i a 3= S 11 s I i I I |ai ^ ^ = I * ^OF-CA! I IVr S z All a =? 01 i | IZB lOS-Af a I VM i i -n <-;> 5 vvlOSANGElfr;* ^F'CAI!FO% iiim z S i 1 % s 1 1 O 11... ^J O c 1 TV) I 3 l^L/I s interspersed with rows of quince trees, and far off in one corner was one little patch, penuriously devoted to ornament, which flamed with marigolds, poppies, snappers, and four-o'clocks. Then there was a little box by itself with one rose geranium in it, which seemed to look around the garden as much like a stranger as a French dancing master in a Yankee meeting house. That is the dwelling of Uncle Lot Griswold. Uncle Lot, as he was commonly called, had a character that a painter would sketch for its lights and contrasts rather than its symmetry. He was a chestnut burr, abounding with briers without and with substantial goodness within. He had the strong-grained practical sense, the calculating worldly wisdom of his class of people in New England ; he had, too, a kindly heart, but all the strata of his character were crossed by a vein of surly petulance, that, half way between joke and earnest, colored everything that he said and did. If you asked a favor of Uncle Lot, he generally kept you arguing half an hour, to prove that you really needed it, and to tell you that he could not all the while be troubled with helping one body or another, all which time you might observe him regularly making his preparations to grant your request, and see, by an odd glimmer of his eye, that he was preparing to let you hear the "conclusion of the whole matter," which was, " well, well I guess I'll go on the hull I 'spose I must at least ; " so off he would go and work while the day lasted, and then wind up with a farewell exhortation " not to be a cailin' on your neighbors when you could get along without." If any of Uncle B Y HARRIE T BEECHER STO WE. / Lot's neighbors were in any trouble, he was always at hand to tell them that " they shouldn't a' done so; " that " it was strange they couldn't had more sense ; " and then to close his exhortations by laboring more diligently than any to bring them out of their difficul- ties, groaning in spirit, meanwhile, that folks would make people so much trouble. " Uncle Lot, father wants to know if you will lend him your hoe to-day," says a little boy, making his way across a cornfield. "Why don't your father use his own hoe ? " " Ours is broke." " Broke ! How came it broke ? " " I broke it yesterday, trying to hit a squirrel." " What business had you to be hittin' squirrels with a hoe ? Say ! " "But father wants to borrow yours." " Why don't you have that mended ? It's a great pest to have everybody usin' a body's things." " Well, I can borrow one some where else, I sup- pose," says the suppliant. After the boy lias stumbled across the ploughed ground and is fairly over the fence, Uncle Lot calls, " Halloo, there, you little rascal ! What are you goin' off without the hoe for?" " I didn't know as you meant to lend it." " I didn't say I wouldn't, did I ? Here, come and take it stay, I'll bring it ; and do tell your father not to be a let'tin' you hunt squirrels with his hoes next time." Uncle Lot's household consisted of Aunt Sally, his wife and an only son and daughter ; the former at the time our story begins, was at a neighboring literary institution. Aunt Sally was precisely as clever, as easy to be entreated, and kindly in externals, as her helpmate was the reverse. She was one of those respectable, pleasant old ladies whom you might often have met on the way to church on a Sunday, equipped with a great fan and a psalm book, and carrying some dried orange peel or a stalk of fennel, to give to the children if they were sleepy in meeting. She was as cheerful and domestic as the tea kettle that sung by her kitchen fire, and slipped along among Uncle Lot's angles and peculiarities as if there never was anything the matter in the world ; and the same mantle of sun- 8 UNCLE LOT. shine seemed to have fallen on Miss Grace, her only daughter. Pretty in person and pleasant in her ways, endowed with native self-possession and address, lively and chatty, having a mind and a will of her own, yet good- humored withal, Miss Grace was a universal favorite. It would have puzzled a city lady to understand how Grace, who never was out of Newbury in her life, knew the way to speak, and act, and behave, on all occas- ions, exactly as if she had been taught how. She was just one of those wild flowers which you may sometimes see waving its little head in the woods, and looking so civilized and arden-like, that you wonder it it really did come up and grow there by nature. She was an adept in all household concerns, and there was something amazingly pretty in her ener- getic way of bustling about, and " putting things to rights." Like most Yankee damsels, she had a long- ing after the tree of knowledge, and, having exhausted the literary fountains of a district school, she fell to reading whatsoever came in her way. True, she had but little to read ; but what she perused she had her own thoughts upon, so that a person of information, in talking with her, would feel a constant wondering pleasure to find that she had so much to say of this, that, and the other thing than he expected. Uncle Lot, like every one else, felt the magical brightness of his daughter, and was delighted with her praises, as might be discerned by his often finding occasion to remark that " he didn't see why the boys need to be all the time a' comin' to see Grace, for she was nothing so extr'or'nary after all." About all matters and things at home she gen- erally had her own way, while Uncle Lot would scold and give up with a regular good grace that was quite creditable. " Father," says Grace, " I want to have a party next week." " You sha'n't go to havin' your parties, Grace. I always have to eat bits and ends a fortnight after you have one, and I won't have it so." And so Uncle Lot walked out, and Aunt Sally and Miss Grace proceeded to make the cake and pies for the party. B Y HARRIE T BEECHER STO WE. 9 When Uncle Lot came home, he saw a long array of pies and rows of cakes on the kitchen table. " Grace Grace Grace, I say ! What is all this here flummery for ? " " Why, it is to eat, father," said Grace, with a good- natured look of consciousness. Uncle Lot tried his best to look sour ; but his visage began to wax comical as he looked at his merry daughter ; so he said nothing, but quietly sat down to his dinner. "Father," said Grace, after dinner, "we shall want two more candlesticks next week." " Why can't you have your party with what you've got ? " "No, father, we want two more." " I can't afford it, Grace there's no sort of use on't and you sha'n't have any." " Oh, father, now do," said Grace. " I won't, neither," said Uncle Lot, as he sallied out of the house, and took the road to Comfort Scran's store. In half an hour he returned again ; and fumbling in his pocket, and drawing forth a candlestick, levelled it at Grace. " There's your candlestick." " But, father, I said I wanted two" " Why can't you make one do ? " " No, I can't ; I must have two." " Well, then, there's t'other ; and here's a fol-de-rol for you to tie around your neck." So saying, he bolted for the door, and took himself off with all speed. It was much after this fashion that matters commonly went on in the brown house. But having tarried long on the way, we must proceed with the main story. James thought Miss Grace was a glorious girl ; and as to what Miss Grace thought of Master James, per- haps it would not have been developed had she not been called to stand on the defensive for him with Uncle Lot. For, from the time that the whole village of Newbury began to be wholly given unto the praise of Master James, Uncle Lot set his face as a flint against him from the laudable fear of following the multitude. He therefore made conscience of stoutly gainsaying everything that was said in his behalf, 10 UNCLE LOT. which, as James was in high favor with Aunt Sally, he had frequent opportunities to do. So when Miss Grace perceived that Uncle Lot did not like our hero as much as he ought to do, she, of course, was bound to like him well enough to make up for it. Certain it is that they were remarkably happy in finding opportunities of being acquainted, that James wailed on her, as a matter of course, from sing- ing school, that he volunteered making a new box for her geranium on an improved plan, and above all, that he was remarkably particular in his attentions to Aunt Sally a stroke of policy which showed James had a natural genius for this sort of matters. Even when emerging from the meeting house in full glory, with flute and psalm book under his arm, he would stop to ask her how she did ; and if it was cold weather, he would carry her foot stove all the way home from meeting, discoursing upon the sermon, and other serious matters, as Aunt Sally observed " in the pleasantest, prettiest way that ever ye see." This flute was one of the crying sins of James in the eyes of Uncle Lot. James was particularly fond of it, because he had learned to play on it by intuition, and on the decease of the old pitchpipe, which was slain by a fall from the gallery, he took the liberty to intro- duce the flute in its place. For this, and other sins, and for the good reason above named, Uncle Lot's counte- nance was not towards James, neither could he be moved to him-ward by any manner of means. To all Aunt Sally's good words and kind speeches, he had only to say that "he didn't like him, that he hated to see him a' manifesting and glorifying there in the front gallery Sundays, and a' acting everywhere as if he was master of all; he didn't like it, and he wouldn't." But our hero was no whit cast down or discomfited by the malcontent aspect of Uncle Lot. On the contrary, when report was made to him of divers of his hard speeches, he only shrugged his shoulders with a very satisfied air, and remarked that "he knew a thing or two for all that." " Why, James," said his companion and chief coun- sellor, " do you think Grace likes you ? " " I don't know," said our hero, with a comfortable appearance of certainty. B V HARRIE T SEE CtiER S TO WE. 1 1 "But you can't get her, James, if Uncle Lot is cross about it." " Fudge ! I can make Uncle Lot like me if I have a mind to try." " Well then, Jim, you'll have to give up that flute of yours, I tell you now." " Fa sol la I can make him like me and my flute too." " Why, how will you do it ? " " Oh, I'll work it," said our hero. "Well, Jim, I tell you now, you don't know Uncle Lot if you say so ; for he is just the settest critter in his own way that ever you saw." " I do know Uncle Lot though, better than most folks ; he is no more cross than I am ; and as to his being set, you have nothing to do but to make him think he is in his own way, when he is in yours that is all." " Well," said the other, " but you see I don't believe it." " And I'll bet you a gray squirrel that I'll go there this very evening, and get him to like me and my flute both," said James. Accordingly the late sunshine of that afternoon shone full on the yellew buttons of James as he pro- ceeded to the place of conflict. It was a bright, beauti- ful evening. A thunder storm had just cleared away, and the silver clouds lay rolled up in masses around the setting sun ; the rain drops were sparkling and winking to each other over the ends of the leaves, and all the blue-birds and robins, breaking forth into song, made the little green valley as merry as a musi- cal box. James' soul was always overflowing with the kind of poetry which consists in feeling unspeakably happy ; and it is not to be wondered at, considering where he was going, that he should feel in a double ecstasy on the present occasion. He stepped gayly along, occa- sionally springing over a fence to the right to see whether the rain had swollen the trout brook, or to the left to notice the ripening of Mr. Somebody's water- melons for James always had an eye on all his neigh- bors' matters as well as his own. In this way he proceeded till he arrived at the picket 12 UNCLE LOT. fence that marked the commencement of Uncle Lot's ground. Here he stopped to consider. Just then four or five sheep walked up, and began also to consider a loose picket, which was hanging just ready to drop off ; and James began to look at the sheep. " Well, mister," said he, as he observed the leader judiciously drawing himself through the gap, " in with you just what I wanted," and having waited a moment to ascertain that all the company were likely to follow, he ran with all haste towards the house, and swing- ing open the gate, pressed all breathless to the door. " Uncle Lot, there are four or five sheep in your garden ! " Uncle Lot dropped his whetstone and scythe. " I'll drive them out," said our hero ; and with that, he ran down the garden alley, and made a furious de- scent on the enemy ; bestirring himself, as Bunyan says, " lustily and with good courage," till every sheep had skipped out much quicker than it skipped in ; and then, springing over the fence, he seized a great stone, and nailed on the picket so effectually that no sheep could possibly encourage the hope of getting in again. This was all the work of a minute, and he was back again ; but so exceedingly out of breath that it was necessary for him to stop a moment and rest himself. Uncle Lot looked ungraciously satisfied. " What under the canopy set you to scampering so ? " said he. " I could a' driv out them critturs myself." " If you are at all particular about driving them out yourself, I can let them in again," said James. Uncle Lot looked at him with an odd sort of twinkle in the corner of his eye. " 'Spose I must ask you to walk in," said he. " Much obliged," said James, " but I am in a great hurry." So saying, he started in a very business-like fashion towards the gate. " You'd better jest stop a minute." " Can't stay a minute." " I don't see what possesses you to be all the while in sich a hurry ; a body would think you had all creation on your shoulders." "Just my situation, Uncle Lot," said James, swing- ing open the gate. BY HA RRIE T BE EC HEX STO WE. 1 3 " Well, at any rate, have a drink of cider, can't yc ? " said Uncle Lot, who was now quite engaged to have his own way in the case. James found it convenient to accept this invitation, and Uncle Lot was twice as good natured as if he had staid in the first of the matter. Once fairly forced into the premises, James thought fit to forget his long walk and excess of business, especially as about that moment Aunt Sally and Miss Grace returned from an afternoon call. You may be sure that the last thing these respectable ladies looked for was to find Uncle Lot and Master James tete-a-tete, over a pitcher of cider ; and when, as they entered, our hero looked up with something of a mischievous air, Miss Grace, in particular, was so puzzled that it took at least a quarter of an hour to untie her bonnet strings. But James staid, and acted the agreeable to perfection. First he must needs go down into the garden to look at Uncle Lot's wonderful cabbages, and then he promenaded all around the corn patch, stop- ping every few moments and looking up with an ap- pearance of great gratification, as if he had never seen such corn in his life ; and then he examined Uncle Lot's favorite apple tree with an expression of wonder- ful interest. " I never! " he broke forth, having stationed himself against the fence opposite to it ; " what kind of an apple tree is that ? " " It's a bellflower, or somethin' another," said Uncle Lot. " Why, where did you get it ? I never saw such apples ! " said our hero, with his eyes still fixed on the tree. Uncle Lot pulled up a stalk or two of weeds, and threw them over the fence, just to show that he did not care anything about the matter; and then-he came up and stood by James. " Nothin' so remarkable, as I know on," said he. Just then Grace came to say that supper was ready. Once seated at table, it was astonishing to see the per- fect and smiling assurance with which our hero con- tinued his addresses to Uncle Lot. It sometimes goes a great way towards making people like us to take it 14 UNCLE LOT. for granted that they do already ; and upon this prin- ciple James proceeded. He talked, laughed, told stories, and joked with the most fearless assurance, occasionally seconding his words by looking Uncle Lot in the face, with a countenance so full of good will as would have melted any snow-drift of prejudices in the world. James had also one natural accomplish- ment, more courtier-like than all the diplomacy in Europe, and that was the gift of feeling a real interest for anybody in five minutes ; so that if he began to please in jest, he generally ended in earnest. With great simplicity of mind, he had a natural tact for see- ing into others and watched their motions with the same delight with which a child gazes at the wheels and springs of a watch, to " see what it will do." The rough exterior and latent kindness of Uncle Lot were quite a spirit-stirring study ; and when tea was over, as he and Grace happened to be standing together in the front door, he broke forth, " I do really like your father, Grace ! " " Do you ? " said Grace. "Yes, I do. He has something in him and I like him all the better for having to fish it out." " Well, I hope you will make him like you," said Grace, unconsciously ; and then she stopped, and looked a little ashamed. James was too well bred to see this, or look as if Grace meant any more than she said a kind of breed- ing not always attendant on more fashionable polish so he only answered, " I think I shall, Grace, though I doubt whether I can get him to own it." " He is the kindest man that ever was," said Grace ; " and he always acts as if he was ashamed of it." James turned a little away, and looked at the bright evening sky, which was glowing like a calm golden sea ; and over it was the silver new moon, with one little star to hold the candle for her. He shook some bright drops off from a rosebush near by, and watched to see them shine as they fell, while Grace stood very quietly waiting for him to speak again. " Grace," said he, at last, " I am going to college this fall." "So you told me yesterday," said Grace. James B Y HARR1E T BEECH ER STO WE. \ 5 stooped down over Grace's geranium, and began to busy himself with pulling off all the dead leaves, re- marking in the meanwhile. ' And if I do get him to like me, Grace, will you like me too ?" " I like you now very well," said Grace. " Come, Grace, you know what I mean," said James, looking steadfastly at the top of the apple tree. " Well, I wish then, you would understand what I mean, without my saying any more about it," said Grace. " O, to be sure I will !" said our hero, looking up with a very intelligent air, and so as Aunt Sally would say, the matter was settled with " no words about it." Now shall we narrate how our hero, as he saw Uncle Lot approaching the door, had the impudence to take out his flute, and put the parts together, arranging and adjusting the stops with great composure ? " Uncle Lot," said he, looking up, "this is the best flute that ever I saw." " I hate them tooting critturs," said Uncle Lot snap- pishly. " I declare, I wonder how you can," said James, " for I do think they exceed " So saying he put the flute to his mouth, and ran up and down a long flourish. "There! what do you think of that?" said he, looking in Uncle Lot's face with much delight. Uncle Lot turned and marched into the house, but soon paced to the right-about, and came out again, for James was fingering " Yankee Doodle," that appro- priate national air for the descendants of the Puritans. Uncle Lot's patriotism began to bestir itself ; and now, if it had been anything, as he said, but " that ere flute" as it was, he looked more than once at James' fingers. " How under the sun could you learn to do that ?" said he. " Oh, its easy enough," said James, proceeding with another tune ; and, having played it through, he stopped a moment to examine the joints of his flute, and in the mean time addressed Uncle Lot. "You can't think how grand this is for pitching tunes. I always pitch the tunes on Sunday with it." " Yes ; but I don't think it's a right and fit instru- ment for the Lord's house," said Uncle Lot. 16 UNCLE LOT. " Why not ? It is only a kind of a long pitchpipe, you see," said James; "and, seeing the old one is broken, and this will answer, 1 don't see why it is not better than nothing," " Why, yes, it may be better than nothing," said Uncle Lot ; "but as 1 always tell Grace and my wife, it ain't the right kind of instrument after all ; it ain't solemn." "Solemn!" said James, " that is according as you work it. See here, now." So saying, he struck up Old Hundred, and proceeded through it with great per- severance. " There, now ! " said he. " Well, well, I don't know but it is," said Uncle Lot ; "but, as I said at first, I don't like the looks of it in meetin'." " But yet you really think it is better than nothing," said James, "for you see I can't pitch my tunes with- out it." " Maybe 'tis," said Uncle Lot ; "but that isn't sayin' much." This, however, was enough for Master James, who soon after departed with his flute in his pocket, and Grace's last words in his heart, soliloquizing as he shut the gate, " There, now, I hope Aunt Sally wont go to praising me ; for, just so sure as she does, I shall have it all to do over again." James was right in his apprehension. Uncle Lot could be privately converted, but not brought to open confession ; and when, the next morning, Aunt Sally remarked, in the kindness of her heart, " Well, I always knew you would come to like James," Uncle Lot only responded. " Who said I did like him ?" " But I am sure you seemed to like him last night." "Why, I couldn't turn him out o' doors, could I ? I don't think nothin' of him but what I always did." But it was to be remarked that Uncle Lot contented himself at this time with the mere general avowal, without running it into particulars, as was formerly his wont. It was evident that the ice had begun to melt, but it might have been a long time in dissolving, had not collateral incidents assisted. It so happened that about this time George Gris- B Y HARRIE T BE EC HER S TO WE. 1 7 wold, the only son before referred to, returned to his native village, after having completed his theological studies at a neighboring institution. It is interesting to mark the gradual development of mind and heart, from the time that the white-headed, bashful boy quiis the country village for college, to the period when he returns, a formed and matured man, to notice how gradually the rust of early prejudices begins to cleave from him how his opinions, like his handwriting, pass from the cramped and limited forms of a country school into that confirmed and characteristic style which is to mark the man for life. In George this change was remarkably striking. He was endowed by nature with uncommon acuteness of feeling and fondness for reflection qualities as likely as any to render a child backward and uninteresting in early life. When he lef; Newbury for college, he was a taciturn and apparently phlegmatic boy, only evincing sensi- bility by blushing and looking particularly stupified whenever anybody spoke to him. Vacation after vaca- tion passed, and he returned more and more an altered being ; and he who once shrunk from the eye of the deacon, and was ready to sink if he met the minister, now moved about among the dignitaries of the place with all the composure of a superior being. It is only to be regretted that, while the mind improved, the physical energies declined, and that every visit to his home found him paler, thinner, and less prepared in body for the sacred profession to which he had devoted himself. But now he was returned a minister a real minister, with a right to stand in the pulpit and preach ; and what a joy and glory to Aunt Sally and to Uncle Lot, if he were not ashamed to own it ! The first Sunday after he came, it was known far and near that George Griswold was to preach; and never was a more ready and expectant audience. As the time for reading the first psalm approached, you might see the white-headed men turning their faces attentively towards the pulpet ; the anxious and expect- ant old women, with their little black bonnets bent forward to see him rise. There were the children looking because every body else looked ; there was Uncle Lot in the front pew, his face considerably 2 1 8 UNCLE LOT. adjusted ; there was Aunt Sally, seeming as pleased as a mother could seem ; and Miss Grace lifting her sweet face to her brother, like a flower to the sun ; there was our friend James in the front gallery, his joyous countenance a little touched with sobriety and expectation ; in short, a more embarrassingly attentive audience never greeted the first efforts of a young min- ister. Under these circumstances there was something touching in the fervent self-forgttfulness which charac- terized the first exercises of the morning, something which moved every one in the house. The devout poetry of his prayer, rich with the Orien- talism of Scripture, and eloquent with the expression of strong yet chastened emotion, breathed over his audience like music hushing every one to silence, and beguiling every one to feeling. In the sermon, there was the strong intellectual nerve, the constant occur- rence of argument and statement, which distinguishes a New England discourse ; but it was touched with life by the intense, yet half subdued feeling with which he seemed to utter it. Like the rays of