduce the story that is to fol- j[ of his family who had left the Green mountains since low, or the story to introduce the description. Possi- the flight of the regicides to America. We assimilate bly the latter, for having consumed by callow youth I j to what we live among, and Forbearance was very general in wandering " to and fro in the earth," like Sathanas of old, and looking on my country now with an eye from which all the minor and temporary features have gradually faded, I find my pride in it (after its glory- as a republic) settling principally on the superior handiwork of nature in its land and water. When I talk of it now, it is looking through another s eyes his who listens. I do not describe it after my own memory of what it was once to me, but according to my idea of what it will seem now to a stranger. green, and very like a mountain. He had a i resemblance to one of Thorwaldsen s unfinished apos- ties larger than life, and just hewn into outline. My acquaintance w th him commenced during my first year at the university. He stalked into my room one morning with a hair-trunk on his back, and handed me the follow ing note from the tutor : 41 SIR : The faculty have decided to impose upon you the fine of ten dollars and damages, for painting 24 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. the president s horse on sabbath night while grazing on the college green. They, moreover, have removed Freshman Wilding from your rooms, and appoint as your future chum the studious and exemplary bearer, Forbearance Smith, to whom you are desired to show a becoming respect. " Your obedient servant, "ERASMUS S^UFFI^EGREEK. " To Freshman Slingsby." Bather relieved by my lenient sentence (for, till the next shedding of his well-saturated coat, the sky-blue body and red mane and tail of the president s once gray mare would interfere with that esteemed animal s usefulness), I received Air. Smith with more polite ness than he expected. He deposited his hair-trunk in the vacant bedroom, remarked with a good-humored smile that it was a cold morning, and seating himself in my easiest chair, opened his Euclid, and went to work upon a problem, as perfectly at home as if he had furnished the room himself, and lived in it from his matriculation. I had expected some preparatory apology at least, and was a little annoyed ; but being upon my good behavior, I bit my lips, and resumed the "Art of Love," upon which I was just then prac tising my nascent Latinity, instead of calculating loga rithms for recitation. In about an hour, my new chum suddenly vociferated "Eureka!" shut up his book, and having stretched himself (a very unnecessary op eration), coolly walked to my dressing-table, selected my best hair-brush, redolent of Macassar, and used it with the greatest apparent satisfaction. " Have you done with that hair-brush ?" I asked, as he laid it in its place again. " Oh yes !" " Then, perhaps, you will do me the favor to throw it out of the window." He did it without the slightest hesitation. He then resumed his seat by the fire, and I went on with my book in silence. Twenty minutes had elapsed, per haps, when he rose very deliberately, and without a word of preparation, gave me a cuff that sent me fly ing into the wood-basket in the corner behind me. As soon as I could pick myself out, I flew upon him. but I might as well have grappled with a boa-constrictor. He held me off at arm s length till I was quite ex hausted with rage, and, at last, when I could struggle no more, I found breath to ask him what the devil he meant. " To resent what seemed to me, on reflection, to be an insult," he answered, in the calmest tone, " and now to ask your pardon for a fault of ignorance. The first was due to myself, the second to you." Thenceforth, to the surprise of everybody, and Bob Wilding and the tutor, we were inseparable. I took Bruin (by a double elision Forbearance became " bear," and by paraphrase Bruin, and he answered to the name) I took him, I say, to the omnium shop, and presented him with a dressing-case, and other appli ances for his outer man ; and as my inner man was relatively as much in need of his assistance, we mu tually improved. I instructed him in poetry and po liteness, and he returned the lesson in problems and politics. My star was never in more fortunate con junction. Four years had woven their threads of memory about us, and there was never woof more free from blemish. Our friendship was proverbial. All that much care and Macassar could do for Bruin had been done, but there was no abating his seven feet of stature, nor re ducing the size of his feet proper, nor making the mus cles of his face answer to their natural wires. At his most placid smile, a strange waiter would run for n hot towel and the doctor (colic was not more like it self than that like colic); and for his motions oh Lord I a skeleton, with each individual bone append ed to its neighbor with a string, wculd execute a pas scul with the same expression. His mind, however, had none of the awkwardness of his body. A simpli city and truth, amounting to the greatest naivete, and a fatuitous unconsciousness of the effect on beholders of his outer man, were its only approaches to fault or foible. With the finest sense of the beautiful, the most unerring judgment in literary taste, the purest romance, a fervid enthusiasm, constancy, courage, and good temper, he walked about the world in a mask an admirable creature, in the guise and seeming of a ludicrous monster. Bruin was sensitive on but one point. He never j could forgive his father and mother for the wrong they j had entailed on him at his baptism. "Forbearance j Smith !" he would say to himself sometimes in uncon scious soliloquy, "they should have given me the vir- | tue as well as the name !" And then he would sit with a pen, and scrawl " F. Smith" on a sheet of paper by the hour together. To insist upon knowing his Christian name was the one impertinence he never fonrave. III. My party at Nahant consisted of Thalaba, Forbear ance, and myself. The place was crowded, but I passed my time very much between my horse and my i friend, and was as certain to be found on the beach i when the tide was down, as the sea to have left the sands. Job (a synonyme for Forbearance which be came at this time his common soubriquet) was, of course, in love. Not the least to the prejudice, how ever, of his last faithful passion for he was as fond of the memory of an old love, as he was tender in the presence of the new. I intended to have had him dis sected after his death, to see whether his organization was not peculiar. I strongly incline to the opinion that we should have found a mirror in the place of his heart. Strange ! how the same man who is so fickle in love, will be so constant in friendship ! But is it fickleness ? Is it not rather a supcrjlu, of tenderness in the nature, which overflows to all who approach the fountain ? I have ever observed that the most suscep tible men are the most remarkable for the finer quali ties of character. They are more generous, more delicate, and of a more chivalrous complexion alto gether, than ether men. It was surprising how reason ably Bruin would argue upon this point" " Because I was happy at Niagara," he was saying one day as we sat upon the rocks, " shall I take no pleasure in the falls of Montmorenci ? Because the sunset was glorious yesterday, shall I find no beauty in that of to-day ? Is my fancy to be used but once, and the key turned upon it for ever? Is the heart like a bon bon, to be eaten up by the first favorite, and thought of no more ? Are our eyes blind, save to one shape of beauty ? Are our ears insensible to the music save of one voice ?" " But do you not weaken the heart, and become in capable of a lasting attachment, by this habit of incon stancy 1" " How long, my dear Phil, will you persist in talk ing as if the heart was material, and held so much love as a cup so much water, and had legs to be weary, or organs to grow dull ? How is my sensibility lessened Tiow my capacity enfeebled? What would I have done for my first love, that I would not do for my last ? I would have sacrificed my life to secure the happi ness of one you wot of in days gone by: I would jump into the sea, if it would make Blanche Carroll happier to-morrow." " Sautez-dvnc !" said a thrilling voice behind ; and as if the utterance of her name had conjured her out of the ground, the object of all Job s admiration, and a little of my own, stood before us. She had a work- INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. basket in her hand, a gipsy-hat tossed carelessly on her bead, and had preceded a whole troop of belles and matrons, who were coming out to while away the morning, and breathe the invigorating sea-air on the rocks. Blanche Carroll was what the women would call " a little love," but that phrase of endearment would not at all express the feeling with which she inspired the men. She was small, and her face and figure might have been framed in fairy-land for bewitching beauty ; but with the manner of a spoiled child, and, apparently, the most thoughtless playfulness of mind, she was as veritable a little devil as ever took the shape of woman. Scarce seventeen at this time, she had a knowledge of character that was like an instinct, and I was an accomplished actress in any part it was neces sary for her purpose to play. No grave Machiavel i ever managed his cards with more finesse than that | little intriguante the limited world of which she was ! the star. She was a natural master-spirit and plotter; and the talent that would have employed itself in the ! deeper game of politics, had she been born a woman of rank in EJurope, displayed itself, in the simple so- j ciety of a republic, in subduing to her power every- : thing in the shape of a single man that ventured to her net. I have nothing to tell of her at all commensu rate with the character I have drawn, for the disposal of her own heart (if she has one) must of course be the most important event of her life ; but I merely pencil the outline of the portrait in passing, as a i specimen of the material that exists even in the | simplest society for the dramatis persons of a i court. " Good-night ! Tis little now to thee That in my ear thy words were spoken, And thou wilt think of them and me As long as of the bracelet broken. For thus is riven many a chain That thou hast fastened but to break, And thus tliou lt sink to sleep again, As careless that another wake : The only thought thy heart can rend Is what the fellou ll charge to mend!" Job s conclusion was more pathetic, but probably less true. He appeared after the applause had ceased, and resumed his place at the lady s feet, with a look in his countenance of having deserved an abatement of persecution. The beauty spread out the fragments of the broken bracelet on the rock beside her. " Mr. Smith !" said she, in her most conciliating tone. Job leaned toward her with a look of devoted in quiry. " Has the tide turned ?" " Certainly. Two hours since." " The beach is passable, then ?" " Hardly, I fear." " No matter. How many hours drive is it to Sa lem ?" " Mr. Slingsby drives it in two." " Then you ll get Mr. Slingsby to lend you his stanhope, drive to Salem, have this bracelet mended, and bring it back in time for the ball. / have spoken, as the grand Turk says. Allez /" " But my dear Miss Carroll " She laid her hand on his mouth as he began to re monstrate, and while I made signs to him to refuse, We followed the light-footed beauty to the shelter she said something to him which I lost in a sudden of one of the caves ope ning on the sea, and seated our- ! dash of tlle waters - He looked at me for in ^ selves about her upon the rocks. Some one proposed that Job or myself should read. " Oh, Mr. Smith," interrupted the belle, "where is n.y bracelet ? and where are my verses ?" At the ball the night before she had dropped aracelet in the waltz, and Job had been permitted to take care of the fragments, on condition of restoring them, with a sonnet, the next morning. She had just i thought of it. " Read them out ! read them out !" she cried, as Job, blushing a deep blue, extracted a tri-colored pink document from his pocket, and tried to give it to her i unobserved, with the packet of jewelry. Job looked at her imploringly, and she took the verses from his hand, and ran her eye through them. " Pretty well !" she said ; " but the last line might be improved. Give me a pencil, some one !" And bending over it, till her luxuriant hair concealed her fairy fingers in their employment, she wrote a moment upon her knee, and tossing the paper to me, bijde me read it out with the emendation. Bruin had, mean time, modestly disappeared, and I read with the more freedom Twas broken in the gliding dance, When thou wcrt in I he dream of power ; When shape and motion, tone and glance, Were glorious all the woman s hour ! The light lay soft upon thy brow, The music molted in thine ear, And one perhaps forgotten now, With - wildered thoughts stood listening near. Marvelling not that links of gold A pulse like thine had not controlled. Tis midnight now. The dance is done, And thou. in thy soft dreams, asleep, And I, awake, am gazing on The fragments given me to keep : I think of every glowing vein That ran beneath these links of trnld, And wonder if n. thrill of pain Made those bright channels ever cold ! With gifts like thine, I can not think Grief ever chilled this broken link. for my consent. " Oh ! you can have Mr. Slingsby s horse," said the beauty, as I hesitated whether my refusal would not check her tyranny, " and I ll drive him out this even ing for his reward, N*est-ce pasl you cross man !" So, with a sun hot enough to fry the brains in his skull, and a quivering reflection on -the sands that would burn his face to a blister, exit Job, with the broken bracelet in his bosom. "Stop, Mr. Slingsby," said the imperious little belle, as I was making up a mouth, after his departure, to express my disapprobation of her measures, "no lec ture, if you please. Give me that book of plays, and I ll read you a precedent. Because you are virtuous, shall we have no more cakes and ale ? Ecoulez ! And, with an emphasis and expression that would have been perfect on the stage, she read the following passage from " The Careless Husband :" " Lady Bef.li/ The men of sense, my dear, make the best fools in the world ; their sincerity and good breeding throw them so entirely into one s power, and give one such an agreeable thirst of using them ill, to show that power tis impossible not to quench it. " Lady Easy. But, my Lord Morelove " Lad y B. Pooh ! my Lord Morelove s a mere In dian damask one can t wear him out: o my con- sciende, I must give him to my woman at last. I begin to be known by him ; had I not best leave him oft", my dear? " Lady E. Why did you ever encourage him ? "Lady B. Why, what would you have one do? For my part, I could no more choose a man by my eye than a shoe one must draw them on a little, to see if they are riaht to one s foot. " Lady E. But I d no more fool on with a man I could not like, than wear a shoe that pinched me. " Lady B. Ay ; but then a poor wretch tells one he ll widen em, or do anything, and is so civil and silly, that one does not know how to turn such a trifle as a pair of shoes, or a heart, upon a fellow s hands again. " Lady E And there s my Lord Foppington. 26 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. "Lady B. My dear! fine fruit will have flies about it ; but, poor things! they do it no harm; for, if you observe, people are generally most apt to choose that the flies have been busy with. Ha ! ha ! " Lady E. Thou art a strange, giddy creature ! " Lady B. That may be from too much circula tion of thought, my dear!" " Pray, Miss Carroll," said I, as she threw aside the book with a theatrical air, " have you any precedent for broiling a man s brains, as well as breaking his heart ? For, by this time, my friend Forbearance has a coup de soleil, and is hissing over the beach like a steam-engine." " How tiresome you are ! Do you really think it will kill him ?" " It might injure him seriously let alone the dan ger of driving a spirited horse over the beach, with the tide quarter-down." " What shall I do to be taken out of the corner, Mr. Slingsby ?" "Order your horses an hour sooner, and drive to Lynn, to meet him halfway on his return. I will re sume my stanhope, and give him the happiness of driving back with you." " And shall I be gentle Blanche Carroll, and no ogre, if I do ?" "Yes; Mr. Smith surviving." " Take the trouble to give my orders, then ; and come back immediately, and read to me till it is time to go. Meantime, I shall look at myself in this black mirror." And the spoilt, but most lovely girl bent over a dark pool in the corner of the cave, forming a picture on its shadowy background that drew a mur mur of admiration even from the neglected group who had been the silent and disapproving witnesses of her caprice." IV. A thunder-cloud strode into the sky with the rapid ity which marks that common phenomenon of a breathless summer afternoon in America, darkened the air for a few minutes, so that the birds betook them selves to their nests, and then poured out its refresh ing waters with the most terrific flashes of lightning, and crashes of thunder, which for a moment seemed to still even the eternal base of the sea. With the same fearful rapidity, the black roof of the sky tore apart, and fell back, in rolling and changing masses, upon the horizon ; the sun darted with intense brilliancy through the clarified and transparent air; the light- stirring breeze came freighted with delicious coolness; and the heavy sea-birds, who had lain brooding on the waves while the tumult of the elements went on, rose on their cimeter-like wings, and fled away, with in comprehensible instinct, from the beautiful and freshen ed land. The whole face of earth and sky had been changed in an hour. Oh, of what fulness of delight are even the senses capable ! What a nerve there is sometimes in every pore ! What love for all living and all inanimate things may be born of a summer shower ! How stirs the fancy, and brightens hope, and warms the heart, and sings the spirit within us, at the mere animal joy with which the lark flees into heaven! And yet, of this exquisite capacity for pleasure we take so little care ! We refine our taste, we elaborate and finish our mental perception, we study the beautiful, that we may know it when it appears yet the senses by which these faculties are approached, the stops by which this fine instrument is played, are trifled with and neglected. We forget that a single excess blurs and confuses the music written on our minds ; we forget that an untimely vigil weakens and bewilders the delicate minister to our inner temple ; we know not, or act as if we knew not, that the fine and easily- jarred harmony of health is the only interpreter of Nature to our souls ; in short, we drink too much claret, and eat too much pate foie gras. Do you un derstand me, gourmand et gourmet ? Blanche Carroll was a beautiful whip, and the two bay ponies in her phaeton were quite aware of it. La Bruyere says, with his usual wisdom, " Une belle femme qui a les qualites d un honnete homme est ce qu il y a au monde d un commerce plus delicieux ;" and, to a certain degree, masculine accomplishments too, are very winning in a woman if pretty ; if plain, she is expected not only to be quite feminine, but quite perfect. Foibles are as hateful in a woman who does not possess beauty, as they are engaging in a wo man who does. Clouds are only lovely when the heavens are bright. She looked loveliest while driving, did Blanche Carroll, for she was born to rule, and the expression native to her lip was energy and nerve ; and as she sat with her little foot pressed against the dasher, and reined in those spirited horses, the finely-pencilled mouth, usually playful or pettish, wasr pressed to gether in a curve as warlike as Minerva s, and twice as captivating. She drove, too, as capriciously as she acted. At one moment her fleet ponies fled over the sand at the top of their speed, and at the next they were brought down to a walk, with a suddenness which threatened to bring them upon their haunches. Now far up on the dry sand, cutting a zigzag to lengthen the way, and again below at the tide edge, with the waves breaking over her seaward wheel ; all her powers at one instant engrossed in pushing them to their fastest trot, and in another the reins lying loose on their backs, while she discussed some sudden flight of philosophy. " Be his fairy, his page, his everything that love and poetry have invented," said Roger Ascham to Lady Jane Grey, just before her marriage; but Blanche Carroll was almost the only woman I ever saw capable of the beau ideal of fascina ting characters. Between Miss Carroll and myself there was a safe and cordial friendship. Besides loving another better, she was neither earnest, nor true, nor affectionate enough to come at all within the range of my possible attachments, and though I admired her, she felt that the necessary sympathy was wanting for love ; and, the idea of fooling me with the rest once abandoned, we were the greatest of allies. She told me all her triumphs, and I listened and laughed without thinking it worth while to burden her with my confidence in return ; and you may as well make a memorandum, gentle reader, that that is a very good basis fora friend ship. Nothing bores women or worldly persons so uch as to return their secrets with your own. As we drew near the extremity of the beach, a boy rode up on horseback, and presented Miss Carroll with a note. I observed that it was written on a very dirty slip of paper, and was waiting to be enlightened as to contents, when she slipped it into her belt, took the whip from the box, and flogging her ponies through the heavy sand of the outer beach, went off, at a pace which seemed to engross all her attention, on her road to Lynn. We reached the hotel and she had not spoken a syllable, and as I made a point of never in quiring into anything that seemed odd in her conduct, I merely stole a glance at her face, which wore the expression of mischievous satisfaction which I liked he least of its common expressions, and descended rom the phaeton with the simple remark, that Job could not have arrived, as I saw nothing of my stan- lope in the yard. Mr. Slingsby." It was the usual preface to asking some particular favor. " Miss Carroll." " Will you be so kind as to walk to the library and INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. select me a book to your own taste, and ask no ques tions as to what I do with myself meantime ?" "But, my dear Miss Carroll your father " " Will feel quite satisfied when he hears that Cato was with me. Leave the ponies to the groom, Cato, and follow me." I looked after her as she walked down the village street with the old black behind her, not at all certain of the propriety of my acquiescence, but feeling that there was no help for it. I lounged away a half hour at the library, and found Miss Carroll waiting for me on my return. There were no signs of Bruin ; and as she seemed impatient to be off, I jumped into the phaeton, and away we flew to the beach as fast as her ponies could be driven under the whip. As we descended upon the sands she spoke for the first time. "It is so civil of you to ask no questions, Mr. Slings- by ; but you are not offended with me ?" " If you have got into no scrape while under my charge, I shall certainly be too happy to shake hands upon it to-morrow." " Are you quite sure ?" she asked archly. " Quite sure." " So am not I," she said with a merry laugh; and in her excessive amusement she drove down to the sea, till the surf broke over the nearest pony s back, and filled the bottom of the phaeton with water. Our wet feet were now a fair apology for haste, and taking the reins from her, I drove rapidly home, while she wrap ped herself in her shawl, and sat apparently absorbed in the coming of the twilight over the sea. I slept late after the bail, though I had gone to bed exceedingly anxious about Bruin, who had not yet made his appearance. The tide would prevent his crossing the beach after ten in the morning however, and I made myself tolerably easy till the sands were passable with the evening ebb. The high-water mark was scarcely deserted by the waves, when the same boy who had delivered the note to Miss Carroll the day before, rode up from the beach on a panting horse, and delivered me the following note : " DKAR PHILIP : You will be surprised to hear that I am in the Lynn jail on a charge of theft and utterance of counterfeit money. I do not wait to tell you the particulars. Please come and identify, " Yours truly, " F. SMITH." I got upon the boy s horse, and hurried over the beach with whip and spur. I stopped at the justice s office, and that worthy seemed uncommonly pleased to see me. " We have got him, sir," said he. " Got whom ?" I asked rather shortly. " Why, the fellow that stole your stanhope and Miss Carroll s bracelet, and passed a twenty dollar counter feit bill ha n t you hearrc on t ?" The justice s incredulity, when I told him it was probably the most intimate friend I had in the world, would have amused me at any other time. " Will you allow me to see the prisoner?" I asked. " Be sure I will. I let Miss Carroll have a peep at him yesterday, and what do you think ? Oh, Lord ! he wanted to make her believe she knew him ! Good ! wasn t it? Ha! ha! And such an ill-looking fel low! Why, I d know him for a thief anywhere! Your intimate friend, Mr. Slingsby ! Oh, Lord ! when you come to see him ! Ha ! ha !" We were at the prison-door. The grating bolts turned slowly, the door swung rustily on its hinges as if it was not often used, and in the next minute I was enfolded in Job s arms, who sobbed and laughed, and Has quite hysterical with his delight. I scarce won dered at the justice s prepossessions when I looked at the figure he made. His hat knocked in, his coat muddy, his hair full of the dust of straw the natural ideousness of poor Job had every possible aggrava- We were in the stanhope, and fairly on the beach, before he had sufficiently recovered to tell me the story. He had arrived quite overheated at Lynn, but, in a hurry to execute Miss Carroll s commission, he merely took a glass of soda-water, had Thalaba s mouth washed, and drove on. A mile on his way, he was overtaken by a couple of ostlers on horseback who very roughly ordered him back to the inn. He refused, and a fight ensued, which ended in his beino- tied into the stanhope, and driven back as a prisoner. The large note, which he had given for his soda-water, it appeared, was a counterfeit, and placards, offering a reward for the detection of a villain, described in the usual manner as an ill-looking fellow, had been stick ing up for some days in the village. He was taken before the justice, who declared at first sight that he answered the description in the advertisement. His stubborn refusal to give the whole of his name (he would rather have died, I suppose), his possession of my stanhope, which was immediately recognised, and lastly, the bracelet found in his pocket, of which he refused indignantly to give any account, were circum stances enough to leave no doubt on the mind of the worthy justice. He made out his mittimus forthwith, granting Job s request that he might be allowed to write a note to Miss Carroll (who, he knew, would drive over the beach toward evening), as a very great favor. She arrived as he expected. " And what in Heaven s name did she say ? said I, interested beyond my patience at this part of the story. "Expressed the greatest astonishment when the justice showed her the bracelet, and declared she .never saw me before in her life!" That Job forgave Blanche Carroll in two days, and gave her a pair of gloves with some verses on the third, will surprise only those who have not seen that lady. It would seem incredible, but here are the verses, as large as life : " Slave of the snow-white hand ! I fold My spirit in thy fabric fair ; And when that dainty hand is cold, And rudely comes the wintry air, Press in thy light and straining form Those slender fingers soft and warm ; And, as the fine-traced veins within Quicken their bright and rosy flow. And gratefully the dewy skin Clings to the form that warms it so Tell her my heart is hiding there, Trembling to be so closely prest, Yet feels how brief its moments are, And saddens even to be blest Fated to serve her for a day, And then, like thee, be flung away." EDITH LINSEY. PART 1. FROST AND FLIRTATION. Oh yes for you re in love with me . (I m very glad of it, I m sure ;) But then you are not rich, you see. And I you know I m very poor ! Tis true that I can drive a tandem Tis true that I can turn a sonnet Tis true I leave the law at random, When I should study plague upon it ! But this is not excuse me ! m y ! ( A thing they give for house and land ;) And we must eat in matrimony And love is neither bread nor honey And so you underatand !" 28 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. " Thou art spotless as the snow, lady mine, lady mine ! Thou art spotless as the snow, lady mine ! But the noon will have its ray, And hearts why should not they? Why not thine V IT began to snow. The air softened ; the pattering of the horse s hoofs was muffled with the impeded vi bration ; the sleigh glided on with a duller sound ; the large loose flakes fell soft and fast, and the low and just audible murmur, like the tread of a fairy host, melted on the ear with a drowsy influence, as if it were a descent of palpable sleep upon the earth. You may talk of falling water of the running of a brook of the humming song of an old crone on a sick vigil or of the lem susurro of the bees of Hybla but there is nothing like the falling of the snow for soft and soothing music. You hear it or not, as you will, but it melts into your soul unaware. If you have ever a heartache, or feel the need of " poppy or man- dragora," or, like myself, grow sometimes a-weary of the stale repetitions of this unvaried world, seek me out in Massachusetts, when the wind softens and veers south, after a frost say in January. There shall have been a long-lying snow on the ground, well- trodden. The road shall be as smooth as the paths to our first sins of a seeming perpetual declivity, as it were and never a jolt or jar between us and the edge of the horizon ; but all onward and down appa rently, with an insensible ease. You sit beside me in my spring-sleigh, hung with the lightness of a cob web cradle for a fairy s child in the trees. Our horse is, in the harness, of a swift and even pace, and around his neck is a string of fine small bells, that ring to his measured step in a kind of muffled music, softer and softer as the snow-flakes thicken in the air. Your seat is of the shape of the fauteuil in your library, cushioned and deep, and with a backward and gentle slope, and you are enveloped to the eyelids in warm furs. You settle down, with every muscle in repose, the visor of your ermine cap just shedding the snow from your forehead, and with a word, the groom stands back, and the horse speeds on, steady, but beautifully fast. The bells, which you hear loudly at first, begin to deaden, and the low hum of the alighting flakes steals gradually on your ear; and soon the hoof- strokes are as silent as if the steed were shod with wool, and away you flee through the white air, like birds asleep upon the wing diving through the feathery fleeces of the moon. Your eyelids fall forgetfulness steals upon the senses a delicious torpor takes pos session of the uneasy blood and brain and thought yield to an intoxicating and trance-like slumber. It were perhaps too much to ask that any human bosom may go scathless to the grave ; but in my own un worthy petitions I usually supplicate that my heart may be broken about Christmas. I know an anodyne o that season. Fred Fleming and I occupied one of the seven long seats in a stage-sleigh, flying at this time twelve miles in the hour (yet not fast enough for our impatience), westward from the university gates. The sleighing had been perfect for a week, and the cold keen air had softened for the first time that morning, and assumed the warm and woolly complexion that foretokened snow. Though not very cheerful in its aspect, this is an atmosphere particularly pleasant to breathe, and Fred, who was making his first move after a six weeks fever, sat with the furs away from his mouth, nostrils expanded, lips parted, and the countenance altogether of a man in a high state of physical enjoyment I had nursed him through his illness, by-the-way, in my own rooms, and hence our position as fellow- travellers. A pressing invitation from his father to come home with him to Skaneateles, for the holydays, had diverted me from my usual winter journey to the North ; and for the first time in my life, I was going upon a long visit to a strange roof. My imagination had never more business upon its hands. Fred had described to me, over and over again, every person I was to meet, brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, and friends a household of thirty people, guests included ; but there was one person among them of whom his descriptions, amplified as they were, were very unsatisfactory. Is she so very plain ?" I asked for the twentieth time. " Abominably !" " And immense black eyes?" " Saucers !" "And large mouth?" "Huge!" "And very dark?" " Like a squaw !" "And skinny hands, did you say ?" " Lean, long, and pokerish !" " And so very clever ?" " Knows everything, Phil !" "But a sweet voice ?" " Um ! everybody says so." " And high temper ?" " She s the devil, Phil ! don t ask any more ques tions about her." " You don t like her, then ?" " She never condescends to speak to me ; how should I ?" And thereupon I put my head out of the sleigh, and employed myself with catching the snow-flakes on my nose, and thinking whether Edith Linsey would like me or no ; for through all Fred s derogatory descrip tions, it was clearly evident that she was the ruling spirit of the hospitable household of the Flemings. As we got farther on, the new snow became deeper, and we found that the last storm had been heavier here than in the country from which we had come. The occasional farm-houses were almost wholly buried, the black chimney alone appearing above the ridgy drifts, while the tops of the doors and windows lay below the level of the trodden road, from which a descending passage was cut to the threshold, like the entrance to a cave in the earth. The fences were quite invisible. The fruit-trees looked diminished to shrubberies of snow-flowers, their trunks buried under the visible surface, and their branches loaded with the still falling flakes, till they bent beneath the burden. Nothing was abroad, for nothing could stir out of the road without danger of being lost, and we dreaded to meet even a single sleigh, lest in turning out, the horses should "slump" beyond their depth, in the untrodden drifts. The poor animals began to labor severely, and sunk at every step over their knees in the clogging and wool-like substance ; and the long and cumbrous sleigh rose and fell in the deep pits like a boat in a heavy sea. It seemed impossible to get on. Twice we brought up with a terrible plunge and stood suddenly still, for the runners had struck in too deep for the strength of the horses; and with the snow- shovels, which formed a part of the furniture of the vehicle, we dug them from their concrete beds. Our progress at last was reduced to scarce a mile in the hour, and we began to have apprehensions that out- team would give out between the post-houses. For tunately it was still warm, for the numbness of cold would have paralyzed our already flagging exertions. We had reached the summit of a long hill with the greatest difficulty. The poor beasts stood panting and reeking with sweat; the runners of the sleigh were clogged with hard cakes of snow, and the air was close and dispiriting. We came to a stand-still, with the vehicle lying over almost on its side, and I stepped out to speak to the driver and look forward. It was a discouraging prospect ; a long deep valley lay before us, closed at the distance of a couple of INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. miles by another steep hill, through a cleft in the top of which lay our way. We could not even distinguish the line of the road between. Our disheartened ani mals stood at this moment buried to their breasts, and to get forward without rearing at every step seemed impossible. The driver sat on his box looking un easily down into the valley. It was one undulating ocean of snow, not a sign of a human habitation to be seen, and even the trees indistinguishable from the general mass by their whitened and overladen branch es. The storm had ceased, but the usual sharp cold | that succeeds a warm fall of snow had not yet light- \ ened the clamminess of the new-fallen flakes, and | they clung around the foot like clay, rendering every step a toil. " Your leaders are quite blown," I said to the dri ver, as he slid off his uncomfortable seat. " Pretty nearly, sir !" "And your wheelers are not much better." " Sca cely." "And what do you think of the weather?" " It ll be darnation cold in an hour." As he spoke he looked up to the sky, which was already peeling off its clouds in long stripes, like the skin of an orange, and looked as hard and cold as marble be tween the widening rifts. A sudden gust of a more chilling temperature followed immediately upon his prediction, and the long cloth curtains of the sleigh flew clear of their slight pillars, and shook oft their fringes of icicles. " Could you shovel a little, mister ?" said the dri- ; ver, handing me one of the broad wooden utensils ; from his foot-board, and commencing himself, after having thrown off his box-coat, by heaving up a solid j cake of the moist snow at the side of the road. "It s just to make a place to rub down them ere- j turs," said he, as I looked at him, quite puzzled to know what he was going to do. Fred was too weak to assist us, and having righted j the vehicle a little, and tied down the flapping cur- i tains, he wrapped himself in his cloak, and I set heart- i ily to work with my shovel. In a few minutes, taking advantage of the hollow of a drift, we had cleared a small area of frozen ground, and releasing the tired animals from their harness, we rubbed them well down with the straw from the bottom of the sleigh. The persevering driver then cleared the runners of their iced and clinging masses, and a half hour having elapsed, he produced two bottles of rum from his box, and, giving each of the horses a dose, put them again to their traces. - We heaved out of the pit into which the sleigh had settled, and for the first mile it was down-hill, and we got on with comparative ease. The sky was by this time almost bare, a dark, slaty mass of cloud alone settling on the horizon in the quarter of the wind, while the sun, as powerless as moonlight, poured with dazzling splendor on the snow, and the gusts came keen and bitter across the sparkling waste, rimming the nostrils as if with bands of steel, and penetrating to the innermost nerve with their pungent iciness. No protection seemed of any avail. The whole surface of the body ached as if it were laid against a slab of ice. The throat closed instinctively, and contracted its unpleasant respiration the body and limbs drew irresistibly together, to economize, like a hedge-hog, the exposed surface the hands and feet felt transmu ted to lead and across the forehead, below the pres sure of the cap, there was a binding and oppressive ache, as if a bar of frosty iron had been let into the scull. The mind, meantime, seemed freezing up un willingness to stir, and inability to think of anything but the cold, becoming every instant more decided. From the bend of the valley our difficulties became more serious. The drifts often lay across the road like a wall, some feet above the heads of the horses, and we had dug through one or two, and had been once upset, and often near it, before we came to the steepest part of the ascent. The horses had by this time begun to feel the excitement of the rum, and bounded on through the snow with continual leaps, jerking the sleigh after them with a violence that threatened momently to break the traces. The steam from their bodies froze instantly, and covered them with a coat like hoar-frost, and spite of their heat, and the unnatural and violent exertions they were making, it was evident by the pricking of their ears, and the I sudden crouch of the body when a stronger blast swept over, that the cold struck through even their I hot and intoxicated blt>od. We toiled up, leap after leap, and it seemed mirac ulous to me that the now infuriated animals did not burst a blood-vessel or crack a sinew with every one of those terrible springs. The sleigh plunged on af ter them, stopping dead and short at every other mo ment, and reeling over the heavy drifts, like a boat in a surging sea. A finer crystallization had meantime taken place upon the surface of the moist snow, and the powdered particles flew almost insensibly on the blasts of wind, filling the eyes and hair, and cutting the skin with a sensation like the touch of needle points. The driver and his matldened but almost ex hausted team were blinded by the glittering and whirl ing eddies, the cold grew intenser every moment, the forward motion gradually less and less, and when, with the very last effort apparently, we reached a spot on the summit of the hill, which, from its exposed situa tion, had been kept bare by the wind, the patient and persevering whip brought his horses to a stand, and despaired, for the first time, of his prospects of getting on. I crept out of the sleigh, the iron-bound runners of which now grated on the bare ground, but found it impossible to stand upright. " If you can use your hands," said the driver, turn ing his back to the wind which stung the face like the lash of a whip, " I ll trouble you to untackle them horses." I set about it, while he buried his hands and face I in the snow to relieve them for a moment from the agony of cold. The poor animals staggered stiffly as 1 pushed them aside, and every vein stood out from their bodies like ropes under the skin. " What are you going to do ?" I asked, as he joined me again, and taking off the harness of one of the leaders, flung it into the snow. " Hide for life !" was his ominous answer. " Good God ! and what is to become of my sick ;l friend ?" " The Almighty knows if he can t ride to the ; tavern !" I sprang instantly to poor Fred, who was lying in j the bottom of the sleigh almost frozen to death, in- I formed him of the driver s decision, and asked him if i he thought he could ride one of the horses. He was j beginning to grow drowsy, the first symptom of death by cold, and could with difficulty be roused. With the driver s assistance, however. I lifted him out of the sleigh, shook him soundly, and making stirrups of the traces, set him upon one of the horses, and started him off before us. The poor beasts seemed to have a presentiment of the necessity of exertion, and though stiff and sluggish, entered willingly upon the deep drift which blocked up the way, and toiled exhaustedly i on. The cold in our exposed position was agonizing. Every small fibre in the skin of my own face felt split- ! ting and cracked, and my eyelids seemed made of ice. ; Our limbs soon lost all sensation. I could only press 1 with my knees to the horse s side, and the whole col lected energy of my frame seemed expended in the exertion. Fred held on wonderfully. The driver had still the use of his arm, arid rode behind, flogging the poor animals on, whose every step seemed to be the 30 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. last summons of energy. The sun set, and it was rather a relief, for the glitter upon the snow was ex ceedingly painful to the sight, and there was no warmth in its beams. I could see my poor friend drooping gradually to the neck of his horse, but until he should drop off it was impossible to assist him, and his faith ful animal still waded on. I felt my own strength fast ebbing away. If I had been alone, I should certainly have lain down, with the almost irresistible inclination to sleep ; but the thought of my friend, and the shout ing of the energetic driver, nerved me from time to time and with hands hanging helplessly down, and elbows fastened convulsively to my side, we plunged and struggled painfully forward. I but remember being taken afterward to a fire, and shrinking from it with a shriek the suffering of reviving consciousness was so intolerable. We had reached the tavern liter ally frozen upon our horses. II. I was balancing my spoon on the edge of a cup at the breakfast-table, the morning after our arrival, when Fred stopped in the middle of an eulogium on my virtues as a nurse, and a lady entering at the same moment, he said simply in parenthesis, " My cousin Edith, Mr. Slingsby," and went on with his story. I rose and bowed, and as Fred had the parole, I had time to collect my courage, and take a look at the enemy s camp for, of that considerable household, I felt my star to be in conjunction or opposition with hers only, who was at that moment my vis-a-vis across a dish of stewed oysters. In about five minutes of rapid mental portrait-paint ing, I had taken a likeness of Edith Linsey, which I see at this moment (I have carried it about the world for ten years) as distinctly as the incipient lines of age in this thin-wearing hand. My feelings changed in that time from dread or admiration, or something be tween these, to pity ; she was so unscrupulously and hopelessly plain so wretchedly ill and suffering in her aspect so spiritless and unhappy in every motion and look. " I ll win her heart," thought I, " by being kind to her. Poor thing ! it will be something new to her, I daresay!" Oh, Philip Slingsby ! what a doomed donkey thou wert for that silly soliloquy ! And yet even as she sat there, leaning over her un- tasted breakfast, listless, ill, and melancholy with her large mouth, her protruding eyes, her dead and sallow complexion, and not one redeeming feature there was something in her face which produced a phantom of beauty in my mind a glimpse, a shadowing of a countenance that Beatrice Cenci might have worn at her last innocent orison a loveliness moulded and exalted by superhuman and overpowering mind in stinct through all its sweetness with energy and fire. So strong was this phantom portrait, that in all my thoughts of her as an angel in heaven (for I supposed her dying for many a month, and a future existence was her own most frequent theme), she always rose to my fancy with a face half Niobe, half Psyche, radiantly lovely. And this, too, with a face of her own, a bond fide physiognomy, that must have made a mirror an unpleasant article of furniture in her chamber. I have no suspicion in my own mind whether Time was drunk or sober during the succeeding week of those Christmas holydays. The second Saturday had come round, and I just remember that Fred was" very much out of humor with me for having appeared to his friends to be everything he had said I was not, and nothing he had said I was. He had described me as the most uproarious, noisy, good-humored, and agree able dog in the world. And I was not that at all particularly the last. The old judge told him he had not improved in his penetration at the university. A week ! and what a life had been clasped within its brief calendar, for me ! Edith Linsey was two years older than I, and I was considered a boy. She was thought to be dying slowly, but irretrievably, of consumption ; and it was little matter whom she loved, or how. They would only have been pleased, if, by a new affection, she could beguile the preying melan choly of illness ; for by that gentle name they called, in their kindness, a caprice and a bitterness of charac ter that, had she been less a sufferer, would not have been endured for a day. But she was not capricious, or bitter to me ! Oh no ! And from the very extreme of her impatience with others from her rudeness, her violence, her sarcasm she came to me with a heart softer than a child s, and wept upon my hands, and weighed every word that might give me offence, and watched to anticipate my lightest wish, and was hum ble, and generous, and passionately loving and depen dant. Her heart sprang to me with a rebound. She gave herself up to me with an utter and desperate abandonment, that owed something to her peculiar character, but more to her own solemn conviction that she was dying that her best hope of life was not worth a week s purchase. We had begun with books, and upon them her past enthusiasm had hitherto been released. She loved her favorite authors with a passion. They had relieved j her heart ; and there was nothing of poetry or philoso- | phy that was deep or beautiful, in which she had not steeped her very soul. How well I remember her re peating to me from Shelley those glorious lines to the soaring swan : " Thou hast a home, Beautiful bird ! Thou voyagest to thy home Where thy swoet mate will twine her downy neck With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes Bright with the lustre of their own fond joy ! And what am J, that I should linger here, With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers To the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven That echoes not my thoughts !" There was a long room in the southern wing of the house, fitted up as a library. It was a heavily-curtain ed, dim old place, with deep-embayed windows, and so many nooks, and so much furniture, that there was that hushed air, that absence of echo within it, which is the great charm of a haunt for study or thought. It was Edith s kingdom. She might lock the door, if she pleased, or shut or open the windows ; in short, when she was there, no one thought of disturbing her, and she was like a " spirit in its cell," invisible and inviolate. And here I drank into my very life and soul the outpourings of a bosom that had been locked till (as we both thought) the last hour of its life a flow of mingled intellect and passion that overran my heart like lava, sweeping everything into its resistless fire, and (may God forgive her !) leaving it scorched and desolate when its mocking brightness had gone out. I remember that " Elia" Charles Lamb s Elia was the favorite of favorites among her books ; and partly that the late death of this most-to-be-loved au thor reminded me to look it up, and partly to have time to draw back my indifference over a subject that it something stirs me to recall, you shall read an imi tation (or continuation, if you will) that I did for Edith s eye, of his " Essay on Books and Reading." I sat with her dry and rleshless hand in mine while I read it to her, and the fingers of Psyche were never fairer to Canova than they to me. " It is a litlle singular," I began (looking into her eyes as long as I could remember what I had written), " that, among all the elegancies of sentiment for which the age is remarkable, no one should ever have thought of writing a book upon Reading. The refinements INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 3] of the true epicure in books are surely as various as those of the gastronome and the opium-eater ; and I can conceive of no reason why a topic of such natural occurrence should have been so long neglected, unless it is that the taste itself, being rather a growth of indo lence, has never numbered among its votaries one of the busy craft of writers. " The great proportion of men read, as they eat, for hunger. I do not consider them readers. The true secret of the thing is no more adapted to their compre hension, than the sublimations of Louis Eustacbe Ude for the taste of a day-laborer. The refined reading- taste, like the palate of gourmanderie, must have got beyond appetite gross appetite. It shall be that of a man who, having led through childhood and youth on simple knowledge, values now only, as it were, the apotheosis of learning the spiritual narc. There are, it is true, instances of a keen natural relish : a boy, as you will sometimes find one, of a premature thought- fulness, will carry a favorite author in his bosom, and feast greedily on it in his stolen hours. Elia tells the exquisite story: I saw a boy, with eager eye, Open a book upon a stall, And read as he d devour it all ; Which, when the stall-man did espy, Soon to the boy 1 heard him call, " You sir, you never buy a book, Therefore in one you shall not look !" The boy passed slowly on, and with a sigh, He wished he had never been taught to read Then of the old churl s books he should have had no need. " The pleasure as well as the profit of reading de pends as much upon time and manner, as upon the book. The mind is an opal changing its color with every shifting shade. Ease of position is especially necessary. A muscle strained, a "nerve unpoised, an admitted sunbeam caught upon a mirror, are slight circumstances; btit a feather may tickle the dreamer from paradise to earth. Many a froward axiom, says a refined writer, many an inhumane thought hath arisen from sitting uncomfortably, or from a want of symmetry in your chamber. Who has not felt, at times, an unaccountable disrelish for a favorite author? Who has not, by a sudden noise in the street, been startled from a reading dream, and found, afterward, that the broken spell was not to be rewound ? An ill-tied cravat may unlink the rich harmonies of Tay lor. You would not think Barry Cornwall the de licious heart he is, reading him in a tottering chair. " There is much in the mood with which you come to a book. If you have been vexed out of doors, the good humor of an author seems unnatural. I think I should scarce relish the gentle spiriting of Ariel with a pulse of ninety in the minute. Or if I had been touched by the unkindness of a friend,* Jack FalstalF would not move me to laughter as easily as he is wont. There are tones of the mind, however, to which a book will vibrate with a harmony than which there is nothing more exquisite in nature. To go abroad at sunrise in June, and admit all the holy influences of the hour stillness, and purity, and balm to a mind subdued and dignified, as the mind will be by the sacred tranquillity of sleep, and then to come in with bathed and refreshed senses, and a tem per of as clear joyfulness as the soaring lark s and sit down to Milton or Spenser, or, almost loftier still, the divine Prometheus of Shelley, has seemed to j me a harmony of delight almost too heavenly to be human. The great secret of such pleasure is sym pathy. You must climb to the eagle poet s eyry. You must have senses, like his, for the music that is only audible to the fine ear of thought, and the beauty that is visible only to the spirit-eye of a clear, and for the time, unpolluted fancy. The stamp and pressure of the magician s own time and season must be upon you. You would not read Ossian, for example, in a j bath, or sitting under a tree in a sultry noon; but I after rushing "into the eye of the wind with a fleet horse, with all his gallant pride and glorious strength and fire obedient to your rein, and so mingling, as it will, with his rider s consciousness, that you feel as if you were gifted in your own body with the swift ness and energy of an angel ; after this, to sit down to Ossian, is to read him with a magnificence of de lusion, to my mind scarce less than reality. I never envied Napoleon till I heard it was his habit, after a battle, to read Ossian. "You can not often read to music. But I love, when the voluntary is pealing in church every breath in the congregation suppressed, and the deep-volumed notes pouring through the arches of the roof with the sublime and almost articulate praise of the organ to I read, from the pew Bible, tire book of Ecclesiastes. I The solemn stateliness of its periods is fitted to music I j like a hymn. It is to me a spring of the most thril ling devotion though I shame to confess that the richness of its eastern imagery, and, above all, the in imitable beauty of its philosophy, stand out somewhat definitely in the reminiscences of the hour. "A taste for reading comes comparatively late. Robinson Crusoe will turn a boy s head at ten. The Arabian Nights are taken to bed with us at twelve. At fourteen, a forward boy will read the Lady of the Lake, Tom Jones, and Peregrine Pickle; and at seventeen (not before) he is ready for Shakspere, and, if he is of a thoughtful turn, Milton. Most men do not read these last with a true relish till ! after this period. The hidden beauties of standard I authors break upon the mind by surprise. It is like discovering a secret spring in an old jewel. You take up the book in an idle moment, as you have done a j thousand times before, perhaps wondering, as you I turn over the leaves, what the world finds in it to ad- j mire, when suddenly, as you read, your fingers press | close upon the covers, your frame thrills, and the i passage you have chanced upon chains you like a j spell it is so vividly true and beautiful. Milton s Comus flashed upon me in this way. I never could read the Rape of the Lock till a friend quoted some passages from it during a walk. I know no more ex quisite sensation than this warming of the heart to an old author; and it seems to me that the most delicious portion of intellectual existence is the brief period in which, one by one, the great minds of old are admit ted with all their time-mellowed worth to the affec tions. With what delight I read, for the first time, the kind-hearted plays of Beaumont and Fletcher! How I doated on Burton ! What treasures to me were the Fairy Queen and the Lyrics of Milton! " I used to think, when studying the Greek and Latin poets in my boyhood, that to be made a school- author was a fair offset against immortality. I would as lief, it seemed to rne, have my verses handed down 1 by the town-crier. But latterly," after an interval of a i few years, I have taken up my classics (the identical school_ copies with the hard places all thummed and pencilled) and have read them with no little pleasure. : It is not to be believed with what a satisfaction the riper eye glides smoothly over the once difficult line, i finding the golden cadence of poetry beneath what ! once seemed only a tangled chaos of inversion. The ! associations of hard study, instead of reviving the old i distaste, added wonderfully to the interest of a re- I perusal. I could see now what brightened the sunken eye of the pale and sickly master, as he took up the i hesitating passage, and read on, forgetful of the delin- i quent, to the end. I could enjoy now, what was a dead letter to me then, the heightened fulness of He- i rodotus, and the strong-woven style of Thucydides, ! and the magnificent invention of Eschylus. I took j an aversion to Homer from hearing a classmate in the j next room scan it perpetually through his nose. INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. There is no music for me in the Iliad. But, spite of the recollections scored alike upon my palm and the margin, I own to an Augustan relish for the smooth melody of Virgil, and freely forgive the sometime troublesome ferule enjoying by its aid the raciness of Horace and Juvenal, and the lofty philosophy of Lucretius. It will be a dear friend to whom 1 put down in my will that shelf of defaced classics. " There are some books that bear reading pleasantly once a year. Tristram Shandy is an annual with me. I read him regularly about Christmas. Jeremy Taylor (not to mingle things holy and profane) is a good table-book, to be used when you would collect your thoughts and be serious a while. A man of taste need never want for Sunday reading while he can find the sermons of Taylor, and South, and Ful ler writers of good theological repute though, be tween ourselves, I think one likelier to be delighted with the poetry and quaint fancifulness of their style, than edified by the piety it covers. I like to have a quarto edition of Sir Thomas Brown on a near shelf, or Milton s prose works, or Bacon. These are health ful moods of the mind when lighter nutriment is dis tasteful. "I am growing fastidious in poetry, and confine myself more and more to the old writers. Castaly of late runs shallow. Shelley s (peace to his passionate heart!) was a deep draught, and Wordsworth and Wilson sit near the well, and Keats and Barry Corn wall have been to the fountain s lip, feeding their imaginations (the latter his liearl as well), but they have brought back little for the world. The small silver stream will, I fear, soon cease to flow down to us, and as it dries back to its source, we shall close nearer and nearer upon the pure English undefiled. The dabblers in muddy waters (tributaries to Lethe) will have Parnassus to themselves. "The finest pleasures of reading come unbidden. You can not, with your choicest appliances for the body, always command the many-toned mind. In the twilight alcove of a library, with a time-mellowed chair yielding luxuriously to your pressure, a June wind laden with idleness and balm floating in at the window, and in your hand some Russia-bound ram bling old author, as Izaak Walton, good-humored and quaint, one would think the spirit could scarce fail to be conjured. Yet often, after spending a morning hour restlessly thus, I have risen with my mind un hinged, and strolled off with a book in my pocket to the woods; and, as I live, the mood has descended upon me under some chance tree, with a crooked root under my head, and I have lain there, reading and sleeping by turns, till the letters were blurred in the dimness of twilight. It is the evil of refinement that it breeds caprice. You will sometimes stand unfa- tigued for hours on the steps of a library; or in a shop, the eye will be arrested, and all the jostling of customers and the looks of the jealous shopman will not divert you till you have read out the chapter. I do not often indulge in the supernatural, for I am an unwilling believer in ghosts, and the topic ex cites me. But, for its connexion with the subject upon which I am writing, I must conclude these rambling observations with a late mysterious visitation of my own. " 1 had, during the last year, given up the early summer tea-parties common in the town in which the university stands ; and having, of course, three or four more hours than usual on my hands, I took to an afternoon habit of imaginative reading. Shakspere came first, naturally ; and I feasted for the hundredth time upon what I think his (and the world s) most delicate creation the Tempest. The twilight of the first day overtook me at the third act, where the banquet is brought in with solemn music by the fairy troop of Prospero, and set before the shipwrecked king and his followers. I closed the book, and lean ing back in my chair, abandoned myself to the crowd of images which throng always upon the traces of Shakspere. The fancy music was still in my mind, when an apparently real strain of the most solemn melody came to my ear, dying, it seemed to me as it reached it, the tones were so expiringly faint and low. I was not startled, but lay quietly, holding my breath, and more fearing when the strain would be broken, than curious whence it came. The twilight deepened, till it was dark, and it still played on, changing the tune at intervals, but always of the same melancholy- sweetness ; till, by-and-by, I lost all curiosity, and, giving in to the charm, the scenes I had been reading began to form again in my mind, and Ariel, with his delicate ministers, and Prospero, and Miranda, and Caliban, came moving before me to the measure, as bright and vivid as the reality. I was disturbed in the midst of it by Alfonse, who came in at the usual hour with my tea ; and, on starting to my feet, I lis tened in vain for the continuance of the music. I sat thinking of it a while, but dismissed it at last, and went out to enjoy, in a solitary walk, the loveliness of the summer night. The next day I resumed my book, with a smile at my previous credulity, and had read through the last scenes of the Tempest, when the light failed me. I again closed the book, and pres ently again, as if the sympathy was instantaneous, the strain broke in, playing the same low and solemn mel odies, and falling with the same dying cadence upon the ear. I listened to it, as before, with breathless at tention ; abandoned myself once more to its irresistible spell ; and, half-waking, half-sleeping, fell again into a vivid dream, brilliant as fairy-land, and creating itself to the measures of the still audible music. 1 could not now shake off my belief in its reality ; but I was so wrapt with its strange sweetness, and the beauty of my dream, that I cared not whether it came from earth or air. My indifference, singularly enough, continued for several days ; and, regularly at twilight, I threw aside my book, and listened with dreamy wakefulness for the music. It never failed me, and its results were as constant as its coming. AVhatever 1 had read sometimes a canto of Spenser, sometimes an act of a play, or a chapter of romance the scene rose before me with the stately reality of a pageant. At hist I began to think of it more seriously ; and it was a relief to me one evening when Alfonse came in earlier than usual with a message. 1 told him to stand perfectly still; and after a minute s pause, during which 1 heard distinctly an entire passage of a funeral hymn, I asked him if he heard any music ? He said he did not. My blood chilled at his positive reply, and I bade him listen once more. Still he heard nothing. 1 could endure it no longer. It was to me as distinct and audible as my own voice; and I rushed from my room as he left me, shuddering to be left alone. "The next day I thought of nothing but death. Warnings by knells in the air, by apparitions, by mys terious voices, were things I had believed in specula- tively for years, and now their truth came upon me like conviction. I felt a dull, leaden presentiment about my heart, growing heavier and heavier with every passing hour. Evening came at last, and with it, like a summons from the grave, a dead march swelled clearly on the air. I felt faint and sick at heart. This could not be fancy ; and why was it, as I thought I had proved, audible to my ear alone ? I threw open the window, and the first rush of the cool north wind refreshed me ; but, as if to mock my at tempts at relief, the dirge-like sounds rose, at the in stant, with treble distinctness. I seized my hat and rushed into the street, but, to my dismay, every step seemed to bring me nearer to the knell. Still I hur ried on, the dismal sounds growing distractingly loud er, till, on turning a corner that leads to the lovely INKLINGS OP ADVENTURE. 33 burying-ground of New Haven, Icame suddenly upon a bell-foundry ! In the rear had lately been hung, for trial, the chiming bells just completed for the new Trinity church, and the master of the establishment informed me that one of his journeymen was a fine player, and every day after his work, he was in the habit of amusing himself with the Dead March in Saul, the Marsellois Hymn, and olher melancholy and easy tunes, muffling the hammers that he might not disturb the neighbors." I have had my reward for these speculations, dear reader a smile that is lying at this instant, perdu, in the innermost recess of memory and I care not much (without offence) whether you like it or no. She \ thanked me she thought it well done she laid her head on my bosom while I read it in the old library of the Flemings, and every word has been "paid for in fairy gold."" I have taken up a thread that lengthens as I unra vel it, and I can not well see how I shall come to the end, without trespassing on your patience. We will cul it here, if you like, and resume it after a pause ; j but before I close, I must give you a little instance of how love makes the dullest earth poetical. Edith had given me a portefeuille crammed with all kinds of embossed and curious note-paper, all quite too pret ty for use, and what I would show you are my verses on the occasion. For a hand unpractised, then, in , aught save the " Gradus ad Parnassum," I must own I have fished them out of that same old portefeuille (faded now from its glory, and worn with travel but O how cherished !) with a pleasant feeling of paternity : ; Thanks for thy gift ! But heardst thou ever A story of a wandering fay. Who, tired of playing syJph for ever, Came romping to the"earth one day ; And, flirting like a little love With everything that flew and flirted, Made captive of a sober dove, Whose pinions (so the tale asserted), Though neither very fresh nor fair, Were well enough ir common wear. " The dove, though plain, was gentle bred, And coood agreeably, though low ; But still the fairy shook her head, And, patting with her foot, said No ." Twas true that he was rather fat : But that was living in an abbey ; And solemn but it was not that. What then? lf r hy, sir, your wj ng.? are shabby. ; 44 The dove was dumb : he drooped, and sidled In shame along the abbey-wall ; And then the haughty fay unbridled, And blew her snail-shell trumpet-call ; And summoning her waiting-sprite, Who bore her wardrobe on his hack, She took the wings she wore at night, (Silvery stars on plumes of black,) And, smiling, begged that he would take And wear them for his lady s sake. " He took them ; but he could not fly ! A fay-wing was too fine for him ; And when she pouted, by-and-by, And left him for some other whim, He laid them softly in his nest, And did his flying with his own, And they were soft upon his breast, When many a night he slept alone ; And many a thought those wings would stir, And many a dream of love and her." PART II. LOVE AND SPECULATION. EDITH LINSEY was religious. There are m^ny iniensijiets (a new word, that I can t get on without: I submit it for admission into the language) ; there 3 are many intensifies, I say, to the passion of love : such as pride, jealousy, poetry (money, sometimes, Din mio . ) and idleness:* but, if the experience of one who first studied the Art of Love in an "evan gelical country is worth a para, there is nothing within the bend of the rainbow that deepens the ten der passion like religion. I speak it not irreverently. The human being that loves us throws the value of its existence into the crucible, and it can do no more. Love s best alchymy can only turn into affection what j is in the heart. The vain, the proud, the poetical, i the selfish, the weak, can and do fling their vanity, | pride, poetry, selfishness, and weakness, into a first ; passion ; but these are earthly elements, and there is j an antagonism in their natures that is for ever stri- | ving to resolve them back to their original earth. But religion is of the soul as well as the heart the mind as well as the affections and when it mingles in love, I it is the infusion of an immortal essence into an un worthy and else perishable mixture. Edith s religion was equally without cant, and without hesitation or disguise. She had arrived ; at it by elevation of mind, aided by the habit of never i counting on her tenure of life beyond the setting of i the next sun, and with her it was rather an intellec- ! tual exaltation than an humility of heart. She thought j of God because the subject was illimitable, and her ; powerful imagination found in it the scope for which she pined. She talked of goodness, and purity, and I disinterestedness, because she found them easy virtues ] with a frame worn down with disease, and she was* i removed by the sheltered position of an invalid from I the collision which tries so shrewdly in common life the ring of our metal. She prayed, because the ful ness of her heart was loosed by her eloquence when on her knees, and she found that an indistinct and mystic unburthening of her bosom, even to the Deity, was a hush and a relief. The heart does not always require rhyme and reason of language and tears. There are many persons of religious feeling who, from a fear of ridicule or misconception, conduct them selves as if to express a devout sentiment was a want of taste or good-breeding. Edith was not of these. Religion was to her a powerful enthusiasm, applied without exception to every pursuit and affection. She used it as a painter ventures on a daring color, or a musician a new string in his instrument. She felt that she aggrandized botany, or history, or friendship, ; or love, or what you will, by making it a stepping- i stone to heaven, and she made as little mystery of it as she did of breathing and sleep, and talked of subjects which the serious usually enter upon with a sup pressed breath, as she would comment upon a poem or define a new philosophy. It was surprising what an impressiveness this threw over her in everything ; how elevated she seemed above the best of those about her; and with what a worshipping and half- reverent admiration she inspired all whom she did not utterly neglect or despise. For myself, my soul was drink up in hers as the lark is taken into the sky, and I forgot there was a world beneath me in my intoxica tion. I thought her an angel unrecognised on earth. I believed her as pure from worldliness, and as spot less from sin, as a cherub with his breast upon his lute ; and I knelt by her when she prayed, and held her upon my bosom in her fits of faintness and ex haustion, and sat at her feet with my face in her hands listening to her wild speculations (often till the morn ing brightened behind the curtains) with an utter and irresistible abandonment of my existence to hers, which seems to me now like a recollection of another jjfe it were, with this conscious body and mind, a self-relinquishment so impossible ! Our life was a singular one. Living in the midst * " La paresse dans les femmes est le presage de 1 amour." LA BRUYEHE. 34 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE, of a numerous household, with kind and cultivated people about us, \ve were as separated from them as if the ring of Gyges encircled us from their sight. Fred wished me joy of my giraffe, as he offensively called his cousin, arid his sisters, who were quite too pretty to have been left out of my story so long, were more indul gent, I thought, to tlie indigenous beaux of Skaneat- eles than those aboriginal specimens had a right to expect ; but I had no eyes, ears, sense, or civility for anything but Edith. The library became a forbidden spot to all feet but ours ; we met at noon after our late vigils and breakfasted together; a light sleigh was set apart for our tete-a-tete drives over the frozen lake, and the world seemed to me to revolve on its axle with a special reference to Philip Sliugsby s happiness. I wonder whether an angel out of heaven would have made me believe that I should ever write the story of those passionate hours with a smile and a sneer ! I tell thee, Edith ! (for thou wilt read every line that I have written, and feel it, as far as thou canst, feel any thing), that I have read " Faust" since, and thought thee Mephistopheles ! I have looked on thee since, with thy cheek rosy dark, thy lip filled with the blood of health, and curled with thy contempt of the world and thy yet wild ambition to be its master-spirit and idol, and struck my breast with instinctive self-ques tioning if thou hadst given back my soul that was thine own ! I fear thee, Edith. Thou hast grown beautiful that wert so hideous the wonder-wrought miracle of health and intellect, filling thy veins, and breathing almost a newer shape over form and feature ; lut it is not thy beauty ; no, nor thy enthronement in the admiration of thy woman s world. These are little to me; for I saw thy loveliness from the first, and I worshipped thee more in the duration of a thought than a hecatomb of these worldlings in their lifetime. I fear thy mysterious and unaccountable power over the human soul! I can scorn thee here, in another land, with an ocean weltering between us, and anatomize the character that I alone have read truly and too well, for the instruction of the world (its amusement, too, proud woman thou wilt writhe at that) but I confess to a natural and irresistible obedi ence to the mastery of thy spirit over mine. I would not willingly again touch the radius of thy sphere. 1 would come out of Paradise to walk alone with the devil as soon. How little even the most instructed women knew the secret of this power ! They make the mistake of cultivating only their own minds. They think that, by se//-elevation, they will climb up to the intellects of men, and win them by seeming their equals. Shal low philosophers! You never remember that to sub due a human being to your will, it is more necessary to know his mind than you own that, in conquering a heart vanity is the first out-post that while your are employing your wits in thinking how most effectually to duzzle him, you should be sounding his character for its undeveloped powers to assist him to dazzle you that love is a reflected light, and to be pleased with others we must be first pleased with ourselves ! Edith (it has occurred to me in my speculations since) seemed to me always an echo of myself. She expressed my thought as it sprang into my brain. 1 thought that in her I had met my double and coun- terpirt, with the reservation that I was a little the stronger spirit, and that in >/ mind lay the material of the eloquence that flowed from her lips as the al mond that you endeavor to split equally leaves the kernel in the deeper cavity of its shell. Whatever the topic, she seemed using my thoughts, anticipating my reflections, and, with an unobtrusive but thrilling flattery, referring me to myself for the truth of what I must know was but a suggestion of my own ! O! Lucrezia Borgia ! if Machiavelli had but practised that subtle cunning upou thee, thou wouldst have had lit tle space in thy delirious heart for the passion that, in the history of crime, has made thee the marvel and the monster. The charm of Edith to most people was that she was no sublimation. Her mind seemed of any or ne stature. She was as natural, and earnest, and as sat isfied to converse, on the meanest subject as on the highest. She overpowered nobody. She (apparently) eclipsed nobody. Her passionate and powerful elo quence was only lavished on the passionate and pow erful. She never misapplied herself: and what a secret of influence and superiority is contained in that single phrase ! We so hate him who out-measures us, as we stand side by side before the world ! I have in my portfolio several numbers of a manu script " Gazette," with which the Flemings amused 1 1 themselves during the deep snows of the winter in | ; which I visited them. It was contributed to by every- j; body in the house, and read aloud at the breakfast- | table on the day of its weekly appearance, and, quite i apropos to these remarks upon the universality of | Edith s mind, there is in one of them an essay of hers, j on what she calls minute philosophies. It is curious, as showing how, with all her loftiness of speculation, 1 1 she descended sometimes to the examination of the j smallest machinery of enjoyment. " The principal sources of everyday happiness," (I am copying out a part of the essay, dear reader), "are too obvious to need a place in a chapter of breakfast- table philosophy. Occupation and a clear conscience, the very truant in the fields will tell you, are craving necessities. But when these are secured, there are lighter matters, which, to the sensitive and educated at least, are to happiness what foliage is to the tree. They are refinements which add to the beauty of life without diminishing its strength; and, as they spring only from a better use of our common gifts, they are I neither costly nor rare. I have learned secrets under the roof of a poor man, which would add to the Jux- ; ury of the rich. The blessings of a cheerful fancy and a quick eye come from nature, and the trailing of a vine may develop them as well as the curtaining of a king s chamber. " Riding and driving are such stimulating pleasures, that to talk of any management, in their indulgence | seems superfluous. Yet we are, in motion or at rest, equally liable to the caprices of feeling, and, perhaps, the gayer the mood the deeper the shade cast on it by untoward circumstances. The time of riding should never be regular. It then becomes a habit, and hab its, though sometimes comfortable, never amount to positive pleasure. I would ride when nature prompt ed when the shower was past, or the air balmy, or the sky beautiful whenever and wherever the sig nificant finger of Desire pointed. Oh! to leap into the saddle when the west wind blows freshly, and gal lop off into its very eye, with an undrawn rein, care less how fir or whither; or, to spring up from a book when the sun breaks through afier a storm, and drive away under the white clouds, through light and shad ow, while the trees are wet and the earth damp and spicy; or, in the clear sunny afternoons of autumn, | with a pleasant companion on the seat beside you, and j the glorious splendor o-f the decaying foliage flushing in the sunshine, to loiter up the valley dreaming over the thousand airy castles that are stirred by such shifting beauty these are pleasures indeed, and such as he who rides regularly after his dinner knows as little of as the dray-horse of the exultation of the courser. There is a great deal in the choice of a compan ion. If he is an indifferent acquaintance, or an indis criminate talker, or has a coarse eye for beauty, or is insensible to the delicacies of sensation or thought if he is sensual, or stupid, or practical constitutionally he will never do. He must be a man who can de- INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 35 tect a rare color in a leaf, or appreciate a peculiar passage in scenery, or admire a grand outline in a cloud ; he must have accurate and fine senses, and a heart, noble at least by nature, and subject still to tier direct influences ; he must be a lover of the beautiful in whatever shape it comes; and, above all, he must have read and thought like a scholar, if not like a poet. He will then ride by your side without crossing your humor : if talkative, he will talk well, and if silent, you are content, for you know that the same grandeur or beauty which has wrought the silence, in your own thoughts has given a color to his. " There is much in the manner of driving. I like a capricious rein now fast through a hollow, and I now loiteringly on the edge of a road or by the bank | of a river. There is a singular delight in quickening j your speed in the animation of a climax, and in j coming down gently to a walk with a digression of feeling, or a sudden sadness. "An important item in household matters is the management of light. A small room well-lighted is much more imposing than a large one lighted ill. Cross lights are painful to the eye, and they destroy | besides the cool and picturesque shadows of the fur- j niture and figures 1 would have a room always par- i tially darkened : there is a repose in the twilight dim- Desa of a drawing-room which affects one with the proper gentleness of the place : the out-of-door hu mor of men is too rude, and the secluded light sub dues them fitly as they enter. 1 like curtains heavy, and of the richest material: there is a magnificence in large crimson folds which nothing else equals, and ! the color gives everything a beautiful teint as the light streams through them. Plants tastefully arranged are j pretty ; flowers are always beautiful. I would have my own roonf like a painter s one curtain partly drawn ; a double shadow has a nervous look. The effect of a proper disposal of light upon the feelings is by most people surprisingly neglected. I have no doubt that as an habitual thing it materially affects the character; the disposition for study and thought is certainly de pendant on it in no slight degree. What is more contemplative than the twilight of a deep alcove in a ! library ? What more awakens thought than the dim interior of an old church with its massive and shadowy ; pillars ? " There mav be the most exquisite luxury in furni- i ture. A crowded room has a look of comfort, and j suspended lamps throw a mellow depth into the fea- ! tures. Descending light is always the most becoming ; : it deepens the eye, and distributes the shadows in the I; face judiciously. Chairs should be of different and curious fashions, made to humor every possible wea- J! riness. A spice-lamp should burn in the corner, and the pictures should be colored of a pleasant tone, and , the subjects should be subdued and dreamy. It should ij be a place you would live in for a century without an || juicomfortable thought. I hate a neat room. A dozen j of the finest old authors should lie about, and a new j. novel, and the last new prints. I rather like the French I fashion of a bonbonniere, though that perhaps is an ex travagance. " There is a management of one s own familiar in tercourse which is more neglected, and at the same time more important to happiness, than every other ; it is particularly a pity that this is not oftener under stood by newly -married people ; as far as my own observation goes, I have rarely failed to detect, far too early, signs of ill-disguised and disappointed weariness. It was not the reaction of excitement not the return to the quiet ways of home but a new manner a for getful indifference, believing itself concealed, and yet betraying itself continually by unconscious and irre pressible symptoms. I believe it resulted oftenest from the same causes: partly that they saw each other too much, and partly that when the form of eti quette was removed, they forgot to retain its invalua ble essence an assiduous and minute disinterested ness. It seems nonsense to lovers, but absence is the secret of respect, and therefore of affection. Love is divine, but its flame is too del : cate for a perpetual household lamp ; it should be burned only for incense, and even then trimmed skilfully. It is wonderful how a slight neglect, or a glimpse of a weakness, or a chance defect of knowledge, dims its new glory. Lovers, mar ried or single, should have separate pursuits they should meet to respect each other for new and distinct acquisitions. It is the weakness of human affections that they are founded on pride, and waste with over much familiarity. And oh, the delight to meet after hours of absence to sit down by the evening lamp, and with a mind Unexhausted by the intercourse of the day, to yield to the fascinating freedom of conver sation, and clothe the rising thoughts of affection in fresh and unhackneyed language ! How richly the treasures of the mind are colored not doled out, counter by counter, as the visible machinery of thought coins them, but heaped upon the mutual altar in lavish and unhesitating profusion ! And how a bold fancy as sumes beauty and power not traced up through all its petty springs till its dignity is lost by association, but flashing full-grown and suddenly on the sense ! The gifts of no one mind are equal to the constant draught of a lifetime ; and even if they were, there is no one taste which could always relish them. It is an humilia ting thought that immortal mind must be husbanded like material treasure ! " There is a remark of Godwin, which, in rather too strong language, contains a valuable truth: A judicious and limited voluptuousness, he says, is ne cessary to the cultivation of the mind, to the polishing of the manners, to the refinement of the sentiment, and to the development of the understanding ; and a woman deficient in this respect may be of use in the government of our families, but can not add to the enjoyment, nor fix the partiality of a man of taste ! Since the days when St. Leon was written, the word by which the author expressed his meaning is grown perhaps into disrepute, but the remark is still one of keen and observant discrimination. It refers (at least so I take it) to that susceptibility to delicate attentions, that fine sense of the nameless and exquisite ten derness of manner and thought, which constitute in the minds of its possessors the deepest undercurrent of life the felt and treasured, but unseen and inex pressible richness of affection. It is rarely found in the characters of men, but it outweighs, when it is, all grosser qualities for its possession implies a generous nature, purity, fine affections, and a heart open to all the sunshine and meaning of the universe. It belongs more to the nature of woman ; but indispensable as it is to her character, it is oftener tlnn anything else, wanting. And without it, what is she ? What is love to a being of such dull sense that she hears only its common and audible language, and sees nothing but what it brings to her feet to be eaten, and worn, and looked" upon ? What is woman, if the impassioned language of the eye, or the deepened fulness of the tone, or the tenderness of a slight attention, are things unnoticed and of no value ? one who answers you when you speak, smiles when you tell her she is grave, assents barely to the expression of your enthusiasm, but has no dream beyond no suspicion that she has not felt and reciprocated your feelings as fully as you could expect or desire ? It is a matter too little looked to. Sensitive and ardent men too often marry with a blindfold admiration of mere goodness or loveliness. The abandon of matrimony soon dissipates the gay dream, and they find themselves suddenly unsphered, linked indissolubly with affections strangely different from their own, and lavishing their only treasure on those who can neither appreciate nor return it. The 36 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. after-life of such men is a stifling solitude of feeling. Their avenues of enjoyment are their manifonn sym pathies, and when these are shut up or neglected, the heart is dark, and they have nothing to do thencefor ward but to forget. " There are many, who, possessed of the capacity for the more elevated affections, waste and lose it by a careless and often unconscious neglect. It is not a plant to grow untended. The breath of indifference, or a rude touch, may destroy for ever its delicate tex ture. To drop the figure, there is a daily attention to the slight courtesies of life, and an artifice in detecting the passing shadows of feeling, which alone can pre serve, through life, the first freshness of passion. The easy surprises of pleasure, and earnest cheerfulness of assent to slight wishes, the habitual respect to opin ions, the polite abstinence from personal topics in the company of others, the assiduous and unwavering at tention to her comfort, at home and abroad, and, above all, the absolute preservation in private of those pro prieties of conversation and manner which are sacred before the world are some of the thousand secrets of that rare happiness which age and habit alike fail to impair or diminish." II. Vacation was over, but Fred and myself were still lingering at Fleming Farm. The roads were impas sable with a premature THAW. Perhaps there is noth ing so peculiar in American meteorology as the phe nomenon which I alone probably, of all the imprisoned inhabitants of Skaneateles, attributed to a kind and 44 special Providence." Summer had come back, like Napoleon from Elba, and astonished usurping winter in the plenitude of apparent possession and security. No cloud foreboded the change, as no alarm preceded the apparition of " the child of destiny." We awoke on a February morning, with the snow lying chin- deep on the earth, and it was June ! The air was soft and warm the sky was clear, and of the milky ceru lean of chrysoprase the south wind (the same, save his unperfumed wings, who had crept off like a sa tiated lover in October) stole back suddenly from the tropics, and found his flowery mistress asleep and in sensible to his kisses beneath her snowy mantle. The sunset warmed back from its wintry purple to the golden teints of heat, the stars burned with a less vitreous sparkle, the meteors slid once more lambent- ly down the sky, and the house-dove sat on the eaves, washing her breast in the snow-water, and thinking (like a" neglected wife at a capricious return of her truant s tenderness) that the sunshine would last for ever ! Th air was now full of music. The water trickled away under the snow, and, as you looked around and saw no change or motion in the white carpet of the earth, it seemed as if a myriad of small bells were ring ing under ground fairies, perhaps, startled in mid- revel with the false alarm of summer, and hurrying about with their silver anklets, to wake up the slum bering flowers. The mountain-torrents were loosed, and rushed down upon the valleys like the Children of the Mist; and the hoarse war-cry, swelling and fal ling upon the wind, maintained its perpetual undertone like an accompaniment of bassoons ; and occasionally, in a sudden lull of the breeze, you would hear the click of the undermined snow-drifts dropping upon the earth, as if the chorister of spring were beating time to the reviving anthem of nature. The snow sunk perhaps a foot in a day, but it was only perceptible to the eye where you could measure its wet mark against a tree from which it had fallen away, or by the rock, from which the dissolving bank shrunk and separated, as if rocks and snow were as heartless as ourselves and threw off their friends, too, in their extremity ! The low-lying lake, meantime, surrounded by melting mountains, received the aban doned waters upon its frozen bosom, and, spreading them into a placid and shallow lagoon, separate by a crystal plane from its own lower depths, gave them the repose denied in the more elevated sphere in which lay their birthright. And thus (oh, how full is na ture of these gentle moralities !) and thus sometimes do the lowly, whose bosom, like the frozen lake, is at first cold and unsympathetic to the rich and noble, still receive them in adversity, and, when neighbor hood and dependance have convinced them that they are made of the same common element, as the lake melts its dividing and icy plane, and mingles the strange waters with its own, do they dissolve the unnatural bar rier of prejudice, and take the humbled wanderer to their bosom ! The face of the snow lost its dazzling whiteness as the thaw went on as disease steals away the beauty of those we love but it was only in the distance, where the sun threw a shadow into the irregular pits of the dissolving surface. Near to the eye (as the dying one pressed to the bosom), it was still of its original beauty, unchanged and spotless. And now you are tired of my loitering speculations, gentle read er, and we will return (please Heaven, only on paper!) to Edith Linsey. The roads were at last reduced to what is expres sively called, in New England, slosh (in New York, posh, but equally descriptive), and Fred received a hint from the judge that the mail had arrived in the usual time, and his beaux jours were at an end. A slighter thing than my departure would have been sufficient to stagger the tottering spirits of Edith. We were sitting at table when the letters came in, and the dates were announced that proved the opening of the roads ; and I scarce dared to turn my eyes upon the pale face that I could just see had dropped upon her I bosom. The next instant there was a general confu- ! sion, and she was carried lifeless to her chamber. A note, scarce legible, was put into my hand in the I course of the evening, requesting me to sit up for her | in the library. She would come to me, she said, if she had strength. It was a night of extraordinary beauty. The full moon was high in the heavens at midnight, and there had been a slight shower soon after sunset, which, with the clearing-up wind, had frozen thinly into a most fragile rime, and glazed everything open to the sky with transparent crystal. The distant forest looked serried with metallic trees, dazzlingly and unspeakably gorgeous ; and, as the night-wind stirred through them and shook their crystal points in the moonlight the aggregated stars of heaven springing from their Ma ker s hand to the spheres of their destiny, or the inarch of the host of the archangel Michael with their irradiate spear-points glittering in the air, or the dia mond beds of central earth thrust up to the sun in some throe of the universe would, each or all, have been well bodied forth by such similitude. It was an hour after midnight when Edith was sup ported in by her maid, and, choosing her own position, sunk into the broad window-seat, and lay with her head on my bosom, and her face turned outward to the glit tering night. Her eyes had become, I thought, un naturally bright, and she spoke with an exhausted faintness that gradually strengthened to a tone of the most thrilling and melodious sweetness. I shall never get that music out of my brain ! " Philip !" she said. " I listen, dear Edith !" " I am dying." And she looked it, and I believed her; and my heart sunk to its deepest abyss of wretchedness with the conviction. She went on to talk of death. It was the subject INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 37 that pressed most upon her mind, and she could scarce fail to be eloquent on any subject. She was very eloquent on this. I was so impressed with the manner in which she seemed almost to rhapsodize between the periods of her faintness, as she lay in my arms that night, that every word she uttered is still fresh in my memory. She seemed to forget my presence, and to commune with her own thoughts aloud. I recollect," she said, when I was strong and well (years ago, dear Philip!), I left my books on a morning in May, and looking up to find the course of the wind, started off alone for a walk into its very eye. A moist steady breeze came from the southwest, dri ving before it fragments of the dispersed clouds. The air was elastic and clear a freshness that entered free ly at every pore was corrring up, mingled with the pro fuse perfume of grass and flowers the colors of the new, tender foliage were particularly soothing to an eye pained with close attention and the just percep tible murmur of the drops shaken from the trees, and the peculiarly soft rustle of the wet leaves, made as much music as an ear accustomed to the silence of solitude could well relish. Altogether, it was one of those rarely-tempered days when every sense is satis fied, and the mind is content to lie still with its com mon thoughts, and simply enjoy. " I had proceeded perhaps a mile my forehead held up to the wind, my hair blowing back, and the blood glowing in my cheeks with the most vivid flush of exercise and health when I saw coming toward me a man apparently in middle life, but wasted by ill- | on it in wonder. ness to the extremest emaciation. His lip was color- realize it. less, his skin dry and white, and his sunken eyes had that expression of inquiring earnestness which comes now, will settle and grow dull ? That the refined lip, which now shrinks so sensitively from defilement, will not feel the earth lying upon it, and the tooth of the feeding worm ? That the free breath will be choked, and the forehead be pressed heavily on by the decay ing coffin, and the light and air of heaven be shut quite out ; and this very body, warm, and breathing, and active as it is now, will not feel uneasiness or pain ? I could not help looking at my frame as these thoughts crowded on me; and I confess I almost doubted my own convictions there was so much strength and quickness in it my hand opened so freely, and my always with impatient sickness. He raised his head, and looked steadily at me as I came on. My lips were open, and my whole air must have been that of a per son in the most exulting enjoyment of health. I was just against him, gliding past with an elastic step, when, with his eye still fixed on me, he half turned, and in a voice of inexpressible meaning, exclaimed, nostrils expanded with such a satisfied thirst to the moist air. Ah ! it is hard to believe at first that we must die ! harder still to believe and realize the repul sive circumstances that follow that terrible change ! It is a bitter thought at the lightest. There is little comfort in knowing that the soul will not be there that the sense and the mind that feel and measure suf fering, will be gone. The separation is too great a mystery to satisfy fear. It is the body that we know. It is this material frame in which the affections have grown up. The spirit is a mere thought a presence that we are told of, but do not see. Philosophize as we will, the idea of existence is connected indissolubly with the visible body, and its pleasant and familiar senses. We talk of, and believe, the soul s ascent to its Maker ; but it is not ourselves it is not our own conscious breathing identity that we send up in ima gination through the invisible air. It is some phantom that is to issue forth mysteriously, and leave us gazing We do not understand, we can not At the time I speak of, my health had been always unbroken. Since then, I have known disease in many Merciful Heaven ! lioic well she eaning, is ." I passed on, with his voice still ringing in my ear. It haunted me like a tone in the air. It was repeated in the echo of my tread in the panting of my heart. I felt it in the beating of the strong pulse in my temples. As if it was strange that I should be so well ! I had never before realized that it could be otherwise. It Deemed , impossible to me that my strong limbs shoi W /ail me, or the pure blood I felt bounding so bravely through j my veins could be reached and-tswn ed b y disease. I ate. forms, and have had, of course, more time and occa- ! sion for the contemplation of death. I have never, j till hue, known resignation. With my utmost energy I I was merely able, in other days, to look upon it with i quiet despair; as a terrible, unavoidable evil. I re- ! member once, after severe suffering for weeks, I over heard the physician telling my mother that I must die, and from th;>< moment the thought never left me. A thin line of light came in between the shutters of the south window ; and, with this one thought fasten- ed on my mind, like the vulture of Prometheus, I lay and watched it, day after day, as it passed with its imperceptible progress over the folds of my curtains. The last faint gleam of sunset never faded from its damask edge, without an inexpressible sinking of my heart, and a belief that I should see its pleasant light no more. I turned from the window when even ima gination could find the daylight no longer there, and How should it come ? If . - me ? If I slept, would it not r^iresh me ? If I came felt my pulse and lifted my head to try my remaining out in the cool free air wld not m y lungs Weave, j| strength. And then every object, yes, even the mean- and my muscles BpriP* >d my face feel its grateful freshness ? I held o* 1 m y arm > <or tne first time in in y ! life, with a doub *>( its strength. I closed my hand | unconscious^ * w tn a f ear >t would not obey. I drew j a deep hr*"* 1 1 to ^ ee ^ l was difficult to breathe ; and | even "f bounding step, that was as elastic then as a fane s, seemed to my excited imagination already to have become decrepit and feeble. I walked on, and thought of death. I had never est, grew unutterably dear to me ; my pillow, and the cup with which my lips were moistened, and the cool ing amber which I had held in my hand, and pressed to my burning lips when the fever was on me every thing that was connected with life, and that would re main among the living when I was gone. " It is strange, but with all this clinging to the world my affection for the living decreased sensibly. I grew selfish in my weakness. I could not bear that they before done so definiteJy ; It was like a terrible shape j should go from my chamber into the fresh air, and that had always pursued me dimly, but which I had j have no fear of sickness and no pain. It seemed un- never before turned and looked steadily on. Strange! jj feeling that they did not stay and breathe the close that we can live so constantly with that threatening jj atmosphere of my room at least till I was dead. hand hung over us,and not think of it always! Strange! ji How could they walk round so carelessly, and look that we can use a limb, or enter with interest into any |j on a fellow-creature dying helplessly and unwillingly, pursuit of time, when we know that our continued u and never shed a tear! And then the passing cour- life is almost a daily miracle ! \\ tesies exchanged with the family at the door, and the "How difficult it is to realize death ! How difficult i| quickened step on the sidewalk, and the wandering looks it is to believe that the hand with whose every vein j about my room, even while I was answering with my you are familiar, will ever lose its motion and its i difficult breath their cold inquiries! There was an in- warmth? That the quick eye, which is so restless || human carelessness in all this that stung me-to the settl. INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. "I craved sympathy as I did life ; and yet I doubted it all. There was not a word spoken by the friends who were admitted to see me, that I did not ponder over when they were gone, and always with an im patient dissatisfaction. The tone, and the manner, and the expression of faee, all seemed forced : and often, in my earlier sickness, when I had pondered for hours on the expressed sympathy of some one I had loved, the sense of utter helplessness which crowded on me with my conviction of their insincerity, quite overcame me. I have lain night after night, and looked at my indifferent watchers : and oh how I hated them for their careless ease, and their snatched moments of repose ! I could scarce keep from dashing aside the cup they came to give me so sluggishly. " It is singular that, with all our experience sf sick ness, we do not attend more to these slight circum stances. It can scarce be conceived how an ill-man- aged light, or a suppressed whispering, or a careless change of attitude, in the presence of one whose senses are so sharpened, and whose mind is so sensitive as a sick person s, irritate and annoy. And, perhaps, more reader, with what must be more interesting to me than to you, it is because every syllable was burnt like enamel into my soul, in my boundless reverence and love. It was two o clock, and she still lay breathing pain fully in my arms. 1 had thrown up the window, and the soft south wind, stirring gently among the tinkling icicles of the trees, came in, warm and genial, and she leaned over to inhale it, as if it came from the source of life. The stars burned gloriously in the heavens ; and, in a respite of her p-.iin, she lay back her head, and gazed up at thein with an inarticulate motion of her lips, and eyes so unnaturally kindled, that I thought reason had abandoned her. "How beautiful are the stars to night, Ediih!" I said, with half a fear that she would answer me in madness. " Yes," she said, putting nfy hand (that pressed her closer, involuntary, to my bosom) first to her lips "Yes; and, beautiful as they are, they are all accu rately numbered and governed, and just as they burn- now have the burned since the creation, never faint than these to bear, is the affectedly subdued tone of ! in their watches, and never absent from their place, condolence. I remember nothing which I endured so ! How glorious they are! How thrilling it is to see them impatiently. " Annoyances like these, however, scarcely diverted ! fox. a moment the one great thought of death. It be- came at last familiar, but, if possible, more dreadfully horrible from that very fact. It was giving it a new character. I realized it more, The minute circum stances became nearer and more real F tried the posi tion in which I should lie in my coffin I lay with stand with such a constant silence in the sky, vm- steadied and unsupported, obeying the great law of their Maker! What pwre and silvery light h is! How steadily it pours from those small fountains, giving every spot of earth its due portion ! The hovel and the palace are shone upon equally, and the shepherd gets as broad a beam as the king, and these few rays that are now streaming into my feverish eyes were my arms to my side, and my feet together, and with j meant and lavished only for me! I have oftf the cold sweat standing in large drops on my lip, com- !! thought has it never occurred to you, dear Philip ? posed my features into a forced expression, of tran- ! how ungrateful we are to call ourselves poor, when quillity. there is so much that no poverty can take away f I awoke on the second morning after the hope of |l Clusters of silver rays from every star in these heavens my recovery had bco n abandoned. There was a nar- are mine. Every breeze that breaks on my forehead row sunbeam lying in ;. clear crimson line across the |] was sent for my refreshment. Every tinkle and ray curtain, and I lay and watched the specks of lint sail- j ing through it, like silver-winged insects, and the thin dust, quivering and disappearing on its definite limit, I in a dream of wonder. I had thought not to see I another sun, and my mind was still fresh with the ex pectation of an immediate change ; I could not believe from those stirring and glistening icicles, and the vigorating freshness of this unseasonable and delicious wind, and moonlight, and sunshine, and the glory of the planets, are all gifts that poverty could not take away ! It is not often that I forget these treasures ; for I have loved nature, and the skies of night and day, in that I was alive. The dizzy throb in my temples was | all their changes, from my childhood, and they have done ; my limbs felt cool and refreshed; my mind had j| been unspeakably dear to" me ; for in them I see the that feeling of transparency which is common after !j evidence of an Almighty Maker, and in the excessive healthful and sweet sleep; and an indefinite sensation of pleasure trembled in every nerve. I thought that this might be death, and that, with this exquisite feel ing of repose, I was to linger thus consciously with the body till the last day ; and I dwelt on it pleasantly with my delicious freedom from pain. I felt no regret for life none for a friend even : I was willing quite _ willing to lie thus for ages. Presently the physician I j it is the last time I am surt f j t the verv last ! Yet "ty of the stars and the unfading and equal splen dor of their steadfast fires, 1 see glimpses of an im mortal hie, anc j fj nc j ail answer to the eternal question ing within mo,; " j. hree . Fb* village clock reaches us to night. Nay, the wind can nos, i, arm me now . Turn me more to the window, for I wouvi j ook nearer upon the stars: entered ; he came and laid his fingers on my pulse, and his face brightened. You will get well, he said, and I heard it almost without emotion. Gradually, however, the love of life returned; and as I realized it fully, and all the thousand chords which bound me to it vibrated once more, the tears came thickly to my eyes, and a crowd of delightful thoughts pressed cheerfully and glowingly on me. No language can do justice to the pleasure of convalescence from extreme sick ness. The first step upon the living grass the first breath of free air the first unsuppressed salutation of to-morrow night those stars wh\ a || ^ e t| iere ,, ot missing from the sky, nor shining u^,, ,- av f| le ] ess De . cause I am dead ! It is strange thv<\ t jjj s thought should be so bitter strange that the CI>IN WUJ J O! s hjp should be so close between our earthly affect, - >ns ., m j those spiritual worlds and stranger yet, that, .v,>tj s _ fied as we must be that we shall know them neartt and better when released from our flesh, we still cling: so fondly to our earthly and imperfect vision. I I erl, Philip, that I shall traverse herealter every star hi tfiose bright heavens. If the course of that career of kn a friend my fainting heart, dear Philip, rallies and | edge, which I believe in my soul it will be the reward quickens even now with the recollection." I have thrown into a continuous strain what was murmured to me between pauses of faintness, and with difficulty of breath that seemed overpowered only by the mastery of the eloquent spirit apparently trembling on its departure. 1 believed Edith Linsey would die that uight; I believed myself listening to words spoken almost from heaven ; and if I have wearied you, dear of the blessed to run, be determined in any degrt the strong desires that yearn so sickeningly within us, I see the thousand gates of my future heaven shii.ii.jj at this instant above me. There they are! the clus tering Pleiades, with their sweet influences ; and the morning star, melting into the east with its trans cendent lambency and whiteness; and the broad gal axy, with its myriads of bright spheres, dissolving into INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. each other s light, and belling the heavens like a gir dle. J shall see them all ! 1 shall know them and the r inli ibitants as the -angels of (iod know them ; the mystery of their order, and the secret of their wonderful harmony, and the duration of their appoint ed courses all will be made clear!" 1 have trespassed again, most indulgent reader, on the limits of these Procrustean papers. J must defer the " change" that " came o er the spirit of my dream" till another mood an I time. Meanwhile, you may- consider Edith, if you like, the true heart she thought herself (and I thought her) durin;: her nine deaths in the library; and you will have leisuie to imagine the three years over which we shall skip with this finale, during which I made a journey to the north, and d.-mced out a winter in your own territories at Quebec a cir cumstance I allu.Ie to, no less to record the hospitali ties of the garrison of that time (this was in 27 were you there?) than to pluck forth from Time s hinder- most wallet a modest copy of verses 1 addressed thence to Edith. She sent them back to me considerably mended; but I give you the original draught, scorn ing her finger in my poesies. TO EDITH, FROM THE NORTH. As, gazing on the Pleiades, We count each fair and starry one, Yet wander from the light of these To muse upon the Pleiad gone ; As, bending o er fresh-gathered flowers, The rose s most enchanting hue Reminds us hut of other hours, Whose roses were all lovely, too; So. dearest, when I rove among The bright ones of this northern sky, And mark the smilt- , and list the song, And watch the dmcers gliding by The fairer still they seem to be, The more it stirs a thought of thee. The sad, sweet bells of twilight chime, Of many hearts may touch hut one, And so this seeming careless rhyme Will whisper to thy heart alone. I give it to the winds. The bird, Let loose, to his far nest will flee : And love, though hreathed but on a word, Wi.l find thee over land and sea. Though clouds across he sky have driven, We trust the star at last will shine ; And like the very light of heaven, I trust thy love trust thou in mine ! PART III. A DIGRESSION. " By. Will you not sleep, sir? Knight. Fling the window np ! Ml look upon the stars. Where twinkle now The I leiades? Boy. Here, master! KtifU. Throw me now MY cloak upon my slmu ders. and good niglit ! I have no mind to sleep ! * * * * * * * She bade me look Upon his hand of stars when other eyes Beamed on me brightly, and remember her By the Lost Pleiad. Ratj. Are you well, sir ? Knight. Boy! Love you the stars ? Boy. When they first spring- at eve Better than near to morning. Knight. Fickle child ! Are they more fair in twilight ? Hoy. Master, no ! Brighter as nisrht wears onliut I foiget Their beauty, looking on >h<-m InngT * SIR FABIAN," an unpub ishtd Poem. IT was a September night at the university. On the morrow I was to appear upon the stage as the winner of the first honors of my year. I was the envy the admiration iu some degree the wonder, of the col- I legiate town in which the university stands ; for I had j commenced my career as the idlest and most riotous of freshmen. What it was that had suddenly made me enamored of my chambers and my books that had saddened my manners and softened my voice that had given me a disgust to champagne and my old al lies, in favor of cold water and the Platonists that, in i short, had metamorphosed, as Bob Wilding would ; have said, a gentleman-like rake and vau-rien into so | dull a thing as an exemplary academician was past i the divining of most of my acquaintances. Oh, once- , loved Edith! hast thou any inkling in thy downward metempsychosis of the philosophy of this marvel ? If you" were to set a poet to make a town, with carte blanche as to trees, gardens, and green blinds, he would probably turn out very much such a place as New Haven. (Supposing your education in ge ography to have been neglected, dear reader, this is the second capital of Connecticut, a half-rural, half- metropolitan town, lying between a precipice that makes the fag-end of the (ireen mountains and a handsome bay in Long-Island sound.) The first thought of the inventor of New Haven was to lay out the streets in parallelograms, and the second was to plant them from suburb to water-side with the mag nificent elms of the country. The result is, that at the end of fifty years, the town is buried in leaves. If it were not for the spires of the churches, a bird flying over on his autumn voyage to the Floridas would never mention having seen it in his travels. It is a glorious tree, the elm and those of the place I speak of are famous, even in our land of trees, for their sur prising size and beauty. With the curve of their stems in the sky, the long weepers of their outer and lower branches drop into the street, fanning your face as you pass under with their geranium-like leaves ; and close overhead, interwoven like the trellice of a vine, they break up the light of the sky into golden flecks, and make you, of the common highway, a bower of the most approved secludedness and beauty. The houses are something between an Italian palace and an English cottage built of wood, but, in the dim light of those overshadowing trees, as fair to the eye as marble with their triennial coats of paint ; and each stands in the midst of its own encircling grass- plot, half buried in vines and flowers, and facing out ward from a cluster of gardens divided by slender palings, and filling up with fruit-trees and summer- houses the square on whose limit it stands. Then, like the vari-colored parallelograms upon a chess board, green openings are left throughout the town, fringed with triple and interweaving elm-rows, the long and weeding branches sweeping downward to the grass, and with their enclosing shadows keeping moist and cool the road they overhang; and fair forms (it is the garden of American beauty New- Haven) flit Hheurin the green light in primitive security and free dom, and you would think the place, if you alit upon it in a summer s evening what it seems to me now in memory, and what 1 have made it in this Rosa- MatilJa description a scene from Boccacio, or a vision from long lost Arcady. New Haven may have eight thousand inhabitants. Its steamers run to New York in six hours (or did in my time I have ceased to be astonished on that sub ject, and should not wonder if they did it now in one a trifle of seventy miles up the sound), and the ladies go up in the morning for a yard of bobbin and return at night, and the gentlemen the same for a stroll in Broadway ; and it is to this circumstance that, while it preserves its rural exterior, it is a very metro- , politan place in the character of its society. The I Armaryllis of the petty cottage you admire wears the fashion twenty days from Paris, and her shepherd has a coat from Nugee, the divine peculiarity of which is 1 not yet suspected east of Bond street ; and, in the 40 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. newspaper hanging half out of the window, there is news, red-hot with the velocity of its arrival, from Russia and the Rocky Mountains, from the sources of the Mississippi and the brain of Monsieur Herbault. Distance is an imaginary quantity, and Time, that used to give everything the go-by, has come to a stand-still in his astonishment. There will be a prop osition in congress ere long to do without him alto gether every new thing " saves time" so marvel lously. Bright as seems to me thrs seat of my Alma Mater, however, and gayly as I describe it, it is to me, if I may so express it, a picture of memory glazed and put away ; if I see it ever again, it will be but to walk through its embowered streets by a midnight rnoon. It is vain and heart-breaking to go back, after absence, to any spot of earth of which tin men of from eighteen to twenty -four every one of whom was passing the last evening of the four most impressible and attaching years of his life, with the family in which he had been most intimate, in a town where refinement and education had done their ut most upon the society, and which was renowned throughout America for the extraordinary beauty of its women. They had come from every state in the Union, and the Georgian a-nd the Vermontese, the Kentuckian and the Virginian, were to start alike on the morrow-night with a lengthening chain for home, each bearing away the hearts he had attached to him (one or more!) and leaving his own, till, like the mag- : netized needle, it should drop away with the weak ened attraction ; and there was probably but one that night in the departing froop who was not whispering in some throbbing ear the passionate but vain and interest was the human love whose home and cradle it \\ mocking avowal of fidelity in love ! And yet I had had been. But there is a period in our lives when I j had my attachments too; nnd there was scarce a the heart fuses and compounds with the things about jl house in tlwit leafy and muramring paradise of friend- it, and the close enamel with which it overruns and j ship and trees, that would not have hailed me with binds in the affections, and which hardens in the] acclamation had I entered the door; and I make this lapse of years till the immortal germ within is noti| record of kindness and hospitality (unforgolten after more durable and unwasting, warms never again, nor j] long years of vicissitude and travel), with the hope softens; and there is nothing on earth so mournful j that there m;iy yet live some memory as constant as and unavailing as to return to the scenes which are unchanged, and look to return to ourselves and others as we were when we thus knew them. Yet we think (I judge you by my own soul, gentle reader) that it is others not we who are changed ! We meet the friend that we loved in our youth, and it is ever he who is cold and altered ! We take the hand that we bent over with our passionate kisses in boyhood, and our raining tears when we last parted, and it is ever hers that returns not the pressure, and her eyes, and not ours oh, not ours! that look back the moistened and once familiar regard with a dry lid mine, and that some eye will read it with a warmth in its lid, and some lip some one at least murmur, "/ remember him!" There are trees in that town whose drooping leaves I could press to my lips with an affec tion as passionate as if they were human, though the- lips and voices that have endeared them to me are as changed as the foliage upon the branch, and would recognise my love as coldly. There was one, I say, who walked the thronged pavement alone that night, or but with such company as Uhland s ;* yet the heart of that solitary senior was far from lonel\ r . The ualm of years of ambition was and a gaze of stone ! Oh God! it is ever he the j! in his grasp the reward of daily self-denial ;md mid- friend you have worshipped for whom you would (; night watching the prize of a straining mind and have died who gives you the tips of his ringers, and j a yearning desire ; and there was not one of the many greets you with a phrase of fashion, when you would j who spoke of him that night in those crowded rooms, rush into his bosom and break your heart with weep- j either to rejoice in his success or to wonder at its at- ing out the imprisoned tenderness of years ! I could j tainment, who had the shadow of an idea what spirit carve out the heart from my bosom, and fling it with j sat uppermost in his bosom. Oh! how common is a malison into the sea, when I think how utterly and i this ignorance of human motives ! How distant, and worse than useless it is in this world of mocking j slight, and unsuspected, are the springs often of the names ! Yet " love" and " friendship" are words that read well. You could scarce spare them in poetry. II. It was, as I hare said, a moonlight night of unpar alleled splendor. The morrow was the college anni versarythe day of the depvu-ture of the senior class nd the town, which is, as it were, a part of the uni versity, was in the usual tumult of the gayest and saddest evening of the year. The night was warm, and the houses, of which the drawing-rooms are ali on a level with the gardens in the rear, and through which a long hall stretches like a ball-room, were thrown open, doors and windows, and the thousand students of the university, and the crowds of their friends, and the hosts of strangers drawn to the place at this season by the annual festivities, and the fami lies, every one with a troop of daughters (as the leaves on our trees, compared with those of old countries three to one so are our sons and daughters) were all sitting without lamps in the moon-lit rooms, or strol ling together, lovers and friends, in the fragrant gar dens, or looking out upon the street, returning the greetings of the passers-by, or, with heads uncovered, pacing backward and forward beneath the elms before the door the whole scene one that the angels in heaven might make a holyday to see. There were a hundred of my fellow-seniors young most desperate achievement! How little the world knows for what the poet writes, the scholar toils, the politician sells his soul, and the soldier perils his life ! And how insignificant and unequal to the result would seem these invisible wires, could they be traced back from the hearts whose innermost resource and faculty they have waked and exhausted ! It is a startling thing to question even your own soul for its motive. Ay, even in trifles. Ten to one you are surprised at the answer. I have asked myself, while writing this sentence, whose eye it is most meant to please; and, as I live, the face that is conjured up at my bidding is of one of whom I have not had a definite thought for years. I would lay my life she thinks at this instant I have forgotten her very name. Yet I know she will read this page with an interest no other could awaken, striving to trace in it the changes that have come over me since we parted. I know (and I knew then, though we never exchanged a word save in friendship), that she devoted her innermost soul when we strayed together by that wild river in the West, (dost thou remember it, dear friend ? for now I speak to thee !) to the study of a mind and character of which Almost the sweetest thing I remember is the German, poet s thought when crossing the lerry to his wile and child ; " Take, O boatman ! thrice thy fee, Take, I give it willingly : For, invisMy to tkee, Spirits twain have crossed with me." INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 4i she thought better than the world or their possessor ; and I know oh, how well I know! that with hus band and children around her, whom she loves and to whom she is devoted, the memory of me is laid away in her heart like a fond but incomplete dream of what once seemed possible the feeling with which the mother looks on her witless boy, and loves him more for what he might have been, than his brothers for what they are! I scarce know what thread I dropped to take up this improvista digression (for, like "Opportunity and the Hours," I " never look back :"*) but let us return to the shadow of the thousand elms of New Haven. The Gascon thought his own thunder and lightning superior to that of other countries, but I must run the ! hazard of your incredulity as well, in preferring an American moon. In Greece and Asia Minor, perhaps (ragione she was first worshipped there), Cytheris shines as brightly ; but the Ephesian of Connecticut sees the flaws upon the pearly buckler of ihe goddess, ! as does the habitant of no other clime. His eye lies j close to the moon. There is no film, and no visible beam in the clarified atmosphere. Her light is less ! an emanation than a presence the difference between the water in a thunder-shower and the depths of i the sea. The moon struggles to you in England ; she is all about you, like an element of the air, in America. The night was breathless, and the fragmented light lay on the pavement in motionless stars, as clear and j definite in their edges as if the " patines of bright gold ; had dropped through the trees, and lay glittering be- i neath my feet. There was a kind of darkness visible in the streets, overshadowed as they were by the massy I and leaf-burthened elms, and as 1 looked through the | houses, standing in obscurity myself, the gardens ! seemed full of daylight the unobstructed moon I poured with such a flood of radiance on the flowery- alleys within, and their gay troops of promenaders. And as I distinguished one and another familiar friend, with a form as familiar clinging to his side, and, with drooping head and faltering step, listening or replying : (I well knew), to the avowals of love and truth, ] mur mured in thought to my own far away, but never-for gotten Edith, a vow as deep ay, deeper than theirs, as my spirit and hers had been sounded by the pro- , founder plummet of sorrow and separation. How the very moonlight how the stars of heaven how the balm in the air, and the languor of summer night in my indolent frame, seemed, in those hours of loneli ness, ministers at the passionate altar-fires of my love! ; Forsworn and treacherous Edith ! do I live to write ; this for thine eye? I linger upon these trifles of the past these hours I for which I would have borrowed wings when, they were here and, as then they seemed but the flowering promise of happiness, they seem now like the fruit, enjoyed and departed. Past and future bliss there would seem to be in the world knows any one of such a commodity in the present ? I have not seen it in my travels. III. I was strolling on through one of the most fashion able and romantic streets (when did these two words ever before find themselves in a sentence together ?) when a drawing-room with which I was very familiar, lit, unlike most others on that bright night, by a sus pended lamp, and crowded with company, attracted my attention for a moment. Between the house and the street there was a slight shrubbery shut in by a white paling, just sufficient to give an air of seclusion to the low windows without concealing them from the passer-by, and, with the freedom of an old visiter, I Walter Savage Landor. unconsciously stopped, and looked unobserved into the /ooms. It was the residence of a magnificent girl, who was generally known as the Connecticut beauty a singular instance in America of what is called in England a fine woman. (With us that word applies wholly to moral qualities.) She was as large as Juno, and a great deal handsomer, if the painters have done that much-snubbed goddess justice. She was a "book of beauty" printed with virgin type; and that, by the way, suggests to me what I have all my life been trying to express that some women seem wrought of new material altogether, apropos to others who seem mortal n chavffes as if every limb and feature had been used, and got out of shape in some other person s service. The lady I speak of looked new and her name was Isidora. She was standing just under the lamp, with a single rose in her hair, listening to a handsome coxcomb of a classmate of mine with evident pleasure. She was a great fool, (did I mention that before?) bnt weak, and vacant, and innocent of an idea as she was, Faustina was not more naturally majestic, nor Psyche (soil elle en grande) more divinely and meaningly graceful. Loveliness and fascination came to her as dew and sunshine to the flowers, and she obeyed her instinct, as they theirs, and was helplessly, and with out design, the loveliest thing in nature. I do not see, for my part, why all women should not be so. They are as useful as flowers ; they perpetuate our species. I was looking at her with irresistible admiration, when a figure stepped out from the shadow of a tree, and my chum, monster, and ally, Job Smith (of whom I have before spoken in these historical papers), laid his hand on my shoulder. " Do you know, my dear Job," I said, in a solemn tone of admonition, "that blind John was imprisoned for looking into people s windows?" But Job was not in the vein for pleasantry. The light fell on his face as I spoke to him, and a more haggard, almost blasted expression of countenance, I never saw even in a madhouse. I well knew he had loved the splendid girl that stood unconsciously in our sight, since his first year in college ; but that it would ever so master him, or that he could link his mon strous deformity, even in thought, with that radiant vision of beauty, was a thing that I thought as prob able as that hirsute Pan would tempt from her sphere the moon that kissed Endymion. " I have been standing here looking at Isidora, ever since you left me," said he. (We had parted three hours before, at twilight.) " And why not go in, in the name of common sense ?" "Oh! God, Phil! with this demon in my heart ? Can you see my face in this light ?" It was too true, he would have frightened the household gods from their pedestals. "But what would you do, my dear Job? Why come here to madden yourself with a sight you must have known you would see. "Phil?" "What, my dear boy?" "Will you do me a kindness?" "Certainly." " Isidora would do anything you wished her to do. "Um! with a reservation, my dear chum !" " But she would give you the rose that is in her hair." " Without a doubt." "And for me if you told her it was for me. Would she not ?" " Perhaps. But will that content you ?" " It will soften my despair. I will never look on her face more ; but I should like my last sight of her to be associated with kindness ?" 42 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. Poor Job! how true it is that "affection is a fire which kindleth as well in the bramble as in the oak, and catcheth hold where it first lighteth, not where it may best burn." I do believe in my heart that the soul in thee was designed for a presentable body thy instincts were so invariably mistaken. When didst thou ever think a thought, or stir hand or foot, that it did not seem prompted, monster though thou wert, by conscious good-looking-ness! What a lying simili tude it was thai was written on every blank page in j thy Lexicon: "Larks that mount in the air, build their nests below in the earth ; and women that cast ! their eyes upon kings, may place their hearts upon vassals." Apelles must have been better looking than ; Alexander, when Campaspe said that ! As a general thing you may ask a friend freely to break any three of the commandments in your set vice, \ but you should hesitate to require of friendship a vio lation of etiquette. 1 was in a round jacket and boots, ] and it was a dress evening throughout New Haven. I looked at my dust-covered feet, when Job asked me to enter a soiree upon his errand, and passed my thumb and finger around the edge of vny white jacket; but I loved Job as the Arabian loves his camel, and for the same reason, with a difference the imperishable well-spring he carried in his heart through the desert of the world, and which I well knew he would give up his life to offer at need, as patiently as the animal whose construction (inner and outer) he so remarkably resembled. When I hesitated, and looked down at , my boots, therefore, it was less to seek for an excuse i to evade the sacrificing office required of me, than to beat about in my unprepared mind for a preface to my \ request. If she had been a woman of sense, I should have had no difficulty ; but it requires caution and skill to go out of the beaten track with a fool. "Would not the rose do as well," said I, in despe rate embarrassment, " if she does not know that it is for you, my dear Job ?" It would have been very easy to have asked for it for myself. Job laid his hand upon his side, as if I could not comprehend the pang my proposition gave him. "Away prop, and down, scaffold," thought I, as I gave my jacket a hitch, and entered the door. "Mr. Slingsby," announced the servant. " Mr. Slingsby ?" inquired the mistress of the house, seeing only a white jacket in the clair obscur of the hall. "Mr. Slingsby!!!" cried out twenty voices in amazement, as 1 stepped over the threshold into the light. It has happened since the days of Thebet Ben Kho- rat, that scholars have gone mad, and my sanity was evidently the uppermost concern in the minds of all present. (I should observe, that in those days, I rel ished rather of dandyism.) As 1 read the suspicion in their minds, however, a thought struck me. I went straight up to Miss Higgins, and, solto voce, asked her to take a turn with me in the garden. " Isidora," 1 said, " I have Jong known your supe riority of mindT(when you want anything of a wo man, praise her for that in which she is most deficient, says La Bruyere); "and I have great occasion to rely on it in the request I am about to make of you." She opened her eyes, and sailed along the gravel- walk with heightened majesty. I had not had occa sion to pay her a compliment before since my fresh man year. " What is it, Mr. Slingsby ?" "You know Smith my chum." "Certainly." " I have just come from him." "Well!" " He is gone mad !" "Mad! Mr. Slingsby?" "Stark and furious!" " Gracious goodness !" "And all for you !" " For me ! !" "For you !" I thought her great blue eyes would have become what they call in America "sot," at this astounding communication. "Now, Miss Higgins," I continued, "pray listen; my poor friend has such extraordinary muscular strength, that seven men can not hold him." " Gracious!" "And he has broken away, and is here at your door." "Good gracious!" " Don t be afraid ! He is as gentle as a kitten when I am present. And now hear my request. He leaves town to-morrow, as you welj know, not to return. I shall take him home to Vermont with keepers. He is bent upon one thing, and in that you must humor him." Miss Hiagins began to be alarmed. " He has looked through the window and seen you with a rose in your hair, and, despairing even in his madness of your love, he says, that if you would give him that rose, with a kind word, and a farewell, he should be happy. You will do it, will yon not ?" " Dear me ! I should be so afraid to speak to him!" "But will you ? and I ll tell you what to say." Miss Higgins gave a reluctant consent, and 1 passed ten minutes in drilling her upon two sentences, which, with her fine manner and sweet voice, really sounded like the most interesting thing in the world. 1 left her in the summer-house at the end of the garden, and returned to Job. "You have come without it!" said the despairing lover, falling back against the tree. " Miss Higgins compliments, and begs you will go round by the gate, and meet her in ihe summer-house. She prefers to manage her own affairs." "Good God! are you mocking me?" " I will accompany you, my dear boy." There was a mixture of pathos and ludicrousness in that scene which starts a tear and a laugh together, whenever I recall it to my mind. The finest heart in the world, the most generous, the most diffident of itself, yet the most self sacrificing and delicate, was at the altar of its devotion, offering its all in passionate abandonment for a flower and a kind word: and she, a goose in the guise of an angel, repeated a phrase of kindness of which she could not comprehend the meaning or the worth, but which was to be garnered up by that half-broken heart, as a treasure that repaid him for years of unrequited affection! She recited it really very well. I stood at the latticed door, and in terrupted" them the instant there was a pause in the dialogue; and getting Job away as fast as possible, I left Miss Hiirsiins with a promise of secrecy, and re sumed my midnight stroll. Apropos among Job s letters is a copy of verses, which, spite of some little inconsistencies, I think were written on this very occasion : Nay smile not on me I have borne Indifference nnd repulse from thee ; With my heart sickening I have worn A brow, as thine own cold one, free ; My lip has been as guy as thine, Ever thine own light mirth repeating, Though, in this burning brain of mine, A throb the while, like death, was beating My spirit did not shrink or swerve Thy look 1 thank thee . froze the nerve ! But now again, as when 1 met And loved thee in my happier days, A sin le upon thy bright lip plays, Aud kindness iu thine eye is set INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 43 And tliis I can not hoar ! It melt* the manhood from my pride, It br ngs 1110 closer to tliy side Bewilders -chains me there There where my dearest hope was crushed and died Oh, if thou couldsl hut know the deep Of Jove that hope has nursed for years, How in th" heart s still chambers sleep Its hoarded thoughts, its trembling fears- Treasure that love has brooded o er* Till life, than this, lias nothing more And Mtdcbt thou but tis vain ! I will not, can not lell thee, how That hoard consumes its coffer now I may not write of piin That sickens in the heart, and maddens in the brain ! Then smile not on me . pass me by Coldly, and with a careless mien Twill pierce my heart, and (ill mine eye, But 1 shall be as I have been Quiet in my despair ! Tis better than the throbbing fever, That else were in my brain for ever, And easier to bear ! I ll not upbraid the coldest look The bitterest word tliou hast, in my sad pride I ll brook ! If Job had rejoiced in a more euphonious nnme, I shoul.I have bought a criticism in some review, and started him (airly as a poet. But " Job Smith!" " Poems by Job Smith . " It would never do ! If he wrote like :i seraph, and printed the book at his own expense, illustrated and illuminated, and half-a-crown to each person that would take one away, the critics would damn him all the same! Really, one s father and mother have a great deal to answer for ! But Job is a poet who should have lived in the middle ages, no less for the convenience of the noni de guerre, fashionable in those days, than because his poetry, being chie-fly the mixed product of feeling and courtesy, is particularly susceptible to ridicule. The philosophical and iron wire poetry of our day stands an attack like a fortification, and comes down upon tlie besieger with reason and logic as good as his own. But the more delicate offspring of tenderness and chiv alry, intending no violence, and venturing out to sea upon a rose-leaf, is destroyed and sunk beyond diving- bells by half a breath of scorn. I would subscribe liberally myself to a private press and a court of honor in poetry critics, if admitted, to be dumb upon a penalty. Will no Howard or Wilberforce act upon this hint ? Poets now-a-days are more slaves and felons than your African, or your culprit at the old Bailey ! I would go a great way. privately, to find a genuine spark of chivalry, and Job lit his every-day lamp with it. See what a redolence of old time there is in these verses, which I copied long ago from a lady s album. Yet, you may ridicule them if you like ! .There is a story I have met, Of a high angel, pure and true, With eyes that tears had never wet, And lips that pity never knew; But ever on his throne he sate, Will his white pinions proudly furled, And, looking from his high estate, Beheld the errors of a world : Yet, never, as they rose to heaven, Plead even for one to be forgiven. God looked at last upon his pride, And bade him fold his shining wing, An;l o er .1 land where tempters bide, He made the heartless angel king. Tis lovely reading in the tale, _ The glorious spells they tried on him, Ere grew his heavenly birth-star pale, Ere grew his frontlet jewel dim- Cups of such rare and ravishing wines As even a god might drink and bless, Gems from tmsearched and central mines, Whose light than heaven s was scarcely less Gold of a sheen like crystal spars, And silver whiter than the moon s, And music like the songs of stars, And perfume like a thousand Junes, And breezes, soft as heaven s own air Like fingers playing in his hair ! He shut his eyes he closed his ears H" bade them, in God s name, begone ! And, through the yet eternal years, Had stood, the tried and sinlrss one: But there was yet one untried spell A woman tempted and he fell ! And I if semblance I may find Between such glorious sphere and mine Am not to the high honor blind, Ot filling this fair page of thine Writing my unheard n .me among Sages and sires and men of song ; Hut honor, though the best eVr given, And glory, though it were a king s, And power, though loving it like heaven, Were, to my seeming, lesser things, And less temptation, far, to me / Than half a hope of serving thee I am mounted upon my hobby now, dear reader ; for Job Smith, though as hideous an idol as ever was worshipped on the Indus, was still my idol. Here is a little touch of his quality : I look upon the fadin? flowers Thou giv st me, 1 idy, in thy mirth, And mourn, that, with" the perishing hours Such fair things perish from the earth For thus, I know, the moment s feeling Its own light web of life unweaves, The deepest trace from memory stealing, Like perfume from these dying leaves The thought that gave it, anil the flower, Alike the creatures of an hour. And thus it better were, perhaps, For feel : ng is the nurse of pain, And joys that linger in their laj se, Must die at last, and so are vain ! Could I revive these faded flowers, Could I call back departed bliss, I would not, though this world of ours Were ten times brighter than it is ! They must and let them pass away ! We are forgotten even as they ! I think I must give Edith another reprieve. I have no idea why I have digressed this time from the story I which (you may see by the motto at the beginning of the paper) I have not yet told. I can conceive easily I how people, who have nothing to do, betake them- || selves to autobiography it is so pleasant rambling I about over the past, and regathering only the flowers. j Why should pain and mortification he unsepultured ? ,| The world is no wiser for these written experiences. | " The best book." said Southey, "does but little good to the world, and much harm to the author." I shall deliberate whether to enlighten the world as to Edith s metempsychosis, or no. PART IV. SCENKRY AND A SCENE. " Truth is no doctoresse ; she takes no degrees at Paris or Oxford among great clerks, disputants, subtle Aristotles, men nodnxi inge- nii, nb e to take J.ully by the chin ; but oftenlimes. to such a one as myself, an idiota or common person, no preat things, rnelancho i- zing in woods where water* are, quiet places by livers, rmintains how best to delectate and refresh his myn ture, her pleasaunt scenes, woods, waterf goddess herself. Truth has appeared wiih sparkhn? countenance, so as ye may not be able lightly to resist continually with na lls : on a sudden the hining light and a 44 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. " Ever thus Drop from us treasures one by one : They who have been from youth with us, Whose every look, whose every tone, Is linked to us like leaves to flowers They who have shared our pleasant hours Whose voices, so familiar grown. They almost seem to us our own The echoes of each breath of ours They who have ever been our pride, Yet in their hours of triumph dearest They whom we must have known and tried, And loved the most when tried the nearest They pass from us, like stars that wane, The brightest still before, Or gold links broken from a chain That can be joined no more !" JOB SMITH and myself were on the return from Ni agara. It was in the slumberous and leafy midst of Tune. Lake Erie had lain with a silver glaze upon its bosom for days; the ragged trees upon its green shore dropping their branches into the stirless water, as if it were some rigid imitation the lake glass, and the leaves emerald ; "the sky was of an April blue, as if a night-rain had washed out its iniikiness, till you could see through its clarified depths to the gates of heaven ; and yet breathless and sunny as was the face of the earth, there was a nerve and a vitality in the air that exacted of every pulse its full compass searched every pore for its capacity of the joy of ex istence. No one can conceive, who has not had his imagina tion stretched at the foot of Niagara, or in the Titanic solitudes of rhe west, the vastness of the unbroken phases of nature ; where every tree looks a king, and every flower a marvel of glorious form and color where the rocks are rent every one as by the " tenth" thunderbolt and lake, mountain, or river, ravine or waterfall, cave or eagle s nest, whatever it maybe that feeds the eye or the fancy, is as the elements have shaped and left it where the sculpture, and the paint ing, and the poetry, and the wonderful alchymy of nature, go on under the naked eye of the Almighty, and by his own visible and uninterrupted hand, and where the music of nature, from the anthem of the torrent and storm, broken only by the scream of the vulture, to the trill of the rivulet with its accompani ment of singing birds and winds, is for ever ringing its changes, as if for the stars to hear in such scenes, I say, and in such scenes only, is the imagination over tasked or stretched to the capacity of a seraph s ; and while common minds sink beneath them to the mere inanition of their animal senses, the loftier spirit takes their color and stature, and outgrows the common and pitiful standards of the world. Cooper and Leather- stocking thus became what they are the one a high- priest of imagination and poetry, and the other a sim ple-hearted but mere creature of instinct; and Cooper is no more a living man, liable to the common laws of human nature, than Leatherstocking a true and life like transcript of the more common effect of those overpowering solitudes on the character. We got on board the canal-boat at noon, and Job and myself, seated on the well-cushioned seats, with the blinds half-turned to give us the prospect and ex clude the sun, sat disputing in our usual amicable way. He was the only man I ever knew with whom I could argue without losing my temper ; and the reason was, that I always had the last word, and thought myself victorious. " We are about to return into the bosom of society, my dear Job," said I, " looking with unctuous good nature on the well-shaped boot I had put on for the first time in a month thai morning. (It is an unsen timental fact that hob-nailed shoes are indispensable on the most poetical spots of earth.) " Yes," said Job ; " but how superior is the society we leave behind ! Niagara and Erie ! What in your crowded city is comparable to these ?" " Nothing, for size ! but for society you will think me a pagan, dear chum but, on my honor, straight from Niagara as I come, I feel a most dissatisfied yearn ing for the society of Miss Popkins " " Oh, Phil !" " On my honor !" " You, who were in such raptures at the falls !" "And real ones but I wanted a woman at my el bow to listen to them. Do you know, Job, I have made up my mind on a great principle since we have been on our travels ? Have you observed that 1 was pensive ?" " Not particularly but what is your principle ?" " That a man is a much more interesting object than a mountain." "A man ! did you say ?" " Yes but I meant a woman !" " I don t think so." " I do ! and I judge by myself. When did I ever see wonder of nature tree, sunset, waterfall, rapid, lake, or river that I would not rather have been talk ing to a woman the while ? Do you remember the three days we were tramping through the forest with out seeing the sun, as if we had been in the endless aisle of a cathedral ? Do you remember the long morn ing when we lay on the moss at the foot of Niagara, and it was a divine luxury only 10 breathe ? Do you jj remember the lunar rainbows at midnight on Goat || island ? Do you remember the ten thousand glorious moments we have enjoyed between weather and scene ry since the bursting of these summer leaves ? Do you ?" " Certarnlv, my dear boy !" " Well, then, much as i iove nature and you, there has not been an hour since we packed our knapsacks, that, if I coul 1 have distilled a charming girl out of a mixture of you and any mountain, river, or rock, that I have seen, I would not have flung you, without re morse, into any witch s caldron that was large enough, and would boil at my bidding." " Monster !" "And I believe I should have the same feelings in Italy or Greece, or wherever people go into raptures with things you can neither eat nor make love to." " Would not even the Venus fill your fancy for a day?" "An hour, perhaps, it might ; for I should be study ing, in its cold Parian proportions, the warm structure of some living Musidora but I should soon tire of it, and long for my lunch or my love ; and I give you my honor I would not lose the three meals of a single day to see Santa Croce and St. Peter s." "Both?" "Both." Job disdained to argue against such a want of sen timental principle, and pulling up the blind, he fixed bis eyes on the slowly-gliding panorama of rock and brest, and I mounted for a promenade upon the deck. Mephistopheles could hardly have found a more striking amusement for Faust than the passage of three lundred miles in the canal from Lake Erie to the Hudson. As I walked up and down the deck of the lacket-boat. I thought to myself, that if it were not or thoughts of things that come more home to one s business and bosom" (particularly " bosom"), I could >e content to retake my berth at Schenectady, and re- :urn to Buffalo for amusement. The Erie canal-boat s a long and very pretty drawing-room afloat. It has i library, sofas, a tolerable cook, curtains or Venetian )linds, a civil captain, and no smell of steam or per ceptible motion. It is drawn generally by three horses it a fair trot, and gets you through about a hundred niles a day, as softly as if you were witched over the ground by Puck and Mustard-seed. The company say fifty people) is such as pleases Heaven ; though I nust say (with my eye all along the shore, collecting he various dear friends I have made and left on that INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 45 long canal) there are few highways on which you will meet so many lovely and loving fellow-passengers. On this occasion my star was bankrupt Job Smith being my only civilized companion and I was left to the unsatisfactory society of my own thoughts and the scenery. Discontented as I may seem to have been, I remem ber, through eight or ten years of stirring and thickly- sown manhood, every moment of that lonely evening. I remember the progression of the sunset, from the lengthening shadows and the first gold upon the clouds, to the deepening twilight and the new-sprung star hung over the wilderness. And 1 remember what I am going to describe a twilight anthem in the forest as you remember an air of Rossini s, or a transition in the half-fiendish, half-heavenly creations of Meyer beer. I thought time dragged heavily then, but I wish I had as light a heart and could feel as vividly now ! The Erie canal is cut a hundred or two miles through the heart of the primeval wilderness of America, and the boat was gliding on silently and swiftly, and never sailed a lost cloud through the abv*-, of space on a course more apparently new and untrodden. The luxuriant soil had sent up a rank j gtass that covered the horse-path like velvet; the Erie water was clear as a brook in the winding canal ; the old shafts of the gigantic forest spurred into the j sky by thousands, and the yet unscared eagle swung j off from the dead branch of the pine, and skimmed the tree-tops for another perch, as if he had grown to believe that gliding spectre a harmless phenomenon of nature. The horses drew steadily and unheard at the end of the long line ; the steersman stood mo- j tionless at the tiller, and I lay on a heap of baggage j in the prow, attentive to the slightest breathing of na- j ttire, but thinking, with an ache at my heart, of Edith < Linsey, to whose feet (did I mention it ?) I was has- j tening with a lover s proper impatience. I might as ! well have taken another turn in my " fool s paradise." j The gold of the sunset had glided up the dark pine i tops and disappeared, like a ring taken slowly from an j Ethiop s finger; the whip-poor-will had chanted the first st;ive of his lament; the bat was abroad, and the : screech-owl, like all bad singers, commenced without ! waiting to be importuned, though we were listening ! for the nightingale. The air, as I said before, had been all day breathless; but as the first chill of eve ning displaced the warm atmosphere of the departed sun, a slight breeze crisped the mirrored bosom of the canal, and then commenced the night anthem of the forest, audible, I would fain believe, in its soothing changes, by the dead tribes whose bones whiten amid the perishing leaves. First, whisperingly yet articu- j lately, the suspended and wavering foliage of the birch j was touched by the many-fingered wind, and, like a faint prelude, the silver-lined leaves rustled in the low branches; and, with a moment s pause, when you could hear the moving of the vulture s claws upon the bark, as he turned to get his breast to the wind, the increasing breeze swept into the pine-tops, and drew forth from their fringe-like and myriad tassels a low monotone like the refrain of a far-off dirge; and still as it murmured (seeming to you sometimes like the confused and heart-broken responses of the peni tents on a cathedral floor), the blast strengthened and filled, and the rigid leaves of the oak, and the swaying fans and chalices of the magnolia, and the rich cups of the tulip-trees, stirred and answered with their dif ferent voices like many-toned harps ; and when the wind was fully abroad, and every moving thing on the breast of the earth was roused from its daylight repose, the irregular and capricious blast, like a player on an organ of a thousand stops, lulled and strengthened by turns, and from the hiss in the rank grass, low as the whisper of fairies, to the thunder of the impinging and groaning branches of the larch and the fir, the anthem went ceaselessly through its changes, and the harmony (though the owl broke in with his scream, and though the over-blown monarch of the wood came crashing to the earth), was still perfect and with out ajar. It is strange that there is no sound of na ture out of tune. The roar of the waterfall comes into this anthem of the forest like an accompaniment of bassoons, and the occasional bark of the wolf, or the scream of a night-bird, or even the deep-throated croak of the frog, is no more discordant than the out burst of an octave flute above the even melody of an orchestra ; and it is surprising how the large rain drops, pattering on the leaves, and the small voice of the nightingale (singing, like nothing but himself, sweetest in the darkness) seems an intensitive and a low burthen to the general anthem of the earth as it were, a single voice among instruments. I had what Wordsworth calls a " couchant ear" in my youth, and my story will wait, dear reader, while I tell you of another harmony that I learned to love in the wilderness. There will come sometimes in the spring say in May, or whenever the snow-drops and sulphur butter flies are tempted out by the first timorous sunshine there will come, I say, in that yearning and youth- renewing season, a warm shower at noon. Our tent shall be pitched on the skirts of a forest of young pines, and the evergreen foliage, jf foliage it may be called, shall be a daily refreshment to our eye while watching, with the west wind upon our cheeks, the unclothed branches of the elm. The rain descends softly and warm ; but with the sunset the clouds break away, and it grows suddenly cold enough to freeze. The next morning you shall come out with me to a hill-side looking upon (he south, and .lie down wit!, your ear to the earth. The pine tassels hold in every four of their fine fingers a drop of rain frozen like a pearl in a long ear-ting, sustained in their loose grasp by the rigidity of the cold. The sun grows warm at ten, and the slight green fingers begin to relax and yield, and by eleven they are all drooping their icy pearls upon the dead leaves with a murmur through the forest like the swarming of the bees of Hybla. There is not much variety in its music, but it is a pleasant monotone for thought, and if you have a restless fever in your boSom (as I had, when I learned to love it, for the travel which has corrupted the heart and the ear that it soothed and satisfied then) you may lie down with a crooked root under your head in the skirts of the forest, and thank Heaven for an anodyne to care. And it is better than the voice of your friend, or the song of your lady-love, for it exacts no grati tude, and will not desert you ere the echo dies upon the wind. Oh, how many of these harmonies there are ! how many that we hear, and how many that are " too constant to be heard!" I could go back to my youth, now, with this thread of recollection, and unsepulture a hoard of simple and long-buried joys that would bring the blush upon my cheek to think how my senses ate dulled since such things could give me pleasure! Is there no " well of Kanathos" for renewing the youth of the soul ? no St. Hilary s cradle ? no elixir to cast the slough of heart-sickening and heart-tar nishing custom? Find me an alchymy for that, with your alembic and crucible, and you may resolve t dross again your philosopher s stone ! II. Everybody who makes the passage of the Erie canal, stops at the half-way town of Utica, to visit a wonder of nature fourteen miles to the west of it, called Trenton Falls. It would be becoming in me, before mentioning the falls, however, to sing the praises of 46 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. Utica and its twenty thousand inhabitants having received much hospitality from the worthy burghers, and philandered up and down their well-flagged trot- toir very much to my private satisfaction. I should scorn any man s judgment who should attempt to con vince me that the Erie water, which comes down the canal a hundred and fifty miles, and passes through the market-place of that pleasant town, has not com municated to the hearts of its citizens the expansion and depth of the parent lake from which it is drawn. 1 have a theory on that subject with which I intend to surprise the world whenever politics and Mr. Bulwer draw less engrossingly on its attention. Will any one tell me that the dark eyes I knew there, and whose like for softness and meaning I have inquired for in vain through Italy, and the voice that accompanied their gaze (that Pasta, in her divinest out-gush of melody and soul, alone recalls to me) that these, and the noble heart, and high mind, and even the genius, that were other gifts of the same marvel among wo men that these were born of common parentage, and nursed by the air of a demi-metropolis ? We were but the kindest of friends, that bright creature and my self, and I may say, without charging myself with the blindness of love, that I believe in my heart she was the foster-child of the water spirits on whose wander ing streamlet she lived that the thousand odors that swept down from the wilderness upon Lake Erie, and the unseen but wild and innumerable influences of nature, or whatever you call that which makes the Indian a believer iti the Great Spirit that these came down with those clear waters, ministering to the mind and watching over the budding beauty of this noble and most high-hearted woman! If you do not believe it, 1 should like you to tell me how else such a creature was "raised." as they phrase it in Virginia. I shall hold to my theory till you furnish me with a more reasonable. We heard at the hotel that there were several large parties at Trenton Falls, and with an abridgment of hood of scenery, he was off till Heaven knew when, and as I had that delicacy for his feelings never to dine without him, you may imagine the necessity of my hungry manreuvre. We dined upon the trout of the glorious stream we had come to see ; and as our host s eldest daughter waited upon us (recorded in Job s journal, in my pos session at this moment, as " the most comely and gra cious virgin" he had seen in his travels), we felt bound to adapt our conversation to the purity of her mind, and discussed only the philosophical point, whether the beauty of the stream could be tasted in the flavor of the fish Job for it, I against it. The argument was only interrupted by the entrance of an apple- pudding, so hot that our tongues were fully occupied in removing it from place to place as the mouth felt its heat inconvenient, and then, being in a country of liberty and equality, and the damsel in waiting, as Job smilingly remarked, as much a lady as the Presi dent s wife, he requested permission to propose her health in a cool tumbler of cider, and we adjourned to the moonlight. III. Ten or fifteen years ago, the existence of Trenton Falls was not known. It was discovered, like Paestum, by a wandering artist, when there was a town of len thousand inhabitants, a canal, a theatre, a liberty- pole, and forty churches, within fourteen miles of it. It may be mentioned to the credit of the Americans, that in the "hardness" of character of which travel- j lers complain, there is the soft trait of a passion for ! scenery ; and before the fact of its discovery had got [well into the "Cahawba Democrat" and "Go-the- i whole-hog-Courier," there was a splendid wooden hotel on the edge of the precipice, with a French cook, soda-water, and olives, and a law was passed by the Kentucky Travellers Club, requiring a hanging- bird s nest from the trees "frowning down the awful our toilets in our pockets, Job and I galloped out of ! abysm," (so expressed in the regulation), as a qual- Utica about four o clock of as bright a summer s after- ; ification for membership. Thenceforward to the pres- noon as was ever promised in the almanac. We drew j ent time it has been a place of fashionable resort rein a mile or two out of town, and dawdled along the |! during the summer solstice, and the pine woods, in wild road more leisurely, Job s Green mountain pro- j which the hotel stands, being impervious to the sun, portions fitting to the saddle something in the manner j! it is prescribed by oculists for gentlemen and ladies and relative fitness of a skeleton on a poodle. By the j with weak eyes. If the luxury of corn-cutters had same token he rode safely, the looseness of his bones accommodating itself with singular facility to the irregularities in the pace of the surprised animal be neath him. I dislike to pass over the minutest detail of a period of my life that will be rather interesting in my biogra phy (it is my intention to be famous enough to merit that distinction, and I would recommend to my friends to be noting my " little peculiarities"), and with this posthumous benevolence in my heart, I simply record, that our conversation on the road turned upon Edith Linsey at this time the lady of my constant love for whose sake and at whose bidding I was just conclu ding (with success I presumed) a probation of three years of absence, silence, hard study, and rigid morals, and upon whose parting promise (God forgive her!) I had built my uttermost gleaning and sand of earthly hope and desire. I tell you in the tail of this mock ing paragraph, dear reader, that the bend of the rain bow spans not the earth more perfectly than did the love of that woman my hopes of future bliss; and the ephemeral arc does not sooner melt into the clouds but 1 am anticipating my story. Job s extraordinary appearance, as he extricated himself from his horse, usually attracted the entire at tention of the by-standers at a strange inn, and under cover of this, T usually contrived to get into the house and commit him by ordering the dinner as soon as it i could be got ready. Else, if it was in the neighbor- I penetrated to the United States, it might be prescribed for tender feet as well the soft floor of pine-tassels spread under the grassless woods, being considered an improvement upon Turkey carpet? and green sward. Trenton Falls is rather a misnomer. I scarcely know what you would call it. but the wonder of na ture which bears the name is a tremendous torrent, whose bed, for several miles, is sunk fathoms deep into the earth a roaring and dashing stream, so far I below the surface of the forest in which it is lost, that I you would think, as you come suddenly upon the edge of its long precipice, that it was a river in some inner world (coiled within ours, as we in the outer circle of the firmament), and laid open by some Titanic throe that had cracked clear asunder the crust of this "shallow earth." The idea is rather assisted if you happen to see below you, on its abysmal shore, a party of adventurous travellers; for, at that vast depth, and in contrast with the gigantic trees and rocks, the same number of well-shaped pismires, dressed in the last fashions, and philandering upon your parlor floor, would be about of their apparent size and distinctness. They showed me at Eleusis the well by which Proserpine ascends to the regions of day on her an nual visit to the plains of Thessaly but with the genius loci at my elbow in the shape of a Greek girl as lovely as Phryne, my memory reverted to the bared INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. axle of the earth in the bed of this American river, and 1 was persuaded (looking the while at the fero- tii^re of gold sequins on the Phidian forehead of my Katinka) that supposing Hade.s in the centre of the earth, you are nearer to it by some fathoms at Tren ton. 1 confess 1 have had, since my first descent into those depths, an uncomfortable doubt of the solidity of the globe how the dense it can hold together with such a crack in its bottom ! Jt was a night to play Endymion, or do any Tom foolery that could be l.iid to the charge of the moon, for a more omnipresent and radiant atmosphere of moonlight never sprinkled the wilderness with silver. Ic w;is a night in which to wish it might never be day again a night to be enamored of the stars, and bid God bless them like human creatures on their bright journey a night to love in, to dissolve in to do everything but what night is made for sleep ! Oh heaven ! when I think how precious is life in such moments ; how the aroma the celestial bloom and flower of the soul the yearning and fast-perishing enthusiasm of youth waste ihernselvetin ihe solitude of uch nights on the senseless and unanswering air ; vviien 1 wander alone, unloving and unloved, beneath influences that could inspire me with the elevation of a seraph, were 1 at the ear of a human creature that could summon forth and measure my limitless capaci ty of devotion when 1 think this, and feel this, and so waste my existence in vain yearnings I could ex tinguish the divine spark within me like a lamp on an unvisited shrine, and thank Heaven for an assimila tion to the animals I walk among ! And that is the substance of a speech 1 made to Job as a sequitur of a well-meant remark of his own. that " it was a pity Edith Linsey was not there." He took the clause about the animals" to himself, and I made an apology for the same a year after. We sometimes give our friends, quite innocently, such terrible knocks in our rhapsodies ! Most people talk of the sublimity of Trenton, but I have haunted it by the week together for its mere loveliness. The river, in the heart of that fearful chasm, is the most varied and beautiful assemblage of the thousand forms and shapes of running water that I know in the world. The soil and the deep-striking roots of the forest terminate far above von, looking like a black rim on the enclosing precipices ; the bed of the river and its sky-sustaining walls are of solid rock, and, with the tremendous descent of the stream forming for miles one continuous succession of falls and rapids the channel is worn into curves and cavi ties which throw the clear waters into forms of in conceivable brilliancy and variety. It is a sort of half twilight below, with heie and there a long beam of sunshine reaching down to kiss the lip of an eddy or form a rainbow over a fall, and the reverbemting and changing echoes: " Like a ring of bells whose sound the wind still alters," maintain a constant and most soothing music, varying at every step with the varying phase of the current. Cascades of from twenty to thirty feet, over which the river flies with a single and hurrying leap (not a drop missing from the glassy and bending sheet,) oc cur frequenily as you ascend; and it is from these that the place takes its name. Hut the falls, though beautiful, are only peculiar from the dazzling and un equalled rapidity with which the waters come to the leap. If it were not for the leaf which drops waver ing down into the abysm from trees apparently painted on the sky, and which is caught away by the flashing current as if the lightning had suddenly crossed it, you would think the vault of the steadfast heavens a flyins element as soon. The spot in that long gulf of beauty that 1 best remember is a smooth descent ofsome hundred yards, where the river iu full and undivided I volume skims over a plane as polished as a table of I scagliola, looking, in its invisible speed, like one mir- j ror of gleaming but motionless crystal. Just above, I there is a sudden turn in the glen which sends the w.iter like a catapult against the opposite angle of the rock, and, in the action of years, it lias worn out a cavern of unknown depth, into which the whole j mass of the river plunges with the abandonment of a flying fiend into hell, and, reappearing like the anel that has pursued him, glides swiftly but with divine serenity on its way. (I am indebted for that last figure to Job, who travelled with a Milton in his pocket, and had a natural redolence of "Paradise Lost" in his conversation.) Much as 1 detest water in small quantities (to drink), I have a hydromania in the way of lakes, rivers, and waterfalls. It is, by much, the belle in the family of the elements. Earth is never tolerable unless dis guised in green. Air is so thin as only to be visible when she borrows drapery of water ; and Fire is so staringly bright as to be unpleasant to the eyesight ; but water! soil, pure, graceful water! there is no shape into which you can throw her that she does not seem lovelier than before. She can borrow nothing of her sisters. Earth lias no jewels in her lap so brif- liant as her own spray pearls and emeralds; Fire has no rubies like what she steals from the sunset ; Air has no robes like the grace of her fine-woven and ever- changing drapery of silver. A health (in wine !) to WATER ! Who is there that did not love some stream in his youth ] Who is there in whose vision of the past there does not sparkle up, from every picture of child hood, a spring or a rivulent woven through the darken ed and torn woof of first affections like a thread of unchanged silver 1 How do you interpret the in stinctive yearning with which you search for the river-side or the fountain in every scene of nature-*", the clinging unaware to the river s course when a truant iu the fields in June the dull void you find iu every landscape of which it is not the ornament and the centre ] For myself, I hold with the Greek : " Water is the first principle of all things : we were made from it and we shall be resolved into it."* The awkward thing in all story-telling is transition. Invention you do not need if you have experience ; for fact is stranger than fiction. A beginning in these days of startling abruptness is as simple as open your mouth ; and when you have once begun you can end whenever you like, arid leave the sequel to the reader s imagination: but the hinges of a story the turning gracefully back from a digression (it is easy to turn into one) is the pas qui coule. My education on that point was neglected. It was, as I said before, a moonlight night, and Job and myself having, like Sir Fabian, no mind to sleep," followed the fashion and the rest of the com pany at,, the inn, and strolled down to see the falls l/y moonlight. I had been there before, and I took Job straight to the spot in the bed of the river which I have described above as my favorite, and, after watch ing it for a few minutes, we turned back to a dark cleft in the rock which afforded a rude seat, and sat musing in silence. Several parties had strolled past without seeing us in our recess, when two female figures, with their arms around each other s waists, sauntered slowly around the julting rock below, and approached us, eagerly engaged in conversation. They came on to the very edge of the shadow which enveloped us, and turned to look back at the scene. As the head nearest me was raised to the light, I started half to * The Ionic philosophy, supported by Thales. 48 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. my feet: it was Ediih ! la the same instant her voice of music broke on my ear, and an irresistible impulse to listen unobserved drew me down again upon my seat, and Job, with a similar instinct, laid his hand on my arm. "It was his favorite spot!" said Edith. (We had been at Trenton together years before.) "I stood here with him, and I wish he stood here now, that I might tell him what my hand hesitates to write." " Poor Philip !" said her companion, whom by the voice I recognised as the youngest of the Flemings, "I can not conceive how you can resolve so coldly to bieak his heart." 1 felt a dagger entering my bosom, but still I listen ed. Edith went on. " Why, I will tell you, my dear little innocent. I loved Pljilip Slingsby when I thought I was going to die. It was then a fitting attachment, for I never thought to need, of the goods of this world, more than a sick chamber and a nurse ; and Phil wns kind- hearted and devoted to me, and I lived at home. But, with returned health, a thousand ambitious de sires have sprung up in my heart, and I find myself admired by whom I will, and every day growing more selfish and less poetical. Philip is poor, and love in a cottage, though very well for vou if you like it, would never do for me. I should like him very well for a friend, for he is gentlemanlike and devoted, but, with my ideas, I should only make him miserable, and so I think I had better put him out of misery at once don t you think ? A half-smothered groan of anguish escaped my lips ; but it was lost in the roar of the waters, and Edith s voice, as she walked on, lessened and became inaudi ble to my ear. As her figure was lost in the shadow of the rocks beyond, I threw myself on the bosom of my friend, and wept in the unutterable agony of a ^crushed heart. I know not how that night was spent, but I awoke at noon of the next day, in my bed, with Job s hand clasped tenderly in my own. V. I kept my tryst. I was to meet Edith Linsey at Saratoga in July the last month of the probation by which I had won a right to her love. I had not spo ken to her, or written, or seen her (save, unknown to Ler, in the moment I have described), in the three long years to which my constancy was devoted. I had gained the usual meed of industry in my profes sion, and was admitted to its practice. I was on the threshold of manhood; and she had promised, before heaven, here to give me heart and hand. I had parted from her at twelve on that night three years, and, as the clock struck, I stood again by her side in the crowded ballroom of Saratoga. " Good God ! Mr. Slingsby !" she exclaimed, as I put out my hand. " Am I so changed that you do not know me, Miss Linsey ?" I asked, as she still looked with a wonder ing gaze into my face pressing my hand, however, with real warmth, and evidently under the control, for the moment, of the feelings with which we had parted. " Changed, indeed ! Why, you have studied your self to a skeleton ! My dear Philip, you are ill !" I was but it was only for a moment. I asked her hand for a waltz, and never before or since came wit and laughter so freely to my lip. I was collected, but, at the same time, I was the gayest of the gay ; and when everybody had congratulated me, in her hear ing, on the school to which I had put my wits in my long apprenticeship to the law, I retired to the gallery looking down upon the garden, and cooled my brow and rallied my sinking heart. The candles were burning low, and the ball was nearly over, when I entered the room again, and re quested Kdith to take a turn with me on the colon nade. She at once assented, and I could feel by her arm in mine, and see by the fixed expression on her lip, that she did so with the intention of revealing to me what she little thought I could so well anticipate. " My probation is over," I said, breaking the si lence which she seemed willing to prolong, and which had lasted till we had twice measured the long colon nade. " It was three years ago to-night, I think, since we parted." She spoke in an absent and careless tone, as if trying to work out another more prominent thought in her mind. " Do you find me changed ?" I asked. " Yes oh, yes ! very !" " But I am more changed than I seem, dear Edith !" She turned to me as if to ask me to explain my self. " Will you listen to me while I tell you how ?" " What can you mean ? Certainly." " Then listen, for I fear I can scarce bring myself to repeat what I am going to say. When I first learned to love you, and when I promised to love you for life, you were thought to be dying, and I was a boy. I did not count on the future, for I despaired of your living to share it with me, and, if I had done so, I was still a child, and knew nothing of the world. I have since grown more ambitious, and, I may as well say at once, more selfish and less poetical. You will easily divine my drift. You are poor, and I find my self, as you have seen to-night, in a position which will enable me to marry more to my advantage ; and, with these views, I am sure ] should only make you miserable by fulfilling my contract with you, and you will agree with me that 1 consult our mutual happi- i ness by this course don t you think ?" At this instant I gave a signal to Job, who approached and made some sensible remarks about the weather; I and, after another turn or two, I released Miss Linsey s arm, and cautioning her against the night air, left her to finish her promenade and swallow her own project ed speech and mine, and went to bed. And so ended my first love ! . SCENES OF FEAR, No. I. THE DISTURBED VIGIL. " Antonio. Get me lets out devils !" out a man that OLD PLA.Y. SUCH a uight ! It was like a festival of Dian. A burst of a summer shower at sunset, with a clap or two of thunder, had purified the air to an intoxicating rareness, and the free breathing of the flowers, and the delicious perfume from the earth and grass, and the fresh foliage of the new spring, showed the delight and sympathy of inanimate Nature in the night s beau- ! ty. There was no atmosphere nothing between the eye and the pearly moon and she rode through the heavens without a veil, like a queen as she is, giving a i glimpse of her nearer beauty for a festal favor to the I worshipping stars. I was a student at the famed university of Connecti cut, and the bewilderments of philosophy and poetry j were strong upon me, in a place where exquisite natu ral beauty, and the absence of all other temptation, secure to the classic neophite an almost supernatural wakefulness of fancy. I contracted a taste for the horrible in those days, which still clings to me. I INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 49 have travelled the world over, with no object but gen- || for a moment, and she immediately leaped again upon eral observation, and have dawdled my hour at courts j| the corpse, and had covered her feet and face with and operas with little interest, while the sacking and ; blood before I could recover my hold upon her. The body was no longer in a situation to be spared, and I drowning of a woman in the Bosphorus, the impale ment of a robber on the Nile, and the insane hospitals from Liverpool to Cathay, are described in my capri cious journal with the vividness of the most stirring adventure. There is a kind of crystallization in the circum stances of one s life. A peculiar turn of mind draws to itself events fitted to its particular nucleus, and it is frequently a subject of wonder why one man meets with more remarkable things than another, when it is owing merely to a difference of natural character. It was, as I was saying, a night of wonderful beauty. I was watching a corpse. In that part of the United States, the dead are never left alone till the earth is thrown upon them ; and, as a friend of the family, I had been called upon for this melancholy service on the night preceding the interment. It was a death which had left a family of broken hearts ; for, beneath the sheet which sank so appallingly to the outline of a human form, lay a wreck of beauty and sweetness whose loss seemed to the survivors to have darkened the face of the earth. The ethereal and touching loveliness of that dying girl, whom I had known only a hopeless victim of consumption, springs up in my memory even yet, and mingles with every conception of female beauty. Two ladies, friends of the deceased, were to share my vigils. I knew them but slightly, and, having read them to sleep an hour after midnight, I performed my half-hourly duty of entering the room where the corpse lay, to look after the lights, and then strolled into the garden to enjoy the quiet of the summer night. The flowers were glittering in their pearl-drops, and the air was breathless. The sight of the long, sheeted corpse, the sudden flare of lights as the long snuffs were removed from the candles, the stillness of the close-shuttered room, and my own predisposition to invest death with a su pernatural interest, had raised my heart to my throat. I walked backward and forward in the garden-path ; and the black shadows beneath the lilacs, and even the glittering of the glow-worms within them, seemed weird and fearful. The clock struck, and I re-entered. My compan ions still slept, and I passed on to the inner chamber. I trimmed the lights, and stood and looked at the 1 1 and, with the facility which belongs to his country! seized her with a desperate grasp to draw her off ; but 1 to my horror, the half-covered and bloody corpse rose upright in her fangs, and, while I paused in fear, sat with drooping arms, and head fallen with ghastly help lessness over the shoulder. Years have not removed that fearful spectacle from my eyes. The corpse sank back, and I succeeded in throttling the monster, and threw her at last lifeless from the window. I then composed the disturbed limbs, laid the hair away once more smoothly on the forehead, and, crossing the hands over the bosom, covered the violated remains, and left them again to their repose. My companions, strangely enough, slept on, and I paced the garden-walk alone, till the day, to my inexpressible relief, dawned over the mountains. No. II. THK MAD SENIOR. I WAS called upon in my senior year to watch with an insane student. He was a man who had attracted a great deal of attention in college. He appeared in an extraordinary costume at the beginning of our freshman term, and wrote himself down as Washing ton Greyling, of , an unheard-of settlement somewhere beyond the Mississippi. His coat and oth er gear might have been the work of a Chickasaw tailor, aided by the superintending taste of some white huntsman, who remembered faintly the outline of ha biliments he had not seen for half a century. It was a body of green cloth, eked out with wampum and otter-skin, and would have been ridiculous if it had not encased one of the finest models of a manly frame that ever trod the earth. \Vith close-curling black hair, a fine weather-browned complexion, Spanish fea tures (from his mother a frequent physiognomy in the countries bordering on Spanish America), and the port and lithe motion of a lion, he was a figure to look upon in any disguise with warm admiration. He was soon put into the hands of a tailor-proper, white heap lying so fearfully still within the shadow of the curtains ; and my blood seemed to freeze. At nen, became in a month the best-dressed man in col lege. His manners were of a gentleman-like mildness, the moment when I was turning away with a strong j energetic, but courteous and chivalresque, and, unlike effort at a more composed feeling, a noise like a flutter ! most savages and all coins, he polished without " losing his mark." At the end of his first term, he would have been called a high-bred gentleman at any court in Europe. The opening of his mind was almost as rapid and extraordinary. He seized everything with an ardor and freshness that habit and difficulty never deadened. He was like a man who had tumbled into a new star, and was collecting knowledge for a world to which he was to return. The first in all games, the wildest in all adventure, the most distinguished even in the ele gant society for which the town is remarkable, and unfailingly brilliant in his recitations and college per formances, he was looked upon as a sort of admirable of wings, followed by a rush and a sudden silence, struck on my startled ear. The street was as quiet as death, and the noise, which was far too audible to be a deception of the fancy, had come from the side toward an uninhabited wing of the house. My heart stood still. Another instant, and the fire-screen was dashed down, and a white cat rushed past me, and with the speed of light sprang like an hyena upon the corpse. The flight of a vampyre into the chamber would not have more curdled my veins. A convulsive shudder ran cold over me, but recovering my self-command, I rushed to the animal (of whose horrible appetite for the flesh of the dead \ had read incredulously), and at tempted to tear her from the body. With her claws fixed in the breast, and a yowl like the wail of an infer nal spirit, she crouched fearlessly upon it, and the I his sensations at coming fresh from a wild western stains already upon the sheet convinced me that it j 1 prairie, and, at the first measure of his capacities with would be impossible to remove her without shockingly I men of better advantages, finding himself so uniformly i. f . .1 -r _ _ i i. _ i .1 _ .1 . . . . i i _ _^- i__ j_i:_ i_*r..i T~ _ J phenomenon, and neither envied nor opposed in any thing. I have often thought, in looking on him, that disfiguring the corpse. I seized her by the throat, in the hope of choking her ; but with the first pressure of my fingers, she flew into my face, and the infuriated animal seemed persuaded that it was a contest for life. Half blinded by the fury of her attack, I loosed her superior, must have been stirringly delightful. It is a wonder he never became arrogant ; but it was the last foible of which he could have been accused. We were reading hard for the honors in the senior year, when Greyling suddenly lost his reason. He INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. had not been otherwise ill, and had, apparently in the nrdst of high health, gone mad at a moment s warn ing. The physicians scarce knew how to treat him. The confinement to which he was at first subjected, however, was thought inexpedient, and he seemed to justify their lenity by the gentlest behavior when at liberty. He seemed oppressed by a heart-breaking melancholy. We took our turns in guarding and watching with him, and it was upon my first night of duty that the incident happened which I have thus endeavored to inttoduce. It was scarce like a vigil with a sick man, for our patient went regularly to bed, and usually slept well. I took my " Lucretius" and the " Book of the Mar tyrs," which was just then my favorite reading, and with hot punch, a cold chicken, books, and a fire, I looked forward to it as merely a studious night ; and, as the wintry wind of January rattled in at the old college windows, I thrust my feet into slippers, drew my dressing-gown about me, and congratulated my self on the excessive comfortableness of my position. The Sybarite s bed of roses would have been no temp tation. It had snowed all day, but the sun had set with a red rift in the clouds, and the face of the sky was swept in an hour to the clearness of I want a com parison your own blue eye, dear Mary ! The all- glorious arch of heaven was a mass of sparkling stars. Greyling slept, and I, wearied of the cold philosophy of the Latin poet, took to my "Book of Martyrs." I read on, and read on. The college clock struck, it seemed to me, the quarters rather than the hours. Time flew : it was three. " Horrible ! most horrible !" I started from my chair with the exclamation, and felt as if my scalp were self-lifted from my head. It was a description in the harrowing faithfulness of the language of olden time, painting almost the articulate groans of an impaled Christian. I clasped the old iron-bound book, and rushed to the window as if my heart was stifling for fresh air. Again at the fire. The large walnut fagots had burnt to a bed of bright coals, and I sat gazing into it, totally unable to shake off the fearful incubus from I my breast. The martyr was there on the very hearth ! with the stakes scornfully crossed in his body ; and as the large coals cracked asunder and revealed the prightness within, I seemed to follow the nerve-rending instrument from hip to shoulder, and suffer with him pang for pang, as if the burning redness were the pools of his fevered blood. "Aha!" It struck on my ear like the cry of an exulting fiend. "Aha!" I shrunk into the chair as the awful cry was re peated, and looked slowly and with difficult courage over my shoulder. A single fierce eye was fixed upon me from the mass of bed-clothes, and, for a moment, the relief from the fear of some supernatural presence was like water to a parched tongue. I sank back re lieved into the chair. There was a rustling immediately in the bed, and, starting again, I found the wild eyes of my patient fixed still steadfastly upon me. He was creeping stealthily out of bed. His bare foot touched the floor, and his toes worked upon it as if he was feeling its strength, and in a moment he stood upright on his feet, and, with his head forward and his pale face livid with rage, stepped toward me. I looked to the door. He observed the glance, and in the next instant he sprang clear over the bed, turned the key, and dashed it furiously through the window. "Now!" said he. " Greyling !" I said. 1 had heard that a calm and fixed gaze would control a madman, and with the most difficult exertion of nerve, I met his lowering eye, and we stood looking at each other for a full minute, like men of marble. " Why have you left your bed ?" I mildly asked. " To kill you!" was the appalling answer; and in another moment the light-stand was swept from be tween us, and he struck me down with a blow that would have felled a giant. Naked as he was, I had no hold upon him, even if in muscular strength I had been his match ; and with a minute s struggle I yielded, for resistance was vain. His knee was now upon my breast and his left hand in my hair, and he seemed by the tremulousness of his clutch to be hesitating whether he should dash my brains out on the hearth. I could scarce breathe with his weight upon my chest, but I tried, with the broken words I could command, to move his pity. He laughed, as only maniacs can, and placed his hand on my throat. Oh God! shall I ever forget the fiendish deliberation with which he closed those feverish fingers? " Greyling ! for God s sake ! Greyling !" "Die! curse you!" In the agonies of suffocation I struck out my arm, and almost buried it in the fire upon the hearth. With an expiring thought, I grasped a handful of the red-hot coals, and had just strength sufficient to press them hard against his side. "Thank God!" I exclaimed with my first breath, as my eyes recovered from their sickness, and I looked upon the familiar objects of my chamber once more. The madman sat crouched like a whipped dog in the farthest corner of the room, gibbering and moan ing, with his hands upon his burnt side. ~I felt that I had escaped death by a miracle. The door was locked, and, in dread of another at tack, I threw up the broken window, and to my unutterable joy the figure of a man was visible upon the snow near the out-buildings of the college. It was a charity-student, risen before day to labor in the wood-yard. I shouted to him, and Greyling leaped to his feet.. "There is time yet!" said the madman; but as he came toward me again with the same panther-like caution as before, I seized a heavy stone pitcher standing in the window-seat, and hurling it at him with a fortunate force and aim, he fell stunned and bleeding on the floor. The door was burst opon at the next moment, and, calling for assistance, we tied the wild Missourian into his bed, bound up his head and side, and committed him to fresh watchers. . . . We have killed bears together at a Missouri salt lick since then; but I never see Wash. Greyling with a smile off his face, without a disposition to look around for the door. No. III. THE LUNATIC S SKATE. I HAVE only, in my life, known one lunatic prop erly so called. In the days when I carried a satchel on the banks of the Shawsheen (a river whose half- lovely, half-wild scenery is tied like a silver thread about my heart), Larry Wynn and myself were the farthest boarders from school, in a solitary farm-house on the edge of a lake of some miles square, called by the undignified title of Pomp s pond. An old negro, who was believed by the boys to have come over with Christopher Columbus, was the only other human being within anything like a neighborhood of the lake (it took its name from him), and the only ap proaches to its waters, girded in as it was by an almost impenetrable forest, were the path through old Pomp s clearing, and that by our own door. Out of school, Larry and I were inseparable. He was a pale, sad- INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 51 faced boy, and, in the first days of our intimacy, he had confided a secret to me which, from its uncom mon nature, and the excessive caution with which he kept it from every one else, bound me to him with more than the common ties of schoolfellow attach ment. We built wigwams together in the woods, had our tomahawks made of the same fashion, united our property in fox-traps, and played Indians with perfect contentment in each other s approbation. I had found out, soon after my arrival at school, that Larry never slept on a moonlight night. With the first slender horn that dropped its silver and grace ful shape behind the hills, his uneasiness commenced, and by the time its full and perfect orb poured a flood of radiance over vale and mountain, he was like one haunted by a pursuing demon. At early twilight lie closed the shutters, stuffing every crevice that could admit a ray; and then, lighting as many candles as he could beg or steal from our thrifty landlord, he sat down with his book in moody silence, or paced the room with an uneven step, and a solemn melancholy in his fine countenance, of which, with all my famil iarity with him, I was almost afraid. Violent exer cise seemed the only relief, and when the candles burnt low after midnight, and the stillness around the lone farm-house became too absolute to endure, he would throw up the window, and, leaping desperately out into the moonlight, rush up the hill into the depths of the wild forest, and walk on with supernatural excitement till the day dawned. Faint and pale he would then creep into his bed, and, begging me to make his very common and always credited excuse of illness, sleep soundly till I returned from school. I soon became used to his way, ceased to follow him, as I had once or twice endeavored to do, into the forest, and never attempted to break in on the fixed and wrapt silence which seemed to transform his lips to marble. And for all this Larry loved me. Our preparatory studies were completed, and, to our mutual despair, we were destined to different universities. Larry s father was a disciple of the great Channing, and mine a Trinitarian of uncommon zeal; and the two institutions of Yale and Harvard were in the hands of most eminent men of either persuasion, and few are the minds that could resist a four years ordeal in either. A student was as certain to come forth a Unitarian from one as a Calvinist from the other; and in the New England states these two sects are bitterly hostile. So, to the glittering atmosphere of Channing and Everett went poor Larry, lonely and dispirited; and I was committed to the sincere zealots of Connecticut, some two hundred miles off, to learn Latin and Greek, if it pleased Heaven, but the mysteries of " election and free grace," whether or no. Time crept, ambled, and galloped, by turns, as we were in love or out, moping in term-time, or revelling in vacation, and gradually, I know not why, our cor respondence had dropped, and the four years had come to their successive deaths, and we had never met. I grieved over it ; for in those days I believed with a school-boy s fatuity, " That two, or one, are almost what they seem ;" and I loved Larry Wynn, as I hope I may never love man or woman again with a pain at my heart. I wrote one or two reproachful letters in my senior years, but his answers were overstrained, and too full of protestations by half; and seeing that absence had done its usual work on him, I gave it up, and wrote an epitaph on a departed friendship. I do not know, by the way, why I am detaining you with all this, for it has nothing to do with my story ; but let it pass as an evidence that it is a true one. The climax of things in real life has not the regular procession of incidents in a tragedy. Some two or three years after we had taken "the irrevocable yoke" of life upon us (not matrimony, but money-making), a winter occurred of uncom monly fine sleighing sledging, you call it in Eng land. At such times the American world is all abroad, either for business or pleasure. The roads are passable at any rate of velocity of which a horse is capable ; smooth as montagnes Jtusses, and hard as is good for hoofs; and a hundred miles is dimin ished to ten in facility of locomotion. The hunter brings down his venison to the cities, the western trader takes his family a hundred leagues to buy calicoes and tracts, and parties of all kinds scour the country, drinking mulled wine and "flip," and shaking the very nests out of the fir-trees with the ringing of their horses bells. You would think death and sor row were buried in the snow with the leaves of the last autumn. I do not know why I undertook, at this time, a journey to the west; certainly not for scenery, for it was a world of waste, desolate, and dazzling white ness, fora thousand unbroken miles. The trees were weighed down with snow, and the houses were thatched and half-buried in it. and the mountains and valleys were like the vast waves of an illimitable sea, congealed with its yesty foam in the wildest hour of a tempest. The eye lost its powers in gazing on it. The " spirit-bird" that spread his refreshing green wings before the pained eyes of Thalaba would have been an inestimable fellow-traveller. The worth of the eyesight lay in the purchase of a pair of green goggles. In the course of a week or two, after skimming over the buried scenery of half a dozen states, each as large as Great Britain (more or less), I found myself in a small town on the border of one of our western lakes. It was some twenty years since the bears had found it thinly settled enough for their purposes, and now it contained perhaps twenty thousand souls. The oldest inhabitant, born in the town, was a youth in his minority. With the usual precocity of new settlements, it had already most of the peculiarities of an old metropolis. The burnt stumps still stood about among the houses, but there was a fashionable circle, at the head of which were the lawyer s wife and the member of Congress s daughter; and people ate their peas with silver forks, and drank their tea with scan dal, and forgave men s many sins and refused to for give woman s one, very much as in towns whose his tory is written in black letter. I dare say there were not more than one or two offences against the moral and Levitical law, fashionable on this side the water, which had not been committed, with the authentic aggravations, in the town of ; I would mention the name if this were not a true story. Larry Wynn (now Lawrence Wynn, Esq.) lived here. He had, as they say in the United States, " hung out a shingle" (Londonice, put up a sign) as attorney- at-law, and to all the twenty thousand innocent in habitants of the place, he was the oracle and the squire. He was besides colonel of militia, churchwarden, and canal commissioner; appointments which speak volumes for the prospects of " rising young men" in our flourishing republic. Larry was glad to see me very. I was more glad to see him. I have a soft heart, and forgive a wrong generally, if it touches neither my vanity nor my purse. I forgot his neglect, and called him " Larry." By the same token he did not call me " Phil." (There are very few that love me, patient reader ; but those who do, thus abbreviate my pleasant name of Philip. I was called after the Indian sachem of that name, whose blood runs in this tawny hand.) Larry looked upon me as a man. I looked on him, with all his dignities and changes, through the sweet vista of memory as a boy. His mouth had acquired the 52 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. pinched corners of caution and mistrust common to those who know their fellow-men ; but I never saw it unless when speculating as I am now. He was to me the pale-faced and melancholy friend of my boyhood; and I could have slept, as I used to do, with my arm around his neck, and feared to stir lest I should wake him. Had my last earthy hope lain in the palm of my hand, I could have given it to him, had he needed it, but to make him sleep ; and yet he thought of me but as a stranger under his roof, and added, in his warmest moments, a "Mr." to my name! There is but one circumstance in my life that has wounded me more. Memory avaunt ! Why should there be no unchangeableness in the world? why no friendship? or why ami, and you, gentle reader (for by your continuing to pore over these idle musings, you have a heart too), gifted with this useless and restless organ beating in our bosoms, if its thirst for love is never to be slaked, and its ach ing self-fulness never to find flow or utterance ? I would positively sell my whole stock of affections for three farthings. Will you say " two?" "You are come in good time," said Larry one morn ing, with a half-smile, " and shall be groomsman to me. I am going to be married." " Married ?" " Married." I repeated the word after him, for I was surprised. He had never opened his lips about his unhappy luna cy since my arrival, and I had felt hurt at this ap parent unwillingness to renew our ancient confidence, but had felt a repugnance to any forcing of the topic upon him, and could only hope that he had outgrown or overcome it. I argued, immediately on this infor mation of his intended marriage, that it must be so. No man in his senses, I thought, would link an im pending madness to the fate of a confiding and lovely woman. He took me into his sleigh, and we drove to her father s house. She was a flower in the wilderness, I Of a delicate form, as all my countrywomen are, and lovely, as quite all certainly are not, large-eyed, soft in her manners, and yet less timid than confiding and sister-like, with a shade of melancholy in her smile, caught, perhaps, with the " trick of sadness" from him self, and a patrician slightness of reserve, or pride, which Nature sometimes, in very mockery of high birth, teaches her most secluded child the bride elect was, as I said before, a flower in the wilderness. She was one of those women we sigh to look upon as they pass by, as if there went a fragment of the wreck of some blessed dream. The day arrived for the wedding, and the sleigh- bells jingled merrily into the village. The morning was as soft and genial as June, and the light snow on the surface of the lake melted, and lay on the breast of the solid ice beneath, giving it the effect of one white silver mirror, stretching to the edge of the horizon. It was exquisitely beautiful, and I was standing at the window in the afternoon, looking off upon the shining expanse, when Larry approached, and laid his hand familiarly on my shoulder. "What glorious skating we shall have," said I, "if thi* smooth water freezes to-night !" I lurned the next moment to look at him; for we had not skated together since I went out, at his earnest ^treaty, at midnight, to skim the little lake where we " oassed our boyhood, and drive away the fever from ; n, under the light of a full moon. "embered it, and so did I ; and I put my arm for the color fled from his face, and I "ild have sunk to the floor. full to-night," said he, recovering in- ""-possession. haud firmly, and, in as kind a spoke of our early friend ship, and apologizing thus for the freedom, asked if he had quite overcome his melancholy disease. His face worked with emotion, and he tried to withdraw his hand from my clasp, and evidently wished to avoid an answer. " Tell me, dear Larry," said I. " Oh God ! No . " said he, breaking violently from me, and throwing himself with his face downward upon the sofa. The tears streamed through his fingers upon the silken cushion. "Not cured ? And does she know it ?" " No ! no ! thank God ! not yet !" I remained silent a few minutes, listening to his suppressed moans (for he seemed heart-broken with the confession), and pitying while I inwardly con demned him. And then the picture of that lovely and fond woman rose up before me, and the impossibility of concealing his fearful malady from his wife, and the fixed insanity in which it must end, and the whole wreck of her hopes and his own prospects and happi ness and my heart grew sick. I sat down by him, and, as it was too late to remon strate on the injustice he was committing toward her, I asked how he came to appoint the night of a full moon for his wedding. He gave up his reserve, calm ed himself, and talked of it at last as if he were relieved by the communication. Never shall I forget the doomed pallor, the straining eye, and feverish hand, of my poor friend during that half hour. Since he had left college he had striven with the whole energy of his soul against it. He had plunged into business he had kept his bed resolutely night after night, till his brain seemed on the verge of phrensy with the effort he had taken opium to secure to him self an artificial sleep ; but he had never dared to con fide it to any one, and he had no friend to sustain him in his fearful and lonely hours ; and it grew upon him rather than diminished. He described to me with the most touching pathos how he had concealed it for j years how he had stolen out like a thief to give vent to his insane restlessness in the silent streets of the city at midnight, and in the more silent solitudes of the forest how he had prayed, and wrestled, and wept over it and finally, how he had come to believe that there was no hope for him except in the assistance and constant presence of some one who would devote life to him in love and pity. Poor Larry ! I put up a silent prayer in my heart that the desperate experiment might not end in agony and death. The sun set, and, according to my prediction, the wind changed suddenly to the north, and the whole surface of the lake in a couple of hours became of the lustre of polished steel. It was intensely cold. The fires blazed in every room of the bride s pater nal mansion, and I was there early to fulfil my office of master of ceremonies at the bridal. My heart was weighed down with a sad boding, but I shook off at least the appearance of it, and superintended the con coction of a huge bowl of punch with a merriment which communicated itself in the shape of most joyous hilarity to a troop of juvenile relations. The house resounded with their shouts of laughter. In the midst of our noise in the small inner room entered Larry. I started back, for he looked more like a demon possessed than a Christian man. He had walk ed to the house alone in the moonlight, not daring to trust himself in company. I turned out the turbulent troop about me, and tried to dispel his gloom, for a face like his at that moment would have put to flight the rudest bridal party ever assembled on holy ground. He seized on the bowl of strong spirits which I had mixed for a set of hardy farmers, and before I could tear it from his lips had drank a quantity which, in an ordinary mood, would have intoxicated him helplessly in an hour. He then sat down with his face buried in his hands, and in a few minutes rose, his eyes spark- INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. ling with excitement, and the whole character of his face utterly changed. I thought he had gone wild. " Now, Phil," said he ; " now for my bride !" And with an unbecoming levity he threw open the door, and went half dancing into the room where the friends were already assembled to witness the ceremony. I followed with fear and anxiety. He took his place by the side of the fair creature on whom he had placed his hopes of life, and, though sobered somewhat by the impressiveness of the scene, the wild sparkle still danced in his eyes, and I could see that every nerve in his frame was excited to the last pitch of tension. If he had fallen a gibbering maniac on the floor, I ! should not have been astonished. The ceremony proceeded, and the first tone of his voice in the response startled even the bride. If it had | rung from the depths of a cavern, it could not have been more sepulchral. I looked at him with a shud der. His lips were curled with an exulting expres sion, mixed with an indefinable fear ; and all the blood in his face seemed settled about his eyes, which were j so bloodshot and fiery, that I have ever since wondered he was not, at the first glance, suspected of insanity. | But oh ! the heavenly sweetness with which that love- j liest of creatures promised to love and cherish him, in ! sickness and in "health ! I never go to a bridal but it j half breaks my heart ; and as the soft voice of that beautiful girl fell with its eloquent meaning on my ear, and I looked at her, with lips calm and eyes moist- j ened, vowing a love which I knew to be stronger than i death, to one who, I feared, was to bring only pain and sorrow into her bosom, my eyes warmed with irrepres sible tears, and I wept. The stir in the room as the clergyman closed his prayer, seemed to awake him from a trance. He j looked around with a troubled face for a moment ; and ; then, fixing his eyes on his bride, he suddenly clasped his arms about her, and straining her violently to his bosom, broke into an hysterical passion of tears and laughter. Then suddenly resuming his self-command, he apologized for the over-excitement of his feelings, and behaved with forced and gentle propriety till the guests departed. There was an apprehensive gloom over the spirits of the small bridal party left in the lighted rooms ; and j as they gathered round the fire, 1 approached, and en- ! deavored to take a gay farewell. Larry was sitting . with his arm about his wife, and he wrung my hand in silence as I said, " Good-night," and dropped his head upon her shoulder. I made some futile attempt to rally him, but it jarred on the general feeling, and I I left the house. It was a glorious night. The clear piercing air had a vitreous brilliancy, which I have never seen in any other climate, the rays of the moonlight almost visi bly splintering with the keenness of the frost. The moon herself was in the zenith, and there seemed nothing between her and the earth but palpable and glittering cold. I hurried home : it was but eleven o clock ; and, heaping up the wood in the large fireplace, I took a j volume of" Ivanhoe," which had just then appeared, and endeavored to rid myself of my unpleasant j thoughts. I read on till midnight ; and then, in a I pause of the story, I rose to look out upon the night, j hoping, for poor Larry s sake, that the moon was j buried in clouds. The house was near the edge of j the lake ; and as I looked down upon the glassy waste, ! spreading away from the land, I saw the dark figure of a man kneeling directly in the path of the moon s rays. In another moment he rose to his feet, and the tall, slight form of my poor friend was distinctly visible, as, with long and powerful strokes, he sped away upon his skates along the shore. To take my own Hollanders, put a collar of fur around my mouth, and hurry after him, was the work of but a minute. My straps were soon fastened ; and, following in the marks of the sharp irons at the top of my speed, I gained sight of him in about half an hour, and with great effort neared him sufficiently to shout his name with a hope of being heard. " Larry ! Larry !" The lofty mountain-shore gave back the cry in re peated echoes but he redoubled his strokes, and sped on faster than before. At my utmost speed I followed on ; and when, at last, I could almost lay my hand on his shoulder, I summoned my strength to my breathless lungs, and shouted again " Larry ! Larry !" He half looked back, and the full moon at that in stant streamed full into his eyes. I have thought since that he could not have seen me for its dazzling brightness ; but I saw every line of his features with the distinctness of daylight, and I shall never forget them. A line of white foam ran through his half- parted lips ; his hair streamed wildly over his forehead, on which the perspiration glittered in large drops; and every lineament of his expressive face was stamped with unutterable and awful horror. He looked back no more ; but, increasing his speed with an energy of which I did not think his slender frame capable, he began gradually to outstrip me. Trees, rocks, and hills, fled back like magic. My limbs began to grow numb ; my fingers had lost all feeling, but a strong northeast wind was behind us, and the ice smoother than a mirror ; and I struck out my feet mechanically, and still sped on. For two hours we had kept along the shore. The branches of the trees were reflected in the polished ice, and the hills seemed hanging in the air, and float ing past us with the velocity of storm-clouds. Far down the lake, however, there glimmered the just visible light of a fire, and I was thanking God that we were probably approaching some human succor, when, to my horror, the retreating figure before me suddenly darted oft* to the left, and made swifter than before toward the centre of the icy waste. Oh, God ! what feelings were mine at that moment ! Follow him far I dared not ; for, the sight of land once lost, as it would be almost instantly with our tremendous speed, we perished, without a possibility of relief. He was far beyond my voice, and to overtake him was the only hope. I summoned my last nerve for the effort, and keeping him in my eye, struck across at a sharper angle, with the advantage of the wind full in my back. I had taken note of the mountains, and knew that we were already forty miles from home, a distance it would be impossible to retrace against the wind ; and the thought of freezing to death, even if I could overtake him, forced itself appallingly upon me. Away I flew, despair giving new force to my limbs, and soon gained on the poor lunatic, whose efforts seemed flagging and faint. I neared him. Another struggle ! I could have dropped down where I was, and slept, if there were death in the first minute, so stiff and drowsy was every muscle in my frame. " Larry !" I shouted. " Larry !" He started at the sound, and I could hear a smoth ered and breathless shriek, as, with supernatural strength, he straightened up his bending figure, and, leaning forward again, sped away from me like a phantom on the blast. I could follow no longer. I stood stiff on my skates, still going on rapidly before the wind, and tried to look after him, but the frost had stiffened my eyes, and there was a mist before them, and they felt like glass. Nothing was visible around me but moonlight and ice, and dimly and slowly I began to retrace the slight path of semicircles toward the shore. It was painful work. The wind seemed to divide the very fibres of the skin upon my face. Violent exercise no 54 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. longer warmed ray body, and I felt the cold shoot sharply into my loins, and bind across my breast like a chain of ice; and, with the utmost strength of mind at my command, I could just resist the terrible incli nation to lie down and sleep. I forgot poor Larry. Life dear life ! was now my only thought! So self ish are we in our extremity ! With difficulty I at last reached the shore, and then, unbuttoning my coat, and spreading it wide for a sail, I set my feet together, and went slowly down before j the wind, till the fire which I had before noticed be gan to blaze cheerily in the distance. It seemed an eternity in my slow progress. Tree after tree threw the shadow of its naked branches across the way ; hill after hill glided slowly backward ; but my knees seemed frozen together, and my joints fixed in ice ; and if my life had depended on striking out my feet, I should have died powerless. My jaws were locked, ! my shoulders drawn half down to my knees, and in a < few minutes more, I am well convinced, the blood would have thickened in my veins, and stood still, for [ ever. I could see the tongues of the flames I counted the burning fagots a form passed between me and I the fire I struck, and fell prostrate on the snow ; and j I remember no more. The sun was darting a slant beam through the trees when I awoke. The genial warmth of a large bed of j embers played on my cheek, a thick blanket enveloped me, and beneath my head was a soft cushion of with ered leaves. On the opposite side of the fire lay four Indians wrapped in their blankets, and, with her head on her knees, and her hands clasped over her ankles, sat an Indian woman, who had apparently fallen asleep upon her watch. The stir I made aroused her, and, as she piled on fresh fagots, and kindled them to a bright blaze with a handful of leaves, drowsiness came over me again, and I wrapped the blanket about me more closely, and shut my eyes to sleep. I awoke refreshed. It must have been ten o clock by the sun. The Indians were about, occupied in va rious avocations, and the woman was broiling a slice of deer s flesh on the coals. She offered it to me as I rose ; and having eaten part of it with a piece of a cake made of meal, 1 requested her to call in the men, and, with offers of reward, easily induced them to go with me in search of my lost friend. We found him, as I had anticipated, frozen to death, far out on the lake. The Indians tracked him by the marks of his skate-irons, and from their appearance he had sunk quietly down, probably drowsy and ex hausted, and had died of course without pain. His last act seemed to have been under the influence of his strange madness, for he lay on his face, turned from the quarter of the setting moon. We carried him home to his bride. Even the In dians were affected by her uncontrollable agony. I | can not describe that scene, familiar as I am with pic- j tures of horror. I made inquiries with respect to the position of his i bridal chamber. There were no shutters, and the 1 moon streamed broadly into it : and after kissing his j shrinking bride with the violence of a madman, he sprang out of the room with a terrific scream, and she saw him no more till he lay dead on his bridal bed. INCIDENTS ON THE HUDSON. M. CHABERT, the fire-eater, would have found New York uncomfortable. I would mention the height of I had fixed upon the first of August for my annual trip to Saratoga and with a straw hat, a portmanteau, and a black boy, was huddled into the " rather-faster- than-lightning" steamer, " North America," with about seven hundred other people, like myself, just in time. Some hundred and fifty gentlemen and ladies, thirty seconds too late, stood " larding" the pine chips upon the pier, gazing after the vanishing boat through show ers of perspiration. Away we " streaked" at the rate of twelve miles in the hour against the current, and by the time I had penetrated to the baggage-closet, and seated William Wilberforce upon my portmanteau, with orders not to stir for eleven hours and seven min utes, we were far up the Hudson, opening into its hills and rocks, like a witches party steaming through the Hartz in a caldron. A North-river steamboat, as a Vermont boy would phrase it, is another guess sort d 1 thing from a Brit isher. A coal-barge and an eight-oars on the Thames are scarce more dissimilar. Built for smooth water only, our river boats are long, shallow, and graceful, of the exquisite proportions of a pleasure-yacht, and painted as brilliantly and fantastically as an Indian shell. With her bow just leaning up from the surface of the stream, her cut-water throwing off a curved and transparent sheet from either side, her white awnings, her magical speed, and the gay spectacle of a thousand well-dressed people on her open decks, I know noth ing prettier than the vision that shoots by your door as you sit smoking in your leaf-darkened portico on the bold shore of the Hudson. The American edition of Mrs. Trollope (several copies of which are to be found in every boat, serving the same purpose to the feelings of the passengers as the escape-valve to the engine) lay on a sofa beside me, and taking it up, as to say, " I will be let alone," I commenced dividing my attention in my usual quiet way between the varied panorama of rock and valley flying backward in our progress, and the as varied multitude about me. For the mass of the women, as far as satin slippers, hats, dresses, and gloves, could go, a Frenchman might have fancied himself in the midst of a transplantation from the Boulevards. In London, French fashions are in a manner Anglified : but an American woman looks on the productions of Herbault, Boivin, and Maneuri, as a translator of the Talmud on the inspired text. The slight figure and small feet of the race rather favor the resemblance; and a French milliner, who would prob ably come to America expecting to see bears and buf faloes prowling about the landing-place, would rub her eyes in New York, and imagine she was still in France, and had crossed, perhaps, only the broad part of the Seine. The men were a more original study. Near me sat aKentuckian on three chairs. He had been to the me tropolis, evidently for the first time, and had " looked round sharp." In a fist of no very delicate propor tions, was crushed a pair of French kid-gloves, which, if they fulfilled to him a glove s destiny, would flatter " the rich man" that "the camel" might yet give him the required precedent. His hair had still the traces of having been astonished with curling-tongs, and across his Atlantean breast was looped, in a compli cated zig-zag, a chain that must have cost him a wil derness of rackoon-skins. His coat was evidently the production of a Mississippi tailor, though of the finest English material ; his shirt-bosom was ruffled like a swan with her feathers full spread, and a black silk cravat, tied in a kind of a curse-me-if-I-care-sort-of-a- knot, flung out its ends like the arms of an Italian improvisatore. With all this he was a man to look upon with respect. His under jaw was set up to its fellow with an habitual determination that would the thermometer, but for an aversion I have to figures, j throw a hickory-tree into a shiver ; but frank good- Broadway, at noon, had been known to fry soles. ! nature, and the most absolute freedom from susni- INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. cion, lay at large on his Ajacean features, mixed with an earnestness that commended itself at once Jo your liking. In a retired corner, near the wheel, stood a group of Indians, as motionless by the hour together as figures carved in rosso antico. They had been on their melancholy annual visit to the now-cultivated shores of Connecticut, the burial-place, but unforgot- ten and once wild home of their fathers. With the money given them by the romantic persons whose sympathies are yearly moved by these stern and poet ical pilgrims, they had taken a passage in the "fire- canoe," which would set them two hundred miles on their weary journey back to the prairies. Their Apollo-like forms loosely dressed in blankets, their gnudy wampum-belts and feathers, the muscular arm and close clutch upon the rifle, the total absence of surprise at the unaccustomed wonders about them, and the lowering and settled scorn and dislike ex pressed in their copper faces, would have powerfully impressed a European. The only person on whom they deigned to cast a glance was the Kentuckian, and at him they occasionally stole a look, as if, through all his metropolian finery, they recognised metal with whose ring they were familiar. There were three foreigners on board, two of them companions, and one apparently alone. With their coats too small for them, their thick-soled boots and sturdy figures, collarless cravats, and assumed uncon sciousness of the presence of another living soul, they were recognisable at once as Englishmen. To most of the people on board they probably appeared equally well-dressed, and of equal pretensions to the character of gentlemen; but any one who had made observations between Temple Bar and the steps of Crockford s, would easily resolve them into two Birmingham bag men "sinking the shop," and a quiet gentleman on a tour of information. The only other persons I particularly noted were a southerner, probably the son of a planter from Ala bama, and a beautiful girl, dressed in singularly bad taste, who seemed his sister. I knew the "specimen" well. The indolent attitude, the thin but powerfully- jointed frame, the prompt politeness, the air of superi ority acquired from constant command over slaves, the mouth habitually flexible and looking eloquent even in silence, and the eye in which slept a volcano of vio lent passions, were the marks that showed him of a race that I had studied much, and preferred to all the many and distinct classes of my countrymen. His sister was of the slightest and most fragile figure, graceful as a fawn, but with no trace of the dancing master s precepts in her motions, vivid in her attention to everything about her, and amused with all she saw; a copy of Lalla Kookh sticking from the pocket of her French apron, a number of gold chains hung out- side her travelling habit, and looped to her belt, and a glorious profusion of dark curls broken loose from her combs and floating unheeded over her shoulders. Toward noon we rounded West Point, and shot suddenly into the overshadowed gorge of the moun tains, as if we were dashing into the vein of a silver mine, laid open and molten into a flowing river by a flash of lightning. (The figure should be Mont gomery s; but I can in no other way give an idea of the sudden darkening of the Hudson, and the under ground effect of the sharp over-hanging mountains as you sweep first into the highlands.) The solitary Englishman, who had been watching the southern beauty with the greatest apparent in terest, had lounged over to her side of the boat, and, with the instinctive knowledge that women have of character, she had shrunk from the more obtrusive attempts of the Brummagems to engage her in con versation, and had addressed some remark to him, which seemed to have advanced them at once to ac quaintances of a year. They were admiring the stu pendous scenery together a moment before the boat stopped for a passenger, off a smaU town above the point. As the wheels were checked, there was a sud den splash in the water, and a cry of "a lady over- ! board !" I looked for the fair creature who had been [ standing before me, and she was gone. The boat was 1 sweeping on, and as I darted to the railing I saw the ; gurgling eddy where something had just gone down; ; and in the next minute the Kentuckian and the i youngest of the Indians rushed together to the stern, j and clearing the taffrail with tremendous leaps, dived side by side into the very centre of the foaming circle. ii The Englishman had coolly seized a rope, and, by the time they reappeared, stood on the railing with a coil | in his hand, and flung it with accurate calculation directly over them. With immovably grave faces, and eyes blinded with water, the two divers rose, holding high between them a large pine fagot ! Shouts of ; laughter pealed from the boat, and the Kentuckian, ij discovering his error, gave the log an indignant fling i behind, and, taking hold of the rope, lay quietly to be I drawn in; while the Indian, disdaining assistance, darted through the wake of the boat with arrowy swiftness, and sprang up the side with the agility of a tiger-cat. The lady reappeared from the cabin as they jumped dripping upon the deck ; the Kentuckian shook himself, and sat down in the sun to dry; and j the graceful and stern Indian, too proud even to put I the wet hair away from his forehead, resumed his . place, and folded his arms, as indifferent and calm, 1 save the suppressed heaving of his chest, as if he had ! | never stirred from his stone-like posture. An hour or two more brought us to the foot of the !J Catskills, and here the boat lay alongside the pier to j discharge those of her passengers who were bound to the house on the mountain. A hundred or more moved to the gangway at the summons to get ready, and among them the southerners and the Kentuckian. I had begun to feel an interest in our fair fellow-pas senger, and I suddenly determined to join their party a resolution which the Englishman seemed to come to at the same moment, and probably for the same i reason. We slept at the pretty village on the bank of the I river, and the next day made the twelve hours ascent through glen and forest, our way skirted with the i most gorgeous and odorent flowers, and turned aside ! and towered over the trees whose hoary and moss- I covered trunks would have stretched the conceptions j of the "Savage Rosa." Everything that was not lovely was gigantesque and awful. The rocks were split with the visible impress of the Almighty power that had torn them apart, and the daring and dizzy crags spurred into the sky, as if the arms of a buried nd phrensied Titan were thrusting them from the mountain s bosom. It gave one a kind of maddening desire to shout and leap the energy with which it filled the mind so out-measured the power of the frame. Near the end of our journey, we stopped together on a jutting rock, to look back on the obstacles we had overcome. The view extended over forty or fifty miles of vale and mountain, and, with a half-shut eye, it looked, in its green and lavish foliage, like a near and unequal bed of verdure, while the distant Hudson crept through it like a half-hid satin riband, lost as if in clumps of rnoss among the broken banks of the highlands. I was trying to fix the eye of my com panion upon West Point, when a steamer, with its black funnel and retreating line of smoke, issued as if from the bosom of the hills into an open break of the river. It was as small apparently as the white hand that pointed to it so rapturously. "Oh!" said the half-breathless girl, "is it not like some fairy bark on an eastern stream, with a spice- lamp alight in its prow?" 56 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. "More like an old shoe afloat, with a cigar stuck in it," interrupted Kentucky. As the sun began to kindle into a blaze of fire, the tumultuous masses , so peculiar to an American sky, turning every tree and rock to a lambent and rosy gold, we stood on the broad platform on which the house is built, braced even beyond weariness by the invigorating and rarified air of the mountain. A hot supper and an early pillow, with the feather beds and blankets of winter, were unromantic circumstances, but I am not aware that any one of the party made any audible objection to them; I sat next the Ken- tuckian at table, and can answer for two. A mile or two back from the mountain-house, on nearly the same level, the gigantic forest suddenly sinks two or three hundred feet into the earth, forming a tremendous chasm, over which a bold stag might almost leap, and above which the rocks hang on cither side with the most threatening and frowning grandeur. A mountain-stream creeps through the forest to the precipice, and leaps as suddenly over, as if, Arethusa-like, it fled into the earth from the pur suing steps of a satyr. Thirty paces from its brink, you would never suspect, but for the hollow rever beration of the plunging stream, that anything but a dim and mazy wood was within a day s journey. It is visited as a great curiosity in scenery, under the name of Cauterskill Falls. We were all on the spot by ten the next morning, after a fatiguing tramp through the forest; for the Kentuckian had rejected the offer of a guide, under taking to bring us to it in a straight line by only the signs of the water- course. The caprices of the little stream had misled him, however, and we arrived half- dead with the fatigue of our cross-marches. I sat down on the bald edge of the precipice, and suffered my more impatient companions to attempt the difficult and dizzy descent before me. The Ken tuckian leaped from rock to rock, followed daringly by the southerner; and the Englishman, thoroughly enamored of the exquisite child of nature, who knew no reserve beyond her mnidenly modesty, devoted himself to her assistance, and compelled her with anxious entreaties to descend more cautiously. I lay at my length as they proceeded, and with my head over the projecting edge of the most prominent crag, watched them in a giddy dream, half-stupified by the grandeur of the scene, half-interested in their motions. They reached the bottom of the glen at last, and shouted to the two who had gone before, but they had followed the dark passage of the stream to find its vent, and were beyond sight or hearing. After sitting a minute or two, the restless but over- fatigued girl rose to go nearer the fall, and I was re marking to myself the sudden heaviness of her steps, when she staggered, and turning toward her compan ion, fell senseless into his arms. The closeness of the air below, combined with over-exertion, had been too much for her. The small hut of an old man who served as a guide stood a little back from the glen, and 1 had rushed into it, and was on the first step of the descent with a flask of spirits, when a cry from the opposite crag, in the husky and choking scream of infuriated passion, suddenly arrested me. On the edge of the yawning chasm, gazing down into it with a livid and death-like paleness, stood the southerner. I mechanically fol lowed his eye. His sister lay on her back upon a flat rock immediately below him, and over her knelt the Englishman, loosening the dress that pressed close upon her throat, and with his face so near to hers as to conceal it entirely from the view. I felt the brother s misapprehension at a glance, but my tongue clung to the roof of my mouth ; for in the madness of his fury he stood stretching clear over the brink, and every instant I looked to see him plunge headlong. Be fore I could recover my breath, he started back, gazed wildly round, and seizing upon a huge fragment of rock, heaved it up with supernatural strength, and hurled it into the abyss. Giddy and sick with horror, I turned away and covered up my eyes. I felt assured he had dashed them to atoms. The lion roar of the Kentuckian was the first sound that followed the thundering crash of the fragments. " Hallo, youngster ! what in tarnation are you arter ? You ve killed the gal, by gosh!" The next moment I heard the loosened stones as he went plunging down into the glen, and hurrying after him with my restorative, I found the poor English man lying senseless on the rocks, and the fainting girl, escaped miraculously from harm, struggling slowly to her senses. On examination, the new sufferer appeared only stunned by a small fragment which had struck him on the temple, and the Kentuckian, taking him up in his arms like a child, strode through the spray of the fall, and held his head under the descending torrent till he kicked lustily for his freedom. With a draught from the flask, the pale Alabamian was soon perfectly restored, and we stood on the rock together looking at each other like people who had survived an earth quake. We climbed the ascent and found the brother lying with his face to the earth, beside himself with hia conflicting feelings. The rough tongue of the Ken tuckian to whom 1 had explained the apparent cause of the rash act, soon cleared up the tempest, and he joined us presently, and walked back by his sister s side in silence. We made ourselves into a party to pass the remain der of the summer on the lakes, unwillingly letting off the Kentuckian, who was in a hurry to get back to propose himself for the legislature. Three or four years have elapsed, and I find myself a traveller in England. Thickly sown as are the wonders and pleasures of London, an occasional din ner with a lovely countrywoman in Square, and a gossip with her husband over a glass of wine, in which Cauterskill Falls are not forgotten, are mem orandums in my diary never written but in "red letters." THE GIPSY OF SAEDIS, . . . . " And thou art far, Asia ! who, when my being overflowed, Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine, Which else had sunk into the thirsty dust." SHELLEY S PKOME OUR tents were pitched in the vestibule of the house of Croesus, on the natural terrace which was once the imperial site of Sardis. A humpbacked Dutch artist, who had been in the service of Lady Hester Stanhope as a draughtsman, and who had lingered about be tween Jerusalem and the Nile till he was as much at home in the east as a Hajji or a crocodile ; an Eng lishman qualifying himself for "The Travellers ;" a Smyrniote merchant in figs and opium ; Job Smith (my inseparable shadow) and myself, composed a party at this time (August, 1834), rambling about Asia Minor in turbans and Turkish saddles, and pitch ing our tents, and cooking our pilau, wherever it pleased Heaven and the inexorable suridji who was our guide and caterer. I thought at the time that I would compound to abandon all the romance of that renowned spot, for a clean shirt and something softer than a marble frustrum for a pillow ; but in the distance of memory, and my- INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. self at this present in a deep morocco chair in the library at " The Travellers ;" the same scene in the ruins of Sardis does not seem destitute of interest. It was about four in the lazy summer afternoon. We had arrived at Sardis at mid-day, and after a quarrel whether we should eat immediately or wait till the fashionable hour of three, the wooden dish con taining two chickens buried in a tumulus of rice, shaped (in compliment to the spirit of the spot) like the Mound of Alyattis in the plain below, was placed | in the centre of a marble pedestal ; and with Job and i the Dutchman seated on the prostrate column dislodged for our benefit, and the remainder of the party squatted in the high grass, which grew in the royal palace as if it had no memory of the foot-prints of the kings of ; Lydia, we spooned away at the saturated rice, and I pulled the smothered chickens to pieces with an inde- [ pendence of knives and forks that was worthy of the 4i certain poor man in Attica." Old Solon himself, who stood, we will suppose, while reproving the osten- j tatious monarch, at the base of that very column now j ridden astride by an inhabitant of a country of which j he never dreamed (at least it strikes me there is no mention of the Yankees in his philosophy) the old I graybeard of the Academy himself, I say, would have \ been edified at the primitive simplicity of our repast. ! The salt (he would have asked if it was Attic) was ; contained in a ragged play-bill, which the Dutchman j had purloined as a specimen of Modern Greek, from the side of a house in Corfu ; the mustard was in a I cracked powder-horn, which had been slung at the breast of old Whalley the regicide, in the American J revolution, and which Job had brought from the Green mountains, and held, till its present base uses, in re ligious veneration ; the ham (I should have mentioned that respectable entremet before) was half enveloped in a copy of the " Morning Post ;" and the bread, which had been seven days out from Smyrna, and had been kept warm in the suridji s saddle bags twelve hours in the twenty-four, lay in disjecta membra around the marble table, with marks of vain but persevering attacks in its nibbled edges. The luxury of our lar der was comprised in a flask which had once held Har vey s sauce, and though the last drop had served as a condiment to a roasted kid some three months before, in the Acropolis at Athens, we still clung to it with affectionate remembrance, and it was offered and re- fused daily around the table for the melancholy pleasure of hearing the mention of its name It was unlucky that the only thing which the place afforded of the best quality, and in sufficient quanities* was precisely ; the one thing in the world for which no individual of ! the party had any particular relish water ! It was I brought in a gourd from the bed of the " golden-sand- ! ed Pactolus," rippling away to the plain within pistol- ; shot of the dining-room ; but, to the shame of our sim- ! plicity I must record, that a high-shouldered Jug of ! the rough wine of Samos, trodden out by the feet of j the lovely slaves of the jEgcan, and bought for a far- j thing the bottle, went oftener to the unclassical lips of the company. Methinks, now (the wind east in Lon don, and the day wet and abominable), I could barter the dinner that I shall presently discuss, with its suite i of sherries and anchovy, to kneel down by that golden i river in the sunshine, and drink a draught of pure lymph under the sky of effeminate Asia. Yet, when I was there so rarely do we recognise happiness till she is gone I wished myself (where I had never been) in " merry England." " Merry," quotha ? Scratch it out, and write comfortable. I have seen none 44 merry" in England, save those who have most cause to be sad the abandoned of themselves and the world ! Out of the reach of ladies and the laws of society, the most refined persons return very much to the na tural instincts from which they have departed in the i progress of civilization. Job rolled off the marble column when there was nothing more to eat, and went to sleep with the marks of the Samian wine turning up the corners of his mouth like the salacious grin of a satyr. The Dutchman got his hump into a hollow, and buried his head in the long grass with the same obe dience to the prompting of nature, and idem the suridji and the fig-merchant, leaving me seated alone among the promiscuous ruins of Sardis and the dinner. The dish of philosophy I had with myself on that occasion will appear as a rechauffe in my novel (I intend to write one) ; but meantime I may as well give you the practical inference ; that, as sleeping after dinner is evidently Nature s law, Washington Irving is highly excusable for the practice, and he would be a friend of reason who should introduce couches and coffee at that somnolent period, the digestive nap taking the place of the indigestible politics usually forced upon the com pany on the disappearance of the ladies. Why should the world be wedded for ever to these bigoted incon veniences ! The grand track from the south and west of Asia Minor passes along the plain between the lofty Acropo lis of Sardis and the tombs of her kings ; and with the snore of travellers from five different nations in my ear, I sat and counted the camels in one of the immense caravans never out of sight in the valley of the Hermus. The long procession of those brown monsters wound slowly past on their way to Smyrna, their enormous burthens covered with colored trap pings and swaying backward and forward with their dis jointed gait, and their turbaned masters dozing on the backs of the small asses of the east, leading each a score by the tether at his back ; the tinkling of their hundred bells swarmed up through the hot air of the afternoon with the drowsiest of monotones ; the native oleanders, slender-leaved and tall, and just now in all their glory, with a color in their bright flowers stolen from the bleeding lips of Houris, brightened the plains of Lydia like the flush of sunset lying low on the earth ; the black goats of uncounted herds browsed along the ancient Sarabat, with their bearded faces turned every one to the faintly coining wind : the eagles (that abound now in the mountains from which Sardis and a hundred silent cities once scared their bold progenitors) sailed slowly and fearlessly around the airy citadel that flung open its gates to the Lacedaemonian ; and, gradually, as you may have lost yourself in this tangled paragraph, dear reader, my senses became confused among the objects it enumerates, and I fell asleep with the speech of Solon in my ears, and my back to the crumbling portico of Croesus. The Dutchman was drawing my picture when I awoke, the sun was setting, and Job and the suridji were making tea. I am not a very picturesque object, generally speaking, but done as a wild Arab lying at the base of a column in a white turban, with a stork s nest over my head, I am not so ill-looking as you would suppose. As the Dutchman drew for gelt, and hoped to sell his picture to some traveller at Smyrna who would take that opportunity to affirm in his book that he had been at Sardis (as vide his own sketch), I do not despair of seeing myself yet in lithograph. And, talking of pictures, I would give something now if I had engaged that hump-backed draughtsman to make me a sketch of Job, squat on his hams before a fire in the wall, and making tea in a tin pot with a " malig nant and turbaned Turk," feeding the blaze with the dry thorn of Syria.* It would have been consolation to his respectable mother, whom he left in the Green mountains (wondering what he could have to do with following such a scapegrace as myself through the * It has the peculiarity of a hooked thorn alternating with the straight, and it is difficult to touch it without lacerating the hands. It is the common thorn of the east, and it is supposed that our Savior s crown at his crucifixion was made of it. 58 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. world), to have seen him in the turban of a Hajji tak ing his tea quietly in ancient Lydia. The green tur ban, the sign of the Hajji, belonged more properly to myself; for though it was Job who went bodily to Jerusalem (leaving me ill of a fig-fever at Smyrna), the sanctity of the pilgrimage by the Mohammedan law falls on him who provides the pilgrim with scallop-shell and sandals, aptly figured forth in this case, we will sup pose, by the sixty American dollars paid by myself for his voyage to Jaffa and back. The suridji was a Hajji, too, and it was amusing to see Job, who respect ed every man s religious opinions, and had a little vanity besides in sharing with the Turk* the dignity of a pilgrimage to the sacred city, washing his knees and elbows at the hour of prayer, and considerately, but very much to his own inconvenience, transferring the ham of the unclean beast from the Mussulman s sad dle-bags to his own. It was a delicate sacrifice to a pagan s prejudices worthy of Socrates or a Christian. II. In all simple states of society, sunset is the hour of better angels. The traveller in the desert remembers his home the sea-tost boy his mother and her last words the Turk talks, for a wonder, and the chatter ing Greek is silent, for the same the Italian forgets his mustache, and hums la patria and the English man delivers himself of the society of his companions, and " takes a walk." It is something in the influences of the hour, and I shall take trouble, some day, to maintain that morn, noon, and midnight, have their ministry as well, and exercise each an unobserved but salutary and peculiar office on the feelings. We all separated " after tea ;" the Suridji was off to find a tethering place for his horses; the Englishman strolled away by himself to a group of the " tents of Kedar" far down in the valley with their herds and herdsmen ; theSmyrniote merchant sat by the camel- track at the foot of the hill waiting for the passing of a caravan; the Green-Mountaineer was wandering around the ruins of the apostolic church; the Dutchman was sketching the two Ionic shafts of the fair temple of Cybele ; and I, with a passion for running water which I have elsewhere alluded to, idled by the green bank of the Pactolus, dreaming sometimes of Gyges and Alexander, and sometimes of you, dear Mary! I passed Job on my way, for the four walls over which the " Angel of the Church of Sardis" kept his brooding watch in the days of the Apocalypse stand not far from the swelling bank of the Pactolus, and nearly in a line between it and the palace of Croesus. I must say that my heart almost stood still with awe as I stepped over the threshold. In the next moment, the strong and never-wasting under-current of early reli gious feeling rushed back on me, and I involuntarily uncovered my head, and felt myself stricken with the spell of holy ground. My friend, who was never with out the Bible that was his mother s parting gift, sat on the end of the broken wall of the vestibule with the sacred volume open at the Revelation in his hand. " I think, Philip," said he, as I stood looking at him in silence, " I think my mother will have been told by an .angel that I am here." He spoke with a solemnity that, spite of every other feeling, seemed to me as weighty and true as prophecy. " Listen, Philip," said he, "it will be something to tell your mother as well as mine, that we have read the Apocalypse together in the Church of Sardis." I listened with what I never thought to have heard The Mussulmans make pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and pray at all the places consecrated to our Savior and the Virgin, ex cept only the tomb of Christ, which they do not acknowledge. They believe that Christ did not die, but ascended alive into heaven , leaving the likeness of his face to Judas, who was crucified for him. in Asia my mother s voice loud at my heart, as I had heard it in prayer in my childhood : " Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments ; and they shall walk with me in white: for they are worthy." I strolled on. A little farther up the Pactolus stood the Temple of Cybele. The church to which " He" spoke " who hath the seven spirits of God and the seven stars," was a small and humble ruin of brick and mor tar ; but, of the temple of the Heathen Mother of the world, remained two fair columns of marble with their curiously carved capitals, and the earth around was strewn with the gigantic frusta of an edifice, stately even in the fragments of its prostration. I saw for a moment the religion of Jupiter and of Christ with the eyes of Crcesus and the philosopher from Athens; and then I turned to the living nations that I had left to wander among these dead empires, and looking still on the eloquent monuments of what these religions were, thought of them as they are, in wide-spread Christendom. We visit Rome and Athens, and walk over the ruined temples of their gods of wood and stone, and take pride to ourselves that our imaginations awake the spirit of the spot." But the primitive church of Christ, over which an angel of God kept watch whose undefiled members, if there is truth in Holy Writ, are now " walking with him in white" before the face of the Almighty a spot on which the Savior and his apos tles prayed, and for whose weal, with the other church es of Asia, the sublime revelation was made to John this, the while, is an unvisited shrine, and the " classic" of pagan idolatry is dearer to the memories of men than the holy antiquities of a religion they profess ! III. The Ionic capitals of the two fair columns of the fallen temple were still tinged with rosy light on the side toward the sunset, when the full moon, rising in the east, burnished the other like a shaft of sil ver. The two lights mingled in the sky in a twilight of opal. " Job," said I, stooping to reach a handful of sand as we strolled up the western bank of the river, " can you resolve me why the poets have chosen to call this pretty stream the golden-sanded Pactolus? Did you ever see sand of a duller gray ?" "As easy as give you a reason," answered Job, " why we found the turbidus Hermus, yesterday, the clearest stream we have forded why 1 am no more beautiful than before, though I have bathed like Ve nus in the Scamander why the pumice of Naxos no longer reduces the female bust to its virgin propor tions and why Smyrna and Malta are not the best places for figs and oranges !" "And why the old king of Lydia, who possessed the invisible ring, and kept a devil in his dog s collar, lies quietly under the earth in the plain below us, and his ring and his devil were not bequeathed to his suc cessors. What a pleasant auxiliary to sin must have been that invisible ring ! Spirit of Gyges, thrust thy finger out of the earth, and commit it once more to a mortal ! Sit down, my dear monster, and let us spec ulate in this bright moonshine on the enormities we would commit !" As Job was proceeding, in a cautious periphrasis, to rebuke my irreverent familiarity with the prince of darkness and his works, the twilight had deepened, and my eye was caught by a steady light twinkling far above us in the ascending bed of the river. The green valley wound down from the rear of the Acropolis, and the single frowning tower stood in broken and strong relief against the sky ; and from the mass of shadow be low peered out, like a star from a cloud-rack, the steady blaze of a lamp. INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. "Aliens! Job !" said I, making sure of an adven ture, " let us see for whose pleasure a lamp is lit in the solitude of this ruined city." " I could not answer to your honored mother," said my scrupulous friend, " if I did not remind you that this is a spot much frequented by robbers, and that probably no honest man harbors at that inconvenient altitude." I made a leap over a half-buried frieze that had served me as a pillow, and commenced the ascent. " I could as ill answer to your anxious parent," said Job, following with uncommon alacrity, " if I did not partake your dangers when they are inevitable." We scrambled up with some difficulty in the dark ness, now rolling into an unseen hollow, now stumbling over a block of marble held fast one moment by the lacerating hooked thorn of Syria, and the next brought to a stand-still by impenetrable thickets of brushwood. \Vith a half hour s toil, however, we stood on a clear platform of grass, panting and hot ; and as I was sug gesting to Job that we had possibly got too high, he laid his hand on my arm, and, with a sign of silence, drew me down on the grass beside him. In a small fairy amphitheatre, half encircled by a bend of the Pactolus, and lying a few feet below the email platform from which we looked, lay six low tents, j disposed in a crescent opposite to that of the stream, and enclosing a circular area of bright and dewy grass, t of scarce ten feet in diameter. The tents were round, ! and laced neatly with wicker-work, with their curtain- j doors opening inward upon the circle. In the largest j one, which faced nearly down the valley, hung a small j iron lamp of an antique shape, with a wick alight in j one of its two projecting extremities, and beneath it swung a basket-cradle suspended between two stakes, I and kept in motion by a woman apparently of about forty, whose beauty, but for another more attractive object, would have rewarded us alone for our toil. The | other tents were closed and seemed unoccupied, but the curtain of the one into which our eyes were now strain ing with intense eagerness, was looped entirely back to give admission to the cool night air; and, in and out, between the light of the lamp and the full moon, stole on naked feet a girl of fifteen, whose exquisite symme try and unconscious but divine grace of movement filled my sense of beauty as it had never been filled by the divinest chisel of the Tribune. She was of the height and mould of the younger water-nymph in Gibson s Hylas,* with limbs and lips that, had I cre ated and warmed her to life like Pygmalion, I should have just hesitated whether or not they wanted anoth- j er half-shade of fulness. The large shawl of the east, which was attached to her girdle, and in more guard- j ed hours concealed all but her eyes, hung in loose folds from her waist to her heels, leaving her bust and smoothly-rounded shoulders entirely bare ; arftl, in strong relief even upon her clear brown skin, the flakes of her glossy and raven hair floated over her back, and swept around her with a grace of a cloud in her indo lent motions. A short petticoat of striped Brusa silk stretched to her knees, and below appeared the full j trowser of the east, (^ the same material, narrowed at the ankle, and bound with what looked in the moon light an anklet of silver. 