THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT OF Mrs. Hugh G. Dick TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN: THE POSSIBLE REFORMATION, Jn Ctoo Parts. BY COL. FREDERIC INGHAM. BOSTON: LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. 1904. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by ROBERTS BROTHERS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. Copyright, 1S83, BY ROBERTS BROTHERS. UNIVERSITY PRESS: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. PREFACE. nPHIS little book would never have been writ ten, I suppose, but for the persuasion of my kind friend, the late Dr. WAYLAND, the Presi dent of Brown University. It is nearly fifteen years ago that I told him the plan of this story, if it may be called a story, expressing the wish that some of the masters would undertake to illustrate the lessons involved in it. Every one who knew him and how many there are who knew him enough to love him ! will remember how practical and how personal was every notion of the religious life, of Christian labor, and of missionary triumph, in his mind. What he thought the practical and personal character of my little sketch pleased him ; and he was kind enough to urge me once and again to enlarge it, and to print it. I think it is because he wished it, that I have tried to do so. 5000895 VI PREFACE. There are hundreds of people who know that the character of HARRY WADSWORTH and his unselfish influence are studied from the life T dedicate the book to those who knew him and loved him. EDWARD E. HALE. BOOTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, BOSTON, Sept. 17, 1870- CONTENTS. Jirst Part. THE STORY. CHAP. PAGE I. WHAT BEGAN IT 9 II. THREE YEARS AFTER 28 III. TEN TIMES A HUNDRED 46 IV. TEN TIMES A THOUSAND 78 V. EUROPE, ASIA, AFRICA, AND THE ISLES OF THE OCEAN 90 VI. TEN TIMES A HUNDRED THOUSAND ... 97 VII. THE CoNFERENZ AT CHRISTMAS ISLAND . 109 VIII. TEN TIMES TEN MILLION 118 IX. A THOUSAND MILLION . 130 Seconti Part. HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. NEITHER SCRIP NOR MONEY 157 STAND AND WAIT 203 HARRY WADSWORTH HELPERS 252 LOOK-UP LEGION 255 WELCOME AND CORRESPONDENCE CLUBS . . . 257 PIONEER LEGION WORK 259 A GIRLS' LEGION 260 FIRST PART. THE STORY. I TEN TIMES ONE IS TttJN. CHAPTER L WHAT BEGAN IT. [A talk in Calabria, after dress parade.] SUPPOSE it was the strangest Club that ever came into being. There were these ten members I tell you ol. And they have never met but this once, nor do I believe they will ever meet again. They met in the railroad station at North Colchester, waiting for the express train. The express train, if you happen to remember that particular afternoon and evening, was five hours and twenty minutes behind time. They knew it was behind time, but they had nowhere else to go, and it was then and there that the Chit was formed. For they had all come together at Harrj Wadsworth's funeral. The most manly ano most womanly fellow he, whom I ever knew 10 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. the merriest and the freshest, and the bravest and the wisest; the most sympathizing when people were sorry, and the most sympathizing when they were glad. Thunder ! If I were at home, and could just show you three or four of Harry's yellow letters that lie there, then you wou d know something about him. Simply, he was the most spirited man who ever stumbled over me ; he was possessed, and possessed with a true spirit, that was what he was; and so he had guns enough, and more than guns enough, for any emergency. And Harry Wadsworth had died. And from north, and east, and south, we ten there had come to the funeral. And we were waiting for the train, as I said ; and that is the way the Club was born. Then and there it had its first meet ing, and, as I say, its last, most likely. Bridget Corcoran may strictly be called the founder of the Club, unless dear Harry himself was. For Bridget Corcoran was the first person that Baid any thing. I never can sit still very long at a time at such places. And I had sat in my chair by that overfilled stove, in that stifling room, as long as I could stand it, and a good WHAT BEGAN IT. 11 deal longer, none of us saying any thing. Then 1 had gone out and walked the platform, brood ing, till it seemed to me that any thing was bet ter than walking the platform. Then I went in again to find the air just as dead and stived and insupportable as it was before. And this time I left the door open and walked across to the back window, which looked on a different wood pile from the wood-pile the front window looked upon. I need not say that the only variety in our prospects was in our choice of wood-piles ; but we could look at the ends of sticks, or at the sides of them, as we preferred. I walked to the back window, and began look ing at the back wood-pile. " You knew Mr. Wadsworth ? " said Bridget Corcoran, timidly. And it was a comfort to me. " Knew him ! " said I ; " I did not know any body else ! " " I like to tell you about him then," said she, with her pleasant Irish accent. " I like to teL every one about him. For, save for him, I do not know where I should be this day; and I do know where my boy Will would be." 12 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN " How is that ?" I asked, roused up a little by her sympathy. " Will, sir, would be in the State's Prison save for him you carried to the grave this day ; ana for me, I think I should have died of a broken heart. You know, your reverence, that in the charge of the freight station, when he was first appointed here, it was for him to say who should have the chips, and who should not have them. And he was so good as he always was as to give me the second right in the wood-yard ; Mary Morris always having the first, because her husband, who is now switch-tender, lost his arm in the great smash-up come Michaelmas five years gone by. He gave me the second right, I say; and though I say it who should not, I never abused my privilege, and he knew 1 never did, your reverence, as how could I, when he was always so kind, and often called me into his office, and always spoke to me as kindly as if I was a born lady, as indeed he was a born gentleman." Ah me! if I only could go on and tell Bridget's story as she told it herself, with the thousand pretty praises of dear Harry, you WHAT BEGAN IT. 13 would better understand what manner of man he was, and how the Club was born. But there is no time for that, and this was the story shortly Harry saw one day that her eyes were red, as she passed him, and he would not rest till he had called her into the office and found why ; and the why was, that her boy Will had " hooked jack," as the youngster said, had played tru ant, and had done it now for many weeks in order, and had done it with the Tidd boys, and the Donegans (sons of perdition as they always seemed), and nothing Bridget could say or do would put Will in any better way. Then was it that Harry sent for the little rascal, " talked to him," she said ; but I knew Harry well enough to know what the talking was. He tcok the boy up country with him one day, when he was making a contract for some wood. Ii" stopped a& they came back, at a trout stream, and bade tht- little scamp try some of the best hooks from hie book. He sent him home, after such a glimpse of a decent boy's pleasures, as nobody ever had shown poor Will before. He sent for him the next day, and told him he wanted him in the office. He dressed the child in new clothes 14 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. from head to foot. He made him respect him self, in forty ways you or I would never have thought of. Before three weeks were gone, Will was as lamed of his bad handwriting. Before four weeks were gone, he was ashamed of his old company; in a fortnight more, he was the steadiest scholar in the " Commercial College " of the place. Before three months were over, he came to Harry with some lame duck of a Tidd boy whom he had lured out of some quag mire or other. And the upshot of it was, that at this moment Will was as decent a boy as there was in the county ; while, but for Harry, he had as fair chance as any of them to be hanged. That, severely condensed, was Bridget Cor coran's story. Now, I have no idea of telling how Harry had come to be the star of my worship, worship which was not idolatry. Talking here at the head of the regiment, how do I know who might overhear me, and this is no story to get into the newspapers. But, while I was reflect ing that Harry had rescued poor Will from one set of devils, and me from devils of quite WHAT BEGAN IT. 15 anotner color, Caroline Leslie looked up. She had joined Bridget and me by the window. " Do you mean the Caroline Leslie that gives the bird the lump of sugar in Chalon's picture ? " " Why, yes ! that same Caroline. Leslie. Did you know her ? " She looked up. She thankee Bridget very cordially. " I thank you ever sc much for telling me that. It has comforted me more than any thing to-day. Will you not come and see me sometime in Worcester ? Yon will find me in 907, Summer "Street. Let me write it down for you." So Bridget was pleased. And then Caroline got up and asked me to walk, and took my arm, and we walked the platform together; and she told me what Harry had been to her. How, only three yeara before, when he first came to Colchester, or to that village, how her brother Edward brought him home, and made her mother say he might board there. How her mother said it was im possible, but consented the moment she saw Hany, when he only came in to tea. He v she, Caroline, was a goose and a fool, and a dolt and good-for-nothing, when he moved into that aouse. And how the mere presence of that 16 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. man in that family or was it his booss, 01 was it the people that came to see him ? pad changed the whole direction of her life, as aii arrow's direction is changed when it glances on the side of a temple. Now, Caroline Leslit was no more in love with Harry than you are Pretty girl, she had her own lover, and I T uiew she had. And he, far away across the sea, would shed tears as bitter as hers of that day, when he knew he was never to see Harry's face again. But we were only three of the Club Caro line, Bridget, and I. Count Will Corcoran for four if you like. If you count him, the Club is eleven. But what I tell you will give you an idea. For as soon as we got talking, the bakers and the baked by the stove got talking; all telling much the same kind of story, how dear Harry had been a new life to them. Widdifield, who you would have said had no sentiment, quio* Mrs. Emerson, Mary Merriam, and her brolhei John, and even Will Morton. I must not try to tell the storit 5, though I could, every one. We all drew toge' ^>er at last, when something Mor WHAT BEGAN IT. 17 ton said drew out George Button to " state hia experience." " Wadsworth and I," said he, " went out in one of those first California colonies, when the mutual system was tried in all sorts of ways, and people thought the kingdom of heaven waa coming because they all put two hundred dollars apiece into a joint-stock company. On the voy age I did not see him much, and I know I did not like him. How strange that seems now! For there was no reason under heaven why I should not have found him out at the very first moment ; and now it seems as if I lost so much in losing all the chance of those five months. Well, I lost it for better or worse. We came to California, and the colony all broke up into forty thousand pieces. Little enough sticking by each other there! Each man for himself; and, as always happens on that theory, the devil for us all, with a vengeance! " I roughed through every thing. Got a Jttle dust now and then, and spent it a great deal faster than I got it. I have paid one hundred and eighty-six dollars in gold for a pair of miner's boots, and they were good boots, ~whe* 1 91 18 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. had not a rag beside to put upon my feet, ~l last I thought my lucky time had come. We were up in what they then called the Cotton- wood Reach, and a very good company of ua had struck some very decent diggings, and had laid off our claims with something like precision, and order, and decency. Wadsworth, as I hap pened to know, was with some men who had got hold of a water-privilege three or four miles above us. Some of our men had been up to see about buying some water from him, and said he was quite a king in that country. But I had not seen him. " Then there came in on us, just as we got well established, a lot of roughs, blacklegs and rowdies, of every nation and color under heaven. They wanted our claims ; we all knew that well enough. And they hung round, as such d :vils as they will, trying all sorts of ways to g<;t a corner of the wedge in. We were a pretty decent set; and none of our boys really liked them, but we were as civil as we couk 1 be. Some of the fellows were fools enough to lose dust to them, and I never heard that any of them won any. They pretended to stake off some WHAT BEGAN IT. 19 claims of their own, but they never worked an)' of any account. They drank their whiskey, and put up tents and shanties for gambling; and swaggered round among the rest of us, and said they knew better ways for washing than we did ; and so on. All the time we all knew that something was brewing, while they were about. And sure enough, at last it came. " Watrous and Flanegan, who were a sort ol selectmen to ua, had to go down to Agnes City with some gold, and to buy some pork. And they took with them two or three of the best fellows we had. Watrous came to me the last thing, and said, ' Don't you get into a quarrel with these greasers,' for he knew I hated them, But, Mr. Ingham, a saint in heaven would have quarrelled with those men. It all began about a shovel. One of these blackguards came up to me to borrow a shovel, and I let him have it. Then he came back for another, and I let him have that. Then came up three of them and wanted three shovels ; and, to make a long story short, we came to words they and I. They had come up for a fight; and they got it. At ast, one of the most noisy of them, to give 20 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. him his due, he was half drunk, drew hi* revolver and snapped it at me. Lucky for me it missed fire, and in very short metre I hit him over the head with the crow-bar I was using, O, what a howl they made! They dashed at me, and I ran. The first of them tripped and fell ; which stopped the others a half second. And then the whole tribe of them, who had been watching the affair, came running after me, yelling and howling like so many wolves." By this time, as I said, Dutton had the whole group in the station round him. " Did you ever run for your life ? " said he, with a funny twinkle of the eye. " I tell you, - that to put in the best stride you know, and to clear every log, and take no help at any ditch, but just to run, run, run, run, half a mile, three quarters, and a mile, to feel your heart up in your throat, your lungs pumping, and pumping nothing, while you just run, mn, run, and know that one false step ii death ; I tell you that is what a man remem bers. That was the way I ran. I dared not look back . knew 1 was well ahead of all but one man But T could hear his steady step WHAT BEGAN IT. 21 step, step, step, just in the time of mine, Was he taller than I, or shorter ? I dared noi look round and see. But I knew his stride depended on that. He was gaining nothing oi> me in time; was he gaining in length of pace? " Where was I running to ? Why, to our poor little shanty, where I had left George Orcutt lame in bed. What safety would that bo ? These devils could tear it down in thirty seconds. I did not know, but I ran ! " I ran with the one man close behind, and the others yelling farther back. He did not yell. He saved his breath for running. But he did not catch me. I flung the door open. I crowd ed down the latch. I stuck a domino from the table in between the latch and the latch-guard, and with this as my poor fortress, I flung myself on the floor. The man dashed up after me, but did not so much as try the door! - An instant showed why ; for in ten seconds *he wolves, as they seemed, were howling round him. Then the man, whoever he was, said, ' The first man that steps on this plank is a dead man ! There's been enough of this bullying ' Dirty Dick, take care you are not seen again i 22 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. this county. I give you six hours to be gone Chip and Leathers, you had best go with hirn^ or without him. Your room is better than your company. I will have the sheriff here by night, and we will see what sort of men are going to jump claims on this creek. You fellow with the red beard, who ran away from Angeles, there's a warrant out against you. Understand all of you, that this game is played about through.' "Who was this celestial visitant? Orcutt and I listened in amazement. Was this the way Raphael addressed' the rebellious spirits when Milton was not at hand ? Any way, they answered much as the rebellious spirits would have done. Some swore, some laughed, other some, on the outside, turned round and vamosed. So Orcutt told me, whose eye was at a knot hole. The celestial visitant said not a word more. But in five minutes the whole crew of them was gone. " Then I unlatched the door. Raphael came in, and was Harry Wadsworth ! Yes : that light, frail fellow, whom we carried so easily to-day, was the man who looked those beggars iu the eye that day, and saved my life for me ! WHAT BEGAN IT. 23 " That was the beginning with me, and there are few things he and I have not done together since that. We have slept under the same blanket, and starved on the same trail. And if any man ever taught me any thing, that dear fellow taught me all of life I know that is worth knowing." These were the sort of stones we got telling in the station-house, and it was out of such talk that the project of the Club grew. We had not known each other before, but here was one tie we all had together. Could we not then recog nize it, by some sort of gathering or correspond ence, or union? Natural enough to propose, but you see, of course, what followed. First, Widdifield as good a fellow as lives, but set, or as the vernacular says, " sot," in his way- liked the idea of a Club very much; but thought we must appoint a committee to draw up some little mutual covenant or expression of principles which all the members would willingly agree to. " Something, you know, to give us a little substance." Will Morton did not care BO much for any statement of principles, but 24 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. thought there had better be a constitution made. If he had not changed his coat, he should have had in his pocket the constitution of the Philire- ncan, which would perhaps have served as a gocd model. Mary Merriam did not care about any constitution, but thought the society ought to have a name that everybody would under stand. Poor Bridget Corcoran did not take in much of all this, but hated clubs. The Sham rock Club, that her husband had belonged to had worked all his woe. So one thought this and another said that, and the thing happened which, so far as I know, always happens, even when ten of the simplest minded people in the world meet together with any common purpose There has to be a certain fixed amount of talk, what Haliburton calls the " talkee-talkee stage." It corresponds to the fizz of common air when you open a gas-pipe for the first time. It blows out your match, and you have to wait csome little while before any thing arrives that will burn. One of the Wise Men of the East was it Louis Agassiz ? said, when he first came here, that one of the ama/ing things which he found WHAT BEGAN IT. 25 in America was, that no set of men could get together to do any thing, though there were but five of them, unless they first " drew up a con stitution." If ten men of botany met in a hotel in Switzerland to hear a paper on the habits of Tellia Guilielmensis, they sat down and heard it. But if nme men of botany here meet to hear a paper read on Shermania Rogeriana, they have to spend the first day, first in a tempo rary organization, then in appointing a committee to draw a constitution, then in correcting the draft made by them, then in appointing a com mittee to nominate officers, and then in choosing a president, vice-president, two secretaries, and a treasurer. This takes all the first day. If any of these people are fools enough, or wise enough (" persistent " is the modern word), to come a second time, all will be well, and they will hear about the Shermania. This was the little delay which killed oui little Club at the moment of its birth, if, indeed. it were killed or were born. With regard to that there is a doubt, as you fellows will find out if we should ever get back to this story again. 26 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. [At this point, however, the Quarter Master who had been dying to say something, interrupted Ingham to say it would have been better if the Club had had something to eat, as the organ ization went forward ; and on that, that profane Dalrymple said, " Better something to drink." But Ingham placidly explained that there had never been any thing at the station but dough nuts, and those somewhat tough and musty, and that these had all been eaten by members who had no dinner; that for supper there was nothing left but lozenges, of which the supply was unlimited, but of which man's power of consumption is of nature small.] So we spent the rest of our five hours discuss ing the covenant, the name, and the constitution of our little society, and when at last we neard the scream of the express, and saw its light, we were further from the organization than ever. Everybody looked for scrip and staff (carpet-bag and cane). Everybody seized his coat or his shawl ; and poor Widdifield and Morton were just heard pleading for a committee to draw up a constitution, or "just a little formula, you know " when the train stopped, WHAT BEGAN IT. 2*3 and we stowed away as we could, in the sepa rate cars. For all that, however, these people loved Flurry with their hearts' love ; and not one of them meant to fail in the impulse he had given ; no, nor ever did fail. And though, as I said, the Club never met again, and never can, per haps it has existed to as much purpose. After the train was under way, I passed along from car to car, and asked each of them if he would not write me some day, if any thing turned up which brought Harry to his mind, or which Would have pleased him. Everybody said, " Yes." And what is more, everybody has done as he said. So I have thia mass of letters you saw in my desk, marked " Harry Wadsworth ; " and it is that mass of letters which gives me the material for the really curious story, or stories, I am going to tell you. If you will come round to my tent after the parade is over, I will show you some of them. CHAPTER IL THBEE YEARS AFTER, f What there was in the Letters.] ^ I "HE fellows did not come up to my tent, regimental headquarters, that night. We were on our way up after the parade, when pop, pop, pop, some red-shirted pickets cracked ofl their rifles, frightened by some goats I believe ; for all this happened in one of the Calabrian Valleys. The companies were filing off to supper as the shots were heard, but halted promptly enough, and, in a minute more, we were all brought back to parade again. I ordered some kettles of polenta brought down for the men to eat, and we lounged and lay there, wait ing news and orders for a couple of hours. Then it was clear enough that the whole had been a false alarm, and I let them go to bed. But a week or two after, Dalrymple, who had made a good deal of fun about the Club, came round, and Frank Chancy with him. Dalrymple THREE YEARS AFTER. 20 knew that I would not have any nonsense about it, and indeed he was quite in earnest himself when he asked me to bring out the papers and tell them more about the Club and its history. I told him what I tell you, that there was no history : there were only these letters, nine of them as it happened, folded together and marked " Harry Wadsworth." An odd-looking set they were. A letter from my wife Polly, written exactly on the third anniversary of Harry's funeral ; letters of all sizes and shapes, written on tappa, brown paper, white paper, all sorts of paper; stained, faded, and broken at the edges, but all of them telling of the lives that these nine of the original Club had been leading. Indeed, when we came to look at the dates, they were all written within a month of that same anniversary of the day which we wasted together in the station-house, called deepo, at North Colchester. The letters were : A.. Dictated by Biddy Corcoran to her son Will, and in the most elegant of clerkly hand writing, down strokes hard and up strokes fine, I assure you. B. Caroline Leslie's she had not changed '10 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. her name in marrying her cousin Harry, the same who gave her the canary-bird. She wiote from Cronstadt, Maine. C. George Dutton, written as above, on tappa cloth from one of the Kermadeck Islands, in the South Pacific. D. Mrs. Merriarn, quiet, every-day letter, from 14 Albion Street, Brooklyn. E. As above, Polly Ingham's to me, when 1 was very far off soundings. F. Widdifield's he had accepted a place as professor in Clinton College, Kentucky. G. Will Morton's he was clerk of court in Ethan County, Vermont; always has been clerk of court, as his father was before him, and as his son will be after him. H. John Merriam's book-keeper he, with Pettingill & Fairbanks, Chicago. I. From Mrs. Emerson head of a girls' boarding-school in Fernandina, Florida. And had filed, in the same file, a little paper of memoranda of my own. So there were really the autographs of all, save Mrs. Corcoran, of the ten of the Club which tried vainly to form itself at North Colchester. THREE YEAUS AFTER. 