the sun, it enlightened and melted at the same moment. The strong peculiarities of New England doctrine, involving as they do, all the hidden machinery of mind, all the mystery of its divine relations and future progression, and all the tremendous uncertainties of its eternal good or ill, seemed to have dwelt in his mind, to have burned in his thoughts, to have wrestled with his powers, and they gave to his manner the fervency almost of another world ; while the exceeding paleness of his countenance, and a tremulousness of voice that seemed to spring from bodily weakness, touched the strong workings of his mind with a pathetic interest, as if the being so early absorbed in another world could not be long for this. When the services were over the congregation dispersed with the air of people who had/^// 1 rather than heard, and all the criticism that followed was similar to that of old Deacon Hart an upright, shrewd man who, as he lingered a moment at the church door s turned and gazed with unwonted feeling at the youn^ preacher. " He's a blessed cretur ! " said he, the tears actually making their way to his eyes ; " I haint been so near B Y HARRIS T BEECHER STO WE. 1 9 heaven this many a day. He's a blessed cretur of the Lord ; that's my mind about him ! " As for our friend James, he was at first sobered, then deeply moved, and at last wholly absorbed by the discourse, and it was only when meeting was over that he began to think where he really was. With all his versatile activity, James had a greater depth of mental capacity than he was himself aware of, and he began to feel a sort of electric affinity for the mind that had touched him in a way so new; and when he saw the mild minister standing at the foot of the pulpit stairs, he made directly towards him. " I do want to hear more from you," said he, with a face full of earnestness ; " may I walk home with you ? " " It is a long and warm walk," said George, smiling. " Oh, I don't care for that, if it does not trouble you" said James ; and leave being gained, you might have seen them slowly passing along under the trees, James pouring forth all the floods of inquiry which the sudden impulse of his mind had brought out, and supplying his guide with more questions and problems for solution than he could have gone through with in a month. " I cannot answer all your questions now," said he, as they stopped at Uncle Lot's gate. " Well, then, when will you ? " said James eagerly. " Let me come home with you to-night ? " The minister smiled assent, and James departed so full of new thoughts, that he passed Grace without even seeing her. From that time a friendship commenced between the two, which was a beautiful illustration of the affinities of opposites. It was like a friendship between morning and evening, all freshness and sun- shine on one side, and all gentleness and peace on the other. The young minister, worn by long-continued ill health, by the fervency of his own feelings, and the gravity of his own reasonings, found pleasure in the healthful buoyancy of a youthful, unexhausted mind, while James felt himself sobered and made better by the moonlight tranquillity of his friend. It is one mark of a superior mind to understand and be influenced by the superiority of others, and this was the case with James. The ascendancy which his new friend acquired over him was unlimited, and did more in a month 20 UNCLE LOT. towards consolidating and developing his character than all the four years course of a college. Our religious habits are likely always to retain the impression of the first seal which stamped them, and in this case it was a peculiarly happy one. The calmness, the settled pur- pose, the mild devotion of his friend, formed a just alloy to the energetic and reckless buoyancy of James' character, and awakened in him a set of feelings with- out which the most vigorous mind must be incomplete. The effect of the ministrations of the young pastor, in awakening attention to the subjects of his calling in the village was marked, and of a kind which brought pleasure to his own heart. But, like all other excite- ment, it tends to exhaustion, and it was not long before he sensibly felt the decline of the powers of life. To the best regulated mind there is something bitter in the relinquishment of projects for which we have been long and laboriously preparing, and there is something far more bitter in crossing the long-cherished expectations of friends. All this George felt. He could not bear to look on his mother, hanging on his words and following his steps with eyes of almost childish delight on his singular father, whose whole earthly ambition was bound up in his success, and think how soon the " candle of their old age " must be put out. When he returned from a successful effort, it was painful to see the old man, so evidently delighted, and so anxious to conceal his triumph, as he would seat himself in his chair, and begin with " George, that 'are doctrine is rather of a puzzler ; but you seem to think you've got the run on't. I should re'ly like to know what business you have to think you know better than other folks about it," and, though he would cavil most courageously at all George's explanations, yet you might perceive, through all, that he was inly uplifted to hear how his boy could talk. If George was engaged in argument with any one else, he would sit by with his head bowed down, look- ing out from under his shaggy eyebrows with a shame- faced satisfaction very unusual with him. Expressions of affection from the naturally gentle are not half so touching as those which are forced out from the hard- favored, and severe ; and George was affected, even B Y HAKRIE T BE EC HER STO WE. 2 1 to pain, by the evident pride and regard of his father. "He never said so much to anybody before," thought he, " and what will he do if I die ? " In such thoughts as these Grace found her brother engaged one still autumn morning, as he stood leaning against the garden fence. " What are you solemnizing here for, this bright day, brother George ? " said she, as she bounded down the alley. The young man turned and looked on her happy face with a sort of twilight smile. " How happy you are, Grace ! " said he. " To be sure I am ; and you ought to be, too, because you are better." " I am happy, Grace that is, I hope I shall be." " You are sick, I know you are," said Grace ; " you look worn out. Oh, I wish your heart would spring once as mine does." " I am not well, dear Grace, and I fear I never shall be," said he, turning away and fixing his eyes on the fading trees opposite. "Oh, George! dear George, don't, don't say that, you'll break all our hearts," said Grace, with tears in her own eyes. " Yes, but it is true, sister : I do not feel it on my own account so much as However," he added, " it will all be the same in heaven." It was but a week after this that a violent cold hastened the progress of debility into a confirmed mal- ady. He sunk very fast. Aunt Sally, with the self- deceit of a fond and cheerful heart, thought every day that " he would be better," and Uncle Lot resisted conviction with all the obstinate pertinacity of his char- acter, while the sick man felt that he had not the heart to undeceive them. James was now at the house every day, exhausting all his energy and invention in the case of his friend ; and any one who had seen him in his hours of reckless- ness and glee could scarcely recognize him, as the being whose step was so careful, whose eye so watch- ful, whose voice and touch were so gentle, as he moved around the sick bed. But the same quickness which 22 UNCLE LOT. makes a mind buoyant in gladness, often makes it gentlest and most sympathetic in sorrow. It was now nearly morning in the sick room. George had been restless and feverish all night ; but towards day he fell into a slight slumber, and James sat by his side, almost holding his breath lest he should waken him. It was yet dusk, but the sky was brightening with a solemn glow, and the stars were beginning to disappear, all, save the bright and morning one, which, standing alone in the east, looked tenderly through the casement, like the eye of our heavenly Father, watch- ing over us when all earthly friendships are fad- ing. George awoke with a placid expression of counte- nance, and fixing his eyes on the brightening sky, mur- mured faintly, " The sweet, immortal morning sheds Its blushes round the spheres." A moment after, a shade passed over his face ; he pressed his fingers over his eyes, and the tears dropped silently on his pillow. "George ! dear George ! " said James, bending over him. " It's my friends it's my father my mother," said he faintly. " Jesus Christ will watch over them," said James, soothingly. " Oh, yes, I know he will ; for he loved his own which were in the world ; he loved them unto the end. But I am dying and before I have done any good." "Oh, do not say so," said James; "think, think what you have done, if only for me. God bless you for it ! God will bless you for it ; it will follow you to heaven; it will bring me there. Yes, I will do as you have taught me. I will give my life, rny soul, my whole strength to it ; and then you will not have lived in vain." George smiled, and looked upward ; " his face was as that of an angel ; " and James, in his warmth, con- tinued, " It is not I alone who can say this ; we all bless you ; every one in this place blesses you ; you will be B Y HARRIE T BEECHER STO WE. 2 3 had in everlasting remembrance by some hearts here, I know." " Bless God ! " said George. "We do," said James. 4i I bless him that I ever knew you ; we all bless him, and we love you, and shall forever." The glow that had kindled over the pale face of the invalid again faded as he said, " But, James, I must, I ought to tell my father and mother ; I ought to, and how can I ? " At that moment the door opened, and Uncle Lot made his appearance. He seemed struck with the paleness of George's face ; and coming to the side of the bed, he felt his pulse, and laid his hand anxiously on his forehead, and clearing his voice several times, in- quired " if he didn't feel a little better." " No, father, said George ; then taking his hand, he looked anxiously in his face, and seemed to hesitate a moment. "Father," 'he began, "you know that we ought to submit to God." There was something in his expression at this moment which flashed the truth into the old man's mind. He dropped his son's hand with an exclamation of agony, and turning quickly, left the room. " Father ! father ! " said Grace, trying to rouse him, as he stood with his arms folded by the kitchen win- dow. " Get away, child ! " said he, roughly. " Father, mother says breakfast is ready." " I don't want any breakfast," said he, turning short about. " Sally, what are you fixing in that 'ere por- ringer ? " ' Oh, it's only a little tea for George ; 't will comfort him up, and make him feel better, poor fellow." " You won't make him feel better he's gone," said Uncle Lot, hoarsely. " Oh, dear heart, no," said Aunt Sally. " Be still a' contradicting me ; I won't be contra- dicted all the time by nobody. The short of the case is, that George is goin' to die just as we've got him ready to be a minister and all ; and I wish to pity I was in my grave myself, and so " said Uncle Lot, as he plunged out of the door, and shut it after him. It is well for man that there is one Being who sees 24 UNCLrf &OT. the suffering heart as it is, and not as it manifests itself through the repellances of outward infirmity, and who, perhaps, feels more for the stern and wayward than for those whose gentler feelings win for them human sympathy. With all his singularities, there was in the heart of Uncle Lot a depth of religious sincerity ; but there are few characters where religion does anything more than struggle with natural defect, and modify what would else be far worse. In this hour of trial, all the native obstinacy and pertinacity of the old man's character rose, and while he felt the necessity of sub- mission, it seemed impossible to submit; and thus, reproaching himself, struggling in vain to repress the murmurs of nature, repulsing from him all external sympathy, his mind was " tempest-tossed, and not com- forted." It was on the still afternoon of the following Sab- bath that he was sent for, in haste, to the chamber of his son. He entered, and saw that the hour was come. The family were all there. Grace and James, side by side, bent over the dying one, and his mother sat afar off, with her face hid in her apron, "that she might not see the death of the child." The aged minister was there, and the Bible lay open before him. The father walked to the side of the bed. He stood still, and gazed on the face now brightening with " life and im- mortality. " The son lifted up his eyes ; he saw his father, smiled, and put out his hand. "I am glad you are come," said he. " O George, to the pity, don't ! don't smile on me so ! I know what is coming ; I have tried, and tried, and I can't, I can't have it so " and his frame shook, and he sobbed audibly. The room was still as death ; there was none that seemed able to comfort him. At last the son repeated, in a sweet, but interrupted voice, those words of man's best Friend : " Let not your heart be troubled ; in my Father's house are many mansions. " " Yes ; but I can't help being troubled ; I suppose the Lord's will must be done, but it'll ;7/me. " " O Father, don't, don't break my heart," said the son, much agitated. "I shall see you again in heaven, and you shall see me again ; and then ' your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man take th from you." B Y HARRIE T BEECHER STO WE. 2 5 " I never shall get to heaven if I feel as I do now," said the old man. " I cannot have it so." The mild face of the sufferer was downcast. " I wish he saw all that / do," said he, in a low voice. Then looking towards the minister, he articulated, " Pray for us." They knelt in prayer. It was soothing, as real prayer always must be ; and when they rose, every one seemed more calm. But the sufferer was exhausted ; his countenance was changed ; he looked on his friends ; there was a faint whisper, " Peace I leave with you," and he was in heaven. We need not dwell on what followed. The seed sown by the righteous often blossoms over their grave ; and so it was with this good man. The words of peace which he spoke unto his friends while he was yet with them came into remembrance after he was gone ; and though he was laid in the grave with many tears, yet it was with softened and submissive hearts. " The Lord bless him, " said Uncle Lot, as he and James were standing, last of all, over the grave. " I believe my heart is gone to heaven with him ; and I think the Lord really did know what was best, after all." Our friend James seemed now to become the sup- port of the family ; and the bereaved old man uncon- sciously began to transfer to him the affections that had been left vacant. " James," said he to him one day, " I suppose you know that you are about the same to me as a son." " I hope so," said James, kindly. "Well, well, you'll go to college next week, and none o' y'r keeping school to get along. I've got enough to bring you safe out that is, if you'll be careful and stiddy" James knew the heart too well to refuse a favor in which the poor old man's mind was comforting itself. He had the self-command to abstain from any extraor- dinary expressions of gratitude, but took it kindly, as a matter of course. " Dear Grace," said he to her, the last evening be- fore he left home, " I am changed ; we both are altered since we first knew each other ; and now I am going to be gone a long time, but I am sure " He stopped to arrange his thoughts. " Yes, you may be sure of 26 UNCLE LOT. all those things you wish to say, and cannot," said Grace. " Thank you," said James ; then looking thought- fully, he added, "God help me. I believe I have mind enough to be what I mean to ; but whatever I am or have shall be given to God and my fellow men ; and then, Grace, your brother in heaven will rejoice over me." " I believe he does now," said Grace. " God bless you, James ; I don't know what would have become of us if you had not been here. Yes, you will live to be like him, and to do even more good," she added, her face brightening as she spoke, till James thought she really must be right. ******* It was five years after this that James was spoken of as an eloquent and successful minister in the state of C., and was settled in one of its most thriving villages. Late one Autumn evening, a tall, bony, hard-favored man was observed making his way into the outskirts of the place. " Halloa, there ; " he called to a man over the other side of the fence ; " what town is this 'ere ? " " It's Farmington, sir." " Well, I want to know if you know anything of a boy of mine that lives here ? " " A boy of yours ? Who ? " "Why, I've got a boy here, that's livin' on the town, and I thought I'd jest look him up." " I don't know any boy that is living on the town. What's his name ? " " Why," said the old man, pushing his hat off from his forehead, " I believe they call him James Benton." " James Benton ! Why, that is our minister's name." " O wal, I believe he is the minister, come to think on't. He's a boy o' mine, though. Where does he live ? " " In that white house that you see set back from the road there, with all those trees round it." At this instant a tall, manly-looking person ap- proached from behind. Have we not seen that face before ? It is a touch graver than of old, and its lines have a more thoughtful significance j but all the vivac- B Y HARRIE T BEECHER STO WE. 2J ity of James Benton sparkles in that quick smile as his eye falls on the old man. I thought you could not keep away from us long," said he, with the prompt cheerfulness of his boyhood, and laying hold of both of Uncle Lot's hands. They approached the gate ; a bright face glances past the window, and in a moment Grace is at the door. " Father ! dear father ! " "You'd better make believe be so glad," said Uncle Lot, his eyes glistening as he spoke. "Come, come, father, I have authority in these days," said Grace, drawing him towards the house; "so no disrespectful speeches ; away with your hat and coat, and sit down in this great chair." "So ho! Miss Grace," said Uncle Lot, "you are at your old tricks, ordering round as usual. Well, if I must, I must ; " so down he sat. " Father," said Grace, as he was leaving them after a few days' stay, " it's Thanksgiving day next month, and you and mother must come and stay with us." Accordingly, the following month found Aunt Sally and Uncle Lot by the minister's fireside, delighted witnesses of the Thanksgiving presents which a willing people were pouring in ; and the next day they had once more the pleasure of seeing a son of theirs in the sacred desk, and hearing a sermon that everybody said was " the best that he ever preached ; " and it is to be remarked, that this was the standing commentary on all James' discourses, so that it was evident he was going on unto perfection. " There's a great deal that's worth having in this 'ere life after all," said Uncle Lot, as he sat by the coals of the bright evening fire of that day; "that is, if we'd only take it when the Lord lays it in our way." " Yes," said James ; " and let us only take it as we should, and this life will be cheerfulness, and the next fulness of joy." OLD MADAME, BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. MRS. SPOFFORD, whose early fame came to her while Miss Prescott, was born in Calais, Me., in 1835. She was the eldest daughter of Joseph N. Prescott. When Harriet was still very young, the family removed to Newburyport, Mass. In this little city at the mouth of the Merrimac, she received an excellent edu- cation at the Putnam Free School an institution with a modest name but of academic standing, and which had the reputation of turning out many accomplished scholars, among whom Harriet Prescott ranked as one of the very brightest ; later she attended for two years the Pinkerton Academy in Derry, N. H. At this time the city of her home, Newburyport, contained an un- usual number of both men and women of fine intel- lectual endowment, and into this circle of stimula- tion, Harriet came as a welcome member. Just at this period, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a resi- dent of the place and pastor of the Unitarian Church ; he took great interest in Miss Prescott, and by many a friendly counsel and suggestion helped her on the way she has since so brilliantly trod. Here she achieved her first local success, as the competitor for a literary prize. Having graduated at the early age of seven teen, she found herself at once in the presence of a family misfortune, which, as the eldest of the family, cast almost the entire responsibility of its support upon her young shoulders. The father had been stricken with paralysis, and her mother became a confirmed invalid. Nothing daunted by this serious outlook she set bravely to work to make her literary talent of prac- tical use. She courageously besieged the story paper offices of Boston with sketches and novelettes. The competition was not so great then as it has since be- come, and it was not so difficult to get a hearing ; but much labor was exacted for diminutive pay, and it 33 34 HA KK1E T P RES CO TT SPOFFORD. required almost incessant work to procure sufficient funds to meet the most necessary expenses of herself and family. She sometimes wrote for fifteen hours a day, and continued at approximately hard work for many years. Her wide reputation was acquired almost at a stroke. In 1859 she sent to the Atlantic Monthly a story en- titled, "In a Cellar." James Russell Lowell was at that time editor of the Atlantic, and at first declined to believe that any young lady could have written such a brilliant and characteristic description of Bohemian Parisian life ; he insisted that it must be a translation from the French. Convinced at last of its true authorship, it was published, and thencefor- ward Miss Prescott was always a welcome contributor to its pages ; and at that time the endorsement of the Atlantic opened all other magazine offices to its writers. Her first novel, " Sir Rohan's Ghost," pub- lished in 1859 in Boston, was a very striking work and for skilful plot and effective dramatic denouement has never been exceeded in any of her later works, though a certain crudeness of thought and expression appar- ent in that, has been entirely eliminated by increased age and experience. This book was reviewed at some length in the Crayon, an art journal then pub- lished in New York City, and an admitted authority in literary criticism. One of the most rare gifts of Miss Prescott's genius was her extraordinary affluence of language, which never appeared to be strained or affected any more than the gorgeous tints of a tropical plant. In 1865 Miss Prescott was married to Mr. Richard S. Spofford of Newburyport, a lawyer, and son of Dr. R. S. Spof- ford, the most eminent physician of Essex County ; he was also cousin to the popular and esteemed libra- rian of the Congressional library in Washington, D. C. This union proved a particularly happy one, though childless, until the decease of Mr. Spofford during the present (1888) year. Mrs. Spofford's later works were, "The Amber Gods and Other Stories," published in Boston, 1863 ; " Azarim," in 1864; "New England Legends," in 1871 ; "The Thief in the Night," in 1872 ; "Art Decoration Applied to Furniture," published in New York in HARRIE T FRESCO TT SPOFFORD. 