4t profusion of rings on her fingers, and a gold sequin on her forehead, suspended from a colored fillet, completed her dress, and left nothing to be added by the prude or the painter. She was at that ravishing and divinest moment of female life, when almost the next hour would complete her womanhood like the lotus ere it lays back to the prying moonlight the snowy leaf nearest its heart. A group that will be immortal in the love and wonder of the world, when the divine hand of the English Praxiteles has long passed from the earth. Two more exquisite shapes of women than those lily-crowned nymphs never lay in the womb of marble or human mother. Rome is brighter for them. She was employed in filling a large jar which stood j at the back of the tent, with water from the Pactolus, and as she turned with her empty pitcher, and came j under the full blaze of the lamp in her way outward, treading lightly lest she should disturb the slumber of the child in the cradle, and pressing her two round hands closely to the sides of the vessel, the gradual compression of my arm by the bony hand which still held it for sympathy, satisfied me that my own leaping pulse of admiration found an answering beat in the bosom of my friend. A silent nod from the woman, whose Greek profile was turned to us under the lamp light, informed the lovely water-bearer that her labors I were at an end ; and with a gesture expressive of heat, she drew out the shawl from her girdle, untied the I short petticoat, and threw them aside, and then trip ping out into the moonlight with only the full silken trowsers from her waist to her ankles, she sat down on | the brink of the small stream, and with her feet in the i water, dropped her head on her knees, and sat as mo tionless as marble. " Gibson should see her now," I whispered to Job, "with the glance of the moonlight on that dimpled and polished back, and her almost glittering hair veil ing about her in such masses, like folds of gossamer !" "And those slender fingers clasped over her knees, and the air of melancholy repose which is breathed into her attitude, and which seems inseparable from those indolent Asiatics. She is probably a gipsy." The noise of the water dashing over a small cascade a little farther up the stream had covered our approach and rendered our whispers inaudible. Job s conjecture I was probably right, and we had stumbled on a small encampment of- gipsies the men possibly asleep in those closed tents, or possibly absent at Smyrna. Af- | ter a little consultation, I agreed with Job that it would be impolitic to alarm the camp at night, and resolving on a visit in the morning, we quietly and unobserved withdrew from our position, and descended to our own tents in the ruins of the palace. IV. The suridji had given us our spiced coffee in the small china cups and filagree holders, and we sat dis cussing, to the great annoyance of the storks over our heads, whether we should loiter another day at Sardis, or eat melons at noon at Casabar on our way to Con stantinople. To the very great surprise of the Dutch man, who wished to stay to finish his drawings, Job and myself voted for remaining a view of the subject which was in direct contradiction to our vote of the preceding evening. The Englishman, who was always in a hur ry, flew into a passion, and went off with the phleg matic suridji to look after his horse ; and having dis posed of our Smyrniote, by seeing a caravan (which was not to be seen) coming southward from Mount Tmolus, I and my monster started for the encamp ment of the gipsies. As we rounded the battered wall of the Christian church, a woman stepped out from the shadow ; through a tattered dress, and under a turban of soiled cotton set far over her forehead, and throwing a deep shadow into her eyes, I recognised at once the gipsy woman whom we had seen sitting by the cradle. " Buon giorno, signori," she said, making a kind of salaam, and relieving me at once by the Italian saluta tion of my fears of being unintelligible. Job gave her the good-morning, but she looked at him with a very unsatisfactory glance, and coming I close to my ear, she wished me to speak to her out of the hearing of " il mio domeslico . " "Amico piu (oslo /" I added immediately with a con sideration for Job s feelings, which, I must do myself the justice to say, I always manifested, except in very elegant society. I gave myself the greater credit in 60 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. this case, as, in my impatience to know the nature of the gipsy s communication, I might be excused for caring little at the moment whether my friend was taken for a gentleman or a gentleman s gentleman. The gipsy looked vexed at her mistake, and with a half-apologetic inclination to Job, she drew me into the shade of the ruin, and perused my face with great earnestness. " The same to yourself," thought I, as I gave back her glance, and searched for her meaning in two as liquid and loving eyes as ever looked out of the gates of the Prophet s paradise for the coming of a young believer. It was a face that had been divine, and in the hands of a lady of fashion would have still made a bello rifacimento. " Inglese ?" she said at last. " No, madre Americano." She looked disappointed. " And where are you going, filio mio ?" " To Stamboul." " Benissimo !" she answered, and her face bright ened. " Do you want a servant ?" " Unless it is yourself, no !" " It is my son." It was on my lips to ask if he was like her daughter, but an air of uneasiness and mystery in her manner put me on the reserve, and I kept my knowledge to myself. She persevered in her suit, and at last the truth came out, thai her boy was bound on an errand to Constan tinople, and she wished safe conduct for him. The rest of the troop, she said, were at Smyrna, and she was left in care of the tents with the boy and an infant child. As she did not mention the girl, who, from the resemblance, was evidently her daughter I thought it unwise to allude to our discovery : and- promising that, if the boy was mounted, every possible care should be taken of him, I told her the hour on the following morning when we should be in the saddle, and rid my self of her with the intention of stealing a march on the camp. I took rather a circuitous route, but the gipsy was there before me, and apparently alone. She had sent the boy to the plains for a horse, and though I pre- Bumed that the loveliest creature in Asia was concealed in one or the other of those small tents, the curtains were closely tied, and I could find no apology for in truding either my eyes or my inquiries. The hand some Zingara, too, began to look rather becomingly fiere ; and as I had left Job behind, and was always naturally afraid of a woman, I reluctantly felt myself under the necessity of comprehending her last injunc tion, and with a promise that the boy should join us before we reached the foot of Mount Sypilus, she fair ly bowed me off the premises. I could have forsworn my complexion and studied palmistry for a gipsy, had the devil then tempted me ! We struck our tents at sunrise, and were soon dash ing on through the oleanders upon the broad plain of the Hermus, the dew lying upon their bright vermeil flowers like the pellucid gum on the petals of the ice- plant, and nature, and my five companions, in their gayest humor. I was not. My thoughts were of moonlight and the Pactolus, and two round feet ankle-deep in running water. Job rode up to my " My dear Phil ! take notice that you are nearing Mount Sypilus, in which the magnetic ore was first discovered." " It acts negatively on me, my dear chum ! for I drag a lengthening chain from the other direction." Silence once more, and the bright red flowers still fled backward in our career. Job rode up again. " You must excuse my interrupting your revery, but I thought you would like to know that the town where we sleep to-night is the residence of the beys of Og- lou, mentioned in the Bride of Abydos. " No answer, and the bright red blossoms still flew scattered in our path as our steeds flew through the coppice, and the shovel-like blades of the Turkish stir rups cut into them right and left in the irregular gallop. Job rode again to my side. " My dear Philip, did you know that this town of Magnesia was once the capital of the Turkish empire the city of Timour the Tartar ?" " Well !" "And did you know that when Themistocles was in exile, and Artaxerxes presented him with the tribute of three cities to provide the necessaries of life, Mag nesia* found him in bread?" "And Lampascus in wine. Don t bore me, Job!" We sped on. As we neared Casabar toward noon, and (spite of romance) I was beginning to think with complacency upon the melons, for which the town is famous, a rattling of hoofs behind put our horses upon their mettle, and in another moment a boy dashed into the midst of our troop, and reining up with a fine dis play of horsemanship, put the promised token into my hand. He was mounted on a small Arabian mare, remarkable for nothing but a thin and fiery nostril, and a most lavish action, and his jacket and turban were fitted to a shape and head that could not well be disguised. The beauty of the gipsy camp was beside me ! It was as well for my self-command, that I had sworn Job to secrecy in case of the boy s joining us, and that I had given the elder gipsy, as a token, a very voluminous and closely-written letter of my mother s. In the twenty minutes which the reading of so appa rently "lengthy" a document would occupy, I had leisure to resume my self-control, and resolve on my own course of conduct toward the fair masquerader. My travelling companions were not a litlle astonished to see me receive a letter by courier in the heart of Asia, but that was for their own digestion. All the information I condescended to give, was that the boy was sent to my charge on his road to Constantinople ; and as Job displayed no astonishment, and entered simply into my arrangements, and I was the only per son in the company who could communicate with the suridji (I had picked up a little modern Greek in the Morea), they were compelled (the Dutchman, John Bull, and the fig-merchant) to content themselves with such theories on the subject as Heaven might supply them withal. How Job and I speculated apart on what could be the errand of this fair ..creature to Constantinople how beautifully she rode and sustained her character as a boy how I requested her, though she spoke Italian like her mother, never to open her lips in any Christian language to my companions how she slept at my feet at the khans, and rode at my side on the journey, and, at the end of seven days, -arriving at Scutari, and beholding across the Bosphorus the golden spires of Stamboul, how she looked at me with tears in her unfathomable eyes, and sDurred her fleet Arab to his speed to conceal her emotion, and how 1 felt that I could bury myself with -her in the vizier s tomb we were passing at tlH moment, and be fed on rice with a goule s bodkin, if so alone we might not be parted all these are matters which would make sundry respectable chapters in a novel, but of which you are spared the particulars in a true story. There was a convenience both to the dramatist and the au dience in the " cetera inlus agentur" of the Romans. We emerged from the pinnacled cypresses of the cemetery overlooking Constantinople, and dismount- * Not pronounced as in the apothecary s shop. It is a fine large town at the foot of Mount Sypilus. INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 61 ing from my horse, I climbed upon the gilded turban crowning the mausoleum of a royal Ichoglan (a sul tan s page, honored more in his burial than in his life), and feasted my eyes on the desecrated but princely fair birth-right of the Palaeologi. The Nekropolis the city of the dead on the outermost tomb of whose gloomy precincts I had profanely mounted, stands high and black over the Bosphorus on one side, while on the other, upon similar eminences, stand the gleam ing minarets and latticed gardens of the matchless city of the living as if, while Europe flung up her laugh ing and breathing child to the sun, expiring Asia, the bereaved emperess of the world, lifted her head to the same heavens in majestic and speechless sorrow. But oh! how fairer than Venice in her waters than Florence and Rome in their hills and habitations, than all the cities of the world in that which is most their pride and glory is this fairest metropolis of the Mahomets! With its two hundred mosques, each with a golden sheaf of minarets laying their pointed fingers against the stars, andencircled with the fretted galleries of the callers to prayer, like the hand of a cardinal with its costly ring with its seraglio gardens washed on one side by the sea, and on the other by the gentle stream that glides out of the "Valley of Sweet Waters;" men-of-war on one side, flaunting their red pennants over the nightingale s nest which sings for the delight of a princgss, and the swift caique on the other gliding in protected waters, where the same im prisoned fair one might fling into it a flower (so slen der is the dividing cape that shuts in the bay) with its Bosphorus, its radiant and unmatched Bosphorus the most richly-gemmed river within the span of the sun, extending with its fringe of palaces and castles from sea to sea, and reflecting in its glassy eddies a pomp and sumptuousness of costume and architecture ^ which exceeds even your boyish dreams of Bagdad _and the califs Constantinople, I say, with its tur- baned and bright-garmented population its swarm- ing sea and rivers its columns, and aqueducts, and strange ships of the east is impenetrable seraglio, and its close-shuttered harems its bezestein and its Hippodrome Constantinople lay before me! If the star I had worshipped had descended to my hand out of the sky if my unapproachable and yearning dream of woman s beauty had been bodied forth warm and real if the mining star in the heel of Serpentarius, and the lost sister of the Pleiades had waltzed back together to their places if poets were once more prophets, not felons, and books were read for the good that is in them, not for the evil if love and truth had been seen again, or any impossible or improbable thing had come to pass I should not have felt more thril- lingly than now the emotions of surprise and wonder! While I stood upon the marble turban of theJcho- ^l;ui, my companions had descended the streets of .. SciM-i, and I was left alone with the gipsy. She sat on her Arab with her head bowed to his neck, and when I withdrew my eye from the scene I have faintly described, the tear-drops were glistening in the flow ing mane, and, her bj^ast was heaving under her em broidered jacket \vitUjincontrollable grief. J jumped to the ground, and taking rujrhead between my hands, pressed her wet cheek to my lips. "We part here, signer," said she, winding around her head the masses of hair that had escaped from her turban, and raising herself in the saddle as if to go on. " I hope not, Maimuna!" She bent her moist eyes on me with a look or ear nest inquiry. " You are forbidden to intrust me with your errand to Constantinople, and you have kept your word to your mother. But whatever that errand may be, I hope it does not involve your personal liberty?" She lookedffembarrassed, but did not answer. "You are very young to be trusted so far from your mother, Maimuna !" "Signer, si!" "But I think she can scarce have loved you so well as I do to have suffered you to come here alone !" " She intrusted me to you, signer." I was well reminded of tny promise. I had given my word to the gipsy that I would leave her child at the Persian fountain of Tophana. Maimuna was evidently under a control stronger than the love I half- hoped and half-feared I had awakened. " Andiamo!" she said, dropping her head upon her I bosom with the tears pouring once more over it like rain; and driving her stirrups with abandoned energy into the sides of her Arabian, she dashed headlong down the uneven streets of Scutari, and in a few min utes we stood on the limit of Asia. We left our horses in the "silver city,"* crossing to the "golden" in a caique, and with Maimuna in my j bosom, and every contending emotion at work in my heart, the scene about me still made an indelible im pression on my memory. The star-shaped bay, a mile perhaps in diameter, was one swarm of boats of every most slender and graceful form, the caikjis, in i their silken shirts, and vari-colored turbans, driving j them through the water with a speed and skill which j put to shame the gondolier of Venice, and almost the j Indian in his canoe; the gilded lattices and belvideres of the seraglio, and the cypresses and flowering trees that mingle their gay and sad foliage above them, were already so near that I could count the roses upon the bars, and see the moving of the trees in the evening wind; the muezzins were calling to sunset-prayer, their voices coming clear and prolonged over the water; the men-of-war in the mouth of the Bosphorus were lowering their blood-red flags; the shore we | were approaching was thronged with veiled women, || and bearded old men, and boys with the yellow slipper |j and red scull-cap of the east; and watching our ap- | proach, stood apart, a group of Jews and Armenians, ; marked by their costume for an inferior race, but look ing to my cosmopolite eye as noble in their black robes and towering caps as the haughty Mussulman that stood aloof from their company. We set foot in Constantinople. It was the suburb of Tophana, and the suridji pointed out to Maimuna, as we landed, a fountain of inlaid marble and brass, around whose projecting frieze were traced inscrip tions in the Persian. She sprang to my hand. "Remember, Maimuna!" I said, "that I offer you a mother and a home in another and a happier land. I will not interfere with your duty, but when your errand is done, you may find me if you will. Fare well." With a passionate kiss in the palm of my hand, and one beaming look of love and sorrow in her large and lustrous eyes, the gipsy turned to the fountain, and striking suddenly to the left around the mosque of Sultan Selim, she plunged into the narrow street run ning along the water-side to Galata. VII. We had wandered out from our semi-European, semi-Turkish lodgings on the third morning after our arrival at Constantinople, and picking our way list lessly over the bad pavement of the suburb of Pera, stood at last in the small burying-ground at the sum mit of the hill, disputing amicably upon what quarter of the fair city beneath us we should bestow our share in the bliss of that June morning. "It is a heavenly day," said Job, sitting down un thinkingly upon a large sculptured turban that formed * Galata, the suburb on the European side, was the Chrysop- olis, and Scutari, on the Asian, the Argentopolis of the an cients. INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. fhe head-stone to the grave of some once-wealthy pagan, and looking off wistfully toward the green sum mit of Bulgurlu. The difference between Job and myself was a mania, on his part for green fields, and on mine for human faces. I knew very well that his remark was a leader to some proposition for a stroll over the wilder hills of the Bosphorus, and I was determined that he should enjoy, instead, the pleasure of sympathy in my never- tiring amusement of wandering in the crowded bazars on the other side of the water. The only way to ac complish it, was to appear to yield the point, and then rally upon his generosity. I had that delicacy for his feelings (I had brought him all the way from the Green mountains at my own expense) never to carry my measures too ostentatiously. Job was looking south, and my face was as resolute ly turned north. We must take a caique in any case at Galata (lying just below us) but if we turned the prow south in the first instance, farewell at every stroke to the city ! Whereas a northern course took us straight up the Golden Horn, and I could appear to change my mind at any moment, and land immediate ly in a street leading to the bazars. Luckily, while I was devising an errand to go up the channel instead of down, a small red flag appeared gliding through the forest of masts around the curve of the water-side at Tophana, and, in a moment more, a high-pooped vessel, with the carved railings and outlandish rigging of the ships from the far east, shot out into the middle of the bay with the strong current of the Bosphorus, and squaring her lateen sail, she rounded a vessel lying at anchor with the flag of Palestine, and steered with a fair wind up the channel of the Golden Horn. A second look at her deck disclosed to me a crowd of people, mostly women, standing amid-ships, and the supposition with which I was about inducing Job to take a caique and pull up the harbor after her seemed to me now almost a certainty. " It is a slave-ship from Trebizond, ten to one, my dear Job !" He slid off the marble turban which he had pro faned so unscrupulously, and the next minute we passed the gate that divides the European from the commercial suburb, and were plunging down the steep and narrow straits of Galata with a haste that, to the slippered and shuffling Turks we met or left behind, seemed propably little short of madness. Of a hun dred slender and tossing caiques lying in the disturbed waters of the bay, we selected the slenderest and best manned ; and getting Job in with the usual imminent danger of driving his long legs through the bottom of the egg-shell craft, we took in one of the obsequious Jews who swarm about the pier as interpreters, coiled our legs under us in the hollow womb of the caique, and shot away like a nautilus after the slaver. The deep-lying river that coils around the throbbing heart of Constantinople is a place of as delicate navi gation as a Venetian lagoon on a festa, or a soiree of middling authors. The Turk, like your plain-spoken friend, rows backward, and with ten thousand egg shells swarming about him in every direction, and hi* own prow rounded off in a pretty iron point, an extra piastre for speed draws down curses on the caikji and the Christian dogs who pay him for the holes he lets into his neighbors boats, which is only equalled in bit terness and profusion by the execrations which follow what is called "speaking your mind." The Jew laughed, as Jews do since Shylock, at the misfortunes of his oppressors ; and, in the exercise of his vocation, translated us the oaths as they came in right and left most of them very gratuitous attacks on those (as Job gravely remarked), of whom they could know very little our respected mothers. The slackening vessel lost her way as she got oppo site the bazar of dried fruits, and, as her yards came down by the run, she put up her helm, and ran her towering prow between a piratical-looking Egyptian craft, and a black and bluff English collier, inscribed appropriately on the stern as the " snow-drop" from Newcastle. Down plumped her anchor, and in the next moment the Jew hailed her by our orders, and my conjecture was proved to be right. She was from I Trebizond, with slaves and spices. " What would they do if we were to climb up her side ?" I asked the Israelite. He stretched up his crouching neck till his twisted beard hung clear off like a waterfall from his chin, and looked through the carved railing very intently. " The slaves are Georgians," he answered, after awhile, "and if there were no Turkish purchasers on board, they might simply order you down again." " And if there were " " The women would be considered damaged by a Christian eye, and the slave merchant might shoot you or pitch you overboard." "Is that all?" said Job, evolving his length very deliberately from his coil, and offering me a hand the next moment from the deck of the slaver. Whether the precedence he took in all dangers arose from affec tion for me, or from a praiseworthy indifference to the fate of such a trumpery collection as his own body and limbs, I have never decided to my own satisfac tion. In the confusion of port-officers and boats alongside, all hailing and crying out together, we stood on the outer side of the deck unobserved, and I was soon in tently occupied in watching the surprise and wonder of the pretty toys who found themselves for the first time in the heart of a great city. The owner of their charms, whichever of a dozen villanous Turks I saw about them it might be, had no time to pay them very particular attention, and dropping their dirty veils about their shoulders, they stood open-mouthed and staring ten or twelve rosy damsels in their teens, with eyes as deep as a well, and almost as large and liquid. Their features were all good, their skins without a flaw, hair abundant, and figures of a healthy plump ness looking, with the exception of their eyes, which were very oriental and magnificent, like the great, fat, pie-eating, yawning, boarding-school misses one sees over a hedge at Hampstead. It was delicious to see their excessive astonishment at the splendors of the Golden Horn they from the desert mountains of Georgia or Circassia, and the scene about them (mosques, minarets, people, and men-of-war, all to gether), probably the most brilliant and striking in the world. I was busy following their eyes and trying to divine their impressions, when Job seized me by "the arm. An old Turk had just entered the vessel from the land-side, and was assisting a closely-veiled female to mount after him. Haifa glance satisfied me that it was the Gipsy of Sardis the lovely companion of our journey to Constantinople. " Maimuna !" I exclaimed, darting forward on the instant. A heavy hand struck me backAs I touched her, and as I returned the blow, the swarthy crew of Arabs closed about us, and we were hurried with a most un ceremonious haste to the side of the vessel. J scarce know, between my indignation and the stunning effect of the blow I had received, how I got into the caique, but we were pulling fast up the Golden Horn by the time I could speak, and in half an hour were set ashore on the green bank of the Barbyses, bound on a solita ry ramble up the valley of Sweet Waters. VIII. The art of printing was introduced into the Mo hammedan empire in the reigns of Achmet III. and Louis XV. I seldom state a statistical fact, but this INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. is one I happen to know, and I mention it because the most fanciful and romantic abode with which I am ac quainted in the world was originally built to contain the first printing-press brought from the court of Ver sailles by Mehemet Effendi, ambassador from the "Brother of the Sun." It is now a maison de plais- ancc for the sultan s favorite women, and in all the dreams of perfect felicity which visit those who have once seen it, it rises as the Paradise of retreats from the world. The serai of Khyat-Khana is a building of gold and marble, dropped down unfenced upon the green sward in the middle of a long emerald valley, more like some fairy vision, conjured and forgotten to be dissolved, than a house to live in, real wealher-proof, and to be seen for the value of one and sixpence. The Barbyses falls over the lip of a sea-shell (a marble cascade sculptured in that pretty device), sending up its spray and its perpetual music close under the gilded lattice of the sultana, and following it back with the eye, like a silver thread in a broidery of green velvet, it comes stealing down through miles of the tenderest verdure, without tree or shrub upon its borders, but shut in with the seclusion of an enchanted stream and valley by mountains which rise in abrupt precipices from the edges of its carpet of grass, and fling their irregular shadows across it at every hour save high noon sacred in the east to the sleep of beauty and idleness. In the loving month of May it is death to set foot in the Khyat-Khana. The ascending caique is stopped in the Golden Horn, and on the point of every hill is stationed a mounted eunuch with drawn sabre. The Arab steeds of the sultan are picketed on the low-ly ing grass of the valley, and his hundred Circassians come from their perfumed chambers in the seraglio, and sun their untold loveliness on the velvet banks of the Barbyses. From the Golden Horn to Belgrade, twelve miles of greensward (sheltered like a vein of ore in the bosom of the earth, and winding away after the course of that pebbly river, unseen, save by the eye of the sun and stars), are sacred in this passion- born month from the foot of man, and, riding in their scarlet ai ubas with the many-colored ribands floating back from the horns of their bullocks, and their own snowy veils dropped from their guarded shoulders and deep-dyed lips, wander, from sunrise to sunset, these caged birds of a sultan s delight, longing as wildly (who shall doubt?) to pass that guarded barrier into the forbidden world, as we, who sigh for them without, to fly from falsehood and wrong, and forget that same world in their bosoms! How few are content! How restless are even the most spoiled children of fortune ! How inevitably the heart sighs for that which it has not, even jhough its only want is a cloud on its perpetual sunshine ! We were not of those Job and I for we were of that school of philosophers* who. "had little and wanted nothing ;" but we agreed, as we sat upon the marble bridge sprung like a wind-lifted cobweb over the Barbyses, that \jac envy of a human heart would poison even the content of a beggar ! He is a fool who is sheltered from hunger and cold and still com plains of fortune ; but he is only not a slave or a seraph, who feeling on the innermost fibre of his sensibility the icy breath of malice, utters his eternal malison on the fiend who can neither be grappled with nor avoided. I could make a paradise with loveliness and sunshine, if envy could be forbidden at the gate ! We had walked around the Serai and tried all its entrances in vain, when Job spied, under the shelter of the southern hill, a blood-red fla^ flying at the top of a small tent of the Prophet s green doubtless con cealing the kervas, who kept his lonely guard over the * With a difference. " Nih.il cat, nihil deest," was their motto. precincts. I sent my friend with a " pinch of piastres" to tempt the trowsered infidel to our will, and he soon came shuffling in his tmmilitary slippers, with keys, which, the month before, were guarded like the lamp of Aladdin. We entered. We rambled over the chambers of the chosen houries of the east ; we looked through their lattices, and laid the palms of our hands on the silken cushions dimmed in oval spots by the moisture of their cheeks as they slept ; we could see by the tarnished gold, breast-high at the windows, where | they had pressed to the slender lattices to look forth I upon the valley ; and Job, more watchfully alive to the thrilling traces of beauty, showed me in the dia mond-shaped bars the marks of their moist fingers and the stain as of lips between, betraying where they had clung and laid their faces against the trellis in the indolent attitude of gazers from a wearisome prison. Mirrors and ottomans were the only furniture ; and never, for me, would the wand of Cornelius Agrippa have been more welcome, than to wave back into those senseless mirrors the images of beauty they had lost. I sat down on a raised corner of the divan, probably the privileged seat of the favorite of the hour. Job stood with his lips apart, brooding in speechless poeti- calness on his own thoughts. "Do you think, after all," said I, reverting to the matter-of-fact vein of my own mind, which was para mount usually to the romantic " do you think really, Job, that the Zuleikas and Fatimas who have by turns pressed this silken cushion with their crossed feet were not probably inferior in attraction to the most third-rate belle of New England ? How long would you love a woman that could neither read, nor write, nor think five minutes on any given theme ? The ut most exertion of intellect in the loveliest of these deep- eyed Circassians is probably the language of flowers ; and, good Heavens ! think how one of your della Cruscan sentiments would be lost upon her ! And yet, here you are, ready to go mad with romantic fan cies about women that were never taught even their letters." Job began to hum a stave of his favorite song, which was always a sign that he was vexed and disenchanted of himself. " How little women think," said I, proceeding with my unsentimental vein, while Job looked out of the window, and the kervas smoked his pipe on the sul tana s ottoman " how little women think that the birch and the dark closet, and the thumbed and dog eared spelling-book (or whatever else more refined tor ments their tender years in the shape of education), was, after all, the groundwork and secret of their fas cination over men ! What a process it is to arrive at love! D-o-g, dog c-a-t, cat." If you had not learned this, bright Lady Melicent, I fear Captain Augustus Fitz-Somcrset would never have sat. as I saw him last night, cutting your initials with a dia mond ring on the purple-claret glass which had just poured a bumper to your beauty !" " You are not far wrong," said Job, after a long pause, during which I had delivered myself, unheard, of the above practical apostrophe" you are not far wrong, quoad the women of New England. They would be considerable bores if they had not learned, in their days of bread-and-butter, to read, write, and reason. But, for the women of the softer south and east, I am by no means clear that education would not be inconsistent with the genius of the clime. Take yourself back to Italy, for example, where, for two mortal years, you philandered up and down between Venice and Amalfi, never out of the sunshine or away from the feet of women, and, in all that precious epi sode of your youth, never guilty, I will venture to pre sume, of either suggesting or expressing anew thought. And the reason is, not that the imagination is dull, but INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. that nobody thinks, except upon exigency, in these latitudes. It would be violent and inapt to the spirit of the hour. Indolence, voluptuous indolence of body and mind (the latter at the same time lying broad awake in its chamber, and alive to every pleasurable image that passes uncalled before its windows) is the genius, the only genius, of the night and day. What would be so discordant as an argument by moonlight in the Coliseum ? What so ill-bred and atrocious as the destruction by logic of the most loose-spun theory by the murmuring fountains of the Pamfili ? To live is enough in these lands of the sun. But merely to live, in ours, is to be bound, Prometheus-like, to a rock, with a vulture at our vitals. Even in the most passionate intercourse of love in your northern clime, you read to your mistress, or she sings to you, or you think it necessary to drive or ride ; but I know nothing that would more have astonished your Venetian bionda than, when the lamp was lit in the gondola that you might see her beauty on the lagune in the starless night, to have pulled a book from your pocket, and read even a tale of love from Boccaccio. And that is why I could be more content to be a pipe-bearer in Asia than a schoolmaster in Vermont, or, sooner than a judge s ermine in England, to wear a scrivener s rags, and sit in the shade of a portico, writing love-let ters for the peasant-girls of Rome. Talk of republics your only land of equality is that in which to breathe is the supreme happiness. The monarch throws open his window for the air that comes to him past the brow of a lazzaroni, and the wine on the patrician s lip in toxicates less than the water from the fountain that is free to all, though it gush from the marble bosom of a nymph. If I were to make a world, I would have the climate of Greece, and no knowledge that did not come by intuition. Men and women should grow wise enough, as the flowers grow fair enough, with sunshine and air, and they should follow their instincts like the birds, and go from sweet to sweet with as lit tle reason or trouble. Exertion should be a misde meanor, and desire of action, if it were not too mon strous to require legislation, should be treason to the tate." " Long live King Job!" PART II. I HAD many unhappy thougnts about Maimuna : the g^ince I had snatched on board the Trebizond slaver lc t in my memory a pair of dark eyes full of uneasi ness and doubt, and I knew her elastic motions so well, th*t there was something in her single step as she ca/ie over the gangway which assured me that she waa dispirited and uncertain of her errand. Who was the old Turk who dragged her up the vessel s side with so little ceremony ? What could the child of a gipsy be doing on the deck of a slaver from Trebi zond ? With no very definite ideas as to the disposal of this lovely child should I succeed in my wishes, I had insensibly made up my mind that she could never be happy without me, and that my one object in Constan tinople was to get her into my possession. I had a delicacy in communicating the full extent of my design to Job, for, aside from the grave view he would take of the morality of the step, and her probable fate as a woman, he would have painful and just doubts of my ability to bear this additional demand upon my means. Though entirely dependant himself, Job had that nat ural contempt for the precions metals, that he could not too freely assist any one to their possession who happened to set a value on the amount in his pocket ; and this, I may say, was the one point which, between my affectionate monster and myself, was not discussed as harmoniously as the loves of Corydon and Alexis. The account of his expenditure, which I regularly ex acted of him before he tied on his bandanna at night, was always more or less unsatisfactory ; and though he would not have hesitated to bestow a whole scudo unthinkingly on the first dirty dervish he should meet, he was still sufficiently impressed with the necessity of economy to remember it in an argument of any length or importance : and for this and some other reasons I reserved my confidence upon the intended addition to my suite. Not far from the Burnt Column, in the very heart of Stamboul, lived an old merchant in attar and jessa mine, called Mustapha. Every one who has been at Constantinople will remember him and his Nubian slave in a small shop on the right, as you ascend to the Hippodrome. He calls himself essence-seller to the sultan, but his principal source of profit is the stranger who is brought to his divans by the interpre ters in his pay ; and to his credit be it said, that, for the courtesy of his dealings, and for the excellence of his extracts, the stranger could not well fall into better hands. It had been my fortune, on my first visit to Musta pha. to conciliate his good will. I had laid in my small stock of spice-woods and essences on that occa sion, and the call which I made religiously every time I crossed the Golden Horn was purely a matter of friendship. In addition to one or two trifling pres ents, which (with a knowledge of human nature) I had returned in the shape of two mortal sins a keg of brandy and a flask of gin, bought out of the Eng lish collier lying in the bay in addition to his kind presents, I say, my large-trowsered friend had made me many pressing offers of service. There was little probability, it was true, that I should ever find occa sion to profit by them ; but I nevertheless believed that his hand was laid upon his heart in earnest sin cerity, and in the course of my reflections upon the fate of Maimuna, it had occurred to me more than once that he might be of use in clearing up the mys tery of her motions. "Job!" said I, as we were dawdling along the street of confectioners with our Jew behind us one lovely morning, " I am going to call at Mustapha s." We had started to go to the haunt of the opium- eaters, and he was rather siirprised at my proposition, but, with his usual amiableness (very inconvenient and vexatious in this particular instance), he stepped over the gutter without saying a word, and made for the first turning to the right. It was the first time since we had left New England that I wished myself rid of his company. "But, Job," said I, calling him back to the shady side of the street, and giving him a great lump of candy from the nearest stall (its oriental name, by the way, is "peace-to-your-throat,") "I thought you were bent on eating opium to-day?" My poor friend looked at me for a minute, as if to comprehend the drift of my remark, and as he arrived by regular deduction at the result, I read very clearly in his hideous physiognomy the painful embarrassment it occasioned him. It was only the day before, that, in descending the Bosphorus, we had seen a party of the summary administrators of justice quietly sus pending a Turkish woman and her Greek paramour from the shutters of a chamber-window intercourse with a Christian in that country of liberal legislation being punishable without trial or benefit of dervish. From certain observations on my disposition in the course of my adventures, Job had made up his mind, I well knew, that my danger was more from Delilah than the Philistines ; and while these victims of love were kicking their silken trowsers in the air, I saw, by the look of tender anxiety he cast upon me, from the bottom of the caique, that trie moral in his mind would INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 65 result in an increased vigilance over my motions. While he stood with his teeth stuck full of " peace- j to-your-throat," therefore, forgetting even the instinct of mastication in his surprise and sorrow, I well un derstood what picture was in his mind, and what con struction he put upon my sudden desire to solitude. ! "My dear Philip!" he began, speaking with dif ficulty from the stickiness of the candy in his teeth, i "your respected mother- " At this instant a kervas, preceding a Turk of rank, jostled suddenly against him, and as the mounted Mussulman, with his train of runners and pipe-bearers, came sweeping by, I took the opportunity of Job s surprise to slip past with the rest, and, turning down , an ally, quietly mounted one of the saddle-horses standing for hire at the first mosque, and pursued my way alone to the shop of the attar-merchant. To |; dismount and hurry Mustapha into his inner and pri- , vate apartment, with an order to the Nubian to deny i me to everybody who should inquire, was the work of a minute, but it was scarcely done before I heard Job : breathless at the door. "Ha visto il signore?" he exclaimed, getting to the back of the shop with a single stride. " Effcndi, no!" said the imperturbable Turk, and he laid his hand on his heart, as he advanced, and offered him with grave courtesy the pipe from his lips. The Jew had come puffing into the shop with his slippers in his hand, and dropping upon his hams near j the door, he took off his small g^ray turban, and was wiping the perspiration from his high and narrow fore- j head, when Job darted again into the street with a i sign to him to follow. The look of despair and ex haustion with which he shook out his baggy trowsers : and made after the striding Yankee, was too much | even for the gravity of Mustapha. He laid aside his pipe, and, as the Nubian struck in with the peculiar cackle of his race, I joined myself in their merriment ] with a heartiness to which many a better joke might j have failed to move me. While Mustapha was concluding his laugh between i the puffs of his amber pipe, 1 had thrown myself along p the divan, and was studying with some curiosity the ; inner apartment in which 1 had been concealed. A | curtain of thick but tarnished gold cloth (as sacred j from intrusion in the east as the bolted and barred j doors of Europe) separated from the outer shop a small octagonal room, that, in size and furniture, re- j sembled the Turkish boudoirs, which, in the luxurious ; palaces of Europe, sometimes adjoin a lady s chamber, j The slippered foot was almost buried in the rich car- j pets laid, but not fitted to the floor. The divans were j covered with the flowered and lustrous silk of Brusa, \ and piled with vari-colored cushions. A perpetual j spice-lamp sent up its thin wreaths of smoketo the black and carved ceiling, diffusing through the room a [ perfume which, while it stole to the innermost fibres of the brain with a sense of pleasure, weighed on the j eyelids and relaxed the limbs ; and as the eye became j more accustomed to the dim light which struggled in from a window in the arched ceiling, and dissolved in the luxurious and spicy atmosphere, heaps of the rich shawls of the east became distinguishable with their sumptuous dyes, and, in a corner, stood a cluster of j crystal narghiles, faintly reflecting the light in their; dim globes of rose-water, while costly pipes, silver- mounted pistols, and a rich Damascus sabre in a sheath of red velvet, added gorgeousness to the apart ment. Mustapha was a bit of a philosopher in his way, and he. had made his own observations on the Europeans who came to his shop. The secluded and oriental luxurionsness of the room I have described was one of his lures to that passion for the picturesque which he saw in every traveller; and another was his gigantic Nubian, who, with bracelets and anklets of gold, a 5 white turban, and naked legs and arms, stood always at the door of his shop, inviting the passers-by not to buy essences and pastilles but to come in and take sherbet with his master. You will have been an hour upon his comfortable divans, have smoked a pipe or two, and eaten a snowy sherbet or a dish of rice-paste and sugar, before Mustapha nods to his slave, and pro duces his gold-rimmed jars of essences, from which, with his fat fore-finger, he anoints the palm of your hand, or, with a compliment to the beauty of your hair, throws a drop into the curl on your temples. Meanwhile, as you smoke, the slave lays in the bowl ; of your pipe a small pastille wrapped in gold leaf, from which presently arrives to your nostrils a per fume that might delight a sultan ; and then, from the two black hands which are held to you full of cubical- edged vials with gilded stoppers, you are requested with the same bland courtesy to select such as in size or shape suit your taste and convenience the smallest of them, when filled with attar, worth near a gold piastre. This is not very ruinous, and your next temptation comes in the shape of a curiously-wrought censer, upon the filagree grating of which is laid strips of odorent wood which, with the heat of the coals be neath, give out a perfume like gums from Araby. i This, Mustapha swears to you by his beard, has a spell in its spicy breath provocative as a philtre, and is to be burnt in your lady s chamber. It is worth its I weight in gold, and for a handful of black chips you I are persuaded to pay a price which would freight a caique with cinnamon. Then come bracelets, and amulets, and purses, all fragrant and precious, and, while you hesitate, the Nubian brings you coffee that would open the heart of Shylock, and you drink and purchase. And when you have spent all your money, you go away delighted with Mustapha, and quite per suaded that you are vastly obliged to him. And, all things considered, so you are! When Mustapha had finished his prayers (did I say , that it was noon?) he called in the Nubian to roll up the sacred carpet, and then closing the curtain be- i tween us and the shop, listened patiently to my story of the gipsy, which I told him faithfully from the beginning. When I arrived at the incident on board the slaver, a sudden light seemed to strike upon his mind. "PeUhe, filio mio ! pekhe!" he exclaimed, running his fore-finger down the middle of his beard, and pouring out a volume of smoke from his mouth and nostrils which obscured him for a moment from my sight. (I dislike the introduction of foreign words into a story, but the Turkish dissyllable in the foregoing , sentence is as constantly on an eastern lip as the amber ; of the pipe.) He clapped his hands as I finished my narration, and the Nubian appeared. Some conversation passed between them in Turkish, and the slave tightened his girdle, made a salaam, and taking his slippers at the outer door, left the shop. " We shall find her at the slave-market," said Mus- i started. The thought had once or twice passed through my mind, but I had as often rejected it as impossible. A freeborn Zingara, and on a confiden tial errand from her own mother! I did not see how her freedom, if there were danger, should have been so carelessly put in peril. "And if she is there!" said I; remembering, first, that it was against the Mohammedan law for a Christian to purchase a slave, and next, that the price, if it did not ruin me at once, would certainly leave me in a sit uation rather to lessen than increase my expenses. " I will buy her for you," said Mustapha. The Nubian returned at this moment, and laid at 66 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. meninn) Irad ensconced himself behind a towering heap of folios, and his vexed and impatient pipe-bearer had taken his more humble position on the narrow base of one of the chequered columns which are pe culiar to the bazar devoted to the bibliopolists. As my friend came floundering along " all abroad" with his legs and arms, as usual, 1 contrived, by an adroit insertion of one of my feet between his, to spread him over the musty tomes of the Armenian in away calcu lated to derange materially the well-ordered sequence of the volumes. into a silk shirt, big trowsers, jacket, and slippers, and || " Allah ! Mashallah !" exclaimed Mustapha, whose stood up to look at myself in tho minor. I was as ; spreading lap was filled with black-letter copies of the my feet a bundle of wearing apparel. He then took from a shelf a shaving apparatus, with which he pro ceeded to lather my forehead and temples, and alter a short argument with Mustapha, in which I pleaded in vain for two very seducing clusters of curls, those caressed minions dropped into the black hand of the slave, and nothing was left for the petits soins of my thumb and fore-finger in their leisure hours save a \ well-coaxed and rather respectable mustache. A I scull-cap and turban completed the transformation of j my head, and then, with some awkwardness, I got j like one of the common Turks of the street as possi- j ble, save that the European cravat and stockings had preserved an unoriental whiteness in my neck and ankles. This was soon remedied with a little brown juice, and after a few cautions from Mustapha as to my behavior, I settled my turban and followed him into the street. It is a singular sensation to be walking about in a strange costume, and find that nobody looks surprised. I could not avoid a slight feeling of mortification at the rude manner with which every dirty mussuhnan took the wall of me. After long travel in foreign lands, the habit of everywhere exciting notice as a stranger, and the species of consequence attached to the person and movements of a traveller, become rather pleasures than otherwise, and it is not without pain that one finds oneself once more like common people. I have not yet returned to my own land (Slingsby is an American, gentle reader), and can not judge, therefore, how far this feeling is modified by the pleasures of a recovered home; but I was vexed not to be stared at when playing the Turk at Con stantinople, and, amusing as it was to be taken for an Englishman on first arriving in England (different as it is from every land I have seen, and still more differ ent from my own), I must confess to have experienced again a feeling of lessened consequence, when, on my first entrance into an hotel in London, I was taken for an Oxonian, " come up for a lark" in term-time. Per haps I have stumbled in this remark upon one of those unconfessed reasons why a returned traveller is pro verbially discontented with his home. Whether Mustapha wished to exhibit his new pipe- bearer to his acquaintances, or whether there was fun enough in his obese composition to enjoy my difficul ties in adapting myself to my new circumstances, I can not. precisely say ; but I soon found that we were not going straight to the slave-market. I had several times forgotten my disguise so far as to keep the nar row walk till I stood face to face with the bearded Mussulmans, who were only so much astonished at my audacity that they forgot to kick me over the gutter; and passing, in the bazar of saddle-cloths, an Eng lish officer of my acquaintance, who belonged to the corvette lying in the Bosphorus, I could not resist the temptation of whispering in his ear the name of his sweetheart (which he had confided to me over a bot tle at Smyrna), though I rather expected to be seized by the turban the next moment, with the pleasant con sequences of a mob and an exposure. My friend was so thoroughly amnzed, however, that I was deep in the crowd before he had drawn breath, and I look daily now for his arrival in England (I have not seen him since), with a curiosity to know how he supposes a "blackguard Turk" knew anything of the lock of hair he carried in his waistcoat pocket. The essence-seller had stopped in the book-bazar, and was condescendingly smoking a pipe, with his legs crossed on the counter of a venerable Armenian, who sat buried to the chin in his own wares, when who should co me. pottering along (as Mrs. Butler would say) but Job with his Jew behind him. Mustapha Khoran, while the bowl of his pipe was buried in the fallen pyramid. " Bestia Inglese !" muttered the Armenian, as Job put one hand in the inkstand in endeavoring to rise, and with the next effort laid his blackened fingers on a heap of choice volumes bound in snowy vellum. The officious Jew took up the topmost copy, marked like a cinq-foil with his spreading thumb and fingers, and quietly asked the Armenian what il signore would be expected to pay. As I knew he had no money in his pocket, I calculated safely on his new embarrass ment to divert his anger from the original cause of his overthrow. u Tre colonati," said the bookseller. Job opened the book, and his well-known guttural of surprise and delisht assured me that I might come out from behind the column and look over his shoul der. It was an illuminated copy of Hafiz, with a Latin translation a treasure which his heart had been set upon from our first arrival in the east, and for which I well knew he would sell his coat off his back without hesitation. The desire to give it him passed through my mind, but 1 could see no means, under my present circumstances, either of buying the book or relieving him from his embar rassment ; and as he buried his nose deeper between the leaves, and sat down on the low counter, forget ful alike of his dilemma and his lost friend, I nod ded to Mustapha to get off as quietly as possible, and, fortunately slipping past both him and the Jew unrecognised, left him to finish the loves of Gulistan and settle his account with the incensed Armenian. II. As we entered the gates of the slave-market, Mus tapha renewed his cautions to me with regard to my conduct, reminded me that, as a Christian, [ should see the white female slaves at the peril of my life, and imme diately assumed, himself, a sauntering w\poco-curante manner, equally favorable to concealment and to his interests as a purchaser. I followed close at his heels with his pipe, and, as he stopped to chat with his ac quaintances, I now and then gave a shove with the bowl between his jacket and girdle, rendered impatient to the last degree by the sight of the close lattices on every side of us, and the sounds of the chattering voices within. I should have been interested, had I been a mere spectator, in the scene about me, but Musiapha s unne cessary and provoking delay, while (as I thought pos sible, ifshe really were in the market), Mairnuna might be bartered for at that moment within, wound my rage to a pitch at last scarcely endurable. We had come up from a cellar to which one of Mus- tapha s acquaintances had taken him to see a young white lad he was about to purchase, and I was hoping that my suspense was nearly over, when a man came for ward into the middle of the court, ringing a hand-bell, and followed by a black girl, covered with a scant blank et. Like most of her lace (she was an Abyssinian), her (probably unwilling to be seen smoking with an Ar- ii head was that of a brute, but never were body and limbs INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 67 more exquisitely moulded. She gazed about without |i either surprise or shame, stepping after the crier with | an elastic, leopard-like tread, her feet turned in like j those of the North American Indian, her neck bent gracefully forward, and her shoulders and hips working with that easy play so lost in the constrained dress and motion of civilized women. The Mercury of Giovanni j di Bologna springs not lighter from the jet of the foun- j tain than did this ebon Venus from the ground on which j she stood. I ventured to whisper to Mustapha, that, under cover j of the sale of the Abyssinian, we might see the white | slaves more unobserved. A bid was made for her. " Fifteen piastres !" said the attar-seller, wholly ab- ! sorbed in the sale, and not hearing a syllable I said to him, " She would be worth twice as much to gild my pastilles !" And handing me his pipe, he waddled into the centreof the court, lifted the blanket from theslave s i shoulders, turned her round and round, like a Venus on a pivot, looked at her teeth and hands, and after a conversation aside with the crier, he resumed his pipe, and the black disappeared from the ground. " I have bought her !" he said, with a salacious grin, j as I handed him his tobacco-bag, and muttered a round j Italian execration in his ear. The idea that Maimuna might have become the property of that gross and sensual monster just as easily as the pretty negress he had brought, sent my blood | boiling for an instant to my cheek. Yet I had seen this poor savage of seventeen sold without a thought, save mental congratulation that she would be better fed and clad. What a difference one s private feelings make in one s sympathies ! I was speculating, in a kind of tranquil despair, on the luxurious evils of slavery, when Mustapha called to him an Egyptian, in a hooded blue cloak, whom I re membered to have seen on board the Trebisondian. He was a small-featured, black-lipped, willowy Asiatic, with heavv-lidded eyes, and hands as dry and rusty as the claws of a harpy. After a little conversation, he rose from the platform on which he had crossed his legs, and taking my pro-tempore master by the sleeve, traversed the quadrangle to a closed door in the best- looking of the miserable houses that surrounded the court. 1 followed close upon his heels with a beating heart. It seemed to me as if every eye in the crowded market-place must penetrate my disguise. He knock ed, and answering to some one who spoke from within, the door was opened, and the next moment I found my self in the presence of a dozen veiled women, seated in various attitudes on the floor. At the command of our conductor, carpets were brought for Mustapha and him self; and, as they dropped upon their hams, every veil was removed, and a battery of staring and unwinking eyes was levelled full upon us. 4i Is she here?" said Mustapha to me in Italian, as I stooped over to hand him his eternal pipe. " Dio mio ! no !" I felt insulted, that with half a glance at the Circas sian and Georgian dolls sitting before us, he could ask me the question. Yet they were handsome! Red cheeks, white teeth, black eyes, and youth could scarce compose a plain woman ; and thus much of beauty seemed equally bestowed on all. " Has he no more ?" I asked, stooping to Mus- tapha s ear. I looked around while he was getting the informa tion I wanted in his own deliberate way ; and, scarce knowing what I did, applied my eye to a crack in the wall, through which had been coming, for some time a strong aroma of coffee. I saw at first only a small dim room, in the midst of which stood a Turkish manghal, or btazier of coals, sustaining the coffee-pot from which came the agreeable prefume I had inhaled. As my eye became accustomed to the light, I could distinguish a heap of what I took to be shawls lying in the centre of the floor; and presuming it was the dormitory of one of the slave-owners, I was about turning my head away, when the coffee on the manghal suddenly boiled over, and at the same instant started, from the heap at which I had been gazing, the living form of Maimuna! " Mustapha !" 1 cried, starting back, and clasping my hands before him. Before I could utter another word, a grasp upon my ankle, that drew blood with every nail, restored me to my self-possession. The Circassians began to giggle, and the wary old Turk, taking no apparent notice of my agitation, ordered me, in a stern tone, to fill his pipe, and went on conversing with the. Egyptian. I leaned with an effort at carelessness against the wall, and looked once more through the crevice. She stood by the manghal, filling a cup with a small fila gree-holder from the coffee-pot, and by the light of the fire I could see every feature of her face as distinctly as daylight. She was alone, and had been sitting with her head on her knees, and the shawl, which had now fallen to her shoulders, drawn over her till it con cealed her feet. A narrow carpet was beneath her, and as she moved from the fire, a slight noise drew my attention downward, and I saw that she was chained by I the ankle to the floor. I stooped to the ear of Mus- j tapha, told him in a whisper of my discovery, and im plored him, for the love of Heaven, to get admission into her apartment. " Pclchc ! pekhe ! filio mio /" was the unsatisfactory I answer to my impatience, while the Egyptian rose and i proceeded to turn around, in the light of the window, the fattest of the fair Circassians, from whom he had ! removed every article of dress save her slippers and trousers. I returned to the crevice. Maimuna had drunk her ; coffee, and stood, with her arms folded, thoughtfully gazing on the, fire. The expression in her beautiful and youthful face was one I could scarcely read to my 1 satisfaction. The slight lips were firmly but calmly ; compressed, the forehead untroubled, the eye alone 1 strained, and unnaturally fixed and lowering. I j looked at her with the heart beating like a hammer in | my bosom, and the impatience in my trembling limbs which it required every consideration of prudence to ! suppress. She moved slowly away at last, and sink ing again to her carpet, drew out the chain from be neath her, and drawing the shawl once more over her head, lay down, and sunk apparently to sleep. Mustapha left the Circassian, whose beauties he had risen to examine more nearly, and came to my side. " Are you sure that it is she?" he asked, in an al most inaudible whisper. " Si ." He took the pipe from my hand, and requested me, | in the same suppressed voice, to return to his shop. " And Maimuna" His only answer was to point to the door, and think ing it best to obey his orders implicity, I made the best of my way out of the slave-market, and was soon drinking a sherbet in his inner apartment, and listen ing to the shuttle of every passing slipper for the com ing of the light step of the gipsy. III. The rules of good-breeding discountenance in socie ty what is usually called " a scene." I detest it as well on paper. There is no sufficient reason, appa rent to me, why my sensibilities should be draw.i upon at siht, as I read, any more than when I plep^e myself by following my own devices in compary. Violent sensations are, abstractly as well as conventionally, ill-bred. They derange the serenitv, fluster the man ner, and irritate the complexion, it is for this reason that I forbear to describe the meeting between Maimu- INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. na and myself after she had been bought for forty pounds by the wily and worthy seller of essences and pastilles how she fell on my neck when she discovered that I, and not Mustapha, was her purchaser and mas ter how she explained, between her hysterical sobs, that the Turk who had sold her to the slave-dealer was a renegade gipsy, and her mother s brother (to whom she had been on an errand of affection) and how she sobbed herself to sleep with her face in the palms of my hands, and her masses of raven hair covering my knees and feet like the spreading fountains of San Pie- tro and how I pressed my lips to the starry parting of those raven tresses on the top of her fairest head, and blessed the relying child as she slept are circum stances, you will allow, my dear madam T that could not be told passably well without moving your amiable tenderness to tears. You will consider this paragraph, therefore, less as an ingenious manner of disposing of the awkward angles of my story, than as a polite and praise-worthy consideration of your feelings and com plexion. Flushed eyelids are so very unbecoming ! My confidential interviews with Job began to take rather an unpleasant coloring. The forty pounds I had paid for Maimuna s liberty, with the premium to Mustapha, the suit of European clothes necessary to disguise my new companion, and the addition of a third person in our European lodgings at Pera, rather drove my finances to the wall. Job cared very little for the loss of his allowance of pocket-money, and made no resistance to eating kibaubs at a meat-shop, instead of his usual silver fork and French dinner at Madame Josepino s. He submitted with the same resignation to a one-oared caique on the Bosphorus, and several minor reductions in his expenses, thinking nothing a hardship, in short, which I shared cheerfully with him. He would have donned the sugar-loaf hat of a dervish, and begged his way home by Jerusalem or Mecca, so only I was content. But the morality of the thing ! "What will you do with this beautiful girl when you get to Rome ? how will you dispose of her in Paris ? how will your friends receive a female, already arrived at the age of womanhood, who shall have travelled with you two or three years on the continent ? how will you provide for her? how educate her? how rid yourself of her, with any Christian feeling of com passion, when she has become irrevocably attached to you?" We were pulling up to the Symplegades while my plain-spoken Mentor thrust me these home questions, and Maimuna sat coiled between my feet in the bottom of the caique, gazing into my face with eyes that seemed as if they would search my very soul for the cause of my emotion. We seldom spoke English in her presence, for the pain it gave her when she felt excluded from the conversation amounted in her all- expressive features to a look of anguish that made it seem to me a cruelty. She dared not ask me, in words, why I was vexed ; but she gathered from Job s tone that there was reproof in what he said, and flashing a glance of inquiring anger at his serious face, she gently stole her hand under the cloak to mine, and laid the back of it softly in my palm. There was a delicacy and a confidingness in the motion that started a tear into my eye ; and as I smiled through it, and drew her to me and impressed a kiss on her fore head, I inwardly resolved, that, as long as that lovely creature should choose to eat of my bread, it should be free to her in all honor and kindness, and, if need were, I would supply to her, with the devotion of my life, the wrong and misconstruction of the world. As I turned over that leaf in my heart, there crept through it a breath of peace, and I felt that my good angel had taken me into favor. Job began to fumble for the lunch, and the dancing caique shot forth mer rily into the Black sea. "My dearest chum!" said I, as we sat round our brown paper of kibaubs on the highest point of the Symplegades, "you see yourself here at the outer most limit of your travels." His mouth was full, but as soon as he could con veniently swallow, he responded with the appropriate sigh. " Six thousand miles, more or less, lie between you and your spectacled and respectable mother; but nineteen thousand, the small remainder of the earth s I circumference, extending due east from this paper of | cold meat, remain to you untravelled !" Job fixed his eye on a white sea-bird apparently asleep on the wing, but diving away eastward into the sky, as if it were the heart within us sped onward with our boundless wishes. "Do you not envy him?" he asked enthusiastically. "Yes; for nature pays his travelling expenses, and I would our common mother were as considerate to me ! How soon, think you, he will see Trebisond, ! posting at that courier speed ?" " And Shiraz, and Isaphan, and the valley of Cash- ! mere! To think how that stupid bird will flyover I them, and, spite of all that Hafiz, and Saadi, and Tom I Moore, have written on the lands that his shadow may glide throught, will return, as wise as he went, to Marmora ! To compound natures with him were a nice arrangement, now!" "You would be better looking, my dear Job!" " How very unpleasant you are, Mr. Slin^sby ! But really, Philip, to cast the slough of this expensive and j il-locomotive humanity, and find yourself afloat with I all the necessary apparatus of life stowed snugly into breast and tail, your legs tucked quietly away under you, and, instead of coat and unmentionables to be put off and on and renewed at such inconvenient expense, a : self-renewing tegument of cleanly feathers, brushed j and washed in the common course of nature by wind | and rain no valet to be paid and drilled no dressing- case to be supplied and left behind no tooth-brushes to be mislaid no tight boots no corns no passports nor host-horses! Do you know, Phil, on reflection, I find this mortal coil a very inferior and inconvenient apparatus!" "If you mean your own, I quite agree with you." "I am surprised, Mr. Slingsby, that you, who value yourself on knowing what is due from one highly- civilized individual to another, should indulge in these very disagreeable reflections!" Maimuna did not quite comprehend the argument, | but she saw that the tables were turned, and, without j ill-will to Job, she paid me the compliment of always I taking my side. I felt her slender arm around my j neck, and as she got upon her knees behind me and put forward her little head to get a peep at my lips, her clear bird-like laugh of enjoyment and triumph added visibly to my friend s mortification. A compunctious visiting stole over me, and I began to feel that I should j scarce have revenged myself for what was, after all, but a kind severity. "Do you know, Job," said I (anxious to restore his self-complacency without a direct apology for my ruda- ness), "do you know there is a very deep human truth I hidden in the familiar story of * Beauty and the Beast ? ! I really am of opinion, that, between the extremes of | hideousness and the highest perfection of loveliness, there is no face which, after a month s intercourse, does not depend exclusively on its expression (or, in other words, on the amiable qualities of the individual) for the admiration it excites. The plainest features become handsome unaware when associated only with kind feelings, and the loveliest face disagreeable when linked with ill-humor or caprice. People should re- INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. member this when selecting a face which they are to | Perhaps nothing would he so contradictory as the true see every morning across the breakfast-table for the re- [j analysis of the character of what is called an indolent mainder of their natural lives. Job was appeased by the indirect compliment con tained in this speech: and, gathering tip our kibauhs. we descended to the caique, and pulling aroun.l tin- easternmost point of the Symplegades, bade adieu to the orient, and took the first step westward with the smile of conciliation on our lips. We were soon in the strong current of the Bospho- rus, and shot swiftly down between Europe and Asia, by the light of a sunset that seemed to brighten the west for our return. It was a golden path homeward. The east looked cold behind ; and the welcome of our far-away kinsmen seemed sent to us on those pur pling clouds, winning us back. Beneath that kindling horizon below that departed sun lay the fresh and free land of our inheritance. The light of the world seemed gone over to it. These, from which the day had declined, were countries of memory ours, of hope. The sun, that was setting on these, was dawn ing gloriously on ours. On ordinary occasions. Job would have given me a stave of "Hail Columbia!" after such a burst of pa triotism. The cloud was on liis soul, however. With all the tastes I have just professed, my j strongest feeling on leaving the Symplegades, for ex- amplf, was, and is still, an unwillingness to retrace my steps. Onward! onward! is the perpetual cry of my heart. I could pass my life in going from land to land, so only that every successive one was new. Italy will be old to us ; France, Germany, can scarce lure the imagination to adventure, with the knowledge we have: and England, though we have not seen it, is so familiar to us from its universality that it will not seem, even on a first visit, a strange country. We have sa tiety before us, and the thought saddens me. I hate to go back. I could start now, with Maimuna for a guide, and turn gipsy in the wilds of Asia." "Will you go with him, Maimuna?" " Signor, no /" I am the worst of story-tellers, gentle reader; for I never get to the end. The truth is, that in these ram bling papers, I go over the incidents I describe, not as they should be written in a romance, but as they oc curred in my travels : I write what I remember. There are, of course, long intervals in adventure, filled We have turned to go back," he said, in a kind of sometimes by feasting or philosophy, sometimes 1 up with musing bitterness, "and see what we are leaving be hind ! In this fairy-shaped boat you are gliding like a . . dleness or love; and, to please myself, I must un weave the thread as it was woven. Jt is strange how, y-sna] dream down the Bosphorus. The Therapia yonder is fringed for miles with the pleasure- i important things are the best remembered. You may liore of i 1 tne memory of a traveller, the most wayside and un loving inhabitants of this delicious land, who think a have stood Parthenon, and, looking back upon life too short, of which the highest pleasure is to ram- tl through the distance of years, a chance word of the ble on the edge of these calm waters with their kins men and children. Is there a picture in the wotld more beautiful than that palace-lined shore? Is there companion who happened to be with you, or the atti tude of a Greek seen in the plain below, may come up more vividly to the recollection than the immortal city so magnificent under the sun as that in which it sculptures on the frieze. There is a natural antipathy in the human mind to fulfil expectations. We wander from the thing we are told to admire, to dwell on something we have discovered ourselves. The child terminates? Are there softer skies, greener hills, simpler or better people, to live among, than these? Oh, Philip! ours, with all its freedom, "is a worki day land. There is no idleness there ! The sweat is in church occupies itself with the fly on its prayer- ever on the brow, the serpent of care never loosened book < and " the chlld 1S father of the man " If 1 in " about the heart 1 I confess mvself a worshipper of dulge in llie same perversity in story-telling, dear leisure: I would let no moment of my golden youth i reader if, in the most important crisis of my tale, I go by unrecorded with a pleasure. Toil is ungo dlike, digress to some trifling vein of speculation if, at the close even, the climax seem incomplete, and the moral and unworthy of the immortal spirit, that should walk unchained through the world. I love these idleorien vain 1 plead, upon all these counts, an adherence to tals. Their sliding and haste-forbidding slippers, their iriith and nature. Life real life is made up oj half- flowing and ungirded habiliments, are signs most ex pressive of their joy in life. Look around, and see : how on every hill-top stands a maison de plaisance ; : ridiculous and the trifling, and at the end, oftenest left imperfect. Who ever saw, oft the stage, a five-act tragedy, with its proprieties and its climax? finished romance. The most interesting procession of events is delayed, and travestied, and mixed with the how every hill-tide is shelved into those green plat forms,* so expressive of their habits of enjoyment! Rich or poor, their pleasures are the same. The open air, freedom to roam, a caique at the water-side, and a sairgah on the hill these are their moans of happiness, and they are within the reach of all ; they are nearer U lopia than we, my dear Philip ! We shall be more like Turks than Christians in paradise!" " Inglorious Job!" "Why? Because I love idleness? Are there braver people in the world than the Turks? Are PART III. TEN o clock A. M., and the weather like the prophet s paradise, " Warmth without heat, and coolness without cold." Madame Josepino stood at the door of her Turco-Ital- there people more capable of the romance of heroism? Energy, though it sound a paradox, is the child of . ian boarding-house in the nasty and fashionable main idleness. All extremes are natural and easy; and the ! street of Pera, dividing her attention between a hand- most indolent in peace is likely to be the most fiery in | some Armenian, with a red button in the top of his war. Here we are, opposite the summer serai of Sul- black lamb s-wool cap,f and her three boarders, Job tan Mahmoud; and who more luxurious and idle? Yet the massacre of the Janissaries was one of the boldest measures in history. There is the most per fect orientalism in the description of the Persian beauty byllafiz:- Her heart is full of passion, and her eyes are full of sleep. * All around Constantinople are seen what are called sair- Kahs small greensward platforms levelled in the side of a hill, and usually commanding some lovely view, intended as spots ou which those who are abroad for pleasure may spread Maimuna, and myself, at that critical moment about mounting our horses for a gallop to Belgrade. their carpets. I know nothing so expressive as this of the simple and natural lives led by these gentle orientals. t The Armenians at Constantinople are despised by the Turks, and tacily submit, like the Jews, to occupy a degraded position as a people. A few, however, are employed as in terpreters by the embassies, and these are allowed to wear the mark of a red worsted button in the high black cap of the race a distinction which just serves to make them the great est possible coxcombs. 70 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. We kissed our hands to the fat and fair Italian, and with a promise to be at home for supper, kicked our shovel-shaped stirrups into the sides of our horses, and pranced away up the street, getting many a glance of curiosity, and one or two that might be more freely translated, from the dark eyes that are seen day and night at the windows of the leaden-colored houses of ! the Armenians. We should have been an odd-looking cavalcade for | the Boulevard or Bond street, but, blessed privilege of j the east ! we were sufficiently comine il fauL for Pera. To avoid the embarrassment of Maimuna s sex, I had dressed her, from an English "slop-shop" at. Galata, in the checked shirt, jacket, and trowsers of a sailor- boy, but as she was obstinately determined that her | long black hair should not be shorn, a turban was her only resource for concealment, and the dark and { glossy mass was hidden in the folds of an Albanian shawl, forming altogether as inharmonious a costume as could well be imagined. With the white duck trowsers tight over her hips, and the jacket, which was j a little too large for her, loose over her shoulders and breast, the checked collar tied with a black silk cravat | close round her throat, and the silken and gold fringe j of the shawl flowing coquetishly over her left cheek j and ear, she was certainly an odd figure on horseback, , and, but for her admirable riding and excessive grace of ! attitude, she might have been as much a subject for a j caricature as her companion. Job rode soberly along at her side, in the green turban of a Hajji (which he had persisted in wearing ever since his pilgrimage to ; Jerusalem), and, as he usually put it on askew, the ; gaillard and rakish character of his head-dress, and j the grave respectability of his black coat and salt-arid- pepper trowsers, produced a contrast which elicited a smile even from the admiring damsels at the win- j dows. Maimuna went caracoling along till the road entered the black shadow of the cemetery of Pera, and then, pulling up her well-managed horse, she rode close to my side, with the air of subdued respect which was more fitting to the spirit of the scene. It was a lovely morning, as I said, and the Turks, who are early risers, were sitting on the graves of their kindred with then- veiled wives and children, the marble turbans in that thickly-sown nekropolis\ess numerous than those of the living, who had come, not to mourn the dead who lay beneath, but to pass a day of idleness and pleasure on the spot endeared by their memories. " I declare to you," said Job, following Maimtrna s example in waiting till I came up, " that I think the Turks the most misrepresented and abused people on earth. Look at this scene ! Here are whole families seated upon graves over which the grass grows green and fresh, the children playing at their feet, and their own faces the pictures of calm cheerfulness and enjoy ment. They are the by-word for brutes, and there is not a gentler or more poetical race of beings between the Indus and the Arkansas !" It was really a scene of great beauty. The Turkish tombs are as splendid as white marble can make them, with letters and devices in red and gold, and often the most delicious sculptures, and, with the crowded close ness of the monuments, the vast extent of the burial- ground over hill and dale, and the cypresses (nowhere so magnificent) veiling all in a deep religious shadow, dim, and yet broken by spots of the clearest sunshine, a more impressive and peculiar scene could scarce be imagined. It might exist in other countries, but it would be a desert. To the Mussulman death is not repulsive, and he makes it a resort when he would be happiest. At all hours of the day you find the tombs of Constantinople surrounded by the living. They spread their carpets, and arrange their simple repast around the stone which records the name and virtues of their own dead, and talk of them as they do of the living and absent parted from them to meet again, if not in life, in paradise. " For my own part," continued Job, " I see nothing in scripture which contradicts the supposition that we shall haunt, in the intermediate state between death and heaven, the familiar places to which we have been accustomed. In that case, how delightful are the hab its of these people, and how cheeringly vanish the hor rors of the grave ! Death, with us, is appalling ! The smile has scarce faded from our lips, the light scarce dead in our eye, when we are thrust into a noisome vault, and thought of but with a shudder and a fear. We are connected thenceforth, in the memories of our friends, with the pestilent air in which we lie, with the vermin that infest the gloom, with dullness, with dark ness, with disease; and, memento as it is of their own coming destiny, what wonder if they chase us, and the forecast shadows of the grave, with the same hurried disgust from their remembrance. Suppose, for an iii- stant (what is by no means improbable), that the j spirits of the dead are about us, conscious and watch ful ! Suppose that they have still a feeling of sympa- ! thy in the decaying form they have so long inhabited, | in its organs, its senses, its once- ad mired and long- ! cherished grace and proportion; th;U they feel the ! contumely and disgust with which the features we pro- j fessed to love are cast like garbage inlo the e;;rth, and the indecent haste with which we turn away from the solitary spot, and think of it but as the abode of iester- ! ing and revolting corruption ! At this moment we turned to the left, descending to the Bosphorus, and Maimuna, who had ridden a little ! in advance during Job s unintelligible monologue, came > galloping back to tell us that there was a corpse in the road. We quickened our p;tee, and the next moment our horses started aside from the bier, left in a bend of the highway with a single individual, the grave-digger, sitting cross-legged beside it. Without looking up at our approach, the man mumbled something between his teeth, and held up his hand as if t8 arrest us in our path. "What does he say ?" I asked of Maimuna. " He repeats a verse of the Koran," she replied, "which promises a reward in paradise to him who bears the dead forty steps on its way to the grave." Job sprang instantly from his horse, threw the bridle over the nearest tombstone, and made a sign to the grave-digger that he would officiate as bearer. The man nodded assent, but looked down the road without arising from his seat. "You are but three," said Maimuna, "and he waits for a fourth." I had dismounted by this time, not to be behind my friend in the humanities of life, and the grave digger, seeing that we were Europeans, smiled with a kind of pleased surprise, and uttering the all expressive " Pekkhe /" resumed his look-out for the fourth bearer. The corpse was that of a poor old man. The cof fin was without a coyer, and he lay in it, in his turban and slippers, his hands crossed over his breast, and the folds of his girdle stuck full of flowers. He might have been asleep, for any Ipok of death about him. His lips were slightly unclosed, and his long beard was combed smoothly over his breast. The odor of the pipe and the pastille struggled with the perfume of the flowers, and there was in his whole aspect a life-like ness and peace, that the shroud and the close coffin, and the additional horrors of approaching death, per haps, combine, in other countries, utterly to do away. " Hitherto," said Job, as he gazed attentively on the calm old man, " I have envied the Scaligers their up lifted and airy tombs in the midst of the cheerful street of Verona, and, next to theirs, the sunny sarcophagus of Petrarch, looking away over the peaceful Campagna of Lombardy ; but here is a Turkish beggar who will INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 71 be buried still more enviably. Is it not a paradise of tombs a kind of Utopia of the dead ?" A youns; man wiili a load of vegetables for the market of Pera, came toiling up the hill behind his mule. Sure of his assistance, the grave-digger arose, and as we took our places at the poles, the marketer quietly turned his beast out of the road, and assisted us in lifting the dead on our shoulders. The grave was not far off, and having deposited the corpse on its border, we returned to our horses, and, soon getting clear of the cemetery, galloped away with light hearts toward the valley of Sweet Waters. We were taking breath on the silken banks of the Barbyses M; Constantinople. It is a common-place two-story affair, but the best house of the dozen that form the village, and overlooks a dell below that reminds one of the " Emerald valleys of Cashmeer." We wandered through its deserted rooms, discussed the clever wo man who has described her travels so graphically, and then followed Maimuna to the narrow street, in search of/dbaubs. The butcher s shop in Turkey is as open as the trottoir to the street, and with only an entire sheep hanging between us and a dozen hungry beg- , gars, attracted by the presence of strangers, we crossed j our legs on the straw carpet, and setting the wooden j tripod in the centre, waited patiently the movements of I our feeder, who combined in his single person the I three vocations of butcher, cook, and waiter. One must have travelled east of Cape Coionna to relish Barbyses Maimuna prancing along the pebbly bed, Jj dinner so slightly disguised, but, once rid of European up to her barb s girths in sparkling water, and Job and ! > prejudices, there is nothing more simple than the fact myself laughing at her frolics from either side, when ;i that it is rather an attractive mode of feeding a travel- an old woman, bent double with age, came hobbling jj ler s appetite sitbaudi i/r. toward us from a hovel in the hill-side. Our friend was a wholesome-looking Turk, with a "Maimuna," said Job, fishing out some trumpery jj snow-white turban, a black, well-conditioned beard, a paras from the corner of his waistcoat pocket, " give j! mouth incapable of a smile, yet honest, and a most ihis to that good woman, and tell her that he who gives jj trenchant and janissaresquc style of handling his it is happy, and would share his joy with her." {cleaver. Having laid open his bed of coals with a The gipsy spurred up the bank, dismounted at a i kind of conjurer s flourish of the poker, he slapped the short distance from the decrepit creature, and after a pendent mutton on the thigh in a fashion of encourage- little conversation returned, leading her horse. jj ment, and waiting an instant for our admiration to sub- " She is not a beggar, and wishes to know why you ; j side, he whipping his knife from its sheath, and had out give her money ?" jj a dpzen strips from the chine (as Job expressed it in " Tell her, to buy bread for her children." said my j; Vermontese) " in no time." With the same alacrity patriarchal friend. j I these were cut into bits " of the size of a piece of Maimuna went back, conversed with her again, and j chalk" (another favorite expression of Job s), run returned with the money. j, upon a skewer, and laid on the coals, and in three " She says she has no need of it. Tliereis noliuinan I j minutes, more or less, they appeared smoking on the creature between her ami Allah . " I j trencher, half lost in a fine green salad, well peppered, The old woman hobbled on, Job pocketed his re- j and of a most seducing and provocative savor. If you jected paras, and Maimun-i rode between us in silence. || have performed your four ablutions A. M., like adevout Mussulman, it is not conceived in Turkey that you have occasion for the medium of a fork, and I frankly own, that I might have been seen at Belgrade, cross- legged in a kibaub-shup, between my friend and the gipsy, and making a most diligent use of my thumb and fore-finger. I have dined since at the Rocher de Cancale and the Traveller s with less satisfaction. Having paid something like sixpence sterling for our three dinners (rather an overcharge, Maimuna thought), we unpicketed our horses from the long grass, and bade adieu to Belgrade, on our way to the aqueducts. We were to follow down a verdant val- It was a gem of natural poetry that was worthy of the lips of an angel. III. We kept up the valley of Sweet Waters, tracing the Barbyses through its bosom, to the hills ; and then mounting a steep asc.ent, struck across to the east, over a country, which, though so near the capital of the Turkish empire, is as wild as the plains of the Hermus. Shrubs, forest-trees, and wild grass, cover the appa rently illimitable waste, and save a half-visible horse path which guides the traveller across, there is scarce an evidence that you are uot the first adventurer in the wilderness. What a natural delight is freedom ! What a bound gives the heart at the sight of the unfenced eajth, the unsep.irated hill-sides, the unhedged and unharvested valleys! How thrilling it is unlike any other joy to spur a fiery horse to the hill-top, and gaze away over dell and precipice to the horizon, and never a wall between, nor a human limit to say " Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther!" Oh, I think we have an instinct, dulled by civilization, which is like the caged eaglet s, or the antelope s that is reared in the Arab s tent ; an instinct of nature that scorns boundary and chain ; that yearns to the free desert ; that would have the earth, like the sea or the sky, unappropriated and open ; that rejoices in immeasurable liberty of foot and dwelling-place, and springs passionately back to its freedom even after years of subduing method and spirit-breaking confinement ! I have felt it on the sea, in the forests of America, on the desolated plains of Asia and Roumelia ; I should feel it till my heart burst, had I the wings of a bird! The house once occupied by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu stands on the descent of a hill in the little vil lage of Belgrade, some twelve or fourteen miles from ley, and, exhilarated by a flask of Greek wine (which j I "forgot to mention), and the ever-thrilling circum- 5 1 stances of unlimited greensward and horses that wait not for the spur, we followed the daring little Asiatic up hill and down, over bush and precipice, till Job cried us mercy. We pulled up on the edge of a sheet 1 of calm water, and the vast marble wall, built by the j sultans in the days of their magnificence and crossing j the valley from side to side, burst upon us like a scene of enchantment in the wilderness. Those same sultans must have lived a great deal at Belgrade. Save these vast aqueducts, which are splen did monuments of architecture, there is little in the first aspect to remind you that you are not in the wilds of Missouri; but a further search discloses, in the re cesses of the hidden windings of the valley, circular staircases of marble leading to secluded baths, now filled with leaves and neglected, but evidently on a scale of the most imperial sumptuousness. From the perishable construction of Turkish dwelling-houses, all traces even of the most costly serai may easily have disappeared in a few years, when once abandoned to ruin; and I pleased myself with imagining, as we slackened bridle, and rode slowly beneath the gigantic trees of the forest, the gilded pavilions, and gay scenes of oriental pleasure that must have existed here in INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. the days of the warlike yet effeminate Selims. It is a place for the enchantments of the "Arabian Nights" to have been realized. I have followed the common error in giving these structures in the forest of Belgrade the name of aque ducts. They are rather walls built across the deep valleys, of diiferent altitudes, to create reservoirs for the supply of aqueducts, but are built with all the magnificence and ornament of a facade to a temple. We rode on from one to the other, arriving at last at the lowest, which divides the valley at its wildest part, forming a giddy wall across an apparently bottomless ravine, as dark and impracticable as the glen of the Cauterskill in America. Our road lay on the other side, but though with a steady eye one might venture to cross the parapet on foot, there were no means of getting our horses over, short of a return of half a mile to the path we had neglected higher up the valley. W^ might swim it. above the embankment, but the opposite shore was a precipice. " What shall we do ?" I asked. Job made no answer, but pulled round his beast, and started off in a sober canter to return. I stood a moment, gazing on the placid sheet of water above, and the abyss of rock and darkness be low, and then calling to Maimuna, who had ridden farther down the bank, I turned my horse s head after him. " Signore !" cried the gipsy from below. "What is it, Carissima ?" " Maimuna never goes back !" "Silly child!" I answered, "you are not going to cross the ravine?" " Yes !" was the reply, and the voice became more indistinguishable as she galloped away. " I will be over before you !" I was vexed, but I knew the self-will and temerity of the wild Asiatic, and, very certain that if there were danger it would be run before I could reach her, I drove the stirrups into my horse s sides, and overtook Job at the descent into the valley. We as cended again, and rode down the opposite shore to the embankment, at a sharp gallop. Maimuna was not there. " She will have perished in the abyss," said Job. I sprang from my horse to cross the parapet on foot in search of her, when I heard her horse s footsteps, and the next moment she dashed up the steep, having failed in her attempt, and stood once more where we had parted. The sun was setting, and we had ten miles to ride, and impatient of her obstinacy, I sharply ordered her to go up the ravine at speed, and cross as we had done. I think I never shall forget, angry as I was at the moment, the appearance of that lovely creature, as she resolutely refused to obey me. Her horse, the same fiery Arabian she had ridden from Sardis (an animal that, except when she was on his back, would scarce have sold for a gold sequin), stood with head erect and panting nostrils, glancing down with his wild eyes upon the abyss into which he had been urged the whole group, horse and rider, completely relieved against the sky from the isolated mound they occupied, and, at this instant, the gold flood of the set ting sun pouring full on them through a break in the masses of the forest. Her own fierce attitude, and beautiful and frowning face, the thin lip curled reso lutely, and the brown and polished cheek deepened with a rosy glow, her full and breathing bosom swell ing beneath its jacket, and her hair, which had escaped from the turban, flowing over her neck and shoulders, and mingling with the loosened fringes of red and gold in rich disorder it was a picture which the pencil of Martin (and it would have suited his genius) could scarce have exaggerated. The stately half Arabic, balf Grecian architecture of the aqueducts, and the cold and frowning tints of the abyss and the forese around, would have left him nothing to add to it as a composition. I was crossing the giddy edge of the parapet, look ing well to my feet, with the intention of reasoning with the obstinate being, who, vexed at my reproaches and her own failure, was now in as pretty a rage as myself, when I heard the trampling of horses in the forest. I stopped mid-way to listen, and presently there sprang a horseman up the bank in an oriental costume, with pistols and ataghan flashing in the sun, and a cast of features that at once betrayed his origin. "A Zingara!" I shouted back to Job. The gipsy, who was about nineteen, and as well- made and gallant a figure for a man as Maimuna for a woman, seemed as much astonished as ourselves, and sat in his saddle gazing on the extraordinary figure I have described, evidently recognising one of his own race, but probably puz-zled with the mixture of cos tumes, and struck at the same time with Maimuna s excessive beauty. Lovely as she always was, I had never seen her to such advantage as now. She might have come from fairy-land, for the radiant vision she seemed in the gold of that burning sunset. I gazed on them both a moment, and was about finishing my traverse of the parapet, when a troop of mounted gips-ies and baggage-horses came up the bank at a quick pace, and in another minute Maimuna was surrounded. I sprang to her bridle, and apprehensive of, I scarce knew what danger, gave her one of the two pistols I carried always in my bosom. The gipsy chief (for such he evidently was) meas ured me from head to foot with a look of dislike, and speaking for the first time, addressed Maimuna in his own language, with a remark which sent the blood to her temples with a suddenness I had never before seen. " What does he say ?" I asked. "It is no matter, signore, but it is false!" Her black eyes were like co;ils of fire, as she spoke. " Leave your horse," I said to her, in a low tone, " and cross the parapet. I will prevent his following you, and will join you on your own before you can reach Constantinople. Turn the horses heads home ward!" I continued in English to Job, who was crying out to me from the other side to come baek. Maimuna laid her hand on the pommel to dismount, but the gipsy, anticipating her motion, touched his horse with the stirrup, and sprang with a single leap between her and the parapet. The troop had gath ered into a circle behind us, and seeing our retreat thus cut off, I presented my pistol to the young chief, and demanded, in Italian, that he should clear the way. A blow from behind, the instant that I wns pulling the trigger, sent the discharged pistol into the ravine, and, in the same instant, Maimuna dashed her horse against the unguarded gipsy, nearly overturning him into the abyss, and spurred desperately upon the para pet. One cry from the whole gipsy troop, and then all was as silent as the grave, except the click of her horse s hoofs on the marble verge, as, trembling pal pably in every limb, the terrified animal crossed the giddy chasm at a half trot, and, in the next minute, bounded up the opposite bank, and disappeared with a snort of fear and delight amid the branches of the forest. What with horror and wonder, and the shock of the blow which had nearly broken my arm, I stood mo tionless where Maimuna had left me, till the gipsy, re covering from his amazement, dismounted and put his pistol to rny breast. "Call her back!" he said to me, in very good Ital ian, and with a tone in which rage and determination were strangely mingled, " or you die where you stand 1" INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 78 Without regarding his threat, I looked at him, with a new thought stealing into my mind. He probably read the pacific change in my feelings, for he dropped his arm, and the frown on his own features moderated to a steadfast and inquisitive regard. "Zingara!" I said, "Maimuna is my slave." A clutch of his pistol-stock, and a fiery and impa tient look from his fine eyes, interrupted me for an in stant. I proceeded to tell him briefly how I had ob tained possession of her, while the troop gradually closed around, attracted by his excessive look of in terest in the tale, though they probably did not under stand the language in which I spoke, and all fixing their wild eyes earnestly on my face. " And now, Zingara," I said, "I will bring her back on one condition that, when the offer is fairly made her, if she chooses still to go with me, she shall be j free to do so. I have protected her, and sworn still I to protect her as long as she should choose to cat of | my bread. Though my slave, she is pure and guilt- j less as when she left the tent of her mother, and is worthy of the bosom of an emperor." The Zingara took my hand, and put it to his lips. " You agree to our compact, then ?" I asked. He put his hand on his forehead, and then laid it, with a slight inclination, on his breast. " She can not have gone far," I said, and stepping on the mound above the parapet, I shouted her name till the woods rang again with the echo. A moment, and Job and Maimuna came riding to jj the verge of the opposite hill, and with a few words of explanation, fastened their horses to a tree, and crossed to us by the parapet. The chief returned his pistols to his girdle, and stood aside while I spoke to Maimuna. It was a diffi cult task, but I felt that it was a moment decisive of i her destiny, and the responsibility weighed heavily on my breast. Though excessively attached to her though she had been endeared to me by sacrifices, and ! by the ties of protection though, in short, I loved ; her, not with a passion, but with an affection as a : father more than as a lover I still felt it to be my duty j to leave no means untried to induce her to abandon j me, to return to her own people and remain in her own | land of the sun. What her fate would be in the state I of society to which I must else introduce her, had been eloquently depicted by Job, and will readily be imagined by the reader. After the first burst of incredulity and astonishment at my proposal, she folded her arms on her bosom, and, with the tears streaming like rain over her jacket, listened in silence and with averted eyes. I conclu ded with representing to her, in rather strong colors, the feelings with which she might be received by my friends, and the difficulty she would find in accojjimo- dating herself to the customs of people, to whom not only she must be inferior in the accomplishments of a woman, but who might find, even in the color of that loveliest cheek, a reason to despise her. Her lip curled for an instant, but the grief in her heart was stronger than the scorn for an imaginary wrong, and she bowed her head again, and her tears flowed on. I was silent at last, and she looked up into my face. " I am a burthen to you," she said. " No, dearest Maimuna ! no ! but if I were to see you wretched hereafter, you would become so. Tell me! the chief will make you his wife; will you re join your people ?" She flung herself upon the ground, and wept as if her heart would break. I thought it best to let her feelings have away, and walking apart with the ymiiiu gipsy, I gave him more of the particulars of her his tory, and exacted a promise that, if she should finally be left with the troop, he would return with her to the tribe of her mother, at Sardis. Maimuna stood gazing fixedly inlo the ravine when we turned back, and there was an erectness in her at titude, and ajierte in the air of her head, that, I must acknowledge, promised more for my fears than my wishes. Her pride was roused, it was easy with half a glance to see. With the suddenness of oriental passion, the young chief had become already enamored of her, and, with a feeling of jealousy which, even though I wished him success, I could not control, I saw him kneel at her feet and plead with her in an inaudible tone. She had been less than woman if she had been insensible to that passionate cadence, and the imploring earnest ness of the noble countenance on which she looked. It was evident that she was interested, though she began with scarce deigning to lift her eyes from the ground. 1 felt a sinking of the heart which I can not describe when he rose to his feet and left her standing alone. The troop had withdrawn at his command, and Job, to whom the scene was too painful, had recrossed the parapet, and stood by his horse s head waiting the re sult. The twilight had deepened, the forest looked black around us, and a single star sprang into the sky, while the west was still glowing in a fast purpling gold and crimson. " Signore !" said Maimuna, walking calmly to my hand, which I stretched instinctively to receive her, " I am breaking my heart ; 1 know not what to do." At this instant a faint meteor shot over the sky, and drew its reflection across the calm mirror whose verge we were approaching. "Stay !" she cried ; " the next shall decide the fate of Maimuna ! If it cross to the east, the will of Al lah be done ! I will leave you !" I called to the gipsy, and we stood on the verge of the parapet in breathless expectation. The darkness deepened around us, the abyss grew black and indis tinguishable, and the night-birds flitted past like audi ble shadows. I drew Maimuna to my bosom, and with my hands buried in her long hair, pressed her to my heart, that beat as painfully and as, heavily as her own. A sudden shriek ! She started from my bosom, and as she fell upon the earth, my eye caught, on the face of the mirror from which I had forgetfully withdrawn my gaze, the vanishing pencil of a meteor, drawn like a beam of the sunset, from west to east! I lifted the insensible child, impressed one long kiss on her lips, and flinging her into the arms of the gipsy, crossed the parapet, and rode, with a speed that tried in vain to outrun my anguish, to Constantinople. TOM FANE AND I, " Common as light is love, TOM FANE S four Canadian ponies were whizzing his light phaeton through the sand at a rate that would have^put spirits into anything but a lover absent from his mistress. The " heaven-kissing" pines towered on every side like the thousand and one columns of the Paheologi at Constantinople ; their flat and spreading tops shutting out the light of heaven almost as effec tually as the world of mussulmans, mosques, kiosks, bazars, and Giaours, sustained on those innumerable capitals, darkens the subterranean wonder of Stam- boul. An American pine forest is as like a temple, and a sublime one, as any dream that ever entered into the architectural brain of the slumbering Martin. The Yankee methodists in their camp-meetings, have 74 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. but followed an irresistible instinct to worship God in the religious dimness of these interminable aisles of the wilderness. Tom Fane and I had stoned the storks together in the palace of Croesus at Sardis. We had read Anas- tasius on a mufti s tomb in the Nekropolis of Scutari. We had burned with fig-fevers in the same caravanse rai at Smyrna. We had cooled our hot foreheads and cursed the Greeks in emulous Romaic in the dim tomb of Agamemnon at Argos. We had been grave at Paris, and merry at Rome ; and we had pic-nic d with the beauties of the Fanar in the Valley of Sweet Waters in pleasant Roumelia ; and when, after parting in France, he had returned to England and his regi ment, and I to New England and law, whom should I meet in a summer s trip to the St. Lawrence but Captain Tom Fane of the th, quartered at the cliff perched and doughty garrison of Quebec, and ready for any " lark" that would vary the monotony of duly ! Having eaten seven mess-dinners, driven to the falls of Montmorenci, and paid my respects to Lord Dalhousie, the hospitable and able governor of the Canadas, Quebec had no longer a temptation : and obeying a magnet, of which more anon, I announced to Fane that my traps were packed, and my heart sent on, a Uavimt courier, to Saratoga. " Is she pretty ?" said Tom. " As the starry-eyed Circassian we gazed at through the grill in the slave-market at Constantinople !"- (Heaven and my mistress forgive me for the compari son ! but it conveyed more to Tom Fane than a folio of more respectful similitudes.) " Have you any objection to be dnuvn to your lady love by four cattle that would buy the soul of Osbal- dislon ?" " Objection ! quotha ?" The next morning, four double-jointed and well- groomed ponies were munching their corn in the bow of a steamer, upon the St. Lawrence, wondering pos sibly what, in the name of Bucephalus, had set the hills and churches flying at such a rate down the river. The hills and churches carne to a stand-still with the steamer opposite Montreal, and the ponies were landed and put to their mettle for some twenty miles, where they were destined to be astonished by a similar flying phenomenon in the mountains girding the lengthening waters of Lake Champlain. Landed at Ticonderoga, a few miles trot brought them to Lake George and a third steamer, and, with a winding passage among green islands and overhanging precipices loaded like a harvest-wagon with vegetation, we made our last landing on the edge of the pine forest, where our story opens. " Well, I must object, says Tom, setting his whip in the socket, and edging round upon his driving-box, "I must object to this republican gravity of yours. I should take it for melancholy, did I not know it was the complexion of your never-smiling countrymen." " Spare me, Tom ! I see a hand you can not see. Talk to your ponies, and let me be miserable, if you love me." " For what, in the name of common sense ? Are you not within five hours of your mistress? Is not this cursed sand your natal soil ? Do not The pine-boughs sing Old songs with new gladness ? and in the years that we have dangled about, here- and-there-ians together, were you ever before grave, sad, or sulky ? and will you without a precedent, and you a lawyer, inflict your stupidity upon me for the first time in this waste, and being-less solitude ? Half an hour more of the dread silence of this forest, and it will not need the horn of Astolpho to set me irre mediably mad 1" " If employment will save your wits, you may in vent a scheme for marrying the son of a poor gentle man to the ward of a rich trader in rice and molas ses." " The programme of our approaching campaign, I presume ?" " Simply." " Is the lady willing ?" " I would fain believe so." " Is Mr. Popkins unwilling ?" "As the most romantic lover could desire." "And the state of the campaign ?" " Why, thus : Mr. George Washington Jefferson Frump, whom you have irreverently called Mr. Pop- kins, is sole guardian to the daughter of a dead West Indian planter, of whom lie was once the agent. ] fell in love with Kate Lorimer from description, when she was at school with my sister, saw her by favor of a garden-wall, and after the us>n! vows " Too romantic for a Yankee, by half!" " Proposed bv letter to Mr. Frump." "Oh, bathos!" " He refused me." " Because " "Imprimis, I was not myself in the sugar line, and in secundis, my father wore gloves and did nothing for a living two blots in the eyes of Mr. Frump, which all the waters of Niagara would never wash from my escutcheon." "And what the devil hindered you from running off with her ?" " Fifty shares in the Manhattan Insurance Compa ny, a gold mine in Florida, Heaven knows how many hogsheads of treacle, and a million of acres on the banks of the Missouri." " Pluto s flame-colored daughter defend us! what a living El Dorado !" " All of which she forfeits if she marries without old Frump s consent." " I see I see ! And this lo and her Argus are now drinking the waters at Saratoga ?" "Even so." " I ll bet you my four-in-hand to a sonnet, that I get her for you before the season is over." " Money and all ?" " Mines, molasses, and Missouri acres !" "And if you do, Tom, I ll aive you a team of Vir ginian bloods that would astonish Ascot, and throw you into the bargain a forgiveness for riding over me with j your camel on the banks of the Hermus." " Santa Maria ! do you remember that spongy foot stepping over your frontispiece ? I had already cast my eyes up to Mont Sypilus to choose a clean niche for you out of the rock-hewn tombs of the kings of Lydia. I thought you would sleep with Alyattis, Phil !" We dashed on through dark foiest and open clear ing, through glens of tangled cedar and wild vine, over log bridges, corduroy marshes, and sand hills, till, tow ard evening, a scattering shanty or two, and an occa sional sound of a woodman s axe, betokened our vi cinity to Saratoga. A turn around a clump of tall pines brought us immediately into the broad street of the village, and the flaunting shops, the overgrown, un sightly hotels, riddled with windows like honeycombs, the fashionable idlers out for their evening lounge to the waters, the indolent smokers on the colonnades, and the dusty and loaded coaches driving from door to door in search of lodgings, formed the usual evening picture of the Bath of America. As it was necessary to Tom s plan that my arrival afeSaratoga should not be known, he pulled up at a small tavern at the entrance of the street, find drop ping me and my baggage, drove on to Congress Hall, with my best prayers, and a letter of introduction to my sister, whom 1 had left on her way to the Springs INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 75 with a party at my departure for Montreal. Unwil ling to remain in such a tantalizing vicinity, I hired a chaise the next morning, and despatching a note to Tom, drove to seek a retreat at Barhydl s a spot that can not well be described in the tail of a paragraph. Herr Barhydt is an old Dutch settler, who, till the Ij the forest, three thousand and more miles from thy smoky whereabout, meihinks it would warm up the flush of pleasure around thine eyelids, though the " golden-tressed Adelaide" were waiting her good- nisht kisses at thy knee ! ould stand it no longer. On the second evening _______ ________ ineral springs of Saratoga were discovered some five || of my seclusion, I made bold to borrow olid Barhydt s miles fiom hisdoor, was buried in the depth of a forest solitude, unknown to all but the prow I m" Indian. The sky is supported above him (or looks to be) by a wil derness of straight, columnar pine shafts, gigantic in girth, and with no foliage except at the top, where they branch out like round tables spread for a banquet superannuated roadster, and getting up the steam with infinite difficulty in his rickety engine, higgled away, with a pace to which I could not venture to affix a name, to the gay scenes of Saratoga. It was ten o clock when I dismounted at the stable in Congress Hall, and, giving der Teitfel, as ihe old in the clouds. A small ear shaped lake. sunk as deep i; man ambitiously styled his steed, to the hands of the into the earth as the firs shoot above it, black as Ere bus in the dim shadow of it.s hilly shore and the ob structed light of the trees that nearly meet over if, and clear and unbroken as a mirror, save the pearl spot ostler, stole round through the garden to the eastern colonnade. I feel called upon to describe "Congress Hall." Some fourteen or fifteen millions of white gentlemen of the thousand lotuses holding up their cups to the and ladies consider that wooden and windowed Baby- blue eye of heaven that peers through the leafy vault, i| Ion as the proper palace ol Delight a sojourn to be sleeps beneath his window ; and around him, in the 1 : sighed for, and sacrificed for, and economized loi- forest, lies, still unbroken, the elastic and brown carpet i| the birthplace of Love, the haunt of Hymen, ihe arena of the faded pine tassels, deposited in yearly layers of fashion a place without which a new lease ol I lie since the continent rose from the flood, and footed a ii were valueless for which, if the conjuring cap o King foot beneath the surf. cc to a rich mould that would ; Erricus itself could not furnish a season ticker, it fatten the Svmp!e"laJes to a (lower-garden. With his i might lie on a lady s toilet as unnoticed as a bride s black tarn well .stocked with trout, his bit of a farm nisiht-cap a twelvemonth after marriage. J say to my- betwee as the old Dutch inhabitants dropped faster away, saw never a white human face from one maple-blossoming to another. A roving mineralogist tasted the waters of Saratoga, and, like the work of a lath-and-plaster Aladdin, up j a campaign of pleasure you are losing in America ! what belles than the bluebell slighter and fairer what hearts than the dewdrops fresher and clearer are liv ing their pretty hour, like gems undived for in the ocean what loads of foliage, what Titans of trees, what glorious wildernesses of rocks and waters, are ana, line me wun* >i <> miu-iuu , . .. sprmi" a thrivin<r villas around the fountain s lip, and !] lavishing their splendors on the clouds that sail mer hotels? tin tumblers, and apothecaries, multiplied in the ! them, and all within the magic circle ol winch Con- usual proportion to each other, but out of all prece- ij gress Hall is the centre, and which a circl n dove proporton to eac oter, ut out o a prece de:it, with everything else for rapidity. Libraries, uewspipers, churches", livery stables, and lawyers, fol lowed in their train ; and it was soon established, from the plains of Abr mam to the savannahs of Alabama, th.it no person of fashionable taste or broken constitu tion could exist through the months of July and Au gust without a visit to the chalybeate springs and pop ulous village of Saratoga. It contained seven thoti- would measure to get an appetite for his breakfast if you but knew this, my lord, as I know it, you would not be gazing so vacantly on the steps of Crockford s, nor consider the graybeard such a laggard in his hours !" Congress Hall is a wooden building, of which the size and capacity could never be definitely ascertained. It is built on a slight elevation, just above the strongly- ime it bears, with little at- Mod inhabitants In-fore Herr Barhvdt, living in his !| impregnated spring tvhose na wooded seclusion only five miles off. became aware of ! ! tempt at architecture, save a spacious and vme-covera its existence. A pair of lovers, philandering about the || colonnade, serving as a promenade on either side in uon him one June l two wings, the extremities of which are losr in the d forest on horseback, popped in upon him one June two wings, me exiremu.es o, . - - mornin-, an I thenceforth there was no rest for theljtance. A relic or two ol the still-astonished forest soul of "the Dutchman. Everybody rode down to eat : towers above the chimneys, in the shape of a melan- his trout and make love in the dark sha les of hi. mir- j , choly group of firs ; and, five minutes walk from the roreJ 1 1*00:1; an I at last, in self-defence, he added a j door, the dim old wilderness stands looking down on room or" two to his shanty, enclosed his cabbage-gar- !l the village in its primeval grandeur, like the sp.r.i - e j the wronged Indians, whose tracks are scarce van, s from the sand. In the Strength ol the summer sol- den, anJ put a price upon his trout-dinners. Th traveller now-a-days who has not dined at Barhydt iruiu 111*111:, niiiu 11 iimnwiww ,*s,j ... - . . ,,.;iioii f complexion of anything about me, I waited Tom s op- ij Mr. Westcott, the obliging proprieloi , eration, with a lover s usual patience. Barhydt s visit- l! preference of rooms, on my next annu.il visit, ree o clock, and the j! just and honorable mention. for this before two ani mused upon in those dim and whispering aisles of [j a waltz m INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. the candles quiver, and the pines tremble audibly in their tassels. The ballroom was on the ground floor, and the colonnade upon the garden side was crowded with spectators, a row of grinning black fellows edging the cluster of heads at every window, and keeping time with their hands and feet in the irresistible sym pathy of their music-loving natures. Drawing my hat over my eyes, I stood at the least-thronged window, and concealing my face in the curtain, waited impa- j tiently for the, appearance of the dancers. The bevy in the drawing-room was sufficiently i strong at last, and the lady patronesses, handed in by a state governor or two, and here and there a member of congress, achieved the entree with their usual intre pidity. Followed beaux and followed belles. Such belles ! Slight, delicate, fragile-looking creatures, ele gant as Retzsch s angels, warm-eyed as Mohammedan houries, yet timid as the antelope whose hazel orbs they eclipse, limbed like nothing earthly except an American woman I would rather not go on ! When I speak of the beauty of my countrywomen, my heart swells. I do believe the New World has a newer mould for its mothers and daughters. I think I am not prejudiced. I have been years away. I have sighed in France ; I have loved in Italy ; I have bar gained for Circassians in an eastern bezestein, and I have lounged at Howell and James s on a sunny day in the season ; and my eye is trained, and my percep tions quickened : but I do think (honor bright ! and Heath s " Book of Beauty" forgiving me) that there is no such beautiful work of God under the arch of the sky as an American girl in her bellehood. Enter Tom Fane in a Stultz coat and Sparding tights, looking as a man who had been the mirror of Bond street might be supposed to look, a thousand leagues from his club-house. She leaned on his arm. I had never seen her half so lovely. Fresh and calm from the seclusion of her chamber, her transparent cheek was just tinged with the first mounting blood, from the excitement of lights and music. Her lips were slightly parted, her fine-lined eyebrows were arched with a girlish surprise, and her ungloved arm lay carelessly and confidingly within his, as white, I round, and slender, as if Canova had wrought it in Parian for his Psyche. If you have never seen a i beauty of northern blood nurtured in a southern clime, the cold fairness of her race wanned up as if it had ! been steeped in some golden sunset, and her deep blue ! eye darkened and filled with a fire as unnaturally re splendent as the fusion of crysoprase into a diamond, and if you have never known the corresponding con- i trast in the character, the intelligence and constancy of the north kindling with the enthusiasm and impulse, the passionateness and the abandon of a more burning latitude you have seen nothing, let me insinuate, though you " have been i the Indies twice," that could give you an idea of Kate Lorimer. She waltzed, and then Tom danced with my sister, and then, resigning her to another partner, he offered his arm again to Miss Lorimer, and left the ballroom with several other couples for a turn in the fresh air of the colonnade. I was not jealous, but I felt un pleasantly at his returning to her so immediately. He was the handsomest man, out of all comparison, in the room, and he had dimmed my star too often in our rambles in Europe and Asia, not to suggest a thought, j at least, that the same pleasant eclipse might occur in ! our American astronomy. 1 stepped off the colonnade, and took a turn in the garden. Those "children of eternity," as Walter Savage Landor poetically calls " the breezes," performed their soothing ministry upon my temples, and I replaced Tom in my confidence with an heroic effort, and turned back. A swing hung between two gigantic pines, just under the balustrade, and flinging myself into the cush ioned seat, I abandoned myself to the musings natural i to a person " in my situation." The sentimentalizing promenaders lounged backward and forward above me, and not hearing Tom s drawl among them, I presumed he had returned to the ballroom. A lady and gentle man, walking in silence, stopped presently, and leaned upon the railing opposite the swing. They stood a moment, looking into the dim shadow of the pine- grove, and then a voice, that I knew better than my own, remarked in a low and silvery tone upon the beauty of the night. She was not answered, and after a moment s pause, as if resuming a conversation that had been interrupted, she turned very earnestly to her companion, and asked, "Are you sure, quite sure, that you could venture to marry without a fortune ?" " Quite, dear Miss Lorimer !" I started from the swing, but before the words of execration that rushed choking from my heart could struggle to my lips, they had mingled with the crowd and vanished. I strode down the garden-walk in a phrensy of pas sion. Should I call him immediately to account ? Should I rush into the ballroom and accuse him of his treachery to her face ? Should 1 drown myself in old Barhydt s tarn, or join an Indian tribe, and make war upon the whites ? Or should I could I be mag nanimous and write him a note immediately, offering to be his groomsman at the wedding ? I stepped into the punch-room, asked for pen, ink, and paper, and indited the following note : " DEAR TOM : If your approaching nuptials are to be sufficiently public to admit of a groomsman, you will make me the happiest of friends by selecting me for that office. Yours ever truly, PHII Having despatched it to his room, T flew to the stable, roused der Teufcl, who had gathered up his legs in the straw for the night, flogged him furiously out of the village, and giving him the rein as he entered the for est, enjoyed the scenery in the humor of mad old Hie- ronymo in the Spanish tragedy " the moon dark, the stars extinct, the winds blowing, the owls shrieking, the toads croaking, the minutes jarring, and the clock striking twelve ! Early the next day Tom s " tiger" dismounted at Barhydt s door, with an answer to my note, as fol lows : " DEAR PHIL : The devil must have informed you of a secret I supposed safe from all the world. Be as sured I should have chosen no one but yourself to support me on the occasion ; and however you have discovered my design upon your treasure, a thousand thanks for your generous consent. I expected no less from your noble nature. " Yours devotedly, " TOM. " P. S. I shall endeavor to be at Barhydt s, with materials for the fifth act of our comedy, to-morrow morning." " Comedy ! call you this, Mr. Fane ?" I felt my heart turn black as I threw down the letter. After a thousand plans of revenge formed and abandoned borrowing old Barhydt s rifles, loading them deliber ately, and discharging them again into the air J flung myself exhausted on the bed, and reasoned myself back to my magnanimity. I would be his groomsman ! It was a morning like the burst of a millennium on the world. I felt as if I should never forgive the birds for their mocking enjoyment of it. The wild heron swung up from the reeds, the lotuses shook out their dew into the lake as the breeze stirred ihejn, and the INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 77 senseless old Dutchman sat fishing in his canoe, sing ing one of his unintelligible psalms to a quick measure that half maddened me. I threw myself upon the yielding floor of pine-tassels on the edge of the lake, and with the wretched school philosophy, "&z grams est, breris est," endeavored to put down the tempest of my feelings. A carriage rattled over the little bridge, mounted the ascent rapidly, and brought up at Barhydt s door. " Phil !" shouted Tom, " Phil !" 1 gulped down a choking sensation in my throat, and rushed up the bank to him. A stranger was dismount ing from his horse. " Quick !" said Tom, shaking my hand hurriedly " there is no time to lose. Out with your inkhorn, Mr. Poppletree, and have yojur papers signed while I tie up my ponies." " What is this, sir ?" said I, starting back as the stranger deliberately presented me with a paper, in which my own name was written in conspicuous let ters. The magistrate gazed at me with a look of aston ishment. "A contract of marriage, I think, between Mr. Philip Slingsby and Miss Katherine Lorimer, spin ster. Are you the gentleman named in that instrument, sir?" At this moment my sister, leading the blushing girl by the hand, came and threw her arms about my neck, and drawing her within my reach, ran off and left us together. There are some pure moments in this life that de scription would only profane. We were married by the village magistrate in that magnificent sanctuary of the forest, old Barhydt and his lotuses the only indifferent witnesses of vows as passionate as ever trembled upon human lips. I had scarce pressed her to my heart and dashed the tears from my eyes, when Fane, who had looked more at my sister than at the bride during the ceremony, left her suddenly, and thrusting a roll of parchment into my pocket, ran off to bring up his ponies. I was on the way to Saratoga, a married man, and my bride on the seat beside me, before I had recovered from my astonishment. " Pray," said Tom, " if it be not an impertinent question, and you can find breath in your ecstasies, how did you find out that your sister had done me the honor to accept the offer of my hand ?" The resounding woods rung with his unmerciful laughter at the explanation. "And pray," said I, in my turn, "if it is not an im pertinent question, and you can find a spare breath in j your ecstasies, by what magic did you persuade old Frump to trust his ward and her title-deeds in your treacherous keeping ?" " It is a long story, my dear Phil, and I will give*you the particulars when you pay rne the * Virginia bloods ! you wot of. Suffice it for the present, that Mr. Frump believes Mr. Tom Fane (alias Jacob Phipps, Esq., sleeping partner of a banking-house at Liverpool) to be the accepted suitor of his fair ward. In his extreme delight at seeing her in so fair a way to marry into a \ , bank, he generously made her a present of her own fortune, signed over his right to control it by a docu- \ t merit in your possession, and will undergo as agreeable jj a surprise in about five minutes as the greatest lover of excitement could desire." The ponies dashed on. The sandy ascent by the Pavilion Spring was surmounted, and in another min ute we were at the door of Congress Hall. The last stragglers from the breakfast-table were lounging down the colonnade, and old Frump sat reading the newspa per under the portico. "Aha! Mr. Phipps," said he, as Tom drove up " back so soon, eh ? Why, I thought you and Kitty would be billing it till dinner-time !" " Sir !" said Tom, very gravely, " you have the hon or of addressing Captain Thomas Fane, of his majesty s th Fusileers ; and whenever you have a moment s leisure, I shall be happy to submit to your perusal a certificate of the marriage of Miss Katherine Lorimer to the gentleman I have the pleasure to present to you. Mr. Frump, Mr. Slingsby !" At the mention of my name, the blood in Mr. Frump s ruddy complexion turned suddenly to the color of the Tiber. Poetry alone can express the feeling pictured in his countenance : " If every atom of a dead man s flesh Should creep, each one with a particular life, Yet all as cold as ever twas just so : Or had it drizzled needle-points of frost, Upon a feverish head made suddenly bald. George Washington Jefferson Frump, Esq., left Congress Hall the same evening, and has since ungra ciously refused an invitation to Captain Fane s wedding possibly from his having neglected to invite him on a similar occasion at Saratoga. This last, however, I am free to say, is a gratuitous supposition of my own. LARKS IN VACATION, CHAPTER I. DRIVING STANHOPE PRO TEM. IN the edge of a June evening in the summer vaca tion of 1827, I was set down by the coach at the gate of my friend Horace Van Pelt s paternal mansion a large, old-fashioned, comfortable Dutch house, cling ing to the side of one of the most romantic dells on the North river. In the absence of his whole family on the summer excursion to the falls and lakes (taken by almost every " well-to-do" citizen of the United States), Horace was emperor of the long-descended, and as progressively enriched domain of one of the earliest Dutch settlers a brief authority which he ex ercised more particularly over an extensive stud, and bins number one and two. The west was piled with gold castles, breaking up the horizon with their burnished pinnacles and turrets, the fragrant dampness of the thunder-shower that had followed the heat of noon was in the air, and in a low room, whose floor opened out so exactly upon the shaven sward, that a blind man would not have known when he passed from the heavily-piled carpet to the grass, I found Horace sitting over his olives and claret, having waited dinner for me till five (long beyond the latest American hour), and, in despair of my arrival, having dined without me. The old black cook was too happy to vary her vocation by getting a second dinner ; and when I had appeased my appetite, and overtake my friend in his claret, we sat with the moonlight breaking across a vine at our feet, and cof fee worthy of a filagree cup in the Bezestein, and de bated, amid a true cmbarras dcs rickcsses, our plans for the next week s amusement. The seven days wore on, merrily at first, but each succeeding one growing less merry than the last. By the fifth eve of my sojourn, we had exhausted variety. All sorts of headaches and megrims in the morning, all sorts of birds, beasts, and fishes, for dinner, all sorts of accidents in all sorts of vehicles, left us on the sev enth day out of sorts altogether. We were two dis contented Rasselasesin the Happy Valley. Rejoicing as we were in vacation, it would have been a relic! to have had a recitation to read up, or a prayer-bell to mark the time. Two idle sophomores in a rambling, INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. lonely old mansion, were, we discovered, a very insuf ficient dramatis persona for the scene. It was Saturday night. A violent clap of thunder had interrupted some daring theory of Van Pelt s on the rising of champagne-bubbles, and there we sat, mum and melancholy, two sated Sybarites, silent an hour by the clock. The mahogany was bare between us. Any number of glasses and bottles stood in their lees about the table ; the thrice-fished juice of an olive-dish and a solitary cigar in a silver case had been thrust aside in a warm argument, and, in his father s sacred gout-chair, buried to the eyes in his loosened cravat, one leg on the table, and one somewhere in the neighborhood of my own, sat Van Pelt, the eidolon of exhausted amusement. " Phil !" said he, starting suddenly to an erect posi tion, " a thought strikes me !" I dropped the claret-cork, from which I was at the moment trying to efface the " Margaux" brand, and sat in silent expectation. I had thought his brains as well evaporated as the last bottle of champagne. He resred his elbows on the table, and set his chin between his two palms. "I ll resign the keys of this mournful old den to the butler, and we ll go to Saratoga for a week. What say ?" " It would be a reprieve from death by inanition," I answered, " but, as the rhetorical professor would phrase it, amplify your meaning, young gentleman." " Thus : To-morrow is Sunday. We will sleep till Monday morning to purge our brains of these cloudy vapors, and restore the freshness of our complexions. If a fair day, you shall start alone in the stanhope, and on Monday night sleep in classic quarters at Titus s in Troy." " And you !" I interrupted, rather astonished at his arrangement for one. Horace laid his hand on his pocket with a look of embarrassed care. " I will overtake you with the bay colls in the drosky, but I must first go to Albany. The circula ting medium " I understand." II. We met on Monday morning in the breakfnst-room in mutual spirits. The sun was two hours high, the birds in the trees were wild with the beauty and elas ticity of the day, the dew glistened on every bough, and the whole scene, over river and hill, was a heaven of natural delight. As we finished our breakfast, the light spattering of a horse s feet up the avenue, and the airy whirl of quick-following wheels, announced the stanhope. It was in beautiful order, and what would have been termed on any pave in the world a tasteful turn-out. Light cream-colored body, black wheels and shafts, drflb lining edged with green, dead- black harness, light as that on the panthers of Bac chus it was the last style of thing you would have looked for at the " stoup" of a Dutch homestead. And Tempest ! I think I see him now ! his small in quisitive ears, arched neck, eager eye, and fine, thin nostril his dainty feet flung out with the grace of a flaunted riband his true and majestic action and his spirited champ of the bit, nibbling at the tight rein with the exciting pull of a hooked trout how evenly he drew ! how insensibly the compact stanhope, just touching his iron-gray tail, bowled along on the road after him ! Horace was behind with the drosky and black boy, and with a parting nod at the gate, I turned north ward, and Tempest took the road in beautiful style. I do not remember to have been ever so elated- I was always of the Cyrenaic philosophy that " happiness is motion," and the bland vitality of the air had refined my senses. The delightful /ee^ of the reins thrilled me to the shoulder. Driving is like any other appetite, dependant for the delicacy of its enjoyment on the system, and a day s temperate abstinence, long sleep, and the glorious perfection of the morning, had put my nerves "in condition." I felt the air as I rushed through. The power of the horse was added to my consciousness of enjoyment, and if you can imagine a centaur with a harness and stanhope added to his liv ing body, I felt the triple enjoyment of animal exer cise which would then be his. It is delightful driving on the Hudson. The road is very fair beneath your wheels, the river courses away under the bold shore with the majesty inseparable from its mighty flood, and the constant change of out line in its banks gives you, as you proceed, a constant variety of pictures, from the loveliest lo the most sub lime. The eagle s nest above you at one moment, a I sunny and fertile farm below you at the next rocks, trees, and waterfalls, wedded and clustered as, it seems to me, they are nowhere else done so pictu resquely it is a noble river, the Hudson ! And every few minutes, while you gaze down upon the broad waters spreading from hill to hill like a round lake, a gayly-painted steamer with her fringed and white awn ings and streaming flag, shoots out as if from a sudden cleft in the rock, and draws across it her track of foam. Well I bowled along. Ten o clock brought me to a snug Dutch tavern, where I sponged Tempest s mouth and nostrils, lunched and was stared at by the natives, and continuing my journey, at one I loosed rein and dashed into the pretty village of , Tem pest in a foam, and himself and his extempore master creating a great sensation in a crowd of people, who j stood in the shade of the verandah of the hotel, as if I that asylum for the weary traveller had been a shop for j the sale of gentlemen in shirt-sleeves. Tempest was taken round to the " barn," and I or dered rather an elaborate dinner, designing still to go on some ten miles in the cool of the evening, and hav ing, of course, some mortal hours upon my hands. The cook had probably never heard of more than three dishes in her life, but those three were garnished with all manner of herbs, and sent up in the best china as a warranty for an unusual bill, and what with coffee, a small glass of new rum as an apology for a chasse cafe, and a nap in a straight-backed chair, I killed the enemy to my satisfaction till the shadows of the poplars lengthened across the barnyard. I was awoke by Tempest, prancing round to the door in undiminished spirits ; and as 1 had begun the day en grand seigneur, I did not object to the bill, which considerably exceeded the outside of my calcu lation, but giving the landlord a twenty-dollar note, received the change unquestioned, doubled the usual fee to the ostler, and let Tempest off with a bend for ward which served at the same time for a gracious bow to the spectators. So remarkable a coxcomb had prob ably not been seen in the village since the passing of I Cornwallis s army. The day was still hot, and as I got into the open country, I drew rein and paced quietly up hill and down, picking the road delicately, and in a humor of thoughtful contentment, trying my skill in keeping the edges of the green sod as it leaned in and out from the walls and ditches. With the long whip I now and then touched the wing of a sulphur butterfly hovering over a pool, and now and then I stopped and gathered a violet from the unsunned edge of the wood. I had proceeded three or four miles in this way, when I was overtaken by three stout fellows, gallop- I ing at speed, who rode past and faced round with a peremptory order to me to stop. A formidable pitch fork in the hand of each horseman left me no alterna tive. I made up my mind immediately to be robbed INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 79 quietly of my own personals, bul to show light, if ne cessary, lor Tempest and the stanhope. * " Well, gentlemen," said I, coaxing my impatient horse, who had been rather excited by the clatter of hoofs behind him, " what is the meaning of this ?" Before 1 could get an answer, one of the fellows had dismounted and given his bridle to another, and coming round to the left side, he sprang suddenly into the stanhope. I received him as he rose with a well- placed thrust of my heel which sent him back into the road, and with a chirrup to Tempest, I dashed through the phalanx and took the road at a top speed. The short lash once waved round the small ears before me, there was no stopping in a hurry, and away sped the gallant gray, and fast behind followed my friends in their short sleeves, all in a lathering gallop. A couple of miles was the work of no time, Tempest laying his legs to it as if the stanhope had been a cobweb at his heels ; but at the end of that distance there came a sharp descent to a mill-stream, and I just remember an unavoidable milestone and a jerk over a wall, and the next minute, it seemed to me, I was in the room for not so readily identifying the person of his friend in the damaged gentleman in the straw. " Ay, ay! I see you don t know him," said the land lord, while Van Pelt suiveyed me rather coldly ; "on with him, constables! he Mould have us believe you knew him, sir! walk in, Mr. Van Pelt ! Ostler, look to Mr. Van Pelt s horses ! Walk in, sir !" " Stop !" I cried out in a voice of thunder, seeing that Horace, really had not looked at me, " Van Pelt ! stop, I say !" The driver of the cart seemed more impressed by the energy of my cries than my friends the constables, and pulled up his horse. Some one in the crowd cried out that I should have a hearing or he would " wallup the comitatus," and the justice, called back by this ex pression of an opinion from the sovereign people, re quested his new guest to look at the prisoner. I was preparing to have my hands untied, vet feel ing so indignant at Van Pelt for not having recognised me that I would not look at him, when, to my surprise, the horse started off once more, and looking back, I saw my friend patting the neck of his near horse, evi- where I had dined, with my hands tied, and a hundred ; deutly not having thought it worth his while to take people about me. My cool white waistcoat was mat ted with mud, and my left temple was, by the glass opposite me, both bloody and begrimed. The opening of my eyes was a signal for a closer ! gathering around me, and between exhaustion and the close air I was half suffocated. I was soon made to understand that I was a prisoner, and that the three i v.-liite frocked highwaymen, as I took them to be, were j among the spectators. O.i a polite application to the j landlord, who, I found out, was a justice of the peace as well, 1 was informed that he had made out my mit timus as a counterfeiter, and that the spurious note I \ had passed upon him for my dinner was safe in his possession ! He pointed at the same time to a placard I newly stuck against the wall, offering a reward for the I apprehension of a notorious practiser of my supposed craft, lo the description of whose person I answered, to the satisfaction of all present. Quite too indignant to remonstrate, I seated myself in the chair consi lerately offered me by the waiter, and listening to the whispers of the persons who were still permitted to throng the room, I discovered, what might have struck me before, that the initials on the [ p:mel of the stanhope an 1 the handle of the whip had been compared with the card pasted in the bottom of any notice of the justice s observation. Choking with rage, I flung myself down upon the straw, and jolted on without further remonstrance to the county town. I had been incarcerated an hour when Van Pelt s voice, half angry with the turnkey and half ready to burst into a laugh, resounded outside. He had not heard a word spoken by the officious landlord, till after the cart had been some time gone. Even then, be lieving it to be a cock-and-bull story, he had quietly dined, and it was only on going into tlie yard to see after his horses that he recognised the debris of his stanhope. The landlord s apologies, when we returned to the inn, were more amusing to Van Pelt than consolatory to Philip Slingsby. CHAPTER II. SARATOGA SPRINGS. IT was about seven o clock of a hot evening when Van Pelt s exhausted horses toiled out from the Pine my hat, and the want of correspondence was taken as II Forest, and stood, fetlock deep in sand, on the brow decided corroboration. It was remarked also by a by- j| of the small hill overlooking the mushtonin village of slander that I was quite too much of a dash for an | Saratoga. One or two straggling horsemen were re- honest man, and \\v.\\ he had suspected me from first | turning late from their afternoon ride, and looked at seeing me drive into the village ! I was sufficiently ! us, as they passed on their fresher hacks, with the cu- Uumbled by this time to make an inward vow never again to take airs upon myself if I escaped the county ja.l. The justice meanwhile had made out my orders, and a horse and cart had been provided to take me to i the foot-path to the Spring ; and as Horac the next town. I endeavored to get speech of 1 riosity which attaches to new-comers in a watering- place ; here and there a genuine invalid, who had come to the waters for life, not for pleasure, took ad vantage of the coolness of the hour and crept down flagging cattle into a trot to bring up gal- worship as I was marched out of the inn parlor, but lantly at the door of "Congress Hall," the great bell the crowd pressed close upon my heels, and the digni- of that fast caravanserai resounded through the dusty tary-landlord seemed anxious to rid his house of me. ,|air, and by the shuffling of a thousand feet, audible as we approached, we knew that the fashionable world of Saratoga were rushing down, en masse, " to lea." Having driven through a sand-cloud for the prece ding three hours, and, to say nothing of myself, Van Pelt being a man, who, in his character as the most considerable beau of the University, calculated his first impression, it was not thought advisable to encounter, uncleansed, the tide of fashion at that moment stream- I had no papers, and no proofs of my character, and assertion went for nothing. Besides, T was muddy, and my hat was broken in on one side, proofs of vil- luny which appeal to the commonest understanding. 1 begged for a little straw in the bottom of the cart, and had mads myself as comfortable as my two rustic constables thought fitting for a culprit, when the vehi cle was quickly ordered from the door to make away for a carriage coming at a dashing pace up the road. It was Van Pelt in his drosky. Horace was well known on the road, and the stan hope had already been recognised as his. By this time it was deep in the twilight, and though he was in- | stautly known by the landlord, he might" be excused | ing through the We drove round to the side- door, and gained our pigeon-hole quarters under cover of the back-staircase. The bachelors wing of Congress Hall is a long, un- slightly, wooden barrack, divided into chambers six feet by four, and of au airiness of partition which enables 80 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. the occupant to converse with his neighbor three rooms oft , with the ease of clerks calling out entries to the leger across the desks of a counting-house. The clatter of knives and plates came up to our ears in a confused murmur, and Van Pelt having refused to dine at the only inn upon the route, for some reason best known to himself, I commenced the progress of a long j toilet with an appetite not rendered patient by the sounds of cheer below. I had washed the dust out of my eyes and mouth, and, overcome with heat and hunger, I knotted a cool cravat loosely round my neck, and sat down in the one chair. " Van Pelt !" I shouted. "Well, Phil!" " Are you dressed ?" " Dressed ! I am as pinguid as a pate foie gras greased to the eyelids in cold cream !" I took up the sixpenny glass and looked at my own newly- washed physiognomy. From the temples to the J chin it was one unmitigated red burned to a blister with the sun ! I had been obliged to deluge my head ; like a mop to get out the dust, and not naturally re- I markable for my good looks, I could, much worse than Van Pelt, afford these startling additions to my disad vantages. Hunger is a subtle excuse-finder, however, and, remembering there were five hundred people in j this formidable crowd, and all busy with satisfying their appetites, I trusted to escape observation, and deter- ! mined to " go down to tea." With the just-named ; number of guests, it will easily be understood why it is impossible to obtain a meal at Congress Hall, out of the stated time and place. In a white roundabout, a checked cravat, my hair plastered over my eyes a la Mawworm, and a face like the sign of the " Rising Sun," 1 stopped at Van Pelt s door. " The most hideous figure my eyes ever looked upon !" was his first consolatory observation. " Handsome or hideous," I answered, " I ll not | starve! So here goes for some bread and butter!" and leaving him to his "appliances," I descended to the immense hall which serves the comers to Saratoga, for dining, dancing, and breakfasting, and in wet weather, between meals, for shuttlecock and promenading. Two interminable tables extended down the hall, filled by all the beauty and fashion of the United States, j Luckily, I thought, forme, there are distinctions in this republic of dissipation, and the upper end is reserved for those who have servants to turn down the chairs and stand over them. The end of the tables nearest the door, consequently, is occupied by those whose j opinion of my appearance is not without appeal, if they ; trouble their heads about it at all, and I may glide in, ( in my white roundabout (permitted in this sultry , weather), and retrieve exhausted nature in obscurity. ! An empty chair stood between an old gentleman j and a very plain young lady, and seeing no remembered faces opposite, I glided to the place, and was soon lost to apprehension in the abysm of a cold pie. The table was covered with meats, berries, bottles of chalybeate water, tea appurtenances, jams, jellies, and radishes, and, but for the absence of the roast, you might have doubted whether the meal was breakfast or dinner, lunch or supper. Happy country! in which any one of the four meals may serve a hungry man for all. The pigeon-pie stood, at last, well quarried before me, the debris of the excavation heaped upon my plate ; and, appetite appeased, and made bold by my half hour s obscurity, I leaned forward and perused with curious attention the long line of faces on the opposite side of the table, to some of whom, doubtless,! was to be indebted for the pleasures of the coining fort night. My eyes were fixed on the features of a talkative woman just above, and I had quite forgotten the fact of my dishabille of complexion and dress, when two persons entered who made considerable stir among the servants, and eventually were seated directly op posite me. " We loitered too long at Barhydt s," said one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, as she pulled her chair nearer to the table and looked around her with a glance of disapproval. In following her eyes to see who was so happy as to sympathize with such a divine creature even in the loss of a place at table, I met the fixed and astonished gaze of my most intimate friend at the University. " Ellerton !" "Slingsby !" Overjoyed at meeting him, I stretched both hands across the narrow table, and had shaken his arm nearly off his shoulders, and asked him a dozen questions, be fore I became conscious that a pair of large wondering eyes were coldly taking an inventory of my person and features. Van Pelt s unflattering exclamation upon my appearance at his door, flashed across my mind like a thunderstroke, and, coloring through my burned skin to the temples, I bowed and stammered I know not what, as Ellerton introduced me to his sister ! To enter fully into my distress, you should be ap prized that a correspondence arising from my long and constant intimacy with Tom Ellerton, had been carried on for a year between me and his sister, and that, being constantly in the habit of yielding to me in manners of taste, he had, I well knew, so exaggerated to her my personal qualities, dress, and manners, that she could not in any case fail to be disappointed in seeing me. Believing her to be at that moment two thousand miles off in Alabama, and never having hoped for the pleas ure of seeing her at all, I had foolishly suffered this good-natured exaggeration to go on, pleased with seeing the reflex of his praises in her letters, and, Heaven knows, little anticipating the disastrous interview upon which my accursed star would precipitate me ! As I went over, mentally, the particulars of my unbecom- ingness, and saw Miss Ellerton s eyes resting inquisi tively and furtively on the mountain of pigeon bones lifting their well-picked pyramid to my chin, 1 wished myself an ink-fish at the bottom of the sea. Three minutes after, I burst into Van Pelt s room, tearing my hair and abusing Tom Ellerton s good na ture, and my friend s headless drosky, in alternate breaths. Without disturbing the subsiding blood in his own face by entering into my violence, Horace coolly asked me what the devil was the matter. I told him. " Lie down here !" said Van Pelt, who was a small Napoleon in such trying extremities ; " lie down ojj the bed, and anoint your phiz with this unguent. I see good luck for you in this accident, and you have only to follow my instructions. Phil Slingsby, sunburnt, in a white roundabout, and Phil Slingsby, pale and well dressed, are as different as this potted cream and a dan cing cow. You shall see what a little drama I ll work out for you !" I lay down on my back, and Horace kindly anointed me from the trachea to the forelock, and from ear to ear. " Egad," said he, warming with his study of his pro posed ^plot as he slid his fore-fingers over the bridge of my nose, "every circumstance tells for us. Tall man as you are, you are as short-bodied as a monkey (no offence, Phil !) and when you sit at table, you are rather an under-sized gentleman. I have been astonished every day these three years, at seeing you rise after dinner in Commons Hall. A thousand to one, Fanny Ellerton thinks you a stumpy man." "And then, Phil," he continued, with a patronising tone, "you have studied minute philosophy to little purpose if you do not know that the first step in win- INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 81 ning a wom;m to whom you have been overpraised, is to disenchant her at all hazards, on your first inter view. You will never rise above the ideal she has formed, and to sink below it gradually, or to remain stationary, is not to thrive in your wooing." Leaving me this precocious wisdom to digest, Horace descended to the foot of the garden to take a warm bath, and overcome with fatigue, and the recum- opening at every three steps by a long window into the carpeted floors. When the rooms within are lit in a summer s night, that cool and airy colonnade is thronged by truants from the dance, and collectively by all who have anything to express that is meant for one ear only. The mineral waters of Saratoga are no less celebrated as a soporific for chaperons than as a tonic for the dyspeptic, and while the female Argus bent posture, I soon fell asleep and dreamed of the || dozes in the drawing-room, the fair lo and her Jupi- great blue eyes of Fanny Ellerton. The soaring of the octave flute in " Hail Columbia," ter (represented in this case, we will say, by Miss El- lerton and myself) range at liberty the fertile fields of flirtation. I had easily put Miss Ellerton in surprised good humor with herself and me during the first quadrille, and with a freedom based partly upon my certainty of with which the band was patriotically opening the j | pleasing her, partly on the peculiar manners of the ball, woke me from the midst of a long apologetic let ter to my friend s sister, and I found Van Pelt s black \ boy Juba waiting patiently at the bed-side with curl- j ing-tongs and Cologne-water, ordered to superintend my toilet by his master, who had gone early to the drawing-room to pay his respects to Miss Ellerton. With the cold cream disappeared entirely from my j face the uncomfortable redness to which I had been a ! martyr, and, thanks to my ebony coiffeur, my straight place, I coolly requested that she would continue to dance with me for the rest of the evening. "One unhappy quadrille excepted," she replied, with a look meant to be mournful. " May I ask with whom?" " Oh, he has not asked me yet ; but my brother has bound me over to be civil to him a spectre, Mr. Wrongham ! a positive spectre." How denominated ?" I inquired, with a forced in- and plastered locks soon grew as different to their difference, for I had a presentiment I should hear my umquhile guise" as Hyperion s to a satyr s. Hav ing appeared to the eyes of the lady, in whose favor I hoped to prosper, in red and white (red phiz and white jacket), I trusted that in white and black (black suit j don t seem surprised!" own name. "Slingsby Mr. Philip Slingsby Tom s fidus Achates, and a proposed lover of my own. But you and paleviznomy), I should look quite another person. Juba was pleased to show his ivory in a complimen tary smile at my transformation, and I descended to the drawing-room, on the best terms with the coxcomb in my bosom. Horace met me at the door. "Proteus redinvus /" was his exclamation. "Your new name is Wrongham. You are a gentle senior, instead of a bedeviled sophomore, and your cue is to be poetical. She will never think again of the mon ster in the white jacket, and I have prepared her for the acquaintance of a new friend, whom I have just described to you. I took his arm, and with the courage of a man in a Surprised! E-hem! I know the gentleman !" "Then did you ever see such a monster! Tom told me he was another Hyperion. He half admitted it himself, indeed ; for to tell you a secret, I have cor responded with him a year!" "Giddy Miss Fanny Ellerton! and never saw him !" "Never till to-night ! He sat at supper in a white jacket and red face, with a pile of bones upon his plate like an Indian tumulus." "And your brother introduced you ?" " Ah, you were at table ! Well, did you ever see in your travels, a man so unpleasantly hideous?" Fanny!" said her brother, coining up at the mo mask, went through another presentation to Miss El- ment, "Slingsby presents his apologies to you for not lerton. Her brother had been let into the secret by | joining your cordon to-night but he s gone to bed Van Pelt, and received me with great ceremony as his I with a head-ache." college superior; and, as there was no other person at the Springs who knew Mr. Slingsby, Mr. Wrongham was likely to have an undisturbed reign of it. Miss j Ellerton looked hard at me for a moment, but the j walks not forth to-night, I am yours for a cool hour gravity with which I was presented and received, dis- H on the colonnade." sipated a doubt if one had arisen in her mind, and i Vegetation is rapid in Alabama, and love is a weed that thrives in the soil of the tropics. We discoursed of the lost Pleiad and the Berlin bracelets, of the five "Indigestion, I dare say," said the young lady. " Never mind, Tom, I ll break my heart when I have leisure. And now, Mr. Wrongham, since the spectre she took my arm to go to the ball-room, with an undisturbed belief in my assumed name and eharac- ter. hundred people about us, and the feasibility of boiling commenced the acquaintance of the fair Alaba- i a pot on five hundred a year the unmatrimonial sum mian with great advantages. Received as a perfect stranger, I possessed, from long correspondence with her, the most minute knowledge of the springs, of her character, and of her favorite reading and pursuits, total of my paternal allowance. She had as many ne groes as I had dollars, I well knew, but it was my cue to seem disinterested. And where do you mean to live, when you marry, and, with the little knowledge of the world which she j Mr. Wrongham?" asked Miss Ellerton, at the two had gained on a plantation, she was not likely to pene trate my game from my playing it too freely. Her confidence was immediately won by the readiness . ! as if I had not heard her. hundredth turn on the colonnade. Would you like to live in Italy?" I asked again, with which I entered into her enthusiasm and antici pated her thoughts ; and before the first quadrille was well over, she had evidently made up her mind that Do you mean that as a scqurtur to my question, Mr. Wrongham ?" said she, half stopping in her walk ; \ though the sentence was commenced playfully, she had never in her life met one who so well "under- || dropping her voice at the last word, with something, I thought, very like emotion. I drew her oft" the colonnade to the small garden between the house and the spring, and in a giddy stood her." Oh ! how much women include in that apparently indefinite expression, " He understands me/" The colonnade of Congress Hall is a long prom enade laced in with vines and columns, on the same level with the vast ball-room and drawing-room, and (the light of heaven not being taxed at Saratoga) 6 dream of fear and surprise at my own rashness and success, I made, and won from her, a frank avowal of preference. Matches have been made more suddenly. 82 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. III. Miss Ellerton sat in the music-room the next morn ing after breakfast, preventing pauses in a rather in teresting conversation, by a running accompaniment upon the guitar. A single gold thread formed a fillet about her temples, and from beneath it, in clouds of silken ringlets, floated the softest raven hair that ever grew enamored of an ivory shoulder. Hers was a skin that seemed woven of the lily-white, but opaque fibre of the magnolia, yet of that side of its cup turned | toward the fading sunset. There is no term in paint ing, because there is no touch of pencil or color, that could express the vanishing and impalpable breath that assured the healthiness of so pale a cheek. She was slight as all southern women are in America, and of a flexible and luxurious gracefulness equalled by nothing but the movings of a smoke-curl. Without the elastic nerve remarkable in the motions of Taglioni, she appeared, like her, to be born with a lighter spe cific gravity than her fellow-creatures. If she had floated away upon some chance breeze you would only have been surprised upon reflection. "I am afraid you are too fond of society," said Miss Ellerton, as Juba came in hesitatingly and delivered her a note in the hand writing of an old correspondent. She turned pale on seeing the superscription, and crushed the note up in her bond, unread. I was not sorry to defer the denouement of my little drama, and taking up the remark which she seemed disposed to forget, I referred her to a scrap-book of Van Pelt s, j which she had brought home with her, containing some verses of my own, copied (by good luck) in that sentimental sophomore s own hand. "Are these yours, really and really?" she asked, looking pryingly into my face, and showing me my own verses, against which she had already run a pen cil line of approbation. "Peccavi!" I answered. "But will you make me in love with my offspring by reading them in your own ! voice." They were some lines written in a balcony at day break, while a ball was still going on within, and con tained an allusion (which I had quite overlooked) to some one of my ever-changing admirations. As well as I remember they ran thus : Morn in the east ! How coldly fair It breaks upon my fevered eye ! How chides the calm and dewy air ! Ho w chides the pure and pearly sky ! The stars melt in a brighter fire, The dew in sunshine leaves ihe flowers j They from their watch, in light retire, While we in sadness pass from ours ! I turn from the rebuking morn, The cold gray sky and fading star, And listen to the harp and horn, And see the waltzers near and far ; The lamps and flowers are bright as yet, And lips beneath more bright than they How can a scene so fair beget The mournful thoughts we bear away. Tis something that thou art not here, Sweet lover of my lightest word ! Tis something that my mother s tear By these forgetful hours is stirred ? But I have long a loiterer been In haunts where Joy is said to be ; And though, with Peace I enter in. The nymph comes never forth with me! " And who was this sweet lover, Mr. Wrongham ? I should know, I think, before I go farther with so ex peditious a gentleman." "As Shelley says of his ideal mistress I loved oh, no ! I mean not one of ye. Or any earthly one though ye are fair ! It was but an apostrophe to the presentiment of that which I have found, dear Miss Ellerton ! But will you read that ill-treated billet-doux, arid remember that Juba stands with the patience of an ebon statue wait ing for an answer ?" I knew the contents of the letter, and I watched the expression of her face, as she read it, with no little interest. Her temples flushed, and her delicate lips gradually curled into an expression of anger and scorn, and having finished the perusal of it, she put it into my hand, and asked me if so impertinent a production deserved an answer. I began to fear that the edaircisscment would not leave me on the sunny side of the lady s favor, and felt the need of the moment s reflection given me while running my eye over the letter. " Mr. Slingsby," said I, with the deliberation of an attorney, " has been some time in correspondence with you ?" " Yes." " And, from his letters and your brother s commen dations, you had formed a high opinion of his charac ter, and had expressed as much in your letters ?" " Yes perhaps I did." "And from this paper intimacy he conceives him self sufficiently acquainted with you to request leave to pay his addresses ?" A dignified bow put a stop to my catechism. " Dear Miss Ellerton !" I said, " this is scarcely a question upon which I ought to speak, but by putting this letter into my hand, you seemed to ask my opin ion." " I did I do," said the lovely girl, taking my hand, and looking appealingly into my face ; " answer it for me ! J have done wrong in encouraging that foolish correspondence, and I owe perhaps to this forward man a kinder reply than my first feeling would have dictated. Decide for me write for me relieve me from the first burden that has lain on my heart since " She burst into tears, and my dread of an explanation increased. " Will you follow my advice implicitly ?" I asked. " Yes oh, yes !" " You promise ?" " Indeed, indeed !" " Well, then, listen to me ! However painful the task, I must tell you that the encouragement you have given Mr. Slingsby, the admiration you have expressed in your letters of his talents and acquirements, and the confidences you have reposed in him respecting your self, warrant him in claiming as a right, a fair trial of his attractions. You have known and approved Mr. Slingsby s mind for years you know me but for a few hours. You saw him under the most unfavorable auspices (for I know him intimately), and I feel bound n justice to assure you that you will like him much better upon acquaintance." Miss Ellerton had gradually drawn herself up du ring this splendid speech, and sat at last as erect and as cold as Agrippina upon her marble chair. "Will you allow me to send Mr. Slingsby to you," I continued, rising " and suffer him to plead his own cause ?" If you will call my brother, Mr. Wrongham, I shall feel obliged to you," said Miss Ellerton. I left the room, and hurrying to my chamber, dipped my head into a basin of water, and plastered my long locks over my eyes, slipped on a white roundabout, and tied around my neck the identical checked cravat n which I had made such an unfavorable impression on the first day of my arrival. Tom Ellerton was soon found, and easily agreed to go before and announce me by my proper name to his sister ; and treading close ly on his heels, I followed to the door of the music- room. INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 83 " Ah, Ellen !" said he, without giving her time for i| to the door, where thnt small epitome of the inherit- a scene, " I was looking for you. Slingsby is better, ance of the prince of darkness, an American stage- and will pay his respects to you presently. And, I jj coach, awaited me as its ninth inside passenger. As say you will treat him well, Ellen, and and, don t | the last person picked up, I knew very well the seat to which I was destined, and drawing a final cool breath in the breezy colonnade, I summoned resolu tion and abandoned myself to the tender mercies of flirt with Wrongham the way you did last night ! Slingby s a devilish sight better fellow. Oh, here he is !" As I stepped over the threshold, Miss Ellerton gave me just enough of a look to assure herself that it was the identical monster she had seen at the tea-table, and not deigning me another glance, immediately com menced talking violently to her brother on the state of the weather. Tom bore it for a moment or two with remarkable gravity, but at my first attempt to join in the conversation, my voice was lost in an explosion of laughter which would have been the death of a gentle man with a full habit. Indignant and astonished, Miss Ellerton rose to her full height, and slowly turned to me. " Peccavi /" said I, crossing my hands on my bosom, and looking up penitently to her face. She ran to me, and seized my hand, but recovered herself instantly, and the next moment was gone from the room. Whether from wounded pride at having been the subject of a mystification, or whether from that female caprice by which most men suffer at one period or other of their bachelor lives, I know not but I never could bring Miss Ellerton again to the same interest ing crisis with which she ended her intimacy with Mr. WVongham. She proffered to forgive me, and talked laughingly enough of our old correspondence ; but whenever I grew tender, she referred me to the " sweet lover," mentioned in my verses in the balcony, and looked around for Van Pelt. That accomplished beau, Miss Ellerton s graces without the aid of his quizzing- glass, and I soon found it necessary to yield the pas altogether. She has since become Mrs. Van Pelt, and when I last heard from her was " as well as could be expected." CHAPTER III. MRS. CAPTAIN THOMPSON. THE last of August came sweltering in, hot, dusty, and faint, and the most indefatigable belles of Sarato ga began to show symptoms of weariness. The stars disappeared gradually from the ballroom ; the bar- the driver. The " ray of contempt" that " will pierce through the shell of the tortoise," is a shaft from the horn of a new moon in comparison with the beating of an i American sun through the top of a stage-coach. This " accommodation," as it is sometimes bitterly called, not being intended to carry outside passengers, has a top as thin as your grandmother s umbrella, black, po rous, and cracked ; and while intended for a protec tion from the heat, it just suffices to collect the sun s rays with an incredible power and sultriness, and ex clude the air that makes it sufferable to the beasts of the field. Of the nine places inside this " dilly," the four seats in the corners are so far preferable that the occupant has the outer side of his body exempt from a perspirative application of human flesh (the ther mometer at 100 degrees of Fahrenheit), while, of the three middle places on the three seats, the man in the centre of the coach, with no support for his back, yet buried to the chin in men, women, and children, is at the ninth and lowest degree of human suffering. I left Saratoga in such a state of happiness as you might suppose for a gentleman, who, besides fulfilling this latter category, had been previously unhappy in his love. I was dressed in a white roundabout and trowsers of the same, a straw hat, thread stockings, and pumps, ind was so far a blessing to my neighbors that I looked on observing my discomfiture, began to find out j cool. Directly behind me, occupying the middle of the back seat, sat a young woman with a gratis passen ger in her lap (who, of course, did not count among the nine), in the shape of a fat and a very hot child of three years of age, whom she called John, .Tacky, Johnny, Jocket, Jacket, and the other endearing di minutives of the namesakes of the great apostle. Like the saint who had been selected for his patron, he was a "voice crying in the wilderness." This little gen tleman was exceedingly unpopular with his two neigh bors at the windows, and his incursions upon their legs and shoulders in his occasional forays for fresh air, ended in his being forbidden to look out at either win dow, and plied largely with gingerbread to content him with the warm lap of his mother. Though I had no eyes in the back of my straw hat, I conceived very well the state in which a compost of soft gingerbread, keeper grew thin under the thickening accounts for tears, and perspiration, would soon leave the two un- lernonades; the fat fellow in the black band, who j I scrupulous hands behind me ; and as the jolts of the "vexed" the bassoon, had blown himself from the j coach frequently threw me back upon the knees of girth of Falstaff to an " eagle s talon in the waist ;" j his mother, I could not consistently complain of the papas began to be waylaid in their morning walks by I familiar use made of my roundabout and shoulders in young gentlemen with propositions ; and stage-coaches I j Master John s constant changes of position. I vowed that came in with their basgageless tails in the air, and I my jacket to the first river, the moment I could make the driver s weight pressing the foot-board upon the | sure that the soft gingerbread was exhausted bull astonished backs of his wheelers, went out with the|j kept my temper. How an American Jehu gets his team over ten iles in the hour, through all the variety of sand, ruts, trim of a Venetian gondola the driver s up-hoisted figure answering to the curved proboscis of that stern- laden craft. The vocation of tin-tumblers and water-dippers was gone. The fashionable world (hrazen in its general habit) had drank its fill of the ferrugineous waters. Mammas thanked Heaven for the conclusion of the chaperon s summer solstice ; and those who came to bet, and those who came to marry, " made up their books," and walked off (if they had won) with their winnings. Having taken a less cordial farewell of Van Pelt than I might have done had not Miss Ellerton been hanging confidingly on his arm, I followed my baggage clay-pits, and stump-thickets, is a problem that can only be resolved by riding beside him on the box. In the usual time we arrived at the pretty village of Troy, some thirty miles from Saratoga; and here, having ex changed my bedaubed jacket for a clean one, I freely forgave little Pickle his freedoms, for I hoped never to set eyes on him again during his natural life. I was going eastward by another coach. Having eaten a salad for my dinner, and drank a bottle oficed claret, I stepped forth in my blanched and lavendered" jacket to take my place in the other coach, trusting Providence not to afflict ine twice in 84 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. the same day with the evil I had just escaped, and feel ing, on the whole, reconciled to my troubled dividend of eternity. I got up the steps of the coach with as much alacrity as the state of the thermometer would permit, and was about drawing my legs after me upon the forward seat, when a clammy hand caught me unceremoniously by the shirt-collar, and the voice 1 was just beginning to forget cried out with a chuckle, " Madam!"! said, picking off the gingerbread from my shirt as the coach rolled down the street, "I had hoped that your infernal child - " I stopped in the middle of the sentence, for a pair of large blue eyes were looking wonderingly into mine, and for the first time I observed that the mother of this familiar nuisance was one of the prettiest women I had seen since 1 had become susceptible to the charms of the sex. "Are you going to Boston, sir ?" she inquired, with a half-timid smile, as if, in that case, she appealed to me for protection on the road. " Yes, madam !" I answered, taking little Jocket s pasty hand into mine, affectionately, as I returned her hesitating look ; " may 1 hope for your society so far ?" My fresh white waistcoat was soon embossed with a dingy yellow, where my enterprising fellow-passenger had thrust his sticky fist into the pockets, and my sham shirt-bosom was reduced incontinently to the complex ion of a painter s rag after doing a sunset in gamboge. I saw everything, however, through the blue eyes of his mother, and was soon on such pleasant terms with Master John, that, at one of the stopping-places, I in veigled him out of the coach and dropped him acci dentally into the horse-trough, contriving to scrub him passably clean before he could recover breath enough for an outcry. I had already thrown the residuum of his gingerbread out of the window, so that his fa miliarities for the rest of the day were, at least, less adhesive. We dropped one or two way-passengers at Lebanon, and I was left in the coach with Mrs. Captain and Master John Thompson, in both whose favors I made a progress that (I may as well depone) considerably restored my spirits laid flat by my unthrift wooing at Saratoga. If a fly hath but alit on my nose when my self-esteem hath been thus at a discount, I have soothed myself with the fancy that it preferred me a drowning vanity will so catch at a straw ! As we bowled along through some of the loveliest scenery of Massachusetts, my companion (now become my charge), let me a little into her history, and at the same time, by those shades of insinuation of which women so instinctively know the uses, gave me per fectly to comprehend that 1 might as well economize my tenderness. The father of the riotous young gen tleman who had made so free with my Valencia waist coat and linen roundabouts, had the exclusive copy hold of her affections. He had been three years at sea (I think I said before), and she was hastening to show him the pledge of their affections come ^into the world since the good brig Dolly made her last clearance from Boston bay. I was equally attentive to Mrs. Thompson after this illumination, though I was, perhaps, a shade less en amored of the interesting freedoms of. Master John. One s taste for children depends so much upon one s love for their mothers ! It was twelve o clock at night when the coach rat tled in upon the pavements of Boston. Mrs. Thomp son had expressed so much impatience during the last few miles, and seemed to shrink so sensitively from being left to herself in a strange city, that I offered my services till she should find herself in better hands, and, as a briefer way of disposing of her, had bribed the coachman, who was in a hurry with the mail, to turn a little out of his way, and leave her at her hus band s hotel. We drew up with a prodigious clatter, accordingly, at the Marlborough hotel, where, no coach being ex pected, the boots and bar-keeper were not immediately forthcoming. After a rap "to wake the dead," I set about assisting the impatient driver in getting off the lady s trunks and boxes, and they stood in a large pyramid on the sidewalk when the door was opened. A man in his shirt, three parts asleep, held a flaring candle over his head, and looked through the half- opened door. " Is Captain Thompson up ?" I asked rather brusque ly, irritated at the sour visage of the bar-keeper. "Captain Thompson, sir!" "Captain Thompson, sir! !" I repeated my words with a voice that sent him three paces back into the hall. "No, sir," he said at last, slipping one leg into his trowsers, which had hitherto been under his arm. " Then wake him immediately, and tell him Mrs. Thompson is arrived." Here s a husband, thought I, I as I heard something between a sob and a complaint ; issue from the coach-window at the bar-keeper s intel ligence. To go to bed when he expected his wife and child, and after three years separation ! She might as well have made a parenthesis in her constancy ! "Have you called the captain?" I asked, as I set Master John upon the steps, and observed the man still standing with the candle in his hand, grinning from ear to ear. " No, sir," said the man. " No !" I thundered, " and what in the devil s name is the reason?" "Boots!" he cried out in reply, "show this gentle- j man forty-one. Them may wake Captain Thompson as likes! /never hearn of no Mrs. Thompson!" Rejecting an ungenerous suspicion that flashed across my mind, and informing the bar-keeper en pas sant, that he was a brute and a donkey, 1 sprang up the staircase after a boy, and quite out of breath, ar rived at a long gallery of bachelors rooms on the fifth floor. The boy pointed to a door at the end of the gallery, and retreated to the banisters as if to escape the blowing up of a petard. Rat-a-tat-tat! "Come in!" thundered a voice like a hailing trum pet. I took the lamp from the boy, and opened the door. On a narrow bed well tucked up, lay a most i formidable looking individual, with a face glowing I with carbuncles, a pair of deep-set eyes inflamed and fiery, and hair and eyebrows of glaring red, mixed slightly with gray ; while outside the bed lay a hairy arm, with a fist like the end of the club of Hercules. His head tied loosely in a black silk handkerchief, and on the light-stand stood a tumbler of brandy- and-water. " W hat do you want ?" he thundered again, as I step ped over a threshold and lifted my hat, struck speech less for a moment with this unexpected apparition. " Have I the pleasure," I asked, in a hesitating voice, "to address Captain Thompson?" j , "That s my name!" " Ah ! then, captain, I have the pleasure to inform j you that Mrs. Thompson and little John are arrived. They are at the door at this moment." A change in the expression of Captain Thompson s ; face checked my information in the middle, and as I ! took a step backward, he raised himself on his elbow, ! and looked at me in a way that did not diminish my I embarrassment. "I ll tell you what, Mr. Milk-and-water," said he, I with an emphasis on every word like the descent of a i sledge-hammer; "if you re not out of this room in I two seconds with your Mrs. Thompson and little INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 65 John/ I ll slam you through that window, or the devil take me!" I reflected as I took another step backward, that if 1 were thrown down to Mrs. Thompson from a fifth story window I should not be in a state to render her the assistance she tequired ; and remarking with an ill-feigned gayety to Captain Thompson that so de cided a measure would not be necessary, I backed expeditiously over the threshold. As I was closing his door, I heard the gulp of his brandy-and-water, and the next instant the empty glass whizzed past my retreating head, and was shattered to pieces on the wall behind me. I gave the " boots" a cuff for an untimely roar of laughter as I reached the staircase, and descended, very much discomfited and embarrassed, to Mrs. Thompson. My delay had thrown that lady into a very moving state of unhappiness. Her tears were glistening in the light of the street lamp, and Master John was pulling away unheeded at her stomacher, and crying as if he would split his diaphragm. What to do? 1 would have offered to take her to my pater nal roof till the mystery could be cleared up but I had been absent two years, and to arrive at midnight with a woman and a young child, and such an im probable story I did not think my reputation at home would bear me out. The coachman, too, began to swear and make demonstrations of leaving us in the street, and it was necessary to decide. "Shove the baggage inside the coach," I said at last, "and drive on. Don t be unhappy Mrs. Thomp son! Jocket, stop crying, you villain! I ll see that you are comfortably disposed of for the night where the coach stops, madam, and to-morrow I ll try a litlle reason with Captain Thompson. How the devil can she love such a volcanic specimen!" I muttered to myself, dodging instinctively at the bare remem brance of the glass of brandy-and-water. The coachman made up for lost time, and we rattled over the pavements at a rate that made Jocket s hully- baloo quite inaudible. As we passed the door of rny own home, 1 wondered what would be the impression of my respectable parent, could he see me whisking by, after midnight, with a rejected woman and her progeny upon my hands ; but smothering the un worthy doubt that re-arose in my mind, touching the legitimacy of Master John, I inwardly vowed that I would see Mrs. Thompson at all risks fairly out of her imbroglio. We pulled up with a noise like the discharge of a ! load of paving-stones, and I was about saying some thing both affectionate and consolatory to my weeping charge, when a tall handsome fellow, with a face as brown as a berry, sprang to the coach-door, and seized her in his arms! A shower of kisses and tender ep ithets left me not a moment in doubt. Thfere was another Captain Thompson! He had not been able to get rooms at the Marl- borough, as he had anticipated when he wrote, and presuming that the mail would come first to the post- office, he had waited for her there. As I was passing the Mailborough a week or two afterward, I stopped to inquire about Captain Thomp son. I found that he was an old West India captain, who had lived there between his cruises for twenty years more or less, and had generally been supposed a bachelor. He had suddenly gone to sea, the land lord told me, smiling at the same time, as if thereby hung a tale if he chose to tell it. " The fact is," said Boniface, when I pushed him a little on the subject, "he was sheared off." " What scared him ?" I asked very innocently. "A wife and child from some foreign port!" he an swered laughing as if he would burst his waistband, and taking me into the back parlor to tell me the par ticulars. A LOG IN THE ARCHIPELAGO, THE American frigate, in which I had cruised as the ward-room guest for more than six months, had sailed for winter quarters at Mahon, and my name was up at the pier of Smyrna, as a passenger in the first ship that should leave the port, whatever her destina tion. The flags of all nations flew at the crowded peaks of the merchantmen lying off the Marina, and among them lay two small twin brigs, loading with figs and opium for my native town in America. They were owned by an old schoolfellow of my own, one of the most distin guished and hospitable of the Smyrniote merchants, and, if nothing more adventurous turned up, he had offered to land me from one of his craft at Malta ot Gibraltar. Time wore on, and I had loitered up and down the I narrow street " in melancholy idleness" by day, and I smoked the narghile with those " merchant princes" I by night, till I knew every paving-stone between the j beach and the bazar, and had learned the thrilling ! events of the Greek persecution with the particularity I of a historian. My heart, too, unsusceptible enough when "packed for travel," began to uncoil with ab sence of adventure, and expose its sluggish pulses to the "Greek fire," still burning in those Asiatic eyes, and I felt sensibly, that if, Telemachus-like, I did not ! soon throw myself into the sea, I should yield, past I praying for, to the cup of some Smyrniote Circe. ! Darker eyes than are seen on that Marina swim not in delight out of paradise ! I was sitting on an opium-box in the counting-house j of my friend L n(the princely and hospitable mer- j chant spoken of above), when enter a Yankee "skip- ; per," whom I would have clapped on the shoulder for a townsman if I had seen him on the top of the minaret of the mosque of Sultan Bajazet. His go-ashore black i coat and trowsers, worn only one month in twelve, ! were of costly cloth, but of the fashion prevailing in I the days of his promotion to be second mate of a cod- fisher ; his hat was of the richest beaver, but getting ; brown with the same paucity of wear, and exposure to ! the corroding air of the ocean ; and on his hands were stretched (and they had well need to be elastic) a pair | of Woodstock gloves that might have descended to him from Paul Jones " the pilot." A bulge just over ! his lowest rib gave token of the ship s chronometer, j and, in obedience to the new fashion of a guard, a fine j chain of the softest auburn hair (doubtless his wife s, | and, I would have wagered my passage-money, as pret ty a woman as he would see in his v yage) a chain, 1 say, braided of silken blond ringlets passed around his neck, and drew its glossy line over his broad-breasted white waistcoat the dewdrop on the lion s mane not more entitled to be astonished. A face of hard-weather, but with an expression of care equal to the amount of his invoice, yet honest and fearless as the truck of his mainmast; a round sailor s back, that looked as if he would hoist up his deck if you battered him beneath hatches against his will ; and teeth as white as his new foresail, completed the j picture of the master of the brig Metamora. Jolly old H 1, 1 shall never feel the grip of an honester hand, nor return one (as far as I can with the fisi you crip pled at parting) with a more kindly pressure ! A fair I wind on your quarter, my old boy, wherever you may be trading ! " What sort of accommodations have you, captain ?" I asked, as my friend introduced me. " Why, none to speak of, sir ! There s a starboard birth that a n t got much in it a few boxes of figs, and the new spritsail, and some of the mate s traps but I could stow away a little perhaps, sir." " You sail to-morrow morning ?" " Off with the land-breeze, ir." INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. I took leave of the kindest of friends, laid in a few hasty stores, and was on board at midnight. The next morning I awoke with the water rippling beside me, and creeping on deck, I saw a line of foam stretching behind us far up the gulf, and the ruins of the primi tive church of Smyrna, mingled with the turrets of a Turkish castle, far away in the horizon. The morning was cool and fresh, the sky of an ori ental purity, and the small low brig sped on like a nautilus. The captain stood by the binnacle, looking off to the westward with a glass, a tarpaulin hat over his black locks, a pair of sail-cloth pumps on his feet, and trowsers and roundabout of an indefinable tarri- ness and texture. He handed me the glass, and, obey ing his direction, I saw, stealing from behind a point of land, shaped like a cat s back, the well-known topsails of the two frigates that had sailed before us. We were off Vourla, and the commodore had gone to pay his respects to Sir Pulteney Malcolm, then ly ing with his fleet in this little bay, and waiting, we supposed, for orders to force the Dardanelles. The frigates soon appeared on the bosom of the gulf, and Leading down, neared our larboard bow, and stood for the Archipelago. The Metamora kept her way, but the " United States," the fleetest of our ships, soon left us behind with a strengthening breeze, and, fol lowing her with the glass till I could no longer distin guish the cap of the officer of the deck, I breathed a blessing after her, and went below to breakfast. It is strange how the lessening in the distance of a ship in which one has cruised in these southern seas, pulls on the heartstrings ! I sat on deck most of the day, cracking pecan-nuts with the captain, and gossiping about schooldays in j our native town, occasionally looking off over the hills j of Asia Minor, and trying to realize (the Ixion labor of j the imagination in travel) the history of which thdte barren lands have been the scene. I know not wheth er it is easy for a native of old countries to people these desolated lands from the past, but for me, accustomed to look on the face of the surrounding earth as mere vegetation, unstoried and unassociated, it is with a con stant mental effort alone that I can be classic on clas sic ground find Plato in the desert wastes of the Academy, or Priam among the Turk-stridden and prostrate columns of Troy. In my recollections of Athens, the Parthenon and the Theseion and the sol emn and sublime ruins by the Fount of Callirhoe stand forth prominent enough ; but when I was on the spot a biped to whom three meals a day, a washerwo man, and a banker, were urgent necessities I shame to confess that I sat dangling my legs over the classic Pelasgicum, not " fishing for philosophers with gold and figs," but musing on the mundane and proximate matters of daily economy. I could see my six shirts hanging to dry, close by the temple of the Winds, and I knew my dinner was cooking three doors from the crumbling capitals of the Agora. As the sun set over Ephesus, we neared the mouth of the gulf of Smyrna, and the captain stood looking over the leeward-bow rather earnestly. " We shall have a snorter out of the nor east," he said, taking hold of the tiller, and sending the helms man forward " I never was up this sea but once afore, and it s a dirty passage through these islands in any weather, let alone a Levanter." He followed up his soliloquy by jamming his tiller hard a-port, and in ten minutes the little brig was run ning her nose, as it seemed to me, right upon an in hospitable rock at the northern headland of the gulf. At the distance of a biscuit-toss from the shore, how ever, the rock was dropped to leeward, and a small passage appeared, opening with a sharp curve into the miniature but sheltered bay of Fourgas. We dropped anchor off a small hamlet of forty or fifty houses, and lay beyond the reach of Levanters in a circular basin that seemed shut in by a rim of granite from the sea. The captain s judgment of the weather was correct, and, after the sun set, the wind rose gradually to a vi olence which sent the spray high over the barriers of our protected position. Congratulating ourselves that we were on the right side of the granite wall, we got out our jolly-boat on the following morning, and ran ashore upon the beach half a mile from town, propo sing to climb first to the peak of the neighboring hill, and then forage for a dinner in the village below. We scrambled up the rocky mountain-side, with some loss of our private stock of wind, and considera ble increase from the nor easter, and getting under the lee of a projecting shelf, sat looking over toward Les bos, and ruminating in silence I, upon the old ques tion, "an Sappho publica fuerit" and the captain prob ably on his wife at Cape Cod, and his pecan-nuts, figs, and opium, in the emerald-green brig below us. I don t know why she should have been painted green, by-the-by (and I never thought to suggest that to the captain), being named after an Indian chief, who was as red as her copper bottom. The sea toward Mitylene looked as wild as an ea gle s wing ruffling against the wind, and there was that smoke in the sky as if the blast was igniting with its speed the look of a gale in those seas when unac companied with rain. The crazy-looking vessels of the Levant were scudding with mere rags of sails for the gulf; and while we sat on the rock, eight or ten of those black and unsightly craft shot into the little bay below us, and dropped anchor blessing, no doubt, every saint in the Greek calendar. Having looked toward Lesbos an hour, and come to the conclusion, that, admitting the worst with regard to the private character of Sappho, it would have been very pleasant to have known her; and the captain having washed his feet in a slender tricklet oozing from a cleft in a rock, we descended the hill on the other side, and stole a march on the rear to the town of Fourgas. Four or five Greek women were picking up olives in a grove lying halfway down the hill, and on our coming in sight, they made for us with such speed, that I feared the reverse of the Sabine rape not yet having seen a man on this desolate shore ; they ran well, but they resembled Atalanta in no other pos sible particular. We should have taken them for the Furies, but there were five. They wanted snuff and money making signs easily for the first, but attempt ing amicably to put their hands in our pockets when we refused to comprehend the Greek for " Give us a para." The captain pulled from his pocket an Amer ican dollar-note (payable at Nantucket), and offered it to the youngest of the women, who smelt at it and re turned it to him, evidently unacquainted with the Cape Cod currency. On farther search he found a few of the tinsel paras of the country, which he substituted for his " dollar-bill," a saving of ninety-nine cents to him, if the bank has not broke when he arrives at Mas sachusetts. Fourgas is surrounded by a very old wall, very much battered. We passed under a high arch containing marks of having once been closed with a heavy gate; and, disputing our passage with cows, and men that seemed less cleanly and civilized, penetrated to the heart of the town in search of the barber s shop, cafe, and kibaub shop three conveniences usually tmited in a single room and dispensed by a single Figaro in Turkish and Greek towns of this" description. The word cafe is universal, and we needed only to pio- nounce it to be led by a low door into a square apart ment of a ruinous old building, around which, upon a kind of shelf, waist-high, sat as many of ihe inl abit- ants of the town as could cross their legs conveniently. As soon as we were discerned through the smoke by the omnifarious proprietor of the establishment, two INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 87 of the worst-dressed customers were turned off the shelf unceremoniously to make room for us, the fire beneath the coffeepot was raked open, and the agree able flavor of the spiced beverage of the east ascended refreshingly to our nostrils. With his baggy trowsers tucked up to his thigh, his silk shirt to his armpits, an-l his smoke-dried but clean feet wandering at large in a pair of red morocco slippers, our Turkish Gany mede presented the small cups in their filagree hold ers, and never was beverage more delicious or more welcome. Thirsty \vith our ramble, and unaccus tomed to such small quantities as seem to satisfy the natives of the east, the captain and myself soon became objects of no small amusement to the wondering beards about us. A large tablespoon holds rather more than a. Turkish coffee-cup, and one, or, at most, two of these, satisfies the dryest clay in the Orient. To us, a dozen of them was a bagatelle, and we soon ex hausted the copper pot, and intimated to the aston ished cafi Iji that we should want another. He looked at us a mituite to see if we were in earnest, and then laid his hand on his stomach, and rolling up his eyes, made some remark to his other customers which pro voked a general laugh. It was our last " lark" ashore for some time, however, and spite of this apparent prophecy of a colic, we smoked our narghiles and kept him running with his fairy cups for some time j longer. One never gets enough of that fragrant li quor. The sun broke through the clouds as we sat on the j high bench, and, hastily paying our Turk, we hurried j to the seaside. The wind seemed to have lulled, and j was blowing lightly offshore ; and, impatient of loiter- log on his voyage, the captain got up his anchor and j ran across the bay, and in half an hour was driving : through a sea that left not a dry plank on the deck of I the .Metarnora. The other vessels at Fourgas had not stirred, and the sky in the northeast looked to my eye very threat ening. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the captain crowded sail and sped on like a sea-bird, though I could see by his face when he looked in the quarter of the wind, that he had acted more from im pulse than judgment in leaving his shelter. The heavy sea kicked us on our course, however, and the smart little brig shot buoyantly over the crests of the waves as she outran them, and it was difficult not to feel that the bounding and obedient fabric beneath our feet was j instinct with self-confidence, and rode the waters like their master. I well knew that the passage of the Archipelago was a difficult one < in a storm even to an experienced pilot, and with the advantage of daylight ; and I could not but remember with some anxiety that we were enter ing upon it at nightfall, and with a wind strengthening every moment, while the captain confessedly hfld made the passage but once before, and then in a calm sea of August. The skipper, however, walked his deck con fidently, though he began to manage his canvass with a more wary care, and, before dark, we were scudding under a single sail, and pitching onward with the heave of the sea at a rate that, if we were to see Malta at all, promised a speedy arrival. As the night closed in we passed a large frigate lying-to, which we afterward found out was the Superbe, a French eighty-gun ship (wrecked a few hours after on the island of Andros). The two American frigates had run up by Mitylene, and were still behind us : and the fear of being run down in the night, in our small craft, induced the captain to scud on, though he would else have lain-to with die Frenchman, and perhaps have shared his fate. I stayed on deck an hour or two after dark, and be fore going below satisfied myself that we should owe it to the merest chance if we escaped striking in the night. The storm had become so furious that we ran with bare poles before it ; and though it set us pretty fairly on our way, the course lay through a narrow and most intricate channel, among small and rocky islands, and we had nothing for it but to trust to a providential drift. The captain prepared himself for a night on deck, lashed everything that was loose, and filled the two jugs suspended in the cabin, which, as the sea had been too violent for any hope from the cook, were to sustain us through the storm. We took a biscuit and a glass of Hollands and water, holding on hard by the berths lest we should be pitched through the skylight, and as the captain tied up the dim lantern, I got a look at his face, which would have told me, if I had not known it before, that though resolute and un moved, he knew himself to be entering on the most imminent hazard of his life. The waves now broke over the brig at every heave, and occasionally the descent of the solid mass of water i on the quarter-deck seemed to drive her under like a I cork. My own situation was the worst on board, for I was inactive. It required a seaman to keep the deck, I and as there was no standing in the cabin without great ! effort, I disembarrassed myself of all that would impede j a swimmer, and got into my berth to await a wreck | which I considered almost inevitable. Braced with both hands and feet, I lay and watched the imbroglio in the bottom of the cabin, my own dressing-case 1 among other things emptied of its contents and swim- j ming with some of my own clothes and the captain s, i and the water rushing down the companion-way with ! every wave that broke over us. The last voice I heard ! on deck was from the deep throat of the captain cal- ! ling his men aft to assist in lashing the helm, and then, in the pauses of the gale, came the awful crash upon | deck, more like the descent of a falling house than a I body of water, and a swash through the scuppers im mediately after, seconded by the smaller sea below, in which my coat and waistcoat were undergoing a re hearsal of the tragedy outside. At midnight the gale increased, and the seas that de scended on the brig shook her to the very keel. We could feel her struck under by the shock, and reel and quiver as she recovered and rose again ; and, as if to distract my attention, the little epitome of the tempest going on in the bottom of the cabin grew more and more serious. The unoccupied berths were packed with boxes of figs and bags of nuts, which " brought away" one after another, and rolled from side to side with a violence which threatened to drive them through the side of the vessel ; my portmanteau broke its lash ings and shot heavily backward and forward with the roTl of the sea ; and if I was not to be drowned like a dog in a locked cabin, I feared, at least, I should have my legs broken by the leap of a fig-box into my berth. My situation was wholly uncomfortable, yet half ludi crous. An hour after midnight the captain came down, pale and exhausted, and with no small difficulty managed to get a tumbler of grog. " How does she head ?" I asked. "Side to wind, drifting five knots an hour." "Where are you?" "God only knows. I expect her to strike every minute." He quietly picked up the wick of the lamp as it tossed to and fro, and watching the roll of the vessel, gained the companion-way, and mounted to the deck. I The door was locked, and I was once more a prisoner and alone. An hour elapsed the sea, it appeared to me, strengthening in its heaves beneath us, and the wind howling and hissing in the rigging like a hundred devils. An awful surge then burst down upon the deck, racking the brig in every seam : the hurried tread of feet "overhead told ine that they were cutting 88 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. the lashings of the helm ; the seas succeeded each other quicker and quicker, and, conjecturing from the shortness of the pitch, that we were nearing a reef, 1 was half out of my berth when the cabin door svas wrenched open, and a deluging sea washed down the companion-way. "On deck for your life !" screamed the hoarse voice of the captain. I sprang up through streaming water, barefoot and bareheaded, but the pitch of the brig was so violent that I dared not leave the ropes of the companion lad der, and, almost blinded with the spray and wind, I stood waiting for the stroke. " Hard down !" cried the captain in a voice I shall never forget, and as the rudder creaked with the strain, the brig fell slightly off, and rising with a tremendous surge, I saw the sky dimly relieved against the edge of a ragged precipice, and in the next moment, as if J with the repulse of a catapult, we were flung back; into the trough of the sea by the retreating wave, and j surged heavily beyond the rock. The noise of the breakers, and the rapid commands of the captain ! now drowned the hiss of the wind, and in a few min- | utes we were plunging once more through the un- j certain darkness, the long and regular heavings of ! the sea alone assuring us that we were driving from the shore. The wind was cold, and I was wet to the skin. Every third sea broke over the brig and added to the ^ deluge in the cabin, and from the straining of the!) masts I feared they would come down with every sue- |. ceeding shock. I crept once more below, and regained my berth, where wet and aching in every joint, I [ awaited fate or the daylight. Morning broke, but no abatement of the storm. The captain came below and informed me (what I had j already presumed) that we had run upon the southern- i most point of Negropont, and had been saved by a i miracle from shipwreck. The back wave had taken j us off, and with the next sea we had shot beyond it. |j We were now running in the same narrow channel for Cape Colonna, and were surrounded with dangers. \ The skipper looked beaten out; his eyes were protru- ; ding and strained, and his face seemed to me to have j emaciated in the night. He swallowed his grog, and j flung himself for half an hour into his berth, and then { went on deck again to relieve his mate, where tired of my wretched berth, I soon followed him. The deck was a scene of desolation. The bulwarks were carried clean away, the jolly-boat swept off, and 1 the long-boat the only moveable thing remaining. The men were holding on to the shrouds, haggard and sleepy, clinging mechanically to their support as the sea broke down upon them, and, silent at the helm, > stood the captain and the second mate keeping the brig stern-on to the sea, and straining their eyes for land through the thick spray before them. The day crept on, and another night, and we passed i it like the last. The storm never slacked, and all j through the long hours the same succession went on, the brig plunging and rising, struggling beneath the overwhelming and overtaking waves, and recovering j herself again, till it seemed to me as if I had never! known any other motion. The captain came below j| for his biscuit and grog and went up again without ! speaking a word, the mates did the same with the same silence, and at last the bracing and holding on to pre with watching, the brig labored more and more heavily, and the storm seemed eternal. vent being flung from my berth became mechanical, and I did it while I slept. Cold, wet, hungry, and jj exhausted, what a blessing from Heaven were five | minutes of forgetfulness! How the third night wore on I scarce remember. The storm continued with unabated fury, and when the dawn of the third morning broke upon us the cap tain conjectured that we had drifted four hundred miles before the wind. The crew were exhausted At noon of the third day the clouds broke up a little, and the wind, though still violent, slacked somewhat in its fury. The sun struggled down upon the lashed and raging sea, and, taking our bearings, we found our selves about two hundred miles from Malta. With great exertions, the cook contrived to get up a fire in the binnacle and boil a little rice, and never gourmet sucked the brain of a woodcock with the relish which welcomed that dark mess of pottage. It was still impossible to carry more than a hand s breadth of sail, but we were now in open waters and flew merrily before the driving sea. The pitching and racking motion, and the occasional shipping of a heavy wave, still forbade all thoughts or hopes of comfort, but the dread of shipwreck troubled us no more, and I passed the day in contriving how to stand long enough on my legs to get my wet traps from my floating portmanteau, and go into quarantine like a Christian. The following day, at noon, Malta became visible from the top of an occasional mountain wave; and still driving under a reefed topsail before the hurricane, we rapidly neared it, and I began to hope for the repose of terra firma. The watch towers of the castellated rock soon became distinct through the atmosphere of spray, and at a distance of a mile, we took in sail and waited for a pilot. While tossing in the trough of the sea the following half hour, the captain communicated to me some em barrassment with respect to my landing which had not occurred to me. It appeared that the agreement to land me at Malta was not mentioned in his policy of | insurance, and the underwriters of course were not re- j sponsible for any accident that might happen to the i brig after a variation from his original plan of passage. This he would not have minded if he could have set j me ashore in a half hour, as he had anticipated, but | his small boat was lost in the storm, and it was now a j question whether the pilot-boat would take ashore a passenger liable to quarantine. To run his brig into harbor would be a great expense and positive loss of insurance, and to get out the long-boat with his broken tackle and exhausted crew was not to be thought of. I knew very well that no passenger from a plague port (such as Smyrna and Constantinople) was permitted to land on any terms at Gibraltar, and il the pilot here should refuse to take me off, the alternative was clear, I must make a voyage against my will to America! I was not in a very pleasant state of mind during the delay which followed; for, though I had been three years absent from my country and loved it well, 1 had laid my plans for still two years of travel on this side the Atlantic, and certain moneys for my "charges" lay waiting my arrival at Malta. Among lesser reasons, I had not a rag of clothes dry or clean, and was heartily out of love with salt water and the smell of figs. As if to aggravate my unhappiness, the sun broke through a rifVin the clouds and lit up the white and turreted battlements of Malra like an isle of the blessed the only bright spot within the limits of the stormy horizon. The mountain waves on which we were tossing were tempestuous and black, the comfortless and battered brig with her weary crew looked more like a wreck than a seaworthy merchantman, and no pilot appearing, the captain looked anxiously seaward, as if he grudged every minute of the strong wind rush ing by on his course. A small speck at last appeared making toward us from the shore, and, riding slowly over the tremendous waves, a boat manned by four men came within hailing distance. One moment as high as our topmast, and another in the depths of the gulf a hundred feet below us, it was like conversing from two buckets in a well. INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. "Do you want a pilot?" screamed the Maltese in English, as the American flag blew out to the wind "No!" roared the captain, like a thunder-peal, through his tin-trumpet. The Maltese, without deigning another look, put up his helm with a gesture of disappointment, and bore away. "Boat ahoy!" bellowed the captain. "Ahoy! ahoy!" answered the pilot. " Will you take a passenger ashore ?" "Where from?" " Smyrna !" There was a sound of doom in the angry prolonga tion of that detested monosyllable that sunk to the bottom of my heart like lead. "Clear away the mainsail," cried the captain get ting round once more to the wind. " I knew how it would be, sir," he continued, to me, as I bit my lips in the effort to be reconciled to an involuntary voyage of four thousand miles; "it wasn t likely he d put him self and his boat s crew into twenty days quarantine to oblige you and me." I could not but own that it was an unreasonable ex pectation. "Never mind, sir," said the skipper, consolingly, " plenty of salt fish in the locker, and I ll set you on Long Wharf in no time!" " Brig ahoy!" came a voice faintly across the waves. The captain looked over his shoulder without losing a capful of wind from his sail, and sent back the hail impatiently. The pilot was running rapidly down upon us. and had come back to offer to tow me ashore in the brig s jolly-boat for a large sum of money. " We ve lost our boat, and you re a bloody shark," answered the skipper, enraged at the attempt at extor tion. " He. id your course!" he muttered gruffly to the man at the helm, who had let the brig fall off that the pilot might come up. Irritated by this new and gratuitous disappointment, I stamped on the deck in an ungovernable fit of rage, and wished the brig at the devil. The skipper looked at me a moment, and instead of the angry answer I expected, an expression" of kind commiseration stole over his rough lace. The next moment he seized the helm and put the brig away from the wind, and then making a trumpet of his two immense hands, he once more hailed the returning pilot. " I can t bear to see you take it so much to heart, sir," said the kind sailor, "and I ll do for you what I wouldn t do for another man on the face o the arth. All hands there!" The men came aft, and the captain in brief words stated the case to them, and appealed to their^ense of kindness for a fellow-countryman, to undertake a task, which, in the sea then running, and with their exhausted strength, was not a service he could well demand in other terms. It was to get out the long boat, and wait off while the pilot towed me ashore and returned with her. "Ay, ay! sir," was the immediate response from every lip, and from the chief mate to the black cabin- boy, every man sprang cheerily to the lashings. It was no momentary task, for the boat was as firmly set in her place as the mainmast, and stowed compactly with barrels of pork, extra rigging, and spars in short, all the furniture and provision of the voyage. In the course of an hour, however, the tackle was rigged on the fore and main yards, and with a desperate effort its immense bulk was heaved over the side, and lay tossing on the tempestuous waters. I shook hands with the men, who refused every remuneration be yond my thanks, and, following the captain over the side, was soon toiling heavily on the surging waters, thanking Heaven for the generous sympathies of home and country implanted in the human bosom. Those who know the reluctance with which a merchant cap tain lays-to, even to pick up a man overboard in a fair wind, and those who understand the meaning of a for feited insurance, will appreciate this instance of dif ficult generosity. I shook the hard fist of the kind- hearted skipper on the quarantine stairs, and watched his heavy boat as she crept out of the little harbor with the tears in my eyes. I shall travel far before I find again a man 1 honor more heartily. THE REVENGE OF THE SIGNOR BASIL, PART I. " Un homme capable de faire des dominos av ec les os de son pere." PEBE GOR;OT. IT was in the golden month of August, not very | long ago, that the steamer which plies between St. : Mark s Stairs, at Venice, and the river into which 1 Phaeton turned a somerset with the horses of the sun, 1 started on its course over the lagoon with an unusual God-send of passengers. The moon was rising from the unchaste bed of the Adriatic (wedded every year 1 to Venice, yet every day and night sending the sun j and moon from her lovely bosom to the sky), and while the gold of the west was still glowing on the landward ! side of the Campanile, a silver gleam was brightening momently on the other, and the Arabic domes of St. | Mark and the flying Mercury on the Dogana paled to j the setting orb and kindled to the rising with the same Talleyrand-esque facility. For the first hour the Mangia-foco sputtered on her way with a silent company ; the poetry of the scene, or the regrets at leaving the delicious city lessening in the distance, affecting all alike with a thoughtful incommunicativeness. Gradually, however, the dol phin hues over the Brenta faded away the marble city sank into the sea, with its turrets and bright spires the still lagoon became a sheet of polished glass I, and the silent groups leaning over the rails found tongues and feet, and began to stir and murmur. With the usual unconscious crystallization of so- ! ciety, the passengers of the Mangia-foco had yielded ; one side of the deck to a party of some rank, who had left their carriages at Ferrara in coming from Florence to Venice, and were now upon their return to the city of Tasso, stomaching, with what grace they might, the contact of a vulgar conveyance, which saved them the hundred miles of posting between Ferrara and the Brenta. In the centre of the aristocratic circle stood a lady enveloped in a cashmere, but with her bonnet hung by the string over her arm one of those women of Italy upon whom the divinest gifts of loveliness are showered with a profusion which apparently impover- , ishes the sex of the whole nation. A beautiful woman I in that "land is rarely met; but when she does appear, she is what Venus would have been after the contest I for beauty on Ida, had the weapons of her antagonists, ; as in the tournaments of chivalry, been added to the i palm of victory. The marchesa del Marmore was ap- : parently twenty-three, and she might have been an incarnation of the morning-star for pride and bright- j ness. On the other side of the deck stood a group of young men, who, by their careless and rather shabby j dress, but pale and intellectual faces, were of that class li met in every public conveyance of Italy. The port- I folios under their arms, ready for a sketch, would have removed a doubt of their profession, had one existed ; and with that proud independence for which the class 00 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. is remarkable, they had separated themselves equally from the noble and ignoble disqualified by inward superiority from association with the one, and by acci dental poverty from the claims cultivation might give them upon the other. Their glances at the divine face turned toward them from the party I have alluded to, were less constant than those of the vulgar, who could not offend ; but they were evidently occupied more with it than with the fishing-boats lying asleep on the lagoon : and one of them, half-buried in the coil of rope, and looking under the arm of another, had already made a sketch of her that might some day make the world wonder from what seventh heaven of fancy such an angelic vision of a head had descended upon the painters dream. In the rear of this group, with the air of one who would conceal himself from view, stood a young man who belonged to the party, but who, with less of the pallor of intellectual habits in his face, was much bet ter dressed than his companions, and had, in spite of the portfolio under his arm, and a hat of the Salvator breadth of rim, the undisguisable air of a person ac customed to the best society. While maintaining a straggling conversation with his friends, with whom he seemed a favorite, Signer Basil employed himself in looking over the sketch of the lovely marchesa going on at his elbow occasionally, as if to compare it with the original, stealing a long look from between his hand and his slouched hat at the radiant creature sit ting so unconsciously for her picture, and in a low voice correcting, as by the result of his gaze, the rapid touches of the artist. " Take a finer pencil for the nostril, caro mio !" said he ; "it is as thin as the edge of a violet, and its trans parent curve " " Cospetto !" said the youth ; " but you see by this faint light better than I : if she would but turn to the moon " The signor Basil suddenly flung his handkerchief into the lagoon, bringing its shadow between the queen of night and the marchesa del Marmore ; and, attract ed from her revery by the passing object, the lady moved her head quickly to the light, and in that mo ment the spirited lip and nostril were transferred to the painter s sketch. " Thanks, mio bravo !" enthusiastically exclaimed the looker-on ; " Giorgione would not have beaten thee with the crayon !" and, with a rudeness which surprised the artist, he seized the paper from beneath his hand, walked away with it to the stern, and lean ing far over the rails, perused it fixedly by the mellow lustre of the moon. The youth presently followed him, and after a few words exchanged in an under tone, Signor Basil slipped a piece of gold into his hand, and carefully placed the sketch in his own port folio. II. It was toward midnight when the Mangia-foco en tered the Adige, and keeping its steady way between the low banks of the river, made for the grass-grown and flowery canal which connects its waters with the Po. Most of the passengers had yielded to the drowsy influence of the night air, and, of the aristocratic party on the larboard side, the young marchesa alone was waking : her friends had made couches of their cloaks and baggage, and were reclining at her feet, while the artists, all except the signor Basil, were stretched fairly on the deck, their portfolios beneath their heads, and their large hats covering their faces from the powerful rays of the moon. " Miladi does justice to the beauty of the night, said the waking artist, in a low and respectful tone, as he rose from her feet with a cluster of tuberoses she had. let fall from her hand. " It is indeed lovely, Signor Pittore," responded the marchesa, glancing at his portfolio, and receiving the flowers with a gracious inclination ; " have you touched Venice from the lagoon to-night ? The signor Basil opened his portfolio, and replied to the indirect request of the lady by showing her a very indifferent sketch of Venice from the island of St. Lazzaro. As if to escape from the necessity of praising what had evidently disappointed her, she turned the cartoon hastily, and exposed, on the sheet beneath, the spirited and admirable outline of her own matchless features. A slight start alone betrayed the surprise of the highborn lady, and raising (he cartoon to examine it more closely, she said with a smile, " You may easier tread on Titian s heels than Canaletti s. Bezzuoli has painted me, and not so well. I will awake the mar quis, and he shall purchase it of you." " Not for the wealth of the Medici, madam !" said the young man, clasping his portfolio hastily, pray do not disturb monsignore ! The picture is dear to me!" The marchesa, looking into his face, and with a glance around, which the accomplished courtier be fore her read better than she dreamed, she drew her shawl over her blanched shoulders, and settled her self to listen to the conversation of her new acquaint ance. u You would be less gracious if you were observed, proud beauty," thought Basil ; " but while you think the poor painter may while away the tediousness of a vigil, he may feed his eyes on your beauty as well." The Mangia-foco turned info the canal, threaded its lily-paved waters for a mile or two. and then, put ting forth upon the broad bosom of the Po, went on her course against the stream, and, with retarded pace, penetrated toward the sun-beloved heart of Italy. And while the later hours performed their procession with the stars, the marchesa del Marmore leaned sleepless and unfatigued against the railing, listening with min gled curiosity and scorn to the passionate love-murmur of the enamored painter. His hat was thrown aside, his fair and curling locks were flowing in the night air, his form was bent earnestly but respectfully toward her, and on his lip, with all its submissive tenderness, there sat a shadow of something she could not define, but which rebuked, ever and anon, as with the fierce regard of a noble, the condescension she felt toward him as an artist. III. Upon the lofty dome of the altar in the cathedral of Bologna stands poised an angel in marble, not spoken of in the books of travellers, but perhaps the loveliest incarnation of a blessed cherub that ever lay in the veined bosom of Pentelicus. Lost and unobserved on the vast floor of the nave, the group of artists, who had made a day s journey from Ferrara, sat in the wicker chairs hired for a baioch during the vesper, and drew silently from this angel, while the devout people of Bologna murmured their Ave Marias around. Signor Basil alone was content to look over the work of his companions, and the twilight had already begun to brighten the undying lamps at the shrine, when he started from the pillar against which he leaned, and crossed hastily toward a group issuing from a private chapel in the western aisle. A lady walked between two gentlemen of noble mien, and behind her, attend- ed by an equally distinguished company, followed that lady s husband, the marchese del Marmore. They were strangers passing through Bologna, and had been attended to vespers by some noble friends. The companions of the signor Basil looked on with some surprise as their enamored friend stepped confi- [ dently before the two nobles in attendance upon the INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 91 lady, nnd arrested her steps with a salutation which, though respectful as became a gentleman, was marked with the easy politeness of one accustomed to a favora ble reception. " May I congratulate miladi," he said, rising slowly from his bow, and fixing his eyes with unembarrassed admiration on her own liquid but now frowning orbs, " upon her safe journey over the marches ! Bologna," he continued, glancing at the nobles with a courteous smile, " welcomes her fittingly." The lady listened with a looU of surpiise, and the Bolognese glanced from the dusty boots of the artist to his portfolio. Has the painter the honor to know la signora?" asked the cavalier on her right. " Signor, si !" said the painter, fiercely, as a curl arched the lady s lip, and she prepared to answer. The color mounted to the temples of the marchesa, and her husband, who had loitered beneath the ma donna of Domenichino, coming up at the instant, she bowed coldly to the signor Basil, and continued down the aisle. The artist followed to her carriage, and lifted his hat respectfully as the lumbering equipage took its way by the famous statue of Neptune, and then with a confident smile, which seemed to his com panions somewhat mistimed, he muttered between his teeth, " Ciascuno son bel giorno !" and strolled loiter ing on with them to the trattoria. IV. The court of the grand-duke of Florence is perhaps the most cosmopolitan and the most easy of access in all Europe. The Austrian-born monarch himself, adopting in some degree the frank and joyous charac ter of the people over whom he reigns, throws open his parks and palaces, his gardens and galleries, to the strangers passing through ; and in the season of gayety almost any presentable person, resident at Florence, may procure the entree to the court balls, and start f.iir with noble dames and gentlemen for grace in courtly favor. The fetes at the Palaz/.o Pitti, albeit not always exempt from a leaven of vulgarity, are al ways brilliant and amusing, and the exclusives of the court, though they draw the line distinctly enough to their own eye, mix with apparent abandonment in the motley waltz and mazurka, and either from good-na ture or a haughty conviction of their superiority, never suffer the offensive cordon to be felt, scarce to be sus pected, by the multitude who divert them. The grand-duke, to common eyes, is a grave and rather timid person, with more of the appearance of the scholar than of the sovereign, courteous in public, and benevolent and earnest in his personal attentions to his guests at the palace. The royal quadrille may be shared without permission of the grand chamberlain, and the royal eye, after the first one or two dances of ceremony, searches for partners by the lamp of beauty, heedless of the diamonds on the brow, or the star of nobility on the shoulder. The grand supper is scarce more exclusive, and on the disappearance of the royal cortege, the delighted crowd take their departure, having seen no class more favored than themselves, and enchanted with the gracious absence of pretension in the nobilita of Tuscany. Built against the side of a steep hill, the Palazzo Pitti encloses its rooms of state within massive and sombre walls in front, while in the rear the higher sto ries of the palace open forth on a level with the deli cious gardens of the Boboli, and contain suites of smaller apartments, filled up with a cost and luxury which would beggar the dream of a Sybarite. Here lives the monarch, in a seclusion rendered deeper and more sa:re;l by the propinquity of the admitted world in the apartments below; and in this sanctuary of roy alty is enclosed a tide of life as silent and unsuspected by the common inhabitant of Florence as the flow of the ocean-veiled Arethusa by the mariner of the Ionian main. Here the invention of the fiery genius of Italy is exhausted in poetical luxury; here the reserved and silent sovereign throws off his maintcin of royal conde scension, and enters with equal arms into the lists of love and wit ; here burn (as if upon an altar fed with spice-woods and precious gums) the fervent and uncal- culating passions of this glowing clime, in senses re fined by noble nurture, and hearts prompted by the haughty pulses of noble blood ; and here to the threshold of this sanctuary of royal pleasure press all who know its secrets, and who imagine a claim to it in their birth and attractions, while the lascia-passarc is accorded with a difficulty which alone preserves its splendor. Some two or three days after the repulse of the signor Basil in the cathedral of Bologna, the group of Ij travelling artists were on their way from the grand gal- I lery at Florence to their noonday meal. Loitering with slow feet through the crowded and narrow Via Calzaiole, they emerged into the sunny Piazza, and looking up with understanding eyes at the slender shaft of the Campanile (than which a fairer figure of reli gious architecture points not to heaven), they took their way toward the church of Santa Triniia, propo sing to. eat their early dinner at a house named, from its excellence in a certain temperate beverage, La Birra. The traveller should be advised, also, that by paying an extra paul in the bottle, he may have at this renowned eating-house an old wine sunned on the southern shoulder of Fiesole, that hath in its flavor a certain redolence of Boccaccio scarce remarkable, since it grew in the scene of the Decameron but of a virtue which, to the Hundred Tales of Love (read drinking), is what the Gradus ad. Parnassum should be to the building of a dithyrambic. The oil of two r.razie upon the palm of the fat waiter Giuseppe will assist in calling the vintage to his memory. A thundering rap upon the gate of the adjoining i Palazzo arrested the attention of the artists as they [| were about to enter the Birra, and in the occupant of a dark-green cabriolet, drawn by a pampered horse of the duke s breed, they recognised, elegantly dressed and posed on his seat a la d Orsay, the signor Basil. His coat was of an undecided cut and color, and his gloves were of primrose purity. The recognition was immediate, and the cordiality of the greeting mutual. They had parted from their companion at the gate of Florence, as travellers part, without question, and they met without reserve to part as questionless again. The artists were surprised at j the signor Basil s transformation, but no follower of , their refined art would have been so ill-bred as to ex- < press it. He wished them the bon appetito, as a tall ! chasseur came out to say that her ladyship was at I home; and with a slacked rein the fiery horse sprang | through the gateway, and the marble court of the I palace rang with his prancing hoofs. He who was idle and bought flowers at the Cafe of I the Colonna at Florence will have remarked, as he sat ! in his chair upon the street in the sultry evening the I richly ornamented terrace and balustrade of the Pa lazzo Corsi giving upon the Piazza Trinita. The !| dark old Ghibelline palace of the Strozzi lets the eye down upon it, as it might pass from a helmeted knight I with closed vizor to his un bonneted and laughing I page. The crimson curtains of the window opening I upon the terrace, at the time of our story, reminded every passing Florentine of the lady who dwelt within a descendant of one of the haughtiest lines of Eng lish chivalry resident in Italy since many years for health, but bearing in her delicate frame and ex quisitely transparent features, the loftiest type of pa trician beauty that had ever filled the eye that looked upon her. In the inner heaven of royal exclusiveness 92 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. at the Pitti in its constellation of rank and wit the lady Geraldine had long been the worshipped and as cendant cynosure. Happy in a husband without rank and but of moderate fortune, she maintained the spot less character of an English wife in this sphere of conventional corruption; and though the idol of the duke and his nobles, it would have been like a whisper against the purity of the brightest Pleiad, to have linked her name with love. With her feet upon a sofa covered with a gossamer cashmere, her lovely head pillowed on a cushion of silk, and a slight stand within arm s length holding a vase of flowers and the volume from which she had been reading, the lady Geraldine received the count Basil Spiriford, some time attache to the Russian em bassy at Paris (where he had first sunned his eyes in her beauty), and at present the newly-appointed sec retary to the minister of the same monarch near the court of Tuscany. Without a bow, but with the hasty step and gesture of a long absent and favored friend, the count Basil ran to the proffered hand, and pressed its alabaster fingers to his lips. Had the more common acquaint ances of the diplomate seen him at this moment, they would have marvelled how the mask of manhood may drop, and disclose the ingenuous features of the boy. The secretary knew his species, and the lady Geral dine was one of those women for whom the soul is unwilling to possess a secret. After the first inquiries were over, the lady ques tioned her recovered favorite of his history since they had parted. "I left you," she said, "swimming the dangerous tide of life at Paris. How have you come to shore?" " Thanks, perhaps, to your friendship, which made life worth the struggle ! For the two extremes, how ever, you know what I was at Paris and yesterday I was a wandering artist in velveteen and a sombrero!" Lady Geraldine laughed. "Ah! you look at my curls but Macassar is at a discount ! It is the only grace I cherished in my in cognito. A resumcr I got terribly out of love by the end of the year after we parted, and as terribly in debt. My promotion in diplomacy did not arrive, and the extreme hour for my credit did. Pozzo di Borgo kindly procured me conge for a couple of years, and I dived presently under a broad-rimmed hat, got into a vetturino with portfolio and pencils, joined a troop of wandering artists, and with my patrimony at nurse, have been two years looking at life without spectacles at Venice." "And painting?" "Painting!" " Might one see a specimen ?" asked the lady Geral dine, with an incredulous smile. " I regret that my immortal efforts in oils are in the possession of a certain Venetian, who lets the fifth floor of a tenement washed by the narrowest canal in that fair city. But if your ladyship cares to see a drawing or two " He rang the bell, and his jocki Anglais presently brought from the pocket of his cabriolet a wayworn and thinly furnished portfolio. The lady Geraldine turned over a half-dozen indifferent views of Venice, but the last cartoon in the portfolio made her start. " La Marchesa del Marmore!" she exclaimed, look ing at Count Basil with an inquiring and half uneasy eye. "Is it well drawn?" he asked quietly. "Well drawn? It is a sketch worthy of Raphael. Do you really draw so well as this, or" she added, after a slight hesitation "is it a miracle of love?" " It is a divine head," soliloquized the Russian, half closing his eyes, and looking at the drawing from a distance, as if to fill up the imperfect outline from his memory. The lady Geraldine laid her hand on his arm. " My dear Basil," she said seriously, "I should be wretched if I thought your happiness was in the power of this woman. Do you love her?" " The portrait was not drawn by me," he answered, "though I have a reason for wishing her to think so. It was done by a fellow-traveller of mine, whom I wish to make a sketch of yourself, and I have brought it here to interest you in him as an artist. Mais revenons a nos moutons- la marchesa was also a fellow-traveller of mine, and without loving her too violently, 1 owe her a certain debt of courtesy contracted on the way. Will you assist me to pay it?" Relieved of her fears, and not at all suspecting the good faith of the diplomatist in his acknowledgments of gratitude, the lady Geraldine inquired simply how she could serve him. "In the twenty-four hours since my arrival at Flor ence," he said, "I have put myself, as you will see, au courant of the minor politics of the Pitti. Thanks to my Parisian renown, the duke has enrolled me al ready under the back-stairs oligarchy, and to-morrow night I shall sup with you in the saloon of Hercules after the ball is over. La marchesa, as you well know, has, with all her rank and beauty, never been able to set foot within those guarded penetralia soil her ma licious tongue, soit the interest against her of the men she has played upon her hook too freely. The road to her heart, if there be one, lies over that threshold, and I would take the toll. Do you understand me, most beautiful lady Geraldine?" The count Basil imprinted another kiss upon the fingers of the fair Englishwoman, as she promised to put into his hand the following night the illuminated ticket which was to repay, as she thought, too gener ously, a debt of gratitude ; and plucking a flower from her vase for his bosom, he took his leave to return at twilight to dinner. Dismissing his cabriolet at the gate, he turned on foot toward the church of San Gaetano, and with an expression of unusual elation in his step and countenance, entered the trattoria, where dined at that moment his companions of the pencil. The green lamps glittering by thousands amid the foliage of the Boboli had attained their full brightness, and the long-lived Italian day had died over the distant mountains of Carrara, leaving its inheritance of light apparently to the stars, who. on their fields of deepen ing blue, sparkled, each one like the leader of an un seen host in the depths of heaven, himself the fore most and the most radiant. The night was balmy and voluptuous. The music of the ducal band swelled forth from the perfumed apartments on the air. A single nightingale, far back in the wilderness of the garden, poured from his melodious heart a chant of the most passionate melancholy. The sentinel of the body-guard stationed at the limit of the spray of the fountain leaned on his halberd and felt his rude senses melt in the united spells of luxury and nature. The ministers of a monarch s pleasure had done their ut most to prepare a scene of royal delight, and night and summer had flung in their enchantments when in genuity was exhausted. The dark architectural mass of the Pitti, pouring a blaze of light scarce endurable from its deeply-sunk windows, looked like the side of an enchanted moun tain laid open for the revels of sorcery. The aigrette and plume passed by; the tiara and the jewel upon the breast; the gayly-dressed courtiers and glittering dames; and to that soldier at his dewy post, it seemed like the realized raving of the improvisatore when he is lost in some fable of Araby. Yet within walked malice and hate, and the light and perfume that might have fed an angel s heart with love, but deepened INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 03 in many a beating bosom the consuming fires of envy. With the gold key of office on his cape, the grand chamberlain stood at the feet of the dowager grand dutchess, and by a sign to the musicians, hidden in a latticed gallery behind the Corinthian capital of the hall, retarded or accelerated the soft measure of the waltz. On a raised seat in the rear of the chairs of state, sat the ladies of honor and the noble dames nearest allied to royal blood ; one solitary and privi leged intruder alone sharing the elevated place the lady Geraldine. Dressed in white, her hair wound about her head in the simplest form, yet developing its divine shape with the clear outline of statuary, her eyes lambent with purity and sweetness, heavily fring ed with lashes a shade darker than the light auburn braided on her temples, and the tint of the summer s most glowing rose turned out from the threadlike part ing of her lips ; she was a vision of loveliness to take into the memory, as the poet enshrines in his soul the impossible shape of his ideal, and consumes youth and age searching in vain for its like. Fair Lady Ger aldine ! thou wilt rend these passionate words from one whose worship of thy intoxicating loveliness has never before found utterance, but if this truly-told tale should betray the hand that has dared to describe thy beauty, in thy next orisons to St. Mary of pity, breathe from those bright lips a prayer that he may forget thee ! By the side of the lady Geraldine, but behind the chair of the grand dutchess, who listened to his con versation with singular delight, stood a slight young man of uncommon personal beauty, a stranger appa rently to every other person present. His brilliant uni form alone betrayed him to be in the Russian diploma cy ; and the marked distinction shown him, both by the reigning queen of the court, and the more powerful and inaccessible queen of beauty, marked him as an object of keen and universal curiosity. By the time the fifth mazurka had concluded its pendulous refrain, the grand chamberlain had tolerably well circulated the name and rank of Count Basil Spirifort, the re nowned wit and elegant of Paris, newly appointed to the court of his royal highness of Tuscany. Fair eyes wandered amid his sunny curls, and beating bo soms hushed their pulses as he passed. Count Basil knew the weight of a first impression. Count Basil knew also the uses of contempt. Upon the first principle he kept his place between the grand dutchess and Lady Geraldine, exerting his deeply- studied art of pleasing, to draw upon himself their ex clusive attention. Upon the second principle, he was perfectly unconscious of the presence of another hu man being ; and neither the gliding step of the small- eared princess S in the waltz, nor the solely advance of the last female of the Medici in the mazur ka, distracted his large blue eyes a moment from their idleness. With one hand on the eagle-hilt of his sword, and his side leaned against the high cushion of red velvet honored by the pressure of the lady Geral dine, he gazed up into that beaming face, when not bending respectfully to the dutchess, and drank stead fastly from her beauty, as the lotus-cup drinks light from the sun. The new secretary had calculated well. In the deep recess of the window looking toward San Minia- to, stood a lady nearly hidden from view by the muslin curtains just stirring with the vibration of the music, who gazed on the immediate circle of the grand dutch ess with an interest that was not attempted to b*e dis guised. On her first entrance into the hall, the mar- chesa del Mannore had recognised in the new minion of favor her impassioned lover of the lagoon, herslight- ed acquaintance of the cathedral. When the first shock of surprise was over, she looked on the form which she had found beautiful even in the disguise of pover ty, and, forgetting her insulting repulse when he would have claimed in public the smile she had given him when unobserved, she recalled with delight every syl lable he had murmured in her ear, and every look she had called forth in the light of a Venetian moon. The man who had burned upon the altar of her vanity the ! most intoxicating incense who had broken through the iron rules of convention and ceremony, to throw his homage at her feet who had portrayed so incom parably (she believed) with his love-inspired pencil | the features imprinted on his heart this chance-won i worshipper, this daring but gifted plebeian, as she had | thought him, had suddenly shot into her sphere and become a legitimate object of love ; and, beautified by the splendor of dress, and distinguished by the prefer ence and favor of those incomparably above her, he seemed tenfold, to her eyes, the perfection of adorable beauty. As she remembered his eloquent devotion to herself, and saw the interest taken in him by a woman whom she hated and had calumniated a woman who j she believed stood between her and all the light of ex istence she anticipated the triumph of taking him from her side, of exhibiting him to the world as a fal con seduced from his first quarry ; and never doubting that so brilliant a favorite would control the talisman of the paradise she had so long wished to enter, she j panted for the moment when she should catch his eye i and draw him from his lure, and already heard the 1 chamberlain s voice in her ear commanding her pres- i ence after the ball in the saloon of Hercules. The marchesa had been well observed from the first ! by the wily diplomate. A thorough adept in the art (so necessary to his profession) of seeing without ap pearing to see, he had scarce lost a shade of the vary- ing expressions of her countenance ; and while she | fancied him perfectly unconscious of her presence, he ! read her tell-tale features as if they had given utter ance to her thoughts. He saw, with secret triumph, the effect of his brilliant position upon her proud and vain heart ; watched her while she made use of her throng of despised admirers to create a sensation near i him and attract his notice; and when the ball wore on, and he was still in unwearied and exclusive attendance upon the lady Geraldine, he gazed after her with a momentary curl of triumph on his lip, as she took up her concealed position in the embayed window, and abandoned herself to the bitter occupation of watching the happiness of her rival. The lady Geraldine had never been so animated since her first appearance at 1 the court of Tuscany. It was past midnight when the grand-duke, flushed | and tired with dancing, came to the side of the lady | Geraldine. Count Basil gave place, and, remaining a } moment in nominal obedience to the sovereign s polite request which he was too politic to construe literally, he looked down the dance with the air of one who has turned his back on all that could interest him, and, passing close to the concealed position of the marche sa, stepped out upon the balcony. The air was cool, and the fountain played refresh ingly below. The count Basil was one of those minds which never have so much leisure for digression as when they are most occupied. A love, as deep and profound as the abysses of his soul, was weaving thread for thread with a revenge worthy of a Mohican ; yet, 1 after trying in vain to count eight in the Pleiades, he raised himself upon the marble balustrade, and perfect- | ly anticipating the interruption to his solitude which i presently occurred, began to speculate aloud on the | dead and living at that hour beneath the roof of the j Pitti. A painter s mistress," he said, " immortal in her ! touch of her paramour s pencil, is worshipped for cen turies on these walls by the pilgrims of art ; while the warm perfection of all loveliness the purest and di- vinest of highborn women will perish utterly with the INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. eyes that have seen her! The Bella of Titian, the Fornarina of RafFaelle peasant-girls of Italy have, at this moment, more value in this royal palace than the breathing forms that inhabit it ! The lady Geral- dine herself, to whom the sovereign offers at this mo ment his most flattering homage, would be less a loss to him than either ! Yet they despise the gods of the pencil who may thus make them immortal ! The dull blood in their noble veins, that never bred a thought beyond the instincts of their kind, would look down, forsooth, on the inventive and celestial ichor that in flames the brain, and prompts the fiery hand of the painter! How long will this very sovereign live in the memories of men? The murderous Medici, the am bitious cardinals, the abandoned women, of an age gone by, hang in imperishable colors on his walls ; while of him, the lord of this land of genius, there is not a bust or a picture that would bring a sequin in the market place ! They would buy genius in these days like wine, and throw aside the flask in which it ripened. Raffaelle and Buonarotti were companions for a pope and his cardinals : Titian was an honored guest for the doge. The stimulus to immortalize these noble friends was in the love they bore them ; and the secret of their power to do it lay half in the knowledge of their char acters, gained by daily intimacy. Painters were princes then, as they are beggars now; and the princely art is beggared as well !" The marchesa del Marmore stepped out upon the balcony, leaning on the arm of the grand chamberlain. The soliloquizing secretary had fore told to himself both her coming and her compan ion. " Monsieur le comte," said the chamberlain, " la marchesa del Marmore wishes for the pleasure of your acquaintance." Count Basil bowed low, and in that low and musical tone of respectful devotion which, real or counterfeit, made him irresistible to a woman who had a soul to be thrilled, he repeated the usual nothings upon the beau ty of the night ; and when th, chamberlain returned to his duties, the marchesa walked forth with her companion to the cool and fragrant alleys of the gar den, and, under the silent and listening stars, implored j forgiveness for her pride ; and, with I he sudden aban- donment peculiar to the clime, poured into his ear j the passionate and weeping avowal of her sorrow and ! love. " Those hours of penitence in the embayed win- ; dow," thought Count Basil, " were healthy for your j soul." And as she walked by his side, leaning heavi- j ly on his arm, and half-dissolved in a confiding tender- j ness, his thoughts reverted to another and a far sweet- i er voice; and while the caressing words of the marchesa fell on an unlistening ear, his footsteps insensibly turned back to the lighted hall. VI. As the daylight stole softly over Vallombrosa, the luxurious chariot of the marchesa del Marmore stopped at the door of Count Basil. The lady Geraldine s suit had been successful ; and the hitherto excluded Flor entine had received, from the hand of the man she had once so ignorantly scorned, a privilege for which she would have bartered her salvation : she had supped at his side in the saloon of Hercules. With many faults of character, she was an Italian in feeling, and had a capacity, like all her countrywomen, for a consuming and headlong passion. She had better have been born of marble. " I have lifted you to heaven," said Count Basil, as her chariot-wheels rolled from his door ; " but it is as the eagle soars into the clouds with the serpent. We will see how you will relish the fall !" PART II. THE grand-duke s carriages, with their six horses and outriders, had turned down the Borg ognisanti, and the "City of the Red Lily," waking from her noonday slumber, was alive with the sound of wheels. The sun was sinking over the Apennine which kneels at the gate of Florence ; the streets were cool and shadowy; the old women, with the bambino, between their knees, braided straw at the doors ; the booted guardsman paced his black charger slowly over the jeweller s bridge ; the picture-dealer brought forward his brightest " master" to the fading light ; and while the famous churches of that fairest city of the earth called to the Ave-Maria with impatient bell, the gal lantry and beauty of Tuscany sped through the damp ening air with their swift horses, meeting and passing with gay greetings amid the green alleys of the Cas- cine. The twilight had become gray, when the carriages and horsemen, scattered in hundreds through the in terlaced roads of this loveliest of parks, turned by com mon consent toward the spacious square in the centre, and drawing up in thickly-serried ranks, the soiree on wheels, the reunion en plein air, which is one of the most delightful of the peculiar customs of Florence, commenced its healthful gayeties. The showy car riages of the grand-duke and the ex-king of Wurtern- berg (whose rank would not permit them to share in the familiarities of the hour) disappeared by the avenue skirting the bank of the Arno, and with much delicate and some desperate specimens of skill, the coachmen of the more exclusive nobility threaded the embar rassed press of vehicles, and laid their wheels together on the southern edge of the piazza. The beaux in the saddle, disembarrassed of ladies and axletrees, enjoyed their usual butterfly privilege of roving, and with light rein and ready spur pushed their impatient horses to the coronetted panels of the loveliest or most power ful ; the laugh of the giddy was heard here and there over the pawing of restless hoofs; an occasional scream half of apprehension, half of admiration rewarded the daring caracole of some young and bold rider ; and while the first star sprang to its place, and the dew of heaven dropped into the false flowers in the hat of the belle, and into the thirsting lips of the violet in the field (simplicity, like virtue, is its own reward !), the low murmur of calumny and compliment, of love and lightheartedness, of politeness, politics, puns, and po etry, arose over that assembly upon wheels : and if it was not a scene and an hour of happiness, it was the fault neither of the fragrant eve nor of the provisions of nature and fortune. The material for happiness was there. A showy caleche with panels of dusky crimson, the hammer-cloth of the same shade, edged with a broad fringe of white, the wheels slightly picked out with the same colors, and the coachman and footman in corre sponding liveries, was drawn up near the southern edge of the Piazzi. A narrow alley had been left for horse men between this equipage and the adjoining ones, closed up at the extremity, however, by a dark-green and very plain chariot, placed with a bold violation of etiquette directly across the line, and surrounded just now by two or three persons of the highest rank lean ing from their saddles in earnest conversation with the occupant. Not far from the caleche, mounted upon an English blood-horse of great beauty, a young man had just drawn rein as if interrupted only for a mo ment on some pressing errand, and with his hat slight ly raised, was paying his compliments to the venerable Prince Poniatowski, at that time the Amphytrion of Florence. From moment to moment, as the pauses occurred in the exchange of courteous phrases, the rider, whose spurred heel was close at his saddle- girths, stole an impatient glance up the avenue of INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 93 carriages to the dark-green chariot, arid, excited by the lifted rein and (he proximity of the spur, the grace ful horse fretted on his million feet, and the bending figures from a hundred vehicles, and the focus of bright eyes radiating from all sides to the spot, would have betrayed, even to a stranger, that the horseman was of no common mark. Around his uncovered tem ples floated fair and well-cherished locks of the sunni est auburn ; and if there was beauty in the finely-drawn lines of his lips, there was an inexpressibly fierce spirit as well. II. The count Basil had been a month at Florence. In that time he had contrived to place himself between the duke s ear and all the avenues of favor, and had approached as near, perhaps nearer, to the hearts of the women of his court. A singular and instinctive knowledge of the weaknesses of human nature, per fected and concealed by conversance with the consum mate refinement of life at Paris, remarkable personal beauty, and a quality of scornful bitterness for which no one could divine a reason in a character and fate else so happily mingled, but which at the same time added to his fascination, had given Count Basil a com- j mand over the varied stops of society, equalled by few i plnyers on that difficult and capricious instrument. I: His worldly ambition went swimmingly on, and the : same wind filled the sails of his lighter ventures Mil well. The love of the marchesa del Marmore, as he ji had very well anticipated, grew with his influence and j renown. A woman s pride, he perfectly knew, is diffi- j cult to wake after she has once believed herself adored ; j and, satisfied that the portrait taken on the lagoon, and the introduction he had given her to the exclusive pen etralia of the Pilti, would hold her till his revenge was complete, he left her love for him to find its own food in his successes, and never approached her but to lay to her heart more mordently the serpents of jealousy and despair. For the lady Geraldine the count Basil had con ceived a love, the deepest of which his nature was ca pable. Long as he had known her, it was a passion born in Italy, and while it partook of the qualities of the clime, it had for its basis the habitual and well- founded respect of a virtuous and sincere friendship. At their first acquaintance at Paris, the lovely English woman, newly arrived from the purer moral atmo sphere of her own country, was moving in the disso lute, but skilfully disguised society of the Faubourg St. Germain, with the simple unconsciousness of the : pure in heart, innocent herself, and naturally unsus- j picious of others. The perfect frankness with which ! she established an intimacy with the clever and accoin- ! plished attache, had soon satisfied that clear-sighted j person that there was no passion in her preference, I and, giddy with the thousand pleasures of that me- { tropolis of delight, he had readily sunk his first startled admiration of her beauty in an affectionate and con- ; fiding friendship. He had thus shown her the better qualities of his character only, and, charmed with his wit and penetration, and something; flattered, perhaps, with the devotion of so acknowledged an autocrat of fashion and talent, she had formed an attachment for him that had all the earnestness of love without its passion. They met at Florence, but the "knowledge of good and evil" had by this time driven the lady Geraldine from her Eden of unconsciousness. Still as irreproachable in conduct, and perhaps as pure in heart as before, an acquaintance with the forms of vice had introduced into her manners those ostensible cau tions which, while they protect, suggest also what is to be feared. A change had taken pi ice also in Count Basil. He had left the vitreous and mercurial clime of France, with its volatile and superficial occupations, for the voluptuous arid indolent air of Italy, and the study of its impassioned deifications of beauty. That which had before been in him an instinct of gay pleasure a pursuit which palled in the first moment of success, and was second to his ambition or his vanity had be come, in those two years of a painter s life, a thirst both of the senses and the imagination, which had usurped the very throne of his soul. Like the Hindoo youth, who finds the gilded plaything of his childhood elevated in his maturer years into a god, he bowed his heart to what he held so lightly, and brought the costly sacrifice of time and thought to its altars. He had fed his eyes upon the divine glories of the pencil, and upon the breathing wonders of love in marble, be neath the sky and in the dissolving air in which they rose to the hand of inspiration ; and with his eye dis ciplined, and his blood fused with taste and enthusi asm, that idolatry of beauty, which had before seemed sensual or unreal, kindled its first fires in his mind, and his senses were intoxicated with the incense. There is a kind of compromise in the effects of the atmosphere and arts of Italy. If the intellect takes a warmer hue in its study of the fair models of an tiquity, the senses in turn become more refined and intellectual. In other latitudes and lands woman is loved more coldly. After the brief reign of a passion of instinct, she is happy if she can retain her empire by habit, or the qualities of the heart. That divine form, meant to assimilate her to the angels, has never been recognised by the dull eye that should have seen in it a type of her soul. To the love of the painter or the statuary, or to his who has made himself con versant with their models, is added the imperishable enthusiasm of a captivating and exalted study. The mistress of his heart is the mistress of his mind. She is the breathing realization of that secret ideal which exists in every mind, but which, in men ignorant of the fine arts, takes another form, and becomes a woman s rival and usurper. She is like nothing in ambition she is like nothing in science or business nothing in out-of-door pleasures. If politics, or the chase, or the acquisition of wealth, is the form of this ruling passion, she is unassociated with that which is nearest his heart, and he returns to her with an exhausted interest and a flagging fancy. It is her strongest tie upon his affec tion, even, that she is his refuge when unfit for that which occupies him most in his fatigue, his disap pointment, his vacuity of head and heart. He thinks of her only as she receives him in his most worthless hours; and, as his refreshed intellects awake, she is forgotten with the first thought of his favorite theme for what has a woman s loveliness to do with that? Count Basil had not concluded his first interview with the lady Geraldine, without marvelling at the new feelings with which he looked upon her. He had never before realized her singular and adorable beauty. The exquisitely turned head, the small and pearly ears, the spiritual nostril, the softly moulded chin, the clear loftiness of expression yet inexpressible delicacy and brightness in the lips, and a throat and bust than which those of Faustina in the delicious marble oi the Gallery of Florence might be less envied by the queen of love his gaze wandered over these, and followed her in the harmony of her motions, and the native and unapproachable grace of every attitude; and the pic tures he had so passionately studied seemed to fade in his mind, and the statues he had half worshipped seemed to descend from their pedestals depreciated. The lady Geraldino, for the first time, felt his eye. For the first time in their acquaintance, she was of fended with its regard. Her embarrassment was rend by the quick diplomate, and at that moment sprang into being a passion, which perhaps had died but for the conscious acknowledgment of her rebuke. Up to the evening in the Cascine, with which the 96 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. second chapter of this simply true tale commences, but one of the two leading threads in the count Basil s woof had woven well. "The jealous are the damned," and the daily and deadly agony of the marchesa del Marmore was a dark ground from which his love to the lady Geraldine rose to his own eye in heightened relief. His dearest joy forwarded with equal step his dearest revenge ; and while he could watch the work ing of his slow torture in the fascinated heart of his victim, he was content to suspend a blow to which that of death would be a mercy. " The law," said Count Basil, as he watched her quivering and im ploring lip, "takes cognizance but of the murder of the body. It has no retribution for the keener dagger of the soul." III. The conversation between the Russian secretary and the prince Poniatowski ended at last in a graceful bow from the former to his horse s neck; and the quicker rattling of the small hoofs on the ground, as the fine creature felt the movement in the saddle and prepared to bound away, drew all eyes once more upon the handsomest and most idolized gallant of Florence. The narrow lane of carriages, commencing with the showy ca/eche of the marchesa del Marmore, and closed up by the plain chariot of the lady Geral dine, was still open, and with a glance at the latter which sufficiently indicated his destination, Count Basil raised his spurred heel, and with a smile of de light and the quickness of a barb in the desert, gal loped toward the opening. In the same instant the marchesa del Marmore gave a convulsive spring for ward, and, in obedience to an imperative order, her coachman violently drew rein and shot the back and forward wheels of the caleche directly across his path. Met in full career by this sudden obstacle, the horse of the Russian reared high in air; but ere the screams of apprehension had arisen from the adjacent carriages, the silken bridle was slacked, and with a low bow to the foiled and beautiful marchesa as he shot past, he brushed the hammer-cloths of the two scarce separa ted carriages, and at the same instant stood at the chariot window of the lady Getaldine, as calm and respectful as if he had never known danger or emotion. A hundred eyes had seen the expression of his face as he leaped past the unhappy woman, and the drama of which that look was the key was understood in Flor ence. The lady Geraldine alone, seated far back in her chariot, was unconscious of the risk run for the smile with which she greeted its hero ; and uncon scious, as well, of the poignant jealousy and open mor tification she had innocently assisted to inflict, she stretched her fair and transparent hand from the car riage, and stroked the glossy neck of his horse, and while the marchesa del Marmore drove past with a look of inexpressible anguish and hate, and the dis persing nobles and dames took their way to the city gates, Count Basil leaned close to the ear of that love liest of breathing creatures, and forgot, as she forgot in listening to the besvildering music of his voice, that the stars had risen, or that the night was closing around them. The Cascine had long been silent when the chariot of the lady Geraldine took its way to the town, and, with the reins loose upon his horse s neck, Count Basil followed at a slower pace, lost in the revery of a tumultuous passion. The sparkling and unobstructed stars broke through the leafy roof of the avenue whose silence was disturbed by those fine and light-stepping hoofs, and the challenge of the duke s forester, going his rounds ere the gates closed, had its own deep- throated echo for its answer. The Arno rippled among the rushes on its banks, the occasional roll of wheels passing the paved arch of the Ponte Seraglio, came faintly down the river upon the moist wind, the pointed cypresses of the convent of Bello Sguardo laid their slender fingers against the lowest stars in the southern horizon, and with his feet pressed, carelessly, far through his stirrups, and his head dropped on his bosom, the softened diplomate turned instinctively to the left in the last diverging point of the green al leys, and his horse s ears were already pricked at the tread, before the gate, of the watchful and idle doganieri. Close under the city wall on this side Florence, the traveller will remember that the trees are more thickly serried, and the stone seats, for the comfort and pleasure of those who would step forth from the hot streets for an hour of fresh air and rest, are mossy with the depth of the perpetual shade. In the midst of this dark avenue, the unguided animal beneath the careless and forgetful rider suddenly stood still, and the next moment starting aside, a female sprang high against his neck, and Count Basil, ere awake from his revery, felt the glance of a dagger-blade across his bo som. With the slender wrist that had given the blow- firmly arrested in his left hand, the count Basil slowly dismounted, and after a steadfast look, by the dim light, into the face of the lovely assassin, he pressed her fingers respectfully, and with well counterfeited emotion, to his lips. . " Twice since the Ave-Maria !" he said in atone of reproachful tenderness, " and against a life that is your own !" He could see, even in that faint light, the stern com pression of those haughty lips, and the flash of the darkest eyes of the Val d Arno. But leading her gen tly to a seat, he sat beside her, and with scarce ten brief moments of low-toned and consummate elo quence, he once more deluded her soul ! - " We meet to-morrow," she said, as, after a burst of irrepressible tears, she disengaged herself from his neck, and looked toward the end of the avenue, where Count Basil had already heard the pawing of her im patient horses. " To-morrow!" lie answered ; " but,?)n <7 carissima!" he continued, opening his breast to stanch the blood of his wound, "you owe me a concession after this rude evidence of your love." She looked into his face as if answer were superflu ous. " Drive to my palazzo at noon, and remain with me till the Ave-Maria." For but half a moment the impassioned Italian hesi tated. Though the step he demanded of her was ap parently without motive or reason though it was one that sacrificed to a whim her station, her fortune, and her friends she hesitated but to question her reason if the wretched price of this sacrifice would be paid if the love, to which she fled from this world and heav en, was her own. In other countries, the crime of in fidelity is punished : in Italy it is the appearance only that is criminal. In proportion as the sin is overlook ed, the violation of the outward proprieties of life is severely visited ; and while a lover is stipulated for in the marriage-contract, an open visit to that lover s house is an offence which brands the perpetrator with irremediable shame. The marchesa del Marmore well knew that in going forth from the ancestral pal ace of her husband on a visit to Count Basil, she took \\ leave of it forever. The equipage that would bear j her to him would never return for her ; the protection, | the fortune, the noble relations, the troops of friends, ; would all drop from her. In the pride of her youth ! and beauty from the highest pinnacle of rank from :| the shelter of fortune and esteem she would descend, . i by a single step, to be a beggar for life and love from 1 1 the mercy of the heart she fled to ! " I will come," she said, in a firm voice, looking INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. close into his face, as if she would read in his dim fea tures the prophetic answer of his soul. The count Basil strained her to his bosom, and start ing back as if with the paiu of his wound, he pleaded the necessity of a surgeon, and bade her a hasty good night. And while she pained her own carriage in se crecy, he rode round to" the other gate, which opens upon the Borg ognisanti, and dismounting at the Cafe Colonna, where the artists were at this hour usu ally assembled, he sought out his fellow-traveller, Giannino Speranza, who had sketched the inarchesa upon the lagoon, and made an appointment with him for the morrow. While the count Basil s revenge sped thus merrily, the just Fates were preparing for him a retribution in his love. The mortification of the marchesa del Mar- more, at the Cascine, had been made the subject of conversation at the prima sera of the lady Geraldine ; and other details of the same secret drama transpiring at the same time, the whole secret of Count Basil s feelings toward that unfortunate woman flashed clearly and fully upon her. His motives for pretending to have drawn the portrait of the lagoon for procuring her an admission to the exclusive suppers of the Pitti for a thousand things which had been unaccounta ble, or referred to more amiable causes were at once unveiled. Even yet, with no suspicion of the extent of his revenge, the lady Geraldine felt an indignant pity for the unconscious victim, and a surprised disappro val of the character thus unmasked to her eye. Upon further reflection, her brow flushed to remember that she herself had been made the most effective tool of his revenge ; and as she recalled circumstance after circumstance in the last month s history, the attention and preference he had shown her, and which had grat ified her, perhaps, more than she admitted to herself, seemed to her sensitive and resentful mind to have been only the cold instruments of jealousy. Incapable as she was of an unlawful passion, the unequalled fas cinations of Count Basil had silently found their way to her heart, and if her indignation was kindled by a sense of justice and womanly pity, it was fed and fanned unaware by mortified pride. She rang, and sent an order to the gate that she was to be denied for the future to Count Basil Spirifort. The servant had appeared with his silver tray in his hand, and before leaving h,er presence to communi cate the order, he presented her with a letter. Well foreseeing the eclaircissement which must follow the public scene in the Cascine, the count Basil had left the cafe for his own palazzo ; and, in a letter, of which the following is the passage most important to our story, he revealed to the lady he loved a secret, which he hoped would anticipate the common rumor : ***** "But these passionate words will have offended your ear, dearest lady, and 1 must pass to a theme on which I shall be less eloquent. You will hear to-night, perhaps, that which, with all your im agination, will scarce prepare you for what you will hear to-morrow. The marchesa del Marmore is the victim of a revenge which has only been second in my heart to the love I have for the first time breathed to you. I can never hope that you will either under stand or forgive the bitterness in which it springs ; yet it is a demon to which I am delivered, soul and body, and no spirit but my own can know its power. When I have called it by its name, and told you of its exas peration, if you do not pardon, you will pity me. " You know that I am a Russian, and you know the station my talents have won me ; but you do not know that I was horn a seif and a slave ! If you could rend open my heart and see the pool of blackness and bit terness that lies in its bottom fallen, drop by drop, 7 from this accursed remembrance there would be lit tle need to explain to you how this woman has offend ed me. Had I been honorably born, like yourself, I feel that I could have been, like you, an angel of light : as it is, the contumely of a look has stirred me to a revenge which has in it, I do not need to be told, the darkest elements of murder. " My early history is of no importance, yet I may tell you it was such as to expose to every wind this lacerated nerve. In a foreign land, and holding an official rank, it was seldom breathed upon. I wore, mostly, a gay heart at Paris. In my late exile at Ven ice I had time to brood upon my dark remembrance, and it was revived and fed by the melancholy of my solitude. The obscurity in which I lived, and the oc casional comparison between myself and some passing noble in the Piazza, served to remind me, could I have forgotten it. I never dreamed of love in this humble disguise, and so never felt the contempt that had most power to wound me. On receiving the letters of my new appointment, however, this cautious humility did not wait to be put off with my sombrero. I started for Florence, clad in the habiliments of poverty, but with the gay mood of a courtier beneath. The first burst of my newly-released feelings was admiration for a woman of singular beauty, who stood near me on one of the most love-awakening and delicious eves that I ever remember. My heart was overflowing, and she permitted me to breathe my passionate adoration in her ear. The marchesa del Marmore, but for the scorn of the succeeding day, would, I think, have been the mistress of my soul. Strangely enough, I had seen you without loving you. " f have told you, as a bagatelle that might amuse you, my rencontre with del Marmore and his dame in the cathedral of Bologna. The look she gave me there sealed her doom. It was witnessed by the com panions of my poverty, and the concentrated resent ment of years sprang up at the insult. Had it been a man, I must have struck him dead where he stood : she was a woman, and I swore the downfall of her pride." * * Thus briefly dismissing the chief topic of his letter, Count Basil returned to the pleading of his love. It was dwelt on more eloquently than his revenge ; but as the lady Geraldine scarce read it to the end, it need not retard the procession of events in our story. The fair Englishwoman sat down beneath the Etruscan lamp, whose soft light illumined a brow cleared, as if by a sweep from the wing of her good angel, of the troubled dream which had overhung it, and in brief and decided, but kind and warning words, replied to" the letter of Count Basil. It was noon on the following day, and the Contadini from the hills were settling to their siesta on the steps of the churches, and against the columns of the Piaz za del Gran Duca. The artists alone, in the cool gal lery, and in the tempered halls of the Pitti, shook off the drowsiness of the hour, and strained sight and thought upon the immortal canvass from which they drew ; while the sculptor, in his brightening studio, weary of the mallet, yet excited by the bolder light, leaned on the rough block behind him, and with list less body but wakeful and fervent eye, studied the last touches upon his marble. Prancing hoofs, and the sharp quick roll peculiar to the wheels of carriages of pleasure, awakened the aris tocratic sleepers of the Via del Servi, and with a lash and jerk of violence, the coachman of the marchesa del Marmore, enraged at the loss of his noonday re pose, brought up her showy caliche at the door of Count Basil Spirifort. The fair occupant of that luxu- INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. rious vehicle was pale, but the brightness of joy and hope binned almost fiercely in her eye. The doors flew open as the marchesa descended, and following a servant in the count s livery, of whom she asked no question, she found herself in a small sa loon, furnished with the peculiar luxury which marks the apartment of a bachelor, and darkened like a paint er s room. The light came in from a single tall win dow, curtained below, and under it stood an easel, at which, on her first entrance, a young man stood sketching the outline of a female head. As she ad vanced, looking eagerly around for another face, the artist laid down his palette, and with a low reverence presented her with a note from Count Basil. It in formed her that political news of the highest impor tance had called him suddenly to the cabinet of his chef, but that he hoped to be with her soon ; and, meantime, he begged of her, as a first favor in his newly-prospered love, to bless him with the possession of her portrait, done by the incomparable artist who would receive her. Disappointment and vexation overwhelmed the heart of the marchesa, and she burst into tears. She read the letter again, and grew calmer; for it was laden with epithets of endearment, and seemed to her written in the most sudden haste. Never doubting for an instant the truth of his apology, she removed her hat, and with a look at the deeply-shaded mirror, while she shook out from their confinement the masses of her luxuriant hair, she approached the painter s easel, and with a forced cheerfulness inquired in what attitude she should sit to him. " If the signora will amuse herself," he replied, with a bow, " it will be easy to compose the picture, and seize the expression without annoying her with a pose." Relieved thus of any imperative occupation, the un happy marchesa seated herself by a table of intaglios and prints, and while she apparently occupied herself in the examination of these specimens of art, she was delivered, as her tormentor had well anticipated, to the alternate tortures of impatience and remorse. And while the hours wore on, and her face paled, and her eyes grew bloodshot with doubt and fear, the skilful painter, forgetting everything in the enthusiasm of his art, and forgotten utterly by his unconscious subject, transferred too faithfully to the canvass that picture of agonized expectation. The afternoon, meantime, had worn away, and the gay world of Florence, from the side toward Fiesole, rolled past the Via dei Servi on their circuitous way to the Cascine, and saw, with dumb astonishment, the carriage and liveries of the marchesa del Marmore at the door of Count Basil Spirifort. On they swept by the Via Mercata Nova to the Lung Arno, and there their astonishment redoubled : for in the window of the Casino dei Nobili, playing with a billiard-cue, and laughing with a group of lounging exquisites, stood Count Basil himself, the most unoccupied and listless of sunset idlers. There was but one deduction to be drawn from this sequence of events; and when they remembered the demonstration of passionate jealousy on the previous evening in the Cascine, Count Basil, evidently innocent of participation in her passion, was deemed a persecuted man, and the marchesa del Mar- more was lost to herself and the world ! Three days after this well-remembered circumstance in the history of Florence, an order was received from the grand-duke to admit into the exhibition of mod ern artists a picture by a young Venetian painter, an eleve of Count Basil Spirifort. It was called " The Lady expecting an Inconstant," and had been pro nounced by a virtuoso, who had seen it on private view, to be a masterpiece of expression and color. It was instantly and indignantly recognised as the por trait of the unfortunate marchesa, whose late abau> I donment of her husband was fresh on the lips of com mon rumor ; but ere it could be officially removed, the circumstance had been noised abroad, and the picture had been seen by all the curious in Florence. The order for its removal was given ; but the purpose of Count Basil had been effected, and the name of the unhappy marchesa had become a jest on the vulgar tongue. This tale had not been told, had there not been more than a common justice in its sequel. The worst passions of men, in common life, are sometimes in scrutably prospered. The revenge of Count Basil, however, was betrayed by the last which completed it ; and while the victim of his fiendish resentment finds a peaceful asylum in England under the roof of the compassionate Lady Geraldine, the once gay and admired Russian wanders from city to city, followed by an evil reputation, and stamped unaccountably as a jattatore.* LOVE AND DIPLOMACY. " Pray pardon me, For I am like a boy that hath found money Afraid I dream still." FORD OR WEBSTEH. IT was on a fine September evening, within my time (and I am not, I trust, too old to be loved), that Count Anatole L , of the impertinent and particularly useless profession of attache, walked up and down be fore the glass in his rooms at the "Archduke Charles," the first hotel, as you know, if you have travelled, in the green-belted and fair city of Vienna. The brass ring was still swinging on the end of the bell-rope, and, in a respectful attitude at the door, stood the just- summoned Signor Attilio, valet and privy councillor to one of the handsomest coxcombs errant through the world. Signor Attilio was a Tyrolese, and, like his master, was very handsome. Count Anatole had been idling away three golden summer months in the Tyrol, for the sole purpose, as far as mortal eyes could see, of disguising his fine Phidian features in a callow mustache and whiskers. The crines ridentes (as Eneas Sylvius has it) being now in a condition beyond improvement, Signor Attilio had for some days been rather curious to know what course of events would next occupy the diplomatic talents of his master. After a turn or two more, taken in silence, Count Anatole stopped in the middle of the floor, and eying the well-made Tyrolese from head to foot, begged to know if he wore at the present moment his most be coming breeches, jacket, and beaver. Attilio was never astonished at anything his master did or said. He simply answered, "Si, signore." "Be so kind as to strip immediately, and dress your self in that travelling suit lying on the sofa." As the green, gold-corded jacket, knee-breeches, buckles, and stockings, were laid aside, Count Anatole threw off his dressing-gown, and commenced encasing his handsome proportions in the cast-off habiliments. He then put on the conical, slouch-rimmed hat, with the tall eagle s-feather stuck jauntily on the side, and the two rich tassels pendant over his left eye ; and, the toilet of the valet being completed at the same moment, they stood looking at one another with perfect gravity rathertransformed, but each apparently quite at home in his new character. " You look very like a gentleman, Attilio," said the count. " Your excellency has caught to admiration, I aria A man with aa evil eye. INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. del paese," complimented back again the sometime Tyrolese. 44 Attilio !" " Signore ?" 44 Do you remember the lady in the forest of Friuli ?" Attilio began to have a glimmering of things. Some three months before, the count was dashing on at a rapid post-pace through a deep wood in the moun- tains which head in the Adriatic. A sudden pull-up at a turning in the road nearly threw him from his j britska ; and looking out at the "anima di porco . " of the postilion, he found his way impeded by an overset carriage, from which three or four servants were en deavoring to extract the body of an old man, killed by the accident. There was more attractive metal for the traveller, however, in the shape of a young and beautiful woman, leaning, pale and faint, against a tree, and apparently about to sink to the ground, unassisted. To bring a hat full of water from the nearest brook, and receive her falling head on his shoulder, was the work of a thought. She had fainted quite away, and taking her, like a child, into his arms, he placed her on a bank by the road-side, bathed her forehead and lips, and chafed her small white hands, till his heart, with all the dis tress of the scene, was quite mad with her perfect beauty. Animation at last began to return, and as the flush was stealing into her lips, another carriage drove up with servants in the same livery, and Count Anatole, I thoroughly bewildered in his new dream, mechanically ! assisted them in getting their living mistress and dead master into it, and until they were fairly out of sight, it had never occurred to him that he might possibly wish to know the name and condition of the fairest piece of work he had ever seen from the hands of his Maker. An hour before, he had doubled his bono mano to the postilion, and was driving on to Vienna as if to sit at a new congress. Now, he stood leaning against the tree, at the foot of which the grass and wild flowers showed the print of a new-made pressure, and the postilion cracked his whip, and Attilio reminded him of the hour he was losing, in vain. He remounted after a while ; but the order was to go back to the last post-house. Three or four months at a solitary albergo in the j neighborhood of this adventure, passed by the count in scouring the country on horseback in every direc tion, and by his servant in very particular ennui, brings up the story nearly to where the scene opens. 44 1 have seen her!" said the count. Attilio only lifted up his eyebrows. 44 She is here, in Vienna!" "Felice lei!" murmured Attilio. 44 She is the princess Leichstenfels, and, by the death of that old man, a widow. 41 Vtra.me.nle! inflexio too well not to foresee a damper in the possibility of matrimony. 44 Veramente . " gravely echoed the count. "And now listen. The princess lives in close retirement. An old friend or two, and a tried servant, are the only persons who see her. You are to contrive to see this servant to-morrow, corrupt him to leave her, and rec ommend me in his place, and then you are to take him as your courier to Paris : whence, if I calculate well, you will return to me before long, with impor tant despatches. Do you understand me?" 44 Signor, si!" In the small boudoir of a masin de plaisance, be longing to the noble family of Leichstenfels, sat the widowed mistress of one of the oldest titles and finest II dow opening down t the floor and leading out upon a terrace of flowers, was subdued by a heavy crimson curtain, looped partially away, a pastille lamp was sending up from its porphyry pedestal a thin and just perceptible curl of smoke, through which the lady musingly passed backward and forward one of her slender fingers, and, on a table near, lay a sheet of black-edged paper, crossed by a small silver pen, and scrawled over irregularly with devices and discon nected words, the work evidently of a fit of the most | absolute and listless idleness. The door opened, and a servant in mourning livery I stood before the lady. 44 1 have thought over your request, Wilhelm," she ! said. " I had become accustomed to your services, j and regret to lose you ; but I should regret more to : stand in the way of your interest. You have my per mission." Wilhelm expressed his thanks with an effort that showed he had not obeyed the call of mammon with out regret, and requested leave to introduce the person he had proposed as his successor. 44 Of what country is he?" 44 Tyrolese, your excellency." "And why does he leave the gentleman with whom he came to Vienna?" "// est amoureux d une Vicnnaise, madatnc" an swered the ex-valet, resorting to French to express what he considered a delicate circumstance. 44 Pamre enfant!" said the princess, with a sigh that partook as much of envy as of pity ; let him come in !" And the count Anatole, as the sweet accents reached his ear, stepped over the threshold, and in the coarse but gay dress of the Tyrol, stood in the presence of her whose dewy temples he had bathed in the forest, whose lips he had almost "pried into for breath," whose snowy hands he had chafed and kissed when the senses had deserted their celestial organs the angel of his perpetual dream, the lady of his wild and un controllable, but respectful and honorable love. The princess looked carelessly up as he approached, but her eyes seemed arrested in passing over his fea tures. It was but momentary. She resumed her occupation of winding her taper fingers in the smoke- curls of the incense-lamp, and with half a sigh, as if she had repelled a pleasing thought, she leaned back in the silken fauteuil, and asked the new-comer his name. 44 Anatole, your excellency." The voice again seemed to stir something in her memory. She passed her hand over her eyes, and was for a moment lost in thought. 