31 Ah ! what a pity it is that I may not print all these letters, now and here. If only I, Frederic Ingham, could be the editor of a monthly mag azine of my own ! If only I had 85,555 readers, on the moderate estimate of five readers to each copy sold, and they were all so prejudiced in favor of the Old as to like to read old letters, and yet so tolerant of the New as to be willing to read my speculations upon them ! Then what a title-page could I not make up from these letters alone, for the whole of a number, giving a courteous refusal to all " eminent contributors," and all good assistants not quite so eminent.' To make our " contents on cover: " Biddy Corcoran's Home. By Herxelf. Life by the Furnace. The Kermadeck Islands. Housekeeping. By a Connoisseur. Polly to Fred. Kecollections. Prof. Wlddifield. Three Years of Life. W. Morton. The West as I saw it. By a Big Boy. A New Boarding-school. Mrs. Emerson, 10 x 10 = 100. Fred. Ingham. There, is not that a good title-page for tb 32 TEN TIMES ONE IS TKN. outside of your new magazine? Would not that make Mr. Horace's mouth water, as he drew up his advertisement ? Would not those run ning titles be attractive as men opened the uncut pages? If! ah if only I might myself control these MSS. " It must not be, this giddy trance." I must confine myself to the probable restric tions. " Five thousand words, or, at the outside, five thousand five hundred for a single number." These are the hated limits in which I live and move and have my hampered being. Is there not some worthless epithet above which I can strike out ? Ah no ! better omit all Will Corco- ran's commercial college chirography in one lump, and come without preface to pretty Caro line Leslie. CAROLINE LESLIE'S LETTER. (B.) It is so queer to see where people will turn up when you least expect it Now Caroline Leslie, nince the funeral, had married her cousin Harry, the same, as I said, who gave her the canary- bird ; and he had taken her down to the 'ron- works at Cronstadt, in Piscataquis County. Pretty girl, how little she thought, when she waa THREE YEARS AFTER. 33 giving the canary-bird his sugar, that she was to spend five years of her life in a house just one grade above a log-cabin, with two rooms on the ground floor, and a bed in her parlor, and which was perhaps the only part of it amiss that all her friends in Worcester were to be saying that it was " so fortunate " that her hus band had such a good position ! Good position it was, for all the bed in the parlor. For there Caroline and Harry first subdued the world there were her first three children born ; and there, as the letter showed, she also had done hei share of Harry Wadsworth's work, in Harry Wadsworth's way. When they went down there, it was chaos come again, I can tell you! An old iron-furnace which had been built in the most shiftless and careless way, had made for a year or less some iron of the worst quality, so that the reputation of the ore was all lost, and had then been left to burn out. A new company, with some capital from Ibbotsons or Tubals, or some sort of foreign iron people, had gone in, and had sent down George Landrin, who knew something about making iron, to redeem the reputation of the 8 34 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. place, and Harry Leslie to be treasurer and manager as far as George Landrin was not. Instantly, as I need not say, Harry Leslie and Caroline Leslie were married. That was the firs'*; link that the new iron company forged, and they forged it without knowing that they did so, by appointing him assistant treasurer, with a salary of fifteen hundred a year. They were married, went to Cronstadt in the first wagon after the roads were in any sort opened, and lived there, thirteen miles from the next town> in a village of iron men ; theirs one of three framed houses all, as I said, one grade above a log-cabin. " Hajj any ssiety thar ? " said Mrs. Grundy to Caroline one day when I met Caroline at her father's, where she had come up to Thanksgiving. How Caroline's eyes snapped and flashed fire ! ' The best society, Mrs. Grundy, I ever knew.'' And so it was, indeed, thanks to Leslie, and Landrin, and Harry Wadsworth, and the founder of all good society, the Saviour of all such holea as they found Cronstadt, whose notions in this matter Harry Wadsworth and these fellows had had the wit and heart to follo-v. THREE TEARS AFTER. 35 Here is the letter: " CEONBTADT, November 7 11 DEAR MRS. INGHAM : "I have never forgotten that, as we came home from Mr. Wadsworth's funeral, I promised your husband I would some day write to you about him. And though I have put it off so long, I have always meant to do it. But you know how time goes by without our putting pen to paper. It was three years ago that we all met there together. I cannot believe it " But to-night I am going to write to you, foi I do not know where your husband is, and he must take this as a letter to him. For I have been thinking of Mr. Wadsworth all day. I think of him, and of things he used to say and do, a great deal now we are here in this new life, and I have to try so many experiments, and do so many things for the first time. To-day ia Sunday, and on Sundays I see the working-men here even more than I do on other days, and they are more disposed to talk, or perhaps I am. Harry has been gone for nearly a week now, and will not be back till next Saturday, so Mr Landrin and I and Sarah had to manage about 30 TEN TIMES ONE 13 TEN. the tunes and singing as we best could last night. But to-day we had stalwart help, and I wish you had been here to see and hear our choir. We stii] meet for service, as we did when you were here, in the upper carpenter's shop ; but yesterday Sarah and Eunice drove the men out just before dark, and began to dress the two chests which make the pulpit with colored leaves, and this morning they completed their decoration, and made quite a brilliant show. Joe Deberry, that French charcoal man who got you the Lycopo- dium, was very efficient and sympathetic. Mr. Landrin played the flute; Will Wattles read part of a sermon oat of the 'Independent;' dear old Mr. Mitchell ' led in prayer,' and we really had a good time I did, and we all did. " When we sat round talking, after the service, on the boards and the benches, and a good many outside in the sun, I attacked old Mrs. Follett, and won her heart by asking her how I could dye some yarn I have here. She has alwaya been a little shy of me, but she got talking about this place as it was in the old dynasty. ** It was hell, Mrs. Leslie ! I beg your pardon, but it was just heli and nothing else.' And THREE YEARS AFTER. 37 really, I believe it was. When she told me of the drinking and gambling and fighting of men, and fighting of dogs, and of cocks, and of hens and women, I believe, of every thing really that could fight, why, Mrs. Ingham, when she told me about what her own husband was, who is now as nice a man as there is in the shop, and what a life she led with him, I wondered whether this were the same world. She thought Mr. Landrin and Harry had done a great deal more han they have. I am sure all we could do here is very little. But Harry has put his foot down, and Mr. Landrin has been very willing to help ; and they have said that if they and their wives were here, it should be a decent place to live in ; and when I see how happy and pleasant the people are, and when I think how little I used to know about such places and people at all, I thank God for bringing me here. " All the singers have been up here to-night practising. I wish you knew them all as well as you learned to know Sarah and George Fordyce when you were here. There are some of them who have just that sort of passion for my Harry that your husband has for Harry Wadsworth, 38 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. But when they talk to Mr. Leslie about what he has done for the place, he laughs, and points at Harry Wadsworth's picture, and says, ' Don't thank me, thank him.' Well, to-night ten of them came round to sing, and before we began they produced a beautiful frame for Harry's picture, and asked me to let them put it in, for a surprise to my husband when he comes home. Then they began to talk to me about him, and I told them well, you know what I told them. And I could see the tears roll down George Fordyce's face as I talked to them. And when they went away, he said, ' We have never known what to call this choir class. I move it be called the Harry Wadsworth Club.' And they all clapped their hands and said it should be so. So after all, you see, your husband's club ia born. " But I must stop. I hear Wally crying in the other room, and you know I am my own nurse now. " Give my love to Mr. Ingham when you write. Always, dear Mrs. Ingham, ** Your own, LESLIE." THREE YEARS AFTER. 39 I like that letter ; I like that woman ; I like that place, Cronstadt; and I like the life they lead there. But I should not have filed that letter, and carried it to Italy and Sicily with me, if the others that came about the same time had nat belonged with it ; so they all got tied up together. Try this: PROP. WIDDIPIELD'S LETTER, (p.) " CLINTON COLLEGE, BOUKBON COUWTT, KENTUCKY, November 10 u REV. F. TNGHAM, ETC., ETC.: " Dear Sir, In private conversation with a few of our young gentlemen here, I showed to them such of the letters of our dear Mr. Wads- worth as I have with me. They have been very much impressed by their spirit, freshness, and insight into true life. Do you see any impro priety in my printing privately, say a dozen copies for such of these friends of mine as I think might find advantage in them ? And should you be disposed to add to them a copy of a letter you once read to me, which Mr, 40 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. Wadsworth wrote to you when he entered Into he Polk and Clay canvass so honestly? " Very truly, " Your obedient servant, " INCREASE WIDDIFIELD." You say those two letters are exactly alike ' Of course ; they are all alike. This tappa-cloth letter is 'just like that glazed note-paper from Brooklyn. Want to hear tappa-cloth ? It is not in New Zealandee. Here is the end of it: " It is not true that I am always in scrapes. You say so, I know ; but I do live the steadiest, stupidest life of any eight-day clock of them all. Only you do not hear of that. It is only when I am dragged out of the water by the hair of my head that I am put in the newspaper, or happen to mention the incident, and then you all say, ' Button is always being dragged out of the vater.' This time it was not metaphorically. " 1 had gone off in the Monarch, as she took our six months' collection of be che-la-mer, to sea the last of her officers and to get them well out- Bide the reef, and I had with me my own canoe, THREE YEARS AFTER. 4X and eight of these native boatmen. They are the best fellows in the world. See if you do not say so before I have done. I bade the English men good-by ; they lay to while I jumped down into my boat; and we were off, and I started back for the Cannibal Islands, all my men paddling. Things looked a little grum when we started; there was just the beginning of a nasty Souther, and, to tell the truth, I stayed in the captain's cabin a little later than I meant to. But the men did not mind. I don't think they would mind if they had been in so many cocoa- nut shells with salt-spoons to bale with. They just stretched to their paddling, begged the after man to see that I was warmly covered, and oegan chanting this missionary song, ' Womar iti enata bacha epoku.' How well I came to know that refrain before I was asleep, and after! For I did fall asleep, and *:he first thing I knew George caught me by the leg, dragged me awake, and showed me that we ha^: come to the breakers. The sun was down, but it was light enough, what with waves, and phosphorescence, and stars, to make the wildest sight that ever you or I looked upon. Tnghara. 42 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. the thing I thought of was the Cotton wood claims, and my run for my life, and Harry Wadsworth's appearing to the rescue. I knew it would all be over in two minutes. But I spoke cheeril : to the men ; said, * All right,' which is one of their favorite words, had that strange feeling come over me, which I dare say you have felt, when one looks death right in the face the feeling, ' Now I shall know ;' nodded to George, who calls himself in their pretty way, nia-keiki,' which means foster-brother, and said, 4 God bless you ' to him, and the next second we were under twenty feet of water. Nobody but madmen would have expected to cross that reef with that gale blowing! " Of course I came to the surface, and of course the curlers swung me over the coral in less than no time ! If only they did not swing me upon the next ledge in lesser yet ! I could not hold out five minutes in that swirl and spray, and I knew I could not But before I had time to think much about it, before I had even a chance to clear the water from my eyes to try to see about it, a strong wiry hand had ma under the armpit, and I heard George's gentle THREE YEARS AFTER. 43 voice say, ' All right,' and then in their own language he went on to tell me not to be fright ened. I was frightened, for the first time, for 1 thought I knew the faithful fellow could do nothing for me, and I was afraid he would lose his own life trying to save mine. In much few er words T told him so. But he said just as sweetly as before, ' If I die, you die ; and if I live, you live.' And just then I began to see and near us, in this hollow where we were, between two ridges of breakers, was another of these loving creatures, who said just the same thing, ' If I die, you die ; if I live, you live.' " Ingham, I believe the men saved me by say- Ing that more than by all the wonderful things they did in the next half hour. It seemed to me that it would be so mean if I swamped them or sunk them, that I stuck to my work as I never would or could have done had I been alone. And they the way they lifted, and pushed, and pulled, the way they towed me and shoved \ me, if we ever meet, you will laugh yourself to death as I tell you, and yet it was no laugh ing matter then. All eight held together, and held by clumsy, logy me. They understood 44 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. each other by instinct, and they took me in ai they would have taken in an upset canoe if they had found one floating in the offing. " In half an hour I was lying on the beach here ; these loving fellows were chafing me, lomy-lomying me, and rubbing oil into me. 1 could not speak, but I was alive and in this world. " And what do you suppose was the first thing they did 'he next morning. I was asleep, as you may imagine, but at sunrise every man of them went off in the offing, which was calm enough now, to hunt up what was left of my boat and to bring her in. And when I scolded George for this, and told him the boat was not worth the risk, he said they knew I loved the boat ; they knew I had named the boat * Harry,' and that my Harry-boat was not to be lost if they could save her. Fred, that was the first time I broke down. I fairly cried at that. And, ever since, they have called themselves the 1 Harry-boatmen.' " You see it is as I said, they are all the same letter, only they are written by different hands, in different inks on different sorts of paper. THREE YEARS AFTER. 45 Polly had tied them all up, as they came in, one after another, for six months, and labelled them " Harry Wadsworth," as you saw. Then one day as she went over them, she was tempted to count up the people whom these ten letter- writers told of, as having got clew to our en thusiasm about him. Here were Caroline Leslie's Harry Wadsworth Club 10 Prof. Widdifield's Seniors 12 George Button's Harry-boatmen 8 John Merriam's set 7 Mrs. Emerson's " first class " 11 Biddy Corcoran, Will, the Tidd boys and the Tidd boys' father and mother . . 8 Mrs. Merriam's Sewing Club for Newsboys ... 13 Polly's two children and the two servants, with Mrs. Standish 5 Will Morton and the Base-Ball Club at Ethan ..19 And the men in my own watch, the old quarter master and his son, and the others who messed with them, were I Polly counted them up. There were 103 in aL But Biddy Corcoran and Will Morton had been counted in the old Club of the station. * There are 101 new members," said Polly. " Ten times ten is a hundred. And it was only three years ago," CHAPTER III. TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. [An Experience of Dalrymple's.\ "\ \ 7ELL ! we subdued the world as we could in Calabria. Then we returned to our respective homes : Garibaldi to his island, I to No. 9 in the Third Range, Frank Chancy to Sc-ooby, and Dalrymple to that truly English nome in Norfolk, which nothing had driven him from but the unrest of an Englishman, some lo gad-fly, and the desire of seeing Italy righted, and Vittorio on the throne of Bourbon In these respective spheres, as assigned to us, we did our part; and I, for mine, embarked m the manufacture of a new sphere and new world, of which no more at present- Then was it that the parents of Dalrymple urged him to do his duty to the respectable Norman baron who founded his line, and " settle down." Then was it that Dalrymple, seeking for trout in a brook that ran through the ances- j.'EN TIMES A HUNDRED. 47 tral domain, met Mabel Harlakenden, the young est daughter of a neighboring house. She waa sitting on a mossy rock, her feet hidden in ferns, and reading " Coventry Patmore." Dalrymple -and she had not met since he broke her father's window with a horse-chestnut on the day of her tenth birthday. Then was it that he intro duced himself to her again, and fished no more that day, nor did she read any more. Three months after was it that in the parish church he gave her a ring. The minister took the ring and gave it to Dalrymple, and he then put it on the fourth finger of Mabel Harlakenden's left hand. Then he was taught by the minister. And then they all went home to Dalrymple's father's house to live there. " Was she a descendant of Mabel Harlaken* den of Kent ? " Yes, she was. Why do you interrupt ? That has nothing to do with the story, and your question took nine words. Then Dalrymple proved to be less settled than ever. And it proved that Mahel liked travelling, if it were real travelling, just as much fts he. She hated P?ris, so did he. He hated f8 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. Baden-Baden, lucky for her, so did she He had fished all Norway, so had she. She had hob-nobbed with bandits in Calatria, so had he. Had she ever been to America ? "No, dearest, no!" Would she like to? He had a friend in America, who would put them through, a man who was with him in Calabria. There was nothing Mabel would like better. So instead of " settling down," as good Mr. Charles Dalrymple had expected, these young people, three months after marriage, took passage in the Europa, Captain Leitch, arrived in Boston, stopped at Parker's, took the evening boat to Hallowell, train next day to Skowhegan, and in two days more were laughing and talking at our table at No. 9, in the Third Range. The prettiest English girl I ever saw was Ma bel, is Mabel, let me say, as she is not here to frown. Dalrymple got his wooden bowl that tiite. No! I will not describe her. You should have asked him, if you wanted to know. And Mabrl and he fished in our brooks, guided by my Alice and Paulina, who in their way were aa good fishermen as he. One night, as we sat together, Dalrymple said TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 49 " Will you show my wife those Wadsworth Papers ? " " Do show them to us, Mr. Ingham," said the pretty girl. " Horace has told me about them once and again, they were the very first things 1 knew of you." Well pleased, I produced the papers-, and showed them all I have shown you, and more. Then we fell talking together about Harry, and the Leslies, and Dutton, and all these people and Polly raked out more letters, which I have not pretended to show you, telling how they had all fared in the three years which had gone by Since she tied those nine or ten together. Then Dalrymple asked if, in America, people always shot apart from each other as all of us had done, here was Harry, born in Maine, to die in Massachusetts; here was I, born in Connecti cut, living in Maine ; here was Dutton, born in Massachusetts, drowning off the Kermadeck Is* lands. Was it always so ? And I told him the census would tell him that in 1860 there were near seven hundred thousand people in Iowa, where in 1850 there were not two hundred thou sand ; that the other five hundred thousand were 4 50 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. boin somewhere; and that the same year there were one hundred and twenty-six thousand peo ple who had been born in Maine, who were living in other States, while only four times that number, men. women, and children who were oorn in Maine, were living there. I suppose that half the men and women had emigrated. " Happy country," cried Dairy mple, where no man settles down ! " Then Mabel suggested to him that as they had 110 plan of tiavei, as it would be fatal if they should settle down in No. 9, which they seemed ikely to do, he could have no better clew to fol low in this labyrinth of States than the thread of thfl very letters he had in his hands. " You love Harfy Wadsworth," she said, " as well as any one can who never saw him. I am sure I do." And her great blue eyes were full of tears. " Let us go and see Mrs. Emerson in Brooklyn, I am sure dear Mrs. Ingham will give me a lette to her; you shall go to Vermont, is that the name ? and see Mr. Morton ; we will both go to Chicago, which till I heard you speak, Mr. Ingham, I always called Chickago, and Harry Wadsworth shall introduce us *o America." TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 51 And so it was ordered. They stayed with us a month longer. I will not tell how many trout they caught, for I should have every cockney scared from the Adirondacks down on No. 9 if I did. But at last the good-byes came, and they started on their way. No ! I shall not write the history of their travels. Little Mrs. Dairy m pie may do that herself, and I wish she would. I have only to tell where they crossed Harry Wadsworth's track again. Dalrymple chose to take boat, instead of rail, west from Buffalo. So they sailed one evening in the Deerhound, a famous boat of those days> and their first experience of the floating palace of the western waters. Sunset, twilight, evening of that June day, were as beautiful as hearts could wish, and again and again this young bride and bridegroom congratulated themselves that they had forsworn the train. When bed time came, Horace led Mabel in from the guards where they had been watching the moon ; but before they went to their state-room after mid night, they stopped to watch some euchre-play ers who were sitting up late in the great saloon WJ TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. Aa they sat there, the captain lounged in. They knew him by sight ; he had done the honors at the tea-table. He came up to the table, and said, " Gentlemen, I want you to come forward, and see this schooner on our quarter." Mabel took her husband's arm to go with him ; but the captain said, " No, madam, it is too damp for you ; we will not keep your husband long," and with the other men walked away. Horace stayed how long one minute or ten Mabel does not know. But when he came back it was very quickly, and he said in a low tone to the three women who sat together around the deserted table, " The boat is on fire ; dress the children, and wake the passengers as quietly as you can. Mabel, wait for me in the after-part of the saloon below this. I will come to you there." And he was gone. Mabel was probably never so completely her >wn mistress in her life. She saw that the .saloon was as yet uninvaded. She called the sleepy chambermaids, and gave them their mes sages so calmly that they were not frightened, ?"rom state-room to state-room she passed along, ad knocked up the sleepers, till her share waa TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 53 done, and well done. Then she went to their own state-room, took the travelling-sack in which Horace had his money and his letters; went downstairs to the after saloon, to wait there as she was bidden. All this time it was amazing to her that there was so little noise. The engines were stopped, That she noticed. She heard the men at work forward, but forward was far, far away. If she listened, she did not know what were the noises she heard, plashes; heavy blows as of cutting timber; plashes again, an occasional sharp word which she did not understand, but around her the still monotone of the saloon, in which there were only herself and two little girls and their mother. And how long this lasted Mabel did not know. But at last the smoke came. Something bulkhead or what I do not know something gave way forward, and the smoke came, driving, piling right in upon them, so that those hateful lamps which had been so still and dear and un conscious, became, of a sudden, dim spots in fog The children cried and coughed. Mabel and their mother held them to the open windows. 