3 $ 1881 ; "Marquis of Carabas," Boston, 1872 ; "Hester Stanley at St. Mark's," 1883 ; "The Servant Girl Ques- tion," 1884; and " Ballads about Authors," 1888. Mrs. Spofford's prolific prose pen does not cause us to forget the many beautiful poems and ballads which she has produced, and best of all they seem to be written because they had first been sung in her heart, and had to burst forth into words. There is no outward sign of artificiality about them. For many years Mrs. Spofford has resided at Deer Island a small island in the river Merrimac, in the northerly suburb of Newburyport; the situation is very romantic, and just the place to develop the poetical and imaginative nature. The entire island was pur- chased for a permanent home, though Mrs. Spofford has spent many of her winters, or a portion of them, in Boston and Washington. OLD MADAME. " Miss BARBARA ! Barbara, honey ! Where's this you're hiding at ? " cried old Phillis, tying her bandanna head-gear in a more flamboyant knot over her gray hair and brown face. " Where's this you're hiding at ? The Old Madame's after you." And in answer to the summons, a girl clad in home- spun, but with every line of her lithe figure the lines, one might fancy, of a wood-and water nymph's, came slowly up from the shore and the fishing smacks, with a young fisherman beside her. Down on the margin, the men were hauling a seine and singing as they hauled ; a droger was dropping its dark sails ; barefooted urchins were wading in the breaking roller where the boat that the men were launching dipped up and down ; women walked with baskets poised lightly on their heads, calling gaily to one another; sands were sparkling, sails were glanc- ing, winds were blowing, waves were curling, voices were singing and laughing, it was all the scene of a happy, sunshiny, summer morning in the little fishing- hamlet of an island off the coast. The girl and her companion wound up the stony path, passing Phillis, and paused before a low stone house that seemed o.nly a big bowlder itself, in whose narrow, open hallway, stretching from door to door, leaned a stately old woman* on her staff, a back- ground of the sea rising behind her. " Did you wish for Barbara, Old Madame ? " asked the fisherman, as superb a piece of rude youth and strength as any young Viking. She fixed him with her glance an instant. " And you are his grandson ? " said the old woman. " You are called by his name the fourth of the name Ben Benvoisie ? I am not dreaming ? You are, sure of it ? " 37 38 OLD MADAME. As sure as that you are called Old Madame," he replied, with a grave pride of self-respect, and an air of something solemn in his joy, as if he had but just turned from looking on death to embrace life. " As sure 5s that I am called Old Madame," she repeated. " Barbara, come here. As sure as that I am called Old Madame." But she had not always been Old Madame. A woman not far from ninety now, tall and unbent, with her great black eyes glowing like stars in sunken welli from her face, scarred with the script of sorrow a proud beggar, preserving in her little coffer only the money that one day should bury her with her haughty kindred once she was the beautiful Elizabeth Cham- pernoune, the child of noble ancestry, the heiress of unbounded wealth, the last of a great house of honor. From birth till age, nothing that surrounded her but had its relation to the family grandeur. Her estate -her grandfather's, nay, her great-grandfather's lay on a goodly island at the mouth of a broad river; an island whose paltry fishing-village of to-day was, before her time, a community where also a hand- ful of other dignitaries dwelt only in less splendor. There were one or two of the ancient fishermen and pilots yet living when she died, who, babbling of their memories, could recall out of their childhood the stately form of her father, the Judge Champernoune, as he walked abroad in his black robes, who came from over seas to marry her mother, the heiress of the hero for whom the King of France had sent when, in the French and Indian wars, the echoes of his daring deeds rang across the water to make him Baron Chaslesmarie, with famous grants and largesse. And in state befitting one whom the King of France had with his own hand exalted, had the prodigal Baron Chaslesmarie spent his days never, however, discontinuing the vast fisheries of his father, in which he had himself made fortunes before (he King had found him out. And although the title died with him, and the pension died before him, for the King of France had, with treacherous complaisance, ceded the island to the enemy one day when war was over, yet B Y HARRIE T FRESCO TT SPOFFORD. 39 store of land and money were left for the sole child, who became the wife of Judge Champernoune and the mother of Elizabeth. What a sweet old spot it was in which Elizabeth's girlhood of ideal happiness went by ! The house, a many-gabled dwelling, here of wood and there of brick, with a noble hall where the original cornices and casements had been replaced by others of carveti mahogany, the panels of the doors rich with their thick gilding, and the cellars three-deep for the cor- dials and dainties with which the old Baron Chasles- raarie had stored them, was a part of it, once brought from foreign shores as the great Government-house. Set in its brilliant gardens, it was a pleasant sight to see here a broad upper gallery giving airy shelter, there a flight of stairs running from some flower-bed to some casement, with roses and honeysuckles clambering about the balustrade, avenues of ash and sycamore leading away from it, an outer velvet turf surrounding it and ending in a boundary of mossy granite bowlders. The old baron slept in his proud tomb across the bay by the fort he had defended, the chapel he had built, in the graveyard of his people, proud as he ; and Ben Benvoisie, the lad whom gossips said he had snatched from the shores of some Channel Island in one of the wild voyages of his youth, slept at his feet, but another Ben Benvoisie lived after him. In a dimple between these bowlders of the garden's boundary, Judge Champer- noune and his wife and his other child were laid away ; there was always something sadly romantic to Elizabeth in the thought of her father walking over the island from time to time, and selecting this spot for his eternal rest, where the rocky walls enclosed him, the snows of winter and the bramble-roses of summer covered him, and the waves, not far remote, sang his long lullaby. By the time that Elizabeth inherited the place, the importance of the island town had gone up the river to a spot on the mainland, and one by one the great families had followed, the old ji'd^e buying the land of them as they went, and their houses, dismembered, with fire and with decay, of a u ing here and a gable there, and keeping but little trace of them. The 40 OLD MADAME. judge had no thought of leaving ; and the people would have felt as if the hand of Providence had been withdrawn had he done so. Nor had Elizabeth any thought of it, when she came to reign in her father's stead and infuse new life into the business of her ancestors, that had continued, as it were, by its own momentum, since, although Judge Champernoune had not thought it beneath his judicial dignity to carry it on as he found it, yet, owing to his other duties, he had not given it that personal attention it had in the vigor and impetus of the Chaslesmaries. She had not a memory that did not belong to the place ; certain sunbeams that she recalled slanting down the ware- houses rich with the odors of spices and sugar, through which she had wandered as a child, were living things to her; a foggy morning, when an unseen fruiter in the sea-mist made all the air of the island port delicious as some tropical grove, with its cargo of lemons, seemed like a journey to the ends of ends of the earth. And the place itself was her demesne, she its acknowledged chatelaine ; there was not a woman in the town who had not served in her mother's kitchen or hall ; it was in her fishing-smacks the men went out to sea, in her brigs they ran down to the West Indian waters and over to the Mediterranean ports perhaps, alas, the African ; it was her ware- houses they filled with goods from far countries, which her agents scattered over the land for a com- merce that, beginning with the supplying of the fish- ing-fleets, had swelled into a great foreign trade. And their homes were all that she could make them in their degree ; their children she herself attended in sudden illness, having been reared as her mother was before her, in the homely surgery and herb craft proper to those that had others in their charge ; and many a stormy night, in later years, did the good Dame Elizabeth leave her own children in their downy nests, and hasten to ease some child going out of the world on the horrible hoarse breath of croup, or to bring other children into the world in scorn of doctors three miles off. She was twenty five when the step-son of her father's sister, her cousin by marriage but not by blood, appeared to fulfil the agreement of their parents, B Y HARK IE T FRESCO TT SPOFFORD. 4 1 to take effect when he should finish his travels which indeed, he had been in no haste to end. She had not been without suitors, of high and low degree. Had not the heir of the Canadian governor spoken of a treaty for the hand of this fair princess? Was it not Ben Benvoisie, the bold young master of a fishing- smack, with whom she had played when a child, who once would have carried her off to sea like any Norse pirate, and who had dared to leave his kiss red on her lips ? Had Elizabeth been guilty of thinking that, had she been a river-pilot's daughter, such kisses would not come amiss ? Yet long ago had she understood that she \\as pledged to her cousin Louis, and she waited for his coming. His eyes were as blue as hers were browi., his hair as black as hers was red, his features as Greek as hers were Norrnan, his stature as commanding as her own. " Oh he was a beauty, my cousin Louis was! " she used to say. She never called him her lover, nor her husband he was always her cousin Louis. " So you have come, sir," she said, when he stepped ashore, and crossed the street and met her at the gate, and would have kissed her brow. " More slowly, sir," she said, drawing back. " You have come to win, not to wear. Elizabeth Chaslesmarie Champernoune is not a ribbon or a rose, to be tossed aside and picked up at will." " By the Lord ! " cried Cousin Louis. " If I had dreamed she were the rose she is, the salt seas would not have been running all these years between me and her sweetness and her thorns." " This is no court, and these no court-ladies, Cousin Louis," she replied. " We are plain people, used only to plain speeches." " Plain, indeed," said Cousin Louis. " Only Helen of Troy Was plainer ! " "Nor do flattering words," she said, "well befit those whose slow coming flatters ill." But the smile with which she uttered her somewhat bitter speech was of enchanting good-humor, and Cousin Louis thought his lines had fallen in pleasant places. 42 OLtS MADAME. He was not so sure of it when a month had passed, and the same smile sweetened an icy manner still, and he had not yet been able, in the rush of guests that surrounded her, to have a word alone with Elizabeth. He saw that jackanapes of a young West Indian planter bring the color to her cheek with his whispered word. He saw her stroll down between the sycamores, unattended by any save Captain Wentworth. But let him strive to gain her ear and one of the young officers from Fort Chaslesmarie was sure to intercept him, strive to speak with her, and Dorothy and Jean and Margaret and Belle seemed to spring from the ground to her side. From smiling he changed to sullen, and from sullen to savage to abuse his folly, to abuse her coquetry, to wonder if he cared enough for the winning of her to endure these indignities, and all at once to discover that this month had taught him there was but one woman in the world for him, and all the rest were shadows. One woman in the world, and without her, life was so incomplete, himself so halved, that death would be the better portion. How then ? What to do ? Patience gave up the ,siege. He was thinking of desperate measures on the day when, moping around the shores alone in a boat, he espied them riding from the Beacon Hill down upon the broad ferry-boat that crossed the shallow inlet. How his heart knocked his sides as he saw that pale, dark West Indian, with his purple velvet corduroys, and his nankeen jacket and jockey-cap, riding down beside her, as he saw Wentworth spring from the stirrup to offer a palm for her foot when they reached the door! But Cousin Louis had not waited for that; he had put some strength to his strokes and was at the door before him, was at her side before him, compelling his withdrawal, offering no palm to tread on, but reach- ing up and grasping her waist with his two hands. " By heaven ! " he murmured then, as Wentworth was beyond hearing, his eyes blazing on hers. " What man do you think' will endure this? What man will suffer this suspense in which you keep me ? " " It is you, Cousin Louis, who are keeping me in suspense," she answered, as she hung above him there. And was there anything in her arch tone that gave him hope ? He released her then, but when an hout BY HA RKIE T FRESCO TT SPOFFORD. 4 3 later he met her again, " Very well," he said, in the suppressed key of his passion. " I will keep you in the suspense you spoke of no more. You will marry me this day, or not at all. By my soul, I will wait no longer for my answer ! " " You have never asked me, sir, before," she said. " How could you have an answer ? I hardly know if you have asked me now. But that sunset, with Belle and Margaret and Jean and Dorothy, she strolled down to the little church, that by some hidden password was half-filled with the fishing-people and her servants. And when she came back, she was leaning on Cousin Louis's arm very differently from her usual habit, and the girls were going on before. " If I had known this Cossack fashion was the way to win," Cousin Louis was saying when a scream from Margaret and Belle and Dorothy and Jean rang back to them, and hurrying forward, they found the girls with their outcry between two drawn swords, for Wentworth and the West Indian had come down into the moonlit glade to finish a sudden quarrel that had arisen over their wine, as to the preferences of the fair chatelaine. " Put up your swords, gentlemen," said Cousin Louis, with his proud, happy smile, "unless you wish to measure them with mine. It would be folly to fight about nothing. And there is no such person as Eliz- abeth Champernoune." The men turned white in the moonlight to see the lovely creature standing there, and before they had time for anger or amazement, Elizabeth said after him ; " There is no such person as Elizabeth Champer- noune. She married, an hour ago, her cousin Louis." Ah me, that all these passions now should be but idle air ! Perhaps the hearts of the gallants swelled and sank and swelled again, as they looked at her, beautiful, rosy and glowing, in the broad white beam that bathed her. They put up their swords, and went to the house and drank her health and were rowed away. Elizabeth and Cousin Louis settled down to their long life of promised happiness, in the hospitality of 44 OLD MADAME. an open hearth around which friends and children clustered, blest, it seemed, by fortune and by fate. Gay parties came and went from ihe town above, from larger and more distant towns, from the village and port across the bay. Life was all one long, sweet holiday. What pride and joy was theirs when the son Chaslesmarie was born; what tender bliss Elizabeth's when the velvet face of the little Louise first lay beneath her cwn and she sank away with her into a land of downy dreams, conscious only of the wings of love hovering over her ! How, at once, as child after child came, they seemed to turn into waternixies, taking to the sea as naturally as the gulls flying around the cliffs ! How each loiterer in the village would make the children his own, teaching them every prank of the waves, taking them in boats far beyond the outer light, bringing them through the breakers after dark, wrapped in great pilot-coats and drenched with foam ! She never knew what was fear for her five boys, the foster-brothers of all the other children in ihe village ; only the little maiden Louise, pale as the rose that grew beneath the oriel, she kept under her eye as she might, bringing her up in fine household arts and delicate accomplishments, ignorant of the shadow of Ben Benvoisie stalking so close behind as to darken all her work. Her husband had taken the great business that Elizabeth's people had so long carried on through their glories and titles, their soldiery and war, their other pursuits if they had them ; his warehouse lined the shores, the offing was full of his ships, he owned almost the last rod of land on the island and much along the main. He did not pretend to maintain the state of the old baron ; but to be a guest at Chasles- marie was to live a charmed life awhile. He was a man of singular uprightness; as he grew older apt to bursts of anger, yet to Elizabeth and to his household he was gentleness itself; some men trembled at the sound of his voice, but children never did. If he was not so beloved as his wife by the fishing-people, it was because he was not recognized master as of right, and because he exacted his due, although tossing it in the lap of the next needy one. But he was a person with whom no other took a liberty. B Y HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 45 " A king among men, was rny cousin Louis," Old Madame used 10 say, and sigh and >igh and sigh again as she said it. But the hospitality of the island was not all that of pleasure and sumptuous ease. It was a place easily reached by sail from one or more of the great towns, by boat from the town above ; and in the stirring and muttering of political discontent, the gentlemen who appeared and disappeared at all hours of the day, and as often by night, folded in cloaks wet with the salt sea spray, wore spurs at their heels and swords at their sides to some purpose. And when at last war came Horror of horrors, what was this ! Cousin Louis and his island had renounced allegiance to the crown, and had taken the side of the colonial rebels and the Conti- nental Congress. "We!" cried Elizabeth, who knew little of such things, and had a vague idea that they owed fealty still to that throne at whose foot her grandfather had knelt. " We, whom the King of France ennobled and en- riched ! " " And for that price were we sold ere we were born, and do we stay slaves handed about from one ruler to another ? " her husband answered her. " We have ennobled and enriched ourselves. We have twice and thrice repaid the kings of France in tribute money. Soon shall the kings of France go the way of all the world may the kings of Britain follow them ! Hence- forth, the people put on the crown. I believe in the rights of man. I live under no tyranny but yours," he said gayly. "A Chaslesmarie ! A Champernoune ! " Elizabeth was saying to herself, heedless of his smile. " We are an insignificant islet," her husband urged. " The kings of France have betrayed us. The kings of Britain have oppressed us. We renounce the one. We defy the other! " And he ran the flag under which the rebels fought up the staff at Chaslesmarie, and it was to be seen at the peak of all his brigantines and sloops that, leaving their legitimate affairs, armed them- selves and scoured the seas, and brought their prizes into port. But freely as this wealth came in, as freely it went out ; for Cousin Louis did nothing by the halves. And heart and soul being in the matter, it is 46 OLD MADAME. safe to say that not one guinea of the gold his sailors brought him in, during that long struggle, remained to him at its close. It was during this struggle that, when one day the sloop Adder 1 s -tongue sailed, the elder son of Ben Ben- voisie who had along since married a fisherman's daughter was found on board, a stowaway. Great was Ben Benvoisie's wrath when he missed his son ; but there was nothing to be done. He rejected Cousin Louis's regrets with scorn. But when the sloop brought in her prizes, and the first man ashore told him his son had died of some ailment before he sighted an enemy, then his rage rose in a flame, he towered like an angry god, and standing on the head of the wharf, in the presence of all the people, he cursed Cousin Louis, root and branch, at home and abroad, a black cloud full of bursting lightnings rising behind him, as he spoke, as if he had a confederate in evil powers. cursed him in wild and stinging words that made the blood run cold, that cut Cousin Louis to the heart, that, when they were repeated to her, made even Elizabeth turn faint and sick. "There is a strange second-sight with those Benvoisies," she said. " God grant his curses come to naught." But she hardly ever saw him at a distance without an instant's prayer, and she knew that the fishing-people always after that sight of him standing there at the head of the wharf, with his blazing eyes and streaming hair, and the rain and the lightning and the thunder volleying around him, held some superstitions of their own regarding the evil eye of the Banvoisies, and kept some silent watch to see what would come of it all. But the war at last was ended, the world was trying to regain its equilibrium, and continental money was at hand on every side, and little other. Cousin Louis, who had faith in the new republic, believed with an equally hot head in its good faith, and sent word far and near that he would redeem the current paper, dollar for dollar in gold. And he did so. There were barrels of it in his warehouse garrets, and his grand- children had it to play with. " It is Ben Benvoisie's word, said Elizabeth, when they saw the mistake. But Cousin Louis laughed and kissed her, and said it had sunk a good deal of treasure, to be sure, but B Y HARRIS T FRESCO TT SPOFFORD. 47 asked if Ben Benvoisie's word was to outweigh his fisheries and Meets and warehouses and hay-lands his splendid boys, his girl Louise ! And he caught the shrinking, slender creature to his heart as he spoke this lovely young Louise, as fair and fragile as a lily on its stem, whom he loved as he loved his life, his flower- girl, as he called her, just blossoming into girlhood, with the pale rose-tint on her cheek, and her eyes like the azure larkspur. How was he, absorbed in his counting-room, forgetful at his dinner table, taking his pleasures with guests, with gayeties, to know that his slip of a girl, not yet sixteen, met a handsome hazel- eyed lad at the foot of the long garden every night, B'en Benvoisie the third, and had promised to go with him, his wife, in boy's clothes, whenever the fruiter was ready for sea again ! But old Ben Benvoisie knew it ; and he could not forbear his savage jeer, and the end ivns that Cousin Louis, at the foot of the long garden one night, put a bullet through young Ben Benvoisie's arm, and carried off his fainting girl to her room that she showed no wish to leave again. " She will die," said Cousin Louis, one day toward the year's close, " if we do not give way." " She had better," said Elizabeth, who knew what the misery of her child's marriage with old Ben Ben- voisie's son must needs be when the first glamor of young passion should be over. And she did. And Cousin Louis's heart went down into the grave with her. " It is not only old Ben Benvoisie's word," said Eliza- beth. " It is his hand." Her secret tears were bitter for the child, but not so bitter as they would have been had she first passed into old Ben Benvoisie's power, and been made the instrument for humbling the pride and breaking the heart daily of her brothers Chaslesmarie and Champer- nonne, and of the hated owner of the Adder* s-tongiu\ had she lived to smart and suffer under the difference between the rude race, reared in a fishing-hut, and that reared in the mansion )f her ancestors. Perhaps Old Madame never saw the thing fairly; it always seemed to her that Louise died of some disease incident to childhood. " I have my boys left," said Elizabeth. " And no one can disturb my little grave." 48 OLD MADAME. It was two graves the second year after. For Chaslesmarie, her first-born and her darling, whose baby kisses had been sweeter than her lover's, the life in whose little limbs and whose delicious flesh had been dearer than her own, his bright head now brighter for the fresh laurels of Harvard. Chasles- marie, riding down from the Beacon Hill, where he had gone to see the fishing-fleet make sail, was thrown from his horse, and did not live long enough to tell who was the man starting from the covert of bayberry- bushes. But Elizabeth carried a stout heart and a high head. She could not, if she would, have bent as Cousin Louis did, nor did the proud serenity leave her eye, although his darkened with a sadness never lightened. None knew her pangs, nor saw the tears that stained her pillow in the night ; she would if she could, have hid her suffering from herself. She began to feel a terrible assurance that she was fighting fail-, but she would make a hard fight of it. Conscious of her integrity of purpose, of the justice of her claims, of her right to the children she had borne, there was something in her of the spirit of the ancients who dared, if not to defy the gods, yet to accept the combat offered by them. Champernoune was the heir instead, that was all. Then there were the twin boys, Max and Rex, two lawless young souls , and the youngest of all, St. Jean, whose head always wore a halo in Elizabeth's eyes. With these, why should she grieve ? Now she was also the mother of angels ! Again, after a while, the frequent festivities filled the house, and the great gold and silver plate glittered in the dark dining-room and filled it, at every touch, with melodious and tremulous vibrations. Now the Legislature of the State, one and all, attended a grand banqueting there, now the Governor and his Council ; now navy-yard and fort and town, and far-off towns, came to the balls that did not end even with the bright outdoor breakfast, but ran into the next night's dancing, and a whole week's gayety ; now it was boat- ing and bathing in the creeks ; now it was sailing out beyond the last lights with music and flowers and cheer ; and all the time it was splendor and sumptuous- ness and life at the breaking crest. And Elizabeth led the dance, the stateliest of the stately, the most B Y HA RRIR T PR E SCO TT SPOFFORD. 