44 Anatole," she said (oh, how the sound of his own name, murmured in that voice of music thrilled through the fiery veins of the disguised lover!) "Anatole, I receive you into my service. Wilhelm will inform you of your duties, and 1 have a fancy may wear it instead amente?" responded the valet, with a rising for the dress of the Tyrol you n; for he knew his master and French morals j of my livery, if you will." And witli one stolen and warm gaze from under his drooping eyelids, and heart and lips on fire, as he thanked her for her condescension, the new retainer took his leave. Month after month passed on to Count Anatole in a bewildering dream of ever deepening passion. It was upon a soft and amorous morning of April, that a clashing equipage stood at the door of the proud palace of Leichstenfels. The arms of E blazed on the panels, and the insoucianls chasseurs leaned against the marble columns of the portico, waiting for their master, and speculating on the gayety likely to ensue from the suite he was prosecuting within. How could a prince of E be supposed to sue in vain? The disguised footman had ushered the gay and estates of Austria. The light from a single long win- ii handsome nobleman to his mistress presence. After 100 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. rearranging a family of very well-arranged flower pots, shutting the window to open it again, changing the folds of the curtains not at all for the better," and lookinsr a stolen and fierce look at the unconscious visitor, he could find no longer an apology for remain ing in the room. He shut the door after him in a tempest of jealousy. " Did your excellency ring ?" said he, opening the door again, after a few minutes of intolerable torture. The prince was on his knees at her feet ! "No, Anatole; but you may bring me a glass of water." As he entered with a silver tray trembling in his hand, the prince was rising to go. His face expressed delight, hope, triumph everything that could mad den the soul of the irritated lover. After waiting on his rival to his carriage, he returned to his mistress, and receiving the glass upon the tray, was about leaving the room in silence, when the princess called to him. la all this lapse of time it is not to be supposed that Count Anatole played merely his footman s part. His respectful and elegant demeanor, the propriety of his language, and that deep devotedness of manner which wins a woman more than all things else, soon gained upon the confidence of the princess; and before a week was passed she found that she was happier when he stood behind her chair, and gave him, with some self-denial, those frequent permissions of absence from the palace which she supposed he asked to prosecute the amour disclosed to her on his introduction to her service. As time flew on, she attributed his earnest ness and occasional warmth of manner to gratitude; and, without reasoning much on her feelings, gave herself up to the indulgence of a degree of interest in him which would have alarmed a woman more skilled in the knowledge of the heart. Married from a con vent, however, to an old man who had secluded her from the world, the voice of the passionate count in the forest of Friuli was the first sound of love that had ever entered her ears. She knew not why it was that the tones of her new footman, and now and then a look of his eyes, as he leaned over to assist her at table, troubled her memory like a trace of a long-lost dream. But, oh, what moments had been his in these fleet ing months ! Admitted to her presence in her most unguarded hours seeing her at morning, at noon, at night, in all her unstudied and surpassing loveliness for ever near her, and with the world shut out her rich hair blowing with the lightest breeze across his fingers in his assiduous service her dark full eyes, unconscious of an observer, filling with unrepressed tears, or glowing with pleasure over some tale of love her exquisite form flung upon a couch, or bending over flowers, or moving about the room in all its native and untrammelled grace and her voice, tender, most tender to him, though she knew it not, and her eyes, herself unaware, ever following him in his loitering attendance and he, the while, losing never a glance nor a motion, but treasuring all up in his heart with the avarice of a miser what, in common life, though it were the life of fortune s most favored child, could compare with it for bliss? Pale and agitated, the count turned back at the call of his mistress, and stood waiting her pleasure. "Anatole!" "Madame!" The answer was so low and deep it startled even himself. She motioned him to come nearer. She had sunk upon the sofa, and as he stood at her feet she leaned forward, buried her hands and arms in the long curls which, in her retirement, she allowed to float luxuri antly over her shoulders, and sobbed aloud. Over come and forgetful of all but the distress of the lovely creature before him, the count dropped upon the cush ion on which rested the small foot in its mourning slipper, and taking her hand, pressed it suddenly and fervently to his lips. The reality broke upon her! She was beloved but by whom ? A menial ! and the appalling answer drove all the blood of her proud race in a torrent upon her heart, sweeping away all affection as if her nature had never known its name. She sprang to her feet, and laid her hand upon the bell. " Madame !" said Anatole, in a cold proud tone. She stayed her arm to listen. "I leave you for ever." And again, with the quick revulsion of youth and passion, her woman s heart rose within her, and she buried her face in her hands, and dropped her head in utter abandonment on her bosom. It was the birthday of the emperor, and the courtly nobles of Austria were rolling out from the capital to offer their congratulations at the royal palace of Schoenbrunn. In addition to the usual attractions of the scene, the drawing-room was to be graced by the first public appearance of a new ambassador, whose reputed personal beauty, and the talents he had displayed in a late secret negotiation, had set the whole court, from the queen of Hungary to the youngest dame d honneur, in a flame of curiosity. To the prince E there was another reason for writing the day in red letters. The princess Leich- stenfels, by an express message from the emperess, was to throw aside her widow s weeds, and appear once more to the admiring world. She had yielded to the summons, but it was to be her last day of splen dor. Her heart and hand were plighted to her Ty- rolese minion; and the brightest and loveliest ornament of the court of Austria, when the ceremonies of the day were over, was to lay aside the costly bauble from her shoulder, and the glistening tiara from her brow, and forget rank and fortune as the wife of his bosom ! The dazzling hours flew on. The plain and kind old emperor welcomed and smiled upon all. The wily Metternich, in the crime of his successful man hood, cool, polite, handsome, and winning, gathered golden opinions by every word and look ; the young duke of Reichstadt, the mild and gentle son of the struck eagle of St. Helena, surrounded and caressed by a continual cordon of admiring women, seemed for getful that opportunity and expectation awaited him, like two angels with their wings outspread ; and haugh ty nobles and their haughtier dames, statesmen, schol ars, soldiers, and priests, crowded upon each other s heels, and mixed together in that doubtful podrida, which goes by the name of pleasure. I could moralize here had T time ! The princess of Leichstenfels had gone through the ceremony of presentation, and had heard the murmur of admiration, drawn by her beauty, from all lips. Diz zy with the scene, and with a bosom full of painful and conflicting emotions, she had accepted the proffered arm of Prince E to breathe a fresher air upon the terrace. They stood near a window, and he was pointing out to his fair but inattentive companion the various characters as they passed within. " I must contrive," said the prince, " to show you the new envoy. Oh ! you have not heard of him. Beautiful as Narcissus, modest as Pastor Corydon, clever as the prime minister himself, this paragon of diplomatists has been here in disguise these three months, negotiating about Melternich and the devil knows what but rewarded at last with an ambassa dor s star, and but here he is : Princess Leichsten fels, permit me to present " She heard no more. A glance from the diamond INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 101 star on his breast to the Hephaestion mouth and keen dark eye of Count Anatole, revealed to her the mys tery of months. And as she leaned against the win dow for support, the hand that sustained her in the forest of Friuli, and the same thrilling voice, in almost the same never-forgotten cadence, offered his impas sioned sympathy and aid and she recognised and re membered all. I must go back so far as to inform you, that Count Anatole, on the morning of this memorable day, had sacrificed a silky but prurient mustache, and a pair of the very sauciest dark whiskers out of Coventry. Whether the prince E recognised in the new envoy the lady s gentleman who so inopportunely broke in upon his tender avowal, I am not prepared to say. I only know (for I was there) that the princess Leichstenfels was wedded to the new ambassador in the " leafy month of June ;" and the prince E- , unfortunately prevented by illness from attending the nuptials, lost a very handsome opportunity of singing with effect " If she be not fair for me" supposing it translated into German. Whether the enamored ambassadress prefers her husband in his new character, I am equally uncertain ; home on board, and as ready to enter into any scheme of amusement, as the maddest-brained midshipman could desire. The companion-hatch was covered with its grating, lest some dizzy waltzer should drop his partner into the steerage, the band got out their music-stand, and the bright buttons were soon whirling round from larboard to starboard, with forms in their clasp, and dark eyes glowing over their shoulders, that might have tempted the devil out of Stromboli. Being only a passenger myself, I was contented with sitting on the slide of a carronade, and with the music in my ear, and the twilight flush deepening in the fine- traced angles of the rigging, abandoning myself to the delicious listlessness with which the very air is pregnant in these climates of paradise. The light feet slid by, and the waltz, the gallopade, and the mazurka, had followed each other till it was broad moonlight on the decks. It was like a night without an atmosphere, the radiant flood poured down with such an invisible and moonlike clearness. " Do you see the lady leaning on that old gentle man s arm by the hammock-rail ?" said the first lieu tenant, who sat upon the next gun like myself, a spectator of the scene. I had remarked her well. She had been in the ship though from much knowledge of German courts and i five or ten minutes, and in that time, it seemed to me a little of human nature, I think she will be happy if i I had drunk her beauty, even to intoxication. The at some future day she would not willingly exchange | frigate was slowly swinging round to the land breeze, her proud envoy for the devoted Tyrolese, and does j and the moon, from drawing the curved line of a gip- not sigh that she can no more bring him to her feet sy-shaped capclla di paglia with bewitching conceal- with a pull of a silken string. I ment across her features, gradually fell full upon the dark limit of her orbed forehead. Heaven ! what a vision of beauty! Solemn, and full of subdued paiu as the countenance seemed, it was radiant with an al most supernatual light of mind. Thought and feeling seemed steeped into every line. Her mouth was large the only departure from the severest model of the G ree k an( ] stamped with calmness, as if it had been a legible word upon her lips. But her eyes what can THE MADHOUSE OF PALERMO, HE who has not skimmed over the silvery waters of , - -, - , . . the Lipari, with a summer breeze right from Italy in j| I say of their unnatural lightning of the depth, tn his tonsails. the smoke of Stromboli alone staining the \ fulness, the wild and maniac-like passionateness of their his topsails, the sm unfathomable-looking blue of the sky, and, as the sun dipped his flaming disk in the sea, put up his helm for every look ? My curiosity was strongly moved. I walked aft to ppe s amng s n , the bosom of La Concha d Oro, the Golden Shell, as |j the capstan, and throwing oft my habitual reserve with they beautifully call the bay of Palermo : he who has I some effort, approached the old gentleman < not thus entered, I say, to the fairest spot on the face | arm she leaned, and begged permission to lead 1 of this very fair earth," has a leaf worth the turning in : for a waltz. his book of observation. " If you wish ,t, canssima mia /" sa,d he, turning to In ten minutes after dropping the anchor, with sky i her with all the tenderness in his tone of whic , and water still in a glow, the men were all out of the i honeyed language of Italy is capable. rigging, the spars of the tall frigate were like lines pen- i But she clung to his arm with startled clos ness, and cilled on the sky, the band played inspiringly on the : poop, and every boat along the gay Marina was Right ed with fair Palermitans on its way to the stranger ship. I was standing with the oflicer-of-the-deck by the ; capstan, looking at the first star which had just sprung into its place like a thing created with a glance of the i without even looking at me, turned her lips up to his ear, and murmured, "Mcdpiu!" At my request the officer on duty paid them the com pliment of sending them ashore in one of the frigate s boats; and after assisting them down the ladder, I stood upon the broad stair on the level of the water, and watched the phosphoric wake of the swift cutter till eye "Shall we let the ladies aboard, sir ?" said a smiling middy, coming aft from the gangway. " Yes, sir. And tell the boatswain s mate to clear away for a dance on the quarter-deck." In most of the ports of the Mediterranean, a ship-of- ! gunroom preparatory to Crinkled r, on a summer cruise, is as welcome as the breeze j forms lay about upon the chairs an 1 ta! les, sprn klecl Bringing with her forty or fifty gay ! with swords, epaulettes, and cocked hats , very well the bright sparkles were lost amid the vessels nearer land. The coxswain reported the boat s return ; but all that belonged to the ship had not come back in her. My heart was left behind. The next morning there was the usual bustle in the ing ashore. Glittering uni- wa from the sea. from tlie sea. r> ringing wuu w iuiij u un> ^..j K,.,,cJiprl and vprv young officers overcharged with life and spirits, a band brushed boots were sent to b rebrushed and very of music never so well occupied as when playing for a nice coats to be made, ,1 possible, to dance, and a deck whiter and smoother than a ball- ,! ships barber was cursed for not having .the * r the warlike vessel seems made for a scene Briareus, and no good was wishe 01 ine re. Whatever her nation, she no sooner ! washerwoman of the last port where anchor, than she is surrounded by boats from , j anchored. Cologne-water was m great n** ; and when the word is passed for admission, : the purser had an uncommon number of pnv ucrTat i i Amid til the bustle, the question of how to pass the 102 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. day was busily agitated. Twenty plans were proposed ; but the sequel a dinner at the Hotel Anglais, and a " stroll for a lark" after it was the only point on which the speakers were quite unanimous. One proposition was to go to Bagaria, and see the palace of Monsters. This is a villa about ten miles from Palermo, which the owner, Count Pallagonia, an eccentric Sicilian noble, has ornamented with some hundreds of statues of the finest workmanship, repre senting the form of woman in every possible combina tion, with beasts, fishes, and birds. It looks like the temptation of St. Anthony on a splendid scale, and is certainly one of the most extraordinary spectacles in the world. Near it stands another villa, the property of Prince Butera (the present minister of Naples at the court of France), containing, in the depths of its pleasure- grounds, a large monastery, with wax monks, of the size and appearance of life, scattered about the pas sages and cells, and engaged in every possible uncleri- cal avocation. It is a whimsical satire on the order, done to the life. Another plan was to go to the Capuchin convent, and see the dried friars six or eight hundred bearded old men, baked, as they died, in their cowls and beards, and standing against the walls in ghastly rows, in the spacious vaults of the monastery. A more infernal spectacle never was seen by mortal eyes. A drive to Monreale, a nest of a village on the moun tain above the town a visit to the gardens of a noble man who salutes the stranger with a jet d eau at every turning and a lounge in the public promenade of Palermo itself shared the honors of the argument. I had been in Sicily before, and was hesitating which of these various lions was worthy of a second visit, when the surgeon proposed to me to accompany him on a visit to a Sicilian count living in the neighborhood, who had converted his chateau into a lunatic asylum, and devoted his time and a large fortune entirely to this singular hobby. He was the first to try the sys tem, now, thank God, generally approved, of winning back reason to these most wretched of human suffer ers by kindness and gentle treatment. We jumped into one of the rattling calesini standing in the handsome corso of Palermo, and fifteen minutes beyond the gates brought us to the Casa del Pazzi. My friend s uniform and profession were an immediate passport, and we were introduced into a handsome court, surrounded by a colonnade, and cooled by a fountain, in which were walking several well-dressed people, with books, drawing-boards, battledores, and other means of amusement. They all bowed politely ! as we passed, and at the door of the interior we were met by the count. " Good God ! ? I exclaimed " she was insane, then !" It was the old man who was on board the night be fore ! " E clla?" said I, seizing his arm, before he had concluded his bow, quite sure that he must under stand me with a word. " Era pazza." 1 He looked at me as he answered, with a scrutiny, as if he half suspected my friend had brought him a subject. The singular character of her beauty was quite ex- pi, lined. Yet what a wreck! I followed the old count around his establishment in a kind of dream, but I could not avoid being inter ested at every step. Here were no chains, no whips, no harsh keepers, no cells of stone and straw. The walls of the long corridors were painted in fresco, rep resenting sunny landscapes, and gay dancing figures. Fountains and shrubs met us at every turn. The people were dressed in their ordinary clothes, and all employed in some light work or amusement. It was ijke what it might havfc been in the days of the count s ancestors a gay chateau, filled with guests and de pendants, with no more apparent constraint than the ties of hospitality and service. We went first to the kitchen. Here were tsn people, all, but the cook, stark mad! It was one of the peculiarities of the count s system, that his pa tients led in his house the lives to which they had pre viously been accustomed. A stout Sicilian peasant girl was employed in filling a large brasier from the basin of a fountain. While we were watching her task, the fit began to come on her, and after a fierce look or two around the room, she commenced dashing the water about her with great violence. The cook turned, not at all surprised, and patting her on the back, with a loud laugh, cried, " Brava, Pepinu! brava!" ringing at the same moment a secret bell. A young girl of sixteen with a sweet, smiling coun tenance, answered the summons, and immediately comprehending the case, approached the enraged creature, and putting her arms affectionately round her neck, whispered something in her ear. The expres sion of her face changed immediately to a look of de light, and dropping the bucket, she followed the young attendant out of the room with peals of laughter. " Vcnitc!" said the count, "you shall see how we manage our furies." We followed across a garden filled with the sweet est flowers to a small room opening on a lawn. From the centre of the ceiling was suspended a hammock, and Pepina was already in it, swung lightly from side to side by a servant, while the attendant stood by, and, as if in play, threw water upon her face at every ap proach. It had all the air of a frolic. The violent laughter of the poor maniac grew less and less as the soothing motion and the coolness of the water took effect, and in a few minutes her strained eyes gently closed, the hammock was swung more and more gently, and she fell asleep. " This," said the count, with a gratified smile, " is iny substitute for a forced shower-bath and chains; and this," kissing his little attendant on the forehead, " for the whip and the grim turnkey." I blessed him in my heart. " Come !" said he, as we left the sleeper to her re pose, "I must show you my grounds." We followed him to an extensive garden, opening from the back of the chateau, laid out originally in the formal style of an Italian villa. The long wa iks had been broken up, however, by beautiful arbors with grottoes in their depths, in which wooden figures, of the color and size of life, stood or sat in every altitude of gayety or grotesqueness. It was difficult, in the deep shadow of the vines and oleanders, not to believe them real. We walked on through many a winding shrubbery, perfumed with all the scented flowers of the luxuriant climate, continually surprised with little deceptions of perspective, or figures half concealed in the leaves, till we emerged at the entrance of a charm ing summer theatre, with sodded seats, stage, orches tra, and scenery, complete. ^ Orange- trees, roses, and clematis, were laced together for a wall in the rear. "Here," said the old man, bounding gayly upon the stage, "here we act plays the summer long." "What! not with your patients?" " Si, si gnore ! Who else?" And he went on to describe to us the interest they took in it, and the sin gular power with which the odd idea seized upon their whimsied intellects. We had been accompanied fiom the first, by a grave, respectable looking man, whom I had taken for an assistant. While we were listening to the description of the first attempt they had made at a play, he started out from the group, and pulling himself in an attitude upon the stage, commenced spouting a furious passage in Italian. The count pointed to his forehead, and made a sign to us to listen,. The tragedian stopped at the end of INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 103 his sentence, and after a moment s delay, apparently in expectation of a reply, darted suddenly oft and dis appeared behind the scenes. "PovercUo!" said the count, "it is my best actor!" Near the theatre stood a small chapel, with a circu lar lawn before it, on which the grass had been lately much trodden. It was surrounded partly by a green bank, and here the count seated us, saying with a sig nificant look at me, that he would tell us a story. I should like to give it you in his own words still more with his own manner; for never was a tale told with more elegance of language, or a more natural and pleasant simplicity. But a sheet of " wire-wove" is not a Palermitan cavaliere, and the cold English has not the warm eloquence of the Italiun. He laid aside his hat, ordered fruit and wine, and proceeded. " Almost a year ago I was called upon by a gen tleman of a noble physiognomy and address, who in quired very particularly into my system. I explained it to him at his request, and he did me the honor, as you gentlemen have done, to go over my little establish ment. He seemed satisfied, and with some hesitation informed me that lie had a daughter in a very des perate state of mental alienation. Would I go and see her? "This is not, you know, gentlemen, a public insti tution. I am crazy," he said it very gravely, "quite crazy the first of my family of fools, on this particular theme and this asylum is my toy. Of course it is only as the whim seizes me that I admit a patient; for there are some diseases of the brain seated in causes with which I wish not to meddle. " However, I went. With the freedom of a physi cian I questioned the father, upon the road, of the girl s history. He was a Greek, a prince of the Fanar, who had left his degraded people in their dirty and dangerous suburb at Constantinople, to forget oppres sion and meanness in a voluntary exile. It was just before the breaking out of the last Greek revolution, and so many of his kinsmen and friends had been sac rificed to the fury of the Turks, that he had renounced all idea of ever returning to his country. " And your daughter ? " My dear Katinka, my only child, fell ill upon re ceiving distressing news from the Fanar, and her health and reason never rallied after. It is now several years, and she has lain in bed till her limbs are with ered, never having uttered a word, or made a sign which would indicate even consciousness of the pres ence of those about her. " I could not get from him that there was any disap pointment of the heart at the bottom of it. It seemed to be one of those cases of sudden stupefaction, to which nervously sensitive minds are liable after a vio lent burst of grief; and I began, before I had seen her, to indulge in bright hopes of starting once more the sealed fountains of thought and feeling. "We entered Palermo, and passing out at the other gate, stopped at a vine-laced casino on the lip of the bay, scarcely a mile from the city wall. It was a pretty, fanciful place, and, on a bed in its inner cham ber, lay the most poetical-looking creature I had ever seen out of my dreams*. Her head was pillowed, in an abundance of dark hair, which fell away from her fore head in masses of glossy curls, relieving with a striking effect, the wan and transparent paleness of a face which the divinest chisel could scarce have copied in alabas ter. Dio mio ! how transcendant was the beauty of that poor girl !" The count stopped and fed his memory a moment with closed eyes upon the image. "At the first glance I inwardly put up a prayer to the Virgin, and determined, with her sweet help, to restore reason to the fairest of its earthly temples. I took up her shadow of a hand, and spread out the thin fingers in my palm, and as she turned her large wan dering eye toward me, I felt that the blessed Mary had heard my prayer, You shall see her well again, said I confidently. "Quite overcome, the prince Ghika fell on the bej and embraced his daughter s knees in an agony of tears. "You shall not have the seccatura, gentlemen, of listening to the recital of all my tedious experiments for the first month or two. I brought her to my house upon a litter, placed her in a room filled with every luxury of the east, and suffered no one to approach her except two Greek attendants, to whose services she was accustomed. I succeeded in partially re storing animation to her benumbed limbs by friction, and made her sensible of music, and of the perfumes of the east, which I burned in a pastille-lamp in her chamber. Here, however, my skill was baffled. I could neither amuse nor vex. Her mind was beyond me. After trying every possible experiment, as it seemed to me, my invention was exhausted, and I despaired. " She occupied, however, much of my rnind. Walking up and down yonder orange-alley one sweet morning, about two months ago, I started oft suddenly to my chamber with a new thought. You would have thought me the maddest of my household, to have seen me, gentlemen. I turned out by the shoul- ders the regazza, who was making my bed, washed and scented myself, as if for a ball, covered my white hairs with a handsome brown wig, a relic of my cox combical days, rouged faintly, and, with white gloves, and a most youthful appearance altogether, sought i the chamber of my patient. "She was lying with her head in the hollow of her th ; n arm, and, as I entered, her dark eyes rested full upon me. I approached, kissed her hand with a re spectful gallantry, and in the tenderest tones of which my damaged voice was susceptible, breathed into her ear a succession of delicately-turned compliments to II her beauty. "She lay as immovable as marble, but I had not calculated upon the ruling passion of the sex in vain. A thin flush on her cheek, and a flutter in her temple, only perceptible to my practised eye, told me that the words had found their way to her long-lost conscious ness. "I waited a few moments, and then took up a ring let that fell negligently over her hand, and asked per mission to sever it from the glossy mass in which the arm under her head was literally buried. " She clutched her fingers suddenly upon it, and glancing at me with the fury of a roused tigress, ex claimed in a husky whisper, Lasdale me, signore ." " I obeyed her, and, as I left the room, 1 thanked the Virgin in my heart. It was the first word she had spoken for years. " The next day, having patched myself up more successfully in my leisure, in a disguise so absolute that not one even of my pets knew me as I passed through the corridor, I bowed myself up once more to her bedside. VShe lay with her hands clasped over her eyes, and took no notice of my first salutation. I commenced with a little raillery, and under cover of finding fault with her attitude, contrived to pay an adroit compli ment to the glorious orbs she was hiding from admira tion. She Jay a moment or two without motion, but the muscles of her slight mouth stirred just percepti bly, and presently she drew her fingers quickly apart, and looking at me with a most confiding expression in her pale features, a full sweet smile broke like sud den sunshine through her lips. I could have wept for joy- " I soon acquired all the influence over her I could wish. She made an effort at my request to leave her bed, and in a week or two walked with me in the gar- 104 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. den. Her mind, however, seemed to have capacity |j but for one thought, and she soon began to grow un- Vppv. and would weep for hours. I endeavored to dfcnv from her the cause, but she only buried her face in "niy bosom, and wept more violently, till one day, sobbiog out her broken words almost inarticulately, I gathered her meaning. She was grieved that I did not marry^her ! " Poor girl !" soliloquized the count, after a brief pause, " she was only true to her woman s nature. In sanity had but removed the veil of custom and restraint. She "would have broken her heart before she had be trayed such a secret, with her reason. " I was afraid at last she would go melancholy mad, this one thought preyed so perpetually on her brain and I resolved to delude her into the cheerfulness ne cessary to her health by a mock ceremony. " The delight with which she received my promise almost alarmed me. I made several delays, with the hope that in the convulsion of her feelings a ray of reason would break through the darkness; but she took every hour to heart, and I found it was inevi table. " You are sitting, gentlemen, in the very scene of our mad bridal. My poor grass has not yet recovered, you see, from the tread of the dancers. Imagine the spec tacle. The chapel was splendidly decorated, and at the bottom of the lawn stood three long tables, cov ered with fruits and flowers, and sprinkled here and there with bottles of colored water (to imitate wine), sherbels, cakes, and other such innocent things as I could allow my crazy ones. They were all invited." " Good God !" said the surgeon, " your lunatics ?" "All all! And never was such a sensation pro duced in a household since the world was created. Nothing else was talked of for a week. My worst pa tients seemed to suspend for the time their fits of vio lence. I sent to town for quantities of tricksy stuffs, and allowed the women to deck themselves entirely after their own taste. You can conceive nothing like the business they made of it ! Such apparitions ! Santa Maria . shall I ever forget that Babel ? " The morning came. My bride s attendants had dressed her from her Grecian wardrobe ; and with her long braid parted over her forehead, and hanging back from her shoulders to her very heels, her close-fitted jacket, of gorgeous velvet and gold, her costly brace lets, and the small spangled slippers upon her unstock- inged feet, she was positively an angelic vision of beau ty. Her countenance was thoughtful, but her step was unusually elastic, and a small red spot, like a rose-leaf tinder the skin, blushed through the alabaster paleness of her cheek. " My maniacs received her with shouts of admira tion. The women were kept from her at first with great difficulty, and it was only by drawing their at tention to their own gaudier apparel, that their .anx iety to touch her was distracted. The men looked at her, as she passed along like a queen of love and beamy, and their wild, gleaming eyes, and quickened j breaths, showed the effect of such loveliness upon the unconcealed feelings. I had multiplied my attend- j ants, scarce knowing how the excitement of the scene miffht affect them ; but the interest of the occasion, and the imposing decencies of dress and show, seemed to overcome them effectually. The most sane guests at a bridal could scarce have behaved with more pro priety. " The ceremony was performed by an elderly friend of mine, the physician to rny establishment. Old as I am, gentlemen, I could have wished that ceremony to litive been in earnest. As she lifted up her large liquid eyes to heaven, and swore to be true to me till death, I forgot my manhood, and wept. If I had been younger ma che porcheria ! " After the marriage the women were invited to sa lute the bride, and then all eyes in my natural party turned at once to the feast. I gave the word. Fruits, cakes, and sherbets, disappeared with the rapidity of magic, and then the music struck up from the shrub bery, and they danced as you see by the grass. " I committed the bride to her attendants at sunset, but I could with difficulty tear myself away. On the following day I called at her door, but she refused to see me. The next day and the next I could gain no admittance without exerting my authority. On the fourth morning I was permitted to enter. She had re sumed her usual dress, and was sad, calm, and gentle. She said little, but seemed lost in thought to which she was unwilling or unable to give utterance. " She has never spoken of it since. Her mind, 1 think, has nearly recovered its tone, but her memory seems confused. I scarce think she remembers her illness, and its singular events, as more than a troubled dream. On all the common affairs of life she seems quite sane, and I drive out with her daily, and have taken her once or twice to the opera. Last night we were strolling on the Marina when your frigate came into the bay, and she proposed to join the crowd and go off to hear the music. We went on board, as you know ; and now, if you choose to pay your respects to the lady who refused to waltz with you, take an other sip of your sherbet and wine, and come with me." To say more would be trespassing perhaps on the patience of my readers, but certainly on my own feel ings. I have described this singular case of madness and its cure, because I think it contains in itself the seeds of much philosophy on the subject. It is only within a very few years that these poor sufferers have been treated otherwise than as the possessors of in carnate devils, whom it was necessary to scourge out with unsparing cruelty. If this literal statement of a cure in the private madhouse of the eccentric conte , of Palermo, induce the friends of a single un fortunate maniac to adopt a kind and rational system for his restoration, the writer will have been repaid for bringing circumstances before the public which have since had much to do with his own feelings. MINUTE PHILOSOPHIES, " Nature there Was with thee ; she who loved us hoth, she still Was with thee ; and even so didst thou become A silent poet ; from tlie solitude Of the vast sea didst bring a watchful heart Of the Still couchant, an inevitabi And an eye practised lik ear, blind man s touch." WORDSWORTH. A SUMMER or two since, I was wasting a college va cation among the beautiful creeks and falls in the neighborhood of New York. In the course of my wanderings, up-stream and down-stream, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, and never without a book for an excuse to loiter orf the mossy banks and beside the edge of running water, I met frequently a young man of a peculiarly still and collected eye, and a forehead more like a broad slab of marble than a hu man brow. His mouth was small and thinly cut ; his chin had no superfluous flesh upon it; and his whole appearance was that of a man whose intellectual na ture prevailed over the animal. He was evidently a scholar. We had met so frequently at last, that, on passing each other one delicious morning, we bowed and smiled simultaneously, and, without further intro duction, entered into conversation. It was a temperate day in August, with a clear but not oppressive sun, and we wandered down a long INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 105 creek together, mineralizing here, botanizing there, and examining the strata of the ravines, with that sort of instinctive certainty of each other s attainments which scholars always feel, and thrusting in many a little wayside parenthesis, explanatory of each other s history and circumstances. I found that he was one of those pure and unambitious men, who, by close application and moderate living while in college, be come in love with their books ; and, caring little for anything more than the subsistence, which philosophy tells them is enough to have of this world, settle down for life into a wicker-bottomed chair, more content edly than if it were the cushion of a throne. We were together three or four days, and when I left him, he gave me his address, and promised to write to me. I shall give below an extract from one of his letters. I had asked him for a history of his daily habits, and any incidents which he might choose to throw in hinting to him that I was a dabbler in lit erature, and would be obliged to him if he would do it minutely, and in a form of which I might avail myself in the way of publication. After some particulars, unimportant to the reader, he proceeds : " I keep a room at a country tavern. It is a quiet, out-of-the-way place, with a whole generation of elms about it ; and the greenest grass up to the very door, and the pleasantest view in the whole country round from my chamber-window. Though it is a public house, and the word HOTEL swings in golden capi tals under a landscape of two hills and a river, painted for a sign by some wandering Tinto, it is so orderly a town, that not a lounger is ever seen about the door ; and the noisiest traveller is changed to a quiet man, as if it were by the very hush of the atmosphere. " Here, in my pleasant room, upon the second floor, with my round table covered with choice books, my shutters closed just so much as to admit light enough for a painter, and my walls hung with the pictures which adorned my college chambers, and are there fore linked with a thousand delightful associations I can study my twelve hours a day, in a state of mind sufficiently even and philosophical. I do not want for excitement. The animal spirits, thanks to the Crea tor, are enough at all times, with employment and temperate living, to raise us above the common shad ows of life ; and after a day of studious confinement, when my mind is unbound, and I go out and give it up to reckless association, and lay myself open unre servedly to the influences of nature at such a time, there comes mysteriously upon me a degree of pure joy, umningled and unaccountable, which is worth years of artificial excitement. The common air seems to have grown rarer; my step is strangely elastic ; my sense of motion full of unwonted dignity; my thoughts elevated ; my perceptions of beauty acuter and more pleasurable; and my better nature predominant and - , sublime. There is nothing in the future which looks I water it and let in the sunshine to its bosom, detect difficult, nothing in my ambition unattainable, nothing I the secret springs which move to such beautiful re shall be happier in one hour spent within himself, than in ten wasted on folly. " Few know the treasures in their own bosoms very few the elasticity and capacity of a well-regulated mind for enjoyment. The whole world of philoso phers, and historians, and poets, seem, to the seel qded student, but to have labored for his pleasure ; and as he comes to one new truth and beautiful though) after another, there answers a chord of joy, richer than music, in his heart which spoils him for the coarser pleasures of the world. I have seen my college churn a man, who, from a life of mingled business and pleasure, became suddenly a student lean back in his chair, at the triumph of an argument, or the discovery of a philosophical truth, and give himself up for a few moments to the enjoyment of sensations, which, he assured me, surpassed exceedingly the most vivid pleasures of his life. The mind is like the appetite when healthy and well-toned, receiving pleasure from the commonest food ; but becoming a disease, when pampered and neglected. Give it time to turn in upon itself, satisfy its restless thirst for knowledge, and it will give birth to health, to animal spirits, to every thing which invigorates the body, while it is advan cing by every step the capacities of the soul. Oh ! if the runners after pleasure would stoop down by the wayside, they might drink waters better even than those which they see only in their dreams. They will not be told that they have in their possession the gold- j en key which they covet ; they will not know that the music they look to enchant them, is sleeping in their own untouched instruments ; that the lamp which I they vainly ask from the enchanter, is burning in their own bosoms ! " When I first came here, my host s eldest daughter I was about twelve years of age. She was, without be ing beautiful, an engaging child, rather disposed to be ! contemplative, and, like all children, at that age, very j inquisitive and curious. She was shy at first, but soon I became acquainted with me ; and would come into ! my room in her idle hours, and look at my pictures and read. She never disturbed me, because her nat ural politeness forbade it ; and I pursued my thoughts or my studies just as if she were not there, till, by-and- by, I grew fond of her quiet company, and was hap pier when she was moving stealthily around, and look ing into a book here and there in her quiet way. "She had been my companion thus for some time, when it occurred to me that I might be of use to her in leading her to cultivate a love for study. I seized the idea enthusiastically. Now, thought I, I will see the process of a human mind. I have studied its phi losophy from books, and now I will take a single original, and compare them, step by step. I have seen the bud, and the flower full blown, and I am told that the change was gradual, and effected thus leaf after leaf. Now I will watch the expansion, and while in the past which can not be reconciled with good : I am a purer and a better man; and though I am ele vated in my own thoughts, it will not lead to vanity, for my ideas of God, and of my fellow-men, have been enlarged also. This excitement ceases soon ; but it ceases like the bubbling of a fountain, which leaves the waters purer for the influence which has passed through them not like the mirth of the world, which ebbs like an unnatural tide, and leaves loathsomeness and disgust. " Let no one say that such a mode of life is adapted to peculiar constitutions, and can be relished by those only. Give me the veriest worldling the most de voted, and the happiest of fashionable ephemera, and if ho has material for a thought, and can take pride in the improvement of his nature, I will so order his daily round, that, with temperance and exercise, he sults. The idea delighted me. "I was aware that there was great drudgery in the first step s, and I determined to avoid it, and connect i the idea of my own instruction with all that was de lightful and interesting to her mind. For this pur pose I persuaded her father to send her to a better school than she had been accustomed to attend, and, by a little conversation, stimulated her to enter upon her studies with alacrity. " She was now grown to a girl, and had begun to assume the naive, womanly airs which girls do at her age. Her figure had rounded into a flowing sym metry, and her face, whether from associating princi pally with an older person, or for what other reason I know not, had assumed a thoughtful cast, and she was really a girl of most interesting and striking per sonal appearance. 106 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. " I did not expect much from the first year of my Experiment. I calculated justly on its being irksome and common-place. Still I wasarnuspd and interested. I c^ould hear her light step on the stair, always at the saitie early hour of the evening, and it was a pleasure to toe to say Come in, to her timid rap, and set her a cmjir by my own, that I might look over her book, or taik in a low tone to her. 1 then asked her about her lessons, and found out what had most attracted her notice, and I could always find some interesting fact connected with it, or strike off into some pleasant as sociation, till she acquired a habit of selection in her reading, and looked at me earnestly to know whai I would say upon it. You would have smiled to see her leaning forward, with her soft blue eye fixed on me, and her lips half parted with attention, waiting for my ideas upon some bare fact in geography or his tory; and it would have convinced you that the nat ural, unstimulated mind, takes pleasure in the simplest addition to its knowledge. " All this time I kept out of her way everything that would have a tendency to destroy a taste for mere knowledge, and had the pleasure to see that she passed with keen relish from her text books to my ob servations, which were as dry as they, though recom mended by kindness of tone and an interested manner. She acquired gradually, by this process, a habit of reasoning upon everything which admitted it, which was afterward of great use in fixing and retaining the leading features of her attainments. " I proceeded in this way till she was fifteen. Her mind had now become inured to regular habits of in quiry, and she began to ask difficult questions and wonder at common things. Her thoughts assumed a graver complexion, and she asked for books upon sub jects of which she felt the want of information. She was ready to receive and appreciate truth and instruc- j tion, and here was to begin my pleasure. " She came up one evening with an air of embar- ] rassment approaching to distress. She took her usual seat, and told me that she had been thinking all day that it was useless to study any more. There were so many mysterious things so much, even that she could see, which she could not account for, and, with all her efforts, she got on so slowly, that she was discouraged. It was better, she said, to be happy in ignorance, than to be constantly tormented with the sight of knowledge to which she could not attain, and which she only knew enough to value. Poor child ! she did not know that she was making the same complaint with Newton, and Locke, and Bacon, and that the wisest of men were only gatherers of pebbles on the shore of an illimita ble sea ! I began to talk to her of the mind. I spoke of its grandeur, and its capacities, and its destiny. I told her instances of high attainment and wonderful discovery sketched the sublime philosophies of the soul the possibility that this life was but a link in a chain of existences, and the glorious power, if it were true, of entering upon another world, with a loftier ca pacity than your fellow-beings for the comprehension of its mysteries. I then touched upon the duty of self- cultivation the pride of a high consciousness of im proved time, and the delicious feelings of self-respect and true appreciation. "She listened to me in silence, and wept. It was one of those periods which occur to all delicate minds, j of distrust and fear; and when it passed by, and her ! ambition stirred again, she gave vent to her feelings ^. with a woman s beautiful privilege. I had no more j trouble to urge her on. She began the next day with the philosophy of the mind, and I was never happier i than while following her from step to step in this de- | lightful study. " I have always thought that the most triumphant intellectual feeling we ever experience, is felt upon the first opening of philosophy. It is like the interpreta tion of a dream of a lifetime. Every topic seems to you like a phantom of your own mind, from which a mist has suddenly melted. Every feature has a kind of half-familiarity, and you remember musing upon it for hours, till you gave it up with an impatient dissat isfaction. Without a definite shape, this or that very idea has floated in your mind continually. It was a phe nomenon without a name a something which you could not describe to your friend, and which, by-and- by, you came to believe was peculiar to yourself, and would never be brought out or unravelled. You read on, and the blood rushes to your face in a tumultu ous consciousness you have had feelings in pecu liar situations which you could not define, and here are tbeir very features and you know, now, that it was jealousy, or ambition, or love. There have been mo ments when your faculties seemed blinded or reversed. You could not express yourself at all when you felt you should be eloquent. You could not fix your mind upon the subject, of which, before, you had been passionately fond. You felt an aversion for your very partialities, or a strange warming in your heart toward people or pursuits that you had disliked; and when the beauty of the natural world has burst upon you, as it sometimes will, with an exceeding glory, you have turned away from it with a deadly sickness of heart, and a wish that you might die. " These are mysteries which are not all soluble even by philosophy. But you can see enough of the ma chinery of thought to know its tendencies, and like the listener to mysterious music, it is enough to have seen the instrument, without knowing the cunning craft of the player. "I remembered my school-day feelings, and lived them over again with my beautiful pupil. I entered with as much enthusiasm as she, into the strength and sublimity which I had wondered at before ; and I be lieve that, even as she sat reading by herself, my blood thrilled, and my pulses quickened, as vividly as her own, when I saw, by the deepening color of her cheek, or the marked passages of my book, that she had found a noble thought or a daring hypothesis. " She proceeded with her course of philosophy rap idly and eagerly. Her mind was well prepared for its relish. She said she felt as if a new sense had been given her an inner eye which she could turn in upon herself, and by which she could, as it were, stand aside while the process of thought went on. She began to respect and to rely upon her own mind, and the eleva tion of countenance and manner, which so certainly and so beautifully accompanies inward refinement, stole over her daily. I began to feel respectful in her presence, and when, witli the peculiar elegance of a woman s mind, she discovered a delicate shade of meaning which I had not seen, or traced an associa tion which could spring only from an unsullied heart, I experienced a sensation like the consciousness of an unseen presence elevating, without alarming me. "It was probably well that with all this change in her mind and manner, her person still retained its childish grace and flexibility. She had not grown tall, and she wore her hair yet as she used to do fall ing with a luxuriant fulness upon her shoulders. Hence she was still a child, when, had she been taller or more womanly, the demands upon her attention, and the attractiveness of mature society, might have divided that engrossing interest which is necessary to successful study. " I hav^ often wished I was a painter; but never so much as when looking on this beautiful being as she sat absorbed in her studies, or turned to gaze up a moment to my face, with that delicious expression of inquiry and affection. Every one knows the elevation given to the countenance of a man by contemplative habits. Perhaps the natural delicacy of feminine fea tures has combined with its rarity, to make this ex- INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 107 pression less observable in woman; but, to one famil iar with the study of the human face, there is, in the look of a truly intellectual woman, a keen subtlety of refinement, a separation from everything gross and material, which comes up to our highest dream of the angelic. For myself, I care not to analyze it. I leave it to philosophy to find out its secret. It is enough for me that I can see and feel it in every pulse of my being. It is not a peculiar susceptibility. Everyman who approaches such a woman feels it. He may not define it; he may be totally unconscious what it is that awes him ; but he feels as if a mysterious and in visible veil were about her, and every dark thought is quenched suddenly in his heart, as if he had come into the atmosphere of a spirit. I would have every woman know this. I would tell every mother who prays nightly for the peculiar watchfulness of good spirits over the purity of her child, that she may weave round her a defence stronger than steel that she may place in her heart a living amulet whose virtue is like a circle of fire to pollution. I am not stringing pearls. I have seen, and I know, that an empty mind is not a strong citadel; and in the melancholy chronicle of female ruin, the instances are rare of victims distin guished for mental cultivation. I would my pen were the point of a diamond, and I were writing on living hearts! for when I think how the daughters of a house are its grace and honor and when I think how the father and mother that loved her, and the brother that made her his pride, and the sister in whose bosom she slept, are all crushed, utterly, by a daughter s degra dation, I feel, that if every word were a burning coal, my language could not be extravagant! "My pupil, had, as yet, read no poetry. I was un certain how to enter upon it. Her taste for the beau tiful in prose had become so decided, that I feared for the first impression of my poetical world. I wished it to burst upon her brilliantly like the entrance to an inner- and more magnificent temple of knowledge. I hoped to dazzle her with a high and unimagined beauty, which should exceed far the massive but. plain splendors of philosophy. We had often conversed on the probability of a previous existence, and, one eve ning, I opened Wordsworth, and read his sublime Ode upon Intimations of Immortality. She did not interrupt me, but I looked up at the conclusion, and she was in tears. I made no remark, but took Byron, and read some of the finest passages in Childe Harold, and Manfred, and Cain and, from that time, poetry- has been her world ! "It would not have been so earlier. It needs the j in of color, and the vanishing of the cold shadows of simple and strong nutriment of truth to fit us to relish || gray the heavenly quiet that seems infused, like a and feel poetry. The mind must have strength and j visible spirit, into the pearly depths of the east, as the cultivated taste, and then it is like a language from i light violet tints become deeper in the upper sky, and Heaven. We are astonished at its power and mag- j the morning mist rises up like a veil of silvery film, found time to study nature. She knew little of the character of the material creation, and I now com menced walking constantly abroad with her at sunset, and at all the delicious seasons of moonlight and star light and dawn. It came in well with her poetry. I can not describe the effect. She became, like all who are, for the first time, made sensible of the glories around them, a worshipper of the external world. " There is a time when nature first loses its famil iarity, and seems suddenly to have become beautiful. This is true even of those who have been taught early habits of observation. The mind of a child is too feeble to comprehend, and does not soon learn, the scale of sublimity and beauty. He would not be sur prised if the sun were brighter, or if the siars were sown thicker in the sky. He sees that the flower is beautiful, and he feels admiration at the rainbow ; but he would not wonder if the dyes of the flower were deeper, or if the sky were laced to the four coi ners with the colors of a prism. He grows up with tr"se splendid phenomena at work about him, till they have become common, and, in their most wonderful forms, cease to attract his attention. Then his senses are suddenly, as by an invisible influence, unsealed, and, like the proselyte of the Egyptian pyramids, he finds himself in a magnificent temple, and hears exquisite music, and is dazzled by surpassing glory. He never recovers his indifference. The perpetual changes of nature keep alive his enthusiasm, and if his taste is not dulled by subsequent debasement, the pleasure he re ceives from it flows on like a stream wearing deeper and calmer. Caroline became now my constant companion. The changes of the natural world have always been my chief source of happiness, and I was curious to know whether my different sensations, under different circumstances, were peculiar to myself. I left her, therefore, to lead the conversation, without any ex pression of my feelings, and, to my surprise and de light, she invariably struck their tone, and pursued the same vein of reflection. It convinced me of what I had long thought might be true that there was, in the varieties of natural beauty, a hidden meaning, and a delightful purpose of good ; and, if I am not de ceived, it is a new and beautiful evidence of the pro portion and extent of God s benevolent wisdom. Thus, you may remember the peculiar effect ol the early dawn the deep, unruffled serenity, and the per fect collectedness of your senses. You may remem- j ber the remarkable purity that pervades the stealing nificence. We have been familiar with knowledge t with a person of plain garment and a homely presence -and lie comes to us in poetry, with the state of a and softens away its intensity; and then you will re member how the very beatings of your heart grew (|iiiet, and you felt sistible impulse to pray! king, glorious in purple and gold. We have known There was no irregular delight, no indefinite sensa- hiin as an unassuming friend who talked with us by J tion, no ecstacy. It was deep, unbroken repose, and the wayside, and kept us company on our familiar l] your pulses were free from the fever of life, and your paths and we see him coming with a stately step, and !; reason was lying awake in its chamber, a glittering diadem on his brow; and we wonder that !j " There is a hush also at noon; but it is not like we" did not see that his plain garment honored him the morning. You have been mingling in the business not, and his bearing were fitter for a king! "Poetry entered to the very soul of Caroline Grey. It was touching an unreached string, and she felt as of the world, and you turn aside, weary and distracted, for rest. There is a far depth, in the intense blue of the sky which takes in the spirit, and you are content if the whole compass of her heart were given out. I II to lie "down and sleep in the cool shadow, and forget used to read to her for hours, and it was beautiful to | even our existence. How different from the cool see her eye kindle, and her cheek burn with excite ment. The sublimed mysticism and spirituality of j Wordsworth were her delight, and she feasted upon the deep philosophy and half-hidden tenderness of Coleridge. " I had observed, with some satisfaction, that, in the rapid development of her mental powers, she had not , y wakefulness of the morning, and yet how fitted for the necessity of the hour! "The day wears on and comes to the sunsetting. The strong light passes oft" from the hills, and the leaves are mingled in golden masses, and the tips of the long grass, and the blades of maize, and the luxuriant grain," are all sleeping in a rich glow, as if the daylight 108 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. had melted into gold and descended upon every living thing like dew. The sun goes down, and there is a tissue of indescribable glory floating upon the clouds, and the almost imperceptible blending of the sunset color with the blue sky, is far up toward the zenith. Presently the pomp of the early sunset passes away ; and the clouds are all clad in purple, with edges of metallic lustre; and very far in the west, as if they were sailing away into another world, are seen spots of intense brightness, and the tall trees on the hilly edge of the horizon seem piercing the sky, on fire with its consuming heat. There is a tumultuous joy in the contemplation of this hour which is peculiar to itself. You feel as if you should have had wings; for there is a strange stirring in your heart to follow on and your imagination bursts away into that beautiful world, and revels among the unsubstantial clouds till they become cold. It is a triumphant and extravagant hour. Its joyousness is an intoxication, and its pleas ure dies with the day. " The night, starry and beautiful, comes on. The sky has a blue, intense almost to blackness, and the stars are set in it like gems. They are of different glory, and there are some that burn, and some that I have a twinkling lustre, and some are just visible and faint. You know their nature, and their motion ; and there is something awful in so many worlds moving on through the firmament so silently and in order. You I feel an indescribable awe stealing upon you, and your imagination trembles as it goes up among them. You gaze on, and on, and the superstitions of olden time, and the wild visions of astrology, steal over your mem ory, till, by-and-by, you hear the music which they give out as they go, and drink in the mysteries of their hidden meaning, and believe that your destiny is woven by their burning spheres. There comes on you a delirious joy, and a kind of terrible fellowship with their sublime nature, and you feel as if you could go up to a starry place and course the heavens in com pany. There is a spirituality in this hour, a separa tion from material things, which is of a fine order of happiness. The purity of the morning, and the noon tide quietness, and the rapture of the glorious sunset, are all human and comprehensible feelings ; but this has the mystery and the lofty energy of a higher world, j might object to her want of fashionable tournure, and find fault with her unfashionable impulses. I do not. She is a high-minded, noble, impassioned being, with an enthusiasm that is not without reason, and a com mon sense that is not a regard to self-interest. Her motion was not learned at schools, but it is unembar rassed and free ; and her tone has not been educated to a refined whisper, but it expresses the meaning of her heart, as if its very pulse had become articulate. The many might not admire her I know she would be idolized by the few. " Our intercourse is as intimate still ; and it could not change without being less so for we are constant ly together. There is to be sure lately a slight degree of embarrassment and somehow we read more poetry than we used to do but it is nothing at all nothing." My friend was married to his pupil a few months after writing the foregoing. He has written to me since, and 1 will show you the letter if you will call, any time. It will not do to print it, because there are some domestic details not proper for the general eye ; but, to me, who am a bachelor, bent upon matrimony, it is interesting to the last degree. He lives the same quiet, retired life, that he did before he was married. His room is arranged with the same taste, and with reference to the same habits as before. The light comes in as timidly through the half-closed window, and his pictures look as shadowy and dim, and the rustle of the turned leaf adds as mysteriously to the silence. He is the fondest of husbands, but his affec tion does not encroach on the habits of his mind. Now and then he looks up from his book, and, resting his head upon his hand, lets his eye wander over the pale cheek and drooping lid of the beautiful being who sits reading beside him ; but he soon returns to his half- forgotten page, and the smile of affection which had stolen over his features fades gradually away into the habitual soberness of thought. There sits his wife, hour after hour, in the same chair which she occupied when she first came, a curious loiterer to his room ; and though she does not study so much, because other cares have a claim upon her now, she still keeps pace thhim in the pleasanter branches of knowledge, and and you return to your human nature with a refreshed j| they talk as often and as earnestly as before on the spirit and an elevated purpose : see now the wisdom of God I the collected intellect for the morning pray er and our daily duty the delicious repose for our noontide weariness and the rapt fervor to purify us by night from our worldliness, and keep wakeful the eye of immortality ! They are all suited to our need ; and it is pleasant to think, when we go out at this or that season, that its peculiar beauty is fitted to our pe culiar wants, and that it is not a chance harmony of our hearts with nature. "The world had become to Caroline a new place. No change in the season was indifferent to her noth ing was common or familiar. She found beauty in things you would pass by, and a lesson for her mind or her heart in the minutest workmanship of nature. Her character assumed a cheerful dignity, and an elevation above ordinary amusements or annoyances. She WE equable and calm, because her feelings were never thousand topics of a scholar s contemplation. Her cares may and will multiply ; but she understands the economy of time, and I have no doubt that, with every attention to her daily duties, she will find ample time for her mind, and be always as well fitted as now for the companionship of an intellectual being. I have, like all bachelors, speculated a great deal upon matrimony. I have seen young and beautiful women, the pride of gay circles, married as the world said well ! Some have moved into costly houses, and their friends have all come and looked at their fine furniture and their splendid arrangements for happi ness, and they have gone away and committed them to their sunny hopes, cheerfully, and without fear. It is natural to be sanguine for the young, and, at such times, I am carried away by similar feelings. I love to get unobserved into a corner, and watch the bride in her white attire, and with her smiling face and her soft reached by ordinary irritations ; and, if there were no !| eyes moving before me in their pride of life, weave a other benefit in cultivation, this were almost argument ! waking dream of her future happiness, and persuade enough to induce it. " It is now five years since I commenced my tutor ship. I have given you the history of two of them. In the remaining three there has been much that has in terested my mind probably little that would interest yours. We have read together, and, as far as possible, studied together. She has walked with me, and shared all my leisure, and known every thought. She is now a woman of eighteen. Her childish graces are matured, and her blue eye would send a thrill through you. You myself that it will be true. I think how they will sit upon that luxurious sofa as the twilight falls, and build gay hopes, and murmur in low tones the now unfor- bidden tenderness, and how thrillingly the allowed kiss and the beautiful endearments of wedded life, will make even their parting joyous, and how gladly they will come back from the crowd and the empty mirth of the gay, to each other s quiet company. I picture to myself that young creature, who blushes, even now, at his hesitating caress, listening eagerly for his foot- INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 109 steps as the night steals on, and wishing that he would come ; and when he enters at last, and, with an affec tion as undying as his pulse, folds her to his bosom, I can feel the very tide that goes flowing through his heart, and gaze with him on her graceful form as she moves about him for the kind offices of affec tion, soothing all his unquiet cares, and making him lorget even himself, in her young and unshadowed beauty. I go forward for years, and see her luxuriant hair put soberly away from her brow, and her girlish graces ripened into dignity, and her bright loveliness chast ened with the gentle meekness of maternal affection. Her husband looks on her with a proud eye, and shows the same fervent love and delicate attention < which first won her, and fair children are growing ! -up about them, and they go on, full of honor and ; untroubled years, and are remembered when they die ! I say I love to dream thus when I go to give the young bride joy. It is the natural tendency of feel ings touched by loveliness that fears nothing for itself, and, if I ever yield to darker feelings, it is because the > light of the picture is changed. I am not fond of f dwelling on such changes, and I will not, minutely, j now. 1 allude to it only because I trust that my sim- j pie page will be read by some of the young and beau tiful beings who move daily across my path, and I j would whisper to them as they glide by, joyously and confidingly, the secret of an unclouded future. The picture I have drawn above is not peculiar. It j is colored like the fancies of the bride ; and many oh j many an hour will she sit, with her rich jewels lying loose in her fingers, and dream such dreams as these. She believes them, too and she goes on, for a while, undeceived. The evening is not too long while they talk of their plans for happiness, and the quiet meal is still pleasant with the delightful novelty of mutual re liance and attention. There comes soon, however, a time when personal topics become bare and wearisome, j and slight attentions will not alone keep up the social excitement. There are long intervals of silence, and detected symptoms of weariness, and the husband, first in his impatient manhood, breaks in upon the hours they were to spend together. I can not follow it cir cumstantially. There come long hours of unhappy listlessness, and terrible misgivings of each other s worth and affection, till, by-and-by, they can conceal their uneasiness no longer, and go out separately to seek relief, and lean upon a hollow world for the support which one who was their "lover and friend" could not give them ! Heed this, ye who are winning, by your innocent beauty, the affections of highminded and thinking beings ! Remember that he will give up the brother of his heart with whom he has had, ever, a fellowship of mind the society of his contemporary runners in the race of fame, who have held with him a stern companionship and frequently, in his passionate love, he will break away from the arena of his burning am bition, to come and listen to the "voice of the charm er." It will bewilder him at first, but it will not long ; and then, think you that an idle blandishment will chain the mind that has been used, for years, to an equal communion ? Think you he will give up, for a weak dalliance, the animating themes of men, and the search into the fine mysteries of knowledge ? Oh no, lady ! believe me no ! Trust not your influence to such light fetters ! Credit not the old-fashioned ab surdity that woman s is a secondary lot ministering to the necessities of her lord and master ! It is a higher destiny I would award you. If your immor tality is as complete, and your gift of mind as capable as ours of increase and elevation, I would put no wis dom of mine against God s evident allotment. I would charge you to water the undying bud, and give it healthy culture, and open its beauty to the sun and then you may hope, that when your life is bound up with another, you will go on equally, and in a fellowship that shall pervade every earthly interest END OF INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. DASHES AT LIFE WITH A FREE PENCIL. P A E T III; LOITERINGS OF TRAVEL. LOITERINGS OF TRAVEL. LADY RAVELGOLD, CHAPTER I. " What wouid it pleasure me to have my throat cut With diamonds ? or to be smothered quick With cassia, or be shot to death with pearls 1" DUTCHESS or MALFY. " I ve been i the Indies twice, and seen strange things But two honest women .One, I read of once !" RULE A WIFE. IT was what is called by people on the continent a " London day." A thin, gray mist drizzled down through the smoke which darkened the long cavern of Fleet street ; the sidewalks were slippery and clam my ; the drays slid from side to side on the greasy pavement, creating a perpetual clamor among the lighter carriages with which they came in contact ; the porters wondered that "gemmen" would carry their umbrellas up when there was no rain, and the gentlemen wondered that, porters should be permitted on the sidewalks ; there were passengers in box-coats, though it was the first of May, and beggars with bare breasts, though it was chilly as November ; the boys were looking wistfully into the hosier s windows who were generally at the pastry-cook s ; and there were persons who wished to know the time, trying in vain to see the dial of St. Paul s through the gamboge at mosphere. It was twelve o clock, find a plain chariot with a simple crest on the panels, slowly picked its way through the choked and disputed thoroughfare east of Temple Bar. The smart glazed hat of the coach man, the well-fitted drab greatcoat and gaiters of the footman, and the sort of half-submissive, half-con temptuous look on both their faces (implying that they were bound to drive to the devil if it were miladi s or ders, but that the rabble of Fleet street was a leetle too vulgar for their contact), expressed very plainly that the lady within was a denizen of a more privileged quarter, but had chosen a rainy day for some compul sory visit to " the city." At the rate of perhaps a mile an hour, the well- groomed night-horses (a pair of smart, hardy, twelve- mile cabs, all bottom, but little style, kept for night- work and forced journeys) had threaded the tortuous entrails of London, and had arrived at the arch of a dark court in Throgmorton street. The coachman put his wheels snug against the edge of the sidewalk, to avoid being crushed by the passing drays, and set tled his many-caped benjamin about him ; while the footman spread his umbrella, and making a balustrade of his arm for his mistress s assistance, a closely-veiled lady descended and disappeared up the wet and ill- paved avenue. The green-baize door of Firkins and Co. opened on its silent hinges and admitted the mysterious visiter, who, inquiring of the nearest clerk if the junior part ner were in, was shown to a small inner room contain ing a desk, two chairs, a coal fire, and a young gentle man. The last article of furniture rose on the lady s entrance, and as she threw off her veil he made a low bow, with the air of a gentleman, who is neither sur prised nor embarrassed, and pushing aside the door- check, they were left alone. There was that forced complaisance in the lady s manner on her first entrance, which produced the slightest possible elevation in a very scornful lip owned by the junior partner, but the lady was only forty-five, highborn, and very handsome, and as she looked at the fine specimen of nature s nobility, who met her with a look as proud and yet as gentle as her own, the smoke of Fleet street passed away from her memory, and she became natural and even gracious. The effect upon the junior partner was simply that of re moving from his breast the shade of her first impres sion. " I have brought you," said his visiter, drawing a card from her reticule, " an invitation to the dutchess of Hautaigle s ball. She sent me half a dozen to fill up for what she calls ornamentals and I am sure I shall scarce find another who comes so decidedly under her grace s category." The fair speaker had delivered this pretty speech in the sweetest and best-bred tone of St. James s, looking the while at the toe of the small brodequin which she held up to the fire perhaps thinking only of drying it. As she concluded her sentence, she turned to her companion for an answer, and was sur prised at the impassive politeness of his bow of ac knowledgment. I reg ret that I shall not be able to avail myself of your ladyship s kindness," said the junior partner, in the same well-enunciated tone of courtesy. " Then," replied the lady with a smile, "Lord Au gustus Fitz-Moi, who looks at himself all dinner-time in a spoon, will be the Apollo of the hour. What a pity such a handsome creature should be so vain ! By-the-way, Mr. Firkins, you live without a looking- glass, I see." " Your ladyship reminds me that this is merely a place of business. May I ask at once what errand has procured me the honor of a visit on so unpleasant a day ?" A slight flush brightened the cheek and forehead of the beautiful woman, as she compressed her lips, and forced herself to say with affected ease, The want of five hundred pounds." The junior partner paused an instant, while the lady tapped with her boot upon the fender in ill-dissembled anxiety, and then, turning to his desk, he filled up the LADY RAVELGOLD. Ill check without remark, presented it, and took his hat to wait on her to her carriage. A gleam of relief and pleasure shot over her countenance as she closed her small jewelled hand over it, followed immediately by a look of embarrassed inquiry into the face of the un questioning banker. " I am in your debt already." " Thirty thousand pounds, madam !" " And for this you think the securities on the estate of Rockland " "Are worth nothing, madam ! But it rains. I re gret that your ladyship s carriage can not come to the door. In the old-fashioned days of sedan-chairs, now, the dark courts of Lothbury must have been more at tractive. By-the-way, talking of Lothbury, there is Lady Roseberry s fete champetre next week. If you should chance to have a spare card " " Twenty, if you like I am too happy really, Mr. Firkins " " It s on the fifteenth ; I shall have the honor of seeing your ladyship there ! Good-morning ! Home, coachman !" 44 Does this man love me ?" was Lady Ravelgold s first thought, as she sank back in her returning char iot. " Yet no ! he was even rude in his haste to be rid of me. And I would willingly have stayed too, for there is something about him of a mark that I like. Ay, and he must have seen it a lighter encourage ment has been interpreted more readily. Five hun dred pounds ! really five hundred pounds ! And thir ty thousand at the back of it ! What does he mean ? Heavens ! if he should be deeper than I thought ! If he should wish to involve me first !" And spite of the horror with which the thought was met in the mind of Lavy Ravelgold, the blush over her forehead died away into a half smile and a bright er tint in her lips ; and as the carriage wound slow on through the confused press of Fleet street andt Strand, the image of the handsome and haughty young banker shut her eyes from all sounds without, and she was at her own door in Grosvenor square before she had changed position or wandered half a moment from the subject of those busy dreams. CHAPTER II. THE morning of the fifteenth of May seemed to have been appointed by all the flowers as a jubilee of perfume and bloom. The birds had been invited, and sang in the summer with a welcome as full-throated as a prima donna singin down the tenor in a duet ; the most laggard buds turned out their hearts to the sunshine, and promised leaves on the morrow ; and that portion of London that had been invited to Lady Roseberry s fete, thought it a very fine day" ! That portion which was not, wondered how people would go sweltering about in such a glare for a cold dinner ! At about half past two, a very elegant dark-green cab without a crest, and with a servant in whose slight figure and plain blue livery there was not a fault, whirled out at the gate of the Regent s Park, and took its way up the well-watered road leading to Hamp- stead. The gentlemen whom it passed or met turned to admire the performance of the dark-gray horse, and the ladies looked after the cab as if they could see the handsome occupant once more through its leather back. Whether by conspiracy among the coach- makers, or by an aristocracy of taste, the degree of elegance in a turn-out attained by the cab just de scribed, is usually confined to the acquaintances of Lady ; that list being understood to enumerate all " the nice young men" of the West End, beside the guardsmen. (The ton of the latter, in all matters that affect the style of the regiment, is looked after by r as rer I the club and the colonel.) The junior Firkins seemed an exception to this exclusive rule. No " nice man" could come from Lothbury, and he did not visit Lady ; but his horse was faultless, and when he turned into the gate of Rose-Eden, the policeman at the porter s lodge, though he did not know him, thought it unnecessary to ask for his name. Away he spat tered up the hilly avenue, and giving the reins to his groom at the end of a green arbor leading to the re ception-lawn, he walked in and made his bow to Lady Roseberry, who remarked, " How very handsome ! Who can he be ?" and the junior partner walked on and disappeared down an avenue of laburnums. Ah ! but Rose-Eden looked a paradise that day ! Hundreds had passed across the close-shaven lawn, with a bow to the lady-mistress of this fair abode. Yet the grounds were still private enough for Milton s pair, so lost were they in the green labyrinths of hill and dale. Some had descended through heavily-shaded paths to a fancy dairy, built over a fountain in the bot tom of a cool dell ; and here, amid her milk-pans of old and costly china, the prettiest majd in the country round pattered about upon a floor of Dutch tiles, and served her visitors with cream s and ices already, as it were, adapted to fashionable comprehension. Some had strayed to the ornamental cottages in the skirts of the flower-garden poetical abodes, built from a picturesque drawing, with imitation roughness ; thatch, lattice-window, and low panng^Ul complete; and in habited by superannuated dependants of Lord Rose- berry, whose only duties were to look like patriarchs, and give tea and new cream-cheese to visiters on fete- days. Some had gone to see the silver and gold pheas ants in their wire-houses, stately aristocrats of the game tribe, who carry their finely-pencilled feathers like Marmalet Madarus," strutting in hoop and farthin gale. Some had gone to the kennels, to see setters and pointers, hounds and terriers, lodged like gentle men, each breed in its own apartment the puppies, 33 elsewhere, treated with most attention. Some were in the flower-garden, some in the greenhouses, some in the graperies, aviaries, and grottoes ; and at the side of a bright sparkling fountain, in the recesses of a fir- grove, with her foot upon its marble lip, and <fne hand on the shoulder of a small Cupid who archly made a drinking-cup of his wing, and caught the bright water as it fell, stood Lady Imogen Ravelgold. the loveliest girl of nineteen that prayed night and morning within j the parish of Mny Fair, listening to very passionate language from the young banker of Lothbury. fe A bugle on the lawn rang a recall. From every alley, and by every path, poured in the gay multitude, and the smooth sward looked like a plateau of ani mated flowers, waked by magic from a broidery on green velvet. Ah ! the beautiful dcmi-toilcltcs ! so difficult to attain, yet, when attained, the dress most modest, most captivating, most worthy the divine grace of woman. Those airy hats, sheltering from the sun, yet not enviously concealing a feature or a ringlet that a painter would draw for his exhibition-picture ! Those summery and shapeless robes, covering the pecson more to show its outline better, and provoke more the worship, which, like all worship, is made more adoring by mystery ! Those complexions which but betray their transparency in the sun ; lips in which the blood is translucent when between you and the light ; cheeks finer-grained than alabaster, yet as cool in* their virgin purity as a tint in the dark corner of a Ruysdael : the human race was at less perfection in Athens in the days of Lais in Egypt in the days of Cleopatra than that day on the lawn of Rose-Eden. Cart-loads of ribands, of every gay color, had been laced through the trees in all directions; and amid every variety of foliage, and every shade of green, the tulip-tints shone vivid and brilliant, like an American forest after the first frost. From the left edge of the 112 LADY RAVELGOLD. lawn, the ground suddenly sunk into a dell, shaped like an amphitheatre, with a level platform at its bot tom, and all around, above and below, thickened a shady wood. The music of a delicious band stole up from the recesses of a grove, draped as an orchestra and green-room on the lower side, and while the audience disposed themselves in the shade of the up per grove, a company of players and dancing-girls commenced their theatricals. Imogen Ravelgold, who was separated, by a pine tree only, from the junior partner, could scarce tell you, when it was finished, what was the plot of the play. The recall-bugle sounded again, and the band wound away from the lawn, playing a gay march. Followed Lady Roseberry and her suite of gentlemen, followed dames and their daughters, followed all who wished to see the flight of my lord s falcons. By a narrow path and a wicket-gate, the long music-guided train stole out upon an open hill-side, looking down on a verdant and spreading meadow. The band play ed at a short distance behind the gay groups of spec tators, and it was a^pretty picture to look down upon the splendidly-dressed falconer and his men, holding their fierce birds upon their wrists, in their hoods and jesses, a foreground of old chivalry and romance ; while far beyond extended, like a sea over the horizon, the smoke-clad pinnacles of busy and every-day Lon don. There are suc^^jjjL^sts of the eyes of the rich ! The scarlet hood was taken from the trustiest falcon, and a dove, confined, at first, with a string, was thrown up, and brought back, to excite his altera tion. As he fixed his eye upon him, the frightened victim was let loose, and the falcon flung off; away skimmed the dove in a low flight over the meadow, and up to the very zenith, in circles of amazing swift ness and power, sped the exulting falcon, apparently forgetful of his prey, and bound for the eye of the sun with his strong wings and his liberty. The falconer s whistle and cry were heard ; the dove circled round the edge of the meadow in his wavy flight ; and down, with the speed of lightning, shot the falcon, striking his prey dead to the earth before the eye could settle on his foYm. As the proud bird stood upon his victim, looking around with a lifted crest and fierce eye, Lady Imogen Ravengold heard, in a voice of which her heart knew the music, " They who soar highest strike surest the dove lies in the falcon s bosom." CHAPTER III. THE afternoon had, meantime, been wearing on, and at six the "breakfast" was announced. The tents beneath which the tables were spread were in different parts of the grounds, and the guests had made up their own parties. Each sped to his ren dezvous, and as the last loiterers disappeared from the lawn, a gentleman in a claret coat and a brown study, found himself stopping to let a lady pass who had obeying the summons as tardily as himselt In a white chip hat, Hairbault s last, a few lilies of the valley laid among her raven curls beneath, a simple white robe, the chef-d auvre of Victotine in style and tournure, Lady Ravelgold would have been the belle of the fete, but for her daughter. "Well emerged from Lothbury !" she said, court- esying, with a slight flush over her features, but im mediately taking his arm ; " I have lost my party, and meeting you is opportune. Where shall we breakfast?" There was a small tent standing invitingly open on the opposite side of the lawn, and by the fainter rattle of soup-spoons from that quarter, it promised to be less crowded than the others. The junior partner would willingly have declined the proffered honor, but he saw at a glance that there was no escape, and sub mitted with a grace. " You know very few people here," said his fair creditor, taking the bread from her napkin. "Your ladyship and one other." "Ah, we shall have dancing by-and-by, and I must introduce you to my daughter. By the way, have you no nam^from your mother s side ? Firkins sounds so very odd. Give me some prettier word to drink in this champagne." " What do you think of Tremlet?" " Too effeminate for your severe style of beauty but it will do. Mr. Tremlet, your health ! Will you give me a little of the pate before you? Pray, if it is not indiscreet, how comes that classic profile, and more surprising still, that distinguished look of yours, to have found no gayer destiny than the signing of Firkins and Co. to notes of hand ? Though I thought you became your den in Lothbury, upon my honor you look more at home here." And Lady Ravengold fixed her superb eyes upon the beautiful features of her companion, wondering partly why he did not speak, and partly why she had not observed before that he was incomparably the handsomest creature she had ever seen. " I can regret no vocation," he answered after a moment, " which procures me an acquaintance with your ladyship s family." " There is an arriere pensee in that formal speech, Mr. Tremlet. You are insincere. I am the only one in my family whom you know, and what pleas ure have you taken in my acquaintance ? And, now I think of it, there is a mystery about you, which, but for the noble truth written so legibly on your features, I should be afraid to fathom. Why have you suffered to over-draw my credit so enormously, and without adow of a protest ?" n Lady Ravelgold had disburdened her heart of this direct question, she turned half round and looked her companion in the face with an intense interest, which produced upon her own features an expression of earnestness very uncommon upon their pale and impassive lines. She was one of those per sons of little thought, who care nothing for causes or consequences, so that the present difficulty is removed, or the present hour provided with its wings ; but the repeated relief she had received from the young banker, when total ruin would have been the consequence of his refusal, and his marked coldness in his manner to her, had stimulated the utmost curiosity of which she was capable. Her vanity, founded upon her high rank and great renown as a beauty, would have agreed that he might be willing to get her into his power at that price, had he been less agreeable in his own person, or more eager in his manner. But she had wanted money sufficiently to know, that thirty thousand pounds are not a bagatelle, and her brain was busy till she dis covered the equivalent he sought for it. Meantime her fear that he would turn out to be a lover, grew rapidly into a fear that he would not. Lady Ravelgold had been the wife of a dissolute earl, who had died, leaving his estate inextricably in volved. With no male heir to the title or property, and no very near relation, the beautiful widow shut her eyes to the difficulties by which she was sur rounded, and at the first decent moment after the death of her lord, she had re-entered the gay society of which she had been the bright and particular star, and never dreamed either of diminishing her establish ment, or of calculating her possible income. The first heavy draft she had made upon the house of Firkins and Co., her husband s bankers, had been re turned with a statement of the Raveleold debt and credit on their books, by which it appeared that Lord Ravelgold had overdrawn four or five thousand pounds before his death, and that from some legal difficulties, LADY RAVELGOLD. 113 nothing could be realized from the securities given on his estates. This bad news arrived on the morning of a fete to be given by the Russian ambassador, at which her only child. Lady Imogen, was to make her debut in society. AVith the facility of disposition which was peculiar to her, Lady Ravelgold thrust the papers into her drawer, and determining to visit her banker on the following morning, threw the matter entirely from her mind and made preparations for the ball. With the Russian government the house of Firkins and Co. had long carried on very extensive fiscal transactions, and in obedience to instructions from the emperor, regular invitations for the embassy fetes were sent to the bankers, accepted occasionally by the junior partner only, who was generally sup posed to be a natural son of old Firkins. Out of the banking-house he was known as Mr. Tremlet, and it was by this name, which was presumed to be his mother s, that he was casually introduced to Lady Imogen on the night of the fete, while she was separa ted from her mother in the dancing-room. The con sequence was a sudden, deep, ineffaceable passion in the bosom of the young banker, checked and silenced, but never lessened or chilled by tho recollection of the obstacle of his birth. The impression of his sub dued manner, his worshipping, yet most respectful tones, and the bright soul that breathed through his handsome features with his unusual excitement, was, to say the least, favorable upon Lady Imogen, and they parled on the night of the fete, mutually aware of each other s preference. On the following morning Lady Ravelgold made her proposed visit to the city ; and inquiring for Mr. Firkins, was shown in as usual to the junior partner, to whom the colloquial business of the concern had j long been intrusted. To her surprise she found no | difficulty in obtaining the sum of money which had been refused her on the preceding day a result which she attributed to her powers of persuasion, or to some new turn in the affairs of the estate ; and for two years these visits had been repeated at intervals of three or j four months, with the same success, though not with j the same delusion as to the cause. She had discover- j ed that the estate was worse than nothing, and the j junior partner cared little to prolong his tt-tcs-a-teles \ with her, and, up to the visit with which this tale \ opened, she had looked to every succeeding one with | increased fear and doubt. During these two years, Tremlet had seen Lady Imogen occasionally at balls and public places, and every look they exchanged wove more strongly be tween them the subtle threads of love. Once or twice she had endeavored to interest her mother in conver- j sation on the subject, with the intention of making a confidence of her feelings ; but Lady Ravengold, when not anxious, was giddy with her own success, and the unfamiliar name never rested a moment on her j ear. With this explanation to render ttie tale in- | telligible, " let us," as the French say, " return to our muttons." Of the conversation between Tremlet and her moth er, Lady Imogen was an unobserved and astonished witness. The tent which they had entered was large, > with a buffet in the centre, and a circular table waited on by servants within the ring ; and, just concealed by the drapery around the pole, sat Lady Imogen with a party of her friends, discussing very seriously the threatened fashion of tight sleeves. She had half risen, when her mother entered, to offer her a seat by her side, but the sight of Tremlet, who immediately followed, had checked the words upon her lip, and to her surprise they seated themselves on the side that was wholly unoccupied, and conversed in a tone in audible to all but themselves. Not aware that her lover knew Lady Ravelgold, she supposed that they might have beeu casually introduced, till the earnest ness of her mother s manner, and a certain ease be tween them in the little courtesies of the table, assured her that this could not be their first interview. Trern- let s face was turned from her, and she could not judge whether he was equally interested ; but she had been so accustomed to consider her mother as irresistible when she chose to please, that she supposed it of course ; and very soon the heightened color of Lady Ravelgold, and the unwavering look of mingled admiration and curiosity which she bent upon the handsome face of her companion, left no doubt in her mind that her reserved and exclusive lover was in the dangerous toils of a rival whose power she knew. From the mortal pangs of a first jealousy, Heaven send thee deliverance, fair Lady Imogen ! " We shall find our account in the advances on your ladyship s credit ;" said Tremlet, in reply to the direct question that was put to him. " Meantime permit me to admire the courage with which you look so disagreeable a subject in the face." " For disagreeable subject, read Mr. Tremlet. I show my temerity more in that. Apropos of faces, yours would become the new fashion of cravat. The men at Crockford s slip the ends through a ring of their lady-love s, if they chance to have one thus !" and untying the loose knot of his black satin cravat, Lady Ravelgold slipped over the ends a diamond of small value, conspicuously set in pearls. " The men at Crockford s," said Tremlet, hesita- I ting to commit the rudeness of removing the ring, " are not of my school of manners. If I had been so fortunate as to inspire a lady with a preference for me, j I should not advertise it on my cravat." " But suppose the lady were proud of her preference as dames were of the devotion of their knights in the days of chivalry would you not wear her favor as conspicuously as they ?" A flush of mingled embarrassment and surprise shot over the forehead of Tremlet, and he was turning the ring with his fingers, when Lady Imogen, at tempting to pass out of the tent, was stopped by her mother. "Imogen, my daughter! this is Mr. Tremlet. La dy Imogen Ravelgold, Mr. Tremlet!" The cold and scarce perceptible bow which the wounded girl gave to her lover, betrayed no previous acquaintance to the careless Lndy Ravelgold. With out giving a second thought to her daughter, she held her glass for some champagne to a passing servant, and as Lady Imogen and her friends crossed the lawn to the dancing-tent, she resumed the conversation which they had interruptsd; while Tremlet, with his heart brooding on the altered look he had received, listened and replied almost unconsciously ; yet from ; this very circumstance, in a manner which was in terpreted by his companion as the embarrassment of a timid and long-repressed passion for herself. While Lady Ravelgold and the junior partner were i thus playing at cross purposes over their champagne and bons-bons, Grisi and Lablanche were singing a duet from I Puritani, to a full audience in the saloon ; the drinking young men sat over their wine at the nearly-deserted tables; Lady Imogen and her friends waltzed to Collinefs band, and the artisans were busy below the lawn, erecting the machinery for the fire works. Meantime every alley and avenue, grot and labyrinth, had been dimly illuminated with colored lamps, showing like vari-colomi glow-worms amid the foliage and shells; and if the bright scenery of Rose-Eden had been lovely by day, it was fay-land and witchery by night. Fatal impulse of our nature, that these approaches to paradise in the "delight of , the eye," stir only in our bosoms the passions upon which law and holy writ have put ban and bridle ! " Shall we stroll down this alley of crimson lamps?" 1 said Lady Ravelgold, crossing the lawn from the tent 114 LADY RAVELGOLD. where their coffee had been brought to them, and put ting her slender arm far into that of her now pale and silent companion. A lady in a white dress stood at the entrance of that crimson avenue, as Tremlet and his passionate ad mirer disappeared beneath the closing lines of the long perspective, and, remaining a moment gazing through the unbroken twinkle of the confusing lamps, she pressed her hand hard upon her forehead, drew up her form as if struggling with some irrepressible feeling, and in another moment was whirling in the waltz with Lord Ernest Fitzantelope, whose mother wrote a complimentary paragraph about their per formance for the next Saturday s Court Journal. The bugle sounded, and the band played a march upon the lawn. From the breakfast tents, from the coffee-rooms, from the dance, from the card-tables, poured all who wished to witness the marvels that lie in saltpetre. Gentlemen who stood in a tender attitude in the darkness, held themselves ready to lean the other way when the rockets blazed up, and mammas who were encouraging flirtations with eligibles, whis pered a caution on the same subject to their less ex perienced daughters. Up sped the missiles, round spun the wheels, fair burned the pagodas, swift flew the fire-doves off and back again on their wires, and softly floated down through the dewy atmosphere of that May night the lambent and many-colored stars, flung burning from the exploded rockets. Device followed device, and Lady Imogen almost forgot, in her child s delight at the spectacle, that she had taken into her bosom a green serpent, whose folds were closing like suffoca tion about her heart. The finale was to consist of a new light, invented by the pyrotechnist, promised to Lady Roseberry to be several degrees brighter than the sun compara tively with the quantity of matter. Before this last flourish came a pause ; and while all the world were murmuring love and applause around her, Lady Imogen, with her eyes fixed on an indefinite point in the darkness, took advantage of the cessation of light to feed her serpent with thoughts of passionate and uncontrollable pain. A French attache, Phillipiste to the very tips of his mustache, addressed to her ear, meantime, the compliments he had found most effect ive in the Chaussee d Antin. The light burst suddenly from a hundred blazing points, clear, dazzling, intense illuminating, as by the instantaneous burst of day, the farthest corner of Rose-Eden. And Monsieur Mangepoire, with a French contempt for English fireworks, took advan tage of the first ray to look into Lady Imogen s eyes. 1(1 Mais, Miladi!" was his immediate exclamation, after following their direction with a glance, "ce n est qu un tableau vivant, cela! Help, gentlemen! Elle s evanouit. Some salts! Misericorde! Mon Dicul Mon Dieu /" And Lady Imogen Ravelgold was car ried fainting to Lady Roseberry s chamber. In a small opening at the end of a long avenue of lilacs, extended from the lawn in the direction of Lady Imogen s fixed and unconscious gaze, was pre sented, by the unexpected illumination, the tableau vivant, seen by her ladyship and Monsieur Mange- Eoire at the same instant a gentleman drawn up to is fullest height, with his arms folded, and a lady kneeling on the ground at his feet with her arms stretched up to his bosom. CHAPTER IV. A LITTLE after two o clock on the following "Wednesday, Tremlet s cabriolet stopped near the perron of Willis s rooms in King street, and while he sent up his card to the lady patronesses for his ticket to that night s Almack s, he busied himself in looking into the crowd of carriages about him, and reading on the faces of their fair occupants the hope and anxiety to which they were a prey till John the footman brought them tickets or despair. Drawn up on the opposite side of the street, stood a family-carriage of the old style, covered with half the arms of the herald s office, and containing a fat dowager and three very over dressed daughters. Watching them, to see the effect of their application, stood upon the sidewalk three or four young men from the neighboring club-house, and at the moment Tremlet was observing these circum stances, a foreign britscka, containing a beautiful wo man of a reputation better understood than expressed in the conclave above stairs, flew round the corner of St. James s street, and very nearly drove into the open mouth of the junior partner s cabriolet. "I will bet you a Ukraine colt against this fine bay of yours," said the Russian secretary of legation, ad vancing from the group of dandies to Tremlet, "that miladi, yonder, with all the best blood of England in her own and her daughters red faces, gets no tickets I his morning." "I ll take a bet upon the lady who has nearly extinguished me, if you like," answered Tremlet, gazing with admiration at the calm, delicate, child like looking creature, who sat before him in the britscka. "No!" said the secretary, "for Almack s is a re public of beauty, and she ll be voted in without either blood or virtue. Par e.remple, Lady Ravelgold s voucher is good here, though she does study tableaux in Lothbury eh, Tremlet?" Totally unaware of the unlucky discovery by the fireworks at Lady Roseberry s fete, Tremlet colored and was inclined to take the insinuation as an affront; but a laugh from the dandies drew off his companion s attention, and he observed the dowager s footman standing at her coach window with his empty hands held up in most expressive negation, while the three young ladies within sat aghast, in all the agonies of disappointed hopes. The lumbering carriage got into motion its ineffective blazonry paled by the mortified blush of its occupants and, as the junior partner drove away, philosophizing on the arbitrary opinions and unprovoked insults of polite society, the britsgka shot by, showing him, as he leaned forward, a lovely woman who bent on him the most dangerous eyes in London, and an Almack s ticket lying on the unoccu pied cushion beside her. The white relievo upon the pale blue wall of Al mack s showed every crack in its stucco flowers, and the faded chaperons who had defects of a similar de scription to conceal, took warning of the walls, and retreated to the friendlier dimness of the tea-room. Collinet was beginning the second set of quadrilles, and among the fairest of the surpassingly beautiful women who were moving to his heavenly music, was Lady Imogen Ravelgold, the lovelier to-night for the first heavy sadness that had ever dimmed the roses in her cheek. Her lady-mother divided her thoughts between what this could mean, and whether Mr. Tremlet would come to the ball; and when, presently after, in the dos-a-dos, she forgot to look at her daugh ter, on seeing that gentleman enter, she lost a very good opportunity for a guess at the cause of Lady Imogen s paleness. To the pure and true eye that appreciates the divinity of the form after which woman is made, it would have been a glorious feast to have seen the per fection of shape, color, motion, and countenance, shown that night on the bright floor of Almack s. For the young and beautiful girls whose envied destiny is to commence their woman s history in this exclusive LADY RAVELGOLD. 115 hall, there exists aids to beauty known to no other class or nation. Perpetual vigilance over every limb from the cradle up; physical education of a perfec tion, discipline, and judgment, pursued only at great expense and under great responsibility; moral educa tion of the highest kind, habitual consciousness of rank, exclusive contact with elegance and luxury, and a freedom of intellectual culture which breathes a soul through the face before passion has touched it with a line or a shade these are some of the circumstances which make Almack s the cynosure of the world for adorable and radiant beauty. There were three ladies who had come to Almack s with a definite object that night, each of whom was destined to be surprised and foiled : Lady Ravelgold, who feared she had been abrupt with the inexperienced banker, but trusted to find him softened by a day or two s reflection; Mrs. St. Leger, the lady of the britsgka, who had ordered supper for two on her ar rival at home from her morning s drive, and intended to have the company of the handsome creature she had nearly run over in King street ; and Lady Imogen Ravelgold as will appear in the sequel. Tremlet stood in the entrance from the tea-room a moment, gathering courage to walk alone into such a dazzling scene, and then, having caught a glimpse of the glossy lines of Lady Imogen s head at the farthest end of the room, he was advancing toward her, when he was addressed by a lady who leaned against one of the slender columns- of the orchestra. After a sweetly- phrased apology for having nearly knocked out his brains that morning with her horses fore feet, Mrs. St. Leger took his arm, and walking deliberately two or three times up and down the room, took possession, at last, of a banquette on the highest range, so far from any other person, that it would have been a marked rude ness to have left her alone. Tremlet took his seat by her with this instinctive feeling, trusting that some of her acquaintances would soon^ approach, and give him a fair excuse to leave her ; but he soon became amused with her piquant style of conversation, and, not aware of being observed, fell into the attitude of a pleased and earnest listener. Lady Ravelgold s feelings during this petit entre- tien, were of a very positive description. She had an instinctive knowledge, and consequently a jealous dislike of Mrs. St. Leger s character; and, still under the delusion that the young banker s liberality was prompted by a secret passion for herself, she saw her credit in the city and her hold upon the affections of Tremlet (for whom she had really conceived a violent affection), melting away in every smile of the dangerous woman who engrossed him. As she looked around for a friend, to whose ear she might communicate Borne of the suffocating poison in her own heart, Lady Imogen returned to her from a galopade ; and, like a second dagger into the heart of the pure-minded girl, went this second proof of her lover s corrupt principle and conduct. Unwilling to believe even hef own eyes on the night of Lady Roseberry s fete, she had sum moned resolution on the road home to ask an explana tion of her mother. Embarrassed by the abrupt ques tion, Lady Ravelgold felt obliged to make a partial confidence of the state of her pecuniary affairs; and to clear herself, she represented Tremlet as having taken advantage of her obligations to him, to push a dishonorable suit. The scene disclosed by the sud den blaze of the fireworks being thus simply explain ed, Lady Imogen determined at once to give up Tremlet s acquaintance altogether; a resolution which his open flirtation with a woman of Mrs. St. Leger s character served to confirm. She had, however, one errand with him, prompted by her filial feelings and favored by an accidental circumstance which will ap pear . Do you believe in animal magnetism?" asked Mrs. St. Leger, "for by the fixedness of Lady Ravel- gold s eyes in this quarter, something is going to happen to one of us." The next moment the Russian secretary approach ed and took his seat by Mrs. St. Leger, and with diplomatic address contrived to convey to Tremlet s ear that Lady Ravelgold wished to speak with him. The banker rose, but the quick wit of his companion comprehended the manoeuvre. " Ah ! I see how it is," she said, " but stay you ll sup with me to-night ? Promise me parole d hon- neur /" " Parole /" answered Tremlet, making his way out between the seats, half pleased and half embar rassed. " As for you, Monsieur le Secretaire," said Mrs. St. Leger, " you have forfeited my favor, and may sup elsewhere. How dare you conspire against me ?" While the Russian was making his peace, Trem let crossed over to Lady Ravelgold ; but, astonished at the change in Lady Imogen, he soon broke in abruptly upon her mother s conversation, to ask her to dance. She accepted his hand for a quadrille; but as they walked down the room in search of a vis a-vis, she complained of heat, and asked timidly if he would take her to the tea-room. " Mr. Tremlet," she said, fixing her eyes upon the cup of tea which he had given her, and which she found some difficulty in holding, " I have come here to-night to communicate to you some important in formation, to ask a favor, and to break off an acquaint ance which has lasted too long." Lady Imogen stopped, for the blood had fled from her lips, and she was compelled to ask his arm for a support. She drew herself up to her fullest height the next moment, looked at Tremlet, who stood in speechless astonishment, and with a strong effort, com menced again in a low, firm tone " I have been acquainted with you some time, sir, and have never inquired, nor knew more than your name, up to this day. I suffered myself to be pleased too blindly " " Dear Lady Imogen !" "Stay a moment, sir! I will proceed directly to my business. I received this morning a letter from the senior partner of a mercantile house in the city, with which you are connected. It is written on the supposition that I have some interest in you, and in forms me that you are not, as you yourself suppose, the son of the gentleman who writes the letter." " Madam!" " That gentleman, sir, as you know, never was married. He informs me that in the course of many financial visits to St. Petersburg!!, he formed a friend ship with Count Manteuffel, then minister of finance to the emperor, whose tragical end, in consequence of his extensive defalcations, is well known. In brief, sir, you were his child, and were taken by this English banker, and carefully educated as his own, in happy ignorance, as he imagined, of your father s mis fortunes and mournful death." Tremlet leaned against the wall, unable to reply to this astounding intelligence, and Lady Imogen went on. "Your title and estates have been restored to you | at the request of your kind benefactor, and you are now the heir to a princely fortune, and a count of the Russian empire. Here is the letter, sir, which is of no value to me now. Mr. Tremlet ! one word more, sir." Lady Imogen grasped for breath. " In return, sir, for much interest given you here tofore in return, sir, for this information " " Speak, dear Lady Imogen !" " Spare my mother !" " Mrs. St. Leger s carriage stops the way !" shout- 116 LADY RAVELGOLD. ed a servant at that moment, at the top of the stairs ; and as if there were a spell in the sound to nerve her resolution anew, Lady Imogen Ravelgold shook the tears from her eyes, bowed coldly to Tremlet, and passed out into the dressing-room. "If you please, sir," said a servant, approaching the amazed banker, " Mrs. St. Leger waits for you in her carriage." " Will you come home and sup with us ?" said Lady Ravelgold at the same instant, joining him in the tea-room. " I shall be only too happy, Lady Ravelgold." The bold coachman of Mrs. St. Leger continued to " stop the way," spite of policemen and infuriated footmen, for some fifteen minutes. At the end of that time Mr. Tremlet appeared, handing down Lady Ravelgold and her daughter, who walked to their chariot, which was a few steps behind; and very much to Mrs. St. Leger s astonishment, the handsome banker sprang past her horses heads a minute after, jumped into his cabriolet, which stood on the opposite side of the street, and drove after the vanishing chariot as if his life depended on over taking it. Still Mrs. St. Leger s carriage " stopped the way." But, in a few minutes after, the same footman who had summoned Tremlet in vain, re turned with the Russian secretary, doomed in blessed unconsciousness to play the pis utter at her tete-d-lete supper in Spring Gardens. CHAPTER V. IF Lady Ravelgold showed beautiful by the un compromising light and in the ornamented hall of Almack s, she was radiant as she came through the mirror door of her own loved-contrived and beauty- breathing boudoir. Tremlet had been showed into this recess of luxury and elegance on his arrival, and Lady Ravelgold and her daughter, who preceded her by a minute or two, had gone to their chambers, the first to make some slight changes in her toilet, and the latter (entirely ignorant of her lover s presence in the house), to be alone with a heart never before in such painful need of self-abandonment and solitude. Tremlet looked about him in the enchanted room in which he found himself alone, and, spite of the I prepossessed agitation of his feelings, the voluptuous j beauty of every object had the effect to divert and tranquillize him. The light was profuse, but it came ) softened through the thinnest alabaster ; and while I every object in the room was distinctly and minutely j visible, the effect of moonlight was not more soft and dreamy. The general form of the boudoir was an oval, but within the pilasters of folded silk with their cornices of gold, lay crypts containing copies exquisite ly done in marble of the most graceful statues of an tiquity, one of which seemed, by the curtain drawn quite aside and a small antique lamp burning near it, to be the divinity of the place the Greek Antinous, with his drooped head and full, smooth limbs, the most passionate and life-like representation of voluptu ous beauty that intoxicates the slumberous air of Italy. Opposite this, another niche contained a few books, whose retreating shelves swung on a secret door, and as it stood half open, the nodding head of a | snowy magnolia leaned through, as if pouring from the lips of its broad chalice the mingled odors of the unseen conservatory it betrayed. The first sketch in crayons of a portrait of Lady Ravelgold by young Lawrence, stood against the wall, with the frame half buried in a satin ottoman ; and, as Tremlet stood be fore it, admiring the clear, classic outline of the head and bust, and wondering in what chamber of his brain the gifted artist had found the beautiful drapery in which he had drawn her, the dim light glanced faintly on the left, and the broad mirror by which he had entered swung again on its silver hinges, and admitted the very presentment of what he gazed on. Lady Ravelgold had removed the jewels from her hair, and the robe of wrought lace, which she had worn that night over a boddice of white satin laced loosely below the bosom. In the place of this she had thrown upon her shoulders a flowing wrapper of purple velvet, made open after the Persian fashion, with a short and large sleeve, and embroidered richly with gold upon, the skirts. Her admirable figure, gracefully defined by the satin petticoat and boddice, showed against the gorgeous purple as it flowed back in her advancing motion, with a relief which would have waked the very soul of Titian ; her complexion was dazzling and faultless in the flattering light of her own rooms ; and there are those who will read this who know how the circumstances which surround a woman luxury, elegance, taste, or the opposite of these enhance or dim, beyond help or calculation, even the highest order of woman s beauty. Lady Ravelgold held a bracelet in her hand as she came in. " In my own house," she said, holding the glitter ing jewel to Tremlet, " 1 have a fancy for the style antique. Tasseline, my maid, has gone to bed, and you must do the devoir of a knight, or an abigail, and loop up this Tyrian sleeve. Stay look first at the model that small statue of Cytheris, yonder ! Not the shoulder for you are to swear mine is prettier but the clasp. Fasten it like that. So! Now take me for a Grecian nymph the rest of the evening." " Lady Ravelgold!" " Hermione or Aglae, if you please ! But let us ring for supper !" As the bell sounded, a superb South American trulian darted in from the conservatory, and, spread ing his gorgeous black and gold wings a moment over the alabaster shoulder of Lady Ravelgold, as if he took a pleasure in prolonging the first touch as he alighted, turned his large liquid eye fiercely on. Tremlet. " Thus it is," said Lady Ravelgold, " we forget our old favorites in our new. See how jealous he is !" " Supper is served, miladi !" said a servant entering. " A hand to each, then, for the present," she said, putting one into Tremlet s, and holding up the trulian with the other. _ " He who behaves best shall drink first with me." " I beg your ladyship s pardon," said Tremlet, drawing back, and looked at the servant, who im mediately left the room. " Let us understand each other! Does Lady Imogen sup with us to-night ?" " Lady Imogen has retired," said her mother, in some surprise. " Then, madam, will you be seated one moment and listen to me ?" Lady Ravelgold sat down on the nearest ottoman, with the air of a person too high bred to be taken by surprise, but the color deepened to crimson in the centre of her cheek, and the bird on her hand be trayed by one of his gurgling notes that he was held more tightly than pleased him. With a calm and de cisive tone, Tremlet went through the explanation given in the previous parts of this narration. He de clared his love for Lady Imogen, his hopes (while he had doubts of his birth) that Lady Ravelgold s increas ing obligations and embarrassments and his own wealth might, weigh against his disadvantages ; and now, his honorable descent being established, and his rank en titling him to propose for her hand, he called upon Lady Ravelgold to redeem her obligations to him by an immediate explanation to her daughter of his con duct toward herself, and by lending her whole influ ence to the success of his suit. LADY RAVELGOLD. 117 Five minutes are brief time to change a lover into a son-in-law ; and Lady Ravelgold, as we have seen in the course of this story, was no philosopher. She buried her face in her hands, and sat silent for a while after Tremlet had concluded : but the case was a very clear one. Ruin and mortification were in one scale, mortification and prosperity in the other. She rose, pale but decided, and requesting Monsieur le conte Manteuffel to await her a few minutes, ascended to her daughter s chamber. " If you please, sir," said a servant, entering in about half an hour, " miladi and Lady Imogen beg that you will join them in the supper-room." CHAPTER VI. THE spirit of beauty, if it haunt in such artificial at mospheres as Belgrave square, might have been pleased to sit invisibly on the vacant side of Lady Ravelgold s table. Tremlet had been shown in by the servant to a small apartment, built like a belvidere over the garden, half boudoir in its character, yet intended as a supper- room, and at the long window (opening forth upon descending terraces laden with flowers, and just now flooded with the light of a glorious moon) stood Lady Imogen, with her glossy head laid against the case ment, and the palm of her left hand pressed close upon her heart. If those two lights the moon faintly shed off from the divine curve of her temple, and the stained rose-lamp pouring its mellow tint full on the heavenly sured him that she had obtained a victory over herself. Shrinking immediately, however, from anything like sentiment (with the nervous dread of pathos so pecu liar to the English), she threw off her trulian, that made a circle and alighted on the emerald bracelet of Lady Imogen, and rang the bell for coffee. "I (latter myself, Mr. Tremlet," she said, "that I have made a new application of the homoeopathic phi losophy. Hahnemann, they say, cures fevers by ag gravating the disease ; and when I can not sleep, I drink coffee. J en suis passablement fitre ! You did not know I was a philosopher ?" " No, indeed !" " Well, take some of this spiced mocha. I got it of the Turkish ambassador, to whom I made beaux yeux on purpose. Stop ! you shall have it in the little tin sel cups he sent me. George, bring those filagree things ! Now, Mr. Tremlet, imagine yourself in the serail du Bosphore Imogen and I two lovely Circas- | sians, par exemple! Is it not delicious ? Talking of | the Bosphorus, nobody was classical enough to under- : stand the device in my coiffure to-night." "What was it?" asked Tremlet, absently, gazing I while he spoke, with eyes of envy at the trulian, who ! was whetting his bill backward and forward on the ! clear bright lips of Lady Imogen. " Do you think my profile Grecian ?" asked Lady Ravelgold. " Perfectly !" "And my hair is coiffed a la Grec ?" " Most becomingly." " But still you won t see my golden grasshopper ! shape and whiteness of her shoulder and neck if those || Do you happen to know, sir, that to wear the golden two lights, I say, could have been skilfully managed, ! grasshopper was the birthright of an Athenian ? I saw re you might have made it in a book. Well ! I had to explain it to everybody. Mr. Lawrence ! what a picture you might hav of Lady Imogen Ravelgold ! " Imogen, my daughter ! Mr. Tremlet !" said her mother as he entered. Without changing her position, she gave him the hand she had been pressing on her heart. " Mr. Tremlet !" said Lady Ravelgold, evidently entering into her daughter s embarrassment, " trouble yourself to come to the table and give me a bit of this pheasant. Imogen, George waits to give you some champagne." " Can you forgive me ?" said the beautiful girl, be fore turning to betray her blushing cheek and suffused eyes to her mother. Tremlet stopped as if to pluck a leaf from the ver bena at her feet, and passed his lips over the slight fin gers he held. " Pretty trulian !" murmured Lady Ravelgold to her bird, as he stood on the edge of her champagne-glass, and curving his superb neck nearly double, contrived to drink from the sparkling brim " pretty trulian ! By-the-way, what did that gambler, George Heriot mean, by telling me that its legs should be black ? All Greeks have black legs, said he, yawning in his stupid way. What did he mean, Mr. Tremlet ?" " Greeks and blacklegs are convertible terms. He thought you were more au fait of the slang dictionary. Will you permit me to coax my beautiful rival from your hand, Lady Imogen ?" She smiled, and put forward her wrist, with a bend of its slender and alabaster lines which would have i drawn a sigh from Praxiteles. The trulian glanced his fiery eyes from his mistress s face to Tremlet s, and as the strange hand was put out to take him from his emerald perch, he flew with the quickness of light ning into the face of her lover, and buried the sharp beak in his lip. The blood followed copiously, and Lady Imogen, startled from her timidity, sprang from her chair and pressed her hands one after the other upon the wound, in passionate and girlish abandon ment. Lady Ravelgold hurried to her dressing-room u will be,merry after this ! What ancient Sybarite, j for something to stanch the wound, and, left alone ink you, Mr. Tremlet, inhabits the body of this ! with the divine creature who hung over him, Tremlet you think bright bird ? Look up, mignon, and tell usif^ ou were Hylas or Alcibiades ! Is the pheasant good, Mr. Trem let ?" " Too good to come from Hades, miladi. Is it true that you have your table supplied from Crockford s ?" " Tout bonnement! I make it a principle to avoid all great anxieties, and I can trust nobody but Ude. He sends my dinners quite hot, and if there is a particular dish of game, he drives round at the hour and gives it ! drew her to his bosom and pressed his cheek long nnd ! closely to hers, while to his lips, as if to keep in life, i clung her own crimsoned and trembling fingers. " Imogen !" said Lady Ravelgold, entering, " take him to the fountain in the garden and wash the wound ; | then put on this bit of gold-beater s skin. I will come to you when I have locked up the trulian. Is it pain- ful, Mr. Tremlet ?" Tremlet could not trust his voice to answer, but , the last turn in my own kitchen. I should die, to be jj with his arm still around Lady Imogen, he descended responsible for my dinners. I don t know how people I by the terrace of flowers^ to the fountain get on that have no grand artiste- Pray, Mr. Trem let (I beg pardon Monsieur le conte, perhaps I should say ?") " No, no, I implore you ! Tremlet has been spoken too musically to be so soon forgotten. Tremlet or Charles, which you will !" Lady Ravelgold put her hand in his, and looked from his face to her daughter s with, a smile, which as- They sat upon the edge of the marble basin, and the moonlight striking through the jet of the fountain, descended upon them like a rain of silver. Lndy Imo- I gen had recovered from her fright, and buried her face 1 in her hands, remembering into what her feelings had betrayed her ; and Tremlet, sometimes listening to the clear bell-like music of the descending water, some times uttering the broken sentences which are most 118 PALETTO S BRIDE, eloquent in love, sat out the hours till the stars began to pale, undisturbed by Lady Ravelgold, who, on the upper stair of the terrace, read by a small lamp, which, in the calm of that heavenly summer night, burned unflickeringly in the open air. It was broad daylight when Tremlet, on foot, saun tered slowly past Hyde Park corner on his way to the Albany. The lamps were still struggling with the brightening approach to sunrise, the cabmen and their horses slept on the stand by the Green Park, and with cheerful faces the laborers went to their work, and with haggard faces the night-birds of dissipation crept wea rily home. The well-ground dust lay in confused heel- marks on the sidewalk, a little dampened by the night- dew ; the atmosphere in the street was clear, as it never is after the stir of day commences ; a dandy, stealing out from Crockford s, crossed Piccadilly, lifting up his head to draw in long breaths of the cool air, after the closeness of over-lighted rooms and excitement ; and Tremlet, marking none of these things, was making his way through a line of carnages slowly drawing up to take off their wearied masters from a prolonged fete at Devonshire house, when a rude hand clapped him on the shoulder. " Monsieur Tremlet !" " jl/i, Baron! bien bonjouT. 1 " " Bien rencontre, Monsieur ! You have insulted a lady to-night, who has confided her cause to my hands. Madam St. Leger, sir, is without a natural protector, and you have taken advantage of her position to insult her grossly, Mr. Tremlet, grossly !" Tremlet looked at the Russian during this extraor dinary address, and saw that he was evidently highly excited with wine. He drew him aside into Berkeley street, and in the calmest manner attempted to explain what was not very clear to himself. He had totally forgotten Mrs. St. Leger. The diplomate, though quite beyond himself with his excitement, had suffi cient perception left to see the weak point of his state ment ; and infuriated with the placid manner in which he attempted to excuse himself, suddenly struck his glove into his face, and turned upon his heel. They had been observed by a policeman, and at the moment that Tremlet, recovering from his astonishment, sprang forward to resent the blow, the gray-coated guardian of the place laid his hand upon his collar and detained him till the baron had disappeared. More than once on his way to the Albany, Tremlet surprised himself forgetting both the baron and the in sult, and feeding his heart in delicious abandonment with the dreams of his new happiness. He reached his rooms and threw himself on the bed, forcing from his rnind, with a strong effort, the presence of Lady Imogen, and trying to look calmly on the unpleasant circumstance before him. A quarrel which, the day before, he would have looked upon merely as an in convenience, or which, under the insult of a blow, he would have eagerly sought, became now an almost in supportable evil. When he reflected on the subject of the dispute a contention about a woman of doubt ful reputation taking place in the same hour with a first avowal from the delicate and pure Lady Imogen when he remembered the change in his fortunes, which he had as yet scarcely found time to realize on the consequences to her who was so newly dear to him, and on all he might lose, now that life had be come invaluable his thoughts were almost too painful to bear. How seldom do men play with an equal stake in the game of taking; life, and how strange it is that equality of weapons is the only comparison made ne cessary by the laws of honor ! Tremlet was not a man to be long undecided. He rose, after an hour s reflection, and wrote as fol lows : " BARON : Before taking the usual notice of the oc currence of this morning, I wish to rectify one or two points in which our position is false. I find myself, since last night, the accepted lover of Lady Imogen Ravelgold, and the master of estates and title as a count of the Russian empire. Under the etourdisse- ment of such sudden changes in feelings and fortune, perhaps my forgetfulness of the lady, in whose cause you are so interested, admits of indulgence. At any rate, I am so newly in love with life, that I am willing to suppose for an hour that had you known these cir cumstances, you would have taken a different view of the offence in question. I shall remain at home till two, and it is in your power till then to make me the reparation necessary to my honor. Yours, etc., " TREMLET." There was a bridal on the following Monday at St. George s church, and the Russian secretary stood be hind the bridegroom. Lady Ravelgold had never been seen so pale, but her face was clear of all painful feel ing ; and it was observed by one who knew her well, that her beauty had acquired, during the brief engage ment of her daughter, a singular and undefinable ele vation. As the carriages with their white favors turned into Bond street, on their way back to Belgrave square, the cortege was checked by the press of vehicles, and the Russian, who accompanied Lady Ravelgold in her chariot, found himself opposite the open britscka of a lady who fixed her glass full upon him without recog nising a feature of his face. " I am afraid you have affronted Mrs. St. Leger, baron !" said Lady Ravelgold. " Or I should not have been here !" said the Rus sian ; and as they drove up Piccadilly, he had just time between Bond street and Milton Crescent to tell her ladyship the foregone chapter of this story. The trulian, on that day, was fed with wedding-cake, and the wound on Mr. Tremlet s lip was not cured by Jetting alone. PALETTO S BRIDE, CHAPTER I. " As a fish will sometimes gather force, and, with a longing, per haps, for the brightness of upper air, leap from its prescribed ele ment, and glitter a moment among the birds, so will there be found men whose souls revolt against destiny, and make a fiery pluck at things above them. But, like the fish, who drops, panting, with dry scales, backward, the aspiring man oftenest regrets the native element he has left ; and, with the failure of his unnatural effort, drops back, content, to obscurity." JEREMY TAYLOR. " MY daughter!" said the count Spinola. The lady so addressed threw off a slight mantle and turned her fair features inquiringly to her father. Heed less of the attention he had arrested, the abstracted count paced up and down the marble pavement of his hall, and when, a moment after, Francesca came to him for his good-night kiss, he imprinted it silently on her forehead, and stepped out on the balcony to pursue, under the aiding light of the stars, thoughts that were more imperative than sleep. There had been a fete of great splendor in the ducal gardens of the Boboli, and Francesca Spinola had | shown there, as usual, the most radiant and worship ped daughter of the nobilita of Florence. The mel- ancholy duke himself (this was in the days of his first marriage) had seemed even gay in presenting her with flowers" which he had gathered at her side, with the dew on them (in an alley glittering with the diamonds on noble bosoms, and dewdrops on roses that would slum ber, though it was the birth-night of a princess), and PALETTO S BRIDE. 119 marked as was the royal attention to the envied beauty, it was more easily forgiven her than her usual tri umphs for it cost no one a lover. True to his con jugal vows, the sad- featured monarch paid to beauty only the homage exacted alike by every most admira ble work of nature. The grand-duke Leopold had not been the only ad mirer whose attentions to Francesca Spinola had been remarked. A stranger, dressed with a magnificence that seemed more fitted for a masquerade than a court- ball, and yet of a mien that promised danger to the too inquisitive, had entered alone, and, marking out the daughter of the haughty count from the first, had procured an introduction, no one knew how, and sought every opportunity which the intervals of the dance afforded, to place himself at her side. Occu pied with the courtly devoirs of his rank, the count was, for a while, unaware of what struck almost every one else, and it was only when the stranger s name was inquired of him by the duke, that his dark and jealous eye fell upon a face whose language of kindling and undisguised admiration a child would have inter preted aright. It was one of those faces that are of no degree that may belong to a barbaric king, or to a Greek slave that no refinement would improve, and no servile habits degrade; faces which lake their changes from an indomitable and powerful soul, and are beyond the trifling impression of the common usages of life. Spinola was offended with the daring and passionate freedom of the stranger s gaze upon his daughter; but he hesitated to interrupt their conver sation too rudely. He stayed to exchange a compli ment with some fair obstruction in his way across the crowded saloon, and, in the next moment, Francesca stood alone. "Who left you this moment, my Francesca?" asked the count, with affected unconcern. "I think, a Venetian," she answered. "And his name?" " I know not, my father !" The count s face flashed. Who presented him to my darling?" he asked, again forcing himself to composure. Francesca colored ; and, with downcast eyes, an swered : "No one, my father! He seemed to know me, and I thought I might have forgotten him." Spinola turned on his heel, and, after a few vain in quiries, and as vain a search for the stranger, ordered his attendants, and drove silently home. It was close upon the gray of the morning, and the count still leaned over the stone-railing of his balcony. Francesca had been gone an hour to her chamber. A guitar-string sounded from the street below, and, a { moment after, a manly and mellow voice broke into a | Venetian barcarole, and sang with a skill and tender- | ness which a vestal could scarce have listenedto un moved. Spinola stepped back and laid his hand upon his sword ; but, changing his thought, he took a lamp from the wall within, and crept noiselessly to his daughter s chamber. She lay within her silken cur tains, with her hands crossed on her bosom, and from her parted lips came the low breath of innocent and untroubled sleep. Reassured, the count closed her window and extinguished his lamp; and, when the guitar was no longer heard echoing from the old palace walls, and the rich voice of the serenader had died away with his footsteps, the lord of the Palazzo Spinola betook himself to sleep with a heart somewhat relieved of its burden. On the following day, the count pleaded the early- coming heats of summer; and, with slight prepara tion, left Florence for his summer-palace in the Ap ennines. When Francesca joined him cheerfully, and , even gayly, in his sudden plan, he threw aside the I jealous fears that had haunted his breast, and forgot | the stranger and his barcarole. The old trees of his maison de plaisance were heavy with the leaves of the Italian May; the statues stood cool in the shade; the mountain rivulets forgot their birth in the rocky brooks, and ran over channels of marble, and played up through cactus-leaves and sea-shells, and nereids horns, all carved by the contemporaries of Donatello. " And here," thought the proud noble, "I am a Vecart of the designs of adventurers, and the temptations and dangers of gayety, and the child of my hopes will re fresh her beauty and her innocence, under the watchful eye, ever present, of my love. Francesca Spinola was one of those Italian natures of which it is difficult for the inhabitants of other climes to conceive. She had no feelings. She had passions. She could love but it sprang in an instant to its fullest power and maidenly reserve and hesita tion were incompatible with its existence. She had listened, unmoved, to all the adulation of the duke s court, and had been amused with the devotion of all around her but never touched. The voice of the stranger at the fete of the Boboli the daring words he had addressed to her had arrested her attention ; and it needed scarce the hour which flew like a mo ment at his side to send a new sensation, like a tem pest, through her heart. She reasoned upon nothing asked nothing ; but, while she gave up her soul wholly to a passion hitherto unfelt, the deep dissimula tion which seems a natural part of the love of that burning clime, prompted her, by an unquestioned im pulse, to conceal it entirely from her father. She had counterfeited sleep when nearly surprised in listening to the barcarole, and she had little need to counterfeit joy at her departure for the mountains. The long valley of the Arno lay marked out upon the landscape by a wreath of vapor, stealing up as if enamored of the fading color of the clouds; and far away, like a silver bar on the rim of the horizon, shone the long line of the Mediterranean. The mountain sides lay bathed in azure; and, echoing from the nearest, came the vesper-bells of Vallombrosa. Peace and purity were stamped upon the hour. " My child," said the softened count, drawing Fran cesca to his bosom, as they stood looking off upon this scene from the flowery terrace beneath the por tico; "does my child love me?" Francesca placed her hands upon his shoulders and kissed him for reply. "I feel impelled," he continued, "to talk to you while this beautiful hour is around us, of an affection that resembles it." " Resembles the sunset, my father ?" " Yes ! Shall I tell you how ? By affecting with its soft influence every object under the bend of the sky ! My Francesca ! there are parents who love their children, and love them well, and yet find feel ings for other attachments, and devotion for every other interest in life. Not so mine ! My love for my child is a whole existence poured into hers. Look at me, Francesca! I am not old. I am capa ble, perhaps, of other love than a parent s. There are among the young and beautiful who have looked on me with favoring eyes. My blood runs warm yet, and my step is as full of manhood perhaps my heart as prompt to be gay as ever. I mean to say that I am not too old for a lover. Does my daughter think so ?" " I have been long vain of your beauty, dear fa ther," said Francesca, threading her hand in his dark curls. "There are other things that might share your empire in my heart politics, play, the arts a hun dred passions which possess themselves of men whose fortune or position gives them means and leisure. Now listen, my daughter! You have supplanted all these! You have filled my heart with yourself. 120 PALETTO S BRIDE. I am tempted to love my heart is my daughter s. I am asked to play my thoughts are with my child. I have neither time for politics, nor attention for the arts my being breathes through my child. I am incapable of all else. Do you hear me, Francesca?" " I do, dear father !" "Then, one moment more ! I can not conceal my thoughts from you, and you will pardon love like mine for ungrounded fears. I liked not the stranger at the duke s palace." Francesca stole a quick look at her father, and, with the rapidity of light, her dark eye resumed its tranquillity. " I say I liked him not ! No one knew him ! He is gone, no one knows whither! I trust he will never be seen more in Florence. But I will not disguise from you that I thought you pleased with him!" "Father!" " Forgive me if I wrong you but, without pursu ing the subject, let your father implore you, on his knees, for the confidence of your heart. Will you tell me your thoughts, Francesca ? Will you love me with but the thousandth part of my adoration, my devotion, for my child?" " Father ! I will !" The count rose from the knee on which he had fallen, gave his daughter a long embrace, and led her in. And that night she fled over the Tuscan border, into neighboring Romagna, and, with the stranger at her side, sped away, under the cover of night, toward the shores of the Brenta. Like a city of secrets, sleeps silent Venice. Her sea-washed foundations are buried under the smooth glass of the tide. Her palace-entrances are dark cav- ! erns, impenetrable to the eye. Her veiled dames are unseen in their floating chambers, as they go from street to street ; and mysteriously and silently glide to and fro those swift gondolas, black as night, yet carry ing sadness and mirth, innocence and guilt, alike swiftly, mysteriously, and silently. Water, that be trays no footstep, and covers all with the same mantle of light, fills her streets. Silence, that is the seal of secrecy, reigns day and night over her thousand palaces. For an hour the smooth mirror of the broad canal that sweeps under the Rialto, had not been divided by the steel prow of a gondola. Francesca Spinola stood at the window of a chamber in a palace of gorgeous magnificence, watching that still water for the coming of her husband. The silver lines of the moon stole back imperceptibly, as her full orb sailed up the heavens, and the turrets of the old architecture of Venice, drawn clearly on the unruffled bosom of the canal, seemed retiring before a consuming sheet of silver. The silence seemed painful. To the ear of the beautiful Florentine, the want of the sound of a footstep, of the echo of some distant wheel, the utter death of all sound common to even the stillest hour of a paved city, seemed oppressive and awful. Behind her burned lamps of alabaster, and perfumes filled the chamber, and on a cushion of costly velvet lay a mean and unornamented guitar. Its presence in so costly a palace was a secret yet withheld. She wished to touch its strings, if only to disperse the horror of si lence. But she raised her fingers, and again, without touching it, leaned out and watched the dark arch of the Rialto. A gondola, with a single oar, sped swiftly from its black shadow. It could not be Paletto. He had gone with his two faithful servants to St. Mark s. The oar ceased the bark headed in the water splashed on the marble stair and the gondolier step ped on shore. Ah, who but Paletto had such a form as stood there in the moonlight ? " Are we to be married again," said Francesca, as her husband entered the chamber, " that you have once more disguised yourself as a fisherman ?" Paletto turned from the light, and took up the mysterious guitar. "It is no night to be in-doors, my Francesca! Come with me to the lagoon, and I will tell you the story of this despised instrument. Will you come ?" he pursued, as she stood looking at him in wonder at his strange dress and disturbed look. " Will you come, my wife?" " But you have returned without your gondoliers!" she said, advancing a step to take his hand. "I have rowed a gondola ere now," he answered ; and, without further explanation, he led her down the lofty staircase, and seating her in the stern of the bark which he had brought with him, stepped upon the platform, and, with masterly skill and power, drove it like a shadow under the Rialto. He who has watched the horn of a quarter-moon gliding past the towers, pinnacles and palaces of the drifting clouds, and in his youthful and restless brain, fancied such must be the smooth delight and chang ing vision of a traveller in strange lands one who has thus dreamed in his boyhood will scarce shoot though Venice for the first time in a gondola, without a sense of familiarity with the scene and motion. The architecture of the clouds is again drifting past, and himself seems borne onward by the silver shallop of the moon. Francesca sat on the low cushion of the gondola, watching and wondering. How should her luxurious Paletto have acquired the exquisite skill with which he drove the noiseless boat like a lance-fly over the water. Another gondola approached or was left be hind, the corner of a palace was to be rounded, or the black arch of a bridge to be shot under, and the peculiar warning-cry of the gondoliers, giving notice of their unheard approach, fell from his lips so me chanically, that the hireling oarsmen of the city, mar velling at his speed, but never doubting that it was a comrade of the Piazza, added the "fratdlo mio" to their passing salutation. She saw by every broad beam of light, which, between the palaces, came down across them, a brow clouded and a mind far from the oar he turned so skilfully. She looked at the gondola in which she sat. It was old and mean. In the prow lay a fisher s net, and the shabby guitar, thrown upon it, seemed now, at least, not out of place. She looked up at Paletto once more, and, in his bare throat and bosom, his loose cap and neglected hair, she could with difficulty recognise the haughty stranger of the Boboli. She spoke to him. It was necessary to break the low-born spell that seemed closing around her. Paletto started at her voice, and suspending his oar, while the gondola still kept way as if with its own irresistible volition, he passed his hand over his eyes, and seemed waking from some painful dream. The gondola was now far out in the lagoon. Around them floated an almost impalpable vapor, just making the moonlight visible, and the soft click of the water beneath the rising and dropping prow was the only sound between them and the cloudless heaven. In that silence Paletto strung his guitar and sang to his bride with a strange energy. She listened and played with his tangled "locks, but there seemed a spell upon her tongue when she would ask the meaning of this mystery. "Francesca!" he said at last, raising his head from her lap. "What says my fisherman?" she replied, holding up his rough cap with a smile. Paletto started, but recovering his composure, in stantly took the cap from her jewelled fingers and threw it carelessly upon his head. " Francesca ! who is your husband ?" " Paletto ?" PALETTO S BRIDE. 121 " And who is Paletto ?" i " I would have asked sometimes, but your kisses have interrupted me. Yet I know enough." " What know you?" " That he is a rich and noble seignior of Venice !" " Do I look one to-night ?" " Nay for a masquerade, I have never seen a better ! Where learned you to look so like a fisher man and row so like a gondolier ?" Paletto frowned. " Francesca !" said he folding his arms across his bosom, " I am the son of a fisherman, and I was bred to row the gondola beneath you !" The sternness of his tone checked the smile upon her beautiful lip, and when she spoke it was with a look almost as stern as his own. "You mock me too gravely, Paletto ! But come! I will question you in your own humor. Who educa ted the fisherman s son?" " The fisherman." " And his palace and his wealth whence came they, Signor Pescatore ?" The scornful smile of incredulity with which this question was asked, speedily fled from her lip as Pal etto answered it. " Listen ! Three months since I had never known other condition than a fisherman of the lagoon, nor worn other dress than this in which you see me. The first property I ever possessed beyond my day s earn ings, was this gondola. It was my father s, Giannotto the fisherman. When it became mine by his death, I suddenly wearied of my tame life, sold boat and nets, and with thoughts which you can not understand, but which have brought you here, took my way to the Piazza. A night of chance, begun with the whole of my inheritance staked upon a throw, left me mas ter of wealth I had never dreamed of. I became a gay signore. It seemed to me that my soul had gone out of me, and a new spirit, demoniac if you will, had taken possession. I no longer recognised myself. I passed for an equal with the best-born, my language altered, my gait, my humor. One strong feeling alone predominated an insane hatred to the rank in which you were born, Francesca ! It was strange, too, that I tried to ape its manners. I bought the palace you have just left, and filled it with costly luxuries. And then there grew upon me the desire to humiliate that rank to pluck down to myself some one of its proud and cherished daughters such as you !" Francesca muttered something between her teeth, and folded her small arms over her bosom. Paletto went on. "I crossed to Florence with this sole intention. I i Unknown and uninvited, I entered the palace at the \- fete of the Boboli, and looked around for a victim. !: You were the proudest and most beautiful. I chose 1 1 you and you are here." Paletto looked at her with a smile, and never sun- I beam was more unmixed with shadow than the smile i which answered it on the lips of Spinola s daughter. M My Paletto !" she said, " you have the soul of a i noble, and the look of one, and I am your bride. Let ! us return to the palace !" " I have no palace but this !" he said, striking his hand like a bar of iron upon the side of the gondola. " You have not heard out my tale." Francesca sat with a face unmoved as marble. "This night, at play, I lost all. My servants are dismissed, my palace belongs to another, and with this bark which I had repurchased, I am once more Paletto the fisherman!" A slight heave of the bosom of the fair Florentine was her only response to this astounding announce ment. Her eyes turned slowly from the face of the fisherman, and fixing apparently on some point far out in the Adriatic, she sat silent, motionless, and cold. " I am a man, Francesca!" said Paletto after a pause which, in the utter stillness of the lagoon around them, seemed like a suspension of the breathing of nature, and "I have not gone through this insane dream with out some turning aside of the heart. Spite of my self, I loved you, and I could not dishonor you. We are married, Francesca !" The small dark brows of the Florentine lowered till the silken lashes they overhung seemed starting from beneath her forehead. Her eyes flashed fire below. " Bene . " said Paletto, rising to his feet ; " one word more while we have silence around us and are alone. You are free to leave me, and I will so far re pair the wrong I have done you, as to point out the way. It will" be daylight in an hour. Fly to the governor s palace, announce your birth, declare that you were forced from your father by brigands, and claim his protection. The world will believe you, and the consequences to myself I will suffer in silence." With a sudden, convulsive motion, Francesca thrust out her arm, and pointed a single finger toward Venice. Paletto bent to his oar, and quivering in every seam beneath its blade, the gondola sped on his way. The steel prow struck fire on the granite steps of the Piazza, the superb daughter of Spinola stepped over the trembling side, and with a half-wave of her hand, strode past the Lion of St. Mark, and approached the sentinel at the palace-gate. And as her figure was lost among the arabesque columns shaded from the moon, Paletto s lonely gondola shot once more silently and slowly from the shore. CHAPTER II. THE smooth, flat pavement of the Borg ognisanti had been covered since morning with earth, and the windows and balconies on either side were flaunting with draperies of the most gorgeous colors. The riderless horse-races, which conclude the carnival in Florence, were to be honored by the presence of the court. At the far extremity of the street, close by the gate of the Cascine, an open veranda, painted in fresco, stood glittering with the preparations for the royal party, and near it the costlier hangings of here and there a window or balustrade, showed the embroidered crests of the different nobles of Tuscany. It was the people s place and hour, and beneath the damask and cloth of gold, the rough stone windows were worn smooth by the touch of peasant hands, and the smutched occu pants, looking down from the balconies above, upon the usupers of their week-day habitations, formed, to the stranger s eye, not the least interesting feature of the scene. As evening approached, the balconies began to show their burden of rank and beauty, and the street below filled with the press of the gay contadini. The ducal cortege, in open carriages, drove down the length of the course to their veranda at the gate, but no other vehicle was permitted to enter the ser ried crowd; and, on foot like the peasant-girl, the noble s daughter followed the servants of her house, who slowly opened for her a passage to the balcony she sought. The sun-light began to grow golden. The convent-bell across the Arno rang the first peal of vespers, and the horses were led in. It was a puzzle to any but an Italian how that race was to be run. The entire population of Florence was crowded into a single narrow street men, women, and children, struggling only for a foothold. The sig nal was about to be given for the start, yet no attempt was made to clear a passage. Twenty high-spirited horses fretted behind the rope, each with a dozen spurs hung to his surcingales, which, at the least mo- 122 PALETTO S BRIDE. tion, must drive him onward like the steed of Mazep- pa. Gay ribands were braided in their manes, and the bets ran high. All sounded and looked merry, yet it would seem as if the loosing of the start-rope must be like the letting in of destruction upon the crowd. In a projecting gallery of a house on the side next the Arno, was a p arty that attracted attention, some what from their rank and splendid attire, but more from the remarkable beauty of a female, who seemed their star and idol. She was something above the middle height of the women of Italy, and of the style of face seen in the famous Judith of the Pitti dark, and of melancholy so unfathomable as almost to af fray the beholder. She looked a brooding prophet ess ; yet through the sad expression of her features there was a gleam of fierceness, thnt to the more criti cal eye betrayed a more earthly gleam of human pas sion and suffering. As if to belie the maturity of years of which such an expression should be the work, an ungloved hand and arm of almost childlike softness and roundness lay on the drapery of the railed gallery ; and stealing from that to her just-perfected form, the gazer made a new judgment of her years, while he wondered whal strange fires had forced outward the riper lineaments of her character. The count Fazelli, the husband of this fair dame, stood within reach of her hand, for it was pressed on his arm with no gentle touch, yet his face was turned from her. He was a slight youth, little older, appa rently, than herself, of an effeminate and yet wilful cast of countenance, and would have been pronounced by women (what a man would scarce allow him to be) eminently handsome. Effeminate coxcomb as he was, he had power over the stronger nature beside him, and of such stuff, in courts and cities, are made sometimes the heroes whose success makes worthier men almost forswear the worship due to women. There were two other persons in the balconies of the Corso, who were actors in the drama of which this was a scene. The first was the prima donna of the Cocomero, to whose rather mature charms the capri cious Fazelli had been for a month paying a too open homage ; and the second was a captain in the duke s guard, whose personal daring in the extermination of I a troop of brigands, had won for him some celebrity and his present commission. What thread of sympa- j thy rested between so humble an individual and the haughty countess Fazelli, will be shown in the sequel. Enough for the present, that, as he stood leaning against the pillar of an opposite gallery, looking care lessly on the preparations for the course, that proud dame saw and remembered him. A blast from a bugle drew all eyes to the starting- post, and in another minute the rope was dropped, and the fiery horses loosed upon their career. Right into the crowd, as if the bodies of the good citizens of Florence were made of air, sprang the goaded troop, and the impossible thing was done, for the suffocating throngs divided like waves before the prow, and united again as scathless and as soon. The spurs played merrily upon the flanks of the affrighted animals, and in an instant they had swept through the Borg ogni- santi, and disappeared into the narrow lane leading to the Trinita. It was more a scramble than a race, yet there must be a winner, and all eyes were now occu pied in gazing after the first glimpse of his ribands as he was led back in triumph. Uncompelled by danger, the suffocating crowd made way with more difficulty for the one winning horse than they had done for the score that had contended ; with him. Yet, champing the bit, and tossing his | ribands into the air, he came slowly back, and after passing in front of the royal veranda, where a small ; flag was thrown down to be set into the rosette of his j bridle, he returned a few steps, and was checked by the groom under the balcony of the prima donna. A ! moment after, the winning flag was waving from the rails above, and as the sign that she was the owner of the victorious horse was seen by the people, a shout arose which thrilled the veins of the fair singer more than all the plaudits of the Cocomero. It is thought to be pleasant to succeed in that for which we have most struggled that for which our ambition and our efforts are known to the world to be eminent, in short, in our metier, our vocation. I am inclined to think it natural to most men, however, and to all pos sessors of genius, to undervalue that for which the world is most willing to praise them, and to delight more in excelling in that which seems foreign to their usual pursuits, even if it be a trifle. It is delightful to disappoint the world by success in anything. Detrac tion, that follows genius to the grave, sometimes ad mits its triumph, but never without the " back-water" that it could do *no more. The fine actress had won a shout from assembled Florence, yet off the scene. She laid one hand upon her heart, and the other, in the rash exultation of the moment, ventured to wave a kiss of gratitude to the count Fazelli. As that favored signer crossed to offer his congratu lations, his place beside the countess was filled by a young noble, who gave her the explanatory informa tion that the horse was Fazelli s gift. Calmly, almost without a sign of interest or emotion, she turned her eyes upon the opposite balcony. A less searching and nterested glance would have discovered, that if the young count had hitherto shared the favor of the ad mired singer with his rivals, he had no rival now. There was in the demeanor of both an undisguised tenderness that the young countess had little need to watch long, and retiring from the balcony, she accept ed the attendance of her communicative companion, and was soon whirling in her chariot over the Ponte 3t. Angelo, on her way to the princely palace that would soon cease to call her its mistress. Like square ingots of silver, the moonlight came through the battlements of the royal abode of the Medici. It was an hour before day. The heavy heel of the sentry was the only sound near the walls of the Pitti, save, when he passed to turn, the ripple of the Arno beneath the arches of the jeweller s bridge broke "aintly on the ear. The captain of the guard had strolled from the deep shadow of the palace into the open moonlight, and leaned against a small stone shrine of the Virgin set into the opposite wall, watching mu singly the companionable and thought-stirring em- leress of the night. " Paletto !" suddenly uttered a voice near him. The guardsman started, but instantly recovered his position, and stood looking over his epaulet at the ntruder, with folded arms. " Paletto !" she said again, in a lower and more ap- )ealing tone " will you listen to me ?" " Say on, Countess Fazelli !" " Countess Fazelli no longer, but Paletto s wife !" " Ha ! ha !" laughed the guardsman bitterly, " that tory is old, for so false a one." " Scorn me not ! I am changed." The dark eyes of Francesca Cappone lifted up, moist and full, into he moonlight, and fixing them steadfastly on the sol dier s, she seemed to demand that he should read her soul in them. For an instant, as he did so, a troubled emotion was visible in his own features, but a new bought seemed to succeed the feeling, and turning away with a cold gesture, he said, " I knew you false, jut till now I thought you pure. Tempt me not to lespise as well as hate you !" I have deserved much atyourhand,"she answered, with a deeper tone, " but not this. You are my hus- >and, Paletto !" " One of them !" he replied, with a sneer. Francesca clasped her hands in agony. " I have :ome to you," she said, trusting the generous nature VIOLANTA CESARINI. 123 which I have proved so well. I can not live unloved. I deserted you, for I was ignorant of myself. I have tried splendor and the love of my own rank, but one is hollow and the last is selfish. Oh, Paletto ! what love is generous like yours?" The guardsman s bosom heaved, but he did not turn to her. She laid her hand upon his arm : " I have come to implore you to take me back, Paletto. False as I was to you, you have been true to me. I would be your wife again. I would share your poverty, if you were once more a fisherman on the lagoon. Are you inexorable, Paletto ?" Her hand stole up to his shoulder : she crept closer to him, and buried her head, unrepelled, in his bosom. Paletto laid his hand upon the mass of raven hair whose touch had once been to him so familiar, and while the moon drew their shadows as one on the shrine of the Virgin, the vows of early love were re peated with a fervor unknown hitherto to the lips of Cappone s daughter, and Paletto replied, not like a courtly noble, but like that which was more eloquent his own love-prompted and fiery spirit. The next day there was a brief but fierce rencontre between Count Fazelli and the guardsman Paletto, at the door of the church of Santa Trinita. Francesca had gone openly with her husband to vespers, attend ed by a monk. When attacked by the young count as the daring abducer of his wife, he had placed her under that monk s protection till the quarrel should be over, and, with the same holy man to plead his cause, he boldly claimed his wife at the duke s hands, and bore her triumphantly from Florence. I heard this story in Venice. The gondolier Pa letto, they say, still rows his boat on the lagoon : and sometimes his wife is with him, and sometimes a daugh ter, whose exquisite beauty, though she is still a child, is the wonder of the Rialto as he passes under. I never chanced to see him, but many a stranger has hired the best oar of the Piazza, to pull out toward the Adriatic in the hope of finding Paletto s boat and get ting a glimpse of his proud and still most beautiful wife a wife, it is said, than whom a happier or more contented one with her lot lives not in the "city of the sea." VIOLANTA CESARINI, CHAPTER I. " When every feather sticks in its own wing, Lord Timon will be left a naked gull." IT was an eve fit for an angel s birthnight (and we know angels are born in this loving world), and while the moon, as if shining only for artists eyes, drew the outlines of palace and chapel, stern turret and sere naded belvidere, with her silver pencil on the street, two grave seniors, guardians in their own veins of the blood of two lofty names known long to Roman story, leaned together over a balcony of fretted stone, jutting out upon the Corso, and affianced a fair and noble maid of seventeen summers to a gentleman whose character you shall learn, if we come safe to the se quel. " The cardinal has offered me a thousand scudi for my Giorgione, said the old count Malaspina, at last, changing his attitude and the subject at the same time. " Anima diporco /" exclaimed the other, " what stirs the curtain ? The wind is changing, Malaspina. Let us in ! So, he offers but a thousand ! I shall feel my rheumatism to-morrow with this change. .B a thou sand ! ha ! ha ! Let us in, let us in !" " Let us out, say I !" murmured two lips that were never made of cherries, though a bird would have pecked at them; and stealing from behind the curtain, whose agitation had persuaded her father that the wind was rising, Violanta Cesarini, countess in her own right, and beautiful by Heaven s rare grace, stepped forth into the moonlight. She drew a long breath as she looked down into the Corso. The carriages were creeping up and down at a foot-pace, and the luxurious dames, thrown back on their soft cushions, nodded to the passers-by, as they recognised friends and acquaintances where the moon- II light broke through; crowds of slow promenaders loi tered indolently on, now turning to look at the berry- brown back of a contadini, with her stride like a tra gedy-queen, and her eyes like wells of jet, and now leaning against a palace wall, while a wandering harp- girl sung better for a baiocco than noble ladies for the praise of a cardinal; at one corner stood an artist with his tablet, catching some chance effect perhaps in the drapery of a marble saint, perhaps in the softer dra pery of a sinner; the cafes, far up and dawn, looked like festas out of doors, with their groups of gayly- dressed idlers, eating sherbets and buying flowers ; a gray friar passed now with his low-toned benedicite ; and again a black cowl with a face that reddened the very moonbeam that peeped under; hunchbacks con tended testily for the wall, and tall fellows (by their long hair and fine symmetry, professed models for sculptors and painters) yielded to them with a gibe. And this is Rome when the moon shines well, and on this care-cheating scene looked down the countess Violanta, with her heart as full of perplexity as her silk boddice-lace would bear without breaking. I dare say you did not observe, if you were in Rome that night, and strolling, as you would have been in the Corso (this was three years ago last May, and if you were in the habit of reading the Diario di Roma, the story will not be new to you) ; you did not observe, I am sure, that a thread ran across from the balcony I speak of, in the Palazzo Cesarim, to a high window in an old palace opposite, inhabited, as are many palaces in Rome, by a decayed family and several ar tists. On the two sides of this thread, pressed, while she mused, the slight fingers of Violanta Cesarini; and, as if it descended from the stars at every pull which the light May-breeze gave it in passing, she turned her soft blue eyes upward, and her face grew radiant with hope not such as is fed with star-gazing ! Like a white dove shooting with slant wings down ward a folded slip of paper flew across on this invisible thread, and, by heaven s unflickering lamp, Violanta read some characters traced with a rough crayon, but in most sweet Italian. A look upward, and a nod, as if she were answering the stars that peeped over her, and the fair form had gone with its snowy robes from the balcony, and across the high window from which the messenger had come, dropped the thick and im penetrable folds of the gray curtain of an artist. It was a large upper room, such as is found in the vast houses of the decayed nobility of Rome, and of its two windows one was roughly boarded up to ex clude the light, while a coarse gray cloth did nearly the same service at the other, shutting out all but an artist s modicum of day. The walls of rough plaster were covered with grotesque drawings, done apparently with bits of coal, varied here and there with scraps of unframed canvass, nailed carelessly up, and covered with the study of some head, by a famous master. A | large table on one side of the room was burdened with a confused heap of brushes, paint-bags, and discolored cloths, surmounted with a clean palette ; and not far ! off stood an easel, covered with thumb-marks of all 124 VIOLANTA CESARINI. dyes, and supporting a new canvass, on which was outlined the figure of a nymph, with the head finished in a style that would have stirred the warm blood of Raphael himself with emulous admiration. A low flock bed, and a chair without a bottom, but with a large cloak hung over its back, a pair of foils and a rapier, completed so much of the furniture of the room as belonged to a gay student of Corregio s art, who wrote himself Biondo Amieri. By the light of the same antique lamp, hung on a rusty nail against the wall, you might see a very good effect on the face of an unfinished group in marble, of which the model, in plaster, stood a little behind, representing a youth with a dagger at his heart, ar rested in the act of self-murder by a female whose softened resemblance to him proclaimed her at the first glance his sister. A mallet, chisels, and other im plements used in sculpture, lay on the rough base of the unfinished group, and half-disclosed, half-con cealed, by a screen covered with prints by some curi ous female hand, stood a bed with white curtains, and an oratory of carved oak at its head, supporting a clasped missal. A chair or two, whose seats of worked satin had figured one day in more luxurious neighbor hood, a table covered with a few books and several drawings from the antique, and a carefully-locked escritoire, served, with other appearances, to distin guish this side of the room as belonging to a separate occupant, of gentler taste or nurture. While the adventurous Violanta is preparing her self to take advantage of the information received by her secret telegraph, I shall have time, dear reader, to put you up to a little of the family history of the Cesarini, necessary no less to a proper understanding of the story, than to the heroine s character for dis cretion. On the latter point, I would suggest to you, you may as well suspend your opinion. It is well known to all the gossips in Rome, that, for four successive generations, the marquises of Cesarini have obtained dispensations of the pope for marrying beautiful peasant-girls from the neighbor hood of their castle, in Romagna. The considerable sums paid for these dispensations, reconciled the holy see to such an unprecedented introduction of vulgar blood into the veins of the nobility, and the remarkable female beauty of the race (heightened by the addition of nature s aristocracy to its own), contributed to main tain good will at a court, devoted above all others to the cultivation of the fine arts, of which woman is the Eidolon and the soul. The last marquis, educated like his fathers, in their wild domain among the moun tains, selected, like them, the fairest wild-flower that sprung at his feet, and after the birth of one son, ap plied for the tardy dispensation. From some un known cause (possibly a diminished bribe, as the mar quis was less lavish in his disposition than his prede cessors), the pope sanctioned the marriage, but re fused to legitimatize the son, unless the next born should be a daughter. The marchioness soon after retired (from mortification it is supposed) to her home in the mountains, and after two years of close seclu sion, returned to Rome, bringing with her an infant daughter, then three months of age, destined to be the heroine of our story. No other child appearing, the young Cesarini was legitimatized, and with his infant sister passed most of his youth at Rome. Some three or four years before the time when our tale com mences, this youth, who had betrayed always, a coarse and brutal temper, administered his stiletto to a gen tleman on the Corso, and flying from Rome, became a brigand in the Abruzzi. His violence and atrocity in this congenial life, soon put him beyond hope of pardon, and on his outlawry by the pope, Violanta be came the heiress of the estates of Cesarini. The marchioness had died when Violanta was be tween seven and eight years of age, leaving her, by a death-bed injunction, in the charge of her own con stant attendant, a faithful servant from Romagno, sup posed to be distant kinswoman to her mistress. With this tried dependant, the young countess was permit ted to go where she pleased, at all hours when not at tended by her masters, and seeing her tractable and lovely, the old marquis, whose pride in the beauty of his family was the passion next to love of money in his heart, gave himself little trouble, and thought him self consoled for the loss of his son in the growing at tractions and filial virtues of his daughter. On a bright morning in early spring, six years before the date of our tale, the young countess and her at tendant were gathering wild flowers near the fountain of Egeria (of all spots of earth, that on which the wild flowers are most profuse and sweetest), when a de formed youth, who seemed to be no stranger to Donna Bettina, addressed Violanta in a tone of voice so mu sical, and with a look so kindly and winning, that the frank child took his hand, and led him off in search of cardinals and blue-bells, with the familiarity of an es tablished playfellow. After this day, the little countess never came home pleased from a morning drive and ramble in which she had not seen her friend Signor Giulio; and the romantic baths of Caracalla, and the many delicious haunts among the ruins about Rome, had borne witness to the growth of a friendship, all fondness and impulse on the part of Violanta, all ten derness and delicacy on that of the deformed youth. By what wonderful instinct they happened always to meet, the delighted child never found time or thought to inquire. Two or three years passed on thus, and the old marquis had grown to listen with amused familiarity to his daughter s prattle about the deformed youth, and no incident had varied the pleasant tenor of their lives and rambles, except that, Giulio once falling ill, Bettina had taken the young countess to his home, where she discovered that, young as he was, he made some progress in moulding in clay, and was destined for a sculptor. This visit to the apartment of an obscure youth, however, the marquis had seen fit to object to ; and though, at his daughter s request, he sent the young sculptor an order for his first statue, he per emptorily forbade all further intercourse between him and Violanta. In the paroxysm of her grief at the j first disgrace she had ever fallen into with her master, I Bettina disclosed to her young mistress, by way of justification, a secret she had been bound by the most solemn oaths to conceal, and of which she now was the sole living depository that this deformed youth was born in the castle of the Cesarini, in Ro magna, of no less obscure parentage than the castle s lord and lady, and being the first child after the dis pensation of marriage, and a son, he was consequently the rightful heir to the marquisate and estates of Cesa rini ; and the elder son, by the terms of that dispen sation, was illegitimate. This was astounding intelligence to Violanti, who, nevertheless, child as she was, felt its truth in the yearnings of her heart to Giulio ; but it was with no little pains and difficulty on Bettina s part, that she was persuaded to preserve the secret from her father. The Romagnese knew her master s weakness ; and as the birth of the child had occurred during his long ab sence from the castle, and the marchioness, proud of her eldest-born, had determined from the first that he alone should enjoy the name and honors of his father, it was not very probable that upon the simple word of a domestic, he would believe a deformed hunchback to be his son and heir. The intermediate history of Giulio, Bettina knew little about, simply informing her mistress, that dis gusted with his deformity, the unnatural mother had sent him to nurse in a far-off village of Romagna, and that the interest of a small sum which the marquis VIOLANTA CESARINI. 125 supposed had been expended on masses for the souls of his ancestors, was still paid to his foster-parents for his use. From the time of this disclosure, Violanta s life had beeu but too happy. Feeling justified in contriving secret interviews with her brother; and possessing the efficient connivance of Bettiaa, who grew, like her self, almost to worship the pure-minded and the gentle Giulio. her heart and her time were blissfully crowded with interest. So far, the love that had welled from her heart had been all joyous and untroubled. It was during the absence of the marquis and his daughter from Rome, and in an unhealthy season, that Giulio, always delicnte in health and liable to ex cessive fils of depression, had fallen ill in his solitary room, and, but for the friendly care of a young artist whom he had long known, must have died of want and neglect. As he began to recover, he accepted the offer of Amieri, his friend, to share with him a lodging in the more elevated air of the Corso, and, the more readily, that this room chanced to overlook the palace of Cesarina. Here Violanta found him on her return, and though displeased that he was no longer alone, she still continued, when Amieri was absent, to see him sometimes in his room, and their old haunts without the walls were frequented as often as his health and strength would permit. A chance meeting of Violanta and Amieri in his own studio, however, made it necessary that he should be admitted to their secret, and the consequence of that interview, and others which Violanta found it impossible to avoid, was a passion in the heart of the enthusiastic painter, which consumed, as it well might, every faculty of his soul. We are thus brought to an eveninsr of balmy May, when Giulio fount! himself alone. Biondo had been painting all day on the face of his nymph, endeavoring in vain to give it any other features than those of the lady of his intense worship, and having gone out to ramble for fresh air and relaxation in the Corso. Giulio thought he might venture to throw across his ball of thread and send a missive to his sister, promisin <T her an uninterrupted hour of his society. With these preliminaries, our story will now run smoothly on. CHAPTER II. " COME in, carissima /" said the low, silver-toned voice of the deformed sculptor, as a female figure, in the hood and cloak of an old woman, crossed the threshold of his chamber. " Dear Giulio !" And she lermed slightly over the diminutive form of her brother, and first kissing his pale forehead, while she unfastened the clasp of Bettina s cloak of black silk, threw her arms about him as the disguise fell off, and multiplied, between her caresses, the endearing terms in which the lan guage of that soft clime is so prodigal. They sat down at the foot of his group in marble, and each told the little history of the hours they had spent apart. They grew alike as they conversed ; for theirs was that resemblance of the soul, to which the features answer only when the soul is breathing through. Unless seen together, and not only together, but gazing on each other in complete abandonment of heart, the friends that knew .hem best would have aid they were unlike. Yet Amieri s nymph on the canvass was like both, for Amieri drew from the picture burnt on his own heart by love, and the soulof Violanta lay breathing beneath every lineament. "You have not touched the marble to-day!" said the countess, taking the lamp from its nail, and shed ding the light aslant on the back of the statue. " No ! I have lifted the hammer twenty times to break it in pieces." " Ah ! dearest Ginlio ! talk not thus ! Think it is rny image you would destroy !" " If it were, and truly done, I would sooner strike the blessed crucifix. But, Violanta ! there ia a link wanting in this deformed frame of mine ! The sense of beauty, or the power to body it forth, wants room in me. I feel it I feel it !" Violanta ran to him and pressed the long curls that fell over his pallid temples to her bosom. There was a tone of conviction in his voice that she knew not how to answer. He continued, as if he were musing aloud : " I have tried to stifle this belief in my bosom, and i have never spoken of it till now but it is true! i Look at that statue ! Parts of it are like nature i but it wants uniformity it wants grace it wants I what / want proportion! I never shall give it that, I because I want the sense, the consciousness, the emo- tion, of complete godlike movement. It is only the well formed who feel this. Sculptors may imitate i gods ! for they are made in God s image. But oh, ; Violanta ! / am not !" "My poor brother !" " Our blessed Savior was not more beautiful than the Apollo," he passionately continued, " but could / | feel like the Apollo! Can /stand before the clay and straighten myself to his attitude, and fancy, by the most delirious effort of imagination, that 1 realize in this frame, and could ever have conceived and moulded his indignant and lofty beauty ? No no no !" "Dear dear Giulio." He dropped his head again, and she felt his tears penetrate to her bosom. " Leave this melancholy theme," she said, in an imploring tone, " and let us talk of other things, I have something to tell you, Giulio !" " Raphael was beautiful," he said, raising himself up, unconscious of the interruption, "and Giorgione, and Titian, both nobly formed, and Michael Angelo had the port of an archangel ! Yes, the soul inhabits the whole body, and the sentiment of beauty moves and quickens through it all. My tenement is cramp ed ! Violanta !" "Well, dear brother!" "Tell me your feelings when you first breathe the air in a bright morning in spring. Do yon feel grace ful ? Is there a sensation of beauty? Do you lift yourself and feel swan-like and lofty, and worthy of : the divine image in which you breathe. Tell uie truly, Violanta." " Yes, brother!" " I knew it ! I have a faint dream of such a feel- ! ing a sensation that is confined to my brain somehow which I struggle to express in motion but if I lift j my finger, it is gone. I watch Amieri sometimes, 1 when lie draws. He pierces rny very soul by as- ! suming, always, the attitude on his canvass. Violanta! i how can / stand like a statue that would please the | eye?" "Giulio! Giulio!" ; Well, I will not burden you with my sadness. : Let us look at Blonde s nymph. Pray the Virgin he 1 come not in the while for painting, by lamp-light, shows less fairly than marble." He took the lamp, and while Violanta shook the j tears from her eyes, he drew out the pegs of the easel, and lowered the picture to the light. 44 Are you sure Amieri will not come in, Giulio?" inquired his sister, looking back timidly at the door i while she advanced. " I think he will not. The Corso is gay to night, i and his handsome face and frank carriage, win greet ings, as the diamond draws light. Look at his pic ture, Violanta! With what triumph he paints! How different from my hesitating hand ! The thought that 126 VIOLANTA CESARINI. is bora in his fancy, collects instant fire in his veins and comes prompt and proportionate to his hand. It looks like a thing born, not wrought ! How beautiful >u are, my Violanta ! He has done well brave iondo !" " It is like me, yet fairer." I wish it were done ! There is a look on the lips that is like a sensation 1 feel sometimes on my own I almost feel as if I should straighten and grow fair as it advances. Would it not be a blessed thing, Violanta ?" " I love you as you are, dear Giulio !" "But I thirst to be loved like other men ! I would pass in the street and not read pity in all eyes. I would go out like Biondo, and be greeted in the street j with Mio bravo ! Mio bello ! I would be beloved | by some one that is not my sister, Violanta! I would have my share only my share of human joy and re gard. I were better dead than be a hunchback. I would die, but for you to-night yes, to night." With a convulsive hand he pulled aside the curtain, and sent a long, earnest look up to the stars. Violanta had never before heard him give words to his melan choly thoughts, and she felt appalled and silenced by the inexpressible poignancy of his tones, and the fever ish, tearless, broken-heartedness of his whole manner. As she took his hand, there was a noise in the street below, and presently after, a hurried step was heard on the stair, and Amieri rushed in, seized the rapier which hung over his bed and without observing Vio lanta, was flying again from the apartment. " Biondo !" cried a voice which would have stayed him were next breath to have been drawn in heaven. " Contessa Violanta !" "What is it, Amieri? Where go you now?" asked Giulio, gliding between him and the door. Biondo s cheek and brow had flushed when first ar rested by the voice of the countess, but now he stood silent and with his eyes on the floor, pale as the statue before him. " A quarrel, Giulio !" he said at length. " Biondo !" The countess sprang to his side with the simple utterance of his name, and laid her small hand on his arm. " You shall not go! You are dear to us dear to Guilio, Signor Amieri! If you love us if you care for Giulio nay, I will say it if you care for me, dear Biondo, put not your life in peril." " Lady !" said the painter, bowing his head to his wrist, and kissing lightly the small white fingers that pressed it, "if I were to lose my life this hour, I should bless with my dying lips the occasion which had drawn from you the blessed words I hear. But the more life is valuable to me by your regard, the more need you should not delay me. I am waited for. Fare well!" Disengaging himself from Violanta s grasp, quickly but gently, Amieri darted through the door, and was gone. CHAPTER III. BIOXDO had readily found a second in the first artist he met on the Corso, and after a rapid walk they turned on the lonely and lofty wall of the Pala tine, to look back on the ruins of the Forum. At a fountain side, not far beyond, he had agreed to find his antagonist; but spite of the pressing business of the hour, the wonderful and solemn beauty of the ruins that lay steeped in moonlight at his feet, awoke, for an instant, all of the painter in his soul. " Is it not glorious, Lenzoni ?" he said, pointing with his rapier to the softened and tall columns that carried their capitals among the stars. "We have not come out to sketch, Amieri!" was the reply. "True, caro! but my fingers work as if the pencil was in them, and I forget revenge while 1 see what I shall never sketch again!" Lenzoni struck his hand heavily on Amieri s shoul der, as if to wake him from a dream, and looked close into his face. "If you fight in this spirit, Biondo " "I shall fight with heart and soul, Lenzoni ; fear me not! But when I saw, just now, the bel ejfetto of the sharp-drawn shadows under the arch of Constau- tine, and felt instinctively for my pencil, something told me, at my heart s ear you will never trace line | again, Amieri!" "Take heart, caro amico!" My heart is ready, but my thoughts come fast! What were my blood, I can not but reflect, added to , the ashes of Rome? We fight in the grave of an i empire! But you will not philosophize, dull Len- l zoni! Come on to the fountain!" The moon shone soft on the greensward rim of the i neglected fountain that once sparkled through the j " gold palace" of Nero. The white edges of half- , buried marble peeped here and there from the grass, i and beneath the shadow of an ivy-covered and totter ing arch, sang a nightingale, the triumphant posses- I sor of life amid the forgotten ashes of the Cassars. Amieri listened to his song. "You are prompt, signor!" said a gay-voiced gen tleman, turning the corner of the ruined wall, as Biondo, still listening to the nightingale, fed his heart with the last sweet words of Violanta. " Sempre pronto? is a good device," answered Len zoni, springing to his feet. "Will you fight, side to the moon, signers, or shall we pull straws for the choice of light?" Amien s antagonist was a strongly-made man of thirty, costly in his dress, and of that class of features eminently handsome, yet eminently displeasing. The origin of the quarrel was an insulting observation, coupled with the name of the young countess Cesa- rini, which Biondo, who was standing in the shadow of a wall, watching her window from the Corso, acci dentally overheard. A blow on the mouth was the first warning the stranger received of a listener s neighborhood, and after a momentary struggle they | exchanged cards, and separated to meet in an hour, with swords, at the fountain, on the Palatine. Amieri was accounted the best foil in the ateliers of Rome, but his antagonist, the count Lamba Malas- pina had just returned from a long residence in France, and had the reputation of an accomplished swordsman. Amieri was slighter in person, but well-made, and agile as a leopard; but when Lenzoni looked into the cool eye of Malaspina, the spirit and fire which he would have relied upon to ensure his friend success in an ordinary contest, made him tremble now. Count Lamba bowed, and they crossed swords. Amieri had read his antagonist s character, like his friend, and, at the instant their blades parted, he broke down his guard with the quickness of lightning, and wounded him in the face. Malaspina smiled as he crossed his rapier again, and in the next moment Amieri s sword flew high above his head, and the count s was at his breast. "Ask for your life, mio lravo!" he said, as calmly as if they had met by chance in the Corso. " A morte ! villain and slanderer!" cried Amieri, and striking the sword from his bosom, he aimed a blow at Malaspina, which by a backward movement, was received on the point of the blade. Transfixed through the wrist, Amieri struggled in vain against the supe rior strength and coolness of his antagonist, and falling on his knee, waited in silence for his death-blow. Malaspina drew his sword gently as possible from the wound, and recommending a tourniquet to Lenzoni till a surgeon could be procured, washed the blood VIOLANTA CESARINI. 127 from his face in the fountain, and descended inlo the Forum, humming the air of a new song. Faint with loss of blood, and with his left arm ) around Lenzoni s neck, Biondo arrived at the sur geon s door. " Can you save his hand ?" was the first eager ques tion. Amieri held up his bleeding wrist with difficulty, and the surgeon shook his head as he laid the help less fingers in his palm. The tendon was entirely parted. 44 1 may save the hand." he said, 41 but he will never use it more /" Amieri gave his friend a look full of anguish, and fell back insensible. "Poor Biondo!" said Lenzom, as he raised his pallid head from the surgeon s pillow. " Death were less misfortune than the loss of a hand like thine. The foreboding was too true, alas! that thou never wouldst use pencil more!" CHAPTER IV. THE frowning battlements of St. Angelo were brightened with the glare of lamps across the Tiber, and the d;irk breast of the river was laced with bars of gold like the coat of a captain of dragoons. Here and there lay a boat in mid-stream, and while the drift of the current was counteracted by an occasional stroke at the oar, the boatman listened to the heavenly strains Donna Bettina laughed under her palmer s cowl, and drawing Giulio s arm within her own, they min gled in the masquerade. The old count Cesarini arrived a few minutes after in one of the equipages of the Malaspina, accompanied by a red-cross knight in a magnificent armor, his sword-hilt sparkling with diamonds, and the bars of his visor half-drawn, yet showing a beard of jetty and curling black, and a mouth of the most regular, yet unpleasant beauty. The upper part of his face was quite concealed, yet the sneer on his lips promised a cold and unfeeling eye. "As a hunchback, did you say. count?" 44 It was her whim," answered Cesarini. 4l She has given alms to a poor sculptor with that deformity till her brain is filled with it. Pray the saints to afreet not your offspring, Lamba !" Malaspina surveyed himself in the long mirror at the entrance of the saloon, and smiled back incredu lously with his white teeth. 41 1 gave Bettina strict orders not to leave her side," said Cesarini. 4t You will find the old donna by her palmer s dress. The saints speed your suite, Lamba! I will await you in the card-room when the dance wearies you !" It was not for some time after the two old nobles had affianced their children, that Cesarini had found a fitting opportunity to break the subject to his daugh ter. When he did so, somewhat to his embarrass ment, Violanta listened to it without surprise; and after hearing all he had to say upon the honorable de scent, large fortune, and courtly accomplishments of , , of a waltz, dying and triumphing in alternate cadences . the young count Lamba, she only permitted her fa- j breath of night and the pope s band. A j ther to entertain any future hope on the subject, upon platform was built out over the river, forming a con- J the condition, that, till she was of age, her proposed tinu;ition of the stnge; the pit was floored over, and all draped like a Persian harem ; and thus began a masquerade at the Teatro della Pergola at Rome, which stands, if you will take the trouble to remem ber, close by the bridge and castle of St. Angelo upon the bauk of the "yellow Tiber." ge, her proposed husband should not even be presented to her. For this victory over the most cherished ambition of the old count, Violanta was indebted partly to the holy see, and partly to some qualities in her own character, of which her father knew the force. He was aware l with what readiness the cardinal would seize upon the The entrance of the crowd to the theatre was like a j slightest wish she might express to take the veil and d to represent the things of which bring her possessions into the church, and he was e are commanded not to make graven images, nor : sufficiently acquainted with the qualities of a Cesa- to bow down and worship them. There was the like- : rini, not to drive one of their daughters to extremity, ness of everything in heaven above and on the earth : With some embarrassment the old count made a BDeath, and in the waters under the earth. There clean breast to Malaspina and his son, and was ex- were angels, devils, serpents, birds, beasts, fishes, and ! hausting language in regrets, when he was relieved by fair women of which none except the last occasioned I an assurance from Lamba that the difficulty increased much transgression of the commandment. Oddly j his zest for the match, and that, with Cesarini s per- fishes waltzed and so did the beasts and \\ mission, he would find opportunities to encounter her lair women, the serpents and birds pairing off as they i in her walks as a stranger, and m;ike his way after the ne within sound of the music, with a defiance of ; romantic taste which he supposed was alone at the boN mtural antipathies which would have driven a natural- torn of her refusal For success in this, Count Lamba ist out of his senses. re ]i e d on his personal beauty and on that address in A chariot drove up with the crest of the Cesarini the arts of adventure which is acquired by a residence on the pannel, and out of it stepped rather a si iff figure | in France. dressed as a wandering palmer, with serge and scallop- j Since his duel, Amieri had been confined to his ells, followed by a masked hunchback whose cos- ! bed with a violent fever, danoerously aggravated by tume, even to the threadbare spot on the ridge of his j the peculiar nature of his calamity. The love of the mity, was approved, by the loungers at the door, j pencil was the breath of his soul, and in all his in a general "bravissimo." They entered the dress- 1 1 thaiights of Violanta, it was only as a rival of the ing-room, and the cloak-keeper was not surprised ! lofty fame of painters who had made themselves the when the lump was withdrawn in the shape of a pad |l companions of kings, that he could imagine himself a f wool, arid by the aid of a hood and petticoat of j claimant for her love. It seemed to him that his black silk, the deformed was transformed into a slender \ nerveless hand had shut out heaven s entire light. domino, undistinguished but for the grace and elas- i Giulio had watched by his friend with the faithful ticity of her movements. The attendant was sur- ! fondness of a woman, and had gathered from his mo- pnsed, however, when having stepped aside to deposite !j ments of delirium, what Biondo had from dtlicacy to the pad given in charge to her, she turned and saw the ;| Violanta never revealed to his second, Lenzoni the ornino flitting from the room, but the hunchback ji cause of his quarrel with Malaspina. Touched with with^his threadbare hump still leaning on the palmer s j this chivalric tenderness toward his sister, the kind arm - . . I Giulio hung over him with renewed affection, and "baniissima Vergine . " she exclaimed, pulling out when, in subsequent ravings, the maimed youth be- her cross and holding it between herself and Giulio, !: trayed the real sting of his misfortune the death of the fiend the unholy fiend!" |( his hopes of her love the unambitious brother re- 128 VIOLANTA CESARINI. solved in his heart that if he could aid him by service or sacrifice, by influence with Violanta, or by making the almost desperate attempt to establish his own claims to the name and fortunes of Cesarini, he would devote himself to his service heart and soul. During the confinement of Amieri to his room, the young countess had of course been unable to visit her brother, and as he scarce left the patient s side for a moment, their intercourse for two or three weeks had been entirely interrupted. On the first day the con valescent youth could walk out, she had stolen to the studio, and heard from Giulio the whole history of the duel and its consequences. When he had finished his narrative, Violanta sat, for a few minutes, lost in thought. "Giulio!" she said at last, with a gayety of tone which startled him. " Violanta !" Did you ever remark that our voices are very much alike?" "Biondo often says so." "And you have a foot almost as small as mine." "I have not the proportions of a man, Violanta!" " Nay, brother, but I mean that that we might pass for each other, if we were masked. Our height is the same. Stand up, Giulio " " You would not mock me!" said the melancholy youth with a faint smile, as he rose and set his bent back beside the straight and lithe form of his sister. "Listen to me, amato-bene . " she replied, sitting down and drawing him upon her knee, after satisfying himself that there was no perceptible difference in their height. " Put your arm about my neck, and ove rne while 1 tell you of my little plot." Giulio impressed a kiss upon the clear, alabaster forehead of the beautiful girl, and looked into her face inquiringly. "There is to be a masquerade at La Pergola," she snid "a superb masquerade given to some prince! And I am to go, Giulio ndo /" " Well," answered the listener, sadly. "But do you not seem surprised that I am permitted to go! Shall I tell you the reason why papa gave me permission ?" " If you will, Violanta !" " A little bird told me that Malaspina means to be there !" " And you will go to meet him?" " You shall go to meet him, and I " she hesi tated and cast down the long dark fringes of her eyes; "I will meet Biondo !" Giulio clasped her passionately to his heart. " I see ! I see !" he cried, springing upon his feet, as he anticipated the remaining circumstances of the plot. " We shall be two hunchbacks they will little think that we are two Cesarini. Dear, noble Violanta! you will speak kindly to Biondo. Send Bettina for the clothes, carina mia! You will get twin masks in the Corso. And, Violanta]" " What, Giulio ?" " Tell Bettina to breathe no word of our project to Arnieri ! I will persuade him to go but to see you dauce ! Poor Amieri 1 Dear, dear sister ! Farewell snow ! He will be returning, and you must be gone. The Holy Virgin guard you, my Violanta!" CHAPTER V. THE reader will long since have been reminded, by the trouble we have to whip in and flog up the lagging and straggling members of our story, of a flock of sheep driven unwillingly to market. Indeed, to stop j over the seat, and took a place beside him. if at the confessional (as you will see many a shepherd I a female in a black domino, closely masked, and of the Campagna, on his way to Rome), this tale of jj through the pasteboard mouth protruded the bit of many tails should have been a novel. You have, in brief, what should have been well elaborated, embar rassed with difficulties, relieved by digressions, tipped with a moral, and bound in two volumes, with a portrait of the author. We are sacrificed to the spirit of the age. The eighteenth century will be known in hieroglyphics by a pair of shears. But, "to return to our muttons." The masquerade went merrily on, or, if there were more than one heavy heart among those light heels, it was not known, as the newspapers say, " to our re porter." One, there certainly was heavy as Etna on the breast of Enceladus. Biondo Amieri sat in a cor ner of the gallery, with his swathed hand laid before him, pale as a new sti.tue, and with a melancholy in his soft dark eyes, which would have touched the exe cutioners of St. Agatha. Beside him sat Lcnzoni, who was content to forego the waltz for a while, and keep company for pity with a friend who was too busy with his own thoughts to give him word or look, but still keeping sharp watch on the scene below, and betraying by unconscious ejaculations how great a penance he had put on himself for love and charity. "All, la lella musica, Biondo!" he exclaimed drumming on the banquette, while his friend held up his wounded hand to escape the jar, "listen to that waltz, that might set fire to the heels of St. Peter. Corpo di JBacco ! look at the dragon! a dragon making love to a nun, Amieri! Ah! San Pieiro ! what a foot ! Wait till I come, sweet goblin ! That a goblin s tail should follow such ankles, Biondo ! Eh! belli ssimo ! the knight ! Look at the red cross knight, Amieri! and what? il gobbo, by St. An thony! and the red-cross takes him for a woman! It is Giulio, for there never were two hunchbacks so wondrous like ! Ecco, Biondo !" But there was little need to cry "look" to Amieri, now. A hunchback, closely masked, and leaning on a palmer s arm, made his way slowly through the crowd, and a red-cross knight, a figure gallant enough to have made a monarch jealous, whispered with courte ous and courtly deference in his ear. " Cielo ! it is she!" said Biondo, with mournful earnestness, not heeding his companion, and laying his hand upon his wounded wrist, as if the sight he looked on gave it a fresher pang. "She ?" answered Lenzoni, with a laugh. " If it is not he not gobbo Giulio I ll eat that cross-hilled rapier ! What she should it be, caro Biondo !" " I tell thee," said Amieri, "Giulio is asleep at the foot of his marred statue ! I left him but now, he is too ill with his late vigils to be here but his clothes, I may tell thee, are borrowed by one who wears them as you see. Look at the foot, Lenzoni!" ** A woman, true enough, if the shoe were all ! But I ll have a close look! Stay for me, dear Amieri! I will return ere you have looked twice at them " And happy, with all his kind sympathy, to find a fair apology to be free, Lenzoni leaped over the benches and mingled in the crowd below. Left alone, Biondo devoured with his eyes, every movement of the group in which he was so deeply interested, and the wound in his hand seemed burn- | ing with a throb of fire, while he tried in vain to de- ! tect, in the manner of the hunchback, that coyness ! which might show, even through a mask, dislike or ! indifference. There was even, he thought (and he i delivered his soul over to Apollyon in the usual phrase I for thinking such ill of such an angel) ; there was | even in her manner a levity and freedom of gesture for which the mask she wore should be no apology. He wns about to curse Malaspina for having spared his life at the fountain, when someone jumped lighily VIOLANTA CESARINI. 129 ivory, commonly held in the teeth by maskers, to dis guise the voice. " Good evening to you. fair signer !" "Good even to you, lady !" " I am come to share your melancholy, signer !" "I have none to give away unless you will take all; and just now, my fair one. it is rather anger than sad ness, if it please you. leave me p " What if i am more pleased to stay " "Briefly, I would be alone . I am not of the festa. I but look on, here !" And Biondo turned his shoulder to the mask, and fixed his eyes again on the hunch back, who having taken the knight s arm, was talking and promenading most gayly between him and the palmer. " You have a wounded hand, signer !" resumed his importunate neighbor. "A useless one, lady. Would it were well !" "Signor Melancholy, repine not against providence. I that am no witch, tell thee that thou wilt yet bless Heaven that this hand is disabled." Biondo turned and looked at the bold prophetess, but her disguise was impenetrable. " You are a masker, lady, and talk at random !" " No ! I will tell you the thought uppermost in your bosom !" "What is it?" " A longing for a pluck at the red-cross, yonder!" " True, by St. Mary !" said Biondo, starting ener getically : " but you read it in my eyes !" "1 have told you your first thought, signor, and I will give you a hint of the second Is there a likeness between a nymph on canvass, and a gobbo in a mask !" j " Giulio !" exclaimed Amieri, turning suddenly round; but the straight back of the domino met his ! eye, and totally bewildered, he resumed his seat, and | slowly perused the stranger from head to foot. " Talk to me as if my mask were the mirror of your soul, Amieri," said the soft but disguised voice. "You need sympathy in this mood, and I am your good angel. Is your wrist painful to-night ?" " I can not talk to you," he said, turning to resume bis observation on the scene below. " If you know the face beneath the gobbo s mask, you know the heaven from which I am shut out. But I must gaze on it still." " Is it a woman ?" t* No ! an angel." " And encourages the devil in the shape of Ma- laspina ? You miscall her, Amieri !" The answer was interrupted by Lenzoni, who ran into the gallery, but seeing his friend beset by a mask, he gave him joy of his good luck, and refusing to in terrupt the lete-d-lete, disappeared with a laugh. " Brave, kind Lenzoni !" said the stranger. "Are you his good angel, too?" asked Amieri, surprised again at the knowledge so mysteriously dis- j played. " No ! Little as you know of me you would not be willing to share me with another! Say, Amieri! love j you the gobbo on the knight s arm ?" " You have read me riddles less clear, my fair in cognita ! I would die at morn but to say farewell to her at midnight!" " Do you despair of her love ?" " Do i despair of excelling Raphael with these unstrung fingers ? I never hoped but in my dreams, lady!" "Then hope, waking ! For as there is truth in heaven, Violanta Cesarini loves you, Biondo !" Laying his left hand sternly on the arm of the stranger, Bio-ndo raised his helpless wrist and pointed toward the hunchback, who, seated by the red-cross knight, played with the diamond cross of his sword- hilt, while "the palmer turned his back, as if to give two lovers an opportunity. With a heart overwhelmed with bitterness, he then turned to the mocking incognito. Violanta sat be side him ! Holding her mask between her and the crowd be low, the maiden blush mounted to her temples, and the long sweeping lashes dropped over her eyes their veiling and silken fringes. And while the red-cross knight still made eloquent love to Giulio in the saloon of the masquerade, Amieri and Violanta, in their un observed retreat, exchanged vows, faint and choked with emotion on his part, but all hope, encouragement, and assurance, on hers CHAPTER VI. " WILL you waltz ?" said a merry-voiced domino to the red-cross knight, a few minutes after tapping him smartly on the corslet with her black fan, and pointing, for the first step, a foot that would have tempted St. Anthony. "By the mass!" answered Malaspina, "I should pay an ill compliment to the sweetest voice that ever enchanted human ear" (and he bowed low to Guilio), " did 1 refuse invitation so sweetly toned. Yet my Milan armor is not light !" " I have been refusing his entreaties this hour," said Giulio, as the knight whirled away with Violanta, " for though I can chatter like a woman, I should dance like myself. He is not unwilling to show his grace to his lady-mistress ! Ha! ha! It is worth while to sham the petticoat for once to see what fools men are when they would please a woman ! But, close mask ! Here comes the count Cesarini !" "How fares my child?" said the old noble, leaning over the masked Giulio, and touching with his lips the glossy curl which concealed his temple. Are you amused, idolo wiio?" A sudden tremor shot through the frame of poor Giulio at the first endearment ever addressed to his ear by the voice of a parent. The tears coursed down under his mask, and for all answer to the question, he could only lay his small soft hand in his lather s and return his pressure with irresistible strength and emo tion. "You are not well, rr.y child!" he said, surprised at not receiving an answer, "this ugly hump oppresses you! Come to the air! So lean on me, caro lesoro! We will remove the hump presently. A Cesarini with a hump indeed ! Straighten yourself, my life, my child, and you will breathe more freely !" Thus entered, at one wound, daggers and balm into the heart of the deformed youth; and while Bettina, trembling in every limb, grew giddy with fear as they made their way through the crowd, Giulio, relieved by his tears, nerved himself with a strong effort and prepared to play out his difficult part with calmness. They threaded slowly the crowded maze of M allzers, and, emerging from the close saloons, stood at last in the gallery overhanging the river. The moon was rising, and touched with a pale light the dark face of the Tiber; the music came faintly out to the night air, and a fresh west wind, cool and balmy from the verdant campagna, breathed softly through the lat tices. Refusing a chair, Giulio leaned over the balustrade, and the count stood by his side and encircled his waist with his arm. "I can not bear this deformity, my Violanta!" he said, " you look so unlike my child with it ; I need this little hand to reassure me." " Should you know that was my hand, father?" said Giulio. " Should I not ! I have told you a thousand times that the nails of a Cesarini were marked let me see 130 PASQUALI, THE TAILOR OF VENICE. you again by the arch of this rosy line! See, my little Gobbo ! They are like four pink fairy shells of India laid over rolled leaves of roses. What was the poet s name who said that of the old countess Giulia Cesarini la belia Giulia? " Should you have known my voice, father ?" asked Giiilio, evading the question. " Yes, my darling, why ask me ?" "But, father! if I had been stolen by brigands from the cradle or you had not seen me for many, many years and I had met you to-night as a gobbo and had spoken to you only in sport and had called you father, dear father." should you have known my voice ? would you have owned me for a Cesarini?" " Instantly, my child !" "But suppose my back had been broken suppose 1 were a gobbo a deformed hunchback indeed, in deed but had still nails with a rosy arch, and the same voice with which I speak to you now and pressed your hand thus and loved you would you disown me, father? Giulio had raised himself while he spoke, and taken his hand from his father s with a feeling that life or death would be in his answer to that question. Cesa rini was disturbed, and did not reply for a moment. " My child !" said he at last, " there is that in your voice that would convince me you are mine, against all the evidence in the universe. I can not imagine the dreadful image you have conjured up, for the Cesarini are beautiful and straight by long inheritance. But if a monster spoke to me thus, I should love him ! Come ro my bosom, my blessed child ! and dispel those wild dreams ! Come, Violanta !" Giulio attempted to raise his arms to his father s neck, but the strength that had sustained him so well, began to ebb from him. He uttered some indistinct words, lifted his hand to his mask as if to remove it for breath, and sunk slowly to the floor. "It. is i/our son, my lord !" cried Bettina. "Lift him, Count Cesarini ! Lift your child to the air be fore he dies!" She tore off his mask and disclosed to the thunder- stricken count the face of the stranger ! As he stood pale and agliast, too much confounded for utterance or action, the black domino tripped into the gallery, follow ed by the red-cross knight, panting under his armor. " Giulio ! my own Giulio !" cried Violanta, throw ing herself on her knees beside her pale and insensible brother, and covering his forehead and lips with kisses. "Is he hurt? Is he dead? Water! for the love of Heaven! Will no one bring water?" And tear ing away her own mask, she lifted him from the ground, and, totally regardless of the astonished group who looked on in petrified silence, fanned and caressed him into life and consciousness. " Come away, Violanta !" said her father at last, in a hoarse voice. "IS ever, my father ! he is our own blood! How feel you now, Giulio ?" " Better, sweet ! where is Biondo ?" "Near by! But you shall go home with me. Sigrior Malaspina, as you hope for my favor, lend my brother an arm. Bettina, call up the chariot. Nay, father ! he goes home with me, or I with him, we never part more !" The red-cross knight gave Giulio an arm, and lean ing on him and Violanta, the poor youth made his way to the carriage. Amieri sat at the door, and re ceived only a look as she passed, and helping Giulio tenderly in, she gave the order to drive swiftly home, and in a few minutes they entered together the palace of their common inheritance. It would be superfluous to dwell on the incidents of the sequel, which were detailed in the Diario di Roma, and are known to all the world. The hunch back Count Cesarini has succeeded his father in his title and estates, and is beloved of all Rome. The next heir to the title is a son (now two years of age) of the countess Amieri, who is to take the name of Cesarini on coming to his majority. They live to gether in the old palazzo, and all strangers go to see their gallery of pictures, of which none are bad, except some well intended but not very felicitously executed compositions by one Lenzoni. Count Lamba Malaspina is at present in exile, having been convicted of drawing a sword on a disabled gentle man, on his way from a masquerade at La Pergola. His seclusion is rendered the more tolerable by the loss of his teeth, which were rudely thrust down his throat by this same Lenzoui (fated to have a finger in every pie) in defence of the attacked party on that oc casion. You will hear Lenzoni s address (should you wish to purchase a picture of his painting) at the Caffc del Gioco, opposite the trattoria of La Bella Donna in the Corso. PASQUALI, THE TAILOR OF VENICE, CHAPTER I. GIANNINO PASQUALI was a smart tailor some five years ago, occupying a cool shop on one of the smaller canals of Venice. Four pairs of suspenders, a print of the fashions, and a motley row of the gay-colored trousers worn by the gondoliers, ornamented the win dow looking on the dark alley in the rear, and, attach ed to the post of the water-gate on the canal side, floated a small black gondola, the possession of which afforded the same proof of prosperity of the Venetian tailor which is expressed by a horse and buggy at the door of a snip in London. The place-seeking travel ler, who. nez en I air, threaded the tangled labyrinth of alleys and bridges between the Rialto and St. Mark s, would scarce have observed the humble shop- window of Pasquali, yet he had a consequence on the Piazza, and the lagoon had seen his triumphs as an amateur gondolier. Giannino was some thirty years of age, and his wife Fiametta, whom he had married for her zecchini, was on the shady side of fifty. If the truth must be told, Pasquali had discovered that, even with a bag of sequins for eye-water, Fi ametta was not always the most lovely woman in Venice. Just across the canal lived old Donna Bentoccata, the nurse, whose daughter Tuiturilla was like the blonde in Titian s picture of the Marys ; and to the charms of Turturilla, even seen through the leaden light of poverty, the unhappy Pasquali was far from insensible. The festa of San Antonio arrived after a damp week of November, and though you would suppose the at mosphere of Venice not liable to any very sensible in crease of moisture, Fiametta, like people who live on land, and who have the rheumatism as a punishment for their ae and ugliness, was usually confined to her brazero of hot coals till it was dry enough on the Lido for the peacocks to walk abroad. On this festa, how ever, San Antonio being, as every one knows, the patron saint of Padua, the Padovese were to come down the Brenta, as was their custom, and cross over the sea to Venice to assist in the celebration ; and Fiametta once more thought Pasquali loved her for herself alone when he swore by his rosary that unless she accompanied him to the festa in her wedding dress, he would not turn an oar in the race, nor unfasten his gondola from the door-post. Alas ! Fiametta was PASQUALI, THE TAILOR OF VENICE. 131 married in the summer solstice, and her dress was permeable to the wind as a cobweb or gossamer. Is it possible you could have remembered that, oh, wick ed Pasquali ? It was a day to puzzle a barometer ; now bright, now rainy ; now gusty as a corridor in a novel, and now calm as a lady after a fit of tears. Pasquali was up early and waked Fiametta with a kiss, and, by way of unusual tenderness, or by way of ensuring; the wed- j ding dress, he chose to play dressing maid, and ar ranged with his own hands her jupon and fezzoletta. She emerged from her chamber looking like a slice : of orange-peel in a flower-bed, but smiling arid nod ding, and vowing the day warm as April, and the sky without a cloud. The widening circles of an occa- ; sional drop of rain in the canal were nothing but the bubbles bursting after a passing oar, or perhaps the last i flies ofsummer. Pasquali swore it was weather to win [ down a peri. As Fiametta stepped into the gondola, she glanced her eyes over the way and saw Turturilla, with a face as sorrowful as the first day in Lent, seated at her window. Her lap was full of work, and it was quite evident that she had not thought of being at the festa. j Fiametta s heart was already warm, and it melted quite at the view of the poor girl s loneliness. " Pasquali mio !" she said, in a deprecating tone, as if she were uncertain how the proposition would be received, " I think we could make room for poor Turturilla,!" A gleam of pleasure, unobserved by the confiding sposa, tinted faintly the smooth olive cheek of Pasquali. ! "Eh! diavolo /" he replied, so loud that the sor- ] rowful seamstress heard, and hung down her head still lower; "must you take pity on every cheese paring of a regezza who happens to have no lover! Have reason ! have reason ! The gondola is narrower than your brave heart my fine Fiametta !" And away he pushed from the water-steps. Turturilla rose from her work and stepped out upon the rusly gratings of the balcony to see them depart. Pasquali stopped to grease the notch of his oar, and between that and some other embarrassments, the gondola was suffered to float directly under her window. The compliment to the generous nature of Fiametta, was, meantime, working, and as she was compelled to exchange a word or two with Turturilla while her husband was getting his oar into the socket, it resulted (as he thought it very probable it would), in the good wile s renewing her proposiiion, and ma king a point of sending the deserted girl for her holy- day bonnet. Pasquali swore through all the saints and angels by the time she had made herself ready, though she was but five minutes gone from the window, and telling Fiametta in her ear that she must consider it as the purest obligation, he backed up to the steps of old Donna Bentoccata, helped in her daughter with a better grace than could have been expected, and with one or two short and deep strokes, put forth into the grand canal with the velocity of a lance-fly. A gleam of sunshine lay along the bosom of the broad silver sheet, and it was beautiful to see the gondolas with their gay colored freights all hastening in one direction, and with swift track to the festa. Far up and down they rippled the smooth water, here gliding out from below a palace-arch, there from a nar row and unseen canal, the steel beaks curved and (lash ing, the water glancing on the oar-blades, the curtains moving, and the fair women of Venice leaning out and touching hands as thev neared neighbor or acquaint ance in the close-pressing gondolas. It was a beauti ful sight, indeed, and three of the happiest hearts in that swift gliding company were in Pasquali s gondola, though the bliss of Fiametta, I am compelled to say, was entirely owing to the bandage with which love is so significantly painted. Ah ! poor Fiametta! From the Lido, from Fusina, from under the Bridge of Sighs, from all quarters of the lagoon, and from all points of the floating city of Venice, streamed the fly- ing gondolas to the Giudecca. The narrow walk along the edge of the long and close-built island was thronged \vith booths and promenaders. and the black barks by hundreds bumped their steel noses against the pier as the agitated water rose and fell beneath them. The gondolas intended for the race pulled slowly up and down, close to the shore, exhibiting their fairy-like forms and their sinewy and gayly dress ed gondoliers to the crowds on land and water ; the bands of music, attached to different parties, played here and there a strain ; the criers of holy pictures and gingerbread made the air vocal with their lisping and soft Venetian ; and all over the scene, as if it was the light of the sky or some other light as blessed but less common, shone glowing black eyes, black as night, and sparkling as the stars on night s darkest bosom. He who thinks lightly of Italian beauty should have seen the women of Venice on St. An tonio s day 32, or on any or at any hour when their pulses are beating high andtheireyes alight for they are neither one nor the other always. The women of that fair clime, to borrow the simile of Moore, are like lava-streams, only bright when the volcano kindles. Their long lashes cover lustreless eyes, and their blood shows dully through the cheek in common and listless I hours. The calm, the passive tranquillity in which the delicate graces of colder climes find their element I are to them a torpor of the heart when the blood scarce seems to flow. They are wakeful only to the ener getic, the passionate, the joyous movements of the soul. Pasquali stood erect in the prow of his gondola, and stole furtive glances at Turturilla while he pointed away with his finger to call off the sharp eyes of Fi ametta ; but Fiametta was happy and unsuspicious. Only when now and then the wind came up chilly from the Adriatic, the poor wife shivered and sat closer to Turturilla, who in her plainer but thicker dress, to say nothing of younger blood, sat more com fortably on the black cushion and thought less about the weather. An occasional drop of rain fell on the nose of poor Fiametta, but if she did not believe it was \ the spray from Pasquali s oar, she at least did her best II to believe so; and the perfidious tailor swore by St. I Anthony that the clouds were as dry as her eyelashes. 1 never was very certain that Turturilla was not in the secret of this day s treacheries. The broad centre of the Giudecca was cleared, and the boats took their places for the race. Pasquali ranged his gondola with those of the other spectators, and telling Fiametta in her ear that he should sit on the other side of Turturilla as a punishment for their malapropos invitation, he placed himself on the small remainder of the deep cushion on the farthest side from his now penitent spouse, and while he complain ed almost rudely of the narrowness of his seat, he made free to hold on by Turturilla s waist which no doubt made the poor girl s mind more easy on the subject of her intrusion. Who won and who lost the race, what was the device of each flag, and what bets and bright eyes changed owners by the result, no personage of this ! tale knew or cared, save Fiametta. She looked on eagerly. Pasquali and Turturilla, as the French say, trouvaient autress chats a frailer. After the decision of the grand race, St. Antonio being the protector, more particularly of the humble ("patron of pigs" in the saints calendar), the seignoria and the grand people generally, pulled away for St. Mark s, leaving the crowded Giudecca to the people. Pasquali, as was said before, had some renown as a gondolier. Something what would be called in other countries a scrub race, followed the departure of the 132 PASQUALI, THE TAILOR OF VENICE. winning boar, and several gondolas, holding each one person "only, took their places for the start. The tailor laid his hand on his bosom, and, with the smile that had first stirred the heart and the sequins of Fiametta, begged her to gratify his love by acting as his make-weight while he turned an oar for the pig of St. Antonio. The prize roasted to an appetizing crisp, stood high on a platter in front of one of the booths on shore, and Fiametia smacked her lips, overcame her tears with an effort, and told him, in accents as little as possible like the creak of a dry oar iu the socket, that he might set Turturilla on shore. A word in her ear, as he handed her over the gun wale, reconciled Bonna Bentoccata s fair daughter to this conjugal partiality, and stripping his manly figure of its upper disguises, Pasquali straightened out his fine limbs, and drove his bark to the line in a style that drew applause from even his competitors. As a mark of their approbation, they offered him an outside place where his fair dame would be less likely to be spatter ed with the contending oars ; but he was too generous to take advantage of this considerate offer, and crying out as he took the middle, " ben pronto, si gnori!" gave Fiametta a confident look and stood like a hound in the leash. Off they went at the lap of the drum, poor Fiametta holding her breath and clinging to the sides of the gondola, and Pasquali developing skill and muscle not for Fiamelta s eyes only. It was a short, sharp race, without jockeying or management, all fair play and main strength, and the tailor shot past the end of the Giudecca a boat s length ahead. Much more ap plauded than a king at a coronation or a lord-mayor taking water at London stairs, he slowly made his way back to Turturilla, and it was only when that demure damsel rather shrunk from sitting down in two inches of water, that he discovered how the disturbed element had quite filled up the hollow of the leather cushion and made a peninsula of the uncomplaining Fiametta. She was as well watered, as a favorite plant in a flower- garden. " Pasquali mio /" she said in an imploring tone, holding up the skirt of her dress with the tips of her thumb and finger, " could you just take me home while I change my dress." One moment, Fiametia cara ! they are bringing the pig !" The crisp and succulent trophy was solemnly placed in the prow of the victor s gondola, and preparation was made to convoy him home with a triumphant procession. A half hour before it was in order to move an hour in first making the circuit of the grand canal, and an hour more in drinking a glass and ex changing good wishes at the stairs of the Rialto, and Donna Fiametta had sat too long by two hours and a half with scarce a dry thread on her body. What afterward befell will be seen in the more melancholy sequel. CHAPTER II. THE hospital of St. Girolamo is attached to the convent of that name, standing on one of the canals which put forth on the seaward side of Venice. It is a long building, with its low windows and latticed doors opening almost on the level of the sea, and the wards for the sick are large and well aired ; but, ex cept when the breeze is stirring, impregnated with a saline dampness from the canal, which, as Pasquali remarked, was good for llie rheumatism. It was not so good for the patient. The loving wife Fiametta grew worse and worse after the fatal festa, and the fit of rheumatism brought OQ by the slight ness of her dress and the spattering he had given her in the race, had increased by the end of the week, to a rheumatic fever. Fiametta was old and tough, however, and struggled manfully (woman as she was) with the disease, but being one night a little out of her head, her loving husband took occa sion to shudder at the responsibility of taking care of her, and jumping into his gondola, he pulled across to St. Girolamo and bespoke a dry bed and a sister of charity, and brought back the pious father Gasparo and a comfortable litter. Fiametta was dozing when they arrived, and the kind-hearted tailor willing to spare her the pain of knowing that she was on her way to the hospital for the poor, set out some meat and wine for the monk, and sending over for Tunurilla and the nurse to mix the salad, they sal and ate away the hours till the poor dame s brain should be wander ing again. Toward night the monk and Dame Bentoccata were comfortably dozing with each other s support (having fallen asleep at table), and Pasquali with a kiss from Turturilla, stole softly up stairs. Fiamettn was ma turing unquietly, and working her fingers in the palms of her hands, and on feeling her pulse lie found the fever was at its height. She took him, besides, for the prize pig of the festa, for he knew her wits were fairly abroad. He crept down stairs, gave the monk a strong cup of coffee to get him well awake, and, between the four of them, they got poor Fiametta into the litter, drew the curtains tenderly around and deposited her safely in the bottom of the gondola. Lightly and smoothly ihe winner of ihe pig pulled away with his loving burden, and gliding around the slimy corners of the palaces, and hushing his voice as he cried out "right!" or "left!" to guard the coming gondoliers of his vicinity, he arrived, like a thought of love to a maid s mind in sleep, at the door of St. Girolamo. The abbess looked out and said, " Beriedicite /" and the monk stood fiirn on his brown sandals to receive the precious burden from the arms of Pasquali. Believing firmly that it was equivalent to committing her to the hand of St. Peter, and of course abandoning all hope of seeing her again in this world, the soft-hearled tailor wiped his eye as she was lifted in, and receiving a promise from Faiher Gasparo that he would communicate faithfully the state of her soul in the last agony, he pulled, with lightened gondola and heart, back to his widower s home and Turturilla. For many good reasons, and apparent as good, it is a rule in the hospital of St. Girolamo, that the sick under its holy charge shall receive the visil of neither friend nor relative. If they recover, they return to their abodes to earn candles for the altar of the restor ing saint. If they die, their clolhes are sent to their surviving friends, and this affecting memorial, besides communicating the melancholy news, affords all the particulars and all the consolation they are supposed to require upon the subject of their loss. Waiting patiently for Father Gasparo and his bundle, Pasquali and Turturilla gave themselves up to hopes, which on the tailor s part (we fear it must be admitted), augured a quicker recovery from grief than might be credited to an elastic constitution. The fortune of poor Fiametta was sufficient to warrant Pasquali in neglecting his shop to celebrate every festa that the church acknowledged, and for ten days subsequent to the committal of his wife to the tender mercies of St. Girolamo, five days out of seven was the proportion of merry holydays with his new betrothed. They were sitting one evening in the open piazza of St. Mark, in front of the most thronged cafe, of that matchless square. The moon was resting her silver disk on the point of the Campanile, and the shadows of thousands of gay Venetians fell on ihe immense pavement below, clear and sharply drawn as a black cartoon. The four extending sides of the THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 133 square Iny ha!( m shades half in light, with their inmimeiiilm: columns <m(i balconies and sculptured wutK. .itnl, frowning down on all, in broken light and sh.iduw, stow! iht; arabesque structure of St. Mark s hsell rli//.yini> ihe eyes with its mosaics and confused devic.es. and thrusting forth the heads of her four golden-collared steeds into the moonbeams, till they looked on that black relief, like the horses of Pluto issuing from the gates of Hades. In the centre of the square stood a tall woman, singing, in rich con tralto, an old song of the better days of Venice ; and against one of the pillars, Polichinello had backed his wooden stage, and beat about his puppets with an energy worthy of old Dandolo and his helmeted galley-men. To those who wore not the spectacles of grief or discontent, the square of St. Mark s that night was like some cozening tableau. I never saw anything so gay. Everybody who has "swam in a gondola," knows how the cafes of Venice thrust out their checkered awnings over a portion of the square, and filled tli3 shaded space below with chairs and marble tables. In a corner of the shadow thus afforded, with ice and coffee on a small round slab between them, and the flat pavement of the public promenade under their feet, sat our two lovers. With neither hoof nor wheel to drown or interrupt their voices (as in cities who posed, bridegroom as he was, to make him wait her leisure. Her clothes fitted her ill, and she carried in her hand a pair ofshoes.it was easy to see were never made for her. She rose at last, and as her face be came visible, down dropped Turturilla and the pious father, and motionless and aghast stood the simple Pasquali. Fiametta stepped on shore ! In broken words Pasquali explained. He had landed at the stairs near the fish market, and with two leaps reaching the top, sped off past the buttress in the direction of the goldsmith, when his course was arrested by encountering at full speed, the person of an old woman. Hastily raising her up, he recognised his wife, who, fully recovered, but without a gondola, was threading the zig-zag alleys on foot, on her way to her own domicil. After the first astonishment was over, her dress explained the error of the j;ood father I and the extent of his own misfortune. The clothes had been hung between the bed of Fiametta and that of a smaller woman who had been long languishing of a consumption. She died, and Fiametta s clothes, brought to the door by mistake, were recognised by Father Gasparo and taken to Pasquali. The holy monk, chop-fallen and sad, took his soli tary way to the convent, but with the first step he felt something slide into the heel of his sandal. He sat down on the church stairs and absolved the devil from streets are stones, not water), they murmured their |! theft it was the lost ring, which had fallen upon his hopes and wishes in the softest language under the i foot and saved Pasquali the tailor from the pains of sun, and with the sotto race acquired by all the inhabi- j bigamy. tants of this noiseless city. Turturilla had taken ice to cool her and coffee to take off the chill of her ice, and a bicchicre del pofetto anwre to reconcile these two antagonists in hei digestion, when the slippers of a monk glided by, and in a moment the recognised Father Gasparo made a third in the shadowy corner. The expected bundle was under his arm, and he was on his way to Pasquali s dwelling. Having assured the disconsolate tailor that she hud unction and wafer as became the wife of a citizen of Venice like himself, l)e took heart and grew content that she was in heaven. It was a better place, and Turturilla for so little as a gold ring, would supply her place in his bosom. The moon was but a brief week older when Pas quali and Turturilla stood in the church of our lady of grief, and Father Gasparo within the palings of the altar. She was as fair a maid as ever bloomed in the garden of beauty beloved of Titian, and the tailor was nearer worth nine men to look at, than the fraction of THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA, " Affection is a fire which kinclleth as well in the bramble ax in the oak, and catcheih hnld where it first light.eth, not whore it may bst burn. Larks that mount in the air build their nests below in the earth ; and women that cast iheir eyes upon kings, may placa their hearts upon vassals." MAULOWE. " L acrement cst arliitraire : }a beaute tst quclque chn<e de plus reel et de plus independent du gout tt de I optnion." LA BRUYERE. FAST and rebukingly rang the matins from the towers of St. Etienne, and. though unused to wake, much less to pray, at that sunrise hour, I felt a com punctious visiting as my postillion cracked his whip a man considered usually the exponent of his profes- i and flew past the sacred threshold, over which trip- sion. Aw ly mumbled the good father upon the mat rimonial service, thinking of the old wine and rich pastries that were holding their sweetness under cork ped, as if every stroke would be the last, the tardy yet light-footed mass-goers of Vienna. It was my first entrance into this Paris of Germany, and I stretched upon the fretted gothic pile, so cumbered with orna- ment, yet so light and airy so vast in the area it covered, yet so crusted in every part with delicate de and crust only till he had done his ceremony, and I my head from the window to look back with delight quicker by some seconds than had ever been achieved before by priest or bishop, he arrived at the putting on of the ring. His hand was tremulous, and (oh un lucky omen !) he dropped it within the gilden fence i vice and sculpture. On sped the merciless postillion, of the chancel. The choristers were called, and j and the next moment we rattled into the court-yard of Father Gasparo dropped on his knees to look for it the hotel. but if the devil had not spirited it away, there was no jj I gave my keys to the most faithful and intelligent other reason why that search was in vain. Short of an errand to the goldsmith on the Rialto, it was at last determined the wedding could not proceed. Fa ther Gasparo went to hide his impatience within the restiary, and Turturilla knelt down to pray against the arts of Sathanas. Before they had settled severally to their pious occupations, Pasquali was half way to the Rialto. H;il("an hour elapsed, and then instead of the light grazing of i\ swift-sped gondola along the church stairs, the splash of a sullen oar w-is heard, and Pas- qu;di stepped on shore. They had hastened to the door to receive him monk, choristers rmd bride and to their surprise and bewilderment, he waited to hand out a woman in a strange dress, who seemed dis- of valets an English boy of sixteen, promoted from white top-boots and a cabriolet in London, to a plain coat and almost his master s friendship upon the con tinent and leaving him to find rooms to my taste, make them habitable and get breakfast, I retraced my ! way to ramble a half hour through the aisles of St. Etienne. The lingering bell was still beating its quick and I monotonous call, and just before me, followed closely by a female domestic, a veiled and slightly-formed lady I stepped over the threshold of the cathedral, and look her way by the least-frequented aisle to the altar. I j gave a passing glance of admiration at the small ankle and dainty chaussure betrayed by her hurried step; but remembering with a slight effort that I had sought 134 THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. the church with at least some feeble intentions of re ligious worship, I crossed ihe broad nave to the oppo site side, and was soon leaning against a pillar, and listening to the heavenly-breathed music of the volun tary, with a confused, but I trust, not altogether un profitable feeling of devotion. The peasants, with their baskets standing beside them on the tesselated floor, counted their beads upon their knees ; the murmur, low-toned and universal, rose through the vibrations of the anthem with an ac companiment upon which I have always thought the great composers calculated, no less than upon the echoing arches, and atmosphere thickened with in cense ; and the deep-throated priest muttered his Latin prayer, more edifying to me that it left my thoughts to their own impulses of worship, unde- meaned by the irresistible littleness of criticism, and unchecked by the narrow bounds of another s com prehension of the Divinity. Without being in any leaning of opinion a son of the church of Rome, I confess my soul gets nearer to heaven ; and my re ligious tendencies, dulled and diverted from improve ment by a life of travel and excitement, are more gratefully ministered to, in the indistinct worship of the catholics. It seems to me that no man can pray- well through the hesitating lips of another. The inflated style or rhetorical efforts of many, addres sing Heaven with difficult grammar and embarrass ed logic and the weary monotony of others, re peating without interest and apparently without thought, the most solemn appeals to the mercy of the Almighty are imperfect vehicles, at least to me, for a fresh and apprehensive spirit of worship. The religious architecture of the catholics favors the solitary prayer of the heart. The vast floor of the cathedral, the far receding aisles with their solemn light, to which penetrate only the indistinct murmur of priest and penitent, and the affecting wail or tri umphant hallelujah of the choir; the touching atti tudes and utter abandonment of all around to their unarticulated devotions; the freedom to enterand de part, unquestioned and unnoticed, and the wonderful impressiveness of the lofty architecture, clustered with mementoes of death, and presenting through every sense, some unobtrusive persuasion to the duties of the spot all these, I can not but think, are aids, not unimportant to devout feeling, nor to the most careless keeper of his creed and conscience, entirely without salutary use. My eye had been resting unconsciously on the drapery of a statue, upon which the light of a painted oriel window threw the mingled dyes of a peacock. It was the figure of an apostle ; and curious at last to see whence the colors came which turned the saintly garb into a mantle of shot silk, I strayed toward the eastern window, and was studying the gorgeous dyes and grotesque drawing of an art lost to the world, when I discovered that I was in the neighborhood of the pretty figure that had tripped into church so lightly before me. She knelt near the altar, a little forward from one of the heavy gothic pillars, with her maid beside her, and, close behind knelt a gentleman, who I observed at a second glance, was paying his devo tions exclusively to the small foot that peeped from the edge of a snowy peignoir, the dishabille of which was covered and betrayed by a lace-veil and mantle. As I stood thinking what a graceful study her figure would make for a sculptor, and what an irreligious im pertinence was visible in the air of the gentleman be hind, he leaned forward as if to prostrate his face upon the pavement, and pressed his lips upon the slender sole of (I have no doubt) the prettiest shoe in Vienna. The natural aversion which all men have for each other as strangers, was quickened in my bosom by a feeling much more vivid, and said to be quite as natu ralresentment at any demonstration by another of I preference for the woman one has admired. If I have j not mistaken human nature, there is a sort of imagina ry property which every man feels in a woman he has looked upon with even the most transient regard, which is violated malgre lui, by a similar feeling on the part of any other individual. Not sure that the gentleman, who had so suddenly become my enemy, had any warrant in the lady s con nivance for his attentions, I retreated to the shelter of the pillar, and was presently satisfied that he was as I much a stranger to her as myself, and was decidedly i annoying her. A slight advance in her position to j escape his contact gave me the opportunity I wished, and stepping upon the small space between the skirt of her dress and the outpost of his ebony cane, I began to study the architecture of the roof with gre;it serious ness. The gothic order, it is said, sprang from the | first attempts at constructing roofs from the branches ! of trees, and is more perfect as it imitates more closely I the natural wilderness with its tall tree-shafts and in terlacing limbs. With my eyes half shut I endeavor- ! ed to transport myself to an American forest, and con- vert the beams and angles of this vast gothic structure into a primitive temple of pines, with the sunshine coining brokingly through; but the delusion, other- | wise easy enough, was destroyed by the cherubs roost- j ing on the cornices, and the apostles and saints perch- j ed as it were in the branches ; and, spite of myself, I j thought it represented best Shylock s "wilderness of j monkeys." " S il vous plait, monsieur ." said the gentleman, j pulling me by the pantaloons as I was losing myself in these ill-timed speculations. I looked down. " Vous me genez, monsieur . " " J en suis bien sure, monsieur!" and I resumed my study of the roof, turning gradually round till my heels were against his knees, and backing peu-d-peu. It has often occurred to me as a defect in the system of civil justice, that the time of the day at which a crime is committed is never taken into account by judge or jury. The humors of an empty stomach act so ener getically on the judgment and temper of a man, and the same act appears so differently to him, fasting and full, that I presume an inquiry into the subject would prove that few offences against law and human pity were ever perpetrated by villains who had dined. In the adventure before us, the best-disposed reader will condemn my interference in a stranger s gallantries as impertinent and quixotic. Later in the day, I should as soon have thought of ordering water-cresses for the gentleman s dindon aux trvffes. I was calling myself to account something after the above fashion, the gentleman in question standing near 5 me, drumming on his boot with his ebony cane, when the ladv rose, threw her rosary over her neck, and \ turning to me with a graceful smile, courtesied slight- | ly and disappeared. 1 was struck so exceedingly with the intense melancholy in the expression of the face | an expression so totally at variance with the elasticity I 1 of the step, and the promise of the slight and riante | figure and air that I quite forgot I had drawn a j quarrel on myself, and was loitering slowly toward the I door of the church, when the gentleman 1 had offeud- I ed touched me on the arm, and in the politest manner possible requested my address. We exchanged cards, and 1 hastened home to breakfast, musing on the facility with which the current of our daily life may be i thickened. I fancied I had a new love on my hands, and I was tolerably sure of a quarrel yet I had oeen in Vienna but fifty-four minutes by Breguet. My breakfast was waiting, and Percie had found time to turn a comb through his brown curls, and get the dust off his gaiters. He was tall for his age, and (unaware to himself, poor boy !) every word and action reflected upon the handsome seamstress in Cranboutne THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 135 Alley, whom lie called his mother for he showed blood. His father was a gentleman, or there is no truth in thorough-breeding. As I looked at him, a difficulty vanished from my mind. " Percie!" "Sir!" "Get into your best suit of plain clothes, and if a foreigner calls on me this morning, come in and forget that you are a valet. I have occasion to use you for a gentleman." " Yes, sir !" " My pistols are clean, I presume ?" " Yes, sir!" I wrote a letter or two, read a volume of " Ni jamais, ni toujours," and about noon a captain of dragoons was announced, bringing me the expected cartel. Percie came in, treading gingerly in a pa " My friend is not satisfied. He presumes that monsieur I" Anglais wishes to trifle with him." " Then let your fiiend take care of himself/ said I, roused by the unprovoked murderousness of the feel ing. Load the pistols, Percie! In my country," I continued, turning to the dragoon, " a man isdisgraced who fires twice upon an antagonist who has spared him ! Your friend is a ruffian, and the consequences be on his own hand !" We took our places and the first word was given, when a man dashed between us on horseback at top- speed. The violence with which he drew rein brought his horse upon his haunches, and he was on his feet in half a breath. The idea that he was an officer of the police was immediately dissipated by his step and air. Of the finest athletic form I had ever seen, agile, graceful, of tight t rench boots, but behaving exceedingly like I and dressed pointedly well, there was still an inde- a genileman, and alter a little conversation, managed on j finable something about him, either above or below his part str.ctly according to my instructions, he took ! a gentleman which, it was difficult to say. His his cane and walked oft with his fiiend of the steel |i features were slight, fair, and, except a brow too scabbard to become acquainted with the ground. j heavy for them and a lip of singular and (I thought) The gray of a heavenly summer morning was habitual defiance, almost feminine. His hair g rew brightening above the chimneys of the fair city of j long and had been soi^e, probably by mo. Vienna as I stepped into a caliche, followed by Per- j 1 sing fingers than his own, and his rather silk :ie. With a special passport (procured by the polite- less of my antagonist) we made our sortie at that early cie. ness of my antagonist) we made our sortie at that early hour from the gates, and crossing the glacis, took the road to the banks of the Danube. It was but a mile from the city, and the mist lay low on the face of the troubled current of the river, while the towers and pinnacles of the silent capital cut the sky in clear and sharp lines as if tranquillity and purity, those im maculate hand-maidens of nature, had tired of inno cence and their mistress and slept in town ! I had taken some coffee and broiled chicken before starting, and (removed thus from the category of the savage unbreakfasted) I was in one of those moods of to be pro cares- rather silken mus tache was glossy with some odorent oil. As he approached me and took my hand, with a clasp like a smith s vice, I observed these circumstances, and could have drawn his portrait without ever seeing him again so marked a man was he, in every point and feature. His business was soon explained. He was the j husband of the lady my opponent had insulted, and that pleasant gentleman could, of course, make no ob jection to his taking my place. I officiated as temoin, \ and, as they took their position, I anticipated for the ; dragoon and myself the trouble of carrying them both off the field. 1 had a practical assurance of my friend s ! pistol, and the stranger was not the looking man to I miss a hair s breadth of his aim. The word was not fairly off my lips when both pistols cracked like one discharge, and high into the air sprang my revengeful opponent, and dropped like a clod upon the grass. The stranger opened his universal benevolence, said (erroneously) duced only by a clean breast and milk diet. I could have wept, with Wordsworth, over a violet. My opponent was there with his dragoon, and Per cie, cool and gentlemanlike, like a man who "had ._ . ,. ^ ^ .^. served," looked on at the loading of the pistols, and waistcoat", thrust his fore-finger Into TwoTindTn his gave me mine with a very firm hand, but with a mois- j. ] e ft breast, and slightly closing his teeth, pushed a ture and anxiety m his eye which I have remembered bullet through, which had been checked by the bone since. We were to fire any time after the counting j and lodged in the flesh near the skin. The surgeon of three, and having no malice against my friend, | who had accompanied my unfortunate antagonist Jeft whose impertinence to a lady was (really!) no business | the body, which he had found beyond his art, and m, ne ; i iriten ^ ed of course, to throw away my fire, readily gave his assistance to stanch the blood of my preserver; and jumping with the latter into my ca/eche, 1 put Percie upon the stranger s horse, and we drove The first word was given and I looked at my an tagonist, who, I saw at a glance, had no such gentle intentions. He was taking deliberate aim, and in the four seconds that elapsed between the remaining two words, I changed my mind (one thinks so fast when his leisure is limited !) at least twenty times whether I should fire at him or no. * back to Vienna. The market people were crowding in at the gate, the merry peasant girls glanced at us with their blue, German eyes, the shopmen laid out their gay wares to the street, and the tide of life ran on as busily and " Iroisr pronounced the dragoon, from a throat !. ; ,s gayly, though a drop had been extracted, within like a trombone, and with the last thought, up flew \, scarce ten minutes, from its quickest vein. I felt a my hnnd, and as my pistol discharged in the air, my j| revulsion at my heart, and grew faint and sick. Is a friend s shot struck upon a large turquoise which I human life is HIV life worth anything, even wore on my third finger, and drew a slight pencil-line across my left organ of causality. It was well aimed for my temple, but the ring had saved me. Friend of those days, regretted and unforgotten ! days of the deepest sadness and heart-heaviness, yet somehow dearer in remembrance than all the joys I can recall there was a talisman in thy parting gift thou didst not think would be, one day, my angel ! " You will be able to wear your hair over the scar, sir!" said Percie, coming up and putting his finger on the wound. " Monsieur !" said the dragoon, advancing to Per cie after a short conference with his principal, and looking twice as fierce as before. " Monsieur !" said Percie, wheeling short upon him. y life worth anything, even a thought, to my fellow-creatures ? was the bitter question forced upon my soul. How icily and keenly the unconscious indifference of the world penetrates to the nerve and marrow of him who suddenly realizes it. We dashed through the kohl-market, and driving into the porle-cochere of a dark-looking house in one of the cross streets of that quarter, were ushered into apartments of extraordinary magnificence. CHAPTER II. " WHAT do you want, Percie ?" He was walking into the room with all the deli- berate politeness of a " gold-stick-in-waiting." 136 THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. " 1 ben pardon, sit, but I was asked to walk up, and I was not sure whether I was still a gentleman." ji instantly struck me that it might seem rather infra di to the chevalier (my new friend had thus announced himself) to have had a valet for a second, and as he immediately after entered the room, having step ped below to give orders about his horse, I presented Percie as a gentleman and my friend, and resumed my observation of the singular apartment in which I found myself. The effect on coming first in at the door, was that of a small and lofty chapel, where the light struggled in from an unseen aperture above the altar. There were two windows at the farther extremity, but cur tained so heavily, and set so deeply into the wall, that I did not at first observe the six richly-carpeted steps which led up to them, nor the luxuriously cushioned seats on either side of the casement, within the niche, for those who would mount thither for fresh air. The walls were tapestried, but very ragged and dusty, and the floor, though there were several thicknesses of the heavy-piled, small, Turkev carpets laid loosely over it, was irregular and sunken. The corners were heaped with various articles I could not at first distinguish. My host fortunately gave me an opportunity to gratify my curiosity by frequent absences under the house keeper s apology (odd 1 thought for a chevalier) of expediting breakfast; and with the aid of Percie, I tumbled his chattels about with all necessary freedom. " That," said the chevalier, entering, as I turned out the face of a fresh colored picture to the light, " is a capo tVopera of a French artist, who painted it, as you may say, by the gleam of the dagger." " A cool light, as a painter would say !" " He was a cool fellow, sir, and would have handled a broadsword better than a pencil. * Percie stepped up while I was examining the ex quisite finish of the picture, and asked very respect fully if the chevalier would give him the particulars of the story. It was a full-length portrait of a young and excessively beautiful girl, of apparently scarce fifteen, entirely nude, and lying upon a black velvet couch, with one foot laid on a broken diadem, and her right hand pressing a wild rose to her heart. " It was the fancy, sir," continued the chevalier, " of a bold outlaw, who loved the only daughter of a noble of Hungary." " Is this the lady, sir?" asked Percie, in his politest valet French. The chevalier hesitated a moment and looked over his shoulder as if he might be overheard. " This is she copied to the minutest shadow of a hair ! He was a bold outlaw, gentlemen, and had plucked the lady from her father s castle with his own hand." " Against her will ?" interrupted Percie, rather energetically. " No !" scowled the chevalier, as if his lowering brows had articulated the word, " by her own will and connivance: for she loved him." Percie drew a long breath, and looked more close ly at the taper limbs and the exquisitely-chiselled features of the face, which was turned over the shoulder with a look of timid shame inimitably true to nature. " She loved him," continued our fierce narrator, who, I almost began to suspect was the outlaw him self, by the energy with which he enforced the tale, and after a moonlight ramble or two with him in the forest of her father s domain, she fled and became his wife. You are admiring the hair, sir! It is as luxuriant and glossy now !" " If you please, sir, it is the villain himself!" said Percie in an undertone. " Bref," continued the chevalier, either not under standing English or not heeding the interruption, " an adventurous painter, one day hunting the picturesque in the neighborhood of the outlaw s retreat, surprised this fair creature bathing in one of the loneliest moun tain-streams in Hungary. His art appeared to be his first passion, for he hid himself in the trees and drew her as she stood dallying on the margin of the small pool in which the brook loitered; and so busy was he with his own work, or so soft was the mountain moss under its master s tread, that the outlaw looked, un- perceived the while, over his shoulder, and fell in love anew with the admirable counterfeit. She looked like a naiad, sir, new-born of a dew-drop and a violet." I nodded an assent to Percie. "The sketch, excellent as it seemed, was still un finished when the painter, enamored as he might well be, of these sweet limbs, glossy with the shining water, flung down his book and sprang toward her. The outlaw " "Struck him to the heart? Oh Heaven!" said Percie, covering his eyes as if he could see the murder. " No ! he was a student of the human soul, and de ferred his vengeance." Percie looked up and listened, like a man whose wits were perfectly abroad. " He was not unwilling since her person had been seen irretrievably, to know how his shrinking Iminild (this was her name of melody) would have escaped, had she been found alone." " The painter" prompted Percie, impatient for the sequel. " The painter flew over rock and brake, and sprang into the pool in which she was half immersed ; and my brave girl " He hesitated, for he had betrayed himself. "Ay she is mine, gentlemen; and I am Yvain, the outlaw my brave wife, I say with a single bound, leaped to the rock where her dress was concealed, seized a short spear which she used as a staff in lier climbing rambles, and struck it through his shoulder as he pursued !" " Bravely done !" I thought aloud. " Was it not ? I came up the next moment, but the spear stuck in his shoulder, and I could not fall upon a wounded man. We carried him to our ruined castle in the mountains, and while my Iminild cured her own wound, I sent for his paints, and let him finish his bold beginning with a difference of my own. You see the picture." " Was the painter s love cured with his wound !" I asked with a smile. "No, by St. Stephen! He grew ten times more enamored as he drew. He was as fierce as a welk hawk, and as willing to quarrel for his prey. I could have driven my dagger to his heart a hundred limes for the mutter of his lips and the flash of his dark eyes as he fed his gaze upon her ; but he finished the pic ture, and I gave him a fair field. He chose the broad sword, and hacked away at me like a man." "And the result" 1 asked. " I am here !" replied the outlaw significantly. Percie leaped upon the carpeted steps, and pushed back the window for fresh air; and, for myself, 1 scarce knew how to act under the roof of a man, who, though he confessed himself an outlaw and almost an assassin, was bound to me by the ties of our own critical ad venture, and had confided his condition to me with so ready a reliance on my honor. In the rnidst of my dilemma, while I was pretending to occupy myself with examining a silver mounted and peaked saddle, which I found behind the picture i the corner, a deep and unpleasant voice announced breakfast. "Wolfen is rather a grim chamberlain," said the chevalier, bowing with the grace and smile of the softest courtier, " but he will usher you to breakfast and I am sure you stand in need of it. For myself, THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 137 I could eat worse meat than my grandfather with this appetite." Percie gave me a look of inquiry and uneasiness when lie found we were to follow the rough domestic through the dark corridors of the old house, and through his underbred politeness of insisting on fol lowing his host, I could see that he was unwilling to trust the outlaw with the rear; but a massive and broad door, flung open at the end of the passage, let in upon us presently the cool and fresh air from a northern exposure, and, stepping forward quickly to ; the threshold, we beheld a picture which changed the | current and color of our thoughts. In the bottom of an excavated area, which, as well as I could judge, must be forty feet below the level of the court, lay a small and antique garden, j brilliant with the most costly flowers, and cooled by ! a fountain gushing from under the foot of a nymph in marble. The spreading tops of six alleys of lindens reaching to the level of the street, formed a living roof to the grot-like depths of the garden, and con- [ cealed it from all view but that of persons descend ing like ourselves from the house; while, instead of | walls to shut in this paradise in the heart of a city, I sharply inclined slopes of green-sward leaned in ! under the branches of the lindens, and completed the j fairy-like enclosure of shade and verdure. As we | descended the rose-laden steps and terraces, I ob- j served, that, of the immense profusion of flowers in ! the area below, nearly all were costly exotics, whose j pots were set in the earth, and probably brought , away from the sunshine only when in high bloom; and as we rounded the spreading basin of the foun tain which broke the perspective of the alley, a table, which had been concealed by the marble nymph, and a skilfully-disposed array of rhododendrons lay just beneath our feet, while a lady, whose features i 1 could not fail to remember, smiled up from her couch of crimson cushions and gave us a graceful welcome. The same taste for depth which had been shown in the room sunk below the windows, and the garden below the street, was continued in the kind of mar ble divan in which we were to breakfast. Four steps j descending from the pavement of the alley introduc ed us into a circular excavation, whose marble seats, covered with cushions of crimson silk, surrounded a table laden with the substantial viands which are common to a morning meal in Vienna, and smoking with coffee, whose aroma (Percie agreed with me) exceeded even the tube roses in grateful sweetness. Between the cushions at our backs and the pave ments just above the level of our heads, were piled cir cles of thickly-flowering geraniums, which enclosed us in rings of perfume, and, pouring from the cup of a sculptured flower, held in the hand of the nymph, a smooth stream like a silver rod supplied a ctiannel grooved around the centre of the marble table, through which the bright water, with the impulse of itsdescent, made a swift revolution and disappeared. It was a scene to give memory the lie if it could have recalled the bloodshed of the morning. The green light decked down through the lofty roof upon the glittering and singing water ; a nightingale in a recess of the garden, gurgled through his wires as if intoxicated with the congenial twilight of his prison ; the heavy-cupped flowers of the tropics nodded with the rain of the fountain spray; the distant roll of wheels in the neighboring streets came with an assurance of reality to this dream-land, yet softened by the unreverberating roof and an air crowded with flowers and trembling with the pulsations of falling water; the lowering forehead of the outlaw cleared up like a sky of June after a thunder-shower, ami his voice grew gentle and caressing ; and the delicate mistress of all (by birth, Countess Iminild), a crea- ture as slight as Psyche, and as white as the lotus, whose flexile stem served her for" a bracelet, wel comed us with her soft voice and humid eyes, and saddened by the event of the morning, looked on her husband with a tenderness that would have assoiled her of her sins against delicacy, I thought even in the mind of an angel. " We live, like truth, here, in the bottom of a well," said the countess to Percie. as she gave him his cof fee ; " how do you like my whimsical abode, sir?" " I should like any place where you were, Miladi !" he answered, blushing and stealing his eyes across at me, either in doubt how far he might presume upon his new character, or suspecting that I should smile at his gallantry. The outlaw glanced his eyes over the curling head of the boy, with one of those just perceptible smiles which developed, occasionally, in great beauty, the gentle spirit in his bosom : and I mini hi. pleased with the compliment or the blush, threw off her pensive mood, and assumed in an instant, the coquettish air which had attracted my notice as she stepped before me into the church of St. Ktienne. "You had hard work," she said, "to keep up with your long-legged dragoon yesterday, Monsieur Percie !" " [Miladi ?" he answered, with a look of inquiry. "Oh, I was behind you, and my legs are not much longer than yours. How he strided aw.iy with his long spurs, to be sure ! Do you remember a smart young gentleman with a blue cap that walked past you on the glacis occasionally." Ah, witli laced boots, like a Hungarian ?" I see I am ever to be known by my foot," said she, putting it out upon the cushion, and turning it about with naive admiration ; " that poor captain of the imperial guard paid dearly for kissing it, holy virgin !" and she crossed herself and was silent for a moment. " If I might take the freedom, chevalier," I said, " pray how came I indebted to your assistance in this affair ?" "Iminild has partly explained," he answered. " She knew, of course, that a challenge would follow your interference, and it was very easy to know that an officer of some sort would take a message in the course of the morning to Le Prince Charles, the only hotel frequented by the English d un certain gens. I bowed to the compliment. " Arriving in Vienna late last night, I found Iminild (who had followed this gentleman and the diagoou unperceived) in possession of all the circumstances; and, but for oversleeping myself this morning. 1 should have saved your turquoise, nvm seigneur . " " Have you lived here long, Miladi ?" asked Per cie, looking up into her eyes with an unconscious passionateness which made the countess Iminild color slightly, and bite her lips to retain au expression of pleasure. " I have not lived long, anywhere, sir!" she nnswer- ed half archly, "but I played in this garden when not much older than you!" Percie looked confused and pulled tip his crnvnt. " This house said the chevalier, willing apparently to spare the countess a painful narration, " is the property of the old count lldefert, my wile s lather. He has long ceased to visit Vienna, and has left it, he supposes, to a stranger. When Iminild tires ol the forest, she comes here, and I join her if I can find time. Imusttothesaddle to-morrow, by St. Jacques!" The word had scarce died on his lips when the door by which we had entered the garden was flung open, j and the measured tread of gens-d armes resounded in I the corridor. The first man who stood out upon the upper terrace was the dragoon who had been second to my opponent. 138 THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. Traiter and villain !" muttered the outlaw between his teeth, "I thought I remembered you ! It is that false comrade Berthold, Iminild !" Yvain had risen from the table as if but to stretch his legs; and drawing a pistol from his bosom he cocked it as he quietly stepped up into the garden. I saw at a glance that there was no chance for his escape, and laid my hand on his arm. " Chevalier !" I said, " surrender and trust to op portunity. It is madness to resist here." Yvain !" said Iminild, in a low voice, flying to his side as she comprehended his intention, " leave me that vengeance, and try the parapet. I ll kill him be fore he sleeps! Quick ! Ah, Heavens !" The dragoon had turned at that instant to fly, and with suddenness of thought the pistol flashed, and the traitor dropped heavily on the terrace. Spring ing like a cat up the slope of green sward, Yvain stood an instant on the summit of the wall, hesitating where to jump beyond, and in the next moment rolled heavily back, stabbed through and through with a bayonet from the opposite side. The blood left the lips and cheek of Iminild; but without a word or a sign of terror, she sprang to the side of the fallen outlaw and lifted him up against her knee. The gens-d armes rushed to the spot, but the subaltern who commanded them yielded instantly to my wish that they should retire to the skirts of the garden; and, send ing Percie to the fountain for water, we bathed the lips and forehead of the dying man and set him against the sloping parapet. With one hand grasping the dress of Iminild and the other clasped in mine, he struggled to speak. " The cross !" he gasped, "the cross !" Iminild drew a silver crucifix from her bosom. "Swear on this," he said, putting it to my lips and speaking with terrible energy, swear that you will protect her while you live !" " I swear!" He shut our hands together convulsively, gasped slightly as if he would speak again, and, in another instant sunk, relaxed and lifeless, on the shoulder of Iminild. CHAPTER III. THE fate and history of Yvain, the outlaw, became, on the following day, the talk of Vienna. He had been long known as the daring horse-stealer of Hun gary ; and, though it was not doubted that his sway- was exercised over plunderers of every description, even pirates upon the high seas, his own courage and address were principally applied to robbery of the well- guarded steeds of the emperor and his nobles. It was said that there was not a horse in the dominions of Austria whose qualities and breeding were not known to him, nor one he cared to have which was not in his concealed stables in the forest. The most incredible stories were told of his horsemanship. He would so disguise the animal on which he rode, either by forcing him into new paces or by other arts only known to him self, that he would make the tour of the Glacis on the emperor s best horse, newly stolen, unsuspected even by the royal grooms. The roadsters of his own troop were the best steeds bred on the banks of the Danube; but, though always in the highest condition, they would never have been suspected to be worth a florin till put upon their mettle. The extraordinary escapes of his band from the vigilant and well-mounted gens- d armes were thus accounted for ; and, in most of the villages in Austria, the people, on some market-day or other, had seen a body of apparently ill-mounted peasants suddenly start off with the speed of lightning at the appearance of gens-d armes, and, flying over fence and wall, draw a straight course for the mount ains, distancing their pursuers with the ease of swal lows on the wing. After the death of Yvain in the garden, I had been forced with Percie into a carriage, standing in the court, and accompanied by a guard, driven to my hotel, where I was given to understand that I was to remain under arrest till further orders. A sentinel at the door forbade all ingress or egress except to the people of the house: a circumstance which was only distressing to me, as it precluded my inquiries after the countress Iminild, of whom common rumor, the servants informed me, made not the slightest mention. Four days after this, on the relief of the guard at noon, a subaltern, entered my room and informed me that I was at liberty. I instantly made preparations to go out, and was drawing on my boots, when Percie, who had not yet recovered from the shock of his arrest, entered in some alarm, and informed me that one of the royal grooms was in the court with a letter, which he would deliver only into my own hands. He had orders beside, he said, not to leave his saddle. Wondering what new leaf of my destiny was to turn over, I went below and received a letter, with apparent- j ly the imperial seal, from a well-dressed groom in the : livery of the emperor s brother, the king of Hungary. j He was mounted on a compact, yet fine-limbed horse, I and both horse and rider were as still as if cut in j marble. I returned to my room and broke the seal. It was a letter from Iminild, and the bold bearer was an out law disguised ! She had heard that I was to be re leased that morning, and desired me to ride out on the road to Gratz. In a postscript she begged I would request Monsieur Percie to accompany me. I sent for horses, and, wishing to be left to my own thoughts, ordered Percie to fall behind, and rode slowly out of the southern gate. If the countess Iminild were safe, I had enough of the adventure for my taste. My oath bound me to protect this wild and unsexed woman, but farther intercourse with a band of outlaws, or farther peril of my head for no reason that either a court of gallantry orof justice would rec ognise, was beyond my usual programme of pleasant events. The road was a gentle ascent, and with the bridle on the neck of my hack I paced thoughtfully on, till, at a slight turn, we stood at a fair height above Vienna. " It is a beautiful city, sir," said Percie, riding up. " How the deuce could she have escaped ?" said I, thinking aloud. " Has she escaped, sir ? Ah, thank Heaven !" ex claimed the passionate boy, the tears rushing to his eyes. " Why, Percie !" I said with a tone of surprise which called a blush into his face, " have you really found leisure to fall in love amid all this imbroglio?" " I beg pardon, my dear master !" he replied in a confused voice, "I scarce know what it is to fall in love ; but I would die for Miladi Iminild." "Not -at all an impossible sequel, my poor boy! But wheel about and touch your hat, for here comes some one of the royal family !" A horseman was approaching at an easy canter, I over the broad and unfenced plain of table-land which j overlooks Vienna on the south, attended by sixmount- | ed servants in the white kerseymere frocks, braided with the two-headed black eagle, which distinguish the j members of the imperial household. The carriages on the road stopped while he passed, j the foot-passengers touched their caps, and, as he came near, I perceived that he. was slight and young, but rode with a confidence and a grace not often attained. His horse had the subdued, half-fiery action of an 1 Arab, and Percie nearly dropped from his saddle when I the young horseman suddenly drove in his spurs, THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 139 and with almost a single vault stood motionless be fore us. " Monsieur /" " Madame la Contesse . " I was uncertain how to receive her, and took refuge in civility. Whether she would be overwhelmed with the recollection of Yvain s death, or had put away the thought altogether with her masculine firmness, was a dilemma for which the eccentric contradictions of her character left me no probable solution. Motion ing with her hand after saluting me, two of the party rode back and forward in different directions, as if patrolling; and giving a look between a tear and a smile at Percie, she placed her hand in mine, and shook off her sadness with a strong effort. " You did not expect so large a suite with your protegee," she said, rather gayly, after a moment. " Do I tinderstand that you come now to put your self under my protection ?" I asked in reply. It had been a long summer s day, and, contrary to my usual practice, 1 had riot mounted, even for half a post, to Percie s side in the rumble. Out of humor with fate for having drawn me into very embarrassing circumstances out of humor with myself for the quixotic step which had first brought it on me and a little ol out hutnor with Percie (perhaps from an un acknowledged jealousy of Iminild s marked preference for the varlet), I left him to toast alone in the sun, while I tried to forget him and myself in " Le Marquis de Pontangos." What a very clever book it is, by the way ! The pompous sergeant of the guard performed his office upon my passport at the gate giving me at least a kreutzer worth of his majesty s black sand in exchange for my florin and my English curse (I said before I was out of temper, and he was half an hour writing his abominable name), and leaving my carriage and Percie to find their way together to the hotel, I " Soon, but not now, nor here. I have a hundred I dismounted at the foot of a steep street and made my way to the battlements of the castle, in search of scene ry and equanimity. Ah ! what a glorious landscape ! The precipitous rock on which the old fortress is built seems dropped by the Titans in the midst of a plain, extending miles men at the foot of Mount Semering, whose future fate, in some important respects, none can decide but myself. Yvain was always prepared for this, and everything is en train. I come now but to appoint a place of meeting. Quick ! my patrole comes in, and some one approaches whom we must fly. Can you await me at Gratz ? " I can and will !" She put her slight hand to my lips, waved a kiss at Percie, and away with the speed of wind, flew her swift Arab over the plain, followed by the six horse men, every one of whom seemed part of the animal that carried him he rode so admirably. The slight figure of Iminild in the close fitting dress of a Hungarian page, her jacket open and her beauti ful limbs perfectly defined, silver fringes at her ankles and waist, and a row of silver buttons gallonne down to the instep, her bright, flashing eyes, her short curls escaping from her cap and tangled over her left temple, with the gold tassel, dirk and pistol at her belt and spurs upon her heels it was an apparition I had scarce time to realize, but it seemed painted on my in every direction, with scarce another pebble. Close at its base run the populous streets, coiling about it like serpents around a pyramid, and away from the walls of the city spread the broad fields, laden, as far as the eye can see, with tribute for the emperor! The tall castle, with its armed crest, looks down among the reapers. " You hive not lost your friend and lover, yet you are melancholy !" said a voice behind me, that I was scarce startled to hear. "Is it you, Iminild ?" " Scarce the same for Iminild was never before so sad. It is something in the sunset. Come away while the woman keeps down in me, and let us stroll through the Plaza, where the band is playing. Do you love military music ?" 