54 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. But this could not last, the smoke was leu ser and denser ; the women dropped the children out on a pile of cordage that was coiled up in the narrow passage-way behind the cabin, then clambered out of the windows themselves^ and in that narrow passage, cramped between the cabin wall and the after-railing, stood alone with the little ones. Then, for the first time, she understood that some freak of the fire had cut her off from the main body of the passengers and from her husband. Or were they four together there, the only persons living out of all ? No ! somebody was alive forward, for although for a few minutes the air was almost clear, that lasted only for a few minutes ; the fire was gaining forward, and of a sudden the engines began to move again. The other woman said to Mabel, " They are driving her ashore." "What ever was the reason, it seemed fatal to therr The stream of hot air and hot smoke now circled all round them, so that indeed they could scarcely breathe. Mabel looked over the rail, and so did the poor mother. They could see the projecting after timbers and the rudder-head passing through hem, they must do something, and without TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 55 a word Mabel climbed down, stayed herself firmly by one of the cross-chains which she found there, connecting with the rudder, observed that neither chain nor rudder moved any longer, and then bade the other woman pass her one of the children, and come down herself with the youngest, which she did. How long that lasted, Mabel did not know, whether it was five miles or five minutes that they rushed ove* that foaming sea, with that hot air above them, with this slippery foothold below, and her arma growing so tired as she held child and chain. Not so long but she did hold on, however, till of a sudden a sharp explosion forward taught them both that a crisis had come. In a moment more the way of the boat was checked, and in two minutes Mabel saw that all was still, but the fire. Still that did not drift fiercely back upon them now. Nobody came near them. Probably nobody could come. But when that horrible wend motion over the foam stopped, Mabel was brav er As for the other woman, she never showed sign of terror from the beginning. Mabel no\v found she could lower herself enough to sit upon 56 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. the top of the rudder, and stay herself by a chain above. She did not dare climb up upon the boat again ; she then got the child in her arms, and moved out far enough to make room for the other woman. And there, with cinders and smoke flying over their heads, in water to their armpits, holding by rod and chain above +hem, each with a child embraced, there those women sat, it must have been for hours. I remember Mabel told me she had to wet the rod above her with the water at last, when the fire from the wreck above heated the rod so that she could ir*t hold it in her hand. She trained the child to splash water up to it so as to keep it cool. Meanwhile all they could see was flame and smoke in volumes borne high in the air, but away from them, by the gentle wind, as the fire slowly worked its way along to them. All they could hear was the roaring of the flames. But flames and smoke were borne away from them- The wreck was drifting and drifting crvarer and nearer to the Ohio shore. And so in the gray morning the end came. It ground ed. Mabel had seen the stars grow pale, it had seemed to her that "the dawning gray would TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 57 never dapple into day," but it was lighter, light enough for her to see the shore, and then one, two, three little boats pushing towards them. A.nd then for the first time these women spoke louder than their breath, and the little children cried aloud again with them. The cry did little, I suppose, but a white handkerchief did more. Swift and straight a flat-boat dashed down to them, a boat-hook struck in the stern-timber above Mabel's head ; two men in the bows clutched the two women ; and some one cried, " Back her, back her," and they and the two children were safe. They took them to the kindest, loveliest, poor- est home in Ohio, which was just behind the beach. Tender hands undressed those women and children, chafed their swollen arms and hands, rubbed them warm and dry, dressed them in the best the cabin had, laid them on homespun sheets, as clean as they were coarse. And all four slept, as you never slept. When Mabel awoke just before nightfall, and tried to make out where she was, wondering at the slabs above her and around her, at the walla papered with Frank Leslie's journal, the only 68 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. thing her eye lighted on, that she ever sav before, was the portrait of Harry Wadsworth. That was pinned upon the door. This, then, was what Mabel had taken the ring on her finger for; what she had left her father's house in Norfolk for ; what she nad started to see the world for ! To find herself lying in these coarse homespun sheets, on that queer, high, creaking bedstead ; looking Harry Wadsworth's picture in the face ; opening her fingers to see if she could open them, after all that clinging to the rod and chain ; and trying, by such foolish things as that, to keep herself from asking where Horace was if he were in this world or in another ; where his body was ah ! how wretched and what she should do ? To pretend to drive these questions out of her head, she opened and shut her hands, and won* dered if the rust-stains would ever wash off, anc looked at her wedding-ring, and remembered the parish church and that winter morning when Horace put it there. It was not in that way that she would forget asking where he was, 01 if he was in this world or another ! Mabel sat up in the bed. Every thing seemed TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 69 terribly still. She looked round the little room There was not a shoe or stocking on the floor nor any of her clothes on the one wooden chair. Alice ! " cried Mabel at last. For " Alice " was the only name she knew of all the people who had surrounded her in these terrible hours. They had called the little girl " baby," though she was four or five years old. The children had called their mother " mother," and " Alice" was the ohly name that had been spoken. Alice did not come, but in her place a nice, motherly old lady came, who looked almost as different from anybody Mabel had ever seen before as if she had been one of Button's Ker- madeck men. But there was the touch of nature there, and Mabel and she were kin. " Dear child," said the old woman, " cannot you sleep any more ? Do you feel at all rest ed ?" u Have they heard from my husband ? " said Mabel, " have any more people been brought in ? are there any bodies ? " " Bodies ? Dear no, no," said Mrs. Morrow ; " do not be troubled about the others ; there are plenty of people to take care of them, and they 60 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. with their own boats too. Do not think about them, dear, and do not cry ; let me bring you a cup of tea, and then you shall have your clothes and dress yourself. The men will be back to supper, and we shall know all the news." " But tell me," said Mabel, " tell me where I am, and where I can write to ? What must I do ? I never was alone before. I never had to do any thing before like like this, you know." " Like what, my dear lady ? like taking a cup of tea or like dressing yourself?" And Mrs. Morrow would not stop for an answer. There was a good deal of dry common-sense in Mrs. Morrow, who, after sixty years of emigra tion, of a new home, of birth, life, and death, of joy and of sorrow, was no longer a fool. She was, therefore, without knowing it, a philoso pher. " Come, Amandy-Ann," she cried, bust ling back into the kitchen sitting-room, "come, Amandy-Ann, where are you 9 Here's the Eng lish lady awake again, and nigh faint for her tea." " How did she know that I was an English woman ? " said Mabel to herself. She forgot TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 61 that if Mrs. Morrow had turned up at the Swaff- ham station in Norfolk near her father's house, and had asked her, Mabel, the way to Cockley, she would have known that Mrs. Morrow wad an American, though she only spoke ten words, u I must get up and do something," said Mabel to herself again ; " but how can I get up till they bring me my clothes ? " So they succeeded in keeping her prisoner for a long hour, while she " worried down " the tea, and ate a slice of toast, and tried to eat a slice of corn-bread, which was new to her, and broke an egg, as Mrs. Morrow had never seen an egg broken before. When she had pretended to eat a part of the egg, Mrs. Morrow relented so far as to let Amanda Ann bring in some dry cloth ing, and so to emancipate Mabel from her prison. The men came home. An early tea was served a meal such as Mabel never saw before. The men were cheery, though with no grounds intel ligible for cheeriness. But they explained that there were schooners which had run by Huron, ana a certain brig which was known to be beat- uig up to St. Clair, and two freight boats and a 62 TBIN TIMES ONE IS TEN flat which were bound down the lake, and much more than poor Mabel could understand, any of which alone could have rescued all the Deer- hound's people, if, as no man permitted himself to doubt, they were all in their quarter boats Indeed, they could rescue themselves. How many hundreds of thousands this cheerful fleet might rescue if it were combined in one, Mabel was too downcast to inquire. Poor girl ! she put this and that together so far as to make out that we, far away in No. 9, in Maine, were the only people in America near enough to her for her to confer with, and she asked Elnathan Morrow eagerly if he could not send a telegram to us from her. Of course he could. He would " hitch up " at once and drive over to Elyria and leave the despatch, so it should go the first thing in the morning. So Mabel wrote : I am safe. But I do not know if Horace is. Wo ware in the Deerhound. MABEL DALKYMPLK, To Frederic Ingham, No. 9. in the Tliird Range, Maine. By Skowhcgau. TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 63 Mabel knew en< ugh to know that a telegram must be short. But she was not much used to money yet, poor girl, and she did not know that as the Western Union Telegraph Co. coins it, that despatch cost Elnathan every cent of ready money he had laid up to pay his taxes witn tho next week. But if he had not had the money, Mrs. Morrow would have sent her three tea spoons to the watch-maker at Elyria rather than have that message delayed. Elnathan rose from table before the rest of them, harnessed up, drove to Elyria, and the next morning the Elyria " Democrat " announced that it stopped the press to say that four more persons had been rescued from the conflagration, a young English lady, and her companion, the mother of two children, who were with her ; and that " all these persons were now resting at the mansion-house of our estimable fellow-citizen, Elnathan Mor row, Esq., who has favored us with this infor mation." After Elnathan had left, poor Mabel did her very best not to be unsociable. Her companion on the wreck was still sleeping off the strain, in the same bed with her two children 64 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. " Do you know," said Mabel, " that the first thing I saw, when I opened my eyes, was the face ot a friend ? At least I call him a friend." " Friend ? " said Mrs. Morrow, troubled for a moment with the fear that the pretty English girl was wandering. " Who did you see ? " " Oh ! " said Mabel, " I only meant I saw his picture Mr. Wadsworth's picture." " Did you know Harry Wadsworth ? " cried the old lady, and every one else at the table said in the same instant, substantially the same thing. Mabel explained that she had never seen nim herself, and at once, an air of disappointment showed that no one else at the table had ever seen him. But Mabel said to the youngest girl that if she would bring the little travelling-bag which had hung at her side all through the night, she would show her something. So the bag was brought from behind the stove, and Mabel found that the key still turned in the rusted look She pulled out a wet handkerchief, rusty scissors, the sloppy, stained bit of canvass work that she had been stitching on the afternoon before was it yesterday afternoon or was it not sometime in the last century ? and down at the bottom she TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 65 came to a mother-of-pearl card-case, which had stood the whole, undiluted. Mabel wiped it dry, opened it, looked a moment at another picture which was not stained nor even wet, and from behind that picture pulled out her picture of Harry Wadsworth. It was the last thing that I gave her, except my blessing, when she left us at No. 9. And then she explained, and they explained. None of them had ever seen Harry in the flesh. But here was Mabel who had seen me, who had seen him, and she had seen letters that he wrote, and if her trunk were ever found, in her port folio she had a note of his that I had given her. And they they knew about him. Mrs. Elna- than Morrow the pale, thin, pretty young woman, the mother of the baby, the one that had said so little, but had been frying the cakes all supper-time, she came from Ethan, in Ver mont. Her brother Samuel was one of the Will Morton Base Ball Club ; and she had first met Elnathan, if she would have told the truth, at a reading club at Ethan, where Will Morton read " Monte Cristo " and " Lady Geraldine " to them. And her pale face flushed at last, and 6 66 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. her silence thawed, and she did leave the grid* die at last and came and sat at the corner of the table, as she warmed up to tell how Will Morton laid down the book one night, and talked to them all about Harry. And of course she told many stories of him, which I cannot repeat here ; and then Mabel got to telling some stories that I had told her. And Celia felt as if Mabel and she were old friends, and told her more about Will Morton, and about their life in Ethan, and about the Base Ball Club, and about her brother Sam, who had gone to Minnesota. She told about her own marriage, and how strange it seemed to her to come out here ; and Mabel learned that between Ethan in Vermont, and the southern shore of Lake Erie, there was as much difference as between Cockley in Norfolk and Ethan in Vermont; she learned that she was not the only girl tLat had left her father's house to find a strange, very strange home. If Harry Wadsworth had never done any thing else, he had made sisters of those two women. So they all talked and talked. Just after the June sunset the youngest children slipped in with two great bowls of beautiful TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 67 Btrawberries, and Mabel ate from these as she talked, almost unconsciously. The fire in the stove went down, the griddle-cakes grew cold, and it was dark when their long croon was inter rupted, as Mrs. Palmer, Mary's companion in fortune, opened the kitchen door and came in Horace ? He had been knocked on the head, as he was at work on the forward deck, very early in the business. Some one in the pilot's box hove an axe forward to the mate, who had called for it. Horace was stepping across hastily, the axe struck him in the forehead, knocked him down, and he lay there senseless. The water, leaking from the hose that they were working with, dribbled down on his face sometimes, but nobody could stop to nurse him. But when the game was played through, when the last quarter boat hauled up under the bow of the Deerhound, and the mate for the last time came on board, and said to the captain, a You must come now, sir, there is not a living cat on the vessel," the captain pointed to Horace as he lay there, and said, " Silas, we will heave him down, too. Perhaps there's life in /lira 68 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN Whether there is or not, it shan't be said that the only two English people in the boat went to the bottom. Handsome fellow he is! " And the captain took Horace by the shoulders, and Silas took him under his hips and carried the senseless body to the opening in the rail; they called two firemen who stood on the thwarts and handed it down, and laid it along as best they could, on the after thwart and in the hollow behind it. Then the boat-hooks shoved her off, and the boat followed the others. " Them women," said Silas, meditatively, " must have stifled in ten minutes after he sent them there. What on airth made him tell them to go into the ladies' saloon ? " Horace was not killed. Else these pages were not here. The captain never believed he was killed. As soon as the men gave way at the oars, and the boat was well off the wreck, the captain cut off the waist buttons of Horace's clothes, laid bare his breast, untied his neck-cloth, and again and again flung water in his face, as he lay in the arms of that good-natured German, who was wondering, perhaps, if this were the usual mode of travel in America. In fifteen TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 69 minutes the muscular, full-blooded young Eng lishman opened his eyes ; in three more he was wondering; then he shook himself free, sat up, put his hand to his head, looked round, and began to ask questions. The burning Deerhound could still be seen, and in reply the captain pointed her out to him far astern. Then how boldly the captain lied, as the poor wretch asked after Mabel ! You would have thought Mabel was in a Lord Mayor's barge upon the Cydnus, lying upon cushions, fanned by Cupids and rowed by Naiads, so emphatic were the captain's assurances of her comfort and safety, assurances which Horace was just stupid enough, with the blow, to believe. He grew faint again with his effort, needed a little of the Jamaica the captain gave him, and sank back, with his eyes blurred and his head spinning, on the German's shoulder. Then it was that the second botch was made in the proceedings of that night. The boats Were all pulling for Huron, against a neavy western breeze which was freshening into a gale. The captain's boat was the last of the little squadron, which was pulling in order it musi 70 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. be near twenty miles that they might not risk the beaching business with that heavy sea on. By daybreak the others were all safe, and \vere telegraphed as safe all over the country, while the same telegram reported that the captain's boat was not heard from, and that two women and two children, and an Englishman, name not known, had gone down in the Deerhound. This botch all resulted, because, as the captain's boat slowly followed the others, they crossed the line of the little Canadian brig which was beating across the lake back and forth, working her way home from Buffalo to Amherstburg. It was a natural thing, of course, to answer her friendly hail, a very natural thing to run alongside, a natural thing to take the line her skipper threw, a natural thing to go on board, all of them, and to take the boat in tow. Then as towards morn ing the gale did freshen, and they had to stay on board, it was natural to stay. But because o* all this, so natural at every step, when in the fog of the next day she went ashore and bilged on Pelee Island, and they all crawled to land in wet jackets, that was a pity. That was the reason that for four days Horace though* his wife was TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 71 Jh heaven ; and that for three of those same foui days she was more and more sure he was there. But Horace also fitted off his telegram to No 9, in the Third Range. And his telegram worked through rather faster than hers, though it started later. The two arrived at Skowhegan the same night. And one express messenger was started or No. 9 in the morning with the two. The weak-minded brother neglected to bring any newspaper with him, so that all that Polly and I knew was in these words : We were in the Deerhound. Mabel is lost. Ad dress Detroit. HORACE DALRYMPLE. And in these, as above, I am safe. But I do not know if Horace is. We were in the Deerhound. MABEL DALRYMPLE. What the Deerhound was or where they were, we did not know. But Mabel's despatch was dated Elyria and Horace's was dated London, (J. W ; and we knew that C. W. did not mean West Centre of the real London, but Canada West of the new one. Poor souls! Lake Erie was between them, and neither knew if the other were alive. 72 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. We gave the boy his supper, fed his horse well, admonished him to bring a newspaper another time, and started him back with the return despatches : Your husband is well. Address him at Detroit. F. INGHAJI. Your wife is well. Find her at Elyria. F. ING DAM And with hopes that they would not go Evan- gelining and Gabrielling it all over the Western country till they died, we went to bed, still wishing the boy had brought a newspaper, and wondering what had happened to the Deerhound. Mabel got that despatch the third night, so she slept comfortably and happy. Two days still it was before she had any thing but the telegram to live upon ; but the telegram was enough, and good Mrs. Morrow's chicken fixings and strawberries and " young Hyson " all helped a little. And they fitted off poor Mrs. Palmer, and little Alice and " baby," for Philadelphia. She thought she might as well go to Philadelphia as anywhere. And at last, five days, I believe, after the night of horrors, Horace came up be- TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 73 hind Mabel, as she sat in the piazza with Celia's baby in her arms, put his brown hands on her two cool cheeks, bent over and kissed her, upside down ! And Mabel did not faint away ! The next morning Dalrymple wrote to me at considerable length, giving some hint of the story I have been telling, and of his plans for refitting himself and his wife. Here is the end of the letter: " While all this goes forward we shall stay here, knowing where we are well off. Poor Mabel really is at home here with these nice people, who are just what you would call clever as kind as they can be. Do you know, as soon as she opened her eyes, she saw Wads- worth's picture, and it proved that the waves had flung her upon one more of what she calls the Harry Wadsworth homes. And I, before this poor skipper I tell you of and I had talked five minutes on the logs there on Pelee Island, watch* ing his little vessel as she ground *o pieces, I found he was one of Wadsworth's men ! What io you think of that? He was a rough cus tomer, but when I said something sympathetic 74 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. about the loss of the vessel, he answered as cheerfully as a bird, evidently knowing that it was all right. I told him he was a philosopher. 1 No,' he said, very simply, handing rne back my pipe from which he was lighting his, ' it is not nr philosophy, it is my religion. But I don't like to call it so. Our notion is that a man had better not talk much about his religion, certainly had better not think at all about saving his soul. We think he'd better do what he can to save other people's souls, or if he isn't strong that way, save their bodies, or keep them from the devil, some way ; and forget he has any soul himself, if he can't do better.' " Only think, Ingham, of my hearing sucti words of wisdom out on a fresh-water beach, that did not know enough to have the tide rise. 'Who do you mean by "we"?' I said. 'Oh,' said he, a little nervously this time, ' a little set of us, who don't care to make any noise about our club ; we call ourselves Harry Wadsworth'a men.' "Ingham, I started as if I had been shot Then I was afraid for a minute I was not right in my head, after this dig the axe had given me, TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 75 But it was quite clear that the man and the iake and the logs were there, and I questioned him further. He made no secret of it; there were thirty or forty of them who had arranged to get together sometimes, in Detroit, to help each other as well as they could, in their charities, which he represented as mere nothings, but which I found afterwards were what the world's people would make quite a fuss about, mostly among emigrants and sailors. This man, Woodberry, said, as simply as he said every thing else, that it was the only way he had ever experienced religion ; that his father and mother were religious people, and he had a brother who was a Baptist minis ter; but that he did not make much of their notions or their way, but that these Wadsworth people pulled him through a hard turn once when they found him sick in a sailor boarding-house, and he had found since that their religion proved a very good religion for him. " When we passed through Detroit, he took me round to one of their meetings. It had some of the fuss and form that you and I have seen at lodge, and division, and communication meet ings all the world over ; but it had a perfectly 76 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. healthy tone, was true as truth, and tremendous* ly energetic. There was no vow of secrecy, but great unwillingness to get into the newspaper. When I showed my picture of Wadsworth, I ecame quite a hero. They were glad to hea? of the founder of their club from one side more. Remember that, till that moment, I was in the clothes I swam ashore in. What should you say if I told you that it was the President of the Harry Wadsworth Club who introduced me to the Detroit banker who honored the draft on New York, in which I am at this moment dressed, and with which I am shod and hatted. So much for the photograph. " They have told me of three or four other clubs somewhat like their own. But I do not think there is any effort made to form clubs. It is rather an accident as people drift together. I found they knew all your story of the meeting at the funeral, what you call ' Ten times one ia ten.' Some of them were friends of Morton's, some of them had known Professor Widdifield'a scholars. They had a printed list of the 'origi nal ten,' as they called them. I showed them Mrs. Ingham's calendar of the one hundred and TEN TIMES A HUNDRED. 