49 beautiful still of the beautiful. And if sometimes she saw old Ben Benvoisie's eyes, as he leaned over the gate and looked at her a moment within the gardens and among her roses, it was not to shudder at them. What possessed Elizabeth in those days ? She only felt that the currents of her blood must sweep along in this mad way, or the heart would stop. Then came Champernoune's wedding, he and that friend whom the chief magistrate of the land delighted to honor, marrying sisters in one night. How lovely, how gracious, how young the bride ! Was it at Gon- aives that year that she died dancing ? Was it at Gonaives that the yellow-fever buried Champernoune in the common trench ? Elizabeth was coming up the landing from the boat, her little negro dwarf carrying her baskets, when the news reached her quick senses, as the one that spoke it meant it should ; she staggered and fell. The doctors came to bind up the broken bones, and only when they said, " At last it is quite right ; but, dear lady, your dancing days are over," did any see her tears. She had buried her only girl, her first-born boy, her married heir, without great signs of sorrow. She had plunged into a burning house in the village once, gathering her gauzy skirts about her, to bring out the little Louise whom an unfaithful nurse had taken there and forsaken in her fright ; she had waded, torch in hand, into the wildly rolling surf of a starless night to clutch the bow of Chaselesmarie's boat that was sweeping helplessly to the breaker with the unskilled child at the helm ; she had shut herself up with Champernoune, when Ben Benvoisie brought back the small-pox to the village, and had suffered no one to minister to him but herself ; and when the clog all thought mad tore Cousin Louis's arm, she herself had sucked the poison from the wound. Yet with that sentence, that absurd little sentence, that her dancing days were over, it seemed all at once to Elizabeth that everything else was over, too. With Champernoune now everything else had gone state and splendor, peace and pleasure, hospitality and home and hearth, and all the rest. All things had been possible to her, the mastery of her inner joy itself in one form or another, while she held her forces under 4 50 OLD MADAME. her. But now she herself was stricken, and who was to fight for them ? Who, when the stars in their courses fought against Sisera ! But as wild as the grief of Cousin Louis was, hers was as still, though there were ashes on her heart. She went about with a cane when she got up, unable to step a minuet or bend a knee in prayer. " But see," cried old Ben Benvoisie to himself, " her head is just as high ! " Not so with Cousin Louis. He sat in his counting- room, his face bent on his hands half the time. Cargoes came in unheeded, reports were made him unregarded, ships lay at the wharf unloaded, the state of the market did not concern him nothing seemed of any matter but those three graves. Then he roused himself to a spasmodic activity, gave orders here and orders there, but his mind was otherwhere. With the striking of the year's balance he had made bad bargains, taken bad debts, sent out bad men with his fleets, brought in his fares and his fruits and foreign goods at a bad season, lost the labor of years. A fire had reduced a great property elsewhere to ashes, a storm had scattered and destroyed his southern ships. " Something must be done," said Cousin Louis. And he looked back from his counting-room, on the fair mansion from whose windows he had so long heard song and laughter float- ing, with its gardens round about it, where the sweet-briar and the tall white rose climbed and looked back at the red rose blushing at their feet, where the honeysuckles shed their fragrance, where the great butterflies waved their wings over all the sweet old-fashioned flowers that had been brought from the gardens of France and summer after summer had bloomed and spiced the air, where the golden robins flashed from bough to bough of the lane oi plum-trees, and the sunshine lay vivid on the encir- cling velvet verdure. " Her home, and the home of her people for a century behind her the people whose blood in her veins went to make her what she is noblest woman, sweetest wife that ever made a man's delight. The purest, proudest, loftiest soul that looks heaven in the face. O God, bless her, my dear wife dearer than when I wooed you or when I wedded you, by all the long increase of years ! Something B Y HARRIE T FRESCO TT SPOFFORD. 5 1 must be done," said Cousin Louis, "or that will go with the rest." Perhaps Cousin Louis began to forefeel the future then. Certainly, as a little time passed on, an unused timidity overwhelmed him. Against Elizabeth's advice lie began to call in various moneys from here and there where they were gathering more to themselves. "There is to be another war with the British," he said. " We must look to our fortunes." But he would not have any interference with their way of life, the way Elizabeth had always lived. There must still be the dinner to the judges, the supper to the clergy, the fre- quent teas to the ladies of the fort, the midsummer throng of young people, the house full for the Christ- mas holidays ; Max and Rex were to be thought of, St. Jean was not to grow up remembering a house of mourning. Why had no one told them that, in all the festive season before Champernoune's death, the younger boys not being held then to strict account, old Ben Benvoisie, sitting with them on the sea-beaten rocks, had fired their fancy with stories of the wild sea- life that had blanched his hair and furrowed his face before the time ? One day St. Jean came in to break the news : Max and Rex had run away to sea. " I should have liked to go," said St. Jean, "but I could not leave my mother so." "By the gods!" said his father. "You shall go master of the best ship I have ! " And in due time he sent him supercargo to the East, that he might learn, all that a lad who had tumbled about among ropes and blocks and waves and rocks, ever since his birth, did not already know. But he forbade his wife to repeat to him the names of Rex and Max ; nor would they ever again have been mentioned in his presence but for the report of a ship that had spoken the craft they took, and learned that it had been overhauled, and Max, of whom nothing more was ever heard, pressed into the British service, and Rex, ordered aloft on a stormy night, had fallen from the yard into the sea, and his grave was rolled between two waves. As Elizabeth came home from the little church the first time she went out after this thinking, as she went, of the twilight when she found Champernoune, who had stolen from the lightsome scenes that greeted 52 OLD MADAME. him and his young bride, to stand a little while beside the grave where his brother Chaslesmarie slept she met old Ben Benvoisie. "Well, "he said, "you know how good it is your- self." " Is not the curse fulfilled, Ben Benvoisie ? " she de- manded. " Are you going to spare me none ? " " None," said Ben Benvoisie. The servants were running toward her when she readied the house. The master had a stroke. A stroke indeed. He satin his chair a year, head and face white, speaking of nothing but his children's graves, they thought. "Too cold too damp. Why did I bury 'there ?" he murmured, "I will go have them up," he said. " Oh, why did I bury so deep cold cold Elizabeth ! " But when Elizabeth an- swered him, the thing he would say had gone, and when he died at last, for all his struggle for speech, it was still unspoken. Ah, what a year was that when the long strain was over, and she had placed him where she was to lie her- self, at her father's feet ! Things went on as they would that year. Wrapped in an ashen apathy, Eliza- beth hardly knew she breathed, and living less at that time in this world than the other, the things of this world had small concern for her. Born, too, and reared in wealth, she could as easily have understood that there was any other atmosphere about her as any other condition ; and the rogues, then, had it all their own way. Suits for western lands that were the terri- torial possessions of princes were compromised for sums she never saw ; blocks of city houses were sold for taxes ; heaven knows .what else was done, what rights were signed away on papers brought for her name as administratrix. And when St. Jean came home from sea, where were the various moneys that his father had been calling in for so long a time ? There was not a penny of them to be accounted for. St. Jean was a man before his time. He looked about him. The great business had gone to the dogs, and some of the clerks and factors had gone with it ; at least, they too had disappeared. Other men, in other places, had taken advantage of the lapse, estab- lished other houses, opened other fisheries, stolen their B Y HARK IE T FRESCO TT SPOFFORD. 5 3 markets. There was not enough of either fleet left in condition to weather a gale. "It has all been at the top of the wave," said St. Jean, " and now we are in the trough of the sea.'' But he had his ship, the Great-heart, and with that he set about redeeming his fortunes. And his first step was to bring home to his mother a daughtei-in-law as proud as she Hope, the orphan of a West Indian prelate, with no fortune but her face, and with manners that Elizabeth thought un- becoming so penniless a woman. When St. Jean went away to sea again, he estab- lished his wife Little Madame, the people had styled her in a home of her own ; for large as the Mansion was, it was not large enough to hold those two women : a home in a long low stone house that belonged to the estate and had once been two or three houses together, at which one looked twice, you might say, to see if it were dwelling or bowlder, and which he renovated and then filled with some of the spare pictures and fur- nishings of the Mansion-house. And there Hope lived, cheered Elizabeth what she could, and cared for the children that came to her and how many came ! And Elizabeth, who could never feel that Hope had quite the right to a place as her rival in St. Jean's affec- tions, took these little children to her heart, if she could not yet altogether take their mother ; and they filled for her many a weary hour of St. Jean's absences on his long voyages, St. Jean who, in some miracu- ous way, now represented to her father and husband and son. Elizabeth had time enough for the little people ; for friends did not disturb her much after the first visits of condolence. Trouble had come to many of them, as well. Dorothy and Margaret and Belle and Jean, and their compeers, were scattered and dead and absorbed and forgetful, and she summoned none of them about her any more with music and feasting. Of all her wealth now nothing remained but a part of the land on the island and the adjoining main, with its slight and fickle revenue. Of all her concourse of servants there were only Phillis and Scip, who would have thought themselves transferred to some other world had they left Old Madame. But the Mansion of Chaslesmarie was a place of 54 OLD MADAME. pleasure to the children still, at any rate, and the little swarm spent many an hour in the old box-bordered garden, where the stately lady walked on Phillis's arm, and in the great hall where she told them the history of each of the personages of the tall portraits, from that of the fierce old Chaslesmarie of all down to the angel-faced child St. Jean : told them, not as firing pride with memories of ancient pride, but as storied incidents of family life ; and as she told them she seemed to live over her share in them, and place and race and memories seemed only a part of herself. " Madame," said St. Jean once, when at home, no child of hers had often called her mother, " I think if we sold the place and moved away we would do well. The soil is used up, the race is run out if we trans- planted and made new stock ? Here is no chance to educate the children or to rebuild our fortunes now. Somewhere else, it may be, I could put myself in better business connection " The gaze of his mother's burning black eyes bade him to silence. She felt as if in that moment he had forsworn his ancestors. " Leave this place of whose dust we are made! " she cried. " Or is it made of the dust of the Chasles- maries ? And how short-sighted here, where, at least, we reign ! Never shall we leave it ! See, St. Jean, it is all yours," and from command her voice took on entreaty, and how could St. Jean resist the pleading mother ! He went away to sea again, and left all as before. But the earth had moved to Elizabeth with just one thrill and tremor. The idea, the possibility, of leaving the place into which every fibre of her being was wrought had shaken her. It was a sort of conscious death into whose blackness she looked for one moment so one might feel about to lose identity. She walked through the rooms with their quaint and rich old fur- nishing, sombre and heavy, their gilded panels, their carved wainscot, the old French portraits of her peo- ple that looked down on her and seemed to claim her; she paused in the oriel of the yellow drawing-room, where it always seemed like a sunshiny afternoon in an October beech-woodpaused, and looked across the bay. B Y HARRIE T FRESCO TT SPOFFORD. 5 5 There gleamed the battlements of the fort that her grandfather, the baron, had built ; there was the church below, there was the tomb, among the graves of those whose powers had come to their flower in him ; the grassy knoll, beyond, gleamed in the gold of the slant sun and reminded her of the days when, a child, she used to watch the last glint on the low swells of the graves, across the blue waters of the bay whose rocky islets rose red with the rust of the tides. Far out, the seas were breaking in a white line over the low red ledge, and, farther still, the lighthouse on the dim old Wrecker's Reef was kindling its spark to answer the light on the head of Chaslesmarie that her grandfather had first hung in the air. Close at hand, a boat made in, piled high at either end with the brown sea-weed, the fishing-sails were flitting here and there, as there had never been a day when they were not, and the whole, bathed with the deepening sunset glow, glittered in peace and beauty. There had not been ten days in all her life when she had not looked upon the scene. No, no, no ! As well give up life itself, for this was all there was of life to her. There was the shore where, when a child, she found the bed of garnets that the next tide washed away ; here could she just remember having seen the glorious old Baron Chaslesmarie, with his men-at-arms about him ; here had her dear father proudly walked, with his air of inflexible justice, and the wind had seized his black robes and swept them about her, running at his side ; here had her mother died ; here had she first seen the superb patrician beauty of her husband's face when he came from France, with his head full of Jean Jacques and the rights of man ; here was the little chapel where they married, the linden avenue up which they strolled, with the branches shaking out fragrance and star-beams to- gether above them the first hour, the first delightful hour, they ever were alone together, she and her Cousin Louis. Oh, here had been her life with him a husband tenderer than a lover, a man whose loftiness lifted his race and taught her how upright other men might be, a soul so pure that the light of God seemed to shine through it upon her ! Here had been her joys, here had been her sorrows ; here had she put her love away and heard the molds ring down on that dear 56 OLD MADAME. head ; here had the world darkened to her, here should it darken to her forever when all the shadows of the grave lengthened around her. Father and mother, husband and child, race and land, they were all in this spot. These people, all of whom she knew by name, were they not like her own ; could the warmth of the blood bring much nearer to her these faces that had surrounded her since time begun these men and women whose lives she had ordered, whose children had been fostered with her children, who half- worshiped her in her girlhood, who half-worshiped her still as Old Madame ? Could she leave them ? Not though St. Jean's Great-heart went down, St. Jean's ship for which Hope on her houetop sas so long watching. " I refuse to think of it," she said. "It is infinitely tiresome." And then the children trooped in and stopped further soliloquy, and she let them dress themselves out in her stiff old brocades that had been sent for just after she married and had never needed to be renewed, the cloth of-silver and peach- . bloom, the flowered Venetian, the gold-shot white paduasoy ; she liked to see the pretty Barbara and Helena and Bess prancing about the shining floors, holding up the long draperies, and she would have decked them out in her old silver-set jewels, too, had they not been parted with long since when Cousin Louis was calling in their moneys. It all renewed her youth so sweetly, if so sadly, and the mimic play in some obscure way making her feel they only played at life, relieved her of a sense of responsibility regarding their real life. When they tired of their finery, she led them down, as usual, before the portrait of this one and of that, and told over the old stories they liked to hear. "Madame," said little Barbara, lifting her stiff peach-blossom draperies, "why is it always 'then,' why is it never ' now ' ? " But the old dame's heart did not once cry Ichabod. To her the glory never had departed. It was as im- perishable as sky and air. It was the threatened war-time again at last; and Hope, with her sweet, soft eyes watching from the housetop, saw her husband's ship come in, and with it its consort just a day too late. The embargo had BY HA RRIE T FRESCO TT SPOFFORD. 5 7 been declared, and, unknowingly; he hailed from a for- bidden port. Other sailors touched other ports and took out false papers for protection. St. Jean scorned the act. He relied on public justice : he relied on a reed. His cargoes were confiscated, and his ships were left at the wharf to rot before he could get hear- ing. In those two vessels was the result of his years of storm and calm, nights when the ship was heavy by the head with ice, days when her seamy sides were scorched and blistered by the sun, the best part of his life. And gone because he preferred poverty to per- jury. " Better so," said Old Madame. " I am prouder of my penniless son than of any merchant prince with a false oath on his soul." And her own contentment seemed to her all that could be asked. She never thought of regretting the matter; but she despised the General Government more than ever, and would have shown blue-lights to the enemy, had he been near and wanted a channel, were it not that he was Cousin Louis's enemy as well. Alas ! a bitterer enemy was near. One tempestuous winter's night the minute-guns were heard off Wreck- er's Reef, and who but St. Jean must lead the rescue? Hope, cloaked and on her housetop, with the glass saw it all ; saw St. Jean climb the reef as the moon ran out on the end of a flying scud of cloud to glance on the foam-edged roll of the black wild seas , saw the others following along the sides of the ice-sheathed rock to carry succor to the freezing castaways, and saw, too, a plunging portion of the wreck strike one form, and hurl it headlong. It was her husband. And although he was brought back alive, yet the blow upon his breast, and the night's exposure in the icy waters, in his disheartened state, did deathly work upon St. Jean, and he was laid low and helpless long before his release. Then Elizabeth sold the hay-fields along the main- land to pay the doctor's bills and the druggist's, to try softer air for the prostrated man, to bring him home again. She had loved to see the sun ripening the long stretch of their rich grasses with reds and purples, with russets and fresh-bursting green again, as far as eye could see. But she forgot she had ever owned them, 58 OLD MADAME. or owning them had lost them. They were there still when she gazed that way. Then the Thierry place fol- lowed, and the little Hasard houses, they had not yet learned how to be poor. " There is the quarry," said St. Jean, his heart sore as his hand was feeble. " We cannot work it now." " The grocer took it long ago," said Elizabeth. " And the Podarzhon orchard ? " " Oh, the Podarzhon orchard ! Yes, your great- grandsire used to call it his pot of money. Well, the trees were old and ran to wood, your father renewed so many ! But the apples had lost their flavor, what apples they used to be ! Oh, yes, we ate up the Pod- arzhon orchard some time since. And the lamb- pasture brought the children their great-coats and shoes last year. And the barley-field How lucky that we happened to have them, my dear ! " " And I dying," groaned St. Jean. " What, what is to become of them ! " " To become of them ! " said the unfaltering spirit. " Is there question what will become of any of the blood of Chaslesmarie ? " A night came, at length, when Hope fainted in her arms Elizabeth's last child was dead. " A white name and a white soul," said Elizabeth. " I -thank God I knew him ! " And the Geoffrey field went to bury him. " I shall be with him soon," she said, smil- ing, not weeping. " Heaven can hardly be more holy than he made earth seem, he was so like a saint ! " After that, she felt as if he had no more than gone on one of his long voyages. She sold the few acres of the Millet farm in a month or two; they had nothing else to live on now but such small sales ; and from a por- tion of the proceeds she put aside, in a little* hair- covered coffer, her grave-clothes, with the money, in crisp bank-notes, that should one day suffice to lay her away decently between her graves. And then she and Hope sat down and spent their days telling over the virtues of their dead. It was a summer day, when the late wild-roses were just drooping on their stems and the wanton black- berry vines were everywhere putting out their arms, and all things hung a little heavily in the still air before the thunder-storm, that Elizabeth climbed alone, B Y HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 59 with her staff, to the dimple among the rocks where her dear ones lay. She paused at the -top to look around her. Here swept the encircling river, with the red rocks rising from its azure ; beyond it the main- land lifted softly swelling fields that had once belonged to her ancestors of glorious memory ; far away to the south and east, over its ledges and reefs mounting purple to the bending sky, stretched the sea, its foam- ing fields also once theirs and yielding them its rev- enues. Now, nothing but these graves, she said ; the graves of renown, of honor, of lofty purity. " No, no," said Elizabeth, aloud. "Renown, honor, purity are not buried here. St. Jean's children cannot be robbed of that inheritance. Fire that still burns must burst through the ashes. It is fallen indeed ; but with these children it shall begin its upward way again ! " " Its upward way again," said a deep voice. And, half-starting, she turned to see old Ben Benvoisie sit- ting on one of the graves below her. " So you are satisfied at last, Ben Benvoisie," said Elizabeth, after a moment's gazing. " Satisfied with what ? " " Satisfied that not one child is left to my arms, and that, when the mortgage on the Mansion falls due, not one acre of my birthright is left to my name." " Do you think I did it, then, Old Madame ? " asked the man, pulling his cloak about him. " Am I one of the forces of nature ? You flatter me ! Am I the pride, the waste, the love of pleasure, the heedlessness of the morrow, the self-confidence of your race, that forgot there was a world outside the sound of the name of Chaslesmarie ? Did I take one life away from you ? " he cried, as he tottered to his stick. " Nay, once I would have given you my own ! Did I take a penny of your wealth ? I am as poor to-day as I was seventy years ago when I laid my life at your feet, and you laughed and scorned and spurned it, and thought so lightly of it you forgot it ! " Elizabeth was' silent a little. Her hood fell back, and there streamed out a long lock of her silver hair in which still burned a gleam of gold ; her black eyes, softer than once they were, met quietly the gaze that was reading the writing of the lines cut in her face, 60 OLD MADAME. like the lines whipped into stone by the sharp sands of the desert. " It was not these leveling days," she said. " I was the child of nobles " And I was a worm at your feet. A worm with a sting, you found. But it was not you I cursed," he' cried in a horse passion, " not you, Elizabeth Cham- pernoune ! It was the master ~" "Loujs and I were one," she answered him. " We are one still. A part of him is here above the sod ; a part of me is there below it. We shall rest beside each other soon, as we did every night of forty years. Soon you, too, Ben Benvoisie, will go to your long sleep, and neither your bannering nor your blessing will help or hurt the generation that is to come." " Will it not ? " he said. And he laughed a low laugh half under his breath. " Yet the generations repeat themselves. Look there ! " And he wheeled about suddenly and pointed with his stick, as if it had been an old wizard's wand. "Look yonder at the beach," he said. " On the flat bowlder by which we found the bed of garnets when you and I were too young eighty years ago, is it ? to know that you were the child of nobles, and I a worm ! " And there, on the low, flat rock, distinct against the turbid darkness of the sky, sat the pretty Barbara, a brown-eyed lass of sixteen, and the arm about her shoulder was the arm of young Ben Benvoisie. the old man's grandson, and his face, a handsome tawny face with the blue fire of its eyes, was bent toward hers and hers were lifted. "Leave them to their dream a little while, Old Madame, before you wake them," said the old man, in a strangely altered voice. " I shall not wake them," said Elizabeth. And they were silent a moment again, looking down at the figures on the rocks. And the two faces that had bent together there, had clung together in their first long sweet kiss of love, parted, with the redness of innocent blushes on them, and were raised toward the distant sea, now dimly streaked with foam and wind. " I have seen ninety years," said old Ben Benvoisie. " And you, Old Madame ? " BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 6 1 " I have lived eighty-five," she answered, absently. "Long years, long years," he said. " But, at last," he said, " at last, Dame Elizabeth, my flesh and blood and yours are one ! " Elizabeth turned to move away, but his voice again arrested her. " Look ye ! " he said. " When those two are one, once and forever, when Chaslesmarie is sunk in Benvoisie, when you are conquered at last, I shall tell them where Master Louis buried his moneys, Old Madame ! " She had been going on without a word; but she stopped and looked back over her shoulder. " Only they are conquered, Ben Benvoisie, who contend," she said. " And I have never contended. Perhaps I had rather see her dead. I do not know. But Barbara has her own life to live in these changed times. She is too young, I am too old, to make her live mine. And were I conquered," she cried in a great voice, " it is not by you, but by age and the slow years and death ! I defy you, as I have defied Fate ! For, take the bread from my mouth, the mantle from my back, yet while I live the current in my veins remains," cried the old Titaness, " and while I live that current will always run with the courage and the honor of the Chaslesmaries and Champernounes ! " " Not so," said the other. " Conquered you are. Conquered because your race ceases. Because Chasles- marie is swallowed up in Benvoisie, as death is swal- lowed up in victory ! " But she had gone on into the gathering darkness of the storm, from which the young people fled up the shore, and heard no more. And the storm burst about the island, and the old Chaslesmarie Mansion answered it in roof and rafter, trembling as if to the buffets of striving elemental foes. And all at once the flames wrapped it ; and gilded wainscot, Dutch carving, ancestral portraits, were only a pile of hissing cinders when the morning sun glittered on rain-drops, rocks, and river. And Elizabeth, with her little hair- coffer of cere-clothes and money, had gone to Hope's cottage, and old Ben Benvoisie was found stretched upon the grave where she had seen him sitting. And they never knew where Cousin Louis had buried his money. 