1 looked at the costume and figure of the extra- eyes. The cloud of dust which followed their rapid ordinary creature before I ventured with her on a flight faded away as I watched it, but I saw her still. "Shall I ride back and order post-horses, sir!" asked Percie standing up in his stirrups. " No ; but you may order dinner at six. And Per cie !" he was riding away with a gloomy air; "you may go to the police and get our passports for Venice." " By the way of Gratz, sir!" " Yes, simpleton !" There is a difference between sixteen and twenty- six, I thought to myself, as the handsome boy flogged his horse into a gallop. The time is gone when I coul.l love without reason. Yet 1 remember when a feather, stuck jauntily into a bonnet, would have made any woman a princess; and in those days, Heaven help us ! I should have loved this woman more for her galliardize than ten times a prettier one with all the virtues of Dorcas. For which of my sins am I made guardian to a robber s wife, I wonder ! The heavy German postillions, with their cocked hats and yellow coats, got us over the ground after a manner, and toward the sunset of a summer s evening the tall castle of Gratz, perched on a pinnacle of rock in the centre of a vast plain, stood up boldly against the reddening sky. The rich fields of Styria were ripening to an early harvest, the people sat at their doors with the look of household happiness for which the inhabitants of these "despotic countries" are so remarkable ; and now and then on the road the rattling of steel scabbards drew my attention from a book or a reveiy, and the mounted troops, so perpetually seen on the broad roads of Austria, lingered slowly past with their dust and baggage-trains. public promenade. She was dressed like one of thf travelling apprentices of Germany, with cap and bleuzcr. and had assumed the air of the craft with a success ! absolutely beyond detection. I gave her my arm and I we sauntered through the crowd, listening lo the thrilling music of one of the finest bands in Germany. j The privileged character and free manners of tho wandering craftsmen whose dress she had adopted, I was well aware, reconciled, in the eyes of the in habitants, the marked contrast between our conditions in life. They would simply have said, if they had made a remark at all, that the Englishman was Ion enfant and the craftsman bon camarade. " You had better look at me, messieurs !" said the dusty apprentice, as two officers of the regiment passed and gave me the usual strangers stare ; " f am better worth your while by exactly five thousand florins." " And pray how ?" I asked. " That price is set on my head !" "Heavens! and you walk here !" " They kept you longer than usual with your pass port, I presume ?" " At the gate? yes." " I came in with my pack at the, time. They have orders to examine all travellers and passports with unusual care, these sharp officials ! But I shall get I out as easily as I got in !" "My dear countess!" I said, in a tone of serious do not trifle with the vigilance of the My remonstrance, best police in Europe! I am your guardian, and you owe my advice some respect. Come away from the square and let us talk of it in eainest." "Wise seignior! suffer me to remind you how 140 THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. defily I slipped through the fingers of these gentry after our tragedy in Vienna, and pay w/ opinion some respect! It was my vanity that brought me, with my lackeys, to meet you a la prince royale so near Vienna ; and hence this alarm in the police, for 1 was seen and suspected. I have shown myself to you in my favorite character, however, and have done with such measures. You shall see me on the road to-morrow, safe as the heart in your bosom. Where is Monsieur Percie !" " At the hotel. But stay ! can I trust you with yourself?" " Yes, and dull company, too ! A revoir /" And whistling the popular air of the craft she had ! assumed, the countess Iminild struck her long staff j on the pavement, and with the gait of a tired and I habitual pedestrian, disappeared by a narrow street | Jeading under the precipitory battlements of the ! castle. Percie made his appearance with a cup of coffee ! the following morning, and, with the intention of post- j ing a couple of leagues to breakfast, I hurried through my toilet and was in my carriage an hour after sun- i rise. The postillion was in his saddle and only waited for Percie, who, upon inquiry, was nowhere to be found. I sat fifteen minutes, and just as I was be ginning to be alarmed he ran into the large court of the hotel, and, crying out to the postillions that all was right, jumped into his place with an agility, it struck me, very unlike his usual gantlemanlike deliberation. Determining to take advantage of the first up hill to catechize him upon his matutinal ram bles, I read the signs along the street till we pulled up at the gate. Iminild s communication had prepared me for un usual delay with my passport, and I was not surprised when the officer, in returning it to me, requested me as a matter of form, to declare, upon my honor, that the servant behind my carriage was an Englishman, and the person mentioned in my passport. " Foi d honneur, monsieur," 1 said, placing my hand politely on my heart, and off trotted the postillion, while the 1 caplainof the guard, flattered with my civili ty, touched his foraging-cap. and sent me a German blessing through his mustache. It was a divine morning, and the fresh and dewy air took me back many a year, to the days when I was more familiar with the hour. We had a long trajet across the plain, and unlooping an antivibralion tablet, for the invention of which my ingenuity took great credit to itself (suspended on caoutchouc cords from the roof of the carriage and deserving of a patent I trust you will allow !) I let off my poetical vein in the following beginning to what might have turned out, but for the interruption, a very edifying copy of verses : " Ye are not what 3 r e were to me, Oh waning night and morning star ! Though silent still your watches flee- Though hang yon lamp in heaven as far Thoueh live the thoughts ye fed of yore I m thine, oh starry dawn, no more if Yet to that dew-pe irled hour alone I was not folly s blindest child ; It came when wearied mirth had flown, And sleep was on the gay and wild ; And wakeful with repentant pain, 1 lay amid its lap of flowers, And with a truant s earnest brain Turned hack the leaves of wnsted hours. The angels that by day would floe, Returned, oh morning star ! with thee ! Yet now again * * * A foot thrust into my carriage-window rudely broke the thread of these delicate musings. The postillion was on a walk, and before I could get my wits back from their wool-gathering, the countess Iminild, in Percie s clothes, sat laughing on the cushion beside me. "On what bird s back has your ladyship descended from the clouds ?" I asked with unfeigned astonish ment. The same bird has brought us both down c est a dire, if you are not still en / air," she added, looking from my scrawled tablets to my perplexed face. "Are you really and really the countess Iminild ?" I asked with a smile, looking down at the trowsered feet and loose-fitting boots of the pseudo-valet. " Yes, indeed ! but I leave it to you to swear, fid cVhonneurJ that a born countess is an English valet !" And she laughed so long and merrily that the postillion looked over his yellow epaulets in as tonishment. " Kind, generous Percie ! " she said, changing her tone presently to one of great feeling, " I would scarce believe him last night when he informed me, as as in ducement to leave him behind, that he was only a ser vant! You never told me this. But he is a gentle man, in every feeling as well as in every feature, and, by Heavens! he shall be a menial no longer!" This speech, begun with much tenderness, rose, toward the close, to the violence of passion ; and folding her arms with an air of defiance, the lady- outlaw threw herself back in the carriage. " I have no objection," I said, after a short silence, " that Percie should set up for a gentleman. Nature has certainly done her part to make him one ; but till you can give him means and education, the coat which you wear, with such a grace, is his safest shell. Ants live safely till they have gotten wings, says the old proverb." The blowing of the postillion s horn interrupted the argument, and, a moment after, we were rolled up, withGerman leisure, to the doorof the small inn where I had designed to breakfast. Thinking it probable that the people of the house, in so small a village, would be too simple to make any dangerous comments upon our appearance, I politely handed the countess out of the carriage, and ordered plates for two. " It is scarce worth while," she said, as she heard the order, " fot I shall remain at the door on the look out. The eil-waggen, for Trieste, which was to leave Gratz an hour after us, will be soon here, and (if my friends have served me well), Percie in it. St. Mary speed him safely !" She strode away to a small hillock to look out for the lumbering diligence, with a gait that was no stranger to, "doublet and hose." ft soon came on with its usual tempest of whip-cracking and bugle-blasts, and nearly overturning a fat burgher, who would have proffered the assistance of his hand, out jumped a petticoat, which I saw, at a glance, gave a very em barrassed motion to gentleman Percie. " This young lady," said the countess, dragging the striding and unwilling damsel into the little parlor where I was breakfasting " travels under the charge of a deaf old brazier, who has been requested to protect her modesty as far as Laybach. Make a courtesy, child!" " I beg pardon, sir !" began Percie. " Hush, hush! no English ! Walls have ears, and your voice is rather gruffish, mademoiselle. Show me your passport? Cunegunda Von Krakcnjiatc, eighteen years of age, blue eyes, nose and chin mid dling, etc ! Tliere is the conductor s horn ! Atlez vile ! We meet at Laybach. Adieu, charmante feninie ! Adieu!" And with the sort of caricatured elegance which women always assume in their imitations of our sex, Countess Iminild, in frock-coat and trowsers, helped into the diligence, in hood and petticoat, my " tiger" from Cranbourne-alley ! THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. HI CHAPTER IV. SPITE of remonstrance on my part, the imperative countess, who had asserted her authority more than once on our way to Laybach, insisted on the com pany of Miss Cunegunda Von Krakenpate, in an evening walk around the town. Fearing that Per- cie s masculine stride would betray him, and object ing to lend myself to a farce with my valet, I opposed the freak as ibug as it was courteous but it was not j the first time I had learned that a spoiled woman would have her own way, and too vexed to laugh, I I soberly promenaded the broad avenue of the capital j of Styria, with a valet en demoiselle, and a dame en j valet. It was but a few hours hence to Planina, and Iminild, who seemed to fear no risk out of a walled city, waited on Percie to the carriage the following morning, and in a few hours we drove up to the rural inn of this small town of Littorale. I had been too much out of humor to ask the countess, a second time, what errand she could have | in so rustic a neighborhood. She had made a mystery of it, merely requiring of me that I should defer all arrangements for the future, as far as she was concern ed, till we had visited a spot in Littorale, upon which her fate in many respects depended. After twenty fruitless conjectures, I abandoned myself to the course j of circumstances, reserving only the determination, if it should prove a haunt of Yvain s troop, to separate at once from her company and await her at Trieste? Our dinner was preparing bt the inn, and tired of the embarrassment Percie exhibited in my presence, I walked out and seated myself under an immense linden, that every traveller will remember, standing in the centre of the motley and indescribable clusters of buildings, which serve the innkeeper and black smith of Planina for barns, forge, dwelling, and out houses. The tree seems the father of the village. It was a hot afternoon, and I was compelled to dis pute the shade with a congregation of cows and double- jointed posthorses ; but finding a seat high up on the root, at last I busied myself with gazing down the road, and conjecturing what a cloud of dust might con- j tain, which, in an opposite direction from that which j we had come, was slowly creeping onward to the inn. i Four roughly-harnessed horses at length, appeared, with their traces tied over their backs one of them ridden by a man in a farmer s frock. They struck me , at first as fine specimens of the German breed of draught-horses, with their shaggy fetlocks and long ! manes ; but while they drank at the trough which stood in the shade of the linden, the low tone in which the man checked their greedy thirst, and the instant obedience of the well-trained animals, awakened at once my suspicions that we were to becon^p better acquainted. A more narrow examination convinced me that, covered with dust and disguised with coarse | harness as they were, they were four horses of such bone and condition, as were never seen in a farmer s stables. The rider dismounted at the inn door, and very much to the embarrassment of my suppositions, the landlord, a stupid and heavy Boniface, greeted him j with the familiarity of an old acquaintance, and in an- I swer, apparently to an inquiry, pointed to my carriage, I and led him into the house. " Monsieur Tyrell," said Iminild, coming out to me a moment after, " a servant whom I had expected has arrived with my horses, and with your consent, they shall be put to your carriage immediately." " To take us where 1" " To our place of destination." " Too indefinite, by half, countess ! Listen to me ! I have very sufficient reason to fancy that, in leaving the post-road to Trieste, I shall leave the society of honest men. You and your minions of the moon 10 may be very pleasant, but you are not very safe com panions ; and having really a wish to die quietly in my bed " The countess burst into a laugh. " If you will have the character of the gentleman you are about to visit from the landlord here " "Who is one of your ruffians himself, I ll be sworn!" " No, on my honor ! A more innocent old beer- I guzzler lives not on the road. But I will tell you thus much, and it ought to content you. Ten miles to the west of this dwells a country gentleman, who, the landlord will certify, is as honest a subject of his gracious majesty as is to be found in Littorale. He lives freely on his means, and entertains strangers occasionally from all countries, for he has been a traveller in his time. You are invited to pass a day or two with this Mynheer Krakenpate (who, by the way, has no objection to pass for father of the young lady you have so kindly brought from Laybach), and he has sent you his horses, like a generous host, to bring you to his door. More seriously, this was a retreat of Yvain s, where he would live quietly and play ban citoyen, and you have nothing earthly to fear in accompanying me thither. And now will you wait and eat the greasy meal you have ordered, or will you save your appetite for la fortune de pot at Mynheer Krakenpate s, and get presently on the road !" I yielded rather to the seducing smile and capti vating beauty of my pleasing ward, than to any con fidence in the honesty of Mynheer Krakenpate ; and Percie being once more ceremoniously handed in, we left the village at the sober trot becoming the fat steeds of a landholder. A quarter of a mile of this was quite sufficient for Iminild, and a word to the postillion changed, like a metamorphosis, both horse and rider. From a heavy unelastic figure, he rose into a gallant and withy horseman, and, with one of his low-spoken words, away flew the four compact animals, treading lightly as cats, and. with the greatest apparent ease, putting us over the ground at the rate of fourteen miles in the hour. The dust was distanced, a pleasant breeze was created by the motion, and when at last we turned from the main road, and sped off to the right at the same exhilarating pace, I returned Iminild s arch look of remonstrance with my best-hurnofed smile and an affectionate jemefe d rous! Miss Krakenpate, I observed, echoed the sentiment by a slight pressure of the countess s arm, looking very innocently out of the window all the while. A couple of miles, soon done, brought us round the face of a craggy precipice, forming the brow of a hill, and with a continuation of the turn, we drew up at the gate of a substantial-looking building, something be- ; tween a villa and a farm-house, built against the rock, as if for the purpose of shelter from the north winds. | Two beautiful Angora hounds sprang out at the noise, and recognised Iminild through all her disguise, and presently, with a look offorced courtesy, as if not quite sure whether he might throw off the mask, a stout j man of about fifty, hardly a gentleman, yet above a common peasant in his manners, stepped forward from the garden to give Miss Krakenpate his assistance in alighting. "Dinner in half an hour!" was Iminild s brief greeting, and, stepping between her bowing dependant and Percie, she led the way into the house. I was shown into a chamber, furnished scarce above i the common style of a German inn, where I made a hungry man s despatch in my toilet, and descended at once to the parlor. The doors were all open upon ! the ground floor, and, finding myself quite alone, I I sauntered from room to room, wondering at the scanti- j ness of the furniture and general air of discomfort, and scarce able to believe that the same mistress presided j over this and the singular paradise in which I had 142 THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. first found her at Vienna. After visiting every corner of the ground floor with a freedom which I assumed in my character as guardian, it occurred to me that I had not yet found the dining-room, and I was making a new search, when Iminild entered. I have said she was a beautiful woman. She was dressed now in the Albanian costume, with the addi tional gorgeousness of gold embroidery, which might distinguish the favorite child of a chief of Suli. it was the male attire, with a snowy white juktanilla reaching to the knee, a short jacket of crimson velvet, and a close-buttoned vest of silver cloth, fitting ad mirably to her girlish bust, and leaving her slender and pearly neck to rise bare and swan-like into the masses of her clustering hair. Her slight waist was defined by the girdle of fine linen edged with fringe of gold, which was tied coquettishly over her left side and fell to her ankle, and below the embroidered leggin appear ed the fairy foot, which had drawn upon me all this long train of adventure, thrust into a Turkish slipper with a sparkling emerald on its instep. A. feroniere of the yellowest gold sequins bound her hair back from her temples, and this was the only confinement to the dark brown meshes which, in wavy lines and in the richest profusion, fell almost to her feet. The only blemish to this vision of loveliness was a flush about her eyes. The place had recalled Yvain to her memory. " I am about to disclose to you secrets," said she, laying her hand on my arm, " which have never been re vealed but to the most trusty of Yvain s confederates. To satisfy those whom you will meet you must swear to me on the same cross which he pressed to your lips when dying, that you will never violate, while I live, the trust we repose in you." " I will take no oath," I said ; " for you are leading me blindfolded. If you are not satisfied with the assurance that I can betray no confidence which honor would preserve, hungry as I am, I will yet dine in Planina." " Then I will trust to the faith of an Englishman. And now I have a favor, not to beg, but to insist upon that from this moment you consider Percie as dis missed from your service, and treat him, while here at least, as my equal and friend." " Willingly !" I said ; and as the word left my lips, enter Percie in the counterpart dress of Iminild, with a silver-sheathed ataghan at his side, and the bluish muzzles of a pair of Egg s hair-triggers peeping from below his girdle. To do the rascal justice, he was as handsome in his new toggery as his mistress, and carried it as gallantly. They would have made the prettiest tableau as Juan and Haidee. " Is there any chance that these persuaders may be necessary," I asked, pointing to his pistols which awoke in my mind a momentary suspicion. No none that I can foresee but they are loaded. A favorite, among men whose passions are profession ally wild," she continued with a meaning glance at Percie ; " should be ready to lay his hand on them, even if stirred in his sleep !" I had been so accustomed to surprises of late, that I scarce started to observe, while Iminild was speak ing, that an old-fashioned clock, which stood in a niche in the wall, was slowly swinging out upon hinges. A narrow aperture of sufficient breadth to admit one person at a time, was disclosed when it had made its entire revolution, and in it stood, with a lighted torch, the stout landlord Von Krakenpate. Iminild looked at me an instant as if to enjoy my surprise. " Will you lead me in to dinner, Mr. Tyrell?" she said at last, with a laugh. " If we are to follow Mynheer Von Krakenpate," I replied, " give me hold of the skirt of your juktanilla, rather, and let me follow ! Do we dine in the cellar ?" I stepped before Percie, who was inclined to take advantage of rriy hesitation to precede me, and fol lowed the countess into the opening, which, from the position of the house, I saw must lead directly into the face of the rock. Two or three descending steps convinced me that it was a natural opening en larged by art ; and after one or two sharp turns, and a descent of perhaps fifty feet, we came to a door which, suddenly flung open by our torch-bearer, deluged the dark passage with a blaze of light which the eyesight almost refused to bear. Recovering from my amazement, I stepped over the threshold of the door, and stood upon a carpet in a gallery of sparkling stalactites, the dazzling reflection of innu merable lamps flooding the air around, and a long snow-white vista of the same brilliancy and effect stretching downward before me. Two ridges of the calcareous strata running almost parallel over our heads, formed the cornices of the descending corridor, and from these, with a regularity that seemed like design, the sparkling pillars, white as alabaster, and shaped like inverted cones, dropped nearly to the floor, their transparent points resting on the peaks of the corresponding stalagmites, which, of a darker hue and coarser grain, seemed designed as bases to a new order of architectural columns. The reflection from the pure crystalline rock gave to this singular gallery a splendor which only the palace of Aladdin could have equalled. The lamps were hung between in irregular but effective ranges, and in our descent, like Thalaba, who refreshed his dazzled eyes in the desert of snow by looking on the green wings of the spirit bird, I was compelled to bend my eyes per petually for relief upon the soft, dark masses of hair which floated upon the lovely shoulders of Iminild. At the extremity of the gallery we turned short to the right, and followed an irregular passage, some times so low that we could scarce stand upright, but all lighted with the same intense brilliancy, and formed of the same glittering and snow-white substance. We had been rambling on thus far perhaps ten minutes, when suddenly the air, which I had felt uncomfort ably chill, grew warm and soft, and the low reverbera tion of running water fell delightfully on our ears. Far ahead we could see two sparry columns standing close together, and apparently closing up the way. " Courage! my venerable guardian !" cried Iminild, laughing over her shoulder ; " you will see your dinner presently. Are you hungry, Percie ?" " Not while you look back, Madame la Comtesse !" answered the callow gentleman, with an instinctive tact at his new vocation. We stood at the two pillars which formed the ex tremity of the passage, and looked down upon a scene of which all description must be faint and imperfect. A hundred feet below ran a broad subterraneous river, whose waters sparkling in the blaze of a thousand torches, sprang into light from the deepest darkness, crossed with foaming rapidity the bosom of the vast illuminated cavern, and disappeared again in the same inscrutable gloom. Whence it came or whither it fled was a mystery beyond the reach of the eye. The deep recesses of the cavern seemed darker for the in tense light gathered about the centre. After the first few minutes of bewilderment, I en deavored to realize in detail the wondrous scene be- I fore me. The cavern was of an irregular shape, but all studded above with the same sparry incrustation, i thousands upon thousands of pendent stalactites glit- ! tering on the roof, and showering back light upon the | clusters of blazing torches fastened everywhere upon the shelvy sides. Here and there vast columns, alabaster white, with bases of gold color, fell from the roof to the floor, like pillars left standing in the ruined aisle of a cathedral, and from corner to corner ran their curtains of the same brilliant calcareous sps- THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 143 shaped like the sharp edge of a snow-drift, and almost white. It was like laying bare the palace of some king-wizard of the mine to gaze down upon it. " What think you of Mynheer Krakenpate s taste in a dining-room, Monsieur Tyrell ?" asked the count ess, who stood between Percie and myself, with a hand on the shoulder of each. I had scarce found time, as yet, to scrutinize the artificial portion of the marvellous scene, but, at the question of Iminild, I bent my gaze on a broad plat form, rising high above the river on its opposite bank, the tear of which was closed in by perhaps forty ir regular columns, leaving between them and the sharp precipice on the river-side, an area, in height and ex tent of about the capacity of a ball-room. A rude bridge, of very light construction, rose in a single "No, not Yvain, but Tranchcreur his equal in command over this honest confederacy. By the way, he is your countryman, Mr. Tyrell, though he rights under a nom de guerre. You are very likely to see him, too, for his bark is at Trieste, and he is the only human being besides myself (and my company here) who can come and go at wiH in this robber s paradise. He is a lover of mine, parbleu ! and since Yvain s death, Heaven knows what fancy he may bring hith er in his hot brain ! I have armed Percie for the hazard ?" The thin nostrils of my friend from Cranbourue- alley dilated with prophetic dislike of a rival thus abruptly alluded to, and there was that in his face which would have proved, against all the nurses oaths in Christendom, that the spirit of a gentleman s arch across the river, forming the only possible access | blood ran warm through his heart. Signor Tranch- to the platform from the side where we stood, and, following the path back with my eye, I observed a narrow and spiral staircase, partly of wood and partly cut in the rock, ascending from the bridge to the galle ry we had followed hither. The platform was carpet ed richly, and flooded with intense light, and in its centre stood a gorgeous array of smoking dishes, co;ur must be gentle in his suit, I said to myself, or he will find what virtue lies in a hair-trigger ! Percie had forgot to eat since the mention of the pirate s name, and sat with folded arms and his right hand on his pistol. A black slave brought in an omelette souff.ee, as light and delicate as the ckef-d ctuvre of an artiste in served after the Turkish fashion, with a cloth upon ( the Palais Royal. Iminild spoke to him in Greek, as the floor, and surrounded with cushions and ottomans j he knelt and placed it before her. of every shape and color. A troop of black slaves, whose silver anklets, glittered as they moved, were busy bringing wines and completing the arrangements for the meal. " Allans, mignon /" cried Iminild, getting impatient and seizing Percie s arm, " let us get over the river, i and perhaps Mr. Tyrell will look down upon us with his grands yeux while we dine. Oh, you will come with us ! Suivcz done!" An iron door, which I had not hitherto observed, let us out from the gallery upon the staircase, and ; Mynheer Von Krakenpate carefully turned the key ! behind us. We crept slowly down the narrow stair case and reached the edge of the river, where the warm air from the open sunshine came pouring through the cavern with the current, bringing with it a smell of green fields and flowers, and removing entirely the I have a presentiment," she said, looking at me as the slave disappeared, " that Tranchcoeur will be here presently. I have ordered another omelette on the strength of the feeling, for he is fond of it, and may be soothed by the attention." " You fear him, then ?" " Not if I were alone, for he is as gentle as a woman when he has no rival near him but I doubt his relish of Percie. Have you dined ?" " Quite." " Then come and look at my garden, and have a peep at old Perdicaris. Stay here, Percie, and finish your crapes, mon-mignon ! I have a word to say to Mr. Tyrell." We walked across the platform, and passing be tween two of the sparry columns forming its bound ary, entered upon a low passage which led to a large chill of the cavernous and confined atmosphere I had j opening, resembling singularly a garden of low shrubs found so uncomfortable above. We crossed the bridge, and stepping upon the elastic carpets piled thickly on the platform, arranged ourselves about the smoking repast, Mynheer Von Krakenpate sitting down after permission from Iminild, and Percie by order of the same imperative dictatress, throwing his graceful length at her feet. CHAPTER V. TAKE a lesson in flattery from Percie, Mr. Tyrell, and be satisfied with your bliss in my society without asking for explanations. I would fain have the use of my tongue (to swallow) for ten minutes, and I see you making up your mouth for a question. Try this pilau! It is made by a Greek cook, who fries, boils, and stews, in a kitchen with a river for a chimney." " Precisely what I was going to ask you. 1 was wondering how you cook without smoking your snow- white roof." " Yes, the river is a good slave, and steals wood as well. We have only to cut it by moonlight and com mit it to the current." " The kitchen is down stream, then ?" " Down stream ; and down stream lives jolly Per dicaris the cook, who having lost his nose in a sea- fight, is reconciled to forswear sunshine and mankind, and cook rice for pirates." " Is it true then that Yvain held command on the wa?" turned by some magic to sparkling marble. Two or three hundred of these stalagmite cones, formed by the dripping of calcareous water from the roof (as those on the roof were formed by the same fluid which hardened and pondered), stood about in the spacious area, every shrub having an answering cone on the roof, like the reflection of the same mar ble garden in a mirror. One side of this singular apartment was used as a treasury for the spoils of the band, and on the points of the white cones hung pitchers and altar lamps of silver, gold drinking-cups, and chains, and plate and jewellery of every age and description. Farther on were piled, in unthrifty con fusion, heaps of velvets and silks, fine broadcloths, French gloves, shoes, and slippers, brocades of Genoa, . pieces of English linen, damask curtains still fasten ed to their cornices, a harp and mandolin, cases of danla^ed bons-bons, two or three richly-bound books, and (Fast and most valuable in my eyes), a miniature bureau, evidently the plunder of some antiquary s treasure, containing in its little drawers antique gold | coins of India, carefully dated and arranged, with a I list of its contents half torn from the lid. " You should hear Tranchcoeur s sermons on these pretty texts," said the countess, trying to thrust open a bale of Brusa silk with her Turkish slipper. "He will beat off the top of a stalagmite with his sabre-hilt, and sit down and talk over his spoils and the adventures they recall, till morning dawns." " And how is that discovered in this sunless cave.?" " By the perfume. The river brings news of it, and fills the cavern with the sun s first kisses. Those 144 THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. violets kiss and tell, Mr. Tyrell ! Apropos des bottes, let us look into the kitchen." We turned to the right, keeping on the same level, and a few steps brought us to the brow of a consider able descent forming the lower edge of the carpeted platform, but separated from it by a wall of close stalactites. At the bottom of the descent ran the river, but just along the brink, forming a considerable crescent, extended a flat rock, occupied by all the varied implements of a kitchen, and lighted by the glare of two or three different fires blazing against the perpendicular limit of the cave. The smoke of these followed the inclination of the wall, and was swept entirely down with the current of the river. At the nearest fire stood Perdicaris, a fat, long-haired and sinister-looking rascal, his noseless face glowing with the heat, and at his side waited, with a silver dish, the Nubian slave who had been sent for Tranch- coeur s omelette. * One of the most bloody fights of my friend the rover," said Iminild, " was with an armed slaver, from whom he took these six pages of mine. They have reason enough to comprehended an order, but too little to dream of liberty. They are as contented as tortoises, ici-bas." " Is there no egress hence but by the iron door ?" " None that I know of, unless one could swim up this swift river like a salmon. You may have sur mised by this time, that we monopolize an unexplored part of the great cave of Adelsberg. Common report says it extends ten miles under ground, but common report has never burrowed as far as this, and I doubt whether there is any communication. Father Kraken- j pate s clock conceals an entrance, discovered first by j robbers, and handed down by tradition, Heaven knows j how long. But hark! Tranchcceur, by Heaven! my heart foreboded it !" I sprang after the countess, who, with her last ex clamation, darted between two of the glittering columns separating us from the platform, and my first glance convinced me that her fullest anticipations of the pirate s jealousy were more than realized. Percie stood with his back to a tall pillar on the farther side, with his pistol levelled, calm and unmoveable as a stalactite ; and, with his sabre drawn and his eyes flashing fire, a tall powerfully-built man in a sailor s press, was arrested by Iminild in the act of rushing on him. "Stop! or you die, Tranchcoeur !" said the countess, in a tone of trifling command. " He is my guest !" " He is my prisoner, madame !" was the answer, as the pirate changed his position to one of perfect repose and shot his sabre into his sheath, as if a brief delay could make little difference. " We shall see that," said the countess, once more, with as soft a voice as was ever heard in a lady s boudoir ; and stepping to the edge of the platform, she touched with her slipper a suspended gong, which sent through the cavern a shrill reverberation heard clearly over the rushing music of the river. In an instant the click of forty muskets from the other side fell on our ears ; and, at a wave of her hand, the butts rattled on the rocks, and all was still again. " I have not trusted myself within your reach, Monsieur Tranchcoeur," said Iminild, flinging herself carelessly on an ottoman, and motioning to Percie to keep his stand, " without a score or two of my free- riders from Mount Semering to regulate your con science. 1 am mistress here, sir! You may sit down!" Tranchcceur had assumed an air of the most gen tlemanly tranquillity, and motioning to one of the slaves for his pipe, he politely begged pardon for smoking in the countess s presence, and filled the enamelled bowl with Shiraz tobacco. " You heard of Yvain s death ?" she remarked after a moment passing her hand over her eyes. " Yes, at Venice." " With his dying words, he gave me and mine in charge to this Englishman. Mr. Tyrell, Monsieur Tranchcoaur." The pirate bowed. " Have you been long from England ?" he asked with an accent and voice that even in that brief question, savored of the nonchalant English of the west end. " Two years !" I answered. " I should have supposed much longer from your chivalry in St.Etienne, Mr. Tyrell. My countrymen generally are less hasty. Your valet there," he con tinued, looking sneeringly at Percie, "seems as quick on the trigger as his master." Percie turned on his heel, and walked to the edge of the platform as if uneasy at the remark, and Iminild rose to her feet. " Look you, Tranchcceur ! I ll have none of your sneers. That youth is as well-born and better bred than yourself, and with his consent, shall have the authority of the holy church ere long to protect my property and me. Will you aid me in this, Mr. Tyrell ?" " Willingly, countess !" " Then, Tranchcceur, farewell ! I have withdrawn from the common stock Yvain s gold and jewels, and I trust to your sense of honor to render me at Venice whatever else of his private property may be concealed in the island." " Iminild !" cried the pirate, springing to his feet, " I did not think to show a weakness before this stranger, but I implore you to delay !" His bosom heaved with strong emotion as he spoke, and the color fled from his bronzed features as if he were struck with a mortal sickness. " I can not lose you, Iminild ! I have loved you too long. You must " She motioned to Percie to pass on. " By Heaven, you shall !" he cried, in a voice sud denly become hoarse with passion ; and reckless of consequences, he leaped across the heaps of cushion, and, seizing Percie by the throat, flung him with terrible and headlong violence into the river. A scream from Iminild, and the report of a musket from the other side, rang at the same instant through the cavern, and as I rushed forward to seize the pistol which he had struck from Percie s hand, his half- drawn sabre slid back powerless into the sheath, and Tranchcceur dropped heavily on his knee. " I am peppered, Mr. Tyrell !" he said, waving me off with difficult effort to smile, " look after the boy, if you care for him ! A curse on her German wolves!" Percie met me on the bridge, supporting Trninild, who hung on his neck, smothering him with kisses. " Where is that dog of a pirate ?" she cried, sud denly snatching herataghan from the sheath and flying across the platform. "Tranchcceur !" Her hand was arrested by the deadly pallor and helpless attitude of the wounded man, and the weapon dropped as she stood over him. "I think it is not mortal," he said, groaning as he pressed his hand to his side, " but take your boy out of my sight ! Iminild !" " Well, Tranchcceur !" " I have not done well but you know my nature and iisy love ! Forgive me, and farewell ! Send Bertram to stanch this blood I get faint! A little wine, Iminild !" He took the massive flagon from her hand, and drank a long draught, and then drawing to him a cloak which lay near, he covered his head and dropped ou his side as if to sleep. Iminild knelt beside him and tore open the shirt OONDER-HOOFDEN. 145 beneath his jacket, and while she busied herself in stanching the blood, Perdicaris, apparently well pre pared for such accidents, arrived with a surgeon s probe, and, on examination of the wound, assured I Iminild that she might safely leave him. Washing her hands in the flagon of wine, she threw a cloak over j the wet and shivering Percie, and, silent with horror : at the scene behind us, we made our way over the I bridge, and in a short time, to my infinite relief, stood j in the broad moonlight on the portico of Mynheer Krakenpate. My carriage was soon loaded with the baggage and treasure of the countess, and with the same swift horses that had brought us from Planina, we regained the post-road, and sped on toward Venice by the Friuli. We arrived on the following night at the fair city so beloved of romance, and with what haste I might, I procured a priest and married the Countess Iminild to gentleman Percie. As she possessed now a natural guardian, and a sufficient means of life, I felt released from my death j vow to Yvain, and bidding farewell to the happy i couple," I resumed my quiet habit of travel, and three days after my arrival at Venice, was on the road to Padua by the Brenta. OONDERrHOOFDEN, OR THE UNDERCLIFF, A TALE OF THE VOYAGE OF HEXDRICK CHAPTER I. " IT is but an arm of the sea, as I told thee, skip per," said John Fleming, the mate of the " Halve- Mane," standing ready to jam down the tiller and bring- to, if his master should agree with him in opinion. Hudson stood by his steersman, with folded arms, now looking at the high-water mark on the rocks, which betrayed a falling tide, now turning his ear slightly forward to catch the cry of the man who stood heaving the lead from the larboard bow. The wind drew lightly across the starboard quarter, and, with a counter-tide, the little vessel stole on scarce percepti bly, though her mainsail was kept full the slowly passing forest trees on the shore giving the lie to the merry and gurgling ripple at the prowl The noble river, or creek, which they had followed in admiring astonishment for fifty miles, had hitherto | opened fairly and broadly before them, though, once : or twice, its widening and mountain-girt bosom had deceived the bold navigator into the belief, that he , was entering upon some inland lake. The wind still | blew kindly and steadily from the southeast, and the sunset of the second day a spectacle of tumultuous and gorgeous glory which Hudson attributed justly to the more violet atmospheric laws of an unsettled continent had found them apparently closed in by impenetrable mountains, and running immediately on the head shore of an extended arm of the sea. " She ll strike before she can follow her helm," cried the young sailor in an impatient tone, yet still with habitual obedience keeping her duly on her course. " Port a little !" answered the skipper, a moment after, as if he had not heard the querulous comment of his mate. Fleming s attention was withdrawn an instant by a low guttural sound of satisfaction, which reached his ear as the head of the vessel went round, and, casting his eye amidships, he observed the three Indians who had come oil to the Half-Moon in a c^noe, and had been received on board by the master, standing together in the chains, and looking forward to the rocks they were approaching with countenances of the most eager interest. " Master Hendrick !" he vociferated in the tone of a man who can contain his anger no longer, "will you look at these grinning red-devils, who are rejoicing to see you run so blindly ashore?" The adventurous little bark was by this time within a biscuit toss of a rocky point that jutted forth into the river with the grace of a lady s foot dallying with the water in her bath ; and, beyond the sedgy bank disappeared in an apparent inlet, barely deep enough, it seemed to the irritated steersman, to shelter a canoe. As the Half-Moon obeyed her last order, and headed a point more to the west, Hudson strode forward to the bow, and sprang upon the windlass, stretching his gaze eagerly into the bosom of the hills that were now darkening with the heavy shadows of twilight, though the sky was still gorgeously purple overhead. The crew had by this time gathered with uncon scious apprehension at the halyards, ready to let go at the slightest gesture of the master, but, in the slow- progress of the little bark, the minute or two which she took to advance beyond the point on which his eye was fixed, seemed an age of suspense. The Half-Moon seemed now almost immoveable, for the current, which convinced Hudson there was a passage beyond, set her back from the point with increasing force, and the wind lulled a little with the sunset. Inch by inch, however, she crept on, till at last the silent skipper sprang from the windlass upon the bowsprit, and running out with the agility of a boy, gave a single glance ahead, and the next mo- merit had the tiller in his hand, and cried out with a voice of thunder, " Stand by the halyards ! helm s- a-lee !" In a moment, as if his words had been lightning, the blocks rattled, the heavy boom swung round like a willow spray, and the white canvass, after fluttering an instant in the wind, filled and drew steadily on the other tack. Looks of satisfaction were exchanged between the crew, who expected the next instant an order to take in the sail and drop anchor ; but the master was at the ! helm, and to their utter consternation, he kept her steadily to the wind, and drove straight on, while a gorge, that, in the increasing darkness, seemed the entrance to a cavern, opened its rocky sides as they advanced. The apprehensions of the crew were half lost in their astonishment at the grandeur of the scene. The cliffs seemed to close up behind them; a mountain, that reached apparently to the now colorless clouds, rose up gigantic, in the increasing twilight, over the prow ; on the right, where the water seemed to bend, a craggy precipice extended its threatening wall ; and in the" midst of this round bay, which seemed to them, to be an enclossd lake in the bottom of an abyss, the wind suddenly took them aback, the Halve-Mane lost her headway, and threatened to go on the rocks with the current, and audible curses at his folly reached the ears of the determined master. More to divert their attention than with a prognos tic of the direction of the wind, Hudson gave the order to tack, and, more slowly this time, but still with sufficient expedition, the movement was execu ted, and the flapping sails swung round. The hal yards were not belayed before the breeze, rush ing down a steep valley on the left, struck full on the larboard quarter, and, running sharp past the face of the precipice over the starboard bow, Hudson pointed out, exultingly, to his astonished men, the j broad waters of the mighty river, extending far through I the gorge beyond the dim purple of the lingering 146 OONDER-HOOFDEN. day, which had been long lost to the cavernous and overshadowed pass they had penetrated, tinting its far bosom like the last faint hue of the expiring dolphin. The exulting glow of triumph suffused the face of the skipper, and relinquishing the tiller once more to the mortified Fleming, he walked forward to look out for an anchorage. The Indians, who still stood in the chains together, and who had continued to express their satisfaction as the vessel made her way through the pass, now pointed eagerly to a little bay on the left, across which a canoe was shooting like the reflection of a lance in the air, and, the wind dying momently away, Hudson gave the order to round to, and dropped his anchor for the night. In obedience to the politic orders of Hudson the men were endeavoring, by presents and signs, to induce the Indians to leave the vessel, and the mas ter himself stood on the poop with his mate, gazing back on the wonderful scene they had passed through. " This passage," said Hudson, musingly, " has been rent open by an earthquake, and the rocks look still as if they felt the agony of the throe." 11 It is a pity the earthquake did its job so raggedly, then !" answered his sulky companion, who had not yet forgiven the mountains for the shame their zig-zag precipices had put upon his sagacity. At that instant a sound, like that of a heavy body sliding into the water, struck the ear of Fleming, and looking quickly over the stern, he saw one of the Indians swimming from the vessel with a pillow in his hand, which he had evidently stolen from the cabin window. To seize a musket, which lay ready for attack on the quarter-deck, and fire upon the poor savage, was the sudden thought and action of a man on the watch, for a vent to incensed feelings. The Indian gave a yell which mingled wildly with the echoes of the report from the reverberating hills, ! and springing waist-high out of the water, the gurgling j eddy closed suddenly over his head. The canoe in which the other savages were already embarked shot away, like an arrow, to the shore, and j Hudson, grieved and alarmed inexpressibly at the fool- ! hardy rashness of his male, ordered all hands to arms, i and established a double watch for the night. Hour after hour, the master and the non-repent- ant Fleming paced fore and aft, each in his own I quarter of the vessel, watching the shore and the dark face of the water with straining eyes: but no sound came from the low cliff round which the fly- i ing canoe had vanished, and the stars seemed to I wink almost audibly in the dread stillness of nature, j The men alarmed at the evident agitation of Hudson, j who, in these pent-up waters, anticipated a most ef- j fective and speedy revenge from the surrounding j tribes, drowsed not upon their watch, and the gray i light of the morning began to show faintly over the : mountains before the anxious master withdrew his | aching eyes from the still and star waters. CHAPTER II. LIKE a web woven of gold by the lightning, the sun s rays ran in swift threads from summit to sum- j mit of the dark green mountains, and the soft mist i that slept on the breast of the river began to lift like ; the slumberous lid from the eye of woman, when her j dream is broken at dawn. Not so poetically were these daily glories regarded, however, by the morning watch of the Half- Moon, who, between the desire to drop asleep with their heads on the capstan, and the necessity of keeping sharper watch lest the Indians should come off through the rising mist, bore the double pains of Tantalus and Sysiphus ungratified desire at their lips and threatening ruin over their heads. After dividing the watch at the break of day, Hud son, with the relieved part of his crew, had gone be low, and might have been asleep an hour, when Flem ing suddenly entered the cabin and laid his hand upon his shoulder. The skipper sprang from his berth with the habitual readiness of a seaman, and followed his mate upon deck, where he found his men standing to their arms, and watching an object that, to his first glance, seemed like a canoe sailing down upon them through the air. The rash homicide drew close to Hendrick as he regarded it, and the chatter of his teeth betrayed that, during the long and anxious watches of the night, his conscience had not justified him for the hasty death he had awarded to a fellow- creature. " She but looms through the mist !" said the skip per, after regarding the advancing object for a moment. " It is a single canoe, and can scarce harm us. Let her come alongside !" The natural explanation of the phenomenon at once satisfied the crew, who had taken their superstitious fears rather from Fleming s evident alarm than from their own want of reflection ; hut the guilty man him self still gazed on the advancing phantom, and when a slight stir of the breeze raised the mist like the cor ner of a curtain, and dropped the canoe plain upon the surface of the river, he turned gloomily on his heel, and muttered in an undertone to Hudson, " It brings no good, Skipper Hendrick !" Meanwhile the canoe advanced slowly. The single paddle which propelled her paused before every turn, and as the mist lifted quite up and showed a long green line of shore between its shadowy fringe and the water, an Indian, highly-painted, and more orna mented than any they had hitherto seen, appeared gazing earnestly at the vessel, and evidently approach- ng with fear and caution. The Half-Moon was heading up the river with he rising tide, and Hudson walked forward to the jows to look at the savage more closely. By the eagle and bear, so richly embroidered in the gay- colored quills of the porcupine on his belt of wam- }um, he presumed him to be a chief; and glancing is eye into the canoe, he saw the pillow which had occasioned the death of the plunderer the night before, and on it lay two ears of corn, and two broken arrows. Pausing a moment as he drew near, the Indian pointed o these signs of peace, and Hudson, in reply, spread out his open hands and beckoned him to come on joard. In an instant the slight canoe shot under the starboard bow, and with a noble confidence which the skipper remarked upon with admiration, the tall savage sprang upon the deck and laid the hand of the com mander to his breast. The noon arrived, hot and sultry, and there was no ikelihood of a wind till sunset. The chief had been easted on board, and had shown, in his delight, the most unequivocal evidence of good feeling; and even Fleming, at last, who had drank more freely than usual during the morning, abandoned his suspicion, and oined in amusing the superb savage who was their *uest. In the course of the forenoon, another canoe ;ame off, paddled by a single young woman, whom Fleming, recognised as having accompanied the plun derers the night before, but in his half-intoxicated tate, it seemed to recall none of his previous bodings, and to his own surprise, and that of the crew, she evidently regarded him with particular favor, and by pertinacious and ingenious signs, endeavored to in duce him to go ashore with her in the canoe. The particular character of her face and form would have given the mate a clue to her probable motives, had he been less reckless from his excitement. She was taller than is common for females of the savage tribes, and her polished limbs, as gracefully moulded in their OONDER-HOOFDEN. 147 dark hues as those of the mercury of the fountain, combined, with their slightness, a nerve and steadi ness of action which betrayed strength and resolution of heart and frame. Her face was highly beautiful, j but the voluptuous fulness of the lips was contradicted by a fierce fire in her night-dark eyes, and a quickness i of the brow to descend, which told of angry passions j habitually on the alert. It was remarked by Hans Christaern, one of the crew, that when Fleming left I her for an instant, she abstracted herself from the j other joyous groups, and, with folded arms and looks j of brooding thoughtfulness, stood looking over the i stern ; but immediately on his reappearance, her j snowy teeth became visible between her relaxing lips, and she resumed her patient gaze upon his counten ance, and her occasional efforts to draw him into the canoe. Quite regardless of the presence of the woman, the chief sat apart with Hudson, communicating his ideas j by intelligent signs, and after a while, the skipper j called his mate, and informed him that, as far as he j could understand, the chief wished to give them a feast on shore. " Arm yourselves well," said he, j " though I look for no treachery from this noble pagan ; j and if chance should put us in danger, we shall be j more than a match for the whole tribe. Come with j me, Fleming," he continued, after a pause, "you are j too rash with your firearms to be left in command. Man the watch, four of you, and the rest get into the long-boat. We ll while away these sluggish hours, \ though danger is in it." The men sprang gayly below for their arms, and were soon equipped and ready, and the chief, with an | expression of delight, put off in his canoe, followed more slowly by the heavy long-boat, into which Hud- j son, having given particular orders to the watch to let no savages on board during his absence, was the last to embark. The woman, whom the chief had called j to him before his departure by the name of Kihyalee, I sped off before in her swift canoe to another point of j the shore, and when Fleming cried out from the bow j of the boat, impatiently motioning her to follow, she smiled in a manner that sent a momentary shudder through the veins of the skipper who chanced to ob- j serve the action, and by a circular movement of her J arm conveyed to him that she should meet him from the other side of the hill. As they followed the chief, j they discovered the wigwams of an Indian village be hind the rocky point for which she was making, and ; understood that the chief had sent her thither on some errand connected with his proposed hospitality. A large square rock, which had the look of having been hurled with some avalanche from the mountain, lay in the curve of a small beach of sand, surrounded by the shallow water, and, on the left of this, the chief pointed out to the skipper a deeper channel, hollowed by the entrance of a mountain-torrent intoihe river, through which he might bring his boat to land. At the edge of this torrent s bed, the scene of the first act of hospitality to our race upon the Hudson, stands at this day the gate to the most hospitable mansion on the river, as if the spirit of the spot had consecrated it to its first association with the white man. The chief led the way when the crew had disem barked, by a path skirting the deep-worn bed of the torrent, and after an ascent of a few minutes, through a grove of tall firs, a short turn to the left brought them upon an open table of land, a hundred and fifty feet above the river, shut in by a circle of forest-trees, and frowned over on the east by a tall and bald cliff, which shot up in a perpendicular line to the height of three hundred feet. From a cleft in the face of this precipice a natural spring oozed forth, drawing a darker line down the sun-parched rock, and feeding a small stream that found its way to the river on the northern side of the platform just mentioned, creating between itself and the deeper torrent to the south, a sort of highland peninsula, now constituting the estate of the hospitable gentleman above alluded to. Hudson looked around him with delight and sur prise when he stood on the highest part of the broad natural table selected by the chief for his entertain ment. The view north showed a cleft through the hills, with the river coiled like a lake in its widening bed, while a blue and wavy line of mountains form ed the far horizon at its back; south, the bold eminen ces, between which he had found his adventurous way, closed in like the hollowed sides of a bright- green vase, with glimpses of the river lying in its bottom like crystal ; below him descended a sharp and wooded bank, with the river at its foot, and directly opposite rose a hill in a magnificent cone to the very sky, sending its shadow down through the mirrored water, as if it entered to some inner world. The excessive lavishness of the foliage clothed these bold natural features with a grace and richness al together captivating to the senses, and Hudson long stood, gazing around him, believing that the tales of brighter and happier lands were truer than he had deemed, and that it was his lucky destiny to have been the discoverer of a future Utopia. A little later, several groups of Indians were seen advancing from the village, bearing the materials for a feast, which they deposited under a large tree, indi cated by the chief. It was soon arranged, and Hud son with his men surrounded the dishes of shell and wood, one of which, placed in the centre, contained a roasted dog, half buried in Indian-corn. While the chief and several of his warriors sat down in company with the whites, the young men danced the calumet- ; dance to the sound of a rude drum, formed by drawing a skin tightly over a wooden bowl, and near them, in groups, stood the women and children of the village, glancing with looks of curiosity from the feats of the young men to the unaccustomed faces of the strangers. Among the women stood Kihyalee, who kept her large bright eyes fixed almost fiercely upon Fleming, yet when he looked toward her, she smiled and turned ; as if she would beckon him away a bidding which he tried in vain to obey, under the vigilant watch of his : master. The feast went on, and the Indians having produced gourds, filled with a slight intoxicating liquor made from the corn, Hudson offered to the chief, some spirits from a bottle which he had intrusted to one of the men to wash down the expected roughness of the savage viands. The bottle passed in turn to the j mate, who was observed to drink freely, and, a few minutes after, Hudson rising to see more nearly a trial of skill with the bow and arrow, Fleming found the desired opportunity, and followed the tempting Kihyalee into the forest. The sun began to throw the shadows of the tall pines in gigantic pinnacles along the ground, and the youths of the friendly tribe, who had entertained the |! great navigator, ceased from their dances and feats of skill, and clustered around the feast-tree. Intend- i, ing to get under weigh with the evening breeze and i proceed still farther up the river, Hudson rose to col lect his men, and bid the chief farewell. Taking the hand of the majestic savage and putting it to his i breast, to express in his own manner the kind feel- ! ings he entertained for him, he turned toward the path i ! by which he came, and was glancing round at his men, !! when Hans Christaern inquired if he bad sent the I : mate back to the vessel. " Der teufel, no /" answered the skipper, missing him for the first time ; " has he been long gone ?" " A full hour !" said one of the men. Hudson put his hand to his head, and remembered the deep wrong Fleming had done to the tribe. Re- 148 THE PICKER AND FILER. tribution, he feared, had over-taken him but how was it done so silently? How had the guilty man been induced to leave his comrades, and accelerate his doom by his own voluntnry act ? The next instant resolved the question. A distant and prolonged scream, as of a man in mortal agony, drew all eyes to the summit of the beetling cliff, which overhung them. On its extremes! verge, outlined distinctly against the sky, stood the tall figure of Kih- yalee, holding from her, yet poised over the precipice, the writhing form of her victim, while in the other hand, flashing in the rays of the sun, glittered the bright hatchet she had plucked from his fiirdle. In furiated at the sight, and suspecting collision on the part of the chief, Hudson drew his cutlass and gave the order to stand to arms, but as he turned, the gigan tic savage had drawn an arrow to its head with incredi ble force, and though it fell far short of its mark, there was that in the action and in his look which, in the passing of a thought, changed the mind of the skipper. In another instant, the hesitating arm of the widowed Kihyalee descended, and loosening her hold upon the relaxed body of her victim, the doomed mate fell heavily down the face of the precipice. The chief turned to Hudson, who stood trembling and aghast at the awful scene, and plucked the re maining arrows from his quiver, he broke them and threw himself on the ground. The tribe gathered around their chief, Hudson moved his hand to them in token of forgiveness, and in a melancholy silence the crew took their way after him to the shore. THE PICKER AND FILER, THE nature of the strange incident I have to relate forbids me to record either^place or time. On one of the wildest nights in which I had ever been abroad, I drove my panting horses through a snowdrift breast high, to the door of a small tavern in the western country. The host turned out unwilling ly at the knock of my whip handle on the outer door, and, wading before the tired animals to the barn, which was nearly inaccessible from the banks of snow, he assisted me in getting off their frozen harnesses, and bestowing them safely for the night. The " bar-room" fire burnt brightly, and never was fire more welcome. Room was made for me by four or five rough men who sat silent around it, and with a keen comprehension of " pleasure after pain, 1 I took off my furs and moccasins, and stretched my cold con tracted limbs to the blaze. When, a few minutes after, a plate of cold salt beef was brought me, with a corn cake and a mug of " flip" hissing from the poker, it certainly would have been hard to convince me that I would have put on my coats and moccasins again to | have ridden a mile to paradise. The faces of my new companions, which I had not found time to inspect very closely while my supper lasted, were fully revealed by the light of a pitch-pine knot, thrown on the hearth by the landlord, and their grim reserve and ferocity put me in mind, for the first time since I had entered the room, of my errand in that quarter of the country. The timber-tracts which lie convenient to the rivers of the west, offer to the refugee and desperado of every | description, a resource from want and (in their own | opinion) from crime, which is seized upon by all at j least who are willing to labor. The owners of the ex- j tensive forests, destined to become so valuable, are mostly men of large speculation, living in cities, who, satisfied with the constant advance in the price of j lumber, consider their pine-trees as liable to nothing but the Jaws of nature, and leave them unfenced and unprotected, to increase in size and value till the land beneath them is wanted for culture. It is natural enough that solitary settlers, living in the neighbor hood of miles of apparently unclaimed land, should think seldom of the owner, and in time grow to the opinion of the Indian, that the Great Spirit gave the land, the air, and the water, to all his children, and they are free to all alike. Furnishing the requisite teams and implements, therefore, the inhabitants of these tracts collect a numberof the stragglers through the country, and forming what is called a " bee," go into the nearest woods, and for a month or more, work laboriously at selecting, and felling the tallest and straightest pines. In their rude shanty at night they have bread, pork, and whiskey, which hard labor makes sufficiently palatable, and the time is passed merrily till the snow is right for sledding. The logs are then drawn to the water sides, rafts are formed, and the valuable lumber, for which they paid nothing but their labor is run to the cities for their common advantage. The only enemies of this class of men are the agents who are sometimes sent out in the winter to detect them in the act of felling or drawing off timber, and in the dark countenances around the fire, I read this as the interpretation of my own visit to the woods. They soon brightened and grew talkative when they discovered that I was in search of hands to fell and burn, and make clearing for a farm; and after a talk of an hour or two, I was told in answer to my inquiries, that all the " men people" in the country were busy " lumbering for themselves," unless it were the " Picker and Filer." As the words were pronounced, a shrill neigh outside the door pronounced the arrival of a new-comer. "Talk of the devil" said the man in a lower tone, and without finishing the proverb he rose with a respect which he had not accorded to me, to make room for the Picker and Filer. A man of rather low stature entered, and turned to Jrive back his horse, who had followed him nearly in. [ observed that the animal had neithersaddle nor bridle. Shutting the door upon him without violence, he ex changed nods with one or two of the men, and giving the landlord a small keg which he had brought, he pleaded haste for refusing the offered chair, and stood silent by the fire. His features were blackened with smoke, but I could see that they were small and regu lar, and his voice, though it conveyed in its deliberate accents an indefinable resolution, was almost feminine ly soft and winning. " That stranger yonder has got a job for you," said the landlord, as he gave him back the keg and received the money. Turning quickly upon me, he detected me in a very eager scrutiny of himself, and for a moment I was thrown too much oft my guard to address him. " Is it you, sir ?" he asked, after waiting a moment. "Yes, I have some work to be done hereabouts, but you seem in a hurry. Could you call here to morrow." "I may not be here again in a week." "Do you live far from here ?" He smiled. " I scarce know where I live, but I am burning a piece of wood a mile or two up the run, and if you would like a warmer bed than the landlord will give you " That personage decided the question for me by telling me in so many words that I had better go. His beds were all taken up, and my horses should be taken care of till my return. 1 saw that my presence had interrupted something, probably the formation of a " bee," and more willingly than I would have be lieved possible an hour before, I resumed my furs and wrappers, and declared that 1 was ready. The Picker THE PICKER AND FILER. 149 and Filer had inspired me, and I knew not why, with an involuntary respect and liking. " It is a rough night, sir," said he, as he shouldered a rifle he had left outside, and slung the keg by a leather strap over the neck of his horse, " but I will soon show you a better climate. Come, sir, jump on !" " And you ?" 1 said inquisitively, as he held his horse by the mane for me to mount. It was a Cana dian pony, scarce larger than a Newfoundland dog. " I am more used^to the road, sir, and will walk. Come ?" It was no time to stand upon etiquette, even if it had been possible to resist the strange tone of authori ty with which he spoke. So without more ado, I sprang upon the animal s back, and holding on by the long tuft upon his withers, suffered him passively to plunge through the drift after his master. Wondering at the readiness with which I had en tered upon this equivocal adventure, but never for an instant losing confidence in my guide, I shut my eyes to the blinding cold, and accommodated my limbs as well as 1 could to the bare back and scrambling paces of the Canadian. The Picker and Filer strode on before, the pony following like a spaniel at his heels, and after a half hour s tramp, during which I had merely observed that we were rounding the base of a considerable hill, we turned short to the right, and were met by a column of smoke, which, lifting, the moment after, disclosed the two slopes of a consider able valley enveloped in one sea of fire. A red, lurid cloud, overhung it at the tops of the tallest trees, and far and wide, above that, spread a covering of black smoke, heaving upward in vast and billowy masses, and rolling away on every side into the darkness. We approached a pine of gigantic height, on fire to the very peak, not a branch left on the trunk, and its pitchy knots distributed like the eyes of the lamprey, burning pure and steady amid the irregular flame. I had once or twice, with an instinctive wish to draw rein, pulled hard upon the tangled tuft in my hand, but master and horse kept on. This burning tree, however, was the first of a thousand, and as the pony turned his eyes away from the intense heat to pass be- j tween it and a bare rock, I glanced into the glowing labyrinth beyond, and my faith gave way. I jumped from his back and hailed the Ficker and Filer, with a halloo scarcely audible amid the tumult of the crack ling branches. My voice did not evidently reach his ear, but the pony, relieved from my weight, galloped to his side, and rubbed his muzzle against the unoc- j cupied hand of his master. He turned back immediately. "I beg pardon," he said, "I have that to think of just now which makes me forgetful. I am not surprised at your hesitation, but mount again and trust the pony." The animal turned rather unwillingly at his mas ter s bidding, and a little ashamed of having shown fear, while a horse would follow, I jumped again on his back. "If you find the heat inconvenient, cover your face." And with this laconic advice, the Picker and Filer turned on his heel, and once more strode away be fore us. Sheltering the sides of my face by holding up the corners of my wrapper with both hands, I abandoned myself to the horse. He overtook his master with a shuffling canter, and putting his nose as close to the ground as he could carry it without stumbling, fol lowed closely at his heels. I observed, by the green logs lying immediately along our path, that we were following an avenue of prostrate timber which had been felled before the wood was fired ; but descending presently to the left, we struck at once into the deep bed of a brook, and by the lifted head and slower gait of the pony, as well as my own easier respiration, I found that the hollow through which it ran, contained a body of pure air unreached by the swaying curtains of smoke or the excessive heat of the fiery currents above. The pony now picked his way leisurely along the brookside, and while my lungs expanded with the relief of breathing a more temperate atmosphere, I raised myself from my stooping posture in a profuse perspiration, and one by one disembarrassed myself from my protectives against the cold. I had lost sight for several minutes of the Picker and Filer, and presumed by the pony s desultory movements that he was near the end of his journey, when, rounding a shelvy point of rock, we stood sud denly upon the brink of a slight waterfall, where the brook leaped four or five feet into a shrunken dell, and after describing a half circle on a rocky platform, re- | sumed its onward course in the same direction as be fore. This curve of the brook and the platform it enclosed lay lower than the general level of the forest, and the air around and within it, it seemed to me, was as clear and genial as the summer noon. Over one side, from the rocky wall, a rude and temporary roof of pine slabs drooped upon a barricade of logs, lbrmin r a low hut, and before the entrance of this, at the mo ment of my appearance, stood a woman and a showily- dressed young man, both evidently confused at the sudden apparition of the Picker and Filer. My eyes had scarce rested on the latter, when, from standing at his fullest height with his rifle raised as if to beat the other to the earth, he suddenly resumed hisstoop- ing and quiet mien, set his rifle against the rock, and came forward to give me his hand. " My daughter!" he said, more in the way of ex planation than introduction, and without taking fur ther notice of the young man whose presence seemed so unwelcome, he poured me a draught from the keg he had brought, pointed to the water falling close at my hand, and threw himself at his length upon the ground. The face and general appearance of the young man, now seated directly opposite me, offered no temptation for more than a single glance, and my whole attention I was soon absorbed by the daughter of my singular I host, who, crossing from the platform to the hut, divided her attention between a haunch of venison j roasting before a burning log of hickory, and the ar rangement of a few most primitive implements for our coming supper. She was slight, like her father, in form, and as far as 1 had been able to distinguish his i blackened features, resembled him in the general out- j line. But in the place of his thin and determined mouth, her lips were round and voluptuous, and ! though her eye looked as if it might \vake, it ex- I pressed, even in the presence of her moody father, a drowsy and soft indolence, common enough to the I Asiatics, but seldom seen in America. Her dress was I coarse and careless, but she was beautiful with every { possible disadvantage, and, whether married or not, evidently soon to become a mother. The venison was placed before us on the rock, and the young man, uninvited, and with rather an air of bravado, cut himself a steak from the haunch and broiled it on the hickory coals, while the daughter kept as ne*r him as her attention to her father s wants would permit, but neither joined us in eating, nor encouraged my attempts at conversation. The Picker and Filer ate in silence, leaving me to be my own carver, nnd finishing his repast by a deep draught from the keg which had been the means of our acquaintance, he sprang upon his feet and disappeared. " The wind has changed," said the daughter, look ing up at the smoke, "and he has gone to the western edge to start a new fire. It s a full half mile, and he ll be gone an hour." This was said with a look at me which was any thing but equivocal. I was de trop. 1 took up the rifle of the Picker aud Filer, forgetting that there was 150 THE PICKER AND FILER. probably nothing to shoot in a burning wood, and re marking that I would have a look for a deer, jumped up the water-fall side, and was immediately hidden by the rocks. I had no conception of the scene that lay around me. The natural cave or hollow of rock in which the hut lay embosomed, was the centre of an area of per haps an acre, which had been felled in the heart of the wood before it was set an fire. The forest encircled it with blazing columns, whose capitals were ap- Sarently lost in the sky, and curtains of smoke and ame, which flew as if lashed into ribands by a whirl wind. The grandeur, the violence, the intense bright ness of the spectacle, outran all imagination. The pines, on fire to the peak, and straight as arrows, seemed to resemble, at one moment the conflagration of an eastern city, with innumerable minarets aban doned to the devouring element. At the next moment, the wind, changing its direction, swept out every vestige of smoke, and extinguished every tongue of flame, and the tall trees, in clear and flameless igni tion, standing parallel in thousands, resembled some blinding temple of the genii, whose columns of miraculous rubies, sparkling audibly, outshone the I day. By single glances, my eye penetrated into aisles j of blazing pillars, extending far into the forest, and the j next instant, like a tremendous surge alive with ser- j pents of fire, the smoke and flame swept through it, I and it seemed to me as if some glorious structure had ! been consumed in the passing of a thought. For a minute, again, all would be still except the crackling of the fibres of the wood, and with the first stir of the I wind, like a shower of flashing gems, the bright coals ! rained down through the forest, and for a moment the earth glowed under the trees as if its whole crust were alive with one bright ignition. With the pungency of the smoke and heat, and the variety and bewilderment of the spectacle, I found my I eyes and brain growing giddy. The brook ran cool below, and the heat had dried the leaves in the small clearing, and with the abandonment of a man overcome with the sultriness of summer, I lay down on the rivulet s bank, and dipped my head and bathed my eyes in the running water. Close to its surface there was not a particle of smoke in the air, and, exceeding ly refreshed with its temperate coolness, 1 lay for some time in luxurious ease, trying in vain to fancy the winter that howled without. Frost and cold were never more difficult to realize in midsummer, though within a hundred rods, probably, a sleeping man would freeze to death in an hour. 14 1 have a better bed for you in the shanty," said the Picker and Filer, who had approached unheard in the noise of the fires, and suddenly stood over me. He took up his rifle, which I had laid against a prostrate log, and looked anxiously toward the descent to the hut. "I am liltle inclined for sleep," I answered, " and perhaps you will give me an hour of conversation here. The scene is new to me" " I have another guest to dispose of," he answered, " and we shall be more out of the smoke near the shanty." I was not surprised, as I jumped upon the platform, : to find him angrily separating his daughter and the j stranger. The girl entered the hut, and with a de cisive gesture, he pointed the young man to a "shake- I down" of straw in the remotest corner of the rocky j enclosure. "With your leave, old gentleman," said the in- truder, after glancing at his intended place of repose, " I ll find a crib for myself." And springing up the craggy rock opposite the door of the shanty he gather ed a slight heap of brush, and threw it into a hollow left in the earth by a tree, which, though full grown and green, had been borne to the earth and partly uprooted by the falling across it of an overblown and gigantic pine. The earili and stones had followed the uptorn mass, forming a solid upright wall, from which, like struggling fingers, stretching back in agony to the ground from which they had parted, a few rent and naked roots pointed into the cavity. The sequel will show why I am so particular in this description. " When peace was declared between England and this country," said the Picker and Filer (after an hour s conversation, which had led insensibly to his own history), I was in command of a privateer. Not choosing to become a pirate, by continuing the cruise, I was set ashore in the West Indies by a crew in open mutiny. My property was all on board, and I was left a beggar. I had one child, a daughter, whose mother died in giving her birth. " Having left a sufficient sum for her education in the hands of a brother of my own, under whose roof she had passed the first years of her life, I determined to retrieve my fortunes before she or my friends should be made acquainted with my disaster. " Ten years passed over, and I was still a wanderer md a beggar. " I determined to see my child, and came back, ike one from the dead, to my brother s door. He had brgotten me, and abused his trust. My daughter, then seventeen, and such as you see her here, was the drudge in the family of a stranger ignorant and friend less. My heart turned against mankind with this last drop in a bitter cup, and, unfitted for quiet life, I look ed around for some channel of desperate adventure. But my daughter was the perpetual obstacle. What to do with her ? She had neither the manners nor the education of a lady, and to leave her a servant was impossible. I started with her for the west, with the vague design of joining some tribe of Indians, and chance and want have thrown me into the only mode of life on earth that could now be palatable to me." " Is it not lonely," I asked, " after your stirring ad ventures ?" " Lonely ! If you knew the delight with which I live in the wilderness, with a circle of fire to shut out the world ! The labor is hard it is true, but I need it, to sleep and forget. There is no way else in which I could seclude my daughter. Till lately, she has been coiiteMak, too. We live a month together in one place-ijHfccentre like this of a burning wood. I can bear rfHfep, but I love a high temperature the cliiji^^l^le tropics and I have it here. For weeks I forget that it is winter, tending my fires and living on the game I have stored up. There is a hollow or a brook a bed or a cave, in every wood, where the cool air, as here, sinks to the bottom, and there I can put up my shanty, secure from all intrusion but such as I bring upon myself." The look he gave to the uprooted ash and the sleeper beneath it, made an apology for this last clause unnecessary. He thought not of me. " Some months since," continued the Picker and Filer, in a voice husky with suppressed feeling, " I met the villain who sleeps yonder, accidentally, as I met you. He is the owner of this land. After engaging to clear and burn it, I invited him, as I did yourself, from a momentary fever for company which sometimes comes over the solitary, to go with me to the fallow I was clearing. He loitered in the neighborhood awhile, under pretext of hunting, and twice on my return from the village, I found that my daughter had seen him. Time has betrayed the wrong he inflicted on me. The voice of the agitated father sank almost to a whisper as he pronounced the last few words, and, rising from the rock on which we were sitting, he paced for a few minutes up and down the platform in silence. The reader must fill up from his own imagination KATE CREDIFORD. 151 the drama of which this is but the outline, for the Picker and Piler was not a man to be questioned, and I can tell but what I saw and heard. In the narration of his story he seemed but recapitulating the promi nent events for his own self-converse, rather than at tempting to tell a tale to me, and it was hurried over as brokenly and briefly as I have put it down. .Isat in a listening attitude after he concluded, but he seemed to have unburthened his bosom sufficiently, and his lips were closed with stern compression. " You forget," he said, after pacing awhile, "that I offered j-ou a place to sleep. The night wears late. Stretch yourself on that straw, with your cloak over you. Good night!" I lay down and looked up at the smoke rolling heavily into the sky till I slept. I awoke, feeling chilled, for the rock sheltered me from the rays of the fire. I stepped out from the ; hollow. The fires were pale with the gray of the j morning, and the sky was visible through the smoke. I looked around for a place to warm myself. The : hickory log had smouldered out, but a fire h;id been j kindled under the overblown pine, and its pitchy heart was now flowing with the steady brilliancy of a torch. > I took up one of its broken branches, cracked it on my j knee, and stirring up the coals below, soon sent up a j merry blaze, which enveloped the whole trunk. Turning my back to the increasing heat. I started, for, creeping toward me, with a look of eagerness for which I was at a loss to account, came the Picker and Piler. " Twice doomed !" he muttered between his teeth, ;j " but not by me !" He threw down a handful of pitch pine knots, laid jj his axe against a burning tree, and with a branch of ; hemlock, swept off the flame from the spot where the j fire was eating through, as if to see how nearly it was divided. I began to think him insane, for I could get no j answer to my questions, and when lie spoke, it was ; half audible, and with his eyes turned from me fixedly. I looked in the same direction, but could see nothing remarkable. The seducer slept soundly beneath his matted wall, and the rude door of the shanty was be hind us. Leaving him to see phantoms in the air, as I thought, I turned my eyes to the drips of the water fall, and was absorbed in memories of my own, when ! I saw the girl steal from the shanty, and with one bound overleap the rocky barrier of the platform. 1 laid my hand on the shoulder of my host, and pointed after her, as with stealthy pace looking back occa- ij sionally to the hut, where she evidently thought her father slept, she crept round toward her lover. "He dies!" cried the infuriated man; but as he j jumped from me to seize his axe, the girl crouched out of sight, and my own first thought was to awake ; the sleeper. I made two bounds and looked back, for I heard no footstep. "Stand clear!" shouted a voice of almost super natural shrillness ! and as I caught sight of the Picker and Piler standing enveloped in smoke upon the burn ing tree, with his axe high in the air, the truth flash ed on me. Down came the axe into the very heart of the pitchy flame, and trembling with the tremendous smoke, the trunk slowly bent upward from the fire. The Picker and Piler sprang clear, the overborne ash creaked and heaved, and with a sick giddiness in | my eyes, I look at the unwarned sleeper. One half of the dissevered pine fell to the earth, and the shock startled him from his sleep. A whole age seemed to me elapsing while the other rose with I the slow lift of the ash. As it slid heavily away, the vigorous tree righted, like a giant springing to his feet. I saw the root pin the hand of the seducer to . the earth a struggle a contortion and the leafless i and waving top of the recovered and upright tree rocked with its effort, and a long, sharp cry had gone out echoing through the woods, and was still. I felt my brain reel. Blanched to a livid paleness, the girl moved about in the sickly daylight, when I recovered ; but the Picker and Piler, with a clearer brow than I had yet seen him wear, was kindling fires beneath the remnants of the pine. KATE CREDIFORD, I FOUND myself looking with some interest at the back of a lady s head. The theatre was crowded, and I had come in late, and the object of my curiosity, whoever she might be, was listening very attentively to the play. She did not move. I had time to build a life-time romance about her before I had seen a feature of her face. But her ears were small and of an ex quisite oval, and she had that rarest beauty of woman the hair arched and joined to the white neck with the same finish as on the temples. Nature often slights this part of her masterpiece. The curtain dropped, and I stretched eagerly for ward to catch a glimse of the profile. But no ! she sat next one of the slender pilasters, and with her head leaned against it, remained immovable. I left the box, and with some difficulty made my way into nhc crowded pit. Elbowing, apologizing, persevering, I at last gained a point where I knew I could see my incognita at the most advantage. I turned pshaw ! how was it possible I had not recog nised her? i Kate Crediford ! There was no getting out again, for a while at least, without giving oiience to the crowd I had jostled so unceremoniously. I sat down vexed and commen ced a desperate study of the figure of Shakspere on the drop-curtain. Of course I had been a lover of Miss Crediford s, or I could not have turned with indifference from the handsomest woman in the theatre. She was very beautiful there was no disputing. But we love wo men a little for what we do know of them, and a great deal more for what we do not. I had love-read Kate Crediford to the last leaf. We parted as easily as a reader and a book. Flirtation is a circulating library, in which we seldom ask twice for the same volume, and I gave up Kate to the next reader, feeling no property even in the marks 1 had made in her perusal. A little quarrel sufficed as an excuse for the closing of the book, and both of us studiously avoided a recon ciliation. As I sat in the pit, I remembered suddenly a mole on her left cheek, and I turned toward her with the simple curiosity to knew whether it was visible at that distance. Kate looked sad. She still leaned immove- able against the slight column, and her dark eyes, it struck me, were moist. Her mouth, with this pecu liar expression upon her countenance, was certainly inexpressibly sweet the turned-down corners ending in dimples, which in that particular place, I have al ways observed, are like wells of unfathomable melan choly. Poor Kate ! what was the matter with her? As I turned back to my dull study of the curtain, a little pettish with myself for the interest with which I had looked at an old flame, I detected half a sigh under my white waistcoat ; but instantly persuading myself that it was a disposition to cough, coughed, and began to hum "suoni la tromba." The curtain rose and the play went on. 152 KATE CREDIFORD. It was odd that I never had seen Kate in that humor before. I did not think she could be sad. Kate Crediford sad ! Why, she was the most volatile, light- hearted, care-for-nothing coquette that ever held up her fingers to be kissed. I wonder, has any one really annoyed you, my poor Kate ! thought I. Could I, by chance, be of any service to you for. after all, I owe you something! I looked at her again. Strange that I had ever looked at that face without emotion ! The vigils of an ever-wakeful, ever-passion- J ate, yet ever-tearful and melancholy spirit, seemed set, j and kept under those heavy and motionless eyelids. | And she, as I saw her now, was the very model and j semblance of the character that I had all my life been vainly seeking ! This was the creature I had sighed for when turning away from the too mirthful tender ness of Kate Crediford ! There was something new, or something for the moment miswritten, in that familiar countenance. I made my way out of the pit with some difficulty, and returned to sit near her. After a few minutes, a gentleman in the next box rose and left the seat vacant on the other side of the pilaster against which she leaned. I went around while the orchestra \Vere play ing a loud march, and, without being observed by the thoughtful beauty, seated myself in the vacant place. Why did my eyes flush and moisten, as I looked i upon the small white hand lying on the cushioned barrier between us ! I knew every vein of it, like the strings of my own heart. I had held it spread out in | my own, and followed its delicate blue traceries with > a rose-stem, for hours .and hours, while imploring, and reproaching, and reasoning over love s lights and j shadows. I knew the feel of every one of those ex- [ quisite fingers those rolled up rose-leaves, with nails j like pieces cut from the lip of a shell ! Oh, the promises I had kissed into oaths on that little chef- d oeuvre of nature s tinted alabaster! the psalms and sermons I had sat out holding it, in her father s pew ! the moons I had tired out of the sky, making of it a bridge for our hearts passing backward and forward ! And how could that little wretch of a hand, that knew me better than its own other hand (for we had been more together), lie there, so unconscious of my pres ence ? How could she Kate Crediford sit next to me as she was doing, with only a stuffed partition be tween us, and her head leaning on one side of a pilaster, and mine on the other, and never start, nor recognise, nor be at all aware of my neighborhood ? She was not playing a part, it was easy to see. Oh, I knew those little relaxed fingers too well ! Sadness, indolent and luxurious sadness, was expressed in her counten ance, and her abstraction was unfeigned and contem plative. Could she have so utterly forgotten me magnetically, that is to say? Could the atmosphere about her, that would once have trembled betrayingly at my approach, like the fanning of an angel s invisi ble wing, have lost the sense of my presence ? I tried to magnetize her hand. I fixed my eyes on that little open palm, and with all the intensity I could summon, kissed it mentally in its rosy centre. I re proached the ungrateful little thing for its dulness and forgetfulness, and brought to bear upon it a focus of old memories of pressures and caresses, to which a stone would scarce have the heart to be insensible. But I belie myself in writing this with a smile. I watched those unmoving fingers with a heart. I could not see the face, nor read the thought, of the woman who had once loved me, and who sat near me, now, so unconsciously but if a memory had stirred, if a pulse had quickened its beat, those finely-strung fingers I well know would have trembled responsively. Had she forgotten me altogether ? Is that possible ? Can a woman close the leaves of her heart over a once-loved and deeply-written name, like the waves over a vessel s track like the air over the division of a bird s flight ? I had intended to speak presently to Miss Crediford, but every moment the restraint became greater. I felt no more privileged to speak to her than the stranger who had left the seat I occupied. I drew back, for fear of encroaching on her room, or disturbing the folds of her shawl. I dared not speak to her. And, while I was arguing the matter to myself, the party who were with her, apparently tired of the play, arose and left the theatre, Kate following last, but unspoken to, and unconscious altogether of having been near any one whom she knew. I went home and wrote to her all night, for there was no sleeping till I had given vent to this new fever at my heart. And in the morning, I took the leading thoughts from my heap in incoherent scribblings, and embodied them more coolly in a letter : " You will think, when you look at the signature, that this is to be the old story. And you will be as much mistaken as you are in believing that I was ever your lover, till a few hours ago. I have declared love to you, it is true. I have been happy with you, and wretched without you ; I have thought of you, dream ed of you, haunted you, sworn to you, and devoted to you all and more than you exacted, of time and out ward service and adoration ; but I love you now for the first time in my life. Shall I be so happy as to make you comprehend this startling contradiction ? "There are many chambers in the heart, Kate; and the spirits of some of us dwell, most fondly and secret ly, in the chamber of tears avowedly, however, in the outer and ever-open chamber of mirth. Over the sacred threshold, guarded by sadness, much that we select and smile upon, and follow with adulation in the common walks of life, never passes. We admire the gay. They make our melancholy sweeter by con trast, when we retire within ourselves. We pursue them. We take them to our hearts to the outer vestibules of our hearts and if they are gay only, they are content with the unconsecrated tribute which we pay them there. But the chamber within is, mean time, lonely. It aches with its desolation. The echo of the mirthful admiration without jars upon its mournful silence. It longs for love, but love toned with its own sadness love that can penetrate deeper than smiles ever came love that, having once entered, can be locked in with its key of melancholy, and brooded over with the long dream of a life-time. But that deep-hidden and unseen chamber of the heart may be long untenanted. And, meantime, the spirit becomes weary of mirth, and impatiently quenches the fire even upon its outer altar, and in the complete loneliness of a heart that has no inmate or idol, gay or tearful, lives mechanically on. " Do you guess at rny meaning, Kate ? Do you remember the merriment of our first meeting ? Do you remember in what a frolic of thoughtlessness you first permitted me to raise to my lips those restless fingers ? Do you remember the mock condescension, the merry haughtinass, the rallying and feigned in credulity, with which you first received my successive steps of vowing and love-making the arch look when it was begun, the laugh when it was over, the untiring follies we kept up, after vows plighted, and the future planned and sworn to ? That you were in earnest, as much as you were capable of being, I fully believe. You would not else have been so prodigal of the sweet bestowings of a maiden s tenderness. But how often have I left you with the feeling, that in the hours I had passed with you, my spirit had been alone ! How often have I wondered if there were depths in my heart, which love can never reach ! How often mourned that in the procession of love there was no place allot ted for its sweetest and dearest followers tears and silence ! Oh, Kate ! sweet as was that sun-gleam of early passion, I did not love you ! I tired of your FLIRTATION AND FOX-CHASING. 153 I left you, mention to you, that, in consequence of eating an im prudent quantity of unripe fruit, she felt ill before go ing to the theatre, and was obliged to leave early. To day she seems seriously indisposed. I trust she will be well enough to see you in a day or two and remain, " Yours, truly, " SAMUEL SMITHERS." smiles, waiting in vain for your sadness and thought of you no more ? "But now (and you will be surprised to know that I have been so near to you unperceived) I have drank an intoxication from one glance into your eyes, which throws open to you every door of my heart, subdues to your control every nerve and feeling of my exis tence. Last night, I sat an hour, tracing again the transparent and well-remembered veins upon your hand, and oh! how the language written in those branching and mystic lines had changed in meaning and power. You were sad. I saw you from a dis tance, and, with amazement at an expression upon your face which I had never before seen. I came and sat near you. It was the look I had longed for when I knew you, and when tired of your mirth. It was the lookl had searched the world for, combined with such beauty as yours. It was a look of tender and passionate melancholy, which revealed to me an un suspected chamber in your heart a chamber of ttfars. Ah, why were you never sad before ? Why have we lost why have I lost the eternity s worth of sweet j hours when you love me with that concealed treasure : n ___ rf in your bosom ? Alas ! that angels must walk tb : j win(]ow and t h e back wall I saw the yards of a vessel world, unrecognised, till too late ! Alas, that I have I, suddent |y cross t h e light, and heard the next moment held in my arms and pressed to my lips, and loosed ^ ra u\ e of a chain let go, and all the bustle of a again with trifling and weariness, the creature whom But I never called on Mrs. Samuel Smithers. FLIRTATION AND FOX-CHASING, " The only heart that I have known of late, has been an easy, excitable sort of gentleman, quickly roused and quickly calmed sensitive enough to confer a great deal of pleasure, and not sensi tive enough to give a moment s pain. The heart of other days was a very different person indeed." BULWEB. I WAS moping one day in solitary confinement in quarantine at Malta, when, in a turn between my stone it was my life s errand, the thirst and passionate long ing of my nature, to find and worship ! " Oh, Heaven ! with what new value do I now number over your adorable graces of person ! How spiritualized is every familiar feature, once so deplor- erchantman coming to anchor. 1 had the privilege of promenading between two ring-bolts on the whart below the lazaretto, and with the attraction of a new comer to the sleepy company of vessels under the yellow flag, I lost no time in descending the stone stairs, and was immediately joined by my vigilant sen- bly misappreciated ! How compulsive of respectful tine] the <r uan n an0t whose business it was to prevent _ adoration is that flexible waist, that step of aerial light ness, that swan-like motion, which I once dared to praise triflingly and half-mockingly, like the tints of a flower or the chance beauty of a bird ! And those bright lips ! How did I ever look on them, and not know that within their rosy portal slept voiceless, for my contact with the other visitors to the wharf. The tricolor flew at the peak of the stranger, and we easily made out that she was a merchantman from Marseilles, subject therefore to a week s quarantine on ac count of the cholera. I had myself come from a plague port, Smyrna, and was subjected to twenty Frenchman, though but beginning his imprisonment 1 was in a position comparatively enviable. I had watched for an hour the getting of the vessel into mooring trim, and was beginning to conclude that she had come without passengers, when a gentle- ! man made his appearance on deck, and the jolly-boat | was immediately lowered and manned. A traveller s i baggage wasWianded over the side, the gentleman took for long I pray you !" I despatched this letter, and it would be difficult to embody in language the agony I suffered in waiting for a reply. I walked my room, that endless morning, with a death-pang in every step so fearful was I so prophetically fearful that I had forfeited for ever the heart I had once flung from me. It was noon when a letter arrived. It was in a hand writing new to me. But it was on tl subject which possessed my existence, and it was of final import. It follows : " DEAR SIR : My wife wishes me to write to you, and inform you of her marriage, which took place a week or two since, and of which she presumes you are not aware. She remarked to me, that you thought her looking unhappy last evening, when you chanced to see her at the play. As she seemed to regret not being able to answer your note herself, I may perhaps convey the proper apology by taking upon myself to _ while, the controlling spell of my destiny the tear- | j , quaran t j ne , s j x o f which had passed ; so that the ful spirit followed and called in my dreams, with per petual longing ? Strange value given to features and outward loveliness by qualities within ! Strange witchery of sadness in a woman! Oh, there is, in mirth and folly, dear Kate, no air for love s breathing, still less of food for constancy, or of holiness to con secrate and heighten beauty of person. "What can I say else, except implore to be per mitted to approach you to offer my life to you to ji j e ~.jy e ~ ! o f t i ie captain, and, in obedience to directions begin, thus late, after being known so long, the wor- | from tl)e q uarant j ne officer on the quarterdeck, the ship which till death is your due ? Pardon me if 1 I bo . u was p u n ed directly to the wharf on which I stood. have written abruptly and wildly. I shall await your j Tlje g U(tr( n ano g ave me a caution to retire a little, as answer in an agony of expectation. I do not willingly ^ e stranger was coming to take possession of the next breathe till I see you till I weep at your feet over my apartment to my own, and must land at the stairs near blindness and forgetfulness. Adieu! but let it not be ^. bu() Before j i mc j taken two steps backward, I be^an to recognise features familar to me, and with a i turn of the head as he sprang on the wharf the identity 1 was established completely. Tom Berryman, by all I that was wonderful! I had not seen him since we ] were suspended from college together ten years before. 1 Forgetting lazaretto and guardiano, and all the salt wate* between New Haven and Malta, J rushed up to Tom with the cordiality of other days (a little sharpen ed by abstinence from society), and we st.ll had hold of hands with a firm grip, when the quarantine master aravely accosted us, and informed my friend that he had incurred an additional week by touching me in short, that he must partake of the rema.nder of my quarantine. Aghast and chap-fallen as Berryman was at the con sequences of our rencontre (for he had fully calculated on getting into Malta in time for the carnival), he was somewhat reconciled to his lot by being permitted to share my room and table instead of living his week in solitude ; and, by enriching our supplies a little from 154 FLIRTATION AND FOX-CHASING. town, sleeping much, and chatting through the day in the rich sunshine of that climate of Paradise, we con trived to shove off the fortnight without any very in tolerable tedium. My friend and I had begun our travels differently he taken England first, which I proposed visiting last. It is of course the bonne bouche of travel to everybody, and I was very curious to know Tom s experiences ; and, as I was soon bound thitherward, anxious to pick out of his descriptions some chart of the rocks and shoals in the " British channel" of society. I should say, before quoting my friend, that he was a Kentuckian. with the manner (to ladies) of mingled devotion and nonchalance so popular with the sex, and a chivalric quality of man altogether. His father s political influence had obtained for him personal letters of introduction from the president, and, with this ad vantage, and his natural air of fashion, he had found no obstacle to choosing his society in England ; choosing the first, of course, like a true republican ! We were sitting on the water-steps with our feet immersed up to the ankles (in January too), and in reply to some question of mine as to the approacha- Wlity of noble ladies by such plebeian lovers as him self, Tom told me the story which follows. I take the names at random, of course, but, in all else, I shall try to " tell the tale as twas told to me." Why, circumstances, as you know, sometimes put people in the attitude of lovers whether they will or no ; and it is but civil in such a case, to do what fate ex pects of you. I knew too much of the difference be tween crockery and porcelain to enter English society with the remotest idea of making love within the red book of the peerage, and though I ve a story to tell, I swear I never put a foot forward till I thought it was knightly devoir; inevitable, though ever so ridiculous. Still, I must say, with a beautiful and unreserved woman beside one, very much like other beautiful and unreserved woman, a republican might be pardoned for forgetting the invisible wall. " Right honorable" love liness has as much attraction about it, let me tell you, and is quite as difficult to resist, as loveliness that is honored, right or wrong, and a man must be brought up to it, as Englishmen are, to see the heraldric dragons and griffins in the air when a charming girl is talking to him. " AVhy should a man, whose blood is warm within, Sit like (her) grandsire cut in alabaster ?" Eh ? But to begin with the " Tityre tu patula?." I had been passing a fortnight at the hunting lodge of that wild devil, Lord , in the Scotch Highlands, and what with being freely wet outside every day, and freely wet inside every night, I had given my principle of life rather a disgust to its lodgings, and there were some symptoms of preparation for leave-taking. Un willing to be ill in a bachelor s den, with no solace j tenderer than a dandy lord s tiger, I made a twilight flit to the nearest post-town, and tightening my life- screws a little with the aid of the village apothecary, started southward the next morning with four posters. I expected to be obliged to pull up atEdinboro , but the doctor s opiates, and abstinence, and quiet did i more for me than I had hoped, and I went on very I comfortably to Carlisle. I arrived at this place after nightfall, and found the taverns overflowing with the j crowds of a fair, and no bed to be had unless T could make one in a quartette of snoring graziers. At the i same time there was a great political meeting at I Edinboro , and every leg of a poster had gone north those I had brought with me having been trans- i hitched to a return chaise, and gone off while I was i looking for accommodations. Regularly stranded, I sat down by the tap-room fire, and was mourning my disaster, when the horn ; of the night-coach reached my ear, and in the minute i of its rattling up to the door, I hastily resolved that it was the least of two evils, and booked myself accord ingly. There was but one vacant place, an outsider ! With hardly time enough to resolve, and none to re pent,! was presently rolling over the dark road, chilled to the bone in the first five minutes, and wet through with a " Scotch mist" in the next half hour. Some where about daybreak we rolled into the little town of , five miles from the seat of the earl of Trese- then, to whose hospitalities I stood invited, and I went to bed in a most comfortable inn and slept till noon. Before going to bed I had written a note to be des patched to Tresethen castle, and the earl s carriage was waiting for me when I awoke. I found myself better than I had expected, and dressing at once for dinner, managed to reach the castle just in time to hand in Lady Tresethen. Of that dinner I but re member that I was the only guest, and that the earl regretted his daughter s absence from table, Lady Caroline having been thrown that morning from her horse. I fainted somewhere about the second remove, and recovered my wits some days after, on the safe side of the crisis of a fever. I shall never forget that first half hour of conscious curiosity. An exquisite sense of bodily repose mingled with a vague notion of recent relief from pain, made me afraid to speak lest I should awoke from a dream, yet, if not a dream, what a delicious reality ! A lady of most noble presence, in a half-mourning dress, sat by the sideof a cheerful fire, turning her large dark eyes on me, in the pauses of a conversation with a gray- headed servant. My bed was of the most sumptuous luxury; the chamber was hung with pictures and draped with spotless white; the table covered with the costliest elegancies of the toilet : and in the gentle and deferential manner of the old liveried menial, and the subdued tones of inquiry by the lady, there was a refinement and tenderness which, with the keen sus ceptibility of my senses, "lapt me in Elysium." I was long in remembering where 1 was. The lady glided from the room, the old servant resumed his seat by my bedside, other servants in the same livery came softly in on errands of service, and, at the striking of the half hour by a clock on the mantelpiece, the lady returned, and I was raised to receive something from her hand. As she came nearer, I remembered the Countess Tresethen. Three days after this I was permitted to take the irof a conservatory which opened from the countess s boudoir. My old attendant assisted me to dress, and, with another servant, took me down in a fauteuil. I was in slippers and robe-de-chambre, and presumed :hat I should see no one except the kind and noble Lndy Tresethen, but I had scarce taken one turn up the long alley of flowering plants, when the countess came toward me from the glass door beyond, and on her arm a girl leaned for support, whose beauty (Here Tom dabbled his feet for some minutes in he water in silence.) God bless me ! I can never give you an idea of it ! [t was a new revelation of woman to me; the opening of an eighth seal. In the minute occupied by her approach, my imagination (accelerated, as that faculty always is, by the clairvoyance of sickness), had gone hrough a whofc drama of love fear, adoration, des- leration, and rejection and so complete was it, that n after moments when these phases of passion came ound in the proper lapse of days and weeks, it seemed o me that I had been through with them before ; that t was all familiar; that I had met and loved in some >ther world, this same glorious creature, with the lame looks, words, and heart-ache ; in the same con servatory of bright flowers, and faith, myself in the ;ame pattern of a brocade dressing-gown ! Heavens! what a beautiful girl was that LadyCaro- ine ! Her eyes were of a light gray, the rim of the FLIRTATION AND FOX-CHASING. 155 lids perfectly inky with the darkness of the long sweep ing lashes, and in her brown hair there was a gold lustre that seemed somehow to illuminate the curves of her small head like a halo. Her mouth had too much character for a perfectly agreeable first impres sion. It was nobility and sweetness educated over native high spirit andscornfulness the nature shining through the transparent blood, like a flaw through enamel. She would have been, in other circu instan ces, a maid of Saragossa or a Gertrude Von Wart ; a heroine ; perhaps a devil. But her fascination was resistless ! " My daughter," said Lady Tresethen (and in that beginning was all the introduction she thought neces sary), " is, like yourself, an invalid just escaped from the doctor ; you must congratulate each other. Are you strong enough to lend her an arm, Mr. Berry- man ?" The countess left us, and with the composure of a | sister who had seen me every day of my life, Lady I Caroline took my arm and strolled slowly to and fro, questioning me of my shooting at the lodge, arid talk- j ing to me of her late accident, her eyes sometimes ! fixed upon her little embroidered slippers, as they I peeped from her snowy morning dress, and sometimes ! indolently raised and brought to bear on my flushed cheek and trembling lips; her singular serenity opera ting on rne as anything but a sedative ! I was taken | up stairs again, after an hour s conversation, in a fair j way for a relapse, and the doctor put me under em bargo again for another week, which, spite of all the renewed care and tenderness of Lady Tresethen, seemed to me an eternity ! I ll not bother you with what I felt and thought all that time ! It was a brilliant autumnal day when I got leave to make my second exodus, and with the doctor s per- I mission I prepared for a short walk in the park. I declined the convoy of the old servant, for I had heard , Lady Caroline s horse gallop away down the avenue, and I wished to watch her return unobserved. I had just lost sight of the castle in the first bend of the path, when I saw her quietly walking her horse under the trees at a short distance, and the moment after she observed and came toward me at an easy canter. I had schooled myself to a little more self-possession, i but I was not prepared for such an apparition of splen did beauty as that woman on horseback. She rode an Arabian bay of the finest blood ; a lofty, fiery, match less creature, with an expression of eye and nostril which I could not but think a proper Cendant to her own, limbed as I had seldom seen a horse, and his arched neck, and forehead, altogether, proud as a steed for Lucifer. She sat on him as if it were a throne she was born to, and the flow of her riding-dress seemed as much a part of him as his mane. He ap- : peared ready to bound into the air, like Pegasus, but j one hand calmly stroked his mane, and her faee was as tranquil as marble. " Well met !" she said ; "I was just wishing for a cavalier. What sort of a horse would you like, Mr. Berryman 1 Ellis!" {speaking to her groom), "is old Curtal taken up from grass ?" 41 Yes, miladi!" " Curtal is our invalid horse, and as you are not : very strong, perhaps his easy pace will be best for you. Bring him out directly, Ellis. We ll just walk along the road a little way ; for I must show you my Ara- ; bian ; and we ll not go back to ask mamma s permis sion, for we shouldn t get it ! You won t mind riding a little way, will you ?" Of course I would have bcstrided a hippos-ill at her bidding, and wheu the groom came out, leading a thorough-bred hunter, with apparently a very elastic and gentle action, I forgot the doctor and mounted with great alacrity. We walked our horses slowly down the avenue and out at the castle gate, followed by the groom, and after trying a little quicker pace on the public road, I pronounced old Curtal worthy of her ladyship s eulogium, and her own Saladin worthy, it" horse could be worthy, of his burthen. We had ridden perhaps a mile, and Lady Caroline was giving me a slight history of the wonderful feats of the old veteran under me, wheu the sound of a horn made both horses prick up their ears, and on rising a little acclivity, we cnught sight of a pack of hounds coming across the fields directly toward us, followed by some twenty red-coated horsemen. Old Curtal trembled and showed a disposition to fret, and I ob served that Lady Caroline dexterously lengthened her own stirrup and loosened the belt of her riding- dress, and the next minute the hounds were over the hedge, and the horsemen, leap after leap, after them, and with every successive jump, my own steed reared and plunged unmanageably. "Indeed, I can not stand this !" cried Lady Caro line, gathering up her reins, "Ellis! see Mr. Berry man home !" and away went the flying Arabian over the hedge with a vault that left me breathless with astonishment. One minute I made the vain effort to control my own horse and turn his head in the other direction, but my strength was gone. I had never leaped a fence in my life on horseback, though a tolerable rider on the road ; but before I could think how it was to be done, or gather myself together for the leap, Curtal was over the hedge with me, and flying across a ploughed field like the wind Saladin not far before him. With a glance ahead I saw the red coats rising into the air and disappearing over another green hedge, and though the field was crossed in twenty leaps, I had time to feel my blood run cold with the prospect of describing another parabola in the air, and to speculate on the best attitude for a projectile on horseback. Over went Saladin like a greyhound, but his mistress s riding-cap caught the wind at the highest point of the curve, and flew back ^ into my face as Curtal rose on his haunches, and over I went again, blinded and giddy, and, with the cap held flat against my bosom by the pressure of the air, flew once more at a tremendous pace onward. My feet were now plugged to the instep in the stinups, and my back, too weak to support me erect, let me down to my horse s mane, and one by one, along the skirt of a rising woodland, I could see the red coats dropping slowly behind. Right before me like a meteor, however, streamed back the loosened tresses f Lady Caroline, and Curtal kept close on the track of Saladiu, neither losing nor gaining an inch apparent ly, and nearer and nearer sounded the baying of the hounds, and clearer became my view of the steady and slight waist riding so fearlessly onward. Of my horse I had neither guidance nor control. He needed none. The hounds had crossed a morass, and we were round ing a half-circle on an acclivity to come up with them, and Curtal went at it too confidently to be in error. Evenly as a hand-gallop on a green sward his tremen dous pace told off, and if his was the ease of muscular power, the graceful speed of the beautiful creature moving before me seemed the aerial buoyancy of a bird. Obstructions seemed nothing. That flowing dress and streaming hairsailed over rocks and ditches, and over them, like their inseparable shadow, glided I, and, except one horseman who still kept his ^dis tance ahead, we seemed alone in the field. The clatter of hoofs, and the exclamations ot excitement had ceased behind me, and though I was capable of no exertion beyond that of keeping my seat, I no longer feared the leap nor the pace, and began to an ticipate a safe termination to my perilous adventure. \ slight exclamation from Lady Caroline reached my ear and I looked forward. A small river was before us, and, from the opposite bank, of steep clay, the rider who had preceded us was falling back, his horse s 156 THE POET AND THE MANDARIN. forefeet high in the air, and his arms already in the water. I tried to pull my reins. I shouted to my horse in desperation. And with the exertion, my heart seemed to give way within me. Giddy and faint I abandoned myself to my fate. I just saw the flying heels of Saladin planted on the opposite bank and the streaming hair still flying onward, when, with a bound that, it seemed to me, must rend every fibre of the creature beneath me, I saw the water gleam under my feet, and still I kept on. We flew over a fence into a stubble field, the hounds just before us, and over a gate into the public highway, which we followed for a dozen bounds, and then, with a pace slightly mode rated, we successively cleared a low wall and brought up, on our horses haunches, in the midst of an uproar of dogs, cows, and scattering poultry the fox having been run down at last in the enclosure of a barn. I had just strength to extricate my feet from the stirrups, take Lady Caroline s cap, which had kept its place between my elbows and knees, and present it to her as she sat in her saddle, and my legs gave way under me. I was taken into the farmhouse, and, at the close of a temporary ellipse, I was sent back to Tresethen Castle in a post-chaise, and once more handed over to the doctor ! Well, my third siege of illness was more tolerable, for I received daily, now, some message of inquiry or some token of interest from Lady Caroline, though I learned from the countess that she was in sad disgrace for her inveiglement of my trusting innocence. I also received the cards of the members of the hunt, with many inquiries complimentary to what they were pleased to consider American horsemanship, and I found that my seizure of the flying cap of Lady Caro line and presentation of it to her ladyship at "the death," was thought to be worthy, in chivalry of Bayard, and in dexterity of Ducrow. Indeed, when let out again to the convalescent walk in the conser vatory, I found that 1 was counted a hero even by the stately earl. There slipped a compliment, too, here and there, through the matronly disapprobation of Lady Tresethen and all this was too pleasant to put aside with a disclaimer so I bid truth and modesty hold their peace, and took the honor the gods chose to provide ! But now came dangers more perilous than my ride on Curtal. Lady Caroline was called upon to be kind to me ! Daily as the old servant left me in the alley of japonicas, she appeared from the glass door of her mother s boudoir and devoted herself to my comfort walking with me, while I could walk, in those fragrant and balmy avenues of flowers, and then bringing me into her mother s luxurious apartment, where books, and music, and conversation as frank and untrammelled as man in love could ask, wiled away the day. Wiled it away ? winged it shod it with velvet and silence, for I never knew how it passed ! Lady Caroline had a mind of the superiority stamped so consciously on her lip. She anticipated no consequences from her kindness, therefore she was playful and unembarrassed. She sang to me, and I read to her. Her rides were given up, and Saladin daily went past the window to his exercise, and with my most zealous scrutiny I could detect in her face neither impatience of con finement nor regret at the loss of weather fitter for pleasures out of doors. Spite of every caution with which hope could be chained down, I was flattered. You smile (Tom said, though he was looking straight into the water, and had not seen my face for half an hour) but, without the remotest hope of taking Lady Caroline to Kentucky, or of becoming English on the splendid dowry of the heiress of Trese then, I still felt it impossible to escape from my lover s attitude impossible to avoid hoarding up symptoms, encouragements, flatteries, and all the moonshine of am atory anxiety. I was iu love and who reasons in love ? One morning, after I had become an honorary patient an invalid only by sufferance and was slow ly admitting the unwelcome conviction that it was time for me to be shaping my adieux the conversa tion took rather a philosophical turn. The starting point was a quotation in a magazine from Richter : " Is not a man s universe within his head, whether a king s diadem or a torn scullcap be without ?" and I had insisted rather strenuously on the levelling privilege we enjoyed in the existence of a second world around us the world of revery and dream wherein the tyran ny, and check, and the arbitrary distinctions of the world of fact, were never felt and where he, though he might be a peasant, who had the consciousness in his soul that he was a worthy object of love to a prin cess, could fancy himself beloved and revel in imagin ary possession. " Why," said I, turning with a sudden flush of self- confidence to Lady Caroline, " Why should not the passions of such a world, the loving and returning of love infancy, have the privilege of language ? Why should not matches be made, love confessed, vows ex changed, and fidelity sworn, valid within the realm of drearn-land only ? Why should I not say to yo%, for example, I adore you, dear lady, and in my world of thought you shall, if you so condescend, be my bride and mistress ; and why, if you responded to this and listened to my vows of fancy, should your bridegroom of the world of fact feel his rights invaded ? " In fancy let it be then-!" said Lady Caroline, with a blush and a covert smile, and she rang the bell for luncheon. Well, I still lingered a couple of days, and on the last day of my stay at Tresethen, I became sufficiently emboldened to take Lady Caroline s hand behind the fountain of the conservatory, and to press it to my lips with a daring wish that its warm pulses belonged to the world of fancy. She withdrew it very kindly, and (I thought) sadly, and begged me to go to the boudoir and bring her a volume of Byron that lay on her work-table. I brought it, and she turned over the leaves a mo ment, and, with her pencil, marked two lines and gave me the book, bidding me an abrupt good morning. I stood a few minutes with my heart beating and my brain faint, but finally summoned courage to read : " I can not lose a world for thee But would not lose thee for the world I" I left Tresethen the next morning, and "Hold on, Tom !" cried I " there comes the boat with our dinner from Valletta, and we ll have your sorrows over our Burgundy." " Sorrows !" exclaimed Tom, " I was going to tell you of the fun I had at her wedding !" " Lord preserve us !" "Bigamy wasn t it? after our little nuptials in dream-land ! She told her husband all about it at the wedding breakfast, and his lordship (she marrie d the Marquis of ) begged to know the extent of my prerogatives. I was sorry to confess that they did not interfere very particularly with his . " THE POET AND THE MANDARIN, THE moon shone like glorified and floating dew on the bosom of the tranquil Pei-ho, and the heart of the young poet Le-pih was like a cup running over with wine. It was no abatement of his exulting fulness that he was as yet the sole possessor of the secret of his own genius. Conscious of exquisite susceptibility to beauty, fragrance and music (the three - graces of THE POET AND THE MANDARIN. 157 the Chinese), he was more intent upon enjoying his gifts than upon the awakening of envy for their posses sion the latter being (lie second leaf in the book of genius, and only turned over by the finger of satiety. Thoughtless of the acquisition of fame as the youth ful poet may be, however, he is always ready to an ticipate its fruits, and Le-pih committed but the poet s error, when, having the gem in his bosom which could buy the favor of the world, he took the favor for granted without producing the gem. Kwonfootse had returned a conqueror, from the wars with the Hwong-kin, and this night, on which the moon shone so gloriously, was the hour of his triumph, for the Emperor Tang had condescended to honor with his presence, a gala given by the victorious gene ral at his gardens on the Pei-ho. Softened by his exulting feelings (for though a brave soldier, he was as haughty as Liuykong the thunder-god, or Hwuyloo the monarch of fire), the warlike mandarin threw open his gardens on this joyful night, not only to those who wore in their caps the gold ball significant of patrician birth, but to all whose dress and mien warranted their appearance in the presence of the emperor. Like the realms of the blest shone the gardens of Kwonfootse. Occupying the whole valley of the Pei-ho, at a spot where it curved like the twisted cavity of a shell, the sky seemed to shut in the grounds like the cover of a vase, and the stars seemed bui the garden-lights overhead. From one edge of the vase to the other from hill-top to hill-topextended a broad avenue, a pagoda at either extremity glittering with gold and scarlet, the sides flaming with colored lamps and flaunting with gay streamers of barbarian stuffs, and the moonlit river cutting it in the centre, the whole vista, at the first glance, resembling a girdle of precious stones with a fastening of opal. Off from this central division radiated in all directions alleys of camphor and cinnamon trees, lighted with amorous dimness, and leading away to bowers upon (he hill side, and from every quarter resounded music, and in every nook was seen feasting and merriment. In disguise, the emperor and imperial family mingled in the crowd, and no one save the host and his daugh ters knew what part of the gardens was honored with their presence. There was, however, a retreat in the grounds, sacred to the privileged few, and here, when fatigued or desirous of refreshment, the royal person ages laid aside disguise and were surrounded with the deferential honors of the court. It was so con trived that the access was unobserved by the people, and there was, therefore, no feeling of exclusion to qualify the hilarity of the entertainment, Kwonfootse, with all his pride, looking carefully to his popularity. At the foot of each descent, upon the matted banks of the river, floated gilded boats with lamps burning in their prows, and gayly-dressed boatmen offering con veyance across to all who required it; but thew were also, unobserved by the crowd, boats unlighted and undecorated holding off from the shore, which, at a sign given by the initiated, silently approached a mar ble stair without the line of the blazing avenue, and tak ing their freight on board, sxviftly pulled up the moonlit river, to a landing concealed by the shoulder of the hill. No path led from the gardens hither, and from no point of view could be overlooked the more brilliant scene of imperial revel. It was verging toward midnight when the unknown poet, with brain floating in a celestial giddiness of delight, stood on the brink of the gleaming river. The boats plied to and fro with their freights of fair damsels and gayly-dressed youths, the many-colored lamps throw ing a rainbow profusion of tints on the water, and many a voice addressed him with merry invitation, for Le-pih s beauty, so famous now in history, was of no forbiddujg stateliness, and his motions, like his coun- were as frankly joyous as the gambols of a young leopard. Nol inclined to boisterous gayety at the moment, Le-pih stepped between the lamp-boaring trees of the avenue, and folding his arms in his silken vest, stood gazing in revery on the dancing waters. After a few moments, one of the dark boats on which he had unconsciously fixed his gaze drew silently toward him, and as the cushioned stern was brought j round to the bank, the boatman made a reverence to | his knees and sat waiting the poet s pleasure. Like all men born to good fortune, Le-pih was prompt to follow the first beckoningsof adventure, and asking no questions, he quietly embarked, and with a quick dip of the oars the boat shot from the shore and II took the descending current. Almost in the next in- || slant she neared again to the curving and willow-fringed i margin of the stream, and lights glimmered through the branches, and sweet, low music became audible, and by rapid degrees, a scene burst on his eye, which j i the first glimpse into the gate of paradise (a subsequent I agreeable surprise, let us presume) could scarcely have | exceeded. Without an exchange of a syllable between the ! boatman and his freight, the stern was set against a carpeted stair at the edge of the river, and Le-pih dis- ; embarked with a bound, and stood upon a spacious j area Iving in a lap of the hill, the entire surface carpeted j smoothly with Persian stuffs, and dotted here and there j with striped tents piched with jx)les of silver. Gar- j lands of flowers hung in festoons against the brilliant- ; colored cloths, and in the centre of each lent stood a | low tablet surrounded with couches and laden with II meats and wine. The guests, for whom this portion of the entertainment w;is provided, were apparently assembled at a spot farther on, from which proceeded the delicious music heard by the poet in approaching; and, first entering one of the abandoned tents for a goblet of wine, Le-pih followed to the scene of attrac tion. Under a canopy of gold cloth held by six bearers, stood the imperial chair upon a raised platform not occupied, however, the august Tang reclining more at his ease, a little out of the circle, upon cushions canopied by the moonlight. Around upon the steps j of the platform and near by, were grouped the noble j ladies of the court and the roy;il princesses (Tang living much in the female apartments and his daugh ters numbering several score), and all, at the moment j of Le-pih s joining the assemblage, turning to observe a damsel with a lute, to whose performance the low sweet music of the band had been a prelude. The first touch of the strings betrayed a trembling hand, and the poet s sympathies were stirred, though from her bent posture and her distant position he had not yet seen the features of the player. As the tremulous notes grew firmer, and the lute began to give out a flowing harmony, Le-pih approached, and at the same time, the listening groups of ladies began to whisper and move away, and of those who remained, none seemed to listen with pleasure except Kwonfootse and the emperor. The latter, indeed, rivalled the intruding bard in his interest, rolling over upon the cushions and resting on the other imperial elbow in close at tention. Gaining confidence evidently from the neglect of her auditory, or, as is natuial to women, less afraid of the judgment of the other sex, who were her only listeners, the fair Taya (the youngest daughter of Kwonfootse), now joined her voice to her instrument, and sang with a sweetness that dropped like a plum met to the soul of Le-pih. He fell to his knee upon a heap of cushions and leaned eagerly forward. As she became afterward one of his most passionate themes, we are enabled to reconjure the features that were presented to his admiring wonder. The envy of the princesses was sufficient proof that Taya was of rare beauty ; she had that wonderful perfection of 158 THE POET AND THE MANDARIN. feature to which envy pays its bitterest tribute, which is apologized for if not found in the poet s ideal, which we thirst after in pictures and marble, of which loveli ness and expression are but lesser degrees fainter shadowings. She was adorably beautiful. The outer corners of her long almond-shaped eyes, the dipping crescent of her forehead, the pencil of her eyebrow and the indented corners of her mouth all these turned downward ; and this peculiarity which, in faces of a less elevated character, indicates a temper morose and repulsive, in Taya s expressed the very soul of gentle and lofty melancholy. There was something infantine about her mouth, the teeth were so small and regular, and their dazzling whiteness, shining be tween lips of the brilliant color of a cherry freshly torn apart, was in startling contrast with the dark lustre of her eyes. Le-pih s poetry makes constant allusion to those small and snowy teeth, and the turn ed-down corners of the lips and eyes of his incompar able mistress. Taya s song was a fragment of that celebrated Chinese romance from which Moore has borrowed so largely in his loves of the angels, and it chanced to be particularly appropriate to her deserted position (she was alone now with her three listeners), dwelling as it did upon the loneliness of a disguised Peri, wander ing in exile upon earth. The lute fell from her hands when she ceased, and while the emperor applauded, and Kwonfootse looked on her with paternal pride, Le-pih modestly advanced to the fallen instrument, and with a low obeisance to the emperor and a hesita ting apology to Taya, struck a prelude in the same air, and broke forth into an impulsive expression of his feelings in verse. It would be quite impossible to give a translation of this famous effusion with its oriental load of imagery, but in modifying it to the spirit ofour language (giving little more than its thread of thought), the reader may see glimpses of (he ma terial from which the great Irish lyrist spun his woof of sweet fable. Fixing his keen eyes upon the bright lips just closed, Le-pih sang : " When first from heaven s immortal throngs The earth-doomed angels downward came, And mourning their enraptured songs, Walked sadly in our mortal frame ; To those, whose lyres of loftier string Had taught the myriad lips of heaven, The song that they for ever sing, A wondrous lyre, tis said, was given. And go, the seraph warder said, As from the diamond gates they flew, And wake the songs ye here have led In earthly numbers, pure and new ! And yours shall be the hallowed power To win the lost to heaven again, And when earth s clouds shall darkest lower Your lyre shall breathe its holiest strain ! Yet, chastened by this inward fire, Your lot shall be to walk alone, Save when, perchance, with echoing lyre, You touch a spirit like your own ; And whatsoe er the guise your wear, To him, tis given to know you there. " The song over, Le-pih sat with his hands folded across the instrument and his eyes cast down, and Taya gazed on him with wondering looks, yet slowly, and as if unconsciously, she took from her breast a rose, and with a half-stolen glance at her father, threw it upon the lute. But frowningly Kwonfootse rose from his seat and approached the poet. " Who are you?" he demanded angrily, as the bard placed the rose reverently in his bosom. Le-pih!" With another obeisance to the emperor, and a deeper one to the fair Taya, he turned, after this concise an swer, upon his heel, lifting his cap to his head, which, to the rage of Kwonfootse, bore not even the gold ball of aristocracy. " Bind him for the bastinado !" cried the infuriated mandarin to the bearers of the canopy. The six soldiers dropped their poles to the ground, but the emperor s voice arrested them. " He shall have no violence but from you, fair Taya," said the softened monarch ; " call to him by the name he has just pronounced, for I would hear that lute again !" "Le-pih! Le-pih!" cried instantly the musical voice of the fair girl. Th poet turned and listened, incredulous of his own ears. " Le-pih! Le-pih!" she repeated, in a soft tone. Half-hesitating, half-bounding, as if still scarce be lieving he had heard aright, Le-pih flew to her feet, and dropped to one knee upon the cushion before her, his breast heaving and his eyes flashing with eager | wonder. Taya s courage was at an end, and she sat | with her eyes upon the ground. " Give him the Jute, Kwonfootse !" said the em peror, swinging himself on the raised chair with an i abandonment of the imperial avoirdupois, which set | ringing violently the hundred bells suspended in the ! golden fringes. " Let not the crow venture again into the nest of the eagle," muttered the mandarin between his teeth as he handed the instrument to the poet. The sound of the bells brought in the women and courtiers from every quarter of the privileged area, and, preluding upon the strings to gather his scattered senses, while they were seating themselves around him, Le-pih at last fixed his gaze upon the lips of Taya, and commenced his song to an irregular harmo ny well adapted to extempore verse. We have tried | in vain to put this celebrated song of compliment into English stanzas. It commenced with a description of Taya s beauty, and an enumeration of things she resembled, dwelling most upon the blue lily, which seems to have been Le-pih s favorite flower. The burthen of the conclusion, however, is the new value everything assumed in her presence. "Of the light in this garden," he says, "there is one beam worth all the glory of the moon, for it sleeps on the eye of Taya. Of the air about me there is one breath which my soul drinks like wine it is from the lips of Taya. Taya looks on a flower, and that flower seems to me, with its pure eye, to gaze after her for ever. Taya s jacket of blue silk is my passion. If angels visit me in my dreams, let them be dressed like Taya. I love the broken spangle in her slipper better than the first star of evening. Bring me, till I die, inner leaves from the water-lily, since white and fragrant like them are the teeth of Taya. Call me, should I sleep, when rises the crescent moon, for the blue sky in its bend curves like the drooped eye of Taya," &c., &c. " By the immortal Fo !" cried the emperor, raising himself bolt upright in his chair, as the poet ceased, "you shall be the bard of Tang ! Those are my sen timents better expressed ! The lute, in your hands, is my heart turned inside out ! Lend me your gold chain, Kwonfootse, and, Taya! come hither and put it on his neck !" Taya glided to the emperor, but Le-pih rose to his feet, with a slight flush on his forehead, and stood erect and motionless. " Let it please your imperial majesty," he said, after a moment s pause, " to bestow upon me some gift less binding than a chain." "CarbuncleofBudha! What would theyoutJi have!" exclaimed Tang in astonishment. " Is not the gold chain of a mandarin good enough for his acceptance ?" "My poor song," replied Le-pih, modestly casting down his eyes, " is sufficiently repaid by your majesty s praises. The chain of the mandarin would gall the neck of the poet. Yet if I might have a" reward more valuable " THE POET AND THE MANDARIN. 159 " In Fo s name what is it ?" said the embarrassed | emperor. Kwonfootse laid his hand on his cimeter, and his daughter blushed and trembled. "The broken spangle on the slipper of Taya !" said Le-pih, turning half indifferently away. Loud laughed the ladies of the court, and Kwon footse walked from the bard with a look of contempt, but the emperor read more truly the proud and deli cate spirit tiiat dictated the reply ; and in that moment probably commenced the friendship with which, to the end of his peaceful reign, Tang distinguished the most gifted poet of his time. The lovely daughter of the mandarin was not behind the emperor in her interpretation of the character of Le-pih, and as she stepped forward to put the detach ed spangle into his hand, she bent on him a look full of earnest curiosity and admiration. "What others give me," he murmured in a low voice, pressing the worthless trifle to his lips, " makes me their slave; but what Taya gives me is a link that draws her to my bosom." Kwonfootse probably thought that Le-pih s audi ence had lasted long enough, for at this moment the sky seemed bursting into flame with a sudden tumult of fireworks, and in the confusion that immediately succeeded, the poet made his way unquestioned to the bank of the river, and was reconveyed to the spot of his first embarkation, in the same silent mariner with which he had approached the privileged area. During the following month, Le-pih seemed much in request at the imperial palace, but, to the surprise of his friends, the keeping of " worshipful society" was not followed by any change in his merry manners, nor apparently by any improvement in his worldly condition. His mother still sold mats in the public market, and Le-pili still rode, every few days, to the marsh, for his panniers of rushes, and to all comers, among his old acquaintances, his lute and song were as ready and gratuitous as ever. All this time, however, the fairTaya was consuming with a passionate melancholy which made startling ravages in her health, and the proud mandarin, whose affection for his children was equal to his pride, in vain shut his eyes to the cause, and eat up his heart with mortification. When thefull moon came round again, j reminding him of the scenes the last moon had shone ;; upon, Kwonfootse seemed suddenly lightened of his care, and his superb gardens on the Pei-ho were sud denly alive with preparations for another festival. Kept in close confinement, poor Taya fed on her sorrow, indifferent to the rumors of marriage which could concern only her sisters; and the other demoiselles Kwonfootse tried in vain, with fluttering hearts, to pry into their father s secret. A marriage it certainly was to be, for the lanterns were painted of the color of peach-blossoms but whose marriage ? , It was an intoxicating summer s morning, and the sun was busy calling the dew back to heaven, and the birds wild with entreating it to stay (so Le-pih de scribes it), when down the narrow street in which the poet s mother piled her vocation, there came a gay J procession of mounted servants with a led horse richly caparisoned, in the centre. The one who rode before held on his pommel a velvet cushion, and upon it lay ! the cap of a noble, with its gold ball shining in the sun. Out flew the neighbors as the clattering hoofs came . on, and roused by the cries and the barking of dogs, forth came the mother of Le-pih, followed by the poet himself, but leading his horse by the bridle, for i he had just thrown on his panniers, and was bound out of the city to cut his bundle of rushes. The poet gazed on the pageant with the amused curiosity of j others, wondering what it could mean, abroad at so j early an hour; but, holding back his sorry beast to let the prancing horsemen have all the room they re- quired, he was startled by a reverential salute from the bearer of the velvet cushion, who, drawing up his followers in front of the poet s house, dismounted and requested to speak with him in private. Tying his horse to the door-post, Le-pih led the way into the small room, where sat his mother braid ing her mats to a cheerful song of her son s making, and here the messenger informed the bard, with much circumstance and ceremony, that in consequence of the pressing suit of Kwonfootse, the emperor had been pleased to grant to the gifted Le-pih, the rank ex pressed by the cap borne upon the velvet cushion, and that as a noble of the celestial empire, he was now a match for the incomparable Taya. Futhermore the condescending Kwonfootse had secretly arranged the ceremonial for the bridal, and Le-pih was commanded to mount the led horse and come up with his cap and gold ball to be made forthwith supremely happy. An indefinable expression stole over the features of the poet as he took up the cap, and placing it on his head, stood gayly before his mother. The old dame looked at him a moment, and the tears started to her eves. Instantly Le-pih plucked it off and flung it on the waste heap at her side, throwing himself on his knees before her in the same breath, and begging her forgiveness for his silly jest. "Take back your bauble to Kwonfootse!" he said, rising proudly to his feet, "and tell him that the em peror, to whom I know how to excuse myself, can easily make a poet into a noble, but he can not make a noble into a poet. The male bird does not borrow its brighter plumage from its mate, and she who mar ries Le-pih will braid rushes for his mother!" Astonished, indeed, were the neighbors, who had learned the errand of the messenger from his attendants without, to see the crest fallen man come fortli again with his cap and cushion. Astonished much more were they, ere the gay cavalcade were well out of sight, to see Le-pih appear with his merry countenance and plebeian cap, and. mounting his old horse, trot briskly away, sickle in hand, to the marshes. The day passed in wondering and gossip, interrupted by the entrance of one person to the house while the old dame was gone with her mats to the market, but she returned duly before sunset, and went in as usual to prepare supper for her son. The last beams of day were on the tops of the pagodas when Le-pih returned, walking beside his heavy-laden beast, arid singing a merry song. He threw off his rushes at the door and entered, but his song was abruptly checked, for a female sat on a low seat Ity his mother, stooping over a half-braided mat, and the next moment, the blushing Taya lifted up her brimming eyes and gazed at him with silent but plead ing love. Now, at last, the proud merriment and self respect ing confidence of Le-pih were overcome. His eyes grew flushed and his lips trembled without utterance. With both his hands pressed on his beating heart, he stood ga/.ing on the lovely Taya. "Ah!" cried the old dame, who sat with folded hands and smiling face, looking on at a scene she did not -quite understand, though it gave her pleasure, " Ah ! this is a wife for my boy, sent from heaven ! No haughty mandarin s daughtershe! no proud minx, to fall in love with the son and despise the mother! Let them keep their smari^caps and gift-horses for those who can be bought at such prices ! My son is a noble by the gift of his Maker better than an em peror s gold ball ! Come to your supper, Le-pih ! Come, my sweet daughter !" Taya placed her finger on her lip, and Le-pih agreed that the moment was not yet come to enlighten ; his mother as to the quality of her guest. She was , not long in ignorance, however, for before they could ; seat themselves at table, there was a loud knocking at 160 MEENA DIMITY. the door, and before the old dame could bless herself, an officer entered and arrested the daughter of K \von- footse by name, and Lc-pih and his mother at ihe same time, and there was no dismissing the messenger now. Off they inarched, amid the silent consterna- tion and pity of the neighbors not toward the palace of justice, however, but to the palace of the emperor, where his majesty, to save all chances of mistake, chose to see the poet wedded, and sit, himself, at the bridal feast. Tang had a romantic heart, fat and voluptuous as he was, and the end of his favor to Le- pih and Taya was the end of his life. MEENA DIMITY ; OR, WHY MR. BROWN CRASH TOOK THE TOUR, FASHION is arbitrary, we all know. \Vhat it was that originally gave Sassafras street the right to de spise Pepperidge street, the oldest inhabitant of the village of Slimford could not positively say. The courthouse and jail were in Sassafras street ; but the orthodox church and female seminary were in Pep peridge street. Two directors of the Slimford bank lived in Sassafras street two in Pepperidge street. The Dyaper family lived in Sassafras street the Dimity family in Pepperidge street ; and the fathers of the Dyaper girls and the Dimity girls were worth about the same money, and had both made it in the lumber line. There was no difference to speak of in their respective mode of Jiving none in the educa tion of the girls none in the family gravestones or church-pews. Yet, deny it who liked, ihe Dyapers were the aristocracy of Slimford. It may be a prejudice, but I am inclined to think there is always something in a nose. (I am about to mention a trifle, but trifles are the beginning of most things, and I would account for the pride paramount of the Dyapers, if it is any way possible.) The most stylish of the Miss Dyapers Harriet Dyaper had a nose like his grace the Duke of Wellington. Nei ther her father nor mother had such a feature; but there was a foreign umbrella in the family with ex actly the same shaped nose on the ivory handle. Old Dyaper had once kept a tavern, and he had taken this umbrella from a stranger for a night s lodging. But that is neither here nor there. To the nose of Har riet Dyaper, resistlessly and instinctively, the Dimity girls had knocked under at school. There was au thority in it ; for the American eagle had such a nose, and ihe Duke of Wellington had such a nose; and when, to these two warlike instances, was added the nose of Harriet Dyaper, the tripod stood firm. Am I visionary in believing that the authority introduced into that village by a foreigner s umbrella (so unac countable is fate) gave the dynasty to the Dyapers? I have mentioned but two families one in each of the two principal streets of Slimford. Having a little story to tell, I can not afford to distract my narrative with unnecessary "asides;" and I must not only omit all description of the other Sassafrasers and Pepperidgers, but I must leave to your imagination several Miss Dyapers and several Miss Dimitys Har riet Dyaper and Meena Dimity being the two exclu sive objects of my hero s Sunday and evening atten tions. For eleven months in the year, the loves of the ladies of Slimford were presided over by indigenous Cupids. Brown Crash and the other boys of the vil lage had the Dyapers and the Dimitys for that respect ive period to themselves. The remaining month, when their sun of favor was eclipsed, was during the falling of the leaf, when the "drummers" came up to dun. The townish clerks of the dry goods merchants were too much for the provincials. Brown Cru.Mi knocked under and sulked, owing, as he said, to the melancholy depression accompanying the tall of* the deciduous vegetation. But I have not yet introduced you to my hero. Brown Crash was the Slimford stage-agent. He was the son of a retired watch-maker, and had been laughed at in his boyhood for what they called his "airs." He loved, even as a lad, to be at the tavern when the stage came in, and help out the ladies. With instinctive leisureliness he pulled off his cap as soon after the "whoa-hup" as was necessary (and no sooner), and asked the ladies if they would "alight and take dinner," with a seductive smile which began, as the landlord said, " to pay." Hence his promotion. At sixteen he was nominated stage-agent, and thence forward was the most conspicuous man in the village; for " man" he was, if speech and gait go for any thing. But we must minister a moment to the reader s inner sense ; for we do not write altogether for Slim- ford comprehension. Brown Crash had something in his composition "above the vulgar." If men s qualities were mixed like salads, and I were giving a recipe for Brown Crashes," in Mrs. Glass s style, 1 hould say his two principal ingredients were a dic tionary and a dunghill cock for his language was as ornate as his style of ambulation was deliberate and imposing. What Brown Crash would have been, born Right Honorable, I leave (with the smaller Dy- pers and Dimitys) to the reader s fancy. My object is to show what he was, minus patrician nurture and valuation. Words, with Brown Crash, were suscep tible of being dirtied by use. He liked a clean tow el he preferred an unused phrase. But here stopped his peculiarities. Below the epidermis he was like other men, subject to like tastes and passions. And if he expressed his loves and hates with grandiloquent imagery, they were the honest loves and hates of a week-day world no finer nor flimsier for their be decked plumage. To use his own phrase, Brown frequented but two ladies in Slimford Miss Harriet Dyaper and Miss Meena Dimity. The first we have described in describing her nose, for her remainder was compara tively inconsiderable. The latter was "a Jove," and of course had nothing peculiar about her. She was a lamp nothing till lighted. She was a mantle nothing, except as worn by the owner. She was a mirror blank and unconscious till something came to be reflected. She was anything, loved unloved, nothing! And this (it is our opinion after half a life) is the most delicious and adorable variety of woman that has been spared to us from the museum of specimen angels. (A remark of Brown Crash s, by the way, of which he may as well have the credit.) Now Mr. Crash had an ambitious weakness for the best society, and he liked to appear intimate with the Dyapers. But in Meena Dimity there was a secret charm which made him wish she was an ever-to-be- handed-out lady-stage-passenger. He could have given her a hand, and brought in her umbrella and bandbox, all day Jong. In his hours of pride he thought of the Dyapers in his hours of affection of Meena Dimity. But the Dyapers looked down upon the Dimitys; and to play his card delicately between Harriet and Meena, took all the diplomacy of Brown Crash. The unconscious Meena would walk up Sassafras street when she had his arm, and the scorn ful Harriet would be there with her nose over the front gate to sneer at them. He managed as well as he could. He went on light evenings to the Dya pers on dark evenings to the Dimitys. He took town-walks with the Dyapers country-walks with MEENA DIMITY. 161 the Dimitys. But his acquaintance with the Djapers hung by the eyelids. Harriet liked him : for he WRS the only beau in Slimford whose manners were not belittled beside her nose. But her acquaintance with him was a condescension, and he well knew that he could not "hold her by the nose" if she were offend ed. Oh no ! Though their respective progenitors were of no very unequal rank though a horologist and a " boss lumberman" might abstractly be equals the Dyapers had the power! Yes they could lift him to themselves, or dash him down to the Dimitys; and all Slimford would agree in the latter case that he was a "slab" and a "small potato !" But a change came o er the spirit of Brown Crash s dream ! The drummers were lording it in Slimford, and Brown, reduced to Meena Dimity (for he was too proud to play second fiddle to a town dandy), was walking with her on a dark night past the Dyapers. The Dyapers were hanging over the gate unluckily, and their Pearl-street admirers sitting on the top rail of the fence. " Who is it ?" said a strange voice. The reply, sent upward from a scornfully pro jecting under lip, rebounded in echoes from the tense nose of Miss Dyaper. "A Mr. Crash, and a girl from the back street !" It was enough. A hot spot on his cheek, a warm | rim round his eyes, a pimply pricking in his skin, I and it was all over ! His vow was made. He coldly j bid Meena good night at her father s door, and went | home and counted his money. And from that hour, without regard to sex, he secretly accepted shillings from gratified travellers, and "stood treat" no more. Saratoga was crowded with the dispersed nuclei of the metropolises. Fashion, wealth, and beauty, were there. Brown Crash was there, on his return from a tour to Niagara and the lakes. 44 Brown Crash, Esq.," was one of the notabilities of Congress Hall. Here and there a dandy " could not quite make him out;" but there was evidently something uncommon about him. The ladies thought II him "of the old school of politeness," and the pol- j * iticians thought he had the air of one used to influ ence in his county. His language was certainly very choice and peculiar, and his gait was conscious dig nity itself. He must have been carefully educated ; yet his manners were popular, and he was particularly courteous on a first introduction. The elegance and ease with which he helped the ladies out of their carriages were particularly remarked, and a shrewd observer said of him, that " that point of high breed ing was only acquired by daily habit. He must have been brought up where" there were carriages and la dies." A member of congress, who expected to run for governor, inquired his county, and took wine with him. His name was mentioned by the letter- writers from the springs. Brown Crash was in his perihelion ! The season leaned to its close, and the following ! paragraph appeared in the New York American : " Fashionable Intelligence. The company at the Springs is breaking up. We understand that the Vice-President and Brown Crash, Esq., have already left for their respective residences. The latter gen tleman, it is understood, has formed a matrimonial engagement with a family of wealth and distinction from the south. We trust that these interesting bonds, binding together the leading families of the far-divided extremities of our country, may tend to Meena Dimity. " If that was the effect of fashion and distinction on the heart, Mr. Crash was welcome to his honors! Let him marry Miss Dyaper, and they wished him much joy of her nose; but they would never believe that he had not ruthlessly broken the heart of Meena Dimity, and he ought to be ashamed of himself, if there was any shame in such a dandy." But the milliners, though powerful people in their way, could little affect the momentum of Brown Crash s glories. The paragraph from the "Ameri can" had been copied into the " Slimford Advertiser," and the eyes of Sassafras street and Pepperidge street were alike opened. They had undervalued their in digenous "prophet." They had misinterpreted and misread the stamp of his superiority. He had been obliged to go from them to be recognised. But he was returned. He was there to have reparation made justice done. And now, what office would he like, from Assessor to Pathmaster, and would he be good enough to name it before the next town-meet ing. Brown Crash was king of Slimford! And Harriet Dyaper! The scorn from her lip had gone, like the blue from a radish! Notes for " B. Crash, Esq., "showered from Sassafras street bouquets from old Dyaper s front yard glided to him, per black boy no end to the endearing attentions, undisguised and unequivocal. Brown Crash and Harriet Dyaper were engaged, if having the front parlor entirely given up to them of an evening meant anything if his being expected every night to tea meant anything if his devoted (though she thought rather cold) at tentions meant anything. . ; They did n t mean anything ! They all did n t mean anything ! What does the orthodox minister do, the third Sunday after Brown Crash s return, but read the banns of matrimony between that faithless man and Meena Dimity ! But this was not to be endured. Harriet Dyaper had a cousin who was a " strapper." He was boss of a sawmill in the next county, aud he must be sent for. He was sent for. strengthen the tenacity of the great American Union !" * * * * * It was not surprising that the class in Slimford who knew everything the milliners, to-wit moralized somewhat bitterly on Mr. Crash s devotion to the Dyapers after his return, and his consequent slight to The fisht was over. Boss Dyaper had undertaken to flog Brown Crash, but it was a drawn battle for the combatants had been pulled apart by their coat- tails. They stepped into the barroom and stood re covering their breath. The people of Slimford crowded in, and wanted to have the matter talked over. Boss Dyaper bolted out his grievance. "Gentlemen!" said Brown Crash, with one of his irresistible come-to-dinner smiles, " I am culpable, perhaps, in the minutiae of this business justifiable, I trust you will say, in the general scope and tendency. You, all of you, probably, had mothers, and some of you have wives and sisters; and your silver cord naturally sympathizes with a worsted woman. But, gentlemen, you are republicans! You, all of you, are the rulers of a country very large indeed ; and you are not limited in your views to one woman, nor to a thousand women to one mile, nor to a thousand miles." You generalize! you go for magnificent prin ciples, gentlemen ! You scorn high-and-mightiuess, and supercilious aristocracy !" "Hurra for Mr. Crash!" cried a stagedriver from the outside. 44 Well, gentleman ! In what I have done, I have deserved well of a republican country! True it has been my misfortune to roll my Juggernaut of prin ciple over the sensibilities of that gentleman s re- spectable female relative. But, gentlemen, she of fended, remedilessly and grossly, one of the sovereign people ! She scorned one of earth s fairest daughters, who lives in a back street ! Gentlemen, you know that pride tripped up Lucifer ! Shall a tiptop angel fall for it, and a young woman who is nothing particular 162 THE POWER OF AN "INJURED LOOK/ be left scornfully standing? Shall Miss Dyaper have more privileges than Lucifer ? I appreciate your in dignant negative ! "But, gentlemen, I am free to confess, I had also my republican private end. You know my early his tory. You have witnessed my struggles to be respect ed by my honorable contemporaries. If it be my weakness to be sensitive to the finger of scorn, be it so. You will know how to pardon me. But I will be brief. At a particular crisis of my acquaintance with Miss Dyaper, I found it expedient to transfer my untrammelled tendernesses to Pcpperidge street. My heart had long been in Pepperidge street. But, gentlemen, to have done it without removing from before my eyes the contumelious finger of the scorn of Sassafras street, was beyond my capabilities of en durance. Injustice to my present future, gentle men, I felt that I must remove sour grapes from my escutcheon that I must soar to a point, whence, swooping proudly to Meena Dimity, I should pass the Dyapers in descending ! (Cheers and murmurs.) "Gentlemen and friends! This world is all a fleet ing show. The bell has rung, and 1 keep you from your suppers. Briefly. I found the means to travel and test the ring of my metal among unprejudiced strangers. I wished to achieve distinction and return to my birthplace ; but for what ? Do me justice, gentlemen. Not to lord it in Sassafras street. Not to carry off a Dyaper with triumphant elation! Not to pounce on your aristocratic No. 1, and link my destiny with the disdainful Dyapers! No! But to choose where I liked, and have the credit of liking it ! To have Slimford believe that if I pre. erred their No. 2, it was because I liked it bet ter than No. 1. Gentlemen, I am a republican! 1 may find my congenial spirit among the wealthy I may find it among the humble. But I want the lib erty to choose. And I have achieved it, I trust you will permit me to say. Having been honored by the dignitaries of a metropolis having consorted with a candidate for gubernatorial distinction having been recorded in a public journal as a companion of the Vice-President of this free and happy country you will believe me when I declare that I prefer Pepper idge street to Sassafras you will credit my sincerity, when, having been approved by the Dyapers betters, I give them the go-by for the Dimitys ! Gentlemen, I have done." The reader will not be surprised to learn that Mr. Brown Crash is now a prominent member of the legislature, and an excessive aristocrat Pepperidge street and very democratic speeches to the contrary notwithstanding. THE POWER OF AN "INJURED LOOK, 1 CHAPTER I. I HAD a sort of candle-light acquaintance with Mr. Philip McRueit when we were in college. I mean to say that I had a daylight repugnance to him, and never walked with him, or talked with him, or rode with him, or sat with him; and, indeed, seldom saw him expect as one of a club oyster-party of six. He was a short, sharp, satirical man (nicknamed " my cruet" by his cronies rather descriptively !) but as plausible and as vindictive as Mephistopheles before and after the ruin of a soul. In some other state of existence I had probably known and suffered by Phil. McRueit for I knew him like the sleeve of an old coat, the first day I laid eyes on him ; though other people seemed to have no such instinct. Oh, we were not new acquaintances from whatever star he had been transported, for his sins, to this planet of dirt. I think he was of the same opinion, himself. He chose be tween open warfare and conciliation in the first five minutes after seeing me as a stranger chose the latter. Six or seven years after leaving college, I was fol lowing my candle up to bed rather musingly, one night at the Astor, and on turning a corner, I was obliged to walk round a short gentleman who stood at the head of the stairs in an attitude of fixed contemplation. As 1 weathered the top of his hat rather closely, I caught the direction of his eye, and saw that he was regard ing, very fixedly, a pair of rather dusty kid slippers, which had been set outside the door, probably for cleaning, by the occupant of the chamber opposite. As the gentleman did not move, I turned on the half landing of the next flight of stairs, and looked back, breaking in, by my sudden pause, upon his fit of ab straction. It was McRueit. and on recognising me, he immediately beckoned me to his side. "Does it strike you," said he, " that there is any thing peculiar in that pair of shoes ?" " No except that they certify to two very small feet on the other side of the door." "Not merely small, my dear fellow! Do you see where the pressure has been in those slender shoes, how straight the inside line, how arched the instep, how confidingly flat the pressure downward of the little great toe ! It s a woman of sweet and relying character who wore that shoe to-day, and I must know her. More, sir, I must marry her ! Ah, you laugh but I will ! There s a magnetism in that pair of shoes addressed to me only. Beg your pardon good night I ll go down stairs and find out her number 74! I ll be well acquainted with 74 by this time to-morrow !" For the unconscious young lady asleep in that room, I lay awake half the night, troubled with foreboding pity. I knew the man so well, I was so certain that he would leave nothing possible undone to carry out this whimsical purpose! 1 knew that from that mo ment was levelled, point-blank, at the lady, whoever she might be (if single) a battery of devilish and per tinacious ingenuity, which would carry most any small fort of a heart, most any way barricaded and defended. He was well off; he was well-looking enough; he was deep and crafty. But if he did win her, she was gone! gone, I knew, from happiness, like a stone from a sling. Hs was a tyrant subtle in his cruelties to all people dependant on him and her life would be one of refined torture, neglect, be trayal, and tears. A fit of intermittent disgust for strangers, to which all persons living in hotels are more or less liable, confined my travels, for some days after this rencontre, to the silence-and-slop thorough-fare of the back stairs, " Coming to rny feed" of society one rainy morning, I went into the drawing-room after breakfast, and was not surprised to see McRueit in a posture of absorbed attention beside a lady. His stick stood on the floor, and with his left cheek rested on the gold head, he was gazing into her face, and evidently keep ing her perfectly at her ease as to the wants and gaps of conversation, as he knew how to do for he was the readiest man with his brick and mortar whom I ever had encountered. " Who is that lady?" Tasked of an omni-acquainted old bachelor friend of mine. " Miss Jonthee Twitt and what can be the secret of that rather exclusive gentleman s attention to her, 1 can not fancy." THE POWER OF AN "INJURED LOOK. 163 I pulled a newspaper from my pocket, and seating M carried on the war strenuously. Perfectly certain as I myself in one of the deep windows, commenced rather a compassionate study of MissTwitt intending fully, if I should find her interesting, to save her from the clutches of my detestable classmate. She was a slight, hollow-chested, consumptive- looking girl, with a cast of features that any casual observer would be certain to describe as "interesting." With the first two minutes gaze upon her, my sym pathies were active enough for a crusade against a whole army of connubial tyrants. I suddenly paused, however. Something McRueit said made a change was that " the whirligig of time" would " bring about the revenges" of Mrs. McRueit, I began to feel a meantime pity for her, and had myself presented duly by McRueil the next morning after breakfast. It was a tepid, flaccid, revery-colored August morn ing, and the sole thought of the universe seemed to be to sit down. The devotees to gayety and mineral water dawdled out to the porticoes, and some sat on chairs under the trees, and the dandies lay on the grass, and the old ladies on the steps and the settees, and here and there, a man on the balustrade, and, in in the lady s countenance. She sat just as still ; she !j the large swing, vis-d-vis, sat McRueit and the widow did not move her head from its negligent posture; her I Wanmaker, chattering in an undertone quite inaudi- eyebrows did not contract; her lips did not stir; but the dull, sickly-colored lids descended calmly and fixedly till they hid from sight the upper edges of the pupils! and by this slight but infallible sign I knew but the story will tell what I knew. Napoleon was nearly, but not quite right, when he said that there was no reliance to be placed on peculiarities of feature or expression. CHAPTER II. Ix August of that same year, I followed the world to Saratoga. In my first reconnoitre of the drawing- room of Congress Hall, I caught the eye of Mr. Mc Rueit, and received from him a cordial salutation. As I put my head right, upon its pivot, after an easy ! nod to my familiar aversion, my eyes fell upon Miss j Jonfhee Twitt that was for I had seen, in the newspapers of two months before, that the resolve (born of the dusty slipper outside her door), had been brought about, and she was now on the irrevocable side of a honeymoon sixty days old. Her ei/elid was down upon the pupil motionless, concentrated, and vigilant as a couched panther and from beneath the hem of her dress curved out the high arched instep of a foot pointed with desperate I tension to the carpet ; the little great toe (whose rely- j ing pressure on the soiled slipper Mr. McRueit had been captivated by), now rigid with as strong a pur pose as spiritual homeopathy could concentrate in so j small a tenement. ble. Mrs. McRueit sat on a bench, with her back against one of the high-shouldered pine trees in the court-yard, and I had called McRueit. out of his swing to present me. But he returned immediately to the widow. I thought it would be alleviative and good-natured to give Mrs. McRueit an insight to the harmlessness of Mrs. Wanmaker, and I had done so very nearly to my satisfaction, when I discovered that the slighted wife did not care sixpence about the fact, and that, unlike Hamlet, she only knew seems. The more I developed the innocent object of the widow s outlay of smiles and confidentialities, the more Mrs. McRueit placed herself in a posture to be remarked by the loungers in the court-yard and the dawdlers on the portico, and the more she deepened a certain look j you must imagine it for the present, dear reader. It j would take a razor s edge of analysis, and a Flemish | paint-pot and patience, to carve that injured look into language, or paint it truthfully to the eye ! Juries would hang husbands, and recording angels "ruthless ly overcharge," upon the unsupported evidence of such a look. She looked as if her heart must have suffocated with forbearance long before she began to look so. She looked as if she had forgiven and wept, and was ready to forgive and weep again. She looked as if she would give her life if she could conceal "her feelings," and as if she was nerving soul, and heart, and eyelids, and lachrymatory glands all to agony to prevent bursting into tears with her unutterable anguish ! It was the most unresisting, unresentful, patient, sweet miserableness! A lamb s willingness to "furnish forth another meal" of chops and sweet- I thought I would make Mr. and |j bread, was testy to such meek endurance ! She was Mrs. McRueit the subject of quiet study while I re mained at Saratoga. But I have not mentioned the immediate cause of Mrs. McRueit s resentment. Her bridegroom was walking up and down the room with a certain Mrs. Wanmaker, a widow, who was a better woman than she looked to be, as I chanced to know, but as nobody could know without the intimate acquaintance with Mrs. Wanmaker upon which I base this temark. With beauty of the most voluptuous cast, and a passion for admiration which induced her to throw out every possible lure to men any way worth her time as victims, Mrs. Wanmaker s blood was as " cold as the flow of Iser," and her propriety, in fact, wholly impregnable. I had been myself "tried on" by the widow Wanmaker, and twenty caravan-marches might have been made across the Desert of Sahara, while the conviction I have just stated was " getting through my hair." It was not wonderful, therefore, that both the bride and her (usually) most penetratious bridegroom, had sailed over the widow s shallows, un conscious of soundings. She was a "deep" woman, too but in the love line. I thought McRueit singularly off his guard, if it were only for " appearances." He monopolized the widow effectually, and she thought it worth her while to let the world think him (a bridegroom and a rising young politician), mad for her, and, truth to s;y, they evidently a martyr, a victim, a crushed flower, a " poor thing !" But she did, now and then unseen by any body but me give a glance from that truncated orb of a pupil of hers, over the top of her handkerchief, that, if incarnated, would have made a hole in the hide of a rhinoceros ! It was triumph, venom, implacabili ty such as I had never before seen expressed in hu man glances. There are many persons with but one idea, and that a good one. Mrs. McRueit, I presume, was inca pable of appreciating my interest in her. At any rate she played the same game with me as with other people, and managed her affairs altogether with per fect. unity. It was in vain that I endeavored to hear from her tongue what I read in the lowering pupil of her eye. She spoke of McRueit with evident re luctance, but always with discretion never blaming him, nor leaving any opening that should betray re sentment, or turn the current of sympathy from her self. The result was immediate. The women in the house began to look black upon McRueit. The men "sent him to Coventry" more unwillingly, for he was amusing and popular but "to Coventry" he went! And at last the widow Wanmaker became aware that she was wasting her time on a man whose attentions were not wanted elsewhere and she (the unkindest cut of all) found reasons for looking another way when he approached her. He had became aware, during 164 THE POWER OF AN "INJURED LOOK." this process, what was " in the wind," but he knew too much to stay in the public eye when it was in flamed. With his brows lowering, and his face gloomy with feelings I could easily interpret, he took the early coach on the third morning after my intro duction to Mrs. McRueit, and departed, probably for a discipline trip, to some place where sympathy with his wife would be less dangerous. CHAPTER IH. I THINK, that within the next two or three years, I heard McRueit s name mentioned several times, or saw it in the papers, connected with strong political movements. I had no very definite idea of where he was residing, however. Business called me to a western county, and on the road I fell into the com pany of a great political schemer and partisan one of those joints (of the feline political body), the next remove from the " cat s paw." Finding that I cared not a straw for politics, and that we were going to the same town, he undertook the blandishment of an over flow of confidence upon me, probably with the remote possibility that he might have occasion to use me. I gave in to it so far as courteously to receive all his secrets, and we arrived at our destination excellent friends. The town was in a ferment with the coming election of a member for the legislature, and the hotel being very crowded, Mr. Develin (rny fellow-traveller) and myself were put into a double-bedded room. Busy with my own affairs, I saw but little of him, and he seemed quite too much occupied for conversation, till the third night after our arrival. Lying in bed wiih the moonlight streaming into the room, he began to give me some account of the campaign, preparing for, around us, and presently mentioned the name of McRueit (the name, by the way, that I had seen upon the placards, without caring particularly to in quire whether or not it was " mine ancient" aversion). " They are not aware," snid Mr. Develin, after talking on the subject awhile, " that this petty election, is, in fact, the grain of sand that is to turn the presi dential scale. If McRueit should be elected (as I am sorry to say there seems every chance he will be), Van Buren s doom is sealed. I have come a little too late here. I should have had time to know some thing more of this man McRueit " " Perhaps I can give you some idea of him," inter rupted I, " for he has chanced to be more in my way than I would have bargained for. But what do you wish to know particularly?" (I spoke, as the reader will see, in the unsuspecting innocence of my heart.) "Oh anything anything ! Tell me all you know of him !" Mr. Develin s vividness rather surprised me, for he raised himself on his elbow in bed but I went on and narrated very much what I have put down for the reader in the two preceding chapters. "How do you spell Mrs. Wanmaker s name?" asked my imbedded vis-d-vis, as I stopped and turned over to go to sleep. I spelt it for him. He jumped out of bed, dressed himself and left the room. Will the reader permit me to follow him, like Asmodeus, giving with Asmodean brevity the knowl edge I afterward gained of his use of my involuntary revelation ? Mr. Develin roused the active member of the Van Buren committee from his slumber, and in an hour had the printers of their party paper at work upon a placard. A large meeting was to be held the next day in the town-hall, during which both candidate*, it was supposed, would address the people. Ladies were to occupy the galleries. The hour came round. Mrs. McRueit s carriage drove into the village a few minutes before eleven, and as she stopped at a shop for a moment, a letter was handed her by a boy. She sat still and read it. She was alone. Her face turned livid with paleness after its first flush, and forgetting her errand at the shop, she drove on to the town-hall. She took her seat in a prominent part of the gallery. The preliminaries were gone through with, and her husband rose to speak. He was a plausible orator, an eloquent man. But there was a sentiment circula ting in the audience something whispered from man to man that strangely took off the attention of the audience. He could not, as he had never before found difficulty in doing, keep their eyes upon his lips. Every one was gazing on his wife ! And there she sat with her INJURED LOOK ! pale, sad, apparently striving to listen and conceal her mental suffering. It was as convincing to the audience of the truth of the j insinuation that was passing from mouth to mouth as convincing as would have been a revelation from Heaven. McRueit followed the many upturned eyes at last, and saw that they were bent on his wife, and that once more after years of conciliation, she wore THAT INJURED LOOK ! His heart failed him. He evidently comprehended that the spirit that had driven him from Saratoga, years before popular sympathy with women had overtaken him and was plotting against him once more. His speech began to lose its concentration. He talked wide. The increasing noise overpowered him, and he descended at last from the platform in the midst of a universal hiss. The other candidate rose and spoke; and at the close of his speech the meeting broke up, and as they dis persed, their eyes were met at every corner with a large placard, in which injured wife." kl unfaithful husband," "widow W n k r," were the words in prominent capitals. The election came on the next day, and Mr. McRueit being signally defeated, Mr. Van Buren s election to the Presidency (if Mr. Develin knew anything) was made certain brought about by a woman s INJURED LOOK. My business in the county was the purchase of land, and for a year or two afterward, I was a great deal there. Feeling that I had unintentionally furnished a weapon to his enemies, I did penance by cultivating McRueit. I went often to his house: He was at first a good deal broken up by the sudden check to his ambition, but he rallied with a change in his character for which I was not prepared. He gave up all antagonism toward his wife. He assumed a new manner to her. She had been skilfully managed be fore but he took her now confidingly behind his shield. He felt overmastered by the key she had to popular sympathy, and he determined wisely to make it turn in his favor. By assiduity, by tenderness, childlikeness, he succeeded in completely convincing her that he had but one out-of-doors wish that of embellishing her existence by his success. The effort on her was marvellous. She recovered her health, gradually changed to a joyous and earnest promoter of her husband s interests, and they were soon a mark ed model in the county for conjugal devotion. The popular impression soon gained ground that Mr. Mc Rueit had been shamefully wronged by the previous prejudice against his character as a husband. The tide that had already turned, soon swelled to a flood, and Mr. McRueit now but Mr. McRueit is too power ful a person in the present government to follow any farther. Suffice it to say that he might return to Mrs. Wanmaker and his old courses if he liked for his wife s INJURED LOOK is entirely fattened out of possi bility by her happiness. She weighs two hundred, and could no more look injured than Sir John Falstaff. BEWARE OF DOGS AND WALTZING. 165 BEWARE OF DOGS AND WALTZING, THE birds that flew over County Surrey on the twelfth of June, 1835, looked down upon a scene of which many a "lord of creation," travelling only by the roads, might well have envied them the seeing. For, ever so merry let it be within the lordly parks of England, the trees that look over the ring fence upon the world without, keep their countenance aristocrats that they are! Round and round Beckton Park you might have travelled that sunny day, and often within arrow-shot of its hidden and fairy lawn, and never suspected, but by the magnetic tremor in your veins, that beautiful women were dancing near by, and " mar vellous proper men," more or less enamored, looking on every pink and blue girdle a noose for a heart, of course, and every gay waistcoat a victim venturing near the trap (though this last is mentioned entirely on my own responsibility). But what have we to do with the unhappy exiles without this pretty paradise ! You are an invited guest, dear reader. Pray walk in ! Did you ask about the Becktons? The Becktons are people blessed with money and a very charming acquaintance. That is enough to know about them. Yet stay ! Sir Thomas was knighted for his behavior at some great crisis in India (for he made his fortune in India) and Lady Beckton is no great beauty, but she has the mania of getting handsome people together, and making them happier than belongs properly to handsome people s destiny. And this, I think, must suffice for a first introduction. The lawn, as you see, has the long portico of the house on one side of it, a bend of the river on two other sides, and a thick shrubbery on the fourth. The dancing-floor is in the centre, inlaid at the level of the smooth sward, and it is just now vibrating to the measured step of the mazurka beautifully danced, we must say ! And now let me point out to you the persons most concerned in this gossip of mine. First, the ladies. Miss Blakeney (and she was never called anything but Miss Blakeney never Kate, or Kitty, or Kathleen, j I mean, though her name was Catherine) Miss ! Blakeney is that very stylish, very striking, very \ magnificent girl, I think I may say, with the white chip hat and black feather. Nobody but Miss Blake ney could venture to wear just the dress she is sport- j ing, but she must dash, though she is in half-mourn ing, and, faith! there is nothing out of keeping, artisti cally speaking, after all. A white dress embroidered with black flowers, dazzling white shoulders turned over with black lace, white neck and forehead (brilliant ly white), waved over and kissed by luxuriant black j ringlets (brilliantly black). And very white temples i with very black eyes, and very white eyelids with long i black lashes, and, since those dazzling white teeth were without a contrast, there hung upon her neck a [ black cross of ebony and now we have pul her in black and white, where she will " stay put." Scripta verba inanent, saith the cautionary proverb. Here and there, you observe, there is a small Per- ! sian carpet spread on I he sward for those who like to \ lounge and look at the dancers, and though a score of ! people, at least, are availing themselves of this oriental luxury, no one looks so modestly pretty, half-couched on the richly-colored woof, as that simply dressed ; blonde, with a straw hat in her lap, and her light auburn curls taking their saucy will of her blue-veined neck and shoulders. That lady s plain name is Mabel Brown, and, like yourself, many persons have wished to change it for her. She is half-married, indeed, to several persons here present, for there is one consenting party. Mais rautre ne veut pas, as a French novelist laments, it stating a similar dilemma. Meantime, Miss Brown is the adopted sister of the black and white Miss Blakeney. One more exercise of my function of cicerone ! Lying upon the bank of the river, with his shoulder against that fine oak, and apparently deeply absorbed in the fate of the acorn-cups which he throws into the current, you may survey the elegant person of Mr. Lindsay Maud a gentleman whom I wish you to take for rather more than his outer seeming, since he will show you at the first turn of his head, that he cares nothing for your opinion, though entitled, as the diplomatists phrase it, to your "high consideration." ! | Mr. Maud is twenty-five, more or less six feet, or ! thereabouts. He has the sanguineous tint, rather odd for so phlegmatic a person as he seems. His ! nose is un petit pcu retrousse, his lips full, and his ; smile easy and ready. His eyes are like the surface : I of a very deep well. Curling brown hair, broad and calm forehead, merry chin with a dimple in it, and mouth expressive of great good humor, and quite enough of fastidiousness. If this is not your beau ideal, I am very sorry but experience went to show that Lindsay Maud was a very agreeable man, and pleased generally where he undertook it. And now, if you please, having done the honors, I will take up the story en simple conteur. The sky was beginning to blush about the sun s going to bed, and the dancers and archers were pair ing off, couple by couple, to stroll and cool in the dim shrubberies of Beckton Park. It was an hour to breakfast, so called, for breakfast was to be served in the darker edge of the twilight. With the afore-" named oak-tree between him and the gay company, Mr. Lindsay Maud beguiled his hunger (for hungry he was), by reading a volume of that very clever novel, " Le Pere Goriot," and, chapter by chapter, he " cocked up his ear," as the story-books say, hoping to hear the cheerful bell of the tower announce the serving of the soup and champagne. "Well, Sir Knight Faineant !" said Lady Beckton, stepping in suddenly between his feet and the river brink, " since when have you turned woman-hater, and enrolled among the unavailables ? Here have you lain all day in the shade, with scores of nice girls dancing on the other side of your hermit tree, nnd not a sign of life not a look even to see whether my party, got up with so much pains, flourished or lan guished! I ll cross you out of my little book, recreant!" Maud was by this time on his feet, and he penitent ly and respectfully kissed the fingers threateningly held up to him for the unpardonable sin in a single man is to appear unamused, let alone failing to amuse others at a party sworn to be agreeable. " 1 have but half an apology," he said, " that of knowing that your parties go swimmingly off, whether I pull an oar or no ; but I deserve not the less to be crossed out of your book. Something ails me. lam growing old, or my curiosity has burnt out, or I am touched with some fatal lethargy. Upon my word 1 would as lief listen to a Latin sermon as chat for the next half hour with the prettiest girl at Beckton ! There s no inducement, my dear Lady Beckton ! I m not a marrying man, you know, and flirtation flirtation is such tiresome repetition endless reading of prefaces, and never coming to the agreeable first chapter. But I ll obey orders. Which is the destitute woman ? You shall see how I will redeem my dam aged reputation !" But Lady Beckton, who seldom refused an offer from a beau to make himself useful at her parties, seemed hardly to listen to Maud s justification. She placed her arm in his, and led him across the bfidge which spanned the river a little above, and they were presently out of hearing in one of the cool and shaded avenues of the park. 166 BEWARE OF DOGS AND WALTZING. "A penny for your thought!" said Maud, after walking at her side a few minutes in silence. " It is a thought, certainly, in which pennies are concerned," replied Lady Beckton, " and that is why I find any trouble in giving expression to it. It is difficult enough to talk with gentlemen about love, but that is easy to talking about money." "Yet they make a pretty tandem, money on the lead !" "Oh! are you there ?" exclaimed Lady Beckton, with a laugh ; " I was beginning too far back, al together ! My dear Lindsay, see how much better I thought of you than you deserved ! I was turning over in my mind with great trepidation and embarrass ment how I should venture to talk to you about a money - and-Iove match!" " Indeed ! for what happy man ?" " Toi metne, mon ami!" " Heavens! you quite take away my breath! Spare yourself the overture, my dear Lady Beckton ! I agree ! I am quite ready sold from this hour if you can produce a purchaser, and possession giveti im mediately !" "Now you go too fast; for I have not time to banter, and I wish to see my way in earnest before 1 leave you. Listen to me. I xvas talking you over with Beckton this morning. I ll not trouble you with the discus sion it would make you vain, perhaps. But we ar rived at this : Miss Blakeney would be a very good match for you, and if you are inclined to make a dem onstration that way, why, we will do what we can to make it plain sailing. Stay with us a week, for in stance, and we will keep the Blakeneys. It s a sweet month for pairing, and you are an expeditious love- maker, I know. Is it agreed ?" " You are quite serious!" " Quite!" " I ll go back with you to the bridge, kindest of friends, and return and ramble here till the bell rings, by myself. I ll find you at table, by-and-by, and ex press my gratitude at least. Will that be time enough for an answer ?" "Yes but no ceremony with me! Stay and ponder where you are ! Au rewir . I must see after my breakfast !" And away tripped the kind-hearted Lady Beckton. Maud resumed his walk. He was rather taken aback. He knew Miss Blakeney but as a waltzing partner, yet that should be but little matter ; for he had long ago made up his mind that, if he did not marry rich, he could not marry at all. Maud was poor that is to say, he had all that an angel would suppose necessary in this hungry and cold world assurance of food and clothing in other words, three hundred a year. He had had his unripe time like other youths, in which he was ready to marry for love and no money ; but his timid advances at that soft period had not been responsibly met by his first course of sweethearts, and he had congratulated him self and put a price on his heart accordingly. Mean time, he thought, the world is a very entertaining place, and the belonging to nobody in particular, has its little advantages. And very gayly sped on the second epoch of Mr. Lindsay Maud s history. He lived in a country where, to shine in a profession, requires the " audace, patience et volontc dc quoi renverser le mondc," and having turn ed his ambition well about, like a strange coin that might perhaps have passed current in other times, he laid it away with romance and chivalry, and other things suited only to the cabinets of the curious. He was well born. He was well bred. He was a fair candidate for the honors of a "gay man about town" that untaxed exempt that gues t by privilege that irresponsible denizen of high life, possessed of every luxury on earth except matrimony and the pleasures ] of payment. And, for a year or two, this was very delightful. He had a half dozen of those charming female friendships which, like other ephemera in this changing world, must die or turn into something else at the close of a season, and, if this makes the feelings very hard, it makes the manners very soft ; and Maud was content with the compensation. If he felt, now j and then, that he was idling life away, he looked about j him and found countenance at least ; for all his friends j were as idle, and there was an analogy to his condi- jj tion in nature (if need were to find one), for the but- ! terfly had his destiny like the bee. and was neither pitied nor reproached that he was not a honey-rnaker. But Maud was now in a third lustrum of his exist- I ence, and it was tinted somewhat differently from the rose-colored epochs precedent. The twilight of satisfied curiosity had fallen imperceptibly around . him. The inner veils of society had one by one lifted, and there could be nothing new for his eye in the i world to which he belonged. A gay party, which was once to him as full of un- attru ned objects as the festal mysteries of Eleusinia to i a rustic worshipper of Ceres, was now as readable at a glance as the stripes of a backgammon-board. He j knew every man s pretensions and chances, every wo- man s expectations and defences. Not a damsel whose J defects he had not discovered, whose mind he had not sounded, whosedowry he did not know. Not a beauty, i married or single, whose nightly game in society he i could not perfectly foretell; not an affection unoccupied ] of which he could not put you down the cost of en- ji gaging it in your favor, the chances of constancy, the M dangers of following or abandoning. He had no stake j I in society, meantime, yet society itself was all his j world. He had no ambitions to further by its aid. And until now, he had looked on matrimony as a closed door for he had neither property, nor profes- \ sion likely to secure it, and circumstances like these, in the rank in which he moved, are comprehended I among the " any impediments." To have his own way, Maud would have accepted no invitations except to dine with the beaux esprits, and he would have con- ! centrated the remainder of his leisure and attentions j upon one agreeable woman (at a time) two selfish- nesses very attractive to a blase, but not permitted to [ any member of society short of a duke or a Croesus. And now, with a new leaf turning over in his dull | book of life a morning of a new day breaking on I his increasing night Lindsay Maud tightly screwed ; his arms across his breast, and paced the darkening avenue of Beckton Park. The difference between i figuring as a fortune-hunter, and having a fortune i hunted for him by others, he perfectly understood. I In old and aristocratic societies, where wealth is at j the same time so much more coveted and so much more difficult to win, the eyes of " envy, malice, and all uncharitableness," are alike an omnipresent argus, j in their watch over the avenues to its acquisition. No i step, the slightest, the least suspicious, is ever taken I toward the hand of an heiress, or the attainment of I an inheritance, without awakening and counter-work ing of these busy monsters; and, fora society-man, better to be a gambler or seducer, better to have all the fashionable vices ticketed on his name, than to stand qfficlied as a fortune-hunter. If to have a for tune cleverly put within reach by a powerful friend, however, be a proportionate beatitude, blessed was Maud. So thought he, at least, as the merry bell of Beckton tower sent its summons through the woods, | and his revery gave place to thoughts of something more substantial. And thus far, oh adorable reader ! (for I see what unfathomable eyes are looking over my shoulder) thus far, like an artist making a sketch, of which one part j is to be finished, I have dwelt a little on the touches I of my pencil. But, by those same unfathomable eyes BEWARE OF DOGS AND WALTZING. 167 I know (for in those depths dwell imagination), that if the remainder be done ever so lightly in outline, even then there will be more than was needed for the comprehension of the story. Thy ready and bound less fancy, sweet lady, would supply it all. Given, the characters and scene, what fair creature who has loved, could fail to picture forth the sequel and its more minute surroundings, with rapidity and truth daguerreotypical? Sketcliily, then, touch we the unfinished denouement of our story. The long saloon was already in glittering progress wken Maud entered. The servants in their blue and white liveries were gliding rapidly about with the ter restrial nutriment for eyes celestial to-wit, wines and oysters. Half blinded with the glare of the numberless lights, he stood a moment at the door. " Lady Beckton s compliments, and she has re served a seat for you!" said a footman approaching him. He glanced at the head of the table. The vacant chair was near Lady Beckton and opposite Miss Blake- ney. " Is a vis-a-vis better for love-making than a seat at the lady s ear ?" thought Maud. But Lady better grace, however, coming from simple Miss Blakeney. From the future Mrs. Lindsay Maud, he could have wished those pretty inveiglements very much reduced and modified. At his side, the while, sweet Mabel Brown carried on with him a conversation, which to the high tone i of merriment opposite, was like the intermitted mur- I mur of a brook heard in the pauses of merry instru- j ments. At the same time that nothing brilliant or gay seemed to escape her notice, she toned her own j voice and flow of thought so winningly below the ex- I citernent around her, that Maud, who was sensible of every indication of superiority, could not but pay her i a silent tribute of admiration. " If this were but the I heiress !" he ejaculated inwardly. But Mabel Brown I was a dependant. Coffee was served. The door at the end of the long saloon was sud denly thrown open, and as every eye turned to gaze into the blazing ballroom, a march with the full power of the band burst upon the ear. The diplomatist who had been sitting at the side of Miss Blakeney was a German, and a waltzer comme il y en a peu. At the bidding of Lady Beckton, he put his arm around the waist of the heiress, and bore Beckton s tactics were to spare his ear and dazzle his her away to the delicious music of Strauss, and, by eye, without reference especially to the corresponding jj general consent, the entire floor was loft to this pair impressions on the eyes and ear of the lady. And jj for a dozen circles. Miss Blakeney was passionately she had the secondary object of avoiding any betrayal |, fond of waltzing, and built for it, like a Baltimore of her designs till they were too far matured to be de feated by publicity. " Can you tell me, Mr. Maud," said the sweet voice of Mabel Brown as he drew his chair to the table, "what is the secret of Lady Beckton s putting you next me so pertinaciously ?" "A greater regard for my happiness than yours, B-obably," said Maud; "but why pertinaciously? as there been a skirmish for this particular chair?" " No skirmish, but three attempts at seizure by three of my admirers." If they admire you more than I, they are fitter clipper for running close to the wind. If she had a fault that her friends were afraid to jog her memory about, it was the wearing her dresses a flounce too short. Her feet and ankles were Fenella s own, while [ her figure and breezy motion would have stolen En- dymion from Diana. She waltzed too well for a lady all but well enough for a premiere danseuse de Vopera. Lady Beckton was a shrewd woman, but she made a mistake in crying " encore /" when this single couple stopped from their admired pas de deux. She thought Maud was just the man to be captivated by that display. But the future Mrs. Lindsay Maud companions for a telc-a-tete than a crowded party,"] must not have ankles for general admiration. Oh, no ! said Maud. " I am as near a lover as I can be, and j Maud wished to efface the feeling this exhibition had caused by sharing in the excitement. " Miss Brown," hue said, as two or three couples went off, "permit me the happiness of one turn! 1 and, scarce waiting for an answer, he raised his arm to encircle her waist. Mabel took his hands, and playfully laid them across each other on his own breast in an attitude of resignation. "I never waltz," she said. "But don t think me a prude! I don t consider it wrong in those who think it right." "But with this music tugging at your heels!" said Maud, who did not care to express how much he ad mired the delicacy of her distinction. "Ah, with a husband or a brother, I should think one could scarce resist bounding away; but I can not " " Can not what ? can not take me for either?" in terrupted Maud, with an air of affected malice that covered a very strong desire to ask the question in earnest. _, _. She turned her eyes suddenly upon him with a rapid dmit. With no intention of becoming respon- |! look of inquiry, and, slightly coloring, fixed her at- for her manners, he would even have admired, ; tention silently on the waltzers. Lady Beckton came, making her way through the crowd. She touched Maud on the arm. "Hold hook and line! is it not?" she said, in a whisper. After an instant s hesitation, Maud answered, Yes !" but pages, often, would not suffice to ex- j press all that passes through the mind in "an instant s hesitation." All Lindsay Maud s prospects and cir cumstances were reviewed in that moment ; all his be agreeable !" To this Maud expected the gay retort due to a bag atelle of gallantry ; but the pretty Mabel was silent. The soup disappeared and the entremets were served. Maud was hungry, and lie had sent a cutlet and a glass of Johnnnisberg to the clamorous quarter be fore he ventured to look toward his hostess. He felt her eye upon him. A covert smile stole through her lips as they exchanged glances. "Yes ?" she asked, with a meaning look. "Yes!" And in that dialogue of two monosyllables Lady Beckton presumed that the hand and five thousand a year of Miss Catherine Blakeney, were virtually made over to Mr. Lindsay Maud. And her diplomacy made play to that end without farther deliberation. Very unconscious indeed that she was under the eye of the man who had entered into a conspiracy to become her husband, Miss Blakeney sat between a guardsman and a diplomatist, carrying on the war in her usual trenchant and triumphant fashion. She looked exceedingly handsome that Maud could not but admit, sible as he often had done, her skilful coquetries and adroit displays of the beauty with which nature had en dowed her. She succeeded, Maud thought, in giving both of her admirers the apparent preference (appa rent to themselves, that is to say), and considering her vis-a-vis worth a chance shaft at least, she honored that very attentive gentleman with such occasional notice, as, under other circumstances, would have been far from disagreeable. It might have worn a 168 THE INLET OF PEACH-BLOSSOMS. many steps by which he had arrived at the conclusion that marriage with him must be a matter of convenance merely ; all his put-down impulses and built-up reso lutions ; all his regrets, consolations, and offsets; all his better and worser feelings ; all his former loves (and in that connexion, strangely enough, Mabel Brown) ; all his schemes, in short, for smothering his pain in the sacrifice of his heart, and making the most of the gain to his pocket, passed before him iu that half minute s review. But he said " Yes!" The Blakeney carriage was dismissed that night, with orders to bring certain dressing-maids and cer tain sequents of that useful race, on the following morning to Beckton Park, and the three persons who composed the Blakeney party, an old aunt, Miss Blakeney, and Mabel Brown, went quietly to bed un der the hospitable roof of Lady Beckton. How describe (and what need of it, indeed !) a week at an English country-house, with all its age of chances for loving and hating, its eternity of oppor tunities for all that hearts can have to regulate in this shorthand life of ours? Let us come at once to the closing day of this visit. Maud lay late abed on the day that the Blakeneys were to leave Beckton Park. Fixed from morning till night in the firm resolution at which he had ar rived with so much trouble and self-control, he was dreaming from night till morning of a felicity in which Miss Blakeney had little share. He wished the marriage could be all achieved in the signing of a bond. He found that he had miscalculated his phi losophy in supposing that he could venture to loose thought and revery upon the long-forbidden subject of marriage. In all the scenes eternally being con jured up to his fancy scenes of domestic life the bringing of Miss Blakeney into the picture was an after effort. Mabel Brown stole into it, spite of him self the sweetest and dearest feature of that enchant ing picture, in its first warm coloring by the heart. But, day by day, he took the place assigned him by Lady Beckton at the side of Miss Blakeney, riding, driving, dining, strolling, with reference to being near her only, and still scarce an hour could pass in which, spite of all effort to the contrary, he did not betray his passionate interest in Mabel Brown. He arose and breakfasted. Lady Beckton and the young ladies were bonneted and ready for a stroll in the park woods, and her ladyship came and whispered in Maud s ear, as he leaned over his coffee, that he must join them presently, and that she had prepared Miss Blakeney for an interview with him, which she would arrange as they rambled. " Take no refusal !" were her parting words as she stepped out upon the verandah. Maud strolled leisurely toward the rendezvous in dicated by Lady Beckton. He required all the time he could get to confirm his resolutions and recover his usual mainticn of repose. With his mind made up at last, and a face in which few would have read the heart in fetters beneath, he. jumped a wicker- fence, and, by a cross path, brought the ladies in view. They were walking separately, but as his foot steps were heard, Lady Beckton slipped her arm into Miss Brown s, and commenced apparently a very ear nest undertone of conversation. Miss Blakeney turned. Her face glowed with exercise, and Maud confessed to himself that he rarely had seen so beau tiful a woman. "You are come in time, Mr. Maud," she said, "for something is going on between my companions from which I am excluded." " En revanche, suppose we have our little exclusive secret!" said Maud, offering his arm. Miss Blakeney colored slightly, and consented to obey the slight resistance of his arm by which they fell behind. A silence of a few moments followed, for if the proposed secret were a proposal of mar riage, it had been too bluntly approached. Maud felt that he must once more return to indifferent topics, and lead on the delicate subject at his lips with more tact and preparation. They rose a slight elevation in the walk which over looked the wilder confines of the park. A slight smoke rose from a clump of trees, indicating an in trusion of gipsies within, and the next instant, a deep- mouthed bark rang out before them, and the two la dies came rushing back in violent terror, assailed at every step of their flight by a powerful and infuriated mastiff. Maud ran forward immediately, and suc ceeded in driving the dog back to the tents; but on his return he found only the terrified Mabel, who, lean ing against a tree, and partly recovered from her breathless flight, was quietly awaiting him. " Here is a change of partners as my heart would have it!" thought Maud, as he drew her slight arm within his own. "The transfer looks to me like the interposition of my good angel, and I accept the warning!" And in words that needed no management to bring them skilfully on with the eloquence of a heart re leased from fetters all but intolerable, and from a threatened slavery for life Lindsay Maud poured out the fervent passion of his heart to Mabel Brown. The crust of a selfish and artificial life broke up in the tumult of that declaration, and he found himself once more natural and true to the instincts and better impulses of his character. He was met with the trembling response that such pure love looks for when it finds utterance, and without a thought of worldly calculation, or a shadow of a scheme for their means and manner of life, they exchanged promises to which the subsequent ceremony of marriage was but the formal seal. And at the announcement of this termination to her matrimonial schemes, Lady Beckton seemed much more troubled than Miss Blakeney. But Lady Beckton s disappointment was somewhat modified when she discovered that Miss Blakeney had long before secretly endowed her adopted sister Ma bel with the half of her fortune. THE INLET OF PEACH-BLOSSOMS, THE Emperor. Yuentsoong, of the dynasty Chow, was the most magnificent of the long-descended suc cession of Chinese sovereigns. On his first accession to the throne, his character was so little understood, that a conspiracy was set on foot among the yellow- caps, or eunuchs, to put out his eyes, and place upon the throne the rebel Szema, in whose warlike hands, they asserted, the empire would more properly main tain its ancient glory. The gravity and reserve which these myrmidons of the palace had construed into stupidity and fear, soon assumed another complexion, however. The eunuchs silently disappeared ; the mandarins and princes whom they had seduced from their allegiance, were made loyal subjects by a gen erous pardon ; and in a few days after the period fixed upon for the consummation of the plot, Yuentsoong set forth in complete armor at the head of his troops to give battle to the rebel in the mountains. In Chinese annals this first enterprise of the youth ful Yuentsoong is recorded with great pomp and par ticularity. Szema was a Tartar prince of uncommon ability, young like the emperor, and, during the few last imbecile years of the old sovereign, he had gath ered strength in his rebellion, till now he was at the head of ninety thousand men, all soldiers of repute THE INLET OF PEACH-BLOSSOMS. 169 and tried valor. The historian has unfortunately dimmed (he emperor s fame to European eyes, by at tributing his wonderful achievements in this expe dition to his superiority in arts of magic. As this ac count of his exploits is only prefatory to our tale, we will simply give the reader an idea of the style of the historian, by translating literally a passage or two of his description of the battle: "Szema now took refuge within a cleft of the mountain, and Yuentsoong, upon his swift steed, out stripping the body-guard in his ardor, dashed amid the paralyzed troops with poised spear, his eyes fixed only on the rebel. There was a silence of an instant, broken only by the rattling hoofs of the intruder, and then, with dishevelled hair and waving sword, Szema uttered a fearful imprecation. In a moment the wind rushed, the air blackened, and with the suddenness of a fallen rock, a large cloud enveloped the rebel, and innumerable men and horses issued out of it. Wings flapped against the eyes of the emperor s horse, hel lish noises screamed in his ears, and, completely be yond control, the animal turned and fled back through the narrow pnss, bearing his imperial master safe into the heart of his army. "Yuentsoong, that night, commanded some of his most expert soldiers lo scale the beetling heights of the ravine, bearing upon their backs the blood of swine, sheep, and dogs, with other impure things, and these they were ordered to shower upon the combat ants at the sound of the imperial clarion. On the fol lowing morning, Szema came forth again to offer bat- j tie, with flags displayed, drums beating, and shouts j of triumph and defiance. As on the day previous, the j bold emperor divided, in his impatience, rank after j rank of his own soldiery, and, followed closely by his body-guard, drove the rebel army once more into their fastness. Szema sat upon his warhorse as before, in- I trenched amid his officers and ranks of the tallest Tar- tar spearmen, and as the emperor contended hand to | hand with one of the opposing rebels, the magic im- j precation was again uttered, the air again filled with ; cloudy horsemen and chariots, and the mountain sha- j ken with discordant thunder. Backing his willing j steed, the emperor blew a long sharp note upon his j silver clarion, and in an instant the sun broke through j .he darkness, and the air seemed filled with paper men, lorses of straw, and phantoms dissolving info smoke. I Yuentsoong and Szema now stood face to face, with j only mortal aid and weapons." The historian goes on to record that the two armies suspended hostilities at the command of their leaders, and that the emperor and his rebel subject having en gaged in single combat, Yuentsoong was victorious, j and returned to his capital with the formidable enemy, j whose life he had spared, riding beside him like a ! brother. The conqueror s career, for several years i after this, seems to have been a series of exploits of ! personal valor, and the Tartar prince shared in all his dangers and pleasures, his inseparable friend. It was during this period of romantic friendship that the events occurred which have made Yuentsoong one of the idols of Chinese poetry. By the side of a lake in a distant province of the empire, stood one of the imperial palaces of pleasure, I seldom visited, and almost in ruins. Hither, in one of his moody periods of repose from war, came the conqueror Yuentsoong, for the first time in years sep arated from his faithful Szema. In disguise, and with only one or two attendants, he established him self in the long silent halls of his ancestor Tsinche- mong, and with his boat upon the lake, and his spear in the forest, seemed to find all the amusement of which his melancholy was susceptible. On a certain day in the latter part of April, the emperor had set his sail to a fragrant south wind, and reclining on the cushions of his bajrk, watched the shore as it softly and silently glided past, and, the lake being entirely encircled by the imperial forest, he felt immersed in what he believed to be the solitude of a deserted par adise. After skirting the fringed sheet of water in this manner for several hours, he suddenly observed that he had shot through a streak of peach-blossoms floating from the shore, and at the same moment he became conscious that his boat was slightly headed off by a current setting outward. Putting up his helm, he returned to the spot, and beneath the droop ing branches of some luxuriant willows, thus early in leaf, he discovered the mouth of an inlet, which, but for the floating blossoms it brought to the lake, would have escaped the notice of the closest observer. The emperor now lowered his sail, unshipped the slender mast, and betook him to the oars, and as the current was gentle, and the inlet wider within the mouth, he sped rapidly on, through what appeared to be but a lovely and luxuriant vale of the forest. Still, those blushing betrayers of some flowering spot beyond, extended like a rosy clue before him, and with im pulse of muscles swelled and indurated in warlike ex ercise, the swift keel divided the besprent mirror wind ing temptingly onward, and, for a long hour, the royal oarsman untiringly threaded this sweet vein of the wilderness. Resting a moment on his oars while the slender bark still kept her way, he turned his head toward what seemed to be an opening in the forest on the left, and in the same instant (he boat ran, head on, to the shore, the inlet at this point almost doubling on its course. Beyond, by the humming of bees, and the singing of birds, there should be a spot more open than the tangled wilderness he had passed, and disen gaging his prow from the alders, he shoved the boat again into the stream, and pulled round a high rock, by which the inlet seemed to have been compelled to curve its channel. The edge of a bright green mead ow now stole into the perspective, and, still widening with his approach, disclosed a slightly rising terrace clustered with shrubs, and studded here and there with vases ; and farther on, upon the same side of the stream, a skirting edge of peach-trees, loaded with the gay blossoms which had guided him hither. Astonished at these signs of habitation in what was well understood to be a privileged wilderness, Yuent soong kept his boat in mid-stream, and with his eyes vigilantly on the alert, slowly made headway against the current. A few strokes with his oars, however, traced another curve of the inlet, and brought into view a grove of ancient trees scattered over a gently ascending lawn, beyond which, hidden by the river till now by the projecting shoulder of a mound, lay a small pavilion with srilded pillars, glittering like fairy work in the sun. The emperor fastened his boat to a tree leaning over the water, and with his short spear in his hand, bounded upon the shore, and took his way toward the shining structure, his heart beating with a feeling of wonder and interest altogether new. On a nearer approach, the bases of the pillars seemed decayed by time, and the gilding weather-stained and tarnished, but the trellised porticoes on the southern aspect were laden with flowering shrubs, in vases of porcelain, and caged birds sang between the pointed arches, and there were manifest signs of luxurious taste, elegance, and care. A moment, with an indefinable timidity, the em peror paused before stepping from the green sward upon the marble floor of the pavilion, and in that moment a curtain was withdrawn from the door, and a female, with step suddenly arrested by the sight of the stranger, stood motionless before him. Ravished with her extraordinary beauty, and awe-struck with the suddenness of the apparition and the novelty of the adventure, the emperor s tongue cleaved to his mouth, and ere he could summon resolution, even 170 THE INLET OF PEACH-BLOSSOMS. for a gesture of courtesy, the fair creature had fled within, and the curtain closed the entrance as before. Washing to recover his composure, so strangely troubled, and taking it for granted that some other in mate of the house would soon appear, Yuentsoong turned his steps aside to the grove, and with his head bowed, and his spear in the hollow of his arm, tried to recall more vividly the features of the vision he had seen. He had walked but a few paces, when there came toward him from the upper skirt of the grove, a man of unusual stature and erectness, with white hair, unbraided on his shoulders, and every sign of age except infirmity of slep and mien. The em peror s habitual dignity had now rallied, and on his first salutation, the countenance of the old man soft ened, and he quickened his pace to meet and give him welcome. " You are noble?" he said, with confident inquiry. Yuentsoong colored slightly. " I am," he replied, " Lew-melin, a prince of the empire." "And by what accident here ?" Yuentsoong explained the clue of the peach-blos soms, and represented himself as exiled for a time to the deserted palace upon the lakes. " I have a daughter," said the old man, abruptly, "who has never looked on human face, save mine." "Pardon me!" replied his visiter; " I have thought lessly intruded on her sight, and a face more heavenly fair " The emperor hesitated, but the old man smiled en couragingly. "Jt is time," he said, "that I should provide a younger defender for my bright Teh-leen, and Heaven has sent you in the season of peach-blossoms, with provident kindness.* You have frankly revealed to me your name and rank. Before I offer you the hos pitality of my roof, I must tell you mine. I am Choo-tseen, the outlaw, once of your own rank, and the general of the Celestial army." The emperor started, remembering that this cele brated rebel was the terror of his father s throne. " You have heard my history," the old man con tinued. " I had been, before my rebellion, in charge of the imperial palace on the lake. Anticipating an evil day, I secretly prepared this retreat for my fami ly ; and when my soldiers deserted me at the battle of Ke-chow, and a price was set upon my head, hither I fled with my women and children ; and the last alive is my beautiful Teh-leen. With this brief outline of my life, you are at liberty to leave me as you came, or to enter my house, on the condition that you be come the protector of my child." The emperor eagerly turned toward the pavilion, and, with a step as lighl as his own, the erect and stately outlaw hastened to lift the curtain before him. Leaving his guest for a moment in the outer apart ment, he entered to an inner chamber in search of his daughter, whom he brought, panting with fear, and blushing with surprise and delight, to her future lover and protector. A portion of an historical tale so deli cate as the description of the heroine is not work for imitators, however, and we must copy strictly the por trait of the matchless Teh-leen, as drawn by Le-pih, the Anacreon of Chinese poetry, and the contempo rary and favorite of Yuentsoong. " Teh-leen was born while the morning star shone upon the bosom of her mother. Her eye was like the unblemished blue lily, and its light like the white gem unfractured. The plum-blossom is most fra grant when the cold has penetrated its stem, and the mother of Teh leen had known sorrow. The head of her child drooped in thought, like a violet over laden with dew. Bewildering was Teh-leen. Her * The season of peach-blossoms was the only season of marriage in ancient China. mouth s corners were dimpled, yet pensive. The arch of her brows was like the vein in the tulip s heart, and the lashes shaded the blushes on her cheek. With the delicacy of a pale rose, her complexion put to shame the floating light of day. Her waist, like a thread in fineness, seemed ready to break; yet was it straight and erect, and feared not the fanning breeze ; and her shadowy grace was as difficult to delineate, as the form of the white bird rising from the ground by moonlight. The natural gloss of her hair resembled the uncertain sheen of calm water, yet without the false aid of unguents. The native intelligence of her mind seemed to have gained strength by retirement, and he who beheld her, thought not of her as human. Of rare beauty, of rarer intellect was Teh-leen, and her heart responded to the poet s lute." We have not space, nor could we, without copying directly from the admired Le-pih, venture to describe the bringing of Teh-leen to court, and her surprise at finding herself the favorite of the emperor. It is a romantic circumstance, besides, which has had its parallels in other countries. But the sad sequel to the loves of poor Teh-leen is but recorded in the cold page of history; and if the poet, who wound up the climax of her peffections, with her susceptibility to his lute, embalmed her sorrows in verse, he was prob ably too politic to bring it ever to light. Pass we to these neglected and unadorned passages of her history. Yuentsoong s nature was passionately devoted and confiding; and, like two brothers with one favorite sister, lived together Teh-leen, Szema, and the emper or. The Tartar prince, if his heart knew a mistress before the arrival of Teh-leen at the palace,. owned afterward no other than her ; and fearless of check or suspicion from the noble confidence and generous friendship of Yuentsoong, he seemed to live but for her service, and to have neither energies nor ambition except for the winning of her smiles. Szema was of great personal beauty, frank when it did not serve him to be wily, bold in his pleasures, and of manners al most femininely soft and voluptuous. He was re nowned as a soldier, and, for Teh-leen, he became a poet and master of the lute ; and, like all men formed for ensnaring the heart of women, he seemed to forget himself in the absorbing devotion of his idolatry. His friend, the emperor, was of another mould. Yuent soong s heart had three chambers love, friendship, and glory. Teh-leen was but a third in his existence, yet he loved her the sequel will show how well! In person he was less beautiful than majestic, of large stature, and with a brow and lip naturally stern and lofty. He seldom smiled, even upon Teh-leen, whom he would watch for hours in pensive and absorbed de light ; but his smile, when it did awake, broke over his sad countenance like morning. All men loved and honored Yuentsoong, and all men, except only the emperor, looked on Szema with antipathy. To such natures as the former, women give all honor and ap probation ; but for such as the latter, they reserve their weakness ! Wrapt up in his friend and mistress, and reserved, in his intercourse with his counsellors, Yuenrsoong knew not that, throughout the imperial city, Szema was called " the kieu," or robber-bird, and his fair Teh-leen openly charged with dishonor. Going out alone to hunt as was his custom, and having left his signet with Szema, to pass and repass through the private apartments at his pleasure, his horse fell with him unaccountably in the open field. Somewhat superstitious, and remembering that good spirits some times "knit the grass," when other obstacles fail to bar our way into danger, the emperor drew rein and returned to his palace. It was an hour after noon, and having dismissed his attendants at the city gate, he entered by a postern to the imperial garden, and bethought himself of the concealed couch in a cool THE INLET OF PEACH-BLOSSOMS. 171 grot by a fountain (a favorite retreat, sacred to him self and Teh-leen), where he fancied it would be re freshing (o sleep away the sultriness of the remaining hours till evening. Sitting down by the side of the murmuring fount, he bathed his feet, and left his slip pers on the lip of the basin to be unencumbered in his repose within, and so with unechoing step entered the resounding grotto. Alas! there slumbered the faithless friend with the guilty Teh-leen upon his bosom ! Grief struck through the noble heart of the em peror like a sword in cold blood. With a word he could consign to torture and death the robber of his passing among his soldiers on the evening previous to an engagement, promising to interfere with what was usually his last duty before retiring to his couch. Teh-leen on this occasion seemed moved by some irrepressible emotion, and as he rose to depart, she fell forward upon her face, and bathed his feet with her tears. Attributing it to one of those excesses of feel ing to which all, but especially hearts ill at ease, are liable, the noble monarch gently raised her, and, with repeated efforts at reassurance, committed her to the hands of her women. His own heart beat far from tranquilly, for, in the excess of his pity for her grief he had unguardedly called her by one of the sweet honor, but there was agony in his bosom deeper than j! names of their early days of love strange word now revenge. He turned silently away, recalled his horse upon his lip and it brought back, spite of memory and huntsmen, and, outstripping all, plunged through the forest till night gathered around him. Yuentsoong had been absent many days from his capitol, and his subjects were murmuring their fears for his safety, when a messenger arrived to the coun sellors informing them of the appointment of the captive Tartar prince to the government of the pro vince of Szechuen, the second honor of the Celestial empire. A private order accompanied the announce ment, commanding the immediate departure of Szema and truth, happiness that would not be forgotten ! It was past midnight, and the moon was riding high in heaven, when the emperor, returning between the lengthening watch-fires, sought the small lamp which, suspended like a star above his own tent, guided him back from the irregular mazes of the camp. Paled by the intense radiance of the moonlight, the small globe of alabaster at length became apparent to his weary eye, and with one glance at the peaceful beauty of the heavens, he parted the curtained door beneath for the scene of his new authority. Inexplicable as ! it, and stood within. The Chinese historian asserts was this riddle to the multitude, there were those who that a bird, from whose wing Teh-leen had once read it truly by their knowledge of the magnanimous i! plucked an arrow, restoring it to liberty and life, and soul of the emperor ; and among these was the crafty j in grateful attachment to her destiny, removed the object of his generosity. Losing no time, he set for- lamp from the imperial tent, and suspended it over hers. The emperor stood beside her couch. Startled at his inadvertent error, he turned to retire ; but the lifted curtain let in a flood of moonlight upon the sleeping features of Teh-leen, and like dew-drops, the undried tears glistened in her silken lashes. A lamp burned faintly in the inner apartment of the tent, and her attendants slept soundly. His soft heart gave way. Taking up the lamp, he held it over his beau tiful mistress, and once more gazed passionately and ward with great pomp for Szechuen, and in their joy to see him no more in the palace, the slighted princes of the empire forgave his unmerited advancement. Yuentsoong returned to his capitol ; but to the terror of his counsellors and people, his hair was blanched white as the head of an old man ! He was pale as well, but he was cheerful and kind beyond his wont, and to Teh-leen untiring in pensive and humble at tentions. He pleaded only impaired health and rest less slumbers as an apology for nights of solitude. Once, Teh-leen penetrated to his lonely chamber, but unrestrainedly on her unparalleled beauty. The past the early past was alone before him. He for- by the dim night lamp she saw that the scroll over her j gave her there, as she slept, unconscious of the window* was changed, and instead of the stimulus to throbbing of his injured, but noble heart, so close changed, and instead of the stimulus to glory which formerly hung in golden letters before his eyes, there was a sentence written tremblingly in black : " The close wing of love covers the death-throb of honor." Six months from this period the capitol was thrown into a tumult with the intelligence that the province of Szeclfuen was in rebellion, and Szema at the head of a numerous army on his way to seize the throne of Yuentsoong. This last sting betrayed the serpent even to the forgiving emperor, and tearing the reptile at last from his heart, he entered with the spirit of other times into the warlike preparations. The im perial army was in a few days on its march, ,pnd at Keo-yang the opposing forces met and prepared for encounter. With a dread of the popular feeling toward Teh- leen, Yuentsoong had commanded for her a close litter, and she was borne after the imperial standard in the centre of the army. On the eve before the battle, ere the watch-fires were lit, the emperor came to her tent, set apart from his own, and with the delicate care and kind gentleness from which he never varied, inquired how her wants were supplied, and bade her, thus early, farewell for the night ; his own custom of *The most common decorations of rooms, halls, and tem ples, in China, are ornamental scrolls or labels of colored paper, or wood, painted and f*iJded, and hunsr over doors or windows, and inscribed with a line or couplet conveying some allusion to the circumstances of the inhabitant, or some pious or phi losophical axiom. For instance, a poetical one recorded by Dr op . Mo rrson : From the pine forest the azute dragon ascends the milky way," typical of the prosperous man arising to wealth and honors. jured, beside her he forgave her in the long silent abysses of his soul ! Unwilling to wake her from her tran quil slumber, but promising to himself, from that hour, such sweets of confiding love as had well nigh been lost to him for ever, he imprinted one kiss upon the parted lips of Teh-leen, and sought his couch for slumber. Ere daybreak the emperor was aroused by one of his attendants with news too important for delay. Szema, the rebel, had been arrested in the imperial camp, disguised, and on his way back to his own forces, and like wildfire, the information had spread among the soldiery, who, in a state of mutinous excitement, were with difficulty restrained from rush ing upon the tent of Teh-leen. At the door of bis tent, Yuentsoong found messengers from the alarmed princes and officers of the different commands, implo ring immediate aid arid the imperial presence to allay the excitement, and while the emperor prepared to mount his horse, the guard arrived with the Tartar prince, ignominiously tied, and bearing marks of rough usage from his indignant captors. "Loose him!" cried the emperor, in a voice of thunder. The cords were severed, and with a glance whose ferocity expressed no thanks, Szema reared himself up to his fullest height, and looked scornfully around him. Daylight had now broke, and as the group stood upon an eminence in sight of the whole army, shouts began to ascend, and the armed multitude, breaking through all restraint, rolled in toward the centre. Attracted by the commotion, Yuentsoong turned to give some orders to those near him, when 172 THE BELLE OF THE BELFRY. Szema suddenly sprang upon an officer of the guard wrenched his drawn sword from his grasp, and in an instant was lost to sight in the tent of Teh-leen. A sharp scream, a second of thought, and forth again rushed the desperate murderer, with his sword flinging drops of drops of blood, and ere a foot stirred in the paralyzed group, the avenging cimeter of Yuentsoong had cleft him to the chin. A hush, as if the whole army was struck dumb by a bolt from heaven, followed this rapid tragedy. Dropping the polluted sword from his hand, the emperor, with uncertain step, and the pallor of death upon his countenance, entered the fatal tent. He came no more forth that day. The army was marshalled by the princes, and the rebels were routed with great slaughter; but Yuentsoong never more wielded sword. " He pined to death," says the histo rian, " with the wane of the same moon that shone upon the forgiveness of Teh-leen." THE BELLE OF THE BELFRY; OR, THE DARING LOVER. A GRFSETTE is something else beside a "mean girl" or a "gray gown," the French dictionary to the contra ry notwithstanding. Bless me ! you should see the griset es of Rochepot ! And if you wished to take a lesson in political compacts, you should understand the grisette confederacy of Rochepot ! They were working-girls, it is true dressmakers, milliners, shoe- binders, tailoresses, flowermakers, embroideresses and they never expected to be anything more aristo cratic. And in that content lay their power. The grisettes of Rochepot were a good fourth of the female population. They had their jealousies, and little scandals, and heart-burnings, and plottings, and counterplottings (for they were women) among themselves. But they made common cause against the enemy. They would bear no disparagement. They knew exactly what was due to them, and what was due to their superiors, and they paid and gave credit in the coin of good manners, as can not be done in countries of "liberty and equality." Still there were little shades of difference in the attention shown them by their employers, and they worked twice as much in a day when sewing for Madame Durozel, who took her dinner with them, sans facon in the work-room, as for old Madame Chiquette, who dined all alone in her grand saloon, and left them to eat by themselves among their shreds and scissors. But these were not slights which they seriously resented. Wo only to the incautious dame who dared to scan dalize one of their number, or dispute her dues, or encroach upon her privileges ! They would make Rochepot as uncomfortable for her, parbleu ! as a kettle to a slow-boiled lobster. But the prettiest grisette of Rochepot was not often permitted to join her companions in their self-chap eroned excursions on the holydays. Old Dame Pomponney was the sexton s widow, and she had the care of the great clock of St. Roch, and of one only daughter; and excellent care she took of both her charges. They lived all three in the belfry dame, clock, and daughter and it was a bright day for Thenais when she got out of hearing of that " tick, tick, tick," and of the thumping of her mother s cane on the long staircase, which always kept time with it. Not that old Dame Pomponney had any objection to have her daughter convenably married. She had been deceived in her youth (or so it was whispered) by a lover above her condition, and she vowed, by th* cross on her cane, that her daughter should have no sweetheart above a journeyman mechanic. Now tht romance of the grisettes (parlons has!) was to have one charming little flirtation with a gentleman before they married the leather-apron just to show that, had they by chance been born ladies, they could have played their part to the taste of their lords. But it was at this game that Dame Pomponney had burnt her fingers, and she had this one subject for the exercise of her powers of mortal aversion. When I have added that, four miles from Roche- pot, stood the chateau de Brevanne, and that the old Count de Brevanne was a proud aristocrat of the an- cien regime, with one son, the younjg Count Felix, whom he had educated at Paris, I think I have pre pared you tolerably for the little romance I have to tell you. It was a fine Sunday morning that a mounted hus sar appeared in the street of Rochepot. The grisettes were all abroad in their holyday parure, and the gay soldier soon made an acquaintance with one of them at the door of the inn, and informed her that he had been sent on to prepare the old barracks for his troop. The hussars were to be quartered a month at Roche- pot. Ah ! what a joyous bit of news ! And six offi cers beside the colonel! And the trumpeters were miracles at playing quadrilles and waltzes ! And not a plain man in the regiment except always the speaker. And none, except the old colonel, had ever been in love in his life. But as this last fact required to be sworn to, of course he was ready to kiss the book or, in the absence of the book, the next most sacred object of his adoration. " Finissez done, Monsieur . " exclaimed his pretty listener, and away she ran to spread the welcome in telligence with its delightful particulars. The next day the troop rode into Rochepot, and formed in the great square in front of St. Roch; and by the time the trumpeters had played themselves red in the face, the hussars were all appropriated, to a man for the grisettes knew enough of a marching regiment to lose no time. They all found leisure to pity poor Thenais, however, for there she stood in one of the high windows of the belfry, looking down on the gay crowd below, and they knew very well that old Dame Pomponney had declared all soldiers to be gay deceivers, and forbidden her daughter to stir into the street while they were quartered at Rochepot. Of course the grisettes managed to agree as to each other s selection of a sweetheart from the troop, and of course each hussar thankfully accepted the pair of eyes that fell to him. For, aside from the limited duration of their stay, soldiers are philosophers, and know that "life is short," and it is better to " take the goods the gods provide." But " after everybody was helped," as they say at a feast, there appeared another short jacket and foraging cap, very much to the re lief of red-headed Susette, the shoebinder, who had been left out in the previous allotment. And Susette made the amiable accordingly, but to no purpose, for the lad seemed an idiot with but one idea looking for ever at St. Roch s clock to know the time of day ! The grisettes laughed and asked their sweethearts his name, but they significantly pointed to their foreheads and whispered something about poor Robertin s being a privileged follower of the regiment and a protege of the colonel. Well, the grisettes flirted, and the old clock of St. Roch ticked on, and Susette and Thenais, the plain est and the prettiest girl in the village, seemed the only two who were left out in the extra dispensation of lovers. And poor Robertin still persisted in oc cupying most of his leisure with watching the time of day. THE BELLE OF THE BELFRY. 173 It was on the Sunday morning after the arrival of the troop that old Dame Pomponney went up, as usual, to do her Sunday s duty in winding up the clock. She had previously locked the belfry door to be sure that no one entered below while she was above ; but the Virgin help us ! on the top stair, gazing into the machinery of the clock with absorbed attention, sat one of those devils of hussars! "Thief," " vagabond," and " house-breaker," were the most moderate epithets with which Dame Pomponney ac companied the enraged beating of her stick on the resounding platform. She was almost beside herself i with rage. And Thenais had been up to dust the I wheels of the clock ! And how did she know that | that scelerat of a trooper was not there all the time! But the intruder, whose face had been concealed till now, turned suddenly round and began to gibber | and arin like a possessed monkey. He pointed at the j clock, imitated the "tick, tick, tick," laughed till the big bell gave out an echo like a groan, and then sud denly jumped over the old dame s stick and ran down stairs. "Eh, Sainte Vierge!" exclaimed the old dame, " it s a poor idiot after all ! And he has stolen up to see what made the clock tick ! Ha ! ha ! ha ! Well ! well! lean not come up these weary stairs twice aj day, and I must wind up the clock before I go down to let him out. Tick, tick, tick! poor lad ! poor |j lad! They must have dressed him up to make fun; of him those vicious troopers ! Well ! well !" And with pity in her heart, Dame Pomponney hob- i bled down, stair after stair, to her chamber in the square turret of the belfry, and there she found the poor idiot on his knees before Thenais, and Thenais |j was just preparing to put a skein of thread over his j| thumbs, for she thought she might make him useful and amuse him with the winding of it till her mother came down. But as the thread got vexatiously en tangled, and the poor lad sat as patiently as a wooden reel, and it was time to go below to mass, the dame thought she might as well leave him there till she came back, and down she stumped, locking the door very safely behind her. Poor Thenais was very lonely in the belfry, and Dame Pomponney, who had a tender heart where her duty was not involved, rather rejoiced when she re turned, to find an unusual glow of delight on her daughter s cheek ; and if Thenais could find so much pleasure in the society of a poor idiot lad, it was a sign, too, that her heart was not gone altogether after those abominable troopers. It was time to send the innocent youth about his business, however, so she gave him a holyday cake and led him down stairs and dismissed him with a pat on his back and a strict in junction never to venture again up to the " tick, tick, tick." But as she had had a lesson as to the acces sibility of her bird s nest, she determined thenceforth to lock the door invariably and carry the key in her pocket. While poor Robertin was occupied with his re searches into the " tick, tick, tick," never absent a day from the neighborhood of the tower, the more fortunate hussars were planning to give the grisettes a fete champctre. One of the saints days was coming round, and, the weather permitting, all the vehicles of the village were to be levied, and, with the troop- horses in harness, they were to drive to a small wood ed valley in the neighborhood of the chateau de Brevanne, where seclusion and a mossy carpet of grass were combined in a little paradise for such en joyment. The morning of this merry day dawned, at last, and the grisettes and their admirers were stirring be times, for they were to breakfast sur I herbe, and they were not the people to turn breakfast into dinner. The sky was clear, and the dew was not verv heavy on the 12 grass, and merrily the vehicles rattled about the town, picking up their fair freights from its obscurest cor ners. But poor Thenais looked out, a sad prisoner, from her high window in the belfry. It was a half hour after sunrise and Dame Pompon ney was creeping up stairs after her matins, thanking Heaven that she had been firm in her refusals at least twenty of the grisettes having gathered about her, and pleaded for a day s freedom" for her imprison ed daughter. She rested on the last landing but one to take a little breath but hark ! a man s voice talk ing in the belfry ! She listened again, and quietly slipped her feet out of her high-heeled shoes. The voice was again audible yet how could it be ! She knew that no one could have passed up the stair, for the key had been kept in her pocket more carefully than usual, and, save by the wings of one of her own pigeons, the belfry window was inaccessible, she was sure. Still the voice went on in a kind of pleading murmur, and the dame stole softly up in her stock ings, and noiselessly opened the door. There stood Thenais at the window, but she was alone in the room. At the same instant the voice was heard again, and sure now that one of those desperate hussars had climbed the tower, and unable to control her rage at the audacity of the attempt, Dame Pomponney clutch ed her cane and rushed forward to aim a blow at the military cap now visible at the sill of the window. But at the same instant the head of the intruder was thrown back, and the gibbering and idiotic smile of poor Robertin checked her blow in its descent, and turned all her anger into pity. Poor, silly lad ! he had contrived to draw up the garden ladder and place it upon the roof of the stone porch below, to climb and offer a flower to Thenais ! Not unwilling to have her daughter s mind occupied witli some other thought than the forbidden excursion, the dame offered her hand to Robertin and drew him gently in at the win dow. And as it was now market-time she bid The nais be kind to the poor boy, and locking the door behind her, trudged contentedly off with her slick and basket. I am sorry to be obliged to record an act of filial disobedience in the heroine of rny story. An hour after, Thenais was welcomed with acclamations as she suddenly appeared with Robertin in the midst of the merry party of grisettes. With Robertin not as he had hitherto been seen, his cap on the back of his head and his under lip hanging loose like an idiot s but with Robertin, gallant, spirited, and gay, the hand somest of hussars, and the most joyous of companions. And ThtMiais, spite of her hasty toilet and the cloud of conscious disobedience which now and then shaded her sweet smile, was, by many degrees, the belle of the hour; and the palrn of beauty, for once in the world at least, was yielded without envy. The gri settes dearly love a bit of romance, too, and the cir cumventing of old Dame Pomponney by his ruse of idiocy, and the safe extrication of the prettiest girl of the village from that gloomy old tower, was quite enough to make Robertin a hero, and his sweetheart Thenais more interesting than a persecuted princess. And, seated on the ground while their glittering cavaliers served them with breakfast, the light-hearted grisettes of Rochepot were happy enough to be en vied by their betters. But suddenly the sky darkened, and a slight gust murmuring among the trees, an nounced the coming up of a summer storm. Sauvc qui pent ! The soldiers were used to emergencies, and they had packed up and reloaded their cars and were under way for shelter almost as soon as the grisettes, and away they all fled toward the nearest grange one of the dependancies of the chateau de Brevanne. But Robertin, now, had suddenly become the di rector and ruling spirit of the festivities. The soldiers 174 PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. treated him with instinctive deference, the old farmer of the grange hurried out with his keys and unlocked the great storehouse, and disposed of the horses un der shelter ; and by the time the big drops began to fall, l he party were dancing gayly and securely on the dry and smooth thrashing-floor, and the merry har mony of the martial trumpets and horns rang out far and wide through the gathering tempest. The rain began to come down very heavily, and the clatter of a horse s feet in a rapid gallop was heard in one of the pauses in the waltz. Some one seeking shelter, no doubt. On went the bewitching music again, and at this moment two or three couples ceased waltzing, and the floor was left to Robertin and The- nais, whose graceful motions drew all eyes upon them in admiration. Smiling in each other s faces, and wholly unconscious of any other presence than their own, they whirled blissfully around but there was now another spectator. The horseman who had been heard to approach, had silently joined the party, and making a courteous gesture to signify that the dan cing was not to be interrupted, he smiled back the courtesies of the pretty grisettes for, aristocratic as he was, he was a polite man to the sex, was the Count de Brevanne. "Felix !" he suddenly cried out, in a tone of sur prise and anger. The music stopped at that imperative call, and Robertin turned his eyes, astonished, in the direction from which it came. The name was repeated from lip to lip among the grisettes, " Felix !" " Count Felix de Brevanne !" But without deigning another word, the old man pointed with his riding-whip to the farm-house. The disguised count respectfully bowed his head, but held Thenais by the hand and drew her gently with him. "Leave her! disobedient boy!" exclaimed the father. But as Count Felix tightened his hold upon the small hand he held, and Thenais tried to shrink back from the advancing old man, old Dame Pomponney, streaming with rain, broke in unexpectedly upon the scene. " Disgrace not your blood," said the Count de Bre vanne at that moment. The offending couple stood alone in the centre of the floor, and the dame comprehended that her daugh ter was disparaged. "And who is disgraced by dancing with my daugh ter?" she screamed with furious gesticulation. The old noble made no answer, but the grisettes, in an under tone, murmured the name of Count Felix ! " Is it he the changeling ! the son of a poor gar dener, that is disgraced by the touch of my daughter?" A dead silence followed this astounding exclama tion. The old dame had forgotten herself in her rage, and she looked about with a terrified bewilderment but the mischief was done. The old man stood aghast. Count Felix clung still closer to Thenais, but his face expressed the most eager inquisitiveness. The grisettes gathered around Dame Pomponney, and the old count, left standing and alone, suddenly drew his cloak about him and stepped forth into the rain ; and in another moment his horse s feet were heard clat tering away in the direction of the chateau de Bre vanne. We have but to tell the sequel. The incautious revelation of the old dame turned out to be true. The dying infant daughter of the Marchioness de Brevanne had been changed for the healthy son of the count s gardener, to secure an heir to the name and estates of the nearly extinct family of Brevanne. Dame Pomponney had assisted in this secret, and but for her heart full of rage at the moment, to which the old count s taunt was but the last drop, the secret would probably have never been revealed. Count Felix, who had played truant from his college at Paris, to come and hunt up some of his childish playfellows, in disguise, had remembered and disclosed himself to the little Theuais, who was not sorry to recognise him, while he played the idiot in the belfry. But of course there was now no obstacle to their union, and united they were. The old count pardoned him, and gave the new couple a portion of his estate, and they named their first child Robertin, as was natural enough. PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL, KEPT ON A LATE VISIT TO ENGLAND. Ship Gladiator, off the Isle of Wight, Evening of June 9th, 1839. THE bullet which preserves the perpendicular of my cabin-lamp is at last still, T congratulate myself; and with it my optic nerve resumes its proper and steady function. The vagrant tumblers, the peripatet ic teeth-brushes, the dancing stools, the sidling wash basins and et-ceteras, have returned to- a quiet life. The creaking bulk-heads cry no more. I sit on a trunk which will not run away with me, and pen and paper look up into my face with their natural sobriety and attention. I have no apology for not writing to you, except want of event since we parted. There is not a milestone in the three thousand four hundred miles I have travelled. " Travelled !" said I. I am as unconscious of having moved from the wave on which you left me at Staten Island as the prisoner in the hulk. I have pitched forward and backward, and rolled from my left cheek to my right ; but as to any fueling of having gone onward I am as unconscious of it as a lobster backing after the ebb. The sea is a dreary vacuity, in which he, perhaps, who was ever well upon it, can find material for thought. But for one, 1 will sell, at sixpence a month, all copyhold upon so much of my life as is destined "to the deep, the blue, the black" (and whatever else he calls it) of my friend the song-writer. Yet there are some moments recorded, first with a sigh, which we find afterward copied into memory with a smile. Here and there a thought has come to me from the wave, snatched listlessly from the elements here and there a word has been said which on shore should have been wit or good feeling here and there a good morning, responded to with an effort, has, from its courtesy or heartiness, left an impression which will make to-morrow s parting phrases more earnest than 1 had anticipated. With this green isle to windward, and the smell of earth and flowers com ing to my nostrils once more, I begin to feel an in terest in several who have sailed with me. Humanity, killed in me invariably by salt water, revives, I think, with this breath of hawthorn. The pilot tells us that the Montreal, which sailed ten days before us, has not yet passed up the channel, and that we have brought with us the first west wind they have had in many weeks. The sailors do not know what to say to this, for we had four parsons on board, and, by all sea-canons, they are invariable Jonahs. One of these gentlemen, by the way, is an j abolitionist, on a begging crusade fora school devoted I to the amalgam of color, and very much to the amuse ment of the passengers he met the steward s usual demand for a fee with an application for a contribu tion to the funds of his society ! Hia expectations PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 175 from British sympathy are large, for he ia accom panied by a lay brother " used to keeping accounts," whose sole errand is to record the golden results of his friend s eloquence. But " eight bells" warn me to bed ; so when I have recorded the good qualities of the Gladiator, which are many, and those of her captain, which are more, I will put out my sea-lamp for the last time, and get into my premonitory "six feet by two." ******* The George Inn, Portsmouth. This is a morning in which (under my circumstances) it would be diffi cult not to be pleased with the entire world. A fair day in June, newly from sea, and with a journey of seventy miles before me on a swift coach, through rural England, is what I call a programme of a pleas ant day. Determined not to put myself in the way of a disappointment, I accepted, without the slightest hesitation, on landing at the wharf, the services of an elderly gentleman in shabby black, who proposed to stand between me and all my annoyances of the morning. He was to get my baggage through the customs, submit for me to all the inevitable imposi tions of tide-waiters, secure my place in the coach, bespeak me a fried sole and green peas, and sum up his services, all in one short phrase of I. s. d. So putting my temper into my pocket, and making up my mind to let roguery take the wall of me for one day unchallenged, I mounted to the grassy ramparts of the town to walk off the small remainder of sea-air from my stomach, and admire everything that came in my way. I would recommend to all newly-landed passengers from the packets to step up and accept of the sympathy of the oaks of the " king s bastion" in their disgust for the sea. Those sensible trees, leaning toward the earth, and throwing out their boughs as usual to the landward, present to the sea ward exposure a turned-up and gnarled look of nausea and disgust, which is as expressive to the commonest observer as a sick man s first look at his bolus. I have great affinity with trees, and I believe implicitly that what is disagreeable to the tree can not be pleas ant to the man. The salt air is not so corrosive here as in the Mediterranean, where the leaves of the olive are eaten off entirely on the side toward the sea ; but it is quite enough to make a sensible tree turn up ils nose, and in that attitude stands most expressively every oak on the " king s bastion." ******* The first few miles out of Portsmouth form one long alley of ornamented cottages wood-bine creep ing and roses flowering over them all. If there were but two between Portsmouth and London two even of the meanest we saw a traveller from any other land would think it worth his while to describe them minutely. As there are two thousand (more or less), they must pass with a bare mention. Yet I b ecame conscious of a new feeling in seeing these rural para dises; and I record it as the first point in which 1 find myself worse for having become a " dweller in the shade." I was envious. Formerly, in passing a tasteful retreat, or a fine manor, I could say, " What a bright lawn ! What a trim and fragrant hedge ! What luxuriant creepers ! I congratulate their fortunate owner !" Now it is, " How I wish I had that hedge at Glenmary! How I envy these people their shrubs, trellices, and flowers!" I wonder not a little how the English emigrant can make a home among our unsightly stumps that can ever breed a forgetfulness of all these refined ruralities. After the first few miles, I discovered that the two windows of the coach were very limited frames for the rapid succession of pictures presented to my eye, and changing places with William, who was on the top of the coach, I found myself between two tory politicians, setting forth to each other most eloquently the mal-administrations of the whigs, and the queen s mismanagement. As I was two months behind the English news, I listened with some interest. They made out to their own satisfaction that the queen was a silly girl ; that she had been caught in a decided fib about Sir Robert Peel s exactions with respect to the household ; and one of the Jeremiahs, who seem ed to be a sturdy grazier, said that " in igh life the queen-dowager s ealth was now received uniwersally with three times three, while Victoria s was drank in solemn silence." Her majesty received no better j treatment at the hands of a whig on the other end of the seat ; and as we whirled under the long park fence ! of Claremont, the country palace of Leopold and the I Princess Charlotte, he took the pension of the Belgian I king for the burden of his lamentation, and, between j whig and tory, England certainly seemed to be in I a bad way. This Claremont, it will be remembered by the readers of D lsraeli s novels, is the original of the picture of the luxurious maison de plaisance, drawn in the young duke. We got glimpses of the old palace at Esher, of Hampton court, of Pitt s country seat at Putney, and of Jane Porter s cottage at Esher, and in the seventh hour from leaving Portsmouth (seventy-four miles) we found the vehicles thickening, the omnibuses passing, the blue-coated policemen occurring at short I 1 intervals, and the roads delightfully watered symp- j toms of suburban London. We skirted the privileged 1 paling of Hyde Park ; and I could see, over the rails, | the flying and gay-colored equipages, the dandy horse- j men, the pedestrian ladies followed by footmen with , I their gold sticks, the fashionable throng, in short, ! which, separated by an iron barrier from all contact ij with unsightlinesa and vulgarity, struts its hour in this jj green cage of aristocracy. Around the triumphal arch opposite the duke of Wellington s was assembled a large crowd of carriages and horsemen. The queen was coming from Buck- I ingham palace through the Green park, and they were waiting for a glimpse of her majesty on horse- j back. The regulator whirled mercilessly on; but I far down, through the long avenues of trees, I could I see a movement of scarlet liveries, and a party coming | rapidly toward us on horseback. We missed the | queen by a couple of minutes. It was just the hour when all London is abroad, and Piccadilly was one long cavalcade of splendid equipages on their way to the park. I remembered many a face, and many a crest; but either the faces had beautified in my memory, or three years had done time s pitiless work on them all. Near Devon shire house J saw, fretting behind the slow-moving j press of vehicles, a pair of magnificent and fiery blood horses, drawing a coach, which, though quite new, was of a color and picked out with a peculiar stripe that was familiar to my eye. The next glance con vinced me that the livery was that of Lady B. ; but, for the light chariot in which she used to drive, here was a stately coach for the one tall footman, two for the plain but elegant harness, a sumptuous and superb caparison the whole turn-out on a scale of splendor unequalled by anything around us. Another moment decided the doubt for as we came against the carriage, following, ourselves, an embarrassed press of vehicles, her ladyship appeared, leaning back in the corner with her wrists crossed, the same in the grace of her attitude and the elegance of her toilet, but stouter, more energetic, and graver in the expres sion of her face, than I ever remembered to have seen her. From the top of the stage-coach 1 looked, unseen, directly down upon her, and probably got, by chance, a daylight and more correct view of her countenance than I should obtain in a year of opera and drawing-room observation. Tired and dusty, we were turned from hotel to ho- 176 PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. tel, all full and overflowing ; and finding at last a cor ner at Raggett s, in Dover street, we dressed, dined, and posted to Woolwich. Unexpected and mournful news closed our first day in England with tears. ****** I drove up to London the second day after our ar rival, and having a little " Grub-street" business, made my way to the purlieus of publishers in Paternoster row. If you could imagine a paper mine, with a very deep-cut shaft laid open to the surface of the earth, you might get some idea of Ivy lane. One walks along through its dim subterranean light, with no idea of breathing the proper atmosphere of day and open air. A strong smell of new books in the nostrils, and one long stripe of blue sky much farther off" than usu al, are the predominant impressions. From the dens of the publishers, I wormed my way through the crowds of Cheapside and the Strand, tow ard that part of London which, as Horace Smith says, is "open at the top." Something in the way of a ship s fender, to save the hips and elbows, would sell well I should think to pedestrians in London. What crowds, to be sure ! On a Sunday in New York, when all the churches are pouring forth their congre gations at the same moment, you have seen a faint image of the Strand. The style of the hack cabriolets is very much changed since I was in London. The passenger sits about as high up from the ground as he would in a common chair the body of the vehicle suspended from the axle instead of being placed upon it, and the wheels very high. The driver s seat would suit a sailor, for it answers to the ship s tiller, well astern. He whips over the passenger s head. I saw one or two private vehicles built on this principle, certainly one of safety, though they have something the beauty of a prize hog. The new National Gallery in Trafalgar square, not finished when I left England, opened upon me as I entered Charing Cross, with what I could not but feel was a very fine effect, though critically, its " pepper- boxity" is not very creditable to the architect. Fine old Northumberland house, with its stern lion atop on one side, the beautiful Club house on the other, St. Martin s noble church and the Gallery with such a fine opening in the very cor cordium of London, could not fail of producing a noble metropolitan view. The street in front of the gallery was crowded with carriages, showing a throng of visiters within ; and mounting the imposing steps (the loftiness of the ves tibule dropping plump as I paid my shilling entrance), I found myself in a hall whose extending lines of pil lars ran through the entire length of the building, offering to the eye a truly noble perspective. Off from this hall, to the right and left, lay the galleries of antique and modern paintings, and the latter were crowded with the fair and fashionable mistresses of the equipages without. You will not care to be bothered with criticisms on pictures, and mine was a cursory glance but a delicious, full-length portrait of a noble lady by Grant, whose talent is now making some noise in London, a glorious painting of Van Amburgh among his lions by Edwin Landseer, and a portrait of Miss Pardoe in a Turkish costume, with her pretty feet coiled under her on a Persian carpet, by Pickers- gill, are among those I remember. I found a great many acquaintances in the gallery ; and I was sitting up on a bench with a lady, who pointed out to me a portrait of Lord Lyndhurst in his chancellor s wig and robes a very fine picture of a man of sixty or thereabouts. Directly between me and it, as I looked, sidled a per son with his back to me, cutting off my view very pro- vokingly. " When this dandy gets out of the way with his eyeglass," said I, "I shall be able to see the pic ture." My friend smiled. " Who do you take the dandy to be ?" It was a well-formed man, dressed in the top of the fashion, with a very straight back, curl ing brown hair, and the look of perhaps thirty years of age. As he passed on and I caught his profile, I saw it was Lord Lyndhurst himself. ****** I had not seen Taglioni since the first representa tion of the Sylphide, eight or nine years ago at Paris. ! Last night I was at the opera, and saw her in La Gitana ; and except that her limbs are the least in the world rounder and fuller, she is, in person, absolutely unchanged. I can appreciate now, better than I could | then (when opera dancing was new to me), what it is I that gives this divine woman the right to her proud title of La Deesse de la Dansc. It is easy for the Ellslers, and Augusta, and others, who are said to be only second to her, to copy her flying steps, and even \ to produce, by elasticity of limb, the beautiful effect ; of touching the earth, like a thing afloat, without be ing indebted to it for the rebound. But Taglioni alone finishes the step, or the pirouette, or the arrowy bound over the scene, as calmly, as accurately, as faultlessly, 1 as she begins it. She floats out of a pirouette as if, , instead of being made giddy, she had been lulled by | it into a smiling and child-like dream, and instead of trying herself and a plomb (as is seen in all other dan cers, by their effort to recover composure), it had been the moment when she had rallied and been refreshed. The smile, so expressive of enjoyment in her own grace, which steals over Taglioni s lips when she closes a difficult step, seems communicated, in an indefina ble languor, to her limbs. You can not fancy her fa tigued when, with her peculiar softness of motion, she courtesies to the applause of the enchanted audience, and walks lightly away. You are never apprehensive that she has undertaken too much. You never de tect, as you do in all other dancers, defects slurred over adroitly, and movements that, from their antici pating the music of the ballet, are known by the criti cal eye to cover some flaw in the step, from giddiness or loss of balance. But oh what a new relation bears the music to the dance, when this spirit of grace re places her companions in the ballet ! Whether the motion seems born of the music, or the music floats out of her dreamy motion, the enchanted gazer might be almost embarrassed to know. In the new ballet of La Gitana, the music is based upon the Mazurka. The story is the old one of the child of a grandee of Spain, stolen by gipsies, and re covered by chance in Russia. The gradual stealing |i over her of a recollection of music she had heard in | her childhood was the finest piece of pantomimic act ing I ever saw. But there is one dance, the Cachucha, \ introduced at the close of the ballet, in which Taglioni i has enchanted the world anew. It could only be done ! by herself; for there is a succession of flying move- i ments expressive of alarm, in the midst of which she | alights and stands poised upon the points of her feet, i with a look over her shoulder of fierte and animation possible to no other face, I think, in the world. It was like a deer standing with expanded nostril and i neck uplifted to its loftiest height, at the first scent of his pursuers in the breeze. It was the very soul of swiftness embodied in a look ! How can I describe it j to you ? ****** My last eight hours have been spent between Bed- | lam and the opera one of those antipodal contrasts I of which London life affords so many. Thanks to | God, and to the Howards who have arisen in our time, i a madhouse is no longer the heart-rending scene that i it used to be; and Bedlam, though a place of melan- ! choly imprisonment, is as cheering a spectacle to the humane as imprisonment can be made by care and kindness. Of the three hundred persons who are in mates of its wards, the greater part seemed quiet and content, some playing at ball in the spacious court yards, some lying on the grass, and some working vol- PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 177 untarily at a kind of wheel arranged for raising water to their rooms. On the end of a bench in one of the courts, quite apart from the other patients, sat the youth who came up two hundred miles from the country to marry the queen ! You will remember the story of his forcing himself into Buckingham palace. He was a stout, sandy-haired, sad-looking young man, of perhaps twenty-four; and with his arms crossed, and his eyes on the ground, he sat like a statue, never moving even an eyelash while we were there. There was a very gentlemanlike man working at the waterwheel, or rather walking round, with his hand on the bar, in a gait that would have suited the most finished exquis ite of a drawing-room Mr. Davis, who shot (I think) at Lord Londonderry. Then in an upper room we saw the Captain Brown who shook his fist in the queen s face when she went to the city really a most officer-like and handsome fellow ; and in the next room, poor old Hatfield, who shot at George the Third, and has been in Bedlam for forty years quite sane! He was a gallant dragoon, and his face is seamed with scars got in battle before his crime. He employs him self with writing poetry on the death of his birds and cats whom he has outlived in prison all the society i he has had in this long and weary imprisonment. He I 1 received us very courteously, and called our attention j to his favorite canary showed us his poetry, and all I with a sad, mild, subdued resignation, that quite ! moved me. In the female wards I saw nothing very striking, ex cept one very noble-looking woman who was standing j at her grated window, entirely absorbed in reading the Bible. Her face expressed the most heart-rending j melancholy I had ever witnessed. She has been for years under the terrible belief that she has committed the unpardonable sin," and though quiet all the day, her agony at night becomes horrible. What a corn- j ment on a much-practised mode of preaching the mild ! and forgiving religion of our Savior ! As I was leaving one of the wards, a young woman of nineteen or twenty came up to me with a very po- lite courtesy, and said, "Will you be so kind as to i; have me released from this dreadful place ?" "I am |i afraid I can not," said I. "Then," she replied, lay- | ing her hand on my arm, with a most appealing ear- j nestness, "perhaps you will on Monday you know jl I ve nothing to pack !" The matron here interposed, j: and led her away, but she kept her eyes on us till the door closed. She was confined there for the murder of her child. We visited the kitchens, wash-houses, bakery, &c., &c. all clean, orderly, and admirable, and left our names on the visiters book, quite of the opinion of a Frenchman who was there just before us, and who had written under his own name this expressive praise : " J ai visile certains palais mains beaux et moms bicn entretcnus que cette maison de iafolie." Two hours after, I was listening to the overture of La Cenerentola, and watching the entrance to the op era of the gay, the celebrated, and the noble. In the house I had left, night had brought with it (as it does always to the insane) a maddening and terrific exalta tion of brain and spirit but how different from that exaltation of brain and spirit sought at the same hour, by creatures of the same human family, at the opera ! It was difficult not to wonder at the distribution of allotments to mankind. In a box on the left of me sat the queen, keeping time with a fan to the delicious singing of Pauline Garcia, her favorite minister stand ing behind her chair, and her maids of honor around herself the smiling, youthful, and admired sovereign of the most powerful nation on earth ! I thought of the poor girl in her miserable cell at Bedlam imploring release. The queen s face has thinned and grown more oval since I saw her at a drawing-room, four years ago, as Princess Victoria. She has been compelled to think since then, and such exigencies, in all stations of life, work out the expression of the face. She has now what I should pronounce a decidedly intellectual countenance, a little petulant withal when she turns to speak, but, on the whole, quite beautiful enough for a virgin queen. No particular attention seemed paid to her by the audience. She was dressed less gayly than many others around her. Her box was at the left side of the house, undistinguished by any mark of royalty, and a stranger would never have suspected her presence. Pauline Garcia sang better than I thought it possi ble for any one to sing after Malibran was dead. She has her sister s look about the forehead and eyes, and all her sister s soul and passionateness in her style of singing. Her face is otherwise very plain, but, plain as it is, and young as she is, the opera-going public prefer her already to the beautiful and more powerful Grisi. The latter long triumphant prima donna is said to be very unhappy at her eclipse by this new fa vorite ; and it is curious enough to hear the hundred and one faults found in the declining songstress by those who once would not admit that she could be transcended on earth. A very celebrated person, whom I remembered, when in London before, giving Grisi the most unqualified eulogy, assured the gay admirers in her box last night that she had always said that Grisi had nothing but lungs and fine eyes. She was a great healthy Italian girl, and could sing in tune; but soul or sentiment she never had ! Poor Grisi ! Hers is the lot of all who are so unhappy as to have been much admired. " Le monde ne ha it rien autant que ses idoles quand Us sont d terrc," said the wise La Bruyere. ****** Some of the most delightful events in one s travels are those which afford the least materiel for descrip tion, and such is our scjour of a few days at the vicar age of B . It was a venerable old house with pointed gables, elaborate and pointed windows, with panes of glass of the size of the palm of the hand, low doors, narrow staircases, all sorts of unsuspected rooms, and creepers outside, trellised and trained to every corner and angle. Then there was the modern wing, with library and dining-room, large windows, marble fireplaces, and French paper; and in going from your bedroom to breakfnst, you might fancy yourself stepping from Queen Elizabeth s time to Queen Victoria s. A high hedge of holly divided the smoothly-shaven lawn from the churchyard, and in the midst of the moss-grown headstones stood a gray old church with four venerable towers, one of the most picturesque and beautiful specimens of the old Eng lish architecture that I have ever seen. The whole group, church, vicarage, and a small hamlet of vine- covered and embowered stone cottages, lay in the lap of a gently rising sweep of hills, and all around were spread landscapes of the finished and serene character peculiar to England rich fields framed in flowering hedges, clumps of forest trees, glimpses of distant parks , country seats, and village Spires, and on the horizon a line of mist-clad hills, scarce ever more dis tinct than the banks of low-lying clouds retiring after a thunderstorm in America. Early on Sunday morning we were awakened by the melody of the bells in the old towers ; and with brief pauses between the tunes, they were phiyed upon most musically, till the hour for the morning services. We have little idea in America of the perfection to which the chiming of bells is carried in England. In the towers of this small rural church are hung eight bells of different tone, and the tunes played on them by the more accomplished ringers of the. neighboring hamlet are varied endlessly. 