77 one people who had had their lives lifted up, and made less selfish in their different ways, a? that man's central influence extended. That pleased them ; they had not, for instance, known any thing about the Kermadeck Islands, nor what had become of you or Mrs. Emerson. I showed them Mrs. Emerson's letter to me, and told them about my visit to Mrs. Merriam. And then one of the statistical brethren proposed a count, whereat a more godly brother quoted Scripture and explained about David's census. None the less did they count up the people they knew and I knew who this day count Harry Wadsworth as personal friend, personal comforter, adviser, and help to them. Ingham, there were one thousand and twenty-three ! " I will write you again before we leave here. The house has but three rooms, but they make Us very comfortable. Mabel needs rest, and haa to get clothed again. " Truly yours, H. D." I read that letter to Polly, and she said, " Ten times a hundred is a thousand. It was only six years ago." CHAPTER IV. TEN TIMES A THOUSAND. HPHE Harry Wadsworth Club, which first met in the North Colchester station, had enlarged itself, in six years, without knowing it, and without trying to enlarge, to a thousand mem bers. They did not know each other's names, - and there were not many of them who cared to. They had a great many different constitutions. Some were clubs for singing, some were sewing- schools, some were base ball clubs ; and this rather formal one at Detroit, upon which, by good luck, Horace Dalrymple had stumbled, had offi cers, a president, secretary and records, and all that All you could say of these thousand people was that, in six years, the life of that young rail road freight-agent had quickened their lives, had made them less selfish, and less worldly. They lived more for each other and for God, because TEN TIMES A THOUSAND. 79 he had lived, and they knew that he had ren dered them this service. They showed their knowledge of it in different ways, or some of them perhaps did not speak of it at all. Some of the younger and more demonstrative ones had secret breast-pins with H. W. in a cypher on them. Some of the others, like the Morrows, had Har ry's picture framed and hanging on the wall. Some of them, like me, carried it in their hearts, and needed no bit of paper. But as I say, in six years the ten had multi plied to a thousand by as simple a process aa this, 10 X 10 = 100. 100 X 10 = 1000. And, at this fascinating point, alas ! I must leave the detail of the story. Indeed, as you see, I have had to leave it already. Of these thousand lives, I have told the story of only four or five, and only a very little part of that. If anybody should tell the story, it would be Horace Dai ry m pie, who with his pretty Mabel travelled up and down America, backwards and forwards, as the Harry Wadsworth people advised him, sent him, or invited him, for three years and more, after that horrible night on the Deerhound, SO TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. They saw a great deal of beautiful scenery, and I dare say they " were shown " as the penny- a-liners love to say a great many " institu tions." They came out in the South Park in the Rocky Mountains ; and they went to the Middle Park and to the North Park. I do nd know where they did not go. But they did not travel to see " institutions." They did not, in the first instance, go to hunt, or to fish, or to make sketches. They went where one of Harry Wads- worth's men sent them to another. They went from prince to peasant, you would say, only there is never a peasant nor a prince west of the Atlantic, nor east of the Pacific. They went from cabin to palace, and from palace to cabin So they saw what so few travellers see, the home life of the people here. These persons they visited did not sit in groups, with their best clothes on, talking about Hairy Wadsworth. Not they! A great many of them did not speak his name in a year, may be did not think of him for a month. " It waa not that," said pretty Mabel to me, when she was fresh from this Sinbad life, "the freema sonry of it was that you found everywhere a TEN TIMES A THOUSAND. 8J cheerful out-look, a perfect determination to relieve suffering, and a certainty that it could be relieved, a sort of sweetness of disposition, which comes, I think, from the habit of looking across the line, as if death were little or nothing ; and with that, perhaps, a disposition to be social, to meet people more than half way." Thus spoke the little Englishwoman ; and 1, in my analytical way, used to the inevitable three heads of the sermon, said to myself, " Humph, that is Mabel's translation of faith, hope, and love." Horace and Mabel, after their three years' journey, had found us living in South Boston. We were sitting after dinner one day on the wood-shed behind the house, which served us as a piazza, when Horace laid down his pipe, and asked me if I remembered explaining to him the way in which people dispersed over the United States, so that the census shows that each State is made up from the children of all I had forgotten it, but he recalled it to me. " That was what first set me on this journey,'* eaid he, " which has carried us so far. Now the queer thing about it is, that it is no special law 6 82 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. of your country, this dispersion and radiation ; it is a law of all modern civilization." " Of course it is," said I. " Of course it is," said he. " Here is this Con necticut pinmaker." And he took out from hii pocket-book a bit of green paper, evidently torn from a paper of pins, on which the man said t'jat he was "pinmaker for the people of the United States, and for exportation to all parts of the world." " Now, that," said Horace, " is wha you call a piece of buncombe ; but, for all that it is true. The old statement is true, that if you import into Russia a bottle of champagne or a piece of broadcloth, you import liberal ideas there as truly as if you imported Tom Paine Commerce is no missionary to carry more o better than you have at home. But what you have at home, be it gospel or be it drunkenness, commerce carries the world over. As what's- his-name said, the walking-beam of Livingstone a steam-launch preached as well as Livingstone, and a good many more people heard it." "It would not have said much if Livingstone had not been there," said I, a little emstilv. " Don't be sore, padre," said Horace. " No- TEN 1IMES A THOUSAND. 83 Dody said it would. But you see Livingstone was there. That is just what I am saying. And there are Livingstones all over this world, who are not acquainted with the Royal Geographical Society. As we came on from New York last night, after Mabel turned in, I got out this note book, and I added up the number of men and women who belong to these different Wadsworth clubs, who have travelled or settled in different parts of this world. Just look at them." Sure enough I found Horace, who was always a better acting adjutant than he was any thing else, true to his nature, had entered in close columns, forty lines to a page, the people that any of the Harry Wadsworth people re garded as being really in earnest in relieving the suffering of the world, and getting the world out of the mud. " There's a sort of law of average about it," said Harry. " Every now and then a member dies. Then I make a red star, so, against him. But, on the average, you find that every working man, or especially every working woman in one of these lodges, or clubs, or sing ing-schools, is represented at the end of three years' time by ten persons whom he has started 84 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. on a better kind of life than he was leading belore. When I was with these people at De troit after I got my head knocked open, we counted up a little more than a thousand, of what they called, in their stately way, ' affiliated members.' Your wife, here, was one of thur * affiliated members.' But I have got here, now, in three years' more time, see here," and he turned over page after page of his crowded note-book. At the end was i rough count 10,140. " That is what three y 3ars have made of one thousand and twenty-three, so far as we know. Of course, a great many of them are wholly out of our sight." Little Pauline, who is an enthusiast about Harry Wadsworth, though she never saw him, clapped her hands with delight, as Horace said this, and cried out, " TEN TIMES ONE THOUSAND IS TEN THOUSAND." "Do yeu learn that at the Lincoln School?" said Horace, with approval. " I shall have to put you on my register, I believe. But what I was saying, Ingham, is this : Here are underlined with blue all the seafaring men in this list. See how many. With red are all the Englishmen, TEN TIMES A THOUSAND. 85 Scotchmen, Germans, and the rest, whose homes are likely to be in any part of Europe, see here, and here. With green are marked the Asiatics: people at Calcutta, there's a man at Singapore, all these are Japanese men. And these, underscored with black, there are fifty- one even of them, are in Africa; you would say it was impossible. But what with Algiers, Alexandria, Zanzibar, the Cape, and a good many men and women who went to Liberia, Harry Wadsworth and his loving life are rep resented, so far as that, in Africa." Then Horace went on to say, that for himseli his travelling was over. The people at home were wild to see Mabel and her baby. The child himself was weaned, and he should finally " set tle down " with the two. " I can do as much at home in renewing this worlo^ and bringing in the kingdom," said he, " as if the Arapahoes were scalping me. And I foresee that my mission ground is Norfolk, which I did not suspect when you and 1 were in Calabria. What I have to say now is this, that in Norfolk I shall constitute myself the assistant adjutant, for that quarter of the world, of these Wadsworth people. I 86 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. mean to keep up the list of these whom I hav marked with red. If I write one letter every morning and one every evening to them, and four every Sunday, I can write in three years twenty-five hundred letters to one part of Euiope and to another. I mean to find out, before three years are over, what the radiating influence of one Christian life is, in a quarter of the world which the man never saw who lived that life." We were talking this over, when we met the others at tea. Mabel was full of it. She really knew the Coffins who had gone to Sweden and the Wentworths who were at Dresden, and I know not how many more she meant to write letters to, and get information. Mary Throop was taking tea with us. One of the real steady- going people she, capable of immense enthu siasm, all the more, because she never shows any, no, though you put her on the rack and pull her tendons asunder, the approved way of awaking enthusiasm. She looked over Dairy m- ple's book with approbation, nodded silently once and again, understood it all the better because no one explained it to her, smiled her approval as she gave it back, and said, " I am TEN TIMES A THOUSAND. 87 going to get a book. I am going to take Asia." " Will you ? " cried Horace, exultant. " I had not supposed anybody else would care any thing about doing it. But if you only will ! You bee, my dear Miss Mary, it is not the glorifying of this young man, that is the last thing anybody wants to do. It is that any life as noble as his and as pure as his never dies; and that his power to lift up the world is always going on ! " Yes: Mary Throop saw that too. She had not enlisted herself for any work of mutual admiration. She wanted to register the real diffusive power of right and truth and love and life. She would do her share. Horace thought a moment and said, " If you really will take Asia, I know who will take Africa. Mabel, do you not remember that great black man on the railroad from Memphis ? Here is his name, Fergus Jamiesson. He will take Africa. He had been up the Niger. He had a passion for statistics. And I have his card somewhere. We can have the whole world. For there is nothing the Detroit men will like better than to keep up America. I r vill write bb TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. to-night to Taylor and to Wagner. They have the statistical passion there also." " For my part," said Polly, " I detest writing Betters to people I never saw. I believe you men like it, because you did it in the army, and you thought King Bornba was beaten when you had emptied a pigeon-hole by putting all the papers into big envelopes, and writing on the outside ' Respectfully referred to Major Pendennis.' " For my part," continued she, " I had rathei he children should spend their money on a grab- Dag at a fair, than bring me home a parcel of letters from the fair post-office, that were written at a venture, from somebody to nobody, to be posted nowhere, because they were good for nothing." Mabel laughed and said, " Amen, amen. But you see, dear Polly," said she, " or you shall see, that these letters of ours are written by somebody of flesh and blood, to somebody of blood and flesh, with something in them and going to Sweden, mine are." " Humph," said Polly incredulously, " they will take the express train back to Weeden sta- TEN TIMES A THOUSAND. 89 tion when they get there." But Mabel only laughed the louder, said she should write her first letter then and there ; that Mary Throop should write hers and that Horace should write his. " And Polly," said I, " shall pay the postage, out of our rag-money." So the three first letters in this gigantic corre spondence were written that night in our sitting room in D Street. They were read, criticised, postscripts added, and then forwarded; and so the second half of the formation of the Club began. CHAPTER V. EUliOPE, ASIA, AFRICA, AND THE ISLES OF Tttl OCEAN. 'VT'ES, it is true that the next three years of thia history become a little less determinate. There is less of that " realism," as the critics it, which the critics so much dislike, because it makes you sure that what you read is true, in stead of being bookish, and in general improb able or unreal, as the critics think all truly good writing should be. You see it was on the 24th of March, 1870, that Dalrymple and his pretty wife left our house to take the City of Brussels for Queenstown and Liverpool, and from that day to this day I have never seen their faces more. Also Mary Throop has never been in D Street again. As for Fergus Jamiesson, I never saw him, far less the Detroit corresponding secreta ries. What I am now to tell, therefore, of the three years between 1870 and 1873, I am to EUROPE, ASIA, AFRICA, ETC. 91 compile from statistics, files of letters, and the law of general averages ; and it will have much more the vague air of ordinary history, therefore, than the truth truly told ever does, from which, as you know, ordinary history is indefinitely removed. Sparing you the detail, then, in which pro phecy and history fail alike, here is the sum of the story. Of the TEN THOUSAND Dalrymple had the names of I know not how many hundreds of men and women, who from this cosmopolitan country of ours had carried Harry Wadsworth's name or his picture, or his printed letters, to one or another part of Europe, or if not these, had carried the spirit of his life there. They had what the Detroit men called the four corner stones, and in Detroit had painted on four slabs in their lodge-house : " They " looked up and not down," " they did not talk of themselves," rt they always lent a hand," and " they were not afraid to die." Yes, and they knew, but for Harry Wadsworth, they would have thought more of themselves, would have been brooding and regretting, would have been slower to help, and would have clung tighter to life. 92 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. With these eight hundred, more or less, men and women, Horace and Mabel began their cor respondence : three letters a day, counting hers, and five or six every Sunday. Well for them that postage was coming lower, but they sold their foreign stamps for the benefit of the cause. That was an economy Mrs. Haliburton taught them. Well ! a great many letters never were an swered, perhaps a third part But on the othet hand, it proved at once that there were in Europe already many more of the apostles, as Dalrym- ple began to call them, than he and Mabel had any idea of. They had to open new books, with much wider margins, and much more space be tween the lines. Iron-men had not been ironing in Sweden without carrying there the old Cron- stadt lore ; railroad men did not go to Russia without carrying there the North Colchester traditions ; young artists did not paint in Rome without talking to their model boys, brigands or beggars, as it might happen, in the spirit with which Harry talked to Will Corcoran and the Tidd boys. Nay, Horace even went down into Calabria and established an order there among EUROPE, ASIA, AFRICA, ETC. 93 people as black as the most veritable Carbonari; and he was fond of saying that he found there some Italians, who remembered the padre CoJ onel Ingham, and who had not forgotten what * had told them, in my wretched way, of Harry. I think Mabel was most touched, when, as they were coming home through Thuringia, and had stopped on her account for a day or two, at the smallest and least pretentious inn that ever escaped from being put into Murray, the tidy girl who fried the trout, made the bread, smoothed the pillows, brushed away the flies, and in the evening played on the guitar, proved to speak English, and proved to have learned it at Mani- towoc, in Wisconsin. Mabel was so far Western ised by this time, that she clave to the German girl as to a sister, more, I am afraid, for the flesh is weak, than if the girl had been a bar-maid in Norwich or in Aylsham, rather nearer Mabel's home than Manitowoc was. Be this as it may they sisterized at once. Mabel talked Wiscon sin to her, and she talked of the Lakes to Ma bel, broken English and broken German got cemented together ; and before they were done, the Fraulein had produced a Harry- Wadsworth 94 TEN TIMEd ONE IS TEN. breast-pin ! They hau had a little church there in Wisconsin, back twenty miles from the lake, where one of WiddifiekTs men was the minister! And this girl also had learned " to look forward and not backward, to look up and not down, to look out and not in," and to " lend a hand." And when she came back to Thuringia, in the little guest-house there, she had organized a chorus of peasant-girls, who met her once a week, and read their Bibles together, and sung together, and knitted together, and four times a year gave away the stockings they knit to the old women in the charcoal huts, the witches of seven generations ago, and they did this in memory of Harry! So far that little candle threw its beams ! They showed her the copy of " Frank Leslie," which had the picture of the dedication of the Wads worth Library Hall in Pioneer, Missouri. But I said I would not run into detail. Nor will I even cumber the page by the nicely ruled table Dalrymple made up for me three years after he left us. I had enough rather copy scraps from Mabel's crossed letters. She wrote freely to us, and did not count those letters EUROPE, ASIA, AFEICA, ETC 90 among the official ones. But I will not do that. Nor will I ask you to follow Mary Throop through the mazes of her Asiatic correspond ence. Queer stamps she got, with her Singa pore mails, and her Assam distribution offices, and Galle and Shanghae and Petropaulowsky, and End-of-the-earth in general. Nor will I offend the proprieties by copying the very in different spelling of Fergus Jamiesson, writing from Monrovia, nor explain the great difficul ties of his inland correspondence. Far less will I try to condense within these waning pages the full and triumphant statistics compiled by the recording and corresponding secretaries, and the staffs of assistant correspondents and assist ant recorders of the Detroit central " Office of Registration." Do not we all remember George Canning's words ? "I can prove any thing by statistics, except the truth." So we will let the statistics go, accepting only the results. For, about the time I got Dalrymple's elabo rate letter of his three years' observation in Europe, Jainiesson's from Monrovia came. Be fore long, there appeared an immense printed document from Detroit, and then we wrote to W6 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. Mary for her Asiatic statistics. Queer enough, the old law Held ! In three years, everybody who cared for this dissemination, by personal love and personal work, of the spirit of an un selfish life, had found some nine, ten, or eleven people like himself. The average ran at ten, aa it had done. And when Pauline, who was now a big child, added up all the columns, they came out, under this eternal law, 107,413. " TEN TIMES TEN THOUSAND IS A HUNDRED THOUSAND!" That was the one remark which Pauline volun teered on the occasion. CHAPTER VI. TEN TIMES A HUNDRED THOUSAND A ND so my story is well-nigh done. Not because there is no more to tell, but be cause there is so much to tell. Anybody can count the seed-leaves on an elm-tree the year it starts, but Dr. Gray and Mr. Peirce are the only people I ever heard of who computed the leaves on the Washington Elm ; and the man to whom they told the sum forgot whether there were a million or ten million, because neither the word million nor the words ten million gave him much idea or meaning. I could tell you how Harry Wadsworth made the first ten what they were, but I could only hint of the way the first ten helped the first hundred. I could only pick out one story of the work of the first hundred, and tf the first thousand I know I have told you nothing. But nothing dies which deserves to live. Fifteen years after he was dead, we loved 98 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. him all the same ; and every true word he spoke went over the world with all the same power, though it did happen to be spoken in the language of the Ngambes by a chief of the Barotse to a woman of Sesheke. Wildfire does lot stop of itself; and when a hundred thou sand blades of grass are really on fire, it does not stop easily. So the next three years from this count of Pauline's proved. Dalrymple had also had to appoint secretaries for France, Southern Italy, Northern Italy, and the rest. His polyglot was not very good, and he said different nations had different ways. So it was in Jamiesson's continent also, Kilimane and Sesheke, Ossuan and Jinga, there were many languages, many methods, little writing, and no mails. But love worked wonders easily in that African blood, and Jamiesson had most extraordinary stories from traders, and camel- drivers, and boatmen, and ivory carriers, and 1 know not whom. In Asia they got things going with their own Asiatic fervor, and they went forward with a rush when they were started All religions have begun there, and our co-oper ation in true life, which was no new religion, TEN TIMES A HUNDRED THOUSAND. 