6 2 OLD MADAME. "Miss Barbara! Barbara, honey!" called old Phillis, again, a little before noon. " Where's this you's hiding at ? Old Madame wants ye. Don't ye hear me tell ? " And pretty Barbara came hesitatingly up the rocks that made each dwelling in the place look as if it were a part of the island itself, tearful and rosy and spark- lino-. And by her side, grave as became him that day, and erect and proud as his grandparent, was old Ben Benvoisie's grandson. " Barbara," said the Old Madame presently, break- ing through the reverie caused by their first few words, " did my eyes deceive me yesterday ? Have you cut adrift ? Have you made up your mind that you can do without fine dresses and silver dishes and " "Why, I always have," said Barbara, looking up simply. " That is true," said Elizabeth. " And so they do not count for much. And you think you know what love is you baby? You really think you love this ' sailor-lad ? Tell me, how much you do love him, child ? " "As much, Madame dear," said Barbara, shyly, dimpling, glancing half askance, " perhaps as much, grandmamma, as you loved Cousin Louis." "Say you so? Then it were enough to carry its light through life and throw it far across the dark shadows of death, my child ! And you," she said, turn ing suddenly and severely to young Ben. " Is it for life, or for a holiday, a pleasuring, a pastime ? " He looked at her as if, in spite of the claims ot parentage and her all but century of reign, he ex- amined her right to ask. " Since Barbara promised me," said he at last, " I have felt, Old Madame, like one inside a church." " Something in him," said Elizabeth. " Not altogether the sweetness of the senses, but the sacred- ness of the sacrament." And although they were not married for twice a twelvemonth, Elizabeth considered that she had married them that morning. And the reddest bonnet- rouge among the fishermen had a thrill as if all thrones were leveled when, at old Ben Benvoisie's funeral, in the simple procession where none rode, after young B Y HARRIE T FRESCO TT SPOFFORD. 63 Ben and Barbara, they saw Hope and Old Madame walk, as became the next of kin. And so one year and another crept into the past. And at length Old Madame fell ill. " I am going now, Hope," she said. " I should like to see Barbara's baby before I go. But remember that there is money for my burial in the little coffer. And there is still the Dernier's wood-land to sell " " Do not think of such things now," said Hope. " God will take care of us in some way. He always has. We are as much a part of the universe as the rest of it." " We are put in this world to think of such things," said Elizabeth. " We are put in this world to live in it, not to live in another. Now I am going to another. We shall see what that will be. From this I have had all it had to give. I came into it with the reverence and revenue of princes. I go out of it a beggar," she cried in a tone that tore Hope's heart. " I came into it in purple I go out of it in rags " Rags. Before they laid her away with those who had made part of her career of splendor and of sorrow, they opened the little hair-coffer, moths had eaten the grave-clothes and a mouse had made its nest in the bank-notes. And to-day nothing is left of Chasles- marie or Champernoune not even a name and hardly a memory; and the blood ennobled by the King of France is the common blood of the fishers of the island given once with all its serfs and vassals the island- fishers who sell you a string of herring for a shilling. HEAR Y SOULT. BY REBECCA HARDING DAYIS. REBECCA HARDING DAVIS. IT is not very easy for the uninitiated to estimate the amount of brain work accomplished by those who have spent any considerable time in the practical pro- fession of journalism. In this class we must place Mrs. Davis, and therefore we can only approximate a judgment as to the net result of a lifetime devoted to letters, much of it impersonal, and its weight and importance therefore unknown to the hungry public, whose capacity for digesting printed matter appears to be unbounded. Rebecca Harding was born in Wheeling, West Vir- ginia, June 24, 1831. Probably some of her youthful writings have escaped our research, but in 1861 ap- peared in the Atlantic Monthly that interesting serial story, entitled " Life in the Iron Mills," which was subsequently published in book form ; this work showed an intimate acquaintance with the class it pro- fessed to delineate, and gave fine scope to her especial talent of character analysis. This was followed in the same periodical by " A Story of To-day " ; this was afterwards republished as a book under the title of " Margaret Howth," in 1862. Two years later Re- becca Harding married Mr. L. Clark Davis. He was a journalist, connected with the Inquirer, published in Philadelphia; he was also a contributor to several magazines. Until about 1869, Mr. and Mrs. Davis continued to make Philadelphia their home, but after this period Mrs. Davis was attached to the editorial staff of the New York Daily Tribune, and came to the metropolis to reside. In 1867 she had given to the world that thrilling story " Waiting for the Verdict," which was published in Philadelphia, in 1867 ; then followed "Dallas Galbraith," in 1868; "John An- dross," in 1874. " The Captain's Story," which was published in the Galaxy, was founded on fact ; as was 69 7O REBECCA HARDING DAVIS. also a story entitled "The Faded Leaf of History," which was truly what it professed to be, a narrative found in an old pamphlet in the Philadelphia library. Mrs. Davis is wonderfully gifted in the matter of dis- criminating mental idiosyncrasies. One of her strong characters is the smooth hypocrite, who, posing as the friend of the suffering classes, is in fact only intent on fleecing the public, through enlisting their sympathies, and collecting moneys for his ever abortive schemes of benevolence ; this sort of character is not new in fic- tion but it has never been more finely diagnosed than by Mrs. Davis. Another skilful mind portraiture is that of the female adventuress, who appears at one time as a materializing spiritualist, and then again, creeping into society in the guise of a Russian Prin- cess. There are moral hints and suggestions all through, without being offensively prominent ; but there are two characters which are of practical interest to the lovers of psychological studies one, the doting old father who illustrates to perfection the inane dogma- tism of unreasoning affection, who, in a moribund con- dition, insists on seeing his daughter " comfortably set- tled before he goes," by compelling her, through her affection for himself, to marry a man for whom she felt nothing if not a chronic repulsion. The other psychic study is less common ; an intelligent educated man who believes himself to have inherited insanity through his mother's family : " All the Davidges had brain disease as they approached middle age." Con- sequently as he approached middle age he felt the symptoms coming on him : he had conscientiously declined to marry, foreseeing his evil fate. As the symptoms grew upon him, he takes leave of all his friends and starts upon an extended tour of travel. But one was on board the steamer who had known him from infancy, and who at the last moment informs him that she whom he had always believed to be his mother, was only his step-mother, "he had no Davidge blood in his veins." His cure was instantaneous ; all the dreaded symptoms disappeared. His imagination being corrected, his brain was also. Mrs. Davis has resided of late years in Philadelphia, REBECCA HARDING DAVIS. J\ The absence of a portrait of her from this book is due to the fact that she has never yet consented to have it taken. Her words in refusing it, are : " I am sorry to disappoint you, but as I do not give my photograph to my children, you cannot be offended with me." TIRAR Y SOULT. ROBERT KNIGHT, who was born, bred, and trained in New England, suckled on her creeds and weaned on her doubts, went directly from college to a Louisiana plantation. The change, as he felt, was ex- treme. He happened to go in this way. He was a civil engineer. A company was formed among the planters in the Gulf parishes to drain their marshes in order to establish large rice-farms. James B. Eads, who knew Knight, gave his name to them as that of a promising young fellow who was quite competent to do the sim- ple work that they required, and one, too, who would probably give more zeal and time to it than would a man whose reputation was assured. After Mr. Knight had thoroughly examined the scene of operations, he was invited by the president of the company, M. de Fourgon, to go with him to his plantation, the Lit de Fleurs, where he would meet the directors of the company. " The change is great and sudden," he wrote to his confidential friend Miss Cramer. " From Boston to the Bed of Flowers, from the Concord School of Phi- losophy to the companionship of ex-slaveholders, from Emerson to Gayarre ! I expected to lose my breath mentally. I expected to find the plantation a vast exhibit of fertility, disorder, and dirt; the men, illiter- ate fire-eaters ; the women, houris such as our fathers used to read of in Tom Moore. Instead, I find the farm, huge, it is true, but orderly ; the corn-fields are laid out with the exact neatness of a Dutch garden. The works are run by skilled German workmen. The directors are shrewd and wide-awake. Madame de Fourgon is a fat, commonplace little woman. There are other women the house swarms with guests but not an houri among them. Till to morrow. R. K." 73 74 TIKAR Y SOULT. The conclusion was abrupt, but Knight had reached the bottom of the page of his writing-pad. He tore it off, p.ut it in a business-envelope, and mailed it. He and Miss Cramer observed a certain manly disregard to petty conventionalities. He wrote to her on the backs of old envelopes, scraps of wrapping-paper, any- thing that came first to hand. She liked it. He was poor and she was poor, and they were two good fel- lows roughing it together. They delighted in express- ing their contempt for elegant knick-knackery of any sort, in dress, literature, or religion. " Give me the honest the solid!" was Emma Cra- mer's motto, and Knight thought the sentiment very high and fine. Emma herself was a little person, with an insignificant nose, and a skin, hair, and eyes all of one yellowish tint. A certain fluffiness and piquancy of dress would have made her positively pretty. But she went about in a tightly fitting gray gown, with a white pocket-handkerchief pinned about her neck, and her hair in a small knob on top. But, blunt as she was, she did not like the blunt end- ing of this letter. What were the women like who were not houris ? He might have known that she would have some curi- osity about them. Had they any intellectual training whatever? She supposed they could dance and sing and embroider like those poor things in harems Miss Cramer lived on a farm near the village of Throop. That evening, after she had finished her work, she took the letter over to read to Mrs. Knight. There were no secrets in any letter to her from Robert which his mother could not share. They were all inti- mate friends together, Mrs. Knight being, perhaps, the youngest and giddiest of the three. The Knights knew how her uncle overworked the girl, for Emma was an orphan, and dependent on him. They knew all the kinds of medicine she took for her dyspepsia, and exactly how much she earned by writing book- reviews for a Boston paper. Emma, too, could tell to a dollar what Robert's yearly expenses had been at college. They had all shared in the terrible anxiety lest no position should offer for him, and rejoiced to- ge-ther in this opening in Louisiana. B Y REBECCA HARDING DA VIS. 75 Mrs. Knight ran to meet her. " Oh, you have had a letter, too ? Here is mine ! " She read the letter with nervous nods and laughs of exultation, the butterfly-bow of yellow ribbon in her cap fluttering as if in triumph. Emma sat down on the steps of the porch with an odd, chilled feeling that she was somehow shut out from the victory. " The ' Bed of Flowers?" What a peculiar name for a farm ! And how odd it was in this Mr. de Four- gon to ask Robert to stay at his house ! Do you sup- pose he will charge him boarding, Emma ? " "No, I think not." " Well, Robert will save nothing by that. He must make it up somehow. I wouldn't have him under obli- gation to the man for his keep. I've written to him to put his salary into the Throop Savings Bank till he wants to invest it. He will have splendid chances for invest- ment, travelling over the country East, West, South everywhere ! House full of women ? I hope he will not be falling in love in a hurry. Robert ought to marry well now," Miss Cramer said nothing. The sun had set, and a cold twilight had settled down over the rocky fields, with their thin crops of hay. To the right was Mrs. Knight's patch, divided into tiny beds of potatoes, corn, and cabbage. As Emma's eyes fell on it she remembered how many years she had helped the widow rake and weed that field, and how they had triumphed in every shilling which they made by the garden-stuff. For Robert all for Robert ! Now he had laid his hand on the world's neck and conquered it ! North and West, and that great tropical South, with its flowers and houris all were open to him ! She looked around the circle of barren fields. He had gone out of doors, and she was shut in ! She bade his mother good-night, and went down the darkening road homeward. What a fool she was ! The fact that Robert had a good salary could not change the whole order of the world in a day. Her comradeship with Knight, their plans, their sympathy this was the order of the world which seemed eternal and solid to poor Emma. " I am his friend," she told herself now. " If he had twenty wives, none of them could take my place." 76 TIRAR Y SOULT. Now Knight had not hinted at the possibility of wiving in his letter. There had never been a word or glance of love making between him and Emma; yet she saw him, quite distinctly now, at the altar, and beside him a black-eyed houri. She entered the farm-house by the kitchen. There was the bacon, cut ready to cook for breakfast, and the clothes dampened for ironing. Up in her own bare chamber were paper and ink and two books for review "Abstract of Greek Philosophy" and " Subdrain- age." These reviews were one way in which she had tried to interest him. Interest him ! Greek philosophy ! Drainage ! She threw the books on the floor, and, running to the glass, unloosened her hair and ran her fingers through it, tore the handkerchief from her neck, scanned with a breathless eagerness her pale eyes, her freckled skin, and shapeless nose, and then, burying her face in her hands, turned away into the dark. The night air that was so thin and chilly in Throop, blew over the Lit de Fleurs wet and heavy with the scents, good and bad, of the Gulf marshes. Madame de Fourgon's guests had left the supper-table, and were seated on the low gallery which ran around the house, or lounged in the hammocks that swung under the huge magnolias on the lawn. There were one or two women of undoubted beauty among them ; but Robert Knight was not concerned, that night, with the good or ill-looks of any woman, either in Throop or Louisiana. He was amused by a new companion, a Monsieur Tirar, who had ridden over from a neighbor- ing plantation. Knight at first took him for an over grown boy ; but on coming close to him, he perceived streaks of gray in the close-cut hair and beard. Tirar had sung and acted a comic song, after dinner, at which the older men laughed as at the capers of L monkey. While they were at cards he played croquet with the children. The women sent him on errands. " Jose, my thimble is in the library ! " " Jose', do see where the nurse has taken baby ! "etc. A chair had been brought out now for M. de Four- gon's aunt, an old woman with snowy hair and delicate, BY REBECCA HARDING DAVIS. 77 high features. Jose flew to bring her a shawl and wrapped it about her. She patted him on his fat cheek, telling Knight, as he capered away, how invalu- able was the cher enfant, " He made that Creole sauce to-day. Ah, the petit gourmand has many secrets of crabs and soups. He says the chefs in Paris confide in him, but they are original, monsieur ; they are born in Jose's leetle brain " tapping her own forehead. " Ah, hear him now ! 'T is the voice of a seraph ! " She threw up her hands, to command silence in earth and sky ; leaning back and closing her eyes, while the little man, seated with his guitar 'at the feet of a pretty girl, sang. Even Knight's sluggish nerves were thrilled. He had never heard such a voice as this. It wrung his heart with its dateless pain and pathos. Ashamed of his emotion, he turned to go away. But there was a breathless silence about him. The Cre- oles all love music, and Jose's voice was famous throughout the Gulf parishes. Even the negro nurses stood staring and open-mouthed. The song ended and Tirar lounged into the house. " Queer dog ! " said M. de Fourgon. " He will not touch a guitar again perhaps for months." " He would sing if I ask it," said the old lady. " He has reverence for the age." M. de Fourgon, behind her, lifted his eyebrows. "Jose'," he said, aside to Knight, "is a good fellow enough up here among the women and babies ; but with his own crew, at the St. Charles, there is no more rakehelly scamp in New Orleans." " Is he a planter ? " asked the curious New Eng- lancler. Madame Dessaix's keen ears caught the question. " Ah, the poor lad ! he has no land, not an acre ! His father was a Spaniard, Ruy Tirar, who married Bonaventura Soult. The Soult and Tirar plantations were immense on the Bayou Sara. Jose's father had his share. But crevasse cards the war all gone ! " opening wide her hands. " When your government declared peace, it left our poor Jose at twenty with the income of a beggar." " But that was fifteen years ago," said Knight. 78 TIRAR Y SOULT. " Could he not retrieve his fortune by his profession business ? What does he do ? " " Do? do ? " she turned an amazed, perplexed face from one to the other. "Does he think that Jose shall work ? Jose ! Mon Dieu ! " " Tirar," said M. de Fourgon, laughing, " is not pre- cisely a business man, Mr. Knight. He has countless friends and kinsfolk. We are all cousins of the Tirars or Soults. He is welcome everywhere." 'Oh! "said Knight, with a 'significant nod. Even in his brief stay in this neighborhood, he had found other men than Jose living in absolute idleness in a community which was no longer wealthy. They were neither old, ill, nor incapable. It was simply not their humor to work. They were supported, and as carefully guarded as pieces of priceless porcelain. It is a lax, extravagant feature of life, as natural to Louisiana as it is impossible to Connecticut. It irritated Knight, yet it attracted him, as any nov- elty does a young man. He turned away from his companions, and sauntered up and down in the twi- light. To live without work on those rich, prodigal prairies, never to think of to-morrow, to give without stint, even to lazy parasites there was something royal about that. It touched his fancy. He had. known, remembered, nothing but Throop and hard work for twenty-two years. The air had grown chilly. Inside, M. Tirar had kindled a huge fire on the hearth. He was kneeling, fanning it with the bellows, while a young girl leaned indolently against the mantel, watching the flames, and now and then motioning to Jose to throw on another log. The trifling action startled Knight oddly. How they wasted that wood ! All through his boyhood he used to gather every twig and chip. How often he had longed to make one big, wasteful fire, as they were doing now. The young lady was a Miss Venn, who had been civil to him. It occurted to him that she was the very embodiment of the lavish life of this place. He did not, then or afterward, consider whether she was beau- tiful or not. But the soft, loose masses of reddish hair, and the large, calm, blue eyes, must, he thought, BY REBECCA HARDING DAVIS. 79 belong to a woman who was a generous spendthrift of life. Perhaps Knight was at heart a spendthrift. At all events, he suddenly felt a strange eagerness to become better acquainted with Miss Venn. He sought her out, the next morning, among the groups under the magno- lias. There could be no question that she was stupid. She had read nothing but her Bible and the stories in the newspapers, and had no opinions about either. But she confessed to ignorance of nothing, lying with the most placid, innocent smile. " ' Hamlet ? ' Oh, yes ; I read that when it first came out. But those things slip through my mind like water through a sieve." To Robert, whose brain had long been rasped by Emma's prickly ideas, this dulness was as a downy bed of ease. Emma was perpetually struggling after prog- ress with every power of her brain. It never occurred to Lucretia Venn to plan what she should do to-mor- row, or at any future time. In Throop, too, there was much hard prejudice between the neighbors. To be clever was to have a sharp acerbity of wit: Emma's sarcasms cut like a thong. But these people were born kind ; they were friendly to all the world, while in Lucretia there was a warm affluence of nature which made her the centre of all this warm, pleasant life. The old people called her by some pet name, the dogs followed her, the children climbed into her lap. Knight with her felt like a traveller who has been long lost on a bare, cold marsh and has come into a fire- lighted room. One afternoon he received the card of M. Jose Tirar y Soult, who came to call upon him formally. The little fop was dazzling in white linen, diamond solitaires blazing on his breast and wrists. " You go to ride ? " he said, as the horses were brought round. " Lucrezia, my child, you go to ride ? It portends rain " hopping to the edge of the gallery. " You will take cold ! " " There is not a cloud in the sky," said M. de Four- gon. " Come, Lucretia, mount ! Jose always fancies you on the edge of some calamity." " It goes to storm," persisted Tirar. " You must wear a heavier habit, my little girl." 80 TIRAR Y SOULT. Miss Venn laughed, ran to her own room, and changed her habit. " What way shall you ride ? " Jose' anxiously in quired of Knight. " To the marshes." " It is very dangerous there, sir. There are herds of wild cattle, and slippery ground " fuming up and down the gallery. " Well, well ! Tirar himself will go I will not see the child's life in risk." Knight was annoyed. " What relation does Mon- sieur Tirar hold to Miss Venn ? " he asked his host apart. " He assumes the control of a father over her." " He is her cousin. He used to nurse the child on his knee, and he does not realize that she has grown to be a woman. Oh, yes, the poor little man loves her as if she were his own child ! When their grandfather, Louis Soult, died, two years ago, he left all his estate to Lucretia, and not a dollar to Jose. It was brutal I But Jose' was delighted. 