1 lay and listened to the 178 PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. simple airs as they died away over the valley, with a I 1 pleasure I can scarcely express. The morning was!: serene and bright, the perfume of the clematis and! jasmine flowers at the window penetrated to the cur-;! tains of my bed, and Sunday seemed to have dawned jj with the audible worship and palpable incense of na- || ture. We were told at breakfast that the chimes had , been unusually merry, and were a compliment to our- || selves, the villagers always expressing thus their con- !j gratulations on the arrival of guests at the vicarage. The compliment was repeated between services, and a i very long peal rang in the twilight our near relation- j ship to the vicar s family authorizing a very special | rejoicing. The interior of the church was very ancient look- ing and rough, the pews of unpainted oak, and the jj massive stone walls simply whitewashed. The con- j gregation was small, perhaps fifty persons, and thelj men were (with two exceptions) dressed in russet 1 1 carters frocks, and most of them in leather legging, j I The children sat on low benches placed in the centre ji of the one aisle, and the boys, like their fathers, were in smock frocks of homespun, their heavy shoes shod j with iron like horses hoofs, and their little legs button- I ed up in the impenetrable gaiters of coarse leather, jj They looked, men and boys, as if they were intended to wear but one suit in this world. I was struck with the solemnity of the service, and j| the decorous attention of men, women, and children, to the responses. It was a beautiful specimen of \\ simple and pastoral worship. Each family had the: name of their farm or place of residence printed on the back of the pew, with the number of seats to jj which they were entitled, probably in proportion to their tithes. The "living" is worth, if I remember right, not much over a hundred pounds an insuffi- j cient sum to support so luxurious a vicarage as is,! appended to it; but, happily for the people, the vicar chances to be a man of fortune, and he unites in his !; excellent character the exemplary pastor with the ! ! physician and lord of the manor. I left B with j : the conviction that if peace, contentment, and happi- ness, inhabit one spot more than all others in a world !; whose allotments are so difficult to estimate, it is the vicarage in the bosom of that rural upland. We left B at twelve in the Brighton "Age" the "swell coach" of England. We were to dine thirty miles nearer London, at Park, and we did the distance in exactly three hours, including a stop of fifteen minutes to dine. We are abused by all travellers for our alacrity in dining on the road ; but what stage-coach in the United States ever limited its dining time to fifteen minutes, and what American dinner of roast, pastry, and cheese, was ever despatch ed so briefly ? Yet the travellers to Brighton are of the better class ; and whose who were my fellow- passengers the day I refer to were particularly well dressed and gentlemanly yet all of them achieved a substantial dinner of beef, pudding, and cheese, paid their bills, and drained their glass of porter, within \\ the quarter of an hour. John Bull s blindness to the beam in his own eye is perhaps owing to the f;ict that this hasty meal is sometimes called a " lunch !" The two places beside our own in the inside were occupied by a lady and her maid and two children an interpretation of the number two to which I would not have agreed if I could have helped it. We can not always tell at first sight what will be most amusing, however ; and the child of two years, who sprawled over my rheumatic knees with her mother s permis sion, thereby occasioning on my part a most fixed look out of the window, furnished me after a while with a curious bit of observation. At one of the commons we passed, the children running out from a i gipsy encampment flung bunches of heath flowers into the coach, which the little girl appropriated, and commenced presenting rather graciously to her mother, the maid, and Mrs. W., all of whom received them with smiles and thanks. Having rather a sulky face of my own when not particularly called on to be pleased, the child omitted me for a long time in her distributions. At last, after collecting and re-distribu ting the flowers for about an hour, she grew suddenly grave, laid the heath all out upon her lap, selected the largest and brightest flowers, and made them into a nosegay. My attention was attracted by the serious ness of the child s occupation ; and I was watching her without thinking my notice observed, when she raised her eyes to me very timidly, turned her new bouquet over and over, and at last, with a blush, deeper than I ever saw before upon a child, placed the flowers in my hand and hid her face in her mother s bosom. My sulkiness gave way, of course, and the little coquette s pleasure in her victory was excessive. For the remainder of the journey, those who had given her their smiles too readily were entirely neg lected, and all her attentions were showered upon the only one she had found it difficult to please. I thought it as pretty a specimen of the ruling passion strong in baby-hood as I ever saw. It was a piece of finished coquetry in a child not old enough to speak plain. The coachman of " the age" was a young man of perhaps thirty, who is understood to have run through a considerable fortune, and drives for a living but he was not at all the sort of looking person you would fancy for a "swell whip." He drove beautifully, and helped the passengers out and in, lifted their baggage, &c., very handily, but evidently shunned notice, and had no desire to chat with the " outsides." The ex cessive difficulty in England of finding any clean way of making a living after the initiatory age is passed a difficulty which reduced gentlemen feel most keen ly probably forced this person as it has others to take up a vocation for which the world fortunately finds an excuse in eccentricity. He touches his hat for the half crown or shilling, although probably if it were offered to him when the whip was out of his hand he would knock the giver down for his imperti nence. I may as well record here, by the way, for the benefit of those who may wish to know a compari son between the expense of travelling here and at home, that for two inside places for thirty miles the coach fare was two pounds, and the coachman s fee five shillings, or half-a-crown each inside. To get from the post town to Park (two miles) cost me five-and-sixpence for a " fly," so that for thirty-two miles travel I paid 21. 10s. 6d., a little more than twelve dollars. And speaking of vocations, it would be a useful lesson to some of our ambitious youths to try a be ginning at getting a living in England. I was never at all aware of the difficulty of finding even bread and salt for a young man, till I had occasion lately to en deavor to better the condition of a servant of my own a lad who has been with me four or five years, and whose singular intelligence, good principles, and high self-improvement, fitted him, I thought, for any con fidential trust or place whatever. His own ideas, too (I thought, not unreasonably), had become somewhat sublimated in America, and he was unwilling to con tinue longer as a servant. He went home to his mother, a working-woman of London, and I did my utmost, the month I was in town, inquiring among all classes of my friends, advertising, &c., to find him any possible livelihood above menial service. I was met everywhere with the same answer : " There are hundreds of gentlemen s sons wearing out their youth in looking for the same thing." I was told daily that it was quite in vain that apprenticeships were as much sought as clerkships, and that every avenue to the making of a sixpence was overcrammed and inac- PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 179 cessible. My boy and his mother at last came to their senses ; and, consenting to apply once more for a servant s place, he was fortunate enough to engage as valet to a bachelor, and is now gone with his new master on a tour to France. As Harding the painter said to me, when he returned after his foreign trip, "England is a great place to take the nonsense out of people." * * * * * When London shall have become the Rome or Athens of a fallen empire (qu. will it ever?) the ter mini of the railways will be among its finest ruins. That of the Birmingham and Liverpool track is al most as magnificent as that flower of sumptuousness, the royal palace of Caserta, near Naples. It is really an impressive scene simply to embark for " Brum magem ;" and there is that utility in all this showy expenditure for arch, gateway, and pillar, that no one is admitted but the passenger, and you are refreshing ly permitted to manage your baggage, &c., without the assistance of a hundred blackguards at a shilling each. Then there are " ladies waiting-rooms," and " gentlemen s waiting-rooms," and attached to them every possible convenience, studiously clean and order ly. I wish the president and directors of the Utica and other American railroads would step over and take a sumptuary hint. The cars are divided into stalls, i. e. each passenger is cushioned off by a stuffed partition from his neigh bor s shoulder, and sleeps without offence or encroach ment. When they are crowded, that is an admirable arrangement ; but I have found it very comfortable in long journeys in America to take advantage of an empty car, and stretch myself to sleep along the The Adelphi is the Astor house of Liverpool, a very large and showy hotel near the terminus of the railway. We were shown into rather a magnificent parlor on our arrival ; and very hungry with rail-road- ing since six in the morning, we ordered dinner at their earliest convenience. It came after a full hour, and we sat down to four superb silver covers, anticipa ting a meal corresponding to the stout person and pompous manners of the fattest waiter I have seen in my travels. The grand cover was removed with a flourish and disclosed divers small bits of second-hand beef steak, toasted brown and warped at the corners by a second fire, and on the removal of the other three silver pagodas, our eyes were gratified by a dish of peas that had been once used for green soup, three similarly toasted and warped mutton chops, and three potatoes. Quite incredulous of the cook s intentions, I ventured to suggest to the waiter that he had proba bly mistaken the tray and brought us the dinner of some sportsman s respectable brace of pointers; but on being assured that there were no dogs in the cellar, I sent word to the master of the house that we had rather a preference for a dinner ne\v and hot, and would wait till he could provide it. Half an hour more brought up the landlord s apologies and a fresh and hot beef-steak, followed by a tough-crusted apple- pie, custard, and cheese and with a bottle of Moselle, which was good, we finished our dinner at one of the most expensive and showy hotels in England. The manners and fare at the American hotels being always described as exponents of civilization by English travellers, I shall be excused for giving a counter- picture of one of the most boasted of their own. Regretting exceedingly that the recent mourning vacant seat. Here, full or empty, you can occupy of my two companions must prevent their presence but your upright place. In every car are suspended at the gay festivities of Eglinton, 1 put them on board lamps to give light during the long passages through j the steamer, bound on a visit to relatives in Dublin, the subterranean tunnels. We rolled from under the Brobdignag roof of the terminus, as the church of Mary-le-bone (Cockney for Marie-la-bonne, but so carved on the frieze) struck six. Our speed was increased presently to thirty and returned to the Adelphi to wait en garcon for the Glasgow steamer of Monday. My chamber is a large and well-furnished room, with windows looking out on the area shut in by the wings of the house ; and I must make you still more contented at the Astor, by miles in the hour; and with the exception of the I describing what is going on below at this moment, slower rate in passing the tunnels, and the slackening ! It is half-past eight, and a Sunday morning. All the j bells of the house, it seems to me, are ringing, most, patiently, and in the area before the are six or eight idle waiters, and four stoppages having exceeded an hour altogether. j or five female scullions, playing, quarrelling, scolding, I thought, toward the end, that all this might be j and screaming; the language of both men and women very pleasant with a consignment of buttons, or an more profane and indecent than anything 1 have ever errand to Gretna Green. But for the pleasure of the (before chanced to hear, and every word audible in thing, I would as lief sit in an arm-chair and see bales every room in this quarter of the hotel. This has of striped green silk Unfolded for eight hours, astravel been going on since six this morning; and I seriously the same length of time by the railroad. (I have de- declare I do not think I ever heard as much indecent scribed in this simile exactly the appearance of the i conversation in my life as for three mortal hours must fields as you see them in flying past.) The old wo- j have " murdered sleep" for every lady and gentleman slower rate in passing tiie tunnels, and tne slackening ! it is nan-past eigiu, ; and getting under way at the different stations, this bells of the house, it rate was kept up throughout. We arrived at Liver- i of them very impati< pool (205 miles or upward) at three o clock, our i kitchen windows are : men and cabbages gain by it, perhaps, for yoiucan not tell whether they are not girls and roses. The washer woman at her tub follows the lady on the lawn so i quickly that you confound the two irresistibly the thatched cottages look like browsing donkeys, and the browsing donkeys like thatched cottages you ask the name of a town, and by the time you get up your finger, your point at a spot three miles off in short, the salmon well packed in straw on the top of the j coach, and called fresh-fish after a journey of 200 i miles, sees quite as much of the country as his most intellectual fellow-passenger. I foresee in all this a new distinction in phraseology. " Have you travel- j led in England?" will soon be a question having no reference to railroads. The winding turnpike and ! cross-roads, the coaches and post-carriages, will be resumed by all those who consider the sense of sight as useful in travel, and the bagmen and letter-bags will have almost undisputed possession of the rail- cars. lodged on the rear bide of the " crack hotel" of Liver pool. Sick of the scene described above, I went out just now to take a turn or two in my slippers in the long entry. Up and down, giving me a most appealing stare whenever we met, dawdled also the fat waiter who* served up the cold victuals of yesterday. He evidently had some errand with me, but what I did not immediately fathom. At last he approached " You a got your things, sir ?" " What things?" "The stick and umbrella, I carried to your bed room, sir." " Yes, thank you," and I resumed my walk. The waiter resumed his, and presently approached again. u You a don t intend to use the parlor again, sir ?" "No: I have explained to the master of the house that I shall breakfast in the coffee-room." And again I walked on. 180 PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. My friend began again at the next turn. "You a pay for those ladies dinner yourself, sir?" " Yes." I walked on once more. Once more approaches rny fat incubus, and with a twirl of the towel in his hand looks as if he would fain be delivered of something. Why the d 1 am I badgered in this way ?" I stormed out at last, losing patience at his stammering hesitation, and making a move to get round the fat obstruction and pursue rny walk. " Will you a remember the waiter, if you please, sir?" " Oh ! I was not aware that I was to pay the waiter at every meal. I generally do it when I leave the house. Perhaps you ll be kind enough to let me finish my walk, and trust me till to-morrow morning?" P. S. Evening in the coffee-room They say the best beginning in love is a decided aversion, and badly as I began at Liverpool, I shall always have a tender recollection of it for the admirable and unequalled luxury of its baths. A long and beautiful Grecian building crests the head of George s pier, built by the corporation of Liverpool, and devoted exclusively to salt-water baths. I walked down in the twilight to enjoy this refreshing luxury, and it being Sunday evening, 1 was shown into the ladies end of the building. The room where I waited till the bath was prepared was a lofty and finely proportioned apartment, elegantly furnished, and lined with superb ly bound books and pictures, the tables covered with engravings, and the whole thing looked like a central apartment in a nobleman s residence. A boy showed me presently into a small drawing-room, to which was attached a bath closet, the two rooms lined, boudoir fashion, with chintz, a clock over the bath, a nice carpet and stove, in short, every luxury possible to such an establishment. I asked the boy if the gentle men s baths were as elegant as these. " Oh yes," he said: "there are two splendid pictures of Niagara Falls and Catskill." " Who painted them ?" "Mr. Wall." " And whose are they ?" " They belong to our father, sir !" I made up my mind that " our father" was a man of taste and a credit to Liverpool. ******* I have just returned from the dinner given to Mac- ready at the Freemason s tavern. The hall, so cele brated for public " feeds," is a beautiful room of a very showy style of architecture, with three galleries, and a raised floor at the end usually occupied by the cross table. It accommodated on this occasion four hundred persons. From the peculiar object of the meeting to do honor to an actor for his intellectual qualities, and for his efforts to spiritualise and elevate the stage, there probably never was collected together in one room so much talent and accomplishment. Artists, authors, critics, publishers, and amateurs of the stage a large body in London made up the company. My atten tion was called by one of my neighbors to the singu larly superior character of the heads about us, and I had already observed the striking difference, both in head and physiognomy, between this and a common assemblage of men. Most of the persons connected with the press, it was said, were present; and perhaps it would have been a worthy service to the world had some shorn Samson, among the authors, pulled the temple upon the heads of the Philistines. The cry of " make way !" introduced the duke of Sussex, the chairman of the meeting a stout, mild- looking, dignified old man, wearing a close black scull- cap and the star and riband. He was followed by Lord Conyngham, who, as grand chamberlain, had done much to promote the interests of the drama; by Lord Nugent (whom I had last seen sailing a scampama in the bay of Corfu), by Sir Lytton Bulwer, Mr. I Shell, Sir Martin Shee, Young, the actor, Mr. Milnes, the poet, and other distinguished men. I should have said, by the way Mr. Macready followed next his royal highness. The cheering and huzzas, as this procession walked up the room, were completely deafening. Macready looked deadly pale and rather overcome; and amid : the waving of handkerchiefs and the stunning uproar I of four hundred "gentlemen and scholars," the duke placed the tragedian at his right hand, and took his seat before the turbot. The dinner was an uncommonly bad one ; but of this I had been forewarned, and so had taken a provi sory chop at the club. I had leisure, therefore, to look about me, and truly there was work enough for the eyes. M s head interested me more than any one s else, for it was the personification of his lofty, liberal, and poetic genius. His hair, which was long and profuse, curled in tendrils over the loftiest forehead ; but about the lower part of the face ! lay all the characteristics which go to make up a voluptuous yet generous, an enthusiastic and fiery, yet self-possessed and well directed character. He was excessively handsome ; yet it was the beauty of Masaniello, or Salvator Rosa, with more of intellect than both together. All in all, I never saw a finer face for an artist; and judging from his looks and from his works (he is perhaps twenty-four), I would stake my sagacity on a bold prophecy of his greatness. On the same side were the L s, very quiet-look ing men, and S the portrait-painter, a merry- ! looking grenadier, and L B the poet, with a | face like a poet. Near me was L , the painter, ! poet, novelist, song and music writer, dramatist, and good fellow seven characters of which his friends j scarce know in which he is most excellent and he : has a round Irish face, with a bright twinkle in his | eye, and a plump little body which carries off all his I gifts as if they were no load at all. And on my left [ was S , the glorious painter of Venice, of the j battle of Trafalgar, the unequalled painter of the sea i in all its belongings; and you would take him for a | gallant lieutenant of the navy, with the fire of a score I of battles asleep in his eye, and the roughening of a | hundred tempests in his cheek. A franker and more j manly face would not cross your eye in a year s travel. Mr. J was just beyond, a tall, sagacious-look- ! ing, good humored person of forty-five. He was a man of very kind manners, and was treated with great [ marks of liking and respect by all about him. Buc directly opposite to me sat so exact a picture of Paul j Pry as he is represented on the stage, particularly of my friend Finn in that character, that it was difficult | not to smile in looking at him. To my surprise, I heard some one behind me point him out, soon after, as the well-known original in that character the gentleman, whose peculiarities of person, as well as manners, were copied in the farce of Mr. Poole. " That s my name what s yours ?" said he the mo ment after he had seated himself, thrusting his card close to the nose of the gentleman next him. I took it of course for a piece of fun between two very old friends, but to my astonishment the gentlemen next him was as much astonished as I. The few servants scattered up and down were deaf to everything but calls for champagne (furnished only at an extra charge when called for a very mean system for a public dinner, by the way), and the wines on the table seemed selected to drive one to champagne or the doctor. Each person had four plates, and when used, they were to be put under the bench, or on the top of your head, or to be sat upon, j or what you would, except to be taken away, and the | soup and fish, and the roast and boiled and all, having been put on together, was all removed at one fell swoop the entire operation of dinner having lasted PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 181 just twenty-five minutes. Keep this fact till we are re corded by some new English traveller as the most ex peditious eaters in Christendom. Here end my croakings, however, for the speeches commenced directly, and admirable they were. To the undoing of much prejudice got by hearsay, I listened to Bulwer. He is, beyond all comparison, the most graceful and effective speaker I ever heard in England. All the world tells you that he makes signal failures in oratory yet he rose, when his health was drank, and, in self-possessed, graceful, unhesita ting language, playful, yet dignified, warm, yet not extravagant, he replied to the compliments of his royal highness, and brought forward his plan (as you have seen it reported in the papers) for the erection of a new theatre for the legitimate drama and Mac- ready. I remember once hearing that Bulwer had a belief in his future eminence as an orator and I would warrant his warmest anticipations in that career of ambition. He is a better speaker than Sheil, who follow ed him, and Sheil is renowned as an orator. Really there is nothing like one s own eyes and ears in this world of envy and misrepresentation. D sat near Sheil, at the cross table, very silent, as is his custom and that of most keen observers. The courtly Sir M S was near B , look ing like some fine old picture of a wit of Charles the second s time, and he and Y the actor made two very opposite and gentlemanlike speeches. 1 believe I have told you nearly all that struck me, except what was reported in the gazettes, and that you have no need to read over again. I got away at eleven, and reached the opera in time to hear the last act of the Puritani, and see the Elsslers dance in the ballet, and with a look-in at a ball, I concluded one of those ex hausting, exciting, overdone London days, which are pleasanter to remember than to enjoy, and pleasanter to read about than either. ******* One of the most elegant and agreeable persons I ever saw was Miss P , and I think her conversa tion more delightful to remember than any person s I ever knew. A distinguished artist told me that he remembered her when she was his beau-ideal of female beauty ; but in those days she was more "fancy-rapt," and gave in less to the current and spirit of society. Age has made her, if it may be so expressed, less selfish in her use of thought, and she pours it forth, like Pactolus that gold which is sand from others, i once on a visit to a noble house, when to her dismay a large and fashionable company arrived, who brought with them a mania for private theatricals. Her ward robe was very slender, barely sufficient for the ordinary j events of a week-day, and her purse contained one I solitary shilling. To leave the house was out of the | question, to feign illness as much so, and to decline | taking a part was impossible, for her talent and spright- j liness were the hope of the theatre. A part was cast for her, and, in despair, she excused herself from the gay party bound to the country town to make purcha ses of silk and satin, and shut herself up, a prey to mortified low spirits. The character required a smart village dress, and it certainly did not seem that it could come out of a shilling. She sat at her window, biting her lips, and turning over in her mind whether she could borrow of some one, when her attention was at tracted to a carpenter, who was employed in the con struction of a stage in the large hall, and who, in the court below, was turning off from his plane broad and long shavings of a peculiarly striped wood. It struck her that it was like riband. The next moment she was below, and begged of the man to give her half-a- dozen lengths as smooth -as he could shave them. He performed his task well, and depositing them in her apartment, she set off alone on horseback to the vil lage, and with her single shilling succeeded in pur chasing a chip hat of the coarsest fabric. She carried it home, exultingly, trimmed it with her pine shavings, and on the evening of the performance appeared with a white dress, and hat and belt-ribands which were the envy of the audience. The success of her inven tion gave her spirits and assurance, and she played to admiration. The sequel will justify my first remark. She made a conquest on that night of one of her titled auditors, whom she afterward married. You will al low that Lady may afford to be tolerant of car penters." An eminent clergyman one evening became the sub ject of conversation, and a wonder was expressed that ! he had never married. "That wonder," said Miss P , "was once expressed to the reverend gentle man himself in my hearing, and he told a story in an swer which I will tell you and perhaps, slight as it may seem, it is the history of other hearts as"sensitive and delicate as his own. Soon after his ordination, he preached once every Sabbath, for a clergyman in i a small village not twenty miles from London. Among his auditors, from Sunday to Sunday, he observed a She is still what I should call a handsome woman, or, j young lady, who always occupied a certain seat, and if that be not allowed, she is the wreck of more than || whose close attention began insensibly to grow to him an object of thought and pleasure. She left the church as soon as service was over, and it so chanced that he went on for a year without knowing her name ; but his sermon was never written without many a | thought how she would approve it, nor preached with ] satisfaction unless he read approbation in her face. I Gradually he came to think of her at other times than I when writing sermons, and to wish to see her on other days than Sundays ; but the weeks slipped on, and though he fancied she grew paler and thinner, he never brought himself to the resolution either to ask her name or to seek to speak with her. By these silent steps, however, love had worked into his heart, and he had made up his mind to seek her acquaint ance and marry her, if possible, when one day he was sent for to minister at a funer.il. The face of the corpse was the same that had looked up to him Sun day after Sunday, till he had learned to make it a part of his religion and his life. He was unable to perform the service, and another clergyman present officiated ; and after she was buried, her father took him aside and begged his pardon for giving him pain but he could I not resist the impulse to tell him that his daughter a common allotment of beauty, and looks it. Her person is remarkably erect, her eyes and eyelids (in this latter resembling Scott) very heavily moulded, and her smile is beautiful. It strikes me that it always is so where it ever was. The smile seems to be the work of the soul. I have passed months under the same roof with Miss P 1 and nothing gave me more pleasure than to find the company in that hospitable house dwindled to a " fit audience though few," and gathered around the figure in deep mourning which occupied the warmest corner of the sofa. In any vein, and a-propos to the gravest and the gayest subject, her well-stored mind and memory flowed forth in the same rich cur rent of mingled story and reflection, and I never saw an impatient listener beside her. I recollect, one even ing a lady s sinking "Auld Robin Gray," and some one remarking (rather unsentimentaliy), at the close, " By-the-by, what is Lady (the authoress of the ballad) doing with so many carpenters. Berkeley square is quite deafened with their hammering !" "A-propos of carpenters and Lady ," said Miss P 1 " this same charming ballad-writer owes some thing to the craft. She was~better-born than provided jj had mentioned his name with her last breath, and he with the gifts of fortune, and in her younger days was || was afraid that a concealed affection for him had hur- 182 PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. ried her to the grave. Since that, said the clergyman ia question, my heart has been dead within me, and I look forward only. I shall speak to her in heaven." ****** London is wonderfully embellished within the last three years not so much by new buildings, public or private, but by the almost insane rivalry that exists among the tradesmen to outshow each other in the ex pensive magnificence of their shops. When I was in England before, there were two or three of these pal aces of columns and plate-glass a couple of shawl- shops, and a glass warehouse or two, but now the west end and the city have each their scores of estab lishments of which you would think the plate-glass alone would ruin anybody but Aladdin. After an ab sence of a month from town lately, I gave myself the always delightful treat of an after-dinner ramble among the illuminated palaces of Regent street and its neigh borhood, and to my surprise, found four new wonders of this description a shawl-house in the upper Re gent Circus, a silk-mercer s in Oxford street, a whip- maker s in Regent street, and a fancy stationer s in the Quadrant either of which establishments fifty years ago would have been the talk of all Europe. The first-mentioned warehouse lines one of the quarters of the Regent Circus, and turns the corner of Oxford street with what seems but one window a series of glass plates, only divided by brass rods, reaching from the ground to the roof window-panes twelve feet high, and four or five feet broad! The opportunity which this immense transparency of front gives for the dis play of goods is proportionately improved ; and in the mixture of colors and fabrics to attract attention there is evidently no small degree of art so harmonious are the colors and yet so gorgeous the show. I see that several more renovations are taking place in different parts of both " city" and "town;" and London prom ises, somewhere in the next decimals, to complete its emergence from the chrysalis with a glory to which eastern tales will be very gingerbread matters indeed. If I may judge by my own experience and by what I can see in the streets, all this night-splendor out of doors empties the play-houses for I would rather walk Regent street of an evening than see ninety-nine plays in a hundred ; and so think, apparently, multi tudes of people, who stroll up and down the clean and broad London sidewalks, gazing in at the gorgeous succession of shop-windows, and by the day-bright glare of the illumination exchanging nods and smiles the street, indeed, becoming gradually a fashionable evening promenade, as cheap as it is amusing and de lightful. There are large classes of society, who find the evenings long in their dingy and inconvenient homes, and who must go somewhere; and while the streets were dark, and poorly paved and lighted, the play-house was the only resort where they could be guile their cares with splendor and amusement, and in those days theatricals flourished, as in these days of improved thoroughfares and gay shops they evi dently languish. I will lend a hint to the next essay ist on the " Decline of the Drama." The increased attractiveness of London, from thus disclosing the secrets of its wondrous wealth, compen sates in a degree for what increases as rapidly on me the distastefulness of the country, from the forbid ding and repulsive exclusiveness of high garden-walls, impermeable shrubberies, and every sort of contrivance for confining the traveller to the road, and nothing but the road. What should we say in America to travel ling miles between two brick walls, with no prospect but the branches of overhanging trees from the invis ible park lands on either side, and the alley of cloudy sky overhead ? How tantalizing to pass daily by a noble estate with a fine specimen of architecture in its centre, and see no more of it than a rustic lodge and some miles of the tops of trees over a paling ! All this to me is oppressive I feel abridged of breathing- room and eyesight deprived of my liberty robbed of my horizon Much as I admire high preservation and cultivation, I would compromise for a " snake- fence" all over England. On a visit to a friend a week or two since in the neighborhood of London, I chanced, during a long walk, to get a glimpse over the wall of a nicely-grav elled and secluded path, which commanded what the proprietor s fence enviously shut from the road a noble view of London and the Thames. Accustomed to see people traversing my own lawn and fields in America without question, as suits their purpose, and tired of the bricks, hedges and placards of blacking and pills, I jumped the fence, and with feelings of great relief and expansion aired my eyes and my im agination in the beautiful grounds of my friend s op ulent neighbor. The Thames with its innumerable steamers, men-of-war, yachts, wherries, and ships a vein of commercial and maritime life lying between the soft green meadows of Kent and Essex formed a de licious picture of contrast and meaning beauty, which I gazed upon with great delight for some ten minutes. In about that time I was perceived by Mr. B s gardener, who, with a very pokerish-looking slick in his hand, came running toward me, evidently, by his pace, prepared for a vigorous pursuit of the audacious intruder. He came up to where I stood, quite out of breath, and demanded, with a tight grasp of his stick, what business I had there. I was not very well pre pared with an answer, and short of beating the man for his impudence (which in several ways might have been a losing job), I did not see my way very clearly out of Mr. B s grounds. My first intention, to call on the proprietor and apologise for my intrusion while I complained of the man s insolence, was defeat ed by the information, evidently correct, that Mr. B was not resident at the place, and so I was walk ed out of the lodge-gate with a vagabond s warning never to let him "catch me there again !" So much for my liberal translation of a park-fence! This spirit of exclusion makes itself even more dis agreeably felt where a gentleman s paling chances to include any natural curiosity. One of the wildest, as well as most exquisitely beautiful spots on earth, is the Dargle, in the county Wicklow, in Ireland. It is interesting, besides, as belonging to the estate of the orator and patriot Grattan. To get to it, we were let through a gate by an old man, who received a douceur ; we crossed a newly-reaped field, and came to another gate; another person opened this, and we paid another shilling. We walked on toward the glen, and in the middle of the path, without any ob ject apparently but the toll, there was another locked gate, and another porter to pay ; and when we made our exit from the opposite extremity of the grounds, after seeing the Dargle, there was a fourth gate and a fourth porter. The first field and fee belonged, if I remember rightly, to a Captain Somebody, but the other three gates belong to the present Mr. Grattan, who is very welcome to my three shillings, either as a tribute to his father s memory, or to the beauty of Tinnehinch and the Dargle. But on whichever ground he pockets it, the mode of assessment is, to say the least, ungracious. Without subjecting myself to the charge of a mercenary feeling, I think I may say that the enthusiasm for natural scenery is very much clipped and belittled by seeing it at a shilling the perch paying the money and taking the look. I should think no sum lost which was expended in bringing me to so romantic a glen as the Dargle; but it should be levied somewhere else than within sound of its wild waterfall somewhere else than midway between the waterfall and the fine mansion of Tin nehinch. PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 183 The fish most "out of water" in the world is cer tainly a Frenchman in England without acquaint ances. The illness of a friend has lately occasioned me one or two hasty visits to Brighton; and being abandoned on the first evening to the solitary mercies of the coffee-room of the hotel, I amused myself not I a little with watching the ennui of one of these unfor tunate foreigners, who was evidently there simply to qualify himself to say that he had been at Brighton j in the season. I arrived late, and was dining by my- | self at one of the small tables, when, without looking ; up, I became aware that some one at the other end of the room was watching me very steadily. The place i was as silent as coffee-rooms usually are after the dinner-hour, the rustling of newspapers the only sound that disturbed the digestion of the eight or ten per- | sons present, when the unmistakeable call of" Vaitare !" j informed me that if I looked up I should encounter ; the eyes of a Frenchman. The waiter entered at the ! call, and after a considerable parley with my opposite neighbor, came over to me and said in rather an apologetic tone, " Beg pardon, sir, but the shevaleer ; wishes to know if your name is Coopair." Not very much inclined, fatigued as I was, for a conversation in French, which I saw would be the result of a polite answer to his question, I merely shook my head, and took up the newspaper. The Frenchman drew a long j sigh, poured out his last glass of claret, and crossing his thumbs on the edge of the table, fell into a pro- I found study of the grain of the mahogany. What with dawdling over coffee and tea and reading half-a-dozen newspapers, I whiled away the time till ten o clock, pitying occasionally the unhappy chevalier, who exhibited every symptom of a person bored to the last extremity. One person after another called for a bed-room candle, and exit finally the French- j man himself, making me, however, a most courteous bow as he passed out. There were two gentlemen ; left in the room, one a tall and thin old man of seventy, ! the other a short portly gentleman of fifty or there abouts, both quite bald. They rose together and came to the fire near which I was sitting. "That last man who went out calls himself a cheva lier," said the thin gentleman. "Yes," said his stout friend "he took me for a Mr. Cooper he had travelled with." " The deuce he did," said the other " why he took me for a Mr. Cooper, too, and we are not very much alike." " I beg pardon, gentlemen," said I "he took me j for this Mr. Cooper too." The Frenchman s ruse was discovered. It was in stead of a snuff-box a way he hnd of making ac quaintance. We had a good laugh at our triple re semblance (three men more unlike it would be diffi cult to find), and bidding the two Messrs. Cooper good night, I followed the ingenious chevalier up stairs. The next morning I came down rather late to break fast, and found my friend chipping his egg-shells to pieces at the table next to the one I had occupied the night before. He rose immediately with a look of j radiant relief in his countenance, made a most elabo- ! rate apology for having taken me for Mr. Cooper | (whom I was so like, cependant, that we should be mistaken for each other by our nearest friends), and in a few minutes, Mr. Cooper himself, if he had en tered by chance, would have returned the compliment, and taken me for the chevalier s most intimate friend and fellow-traveller. 1 remained three or four days at Brighton, and never discovered in that time that the chevalier s ruse succeeded with any other person. I was his only successful resemblance to " Monsieur Coopair." He always waited breakfast for me in the coffee-room, and when I called for my bill on the last morning, he 1 dropped his knife and asked if I was going to London and at what hour and if I would be so obliging as to take a place for him in the same coach. It was a remarkably fine day ; and with my friend by my side outside of " the Age," we sped on toward ! London, the sun getting dimmer and dimmer, and the j fog thicker and more chilly at every mile farther from ! the sea. It was a trying atmosphere for the best of spirits let alone the ever-depressed bosom of a stran- i ger in England. The coach stopped at the Elephant j and Castle, and I ordered down my baggage, and in- 1 formed my friend, for the first time, that I was bound j to a country-house six miles from town. I scarce know how I had escaped telling him of it before, but | his " impossible mon ami. . " was said in a tone and ! accompanied with a look of the most complete sur- ! prise and despair. I was evidently his only hope in London. I went up to town a day or two after ; and in ma king my way to Paternoster Row, I saw my friend on the opposite side of the strand, with his hands thrust up to the wrists in the pockets of his "Taglioni," and his hat jammed down over his eyes, looking into the shop windows without much distinction between the trunkmaker s and the printsellers evidently miser able beyond being amused at anything. I was too much in a hurry to cross over and resume my office of escape-valve to his ennui, and I soon outwalked his slow pace, and lost sight of him. Whatever title he j had to the " chevalier" (and he was decidedly too j deficient in address to belong to the order "c/ in- i dustrie"), he had no letter of recommendation in his | personal appearance, and as little the air of even a Frenchman of " quality" as any man I ever saw in the station of a gentleman. He is, in short, the per son who would first occur to me if I were to see a paragraph in the Jim es headed "suicide by a for eigner." Revenons un pen. Brighton at this season (Novem- j ber) enjoys a climate, which, as a change from the heavy air in the neighborhood of London, is extremely exhilarating and agreeable. Though the first day of my arrival was rainy, a walk up the west cliff gave me a feeling of elasticity and lightness of spirits, of which I ; was beginning to forget the very existence, in the ! eternal fogs of the six months I had passed inland. : I do not wonder at the passion of the English for Brighton. It is, in addition to the excellence of the air, both a magnificent city aud the most advantageous ground for the discomfiture of the common enemy, " winter and rough weather." The miles of broad i gravel-walk just out of reach of the surf of the sea, so hard and so smoothly rolled that they are dry in five minutes after the rain has ceased to fall, are alone no small item in the comfort of a town of professed idlers and invalids. 1 was never tired of sauntering along i this smooth promenade so close to the sea. The beautiful children, who throng the walks in almost all weathers (and what children on earth are half as beautiful as English children?) were to me a constant 1 source of pleasure and amusement. Tire of this, and . by crossing the street you meet a transfer of the gay throngs of Regent street and Hyde Park, with splen did shops and all the features of a metropolis, while midway between the sea aud this crowded sidewalk pours a tide of handsome equipages, parties on horse- i back, and vehicles of every description, all subservient j to exercise and pleasure. My first visit to Brighton was made in a very cold day in summer, aud I saw it through most unfavorable spectacles. But 1 should think that along the cliffs, ! where there are no trees or vendure to be seen, there i is very little apparent difference between summer and i winter ; and coming here with the additional clothing \ of a severer season, the temperature of the elastic and i saline air is not even chilly. The most delicate chil- 184 PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. dren play upon the beach in days when there is no sunshine; and invalids, wheeled out in these conve nient bath chairs, sit for hours by the seaside, watch ing the coming and retreating of the waves, apparently without any sensation of cold and this in December. In America (in the same latitudes with Leghorn and Venice), an invalid sitting out of doors at this season would freeze to death in half an hour. Yet it was as cold in August, in England, as it has been in Novem ber, and it is this temperate evenness of the weather throughout (he year which makes English climate, on the whole, perhaps the healthiest in the world. In the few days I was at Brighton, I became very fond of the perpetual ioud beat of the sea upon the shore. Whether, like the " music of the spheres," it becomes at last " too constant to be heard," I did not ask but I never lost the consciousness of it ex cept when engaged in conversation, and 1 found it company to my thoughts when I dined or walked alone, and a most agreeable lullaby at night. This majestic monotone is audible all over Brighton, in doors and out, and nothing overpowers it but the wind in a storm ; it is even then only by fits, and the alternation of the hissing and moaning of the blast with the broken and heavy plash of the waters, is so like the sound of a tempest at sea (the whistling in the rigging, and the burst of the waves), that those who have been at Brighton in rough weather have realized all of a storm at sea but the motion and the sea-sick ness rather a large but not an undesirable diminution of experience. Calling on a friend at Brighton, I was introduced casually to a Mr. Smith. The name, of course, did not awaken any immediate curiosity, but a second look at the gentleman did for I thought 1 had never seen a more intellectual or finer head. A fifteen minutes conversation, which touched upon nothing that could give me a clue to his profession, still satis fied me that so distinguished an address, and so keen an eye, could belong to no nameless person, and I was scarcely surprised when I read upon his card at part ing HORACE SMITH. I need not say it was a very i great pleasure to meet him. I was delighted, too, j that the author of books we love as much as " Zillah," i and " Brambletye-House," looks unlike other men. It gratifies somehow a personal feeling as if those who had won so much admiration from us should, for our pride s sake, wear the undeniable stamp of supe riority as if we had acquired a property in him by loving him. How natural it is, when we have talked and thought a great deal about an author, to call him "ours." "What Smith? Why our Smith Horace Smith" is as common a dialogue between persons who never saw him as it is among his personal friends. These two remarkable brothers, James and Horace Smith, are both gifted with exteriors such as are not I often possessed with genius yet only James is so fortunate as to have stumbled upon a good painter. Lonsdale s portrait of James Smith, engraved by Cousens, is both the author and the man as fine a I picture of him, with his mind seen through his features, j as was ever done. But there is an engraved picture ] extant of the author of Zillah, that, though it is no likeness of the author, is a detestable caricature of the man. Really this is a point about which distinguish ed men, in justice to themselves, should take some little care. Sir Thomas Lawrence s portraits, and Sir Joshua Reynolds s, are a sort of biography of the eminent men they painted. The most enduring history, it has been said, is written in coins. Certain ly the most effective biography is expressed in por traits. Long after the book and your impressions of the character of which it treats have become dim in j your memory your impression of the features and mien of a hero or a poet, as received from a picture, remains indelible. How often does the face belie the biography making us think better or worse of the man, after forming an opinion from a portrait in words, that was either partial or malicious ! I am persuaded the world would think better of Shelley, if there were a correct and adequate portrait of his face, as it has been described to me by one or two who knew him. How much of the Byronic idolatry is born and fed from the idealized pictures of him treasured in every portfolio ! Sir Thomas Lawrence, Chalon, and Par- ris, have composed between them a biography of Lady Blessington, that have made her quite independent of the " memoirs" of the next century. And who, I may safely ask, even in America, has seen the nice, cheerful, sensible, and motherly face which prefaces the new edition of " The Manners of the American Domestics" (I beg pardon for giving the title from my Kentucky copy), without liking Mrs. Trollope a great deal better, and at once dismissing all idea of " the bazar" as a libel on that most lady-like countenance ? * * * * * * # I think Lady S had more talent and distinction crowded into her pretty rooms, last night, than I ever before saw in such small compass. It is a bijou of a house, full of gems of statuary and painting, but all its capacity for company lies in a small drawing-room, a smaller reception-room, and a very small, but very exquisite boudoir yet to tell you who were there would read like Colburn s list of authors, added to a paragraph of noble diners-out from the Morning Post. The largest lion of the evening certainly was the new Persian ambassador, a man six feet in his slippers ; a height which, with his peaked calpack, of a foot and a half, superadded, keeps him very much among the chandeliers. The principal article of his dress does not diminish the effect of his eminence a long white shawl worn like a cloak, and completely enveloping him from beard to toe. From the twisted shawl around his waist glitters a dagger s hilt, lumped with diamonds and diamonds, in most dazzling profu sion, almost cover his breast. 1 never saw so many together except in a cabinet of regalia. Close behind this steeple of shawl and gem, keeps, like a short shadow when the sun is high, his excellency s secre tary, a dwarfishly small man, dressed also in cashmere nd calpack, and of a most ill-favored and bow-stringish countenance and mien. The master and man seem chosen for contrast, the countenance of the ambassa dor expressing nothing but serene good nature. The ambassador talks, too, and the secretary is dumb. T H stood bolt upright against a mirror- door, looking like two T H s trying to see hich was taller. The one with his face to me looked like the incarnation of the John Bull newspaper, for which expression he was indebted to a very hearty face, and a very round subject for a buttoned-up coat; while the H with his back to me looked like an author, for which he was indebted to an exclusive view of his cranium. I dare say Mr. H would agree with me that he was seen, on the whole, at a most en viable advantage. It is so seldom we look, beyond the man, at the author. I have rarely seen a greater contrast in person and expression than between H ;md B , who stood near him. Both were talking to ladies one bald, burly, upright, and with a face of immovable gravity, the other slight, with a profusion of curling hair, rest less in his movements, and of a countenance which lights up with a sudden inward illumination. H s partner in the conversation looked into his face with a ready-prepared smile for what he was going to say, B s listened with an interest complete, but without effort. H was suffering from what I think is the common curse of a reputation for wit the expectation of the listener had outrun the performance. H B , whose diplomatic promotion goes on much faster than can be pleasing to "Lady Cheveley," PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 185 has just received his appointment to Paris the object of his first wishes. He stood near his brother, talking to a very beautiful and celebrated woman, and I thought, spite of her ladyship s unflattering descrip tion, I had seldom seen a more intellectual face, or a more gentlemanly and elegant exterior. Late in the evening came in his royal highness the duke of C -, and I wondered, as I had done many times before, when in company with one of these royal brothers, at the uncomfortable etiquette so laboriously observed toward them. Wherever he moved in the crowded rooms, everybody rose and stood silent, and by giving way much more than for any one else, left a perpetual circular space around him, in which, of course, his conversation had the effect of a lecture to a listening audience. A more embarrassed manner and a more hesitating mode of speech than the duke s, I can not conceive. He is evidently gene, to the last degree with this burdensome deference; and one would think that in the society of highly-cultivated and aristocratic persons, such as were present, he would be delighted to put his highness into his pocket when the footman leaves him at the door, and hear no more of it till he goes again to his carriage. There was great curiosity to know whether the duke would think it etiquetical to speak to the Persian, as in con sequence of the difference between the shah and the British envoy the tall minister is not received at the court of St. James. Lady S introduced them, however, and then the duke again must have felt his rank nothing less than a nuisance. It is awkward enough, at any time, to converse with a foreigner who has not forty English words in his vocabulary, but what with the duke s hesitating and difficult utterance, the silence and attention of the listening guests, and the Persian s deference and complete inability to com prehend a syllable, the scene was quite painful. There was some of the most exquisite amateur sing ing I ever heard after the company thinned off a little, and the fashionable song of the day was sung by a most beautiful woman in a way to move half the com pany to tears. It is called "Ruth," and is a kind of recitative of the passage in Scripture, " Wliere thou goest I will go," &c. ****** I have driven in the park several days, admiring the queen on horseback, and observing the changes in the fashions of driving, equipages, &c., &c. Her majesty seems to me to ride very securely and fearlessly, though it is no wonder that in a country where every body rides, there should be bolder and better horse women. Miss Quentin, one of the maids of honor, said to be the best female equestrian in England, "takes the courage out" of the queen s horse every morning before the ride so she is secured against one class of accidents. 1 met the royal party yesterday in full gallop near the centre of Rotten Row, and fhe two grooms who ride ahead had brief time to do their work of making the crowd of carriages give way. On came the queen upon a dun-colored, highly-groomed horse, with her prime minister on one side of her and Lord Byron upon the other, her cortege of maids of honor and ladies and lords in waiting checking their more spirited horses, and preserving always a slight distance between themselves and her majesty. Victoria s round and plump figure looks extremely well in her dark- green riding-dress, but I thought the man s hat un becoming. Her profile is not sufficiently good for that trying style, and the cloth riding-cap is so much prettier, that I wonder she does not remember that " nice customs courtesy to great queens," and wear what suits her. She rode with her mouth open, and looked exhilarated with the exercise. Lord Melbourne, it struck me, was the only person in her party whose face had not the constrained look of consciousness of observation. 1 1 I observe that the "crack men" ride without mar- ji tingals, and that the best turnouts are driven without | a check-rein. The outstretched neck which is the consequence, has a sort of Arab or blood look, proba bly the object of the change; but the drooping head when the horse is walking or standing seems to me ugly and out of taste. All the new carriages are built near the ground. The low park-phaeton, light, as a child s plaything, and drawn by a pair of ponies, is the fashionable equipage. I saw the prettiest thing con- j ceivable of this kind yesterday in the park a lady I driving a pair of small cream-colored horses of great 1 beauty, with her two children in the phceton, and two grooms behind mounted on cream-colored saddle- j horses, all four of the animals of the finest shape and action. The new street cabs (precisely the old-fash ioned sedan-chair suspended between four wheels, a foot from the ground) are imitated by private carriages, and driven with two horses ugly enough. The cab- phaeton, is in great fashion, with either one or two horses. The race of ponies is greatly improved since I was in England. They are as well-shaped as the large horse, with very fine coats and great spirit. The children of the nobility go scampering through the j park upon them, looking like horsemen and horse- | women seen through a reversed opera-glass. They j are scarce larger than a Newfoundland dog, but they i patter along with great speed. There is one fine lad ! of about eight years, whose parents seem to have very I little care for his neck, and who, upon a fleet, milk- i white, long-tailed pony, is seen daily riding at a rate I of twelve miles an hour through the most crowded I streets, with a servant on a tall horse plying whip and I spur to keep up with him. The whole system has the droll effect of a mixture of Lilliput and Brobdignag. * * * * * * We met the king of Oude a few deys since at a party, and were honored by an invitation to dine with his majesty at his house in the Regent s park. Yester day was the appointed day ; and with the pleasant an ticipation of an oriental feast, we drove up at seven, and were received by his turbaned ayahs, who took shawl and hat with a reverential salaam, and introduced us to the large drawing-room overlooking the park. j The king was not yet down; but in the corner sat I three parsees or fire-worshippers, guests like ourselves, who in their long white linen robes, bronze faces, and ! high caps, looked like anything but " diners-out" in j London. To our surprise they addressed us in ex- I cellent English, and we were told afterward that they ; were all learned men facts not put down to the credit of the Ghebirs in Lalla Rookh. We were called out upon the balcony to look at a i balloon that was hovering over the park, and on step- I ping back into the drawing-room, we found the com pany all assembled, and our royal host alo/ie wanting. There were sixteen English ladies present, and five i white gentlemen beside myself. The Orient, how- ever, was well represented. In a corner, leaning si- I lently against a table, stood Prince Hussein Mirza, the ! king s cousin, and a more romantic and captivating specimen of Hindoo beauty could scarcely be im- j agined. He was slender, tall, and of the clearest olive complexion, his night-black hair falling over his i shoulders in profusion, and his large antelope eyes | fixed with calm and lustrous suiprise upon the half- | denuded forms sitting in a circle before him. We j heard afterward that he has conceived a most uncon trollable and unhappy passion for a high-born and | beautiful P^nglish girl whom he met in society, and i that it is with difficulty he is persuaded to come out j of his room. His dress was of shawls most gracefully j draped about him, and a cap of gold cloth was thrown I carelessly on the side of his head. Altogether he was i like a picture of the imagination. A middle-aged stout man, ashy black, with Grecian 186 PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. features, and a most determined and dignified expres- i sion of mouth, sat between Lady and Miss Por- j ter, and this was the waked or ambassador of the j prince of Sutara, by name Afzul AH. He is in Eng- I land on business for his master, and if he does not sue- i ceed it will be no fault of his under lip. His secretary, ; Keeram Ali, stood behind him the wakeel dressed in [ shawls of bright scarlet, with a white cashmere turban, j and the scribe in darker stuffs of the same fashion. \ Then there was the king s physician, a short, wiry, ! merry-looking, quick-eyed Hindoo, with a sort of quiz- j zical angle in the pose of his turban : the high-priest, also a most merry-looking Oriental, and Ali Acbar, a Persian attache. I think these were all the Asiatics. The king entered in a few minutes, and made the circuit of the room, shaking hands most cordially with : all his guests. He is a very royal-looking person in- j deed. Perhaps you might call him too corpulent, if his fine height (a little over six feet), and very fine j proportions, did not give his large size a character of j majesty. His chest is full and round, and his walk ) erect and full of dignity. He has the Italian olive I complexion, with straight hair, and my own remark at ! first seeing him was that of many others, "How like | a bronze cast of Napoleon !" The subsequent study of his features remove this impression, however, for j he is a most " merry monarch," and is seldom seen j without a smile. His dress was a mixture of oriental and English fashions a pair of baggy blue pantaloons, bound around the waist with a rich shawl, a splendid i scarlet waistcoat buttoned close over his spacious j chest, and a robe of very fine snuff-colored cloth some- ! thing like a loose dressing-gown without a collar. A I cap of silver cloth, and a brilliant blue satin cravat [ completed his costume, unless in his covering should be reckoned an enormous turquoise ring, which al most entirely concealed one of his fingers. Ekbal-ood-Dowlah, Nawnub of Oude (his name and ! title), is at present appealing to the English against ; his uncle, who usurps his throne by the aid and counte- j nance of the East India company. The Mohamme- j dan law, as I understand, empowers a king to choose his successor from his children without reference to primogeniture, and the usurper, though an elder | brother, having been imbecile from his youth, Ekbal s \ father was selected by the then king of Oude to sue- j ceed him. The question having been referred to Lord Wellesley, however, then governor of India, he decided that the English law of primogeniture should prevail, or in other words (as the king s friends say) preferred to have for the king of a subject province an imbecile who would give him no trouble. So slipped from the Nawaub s hands a pretty kingdom of six millions of faithful Mohammedans ! I believe this is the "short" of the story. I wonder (we are reproach ed so very .often by the English for our treatment of the Indians) whether a counter-chapter of " expedient wrong" might not be made out from the history of the Indians under British government in the east ? Dinner was announced with a Hindostanee salaam, and the king gave his arm to Lady . The rest of us "stood not upon the order of our going," and .1 I found myself seated at table between my wife and a I Polish countess, some half dozen removes from the Nawaub s right hand. His highness commenced help- I ing those about him most plentifully from a large pillau, talking all the while most merrily in broken English, or resorting to Hindostanee and his inter preter whenever his tongue got into trouble. With the exception of one or two English joints, all the dishes were prepared with rice or saffron, and (wine being forbidden by the Mahommedan law) iced water was served round from Indian coolers freely. For I one, I would have compounded for a bottle of wine by taking the sin of the entire party on my soul, for, what with the exhaustion of a long London day, and the cloying quality of the Nawaub s rich dishes, I began to be sorry I had not brought a flask in my pocket. His majesty s spirits seemed to require no aid from wine^ He talked constantly, and shrewdly, and well. He impresses every one with a high estimate of his talents, though a more complete and undisguised child of nature I never saw. Good sense, with good humor, frankness, and simplicity, seem to be his leading qualities. We were obliged to take our leave early after din ner, having other engagements for the evening, but while coffee was serving, the Hindostanee cook, a funny little old man, came in to receive the compli ments of the company upon his dinner, and to play and dance for his majesty s amusement. He had at his back a long Indian drum, which he called his "turn turn," and playing himself an accompaniment upon this, he sang two or three comic songs in his own language to a sort of wild yet merry air, very much to the delight of all the orientals. Singer, dancer, musician, and cook, the king certainly has a jewel of a servant in him. One moment bowing ourselves out from the pres ence of a Hindoo king, and the next beset by an Irish man with " Heaven bless your honor for the sixpence you mean to give me !" what contrasts strike the travel ler in this great heart of the world ! Paddy lighted us to our carriage with his lantern, implored the coach man to " dhrive carefully," and then stood with his head bent to catch the sound upon the pavement of another sixpence for his tenderness. Wherever there is a party in the fashionable quarters of London, these Tantaluses flit about with their lanterns for ever at the door of pleasure, yet shivering and starving for ever in their rags. What a life ! *#*#** One of the most rational and agreeable of the fashion able resorts in London is Kensington Gardens, on the days when the royal band plays from five to seven near the bridge of the Serpentine. Some twenty of the best instrumental musicians of London station themselves under the trees in this superb park (for though called " gardens," it is but a park with old trees and greensward), and up and down the fine silky carpet stroll hundreds of the fashionables of " May fair and Belgrave square," listening a little perhaps, and chattering a great deal certainly. It is a good opportunity to see what celebrated beauties look like by daylight; and, truth to say, one comes to the con clusion there, that candle-light is your true kalydor. It is very ingeniously contrived by the grand chamber lain that this public music should be played in a far away corner of the park, inaccessible except by those who have carriages. The plebeians, for whose use and pleasure it seems at first sight graciously con trived, are pretty well sifted by the two miles walk, and a very aristocratic and well-dressed assembly in deed is that of Kensington gardens. Near the usual stand of the musicians runs a bridle path for horsemen, separated from the greensward by a sunk fence, and as I was standing by the edge of the ditch yesterday, the queen rode by, pulling up to listen to the music, and smile right and left to the crowd of cavaliers drawn up in the road. I pulled off my hat and stood uncovered instinctively, but looking around to see how the promenaders received her, I found to my surprise that with the exception of a bald-headed nobleman whem I chanced to know, the Yankee stood alone in his homage to her. I thought before I left America that I should find the stamp of the new reign on manners, usages, con versation, and all the outer form and pressure of socie ty. One can not fancy England under Elizabeth to have struck a stranger as did England under James. We think of Shakspere, Leicester, and Raleigh, and conclude that under a female sovereign chivalry at MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT. 187 least shines brighter, and poetry should. A good deal to my disappointment, I have looked in vain for even a symptom of the queen s influence on anything. She is as completely isolated in England, as entirely above and out of the reach of the sympathies and common thoughts of society, as the gilt grasshopper on the steeple. At the opera and play, half the audience do not even know she is there ; in the park, she rides among the throng with scarcely a head turned to look after her; she is unthought of, and almost unmentioned at balls, routes, and soirees ; in short, the throne seems to stand on glass with no one conductor to connect it with the electric chain of hu man hearts and sympathies. MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT, THAT Irish Channel has, as the English sny, ;i | nasty way with it." I embarked at noon on the 26th, j in a magnificent steamer, the Royal Sovereign, which j had been engaged by Lord Eglinton (as per advertise- ment) to set down at Ardrossan all passengers bound to the tournament. This was a seventeen hours job, including a very cold, blowy, and rough night ; and of the two hundred passengers on board, one half were so blest as to have berths or settees the others were unblest, indeed. I found on board several Americans ; and by the time I had looked at the shape of the Liverpool har bor, and seen one or two vessels run in before a slap ping breeze, the premonitory symptom (which had already sent many to their berths) sent me to mine. The boat was pitching backward and forward with a sort of handsaw action that was not endurable. By foregoing my dinner and preserving a horizontal posi tion, I escaped all sickness, and landed at Ardrossan I at six the next morning, with a thirty-six hours fast \ upon me, which I trusted my incipient gout would re member as a per contra to the feast in the promised " banquet." Ardrossan, built chiefly, I believe, by Lord Eglin- ton s family, and about eight miles from the castle, is a small but very clean and thrifty-looking hamlet on that part of the western coast of Scotland which lies opposite the Isle of Arran. Ailsa Rock, famous in song, slumbers like a cloud in the southwestern hori zon. The long breakers of the channel lay their lines of foam almost upon the street, and the harbor is formed by a pier jutting out from a little promontory on the northern extremity of the town. The one thoroughfare of Ardrossan is kept clean by the Broom of every wind that sweeps the Irish sea. A cleaner or bleaker spot I never saw. A Gael, who did not comprehend a syllable of such English as a Yankee delivers, shouldered my port manteau without direction or request, and travelled away to the inn, where he deposited it and held out his hand in silence. There was certainly quite enough said between us ; and remembering the boisterous ac companiment with which the claims of porters are usually pushed upon one s notice, I could well wish that Gaelic tide-waiters were more common. " Any room, landlord ?" was the first question " Not a clipboard, sir," was the answer. u Can you give me some breakfast ?" asked fifty others in a breath. " Breakfast will be put upon all the tables presently, gentlemen," said the dismayed Boniface, glancing at the crowds who were pouring in, and, Scotchmanlike, making no promises to individuals. " Landlord !" vociferated a gentleman from the other side of the hall "what the devil does this mean? Here s the room I engaged a fortnight ago occupied by a dozen people shaving and dressing !" " I canna help it, sir ! Ye re welcome to turn em a out if ye can . " said j the poor man, lifting up his hands in despair, and re treating to the kitchen. The hint was a good one, I and taking up my own portmanteau, I opened a door | in one of the passages. It led into a small apartment, i which in more roomy times might have been a pantry, but was now occupied by three beds and a great varie- | ty of baggage. There was a twopenny glass on the mantel-piece, and a drop or two of water in a pitcher, and where there were sheets I could make shift for a towel. I found presently, by the way, that I had had a narrow escape of surprising some one in bed, for the sheet which did duty as a napkin was still warm with the pressure of the newly-fled occupant. Three or four smart-looking damsels in caps looked in while I was engaged in my toilet, and this, with one or two slight observations made in the apartment, con vinced me that I had intruded on the dormitory of the ladies maids belonging to the various parties in the house. A hurried "God bless us!" as they retreated, however, was all either of reproach or remonstrance that I was troubled with; and I emerged with a | smooth chin in time for breakfast, very much to the ] envy and surprise of my less-enterprising compan ions. There was a great scramble for the tea and toast; but, uniting forces with a distinguished literary man whose acquaintance I had been fortunate enough to make on board the steamer, we managed to get places at one of the tables, and achieved our breakfasts in tolerable comfort. We were still eight miles from Eglinton, however, and a lodging was the next matter of moment. My friend thought he was provided for nearer the castle, and I went into the street, which I found crowded with distressed-looking people, flying from door to door, with ladies on their arms and wheel barrows of baggage at their heels, the townspeople standing at the doors and corners staring at the novel spectacle in open-mouthed wonder. Quite in a di lemma whether or not to go on to Irvine (which, being within two miles of the castle, was probably much more over-run than Ardrossan), I was standing at the corner of the street, when a Liverpool gentleman, whose kindness I must record as well as my pleasure in his society for the two or three days we were to gether, came up and offered me a part of a lodging he had that moment taken. The bed was what we call in America a bunk, or a kind of berth sunk into the wall, and there were two in the same garret, but the sheets were clean ; and there was a large bible on the table the latter a warrant for civility, neatness, and honesty, which, after many years of travel, I have never found deceptive. I closed immediately with my friend ; and whether it was from a smack of au thorship or no, I must say I took to my garret very kindly- It "was but nine o clock, and the day was on my hands. Just beneath the window ran a railroad, built to bring coal to the seaside, and extending to within a mite of the castle; and with some thirty or forty others, I embarked in a horse-car for Eglinton to see the preparations for the following day s tournament. We were landed near the park gate, after an hour s drive through a flat country blackened with coal-pits; and it was with no little relief to the eye that I en tered upon a smooth and gravelled avenue, leading by a mile of shaded windings to the castle. The day was heavenly; the sun-flecks lay bright as "patines of gold" on the close-shaven grass beneath the trees ; and I thought that nature had consented for once to remove her eternal mist-veil from Scotland, and let pleasure and sunshine have a holyday together. The sky looked hard and deep; and I had no more appre- 188 MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT. hension of rain for the morrow than I should have had under a July sun in Asia. Crossing a bright little river (the Lugton, I think it is called), whose sloping banks, as far as I could see up and down, were shaven to the rich smoothness of " velvet of three-pile," I came in sight of the castle towers. Another bridge over a winding of the same river lay to the left, a Gothic structure of the most rich and airy mould, and from either end of this ex tended the enclosed passage for the procession to the lists. The castle stood high upon a mound beyond. Its round towers were half concealed by some of the finest trees I ever saw ; and though less antique and of a less rowning and rude aspect than I had expected, it was a very perfect specimen of modern castellated archi tecture. On ascending to the lawn in front of the castle. I found that it was built less upon a mound than upon the brow of a broad plateau of table-land, turned sharply by the Lugton, close under the castle walls a natural sight of singular beauty. Two Sara cenic-looking tents of the gayest colors were pitched upon the bright-green lawn at a short distance, and off to the left, by several glimpses through the trees, I traced along the banks of the river the winding en closures for the procession. The large hall was crowded with servants ; but pre- Buming that a knight who was to do his devoir so con spicuously ou the morrow would not be stirring at so early an hour, 1 took merely a glance of the armor upon the walls in passing, and deferring the honor of paying my respects, crossed the lawn and passed over I blue sky of the size of my garret skylight, and a daz- j zling sunshine on the floor. " Skirling" above all the other instruments of the band, the Highland bagpipe made the air reel with "A the blue bonnets are over the border," and, hoisting the window above my head, I strained over the house-leads to get a look at the performer. A band of a dozen men in kilt and bonnet were marching up and down, led by a piper, something in the face like the heathen representations of Boreas; and on a long line of roughly-constructed rail-cars were piled, two or three deep, a crowd resembling, at first sight, a crushed bed of tulips. Bonnets of every cut and color, from the courtier s green velvet to the shepherd s homely gray, struggled at the top ; and over the sides hung red legs and yellow legs, cross- barred stockings and buff boots, bare feet and pilgrim s sandals. The masqueraders scolded and laughed, the boys halloed, the quiet people of Ardrossan stared in grave astonishment, and, with the assistance of some brawny shoulders, applied to the sides of the over laden vehicles, the one unhappy horse got his whim sical load under way for the tournament. Train followed train, packed with the same motley array ; and at ten o clock, after a clean and comforta ble Scotch breakfast in our host s little parlor, we sal lied forth to try our luck in the scramble for places. j After a considerable fight we were seated, each with a j man in his lap, when we were ordered down by the , conductor, who informed us that the chief of the Campbells had taken the car for his party, and that, with his band in the succeeding one, he was to go in the Lugton by a rustic foot-bridge in search of the state (upon a railroad!) to Eglinton. Up swore half- lists. A cross-path (leading by a small temple en closed with wire netting, once an aviary, perhaps, but now hung around in glorious profusion with game, venison, a boar s head, and other comestibles), brought me in two or three minutes to a hill-side overlooking the chivalric arena. It was a beautiful sight of itself without plume or armor. In the centre of a verdant plain, shut in by hills of an easy slope, wooded richly, appeared an oblong enclosure glittering at either end with a cluster of tents, striped with the gayest colors of the rainbow. Between them, on the farther side, stood three galleries, of which the centre was covered with a Gothic roof highly ornamented, the four front pillars draped with blue damask, and supporting a can opy over the throne intended for the queen of beauty. A strongly-built barrier extended through the lists; and heaps of lances, gay flags, and the heraldic orna ments, still to be added to the tents, lay around on the bright grass in a picture of no little richness. I was glad afterward that I had seen thus much with the advantage of an unclouded sun. In reluming, I passed in the rear of the castle, and looked into the temporary pavilions erected for the banquet and ball. They were covered exteriorly with rough board and sails, and communicated by an en closed gallery with one of the larger apartments of the castle. The workmen were still nailing up the drapery, and arranging lamps and flowers; but with all this dis advantage, the effect of the two immense halls, lined as they were with crimson and white in broad alternate stripes, resembling in shape and fashion two gigantic tents, was exceedingly imposing. Had the magnificent design of Lord Eglinton been successfully carried out, it would have been a scene, with the splendor of the costumes, the lights, music, and revelry, unsurpassed, probably, by anything short of enchantment. PRINCIPAL DAY. I WAS awakened at an early hour the morning after my arrival at Ardrossan by a band of music in the street. My first feeling was delight at seeing a bit of i a-dozen Glasgow people, usurpers like ourselves, that they would give way for no Campbell in the world ; and finding a stout hand laid on my leg to prevent my yielding to the order to quit, 1 gave in to what might j be called as pretty a bit of rebellious republicanism as I you would find on the Mississippi. The conductor stormed, but the Scotch bodies sat firm ; and as Scot met Scot in the fight, I was content to sit in silence and take advantage of the victory. I learned after ward that the Campbell chieftain was a Glasgow man ufacturer; and though he undoubtedly had a right to gather his clan, and take piper and eagle s plume, there might, possibly, be some jealous disapprobation at the bottom of his townsmen s rudeness. Campbell and his party presently appeared, and a dozen or twenty very fine looking men they were. One of the ladies, as well as I could see through the black lace veil thrown over her cap and plumes, was a re markably handsome woman ; and I was very glad when the matter was compromised, and the Campbells were distributed among our company. We jogged on at a slow pace toward the tournament, passing thousands of pedestrians, the men all shod, and the women all barefoot, with their shoes in their hands, and nearly every one, in accordance with Lord Eglinton s printed request, showing some touch of fancy in his dress. A plaid over the shoulder, or a Glengary bonnet, or, per haps, a goose-feather stuck jauntily in the cap, was enough to show the feeling of the wearer, and quite enough to give the crowd, all in all, a most festal and joyous aspect. The secluded bit ol road between the rail-track and the castle lodge, probably never before disturbed by more than two vehicles at a time, was thronged with a press of wheels, as closely jammed as Fleet street at noon. Countrymen s carts piled with women and children like loads of market-baskets in Kent; post- chaises with exhausted horses and occupants straining their eyes forward for a sight of the castle ; carriages of the neighboring gentry with " bodkins" and over- packed dickeys, all in costume ; stout farmers on horseback, with plaid and bonnet; gingerbread and ale-carts, pony-carts, and coal-carts; wheelbarrows with baggage, and porters with carpet-bags and hat- MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT. 189 boxes, were mixed up in merry confusion with the most motley throng of pedestrians it has ever been my fortune to join. The vari-colored tide poured in at the open gate of the castle; and if I had seen no other procession, the long-extended mass of caps, bonnets, and plumes, winding through that shaded and beautiful avenue, would have repaid me for no small proportion of my subsequent discomfort. I remarked, by the way, that I did not see a hat in the entire mile between the porter s lodge and the castle. The stables, which lay on the left of the approach (a large square structure with turret and clock, very | like four methodist churches, dos-d-dos), presented j another busy and picturesque scene horses half- j caparisoned, men-at-arms in buff and steel, and the j gay liveries of the nineteenth century paled by the re- I vived glories of the servitude of more knightly times, j And this part of the scene, too, had its crowd of laugh ing and wondering spectators. On reaching the Gothic bridge over the Lugton, ! we came upon a cordon of police who encircled the ! castle, turning the crowd off by the bridge in the di- ( rection of the lists. Sorry to leave my merry and motley fellow-pedestrians, 1 presented my card of in vitation and passed on alone to the castle. The sun was at this time shining with occasional cloudings- over; and the sward and road, after the two or three fine days we had had, were in the best condition for every purpose of the tournament. Two or three noble trees with their foliage nearly i to the ground stood between me and the front of the | castle, as I ascended the slope above the river ; and : the lifting of a stage curtain could scarce be more i sudden, or the scene of a drama more effectively com- J posed, than the picture disclosed by the last step upon i the terrace. Any just description of it, indeed, must read like a passage from the " prompter s book." I I stood for a moment, exactly where you would have ! placed an audience. On my left rose a noble castle with four round towers, the entrance thronged with I men-at-arms, and busy comers and goers in every ! variety of costume. On the greensward in front of the j castle lounged three or four gentlemen archers in ! suits of green silk and velvet. A cluster of grooms under an immense tree on the right were fitting two or three superb horses with theirarmor and caparisons, while one beautiful blood palfrey, whose fine limbs and delicately veined head and neck were alone visible \ under his embroidered saddle and gorgeous trappings of silk, was held by two " tigers" at a short distance, j Still farther on the right, stood a cluster of gayly dec- ; orated tents; and in and out of the looped-up curtain of the farthest passed constantly the slight forms of j lady archers in caps with snowy plumes, kirtles of green velvet, and petticoats of white satin, quivers at their backs and bows in their hands one tall and stately girl (an Ayrshire lady of very uncommon j beauty, whose name I took some pains to inquire), | conspicuous by her grace and dignity above all. SFhe back-ground was equally well composed the ! farther side of the lawn making a sharp descent to the ! small river which bends around the castle, the opposite ! shore thronged with thousands of spectators watching ] the scene 1 have described ; and in the distance be- ! hind them, the winding avenue, railed in for the pro- CWrion, hidden and disclosed by turns among the noble trees of the park, and alive throughout its whole extent with the multitudes crowding to the lists. There was a chivalric splendor in the whole scene, which I thought at the time would repay one for a i long pilgrimage to see it even should the clouds, ; which by this time were coming up very threatening ly from the horizon, put a stop to the tournament al together. On entering the castle hall, a lofty room hung ! round with arms, trophies of the chase, ancient i 13 shields, and armor of every description, T found my self in a crowd of a very merry and rather a motley character knights half armed, esquires in buff, pal- | mers, halberdiers, archers, and sen-ants in modern j livery, here and there a lady, and here and there a spectator like myself, and in a corner by one of the Gothic windows what think you? a minstrel? a gray-haired harper? a jester ? Guess again a re porter for the Times! With a "walking dictionary" at his elbow, in the person of the fat butler of the castle, he was inquiring out the various characters in the crowd, and the rapidity of his stenographic jot tings-down (with their lucid apparition in print two days after in London) would, in the times represented by the costumes about him, have burnt him at the stake for a wizard with the consent of every knight in Christendom. I was received by the knight-marshal of the lists, j who did the honors of hospitality for Lord Eglinton during his preparation for the " passage of arms ;" and finding an old friend under the gray beard and I scallop shell of a venerable palmer, whose sandal and I bare toes I chanced to stumble over, we passed in I together to the large dining-room of the castle. j " Lunch" was on the long table, and some two hun- I dred of the earl s out-lodging guests were busy at ! knife and fork, while here and there were visible some of those anachronisms which, to me, made the zest | of the tournament pilgrims eating Perigord pies, ! esquires dressing after the manner of the thirteenth century diving most scientifically into the richer veins of pates defoie-gras, dames in rufl and farthingale dis cussing blue blanc-mange, and a knight with an over night headache calling out for a cup of tea ! On returning to the hall of the castle, which was | the principal place of assemblage, I saw with no little j regret that ladies were coining from their carriages i under umbrellas. The fair archers tripped in doors from their crowded tent, the knight of the dragon, who had been out to look after his charger, was being wiped dry by a friendly pocket handerckief, and all I countenances had fallen with the barometer. It was i time for the procession to start, however, and the j knights appeared, one by one, armed cap-a-pie, all i save the helmet, till at last the hall was crowded with steel-clad and chivalric forms; and they waited only for the advent of the queen of beauty. After admiring not a little the manly bearing and powerful " thewes and sinews" displayed by the array of modern English i nobility in the trying costumes and harness of olden j time, 1 stepped out upon the lawn with some curiosity j to see how so much heavy metal was to be got into a demipique saddle. After one or two ineffectual at tempts, foiled partly by the restlessness of his horse, the first knight called ingloriously for a chair. Another scrambled over with great difficulty ; and I fancy, though Lord Waterford and Lord Eglinton, and one other whom I noticed, mounted very gallantly and gracefully, the getting to saddle was possibly the most difficult feat of the day. The ancient achievement of leaping on the steed s back from the ground in complete armor would certainly have broken the spine of any horse present, and was probably never done but in story. Once in the saddle, however, English horsemanship told well ; and one of the finest sights of the day I thought was the breaking away of a powerful horse from the grooms, before his rider had gathered up his reins, and a career at furious speed through the open park, during which the steel-encum bered horseman rode as safely as a fox-hunter, and subdued the affrighted animal, and brought him back in a style worthy of a wreath from the queen of beauty. Driven in by the rain, I was standing at the upper side of the hall, when a movement in the crowd and an unusual " making-way" announced the coming of 190 MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT. the "cynosure of all eyes." She enteted from the interior of the castle with her train held up by two beautiful pages of ten or twelve years of age, and at tended by two fair and very young maids of honor. Her jacket of ermine, her drapery of violet and blue velvet, the collars of superb jewels which embraced her throat and bosom, and her sparkling crown, were on her (what they seldom are, but should be only) mere accessaries to her own predominating and radiant beauty. Lady Seymour s features are as nearly fault less as is consistent with expression ; her figure and face are rounded to the complete fulness of the mould for a Juno ; her walk is queenly, and peculiarly un studied and graceful, yet (I could not but think then and since) she was not well chosen for the queen of a tournament. The character of her beauty, uncom mon and perfect as it is, is that of delicacy and loveli ness the lily rather than the rose the modest pearl, not the imperial diamond. The eyes to flash over a crowd at a tournament, to be admired from a distance, to beam down upon a knight kneeling for a public award of honor, should be full of command, dark, lustrous, and fiery. Hers are of the sweetest and most tranquil blue that ever reflected the serene heaven of a happy hearth eyes to love, not wonder at, to adore and rely upon, not admire and tremble for. At the distance at which most of the spectators of the tournament saw Lady Seymour, Fanny Kemble s stormy orbs would have shown much finer, and the forced and imperative action of a stage-taught head and figure would have been more applauded than the quiet, nameless, and indescribable grace lost to all but those immediately round her. I had seen the Queen of Beauty in a small society, dressed in simple white, without an ornament, when she was far more becom ingly dressed and more beautiful than here, and I have never seen, since, the engravings and prints of Lady Seymour which fill every window in the London shops, without feeling that it was a profanation of a style of loveliness that would be " prodigal enough If it unveiled its beauty to the moon." The day wore on, and the knight-marshal of the lists (Sir Charles Lamb, the stepfather of Lord Eglinton, by far the most knightly looking person at the tournament), appeared in his rich surcoat and embossed armor, and with a despairing look at the in creasing torrents of rain, gave the order to get to horse. At the first blast of the trumpet, the thick- leaved trees around the castle gave out each a dozen or two of gay colored horsemen who had stood almost unseen under the low-hanging branches mounted musicians in silk and gay trappings, mounted inen-at- arms in demi-suits of armor, deputy marshals and halberdiers; and around the western tower, where their caparisons had been arranged and their horse- armor carefully looked to, rode the glittering and noble company of knights, Lord Eglinton in his armor of inlaid gold, and Lord Alford, with his athletic frame and very handsome features, conspicuous above all. The rain, meantime, spared neither the rich tabard of the pursuivant, nor the embroidered saddle cloths of the queen s impatient palfrey ; and after a half-dozen of dripping detachments had formed and led on, as the head of the procession, the lady-archers (who were to go on foot) were called by the marshal with a smile and a glance upward which might have been construed into a tacit advice to stay in doors. Gracefully and majestically, however, with quiver at her back, and bow in hand, the tall and fair archer of whose uncommon beauty I have already spoken, stepped from the castle door ; and, regardless of the rain which fell in drops as large as pearls on her un protected forehead and snowy shoulders, she took her place in the procession with her silken-booted troop picking their way very gingerly over the pools behind her. Slight as the circumstance may seem, there was in the manner of the lady, and her calm disregard of self in the cause she had undertaken, which would leave me in no doubt where to look for a heroine were the days of Wallace (whose compatriot she is) to come over again. The knight-marshal put spurs to his horse, and re-ordered the little troop to the castle ; and regretting that I had not the honor of the lady s acquaintance for my authority, I performed my only chivalric achievement for the day, the sending a halberdier whom I had chanced to remember as the servant of an old friend, on a crusade into the castle for a lady s maid and a pair of dry stockings ! Whether they were found, and the fair archer wore them, or where she and her silk-shod company have the tourna ment consumption, rheumatism, or cough, at this hour, I am sorry I can not say. The judge of peace, Lord Saltoun, with his wand, and retainers on foot bearing heavy battle-axes, was one of the best figures in the procession ; though, as he was slightly gray, and his ruby velvet cap and sat urated ruff were poor substitutes for a warm cravat and hat-brim, I could not but associate his fine horse manship with a sore throat, and his retainers and their battle-axes with relays of nurses and hot flannels. The flower of the tournament, in the representing and keeping up of the assumed character, however, was its king, Lord Londonderry. He, too, is a man, I should think, on the shady side of fifty, but of just the high preservation and embonpoint necessary for a royal pres ence. His robe of red velvet and ermine swept the ground as he sat in his saddle; and he managed to keep its immense folds free of his horse s legs, and yet to preserve its flow in his prancing motion, with a grace and ease, I must say, which seemed truly im perial. His palfrey was like a fiery Arabian, all ac tion, nerve, and fire ; and every step was a rearing prance, which, but for the tranquil self-possession and easy control of the king, would have given the specta tors some fears for his royal safety. Lord London derry s whole performance of his part was without a fault, and chiefly admirable, I thought, from his sus taining it with that unconsciousness and entire freedom from mauvaise honte which the English seldom can command in new or conspicuous situations. The queen of beauty was called, and her horse led to the door; but the water ran from the blue saddle cloth and housings like rain from a roof, and the storm seemed to have increased with the sound of her name. She came to the door, and gave a deprecating look upward which would have mollified anything but a Scotch sky, and, by the command of the knight mar shal, retired again to wait for a less chivalric but drier conveyance. Her example was followed by the other ladies, and their horses were led riderless in the pro cession. The knights were but half called when I accepted a friend s kind offer of a seat in his carriage to the lists. The entire park, as we drove along, was one vast ex panse of umbrellas ; and it lookedYrom the carriage- window, like an army of animated and gigantic mush rooms, shouldering each other in a march. I had no idea till then of the immense crowd the occasion had drawn together. The circuitous route railed in for the procession was lined with spectators six or seven deep, on either side, throughout its whole extent of a mile ; the most distant recesses of the park were crowded with men, horses, and vehicles, all pressing onward ; and as we approached the lists we found the multitude full a quarter of a mile deep, standing on all the eminences which looked down upon the enclosure, as closely serried almost as the pit of the opera, and all eyes bent in one direction, anxiously watching the guarded entrance. I heard the number of persons present variously estimated during the day, the esti- MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT. 191 mates ranging from fifty to seventy-five thousand, but I should think the latter was nearer the mark. We presented our tickets at the private door, in the rear of the principal gallery, and found ourselves intro duced to a very dry place among the supports and rafters of the privileged structure. The look-out was excellent in front, and here I proposed to remain, de clining the wet honor of a place above stairs. The gentleman-usher, however, was very urgent for our promotion ; but as we found him afterward chatting very familiarly with a party who occupied the seats we had selected, we were compelled to relinquish the flattering unction that he was actuated by an intuitive sense of our deservings. On ascending to the covered gallery, I saw, to my surprise, that some of the best seats in front were left vacant, and here and there, along the different tiers of benches, ladies were crowd ing excessively close together, while before or behind <hem there seemed plenty of unoccupied room. A second look showed me small streams of water coming through the roof, and I found that a dry seat was totally unattainable. The gallery held about a thou sand persons (the number Lord Eglinton had invited to the banquet and ball), and the greater part of these were ladies, most of them in fancy dresses, and the re mainder in very slight demi-toilette everybody having dressed apparently with a full reliance on the morn- ing s promise of fair weather. Less fortunate than the multitude outside, the earl s guests seemed not to have numbered umbrellas among the necessities of a tournament; and the demand for this despised inven tion was sufficient (if merit were ever rewarded) to i elevate it for ever after to a rank among chivalric ap pointments. Substitutes and imitations of it were made of swords and cashmeres ; and the lenders of veritable umbrellas received smiles which should in duce them, one would think, to carry half-a-dozen to all future tournaments in Scotland. It was pitiable to see the wreck going on among the perishable ele gancies of Victorine and Herbault chip hats of the most faultless toumure collapsing with the wet ; { starched ruffs quite flat ; dresses passing helplessly I from " Lesbia s" style to " Nora Creina s ;" shawls, ! tied by anxious mammas over chapeau and coiffure, crushing pitilessly the delicate fabric of months of in- j vention ; and, more lamentable still, the fair brows and I shoulders of many a lovely woman proving with rain- j bow clearness that the colors of the silk or velvet com posing her head-dress were by no means " fast." The Irvine archers, by the way, who, as the queen s body- j guard, were compelled to expose themselves to the I rain on the grand staircase, resembled a troop of New- j Zealanders with their faces tattooed of a delicate green ; though, as their Lincoln bonnets were all made of the same faithless velvet, they were fortunately streaked so nearly alike as to preserve theiimniform. After a brief consultation between the rheumatisms , in my different limbs, it was decided (since it was vain i to hope for shelter for the entire person) that my cloth- cap would be the best recipient for the inevitable wet; ! and selecting the best of the vacated places, I seated I myself so as to receive one of ihe small streams as I nearly as possible on my organ of firmness. Here I ; was undisturbed, except that once I was asked (my j seat supposed to be a dry one) to give place to a lady ! newly arrived, who, receiving my appropriated rivulet in her neck, immediately restored it to me with many ! acknowledgments, and passed on. In point of posi tion, my seat, which was very near the pavilion of the queen of beauty, was one of the best at the tourna ment; and diverting my aqueduct, by a little manage ment, over my left shoulder, I contrived to be more comfortable, probably, than most of my shivering and melancholy neighbors. A great agitation in the crowd, and a dampish sound of coming trumpets, announced the approach of the procession. As it came in sight, and wound along the curved passage to the lists, its long and serpentine line of helmets and glittering armor, gonfalons, spear- points, and plumes, just surging above the moving sea of umbrellas, had the effect of some gorgeous and bright-scaled dragon swimming in troubled waters. The leaders of the long cavalcade pranced into the arena at last, and a tremendous shout from the multi tude announced their admiration of the spectacle. On they came toward the canopy of the queen of beauty, rnen-at-arms, trumpeters, heralds, and halberdiers, and soon after them the king of the tournament, with his long scarlet robe flying to the tempest, and his rearing palfrey straining every nerve to show his pride and beauty. The first shout from the principal gallery was given in approbation of this display of horseman ship, as Lord Londonderry rode past ; and consider ing the damp state of the enthusiasm which prompted it, it should have been considered rather flattering. Lord Eglinton came on presently, distinguished above all others no less by the magnificence of his appoint ments than by the ease and dignity with which he rode, and his knightly bearing and stature. His golden armor sat on him as if he had been used to wear it ; and he managed his beautiful charger, and bowed in reply to the reiterated shouts of the multitude and his friends, with a grace and chivalric courtesy which drew murmurs of applause from the spectators long after the cheering had subsided. The jester rode into the lists upon a gray steed, shaking his bells over his head, and dressed in an odd costume of blue and yellow, with a broad-flapped hat, asses ears, Arc. His character was not at first under stood by the crowd, but he soon began to excite mer riment by his jokes, and no little admiration by his capital riding. He was a professional person, I think it was said, from Astley s, but as he spoke with a most excellent Scotch " burr," lie easily passed for an in digenous "fool." He rode from side to side of the lists during the whole of the tournament, borrowing umbrellas, quizzing the knights, &c. One of the most striking features of the procession was the turn-out of the knight of the Gael, Lord Glenlyon, with seventy of his" clansmen at his back in plaid and philibeg, and a finer exhibition of calves (without a joke) could scarce be desired. They fol lowed their chieftain on foot, and when the procession separated, took up their places in line along the palisade, serving as a guard to the lists. After the procession had twice made the circuit of the enclosure, doing obeisance to the queen of beauty, the jester had possession of the field while the knights retired to don their helmets (hitherto carried by their esquires), and to await the challenge to combat. All eyes were now bent upon the gorgeous clusters of tents at either extremity of the oblong area ; and in a very few minutes the herald s trumpet sounded, and the knight of the swan rode forth, having sent his de fiance to the knight of the golden lion. At another blast of the trumpet they set their lances in rest, se lected opposite sides of the long fence or barrier run ning lengthwise through the lists, and rode furiously past each other, the fence of course preventing any contact except that of their lances. This part oY the tournament (the essential part, one would think) was, from the necessity of the case, the least satisfactory of all. The knights, though they rode admirably, were so oppressed by the weight of their armor, and so em barrassed in their motions by the ill-adjusted joints, that they were like men of wood, unable apparently even to raise the lance from the thigh on which it rested. I presume no one of them either saw where he should strike his opponent, or had any power of directing the weapon. As they rode close to the fence, however, and a ten-foot pole sawed nearly off in two or three places was laid crosswise on the legs 193 MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT. of each, it would be odd if they did not come in con tact; and (he least shock of course splintered the lance in other words, finished what was begun by the car penter s saw. The great difficulty was to ride at all under such a tremendous weight, and manage a horse of spirit, totally unused both to the weight and the clatter of his own and his rider s armor. I am sure that Lord Eglinton s horse, for one, would have bothered Ivanhoe himself to "bring to the scratch;" and Lord Waterford s was the only one that, for all the fright he showed, might have been selected (as they all should have been) for the virtue of having peddled tin-ware. These two knights, by the way, ran the best career, Lord Eglinton, malgrc his bolter, coming off the victor. The rain, meantime, had increased to a deluge, the queen of beauty sat shivering under an umbrella, the jester s long ears were water-logged, and lay flat on his shoulders, and everybody in my neighborhood had expressed a wish for a dry seat and a glass of sherry. The word " banquet" occurred frequently right and left; hopes for " mulled wine or something hot be fore dinner" stole from the lips of a mamma on the seat behind ; and there seemed to be but one chance for the salvation of health predominant in the minds of all, and that was drinking rather more freely than usual at the approaching banquet. Judge what must have been the astonishment, vexation, dread, and de spair, of the one thousand wet, shivering, and hungry candidates for the feast, when Lord Eglinton rode up to the gallery unhelmeted, and delivered himself as follows : " Ladies and gentlemen, I had hoped to have given you all a good dinner; but to my extreme mortifica tion and regret, I am just informed that the rain has penetrated the banqueting pavilions, and that, in con sequence, I shall only be able to entertain so many of my friends as can meet around rny ordinary table." About as uncomfortable a piece of intelligence, to some nine hundred and sixty of his audience, as they could have received, short of a sentence for their im mediate execution. To comprehend fully the disastrous extent of the disappointment in the principal gallery, it must be taken into consideration that the dornicils, fixed or temporary, of the rejected sufferers, were from five to twenty miles distant a long ride at best, if begun on the point of famishing, and in very thin and well- saturated fancy dresses. Grievance the first, however, was nothing to grievance the second; viz., that from the tremendous run upon post-horses and horses of all descriptions, during the three or four previous days, the getting to the tournament was the utmost that many parties could achieve. The nearest baiting- place was several miles off; and in compassion to the poor beasts, and with the weather promising fair on their arrival, most persons had consented to take their chance for the quarter of a mile from the lists to the castle, and had dismissed their carriages with orders to return at the close of the banquet and ball daylight the next morning ! The castle, everybody knew, was crammed, from " donjon-keep to turret- top," with the relatives and intimate friends of the noble earl, and his private table could accommodate no more than these. To get home was the inevitable alternative. The rain poured in a deluge. The entire park was trodden into a slough, or standing in pools of water carts, carriages, and horsemen, with fifty thousand flying pedestrians, crowding every road and avenue. How to get home with a carriage ! How the deuce to get home without one ! A gentleman, who had been sent out on the errand of Noah s dove by a lady whose carriage and horses were ordered at four the following morning, carne back with the mud up to his knees, and reported that there was not a wheel-barrow to be had for love or money. After threading the crowd in every direction, he had offered a large sum, in vain, for a one-horse cart ! Night was coming on, meantime, very fast ; but absorbed by the distresses of the shivering groups around me, I had scarce remembered that my own in vitation was but to the banquet and ball and my dinner, consequently, nine miles off, at Ardrossan. Thanking Heaven, that, at least, I had no ladies to share my evening s pilgrimage, I followed the queen of beauty down the muddy and slippery staircase, and, when her majesty had stepped into her carriage, I stepped over ankles in mud and water, and began my wade toward the castle. Six hours of rain, and the trampling of such an im mense multitude of men and horses, had converted the soft and moist sod and soil of the park into a deep and most adhesive quagmire. Glancing through the labyrinth of vehicles on every side, and seeing men and horses with their feet completely sunk below the surface, I saw that there was no possibility of shying I the matter, and that wade was the word. I thought, i at first, that I had a claim for a little sympathy on the score of being rather slenderly shod (the impalpable sole of a pattern leather-boot being all that separated | me from the subsoil of the estate of Eglinton); but overtaking, presently, a party of four ladies who had lost several shoes in the mire, and were positively wading on in silk stockings, I took patience to myself from my advantage in the comparison, and thanked fate for the thinnest sole with leather to keep it on. The ladies I speak of were under the charge of a most despairing-looking gentleman, but had neither cloak nor umbrella, and had evidently made no calculations for a walk. We differed in our choice of the two sides of a slough, presently, and they were lost in the crowd ; but I could not help smiling, with all my pity of their woes, to think what a turning up of prunella shoes there will be, should Lord Eglintou ever plough the chivalric field of the Tournament. As I reached the castle, I got upon the Macadamised road, which had the advantage of a bottom somewhere, though it was covered with a liquid mud, of which every passing foot gave you a spatter to the hips. My exterior was by this time equally divided between I water and dirt, and I trudged on in comfortable fellow ship with farmers, coal-miners, and Scotch lasses envying very much the last, for they carried their shoes in their hands, and held their petticoats, to say the least, clear of the mud. Many a good joke they seemed to have among them, but as they spoke in Gaelic, it was lost on my Sassenach ears. I had looked forward with a faint hope to a ginger bread and ale-cart, which I remembered having seen in the morning established near the terminus of the railroad, trusting to refresh my strength and patience with a glass of anything that goes under the generic appellation of "summat;" but though the cart was there, the gingerbread shelf was occupied by a row of Scotch lasses, crouching together under cover from the rain, and the pedlar assured me that "there wasna a drap o speerit to be got within ten mileo the castle." One glance at the railroad, where a car with a single horse was beset by some thousands of shoving and fighting applicants, convinced me that I had a walk of eight miles to finish my " purgation by" tourna ment ; and as it was getting too dark to trust to any picking of the way, I took the middle of the rail-track, and set forward. " Oh. but a weary wight was he When he reached the foot of the dogwood tree." Eight miles in a heavy rain, with boots of the con sistence of brown paper, and a road of alternate deep mud and broken stone, should entitle one to the green SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 193 turban. I will make the pilgrimage of a Hadji from the " farthest inn" with half the endurance. I found my Liverpool friends over a mutton-chop in the snug parlor of our host, and with a strong brew of hot toddy, and many a laugh at the day s adventures by land and water, we got comfortably to bed " some where in the small hours." And so ended the great day of the tournament. After witnessing the disasters of the first day, the demolition of costumes, and the perils by water, of masqueraders and spectators, it was natural to fancy that the tournament was over. So did not seem to think several thousands of newly-arrived persons, pouring from steamer after steamer upon the pier of Ardrossan, and in every variety of costume, from the shepherd s maud to the courtier s satin, crowding to the rail-cars for Eglinton. It appeared from the chance remarks of one or two who came to our lodg ings to deposite their carpet-bags, that it had rained very little in the places from which the steamers had j come, and that they had calculated on the second as ; the great day of the joust. No dissuasion had the | least effect upon them, and away they went, bedecked j and merry, the sufferers of the day before looking out j upon them, from comfortable hotel and lodging, with i prophetic pity. At noon the sky brightened ; and as the cars were j running by this time with diminished loads, I parted ( from my agreeable friends, and bade adieu to my i garret at Ardrossan. I was bound to Ireland, and my | road lay by Eglinton to Irvine and Ayr. Fellow- | passengers with me were twenty or thirty men in j Glengary bonnets, plaids, &c. ; and I came in for my share of the jeers and jokes showered upon them by the passengers in the return-cars, as men bound on a fruitless errand. As we neared the castle, the crowds of people with disconsolate faces waiting for convey ances, or standing by the reopened gingerbread carts ! in listless idleness, convinced my companions, at last i that there was nothing to be seen, for that day at least, ! at Eglinton. I left them sitting in the cars, undecided whether to go on or return without losing their places ; and seeing a coach marked " Irvine" standing in the road, 1 jumped in without question or ceremony. It belonged to a private party of gentlemen, who were to visit the castle and tilting-ground on their way to Irvine ; and as they very kindly insisted on my re maining after I had apologised for the intrusion, I found myself "booked" fora glimpse of the second day s attractions. The avenue to the castle was as crowded as on the day before ; but it was curious to remark how the general aspect of the multitude was changed by the substitution of disappointment for expectation. The lagging gait and surly silence, instead of the elastic step and merry joke, seemed to have darkened the scene more than the withdrawal of the sun, and I was glad to wrap myself in my cloak, and remember that I was on the wing. The banner flying at the castle tower was the only sign of motion I could see in its immediate vicinity ; the sail-cloth coverings of the pavilion were dark with wet; the fine sward was every where disfigured with traces of mud, and the whole scene was dismal and uncomfortable. We kept on to the lists, and found them, as one of my companions expressed it, more like a cattle-pen after a fair than a scene of pleasure trodden, wet, miry, and deserted. The crowd, content to view them from a distance, were assembled around the large booths on the ascent of the rising ground toward the castle, where a band was playing some merry reels, and the gingerbread and ale venders plied a busy vocation. A look was enough; and we shaped our course for Irvine, sympa thizing deeply with the disappointment of the high- spirited and generous lord of the Tourney. I heard at Irvine, and farther on, that the tilting would be re newed, and the banquet and ball given on the succeed ing days ; but after the wreck of dresses and peril of health I had witnessed, I was persuaded that the best that could be done would be but a slender patching up of the original glories, as well as a halting rally of the original spirits of the tournament. So I kept on my way. SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. CHAPTER I. THKRK is an inborn and inbred distrust of "foreign ers" in England continental foreigners, I should say which keeps the current of French and Italian so ciety as distinct amid the sea of London, as the blue Rhone in Lake Leman. The word " foreigner," ia England, conveys exclusively the idea of a dark-com plexioned and whiskered individual, in a frogged coat and distressed circumstances ; and to introduce a smooth-cheeked, plaiuly-dressed, quiet-looking person by that name, would strike any circle of ladies and gentlemen as a palpable misnomer. The violent and unhappy contrast between the Parisian s mode of life in London and in Paris, makes it very certain that few of those bien nes et comv;nable>ncnt riches will live in London for pleasure; and then the flood of political emigres, for the last half century, has monopolised hair-dressing, &c., &c., to such a degree, that the word Frenchman is synonymous in English ears with barber and dancing-master. If a dark gentleman, wearing either whisker or mustache, chance to of fend John Bull in the street, the first opprobrious lan guage he hears the strongest that occurs to the fel low s mind is, " Get out, you Frenchman !" All this, malgrc the rage for foreign lions in London society. A well-introduced foreigner gets easily into this, and while he keeps his cabriolet and confines himself to freqiiemingsoirf es and accepting invitations to dine, he will never suspect that he is not on an equal footing with any " milor" in London. If he wishes to be disenchanted, he has only to change his lodgings from Long s to Great Russell street, or (bit terer and readier trial) to propose marriage to the honorable Augusta or Lady Fanny. Everybody who knows the society of Paris, knows something of a handsome and very elegant young baron of the Faubourg St. Germain, who, with small fortune, very great taste, and greater credit, contrived to go on very swimmingly as an adorable roue and vaurien till he was hard upon twenty-five. At the first crisis in his affairs, the ladies, who hold all the politics in their laps, got him appointed consul to Algiers, or minister to Venezuela, and with this pretty pretext for selling his horses and dressing-gowns, these cherished articles brought twice their original value, saved his loyautt, and set him up in fans and monkeys at his place of exile. A year of this was enough for the darling of Paris, and not more than a day before his desolate loves would have ceased to mourn for him, he galloped into his hotel with a new fashion of whiskers, a black female slave, and the most delicious | histories of his adventures during the ages he had been exiled. Down to the earth and their previous obscurity dropped the rivals who were just beginning to usurp his glories. A new stud, an indescribable I vehicle, a suite of rooms a. rAfricaine, and a mystery, preserved at some expense, about his negress, kept all | Paris, including his new creditors, in admiring aston- 194 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. ishment for a year. Among the crowd of his worship pers, not the last or least fervent, were the fair-haired and glowing beauties who assemble at the levees of their ambassador in the Rue St. Honore, and upon whom le beau Adolplie had looked as pretty savages, whose frightful toilets and horrid French accent might be tolerated one evening in the week vu le souper ! Eclipses will arrive as calculated by insignificant astronomers, however, and debts will become due as presumed by vulgar tradesmen. Le beau Adolphe began to see another crisis, and betook himself to his old advisers, who were dcsoles to the last degree; but there was a new government, and the blood of the Faubourg was at a discount. No embassies were to be had for nothing. With a deep sigh, and a gentle tone, to spare his feelings as much as possible, his friend ventures to suggest to him that it will be neces sary to sacrifice himself. "Ahi ! mais comment /" " Marry one of these betes Anglaises, who drink you up with their great blue eyes, and are made of gold !" Adolphe buried his face in his gold-fringed oriental pocket-handkerchief; but when the first agony was passed, his resolution was taken, and he determined to go to England. The first beautiful creature he should see, whose funds were enormous and well-invested, should bear away from all the love, rank, and poverty of France, the perfumed hand he looked upon. A flourishing letter, written in a small, cramped hand, but with a seal on whose breadth of wax and blazon all the united heraldry of France was inter woven, arrived, through the ambassador s despatch box, to the address of Miladi , Belgrave square, announcing, in full, that le beau Adolphe was coming to London to marry the richest heiress in good socie ty ; and as Paris could not spare him more than a week, he wished those who had daughters to marry, answering the description, to be bien prevenus of his visit and errand. With the letter carne a compend of his genealogy, from the man who spoke French in the confusion of Babel to le dit Baron Adolphe. To London came the valet of le beau baron, two days before his master, bringing his slippers and dres sing-gown to be aired after their sea-voyage across the channel. To London followed the irresistible youth, cursing, in the politest French, the necessity which subtracted a week from a life measured with such "diamond sparks" as his own in Paris. He sat him self down in his hotel, sent his man Porphyre with his card to every noble and rich house, whose barbarian tenants he had ever seen in the Champs Elysees, and waited the result. Invitations from fair ladies, who remembered him as the man the French belles were mad about, and from literary ladies, who wanted his whiskers and black eyes lo give their soirees the neces sary foreign complexion, flowed in on all sides, and Monsieur Adolphe selected his most mignon cane and his happiest design in a stocking, and "rendered him self" through the rain like a martyr. No offers of marriage the first evening! None the second ! ! None the third ! ! ! Le beau Adolphe began to think either that English papas did not propose their daughters to people as in France ; or, perhaps, that the lady whom he had com missioned to circulate his wishes had not sufficiently advertised him. . She had, however. He took advice, and found it would be necessary to take the first step himself. This was disagreeable, and he said to himself, " Lc jeu ne vaut pas le chan- delle ;" but his youth was passing, and his English fortune was at interest. He went to Almack s and proposed to the first authenticated fortune that accepted his hand for a waltz. The young lady first laughed, and then told her mother, who told her son, who thought it an in sult, and called out le beau Adolphe, very much to the astonishment of himself and Porphyre. The thing was explained, and the baron looked about the next day for one pas si bete. Found a young lady with half a million sterling, proposed in a morning call, and was obliged to ring for assistance, his intended having gone into convulsions with laughing at him. The story by this time had got pretty well distributed through the different strata of London society ; and when le beau, Adolphe convinced that he would not succeed with the noble heiresses of Belgrave square, j condescended, in his extremity, to send his heart by his valet to a rich little vulgarian, who " never had a | grandfather," and lived in Harley street, he narrowly I escaped being prosecuted for a nuisance, and, Parig [ being now in the possession of the enemy, he buried j his sorrows in Belgium. After a short exile his friends j procured him a vice-consulate in some port in the j north sea, and there probably at this moment he sor rowfully vegetates. This is not a story founded upon fact, but literally true. Many of the circumstances came under my own observation ; and the whole thus affords a laughable example of the esteem in which what an English fox- hunter would call a " trashy Frenchman" is held in England, ( as well as of the travestie produced by trans planting the usages of one country to another. Ridiculous as any intimate mixture of English and French ideas and persons seems to be in London, the foreign society of itself in that capital is exceedingly spiritual and agreeable. The various European em bassies and their attaches, with their distinguished travellers, from their several countries, accidentally belonging to each ; the French and Italians, married to English noblemen and gentry, and living in Lon don, and the English themselves, who have become cosmopolite by residence in other countries, form a very large society in which mix, on perfectly equal terms, the first singers of the opera, and foreign musi cians and artists generally. This last circumstance gives a peculiar charm to these reunions, though it imparts a pride and haughty bearing to the prima donna and her fraternity, which is, at least, sometimes very inconvenient to themselves. The remark recalls to my mind a scene I once witnessed in London, which will illustrate the feeling better than an essay upon it. I was at one of those private concerts given at an enormous expense during the opera season, at which " assisted" Julia Grisi, Rubini, Lablache, Tamburiui, and Ivanhoff. Grisi came in the carriage of a foreign lady of rank, who had dined loith Aer, and she walked into the room looking like an empress. She was dressed in the plainest white, with her glossy hair put smooth from her brow, and a single white japonica dropped over one of her temples. The lady who brought her chaperoned her during the evening, as if she had been her daughter, and under the excitement of her own table and the kindness of her friends, she sung with a rapture and a freshet of glory (if one may borrow a word from the Mississippi) which set all hearts on fire. She surpassed her most applauded hour on the stage for it was worth her while. The audience was composed, almost exclusively, of those who are not only cultivated judges, but who some- j times repay delight with a present of diamonds. Lablache shook the house to its foundations in his turn ; Rubini ran through his miraculous compass with the ease, truth, and melody, for which his singing s unsurpassed ; Tamburini poured his rich and even fulness on the ear, and Russian Ivanhoff, the one southern singing-bird who has come out of the north, wire-drew his fine and spiritual notes, till they who bad been flushed, and tearful, and silent, when the others SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 195 had sang, drowned his voice in the poorer applause of exclamation and surprise. The concert was over by twelve, the gold and silver paper bills of the performance were turned into f;ms, and everyone was waiting till supper should be announced the prima donna still sitting by her friend, but sur rounded by foreign attaches, and in the highest elation at her own success. The doors of an inner suite of rooms were thrown open at last, and Grisi s cordon of admirers prepared to follow her in and wait on her at supper. At this moment, one of the powdered menials of the house stepped up and informed her very respect fully that supper was prepared in a separate room for the singers ! Medea, in her most tragic hour, never stood so absolutely the picture of hate as did Grisi for a single instant, in the centre of that aristocratic crowd. Her chest swelled and rose, her lips closed over her snowy teeth, and compressed till the blood left them, and, for myself, I looked unconsciously to see where she would strike. I knew, then, that there was more than fancy there was nature and capability of the real in the imaginary passions she plays so powerfully. A laugh of extreme amusement at the scene from the high born woman who had accompanied her, suddenly turned her humor, and she stopped in the midst of a muttering of Italian, in which I could distinguish only the terminations, and, with a sort of theatrical ?uickness of transition, joined heartily in her mirth, t was immediately proposed by this lady, however, that herself and their particular circle should join the insulted prima donna at the lower table, and they suc ceeded by this manoeuvre in retaining Rubini and the others, who were leaving the house in a most un equivocal Italian fury. I had been fortunate enough to be included in the invitation, and, with one or two foreign diplomatic men, I followed Grisi and her amused friend to a small room on a lower floor, that seemed to be the housekeeper s parlor. Here supper was set for six (including the man who had played the piano), and on the side-table stood every variety of wine and fruit, and there was nothing in the supper, at least, to make us regret the table we had left. With a most im perative gesture and rather an amusing attempt at English, Grisi ordered the servants out of the room, and locked the door, and from that moment the con versation commenced and continued in their own musical, passionate, and energetic Italian. My long residence in that country h;id made me at home in it ; every one present spoke it fluently ; and I had an opportunity I might never have again, of seeing with what abandonment these children of the sun throw aside rank and distinction (yet without forgetting it), and join with those who are their superiors in every circumstance of life, in the gayeties of a chance hour. Out of their own country these singers would prob ably acknowledge no higher lank than that of the kind and gifted lady who was their guest ; yet, with the briefest apology at finding the room too cold after the heat of the concert, they put on their cloaks and hats as a safeguard to their lungs (more valuable to them than to others) ; and as most of the cloaks were the worse for travel, and the hats opera-hats with two corners, the grotesque contrast with the diamonds of one lady, and the radiant beauty of the other, may easily be imagined. Singing should be hungry work, by the knife and fork they played ; and between the excavations of truffle pies, and the bumpers of champagne and bur gundy, the words were few. Lablache appeared to be an established droll, and every syllable he found time to utter was received with the most unbounded laughter. Rubini could not recover from the slight he conceived put upon him and his profession by the separate table; and he continually reminded Grisi, who by this time had quite recovered her good humor, that, the night before, supping at Devonshire house, the duke of Wellington had held her gloves on one side, while his grace, their host attended to her on the other. " E vero /" said IvanholF, with a look of modest ad miration at the prima donna. "jB vero, e bravo!" cried Tamburini, with his sepul chral-talking tone, much deeper than his singing. " Si, si, si, bravo /" echoed all the company; and the haughty and happy actress nodded all round with a radiant smile, and repeated, in her silver tones, " Grazie ! cari amid ! grazie . " As the servants had been turned out, the removal ; of the first course was managed in pic-nic fashion ; and when the fruit and fresh bottles of wine were set upon the table by the attaches, and younger gentle- | men, the health of the princess who honored them by her presence was proposed in that language, which, it \ seems to me, is more capable than all others of ex- | pressing affectionate and respectful devotion. All un- I covered and stood up, and Grisi, with tears in her eyes, | kissed the hand of her benefactress and friend, and drank her health in silence. It is a polite and common accomplishment in Italy to improvise in verse, and the lady I speak of is well ; known among her immediate friends for a singular 1 facility in this beautiful art. She reflected a moment ! or two with the moisture in her eyes, and then com- ; menced, low and soft, a poem, of which it would be | difficult, nay impossible, to convey, in English, an j idea of its music and beauty. It took us back to Italy, I to its heavenly climate, its glorious arts, its beauty and its ruins, and concluded with a line of which I remein- I her the sentiment to have been, " out of Italy every land is exile /" The glasses were raised as she ceased, and every I one repeated after her, " Fuori d 1 Italia tutto e esilio . " Ma /" cried out the fat Lablache, holding up his ! glass of champagne, and looking through it with one eye, siarno ben esiliati qua . " and, with a word of i drollery, the party recovered its gayer tone, and the humor and wit flowed on brilliantly as before. The house had long been still, and the last carriage I belonging to the company above stairs had rolled from the door, when Grisi suddenly remembered a bird that | she had lately bought, of which she proceeded to give j us a description, that probably penetrated to every j corner of the silent mansion. It was a mocking-bird, I that had been kept two years in the opera-house, and between rehearsal and performance had learned parts , of everything it had overheard. It was the property j of the woman who took care of the wardrobes. Grisi I had accidentally seen it, and immediately purchased ; it for two guineas. How much of embellishment there j was in her imitations of her treasure 1 do not know; j but certainly the whole power of her wondrous voice, I passion, and knowledge of music, seemed drunk up at once in the wild, various, difficult, and rapid mixture I of the capricious melody she undertook. First came, without the passage which it usually terminates, the \ long, throat-down, gurgling, water-toned trill, in which ! Rubini (but for the bird and its mistress, it seemed to I me) would have been inimitable : then, right upon it, , as if it were the beginning of a bar, and in the most unbreathing continuity, followed a brilliant passage from the Barber of Seville, run into the passionate prayer of Anna Bolena in her madness, and followed by the air of " Suoni la tromba intrepida," the tremen dous duet in the Puritani, between Tamburini and Lablache. Up to the sky, and down to the earth again away with a note of the wildest gladness, and back upon a note of the most touching melancholy if the bird but half equals the imitation of his mistress, he were worth the jewel in a sultan s turban. "Giulia!" "Giulietta!" " GiulieUina !" cried out | one and another, as she ceased, expressing in their 196 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. Italian diminutives, the love and delight she had in spired by her incomparable execution. The stillness of the house in the occasional pauses of conversation reminded the gay party, at last, that it was wearing late. The door was unlocked, and the half-dozen sleepy footmen hanging about the hall were despatched for the cloaks and carriages ; the drowsy porter was roused from his deep leathern dormeuse, and opened the door and broad upon the street lay the cold gray light of a summer s morning. I declined an offer to be set down by a friend s cab, and strolled off to Hyde Park to surprise myself with a sunrise; balancing the silent rebuke in the fresh and healthy countenances of early laborers going to their toil, against the effervescence of a champagne hour, which, since such come so rarely, may come, for me, with what untimeliness they please. CHAPTER II. THE STREETS OF LONDON. IT has been said, that "few men know how to take a walk." In London it requires some experience to know where to take a walk. The taste of the peram bulator, the hour of the day, and the season of the year, would each affect materially the decision of the question. If you are up early I mean early for London say ten o clock we would start from your hotel in Bond street, and hastening through Regent street and the Quadrant (deserts at that hour), strike into the zigzag of thronged alleys, cutting traversely from Coventry street to Covent Garden. The horses on the cab stand in the Haymarket " are at this hour asleep." The late supper-eaters at Dubourg s and the Cafe dt VEurope were the last infliction upon their galled withers, and while dissipation slumbers they may find an hour to hang their heads upon the bit, and forget gall and spavin in the sunshiny drowse of morning. The cabman, too, nods on his perch outside, careless of the custom of "them as pays only their fare," and quite sure not to get "a gemman to drive" at that un seasonable hour. The " waterman" (called a " water man," as he will tell you, " because he gives hay to the orses") leans against the gas-lamp at the corner, looking with a vacant indifference of habit at the splendid coach with its four blood bays just starting from the Brighton coach-office in the Crescent. The side walk of Coventry street, usually radiant with the flaunting dresses of the fail and vicious, is now sober with the dull habiliments of the eaily-stirring and the poor. The town (for this is town, not city) beats its more honest pulse. Industry alone is abroad. Rupert street on the left is the haunt of shabby- genteel poverty. To its low-doored chop-houses steal the more needy loungers of Regent street, and in con fined and greasy, but separate and exclusive boxes, they eat their mutton-chop and potato, unseen of their gayer acquaintances. Here comes the half-pay of ficer, whose half-pay is halved or quartered with wife and children, to drink his solitary half-pint of sherry, and over a niggardly portion of soup and vegetables, recall, as well as he may in imagination, the gay din ners at mess, and the companions now grown cold in death or worldliness ! Here comes the sharper out of luck, the debtor newly out of prison. And here comes many a "gay fellow about town," who will dine to-morrow, or may have dined yesterday, at a table of unsparing luxury, but who now turns up Rupert street at seven, cursing the mischance that draws upon his own slender pocket for the dinner of to-day. Here are found the watchful host and the suspicious waiter the closely-measured wine, and the more closely- measured attention the silent and shrinking compa ny, the close-drawn curtain, the suppressed call for the bill, the lingering at the table of those who value the retreat and the shelter to recover from the embar rassing recognition and the objectless saunter through the streets. The ruin, the distress, the despair, that wait so closely upon the heels of fashion, pass here with their victims. It is the last step within the bounds of respectability. They still live " at the West end," while they dine in Rupert street. They may still linger in the park, or stroll in Bond street, till their better-fledged friends flit to dinner at the clubs, and within a stone s throw of the luxurious tables and the gay mirth they so bitterly remember, sit down to an ill-dressed meal, and satisfy the calls of hunger in silence. Ah, the outskirts of the bright places in life are darker for the light that shines so near them ! How much sweeter is the coarsest meal shared with the savage in the wilderness, than the comparative comfort of cooked meats and wine in a neighborhood like this! Come through this narrow lane into Leicester square. You cross here the first limit of the fashion able quarter. The Sabloniere hotel is in this square; but you may not give it as your address unless you are a foreigner. This is the home of that most mis erable fish out of water a Frenchman in London. A bad French hotel, and two or three execrable French restaurants, make this spot of the metropolis the most habitable to the exiled habitue of the Palais Royal. Here he gets a mocking imitation of what, iu any possible degree, is better than the sacre biftek, or the half-raw mutton-chop and barbarous boiled potato ! Here he comes forth, if the sunshine perchance for one hour at noon, and paces up and down on the side walk, trying to get. the better of his bile and his bad breakfast. Here waits for him at three, the shabby, but most expensive remise cab, hired by the day for as much as would support him a month in Paris. Leicester square is the place for conjurors, bird- fanciers, showmen, and generally for every foreign novelty in the line of nostrums and marvels. If there is a dwarf in London, or a child with two heads, or a learned pig, you will see une or all in that building, so radiant with placards, and so thronged with beggars. Come on through Cranbourne alley. Old clothes, second-hand stays, idem shawls, capes, collars, and ladies articles of ornamental wear generally : cheap straw-bonnets, old books, gingerbread, und stationery . Look at this once-expensive and finely-worked muslin cape ! What fair shoulders did it adorn when these dingy flowers were new when this fine lace-edging bounded some heaving bosom, perhaps, like frost-work on the edge of a snow-drift. It has been the property of some minion of elegance and wealth, vicious or vir tuous, and by what hard necessity came it here ? Ten to one, could it speak, its history would keep us stand ing at this shop window, indifferent alike to the curi ous glances of these passing damsels and the gentle eloquence of the Jew on the other side, who pays us the unflattering compliment of suggesting an improve ment in our toilet by the purchase of the half-worn habiliments he exposes- I like Cranbourne alley, because it reminds me of Venice. The half-daylight between the high and overhanging roofs, the just audible hum of voices and occupation from the different shops, the shuffling of hasty feet over the smooth flags, and particularly the absence of horses and wheels, make it (in all but the damp air and the softer speech) a fair resemblance to those close passages in the rear of the canals between St. Mark s and the Rialto. Then I like studying a pawnbroker s window, and I like ferreting in the old book-stalls that abound here. It is a good lesson in humility for an author to see what he can be bought for in Cranbourne alley. Some " gentle reader," who SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. J97 has paid a guinea and a half for you, has resold you for two-aud-sixpence. For three shillings you may have the three volumes, " as good as new," and the shopman, by his civility, pleased to be rid of it on the terms. If you would console yourself, however, buy Milton for one-and-sixpence, and credit your vanity with the eighteen-pence of the remainder. The labyrinth of alleys between this and Covent Garden, are redolent of poverty and pot-houses. In j crossing St. Martin s lane, life appears to have be- ! come suddenly a struggle and a calamity. Turbulent ! and dirty women are everywhere visible through the ; open windows; the half-naked children at the doors | look already care-worn and incapable of a smile ; and the men throng the gin-shops, bloated, surly, and re pulsive. Hurry through this leprous spot in the vast body of London, and let us emerge in the Strand. You would think London Strand the main artery of the world. I suppose there is no thoroughfare on the face of the earth where the stream of human life . runs with a tide so overwhelming. In any other street in the world you catch the eye of the passer-by, j In the Strand, no man sees another except as a solid body, whose contact is to be avoided. You are safe nowhere on the pavement without all the vigilance of j your senses. Omnibuses and cabs, drays, carriages, wheelbarrows, and porters, beset the street. News- pnper-hawkers, pickpockets, shop-boys, coal-heavers, and a perpetual and selfish crowd dispute the sidewalk, jj If you venture to look at a print in a shop-window, | you arrest the tide of passengers, who immediately I walk over you ; and, if you stop to speak with a friend, | who by chance has run his nose against yours rather j than another man s, you impede the way, and are < made to understand it by the force of jostling. If you j would get into an omnibus you are quarrelled for by half-a-dozen who catch your eye at once, and after \ using all your physical strength and most of your dis- ! crimination, you are most probably embarked in the wrong one, and are going at ten miles the hour to j Bbtckwell, when you are bound to Islington. A j Londoner passes his life in learning the most adroit j mode of threading a crowd, and escaping compulsory , journeys in cabs and omnibuses; and dine with any ; man in that metropolis from twenty-five to sixty years i of age, and he will entertain you. from the soup to the Curac/oa, with his hair-breadth escapes and difficulties with cads and coach-drivers. CHAPTER III. A LONDONER, if met abroad, answers very vaguely any questions you may be rash enough to put to him about " the city." Talk to him of "town," and he would rather miss seeing St. Peter s, than appear ig norant of any person, thing, custom, or fashion, con cerning whom or which you might have a curiosity. It is understood all over the world that the " city" of London is that crowded, smoky, jostling, omnibus and cab-haunted portion of the metropolis of England which lies east of Temple Bar. A kind of debatable country, consisting of the Strand, Covent Garden, and j Tottenham Court road, then intervenes, and west of j these lies what is called " the town." A transit from j one to the other by an inhabitant of either is a matter j of some forethought and provision. If milord, in Carlton Terrace, for example, finds it necessary to visit his banker in Lombard street, he orders not the blood bay and the cane tilbury which he is wont to drive in the morning but the crop roadster in the cab, with the night harness, and Poppet his tiger in plain hat and gaiters. If the banker iu Lombard street, on the contrary, emerges from the twilight of his counting-house to make a morning call on the wife of some foreign correspondent, lodging at the Clarendon, he steps into a Piccadilly omnibus, not in the salt-and-pepper creations of his Cheapside tailor, but (for he has an account with Stultz also for the west-end business) in a claret-colored frock of the last fashion at Crockford s, a fresh hat from New Bond street, and (if he is young) a pair of cherished boots from the Rue St. Honore. He sits very clear of his neighbors on the way, and, getting out at the crossing at Farrance s, the pastry cook, steps in and indulges in a soup, and then walks slowly past the clubs to his rendezvous, at a pace that would ruin his credit irre vocably if practised a mile to the eastward. The dif ference between the two migrations is, simply, that though the nobleman affects the plainness of the city, he would not for the world be taken for a citizen ; while the junior partner of the house of Firkins and Co. would feel unpleasantly surprised if he were not supposed to be a member of the clubs, lounging to a late breakfast. There is a " town" manner, too, and a " city" man ner, practised with great nicety by all who frequent both extremities of London. Nothing could be in more violent contrast, for example, than the manner of your banker when you dine with him at his coun try-house, and the same person when you meet him on the narrow sidewalk in Throgmorton street. If you had seen him first in his suburban retreat, you would wonder how the deuce such a cordial, joyous, spare- nothing sort of good fellow could ever reduce himself to the cautious proportions of Change alley. If you met him first in Change alley, on the contrary, you would wonder, with quite as much embarrassment, how such a cold, two-fingered, pucker-browed slave of mammon could ever, by any license of interpreta tion, be called a gentleman. And when you have seen him in both places, and know him well, if he is a favorable specimen of his class, you will be aston ished still more to see how completely he will sustain both characters giving you the cold shoulder, in a way that half insults you, at twelve in the morning, and putting his home, horses, cellar, and servants, completely at your disposal at four in the afternoon. Two souls inhabit the banker s body, and each is ap parently sole tenant in turn. As the Hampstead early coach turns the corner by St. Giles s, on its way to the bank, the spirit of gain enters into the bosom of the junior Firkins, ejecting, till the coach passes the same spot at three in the afternoon, the more gentle manly inhabitants. Between those hours, look to Firkins for no larger sentiment than may be written upon the blank lines of a note of hand, and expect no courtesy that would occupy the head or hands of the junior partner longer than one second by St. Paul s. With the broad beam of sunshine that inundates the returning omnibus emerging from Holborn into Tot tenham Court road, the angel of port wine and green fields passes his finger across Firkins s brow, and presto! the man is changed. The sight of a long and narrow strip of paper, sticking from his neighbor s pocket, depreciates that person in his estimation, he criticises the livery and riding of the groom trotting past, says some very true things of the architecture of the new cottage on the roadside, and is landed at the end of his own shrubbery, as pleasant and joyous- looking a fellow as you would meet on that side of London. You have ridden out to dine with him, and as he meets you on the lawn, there is still an hour to dinner, and a blood horse spatters round from the sta bles, which you are welcome to drive to the devil if you like, accompanied either by Mrs. Firkins or him self; or, if you like it better, there are Mrs. Firkins s two ponies, and the chaise holds two and the tiger. Ten to one Mrs. Firkins is a pretty woman, and has 198 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. her whims, and when you are fairly on the road, she proposes to leave the soup and champagne at home to equalize their extremes of temperature, drive to Whitehall Stairs, take boat and dine, extempore, at Richmond. Arid Firkins, to whom it will be at least twenty pounds out of pocket, claps his hands and says " By Jove, it s a bright thought ! touch up the near pony, Mrs. Firkins." And away you go, Firkins amusing himself the whole way from Hampstead to Richmond, imagining the consternation of his cook and butler when nobody comes to dine. There is an aristocracy in the city, of course, and Firkins will do business with twenty persons in a day whom he could never introduce to Mrs. Firkins. The situation of that lady with respect to her society is (she will tell you in confidence) rather embarrassing. There are many very worthy persons, she will say, who represent large sums of money or great interests in trade, whom it is necessary to ask to the Lodge, but who are far from being ornamental to her new blue satin boudoir. She has often proposed to Fir kins to have them labelled in tens and thousands ac cording to their fortunes ; that if, by any unpleasant accident, Lord Augustus should meet them there, he might respect them like = in algebra, for what they stand for. But as it is, she is really never safe in cal culating on a societe choisie to dine or sup. When Hook or Smith is just beginning to melt out, or Lady Priscilla is in the middle of a charade, in walks Mr. Snooks, of the foreign house of Snooks, Son, and Co. " unexpectedly arrived from Lisbon, and run down without ceremony to call on his respectable cor respondent." " Isn t it tiresome ?" " Very, my dear madam ! But then you have the happiness of knowing that you promote very essen tially your husband s interests, and when he has made a plum " Yes, very true; and then, to be sure, Firkins has had to build papa a villa, and buy my brother Wilfred a commission, and settle an annuity on my aunt, and fit out my youngest brother Bob to India ; and when I think of what he does for my family, why I don t mind making now and then a sacrifice ; but, after all, it s a great evil not to be able to cultivate one s own class of society." And so murmurs Mrs. Firkins, who is the prettiest \ and sweetest creature in the world, and really loves the husband she married for his fortune ; but as the I prosperity of Hainan was nothing while Mordecaj sat i at the gate, it is nothing to Mrs. Firkins that her fa ther lives in luxury, that her brothers are portioned off, and that she herself can have blue boudoirs and pony-chaises ad libitum, while Snooks, Son, and Co., may at any moment break in upon the charade of Lady Priscilla ! There is a class of business people in London, mostly bachelors, who have wisely declared themselves independent of the West End, and live in a style of their own in the dark courts and alleys about the Ex- I change, but with a luxury not exceeded even in the silken recesses of May Fair. You will sometimes j meet at the opera a young man of decided style, un exceptionable in his toilet, and quiet and gentleman- j like in his address, who contents himself with the side | alley of the pit, and looks at the bright circles of beau- i ty and fashion about him with an indifference it is dif ficult to explain. Make his acquaintance by chance, j and he takes you home to supper in a plain chariot on j the best springs Long Acre can turn out ; and while i you are speculating where, in the name of the prince of darkness, these narrow streets will bring you to, you are introduced through a small door into saloons, ! perfect in taste and luxury, where, ten to one, you sup with the prima donna, or la premiere danseuse, but certainly with the most polished persons of your own sex, not one of whom, though you may have passed a life io London, you ever met in society before. There are, I doubt not, in that vast metropolis, hundreds of small circles of society, composed thus of persons refined by travel and luxury, whose very existence is unsuspected by the fine gentleman at the West End, but who, in the science of living agreeably, are almost as well entitled to rank among the cognoscenti as Lord Sefton or the " member for Finsbury." CHAPTER IV. You return from your ramble in " the city" by two o clock. A bright day " toward," and the season in its palmy time. The old veterans are just creeping out upon the portico of the United Service club, hav ing crammed "The Times" over their late breakfast, and thus prepared their politics against surprise for the day ; the broad steps of the Athenreum are as yet unthronged by the shuffling feet of the literati, whose morning is longer and more secluded than that of idler men, but who will be seen in swarms, at four, entering that superb edifice in company with the employes and politicians who affect their society. Not a cab stands yet at the "Travellers," whose members, noble or fashionable, are probably at this hour in their dres sing-gowns of brocade or shawl of the orient, smoking a hookah over Balzac s last romance, or pursuing at this (to them) desert time of day some adventure which waited upon their love and leisure. It is early yet for the park; but the equipages you will see by-and-by "in the ring" are standing now at Howell and James s, and while the high-bred horses are fretting at the door, and the liveried footmen lean on their gold- headed sticks on the pavement, the fair creature whose slightest nod these trained minions and their fine- limbed animals live to obey, sits upon a three-legged stool within, and in the voice which is a spell upon all hearts, and with eyes to which rank and genius turn like Persians to the sun, discusses with a pert clerk the quality of stockings ! Look at these equipages and their appointments ! Mark the exquisite balance of that claret-bodied chariot upon its springs the fine sway of its sumptuous ham mer-cloth in which the un-smiling coachman sits buried to the middle the exact fit of the saddles, set ting into the curve of the horses backs so as not break, to the most careless eye, the fine lines which exhibit action and grace ! See how they stand together, alert, fiery, yet obedient to the weight of a silken thread ; and as the coachman sees you studying his turn-out, observe the imperceptible feel of the reins and the just-visible motion of his lips, conveying to the quick ears of his horses the premonitory, and, to us, inaudible sound, to which, without drawing a hair s breadth upon the traces, they paw their fine hoofs, and expand their nostrils impatiently ! Come nearer, and find a speck or a raised hair, if you can, on these glossy coats ! Observe the nice fitness of the dead-black harness, the modest crest upon the panel, the delicate picking out of white in the wheels, and, if you will venture upon a freedom in manners, look in through the window of rose-teinled glass, and see the splendid cushions and the costly and perfect adaptation of the interior. The twinmated footmen fly to the carriage-door, and the pomatumed clerk who has enjoyed a tele-d-tete for which a prince-royal might sigh, and an ambassador negotiate in vain, hands in his parcel. The small foot presses on the carpeted step, the airy vehicle yields lightly and recovers from the slight weight of the descending form, the coach man inclines his ear for the half-suppressed order SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 199 from the footman, and off whirls the admirable struc ture, compact, true, steady, but magically free and fast as if horses, footmen, and chariot were but the parts of some complicated centaur some swift-moving monster upon legs and wheels ! Walk on a little farther to the Quadrant. Here commences the most thronged promenade in London. These crescent colonnades are the haunt of foreigners on the lookout for amusement, and of strangers in the metropolis generally. You will seldom find a town- bred man there, for he prefers haunting his clubs; or, if he is not a member of them, he avoids lounging much in the Quadrant, lest he should appear to have no other resort. You will observe a town dandy getting fidgety after his second turn in the Quadrant, while you will meet the same Frenchman there from noon till dusk, bounding his walk by those columns as if they were the bars of a cage. The western side toward Piccadilly is the thoroughfare of the honest passer-by ; but under the long portico opposite, you will meet vice in every degree, and perhaps more beauty than on any other pave, in the world. It is given up to the vicious and their followers by general consent. To frequent it, or to be seen loitering there at all, is to make but one impression on the mind of those who may observe you. The two sides of Regent street continue to partake of this distinction to the end. Go up on the left, and | you meet the sober citizen perambulating with his wife, the lady followed by her footman, the grave and the respectable of all classes. Go up on the other, and in color and mien it is the difference between a grass-walk and a bed of tulips. What proof is here that beauty is dangerous to its possessor ! It is said commonly of Regent street, that it shows more beauty in an hour than could be found in all the capitals of the continent. It is the beauty, however, of brilliant health of complexion and freshness, more than of sentiment or classic correctness. The English features, at least in the middle and lower ranks, are seldom good, though the round cheek, the sparkling lip, the soft blue eyes and hair of dark auburn, common as health and youth, produce the effect of high and al most universal beauty on the eye of the stranger. The larest thing in these classes is a finely-turned limb, and to the clumsiness of their feet and ankles must be attributed the want of grace usually remarked in their movements. Regent street has appeared to me the greatest and most oppressive solitude it) the world. In a crowd of business men, otHn the thronged and mixed gardens j of the continent, the pre-occupation of others is less attractive, or at least, more within our reach, if we would share in it. Here, it is wealth beyond com- j petition, exclusiveness and indifference perfectly un- approachable. In the cold and stern mien ^of the practised Londoner, it is difficult for a stranger not to read distrust, and very difficult for a depressed mind not to feel a marked repulsion. There is no solitude, alter all, like the solitude of cities. " O dear, dear London" (says the companion of Asmodeus on his return from France), "dear even in October ! Regent street, 1 salute you ! Bond street, my good fellow, how are you ? And you, oh, beloved Oxford street, whom the opium-eater called stony hearted, and whom I, enting no opium, and speaking as I find, shall ever consider the most kindly and ma ternal of all streets the street of the middle classes busy without uproar, wealthy without ostentation. Ah, the pretty ankles that trip along thy pavement ! Ah! the odd country-cousin bonnets that peer into thy windows, which are lined with cheap yellow shawls, price one pound four shillings, marked in the corner ! Ah ! the brisk young lawyers flocking from their quar ters at the back of Holborn ! Ah ! the quiet old ladies, living in Duchess street, and visiting thee with their eldest daughters in the hope of a bargain ! Ah, the bumpkins from Norfolk just disgorged by the Bull and Mouth the soldiers the milliners the Frenchmen the swindlers the porters with four-post beds on their backs, who add the excitement of danger to that of amusement ! The various shifting, motley group that belong to Oxford street, and Oxford street alone ! What thoroughfares equal thee in the variety of human specimens ! in the choice of objects for remark, satire, admiration! Besides, the other streets seem chalked out for a sect narrow-minded and devoted to a coterie. Thou alone art catholic all-receiving. Regent street belongs to foreigners, cigars, and ladies in red silk, whose characters are above scandal. Bond street be longs to dandies and picture-dealers. St. James s street to club loungers and young men in the guards, with mustaches properly blackened by the cire of Mr. Delcroix; but thou, Oxford street, what class can especially claim thee as its own ? Thou mockest at oligarchies ; thou knowest nothing of select orders ! Thou art liberal as air a chartered libertine; accept ing the homage of all, and retaining the stamp of none. And to call thee stony-hearted! certainly thou art so lo beggars to people who have not the WHEREWITHAL. But thou wouldst not be so respect- able if thou wert not capable of a certain reserve to paupers. Thou art civil enough, in all conscience, to those who have a shilling in their pocket those who have not, why do they live at all ?" CHAPTER V. IT is near four o clock, and in Bond street you might almost walk on the heads of livery-servants at every stride stepping over the heads of two ladies and a dandy exclusive. Thoroughfare it is none, for the carriages are creeping on, inch by inch, the blood- horses " marking time," the coarhman watchful for his panels and whippletrees, and the lady within her silken chariot, lounging back, with her eyes upon the passing line, neither impatient nor surprised at the delay, for she came there on purpose. Between the swaying bodies of the carriages, hesitating past, she receives the smiles and recognitions of all her male acquaintances ; while occasionally a female ally (for allies against the rest of the sex are as necessary in society to women, as in war to monarchs) occasion ally, I say, a female ally announced by the crest upon the blinker of an advancing horse, arrives opposite her window, and, with only the necessary delay in passing, they exchange, perhaps, inquiries for health, but, cer tainly, programmes, comprehensive though brief, for the prosecution of each other s loves or hates. Occa sionally a hack cab, seduced into attempting Bond street by some momentary opening, finds itself closed in, forty deep, by chariots, butckas, landaus, and fam ily coaches ; and amid the imperturbable and unan- swermg whips of the hammercloth, with a passenger I who is losing the coach by the delay, he must wait, will-he-nill-he, till some "pottering" dowager has purchased the old lord his winter flannels, or till the countess of Loiter has said all she has to say to the guardsman whom she has met accidentally at Pluck- rose, the perfumer s. The three tall fellows, with gold sticks, would see the entire plebeian population of London thrice-sodden in vitriol, before they would advance miladi s carriage a step, or appear to possess eyes or ears for the infuriated cabman. Bond street, at this hour, is a study for such ob- I servers, as, having gone through an apprenticeship of criticism upon all the other races and grades of men and gentlemen in the world, are now prepared to study 200 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. their species in its highest fashionable phase that of "nice persons" at the" West End. The Oxford-street "swell," and the Regent-street dandy, if seen here, are out of place. The expressive word "quiet" (with its present London signification), defines the dress, manner, bow, and even physiognomy, of every true denizen of St. James s and Bond street. The great principle among men of the clubs, in all these partic ulars, is to subdue to deprive their coats, hats, and manners, of everything sufficiently marked to be cari catured by the satirical or imitated by the vulgar. The triumph of style seems to be that the lines which define it shall be imperceptible to the common eye that it shall require the difficult education which cre ates it to know its form and limit. Hence an almost universal error with regard to English gentlemen that they are repulsive and cold. With a thousand times the heart and real politeness of the Frenchman, they meet you with the simple and unaffected address which would probably be that of shades in Elysium, between whom (we may suppose) there is no longer etiquette or concealment. The only exceptions to this rule in London, are, first and alone, Count , whose extraordinary and original style, marked as it is, is inimitable by any man of less brilliant talents and less beauty of person, and the king s guardsmen, who are dandies by prescriptive right, or, as it were, professionally. All other men who are members of Brooks s and the Traveller s, and frequent Bond street in the flush of the afternoon, are what would be called in America, plain, unornamental, and, perhaps, ill- dressed individuals, who would strike you more by the absence than the possession of all the peculiarities which we generally suppose marks a " picked man of countries." In America, particularly, we are liable to error on this point, as, of the great number of our travellers for improvement, scarce one in a thousand remains longer in London than to visit the tower and the Thames tunnel. The nine hundred and ninety- nine reside principally, and acquire all they get of for eign manner and style, at Paris the very most artifi cial, corrupt, and affected school for gentlemen in the polite world. Prejudice against any one country is an illiberal feeling, which common reflection should, and which enlightened travel usually does, entirely remove. There is a vulgar prejudice against the English in almost all countries, but more particularly in ours, which blinds its entertainers to much that is admira ble, and deprives them of the good drawn from the best models. The troop of scurrilous critics, the class of English bagmen, and errant vulgarians of all kinds, and the industriously-blown coals of old hostilities, are barriers which an educated mind may well over look, and barriers beyond which lie, no doubt, the best examples of true civilization and refinement the world ever saw. But we are getting into an essay when we should be turning down Bruton street, on our way to the park, with all the fashion of Bond street and May Fair. May Fair ! what a name for the core of dissipated and exclusive London! A name that brings with it only the scent of crushed flowers in a green field, of a pole wreathed with rose, booths crowded with dancing peasant-girls, and nature in its holyday! This to express the costly, the courtlike, the so-called " heart less" precinct of fashion and art, in their most authen tic and envied perfection. Mais, les extremes se tou- client, and, perhaps, there is more nature in May Fair than in Rose Cottage or Honeysuckle Lodge. We stroll on through Berkeley square, by Chester field and Curzon streets to the park gate. What an aristocraiic quiet reigns here ! How plain are the ex teriors of these houses : how unexpressive these doors, without a name, of the luxury and high-born pride within ! At the open window of the hall sit the butler and footman, reading the morning paper, while they wait to dispense the "not at home" to callers not dis appointed. The rooks are noisy in the old trees of Chesterfield house. The painted window-screens of the probably still-slumbering Count , in his bach elor s den, are closely drawn, and, as we pass Seymour place, a crowd of gay cabs and diplomatic chariots, drawn up before the dark-green door at the farther ex tremity, announce to you the residence of one whose morning and evening levees are alike thronged by dis tinction and talent the beautiful Lady . This short turn brings us to the park, which is rap idly filling with vehicles of every fashion and color, and with pedestrians and horsemen innumerable. No hackney-coach, street-cab, cart, or pauper, is allowed to pass the porters at the several gates : the road is macadamized and watered, and the grass within the ring is fresh and verdant. The sun here triumphs partially over the skirt of London smoke, which sways backward and forward over the chimneys of Park lane, and, as far as it is possible so near the dingy halo of the metropolis, the gay occupants of these varied con veyances "take the air." Let us stand by the railing a moment, and see what comes by. This is the field of display for the coach man, who sits upon his sumptuous hammercloth, and takes more pride in his horses than their owner, and considers them, if not like his own honor and blood, very like his own property. Watch the delicate handling of his ribands, the affected nonchalance of his air, and see how perfectly, how admirably, how beautifully, move his blood horses, and how steadily and well follows the compact carriage ! Within (it is a dark-green calcche, and the liveries are drab, with red edgings) sits the oriental form and bright spiritual face of a banker s wife, the daughter of a noble race, who might have been, but was not, sacrificed in " mar rying into the finance," and who soars up into the sky of happiness, like the unconscious bird that has es caped the silent arrow of the savage, as if her destiny could not but have been thus fulfilled. Who follows? D Israeli, alone in his cab; thoughtful, melancholy, disappointed in his political schemes, and undervaluing his literary success, and expressing, in his scholar-like and beautiful profile, as he passes us, both the thirst at his heart and the satiety at his lips. The livery of his " tiger" is neglected, and he drives like a man who has to choose between running and being run against, 1 1 and takes that which leaves him the most leisure for re flection. Poor D Israeli ! With a kind and generous heart, talents of the most brilliant <C?der, an ambition which consumes his soul, and a father who expects everything from his son ; lost for the want of a tact common to understandings fathoms deep below his own, and likely to drive in Hyde Park forty years hence, if he die not of the corrosion of disappointment, no more distinguished than now, and a thousand times more melancholy. An open barouche follows, drawn by a pair of dark bays, the coachman and footman in suits of plain gray, and no crest on the panels. A lady, of remarkable small person, sits, with the fairest foot ever seen, just peeping from under a cashmere, on the forward cush ion, and from under her peculiarly plain and small bonnet burn, in liquid fire, the most lambent and spiritual eyes that night and sleep ever hid from the world. She is a niece of Napoleon, married to an English nobleman ; and beside her sits her father, who refused the throne of Tuscany, a noble-looking man, with an expression of calm and tranquil resigna tion in his face, unusually plain in his exterior, and less alive than most of the gay promenaders to the bright scene passing about him. He will play in the charade at his daughter s soiree in the evening, how ever, and forget his exile and his misfortunes ; for he is a fond father and a true philosopher. SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 201 CHAPTER VI. IF you dine with all the world at seven, you have still an hour or more for Hyde Park, and " Rotten Row;" this half mile between Oxford street and Pic cadilly, to which the fashion of London confines itself, as if the remainder of the bright green park were for bidden ground, is now fuller than ever. There is the advantage in this condensed, drive, that you are sure to see your friends here, earlier or later, in every day (for wherever you are to go with horses, the conclu sion of the order to the coachman is, " home by the park") and then if there is anything new in the way of an arrival, a pretty foreigner, or a fresh face from the country, some dandy s tiger leaves his master at the gate, and brings him at his club, over his coffee, all possible particulars of her name, residence, con dition, and whatever other circumstances fall in his way. By dropping in at Lady s soiree in the evening, if you were interested in the face, you may inform yourself of more than you would have drawn in a year s acquaintance from the subject of your cu riosity. Malapropos to my remark, here comes a turn-out, concerning which and its occupant I have made many inquiries in vain the pale-colored chariot, with a pair of grays, dashing toward us from the Sey mour gate. As it comes by you will see, sitting quite in the corner, and in a very languid and elegant atti tude, a slight woman of perhaps twenty-four, dressed in the simplest white cottage-bonnet that could be | made, and, with her head down, looking up through heavy black eyelashes, as if she but waited till she had ! passed a particular object, to resume some engrossing j revery. Her features are Italian, and her attitude, j always the same indolent one, has also a redolence of ] that land of repose; but there has been an English | taste, and no ordinary one, in the arrangement of that I equipage and its dependants ; and by the expression, never mistaken in London, of the well-appointed me nials, you may be certain that both master and mis tress (if master there be), exact no common deference. She is always alone, and not often seen in the park ; and whenever I have inquired of those likely to know, I found that she had been observed, but could get no satisfactory information. She disappears by the side toward the Regent s park, and when once out of the gate, her horses are let off at a speed that distances j all pursuit that would not attract observation. There i is a look of" Who the deuce can it be ?" in the faces j of all the mounted dandies, wherever she passes, for | it is a face which once seen is not easily thought of with indifference, or forgotten. Immense as London is, a woman of anything like extraordinary beauty would find it difficult to live there incognito a week ; and how this fair incomprehensible has contrived to elude the curiosity of Hyde-park admiration, for nearly two years, is rather a marvel. There she goes, how ever, and without danger of being arrested for a flying highwayman you could scarcely follow. It is getting late, and, as we turn down toward the clubs, we shall meet the last and most fashionable comers to the park. Here is a horseman, surrounded with half a dozen of the first young noblemen of Eng land. He rides a light bay horse with dark legs, whose delicate veins are like the tracery of silken threads beneath the gloss of his limbs, and whose small, animated head seems to express the very es sence of speed and fire. He is the most beautiful park horse in England ; and behind follows a high bred milk-white pony, ridden by a small, faultlessly- dressed groom, who sits the spirited and fretting crea ture as if he anticipated every movement before the fine hoof rose from the ground. He rides admirably, but his master is more of a study. A luxuriance of black curls"escapes from the broad rim of a peculiar hat, and forms a relief to the small and sculpture-like profile of a face as perfect, by every rule of beauty, as the Greek Antinous. It would be too feminine but for the muscular neck and broad chest from which the head rises, and the indications of great personal strength in the Herculean shoulders. His loose coat would disguise the proportions of a less admirable figure ; but, au resle, his dress is without fold or wrinkle, and no figurante of the ballet ever showed finer or more skilfully developed limbs. He is one of the most daring in (his country of bold riders ; but modifies the still English school of equestrianism, with the ease and grace of that of his own country. His manner, though he is rather Angtomane, is in striking contrast to the grave and quiet air of his com panions ; and between his recognitions, right and left, to the passing promenaders, he laughs and amuses himself with the joyous and thoughtless gayety of a child. Acknowledged by all his acquaintances to pos sess splendid talents, this " observed of all observers" is a singular instance of a modern Sybarite content to sacrifice time, opportunity, and the highest advan tages of mind and body, to the pleasure of the moment. He seems exempt from all the usual penalties of such a career. Nothing seems to do its usual work on him care, nor exhaustion, nor recklessness, nor the dis approbation of the heavy-handed opinion of the world. Always gay, always brilliant, ready to embark at any moment, or at any hazard, in anything that will amuse an hour, one wonders how and where such an un wonted meteor will disappear. But here comes a carriage without hammercloth or liveries; one of those shabby-genteel conveyances, hired by the week, containing three or four persons in the highest spirits, all talking and gesticulating at once. As the carriage passes the " beau-knot" (as , and his inseparable troop are sometimes called), one or two of the dandies spur up, and resting their hands on the windows, offer the compliments of the day to the only lady within, with the most earnest looks of ad miration. The gentlemen in her company become silent, and answer to the slight bows of the cavaliers with foreign monosyllables, and presently the coach man whips up once more, the horsemen drop off, and the excessive gayety of the party resumes its tone. You must have been struck, as the carriage passed, with the brilliant whiteness and regularity of the lady s teeth, and still more with the remarkable play of her lips, which move as if the blood in them were im prisoned lightning. (The figure is strong, but nothing else conveys to my own mind what I am trying to de scribe.) Energy, grace, fire, rapidity, and a capabili ty of utter abandoment to passion and expression, live visibly on those lips. Her eyes are magnificent. Her nose is regular, with nostrils rimmed round with an expansive nerve, that gives them constantly the kind of animation visible in the he;id of a fiery Arab. Her complexion is one of those which, dark and wanting in brilliance by day, light up at night with an alabaster fairness ; and when the glossy black hair, which is now put away so plainly under her simple bonnet, falls over her shoulders in heavy masses, the contrast is radiant. The gentlemen in that carriage are Rubin i, Lablache, and a gentleman who passes for the lady s uncle ; and the hidy is Julia Grini. The smoke over the heart of the city begins to thicken into darkness, the gas-lamps are shooting up, bright and star-like, along the Kensington road, and the last promenaders disappear. And now the world of London, the rich and gay portion of it at least, i enjoy that which compensates them for the absence of the bright nights and skies of Italy a climate within doors, of comfort and luxury, unknown under brighter heavens. 202 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. CHAPTER VII. ISLE OF WIGHT RTDE. " INSTEAD of parboiling you with a soiree or a din ner," said a sensible and kind friend, who called on us at Ryde, " I shall make a pic-nic to Netley." And on a bright, breezy morning of June, a merry party of some twenty of the inhabitants of the green Isle of Wight shot away from the long pier, in one of the swift boats of those waters, with a fair wind for South ampton. Ryde is the most American-looking town I have seen abroad; a cluster of white houses and summery villas on the side of a hill, leaning up from the sea. Geneva, on the Seneca lake, resembles it. It is a place of baths, boarding-houses, and people of damaged constitutions, with very select society, and quiet and rather primitive habils. The climate is de- liciously soft, and the sun seems always to shine there. As we got out into the open channel, I was assisting the skipper to tighten his bowline, when a beautiful ship, in the distance, putting about on a fresh track, caught the sun full on her snowy sails, and seemed to start like an apparition from the sea. " She s a liner, sir !" said the bronzed boatman, sus pending his haul to give her a look of involuntary ad miration. "An American packet, you mean?" "They re the prettiest ships afloat, sir," he contin ued, " and the smartest handled. They re out to New York, and back again, before you can look round, a most. Ah, I see her flag now stars and stripes. Can you see it, sir?" "Are the captains Englishmen, principally?" I asked. "No, sir! all calculators ; sharp as a needle!" "Thank you," said I; " I am a calculator too!" The conversation ceased, and I thought from the boatman s look, that he had more respect than love for us. The cloud of snowy sail traversed the breadth of the channel with the speed of a bird, wheeled again upon her opposite tack, and soon disappeared from view, taking with her the dove of my imagination to return with an olive-branch from home. It must be a cold American heart whose strings are not swept by that bright flag in a foreign land, like a harp with the impassioned prelude of the master. Cowes was soon upon our lee, with her fairy fleet of yachts lying at anchor Lord Yarborough s frigate- looking craft asleep amid its dependant brood, with all its fine tracery of rigging drawn on a cloudless sky, the picture of what it is, and what all vessels seem to me a thing for pleasure only. Darting about like a swal low on the wing, a small, gayly-painted sloop-yacht, as graceful and slender as the first bow of the new moon, played off the roadstead for the sole pleasure of motion, careless whither ; and meantime the low- fringed shores of the Southampton side grew more and more distinct, and before we had well settled upon our cushions, the old tower of the abbey lay sharp over the bow. We enjoyed the first ramble through the ruins the better, that to see them was a secondary object. The first was to select a grassy spot for our table. Thread ing the old unroofed vaults with this errand, the pause of involuntary homage exacted by a sudden burst upon an arch or a fretted window, was natural and true ; and for those who are disturbed by the formal and trite enthusiasm of companions who admire by a prompter, this stalking-horse of another pursuit was not an in different advantage. The great roof over the principal nave of the abbey has fallen in, and lies in rugged and picturesque masses within the Gothic shell windows, arches, secret stair- cases, and gray walls, all breaking up the blue sky around, but leaving above, for a smooth and eternal roof, an oblong and ivy-fringed segment of the blue plane of heaven. It seems to rest on those crumbling corners as you stand within. We selected a rising bank under the shoulder of a rock, grown over with moss and ivy, and following the suggestion of a pretty lover of the picturesque, the shawls and cloaks, with their bright colors, were thrown over the nearest fragments of the roof, and every body unbonneted and assisted in the arrangements. An old woman who sold apples outside the walls was em ployed to build a fire for our teakettle in a niche where, doubtless, in its holier days, had stood the effigy of a saint ; and at the pedestals of a cluster of slender columns our attendants displayed upon a table a show of pasties and bright wines, that, if there be monkish spirits who walk at Netley, we have added a poignant regret to their purgatories, that their airy stomachs can be no more vino ciboque gravali. We were doing justice to a pretty shoulder of lamb, with mint sauce, when a slender youth who had been wandering around with a portfolio, took up an artist s position in the farther corner of the ruins, and began to sketch the scene. I mentally felicitated him on the accident that had brought him to Netley at that par ticular moment, for a prettier picture than that before him an artist could scarce have thrown together. The inequalities of the floor of the abbey provided a mossy table for every two or three of the gayly-dressed ladies, and there they reclined in small and graceful groups, their white dresses relieved on the luxuriant grass, and between them, half buried in moss, the sparkling glasses full of bright wines, and an air of ease and grace over all, which could belong only to the two extremes of Arcadian simplicity, or its high-bred im itation. We amused ourselves with the idea of ap pearing, some six months after, in the middle ground of a landscape, in a picturesque annual ; and I am afraid that I detected, on the first suggestion of the idea, a little unconscious attitudinizing in some of the younger members of the party. It was proposed that the artist should be invited to take wine with us ; but as a rosy-cheeked page donned his gold hat to carry our compliments, the busy draughtsman was joined by one or two ladies not quite so attractive-looking as himself, but evidently of his own party, and our mes senger was recalled. Sequitur they who would find adventure should travel alone. The monastic ruins of England derive a very pecu liar and touching beauty from the bright veil of ivy which almost buries them from the sun. This con stant and affectionate mourner draws from the moist ure of the climate a vividness and luxuriance which is found in no other land. Hence the remarkable love liness of Netley a quality which impresses the visit- ers to this spot, far more than the melancholy usually inspired by decay. Our gayety shocked some of the sentimental people rambling about the ruins, for it is difficult for those who have not dined to sympathize with the mirth of those who have. How often we mistake for sadness the depression of an empty stomach ! How differently authors and travellers would write, if they commenced the day, instead of ending it, with meats and wine! I was led to these reflections by coming suddenly upon i young lady and her companion (possibly her lover), n climbing a ruined staircase sheathed within the wall of the abbey. They were standing at one of the windows, quite unconscious of my neighborhood, and looking down upon the gay party of ladies below, who were still amid the debris of the feast arranging their bonnets for a walk. 1 What a want of soul," said the lady, "to be eat ing and drinking in such a place !" SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 203 "Some people have no souls," responded the gentle man. After this verdict, I thought the best thing I could do was to take care of my body, and I very carefully backed down the old staircase, which is probably more hazardous now than in the days when it was used to admit damsels and haunches of venison to the reverend fathers. I reached the bottom in safety, and informed my friends that they had no souls, but they manifested the usual unconcern on the subject, and strolled away through the echoing arches, in search of new points of view and fresh wild-flowers. " Commend me at least," I thought, as 1 followed on, "to those whose pulses can be quickened even by a cold pie and a glass of champagne. Sadness and envy are sown thickly enough by any wayside." We were embarked once more by the middle of the afternoon, and with a head wind, but smooth water and cool temperature, beat back to Ryde. If the young lady and her lover have forgiven or forgotten us, and the ghosts of Netley, frocked or petticoated, have taken no umbrage, 1 have not done amiss in marking the day with a stone of the purest white. How much more sensible is a party like this, in the open air, and at healthy hours, than the untimely and ceremonious civilities usually paid to strangers. If the world would mend by moralising, however, we should have had a Utopia long ago. CHAPTER VIII. COMPARISON OF THE CLIMATK OF EUROPE AND AMERICA. ONE of Hazlitt s nail-driving remarks is to the effect that he should like very well to pass the whole of his life in travelling, if he could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterward at home. How far action is neces sary to happiness, and how far repose how far the appetite for novelty and adventure will drive, and how far the attractions of home and domestic comfort will recall us in short, what are the precise exactions of the antagonist principles in our bosoms of curiosity and sloth, energy and sufferance, hope and memory are questions which each one must settle for himself, and which none can settle but he who has passed his life in the eternal and fruitless search alter the happi est place, climate, and station. Contentment depends upon many things within our own control, but, with a certain education, it depends partly upon things beyond it. To persons delicately constituted or delicately brought up, and to all idle persons, the principal ingredient in the cup of ^enjoy- ment is climate ; and Providence, that consults the greatest happiness of the greatest number," has made the poor and the roughly-nurtured independent of the changes of the wind. Those who have the misfortune to be delicate as well as poor those, particularly, for whom there is no hope but in a change of clime, but whom pitiless poverty compels to languish in vain after the reviving south, are happily few ; but they have thus much more than their share of human ca lamity. In throwing together my recollections of the cli mates with which 1 have become acquainted in other lands, I am aware that there is a greater difference of opinion on this subject than on most others. A man who has agreeable society about him in Montreal, but who was without friends in Florence, would be very likely to brin^ the climate in for its share of the dif ference, and prefer Canada to Italy; and health and circumstances of all kinds affect, in no slight degree, ovr susceptibility to skies and atmosphere. But it is sometimes interesting to know the impressions of oth ers, even though they agree not with our own ; and I will only say of mine on this subject, that they are so far likely to be fair, as I have been blessed with the same perfect health in all countries, and have been happy alike in every latitude and season. It is almost a matter of course to decry the climate of England. The English writers themselves talk of i the suicidal months ; and it is the only country where I part of the livery of a mounted groom is his master s 1 great-coat strapped about his waist. It is certainly a \ damp climate, and the sun shines less in England than i in most other countries. But to persons of full habit this moisture in the air is extremely agreeable ; and ] the high condition of all animals in England, from ! man downward, proves its healthfulness. A stranger who has been accustomed to a brighter sky, will, at j first, find a gloom in the gray light so characteristic of an English atmosphere; but this soon wears off, and ; he finds a compensation, as far as the eye is con- ! cerned, in the exquisite softness of the verdure, and I the deep and enduring brightness of the foliage. The i effect of this moisture on the skin is singularly grate- 1 ful. The pores become accustomed to a healthy ac tion, which is unknown in other countries ; and the bloom by which an English complexion is known all over the world is the index of an activity in this im portant part of the system, which, when first experi enced, is almost like a new sensation. The transition to a dry climate, such as ours, deteriorates the condi tion and quality of the skin, and produces a feeling, if I may so express it, like that of being glazed. It is a common remark in England, that an officer s wife and daughters follow his regiment to Canada at the expense of their complexions ; and it is a well-known fact that the bloom of female beauty is, in our coun try, painfully evanescent. The climate of America is, in many points, very different from that of France and Great Britain. In the middle and northern states, it is a dry, invigora ting, bracing climate, in which a strong man may do more work than in almost any other, and which makes continual exercise, or occupation of some sort, abso lutely necessary. With the exception of the "Indian summer," and here and there a day scattered through i the spring and the hot months, there is no weather : tempered so finely that one would think of passing the day in merely enjoying it, and life is passed, by 1 those who have the misfortune to be idle, in continual and active dread of the elements. The cold is so acrid, and the heat so sultry, and the changes from one to the other are so sudden and violent, that no enjoyment can be depended upon out-of-doors, and no system of clothing or protection is good for a day together. He who has full occupation for head and hand (as by far the greatest majority of our country men have) jnay live as long in America as in any por tion of the globe vide the bills of mortality. He whose spirits lean upon the temperature of the wind, or whose nerves require a genial and constant atmo sphere, may find more favorable climes ; and the hab its and delicate constitutions of scholars and people of sedentary pursuits generally, in the United States, prove the truth of the observation. The habit of regular exercise in the open air, which is found to be so salutary in England, is scarcely pos sible in America. It is said, and said truly, of the first, that there is no day in the year when a lady may not ride comfortably on horseback ; but with us, the extremes of heat and cold, and the tempestuous char acter of our snows and rains, totally forbid, to a deli cate person, anything like regularity in exercise. The consequence is, that the habit rarely exists, and the high and glowing health so common in England, and consequent, no doubt, upon the equable character of the climate in some measure, is with us sufficiently 204 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. rare to excite remark. " Very English-looking," is a common phrase, and means very healthy-looking. Still our people last and though I should define the English climate as the one in which the human frame is in the highest condition, t should say of America, that it is the one in which you could get the most work out of it. Atmosphere, in England and America, is the first of the necessaries of life. In Italy, it is the first of its luxuries. We breathe in America, and walk abroad, without thinking of these common acts but as a means of arriving at happiness. In Italy, to breathe and to walk abroad are themselves happiness. Day after day week after week month after month you wake with the breath of flowers coming in at your open window, and a sky of serene and unfathomable blue, and mornings and evenings of tranquil, assured, heav enly purity and beauty. The few weeks of the rainy season are forgotten in these long halcyon months of sunshine. No one can have lived in Italy a year, who remembers anything but the sapphire sky and the kindling and ever-seen stars. You grow insensibly to associate the sunshine and moonlight only with the fountain you have lived near, or the columns of the temple you have seen from your window, for on no objects in other lands have you seen their light so constant. I scarce know how to convey, in language, the effect of the climate of Italy on mind and body. Sitting here, indeed, in the latitude of thirty-nine, in the middle of April, by a warm fire, and with a cold wind whistling at the window, it is difficult to recall it, even to the fancy. I do not know whether life is pro longed, but it is infinitely enriched and brightened, by the delicious atmosphere of Italy. You rise in the morning, thanking Heaven for life and liberty to go abroad. There is a sort of opi;ite in the air, which makes idleness, that would be the vulture of Prome theus in America, the dove of promise in Italy. It is delicious to do nothing delicious to stand an hour looking at a Savoyard and his monkey delicious to sit away the long, silent noon, in the shade of a col umn, or on the grass of a fountain delicious to be with a friend without the interchange of an idea to dabble in a book, or look into the cup of a flower. You do not read, for you wish to enjoy the weather. You do not visit, for you hate to enter a door while the weather is so fine. You lie down unwillingly for your siesta in the hot noon, for you fear you may oversleep the first coolness of the long shadows of sunset. The fancy, meantime, is free, and seems lib erated by the same languor that enervates the severer faculties ; and nothing seems fed by the air but thoughts, which minister to enjoyment. The climate of Greece is very much that of Italy. The Mediterranean is all beloved of the sun. Life has a value there, of which the rheumatic, shivering, snow-breasting, blue-devilled idler of northern regions has no shadow, even in a dream. No wonder Dante mourned and languished for it. No wonder at the sentiment I once heard from distinguished lips Fuori d? Italia tutto e. esiiio. This appears like describing a Utopia ; but it is tvhat Italy seemed to me. I have expressed myself much more to my mind, however, in rhyme, for a prose essay is, at best, but a cold medium. CHAPTER IX. STRATFORD-ON-AVON. " OWE-P UN -FIVE outside, sir, two p un in." It was a bright, calm afternoon in September, prom ising nothing but a morrow of sunshine and autumn, ! when I stepped in at the White Horse Cellar," in | Piccadilly, to take my place in the Tantivy coach for Stratford-on-Avon. Preferring the outside of the coach, at least by as much as the difference in the prices, and accustomed from long habit to pay dearest for that which most pleased me, I wrote myself down for the outside, and deposited my two pounds in the horny palm of the old ex-coachman, retired from the box, and playing clerk in this dingy den of parcels and | portmanteaus. Supposing my business concluded, I stood a minute speculating on the weather-beaten, cramp-handed old Jehu before me, and trying to rec oncile his ideas of "retirement from office" with those of his almost next door neighbor, the hero of Strath- fieldsaye. I had mounted the first stair toward daylight, when a touch on the shoulder with the end of a long whip a technical "reminder," which probably came easier to the old driver than the phrasing of a sentence to a " gemman" recalled me to the cellar. " Fifteen shillin , sir," said he laconically, pointing with the same expressive exponent of his profession to the change for my outside place, which 1 had left lying on the counter. " You are at least as honest as the duke," I solilo quised, as I pocketed the six bright and substantial half-crowns. I was at the " White Horse Cellar" again the fol lowing morning at six, promising myself with great sincerity never to rely again on the constancy of an English sky. It rained in torrents. The four inside places were all taken, and with twelve fellow-outsides, J mounted to the wet seat, and begging a little straw by way of cushion from the ostler, spread my um brella, abandoned my knees with a single effort of mind to the drippings of the driver s weather-proof upper Benjcim^i, and away we sped. I was "due" at the house of a hospitable catholic baronet, a hundred and two miles from London, at the dinner-hour of that day, and to wait till it had done raining in England is to expect the millennium. London in the morning I mean the poor man s morning, daylight is to me matter for the most speculative and intense melancholy. Hyde park in the sunshine of a bright afternoon, glittering with equipages and gay with the Aladdin splendors of rank and wealth, is a scene which sends the mercurial quali ties of the blood trippingly through the veins. But Hyde park at daylight seen from Piccadilly through fog and rain, is perhaps, of all contrasts, to one who has frequented it in its bright hours, the most dispirit ing and dreary. To remember that behind the barri caded and wet windows of Apsley house sleeps the hero of Waterloo that under these crowded and fog- wrapped houses lie, in their dim chambers breathing of perfume and luxury, the high-born and nobly- moulded creatures who preserve for the aristocracy of England the palm of the world s beauty to remem ber this, and a thousand other associations linked with the spot, is not at all to diminish, but rather to deepen, the melancholy of the picture. Why is it that the deserted stage of a theatre, the echo of an empty ball room, the loneliness of a frequented promenade in untimely hours any scene, in short, of gayety gone by but remembered oppresses and dissatisfies the heart ! One would think memory should re-brighten and re-populate such places. The wheels hissed through the shallow pools in the Macadam road, the regular pattering of the small hoofs in the wet carriage-tracks maintained its quick and monotonous beat on the ear ; the silent driver kept his eye on the traces, and "reminded" now and then with but the weight of his slight lash a lagging wheeler or leader, and the complicated but compact machine of which the square foot that I occupied had been so nicely calculated, sped on its ten miles in the hour SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 205 with the steadfastness of a star in its orbit, aud as in dependent of clouds and rain. "_Es< ce (/ne monsieur parle Francois 1" asked at the end of the first st:ige my right-hand neighbor, a little gentleman, of whom I had hitherto only remarked that he was holding on to the iron railing of the seat with great tenacity. Having admitted in an evil moment that I had been in France, I was first distinctly made to understand j that my neighbor was on his way to Birmingham purely far pleasure, and without the most distant ob ject of business a point on which he insisted so long, and recurred to so often, that he succeeded at last in persuading me that he was doubtless a candidate for the French clerkship of some exporter of buttons. After listening to an amusing dissertation on the rash ness of committing one s life to an English stage coach, with scarce room enough for the perch of a parrot, and a velocity so diablemcnt dangcrcux, I tired of my Frenchman ; and, since I could not have my own thoughts in peace, opened a conversation with a straw-bonnet and shawl on my left the property, I soon discovered, of a very smart lady s maid, very in dignant at having been made to change places with " The carriage has been waiting some time for you, Master George, who, with his mother and her mistress, i sir," s should be the landlady. Having expected to see a rosy little Mrs. Boniface, with a brown pinafore and worsted mittens, I made up my mind at once that the inn had changed mistresses. On the right of the old- fashioned entrance blaeed cheerily the kitchen fire, and with my enthusiasm rather dashed by my disap pointment, I stepped in to make friends with the cook, and get a little warmth and information. " So your old mistress is dead, Mrs. Cook," said I, rubbing my hands with great satisfaction between the fire and a well-roasted chicken. " Lank, sir, no, she isn t !" answered the rosy lass, pointing with a dredging-box to the same respectable lady in black who was just entering to look after me. "I beg pardon, sir," she said, dropping a cour tesy ; " but are you the gentleman expected by Sir Charles ?" "Yes, madam. And can you tell me anything of your predecessor who had the inn in the days of Washington Irving?" She dropped another courtesy, and drew up her thin person to its full height, while a smile of gratified vanity stole out at the corners of her mouth. ere dry and comfortable inside. She "would not have minded the outside place, 1 she said, " for there were sometimes very agreeable gentlemen on the out side, very ! but she had been promised to go inside, and had dressed accordingly ; and it was very pro voking to spoil a nice new shawl and best bonnet, just because a great school-boy, that had nothing on that would damage chose not to ride in the rain." " Very provoking, indeed !" I responded, letting in the rain upon myself unconsciously, in extending my i umbrella forward so as to protect her on the side of the wind. " We should have gone down in the carriage, sir," j she continued, edging a little closer to get the full ad vantage of my umbrella ; " but John the coachman has got the hinfluenzy, and my missis wo n t be driven he said, with a softer tone than that in which .he had hitherto addressed me; " and you will hardly j be at C in time for dinner. You will be coming over to-morrow or the day after, perhaps, sir; and then, if you would honor my little room by taking a cup of tea with me, I should be pleased to tell you all about it, sir." I remembered a promise I had nearly forgotten, that I would reserve my visit to Stratford till I could be accompanied by Miss J. P , whom I was to have the honor of meeting at my place of destina and promising an early acceptance of the kind land lady s invitation, I hurried on to my appointment over the fertile hills of Warwickshire. I was established in one of those old Elizabethan country-houses, which, with their vast parks, their self-sufficing resources of subsistence and company, by no other coachma n ; she s" as obstinate as a mule, j and the absolute deference shown on all sides to the sir. And that isn t all I could tell, sir; but I scorns | lord of the manor, give one the impression rather of a to hurt the character of one of my own sex." And j little kingdom with a castle in its heart, than of an the pretty abigail pursed up her red lips, and looked j abode for a gentleman subject. The house itself determined not to destroy her mistress s character (called, like most houses of this size and consequence in Warwickshire, a " Court,") was a Gothic, half- castellated square, with four round towers, and in numerable embrasures and windows; two wings in front, probably more modern than the body of the house, and again two long wings extending to the rear, at right angles, and enclosing a flowery and formal parterre. There had been a trench about it, now unless particularly requested. I detest what may be called a proper road-book even would it be less absurd than it is to write one on a country so well conned as England. I shall say nothing, therefore, of Marlow, which looked the picture of rural loveliness though seen through fog, nor of Oxford, of which all I remembe is that I dined there with my teeth chattering, and lin. All England is lovely filled up, and at a short distance from the house stood a polyangular and massive structure, well calculated for defence, and intended as a strong-hold for the re- my knees saturated with rain. to the wild eye of an American unused to high cukiva- j tion ; and though my enthusiasm was somewtiat damp, |j treat of the family and tenants in more troubled times. I arrived at the Abridge over the Avon, blessing England ;j One of these rear wings enclosed a catholic chapel, sufficiently for its beauty, and much more for the speed 1 1 for the worship of the baronet and those of his tenants of its coaches. The Avon, above and below the bridge, ran brightly along between low banks, half sward, half meadow ; who professed the same faith ; while on the northern I side, between the house and the garden, stood a large protestant stone church, with a turret and spire, both and on the other side lay the native town of the im- | chapel and church, with the clergyman and priest, favored by the mortal wool-comber a gay cheerful-looking village, i[ dependant on the estate, and equally favor narrowing in the centre to a closely-built street, across ; liberal and high-minded baronet. The tenantry torm- ed two considerable congregations, and lived and wor- shipped side by side, with the most perfect harmony an instance of real Christianity, in my opinion, which the angels of heaven might come down to see. A lovely rural graveyard for the lord and tenants, and a secluded lake below the garden, in which hundreds of wild ducks swam and screamed unmolested, completed the outward features of C court. There are noble houses in England, with a door communicating from the dining-room to the stables, that the master and his friends may see their favorites, which swung, broad and fair, the sign of the " Red : horse." More ambitious hotels lay beyond, and . broader streets ; but while Washington Irving is re membered (and that will be while the language lasts), j the quiet inn in which the great Geoffrey thought and wrote of Shakspere will be the altar of the pil- grim s devotions. My baggage was set down, the coachman and guard tipped their hats for a shilling, and, chilled to the bone, I raised my hat instinctively to the courtesy of a slender gentlewoman in black, who, by the keys at her girdle, 14 206 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. after dinner, without exposure to the weather. In the place of this rather bizarre luxury, the oak-panelled and spacious dining-hall of C is on a level with the organ loft of the chapel, and when the cloth is re moved, the large door between is thrown open, and the noble instrument pours the rich and thrilling music of vespers through the rooms. When the service is concluded, and the lights on the altar ex tinguished, the blind organist (an accomplished musi cian, and a tenant on the estate), continues his volun taries in the dark until the hall-door informs him of the retreat of the company to the drawing-room. There is not only refinement and luxury in this beautiful arrangement, but food for the soul and heart. I chose my room from among the endless vacant but equally luxurious chambers of the rambling old house ; my preference solely directed by the portrait of a nun, one of the family in ages gone by a picture full of melancholy beauty, which hung opposite the window. The face was distinguished by all that in England marks the gentlewoman of ancient and pure descent ; and while it was a woman with the more tender qualities of her sex breathing through her fea tures, it was still a lofty and sainted sister, true to her cross, and sincere in her vows and seclusion. It was the work of a master, probably Vandyke, and a picture in which the most solitary man would find company and communion. On the other walls, and in most of the other rooms and corridors, were distributed por traits of the gentlemen and soldiers of the family, most of them bearing some resemblance to the nun, but differing, as brothers in those wild times may be sup posed to have differed, from the gentle creatures of the blood, nursed in the privacy of peace. CHAPTER X. VISIT TO STRATFORD-ON-AVON SHAKSPERE. ONE of the first visits in the neighborhood was nat urally to Stratford-on-Avon. It lay some ten miles south of us, and I drove down, with the distinguished literary friend I have before mentioned, in the car riage of our kind host, securing, by the presence of his servants and equipage, a degree of respect and at tention which would not have been accorded to us in our simple character of travellers. The prim mistress of the "Red Horse," in her close black bonnet and widow s weeds, received us at the door with a deeper courtesy than usual, and a smile of less wintry formal ity; and proposing to dine at the inn, and "suck the brain" of the hostess more at our leisure, we started immediately for the house of the wool-comber the birthplace of Shakspere. Stratford should have been forbidden ground to builders, masons, shopkeepers, and generally to all people of thrift and whitewash. It is now rather a smart town, with gay calicoes, shawls of the last pat tern, hardware, and millinery, exhibited in all their splendor down the widened and newer streets ; and though here and there remains a glorious old gloomy and inconvenient abode, which looks as if Shakspere might have taken shelter under its eaves, the gayer features of the town have the best of it, and flaunt their gaudy and unrespected newness in the very windows of that immortal birthplace. I stepped into a shop to inquire the way to it. "Shiksper s ouse, sir? Yes, sir!" said a dapper clerk, with his hair astonished into the most impossi ble directions by force of brushing; "keep to the right, sir ! Shiksper lived in the wife ouse, sir the ouse, you see beyond, with the windy swung up, sir." A low, old-fashioned house, with a window sus- pended on a hinge, newly whitewashed and scrubbed, stood a little up the street. A sign over the door in formed us in an inflated paragraph, that the immortal Will Shakspere was born under this roof, and that an old woman within would show it to us for a considera tion. It had been used until very lately, I had been told, for a butcher s shop. A "garrulous old lady" met us at the bottom of the narrow stair leading to the second floor, and began not to say anything of Shakspere but to show us the names of Byron, Moore, Rogers, &c., written among thousands of others on the wall! She had worn out Shakspere ! She had told that story till she was tired of it! or (what, perhaps, is more probable) most people who go there fall to reading the names of the visiters so industriously, that she has grown to think some of Shakspere s pilgrims greater than Shakspere. "Was this old oaken chest here in the days of Shakspere, madam?" I asked. "Yes, sir, and here s the name of Byron here with a capital B. Here s a curiosity, sir." "And this small wooden box?" "Made of Shakspere s mulberry, sir. I had sich a time about that box, sir. Two young gemrnen were here the other day just run up, while the coach was changing horses, to see the house. As soon as they were gone I misses the box. Oft scuds my son to the Red Horse, and there they sat on the top looking as innocent as may be. Stop the coach, says my son. What do you want ? says the driver. My mother s mulberry-box ! Shakspere s mulberry-box ! One of them ere young men s got it in his pocket. And true enough, sir, one on em had the imperence to take it out of his pocket, and flings it into my son s face ; and you know the coach never stops a minnit for nothing, sir, or he d a smarted for it." Spirit of Shakspere ! dost thou not sometimes walk alone in this humble chamber ! Must one s inmost soul be fretted and frighted always from its devotion by an abominable old woman ? Why should not such lucrative occupations be given in charity to the deaf I and dumb ? The pointing of a finger were enough in i such spots of earth ! I sat down in despair to look over the book of visit- i era, trusting that she would tire of my inattention. As it was of no use to point out names to those who ! would not look, however, she commenced a long story i of an American who had lately taken the whim to | sleep in Shakspere s birth-chamber. She had shaken i him down a bed on the floor, and he had passed the i night there. It seemed to bother her to comprehend j why two thirds of her visitors should be Americans j a circumstance that was abundantly proved by the books. It was only when we were fairly in the street that I began to realize that I had seen one of the most glori ous altars of memory that deathless Will Shakspere, the mortal, who was, perhaps (not to speak profanely), next to his Maker, in the divine faculty of creation, first saw the light through the low lattice on which we turned back to look. The single window of the room in which Scott died at Abbotsford, and this in the birth-chamber of Shak spere, have seemed to me almost marked with the touch of the fire of those great souls for I think we have an instinct which tells us on the spot where mighty spirits have come or gone, that they came and went with the light of heaven. We walked down the street to see the house where Shakspere lived on his return to Stratford. It stands at the corner of a lane, not far from the church where he was buried, and is a newish un-Shaksperian looking place no doubt, if it be indeed the same house, most | profanely and considerably altered. The present pro prietor or occupant of the house or site took upon himself some time since the odium of cutting down SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 207 the famous mulberry-tree planted by the poet s hand in the garden. I forgot to mention in the beginning of these notes that two or three miles before coming to Stratford we passed through Shottery, where Anne Hathaway lived. A nephew of the excellent baronet whose guests we were occupies the house. I looked up and down the green lanes about it, and glanced my eye round upon the hills over which the sun has continued to set and the moon to ride in her love-inspiring beauty ever since. There were doubtless outlines in the landscape which had been followed by the eye of Shakspere when coming, a trembling lover, to Shottrey doubt less, teints in the sky, crops on the fields, smoke- wreaths from the old homesteads on the high hill sides, which are little altered now. How daringly the imagination plucks back the past in such places ! How boldly we ask of fancy and probability the thou sand questions we would put, if we might, to the magic mirror of Agrippa ? Did that great mortal love timid ly, like ourselves? Was the passionate outpouring of his heart simple, and suited to the humble condition of Anne Hathaway, or was it the first fiery coinage of Romeo and Othello? Did she know the immortal honor and light poured upon woman by the love of genius ? Did she know how this common and often- est terrestrial passion becomes fused in the poet s bo som with celestial fire, and, in its wondrous elevation and purity, ascends lambently and musically to the very stars ? Did she coy it with him? Was she a woman to him, as commoner mortals find woman ca pricious, tender, cruel, intoxicating, cold everything by changes impossible to calculate or foresee ? Did he walk home to Stratford, sometimes, despairing, in perfect sick-heartedness, of her affection, and was he recalled by a message or a lover s instinct to find her weeping and passionately repentant? How natural it is by such questions and specula tions to betray our innate desire to bring the lofty spirits of our common mould to our own inward level to seek analogies between our affections, passions, appe tites, and theirs to wish they might have been no more exalted, no more fervent, no more worthy of the adora ble love of woman than ourselves ! The same temper that prompts the depreciation, the envy, the hatred, exercised toward the poet in his lifetime, mingles, not inconsiderably, in the researches so industriously prose cuted after his death into his youth and history. To be admired in this world, and much more to be beloved for higher qualities than his fellow-men, insures to genius not only to be persecuted in life, but to be ferreted out with all his frailties and imperfections from the grave. The church in which Shakspere is buried stands near the banks of the Avon, and is a most picturesque and proper place of repose for his ashes. AJJ avenue of small trees and vines, ingeniously overlaced, ex tends from the street to the principal door, and the interior is broken up into that confused and accidental medley of tombs, pews, cross-lights, and pillars, for which the old churches of England are remarkable. The tomb and effigy of the great poet lie in an inner chapel, and are as described in every traveller s book. I will not take up room with the repetition. It gives one an odd feeling to see the tomb of his wife and daughter beside him. One does not realize before, that Shakspere had wife, children, kinsmen, like other men that there were those who had a right to lie in the same tomb; to whom he owed the chari- ies of life; whom he may have benefited or offended; who may have influenced materially his destiny, or he theirs ; who were the inheritors of his household goods, his wardrobe, his books people who looked on him on Shakspere as a landholder, a renter of a pew, a townsman ; a relative, in short, who had claims upon them, not for the eternal homage due to celestial I inspiration, but for the charity of shelter and bread had he been poor, for kindness and ministry had he been sick, for burial and the tears of natural affection when he died. It is painful and embarrassing to the mind to go to Stratford to reconcile the immortality and the incomprehensible power of genius like Shak- spere s, with the space, tenement, and circumstance of a man ! The poet should be like the sea-bird, seen only on the wing his birth, his slumber, and his death, mysteries alike. I had stipulated with the hostess that my baggage should be put into the chamber occupied by Wash ington Irving. I was shown into it to dress for dinner a small neat room, a perfect specimen, in short, of an English bedroom, with snow-white curtains, a look ing-glass the size of the face, a well-polished grate and poker, a well-fitted carpet, and as muc$ light as heaven permits to the climate. Our dinner for two was served in a neat parlor on the same floor an English inn dinner simple, neat, and comfortable, in the sense of that word unknown in other countries. There was just fire enough, in the ! grate, just enough for two in the different dishes, a servant who was just enough in the room, and just civil enough in short, it was, like everything else in that country of adaptation and fitness, just what was i ordered and wanted, and no more. The evening turned out stormy, and the rain pat tered merrily against the windows. The shutters were closed, the fire blazed up with new brightness, the well-fitted wax lights were set on the table ; and when the dishes were removed, we replaced the wine with a i tea-tray, and sent for the hostess to give us her com pany and a little gossip over our cups. Nothing could be more nicely understood and de- I fined than the manner of English hostesses generally j in such situations, and of Mrs. Gardiner particularly ! in this. Respectful without servility, perfectly sure j of the propriety of her own manner and mode of ex- i pression, yet preserving in every look and word the | proper distinction between herself and her guests, she ; insured from them that kindness and ease of commu nication which would make a long evening of social conversation pass, not only without embarrassment on, either side, but with mutual pleasure and gratification. "I have brought up, mem," she said, producing a well-polished poker from under her black apron, be fore she took the chair set for her at the table "I have brought up a relic for you to see, that no money would buy from me." She turned it over in my hand, and I read on one of the flat sides at the bottom "GEOFFREY CRAYON S SCEPTRE." " Do you remember Mr. Irving," asked my friend, "or have you supposed, since reading his sketch of Stratford-on-Avon, that the gentleman in number three might be the person ?" The hostess drew up her thin figure, and the ex pression of a person about to compliment herself stole into the corners of her mouth. " Why, you see, mem, I am very much in the habit of observing my guests, and I think I may say I knows a superior gentleman when I sees him. If you re member, mem" (and she took down from the mantle- piece a much-worn copy of the Sketch-Book), "Geof frey Crayon tells the circumstance of my stepping in when it was getting late, and asking if he had rung. I knows it by that, and then the gentleman I mean was an American, and I think, mem, besides" (and she hesitated a little, as if she was about to advance an original and rather venturesome opinion) " I think I can see that gentleman s likeness all through this book." A truer remark or a more just criticism was per haps never made on the Sketch-Book. We smiled, and Mrs. Gardiner proceeded : 208 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. " I was in and out of the coffee-room the night he arrived, mem, and I sees directly by his modest ways and timid look that he was a gentleman, and not fit company for the other travellers. They were all young men, sir, and business travellers, and you know, mem, ignorance takes the advantage of modest merit, and af ter their dinner they were very noisy and rude. So, I says to Sarah, the chambermaid, says I, That nice gentleman can t get near the fire, and you go and light a fire in number three, and he shall sit alone, and it shan t cost him nothing, for I like the look on him. Well, mem, he seemed pleased to be alone, and after his tea, he puts his legs up over the grate, and there he sits with the poker in his hand till ten o clock. The other travellers went to bed, and at last the house was as still as midnight, all but a poke in the grate now and then in number three, and every time I heard it, I jumped up and lit a bed-candle, for I was getting very sleepy, and I hoped he was getting up to ring for | a light. Well, mem, I nodded and nodded, and still no ring at the bell. At last I says to Sarah, says I, Go into number three, and upset something, for I am sure that gentleman has fallen asleep. La, ma am, says Sarah, I don t dare. Well, then, says I, I ll go. So I opens the door, and I says, If you please, sir, did you ring ? little thinking that question would ever be written down in such a beautiful book, mem. He sat with his feet on the fender poking the fire, and a smile on his face, as if some pleasant thought was in his mind. No, ma am, says he, I did not. I shuts the door, and sits down again, for I hadn t the heart to tell him that it was late, for he was a gentle man not to speak rudely to, mem. Well, it was past twelve o clock, when the bell did ring. There, says I to Sarah, thank Heaven he has done thinking, and \ve can go to bed. So he walked up stairs with his light, and the next morning he was up early and off to the Shakspere house, and he brings me home a box i of the mulberry-tree, and asks me if I thought it was 1 genuine, and said it was for his mother in America, \ And I loved him still more for that, and I m sure I j prayed she might live to see him return." "I believe she did, Mrs. Gardiner; but how soon j after did you set aside the poker ?" " Why, sir, you see there s a Mr. Vincent that comes here sometimes, and he says to me one day : So, Mrs. Gardiner, you re finely immortalized. Read that. So the minnit I read it, I remembered who it f was, and all about it, and I runs and gets the number three poker, and locks it up safe and sound, and by- and-by I sends it to Brummagem, and has his name engraved on it, and here you see it, sir and I wouldn t take no money for it." I had never the honor to meet or know Mr. Irving, and I evidently lost ground with the hostess of the "Red Horse" for that misfortune. I delighted her, however, with the account which I had seen in a late newspaper, of his having shot a buffalo in the prairies of the west; and she soon courtesied herself out, and left me to the delightful society of the distinguished lady who had accompanied me. Among all my many loiterings in many lands, I remember none more in tellectually pure and gratifying, than this at Stratford- on-Avon. My sleep, in the little bed consecrated by the slumbers of the immortal Geoffrey, was sweet and light ; and I write myself his debtor for a large share of the pleasure which genius like his lavishes on the world. CHAPTER XI. CHARLECOTE. ONCE more posting through Shottery and Stratford- on-Avon, on the road to Kenilworth and Warwick, I felt a pleasure in becoming an habitue in Shakspere s town in being recognised by the Stratford post-boys, known at the Stratford inn, and remembered at the toll-gates. It is pleasant to be welcomed by name anywhere ; but at Stratford-on-Avon, it is a recogni tion by those whose fathers or predecessors were the companions of Shakspere s frolics. Every fellow in a slouched hat every idler on a tavern bench every saunterer with a dog at his heels on the highway should be a deer-stealer from Charlecote. You would almost ask him, " Was Will Shakspere with you last night ?" The Lucys still live at Charlecote, immortalized by a varlet poacher who was tried before old Sir Thomas for stealing a buck. They have drawn an apology from Walter Savage Landor for making too free with the family history, under cover of an im aginary account of the trial. I thought, as we drove along in sight of the fine old hall, with its broad park and majestic trees very much as it stood in the days of Sir Thomas, I believe that most probably the descendants of the old justice look even now upon Shakspere more as an offender against the game-laws than as a writer of immortal plays. I venture to say, it would be bad tact in a visiter to Charlecote to felici tate the family on the honor of possessing a park in which Shakspere had stolen deer to show more in terest in seeing the hall in which he was tried than in the family portraits. On the road which I was travelling (from Stratford to Charlecote) Shakspere had been dragged as a cul prit. What were his feelings before Sir Thomas ! He felt, doubtless, as every possessor of the divine fire of genius must feel, when brought rudely in contact with his fellow-men, that he was too much their supe rior to be angry. The humor in which he has drawn Justice Shallow proves abundantly that he was more amused then displeased with his own trial. But was there no vexation at the moment? A reflection, it might be, from the estimate of his position in the minds of those who were about him who looked on him simply as a stealer of so much venison. Did he care for Anne Hathaway s opinion then ? How little did Sir Thomas Lucy understand the relation between judge and culprit on that trial ! How little did he dream he was sitting for his picture to the pestilent varlet at the bar ; that the deer-stealer could j better afford to forgive him than he the deer-stealer ! i Genius forgives, or rather forgets, all wrongs done in i ignorance of its immortal presence. Had Ben Jonson made a wilful jest on a line in his new play, it would have rankled longer than fine and imprisonment for deer-stealing. Those who crowd back and trample upon men of genius in the common walk of life ; who cheat them, misrepresent them, take advantage of their inattention or their generosity in worldly matters, are sometimes surprised how their injuries, if not them selves, are forgotten. Old Adam Woodcock might as well have held malice against Roland Grame for the stab in the stuffed doublet of the Abbot of Mis rule. Yet, as I might have remarked in the paragraph gone before, it is probably not easy to put conscious and secret superiority entirely between the mind and the opinions of those around who think differently. It is one reason why men of genius love more than the common share of solitude to recover self-respect. In the midst of the amusing travesty he was drawing in his own mind of the grave scene about him, Shak spere possibly felt at moments as like a detected culprit as he seemed to the gamekeeper and the justice. It is a small penalty to pay for the after worship of the world ! The ragged and proverbially ill-dressed peasants who are selected from the whole campagna, as models to the sculptors of Rome, care little what is thought of their good looks in the Corso. The SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 209 disguised proportions beneath their rags will be ad mired in deathless marble, when the noble who scarce deigns their possessor a look will lie in forgotten dust under his stone scutcheon. CHAPTER XII. WARWICK CASTLE. WERE it not for the " out-heroded" descriptions in the guide-books, one might say a great deal of War wick cnstle. It is the quality of overdone or ill-ex pressed enthusiasm to silence that which is more rational and real. Warwick is, perhaps, the best kept of all the famous old castles of England. It is a superb and admirably-appointed modern dwelling, in the shell, and with all the means and appliances preserved, of an ancient stronghold. It isa curious union, too. My lady s maid and my lord s valet coquet upon the bar tizan, where old Guy of Warwick stalked in his coat- of-mail. The London cockney, from his two days watering at Leamington, stops his pony-chaise, hired ai half-a-crown the hour, and walks Mrs. Popkins over the old draw-bridge as peacefully as if it were the threshold of his shop in the Strand. Scot and French man saunter through fosse and tower, and no ghost of the middle ages stalks forth, with closed visor, to challenge these once natural foes. The powdered butler yawns through an embrasure, expecting "mila- di," the countess of this fair domain, who in one day s posting from London seeks relief in Warwick Castle from the routs and soirees of town. What would old Guy say, or the " noble imp" whose effigy is among the escutcheoned tombs of his fathers, if they could rise through their marble slabs, and be whirled over the drawbridge in a post-chaise ? How indignantly they would listen to the reckoning within their own port cullis, of the rates for chaise and postillion. How astonished they would be at the butler s bow, and the proffered officiousness of the valet. " Shall I draw off your lordship s boots ? Which of these new vests from Staub will your lordship put on for dinner ?" Among the pictures at Warwick, I was interested by a portrait of Queen Elizabeth (the best of that sov ereign I ever saw) ; one of Machiavelli. one of Essex, and one of Sir Philip Sidney. The delightful and gifted woman whom 1 had accompanied to the castle observed of the latter, that the hand alone expressed all his character. I had often made the remark in real life, but 1 had never seen an instance on painting where the likeness was so true. No one could doubt, who knew Sir Philip Sidney s character, that it was a literal portrait of his hand. In our day, if you have an artist for a friend, he makes use of you while you call, to "sit for the hand" of the portrait on Vis easel. Having a preference for the society of artists myself, and frequenting their studios habitually, I know of some hundred and fifty unsuspecting gentlemen on canvass, who have procured for posterity and their children portraits of their own heads and dress-coats to be sure, but of the hands of other persons ! The head of Machiavelli is, as is seen in the marble in the gallery of Florence : small, slender, and visibly " made to creep into crevices." The face is impassive and calm, and the lips, though slight and almost femi nine, have an indefinable firmness and character. Es sex is the bold, plain, and blunt soldier history makes him, and Elizabeth not unqueenly, nor (to my think ing) of an uninteresting countenance; but, with all jhe artist s flattery, ugly enough to be the abode of the murderous envy that brought Mary to the block. We paid our five shillings for having been walked through the marble hall of Castle Warwick, and the dressing-room of its modern lady, and, gratified much more by our visit than I have expressed in this brief description, posted on to Kenilworth. CHAPTER XIII. KENILWORTH. ON the road from Warwick to Kenilworth, I thought more of poor Pierce Gaveston than of Elizabeth and her proud earls. Edward s gay favorite was tried at Warwick, and beheaded on Blacklow hill, which we passed soon after leaving the town. He was executed in June; and I looked about on the lovely hills and valleys that surround the place of his last moments, and figured to myself very vividly his despair at this hurried leave-taking of this bright world in its bright est spot and hour. Poor Gaveston! It was not iu his vocation to die ! He was neither soldier nor prel ate, hermit nor monk. His political sins, for which he suffered, were no offence against good-fellowship, and were ten times more venial than those of the " black dog of Arden," who betrayed and helped to murder him. He was the reckless minion of a king, but he must have been a merry and pleasant fellow ; and now that the world (on our side the water at least), is grown so grave, one could go back with Old Mor tality, and freshen the epitaph of a heart that took life more gayly. As we approached the castle of the proud Leices ter, I found it easier to people the road with the flying Amy Robsart and her faithful attendant, with Mike Lam- bourne, Flibbertigibbet, Richard Varney, and the troop of mummurs and players, than with the more real characters of history. To assist the romance, a little Italian boy, with his organ and monkey, was fording the brook on his way to the castle, as if its old towers still held listeners for the wandering minstrel. I tossed him a shilling from the carriage window, and while the horses slowly forded the brook, asked him in his own delicious tongue, where he was from. " Son di Fircnze, signore /" "And where are you going ?" "Li! alcastello." Come from Florence and bound to Kenilworth ! Who would not grind an organ and sleep under a hedge, to answer the hail of the passing traveller in terms like these ? I have seen many a beggar in Italy, whose inheritance of sunshine and leisure in that de licious clime I could have found it in my heart to envy, even with all its concomitants of uncertainty and want; but here was a bright-faced and inky-eyed child of the sun, with his wardrobe and means upon his back, travelling from one land to another, and loiter ing wherever there was a resort for pleasure, without a friend or a care ; and, upon my life, I could have donned his velveteen jacket, and with his cheerful heart to button it over, have shouldered his organ, put my trust iu iforestieri, and kept on for Kenilworth. There really is, I thought, as I left him behind, no prgfit or reward consequent upon a life of confinement and toil ; no moss ever gathered by the unturned stone, that repays, by a thousandth part, the loss of even this poor boy s share of the pleasures of change. What would not the tardy winner of fortune give to exchange his worn-out frame, his unloveable and furrowed features, his dulled senses, and his vain regrets, for the elastic frame, the unbroken spirits, and the redeemable, yet not oppressive poverty of this Florentine rcguzzo . The irrecoverable gem of youth is too often dissolved, like the pearl of Cleopatra, in a cup which thins the blood and leaves disgust upon the lip. The magnificent ruins of Kenilworth broke in upon my moralities, and a crowd of halt and crippled ciceroni 210 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. beset the carriage-door as we alighted at the outer 1 tower. The neighborhood of the Spa of Leamington, i makes Kenilworth a place of easy resort ; and the beggars of Warwickshire have discovered that your | traveller is more liberal of his coin than your sitter-at- i home. Some dozens of pony-chaises and small, crop j saddle-horses, clustered around the gate, assured us | that we should not muse alone amid the ruins of j Elizabeth s princely gift to her favorite. We passed | into the tilt-yard, leaving on our left the tower in which Edward was confined, now the only habitable part of Kenilworth. It gives a comfortable shelter to an old seneschal, who stands where the giant probably stood, with Flibbertigibbet under his doublet for a \ prompter ; but it is not the tail of a rhyme that serves now for a passport. Kenilworth. as it now stands, would probably dis enchant almost any one of the gorgeous dreams con jured up by reading Scott s romance. Yet it is one of tho most superb ruins in the world. It would scarce be complete to a novel-reader, naturally, without a warder at the gate, and the flashing of a spear-point and helmet through the embrasures of the tower. A horseman in armor should puce over the draw-bridge, and a squire be seen polishing his cuiras through the opening gate; while on the airy bartizan should be observed a lady in hoop and farthingale, philander ing with my lord of Leicester in silk doublet and rapier. In the place of this, the visiter enters Kenil worth as I have already described, and stepping out into the tilt-yard, he sees, on an elevation before him, a fretted and ivy-covered ruin, relieved like a cloud- castle on the sky ; the bright blue plane of the western heavens shining through window and broken wall, flecked with waving and luxuriant leaves, and the crusted and ornamental pinnacles of tottering masonry inhabit it. If I read Kenilworth now, I see Mike Lambourne stealing out, not from the ruined postern which I clambered through, over heaps of rubbish, but from a little gate that turned noiselessly on its hinges, in the unreal castle built ten years ago in my brain. I had wandered away from my companion, Miss Jane Porter, to climb up a secret staircase in the wall, rather too difficult of ascent for a female foot, and from my elevated position I caught an accidental view of that distinguished lady through the arch of a Gothic window, with a background of broken architecture and foliage presenting, by chance, perhaps the most fit ting and admirable picture of the authoress of the Scottish Chiefs, that a painter in his brightest hour could have fancied. Miss Porter, with her tall and striking figure, her noble face (said by Sir Martin Shee to have approached nearer in its youth to his beau ideal of the female features than any other, and still possessing the remains of uncommon beauty), is at all times a person whom it would be difficult to see with out a feeling of involuntary admiration. But standing, as I saw her at that moment, motionless and erect, in the morning dress, with dark feathers, which she has worn since the death of her beloved and gifted sister, her wrists folded across, her large and still beautiful eyes fixed on a distant object in the view, and her nobly-cast lineaments reposing in their usual calm and benevolent tranquillity, while, around and above her, lay the material and breathed the spirit over which she had held the first great mastery it was a tableau vivanl which I was sorry to be alone to see. Was she thinking of the great mind that had evoked the spirits of the ruins she stood among a mind in which (by Sir Walter s own co s < jssion) she had first bared the vein of romance which breathed so freely and sculpture just leaning to their fall, though the 1 for the world s delight? Were the visions which foundations upon which they were laid, one would still think, might sustain the firmament. The swelling root of a creeper has lifted that arch from its base, and the protruding branch of a chance-sprung tree (sown perhaps by a field-sparrow) has unseated the key-stone of the next ; and so perish castles and repu tations, the masonry of the human hand, and the fabrics of human forethought ; not by the strength which they feared, but by the weakness they despised ! Little thought old John of Gaunt, when these rudely- hewn blocks were heaved into their seat by his hercu lean workmen, that, after resisting fire and foe, they would be sapped and overthrown at last by a vine-ten dril and a sparrow ! Clinging against the outer wall, on that side of the castle overlooking the meadow, which was overflowed for the aquatic spots of Kenilworth, stands an antique and highly ornamental firephice, which belonged, doubtless, to the principal hall. The windows on either side looking forth upon the fields below, must have been those from which Elizabeth and her train observed the feats of Arion and his dolphin; and at all times, the large and spacious chimney-place, from the ; sweep with such supernatural distinctness and rapidity through the imagination of genius visions of which the millionth portion is probably scarce communicated to the world in a literary lifetime were Elizabeth s courtiers, Elizabeth s passions, secret hours, inter views with Leicester were the imprisoned king s nights of loneliness and dread, his hopes, his indignant, but unheeded thoughts were all the possible circum stances, real or imaginary, of which that proud castle might have been the scene, thronging in those few moments of re very through her fancy ? Or was her heart busy with its kindly affections, and had the beauty and interest of the scene but awakened a thought i of one who was most wont to number with her the sands of those brighter hours ? Who shall say ? The very question would perhaps startle the thoughts beyond recall so elusive are even the most angelic of the mind s unseen visitants? I have recorded here the speculations of a moment while I leaned over the wall of Kenilworth, but as 1 descended by the giddy peal of rude laughter broke from the party in the fosse below, and I could not but speculate on the difference between castle s first occupation to its last, must have been the ij the various classes whom curiosity draws to the spot, centre of the evening revelry, and conversation of its The distinguished mind that conceives a romance guests. It was a hook whereon to hang a revery, and " which enchants the world, comes in the same guise between the roars of vulgar laughter which assailed j and is treated but with the same respect as theirs, my ears from a party lolling on the grass below, I con- The old porter makes no distinction in his charge of tri ved to figure to myself, with some distinctness, the ;| ha!f-a-crown, and the grocer s wife who sucks an personages who had stood about it. A visit to Kenil- ! orange on the grass, looks at the dark crape hat and worth, without the deceptions of fancy, would be as disconnected from our previous enthusiasm on the plain exterior her only standards and thinks herself as well dressed, and therefore equal or superior to the subject as from any other scene with which it had no tall lady, whom she presumes is out like herself 01 relation. The general effect at first, in any such spot, day s pleasuring. One comes and goes like the other, is only to dispossess us, by a powerful violence, of the j cherished picture we had drawn of it in imagination ; and is forgotten alike by the beggars at the gate and the seneschal within, and thus invisibly and unsuspect it is only after the real recollection has taken root ; ed, before our very eyes, does genius gather its gold- and ripened after months, it may be that we can I Jen fruit, and while ive walk in a plain and common- fully bring the visionary characters we have drawn to | place world, with commonplace and sordid thoughts SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 211 and feelings, the gifted walk side by side with us in a world of their own a world of which we see distant glimpses in their after-creations, and marvel in what i unsunned mine its gems of thought were gathered ! CHAPTER XIV. A VISIT TO DUBLIN ABOUT THE TIME OF THE QUEEN S MARRIAGE. THE usual directions for costume, in the corner of the court card of invitation, included, on the occasion of the queen s marriage, a wedding favor, to be worn by ladies on the shoulder, and by gentlemen on the left breast. This trifling addition to the dress of the individual was a matter of considerable importance to the milliners, hatters, etc., who, in a sale of ten or twelve hundred white cockades (price from two dollars to five) made a very pretty profit. The power of giv ing a large ball to the more expensive classes, and or dering a particular addition to the costume in other words, of laying a tax on the rich for the benefit of the poor, is exercised more frequently in Ireland than in other countries, and serves the double purpose of popularity to the lord lieutenant, and benefit to any particular branch of industry that may be suffering from the decline of a fashion. The large quadrangular court-yard of the castle rattled with the tramp of horses feet and the clatter of sabres and spurs, and in the uncertain glare of torches and lamps, the gay colors and glittering arms of the mounted guard of lancers had a most warlike appear ance. The procession which the guard was stationed to regulate and protect, rather detracted from the ro mantic effect the greater proportion of equipages being the covered hack cars of the city vehicles of the most unmitigated and ludicrous vulgarity. A coffin for two, set on its end, with the driver riding on the turned-down lid, would be a very near resemblance ; and the rags of the driver, and the translucent leanness of his beast, make it altogether the most deplorable of conveyances. Here and there a carriage with liveries, and here and there a sedan-ch.iir with four stout Milesian calves in blue stockings trotting under the poles, rather served as a foil than a mitigation of the effect, and the hour we passed in the line, edging slowly toward the castle, was far from unfruitful in amusement. I learned afterward that even those who have equipages in Dublin go to court in hack cars as a matter of economy one of the many indications of that feeling of lost pride which has existed in Ireland since the removal of the parliament. A hall and staircase lined with files of soldiers is not quite as festive an entrance to a ball as the n^ore com mon one of alleys of flowering shrubs ; but with a waltz by a military band resounding from the lofty ceiling, I am not sure that it does not temper the blood as aptly for the spirit of the hour. It was a rainy night, and the streets were dark, and the effect upon myself of coming suddenly into so enchanted a scene -arms glittering on either side, and a procession of uniforms and plumed dames winding up the spacious gtairs W as thrilling, even with the chivalric scenes of Eglinton fresh in niy remembrance. At the head of the ascent we entered a long hall, lined with the private servants of Lord Ebrington, and the ceremony of presentation having been achieved the week before, we left the throne-room on the right, and passed directly to St. Patrick s Hall, the grand scene of the evening s festivities. This, I have said before, is the finest ball-room I remember in Europe. Twelve hundred people, seated, dancing, or promenading, were within its lofty walls on the night whose festivi ties I am describing; and at either end a gallery, sup ported by columns of marble, contained a band of music, relieving each other with alternate waltzes and quadrilles. On the long sides of the hall were raised tiers of divans, filled with chaperons, veteran officers, and other lookers-on, and at the upper end was raised a platform with a throne in the centre, and seats on either side for the family of the lord lieutenant and the more distinguished persons of the nobility. Lord Kbrington was rather in his character of a noble host than that of viceroy, and I did not observe him once seated under his canopy of state ; but with his aids and some one of the noble ladies of his family on his arm, he promenaded the hall conversing with his ac quaintances, and seemingly enjoying in a high degree the brilliant gayety of the scene. His dress, by the way, was the simple diplomatic dress of most conti nental courts, a blue uniform embroidered with gold, the various orders on his breast forming its principal distinction. I seldom have seen a man of a more calm and noble dignity of presence than the lord lieu tenant, and never a face that expressed more strongly the benevolence and high purity of character for which he is distinguished. In person, except that he is taller, he bears a remarkably close resemblance to the Uuke of Wellington. We can scarcely conceive, in this country of black coats, the brilliant effect of a large assembly in which there is no person out of uniform or court-dress every lady s head nodding with plumes, and every gentleman in military scarlet and gold or lace and embroidery. I may add, too, that in this country of care-worn and pale faces, we can as little conceive the effect of an assembly rosy with universal health, habitually unacquainted with care, and abandoned with the apparent child-like simplicity of high breeding, to the inspiring gayety of the hour. The greater con trast, however, is between a nation where health is the first care, and one in which health is never thought of till lost; and light and shade are not more con trasted than the mere general effect of countenance in one and in the other. A stranger travelling in our country, once remarked to me that a party he had at tended seemed like an entertainment given in the con valescent ward of a hospital the ladies were so pale and fragile, and the men so unjoyous and sallow. And my own invariable impression, in the assemblies I have first seen after leaving my own country was a | corresponding one that the men and women had the rosy health and untroubled gayety of children round a May-pole. That this is not the effect of climate, I do j most religiously believe. It is over-much care and over much carelessness the corroding care of an avid temer ity in business, and the carelessness of all the functions of life till their complaints become too imperative to be disregarded. But this is a theme out of place. The ball was managed by the grand chamberlain (Sir William Leeson), and the aids-de-camp of the lord lieutenant, and except that now and then you were reminded by the movement around you that you stood with your back to the representative of royalty, there was little to draw your attention from the attrac tions of the dance. Walt/,, quadrille, and gallop, fol lowed each other in giddy succession, and "what do you think of Irish beauty?" had been asked me as often as "how do you like America ?" was ever mum bled through the trumpet of Miss Martineau, when I mounted with a friend to one of the upper divans, and tried, what is always a difficult task, and nowhere so difficult as in Ireland, to call in the intoxicated fancy, and anatomize the chartn of the hour. Moore s remark has been often quoted " there is ! nothing like an Irish woman to take a man off his i feet;" but whether this figure of speech was suggested I by the little bard s common soubriquet of "Jump-up- I and-kiss-me* Tom Moore," or simply conveyed his The name of a small flower, common in Ireland. 212 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. idea of the bewildering character of Irish beauty, it contains, to any one who has ever travelled (or waltzed) in that country, a very just, as well as realizing: descrip tion. Physically, Irish women are probably the finest race in the world I mean, taller, better limbed and chested, larger eyed, and with more luxuriant hair, and freer action, than any other nation I have ob served. The Phoenicijan and Spanish blood which has run hundreds of years in their veins, slill kindles its dark fire in their eyes, and with the vivacity of the northern mind and the bright color of the northern skin, these southern qualities mingle in most admira ble and superb harmony. The idea we form of Ital ian and Grecian beauty is never realized in Greece and Italy, but we find it in Ireland, heightened and ex ceeded. Cheeks and lips of the delicacy and bright teint of carnation, with snowy teeth, and hair and eye brows of jet, are what we shouM look for on the palette of Appelles, could we recall the painter, and reanimate his far-famed models; and these varied charms, united, fall very commonly to the share of the fair Milesian of the upper classes. In other lands of dark eyes, the rareness of a fine-grained skin, so necessary to a bru nette, makes beauty as rare but whether it is the damp softness of the climate or the infusion of Saxon blood, a coarse skin is almost never seen in Ireland. I speak now only of the better-born ranks of society, for in all my travels in Ireland, I did not chance to see even one peasant-girl of any pretensions to good looks. From north to south, they looked, to me, coarse, ill-formed, and repulsive. I noticed in St. Patrick s Hall what 1 had remarked ever since I had been in the country, that with all their beauty, the Irish women are very deficient in what in England is called style. The men, on the contrary, were particularly comme ilfaul, and as they are a magnificent race (corresponding to such mothers and sisters), I frequently observed I had never seen so many handsome and elegant men in a day. When ever I saw a gentleman and lady together, riding, driving, or walking, my first impression was, almost universally, that the man was in attendance upon a woman of an inferior class to his own. This differ ence may be partly accounted for by the reduced cir cumstances of the gentry of Ireland, which keeps the daughters at home| that the sons may travel and im prove ; but it works differently in America, where, spite of travel and every other advantage to the con trary, the daughters of a family are much oftener lady-like than the sons are gentleman-like. After wondering for some time, however, why the quick witted women of Ireland should be less apt than those of other countries in catching the air of high breeding usually deemed so desirable, I began to like them bet ter for the deficiency, and to find a reason for it in the very qualities which make them so attractive. Noth ing could be more captivating and delightful than the manners of Irish women, and nothing, at the same time, could be more at war with the first principles of English high breeding coldness and relenu. The frank, almost hilarious "how are you?" of an Irish girl, her whole-handed and cordial grasp, as often in the day as you meet her, the perfectly un-missy-ish, confiding, direct character of her conversation, are all traits which would stamp her as somewhat rudely bred in England, and as desperately vulgar in New York or Philadelphia. Modest to a proverb, the Irish woman is as unsus pecting of an impropriety as if it were an impossible thing, and she is as fearless and joyous as a midship man, and sometimes as noisy. In a ball-room she looks ill-dressed, not because her dress was ill-put-on, but because she dances, not glides, sits down without care, pulls her flowers to pieces, and if her head-dress incommodes her, gives it a pull or a push acts which would be perfect insanity at Almack s. If she is of fended, she asks for an explanation. If she does not understand you, she confesses her ignorance. If she wishes to see you the next day, she tells you how and when. She is the child of nature, and children are not "stylish." The niminy-piminy, eye-avoiding, finger-tipped, drawling, don t-touch-rne manner of some of the fashionable ladies of our country, would amuse a cold and reserved English woman sufficiently, but they would drive an Irish girl into hysterics. 1 have met one of our fair country-people abroad, whose "Grecian stoop," and exquisitely subdued manner, was invariably taken for a fit of indigestion. The ball-supper was royally sumptuous, and served in a long hall thrown open at midnight ; and in the gray of the morning, I left the floor covered with waltzers, and confessed to an Irish friend, that I never in my life, not even at Almack s, had seen the half as much true beauty as had brightened St. Patrick s Hall at the celebration of the queen s marriage. CHAPTER XV. CLOSING SCENES OF THE SESSION AT WASHINGTON. THE paradox of" the more one does, the more one ] can do," is resolved in life at Washington with more success than I have seen it elsewhere. The inexora ble bell at the hotel or boarding-house pronounces the irrevocable and swift transit of breakfast to all sleepers after eight. The elastic depths of the pillow have scarcely yielded their last feather to the pressure of ! the sleeper s head, before the drowse is rudely shaken from his eyelids, and with an alacrity which surprises himself, he finds his toilet achieved, his breakfast over, and himself abroad to lounge in the sunshine till the flag waves on the capitol. He would retire to his chamber to read during these two or three vacant hours, but the one chair in his pigeon-hole creaks, or has no back or bottom, or his anthracite fire is out, or j is too hot for the size of the room : or, in short, Wash ington, from whatever cause, is a place where none read except those who stand up to a padlocked news paper. The stars and stripes, moving over the two wings of the capitol at eleven, announce that the two chambers of legislation are in session, and the hard- i working idler makes his way to the senate or the house. He lingers in the lobby awhile, amused with the button-hole seizers plying the unwilling ears of members with their claims, or enters the library, where ladies turn over prints, and enfilade, witli their battery of truant eyes, the comers-in at the green door. He then gropes up the dark staircase to the senate gallery, and stifles in the pressure of a hot gallery, forgetting, like listeners at a crowded opera, j that bodily discomfort will unlink the finest harmonies j of song or oratory. Thence hedescends to the rotunda to draw breath and listen to the more practical, but i quite as earnest eloquence of candidates for patents ; and passes, after while, to the crowded gallery of the house, where, by some acoustic phenomena in the construction of the building, the voices of the speakers comes to his ear as articulate as water from a narrow- necked bottle. "Small blame to them !" he thinks, however: for behind the brexia columns are grouped all the fair forms of Washington ; and in making his ! bow to two hundred despotic lawgivers in feathers and | velvet, he is readily consoled that the duller legislators ! who yield to their sway are inaudible and forgotten. I To this upper house drop in, occasionally, the younger I or gayer members of the lower, bringing, if not politi cal scandal, at least some slight resumcr of what INJr. Somebody is beating his desk about below ; and thus, I crammed with the day s trifles or the day s business, I and fatigued from heel to eyelid, our idler goes home SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 213 at five to dress for dinner and the night s campaign, having been up and on his legs for ten mortal hours. Cold water and a little silence in his own room have rather refreshed him, and he dines at six with a party of from fifteen to twenty-five persons. He discusses the vital interests of fourteen millions of people over a glass of wine with the man whose vote, possibly, will decide their destiny, and thence hurries to a ball room crammed like a perigord-pie, where he pants, elbows, eats supper, and waltzes till three in the morning. How human constitutions stand this, and stand ifdaily and nightly, from the beginning to the end of a session, may well puzzle the philosophy of those who rise and breakfast in comfortable leisure. I joined the crowd on the twenty-second of Februa ry, to pay my respects to the president, and see the cheese. Whatever veneration existed in the minds of the people toward the former, their curiosity in ref- { erence to the latter predominated, unquestionably, ij The circular jmve, extending from the gate to the i White House, was thronged with citizens of all classes, those coming away having each a small brown paper | parcel and a very strong smell; those advancing mani- \ festing, by shakings of the head and frequent exclama- j tions, that there may be too much of a good thing, j and particularly of a cheese. The beautiful portico j was thronged with boys and coach-drivers, and the odor strengthened with every step. We forced our | way over the threshold, and encountered an atmo sphere, to which the mephitic gas floating over Aver- nus must be faint and innocuous. On the side of the hall hung a rough likeness of the general, emblazoned with eagle and stars, forming a background to the huge tub in which the cheese had been packed ; and in the centre of the vestibule stood the "fragrant gift," surrounded with a dense crowd, who, without crackers, or even " malt to their cheese," had, in two hours, eaten and purveyed away fourteen hundred pounds ! The small segment reserved for the president s use counted for nothing in the abstractions. Glad to compromise for a breath of cheeselcss air, we desisted from the struggle to obtain a sight of the table, and mingled with the crowd in the east room. Here were diplomates in their gold coats and officers in uniform, ladies of secretaries and other ladies, soldiers on volunteer duty, and Indians in war-dress and paint. Bonnets, feathers, uniforms, and all it was rather a gay assemblage. I remembered the de scriptions in travellers books, and looked out for millers and blacksmiths in their working gear, and for rudeness and vulgarity in all. The oiler of a mam moth cheese to the public was likely to attract to the presidental mansion more of the lower class than would throng to a common levee. Great-coats there were, and not a few of them, for the day was raw, and unless they were hung on the palings outside, theyjpnust re main on the owners shoulders ; but, with a single ex ception (a fellow with his coat torn down his back, possibly in getting at the cheese), I saw no man in a dress that was not respectable and clean of its kind, and abundantly fit for a tradesman out of his shop. Those who were much pressed by the crowd put their hats on ; but there was a general air of decorum which would surprise any one who had pinned his faith on travellers. An intelligent Englishman, very much inclined to take a disgust to mobocracy, ex pressed to me great surprise at the decency and proper behavior of the people. The same experiment in England, he thought, would result in as pretty a riot as a paragraph-monger would desire to see. The president was down stairs in the oval reception room, and, though his health would not permit him to stand, he sat in his chair for two or three hours, and received his friends with his usual bland and dignified courtesy. By his side stood the lady of the mansion, dressed in full court costume, and doing the honors of her place with a grace and amenity which every one felt, and which threw a bloom over the hour. Gene ral Jackson retired, after a while, to his chamber, and the president-elect remained to support his relative, and present to her the still thronging multitude, and by four o clock the guests were gone, and the " ban quet hall" was deserted. Not to leave a wrong im pression of the cheese, I dined afterward at a table to which the president had sent a piece of it, and found it of excellent quality. It is like many other things, more agreeable in small quantities. Some eccentric mechanic has presented the presi dent with a sulkey, made entirely (except the wheels) of rough-cut hickory, with the bark on. It looks rude enough, but has very much the everlasting look of old Hickory himself; and if he could be seen dri ving a high-stepping, bony old iron-gray steed in it, any passer by would see that there was as much fitness in the whole thing as in the chariot of Bacchus and his reeling leopards. Some curiously-twisted and gnarled branches have been very ingeniously turned into handles and whip-box, and the vehicle is compact and strong. The president has left it to Mr. Van Buren. In very strong contrast to the sulkey, stood close by, the elegant phaeton, made of the wood of the old frigate Constitution. It has a seat for two, with a driver s box, covered with a superb hammercloth, and set up rather high in front; the wheels and body are low. and there are bars for baggage behind ; altogeth er, for lightness and elegance, it would be a creditable turn out for Long Acre. The material is excessively beautiful a fine-grained oak, polished to a very high degree, with its colors delicately brought out by a coat of varnish. The wheels are very slender and light, but strong, and, with all its finish, it looks a vehicle capa ble of a great deal of service. A portrait of the Con stitution, under full sail, is painted on the panels. CHAPTER XVI. THE INAUGURATION. WHILE the votes for president were being counted in the senate, Mr. Clay remarked to Mr. Van Buren, with courteous significance : " It is a cloudy day, sir!" " The sun will shine on the fourth of March!" was the confident reply. True to his augury, the sun shone out of heaven without a cloud on the inaugural morning. The air was cold, but clear and life-giving ; and the broad avenues of Washington for once seemed not too large for the thronging population. The crowds who had been pouring in from every direction for several days before, ransacking the town for but a shelter from the night, were apparent on the spacious sidewalks ; and the old campaigners of the winter seemed but a thin sprinkling among the thousands of new and strange facts. The sun shone alike on the friends and oppo nents of the new administration, and, as far as one might observe in a walk to the capitol, all were made cheerful alike by its brightness. It was another augury, perhaps, and may foretell a more extended fusion under the light of the luminary new risen. In a whole day passed in a crowd composed of all classes and parlies, 1 heard no remark that the president would have been unwilling to hear. I was at the capitol a half hour before the proces sion arrived, and had leisure to study a scene for which I was not at all prepared. The noble staircase of the east front of the building leaps over three arches, under one of which carriages pass to the base ment door ; and, as you approach from the gate, the 214 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. eye cuts the ascent at right angles, and the sky, broken by a small spire at a short distance, is visible beneath. Broad stairs occur at equal distances, with corre sponding projections ; and from the upper platform rise the outer columns of the portico, with ranges of col umns three deep extending back to the pilasters. I had often admired this front with its many graceful columns, and its superb flight of stairs, as one of the finest things I had seen in the world. Like the effect of the assembled population of Rome waiting to re ceive the blessing before the front of St. Peter s, how ever, the assembled crowd on the steps and at the base of the capitol heightened inconceivably the gran deur of the design. They were piled up like the people on the temples of Babylon in one of Martin s sublime pictures every projection covered, and an inexpressible soul and character given by their pres ence to the architecture. Boys climbed about the bases of the columns, single figures stood on the posts of the surrounding railings in the boldest relief against the sky; and the wholesaling was exactly what Paul Veronese would have delighted to draw. I stood near an accomplished artist who is commissioned to fill one of the panels of the rotunda, and I can not but hope he may have chosen this magnificent scene for his subject. The republican procession, consisting of the presi dents and their families, escorted by a small volunteer corps, arrived soon after twelve. The General and Mr. Van Buren were in the constitution phaeton, drawn by four grays, and as it entered the gate, they both rode uncovered. Descending from the carriage at the foot of the steps, a passage was made for them through the dense crowd, and the tall white head of the old chieftain, still uncovered, went steadily up through the agitated mass, marked by its peculiarity from all around it. I was in the crowd thronging the opposite side of the court, and lost sight of the principal actors in this imposing drama, till they returned from the senate chamber. A temporary platform had been laid, and railed in on the broad stair which supports the por tico, and, for all preparation to one of the most impor tant and most meaning and solemn ceremonies on earth for the inauguration of a chief magistrate over a republic of fifteen millions of freemen the whole ad dition to the open air, and the presence of the people, was a volume of holy writ. In comparing the impres sive simplicity of this consummation of the wishes of a mighty people, with the tricked-out ceremonial, and I hollow show, which embarrass a corresponding event in other lands, it was impossible not to feel that the moral sublime was here that a transaction so impor tant, and of such extended and weighty import, could borrow nothing from drapery or decoration, and that the simple presence of the sacred volume, consecrating the act, spoke more thrillingly to the heart than the trumpets of a thousand heralds. The crowd of diplomatists and senators in the rear of the columns made way, and the ex-president and Mr. Van Buren advanced with uncovered heads. A murmur of feeling rose up from the moving mass be low, and the infirm old man, emerged from a sick- chamber, which his physician had thought it impossi ble he should leave, bowed to the people, and, still uncovered in the cold air, took his seat beneath the portico. Mr. Van Buren then advanced, and with a I voice remarkably distinct, and with great dignity, read i his address to the people. The air was elastic, and the day still ; and it is supposed that near twenty thou sand persons heard him from his elevated position dis tinctly. I stood myself on the outer limit of the crowd, and though I lost occasionally a sentence from the interruption near by, his words came clearly ar ticulated to my ear. When the address was closed, the chief justice ad vanced and administered the oath. As the book touched the lips of the new president, there arose a general shout, and expression of feeling common enough in other countries, but drawn with difficulty from an American assemblage. The sons, and the immediate friends of Mr. Van Buren, then closed about him ; the ex-president, the chief justice, and others, gave him the hand of congratulation, and the ceremony was over. They descended the steps, the people gave one more shout as they mounted the con stitution carriage together, and the procession returned through the avenue, followed by the whole population of Washington. Mr. Van Buren held a levee immediately afterward, but I endeavored in vain to get my foot over the threshold. The crowd was tremendous. At four, the diplomatic body had an audience ; and in replying to the address of Don Angel Calderon, the president astonished the gold coats, by addressing them as the democratic corps. The representatives of the crowned heads of Europe stood rather uneasily under the epithet, till it was suggested that he possibly meant to say diplomatic. CHAPTER XVII. WASHINGTON IN THE SESSION. THERE is a sagacity acquired by travel on the sub ject of forage and quatters, which is useful in all other cities in the world where one may happen to be a stranger, but which is as inapplicable to the emergen cies of an arrival in Washington as waltzing in a ship wreck. It is a capital whose peculiarities are as much sui generis as those of Venice ; but as those who have become wise by a season s experience neither remain on the spot to give warning, nor have recorded thei experiences in a book, the stranger is worse ofif in a coach in Washington than in a gondola in the "city of silver streets." It is well known, I believe, that when the future city of Washington was about being laid out, there were two large lot-buyers or land-owners, living two miles apart, each of whom was interested in having the public buildings upon the centre of his own do main. Like children quarrelling for a sugar horse, the subject of dispute was pulled in two, and one got the head, the other the tail. The capitol stands on a rising ground in solitary grandeur, and the president s house and department buildings two miles oft" on an other. The city straddles and stretches between, doing its best to look continuous and compact; but the stranger soon sees that it is, after all, but a " city of magnificent distances," built to please nobody on earth but a hackney-coachman. The new-comer, when asked what hotel he will drive to, thinks himself very safe if he chooses that nearest the capitol supposing, of course, that, as Washington is purely a legislative metropolis, the most central part will naturally be near the scene of action. He is accordingly set down at Gadsby s, and, at a price that would startle an English nobleman, he engages a pigeon-hole in the seventh heaven of that boundless caravansary. Even at Gadsby s, however, he finds himself over half a mile from the capitol, and wonders, for two or three days, why the deuce the hotel was not built on some of the waste lots at the foot of Capitol hill, an improvement which might have saved him, in rainy weather, at least five dollars a day in hack-hire. Meantime the secretaries and foreign ministers leave their cards, and the party and dinner-giving people shower upon him the "small rain" of pink billets. He sets apart the third or fourth day to return their calls, and inquires the addresses SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 215 of his friends (which they never write on their cards, ; because, if they did, it would be no guide), and is told j it is impossible to direct him, but the hackney-coachmen I all know! lie calls the least ferocious-looking of the j most bullying and ragged set of tatterdemalions he has ever seen, and delivers himself and his visiting-list into his hands. The first thing is a straight drive two milt s away from the capitol. He passes the presi dent s house, and getting off the smooth road, begins to drive and drag through cross lanes and open lots, laid out according to no plan that his loose ideas of geometry can comprehend, and finds his friends liv- ing in houses that want nothing of being in the coun- j try, but trees, garden, and fences. It looks as if it had ! rained naked brick houses upon a waste plain, and j each occupant had made a street with reference to his j own front door. The much-shaken and more-aston- j ished victim consumes his morning and his temper, ! and has made, by dinner-time, but six out of forty j calls, all imperatively due, and all scattered far and j wide with the same loose and irreconcilable geogra- j py- A fortnight s experience satisfies the stranger that this same journey is worse at night than at morning; and that, as he leaves his dinner which he pays for at home, runs the risk of his neck, passes an hour or two on the road, and ruins himself in hack-hire, it must be a very yes, a very pleasant dinner-party to compensate him. Consequently, he either sends a "p. p. c." to all his acquaintances, and lives incog., or, which is a more sensible thing, moves up to the other settlement, and abandons the capitol. Those who live on the other side of the president s house are the secretaries, diplomatists, and a few wealthy citizens. There is no hotel in this quarter, but there are one or two boarding-houses, and (what we have been lucky enough to secure ourselves) fur- j nished lodgings, in which you have everything but board. Your dinner is sent you from a French cook s near by, and your servant gets your breakfast a plan which gives you the advantage of dining at your own hour, choosing your own society, and of having covers for a friend or two whenever it suits your humor, and at half an hour s warning. There are very few of these lodgings (which combine many other advantages over a boarding-house), but more of them would be a good speculation to house-owners, and I wish it were suggested, not only here, but in every city in our country. Aside from society, the only amusement in Wash ington is frequenting the capitol. If one has a great j deal of patience and nothing better to do, this is very well ; and it is very well at any rate till one becomes I acquainted with the heads of the celebrated men in I both the chambers, with the noble architecture of the i building, and the routine of business. This done, it ! is time wearily spent for a spectator. The finef orators i seldom speak, or seldom speak warmly, the floor is oftenest occupied by prosing and very sensible gentle men, whose excellent ideas enter the mind more agreeably by the eye than the ear, or, in other words, are better delivered by the newspapers, and there is a I great deal of formula and etiquetical sparring which i is not even entertaining to the members, and which consumes time " consumedly." Now and then the | senate adjourns when some one of the great orators has taken the floor, and you are sure of a great effort the next morning. If you are there in time, and can sit, like Atlas with a world on your back, you may en joy a front seat and hear oratory, unsurpassed, in my opinion, in the world. The society in Washington, take it all in^ll, is by many degrees the best in^the United States. One is prepared, though I can not conceive why, for the con trary. We read in books of travels, and we are told by everybody, that the society here is promiscuous, rough, inelegant, and even barbarous. This is an untrue representation, or it has very much changed. There is no city, probably no village in America, where the female society is not refined, cultivated, and elegant. With or without regular advantages, woman attains the refinements and the tact necessary to polite intercourse. No traveller ever ventured to complain of this part of American society. The great deficiency is that of agreeable, highly-cultivated men, whose pur suits have been elevated, and whose minds are pliable to the grace and changing spirit of conversation. Every man of talents possesses these qualities naturally, and hence the great advantage which Washington en joys over every other city in our country. None but a shallow observer, or a malicious book-maker, would ever sneer at the exteriors or talk of the ill-breeding of such men as form, in great numbers, the agreeable society of this place for a man of great talents never could be vulgar; and there is a superiority about most of these which raises them above the petty standard which regulates the outside of a coxcomb. Even compared with the dress and address of men of similar positions and pursuits in Europe, however (members of the house of commons, for example, or of the cham ber of deputies in France), it is positively the fact that the senators and representatives of the United States have a decided advantage. It is all very well for Mr. Hamilton, and other scribblers whose books must be spiced to go down, to ridicule a Washington soiree for English readers; but if the observation of one who has seen assemblies of legislators and diplomatists in all the countries of Europe may be fairly placed against his and Mrs. Trollope s, 1 may assert, upon my own authority, that they will not find, out of May Fair in England, so well-dressed and dignified a body of men. I have seen as yet no specimen of the rough animal described by them and others as the "western member;" and if IJavid Crockett (whom I was never so fortunate as to see) was of that description, the race must have died with him. It is a thing 1 have learned since I have been in Washington, to feel a wish that foreigners should see congress in session. We are so humbugged, one way and another, by travellers lies. I have heard the observation once or twice from strangers since I have been here, and it struck myself on my first arrival, that I had never seen within the same limit before, so many of what may be called "men of mark." You will scarce meet a gentleman on the sidewalk in Washington who would not attract, your notice, seen elsewhere, as an individual possess ing in his eye or general features a certain superiority. Never having seen most of the celebrated speakers of the senate, 1 busied myself for the first day or two in examining the faces that passed me in the street, in the hope of knowing them by the outward stamp which, we are apt to suppose, belongs to greatness. I gave it up at last, simply from the great number I met who might be (for all that features had to do with it) the. remarkable men I sought. There is a very simple reason why a congress of the United States should be, as they certainly are, a much more marked body of men than the English house of commons or lords, or the chamber of peers or deputies in France. I refer to the mere means by which, in either case, they come by their honors. In England and France the lords and peers are legislators by hered itary right, and the members of the commons and deputies from the possession of extensive property or family influence, or some other cause, arguing, in most cases, no great personal talent in the individual. They are legislators, but they are devoted VTV often much more heartily to other pursuits running or farming, racing, driving, and similar out-of-door pas sions common to English gentlemen and lords, or the corresponding penchants of French peers and deputies. 