99 but only a little additional vigor with a little more simplicity in the old, was at home on the old soil. And here in America, I need not tell how many forms of organization and of refusal to organize, how many statements, platforms, movements, combinations, head centres, middle centres, and centre centres, would develop in three years. What pleased me in it all was this, that, nobody, so far as I could find out, got swept away with the folly of counting noses. Nobody seemed to think he was subduing the world, because he was in a correspondence bureau and kept count of those who subdued. I do not believe anybody gave more time to the corre spondence than Horace did, a letter before breakfast, and another as he went to bed, per haps half an hour a day. On the other hand, I am perfectly sure that Horace was ten times a man, because he was thus thrown into outside relations. What does the third " plank " say, but " Look out rather than in." It was near the end of these three years that they made an attack on us, Horace and Mabel, and insisted that our four oldest girls should make them a visit. We 100 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN said it was nonsense, but the girls did not thin* so, and after many obstacles set up by me, Horace and Mabel and the four girls con quered ; and, trampling over my body, Alice, Bertha, Clara, and PauJne, all sailed for Eng land, went to Norfolk, and made a most lovely summer visit there. Horace took them up into Scotland, and they tried salmon-fishing there, all of them, Mabel and all, went to the Lakes together, and they slopped with their water- colors there ; but the very best of all was at home. That was so homelike, so English, and so lovely. I think Mabel's father, in his heart of hearts, thought that these four girls were the most extraordinary things which Horace had ever sent home from his wanderings; that no stuffed kangaroo, or no living emu of his boy hood, equalled these four adventurous living specimens. But none the less did he come over daily to the house to see what could be done that day for their amusement. And Horace's own father, as the girls by one accord declared, was "just lovely." Of which visit, let them write the history, in this place only this is to be noted : that except- TEN TIMES A HUNDRED THOUSAND. 101 ing when Pauline went bodily into Horace's den, and compelled him to show her "Wadsworth letters, they hardly saw or heard any thing of the secretary's duties as secretary. What they did see was the eager, cheerful life of a consci entious gentleman in the midst of a large ten antry. They saw farms in perfect order ; they saw laborers with the lines of promotion open ; they went into schools of cheerful, bright, in telligent children, well taught and thriving ; they saw all the time that Horace was lifting where he stood ; and that by Swaffham in Norfolk, he was driving out the King Bombas of that region quite as effectually as he drove out another King Bomba from Calabria. His vocation was that of an English land-proprietor, compelling deserts to blossom and bear fruit ; his avocation was so near to it, that it was hard to discrimi nate. It was the making the men who worked on his estates to be more manly, and the lifting up their children's lives ; yes, and without theii knowing it also, the farmers who only paid him. rent, and the laborers whom they hired, and their children also, were lifted up in the general reno vation. These were the vocation and the avo- 102 TEN TIMES ON.E IS TEN. cation. For a little " Third," as he called it, a pastime of his dressing-room, he kept up the correspondence with such Englishmen aa believed in the four cardinal points, and were trying to make other people live by them. Norfolk, Norfolk, Norfolk, always Norfolk, with its dear English names, Swaffham and Cockley and Aylsham, and I know not where not, are the burden of the girls' tales of this celebrated English visit. But the end of it is the part which specially belongs in this history of mine ; namely, the expedition they all made to Baden-Baden. A queer place, you would have said, for Horace and Mabel actually to start for, having no other object than to entertain four country cousins, that is, my four girls. But you say this because you do not know that the Prime Minister, and indeed half the government, and the Crown Prince himself, were, at this time, all enthusiasts for " the four cardinal points " named above; and had, long before, painted these statements of them, in letters of gold on the four sides of the Kursaal, where you, Mr. Chips, remember losing five hundred rouleaux the night before you left for home : lk Sursura TEN TIMES A HUNDRED THOUSAND. 103 corda," u vorwiirts nicht ruckwarts," " avrws ov ouvrov" and " lend a hand." This was the way they rendered the four legends, which Detroit had been satisfied to print in our vernacular. I need not say that the whole gambling business was at an end ; but though they were virtuous, there were cakes still, and what took the place of ale. The government younger men than you and I remember in Baden were all of them enthusiasts, and all of them aesthetic. They declared that they would show that Baden-Baden without high play could be made more attractive than Baden-Baden with it: they gave the four " cardinal points " for the secrets of the attraction, and certainly they succeeded. The drama of Weimar was never better than theirs ; the out door life of Baden-Baden itself, in its tawdry days, was never as luxurious as this was now , the fine art of Munich was more grandiose, but not half so lovely as this ; and, what with pretty girls, enthusiastic artists, an opera beyond re proach, the perfection of comedy, the most agreeable men in Europe and the most attractive women, the people who came there managed to live without rouge et noir, at least my girls did 104 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. But they did not go there for mere agreeable living. It was, as we know, rather more than eighteen years since that meeting of ten of us, in the North Colchester station house. It was three years since, as I told you, Pauline added up her " hundred thousand " of the multiples of that original ten. And at the end of the eighteen years, the Crown Prince had determined to call together privately a Conferenz of corresponding secretaries ; not, as he said in his circular, for the purpose of making any plans, for, as he sup posed, the great merit of our movement was that it never had any plans, but that the secretaries might know each other by sight, and, at least, have the satisfaction of shaking hands. " If they did nothing else," said the Crown Prince, " they could show each other how they kept their record-books." So they assembled, and for four of Horace's suite I can testify that, as we say down East, " they had an excellent time." But it was the queerest assembly that ever came together in that Kursaal. Sailors from the Levantine ports, old long- robed men from Poland, who looked like Shylock but were very unlike him, cloth-men from the TEN TIMES A HUNDRED THOUSAND. 105 depths of Germany, quiet Spanish scholars from the university cities, two quaint-looking school masters from Holland, and nice stout men, who, Alice is sure, were burgomasters. Then among all this white trash, you might see Jamiesson himself, great quiet black man, a little over dressed, and his crew of all colors, camel-drivers, pottery-men, wool merchants, cadis, and muftis. Mary Throop was there, looking in the face, for the first time, beys and effendis, with whose autographs she had been long acquainted, and talking, with smiles and with gestures, to people who spoke " Central Tartary" and " Turkey-in- Asia," but of other lingo knew none. All, save a herd of black-coated Americans, looked like a fancy ball, as Clara said, of a thousand people who still moved about as if they had all breakfasted together and were entirely confident in each other, and were never to part from each other again. At the first meeting, two or three hun dred out of the thousand had each his record- book under his arm ; and, on the old faded green of the tables, left in memoriam, you would see a Spaniard trying to explain to a Pole about his totals, his gratifying coincidences, and hit 106 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. surprises, holding up his fingers by way of count, and the Pole bowing, and sympathizing, and saying, "Ah!" and " aussi," under the im pression that "aussi" was Spanish for "yes." It was very funny to the eye, for it was the Tower of Babel backwards. It was all lan guages and peoples united again under the empire of love. No! They would not have any meeting for speech-making, lest they should get into the old ruts. Only, on the day fixed for the first assem bling, the Crown Prince made one very satisfac tory speech, with occasional quotations of the four mottoes, pointing to them, which was cheered loudly by those who did not understand it, and equally loudly by those that did. Then, instead of the usual forlornity of a convention, they all fell to talking together, and a charming buzz arose. Dark-eyed secretaries from Bulgaria wer seen talking to blonde secretaries with curls from the neighborhood of Fort Scott, in Kansas; a very business-like secretary from Oshkosh was caught talking, behind a door, with a very pretty Circassian secretary who had brought her book all the way from Hirnry. The result cf a week's TEN TIMES A HUNDRED THOUSAND 10? rapid talking, with drives, and walks, and con certs, and picnics, was very great mutual confi dence and regard among the secretaries, more, as Pauline thought, and as Mabel agreed, than if they had all sat on uncomfortable settees eight hours a day for a week, and had discussed some resolutions that nobody cared a very great deal for. Only then there would have been so much more to put in the newspapers ! And what is life good for, if you cannot put it into the news papers ? Meanwhile, the secretary of state was at work with a detail of clerks furnished him by the home department ; and the different secretaries brought in their books to him, and their totals were transcribed and added, and put into all sorts of tables, in the most admirable way, so as to look quite as dull as, in reality, the miraclevS they described were exciting. And the result of the whole was, that in the three last years the movement had gained TENFOLD ! Each indi vidual member seemed, on the average, to have brought in ten new members, or BO nearly ten, that 1he deaths in three years were made good, with nine members more. The grand total 108 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. increased the 107,413 members of three years before to 1,081,729! So soon as this was proved, a royal salute was fired from the old batteries. And, that evening, the coirt-band performed for the first time a magnificent new symphony, by the great Rud jlphssen himself, of which the theme was Zehn Mai Eins ist Zehrk which was received with rapture by all who at all appreciated classical music. I am sorry to say some of the Chinese secretaries did not. But as there was not room for them to sit down, they walked in the gardens in the moonlight Of all which glories Bertha wrote full accounts to us, winding up, in immense letters, with what was everybody's motto and badge at Baden- Ba den, TEN TIMES A HUNDRED THOUSAND IS A MILLION. CHAPTER VII. THE CONFERENZ AT CHRISTMAS ISLAND. A ND so after a little of Switzerland, and a dash at Rome and at Naples, my girls came Vome No: no matter what secretaries they had met, that is not part of the story. It had certainly been the most curious convention that ever was held ; with no speeches except this by the Crown Prince, and, instead of Resolutions, nothing but a Symphony. A convention which ended in a symphony ! Nothing but a symphony ! As I heard Kate who had been to Trinity for she knew what say, bitterly disappointed, tha- there was " nothing but prayers " there ; and as the pretty Baroness Thompson when she returned from her wedding-tour, when they had arrived at Niagara too late for the hops at the hotels, told me that there was nothing at Niagara but water! A convention with nothing but a symphony ! But not so bad a convention after all 110 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. For it sent all these secretaries home well convinced that there was much more in the movement than figures ; and that they and the cause they loved were lost if it were shipwrecked on statistics ; that dear Harry Wadsworth himself would be dissatisfied, even in heaven, if he thought one of them was getting betrayed into preferring a method to the reality. " Love is the whole," said the Piscataquis Secretary to me, as he stopped at No. 9, with some letters from the girls ; and I know he went down to his camp of lumbermen more resolved than ever to lend a hand, and some very noble things we heard from that lumber camp before the next year had gone by. But I have forsworn detail. You see we are rushing to the end ! From this great Conferenz the story of the movement is indeed mixed up with the larger history of the world. It was onlj then that for the first time many in the movement, and many out of it, knew that there was any movement at all. A stone is thrown into the water, but who ever knows where or if the sixth circle strikes the meadow-grass on the shore ? THE CONFERENZ AT CHRISTMAS ISLAND. Ill Nor did we hear of any Conferenz or Con vention three years after, till it was too late for us. We went on in our quiet way. Life Was purer and simpler and less annoyed to us, because constantly, now, we met with near and dear friends whom we had not known a day before, and who looked up and not down, looked out and not in, looked forward and not back ward,, and were ready to lend a hand. Life seemed simpler to them, and it is my belief that, to all of us, in proportion as we bothered less about cultivating ourselves, and were willing to spend and be spent for that without us, above us, and before us, life became infinite and this world became heaven. But there was a Conferenz, though we did not know of it beforehand; without taking down the dictionary I cannot tell what they called it It was in one of the South-Sea Isl ands, set a-going by some of George Button's Kermadeck people. They could not go to Baden- Baden, of course ; and I believe the whole Pacific Ocean had had but two representatives there. Their oanoes could not double Cape Horn, they said. But when they heard the accounts of 112 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. Baden-Baden, they all said that, for all its glories, it was still true, as Mr. Morris had made out, that the earthly paradise was in their own beautiful ocean, Pacific Ocean indeed, if any one understood the sublime prophecy in which it was named. So the Beche-la-mer people, and the seal-fishers, and the Nootka Sounders, and the birds'-nest men, and all sorts of Alexander Selkirks, and Swiss Families, and Peter Wilkin- Bes, and Crusoes without a name, all the Judds and Bishop Selwyns and Pitcairns Isl anders fell to corresponding with each other, and organized their own celebration of the seventh triennial anniversary of the original club meet ing. It was to be held on Christmas Island, for the name was of good omen ; and, as near as they could figure, that was near the centre of the Pacific, and on the whole equally convenient and inconvenient to everybody, like a well- placed school-house in the school district of a country town. Great correspondence they had with other secretaries, and great temptations they offered of bread-fruit and poe, and cocoa- nuts, and bananas, with actually unlimited sup plies of guava jelly, to any who were carnally THE CONFERENZ AT CHRISTMAS ISLAND. 113 minded, if they would come. Great efforts they made to get some of the " original ten," and with such success that the Widow Corcoran went, and one of the Tidd boys, and Widdi- field, and great heroes, I can tell you, they were too. And in every sort of craft the ocean bears did the delegates from different groupa arrive; from groups with names, and groups without them. As by those ocean currents the original cocoanuts were borne wafted in their husky boats; and every seed and every egg that has been needed since for the food of man 01 beast, so the delegates or secretaries came north, came south, came east, and came west, to Christmas Island. And they held high festival there for many days. George Dutton was there, evidently no day older than he was when in California he ran for his life. Widdifield met college pupils of his, whom he had not seen since he preached in Newark in New Jer- feey. Mrs. Corcoran met some people from the Old Country who had been living in Honolulu for twenty years ; but on conversation it proved that from their old home in Ballykeir they could see Stevie's Mount in the sunrise, which she, Li.4 TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. Mrs. Corcoran, always saw in the sunset, as a little girl, she came and went in Ballytui- lah ; and, though neither of them had ever gone to Stevie's Mount, by going round the world, they had met here on Easter day on Christmas Island. Strong representations from Japan were there, of those charming, mild-spoken, gentle manly noblemen, and in the ardor of the move ment some of them had ventured to bring their sisters and their wives. And there, too, they had their symphonies in their own kind, though not after the fashion of the court-band of Carlsruhe. Symphonies in dancing, symphonies in canoes on still water be hind guardian reefs, symphonies whispered in the ear, symphonies spoken in prayer to God by great congregations ; there was no want of symphonies, and no want of harmony, though there was not a resolution or programme or pre- amblr printed or voted for, nor so much as a cornet-a-piston on the whole Island. The secre taries had their books, tappa books and books of rice paper, books of cotton, books of seal skin, books from America ruled by Leveridge and Stratton's compound, patent, self-adjusting, THE CONFERENZ AT CHRISTMAS ISLAND. 115 double combination ruling machine, and long rolls of parchment which some Muftis brought from beyond Muscat. And speculative secreta ries and calculating secretaries lay for days with their books under fronds of giant ferns, twenty feet high, yes, just as lovingly as the fairies lie under the maiden's-hair in the spring pasture, and calculated and copied, subtracted, trans ferred, cancelled, and added. Immense corre spondence they opened from absent secretaries, and then calculated more, made more transfers, and added more. Then they filed the letters, and went off to their dancing, or talking, or story-tell ing. Then the next day they met and calculated again, and more boats and ships brought more letters. And after two or three weeks the whole was put in the proper tables, and the great law, " Ten Times One is Ten," was verified again. In only three years from the Conferenz at Baden- Baden it was made certain that the movement was represented by at least 10,934,1 27 members. There was immense jollification at the announce ment, a great international feast of two finger and three finger poe, with roast-beef, beche-la mer, birds' nests, and guava jelly, ad libitum* 116 TEN TIMES ONE 13 TEN. And when all had well feasted, George sent off his own lovely clipper yacht, the " Harry Wads- worth," which had long before taken the place of the shattered canoe, with a skipper who cracked o i day and night to Hawaii, and telegraphed to the four continental secretaries only these words : " Ten million nine hundred and thirty- four thousand, one hundred and twenty-seven." " Only these and nothing more." And the next morning, all over the world where there were newspapers, in the head line of the " Personal " in the leading journals of the towns where were secretaries, there appeared in full-face italic cap- tals these words only, understood by the elect, if oy no others : table Mountains, as the sun was setting cheerily on them, and lighting them up with the glories of amber and gold and fire. CHAPTER III. ANOTHER YEAR HOW quickly a year goes round ! And this year the snow had fallen as early as Thanksgiving. And on Adam and Eve's Day, in the morning, a little fresh fall had made every roadway look as if it were ready for a wedding. But the sky had cleared, and it was, oh, so blue ! And Irene came out and stood on the top of the high steps, and looked across the Valley Beautiful to the Delectable Mountains. She was in a seal-skin sack this time, and she wore a pretty Polish cap, all ready for a sleigh-ride ; and as, with her deep brown eyes, she looked into the blue, you would have known that she was looking into heaven. Just a minute she stood there, and then up drove a heavily-robed sleigh ; and Horace Whittier, who drove the handsome horses, flung down the reins, sure that they would stand, 190 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. and ran up the steps, and caught her by both hands. "lam ten minutes early!" cried he, "but you are earlier. Victory, victory ! She waits on the steps for her impatient lover." " Impudent boy ! " said Irene, as he almost lifted her into the sleigh, " is there nothing in the world but you and your old horses ? Would not anybody, with half a quarter of an eye, want to stand and see that snow on the ever greens, and my dear old Blue Hills white against the sky? And you suppose I was waiting for you ? " " Anyway," said he happily, as he tucked her in, " it is lucky I came early." ** I think you are apt to come early," said she, and they laughed happily as they started. " Dear child," said Horace, " these bear-skins are the most false of shams. This thing we sit in is nothing but an express wagon. I made just room enough for your little feet ; lucky they are so little. But for me, what with Noah's-arks and tin horses, and the Dutchman and his wife, and battledoors, I am sure I put my heel through the battledoors, and NEITHER SCRIP NOR MONEY. 191 the thermometer that I sat upon, and my poor sister's glass shade, which I am afraid I drove the whip-stock through, for me, I should be very uncomfortable if you were not here. You do not think all these people would mind if I just melted the rime on my moustache by rest ing it for an instant on that velvet cheek of yours, do you ? ' ' " Horace, if you do not talk sense, I will beckon to that conductor, and go for my errands in the Paul Dudley. People ride in the Paul Dudley without having idiots talk to them." " Sweetheart, the Paul Dudley shall be hung this day with camellias and orange-blossoms. It was in the Paul Dudley that you found the pict ure. If it had not been for the Paul Dudley and the picture, where should I have been this day?" and now he was very serious. " Dear Horace," said she, " it was to be, and forty Paul Dudleys could not help it. Some things are written in heaven." So they talked, now of the gravest and now of the gayest; laughed sometimes, and all but cried sometimes, as he told some story of his adventurous life, or she some story of hers, so quiet ; but he said 192 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. that hers was more adventurous than his. They talked, they laughed, or they were even silent, in all the joy and certainty of happy love. " How splendid your bear-skin cap is ! " said she ; " it' it were only after dark when we came to Oneida Street, we might ask the policeman to show us the road to the roof of the houses, and you could go down ihi chimney with the Noah's-arks and things, while I held the pawing steeds on the ridge-pole. On the whole, I am rather glad the methods of civilization don't re quire us to ride on ridge-poles. I am sure I should be frightened. You mustn't stay too long, and I don't think I will get out. Just at noon we must be at the wedding ; and there 's the hospital and Jeannie's people beside." "Never fear me about being late at wed dings," said the impetuous Horace ; "sometimes I think I can never wait till they come. But the longest lane turns at last." " I tell you," said she, " that you are such a favorite with Mrs. McGoffin, that you will stand whispering soft nothings in her ear while I am freezing to death here ; and at last I shall take mercy on the horses, and walk them ten or NEITHER SCRIP NOR MONEY, 193 twenty times up the street and down, and they will take fright in Harrison Avenue, and run five miles, and I shall lie over the back of the seat screaming, ' Horace, Horace ! ' and you will have no clew to follow by but a line of Noah's-arks and thermometers on the road ; and a mounted policeman will come to the rescue, and will take me to a grausome church near Punkapog, and insist that I shall be his wife." " Irene, I will kill that policeman ! I shall arrive on my bicycle just in time; and when the minister says, ' Does any man know cause ? ' I shall say ' I do.' I shall shoot him with his own revolver ; I shall take his place, and for once a wedding will come off earlier than it was ex pected. Never you fear Mrs. McGoffin's fas cinations. I shall be down in twenty seconds, before the horses know that I have stopped." Nor did he much exaggerate his own speed. He left the Noah's-arks and horses and guns and swords and cups and balls and the prayer- book and the tippet, for Mrs. McGoffin, Dennis McGoffin, and all the little McGoffins, and was down, as he said himself, " in no time." Then to Jeannie's friends, with the self-registering 13 194 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. thermometer and the Scott's Poems for the old people, and no end of parcels for the youngsters. Here, too, he left Irene's Christmas wishes, and told why Irene could not stay long that day. At the hospital they both alighted together. Of course the children of a year ago were gone. But life is almost as finite at one Christmas-tide as at another : so there was no lack, alas, of broken arms and broken legs and burned hands among the little ones. This year there were no paper soldiers for them ; but, by the time they said good-by, each child had on his bed-table a box of pewter soldiers, Prussian for the Ger man girl, French for the French boy, red-coats for little Johnny Bull, and even Highlanders for the little Sawney. These, and two or three books for the bigger children, left the surgical ward happy. " Thirteen minutes for the Weis children ! " cried he, " and then there will be not a magnet nor a Noah's-ark in the shebang." Nor was there. Then, as on the wings of the wind, he cut across to the little Swedish Emanuel Church ; and here was Tom, waiting for the horses. And, NEITHER SCRIP NOR MONEY. 195 quite in time, Horace gravely led Irene up the right-hand aisle, and a very famous usher, with an enormous bridal favor, placed him and her in a pew among the bridegroom's friends. " I told him to put us here," whispered he, " because I was so afraid the bride would have more on her side than poor Feodor. She is so pretty, you know." " You must not talk in meeting. You must sit perfectly still." Nor did he have to wait long before the bride's procession moved up one aisle ; and the pretty Ingeborg, blushing under her orange- blossoms and her lace veil, met, face to face, the handsome, proud, olive-faced Feodor, who appeared, with his best men, at the head of his aisle; and then in the quaint, homely Swed ish, and by that pretty form of service, dear, good Mr. Johanssen made them one. Then, as is the sensible custom of the olden churches, all the friends met for a moment to sign the register. So in the vestry, while it was got ready, Mr. Donne and his wife, Mrs. Her bert, Horace, and Irene, as well as Mrs. Mc- Goffin and Dennis, and Jeannie and her father 196 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. and mother, all stood together, making, indeed, near half of the witnesses. " Thank you so for the Patriarch's Sermons," said Irene to Mr. Donne. " As soon as we are well on our journey, I shall make Horace read them aloud to me." And Mr. Donne seemed like a different man from that poor, languid fellow we saw a year before, as he said eagerly : " You will find the Poems at your house. Roberts has sent the first volume from the bind er's for a wedding present." " I believe, Mr. Donne, you claim the making of this match," said Horace, as he approached them ; " now I thought it was my blunder." " Yours ! how yours ? " " Why, because she was my sister's best bower, don't you see ? " " Your sister's fiddlestick ! The Tartar, there, looks to me as if he thought he made it. For my part, I give Miss Mayhew the credit." Meanwhile Mrs. Donne was hovering round Irene, and asking about the evening, and talking about her husband, and making her remember how ill he was, and making her wonder how well he seemed now. NEITHER SCRIP NOR MONEY, 197 " I believe, Irene, the day you came in and set him to work on other people, that day dates his recovery." " He has sent me the volume of Philarete's Sermons ; and I shall make Horace read them to me." "You will find that easy enough. They are just such sermons as men like. They are the Patriarch's annual reviews of the social condi tion of Russia, you know. They are not a bit like what we call sermons." "And the Poems?" " Oh ! the drollest, weirdest, most enticing, and most provoking things you ever saw. But, Irene, have you seen Rudolf? You will not know him in his ulster. He is at the door with the horses. Do you know Edward says that boy is a genius ? But you found that out too." Irene, in another minute, was kissing Inge- borg. Then she gavo her hand to Feodor. " It was a happy day, I assure you, for me, Miss Mayhew," said he, in. that preternaturally accurate English which Russians speak when they speak any, " the day I met you in the 198 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. hospital." " And the day when my little Ru dolf piloted you to Mr. Donne." " And the day when Ingeborg came in to help out his Swedish," said the proud bridegroom. And here came Mr. Johanssen and his clerk, with the big book of the register. And, after they had all signed, the minister bade the bride and bridegroom good-by, with a sort of benediction ; and then with much hand- clapping, and gratulations in many languages, Mr. and Mrs. Ivanovitch withdrew, and he lifted her to the waiting carriage. " Irene," said the impetuous Mrs. Herbert as they looked from the window, "I want you to notice that faultless polonaise of hers. Now you think Madame Pierrot made it, and well you may. But she did not. It is Ingeborg's own idea, to tell the truth ; but every piece was cut, and every stitch taken, by your Jeannie Fraser. The girl is an artist." " And so you will find her, Fanny. She will not run your Wheeler & Wilson long. Before you are five years older she will be in your bil liard-room, using the upper light as she models her group of " NEITHER SCRIP NOR MONEY. 199 " Come, Irene, come, Irene, you and Fanny must not philosophize forever. The Lady Irene's shebang stops the way, and Tom is dying to get out of it ; I to get in. Good-by, good people, good-by." And so wedding num ber one ended. CHAPTER LAST. TWO BY TWO. Church of Glad Tidings was dimly lighted that same evening. In festoons on the pulpit and the font, in lines marking the shape of the cross behind the pulpit, there was enough evergreen to show that this was Christ mas time. On the communion-table itself was a heap of beautiful flowers, which covered the low vase whose waters kept them fresh. The font was overflowing too with white flowers; and so one knew that here were preparations for a festival. From the organ came heavenly, sympathizing, and peaceful harmonies. And, in the front pews, perhaps a hundred people waited 20t7 flARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. quietly, among them everybody we met at Ingeborg's wedding, except Mr. Johanssen and his clerk, and two others. And many more were there, of whom it has not been necessary to advise this reader. The minister sat in his great high-backed chair, holding his book in his hand. Quietly, and without any one's knowing the moment of their entrance except the minister, Horace and Irene came into the church to gether, and walked slowly up to the chancel. The church flashed light for their welcome. The minister stood up to greet them, and, as the strains of the organ died away, began the service : " We are gathered together," And as he looked upon her face, as their eyes met, it was as the face of an angel love, cour age, truth, and peace. And then he could look into Horace's face, and there was the happy, strong look of a brave man, joy, courage, certainty, peace. I suppose Irene's dress, which was a present from Mrs. Herbert, was like other people's wed ding dresses. I sat rather back in the church ; but I am sure it was not a claret-colored alpaca. NEITHER SCRIP NOR MONEY. 201 Indeed I know, from some notes before me why should I conceal it from you, dear Fanchon and dear Dick? I know that it was of a creamy- white brocade. You thought the veil was of Valenciennes ? Yes ! but in truth it was made on cushions, in Dunrobiri Alley, by Rudolf Weis's own mother, who had been taught all that art in Belgium, before she was sixteen years old. That was her present to the bride. And the myrtle wreath the bride wore, with its lovely blossoms, was from myrtle, every spray of which Rudolf himself had grown in his own windows. And this bouquet, which even Horace let her carry instead of an orthodox bouquet of orange- blossoms, you see how pretty it is, though it is not all white, it is made, every leaf of it, from the flowers the hospital children have been nursing in their own windows. The Maltese cross she wears is Edward Donne's present; and the bouquet-holder all that curious open sil ver filigree- work is the work of Feodor's own hands. There is Feodor, and there is Ingeborg with him, in the third pew on the bridegroom's side. There is not a person in the church, from the 202 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. old minister forward, but would gladly die for Irene, though they would all rather live for her. There is not a person here but is perfectly happy, because she is perfectly happy, or they hope she will be. Perfectly happy she is, or she thinks she is. Perfectly happy is he, or he thinks he is. But how little he knows or she knows yet what a life of perfect happiness is ! How much better will they know even twelve months from to-day ! , So the minister blessed them with all his heart. And the organ waked from its silence, and sounded forth the wedding-march ; and Horace led her in triumph from the church, and we all followed : " Two by two ; that is the rule." To illustrate another form of the willingness to Lend a Hand, I wrote STAND AND WAIT. STAND AND WAIT: A STORY OF CHRISTMAS. CHAPTER I. CHKISTMAS EVE. " '~pHEY 'VE come ! they 've come ! " -* This was the cry of little Herbert, as he ran in from the square stone which made the large doorstep of the house. Here he had been watching, a self-posted sentinel, for the moment when the carriage should turn the cor ner at the bottom of the hill. " They 've come ! they 've come ! " echoed joyfully through the house ; and the cry pen etrated out into the extension, or L, where the grown members of the family were, in the kitchen, " getting tea" by some formulas more solemn than ordinary. " Have they come ? " cried Grace ; and she set her skillet back to the quarter-deck, or after- part of the stove, lest its white contents should 204 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. burn while she was away. She threw a waiting handkerchief over her shoulders, and ran with the others to the front door, to wave something white, and to be in at the first welcome. Young and old were gathered there in that hospitable open space, where the side road swept up to the barn on its way from the main road. The bigger boys of the home party had scat tered half-way down the hill by this time. Even grandmamma had stepped down from the stone, and walked half-way to the roadway. Every one was waving something. Those who had no handkerchiefs had hats or towels to wave ; and the more advanced boys began an undefined or irregular cheer. But the carryall advanced slowly up the hill, with no answering handkerchief, and no bon neted head stretched out from the side. And, as it neared Sam and Andrew, their enthusiasm could be seen to droop, and George and Her bert stopped their cheers as it came up to them ; and before it was near the house, on its grieved way up the hill, the bad news had come up be fore it, as bad news will, " She has not come, after all." STAND AND WAIT. 205 It was Huldah Root, Grace's older sister, who had not come. John Root, their father, had himself driven down to the station to meet her ; and Abner, her oldest brother, had gone with him. It was two years since she had been at home, and the whole family was on tiptoe to welcome her. Hence the unusual tea prepara tion ; hence the sentinel on the doorstep ; hence the general assembly in the yard ; and, after all, she had not come ! It was a wretched disap pointment. Her mother had that heavy, silent look, which children take as the heaviest afflic tion of all, when they see it in their mothers' faces. John Root himself led the horse into the barn, as if he did not care now for anything which might happen in heaven above or in earth beneath. The boys were voluble in their rage : " It is too bad ! " and, " Grandmamma, don't you think it is too bad ? " and, " It is the meanest thing I ever heard of in all my life ! " and, " Grace, why don't you say anything? Did you ever know anything so mean ? " As for poor Grace herself, she was quite beyond saying anything. All the treasured words she had laid up to say to Huldah ; all the doubts 206 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. and hopes and guesses, which were secret to all but God, but which were to be poured out in Huldah's ear as soon as they were alone, were coming up one by one, as if to choke her. She had waited so long for this blessed fortnight of sympathy, and now she had lost it. Grace could say nothing. And poor grandmamma, on whom fell the quieting of the boys, was at heart as wretched as any of them. Somehow, something got itself put on the supper-table ; and, when John Root and Abner came in from the barn, they all sat down to pre tend to eat something. What a miserable con trast to the Christinas Eve party which had been expected ! The observance of Christmas is quite a nov elty in the heart of New England among the lords of the manor. Wiuslow and Brewster, above Plymouth Rock, celebrated their first Christmas by making all hands work all day in the raising of their first house. It was in that way that a Christian empire was begun. They builded better than they knew. They and theirs, in that hard day's work, struck the key note for New England for two centuries and a STAND AND WAIT. 207 half. And many and many a New Englander, still in middle life, remembers that in childhood, though nurtured in Christian homes, he could not have told, if he were asked, on what day of the year Christmas fell. But as New England, in the advance of the world, has come into the general life of the world, she has shown no in aptitude for the greater enjoyments of life ; and, with the true catholicity of her great Congrega tional system, her people and her churches seize, one after another, all the noble traditions of the loftiest memories. And so in this matter we have in hand : it happened that the Roots, in their hillside home, had determined that they would celebrate Christmas, as never had Roots done before since Josiah Root landed at Salem from the Hercules, with other Kentish people, in 1635. Abner and Gershom had cut and trimmed a pretty fir-balsam from the edge of the Hotchkiss clearing, and it was now in the best parlor. Grace, with Mary Bickford, her firm ally and other self, had gilded nuts, and rubbed lady-apples, and strung popped corn ; and the tree had been dressed in secret, the youngsters all locked and warned out from the 208 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. room. The choicest turkeys of the drove, and the tenderest geese from the herd, and the plumpest fowls from the barnyard, had been sac rificed on consecrated altars. And all this was but as accompaniment and side illustration of the great glory of the celebration, which was that Huldah, after her two years' absence, IIul- dah was to come home. And now she had not come, nay, was not coming ! As they sat down at their Barmecide feast, how wretched the assemblage of unrivalled dainties seemed ! John Root handed to his wife their daughter's letter ; she read it and gave it to Grace, who read it, and gave it to her grandmother. No one read it aloud. To read aloud in such trials is not the custom of New England. BOSTON, Dec 24, 1848. DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER; It is dread ful to disappoint you all, but I cannot come. I am all ready, and this goes by the carriage that was to take me to the cars. But our dear little Horace has just been brought home, I am afraid, dying ; but we cannot tell, and I cannot leave STAND AND WAIT. 209 him. You know there is really no one who can do what I can. He was riding on his pony. First the pony came home alone ; and, in five minutes after, two policemen brought the dear child in a carriage. His poor mother is very calm, but cannot think yet, or do anything. We have sent for his father, who is down-town. I try to hope that he may come to himself ; but he only lies and draws long breaths on his little bed. The doctors are with him now ; and I write this little scrawl to say how dreadfully sorry I am. A Merry Christmas to you all. Do not be troubled about me. Your own loving HULDAH. P. S. I have got some little presents for the children ; but they are all in my trunk, and I cannot get them out now. I will make a bun dle Monday. Good-by. The man is waiting. This was the letter that was passed from hand to hand, of which the contents slowly trickled into the comprehension of all parties, according as their several ages permitted them 210 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. to comprehend. Sam, as usual, broke the si lence by saying : " It is a perfect shame ! She might as well be a nigger slave ! I suppose they think they have bought her and sold her. I should like to see 'em all, just for once, and tell 'em that her flesh and blood is as good as theirs; and that, with all their airs and their money, they 've no busi ness to " "Sam," said poor Grace, "you shall not say such things. Huldah has stayed because she chose to stay ; and that is the worst of it. She will not think of herself, not for one minute ; arid so everything happens." And Grace was sobbing beyond speech again ; and her intervention amounted, therefore, to little or nothing. The boys, through the even ing, descanted among themselves on the outrage. Grandmamma, and, at last, their mother, took successive turns in taming their indignation ; but, for all this, it was a miserable evening. As for John Root, he took a lamp in one hand, and the Weekly Tribune in the other, and sat before the fire and pretended to read ; but not once did John Root change the fold of the paper STAND AND WAIT. 211 that evening. It was a wretched Christmas Eve ; and, at half-past eight, every light was out, and every member of the household was lying, stark-awake, in bed. Huldah Root, you see, was a servant with the Bartletts, in Boston. When she was only six teen she was engaged at her trade, as a vest- maker, in that town ; and, by some chance, made an appointment to sew as a seamstress at Mrs. Bartlett's for a fortnight. There were any number of children to be clothed there ; and the fortnight extended to a month. Then the month became two months. She grew fond of Mrs. Bartlett, because Mrs. Bartlett grew fond of her. The children adored her ; and she kept an eye to them ; and it ended in her en gaging to spend the winter there, half-seam stress, half-nurse, half-nursery-governess, and a little of everything. From such a beginning it had happened that she had lived there six years, in confidential service. She could cook better than anybody in the house, better than Mrs. Bartlett herself; but it was not often that she tried her talent there. On a birthday perhaps, 212 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. in August, she would make huckleberry cakes, by the old homestead receipt, for the children. She had the run of all their clothes as nobody else had ; took the younger ones to be meas ured ; and saw that Done of the older ones went out with a crack in a seam, or a rough edge at the foot of a trowser. It was whispered that Minnie had rather go into the sewing-room to get Huldah to show her about Alligation or Square-root, than to wait for Miss Thurber's explanations in the morning. In fifty such ways it happened that Huldah, who, on the roll-call of the census-man, probably rated as a nursery-maid in the house, was the confidential friend of every member of the family, from Mr. Bartlett, for whom she knew where to find the Intelligencer, down to the chore-boy who came in to black the shoes. And so it was that, when poor little Horace was brought in with his skull knocked in by the pony, Huldah was, and modestly knew that she was, the most essential person in the stunned family-circle. While her brothers and sisters were putting out their lights at New Durham, heart-sick and wounded, Huldah was sitting in that still room. S'i'AND AND WAIT. 213 where only the rough, choked breathing of poor Horace broke the sound. She was changing, once in ten minutes, the ice-water cloths ; was feeling of his feet sometimes ; wetting his tongue once or twice in an hour; putting her ringer to his pulse, with a native sense which needed no second-hand to help it; and all the time, with the thought of him, was remembering how grieved and hurt and heart-broken they were at home. Every half-hour, or less, a pale face ap peared at the door; and Huldah just slid across the room and said : " He is really doing nicely, pray lie down ; " or " His pulse is surely bet ter ; I will certainly come to you if it flags ; " or " Pray trust me, I will not let you wait a moment if he needs you ; " or " Pray get ready for to-morrow. An hour's sleep now will be worth everything to you then." And the poor mother would crawl back to her baby and her bed, and pretend to try to sleep ; and in half an hour would appear again at the door. One o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock. How com panionable Dr. Lowell's clock seems when one is sitting up so, with no one else to talk to I Four o'clock at last ; it is really growing to be 214 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. quite intimate. Five o'clock. " If I were in dear Durham now, one of the roosters would be calling," Six o'clock. Poor Horace stirs, turns, flings his arm over. " Mother O Hul- dah ! is it you ? How nice that is ! " And he is unconscious again ; but he had had sense enough to know her. What a blessed Christmas present that is, to tell that to his poor mother when she slides in at daybreak, and says : " You shall go to bed now, dear child. You see I am very fresh ; and you must rest yourself, you know. Do you really say he knew you? Are you sure he knew you? Why, Huldah, what an angel of peace you are ! " So opened Huldah's Christmas morning. Days of doubt, nights of watching. Every now and then the boy knows his mother, his father, or Huldah. Then will come this heavy stupor, which is so different from sleep. At last the surgeons have determined that a piece of the bone must come away. There is the quiet gathering of the most skilful at the determined hour ; there is the firm table for the little fel low to lie on ; here is the ether and the sponge ; STAND AND WAIT. 215 and, of course, here and there, and everywhere, is Huldah. She can hold the sponge, or she can fetch and carry ; she can answer at once if she is spoken to ; she can wait, if it is waiting ; she can act, if it is acting. At last the wretched lit tle button, which has been pressing on our poor boy's brain, is lifted safely out. It is in Mor ton's hand ; he smiles and nods at Huldah as she looks inquiry, and she knows he is satisfied. And does not the poor child himself, even in his unconscious sleep, draw his breath more lightly than he did before ? All is well. " Who do you say that young woman is ? " says Dr. Morton to Mr. Bartlett, as he draws on his coat in the doorway after all is over. " Could we not tempt her over to the General Hospital ? " " No, I think not. I do not think we can spare her." The boy Horace is new-born that day ; a New Year's gift to his mother. So pass Huldah's holidays. CHAPTER II. CHRISTMAS AGAIN. FOURTEEN years make of the boy, whose pony was too much for him, a man equal to any prank of any pony. Fourteen years will do this, even to boys of ten. Horace Bartlett is the colonel of a cavalry regiment, stationed just now in West Virginia ; and, as it happens, this twenty-four-year-old boy has an older commis> sion than anybody in that region, and is the Post Commander at Talbot C. H., and will be, most likely, for the winter. The boy has a vein of foresight in him, a good deal of system ; and, what is worth while to have by the side of sys tem, some knack of order. So soon as he finds that he is responsible, he begins to prepare for responsibility. His staff-officers are boys too ; but they are all friends, and all mean to do their best. His surgeon-in-charge took his degree at Washington last spring ; that is encouraging. Perhaps, if he has not much experience, he has, STAND AND WAIT. 217 at least, the latest advices. His bead is level too ; he means to do his best, such as it is ; and, indeed, all hands in that knot of boy-counsellors will not fail for laziness or carelessness. Their very youth makes them provident and grave. So among a hundred other letters, as October opens, Horace writes this : TALBOT COURT HOUSE, VA., Oct. 3, 1863. DEAR HULDAH, Here we are still, as I have been explaining to father ; and, as you will see by my letter to him, here we are like to stay. Thus far we are doing sufficiently well. As I have told him, if my plans had been adopted we should have been pushed rapidly forward up the valley of the Yellow Creek; Badger's corps would have been withdrawn from before Win chester ; Wilcox and Steele together would have threatened Early ; and then, by a rapid flank movement, we should have pounced down on Longstreet (not the great Longstreet, but lit tle Longstreet) and compelled him to uncover Lynchburg ; we could have blown up the dams and locks on the canal, made a freshet to sweep all the obstructions out of James River ; and 218 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WAD5WORTH CLUBS. then, if they had shown half as much spirit on the Potomac, all of us would be in Eichmond for our Christmas dinner. But my plans, as usual, were not asked for, far less taken. So, as I said, here we are. Well, I have been talking with Lawrence Worcester, my surgeon-in-charge, who is a very good fellow. His sick-list is not bad now, and he does not mean to have it bad ; but he says that he is not pleased with the ways of his ward- masters ; and it was his suggestion, not mine, mark you, that I should see if one or two of the Sanitary women would not come as far as this to make things decent. So, of course, I write to you. Don't you think mother could spare you to spend the winter here ? It will be rough, of course ; but it is all in the good cause. Per haps you know some nice women, well, not like you, of course, but still, disinterested and sensible, who would come too. Think of this carefully, I beg you, and talk to father and mother. Worcester says we may have three hundred boys in hospital before Christmas ; if Jubal Early should come this way, I don't STAND AND WAIT. 219 know how many more. Talk with mother and father. Always yours, HORACE BARTLETT. P. S. I have shown Worcester what I have written ; he encloses a sort of official letter, which may be of use. He says, " Show this to Dr. Hayward ; get them to examine you and the others, and then the government, on his order, will pass you on." I enclose this because, if you come, it will save time. Of course Huldah went. Grace Starr, her married sister, went with her, and Mrs. Phil- brick, and Anna Thwart. That was the way the\' happened to be all together in the Meth odist church, that had been, of Talbot Court House, as Christmas holidays drew near, of the year of grace, 1863. She and her friends had been there quite long enough to be wonted to the strangeness of December in the open air. On her little table, in front of the desk of the church, were three or four buttercups in bloom, which she had gath ered in an afternoon walk, with three or four 220 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. heads of hawksweed. " The beginning of one year," Huldah said, " with the end of the other. " Nay, there was even a stray rose which Dr. Sprigg had found in a farmer's garden. Hul dah came out from the vestry, where her own bed was, in the gray of the morning, changed the water for the poor little flowers, sat a mo ment at the table to look at last night's memo randa ; and then beckoned to the ward-master, and asked him in a whisper, what was the movement she had heard in the night, " An other alarm from Early ? " "No, miss, not an alarm. I saw the Colo nel's orderly as he passed. He stopped here for Dr. Fenno's case. There had come down an express from General Mitchell, and the men were called without the bugle, each man separately ; not a horse was to neigh, if they could help it. And really, miss, they were off in twenty minutes." "Off, who are off?" " The whole post, miss, except the relief for to-day. There are not fifty men in the village, besides us here. The orderly thought they were to go down to Braxton's ; but he did not know." STAND AND WAIT. 221 Here was news indeed ! news so exciting that Huldah went back at once, and called the other women ; and they all of them together began on that wretched business of waiting. They had never yet known what it was to wait for a real battle. They had had their beds filled with this and that patient from one or another post, and had some gun-shot wounds of old standing among the rest ; but this was their first battle, if it were a battle. So the covers were taken off that long line of beds down on the west aisle, and from those under the singers' seat ; and the sheets and pillow-cases were brought out from the linen-room, and aired, and put on. The biggest kettles are filled up with strong soup ; and they have milk-punch and beef-tea all in readiness ; and everybody they can command is on hand to help lift patients and distribute food. But there is only too much time. Will there never be any news? Anna Thwart and Doctor Sprigg have walked down to the bend of the hill, to see if any messenger is coming. As for the other women, they sit at their table ; they look at their watches ; they walk down to the door ; thev come back to the table. 222 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. I notice they have all put on fresh aprons, for the sake of doing something more in getting ready. Here is Anna Thwart. " They are coming ! they are coming ! somebody is coming. A mounted man is crossing the flat, coming to wards us ; and the doctor told me to come back and tell." Five minutes more, ten minutes more, an eternity more, and then a rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat, the mounted man is here. " Wag ons right behind. We bagged every man of them at Wyatt's. Got there before daylight. Colonel White's men from the Yellows came up just at the same time, and we pitched in before they knew it, three or four regiments, thirteen hundred men, and all their guns." " And with no fighting ? " " Oh, yes ! fighting of course. The colonel has got a train of wagons down here, with the men that are hurt. That 's why I am here. Here is his note." Thus does the mounted man discharge his errand backward. DEAR DOCTOR, We have had great success. We have surprised the whole post. The com- STAND AND WAIT. 223 pany across the brook tried hard to get away, and a good many of them, and of Sykes's men, are hit ; but I cannot find that we have lost more than seven men. I have nineteen wagons here of wounded men, some hurt pretty badly. Ever yours, H. So there must be more waiting. But now we know what we are waiting for ; and the end will come in a finite world. Thank God, at half-past three, here they are ! Tenderly, gently. " Hush, Sam ! Hush Caesar ! You talk too much." Gently, tenderly. Twenty-seven of the poor fellows, with everything the matter, from a burnt face to a heart stopping its beats for want of more blood. " Huldah, come here. This is my old class mate, Barthew ; sat next me at prayers four years. He is a major in their army, you see. His horse stumbled, and pitched him against a stone wall ; and he has not spoken since. Don't tell me he is dying ; but do as well for him, Hul dah," and the handsome boy smiled, "do as well for him as you did for me." So they carried Barthew, senseless as he was, tenderly 224 HARRY WADS WORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. into the church ; and he became E, 27, on an iron bedstead. Not half the soup was wanted, nor the beef-tea, nor the punch. So much the better. Then came day and night, week in and out, of army system and womanly sensibility ; that quiet, cheerful, homish, hospital life, in the quaint surroundings of the white-washed church ; the pointed arches of the windows and the faded moreen of the pulpit telling that it is a church, in a reminder not unpleasant. Two or three weeks of hopes and fears, failures and success, bring us to Christmas Eve. It is the surgeon-in-chief who happens to give our particular Christmas dinner, I mean the one that interests you and me. Huldah and the other ladies had accepted his invitation. Horace Bartlett and his staff, and some of the other officers, were guests ; and the doctor had given his own permit that Major Barthew might walk up to his quarters with the ladies. Huldah and he were in advance, he leaning, with many apologies, on her arm. Dr. Sprigg and Anna Thwart were far behind. The two STAND AND WAIT. 225 married ladies, as needing no escort, were in the middle. Major Barthew enjoyed the emancipa tion, was delighted with his companion, could not say enough to make her praise the glimpses of Virginia, even if it were West Virginia. " What a party it is, to be sure ! " said he. " The doctor might call on us for our stories, as one of Dickens's chiefs would do at a Christmas feast. Let us see, we should have THE SURGEON'S TALE ; THE GENERAL'S TALE; for we may at least make believe that Hod's stars have come from Washington. Then he must call in that one-eyed servant of his, and we will have THE ORDERLY'S TALE. Your handsome friend from Wisconsin shall tell THE GERMAN'S TALE. I shall be encouraged to tell THE PRISONER'S TALK. And you " 15 226 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. " And 1 ? " said Huldah laughing, because he paused. " You shall tell THE SAINT'S TALE." Barthew spoke with real feeling, which he did not care to disguise. But Huldah was not there for sentiment ; and without quivering in the least, or making other acknowledgment, she laughed as she knew she ought to do, and said : " Oh, no ! that is quite too grand, the story must end with THE SUPERINTENDENT OF SPECIAL RELIEF'S TALE. It is a little unromantic to the sound ; but that 's what it is." " I don't see," persisted the major " if Super intendent of Special Relief means Saint in Latin, why we should not say so." " Because we are not talking Latin," said Huldah. "Listen to me; and, before we come to dinner, I will tell you a story pretty enough for Dickens, or any of them ; and it is a story not fifteen minutes old. " Have you noticed that black-whiskered fel- STAND AND WAIT. 227 low, under the gallery, by the north window? Yes, the same. He is French, enlisted, I think, in New London. I came to him just now, man aged to say etrennes and Noel to him, and a few other French words, and asked if there were nothing we could do to make him more at home. Oh, no ! there was nothing ; madame was too good, arid everybody was too good, and so on. But I persisted. I wished I knew more about Christmas in France ; and I staid by. ' No, madame, nothing ; there is nothing : but, since you say it, if there were two drops of red wine, du vin de mon pays, madame; but you could not, here in Virginia.' Could not I ? Long arms has a superintendent of special re lief. There was a box of claret, which was the first thing I saw in the store-room the day I took my keys. The doctor was only too glad the man had thought of it ; and you should have seen the pleasure that red glass as full as I could pile it gave him. The tears were running down his cheeks. Anna, there, had another Frenchman; and she sent some to him: and my man is now humming a little song about the vin rouge of Bourgogne. Would not Mr. 228 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. Dickens make a pretty story of that for you, THE FRENCHMAN'S STORY?' Barthew longed to say that the great novelist would not make so pretty a story as she did. But this time he did not dare. You are not going to hear the eight stories. Mr. Dickens was not there, nor, indeed, was I. But a jolly Christinas dinner they had, though they had not those eight stories. Quiet they were, and very, very happy. It was a strange thing, if one could have analyzed it, that they should have felt so much at home, and so much at ease with each other, in that queer Virginian kitchen, where the doctor and his friends of his mess had arranged the feast ; and a happy thing it was, that the recollections of so many other Christmas homes should come in, not sadly, but pleasantly, and should cheer, rather than shade, the evening. They felt off-soundings, all of them. There was, for the time, no responsi bility. The strain was gone. The gentlemen were glad to be dining with ladies, I be lieve ; the ladies, unconsciously, were probably glad to be dining with gentlemen. The officers STAND AND WAIT. 229 were glad they were not on duty; and the prisoner, if glad of nothing else, was glad he was not in bed. But he was glad for many things beside. You see it was but a little post. They were far away; and they took things with the ease of a detached command. " Shall we have any toasts ? " said the doctor, when his nuts and raisins and apples at last appeared. " Oli, no ! no toasts, nothing so stiff as that." " Oh, yes ! oh, yes ! ' ' said Grace ; " I should like to know what it is to drink a toast. Some thing I have heard of all my life, and never saw." " One toast, at least, then," said the doctor. "Colonel Bartlett, will you name the toast?" " Only one toast? " said Horace ; " that is a hard selection: we must vote on that." " No, no ! " said a dozen voices ; and a dozen laughing assistants at the feast offered their advice. " I might give the Country ; I might give the Cause ; I might give the President : and everybody would drink," said Horace. " I might give Absent Friends, or Home, Sweet Home; but then we should cry." 230 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. " Why do you not give the Trepanned Peo ple ? " said Worcester, laughing, " or the Silver- headed Gentlemen ? " " Why don't you give the Staff and the Line ? Why don't you give Here 's Hoping ? Give Next Christmas ; give the Medical Depart ment ; and may they often ask us to dine ! " " Give Saints and Sinners," said Major Barthew, after the first outcry was hushed. " I shall give no such thing," said Horace. " We have had a lovely dinner ; and we know we have ; and the host, who is a good fellow, knows the first thanks are not to him. Those of us who ever had our heads knocked open, like the Major and me, do know. Fill your glasses, gentlemen, I give you the Special Diet Kitchen." He took them all by surprise. There was a general shout ; and the ladies all rose and dropped mock courtesies. " By Jove," said Barthew to the Colonel, afterwards, " It was the best toast I ever drank in my life. Anyway, that little woman has saved my life. Do you say she did the same to you?" CHAPTER III. CHRISTMAS AGAIN. you think that, when the war was over, Major Barthew, then Major-General, re membered Huldah all the same, and came on and persuaded her to marry him, and that she is now sitting in her veranda, looking down on the Pamunkey River. You think that, do you not? Well, you were never so mistaken in your life ! If you want that story, you can go and buy yourself a dime-novel. I would buy The Rescued Rebel, or The Noble Nurse, if I were you. After the war was over, Huldah did make General Barthew and his wife a visit once, at their plantation in Pocataligo County ; but I was not there, and know nothing about it. Here is a Christmas of hers, about which she wrote a letter ; and, as it happens, it was a letter to Mrs. Barthew. 232 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. HULDAII ROOT TO AGNES BARTIIEW. VILLIERS-BOCAGE, Dec. 27, 1868. . . . Here I was, then, after this series of hopeless blunders, sole alone at the gare [French for station] of this little, out-of-the-way town. My dear, thew, was never an American here since Christopher Columbus slept here when he was a boy. And here, you see, I was like to re main ; for there was no possibility of the others getting back to me till to-morrow, and no good in my trying to overtake them. All I could do was just to bear it, and to live on and live through, from Thursday to Monday; and really, what was worst of all was, that Friday was Christmas Day. Well, I found a funny little carriage, with a funny old man who did not understand my patois any better than I did his ; but he under stood a franc-piece. I had my guide-book, and I said auberge; and we came to the oddest, most outlandish and old-fashioned establishment that ever escaped from one of Julia Nathalie wom an's novels. And here I am. And the reason, my dear Mrs. Barthew, that I take to-day to write to you, you and the STAND AND WAIT. 233 Colonel will now understand. You see it was only ten o'clock when I got here ; then I went to walk, many enfants terribles following respect fully ; then I came home, and ate the funny refection ; then I got a nap ; then I went to walk again, and made a little sketch in the churchyard : and this time, one of the chil dren brought up her mother, a funny Norman woman, in a delicious costume, I have a sketch of another just like her, and she drop ped a courtesy, and, in a very mild patois, said she hoped the children did not trouble madame. And I said, "Oh, no ! " and found a sugar-plum for the child, and showed my sketch to the woman ; and she said she supposed madame was Anglaise. I said I was not Anglaise and here the story begins ; for I said I was Americaine. And, do you know, her face lighted up as if I had said I was St. Gulda, or St. Hilda, or any of their Northmen Saints. " Americaine ! est-il possible ? Jeannette, G-ertrude, faites vos reverences; madame est Americaine" And, sure enough, they all dropped preter- 234 HARRY WADSWORTH AND \VADSWORTH CLUBS. natural courtesies. And then the most eager enthusiasm; how fond they all were of les Americaines, but how no Americaines had ever come before ! And was madame at the Three Cygnets? And might she and her son and her husband call to see madame at the Three Cyg nets? And might she bring a little etrenne to madame ? And I know not what beside. I was very glad the national reputation had gone so far. I really wished I were Charles Sunnier (pardon me, dear Mrs. Barthew!), that I might properly receive the delegation. But I said, " Oh, certainly ! " and, as it grew dark, with my admiring cortege, whispering now to the street full of admirers that madame was Americaine, I returned to the Three Cygnets. And in the evening they all came. Really, you should see the pretty basket they brought for an tirenne. I could not guess then where they got such exquisite flowers ; these lovely stephanotis blossoms, a perfect wealth of roses, and all arranged with charming taste in a quaint country basket, such as exists nowhere but in this particular section of this quaint old STAND AND WAIT. 235 Normandy. In came the husband, dressed up and frightened, but thoroughly good in his look. In came my friend ; and then two sons and two wives, and three or four children : and, my dear Mrs. Barthew, one of the sons, I knew him in an instant, was a man we had at Talbot Court House when your husband was there. I think the Colonel will remember him, a black-whiskered man, who used to sing a little song about le vin rouge of Bourgogne. He did not remember me ; that I saw in a moment. It was all so different, you know. In the hospital I had on a cap and apron, and here, well it was another thing. My hostess knew that they were coming, and had me in her largest room, and I succeeded in making them all sit down ; and I received my formal welcome ; and I thanked in my most Parisian French ; and then the conversation hung fire. But I took my turn now, and turned round to poor Louis. "You served in America, did you not?" said I. " Ah, yes, madame ! I did not know my mother had told you." 236 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. No more did she, indeed ; and she looked astonished. But I persevered : " You seem strong and well." " Ah, yes, madame ! " " How long since you returned ? " " As soon as there was peace, madame. We were mustered out in June, madame." " And does your arm never trouble you? " " Oh, never, madame ! I did not know my mother had told you." New astonishment on the part of the mother. " You never had another piece of bone come out ? " " Oh, no, madame ! how did madame know ? I did not know my mother had told you ! " And by this time I could not help saying: " You Normans care more for Christmas than we Americans ; is it not so, my brave ? " And this he would not stand ; and he said stoutly, " Ah, no, madame ! no, no, jamais ! " and began an eager defence of the religious enthusiasm of the Americans, and their good ness to all people who were good, if people would only be good. But still he had not the least dream who I was. And I said : STAND AND WAIT. 237 " Do the Normans ever drink Burgundy ? " and to my old hostess : " Madame, could you bring us a flask du vin rouge de Bourgogne ? " and then I hummed his little chanson, I am sure Colonel Barthew will remember it, " Deux gouttes du vin rouge de Bourgogne" My dear Mrs. Barthew, he sprang from his chair and fell on his knees, and kissed my hands, before I could stop him. And when his mother and father, and all the rest, found that I was the particular sceur de la charite who had had the care of dear Louis when he was hurt, and that it was I he had told of that very day, for the thousandth time, I believe, who gave him that glass of claret, and cheered up his Christmas, I verily believe they would have taken me to the church to worship me. They were not satisfied, the women with kissing me, or the men with shaking hands with each other ; the whole auberge had to be called in, and poor / was famous. I need not say I cried my eyes out ; and when, at ten o'clock, they let me go to bed, I was worn out with crying, and laughing, and talking, and listening ; and I believe they were as much upset as I. 238 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTII CLUBS. Now that is just the beginning ; and yet I see I must stop. But, for forty-eight hours I have been simply a queen. I can hardly put my foot to the ground. Christmas morning, these dear Thibault people came again ; and then the cure came ; and then some nice Madame Perrons came, and I went to mass with them ; and, after mass, their brother's carriage came, and they would take no refusals; but with many apologies to my sweet old hostess, at the Three Cygnets, I was fain to come up to M. Firmin's lovely chateau here, and make myself at home till my friends shall arrive. It seems the poor Thibaults had come here to beg the flowers for the etrenne. It is really the most beautiful country residence I have seen in France ; and they live on the most patriarchal footing with all the people round them. I am sure I ought to speak kindly of them. It is the most fasci nating hospitality. So here am I, waiting, with my little sac de nuit to make me aspettabile ; and here I ate my Christmas dinner. Tell the Colonel that here is " THE TRAVELLER'S TALE ; " and that is why the letter is so long. Most truly } r ours, HULDAH ROOT. CHAPTER IV. ONE CHRISTMAS MORE. r I ""HIS last Christmas party is Huldah's own. -* It is hers, at least, as much as it is any one's. There are five of them, nay six, with equal right to precedence in the John o' Groat's house, where she has settled down. It is one of those comfortable houses which are still left three miles out from the old State House in Boston. It is not all on one floor ; that would be, perhaps, too like the golden courts of heaven. There are two stories ; but they are connected by a central flight of stairs of easy tread (designed by Charles Cummings) ; so easy, and so stately withal, that, as you pass over them, you always bless the builder, and hardly know that you go up or down. Five large rooms on each floor give ample room for the five heads of the house, if, indeed, there be not six, as I said before. In this Saints' Rest there have drifted to gether, by the eternal law of attraction, Hul- 240 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. dah, and Ellen Philbrick (who was with her in Virginia and in France, and has been, indeed, but little separated from her, except on duty, for twenty years), and with them three other friends. These women, well I cannot intro duce them to you without writing three stories of true romance, one for each. This quiet, strong, meditative, helpful saint, who is coming into the parlor now, is Helen Touro. She was left alone with her baby when the Empire State went down, and her husband was never heard of more. The love of that baby warmed her to the love of all others ; and, when I first knew her, she was ruling over a home of babies, whose own mothers or fathers were not, always with a heart big enough to say there was room for one more waif in that sanctuary. That older woman, who is writing at the Davenport in the corner, lightened the cares and smoothed the daily life of General Schuyler in all the last years of his life, when he was in the Cabinet, in Brazil, and in Louisiana. His wife was long ill, and then died. His children needed all a woman's care ; and this woman stepped to the front, cared for them, cared for all his house- STAND AND WAIT. 241 hold, cared for him ; and I dare not say how much is due to her of that which you and I say daily we owe to him. Miss Peters, I see you know. She served in another regiment; was at the head of the sweetest, noblest, purest school that ever trained, in five-and-twenty years, five hundred girls to be the queens in five hundred happy and strong families. All of these five, our Huldah, and Mrs. Philbrick too, you have seen before, all of them have been in " the service ; " all of them have known that perfect service is perfect freedom. I think they know that perfect service is the highest honor. They have together taken this house, as they say, for the shelter and home of their old age. But Huldah, as she plays with your Harry there, does not look to me as if she were superannuated yet. " But you said there were six in all." " Did I ? I suppose there are. Mr. Phil- brick, are there five captains in your establish ment, or six? " " My dear Mr. Hale, why do you ask me ? You know there are five captains and one general. We have persuaded Seth Corbet to 16 242 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. make his home here, yes, the same who went round the world with Mrs. Cradock. Since her death, he has come home to Boston ; and he reports to us, and makes his headquarters here. He sees that we are all right every morning ; and then he goes his rounds to see every grand child of old Mr. Cradock, and to make sure that every son and daughter of that house is ' all right.' Sometimes he is away over night. This is when somebody in the circle of their friends is more sick than usuaj, and needs a man nurse. That old man was employed by old Mr. Cradock, in 1816, when he first went to housekeeping. He has had all the sons and all the daughters of that house in his arms ; and now that the youngest of them is five-and- Iwenty, and the oldest fifty, I suppose he is not satisfied any day until he has seen that they and theirs, in their respective homes, are well. He thinks we here are babies ; but he takes care of us all the more courteously." " Will he dine with you to-day ? " "I am afraid not ; but we shall see him at the Christmas-tree after dinner. There is to be a tree." STAND AND WAIT. 243 You see, this house was dedicated to the Apotheosis of Noble Ministry. Over the man tel-piece hung Raphael Morghen's large print of " The Lavatio," Caracci's picture of the " Washing of the Feet," the only copy I ever saw. We asked Huldah about it. " Oh, that was a present from Mr. Burch- stadt, a rich manufacturer in Wirtemberg, to Ellen ! She stumbled into one of those villages when everybody was sick and dying of typhus, and tended and watched and saved, one whole summer long, as Mrs. Ware did at Osmotherly. And this Mr. Burchstadt wanted to do some thing; and he sent her this in acknowl edgment. On the other side was Kaulbach's own study of Elizabeth of Hungary, dropping her apron full of roses. " Oh ! what a sight the apron discloses ; The viands are changed to real roses ! " When I asked Huldah where that came from, she blushed, and said, " Oh, that was a present to me ! " and led us to Steinler's exquisite " Good Shepherd," in a larger and finer print than I had ever seen. Six or eight gentlemen 244 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. in New York, who, when they were dirty babies from the gutter, had been in Helen Touro's hands, had sent her a portfolio of beautiful prints, each with this same idea, of seeking what was lost. This one she had chosen for the sitting-room. And on the fourth side was that dashing group of Horace Vernet's, " Gideon crossing Jordan," with the motto wrought into the frame, " Faint, yet pursuing." These four pic tures are all presents to the "girls," as I find I still call them ; and on the easel, Miss Peters had put her copy of " The Tribute Money." There were other pictures in the room ; but these five unconsciously told its story. The five girls were always together at Christ mas ; but, in practice, each of them lived here only two fifths of her time. " We make that a rule," said Ellen, laughing. " If anybody comes for anybody when there are only two here, those two are engaged to each other ; and we stay. Not but what they can come and stay here if we cannot go to them." In practice, if any of us, in the immense circles which these saints had befriended, were in a STAND AND WAIT. 245 scrape, as, if a mother was called away from home, and there were some children left, or if scarlet fever got into a house, or if the chil dren had nobody to go to Mount Desert with them, or if the new house were to be set in order, and nobody knew how, in any of the trials of well-ordered families, why, we rode over to the Saints' Rest to see if we could not induce one of the five to come and put things through. So that in practice, there were seldom more than two on the spot there. But we do not get to the Christmas dinner. There were covers for four-and-twenty ; and all the children besides were in a room up-stairs, presided over by Maria Munroe, who was in her element there. Then our party of twenty- four included men and women of a thousand romances, who had learned and had shown the nobility of service. One or two of us were invited as novices, in the hope, perhaps, that we might learn. Scarcely was the soup served when the door bell rang. Nothing else ever made Huldah look nervous. Bartlett, who was there, said, in an aside to me, that he had seen her more calm 246 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. when there was a volley firing within hearing of her store-room. Then it rang again. Helen Touro talked more vehemently ; and Mrs. Bart- lett at her end started a great laugh. But when it rang the third time something had to be said ; and Huldah asked one of the girls, who was waiting, if there were no one attend ing at the door. " Yes 'm, Mr. Corbet." But the bell rang a fourth time, and a fifth. " Isabel, you can go to the door. Mr. Corbet must have stepped out." So Isabel went out, but returned with a face as broad as a soup-plate. " Mr. Corbet is there, ma'am." Sixth door-bell peal, seventh, and eighth. " Mary, I think you had better see if Mr. Corbet has gone away. " Mary returns, face one broad grin. " No, ma'am, Mr. Corbet is there. " Heavy steps in the red parlor. Side door bell, a little gong, begins to ring. Front bell rings ninth time, tenth, and eleventh. Saint John, as we call him, had seen that something was amiss, and had kindly pitched STAND AND WAIT. 247 in with a dissertation on the passage of the Red- River Dam, in which the gravy-boats were steamships, and the cranberry was General Banks, and the spoons were aids. But, when both door-bells rang together, and there were more steps in the hall, Huldah said, " If you will excuse me," and rose from the table. " No, no, we will not excuse you," cried Clara Hastings. " Nobody will excuse you. This is the one day of the year when you are not to work. Let me go." So Clara went out. And after Clara went out, the door-bells rang no more. I think there were still steps in the hall. She came back, and said a man was in quiring his way to the " Smells ; " and they di rected him to " Wait's Mills," which she hoped would do. And so Huldah's and Grace's stu pendous housekeeping went on in its solid or der, reminding one of those well-proportioned Worcester teas, which are, perhaps, the crown and glory of the New-England science in this matter. I ventured to ask Sam Root, who sat by me, if the Marlborough tarts were not equal to his mother's. And we sat long ; and we laughed loud. We 248 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. talked war, and poetry, and genealogy. We rallied Helen Touro about her housekeeping ; and Dr. Worcester pretended to give a list of surgeons and majors and major-generals who had made love to Huldah. By-and-by, when the grapes and the bonbons came, the sixteen children were led in by Maria Munroe, who had, till now, kept them at games of string and hunt the slipper. And, at last, Seth Corbet flung open the door into the red parlor, to an nounce " The Tree." Sure enough, there was the tree, as the five saints had prepared it for the invited chil dren, glorious in gold, and white with wreaths of snowflakes, and blazing with candles. Sam Root kissed Grace, and said, " O Grace ! do you remember? " But the tree itself did not surprise the children as much as the five tables at the right and the left, behind and before, amazed the Sainted Five, who were indeed the children now. A box of the vin rouge de Bourgogne, from Louis, was the first thing my eye lighted on, and above it a little banner read : " Huldah's table. " And then I saw that these five tables were heaped with the Christmas offerings to the STAND AND WAIT. 249 five saints. It proved that everybody, the world over, had heard that they had settled down. Everybody in the four hemispheres, if there be four, who had remembered the un selfish service of these five, had thought this a fit time for commemorating such unselfish love, were it only by such a present as a lump of coal. Almost everybody, I think, had made Seth Cor bet a confidant ; and so, while the five saints were planning their pretty tree for the sixteen children, the North and the South, and the East and the West, were sending myrrh and frank incense and gold to them. The pictures were hung with Southern pine from Barthew. Boys, who were now men, had sent coral from India, pearl from Ceylon ; and would have been glad to send ice from Greenland, had Christmas come in midsummer. There were diamonds from Brazil, and silver from Nevada, from those who lived there ; there were books, in the choicest binding, in memory of copies of the same word, worn by travel, or dabbled in blood ; there were pictures, either by the hand of near friend ship, or by the master-hand of genius, which brought back the memories, perhaps, of some 250 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. old adventure in " The Service," perhaps, as the Kaulbach did, of one of those histories which makes all service sacred. In five-and- tvventy years of life, these women had so sur rounded themselves, without knowing it or thinking of it, with loyal, yes, adoring friends, that the accident of their finding a fixed home had called in all at once this wealth of acknowl edgment from those whom they might have for gotten, but who would never, forget them. And, by the accident of our coming together, we saw, in these heaps on heaps of offerings of love, some faint record of the lives they had en livened, the wounds they had stanched, the tears they had wiped away, and the homes they had cheered. For themselves, the five saints, as I have called them, were laughing and cry ing together, quite upset in the surprise. For ourselves, there was not one of us who, in this little visible display of the range of years of service, did not take in something more of the meaning of, " He who will be chief among you, let him be your servant. " The surprise, the excitement, the laughter, STAND AND WAIT. 251 and the tears found vent in the children's eager ness to be led to their tree ; and, in three min utes Ellen was opening boxes, and Huldah pull ing fire-crackers, as if they had not been thrown off their balance. But when each boy and girl had two arras full, and the fir-balsam sent down from New Durham was nearly bare, Edgar Bartlett pointed to the top bough, where was a brilliant not noticed before. No one had no ticed it, not Seth himself, who had most of the other secrets of that house in his possession. I am sure that no man, woman, or child knew how the thing came there ; but Seth lifted the little discoverer high in air, and he brought it down triumphant. It was a parcel made up in shining silvered paper. Seth cut the strings. It contained twelve Maltese crosses of gold, with as many jewels, one in the heart of each, I think, the blazing twelve of the Revelations. They were displayed on ribbons of blue and white, six of which bore Huldah's, Helen's, El len Philbrick's, Hannah's, Miss Peters's, and Seth Corbet's names. The other six had no names ; but on the gold of these was marked : " From Huldah, to " " From Helen, to 252 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. " and so on, as if these were decorations which they were to pass along. The saints themselves were the last to understand the deco rations ; but the rest of us caught the idea, and pinned them on their breasts. As we did so the ribbons unfolded, and displayed the motto of the order : " Henceforth I call you not servants ; I have called you friends." It was at that Christmas that the ORDER OF LOVING SERVICE was born. I NEVER supposed that the fancy of Club or ganization, as conceived in the story, would be practically carried out. But Miss Ella Russell of New York at once read the story to some boys in a mission school, and formed from them the Club of HARRY WADSWORTH HELPERS. It is, so far as I know, the first of the long series of Wadsworth Clubs. Of this club Miss Russell gives this history : *' The boys, from thirteen to HARRY WADSWORTH HELPERS. 253 sixteen years old, felt that they were too old to go to any mission school ; but the idea of a club to meet Sunday afternoons, officered by them selves, seemed a more grown-up affair. I had read them the story of Harry Wads worth, with which they were delighted ; and, as the class was ten in number, they decided to call them selves The Harry Wadsworth Helpers, to adopt the four mottoes, and to see what they could do to ' lend a hand.' They were to meet each week at the Sunday-school rooms, joining first with the school in the general exercises, then having their own order of proceedings. They had an initiation-fee, of ten cents, I be lieve, and monthly dues, besides fines, &c. The secretary kept a large book, and each member pledged himself to do some special thing each week ' to help some one ; ' and on Sundays all these were given and recorded in the book. Two of the boys devoted themselves to pick ing up drunken men in the street, finding out where they lived, and taking them home. Some read to a hopelessly deformed boy who could not sit up, and so on. Every two months the money collected was spent by 254 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. the boys themselves in relieving some case of special distress. " The boys now are men, and, though widely scattered, are nearly all doing well. Only yes terday I received a letter from one who has been for several years in the Black Hills." In one of the old numbers of the " From Year to Year " I heard of similar organizations. In the beginning of 1871, I had the list of some fifty persons, in different parts of the world, who called themselves, more or less defi nitely, Harry Wadsworth People. Every two or three months perhaps, from that time, for several years, I would get a letter from one or another of them, perhaps asking advice for the formation of a club, perhaps sending me an anecdote of some act of heroism or help. In answer to questions about the forming of clubs, I have always said that "the less fuss and feathers" the better ; that all the idea I had of a Wads- worth Club was, that it should be made of unselfish people, who met, not for " mutual improvement," but with some definite plan for the other people. I know not why, > but this book, " Ten Times HARRY WADSWORTH HELPERS. 255 One is Ten," very soon had an entree into pris ons. I have, I suppose, a dozen letters, from different sources, telling me of the pleasure pris oners have taken in it. One of the clubs is one of young ladies, who have circulated it in large numbers, in prisons. Until last summer I should have said that this was as important a club in size as any. I think the Ten Times One Club, of West- field, Massachusetts, was the largest of these organizations; is it so still? In 1874 Miss Mary A. Lathbury, without having then seen the book which the reader has in his hands, pro posed the establishment of the Look-Up Legion, with the four mottoes, which she had seen on the frieze of a friend's parlor in Orange. This Legion extends through five hundred or more Sunday-schools. Their object is expressed in this general order: LOOK-UP LEGION. THE Look-Up Legion is a society carried on through the Bay Window Department of "The Sunday-School Advocate," and having a member ship of over three thousand boys and girls. Its object is to aid in building up true character, and 256 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. in scattering the light of unselfish lives. Its mem bers pledge themselves to be " truthful, unselfish, cheerful, hopeful, and helpful." They adopt the famous Wadsworth mottoes, found in " Ten Times One is Ten," by Rev. E. E. Hale: " Look up and not down ; Look out and not in ; Look forward and not back, and Lend a hand." Persons may become members of this society by sending their names to "The Sunday-School Advo cate ; " this proves their willingness to subscribe to the pledge. Local chapters or clubs have been formed in many places, and it is hoped that this will be done wherever practicable. Weekly or semi-monthly meetings are recommended, and some line of work, adapted to the locality, may be carried on through these meetings. Reports from all such clubs will be welcomed at the office of " The Sunday-School Advocate." A beautiful badge of nickel plate, in the form of a Maltese cross, bearing the four mottoes, will be sent on receipt of fifteen cents. Pledge-cards at three cents each. MARTHA VAN MAETER. Miss Van Marter is the corresponding secre tary of the first division of the Legion ; her address is Orange, New Jersey. WELCOME AND CORRESPONDENCE CLUBS. 257 In the summer of 1881 I met the first divi sion of the Legion at its anniversary meeting. Then was established the system of circular correspondence which has been kept up ever since. Any person or club who wishes to enter into this correspondence must send fifty cents subscription to the WELCOME AND CORRESPONDENCE CLUB, 39 Highland Street, Roxbury, Mass. To such club or person will be sent the Monthly Circular, containing letters from the several organizations. From the Circular of the first year I copy here a few of these reports. FLOWER AND FRUIT MISSION. THE work of our Flower Mission differs some what from that in larger cities ; for we visit the invalids hi their homes, more than in hospitals and other charitable institutions ; and, not having so many, we can devote more time to each, and become better acquainted with them. The young ladies who do not dare to undertake work of greater responsibility succeed admirably in this charity; 17 258 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. and it has always seemed to me, that, however re freshing these visits are to the aged and sick, the visitors themselves derive the greater benefit from them in the lessons of patience and cheerfulness which are often so forcibly impressed upon them. Our Fruit and Flower Mission was started more than twelve years ago, in connection with our Un ion for Good Works, and is still going on quietly and successfully ; and others have been formed since in different churches. The names of the per sons we were to visit were given to us by the Re lief Committee of the Union, whom we consulted when new ones were suggested, and to whom we gave a monthly report of our work. I think it is still carried on in the same way ; but, as I was obliged to give up my part of the work some time ago, I am not quite sure. We had a committee of sixteen young ladies, eight of whom visited each week, two usually going together. One from each committee of eight was appointed to give to each the names of those she should visit, keep the ac counts, and divide the small sum of money with which we bought fruit and delicacies when they were not contributed. Each one made about six visits, which was all we could do while the flowers were fresh in the hot weather ; and each sent her re port to our secretary, to be copied into the book to which we always referred before making our next visit. We became so interested in our patients that we could not give them up when the flower contributions ceased, and have always kept up our PIONEER LEGION WORK. 259 visiting through the winter,. taking fruit and little delicacies, but avoiding all almsgiving. Many of us have formed life-long friendships, for which we shall always be grateful to the Flowed Mission. PIONEER LEGION WORK. IT affords me pleasure to become a correspondent of, and a subscriber to, your circulars on behalf of the Look-Up Legion of this place. We live in a lumbering district, and our advantages are few com pared with our city sisters. Yet we enjoy other benefits which they cannot. We have a grand pan orama of evergreen-clad mountains, valleys rapidly being reclaimed from their wild state, and the lim pid streams reflecting the beauties from their crystal depths. Pure air and pure water render living a delight; and what more natural in such surround ings than that morality should gain many friends? The spirit of charity, which has never allowed a poor-tax to be levied in this township, finally took definite shape in the form of a band consisting of twenty young ladies, from fifteen to twenty-one years old, who, being rather prejudiced against the word Club, took the name and pledge of the "Look-Up Legion." Since the 1st of October last they have met once a week in the afternoon, and 260 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. sewed. They made a number of useful articles, such as aprons, children's dresses, bags for school-books, dressed dolls, &c. Then the week before Christmas they held a fair and festival, the net profits being $50. With this sum and other donations, they purchased a library of carefully selected books. The Look-Up Legion are members, and any one else can become a member by paying one dollar, and quarterly fees of twenty-five cents. Latterly the Legion has not been meeting, on account of its members being mostly in school, and their leisure time is limited. They secured the services of an eminent minister to lecture on London, which great city he had re cently visited. Other lectures are in reserve; so that the little band is a leaven that will very soon, God prospering them, leaven the whole lump of surrounding society. They are ready for any good work that calls them, and will be glad to read of the doings of other organizations, which may help to decide their future course. N. N. A GIRLS' LEGION. HOW ABOUT BOYS? THE club of which I am chief (if that be my position) calls itself the Lend-a-Hand Club. It numbers between forty and fifty members, all girls. Some boys wish to join, but I have not yet seen clearly the best way to receive them. I will ask the Correspondence Club what I shall do with the A GIRLS* LEGION. 261 boys, under the circumstances, after being freely told what the girls do. Our club meets at my house once in two weeks, Monday, at4j o'clock, P.M., so as not to interfere with school ; and continues in session one hour, so as to get home before dark. We sew or work on anything we have to do the first half-hour of our session ; and the other half we devote to literary exercises, such as reading and recitations and music. Short original essays are coaxed from the girls ; and we have an exercise we call Oddities, which consists of something original and funny, arranged by a committee selected the week before, and kept a secret from the other mem bers of the club till it is brought out at the meeting. Sometimes it takes the form of a tableau, sometimes a charade. Always it proves very interesting. As for useful work, the girls are of ages from ten to fif teen years, and know less about sewing than their grandmothers did at their age, no doubt ; but they bring such eager, willing hearts to the task, they accomplish a good deal. In November we sent a large box of clothing, and articles suitable for Christmas presents, to a missionary in Utah. The girls hold themselves in readiness to do any kindly deed they may be asked to do. Sometimes, when a beggar calls at my door, I send two or three of the girls to find out about the family. If they live in our town, and if they are found needy, we attend to their wants as far as possible. We have been organized only a year, and had a long vacation of four months in the summer, and 262 HARRY WADSWORTH AND WADSWORTH CLUBS. are having another this winter, while the days are short, so that our work has been interrupted. We have bed-quilts and tidies and rugs commenced, which we hope to see finished. Dressing dolls for hospital children would be rather our delight, if we knew just the best way to dispose of them. Our city is rather too small for our benevolence. We have a constitution and by-laws, a president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer. We have a membership-fee of ten cents, payable yearly, and a contribution of a penny each at every meeting. University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. The Man Without a Country BY EDWARD EVERETT HALE New Edition* With a preface giving an account of the circumstances and incidents of its publication, and a new introduction by the author in the year of the war with Spain. i6mo. Cloth. 50 cents. Illustrated Edition, With forty pictures by Frank T. Merrill. Square 8vo. Cloth. 75 cents. The Story of the Man without a Country will be remem bered and read as long as the American flag flies, and it will continue to do good to successive generations of young Americans. . . . What a splendid work of imagination and patriotism that story is ! Its theme is vital, and consequently its influence is perennial. New York Sun {Editorial). It is so full of a lofty patriotism, so full of subtle sug gestions that would mean nothing to a foreigner but that move our hearts strangely, that to read it is to grow prouder than ever of the country and the flag. Cincinnati Com mercial Gazette, The moral of the story may be found in Nolan's own pitiful words to a young sailor : " And for your country, boy, and for that flag, never dream a dream but of serving her as she bids you, though the service carry you through a thousand hells. No matter what happens to you, no matter who flatters you or who abuses you, never look at another flag, never let a night pass but you pray God to bless that flag. Remember, boy, that behind all these men you have to do with, behind officers and government and people even, there is the country herself, your country, and that you belong to her as you belong to your own mother." LITTLE, BROWN, fef COMPANY, Publishers 254 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON, MASS. ERNEST KENAN'S WRITINGS HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 5 vols. 8vo. $12.50. Separate volumes, $2.50 each. Vol. I. Till the Time of King David. Vol. II. From the Reign of David up to the Capture of Samaria. Vol. III. From the Time of Hezekiah till the Return from Babylon. Vol. IV. From the Rule of the Persians to that of the Greeks. Vol. V. Period of Jewish Independence and Judea under Roman Rule. With an index to the five volumes. The first two volumes contain the analysis of the events that led up to the rise of the prophets; in the third he unfolds his view of those prophets ; while the last two illus trate the course of the prophetical ideas, steadily making their way, despite constantly recurring backsets, till their final triumph in Jesus. Nothing that he has done reveals the brilliancy of his mind and the greatness of his intellectual grasp as does this monument, which he was fortunately permitted to finish before his life came to an end. THE APOSTLES : Including the period from the death of Jesus until the greater missions of Paul. Translated and edited by JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, D.D., late lecturer on Ecclesiastical His tory in Harvard University. 8vo. $2.50. ANTICHRIST. Translated and edited by JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN. 8vo. $2.50. LIFE OF JESUS. From the twenty-third and final French edition. With Notes. Revised and enlarged. 8vo. $2.50. THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE. Demy 8vo. $2.50. LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, Publishers 254 Washington Street, Boston, Massachusetts. University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. A 000144192 2 Univ Sc I