'A woman must have money, or she is cold in the world,' he said. ' But to shorn lambs, like me, every wind is tempered. ' " Mr. Knight was thoughtful during the first part of the ride. " I did not know," he said, presently, to young McCann, from St. Louis, a stranger like himself, " that Miss Venn was a wealthy woman." " Oh, yes, the largest landholder in this parish, and ten thousand a year, clear, besides." Ten thousand a year ! And Emma drudging till midnight for two or three dollars a column ! Poor Emma! A gush of unwonted tenderness filled his heart. The homely, faithful soul ! Ten thousand a year! Knight would have been humiliated to think that this money could change his feeling to the young woman who owned it. But it did change it. She was no longer only a dull, fascinating appeal to his imagination. She was a power ; some- thing to be regarded with respect, like a Building Association or Pacific Railway stocks. But for some unexplained reason he carefully avoided her during the ride. Miss Venn was annoyed at this desertion, and showed it as a child would do. She beckoned him again and again to look at a heron's nest, or at the water-snakes darting through the ridges of the bayou, B Y REBECCA HA RDING DA VIS. 8 1 or at a family of chameleons who were keeping house on a prickly-pear. Finding that he did not stay at her side, she gave up her innocent wiles, at last, and rode on in silence. M. Tirar then flung himself headlong into the breach. He poured forth information about Louisiana for Knight's benefit, with his own flighty opinions tagged thereto. He told stories and laughed at them louder than anybody else, his brown eyes dancing with fun ; but through all he kept a furtive watch upon Lucretia to see the effect upon her. They had now reached the marshes which lie along the Gulf. They were covered with a thin grass, which shone bright-emerald in the hot noon. The tide soaked the earth beneath, and drove back the narrow lagoons that were creeping seaward. A herd of raw- boned cattle wandered aimlessly over the spongy sur- face, doubtful whether the land was water, or the water, land. They staggered as they walked, from sheer weakness; one steer fell exhausted, and as Lucretia's horse passed, it lifted its head feebly, looked at her with beseeching eyes, and dropped it again. A Hock of buzzards in the distance scented their prey and began to swoop down out of the clear sky, flashes of black across the vivid green of the prairie, with low and lower dips until they alighted, quivering, on the dying beast and began to tear the flesh from its side. Josd rode them down, yelling with rage. He came back jabbbering in Spanish and looking gloomily over the vast empty marsh. " I hate death anywhere, but this is wholesale murder! These wretched Cajans of the marsh raise larger herds than they can feed ; they starve by the hundreds. That poor beast is dead thanks be to God ! " After a pause. " Well, well ! " he cried, with a shrug, " your syndicate will soon convert this delta into solid ground, Mr. Knight ; it is a noble work ! Vast fortunes " with a magnilo- quent sweep of his arm " lie hidden under this mud." " Why don't you take a share in the noble work then ? " asked McCann. " That is, if it would not interfere with your other occupations ? " " Me ? I have no occupations ! What work should I do ? " asked Jose', with a fillip of his pudgy fingers. 6 82 TIRAR Y SOULT. Presently he galloped up to Miss Venn's side with an anxious face. " Lucrezia, my child, has it occurred to you that you would like me better if 1 were doctor, or lawyer, or something? " She looked at him, bewildered, but said nothing. " It has not occurred to me" he went on seriously. " I have three, four hundred dollars every year to buy my clothes. I have the Tirar jewelry. What more do I want ? Every thing I need comes to me." " Certainly, why not ? " she answered absently, her eyes wandering in search of something across the marsh. " Then you do not mind ? " he persisted anxiously. " I wish my little girl to be pleased with old Jose. As for the rest of the world " he cracked his thumb con- temptuously. Miss Venn smiled faintly. She had not even heard him. She was watching Knight, who had left the party and was riding homeward alone. Jose fancied there were tears in her eyes. " Lucrezia ! " No answer. " Lucrezia, do not worry ! 7am here." " You ! Oh, Man Dicu ! You are always here ! " She broke forth, pettishly. Jose gasped as if he had been struck, then he reined in his horse, falling back, while Mr. McCann gladly took his place. M. Tirar, after that day, did not return to the planta- tion. Once he met M. de Fourgon somewhere in the parish, and with a sickly smile asked if Lucretia were in good health. " Remember Jean," he added, earnestly, riding with him a little way. " I am that little girl's guardian. If she ever marry, it is Jose who must give her away. So ridiculous in her father to make a foolish young fellow like me her guardian ! " " Not at all ! No, indeed ! Very proper, Tirar," said M. de Fourgon, politely, at which Jose's face grew still paler and more grave. One day he appeared about noon on the gallery. His shoes were muddy, his clothes the color of a be- draggled moth. " Ah, man enfant /" cried Madame Dessaix, kindly, B Y REBECCA HA RDING DA VIS. 8 3 from her chair in a shady corner. " What is wrong ? No white costume this day, no diamonds, no laugh ? What is it, Jose' ?" " Nothing, madame," said the little man, drearily. " I grow old. I dress no more as a young man. I accommodate myself to the age the wrinkles." " Wrinkles ? Bah ! Come and sit by me. For whom is that you look ? " " But I thought I heard Lucrezia laugh as I rode up the levee ? " Madame Dessaix nodded significantly and, putting her fingers on her lips, with all the delight that a Frenchwoman takes in lovers, led him, on tip-toe, to the end of the gallery and, drawing aside the vines, showed him Lucretia in a hammock under a gigantic pecan-tree. A mist of hanging green moss closed about her. She lay in it as a soft, white bird in a huge nest. Knight stood leaning against the trunk of the tree, looking down at her, his thin face intent and heated. He had spoken to her, but she did not answer. She smiled lazily, as she did when the chil- dren patted her on the cheek. " Voila la petite!" whispered Madame Dessaix, tri- umphantly. Then she glanced at M. Tirar, finding that he looked on in silence. He roused himself, with a queer noise in his throat. " Yes, yes ! Now what does she answer him ? " " Mere de Dieu ! What can she answer ? He is young. He is a man who has his own way. He will have no answer but the one ! We consider the affair finished ! " Tirar made no comment. He turned and walked quickly down to the barnyard, where the children were, and stood among them and the cows for awhile. The stable boys, used to jokes and picayunes from him, turned hand-springs and skylarked under his feet. Finding that he neither laughed nor swore at them, they began to watch him more narrowly, and noticed his shabby clothes with amazed contempt. " Don Jose saek, ta-ta ! " they whispered. " Don Jose, yo' no see mud on yo' clo'es ? " " But he stood leaning over the fence, deaf and blind to them. His tormentors tried another point of attack. 84 TIRAR Y SOULT. " Don Jose no seek, but his mare seek. Poor Chi- quita ! She old horse now." " It's a damned lie ! " Tirar turned on the boy with such fury that he jumped back. " She's not old ! luring her out ! " The negroes tumbled over each other in their fright. The little white mare was led out. Jose' patted her with trembling hands. Whatever great trouble had shaken him turned for the moment into this petty out- let. " There is not such a horse in Attakapas ! " he mut- tered to himself. "I am old, but she is young!" The mare whinnied with pleasure as he stroked her and mounted. As he rode from the enclosure, a clumsy bay horse was led out of the stable. Knight came down the levee to meet it. Jose scanned it with fierce con- tempt. "Ah, the low-born beast! And its master is no otherwise ! But who can tell what shall please the little girl ? " But Tirar could not shut his eyes to the fact that the figure on the heavy horse was manly and fine. The courage in his heart was at its lowest ebb. " Jose* is old and fat fat. That is a young fellow he is like a man !" His chin quivered like a hysteric woman's. The next minute he threw himself on the mare's neck. " I have only you now, Chiquita ! Nobody but you ! " She threw back her ears and skimmed across the prairie with the hoof of a deer. When he passed Knight, M. Tirar saluted him with profound courtesy. '* Funny little man," said Robert to McCann, who had joined him. " You might call him a note of exag- geration in the world. But that is a fine horse that he rides." " Yes ; a famous racer in her day, they tell me. Tirar talks of her as if she were a blood-relation. I wish we had horses of her build just now. That brute of yours sinks in the mud with every step." "It is deeper than usual to-day. I don't understand it. We have had no rain." They separated in a few minutes, Knight taking his way to the sea marshes. The marshes were always silent, but there was a sin- BY REBECCA HARDING DA VIS. 85 gular, deep stillness upon them to-day. The sun was hidden by low-hanging mists, but it turned them into tent-like veils of soft, silvery brilliance. The colors and even the scents of the marshes were oddly intensi- fied beneath them ; the air held the strong smells of the grass and roses motionless ; the lagoons, usually chocolate-colored, were inky black between their fringes of yellow and purple flags ; the countless circu- lar pools of clear water seemed to have increased in number, and leaped and bubbled as if alive. If poor Emma could but turn her eyes from the barren fields of Throop to this strange, enchanted plain ! He checked himself. What right had he to wish for Emma ? Lucretia But Lucretia would see nothing in it but mud and weeds ! Lucretia was a dear soul ; but after all, he thought with a laugh, her best qualities were those of an amia- ble cow. That very day he had brought himself to make love to her with as much force as his brain could put into the words, and she had listened with the amused, pleased, ox-like stare of one of these cattle when its sides were tickled by the long grass. She had given him no definite answer. Knight ploughed his way through the spongy prairie, therefore, in a surly ill-humor, which the unusual depth of mud did not make more amiable. He was forced to ride into the bayou every few minutes to wash the clammy lumps from the legs of his horse. Where M. Tirar went that day, he himself, when afternoon came, could not have told distinctly. He had a vague remembrance that he had stopped at one or two Acadian farm-houses for no purpose whatever. He was not a drinking man, and had tasted nothing but water all day, yet his brain was stunned and bruised, as if he was rousing from a long debauch. When he came to himself he was on the lower marshes. Chiquita had suddenly stopped, planted her legs apart like a mule, and refused to budge an inch farther. What ailed this bayou ? It, too, had come' to a halt, and had swollen into a stagnant black pond. Jose was altogether awake now. He understood what had happened. A heavy spring tide in the gulf 86 TIRAR Y SOULT. had barred all outlet for the bayous, wnich cut through the marshes. The great river, for which they were but mouths, was always forcing its way over their banks and oozing through all the spongy soil. There was no immediate danger of his drowning ; but unless he made instant escape, there was a certainty that he would be held and sucked into the vast and rapidly spreading quicksands of mud until he did drown. If Chiquita ? He wheeled her head to the land and called to her. She began to move with extreme caution, testing each step, now and then leaping to a hummock of solid earth. Twice she stopped and changed her course. Jose dismounted several, times and tried to lead her. But he soon was bogged knee deep. He saw that the instinct of the horse was safer than his judgment, and at last sat quietly in the saddle. At ordinary times he would have sworn and scolded, and, perhaps, being alone, have shed tears, for Jose was at heart a coward and dearly loved his life. But to-day it was low tide in the little man's heart. The bulk of life had gone from him with Lucretia. His love for her had given him dignity in his own eyes ; without her he was a poor buffoon, who carried his jokes from house to house in payment for alms. He did what he could, however, to save his life, rationally enough threw off his heavy boots, and the Spanish saddle, to lighten the load on the mare, patted her, sang and laughed to cheer her. Once, when the outlook was desperate, he jumped off. " She shall not die ! " he said, fiercely. He tried to drive her away, but she stood still, gazing at him wistfully. " Aha ! " shouted Jose, delighted, nodding to some invisible looker-on. " Do you see that ? She will not forsake me ! So, my darling ! You and Tirar will keep together to the last." He mounted again. Chiquita, after that, made slow but steady progress. She reached a higher plateau. Even there the pools were rapidly widening ; the oozing water began to shine between the blades of grass. In less than an hour this level also would be in the sea. But in less than an hour Chiquita would have brought him to dry grouad. BY REBECCA HARDING DA VIS. S/ Jose talked to her incessantly now, in Spanish, argu- ing as to this course or that. " Ha ! What is that ? " he cried, pulling her up. " That black lump by the bayou ? A man no ! A horse and man ! They are sinking held fast ! " He was silent a moment, panting with excitement. Then " It is Knight ! " he cried. " Caught like a rat in a trap ! He will die thanks be to God ! " If Knight were dead, Lucretia would be his own little girl again. The thought was the flash of a moment. Knight's back was toward him. Jose, unseen, waited irresolute. After the first murderous triumph he hoped Robert could be saved. Tirar was a qoward, but at bottom he was a man how much of a man remained to be proved. The longer he looked at the engineer, the more he hated him, with a blind, childish fury. "But lam not murdered I!" he said to himself, mechanically, again and again. Chiquita pawed, impatient to be off. The water was rising about her hoofs. It sparkled now everywhere below the reeds. Death was waiting for both the men a still, silent, certain death the more horrible be- cause there was no fury or darkness in it. The silvery mist still shut the world in, like the walls of a tent ; the purple and yellow flags shone in the quiet light. Chiquita could save one, and but one. The Tirars and Soults had been men of courage and honor for generations. Their blood was quickening in his fat little body. A thought struck him like a stab from a knife. " If Knight dies, it will break her heart. But me !" Then he cracked his thumb contemptuously. " What does she care for poor old Jose ? " We will not ask what passed in his heart during the next ten minutes. He and his God were alone together. He came up to Knight and tapped him on the shoul- der. "Hello! What's wrong?" " I'm bogged. This brute of a horse is sinking in the infernal mud." "Don't jerk at him ! I'll change the horses with you, If you are in a hurry to reach the plantation. Chiquita can take you more quickly than he." 88 TIRAR Y SOULT. " But you ? I don't understand you. What will you do? " I am in no hurry." " This horse will not carry you. It seems to me that the mud is growing deeper." " I understand the horses and mud of our marshes better than you. Come, take Chiquita. Go ! " Knight alighted and mounted the mare, with a per- plexed face. He had begun to think himself in actual danger, and was mortified to find that Jose made so light of the affair. " Well, good-day, Monsieur Tirar ! " he said. "It is very kind in you to take that confounded beast off my hands. I'll sell him to-morrow if I can." He nodded to Jose, and jerked the bridle sharply. " Come, get up ! " he said, touching Chiquita with the whip. Jose leaped at him like a cat. " Damnation ! Don't dare touch her ! wrenching the whip from his hand, and raising it to strike him. " Pardon, sir," stiffening himself, " my horse will not bear a stroke. Do not speak to her and she will carry you safely. His hand rested a moment on the mare's neck. He muttered something to her in Spanish, and then turned his back that he might not see her go away. Mr. Knight reached the upper marshes in about two hours. He caught sight of a boat going down the bayon, and recognizing M. de Fourgon and some other men from the plantation in it, rode down to meet them. " Thank God you are safe, Knight ! exclaimed M. de Fourgon. " How's that ? Surely that is Chiquita you are riding ! Where did you find her?" " That queer little Mexican insisted that I should swap horses with him. My nag was bogged, and " The men looked at each other. "Where did you leave htm ?" "In the sea-marsh, near the mouth of this bayou. Why, what do you mean ? Is he in danger ? Stop 1" he shouted, as they pulled away without a word. "For God's sake, let me go with you ! " He left Chiquita on the bank and leaped into the boat, taking an oar. " You do not mean that Tirar has risked his life for mine ?" he said. B Y REBECCA HARDING DA VIS. 89 " It looks like it," McCann replied. "And yet I could have sworn that he disliked you, especially." "The old Tirar blood has not perished from off the earth," said M. de Fourgon, in a low voice. "Give way ! Together now ! I fear we are too late." The whole marsh was under water before they reached it. They found Jose's body submerged, but wedged in the crotch of a pecan-tree, into which he had climbed. It fell like a stone into the boat. M. de Fourgon laid his ear to his heart, pressed his chest, and rose, replying by a shake of the head to their looks. He took up his oar and rowed in silence for a few minutes. " Pull, gentlemen ! " he said horsely. " The night is almost upon us. We will take him to my house." But Knight did not believe that Jose was dead. He stripped him, and rubbed and chafed the sodden body in the bottom of the boat. When they reached the house and, after hours of vain effort, even the physician gave up, Knight would not listen to him. " He shall not die, I tell you ! Why should his life be given for mine ? I did not even thank him, brute that I am ! " It was but a few minutes after that, that he looked up from his rubbing, his face growing suddenly white. The doctor put his hand on Tirar's breast. " It beats !" he cried excitedly. " Stand back ! Air brandy ! " At last Jose" opened his eyes, and his lips moved. " What is it, my dear fellow ?" they all cried, crowding around him. But only Knight caught the whisper. He stood up, an amazed comprehension in his eyes. Drawing M. de Fourgon aside, he said: "I under- stand now ! I see why he did it ! " and hurried away abruptly, in search of Miss Venn. The next morning M. Tirar was carried out in a steamer-chair to the gallery. He was the hero of the day. The whole household, from Madame Dessaix to the black pickaninnies, buzzed about him. Miss Venn came down the gallery, beam- ing, flushed, her eyes soft with tears. She motioned them all aside and sat down by him, stroking his cold hand in her warm ones. 90 TIRAR Y SOULT. " It is me that you want, Jose* ? Not these others ? Only me ? " "If you can spare for me a little time, Lucrezia?" he said, humbly. She did not reply for so long that he turned and looked into her face. " A little time ? All of the time," she whispered. Jose started forward. His chilled heart had scarce- ly seemed to heat since he was taken from the water. Now it sent the blood hot through his body. "What do you mean, child?" he said, sternly. " Think what you say. It is old Josd. Do you mean " Yes ; and I always meant it," she said quietly. "Why, there are only us left you and me. And Chiquita," she added, laughing. A week later Mrs. Knight received a letter from Robert, with the story of his rescue. She cried over it a good deal. " Though I don't see why he thinks it such an extra- ordinary thing in that little man to do ! " she reflected. " Anybody would wish to save Robert, even a wild Mexican. And, why upon earth, because his life was in danger, he should have written to offer it to Emma Cramer, passes me ! She hasn't a dollar." Through the window she saw the girl crossing the fields, with quick, light steps. " She's heard from him ! She's coming to tell me. Well, I did think Robert would have married well, having his pick and choice " But the widow's heart had been deeply moved. " Poor Emma ! She's been as faithful as a dog to Robert. If she has no money, she will save his as an heiress would not have done. Providence -orders all things right," she thought, relenting. " If that girl has not put on her best white dress on a week-day ! How glad she must be ! I'll go and meet her, I guess. She has no mother now, to kiss her, or say God bless her, poor child ! " and she hurried to the gate. TOM FOSTER'S WIFE, BY EDNA DEAN PROTOCR EDNA DEAN PROCTOR WAS born in Henniker, New Hampshire, her father's family having gone there from Essex County, Massachusetts. She was thoroughly educated and trained, and started out in life, equipped not only with a great love of learning, but with all the accessories which made it possible for her to follow the inclinations of her mind. She was early in life a writer of poetry, but not until the civil war which aroused the patriotic element within her were her verses known to her countrymen. Then her thrill- ing national poems sounded like a bugle from the hill of Mars. The name of Edna Dean Proctor became dear to the loyal soldiery, and her appeals were read beside the camp fires as they were repeated in the New England homes and schools. No battle songs did more to sustain the sentiment of patriotism in the soldiery than those of Miss Proctor, which are found in her volume of collected poems. "The Stripes and Stars," written in April, 1861 ; " Compromise," in- scribed to Congress, July 4, 1861 ; "Who's Ready?" written in July, 1862, are really national anthems. A volume of her poems was published by Hurd & Houghton in 1867. A later collection has been made and is now in course of publication. Miss Proctor never hastens the publication of anything she writes, and being so fortunately situated in life as to be in- dependent of circumstances, she writes only when impelled by her genius; hence the world receives her best work. Miss Proctor's mission in life is that of a poet, and she lives in the thoughts and affections of thousands who have never seen her. She is mistress of pathos, and when her poem, " Heaven, Oh Lord, I Cannot Lose " appeared, it brought a wealth of responses from all over the land. John Greenleaf Whittier pronounced 95 96 EDNA DEAN PROCTOR. the poem, " New Hampshire," one of the grandest produced in this country, and his verdict of her poems generally was that they had greater strength and a loftier and higher order of merit than those of any American female writer. Of her poem, " Oh, Loved and Lost," he says, " How sweet, tender and lovely the poem is ! All our hearts were touched by it. It is a poem full of power and pathos, yet its shadows are radiant with a holy hope. I have read it over and over with deep interest and sympathy, and have found comfort and strength in it." The gentle Quaker poet also said of her poem on "Burns,"' that it was so good, so true, so tender, yet so strong of thought that he hoped the bard himself, in his new life, might read it. Mr. Longfellow used many of Miss Proctor's poems in his " Poems of Places," and expressed regret that her poem " Holy Russia " had not been written in time for his book, saying, "It would have been a splendid prelude to the volume." Mr. Longfellow greatly admired Miss Proctor's " Russian Journey," as a book of surpassing interest. The original poem which precedes each chapter stirs the heart like the sound of a trumpet. This was her second volume of prose, and it was written after a prolonged tour in Europe and a stay of many months in that country. She has occasionally written short sketches and stories, but of her prose work she is not willing to speak unreservedly because poetry is her field. Few women have enjoyed larger opportunities for self-improvement by study and travel. She has an exquisite sympathy with sorrow and suffering, and one feels a relief in turning from intensely saddening poems, as "At Home," in which the death of Charley, a wounded soldier boy, within sight of his old home in New Hampshire, is told with thrilling presentability, to use a good old word, to those happier songs in which with gentle hand she wipes away the tears from all faces. While a writer of exquisite verse, Miss Proctor is, happily, a woman of rare personality. Not tall nor quite small, she is of medium stature, deliberate and graceful in movement, and possessed of much dignity Her manners are those of a high-bred lady, and her voice, which is sweet and low, is her great charm. She is a fluent talker, but never a gay o ne , Her ways are EDNA DEAN PROCTOR. 97 gentle and earnest, rather than merry and vivacious. A distinguished writer, describing her, spoke of her as "the lady with eyes from out the East." Their ex- pression is always soft, and sometimes sad, and her soul is photographed in the light that shines out from her black, lustrous and full eyes. As in her poems, so in her life ; the sunshine and the clouds will sometimes pass each other, but there is such an undercurrent of love and hope in her nature that the sunshine predominates. Miss Proctor is a true poet a woman of genius and sterling worth. TOM FOSTER'S WIFE. I HAD just returned from a two years stay in Europe, and was sauntering down Tremont street, in the golden September morning, when I saw my old friend, Tom Foster, get out of a horse-car a few steps in advance of me. I knew him in a moment, though we had hardly met since we were at Exeter Academy together, ten years before room-mates and blithe companions until we parted I to go to Harvard and he to enter his father's store, the well known house of Foster & Co., Pearl street. He was a merry, hearty, practical fellow, clear skinned and robust as an Englishman, self-reliant and enterprising as New Hampshire birth and Boston training could make him. I always liked him ; but he plunged into business and I into study, and so, with- out meaning it, we had almost lost sight of each other. He was an only child and his parents spent their summers at their homestead in Greenland, near Portsmouth, and their winters in Boston. As I said, I knew him in a moment. He had grown tall and stout, but the boy was still in his face, and with a flush of early feeling I sprang forward and, caught him by the arm. " Tom ! How are you ? " He looked puzzled for a moment, and then, bursting into a laugh, he seized my hand in his strong grasp, and exclaimed : " Why, John Ralston ! Is this you ? Where did you come from ? I'm glad to see you, my boy. Why, I haven't set my eyes on you since we made that trip to Nahant, in your Freshman year. The truth is, father was so poorly for a long time then that I had everything to see to, and felt as if the world was on my shoulders. I did hear, though, about your college honors and your going to Germany ; and I've often thought of you lately and wished to see you. Why, Jack, in spite of my weight and your beard 99 . IOO TOM FOSTER'S WIFE. and broad shoulders, I can't realize that ten years have gone since we were at Exeter together. We must talk over old times and new. When did you get back and what are your plans ? " " I came yesterday, and shall stay in the city, on account of a business matter, until next Tuesday. Then I am going home." " Well, now, this is Saturday, and you can do nothing after three o'clock. Come and spend Sunday with me in the country. I want to show you my wife." " Your wife ! Are you married, Tom ? " " Married nearly a year," said he, with a smile. "You don't look very solemn over it." " Solemn ? It's the jolliest thing I ever did in my life. Meet me at the Eastern Depot at four o'clock, and I'll tell you all about it on the way down. We parted at the Winter street corner he to go to his store, and I to the Parker -House. " How handsome Boston has grown," said I, glancing at the fine buildings and the Common, beautiful in the September sun. " We think it a nice town," he replied, speaking with the moderate words and the perfect assurance of the Bostonian, to whom his city is the sum of all excellence and delight. " Remember, four o'clock." And he disappeared in the crowd. " Tom married ! " I said to myself, as I walked along. I dare say it is to his father's pretty ward, Clara Maitland, whom I saw when I spent the day there, eleven years ago. I remembered what long curls she had and how fond she seemed of him. " Yes, I dare say it's to Clara. I hope, though, she hasn't grown up into one of those delicate young ladies, good for noth- ing but to display the latest fashions and waltz a little and torture the piano. Better some rosy, sturdy German Gretchen than a poor doll like them. It would be a shame for Tom, with his splendid physique and vigorous brain, to be tied for life to such a woman ! " And then, turning down School street, my thoughts wandered off to a blue-eyed girl I had loved for many a year a girl who was not satisfied with the small triumphs of the croquet-ground, but who could send an arrow straight home to the mark ; and climb the hills with me, her step light and free as, {he deer's in th. BY EDNA DEAN PROCTOR. \Ql glade below ; and hold a steady oar in our boat on the river ; and swim ashore, if need should be ; and then, when walk or row was over, who could sit down to a lunch of cold meat and bread and butter with an appe- tite as keen as a young Indian's after a day's hunt ; yes, and who knew how to be efficient in the kitchen and the rarest ornament of the parlor. How impatient I was to see her, the bewitching maiden whom a prince might be proud to marry. And again I said to myself, as I went up the Parker House steps : " I do hope Tom hasn't made a fool of himself ! " Four o'clock found me at the station ; and a moment later in walked Tom, carrying a basket filled with Jersey peaches. " They don't grow in Greenland," said he, tucking the paper down over the fruit. " Come this way." I followed him, and we had just seated ourselves comfortably in the cars when the train moved off. " Now for the story, Tom, 1 ' said I, as we crossed the bridge and caught the breeze cool from the sea. " But I can guess beforehand the girl you married ; it was Clara Maitland." A shadow passed over Tom's face. " Clara has been dead four years," said he. " She inherited consumption from her mother. We did everything for her took her to Minnesota and Florida ; but it was no use. She didn't live to see her eighteenth birthday." " Poor Clara ! She loved you dearly. Then I sup- pose you chose some Boston girl of your acquaint- ance ? " , " Jack, you couldn't tell who Mrs. Tom Foster was if you should try from now till morning. I shall have to enlighten you." And, moving the basket to one side and settling himself in his seat, he went on: "You know I have the misfortune to bean only child. After I was twenty-one, father and mother began to talk about my marrying. I have plenty of cousins, you know, and we always had young ladies going in and out of the house ; but while Clara lived she was com- pany for me, and after she died I was full of business, and didn't trouble myself about matrimony. To tell the truth, Jack, I didn't fancy the girls. Perhaps I was unfortunate in my acquaintances ; but they seemed 102 TOM FOSTER'S WIFE. to me to be all curls and flounces and furbelows, and I would as soon have thought of marrying a fashion- plate as one of these elaborate creatures. I don't object to style ; I like it. But you can see fine gowns and bonnets any day in the Washington street windows, and my ideal of a woman was one whose dress is her least attraction." " Do you recollect father's former partner, Adam Lane ? He's a clever old gentleman and a millionaire, and father has the greatest liking and respect for him. He has two daughters one married years ago : and the other, much younger, father fixed upon as a desira- ble wife for me. I rather think the two families had talked it over together ; at any rate, Miss Matilda came to Greenland for a long summer visit. She is an amiable girl, but so petted and spoiled that she is food for nothing undeveloped in mind and body, he looked very gay in the evening, attired in Jordan, Marsh & Co. 's latest importations. But she was always late at breakfast ; she didn't dare to ride horseback ; she couldn't take a walk without stopping to rest on every stone ; and once, when I asked her if she had read the account of the battle of Sedan, she looked up, in her childish way, and said, 'No, Mr. Foster. News- papers are so tiresome.' Bless me ! what should 1 have done with such a baby ? " " A year ago this summer I was very much confined at the store ; and, when August came, instead of spend- ing the whole month at home, I thought I would have a little change, and so I went down for a fortnight to the Cliff house, on Beach. It's a quiet, pleasant resort, and you'll always find from fifty to one hundred people there during the season. The landlord is a good fellow, and a distant relative of mine. I thought he looked flurried when I went in, and after a few minutes he took me one side and said : " 'Tom, you've come at an unlucky time. I had a very good cook, that I got from Boston, at twenty dol- lars a week ; but she's a high-tempered woman. Last evening she quarrelled with her assistants, this morn- ing the breakfast was all in confusion, and now she's packing her trunk to leave by the next train. In two or three days I can probably get another one down in BY EDNA DEAN PROCTOR. 103 her place ; but what we're to do meanwhile I don't know.' " ' But, Norton,' said I, ' isn't there some one near by or in the house who can take it ? ' " ' I doubt it,' he replied. ' I've half a dozen girls from the vicinity doing upstairs work one of them from your town, the best waiter in the dining-room. But I suppose all of them would either be afraid of the responsibility or think it beneath them to turn cook ; though they would have plenty of help, and, earn twenty dollars where they now get three.' " ' Who's here from Greenland ? ' I asked, for I knew something of almost every one in the place. " ' Mary Lyford.' " ' Mary Lyford ? A black-eyed, light-footed girl, about twenty years old, with two brothers in Colorado and her father a farmer on toward Stratham ? ' " ' Yes, the very same.' " ' Why, she's the prettiest girl in Greenland, at least, I thought so two years ago, when I danced with her at the Thanksgiving party in the village ; and I heard last fall that she took the prize at the Manchester Fair for the best loaf of bread. But why is she here ? ' " ' Oh, you know farmers haven't much ready money, and I suppose she wanted to earn something for her- self, and to come to the Beach, like the rest of us. You say she took the premium for her bread. I believe I'll go into the dining-room and propose to give the cook's place to any one of the gins who would like it and who feels competent to take it. I must do something,' and, looking at his watch, he went out. " ' Ten minutes later he came back, clapping his hands, and exclaimed : " 'Mary Lyford says she'll try it.' " ' Hurrah for Greenland,' cried I. Isn't that plucky ? By Jove ! I hope she'll succeed, and I believe she will.' " ' You mustn't expect much to-day,' said Norton. ' Things are all topsy-turvy in the kitchen, and it'll take some time tc get them straightened out.' " Just then a new arrival claimed his attention, and with a serener face he turned away, " Dinner was poor that day, supper was little better, and, in spite of Norton's caution, I began to be afraid 104 TOM FOSTERS WIFE. that Greenland was going down. But the next morn- ing, what a breakfast we had juicy steaks, hot pota- toes, delicious rolls and corn-bread, griddle cakes that melted in your mouth, and coffee that had lost none of its aroma in the making. Thenceforth every meal was a triumph. The guests praised the table,' and hastened to their seats at the first sound of the bell. Norton was radiant with satisfaction, and I was pleased as if I had been landlord or cook myself. Several times I sent my compliments and congratulations to Mary ; but she was so constantly occupied that I never had a glimpse of her till the night before I was to leave. I was dancing in the parlor, and had just led a young lady of the Matilda Lane stamp to her mamma, when I saw Mary standing with the dining- room girls on the piazza. I went out, and, shaking her cordially by the hand, told her how interested I had been in her success, and how proud I was to find a Greenland girl so accomplished. She blushed, and thanked me, and said, in a modest way, that she was very glad if we were all suited ; and then Norton came up and expressed his entire gratification with what she had done. As she stood there in a white pique dress, with a scarlet bow at her throat, and her dark hair neatly arranged, she looked every inch a lady. " ' Do me the favor, Miss Lyford, said I, to dance the next cotillion with me.' " ' Ah ! Mr. Foster,' she replied, looking archly at Norton, ' that is'nt -expected of the help.' " ' The "help " ! I said, indignantly. You are queen of the establishment, and I invite you to dance, and so does Mr. Norton.' " ' Certainly, I do,' he answered. ' Go and show the company that you are at home in the parlor as well as the kitchen. 1 So, smiling and blushing, she took my arm. " ' Didn't we make a sensation when we went in ! Perhaps there was no fellow there with a better ' social position ' (you know the phrase) than I ; and I had been quite a favorite with the ladies. You should have seen them when we took our places on the floor! Some laughed, some frowned, some whispered to their neighbors ; but I paid not the slightest attention to it all, and Mary looked so pretty, and went through the B Y EDNA DEAN PROC TOR. 1 05 dance with such grace and dignity, that before it was over I believe all regarded her with admiration. I didn't wait for comments, but escorted her out as if she had been the belle of Boston.' " ' Good-night, Miss Lyford,' I said, when we reached the hall. ' I am going in the morning ; but I shall see you again when you get back to Greenland.' " ' Good-night, Mr. Foster,' she replied, ' I thank you for your kindness.' Then she added, laughing ; ' Have you any orders for breakfast ? ' " ' Why, yes, I should like to remember you by a plate of such muffins as we had yesterday.' " ' You shall have them, sir,' she said, as she dis- appeared in the doorway. And have them I did. " Three weeks later Mary came home to Greenland, with more than a hundred dollars in her purse and a fame that was worth thousands. I went to see her at her father's house. I found her in every way excel- lent and lovely ; and the end was that at Christmas we were married." " Glorious ! " I exclaimed. " Give me your hand, Tom ! I was afraid you had been taken in by some Matilda Lane." " Do you think I : m a fool ? " said he. Then I told him of my own choice, and I was still talking when the train stopped at the Greenland sta- tion. We soon arrived at his hospitable home. His wife was all he had pictured her; a refined, intelligent, handsome woman, who would develop and grow in attractiveness every year of her life. After a merry evening in their pleasant parlor, I went to bed, and dreamed that the millennium had come, and that all women were like my blue-eyed girl and Mrs. Tom Fos- ter. Fourth of July in Jonesville. BY MARIETTA HOLLEY. <~ "3*l_ ^^^ If MARIETTA HOLLEY. Miss HOLLEY commenced her career as a writer when in her teens, though she published nothing until 1876. When she was a young girl she was given to poetry, and wrote a great deal. She thought she should like to become a great painter; then she decided to be a poet, but finally abandoned both intentions to become " Josiah Allen's wife," and by so doing made herself famous. In the year 1876 appeared her first book, " Samantha at the Centennial," which at once pleased the popular taste and led her to follow it speedily with a second book, " My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's," which proved equally successful. Quaint, grotesque humor and pathetic homeliness of speech are the weapons she used to make known the wrongs of her sex and the evils of the times in which we are living. In her prose works she mostly employs the speech of half-taught people, pinning to paper their ludicrous blunders, and turns ridicule against ancient wrongs, venerated because they are ancient. Every one laughs at the absurdities of " Josiah Allen's Wife," and no one forgets the crushing exposures of fraud and oppres- sion which she makes. Says a writer in the Woman 's Journal: "Miss Holley has improved on the methods of Solomon's day, by robing wisdom in the garb of folly, and standing her in the market place thus disguised, so that when the multitudes flock about her and feast themselves with laughter, to those who would not otherwise hatken, suddenly 'Amid the market's din Comes the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within, They enslave their children's children who so make compromise with sin.' And those who come to smile remain to pray, while 8 "3 114 MARIETTA HOLLEY, those who expected a Bacchante, awe-struck, behold Minerva." Like Dickens, she brings to her aid the very people whose sufferings she aims to relieve, and whose evil deeds she hopes to check. She is not only quaint in expression but magnetic, and her sentiments are often touchingly and pathetically strong. " Samantha never went to school much, didn't know riothin' about gram- mar and never could spell," but she has in her pen the power of Ithuriel's spear, whose touch revealed the beauty which existed in everything. Miss Holley's latest prose work, " Sweet Cicely," was wrought out through her horror of intemperance and her desire to see the young of her country saved from the evils of strong drink. Her latest contribu- tion to literature is a book of poems, which reveal strength and tenderness, but have failed to suit the popular taste because they are wanting in the grotesque humor and pathetic homeliness of style, which charac- terizes her prose works. But they will stand the test of time, and be read when Samantha's trials at the Cen- tennial will have been forgotten. Miss Holley is a personality of whom all gracious and generous things may be said. She is a strong, loveable woman of high ideals and innocent, beautiful life, and is destined to be a blessing to her kind as long as she lives and long beyond her day. FOURTH OF JULY IN JONES- VILLE. A FEW days before the Fourth, Betsey Bobbet came into our house in the morning and says she, " Have you heard the news ? " " No," says I, pretty brief, " for I was jest puttin' in the ingrediences to a six quart pan loaf of fruit cake, and on them occasions I want my mind cool and un- ruffled." " Aspire Todd is goin' to deliver the oration," says she. " Aspire Todd ! Who's he ? " says I, cooly. "Josiah Allen's wife," says she, "Have you for- gotten the sweet poem that thrilled us so in the Jones- ville Gimlet a few weeks since ? " " I hain't been thrilled by no poem," says I, with an almost icy face pourin' in my melted butter. " Then it must be that you have never seen it. I have it in my port money and I will read it to you," say.s she, not heedin' the dark froun gatherin' on my eyebrow, and she began to read : A QUESTIONING SAIL SENT OVER THE MYSTIC SEA. BY PROF. ASPIRE TODD. So the majestic thunderbolt of feeling, Out of our inner lives our unseen beings flow Vague dreams revealing, Oh, is it so ? Alas! or no, How be it. Ah ! how so ? Is matter going to rule the deathless mind? What is the matter ? Is it indeed so ? Oh, truths combined ; Do the Magaloi theori still tower to and fro ? How do they move ? How flow? MS 1 1 6 FOUR TH OFJUL Y IN JONESVILLE. Monstrous, aeriform, phantoms sublime, Come leer at n e, and Cadmian teeth my soul gnaw, Through chiliasms of time; Transcendentally and remorslessly gnaw ; By what agency ? Is it a law ? Perish the vacueus in huge immensities ; Hurl the broad thunderbolt of lecling free, The vision dies ; So lulls the bellowing surf, upon the mystic sea, Is it indeed so ? Alas ! Oh me. " How this sweet poem appeals to tender hearts," says Betsey, as she concluded it. " How it appeals to tender heads," says I, almost coldly, measurin' out my cinnamon in a big spoon. "Josiah Allen's wife, has not your soul never sailed on that mystical sea he so sweetly depictures? " "Not an inch," says I, firmly, " not an inch." " Have you not never been haunted by sorrowful phantoms you would fain bury in oblivion's sea ? " " Not once," says I, " not a phantom," and says I, as I measured out my raisons and English currants, "if folks would work as I do, from mornin' till night and earn their honest bread by the sweat of their eye- brows, they wouldn't be tore so much by phantoms as they be ; it is your shiftless creeters that are always bein' gored by phantoms, and havin' 'em leer at 'em," says I with my spectacles bent keenly on her. " Why don't they leer at me,. Betsey Bobbet ? " " Because you are intellectually blind, you cannot see." " I see enough," says I, " I see more'n I want to a good deal of the time." In a dignified silence, I then chopped my raisons impressively, and 1 Betsey started for home. The celebration was held in Josiah's sugar bush, and I meant to be on the ground in good season, for when I have jobs I dread, I am for takin' 'em by the fore- lock and grapplin' with 'em at once. But as I was bakin' my last plum puddin' and chicken pie, the folks begun to stream by; I hadn't no idee there could be so many folks scairt up in Jonesville. I thought to my- self, I wonder if they'd flock out so to a prayer-meetin'. But they kep' a comin', all kind of folks, in all kinds of vehicles, from a six horse team, down to peacible B Y MISS MARIE TTA NOLLE Y. UJ lookin' men and wimmen drawin' baby wagons, with two babies in most of 'em. There was a stagin' built in most the middle of the grove for the leadin' men of Jonesville, and some board seats all round it for %e folks to set on. As Josiah owned the ground, he was invited to set upon the stagin'. And as I glanced up at that man every little while through the day, I thought proudly to myself, there may be nobler lookin' men there, and men that would weigh more by the steelyards, but their haint a whiter shirt bosom there than Josiah Allen's. When I got there the seats were full. Betsey Bob- bet was jest ahead of me, and says she : " Come on, Josiah Allen's wife, let us have a seat ; we can obtain one, if we push and scramble enough." As I looked upon her carryin' out her doctrine, pushin' and scrambling I thought to myself, if I didn't know to the contrary, I never should take you for a modest dignifier and retirer. And as I beheld her breathin' hard, and her elboes wildly wavin' in the air, pushin' in between native men of Jonesville and foreigners, I again methought, I don't believe you would be so sweaty and out of breath a votin' as you be now. And as I watched her labors and efforts I continued to methink sadly, how strange ! how strange ! that retirin' modesty and delicacy can stand so firm in some situations, and then be so quickly overthrowed in others seemin'ly not near so hard. Betsey finally got a seat, wedged in between a large healthy Irishman and a native constable, and she mo- tioned for me to come on, at the same time pokin' a respectable old gentleman in front of her, with her parasol, to make him move along. Says I : " I may as well die one way as another, as well expier a standin' up, as to tryin' to get a seat," and I quietly leaned up against a hemlock tree and composed myself for events. A man heard my words which I spoke about one-half to myself, and says he : " Take my seat, mum." Says I : " No, keep it." Says he : "I am jest comin' down with a fit, I have got to leave the ground instantly." Says I : "In them cases I will." So I sot. His 1 1 8 POUR TH OFJUL Y IN JONESVILLE. tongue seemed thick, and his breath smelt of brandy, but I make no insinuations. About noon, Prof. Aspire Todd walked slowly on to the ground, arm in arm with the editor of the Gimlet, old Mr. Bobbet follerin' him closely behind. Countin' two eyes to a person, and the exceptions are triflin', there was seven hundred and fifty or sixty eyes aimed at him as he walked through the crowd. He was dressed in a new shinin' suit of black, his complexion was deathly, his hair was jest turned from white, and was combed straight back from his forward and hung down long, over his coat collar. He had a big moustache, about the color of his hair, only bearin' a little more on the sandy, and a couple of pale blue eyes with a pair of spectacles over 'em. As he walked upon the stagin' behind the Editer of the Gimlet, the band struck up, " Hail to the chief, that in triumph advances. ' As soon as it stopped playin' the Editer of the Gimlet come forward and said : " Fellow citizens of Jonesville and the adjacent and surroundin' world, I have the honor and privilege of presenting to you the orator of the day, the noble and eloquent Prof. Aspire Todd, Esq." Professor Todd came forward and made a low bow. " Bretheren and sisters of Jonesville," says he ; "Friends and patrons of Liberty, in risin' upon this aeroter, I have signified by that act, a desire and a willingness to address you. I am not here, fellow and sister citizens, to outrage your feelings by triflin' remarks. I am not here, male patrons of liberty, to lead your noble, and you female patrons, your tender footsteps into the flowery fields of useless rhetorical eloquence ; I am here noble brothers and sisters of Jonesville not in a mephitical manner, and I trust not in a mentorial, but to present a few plain truths in a plain manner, for your consideration. My friends, we are in one sense but tennifolious blossoms of life ; or, if you will pardon the tergiversation, we are all but mineratin' tennirosters, hovering upon an illinition of mythoplasm." "Jes' so," cried old Bobbet, who was settin' on a bench right under the speaker's stand, with his fat red face lookin' up shinin' with pride and enthusiasm B Y A//SS MA KIE TTA HOL LEY. 119 (and the brandy he had took to honor the old Revolu- tionary heroes), "jes' so! so we be!" Professor Todd looked down on him in a troubled kind of a way for a minute, and then went on : " Noble inhabitants of Jonesville and the rural dis- tricts, we are actinolitic bein's ; each of our souls, like the acalphia, radiates a circle of prismatic tentacles, showing the divine irridescent essence of which com- posed are they." "Jes' so," shouted old Bobbet, louder than before. " Jes' so, so they did, I've always said so." "And if we are content to moulder out our existence, like fibrous, veticulated, polypus, clingin' to the crus- taceous courts of custom, if we cling not like soarin' prytanes to the phantoms that lower their sceptres down through the murky waves of retrogression, en- deavorin' to lure us upward in the scale of progressive bein', in what degree do we differ from the accol- phia? " "Jes' so," says old Bobbet, lookin' defiantly round on the audience. " There he has got you, how can they?" Professor Todd stopped again, looked