216 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. It is only the few great leaders and orators who devote themselves to politics exclusively. With us every one knows it is quite the contrary. An American politician delivers himself, body and soul, to his pur suit. He never sleeps, eats, walks, or dreams, but in subservience to his aim. He can not afford to have another passion of any kind till he has reached the point of his ambition and then it has become a mordent necessity from habit. The consequence is, that no man can be found in an elevated sphere in our country, who has not had occasion for more than ordi nary talent to arrive there. He inherited nothing of his distinction, and has made himself. Such ordeals leave their marks, and they who have thought, and watched, and struggled, and contended with the pas sions of men as an American politician inevitably must, can not well escape the traces of such work. It usually elevates the character of the face it always strongly marks it. A-propos of " men of mark ;" the dress circle of the theatre, at Power s benefit, not long since, was graced by three Indians in full costume the chief of the Foxes, the chief of the loways, and a celebrated war rior of the latter tribe, called the Sioux-killer. The Fox is an old man of apparently fifty, with a heavy, aquiline nose, a treacherous eye, sharp as an eagle s, and a person rather small in proportion to his head and features. He was dressed in a bright scarlet blanket, and a crown of feathers, with an eagle s plume, standing erect on the top of his head, all dyed in the same deep hue. His face was painted to match, ex cept his lips, which looked of a most ghastly sallow, in contrast with his fiery nose, forehead, and cheeks. His tomahawk lay in the hollow of his arm, decked with feathers of the same brilliant color with the rest of his drapery. Next him sat the Sioux-killer, in a dingy blanket, with a crown made of a great quantity of the feathers of a pea-hen, which fell over his face, and concealed his features almost entirely. He is very small, but is famous for his personal feats, having, among other things, walked one hundred and thirty miles in thirty successive hours, and killed three Sioux (hence his name) in one battle with that nation. He is but twenty-three, but very compact and wiry-looking, and his eye glowed through his veil of hen-feathers like a coal of fire. Next to the Sioux-killer sat " White Cloud," the chief of the loways. His face was the least warlike of the three, and expressed a good nature and freedom from guile, remarkable in an Indian. He is about twenty-four, has very large features, and a fine, erect person, with broad shoulders and chest. He was painted less than the Fox chief, but of nearly the same color, and carried, in the hollow of his arm, a small, glittering tomahawk, ornamented with blue feathers. His head was encircled by a kind of turban of silver- fringed cloth, with some metallic pendents for earrings, and his blanket, not particularly clean or handsome, was partly open on the breast, and disclosed a calico shirt, which was probably sold to him by a trader in the west. They were all very attentive to the play, but the Fox chief and White Cloud departed from the traditionary dignity of Indians, and laughed a great deal at some of Power s fun. The Sioux-killer sat between them, as motionless and grim as a marble knight on a tomb-stone. The next day I had the pleasure of dining with Mr. Power, who lived at the same hotel with the In dian delegation ; and while at dinner he received a message from the loways, expressing a wish to call on him. We were sitting over our wine when White Cloud and the Sioux-killer came in with their inter preter. There were several gentlemen present, one of them in the naval undress uniform, whose face the Sioux-killer scrutinized very sharply. They smiled in bowing to Power, but made very grave inclinations to the rest of us. The chief took his seat, assuming a very erect and dignified attitude, which he preserved immoveable during the interview ; but the Sioux-killer drew up his legs, resting them on the round of the chair, and, with his head and body bent forward, seemed to forget himself, and give his undivided atten tion to the study of Power and his naval friend. Tumblers of champagne were given them, which they drank with great relish, though the Sioux-killer provoked a little ridicule from White Cloud, by cough ing as he swallowed it. The interpreter was a half- breed between an Indian and a negro, and a most in telligent fellow. He had been reared in the loway tribe, but had been among the whites a great deal for the last few years, and had picked up English very fairly. He told us that White Cloud was the son of old White Cloud, who died three years since, and that the young chief had acquired entire command over the tribe by his mildness and dignity. He had paid the debts of the loways to the traders, very much against the will of the tribe; but he commenced by declaring firmly that he would be just, and had carried his point. He had come to Washington to receive a great deal of money from the sale of the lands of the tribe, and the distribution of it lay entirely in his own power. Only one old warrior had ventured to rise in council and object to his measures; but when White Cloud spoke, he had dropped his head on his bosorn and submitted. This information and that which followed was given in English, of which neither of the loways understood a word. Mr. Power expressed a surprise that the Sioux- killer should have known him in his citizen s dress. The interpreter translated it, and the Indian said in answer: " The dress is very different, but when I see a man s eye I know him again." He then told Power that he wished, in the theatre, to raise his war-cry and help him fight the three bad- looking men who were his enemies (referring to the three bailiffs in the scene in Paddy Carey). Power asked what part of the play he liked best. He said that part where he seized the girl in his arms and ran off the stage with her (at the close of an Irish jig in the same play). The interpreter informed us that this was the first time the Sioux-killer had come among the whites. He had disliked them always till now, but he said he had seen enough to keep him telling tales all the rest of his life. Power offered them cigars, which they refused. We expressed our surprise ; and the Sioux- killer said that the Indians who smoked gave out soonest in the chase; and White Cloud added, very gravely, that the young women of his tribe did not like the breaths of the smokers. In answer to an in quiry I made about the comparative size of Indians and white men, the chief said that the old men of the whites were larger than old Indians, but the young whites were not so tall and straight as the youths of his tribe. We were struck with the smallness of the chief s hands and feet; but he seemed very much mortified when the interpreter translated our remark to him. He turned the little sallow fingers over and over, and said that old White Cloud, his father, who had been a great warrior, had small hands like his. The young chief, we were told by the interpreter, has never yet been in an engagement, and is always spared from | the heavier fatigues undergone by the rest of the I tribe. They showed great good nature in allowing us to I look afc their ornaments, tomahawks, &c. White Cloud wore a collar of bear s claws, which marked him for a chief; and the Sioux-killer carried a great | cluster of brass bells on the end of his tomahawk, of ; which he explained the use very energetically. It ! was to shake when he stood over his fallen enemy in SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 217 the fight, to let the tribe know he had killed him. | After another tumbler of champagne each, they rose to take their leave, and White Cloud gave us his hand j gently, with a friendly nod. We were all amused, | however, with the Sioux-killer s more characteristic | adieu. Ue looked us in the eye like a hawk, and gave , us each a grip of his iron fist, that made the blood | tingle under our nails. He would be an awkward customer in a fight, or his fixed lips and keen eye very ! much belie him. CHAPTER XVIII. WASHINGTON AFTKR THE SESSION. THE leaf that is lodged in some sunny dell, after drifting on the whirlwind the Indian s canoe, after it has shot the rapids the drop of water that has strug gled out from the Phlegethon of Niagara, and sleeps on the tranquil bosom of Ontario are faint images of contrast and repose, compared with a Washington!- j an after the session. I have read somewhere, in an I oriental tale, that a lover, having agreed to share his j life with his dying mistress, took her place in the i grave six months in the year. In Bagdad it might have been a sacrifice. In Washington I could con ceive such an arrangement to make very little dif ference. Nothing is done leisurely in our country ; and, by the haste with which everybody rushes to the rail road the morning after the rising of congress, you I would fancy that the cars, like Cinderella s coach, j would be changed into pumpkins at the stroke of twelve. The town was evacuated in a day. On the j fifth of March a placard was sent back by the inn keepers at Baltimore, declaring that there was not so ! much as a garret to be had in that city, and imploring gentlemen and ladies to remain quietly at Washington j for twenty-four hours. The railroad engine, twice a j day, tugged and putted away through the hills, draw- j ing after it, on its sinuous course, a train of brick-color ed cars, that resembled the fabulous red dragon trailing \ its slimy length through the valley of Crete. The j gentlemen who sit by the fire in the bar-room at ! Gadsby s, like Theodore Hook s secretary, who could i hear his master write " Yours faithfully" in the next j room, learned to distinguish " Received payment" j from " Sundries," by listening to the ceaseless scratch of the bookkeeper. The ticket-office at the depot I was a scene of struggle and confusion between those who wanted places ; while, looking their last on these j vanishing paymasters, stood hundreds of tatterdema- j lions, white, yellow, and black, with their hands in i their pockets, and (if sincere regret at their departure \ could have wrung it forth) a tear in their eye. The bell rang, and the six hundred departures flocked to ! their places young ladies, with long faces, leaving the delights of Washington for the dull repose of the country their lovers, with longer faces, trying, in vain, to solve the X quantity expressed by the aforesaid " Sundries" in their bill and members of congress with long faces, too for not one in twenty has "made | the impression" he expected ; and he is moralizing on the decline of the taste for eloquence, and on the want of " golden opportunity" for the display of indig nant virtue! Nothing but an army, or such a concourse of people as collects to witness an inauguration, could ever make Washington look populous. But when congress, and its train of ten thousand casual visiters are gone, and only the official and indigenous inhabitants remain, Balbec, or Palmyra, with a dozen Arabs scattered among its ruins, has less a look of desolation. The | few stragglers in the streets add to its loneliness pro- , ducing exactly the effect sometimes given to a wood land solitude by the presence of a single bird. The vast streets seem grown vaster and more dispropor tionate the houses seem straggling to greater distan ces the walk from the president s house to the capitol seems twice as long and new faces are seen here and there, at the doors and windows for cooks and inn keepers that had never time to lounge, lounge no\v, and their families take quiet possession of the unrented front parlor. He who would be reminded of his de parted friends should walk down on the avenue. The carpet, associated with so many pleasant recollections which has been pressed by the dainty feet of wits and beauties to tread on which was a privilege and a delight is displayed on a heap of old furniture, and while its sacred defects are rudely scanned by the curi ous, is knocked down, with all its memories, under the hammer of the auctioneer. Tables, chairs, ottomans all linked with the same glowing recollections go for most unworthy prices; and while, humiliated with the sight, you wonder at the artificial value given to things by their possessors, you begin to wonder wheth er your friends themselves, subjected to the same searching valuation, would not be depreciated too! Ten to one, if their characters were displayed like their carpets, there would come to light defects as un suspected ! The person to whom this desolation is the " un- kindest cut" is the hackney-coachman. "His voca tion" is emphatically gone ! Gone is the dollar made every successive half hour! Gone is the pleasant sum in compound addition, done "in the head," while wait ing at the doors of the public offices! Gone are the short, but profitable, trips to the theatre ! Gone the four or five families, all taken the same evening to par ties, and each paying the item of" carriage from nine till twelve !" Gone the absorbed politician, who would rather give the five-dollar bill than wait for his change ! the lady who sends the driver to be paid at "the bar;" the uplifted fingers, hither and thither, which embar rass his choice of a fare gone, all! The chop-fallen coachy drives to the stand in the morning and drives home at noon; he creeps up to Fuller s at a snail- pace, and, in very mockery of hope, asks the home ward-bound clerk from the department if he wants a coach! Night comes on, and his horses begin to be lieve in the millenium and the cobwebs are wove over his whip-socket. These changes, however, affect not unpleasantly the diplomatic and official colony extending westward from the president s. The inhabitants of this thin-sprinkled settlement are away from the great thoroughfare, and do not miss its crowds. The cessation of parties is to them a relief from night-journeys, colds, card-leavings, and much wear and tear of carriage-horses. They live now in dressing-gowns and slippers, read the re views and the French papers, get their dinners com fortably from the restaurateurs, and thank Heaven that the capitol is locked up. The attaches grow fat, and the despatches grow thin. There are several reasons why Washington, till the rnontli of May, spite of all the drawbacks in the pic ture delineated above, is a more agreeable residence than the northern cities. In the first place, its climate is at least a month earlier than that of New York, and, in the spring, is delightful. The trees are at this mo ment (the last week in March) bursting into buds; open carriages are everywhere in use; walking in the sun is oppressive ; and for the last fortnight, this has been a fair chronicle of the weather. Boston and New York have been corroded with east winds, mean time, and even so near as Baltimore, they are still wrapped in cloaks arid shawls. To those who, in reckoning the comforts of life, agree with me in making climate stand for nine tenths, this is powerful attrac tion. 218 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. Then the country about Washington, the drives and rides, are among the most lovely in the world, the banks of Rock creek are a little wilderness of beauty. More bright waters, more secluded bridle paths, more sunny and sheltered hill-sides, or finer mingling of rock, hill, and valley, I never rode among. Within a half hour s gallop, you have a sylvan retreat of every variety of beauty, and in almost, any direction ; and from this you come home (and this is not the case with most sylvan rides) to an excellent French dinner and agreeable society, if you like it. You have all the seclusion of a rural town, and none of its petty politics and scandal all the means and appliances of a large metropolis, and none of its exactions and lim itations. That which makes the charm of a city, and that for which we seek the country, are equally here, and the penalties of both are removed. Until the reflux of population from the Rocky mountains, I suppose Washington will never be a me tropolis of residence. But if it were an object with the inhabitants to make it more so, the advantages I have just enumerated, and a little outlay of capital and enterprise, would certainly, in some degree, effect it. People especially who come from Europe, or have been accustomed to foreign modes of living, would be glad to live near a society composed of such attractive materials as the official and diplomatic persons at the seat of government. That which keeps them away is, principally, want of accommodation, and, in a less de gree, it is want of comfortable accommodation in the other cities which drives them back to Europe. In Washington you must either live at an hotel or a boarding-house. In either case, the mode of life is only endurable for the shortest possible period, and the moment congress rises, every sufferer in these de testable places is off for relief. The hotels are crowd ed to suffocation ; there is an utter want of privacy in the arrangement of the suites of apartments ; the ser vice is ill-ordered, and the prices out of all sense or reason. You pay for that which you have not, and you can not get by paying for it that which you want. The boarding-house system is worse yet. To pos sess but one room in privacy, and thai opening on a common passage; to be obliged to come to meals at certain hours, with chance table companions, and no place for a friend, and to live entirely in your bedroom or in a public parlor, may truly be called as abominable a routine as a gentleman could well suffer. Yet the great majority of those who come to Washington are in one or the other of these two categories. The use of lodgings for strangers or transient resi dents in the city does not, after all the descriptions in books, seem at all understood in our country. This is what Washington wants, but it is what every city in the country wants generally. Let us describe it as if it was never before heard of, and perhaps some en lightened speculator may advance us half a century in some of the cities, by creating this luxury. Lodgings of the ordinary kind in Europe generally consist of the apartments on one floor. The house, we will suppose, consists of three stories above the basement, and each floor contains a parlor, bedroom, and dressing-room, with a small antechamber. (This arrangement of rooms varies, of course, and a larger family occupies two floors.) These three suites of apartments are neatly furnished ; bed-clothes, table- linen, and plate, if required, are found by the proprie tor, and in the basement story usually lives a man and his wife, who attend to the service of the lodgers; i. e., bring water, answer the door-bell, take in letters, keep the rooms in order, make the fires, and, if it is wished, do any little cookery in case of sickness. These people are paid by the proprietor, but receive a fee for extra service, and a small gratuity, at departure, from the lodger. It should be added to this, that it is not infra, dig: to live in the second or third story. In connexion with lodgings, there must be of course a cook or restaurateur within a quarter of a mile. The stranger agrees with him for his dinner, to consist of so many dishes, and to be sent to him at a certain hour. He gives notice in the morning if he dines out, buys his own wine of the wine-merchant, and thus saves two heavy items of overcharge in the hotel or boarding-house. His own servant makes his tea or coffee (and for this purpose has access to the fire in the basement), and does all personal service, such as brushing clothes, waiting at table, going on errands, &c., &c. The stranger comes in, in short, at a mo- I ment s warning, brings nothing but his servant and baggage, and finds himself in five minutes at home, his apartments private, and every comfort and con venience as completely about him as if he had lived there for years. At from ten to fourteen dollars a week, such apart ments would pay the proprietor handsomely, and af ford a reasonable luxury to the lodger. A cook would make a good thing of sending in a plain dinner for a dollar a head (or more if the dinner were more expen sive), and at this rate, a family of two or more persons might have a hundred times the comfort now enjoyed at hotels, at certainly half the cost. We have been seduced into a very unsentimental chapter of " ways and means," but we trust the sug gestions, though containing nothing new, may not be altogether without use. The want of some such thing I as we have recommended is daily and hourly felt and j complained of. THE FOUR RIVERS, THE HUDSON THE MOHAWK THE CHENANGO THE SUSQUEHANNAH. SOME observer of nature offered a considerable re ward for two blades of striped grass exactly similar. i The infinite diversify, of which this is one instance, | exists in a thousand other features of nature, but in 1 none more strikingly than in the scenery of rivers. 1 What two in the woild are alike ! How often does I the attempt fail to compare the Hudson with the Rhine the two, perhaps, among celebrated rivers, which j are the nearest to a resemblance ? Yet looking at the I first determination of a river s course, and the natural j operation of its search for the sea, one would suppose j that, in a thousand features, their valleys would scarce I be distinguishable. I think, of all excitements in the world, that of the first discovery and explanation of a noble river, must j be the most eager and enjoyable. P ancy " the bold i Englishman, as the Dutch called Hendrich Hudson, \ steering his little yacht, the Halve-Mane, for the first time through the Highlands ! Imagine his anxiety for the channel forgotten as he gazed up at the tower- j ing rocks, and round upon the green shores, and on- | ward, past point and opening bend, miles away into the i heart of the country ; yet with no lessening of the glorious stream beneath him, and no decrease of promise in the bold and luxuriant shores ! Picture him lying at anchor below Newburgh, with the dark j pass of the " Wey-Gat" frowning behind him, the I lofty and blue Catskills beyond, and the hill-sides around covered with the red lords of the soil, exhibit ing only less wonder than friendliness. And how beautifully was the assurance of welcome expressed, when the "very kind old man" brought a bunch of arrows, and broke them before the stranger, to induce him to partake fearlessly of his hospitality! SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 219 The qualities of the Hudson are those most likely to impress a stranger. It chances felicitously that the traveller s first entrance beyond the sea-board is usually made by the steamer to Albany. The grand and im posing outlines of rock and horizon answer to his an ticipations of the magnificence of a new world ; and if he finds smaller rivers and softer scenery beyond, it I strikes him but as a slighter lineament of a more en- I larged design. To the great majority of tastes, this, I too, is the scenery to live among. The stronger lines of natural beauty affect most tastes ; and there are few who would select country residence by beauty at all, who would not sacrifice something to their prefer ence for the neighborhood of sublime scenery. The quiet, the merely rural a thread of a rivulet instead of a broad river a small and secluded valley, rather than a wide extent of view, bounded by bold moun tains, is the choice of but few. The Hudson, there fore, stands usually foremost in men s aspirations for escape from the turmoil of cities; but to my taste, though there are none more desirable to see, there are sweeter rivers to live upon. I made one of a party, very lately, bound upon a rambling excursion up and down some of the river- courses of New York. We had anticipated empty boats, and an absence of all the gay company usually found radiating from the city in June, and had made up our minds for once to be contented with the study of inanimate nature. Never were wiseheads more when a Yankee settler hews me down twenty wood- nymphs of a morning ! There lie their bodies, limb less trunks, on the banks of the Mohawk, yet no Dutch man stands sprouting into leaves near by, nor woollen jacket turning into bark, as in the retributive olden time! We are abandoned of these gods of Arcady! They like not the smoke of steam funnels ! Talking of smoke reminds me of ashes. Is there no way of frequenting railroads without the loss of one s eyes. Must one pay for velocity as dearly as Cacus for his oxen ? Really this new invention is a blessing to the oculists ! Ten thousand small crystals of carbon cutting right and left among the fine vessels and delicate membranes of the eye, and all this amid glorious scenery, where to go bandaged (as needs must), is to slight the master-work of nature ! Either run your railroads away from the river courses, gentle men contractors, or find some other place than your passengers eyes to bestow your waste ashes ! I have heard of " lies in smiles," but there s a lye in tears, that touches the sensibilities more nearly ! There is a drowsy beauty in these German flats that seems strangely profaned by a smoky monster whisk ing along twenty miles in the hour. The gentle canal- boat was more homogeneous to the scene. The hills lay off from the river in easy and sleepy curves, and the amber Mohawk creeps down over its shallow gravel with a deliberateness altogether and abominably out of tune with the iron rails. Perhaps it is the rails out mistaken. Our kind friend, Captain Dean, of the II of tune with the river but any way there is a discord. Stevens, stood by his plank when we arrived, doing his j I am content to see the Mohawk, canal, and railroad best to save the lives of the female portion of the j inclusive, but once a year. 1 ___ l_- _ ___ 1. ____ J . _ J .1 -wr 1 , , J , crowd rushing on board ; and never, in the most palmy days of the prosperity of our country, have we seen a greater number of people on board a boat, nor a strong er expression of that busy and thriving haste, which is thought to be an exponent of national industry. How those varlets of newsboys contrive to escape in time, or escape at all, from being crushed or carried off; how everybody s baggage gets on board, and everybody s wife and child ; how the hawsers are slipped, and the boat got under way, in such a crowd and such a crush, are matters understood, I suppose, by Providence and the captain of the Stevens but they are beyond the comprehension of the passenger. Having got out of hearing of " Here s the Star !" "Buy the old major s paper, sir ?" " Here s the Ex press!" "Buy the New-En/?" " Would you like a New-Era, sir ?" " Take a Sun, miss ?" and a hun dred such deafening ciies, to which New York has of late years become subject, we drew breath and com parative silence off the green shore of Hoboken, thank ing Heaven for even the repose of a steamboat, after the babel of a metropolis. Stillness, like all other things, is relative. The passage of the Hudson is doomed to be |je-wi it- ten, and we will not again swell its great multitude of describers. Bound onward, we but gave a glance, in passing, to romantic Undercliff and Cro -Nest, hallow ed by the sweetest poetry our country has yet com mitted to immortality ; gave our malison to the black smoke of iron-works defacing the green mantle of nature, and our benison to every dweller on the shore who has painted his fence white, and smoothed his We reached the head waters of the Chenango river, by what Miss Martineau celebrates as an " exclusive extra," in an afternoon s ride from Utica. The latter thrifty and hospitable town was as redolent of red bricks and sunshine as usual ; and the streets, to my regret, had grown no narrower. They who laid out the future legislative capital of New York, must have been lovers of winter s wind and summer s sun. They forgot the troubles of the near-sighted (it requires spectacles to read the signs or see the shops from one side to the other); they forgot the perils of old women and children in the wide crossings; they forgot the pleasures of shelter and shade, of neighborly vis-a-vis, of comfortable-lookingness. I maintain that Utica is not a comfortable-looking town. It affects me like the clown in the pantomime, when he sits down without bending his legs by mere straddling. I would not say anything so ungracious if it were not to suggest a remedy a shady mall up and down the middle ! What a beautiful town it would be like an old-fashioned shirt bosom, with a frill of elms! Your children would walk safely within the rails, and your country- neighbors would expose their " sa ace," and cool their tired oxen in the shade. We felt ourselves compen sated for paying nearly double price for our " extra," by the remarkable alacrity with which the coach came to the door after the bargain was concluded, and the politeness with which the "gentleman who made out the way-bill," acceded to our stipulation. He bowed us off, expressed his happiness to serve us, and away we went. The Chenango, one of the largest tributaries to the lawn to the river; and sooner than we used to do by 1 1 Susquehannah, began to show itself, like a small brook, some five or six hours (ere railroads had supplanted jj some fifteen or twenty miles from Utica. Its course the ploughing and crawling coaches to Schenectady), II lay directly south and the new canal kept along its we fed our eyes on the slumbering and broad valley i bank, as deserted, but a thousand times less beautiful of the Mohawk. How startled must be the Naiad of this lovely river to find her willowy form embraced between railroad and canal ! one intruder on either side of the bed so sacredly overshaded ! Pity but there were a new knight of La Mancha to avenge the hamadryads and ; in its loneliness than the river, whose rambling curves it seemed made to straighten. We were not in the best humor, for our double-priced " extra" turned out to be the regular stage ; and while we were delivering and waiting for mails, and taking in passengers, the troop of idlers at tavern-doors amused themselves with water-nymphs of their wrongs from wood-cutters and i| reading the imaginative production called our "extra contractors ! Where sleep Pan and vengeful Oread, \\ way-bill," as it was transferred, with a sagacious wink, 220 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. from one driver s hat to the other. I thought of Paddy s sedan-chair, with the bottom out. " If it were not for the name of the thing," said he, as he trotted along with a box over his head. I say we were not in the best of humors with our prompt and polite friend at Utica, but even through these bilious spectacles, the Chenango was beautiful. Its valley is wide and wild, and the reaches of the capricious stream through the farms and woods along which it loiters, were among the prettiest effects of water scenery I have ever met. There is a strange loneliness about it ; and the small towns which were I sprinkled along the hundred miles of its course, seem rather the poineers into a western wilderness, than j settlements so near the great thoroughfare to the lakes. ! It is a delicious valley to travel through, barring "corduroy." Tre-men-dous ! exclaims the traveller, as the coach drops into a pit between two logs, and surges up again Heaven only knows how. And, as my fellow-passenger remarked, it is a wonder the road does not echo " tree-mcnd-us /" Five miles before reaching the Susquehannah, the road began to mend, the hills and valleys assumed the smile of cultivation, and the scenery before us took a bolder and broader outline. The Chenango came down full and sunny to her junction, like the bride, who is most lovely when just losing her virgin name, and pouring the wealth of her whole existence into the bosom of another; and, untroubled with his new burden, the lordly Susquehannah kept on his majestic way, a type of such vainly-dreaded, but easily-borne responsibilities. At Binghamton, we turned our course down the Susquehannah. This delicious word, in the Indian j tongue, describes its peculiar and constant windings, || and I venture to say that on no river in the world are i! the grand and beautiful in scenery so gloriously mixed. The road to Owego follows the course of the valley rather than of the river, but the silver curves are con- j; stantly in view; and, from every slight elevation, the ! majestic windings are seen like the wanderings of a vein, gleaming through green fringes of trees, andj; circling the bright islands which occasionally divide their waters. It is a swift river, and singularly living and joyous in its expression. At Owego there is a remarkable combination of bold scenery and habitable plain. One of those small, bright rivers, which are called "creeks" in this coun- I try, comes in with its valley at right angles, to the vale and stream of the Susquehannah, forming a star with i three rays, or a plain with three radiating valleys, or a city (in the future, perhaps), with three magnificent exits and entrances. The angle is a round mountain, some four or five hundred feet in height, which kneels fairly down at the meeting of the two streams, while another round mountain, of an easy acclivity, lifts gracefully from the opposite bank, as if rising from the same act of homage to Nature. Below the town and above it, the mountains, for the first time, give in to the exact shape of the river s short and capricious course ; and the plain on which the town stands, is enclosed between two amphitheatres of lofty hills, shaped with the regularity and even edge of a coliseum, and resembling the two halves of a leaf-lined vase, struck apart by a twisted wand of silver. Owego creek should have a prettier name for its small vale is the soul and essence of loveliness. A meadow of a mile in breadth, fertile, soft, and sprink led with stately trees, furnishes a bed for its swift windings ; and from the edge of this new tempe, on the southern side, rise three steppes, or natural ter races, over the highest of which the forest rears its head, and looks in upon the meeting of the rivers, while down the sides, terrace by terrace, leap the small streamlets from the mountain-springs, forming each again its own smaller dimple in this loveliest face of Nature. There are more romantic, wilder places than this in the world, but none on earth more habitably beauti ful. In these broad valleys, where the grain-fields, and the meadows, and the sunny farms, are walled in by glorious mountain sides, not obtrusively near, yet by their noble and wondrous outlines, giving a per petual refreshment, and an hourly-changing feast to the eye in these valleys, a man s household gods yearn for an altar. Here are mountains that, to look on but once, "become a feeling" a river at whose grandeur to marvel and a hundred streamlets to lace about the heart. Here are fertile fields, nodding with grain ; " a thousand cattle" grazing on the hills here is assembled together, in one wondrous centre, a spe cimen of every most loved lineament of Nature. Here | would I have a home ! Give me a cottage by one of these shining streamlets upon one of these terraces, that seem steps to Olympus, and let me ramble over these mountain sides, while my flowers are growing, and my head silvering in tranquil happiness. He ! whose Penates would not root ineradicably here, has no heart for a home, nor senses for the glory of Na- ; ture ! END OF LOITERINGS OF TRAVEL. EPHEMERA. 113 cut from one end that is sewed on to the other ! But, out on monotony, and hey for Saratoga ! If there be an approach to a gayety-paradise on earth if there be a place where the mortifications of neighborhood are forgotten, and " people s natural advantages" are prom inent and undisputed if there be, this side Heaven, a place where it is worth while to dress, worth while to be pretty, worth while to walk, talk, and particu larly and generally outdo " The snowy swans that strut on Isca s sands," it is sandy Saratoga Marvin s United States Hotel ! Take your papa there, " for his health," my dear belle! "And tell him, too," that it was the well- expressed opinion of the philosopher Bacon, that "money, like manure, is offensive if not spread-" Tell your mamma to tell him how pale he is when he wakes in the morning! Tell the doctor to prescribe Congress water without the taste of the cork! Tell him, if he does not, and you are not let go with a chaperon, you will do something you shudder to think of bolt, slope, elope, with the first base " Arimaspian who, by stealth, Will from his wakeful custom purloin The guarded gold" to which you are the heiress ! For it is credibly and currently reported " in high circles," that the coming season at Saratoga is to be of a crowded uncomforta- bleness of splendor that was reserved for the making fashionable, by Mr. Van Buren, of the " United States" and its dependant colonies. Among the alleviations to passing a summer in town (misericordia pro nobis . ) is the completion of Mr. Stevens s Gothic cottage at the lip of the Elysian Hoboken, where are to be had many good things, of course, but where (I venture to suggest) it would be a bliss ineffable to be able to get a good breakfast! What a pleasure to cross the ferry, and, after a morning ramble in that delicious park, to sit down in the fresh air volant through the galleries of that sweet cottage, and eat (if nothing more) a nice roll with a good cup of French coffee ! A restaurateur there would make a fortune, I do think. Bring it about, Mr. "Person Concerned," and you shall lack neither our company nor a zealous trumpeter. THE CLOISTER. Committee (solus). Oh, most beset of brigadiers! Most civil of military men ! (for half a firm, the most yielding partner of my acquaintance!) whett, oh re sponsible general, will you get through with your^?r- ticular callers and come to confab ? True, 1 have dined, and can wait! True, there are joint letters to answer! True, I can listen, and look out into the back yard ! Hark ! Syphax, my black boy, loquitur. Syphax (to the general). Shall I cut out them favorable notices from the exchanges, sir? Brigadier. Those favorable notices, Syphax! Heavens ! what an unfeeling man ! For the love of pity, corrupt not the innocent grammar of the lad, my dear brigadier! Out of seven black boys sent me for trial by the keeper of an intelligence-office, six, to my disgust, spoke with the painful accuracy of Doc tor Pangloss. The last, my inestimable Syphax, whom that finished brigadier would fain bring to his own level of heartless good grammar was ignorant (virtuous youth!) even of the sexes of pronouns! He came to me innocent; and, I need not say to any writer to any slave of the rule-tied pen to any man cabined, cribbed, confined, as are public scribblers to case and number, gender and conjugation, participle present, and participle past I need not say, to such a victim, what an oasis in the desert of perfection was the green spot of a black boy s cacology ! Oh, to the attenuated ear of the grammar-ridden! to the tense mood of unerring mood and tense what a lux ury is an erring pronoun what a blessed relief from monotony is a too-yielding verb, seduced, from its sin gular antecedent, by a contiguity of plural! Out on perfectionists! Out on you, you flaw-less brigadier! Correct your own people, however! Inveigle not my Syphax into rhetoric ! Ravish not from my use the one variation, long-sought and chance-found, from the maddening monotone of good grammar! And this brings to my mind "(if I get time to jot it down before the brigadier comes to cloister) a long- settled conviction of my own, that the corrections in American manners brought about by the criticisms of Trollope and others, have been among the worst in fluences ever exercised upon the country. Gracious heaven ! are we to have our national features rasped off by every manner-tinker who chooses to take up a file ! See how it affects the English to laugh at their bloat of belly and conceit, their cockney ignorance and their besotted servility to rank. Do they brag less, and drink less beer ? Do they modify their Bow- bell dialect one hair, or whip off their hats with less magical celerity when spoken to by a lord? Not a bit! They will be English till they are smothered with Russians English ghosts (those who die before England is conquered by Russia), with English man ners, at doomsday. They are not so soft as to be moulded into American pottery, or German pottery, or French pottery, because an American, or a Ger man, or a Frenchman, does not find them like his own country s more common utensils ! Where do national features exist? Not among well-bred people! Not where peas are eaten with a fork and soup-plates left untilted by the hungry ! All well-bred people are monotonously alike whatever their nation and what ever the government they have lived under. Differ ences of manners are found below this level, and the mistake the lamentable mistake lies in submitting to correct this low level by the standard of coxcombs! What a picture would be without shade what music would be without discords what life would be with out something to smile at what anything would be without contrast that are we becoming by our sensi tiveness to criticism. Long live our (B u\l-judice) " abominations." Long live some who spit and whit tle, some who eat eggs out of wine-glasses and sit on four chairs, some who wear long naps to their hats, some who eat peas with a knife, some who pour out their tea into saucers, and some who are civil to un protected ladies in stage-coaches! Preserve some thing that is not English, oil, my countrymen ! [Enter the brigadier.] Brigadier. Forgive me, my dear boy what is that I see written on your paper about Russia ? The Russie men are round of bodies, fully-faced, The greatest part with bellies that overhang the waist, Flat-headed for the most, with faces nothing faire, But brown by reason of the stoves and closeness of the aire." So says old Tuberville, the traveller and now to busi ness. Jot ! Committee. What ? Brigadier. Jot that we are glad to offer to the patrons of the "Mirror Library" a book they will thank us for, at every line " THE PLEA OF THE MID SUMMER FAIRIES," and other admirable poems, preg nant with originality and richness, by Thomas Hood. His poetry is the very attar, the aroma, the subtlest extract of sweet imagination. " EUGENE ARAM" is one of those included in this volume. Committee. What else are you glad of? 114 EPHEMERA. Brigadier. Glad to be sorry that Parke Godwin s fine analytical mind and bold foundry of cast-iron English are not freighted with a more popular sub ject than Fourierism worthy though the theme be of the regard of angels whose approbation don t pay. Politics should be at a lift to deserve the best ener gies of such a writer but they are not, and so he turns to philosophy. Committee. But he should play Quintus Curtius, and write up politics to his level, man ! The need is more immediate than the need of Fourierism. Brigadier. My dear boy, give away nothing but what is saleable. Gifts, that would not otherwise have been money in your purse, are not appreciated par ticularly advice. We love Godwin let us love his waste of ammunition, if it please him to waste it. Committee. " Then let him weep, of no man mercified," if his brains be not coinable to gold, /would make a merchant of genius! The world has need of brains like Godwin s, and need makes the supply into com modity, and commodity is priceable. That s the logic by which even my poor modicum is made to thrive. Apropos what do you think of these lines on "bells," by Duganne? A poet. I should say: " Ye melancholy bells, Ye know not why ye re ringing- See not the tear-drops springing From sorrows that ye bring to mind, Ye melancholy bells. " And thus ye will ring on To-day, in tones of sadness ; To-morrow, peals of gladness ; Ye ll sound them both, yet never feel A thrill of either one. " Ye ever-changing bells ! Oh many ye resemble, Who ever throb and tremble, Yet never know what moves them so Ye ever-changing bells." Brigadier. Kernel-ish and quaint. But, my dear boy, " twilight, soft arbiter Twixt day and night," is beginning to blur the distinctness of the cheeks on that apron drying upon the line in the back yard. Shall we go to tea? The opening of the exhibition at the National Acad emy is like taking a mask from one of the city s most agreeable features. And it is only those who live in the city habitually, and ivho live as fast as the city does, who are qualified to enjoy it with the best apprecia tion. Did you ever notice, dear reader, how behind the tide you feel, on arriving in town, even after an j absence of a week how whirling and giddy your sen- sntions are how many exciting things there seem for I you to do how " knowing" and ahead-of-you" seem j all the takers-coolly whom you meet- how incapable you are of any of the tranquil pleasures of the me tropolis, and with what impatient disgust you pnss any exhibition which would subtract you, mind and body, from the crowd. It is not for strangers, then, that the j exhibition is the highest pleasure. It is for those who ! have laid behind them the bulk of the city excite ments in a used-up heap to whom balls are nuisances, theatres sntiety, concerts a bore, Broadway stale, giants, dwarfs, and six-legged cows, "familiar as your [ hand." It is only such who have the cool eye to look critically and enjoyingly at pictures. It is for such that Durand has laid into his landscape the touch that ; was preceded by despair for such that Ingham elab orates, and Page strains invention, and Sully woos the ! coy shade of expression. And, truth to say, it is not | one of the least of the gratuitous riches of existence, that while we are sifting away the other minutes of the year in commonplace business or pleasure, forget ful of art and artists, these gifted minds are at work, producing beautiful pictures to pamper our eyes with in spring ! If you never chanced to think of that before, dear reader, you are richer than you thought! Please enclose us the surplus in bankable funds ! Ehem! There are more portraits in the exhibition than will please the dilettanti but hang the displeased ! We would submit to a thousand indifferent portraits, for the accident of possessing a likeness of one friend unex pectedly lost. For Heaven s sake, let everybody be painted, that, if perchance there is a loved face marked, unsuspected by us, for heaven, we may have its semblance safe before it is beyond recall! How bitter the regret, the self-reproach, when the beautiful joy of a household has been suddenly struck into the I grave, that we might have had a bright image of her j on canvass that we might have removed, by holding | converse wiih her perpetuated smile, the dreadful image of decay that in sad moments crowds too closely upon us! For the sake of love and friendship, let that branch of the art, now in danger of being dispar aged by short-sighted criticism let it be ennobled, for the sacred offices it performs ! Is an art degrading to its follower which does so much which prolongs the presence of the dead, which embellishes family ties, which brightens the memory of the absent, which quickens friendship, and shows the loved, as they were before ravage by sadness or sickness ? There should rather be a priesthood of the affections, and portrait- painters its brotherhood holy for their ministering pencils. We have a customer in Andover, to whose attention particularly we commend the truly delicious poetry of " The Sacred Rosary," as some atonement for having inveigled him into the purchase of the " Songs of the Bard of Poor Jack." That mis-spent shilling troubled our friend, and he wrote us a letter and paid eighteen pence postage to complain of it! but non omnia pos- sum-us omnes (we can t play possum with all our sub scribers), and we humbly beg our kind friend (who j lives where we learned our Latin) to refresh his piety ! with the "Rosary," and forgive the Dibdin. The j apology over, however, we must make bold to say that j of all the publications of the " Mirror Library," this collection of Dibdin s songs has sold the best. It has been indeed what our Andover friend scornfully calls " a catch-penny affair," and we wish there were (what there never will be) another catch-penny like it. No by Castaly ! such a book will never again be written ! If ever there was honest, hearty, natural, manly feel ing spliced to rhyme, it is in these magnificent songs. England s naval glory her esprit-dc-man-o -war hei empire of the sea lies spell-bound in that glorious song-book ! She owes more to Dibdin than to Chat- j ham or Burke as much as to Howard or Wilber- force! Ah, dear Anonym of Andover, you have never hung your taste out to salt over the gunwale ! Fou don t know poor Jack. Find out when your lease of life is likely to run out go first to sea read Dibdin understanding!}-, c poimori!" The proprietor of the " Connecticut pie depot" \ (corner of Beekman and Nassau), writes us that he will be happy to have us " call and taste his pies when we are sharp-set," and that he hails from Boston and takes a pride in us. So we do in him. though, for a EPHEMERA. 115 puff, our pen against his rolling-pin for a thousand pound ! He evidently thinks us " the cheese," for he says he wishes to be noticed in our " dairy of town trifles." Well, sir, we don t " fill our belly with the east wind," nor eat pies, since we left Boston, but we rejoice in your pie-ous enterprise, and agree, with you, to consider ourselves mutually \\iejlour of the city we come from. Apropos we can do our friend a service which we hope he will reciprocate by opening a sub scription-book in his pie-magazine, and procuring us five hundred subscribers (payments invariably in ad vance). A young lady has written to us, imploring the Mirror s aid in reforming the prog at fashionable boarding-schools. There are symptoms of a " strike" for something better to eat in these coops of chicken- angels, and the establishment of a " Connecticut pie depot" seems (seems, madam, nay, it is !) beautifully providential ! We can not trace our anonymous note to any particular school, but we hereby recommend to the young ladies in every "establishment," "nun nery," and "seminary," to "hang their aprons on the outer wall," and hoist in our friend s pastry, on trial. The French pockets will be filled the first day gratis, we undertake to promise. The second day and after, of course, the bill will be presented to tante or the music-master. There are poems which the world "does not wil lingly let die," but which this same go-to-bed world, tired of watching, covers quietly up with the ashes of neglect, and leaves to grow as black as the poker and tongs of criticism that stand unused beside them. Stop the first twenty men (gentlemen, even) whom you see in the street, and probably not one can tell you even the argument of Goldsmith s great poem ! And the " pourquoy Sir Knight" is simply that " The English Poets," in six formidable volumes, are too much for cursory readers to encounter! The poems and passages they would "thumb," if they could light readily on them, are buried up in loads of uninterest ing miscellany. They want the often-quoted, unde niable, pure fire, raked out of this heap of embers. Our last number of the Mirror Library begins a sup ply of this want, under the title of " LIVE COALS, raked from the Embers of English Poetry." The following advertisement is cut from " The Sun :" " NOTICE To the gentleman that pushed the man over the curbstone in Broadway, at the corner of Lis- penard street, with his dinner-kettle in his hand, from this time forth never to lay his hand on David Brown again." Now, what other country than America would do for David Brown ? God bless the land where a man can pour his sorrows into the sympathizing bosom of a newspaper! Query does not this seventy -five cent vent supersede altogether the use of that dangerous domestic utensil, a friend ! Add to this the invention of an wnexpressive substitute for gunpowder, and the world will be comparatively a safe place. Point of fact we delight in all manner of old things made young again, particularly in all kinds of vene rable and solemn humbug " showing green." If ever there was a monster, grown out of sight of its natural and original intention a bloated, diseased, wen-cov ered, abate-worthy nuisance of a monster, it is the newspaper. The first newspaper ever published in France was issued by a physician to amuse his pa tients. "To this complexion" would we reduce it once more. Fill them with trifles, or with important news (the same thing as to amusement), and throw a wet blanket, and keep it wet, over congressional twad dle, polemical fubbery, tiresome essays, political cob- webberies yes, especially politics ! People some times cease to talk when there are no listeners, and it might be hoped, with God s blessing and help ("Ave Maria ! ora pro nobis !") that congress members would cease to put us to shame as well as to bore us to ex tinction, if there were no newspapers to fan their indignant eloquence. It is a query worth sticking a pin in how many nuisances would die (beside con gress) if newspapers were restored to their original use and purpose? Any symptom of this regenera tion inexpressibly refreshes us. Hence our delight at the advertisement of David Brown. Who would not rather know that a man had run against David Brown at the corner of Lispenard street, with a dinner-kettle in his hand (and had better not do it again), than to read the next any ten speeches to be delivered on the rowdy floor of congress ! We have said enough to give you a thinking-bulb, dear reader, and now to our next but Apropos we wish our friend Russell Jarvis, or any analytically-minded and strong writer half as good, would prepare us a speculative essay on the query which is the natural inference of the late Washing- | ton doings, viz. : how curious must be the process of mind by which a gentleman (there are one or two in congress) could be brought to consent to stay there hail from there frank from there have his letters addressed there in any way or shape take upon himself a member s share of this lustrum s ob loquy and abomination ? Not but what we think it I wholesome we do ! You can not cure festers with- j out bringing them to a head. The wonder is, how gentlemen are willing to be parts of a congress that is only the nation s pustule the offensive head and vent of all the purulent secretions of the body politic ! Thank God, they are coming to a head to this head, if need be (it is rather conspicuous, it is true like a pimple on a lady s nose, which might be better situ ated) to have the worst issue of our national shame on the floor of Congress ; but better so than pent U p better so than an inward mortification precursory of dissolution ! For our own part (though we are no politician, except when stung upon our fifteen mil lionth of national feeling), we think we could do very well without a congress. We believe the supreme court capable of doing all the legislative grinding ne cessary for the country, or, if that would not do, we think a congress convened only for the first three months of every administration, in which speaking was prohibited, would answer all wise ends. We are over-governed. The reign of grave outrages and solemn atrocities is at its height, and Heaven overturn it, and send us, next after, a dynasty of laws " left to settle," and trifles paramount. Amen. We are not of the envious and discontented nature of a muttou candle, blackest at the wick that is to say we do not think every spot brighter than the one we live in. We seek means to glorify New York since we live here. Pat to our bosom and business, therefore, comes a letter " from a gentleman to his sister," apotheosistic (we will have our long word if we like) of this same pleasant municipality. Our friend i and anonymous correspondent does not go quite | enough into detail, and we cut off his long peroration, in which he compares himself very felicitously to "a bottle of soda-water, struggling for vent." "Now ! then," he continues, " to uncork (off hat) and let my 1 1 exuberant contents be made manifest : " Once more in New York dear, delightful New ! York ! the spot of all spots and the place of all places ! 1 the whereabout which the poet dreamed of when he 116 EPHEMERA. Bpoke of the first flower of the earth and first gem of the sea ; and once more here, too, not to look upon it for a moment, and then depart, but to stay, lo live, to be, to exist, and to enjoy. You do not know the love I bear New York ; it is, beyond all others, the place where existence is ; where time passes, not like a summer s dream, but as time should pass, in a suc cession (constant) of employments and enjoyments. " I love the city, as I love everything loveable, with a full and abiding joyousness. There is nothing pas sing, or in still life, but goes to make up the sum. The very odor of the atmosphere, which might shock your delicate, country-bred olfactories, is more to me than all the fragrance of all the green fields that were ever babbled of. "The country is all very well, in its way. 1 love that also at a distance, or in moderate quantities. Homeopathetically, as it were as, for instance, the Battery. I love to walk there, to inhale the sea- breeze, and enjoy the sweet smell of the growing grass and the budding trees; and to look over to Long Island or New Jersey, and see the country blooming (afar oft ) under the loving smiles of spring. Yes, the country is, no doubt, very desirable for a few days in the summer for a change, or to come back from with a new relish for the real life that awaits one on his return. " I love to stand on the docks, of a still evening, and hear the tide rush past. The very rime of the sea drifts in music to my ear. The rushing of the free and ever-changing waters, the glad dancing of its waves, the glowing reflex of the stars in their bosom, the rifting foam, and the swift gushing sound, like a continuous echo, stir up the dormant poetry of one s soul, and send him, with a glowing heart, back to his lonely home, happier for the sweet communion. "All the time, too, is thought-filled; there is no standing still here. Business is part of life, perhaps life itself, and it is constantly going on around and with us. If I choose a walk, Broadway is full of life never-ending, never-tiring. So all over the city. One can not stroll anywhere but he meets with some thing new, something strange, something interesting; some chapter opens, which has till then been to him as a dead letter. " Somebody, who wanted to express in strong lan guage that nature might be improved by art, has said that < God made the country, man made the town. How true it is! And, beyond that, here are congre gated hundreds of thousands of featherless bipeds (men and women), of whom, perhaps, you know not a dozen, but every one of whom, in your walks, is to you a study. "Then, again, the very situation the form, struc ture, and appliances of New York, are delightful and fascinating beyond compare. Such a beautiful promontory, swelling up from two magnificent rivers, rising from either, gently, to the palace-lined thor oughfare on its crown; and crossbarred with a thou sand avenues to both rivers inlets for pure air, ever fresh rising from the sea, blowing over and into every habitation, and freighted with health, like the gales of Araby the blest. "Nature has been wonderfully prodigal of her be- stowments on this spot, and the hand of man has not been niggardly in completing what the fair dame com menced, by putting a worthy superstructure on her noble foundation. I have often thought of the remark made by some one, that the man who first stood on Manhattan island, and looked around him with an eye and a mind that could comprehend and appreciate its wonderful beauties and advantages, must have held his very breath in wonder and admiration. " And then more of its present beauties to the dwellers therein. Should one, in hot and dusty weather, choose to change the scene, how joyous a j trip to Sandy Hook ! Often have I stood on the I heights, and looked off on old Ocean, holding in my gaze one of the most glowing scenes that this world j shows. The wide and boundless view the noble I Hudson and the city above, the green beauties of j Long island before, and the heaven ocean below, spread [ out in its grand sublimity; the sails of all nations flashing on its breast and blending in its glory, ; like a mirror where the Almighty s form Glasses itself. "Oh who, with such a prospect before him, feels not his soul elevated and his thoughts sublimated ! Thoughts, indeed, too wild for utterance, are born, not for others, but to sink deep in the heart and leave him a wiser if not a better man. " This, you will say is the country ah, but it is the country of New York, close by, and part of city life itself. Then there is another country (yours is only one) over the other shoulder, where the moderate sum of sixpence will waft us to the delightful walks, the green lawns, the shady groves, and cool zephyrs of dear, charming Hoboken. Doubly dear to a New- Worker. Fresh smelling and fragrant in the spring, cool and breezy in the hot days of summer ; and. with the rustling leaf of autumn, dear in its remembered beauties, its fading foliage, and the ever-sounding sur ges that beat with melancholy moan at the foot of its beetling crags and sloping lawns. Ah, lovely Hobo- ken, None know thee but to love thee, Nor name thee but to praise ! "Mr. Stevens, we owe you much; and we can af ford to owe ; but we pay you a large annual interest in gratitude and praise. Tis all we have, we can no more. " We also cut off the irrelevant tail of our friend s letter (tipped with a " G."), and beg another from him with a finer nib to his pen going more into the individ ualities. If you would like a subject suggested (exem pli gratia) give us the hopes, trials, temptations, and aspirations of a Broadway shop-tender. They seem fine youths, those silk-and-suavity venders. Who knows what is their pny and prospects ? How can they afford such good manners and fine waistcoats ? I What is the degree of friendly acquaintance bred be- j tween them and the ladies in the course of a bargain ? j Have they legs (below the counter) ? Do they rnar- 1 ry? Have they combinations, and esprit de corps? Which are the honorablest goods to sell? As to the " beating down" of grass-cloth and stockings is it interesting, or more so than the cheapening of calico? When do they eat ? Do handsomer ones get higher wages? May their "cousins" come to see them? How do they look with hats on ? What is the dura tion of their chrysalis the time of metamorphosis from boy to " boss" and what are their several sta ges of mental discipline ? The most saleable book in the world would be the autobiography of a Broadway clerk (dry goods, retail). Let this " verbum" be " sat" to a sapienti. We have undertaken to make ourselves acquainted with the island on which we live. We mean to give our readers, bit by bit, the results of our observations upon the customs, manners, geography, and morals of the island of New York, as noted down in our ram bles. We do not take our walks in chapters, howev er, and we shall, therefore, be equally miscellaneous and disorderly in our arrangement of topics. It is a curious island, and some of the inhabitants are curi ous islanders. Those who only walk up the city s backbone (Broadway) know very little of its bowels and extremities. Little by little, we hope to make EPHEMERA. 117 out its truthful anatomy veins, pulses, functions, and arteries. We should like to know, among other things, why the broadest, most accessible, most convenient street in New York, the noble avenue of W^:ST BROADWAY, is entirely given up to negroes? The rage is to move up town but there are people who are not rajahs, who are willing to pay high rents people who don t care where the fashionable people go to (while they live), and who simply desire to reside in broad streets for air and light, and above all, to be near, if possible, to their business. Now the narrowest part of this be- streeted island is of course the most wholesome, as the air from the two rivers comes over fewer chimneys and gutters. The broader the street the better, both for health and show. The access to a street should be good, and West Broadway, in its whole length, is parallel to Broadway, and approachable by Chambers street, Murray, Warren, and all the best short ave nues of the city. It has, besides, near by, the beau tiful " lungs" of St. John s park, the hospital grounds, and College Green, and is crossed at its upper end by the broad ventilator of Canal street. Where, on the island, is there a street more calculated to be whole some dirty as it now is from the character of its oc cupants ? It would require, it is true, an entire renova tion, before any one person, desirous of good neigh borhood, could live there but that renovation (we prophesy it) will be done. Some speculator will buy lots in it, and call a meeting of proprietors to suggest a general turn-out and improvement, or some one of the Wall street Astor-hood will buy the street, from lamp-post to lamp-post, and fill it with fashionable dwelling-houses. The up-town tide will partly ebb, the natural advantages of the Battery and Lower Broadway will regain their ascendency, and the san dalled foot of the island will again wear jewels on its instep. Pearl street (if Manhattan lie on his back) would be the main artery of his left leg, and Franklin square, which occupies a natural knoll, would be his knee- pan. This gives you some idea of its geography, though, probably, dear reader, if you are not in the dry-goods line, you have never visited it. It is a cu rious place historically, and was once the aristocratic centre of the city. There are still two famous houses in it one the old Walton mansion, and the other a building that was once the headquarters of Washing ton. In the yard of the latter house is a pear-tree of Washington s planting. And, by the way, our com panion (in a first visit which we made to Franklin square a day or two since) told us a story that may be new or old, touching an attempt made to poison Washington. A dish of some vegetables from a for cing-bed was put upon the table for dinner, and the general, remarking that growths so much earlier than was natural were not wholesome, threw them out of the window. Some pigs in the yard were poisoned by eating them. Colonel Stone can tell us if the story be true always presuming it is not in some veritable history of New York.* The Walton house is still a noble-looking mansion, with its English mould ings in good preservation, and is now occupied as a lodging-house. The headquarters of Washington are tenanted by a pianoforte builder, and all around looks trafficky and dull. One of the favorite spring amusements of the peo ple of New York (of course of the silly people, of whom there are at least several) is to attend the auc tion sales at private houses. We heard of one silly " A recollection 1ms come back to us very reluctantly (on its way to bed with Lethe), that of having seen this anecdote in Dunlap s History. but honest woman (they are often honest) who, on be ing rallied a day or two since at having so passed the last fortnight, said, " La! it s so amusing to see how people live !" And, truly enough, you may find out by this process how every class "furnishes," which is a considerable feature in living, and it is wonderful with how little ceremony and reluctance the house hold gods are stripped to the skin and exposed to the gaze of a public invited in by the red flag of an auc tion ! It is possibly a very natural feature of a new country to have no respect for furniture ; but to our notion it comes close after "honor thy father and mother" to honor the chairs and tables at which they have eaten and prayed, counselled and blessed. And even this were easier got over the selling of the mere mahogony and damask if the articles were removed to a shop and disassociated from the places where they had become hallowed. But to throw open sacred boudoirs, more sacred bedrooms, breakfast- rooms, bath-rooms, in which (as has been the case once or twice lately) lovely and cherished women have lived, and loved, and been petted, and secluded, and caressed to let in vulgar and prying curiosity to sit on the damask seats and lounge on the silken so fas, and breathe the air impregnated with perfume that could betray the holiest secrets if it had a tongue and then to stand by while an auctioneer chaffers, and describes, and tempts the vulgar appetite to buy! Why, it seems to us scarce less flagrant and atrocious than the ride of Lady Godiva desecrating to those who sell out, and a profanity and license in those who go to see ! It is a famous time, now, to buy cheap second-hand furniture, by the way for the fashion of French fur niture has come in lately, with a rush, and the nabobs are selling out from sideboard to broom, and furnish ing anew a. la Francaise, from skylight to basement. By a year from this time there will be more houses in New York above a certain cost and up to a marquis s taste and wants, than either in Paris or London. (And this estimate is not extravagant, for only " the few" abroad spend money as"///e many" do here.) There is a dry-goods retailer in Broadway, who has a house furnished as sumptuously, and in as good taste, as the most extravagant nobleman s house in London. The thing is done very simply. The dimensions of the house, and an accurate description of the way it is lighted and arranged, are sent out to the first uphol sterers of Paris men who are artists in their way, and who have furnished for royalty and rank all over Europe. Carte blancfte as to expense, and out comes your " interior," complete, lustrous, and as good as his majesty s wanting only (really only) the society suitable to enjoy it which is like (something like) a very fine play without a symptom of an audience. So marked is this change of taste, and the new school of furnishing, that the oldest and most wealthy of the cabinet warehouse-men in this city has com pletely abandoned the making of English furniture. He has sold out an immense stock of high-priced arti cles at auction, and sent to France for models and workmen to start new with the popular taste. It is a great chance, by the way, to establish the European fashion of hotels garnis for strangers giving them the temporary hire of houses ready furnished, by the week or month their meals sent to them from a res taurateur. Such investments bring large profits ; and the convenience of the custom, to families coming from the south or west, and wishing for greater priva cy and more room than they can get at a hotel, is very great. So may good come out of an extravagant foily. THE ANTIQUE CABINET. Whether it is a perverse pleasure in seeing costly things out of place, or an aversion we have to new things (except new thoughts, 118 EPHEMERA. new toothpicks, and new ladies gear), or the natural | love for miscellany common to all mankind whether i it is for one of these reasons, or for a little of each we are in the habit of bestowing the loose ends of our idleness upon the warehouses of second-hand furniture. Nothing grows upon a man like a habit of choice between such entertainment and any society merely tolerable the preference given, of course, to the shabby but more suggestive damask and mahogany. Ah, the variety of things people sell to get money ! What curious places shops are, where they will buy anything that is "sacrificed!" How entertaining to mousle about among old portraits, broken ornaments, miniatures soiled by wearing in the bosom, unstrung harps, battered statuary, and furniture that has kept proud company! How curious-minded must become at last these dealers in nothing with a gloss on ! How exactly they must know the duration and value of fashionable newness ! How well they must under stand the pitiless transit from ornament to lumber how well the sudden chill of the money-test to arti cles valued, till then, only by affection ! But we can not afford a digression here. Resting our umbrella on the steps to a high bed the other day, and our chin on our umbrella (a posture taken for the leisurely perusal of a crowded corner of an old furniture shop), we began to pick out from the mass, an outline of an old cabinet secretary. Now we have been that degree of vagabond, that we have to confess having fairly topped our meridian with out the knowledge of more luxury in writing-tools than any table, any pen, and any conceivable vagary of ink- holder. It is true, that while travelling we got ac customed to fastening the other end of our thought- string to an old black trunk a companion to our hithering and thithering for seven long years and, by dint of habit in many a far country, we could ill write, at last, where that old portmanteau was not ready to receive our eyes as they came off the paper. But, in reforming our baggage for matrimony, the old trunk was degraded to a packing-box, and at present it peacefully reposes, smelling of quinces, and holding the modest Sunday-clothes of our farmer s dame at Glenmary. Save and since this, our travelled and " picked pen of countries" has been without appanage or equipage, wearing all its honors upon its bare plume of service, and, like a brave and uncomplaining soldier, scorning to claim the dignities which should have been plucked down by its deservings. Well well ! " the whirligig of time !" " Pen !" we mentally ejaculated, as we made out the odd corners and queer angles of the antique cabinet " thy proper honors are in flower! Thou shall do thy work in luxury after this ! What pigeon-holes can do to make thee comfortable what drawers, what slits, what niches and nooks is as good as done! Rise to-morrow rich and glorious!" We had the advantage to be favorably known to the furniture-dealer. He was a man who rejoiced in our promotions. -We bought the old secretary without chaffer, " at the lowest figure," and requested that it might be dug out from its unsold neighbors, and sent home, not too vigorously dusted. Here it is. We are writing upon its broad let-down leaf, and our pen struts like a knight wearing for the first hour his well- earned spurs. It is an old chamberer the secretary brown-black mahogany, inlaid with sandal-wood and has held money, and seen frowns and smiles. In its experience (for which we would give a trifle) we ourself are but a circumstance. The hand that first wrote at it is cold ; and, for the hands that are to write at it hereafter, nature may not yet have sorted out the nails. Our own hand will give over its cun ning and turn to ashes, meantime. One man s life and using are but of the duration of a coat of varnish, to this old cabinet s apprehension. Ah " we !" "By the pricking of our thumbs," the brigadier is mounting the stairs. Since the possession of our first operative luxury, we have taken a disgust to the cloister conceiting that the smell of soap, from the lavendering in the back yard, gave a stain to such flowers of imagination as were born there. The brig adier says we grow superfine. Soil! It is time after "taking it as it comes" for so many years. Be sides, we must have something to set off against his epaulettes ! Glory in your staff, dear brigadier, but leave us our cabinet! Brigadier (entering out of breath). Paff ! paff! How the breath of life flutters with this vicinity to heaven ! Paff! paff! prophetic nature ! How are you, my dear upster? Committee. You see the ink wet in my pen I was just about to dash into a critique. That straw-colored volume of poems, by Mrs. Lewis, shows feathers from Pegasus; though, as usual with lady-poems, without any parings from the hoof any trace of that part of the old steed that touches earth. It takes wrongs and sufferings like those of Mrs Norton, L. E. L., and Mrs. Hemans to compound a poetess of any reality and strength. Soil, that, if torn up with a ploughshare, may yield the heavy grain of anguish, will yield nothing but daisies and white clover, lying undisturbed in the sunshine. Yet this same white clover is very sweet grazing, and Mrs. Lewis s is a very sweet book. May she never write a better one by having suffered enough to " qualify /" Brigadier. Amen ! I say, rny boy, what a clever thing Inman is making of his magazine ! The May number is beautiful. AVhat a good pick he has among the magazine-writers ! Committee. Excellent but he uses himself up with making his correspondents work, and sets too little value on his own writings. He wants a sub. for drudgery. He could, with his strong fabric of good sense (which is genius), and his excellent critical pow ers, make all the rest of the " COLUMBIAN" subser vient to his own articles. Brigadier. Tell him so. Committee. Will he stand it as your firm ally ? Brigadier. Bless your soul, he has told you many a plainer thing in print. Committee. Has he ? Here goes, then : " For Jove s right hand, with thunder cast from sky, Takes open vengeance oft for secret ill." But now we think of it, you are bound to be particu larly good-natured, my dear brigadier. With what enthusiasm they received your song the other night at the Tabernacle "The Pastor s Daughter!" That, and " Boatman haste," and " Cheerly o er the mountains," are three songs, that, skilfully built, as they are, upon three of our most exquisite national melodies, and intrinsically beautiful in words and mu sic, will be classics. A twill has published them charm ingly, too. What lots of money you ought to make out of these universalities ! Brigadier. My dear boy, stop praising me at a ju dicious place for praise, like " heat, hath three de grees : first, it indurateth or maketh strong; next, it maketh fragile; and lastly, it doth encinerate or calcinate, or crumble to pieces." Committee. Subtle tactician ! How you have cor rupted my rural simplicity! Mff mff mff! I think I sniff mint ! The wind sets this way from Windust s. How it exhausts the juices to talk pleas antly with a friend ; and, by-the-way, soft crabs are in the market. What say to a dish of water-cresses, and such other things as may suggest themselves we two over the way ! We are in too good humor to dine in public to-day. We should seem to lack modesty, with this look of exultation on our faces. Brigadier. To dinner, with all my heart for the EPHEMERA. 119 Mirror lias an appetite the philosopher s tranquil : appetite idem contemptui et admirationi habitus. Committee. I go to shave off this working face, my dear general ! Please amuse yourself with my warm pen. Our correspondents, " l r ." and " E. K." two " treasures trove," if such periodical ever had should be gracefully and gratefully thanked. Do it while I am gone, with your usual suaviter. [Brigadier writes.] I GAVE in to a friend s proposition to " poke about," lately, one afternoon, and, by dint of turning every corner that we had never turned before, we zig-zagged [ ourselves into a somewhat better acquaintance with j the Valley of Poverty lying between Broadway and the Bowery. On our descent we stopped at the Tombs, making, however (as many do), rather an unsatisfacto ry visit. We lacked an Old Mortality to decipher the i names and quality of the tenants. It is a gloomy ac cess to Justice, up the dark flight of steps frowned over by these Egyptian pillars : and the resolute-looking constables, and the anxious-looking witnesses and prisoners friends who lean and group at the bases of the columns, or pace up and down the stony pave ment, show, with gloomy certainty, that this is not the dwelling of " Hope, with eyes so fair." "We turned | out of the dark portico into the police court a dingy j apartment with the dust on the floor not like other | unswept apartments, but ground into circles of fine j powder by hurried and twisting footprints. No culprit was before the court, and the judge s terrors were laid | on the desk with his spectacles. We looked about in I vain for anything note-worthy. Even the dignity of " the presence" was unrecognised by us, for (not be- j ing in the habit of uncovering where there is neither j carpet, lady, nor sign of holy cross) we were obliged j to be notified by the " hats off , gentlemen," of the one other person in the room apparently a constable on duty. A side door led us downward to the watch-house, which occupies the basement of the Egyptian struc ture. It is on a level with the street, and hither are brought newly-caught culprits, disturbers of the peace, and, indeed (so easy is disgrace), anybody accused by anybody ! It is not an uncoinmon shape of malice (so the officer told us in answer to my query) for the aggressor in a quarrel to give the sufferer in charge to the watchman and have him locked up ! The prisoner is discharged, of course, the next morning, the complainant not appearing, to prosecute ; but passing a night in a cell, even on false accusation, is an infliction which might fall with some weight on an honest man, and the power to inflict it should not be quite so accessible " thinks I to myself." (I made a mental promise to get better information on the sub ject of arrests, and generally on the subject of the draw ing of the first line between " ourselves" and the guilty. With Miss Lucy Long s privilege, I shall duly produce what I can gather.) On application at the door of the prisons, we were informed nonchalantly (and figuratively, I presume) that it was " all open," and so indeed it seemed, for there was no unlocking, though probably the hinges would have somehow proved reluctant had a prisoner tried the swing of them. We walked in to the prison- yard unattended, and came first to the kitchens. A very handsome woman, indeed, was singing and washing at a tub, and up and down, on either side of the large boilers, promenaded a half-dozen men in couples sailors and loafers, " in for a month," as we were after ward informed. They looked as happy as such men do elsewhere, I thought, and wearing no prison-dress, they seemed very little like prisoners. It is consider ed quite a privilege, by the way, to be employed in the kitchen. The inner prison-door looked more like one s idea of a " Tolbooth," and by it we gained the interior of the Tombs. Gadsby s Hotel at Washington is a very correct model of it, on a somewhat large scale. The cells all open upon a quadrangle, and around each of the four stories runs a light gallery. In the place of Gadsby s fountain is a stove and the turnkey s desk, and, just as we entered, one of the prisoners was cook ing his mess at the fire with quite an air of comfort and satisfaction. It chanced to be the time of day when the cell-doors are thrown open, and the tenants were mostly outside, hanging over the railings, smo king, chatting with each other and the keepers, and apparently not at all disturbed at being looked at. Saunders, the absconding clerk, whose forgery made so much noise not long ago, was pointed out to us, and a more innocent-looking fair-haired mother s boy you could scarce pick out of a freshman class. He has grown fat in the Tombs. His accomplice, Raget, the Frenchman, is not much older, but he looked rather more capable of a clever bad trick, and French man-like, he preserved, even in prison, the dandy air, and wore his velvet dressing-cap with as jaunty an air of assurance as if just risen to an honest man s break fast. He is handsome, and his wife still voluntarily shares his cell. A very worthy-looking old gentle man leaned at his cell-door, a celebrated passer of counterfeit money ; and a most sanctimonious and theological-student-looking young man was pacing one of the galleries, and he had been rather a success ful swindler. Truly " looks is nuffin," as Sam. Weller was shrewd enough to discover. We looked into one or two of the cells. To a man who has ever suited his wants to the size of a ship s state-room, they are very comfortable lodgings, and probably a sailor would think quarters in the Tombs altogether luxurious. Punishment of this kind must be very unequal, until it is meted out by what a man has been used to. (Till then, at least, it is better not to steal !) Two or three of the cells were carpeted and decked with pictures, and the walls of one I look ed into were covered with drawings. Friends are permitted, of course, to bring to prisoners any luxuries except liberty ; and on the small shelf of another cell we saw a pyramid of gingerbread the occupant, prob ably, still a youth. We passed over to the female prison. The cell- doors were all open as in the other wards. But here were strong symptoms that, however "it is not good for man to be alone," it is much more unpalatable to woman. A poor girl who had just been brought in, and was about to be locked up, was pleading piteously with the keeper not to be shut up alone. Seven others who had just been sentenced and were " waiting for their carriage" to go to Sing-Sing, sat around the stove in the passage, and a villanous-looking set they were. It is a pity women ever sin. They look so much worse than we (probably from falling so much farther) and degradation in dress is so markedly un- [ becoming ! Most of the female cells were double- bedded, I observed; and in one, which was very nice ly furnished, stood a tall and well-dressed, but il favored woman, who gave back our look of curiosity with a ferocious scowl. It struck me as curious, that, out of nineteen or twenty women whom we saw in the Tombs, two thirds had scratched faces! One of the police-officers joined us in the latter part of our rounds, but too late for the thorough inquiries I wished to make ; and promising myself another visit to the Tombs, accompanied by some one in authority, I made my envied and unobstructed exit. It was a sunny spring afternoon, the kind of weather in which, before all other blessings, to thank God for 120 EPHEMERA. liberty. With a simultaneous expression of this feeling as we cleared the prison steps, my friend and I crossed the rail-track which forms the limit of the New York Alsatia, and were presently in the heart of the Five Points very much in the same " circle" of society as we had just left, the difference probably consisting in scarce more than cleanly restraint with out want, and dirty liberty with it. Luckily for the wretched, the open air is very nearly as pleasant for half the year as the inside of a millionaire s palace, and the sunshine is kept bright and the sky clear, and the wind kept in motion alike for the pauper setting on his wooden door-step and the rich man on the silk ottoman in his window. Possibly, too, there is not much difference in the linings of their content, and if so, the nominal value of the distinctions between rich and poor should be somewhat modified. At the Five Points, to all appearance, nobody goes in doors except to eat and sleep. The streets swarrn with men, wo men, and children, sitting down. The negro-girls with their bandanna turbans, the vicious with their gay- colored allures, the sailors tired of pleasures ashore, the various " minions of the moon" drowsing the day away they are all out in the sun, idling, jesting, quarrelling, everything but weeping, or sighing, or complaining. The street is dirty, but no offence to their nostrils ! The police officers are at the watch- house door, always on the alert, but (probably from possessing little imagination) the culprits of to-morrow have no apprehension till apprehended. A viler place than the Five Points by daylight you could not find, yet to the superficial eye, it is the merriest quarter of New York. I am inclined to think Care is a gentle man, and frequents good society chiefly. There is no print of his crow s-foot about the eyes of these out casts. Who knows how much happiness there is in nothing to dread the downfall well over? We strolled slowly around the triangular area which is the lungs of the Five Points, and, spoken to by some one in every group we passed, escaped without anything like a rudeness offered to us. The lower story of every second house is a bar-room, and every bench in them had a sleeper upon it. There are some houses in this quarter that have been pretentious in their day, large brick buildings with expensive cor nice and mouldings one particularly at the corner of the famous " Murdering Alley," which would bring a six-hundred-dollar rent, " borne like Loretto s chapel through the air" to a more reputable neighbor hood. We wound our way into the German quarter, which occupies the acclivity between the Five Points and the Bowery; but as I wish to connect, with a descrip tion of this, some notices of the habits and resorts of foreigners generally in New York, I shall drop the reader at the corner. It is right and wholesome that anew country should be the paradise of the working-classes, and that ours is so may be seen very readily. A wealthy merchant, whose family is about leaving the city, sold out his household furniture last week, and among other very expensive articles, a magnificent piano. It was bid off at a very fair price, and the purchaser turned out to be the carman usually employed at the merchant s warehouse! He bought it for his daughters. The profits of this industrious man s horse and cart were stated by this gentleman to approach three thousand dollars a year ! A drygoods palace, is now going up in Broadway, which will probably exceed in splendor even the cele brated shops which are the prominent features of London and Paris. " Stuart" is the projecter, and when it is completed, he will leave the low-browed and dingy long-room in which he has amassed a fortune, and start fresh in this magnificent " bezes- tein." Extending back to a great depth, the new structure is to open by a right angle on another street, giving the facility of two entrances. "Shop ping" is to be invested with architectural glories as if its Circean cup was not already sufficiently seductive ! Even this chrysalis-burst of Stuart s, however, is a less forcible exponent of the warrant for the importa tion of luxuries, than the brilliant CURIOSITY SHOP of TIFFANY and YOUNG. No need to go to Paris now for any indulgence of taste, any vagary of fancy. It is as well worth an artist s while as a purchaser s, however, to make the round of this museum of luxu ries. The models of most of these fancy articles have been the perfected work approached with slow degrees, even by genius. Those faultless vases, in which not a hair line is astray from just proportion, are not the chance work of a potter ! Those intricate bronzes were high achievements/of art ! Those mignon gems of statuary are copies of the most inspired dreams and revelations of human beauty ! The arts are all there their best triumphs mocked in luxurious trifles. Poetry is there, in the quaint and lovely conception of keepsakes and ornaments. Even refinements upou rural simplicity are there, in the simple and elegant basket furniture of Germany. The mechanic arts are still more tributary in the exquisite enamel of port folios, the contrivance of marvellous trinkets, the fine carving and high finish of the smithcry of precious metals. And then, nowhere such trim shape and dainty color in gloves nowhere such choice dandy appointments in the way of chains and canes nowhere such rnollifiers of the hearts of sweethearts in the way of presents of innumerable qualities, kinds, values, and devices. I think that shop at the corner of Broadway and Warren is the most curious and visit-worthy spot in New York money in your pocket or no money. And (left out of ourenumeration)- these enterprising luxurifers have lately opened a second story, where they show such chairs and work-tables as are last in vented things in their way gorgeous and unsurpassa ble. If the gods have any design of making me rich, I wish it might be done before TIFFANY and YOUNG get too old to be my caterers. The theatrical astronomers have been much inter ested in the birth of a new star lovely Mrs. Hunt of the Park who has suddenly found her sphere and commenced shining brilliantly in a range of characters seemingly written for the express purpose of develop ing her talent. Her arch, half-saucy, and yet natural and earnest personation of Fortunio has "taken the town." She had made the success also of a very in different piece a poor transfer of the celebrated Gamin de Paris in which she played the character of a young rascal with a very good heart. The in creasing applause with which Mrs. Hunt is nightly greeted, after having had her light so long " hidden under the bushel" of a stock actress, must be a high gratification to " Strong-back," her husband, indeed, his undisguised enjoyment of her clever acting (as he plays with her in Fortunio), is as "good as a play" and much more edifying. Success to her, pray I! THE CABINET. With difficult and analytical de liberation, we have, at last, duly distributed, to the slits, pigeon-holes, drawers, and cavities of our an- EPHEMERA. 121 tique cabinet, their several and appropriate offices and functions. It was a discipline of our talent at strategy, was this job of office-giving for, to confess a weak ness, we have become superstitious touching this ven erable piece of furniture. It seems to us haunted ! We have harbored it, now, some three weeks, and have attempted with it, in that time, certain liberties of arrangement which have been mysteriously cross- purposed. Nothing about it would stay arranged. We put our approved contributions into one pigeon hole, and our doubtfuls into another, our to-be-noticed into the upright slits, and our damned into the hori zontal. We had a topic-drawer, and a drawer for memoranda an oblivion-hole and a cave of ridicule. We committed the proper documents to each, and thanking Heaven for a tried secretary, commenced our tranquil reign. A week had not glided by, before all was in confusion. Every hole seemed to have kicked out its tenant. The " approved" had scrambled in with the "doubtfuls," and the "damned" into the " noticed-hole," and " things to be written about," " things to be laughed at," and " things to be forgot ten," had changed places with marvellous and deci sive celerity! We tried to restore order, but the con fusion increased. Nothing would stay put. It was manifestly a Tyler cabinet the doomed victim of dis arrangement. How order has been restored by what spirit-fin gers our labels have been changed what intimations as to the occupancy of each particular pigeon-hole we have been compelled to regard is more than a cabinet secret. We have had (to make a confession) enough of telling ghost-stories. We have been called on by all manner of men and women for our facts as to the only glimpse into the spirit-world which we ever described. It has cost us any quantity of brass (in the wear of our knocker) to satisfy curiosity on that subject. Enough that our pigeon-holes are la belled with supernatural certainty. Our contributors, now, will go to their appointed niche by a selective destiny of which the responsibility is not ours. The j rejecteds will be kind enough to note this, and curse the cabinet not us! If their manuscripts lodge in the upright slits of the " damned," it is because the " accepted" would not hold, keep, or harbor them. We wash our hands. Our first three pulls from the topic-drawers are let ters of complaint against postmasters for the postage on the Mirror. According to the interpretation of the law by some village postmasters, the government may charge more for carrying the light weight of the Mir ror than we for editing, printing, embellishing, and wrapping it! The dtince in the Charlestown post- office has compelled our subscribers to have their pa pers sent to Boston, the nearest office presided over by a gentleman. Another pig s head has control of the Dedham office, and by-the-way, we clipped from a Dedham paper, the following results of his readings of the postage law : Tweedledum. The postage at the Dedham office for the New World newspaper of 32 pages, is " one and 4-8ths of a cent." Tweedledee. The postage for the New Mirror newspaper of 16 pages, smaller in size, with a plate, is "3 and 12-16ths, or twenty-four thirty-twoths of a cent ." Tweedledum second. The postage of a New Mir ror extra, of 32 pages of smaller size, is five cents ! There are one or two offices in the interior of this state where the postage on a single copy of the Mir ror has been charged fifteen cents of course leaving it unredeemed in the office for the postmaster s use as he expected ! Now, pray (we ask of our friend the town-pump), what is the use of the much-vaunted blessing of "cheap literature," if the Government, or its petty officials, are to stand between the publishers and the people, making it dear by charging as much as its whole value for carrying it ! Ought the government to favor the circulation of intelligence or not ? Is it proper to put the most oppressive, or the least oppres sive construction, on all cases which affect the spread of art and literature ? It is a fact, that revenue suffi cient has been received at the port of New York in the last two months to pay the whole expenses of the government of the United States for one year. (So we were authentically informed yesterday.) But, if government must have more revenue, should not liter ature (we scarce have patience to ask it) be the last thing taxed ? Should not luxuries, vanities, goods and chattels, be levied upon, to the crack of endurance, j for the support of authority, before one ray of light is stopped on its way to the public mind stopped to be converted into a perquisite for the pocket of a petty despot ? Of the postmasters in the larger cities there is no complaint. They are generally enlightened men. Mr. Graham here Mr. Green in Boston throw no obstacles in the way of literature. On the contrary, they do all in their power to promote and to facilitate it. It is the petty, ignorant, peppercorn post master of a small milage, who, clothed with a little brief authority, and knowing that his oppressions leaves the disputed article in his hands, reads the law perversely, and at last shuts his whole neighborhood against everything but newspapers ! It is rather a reproach to a country whose boast and whose reliance for the perpetuity of its free institu tions is the superior intelligence of its population, that monarchical countries (England and France) should be before us in the reduction of taxes on the convey ance of intelligence. It has struck us as extraordi- | nary, too, that in the revising of postage laws, the in crease of facilities for carrying the mails should not have suggested a reduction of postage! But at any rate leaving the laws as oppressive as they are we call upon on enlightened statesman like Mr. Wick- | liffe to insist upon the most lenient and most favorable interpretation of them instead of having his admin istration of the department distinguished, as it fias been and is, for more postoffice oppressions than were ever known before. The postage on the Mirror, for one instance never before charged higher than the newspapers which it scarce equals in weight now varies (in some of the country postoffices) from Jive to fifteen cents a gross " sliding-scale" of oppression which must put a stop to our enterprise, if persevered in, or cause us to give up cover and embellishment, and circulate only the newspaper sheet, suited to the petty letter of the law ! The great majority of post masters, however, we are happy to add, charge mere newspaper postage for the Mirror, "as the law" (prop erly understood) " directs." Our favorite adversary of the American finds pala table fault with us for not appending Leigh Hunt s name to such good things as we have copied from him. Why should we ? We do not claim, them as origi nal, nor are they leaded, as original contributions are wont to be. The original object of giving the author s name is lost (we conceive) at the distance of this country from England. Leigh Hunt collects and publishes in volumes all he writes, and his good things are well labelled and guarded in his own country. Neither his fame, his profit, nor his consequence (the three ends he aims at), could be affected by adding his name to what we occasionally take from him. Be- aides tit-for-tat-\cz\\y considered the English steal our articles by the dozen, and not only leave out our name but appropriate them, by other initials, as their own. They have at this moment a cheap edition of ! our poems in the press without our leave or license, | and we have helped swell most of the collections of English poetry, with no clue K-ft for posterity to dis- 122 EPHEMERA. cover that the author had also the honor of the l( American s" frequent notice. Besides again, there is a precedent in nature. The rice-birds of the south are the bobolinks of the north losing their name and copyright altogether by emigration. But now, having defended our castle, we would fain express our pleas ure at the tone and quality of the "American s" fault-findings, invariably done in good taste, and con fined always within legitimate critical bounds. This, which in a Utopia, would be like praising water for running down hill, is great praise in an unmitigated republic. Fault found with our writings, without a smutch on out-self, is " a thing to thank God on" as things go. In the same breath let us laud the Boston Atlas, who says of us, with something between a pickle and a sweetmeat, that " he has one fault he caters for his readers as for himself, and novelty or eccentricity of expression sometimes usurps the place which should only be accorded to thoughts of real value." We kiss the rod. (Enter the Brigadier.) Brigadier. My dear boy, what could have pos sessed you to get up so early ? Ten o clock, and the last page all written, and not a subject touched, I ll wager a julep, out of forty that were indispensable ! Have you said no word of the " Mirror Library ?" Cabinet. Supererogatory, brigadier! Why add perfume to the violet ! Our selections for the Library are appreciated they sell ! They advertise them selves. They breathe sweetness. Brigadier. Like the lady s breath, which made all men exclaim, "Hereof be scent-bags made!" Eh, my boy ? Cabinet. The " Rubric of Love" that bundle of all the delicious things ever written on the exciting sub ject of love what but its very name and purpose is wanting to make that universal] Everybody, whose lease of love is not quite run out, must have a copy of it ! Brigadier. They must! they must ! It is a book, charming arid cheap at any price. But Cabinet. I ll stave oflf your "but" with a passage from Milton s Comus, for I ll talk of work no more. Did you know that the julep was to Milton what gin was to Byron ? Listen ! " And first behold this cordial julep here, With spirits of balm and fragrant syrups mixed . Not that Nepenthe which the wife of Thone In Egypt gave to Jove-born Helena, Is of such power to stir up joy as this, To life so friendly, or so cool to thirst !" Let us to this " Nepenthe" for we thirst with Milton. It would probably flabbergast most barn-door fowl to be asked the meaning of eccalobeon, though, call it the hatching of eggs, and they would laugh at being acquainted with anything else. This big word has mystified the posts and corners for a fortnight, and yesterday my curiosity came to a head. I looked at the bottom of the placard to see where the Eccalobeon was to be exhibited, and soon found myself at a small boy, keeping door opposite Washington Hall. (The lad was so small and pale, by the way, that I thought it warrantable to inquire whether he was produced by eccalobeon. It appeared that he was not. He had a regular mother, who " knew he was out.") The chirruping of chickens saluted our ears as we opened the door, and we observed that a corner of the room was picketed off, where a dozen or two of these pseudo-orphans (who had lost their mother by not having been suffered to have one), were pecking at gravel and evidently doing well. V"ery good manners, for chickens, though, as the man in the menagerie says, " where they got them mity knows." It began to look very much as if mothers were a superfluity. The centre of the room was occupied by the artifi cial mother a square brick structure, containing ovens in which lay the eggs in different stages of prog ress. Pieces of carpet were suspended before the openings, and, on raising them and putting in the hand, the temperature within seemed to be at about blood-heat. The keeper took out an egg that was about to enter upon its new destiny of skewer and gravy. The chicken had been twenty days on the road from spoon-victual land, and its little beak was just hardened sufficiently to prick a hole into the world in which it was to be eaten. It lay in a heap, rather confusedly packed, its thigh bone close at its beak (apparently ready to be used as a fulcrum in pry ing the crack open), and its downy feathers, wet and forlorn, just lifted by respiration. This premature removal of the shell, however, the man said, would be fatal. The destiny of that little well-contrived heart, as far as this world was concerned, was to furnish material for this sigh and paragraph ! In dishes upon the table were eggs, without shells, in all the different stages of formation. In some the veins were just reddening, and the vessels filling around the heart, and in one, just opened, the newly-formed heart, a red globule of the size of a pin s head, was playing backward and forward, like a shuttle in a miniature loom. With a glass, every phase of the process of chicken-making could be distinctly seen. The yolk, I was surprised to learn, does not contribute to the material of the body the most valuable portion of its existence, as an egg, being, therefore, of no value to it in its after-life of chicken ! The provision is certainly a wise one by which winged creatures, that could not well fly if gravid like other animals, are provided with a removable womb in the shape of an egg, so that their parturition can be carried on outside the body, and their buoyancy of locomotion is not in terfered with. The comparison between the incuba tion of fowls and human gestation immediately suggests itself, and the superior convenience of the former to the shape-destroying, beauty-marring, and painful ma ternity of our race, seems a blessing to be envied, at least by the beautiful. How long might women con tinue ornamental, and to what age would their person al loveliness beundiminished, if the care and suffering of maternity could be delegated to a brick oven ! I am inclined to think it is not peculiar to myself to have a sabbath taste for the water-side. There is an affinity, felt I think by man and boy, between the stillness of the day and the audible hush of boundaries to water. Premising that it was at first with the turn- ed-up nose of conscious travestie, I have to confess the finding of a sabbath ramble, to my mind, along the river-side in New York the first mile toward Albany on the bank of the Hudson. Indeed, if quiet be the object, the nearer the water the less jostled the walk on Sunday. You would think, to cross the city anywhere from river to river, that there was a general hydrophobia the entire population crowding to the high ridge of Broadway, and hardly a soul to be seen on either the East river or the Hudson. But, with a little thoughtful frequenting, those deserted river-sides become contemplative and pleasant rambling-places, and, if some whim of fashion do not make the bank of the Hudson like the Marina of Smyrna, a fashion able resort, I have my Sunday afternoons provided for, during the pigritude of city durance. Yesterday (Sunday) it blew one of those unfolding west winds, chartered expressly to pull the kinks out of the belated leaves a breeze it was delightful to set the face to strong, genial, and inspiriting, and smell- EPHEMERA. 123 ing (in New York) of the snubbed twigs of Hoboken. The Battery looked very delightful, with the grass laying its cheek to the ground, and the trees all astir and trinkling, but on Sunday this lovely resort is full of smokers of bad cigars unpleasant gentlemen to take the wind of. I turned the corner with a look through the fence, and was in comparative solitude the next moment. The monarch of our deep water-streams, the gigantic 44 Massachusetts," lay at her wharf, washed by the waving hands of the waters taking leave of the Hudson. The river ends under the prow or, as we might say with a poetic license, joins on, at this point, to Ston- ington so easy is the transit from wharf to wharf in that magnificent conveyance. From this point up, extends a line of ships, rubbing against the pier the fearless noses that have nudged the poles and the tropics, and been breathed on by spice-islands and ice bergs an array of nobly-built merchantmen, that, with the association of their triumphant and richly- freighted comings and goings, grows upon my eye with a certain majesty. It is a broad street here, of made land, and the sidewalks in front of the new stores are lumbered with pitch and molasses, flour and red ochre, bales, bags, and barrels, in unsightly confusion but the wharf-side, with its long line of carved figure heads, and bowsprits projecting over the street, is an unobstructed" walk on Sundays at least and more suggestive than many a gallery of marble statues. The vessels that trade to the North sea harbor here, unloading their hemp and iron; andthesuperb French packet-ships, with their gilded prows ; and, leaning over the gangways and tafferails, the Swedish and Norwegian sailors jabber away their Sunday s idle time ; and the negro-cooks lie and look into the pud dles, and altogether it is a strangely-mixed picture Power reposing and Fret and Business gone from the six-days whip and chain. I sat down on a short hawser-post, and conjured the spirits of ships around me. They were as communicative as would naturally be expected in a tete-a-tete when quite at leisure. Things they had seen and got wind of in the Indian seas, strange fishes that had tried the metal of their copper bottoms, porpoises they had run over asleep, wrecks and skeletons they had thrown a shadow across when under prosperous headway these and particu lars of the fortunes they had brought home, and the passengers coming to look through one more country to find happiness, and the terrors and dangers, heart aches and dreams, that had come and gone with each bill of lading the talkative old bowsprits told me all. I sat and watched the sun setting between two out landish-looking vessels, and, at twilight, turned to go home, leaving the spars and lines drawn in clear trace ry on a sky as rosy and fading as a poet s prospects at seventeen. POSTOFFICE ABUSES. " It will none otherwise be," says Sir Thomas More, "but that some stumblinge blockes will always bee, by malicious folk, laid in good people s way." Upon this text we propose to preach a little sermon. We have given in to the rage of the day, which is the cheapening; of brain-work, not very willingly at first, but heartily when our mind was made up to it. The author is depreciated, and that is, perhaps, not wellbut the public is benefited, and that is, very certainly, good. Millions are touched by the length ened wand of literature, who were beyond its reach till it was eked out by cheapness. The old Mirror, at five dollars per annum, occasion ally embellished by a plate, was considered, by the successive postmasters-general for twenty years, as a ftopular good, which it was well worth their while to favor and foster. It throve accordingly. Had Mr. Wickliffe been postmaster-general when it was started, it would not have lived a year ! With or without its plate, with or without its cover, it went rigorously to all parts of the country, at newspaper postage. No village postmaster would have ventured to charge more upon it; and if one had been pragmatical enough to twist the law into a new reading for that purpose, the very first complaint would have set it right, or re- moved him. The editors had no trouble on the sub ject, and they went on, pioneering the way into the ; fields of art and elegant literature, and setting an ex- 1 ample which has been followed by the large troop of ! tasteful periodicals now in existence, to the no small 1 diffusion of taste and intelligence. Literature began to cheapen. It was proposed to bring refinement, delicate sentiment, the ennobling love of poetry, and an acquaintance with heroic mod els through song and story, within reach of the hum- I bier classes. New periodicals were started on this basis. The old Mirror was superseded by cheaper 1 works works which, for tJiree dollars, gave as much or more matter, but without embellishment, and of very inferior typography and paper. That rage had its day. The circulation of light literature was very i much enlarged, and the people, of all classes, became | interested in the current writing of the eventful pres ent hour. This sudden spread of taste (we may say in passing) was an ingredient thrown into the national character which no doubt powerfully furthered what it seems Mr. Wickliffe s sole mission to retard the refinement and growing intelligence of the American people. But there was one more effort to be made. Com plaints began to be heard that these cheap publica tions were inelegant; that, sent forth damp, unpressed and unembellished, they became smutched and grew unsightly and hurtful to the eyes; and that more careful workmanship and better type and paper were desirable. The founder of the old Mirror took the subject into examination and study. He made the closest calculations of the cost of fair print and em bellishment, and after much thought and inquiry, aid ed by twenty years of experience and success, he ma tured the plan of the present " NEW MIRROR." It was the plan of a periodical to be suited to the now refined taste of the "greatest number," as well as adapted to the means of the greatest number, and the uniting of these two desirable extremes brought its price within a hair s breadth of its cost, and left the feasibility of the project dependant wholly on the chance of sailing at once, and smoothly, into an enor mous circulation. The item of postage was not over looked but as the New Mirror, cover and plate in cluded, would scarce weigh half as much as the Al bion, Spirit of the Times, and other weekly papers which went for newspaper-postage, and it was no heavier than the old Mirror, which went for the same postage, the subject was not thought worth a doubt. "\Vell the New Mirror made its appearance. A type worthy of the choicest library, a cover conve nient and elegant, a beautiful steel plate, and sixteen pages of matter edited with careful experience and labor, were offered to the public for this same man ageable price of " three dollars a year!" The poor est citizen need not now be without his fair share of knowledge of the arts and literature. Nothing seemed to stand in the way. The manifest high order of style and spirit in the design of the work, combined with its accessibility by cheapness, sent it abroad like day-rising. Its circulation became, as it well needed to be, enormous. And now, you ask, what is the matter? And we will tell you, and we wish Mr. Wickliffe to listen. A gentleman called at our office a week or two since, and bought a copy or two of the " Mirror Li- brarv," expressing his regret that it was not conve- 124 EPHEMERA. nient for him to take the Mirror. He lived in Ver- non, Oneida county, New York, and the postage charged him by Mr. J. W. Jenkins, the postmaster of that place, was FOURTEEN CENTS on each copy bringing the cost of the Mirror up to ten doltars twen ty-eight cents a year ! We immediately addressed a letter to Mr. J. W. Jenkins, inquiring respectfully into the reason of this exorbitant charge, and that letter Mr. J. W. Jenkins has never answered. The gentleman assured us that several persons of his ac quaintance in Vernon had been deterred from subscri bing to the Mirror by Mr. J. W. Jenkins s overcharge of postage. Again: we have discovered, in many in stances, that our subscribers, after paying their sub scriptions, have let their papers lie in the postoffice i rather than submit to the extortionate charge of post age, and the postmasters have never notified us of the fact. Again : the Mirrors miscarry, to a degree that shows more than neglect on the part of the postmas ters or their subordinates. The complaints and stop pages for this last reason are out of all precedent and proportion. Again : the postage charged on the New Mirror varies, as we have said before, from one cent to fifteen, in some of the country postoffices, more or less, according to the whim or tyranny of the dull of ficial. The postmaster of Great Harrington is one of those pigheaded dunces, charging postage on the Mirror sent to the "Berkshire Courier" in direct vi olation of the law which exempts papers from postage on exchanges. What is the remedy for these abuses ? We have complained to Mr. WicklifTe of the irregularity and extortion in regard to the postage on the Mirror, and have received in turn a letter of sesquipedalian flum mery, the compounding of which required the edu cation of a Virginia politician; and, our letter once answered, the abuse was probably never thought of in the department. Yet it was a matter serious enough to be worth Mr. Wickliffe s attention. These petty tyrants with their "little brief authority," stand between the public and the supply for public refinement and intelligence. They change the cost of the cheap est and most elegant publication of the day from $3.52 (postage and all) to $10.28! They strangle literary enterprise in the cradle. And for whose ad vantage ? Not the government s for subscribers will rather leave their Mirrors in the office than pay the ex tortionate charge. For the benefit of the postmasters themselves who, by this indirect fraud, obtain a nice handful of periodicals weekly, to dispose of as one of the perquisites of their office! This is surely a mat ter worth Mr. Wickliffe s while to look after. To the majority of postmasters we owe thanks rather than reproaches. They have rightly judged that the spirit of the law did not intend a difference of two cents between a paper stitched and a paper not stitched (a difference made by some of the Dogberry post masters). They feel justly that if there is a question as to the intention of a postage-law, the cause of in telligence and literature is to have the benefit of the most favorable interpretation. No law can exactly describe every periodical likely to be started. No senate, in making a law, intends to charge more for carrying three printed pieces that weigh one ounce, than one printed piece that weighs tivoor three ounces yet so, again, do these petty Dogberrys interpret the law. There is another point about which we would in quire of the committee now engaged on the revised postage-laws. Why should literary papers of the same weight be more taxed than newspapers ? Is the circu lation of moral and refining influences twice as tax able as the circulation of scandal and politics, rapes and murders, amusements and advertisements ? Sure ly the intelligence that enlightens the community is as much contained in the weeklies and monthlies as in the daily papers. Yet in the bill now before the house, the former are taxed at twice the price of the latter! This, we suppose, is some of Mr. Wickliffe s handiwork. We give up the postmaster-general leave him to be bewildered with the technicalities of his office careful of the husks while the grain sifts away from him. We make an appeal to the fountain of his of ficial power public opinion ! Let this matter be un derstood, and let every petty postmaster who plays the tyrant, or misuses his authority, be memorialized out of office. The government ought not to be one penny richer for carrying the mails. No revenue should be derivable to the treasury from the carrying of intelligence. The cheapest postage-rate possible should be set by law, and the law should be bent to suit circumstances in all cases where the cost of car rying is not thereby made greater. Public opinion should so instruct the public servant. The postmas ter-general, and the lesser postmasters who obey his dictum, should be made to feel that the least pretence for extortion or oppression on their part, or any want of accommodation and liberal conduct, would be promptly punished. We write freely on this subject, for our enterprise is at stake, and we speak somewhat, too, for other interests than our own. To offer a pe riodical for three dollars a year, that is made to cost ten by the oppression of postmasters, is to advertise a misnomer. Let the Wickliffe dynasty prevail, and we shall be obliged to leave off cover, plate, and stitching, and change the Mirror to a simple printed sheet, without protection from wear and tear, and without embellishment or capability of binding and preservation. We have always felt great sympathy for the blind. We have felt also great curiosity to know exactly how much of human knowledge is forbidden to go in at the ear and how much that is turned aside, as inad missible at that one portal, can be smuggled in after ward under the cloak of explanation and description. The accounts of Laura Bridgman interested us pro- portionably more from her greater deprivations. It is putting this curiosity in a much more spicy vein of gratification, however, to know that a poet is impris oned in one of these windowless temples, and to dis cover how he lives without light and color as well as how much he is the purer and better from escaping all that offends the eye, which, by-the-way, is not a little. The poems of Miss FRANCES JANE CROSBY, a pupil of the New York Institution for the Blind, lie before us, and we have read them with great mod ification of our pity for the blind. Eyes could scarce do more. No one in reading the miscellaneous poems by Miss Crosby would suspect that she was blind. She seems to forget it herself. She talks of "crimson teints" and "purple west" and "stars of mildest hue," with quite the familiarity of those who see. But it is evident that her ear has more than a common share of nicety and susceptibility to measure, for in no early poems that we remember is there such smooth ele gance of rhythm. The volume is composed principally of poems of the affections, and well-expressed, musical, and cred itable to the authoress, are all the pieces. The price of such a volume should be nominal merely, and the kindly-disposed should give for it what their benevo lence prompts. We would suggest to the publishers to send it round by agents with this view. There are things in the world better than poetry, and things written without genius that more stir the EPHEMERA. 125 soul of a man than would some things ticketed for immortality. Now we do not make sure that we are not "weak" on the subject of young children. We always thought them quite eligible to any possible choir of cherubim. But we will venture to unmask our foible, if foible it be, by declaring that we have read the following downright, homely, truthful, and funny verses (sent to us by some charming mother) read them with delight. It is good honest poetry, with a foothold to it, and we should like to see the baby, since reading it : "MY BABY. " She is not a beauty, my sweet little pet, Her mouth s not a rosebud, her eyes not like jet, Her nose far from Grecian, her skin not like snow, She is not a beauty, dear me ! no, no, no ! But then she is winsome, this bird of my bower, And she grows on my heart every minute and hour. " She is not a beauty, my sweet little pet, On dimples more witching my eyes have been set ; Her mouth, I must tell you, is large like mama s, While her chin, to-be-sure, is just like her papa s ! But when she smites trustingly, what can compare With this gem of my casket, bright, sparkling, and fair? " She is not a beauty, my sweet little pet, Far handsomer babies each day can be met ; Her brows are not arching indeed, they re too straight, Yet time will work wonders, with patience I ll wait. But if she s not handsome, it matters not no ! This bud of my bosom is pure as the snow. " She is not a beauty, my sweet little pet, That her forehead is too low I can not forget ; No, no, she s not beautiful I must confess, (Between you and I, would her mouth had been less) But she loves me so dearly, oh, how could I part With this light of my pilgrimage, joy of my heart, c. n." We are fortunate in a troop of admirable contribu tors who write for love, not money love being the only commodity in which we can freely acknowledge ourselves rich. We receive, however, all manner of tempting propositions from those who wish to write for the other thing money and it pains us griev ously to say " No," though, truth to say, love gets for us as good things as money would buy our read ers will cheerfully agree. But, yesterday, on open ing at the office a most dainty epistle, and reading it fairly through, we confess our pocket stirred within More at first than afterward for, upon reflec- | Bro tion, we became doubtful whether the writer were not old and "blue" it was so exceedingly well done! We have half a suspicion, now, that it is some sharp old maid in spectacles some regular contributor to Godey and Graham, who has tried to inveigle us through our weak point possibly some varlet of a man-scribbler. But no ! it is undeniably .feminine. Let us show you the letter the latter part of it, at least, as it opens rather too honeyedly for print: "You know that the shops in Broadway are very tempting this spring. Suck beautiful things ! Well, you know (no, you don t know that, but you can guess) what a delightful thing it would be to appear in one of those charming, head-adorning, complexion-soften ing, hard-feature-subduing Neapolitans; with a little gossamer veil dropping daintily on the shoulder of one of those exquisite balzarine,<;, to be seen any day at Stewart s and elsewhere. Well, you know (this you must know) that shopkeepers have the impertinence to demand a trifling exchange for these things, even of a lady ; and also that some people have a remark ably small purse, and a remarkably small portion of the yellow root in that. And now, to bring the mat ter home, / am one of that class. I have the most counterfeiting that is, filling the void with tissue-pa per in lieu of bank-notes, preparatory to a shopping expedition ! " Well, now to the point. As Bel and I snuggled down on the sofa this morning, to read the New Mir ror (by-the-way, cousin Bel is never obliged to put tissue-paper in her purse), it struck us that you would be a friend in need, and give good counsel in this emergency. Bel , however, insisted on my not tel ling what I wanted the money for; she even thought that I had better intimate orphanage, extreme suffer ing from the burdens of some speculating bubble, ill ness, etc., etc. ; but did not I know you better! Have I read the New Mirror so much (to say nothing of the graceful things coined under a bridge, and a thou sand other pages flung from the inner heart), and not learned who has an eye for everything pretty? Not so stupid, Cousin Bel no, no ! "However, this is not quite the point, after all; but here it is. I have a pen not a gold one (I don t think I could write with that), but a nice little feath er-tipped pen, that rests in the curve of my fore-finger as contentedly as on its former pillow of down. (Shocking! how that line did run down hill ! and this almost as crooked! dear me!) Then I have little messengers racing like mad through the galleries of my head, spinning long yarns, and weaving fabrics rich and soft as the balzarine which I so much covet, until 1 shut my eyes and stop my ears and whisk away with the wonderful lamp safely hidden in my own brown braids. Then I have Dr. Johnson s diction ary capital London edition, etc., etc.; and, after I use up all the words in that, I will supply myself with Webster s wondrous quarto, appendix and all. Thus prepared, think you not I should be able to put some thing in the shops of the literary caterers something that, for once in my life, would give me a real errand into Broadway ? Maybe you of the New Mirror pay for acceptable articles maybe not. Comprenez-vous ! "O I do hope that beautiful balzarine like Bel s will not be gone before another Saturday ! You will not forget to answer me in the next Mirror ; but pray, my dear editor, let it be done very cautiously, for Bel would pout all day if she should know what I have written. Till Saturday, your anxiously-waiting friend, "FAN^Y." Well we give in ! On condition that you are un der twenty-five, and that you will wear a rose (recog- nisably) in your boddice the first day you appear in with the hat and "balzarine," we will pay the bills. Write us thereafter a sketch of " Bel " and yourself as cleverly done as this letter, and you may "snuggle down" on the sofa and consider us paid and the public charmed with you. In the days when we were " possessed" with horses, and horse-racing, we were sadly well-acquainted with a jockey who lost his wits in the excitement of losing a race. He hung about race-courses for some years after becoming an idiot, and by dint of always denying a horse s good qualities in the stable, and of never speaking well of one except at the winning moment, he contrived to preserve, through all his idiocy, some influence in the judgment of horseflesh. We have been reminded of our old friend Spavin (call him Spavin " nil mortuis") by certain of our critical brother editors, and their very kindly-intended (pos sibly) critiques on the Mirror; Come a week (as such weeks will come) when our health is queasy, and when our spirits are gathering violets in dells where a pa ving-stone would be stoned to death as a monster (and there are dells incapable of a paving-stone) come beautiful little purse in the world, but it is only kept i such a week, we say, and let the Mirror go forth, for show; I even find myself under the necessity of without such quantity of our own work as strains our 126 EPHEMERA. extremest fibre to the crack, and down comes this vigilant critic upon us with a cry of " no go," " falling off," " idle," and " better formerly" disparagements that would take the conceit out of a church steeple ! And why does he do this ? Why should we not be better at some times than at others, without being criticised like a steam-engine a thing incapable of mood, humor, and caprice? Simply because this sort of critique is easy to tvrite, and so favors, in the writer, the very idleness he criticises in us. But, good heavens ! are we not entitled to our worser, as well as our better moments ! Shall we always be at tiptop speed, and never have freedom from disparagement except when winning a race ? We boldly lay claim to more industry than rightly falls to us as our share of the curse ! Supposing, for the moment, that our writings are better for the Mir ror than what takes their place occasionally (a flatter ing inference from our critic s critique), we do more in quantity, in the course of the year, than one editor in a hundred. There is more copied from the Mirror (we have often had occasion to observe) than from any two periodicals in the country. The truth is, we are too famous for comfort ! " Oh mediocrity, Thou priceless jewel only mean men have But never value like the precious gem Found in the muck-hill by the ignorant cock." You see what troubles us, dear reader ! The flowering into glory of such a century-plant of excellence as our worthy friend and fellow-publish er, JAMKS HARPER, has in it, with all our willing ac clamation, some occasional provocation to a smile. The sudden call for " his picture" the eager litho graph of his fun-bestridden nose and money-making spectacles the stir he has made among the abuses, with his Cliff-street way of doing business, and the salutary feel we get of the wand of power in his clutch, while we still see him in his accustomed haunts, busy and unpedestaled as before there is something in the contrast which makes us say, with Prince Hal, " Ned, come out of that fat room and give us thy hand to laugh a little," though, with all our heart, we rejoice in his authority. The Courier, speaking of the likeness just published of Mr. Har per, says : " The new mayor s pleasant, shrewd, and half-quizzical countenance is cleverly hit off, and he is peering through the official eye-glasses in a manner that portends trouble to all municipal delinquents. Let them look to their ways, and Jet all subordinate official functionaries look to the streets ; for this por trait would convince us, even if we were not acquaint ed with the original, that the chief magistrate has an eye upon them." This bit of speculation as a preface to our lauda- mus of Mayor Harpers administration, as felt particu larly in two or three abated nuisances. The hack- men are no longer permitted to devour passengers on their arrival in steamboats, nor to make a clievaux-dc- frise of their whips at the landing-piers, but must sit quietly on their coach-boxes till called for. The omnibus-racing is to be put a stop to, we understand, and that should really be celebrated in an appropriate " northern refrain. 1 " There are two refrains more that we would suggest to our city Harper that hose- boys should be made to refrain from flooding the sidewalks under the thin shoes of ladies, and that gen tlemen who must smoke in the street should refrain from the windward side of ladies, particularly those who prefer air that has not been used. And apropos (it will be seen that we were born to make a world) we wish to suggest to enterprise an other abatement of the nuisances of Broadway. It is desirable to reduce the number of omnibuses in this great thoroughfare, for many very cogent rea sons but as long as they pay that is to say, as long as the public require them they must even go on deafening promenaders, and endangering private car riages and the lives of people crossing the street. But who that is down town in a summer s day, and wishes to go anywhere to the western side of the city, would not prefer to take a ferry-boat (if there were one) from the foot of Maiden lane round the Battery to Chelsea ? How preferable the fresh air, and beautiful scenery of the rivers and bay, to a crowded omnibus in hot weather ! How much more desirable would be a residence in Chelsea, if there were such a conveni ence ! The boats might touch at the foot of Cort- land street and the Battery, and, indeed, extend their course up the East river to the foot of Pike street plying, say, every ten minutes, from Pike street to Chelsea, and back rounding the Battery, and touch ing wherever it was convenient. \V^ho would not pre fer this to omnibussing ? Let this line communicate with Stevens s upper ferry to Hoboken, and the line would be continuous from that beautiful spot, all round the city. Quite aside from its utility, this would be one of the prettiest pleasure trips that could be invented. Pensez-y, Messrs. Stevens. If any charitable person has an old man or woman whom he would like to set up in an easy and profita ble business, we have a plan to suggest. Give them half a dozen light chairs, and send them to the Bat tery or the Park. In all public promenades in France there are chairs to be hired for two cents an hour, and besides being a good trade for the lame and old. this convenience is wanted. By the way, where are the good things, clever couplets, and flings of wit, that used to fly about at the municipal elections ? Squibs grow dull. Where is that witty conservative whig who, when " Forest and Liberty" was placarded by the democrats, put up a rival bill of "Povey and the Constitution ?" Wit and poetry (we might have remembered) seem to have gone into advertisements. When people have done with "Who is Seatsfield ?" we shall start a new query " Who is the bard of Stoppani ?" Moore s oriental flow of melting stanza and balmy imagery is quite paled in its glory by Stoppani s advertisement: Will you come to the BATHS IN BROADWAY, Where the genius of luxury presides, And the glorious Croton, by night and by day, Through the conduits silently glides ? " The ceiling al fresco, the beautiful bar, Rich drapery, and sumptuous screens, The marble as white as a Persian Cyrnar, The painting of Italy s scenes," etc. Mellifluously musical! Who is the distinguished au thor ? The advertisement of a hatter plausibly sets forth that the Miller prophecy being exploded, and the world really not coming to an end (at least within a hat s-wear of time), the prospects of the globe s con tinuance justifies the venture of a new hat ! We think we see a hat bought on that hypothesis ! We are happy to see that our imported word, rococo, is coming into general use. A critic in the Herald, EPHEMERA. 127 noticing the opera, says : " This concert-piece has been rococo for some time, and, like an old maid, is getting, every year, two years older." This is a clever critic, by the way, though in the sentence we have quoted he reminds us of a bit of dialogue in an old play : " Manes. Didst thou not find that I did quip thee ? Psy. No, verily. What is a quip ? Manes. A short saying of a sharp wit, with a bit ter sense in a sweet word." The True Sun quotes, with a clincher, from the Buffalo Commercial, " The common use of the word | lady, instead of the definite honored term wife, is an atrocious vulgarism that should be universally scouted." We think the ladies should be informed of the etymological meaning of the two words, and take their choice after. Wife is derived from the An- j glo-Saxon word signifying to weave, and means the j person who weaves for the family. Lady originally j meant a woman raised to the rank of her husband j from the Saxon word signifying elevated. The pro- j priety of calling a man s better half his lady, depends, of course, on the fact whether she was made more I respectable by the match; and the propriety of calling | her his wife, hangs upon her expertness and industry at the loom. Which will the fair sex prefer ? NEW LITERARY EPOCH. We have been, for the last year, not only working among, but ivatching, " the signs of the times" in the way of literature. We have been trying, not only to make out a living, but to make out head and tail to our epoch to see what ; way the transition was tending, and when there was likely to be any reliable shape and form to American j literature ; or (to change the figure) whether the lit erary boatmen, who stand with their barques hauled ashore, uncertain of the current, and employing them selves meantime in other vocations, could be called upon to launch and dip their oars, sure at last of tide and channel. International copyright has died a natural death. There was not a statesman in the country who had the courage to take the chance of making or marring his political fortunes by espousing the question. At the same time palpably just, honorable, and expedient, as would be the giving of copyright to English au thors there was some excuse for shying the subject, in the violent abuse that was indiscreetly showered upon us by Dickens and the Reviews, at the very moment when general public attention had been called to the subject, and when there was every prospect of its turning the crisis favorably. It would have taken the statesmanship and eloquenc* of Clay or Webster to have made the discussion at all endura ble to congress, and we are quite sure that it will be ten years before the public irritation against English travellers and critics will have sufficiently abated to tolerate any measure in their favor. Dickens, and his friend, the critic of the Foreign Quarterly, therefore, have sanded their own bread and butter in throwing dirt at us. But the great end of international copyright is coin ing about without the aid of legislation. The abuse has been that American authors were thrown out of j the market by English works that were to be had for nothing (justice to the English author, of course, a secondary consideration). But this abuse is losing strength by surfeit. The publishers and periodical agents are aghast, at this very moment, of the falling off of interest in ihe most attractive publications. The zest for novelty has been so pampered, that only the first number or two. of anything new, sells well. And not from any falling off in their character. The Eng lish pictorial papers (for one example) have rather im proved in merit, but a publisher informed us a day or two since that they do not now sell ten where they sold a hundred a month or two ago. Such enter prises used to begin small, and grow into favor gradu ally. Noic, the cornucopia of their prosperity is re versed the small end turned from the publisher. Copyrighted American books, and American periodi cals, though dearer than reprints, sell much better, and in our opinion the American public, in three months more, will give a preference so decided to home literature, and home periodicals, that, as far as protection to our native authors is concerned, the in ternational copyright will be useless. The truth is, that literature, to be permanently popular, must be produced under the meridian of the country it is to supply. Who will pretend that any periodical in this country is edited with half the ability of the London magazines and reviews ? The leading intellects of the age men who in this country would be eminent lawyers and politicians, devote themselves to maga zine-writing abroad, and, besides, they are a trained class of professed authors, such as we have no idea of in America. Our contributors are men who dash off an article as by-play, and make no investment of thought or money in it and of course it can not com pare to the carefully-written and well-considered arti cles of English weeklies and monthlies. But look at the difference of circulation. See how periodicals languish that are made up of the cream of these Lon don magazines, and see how Graham and Godey, In- man of the Columbian, and ourselves, quadruple them in vogue and prosperity ! It was to be expected it is the most natural thing in the world that America should grow American, at last ! What more natural than that we should tire of having our thinking done in London, our imaginations fed only with food that is Londonish, and our matters of feeling illustrated and described only by London associations, tropes, and similitudes ? This weariness of going to so dis tant a well for better water, we do say, is to be relied upon as a sign of the literary times. The country is tired of being bc-Brilished. It wants its own indige nous literature, and we think we should be safe to morrow in issuing a replevin upon law, politics, and commerce, for the men of genius draughted for their employ, during the want of a literary market, (live up the blood horses harnessed into your dull drays, oh, Wall street and Pearl ! Untie your fetters of red tape, and let loose your enslaved poets and novelties, oh, Nassau and Pine ! Discharge Halleck, oh, Astor; and give up Wetmore, oh, crates of crockery ! Lead off with a new novel, Mr. Cooper, and let the public give us a five years benefit of their present disgust with imported literature, to recover from the numb ness of inaction and discouragement. Give us five years of the home tide of sympathy that is now setting westward, and we will have an American literature that will for ever prevent the public taste and patron age from ebbing back again to England. THINGS AS THEY COME. We know of a matter we mean to write about, somewhere between this and the bottom of the next column somewhere within this half-cent s-worth, that is to say (this page costs you not quite half a cent, dear reader !) but we must first haul out two or three things that lie a-top of it in our fact-drawer ; facts being, as everybody knows, obstinate as nails in a keg, when you want a particular one from underneath. We have whims (this lies a-top), about the face of newspaper type. There are some most worthy and able periodicals that we could not read our own obitua- 128 EPHEMERA. ry in, without an effort the type is so unexplainably anti-pathetic. Every editor who turns over exchange papers will know precisely what we mean. There is no necessity for naming those which we should never open if we had them in our pocket "forty days in the wilderness," but we can. without offence, name an op posite example the PICAYUNE which, from the mere witchery of type, a man would like to take out of the postoffice on his way to execution. The BOS TON TRANSCRIPT is another (fact No. 2) which we fatuitously read, and slwuld read, even if it were edited by that broken mustard-spoon, the Portland Thersites. The type is captivating a kind of insinuating, piquant, well-bred brevier, that catches the eye like a coquette in a ball-room. And this, be it noted, spite of the " burnt child s" prejudice, for the fair editress does not always put on her gloves, before taking a tweak at our immortality! And, apropos there is an editor " down south" who sympathises with this typical weakness of ours declaring in a late paper that the reputation of our letters to the Intelligencer " was entirely owing to the large type in which they were sd." And this we not only believe, but if we fork over the swindle" to our printe ever get rich, we will deluded employers. The reader will see that we are trying to apologise for our dissipation in reading newspapers being such very loose mental company, and we, as news-writer, having, no more business with the luxury of news written, than a shoemaker with wearing the patent leathers he makes for his gentlemen customers. But we have read an article in the seductive type of the Transcript which led us to philosophise a little touch ing a point of contrast between Boston and New York ; and as we grew up in Boston, but were dug up, and trimmed, and watered into flowering, in New York, we claim to know both places well enough to run a parallel with fairish fidelity. The article we speak of was a letter, containing, among other things, a touch-up of the Astor house ; but the Astor is so much the best hotel in the world, that fault-finding, merited as it may be, will send no body from its door in search of a better. Without alluding farther to the letter, let us jot down the specu lation it suggested. New York is far more vicious than Boston, without a doubt. But it is not much more vicious than it was, when it was of Boston s size. We have often wished to preach a sermon to the Bostonians from 1 Corin thians iv. 7: "For who maketh thee to differ from another ? And what hast thou, that thou didst not receive?" Up to the present time, the Puritan obedi ence to authority, and the " power paramount" of good principles, have never been sapped or shaken in Boston. It is but one community, with one class of leading prejudices, and worked by one familiar set of moral, social, and political wires. The inhabitants are nearly all Americans, all church-goers of some j sect or other, implicitly subject to general and time- j honored principles, and as controllable by mayor and ; aldermen as an omnibus by passengers and driver, j Indeed, the municipal history of Boston for the last twenty years, is a Utopian beau-ideal of efficiency and I order, which will never bercpeated. The authoritative break-up of the first formidable symptom of mob- ocracy two years ago, for example when bold mayor Elliott quietly took the fire-engines from their turbu lent companies, and put them into the hands of a paid fire-police could never have been done in any other city of this country ; and ten years hence (Boston continuing to increase and vitiate), a similar pluck at the beard of mob license would be a dangerous experi ment. But look at New York in comparison. There are at least a hundred thousand Irish in this city, twenty thousand French, sixty thousand Germans, and a miscellany of other nations, that probably leaves scarce one fourth of the population (say a hundred thousand), for indigenous and home-spirited Neiv-Yorkers. One quarter too, of the general population, is in a condition that is scarce known in Boston that of desperate ex tremity of livelihood, and readiness to do anything for the moment s relief, vicious, turbulent, or conspirative. The municipal government of New York is, unfor tunately, in some measure, a political tool, and com pelled to shape its administration somewhat with a view to politics. Harsh measures, used in Boston upon the first germ or symptom of license, are reserved in New York for such signal instances as are melo dramatically flagrant such as can not be perverted, by the party out of power, into a counter-current of sympathy and resentment. What there is now remain ing of the Knickerbocker influence in New York, is the degree in which New York can compare with Boston and this small remainder of the old Dutch character is, as to power and check, about equal to what will be left of Puritan character in Boston, when Boston, by aid of railroads and inducements for foreign residence, shall have four hundred thousand inhabitants. Look at the difference in the observance of Sunday in the two places ! At least twenty thousand people cross to Hoboken alone, to pass the sabbath in the fields foreigners, mostly, who have been in the habit of making it a holyday at home. The Bostonians would suppress the ferry, without the slightest hesitation! There are four or five Sunday newspapers in New York, and Boston will not support one. There are German balls in various places in this city, on Sunday evening ; and oyster-shops, and bar-rooms, and the drinking-places, in all directions in the suburbs, have overflowing custom on that day. The government of the city is, of course, in some degree, a reflex of this large proportion of the sovereign voters, and when public opinion countenances a degree of license, it is next to impossible to bring in a city government that can control it. We have not room to follow out this comparison in detail but we wished to outline it, as a reply to the condemnations of New York (for the sale of vicious publications, etc., etc.), made from time to time, by our more virtuous brethren in the north. We shall take another opportunity to enlarge upon it. We have received several truly delightful and grati fying letters from eminent clergymen of different per suasions, thanking us for the Sacred Numbers of the Mirror Library, and sending us the choice poems which they had severally laid aside, to add to another collection. We had no idea there was so much beauti ful religious poetry in existence ! This rich vein of literature has been unworked and overlooked, and we assure the religious world, confidently, that we are doing a most important work in the collection of these gems of piety and poetry in a cheap and accessible form. " SONGS FOR THE SABBATH," falls behind none of them in interest, and will be a classic in re ligious books, as long as religious literature exists. We do not know whether we were particularly in a mood to be pleased on the night of Simpson s benefit at the Park, but several things pleased us more than they seemed to please other people the dancing, for example, both of KORPONAY, and of DESJARDINS. (Of the acting we do not speak, and by-the-way, we may as well say, here, that the stage is so much bet ter kept in hand by the theatrical critic of the Albion than we could possibly do it, that we generally shie that part of criticism, from a sort of consciousness that it will be done for the public by abler hands. AVe EPHEMERA. 129 love good criticism, nnd we love "honor to whom i accompaniments as well. See how eloquence was honor is due.") We did not see Korponay at his debut at Palmo s but a friend pronounced his dan cing a failure. As an attempt at anything in Vestris s line, it certainly was a failure. But that is not the dish to which the well-made Pole invites us. He is, made ;\ pleasure in the gardens of the academy of Athens ! Instead of treating our orators as we do the fountain in the Park (eiving them a broad margin of bare ground), we should surround their oratory with tributary ornament. The audiences now, at lectures, amon- dancers, what olives are at a feast" bad j are that passionless and abstract portion of the coin- pickle s" to the vulgar, but artful appetisers to the j munity that can stand anything in the shape of an m- refined. Korponay seemed to us like a symmetrical and dashing nobleman, doing gracefully a difficult and grotesque dance for the amusement and admiration of a court leaning as far away as possible from the airs of a professed dancer, and intent only on showing the eloquence, from being a jewel dulled with the dirt o superb proportion of his figure and the subtle com- j! mine, will be a gem in the fit setting of a sparkling tellectual bore the Grahamites of amusement. But give us orators on popular subjects, at Palmo s, with dress-circle, bright lights, opera-music, scenery, and interludes for conversation and change of place, and maud over his limbs. role of performance. His face expressed exactly this fi tiara. This would be, beside, a kind of premium It was full of mock solemnity 1 1 upon eloquence, that would foster it into a national .<! hi<>h-bred assurance. He seemed to us exactly ! excellence. There are men at the bar, in the press, the sort of noble masquer \hrt, at a Venetian festival and in business, who have the " volcano ol burning of old time, would have "topped the jaunty part," and !j words" within them, and would make eloquence a | study, were it a source of renown and profit-. What say to a new niche for oratory, oh, amiable public ! | Let us get a new screw upon public feeling, to use i with effect when we have patriotism to arouse, or carried away the flower, the ladies favor. But the untrumpeted deservings of Monsieur Kor ponay are less surprising than the want of apprecia tion of Mademoiselle Desjardins. We never saw her before, though she has been dancing in town for some time, and, considering how easily most any hook and line of public amusement catches us, it is very plain that the bait has not been skilfully angled. In the oly of th first place, as to qualifications, we never have seen, in | all our travels from Niagara to the Black sea (the two | poles at SllUUlU UUTC oiwtfu m wvui* v .^v.^^.. .. j Me.cury 1 There is not a woman s heart better should be, with captivating flowers. mounted, we venture to sav, between Ontario and the I And while we have this thread in our loom, e i Suxine. And she uses "these communicators with I express the delight with which we listened, not long earth deftly and Ariel-wise ! We only saw her in the ! j since, to oratory in a silk gown-an oration on cov- fhich isa kind of attitudinizing dance, and J TKMPT, that was linked naturally enough to a text and ,11 our travels from Niagara to the Black sea (the two | orchestra, a glowing oraiwn, a, i , il, x>lesof our "inky orbit"), so well-bridaed an instep, ! and we shall have public amusement in which I. u,d so Dianesque a pair of serviceable ankles. She ;! serious classes will join with the gay, and in wh, mould have stood to John of Bologna for his poised ; instruction shall be dressed, as it always may be, an buses to overthrow passions to awake for good pur poses. Let us have a power at the public ear that will be a check-balance to newspapers, that have a monop oly of the public eye. Let music, oratory, and paint ing, combine in a tripod to support each other ;\fine orchestra, a glowing oration, and beautiful scenery which the which d Polacca, possibly, ficult pas ch is a kind or attitudinizing aance, ana TKMFT, iiwi j~~ . . possibly, better suited to her abilities than a more dif- j j a pulpit, but which would have been a noble ^p.ece of But she walked and acted it with spirit! intellectual oratory in a public hallo^the and grace enough to be charming, and though she is j not to be named with Ellsler, she is enough of a dan- j sense, in Ellsler s absence, to give one s eyes their night s rations very satisfactorily. Underrated she is ! \ We see, by one of the careful and elaborate reports of the Republic, that the Mercantile Library Associ ation have had a report from a despair-committee, on the subject of the decline of lectures. Eloquence don t pay for the candle, it seems. This excellent association, however, shrinks the wrong way from the plaoue they have had with it. The taste for eloquence is n"o more dead or torpid in New York than the love of war or the relish for lions. \V hile people have brains and hearts they will love a true orator. But \ they are tired (and reasonably enough) of th* bald and . untarnished style i" which oratory is served up to I them. To go moping into the dark and silent Taber- j n;ic | e ! tne gas economized till the rise of the orator, j and a deathly and gloomy silence maintained for an hour (more or less) before the commencement of the jl l PCtl) ,-e_to have the orator s first opening addressed M sing the entire summer i to chilled, oppressed, and unelevated minds, and all !| a few alleviations which have as yet orator was Rev. HKNRY GILKS, and the sermon was delivered in a place that is used to eloquence the pulpit of Mr. Dewey. There were passages in this discourse that were worked up, both in (ervor ol lan guage and concentrated fire of delivery, to a pitch that we should call truly Demosihenian. Mr. Giles is a natural orator a man of expanded generalizing powers. It is a treat to hear him, such as would not be second in interest to any dramatic entertainment, and properly combined xvith other things as agreeable to the taste, there would be an attraction in such ora tory that would draw better than a play. We really wish that some " manager" would undertake the get ting up of the scenery and musical accessories to ora tory, and let secular eloquence take leave of the pul pit where it does not properly belong, and come into a field more natural to its aims and uses. We had a June May, and a May June, and the brick world of Manhattan has not, as yet, become too hot to hold us. This is to be our first experiment at p n the city, and we had laid up ftTs making of eloquence what the ascetic makes of religion a dry crust instead of a relishing loaf. No, no! attired; and eloquence has its natural 9 130 EPHEMERA. privnfe yachts! We know no plensanter trip, after (lie dusU of the evening, than to stroll down to the ferry, haul a bench to the bow of the ferry-boat, and "open up" the evening breeze for two miles and back, for a shilling! Afier eight o clock, there are, on an average, ten people in the boat, and you have the cool shoulder under the railing as nearly as possi ble to yourself. The long line of lamps on either shore makes a gold flounce to the " starry skirt of heaven" the air is as pure as the rich man has it in his grounds, and all the money in the world could not mend the outside of your head, as far as the horizon. (And the horizon, at such place and hour, becomes a substitute for the small hoop you have stepped out of.) No man is richer than we, or could be better off till we reach the Jersey shore and we are as rich going back. Try this, of a hot evening, all who prefer coolness and have a mind that is good company. Then, there is our substitute for an airing. There is a succession of coaches, lined with red velvet, that, in the slope of the afternoon, ply, nearly empty, the whole length of Broadway two or three miles, at an easy pace, for sixpence. We have had vehicles, or friends who had vehicles, in most times and places that we remember, and we crave our ride after dinner. We need to get away from walls and ceiling stuck over with cares and brain-work, and to be amused without effort particularly without the effort of walk ing or talking. So " Taking our hat in our hand, that remarkably requisite practice," we step out from our side street to the brink of Broad way, and presto, like magic, up drives an empty coach with two horses, red velvet lining, and windows open; and by an adroit slackening of the tendons of his left leg, the driver opens the door to us. With the lei surely pace suited to the hour and its bcsoin, our car riage rolls up Broadway, giving us a sliding panorama of such charms as are peculiar to the afternoon of the great thoroughfare (quite the best part of the day, for a spectator merely). Every bonnet we see wipes off a care from our mental slate, and every nudge to our curiosity shoves up our spirits a peg. Easily and uncrowded, we are set down for our sixpence at " Fourteenth street," and turning our face once more toward Texas, we take the next velvet-lined vehicle bound down. The main difference betwixt us and the rich man, for that hour, is, that he rides in a green lane, and we in Broadway he sees green leaves and we pretty women he pays much and we pay little. The question of envy, therefore, depends upon which of these categories you honestly prefer. While Providence furnishes the spare shilling, we, at any rate, will not complain. Such of our friends as are prepared to condole with us for our summer among the bricks, will please credit us with the two foregoing alleviations. The postoffice irregularities of which we have so often complained, have drawn from one of our good- natured subscribers, a lament in poetry. We wish all our friends would take it as kindly, but give voice to it as expressively : " No Mirror to-day No price, no pay ; No chance to spend a sixpence all day long ; No work at all to do, No help for feeling blue ; No plate, no tale, no trifle, and no song ! No why and no because ; No faith in the whole race of editors No remedy, tis true ; No seeing exactly what it s best to do ; No chance of being heard, No profit in a word ; No grumbling at the keepers of the keys ; No hope of men who do just what they please ; No chance to raise a breeze ; No hope, no sign, No promise that I can divine ; No faith to-day in high humanity ; No doubt that life is vanity ; No dawn, no rising of a better day ; No faint foreshadowing of a golden way : No knowing when Wicldifie will be turned away ; No last resort but a vile parody. No Mirror " We very seldom buy a volume of new poetry, but jj the portrait on the first leaf of Mrs. Butler s book, a jj portrait by the admirable and spiritualizing pencil of I Sully, and engraved by the as admirable and spirituali zing burin of Cheney, was worth quite the price of the volume. We have since read the poetry. The pic ture bears a slight resemblance to the poetess, Mrs. Norton, and the poetry is very like Mrs. Norton s in its intention. But both in features and verse, Mrs. Butler is very far that glorious woman s inferior. We have been vexed to see how narrow an escape Mis. Butler has had, of being a fine poetess, however how easily with a little consistent labor, and some little unity of sentiment and purpose, she might have filled out ihe penumbra which provokingly shows what she might have been but for the eclipse of caprice or carelessness. We have struck a word in this last sentence which seems to us to be the master-chord of all her poetry caprice! She begins nobly and goes evenly and beautifully half through her strain, and then falters and winds weakly or inconsequently off. We could quote passages from this book as fine as anything of Mrs. Norton s, but there is no one fin ished poem in it worth reprinting. Jn all this, we are looking at it with the world s eye. To a poet, who judges of a fragment, as the connoisseur knows the statue of Hercules, by the foot, this volume is full of genius. There is a massy fulness in the use of epithets and figures that shows a Sapphic prodigality of fervor and impulse, and there is, moreover, a mas- j culine strength of passionateness in the moulding and flinging off of emotion, that, well carried out, would have swept the public heart like a whirlwind. We had marked many passages of Mrs. Butler s book for ex tract, but on looking at them again, we find the best and most creditable blemished with flaws, and, with strong admiration for what the authoress might have been, we lay the book aside. Our readers will remember a very clever letter, wiitten to us by an anonymous lady who wished to conjure a new bonnet and dress out of her inkstand. The inveiglement upon ourselves (to induce us to be her banker), was so adroit and fanciful that we sus pected the writer of being no novice at rhetorical trap one, indeed, of the numerous sisterhood who, denied the concentrated developments of maternity, scatter their burthensorne ammunition of contrivance and re source upon periodical literature. We " gave i n ," however walking willingly into the lady s noose on a condition, that she should wear a rose recognisably in Broadway the day she first sported the balzarine and Neapolitan, and afterward send us a sketch of herself and her cousin. The " sketch" we have re ceived, and when we have seen the rose we shall not hesitate to acknowledge the debt. Jn the following parts of the letter which accompanied the sketch, the reader will see that the authoress feels (or feigns mar vellously well) some resentment at our suspicions as to her age and quality : " Have you never heard, my de (pardon ! I fear it is a habit of mine to write too honeyedly ) but have you not heard that suspicion is a heavy armor, which, with its own weight impedes more than it protects. Suspicion is most assuredly a beggarly virtue. It EPHEMERA. 131 may, now and then, prevent you from being; taken in, but it nips you in the costs most unmercifully. Oh! sharpsighU dnessis the most extravagantly dear whistle that poor humans ever purchased! That you should suspect me too, when 1 was opening my heart away down to the core. How could you ? inveigle ! no inveigling about it! I want a bonnet and dress, and said so, frankly and honestly. And I never wrote a line for Graham in my life, no ! nor for Godey either. As for le couleur tics bas, your keen-eyed hawk pounced on less than a phantom there. From the day that I j stood two mortal hours with my linger poked into my I eye, and a fool s-cap on my head, because I persisted i in spelling b-a-g, baker, to the notable morning of | christening my cousin by her profession, I have been voted innocent of all leaning toward the uncelestial. Indeed it is mote than suspected by my friend (cousin Bel excepted) that I affect dame Nature s carpet, rather than her canopy. Maybe I am some varlet of a man scribbler Oh! you are such a Yankee at guessing ! Old ! ah, that is the unkindest cut of all ! You an editor, and the son of an editor, and not know that old maids are a class extinct at the present day, save in the sew ing societies, etc., of some western village, suliject only to the exploring expeditions of the in defatigable Mary Clavers ! " Have you never heard of five-and-twenty s being a turning point, and ken ye not its meaning ? Why, faire maydens then reverse the hour-glass" of old gray-beard ; and, one by one, drop back the golden sands that lie lias scattered, till, in five years, they are twenty again. Of course, then, I must be under twenty-five ; but, as a punishment 1 for your lack of gallantry, you shall not know whether I the sands are dropping in or out of my glass. One thing, however, is indisputable: lam not sharp, my face has not a single sharp feature, nor my temper (it is I, who know, that say it), a sharp corner, nor my voice a sharp tone. So much in self-justification, and now to the little package which you hold in the other hand. " I send my sketch in advance, because I nm afraid cousin Bel and I might not interest you and the pub- j lie so much as we do ourselves; and then how are we to consider you paid. In truth, I can not write j clever things. Bel might, but she never tries. Some- : times she plans for me; but, somehow, I never can 1 1 find the right words for her thoughts. They come into my head like fixed-up visitors, and play tea-party | ! with their baby neighbors, until I am almost as much || puzzled by their strange performances as the old woman of the nursery rhyme, who was obliged to call on her little dog at home to establish her identity. No, no ! I can not write clever things, and particularly on the subject to which I am restricted ; but if it is the true sketch that you would have for the sake of the information, why here it is. You will perceive that I have been very particular to tell you ell. " Pray, do you allow us carte blanche as far as the hat and dress are concerned ? You had better nor, for Bel never limits herself. How soon may we have j them ? The summer is advancing rapidly, and my old muslin and straw are unco shabby. Yours with j all due gratitude, " FANNY FORESTER." Whoever our fair correspondent may be, old or j young, naive or crafty, we can tell her that talent like hers need never want a market. We commend her, [ thus in print, to those princes of literary paymasters, | Graham and Godey, with our assurance that no more j entertaining pen strides a vowel in this country. The sketch of " The Cousins," which we shall give here- j after, has a twi.rt-tear-and-smile-fulness which shows the writer s heart to be as young as a school-girl s , satchel, whatever kind of wig she wears, and whatever the number of her spectacles. And she will be as young forty years hence -for genius will be a child, eternity through, in Heaven. If, by chance, the lady is a sub- twenty -fwity, she is a star rising, and we should like to visit her before she culminates. TIIK REST OF WHAT WE HAVE TO SAY. There is a circulation that beats newspapers beatsthem particu larly in this the Tuesday s paper overtakes the Mon day s, but the lie of Monday is never overtaken by the truthof Tuesday. Some time since a sketch appeared in the Mirror, written by a correspondent, which was sei/.ed upon immediately by some of the busy-bodies of society, as an intentional attack upon one of the first families in this city. A week or two after its publica tion, a friend informed us of the rumor, and we read the sketch over again to see what was objectionable in it. With the exception of a correction made by the proof reader, and one accidental circumstance, invented by the writer to round a sentence, there was nothing in it that could possibly apply to the family in question, and we were amazed at the interpretation put upon it. Subsequent knowledge of the writer and her object has completely removed from our mind, and that of the family alluded to, all shadow of suspicion that any particular person or persons were in her mind while writing it. The story has again come round to us, however, and in so bold a shape that we think it worth while to nail it again with a denial. There never has been, in the Mirror, and there never icill be, any offen sive allusion to individuals in private life. Descriptive writers constantly describe classes, and, if they describe them well, they will apply as the essays in the Specta tor do. to hundreds of persons. The amiable Mis3 Sedgwick, utterly incapable of an intentional wound to the feelings of any one, has lived in constant hot water, from the offence taken at the supposed person alities of her descriptions. It is very easy for a mali cious person to take any sketch of character, and find for it a most plausible original. But there should be a watch kept for those who first name these discoveries the first finders of the key to a mischievous allusion. The first time you hear a malicious story, MARK THE TELLER OF IT for ten to one, in that person, male or female, lies the whole malice of the invention and ap plication. Such people do not work in the dark, however. Mischief-making is a most unprofitable trade, and we trust that, in the future school of Ameri can morals, the certain infamy of being the first teller of a malicious tale, will be a predominant feature. It can easily be made so, by " keeping the subject be fore the people." One of the most curious features of New Y r ork is the gradual formation of a PATERNOSTER Row or the making of Aim street to correspond with that famous book-mine and fame-quarry of London. Our enterprising and thrifty friends and neighbors, BUR- GFSS. STRINGER, & Co., are the "LONGMANS" ol this publishing Row, and truly, the activity of their sales, and the crowds leaning continually over their counter, give a new aspect to the hitherto contemplative current of merchandise in literature. Their central and spa cious shop on the corner of Broadway, is a thronged book-market, as vigorously tended and customered as the sales of pork and grain. They have lately added to their establishment two stores intervening between them and us, and, with the office of our friends of the " NEW WORLD" farther down the street, and several intermediate publishing and forwarding offices, we of the Mirror are in the midst of a formidable literary mart, that seems destined to concentrate the book- trade, and make, of Ann street, as we said just now, a Paternoster Row. The Turks (who, by the way, have many other sensible notion, besides washing themselves instead of their shirts), devote each differ- 133 EPHEMERA. ent lane of their grand bazar to a single commodity no shoemakers to he found out of Shoemaker-lane, anJ no books out of Book-alley. The convenience of ihis arrangement, to the public, is very great, and it would be, in this city, a prodigious saving of labor, in cartage and tiaffic, to the booksellers themselves. We have a faint hope of seducing over, to our Row, the agreeable clique of our friend Porter of the Spirit," and we hope Inman of the Columbian will follow after (to save rent), and in this way, we shall h;ive a morning lounge in Ann street for the beaux esprits, that will enable us to combine into a literary social order and have some fun and more weight. Nothing like combination, oh, fellow-pensrnen ! Why shou d we not have a head, and wag ir, like the cham ber of commerce and the powerful presbytery ? For a cl.iss that keeps the key of the city s to-morrow, the press in New York is as strangely unorganized and segregate a body as anarchy of public opinion could possibly desire. But we are trenching here on some thing we have in petto, to write upon more gravely hereafter. We seldom read a novel. We can not afford the sympathy, even when we have the time. But, some what liquefied on a warm afternoon of last week, our resolution would not hold, and we took up " THK Jiosw OF THISTLE ISLAND," a Swedish novel by Etn- ilie Carlen, just published by Winchester. The story took hold of us immediately, and we read the book through before going to bed, charmed with its earnest and sjraphic truth of narration and char ter, and par ticularly with the entire fusion of the style, betraying no thumb-spot from the dictionary-cover, and no smack of haste or clumsiness in the transfer. It reads like a book original in English, and that, to our pro fessional superfinery of noun and pronoun, is no small difference from ordinary translations. THE REMAINDER. One of the greatest pleasures of living in our free country, is the unceasing satis faction one feels at not having died last week fortu nately surviving to put down one more lie that, if you hud been dead, would be as durable as your tomb stone. Another peculiarity of our country good or bad as you chance to feel about it is the necessity to talk a great deal about yourself, if you would keep up a lively popularity. With these two patriotic promptings, let us say a word of a trip we made lately to Albany. h is not perhaps generally known that Albany was our birthplace. We were born once before, it is true, in Portland, somewhere about half a life ago a man-child." But in Albany, in 1827, we first open ed our eyes, as an adult lion. Up to that period we had been under tutors, and had known only boy friends. By a fortunate chance we suddenly acquired the friendship of a man of great talent and accom plishment, and on a visit to this, our first man-friend at Albany, we stood, for the first time, clear of the imprisoning chalk-lines of boyhood. Those who have " hived the honey" of their summers of the heart know well how intoxicatingly sweet was the first gar den of life in which they walked as men. Still a child at home, and still a college-boy at New Haven, we were, at Albany, a man who had written a book, and as the companion and guest of our fashionable and popu lar friend,* we saw beauty enough, and received kiud- * I trust it will not be considered mistimed or unnatural if I follow the impulse of my heart, and put, into a note to so worldly a theme, the substance of a tearful and absorbing revery, which, for the last half hour, has suspended my pen over the paper. The name of the gentleman I have just al- ness enough, to have whipped a less leathery brain into syllabub. The loveliness of the belles of Albany at that time, and the brilliancy of its society, are perpet uated in a remembrance that will become a tradition ; and we have never since seen, in any country or so ciety of the world, an equal proportion of elegant men and beautiful and accomplished women. It was so acknowledged over the whole country. The regency of fashion, male and female, was confessedly at Alba ny. New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore, were provinces to this castle of belle-dom ! We have an object in showing what Albany was, at the time we were in the habit of visiting it, and how inevitably, from a combination of circumstances, it becaiue and has remained, to us, a paradise of enchanting associa tions. There is no spot in this country which we re member with equal pleasure. It was the first leaf turned over in our book of manhood. We went to Albany with these memories upon us, a week or more ago, to lecture. We spent the morn ing in finding old friends and reviving old associations, and in the evening we had an audience much larger than we looked for, and as brilliant as hope born of such memories could have prefigured it; and we re turned to the city the morning after, gratified and de lighted. But (and here comes the matter in hand) there seems to have been a gentleman in Albany who was unwilling we should be delighted. We have not seen the article he wrote, but, as condensed in another paper, it goes to show that the reasons why we were unsuccessful at Albany were, first, that we have been in the habit of abusing its Dutch aristocracy, and second, that two years ago we "insulted a liidy there and refused a challenge from her friend !" Now here are four items of absolute news to us: 1, that we did ! not succeed 2, that we ever insulted a lady any- ! where 3, that we ever declined any fight that was ever proposed to us 4, that we ever abused the Dutch at Albany. j On the fourth count of the indictment, alone, a I friend has thrown a little light. We did once, inad- i vertently, use an adjective, in a way which has been i remembered fifteen years! We said of the swine in j the streets of Albany (in some trifling article for a newspaper), that they were a nuisance " more Dutch than decent." The alliteration seduced us somewhat, but there was provocation as well for, the night luded to, JOHN BLEECKER VAN SCHAICK, will call up, at once, to the memory of the Albanians, as well as to the prominent men of all parts of the country, a loss, by early death, of one of our most accomplished gentlemen, and most admira bly-gifted minds. The proportion the balance of character and intellect, in Mr. Van Schaick the fine sense of honor, and the keen discrimination of wit, the manliness and the del icacy, the common sense and the strong poetical perception made him, to me, one of the most admirable of studies, as well as the most winning and endearing of friends. I loved and honored him, till his death, as few men have ever won from me love and honor. It was a matter of continual urging on my part, to induce him to devote his leisure, given him by ample means, to literature. Some of his poetry appeared in the magazines, and is now collected in a volume of the Amer ican poets. But he had higher studies and more vigorous aims than light literature, and he had just broken ground as a I j brilliant orator and statesman, when disease unnerved and prostrated him. Mr. Van Schaick had, however, another Ij quality which would have made him the idol of society in j! England (though, comparatively, little appr-.oiated here) I unequalled wit and brilliancy of converse .IP-. I say ur.e- \) mailed for I have lived long in the soo .y of the men of I svft most celebrated in London, and I hv t .ver thought that jl ibis countryman of my own was their V ^P livocal superior. His "Syonderful quickness and fineness o^ r.-rception, and the ready facility of his polished language, combined with his universal reading and information, made his society in the highest degree delightful and fascinating ; and though, as my first friend of manhood, I gave him warm nnd impulsive ad- miration, my subsequent knowledge of mankind has con stantly enhanced this admiring appreciation In all qualities of the heart he was uprightly noble; and, altogether, we think that in him died the best-balanced and most highly- giflod chnractpr we have ever intimately known. EPHEMERA. 133 before writing it, strolling home from a party in Al bany, we had been brought from the seventh heaven to the sidewalk, tripped up by a pig ! Now, to us, the pig was Dutch. We had lived only in New Eng land, where this animal, from some prejudice against his habits, has not the freedom of the city. Visiting two Dutch cities, New York and Albany, we found the pig master of the pave, and the offending adjec- .ive, lubricated by our disaster, slipped into its place with inevitable facility. We have heard from time to time, of this perversion of the word Dutch, as a thing remembered against us. We had hoped that the great fire in Wall street, the death of Harrison, the Miller-prophecy, and the other events of the last fif- ; teen years, would have wiped that small adjective out. We do not know why it should outlive the poets who have written and been forgotten in that time the > steamboats that have been built and used up the i politicians who have flourished and fallen the com ets that have glittered and gone the newspapers that have started and stopped. The secret of that little adjective s imperishableness is worth analyzing especially by poets and the patentees of "asbestos safes." We wish we could stumble upon as long- lived a conjunction I Seriously, we are annoyed and hurt at the discov ery of a hostility that could make itself heard, in a place we owe so much to for past happiness. We beg the Albanians to forgive us for the unintentional offence, and to take us and our Mirror into that favor of which we have always been ambitious. The spot where all the winds of heaven turn the corner the coolest and most enjoyable spot in the hottest and least enjoyable summer s day is the out side bastion of Castle Garden. We made our way there a few days ago, when the streets were fairly in a swoon with the breathless heat, and it was as cool and bree/.v, outside the round castle, as a hill-top on a May mo rning. For children for happy idlers with a book for strangers who wish to study the delicious panorama of the bay there is no place comparable to the embrasures, parapets, and terraces of Castle Garden. TWO OR THREE LITTLE MATTERS. There is HO struggling against it we have a need to pass the sum- merln some place that God made. We have argued the instinct down every morning since May-day while shaving. It is as cool in the city as in the c II! country, we believe. We see as many trees, from our window (living opposite St. Paul s churchyard), and as much grass, as we could take in ai a glance. The air we breathe, outside the embrasures of Castle Garden, every afternoon, and on board the Hoboken and Jersey boats, every warm evening, are entire rec ompenses to the lungs for the day s dust and stony heat. And then God intends that somebody shall live in the city in summer-time, and why not we? By the time this argument is over, our chin and our re bellious spirit are both smoothed down. Breakfast is ready as cool fruit, as delicious butter under the ice, and as charming a vis-a-vis over the white cloth and coffee-tray as we should have in the country. We go to work after breakfast with passable content. The city cries, and the city wheels, the clang of the char coal cart and the importunities of printer s imp all blend in the passages of our outer ear as unconsciously and fitly as brook-noises and breeze-doings. We are well enough till two. An hour to dinner passed in varnished boots and out-doors-inesses somewhat a weary hour, we must say, with a subdued longing for some earth to walk upon. Dinner pretty well Discontent and sorrow dwell in a man s throat, and go abroad while it is watered and swept. The hourafier dinner has its little resignations also coffee, music, and the " angel-visit" from the nursery. Five o clock | comes round, and with it nature s demand for a pair of horses. (Alas ! why are we not centaurs, to have a pair of horses when we marry ?) We get into an omnibus, and as we get toward the porcelain end of the cicy, our porcelain friends pass us in their car riages, bound out where the earth breathes and the grass grows. An irresistible discontent overwhelms us! The paved hand of the city spreads out beneath us, holding down I he grass and shutting off the salu tary earth-pores, and we pine for balm and moisture! The over-worked mind offers no asylum of thought. It is the out-door time of day. Nature calls us to her bared bosom, and there is a floor of impenetrable stone between us and he.r! At the end of the omni bus-line we turn and go back, and resume our paved and walled-up existence, and all the logic of philoso phy, aided by icecreams and bands of music, would fail to convince us, that night, that we are not vic tims and wretches. For Heaven s sake, some kind old man give us an acre off the pavement, and money enough to go and lie on the outside of it of summer afternoons ! Let us out of this great stone oven ! The city is intolerable ! Oh, from these heated bricks and stones, what moistureless. what wilted, what fainting air comes to the nostrils ! The two river-breezes doing their best to meet across the island, swoon in Broadway. The pores gasp, the muscles droop, the mind is blank and nerveless. Let us out somewhere ! We had such a fever upon us as is expressed above, when a friend offered to drive us to ROCKAWAY. With a mental repetition of the affecting prayer of the poor woman in the ballad, (" Take a white napkin, and wrap my head softly, And then throw me overboard, me and my baby !") we crept into his wagon, and bowled away silently on the road to Jamaica. It was a hot evening, but the smell of the earth, and the woods, and the dairy-farms, roused our drooping petals a little. Jamaica lies somewhat in the island s Jap, however, and it was not till we began to sniff the salt of the open Atlantic, that we were once more " capable creatures." But what a revivification as we approached Rockaway ! The sea-breeze nudged up our drooping eyebrows, gave a pull to the loose halliards of our let-go smiles, crisped our pores, and restored everything to its use and its ac tivity the irrevocable starch in our shirt-collars alone incapable of rally. Rockaway (we write only for those who know nothing of it) is part of the snowy edge of the Atlantic St. George s hotel, at Ports mouth, England, being all but next door to the Rock- away pavilion. Of course there, is nothing to take the saline coolness out of the breeze (unless by chance it has come across St. Helena or the Azores), and the difference between the "entire quadruped" in tbe way of a sea-breeze, and the mixtures they get in some other sea-side places, is worth taking pains for. But let us tell, in plain language, ivhat sort of place Rockau ayisfor the benefit of those who are choos ing a month s resort for health or pleasure. The pavilion of Rockaway is an immense hotel, whose majestic portico forms the centre of a curving beach of two or three miles in the bend, on the south ern shore of Long Island. From this portico, and from the windows of the hotel, the delightful sight and sound of the beating surf are visible and audible eternal company to eye and ear. The beach ex tends for miles either way a broad floor as smooth as marble, and so hard that a carriage wheel scarce 134 EPHEMERA. leaves a print, and this, as a drive, we presume to be the most delightful and enjoyable in the world. The noiseless tread of the horse, and the unheard progress of the wheels, the snowy surf along the edge of which you keep your way, and the high exhilaration given to the spirits by the sea-breeze, and the enlivening beat of the waves upon the sand at your feet, form, altogether, an enchantment to which, in the way of out-door pleasure, we scarce know a parallel. And, as a walk, the pure hard floor of that interminable beach is, of course, equally delightful. The arrangements for bathing are very well man aged. There are some twenty bathing-houses on the beach, near the house, and, between the hours of ten and twelve in the forenoon, the ocean-side is guarded and kept exclusive to the ladies and their attendants. An omnibus constantly plies between the bathing- bouses and the hotel, and to- ladies and children, to old men and young, the hour spent in the invigorating surf is the pleasure of the day. All, alike, come back elated and animated, and the society of the place shows very markedly the fillip given by the sea-bath ing to health and spirits. Children, more especial^, who have drooped in the city, pluck up appetite and vigor immediately at Rockaway. As the favorite and regular resort of many of the best families of the city, the society of the pavilion has always been acknowledged to be of a more refined quality and on a more agreeable footing than that of any other watering-place. It is equally removed from useless ceremony and undesirable freedom. Those who wish to combine gayety with the pursuit of health and the enjoyment of luxury, have facilities for all these at Rockaway, in a degree as desirable as it is unusual. The table is not surpassed by that of any hotel even in the city, and this, in a watering-place, is a peculiarity ! Mr. Cranston, the keeper of the house, thoroughly understands his business. As to facilities for getting to Rockaway, the railroad from Brooklyn ferry takes you to Jamaica in half an hour; from Jamaica, on the arrival of the cars, starts regularly a mammoth omnibus with six horses, and other roomy conveyances are supplied if necessary, which bring you to Rockaway in an hour. All de lays included, it is about two hours from the city. Certain coolness and certainly-improved health thrown into the scale, the desirableness of Rockaway, as a summer resort, far outweighs that of every other wa tering-place in the country. A late number of the Southern Literary Messenger contains two poems of uncommon merit for the drift of a periodical. One is by Mr. Gilmore Simms (whose much-worked mine has now and then a very golden streak of poetry), and the other is by H. B. Hirst a poem of fifty-seven stanzas on the subject of ENDYMION. This latter is after Keats. It is very highly studied, very carefully finished, and very airily and spiritually conceived. Its faults are its conceits, which are not always defensible for instance, the one in italics, in the following beautiful description of Di ana as she descended to Endymion: " A crescent on her brow a brow whose brightness Darkened the crescent ; and a neck and breast On which young love might rest Breathless with passion ; and an arm whose whiteness Shadowed the lily s snow ; a lip the bee Might dream in, and a knee Round as a period ; while her white feet glancing Between her sandals, shed a twilight light Athwart the purple night. Cycling her waist a zone, whose gems were dancing With rainbow rays, pressed with a perfect grace Her bosom s ivory space." Now we know as well as anybody what the " round of a period" is, and we have seen, here and there, a god dess s knee, and we declare there is no manner or shape of likeness that justifies the comparison ! With the exception of two or three of these lapses away from nature, however, it is a beautiful poem this "Endymion" and will read well in a volume. By the way, let us wonder whether the sweet poetess by the same name is a sister of Mr. Hirst. We consider Niblo s garden one of the chief "broideries" upon our woof of probation in this dirty planet, and if there are to be offsets for good things enjoyed this side of Cocytus, we expect to pay for Mitchell. Oh, thou pleasant Mitchell ! And he to j grow fat under the exercise of such a wand of indus- | trious enchantment ! What is the man made of, be- : sides brains! We sat through the " RKVOLT OF THE HAREM," a j night or two ago, and saw all its funny sights, seriatim. The ballet, as intended to be seen, was excellent for the time and material, indeed, quite wonderful. But 1 we had our little pleasures (not down in the bill), and |: one of them was to see pretty Miss Taylor, the clever i: opera-singer, figuring as an Odalisque danseuse ! If that pretty actress be not abducted, and sold to the sultan within a year, we shall think less of the enter prise of Salem privateers! She only wants to forget that she is Miss Taylor, indeed, to dance uncommonly ji well the consciousness of her silk stockings being at present something of a damper to the necessary aban- j don. But, modesty and all, she is very charming in j this ballet, and one wonders what Mitchell will make ! of her next ! Korponay, too the elegant Korponay figuring as an Abyssinian eunuch ! That, truth to | say, had for us a dash of displeasure! He entered i into it with all his might, it is true, and played the I nigger with Jim Crow facility ; but the part, for him, | was out of character, and we shall not be content till he \sdis-mggered by appearing once more in the role I! of a gentleman. The bath-scene was well arranged, though the prettiest girls were not in the water (pray why. Master Mitchell ?) And the military evolutions of the revolted ladies were very well done, and will be better done with a little more practice, and the mend- i ing of that corporal s stocking with a hole in it. The town seemed pleased, we thought. We have not yet mentioned the premiere danseuse, Mademoiselle Desjardiris, who did very well in the way of her vocation, but from whose feet have de parted, with the boots she wore, the exquisite symme- i try we admired at Simpson s benefit. Ah, ladies, you j should wear boots! Here were two feet in tightly- sandalled shoes, looking like two tied-up parcels from Beck s, which, a night or two before, in brodeqvins bien fails, looked models of Arabian instep! Can boots do that? We hereby excommunicate, from the church of true love, all husbands, fathers, and guard ians, who shall rebel against the preference, by wife, ward, or daughter, of Nunn s boots at $3 50, over Middleton s slippers at ten shillings. The embellish ment is worth the difference! We have received a very testy letter from some old gentleman, requesting us to reform the gait of the New York ladies. He manages to convey what pecu liarity it is that offends his eye, but he is mistaken as to the stoop. The lady within stands straight enough! If he knows this, and means covertly to attack the ar tificial portion of the outline, we can tell him that he rashly invades, not merely a caprice of fashion (which in itself were formidable enough), but the most jealous symbol and citadel of female domination ! There are thousands of ladies who would resign carriages and EPHEMERA. 135 die by fire and! 1 city of worship between men and women in those ount on horse- j days! and as innocent as joyous ! Compare it with satin without a sigh, but who would fagot rather than yield the right to mount on horse back in the masculine riding habit! "Wearing the breeches" is a worn-out figure of speech, but does anybody in his senses believe that the usurpation has And now, my dear Willis, a cautious word or two not taken refuge in a new shape ? Need we open our i about the women. There are " belles" at Saratoga, the arms -length superfmery, and dangerous pent-up- itude of now! respondent s eyes any further ? What bird is the most pronounced and unequivocal type of martial and masculine bravery ? What bird is the farthest re move, in shape, air, and habits, from his female part ner ? What bird lives up systematically to woman s ideal of a hero a life of fighting and making love? Draw the outline from the comb of a fighting-cock to well-born, well-moulded, and well-dressed five or six of the first degree of perilous loveliness, none of ihe second degree (I don t know why) and fifty or sixty with beauty enough to make, each one, a dull man happy. The rest are probably immortal creatures, and have angels to look after them but, as they make no sacrifices in proportion to their mortal plainness, the feather-tip of his bustle, and you have the eidolon they are ciphers, fit least till doomsday. I will not of male carriage and the dressmaker s ne plus ultra! impa : r my advantages by telling, to an enterprising We warn off our correspondent! ji admirer like yourself, even the names of the adorables, for as I slide into the back-swath of the great mower, I am jealous of opportunity but there is one woman here who was the electric light of the court of France i when I was abroad, a creature of that airy stateliness that betrays the veiled symmetry LETTER FROM CINNA BKVKRLEY, ESQ., TO N. WILLIS. SARATOGA, U. S. Hotel, August 1. Of the fair form that terminates so well an se g as ea un now as , . my dear poet, and I am trying on the old trick maternal nioU rnfulness of eye has more than mad, f gayety at Saratoga. Which of us should write , for (he fainter roses an d mO re languishing lilies ol ie other a letter ? You, if you say so though as J > ^ ch<jeU (God be pl - aise d f or compensations ! You are feed.ng the news-hopper of your literary ^ ^ jg ag beailtiflll now as then , for a kind of tender mill, my dear poet, and I am trying on the old trick ! _ ^ , v , Qto ,. n , 1 mnnrn f n | npsa O f eve has more than made of the get older, I am beginning to think well of the town, even in August. You have your little solaces, my fast liver ! Well what shall I tell you ? This great khan in in the desert of dulness is full, to the most desirable lilies of (God be praised lor compensations !) ^u. i witho ut specifying more to you, I must hold back a bit of speculation that I have in reserve, while 1 make you marvel at a triumph of toilet achieved by the kind of short gown, or kirtle,* never before seen but at a wash-tub, but proinpted now to be the lode- uncomfortabieness. Shall I begin with the tnen ! star O f the drawing-room ! There are articles of dress, God made them first, and as it is a test of the ultimate ;l u ^ now , which are inlensijiers making vulgarity degree of refinement to reapproach nature, why, let j more vu |g ;) r, aristocracy more aristocratic and the men have the precedence ! Less American than phi- ; ^^ who comes Uj rt | e d to breakfast at Saratoga, is of losophical, you will say! but men first, let it be . l jf ature B daintiest fabric, only less proud than win- must have my way in my post-meridian, nine but fancy a buttoned-up frock-coat over a There used to be dandies! That was in the time ,| gn petticoat, and you can picture to yourself the when there was an aristocracy in the country. V" th i| saucv piquancy of the costume. Titania in the the levelling (from the middle to the top) that has b een I laundrv ; going on for the last ten or twelve years, the incentive somehow, seems gone, or, account for it how you will there are no dandies! I am inclined to think I was going to philosophize upon the changes in lady-tactics within the last few years, but I will just hint at a single point that has impressed me. The that two causes may have contributed ^to it the mdis-i . n) . tive con fi d i n 1 gness o f American girlhood (the cretion of tailors in using gentlemen s ideas pro || j ove |j e8t 8OC j a | phase that ever ascended from the shepherd s fold to ihe drawing-room) has been aban doned for the European mamma-dom and watchful restraint, but without some of the compensatory Eu ropean concomitants. I will not "lift the veil" by telling what those concomitants are. It would be a - - . delicate and debateable subject. But the effect of woman s being beautiful enough to adore, and yet not i ^ ^ a(] tation ig) in my opinion, far more dan- wise enough to know that degree of dilierence . AH, ug than what it seeks to SIlp plant or remedy, and cuously. and the attention paid to dress by all classes everybody who can buy a coat at all, being within one decree of comme it faut ! The other side of that degree is not far enough off from the mob, and so dandyism is discouraged. Needlessly, it is true, for the differ ence is marked enough; but the possibility of a ~ my dear Willis, that an angel may " walk unrecog nised !" It has killed the class ! Tliere is one dandy only, at Saratoga, and he is but the dovetail upon the age gone by a better-dressed man ten yea rs ago than this morning at breakfast. among other evils is that of making culpable what was once thought innocent. I shudder at the manuiac- ture of new sins in a world where enough, for all needful ruin, grows wild by the road-side. I do not believe we shall grow purer by Europeamzmg. 1 lie wjitcr One dandy among three thousand "fashionables!" It, wii-it else would you like to know; i ne waier is early in the season, it is true, and (as a youth said j ^^ gg metamc as ofoij, though the beauties around purer by Europeanizing. ou like to know ? Th to me yesterday, with a clever classification) "all Car- j ^ ^ of - the j ounl;i in are an increased congregation. venter s coats are gone this year to Newport." But, j _,. -, k p ,) ie j r grea t caravansary admirably still, there are those here done into stereotype, and reckless of the peculiarities in themselves which are susceptible of piquant departures from the fashion who would have been, twenty years ago, each one a phenix unresembled ! How delightful the springs were, in those days of marked men! How adored they were by the women ! How generously The Marvms keep ter grea c well, as usual, though, surviving amid such a cataract of travel, they should rather call their hotel "Goat Island" than "United States." Un.on hall is making a fortune out of the invahd saints, and Con gress hall looks romantic and flirt-w.se as ever ; ; by-the-way, they are about to enlarge it, with a portico overlooking the spring. Delicious dinners can be had and an omnibus runs there regularly, and at the lake HI IIIO la* w au* * - - I/-* in all matters, Saratoga enlarges. It serves a needful (by such petting as is now unknown) their anxieties of toilet were repaid and glorified ! How the arrival of each " particular star" was hailed by the rushing out of the white dresses upon the portico of Congress M nave smi;f . ulstuvc , rvi ._ r .... hall the acclamations, the felicitations, the inquiries was dug up" by the spirited belles of Carolina, anc tender and uproarious ! There was a joyous recipro- at the south a Jib-along-josey: T have since discovered that this promo ted article of dress 136 EPHEMERA. purpose in this gregarious country; and on the whole, no place of escape is pleasanter to man or woman. How is the joyous brigadier? Make my homage acceptable to his quill and his epaulets, and ask him, j in his next hour of inspired song, to glorify proud j beauty in humble kirtle. Come to Saratoga, my dear Willis, and let me tell your how sincerely I am yours, CINNA BEVERLEY. The time will come, perhaps, when we shall be a connoisseur in snuff-boxes, insects, or autographs but, meantime, we are curious in the cultivation of the rarer kinds of friendship. The ingenious idea oc curred to us, some ten years ago, of turning the waste overflow of our heart into some such special and available irrigation, and the result we shall leave to be published posthumously, under the title of AMICUL- TURK, or a TREATISE ON LOVE-WASTE. Our proper channels of affection being first supplied to the point ! the world goes, and stuff for moralizing eh, old Willis ? The charm of society at Saratoga lies in getting the thing without paying for it. To see a pretty woman in town, one has to resolve at breakfast, shape his arrangements, stick three hours to his resolve, trav el a mile, ring a bell, run the chance of intruding or "not at home," talk to some bore in the way of aunt or brother, and two to one, after all, you light upon an undress humor in the lady visited. In the great drawing-room of the United States, on the contrary, the whole visitable world is reduced to the compass of a gamut, and you have it all within the spread of your hand, and all in tune ! You dress, breakfast, and sit on a sofa, and in ten minutes your entire female ac quaintance passes within three feet of your nose, and every one as ready to be talked to as if you had ridden three miles, and wasted patience and a forenoon to have that pleasure. You leave her when you like, without the trouble of an adieu, see and talk to twenty more with the same charming economy of time and of overflow, we have felt free to venture upon very ; labor, and having got through your duty-talks by bold experiments with the remainder, and some of our specimens, of course, are simply curiosities ; but we have them (friends) of every quality, form, and condi tion, male and female, preserved with studious care and industry guardedly confining ourselves to only one of a kind. Some of the humbler specimens are I of great beauty, but will show better preserved and I pressed in a posthumous andbarium. We can only i venture, in our lifetime, to give specimens of the j more ornamental varieties ; and our object now is to introduce a leaf of the species "callow dandy" in eleven, you select your favorite and devote yourself to her for the remaining twelve or fourteen hours "a month s love in a day!" This, if you please, is letting " the serious part of life go by Like the neglected sand," and very glad to be rid of it ! Now, don t you think, my paternal Willis, that society in town has too many hinderances, obstructions, cross-purposes, exactions, mystifications, and botherations considering tkat a plague slices off just as much life as a pleasure! I oilier words, to give you a letter from a very elegant lad with a nascent mustache, a prized friend of ours, now, for the first time, at Saratoga. He writes about trifles, but in hot weather we (for one) like trifles best; and as he writes, after all, with a dash of philosophy, j we have not thought it worth while to omit or alter, loots, my dear dandy ? Do you observe what aT>reak- Here is hisjetter, written in the vanishing legibility of! down they give to the instep, and how shamble-footed, and down at the heel the men seem who wear them ? After all, there is a " blood look" to a man s leg as wish the Marvins would take a lease of New York, roof it in, knock away walls, and make a "Springs" of it ! It is so very cumbrous, letting people have whole houses to themselves ! Have you anatomized this new fashion of Baiter- a once good school-hand : U. S. HOTEL, Aug. . DFAR WILLIS: Your kind note to St. John, of the Knickerbocker, got me the state-room with the pic ture of " Glenmary" on the panel, and I slept under the protection of your household gods famously, of course. The only fault I found with that magnificent boat, was the right of any "smutched villain" to walk through her. It is a frightful arrangement that can sell, to a beauty and a blackguard, for the same money, the right to promenade on the same carpet, and go to sleep with the same surroundings on the opposite sides of a pine partition ! Give me a world where antipodes stay put! But what a right-royal, "slap- up" supper they give in the Knickerbocker! They ll make the means better than the end travelling better than arriving if they improve any more ! I had a great mind to go back the next day, and come up again. Saratoga s great fun. I had no idea there were so many kinds of people beasts and beauties. Five hundred men and women in one house is a lumping of things that shoves aside a great many secrets there s no room for. Old women popping out of their rooms, with their wigs off, to call a waiter lazy men coming to breakfast unshaved cross people that can not, be smiling all day long lovers besieging, when the lady would prefer cracker and cheese jealous people looking daggers while they pretend to blow their noses bustles flattened by dinner-chairs into upright pianos ladies spreading their nostrils at un expected introductions old maids in calm disgust, and just-outs in " sweet confusion" a Turk in the portico selling attars, and a Jew in the drawing-room, shining in patent leather all pretty good sights, as well as a horse s, and no dandy can look "clean limbed" with unstrapped trousers and his apparent foot cut in two by shoes of two colors. The eye wants a clean line from the point of the toe to the swearing- place of the patriarchs, and an unblemished instep rising to the pantaloon. The world s tailors have been ever since breeches-time learning the proper ad justment of straps, and now it is perfected, the capri cious world condemns it to disuse! Write an article about it, my dear Willis! And then these gathered French trousers making a man into a " big-hipped humble-bee" as if we needed to be any more like women ! I see, too, that here and there a youth has a coat padded over the hips! Though, apropos of coats, there is a well-dressed man here with a new cut of Carpenter s. He s a Prometheus, that Carpenter heating his goose by undoubted "fire from heaven!" The skirts of the last inspiration cross slightly behind, aiding the Belvidere "pyramid inverted" (from the shoulders down) and of course promoting the fine arts of tailoring. Allowing freely the tip-toppiness of Jennings in trousers, waistcoats, and overcoats, there is nobody like this Philadelphia man for coats ! You might as well restore the marble chips to the nose of a statue as suggest an improvement to him. And what a blessing this is, my dear Willis! Do you remem ber the French dandy s sublime sentiment: " Si I on rencontrait un habit parfait dans toute sa vie, on pour- rait presque se passer tV amour . " Ah! such an interminable letter as I am writing! Your friend " Jo. Sykes," the puller of the big wires, is here, handsome and thoughtful, with a daughter who is to be the belle of I860 the loveliest child I have seen in my travels. The beautiful women I will EPHEMERA. 137 tell you about over our olives and tinta. No events that I can trust to the indiscretion of pen and ink. Ever yours, AUGUSTUS ILIHO. Of course there was a postscript, but that we must reserve for posterity. Our friend Gus lliho is not a man to write altogether upon third person topics. But we have another friend at Saratoga a female speci men and we hope to hear from her, twixt this and the season over. Our readers will please expect it. THE CABINET. (" The Committee" trimming pencil in the Eastern-most bdthin g-house on Rockaway beach. Enter the briga- i dier with nostrils inflated.) Brig. Fmff ! fmff ! God bless the Atlantic ocean ! j Fmff! "Salt sea" indeed! I never smelt a breeze fresher. Fmff! fmff! fmff! You got the start of j me, my dear boy ! (pulls his last high heel out of the \ deep sand and sits down on the threshold.) What say to a strip and dip before we come to business? Com. Fie ! general, fie ! Look through your fingers at the other end of the beach ! It is the hour i of oceanic beatitude the ladies bathing ! The mur- j muring waters will be purer for the interview. Bathe j we in the first wave after ! Brig. How can you Play in wench-like words with that Which is so serious ?" Did you bring a towel, mi-boy? Com. Tut ! would you offend the south wind, that proffers the same office so wooingly ? Walk on the bench, man. and let the sun peruse you, whileyoudry! Brig. So should I be more red, with a vengeance ! But 1 don t like this dry-salting, mi-boy ! It s too sticky ! Ye gods ! look at the foam upon that wave ! What is that like, my poet ? Com. Like the unrolling of a bale of lace on a broad counter! The "tenth wave" is the head clerk, and the clams and soft crabs are the ladies shopping! ; How I love the affinities of Art and Nature! Brig. Poll ! Where s Nature s twine and brown ! paper? Don t be transcendental ! Com. How ignorant you are, not to know eel-grass i and devil s apron Nature s twine and brown paper ! My dear general, were you ever introduced to the Atlantic? Is this your first visit? Stand up in the doorway ! (Brigadier rises and the surf bows to the ground.) General Morris ! the Atlantic ocean. Atlantic ocean! General Morris. I am happy to bring two such distinguished " swells" together. Thoagh (apro pos, Mr. "Heaving Main !") the general is a gay man! Look out for your " pale Cynthia !" The moon is not famed for her constancy ! Brig. What are you mumbling there, mi-boy! I wish, under the tender influence of these suggesting waters, to express a wish that you would write some poetry, or give us a new tale, or dash us off a play, or Com. Or, in some other way make rubbish for posterity ! No, sir ! There are no pack-horses in Posthumousland, and, as much as will ride in a ghost s knapsack, with his bread and cheese, is as much, in quantity, as any man should write who has pity for his pedestrian soul on its way to dooms-day ! Why, ! general, the TALES which I am about to publish (in cluding "Inklings," "Loiterings" etc., etc.), will make, of themselves, a most adult-looking octavo. My POEMS and PLAYS have tonnage enough to carry, at least, all the bulk necessary to a fame ; my MISCEL LANIES, yet to be collected will make a most sizeable volume of slip-slop ; PENCILLINGS is no pamphlet: and LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE, and other episiolary production do you see how beautifully the sand immortalizes the industrious waves that write succes sively their sparkling lines on the beach ! Brig. Don t malign your "eternal fame, mi-boy !" Com More eternal, I believe, than the love of the impertinent Lothario in the sonnet : (" But say, my all ! my mistress ! and my friend ! What day next week th eternity shall end?") but how much more eternal it would be, if they would make the genesis of a man s works like (hat of the patriarchs dateable from the first satisfactory off-shoot of his manhood ! Do you remember the expressive genealogy of Shem ? 12. And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years and begat Salah : 13. And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years and begat sons and daughters. 14. And Eber lived four and thirty years and begat Peleg : 15. And Eber lived after he begat Peleg four hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters. And so on, up to Abraham, whose father was seven ty years old when he was born. But don t you sup pose these boys did anything before they were thirty- odd ? Their history begins with their first creditable production ! Eber was nothing till he begat Peleg, though, very likely, the critics of that time "preferred very much his earlier productions." Brig. And you think you could begin, now, with your first Peleg and Salah ? Com. You have said it. But, as I hinted before, my posthumous knapsack is already full of rubbish, and a thought strikes me ! Brig. " Call it out !" Com. I ll change my style and start a new reputa tion, incog! Brig. Famous ! Com. And sell some man the glory of it for an annuity ! Brig.-Good ! Com. ( Thoughtfully) The old countess of Des mond shed her teeth three limes. Brig. A precedent in nature. Com. (Firmly) Soit! Done! So be it! Hang me if I don t ! You ll hear of a new author before long one that beats me hollow ! Look me up a purchaser, my dear brigadier ! Literary fame furnish ed at say, three thousand dollars per annum ! Brig. Mi-boy, the ladies have left the beach I wonder if the sea would condescend to us, now ! Com. Peltry after roses and ivory ! I don t know! Brig. Talking of Esau he should have lived in cravat-time. Well-drest, your hirsute customers looks not amiss ! (No pun, you villain !) Stand back, my unclad-boy ! Here comes a wagon load of women ! Com. Chambermaids and nurses; who, by the way they flock to the beach in the male hours, must either have eyes with a nictitating membrane, or a modesty that is confined to what they hear. I wish to heaven that all females were patricians undesecrated by low taste and servitude ! It s like classifying owls with angels because they are both feathered, to call these rude creatures women . What s that scar on your breast, brigadier? Brio-. Slide down your "nictitating membrane," mi-boy, and don t be too observing ! Here goes ! Hup! (The brigadier rushes into the surf, takes a stitch through three frills of the island s shirt, and rises like a curly-headed sun from the ocean.) Com. (so/us). There he swims ! God bless him for a buoyant brigadier ! How the waves tumble over his plump shoulders, delighted to feel the place where ride his epaulets and his popularity! Look out for sharks, my dear general ! They snuff a poet afar off! 138 EPHEMERA. Natural victims we are to them on land or water! Hear him laugh as he shakes the brine out of his whiskers ! Was ever such a laugh ! His heart gives that " ha ! ha !" a fillip as it sets out ! I must swim off to him ! Clear the beach, soft crab and sand-bird! Morris and Willis must swim together! ****** Brig. (Sitting down to dry.) This salting freshens a man, and this wetting makes him dry. Oh for a drink and the asp of Cleopatra a cobbler and a riper! ! Shake yourself, mi-boy ! Com. Suppose we roll in the sand and take a wrestle, like the athleta? of old eh ? How do you propose to get the sand and gravel out from your doigts da pied, general ? Brig. " Gravelled, 1 we are, mi-boy, but not " for lack of matter !" Let s dress first, and then go down and rinse our feet with the aid of the moon s lover lacking a servant to bring a pail ! Are you dry ? Com. Inner and outer man very ! What s this | dropped out of your pocket! Brig. A song* that I wrote for Brown to set to musicT Shall I read it to you ? (Brigadier reads with his hand on his breast.) TIS NOW THE PROMISED HOUR. " The fountains serenade the flowers, Upon their silver lute And, nestled in their leafy bowers The forest-birds are mute : The bright and glittering hosts above, Unbar their golden gates, While nature holds her court of love, And for her client waits. Then, Jady, wake in beauty rise ! Tis now the promised hour. When torches kindle in the skies To light thee to thy bower. " The day we dedicate to care To love the witching night ; For all that s beautiful and fair In hours like these unite. E en thus the sweets to flowerets given The moonlight on the tree And all the bliss of earth and heaven Are mingled, love, in thee. Then, lady, wake in beauty rise ! Tis now the promised hour, When torches kindle in the skies To light thee to thy bovver." Com. True and smooth as a locomotive on a "T" rail ! Is it sold and set? Brig. Beautifully set to music by Brown, and sold to Atwill, who will publish it immediately. Com. It s a delicious song, my happy troubadour, and destined to tumble over bright lips enough to make a sunset. That we should so envy the things we make ! My kingdom for a comb ! I shall never get the salt out of my hair I m " briny as the beaten mariner, Oft soused in swelling Tethys saltish tears." Tf you want a curl to keep, now s your time ! Brig. Willis? . Com. My lord ? Brig. I hear you were voted in to the " Light Guard" last week. Cow. Yes, sir, an honorary private! I feel the compliment, for they are a set of tip-top capables, joy ous and gentlemanly but, my dear martinet, what the devil do they want of a man s dura mater? Brig. A man s what ? Com. The weary membrane of an author s brain. Brig. They want it, you say ? Com. With the official announcement came an order to equip myself according to directions, and * This song, set to music, has been purchased and copy righted by Mr. Atwill. " deposite my fatigue-jacket" in the armory of the corps ! What fatigue-jacket have I, but the jacket of my brain ? Brig. True ! Pick up your boots and come along ? (Exit the brigadier barefoot, and the cabinet adjourns.} Half an hour later room No. 300, Rockaway Pavil ion. Two sherry cobblers on the table, uith two straws, erect in the ice.) Brig. How like this great structure on the sand must be, to a palace amid the ruins of Persepolis ! Com. The palace of Chilminar with forty columns and stairs for ten horses to go up abreast ! very like indeed especially the sand ! Somewhat like, in another respect, by the way that the palaces of Persepolis were the tombs of her kings, and Rock- away is the place of summer repose for the indignant aristocracy of Manhattan.- Brig. True, as to the aristocracy, but why " indig nant ?" Com. That there can be fashion without them at Saratoga (which there could not be once), and that " aristocratic" and " fashionable are two separate estates, not at all necessary to be combined in one individual. Rockaway is full, now, of the purest porcelain porcelain fathers, porcelain mothers, porce lain daughters ! Brig. Then why is not the society perfectat Rock- away ? Com. Because the beaux go after the crockery at Saratoga. The rush, the rowdydow, the flirtations, and game suppers, are all at Saratoga! Aristocracy likes to have the power of complaining of these things as nuisances inseparable from its own attraction. Aris tocracy builds high walls, but it likes to have them pertinaciously overleaped. The being let alone within their high walls, as they are now at their exclusive watering-places, was not set down in the plans of aris tocratic campaigns ! Brig. But they are charming people here, mi-boy? Com. The best-bred and most agreeable people in the world, but the others give a beau more for his money. In all countries, but ours, people make ac quaintances for life. But the hinderances and obstacles which are not minded at the beginning of a lifetime acquaintance, are intolerable in an acquaintance for a week (the length of most summer acquaintances with us), and the floating beaux from the south, the west, the Canadas, and the West Indies, go where they can begin at the second chapter omitting the tedious preface and genealogical introduction. Brig. Rockaway is stupid, then. Com. Quiet, not stupid. The lack of beaux and giddy times is only felt by the marriageable girls, and there are a great many people in the world besides marriageable girls. And upon this same " many people," will depend the prosperity of the Pavilion. When it is known that it is a delightful place for everything but flirting, it will be a centre for sober people to radiate to, and a paradise for penserosos like you and me, general eh? 1 suppose Cranston would as lief (liefer, indeed) that his rooms should be filled with tame people as wild. Brig. How s your cobbler ? Com Fit to immortalize the straw that passes it ! Brig. What birds are those, my Willis ? Com. Shore birds that build in the sedge and feed on molluscous animals death on the soft crabs ! And, general, do you know that the male of this bird (called the phalarope), is a most virtuous example to our sex ? What do you think he does ? Brig. Feeds the little-uns ? EPHEMERA. 139 Com. Hatches them, half and half, with the she- bird, and helps bring them up ! Brig. Is the gender shown in the plumage ? Com. No. Brig. So I thought. Your handsome peacock, now, leaves it all to the hen. The domestic virtues are their own reward remarkably so ! Is that the dinner-bell ? Com. Yes, it is that music ! " Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die." I ll meet you below, my dear general ! Adieu! (Cabinet adjourns for the day.) THE CABINET. ( Rockawoy beach, Sunday evening. The brigadier and committee seated on their boot-legs, after walking two miles, barefoot, on the hard sand.) Brig. Boots are durance vile, mi-boy ! How much we lose in not keeping our feet open to female assidu ities ! Fancy one of those apostolic washings a sweet woman kneeling before you, and, with her hair breathing perfumes over your ankles, performing it as an office of tenderness and hospitality ! Can patent leather be weighed against desuetude so melancholy ! Com. I am satisfied that the tender pink in your toe-nails was intended by nature to be admired, my dear brigadier ! And there is nature s remonstrance eloquent in a corn against the airless confinement of boot and stocking ! Why is a poet like a sandal ? Brig. Philosophize, my dear boy, don t quibble ! Com. Because he s a soul kept under with a thong ! Brig. Willis, 1 love the sea ! Com. So sung Barry Cornwall, " the open sea." As if Pharaoh had not yet passed over! To me the sea seems, on the contrary, for ever slamming down trap-doors of surf, and carefully covering the " treas ures of the deep" with cold water. I never saw any thing less "open!" Brig. There goes the sun down ! as red as what shall 1 compare it to ? Com. A wafer, sealing up this 17th of August for the doomsday postoffice. Happy they who have not forgotten the P. S. of repentance ! Brig. Ah, mi-boy! that pious infancy of yours! It oozes through the after-crust of your manhood in drops of poetry ! Pity you are less of a saint than you were at seventeen ! Com. Less of a saint / am not, though more of a sinner I am ! All I had seen at seventeen was beauty and goodness, and with an innate sense of beauty and goodness, I worshipped the Maker, my youth jhrough, with a poet s adoration ! The heart melts and drops upon its knees within a man, at any sudden revelation of unusual loveliness; and I have worshipped God, and loved one of his angelic creatures, with the white quivering lip of the same rush of blood inward. If to look often and adoringly " through nature up to na ture s God" be devotion, I am still devout. No sun set, no morning s beauty, no rich and sudden sight of loveliness in scenery, goes by without the renewal of that worship in my heart that was once religion. I praise God daily. Worldling as I am, and hardly as I dare claim any virtue as a Christian, there is that within me which sin and folly never reached or tainted. The unprompted and irresistible thoughts, upsprings in my mind in any scene of beauty, would seem prayers, and pure ones, to many an humble Christian. Pardon me for reading to you this inner leaf, my dear brigadier ! Brig. Thank you, on the contrary, for its philos ophy, my dear boy ! Saints and worldlings have more ! feelings in common than the pulpit admits. That I j believe. Com. The chasm between them in this world should be narrowed, for they have many sympathies. The bigot makes the separation unnaturally wide. j Who is the one man mentioned in Scripture as I "loved" by the Savior? The "young ruler" who could not give up his " great possessions" "to inherit 1 eternal life !" Is not this tender interest in one " out of the fold," a lesson a most unheeded lesson, to the strict sect ? I talk feelingly of this, for I have an ad miration of goodness and purity that has never sepa rated itself from my love of beauty. I love a simple and unobtrusive piety, and am drawn irresistibly toward the possessor. Yet this better part of my nature is excluded with the rest, when 1 am denied Christian sympathy. Come out of dream-land, brigadier, and observe the tender violet in that upper [ cloud ! Brig. I was thinking whether the wave that falls upon the beach is to be congratulated or pitied com paring its arrival, that is to say, with its "swell" time upon the sea. Com. Congratulated, I should say. The hoary ! locks with which it approaches the beach, though they are breakers ahead when seen from the sea, are beautiful when seen from the shore as the head, whitened with the dreaded troubles of life, grows more beautiful in the eyes of angels, as it is more whitened and troubled, approaching heaven! JJut what hypocrites these shore-birds are, witli their I whitest plumes turned earthward! See that dark- ! backed snipe on the beach, with his white breast and belly! Brig. Rather what knowledge of mankind they have preferring to keep their darker side for the : more forgiving eye of Heaven ! Com. True the better reading! Do you like snipe ? Brig. With a pork shirt they are fairish that is, if you can t get woodcock. But, mi-boy, it isn t you that need ever eat snipe ! Com. As how ? Brig. (Pulling out the Sunday Mercury and read ing) "Willis, it is said, has profited So, QUO by the sale of the last edition of Pencillings by the Way. " Com. The mischief he has! for "has" read would be pleased to. Perhaps the editor of the Mercury will be kind enough to fork over the difference be tween fact and fiction ! By-the-way, I have read the book, myself, for the first time in eight years, and I have been both amazed and amused with the difference between what I saw then, and what I know now ! And I am going to give the public the same amazement and amusement, by writing for the Mirror a review of "Pencillings" with my new eyes showing the inter esting difference between first impressions and after familiarity. Brig. They ll want to read " Pencillings" over again, mi-boy! Com. For a hasty pudding it has held out surpri singly already. The fifth edition, embellished with 1 engravings, is still selling well in England, and in the most stagnant literary month of the year we have sold two editions, as you know. I am inclined to fear that 1 shall be less known by my careful writings than by this unrevised book written between fatigue and sleep, by roadsides and in most unstudylike places, and r epublished, in the Mirror edition, exactly as first written ! There is a daguerreotypity in literal first impressions, my dear general, and a man would write an interesting letter, the first moment after seeing the ! Colosseum for the first time, though a description from memory, a month after, would be very stupid. Did you ever feel posthumous, brigadier ? Brig. No. 1 never was dead. 140 EPHEMERA. Com. Nor I, except "in trespasses and sins" but a letter I received to-dny has given me a most pos thumous sensation. Tt was sent me to publish, by a lady who has lived several years abroad, and has lately revisiied Saratoga. It will "rub my brass" as the | maids say, to publish the passage about myself (quoted from the letter of a German baron), but it may make somebodies buy " Pencillings" to know that it has: passed abroad into a vade-mecum for travellers. So, down modesty and swell pocket! Who knows but ; that the " Sunday Mercury," that " lighted on the heaven kissing hill" of $5,000, may be a better prophet than historian ! Set your heels comfortably into the sand, general, and listen to this letter. There are some sweet lines at the close, written by the same lady after visiting the home of the young poetess Da vidson, whose precocious genius and premature death have been so feelingly written upon : " When you and I, my dear sir, met so pleasantly : some weeks since at Saratoga, I forgot to give you an \ extract from a letter which I had received from Ger many. No one can be insensible to deserved praise from a far land, and I know you will read with gratifi cation these few lines from a distinguished friend of ! mine : I remember with pleasure our visit to your splendid frigate, the United States, in the bay of Na ples. We met Mr. N. P. Willis on board, and after his cruise I met him again at Lady Parley s. He will not remember me, but if you ever see him, tell him that a person who lias visited almost all the spots described in his " Pencillings by the Way," feels the greatest pleasure in reading his book at least twice a year. It accompanies him regularly from Dresden to his estates in the spring, and back to the city in the autumn. " Not having seen Saratoga for many years, I was curious to perceive what changes time had made. Of course, its outward condition is greatly improved, and the remarkable change of all is the transition of the fashion and gayety from Congress hall to the United States hotel. It would be unwise to compare this latter establishment with any other that we have seen I in Europe, inasmuch as the whole order of arrange- j merit is entirely different ; but this must be conceded, { that/or a fortnight, no place in the world offers more i amusement. One may remain months at Carlsbad, j Baden-Baden, &c., without fatigue, in consequence of the entirely independent manner of living; but Saratoga must be taken, to be enjoyed, in homeopathic doses of the beforementioned fourteen days. It is really extraordinary how well-ordered and conducted is the United States hotel, when we remember the i crowds that dwell within its four walls and its colo- j nies; and assuredly the brothers* who bring about this state of things, deserve great commendation, j Having been repeatedly told, since my return from a long absence, that Saratoga had deteriorated, I con fess to having seen nothing of the sort. I had the good fortune to meet some of the most remarkable men of my country, and many of the fairest of its daughters, and to enjoy their society. I hold that Saratoga must be visited upon broad American prin ciples no cliques (like will come to like) but a gra cious word for all. At Carlsbad, and all other conti nental watering-places, the government provides a master of ceremonies, who introduces, regulates the balls, &c. The voice of the people gives this posi tion, at the United States hotel, to a citizen of Balti more, and allow me to say, that those who look upon him as a mere manager of balls, totally mistake his character; for a kinder and better heart never beat within a human breast than he possesses. Indeed, Bal timore seems to have been singularly well represented this year the incomparable beauty of its women Messrs. Marvin excellent hosts and most worthy men. | eclipsing all, and the wit alone of one finished gentle man of that town being sufficient to leaven a mass I meeting. "1 think the visits of clergymen to watering-places a signal benefit, when they resemble the Rev. Dr. Bethune, engaging in pleasing conversation with young and old, whom he enlivened by his eloquence. j He never lost sight of the great aim of his existence their improvement. Ever surrounded by eager listen ers, he left them better, wiser. On the whole, I think we must consider Saratoga as a great public good a neutral ground, where the south discovers that the norih is not a Mont Blanc, and the north perceives that the south is not a Vesuvius ! " My last visit at Saratoga was to the late home of the gifted Davidsons. Their brother kindly accompanied me, and presented me to his bereaved father. It seemed, as I lingered amidst their remains, a very home of shadows* a wondrous contrast to the surrounding scenes. I considered myself quite fortunate in hiving paid this visit, as Dr. Davidson leaves San-toga shortly, and the establishment will thereby be enl wly dismembered. * " A home of shadows ! mid the din Of fashion s gay and glittering scene So calm, so purely calm within Breathing of holiness serene. " A home of shadows ! where the twain, Who dwelt within its hallowed core, Are sought with wondering eyes in vain, Alas ! to bless its walls no more ! " The pair have winged their glorious flight, And, borne by angels through the air, To realms of everlasting light, Are linked with cherubs bright and fair. " Some student, yet, in time untold, Star-seeking in the dark blue sky, Will, midst its silver lamps, behold These joyous Pleiads wandering by. " Back, back to earth its pleasures, cares- Must thou, my soul, my thoughts be given, But, bless the spot, that, midst its snares, Called for a lingering look to heaven." Brig. Charming verses, and she must be a fresh hearted and impressible woman who wrote them. Do you remember the first thought of " Pencillings, mi-boy the oysters at Sandy Welsh s, over which 1 offered to send you abroad ? Com. Theodore Fay, you, and I, supping together! Brig. You have a way of knowing opportunity when^ou see it! I little dreamed of so long a leass of you! Dear Theodore! howl should like to eal that supper over again ! Com. I am very glad it agreed with you (presuming it is me and Theodore you want over again not the oysters !) They say Fay has grown fat, handsome and diplomatic. When shall we have that sweet fel low back among us? Brig. When they want the place for a green sec retary, who knows nothing of the court or court Ian guage. As soon as a man has been long enough attached to a legation to be presentable and useful, they recall him ! What is that other letter I brought you ? Com. From a lady at Fishkill, who is dazzled with the upshoot of "Fanny Forester." She thinks Fan ny s offhand piquancy is easy to do, and the lettei shows how much she is mistaken. I would fain say an encouraging word, however, for she seems to have the best of motives for wishing to be literary. Now, is it kinder to discourage such beginners at once, or to encourage them good-naturedly into a delusion ? Brig. Always discourage, mi-boy, for if they have genius, they will prosper " like a thunder-cloud, against the wind," EPHEMERA. 141 and if they have none, they are better stopped where II thought. Here, it is thought s hnrness language ! they are. How many heart-aching authoresses do we j What makes these people throw their potato-parings they __ ., know at this moment, who can write just well enough j to be wof ully distressed with the reluctance of the i market! The only style saleable is the spicy but dif- j into the gutter, my dear general ? Brig. Ann street, mi-boy, rails for the attention of Mayor Harper. The Mirror has a dainty nostril ficult vein of brig ht Fanny Forester, and yet, to all or two, and there are flower-pots in the windows op- neophyte, that very woof seems the easiest woven! f posite, and Burgess & Stringer keep the choicest of A woman who is more intelligent than the people I literary conservatories, yet we reside upon a rivulet around her, is very apt to believe that she might be , of swill! The simple enforcement of the law would famous, and make money with her pen ; and unless \ sweeten things, but there is no police except for crim inals in this land of liberty. Look at that brace of turtle-doves coming up-street! What loving friend- ; ships women have, at an age when boys are perfect she endeavors in this way to compensate herself for Ishmaelites. the lack of belleship. Better raise flowers and sell Com. Pardon me, my dear general, if I correct bouquets, dear Rosalie Beverlv ! your cacology. The sportsmen call two turtles a Com. The gray lace of twilight s star-broidered | dule of turtles, not a brace. Though, by-the-way, 1 veil has fallen over" the sea, brigadier. Let us paddle have not long been in possession of my learning upon back through the surf-edge to the bathing-houses, boot, ! that point. Let me read you a chapter on the nomen- and reappear to a world (1 don t think) disconsolate ; clature of such matters from this book in my hand. " Fair politure walk all her body over, And symmetry rejoice in every part," without us. THE CABINET. (Shop-door, Ann street. The Brigadier and Commit tee standing, sphinx-wise, outside.) Brig. The " devil" was here just now for " copy," my dear boy ! Com. The devil here and no Fanny Forester! We have given our readers a taste of this charming incognito, brigadier, and now they ll not feast with out her! I wonder whether she s pretty? Brig. So would she be over-endowed. No, mi- boy ! " I warrant that, with all her cleverness, she has envied, many a time, the doll of the village ! Com. A woman is, sometimes, wholly unadmired, who would become enchanting by a change of her Will you listen? The book is "Goodman s Social History of Great Britain" a gem of delightful read ing: "The stags which ran wild in the king s forests were named as early (if not earlier) as Edward III. (1307), from their antlers; thus the first year the male is called a calf, second year a brocket, third year a spayer, fourth year a stag, fifth year a great stag, sixth year a hart of the first head. "In the notes of Sir Walter Scott s Lady of the Lake, is a curious account of the brytling, breaking up, or quartering of the stag. The forester had his portion, the hounds theirs, and there is a little gristle, called the raven s bone, which was cut from the bris ket, and frequently an old raven was seen perched upon a neighboring tree waiting for it. "The fallow-deer, which are kept in the English parks, have also names, but not exactly the same as ,.,. _. _ 6 , - , . - , for stags. The males and the females the first year surroundings. That playful wit of Fanny Forester s, i are called fawns, second year the females are callec what-like shell soever it inhabits, would make her the || does, which name she always retains; but the male idol of a circle of appreciators for its work is in her > is called a prickett; third year he is called a shard; face, somewhere! Do you remember George Sand s fourth year, a sword; fifth year, a sword-ell, or sor- description of one of her heroines? "Elle 6tait jolie j rell; sixth year, a buck of first head ; seventh year, par juxta-position. Heureuse, elle eut ete ravissante. l| a buck; eighth year, a full buck; he is then fit for Le bonheur est la poesie des femmes, comme la toi- ; killing, and not before: and in the summer is very fat, lette en est le Card. Si la joi d un bal eut reflete ses j which he loses in winter. Buck-venison is not fit to teints rosees sur ce visage pale, si les douceurs d une : ! eat in winter, and ought not to be killed, vie eleante eussent rempli, eussent vermillione ses j "When beasts went together in companies, there iouesdeia Increment creusees, si 1 amour eut ranime was said to be a pride of lions, a lepe ol leopards, a ses yeux tristes, elie aurait pu lutter avec les plus ; herd of harts, of bucks, and all sorts of deer; a bevy belles jeunes filles. II lui manquait e V* cr * e we : : of roes, a sloth of bears, a singular of boars, a sowndes seconde fois la fcmmc :les chiffons et les billet-doux . " of swine, a dryfte of tame swine, a route of wolves, a Bri<r.(whohad gone in to escape the French quo- \\ harass of horses, a rag of colts, a stud of mares, a -ionand returned as the last word lingered on the pace of asses, a barren of mules, a team of oxen, a nmittee s lias). Write a billetdoux" to the next drove of kine, a flock of sheep, a tribe ol goats, a risen star, mi-boy, and ask her (him, it, or her) I sculk of foxes, a cete of badgers, a nchess of mar- shine first, like Fanny Forester, in the columns of tins, a fessynes of ferrets, a huske or a down of hares, unnsen to shine first, like b anny the Mirror. I love the baptism of genius, and (mod estly speaking) I have been the St. John in the wil derness of new writers. Com. Apostolic brigadier! You do know a star, even " at the breast" though, from sucking poets de liver me mostly, oh, kind Heaven ! They exact a faith in their call and mission that precludes every thing but the blindest and most acquiescent admira tion. I remember my own difficult submissions to the corrections of the kind, but truthful and consist ent critic of my youth, Buckingham of the Boston Courier. He was always right, but it is hard, when a nest of rabbits, a clowder of cats, a kendel of young cats, a shrewdness of apes, and a labor of moles. "When animals are retired to rest, a hart was said to be harbored; a buck lodged; a roebuck bedded ; a fox kennelled; a badger earthed; a hare formed; and a rabbit seated. " Dogs which run in packs are enumerated by couples. If a pack of fox-hounds consists of thirty- six, which is an average number, it would be said to contain eighteen couples. "Dogs used for the gun, or for coursing, two of them are called a brace, three a leash; but two span- your feathers are once smoothed down, to pluck oat iels, or harriers, are called a couple. They also say and re-stick them in vour poetical peacockery ! Ah, a mute of hounds, for a number; a kennel of raches, juvenilities! We build bridges over chasms of mean- ! a cowardice of curs, and a litter of whelps, ing, but they drop away behind us, as we pass over! " The seasons for alle sortes of veiiery were regu- In Heaven, where there will be no grammar and die- , lated in the olden time as follows: The time ot tionarv we shall have a new standard of excellence grace begins at midsummer, and lasteth to holy-rood ; 142 EPHEMERA. the fox mny be hunted from the nativity to the an nunciation of our lady; the roebuck from Easter to Michaelmas; the roe from Michaelmas to Candlemas; the hare from Michaelmas to midsummer; the wolf, as the fox and the boar, from the nativity to the pu rification of our lady. " So for birds there is a vocabulary ; and first, for aquatic birds: a herd of swans, of cranes, and of curlews, a dropping of sheldrakes, a spring of teals, a serges of herons and bitterns, a covert of cootes, gag gles of geese, sutes of mallards, baddylynges of ducks. Now for meadow and upland birds : a congregation of plovers, a walk of snipes, a fall of woodcocks, a muster of peacocks, a nye of pheasants, a dule of turtles, a brood of hens, a building of rooks, a numer ation of starlings, a flight of swallows, a watch of nightingales, a charm of goldfinches, flights of doves and wood-pigeons, coveys of partridges, bevies of quails, and exaltations of larks. "When a sportsman inquires of a friend what he has killed, the vocabulary is still varied ; he does not use the word pair but a brace of partridges, or pheasants, a couple of woodcocks; if he has three of any sort, he says a leash. " If a London poulterer was to be asked for a pair of chickens, or a pair of ducks, by a female, he would suppose he was talking to some fine finicking I lady s maid, who had so puckered up her mouth into small plaits before she started, that she could not open it wide enough to say couple. "As the objects sportsmen pursue are so various, and as the English language is so copious, various terms have been brought into use: so that the ever lasting term pair, this pairing of anything (except in the breeding-season) sounds so rude, uninstructive, and unmusical, upon the ears of a sportsman, that he would as soon be doomed to sit for life by the side of a seat-ridden cribbage-player as to hear it. " It is the want of this knowledge which makes the writings of Howitt and Willis, when they write upon this ever-interesting national subject, appear so tame; the sportsman peruses their pages with no more zest than he listens to the babble of a half-bred hound, or a ranging spaniel that barks at every bird he sees leaving his game. " Mr. Goodman adds, in a note, the explanation of my blunders in dog-nomenclature: "Mr. Willis, in vol. iii., p. 203, Pencillings by the Way, gives the following information, speaking of the duke s greyhounds (at Gordon Castle): "Dinna tak pains to caress them, sir," said the huntsman, " they ll only be hanged for it." I asked for an expla nation. He then told me that a hound was hung the moment he betrayed attachment to any one, or in any way showed superior sagacity. In coursing the hare, if the dog abandoned the scent, to cut across or inter cept the animal, he was considered as spoiling the sport. If greyhounds leave the track of the hare, either by their own sagacity, or to follow the master in intercepting it, they spoil thfe pack, and are hung without mercy. Perhaps Mr. Willis will excuse me if I show how unsporlsman-like this is. In the first place, there are no packs of greyhounds; in the next place, those who attend on them are not called hunts men ; in the next place, they never run by scent : if they did, they ought to be destroyed. As to the ca ressing, no dog ought ever to be caressed without he had first performed some extraordinary feat, and then it should be done instantly. The everlasting petting or patting a dog, spoils it in its nature, its disposition, its temper, and its habits. It becomes worthless, ex cept as a lapdog, and that is the most contemptible and worthless thing in all God s creation. " Many years close observation has convinced me, that where the dog is once admitted into the house, ij and petted, the dogs rule the children, and the chil- dren rule the rest; bringing in its train all the usual concomitants of turbulence, filth, and frowsiness; and turning the room into a dog-kennel. " ( If men transact like brutes, tis equal then For brutes to claim the privilege of men. " The correction is very right thanks to Mr. Good man. My attention was called to the blunder, by the duke of Gordon himself, soon after the publication of the book in England; and I should have corrected ; it in this new edition, but for determining not to read the proofs, that the letters might be published literally from the first copy. But what beautifully descriptive words are those in the nomenclature of birds, my dear general: "A watch of nightingales! a charm of goldfinches! a numeration of starlings, and exalta tions of larks!" How pretty it would be, instead of "Here come two pretty women!" to say, "Here comes a charm of women!" Instead of, "There stand Morris and Willis!" to have the shoemaker op posite say, " Look at that pride of lions," or that "exaltation of editors!" Brig. A "muster of peacocks" hits my fancy de scriptive, say, of two loungers in uniform! Aha! mi-boy! fine! Com. Most brigadierish of brigadiers! You would rather be the sodger men have "made you than the poet God made you ! So would not I ! Brig. you rejoice in a destiny fulfilled, then? Com. Quite the contrary. I mean to say that God made me a natural idler and trifler, and want made me a poet and a worky; and unlike you, I would rather be what God made me. By-the-way, do you know the trouble there was in the first composing of a horse? This same amusing book quotes from Fitz- herberfs old book on agriculture: "A horse has fif ty-four properties, viz. : two of a man, two of a bad ger, four of a lion, nine of an ox, nine of a hare, nine of a fox, nine of an ass, and ten of a woman. This description has been somewhat altered, but perhaps not improved upon, viz.: three qualities of a woman, a broad breast, round hips, and a long mane; three of a lion, countenance, courage, anil fire ; three of a bullock, the eye, the nostrils, and joints; three of a sheep, the nose, gentleness, and patience ; three of a mule, strength, constancy, and good feet; three of a deer, head, legs, and short hair; three of a wolf, throat, neck, and hearing ; three of a fox, ear, tail, and throat; three of a serpent, memory, sight, and cunning; and three of a hare or cat, cunning, walk ing, and suppleness." THE CABINET. (Committee s private study. Brigadier lounging in a fauteuil.) Com. My dear general, what do you think, ab stractly, of industry ? Does no shuddering con sciousness of awful platitude creep over you, in this dreadfully exemplary career that we are pursuing ? I feel as if the very nose on my face were endeavoring to " dress," as you military men say striving to come down to the dull, cheek-bone level of tedious uni formity ! I declare I should be pleased to "hear tell" of something out of the " way of business" sentiment of some sort ! Brig. Listen to a song that I have just \vritten. There is a background of truth to it the true sadness of a lovely living woman that would supply your need of a sensation, if your imagination could picture her. Com. It shall ! .Read away, my friend ! (Brigadier reads.) EPHEMERA. 143 Com. Thai is a peculiarly musical and engaging j general, lhat I, for one, shall " cast my slough," and measure, and you have hung it upon hinges of honey, try my youth on again ! It simcks of the days when poets wrote a song a year, finishing, to the last vanishing point of perfec tion. What do the women say to you for translating their prose into angel-talk ? Brio.: They love poetry, mi-boy ! The more po etical you can make their life, the more they love life ; and you ! They would rather suffer than live monot- | onously. So, beware ihe "even tenor !" Com. Even of prosperity, eh ? I ll beware when jj 1 see it coming ! Brig: Ah, mi-boy, you have no idea of the intense abstraction of mind necessary to bring a poetical ima gination down to habits of business. Com. Do you really wish to know what is to be the new race in society this winter? Brig. What ? Com. Married belles ! The teens dynasty is pas sing away ! The talk, this summer, at all the water ing-places, has been of beautiful women, who (if. per- I chance, they have loved out their love) have not shone i out their shine ! Heavens ! how many there are completely shelved in American society, who have never had more than two winters of vogue in the world, and who are compelled to believe that, out of thirty years of loveliness, only two are to be rescued from the nursery only two to intervene between the nursery filial and the nursery maternal! What a utensil woman is, in this way ! For what did Heaven give them their other powers ? Heaven did iiot put the smile of woman under her arm! No! it was placed where it could not be covered without suffoca tion, and, doubtless, with a purpose. : that the lips and their outgoing should be kept open to society! Till those lips fade till the mind that speaks through them loses its playfulness and attraction, woman can not be monopolized without a manifest waste of the gifts of nature making that bloom for two years only, that was constructed to bloom for forty ! Besides these very charms are withdrawn from the world be fore ripening flowers permitted only to bud ! There never was a belle who was not more marriage than before. An un agreeable than a ripe one. The elegant repose " For when the life is quickened, out of doubt, The wits that were defunct and dead before, Break up their drowsy grave, and newly move With casted slough and fresh legerity," and who knows ? I may be agreeable in the re formed baby-house of society ! Brig. " Hope on hope ever !" THE CABINET. (Committee and Brigadier in confidential session.) Com. My dear general, it won t do ! Read these two letters ! . I won t waste my eyes with them ! It must do ! who says it won t do? Com. One Noggs. .Bri,g-. Who s Noggs ? Com. By Jove, he writes a capital letter! Hear this, my incensed brigadier ! (reads.) " DEAR WILLIS : You frightened me to-day, terri bly, in the hint you threw out in the course of con versation with the brigadier, to wit : Shall we make it into a monthly ? " Make the WEEKLY NKW MIRROR into a monthly ! God forbid ! / forbid, anyhow. Who are you? I am a live Yankee, at your service, who lives in the land of soles and codfish, whig pow-wows and demo cratic clam-bakes one who has not been so deco rously brought up, perhaps as some of your readers, but a man for a that a constant reader of the Mir ror, at any rate proof of my manhood, eh ? Well, sir, I, Newman Noggs, Esq., of Lynn, coun ty of Essex, etc., etc., do hereby seriously and ar dently protest against any such nonsense as is implied in the above question. Excuse me, sir, but 1 couldn t help it. I feel so worked up at the bare idea of the agreeable after visits of the Mirror coming only monthly, that I can ripe mind is far less . hardly stick to decency. Why, sir, 1 shouldn t be in agreeao.e man n,ic u.. c . /he elegant repose of trim for my sabbath-day meeting albeit a pious man lovely married women is Jar more enchanting than the I am I were it not for the preparatory study in tli hovdenish romping or inexperienced sentiment of j Mirror, Saturday nights. Not lhat you are so dread- girls Speak up, brigadier ! What say ? i fully religious, but there is always sure to be some- fe B^._It is highly natural, mi-boy, that this change thing in you that makes me feel better, and when I i nat- feel bolter I want to go to church, of course, to let lorna- myself and the world know that I m getting kind o good. As for the literary merils of ihe Mirror, it don t become ihe like o me to be offering an opinion. All I ve got to say is, that I individually like it first- rate. There s a sort of racy, spicy, off-hand, unstudied of an operative i n"a nat\on*-?acTor^ ! wittiness about it that takes my eye amazingly. should be coming about, now ! But it was botl ural and necessary that, hitherto in the unorn mental foundation of American society, woman should be reduced to her simple primitive mission shining, like the glow-worm, only long enough to attract the male. When married, she passed into the condition a working educatress, a working patriot-maker Her i for God s sake, or more particularly for my sake, dear whole time was then needed for offices that are now | Willis, don t ye change it. Suppose it does cost performed (all but the first) by schools, moral teach- jj some folks a little more for postage than it wou ers surrounding example, and national routine. Lu- something else what o that? Who s air? ia 01 a bricate the child now with money, and it will slide on cent or two ? I m a poor man long s.de o some folk, money to manhood over an inevitable railroad of education and good influences. Ot course, the mother is now at liberty to shine as long as nature feeds the lamp; and. indeed, it is in this way, only, thai she can fulfil her destiny dispensing elsewhere the sweet influ ences no longer needed exclusively by her chil dren. Com. Statesmanlike and pellucid ! Well, sir, this great national metamorphosis is now coming about ! t has been secretly resolved, among the young mar- ;j general, the brigadu ried men of New York, that there shall exist, this inter, a post-connubial bclte-ocracy : and that mar and yet I rather pay letter-postage than have it stop. So,- Willis dear, just tell your postage friends to econ omize in some other department, or, it they can t do that, tell em I ll make it up to em. "No, no, friend of my early youth, don t think of any such thing, that is, if ye love me for 1 could better spare something better, than the piquant dish of conversation which weekly (oh, let it be ever week- \\\ occurs between mi-boy and our dearly-beloved J i .1 - . !...:_.. j:,. > Mrs. Noggs, loo a strong woman, by the way ,. nevertheless, weekly on this point, very. She says ried belles shall, accordingly, have "the pas, in waltz, she ll never forgive you if you change the (air form quadrille, promenade, and conversation. How deli- i of the Mirror. Think o that Though not a vam cious ! isn t it ? It enlarges the field so ! I believe, ! woman, she has a passion for looking into the Mirror 144 EPHEMERA. that is very affecting. On the other hand, she says if you ll give up the horrid notion of changing the form of the Mirror, she ll fry you a nipper as brown as a nut, with her own fair hands, when next you come Bostonward, and will visit our humble cottage near the sea. I have ye now ! For my well- tried friends, Gentleman Charles (him of the Astor house, I mean) and his handsome partner, tell me you are a gallant youth and well affected toward the ladies. " We shall look anxiously in the next Mirror to find our anxious hopes confirmed, and, if not disappointed, shall henceforth, as in duty bound, ever pray for your everlasting welfare, world without end. " Yours till then, "NoGGS." Com. I have had twenty letters the last week (none as good as that, but) all to the same purpose! I am inclined to think, general, that Heaven s first pe riodical (Sunday) was arranged in accordance with some revolution of our mental nature, and that once in seven days, as it is good to rest, so it is good to read, or grieve, or go love-making. Friends dine to gether once a week, making friendship a weekly peri odical. Lovers of nature in cities ride to the coun try once a week. We eat a boiled dinner once a week. Everybody in New England needs beans once a week. The weather comes round once a week fair Sundays and wet Sundays coming in successive dozens. There is nothing agreeable in nature that is monthly, except the moon, and the very sight of that periodical puts people to sleep! Brig. There is the monthly rose, mi-boy ! Com. The poorest rose that blows! Brig. But here is a point I should like to make clear to the public. With an enormous subscription every day increasing, we are every day making less money. Com. How, oh, business man ? Brier. Thus: For Mirrors that we sell through agents in cities, we get but four cents each. For Mirrors that we send to subscribers by mail, we get the full price sixpence each. The irregular and exor bitant postage has nearly killed our mail subscription, on which we chiefly depended, while in cities, where our patrons get them from the agents without postage, we have a sale growing daily more enormous. The dense of it is, that the Minor at sixpence is as cheap as it cnn possibly be sold with anything like profit, and selling it to agents literally at cost, the increase of the agency circulation does us no manner of good ! Com. Why sell to agents at cost? Brig. It was a necessary evil in the beginning lacking capital to hire the doing of what agents do. Com. And we must go on as we begun ? Brig. Short of a six months paralysis, which we could not afford, there is no help for it ! But the postage is the great block in our way ! Most people would subscribe and have it sent to their houses by mail, if the postage were not more than the subscrip tion. Com. How would that be helped in the monthly form. Brier. Ah ! now you come to the matter. The monthly Mirror goes for seven cents postage, and most of our mail subscribers who remain, have the Mirror sent in the monthly form, by mail and I wish all who value the Mirror, or care for us, would do the same. To take it weekly from an agent, does not bring back to you a single leaf of Glenmary, my dear boy ! Com. Ah, my dear friend Glenmary! Some villain some wanton and unfeeling villain has de stroyed a vine I planted, which had completely em bowered that sweet cottage. In an Ithaca paper, sent to me yesterday, I find a letter here it is from some Owego gentleman to the editor. Let me read you part of it : " The cottage you know, like a bird s nest, is al most hid in the foliage. On one side is the road pas- | sing over the bridge, and all around a sweet lawn, sloping away to Owego creek. The bridge was once white, and neat in its outward appearance. But how Willis, even in the summer months, made his bridge-gipsying delicious, is now a mystery. The groundwork is flood-wood, and reptiles crawl where swallows peeped out from their nests against the sleepers, while every five minutes a baptism of dust comes down from above, as a benediction from the passing traveller. But the pruning hand of a man of taste has been wanting to all this rural spot for two years past, which may account for the blemishes we find in the picture so beautifully drawn in A 1 Abri. Some Caligula among shrubbery has cut the root of a luxuriant vine, which spread itself over the cottage front, making a delightful arbor of the piazza ; and its leaves and tendrils, already changed in hue, are folding themselves to die. As through it the night- breeze rustled, it seemed to breathe of the desolation that had stolen upon this garden, sacred to the mem ory of a lovely exotic which made it a paradise, and the fadeless light of genius." That is written by some kind man, who understood how a heartstring might be cut through with a vine one had planted and cherished. Whoever may be the perpetrator of that needless outrage, I commend him to the notice of my friendly neighbors, adding a petition from me, which may thus reach them, that only Time s hand may be suffered to ravage my lost paradise. Brig The subject troubles me, mi-boy ! Let us change it. I ve a funny communication here, from a Rip Van Winkle, who dates fifty years hence, and Com. Keep it till next week, general, and let us get into the fresh air. I m manuscript sick. Allans I Stay while I mend my outer man a little, read this funny letter, sent me by the lady to whom it was written. She thinks her friend, young " Cinna Bev- erley," is a genius. (Brigadier reads, with an occasional laugh.) "TO MISS PHffiBE LORN. "DEAR BEL-PHOEBE: I have been twiddling my sunbeam (you say my letters are perfect sunshine ) for some time, more or less, in a quandary as to what is now resolved upon as Dear Bel-Phcebe the be ginning of this (meant-to-be) faultless epistle. I chanced to wake critical this morning, and, dear Phoebe, as the beginning of this letter of mine, looked both vulgar and meaningless. I inked it out as you see. A reference to my etymological dictionary, however, restored my liking for that dear 1 word. It is derived from the Anglo-Saxon verb Dcr-ian, which means to do mischief. Hence dearth, which, by doing mischief, makes what remains more precious, and hence dear, meaning something made precious by hav ing escaped hurting. Dear Phoebe, therefore (mean ing unhurt Phcebe), struck me as pretty well you be ing one of those delicious, late-loving women, destined to be hurt first at thirty. Still, the sacred word Phoebe was too abruptly come upon. It sounded familiar, and familiarity should be reserved for the postscript. I should have liked to write dear Lady Phoebe, or dear Countess Phoebe but we are not permitted to read our title clear, in this hideously- simple country. Might I invent an appellative? We say char-woman and horse-man why not put a de scriptive word before a lady s name, by way of re spectful distance. Phcebe Lorn is a belle why not eay 5e/-Phcebe ? Good! It sounds authentic. This letter, then, is to Phosbe, unhurt and beautiful (alias), Dear Bel-Phcebe ! " You are an ephemeron of a month the month at Saratoga, in which you get wings to come forth EPHEMERA. 145 from your eleven months chrysalis in the country and you are now once more gathered to your fathers, and mourning over the departed summer ! Your Arabian mare feels your thrilling weight again, and you astonish your pet cow with sponge-cake over the lawn fence, and give caraways to your top-knot hens, and say Sir to your greyhound, and make-believe care for your dahlias and tube-roses but the pleas- antest part of the day, after all, is its heavenly twilight of closed eyelids, when you can live over again that month at Saratoga myself, perhaps, then, cursorily remembered ! For you rejoice in the perils of love, unhurt and and adorable Phoebe ! "But you know enough aboutyourself and you wish to hear about the town ! Well ! the flies are numb with the first frost, the window-blinds are open nearly to Union square, somebody has been seen with a velvet waistcoat, starch is looking up, and the town is full of palmetto-hatted andready-made-clothing-ized southerners. By these data judge of the epoch. I, myself, am among my dusted household gods, and, at this moment (writing in my bed-room) see my boots phalanxed in their winter parade. 1 must say it is, so far, pleasant ! Perhaps but you want news, not the philosophy of boots in repose. " You heard of the marriage of one of our wild In dians to an English girl, not long ago in London. She has been at the Waverley some days, and has excited no little curiosity. She is moderately hand some, but in such an unusual style of beauty that she out-magnetizes many a more strictly beautiful woman. My vaurien friend, F., the artist (who chanced to dine opposite the chief and chief-ess at the taUc-iV kote a day or two since), declares the face to be wholly unique, and a sufficient explanation of the extraordi nary whim of her marriage. I have never, myself, wondered at it. The crust, impenetrable upward, of English middle life, is enough to drive genius of any kind more mad than this ! What hell like inevitable mediocrity in anything ! This fine woman, now going to live a dog s life with nn Indian in the wilderness, would have spent her days in a brick row, and grown idiotic with looking out upon the same sidewalk till death. Which would you rather ? "Do you remember (for beautiful women don t al ways remember beautiful women) the adorable Mrs. C., at Saratoga that charming specimen of a healthy and practicable angel ? She has been here a week on her return from Niagara, and Flagg, the beauty-painter, lias stolen a copy of her on canvass. Ah, Bel-Phoebe! You have a loss in not realizing what it is to a man when an exquisite face holds still to be critically ad mired !. You can see the grain of the velvet in her brown eye, now, and trace by what muscle her heart pulls, to keep down that half-sad cornerof her delicious mouth ! He is an appreciator, that Flagg, and paints a woman as she looks to appreciators differently from the butchers -meat estimation of common gazers on beauty. Mrs. C., has gone to Baltimore, where beauty is an indigenous drug belles of that city rich in women being never valued till transplanted. But heavens ! how tired you will be of reading this long female paragraph ! Hasten to speak of some thing with a man in it ! "One of the most fascinating men in England is ekeing out an exile from May fair, by singing -and lecturing on songs to the delighted Croton drinkers. He is a man of that quiet elegance of address that seems nothing in a woman s way till she has broken her neck over it, and he sings as such a man shouldn t to be a safe man, that is to say ! Fancy Moore s songs any more bewitched than Moore intended ! Mr. McMichael s voice glides under your heart like a gondola under a balcony Moore s melody represent ing the embellished and enriched moonlit water. It is the enchanted perfection of lover-like, and gentle- 10 man-like song-singing. songs in England, and Mr. McMichael sings them in heard Moore sing his own " ael sings them (Ask your papa the same style only in apotheosis ! to translate that big word.) "Do you care about theatres? We have a new tragedian, about whose resemblance to Macready the critics are quarrelling, and a new tragedian-ess who has put the boxes into fits by coming on the stage without a bustle! (Fancy Desdemona without a bustle !) Of course you are surprised, for this is one of these coming events that could not possibly cast their shadows before, but fashion is imperative, and Where ruled the (bustle) Nature broods alone ." I understand the omnibuses are to be re-licensed to carry fourteen inside, and the shops in Broadway are petitioning (so Alderman Cozzens told me to-day) to put out bow-windows, in expectation of the vacated space. " Seriously, there has been a growing mistrust (Pearl-streetingly speaking) of the article woman, as shown to customers ! Thank fashion, there is more chance now of a poor youth s knowing the ( ground covered by the imposing obligations of matrimony .") " As to the fault found with Anderson his resem blance to Macready I see it in no objectionable particular, unless it be theincorrigible one, of a mutual brevity of nose. He was educated to his profession by Macready, and of course has his master s severe taste, and smacks somewhat of his school, which is a good one. I like him much better than I do Mac- ready, however, for, though he has most of his ex cellences, he has none of his defects, and, in voice and pliancy of action, he is much that artificial man s superior. Criticism aside, Anderson plays agreeably and makes you like him, whereas Macready, playing ever so well, does it disagreeably, and makes you dis like him ! But I am no judge for I would rather sit on a sofa by most any woman than sit in a box during most any play. Pity me ! " Hast thou great appetite, and must I vouchsafe thee still another slice of news ? The new hotel up town is waxing habitable, and the proprietor is in a quandary what to call it. The natural inquiry as to what would be descriptive, has suggested a look at the probabilities of custom, and it is supposed that it will be filled partly with that class of fashionables who feel a desire to do something in life besides laboriously keep house, partly by diplomatists and dandies wish ing to be convaynient to balls and chez-eltcs, and partly by such Europeanized persons as have a distaste for American gregariousness, and desire a voice as to the time and place of refreshing and creature. The arrangements are to surpass any previous cis-Atlantic experience, and the whole project is considered as the first public flower of the transplanted whereabout of aristocracy. It has been proposed to call it MAY FAIR HOTEL May Fair being the name of the fashion able nucleus of London. HAUTEVILLE HOTEL has been suggested, descriptive of its position up-town. HOTEL RECHERCHE, HOTEL CHOISI, are names pro- nosed also, but more liable to criticism. I, myself, proposed AL ABi-as signifying a house aside from the rush of travel and business. Praise that, if you please ! Billings, the lessee, is a handsome man, ot a very up-town address, with the finest teeth possible for the welcome to new-comers this last no indifferent item ! He is young but young people are the fashion. Young England and Young France wield the power. I have not mentioned the system of the hotel, by the way, which is that of Meunce s at Paris a table-d hote and a restaurant, and dinner in public, or private, or not at all, at your option. Charm ingwont it be ? " Crawford, the sculptor, has come home from Italy, 146 EPHEMERA. and, as he is the American, par excellence, in whom resides the sense of beauty, I trust he may see you. What else had I to say? Something but I write it on a slip, for it will be personal, and you like to show all your letters to the governor. " Adieu, dear Bel-Phoebe, and pray tear up the slip enclosed as soon as you have recovered from fainting. Yours at discretion. " CINNA BEVERLEY, JR." FANNY FORESTER." We have been accused, face to face, several times, and by letter once or twice, of being, ourself, that bewitching masquerader. We have conjured some variety out of our workyday quill, it is true, and have an unfulfilled and recorded vow of a new alias but in " Fanny Forester" there resides a dimpled youthfulness and elasticity that is not found so many miles on the road as our present sojourn ! Oh no, sweet Fanny ! they slander you and do too much credit to our industry and versatility ! Those who wish to know more of Fanny Forester, may hear of her, now, among the high-priced contributors of Graham and Godey. DR. LARDNER S LECTURE. We did not chance to hear Dr. Lardner s excellent and amusing lecture on the " London literati," etc., but the report of it in the " Republic" has scraped the moss from one corner of our memory, and we may, perhaps, aid in the true portraiture of one or two distinguished men by show ing a shade or two in which our observation of them differed from that of the doctor. We may remark here, that Dr. Lardner has been conversant with all the wits and scholars of England for the last two or three lustrums, and we would suggest to him that, with the freedom given him by withdrawal from their sphere, he might give us a book of anecdotical biogra phy that would have a prosperous sale and be both instructive and amusing. \Ve shall not poach upon the doctor s manor, by the way, if we give our im pression of one of these literati himself as he ap peared to us, once in very distinguished company, in England. We were in a ball in the height of the season, at Brighton. Somewhere about the later hours, we chanced to be in attendance upon a noble lady, in company with two celebrated men. Mr. Ricardo and Horace Smith (the author of Bramblelye House, and Rejected Addresses), Lady Stepney, authoress of the " New Road to Ruin," approached our charming centre of attraction with a proposition to present to her the celebrated Dr. Lardner. " Yes, my dear ! I should like to know him of all things ." was the reply, and the doctor was conjured forthwith into the magic circle. He bowed " with spectacles on nose," but no other extraneous mark of philosopher or scholar. We shall not offend the doctor by stating that, on this evening, he was a very different looking person from his present practical exterior. With showy waistcoat, black tights, fancy stockings and small patent-leather shoes, he appeared to us an ele gant of very bright water, smacking not at all, in man- j ner no more than in dress, of the smutch and toil of the laboratory. We looked at and listened to him, ! we remember, with great interest and curiosity. He left us to dance a quadrille, and finding ourself acci dentally in the same set, we looked at his ornamental and lover-like acquittalof himself with a kindofwonder at what Minerva would say ! This was just before the doctor left England. We may add our expression of pleasure that the Protean facility of our accomplished and learned friend has served him in this country- making of him the best lecturer on all subjects, and the carver out of prosperity under a wholly new meridian. * But, to revert to the report of the lecture : " The doctor gave some very amusing descriptions of the personal peculiarities of Bulwer and D Israeli. the author of Coningsby, observing that those who have read the works of the former, would naturally conclude him to be very fascinating in private society. Such, however, was not the case. He had not a particle of conversational facility, and could not utter twelve sentences free from hesitation and embarrass ment. In fact, Bulwer was only Bulwer when his pen was in his hand and his meerschaum in his mouth. He is intimate with Count D Orsay, one of the hand somest men of the day, and in his excessive admira tion of that gentleman has adopted his style of dress, which is adapted admirably to the figure of the second Beau Brummell, but sits strangely on the feeble, rick ety and skeleton form, of the man of genius." Now it struck us, on the contrary, that there was no more playful, animated, facile creature in London society than Bulwer. He seemed to have a horror of stilted topics, it is true, and never mingled in gene ral conversation unless merrily. But at Lady Bles- sington s, where there was but one woman present (herself), and where, consequently, there could be no tetes-u-tetcs, Bulwer s entrance was the certain precur sor of fun. He ivas a brilliant rattle, and as to any " hesitation and embarrassment," we never saw a symptom of it. At evening parties in other houses, Bulwer s powers of conversation could scarce be fairly judged, for his system of attention is very concentra- tive, and he was generally deep in conversation with some one beautiful woman whom he could engross. We differ from the doctor, too, as to his style of dandy ism. Spready upper works, trousers closely fitting to the leg, a broad-brimmed hat, and cornucopial whisk ers, distinguished D Orsay, while Bulwer wore al ways the loose French pantaloon, a measurable hat- brim, and whiskers carefully limited to the cheek. We pronounce the doctor s astrology (as to these stars) based upon an error in "observation." The reporter adds : " D Israeli he described as an affected coxcomb, with a restless desire to appear witty ; yet he never remembered him to have said a good thing in his life except one, and that was generally repeated with the preface, D Israeli has said a good thing at last. " That D Israeli is not a bon-mot" man, is doubtless true. It never struck us that he manifested a " desire to appear witty." He is very silent in the general melee of conversation, but we have never yet seen him leave a room before he had made an impression by some burst in the way of monologue eitheran eloquent description or a dashing new absurdity, an anecdote or a criticism. He sits indolently with his head on his breast, taking sight through his eyebrows till he finds his cue to break in, and as far as our observation goes, nobody was ever willing to interrupt him. The doctor calls him an "affected coxcomb," but it is only of his dress that this is any way true. No schoolboy is more frank in his manners. This is true, even since D Israeli s " gobble up" of the million with a widow. When we were first in London, he was the immortal tenant of one room and a recess, and with manners indolently pensive. Three years after, returning to England, we found him master of a lordly establish ment on Hyde Park, and. except that he looked of a less lively melancholy, his manners were as untroubled with affection as before. We do not in the least doubt the sincerity of the doctor s report, but it shows how even acute observers (we two are that, doctor !) will see the same thing with different eyes. This article is too long. New York has an unsupplied want no less a thing than a FASHIONABLE PROMENADE. Broadway, that EPHEMERA. 