doun on Bob- bet, and put his hand to his brow in a wild kind of a way, for a minute, and then went on. " Let us, noble brethren in the broad field of hu- manity, let us rise, let us prove that mind is superior 10 the acalphia." " Yes, less," says old Bobbet, " less prove our- selves." " Let us shame the actinia," said the Professor. "Yes, jes' so! " shouted old Bobbet, "less shame him ! " and in his enthusiasm he got up and hollered agin, " Less shame him." Professor Todd stopped stone still, his face red as blood, he drinked several swallows of water, and then he whispered a few words to the Editer of the Gimlet, who immediately came forward and said : " Although it is a scene of touchin' beauty, to see an old gentleman, and a bald-headed one, so in love with eloquence, and to give such remarkable proofs of it at his age, still as it is the request of my young friend, and I am proud to say, 'My young friend,' in regard to one gifted in so remarkable a degree, at his request 1 2O FOUR TH OFJUL Y IN JONES VILLE. I beg to be permitted to hint, that if the bald-headed old gentleman in the linen coat can conceal his admi- ration, and suppress his applause, he will confer a favor on my gifted young friend, and through him indirectly to Jonesville, to America, and the great cause of humanity, throughout the length and breadth of the country." Here he made a low bow and sot down. Professor Todd continued his piece without any more interrup- tion, till most the last, he wanted the public of Jones- ville to "droun black care in the deep waters of oblivion, mind not her mad throes of dissolvin' bein', but let the deep waters cover her black head, and march onward." Then the old gentleman forgot himself, and sprung up and hollered " Yes ! droun the black cat, hold her head under ! What if she is mad ! don't mind her screamin' ! there will be cats enough left in the world ! do as he tells you to ! less droun her ! " Professor Todd finished in a few words, and set down lookin' gloomy and morbid. The next speaker was a large, healthy lookin' man, who talked aginst wimmin's rights. He didn't bring up no new arguments, but talked as they all do who oppose 'em. About wimmin outragin' and destroyin' their modesty, by bein' in the same street with a man once every 'lection day. And he talked grand about how woman's weakness aroused all the shivelry and nobility of a man's nature, and how it was his dearest and most sacred privilege and happiness, to protect her from even a summer's breeze, if it dared to blow too hard on her beloved and delicate form. Why, before he got half through, a stranger from another world who had never seen a woman, wouldn't have had the least idee that they was made of clay as man was, but would have thought they was made of some thin gauze, liable at any minute to blow away, and that man's only employment was to stand and watch 'em, for fear some zephyr would get the advantage of 'em. He called wimmin every pretty name he could think of, and says he, wavin' his hands in the air in a rapped eloquence, and beatin' his breast in the same he cried, " Shall these weak, helpless angels, these sera- B Y MISS MA RIE TTA HOLLE Y. 121 phines, these sweet, delicate, cooin' doves whose only mission it is to sweetly coo these rainbows, these posys vote ? Never ! my brethren, never will we put such hardships upon 'em." As he sot down, he professed himself and all the rest of his sect ready to die at any time, and in any way wimmin should say, rather than they should vote, or have any other hardship. Betsey Bobbet wept aloud, she was so delighted with it. Jest as they con- cluded their frantic cheers over his speech, a thin, feeble lookin' woman come by where I stood, drawin' a large baby wagon with two children in it, seemingly a two-year-old, and a yearlin'. She also carried one in her arms who was lame. She looked so beat out and so ready to drop down, that I got up and gave her my seat, and says I : " You look ready to fall down." " Am I too late," says she, " to hear my husband's speech ? " " Is that your husband," says. I, " that is laughin* and talkin' with that pretty girl ? " " Yes," said she with a sort of troubled look. " Well, he jest finished." She looked ready to cry, and as I took the lame child from her breakin' arms, says I " This is too hard for you." " I wouldn't mind gettin' 'em on to the ground," says she, " I haint had only three miles to bring 'em ; that wouldn't be much if it wasn't for the work I had to do before I come." " What did you have to do ? " says I in pityin' accents. " Oh, I had to fix him off, brush his clothes and black his boots, and then I did up all my work, and then I had to go out and make six lengths of fence the cattle broke into the corn yesterday, and he was busy writin' his piece, and couldn't fix it and then I had to mend his coat," glancin' at a thick coat in the wagon. " He didn't know but he should want it to wear home. He knew he was goin' to make a great effort, and thought he should sweat some ; he is dread- ful easy to take eold," said she with a worried look. " Why didn't he help you along with the children ? " $aid I, in a indignant tone. 122 FOURTH OF JULY IN JONES VILLE. " Oh, he said he had to make a great exertion to-day, and he wanted to have his mind free and clear; he is one of the kind that can't have their minds tram- meled." " It would do him good to be trammeled hard ! " says I, lookin' darkly at him. ' Don't speak so of him," says she beseechingly. " Are you satisfied with his doin's ? " says I, lookin' keenly at her. " Oh yes," says she in a trustin' tone, liftin' her care-worn, weary countenance to mine, " Oh yes, you don't know how beautiful he can talk" I said no more, for it is a invincible rule of my life, not to make no disturbances in families. But I gave the yearlin' pretty near a pound of candy on the spot, and the glances I cast on him and the pretty girl he was a-flirtin' with, was cold enough to freeze 'em both into a male and female glazier. Lawyer Nugent now got up and said, " That whereas the speaking was foreclosed, or in other words finished, he motioned they should adjourn to the dinner table, as the fair committee had signified by a snowy signal that fluttered like a dove of promise above waves of emerald, or in plainer terms by a towel, that dinner was forthcoming ; whereas he motioned they should adjourn sine die to the aforesaid table." Old Mr. Bobbet, and the Editer of the Gimlet seconded the motion at the same time. And Shake- speare Bobbet wantin' to do somethin' in a public way, got up and motioned " that they proceed to the table on the usial road," but there wasn't any other way only to wade the creek that didn't seem to be nec- essary, but nobody took no notice of it, so it was jest as well. The dinner was good, but there was an awful crowd round the tables, and I was glad I wore my old lawn dress, for the children was thick, and so was bread and butter, and sass of all kinds, and jell tarts. And I hain't no shirk; I jess plunged right into the heat of the battle, as you may say, waitin' on the children, and the spots on my dress skirt would have been too much for any body that couldn't count forty. To say noth- in' about old Mr. Peedick steppin' through the back breadth, and Betsey Bobbet ketchin' holt of me and BY AfISS MARIETTA HOLLEY. 12$ rippin' it off the waist as much as half a yard. And then a horse started up behind the widder Tubbs, as I was bendin' down in front of her to get somethin' out of a basket, and she weighin' above 200, was precipi- tated onto my straw bonnet, jammin' it down almost as flat as it was before it was braided. I came off pretty well in other respects, only about two yards of the rufflin' of my black silk cape was tore by two boys who got to fightin' behind me, and bein' blind with rage tore it off, thinkin' they had got holt of each other's hair. There was a considerable number of toasts drank ; I can't remember all of 'em, but among 'em was these, " The eagle of Liberty ; May her quills lengthen till the proud shadow of her wings shall sweetly rest on every land." "The Fourth of July; the star which our old four fathers tore from the ferocious mane of the howling lion of England, and set in the calm and majestic brow of E. pluribus nnnum. May it gleam wilh brighter and brighter radience, till the lion shall hide his dazzled eyes, and cower like a stricken lamb at the feet of E. pluribus" " Dr. Bombus, our respected citizen ; how he tenderly ushers us into a world of trial, and profes- sionally and scientifically assists us out of it. May his troubles be as small as his morphine powders, and the circle of his joys as well rounded as his pills." " The press of Jonesville, the Gimlet, and the Augur ; May they perforate the crust of ignorance with a gigan- tic hole, through which blushing civilization can sweet- ly peer into futurity." " The fair sect : first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of their countrymen. May them that love the aforesaid, flourish like a green bayberry tree, whereas may them that hate them, dwindle down as near to nothin' as the bonnets of the aforesaid." That piece of toast was Lawyer Nugent's. Prof. Aspire Todd's was the last. " The Luminous Lamp of Progression, whose scia- therical shadows falling upon earthly matter, not promoting sciolism, or Siccity ; may it illumine human- ity as it tardigradely floats from matter's aquius wastes, to minds majestic and apyrous climes." Shakespeare Bobbet then rose up, and says he: " Before we leave this joyous grove I have a poem 1 24 FOURTH OFJUL Y IN JONESVILLE. which I was requested to read to you. It is dedicated to the Goddess of Liberty, and was transposed by an- other female, who modestly desires her name not to be mentioned any further than the initials B. B." He then read the follerin' spirited lines : Before all causes East or West, I love the Liberty cause the best, I love its cheerful greetings ; No joys on earth can e'er be found, Like those pure pleasures that abound, At Jonesville Liberty meetings. To all the world I give my hand, My heart is with that noble band, The Jonesville Liberty brothers ; May every land preserved be, Each climed that dates on Liberty Jonesville before all others. The picknick never broke up till most night. I went home a little while before it broke, and if there was a beat out creeter, I was ; I jest dropped my delapidated form into a rockin' chair with a red cushion and says I, "Then needn't be another word said; I will never go to another Fourth as long as my name is Josiah Allen's wife." " You hain't patriotic enough, Semantha," says Josiah; "you don't love your country." "What good has it done the nation to have me all tore to pieces ? " says I. " Look at my dress, look at my bonnet and cape ! Any one ought to be a ironclad to stand it ! Look at my dishes ! " says I. "I guess the old heroes of the Revolution went through more than that, " says Josiah. " Well, I hain't a old hero ! " says I coolly. " Well, you can honor 'em, can't you ? " " Honor 'em ! Josiah Allen, what good has it done old Mr. Lafayette to have my newearthern pie plates smashed to bits, and a couple of tines broke off of one of my best forks ? What good has it done to old Thomas Jefferson, to have my lawn dress tore off me by Betsey Bobbet ? What benefit has it been to John Adams, or Isaac Putnam, to have old Peedick step through it ? What honor has it been to George Wash- ington to have my straw bonnet flatted down tight to B Y MISS MA RIE TTA HOLLE Y. 12$ my head ? I am sick of this talk abaut honorin', and liberty and duty, I am sick of it," says I ; "Folks will make a pack-horse of duty, and ride it to circus'es and bull rights, if we had 'em. You may talk about honor- in' the old heroes and goin' through all these perform- ances to please 'em. But if they are in Heaven they can get along with heerin' the Jonesville brass band, and if they haint, they are probably where fireworks haint much of a rari'ty to 'em. Josiah quailed before my lofty tone and I relapsed into a weary and delapidated silence. ft* c NORA PERRY. SOMETIME in the " seventies " there appeared in the Boston and other papers, printed, reprinted, copied one from the other, a charming, touching little poem called " After the Ball." Ever since its first appearance in its fugitive state, the name of Nora Perry has been a loved and familiar one to all persons, men or women, possessing any feeling or imagination. This poem which was some times printed under the title of " Madge and Maud " was afterwards incorporated in a book with other poems, published in Boston in 1874, but the many sweet verses that Nora Perry has written since that lime, have never blotted out from the memory of her readers that lovely picture of the two maidens, who, " Sat and combed their beautiful hair After the revel was don 1 ;." Nora Perry was born in Massachusetts in 1841, but the family early removed to Providence, in Rhode Island. Her father was a merchant in good standing and repute, and his daughter received her education chiefly at home and in private schools. When about eighteen Nora commenced writing for the magazines, her first serial story being " Rosiland Newcomb," which was published in Harpers 1859-60. Much of her time in later years was spent in Boston, whence she wrote society letters for the Chicago Tribune, and also became Boston correspondent to the most influen- tial paper in Rhode Island, the Providence Journal. At intervals she was in the habit of collecting her maga- zine contributions and issuing them in book form, dainty little volumes, such as are often classed as " summer reading ." In this shape appeared in 1880 " The Tragedy of the Unexpected and Other Stories," which by the way is no tragedy at all, but a pleasant 133 134 NORA PERKY. little summer idyl. In 1881 followed a "Book of Love Stories," the very title of which endeared it to all the youthful devourers of " something new " not requir- ing too much thought. In 1885 we have from her pen the interesting novelette " For a Woman " ; in 1886 a volume of "New Songs and Ballads " ; and so late as 1887 "A Flock of Girls. '' In her last volume of poems, there are several of as high literary merit as that to which we have referred and which has so per- sistently clung in the memories of her readers "After the Ball," but none we think which holds the sympathies so completely. Among the best may be noted " Her Lover's Friend," "Lady Wentworth," and a piece of fine imagination entitled " The Maid of Honor." To most readers we think Nora Perry offers a refreshing peculiarity in her prose writings, that of abstaining from any obvious moral purpose in her stories ; not but that such moral uses may be drawn from them by the rigid utilitarians, who are never satis- fied with a book or any object merely for its pleasant interest or its beauty, if they cannot extract some wise maxim of life or practical use for it, Nora Perry we believe has never written a line which the most super-critical prude might not approve, but it is a relief now and then to read a story, simply for the story's sake, without having its wisdom-lesson thrust upon one in every paragraph, or peeping up between the lines, compelling one to recognize the presence of a mentor, when one seeks only recreation, beauty and refreshment for the weary mind, jaded with study, or the digestion of overmuch ethics. DOROTHY. DOROTHY was going to her first party. She wa& dressed in a fine white wrought muslin, which had rather a short, scant skirt, with a little three-inch ruffle round the bottom. It had also a short waist antt short, puffy sleeves, with frills of lace that fell softly against the young, girlish arms with a very pretty effect. About the waist a sash of rose-colored lute- string was tied in a great bow. The fringed ends fell almost to the hem of the three-inch ruffle, and seemed to point to the white kid slippers, with their diamond buckles, that were plainly visible beneath the short skirt. Dorothy was ready a full half-hour belore it was time to go, so that she had ample opportunity after her mother and Phoebe the little m?ld had left her, fora good many last finishing touches and final glances at herself; and you may be sure she was no more sparing of these than any other young girl of seventeen, dressed for her first party. As she stands before the glass, giving her long mitts an extra pull, or settling the rebellious curls above her forehead, or patting the sleeve puffs carefully, she makes a very pretty picture a pretty picture and a quaint one, for the costume is of the Revolutionary period. As I set her thus before you, you think you are legarding a young girl of to-day perhaps, decked out for some fancy dress party in this old-time dress, but Dorothy belongs to the time of her dress. She is, or was, the daughter of Mr. Richard Merri- dew, of Boston, a gentleman, who, from the first, had ranged himself with those who protested against the exactions of the British crown. A gentleman of fortune, his acquaintance was largely with the aris- tocracy of the country, who were mostly, if not all, 136 DOROTHY. Tories. Dorothy's natural associates, therefore, were the sons and daughters of these Tories. But visiting was not a free-and-easy matter with young people of her class, as it is now ; and brought up carefully at home, under private instruction, she had no opportunities for school intimacies. The company she had seen the most of up to this time had been her father's and mother's friends. Now and then they brought with them on their visits some one of the younger members of their families, and thus had sprung up an acquaintance which, while it formed an agreeable variety in Dorothy's life, was not of the in- timate and confidential kind that exists between young girls of this day. Indeed, intimacies of that kind would have been thought forward and improper, and would scarcely have been permitted. During the last year or two before Dorothy's seven- teenth birthday, there had been little tea-party civilities exchanged between the young people, and if you could have looked in upon these parties, you would have seen a picture for all the world exactly like that quaint picture that Kate Greenaway has in her pretty book, " Under the Window," where Phillis and Belinda are sitting in a garden before a small tea-table ; charming little maids in their straight, scant dresses and long sashes and black net mitts. But these were only mild, little-girl affairs, of the afternoon, and not a fine gather- ing of youths and maidens, as was this affair for which the seventeen-year-old Dorothy was prinking before the glass. She had given, perhaps, the fortieth pinch and pat to the little tendril curls over her forehead, when her father's voice called from below, " Dorothy ! Dorothy ! " She caught up her gay silk fan, tipped splendidly with peacock eyes, flung her red merino cloak, with its caleche hood, over her arm, and went running down the stairs, her little heels click- clacking as she went. "Here I am, father! Has Thomas brought the chaise round ? " she cried, as she met her father at the door of the sitting-roona. " Oh, there's no hurry. I only wanted to see my fine bird in her new feathers, and I thought by what her mother had just been telling me, that she had been B Y NORA PE-RR Y. 137 preening and pruning these feathers quite long enough." Dorothy blushed beneath the half-amused, half- satirical glance that her father bestowed upon her. As she crossed the floor, the autumn wind that united with the little blaze upon the hearth to make a draught, seized upon her long sash-ends and blew them out like a train. " Ah, she's quite a bird of Paradise ! or," catching sight of the peacock tips, " perhaps we might get nearer to the truth if we got nearer to the earth." Just then, on the box-bordered garden path fronting the window, a magnificent specimen of a peacock spread its splendid court train, and at the same mo- ment uttered the harsh, discordant cry for which it is noted. Mr. Merridew gave a little mocking laugh. "There, my dear, you see the Prince you named your pet rightly applauds and welcomes you as one of its kind. You are going into the company of those who prefer just such princes, with their shows and noise ; but I hope my Dorothy by this time has learned to know the truth and the right ; to know that kings and princes and their followers are not always as fine as they seem outside." Dorothy knew quite well what her father meant. She had not listened to the earnest conversations between him and his friends from time to time without gathering in their spirit, and becoming herself more or less influenced. Mr. Merridew was an ardent believer in the rights of men, and the justice of the colonists' protest against the crown's renewed taxation. She had heard the whole discussed again and again, and again and again had been thrilled with her father's eloquent, im- passioned words, as he had laid the case before some wavering neighbor. She knew that if it came to the point of sacrifice, he was willing to give his fortune and risk his life for his principles. Only a week ago, when this invitation had come for her to attend this fete on the birthday of Mr. Robert Jennifer's eldest daughter, she had heard a conversa- tion between her father and mother that had made an ineffaceable impression upon her mind ; and this con- 138 -DOROTHY. versation was now brought forward again, as her father turned and said to his wife "I feel like half a traitor to my beliefs, Miriam, as I see our girl decked out like this, and on her way to those king-loving Jennifers. I didn't like it from the first. I wish I had not given my consent, for at the best it is inconsistent with my principles." " If Dorothy were a son, a young man, it would be different ; but she is a girl, a mere child, and I think, as I said in the beginning, that it would be very unfriendly and unneighborly to keep her from this visit," responded Mrs. Merridew. "If Dorothy were a son, it would be different in- deed. A son, I hope, would be pondering things of more moment than this gay show at this time ; and in- stead of making a display of these fine diamonds, would be storing them away as a fund to be used at the country's need." "Richard, I think you lay too much stress upon these trifles. Dorothy is young, a child; she should be allowed to have a little girlish enjoyment. It chances, from our condition in life, that her acquaint- ance is with those that you term king-loving folks largely, like the Jennifers. We could not very well call in the people, the tradefolks, and tell her to make friends with them at a minute's warning," cried Mis- tress Merridew, with a little curl of her lip. She could be satirical as well as her husband. " Well, well, let the child have her pleasure. Per- haps I am too severe a judge in these matters. But, Dorothy, don't let these king-loving folk make you dis- loyal to the cause of liberty and justice." " Never fear, father," answered Dorothy, laughing brightly. "No king-loving folks could make me dis- loyal." " You talk as if she were going into a company of graybeards, Richard ! " exclaimed Mrs. Merridew. " As if these children would talk of such subjects on such a merry occasion ! But here comes Thomas with the chaise, Dorothy. Now be a good girl, and re- member when you take your cloak off to let the serving- maid see to it that your' sleeve-puffs are well pulled out and your hair in neat order." The sounds of the harp and viol proclaimed that the BY NORA PERRY. 139 dancers were in full swing when Dorothy alighted at the Jennifers' door, and a little feeling of perturbation seized her, as she discovered that, after all her ex- pedition in dressing, she was a little late. But a cor- dial greeting from her hostess, and a pleasant and ad- miring nod here and there from one and another of the guests, soon relieved this perturbation, and very soon she found herself tripping the light, or stately, measures with the best of them. "Children, indeed!" she thought .as she looked about her. Here was young Mr. Carroll Jennifer and his brother Mark, and Mr. Robertson, and the Langton cousins, quite young gentlemen, with their lace frills and satin waistcoats, and costly chains and seals hang- ing therefrom. And Cynthia Jennifer, with her pow- dered hair and fine brocade gown, looked like a stately young woman who had seen the world. In those days dancing was not the only amusement that young people indulged in at an evening party. Frolicsome games were greatly the fashion, and after a contra-dance, little Betty Jennifer proposed that they should play " King George's troops." This was rather childish, and there was a little prim demurring on the part of stately Miss Cynthia, but the stiff starch of grown-up manners had begun to be a good deal shaken out of these young people by this time, with the pow- der in their hair, and there was such a merry second- ing of Betty's proposition that Miss Cynthia relented., not without secret satisfaction. Do young people still play this game, I wonder ? It is a pretty game, with its procession that passes along under the arch of two of the company's clasped and lifted hands,_ these two singing, " Open the gates as high as the sky, To let King George's troops pass by." There is a forfeit to pay by those whom the keepers of the gate succeed in catching with a sudden down- ward swoop of the hands as they pass under, and great amusement ensues when some captive is set to perform- ing some droll penance or ridiculous task. Dorothy had played the game hundreds of times, and was very expert in evading and eluding the most I4