147 used to be the parade of all that wns feminine, fashion able and fair, has been, for some time, only a walk of plain-dress-necessity to the noli-me-tangcries, and it will soon be left entirely to the deaf and the humble so intolerable is the Bedlam racket of its abominable omnibuses ! (To get an audible answer to the " How do you do ?" one has need to take one s friend into a store.) Our ladies have done like the English, in giving up shopping and walking the street in full dress, and now, where is to be the English or French substitute our Hyde park or our Bois de Boulogne ? Ladies, in London, are supposed to be so incapable of walk ing at ail in the street, that, if they do so, it is rather \vell-bred not to recognise them in passing. But after shopping in disguise in Regent street (their Broadway) they go home and "dress for the carriage," and drive out to meet all the world in the " Rotten row" of the park. Up and down this half mile they follow in slow procession, meeting as slow a procession going the other way, and bowing at every carriage length, and, no public hack being admitted into the park, those who have no carriages have no promenade ! Don t let us improve with our eyes shut ! We have taken off our foot of fashion from one round of the ladder. How long is it to be suspended in the air for, a driving park is the next inevitable step upward ? ODD ENOUGH. The best view of Trinity steeple and almost the only view of Trinity cliurch, is across some old one-story wooden groceries in Greenwich street, the spectator standing upon the opposite sidewalk ! " We never know to whom we look best," said we to the steeple, when we discovered it ! To Broadway- gazers, Trinity steeple is a Gothic column. The body of the church is wholly lost as to effect, and it was a great mistake not to set it sidewise upon the street. But, let us suggest something to the enormously wealthy vestry of that church. There is not a valua ble building, nor scarce a lot unoccupied by a nuisance, between this splendid fabric and Greenwich street. How easy to buy this advantageous slope, and make of it an ascending foreground, unequalled except by the ascent to the capitol at Washington! Besides the addition to the beauty of the city, it would give another "lungs" to the neighborhood of Wall street, and grace, fitly and with additional beauty, the resting- place of the gallant and lamented Lawrence. CHANGE IN NEW YORK HABITS. The great pecu liarity of America our gregariousness. as shown in our populous hotels has taken a large strid on its way to the exclusivism of Europe. The office of the lessee of the new hotel up-town lias been overrun with applicants, and most of them, we understand, with a view of availing themselves of its privileges as a hotel garni or furnished house where the meals are dis cretionary, as to place, time, and price. Let us look a little into this. A gentleman arrives at a London hotel. He alights at the door of what resembles a private house. He is shown to a small parlor and bed-room, and left alone with his baggage and the peculiarly neat and unsoci able chairs and table. He orders his dinner and tea, and it is served to him alone. He is as much alone the remainder of the day and evening, and from that time to doomsday, if he stay so long ; and there is no place about the" house where he can vary this loneli ness, except the coffee-room, where the parlor class of lodgers have no errand and rarely go. His engage ment with the landlord is to pny so much, by the day, for his rooms, and for whatever else he chooses to order. What with the absence of books, and all the comforts and trifles that give a look of home, and, on the other hand, the lack of the American compensations, such : as reading-room, ladies drawing-room, sitting-rooms, and thronged halls and entries, the solitude and gloom of a hotel in the heart of London could scarce be exceeded. But, admirably suited as is the American system of hotel to the relief and pleasure of the stranger and ; traveller, there is a class of hotel-lodgers who would | be more comfortable in New York were there a hotel after the European fashion and it is with a view td ; this class, mainly, that the new hotel up-town has ! been designed. We refer to the class who wish a luxurious home, but can not afford time, trouble, or money, to be housekeepers. There are many families of this description families who pass the summer in the country, but in the winter reside in town, and, dreading the trouble and expense of a town house, would still prefer a private table and drawing-room. j For such, a hotel garni, with elegant suites of apart- ! ments and a restaurant on the floor before, is the well- ! adapted provision, and this class is sufficiently large to more than warrant the enterprise of the hotel up town. The great mass, however, even of families (and I certainly of bachelors), prefer the gregarious hotel, \ where two or three hundred people form almost one [ family, where eating and dancing and social pleasures are all enjoyed in common, and where business and amusement are closely, and without foresight or trouble, closely intermingled. This style of living best suits the great mass of a business community, and it will not be till we have a ruling proportion of aris tocratic idlers, that the gregarious hotel will go out of fashion. That may be fifty years hence, or our "gre gariousness" may become a national peculiarity, and the Astor " stay put" for a century. We speak the Tuscan, and lively Mr. Palmo is betrayed by his soft c to be a Piedmontese or a Vene tian else we should venture to give him the ideas here-below embodied, in his own lingua de belleza. We beg his worthy and eloquent legal counsellor, however (whom we have the pleasure to know), to translate to him, through some medium more pellucid than the last, the nicer shades of our meaning. We put up our prayer for its happy voyage to the mana ger s harbor of comprehension. An OPERA, like a woman, is never to be taken liter ally. It is not, exclusively or mainly, a place wherein to hear good music. If the music be the best that can be procured (though it were only the best in Ethiopia), the uncrowned but very executive King Public is content. " Our" ear is merciful ! But the opera is a place for the advancing of two ends more human tenderness and human vanity. Ten go thither to flirt, and forty to be seen, where one goes to pamper his auricular nerve upon a cadenza. We don t see that this requires enlarging upon. We wish to enlighten those who have hitherto been proudly content with their own country (haven t trav elled, and that s the reason), as to the true uses of the opera abroad the way it is truly used, that is to say, where sing Rubini and his starry troupe. P irst, as to construction. The London opera-house (like the Parisian) is composed of a hundred or more private boxes, and a pit. The private boxes are used by their lady-proprietors to receive company during the evening, and the pit is used to reconnoitre the boxes, to lounge, to chat, and to be visible in white gloves and opera- glass (this last a most necessary demonstration by those who would not otherwise be considered " men about town"). We have not yet mentioned the Us- 148 EPHEMERA. tening to the opera. This very subordinate part of the evening s entertainment commences at the signal sh!" "sh!" from the connoisseurs, indicating that some favorite aria is commencing which is worth lis tening to, or a duett or quartette, or fine point of action, coming off, and, till this is past, the audience, above and below, is breathlessly still and attentive. At all other times during the performance of the opera, it is rather green than otherwise to pay attention to the stage, and anybody who should request that his neighbors would not converse during the recitative secco, would be smiled at as " capital fun !" The opera, in short, is considered as a help, an accompani ment (or, if you like, a stop-gap) to conversation, and the consequence is that nowhere are people so much at their ease, and nowhere are so many bright and merry things said as at the opera! We ll mend our pen, dear reader, while you compare this with the quaker- meeting attention so tediously given at Palme s. But this is to be mended (the practice, we mean the pen does pretty well), and the first thing we wish to suggest to Mr. Pal mo is an improvement in the "fP s alley" P ar t f if- To go round behind the boxes, as the house is constructed now, is formidably conspicuous, unless one has a direct errand to the lady next the stage; yet this, with the exception of having a seat in the pit, and sitting in it, is the only way to get a look at the house and " see who is there." Let Mr. Pal mo drop a staircase, passing under the stage- box to the front of the pit, and there would be an ex cusable lounge of observation all round the house a prodigious difference in the attraction for the dan dies, let us assure you, signor ! You need the dan dies! You wish to make it among the necessities of a "man about town," that he should have a season- ticket to the opera. But it is no pleasure to sit cramped and silent in one seat, and no pleasure to come in and stand behind the audience for the whole evening, or for an hour. It would be a pleasure to see the audience from the front, and that can not be done now, without a pretty " cool" walk to the or chestra and back. Now could it? We have two or three other propositions to make for the improvement of the social opportunities of the opera, but this will do for to-day. Addio, signore ! We cordially approve of the reason for, and the feeling which prompted the following paragraph. We have the pleasure of knowing the three gentle men mentioned in it. particularly the urbane captain, and we wish the Howards a happy retirement, and Captain Roe ^.-bounding prosperity but this done, we wish to note a nationality as it passes ; and first, to quote a paragraph: "It has been announced in various quarters that the Messrs. Howard, who have established the hotel so extensively and favorably known as Howard s Ho tel, have disposed of that establishment to Captain Roe, of the "Empire" steamboat. * * * As for the Howards, we are glad that they have done so well. We presume that, being relieved now from the labor of keeping such a large establishment, they will retire to some of those beautiful retreats with which their native state, Vermont, abounds." It will be seen at once that a traveller who should measure this trio by the European scale of condition in life (rank these gentlemen, that is to say, with "mine host" in any other part of the world) would make a blunder. The difference between an Ameri can hotel-proprietor, and a London Boniface, is not merely that our hotels are six times as large. It is not merely that he is six times as great a " proprie tor." The vocation is almost wholly different and the difference is a result of the totally different hab its of the two countries. In London, you may, by chance, see the " land-Zae/?/," daily, but you may be months in the house without seeing the " land-Zorc?." (Two terrible misnomers, by-the-way, for the hostess, though she has no land, is not a lady but as a land- lady, and mine host is far enough from a lord with land, though he is no lord except as a land-lord !) The English host, therefore, is never an acquaintance of his guest, and the guest knows his hostess only in the quality of an upper servant. The reader will have recognised the difference we wish to point to. The American hotel-keeper has charge, not of twenty or thirty people living wholly in their own private rooms, but of two or three hundred, whose habits are all gregarious, and to almost every one of them he (the landlord) is a personal and familiar friend. The ex tent of this friendly intercourse with persons mostly of the better class, gives to the hotel-proprietor a mass of influence, direct and indirect, which makes him a very important person in the community. He is continually appealed to for knowledge on popular subjects, such as is got only by great facilities of hear say. He is often made a reference in disputes, from his necessary habit of impartiality. He is intrusted with deposites of great value by his guests, and is the confidant-general of the secrets and difficulties of strangers, and of travelling lovers and mourners. Ladies and families are committed to his charge. Public entertainments are given by his advice and di rection ; and, in short, he has so much harm, and so much good influence, in his power, that he is, neces sarily, a person of high moral character, superior judgment, discretion, and information wit/tout all ivhich public opinion would not tolerate him in his place and, ivilh which, while in the full exercise of his vocation, he naturally holds a high station of re publican social rank. It is in tacit obedience to this scale of valuation, that the change of masters in a public hotel is made the subject of newspaper an nouncement and comment a notice of the fact which would seem to a London editor wholly beyond its con sequence and value. We are aware that it is rather Utopian to give nom inal rank to people according to their actual worth and influence; but let us have our little bit of fancy now and then ! We should be afraid to call public attention to the rank of editors measuring it by their power! OLE BULL AND HIS MISSING " SPOT." As we pre dicted, this great luminary took the light of the world to himself on Saturday night, and became vis ible above the horizon of the footlights precisely at eight, " Bright as a god, but punctual as a slave !" Mrs. Child (the moon who reflects the masculine gold of his music in the feminine silver of language) sat in the stage-box, somewhat obscured in the pe numbra of a shocking cap. (We rely upon Miss Dorsey to invent a "silver cloud," or, at any rate, some headdress more becoming for the waxing glory of this charming reflector.) The Memnonian music awoke, of course, with the appearance of Ole-Apollo, and the crammed world of fashion sat breathless. By the time the first piece was played, however, it was felt that there was something wrong. The audi ence was irresponsive. The ivory inside edge of the moon s disk (disclosed by the tranquil smile at first), became less and less visible, and disappeared. The applause was mechanical. Madame Burkhardt arose like a morning vapor, and clouded the horizon with an abominable song. Ole Bull broke out again, and though the shadows had shortened somewhat before EPHEMERA. 149 he finished his second piece, there was still a lack still but a dull acknowledgment of his glory. We presently discovered the cause. A heavy fore- lock of hair, which used to drop over the forehead j of the inspired Norwegian, descending "with the j linked sweetness long drawn out" of a cadenza, and j then tossed back like an absorbed comet with the re- j vulsive sweep of a return to the flon-Jlon of the air this expressive forelock, with the steeped sweetness of the Niagara it had overheard, and the dreams of j melody it had stirred to, was gone to " and scis- j sois." The " sun was (the day before) shorn of his j beams" by Cristadoro! Mingled with the hair of, the uninspired, that magic lock had been swept into Broadway from the floor of the undiscriminating bar ber, and, fallen from the heaven of harmony, is now ! sticking to the wheels of omnibuses in a purgatory of Sysiphus. Those in other cities who remember the toss back of that wild lock of hair in the convul sive transitions of Ole Bull s music, will understand that there must have been, emphatically, a spot mis sing on his luminous face. Spite of politics and attractions elsewhere, the house was crammed; and in spite of the missing lock, Ole Bull recovered his power over the audi ence. The last piece he played was electric, and the curtain fell amid unlimited plaudits. THE PAY FOR PKRIODICAL-WRITING. What a butcher would think of veal, as a marketable article, if everybody had an ambition to raise calves to give away, is very near the conclusion that a merely busi ness-man would arrive at, on inquiring into the sale- ableness of fugitive literature. It is as pleasant for people not hackneyed in authorship to see their thoughts transferred to print, as it is for beauties to see their faces transferred to canvass; and, if custom ary, most contributors to periodicals would pay the publisher as willingly as women pay the portrait- painter. Another thing. Females are naturally fa cile writers, and the attention paid to the mental cul ture of women in our day, has set their thoughts a-flow upon paper, as the letting in of sunshine upon the dark floor of the forest draws to the surface new springs of water. These facts to begin with, the reader will easily understand the pourquoi of the^un- promising literary market we have to " open up" to him. There are several of the magazines that pay for articles, but no one of them, we believe, pays for all its contents. Graham and Godey (two men of noble liberality to authors) pay prices to some of their con tributors that would far outbid the highest rates of magazine-payment in England. Their prose-writers receive from two to twelve dollars a page, ?>nd their poets from five to fifty dollars an article. The Co lumbian and the Ladies Magazine also pay well. The North American Review used to think it liberal enough to pay Edward Everett a dollar a page. All the paying magazines and reviews, however, reject fifty articles to one that they accept, and they pay nobody whose " name" would not enrich their table of contents. In point of fact, but for Ike necessity of a brag, and the misfortune that a writer, once made famous, esteems pay a desirable manner of compli ment (whether he wants the money or not), the liter ary periodicals in this country might do well, relying only on the editor s pen and the epidemic "cacoethes." The Mirror did so and was as cleverly contributed to, we think, as any periodical in the country. The rejected articles (offered to us, of course, as a gratu ity) would have filled, at least, a barrel a month! Newspapers pay for reporting and editing, but sel dom or never for "articles." The faror, on the con trary, of giving room and circulation to another man s ideas, is growing into a saleable commodity the ed itor (on the ground that he risks the popularity of his paper by relinquishing the chance of a better ar ticle) charging rent for his columns instead of hiring a tenant. To every scheme of public interest to every society to everything which newspapers can hinder or further there is attached some person who is both desirous and able to present the subject forcibly on paper; and, quite as readily and zealously, if there be an objectionable side to it, springs up a pen-and-ink caviller in opposition. Between them, and with the desire to figure in print which besets very many able men, newspaper-editors need pay for little aid except eyewater and scissors, and they get credit for a world of zeal in good causes by articles they neither write nor pay for. We have got to the footboard of our Procrustes bed. AUTHORS PAY IN AMERICA. We have hot coals smouldering in the ashes of " things put oft ," which we poke reluctantly to the surface just now reluc tantly only because we wish to light beacons for an author s crusade, and we have no leisure to be more than its Peter the Hermit. We solemnly summon Edgar A. Poe to do the devoir of Cceur de Lion no man s weapon half so trenchant! And now lot us turn the subject round, small end foremost. These are days when gentlemen paint their own boots, and we have latterly been our own publisher. We have thereby mastered one or two statistics which, we know not well why, never looked us in the face before, and which we proceed to hold up by the nape of the neck for the encouragement of the less stuffy or less inquiring. Authors who can not find publish ers, and authors who, having found them, have been as much respected by them as pig-iron by the razor- maker, are invited to "lend us their ears" on interest. What proportion should an author have of the net profits of a book 1 This seems a shallow question enough^ but there is a deep hole in it. Remember, in the first place, that the author wrote the book that God gave him the monopoly of the vein Irom which it is worked that he has been at the expense and toil of an education, and to other expenses and toils (as in travel) that his mind s lease is far shorter than his lease of life and that thoughtsmiths should be better paid than blacksmiths or goldsmiths (that is to say, if the credit the work does to the country goes for anything in the valuation). The question of the division of profit is between author and publisher, and the publisher gives his uneducated mental attention to the sale, a brief use of his credit for the printing and binding, and runs a most partial risk as to the re sultfor he need not purchase the book except in obedience to his own judgment and his readers , and the cost is paid, of course, before there are any " net receipts." (There is great capital made of this "risk," but ninety-nine books in a hundred more than clear expenses!) Now, taking a stereotyped dollar- book for example, the plates, worth four or five hun dred dollars, are paid for, with a moderate , sale, m^he first month Suppose it to be three months. Ine use of tl"e Publisher s credit for $500 for ninety days has beea his only outlay of consequence; but the author has had his outlay of brain-work, time, genius, and years of education The printing and getting up, after the plates are paid for, cost about on, fifth of the retail ^rice-twenty cents on a dollar. To charge ten cents more on each copy for the absolute expense of selling and circulating, is more than lib eral and now, how shall the remaining seventy cents the net P rofit-ie divided between author and pub- Usher 1 150 EPHEMERA. We should like to have a watchmaker s answer to that question. How much ought the jeweller to have for buying it from the maker, warranting it "to go" after examining it, for advertising it, and for selling it across a counter? Suppose the watch to sell for a hundred dollars, and seventy dollars to be the net profit above cost of material. What would you say, if the maker got but ten or twenty dollars, and the retailer fifty or sixty ? Yet that is the proportion at which author and bookseller are paid for literary pro duction the seller of the book being paid from twice to five times as much as the author of it! Certainly, the readiest-minded man we ever knew, as well as one of the most brilliant and highly culti vated conversationists, is Major Dave/ac, the subject of the anecdote below. Never was a man more out of place as a stump-orator and agitator, well as he acquits himself in these turbulent vocations. It is no ne of our business to discuss that point, however. We were only about to roll the anecdotical snow-ball a little larger, by recording a bon mot of the major s, at the birth of which we chanced to be present. Davezac was charge at Naples in eighteen hundred and some time ago, and French being the language he was born in, his wit of course played freely in the court vernacular. He was quite the idol of the diplo matic corps, and an "indispensable" at all dances and masquerades. We were dining one evening in his company during the carnival. The major sat oppo site to us, next to a very pretty German countess. During the procession and the pelting of sugar-plums which had occupied the early part of the day, the countess had received a slight bruise upon her cheek. Davezac wore court-plaster on his lip a hit also from the sugared ammunition. They were both complain ing. "_E/i, Monsieur Davezac" said the countess, mournfully, " il faut reunir nos doulcurs . " " Oui, madam, et nos blessures!" replied the major instantly, placing his lip upon the cheek of the surprised suf ferer. COSMOPOLITE ATTRACTION IN BROADWAY. With in a few doors, in the neighborhood of Prince street, are collected accidentally, at present, four most vivid representations of four very distant and different countries Spain, India, Paris, and Constantinople the " Alhamra," the "Panorama of Madras," the " Panorama of Paris," and the new shop of " Turk ish curiosities." He who wishes to realize what bal loons are to do for us in 55, can astonish and con fuse his geographical impressions to his entire satis faction, by a visit to all these in one morning. The Turkish shop has articles for sale that could seldom before be obtained except by a voyage to the Orient. We brought some curiosities from Constan tinople, but we have a thousand times regretted, since, that we had not quadrupled our purchases in the bazars and bezestein so much were the articles admired, and so impossible was it, even in the curiosity-shops of Europe, to find specimens of them. No person who is luxurious in personal habits would willingly be, for example, without the Turkish shirts having once seen them. They are the poetry of neglige costume the idealized romance of the drapery of dishabille. Those who have time to make a luxury of dressing-room or boudoir the beautiful and idle of either sex should take a look at the gossamer shirts from Constantinople. But there are all man ner of things in this shop beside. There are beauti ful gold-embroidered slippers, small carpets and otto man-cloths, attars in gold bottles, gold-embroidered handkerchiefs and gilded pastilles everything, in short, that one buys of old Mustapha, near the Hip podrome in Stamboul, confectionary included. We inquired after old Mustapha yesterday, and the Greek who keeps the shop (who was himself a confectioner in Constantinople) delighted us with talking. of him, as if he had seen him yesterday ! Picturesque and jolly old turbaned Mustapha! what fun it was to have the curtain lifted by his grinning Abyssinian in anklets and wristlets, and step into the back shop to take coffee and try his essences! It quite came over us like a dream yesterday the chat with this Broad way Constantinopolitan. If you have any curiosity, dear reader, call and taste the confectionary at this shop, and look at the translucent shirts, and see the Persian inkstands, and handle the graceful cimeters, and look at the Brusa silks and seraglio slippers in short, see Constantinople for that is a palpable slice of it! JUMPING THE PEW. We were once in the gallery of a country church when an address was to be de livered to a Sunday school. The body of the house was reserved for the adult audience, and the boys were confined to one of the side aisles. There was evident ly an understanding, however, that if not otherwise wanted, the well-cushioned seat facing the chancel was to be given up to as many lads as could occupy it. It would hold, perhaps, twenty, and a hundred of them were packed in the aisle like figs, waiting till the class leader at the head should " open up." Looking on with some amusement, we found our eye arrested by the bright face of a lad, half way down, who bore the keeping back very impatiently. His struggles to pass the other boys were vehement, but of no use. He was slight, and his neighbors were bold and sturdy. Presently he bit his lips, entered a pew, jumped the partition into the central aisle, and walked round to the front. There was a murmur of indignation among the boys, and a general smile among the spectators, but he secured his pick of seats. The clergyman, in the course of his address, thought proper to get up an impromptu colloquy, and, to the evident annoyance of the other boys, selected the pew-jumper, who sat just before him, for the honor. The lad arose, when questioned, and surprised the whole audience with the clearness of his replies. He sat down amid gene ral applause, and (whatever reproof he got in private for his daring) he was the envied hero of the day. We have often since had the successful boldness of this lad recalled to our memory by the class of things it illustrates, and our mental reply, after reading a let ter to which this was the preface, was "Better jump the pew !" Our correspondent can not get a hearing from the public ! Few things are more difficult. " We have not read his book, but it may be excellent snuff to keep a fame going, and yet not the stuff to start one. Genius is expected " never to go into the water till it knows how to swim" never to expect to be read but for having been read before ! With any degree of ability, more or less, it is easy to be almost hopelessly overlaid. We, ourself, are a very humble example. We "jumped the pew" unconsciously, in England, with our furiously abused " Peucillings," and imme diately sold, for the highest price, an edition of " Ink lings of Adventure" a series of tales that had fallen still-born into the lap of Boston, and for the first print ing of which we paid more than a thousand dollars on our return to their birth-place. Instances of "jump ing the pew" will occur to every observer of men every reader of biography. It is the shabby door to many a path of glory. Almost every profession begins with a dilemma hope deferred, or a pew to jump I The starving lawyer in the west, who flogged his neighbor to have a case to plead, jumped the pew ! EPHEMERA. 151 The veteran Buckingham, one of the most judicious, able and respected editors in the country, was starving in Boston, when he "jumped the pew" with the abu sive "Galaxy" making himself read from terror till he was famous enough to be read for merit. The game is dangerous, however, and the principle lies in most questionable neighborhood. For one who would succeed in it there are ninety-nine who would fail, and failure is hopeless extinction ! The pew can be jumped but once. The attention of the public can be but once summoned by a rude pluck at its beard ; and, to keep attention long enough to have the rude ness forgotten, there must be merit that the public would regret overlooking merit, indeed, of which the neglect was injury enough to justify violent extrication. THE MIRROR STEAM-PRESS. It would be curious not to lose sight of the Latin word, dropped for transla tion into the scholar s ear, till it re-appears in English on his tongue, but a half-hour s watching of the steam- press on which the Mirror is printed would be hardly a less instructive spectacle of contrivance. To com plete the assimilation of the second process to the first, it would have been necessary, till lately, to em ploy a boy to pull the word off the scholar s tongue ; but, by the ingenuity of R. HOE & Co., the, great organ of public opinion is endowed with a happy de livery of its own laying off the sheet that was printed and ready for utterance , that is to say, and drawing in its iron tongue, unaided, to be laden with the mean time coinage of another. The improvements in printing-presses within the last ten or fifteen years are probably far less remark able than some other progresses of mechanic inven tion, yet they are wonderful enough to use up quite as much curiosity as it is comfortable to find epithets for, in a day. The difference between the old Ramage press, and the steam-miracle in our present office, is peculiarly impressive to ourself. There is a small bar of iron in this press which fulfils precisely the same destiny to which we were at one time devoted. We were considered in an exemplary line of life while performing exactly its office that of inking the type during a long year of disgust with Latin (when a sensible papa took us at our word, and allowed us to prefer a trade to a satchel !) The ink was in those days kept in a wooden box, and, with two stuffed leather balls, a boy or man, be side the press, distributed it over the face of the type, while the pressman was fixing the sheet for the impres sion. We remember balling an edition of " Watts s Psalms and Hymns," which it took weeks to print, and, by the same token, there are lines in that good book of which we caught glimpses on the " frisket," that, to this day, go to the tune we played with the ink-balls while conning them over ! Reviving ambi tion sent us back to school, however, and invention soon after superseded the ink-boy s elbows (encum bered with a stomach), by a bit of machinery that neither required to be fed, nor committed verses to memory while inking the type ! This getting rid of the boy was the peculiarity of the Smith press, and then followed the Napier press, which dispensed with the man, and needed only the tending of two girls or boys; and now (thanks to Mr. Hoe), we have a steam- press, which puts up three iron fingers for a sheet of white paper, pulls it down into its bosom, gives it a squeeze that makes an impression, and then lays it into the palm of an iron hand which deposites it evenly on a faap a t the rate of two thousand an hour ! We often stop with curiosity to look at the little arrangement which does the work our elbows have ached with, and we think the Mirror press altogether is a sight worth your coming to see, dear reader ! THE FIRST DAY OF THE WORLD S NEW LEASE was clasped upon the last yesterday of the completed series, by as glorious a retiring moon, and as brilliant a rising sun, as were ever coveted by the " old gray- beard," at whose funeral they are to be the expiring candles. A finer night than last night a finer day than to-day never relieved watch upon the "tented heavens." We stood looking up a steeple from our bed-room window at midnight (having first finished an article for to-day s paper, upon the venture of its being wanted), and we stood shaving at the same window when the gold smile of the unexpected sun rise called upon the surprised weather-cock to look about him as usual ! We, therefore, certify to the world s coming honestly by its "situation." Go about your business, oh, mankind ! Coming down the front steps of the Astor, at half- past six, we naturally enough took a look up Broad way, to see if, perchance, some blessed change in the pavement might not give the first sign of anew Jerusa lem. But if the sapphire paviors had called upon Mayor Harper, he had struck at something in the contract. The old holes were there, with stones of the accustomed complexion (chafed "trap," minera- logically speaking) and the mud evidently unaware of a miracle. But, hey! now! WHAT! a rainbow across Broadway? ? Could we believe our eyes? a many-colored arch completely spanning the street, hung with flowers, and men walking over it! ! Was an advent forthcoming, after all ? While we write, that Advent is in progress ! It is the ADVENT OF YOUTH JUVENOCRACY IN THI AS CENDANT! A flowery arch spans the breadth of Broadway, and under it winds, at this moment, the procession in honor of first maturity manhood in youth ! It scarce needed, it is true, that the world should be born again before its new monarch should make formal entry. It was, ten years ago, discovered in France two years ago in England last year in America that the gray head icas only the wisest while there were no books but experience ! That which men once waited to know till the hair was silvered, is now taught the child at school conned in the ambitious dream of the youth in his puberty. The world has " hung fire" in other ages, from the damp of burnt- out enthusiasm spread like a blanket over its brain- powder. Improvement has gone upon crutches. Action waited for enterprise to cough. Courage stayed to fumble for spectacles. The forenoou shadows of the sun of human intellect were of un trustworthy measure, and the dial to begin to ivork by was shadowed till post-meridian ! Without touching upon the political articulation in " the roar of the Young Lion," we MARK THE EPOCH the epoch of " Young France," " Young England," " Young America !" We could show, had we time, how strikingly the peculiar habits of our land have more prepared us than other countries, for the sover- ei<rnty of YOUTH! We have no time now. We must go" forth with the crowd and see the bright cheek and curling beard of the Young Monarch in his hour of triumph. The cannon are pealing ! The drums shake upon the prophetic sunshine in th " HaU to the" YOUTH " that in triumph advances ." 12 o clock. We have been to Broadway. The procession is soon to form. The mounted marshals 3 f the day are galloping to and fro with their nbanded insizniathe pictorial outside of the Museum is per fectly embroidered with petticoats (a charming relief!) th g windows on both sides of Broadway are cram med with gnyly-dressed spectators-the 500 Boston voung men (fine, wholesome-looking fellows, who certainly do credit to their " parsley bed"), are assem bled with their badges in front of the Astor the town is full of what the ladies would call " handsome young 152 EPHEMERA. strangers" the omnibuses carry flags the whole street, from the triumphal arch to the pinnacles of Trinity, looks impassable with the glittering crowd. "We never saw comparable preparation for a festal march. It will be a day to be remembered mocked at, perhaps, as the first after a millenial crisis, but glorified as the first in the great era of Youthfulhood ! MASS MEETING OF NEWSBOYS. We may be per mitted, perhaps, to please our friends with the an nouncement that we at least stand well upon the side walk ! The exhaustion of our large edition at four o clock, yesterday afternoon, and a general return of the newsboys from their routes with eager demands for more, occasioned a multitudinous holding of counsel among those piping potentates, and to the as tonishment of our corner and the neighborhood, the assembled varlets actually gave the Evening Mirror three cheers ! We bow to the tattered vox populi, and own the soft impeachment. Gentlemen newsboys ! give us your hand (with a newspaper between !) and permit us to offer you a business suggestion. Aston ish one of your insinuating number with a white shirt, and try the new trick of selling us with a smile to the ladies ! Call him the ladies boy, and treat him deli cately when he is dressed and can t afford the results of your familiarity ! Your powerful body amounts at present to some three or four hundred, and your profits will soon tempt the competition of older gen tlemen, unless you find more worlds to conquer. Hurrah for the ladies, gentlemen (waving whatever you have to represent a pocket-handkerchief) and now, if you will graciously withdraw your attention, we would speak to those over whom you have the ad vantage of youth. We have to thank the press all over the country for the most flattering mention and the kindest encour agement. Our own craft seem to love us. We thought of quoting some of their felicilous notices, but our grateful pride would thus fall into a shape used for puffing, and we shrink from the medium. Thanks to our friends simply but fervently. GOLD INKSTAND TO THE AUTHORESS OF THE SCOT TISH CHIEFS. The works of JANE PORTER have probably brought more money into the hands of booksellers than those of any writer except, per haps, Scott, and at this moment steam-presses are employed in printing large editions of her delight ful novels. An enthusiastic man, a great admirer of Miss Porter, has, for the second time, started a subscription among the booksellers of this city to pre sent her with a gold inkstand, and the Harpers, Ap- plelons, Langleys, and others, have subscribed with enthusiastic liberality. Perhaps a description of Jane Porter with a little of her hitherto unwritten history may not be unacceptable. Miss PORTER was the daughter of a gallant English officer, who died, leaving a widow, and three children, then very young, but all destined to remarkable fame Sir ROBERT KER PORTER, JANE PORTER, and ANNA MARIA PORTER. Sir Robert, as is well known, was the celebrated historical painter, traveller in Persia, soldier, diplomatist, and author, lately deceased. He went to Russia with one of his great pictures when very young, married a wealthy Russian princess, and passed his subsequent years between the camp and diplomacy, honored and admired in every station and relation of his life. The two girls were playmates and neighbors of Walter Scott. Jane published her " Scottish Chiefs" at the age of eighteen, and became immediately the great literary wonder of her time. Her widowed mother, however, withdrew her imme diately from society to the seclusion of a country town, and she was little seen in the gay world of Lon don before several of her works had become classics. Anna Maria, the second sister, commenced her admi rable series of novels soon after the first celebrity of Jane s works, and they wrote and passed the brightest years of their life together in a cottage retreat. The two sisters were singularly beautiful. Sir Thomas Lawrence was an unsuccessful suitor to Anna Maria, and Jane (said by Sir Martin Shee to have been the handsomest woman he ever saw) was engaged to a young soldier who was killed in the Peninsula. She is a woman to have but one love in a lifetime. Her betrothed was killed when she was twenty years of age, and she has ever since worn mourning, and re mained true to his memory. Jane is now the only survivor of her family, her admirable mother and her sister having died some twelve or fourteen years ago, and Sir Robert having died lately, while revisiting England after many years diplomatic residence in Venezuela. Miss Porter is now near sixty. She has suffered within the last two or three years from ill-health, but she is still erect, graceful, and majestic in person, and still possessed of admirable beauty of countenance. Her large dark eyes have a striking lambency of lus tre, her smile inspires love in all who see her, and her habit of mind, up to the time we last saw her (three or four years ago), was that of rejlccting the mood of others in conversation, thinking never of herself, and endeavoring only to make others shine, and all this with a tact, a playfulness and simplicity, an occasional unconscious brilliancy and penetration, which have made her, up to sixty years of age, a most inter esting, engaging, and lovely woman. We have had the good fortune to pass several months, at different times, under different hospitable roofs, with Jane Porter, and, considering the extent of her charm, over old and young, titled and humble, masters and servants, we sincerely think we never have seen a woman so beloved and so fascinating. She is the idol of many different circles of very high rank, and passes her time in yielding, month after month, to pressing invitations from the friends who love her. The dowager queen Adelaide is one of her warmest friends, the highest families of nobility contend for her as a resident guest, distinguished and noble for eigners pay court to her invariably on arriving in England, she has been ennobled by a decree of the king of Prussia, and with all this weight of honor on her head, you might pass weeks with her (ignorant of her history) without suspecting her to be more than the loveliest of women past their prime, and born but to grace a contented mediocrity of station. This is an impartial and truthful sketch of the cele brated person for whom the above-mentioned compli ment is intended. We trust it may find her alive, and with her accustomed bright smile upon her lips God guard and preserve her ! RocKiNG-CHAiRCTcelNKSTANDrm -<Y/. We gave, "by authority," an account of a subscription paper, the purpose of which was to present to Jane Porter an inkstand of gold. Our publisher-mayor Mr. Har per, headed the list with $40. We wrote a paragraph on the subject, and the same evening were called to see a rocking-chair into which the inkstand had been suddenly converted by a rub against the Aladdin s lamp of propriety. We went into Meeks s museum of sumptuous furniture, and the chair was disrobed, for us, of a beautiful chintz cover presented to Miss Por ter by Messrs. Meeks, the makers. The chair is a bijou. The model is appropriately Elizabethan (a EPHEMERA. 153 chair for the virgin queen of English romance, made in the style of the virgin queen of English history) the carving in rosewood relief, and the lining of crim son velvet. The exact model of the chair was sent to Queen Victoria not long since, as a specimen of American furniture, by a club of English gentlemen. The cadcau goes out consigned by the mayor of New j York to the lord-mayor of London, for his worshipful presentation, Mr. Griswold, the packet owner, giving it an honorary passage. The following letter, written on parchment and sealed with the city arms, accom panies it : " NEW YORK, October 28, 1844. " DEAR MADAM : The undersigned, booksellers, publishers, and authors, of the city of New York, have long felt desirous of transmitting to you a me- mori-il of the high and respectful admiration which they entertain for one to whose pen we are indebted j for some of the purest and most imaginative produc tions in the wide range of English literature. As the authoress of Thaddeus of Warsaw, the Scottish Chiefs, &c., your name has spread over the length and breadth of our land, and the volumes of your de lightful works may be found gracing alike the abodes of the wealthy, and the humble dwellings of the poor. And deservedly so for if purity of sentiment, felicity of expression, and the constant inculcation of the noblest lessons of religion and morality, be any passport to literary fame, then will the name of Miss Porter rank high on the list of those whom the present age delights to honor, and for whom coming ages will entertain a deep feeling of reverential esteem. "Regarding you, therefore, as that one among the writers of our time who first opened up the path that has been since further embellished by the kindred genius of a Scott, we take the liberty, as well on our own behalf as in the name of thousands of American readers to whom your charming productions have taught, in so graceful and captivating a manner, the lessons of true virtue, of presenting you with the ac companying testimonial of our sincere and grateful esteem. "We have the honor to remain, dear madam, " Your obedient servants, " JAMES HARPER, Mayor of New York, W. H. APPLETON, DANIEL APPLETON, CHAS. S. FRANCIS, S. B. COLLINS, HARPER & BROTHERS." We have still another light to throw upon this fa mous chair. The WOOD, without which it might not have been built, did not come from the West Indies in planks of amyris balsamifcra (rosewood), but from Canandaigua, in the shape of a gentleman whose heart distils a better balsam of courtesy! We first heard of Mr. Wood and the proposed presentation of an inkstand, from Miss Porter herself. She inquired whether we knew Mr. Wood, and gave us the history of his project to compliment her, apropos of promis ing us a sight of barrels of jirescnts which had show ered upon her from all parts of the world. She ex pressed a most simple-hearted delight in the extent of her American reputation, and wished to see a copy of one of the American editions. On our return to this country we found a small copy of the " Scottish Chiefs," almost illegible with grease and thumbing, in the kitchen of a remote tav ern in Pennsylvania. We sent it to her with a little water added unintentionally to its romance having fallen overboard with it in our pocket while ferrying a skiff across the Susquehannah. By the way, let us here record an act of liberality in an English pub lisher, which is apropos of this present from the American bibliopoles. We were one day requested by Mr. George Virtue, the enterprising publisher of the American Scenery, to be the bearer of a message to Miss Porter. He wished to publish her Scottish Chiefs in a beautifully-embellished edition. The copy right, by English law limiting duration, had long since expired but Mr. Virtue wished to give Miss Porter ei/JOO one thousand dollars FOR HER FORMAL CON SENT. The check was sent the next day, and the edition, one of tho must superb specimens of embel lished edition in the language, is since completed. The old proverb says of a burn, " Rub it to Wood, It will come to good," and we had a burn at our fingers end as to the real mover s getting his share of the credit of this compli ment to Miss Porter. There is little enough enthu siasm for others glory in the world little enough to prevent all fear of surfeit by mention. We have re corded, therefore, against his express orders, the dis interested zeal of WILLIAM WOOD in this matter. THE OVERCOAT DILEMMA. We have received a note from a dismayed tailor in a thriving inland town of Massachusetts, begging us, " for charity s sake," to inform him "what is the fashion for overcoats." He protests that the models sent him from the city are inelegant and unbecoming and he begs us to in quire of some dandy, regnant or ci-detant, as to the existence, among knowing men, of some outer habili ment more becoming than the prevailing type. This is our summing up of his wishes as expressed in a let ter of three pages. Before venturing to tamper with so ticklish a sub ject, let us fortify the ground by an extract from a very grave and well-considered lecture on the " Changes of the Fashions," lately delivered before a lyceum in Portsmouth : Although the inventors of new fashions and the leaders in them are highly culpable for the injury they do society yet nine tenths of those whom we see in fashionable attire are persons on whom no im putation can be cast : neither is there one in a hun dred of their dressmakers or tailors, hatters or cord- wainers, who are deserving a breath of censure for do ing their work in a fashionable style. So powerful an impetus has been moving the fashionable world, that no individual can with safety hold up a resisting hand. Nothing but a combined strength can over come it. Common sense asks why is it that a coat of a few years standing, with a broad back and long waist, which the prudent man has kept for his holyday wear, is not as really valuable as one in which the seams are more nearly allied, or the buttons placed in a different position ? Public opinion replies the man is not in fashion. The observers point him out among the multitude "There is a sample of old times * " There goes a miser who can t afford a new coat :" and a soft voice whispers as he passes " I wonder who would have that old-fashioned man !" How frequently is the public sympathy excited for an adroit rogue in fash ionable attire, who has received the just sentence of the law while the poorly-clad culprit by his side, not more guilty, passes almost unpitied to the gal lows. Thus to be out of fashion a man is generally re garded as wanting in spirit or purse ; and it becomes a matter of necessity for a modest man, who wishes to elude the notice of the world, to follow along in the wake of fashion. However much a person in common life may be disgusted with its fluctuations, he must bear the imputation of vanity, and in some degree lose his influence in society, if he either has a new dress made in an old style, or for convenience appears in any new clothing which is made more 154 EPHEMERA. with a view to general utility than in subservience to fashion. With this warrant for giving a grave opinion on the subject, we proceed to huddle together our kersey mere ideas as follows : The sack-coat belongs to the climate of England, and is wholly desoriente. in ibis country. It was in vented as a kind of body-umbrella in which elegant men could pass unwet from club to cab, in that cli mate of eternal moisture, and was never meant to be used but as a garment of transit. A dandy bien poinlu in his kid and varnish extremities, may certainly walk the street safely in a sack-coat, as his quality would be known by his gloves and boots only, were he other wise parenthesized in a barrel. But, unless redeema ble by the point of his boot or a finger of his glove, no man is " dressed" in a sack. By universally making sack-coats of coarse cloth in England, they class them very definitely with hackney-coaches and umbrellas temporary conveniences of which the material is by no means a point of honor. In England, however, dandies dress to drive, and in this country they dress to walk, and, of course, it is more important here that the street coat should be be coming to the shape than is thought necessary in Eng land. The paletot (for a description of which see " Scott s" authentic " Mirror of Fashion") is becom ing to men of fine carriage, and the " Taglioni," when cut into the back adroitly, is becoming to slender fig ures. In the present anarchy of overcoat, however, every man can choose for himself, and our pastoral querist of the shears, we venture to assure him, is perfectly safe in first suiting his customers, and then swearing it to be the fashion. We would just hint, in conclusion, that there is a mixture of cloak and overcoat that we have seen on a " slap-up" man lately from Paris, and this chanced to hit our weakness. Any man who has genius in his shears will require no broader hint of what the combination looks like ! YOUNG MEN S PROCESSION. The procession of yesterday, was less remarkable for its numbers (esti mated at 3,000) than for the unusual interest taken in it by the spectators the enthusiasm of the ladies and more quiet lookers-on, and the boundless heartiness of the cheers by the people in the streets. The quali ty of the general feeling, to our thinking, was more nearly up to the warmth of the Lafayette Ovation, than any procession that has taken place since. We remarked, also, that in the escorts and cavalcade, there was a large mixture of fashionable young men, which is a new feature in the public processions of this city. There were also more clergymen, who had errands in town and about the streets, than usual the white cravat in rather uncommon proportion. Altogether, we think the bed of this new party has a longer and broader blanket covering higher toward the fastidious public head, and falling more kindly upon the service able public feet than any new-party blanket spread within our recollection. Youth is beloved. Its hopes are contagious. Its opinions are supposed free from selfishness. Its ardor is credited with inspiration. The party of youth, whenever it is combined for one object, must triumph, it seems to us for it carries with it an outside atmosphere of electric sympathies exclusively its own, while, within, it has the energy of enthusiastic first manhood, and confidence unsub dued by experience. OPENING OF THE RAILROAD TO WHITE PLAINS. The first rush of blood through the heart of Pygma lion s statue, and the first rush of a rail-car, on Satur day, through the bosom of the Bronx valley, would seem to us a well-matched fable and fact, were not the fact, both as a surprise and a change, more electric than the fable. To realize it, one must get at the way it is looked at by the rustic dwellers in the plains be yond. They were called upon to believe that a city which has, all their lives, been four hours distant, " good driving," would, after the forthcoming celebra tion, be slid up to within one hour, "easy going." Their potatoes are to glide to market, and coal and groceries to glide back, with magical facility their women-folks are to go to town, stop and get home be tween dinner and supper the morning newspapers are to arrive from New York a little after breakfast the citizens are to come out by hundreds for an after noon walk New York, in short, is four times as near as it used to be, only the land is not knocked away be tween ! A gentleman told us, just before the cars started on their return, from White Plains, that the country-people, around, were not only incredulous as to the completion of the road, up to the time of the arrival of the cars, but that they still (6 o clock P. M.) looked upon the whole affair celebration, train, music and guns as a humbug lhat could never hold out got up for some Millerite or political hocus- pocus, and to end only in the ruin of their credulous neighbors ! To start fair, however. We were invited to join the worshipful society of aldermen, bank-directors, stockholders, and judiciary, who, on Saturday after noon, were to invade, for the first time, by public rail road, the virgin seclusion of the White Plains. The access, through the valley of the Bronx, promised some thing attractive in the way of landscape, and there was a pull out of town in the soft air of the morning. We were at the cars punctually at one, found a friend inside, and a band of music a-top, and rolled away from the City Hall with a double momentum steam to draw the cars, and the gentlemen in the cars who are drawn on for the steam ! We went on our musi cal way through Centre street, embellishing it (by the beauty attracted to the chamber-windows) as the moon brightens the clouds in passing through, and with a momentary chill from the deserted propriety of streets up-tovvn, were soon in the fields fields by the way, which are secured to Nature and shorn of their chief value (nearness to town) by the railroad which makes fields beyond quite as come-at-able. We gave Harlem an outbreak of music in passing through, stopped a moment at Williams bridge, where the road has hitherto terminated, and then proceeded upon the new track through the Bronx valley.* The scenery for the next twelve miles was as primitive and fresh as if a three-days journey lay between it and a great city the most unconscious looking old water- mills on the stream, the woods and hill-sides with a look most innocent of snob and suburb, and a univer sal gape of amazement on the faces of cottagers and their cows. The seclusion and thorough country of the whole twelve miles were enchanting, and we prom ised ourselves a ramble to twenty successive nooks that we saw (and twenty successive times of course had occasion to remember that we had become a utensil of daily use, labelled "never to be taken out of the kitchen !" We are sorry to say the grass will probably do pretty well without us, now, till we disturb it to ask leave to pass under.) The hill-sides suddenly fell back and we glided into an open plain, where two or three hundred rustic- looking people were assembled six or seven of them * The road, from a few miles above the Harlem river, fol lows the valley of the Bronx, a small stream, taking its rise near Rye, and sometimes dignified by the name of a river. We believe that it was contemplated by the British govern ment, at one time, to form a court of inquiry, to try the British admiral for not ascending the Bronx river with his fleet, and destroying the army of General Washington, then lying near White Plains. EPHEMERA. 155 busy on a knoll near by, ramming a welcome up a gun. The report rang as the engine slopped, and White Plains was cosmopolized ! Out jumped Wall street and City Hall. An old negro and his very old wife commenced furiously opening oysters at a bench near bv. The cars stood in the middle of a corn-field. The country people gathered around and looked hard at the boots of the company. Two or three barrels of crackers were rolled over the corn-hills to a new stable building in the field. Everybody from the city seemed exclusively occupied with smelling the plough ed ground. Horses were tied to the fences all about. The landscape (breasted with fine, fertile hills, and having the White Plains for its lap), was slumbering in a soft haze, with just sunshine enough to content a man who would be contented without it, and al together the scene was simple and fresh near by, and the distance more picturesque than the name of " White Plains" had suggested. On the floor of the new barn, half boarded and nearly shingled, were spread four long tables, laden with a very profuse and substantial repast, and, in fifteen minutes after arrival, the president was in his place, and the stockholders and their guests seated and " in a fair way" to be enthusiastic. After a round or two of champagne, the president s health was drank and his report called for but we will give the statistics in another paragraph. Pretty sure of hearing the report and reading the speeches " in the way of business," we accepted the invitation of Mr. Lyon, and drove to his beautiful residence, near by a Gothic cottage of most absolute taste, a sketch of which we had seen in the new edi tion of " Downing s Rural Architecture." It is enough to make one doubt all the ills of life to see such a place to pass it in. The table-land of the White Plains lies behind the house, and a valley folded slope over slope, and sunk, knoll below knoll drops away from the lawn in front, showing miles of wild-wood and fertile fields, with a shady glen leading away to the left the whole combination, for an inland view, unsurpassed in variety and beauty. The cottage is in the Tudor style, faultless within and without. We wish we had time and space to say more of it and its surroundings. We should add that Mr. Lyon has been the zealous apostle of the road, and that a pro cession was formed after the collation to make him a complimentary visit. They went to his house, pre ceded by the band, but were unfortunately missed by- Mr. Lyon, who was conducting his friends back by a shorter path across the fields. The White Plains moon rose to see us off, and, as we got under way with music and cheers, she added another full face to the gazing rustics, and, when last , seen, was apparently climbing~up on a barrel to look I over the spectators shoulders. As she was in town when we arrived at half past nine, and as there were [ no ladies invited by the directors, she must have got a ride somehow behind, and whatever the conductor may say (for we know her well !) the paying her pas sage was probably " all moonshine." LABOR AND BRAINS. We hear much about " pro tection for labor," and very little about protection for Irains (except in the way of a hat). The working men, those who use their hands skilfully and industri ously, have many advocates of their claims. The politicians and the law-makers and the newspaper press, take up their cause loudly and sincerely, but those who " can not dig," who are " ashamed to beg" and have nothing but their brains their intellect, to depend upon are whistled down the wind, "the prey to fortune." One class of these luckless personages, is that of editors and assistant editors, and their remuneration is not only inadequate, generally speaking, to their sup port, but far below their real merit. What would the newspaper press of this city be but for these men ? Nothing ! They are the indirect means of giving a livelihood to thousands, and are never thanked for it. For example. We know of a newspaper in this city which owes its success to a small corps of editors, whose whole pay is about two thousand dollars per annum. If they should withdraw their aid, the paper icould stop beyond a question. Let us see what their brains do for others. The paper-makers receive from the establishment. 818,000 a year. The compositors receive about 10, 000 more the reporters and clerks about 83,000 more. The type-makers and ink-manufacturers about $2,000 more. And this expenditure goes on from year to year. It would be utterly impossible for this $32,000 to be re ceived and expended in this way, but for the talent and tact of two or three persons connected with the paper. A large number of persons is actually supported by their brains, and yet there is not one among the num ber thus supported, who does not think his own person al labor and toil, far more important and praiseworthy than that of the men who actually furnish them with employment! This is the justice of the world ! This is the result of the ridiculous notions prevailing, that the lifting of the sledge-hammer is more deserving of reward than the skill which guides its blows. Me chanical labor of all kinds is better paid than literary labor, and it is time that just impressions prevailed on this subject. Let us honor the working men, but when they are aided by talent and literary industry, they should honor them in return. The editorial corps are making the fortunesof many newspaperand magazine establishments in this country, and yet many men of talent are starving under the effort. PORTRAIT OF WORDSWORTH Bt HENRY LNMAN Without wishing to compare our great painter to a worm except as having used up one system (of artis tic ideas) and being fairly on wing in a new one we think the worm in chrysalis and its emergent new creature very fair types of the Inman that was, in America, and the Inman that is, in England. Before this time we think he would have gone abroad prema turely. Genius requires to complete its first identity to ripen fully to acquire the perfection of com mand over, and familiarity with, its in-born peculiari tiesbefore trusting itself in a sphere which is both removed from habit and aids to concentration, and bewildering with the glitter and supremacy of other models. No matter what the pursuit, there is a natural mental chrysalis a time after completed man hood, when a change of scene, change of habits, change of influences, external and internal, renew the life of both mind and body, open chambers in the soul hitherto unseen, and incredibly beautify and enrich the whole existence. How many painters have we seen confirmed into tame copyists crushed by the weight of the masters above them by going abroad ha new-born style just struggling into shape and seeming of its own! In a minor way, how many characters are smothered by being forced into a too trying element of society before completing their natural idiosyncrasy! Power went abroad at the right stage of his exis tence as a sculptor Grenough, perhaps, too early. Inman might, possibly, have gone earlier, with equal advantage. He has been, for some time, gaining little in his art. The easily-given and ill-weighed praise of our country had long ago satiated him. He had little stimulus beyond the profit of his pencil. But the mind that lies fallow under such torpor, ripens and 156 EPHEMERA. collects richness under the surface, and ploughed again, before it is mastered by weeds and tangle, it shows wondrous fertility and vigor. We have put down, now, what passed through our mind while looking yesterday at a head of Words worth, which is just received from Inman. It is a masterly piece of work, though but a sketch. The truth to nature convinces you that it is an infallible portrait, without your ever having seen the original. It is Wordsworth. It is the shell of the meat in his books. His feeblenesses and his philosophic sim plicities are there. You see how he came to write what we have read. He has done his own portrait a faithful copy, in poetry, of the same as this on can- ass. Majestic and weak, wise and silly, far-sighted and credulous old man ! He looks like his poetry, and to a man who could read characters as some do, there would be nothing new in his books after seeing Inman s picture, nor any surprise in Inman s picture, after seeing his books. What will Broadway be like, with omnibuses exclu ded, and two lines of railcars plying its entire length ? Where will the tracks be? both in the middle, or one on each side? If the latter, how will car riages stand by the sidewalk with safety? If the former, will there be room left for two carriages to pass each other on either side? Will not the fre quent taking-up and setting-down of passengers, and the consequent hinderance of cars behind, make the passage up and down tediously slow? These are questions that, with sundry others on the same sub ject, will furnish table-talk to the city for the ensuing week the announcement of the corporation s inten tion to have a railroad there being yesterday made public. Let us mumble about it a little. The slow ness of the motion would justify a very narrow track. By placing the seats lengthwise, and back to back, the cars themselves might be made very narrow, and with a roof overhead, and no sides (or sides remova ble in fair weather), passengers might easily jump on and off, and be sufficiently protected. They will probably stop for passengers at the crossings only. The fare will be taken by a boy inside, as soon as the passenger is seated, to prevent delay. We shall have the comfort (sitting back to back) of not becoming so compulsively acquainted with anybody s face, breath, knees, and umbrella. Our chances of being the sub ject of a coroner s inquest will be diminished 100 per cent. the present rate and manner of omnibus-driving having (we presume) nearly doubled the cost of life-in : surance to those who live in the upper part of the city. There will probably be fast lines established in the streets nearly parallel to Broadway, and the great tide of human life, now concentrated in one thoroughfare, will be divided into three. McNair & Scarpa, and other sellers of " acoustic oil," will languish under the suspended deafening of Broadway, and that charm ing lounge will be once more susceptible of enjoy ment by walk and talk. The danger of prying off a wheel upon the railtrack, or coming in contact with the cars, will deter the timid from taking their car riages into Broadway, and we shall meet all the pretty shopperesses on foot (the greatest Amelia-ration)! The "Kipp& Brown" buses will be obliged to come down Church street, and have their terminus at the corner of Fulton street and Broadway or (query?) will the lower part of Broadway, between the Park and Bowling-green, be necessarily left open to the converging lines from east and west? "Taglioni is coming to this country." So say the papers ; and if it prove true, we shall see the differ- ence between the apparent efforts of a football and a balloon between common and rarefied air (in manner as well as in motion) between a smile which, beauti fully dissected from the muscles that might else move it, is left stereotyped upon the face, and a smile timid, natural, and impulsive in short, the difference be tween the "divine Fanny" and the womanly Taglioni. (We prefer a woman to " a divinity" any day !) Like all women permitted to be desirably famous, Taglioni paid the inexorable penalty of being undesirably mated. She has amassed a fortune or two from the "gold dust" at the toe of her white slipper dissipa ted, they say, without pity, by her husband, and she has at last cut him (in toto), and goes entirely upon her own legs. We hope they and the Cunard pad dles will, indeed, bring her to this country. In see ing any other stage-exhibition, one is conscious of the seat he sits on and the trouble of holding his hat. To see Taglioni is to be in a trance, during which one might almost be content with the seat of St. Lawrence on a gridiron. We shall remember (talk ing of seats), "while memory holds her seat" (and has any pleasure in sitting on it), the first performance of La Sylphide at Paris by far the most entrancing I and intoxicating spectacle we ever witnessed. We venture to refer the reader to our description of it in " Pencillings." We wonder whether Taglioni will come ! Echo " come !" MAJOR NOAH AND HIS APOLOGY FOR THE Cuuci- FIXION. Our friend, the lecturer on the Restoration, has written us a letter, phrased with great forbearance and kindness, but finding grievous fault with our yes terday s notice of his discourse at the Tabernacle. His letter is too long to publish, as he requests, but we will give its substance, and leave out only his ex pressions of good will. He says he "understood from a friend that we were fast asleep before the lec ture commenced, and slept throughout the whole of it." With his letter, the major sent us a copy of the Mirror with the objectionable passages of our re port underlined. Here they are: " Major Noah arose and commenced with an apolo gy for the Jews as to the crucifixion of our Savior." "With the exception of his very adroit disparage ment of the Savior," &c., &c. Some extracts from the lecture, copied from his MS. into the Express, were also sent us by the ma jor, and we extract the page which, in the deliveiy, impressed us as represented in our objectionable sen tences. "The Jews were amazed, perplexed, and bewil dered at all they saw and heard. They knew Jesus from his birth: he was their neighbor; they knew his father Joseph, and Mary his mother, his brothers, James and Judas; he was in constant intercourse with his brethren in their domestic relations, and sur rounded by their household gods; they remembered him a boy, disputing, as was the custom, most learn edly with the doctors in the temple ; as a man pursu ing to the age of thirty, the modest and laborious calling of his profession; and yet he proclaimed him self the Son of God, and performed most wonderful miracles, was surrounded by a number of disciples, poor, but extraordinary gifted men, who sustained his doctrines, and had an abiding faith in his mission ; he gathered strength and followers as he pro gressed ; he denounced the whole nation, and proph- ecied its destruction, with their altars and temples; he preached against whole cities, and proscribed their leaders with a force which, even at this day, would shake our social systems. The Jews became alarmed at his increasing power and influence, and the Sanhedrim resolved to become his accuser, and EPHEMERA. 157 bring him to trial under the law as laid down in the 13th of Deuteronomy. " In reflecting deeply on all the circumstances of this, the most remarkable trial and judgment in his tory, I am convinced, from the whole tenor of the proceedings, that the arrest, trial, and condemnation of Jesus of Nazareth, was conceived and executed un- ler a decided panic" Now it seemed to us, and it seems to us (for we^are wide awake now), that to represent the Son of God, while on a mission from Jehovah for the salvation of a world, made the victim of a " decided panic" the "earth quaking, the rocks rent, the sun darkened, the graves opened, and the veil of the temple rent in twain," as the consequence of a "decided panic," un der the influence of which the Jews had crucified one whom they "knew as a boy," and as an industrious laborer this does seem to us a "disparagement of the Savior," and of the dignity of his mission, and it docs seem to us as intended to "apologise for the Jews." What other aim or relevancy has this very new and original reason for the crucifixion, but to apologise for the act? As this is the "first time for centuries" that the Jews have had n apologist, our readers will be inter ested to know more particularly how the crucifixion is defended. We therefore yield to our own wish, and give the following more extended extract from Major Noah s lecture, underlining those passages which we oflendingly described as "adroit disparage ment," and " apology for the Jews:" The title of God was a title of power and domin ion, and frequently was conferred by the Almighty himself on earthly rulers. See, I have made thee a God to Pharaoh, as God supreme said to Moses. Son of God ivas a title frequently conferred on those of distinguished piety and learning, and on those posses sing the emanations of the divinity, and this title the apostles themselves carry out in their writings. " The Son, My Son, not the Father; the hu manity, not the divinity, the image of the invisible God, not ihe invisible God himself; and as Paul said, there is one God and one mediator between God and man. Could the Almighty delegate a mediatorial character to any one on earth? Who can doubt it ? God said to Moses, Behold, 1 send an angel before thee to keep thee in the way ; provoke him not, for he will not pardon your transgressions, for my name is in him; my spirit is in him. It was not therefore al together on the charge of Jesus having catted himself Son of God, that the Sanhedrim accused and con demned him ; political considerations mingled them selves, and in a measure controlled the decision of the council, and this is demonstrable from the declaration of Caiaphas himself, as stated in the Gospel: Better that one man should die than that the nation should be destroyed. " It was the sedition, and not altogether the blasphe my, the terror and apprehension of political overthrow, which led to conviction, and this political and national characteristic ivas maintained throughout ; it was that consideration which induced the Jews to urge upon Pi late a confirmation of the sentence. It was the charge of assuming the prerogatives of Cesar, not the name of the Divinity, which overcame the well-founded ob jections of the Roman governor, and crucifixion itself was a Roman and not a Jewish punishment. The opprobrious insults heaped upon the master came from the Roman soldiers, and that mixed rabble, which, even in our day, desecrate all that is held sa cred. " I place these most absorbing events before you my countrymen, not to contrast things sacred wit! timidity, their hesitation, without even a ray of hope; a people so venerable for their antiquity, so beloved and protected for their fidelity, on the very threshold of political destruction. " It. is not my duly to condemn the course of our an cestors, nor yet to justify the measures they adopted ity ; but if in that dire extremity if there are mitigating cir- umstanccs, I am bound by the highest considerations which a love of truth and justice dictates, to spread them before you, at the same time to protest against any entailing upon us, the responsibility of acts com mitted eighteen hundred years ago by our fathers, and thus transmit to untold generations the anger and ha tred of a faith, erroneously taught to believe us the aggressors. " The Jews, my friends, were but the instruments of a higher power, arid in rejecting Jesus of Nazareth, we have a great and overwhelming evidence of the infinite ivisdom of (he Almighty. Had they acknowledged him as their Messiah at that fearful crisis, the whole na tion would have gradually sunk under the Roman yoke, and we should have had at this day paganism and idolatry, with all their train of terrible evils, and darkness and desolation would have spread over the earth. But the death of Jesus was the birth of Christianity ; the Gentile church sprang from the ru ins which surrounded its primitive existence; its march was onward, beset with darkness and difficul ties, with oppression and persecution, until the Sun of Reformation rose upon it, dissipating the clouds of darkness which had obscured its beauties, and it shone forth with a liberal and tolerant brightness, such as the Great Master had originally designed it. Had not that event occurred, how would you have been saved from your sins? The Jews in this did nothing but what God himself ordained, for you will find it written in the Acts of the Apostles, And now, breth ren, I know that through ignorance ye did it, as did also your rulers ! " We leave it to any Gentile (saved by the "decided political panic" of the Jews under Caiaphas), whether it was not reasonable enough at least for a man i fast asleep" to fancy he could detect in the above argument, an "apology for the Jews," and a "dispar agement of the Savior." We were quite too fast asleep to detect anything else! No, dear major, we were not " asleep" when this was delivered! Our head was down for you had 1 two unshaded lamps, looking like blazing earrings, on either side of your benevolent head, and our eyes as weak as your heartstrings but we went to the Tabernacle, not only with the interest of friendship for yourself, but with high excitement in the unpar alleled background of your theme ! We could not tell you, without a seem ing rhapsody we could not trust ourself to record, out of blank verse the scope your subject seemed to possess, the tragic sublimity of your position, the climax of events you wished to be instrumental in bringing to a close, and the interest that might be awakened in the Christian world by an eloquent, life-devoted, fervent apostle of the restora tion ! There is no theme for eloquence with a thou sandth part of the pathos, depth, splendor, -and pres ent convergent/ of this ! Heavens ! what a theme ! The key of tlie whole Christian era ! The winding up of a cycle of two thousand years numbered from the crucifixion! The close of the one expiation which is the theme of scripture-prophecy, and with the closing of which comes in the millenial glory, and the renewal of Paradise on earth! This theme, on the lips of genius, one would think genius ac cursed eighteen hundred years ago, and to be one of the forgiven at the second coming of the Messiah those~whYch are profane, but that you should under- might burn like the fire upon the lips of Paul, and tand The exact position of the Jews at that time; || turn all eyes toward waiting Jerusalem. This was their painful situation, their prostrate condition, their ll the view of the subject with which we went to the 158 EPHEMERA. Tabernacle, dear major! almost envying you your qualification by birth for the using of it. We mean no disrespect in our notice. W^e were only a little disappointed and annoyed that you did not kindle into a crusader, or try on Peter the Hermit, till we gazec at you, spite of your earrings ! And now (" to step out of the carriage and see ourselves go by") you are wrong if you are right major, and right if you are wrong ! If your Jewisl creed be right, you are wrong to deny its manifest de duction. If your Jewish creed be wrong, you are right in wishing to explain it away. But you can not have your cake and eat it, too. You can not rec oncile the church with the synagogue, nor can you lecture palatably and frankly from the synagogue to Christians. The time, at least, is not come. " At the end of the world" (says a commentator on the Bi ble), " Christ will unite the church with the syna gogue, the Jew with the Christian, the Christian with the Gentile ; then all things will be restored to a per fect union, and there will be but one shepherd and one flock." PRICES OF WOMEN COLD AND WARM. A lovely female slave, warm from the mountains of Circas; and warranted not to be second-hand, may be bought at Constantinople for three hundred dollars. A lovely female statue, cold from the marble mountains of Car rara (and spotless as the snow, without a doubt), was lately sold by Mr. Power to the Hon. William Pres ton, for three thousand dollars. Something would seem to be wrong here the " clay-tariff " or the Ot toman " protection" or something ! Various ques tions arise. Is an original woman a favorite article ? Is the imitation by Power of the fabrics of Nature & Co. an improvement upon the model ? Is the presence of the faculty of speech in the cheaper article any special indication of a preference that can be relied upon in the buyer ? Perhaps some extensive dealer in both articles will oblige us with a solution of this mercan tile problem. We had a bonne louche of opera last night atNiblo s which made us long for the whole feast a hint of a ballet which provoked great desire for more and just such a sprinkling of judicious white gloves as satisfied the cognoscents that there was something in the bill that had a pull upon the town s fashion. Then, as if it were to be nothing but an appetizer, Madame Pico appeared in a private box, and the audience saw, that, whatever the warble might be, the throat it would come from was of the most capable fulness of beauty. We have had our suspicions, from the quietness with which she "bides her time," that Madame Pico is a star conscious of the swing for a large orbit, and very sure of "putting a circle round the" town, whenever she rises. It is a considerable spoke in the wheel of this same orbit that she is a very superb woman. She has the adorable low Greek forehead, like Mrs. Nor ton s (the poetess), and a certain maintien of bust and neck which shows the kind of passionate uppishness the old gods used to be fond of. ( Vide the gods old pictures.) We were not surprised last night to overhear a foreigner telling one of his countrymen that Madame Pico would make more impression in New York than any prima donna since Malibran. What say, Corbyni ! Light up your dress-circle with a little more gas, and give us b allet and opera with Borghese and Pico on alternate nights ! In every civilized country but this, the government backs up the opera, as an important public refinement. The royal treasurer is always half a stage manager. With us, the people are the sovereign, but Chancellor Bibb, not having, as far as we know, offered terms to | Madame Pico, we, as one of the royal pores, do our part of the insensible perspiration, and express the warm desire of the public, that Madame Pico should appear. It is manifest dulness of enterprise, to have no opera now. There are no parties, the autumn weather is moderate, the strangers hang about town, till after the Indian summer, and there is no room for doubt that the thing would be supported. There was a demonstration of enthusiasm, last night, which appeared to be quite a I improvista, at the per formance of the Polka, by " Master WOOD and la Petite CARLINE." These two little miniatures of j the size of children six years old danced, to our thinking, quite wonderfully. We are likely to have j no grown-up dancers, this year at least, who, reduced t to the same size by an inverted opera-glass, would do I the Polka any better. The necessary air of galliar- \ disc, the precision, combined with abandon, the look and gesture, were all capitally well done. They are I charming little people, and a good deal of a " good I card" for any theatre. Query, for Corbyn Would not a ballet, by these Lilliputians, got up for children, to commence at four o clock in the afternoon, and last I about one hour, be a paying enterprise? One hint more : Is there not the making of a fine actress and singer in Miss Rosina Shaw ? She has beauty, remarkable voice, grace and confidence four " pretty wells." Keep an eye on her, Mr. Manager! THE DAT AFTER THE BALLOT. The contention for the favors of Mrs. Vox Populi is over. The diffi cult darne has made her election. The future presi dent is in the ballot-box, and that womb of authority is now silently waited upon by the paternal majority. God bless whatever is to be brought forth ! Thank Heaven the town is stiller ! There is more noise upon the blacksmith s anvil and the shoemaker s lap-stone more clatter upon the tinman s vice and the coppersmith s rivet but the town s heart beats less audibly, to-day, and the town s pulse less feverish ly and wildly. The political bully is looking around unwillingly but peacefully for work. The club wrangler s vocation is gone. The working-man will give less of his evening to the bar-room and caucus. Wives rejoice. Children are glad. Considering only individuals, the immediate tumult and recoil of politics seem only evil and violence. The pore and the pediculus will complain of blood letting and blister. We believe the country at large is benefited by the bringing of these bad humors to the surface, however. We are sure at least that we see all there is, in our body popular, that is dangerous. There is evil disposition, antagonism, discontent, cra ving for excitement, love of combination, dormant energy, and ambition qualities everywhere distribu ted, and hungering, every one, for a field of action. Where better would they break out, than in politics ? How, easier, should we know our neighbor s length of conscience-string and proneness to trick and unfair ness, than by watching him when his passions are roused and his cautiousness forgotten ? What man in a political committee knows too little of his fellows for future living with them ? But, thank God, the tumult once over, the city re turns to peace, industry, and prosperity. Injury and calumny stand no more behind the editor s chair literature and commerce, instead, look promptingly over his shoulder. The merchant is relieved from anxiety, and knows how to shape his venture. The mechanic "hangs" politics for a plague and a bother. The republic has set up its master, and is content to be governed while it toils and prospers. There is one feature of the late contest, however, for which we can find no philosophical offset. We EPHEMERA. 159 refer to the unparallelled and insane extent to which betting has been carried. Of any good this practice does we do not see even a shadowing. Of its intoler able evils we hear mournful accounts at every turn. It seems to have infected, with a gambling mania, those who never before hazarded money on a question of chance or uncertainty. We have heard several really most lamentable instances of fatuity and disaster in this new demon-shape of party-spirit. Families are ruined, creditors robbed, children deprived of edu cation and bread by men who would as soon cut off their hands as throw a stake at a gaming-table ! Is there no power in the law to put a stop to this new evil of politics ? We ask this question to provoke, if possible, an answer. And now as politics walkout from the public mind, and there is room for something else to walk in let us mention a great evil in this country of ours, and tell some news that has an example by which to mend it. WE TOIL TOO MUCH! LADIES DICTIONARY the word Alpaca. The Al paca is a South American animal, much used as a beast of burden by the Indians, with long hair, princi pally black, but slightly grizzled. It is an excessive- ly irritable animal, and indomitable till soothed. The importance of this animal has already been considered by the English, in their hat, woollen, and stuff trade, and an essay on the subject has been published by Dr. Hamilton of London. The wool is so remarkable, being a jet black, glossy, silk-like hair, that it is fitted for the production of texile fabrics differing from all others, occupying a medium position between the wool and the silk. It is now mingled with other ma terials in such a singular manner, that while a par ticular dye will affect those, it will leave the Alpaca wool with its original black color, thus giving rise to great diversity. WHO WANTS A DRESS-OPERA ? There is a large class in every metropolis who are fond of gayely, dress, and " a place to go to," but who do not like private parties for three or more reasons: 1st, the lateness of the hours; 2d, the trouble of making the agreeable ; 3d, the card-and-visit nuisance, the man agement and ceremony, necessary to keep up fashion able vogue. The part of the evening between eight and eleven is, to this class, the time of the twenty-four hours in which they wish to be abroad, to be admired, to be amused. The less trouble with it the better; and they would rather give a dollar and think no more about it, than leave a card at an expense of memory, time, equipage, and politic calculation. They want a place where everybody dresses ; where it il light ; where they will see beauty, and be seen themselves by appreciative eyes ; where there is music to hear and a show to look at if they like to be silent, or friends in a box near by if they wish to converse a place where they can hear the gossip, have singers to criticise, and "see the world" in short, AN OPERA. To the great majority of ball-goers particularly to the men the time from eight to eleven hangs heavily. They would gladly dress early and go first to the opera, if it were habitually a dress-resort. There are many well-off people to whom a dress- opera is the only tolerable amusement lame people ; ladies who only look well sitting, or look best in shawls and opera-dress ; foreigners who do not speak the language ; timid persons, who wish to see the gay world without encountering it ; and the many fami lies who have a competency to live and can afford amusement, but want a handle to the door of society. The first object of strangers in town (of whom there are always several thousands), is to go where they can see the well-dressed and fashionable people. Most strangers, in a large city, would rather see the exclu- sives in an opera-box, than the Croton reservoirs, or the monsters in a menagerie. People in ceremonious mourning find a great relief in seeing the gay world from an opera-box. Last (not least, unless you please!) some people would frequent the opera, the season through, for the music. It "soothes" our "savage breast" for one, and we think the " hang" of opera-music in the town hum and whistle is a desirable and refining variety. Now, with all this desirableness and frequentability, is it not wonderful that no larger capitalist than Signor Palmo (pocket edition), should have ventured to em bark in a scheme for an opera-house ! It is not a schemeto prosper donely halves. Itmust be a splen did affair, or a failure. There must be comfort in the seats, breadth in the alleys, boundless prodigality in the lights, luxury in the saloons and entrances, and Alhambrian excellence in the refreshments. The manager should be a mixture of Crcsar, Talleyrand, and Bluebeard awful, politic, punctual in pay. and relentless to the caprices of pri madonnas. Two slash ing critics should be employed to annihilate each other daily, in opposing preferences for the performers. The exaction of full dress for all comers should be rigidly enforced. The names of the belles at every last night s opera should be disembowelled and para graphed every morning. Prestige, celebrity, show, humbug, and ceremony, should be added to the most indefatigable real merit in the management, and then the shareholders would make money. Then, too, we should have a DRESS-RESORT what no theatre now is or ever has been in New York, but hat, of all refinements and resources, is the most delightful and indispensable. We could write, a column about the blessing of beauty seen in public, the chastening and refining influences of music, the restraining proprieties of dress and observance, etc., etc., etc. but we confine ourself to tangibilities. One more fact the existence of such an opera-house, so conducted, would link New York in the operatic chain of star-travel; and Grisi, Lablache, and the rest, would as certainly come here from London and Paris, as go to Vienna and St. Petersburg!!, Berlin and Naples. Our readers in Wall street will please consider this as a " money article: PROMISCUOUS REPLIES TO LETTERS. DEAR JACK: Since my compulsory budding, flower ing, and bearing fruit, have been accelerated to one season per diem, to feed a daily paper, you will easily understand that I found it necessary at first to work all my sap into something useful omitting as it were, the gum deposite of superfluous correspondence. J accordingly left you off. Your last letter was slipped into the no- more-bother hole, without the usual en dorsement of " answered," and I considered you like ;i trinket laid aside before a race-not to encumber e. I miss the writing of trumpery, however. 1 miss the sweeping out of the corners of my mind-full of things fit only for the dust-pan, but still very possibly hiding a silver-spoon. Do you want any more explanation of why you get etter from me for one cent, printed, instead ^of a written one at eighteen and three quarters ? It is wonderful how much cheaper printing is than writing ! I left off my envy of your country life as usual with my summer "trowsers, not caring to see the death of anything even the resigned summer. As soon as I have occasion to button my coat to keep out the air, I am content with that part of the earth s breast that is paved over. The town is honored now by the pres- 160 EPHEMERA ence of those who could go away if they wished, and, as, human-like, the town values those who can do without it, "New York is gay." Shopping is this month s pastime, however. The ladies have no need of parties while they can yield reluctant dollars to in sidious temptation. It was in competition with the " fall goods" that the opera failed a month ago open ed on the supposition that people had nothing to amuse them! A manager, and not know the sex ! Kech! Pal mo ! The town is to be illuminated on Monday next by the apparition of a new base and a brace of prima- donnas. Madame Pico has been biding her time like game in the larder, and the town is quite ready to sweeten her with the current condiment and devour her. She is a beautiful woman, and though 1 never could get my sentiment over the foot-lights, I love to see the town fascinated. Pray Heaven she sings well after all the heralding I have done for her ! If that well-chiselled throat should have an awkward corner in it, we should have to restore to Borghese her divi ded throne and go back to our worship of her toilet and other utmost-possibles, with an indifferent grace. Happy queen of Sheba, who ordained that no woman should reign after her ! Well, sir, what do you want to know ? There are few things above ground that I do not hear of, some hundreds of newspapers doing their best to make news and send it to me to cook to your liking ! He who subscribes to the Mirror appoints me his fashioner of things palatable to know, and though, like other cooks, I pass under my nose a vast deal I should not choose for my own relishing, I do my best to give it with due spice and proportion. Indeed, what with serving so many people with so many different kinds of knowl edge, I feel like the omnificent man called for in Ben Jonson s " Staple of news :" " Where is my fashioner, my feather-man, My linener, perfumer, barber, all !" When Saturday comes round with the life, business, fun, and literature of the whole week in one a mir- ror d E Pluribus Unum it seems wonderful to me how so much, and of such endless variety, could have been gathered into one week s history ! That weekly Mirror is worth binding and keeping, if it were only as a choice record of the events of the buyer s times set down, point by point, with the life he lived amidst their occurrings. There is nothing good, brilliant, or important, that is not recorded in it, and, if a man wants to forget as he goes along, that pack- horse will take the load off his memory, and for three dollars a year bring it safe after him ! And now, dear Jack, assuring you that this letter is wholly confidential, and that you are not at liberty to give it away as an autograph, I record myself, As usual, Yours, . To JOHN ESQ., (a friend in the country). ETIQUETTE OF WEDDING-CARDS. MESSRS. EDITORS: My friend John Smith is to be married to Lucy Jones. She issues a card of invita tion like this : No. 59 AT HOME, -street, Tuesday Evening, November 14th. JOHW SMITH, JLucy JONES. Now he intends to use this for inviting to the cere mony ; but I tell him it is wrong, and can only be used to invite to the party after the ceremony. He con tends that this is the usual form so the engraver tells him, etc. Please give us the law in these matters (we can ap peal to. no higher authority in matters of etiquette and fashion) ; let us have the two customary forms, for wedding and party, for the enlightenment of in experienced candidates who wish to follow the fash ions, and much oblige, CUSTOM. P. S. We wait for your infallible decision. Wednesday morning. DEAR CUSTOM : Your friend is wrong, from the egg to the apple. Miss Lucy Jones has a mother, or father, guardian, or friend, at whose house she is to be married. The invitation should come from the per son under whose protection she is given away (sent, if you please, to Mr. Smitl^s friends, with Mr. Smith s card, but understood by Miss Lucy Jones s friends, without card or explanation). It is tampering with serious things, very dangerously, to circulate the three words, "AND MRS. JOHN SMITH," one minute before the putting on of the irrevocable ring. The law which permits ladies (though not gentlemen) to change their minds up to the last minute before wed- lock, exacts also that the privileged angels should not be coerced by the fear of seeing the escaped name afterward on a wedding card ! Besides, such a card, so issued, would be received from Mrs. Smith before there was any such person. The first proper use of the wedded name is to send it with parcels of wedding-cake, the morning after the ceremony, to friends and persons desired as visiting acquaintances. This is considered an excusable ad vance on the part of persons entering newly upon life, and the promptness uith which a return-card is left upon the bride is an indication of the degree of pleas ure with which the proposition of acquaintance is re ceived. Another advantage of cake and card : the etiquette of (exacting that a new nail should be thus driven in all acquaintances that are to be kept up) en ables bride and bridegroom to drop, without offence, such acquaintances of each as are respectively unde sirable persons inseparable from the set in which the lady has lived, who are not agreeable to the bride groom, and bachelor acquaintances of the bridegroom, who may be thought too free for the fireside. Wed ded life is thus begun with a "culled posy of friend ship," the door of society open before, and mischief- makers shut out behind. Our compliments to Miss Jones, and we remain, Very truly Open to card and cake, MIRROR TRIPLET. UNMARRIED PEOPLE four times as liaUe to insani/i/ as MARRIED PEOPLE. The " Concord Freeman," in a statistical article made up from hospital reports, shows, that if a man is, perhaps, oftener out of jwcket when married, he is not so often out of his head. The editor says : Few people are aware how much more insanity prevails among bachelors and unmarried la dies than among the married of both sexes. We learn from the examination of very many reports, that of every five of all lunatics sent to American hospitals, three are unmarried, and only two are married, and that almost all of them are over twenty-one years old. On the other hand, it is pretty certain that in all the community over twenty-one years of age, there are more than three times as many in as out of wedlock. If this be the case, then the unmarried are more than four times as liable to become insane as married people. EPHEMERA. 161 The Herald seems to think we have bought the " Republic." We are sorry that a republic is a mar ketable commodity, but at any rate we have bought nothing of that name or description. Our ambition, somehow, does not seem to stumble upon things re publican. In this world we desire a farm, on which we can be " monarch of all we survey," and in the next, we pray for a citizenship in the kingdom of heaven. " Up-TowN" AND " DOWN-TOWN." We see that these names of the different halves of the city are be coming the common language of advertisements, etc. A person advertises in one of the papers a " Down town singing school," and another a "Down-town dancing academy." We think our friend Billings would better stick to " Up-town Hold" as the better designation of the new brick khan. THE NEW SEQUEL TO THEATRICAL INTELLIGENCE. Since the bishops and deacons have taken to in dicting each other for fallings-away of which the pub lic like to read the Scan. Mag., we observe that the particular column of newspapers which is devoted to spicy news, theatricals, police incidents, etc., has silently become the locality for brief paragraphs an nouncing where distinguished preachers are to hold : be seen there, in cab or mounted ; the women of " po sition" must refresh there the memories of forgetful i tributaries; the new candidate for fashion must there display that taste in " belongings" which can only be I guessed at in a ball-room; there are seen all whose | means make them eligible to expensive circles of so- I ciety, and who (by something that will and does tell, in the equipage, or the mode of dressing for, and ap pearing in, it) there make claim to fitness for, at least, a ceremonious conversance with the haute voice. Of course, there is a postern of society in all cities, through which are admitted certain classes, who keep no equipages those who are to amuse, instruct, or 1 embellish the gay world poets, parsons, and pretty women ; but the promenade on wheels is, to all oth- ! ers, the inexorable vestibule, and, as far at least as this I gate, the ordinary seekers of the heaven beyond must come with horses. Cowper only mentioned the barest essentials when he said, " Well-drest, well-bred, Well-equtpaged, is ticket good enough To pass us readily through every door." In New York, however undesirable to the mass, this formidable gulf is about to be sunk, between wealth and competency. At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city. There is no place where equipages are exclusively looked for. There are five or ten thousand young men who dress as well as the millionare s son; five or ten thousand forth. In the salad column of one of the papers there la dies for whom milliners and mantua-makers do their is one announcement of a play followed by six an- best ! te " or twenty thousand who can show as well nouncements of sermons ! And in there a a specific " repo another paper mons, ire very nearly two columns of sketches of ser- from a specific " reporter! !" We saw yesterday, for the first time in this coun try, an equipage of full ceremonial splendor, faultless in taste, and evidently not at all modified by any dread of democratic prejudices. We admired the " bravery" of the turn-out, and the courage of using it. The ice broken, there will soon be conjured oth ers from the vaults in Wall street but meantime, let us look a little at the necessity for a promenade drive in New York, and its probable locality. In or near every capital of Europe there is a spot which serves, for those who have carriages, the same purpose which Broadway serves for promenaders on foot. In London it is the Mayfair side of Hyde park ; in Paris it is the Champs Elysees and Bois de Bou logne; in Florence it is the Cascine ; in Rome the Pincian hill ; in Naples the Strada Nuova. In all of these capitals the titled and wealthy avoid driving in the crowded streets except upon errands of necessity, and in London it is the custom to keep a plainer ve hicle with cob-horses expressly for use at night and errands in the city. Ladies who have occasion to go out in the morning, do so on foot and in the plainest dress, followed invariably by a servant. They return to lunch at one or two, and immediately after dress for the show part of the day s out-door occupation. The carriage comes round in full livery at the specified hour, and, the shopping and business-errands having been despatched in the forenoon, the equipage starts upon the afternoon destination of ceremony or pleas ure. An hour before sunset or the dinner hour, the principal drive is over, and the scattered equipages meet, as upon a fashionable exchange, for a prome nade of display. This conventional assembling is re lied upon for recognition of acquaintance, for arrange ments as to the evening, for keeping advised of the fashions, for seeing strangers, and for contests of style in equipage and personal atlire. The dandies must 1 1 on foot, and walk as well without heart-burnings, in Broadway one as another. New York is (at this critical moment, before the shoot of the centripetal particles to a new nucleus) the largest republic of "first quality" people that the world ever saw. There is one spot which has been talked of as a promenade drive, and we believe some endeavor has been made to purchase it for the purpose the beau- | tiful wood on the right of the Third avenue. That charming spot would stand to New York very much as the CASCINE to Florence. We doubt, however, whether, yet awhile at least, the object would warrant the purchase. The first probable promenade drive, we should say, would be the FIFTH AVENUE, from Washington square to the Croton reservoir. The splendor of the houses on this broad highway is far beyond that of any other portion of the city; it is no thoroughfare for omnibuses ; it leads from the wealthiest neighbor hood to a prominent public work ; it is on the return route from the loveliest drives on the island ; and, should the summit of the rising ground on which the reservoir stands be fixed upon, as proposed, for the Washington monument, and planted and decorated, that limit would be a convenient turning-place, and a charming and airy spot for a sunset soiree en voiture. A STORY FOR TOUR SON, SIR. The present king of France, one very cold evening, was riding from Boston to Salem on the outside of the stage. He was entirely without money to pay for a lodging that night, and he began to make friends with the driver to get part of his bed. After a while the driver s com passion was aroused. You are not a very clean looking chap," said he to the poor Frenchman, "but my bed is in the harness-room, where there s a stove, and if you ll keep your trowsers on, and sleep outside, I don t mind /" THE REPUBLIC OF BROADWAY. Eyes were con trived at some trouble ; the great sun shows only the 162 EPHEMERA. outside of things; the present and visible (Carlyle- ically speaking)" is the world God adapted our senses to; and though some people like to live the life of a sundial under ground, we prefer to throw to-day s shadow from whatever we do writing about what we see, and thinking most about what jostles our elbow. This explained, We have a loose slip-slop or two for the young men about town not as to their invisible minds and morals, but as to their visible walking and dressing. Having "bought our doublet in Italy, our round hose in France, our bonnet in Germany, and our behavior everywhere," we may perhaps excusably scale a ped estal to give our opinion; though the credit we take to ourselves may be granted in the spirit of Falstaff s to Doll Tearsheet, "We catch of you, Doll, we catch of you !" There is nothing so republican as a dressy popula tion. We are no " leveller," but we like to see things level themselves; and the declaration of independence is impotent in comparison with the tailor s goose. A young man about town slips his miniature into five thousand eyes per diem. Fifty of the five thousand who see him know whether his father is a mechanic or a rich man; and it depends wholly upon his dress and mien whether the remaining four thousand nine hundred and fifty take him to be a rich man s son or a mechanic s son. It is reasonable, of course, to let the fifty who know think what pleases them, and to dress for the very large majority who don t know. This is apparently the tacit philosophy of the young men of New York. There is no telling, by any dif ference in dress, whether the youth going by has, probably, a sister who is an heiress, or a sister who is a sempstress. There is no telling the merchant from his bookkeeper no guessing which is the diner on eighteen pence, and which the gourmet of Delmon- ico s no judging whether the man in the omnibus, whom you vaguely remember to have seen some where, was the tailor who tried on your coaf, or your vis-d-vis last night at a ball. As we said above, this is a true republic. A young man whose appearance is four-story-housy, can very well afford to let a few people know that he sleeps over the shop. If he is more elegant than a rich man s son, he gets as nearly the full value of the dif ference as ordinary vanity would require. Every young man finds means to dress to his liking, and of course every young man starts fair, each morning, with all of his age, for the day s competition in bright eyes. We shall be understood, now, in our republican ef fort to add still another levelling to this of the tailor s goose to bring the attractions of plain men up to those of the "aristocracy of nature." The hints we have to throw out will be slighted by the good-look ing; taken advantage of by the plain thus levelling, in another respect, upward. The rarest thing seen in Broadway is a young man who walks well. A stoop in the back is almost na tional; and an upright, graceful, gentlemanlike gait is as rare as it is singularly striking. If you can af ford the time to walk slowly, high-heeled boots are a great improvement. With time enough, you drop the foot insensibly from a high heel, like an actor walking down the slope of the stage. Beside, it makes the instep look high, which implies that your father did not carry a hod. Avoid a broadcloth shirt, in the shape of a shape less garment with sleeves (one of the new fashions). It looks colic-y, with the wind bellying it out in all directions as you walk along. Leave long cloaks to the clergy. The broad velvet collar, turning over, diminishes your apparent breadth of shoulders, and it should be worn with careful dra matic propriety, not to be very awkward and inelegant. If you are about to have an overcoat made, get a fat friend to go and be measured for it. At any rate, let not your diaphragm be so imprisoned, that the first heroic sentiment will tear off a button. One of Jenning s cutters is the apostle of a reform in this matter measuring you (if you request it) by a mag nify ing-glass, from the waist upward. These are not King Canute s days, when " none under the rank of gentlemen dare presume to have a greyhound to follow him." The outward symbols, once peculiar to elegance, are pretty well levelled up to, as we said before but, by careful observation, you will now and then see a something that nice men do, or do not do, which has not yet got through the hair of the promiscuous. As an example, and in the hope that it will not be generally understood, we will mention, that very particular men, for the last year, have walked the street invariably with a kind of grieved look very expressive and distinguishing. We will resume this republican theme. THK DESIGNATION OF THE LADY PRESIDENTESS. If it had not been for a certain ante-expiatory "white horse," we should have prayed for the miraculous re turn to this world of "John Tetzel, Vender of Indul gences." The editor of the Morning News did jus tice to his Irish blood a day or two ago, by giving back, to the loser s wife, a saddle-horse he had won in a bet; but how, in the name of all the gallant pro prieties, can he justify himself to the ladies of the de mocracy for making no distinction between their queen and the (of course) less glorious queen of any coun try on earth? The promiscuousness of two "Mrs. P s!" " WHITE-HOUSE- Among other consequences of the election of Mr. Polk, it is said, will be to locate in the White-house at Washington the handsomest and perhaps the most accomplished lady that ever presided in its stately halls. Mrs. P. has, for some years, been remarkable not only for personal beauty, but for that greater charm, graceful manners, and a highly-cultivated mind." If, in this democratic country, one may venture to say a word for the other " Mrs. P.," we think that Louis Philippe s having slept with a stagedriver in this country (vide a late anecdote) might have pro cured for his wife the easy privilege of at least one distinguishing initial. It surely would not seriously invade the simplicity of our court circular to add a " J." to the single-letter title of the lady presidentess of fifteen millions and Texas! Be generous, gentle men people! Let us have some distinction in the Queen " P. s" of the two countries. The editor of the Morning News will be some day minister to France. Fancy his being called on to present "Mrs. American P." to " Mrs. French P." OVERHAUL OF SAILING ORDERS. The sails draw the freight sits trim in the hold the ship minds her helm, and the wind strengthens on the quarter with a freshness that strains rope and spar. It is per haps the best moment that will occur, in the long voyage before us, to overhaul our signals and sailing- papers, and understand how we are to communicate with the fleet, and go straightest and most prosperous ly to our destined haven. (Whoa, Pegasus! We have been as poetical as will have been expected of us at one day s notice. Drop to the ground and let us go off on a plain trot!) We have always looked upon the gentlemen of the daily press as among the enviably unlabelled poten tates of this country of King Everybody-nobody EPHEMERA. 163 enviably as having enormous power and little responsi bility as to the using of it. The power will doubtless remain as large and the responsibility as small. "A free press" is the lesser of two evils. In the perpet uation of this state of things, however, lies our future vocation, and while we have it yet in our power to " make a clean breast," and avow what we have ob jected to in the exercise, by others, of the spells by which we are to conjure let us name at least the one blot which most smirches the forward face of the pro fession. It were of little use for one. editor to declare that he would make war freely upon opinions never upon persons. And the disadvantage is not merely that of throwing away the dagger in battle, because the sword is more gentlemanly not merely a lessening of one s formidabieness to an opponent. The evil is in the greater curiosity to watch the slabber, felt by the look ers-on. The temptation to be personally abusive lies in the diseased appetite of the crowd that will follow the abuser leaving the scrupulous man alone with his decency. Living as editors do, by the favor of the crowd, if many are willing to minister to this dis eased appetite, decency in the few is a kind of slow, business-suicide. It would almost require a Utopian fancy to picture the beauty of a press from which personalities and illwilled abuse were wholly excluded. No personal ities in literature, and none in politics the author, editor, and statesman, alike intrenched in " that credent bulk That no particular scandal once can touch, But it confounds the breather," how completely the envy of malignant mediocrity would be deprived of its now easy sting, and how completely ruffianism and brutality would be confined to the bully-club and dram-shop ! Scholars would wait on public opinion, at the editor s table, busied only with embellishing, and not engrossed with de fending their fair fame ; and gentlemen of sensitive honor, who are now appalled at the calumnious gaunt let of politics, would come forward to serve their country at the small posts occupied now only by men senseless to defamation. To the coming about of this paradise of letters, editorial consent is alone wanting. No one man could live long, the only calumniator of the press. No one man would dare to hold the only pen deficient in courtesy and gentlemanlike regard to private charac ter. Complete silence from the rest of the press toward the one offender, after a unanimous publica tion of his disgrace refusal, without exception, to exchange papers with him from that time forward any combination, in short, which should make the os tracism of such an individual, by his brethren of the press, universally known would suffice to r*urge the press of him. One year of such united self-censor ship would so purify the public habit of news-read ing, that an offence against propriety would at least startle and alarm the public sense; and, arrived at that point, a very moderate apostleship might complete the reform. We do not anticipate this. Oh, no ! We are " in this earthly world, where to do harm Is often laudable ; to good sometimes Accounted dangerous folly ;" but, at the risk of being the "grave of our deserv ing," we shall do the leaning of one to the better side. We shall have harder work for it. Nothing is easier than to be popular by habitual illwill. Trashy minds write most readable satire, and, with the mood on or off the industry willing or reluctant fault-finding is fecund production. But if good nature can be spiced if courteous treatment of our brother editors, brother authors, and all nameable men, can be made palatable to the public if a paper wholly incapable of rui unkindness, but capable of all things pleasurable else, can be fairly tested we trust to do without the price of giving pain, and we trust that the money so turned out of our hand will not be like the lost oil of the tomb of Belus irreplaceable. THK COST OF FASHION. From a pamphlet sent us, ; learn that five hundred millions of dollars are spent annually in the United States for such articles of dress as are subject to the fluctuations of fashion. Of this sum, it is computed that sixteen millions are spent for hats, probably about twenty millions for caps and bonnets, and for other articles of dress not less than four hundred millions ! So that not far from a million and a half dollars are spent daily for clothing; of which, if the calls of fashion claim but ten per cent, (but probably she re ceives double that sum), one hundred and fifty thou sand dollars are sacrificed daily at the footstool of the fickle goddess, by the enlightened citizens of the United States ! Is it not time that some standard of national dress was established ? We certainly have had sufficient experience to know what kinds of clothing are the most convenient, and one good reason can not be pro duced for the unmeaning changes which are every day taking place. It is not to be expected that in a free country, where it is proverbial that " every man is at liberty to wear shoes or go without," an association to fix upon a general standard of dress would lead all to adopt it. No there would be those still found who, lacking other points to recommend them to public notice, would act the cameleon still. But no small portion of the community would recommend that course which would most evidently be for the public good. The number, if large and respectable, would exert a sufficient influence by their example to prevent the standard fashion from ever appearing out of date. The ladies bonnets would then be new at the end of three years, instead of being old-fashioned at the end of one. The gentlemen s hats would be fashionable until worn out; and the wedding coat, which is saved for holyday occasions, might descend from father to son, a fashionable garment. A HUMBUG FAME. THOMAS CARLYLE. We have nowhere seen a just- er view of this much-talked-of writer than is given in the October number of the Biblical Repository, a journal conducted with great ability by an association of divines. The writer (Prof. J. T. Smith, of New ton Theological Institute, Mass.) allows Carlyle to be a " most vigorous, unique, and original thinker and writer," and that his "Past and Present" is "certainly worth reading." He allows further, that that work contains many noble and truthful sentiments, uttered with commanding energy. This, however, is the ex tent of his commendation. " We must, on the whole," says the writer, " characterize it as a book, in style, barbarous; in politics, incendiary ; in philosophy, du bious ; and in theology, execrable." This opinion the reviewer supports by an analysis of the work, and by a specification of particulars. The barbarity of the style no one doubts, and no one, except a few very warm admirers, defends. This very barbarity seems to us only another manifestation of that arrogance which characterizes all Carlyle s 164 EPHEMERA. attempts. A man who condemns everybody must needs be an inventor. The work is said to "breathe an overweening, mor bid admiration of the past." Nothing of the present satisfies Mr. Carlyle ; nothing of the past but elicits his commendation, and among other things, Scandi navian savagery, Mohammedanism, twelfth century Catholicism, the fighting barons of feudal times, Popes Gregory and Hildebrand, and other personages of like stamp, each and all present to him some phase worthy of special notice and admiration. The religion and the systems of government of the present day, have very hard fare at his hands, since the former is all cant, hypocrisy, and quackery, and the latter nothing better, to say the least. We are, in truth, recom mended to go back to the twelfth century for models of religion and government. The HERO must be found by some means or he must find himself. A fighting aristocracy like that of the twelfth century is no longer possible ; but a working aristocracy must take its place, and the system of villanage be restored. In deed, American slavery seems essentially the system recommended by this practical preacher. The sum and substance of our own view of the whole matter is, that while we sympathize to some ex tent with Mr. Carlyle in his dissatisfaction with the present state of things, the remedies he proposes in his deep-mouthed and most oracular tone, are abso lutely naught the mere dreams of a mind well-inten tioned enough, but half-crazed with overweening self- estimation. He insists much on the necessity of a "French revolution" in England. "There will be two, if needed ; there will be twenty, if needed. . . The laws of nature will have themselves fulfilled," and much more to the same purpose. Yet this inevitable fulfilment of the laws of nature which is to work all good, seems, according to the seer s estimate, as yet to have wrought nothing but ill. His final hope is a hero-king: "Yes, friends: hero-kings and a whole world not unheroic there lies the port and happy haven," &c. In fine, if Carlyle s words mean any thing (which, the more we read the more we doubt), the whole people are to be roused to violent revolt, and plunged into all sorts of horrors, as a preparation for a better state of things! Carlyle speaks of the last two centuries as godless centuries and that in contrast with the long ages that went before them. What is this but to shock the common sense of history ? And his remedy is HERO-HOOD. What is this but inane twaddle ? Mon strous, unblushing egotism, is one of Carlyle s stri king characteristics. Great and learned men, astrono mers, philosophers, and others, are " poor scientific babblers ;" he alone, it would seem, discerns the re ality of things, and has the key to the mysteries of nature. "Insight" has been granted to no other. One of the wonders of the age to us is, that such a monstrosity as Carlyle should have attained so high a place in its estimation. His merits are so overloaded by the most shocking and unbounded affectation and egotism, that we rise from the perusal of much that he has written with no other sensations than those of weariness and disgust. The poems of the Kentucky Sappho, AMELIA, have been published in a very elegant gift-book volume, by Tompldns, of Boston. We have expressed our almost unqualified admiration of this lady s poems, as they separately appeared. She has a mind fed equally from a full heart and a prodigal imagination. It was once remarked to us, by a critic as candid as he is discerning, that there is a great development of the poetic sentiment in this country ; that many of our collections, which, in their brief existence, resemble the flowers that seem to be born only to die, like those delicate, odorous, and lovely objects in nature, have often a character of sweetness, purity, and freshness, grateful to refined taste and a feeling heart. The pieces contained in this volume are worthy of such praise. A loving heart, and a soul in harmony with the beauty of the world and the divine spirit which informs it, dictated these poems. We might make many beautiful selections from this handsome volume; but we must content ourselves, for the present, with naming one, " The Little Step son," which, in its earnest simplicity, and its ringing music, reminds us of that favorite translation, "My ear-rings! my ear-rings! they ve dropped into the well !" Not merely that the measure is the same, but that the whole tone seems the echo of far off and primitive manners the voice of untutored affection. MIFF BETWEEN JOHN BULL AND BROTHER JONA THAN. The offensive club exclusion by which Eng lish aristocrats have undertaken to make Ameri cans pay their debts, does, unquestionably, put the screw upon a national weakness. We are not sorry for it but there could have been nothing in worse taste or showing a more ignorant lack of discrimina tion setting aside the fact of its being done by a class of men, who are themselves, notoriously bad paymas ters. We do not believe, however, all that is in the papers on the subject. The " Reform-Club," in which it originated, is a new combination of ill-ballast ed politicians, and the movement will be disclaimed in some authoritative shape, before a month is over. Trifling as the matter abstractly is, it would act very pungently on any questionof war-making which should arise among us within a year. Perhaps some of our readers would like to know how far an exclusion from the clubs affects Americans in England. The fact of not having the honorary privilege of admission to the two principal clubs, was (before this national exclusion) sufficient evidence that a gentleman had not come well introduced. One of the first and most natural questions addressed to a stranger in London is, " What club are you in ?" the intention being to ask you to a tete-d-tete club dinner, if you turn out agreeable. This is almost the only courtesy that a literary man in England has it in his power to show you. He can give you a dinner for a few shillings at his club (if you are a member of it and not otherwise), which in point of style and com fort is equal to a nobleman s entertainment. Or (which is more common) he can say, "I dine at the Athenaeum to-day at six. If you have no better en gagement, we ll put our chairs together" each man in this case paying his own bill. An invitation to club privilege is only got up by high interest, however. It requires some person of consequence to play the applicant, and the number of strangers in each club, at one time, is seldom more than twenty or thirty. The following are the formulas of invitation to the two principal clubs : "PALL MALL, 28th January, 1835. "DEAR SIR : I am directed by the committee of the TRAVEL LERS to inform you that they have great pleasure in admit ting you as a visiter to the club for the ensuing month, and that they hope to be favored with your frequent attendance. " I have the honor to be, sir, " Your most obed t and humble serv t, " J. W. SINGER. Secretary." " ATHENJEUM, LONDON, 19th February, 1835. " SIR: I am directed to inform you that the committee of the ATHENJEUM have ordered your name to be placed on the list of distinguished foreigners residing in London, who are invited to the house of the club for three months, sub- EPHEMERA. 165 ject to the same regulations as the members are required to observe. " In case your stay should be prolonged beyond that period, and it should be your wish to have this invitation renewed, it will be necessary that an application be made to the commit tee to that effect. " I have the honor to be, sir, " Your very obedient, humble servant, " EDWARD MAGRATH, Sec y." It is rather important to a man making his way in London society, that he should be seen at the clubs. The formidable " Who is he ?" is always satisfactorily answered by, " Don t know, but I saw him at the club." It influences all manner of introductions, breaking down scores of invisible walls between the new-comer and desirable things and people. A call at the clubs is an invariable part of the routine of a fashionable man s morning. He goes there to meet friends, to j hear the news, to bet, to smoke, to make engagements to prepare for the out-door part of the day, in short. : All notes, requiring a very private delivery, are ad- I dressed to a man at his club. Men who have no li- ! braries of their own, do the most of their reading ! there. It is the place to see great men, fashionable I men, famous men ; and to see them without their masks for the security, as to the proper introduction of all present, throws an atmosphere of marked laisser- allf.r around sensitive greatness. We sat down, however, to comment upon the igno rance as to our country, shown by the late narrow- viewed movement of club-exclusion the evident igno rance of any distinction between state responsibility and national responsibility. To mention it is enough, however; and we turn to that which will show the out-lying proof of English ignorance of us. One of the dullest, most arrogant, and unscrupulous of travellers is commended in the last foreign quarter ly, by one of the most unfair and ignorant of critics. If all travellers and critics were like this well-matched pair, the subject of British tourists and reviewers, and their opinions and statements concerning us would not be worth a thought. Of the capacity and information of the reviewer, take one or two specimens. " The unanimity of whigs, lories, and radicals, upon the one topic of American society (i. e., in condemnation) is a thing to wonder at and reflect upon." Two of the most readable works of this class within the last ten years are decidedly favorable those of Miss Martineau, and the Hon. Charles Augustus Murray. A more striking instance still of the reviewer s utter ignorance or most shameful falsification is his representing the internal traffic in slaves as j)ublicly repudiated, and founding on that a charge of duplicity, since "men are ready to swear there is no such thin"; from one end of America to the other as a trade in slaves." A very suitable person this to write comments on American travels ! With such endorsements Mr. Featherston- haugh s statements can not but pass current ! We did not suppose there was, in the obscurest corner of Europe, one dabbler in ink so profoundly and inex cusably ignorant as not to know that slaves were openly bought and sold in the slave states of this country. That such Cimmerian darkness (to make the most charitable supposition) should envelope the brain of a British reviewer is a marvel indeed! It was not, however, to expose such ignorance that we took up the pen, nor to draw the very natural con clusion of the amount of information, which Mr. F. s book conveyed to his countrymen at large, since, not withstanding the title "slave states," his reviewer con cluded there was no acknowledged slavery for with out purchase and sale the system is of course knocked on the head. But such are not all British tourists, nor such all British reviewers; and it is worth while to inquire why it is, that, placing out of the account writers of this class, there is still so large a proportion of our well- informed and sensible visitants, who get an unfavor able impression of our institutions and of our state of society. We ought to give up the idea of a prevalent ill- feeling toward us in the fatherland of our ancestors, or a wish to put us down, because we are on the wrong side of the water. Few Englishmen like us the less because we are Americans, and not French or German or Russians. Thousands of us when abroad have ex perienced the contrary. Nor ought we to suppose that envy, jealousy, or ancient grudges, are at the bottom of the hard measure meted out to us by tourists. True, we have met in war as enemies, and in peace as commercial rivals, and have in both held our own; but meanness and spite form no part of the character of John Bull. He has tremendous faults, but he keeps tolerably clear of pettinesses. One fault shows itself with the English abroad, wherever they are. Though the greatest travellers, they are the least cosmopolitan. The island mania attends them everywhere, except at home. Like some mistresses to some lovers, old England seems the dearer the farther they get away from her. Gold smith s Traveller s lengthening chain is no ficiion. Across the ocean it is often insupportable. Some times, also, this distance has, at the outset of the voyage, " lent enchantment to the view," which, when dispelled, leads to a bitter, though unreasonable dis appointment. The very resemblance which we bear to the Eng lish and must bear, from our origin, our language, our literature, and our continued intercourse ever since the ocean rolled between us is unfavorable to a just, and still more to a partial judgment of us, on the part of those honestly disposed to do us justice. To other people the British traveller can apply, in some measure, the true standard i. e., to each its own ; but for us, he can have only the home standard. Weighed by this, we are, of course, found wanting. He find us nine tenths English, and scolds that the other tenth is not English too. It is needless to discuss the point, whether that tenth is better or worse the English blood renforces (as some Frenchman has pronounced, justly we hope) or not it is enough that it is not English for the genuine John Bull to pronounce it ridiculous or insufferable ; to laugh or rail at it according to bis humor. The general resemblance he can not deny, but he unreasonably demands an exact likeness. Jn the points where this is not perceptible, he of course considers us shockingly degenerate, altered altogether for the worse. Now there are various points which we should not expect him to appreciate justly, for we know he is a creature full of prejudices and contra dictions, and he must see with his own eyes or not see at all. Another real difficulty is, that no mere passing traveller can realize the crowning glory of our country and of our institutions the general diffusion of com fort and intelligence. A traveller is looking out for the salient points something striking or marvellous something that will tell in his book and his memory. A thousand comfortable or even elegant private dwel lings that he might pass, would not make upon him so vivid an impression as one splendid palace while the former would indicate a thousand families living in comfort and abundance, and the latter that there was one family of over-grown wealth with a presump- | tion against its possessing the average worth of the former, or even enjoying their average happiness. We contribute to the severity of the judgments against us by our own fault. Our sensitiveness lays us peculiarly open to attack, and none reply to such attacks with more violence. The foreigner who 166 EPHEMERA. knows this and who can not perhaps conscientiously grant us all we ask, sharpens his weapons beforehand for the encounter, and deals harder blows in anticipa tion of those which he knows he is about to bring down upon himself. To this must be added our national vanity a characteristic which the candid among us own. From demanding too indiscriminate praise, we do not get that which we really deserve, as the trader, who praises his wares extravagantly, is sure to have them under valued. If our claims were more moderate, they would be oftener acknowledged. If we exacted less, more would be voluntarily given. If we did not rise up against deserved reproof, we should be oftener spared that which we did not deserve. When we claim the eloquence of a Chatham for every stump orator, and then apply the same phrases to our really great and eloquent men, the latter are sufferers. If we claim for our every-day life or even for our soirees recherchees the grace and polish of a court, where they have nothing to do but to kill time agreeably, the assertion is simply ridiculous. Some traveller (Dickens we believe) says of the factory-girls of Lowell, that they have the port and bearing (or something to that effect) of well-bred ladies. Pretty complimentary we should think ! But an annotator somewhere (but where we know not), is not satisfied. He adds, that if Mr. Dickens should meet these per sons in private circles, he would find they had the correspond ing elegance and manners. As if any good factory-girl at Lowell would pass muster at Queen Victoria s drawing-room ! THE NEW PRIMA DONNA. The haste with which it is the fashion to write about prima-donnas, giving them a cornucopial criticism, on their debut, and drop ping directly after into very brief notices, reminds us of a lady s reproach to her lover, in the old play of the Spanish friar : " You men are like watches, wound up for striking twelve immediately ; but after you are satisfied, the very next that follows is the solitary- sound of single one." We should like very much to defer expressing an opinion of Madame Pico, till she had a little recovered from the embarrassment of a first performance, and (more important still in critici sing) till we had steeped our tympanum a little longer in the honey the bees of Italy have shed upon her lips ; but The audience at Palmo s, last night, was, probably, the best ever assembled since Malibran s time, as to the capability of judging of a cantatrice by taste and comparison. Madame Pico, even in Italy, would scarce have dropped her golden cadences into more judicious ears. Fortunately, too, the unripeness of an entirely new opera was corrected by the predomi nance of natural melody in the composer s style ma king it all come to the ear with the impromptu wel come sometimes refused to the best music. By the way without knowing whether this opera will grow upon us, and allowing, at once, that it has none of Beethoven s under-song, nor any of the supernatural combinations of Mozart we must express our almost passionate delight in its main burthen and character. We write, it is true, by a past-time-to-go-to-bed candle, and with the graciles-que sensus still reeling under the intoxication of the cup of bewitched sound ; but if this gets to press (and we shall look it over before breakfast, to-morrow morning), we congratulate the every-day-ear of the city we live in, upon a opera that is natural as a bird s song, and that can be enjoyed with as simple a taste for music at the same "time, no more to be disparaged, for its simplicity, than the bird s throat for not having the harp-stop of a piano. But let us go on, story -fashion. The curtain drew up, and after the appearance of the usual precedent foil of chorus-singers, Sanquirico, the ben amatoofthe company, came on as a postillion. After making a bow, with the good-will of a waterfall, in acknowledgment of the applause with which he was met, he went on playing his part, and (to dismiss him with this brief notice) most admirably to the last. The make-way motions of the guard and the aspettando impatience of the music, now prepared us for the prima-donna. She was to represent a young girl, under the protection of the prince and princess, whose escape from ruin by a villain is the story of the opera. "Chiara!" trilled the "cue" and in glided Chiara! Madame Pico has a look in her face as if " Sorrow had passed that way." She has had a narrow escape of being superbly handsome, and, as it is, she could personate, with small call upon the imagination, the part of "Mrs. Helpless Ingulfus," on the stage or off it. Tho not near so beautiful, she is a strong likeness of Mrs. Norton the same low, concentrative forehead, the same something-or-other in the sweep of the dark hair, the same caressing inwardness in the white round of the shoulder. There is rather too much of a caden za in her bust, and her under lip does not always come up with the alacrity we like in a woman, but we may change our opinion. She was very much frightened, and these matters are " now high, now low again, Like a ring of bells that the wind s wooing alters." The welcome of applause ceased, and the expected voice trembled on the silence. It was listened to with pricked ears, nodded to by the cognoscenti at the first pause approved, applauded. It was a rich, clouded contralto, its depths hidden by a soprano part, like a dark well impoverished by a slant beam of sunshine. As she went on, gathering a little more control, her voice sank to the inner sound-chamber where the heart sits to listen, and the audience, instead of louder applaud ing, began to murmur their admiration. Evident as it was that the delicious home of her voice was never reached, or borrowed from, by the notes of that soprano part, there was a kind of full forth-shadowing of reser ved power which made, even what she did sing, satisfy the ear. And then, occasionally, where the lower notes approached her treasury of un-used power, she flung out a contralto cadence upon the air with an ef fect the audience waited impatiently to hear repeated. We feel bespoken to be enchanted with a fair develop ment of that full throat s capabilities. Artistic com parison apart, we have a passion for a contralto noth ing that can pass the portal of an ear touching with half the delicacy our levia ajfectuum vestigia. Those who take our criticisms will, if they like, make allow ance for this weakness. Borghese was in one of the avant-scene boxes, lend ing her captive town to her rival with the best grace imaginable. She well may for a smiling rivalry be tween her and Pico will give each new attraction, particularly since their voices are of totally opposite quality. The little soprano comme-il-faut has her advantages, and Madame Pico has hers. Neither of them is quite the " horn of Astolpho, at the sound of which the hearer went mad," but while hearing either, as Esdras says, "a man remembereth neither sorrow nor debt." May they pull together " like Juno s swans, coupled and inseparable !" The FOOTRACE we have seen this afternoon " car ried the town" more completely than any excitement we have yet been abroad in politics not excepted. We were late, but a thousand people were on the road with us, and when we arrived, the first race was EPHEMERA. 167 just over, Jackson the winner. The weather was Indian summer, in its most bracing smile good omen, a punster would say, for the red-skinned com- I petitor! The roads had been dried pretty well hy the sharp wind of yesterday, the grass looked glossy, and King Pluribus was in unusual good hu mor as he generally is on the first bright day after bad weather. The stands looked like stacks of noses and hats, and after a vain attempt to find room in the principal ones, we descended to the course to take our chance with the great company of the jostled. As it was an object to get a near view of the runners at the end of j the first quarter of a mile, we crossed the area of the | field to the less thronged side of the course, and I awaited their coming. Several loads of undisguised sinners were near us, one of whom, a professed ma- I tron, apparently, coolly sat with a pair of pistols, wait- | ing some expected attack from a crowd of ruffians who had surrounded them. She looked quite capa- j ble of a tragedy; but the striking of the bell at the ! stand drew off the rowdies to the ring-fence, and the | pistols in the gloved hands gave place to a bouquet, j We had been thinking that there should be a compel- j itrix in the race to inherit the honors of Atalanta, and a female, by a pull of the forefinger, might easily have taken the day s notoriety from the competitors in the race. A stroke of the bell a shout from twenty thou sand throats a sudden radiation, to one point, of all \ the loose vagrants in the field and around came the i horse-fence, that in single file kept pace with the run- I ners, hemming them in from the crowd. The gro tesque-looking pedestrians hugged the wooden railing very closely as they came along, Barlow ahead, the Indian close on his heels, and Gildersleeve, the victor J of the last race, quietly consenting to be number three. The foremost man was simply "diapered," as the nurses say, exhibiting his white Saxon skin in strong contrast to the smoked hams of the Indian be hind him, and if the race had depended on muscle merely, a good anatomist might have picked out the winner, hy points fairly displayed, as easily as a horse s capabilities are seen by the jockey. They ran very differently. A plurnbline, dropped from the forehead of each, would have fallen a foot in advance of Barlow s body, and eighteen inches in ad vance of the Indian s, while it would have lain close to the breast of the erect little Gildersleeve. Barlow never took his eyes from the ground, and kept his lower jaw relaxed in a kind of shame-faced smile. We observed that his make was in exceeding good distribution, and though he was slightly knock-kneed, he made play as straight ahead as a pendulum, losing nothing by sideling. Gildersleeve s natural ballast, on the contrary, rounded him to, slightly, at every step, and his shoulders were partly employedin coun teracting the swing. McCabe, who was compact all over, trotted along like a stiff little pig, giving no where, and the Indian, a long, stringy six-footer, seemed to follow his head like a kite s bobs the near est way for a wave. Gildersleeve, it struck us, was lividly pale, the Indian ready to cry with anxiety, McCabe spunky, and Barlow slyly confident of suc cess. We crossed over to the stands, where, we presume, upon four acres of ground, there were twenty-five thousand men. It was a peculiar-looking crowd sprinklings excepted, very gamc-y. We presume no pick of New York city could have brought out of it, so completely, the stuff it holds for an army. The betting was going on vigorously Barlow and Steep- rock the favorites, but every man talking up his coun tryman. The Irish swore up McCabe as he came along, the English applauded Barlow, the New-York ers encouraged Gildersleeve and the Indian. Mean- ime, the horse-fence-men rode open the crowd with triking and shouting; betting-books were whipped ut at every completed mile; boys cried cigars; row- ies broke down barriers and climbed into the stands ; he men on the roofs pointed after the runners, and allooed the gainings and losings; and every third minute the naked white shoulders came round ahead, nd it was manifest that Barlow gained constantly, nd, unless the little Yankee or the Indian could over- aul him by a miraculous push, he was sure to win. They came along for the tenth mile, and the crowd were almost still with anxiety. The overtaking rush, iy which Gildersleeve won in the last race, was now xpected of him by his backers. Barlow passed, a mndred feet ahead ; Steeprock strained after, with a ponge at his lips, and his knees tottering; Gilder- leeve came third, a spectacle of pallor and exhaus- ion ; Greenhalgh, another Englishman, was evidently naking more speed and that was the last we saw of hem in motion. With the thousands rushing in from all sides we vere swept toward the judges stand. The horsemen ame on, in the midst of a sea of heads keeping pace thh them, whips going, shouts pealing, boys and bul- ies screaming, swearing, and crowding. " Barlow !" Barlow!" "Barlow!" arose from hundreds of wild oices, and the tumult of inquiry as to the others grew deafening. We backed out a little to hear the ictor called off by the judges. A moment s stillness vas procured, and the competitors were named from he standin the order in which they had come in: Barlow, Steeprock, Greenhalgh, Gildersleeve. The ime made by the winner was ten miles in fifty-four minutes twenty-one seconds. As we turned away, Gildersleeve was brought along )y two men, with his eyes half closed and his tongue oose in his lips; and he seemed just able to place his eet, one after the other, mechanically, as he was ifted over the ground. A sicker-looking man we never saw. A minute after, Barlow appeared above he crowd, on a man s shoulders, waving his hand and smiling quite composedly, and the shouts, apparently "rom every voice, hailed him victor. P. S. We had nearly forgotten a good conundrum he race gave birth to : Question. Why did Barlow run so like a locomo tive yesterday ? Answer. Because he had behind him an Indian- near. NEW TRIAL OF CULPRIT POETS. Mrs. Oilman has invented a new kind of book ("Oracles from the Poets," of which we gave a notice a few days ago), and the opening preface, very charmingly written, tries the poets by new standards altogether. She had occasion to ransack all the popular authors for an swers to the fate-questions of her Fortune-Teller, and of course she discovered where lay the most thought and feeling of a peculiar character. She begins by finding out that poets are benevolent. She had great difficulty in finding sixty answers to the question, " To what hare you a distaste or aversion ?" while " What gratifies your taste or affections 7" was stuff as common as ctover. She says that in Shakspere there is a singular lack of mention of places of residence, and there seems not to be even a fair proportion of pas sages descriptive of musical sounds, hours, seasons, and (except in the Winter s Tale) of flowers. In Wordsworth, scarcely a flower or musical sound is de scribed. They are alluded to, but not painted out. The poetry of Crabbe, though abounding in numer ous characters, could furnish almost nothing for her purpose, on account of their being woven into the general strain of his narrations. Shelley, Landon, and Howitt, are eminently the poets of flowers, while 168 EPHEMERA. Darwin, with a whole "Botanic Garden" before h and Mason, in his "English Garden," gave none fairly entitled to selection. Few passages of any sort, except those hackneyed into adages, could be gained from Milton, on account of the abstract, lofty, and continuous flow of his diction. Coleridge has cor responding peculiarities. Keats and Shelley are the poets of the heavens. Byron, with faint exceptions, does not describe a flower, or musical sound, or place of residence. The AMERICAN POETS, in contradis tinction to their elder and superior brethren of the fatherland, display a more marked devotion to nature, with which a continued glow of religious sentiment aptly harmonizes. Apropos as the living American poets are in pro cess of broidery, would it not be well to know where their worsteds are deficient, that they may shop up their lacking threads in the Broadway of contempla tion? Will not some of our several sleeping female geniuses (intellectual dolce-far-nientes, of whom we know at least a capable dozen) take up the American poets and go through them with a discriminating bod kin, showing what colors lack replenishing ? It would serve the poetry of Bryant-dom the present passing age in which this faultless poet is the flower in most palpable relief. Come, ladies! tell us what Lowell (whose fame is being worked just now) had better thread his inspired needle with ! Tell us what Long fellow is out of. Tell us whether Halleck has done enough to cover the pattern, and whether some oth ers hadn t better unravel and work it all o\jer again ! At any rate, turn up their frames of immortality and show us the wrong side! Let them mend, if they like, " Ere the worm pierce their tapestry, and the spider Weave his thin curtain o er unfinished dreams." THE UPPER TEN THOUSAND OF NEW YORK CITY. The first three of the following paragraphs are from the True Sun of November 22, and the last is from the same paper of a day or two previous: "Politically, we are all republicans socially, we are divided into classes on the European plan. There is a certain class, for instance, that lakes exer cise only on one side of Broadway the west side. The canaille, to-be-sure, may walk there too, be cause, fortunately, our aristocracy, with all its pride and vanity, has no power; but what perfumed and ringleted exquisite would ever think of sporting his white kids, mustaches, and goatee, on the east side of our great thoroughfare? That would be literally wasting his sweetness on the desert air. We under stand, by-the-by, that Stewart is severely censured for choosing the site of Washington Hall as the lo cation of his new temple of taste" and fashion, merely because it is situated on the east side of Broadway. However, if the pavement in front is sprinkled thrice a day with eau de Cologne, and Mr. Stewart doubles the price of his goods, in order to give ton to the lo cation, it may do away with the fashionable prejudice against the promenade of the nobodies, and thereby equalize the value of the property on the two sides of the street. At present there is a very material difference in the price of the brick and mortar which borders the two pavements." "THE OPERA. That this is a refined and elegant amusement, no one can doubt; but to exaggerate its consequence, to make it a grand controlling feature in our society, is, in our judgment, giving it undue importance. With regard to its being a very aristo cratic affair in New York, we can only say, that a complete refutation of such an idea may be easily had at any time by a glance at the dress-circle habitues. "TnE ARISTOCRACY. We must confess we do not think that wealth is the only essential necessary to place one in good society. We can imagine many refined, intellectual, and charming people, who do not drive equipages lined with silk, and who have nei ther coachman nor footman bedizened with lace. What would be thought of the elegance of a leader of the ton, who could take a peculiarly-dressed par tridge from a dinner-table, and place it in his hat, in order to carry it home with him ? We do not imagine that such an attempt (for it was unsuccessful) marks any very superior degree of refinement!" "There are some, again, who study a profound re serve, or rather adopt an appearance of hauteur. They are stiff, quiet, and unapproachable. These are the dandies of the cities, who adopt the Horatian sentiment of " Odi profanum vulgus, &c. You must not come between the wind and their no bility. They wear the last productions of Watson, or Jennings, or Carpenter, and display a clean pair of kid gloves, with the last fashion of wrist-buttons. You might, if uninitiated, suppose them some dis tinguished foreigners on their travels. In nine cases out of ten (hey belong to the parvenu order of the aristocracy. Whiskey or codfish has taken a rise, and their honored father has made a fortune. The family-mansion in a back lane has been abandoned for some fashionable quarter, and visits on one side have been paid throughout the neighborhood. If they choose, they could astonish, but they would not condescend. The railroad-car does not shake down their consequence. They regret this progress of one art, which makes so many other arts useless. They are delighted when they escape from the crowd and seek the hotel, where the extravagant charges prevent the danger of further collision." We received yesterday an anonymous letter, re proving us, in sober bad English, for ministering to the vanity of the rich, by an article in the Mirror on the selection of " a promenade drive." This, the re proof also given us a day or two since by a political paper for an article on the prima-donna, and the fore going paragraphs from a neutral paper, aimed princi pally at popularity with the working classes, are suf ficient indications, we think, that some bitter weed, passing for an aristocracy-nettle, is rolled up in the present cud of the reposing people. We commence taking exceptions to the tone of these articles, by stating what seems to us a fact of general notoriety that the ten thousand people up permost in this city (aristocrats, if wealth and po sition make them so) are the most moral and scru pulous ten thousand in the four hundred thousand of the population. There is probably about this num ber ten thousand who are rich enough, if they choose, to keep a carriage. Two thirds of them, we presume, were poor men a few years ago, and the children of three fourths of them will be obliged to work for a living (a flying-fish aristocracy, who are hardly long enough out of the water, one would think, to give offence by their brief airs to those left in the element below them). There is a smaller class perhaps two thousand families who have been respect able and well off for two or more generations. There is a third class, still perhaps one or two hundred whose display is offensive, from no one s knowing where their money comes from, or from their being sup posed to live dishonestly above their means, or from being notoriously vicious. Of these three classes an " aristocracy" of ten thousand one half, at least, are religious, and the remainder seek refined pleasures, and attend the atres and operas; but, with the exception of the third and smallest class last named, we venture to repeat, that the upper ten thousand are by much the most EPHEMERA. 169 exacting of moral character iu their friends, the most rigid in the support of moral opinions and charities, and the most exemplary in their individual private life. This is true of the upper ten thousand of no other country in the world. It would sound Utopian in Eng land to assert this to be true of the upper classes of any city on the face of the earth. Look at the dif ference of the standards in ordinary matters. To make a good match, here, it is necessary that a young man should be moral; and if he be of high character in this respect (and the lady willing), public opinion will not suffer his pretensions to be slighted by the richest man! In every other country the lover s mo rality is altogether a secondary consideration family and fortune far before it. Morality is a young man s best card in New York ; whether his object be influ ence, matrimony, good business-connexion, appoint ments from societies, or general position in the best circles. This truth needed only to be put in print to make people wonder it had not been said before ! It is a wretched trick caught from English papers ; and English plays, to talk of the rich as certainly vicious, and of the poor as necessarily virtuous. We live in a country where the sovereignty (that part of sociely which vice commonly noses and follows close alter) resides at the opposite end from the sovereignty of England. The more virtuous class, here as there, is comparatively powerless at the polls. The rowdy drunkard and the gambler do as much toward presi- j dent-making and the selection of lawgivers, as the I thrifty merchant, and the rich father of a family of virtuous daughters; and, as there are a hundred hus bands, of either of the first-named classes, to one of either of the others, virtue and order keep company with sovereignty in this country as little as in Eu rope! Power is at the surface of a country, and the scum rises to it. We are quite aware, that the pen and inkstand with which we write these sentiments will not be, to all readers, " a pot of lambative elec tuary with a stick of licorice." RIVALRY AT THE OPERA. The musical tilt, to de cide which was the more prime of the prima-donnas, came off last night, to the very great entertainment of the towu s ornamentals. It reminded us very strongly of the contention between the lute and the nightingale, in the old play of the " Lover s Melan choly." Borghese drops dead in the last act, very soon after a glorious and triumphant outbreak by Pico; and we will quote a passage to show how this resembles the poetic story premising, by-the-way, that a musician, playing in the woods, is overheard by a bird, who mocks him till the lute-player gets angry at the excellence of the rivalry : " To end the controversy, in a rapture, Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly So many voluntaries and so quick That there was curiosity and cunning, Concord in discord, lines of differing method, Meeting in one full centre of delight. the bird (ordained to be Music s first martyr) strove to imitate These several sounds ; which, when her warbling throat Failed in, for grief down dropped she on his lute, Aud broke her heart." But, to tell the other story "after the manner of men." The opera was "Lucrezia Borgia." Signorina Borghese represents (as well as we could understand the story) a bad mother, who, in poisoning a large party of youths, half rakes, half conspirators, for hav ing insulted her sign over the door, poisons one too many her son. Madame Pico represents the leader of the set, and does the noise and the jollification. She descends upon the stage the first thing after the rising of the curtain, dressed in a very modest suit of male attire, and figures about as a Roman Captain Ryriders, bandying dialogue here and there, but with no chance of display in the three or four first acts. Borghese, we began to think, was to have the best of it all the way through. She was exquisitely dressed, sang with as little of the split-straw in her soprano as we ever heard her sing with, and acted to her singing (as she always does) with what the Greeks called ono- matopcia movement linked with sound indivisibly. The applause was pretty well, but not overpowering. The fourth act represented the youths at the fatal supper, Pico the principal customer. After a little hobnobbing on the other side of the table, she glides round, upon her plumptitudinous locomotives, and dashes into a song, rich, rollicking, and risvegliato ! Down went the bucket for the first time into her well of contralto, and up came the liquid and golden mu sic, of a round, true fulness, that made the ear s thirst a luxury. It was a passage full of involutions, abrupt, startling, and bacchanal; but her skill in flinging her voice from point to point, with the capricious surpri ses of the music, was wonderfully subtle. The au dience was, for the first time in the evening, fairly lifted clear of the ground. On the part of the stage- company, no encore was looked for at this point of the opera. The closing of Pico s song is the signal for a death-bell and the disclosing of a hearse a-piece for the jolly junketers. The audience were not ready, however. The applause kept on till the hearses jacked out, and the song was sung over again. Oh, "ion* deliciously it was sung! No voice, however arge its compass, was ever sweeter, rounder, mellow er in its quality, than Madame Pico s. The audience murmured, and leaned forward, and ejaculated, and with one unhesitating accord, it seemed to us, gave over the palm to the contralto. The chorus-singers seemed surprised she herself forgot her male attire, and courtesied (the first time we ever saw how it was done, by-the-by), a tributary bouquet flew over the footlights, and Lucrezia Borgia rose up once more, like an apparition amid the hearses in waiting. The last act, like the first three, was all Borghese s. It is deep tragedy, and she played it well. The young man, poisoned by mistake, held his stomach till he was done for, and his letting go was the signal for Borghese to give her " C sharp," and go after him. The curtain dropped, and the applause rose imme diately. Borghese came out and was cheered till she courtesied out, but still the applause continued. No reply. The canes began to rap, and the audience seemed not beginning to go. " Pico !" shouted some body. " Pico !" shouted everybody. Still no an swer. The deafening uproar at last lifted the cur tain, and there was Borghese! led forward by Peroz- zi, and courtesying again ! And presently, all alone, with her hair down her back, her mustache gone, and a loose dressing-gown about her, the real queen by acclamation took the honors there was no longer any denying her. The will of the audience, and the will of the Italian corps, were two entirely different matters. We really do not see why these fine-throated peo ple can not consent to do their best, and let the pub lic like which they please. The two singers are both admirable, each unrivalled in her way : and, because we admire the new-comer, it is no reason why we should not still appreciate our former favorite. But see how unlike musical people in prose are to musical people in poetry. We will quote the conclusion of the pretty story we began our criticism with, for a lesson of magnanimity, after the bird dropped, broken hearted, upon the lute. " It was the quaintest sadness To see the conqueror, upon her hearse, Weeping a funeral elegy of tears. He looks upon the trophies of his art, 170 EPHEMERA. Then sighed, then wiped his eyes, then sighed and cried, Alas ! poor creature, I will soon revenge This cruelty upon the author of it. Henceforth this lute, guilty of innocent blood, Shall never more betray a harmless peace To an untimely end : and, in that sorrow, As he was poshing it against a tree, I suddenly stepped in." Another night we trust to see Borghese submitting resignedly, like the bird, to be beaten ; though if the conquering Pico undertakes, in consequence, to "pash herself against a tree," we trust the manager will "suddenly step in." THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY DINNER. We went to the dinner of the Historical Society last evening, with a mood in our mental pocket, which was as useless to us as the wrong mask for a night of carnival. We went to indulge in relaxation and gratify curiosity. We decided in the midst of confusing avocations, that it would be delightful to see Mr. Adams and Mr. Gal- latin, pleasant to listen to the voices whose words we should read in the next morning s papers, and curious to see the first menu of the opening hotel up-town. We presumed there would be some dull talking, which the dinner and the friends around would keep off with the by-play of conviviality, and that we should, at any rate, hear wit, get our cares jostled from astride us, and store up, for illustration to future thought and reading, two pictures of men who are soon to pass over to history. But (the two great statesmen who were to be present set aside for the moment) it is not easy to come at all into the presence of a large number of men of superior intellect, without feeling the dormant thunder of the cloud about us. This is partly a moral magnetism, we presume, but there is a physiognomy in crowds; and, to the eye accustomed to see men " as they come," the look of an assemblage of master- intellects is the laying of a spirit-hand upon the be holder. There were present the leading minds of this great metropolis able divines, merchant princes, formidable politicians, brilliant lawyers, scheming cap italists, influential citizens, philanthropists, scholars, poets, and journalists none of them common men, and none without the sympathy-read print upon the forehead distinction s philactery of pain.* Seated at table, we looked about upon the men we knew, and followed back into their bosoms the visible thread of which we knew the knot at the heart-strings. We have no time here (our hasty thoughts going from us, sentence by sentence, into irrevocable print, as we record them) no time to separate and describe the crowding influences that changed our careless pre paratory mood into an overshadowed aud attentive silence. We passed an evening of resistless revery much of it homage, much of it quickening to ambi tion, and in part a coveting of fellowship and sympa thy. But we can not go on with this misplaced rec ord of emotions. There are weighty and wide influences exercised by an historical society, which, again, we can only hint at, far too hastily. Historical record is the paymaster of the immortality toiled for by greatness ; and it is vital to the existence of great motives, that this treasurer s trust should be faithfully discharged, and his accounts chronicled in blazon. Affecting mention was drawn from Mr. Adams of his coming reward from history the reward of justificatory tri umph for having passed through the fire of calumny. It was over these heated plough-shares that he has * We may say, in passing, that we have seen the first men of their time in many countries, and many assemblages of distinguished men, but it struck us that we had never seen either a finer collection of intellectual heads, or finer individ ual specimens, than this occasion had brought together. walked to the luminous door by which he is about to pass from the world ; and if he could be sure of no brother-spirits left behind, to see the truth written in characters legible to the world, he would have done his great services to his country, by sufferings, indeed, mournfully thankless. In a republic, especially in an age of free-thinking and irreverence for usage, like ours the influence of a society which brightens and keeps manifest the coolly-proved wisdom of the past, is more especially all-needful. History forgotten, the present is a ship without chart or compass, trusting to the stars alone in the clouded storm-nights of politics. Ambition, with that watchful dragon asleep no rec ord to be dreaded beyond the memory of the living would be a fiend loosed upon the world. History is our citadel of safety. NEW KIND OF HOTEL UP-TOWN. We have thought that it would, perhaps, interest our readers to go into a detail of the differences between the popular hotel (like the Astor, the American, Howard s, &c.) and what is understood in Europe as the hotel-garni of which the up-town hotel is the new example in this country. The hotel-garni is a furnished house, in which the lodging is the only charge not variable at the option of the guest. A certain price is charged for the rooms occupied, and the other expenses are accord ing to what is ordered. A popular bachelor, for ex ample, makes a great economy of this. He pays for his rooms and his breakfast; and, if invited out to dine five times in the week, saves the corresponding items in his bill five dinners and five bottles of wine. This, in Europe, is considered a fair offset against patent blacking, white gloves, and hack-hire ; and puts society on a level with health, sunshine, reputa tion, and other plain matters-of-course. A common table and a restaurant are not necessary parts of a ho tel-garni, but they serve to increase its eligibility. There is a certain price for a dinner at the table d hote, charged separately every day ; but in Europe few dine at the common table except strangers in town. A fashionable man avoids it as an implied confession, 1st, that he has not been invited out that day, and, 2d, that he can content himself with everybody s dinner and company. For families, particularly if there are unmarried daughters, it is irreconcilable with position, if not with propriety, to live at the public table. The rooms in these hotels are arranged so as to unite a draw ing-room with each bedroom, and every person, or fam ily, respectably lodged, has a private parlor for meals and reception of visits. There is no large common draw ing-room, of course. The meals are furnished by ex press order, given each day, to the restaurant below, aud sent up with tablecloth, silver, glass, &c. all at the appointed hour, and all removed together when dinner is over giving the lodger no trouble, except to wait on himself while dining, or provide a servant to do so. As each dish is for one person only, how ever (or one family), the expense of such a dinner is much greater than where the dishes are cooked in larger quantities for a hundred people. To dine in private on as many dishes as you may taste for fifty cents at a public table, would cost, probably, from two to five dollars. The ordinary hotel is, of course, described by specifying the peculiarities of the other. It will be seen at once that the hotel-garni must prevail with the increase of exclusiveism in this country. It is only in new countries that families can do without household gods ; and it is only where the whole male society of a country is only unharnessed for sleep from the eternal drag of money-making, that the do mestic virtues can be left safely without private altars EPHEMERA. 171 and locked doors, single roof-trees, and four-walled ! to announce an ASTROLOGICAL CONJUNCTION, however, simplicity. Twenty years hence, we venture to say, the Astor s splendid drawing-room will be occupied by some nabob of a lodger needed no longer as a , common parlor and its long galleries will be but j f ba P e _ f v cold [ suites of apartments, every third bedroom converted into a cosy saloon, and the occupants seeing as little of each other as neighbors in a "block." There are some very republican advantages in our present system of hotels, which the country is not yet ready to forego. Tell a country lady in these times that when she comes to New Fork she must eat and pass the evening in a room by herself, and she would rather stay at home. The going to the Astor, and dining with two hundred well-dressed people, and sitting in full dress in a splendid drawing-room with plenty of company is the charm of going to the city ! The theatres are nothing to that ! Broadway, the shopping, and the sights, are all subordinate poor accessories to the main object of the visit. A large company as cheap as none at all a hundred dishes as cheap as one a regal drawing-room at her service, with superb couches, piano, and drapery, and costing no more than if she stayed in her bedroom plenty of eyes to dress for if not to become acquainted with, and very likely a " hop" and a band of music bless my soul, says the country lady, I hope they ll never think of improving away all that! And, there lies the pinch ! The senator now on his way to congress, dines with his family at the public table. The gentleman who does not choose to keep house, invites his friends to dine with him at the pub lic table. The man who prefers to dine in a private parlor is satirically made welcome to his own society if he prefers it ! The distinguished, the fashiona- able, the dressy, and handsome,^ may all dine, without peril of style, at the public (able. But since so may the opposites of all these, and anybody else who is tolerably dressed and well-behaved the public table is the tangible republic the only thing palpable and agreeable that we have to show, in common life, as republican. And when the exclusivism of the hotel- garni draws its dividing line through this promiscu ous community of habits, the cords ivill be cut which let some people UP, out of reach, and drop some ^ iii- people DOWN, out of all satisfactory supposible contact \cith society. GROWTH OF WESTERN LITERATURE. We are happy to notice that seven out of the seventeen arti cles with the names of the authors, in the last two numbers of the Biblical Repository, are from persons connected with literary institutions west of the mount ains. Among the subjects of the western writers are, The Writings of Martin Luther; Evidences from Nature for the Immortality of the Soul ; and the Natural History of Man in his Spiritual Relations. Another article contains an able defence of presbyte- rianism. So far as we can judge from a hasty view, these subjects, some of which are the greatest that can employ the pen anywhere, are treated with tact and ability, and give us a favorable opinion of the con dition of our western seminaries of learning. The remaining contributions are from New England, with the exception of one from Virginia. New York does not appear in the list of contributors names. THE OPERA. The " stars" of the opera are just through their night s work and the stars of heaven are half way through theirs. We have not the pleasure of a personal acquaintance with a single individual in either company knowing neither Venus nor Pico, Lyra nor Borghese, " off the stage." We are about and, as "many an inhumane thought hath arisen from a man s sitting uncomfortably in his chamber," we have sent for an emollient to our arm chair, in the xpecting there by to achieve our nearest perihelion to the calm clear sightedness of Copernicus. Up-town New York, a week ago, was in the situa tion the starry firmament was in, about two hundred years before the Christian era. Pythagoras recorded his conviction at that time that there were two stars wanting to complete the harmony of a certain portion of the heavens, and, in the very spots named by the great philosopher, Mars and Jupiter did soon after make their first appearance. In like manner a Daily Pythagoras, of this city (we think it was Mr. King of the American), darkly hinted in a late evening paper, that there were two stars necessary contralto and soprano to complete harmony of the Palmospheric constellation ; and, in that very troop, Pico and Bor ghese did soon after take their places in similarly har- morious conjunction. We trust history will do us justice for linking together these two marked fore- shadowings of stars " doing something for their fami- ies." [Your health, dear reader, in a glass of Cordon- )leu m m mplck ! delicious !] And now we have to beg the discreet portion of the public to step with us behind the curtain not hat (representing the rosy dawn) which drops before Vlars and Jupiter, but that (representing Jupiter feei ng the pulse of Minerva) which drops before Bor ghese and Pico. There has been a terrible rowdydow the operatic green-room. Borghese has been hitherto queen of the zodiac, and her orbit was only ntersected by nebula; of nameless supernumeraries. The breaking of Pico upon the gaze of the impartial slar-worshippers, however, and their undeniable prefer ence, of the star at fifty dollars a night to the star at double the money, sent Borghese sick to her bed ; and she is said to have vowed (with the spunk of the Lost Pleiad, who died for jealousy of her six brighter sisters) that she would never rise again if papa would excuse her. [Our astronomy is used up, dear reader, but the champagne still holds out. A glass to Borghese s better resignation, and let us go on, in terrestrial phraseology. M-m-mpIck !] Borghese commenced making position, a year or more ago, and has pursued it very skilfully, and, therefore, very creditably to herself. For a winter, or more, before showing herself as an admirable ac tress, she revolved in the japonica circles up-town, as a singer at parties, and made acquaintances and friendships exclusively among the forced-plant cus tomers of Hogg and Thorburn. Her manners were of that well-studied, eager unconsciousness, which is the modesty of nature in a hot-house school ; and her tact, elegance, and musical science, were leaved like a rose-bud tied up with a string showing what the prima-donna might be, if the young lady were loosed and expanded. As the parent-stem required to be relieved of her, she prepared to throw herself on the public; and when she did, she was, of course, plucked from neglect, and cherished in the protect ing bosom of the society that had secluded her. She has been worn in triumph, as the first flower of the opera, for a couple of seasons as you know, dear public ! But nature exacts an equilibrium; and where there is more public harmony, there will be more private discord. The children of the " boot on the map," kick against authorities, and every tuneful rehearsal had its offset in a quarrel. Signor Borghese (the star-father), not being of the sect of the Apotactiw, who renounce property, took advantage of a tight 172 EPHEMERA. place in the treasury, and bought in, " for a song," the theatrical weapons and wardrobe. Of course, whatever solvent might separate the other parts of the company, they crystallized, again, around their only possible nucleus the prima-donna who had the tog gery ! And, at this stage of the Borghese monocracy came Pico ! Months passed away. The story of Pico s errand her husband a political prisoner at Venice, and her voice the only probable conjurer of the gold key to release or relieve him was told and apparently for gotten. We heard it, and reserved our republican sympathy till she should appear. The Mirror suggest ed a concert knowing nothing of her powers but her friends thought she had better bide her time with the opera. She has done so. At half the pay of Borghese, she phyed to-night for the second time, in the opera of Lucrezia Borgia. We have come home from hearing her "posses sed" (as this undevoured cold duck is our witness) our capacity for delight plummeted our cistern of unshed tears strangely and pleasurably troubled our pen as gushing with welcome to Pico as the miraculous oil-spring of old Rome that welcomed home the con quering Augustus. [Her health in this last glass of champagne God bless her !] The house was crowded. Borghese sang beauti fully, and played as no other female in America can play. She was heartily applauded but as on the last opera night the tumult of the house was reserved for the drinking song of Pico. It is her first chance to unchain soul and voice after nearly a whole opera of subservient by-play. Oh how the first swooping away into those clear silver caverns of her throat dropping through unfathomable love-depths with her fearless down-cadences, and turning with an easy up- lift again toward the summit-perch of the careless akissimo how like an eagle s swoop it careered ! overtaking the dew falling, and the perfume rising into the sky, and, with all its fierce swiftness, robbing the cleft air of nothing but fragrance and softness. [We are getting poetical but champagne after Pico, is, as the Venetians say, tanto amorevolc ! We ll go to bed and sum up in the morning.] Thursday Morning. Our friend of the " Morning News," expresses, in his paper of to-day, a regret that "a feeling of rivalry is encouraged between Borghese and Pico." We are surprised at this discouragement, on his knowing part, of the great secret of good opera and good everything else. When are they ever so likely to sing so well, and to draw so well, as when " their souls come upward to their lips Like neighboring monarchs at their borders meeting?" He adds, that " Pico fairly out-Pico d Pico," and we should say the same of Borghese, if the name would come as pat. No ! no ! let them be rivals ! What could be pret tier ? more gracefully done, and more touchingly enlisting to the feelings than Borghese s picking up the wreath again, last night, and giving it generously to Pico? We broke a new malacca stick in applaud ing that action alone. Viva Borghese ! Viva Pico! You are two halves of a scissors, dear ladies, and rivalry is your rivet. Divide the public since both halves are your oivn, after they are divided ! Pico AND BORGHESE. These two ladies are certain ly most poculent commodities, and the town drinks their delicious music with unquestionable intoxica tion. The crammed opera-house was as breathless with absorbed attention last night as if Pico s rosy- lipped cup ministered to every heart s measure of ful ness one palate common to all. For ourself, we con fess immeasurable delight in Pico. Her voice has a road to the heart upon which criticism takes no toll the gate-opening facility of music going home. One listens to it as Shelley seems to have listened to the witch of Atlas " Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought," the very inmost tenant of your bosom, somehow, seeming to have " expected it, all along." Borghese is a treasure to a town an uncommon creature such an actress and artist as we shall not see again until we deserve a benefit from the gods but Pico ! oh, Pico is of quite another invoice of goods from paradise. Borghese is the most ingenious har mony-pump that, for many a year, has offered patron age a handle the other is a natural-well spring of passionate and careless music, that would flow as bountifully, for a bird to drink, as for an emperor to stoop to. Pico s voice would cut up like a polypus not a fragment without the making of a woman in it. She neither sings, nor moves, nor smiles, as if she remembered ever doing it before ; and if she has not the great " art of concealing art" (of which we have had our half a suspicion), she is one of those helpless irresistibles that could as soon become invisi ble as not bewitch. Th.e drinking song (Pico s only good chance in the whole opera), was stunningly applauded last night, and, at the close, a wreath was thrown to her from a very select company in a private box, and thrown with a pretty good aim for she caught it upon her bosom. Out of it (or the place where she caught it we could not tell which) dropped a sealed note, which we trust contained a check payable in favor of the im prisoned husband at Venice. If we had a moderate thought during the opera of last night, it was that there could be no question of a keen taste for music in New York for here was a crowded audience, attentive, appreciative, measuring its applause most judiciously, and leaving the house delighted. We are sure a large opera-house would do with more inducements to foreign subordinates, more enterprise to procure visits from the Parisian and London operatics, better regulations for private boxes, etc., etc. We think, for one, that there is no greater pleasure, away from a man s hearth, than a good opera. ENVY OF THE RICH, OR, THE FLYING-FISH ARIS TOCRACY, AND THE No. 1 PASSENGER LEFT BEHIND. In the hurry of composition, yesterday, we stum bled upon a similitude (a "flying-fish aristocracy") which, we think, expresses that transitory duration of American "up-in-the-world," which should make the greater number of rich people looked upon with in dulgent affection by those left temporarily below. Of such short-lease wings as most American " first fami lies" fly with, there need be little envy, one would think in the democratic element they drip with till they drop again. There are families, however a small number who hold their own for three or four generations ; and, in the " measureless content" of these with their position, the democrats find offence; but one of the most curious social problems we know of, is the manner in which the old families of New York are let alone, and tacitly eclipsed by the more newly prosperous; and we must offer to our readers a descriptive similitude for this also. (Our object, it will be seen, is to take away the offence of aristocracy, if possible, and induce King Public to let us cater for them, as for all other classes, with level editorial re publicanism!) EPHEMERA. 173 A half hour before the starting of the Oxford night mail, a fat gentleman was discovered fast asleep in the coach, which was stil! under the shed- He occupied the back seat, and his enormous bulk filled it so com pletely thai there was no room for the usual fourth inside passenger. But four seats were taken and paid for, and the last man booked insisted on his right to a place fat man, or no fat man! The stout gentleman was waked, and requested to come out till the other three were seated. " He [however] knew his rights, and knowing dared main tain ;" and having mentioned his name, and inquired whether it was not first on the book, settled his chin into his cravat, and speedily snored again ! " Is this Oxford ? bless me, how I have slept!" said the fat man, rub bing his eyes, when the coach door was opened the next morning in the same place where it stood when he went to sleep . The driver had hitched his team to another coach, and the three unprivileged customers last booked were probably breakfasting in Oxford ! It strikes us that the people who are last booked, in this community, may very well monopolize the envy (success in arriving at their destination of conspicu- ousness being, of course, the chief matter of envy) and the fat sleepers, upon the usurped seats, once left out of the proscription, the charity for " flying-fish" easily forgives the remainder. If the above dues not please our friend "Cheap Jemmy," we will never do a good-natured thing again as long as we live. If he knew Latin, we should send him in a bill for a diaphoretic. AFTER THE OPERA. (Supper in 184 s room at the Astorthe brigadier here " on business" a poulct pique, and a bottle of cham pagne in silver tissue paper, also here " on busi ness" Eleven O clock, Esq., just parting from the bell of St. Paul s, with a promise to be " round in the morning." ) Brig, (nodding, and taking up his glass). Mi-boy ! 184 (lauing his hand on the general s arm). Not in such profane haste, my prompt sodger! That glass of wine is the contemporary of bliss sent to us to be drank lo the health of a bride, now three hours past the irrevocable gate. Brig. Married at eight 1 Do you say that ? God bless her, in a bumper! (gazes abstractedly into the bottom of the glass, and speaks musingly.) Ten min utes past eleven ! Well, who s the lady, and who the happy man ? 184. One of our parish, who, though he does not personally know us, wishes us to be made aware of his happiness. We have written ourselves into his bosom. God bless him for the loving door in his eye isn t so, my tree-sparer! So may all men take us in ! Try a bit of chicken now, general, or that tear in your eye will fall back on an empty stomach! Brig. And what a difference it makes what it falls back upon, mi-boy ! The salt in a tear is not natu ral, depend on it, or the in ards would take to it more kindly. What an etiquette of mercy it would be, now, to make pathos and bad news matters of full- dressnever to be alluded to in good society, till a man has ceased, as Menenius says, " to pout upon the morning !" What s your to-morrow s leader ? 184. Not coming to business at the second glass, I hope ? Fie on you for a disrespect to the bride. (The brigadier blushes, and covers his confusion by reading the label on the bottle.) How enchantingly old Belisario and his captive sung their vows of friend ship to-night ! Ah, musir and lights ! things are TO much finer for embellishing ! Our small friendship now, general brought forward to the prompter s cup board and foot-lights do you think it would be en cored, like that ? Brig. As you don t ask for information, mi-boy, i let s proceed to business. Can you give me an idea of your to-morrow s editorial ? 184. No ! Brig. And the boy is to come for it at seven ! 184 (seizing a pen). What shall it be ? Brig. Why, there s the mud in the streets and the Bohemian Girl and the wretched weather and the menagerie and Vandenhoff and Stuart s candy- shop and Mrs. Coles 184. By the by ! a discovery ! r Tryon ought to head his play-bills with the Marsellois war-cry " to arms ! to arms !" I never saw a pair in my life more exquisitely moulded and polished than Mrs. Coles s, of the Bowery circus as shown after her third undoing on horseback! It takes a symmetrical woman, of course, to stand tiptoe upon a flying horse, and strip, from a jacketed Cracovienne to a short sleeved evening dress but ladies of this vocation, well | made in all other respects, are usually thin from the elbow to the shoulder. Shall I make a " leader" of Mrs. Coles ? Brig. Certainly not, mi-boy ! nor a follower either ! Just indicate, as it were call attention mysteriously hint somehow that there is a part of the equestrian performance that reminds you of things you saw in Italy statuary or something delicately, mi-boy very delicately ! What else have you got down there in your memorandum-book? 184. Half a dozen topics. Here s a note that I smells of "above Bleecker," requesting us to implore of Japonica-dom not to give parties on opera-nights! Really, they should not ! The opera is a rare luxury, without which a metropolis is like a saloon without a I mirror, and there should be a little combination, among refined people if not to give it extra support, ! at least to throw no hinderance in its way. They do ! this in London (where, by the way, there are but ! two operas a week, and it would be quite enough here) | Lady Blessington, for one, never " at home" on opera-nights, and dinner-parties are given-at an earlier hour to release people in time. The quality of the opera depends, of course, on its enthusiastic support, ; and those who can appreciate it can do no less, I i think, than to go in full dress, and go habitually. It I is far pleasanter than a party, is over at bearable bed- time, and, just now, the company at Palmo s is too good to be slighted. And, by the way, have you thought how gloriously Pico has beggared the loud trumpet we blew for her on her first appearance! "Ants," says the old proverb, "live safely till they have gotten wings, and juniper is not thrown away till it hath gotten a high top." She is neither your ant nor your juniper-blossom is she general ? Brig, (who has been dozing). Not my aunt, mi- boy, whoever you re talking of. I never had one- hope I never shall ! 184. What s that note falling out of your pocket, meantime ? Sri*. Well thought of I brought it to you for a paragraph. What do you think it is ? A complaint from the ladies that the young men waylay them on the staircases ! 184 Heavens and Sabines ! wait till I dip my pen in the thunder-stand ! Who? How? When? How many ? Brig. At parties at parties my dear boy don t , be violent ! This lady declares (brigadier opens the note) that it is a " perfect nuisance, the mere descent from the dressing-room to the ball-room" "a pretty girl has to comedown a perfect ladder of boys every stair an engagement to dance" " no chance for a 174 EPHEMERA. pick" " her mind fatigued with the effort to remem ber her partners" " no hope of dancing with a grown up man from Christmas to April" " green talk alto gether" " dreadful sense of unripeness" " no sub ject but Pico and Polka" " begs we will write the boys off the staircase," etc., etc. You see your sub ject. 184. Shall I tell you why that was not written by a woman ? Don t you see that if this system of long lists of engagements were done away, a lady would have no escape from a disagreeable partner no plea of too many engagements no chance for a lie whiter than many a truth ? Don t you see, that (now duel ling is laughed at) a lady can leave out an early part ner on the list, or slip a tardy one in, with perfect ease and comfort distressing nobody s mamma with fears of Hoboken! Leave the ladies alone for put ting down troublesome usages ! Your letter was written by some old coxcomb going out of fashion, who can get nobody to dance with him, and lays it to the boys on the staircase ! Tut! Brig. Twelve o clock, and where s your leader ? Oh, mi-boy, think of to-morrow s paper ! 184. Hang the leader ! Let s go without it once in a way ! Brig. Gracious ! no ! What will the public say ? There goes one o clock ! Bed-time (for me not for you) and nothing from you for the boy in the morn ing ! Oh, mi-boy, sit up! Go and wash your face, and feel fresh! Write a paragraph requesting the Mirror brides to send their champagne, hereafter, ex clusively to the talking partner! Where s my hat ? Get inspired, mi-boy, get inspired ! Good night! 184. Stay stay stay! Listen to this! (184 reads the foregoing dialogue to the brigadier, whose face gradua .ly reassumes its usual serene placidity. He lays down his hat and picks another wing of the chicken.) Brig. And you have been writing this down, all the time, with your hand deep in that old cabinet ! Bless me, what a boy you are for expedients! I thought you was scratching autographs, or writing " Pico," or sketching Glenmary, or something ! But you haven t mentioned the weekly? 184. Poh ! it doesn t want mentioning. Brig. Not more than the sun and moon, and other periodicals but you trust the world s memory too much, my worky ! They d forget the sun shone if it wasn t down in the almanac ! Say something! 184. Well, let s see ! It s our diary of the world s goings-on and what we think of it published every seventh day. It is a week s corn, ground, sifted, and bagged, for those who can t go to mill every day. It is a newspaper without the advertisements and other trumpery at half price, in consequence of lumber left out and one postage instead of seven. It is edited every day, and other weeklies are edited once a week. It gives the news, the fashions, the fun, the accidents, the operas, and our all-spice to make it keep, in a handsome, preservable shape bindable for reference and re-reading "the times" as it were, "boned and potted." Shall I say any more ? Brig. Three dollars a year 184. Mum, man ! Never mention money after midnight ! What will the angels say ! Go to bed ! go to bed ! (Exit brigadier, after a silent embrace.) AFTER THE OPERA. A FEW GRAVE REMARKS WHILE SUPPER IS COMING. The Cinderella-tude of Madame Pico s own situa tion, in the operatic corps, and her still disputed claim to the "glass slipper" of preference, sent us to Pal- mo s, to-night, with somewhat of an owl upon our shoulder. We dreaded Prince Public s final choice between her and the favorite daughter of Don Mag- nifico for the real- life opera had come to its last act, and, as she should or should not, make the most of the opportunity (of which we had done our best to be the " Pilgrim Alidoro"), she would, or would not, wear to-morrow the crown of Palmo-dom. The cur tain is down, and ENTER SUPPER FOR NO. 184. Before we grow too enthusiastic for the nice distinc tions of criticism, let us say a word of the general performance of the opera. Why the frisky Signer Antognini, whose conceit, " Ploughed by the sunbeams only, would suffice For the world s granary/ was cast in a part that the unemployed Perozzi would have done so much better, and so much more agree ably to the public, we have no Italian spectacles to see. And apropos if it is the object of the com pany to please and draw, why did not Borghese (ex cept that silver is less tractile than gold) take the sec ond role in this opera, as Pico did in Lucrezia Bor gia ? The part sustained by Miss Moss has rather more scope in it than that of Orsini, and how vastly more attractive the opera, so cast, would be to the public ! Signor Tomasi showed the vertebras in his voice, to-night, more than he did in Belisario prob ably from stooping with difficulty to the comic ; but Sanquirico what shall we say of his admirable per sonable of Don Magnifico ? We ll drink his health by way of answer. (A lei, Sanquirico . ) And so ends our fault-finding. SECOND GLASS. This glass of purple Tinta, steeped in the latitude of Italy, tastes, of course, of the climate of Pico s voice ; and we are glad to vary, with this redolent bumper, the avenue to our heart so breaking up the ear s monopoly of toll. Health to Cinderella tri umphant! Her voice has a flavor (if this wine be like it and it is the sun s fault if it is not like it for the same cupful of his mellow light fed the grape from which gushed the wine and the lip from which poured the melody) worthy of the immortality of Falernian. (For this discovery of homogeneousness of pulp we beg a medal from the Institute.) We were afraid, as we said before, that Pico, " like a careless farrier, would lame her well-shod glory with the last nail," but she sang throughout with un blemished deliciousness, and the " piu mestar," at the close, fairly took the town ! Nothing has been heard like it, in this city, since Malibran, either in voice or execution. We have made up our mind about Pico. Her abandon is like the apparent carelessness of all kinds of genius -fearless trust after finished study. Of that desperate and intoxicating let-go, Borghese has none. She is artistic and careful in the most pas sionate extremity, dying, even, "with her wits all about her." Pico fastens each link of the composer s melody in her brain, with workmanlike fidelity; but when she comes out from her music-smithy, she brings with her no memory of the clink of hammer and rivet. In that relying forgetfulness lies the mys tery of her charm. It is recognised, by the instinct men have that this is the quality of those who do best statesmen or soldiers, poets or lovers the most successful, in all enterprises, throwing themselves on what they have once made up their minds to, as a bird launches from the cliff. Nature prodigally sec onds the unhesitating trust of Pico s execution. Her voice follows her concerted thought with the certainty of a shadow and the fulness of a floodtide. The plentitude of every shade and semi-tone, insures, in the first five minutes of hearing her, an ab sence of all dread of flaw or falling off an assurance, EPHEMERA. 175 that whatever height or depth she stoops her neck to swoop for, it will bring, for the listener, " those music-wings Lent to exalt us to the seventh sphere." WE DRINK TO THE JACOB S LADDER OF MUSIC. A new light breaks upon us as to the uses of the opera. As~(to the wicked) common speech is a con venience and swearing a luxury, so poetry is a conve nience to passion, and music its luxury. An unhar- moni/.ed shout a succession of cries may mean anything ; but a chorus, or a concerted transition of j cries, has a meaning to convey fioodtides out of the soul. Poetry may fall cold upon the eye, but music must melt in the ear. These premises allowed, the opera becomes (does it not?) a healthful vent to the passions of a metropolis a chance (for those who long to swear and do violence), by a more innocent to wreak Their thoughts upon expression !" How common the feeling " to want a spree ." and who that for three hours has choked back tears in his throat, and been enraptured with a contralto across the footlights, is not ready to go to bed like a gentle man ? An opera is a blessed succedaneum to the many. To the few it is the loan of a dictionary from Heaven ! Thoughts otherwise mute feelings whose dumbness is the inner man buried alive, leap to free- breathing utterance with music. It is for this reason that an unknown language is the best vehicle for an opera. We wish to hear the harmony, and let our souls furnish the articulation. Don t you see, now, my dear "Bohemian Girl . " the plain reason of the platitude of English opera! paragement to the outline of the republic. It is a pyramid, in fair progression, but refinement sits with in it like an hourglass. Half-way up the ascent of political perfection, the social diagram within is at its inevitable "tight place ;" and while we remember on what a breadth of polite foundation public opinion built up society at the Revolution, and while we be lieve that, half a century hence, we shall have as re fined standards as any country on earth, we believe that, now, there is a squeeze upon good-breeding in this country (less protection for private rights and feelings than there was once, and will be again), and it is as well that those who are to suffer by the tight place should be prepared to stand it. To protect that upon which the proprietor has a right t a value, is the object of law and to put civilization. Italian music has words to it, and so has a dancing-girl a carotid artery but you wish to feel your own heart beat delightfully, and not to count the quickening pulses of Taglipni s you wish to embark your own thoughts in music s en chanted boat, and not see how it was first laden with other people s. A man s soul can have nothing in it unsaid, when he wants a libretlo to help him listen understandingly to Pico ! And now, having translated into grammatical Eng lish, the inarticulate contents of a chicken s breast, and a pint-bottle of Tinta (for the benefit of a public to whom these eloquent midnight companions would otherwise have spoken in vain), let us to bed apro- pos-imously remarking, that, in the paragraph prece dent to this, there is a hint as to the uses of an opera, worthy the attention of the society of moral reform. As the clergy are, probably, asleep at this hour (3 o clock), we say no more. (Exit " 184," with a candle.) THE MIRROR HELD UP TO THE TIMES. It is a trick of ours to begin at the other end, when the sub ject would otherwise open dry bespeaking attention, as it were, by first naming the inducement. As we have lately been pulled up for not giving credit, we may as well mention, that we took this peculiarity of style from Mother Goose s politic inducement to the five reluctant patrons of the milkpail : " Cushy cow bonny, give down your milk, And I will give you a goim of silk." Silk gown : we are about to show how we have Five dollars, paid back, will satisfy a man who has been robbed of five dollars; but the thief goes to prison besides. A wound given to a man is soon healed and forgotten, but the assailant is condemned for a felon. A newspaper-attack upon a man, for pe culiarities with which the public have no business, may be a deeper offence to him than the loss of half his fortune, yet the attempt at remedy by law is worse than bearing it in silence. The damages given are rifling and nominal, and the prosecution propagates the evil. The above is a skeleton statement, to which the memory of every newspaper-reader will supply the flesh-and-blood illustrations. A late decision in Mas sachusetts, justifying an unnecessary libel on the ground of its truth, threw off, to our thinking, the last skin of the metamorphosis. There is left, now, no protection, by law or public opinion, to anything but the pocket and the person of the citizen. His private feelings, his domestic peace, his hard-won respect from other men, his consciousness of respectability abroad commodities of more value to him than money are outlawed, and, if wronged, left to his in dividual avenging. Few republicans need to be told that the law casts o formidable shadow unless shone upon by public pinion. The law of libel is powerless, because the icense of the press is agreeable to the public. If it ,ere not so, the libeller would not find himself, after onviction, still on the sunny side of public favor lor would judges charge juries with the little emphasis hey do nor would juries give, as they do, damages hat turn the plaintiff into ridicule! There is another thing that republicans need not be old : that where a just remedy is denied by the law, he individual takes the penalty into his own hands ;he same public that left him to administer it, kindly warding off the law when he is tried for the retribu tive assault and battery. A case of this sort lately occurred in the tabernacle city. A family of the most liberal habits and highest private worth just risen to wealth by two generations of honest industry chose to marry a daughter with entertainments pro portionate to their fortune. A malicious editor, avow edly " to make his paper sell," and for no other rea son, came out with a foul-mouthed ridicule of the festivities, that completely destroyed the happiness of the brightest domestic event of their lives. One hun dred thousand dollars would have been no inducement to the family to suffer the pain and mortification that were, and will be for years, the consequences of that unprovoked outrage. But where lay the remedy ? The law would perpetuate the ridicule, without giv- in(T damages that would outweigh the additional sale 1U S *"* T . i . _ -i_:_ _. .~ .1,.,* *V in arrived at the conclusion, that, in the state of the country now "opening up," it will be necessary for every eentleman to be a pugilist. We beg to premise, that the state of things we are would have been, had there been puonc opinion i, about to show forth is by no means a sign of repub give power to the law) ca led on the defendant lican retrogression. We are about to record no dis- ! would have been) and whipped him severely; ai of the paper. It chanced, in this case, that the in jured man was of athletic habits and proportions, and the editor was small and puny. The plaintiff (that would have been, had there been public opinion to 176 EPHEMERA. when tried for the assault and bnttery, was punished with a fine next to nothing. The public opinion of the city of " broad philacteries" virtually justified both outrages. But where would have been the rem edy, if the physical superiority had been on the oth er side, or if the popular blight-monger had been an unassailable cripple ? Another case of legal justification of club-law lately occurred in this city. It is so marked an instance, also, of the social impunity of printed injuries (the in- flictor, Mr. Gliddon, being still a popular lecturer, and glorified daily by the model family-newspaper of Boston), that we venture to quote three or four pas sages from the libel. Mr. Cooley, the flogger, had described, with humorous ridicule, some people he saw in Egypt, and Mr. Gliddon takes it for granted (though it is denied by Mr. Cooley) that the ridicule was aimed at himself and his father. A pamphlet of thirty or forty pages of abuse of Cooley is the retort to this supposed allusion, and from a notice of the pamphlet in a daily paper, we copy three or four of its quoted sentences: "If, since the publication of The American in Egypt, it be a work of supererogation on his part (Gliddon s) to place upon public record the petulant vagaries of an upstart, to recall the petty shifts of an itinerant miser, to unmask the insidious insipidities of a would-be author, or to refute the falsehoods of a literary abortion, it will be allowed that the deed is none of his seeking, but has been fastened on him, as the only course within the letter of American laws whereby a poltroon can receive chastisement from those who would have gladly vindicated their honor by means to them far more satisfactory." "Again Mr. Gliddon says: I grieved that, not hav ing been gifted with prophetic vision, I neglected to apply it [the corbash] in the Thebaid to Mr. Cooley himself, for I may never have such an eligible chance again. " " Had he been in Cairo at the time [of my depar ture from that city], he should have laid aside all of ficial character, even at the risk of eventual censure, and Mr. Cooley should not have perpetrated his pas quinade in Arabia Petrea and Palestine, before he [Gliddon] had hung a cowskin on those recreant limbs! " " If he [Gliddon] do not now apply a horsewhip to Mr. Cooley s shoulders, it is solely because, in a com munity among which both are residing, the satisfac tion he should derive from a physical expression of his obligations to Mr. Cooley, might prove more ex pensive than the pleasure is worth." " Our relative positions have been, and, so far as may depend on him, will remain perfectly distinct ; for possible affluence will never raise Mr. Cooley to the social standing of a gentleman. " " Mr. Cooley s fractiousness is confined to paper pellets. Innate cowardice is a guaranty for his never resorting to a different manifestation of his vicious, though innocuous waspishness." The first time Mr. Cooley saw Mr. Gliddon after these expressions of restrained warlike impatience, he gave him a beating. Mr. Gliddon prosecuted him for assault and battery, recovered " five dollars damages," and went on lecturing with high popular favor. What was Mr. Cooley s remedy for being published as " no gentlemen," a "miser," and a "coward," who had three times escaped personal chastisement? Mr. Cooley is not the "loafer" these epithets would seem to make him. He is a man of fortune, and a most excellent citizen, with highly-respectable connexions, and a hearth blessed with the presence of beauty and refinement. A duel would have brought upon him a ridicule more formidable than personal danger the law on the subject is a cipher and, to remove the pointed finger from waiting on him at his very table, he was obliged to chastise the man who stigmatized him. One more proof of the same new state of things, though in a different line. A highly-educated young lawyer in this city, in canvassing for the whigs, during the late political contest, was severely whipped by three members of the leading democratic club. He lay a-bed a week, recovering from his bruises, and, at the end of that time, walked into a meeting of the club referred to and demanded a hearing. Order was called, and he stated his case, and demanded of the president of the club that a ring should be formed, and his antagonists turned in to him one after the other. It was enthusiastically agreed to, and the three bullies being present, were handed over to him and handsomely flogged, one after the other. Of course this is not all we are to hear of such a man; but who will deny, that when he comes to stand for congress, he will not have counterbalanced, by this act, the disadvantage of belonging to one of the most aristocratic families of the city ? We are expressing no discontent with our country. We are playing the Mirror only showing the public its face, that it may not forget " what manner of man" it is. We have shown by facts, that there is no more remedy among us, for the deepest injuries that can be inflicted, than there is among wild beasts in the forest. Duelling is as good as abolished, we rejoice with all our hearts but it owes its abolition to the country s having sunk below the chivalric level at which that weed could alone find nourishment. We leave to others to draw conclusions and suggest rem edies. We are not reformers. We submit. But we should think a man as improvident, not forthwith to be rubbing up his sparring, as a gentleman would have been in Charles the Second s time, to have walked abroad without his sword. They have a saying in the Mediterranean (from the custom of yoking a hog with a donkey together for draught), "You must plough with a hog if you stay in Minorca!" Rev. Sidney Smith s description of himself from a letter to a correspondent of the New York American. "I am seventy-four years old; and being a canon of St. Paul s, in London, and rector of a parish in the country, my time is equally divided between town and country. I am living amidst the best society in the metropolis, am at ease in my circumstances, in tolera ble health, a mild whig, a tolerating churchman, and much given to talking, laughing, and noise. I dine with the rich in London, and physic the poor in the country passing from the sauces of Dives to the sores of Lazarus. I am, upon the whole, a happy man, have found the world an entertaining world, and am heartily thankful to Providence for the part allotted to me in it." We can add a touch or two to the auto-sketch of the witty prebend, who, we think, is one of the men most thought about just now. He is a fat man, weighing probably between two and three hundred pounds, with a head and stomach very c/mrcA-man-like (that is to say in the proportion of a large church with a small belfry) a most benevolent yet humorous face, and manners of most un-English boisterousness and cordiality. At a party he is followed about, like a shepherd by his sheep, and we remember, once, at his own house, seeing Lord Byron s sister, the Hon. Mrs. LEIGH, one of the laughing flock browsing upon the wit that sprung up around him. One would think, to see him and know his circumstances, that the gods had done their best to make one of the Mr. Smiths perfectly happy. EPHEMERA. 177 JOHN (JUINCT ADAMS. (In reply to our respected private correspondent, and the editor with his puddle against every man, and every man s inkstand against him.) When is a statesman beyond accusation 1 NOT while he is still armed in the arena! NOT while he has neither dismounted from the car of ambition, nor, j even once, made sign to the world, that he would fain stop and turn his face to his Maker ! We are understood as referring to Mr. ADAMS. We consider this present active member of congress as, beyond competition, the most potent spirit in America. " Venerable" he is and " his hand trem- hles" but his venerableness is a cavern of power, and his uplifted forefinger trembles as the granite trembles Lashed by the waves." We know there is a level on the mountain of life, where the air is pure and cold a height at which im purity can scarce come, more, between the climber and his God but, it is above where the lightning comes from it is above the dark cloud where sleeps the thunder, collected from below, and charged with in- separable good and harm. This incorrupt level is, at least, one step above the cloud in which Mr. Adams has pertinaciously lingered ; and if his friends insist that he has been long enough lost to common scrutiny to have reached the upper side of the cloud of danger ous power, we must be excused for pointing our con ductor till he is done stirring in the thunder. Persuade us that Mr. Adams is so " venerable" as to have outlived all liability to the license described by the poet : " For now, at last, alone, he sees his might ! Out of the compass of respective awe He now begins to violate all right. While no restraining fear at hand he saw." Persuade us that a vindictive man maybe safely bowed > before, for an angel, with his hand, for the first time, | fetterlessly clutched on this world s thunderbolts ! | Persuade us that Mr. Adams could not stoop his ; statesmanship to resent, and that he is not one of those dreaders of political extinction, who feel that "not to be at all is worse than to be in the miserablest condi tion of something." Persuade us, in short, that no provocation in argument, no lull of responsibility, no oracular unanswerableness, no appetite for the exercise of power, no " injury, The jailer to his pity," could tempt Mr. Adams, with his present undiminish- ed mental vigor, to swerve a hair line from good by weight thrown upon public measure, or by influence wrongfully exercised over the fair fame of the dead and the private feelings of the livingpersuade us of all this, and we will allow that he is beyond " venerably" beyond the remindings of human cen sure ! But now having arms-lengthed it, in reply to a very formal letter we received last evening condemning the admission into our columns of a communication accusatory of Mr. Adams let us come closer to the reader with a little of our accustomed familiarity. We were called upon a day or two since, by one of the first scholars and most intelligent of business men among us this communication in his hand. He left us to read it at our leisure. We, at first, were unpleasantly affected by it, and slipped it upon our refusal Iwiok sorry that so great a man as Mr. Adams should have an unbeliever (and so weighty an unbeliever), in greatness so ready for its closing seal. We should have stopped at this regret, probably, and only thought of the subject again when returning the 1-2 manuscript, but that we had been previously impress ed with our friend s courage in historical justice on a wholly different subject. This brought about the sober second thought, and we turned it over somewhat as follows : Of the allowed UPPER TRIUMVIRATE of this country CLAY, JACKSON, and ADAMS the peaceful good name of the first is, just now, closed for history, by his willing relinquishment of public action. The world owes him the glorified repose for which he has signified his desire. The second has also retired ; and, though he sometimes has sent his invincible banner to wave again in the political field, it would be a harsh pen that would transmute, and make read able by judicious eyes, the silly abuses syringed at the venerable old chieftain by the Bedouin squirt of the " Express." The third Mr. Adams we could not but feel, at once, wasoff the pedestal where the world had willing ly placed him, and had come down, once more " to dabble in the pettiness of fame." (We shall be pardoned, by the way, for quoting what is recalled by this chance-sprung quotation a com parison which seems to us singularly to picture Mr. Clay and Mr. Adams as to loftiness of public life and motive.) Dante says : The world hath left me, what it found me, pure, And, if 1 have not gathered yet its praise, I sought it not by any baser lure. Man wrongs and time avenges ; and my name May form a monument not all obscure, Though such was not my ambition s end and aim- To add to the vain-glorious list of those Who dabble in the pettiness of fame, And make men s fickle breath the wind that blows Their sail." We felt, at once, that this latter character this aliquis in omnibus, nihil in singulis was, as displayed in Mr. Adams s career, rather the mettle of invincible ! obstinacy and unrest acting upon strong talent, than the r\n of the clear metal of human greatness. There was nothing in Mr. Adams s life of toil that had not fed his innate passion for antagonism. He was a born ascetic, in whose nostrils the fiery perils of other men were but offensive smoke who had no temptation to softer pleasure than a pasquinade against a political r j va l who had made the most of the morality which came natural to him, and which, in this land, covers more sins than charity. He was not, like Clay and Jackson, great in spite of the impassioned nature for which we (so inconsistently), love the man and dis claim his greatness. He has been the terror of his time for wounds worse than murder yet gave no stab that could be "stopped with parsley." needed no shirt of penance to make him remem that " The virtues of great men, will only show Like coy auriculas, in Alpine snow. He has profited by men s not remembering that (in the zoology of the pleasures), the sm of the sloth , were a merit in the armadillo-one hatmg to move and the other hating to be st.l , and bo th tested by t w;. artivitv of motion. In short, Mr. Adarns h he has unquestionably walked to the topmost if of the temple of statesmanship, and is now the third reatest man in the country that shakes under "las exclusively pampered his own des.res, top most and undermost, by the practice of the virtues h . Inve shielded him. The toils that have advanced Sm were begun in the pastime of an -istocratic youth; and position, up to quite the end of that - second heat" of his ambition-race, was an inheritance nerseveringly thrust on him. Can such a man, while ! our ditmy^ still hourly hanging on his l.ps, be 11 venerable" beyond the possibility of censure? 178 EPHEMERA. With this unwilling mental review of the " boiled peas" of Mr. Adams s pilgrimage to greatness un willingly, as it was irresistibly and truthfully dispara ging we reverted to our first picture of his present position. We had been truly, and even tearfully, af fected, on seeing the old man, at the late festival of the Historical Society doubtless very near his grave, but fighting his way determinately backward through the gate of death and we expressed ourself in terms of high respect and honor, when we wrote of it the morning after. It is a recompensing ordinance of Nature, that the glory and virtues of a great man ac company his person and his sins lie where they first fall in the furrow of history. It is hard to look upon any man s face, and remember ill of him ; and there is many a great man, who has a halo where he comes, and none where he is heard of. We remembered nothing disparaging to Mr. Adams that evening. But in our office, with a shade drawn over our eyes, to compel a disagreeable decision of duty, we saw that the age and decrepitude, which apparently exacted submission to his will, had left no joint open in his harness, loosened no finger upon his weapons of attack. He can defend himself he has hundreds to defend him, should he be silent. His much talked-of "diary" lacks no evidence that truth can furnish ; and if the charges against him are " mere cobwebs in a church bell," the best of prayers is, that he may burst them with one stroke of living triumph, and not leave even that slight violence to be done by the knell of his departure. The last thought that came to us, and the only one we thought necessary fora preface to the communica tion, was, that now would probably be the time chosen by Mr. Adams himself for denying (and they MUST BE DKNIED !) these indictments against his greatness. The five years silence that will follow his death, had better harden over no ulcer to be re-opened and cleansed, to the world s offence, hereafter. We took some credit to ourself, for simply saying this, without recording what we have been compelled to record now the reasons of our thinking gravely of the com munication. We would have taken the other side and entered into the defence quite as willingly but the writer, as well as Mr. Adams, is a man not to be denied a hearing. We may perhaps be permitted to close this article written in a most unwonted vein, for us with a little editorial comfort from Shak- spere : " What we oft do best, By sick interpreters, or weak ones, is Not ours, or not allowed ; what worst, as oft, Hitting a grosser quality, is cried up For our best act. But if we shall stand still For fear our motion will be mocked or carped at, We should take root here where we sit, or sit For statues only. " MONEY ARTICLE" ON THE OPERA. We were de lighted to hear it whispered about at the opera, last night, that there is a movement among the people of taste and influence to " set up," by a liberal subscrip tion, the present excellent, but impoverished and struggling operatic company. The first thought that occurs to any one hearing of this, would, probably, be a surprise that, with such full houses as have graced the opera, they have not been thriving to the fullest extent of reasonable expectation. We understand, however, that it is quite the contrary. When the present company commenced their engagement, there was an arrearage of gas expenses to be paid up, the license was to be renewed, at $500; and the house, even when full, gives but a slender dividend over the expenses of the orchestra, scenery, lights, stage prop erties, and dresses. At the onlv " division of the spoils" that has yet been made, Madame Pico re ceived but sixty dollars so insufficient a sum being all that this admirable singer has received for several months waiting, and one month s playing and singing ! Her dresses alone cost her twice the sum! Borghese received twice this amount, but the other performers, of course, much less even than Pico. In the history of the first introduction of Italian music into England, in 1692, it is stated that the sing ers (an " Italian lady," a basso, and a soprano} were taken up by two spirited women of fashion, wives of noblemen, who arranged benefit concerts at their own houses, for the " charming foreigners," and inviting their friends as if to a ball demanding Jive guineas for each invitation! The rage for these expensive concerts is recorded as a curious event of the time, and it was a grievous mark of unfashionableness not to be honored with a ticket. The American public is a hard master to these children of the sun. They take no comfort among us, if they lay up no money. Our climate is both dangerous and disagreeable ! Our usages, and preju dices, and manner of life, all at variance with theirs! Their hearts are bleak here, and their pockets at least should have a warm lining ! And (by the way) see what a difference there is, even between our coun try and chilly England, in the way society treats them! We chance to possess an autograph letter of JULIA GRISI S, given us by the lady to whom it was addressed a daughter of Lucien Bonaparte married to an English nobleman. Look at the position this little chance record reveals of a prima donna in Eng land : " AlMABLE ET TRES CHERE PRINCESSE ! " Je suis vraiment desolee de ne pouvoir aller ce soir chez Lady Morgan. Je dine chez le Prince Esterhazy ou je dois passer la soiree. Demain au soir, j ai un concert pour M. La- porte, le reste de la semaine je suis libre et tout </ vos ordres. Si vous croyez de combiner quelque-choze avec Lady Morgan, comptez sur moi ! Domain je passerai chez Lady Morgan pour faire mes excuses en personne. " Que dirai-je de ce magnifique voile ! Que la geuerosite e 1 amabilile sont innees dans la grandefamille. " Croyez toujours, madame la princesse, a tout le devoue- ment de votre servante, JULIA GRISI. We chance to have another dramatic autograph, a note of LEONTINE FAY S, given us by the same noble lady (and we may say here, apropos, that we should be very happy to show these, and others, to persons curious in autographs) showing the same necessary reliance ou special patronage : " THEATRE FRANCAIS. " M lle Leontine Fay a 1 honneur de presenter ses humble respects a Lady D , et de solliciter sa puissante protection rr la soiree qui aura lieu a son benefice Vendredi, 10 Juliet, choix des pieces et les noms des artistes qui veulent bien contribuer a son succes liu font esperer que miladi, qui aime a encourager les arts, daignera 1 honorer de sa presence." This is dated from the French theatre in London, but we treasured up the autograph with no little ava rice, for Leontine Fay was in the height of her glory, in Paris, when we first went abroad, and, to us, she seemed a new revelation of things adorable. She was made for the stage by nature as scenery is adapted by coarse lines for distant perspective. Her eyes were dark, luminous, and of a size that gave room for the whole audience to "repose on velvet" in them. But we wander! We resume our subject, after saying that we never envied prince or king, till we heard, at that time, that Leontine Fay passion ately loved the prince royal the young duke of Or leans. He is dead, she is grown ugly, and we are left to admire Pico. " Much after this fashion," etc., etc. Grave people (though by no means all grave peo ple) are inclined to bid the opera " stand aside" as a ! thing unholy. We think this is a mistake. We be- EPHEMERA. 179 lieve music to be medicinal to body and soul. Wilh entire reverence, we take leave to remind the religious objector of the cure of Saul, and to quote the pas sage : " But the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him. And Saul s servants said unto him, Behold now, an evil spirit troubleth thee. Let our Lord now command thy servants which are before thee, to seek out a man who is a cunning player on a harp ; and it shall come to pass, when the evil spirit from God is upon thre, that he shall play with his hand, and thou shall be well. " And it came to pass that when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took a harp and played with his hand : so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him. The medicinal value attached to music by the an cients is also shown in the education of Moses at the court of Pharaoh. Clemens Alexandrinus has re corded that " Moses was instructed by the Egyptians in arithmetic, geometry, rhythm, harmony, but, above all, in medicine and music." Miriam sang and danced in costume, and David " in his linen ephod," and the only reproach made by Laban to Jacob, for carrying off his two daughters, was, that he did not give him the opportunity to send him away "with mirth and with songs, with tabret and with harp." We refer to these historic proofs, to remind the objecting portion of the community that scenic musical representation was a vent for domestic and religious feeling among the an cients, and that, in an opera particularly one unac companied by modern ballet there is no offence to mor;il feeling, but, on the contrary, authorized good. To revert to our purpose, in this article (chrono logically, somewhat spready !) We do not know what shape the aroused liberality of the wealthy clas ses of New York will take, but we should think that Madame Pico (as she has given us the most pleas ure, at the greatest expense to herself, and is an un protected and exemplary woman, alone among us) should have a special benefit by subscription concert, or some other means as exclusive to herself. We suggest it but we presume we are not the first it has occurred to. Will the wealthy gentlemen who are nightly seen in the dress-circles, delighted with her exquisite music, turn the subject over at their luxuri ous firesides? stract principles to which there is no opposition nothing is dearer to the heart than opinions for which we have been called on to contend and suffer. A free press, therefore, keeping open gate for all sub jects not prohibited by law and morals, is far safer than a press over-guarded in its admissions to the public eye. Having thus repeated, as it were, a page of the very spelling-book of freedom, let us bespeak, of our subscribers, a let-off, as far as we personally are con cerned, for any decent opinions expressed under the head of " correspondence." We throw open that part of our paper. It is interesting to know what people think who do not agree with us. We court variety. We would not (in anything but love) be called a big- ot. New opinions, even the truest, are reluctantly | received, and, we think, very often culpably distrusted. As far, therefore, as the. yea or nay may go, on any proper subject, we care not a fig which side writes first to us. and we hereby disclaim responsibility for all articles under "owr correspondence, 1 " except on the score of morals and readableness. To AND ABOUT OUR CORRESPONDENTS. We Wish to "define our position" with regard to our corre spondents and their opinions. Were an editor to profess an agreement of opinion with every writer for his paper, he would either claim a superhuman power of decision on all possible sub jects, at first sight, or he would exclude communica tions on all subjects, except his own mental hobbies and matters of personal study and acquaintance. To avoid both horns of this fool s dilemma, he opens a correspondence column, in which anything (short of an invasion of a cardinal virtue, or violation of a palpable truth) may very properly and irresponsibly appear. The only questions the editor asks himself are, whether it will interest his readers, and whether it is worth its space in the paper. But there are people for whom it is necessary that we should go back to the very catechism of political economy, and show upon what principle is founded the expediency of a FREE PRESS a press untrammel led by a king in a kingdom, and by the sovereign re publicans in a republic. Opinions have been well likened to steam power less when diffused abroad, resistless when shut in and denied expansion. The unconscious apostleship of Mr. Adams procuring an explosion in favor of aboli tion, by his obstinacy in provoking an undue suppres THE OPERA. The PURITAM is one of those ope ras with which musical criticism has little or nothing to do. If only tolerably sung, the feeling of the audi ence goes on before making no stay with fault-find ing. The applause last night, after a most limping and ill-paced duett between Tomasi and Valtellina, | was tempestuous ; and Antognini, in one passage, ran off his voice, and was gone for several notes in some unknown region, and yet, on spreading out his hands immediately after, there was great approbation by the audience ! Great effort was made by the audience to encore " Suoni la tromba" but the two bases thought more basely of their bases than the audience, and did not repeat it. Is there no way to implore Valtellina to abate a little of his overreaching of voice, in that superb invocation ? He overdoes it terribly. We are not writing in very good humor, we are afraid but the enthusiasm of a crammed house needs no propping. We would not find fault if they needed our praise. BORGHESE did well but will do better at the next representation. She would sing with fuller tone for a little egg beat up with brandy. We longed to unreef her voice in some way croud a little more abandon into it. She acted as she always does to a charm. Pico was in one of the proscenium boxes, looking very charming, and evidently enjoying the whole op era with uu-envious enthusiasm. She went with a bouquet for Borghese so said a bird in our ear. OLE BULL S NIAGARA. (AN HOUR BEFORE THE PERFORMANCE.) Saddle, as. of course, we are, under any very striking event, we find ourselves bestridden, now and then, with a much wider occupancy than the plumb-line of a newspaper column. Ole Bull possesses us over our tea-table; he will possess us over our supper- table his performance of Niagara equi-dietant between the two. We must think of him and his violin for this coming hour. Let us take pen and ink into our confidence. The "origin of the harp" has been satisfactorily recorded. We shall not pretend to put forward a credible story of the origin of the violin ; but we wish to name a circumstance in natural history. The house-cricket that chirps upon our hearth, is well sion of the subject is a striking illustration of this, known as belonging to the genus Pneumora. Its in- Nothing makes less impression on the mind than ab- | sect si/.e consists almost entirely of a pellucid abdomen. 180 EPHEMERA. crossed with a number of transverse ridges. This, when inflated, resembles a bladder, and upon its tight ened ridges the insect plays like a fiddler, by drawing its thin legs over them. The cricket is, in fact, a living violin; and as a fiddler is "scarce himself" without his violin, we may call the cricket a stray portion of a fiddler. Ole Bull " is himself" with his violin before him but without it, the commonest eye must remark that he is of the invariable build of the restless searchers after something lost the build of enthusiasts that is to say, chest enormous, and stomach, if anything, rather wanting ! The great musician of Scripture, it will be remembered, expressed his mere mental afflic tion by calling out "My bowels! my bowels!" and, after various experiments on twisted silk, smeared with the white of eggs, and on single threads of the silk-worm, passed through heated oil, the animal fibre of cat- gut has proved to be the only string that answers to the want of the musician. Without trying to re duce these natural phenomena to a theory (except by suggesting that Ole Bull may very properly take the cricket as an emblem of his instinctive pursuit), we must yield to an ominous foreboding for this evening. The objection to cat-gut as a musical string is its sensibility to moisture ; and in a damp atmosphere it is next to impossible to keep it in tune. The string comes honestly enough by its sensitiveness (as any one will allow who has seen a cat cross a street after a shower) but, if the cat of Ole Bull s violin had the least particle of imagination in her, can what is left of her be expected to discourse lovingly of her natural antipathy a water-hU 1 But before we draw on our gloves to go over to Palmo s a serious word as to what is to be attempted to-night. Old Bull is a great creature. He is fitted, if ever mortal man was, to represent the attendant spirit in Milton, who " Well knew to still the wild woods when they roared And hush the moaning winds ;" but it seems to us that, without a printed programme, showing what he intends to express besides the mere sound of waters, he is trusting far too rashly to the comprehension of his audience and their power of musical interpretation. He is to tell a story by music ! Will it be understood? We remember being very much astonished, a year or two ago, at finding ourself able to read the thoughts of a lady of this city, as she expressed them in an ad mirable improvisation upon the piano. The delight we experienced in this surprise induced us to look into the extent to which musical meaning had been perfected in Europe. We found it recorded that a Mons. Sudre, a violinist of Paris, had once brought the expression of his instrument to so nice a point that he " could convey information to a stranger in another room," and it is added that, upon the evidence thus given of the capability of music, it was proposed to the French government to educate military bands in the expression of orders and heroic encouragements in battle! Hayden is criticised by a writer on music as having failed in attempting (in his great composi tion " The Seasons") to express " the dawn of day," "the husbandman s satisfaction," "the rustling of leaves," " the running of a brook," "the coming on of winter," "thick fogs," etc., etc. The same writer laughs at a commentator on Mozart, who, by a " sec ond violin quartette in D minor," imagines himself informed how a loving female felt on being abandoned, and thought the music fully expressed that it was Dido ! Beethoven undertook to convey distinct pic tures in his famous Pastoral Symphony, but it was thought at the time that no one would have dis- the country and his musical sensations while sitting beside a river unless previously told what was com ing ! Still, Ole Bull is of a primary order of genius, and he is not to wait upon precedent. He has come to our country, an inspired wanderer from a far away shore, and our greatest scenic feature has called on him for an expression of its wonders in music. He may be inspired, however, and we, who listen, still ! be disappointed. He may not have felt Niagara as we | did. He may have been subdued where a meaner spirit would be aroused as " Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." (Seven o clock, and time to go.) (AFTER THE PERFORMANCE.) We believe that we have heard a transfusion into music not of " Niagara," which the audience seemed bona-fide to expect, but of the pulses of the human heart AT Niagara. We had a prophetic boding of the result of calling the piece vaguely " Niagara" the listener furnished with no " argument," as a guide through the wilderness of " treatment" to which the subject was open. This mistake allowed, however, it must be said that Ole Bull has, genius-like, refused to mis-interpret the voice within him refused to play the charlatan, and " bring the house down" as he might well have done by any kind of " uttermost," from the drums and trumpets of the orchestra. The emotion at Niagara is all but mute. It is a " small, still voice" that replies within us to the thun der of waters. The musical mission of the Norwegian was to represent the insensate element as it was to him to a human soul, stirred in its seldom-reached depths by the call of power. It was the answer to Niagara that he endeavored to render in music not the call ! We defer attempting to read further, or rightly, this musical composition till we have heard it again. It was received by a crowded audience, in breathless silence, but with no applause. Miss JULIA NORTHALL S first appearance as a public singer was very triumphant. If her heart had not kept beating just under her music-maker, she would have made much better music, however. When we tell the lovely debutante, that persons in besieged fortresses can detect the direction of the enemy s ap proach under ground, by placing sanded drums on the surface, which betray the strokes of the mining pickaxes by the vibrations of the particles, she will understand how the beating of her heart may disturb the timbre of her voice to say nothing of the disturb ance in the air by the accelerated beating of the anxious hearts of her admirers! She has great ad vantages a rich voice deep down with an upper chamber in it (what the musicians call a contralto tinguished between his musical sensations on visiting I. man is stylish, now, sfogato), and a kind of personal beauty susceptible of great stage embellishments. " Modest assurance" (with a preponderance of assurance if anything), is her great lack. Sanquirico sang admirably but his black coat spoiled it for all but the cognoscenti. We came out of the opera-house amid a shower of expressions of disappointment, and we beg pardon of " the town" for remembering what Antigenides of Athens said to a musical pupil who was once too little applauded. " The next time you play," said Anti genides, "shall be to me and the Muses." THE TWO NEW FASHIONS, WHITE CRAVATS AND LADIES TARPAULINS. Here and there a country reader will, perhaps, require to be informed that no in the evening, without a EPHEMERA. 181 white cravat. To those who frequent the opera this will be uo news, of course ; us no eye could have failed to track the "milky way," around the semi circle, from stage-box to stage-box. The fact thus recorded, however, we proceed to the diagnosis of the fashion (aud of another fashion, of which we shall presently speak) premising only that we are driven to the discussion of these comparatively serious themes, by the frivolous character of other news, aud the temporary public surfeit of politics, scandal, and murder. The white cravat was adopted two years since, in London, as the mark of a party " Young England." Our readers know, of course, that for ten years, they have been worn only by servants in that country, and that a black coat and white cravat were the unmis takable uniform of a family butler. The Cravat hav ing been first worn as the distinction of a certain re- i forming club, in Cromwell s parliament, however, the ! author of Vivian Grey adopted it as the insignium of j the new political party, of which he is the acknowl- i edged leader; and, as the king of the white cravats, he ! has set a fashion for America. The compliment we pay him is the greater, by the way, that we do not often copy the tight-legged nation in our wearables. I It was established in Brummell s time that a white | cravat could not be successfully tied, except upon the critical turn preceding the reaction of a glass of cham pagne and a cup of green tea. A felicitous dash of inspired dexterity is the only thing to be trusted, and failure is melancholy! As to dressiness, a white cravat i is an intensifier making style more stylish, and the lack of it more observable ; but artistically it is only [ becoming to light complexions by its superior white ness, producing an effect of warmth on a fair skin, | but impoverishing the brilliancy of a dark one. As a sign of the times, the reappearance of the white cra vat is the forerunner of a return to old-fashioned showiness in evening dress, and, as the wheel comes ] round again, we shall revive tights, buckles, and shoes expelling the levelling costume of black cravat and boots, and making it both expensive and troublesome to look like a gentleman after candlelight. So tilts the plank in republics aristocratic luxury going up as aristocratic politics are going down ! But what shall we say of trains and tarpaulins for ladies wear! Jack s hat, copied exactly in white satin, is the rage for a head-dress, now (worn upon the side of the head with a ruinous feather) and a velvet train is about becoming indispensable to a chaperon ! It will be a bold poor man that will dare to marry a lady ere long what with feathers and trains and pages wages ! We rejoice that we had our fling in the era of indifferent pocket. Keep the aristocracy unemployed on politics for another administration or two, and we shall drive matrimony to the extremities of society none but the very rich, or verypoor, able to afford the luxury ! MKRRY CHRISTMAS. Our paper of this evening (Christmas eve) is to be read by the light of the " YULE LOG," or whatever else represents the bright j centre around which, dear reader! your family does its Christmas assembling. We shall perhaps amuse you by suggesting a comparison between the elegant lamp, which diffuses its light over your apartment, > and the expedient resorted to by your English ances tors to brighten the hall for their Christmas evening. " I myself," says an old historian, " have seen table cloths, napkins, and towels, which being taken foul \ from the table, have been cast into the fire, and there they burned before our faces upon the hearth." This, of course, was by way of illustrating the greasy habits of our ancestors at table, and gives an amusing piquan- cy to the injunction of wisdom that we should cherish the " lights of the past." There are two points of freedom in which we envy the condition of slaves at the south FREEDOM from responsibility at all times, and FREEDOM /ro//i all man ner of work from Christmas to New Year. " The negroes" (says a writer on the festivals, games, and amusements, in the southern states), " enjoy a week s recreation every winter, including Christmas and New Year s ; during which they prosecute their plays and sports in a very ludicrous and extravagant manner, dressing and masking in the most grotesque style, and having, in fact, a complete carnival." We confess this let-up from the pressure of toil is enviable. The distinction between horse and man, in the latter s re quiring mental as well as bodily rest, should be legis lated upon all business barred with penalties, except for the necessaries of life, during the Christinas holy- days and during another week somewhere in June. We are a monotonous people in this country. The festivals of the Jews occupied a quarter of the year, and eighty days were given to festivals among the ancient Greeks! We do not fairly keep more than one in New York New Year s day the only day, except Sundays, when newspapers are not issued and shops are all shut. We are sorry we can not paragraph America into more feeling for holydays, but we may perhaps prevent a gradual desuetude of even keeping Christmas, by heaping up our regrets when it comes round. We shall join the procession of visitors to the toy-shops aud confectioners to-night, and we think, by the way, that these rounds to the gift-venders, might be made exceedingly agreeable. "GuiON," "SANDS," "THOMP SON," " TIFFANY & YOUNG," " STUART S CANDY PALACE," " BONFANTI S," and "THE ALHAMRA," are beautiful places for a range of soirees in hat and bon net, and we went this round last Christmas eve with great amusement. Happy children are beautiful sights, and we can still see bons-bons with their eyes. READER ! a merry Christmas ! and let us repeat once more to you the old stanza (tho* old Trinity is no longer what it was when this was written) : " Hark the merry bells chiming from Trinity, Charm the ear with their musical din. Telling all, throughout the vicinity, Holyday gambols are now to begin ! Friends and relations, with fond salutations, And warm gratulations, together appear, While lovers and misses with holyday kisses Greet merry Christmas and happy New Year." THE OTHER SIDE OF BROADWAY. It is time that the decline of the era of shopping a-foot was fairly an nounced as at rtsfall an epoch gone over to history. Washington Hall has been purchased as a property no longer objectionable from its being the other side of mud, and is to be speedily converted into the most magnificent "ladies store" within the limits of silk and calico. We are credibly assured that this last assertion is fully borne out by the plans of Mr. Stuart, the projector. No shop in London or Paris is to surpass it. But the best part of it remains to be told : The building is to have a court for carnages in the centre, so that shoppers will thunder in at a porte cochere, like visiters to the grand duke of Tuscany ! There will of course be a spacious door on the street, for those who can cross Broadway without a carriage (poor zealous things!) but the building is con trived for those to whom the crowded side of the street is rather an objection, and who wish their hammer- cloths to stand out of the spatter of omnibuses while they shop ! ! There is a comment on " the times" in this plan of Mr. Stuart s which we commend to the notice of some other parish. 182 EPHEMERA. Farther down-town, however (156) the shilling side of Broadway has been embellished by a new store, in- , tended for all comers and customers, and certainly an j ornament to the town occupied by BEEBK & Cos- I TAR, hatters. No more showy and sumptuous saloon | could possibly be contrived than this " hatter s shop;" ! and it is very well that they keep one article of ladies [ wear (riding-hats) for it is altogether too pretty a j place for a monastery. The specimen hats stand on j rows of marble tables, and the room is lined with mir- I rors and white panels the effect very much that of a brilliant French cafe. As to the article of merchan- j disc, Beebe & Costar have made tributary the " lines i of beauty" to a degree which gives their hats a most peculiar elegance of shape, and it is worth the while of those who are nice in their tea-men, to " look in." Apropos : The only god who employed a hatter j was Mercury why is not that " English clever" deity, with his winged hat, installed as a hatter s crest ? The propriety of it must have occurred to the hatters. Possibly we are so mercurial a nation, that it was thought impolitic no man wanting any more mercury in his hat at least when it is on. We see that the annual hatters ball comes off on the 26th. May we venture to suggest as topics of discussion in the quadrilles 1st, Mercury s claims to the arms of the assembly, and, 2d, what peltry was probably used by the hatter of Olympus, and 3d, whether (as it was a winged hat) it must not have been made of the only quadruped that flies fur, the flying squirrel? "Curi ous questions, coz !" English (and Americans) are proud, but not vain ; i the French are very vain, but have little pride. "Again: we like the Englishman s fondness for j white linen, and in this we can not imitate him too closely. It is not only in the evening, as with the Frenchman, that he puts on his fine linen, but at rising he must have it. Though he may wear a shaggy morning coat, his under garments must be I spotless. You may know him when travelling on the I continent, by the unrivalled whiteness of his linen. j The same cleanliness makes the white cravat prefer- ! able. It has its recommendation in being a clean fashion for no gentleman can wear it more than once ; whereas, the black satin cravat, which your correspondent so much extols, is an exceedingly dirly fashion for, after dancing, the perspiration settles in | the satin ; and with the dust in the room, &c., it be comes unfit to wear more than twice, whereas the French wear their cravats until they are worn out." FRANCE versus ENGLAND, or the BLACK CRAVAT versus THE WHITK. We have received, in a very j Loudon-club-y handwriting, a warlike reply to the note we published lately from a French gentleman on the subject of the white cravat. The two nations seem to have separated into hostile array on the sub ject. Our English correspondent certainly brings cogent arguments in favor of the white, and indeed of English costume generally. After asking very naturally what our French correspondent s phrase, "perfidious Albion, 1 had to do with it, and suggesting that "black cravat" had better "reflect on the late conduct of the French in the Pacific," he goes on with the matter in question : "The P^nglish fashion for gentlemen s dress is never to sacrifice comfort to appearance, which the French fashion invariably does; the clothes of the English are loosely made, so that every limb of the body is free. You see nothing in the dress that can be called effeminate ; they appear to eschew everything that approaches the Miss Nancy school ; no man with them is considered well-dressed, however costly his attire, if he be not manly in his appearance. Now, a Frenchman s clothes are made to fit so tight, that it is impossible for him to look at his ease. A French man dressed looks as if he had just come out of a band-box; he looks like a pretty doll which you see in the shop windows in Paris. To hand a lady a chair, he runs the danger of bursting his coat, or cracking his waist-band ; he can not stoop to pick up a lady s fan, without danger to his inexpressibles. The Frenchman dressed is no longer the easy, pliant, laughing man, that we know him to be when in dis habille but he is stiff, unnatural, ind effeminate. "The English fashion abhors display ; the French, on the contrary, invites it. With the Frenchman dress is a great affair, for he intends to make a sensa tion. With the Englishman it is but secondary, for he does not believe that mere dress can have any in fluence. You may form an idea of the sentiments i;i > in of both nations from this national character the i The sun "kept Christmas" yesterday, by appearing in his best." We never saw a more joyous, kindly, i holyday quality of sunshine. All who had hearts to I go abroad with, went abroad, and a-Broadway was a long aisle of beauty in nature s roofless cathedral. j God help all who were not happy yesterday ! We I picked up a bit of real-life poetry (by-the-way) in a very unexpected place yesterday a confectioner s shop ! The circumstance is at such a distance from poetry, that the flash comes before the report a laugh before the eye is moistened. At Thompson s, the best confectioner of the city, we saw a large pound- j cake, with a figure of a nun standing on it, dressed in j white, and we were told that a cake had just gone to I the sisters of the Barclay-street convent, with this lit- tie figure in mourning instead of white sent by a young catholic lady who had just lost her mother. As a conveyance of a thought, intended to be en tirely between the mourner and the sympathising sis ters, we think this was very beautiful. Perhaps we spoil it by giving the coarse-minded a chance to ridi cule it. We wish to introduce to the reader the word tonal- it]). Let us show its availableness at once by using it to express the secret of Pico s overwhelming effect upon the audience on Saturday evening. As musical people know, melody is the natural "concord of sweet sounds," and harmony may be tolerably defined as the artificial creation of surprises to vary melody. Mali- bran saw, for instance, that one of her rustic audiences could feel melody, but was incapable of appreciating harmony, when they tumultuously encored her in " Home, Sweet Home," and let her " Di tanti pal- pili" go by without applause! It takes more than one hearing, for persons not learned in music, to ap preciate the harmony of an opera, though if there be in it an air of simple melody, a child will listen to it, for the first time, with delight. But there are op eras, much cried up, where the melody and harmony are not in TONE ; and though people may be made to like them against nature (as they like olives), the ma jority of the audience will feel incredulous as to its being " good music." (We were two or three years opera-going before these unwritten distinctions got through our dura mater, dear reader; and if you are not in a hurry, perhaps you will pay us the compli ment of reading them over again, while we mend our pen for a new paragraph.) Pico sang a part in the opera of Saturday night, which, in our opinion, owed its electric power to three tonalities: tone No. 1, between the harmony and mel ody of the music tone No. 2, between the music EPHEMERA. 183 and her own impression on the public as a woman and tone No. 3, between the opera and the mood of the public for that evening. Tone No. 1 is already explained. Tone No. 3 was, perhaps, a combination of pleasurable accidents both the donnas in one piece, the house crammed with fashion, and graced with more beauty than usual, and (last, not least) the change in the weather. A sud den south wind in December, makes even fashion af fectionate, and, with such influences in the air, mu- ; sic that is "the food of love," may "play on" with entire confidence as to its reception. Of tone No. 2 jj (the p;irt in Donizetti s opera) we wish to speak more at large, but we can not trust ourself afloat with it in ^ a paragraph already under headway. Donizetti is commonly rated as a trite and not very j vigorous composer. Asa musical convoy, he never ; drops the slowest sailor below the horizon. Bur, that he lets his heart steer the music whenever he can per suade science to give up the helm, everybody must ( have felt who has embarked a thought in one of his ; operas. The music written down for Orsini (Pico s part) expresses the character that Slr-ikspere s words give to Mercutio the prince of thoughtless good jj fellows, careless, loveable, and amusing. Between this and Pico s personal qualities (as made legible | ; across the footlights), there is a tonality the town has j felt a joyous recognition, by the audience, of a com- : plete correspondence between the good-fellow music she sings and the good fellow nature has made her. j There is a class of such women some of them the most captivating of their sex, and every one of them the acknowledged "best creature in the world" of the |. circle she lives in. Here and there a person will un- jj derstand better what we mean if we mention that | Pico sat in the proscenium-box on the night of Oie Bull s concert, and, with a full house looking at her j with eager curiosity, sat and munched her under-lip most unbecomingly, in perfect unconsciousness of .| any need of forbearing to do in public what she would , have done if she were alone! We must say we like women that forget themselves ! We heard twenty judicious persons comment on the opera of Saturday, and with but one expression of never, in any country, having enjoyed opera more. The universal tonality, to which we have tried to play the interpreter, is partly a matter of coincidence, and may not happen again; but we assure the two donnas and our friend Signor Sacchi, that with the remem brance of it, and with them both in the glorious opera \ of Semiramide, next week, they will want a larger house than Palmo s. And, by-the-way, this amiable "Quintius Curtius" of the opera, who has procured us the luxury of a temple of music by jumping into the gulf with his $47,000 excellent Signor Palmo claims of the pub lic a slight return; no more than that they should ac knowledge the fact of his disaster ! It has been doubt- j! ed that he has lost money, and some of the world s cruelty has been dealt out to him in the shape of a sneer at his sincerity. We copy (literally) the ex planation sent us on the subject, and bespeak for him present public regard, and some future more tangible demonstration : "Being attracted by a statement made in the Mir ror in reference to the Italian company at Palmo s opera-house, showing the receipts and disbursements for twelve nights, leaving but a small amount to be divided by the company, after having as good and bet ter houses than when under the auspices of Signor j Palmo, whose honesty has been imputed to have made money, and made the public and his creditors believe the contrary, now the mystery is solved, and the pub lic should be satisfied of Signor Palmo s integrity, who is ready to show by bills paid, and his books, that he lias lost $47,000 the last four years." SUPPER AFTER THE OPERA. Private room over the Mirror office, corner of Ann and Nassau Supper on the round table, and brigadier mixing summat and water Flagg, the artist, fa tiguing Oie salad with a paper-folder Devil in wait ing Quarter past ten, and enter " Yours Truly" from the opera. Brig. Here he comes, like a cloud dropping from Olympus -charged with Pico-tricity ! Boy (to the " devil"), stick a steel pen in my hat for a conductor! Now let him rain ! Flagg. Echo let him reign ! Yours Truly (looking at the salad-dish). Less gamboge for me, if you please, my dear artist! Be merciful of mustard when you mix for public opin ion ! But, nay! brigadier! Brig. Thank you for not calling on me to bray, mi-boy! What shall I neigh at? Yours Truly. How indelicate of you to call on an artist to exercise his profession on a party of pleas ure! Brig. How ? Yours Truly Setting him to grind colors in a sal ad-dish! What are you tasting with that wooden ladle, my periodical sodger? Brig. Two of " illicit" to one of Croton potheen from a private still in the mountains of Killarny! Knowles sent it to me ! You have no idea what a flavor of Kate Kearney there is about it ! (finff! frnff!) Flagg (absently). I smell the color of the heath- flowers in it crocus-yellow on a brown turf! Brig. Stick a pin there, mi-boy! a new avenue to the brain for things beautiful! Down with priv ileged roads in a republic! Why should the colors mixed for a limitless sense of beauty go in only at the eye? Flagg. No reason why. I wish we could hear colors ! Brig. So you can, my inspired simplicity! and taste them, too! You can hear things that are read, and you can taste the brown in a turkey! (Turning to Yours Truly) Was that well said, my dear boy ? Yours Truly. Pardon me if I suggest still an im provement in the aristocracy of the senses ! The eye has a double door of fringed lids, and the mouth an inner door of fastidious ivory; and, with the power to admit or exclude at will, these are the exclusive or gans! The republicans are the nose and ear open to all comers, and forced to make the best of them ! Flagg. A new light, by Jupiter ! Let us pamper the aristocracy ! An oyster for my ivory gate, if you please, general, and let us spite the ear s monopoly of Pico by drinking her in silence ! ( ) Brig.( ) Yours Truly. ( ) Brig. Touching Pico is she, or isn t she ? you know what I want to know, my boy ! Disembowel your mental oyster! What ails Borghese? What is a " contralto?" Is it anything wrong or what ? Yours Truly. A contralto, my particular general, fe a voice that touches bottom rubs your heart with its keel, as it were, while floating through you com paring with a soprano, as the air on a mountain-top compares with a breeze from lower down. grig. Best possible description of yourself, mi- boy ! Go on, my contralto ! Flagg. Yes go on about Borghese what is the philosophy of Borghese s salary being the double of Pico s ? Yours Truly. Ah! now you touch the weight that keeps Borghese down ! The public, like your self, ask why the prima-donna who gives them the more pleasure is the poorer paid ! Borghese but first let me tell you what I think of her, comparison 184 EPHEMERA. apart. (Boy, light a cigar, and keep it going with the bellows, a la pastille ! I like the smoke, but to talk with a cigar in the mouth spoils the delicacy of dis crimination.) Brig. Spare us the scientific, mi-boy ! Yours Truly. Why, what do you mean ? I am as ignorant of music, my dear sodger, as an Indian is of botany but he knows a weed from a flower, and / talk of music as the audience judge of it by what I hear, " mark, and inwardly digest." Brig. But the big words, my dear contralto ! Yours Truly. " Foreign slip-slops," I grant you but nothing more ! I lived three years in Italy, and, of course, heard Italian audiences express themselves, and here and there a phrase sticks to me but if I know "B sharp 1 from "B flat" (which is more than some musical critics know), it is the extent of my knowledge. No, general ! there is no sillier criticism of music than technical criticism. You might as well paint cannon-balls piebald and then judge of their effect by remembering which color showed through the touch-hole before priming ! Notes go to the ear ; effects shower the nerves. A musician who is a critic, judges of a prima-donna by the accuracy with which she imitates what he (the musician) has played on an instrument like a light-rope dancer criticising his brother of the slack-rope, because he don t swing over the pit! Analyze the applause at an opera ! There are, perhaps, ten persons in a Palmo audience who are scientific musicians. These ten admire most what they can most exclusively admire rapid and difficult passages (what the Italians call fiorituri, or " flourish es") executed with the most skilful muscular effort. of the vocal organs. These ten, however, pass over, as very pleasant accidents of the opera, the part which pleases the rest of the audience the messa di voce the tender expression of slower notes which try the sweetness of the voice the absoluteness of the " art j concealing art," and which, more than all, betrays the personal sensibility and quality oj the actress s mind. My dear brigadier, true criticism travels a circle, and ends where it began with nature- But as the art of the prima-donna brings her to the same point, the un scientific audience are most with the most skilful pri ma-donna nearer to a just appreciation of her than musicians are. Brifr. Now I see the reason I am so enchanted with Pico, mi-boy ! I was afraid I had no business to like her as I didn t know Italian music ! What a way you have of making me feel pleasant ! Yours Truly. Pico has enchanted the town, briga- j dier ! and I have endeavored to put the flesh and blood of language to the ghost of each night s enchant ment. That ghost of remembrance sticks by us through the next day, and I thought it would be I agreeable to the Mirror readers to have the impres sion of the music recalled by our description of it. Have I done it scientifically ? Taste forbid ! even if I knew how ! I interpret for " the million" not for " the ten." Flagg. But about Borghese ! Yours Truly. Well I have a great deal to say about Borghese I have a great deal of the " flesh and blood" I just spoke of, in reserve for Borghese ; but I shall follow a strong public feeling, and not clothe her enchantments with language, till she slacks her hold upon the purse-strings, and shares equally, at least, with the donna whom the public prefer. There goes the brigadier fast asleep ! Good night, gentlemen ! (Exit " Yours Truly.") OLE BULL S CONCERT. We longed last night for one of " Curtis s acoustic chairs," by which all the sound that approaches a man is inveigled into his ear and made the most of, for we heard Niagara atten tively through, and at every change in the music wished it louder. We thought even the "dying fall" too expiring. It occurred to us, by the way, that if the text of this discoursed music had been one of the psalms instead of God s less interpretable voice in the cataract, the room for enthusiasm, as well as the preparation for it, on the part of the audience, would have been vastly greater. In a mixed assembly (of the quality of that at Palmo s last night) no chamber of imagination is furnished or tenanted except that of religion, and the very name of a bible psalm on the vi olin would hnve clothed any music of Ole Bull s per forming with the aggrandizing wardrobe of asso ciation kept exclusively for " powerful sermons" and "searching prayers." We rather wonder that this ready access to the excitability of the mass has not been taken advantage of by the violinists. We confess to a little surprise in Ole Bull s organi zation. With the " Bust of a Hercules waist of a gnat" a superb build for a gladiator or an athlete his violin is a woman ! The music he draws from it is all deli cacy, sentiment, pathos, and variable tenderness never powerful, masculine, or imposing. " The Mother s Prayer," and the " Solitude of a Prairie," are more effective than " Niagara," for that reason. The audience are prepared for a different sex in a cataract. We know very well that the accordatura of a violin is of all compass, and that Paganini " played the devil" on it, as well as the angel, and we repeat our surprise, that, even in a piece whose name sug gests nothing but masculine power, the burthen should be wholly feminine ! Fact, as this unquestionably is, we leave it to our readers to reconcile with another fact that the applause at one of Ole Bull s concerts bears no proportion to the enthusiasm, as the ladies, without exception, are enchanted with him, and the men (who do the applauding) are, almost without exception, dis satisfied with him. " Gentle shepherd, tell us why !" Even at the high price of tickets, nobody draws like the Norwegian. A very sensible correspondent of ours proposed to him (through the Mirror) to lower his price, and allow those who could not afford the dollar to have an opportunity of hearing him. He is the soul of kindness and charity, and we should sup pose this would strike him as a felicitous hint. BATTLE OF THE CRAVATS. The front row of the opera resembles a pianoforte with its white and black keys the alternation of black and white cravats is so evenly distributed. The Frenchmen are all in black cravats of course, and the English and Americans in white, and a man might stop his ears and turn his back to the orchestra (when the two donnas are on the stage together) and tell who is singing, Pico or Borghese, by the agitation of the black cravats or the white. It is a strong argument in favor of the white cravats, apropos, that the Americans, whose sympa thy is with the French in almost everything, should have joined the English in this division of opinion. We have received two or three most bellicose letters on each side of this weighty argument, and would publish them if we had a spare page. THE OPERA. Madame Pico was evidently strug gling, last evening, against the effects of her late ill ness ; but she delighted the audience as usual, with her impassioned and effective singing. The opera EPHEMERA. 185 is a very trying one, and, to us, not the most agreea ble in its general character particularly in the lach rymose tone, throughout, of the part allotted to Pico. Sanquirico was a relief to this ennui, and he so charmed one lady in the house, that she threw him a bouquet ! He played capitally well barring one little touch of false taste in using two English words by way of being funny. It let him down like the falling out of the bottom of a sedan. Several of our French friends, by the way, have re quested us to contradict the on dit we mentioned in the Mirror, touching a " cabal to keep Pico subservi ent to Borghese." A regularly-formed one there doubtless is not but the French are zealous allies, and every one of them does as much for Borghese as he can, and, of course, as much as he could do in a cabal. On the contrary, there seems to be no one in dividual taking any pains about Pico the general en thusiasm at the opera excepted. Let us state a fact : We have received many visits and more than a dozen letters, to request even our trifling critical preference for Borghese ; and no sign has been given, either by Pico or her friends, that our critical preference was wished for, or otherwise than tacitly acknowledged. This being true of a mere newspaper, what must be probably the difference of appeal to more direct sour ces of patronage? One or two persons have talked feelingly of pity for Borghese s mortification ! We are watching to see when her mortification will be so insupportable that she will slacken her grasp upon The question whether a country is ready for liveries that is to say, whether it has arrived at that stage where the want they imply is felt, and where the dis tinctions they imply are acknowledged is the true point at issue. It is a curious point, too, for, in every other nation, liveries may be excused as traditional as being only modifications of the dresses of feudal retainers while Americans, without this apology, must defend the abrupt adoption of liveries on the mere grounds of propriety and convenience. We certainly have not yet arrived at that point of civilization where liveries are needed as in England to protect a lady from insult in the street. A fe male may still walk the crowded thoroughfares of New York by daylight as she dare not do in Lon don unattended, either by a gentleman or a servant in livery. (We live in hope of overtaking the civiliza tion of the mother-country !) Neither has a liveried equipage, as yet, the tacit consequence, in America, which secures to it in London the convenient conces sions of the highway. We are republican enough, thus far, to allow no privileges to be taken for grant ed ; and he who wishes to ride in a vehicle wholly in visible to omnibus-drivers, and at the same time to have his lineage looked into and perpetuated without the expense of heraldic parchment, has only to ap pear in Broadway with liveried equipage! We differ from some of our luxurious friends, bv thinking, that, as long as the spending of over five I thousand dollars a year makes a gentleman odious in Pico s just share of the profits ! We are not only the ji the community, liveries are a little premature. It true exponent of public opinion in reference to the merits of these ladies, but, if we are not personally impartial, it is because (though we have no acquaint ance with either of the two ladies) we chance to know most of Borghese s friends. Pico is evidently a kind- hearted person, indolently careless of her pecuniary interests, and it is impossible to see the shadows of mental suffering in her face and not wish to aid her but we should not sacrifice critical taste to do even that, and we have not written a syllable that her effect \ on the public has not more that justified. At the | same time we have never said a syllable to disparage | Borghese, and have only forborne to say as much of] her merits as we should otherwise have done, because she was overpaid and strongly hedged in with sup porters. SERVANTS IN LIVERY, EQUIPAGES, ETC. There is a stage of civilization at which a country will not and a subsequent stage at which a country will tolerate liveried servants. In a savage nation, an able-bodied man who should put on a badge of hopeless and sub missive servitude for the mere certainty of food and clothing, would be considered a disgrace to his tribe. The further step of making that badge ornamental to the servile wearer, would probably be resented as an affront to the pre-eminence of display which is the rightful prerogative of chiefs and warriors. In a crowded and highly-civilized country, it is found convenient for patricians to secure the tacit giving-way of plebeian encounter in thronged places convenient for them to distinguish their own servants from other people s in a crowd at night and, more particularly, in large and corrupt cities, it is conveni ent to have such attendants for ladies as may secure them from insult in public the livery upon the fol lower showing that the person he follows is not only re spectable, but of too much consequence to be annoyed with impunity. The ostentation of servants in livery is scarce worth a comment, as, unless newly assumed, it is seldom thought of by the owner of the equipage, nor is it offensive to the passer-by, except in a coun try where it is not yet common. I is a pity to be both virtuous and unpopular. The I moving about in a cloud of reminded lordship is a luxury very consistent with high morality, but it comes coldly between republicans and the sun whatever fire of heaven the offending cloud may em bosom. We wonder, indeed, at the remaining in this country, of any persons ambitious of distinctions in the use of which we are thus manifestly "behind the age." It is so easy to leave the lagging American anno domini of aristocracy, and sail for the next cen tury by the Havre packet ! That Heaven does not disdain such Jove of each other as is quickened by personal admiration, is proved by the injunctions to the children of Israel to appear in cheerful and becoming dresses on festal days those days occupying rather more than a quarter of a year. The Jews also ornamented their houses on holydays, not as we do with evergreens (a custom we have taken from the Druid " mistletoe, cut with the golden knife"), but with such ornaments as would best embellish them for the reception of friends. The French nation is to be admired for supremacy, in this age, in the exhibition of the kindly feelings and the brightening of the links of relationship and friendship. It has been stated (among statistics) that for bons-bons alone, in Paris, on new year s day, were expended one hundred thousand dollars ! We copy the French with great facility in this country, and (until the pro posed " annexation of Paris") we rejoice in the pros perity of STUART S CANDY QUARRY in New York, and the myriad cobwebs of affection that stick, each by one thread, to the corner of Chambers and Greenwich streets! If not quite a " pilgrimage to Jerusalem," it is a pilgrimage to our best signs and emblems of Jerusalem usages, to go the rounds of the gift-shops during the holydays; and no kindly Christian parent, who wishes to throw out an anchor for his children against the storm of political ruffianism, should neg lect to bind friendship and family by a new tie in the holydays ! We see a use in the skill at temptation shown by such admirable taste-mongers as TIF- 186 EPHEMERA. FANY & YOUNG, WOODWORTH, GUION, and others, which is beyond the gratification of vanity, and far from provocatives to " waste of money." But this is no head under which to write a sermon. We have (ourselves) a preference among the half dozen curiosity-shops of the city a preference which may, perhaps, be called professional springing from love for the memory of a departed poet. The son of Woodworth, the warm-hearted author of the "Old Oaken Bucket" and other immortal embodiments of the affections, in verse, is the present proprietor of the establishment known as Bonfanti s (by our just men tioned theory of the holy ministration of gifts, employed on somewhat the same errand in life as the bard who went before). It may not be improper to mention hare, that the last few painful years of the poet s life were soothed with a degree of filial devotion and ten derness which makes the Woodworths cherished among their friends, and this is a country, thank God, where such virtues bring prosperity in business ! BREAKFAST ON NEW YEAR S DAY. A.stor house, No. 184 nine o clock in the morning breakfast for two on the table enter the brigadier. Brig. (Embracing "MS"). Mi-boy! GOD BLESS " We." (With his hand to his forehead.) With what a sculptured and block-y solidity you hew out your benedictions, my dear general! You fairly knock a man over with blessing him ! Sit down and wipe your eyes with that table-napkin ! Brio-. Well how are you? " We." Hungry ! I ll take a wing of the chicken before you killed probably last year. How many " friends, countrymen, and lovers," are you going to call on to day ? Brig. I wish I knew how many I shall not call on! What is a (pass the butter if you please) what is a pat of butter, like me, spread over all the daily bread of my acquaintance ? We." " Tis Greece but living Greece no more !" I ll tell you what 1 have done, general. Here is a list of all my circle of pasteboard. It begins with those I love, and ends with those with whom I arn cere monious. Those whom I neither love nor am cere monious with, form a large betweenity of indifference; and though you may come to love those with whom you are ceremonious, you never can love those you are wholly indifferent to. I have crossed out this be tweenity. Life is too short to play even a game of acquaintance in which there is no possible stake. Brig. How short life is, to be sure ! " We." Shorter this side the water than the other! In Europe a man is not bowed out till he is ready to go ! Here, he is expected to have repented and made his will at thirty-seven! I shall pass my "second childhood" in France, where it will pass for a con tinuation of the first! Brig. My dear boy, don t get angry! Eat your breakfast and talk about New Year s. What did the Greeks used to do for cookies? We." Well thought of they made presents of dates covered with gold leaf! Who ever gilds a date in this country ? No ! no ! general ! You will see dozens of married women to-day who have quietly settled down into upper servants with high-necked dresses lovely women still who would be belles for ten years to come, in France ! Be a missionary, brigadier! Preach against the unbelievers in mulie brity ! It s New Year and time to begin something ! Implore your friends to let themselves be beautiful once more ! (Breast-bone of that chicken, if you please !) I should be content never to see another woman under thirty their loveable common-sense comes so long after their other maturities ! Brig. What common-place things you do say, to be sure ! Well, mi-boy, we are going to begin another year ! " We." Yes prosperously, thank God ! And, j oh, after the first in-haul of rent from these well- i tenanted columns, what a change we shall make in I our paper ! Let us but be able to afford the outlay of laborious aid, which other editors pay for, and see how the Mirror will shine all over . I have a system in my brain for a daily paper the fruit of practical study for the last three months which I shall begin upon before this month has made all its icicles; and , you shall say that I never before found my true voca- i lion ! The most industriously edited paper in the country is but the iron in the razor; and though it is not easy to work that into shape, anybody can hire it done, or do it with industry. The steel edge, we shall find time to put on, when ice are not, as noiv, employed in tinkering the iron ! Brig. Black-and-white-smiths you and I! " We." No matter for the name, my dear general! one has to be everything honesty will permit, to get over the gulf we have put behind us. Civilized life is full of the most unbridged abysses. Transitions from an old business to a new, or from pleasure to business, or from amusing mankind to taking care of yourself, would be supposed, by a " green" angel, to be good intentions, easy enough carried out, in a world of reciprocal charities. But let them send down the most popular angel of the house of Gabriel & Co., to borrow money for the most brilliant project, without bankable security ! And the best of it is, that though your friends pronounce the crossing of a busi ness-gulf, on your proposed bridge of brains, impossi ble and chimerical, they look upon it as a matter of course when it is done! You and I are poets if the money and fuss we have made will pass for evidence yet nobody thinks it surprising that we have taken off our wings, and rolled up our shirt-sleeves to carry the hod ! Not to die without having experienced all kinds of sensations, I wish to be rich though it will come to me like butter when the bread is gone to spread it on. Heigho ! Brig. How you keep drawing similitudes from what you see before your eyes ! Let me eat my breakfast without turning it into poetry! It will sour on my stomach, my dear boy ! " We." So you are ordered out to smash the Hel- derbergers, general ! Brig. Ordered to hold myself in readiness that s all at present. I wish they d observe the seasons, and rebel in pleasant weather! Think of the summit of a saddle with the thermometer at zero ! Besides, if there is any fighting to do one likes an enemy. This campaign to help the constable, necessary as it is, goes against my stomach. " We." Fortify it, poor thing ! What say to a drop of curacoa before you begin your New Year s round ? (Pouring for the general and himself.) Burke states, in his " Vindication of Natural Society," that your predecessor, Julius Cesar, was the means of killing two millions one hundred thousand men! How populous is Helderberg women and all? | Brig. Twelve o clock, my dear "boy, and time to be shaking hands and wishing. Take the first wish off the top of my heart a happy New Year to you, and " We." Gently with that heavy benediction ! Brig. GOD BLESS YOU, mi- boy ! (Exit the brigadier, affected.) EPHEMERA. 187 THEMES FOR THE TABLE. Among the "upper ten thousand," there are, of course, many persons, not only of really refined taste, but of practical common sense, and to them we wish to proffer a hint or two, touching the usages just now in plastic and manage able transition among the better classes. The follow ing note, received a day or two since, suggests one of the improvements that we had marked down for com ment : MR. EDITOR: I observe that a bachelor, wri invited mocraey might wish fashion kept inconvenient, for this very purpose; but our belief is, that there is no place like a republic for a positive and even violent aristoc racy, and, if inevitable, it is as well to compound it of good elements in the beginning. Simply, then, no intellectual man, past absolute juvenility, would con sent to enfeeble his mind by fashionable habits injuri ous to health. Late hours and late suppers (in a country where we can not well sleep till noon as they do in Europe) are mental suicide. Hours and usages, therefore, which are not accommodated to the conve nience of the best minds of the country, will drive those minds from the class to which they form the objection, and the result is easily pictured. We shall resume the topic. ting in the American, recommends to and inviters, to send invitations and answers, stamp ed, through the penny-post. This is a capital idea, and I shall adopt it for one. I perceivethat abachelor i in another paper says, it will suit him and his fellow- bachelors, for reasons set forth, and that he will adopt ;, the plan. Now, Mr. Editor, I am a housekeeper, ! | and married, and my wife requires the use of all my j servants, and can not spare them to be absent three or J | LIVERIES AND OPERA-GLASSES. i here is really no four days, going round the city, delivering notes, on way of foreseeing what the Americans will stand and the eve of a party. These notes could, by the plan i! what they will not. An aristocratic family or two, ested, be delivered in three hours, and insure a unwilling to compete with the working-classes in person- sugg . prompt answer. I can then know exactly who is coming and who is not a very convenient point of knowledg al attire, choose to transfer the splendors of their condi tion to the backs of their servants. They dress plainly themselves and set up a liveried equipage as they - These reasons induce me to become an advocate \\ have an absolute and (one would think) an unoffend- of the suggestion. There are other sound arguments ! ing right to do. This, however, the American pub- that mioht be urged in its favor, but pray present them J j lie will not bear and the persons so doing are insulted in your own fashion to your readers. ; by half the presses in the country. " Yours, &c." There is another very burthensome matter, the annoyance of which might be transferred to the penny- j; classes are all in private boxes, with blinds and curtains ostcare/ bavin* / When men are busy and ladies ji to shutout observation if they please, the use of opera- But what they will bear is much more remarkable. In the immense theatres of Europe, where the upper j; classes are all in private boxes, with blinds and curta ji to shutout observation if they please, the use of ope ill (the business and the illness equally unlikely to be \\ glasses has gradually become sanctioned. It is fou heard of by way of apology) it would often be a most convenient for those classes to diminish the dista essential relief to commit to envelopes a dozen cards, i across the house, since they have the choice of sec It is found nee clu- and with an initial letter or two in the corner,* ex- sion behind curtains which those in the pit have not. pressive of good-will but inability to call in person, Abstractly, of course, the giving to a vulgarian the make and return visits without moving from counting power to draw a lady s face close to him lor a house or easy-chair. This, in a country where few hour s examination, would be permitting a gross li- keep carriages, and where every man worth knowing j cense. This being the custom in Europe, however, has some business or profession, should be an easy pit is adopted with no kind of comparisons of rca matter to brin- about ; and, if established into a usage why, in New York. We budd an opera-house, si- larger than a drawing-room, and light it so well, and matter to bring about ; and, if established into a usage that gave no offence, would serve two purposes re- ; reasons scarce lieving the ill or busy, and compelling those, who so arrange the seats, that people are as visible to each really wish to keep up an acquaintance, at least to other as they would be m a drawing-room ; and m send cards once in a wLe, as reminders. this cosy place, allow peon e -to coolly -^ -r We wish that common sense could be made fashion able among us vigorously applied, we mean, to the fashions of the best style of people. Why should not , opera-glasses and turn them full into the faces of those they wish to scrutinize. So near as the glass is, too, it is utterly impossible not to be conscious of being . the insufferable nuisance of late parties be put down looked at and the embarrassment ,t occas.ons , to very in this country by a plot between a hundred of our young ladies ,s easy enough shown. We have used . *J . J . . i , .1 _ 1 _ :, nnvaalT fHafMHlflA 111 Knmf* Wfi (lO 33 sensible and distinguished families? In England they are at the dinner-table between six and ten ; but why should ive, who seldom dine later than three or four, yawn through a long unoccupied evening before going out, merely because they go to parties at eleven in London ? Why should it not be American, to revise, correct, and adapt to differences of national character, the usages we copy from other countries ? The sub ject of late parties is constantly talked over, however, and as all are agreed as to the absurdity of the fashion, a hint at it, here, is enough. There are other usages which require remodelling by this standard, but while we defer the mention of them at present, we wish to allude to another argu ment (in favor of common sense applied to fashion) remoter and perhaps weightier than mere convenience. It is simply, that, if an aristocracy is to be formed in this country, the access to its resorts must be kept convenient for men of sense, or society will be left ex clusively to fools. Believers in the eternity of de- T. R. M., for instance (meaning this to remind you of me), written in the corner of a card, might imply that the friendly wish had occurred, though the call was overruled by hinderances this impertinence ourself (because in Rome we do as Romans do), but we never yet have levelled a glass I upon a face without seeing that the scrutiny was at I once detected. Since we have preached on the sub ject, however, we shall " go and sin no more." " We ask for information :" is the difference of reception, for these two European customs, explain able on the ground that opera-glasses are a mxury within the reach of most persons, and liveries are not J Dp republicans only object to exclusive impertinences? OPERA LAST NIGHT We presume we are safe in saying that no four inhabitants in New York gave as much pleasure last night as Pico, BORGHESE, fK- ROZZI, and VALTELLINA. We certainly would not have missed our share for any emotion set down i among the pleasures of Wall street well as we know the let-up of an opportune discount ! 1 hat emperor of Rome who poisoned Britannicus because he was i a better tenor than himself, and slept in his imperial bed with a plate of lead on his stomach to improve his voice, knew where music went to, and ot what 188 EPHEMERA. recesses, within his empire, he was not monarch with out it. (We suggest a meeting of gentlemen up-town to erect a monument to Nero, now for the first time appreciated !) Let us tell the story of Semiramide and we must take the liberty, for clearness sake, to use the names of the performers without the Siamese-ry of the names of the characters. Borghese is queen of Babylon. She and Valtel- lina, who is an old lover of hers, have killed her former husband, a descendant of Belus by whom she had a child. This child is Pico, rightful heir to the throne. At the time the curtain rises, Borghese and Valtel- lina suppose that Pico also is killed, and the throne vacant for a new husband to Borghese. Valtellina wishes to be that husband ; but Borghese, partly from dislike of him, and partly from having had enough of matrimony, takes advantage of a thunder-storm to put off her expected decision. Meantime Pico arrives (acquainted only with Mr. Meyer, apparently, who is a high-priest of Belus), and Queen Borghese, not knowing that it is her own child, falls in love with him ! There is a Miss Phillips who is a descendant of this same Belus, and who is to have the throne if Borghese does not marry Valtellina. Pico loves Miss Phillips for some reason only hinted at, and has come to Babylon to see her. Mr. Meyer, who is the only one aware that Pico is the prince supposed to be lost, takes him down into the tomb of the dead king, tells him who he is, gives him his father s " things" in a box, and leaves him there to have a conversation with his mother who happens to drop in. It is all cleared up between them, and they sing a duet together, and go out for a little fresh air. Valtellina, mousing about after the queen, comes afterward to the tomb and meets the high-priest there ; and one after another drops in, till the tomb is full, and the ghost of the old king takes the opportunity to get up and mention what he died of. Great confusion of course ; and, soon after, Pico, feeling called upon to kill the mur derer of the sleepless old gentleman, stabs at some body in the dark and kills his mother ! Valtellina is led off by the police, Pico faints in the arms of Mr. Meyer, the satraps and Babylonians rush in, and the curtain falls leaving Pico to marry Miss Phillips and succeed to the throne. All this of course took place in a city built two generations after Ham (brother of Shein and Japhet) but what with the look of the " tombs," and the way people were stabbed and pois oned, it was impossible not to wonder what Justice Matsell would have done in the premises. AVe shall hear Semiramide again to-night, and speak more advisedly of the music on Monday. At present, we can not convince ourself that Grisi and Persian! sang any better when we heard them in London. We can never hope for and we need not wish a better opera. BORGHESE is a most accomplished creature, with (among other things) an intoxicating way of crushing her eyes up to express passion (in a way that none but people of genius do) and she does nothing indifferently. Pico, with her wonderful at-home-ative- ness anywhere between the lowest note and the high est, faultless in her science, and personally of the kind of women most loveable, is enough, of herself, to keep a town together. PEROZZI, with his sweet, pure voice, and gentlemanly taste (lie was king of Egypt last night, by the way, and a candidate for Borghese s hand), is worthy to be a third star in any such Orion s belt, and the fourth may well be VALTELLINA, whose thorough base, we have no doubt, first suggested the idea of the forty-horse excavator lately patented by congress. But what shall we say of the scenery ? We were taken completely by surprise, with the taste as well as splendor of it, and we think Stanfield himself, the great artist who produces occasionally such marvels in the spectacles of Drury Lane, would have taken a pride in claiming it. Certainly no comparable scene ry has been exhibited, to our knowledge, in this country. The costumes were also admirable. Abstaining as we do, for to-day, from musical criticism, we can not help alluding to the electric ef fect, upon the audience, of the duet between Pico and Borghese the well-known " Giorno d orrore." The house was uncomfortably crammed, but a pin might have been heard to drop, at any moment dur ing the singing of it. It was a case of complete musi cal intoxication. The applause was boundless, but unluckily the encore (which we trust will not be foiled again to-night) was defeated by an evident fear on the part of the audience of intemipting a part of the duet not yet completed. If you love your public, dear Semiramide, nod, to-nig/it, to the orchestra, after the bouquets have descended ! BEHIND THE CURTAIN. Editor s room, toward midnight Enter the brigadier, as the printers go down stairs The day over, and the shop shut up under A pen (too tired to be wiped) drying in peace on the editor s table News boys done (thank God .) Brigadier collapsed into a chair. Brig. Oh, mi-boy ! To think of the trouble of "getting along," and the very small place in which we sleep, when we get there ! I wonder whether a man would be much behind the time at his own fu neral if he stopped working! I m tired, Willis! I ll send my ticket for the afterpiece, and " go home," as the Moravians say. " We." You forget ! Editors are on the " free list" in the theatre of life, and " not entitled to a check." Brig. Talk plain to me, my dear boy, and save your heliotropes for the paper! The work I have done this week ! Is it you that say somewhere, "there s no poetry in a steamboat?" Think of the blessed cry of " stop her !" " We." And so you are fairly fagged, my " mar tial Pyrrhus !" Brig. Fagged and dispirited ! Moving the print ing office getting all the advertisements set up in, new type little indispensable nothings plaguing my life out new arrangements in every corner, and the daily paper going on besides " We." I don t wonder you re dead! Brig. That is the least of my trouble, I was going to say (though, to be sure, what we have done this last week, changing office, and renewing type, with out stopping the daily, is very much like shoeing your horse without slacking his trot) but the "ben efit," my dear boy, the benefit. " We." So long since you have had any money to end is that what you mean ? You are afraid you have lost the art of making yourself out poorer than the man who comes to borrow. Why, my poor general ! Brig. Doesn t it strike you as a dreadful mortifi cation, my dear Willis ? We" The whole business ? Brig. The whole business. " We." Inasmuch as for genius to be rich, after being poor, would make a god of the man so en riched (by the intensity of his enjoyment, and his nat- iral inoculation against catching the canker from his noney) it is wisely ordained by Providence that we shall not receive it in sums larger than $3, city bill, ithout mental agony. We should else be in heaven EPHEMERA. 189 before our time, my dear general purgatory omit ted ! Brig. But isn t your pride wounded for me, my dear hoy ? 44 We." As Cassio says (who, by the way, loved general Othello very much as I do you), I do attend here on the general, And think it no addition, nor my wish, To have him see me womaned." I have no tear to shed on the subject. I have thought it all over, and would have stood in your place and received the painful thousands myself, if I had thought it more than you could bear but let me tell you how I look at it. Brig. Do, mi-boy, and don t joke more than you can help ! there, and we are likely at any moment to be " broke" by the critics "making a run upon the bank." Brig. Now that s what I call clear ! " We." Don t interrupt me ! The risks of suc cess in literature, the outlay for education, the delay in turning it to profit, the endurance of the gauntlets of criticism, and the rarity of the gift of genius from God, should be added to the usually fragile shop in which its wares are embarked for vending. The poet, by constitution least able to endure rude usage, is the common target of coarseness and malice. Here and there, to be sure, a man is born, like me with brains enough, but more liver than brains and such men sell thoughts as they would potatoes, and don t break their hearts if customers find specks in them; but the literary profession, generally, is of another make, and political economy" should compensate proportion- ~TFe" Editors are the pump-handles of charity, II ally. They do it for clergymen ! What clergyman ilwavs helping people to water, and never thought to feels it an indignity to be sent abroad by subscription, be thirsty themselves ! if his health fails ? He considers that he is inade- Brir You funny Willis! so we are! quately paid unless his parish take the risks ol Ins .. We "You, particularly, have not only been > health ! And you /besides the reason you have, bolted to the public cistern for every benefit of the! wholly apart from our joint business, for needing this last twenty years the fag and worky of every possible i benefit here you are, after passing your lile in ser- c haritable committee, but your paper has been called ,; ving people, with a pair of eyes you can scarce sign upon (and that people think nothing of) to blow wind !! your name by, and a prospect of a most purblind view heme of benevolence, every j! of the City Hall when they make you mayor. into the sail of every sc device for the good of individuals or the public. Peo- ] pie see your face on every printed note that comes to them. You are the other-folks-beggar of the town. When you die Un ff . No painful allusions now, mi-boy ! 4 We." I was only going to say, my dear general, that they will wish they had unmuzzled the ox that trod out the corn ! Brig, (siuallowing something apparently}. But T have had so many misgivings about this benefit concert, my dear Willis ! "We." The pump-handle changing places with the pail ! Well it will be a shower-bath at first, but you ll be full when it s over! Briff. There you go again ! 4 We." I was letting that simile trickle off my lips while I fished up, from my practical under-cur rent, another good reason for your benefit. Suffer me to be tedious a moment! Brig. Be so, mi-boy be so ! I love you best when you re tedious! 44 We." Well, then ! Political economy differs from the common estimates of things, by taking into consideration not only their apparent value at the time of sale, but what it has cost, directly or indi rectly, to attain that value. Do you understand me ? Brig. No. 44 We." For example, then ! a leg of mountain mutton may weigh no more than a leg of lowland mutton but as the fibre of the meat is finv from be ing fed on highland grass, it is reasonable to estimate it^by something besides its weight i. e., the shep herd s risk of losing it by wild beasts, and the trouble of driving it up and down the mountain. J3r?>. True. 44 We." Thus, a lawyer charges you fifty dollars for an opinion which it takes him but ten minutes to dictate to his clerk. A savage would laugh at the price, and offer to talk twice the time for half the monev but a civilized man pays it, allowing for the education, study, and talent, which it cost to give the opinion value. Brig. True again. Now for our " mutton." 44 We." You and I, my dear general, are brain- mongers which is an exceedingly ticklis^ trade. We art with our goods in supposition, like the capital Brig. Mi-boy ! oh ! "We." There s but one pair of well-endorsed eyes >etween us, and suppose somebody leaves me money enough to unharness me from this omnibus, and turn e out to grass at Glenmaiy ! What will become of m? Brig. Heaven indissolubly Siamese us, my dear boy ! .4 We." And T have not even named, yet, the os tensible ground for this concert the songs you have loaded the women s lips with, and never received even a kiss for your trouble ! Brig. What a fellow you are for reasons, Willis! 44 We." My dear friend, I am going to state all this to the committee for your benefit! By the way did you ever hear of Ismenias, the D Orsay of an cient Corinth ? Brig. Never. "We" Ismenias commissioned a friend to buy a jewel for him. The friend succeeded in purchasing it at a sum below its value. " Fool!" said Ismenias, "you have disgraced the gem!" Did you suppose, general, that I was going to give the public, the pleas ure of paying you this tribute without taxing their admiration as well as their pockets ! No ! (Hear him !) No ! I trust every woman who has su heard sung, a song of yours, w be there to wave a handkerchief for you ! I hope every man who loves literature, and has a corner in his heart for the poet who has pleased him, will be there to applaud you ! I hope David Hale will give us gas enough to see you on the platform. I hope God bless me, twelve o clock ! .OPERATIC PARTY. As our readers are aware, a private sparkle from the stars of an operatic constella tion, is one of the luxuries rated as princely in Europe a proper fitness in the other circumstances of the entertainment requiring a spaciousness of saloons and a magnificence of menu which only the very wealthi est have to offer. The private dwelling-houses of this city, till within a few years, have been much too small for the introduction of this advanced phase of pleasure. Last night, however, a sumptuous resi dence, that might compare to advantage with any m- in Europe, was thrown open, and its "uilder- 190 EPHEMERA. bination. As being the head of a new chapter of na tional refinement, it would, perhaps, be posthumously worth while to depict the scene not only as to its sumptuary splendors and costumes, but with a de scription of the " beauty that bewitched the light" but however posterity might thank us for such an inky Arethusa, we have too much to do with what is above ground, just now, to bury charms for the future. Madame Pico remarked, before the commencement of the performance, that it was almost as trying for singers used to a theatre to adapt the voice, impromp tu, to a saloon, as for an amateur to calculate, at once, the volume of voice necessary to fill a theatre. The first two or three pieces were, notwithstanding this judicious apprehension, a little too loud. Signer Valtellina must have the credit of having been the first to reduce the " fill of the empyrean" to the ca pacity of a saloon, and, after the measure was taken, the music was exquisitely enjoyable. After tea (served in an adjoining apartment at the close of the first part) the artists assumed, to a charm, the neces sary abandon, and the singing between tea and sup per was, to our ear, faultless. The pianist only, M. Etienne seemed lacking in the magnetism to quicken the movement with the acceleration of Pico s climax, and we wished a younger or more sympathetic hand in the accompaniment; but this charming cantatrice has too infallible an ear to outrun the instrument, and the effect was sufficiently enchanting. She and Sig- norina BORGHKSK were rapturously encored, and a laughing terzetto between BORGHKSK, SANQUIRICO, and PEROZZI, was called for, a second time, with bound less delight and enthusiam. We had never before seen Madame Pico off the stage. Care has left no foot-print on the threshold of the gate of music, and her mouth is infantine in texture and expression ; but her eyes have that in definable look which betrays " The thieves of joyance that have passed that way." Her person shows to more advantage in a drawing- room than on the stage, and her manners, like those of all gifted Italians, are of a natural sculpture beyond the need of artificial chiseling. BORGHKSE, too, has charming manners, and we were pleased with the cor dial accueil given to the prima-donnas by the ladies of the party. Altogether, the absolute good taste of the entertainment, and the unusually choice mixture of elements, social, sumptuous, and professional, made the evening one of high enchantment. OPERA SINGERS At the benefit of Mademoiselle Borghese, lately, the centre of the ceiling suddenly gave birth (at the close of the first act) to a shower of billets-doux, which, being immediately followed by the descent of the drop-scene, representing Jupiter feeling the pulse of Juno, was understood by the audience " as well as could be expected." The delivery was rather a relief to the feeling of the house, for the crowd and pressure had been very uncomfortable, and some critical event was needed to relieve the en durance. We have been pleased at the example, set by the good authority of the parly of Monday evening, of giving a cordial, social welcome to distinguished musi cal strangers. America profits by having two nations inarching immediately before her in civilization each unwilling to imitate the other, but both open to study, by us, with no impediment as to our selection of points for imitation or rejection. The French and English are wholly at variance on the point we have just alluded to the social position given to celebrated musicians. In the high circles of France, when a ! party is given at which the operatic singers perform a concert, the reception for the musicians consults only their personal comfort. Chairs are placed for them, which they rarely leave to mix with the party, and their supper is always separate from that, of the guests. There is no intention shown, of treating them like equals. In England, on the contrary, the operatic company are the pels of society. Pasta, Catalani, Persiani, Grisi, and the male singers, Lablache, Rubini, Ivanhoff, and others, were free of all exclu- j sion on the score of rank, and " dined and teted" familiarly like noble strangers from other countries. We have seen the duke of Wellington holding the gloves of GRISI, while she pulled to pieces a bunch of grapes at the supper table of Devonshire house ; and we have a collection of autographs of public singers (two of which we published the other day), addressed to persons of high rank, and expressed in terms of the most confessed feeling of ease as to relative posi tion. We repeat that we rejoice in the power to select footsteps to follow in civilization (from those of two nations gone on before), and we take pride, that, in this latest instance, we have copied the more liberal and kindly-hearted usage. These children of a pas sionate clime are not justly measured by our severe standards; and we should receive them like airs from a southern sky, without cooling them first by a chymi- cal analysis. They are, commonly, ornaments to society -joyous, genial, free from the "finikin" super- fineries of some of those inclined to abase them and the difference of the pleasure they give, when their hearts are in it, is offset enough for any sacrifice made in ex cusing the "low breeding" of their genius ! BORGHKSK, whose benefit came off so triumphantly last night, is a woman of very superior mind, of man ners faultlessly distinguished, and (essential praise to a woman) a model of toilet-ability. She is, besides, a remarkable actress, and a very accomplished musician. This is a pretty good description of an agreeable ac quaintance ; and, if we were to sketch Madame Pico, it would be in terms still more warmly eulogistic. We leave to the ladies who throw bouquets to San- quirico, to laud the men of the opera, and wind up this essay of political economy, by drawing an instruc tive example, of the effect of what we preach, from the manufacture of a prima-donna into a queen and goddess, in the days of venerable antiquity. "Among the female performers of antiquity, LAMIA is certainly the most celebrated ; how much her fame may have been aided by her beauty we can not deter mine. She was everywhere received with honor, and according to Plutarch, equally admired for her wit, beauty, and musical performance. She was a native of Athens, but travelled into Egypt to hear the cele brated flute-players of that country. During her resi dence at the court of Alexandria, Ptolemy Soter was defeated in a naval engagement by Demetrius, and all his wives and domestics fell into the hands of the conqueror. Lamia was among the number; but Demetrius was so attracted by her beauty and skill, that he raised her to the highest rank, and from her solicitations, conferred such benefits on the Athenians, that they gave him divine honors and dedicated a tem ple to Venus Lamia. " MADAME Pico s BENEFIT. We should be happy if Europe would inform us why this remarkable can tatrice comes to us " new as a tooth-pick," as to fame, and whethe^ (the same lack of previous trumpeting having given us a surprise in Malibran), we are to have the credit also of the eccalobeion of Pico ! Even without the " deep-sea plummet" of her contralto (which certainly does touch bottom for which most EPHEMERA. 191 voices lack fathoms of line) she has a compass as a mezzo soprano, which would alone serve for remarka ble success in her profession. She is a most correct musician loo (the only false note we have heard from her, having been occasioned by her striking her chest too violently while singing defiance to Vallelliua) and, withal, a most gifted and charming woman, every way formed to be an idol for the public. We have written a great deal about Madame Pico, and, her benefit being the last occasion we shall find, to do more than chronicle her movements, we shall send this quill to our friend Kendall of the Picayune (as the Highlanders send the lighted brand), enveloped in a stanza addressed by an Italian poet to Lady Coventry : " Si tutti gli alberi del mondo Fossero penne, II cielo fosse carta, II mare inchiostro Non basterenno a destrivere La miuiina parte della" We leave the rest to the Picayune s prophetic divina tion. Adieu, Pico, 1 in-cantatrice ! A clear throat and a plethoric pocket to you ! MADAME ARNOULT S CONCERT. It looked very queer (and a little wicked withal) to see opera-glasses and ladies with their heads uncovered, in the pews of the Tabernacle ; and we are not sure that our " way we should go" did not twitch us for a " departure," when we found ourselves applauding with kid gloves in the neighborhood of the altar ! We were applaud ing Pico ; and the next thought that came to us was, a regret that such voices should not be consecrated to church choirs ; for (granting the opera to be a profane amusement, as is thought by the worshippers at the Tabernacle), " it is a pity," as a celebrated divine once said, "that the devil should have all the good music." And, apropos was not this capital remark (attributed, we believe, to Wesley) suggested by one, recorded of the pope Gregory of the fifth century ? Britain at that time was, to Rome, what Africa is now to us a savage country they brought slaves from; and the introduction of Christianity into that heathen land is said to have been prompted by the pope s admira tion of the beauty of two or three young John Bulls who were for sale in the market-place of Rome. On inquiring of the merchant if they were Christians, and being informed they were pagans, he exclaimed, " Alas, what a pity that (he author of darkness should be in possession of men of such fair countenances . " He commissioned Pelagius forthwith to send missionaries to the handsome British pagans, and hence the church of England probably the only church, the members of which owe their salvation to their personal beauty ! (Pardon this historical digression, dear readers!) Madame ARNOULT took New York by surprise she is so much better a singer than was supposed. With less effort, and in a smaller room than the nave of the Tabernacle, she would, however, appear to much more advantage. Her voice, to our ear, lacked fledg ing, or lining, or something to make it warmer or more downy but it is a clear and most cultivable soprano, and she manages it with wonderful skill for a beginner at public singing. We predict great popu larity for her. Madame Pico sang, with her, the duet from Semiramide, and it was enough to steep even the pulpit cushion in a this world s trance of music. ARMLETS. We have observed that there is a late fashionable promotion of the jewels of the arm to the more lovely round above the elbow, where, it must be confessed, a bracelet sits much more enviably im bedded. We rather think this renewal of the fashion of armlets is a clean jump from the rape of Helen to 1845, for the latest mention we can find of it is in the account of the Trojan nymphs, who laid aside their armlets to dance in the choirs on Mount Ida. It takes an arm, plump and not too plump, to wear this clasp with a grace, but where the arm is really beauti ful, no ornament could be more filly and captivatingly located. We were very much struck with the effect upon the dazzling arm on which we lately noticed it. VIEWS OF MORRIS S CONCERT. There are few buttons on the motley coat of human dependance, to which the button-hole is not serviceably correspondent the button (conferring the favor) commonly draw ing the same garment closer by aid of the button-hole (receiving the favor). There is one very striking in stance however, of constant services unreciprocated, in what editors do for singers and actors. Our attention has been called to this by a series of paragraphs (part silly, part malicious) expressing surprise that Ole Bull and others, who had never been in any way benefited by Gen. Morris, should have been asked to contribute their services gratuitously to his benefit concert. It is needful, of course, in a newspaper, to make some mention and some critical estimate of all public performers. It may be done favorably or unfavor ably ; and there is a way of being abundantly paid lor either. " BLACK MAIL" is willingly paid where com mendation is sold in shambles, but the editor is letter paid, still, if, with skilful roasting and dissection of the faults of public performers, he cruelly enriches his paper (like a pate, defoie gras with the liver of the goose roasted alive), and so sends it, palatably spiced, to the umnquiring appetite of the public. He who has a hair of his head left undamned, to creep with shame at the " black mail" sale of his approbation and he who has common human kindness to prevent his murdering the hopes of strangers to make his paper readable both these are of classes that go un paid, and commonly unthanked, for services most essential to others, and forbearance most costly to themselves. The editor s business is to make his paper readable. The most difficult task he has to do is to be readably good-natured. The easiest writing in the world is criticism amusingly severe. If any one doubts, for ! example, that with the same pains we have taken, I glowingly to interpret between Ole Bull and the pub- I 1 lie, we could have ridiculed him into a comparative 1 failure sending a laugh before him through the country that would have armed every listener with an impenetrable incredulity if any one doubts our power i to have done this, as easily as we have ushered him into hearts we made ready for a believing reception 1 of his music, he does not know either the press or the !j public neither the arbitrary license of the press, nor ! the public s weak memory for everything but ridicule. l| \Vkeie Ole Bull now stands, the press is compara tively powerless. He is stamped with success. But, i| when he stood on the threshold of this country s favor \ a musician, whose peculiaiities at first seemed tricks, 1 and whom few heard for the first time with a confident I appreciation if, then, ridicule had met him, boldly 1 and unsparingly, even though this one paper had alone opened the cry, he would have had us to thank, we believe, for the tide turned back on which lie now rides triumphantly onward. Certain as it is that we could not, all alone, have made his present good fortune, it i is quite as certain that we could, all alone, \\avemarred \ it and that, too, to the profitable spicing of our some- ! what praise-ridden columns. We need not. stop to 192 EPHEMERA. tell the reader that we are describing the fiend Siam- esed to Liberty an Irresponsible Press which can not be chained without chaining Liberty too but we wish to show that there is some merit in not harnessing this fiend to our own slow vehicle of fortune. There never was an opportunity so ready as Ole Bull s ad vent for amusing ridicule but we were the first, or among the first, to call for faith in him, and aid in his appreciation. We did it from love of the man and belief in his genius, and would as soon have been marked on the brow with a hot iron as bargain for a syllable of it. But the unforeseen opportunity pre senting itself? when, apparently, he might return our paper s service by a favor to our associate he was invited without scruple to do so. Suppose he had played ten minutes on the violin for the benefit of the proprietor of a paper devoted, for a year, invariably to his interests ? Would it have been the " act of chari ty" for which a paragraphist says that " Ole Bull was unreasonably called upon ?" The high-spirited Nor wegian placed his regret, that he could not be here to comply, upon no such footing. While we are calling things by their real names, we may as well change the label of another matter the motive of the benefit to Gen. Morris. As the public know, our estimable associate, by twenty years of literary labor, amassed a moderate fortune, which, in the disasters of an era of bankruptcy, he suddenly lost. A part of his property was invested in the beautiful country-seat of Undercliff on the Hudson the residence of his family for several years. His friends with a provident hope, looking beyond the clouds that enveloped him fastened, to the transfer of this lovely spot, a condition by which he might, if able, repurchase it at a certain time, and at. its then reduced valuation. He has since been suffered to tenant it for a trifling rent. He has improved it, em bellished it, increased its value. "His children have grown up in it. But, meantime, the limit came around (now only a short time off) when the purchase must be made or the home lost. His old friends came to inquire into the probable result of their forethought for him. We need not give the particulars of our business General Morris was partly prepared to re deem the property. The lack was a sum that might be covered by a benefit concert so suggested by one of the parties. It was urged upon him "and declined. He was told that Beranger had three subscriptions (one of twenty thousand dollars) that Campbell had several that Scott s children were relieved of his debts by a posthumous subscription of two hun dred thousand dollars and that private subscrip tions for literary men were of common occurrence in England. The public know the sequel. He refused, till the concert was agreed upon by his friends without him. The Italians, whom our paper had more especially served, sprang, generously and with acclamation, to reciprocate our constant advocacy of their company s attraction. The musicians resident here were all friends of General Morris, for he alone, more than all other men in New York taken together, had served the dramatic and musical profession. They, too, joyous ly sprang to the chance of benefiting him. Never was service more eagerly rendered than that by the performers last night at the Tabernacle never came good purpose before the public, so lamely and dis paragingly construed. In making up our mind to allow the public to be intimate with us, we expect now and then to expose the lining of our gaberdine. We conform to the exi gences of the latitude we live in but upon dishabille ex planations, we hope for dishabille constructions. What we have written here, between five o clock, A. M-, and breakfast (wholly without the knowledge of General Morris), goes to press with the ink undried, and we have no security against errors but that of writing as we would talk to our confessor. If the time should ever arise when really good intentions may be trusted to stand, in public opinion : With that credent bulk That no unworthy scandal once can touch But it confounds the breather," we may cease to explain " why our stocking is un- gartered." Meantime, we expect to die. THE OPERA BEREAVEMENT. What is to become of this widower of a town when it has lost its fairly-es poused Pico, we must leave to the survivor s obituary to record. We may as well have our ears boxed and stowed away ! Their vocation is as good as gone ! No more Pico ? Faith, it will go hard for the first week or two ! But by the way as those " lost from us" are invariably supposed to be crowned in the next place they go to, and as, of course, Pico will be crowned in the presence of St. Charles and the brunet angels of New Orleans, we must take upon ourselves, as her New York " gold stick in waiting," to summon one at least, of her liege subjects to his duty. (We happen, fortunately, to possess an autograph of George the Fourth, signed to the necessary formula.) " To G W- K , Marquis of Picayune : RIGHT TRUSTY AND RIGHT WELL-BELOVED COUSIN. We greet you well. Whereas, the 1st day of March next (or thereabouts) is appointed for our coronation. These are to will and command you (all excuses set apart) to make your personal attendance on us at the time above-mentioned, furnished and ap pointed as to your rank and quality appertaineth There to do and perform all such services as shall be required and belong to you. Whereof you are not to fail. And so we bid you heartily farewell. "Given at.our court at Palmo s, the 21st day of January, 1845, in the first year of our reign. "Pico PRIMA (donna). " STAR RETURNING TO ITS MERIDIAN. Pico has changed her mind! Jubilate! She has declined to go to New Orleans with the Borgheses, and will re main here to be the nucleus for a new operatic crys- talization. We beg New York and Boston to shake hands in felicitation ! And now that it is settled (as we understand it was, yesterday, by a decisive letter to Signor Borghese), Jet us splinter a ray or two of light upon the diamond that has so wisely refused re setting. New Orleans is a French city, with a French opera ; and Mademoiselle Borghese is a French wo man, with lost laurels to win back from the Italian Pico. This new arena, little likely to have been an impartial one, is a great way off, the journey danger ous and tedious, and, to go there, Madame Pico must abruptly leave a wave of fortune, which she is now riding " at the flood." and give up three admiring cities for one that might be dubious ! A new opera-house is about to be built here, of which she will be the first predominant star; her concerts, in the meantime, in the different cities, will profitably employ her ; and, as to the company, there is a substitute lying perdu for Borghese, and a tenor might soon be found to re place Perozzi. Out of these facts, the public can pick the good reasons Madame Pico has for abandon ing her journey to New Orleans. Let us do our best to show her that she has not made a mistake in pre ferring us TAKING THE WHITE VEIL. The Undine of the Bowling-green (Miss Undine W g, if named after EPHEMERA. 193 the gentleman to whose liberality she owes her exist ence) was shown last evening, with her radiant beau ty enveloped in slittering white, to the assembled friends of the author of her being. To alight from the poetry of the matter: Mr. W g invited, yester day, a party of his friends to see an illumination of the superb fountain with which he has embellished that part of the city. The rocky structure through which it leaps, is completely encrusted with ice, and it look ed like like more things than we have room to men tion. The colored light covered the fountain first with a suffused blush of the tenderest pink, and this deepened to crimson, and the glow upon ice and water was really superb beyond any effect of the kind we have ever witnessed. It made even a Dry Dock om- nibus (which chanced to be passing at the moment), look rosily picturesque and fairy-like. The black sky overhead ; the delicate tracery of the naked branches of the trees; the enclosure of architecture with lights ] in the windows (which seemed completely to shut it ! in like the court of an illuminated palace), were all striking additions to the effect. We would inquire, ! by the way, whether this couleur de rose could not be adapted to the brightening of the ice with which the fountains of the mind are sometimes crusted over. Phlogistic chymists will please explain. IMPROVEMENTS ON THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE. The making an improvement in one s mother s prop erty is, of course, a praiseworthy filial service, and we find that we have succeeded in enriching our "mother language" by successfully breaking, to new and valu able service, a pair of almost useless and refractory terminations. " -Dom" and " -tricity" may now be hitched by a single hyphen to any popular word, name, or phrase, and, without the cumbrous harness of a periphrasis, may turn it out in the full equipage of a collect : ve noun! Our first experiment in this econo my of parts of speech was the describing a charming class of society by the single word JAPONICA-DOM. This musical substantive could hardly be displaced by a shorter sentence than " the class up town who usu ally wear in their hair the expensive erotic commonly called a japonica." The second experiment was the word PICO-TRICITY a condensation of " the power, brilliancy, and electric effect of the singing of Mad ame Rosina Pico." We see by the papers that these expediting inventions (for which we liberally refrained from taking out a patent) are freely used already by our brother administrators of the mother language, and we have only respectfully to suggest a proper economy and fitness in their application. EARLY-HOURS-DOM. We scarcely need explain, we presume, that we have undertaken the wholesome mission of giving interest, as far as in us lies, to the more re fined occupancy of that portion of the day com prised between twilight and go-to-bcd time becoming, so to speak, the apostle of fashionable early-hours- dom. Of course we are entirely too practical to dream of " reforming out," by mere force of argument, the four-hours unprofitable yawn and the night s restitu tion-less robbery of sleep. Every one knows that the reasons for the late hours of European fashion are wholly wanting in this country but every one consents to follow the fashion ivithout the reasons. The only way to diminish the attraction of late amusements is to anticipate them by more attractive early amuse ments. It will be remembered that we commenced our vigorous support of the opera with this view of the use of it. It was a well-put though unsuspected blow to the habit of late hours, for many gave up par ties they would otherwise have gone to, from having been sufficiently amused at the opera; and others found out, practically, that to dress and go to the op era from seven till ten, gave all the relaxation they re quired, and their natural night s sleep into the bar gain ! It is with this ultimate view of making a fash ionable Kate " Conformable as other household Kates" giving us a substitute that shall make late hours more easily dispensed with that we look upon the plan of this new opera-house as a national benefit. If built luxuriously, lavishly lighted, made to serve all the pur poses of a sumptuous festal saloon, and give exquisite music besides, it will be a preferable resort to a ball room ; and we believe that it is only from the lack of a preferable resort in evening dress, that late parties are any way endurable. Early parties on the off ninhts of the opera, would soon follow, we think the habit of early hours of gayety, once relished and so would creep out this servile and senseless imitation of foreign fashion. UNTILLED FIELD OF LITERATURE IN NKW YORK. The one country we have lived in, without loving a native, is the country that, on the whole, gave us the most to admire FRANCE. We embroidered a year and a half of our memory with the grace and wit of the world s capital of taste, and we have left a heart (travellers pattern) in every other country between Twenty-second street and the Black sea; but, that we do not even suspect the color of a French heart ache we solemnly vow and marvel. We admire the French quite enough, however (perhaps there lies the philosophy of it!) to leave no fuel for sentiment to mourn over as wastage, and now (apropos des bottes) why have we no vehicle for French wit in New York no battery for the friction and sparkle of French electricity? How can the French live without a " Charivari ?" Twenty thousand French inhabitants and no savor in the town, as if the gods had "dined below stairs!" Ten thousand French women (prob ably), and either no celebrity, of wit or beauty, among them, or no needful newspaper-cloud in which the thunder and lightning of such pervading electricities could be collected ! We wonder whether the " Courrier des Etats Unis" (the Anchises French paper which we read, as the pious ./Eneas carried his father on his back, to have something to cherish, out of the city left behind something French, that is to say) we wonder wheth er, on their alternate days, the editors of that sober tri-weekly paper could not give us something spiced a, la Par isicnne and whether such a vehicle, for the French wit that must be here, benumbed or hidden, would not be a profitable speculation ! The " Cour rier" is the best of useful and grave papers, and en tirely fulfils its destiny, but it is small pleasure to the ten thousand people in New York, who relish French literature, to re-peruse the matter of the daily papers, rechauffe in a foreign language. If the lack of Paris ian material, here, were an apparent objection, what a delightful luxury it would be to have a paper made up, at Jirst, entirely, with the condensed essence of the gay papers of Paris ? A feature of New York chari- vari-ty might be gradually worked in but, meantime, a well-selected bouquet of the prodigal wit and fun of the capital (made comprehensible by a correspond ence kept up with Paris, which should explain allu sions, etc.) would be, we should really suppose, most attractive to the better classes of our society, and, to the French of New Orleans and other more remote cities, an indispensable luxury. There is a natural homeopathy for everything French in this city much stronger than for the same thing* 194 EPHEMERA. a VAnglaise. We would wish, too, that the barrier of a different language were gradually broken down, BO that some of the delightful peculiarities of Paris might ooze into our city manners through a conduit of periodical literature. Heigho ! to think of the brilliant intellectual lamps blazing like noonday in France, while, with the material for the same bright ness about us, we sit by the glimmer of fire-light! Oh, Jules Janin ! " American in Paris !" come over with your prodigal brain and be a Parisian in Ameri ca! Ordain yourself as a missionary of wit, and Ja- nin-ify a continent by a year s exile beyond the Bou levards! You ll laugh at us when you return, but streams chafe the channels they refresh, and we will take you with your murmur! " L onda, dal mar divisa, Bagna la valle e 1 monte, Va passegiara In fiume, Va prigionera In fonte, Mormora sempre e gem Fin che non torna al mar." It would hardly be inferred but wo really sat down to write the following paragraph, and not the foregoing one : THE PRIMA-DONNAS AT FAULT. The "Courrier des Etats Unis" has now and then an ebullition of na tional spirituality, in the shape of a half column of theatrical gossip, and we have had on our table, for several days, a cut-out paragraph, very well hit off, touching one or two of the town s pleasure-makers. The editor is, of course, behind the curtain, as the natural centre of the foreign circle of New York, and he writes with knowledge. He gives as a fact that Borghese cleared $550 by her benefit, but he dispara ges the performance of that evening, and hauls the ladies seriously over the coals for having exhausted themselves at a private party the night before ! He detects an anachronism in Serniramide, and calls Pico to account for appearing before the queen (as Arsace) with his mother s crown on, when the good lady had as yet only promised it to him ! The first thing in the succeeding duet, says the " Courrier," should have been a remark from Semiramide (who has promised him the crown as a lover, not knowing it is her son) to this effect : " Vous etes un peu presse, mon bel amoureux!" ou bien, " De quel droit portez-vous cette couronne, que je n ai fait que vous offrir ?" The crown given him by the high-priest, out of the pater nal box, was, of course, only symbolic, as the queen was still on the throne. KORPONAY S FALL, FROM A FAUX PAS. Another matter touched in the same paragraph is the non- rising of the new ballet-star promised for that evening. The leader of the constellation chanced to be taken ill (below the horizon) at Philadelphia, but the Cour rier states that the illness was owing to a fall, from faux pas, and that the faux pas was an engagement by ihe tumbler (Korponay) to go to Philadelphia once a week for twenty-four dollars, when his expen ses, wife and all, were twenty-six/ The Courrier does not state, what we think highly probable, that Korpo- nay s blood has come through too many generatio of gentlemen to be good at a dancing-master s bar gains. THE NEW DANSEUSE. A third topic of this same pregnant paragraph is the contention between two dancing-masters, Charruaud and Mons. Korponay, for the honor of having given the finishing grace to the "light fantastic toe" of Miss BROOKS, the new won der. Monsieur Charruaud (Frenchman-like) declares that she is not only his pupil, but by no means the best of his pupils . Monsieur Korponay simply advertises her as his; and the star, and the star s mamma, con fess to her Korponay-tivity. But (" How Alexander s dust may stop a bung !") What blood does the public think is running in the veins of this same " fantastic toe?" James Brooks the " Florio," who, ten years ago, was the poetical passion of this country was the father of this dancing girl ! What would that sensitive poet have written (prophetically) on the first appearance of his daughter in a pas seul ! LONGFELLOW S WAIF. A friend, who is a very fine critic, gave us, not long since, a review of this delight ful new book. Perfectly sure that anything from that source was a treasure for our paper, we looked up from a half-reid proof to run our eye hastily over it, and gave it to the printer not, however, without mentally differing from the writer as to the drift of the last sentence, as follows: " We conclude our notes on the Waif with the observation that, although full of beauties, it is in fected with a moral taint or is this a mere freak of our own fancy ? We shall be pleased if it be so but there does appear, in this exquisite little volume, a very careful avoidance of all American poets who may be supposed especially to interfere with the claims of Mr. Longfellow. These men Mr Longfellow can continuously imitate (is that the word?) and yet never even incidentally commend." Notwithstanding the haste with which it passed through our attention (for we did not see it in proof), the question of admission was submitted to a principle in our mind; and, in admitting it, we did by Longfellow as we would have him do by us. It was a literary charge, by a pen that never records an opinion without some supposed good reason, and only injurious to Long fellow (to our belief) while circulating, un-replied-to, \nconversation-dom. In the second while we reasoned upon it, we went to Cambridge and saw the poet s face, frank and scholar-like, glowing among the busts and pictures in his beautiful library, and (with, per haps a little mischief in remembering how we have always been the football and/iethe nosegay of our con- 1 temporaries) we returned to our printing-office arguing ! thus : Our critical friend believes this, though we do not; Longfellow is asleep on velvet; it will do him good to rouse him ; his friends will come out and fight his battle ; the charge (which to us would be a comparative pat on the back) will be openly disproved, and the acquittal of course leaves his fame brighter than before the injurious whisper in conversation- dom killed into the bargain! That day s Mirror commenced its " Circle in the water Which only seeketh to expand itself Till, by much spreading, it expand to naught." We expected the return mails from Boston to bring us a calmly indignant "Daily Advertiser," a coquet- tishly reproachful " Transcript," a paternally severe " Courier," and an Olympically-denunciatory "Atlas." j A week has elapsed, and we are still expecting. Thun- j der is sometimes "out to pasture." But, meantime, I a friend who thinks it the driver s lookout if stones are thrown at a hackney-coach, but interferes when it is a private carriage (has loved us these ten years, that is to say, and never objected to our being a tar get, but thinks a fling at Longfellow is a very different matter) this friend writes us a letter. He thinks as we do, exactly, and we shall, perhaps, disarm the above-named body-guard of the accused poet by quo ting the summing-up of his defence: "It has been asked, perhaps, why Lowell was neg lected in this collection? Might it not as well be asked why Bryant, Dana, and Halleck, were neglect ed ? The answer is obvious to any one who candidly EPHEMERA. 195 considers the character of the collection. It professed to be, according to the proem, from the humbler poets ; and it was intended to embrace pieces that were anon ymous, or which were not easily accessible to the gen eral reader the ivaifs and estrays of literature. To put anything of Lowell s, for example, into a collec tion of waifs, would be a peculiar liberty with pieces which are all collected and christened." It can easily be seen how Longfellow, and his friends for him, should have a very different estimate from ourself as to the value of an eruption, in print, of the secret humors of appreciation. The transient disfiguring of the skin seems to us better than disease concealed to aggravation. But, apart from the intrin- j sic policy of bringing all accusations to the light, where they can be encountered, we think that the pe culiar temper of the country requires it. Our na tional character is utterly destitute of veneration, j There is a hostility to all privileges, except property ; in money to all hedges about honors to all reserves : of character and reputation to all accumulations of value not bankable. There is but one field considered fairly open money-making. Fame-making, charac- j ter-making, position-making, power-making, are priv ileged arenas in which the " republican many" have no share. The distrust with which all distinction, except j wealth, is regarded, makes a whispered doubt more j dangerous to reputation than a confessed defect. The j dislike to inheritors of anything birthrights of any thing family names or individual genius metamor phoses the first suspicion greedily into a belief. A clearing-up of a disparaging doubt about a man is a public disappointment. " That fellow is all right again, hang him!" is the mental ejaculation of ninety- nine in a hundred of the readers of a good defence or a justification. P. S. We are not recording this view of tilings by way of assuming to be, ourself, above this every-day level of the public mind too superfine to be a part \ of such a public. Not a bit of it. We can not afford superfinery of any kind. We are trying to make a i living by being foremost in riding on a coming turn of the tide in these matters. The country is at the low est ebb of democracy consistent with its intelligence. The taste for refinements, for distinctions, for aristo cratic entrenchments, is moving with the additional momentum of a recoil. We minister to this, in the way of business, as the milliner makes a crown-shaped head-dress for Mrs. President Tyler. It has its pen alty, but that was reckoned at starting. We knew, of course, that we could not sell fashionable opinions at our counter without being assailed as assuming to be the representative of fashion* just as if we could not even name a tribute of libertinism to virtue with out being sillily called a libertine by the Courier, Commercial, and Express. However, the re is some hope, by dint of lifetime fault-culture, that, in the sod over a man s grave, there will be no slander-seed left to flower posthumously undetected. but wishing us to impress upon our religious readers, i by arguments more at length, the sacredness of good j music, even by an operatic singer. We remember a passage in Burnet s Records, which shows that even [ these operatic singers, if enlisted to sing in the choirs of churches, would become the special subjects of prayer. " Also ye shall pray for them that find any light in this church, or give any behests, book, bell, chalice or vestment, surplices, water-cloth or towel, lands, rents, lamp or light, or other aid or service, whereby God s worship is better served, sustained and maintained in reading and SINGING." It has long been our opinion that to heighten the character of church music would be aiding and giving interest and con- I sequence to religious service, and the inviting of pro fessed singers to the choirs, for the sabbaths they pass in the city, would make them particularly (according to Burnet) special subjects of prayer. The four-feet precipice between the carriage wheel and the side walk, and the back slope to the range of racing omnibuses and drunken sleigh-riders, prevent ladies from embarking in carriages at present, and this is one thing that reconciles us to the opera people s having chosen to " fold up their tents like the Arab And silently steal away." Madame Pico has found a rich oasis in Boston appre ciation, and we trust the snow will have melted away before the Tabernacle so that it will not bean inacces sible desert when she returns. Her concert there will be like a dawn after a month s night of music. POPULARITY OF MADAME Pico. During the past week we received a letter from a serious writer (a lady), confessing to her own great delight in Madame Pico, Others have recorded this national habit of attacking the individual instead of the opinion. Dr. Reese, in his " Ad dress in behalf of the Bible in Schools," thus speaks of the manner of opposition to his philanthropic labors : " I have learned that to tremble in the presence of popular clamor, or desert the post of duty when it becomes one of danger, is worthy neither of honor nor manhood ; else I would have gladly retired from the conflict to which I found my first ojfficial act exposed me, and the hostile weapons of which, were aimed, not at the law under which I was acting, but hurled only againtt my humble self." TWO OR THREE NEW FASHIONS IN FRANCE. In a French pamphlet handed in to our office a few days ago, purporting to be Monsieur Grousset s justification for having been shot down in Broadway by Monsieur Erneric, Mr. Grousset describes a previous affair with the same gentleman, lately, in France. On that oc casion, he states, Mr. Emeric went to the field attended by nine persons, one of whom was a lady ! We find, also, by a private letter from a friend in ! Paris, that the now common FEMALE practice of SMO KING CIGARS is considered (by connoisseurs in know- ing-dotn) as a most engaging addition to the attractions of some particular styles of beauty ! "The play of the mouth upon the cigar, the reddening of the lips by the I irritation of the tobacco, and the insouciant air, al- ! together, which it gives to the smoker, adds to the peculiar quality of a dashing and coquettish woman, as much as it would detract from that of a retiring and timid one." The eyes (he adds) gleam with a peculiar softness, through the smoke. Our correspondent had (just returned from a call on a charming American lady, whom he found with a cigar in her rosy mouth ! WELLINGTON BOOTS have been sported during the late bad weather for walking, by some of the fashion able ladies of Pai is. They are made of patent leather, reaching to the knee, with a small tassel in front (at least so exhibited in shop-windows) and the leg of the boot rounded and shaped in firm leather, like the fashion of boots twenty years ago. The high heel (keeping the sole of the foot from the wet pavement), is "raved about," in Paris the ladies wondering how such a sensible thing as a heel should have been so long disused by the sex most in need of its protection. The relief of the ankles from contact with the cold or wet edge of the dress in wet weather is dwelt upon in the description, as is also the increased beauty of the foot from the heightening of the arch of the instep by II the high heel- 196 EPHEMERA. FASHIONS FOR COUNTRY BELLES. The following appeal to our gallantry pulls very hard : MR. EDITOR: One of the greatest treats you could give your country lady readers, would be to furnish them from time to time, with brief hints as to the actual style of fashions in the metropolis. We have, all along, depended for information on this im portant subject, upon the monthly magazines, all of which profess to give the fashions as worn, but we find out to our dismay, that they pick up their fashions from the Paris and London prints at random some of them adopted by our city ladies, some not ! It thus happens that we country people, who like to be in the fashion, are often subjected to great expense and mor tification relying too implicitly upon the magazine reports. We cause a bonnet or a dress to be made strictly in accordance with the style prescribed in the fashion plate of the magazine, and when we hie away to the city with our new finery, we discover that our costume is so outre that every one laughs at us! Now, should there not be some remedy for this evil ? " We ladies hope you will do something for us in the way of remedying this. You can make up a para graph, every now and then, on the subject without more trouble than it costs you in writing a critique on a much less important matter. Let us know all about the real changes in the outer woman in Broadway and in drawing-rooms. Tell us all about the New York shawls, and New York handkerchiefs, and New York gloves, etc. And, when the fine weather again appears, tell us about the riding -dresses and riding- caps your friends in the city wear, and do not fail to give us an exact account of the kind of sun-defenders in vogue, whether they be parasols, shades, hoods, or anything else. " I subscribe myself, your well-wisher, " KATE SALISBURY. " Belle Grange, Jan. 29." We have omitted the bulk of Miss Kate s letter, giving rather too long an account of two or three ex pensive disasters from being misguided by magazine as to the fashions but it is easily to be seen that it is a matter that concerns outlay which " comes home to business and bosom." We shall take it into con sideration. Our present impression is, that we shall set apart half a column, weekly, bi-weekly, or tri weekly, devoted to " the fashions by an eye-witness." This, however, immediately suggests a dilemma : There are two schools of taste among the ladies ! Some women dress for men s eyes, and this style is both striking and economical. Other women (most women indeed), dress for ladies approval only, and this style is studiously expensive, sacrifices becoming- ness to novelty, and is altogether beyond male appre ciation. Which style should we shape our report for ? CANADIAN Gossip. The chief of the Scotch clan, McNab, has lately emigrated to Canada with a hun dred clansman. On arriving at Toronto, he called on his newly illustrious namesake, Sir Allan, and left his card as " The McNab." Sir Allan returned his visit, leaving as his card, " The other McNab." The un usual relish of this accidental bit of fun, has elevated the definite article into a kind of provincial title, and, in common conversation, the leading individual of a family name is regularly ^e-ified. Among the officers at Montreal there was lately a son of the late cele brated " Jack Mytton," the most game-y sportsman in England. Meeting Sir Allan McNab at a mess- dinner, young Mytton sent wine to him with the mes sage : " The Mytton" would be happy to take wine with " The Other McNab." We should not wonder f this funny use of the definite article became the | germ of the first American title. The Tyler ! The \ Mrs. Tyler ! This same young Mytton, by the way, inherited his father s adventurous temper, and though the first favorite of Montreal society, he alone, of all tlie offi cers, could find no lady willing to sleigh-ride with him. They openly declared their fear of his pranks of driving. One fine day, however, when all the town was on run ners, Mytton was seen with a dashing turn-out, and a lady deeply veiled, sitting beside him, to whose com fort he was continually ministering, and to whom he was talking with the most merry glee. It was, to all appearance, a charming and charmed auditor, at least. The next day, there was great inquiry as to who was driving with Mr. Mytton. The mystery was not solved for a week. It came out at last, that in a certain milliner s shop in Montreal had stood a wooden "lay figure" for the exhibition of caps and articles of dress. The despairing youth had bought this, had it expensively and fashionably dressed, and still keeps it at his lodgings (under the name of " Ma m selle Pis-Aller") for his companion in sleigh-ridina! WHO ARE THE UPPER TEN THOUSAND ? (In reply to a question of Fanny Forester s.) * * * Your postscript, asking "Enlightenment as to the upper ten thousand" can not be answered with a candle-end of attention. From the " sixes and sevens" of our brain, we must draw a whole "dip," new and expensive, to throw light on that matter- expensive, inasmuch as the same length of editorial candle would light us through a paragraph. If ador- | able "Cousin Bel" chance to be leaning over your i chair, therefore, beg her to lift the cuHain of her auburn tress-aract from your shoulder, and allow the American public to look over while you read. The upper ten thousand, all told, would probably number one hundred thousand, or more : Not in Eng land, where the upperdorn is a matter of ascertained certainty, but in a republic, where every man has his own idea of what kind are uppermost, and where, of course, there are as many " ten thousands" as there are different claims to position. Probably few things would be funnier than for an angel suddenly to re quest the upper ten thousand of New York to walk up the let-down steps of a cloud, and record their names and residences, for the convenience of the up-town ministering spirits ! A hundred thousand, we are sure, would be the least number of autographs left in the heavenly directory ! But, till we arrive at the "red-book" degree of defi nite aristocracy, a newspaper addressed to the " upper ten thousand" embraces a sufficient bailiwick for the most ambitious circulation. There are all manner of standards for "the best people." The ten thousand who live in the biggest houses would define New York upperdom with satisfactory clearness, to some. The ten thousand " safest" men would satisfy others. The educated ten thousand the religious ten thousand the ten thousand who had grandfathers the ten thousand who go to Saratoga and Newport the liberal ten thousand the ten thousand who ride in carriages the ten thousand who spend over a certain sum the ten thousand " above Bleecker" the ten thousand "ever heard of" are aristocracies as others estimate them. And till the really upper ten thousand are indubitably defined, there are ninety thousand, more or less, who are in the enjoyment of a most desi rable illusion. No! no! republican benevolence the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" would stop the march of civilization as to aristocracy, where it is. Its progress is through a reversed cornucopia, and the EPHEMERA 197 extreme end is too small for the comfort of the " na tion." Meantime, however, the standard of good manners is rather loosely kept, and though the ten 41 ten-thousands" are all seen to be tolerable, there is a small class who go wholly unappreciated those who are unconscious of their own degree from nature, and are only recognisable by the highest standards. We speak of those who have " no manner" simply because they would be less refined if they had. There are enchanting women in New York we ourself know a half-dozen who are wholly unaware them selves, wholly unsuspected by others, of carrying a mark from nature that in Europe would supersede all questions of origin and circumstances. English aris tocratic society is sprinkled throughout with these sealed packets of nobility from God one of whom I remember inquiring out with great interest, a single lady of thirty-six apparently, but looking like a dis tilled drop of the " blood of all the Howards." simple as a tulip on (he stem, and said, though obscurely con nected, to have refused a score of the best matches of England. These "no manners" that are better than "good manners" walk a republic quite undetected as aristocracy; but, as the persons so born are always beloved (losing only the admiration that is due to them) their benighted state scarce calls for a mis sionary ! We should not be surprised if there were a pair from this Nature s Upper-dom " Two trusty turtles, truefastest of all true," in your own village, dear Fanny Forester ! THE WEST IN A PETTICOAT. (By way of declining a communication in hope of a better one.) We have been for years looking at the western horizon of American literature, for a star to rise that should smack of the big rivers, steamboats, alligators, and western manners. We have the DOW.X KAST embodied in Jack Downing and his imitators. There was wanting a literary embodiment of the OUT WEST not, a mind shining at it, by ridiculing it from a distance, but a mind shining from it, by showing its peculiar qualities unconsciously. The rough-hewn physiognomy of the west, though showing as yet but in rude and unattractive outline, is the profile of a fine giant, and will chisel down to noble features hereafter; but, meantime, there will be a literary foreshadowing of its maturity abrupt, confiding, dashing writers, regardless of all trammels and fearless of ridicule and we think we have heard from one of them. The letter from which we shall quote presently, is entirely in earnest, and signed with the Jady s real name. We at first threw the accompanying com munication aside, as very original and amusing, but unfit for print except with comments which we had no time to make. Taking it up again this morning, we think we see a way to compass the lady-writer s object, and we commence by giving her a fictitious name to make famous (instead of her own), and by in teresting our readers in her with showing her charac ter of mind as her letter shows her to us. She is quick, energetic, confident of herself, full of humor, and a good observer, and the " half-horse half-alliga tor impulses with which she writes so unconscious ly, may be trimmed into an admirable and entirely original style by care and labor. Miss " Kate Juniper,"* (so we name her), thus The word " Juniper is derived from the Latin words "junior and pai-ere" descriptive of a fruit which makes its appearance prematurely. We trust Miss Kate Juniper will sec the propriety of using this name till she is ripe enough to re sume her own. dashes, western-fashion, in what she has to say to us : " 1 hate formal introductions. I would speak to you now, and I will see you, when I may, in the Palace of Truth. I am in Godey s Lady s Book with decent compensation, but I want to be published faster than they can do it. I want to write for the Mirror icithout pay, for the sake of getting my name up. I shall ultimately put money in rny purse by this course. I have now three manuscript volumes, which good judges tell me are equal to Miss Bremer s. I send you a specimen. I have a series of these sketches, enti tled The Spirits of the Room. I can sell them to Godey, but he will be for ever bringing them out. I ! propose to give them to you, if you like them, in the ! true spirit of bargain and sale, though not in the let- i ter. 1 will give you as many as will serve my purpose ; of getting my name known; and then, if success comes, you will hold me by the chain of gratitude, as you now do by that of reverence and affection. " Will ypu write me immediately and tell me your i thoughts of this thing ? Truly your friend." We can only give a taste of her literary quality by an extract from her communication, the remainder wanting finish, and this portion sufficing to introduce I her to our readers. We give it precisely as written I and punctuated. She is describing an interview with I a travelling lecturer on magnetism, and gives her own experience in neurological sight-seeing : "Mark the sequel. I had, on going into the room, lost my handkerchief. A gentleman famed for his wisdom, his powder of seeing as far into the future without the gift of second sight, as others can with it, lent me his, protem. 1 heard the wonderful statements of the New School in Psychology relative to sym pathy established by means of magnetized or neurolo- | gized handkerchiefs, letters, etc. I determined to keep the handkerchief and see if there were enough of the soul aura of my wise-acre friend imprisoned in it, to affect me. I did so ; I returned to my home in the hotel to riiy lonely room ; evening shut in ; the waiter did not bring me a light; my anthracite burned blue and dimly enough ; 1 bound the magic handker chief about my brow and invoked the sight of my friend to aid my own. What I saw shall be told in the next chapter. CHAPTER I. "I gazed into the dimness and vacancy that sur rounded me J conjured the guardian spirit of the room to come before me, and communicate some of the secrets of his wards. How many hearts, thought I, have beat with joy and sorrow, with hope, and with anguish unutterable in this room. But no guardian spirit appeared, and 1 began to think that the tee-total pledge of this hotel had really banished all sorts of spirits, neurology to the contrary notwithstanding. I i closed my eyes, laid my hand on the bewiirhing | point in my forehead, and lo ! my eyes were opened, not literally but neurologically. At first a figure was revealed dimly and indistinctly gradually its out lines grew more defined, and a graceful young man stood before me. He was enveloped in the (olds of an am ple cloak, a jewelled hand held it in front, and he stood as if waiting to be known and noted. While gazing on him I found myself endowed with new and marvellous powers every line of his face had its language, and told me a broad history. His attitude, his hand, the manner in which the folds of his cloak fell about him, constituted a library that I was skilled to read, if I would. Here was the signatura rerun. I looked and looked it was like looking into a libra ry and determining what you shall read, and what you i shall leave unread. Some one has said that ihe j half is greater than the whole. This may be a physi cal, yet not a metaphysical paradox. Here I saw tha 198 EPHEMERA. last occupant of my room standing before me. I said I will first look at one week of his life. In a moment I beheld him pacing fitfully the room his thoughts came before me they were such as these," &c., &c. Miss Juniper goes on with an account of half a dozen different characters, who (by a very natural vein of revery) she imagines may have occupied the room before her. The specimen we have given sim ply shows the free dash of her pen, and we think we see in it the capability of better things. FEMALE STOCK BROKERS, ETC. A letter from Paris to the London Times describes the stock ex change of Paris (the Bourse) as thronged by female speculators not less than a hundred in attendance on any one day. To do this, too, they are obliged to stand in the open square in front of the building, as they have been excluded from the interior by a spe cial regulation ! Every five minutes during the sale of stocks, two or three bareheaded agents rush down the steps of the Bourse to announce to the fair spec ulators the state of the market; and they buy and sell accordingly. Fancy a few of the customs of the " most polite na tion" introduced into New York ! What would "Mrs. Grundy" say of a hundred ladies standing about on the sidewalk in Wall street, speculating in stocks, and excluded by a vote of the stock-brokers from the floor of the Exchange! When will the New York ladies begin to smoke in their carriages, as they do in Par- This book begins with an emblematic device re sembling, at first view, the knightly decoration called by our English neighbors a star. On further exami nation, a garter seems to be included in the figure; but upon still closer view, we discover, within the rays which form the outer border, first an eternal serpent then the deeper mystery of two triangles one of light, the other of darkness and shadow. We should not have been thus particular in describing a new decoration, but we conceive that the figure is very significant of the tone and design of the book. It belongs to what is called the transcendental school a school which we believe to have mixed up much of what is noble and true with much of what is merely | imaginary and fantastic. Truth, freedom, love, light these are high and holy objects; and though they may be sought, sometimes, by modes which we may think susceptible of improvement, we honor those who propose to themselves such objects, according to their aims and not according to their ability of ac complishment. The character and rights of woman form naturally the principal subject of Miss Fuller s book ; and we hope it may have an influence in con vincing, if not "man," at least some men, that woman was born for better things than to " cook him some thing good." THE ENGLISH PREMIER. We see a text for the least-taste-in-life of a sermon, in the following touch- up of Sir Robert Peel by the London Examiner: " WANTED, A PREMIER S ASSISTANT. Our friend Punch, who has written some excellent lessons for is? When will they wear Wellington boots with ministers, suited to the meanest capacity, in words high heels? When will they frequent the billiard- rooms and public eating-houses ? When will those who are not rich enough to keep house, use "home" only as birds do their nests, to sleep in breakfasting, di ning, and amusing themselves, at all other hours, out of doors, or in cafes and restaurants? .W^hen will the more fashionable ladies receive morning calls in the prettiest room in the house their bed-room them selves in bed, with coquettish caps and the most soig nee demi-toilet any way contrivable? Funny place, France ! Yet in no country that we were ever in, seemed woman so insincerely worshipped so mocked with the shadow of power over men. We should think it as great a curiosity to see a well-bred French man love-sick (when he supposed himself alone) as to see an angel tipsy, or a marble bust in tears. This condition of the " love of the country," and the dissi pation of female habits, are mutual consequences so to speak. Men are constituted by nature to love women, and in proportion as women become man-ified they feel toward them as men do to each other self ish and unimpressible. We remember once asking a French nobleman who was very fond of London, what was the most marked point of difference which he (as a professed love-maker) found between French and English women. The reply was an unfeeling one, but it will be a guide to an estimate of the effect of the different national manners on female character. "The expense of a love affair," said he, " falls on the man in France, and on the woman in England. Eng lish women make you uncomfortable by the quantity of presents they give you, and French women quite as uncomfortable by the quantity they exact from you." We only quote this remark as made by a very great beau and a very keen observer the fact that a high-bred man weighed women at all in such abomina ble scales being a good argument (at least) against in viting the ladies to Wall street and the billiard-rooms! And now let us say a word of what made the letter in the Times more suggestive than it otherwise would have been Miss Fuller s book on " WOMAN IN THE J^FNETEENTH CENTURY," from one syllable to three, by easy upward ascent, should take Sir Robert Peel s education in hand, and teach him how to write a decent note. " Notwithstanding the proverb to the contrary, a man may do a handsome thing in a very awkward way. "It was quite becoming and right to give a pension of c20 a year to Miss Brown, but what a note about it is this, with its parenthetical dislocations, and its atrocious style as stiff as buckram : " Whitehall, Dec. 24. " MADAM : There is a fund applicable, as vacancies may occur, to the grant of annual pensions of very limited amount, which usage has placed at the dispo sal of the lady of the first minister. On this fund there is a surplus of c20 per annum. " Lady Peel has heard of your honorable and suc cessful exertions to mitigate, by literary acquirements, the effects of the misfortune by which you have been visited; and should the grant of this pension for your life be acceptable to you, Lady Peel will have great satisfaction in such an appropriation of it. " I am, &c. ROBERT PEEL. "If Punch had been over Sir Robert Peel when he wrote this, he would have hit him several sharp raps on the knuckles with his baton, we are quite certain. The model of the note may be in Dilworth, very probably, or even in the Complete Letter-Writer, by the retired butler; but, nevertheless, it is not a true standard of taste. " Not to mention the clumsy parenthetical clauses so much better omitted, or the long-tailed words so out of place in a note about a matter of c20 a year. Sir Robert Peel has to learn that none but he-millin ers and haberdashers talk of their " ladies." Sir Rob ert Peel, as a gentleman and a prime minister, needs not be ashamed of writing of his wife. He may rest quite assured that the world will know that his wife is a lady without his studiously telling it so. " Foreigners will ask what is the distinction be tween a gentleman s lady and his wife ; whether they are convertible terms; whether there are minister s wives who are not ladies ; or whether there are ladies who EPHEMERA. 199 are not wives; and why the equivocal word is prefer red to the distinct one; and why the wife is treated if it were the less honorable. " Formerly men used to have wives, not ladies; but in the announcement of birlhs it has seemed finer to Mr. Spruggins and Mr. Wiggins to say that his lady has been delivered than his wife, the latter sounding homely and low. "But Sir Robert Peel should not be led away by these examples. He is of importance enough in the : world to afford to mention his wife in plain, honest, I homely old English. "Any one who is disposed to give lessons in letter- writing can not do better than collect Sir Robert Peel s notes as warning examples. From the Velve teens to Miss Brown s c20 a year, they have all the same atrocious offences of style and taste. It is an other variety of the Yellow Plush school. " It distresses us to see it. We should like to see MissBrown s <20 a year rendered into plain, gentle manly English. " As prizes are the fashion, perhaps some one will give a prize for the best translation of Sir Robert Peel s notes into the language of ease, simplicity, and with them, good taste." Sir Robert s crockery note proves, not that his pre miership still shows the lint of the spinning-jenny, but [ that he employed one of his clerks (suitably impressed j with his duty to Lady Peel) to write the letter. We wish to call attention, however, to the superior sim- \ plicity of the taste contended for by the critic, and to the evidence it gives that extremes meet in the usages ! of good breeding as in other things the highest re finement fairly lapping over upon what nature started with. The application of this is almost universal, but perhaps we had better particularize at once, and con fess to as much annoyance as we have a right to ex press (in " a free country") at the affected use of the word lady in the United States, and the superfine shrinking from the honest words wife and woman. M Those who say "this is my lady, sir!" instead of{ "this is my wife, sir!" or those who say "she is a P very pretty lady" instead of "she is a very pretty |; woman," should at least know what the words mean, and what they convey to others. In common usage, to speak of one s wife as one s lady, smacks of low-breeding, because it expresses a kind of announcement of her rank, as if her rank would not otherwise be understood. It is sometimes used from a dread of plain-spoken-ness, by men who doubt their own manners but, as it always betrays the doubt, it is in bad taste. The etymology of the plainer words is a better argument in their favor, how ever. In the Saxon language from which they are derived, wceepman signifies that one of the conjugal pair who employed the weapons necessary for the de fence of the family, and icif-man signified, the one who was employed at the woof, clothing the family by her industry. (The terms of endearment, of course, were " my fighter," and " my weaver !") instead of this honestly derived word (wife), meaning the one who has the care of the family, the word lady is used, which (also by derivation from the Saxon) signifies one. who is raised to the rank of her conjugal mate ! But, in this country, where the males invariably bur row in trade, while the females as invariably soar out of their reach in the sunshine of cultivation, few wo men are raised to the rank of their husbands. It is an injustice to almost any American woman to say as much by calling her a lady. It is one part, though ever so small a part, of patri otism, to toil for improving the manners of the coun try. If we can avoid the long round of affectations, and make a short cut to good taste by at once sub mitting every question of manners to the three ulti mate standards of high-breeding simplicity, disinter estedness, and modesty, it might save us the century or two of bad taste through which older countries have found their way to refinement. Amen ! LETTER TO FANNY FORESTER. DKAR FANNY : Would your dark eyes vouchsafe to wonder how I come to write to you ? Thus it ! befell :_ You live in the country and know what log-haul- I ing is like over the stumps in the woods. You have, many a time, mentally consigned, to condign axe and fire, the senseless trunk that, all its life, had found motion enough to make way for every silly breeze that flirted over it, but lay in unyielding immoveable- ness when poor oxen and horses were tortured to make it stir! If you knew what a condition Broadway is in what horses have to suffer to draw omnibuses and how many pitiless human trunks are willing doggedly to sit still to be drawn home to the fire by brute agony you would see how, while walking in Broadway, I was reminded of log-hauling then of the country and then, of course, of Fanny Forester. Before setting the news to trickle from my full pen let me quote from a book (one that is my present passion), a fine thought or two on the cruelty to ani mals that has, this day, in Broadway, made me no better than Uncle Toby in Flanders ! " Shame upon creation s lord, the fierce unsanguined dpspot : What ! art thou not content thy sin hath dragged down suffering and death Upon the poor dumb servants of thy comfort, and yet must thou rack them with thy spite ? For very shame be merciful, be kind unto the creatures thou hast ruined ; Earth and her million tribes are cursed for thy sake ; Liveth there but one among the million that shall not bear witness against thee, A pensioner of land or air or sea, that hath not whereof it will accuse thee ? From the elephant toiling at a launch, to the shrew-mouse in the harvest-field, From the whale which the harpooner hath stricken, to the minnow caught upon a pin, From the albatross wearied in its flight, to the wren in her covered nest, From the death-moth and the lace-winged dragon-fly, to the lady-bird and the gnat, The verdict of all things is unanimous, finding their master cruel : The dog, thy humble friend, thy trusting, honest friend, The horse, thy uncomplaining slave, drudging from mom to even, The lamb, and the timorous hare, and the laboring ox at plough, And all things that minister alike to thy life and thy com fort and thy pride. Testify with one sad voice that man is a cruel master. The galled ox can not complain, nor supplicate a moment s respite ; The spent horse hideth his distress, till he panted out his spirit at the goal ; Behold, he is faint with hunger ; the big tear standeth in His sk u/isVore with stripes, and he tottereth beneath his burden : His limbs are stiff with age, his sinews have lost their And^n is stamped upon his face, while he wrestleth unequally with toil ; Yet once more mutely and meekly endureth he the crush- ing blow ; That struggle hath cracked his heart-strings the generous brute is dead !" I doubt whether fifty years of jumping toothache would not be a lesser evil, hereafter, than the retribu tion charged this day against each passenger from Wall street to Bleecker. And, as if to aggravate the needlessness of the sin, the sidewalk was like the side walks in June dry, sunny, and besprinkled with ador able shoppers. With the sides of the street thus 200 EPHEMERA. clenn and bright, the middle with a succession of pits, each one of which required the utmost strength of a pair of horses to toil out of the wheels continually cutting in to the axletrees, each sinking of the wheels bringing down the whip on the guilty horses, and, with all the lashing, cursing, toiling and breaking of harness, people (with legs to carry them) remaining heartlessly inside the omnibuses. Oh, for one hour s change of places horses inside arid passengers in harness ! But why break your country heart for sins in Broadway ? Think rather of the virtues and the fashions. Large parasols (feminized, from male um brellas, only by petticoats of fringe and the change- ableness of the silk) are now carried between heaven and bright eyes, to the successful banishment of the former. Ladies sit in the shops smoking camphor cigars while their daughters buy ribands. French lap-dogs, with maids to lead them, are losing singu larity, as pairs of spectacles. People in the second story are at the level of very fine weather. Literature is at a dead stand-still. The " father of evil has not yet told us what the next excitement is to grow out of; and meantime (to-night) we are to have an Eng lish song from Madam Pico at the Tabernacle. So you have been ill and are mortal after all ! Well ! I presume whatever stays to keep the violets company "Fanny Forester" goes to He;iven; so you must have your reminders, like the rest of us, that the parting guest is to be looked after. What a to- morrow-dom life is! Eve s fault or Adam s to-day was left in Eden ! we live only for what is to come. I am, for one, quite sick of hoping ; and if I could put a sack of money at my back to keep my heels from tripping, I would f;ice about and see nothing but the to-day of the children behind me. (Bless me, how grave ] am getting to be !) Write to me, dear Fanny! As I go to market on this river of ink, write me such a letter as will ride without damage in the two-penny basket that brings this to you. And now adieu or rather au soin de Dieu for I trust that the first lark that goes up with the spring news will bid the angels not to expect you, yet awhile. Take care of your health. Yours always. MADAMK Pico s CONCERT. We should guess that between two and three thousand persons were listeners in the vast hall of the Tabernacle at the concert. The five hundred regular opera-goers, who were apparent ly all there, were scattered among a mass of graver countenances, and Madame Pico saw combined her two bailiwicks of fashion and seriousness. She seems to be equally popular with both, and her "good-fel low" physiognomy never showed its honest beauty to more advantage. She wore a Greek cap of gold braid on the right-side organ of conscientiousness, and prob ably magnetized very powerfully the large gold tassel that fell from it over her cheek. The English song was the qui-vive-\ly of the evening, however, and English, from a tongue cradled in a gondola, is cer tainly very peculiar! But, preserv us, Rossini-Bel lini ! After hearing exclusively Italian music from a songstress, the descent to Balfe is rather intolerable. A lark starting for its accustomed zenith with "chicken fixings" would represent our soul as it undertook to soar last night with Balfeathered Pico! What should make that same song popular is beyond our divining. Most of its movement works directly in the joint be tween the comfortable parts of the voice, and nobody ever tilled through its see-saw transitions, in our hear ing, without apparent distress. Madame Arnoult made a very strong impression on the audience last night. She sang with more dew in her throat than when we heard her before, and we fancy that the hard enamel of her tones, at thai time, was from the bracing up against timidity, and not from the quality of the organ. She has only to draw a check for what popularity she wants, we presume. TOWN-HUNGER FOR POETS. The appetite for live bards (like other scarce meats, commonly liked best when pretty well gone) is probably peculiar to old countries. We have stumbled lately on the follow ing letter touching Petrarch, written in 1368, by the Seigneury of Florence, to Pope Urban V. : " The celebrity and talent of our fellow-citizen. M. Francesco Petrarca, inspire us with a great desire to attract him back to reside in Florence, for the honor of the city and for his own tranquillity; for he has greatly harassed himself by bodily fatigues and scien tific pursuits in various countries. But as he has here no patrimony nor means of support, and little fancy for a secular life, be pleased to grant him the favor of the first canonry vacant in Florence ; and this notwithstanding any previous promise, so that no one may be appointed canon in preference to him. And you will ascertain from Pitti in what manner this ap pointment may be obtained for him in the most ample manner." How long it will be before Newburyport will send to the governor of Arkansas for ALBERT PIKE before New Haven will send to Mayor Harper for Mr. HAL- LECK before Portland will send to President Quincy for LONGFELLOW before other great cities will send for the now peripatetic ashes of their future honorary urns, and confer on them " appointments in the most ample manner" we are not prophet enough to know nor do we know what the locofocos would sny to such appointments. We suggest, however, that the poets should combine to vote for Mayor Harper on condition that he inquire what poets New York needs to have back " for the honor of the city and their own tranquillity." JAPONICA-DOM IN ITALY We have often thought that it would amuse, and possibly instruct, New- Yorkers, to know exactly what class of Europeans have, as nearly as possible, their own pretensions to aristocracy, and where such persons "stand," in the way of go-to-lhe-devil-dom, from the titled classes. There is scarce a man of fortune or fashion in New York who is not what they call in Europe a roturier a man, that is to say, whose posilion is made al together by his money. The treatment which a roturier gets, therefore, from ihose above him, presents a fair opportunity for contrasting his value (measured by this scale) with that of a rich, but grandfotherless New-Yorker. Besides other profit in the comparison, it is as well, perhaps, to form a guess as to what sort of a sore the upper ten thousand will make, when they come to a head in Manhattan. A letter to the Foreign Quarterly Review from a cor respondent in Italy, gives an account of the celebra tion of a scientific anniversary which draws together the accessible celebrities of Europe, and which was held this year in Milan. Incidentally the writer speaks of Milanese society thus : "Yes! the congress, whatever its other claims to consideration may have been, was deficient in quar- terings, and was therefore, no company for Milanese noblesse. Nowhere, in Europe, is the effete barbar ism of castes more in vigor than at Milan. The result of course, and of necessity, is, that the exclu sive there are the least advanced in social and moral ivilization of all the great cities of Italy. Will it be EPHEMERA. 201 believed that these noble blockheads have a Casino for themselves .ml their females, to whose festivities the more distinguished of their non-noble fellow-citi zens are invited after what manner does the civilized nineteenth century Englishman think? Thus: A gallery has been constructed, looking from above into the ball-room. Inhere such more distinguished roturiers (men of low descent), with their families, as the privi leged caste may condescend to invite not to share but to witness their festivities, being duly fenced in with an iron grating, may gaze through the bars at the paradise that they can never enter. It is at least something ! They may there see tuhal it is to be noble / The happy ones, thus permitted to feast their eyes, may, at least, boast to their less fortunate fellow-citizens, of the condescension with which they have been honored, and thus propagated, in some degree the blessings of exclusiveness among the ranks of the swinish multitude! In their happy gallery, at the top of the noble ball-room, they may at least inhale the refuse breath streaming up from noble lungs delicious gales from Ara by tJie blest. Surely this is something. The wealthy citizens of Milan feel that it is ; and they value the so-condescendingly-granted privilege ac cordingly. "Yes! the roturier citizens of Milan incredible as it may seem to those whose more civilized social system has given them the feelings of men in the place of those of slaves do gratefully and gladly accept tliese invitations. Yes for one of the curses most surely attendant on the undue separation of a privi leged caste, is the degradation of both parties the real abasement of the pariah, as well as the fancied exalta tion of the noble." Our readers imaginations will easily transfer this state of things to New York (fancying one class of rich men inviting another class of men, quite as rich, but with not the same sort of grandfathers, to look at a ball through an iron gr<iting!) but, leaving our friends to pick out the " customers" for the two sides of the grate, we turn to another difference still, between the nether -graters and the mechanics. There is even a more impassable barrier between these, and it is almost as impassable in England and France as in the more monarchical portions of Europe. A letter from abroad in the Ledger of yesterday, states this phase of social distinction very clearly : " The present state of society in France presents, therefore, a new and almost incurable evil the entire separation of tiie capitalists, the merchants and manu facturers, from the laboring portion of the community ; and what is worse, a hostile attitude of these social elements to each other. In Germany, and partly even in England, the interests of the manufacturers and capitalists are parallel with those of the laborers, and kept so by the pressure of a wealthy overbearing aris tocracy in Great Britain ; while on the continent the industrious pursuits are not yet sufficiently developed to effect the separation. Whenever the laborers (the pariahs) of England make common cause with their employers, or rather, whenever their demands coincide with those of their masters, the aristocracy is gene rally obliged to yield : but whenever, as in the case of the chartists, the laborers or inferior orders of the industrious section of society demand anything for itself which does not agree with the views of their em ployers, they are perfectly powerless a mere play-ball, tossed to and fro between the landlords and the cotton- lords. "In France, as I have observed, the separation of the higher bourgeoisie from those who help them by their labor to amass wealth, is complete; but so power less is the latter section that it is not only not repre sented in the chambers, but not even thought or spo ken of, except when it is thought necessary to teach it a lesson by putting it down and teaching it obedi- , ence. The misery of the laboring classes has not yet found an orator. " We have given, here-above, an attractive nucleus for table-talk and speculation, and we leave it to our friends. POETS AND POETRY OF AMERICA. An hour s lecture on this subject by Mr. Poe is but a " foot of Hercules," and though one can see what would be the proportions of the whole, if treated with the same scope and artistic minuteness, it is a pity to see only the fragment. What we heard last night convinced us, however, that one of the most readable and sale able of books would be a dozen of such lectures by Mr. Poe, and we give him a publisher s counsel to print them. After some general remarks on poetry and the uses of impartial criticism, Mr. Poe gently waked up the American poetesses. He began with Mrs. Sigourney, whom he considered the best known, and who, he seemed to think, owed her famousness to the same cause as "old boss Richards" the being kept before the people. He spoke well of her poetry abstractly, but intimated that it was strongly be-Hemans d, and that without the Hemanshood and the newspaper iteration, Mrs. Sigouruey would not be the first American poetess. He next came to Mrs. Welby as No. 2, and gave her wholesome muse some very stiff laudation. Mrs. Osgood came next, and for her he prophesied a rosy future of increasing power and re nown. He spoke well of Mrs. Seba Smith, and he spent some time in showing that the two Miss David sons, with all their merit, were afloat " on bladders in a sea of glory." The pricking of these bladders, by- the-way, and the letting out of Miss Sedgwick s breath, and Professor Morse s, and Mr. Southey s, was most artistically well done. Of the inspired males Mr. Poe only took up the copperplate five Bryant, Halleck, Longfellow, Sprague, and Dana. These, as having their por traits engraved in the frontispiece of Griswold s "Poets and Poetry of America," were taken to rep resent the country s poetry, and dropped into the melting-pot accordingly. Mr. Bryant came first as the allowed best poet; but Mr. Poe, after giving him high praise, expressed a contempt for " public opin ion," and for the opinion of all majorities, in matters of taste, and intimated that Mr. Bryant s universality of approval lay in his keeping within very narrow lim its, where it was easy to have no faults. Halleck, Mr. Poe praised exceedingly, repeating with great beauty of elocution his Marco Bozzaris. Longfellow, Mr. Poe said, had more genius than any other of the five, but his fatal alacrity at imitation made him borrow, when he had better at home. Sprague, but for one drop of genuine poetry in a fugitive piece, was described by Poe as Pope-and-water. Dana found very little favor. Mr. Poe thought his metre harsh and awkward, his narrative ill-managed, and his con ceptions eggs from other people s nests. With the copperplate five, the criticisms abruptly broke off, Mr. Poe concluding his lecture with the recitation of three pieces of poetry which he thought had been mista kenly put away, by the housekeeper of the temple of fame, among the "empty bottles. Two of them were by authors we did not know, and the third was by an author whom we have been exhorted to know under the Greek name of Seauton ("gnothi seauton") ourself ! (Perhaps we may be excused for mentioning that the overlooked bottle of us contained "unseen spirits," and that the brigadier, who gave us twenty dollars for it, thought it by no means "small beer!") Mr. Poe had an audience of critics and poets between two and three hundred of victims and victim- j zers and he was heard with breathless attention. He 202 EPHEMERA. becomes a desk, his beautiful head showing like a statuary embodiment of discrimination; his accent drops like a knife through water, and his style is so much purer and clearer than the pulpit commonly gets or requires, that the effect of what he says, beside other things, pampers the ear. Poe s late poem of " The Raven," embroidered him at once on the quilt of the poets ; but as the first bold traverse thread run across the parallelisms of American criticism, he wants but a business bodkin to work this subordinate talent to great show and profit. We admire him none the less for dissenting from some of his opinions. ASYLUM FOR INDIGENT WOMEN. A benevolent friend surprised us, on Saturday, into one of the most agreeable visits we ever made a visit to an institution of whose existence we were not even aware. We presume that others have shared our ignorance, and that the name we have written above will convey to most readers an idea either vague or entirely novel. Poetry alone would express truly the impression left on our mind by this visit, but we will confine ourself to a brief description in prose. Our friend informed us, on the way, that an entrance fee of fifty dollars was required, and that the claims of the proposed inmate (as to respectability and such cir cumstances as would affect the social comfort of the establishment) were decided upon by the board of management. Once there, she has a home for life, with perfect command of egress, absence for visits, and calls from friends, books, medical attendance, oc cupation, &c. Each inmate commonly adds some furniture to the simple provision of the room. We entered a large building, with two spacious wings, standing on Twentieth street, near the East river. Opposite the entrance, the door opened into a cheerful chapel, and we turned to the left into a drawing-room, which had all the appearance of an apartment in the most comfortable private residence. We descended thence through warm corridors, to the refectory in the basement, and here the ladies (be tween fifty and sixty of them) chanced to be taking their tea. We really never saw a pleasanter picture of comfort. The several tables were scattered irreg ularly around the room, and each little party had sep arate teapot and table furniture, the arrangements reminding one of a cafe, in a world grown old. The gay chatting, the passing of cups and plates, the nod ding of clean caps, and the really unusual liveliness of the different parties, took us entirely by surprise took away, in fact, all idea of an asylum for sickness or poverty. What with the fragrant atmosphere of souchong, and the happy faces, it would have been a needlessly fastidious person who would not have sat down willingly as a guest at the meal. We looked into the kitchen and household arrange ments for a few minutes, finding everything the model of wholesome neatness, and then, as the ladies had returned to their rooms, we made a few visits to them, chez elles, introduced by the attendant. Here again, the variety of furniture, the comfortable rock ing-chairs, the curtains, and pictures, and ornamental trifles, removed all idea of hospital or asylum-life, and gave us the feeling of visiters in private families. The ladies were visiting from room to room, and those we conversed with assured us that they had every thing for their comfort, and were as happy as they well could be though they laughed very heartily when we expressed some envy of the barrier between them and the vexed world we must return to, and at our wish that we could "qualify" and stay with them. We have rarely had merrier conversation in a call, and we think that this asylum for age holds at least one or two very agreeable women. But what charity can the angel of mercy so smile upon, as this waiting upon life to its gloomy retiring- door, lighting the dark steps downward, and sending home the weary guest with a farewell, softened and cheerful ! God bless the founder of this beautiful charity ! Who can hear of it and not wish to aid it ? Who has read thus far, our truthful picture, and does not mentally resolve to be one (though by ever so small a gift) among its blest benefactors. We begged a copy of the last report, and we find that the society, which supports the asylum, has some eighty pensioners out of the house, and that there is some fear entertained, from the low state of the funds, as to the ability to continue these latter charities. We can not conceive the treasury of such an institu tion in want. We are not authorized to make any appeal to the public, but those who are inclined to give can easily find out the way. SACRED CONCERT. We have once or twice, when writing of musical performers, given partial expres sion to a feeling that has since been very strongly confirmed the expediency of addressing music, in this country, to the more serious instead of the gayer classes, for its best support and cultivation. The high moral tone, this side the water, of all those strata of society to which refined amusement looks for sup port, gives music rather an American rebuke than an American welcome coming as a pleasure in which dissipated fashionables are alone interested. Italian opera, properly labelled and separated from its need less association with ballet, would rise to the unof fending moral level of piano-music, sight-seeing, con cert-going, or what the serious commonly call inno cent amusements. Till lately it has been generally understood that the only hope for patronage of fine music, in New York, was the exclusive class which answers to the court circles of Europe ; and, so addressed, the opera has very naturally languished. The truth is, that the great mass of the wealthy and respectable population of New York is at a level of strict morality, or of religious feelings rising still higher, and any amusement that goes by a doubtful name among moralists, is at once excluded. But music need never suffer by this exclusion, and as the favor of these stricter classes, once secured, would be of inexhaustible profit to musicians, it would be worth while for some master-spirit among them to undertake the proper adaptation of music to moral favor. Why should the best singers be considered almost, profane was the question that naturally enough oc curred to us the other night on hearing the Taberna cle fill, to its vast capacity, with the voice of Madame Pico giving entrancing utterance to Scripture! Here were a thousand lovers of music sitting breathless to gether, with their most hallowed feelings embarked upon a voice usually devoted to profane uses. Many whose tears flow only at hallowed prompting, listened with moist eyes to the new-clad notes of familiar sa cred music perhaps half-sighing with self-reproach that the enchantment of an opera-singer should have reached such sacred fountains of emotion. Why should not the best musical talent, as well as the more indifferent, be made tributary to religion? Why should not sacred operas be written for our country exclusively ? Why should not the highly dramatic scenes and events of Scripture be represented on the stage, and seen with reverence by the classes who have already seen them in their imaginations, during perusal of the inspired volume. And why should not the events of human life, as portrayed in unobjection able operas, be alternated with these, and addressed to the moral approbation of our refined serious classes? EPHEMERA. 203 We believe that this (and not this alone of things com monly delivered over to the evil spirit among us) would be willingly taken charge of by the angel of good influences. We can not give a critical notice of the performances at the sacred concert, as we were unable to remain after the conclusion of the first part, but we heard a single remark which seems to us worth quoting. At the conclusion of Madame Pico s first air, a gentle man, standing near us, observed that it was very odd a foreigner should sing with perfect articulation, while he could scarce understand a word from those who sang in their native tongue ! The instrumental mu sic was admirable, and the scenic effect of the female choir (all dressed in white, and getting up with a spontaneous resurrection for the chorus) was at least impressive. P. S. Just as we are going to press we have re ceived a critique of the concert, speaking very glow ingly of Madame Pico, and the " moist melodious hymn From her white throat dim," "as Aristophanes hath it," of the "deep clear tones of BROUGH, so long lost to us," and " Miss Norihall and Mr. Meyer," as having "given full satisfaction." THE FAMINE AT WASHINGTON. The city is alive with laughable stories of the distress for bed and prov ender during the late descent upon the scene of the inauguration. " As the scorched locusts from the fields retire While fast behind them runs the blaze of fire," the belles and beaux, politicians and travellers, are crowding back to the regions of steady population, aghast at the risks of famine run in the capital of a land of proverbial abundance. The stories are mostly such as would easily be imagined taking place in any country, under the circumstances, but we heard of one worth recording a Yankee variation of an expedient tried some years ago by an Englishman at Saratoga. John Bull, in that instance (it may be remembered), after calling in vain to the flying attendants at the crowded table, splashed a handful of silver into his plate and handed it to a waiter with a request for " a clean plate and some soup." A Massachusetts judge, probably remembering this, drew a gold piece from his pocket last week while sitting hungry at the strip ped table at Washington, and tapping his tumbler with it till he attracted attention, laid it beside his plate and pointed to it while he mentioned what he wanted. He was miraculously supplied of course, but, when he had nothing more to ask, he Qplitely thanked the waiter and returned the gold piece to his own pocket ! THE GERMAN CONCERT. The great wilderness of Pews-y-ism the boundless Tabernacle was filled to its remotest " seat for one" on Saturday evening, and a more successful concert could scarcely have been given. The nation cradled away from salt air, showed their naturally fresh enthusiasm for the per formances, and it seemed to have an effect upon Madame Pico, for her friends thought she never had sung so enchantingly, as in the second of the pieces set down for her " la casta Diva" She was ap plauded to the utmost tension of Mr. Male s roof and rafters. The German chorus by a score of amateurs was admirably given, and Schaftenburg s piano-music was done to the utmost probable of excellence. " MINE HOST." Some time ago, in some specula tions on American peculiarities, we commented on the hotel-life so much more popular in this country than elsewhere, and the necessity, bred by the manners and habits of our people, that hotel-keepers should be well-bred men, of high character and agreeable man ners. The trusts reposed in them by their guests, and the courtesy they are called on to exercise, make it almost inevitable that such men should alone be encouraged to assume the direction of hotels. This tendency of fitness has lately put the Howard house into the hands of one of our most courteous, capable, and agreeable friends, Capt. Roe, and the public will find that central hotel all that they can require. THE GEODE. We remember being pitched for a week into Query-dom, while attending college lec tures, by Prof. Silliman s astounding story of the mine in (we think) Meriden, Connecticut a single cave in which had been found a specimen of almost every known precious stone. It was a kind of omnibus geode, and with a boy s imagination, we speculated endlessly on how so many rare gems could have chanced to have come together in this world of loose distribution. We have come, now, however, to the astounding knowledge of a geode of poetesses the centre of which is Fanny Forester and though there are astonishing resemblances between the material and spirilual world, we were not prepared for this ! Fanny herself, as a prose writer and poetess, has now an assured fame. But, on St. Valentine s day, we received an original Valentine from one of her in timate friends, which was as beautiful poetry as fame wants in her trumpet, and two or three weeks ago we published a most delicious poem from another friend of Fanny Forester s, and here comes a fourth gem which seems to hint (and this is too sad a possibility to trifle upon) that gifted Fanny Forester is beckoned to, from a better world. God send her health with this coming spring thousands will pray fervently. Here follows a prayer for it, expressed in touching erse by one who seems a familiar friend : " TO FANNY FORESTER. 3RENCE NOBLK. Saw you ever a purer light More still and fair than the harvest moon When day has died in a shadowless night ? And the air is still as a summer s noon? No? Ah, sweet one, your eyelids shrine A light far purer, and more divine. 1 Heard you ever the silvery gush Of a brook, far down in its rocky dell ; And stilled your breath with a tremulous hush, As its mystic murmurs rose and fell ? Tis thus I list to the liquid flow Of your silvery accents, soft and low. Yet, sweet Fanny, the light that gleams Neath the sweeping fringe of your radiant eyes, Too purely chaste, and too heavenly seems To dwell in the glare of our earthly skies ; And, too soft and low your tones have birth. To linger long mid the din of earth 1 The sweet brow shrined in your clustering hair Has gathered a shadow wan, and deep, And the veins a darker violet wear, Which over your hollow temples creep ; And your fairy foot falls faint and slow, As the feathery flakes of the drifting snow. Tis said the eods send swift decay To the bright ones they love, of mortal birth ; And your angel Dora passed away In her youth s sweet spring-time, from the earth, Yet stay, sweet Fanny ." your pinions fold, Till the hearts that love you now, are cold." 204 EPHEMERA. YANKEE-PARISIAN ARISTOCRACY. Our agreeable neighbor of the " Etats-Unis" gives a letter from Paris which states that " another rich American is about taking the place of the retiring Col. THORN. Mr. MACNAMARA has opened a superb house in the rue de la Madeleine, and is sending out invitations par milliers. In the commencement of a fashionable career as an entertainer, a thousand invitations will hardly bring persons enough to form a quadrille. Mr. TUDOR, another American, is just now in that stage where he has commenced weeding his saloons !" The same agreeable letter states that two sisters of the Hon. Mrs. Norton, Lady Seymour (the Queen of Beauty at Eglinton), and Lady Dufferin (the Mrs. Blackwood whose songs are well known in this coun try), have been playing at the English embassy in private theatricals. The characters were nearly all personated by lords and ladies, yet one Baltimore belle sustained the part of " Mary Copp" in the play of Charles the Second Miss MACTAVISH. The two sisters of Mrs. Norton and the " Undying One" herself, were by much the three most beautiful wo men we saw abroad magnificent graces between whom it was hard to choose the most beautiful. NEWELL S PATENT LOCK. Mr. Newell s wonder ful lock (one of which costs as much as a pianoforte) is not wholly original. On the world s first washing- day, Monday No. 1, a human mind was created on precisely the same principle. Without going into the details either of this lock or a human mind (in either of which we should lose ourself of course) we will simply give the principle of Nature s patent and Mr. Newell s, viz : that the lock is constructed not only to be un-openable to all keys but the right one, but to become just what that right one makes it. Newell s lock is a chaos of slides, wards, and joints, till the key turns in it ; and it then suddenly springs into order, simplicity, and beauty of construction. Another resemblance to Nature s plastic lock, is this feature of Newell s, that by the slightest change in the key (provided for by bits inserted at will) the whole interior responds differently ; so that a bank director, like a mind director, may change his key every day in the year, and (preserving only the harmony between lock and key) will find the lock every day responsive to the change. Fair dealing required, we think, that the proper credit should have been given to the original inventor, and that the patent should bo called " New ell s, after Nature." Having shown the way the invention struck us, however," we copy by request what was said of it by the Journal of Commerce: " Mr. Newell denominates this new masterpiece of ingenuity, theParautoptic Toiken Permutation Lock. Parautoptic, being a Greek word, signifying preven tive of an internal inspection, and toiken meaning walled, hence the name. This lock has been named after its peculiar properties. Phosphoric or other lisjht may be introduced into it in vain in order to view its interior construction. The tumblers being separated from the essential actional parts of the lock, which constitute its safety, by a perpendicular wall of solid steel forming two distinct and separate chambers in the same, thus counteracting all burglarious designs. The front chamber will, on close inspection, either by phosphoric light or reflection, exhibit nothing but solid walls of steel or iron. This lock is susceptible of an infinity of changes from thousands to millions, ena bling the possessor to change or vary it at pleasure, simply by transposing or altering the bits in the key, before using it to lock the door, in a manner which is truly surprising. It therefore follows that a person may make himself a different lock every j moment of his life, if such be his disposition, thereby frustrating the skill of the maker, and placing him on a footing with the merest novice. We are, therefore, fully persuaded of its being the ultimatum of lock- making, and sincerely congratulate the inventor of this admirable contrivance, in thus being able to counteract so effectually the various plans and schemes of burglars and pick-locks, and we feel warranted in stating that after due inspection, all those connected with banking institutions, and the public generally, will adopt it at once as preferable to all others, for the safe-keeping and protection of their property." THE NEW YORK "RocHER DE CANCALE." To dine tete-a-tete with a friend, in Paris, or to give a din ner party, you must go to the above-named renowned restaurant, where have dined, probably, all the gentle men now existing. Private room, faultless dinner, : apt and prompt service, and reasonable charges, con- j stitute the charm, and all this we are to have (or so h says that communicative "little bird in the air") at i the corner of Reade st., in the new Maison Lafarge. | That " unrecognised angel," Signer Bardotte, is to ! be the chef des details, and, in partnership with him, a gentleman well fatigued with travel and experience is to act as partner. Of course we would much rather ! record the establishment, at the same corner, of an asylum for unavoidable accomplishments, but since ! luxury will cut its swarth, we like to see the rake with 1 a clean handle. THE MISSES RICE AND THE BEARS. The Port- || land Advertiser states that in a secluded part of Ox ford county, called "The Andover Surplus," there reside two female farmers, who occupy a few acres, and "do their own chores," hiring male help only for haying and harvesting. Out in the woods lately with the ox-team, cutting and drawing winter s wood, one of the Misses Rice was attracted by the barking of the dog at a hollow tree. One of the young ladies was absent for the moment, and the other chopped a hole in the tree and came to a lear-skin . Nothing daunted at the sight, she gave a poke, and out scram bled bruin, whom she knocked down and despatched. A second bear immediately made his appearance, and she despatched him ! A third bear then crept from the tree, and the same axe finished him ! This, Miss Rice considered a good morning s work, for there is a two-dollar bounty on bears, and the skins and grease are worth five dollars, at least. We should like to see Miss Rice, of the " Andover Surplus !" INCONSTANCY MADE ROMANTIC. " The Countess Faustina" (the new book now in everybody s hands) is the first novel we remember to have read, the whole burthen of which is a glorification of inconstancy in love ! The heroine is charmingly drawn the model of divine women but after quite innocently using up all that was most loveable in two men and deserting them, she gets tired of a third, and goes into a con vent to finish the story ! The lovers are all described as worthy of a deathless passion, and the love on both sides, while it lasts, is of the loftiest lift and devotion, but the countess has the little peculiarity of liking no love except love in progress, and she deserts, of course, at the first premonishing of the halt of tranquillity. The following passage, descriptive of her enlightening her last love as to the coming break-off, will show how neatly she wrapped up the bitter pill : "Be silent, she exclaimed, when I was about to answer her, * be silent ! Does not the water-lily EPHEMERA. 205 know its time, rises to blossom from the water, and|| then returns back into its depths, satisfied, tranquil, with a treasure of sweet recollections? Flowers! know when their time is passed, and man tries, all he can, not to be aware of it. This year with you, Mario, was the height of my blossoming ! " You love me no longer, I exclaimed bitterly. " Fool ! she replied, with that ecstatic smile which I never saw on any brow but hers, have you not j touched the tabernacle of my heart? Is not my son j yours? No, Mario! I love you; J have loved nothing so much ; I shall never love anything after \ you but, above you, God ! My soul has squandered i itself in such transports of love and inspiration with yours, that all it can ever meet in this region will be ; but a repetition, and perhaps an insipid one. We have so broken up my heart in searching for its treas ure, that the gold mines are probably exhausted, before the sad certainty comes upon us. Faustina! I know not in what tone I said this, but she sank trembling into my arms, and said very, very softly, " Oil, if you are angry, I shall not have the cour age to open my heart to you ! " I knew I ought not to alarm her, and I embraced j her tenderly, and inquired what she thought of doing. "She replied, I will close the mine! If there is any valuable metal within, it may rest quietly in the depths. And above I will plant flowers. "But what can what would you do? I inquired with terrible anxiety. " Belong entirely to God, and enter a convent." she replied," &c., &c. Six months of convent-life sufficed to finish the Countess Faustina, who "discovered too late" (says the narrator) " that, during our life, we can but look, like Moses, toward the promised Canaan" (of a man worth being constant to) "but never reach it!" It strikes us this is a naughtyish book at least, if, as we read in Spenser : " there is no greater shame Than lightness or inconstancy in love." The book is a mark of the times, however. It makes no mention of Fourierism, but we doubt whether its sentiments would have been ventured upon in print, if Fourier principles had not insensibly opened the gates. It is no sign that principles are not spreading, because everybody writes against them, and because few will acknowledge them. We see by various symptoms in literature, that the mere peep into free-and-easy-dorn given by the discussion of Fourier tenets, has left a leaning that way. There is no particular Fourierism, that we know of, in the two following pieces of poetry, but they fell from that same leaning, we rather fancy. We copy the first from our sober and exemplary neighbor, " r JPhe Al bion" : " No ! the heaven-enfranchised poet Must have no exclusive home, But (young ladies, you should know it) Wives in scores his hair to comb. When the dears were first invented, One a-piece Fate only gave us, Wiser far two kings demented Solomon and Hal Octavus. " Doctors Commons judge severely, My belief to reason stands ; Any dolt can prove it clearly, With ten fingers on his hands. Smiles and glances, sighs and kisses From one wife are sweet what then ? That amount of wedlock s blisse Take, and multiply by ten. " Laughing Jane and sparkling Jessy Shall the morning s meal prepare, Brilliant Blanche and bright-eyed Bessy Mid-day s lunch shall spread and share ; Ann and Fan shall grace my dinner, Rose and Laura pour my tea ; Sue brew grog, while Kate, sweet sinner, Lights the bedroom wax for me. "Monk ! within thy lonely cell, What wouldst give to greet a bride ? Monckton bids thee forth to dwell With a dozen by thy side. Poet ! in your crown one wife Shines a jewel, past a doubt, But in ten times married life, Mind your jewels don t full out! The next instance comes from the very heart of holier-than-thou-dom the exemplary state of Maine. The St. Louis Reveille declares it to be a "well-au thenticated fact which occurred at Holton, in Maine. 1 In old New England, long ago, When all creation travelled slow, And naught but trackless deserts lay, Before the early settlers way, A youth and damsel, bold and fair, Had cause to take a journey where Through night and day, and day and night, No house would greet their wearied sight ; And, thinking Hymen s altar should Precede their journey through the wood, They straightway to a justice went, By love and circumstances sent ! The justice good old honest pate Said it was quite unfortunate, But at that time he could not bind These two young folks of willing mind, For his commission sad to say Had just expired but yesterday ! Yet, after all, he u-ould not say That single they should go away : And so he bade them join their hands In holy wedlock s happy bands, And just a little he would marry Enough, perhaps, to safely carry As they were in connubial mooa Enough to do them through the wood ." " MISSIONARY EYELIDS. At No. 75, Fulton street, a large emporium has lately been opened for the sale of the plant propagated from the cut-off eyelids of the first Christian missionary to China in other words, for the sale of tea! One of the partners of this es tablishment (the Pekin tea company) has written a charming little pamphlet, called a " Guide to Tea- Drinkers," in which he gives the following true origin of the wakeful properties of tea: " Darma, the son of an Indian king, is said to have landed in China in the year 510 of the Christian era. He employed all his care and time to spread through the country a knowledge of God and religion, and, to stimulate others by his example, imposed on himself privations of every kind, living in the open air, in fast ing and prayer. On one occasion, being worn out with fatigue, he fell asleep against his will, and that he might thereafter observe his oath, which he had thus violated, he cut off" his eyelids, and threw them on the ground. The next day passing the same way, he found them changed to a shrub (tea) which the earth never before produced. Having eaten some of its leaves he felt his spirits much exhilarated, and his strength restored. He recommended this aliment to his disciples and followers. The reputation of tea in creased, and from that time it continued to be gener ally used." The pamphlet goes on to state the properties of the different kinds of tea, describing Pekoe as the best of teas (qu? hence the prevailing of the Pico (ease over Borghese s), and declares it to be peculiarly agreeable (Pekoe te-j) to poets and ladies as follows : "The warmth conveyed to the stomach of man by tea-drinking at his various meals, becomes essential to him, nor would the crystal steam of the poet suffice for the healthy powers of digestion in the artificial state of existence in which we are placed. A learned 206 EPHEMERA. writer declares that tea is particularly adapted for the ordinary beverage of young women, and the individual who, until the day of her marriage, has never tasted wine or any fermented liquor, is the one who is most likely to fulfil the great end of her existence the handing down to posterity a strong and well-or ganized offspring." A visit to this emporium is well worth curiosity s while, and tea can there be bought in large or small quantities, and in prices much below those of grocers. WOMKN IN THEIR JUNE. The early decay of fe male beauty, consequent on neglect of physical edu cation and the corroding dryness of our climate, has given an American value to the immature April and May of female seasons, and a corresponding depreci ation to the riper June. The article which we copy woman may be in her loneness in her loneness and the fairer for that loneness. You may think it is bespeaking favor and patience with a vengeance." REFINED CHARITIES. Our readers were made aware, a few days since, that we had received very great pleasure from a visit to an institution hitherto unknown to us the " Asylum for Aged and Indigent Ladies." That so beautiful a charity, conducted with so happy a method, should never have come to our knowledge, struck us as probably a singular chance in our own hearsay but we find that others, as likely to be interested in it as ourself, were equally in the dark, and one lady (quite the most active Dor cas of our acquaintance) took our account to be an ingenious device to suggest such an institution ! That a large two-winged building, with a sculptured tablet below, from the Brooklyn Star, expresses, we believe, I se . 1 in front, stating its purpose, and so filled that it the opinion of the best judges of these exotics from a better world, and emboldens us to express a long- entertained belief that the most loveable age of un married woman s life commences, at the earliest, at twenty-Jive, and lasts as long after as she shows no dim inution of sensibility, and no ravages of time. Women improve so much longer than men (improve by the loving and suffering that spoils men), that we wonder they have never found an historic anatomist of their later stages. We suggest it to pens at a loss. Here follow our contemporary s opinions : My dear sir, if you ever marry, marry an old maid a good old maid who is serious, and simple, and true. I hate these double-minded misses, who are all the time hunting after a husband. I tell you that when a woman gets to be twenty-eight, she settles into a calm rather she " anchors in deep wa ters, and safe from shore." There never was a set, or class, or community of persons, so belied as these ancient ladies. Look upon it as no reproach to a woman that she is not married at thirty or thirty-five. Above all, fall not into the vulgar notion of romances, and shallow wits unlearned in women s hearts, be cause they never had the love of a true woman that these are continually lying in wait to catch bachelors hearts. For one woman who has floated into the calm of her years, who is anxious to fix you, I will find you fifty maidens in their teens, and just out, who lay a thousand snares to entrap you, and with more cold-blooded intent for whether is worse, that one of singleness of purpose should seek to lean on you for life, or that one should seek you as a lover, to excite jealousy in others, or as a last resort. " Marry a healthy, well-bred woman, between twenty-eight and thirty-five, who is inclined to love you, and never bewilder your brains with suspicions about whether she has intentions on you or not. This is the rock of vanity upon which many a man has wrecked his best feelings and truest inclinations. Our falseness, and the falseness of society, and more than all, the false and hollow tone of language upon this subject, leave very little courage for a straightforward and independent course in the matter. What matter if a woman likes you, and shows that she does, hon estly, and wishes to marry you ? the more reason for self-congratulation but not for vanity. What matter if she be young or not, so she be loveable? I won t say what matter if she be plain or not for everybody knows that that is no matter where love is, though it may have some business in determining the senti ment. I don t know what has led me into this course of remark. The last thing I should have expected on sitting down to write, is, that I should have fallen into a lecture on matrimony. I am not an old maid myself, yet ; but I have a clearer eye to their virtues might be taken up to heaven by its "knit corners, like the sheet full of living things let down to the apostle on the housetop that such a building, with such a purpose, should exist unsuspected in one of the streets of New i r ork, is somewhat a marvel. But we were not prepared for TWO such surprises! We have since discovered another charity that was wholly unknown to us, as delicate, if not as poetically beau tiful, and we begin to think that the old saying is true ministering spirits do walk the earth, unrecog nised in their tender ministrations, and " The tears that we forget to note, the angels wipe away." Our second discovery is of an institution called the DEPOSITORY intended for the benefit of reverse of fortune, LADIKS those persons ivho have experienced and who can not come before the public, while, at the same time, they may, from necessity, wish to dispose of useful and ornamental work, if it could be done pri vately, and to advantage" The institution supports a store for the sale of needlework, &c., and any one of its twenty-five managers may receive an application and give a " permit" to the lady in want this one manager alone the possessor of the secret of the lady s wants and mode of supplying them. Work, drawings, &c., are thus purchased by the society s funds, and sold by the hired saleswoman of the society, and a veil is thus hung between delicacy and the rude con tact of open want a veil which prevents more pain, probably, than the food which prevents only bodily suffering. This beautiful charity has now been in existence twelve years, and by its tenth report (we have no later one) we find that fourteen hundred dollars were paid out for work in the twelve months preceding. This sum is not large, and it shows that the subscriptions to the funds of the society are less liberal than could be desired. We should think that the bare knowledge of the existence of such societies as this and the one beforementioned, would start streams of gift-laden sympathy toward them, and we think they but need wider publicity. We are not authorized to mention in print the names of the treasurer or directresses, but the report lies on our table, and we shall be happy to give the information to any individual applying at our office. We copy the following astounding intelligence from a Montreal paper : " ANNEXATION OF THE STATE OF MAINE. After all that has been said of Texas and Oregon, and the desire entertained by the people of the United States to enlarge their territory by the acquisition of im- nense tracts, it will surprise many, and add much than I have had, and begin to feel how dignified a ! the protocols that will be issued, to learn that the state EPHEMERA. 207 of Maine, disgusted ivith slavery and repudiation, and feeling a community of interests uith those of north of forty-jive degrees, has petitioned her majesty Queen Victoria to readmit her to the old family circle of John Bull, where property is respected, and where there is neither vote by ballot, Lynch law, slavery, nor repudia tion. " It is generally surmised that his honor, Judge Preble is charged with khis delicate mission, and that the petition will be sent through his excellency Lord Metcalfe, by the next steamer, though the ostensible ground of his honor s visit to Montreal is the railroad to Portland ; and it is evident that if the admission is agreed on, and is prompt and immediate, all the stock will be at once subscribed by the home government, and presented to the new confederation. " Part of New Hampshire, Vermont, and that por tion of New York bordering on the St. Lawrence, will, it is thought, follow this laudable example. " N. B. No STATE THAT HAS REPUDIATED NEED APPLY." We were born in Portland, and by annexation, as above, are likely to turn out a " a Britisher from the provinces!" President Polk is to lose us Queen Victoria is to have us! Lucky we were presented to her majesty while we were a republican court-eligible before we sank, that is to say, from a " distinguished foreigner" into a provincial editor! We should never have had formal certainty of having lodged exclu sively for the space of a minute, in the queen s eye, had Maine annexed herself before we were brought to the notice of " Gold Stick in Waiting." So much, at least, it was better to have been temporarily a Yankee ! There is one other difference to be considered, while we are measuring the matter at the top we cease to be a competitor for the presidency ! Our glorious fifteen millionth of capability for "No. 1" drops from us as treason to Victoria ! We are re duced to the prospect of dying the inferior of Louis Philippe (!) without the benefit of a doubt. We be come also, doubtless, the inferior of all the titled gen tlemen catalogued in the " red book," many of whom, till Maine was annexed, welcomed us to walk into their houses, without mentally seeing us pass under the yoke over the door. We are to unlearn " Yan kee Doodle," and learn "God save the Queen." We are to call this half-savage country " The States," and keep the birthdays of the queen s annuals. We are to glory in standing armies, national debt, and London fog and porter, and begin to hesitate in our speech, and wear short whiskers. The change in our prayer-book is not much. We are to do our ci phering in pounds, and that will plague us ! We are to be interested in Canada politics and Lord Met- calfe s erysipelas. We are to belong to a country where births are published, as the first sign* that peo ple know all about you, and that you must stay put. (This last strikes us as the worst part of it.) We are to pass for an Englishman on our travels, in the states and elsewhere, and that is agreeable, because our suavity will be unexpected. The larger features of our metamorphosis we omit for future consideration but, as far as these personal ones go, we fear we had a better chance as a Yankee ! We were what we could make ourselves we are to be what others make us. Queen Victoria, on the whole, will oblige us by not laying her hands on our Maine ! poetic feeling, and will do for the heart, what the single japonica does to the dress give the finishing expression, no way else so felicitously effective. Those who make love before this book gets into use, will work like savages with arrows before the discove ry of gunpowder. Those whose best thoughts die in birth, for lack of recognition and ready-made cloth ing, will wonder how they were ever comfortable without it. Our Cumberland correspondent spent a whole letter, wondering why we, who were constantly quoting the book, had never written a critique upon it. Our reason for not doing so or rather for first making our readers thoroughly alive to its beauty by extract is indirectly given in the book itself, in the chapter called " Indirect Influences." See how ex quisitely it is done : Behold those broken arches, that oriel all unglazed, That crippled line of columns creeping in the sun, The delicate shaft stricken midway, and the flyine buttress, Idly stretching forth to hold up tufted ivy : Thinkest thou the thousand eyes that shine with rapture on a ruin, Would have looked with half their wonder on the perfect pile? And wherefore not but that light hints, suggesting unseen beauties, Fill the complacent gazer with self-grown conceits ? And so, the rapid sketch winneth more praise to the painter, Than the consummate work elaborated on his easel : And so, the Helvetic lion caverned in the living rock- Hath more of majesty and force, than if upon a. marble pedestal. " Tell me, daughter of taste, what hath charmed thine ear in music? Is it the labored theme, the curious fugue or cento Nay rather the sparkles of intelligence flashing from some strange note, Or the soft melody of sounds far sweeter for simplicity ? Tell me, thou son of science, what hath filled thy mind in reading ? Is it the volume of detail where all is orderly set down And they that read may run, nor need to stop and think ; The book carefully accurate, that counteth thee no betUT than a fool, Gorging the passive mind with annotated notes? Nay rather the half-suggested thoughts, the riddles thou mayst solve, The fair ideas, coyly peeping like young loves out of roses, The quaint arabesque conceptions, half-cherub and half- flower, The light analogy, or deep allusion, trusted to thy learn- The confidence implied in thy skill to unravel meaning mysteries ! For ideas are ofttimes shy of the close furniture of words, And thought, wherein only is power, may be best conveyed by The flash that lighteth up a valley, amid the dark midnight of a storm, Coineth the mind with that scene sharper than fifty sum mers." The book of which this exquisite passage is a part, is called "proverbial philosophy." It is by Martin Farquhar Tupper, of Christ church, Oxford, and an American edition of it has lain in the bookstores for two years, wholly unsaleable ! It can afford to " bide its time," and mean-time, we shall enrich our readers with it, bit by bit. A FUTURE PASSION, IN THE EGO. We have had a book for some time, that is destined to be an Ameri can passion. Once rend, it infatuates for it expres A RGUMENT FOR SEDAN CHAIRS. MR. EDITOR : You stand accredited as the ready friend of luxurious elegance, the happy mingler of those foreign ingredients, the utile with the duln. ! My dear sir, why have you never said a word in favor -.. .. .,..-,- of the SEDAN-CHAIRS ? The very name carries one brief and beautiful figure every possible <[ back to the days of Pope and Add.son ; to the routs. 208 EPHEMERA. and masquerades and Ranelagh of London, in the reign of wits. Even Cowper celebrates it: " Possess ye therefore, ye who, borne about In chariot and sedans, know no fatigue But that of idleness. It is an Italian stggietta; and thus defined by an old writer : a kind of chaire used in Italy to carrie men and women up and downe. It seems to have emigrated to London from Sedan, the birthplace of Turenne. Dryden used it for the lectica of the Ro mans : " Some beg for absent persons, feign them sick, Close mewed in their sedans for want of air. And for their wives present an empty chair. " Were you ever in one ? Then you will agree that it is as necessary in Broadway as a gondola in Venice. Think of Pope s two pages and a chair. Our thousand and one idlers, who are too ragged to beg, and too poor to keep a cab, might flourish their poles to some purpose in front of St. Paul s a better class of chairmen than some we wot of. They need not have so heavy a load, nor so great a peril, as those who, according to Swift, helped in the Trojan horse: " Troy chairmen bore the wooden steed, Pregnant with Greeks, impatient to be freed, Tho.=e bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do, Instead of paying chairmen, run them through. " The new police woulJ defend the glass from any roystering blood, who, as Prior sings : " Breaks watchmen s heads and chairmen s glasses And thence proceeds to nicking sashes. Opposition may be expected: there was such at the cab-epocha. But who can even name a cab, without ignominy. Think of a trundling box a packing-case on wheels surmounted by a top-heavy Milesian, enthroned on a remnant of Chatham-street-great-coat, forcing you along sidewise by a series of thumps, and then, with a paroxysm that tries every ball and socket, dumping you on the trottoir! Our semi-tropical climate demands a protection from the sun : some thing emulating the oriental palanquin ; a parasol which shall preclude fatigue and dust, as well as sun light which shall transport the delicate woman with the gentlest conceivable carriage, and into the very hall of the stately mansion. What, prithee, can answer these conditions but the sedan-chair? I al ready see you in one, peering through the sky-blue curtain, as you swim through your evening survey. The corporation will at once adjust a bill of rates ; the thing is done. " LUNARIUS." We have been but in one city where sedans were in use Dublin. What struck us, in using them (and that is what the reader cares most to know, we pre sume) was the being shut up where it was warm and dry, and let out where it was warm and dry. The sedan is a small close carriage an easy chair en closed by windows carried on poles by two men. They come into your drawing-room if, you wish, shut you up in a carriage by the fireside, and carry you, without the slightest jar or contact with out-of-doors, into the house where you are to dine or dance no wet sidewalk and no gust of cold wind, snow, or rain ! They are cheaper than carriages because men are easier kept than horses, and as a sedan-chairman can also follow some other trade in the daytime, we should think it would be good economy to introduce them to New York. Many a delicate woman might then go to parties or theatres with a quarter of the present risk to lungs or head-dress ! PRINCE S GARDENS. We have received an im mense catalogue of the fruit-trees, plants, flowers, vines, and berries, comprised in this ark of vegetation at Flushing, and we should think from the account of Prince s gardens, and the prodigal variety of this catalogue, that the establishment would be better worth visiting than any object of curiosity in the neighborhood. It is now in the hands of the third generation of descendants from the original founder no slight marvel of constancy of pursuit in this country ! But we have found a singular pleasure in this cata logue no less than a perfect feast upon the names and descriptions of the fruits and flowers ! It reads like a directory of some city of fairies, with a description of the fairy-citizens written out against their names. We can fancy a delightful visiting-list of people an swering to these descriptions of fruits and flowers. Here are a few of the characters : Different APPLKS are described as " flesh stained with red, perfumed;" "snow-white flesh, musky sweet;" " fair, beautiful, pleasant flavor, sprightly ;" "tender, juicy, keeps well;" "remains juicy till late;" "red flesh, a curiosity," etc., etc. Different pears are described as " rich, sugary, delicious aroma ;" " most splendid, extra delicious, none more estimable, grows vigorously, bears soon ;" " beautiful, aromatic, bears young, greatly esteemed ;" " rich, musky ;" " excellent, slow to yield fruit ;" " thin skin, sweet, very good;" "new native variety, estimable, handsome;" "very large, skin shining, flesh crisp, agreeable flavor, excellent," &c. Different peaches are described as "oval, splendid, luscious;" estitna- ble, foliage curled, peculiar;" "waxen appearance, globular, delicious flavor," &c. Different scrapes are described as " large, estimable, vigorous;" "sweet, firm, thick skin, hangs long, monstrous clusters ;" " monstrous fox variety; " Willis s larire black ;" (?) "sprightly, pure for wine," etc. Different roses are called by name and described "formidable red;" "glory of the reds;" insurmountable beauty;" "new Dutch virgin s blush;" "sombre agreeable;" " Watson s blush; 1 "red prolific;" "pale rose, deep centre;" "deep rose, very robust;" "bluish violet, superb, singular;" "bright pink, flaked with scarlet;" "pubescent yellow flowering;" "white quilled;" "extra magnificent;" " splendid, full, double-shaded blush, monstrous size," etc., etc. Such names and definitions, of anything, were enough to bring one to Flushing, and Mr. Prince may look out for us very early in May, catalogue in hand, to see beauties he has described so glowingly ! We trust the list of adjectives we have put so venture somely close together in our cool columns will not explode in type, with spontaneous combustion! LETTERS OF INTRODUCTION. The following query may be answered briefly enough by quoting only Eu ropean usage, but the propriety of an American varia tion occurs to us, and we will write a line on the sub ject first giving the suggestive note : " SIR : My friend N., usually a well-informed, though rather an obstinate individual, is about to travel, and asked me for a letter of introduction to a friend abroad. The letter is written, and is submit ted to his perusal, after which he hands it back to be sealed, insisting that the rule is inflexible that all let ters should be sealed. I refuse to affix the wax, holding that a letter of introduction should be open. " We leave the question to your decision. As my friend N. can not sail until the question is decided, an early decision will oblige him and your humble ser vant, " B." With very ceremonious people, and cereinonious notes of introduction, it is usual to affix a seal upon the outside of the letter, leaving it to be read and EPHEMERA. 209 fastened by the bearer, before delivery. If the let ter extends beyond the mere stating of who the bearer is, and the desire that he should be kindly re ceived, or if it treats of other matters, it is given sealed. Either mode is perfectly allowable, for if the bearer objects to a sealed letter, he can ask the con tents when he receives it. It is more common, how ever, to give, it unsealed. Briefly, now, to the point we are coming to : let ters of introduction, in this country, should be ad dressed to the women and not to the men, and should go more into details of what the bearer is and what is his errand of travel, and therefore should be sealed. We have long been aware of a prevailing impression that Americans treat letters of introduction with a very uncivilized inattention, and so (hey do because the etiquetical and hospitable cares of American families are in charge of the wife, and the husband is very likely to stick the letter into a pigeon-hole of his desk, and character of the ten thousand other workies whom I Mr. Willis could name. Some think that he ! means to be witty, and alludes ironically to the "up- I per ten." This is a great mystery. " The constituent elements of japonica-dom and i dandy-dom may be seen daily in Broadway, between j the hours of twelve and three. All the beauty above ! Bleecker street wanders at that time down as far as j the Park, hazarding even the contamination of the I vulgar crowd, in the hope of securing an appetite for j dinner. The liveried lacqueys, who oscillate upon a j black board behind the carriages of our republican nabobs, sport their gayest trappings: I had the pleas- I ure of seeing one yesterday in a drab cut-away with gold lace and yellow facings, and white silk stockings with purple velvet smalls! What is this great coun try coming to ? We Gothamites do sometimes make ourselves ridiculous, by aping what as a people we profess to despise. It is rumored that a deputntiot forget all about it. The wife in America does all the L of English small-potato baronets may be expected ornamental. To see a rich man come down the steps |j in this city next summer; and that the object of their of his own house (almost anywhere " up town") you !i transatlantic mission is, to establish an aristocratic would take him to be a tradesman who had been in to ji nucleus among our upper ten thousand." 1 A her- collect a bill. To see the wife follow, you would at ij aid s college has already been set on foot; and I have once acknowledge that she looked as though she lived in the house, and fancy that she was probably an noyed to see that man pass out by the front door ! From making himself a slate to keep his wife a god dess, the American loses all idea of the propriety of looking like a mate for his wife, and he unconsciously ceases to take any care of the civilities to which his own manners give so little value, and neglects all persons who have not had the tact to be presented first to the ornamental moiety. It should be an American usage, therefore, growing out of the inferi ority of the husband s breeding to the wife s, that let ters of introduction should be addressed to the woman. Of course, as she has no opportunity to inquire into the bearer s position or habits, these should be more minutely set down, and the letter should be sealed. " FINDINGS." We see advertised continually cer- j tain commodities called "findings," which we under stand are what hatters and shoemakers require be sides peltry and leather. There are findings for newspapers, too what the editors require besides leaders and news and it may gratify our subscribers to know, that out of the weary slip-slop which we commonly scribble after making up the Mirror s lead ers and news, our contemporaries supply themselves with the greater part of their ornamental " findings." Like every other editor, we are in the habit of giving a line or two occasionally, in the body of our paper, heard that it enjoys considerable patronage. It is proposed to build wings on either side of the up-town opera-house the one to be assigned to this herald s college, and the other to the university of fashion, of which Mr. Willis is to be president. Some say that Colonel Webb has applied for the vice-presiden cy, but I can not vouch for this. "The chief feature of the Broadway Journal is a defence by Mr. Poe of his attack upon Longfellow, &c. It is as stupid as might be expected from a man ! who used to do up such very small prosodial criti- cisms for Graham s Magazine. Mr. Poe comes down ; rather severely on Willis he therefore has probably discontinued his services at the Mirror office." One mistake in the above : Mr. Poe left us some \ time before writing in the Broadway Journal, and to ] edit that journal ; and he never offended us by a c"riti- i cism, nor could he, except by personalities, in which I he never indulges. SCHILLER AND GOETHE. Mr. Calvert of Balti more has given us, as translator, a most agreeable collection of gossippy letters the undress of two great minds, of the age just closed behind us. What we most wish to comment on, however (the book speaks for itself), is Mr. Calvert s own the preface, in which he indignantly and most properly rebukes the last orator of the " Phi Beta Kappa Society," for a short-sighted and illiberal attack on the memory of Goethe. We found it difficult, at the time, to restrain to the wares of our most liberal advertisers, and it ap- J an outbreak of disgust, but the oration was not pub- 1 lished for some time, and we were unwilling to take ground upon a newspaper report of it. Meantime, our natural alacrity at forgeti ing disagreeable things dropped it out of memory. We are not sorry that a condemnation of it is now recorded in a book that must live. Mr. Calvert puts the truth thus forcibly : " How little outward testimony survives about Shakspere ; but whoso can read his poetry, may get a knowledge of the man surer and more absolute than could have been gotten even from the fullest contemporaneous opin ions. As the tree is known by its fruit, we know that pears that even this wastage of business notices considered spice enough for other papers to be sea soned with. The Boston Transcript spices its little sheet very often with these parings of our daily apple. Here is part of a letter which contains a touch : "The leading articles in the Mirror and Commer cial Advertiser for the last day or two have been de voted to the all-engrossing topic, the spring style of hats. After admitting that knowingness could no further go than Beebe & Costar went, Willis winds up thus : For ourself and ten thousand other workies whom we could name, the sadder model of Orlando Fish timid, proper, and thoughtful is perhaps more appropriate. This passage has produced a great sensation in dandy-dom. The Fish party are in rap tures, and could hug Willis to their very bosoms; the opposition is in a fury. Nobody can tell what the result may be. Willis dare not venture out, it is thought without a body-guard of Fishites. There are, moreover, many surmises with regard to the 14 the parent of the Shaksperian progeny must have been a man in whom, in close alliance with a kingly intellect, dwelt, as well the virtues that ennoble, as the graces that beautify and the affections that sweeten life. Into whatever errors an ardent temperament may have drawn him, they dim not the lucent image of him, fixed in our minds by study of his works; nay, we presume not to wish them uncommitted, lest 210 EPHEMERA. an attempt to better such a bounteous gift from God, should mar, but by a tittle, the original proportions of one, the sum of whose life has been to the world an un- measurable benefaction. When a bad man s brain shall give birth to an Iphiginea, a Clara, a Mignon, you may pluck pomegranates from Plymouth rock, and reap corn on the sands of Sahara. "On a formal public occasion (the Phi Beta Kap pa oration at Cambridge in 1844), a blind and most rude assault has been made on one of the mightiest of the dead, whose soul lives on earth, and will for ages live in the exaltation of the loftiest minds. Out of stale German gossip, out of shallow waitings of prosaic critics, shallower clamors of pseudo- patriots, uncharitable magnification of common failings, were compounded calumny against one of the fore most men of the world, and the most honored man of a people rich in virtue and genius." Quite aside from the defence of Goethe, we think there is an obvious presentment here of the continual manner of treating all kinds of eminence and celeb rity, here, in our own country, and at this present hour. As the proverb says : " Thankfully take refuge in obscurity, For, if thou claimest merit, thy sin shall be proclaimed upon the housetops ! Consider them of old, the great, the good, the learned ; Did those speed in favor ? were they loved and admired ? Was every prophet had in honor ? and every deserving one remembered to his praise ? It were weariness to count up noble names neglected in their lives, The scorned, defamed, insulted, but the excellent of the earth. For good men are the health of the world, valued only when it perisheth. Living genius is seen among infirmities wherefrom the com moner are free, And there be many cares, and man knoweth little of his brother ! Feebly we appreciate a motive, and slowly keep pace with a feeling. Yet, once more, griever at neglect, hear me to thy comfort : Neglect? LIBEL ON A WORLD, WHERE HALF TH^T WORLD IS WOMAN ! No man yet deserved, who found not some to love him ! 0, woman ! self- forgetting woman ! poetry of human life ! Many a word of comfort, many a deed of magnanimity, Many a stream of milk and honey pour ye freely on the earth !" STEWART S STABLE ECONOMY. We covet three things in the Arab s condition his loose trousers, his country without fences, and his freedom to live with his horse. That we have once had the centaur variety in the human race, men-quadrupeds, and have once known horseflesh as " flesh of our flesh," the natural longing to prance, when we first get into the open air after long confinement, is but one of many evidences. In a mere notice of a book, however, we have no leisure to trace back a problem of physiology. We merely wish to convey to such of our enviable readers as can resume the centaur (by loving and living with a horse in the country), the treasure they have in a book which shows them how to make their life (the horse half of it) a luxury instead of an endurance, and to give our own five years enjoyment in breaking, petting, and improving horses, by aid of this same book, as expe rienced commendation. We had the English edition of Stewart s books on horses, but the Appletons have republished the "Stable Economy," with "notes adapting it to American food and climate," by Mr. Allen, the able editor of the Agriculturist, and it is now an invaluable vade-mecum, for all men who have the luxury of a stable. We can not help repeating that a visitable stable, with friends in it in the shape of horses with horses in it one has himself broken and trained a stable to which the ladies like to go after breakfast, and where a gentleman can throw on his own saddle and bridle, and gallop oft , without needing first to find his groom- that this is the next best luxury our country affords, after ladies society. (Horses, that is to say, before politics or stocks, under male discussion.) The stable at Gordon castle (approachable by a covered passage from the principal hall) was a fre quent resort for the ladies after breakfast ; and we have seen women, the highest in rank at the English court, going in and out of the stalls, patting the favor ites they were to ride later in the day, and discussing their beauty with the simplicity and frankness of Arabs in the desert. While we are building country- houses and forming habits in America, it is well to know all the luxury we can enjoy in rural life, and no one should build stable, or own horse, without con sulting the excellent directions for stabling and using the horse, in this book of Stewart s. GRUND S LETTERS FROM EUROPE. In Godey s Lady s Book for April we find one of these best epistles of the day, and (to tell the truth) we read them with very little satisfaction, for they leave us with a want to go where they are written. The April number of Godey is principally the work of unwedded quills (no less than ten misses numbered among the contributors !), but we have read it with great satis faction, and felicitate our old friend upon the bril liancy of his maiden troop. Godey is the pioneer of magazines, and he has a tact at collection and selec tion, which has put him where he is-^-safe at high- water mark in enduring prosperity. Success to him. By-the-way though we have no room to expatiate on the several papers in this number the " Sketch of Joseph Bonaparte" is capital. Is that by a " miss" too? And apropos, Godey! What a vile word "miss" is, to express the sweetest thing in nature ! Why should the idol of mankind be called a "miss?" Why should the charming word heifer be degraded to the use of kine? We say "degraded," for it once served ladies as a synonym for the proudest of virgin sweethearts. Ben Jonson, in his play of the "Silent Woman," thus writes a speech for his hero : " But heare me, faire lady, I do also love her whom I shall choose for my heifer, to be the first and prin cipal in all fashions." The derivation of the word heifer is so complimen tary ! It comes from two Anglo-Saxon words, which signify " to step superbly," as a young creature who has borne no burthens. With this explanation, we trust our friend Godey will no longer hesitate to ad vertise his fair contributors as the bright lights of IIEIFERDOM disusing henceforth, for ever, the dispar aging epithet of misses. LETTER FROM THE EDITOR S ROOM. NEW YORK, FRIDAY, March 21. To a lady-friend in the country. I am up to the knees in newspapers, and write to you under the stare of nine pigeon-holes, stuffed with literary portent. Were there such a thing (in this world of everythings) as papyral magnetism, you would get a letter, not only typical in itself, but typical of a flood in which my identity is fast drowning. Oh, the drown of news, weighed unceasingly little events and great ones against little more than the trouble of snipping round with scissors ! To a horrid death to a miraculous preservation to a heart-gush of poesy to a marriage to a crime to the turn of a political crisis to flashing wit and storied agonies giving but the one EPHEMERA. 211 invariable first thought " Shall I cut it out ?" Alas, dear beauty-monarch of all you survey! your own obituary, were I to read it in a newspaper of to-mor row, would speak scarce quicker to my heart than to those scissors of undiscriminnting circum-cision ! With the knowledge that the sky above me was en riched, as Florence once was, by the return of its long-lost and best model of beauty, I should ask, with be-paragraphed grief "will her death do for the Mirror ?" But you are alive to laugh at me alive to be (is your lip all ready for a curl ?) the "straw" for me, drowning, to catch at ! I write to you, to-day, to vary routine ! Happy they who can see but one face when they write ! 1 am trying hard to see only yours trying hard, by mental recapitulation of eyes like fringed inkstands, passionate nostrils, and chin of in domitable calm, to forget the vague features of my many-nosed public. Oh, the dread loss of one-at-a- titne-ativeness ! Oh, the exile to the sad land of nominative plural! Oh, the unprized luxury of see ing but little, and seeing that little for yourself! But this is a letter from town, and you want the gossip. Spring is here getting ready to go into the country. The dust and shutter-banging of the tem pestuous equinox, have, for three days, banished the damageables from Broadway, and I know not the complexion of the spring fashions, now four days old. I was in a gay circle last night where some things were talked of hm ! let me remember Mrs. Mow- ATT S forthcoming comedy was one topic. Do you know this Corinne of the temperate latitudes? An exact copy, in marble, of her neck and head, would show you a Sapphic bust of most meaning and clear- lined beauty, and there is inspiration in the color of her living eyes and in the prodigal abundance of her floral hair. All this beauty she wastes and thinks nothing of busied only with the lining of a head, which some tropical angel fashioned as he would have turned out a magnolia. She has genius, and her lamp burns within. But it takes more than genius to write comedy, and more than beauty (though it should not) to give it success, and I tremble for the lovely dramatist. The excitement about it is great the actors all like their roles the stage-manager says it is good the public are wishing to be pleased and will flock to the experiment and with all my heart, I pray for a "house" continually "brought down." I enclose you a sketch of the plot from the New World of this morning : " The subject is well chosen. Fashion that is, the effort to show offdazzlingly in society is, in this country, a fact of sufficient body and consistence to afford material for an original comedy and the inci dents and peculiarities of manner and character at tending the effort, are often abundantly ludicrous and grotesque to make the comedy laughable. The glass of fashion, held fairly up in New York, will show some amusing scenes, quite new to the stage. "The characters of the piece are selected and group ed, we think, with character and judgment. An un educated woman of fashion, driving her husband into dishonesty and crime by her crime and extravagance a pretended French count, who knows, at least, all the police courts of Europe very thoroughly a clever French waiting maid, who finds in the said count an old acquaintance a negro valet of all work rejoicing in a scarlet livery, and much inclined to grandilo quencea rich old farmer, from Cattaraugus, carry ing the moral of the piece, and no small part of its humor, stoutly on upon his broad shoulders a Fanny- Forester-like country girl, transplanted into the city from Geneva, to work out the plot, and get the good luck of the catastrophe these are the main person ages. An old maid a small poet a solemn dandy, styled Fogg a confidential clerk called Snobson, and clearly belonging to the large family of Snobs a walk ing gentleman, and a young coquette, are thrown in as make-weights. Here is certainly a goodly drama tic array. "The dialogue is written with taste and spirit. It has few passages of what is called fine writing, but it embodies enough of wit, and fancy, and observa tion, to keep the attention of the reader constantly and pleasurably excited. A riged criticism, resolved upon fault-finding, might say that the conclusion of this piece is too clearly apparent from its commencement, and that the action moves too sloxvly through the first three acts. But admitting all this, the comedy certainly has great merit, and, if well brought out, will have a run. We believe that its first night will be greeted by a large audience, and we most cordially bespeak for it the favorable consideration to which it is, in every regard, entitled." Forrest s fate among the London Philistines is another matter of chat. The Macready critics are down upon him Foster of the Examiner, Macready s bull-dog, heaviest and foremost. This was to have been expected, of course. The gravelly bottom of Macready s throat has been forced upon the English, for so long, as the only sarcophagus of Shakspere, that the bringing of the dry bones to life, in an open mouth, and the marring of the sexton s vocation, was not submitted to without a grumble. An English critic predicts that Forrest "will play down the grum blers yet," and I trust he will do so. He is the kind of man to say with old Chapman : " Give me the spirit that on life s rough sea Would have his sails filled with lusty wind, Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack, And his rapt ship run-on her side so low That she drinks water, and her keel ploughs air." He is twenty times the man, and the actor, that Mac- j ready is, and the English will find out his mark if he I ! stay long enough. Meantime they are enchanted | with Miss Cushman, who, the "Examiner says , is a ! " feminized caricature of Macready s physiognomy." I like her, by the way, and rejoice in her success as much as I wish a better appreciation of Forrest. What else shall I tell you? The Mirror s won drous "rise and progress," profitably and firmly seated, i after less than six months of industrious existence, is j a marvel that even your beauty may rejoice in for it will bring me to your feet (by paying the expenses ! of transit) when the summer comes over us. Where I are you going to Baden it this summer ? At Sara- toga? 1 like that place, because you can there, and there alone, be an island in a sea of people. Where there are fewer, you are added to the continent of sociability, and have no privileges. Shall we say the last week in August ? Bottom of the page. Scarce room to write my self Yours AN IDEA FOR TATTERSALL S. There are luxuries which rich men forego, not for the money but for the mind they cost. Hundreds of people in this city, for instance, could very well afford a carriage, but they can not afford the trouble of buying horses, the care of looking after grooms, nor the anxieties inseparable from horse-owning in this country of perpetual new servants. In England this want is provided for by the system the livery-stable keepers call jobbing. Lady Blessington s two or three different equipages for in stance are allowed to be the prettiest and best ap pointed in London. Yet she owns neither carriages, horses, nor harness. She pays a certain sum per annum to be provided with what she wants in the way of equipages, and keeps only her own coachmau 212 EPHEMERA. and footmen. A new carriage is furnished whenever wanted, and of whatever style is wanted (the jobber finding no trouble probably in disposing of the one given up) and a sick or lame horse is replaced imme diately from a stable where the first blood and shape are alone kept. Her ladyship thus knows precisely what her driving is to cost her for the year, and transfers to the jobber all the risk, anxiety, and trouble. A wealthy New-Yorker, a day or two since, made a very handsome offer to a livery-stable keeper to furnish him a carriage on this same plan, and the of fer was refused. But, though a single customer of this kind might be troublesome, combination (that great secret of luxurious economies) might " make it an swer." Twenty nice carriages, let out to private gentlemen at $1,000, or $1,500 a year each, might be looked after by one jobber well versed in horseflesh, and his taste and experience would turn out better equipages than could be got up by private individuals. The twenty stables now kept up would be combined in one (this in itself, no small saving) and the rich man might be driven in better style, for less money than it now costs him, and better than all without the vexatious care, vigilance and anxiety of keeping a private carriage. P. S. We can safely say that we are entirely disin terested in the proposed arrangement ! GRAHAM FOR APRIL. The equinox brought us such detestable weather, that instead of our usual two hours airing of brains under a hat, we lay on our back yesterday afternoon and read "Graham." How ! does the man get so many good things! Grund, | Fanny Forester, Mrs. C. H. Butler, Win. Lander, Mrs. Embury, Mrs. Osgood, Mr. Peterson all have written their best for this number. Our friend Fanny s story of "Nickie Ben" seems to us particularly fresh, bright, and original. Mr. Grund s letter from Paris is full of intelligence, and among other things, he thus | speaks of Eugene Sue and his two tasters : "He lives now, by the product of his industry, in princely style ; but his enjoyments are troubled by ! the constant fear of being poisoned by his political : and religious adversaries. He has, therefore, con- ! traded an intimate friendship with two large, beautiful \ Newfoundland dogs, who are his constant dinner and j breakfast companions, and who always cat first of every \ dish that is brought on the table. If these judges of | gastronomy pronounce in favor of it, by first eating a ! large quantity, with apparent relish, the author of j " The Mysteries" and " The Wandering Jew" him self partakes of it without farther scruple. He be lieves dogs much more faithful than men, and the sagacious instincts of a regular Newfoundlander su perior to the science of chymists and physicians." Poor dogs! Considering that they would doubtless have been wagging their tails in Paradise, but for Adam s transgression, it seems hard to make them die, for a human master, besides! But, to turn to the first leaf lo ! the brigadier ! There he stands, looking as amiable as if he had just nabbed a flying thought for a song, his smile a little more rigid, however, and his phiz a little thinner than his accommodating wont. The picture is enough like him, notwithstanding, for all "business purposes." We think him better looking than the artist has "c/one" him, and this we request the ladies (who sing his songs) to allow for. The magazine opens with a critical biography, exceedingly well done, and (the brigadier below stairs playing salesman) we see noth ing to prevent our quoting a note of our own to the writer : NEW YORK, Feb. 1, 1845. Mr DEAR SIR : To ask me for my idea of General Morris is like asking the left hand s opinion of the dexterity of the right. I have lived so long with the "brigadier," known him so intimately, worked so con stantly at the same rope, and thought so little of ever separating from him (except by precedence of ferriage over the Styx), that it is hard to shove him from me to the perspective distance hard to shut my own par tial eyes, and look at him through other people s. I will try, however, and as it is done with but one foot off from the treadmill of my ceaseless vocation, you will excuse both abruptness and brevity. Morris is the best known poet of the country by acclamation, not by criticism. He is just what poets would be if they sung, like birds, without criticism ; and it is a peculiarity of his fame, that it seems as regardless of criticism as a bird in the air. Nothing can stop a song of his. It is very easy to say that they are easy to do. They have a momentum, some how, that is difficult for others to give, and that speeds them to the far goal of popularity the best proof consisting in the fact that he can, at any moment, get fifty dollars for a song, unread, when the whole remainder of the American Parnassus could not sell one to the same buyer for a shilling. It may, or may not, be one secret of his popularity, but it is a truth that Morris s heart is at the level of most other people s, and his poetry flows out by that door. He stands breast high in the common stream of sympathy, and the fine oil of his poetic feeling goes from him upon an element it is its nature to float upon, and which carries it safe to other bosoms, with little need of deep diving or high flying. His senti ments are simple, honest, truthful, and familiar; his language is pure and eminently musical, and he is prodigally full of the poelry of everyday feeling. These are days when poets try experiments ; and while others succeed by taking the world s breath away with flights and plunges, Morris uses his feet to walk quietly with nature. Ninety-nine people in a hundred, taken as they come in the census, would find more to admire in Morris s songs than in the writings of any other American poet ; and that is a parish in the poetical episcopate, well worthy a wise man s nur ture and prizing. As to the man Morris my friend I can hardly venture to "burn incense on his mustache," as the French say write his praises under his very nose but, as far off as Philadelphia, you may pay the prop er tribute to his loyal nature and manly excellences. His persona] qualities have made him universally pop ular, but this overflow upon the world does not impov erish him for his friends. I have outlined a true poet, and a fine fellow fill up the picture to your liking. Yours, very truly, N. P. WILLIS. We get, from literary fledglings, at least one letter per diem, requesting detailed advice on the quo modo of a first flight in prose or poesy. We really suppose we have, or are to have, an end to our life, and we like to economise time. So we publish a letter, which we once had occasion to write, and which must serve as a circular a letter which we recorded in our diary when it was written recorded with the following preface : There lies before me now, upon my table, a letter of three tolerably compact pages, addressed to a young gentleman of college, who is " bit by the dipsas" of authorship. His mother, a sensible, plain, farmer s widow, chanced to be my companion for a couple of days, in a stage-coach, and while creeping over the mountains between the Hudson and the Sus- quehannah, she paid my common sense the compli- EPHEMERA. 213 ment of unburthening a very stout heart to me. Since her husband s death, she has herself managed the farm, and by active, personal oversight, has con trived " to make both ends so far lap" (to use her own expression), as to keep her only boy at college. By her description, he is a slenderish lad in his constitu tion, fond of poetry, and bent on trying his fortune with his pen, as soon as he has closed his thumb and finger on his degree. The good dame wished for the best advice I could give him on the subject, leaving it to me (after producing a piece of his poetry from her pocket, published in one of the city papers) to en courage or dissuade. I apprehended a troublesome job of it, but after a very genial conversation (on the subject of raising turkeys, in which she quite agreed with me, that they were cheaper bought than raised, when corn was fifty cents a bushel greedy gobblers !). I reverted to the topic of poetry, and promised to write the inspired sophomore my views as to his pros pects. Need I record it ? that long letter affects me like an unsigned bank-note like something which might so easily have been money like a leak in the beer-bnrrel like a hole in the meal-bag! It irks me to lose them three fair pages a league s drift to lee ward a mortal morning s work, and no odor lucri thence arising ! I can not stand it, Mrs. , and Mr. Sophomore ! You are welcome to the autograph copy, but faith ! I must print it. There is a superfluity of adjectives (intended, as it was, for private perusal), but I will leave them out in the copy. Thus runs the letter: DKAR SIR: You will probably not recognise the handwriting in which you are addressed, but by cast ing your eye to the conclusion of the letter, you will see that it comes from an old stager in periodical lit erature; and of that, as a profession, I am requested by your mother to give you, as she phrases it, "the cost and yield." You will allow what right you please to my opinions, and it is only with the authority of having lived by the pen, that I pretend to offer any hints on the subject for your guidance. As "the farm" can afford you nothing beyond your education, you will excuse me for presuming that you need in formation mainly as to the livelihood to be got from literature. Your mother thinks it is a poor market for pota toes, where potatoes are to be had for nothing, and that is simply the condition of American literature (as protected by law). The contributors to the numer ous periodicals of England, are the picked men of thousands the accepted of hosts rejected the flower of a highly-educated and refined people soldiers, sailors, lords, ladies, and lawyers all at leisure, all anxious to turn a penny, all ambitious of print and profit; and this great army, in addition to the hun dreds urged by need and pure literary zeal fliis great army, I say, are before you in the market, offering their wares to your natural customer, at a price for which you can not afford to sell nothing ! It is true that by this state of the literary market, you have fewer competitors among your countrymen the best talent of the country being driven, by necessity, into less congenial and more profitable pursuits; but even with this advantage (none but doomed authors in the field) you would probably find it difficult, within five years after you graduated, to convert your best piece of poetry into a genuine dollar. I allow you, at the same time, full credit for your undoubted genius. You naturally inquire how American authors live. I answer, by being English authors. There is no American author who lives by his pen, for whom Lon don is not the chief market. Those whose books sell only in this country, make scarce the wages of a day- laborer always excepting religious writers, and the authors of school-books, and such works as owe their popularity to extrinsic causes. To begin on leaving college, with legitimate book-making writing novels, tales, volumes of poetry, &c., you must have at least five years support from some other source, for until you get a name, nothing you could write would pay "board and lodging;" and "getting a name" in America, implies having first got a name in England. Then we have almost no professed, mere authors. They have vocations of some other character, also. Men like Dana, Bryant, Sprague, Halleck, Kennedy, Wetmore, though, no doubt, it is the first wish of their hearts to devote all their time to literature, are kept, by our atrocious laws of copyright, in paths less j honorable to their country, but more profitable to I themselves, and by far the greatest number of discour- j aged authors are " broken on the wheel" of the pub- I lie press. Gales, Walsh, Chandler, Buckingham, and | other editors of that stamp, are men driven aside from authorship, their proper vocation. Periodical writing seems the natural novitiate to : literary fame in our country, and I understand from your mother that through this lies your chosen way. | I must try to give you as clear an idea as possible of j the length and breadth of it, and perhaps I can best j do so by contrasting it with another career, which (if | advice were not always useless) I should sooner advise. Y"our mother s farm, then, consisting of near a hun dred acres, gives a net produce of about five hundred dollars a year hands p;iid, I mean, and seed, wear and | ! tear of tools, team, <?cc., first subtracted. She has j; lived as comfortable as usual for the last three or four I years, and still contrived to lay by the two hundred and fifty dollars expended annually on your educa tion. Were you at home, your own labor and over- ! sight would add rather more than two hundred dollars , to the income, and with good luck you might call i yourself a farmer with five hundred dollars, as the I Irish say, "to the fore." Your vocation, at the same | time, is dignified, and such as would reflect favorably : on your reputation, should you hereafter become in any way eminent. During six months in the year, you would scarce find more than an hour or two in the twenty-four to spare from sleep or labor; but in the winter months, with every necessary attention to your affairs out of doors, still find as much leisure for study and composition as most literary men devote to those purposes. I say nothing of the pabulum of rural influences on your mind, but will just hint at another incidental advantage you may not have thought of. viz. : that the public show much more alacrity in crowning an author, if he does not make bread and butter of the laurels! In other words, if you are a farmer, you are supposed (by a world not very brilliant in its conclusions) to expend the most of your mental energies (as they do) in making your | living; and your literature goes for an "aside" waste-water, as the millers phrase it a very material premise in both criticism and public estimation. At your age, the above picture would have been thrown away on myself, and I presume (inviting as it seems to my world-weary eyes) it is thrown away now upon you. I shall therefore try to present to you the lights and shadows of the picture which seem to you more attractive. Your first step will be to select New York as the city which is to be illustrated by your residence, and to commence a search after some literary occupation. You have a volume of poetry which has been returned to you by your " literary agent," with a heavy charge for procuring the refusal of every publisher to under take it, and with your pride quite taken out of you, you are willing to devote your Latin and Greek, your acquaintance with prosody and punctuation, and a very middling proficiency in chicography (no offence your mother showed me your autograph list of bills for the winter term) all this store of accomplishment 214 EPHEMERA. you offer to employ for a trifle besides meat, lodging, and apparel. These, you say, are surely moderate expectations for an educated man, and such wares, so cheap, must find a ready market. Of such stuff, you know that editors are made, and in the hope of finding a vacant editorial chair, you pocket your MSS., and commence inquiry. At the end of the month, you begin to think yourself the one person on earth for whom there seems no room. There is no editor wanted, no sub-editor wanted, no reporter, no proof reader, no poet ! There are passable paragraphists by scores educated young men, of every kind, of prom ising talent, who, for twenty dollars a month, would joyfully do twice what you propose give twice as much time, and furnish twice as much "copy." But as you design, of course, to "go into society," and gather your laurels as they blossom, you can not see your way very clearly with less than a hay maker s wages. You proceed with your inquiries, however, and are, at last, quite convinced that few things are more difficult than to coin uncelebrated brains into current money that the avenues for the employment of the head, only, are emulously crowd ed that there are many more than you had supposed who have the same object as yourself, and that, what ever fame may be in its meridian and close, its morn ing is mortification and starvation. The "small end of the horn" has a hole in it, how ever, and the bitter stage of experience I have just described, might be omitted in your history, if, by any other means, you could be made small enough to go in. The most considerable diminution of size, per haps, is the getting rid, for the time, of all idea of "living like a gentleman" (according to the common I acceptation of the phrase). To be willing to satisfy I hunger in any clean and honest way, to sleep in any I clean and honest place, and to wear anything clean and honestly paid for, are phases of the crescent moon of fame, not very prominently laid down in our imaginary chart ; but they are, nevertheless, the first indication of that moon s waxing. I see by the advertisements, that there are facilities now for cheap living, which did not exist " when George the Third was king." A dinner (of beef, bread, and potatoes, with a bottle of wine) is offered, by an advertiser, of the savory name of G for a shilling, and a breakfast, most invi tingly described, is offered for sixpence. I have no doubt a lodging might be procured at the same mod est rate of charge. " Society" does not move on this plane, it is true, but society is not worth seeking at any great cost, while you are obscure, and if you ll wait till the first moment when it would be agreeable (the moment when it thinks it worth while to caress you), it will come to you, like Mohammed to the moun tain. And like the mountain s moving to Mohammed, you will find any premature ambition on the subject. Giving up the expectation of finding employment suited to your taste, you will, of course, be " open to offers," and I should counsel you to take any that would pay, which did not positively shut the door upon literature. At the same wages you had better direct covers in a newspaper office, than contribute original matter which costs you thought, yet is not appreciated ; and in fact, as I said before with refer ence to farming, a subsistence not directly obtained by brain-work, is a material advantage to an author. Eight hours of mere mechanical copying, and two hours of leisurely composition, will tire you less, and produce more for your reputation than twelve hours of intellectual drudgery. The publishers and book sellers have a good deal of work for educated men proof-reading, compiling, corresponding, &c., and this is a good step to higher occupation. As you moder ate your wants, of course you enlarge your chances for employment. Getting up in the world is like walking through a mist your way opens as you get on. I should say, that with tolerable good fortune, you might make by your pen, two hundred dollars the first year, and in crease your income a hundred dollars annually, for five years. This, as a literary " operative." After that period, you would either remain stationary, a mere " workey," or your genius would discover "by the dip of the divining rod," where, in the well- searched bowels of literature, lay an unworked vein of ore. In the latter case, you would draw that one prize in a thousand blanks of which the other com petitors in the lottery of fame feel as sure as yourself. As a "stock" or "starring" player upon the liter ary stage, of course you desire a crowded audience, and it is worth your while, perhaps, to inquire (more curiously than is laid down in most advices to authors) what is the number and influence of the judicious, and what nuts it is politic to throw to the groundlings. Abuse is, in criticism, what shade is in a picture, dis cord in harmony, acid in punch, salt in seasoning. Unqualified praise is the death of Tarpeia, and to be neither praised nor abused is more than death it is inanition. Query how to procure yourself to be abused ? In your chymical course next year, you will probably give a morning s attention to the analysis of the pearl, among other precious substances, and you will be told by the professor, that it is the consequence of an excess of carbonate of lime in the flesh of the oyster in other words, the disease of the sub-aque ous animal who produces it. Now, to copy this poli tic invalid to learn wisdom of an oyster find out what is the most pungent disease of your style, and hug it till it becomes a pearl. A fault carefully studied is the germ of a peculiarity, and a peculiarity is a pearl of great price to an author. The critics begin very justly by hammering at it as a fault, and after it is polished into a peculiarity, they still ham mer at it as a fault, and the noise they make attracts attention to the pearl, and up you come from the deep sea of obscurity, not the less intoxicated with the sun shine, because, but for your disease, you would never have seen it. With one more very plain piece of counsel, I have done. Never take the note of any man connected with literature, if he will cash it for fifty per cent. BREAKFASTS AND THE QUARTERLY. Mr. Lock- hart can never do harm except indirectly. His asser tions and his criticisms are taken with more than the "grain of salt." Mr. Cooper may have a private quarrel with him for some of his ungentlemanly phraseology, but for the literary part of the criticism on " England," it will stand in the place of a good ad vertisement to the book, and there ends all its good and evil. In the following passage, however, a blow (most unwise and most injurious) is struck at one of the pleasantest usages of English hospitality : "We suspect that Mr. Cooper will not think Mr. Rogers s breakfasts quite so admirable, nor the other twenty so transcendantly agreeable, when he learns that it is by no means usual to invite strangers to breakfast in London, and that such breakfasts are generally given when the guest is one about whose manners, character, or social position, there is some uncertainly a breakfast is a kind of mezzo-termine, between a mere visit and the more intimate hospitality of a dinner. It is, as it were, a state of probation." Quarterly Review for October. As the great organ of the tory party in England, the Quarterly might fairly be taken by a foreigner as an authority upon a point of English manners. The consequence follows, that he can not be invited to break fast without fair ground to presume it an insult. Shots have been exchanged upon slighter ground. At the EPHEMERA. 215 best, a suspicion is thrown upon this mode of hospi- j him as a gentleman and a friend. I can not, if it tality which deprives it entirely of its easy and confi dential character; and that it is an injury to society which could only be corrected by the publication of || a correct portrait of Mr. Lockhart. No one after were proper, quote the exact words he used ; but, this seeing it would credit any assertion he might make j upon a subject involving a knowledge of good-fellow- ] ship. The editor of the Quarterly looks his vocation bet- i ter than any man it has been my fortune to see. In i his gait and voice there is a feline resemblance which | is remarkable. It is impossible for a human being to be more like a cat. To aid the likeness, he is slightly i parry-toed, and when you see him creeping along Pall Mall on his way to the club, you can not avoid the impression that he is mousing. In his person he is extremely thin, and, but for his mouth, Lockhart would look like a gentleman. In that feature lies a whole epitome of the man. The lips are short, and of barely the thickness of the skin, and habitually drawn in close against the teeth. To this feature, which resembles somewhat the mouth of a small purse, all the countenance seems subordinate. The ] contraction pulls upon every muscle of his face, and i upon every muscle is stamped the malice of which his mouth is the living and most legible type. This description of the man is very apropos of his opinions of breakfast. I presume he was never asked to an unceremonious breakfast in his life. Would any one in his senses begin his day by sitting down opposite to such a face for a couple of hours ? Not willingly, I should think. I presume every Englishman except the editor of the Quarterly will agree that to ask a stranger to breakfast is much more flattering than to invile him to dinner. Engagements to breakfast, indeed, are almost always made at dinner. The reply to a letter of introduction is usually a card and an invitation to j dine. If your host is pleased with you, nothing is j more common than for him to say at parting, " You have been so engrossed that I have scarce spoken to you come and breakfast with me to-morrow at nine." You accept, and you improve on acquaintance into a J friend. In a snug library, all ceremony put off, the { mind tranquil and sincere, you enter upon a different class of subjects, more familiar, more confidential, j The attention of your host is more undivided, and your conversation leads you to make engagements for the day, or the evening ; and thus a man with whom ; you might have discussed the corn-laws or the new : opera, forty times, across the glare of a dinner-table, and only known at last as a talker of commonplaces, becomes a pleasant friend, perhaps an intimate com panion. I have not the Quarterly Review by me at this mo ment, but, if I do not mistake, the breakfasfs with the poet Rogers, described by Mr. Cooper, furnish the i text for Mr. Lockhart s " new light" upon this sub- < ject. I am happy to have it in my power to set our j countrymen right upon the estimation in which | Cooper is held by that polished and venerable amphyt- rion. It was kindly and complimentarily done of Mr. Rogers to talk a great deal of a compatriot, of whose talents he justly supposed every American should be proud. I was enjoying (according to Mr. Lockhart) the equivocal honor of breakfast ing with him an honor which, questionable or not, I shared with one of the most distinguished for eigners then in England. This latter gentleman pro fessed the highest enthusiasm for the works of Cooper, and took pains to draw out the venerable poet on the , subject of his personal manners, conversation, &c. A j handsomer eulogium of an absent author I never heard. Mr. Rogers admired the bold independence of his cast of mind, and spoke in the highest terms of subtract from this praise all you please to fancy might have been said in kindness or compliment to a com patriot, there was still enough left to gratify the self- love of the most exacting. If Mr. Lockhnrt had ever been similarly honored, he would have excused Mr. Cooper for dwelling com placently on the " breakfasts in St. James s Place." Rogers has lived in the very core of all that is pre cious or memorable of two ages of English wit, liter ature, and politics, himself oftenest the bright centre around which it gathered. His manners are amenity itself, his wit is celebrated, his powers of narration delightful. With all this he seems to forget his own fame and himself, and never to have known envy or ill-will. As he sits at that small breakfast-table, his head silvery white, the bland smile of intellectual en joyment upon his lips, talking or listening with equal pleasure, and with the greatest tact and delicacy, al ternately drawing out the resources of his guests, and exhibiting modestly his own, he is a picture of tran quil, dignified, and green old age, which it were a pity to have travelled far and not seen. I felicitate Mr. Cooper on the possession of his esteem and friend ship. I please myself with remembering that I have seen him. I pity Mr. Lockhart that the class of en tertainments of which this is one, is reserved for those whose faces will not "spoil the cream." Between butchering for Fraser and dissecting for the Quarterly, Mr. Lockhart may have derived a suf ficient revenue to " give dinners ;" but he forgets that more amiable literature is not so saleable, and that his brother authors are compelled to entertain strangers at breakfast. Taboo that meal, and, good heavens ! what becomes of the " great army of writers" in Lon don, who, over " tea and toast," in their quiet lodg ings, give the admiring pilgrim of literature a feast of reason one alone worth all the dinners of May fair ? What becomes of younger sons, and callow orators, and lawyers in the temple, who, over red herrings and coffee, let the amused guest into the secrets of their menus-plaisirs, and trenching a half-crown, at the most, upon their slender pockets, send him away de lighted with their gay hospitality. Breakfasts! What would you know of authors and artists without breakfasts? You see but half the man in his works. Would you rather breakfast with Chantrey in his stu dio, and hear him criticise his own marble, or dine with him at Lord Lansdowne s, and listen to his bavar- daqc upon fly-fishing? Would you rather see gentle Barry Cornwall, smothered and silent, among wits and lordlings at " miladi s," or breakfast with him in his crammed library in St. John s Wood, and hear him read one of his unpublished songs, with the tears in his eyes, and the children at his knee, breathless with listening ? Would you rather meet Moore, over a cup of tea, in the shop-parlor at Longman s, in Pat ernoster row, or see him at one of the show-dinners of this publishing Mecenas, at his villa in Hamp- stead ? Out upon the malicious hand that would sow distrust and suspicion in these delightful by-paths of hospitality ! An author is always a double existence, and it is astonishing how different may be the intellectual man from his everyday representative. Lockhart, the au thor of Valerius, Adam Blair, and the Life of Sir Walter Scott, is a splendid and delightful intellect no one can deny it. Mr. Lockhart, the gentleman who looks as if he had a perpetual inclination to whistle, and who does the bourreau for the Quarterly, is an individual I should rather meet anywhere than at breakfast. Heaven send him a relaxation of his facial muscles, and a little charity to leave the world with. 216 EPHEMERA. A SPRING DAY IN WINTER. A spring day some times bursts upon us in December. One scarcely knows whether the constant warmth of the fire, or the fresh sunny breathings from the open window, are the most welcome. At such a time, the curtains swing lazily to the mild wind as it enters, and the light green leaves of the sheltered flowers stir and erect them- ! EVANESCENT IMPRESSIONS I have very often, in the fine passages of society such as occur some times in the end of an evening, or when a dinner party has dwindled to an unbroken circle of choice and congenial spirits, or at any of those times when conversation, stripped of all reserve or check, is poured out in the glowing and unfettered enthusiasm selves with an out-of-door vigor, and the shuffled steps | to which convivial excitement alone gives the confi- and continued voices of the children in the street, j have the loitering and summer-like sound of June. I do not know whether it is not a cockney feeling, but with all my love for the country, fixed as it is by the recollections of a life mostly spent in the " green fields" I sometimes "babble of," there is something in a summer morning in the city, which the wet, warm woods, and the solitary, though lonely haunts of the country do not, after all the poetry that has been "spilt upon them" (as Neal would say), at all equal. dence necessary to its flow I have often wished, at such times, that the voice and manner of the chance and fleeting eloquence about us could be arrested and written down for others beside ourselves to see and admire. In a chance conversation at a party, in the bagatelle rattle of a dance, in a gay hour over coffee and sandwiches en famille, wherever you meet those whom you love or value, there will occur pieces of dialogue, jeux d esprit, passages of feeling or fun trifles, it is true, but still such trifles as make eras in Whether it is that we find so much sympathy in the , the calendar of happiness which you would give the many faces that we meet, made happy by the same sweet influences, or whatever else may be the reason, certes, I never take my morning walk on such a day, without a leaping in my heart, which, from all I can gather by dream or revelation, has a touch in it of Paradise. I returned once, on such a day, from an hour s ramble after breakfast. The air rushed past my temples with the grateful softness of spring, and every face that passed had the open, inhaling expres sion which is given by the simple joy of existence. The sky had the deep clearness of noon. The clouds were winnowed in light parallel curves, looking like white shells inlaid on the arched heavens ; the smooth, glassy bay was like a transparent abyss opening to the earth s centre, and edging away underneath, with a ! slope of hills, and spires, and leafless woods, copied | minutely and perfectly from the upper landscape, and the naked elms seemed almost clothed as the teeming eye looked on them, and the brown hills took a teint of green so freshly did the summer fancies crowd into the brain with the summer softness of the sun shine and air. The mood is rare in which the sight of human faces does not give us pleasure. It is a j world to rescue from their ephemeral destiny. They I are, perhaps, the soundings of a spirit too deep for ordinary life to fathom, or the gracefulness of a fancy I linked with too feminine a nature to bear the eye of the world, or the melting of a frost of reserve from the diffident genius they are traces of that which is fleeting, or struck out like phosphorus from the sea by irregular chance and you want something quicker and rarer than formal description to arrest it warm and natural, and detain it in its place till it can be looked upon. THE FIRST FEELING OF WINTER. How delight fully the first feeling of winter comes on the mind ! What a throng of tranquillizing and affectionate thoughts accompany its first bright fires, and the sound, out of doors, of ils first chilling winds. Oh, when the leaves are driven in troops through the streets, at nightfall, and the figures of the passers-by j hurry on, cloaked and stooping with the cold, is there a pleasanter feeling in the world than to enter the closed and carpeted room, with its shaded lamps, and curious occupation to look on them as they pass" 1 1 itS gial warmth, and its cheerful faces about the __j .....j.. .i-.f.. i_.i j i , " y r 7 1! evening table ! I hope that I speak your own senti- and study their look and meaning, and wonder at the providence of God, which can provide, in this crowded world, an object and an interest for all. With what a singular harmony the great machine of society goes on! So many thousand minds, and each with its peculiar cast and its positive difference from its fellow, and yet no dangerous interference, and no discord audible above the hum of its daily revolution. I could not help feeling a religious thrill, as I passed face after face, with this thought in my mind, and saw each one earnest and cheerful, each one pressing on with its own object, without waiting or caring for the equally engrossing object of the other. The man of business went on with an absorbed look, caring only to thread his way rapidly along the street. The stu - dent strided by with the step of exercise, his lips parted to admit the pleasant air to his refreshed lungs, and his eye wandering with bewildered pleasure from object to object. The schoolboy looked wistfully up and down the street, and lingered till the last stroke of the bell summoned him tardily in. The woman ish school-girl, with her veil coquettishly drawn, still flirted with her boyish admirer, though it was " after nine," and the child, with its soiled satchel and shining face, loitered seriously along the sidewalk, making acquaintance with every dog, and picking up every stone on its unwilling way. The spell of the atmo sphere was universal, and yet all kept on their several courses, and the busy harmony of employment went steadily and unl rokenly on. How rarely we turn upon ourselves, and remember how wonderfully we are made and governed ! rnent, dear reader, when I prefer to every place and time, in the whole calendar of pleasure, a winter evening at home the "sweet, sweet home" of child hood, with its unreserved love and its unchanged and unmeasured endearments. We need not love gayety the less. The light and music and beauty of * the dance will always breed a floating delight in the brain that has not grown dull to life s finer influences ; yet the pleasures of home, though serener are deeper, and I am sure that the world may be searched over in vain for a sense of joy so even and unmingled. It is a beautiful trait of Providence that the balance is kept so truly between our many and different bles sings. It were a melancholy thing to see the sum mer depart with its superb beauty, if the heart did not freshen as it turned in from its decay to brood upon its own treasures. The affections wander under the enticement of all the outward loveliness of nature, and it is necessary to unwind the spell, that their rich kindness may not become scattered and visionary. 1 have a passion for these simple theories, which I trust will be forgiven. I indulge in them as people pun. They are too shadowy for logic, it is true like the wings of the glendoveer, in Kehama, gauze-like and filmy, but flying high withal. You may not grow learned, but you surely will grow poetical upon them. I would as lief be praised by a blockhead as be asked the reason. THE POET SHELLEY. Shelley has a private nook in my affections. He is so unlike all other poets that EPHEMERA. 217 I can not mate him. He is like his ov/n " skylark" among birds. He does not keep ever up in the thin air with Byron, like the eagle, nor sing with Keats low and sweetly like the thrush, nor, like the dove sitting always upon her nest, brood with Wordsworth over the affections. He begins to sing when the morning wakes him, and as he grows wild with his own song, he mounts upward, " And singing ever soars, and soaring ever singeth ;" and it is wonderful how he loses himself, like the delirious bird in the sky, and with a verse which may be well compared for its fine delicacy with her little wings, penetrates its far depths fearlessly and full of joy. There is something very new in this mingled trait of fineness and sublimity. Milton and Byron seem made for the sky. Their broad wings always strike the air with the same solemn majesty. But Shelley, near the ground, is a very " bird in a bower, running through his merry compass as if he never dreamed of the upward and invisible heavens. Withal, Shelley s genius is too fiery to be moody. He was a melancholy man, but it was because he was crossed I in the daily walk of life, and such anxieties did not touch his imagination. It was above far, far above them. His poetry was not, like that of other poets, linked with his common interests ; and if it " un bound the serpent of care from his heart," as doubt less it did, it was by making him forget that it was there. He conceived and wrote in a wizard circle. The illiberal world was the last thing remembered, and its annoying prejudices, gall him as they might in the exercise of his social duties, never followed over the fiery limit of his fancy. Never have we seen such pure abstraction from earthliness as in the tem per of his poetry. It is the clear, intellectual lymph, unalloyed and unpolluted. Aw AUTHOR S JUDGMENT OF HIS OWN WORKS. It is a false notion that the writer is no judge of his own book. Verses in manuscript and verses in print, in the first place, are very different things, and the mood of writing and the mood of reading what one has written, are very different moods. We do not know how it is with others, but we open our own volume with the same impression of strangeness and novelty that we do another s. The faults strike us at once, and so do the beauties, if there are any, and we read coolly in a new garb, the same things which upon paper recalled the fever of composition, and rendered us incapable of judgment. As far as I can discover by others experience and my own, no writer understands the phenomena of composition. It is impossible to realize, in reading, that which is to him impassioned, the state of feeling which produced it. His own mind is to himself a mystery and a wonder. The thought stands before him, visible to his outward eye, which he does not remember has ever haunted him. The illustration from nature is often one which he does not remember to have noticed the trait of character, or the peculiar pencilling of a line in beauty altogether new and startling. He is affected to tears or mirth, his taste is gratified or shocked, his fancy amused or his cares beguiled, as if he had never be fore seen it. It is his own mind, but he does not rec ognise it. He is like the peasant-child taken and dressed richly ; he does not know himself in his new adornments. There is a wonderful metamorphosis in print. The author has written under strong excite ment, and with a development and reach of his own powers which would amuse him were he conscious of the process. There are dim and far chambers in the mind which are never explored by reason. Im sometimes, and brings out their treasures to the light ignorant of their value, and almost believing that the dreams when they glitter are admired. There are phantoms which haunt the perpetual twilight of the inner mind, which are arrested only by the daring hand of an overwrought fancy, and like a need done in a dream, the difficult steps are afterward but faintly remembered. It is wonderful how the mind accumu lates by unconscious observation how the teint of a cloud, or the expression of an eye, or the betrayal of character by a word, will lie for years forgotten in the memory till it is brought out by some searching thought to its owner s wonder. FROST It is winter veritable winter with bona- fidc frost, and cramping cold, and a sun as clear and powerless as moonlight. The windows glitter with the most fantastic frost-work. Cities, with their spires and turrets, ranks of spears, files of horsemen every gorgeous and brilliant array told of in ro mance or song, start out of that mass of silvery trace ry, like the processions of a magic mirror. What a miraculous beauty there is in frost ! What fine work in its radiant crystals ! What mystery in its exact proportions and its maniform varieties ! The feathery snow-flake, the delicate rime, the transparent and sheeted ice, the magnificent ice-berg moving down the sea like a mountain of light how beautiful are they all, and how wonderful is it, that, break and scatter them as you will, you find under every form the same faultless angles, the same crystalline and sparkling radiation. It sometimes grows suddenly cold at noon. There has been a heavy mist all the morning, and as the north wind comes sharply in, the air clears and leaves it frozen upon everything, with the thinness of palpable air. The trees are clothed with a fine white vapor, as if a cloud had been arrested and fixed motionless in the branches. They look, in the twilight, like gigantic spirits, standing in broad ranks, and clothed in drapery of supernatural white ness and texture. On close examination, the crystals are as fine as needles, and standing in perfect parallel ism, pointing in the direction of the wind. They are like fringes of the most minute threads, edging every twig and filament of the tree, so that the branches are thickened by them, and have a shadowy and mysteri ous look, as if a spirit foliage had staged out from the naked limbs. It is not so brilliant as the common rime seen upon the trees after a frozen rain, but it is infinitely more delicate and spiritual, and to me seems a phenomenon of exquisite novelty and beauty. THE CLOSING YEAR. It is a melancholy task to reckon with the departed year. To trace back the curious threads of affection through its many-colored woof, and knot anew its broken places to number the missing objects of interest, the dead and the neg lected to sum up the broken resolutions, the defer red hopes, the dissolved phantoms of anticipation, and the many wanderings from the leading star of duty this is indeed a melancholy task, but, withal, a profitable, and, it may sometimes be, a pleasant and a soothing one. It is wonderful in what short courses the objects of this world move. They are like arrows feebly shot. A year a brief year, is full of things dwindled and finished and forgotten. Nothing keeps evenly on. What is there in the running calendar of the year that has departed, which has kept its place and its magnitude ? Here and there an aspirant for , fame still stretches after his eluding shadow here and I 1 there an enthusiast still clings to his golden drenm gination in her rapt phrensy wanders blindly there |: here and there (and alas ! how rarely) a friend kcq>9 218 EPHEMERA. his truth, and a lover his fervor hut how many more, that were as ambitious, as enthusiastic, as loving as these, when this year began, are now sluggish, and cold, and false ? You may keep a record of life, and as surely as it is human, it will be a fragmented and disjointed history, crowded with unaccountableness and change. There is nothing constant. The links of life are" for ever breaking, but we rush on still. A fellow-traveller drops from our side into the grave a guiding star of hope vanishes from the sky a creature of our affections, a child or an idol, is snatched from us perhaps nothing with which we began the race is left to us, and yet we do not halt. " Onward still onward" is the eternal cry, and as the past recedes, the broken ties are forgotten, and the present and future occupy us alone. There are bright chapters in the past, however. If our lot is capricious and broken, it is also new and various. One friend has grown cool, but we have won another. One chance was less fortunate than we expected, but another was better. We have en countered one man s prejudices, but, in so doing, we have unexpectedly flattered the partialities of his neighbor. We have neglected a recorded duty, but a deed of charity done upon impulse, has brought up the balance. In an equable temper of mind, memory, to a man of ordinary goodness of heart, is pleasant company. A careless rhymer, whose heart is better than his head, says " I would not escape from memory s land, For all the eye can view ; For there s dearer dust in memory s land, Than the ore of rich Peru. I clasp the fetter by memory twined, The wanderer s heart and soul to bind." It was a good thought suggested by an ingenious friend of mine, to make one s will annually, and re member all whom we love in it in the degree of their deservings. I have acted upon the hint since, and truly it is keeping a calendar of one s life. I have little to bequeath, indeed a manuscript or two, some half dozen pictures, and a score or two of much- thumbed and choice authors but, slight as these poor mementoes are, it is pleasant to rate their differ ence, and write against them the names of our friends, as we should wish them left if we knew we were pres ently to die. It would be a satisfying thought in sick ness, that one s friends would have a memorial to suggest us when we were gone that they would know we wished to be remembered by them, and re membered them among the first. And it is pleasant, too, while alive, to change the order of appropriation with the ever-varying evidences of affection. It is a relief to vexation and mortified pride to erase the name of one unworthy or false, and it is delightful, as another gets nearer to your heart, with the gradual and sure test of intimacy, to prefer him in your secret register. If I should live to be old, I doubt not it will be a pleasant thing to look over these little testaments. It is difficult, now, with their kind offices and pleasant faces ever about one, to realize the changes of feeling between the first and the last more difficult still to imagine, against any of those familiar names, the significant asterisk which marks the dead yet if the common chances of human truth, and the still more desperate changes of human life, continue it is melancholy to think what a miracle it would be if even half this list, brief and youthful as it is, should be, twenty years hence, living and unchanged. The festivities of this part of the year always seem ed to me mistimed and revolting. I know not what color the reflections of others take, but to me it is simply the feeling of escape the released breath of fear after a period of suspense and danger. Accident, misery, death, have been about us in their invisible shapes, and while one is tortured with pain, and another reduced to wretchedness, and another struck into the grave beside us, we know not why orhow, we are still living and prosperous. It is next to a miracle that we are so. We have been on the edge of chasms con tinually. Our feet have tottered, our bosoms have been grazed by the thick shafts of disease had our eyes been spirit-keen we should have been dumb with fear at our peril. If every tenth sunbeam were a deadly arrow if the earth were full of invisible abysses if poisons were sown thickly in the air, life would hardly be more insecure. We can stand upon our threshold and see it. The vigorous are stricken down by an invisible hand the active and busy suddenly disappear death is caught in the breath of the night wind, in the dropping of the dew. There is no place or moment in which that horrible phantom is not gliding among us. It is natural at each period of escape to rejoice fervently and from the heart ; but I know not, if others look upon death with the same irrepressible horror that I do, how their joy can be so thoughtlessly trifling. It seems to me, matter for deep, and almost fearful congratulation. It should be expressed in religious places and with the solemn voice of worship ; and when the period has thus been marked, it should be speedily forgotten lest its cloud become depressing. I am an advocate for all the gayety that the spirits will bear. I would reserve no particle of the treasure of happiness. The world is dull enough at the best. But do not mistake its temper. Do not press into the service of gay pleasure the thrilling solemnities of life. I think anything which reminds me of death, solemn ; any time, when our escape from it is thrust irresistibly upon the mind, a solemn time; and such is the season of the new year. It should be occupied by serious thoughts. It is the time to reckon with one s heart to renew and form resolutions to forgive and reconcile and redeem. MIDNIGHT. The bell struck as the word was writ ten ! Twelve and how many-toned in the human ear are the measured strokes that have proclaimed it. The well and contemplative, the sick and restless, the reveller hailing it as the empress of the hours, and the patient and solemn watcher by the dead, counting it on his vigil, and shuddering at the dreadful silence it makes audible sleepless ambition starting from its waking dream, and sleeping guilt blessedly aroused from its nightmare of detection with what a different voice and meaning do the tremulous and lengthened cadences of that same bell fall upon the different ears that listen to them ! Yet it is so with everything about us and the boldest and best lesson of philoso phy is that which teaches us that outward circum stances have no color of their own that the universe is within us that the eye sees no light or shadow, and the ear hears no music or jar, and the senses re ceive no impression of pain or pleasure, but as the inward eye is light or shaded, the inward ear attuned or discordant, and the inward sense painful or pleas urable. It is a glorious creed for by it, he who governs his own soul holds the key of the universe. Its colors are put on at his bidding, its music wakes at his desire, and its magnificent changes, arbitrary and omnipotent as they seem, take form and pressure from the small, still thought in his bosom ! Yet how difficult it is! How true, that "he who ruleth his own spirit is greater than he that taketh a city." To put down at will the maniform spectres of thought to suppress fear and discouragement, and sadness that comes up uncalled to lay a finger on the lip of complaint, and seal up a tear in its cell, and press down, with a stern fetter, the ungovernable nerve of unrest to " lay commandment" on a throb- EPHEMERA. 219 bing pulse, and break the wings of a too earnest ima gination, and smother, in their first rising, the thou sand impatient feelings that come out of time and season this it is that the anchorite in his cell, and the master spirit in his career, and the student, wast ing over his lamp, may pray, and wrestle, and search into many mysteries for in vain ! In my days of idleness (a habit, by-the-by, which should be put down as a nervous complaint in the books) I occupied, for some nine hours in the day, a window opposite a city-clock. It was a tolerable amusement, between breakfast and recitation, to watch the passing of the hours, "hand over hand." 1 thought then, as I think now, that thegreat deficiency in the con struction of the human mind, is the want of something on the principle of the stop-watch, to suspend its ope rations at will but it is no slight relief, since I must think, to have a dial-plate, or a nail in the wall, or any object that it is no trouble to see, to serve as a nu cleus to thought. By-and-by, with the force of hab it, the dial became necessary. I could not think tranquilly without it. My pulses beat sixty in the minute. My imagination built by the hour nine ten twelve castles a day, as the lectures interfered more or less with my repose. In the course of time, I fell into the habit of mu sing on the circumstances dependant on the arrival of the hours, and as my mood happened to be gay or gloomy, I pondered, with the strong sympathy of un occupied feelings, on the happiness or misery they brought. If it was a bright sunny forenoon in May, and the eggs had been well boiled at breakfast, the striking of the clock sny twelve stirred a thousand images of pleasure. The boys just leaping out of school, the laborer released from his toil, the belle stepping forth for a promenade, the patient in the in terval of his fever all came up in my imagination, and their several feelings, with all the heightening of imagination, becnme my own. If the weather was hot, on the contrary, or the professor had bored me at lecture, or if my claret was pricked at dinner, I Buffered the miseries of an hospital. There goes the clock say four! Some poor fellow now, at this very moment, is baring his limb to the surgeon the after noon is at the hottest, and the sick are getting restless and weary some hectic consumptive, fallen, per haps, into a chance sleep, is waked, by the trouble some punctuality of his nurse, to take his potion it is the hour the dying man is told he can not survive. Every misery imaginable under the sun rose in phan toms around me, and I suffered and groaned under the concentrated horrors of them all. It serves to show how the mind is its own slave or its own master. And so, having arrived at the moral, with your leave, dear reader, for it is " past one," I will to bed. Good night! SNOW. The black, unsightly pavement, every stone of which you know with as cursed a particular ity as the chinks in the back of your fireplace, cov ered with white. The heavy-wheeled carts, which the day before shook the ground under you, and split your ears with their merciless noise, replaced by sleds with musical bells, driven swiftly and skilfully past. The smoked houses, with their provokingly-regular windows and mean doors, that have disturbed the sen timent of grace in your fancy every walk you have taken for months, all laden, and tipped, and frosted into lines and surfaces of beauty ; faultless icicles hanging from the eaves of the shutters, and sparkling crystals of snow edging every projecting stone magic could not exceed it! If the horn of Astol- pho had been blown from the cupola of the state- house, and the whole city had run mad, things could not have looked more strangely new and delightful. And the sleighing other people like it, and for their sake I blessed Piovidence for another item. I like it myself for the first mile. But with the loss of sen sation in our feet and hands, I have a trick of grow ing very unhappy. I am content, after one ride, with seeing a sleigh through a parlor-window. Eight o clock how merrily the sleigh-bells ring to-night! One comes into hearing as another is lost, and the loud, laughing, and merry voices of the gay riders come up to my retired room in the veriest con trast to my own quiet occupation. How more than solitude it separates one from humanity, to live in the midst of the gay world and take no part in its enjoy ments ! An eremite in the crowd is the only con tented solitary. In the midst of the heaviest sadness the heart feels in this wretched world, the form of distant pleasure is beautiful. We must live near that treacherous dame to know how sorrows lurk in her shadow. Break down the imagination as you will, and bind it by the most relentless memories to your sick heart, it will steal away to scenes you had thought forgotten, and come back fired with their false beau ty, to tempt you to try their winning flatteries once more. It is only by knowing that you can call gay- ety at any moment to your side, that you can quite forget it ; and the studious tenant of a garret, to whose solitude the mingled murmur of a city comes constantly up who can abandon his books whenever the fancy takes him, for the crowd, and enter and throng on with it after its fleeting lure is the only man who, with youtli and the common gifts of Provi dence, can heartily despise it. And he if contrast is (as who will deny that has followed after the impossible spirit of contentment, till hope is dead within him) if contrast is, I say, the only bliss in life then does he, the scholar in the crowd, live with a most excellent wisdom. He is roused from communion with a spirit whose immor tal greatness has outlived twenty generations, by the passing mirth of a fool whose best deed will not live in the world s memory an hour. He sits and pores upon an eternal truth, or fires his fancy with heavenly poetry, or winds about him the enchantments of truth- woven fiction, or searches the depths of his own suffi cient heart for the sublime wisdom of human nature, and from the very midst he is plucked back to this every-day world, and compelled to the use of faculties in which a brute animal equals or surpasses him! One moment following the employment of an angel, the next contending with meanness and cunning for his daily bread now kindled to rapture with some new form of beauty, and now disgusted to loathing with some new-developed and unredeemable baseness in his fellow-men. What contrast is there like this ? Who knows so well as a scholar the true sweetness of surprise ? the delightful and only spice of this oth erwise contemptible life novel sensation 1 CHANGE. How natural it is, like the host in the rhyme, to " Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest !" How true a similitude it is of every change, not only of time and season, but of feeling and fancy. I have just walked from the window where I stood looking upon the two elms that have refreshed my eye with their lively verdure the summer long, and the adven turous vine, overtopping our neighbor s chimneys, that was covered but a week ago with masses of splendid crimson and scarlet, and with the irresistible regret I feel always at the decay of nature powerful within me, I have seated myself at the fire, with a gladness in the sup planting pleasures of winter, that brings with it, not only a consolation for the loss, but an immediate for- 220 EPHEMERA. getfulness of the past. " Nothing," says Goethe, " is more delightful than to feel a new passion rising when the flame that burned before is not quite extin guished, as, when the sun sets, we turn with pleasure to the rising moon." Who would give a fig for friendship ! Who would waste golden hours in win ning regard ! Who, with this lesson before him, would do aught but look well to his reckoning with heaven, and turn in upon his own soul what time and talents are Isft to him after ! It is a bitter philosophy to learn. The outward world is my first love, and, with all my disappointment, it is difficult at first to set up a new altar for the inner. I would not be as cetic ; neither would I be so happy that, like Poly- crates, I must throw my ring into the sea that I may have something to lament; but I believe he has the true savoir vivre, who, believing fully in the world s unprofitableness, is willing to be amused by it, and who, conversant with its paths and people, has better places and friends (solitude and his books) to which he can enter and shut the door to be at peace. WINTER TRIP TO NAHANT. The old chronicler, Time, strides on over the holyday seasons as if noth ing could make him loiter. It may be a hallucina tion, but a winter s day, spite of the calendar, is as long to me as two summer ones. I do not feel the scene pass. There is no measure kept on my senses by its evenly-told pulse. The damp morning, and the silent noon, and the golden twilight, come and go; and if 1 breathe the freshness of the one, and sleep under the repose of the other, and gaze upon the beauties of the third, why, the end of existence seems answered. Labor is not in harmony with it. The thought that disturbs a nerve is an intrusion. Life s rapid torrent loiters in a pool, and its bubbles all break and are forgotten. Indolence is the mother of phi losophy, and I " let the world slide." I think with Rousseau, that " the best book does but little good to the world, and much harm to the author." I remem ber Colton s three difficulties of authorship, and Pel- ham s flattering unction to idleness, ihat " learning is the bane of a poet." The " mossy cell of peace," with its " Dreams that move before the half-shut eye, And its gay castles in the clouds that pass," is a very Eden ; and, of all the flowers of the field, that which has the most meaning is your lily that " toils not, neither does it spin;" and of all the herbs of the valley, the " Yellow lysimacha that gives sweet rest," has the most medicinal balm. I am of the school of Epicurus. I no longer think the "judicious voluptu ousness" of Godwin dangerous. Like the witch of Atlas, I could " pitch my tent upon the plain of the calm Mere," and rise and fall for ever to its indolent swell. And speaking of idleness (I admire Mochin- go s talent for digression "Now thou speakest of immortality, how fs thy wife, Andrew") one of the pleasantest ways of indulging that cardinal virtue used to be by an excursion to Nahant. Establishing myself unostentatiously upon the windward quarter of the boat, to avoid the vile volatile oils from the machinery Shelley in one hand, perhaps, or Elia, or quaint Burton (English editions, redolent in Russia, and printed as with types of silver) with one of these, I say, to refresh the eye and keep the philosophic vein breathing freely, the panorama of the bay passes silently before my eye island after island, sail after sail, like the conjurations of a magic mirror. And this is all quiet, let me tell you all in harmony with the Socratic humor for the reputable steamer Ousa- tonic (it distresses me daily that it was not spelt with an H) is none of your fifteen-milers none of your high-pressure cut-waters, driving you through the air, breathless with its unbecoming velocity, and with the fear of the boiler before your eyes but with a dignified moderation, consistent with a rational doubt of the integrity of a copper-kettle, and a natural ab horrence of hot water, she glides safely and softly over her half-dozen miles an hour, and lands you, cool and good-humored, upon the rocky peninsula, for a consideration too trifling to be mentioned in a well-bred period. And then if the fates will me an agreeable companion (I wish we had time to describe my beau-ideal), how delightful, as Apple island is neared, with its sweep of green banks and its magnifi cent elms every foot of its tiny territory green and beautiful how delightful to speculate upon the char acter of its eccentric occupant, and repeat the thou sand stories told of him, and peer about his solitary cottage to catch a glimpse of his erect figure, and draw fanciful portraits of his daughter, who, the world says, for the sixteen years of her sweet life, has had only the range of those limited lawns, which she may ramble over in an hour and, as the boat glides by, to watch the fairy isle sleeping, if the bay is calm, with its definite shadow, and looking like a sphere, floating past in the air, covered with luxuriant verdure. It is but a brief twelve miles from Boston to Nahant, and the last four stretch out beyond the chain of islands, upon the open sea. To a city-bred eye and fancy there is a refreshing novelty, added to the expanding influence of so broad a scene, which has in it a vigor ous and delightful stimulus. The mind gets out of its old track. The bnck-ground of the mental picture is changed, and it affects the whole. The illimitable sky and water draw out the imagination to its remo test link, and the far apart and shining sails, each cov ering its little and peculiar world, and sped with the thousand hopes of those for whom its lonely adven turers are tracking the uncertain sea, win on the mind to follow them upon their perilous way, and breathe for them the " God speed" of unconscious interest. It is a beautiful and magic sight to see them gliding past each other on their different courses, impelled by the same invisible wind, now dark with shadow, and now turning full to the light, and specking the horizon, like the white birds careering along the edge of its definite line. The sea grows upon you as you see it more. The disappointment felt at first in its extent wears away, as you remember its vast stretch under those blue depths, which your eye can not search ; and the waste of its " untrampled floor," and the different depths at which the different spoils of the sunk ships have balanced and hung, and the innu merable tribes who range their own various regions of pressure, from the darkest caverns to the thin and lighted chambers at its surface, all come step by step upon the mind, and crowd it with a world of wonder ing speculation. It is delightful to sit with the agreeable companion spoken of, and with the green waves heaving about us, to indulge in these wayward and unprofitable imaginations. It is a splendid range for a wild-winged thought that measureless sea ! I love to talk of its strange mysteries. I love to go down with one who will not check me with cold ob jections, and number and shape out its inhabitants. With such a fellow-wanderer, I have found palaces that surpass Aladdin s, and beings to whom the upper and uncondensed water has a suffocating thinness. But these are idle speculations to the world s eye, gentle reader, and should be reserved for your private ear. We will go, some summer afternoon, and talk them over together on the deck of that same delib erate steamer. You have no idea how many things are untold of the deep sea how many dreams of it EPHEMERA. 221 an idler man than yourself will weave out of its green depths in his after-dinner musings. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. " Gentle Sir Philip Sid ney," says Tom Nash, in two sweetly-flowing senten ces of his Pierce Penniless, " thou knewest what be longed to a scholar; thou knewest what pains, what toil, what travel, conduct to perfection ; well couldst | thou give every virtue his encouragement, every art j his due, every writer his desert, cause none more i virtuous, witty, or learned, than thyself. But thou art dead in thy grave, and hast left too few successors of thy glory ; too few to cherish the sons of the mu ses, or water those budding hopes with their plenty, which thy bounty erst planted." "He was not only j of an excellent wit," relates, in his own confused and i rambling way, the eminent antiquarian John Aubrey, j who was born not more than forty years after Sidney s decease, "but extremely beautiful; he much resembled I his sister, but his hair was not red, but a little incli ning, viz., a dark amber color. If I were to find fault in it, methinks it is not masculine enough; yet he j was a person of great courage."* " He was, if ever ; there was one," says another writer, " a gentleman j finished and complete, in whom mildness was associa ted with courage, erudition mollified by refinement, and courtliness dignified by truth. England will ever place him among the noblest of her sons; and the light of chivalry, which was his guide and beacon, will ever lend its radiance to illume his memory. He died at the age of thirty-two, and if the lives of Mil ton and Dryden had not been prolonged beyond that period, where would have been their renown?" Glorious Sidney ! It stirs the blood warmly about one s heart to think of him. It is somewhat late in j the day, I know, to eulogize him ; but his bright | honor and his beautiful career, are among my earliest I historical recollections, and I have remembered it j since with the passionate interest that in every one s mind burns in, with an enamel of love, some one of the bright images presented in boyhood. You have some such idol of fancy, I dare answer for it, reader of mine some young (for young he must be, or af fection stiffens into respect) some young and famous, and withal courtly, and perhaps " beautiful," winner I of a name. It is Gaston de Foix, perhaps, with his , fierce thirst for glory (the pictures of him by the old , masters are models of manly beauty), or the fourth i Henry, with his temper of romance (the handsomest man in his kingdom), or (if you loved your classics) i Alcibiades (you forget, of course, that he was a volup- ! tuary), or the generous Antony (" Shakspere s" rather ! than the historian s), or Hylas, or Endymion, or Phaeton (he cleared the first few planets in fine style), or some other fonnosus puer adored and sung by the glorious old bards upon the shores of Tiber or Ilissus. He rises to your mind as I mention it a figure of graceful youth, the slight and elegant proportions of the boy, just ripening into the muscular fulness of manhood his neck rising with a free majesty from \ his shoulders, and his eye kindling with some passing thought of glory, answered by the proud and deliber- ! ate curving of his lip, and the animated expansion of I his nostril. You see him with your mind s eye the classic model and classic dream of your scholar-days, j when the sound of the leaves in the tree over you had the swell of an hexameter in your ear, and your thoughts came in Latin, and a line of Homer sprung ! to your lips in your involuntary soliloquies. Ah ! | those were days for dreams ! Who would not let slip the straining grasp of manhood be it at wealth, fame, power anything for which he is flinging his youth and gladness, and all his best treasures, behind ! Very much the description of Shelley. him to be once more the careless dreamer that he was to lie once more upon a hill-side, and forget everything in the unquestioned and unshadowed bles sedness of a boy ! DEATH-LOVE AND WARNING. It was getting tow ard midnight when a party of young noblemen came out from one of the clubs of St. James street. The servant of each, as he stepped upon the pavement, threw up the wooden apron of the cabriolet, and sprung to the head of the horse; but, as to the des tination of the equipages for the evening, there seem ed to be some dissensions among the noble masters. Between the line of coroneted vehicles, stood a hackney-coach, and a person in an attitude of expectan cy pressed as near the exhilarated group as he could without exciting immediate attention. " Which way?" said he whose vehicle was nearest, standing with his foot on the step. " All together, of course," said another. " Let s make a night of it." " Pardon me," said the clear and sweet voice of the last out from the club ; " I secede for one. Go your ways, gentlemen !" "Now, what the deuse is afoot?" said the fore most, again stepping back on the sidewalk. " Don t let him off, Fitz! Is your cab here, Byron, or will you let me drive you? By Jove, you sha n t leavens!" "But you shall leave me, and so you are not for sworn, my friend ! In plain phrase, I won t go with you ! And I don t know where I shall go ; so spare your curiosity the trouble of asking. I have a presenti ment that I am wanted by devil or angel I see a hand you can not see. " " And a very pretty hand it is, I dare swear," said the former speaker, jumping into his cab and starting off with a spring of his blood horse, followed by all the vehicles at the club-door, save one. Byron stood looking after them a moment, and raised his hat and pressed his hand hard on his fore head. The unknown person who had been lurking near, seemed willing to leave him for a moment to his thoughts, or was embarrassed at approaching a stran ger. As Byron turned with his halting step to descend the steps, however, he came suddenly to his side. "My lord !" he said, and was silent, as if waiting for permission to go on. " Well," replied Byron, turning to him without the least surprise, and lookingly closely into his face by the light of the street-lamp. " I come to you with an errand which perhaps " " A strange one, I am sure ; but I am prepared for it I have been forewarned of it. What do you re quire of me ? for I am ready !" " This is strange !" exclaimed the man " Has another messenger, then " "None except a spirit for my heart alone told me I should be wanted at this hour. Speak at once." 44 My lord, a dying girl has sent for you !" 44 Do I knor her?" 44 She has never seen you. Will you come at once and on the way I will explain to you what I can of this singular errand ; though, indeed, when it is told you, you know all that I comprehend." They were at the door of the hackney-coach, and Byron entered it without further remark. <4 Back again!" said the stranger, as the coachman closed the door, " and drive for dear life, for we shall scarce be in time, I fear !" The heavy tongue of St. Paul s church struck twelve as the rolling vehicle hurried on through the now lonely street, and though so far from the place whence they started, neither of the two occupants 222 EPHEMERA. had spoken. Byron sat with bare head and folded arms in the corner of the coach ; and the stranger, with his hat crowded over his eyes, seemed repressing some violet emotion ; and it was only when they stopped before a low door in a street close upon the river, that the latter found utterance. " Is she alive ?" he hurriedly asked of a woman who came out at the sound of the carriage-wheels. " She was a moment since but be quick !" Byron followed quickly on the heels of his com panion, and passing through a dimly lighted entry to the door of a back-room, they entered. A lamp, shaded by a curtain of spotless purity, threw a faint light upon a bed, upon which lay a girl, watched by a physician and a nurse. The physician had just re moved a small mirror from her lips, and holding it to the light, he whispered that she still breathed. As Byron passed the edge of the curtain, however, the dying girl moved the fingers of the hand lying on the coverlet, and slowly opened on him her languid eyes eyes of inexpressible depth and lustre. No one had spoken. "Here he is," she murmured. "Raise me, mother, while I have time to speak to him." Byron looked around the small chamber, trying in vain to break the spell of awe which the scene threw over him. An apparition from the other world could not have checked more fearfully and completely the worldly and scornful under-current of his nature. He stood with his heart beating almost audibly, and his knees trembled beneath him, awaiting what he prophetically felt to be a warning from the very gate of heaven. Propped with pillows, and left by her attendants, the dying girl turned her head toward the proud, noble poet, standing by her bedside, and a slight blush overspread her features, while a smile of angelic beauty stole through her lips. In that smile the face reawakened to its former loveliness, and seldom had he who now gazed breathlessly upon her, looked on such spiritual and incomparable beauty. The spacious forehead and noble contour, still visible, of the emaciated lips, bespoke genius impressed upon a tablet all feminine in its language ; and in the motion of her hand, and even in the slight movement of her graceful neck, there was something that still breathed of surpassing elegance. It was the shadowy wreck of no ordinary mortal passing away humble as were the surroundings, and strange as had been his sum mons to her bedside. " And this is Byron ?" she said at last, in a voice bevvilderingly sweet even through its weakness. " My lord ! I could not die without seeing you without relieving my soul of a mission with which it has long been burthened. Come nearer for I have no time left for ceremony, and I must say what I have to say and die! Beautiful," she said, "beauti ful as the dream of him which has so long haunted me! the intellect and the person of a spirit of light ! Pardon me, my lord, that, at a moment so important to i yourself, the remembrance of an earthly feeling has i been betrayed into expression." She paused a moment, and the bright color that had shot through her cheek and brow faded, and her countenance resumed its heavenly serenity. " I am near enough to death," she resumed "near enough to point you almost to heaven from; where I am; and it is on my heart like the one errand i of my life like the bidding of God to implore you to prepare for judgment. Oh, my lord! with your glorious powers, with your wondrous gifts, be not | lost! Do not, for the poor pleasures of a world like ; this, lose an eternity in which your great mind will outstrip the intelligence of angels. Measure this i iiought scan the worth of angelic bliss with the I intellect which has ranged so gloriously through the universe ; do not, on this one momentous subject of human interest on this alone be not short sighted !" "What shall I do ?" suddenly burst from Byron s lips in a tone of agony. But with an effort, as if struggling with a death-pang, he again drew up his form and resumed the marble calmness of his counte nance. The dying girl, meantime, seemed to have lost herself in prayer. With her wasted hands clasped on her bosom, and her eyes turned upward, the slight motion of her lips betrayed to those around her that 1 she was pleading at the throne of mercy. The physi- cian crept close to her bedside, but with his hand in his breast, and his head bowed, he seemed but watch ing for the moment when the soul should take its ! flight. She suddenly raised herself on the pillow. Her j long brown tresses fell over her shoulders, and a brightness unnatural and almost fearful kindled in her eyes. She seemed endeavoring to speak, and gazed steadfastly at Byron. Slowly, then, and tranquilly she sank back again upon her pillow, and as her hands fell apart, and her eyelids dropped, she murmured, "Come to Heaven!" and the stillness of death was in the room. The spirit had fled. The breaking of the silver cord is the first tone from the life-strings of genius, which is answered only in vibrations of affection. This truth, indeed, is touch- ingly shadowed forth in the accompaniments of death. The dark colors in the drapery of life, are dropped in the weaving of the shroud. The discords of music are rejected in the melody of the dirge. The praise upon the marble is the first tribute written without disparagement, and the first suffered without dissent. It is this new relation of the public to a great name this completed and lucent phase of a light in litera ture which seems to make a posthumous recast of criticism one of the legitimate departments of a review. Like the public feeling, the condition and powers of criticism toward an author s fame, are essentially changed by his death. His personal character, and the events of his life the foreground, so to speak, in the picture of his mind, are, till this event, wanting to the critical perspective; and when the hand to cor rect is cold, and the ear to be caressed and wounded is sealed, some of the uses of censure, and all reserve in comparison and final estimate, are done way. It is time for the reviews to take up, on this ground, the character and writingsof Hillhouse. The author of Hadad, the most finished and lofty poem of its time, should have been followed, within a year after his death, by a new and reverential appreciation, and living, as he did, in a learned and literary circle of friends, a biography, at least, was looked for, out of which criticism might shape a fresh monument to his genius. Such men as Hillhouse are not common, even in these days of universal authorship. In ac complishment of mind and person, he was probably second to no man. His poems show the first. They are fully conceived, nicely balanced, exquisitely finish ed works for the highest taste to relish, and for the severest student in dramatic style to erect into a model. Hadad was published in 1825, during my second yearin college, and to me it was the opening of a new heaven of imagination. The leading characters possessed me for months, and the bright, clear, harmonious lan guage was, for a long time, constantly in my ears. The author was pointed out to me, soon after, and for once, I saw a poet whose mind was well imaged in his person. In no part of the world have I seen a man of more distinguished mien, or of a more inborn dignity and elegance of address. His person was very EPHEMERA. 223 finely proportioned, his carriage chivalric and high bred, and his countenance purely and brightly intel lectual. Add to this a sweet voice, a stamp of high courtesy on everything he uttered, and singular sim plicity and taste in dress, and you have trie portrait of one who. in other days, would have been the mir ror of chivalry, and the flower of nobles and trou- bndors. Hillhousewas no less distinguished in oratory. There was still remembered, at the time of the pub lication of Hadad, an oration pronounced by him at the taking of his second degree an oration upon "the Education of a Poet," gloriously written, and most eloquently delivered. His poem of "the Judge ment," delivered before the " Phi Beta Kappa Socie ty," added in the same way to his renown, as did a subsequent noble effort of eloquence, to which I listen ed myself, with irresistible enchantment. Hillhouse had fallen upon days of thrift, and many years of his life which he should have passed either in his study, or in the councils of the nation, were enslaved to the drudgery of business. His constitu tion seemed to promise him a vigorous manhood, however, and an old age of undiminished fire, and when he left his mercantile pursuits, and retired to the beautiful and poetic home of "Sachem s Wood," his friends looked upon it as the commencement of a ripe and long enduring career of literature. In har mony with such a life were all his surroundings scenery, society, domestic refinement, and companion ship and never looked promise fairer for the realiza tion of a dream of glory. That he had laid out some thing of such a field in the future, I chance to know, for, though my acquaintance with him was slight, he confided to me in a casual conversation, the plan of a series of dramas, different from all he had attempted, upon which he designed to work with the first mood and leisure he could command. And with his high scholarship, knowledge of life, taste and genius, what might not have been expected from its fulfilment ? But his hand is cold, and his lips still, and his light, just risinz to its meridian, is lost now to the world. Love and honor to the memory of such a man. BACHELOR BOB S DISCOVERIES. " Sad were the lays of merry days, And sweet the songs of sadness." " Come !" said Bachelor Bob, as he hitched his chair closer to the table, " quite alone, half past twelve, and two tumblers of toddy for heart-openers, what say you to a little friendly inquisition into your mortal felicity ? You were the gayest man of my acquaintance ten years ago ; you are the gravest now ! Yet you swear by your Lares and Peaates, that (up to the lips as you are in care and trouble) you never were so happy as in these latter days. Do you ssvear this to me from a way you have of hang ing out trap for the world, or are you under a little in nocent delusion ?" Bob s hobby is the theory of happiness. Riches and poverty, matrimony and celibacy, youth and age, are subjects of contemplation to Bob, solely with ref erence to their comparative capacity for bliss. He speculates and talks about little else, indeed, and his intercourse with his friends seems to have no other end or aim than to collect evidence as to their happi ness and its causes. On this occasion he was addres sing a friend of mine, Smith, who had been a gay man in his youth (a merry man, truth to say, for he was in a perpetual breeze of high spirits), but who had married, and fallen behindhand in his worldly affairs, and so grown careworn and thoughtful. Smith was rather a poet in a quiet way, though he only used po etry as a sort of longer plummet when his heart got off soundings. I am indebted to Bob for the speci mens of his verse-making which I am about to give, | as well as for the conversation which brought them I to light. " Why," said Smith, "you have stated a dilemma j with two such inevitable horns that argument would | scarcely help me out of it. Let me see, what proof i can I give you that I am a happier man than I used to be, spite of my chapfallen visage ?" Smith mused a moment, and reaching over to a desk near his elbow, drew from its private drawer a book with locked covers. It was a well-filled manu script volume, and seemed a collection of prose and verse intermixed. The last page was still covered ! with blotting-paper, and seemed recently written. "I am no poet," said Smith, coloring slightly, " but it has been a habit of mine, ever since my cal low days, to record in verse all feelings that were too warm for prose ; sometimes in the fashion of a solilo quy (scripta vcrba), sometimes in verses to the dame or damsel to whom I was indebted for my ignition. Let me see, Bob! we met in Florence, I think ?" " For the first time abroad, yes !" " Well, perhaps that was my gayest time; certainly I do not remember to have been anywhere more gay or reckless. Florence, 1832, um here are some lines written that summer : do you remember the beautiful Irish widow you saw at one of the casino balls ? ad dressed to her, flirt that she was ! But she began all her flirtations with talking of her sorrows, and, if she tried you on, at all " " She didn t !" interrupted Bob. "Well, if she had you would have been humbug- j ged with her tender melancholy, as I was. Here are j the verses, and if ever I turned out my lining to the moon, they are true to my inner soul in those days I of frolic. Read these, and then turn to the last page ! and you will find as true a daguerreotype of the inner light of my moping days, written only yesterday." Tis late San Marc is beating three As I look forth upon the night ; The stars are shining tranquilly, And heaven is full of silver light ; The air blows freshly on my brow- Yet why should I be waking now ! I ve listened, lady, to thy tone, Till in my ear it will not die ; I ve felt for sorrows not my own, Till now I can not put them by ; And those sad words and thoughts of thine Have breathed their sadness into mine. Tis long though reckoned not by years Since, with affections chilled and shocked, I dried a boy s impassioned tears, And from the world my feelings locked The work of but one bitter day, In which were crowded years of pain ; And then I was as gay, again, And thought that I should be for aye ! The world lay open wide and bright, And I became its lightest minion, And flew the wording s giddy height With reckless and impetuous pinion Life s tide, with me, had turned from shore Ere yet my summers told a score. And years have passed, and I have seemed Happy to every eye but thine, And they whom most I loved have deemed There was no lighter heart than mine ; And, save when some wild passion-tone Of music reached the sleeping nerve, Or when in illness and alone My spirit from its bent would swerve, My heart was light, my thoughts u-ere free, I tM the thing I seemed to be. I came to this bright land, and here, Where I had thought to nerve my wings To soar to a more lofty sphere, And train myself for sterner things The land where I had thought to find No spell but beauty breathed in stone 224 EPHEMERA. To learn idolatries of mind, And leave the heart to slumber on Here find I one whose voice awakes The sad, dumb angel of my breast, And, as the long, long silence breaks Of a strong inward lip suppressed, It seems to me as if a madness Had been upon my brain alway As if twere phrensy to be gay, And life were only sweet in sadness ! Words from my lips to-night have come That have for years been sealed and dumb. It was but yesterday we met, We part to-morrow. I would fain With thy departing voice forget Its low, deep tone, and seal again My feelings from the light of day, To be to-morrow only gay ! But days will pass, and nights will creep, And I shall hear that voice of sadness With dreams, as now, untouched by sleep, And spirits out of tune with gladness ; And time must wear, and fame spur on ; Before that victory is re-won ! And so farewell ! I would not be Forgotten by the only heart To which my own breathes calm and free, And let us not as strangers part ! And we shall meet again, perhaps, More gayly than we re parting now; For time has, in its briefest lapse, A something which clears up the brow, And makes the spirits calm and bright And now to my sad dreams ! Good night ! " What a precious hypocrite you were for the mer riest dog in Florence !" exclaimed Bob, as he laid the book open on its back, after reading these lines. " You feel that way ! credat Judteus . "But there are some other poetical lies here what do you mean by we met but yesterday, and we part to-morrow, when I know you dangled after that widow a whole season at the baths ?" " Why," said Smith, with one of his old laughs, " there was a supplement to such an outpouring, of course. The reply to my verses was an invitation to join their party the next morning in a pilgrimage to Vallambrosa, and once attached to that lady s suite va pour toujours ! or as long as she chose to keep you. Turn to the next page. Before coming to the verses of my more sober days, you may like to read one more flourish like the last. Those were addressed to the same belle dame, and under a continuance of the same hallucination." Bob gravely read : My heart s a heavy one to-night, Dear Mary, thinking upon thee I know not if my brain is right, But everything looks dark to me ! I parted from thy side but now, I listened to thy mournful tone, I gazed by starlight on thy brow, And we were there unseen alone Yet proud as I should be, and blest, I can not set my heart at rest ! Thou lov st me. Thanks, oh God, for this ! If I should never sleep again If hope is all a mock of bliss I shall not now have lived in vain ! I care not that my eyes are aching With this dull fever in my lids I care not that my heart is breaking For happiness that Fate forbids The one sweet word that thou hast spoken, The one sweet look I met and blessed, Would cheer me if my heart were broken Would put my wildest thoughts to rest ! I know that I have pressed thy fingers Upon my warm lips unforbid I know that in thy memory lingers A thought of me, like treasure hid Though to my breast I may not press thee, Though I may never call thee mine, I know and, God, I therefore bless thee ! No other fills that heart of thine ! And this shall light my shadowed track ! I take my words of sadness back ! "What had that flirting widow to do with the gen tle name of Mary ?" exclaimed Bob, after laughing very heartily at the point blank take-in confessed in these very solemn verses. "Enough of love-melan choly, however, my dear Smith ! Let s have a look now *t the poetical side of care and trouble. What do you call it?" THE INVOLUNTARY PRAYER OF HAPPINESS. I have enough, oh God ! My heart, to-night, Runs over with the fulness of content ; As I look out on the fragrant stars, And from the beauty of the night take in My priceless portion yet myself no more Than in the universe a grain of sand I feel His glory who could make a -world, Yet, in the lost depths of the wilderness Leave not a flower imperfect ! Rich, though poor ! My low-roofed cottage is, this hour, a heaven ! Music is in it and the song she sings, That sweet-voiced wife of mine, arrests the ear Of my young child, awake upon her knee ; And, with his calm eye on his master s face, My noble hound lies couchant ; and all here All in this little home, yet boundless heaven Are, in such love as I have power to give, Blessed to overflowing ! Thou, who look st Upon my brimming heart this tranquil eve, Knowest its fulness, as thou dost the dew Sent to the hidden violet by Thee ! And, as that flower from its unseen abode Sends its sweet breath up duly to the sky, Changing its gift to incense so, oh God ! May the sweet drops that to my humble cup Find their far way from Heaven, send back, in prayer, Fragrance at thy throne welcome ! Bob paused a moment after reading these lines. " They seem in earnest," he said, " and I will sooner believe you were happy when you wrote these, than that you were sad when you wrote the others. But one thing I remark," added Bob, "the devout feeling in these lines written when you are happiest ; for it is commonly thought that tribulation and sadness give the first religious tinge to the ima gination. Yours is but the happiness of Christian resignation, after all." " On the contrary," said Smith, " nothing makes me so wicked as care and trouble. I always had, from childhood, a disposition to fall down on my knees and thank God for everything which made me happy, while sorrows of all descriptions stir up my antagonism, and make me feel rather like a devil than a Christian." In that case," said Bob, faking up his hat, " good night, and God prosper you ! And as to your happi ness?" " Well, what is the secret of my happiness, think you ?" "Matrimony," replied Bob- 132 C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES