University of Virginia Library

DASHES AT LIFE
WITH A FREE PENCIL.

2. PART II;
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE,
AND
LOITERINGS OF TRAVEL.

PREFACE.

The following passages are extracts from the
prefaces to the English editions of the two works
included in this book—“Inklings of Adventure”
and “Loiterings of Travel:”—

It will be seen, by many marks in the narratives
which follow, that they are not the work of imagination.
The dramas of real life are seldom well
wound up, and the imperfectness of plot which
might be objected to them as tales, will prove to
the observant reader that they are drawn more
from memory than fancy. It is because they are
thus imperfect in dramatic accomplishment, that I
have called them by the name under which they
have been introduced. They are rather intimations
of what seemed to lead to a romantic termination
than complete romances—in short, they are
Inklings of Adventure. The adventures were jotted
down—the events recorded—the poems indited,
and the letters despatched, while the thought was
freshly born, or the incident freshly heard or remembered—at
the first place which afforded the
leisure—in short, during Loiterings of Travel.

For the living portraitures of the book I have a
word to say. That sketches of the whim of the
hour, its manners, fashions, and those ephemeral
trifles which, slight as they are, constitute in a
great measure its “form and pressure”—that these,
and familiar traits of persons distinguished in our
time, are popular and amusing, I have the most
weighty reasons certainly to know. They sell.
“Are they innocent?” is the next question. And
to this I know no more discreet answer than that
mine have offended nobody but the critics. It has
been said that sketches of contemporary society
require little talent, and belong to an inferior order
of literature. Perhaps. Yet they must be well
done to attract notice at all; and if true and graphic,
they are not only excellent material for future
biographers, but to all who live out of the magic
circles of fashion and genius, they are more than
amusing—they are instructive. To such persons,
living authors, orators, and statesmen, are as much
characters of history, and society in cities is as
much a subject of philosophic curiosity, as if a
century had intervened. The critic who finds
these matters “stale and unprofitable,” lives in the
circles described, and the pictures drawn at his
elbow lack to his eye the effect of distance; but
the same critic would delight in a familiar sketch
of a supper with “my lord of Leicester” in Elizabeth's
time, of an evening with Raleigh and
Spenser, or perhaps he would be amused with a
description by an eye-witness of Mary Queen of
Scots, riding home to Holyrood with her train of
admiring nobles. I have not named in the same
sentence the ever-deplored blank in our knowledge
of Shakspere's person and manners. What
would not a trait by the most unskilful hand be
worth now—if it were nothing but how he gave
the good-morrow to Ben Jonson in Eastcheap?

How far sketches of the living are a breach of
courtesy committed by the author toward the persons
described, depends, of course, on the temper
in which they are done. To select a subject for
complimentary description is to pay the most undoubted
tribute to celebrity, and, as far as I have
observed, most distinguished persons sympathize
with the public interest in them and their belongings,
and are willing to have their portraits drawn,
either with pen or pencil, by as many as offer
them the compliment. It would be ungracious to
the admiring world if they were not.

The outer man is a debtor for the homage paid
to the soul which inhabits him, and he is bound,
like a porter at the gate, to satisfy all reasonable

curiosity as to the habits of the nobler and invisible
tenant. He owes his peculiarities to the
world.

For myself, I am free to confess that no age
interests me like the present; that no pictures of
society since the world began, are half so entertaining
to me as those of English society in our
day; and that, whatever comparison the living
great men of England may sustain with those of
other days, there is no doubt in my mind that English
social life, at the present moment, is at a higher
pitch of refinement and cultivation than it was
ever here or elsewhere since the world began—
consequently it, and all who form and figure in it,
are dignified and legitimate subjects of curiosity
and speculation. The Count Mirabel and Lady
Bellair of D'Israeli's last romance, are, to my
mind, the cleverest portraits, as well as the most
entertaining characters, of modern novel-writing;
and D'Israeli, by the way, is the only English author
who seems to have the power of enlarging
his horizon, and getting a perspective view of the
times he lives in. His novels are far more popular
in America than in England, because the Atlantic
is to us a century. We picture to ourselves
England and Victoria as we picture to ourselves
England and Elizabeth. We relish an anecdote
of Sheridan Knowles as we should one of Ford
or Marlowe. This immense ocean between us is
like the distance of time; and while all that is
minute and bewildering is lost to us, the greater
lights of the age and the prominent features of society
stand out apart, and we judge of them like
posterity. Much as I have myself lived in England,
I have never been able to remove this long
perspective from between my eye and the great men
of whom I read and thought on the other side of
the Atlantic. When I find myself in the same
room with the hero of Waterloo, my blood creeps
as if I had seen Cromwell or Marlborough; and
I sit down afterward to describe how he looked,
with the eagerness with which I should communicate
to my friends some disinterred descriptior
of these renowned heroes by a contemporary
writer. If Cornelius Agrippa were redivivus, in
short, and would show me his magic mirror, I
should as soon call up Moore as Dryden—Wordsworth
or Wilson as soon as Pope or Crichton.

PEDLAR KARL.

—L'Evangile des Femmes.

I am not sure whether Lebanon Springs, the scene
of a romantic story I am about to tell, belong to New
York or Massachusetts. It is not very important, to
be sure, in a country where people take Vermont and
Patagonia to be neighboring states, but I have a natural
looseness in geography which I take pains to mortify
by exposure. Very odd that I should not remember
more of the spot where I took my first lessons in
philandering!—where I first saw you, brightest and
most beautiful A. D. (not Anno Domini), in your white
morning-frocks and black French aprons!

Lebanon Springs are the rage about once in three
years. I must let you into the secret of these things,
gentle reader, for perhaps I am the only individual
existing who has penetrated the mysteries of the four
dynasties of American fashion. In the fourteen millions
of inhabitants in the United States, there are
precisely four authenticated and undisputed aristocratic
families. There is one in Boston, one in New
York, one in Philadelphia, and one in Baltimore. By
a blessed Providence they are not all in one state, or
we should have a civil war and a monarchy in no time.
With two hundred miles' interval between them, they
agree passably, and generally meet at one or another
of the three watering-places of Saratoga, Ballston, or
Lebanon. Their meeting is as mysterious as the process
of crystallization, for it is not by agreement. You
must explain it by some theory of homœopathy or
magnetism. As it is not known till the moment they
arrive, there is of course great excitement among the
hotel-keepers in these different parts of the country,
and a village that has ten thousand transient inhabitants
one summer, has, for the next, scarcely as many
score. The vast and solitary temples of Pæstum are
gay in comparison with these halls of disappointment.

As I make a point of dawdling away July and August
in this locomotive metropolis of pleasure, and
rather prefer Lebanon, it is always agreeable to me to
hear that the nucleus is formed in that valley of hemlocks.
Not for its scenery, for really, my dear east
ern-hemispherian! you that are accustomed to what
is called nature in England (to wit, a soft park, with a
gray ruin in the midst), have little idea how wearily
upon heart and mind presses a waste wilderness of
mere forest and water, without stone or story. Trees
in England have characters and tongues; if you see a
fine one, you know whose father planted it, and for
whose pleasure it was designed, and about what sum
the man must possess to afford to let it stand. They
are statistics, as it were—so many trees, ergo so many
owners so rich. In America, on the contrary, trees
grow and waters run, as the stars shine, quite unmeaningly;
there may be ten thousand princely elms, and
not a man within a hundred miles worth five pounds
five. You ask, in England, who has the privilege of
this water? or you say of an oak, that it stood in such
a man's time: but with us, water is an element unclaimed
and unrented, and a tree dabbles in the clouds
as they go over, and is like a great idiot, without soul
or responsibility.

If Lebanon had a history, however, it would have
been a spot for a pilgrimage, for its natural beauty.
It is shaped like a lotus, with one leaf laid back by
the wind. It is a great green cup, with a scoop for a
drinking-place. As you walk in the long porticoes of
the hotel, the dark forest mounts up before you like a
leafy wall, and the clouds seem just to clear the pine-tops,
and the eagles sail across from horizon to horizon,
without lifting their wings, as if you saw them
from the bottom of a well. People born there think
the world about two miles square, and hilly.

The principal charm of Lebanon to me is the village
of “shakers,” lying in a valley about three miles
off. As Glaucus wondered at the inert tortoise of
Pompeii, and loved it for its antipodal contrast to himself,
so do I affection (a French verb that I beg leave
to introduce to the English language) the shaking
quakers. That two thousand men could be found in
the New World, who would embrace a religion enjoining
a frozen and unsympathetic intercourse with
the diviner sex, and that an equal number of females
could be induced to live in the same community, without
locks or walls, in the cold and rigid observance
of a creed of celibacy, is to me an inexplicable and
grave wonder. My delight is to get into my stanhope
after breakfast, and drive over and spend the forenoon
in contemplating them at their work in the fields.
They have a peculiar and most expressive physiognomy;

the women are pale, or of a wintry redness in
the cheek, and are all attenuated and spare. Gravity,
deep and habitual, broods in every line of their thin
faces. They go out to their labor in company with
those serious men, and are never seen to smile; their
eyes are all hard and stony, their gait is precise and
stiff, their voices are of a croaking hoarseness, and nature
seems dead in them. I would bake you such men
and women in a brick-kiln.

Do they think the world is coming to an end? Are
there to be no more children? Is Cupid to be thrown
out of business, like a coach proprietor on a railroad?
What can the shakers mean, I should be pleased to
know?

The oddity is that most of them are young. Men
of from twenty to thirty, and women from sixteen to
twenty-five, and often, spite of their unbecoming dress,
good-looking and shapely, meet you at every step. Industrious,
frugal, and self-denying, they certainly are,
and there is every appearance that their tenets of
difficult abstinence are kept to the letter. There is
little temptation beyond principle to remain, and they
are free to go and come as they list, yet there they
live on in peace and unrepining industry, and a more
thriving community does not exist in the republic.
Many a time have I driven over on a Sunday, and
watched those solemn virgins dropping in one after
another to the church; and when the fine-limbed and
russet-faced brotherhood were swimming round the
floor in their fanatical dance, I have watched their
countenances for some look of preference, some betrayal
of an ill-suppressed impulse, till my eyes ached
again. I have selected the youngest and fairest, and
have not lost sight of her for two hours, and she
might have been made of cheese-parings for any trace
of emotion. There is food for speculation in it. Can
we do without matrimony? Can we “strike,” and be
independent of these dear delightful tyrants, for whom
we “live and move and have our being?” Will it
ever be no blot on our escutcheon to have attained
thirty-five as an unfructifying unit? Is that fearful
campaign, with all its embarrassments and awkwardnesses,
and inquisitions into your money and morals,
its bullyings and backings-out—is it inevitable?

Lebanon has one other charm. Within a morning
drive of the springs lies the fairest village it has ever
been my lot to see. It is English in its character,
except that there is really nothing in this country
so perfect of its kind. There are many towns in the
United States more picturesquely situated, but this,
before I had been abroad, always seemed to me the
very ideal of English rural scenery, and the kind of
place to set apart for either love or death—for one's
honeymoon or burial—the two periods of life which
I have always hoped would find me in the loveliest
spot of nature. Stockbridge lies in a broad sunny
valley, with mountains at exactly the right distance,
and a river in its bosom that is as delicate in its windings,
and as suited to the charms it wanders among,
as a vein in the transparent neck of beauty. I am
not going into a regular description, but I have carried
myself back to Lebanon; and the remembrance
of the leafy mornings of summer in which I have
driven to that fair earthly paradise, and loitered under
its elms, imagining myself amid the scenes of song
and story in distant England, has a charm for me now.
I have seen the mother-land; I have rambled through
park, woodland, and village, wherever the name was
old and the scene lovely, and it pleases me to go back
to my dreaming days and compare the reality with the
anticipation. Most small towns in America have traces
of newness about them. The stumps of a clearing, or
freshly-boarded barns—something that is the antipodes
of romance—meets your eye from every aspect. Stockbridge,
on the contrary, is an old town, and the houses
are of a rural structure; the fields look soft and genial
the grass is swardlike, the bridges picturesque, the
hedges old, and the elms, nowhere so many and so
luxuriant, are full-grown and majestic. The village
is embowered in foliage.

Greatest attraction of all, the authoress of “Redwood”
and “Hope Leslie,” a novelist of whom America has
the good sense to be proud, is the Miss Mitford of Stockbridge.
A man, though a distinguished one, may have
little influence on the town he lives in, but a remarkable
woman is the invariable cynosure of a community,
and irradiates it all. I think I could divine the presence
of one almost by the growing of the trees and flowers.
“Our Village” does not look like other villages.

2. II.

You will have forgotten that I had a story to tell,
dear reader. I was at Lebanon in the summer of —
(perhaps you don't care about knowing exactly when
it was, and in that case I would rather keep shy of
dates. I please myself with the idea that time gets on
faster than I). The Springs were thronged. The
president's lady was there (this was under our administration,
the Adams'), and all the four eliques spoken
of above were amicably united—each other's beaux
dancing with each other's belles, and so on. If I were
writing merely for American eyes, I should digress
once more to describe the distinctive characters of the
south, north, and central representations of beauty:
but it would scarcely interest the general reader. I
may say, in passing, that the Boston belles were à
l'Anglaise, rosy and riantes; the New-Yorkers, like
Parisians, cool, dangerous, and dressy; and the Baltimoreans
(and so south), like Ionians or Romans, indolent,
passionate, lovely, and languishing. Men,
women, and pine-apples, I am inclined to think, flourish
with a more kindly growth in the fervid latitudes.

The campaign went on, and a pleasant campaign it
was—for the parties concerned had the management
of their own affairs; that is, they who had hearts to
sell made the bargain for themselves (this was the
greater number), and they who disposed of this commodity
gratis, though necessarily young and ignorant
of the world, made the transfer in the same manner, in
person. This is your true republic. The trading in
affections by reference—the applying to an old and
selfish heart for the purchase of a young and ingenuous
one—the swearing to your rents, and not to your
faithful passion—to your settlements, and not your
constancy—the cold distance between yourself and
the young creature who is to lie in your bosom, till
the purchase-money is secured—and the hasty marriage
and sudden abandonment of a nature thus
chilled and put on its guard, to a freedom with one
almost a stranger, that can not but seem licentious,
and can not but break down that sense of propriety in
which modesty is most strongly intrenched—this
seems to me the one evil of your old worm-eaten monarchies
this side the water, which touches the essential
happiness of the well-bred individual. Taxation
and oppression are but things he reads of in the morning
paper.

This freedom of intercourse between unmarried
people has a single disadvantage—one gets so desperately
soon to the end of the chapter! There shall be
two hundred young ladies at the Springs in a given
season, and, by the difference in taste so wisely arranged
by Providence, there will scarcely be, of course,
more than four in that number whom any one gentleman
at all difficult will find within the range of his
beau ideal. With these four he may converse freely
twelve hours in the day—more, if he particularly desires
it. They may ride together, drive together, ramble
together, sing together, be together from morning

till night, and at the end of a month passed in this way,
if he escape a committal, as is possible, he will know
all that are agreeable, in one large circle, at least, as well
as he knows his sisters—a state of things that is very
likely to end in his going abroad soon, from a mere
dearth of amusement. I have imagined, however,
the case of an unmarrying idle man, a character too
rare as yet in America to affect the general question.
People marry as they die in that country—when their
time come. We must all marry is as much an axiom
as we must all die, and eke as melancholy.

Shall we go on with the story? I had escaped for
two blessed weeks, and was congratulating the susceptible
gentleman under my waistcoat-pocket that we
should never be in love with less than the whole sex
again, when a German Baron Von — arrived at
the Springs with a lame daughter. She was eighteen,
transparently fair, and, at first sight, so shrinkingly
dependant, so delicate, so childlike, that attention to
her assumed the form almost of pity, and sprang as
naturally and unsuspectingly from the heart. The
only womanly trait about her was her voice, which
was so deeply soft and full, so earnest and yet so gentle,
so touched with subdued pathos and yet so melancholy
calm, that if she spoke after a long silence, I
turned to her involuntarily with the feeling that she
was not the same—as if some impassioned and eloquent
woman had taken unaware the place of the
simple and petted child.

I am inclined to think there is a particular tenderness
in the human breast for lame women. Any
other deformity in the gentler sex is monstrous; but
lameness (the devil's defect) is “the devil.” I picture
to myself, to my own eye, now—pacing those rickety
colonnades at Lebanon with the gentle Meeta hanging
heavily, and with the dependance inseparable from
her infirmity, on my arm, while the moon (which was
the moon of the Rhine to her, full of thrilling and unearthly
influences) rode solemnly up above the mountain-tops.
And that strange voice filling like a flute
with sweetness as the night advanced, and that irregular
pressure of the small wrist in her forgotten lameness,
and my own (I thought) almost paternal feeling
as she leaned more and more heavily, and turned her
delicate and fair face confidingly up to mine, and that
dangerous mixture altogether of childlikeness and
womanly passion, of dependance and superiority, of
reserve on the one subject of love, and absolute confidence
on every other—if I had not a story to tell, I
could prate of those June nights and their witcheries
till you would think

and myself “bitten by the dipsas.”

We were walking one night late in the gallery running
around the second story of the hotel. There was
a ball on the floor below, and the music, deadened
somewhat by the crowded room, came up softened and
mellowed to the dark and solitary colonnade, and added
to other influences in putting a certain lodger in my
bosom beyond my temporary control. I told Meeta
that I loved her.

The building stands against the side of a steep mountain
high up above the valley, and the pines and hemlocks
at that time hung in their primeval blackness
almost over the roof. As the most difficult and embarrassed
sentence of which I had ever been delivered
died on my lips, and Meeta, lightening her weight on
my arm, walked in apparently offended silence by my
side, a deep-toned guitar was suddenly struck in the
woods, and a clear, manly voice broke forth in a song.
It produced an instant and startling effect on my companion.
With the first word she quickly withdrew
her arm; and, after a moment's pause, listening with
her hands raised in an attitude of the most intense eagerness,
she sprang to the extremity of the balustrade,
and gazed breathlessly into the dark depths of the forest.
The voice ceased, and she started back, and laid
her hand hastily upon my arm.

“I must go,” she said, in a voice of hurried feeling;
“if you are generous, stay here and await me!” and in
another moment she sprang along the bridge connecting
the gallery with the rising ground in the rear, and
was lost in the shadows of the hemlocks.

“I have made a declaration,” thought I, “just five
minutes too soon.”

I paced up and down the now too lonely colonnade,
and picked up the fragments of my dream with what
philosophy I might. By the time Meeta returned—
perhaps a half hour, perhaps an age, as you measure
by her feelings or mine—I had hatched up a very pretty
and heroical magnanimity. She would have spoken,
but was breathless.

“Explain nothing,” I said, taking her arm within
mine, “and let us mutually forget. If I can serve you
better than by silence, command me entirely. I live
but for your happiness—even,” I added after a pause,
“though it spring from another.”

We were at her chamber-door. She pressed my
hand with a strength of which I did not think those
small, slight fingers capable, and vanished, leaving me,
I am free to confess, less resigned than you would suppose
from my last speech. I had done the dramatic
thing, thanks to much reading of you, dear Barry
Cornwall! but it was not in a play. I remained killed
after the audience was gone.

3. III.

The next day a new character appeared on the
stage.

“Such a handsome pedlar!” said magnificent Helen
— to me, as I gave my horse to the groom after
a ride in search of hellebore, and joined the promenade
at the well: “and what do you think? he sells
only by raffle! It's so nice! All sorts of Berlin iron
ornaments, and everything German and sweet; and
the pedlar's smile's worth more than the prizes; and
such a mustache! See! there he is!—and now, if
he has sold all his tickets—will you come, Master
Gravity?”

“I hear a voice you can not hear,” thought I, as I
gave the beauty my arm, and joined a crowd of people
gathered about a pedlar's box in the centre of the
parterre.

The itinerant vender spread his wares in the midst
of the gay assemblage, and the raffle went on. He
was excessively handsome. A head of the sweet gentleness
of Raphael's, with locks flowing to his shoulders
in the fashion of German students, a soft brown
mustache curving on a short Phidian upper lip, a
large blue eye expressive of enthusiasm rather than
passion, and features altogether purely intellectual—
formed a portrait of which even jealousy might console
itself. Through all the disadvantages of a dress
suited to his apparent vocation, an eye the least on
the alert for a disguise would have penetrated his in
a moment. The gay and thoughtless crowd about
him, not accustomed to impostors who were more than
they pretended to be, trusted him for a pedlar, but
treated him with a respect far above his station insensibly.

Whatever his object was, so it were honorable, I
inly determined to give him all the assistance in my
power. A single glance at the face of Meeta, who
joined the circle as the prizes were drawn—a face so
changed since yesterday, so flushed with hope and
pleasure, and yet so saddened by doubt and fear, the
small lips compressed, the soft black eye, kindled and

restless, and the red leaf on her cheek deepened to a
feverish beauty—left me no shadow of hesitation. I
exchanged a look with her that I intended should say
as much.

4. IV.

I know nothing that gives one such an elevated idea
of human nature (in one's own person) as helping
another man to a woman one loves. Oh last days of
minority or thereabout! oh primal manhood! oh
golden time, when we have let go all but the enthusiasm
of the boy, and seized hold of all but the selfishness
of the man! oh blessed interregnum of the
evil and stronger genius! why can we not bottle up
thy hours like the wine of a better vintage, and enjoy
them in the parched world-weariness of age? In the
tardy honeymoon of a bachelor (as mine will be, if it
come ever, alas!) with what joy of paradise should we
bring up from the cellars of the past a hamper of that
sunny Hippocrene!

Pedlar Karl and “the gentleman in No. 10” would
have been suspected in any other country of conspiracy.
(How odd, that the highest crime of a monarchy
—the attempt to supplant the existing ruler—becomes
in a republic a creditable profession! You are a traitor
here, a politician there!) We sat together from
midnight onward, discoursing in low voices over sherry
and sandwiches; and in that crowded Babylon, his
entrances and exits required a very conspirator-like
management. Known as my friend, his trade and his
disguise were up. As a pedlar, wandering about
where he listed when not employed over his wares, his
interviews with Meeta were easily contrived, and his
lover's watch, gazing on her through the long hours
of the ball from the crowd of villagers at the windows,
hovering about her walks, and feeding his heart on
the many, many chance looks of fondness given him
every hour in that out-of-doors society, kept him comparatively
happy.

“The baron looked hard at you to-day,” said I, as
he closed the door in my little room, and sat down on
the bed.

“Yes; he takes an interest in me as a countryman,
but he does not know me. He is a dull observer, and
has seen me but once in Germany.”

“How, then, have you known Meeta so long?”

“I accompanied her brother home from the university,
when the baron was away, and for a long month
we were seldom parted. Riding, boating on the Rhine,
watching the sunset from the bartizan of the old castle-towers,
reading in the old library, rambling in the park
and forest—it was a heaven, my friend, than which I
can conceive none brighter.”

“And her brother?”

“Alas! changed! We were both boys then, and a
brother is slow to believe his sister's beauty dangerous.
He was the first to shut the doors against me, when
he heard that the poor student had dared to love his
highborn Meeta.”

Karl covered his eyes with his hand, and brooded
for a while in silence on the remembrances he had
awakened.

“Do you think the baron came to America purposely
to avoid you?”

“Partly, I have no doubt, for I entered the castle
one night in my despair, when I had been forbidden
entrance, and he found me at her feet in the old corridor.
It was the only time he ever saw me, if, indeed,
he saw me at all in the darkness: and he immediately
hastened his preparations for a long-contemplated
journey, I knew not whither.”

“Did you follow him soon?”

“No, for my heart was crushed at first, and I despaired.
The possibility of following them in my
wretched poverty did not even occur to me for
months.”

“How did you track them hither, of all places in
the world?”

“I sought them first in Italy. It is easy on the
continent to find out where persons are not, and after
two years' wanderings, I heard of them in Paris.
They had just sailed for America. I followed; but
in a country where there are no passports, and no
espionage, it is difficult to trace the traveller. It was
probable only that they would be at a place of general
resort, and I came here with no assurance but hope.
Thanks to God, the first sight that greeted my eyes
was my dear Meeta, whose irregular step, as she
walked back and forth with you in the gallery, enabled
me to recognise her in the darkness.”

Who shall say the days of romance are over? The
plot is not brought to the catastrophe, but we hope it
is near.

5. V.

My aunt, Isabella Slingsby (now in heaven, with
the “eleven thousand virgins,” God rest her soul!),
was at this time, as at all others, under my respectable
charge. She would have said I was under hers—
but it amounts to the same thing—we lived together
in peace and harmony. She said what she pleased,
for I loved her—and I did what I pleased, for she
loved me. When Karl told me that Meeta's principal
objection to an elopement was the want of a matron,
I shut the teeth of my resolution, as they say in Persia,
and inwardly vowed my unconscious aunt to this
exigency. You should have seen Miss Isabella Slingsby
to know what a desperate man may be brought to
resolve on.

On a certain day, Count Von Raffle-off (as my witty
friend and ally, Tom Fane, was pleased to call the
handsome pedlar) departed with his pack and the
hearts of all the dressing-maids and some of their mistresses,
on his way to New York. I drove down the
road to take my leave of him out of sight, and give
him my last instructions.

How to attack my aunt was a subject about which
I had many unsatisfactory thoughts. If there was one
thing she disapproved of more than another, it was an
elopement; and with what face to propose to her to
run away with a baron's only daughter, and leave her
in the hands of a pedlar, taking upon herself, as she
must, the whole sin and odium, was an enigma I ate,
drank, and slept upon, in vain. One thing at last became
very clear—she would do it for nobody but me.
Sequitur, I must play the lover myself.

I commenced with a fit of illness. What was the
matter? For two days I was invisible. Dear Isabella!
it was the first time I had ever drawn seriously on thy
fallow sympathies, and, how freely they flowed at my
affected sorrows, I shame to remember! Did ever
woman so weep? Did ever woman so take antipathy
to man as she to that innocent old baron for his supposed
refusal of his daughter to Philip Slingsby? This
revival of the remembrance shall not be in vain. The
mignonette and roses planted above thy grave, dearest
aunt, shall be weeded anew!

Oh that long week of management and hypocrisy!
The day came at last.

“Aunt Bel!”

“What, Philip, dear?”

“I think I feel better to-day.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. What say you to a drive? There is the
stanhope.”

“My dear Phil, don't mention that horrid stanhope.
I am sure, if you valued my life—”

“Precisely, aunt—(I had taken care to give her a

good fright the day before)—but Tom Fane has offered
me his ponies and Jersey wagon, and that, you know,
is the most quiet thing in the world, and holds four.
So, perhaps—ehem!—you'll—ask Meeta?”

“Um! Why, you see, Philip—”

I saw at once, that, if it got to an argument, I was
perdu. Miss Slingsby, though a sincere Christian,
never could keep her temper when she tried to reason.
I knelt down on her footstool, smoothed away the false
hair on her forehead, and kissed her. It was a fascinating
endearment of mine, that I only resorted to on
great emergencies. The hermit tooth in my aunt's
mouth became gradually visible, heralding what in
youth had been a smile; and, as I assisted her in rolling
up her embroidery, she looked on me with an unsuspecting
affection that touched my heart. I made
a silent vow that if she survived the scrape into which
she was being inveigled, I would be to her and her
dog Whimsiculo (the latter my foe and my aversion)
the soul of exemplary kindness for the remainder of
their natural lives. I lay the unction to my soul that
this vow was kept. My aunt blessed me shortly before
she was called to “walk in white” (she had hitherto
walked in yellow), and as it would have been unnatural
in Whimsiculo to survive her, I considered his
“natural life” as ended with hers, and had him peacefully
strangled on the same day. He lies at her feet,
as usual, a delicate attention of which (I trust in Swedenborg)
her spirit is aware.

With the exception of “Tom Thumb” and “Rattler,”
who were of the same double-jointed family of
interminable wind and bottom, there was never perhaps
such a pair of goers as Tom Fane's ponies. My
aunt had a lurking hope, I believe, that the baron
would refuse Meeta permission to join us, but either
he did not think me a dangerous person (I have said
before he was a dull man), or he had no objection to
me as a son-in-law, which my aunt and myself (against
the world) would have thought the natural construction
upon his indifference. He came to the end of the
colonnade to see us start, and as I eased the ribands
and let the ponies off like a shot from a crossbow, I
stole a look at Meeta. The color had fled from cheek
and lip, and the tears streamed over them like rain.
Aunt Bel was on the back seat, grace à Dieu!

We met Tom at the foot of the hill, and I pulled
up. He was the best fellow, that Tom Fane!

“Ease both the bearing reins,” said I, “I am going
up the mountain.”

“The devil you are!” said Tom, doing my bidding,
however; “you'll find the road to the shakers much
pleasanter. What an odd whim! It's a perpendicular
three miles, Miss Slingsby. I would as lief be
hoisted up a well and let down again. Don't go that
way, Phil, unless you are going to run away with
Miss Von—”

thought I, and waving the tandem lash over the ears
of the ponies, I brought up the silk on the cheek of
their malaprop master, and spanked away up the hill,
leaving him in a range likely to get a fresh supply of
fuel by dinner-time. Tom was of a plethoric habit,
and if I had not thought he could afford to burst a
blood-vessel better than two lovers to break their hearts,
I should not have ventured on the bold measure of
borrowing his horses for an hour, and keeping them a
week. We have shaken hands upon it since, but it is
my private opinion that he has never forgiven me in
his heart.

As we wound slowly up the mountain, I gave Meeta
the reins, and jumped out to gather some wild flowers
for my aunt. Dear old soul! the attention reconciled
her to what she considered a very unwarrantable caprice
of mine. What I could wish to toil up that
steep mountain for? Well! the flowers are charming
in these high regions!

“Don't you see my reason for coming, then, aunt
Bella?”

“Was it for that, dear Philip?” said she, putting
the wild flowers affectionately into her bosom, where
they bloomed like broidery on saffron tapestry; “how
considerate of you!” And she drew her shawl around
her, and was at peace with all the world. So easily
are the old made happy by the young! Reader, I
scent a moral in the air!

We were at the top of the hill. If I was sane, my
aunt was probably thinking, I should turn here, and
go back. To descend the other side, and reascend
and descend again to the Springs, was hardly a sort of
thing one would do for pleasure.

“Here's a good place to turn, Philip,” said she, as
we entered a smooth broad hollow on the top of the
mountain.

I dashed through it as if the ponies were shod with
talaria. My aunt said nothing, and luckily the road
was very narrow for a mile, and she had a horror of a
short turn. A new thought struck me.

“Did you ever know, aunt, that there was a way
back around the foot of the mountain?”

“Dear, no; how delightful! Is it far?”

“A couple of hours or so; but I can do it in less.
We'll try;” and I gave the sure-footed Canadians the
whip, and scampered down the hills as if the rock of
Sisyphus had been rolling after us.

We were soon over the mountain-range, and the
road grew better and more level. Oh, how fast pattered
those little hoofs, and how full of spirit, and
excitement looked those small ears, catching the
lightest chirrup I could whisper, like the very spell of
swiftness! Pines, hemlocks and cedars, farmhouses
and milestones, flew back like shadows. My aunt sat
speechless in the middle of the back seat, holding on
with both hands, in apprehensive resignation! She
expected soon to come in sight of the Springs, and
had doubtless taken a mental resolution that if, please
God, she once more found herself at home, she would
never “tempt Providence” (it was a favorite expression
of hers) by trusting herself again behind such a pair
of fly-away demons. As I read this thought in her
countenance by a stolen glance over my shoulder, we
rattled into a village distant from Lebanon twenty
miles.

“There, aunt,” said I, as I pulled up at the door of
the inn, “we have very nearly described a circle.
Now, don't speak! if you do, you'll start the horses.
There's nothing they are so much afraid of as a woman's
voice. Very odd, isn't it? We'll just sponge
their mouths now, and be at home in the crack of a
whip. Five miles more, only. Come!”

Off we sped again like the wind, aunt Bel just venturing
to wonder whether the horses wouldn't rather go
slower. Meeta had hardly spoken; she had thoughts
of her own to be busy with, and I pretended to be fully
occupied with my driving. The nonsense I talked to
those horses, to do away the embarrassment of her silence,
would convict me of insanity before any jury in
the world.

The sun began to throw long shadows, and the short-legged
ponies figured like flying giraffes along the retiring
hedges. Luckily, my aunt had very little idea
of conjecturing a course by the points of the compass.
We sped on gloriously.

“Philip, dear! hav'n't you lost your way? It seems
to me we've come more than five miles since you
stopped” (ten at least), “and I don't. see the mountains
about Lebanon at all!”

“Don't be alarmed, aunty, dear! We're very high,
just here, and shall drop down on Lebanon, as it were.
Are you afraid, Meeta?”

“Nein!” she answered. She was thinking in German,
poor girl, and heart and memory were wrapped
up in the thought.

I drove on almost cruelly. Tom's incomparable
horses justified all his eulogiums; they were indefatigable.
The sun blazed a moment through the firs,
and disappeared; the gorgeous changes of eve came
over the clouds; the twilight stole through the damp
air with its melancholy gray; and the whippoorwills,
birds of evening, came abroad, like gentlemen in debt,
to flit about in the darkness. Everything was saddening.
My own volubility ceased; the whiz of the
lash, as I waved it over the heads of my foaming ponies,
and an occasional “Steady!” as one or the other
broke into a gallop, were the only interruptions to the
silence. Meeta buried her face in the folds of her
shawl, and sat closer to my side, and my aunt, soothed
and flattered by turns, believed and doubted, and was
finally persuaded, by my ingenious and well-inserted
fibs, that it was only somewhat farther than I anticipated,
and we should arrive “presently.”

Somewhere about eight o'clock the lights of a town
appeared in the distance, and, straining every nerve,
the gallant beasts whirled us in through the streets,
and I pulled up suddenly at the door of an hotel.

“Why, Philip!” said my aunt in a tone of unutterable
astonishment, looking about her as if she had
awoke from a dream, “this is Hudson!”

It was too clear to be disputed. We were upon the
North river, forty miles from Lebanon, and the steamer
would touch at the pier in half an hour. My aunt
was to be one of the passengers to New York, but she
was yet to be persuaded of it; the only thing now was
to get her into the house, and enact the scene as soon
as possible.

I helped her out as tenderly as I knew how, and, as
we went up stairs, I requested Meeta to sit down in a
corner of the room, and cover her face with her handkerchief.
When the servant was locked out, I took
my aunt into the recess of the window, and informed
her, to her very great surprise, that she had run away
with the baron's daughter.

“Philip Slingsby!”

My aunt was overcome. I had nothing for it but to
be overcome too. She sunk into one chair, and I into
the other, and burying my face in my hands, I looked
through my fingers to watch the effect. Five mortal
minutes lasted my aunt's wrath; gradually, however,
she began to steal a look at me, and the expression of
resentment about her thin lips softened into something
like pity.

“Philip!” said she, taking my hand.

“My dear aunt!”

“What is to be done?”

I pointed to Meeta, who sat with her head on her
bosom, pressed my hand to my heart, as if to suppress
a pang, and proceeded to explain. It seemed impossible
for my aunt to forgive the deception of the thing.
Unsophisticated Isabella! If thou hadst known that
thou wert, even yet, one fold removed from the truth,
—if thou couldst have divined that it was not for the
darling of thy heart that thou wert yielding a point
only less dear to thee than thy maiden reputation—
if it could have entered thy region of possibilities that
thine own house in town had been three days aired
for the reception of a bride, run away with by thy ostensible
connivance, and all for a German pedlar, in
whose fortunes and loves thou hadst no shadow of
interest—I think the brain in thee would have turned,
and the dry heart in thy bosom have broken with surprise
and grief!

I wrote a note to Tom, left his horses at the inn,
and at nine o'clock we were steaming down the Hudson,
my aunt in bed, and Meeta pacing the deck with
me, and pouring forth her fears and her gratitude in
a voice of music that made me almost repent my self
sacrificing enterprise. I have told the story gayly,
gentle reader! but there was a nerve ajar in my heart
while its little events went on.

How we sped thereafter, dear reader!—how the
consul of his majesty of Prussia was persuaded by my
aunt's respectability to legalize the wedding by his
presence—how my aunt fainted dead away when the
parson arrived, and she discovered who was not to be
the bridegroom and who was—how I persuaded her
she had gone too far to recede, and worked on her tenderness
once more—how the weeping Karl, and his
lame and lovely bride, lived with us till the old baron
thought it fit to give Meeta his blessing and some
money—how Tom Fane wished no good to the pedlar's
eyes—and lastly, how Miss Isabella Slingsby lived
and died wondering what earthly motive I could have
for my absurd share in these events, are matters of
which I spare you the particulars.

NIAGARA—LAKE ONTARIO—THE ST. LAWRENCE.

1. NO. I.—NIAGARA.

It was in my senior vacation, and I was bound to
Niagara for the first time. My companion was a specimen
of the human race found rarely in Vermont, and
never elsewhere. He was nearly seven feet high,
walked as if every joint in his body was in a hopeless
state of dislocation, and was hideously, ludicrously,
and painfully ugly. This whimsical exterior contained
the conscious spirit of Apollo, and the poetical susceptibility
of Keats. He had left his plough in the Green
mountains at the age of twenty-five, and entered as a
poor student at the university, where, with the usual
policy of the college government, he was allotted to
me as a compulsory chum, on the principle of breaking
in a colt with a cart-horse. I began with laughing
at him, and ended with loving him. He rejoiced in
the common appellation of Job Smith—a synonymous
soubriquet, as I have elsewhere remarked, which was
substituted by his classmates for his baptismal name
of Forbearance.

Getting Job away with infinite difficulty from a
young Indian girl who was selling moccasins in the
streets of Buffalo (a straight, slender creature of eighteen,
stepping about like a young leopard, cold, stern,
and beautiful), we crossed the outlet of Lake Erie at
the ferry, and took horses on the northern bank of
Niagara river to ride to the falls. It was a noble
stream, as broad as the Hellespont and as blue as the
sky, and I could not look at it, hurrying on headlong
to its fearful leap, without a feeling almost of dread.

There was only one thing to which Job was more
susceptible than to the beauties of nature, and that
was the beauty of woman. His romance had been
stirred by the lynx-eyed Sioux, who took her money
for the moccasins with such haughty and thankless
superbia, and full five miles of the river, with all the
gorgeous flowers and rich shrubs upon its rim, might
as well have been Lethe for his admiration. He rode
along, like the man of rags you see paraded on an ass
in the carnival, his legs and arms dangling about in
ludierous obedience to the sidelong hitch of his pacer.

The roar of the falls was soon audible, and Job's
enthusiasm and my own, if the increased pace of our
Narraganset poniesmeant anything, were fully aroused.
The river broke into rapids, foaming furiously on its

course, and the subterranean thunder increased like a
succession of earthquakes, each louder than the last.
I had never heard a sound so broad and universal. It
was impossible not to suspend the breath, and feel absorbed,
to the exclusion of all other thoughts, in the
great phenomenon with which the world seemed trembling
to its centre. A tall, misty cloud, changing its
shape continually, as it felt the shocks of the air, rose
up before us, and with our eyes fixed upon it, and our
horses at a hard gallop, we found ourselves unexpectedly
in front of a vast white — hotel! which suddenly
interposed between the cloud and our vision.
Job slapped his legs against the sides of his panting
beast, and urged him on, but a long fence on either
side the immense building cut him off from all approach;
and having assured ourselves that there was
no access to Niagara except through the back-door of
the gentleman's house, who stood with hat off to receive
us, we wished no good to his majesty's province
of Upper Canada, and dismounted.

“Will you visit the falls before dinner, gentlemen?”
asked mine host.

“No, sir!” thundered Job, in a voice that, for a moment,
stopped the roar of the cataract.

He was like an improvisatore who had been checked
by some rude birbone in the very crisis of his eloquence.
He would not have gone to the falls that
night to have saved the world. We dined.

As it was the first meal we had ever eaten under a
monarchy, I proposed the health of the king; but Job
refused it. There was an impertinent profanity, he
said, in fencing up the entrance to Niagara that was a
greater encroachment on natural liberty than the stamp
act. He would drink to no king or parliament under
which such a thing could be conceived possible. I left
the table and walked to the window.

“Job, come here! Miss —, by all that is lovely!”

He flounced up, like a snake touched with a torpedo,
and sprang to the window. Job had never seen
the lady whose name produced such a sensation, but
he had heard more of her than of Niagara. So had
every soul of the fifteen millions of inhabitants between
us and the gulf of Mexico. She was one of those miracles
of nature that occur, perhaps, once in the rise
and fall of an empire—a woman of the perfect beauty
of an angel, with the most winning human sweetness
of character and manner. She was kind, playful, unaffected,
and radiantly, gloriously beautiful. I am sorry
I may not mention her name, for in more chivalrous
times she would have been a character of history.
Everybody who has been in America, however, will
know who I am describing, and I am sorry for those
who have not. The country of Washington will be
in its decadence before it sees such another.

She had been to the fall and was returning with her
mother and a troop of lovers, who, I will venture to
presume, brought away a very imperfect impression of
the scene. I would describe her as she came laughing
up that green bank, unconscious of everything but
the pleasure of life in a summer sunset; but I leave it
for a more skilful hand. The authoress of “Hope
Leslie” will, perhaps, mould her image into one of
her inimitable heroines.

I presented my friend, and we passed the evening
in her dangerous company. After making an engagement
to accompany her in the morning behind the
sheet of the fall, we said “Good-night” at twelve—one
of us at least as many “fathom deep in love” as a thousand
Rosalinds. My poor chum! The roar of the
cataract that shook the very roof over thy head was
less loud to thee that night than the beating of thine
own heart, I warrant me!

I rose at sunrise to go alone to the fall, but Job was
before me, and the angular outline of his gaunt figure,
stretching up from Table Rock in strong relief against
the white body of the spray, was the first object that
caught my eye as I descended.

As I came nearer the fall, a feeling of disappointment
came over me. I had imagined Niagara a vast
body of water descending as if from the clouds. The
approach to most falls is from below, and we get an
idea of them as of rivers pitching down to the plain
from the brow of a hill or mountain. Niagara river,
on the contrary, comes out from Lake Erie through a
flat plain. The top of the cascade is ten feet perhaps
below the level of the country around—consequently
invisible from any considerable distance. You walk
to the bank of a broad and rapid river, and look over
the edge of a rock, where the outlet flood of an inland
sea seems to have broken through the crust of the
earth, and, by its mere weight, plunged with an awful
leap into an immeasurable and resounding abyss. It
seems to strike and thunder upon the very centre of
the world, and the ground beneath your feet quivers
with the shock till you feel unsafe upon it.

Other disappointment than this I can not conceive
at Niagara. It is a spectacle so awful, so beyond the
scope and power of every other phenomenon in the
world, that I think people who are disappointed there
mistake the incapacity of their own conception for the
want of grandeur in the scene.

The “hell of waters” below need but a little red
ochre to out-Phlegethon Phlegethon. I can imagine
the surprise of the gentle element, after sleeping away
a se'nnight of moonlight in the peaceful bosom of
Lake Erie, at finding itself of a sudden in such a coil!
A Mediterranean sea-gull, which had tossed out the
whole of a January in the infernal “yeast” of the
Archipelago (was I not all but wrecked every day between
Troy and Malta in a score of successive hurricanes?)—I
say, the most weather-beaten of sea-birds
would look twice before he ventured upon the roaring
caldron below Niagara. It is astonishing to see how
far the descending mass is driven under the surface of
the stream. As far down toward Lake Ontario as the
eye can reach, the immense volumes of water rise
like huge monsters to the light, boiling and flashing
out in rings of foam, with an appearance of rage and
anger that I have seen in no other cataract in the
world.

“A nice fall, as an Englishman would say, my dear
Job.”

“Awful!”

Halleck, the American poet (a better one never
“strung pearls”), has written some admirable verses
on Niagara, describing its effect on the different individuals
of a mixed party, among whom was a tailor.
The sea of incident that has broken over me in years
of travel, has washed out of my memory all but the
two lines descriptive of its impression upon Snip:—

“Shall we go to breakfast, Job?”

“How slowly and solemnly they drop into the
abysm!”

It was not an original remark of Mr. Smith's. Nothing
is so surprising to the observer as the extraordinary
deliberateness with which the waters of Niagara
take their tremendous plunge. All hurry and foam
and fret, till they reach the smooth limit of the curve
—and then the laws of gravitation seem suspended,
and, like Cesar, they pause, and determine, since it is
inevitable, to take the death-leap with becoming dignity.

“Shall we go to breakfast, Job?” I was obliged to
raise my voice, to be heard, to a pitch rather exhausting
to an empty stomach.

His eyes remained fixed upon the shifting rainbows
bending and vanishing in the spray. There was no
moving him, and I gave in for another five minutes

“Do you think it probable, Job, that the waters of
Niagara strike on the axis of the world?”

No answer.

“Job!”

“What?”

“Do you think his majesty's half of the cataract is
finer than ours?”

“Much.”

“For water, merely, perhaps. But look at the delicious
verdure on the American shore, the glorious
trees, the massed foliage, the luxuriant growth even to
the very rim of the ravine! By Jove! it seems to me
things grow better in a republic. Did you ever see a
more barren and scraggy shore than the one you stand
upon?”

“How exquisitely,” said Job, soliloquizing, “that
small green island divides the fall! What a rock it
must be founded on, not to have been washed away
in the ages that these waters have split against it!”

“I'll lay you a bet it is washed away before the
year two thousand—payable in any currency with
which we may then be conversant.”

“Don't trifle!”

“With time, or geology, do you mean? Isn't it
perfectly clear from the looks of that ravine, that Niagara
has backed up all the way from Lake Ontario?
These rocks are not adamant, and the very precipice
you stand on has cracked, and looks ready for the
plunge.[1] It must gradually wear back to Lake Erie,
and then there will be a sweep, I should like to live
long enough to see. The instantaneous junction of
two seas, with a difference of two hundred feet in their
levels, will be a spectacle—eh, Job?”

“Tremendous!”

“Do you intend to wait and see it, or will you come
to breakfast?”

He was immoveable. I left him on the rock, went
up to the hotel and ordered mutton-chops and coffee,
and when they were on the table, gave two of the
waiters a dollar each to bring him up nolens-volens.
He arrived in a great rage, but with a good appetite,
and we finished our breakfast just in time to meet
Miss —, as she stepped like Aurora from her
chamber.

It is necessary to a reputation for prowess in the
United States to have been behind the sheet of the
fall (supposing you to have been to Niagara). This
achievement is equivalent to a hundred shower-baths,
one severe cold, and being drowned twice—but most
people do it.

We descended to the bottom of the precipice, at the
side of the fall, where we found a small house, furnished
with coarse linen dresses for the purpose, and
having arranged ourselves in habiliments not particularly
improving to our natural beauty, we reappeared—
only three out of a party of ten having had the courage
to trust their attractions to such a trial. Miss —
looked like a fairy in disguise, and Job like the most
ghostly and diabolical monster that ever stalked unsepultured
abroad. He would frighten a child in his
best black suit—but with a pair of wet linen trowsers
scarcely reaching to his knees, a jacket with sleeves
shrunk to the elbows, and a white cap, he was something
supernaturally awful. The guide hesitated
about going under the fall with him.

It looked rather appalling. Our way lay through a
dense descending sheet of water, along a slender
pathway of rocks, broken into small fragments, with
an overhanging wall on one side, and the boiling
caldron of the cataract on the other. A false step,
and you were a subject for the “shocking accident”
maker.

The guide went first, taking Miss —'s right
hand. She gave me her left, and Job brought up the
rear, as they say in Connecticut, “on his own hook.”
We picked our way boldly up to the water. The wall
leaned over so much, and the fragmented declivity
was so narrow and steep, that if it had not been done
before, I should have turned back at once. Two
steps more, and the small hand in mine began to struggle
violently, and, in the same instant, the torrent beat
into my eyes, mouth, and nostrils, and I felt as if I
was drowning. I staggered a blind step onward, but
still the water poured into my nostrils, and the conviction
rushed for a moment on my mind that we were
lost. I struggled for breath, stumbled forward, and
with a gasp that I thought was my last, sunk upon
the rocks within the descending waters. Job tumbled
over me the next instant, and as soon as I could clear
my eyes sufficiently to look about me, I saw the
guide sustaining Miss —, who had been as nearly
drowned as most of the subjects of the Humane Society,
but was apparently in a state of resuscitation.
None but the half-drowned know the pleasure of
breathing.

Here we were within a chamber that Undine might
have coveted, a wall of rock at our back, and a transparent
curtain of shifting water between us and the
world, having entitled ourselves à peu près to the same
reputation with Hylas and Leander, for seduction by
the Naiads.

Whatever sister of Arethusa inhabits there, we
could but congratulate her on the beauty of her abode.
A lofty and well-lighted hall, shaped like a long pavilion,
extended as far as we could see through the spray,
and with the two objections, that you could not have
heard a pistol at your ear for the noise, and that the
floor was somewhat precipitous, one could scarce imagine
a more agreeable retreat for a gentleman who
was disgusted with the world, and subject to dryness
of the skin. In one respect it resembled the enchanted
dwelling of the Witch of Atlas, where, Shelley tells
us—

It is lucky for Witches and Naiads that they are not
subject to rheumatism.

The air was scarcely breathable—(if air it may be
called, which streams down the face with the density
of a shower from a watering-pot), and our footing upon
the slippery rocks was so insecure, that the exertion
of continually wiping our eyes was attended with imminent
danger. Our sight was valuable, for surely,
never was such a brilliant curtain hung up to the sight
of mortals, as spread apparently from the zenith to our
feet, changing in thickness and lustre, but with a constant
and resplendent curve. It was what a child might
imagine the arch of the sky to be where it bends over
the edge of the horizon.

The sublime is certainly very much diluted when
one contemplates it with his back to a dripping and
slimy rock, and his person saturated with a continual
supply of water. From a dry window, I think the infernal
writhe and agony of the abyss into which we
were continually liable to slip, would have been as fine
a thing as I have seen in my travels; but I am free to
admit, that, at the moment, I would have exchanged
my experience and all the honor attached to it, for a
dry escape. The idea of drowning back through that
thick column of water, was at least a damper to enthusiasm.
We seemed cut off from the living. There
was a death between us and the vital air and sunshine.

I was screwing up my courage for the return, when
the guide seized me by the shoulder. I looked around,
and what was my horror to see Miss — standing
far in behind the sheet upon the last visible point of

rock, with the water pouring over her in torrents, and
a gulf of foam between us, which I could in no way
understand how she had passed over.

She seemed frightened and pale, and the guide explained
to me by signs (for I could not distinguish a
syllable through the roar of the cataract), that she had
walked over a narrow ledge, which had broken with
her weight. A long fresh mark upon the rock at the
foot of the precipitous wall, made it sufficiently evident:
her position was most alarming.

I made a sign to her to look well to her feet; for
the little island on which she stood was green with
slime and scarce larger than a hat, and an abyss of full
six feet wide, foaming and unfathomable, raged between
it and the nearest foothold. What was to be
done? Had we a plank, even, there was no possible
hold for the further extremity, and the shape of the
rock was so conical, that its slippery surface evidently
would not hold a rope for a moment. To jump to her,
even if it were possible, would endanger her life, and
while I was smiling and encouraging the beautiful
creature, as she stood trembling and pale on her dangerous
foothold, I felt my very heart sink within me.

The despairing guide said something which I could
not hear, and disappeared through the watery wall,
and I fixed my eyes upon the lovely form, standing,
like a spirit in the misty shroud of the spray, as if the
intensity of my gaze could sustain her upon her dangerous
foothold. I would have given ten years of my
life at that moment to have clasped her hand in mine.

I had scarce thought of Job until I felt him trying
to pass behind me. His hand was trembling as he
had it on my shoulder to steady his steps; but there
was something in his ill-hewn features that shot an
indctinable ray of hope through my mind. His sandy
hair was plastered over his forehead, and his scant
dress clung to him like a skin; but though I recall
his image now with a smile, I looked upon him with a
feeling far enough from amusement then. God bless
thee, my dear Job! wherever in this unfit world thy
fine spirit may be fulfilling its destiny!

He crept down carefully to the edge of the foaming
abyss, till he stood with the breaking bubbles at his
knees. I was at a loss to know what he intended.
She surely would not dare to attempt a jump to his
arms from that slippery rock, and to reach her in any
way seemed impossible.

The next instant he threw himself forward, and
while I covered my eyes in horror, with the flashing
conviction that he had gone mad and flung himself
into the hopeless whirlpool to reach her, she had
crossed the awful gulf, and lay trembling and exhausted
at my feet! He had thrown himself over the
chasm, caught the rock barely with the extremities of
his fingers, and with certain death if he missed his
hold or slipped from his uncertain tenure, had sustained
her with supernatural strength as she walked
over his body!

The guide providentially returned with a rope in
the same instant, and fastening it around one of his
feet, we dragged him back through the whirlpool, and
after a moment or two to recover from the suffocating
inumersion, he fell on his knees, and we joined him,
I doubt not devoulty, in his inaudible thanks to God.

2. II.—LAKE ONTARIO.

The next bravest achievement to venturing behind
the sheet of Niagara, is to cross the river in a small
boat, at some distance below the Phlegethon of the
abyss. I should imagine it was something like riding
in a howdah on a swimming elephant. The immense
masses of water driven under by the Fall, rise
splashing and fuming far down the river; and they
are as unlike a common wave, to ride, as a horse and
a camel. You are, perhaps, ten or fifteen minutes
pulling across, and you may get two or three of these
lifts, which shove you straight into the air about ten
feet, and then drop you into the cup of an eddy, as if
some long-armed Titan had his hand under the water,
and were tossing you up and down for his amusement.
It imports lovers to take heed how their mistresses
are seated, as all ladies, on these occasions,
throw themselves into the arms of the nearest “hose
and doublet.”

Job and I went over to dine on the American side
and refresh our patriotism. We dined under a hickory-tree
on Goat island, just over the glassy curve of the
cataract; and as we grew joyous with our champagne,
we strolled up to the point where the waters divide
for the American and British Falls; and Job harangued
the “mistaken gentleman on his right,” in
eloquence that would have turned a division in the
house of commons. The deluded multitude, however,
rolled away in crowds for the monarchy, and at
the close of his speech the British Fall was still, by a
melancholy majority, the largest. We walked back
to our bottle like foiled patriots, and soon after, hopeless
of our principles, went over to the other side too!

I advise all people going to Niagara to suspend making
a note in their journal till the last day of their
visit. You might as well teach a child the magnitude
of the heavens by pointing to the sky with your
finger, as comprehend Niagara in a day. It has to
create its own mighty place in your mind. You have
no comparison through which it can enter. It is too
vast. The imagination shrinks from it. It rolls in
gradually, thunder upon thunder, and plunge upon
plunge; and the mind labors with it to an exhaustion
such as is created only by the extremest intellectual
effort. I have seen men sit and gaze upon it in a cool
day of autumn, with the perspiration standing on
their foreheads in large beads, from the unconscious
but toilsome agony of its conception. After haunting
its precipices, and looking on its solemn waters for
seven days, sleeping with its wind-played monotony
in your ears, dreaming, and returning to it till it has
grown the one object, as it will, of your perpetual
thought, you feel, all at once, like one who has compassed
the span of some almighty problem. It has
stretched itself within you. Your capacity has attained
the gigantic standard, and you feel an elevation
and breadth of nature that could measure girth and
stature with a seraph. We had fairly “done” Niagara.
We had seen it by sunrise, sunset, moonlight;
from top and bottom; fasting and full; alone and together.
We had learned by heart every green path
on the island of perpetual dew, which is set like an
imperial emerald on its front (a poetical idea of my
own, much admired by Job)—we had been grave, gay,
tender, and sublime, in its mighty neighborhood, we
had become so accustomed to the base of its broad
thunder, that it seemed to us like a natural property
in the air, and we were unconscious of it for hours;
our voices had become so tuned to its key, and our
thoughts so tinged by its grand and perpetual anthem,
that I almost doubted if the air beyond the reach of
its vibrations would not agonize us with its unnatural
silence, and the common features of the world seem
of an unutterable and frivolous littleness.

We were eating our last breakfast there, in tender
melancholy: mine for the Falls, and Job's for the
Falls and Miss —, to whom I had a half suspicion
that he had made a declaration.

“Job!” said I.

He looked up from his egg.

“My dear Job!”

“Don't allude to it, my dear chum,” said he, dropping
his spoon, and rushing to the window to hide his
agitation. It was quite clear.

I could scarce restrain a smile. Psyche in the embrace
of a respectable giraffe would be the first thought

in anybody's mind who should see them together.
And yet why should he not woo her—and win her
too? He had saved her life in the extremest peril, at
the most extreme hazard of his own; he had a heart
as high and worthy, and as capable of an undying
worship of her as she would find in a wilderness of
lovers; he felt like a graceful man, and acted like a
brave one, and was sans peur et sans reproche, and
why should he not love like other men? My dear
Job! I fear thou wilt go down to thy grave, and but
one woman in this wide world will have loved thee—
thy mother! Thou art the soul of a preux chevalier
in the body of some worthy grave-digger, who is strutting
about the world, perhaps, in thy more proper carcass.
These angels are so o'er hasty in packing!

We got upon our horses, and had a pleasant amble
before us of fifteen miles, on the British side of the
river. We cantered off stoutly for a mile to settle our
regrets, and then I pulled up, and requested Job to
ride near me, as I had something to say to him.

“You are entering,” said I, “my dear Job, upon
your first journey in a foreign land. You will see
other manners than your own, which are not therefore
laughable, and hear a different pronunciation from
your own, which is not therefore vulgar. You are to
mix with British subjects, whom you have attacked
vigorously in your school declamations as `the enemy,'
but who are not therefore to be bullied in their own
country, and who have certain tastes of their own,
upon which you had better reserve your judgment.
We have no doubt that we are the greatest country
that ever was, is, or ever shall be; but, as this is an
unpalatable piece of information to other nations, we
will not stuff it into their teeth, unless by particular
request. John Bull likes his coat too small. Let him
wear it. John Bull prefers his beefsteak to a fricandean.
Let him eat it. John Bull will leave no stone
unturned to serve you in his own country, if you will
let him. Let him. John Bull will suffer you to find
fault for ever with king, lords, and commons, if you
do not compare them invidiously with other governments.
Let the comparison alone. In short, my
dear chum, as we insist that foreigners should adopt
our manners while they are travelling in the United
State, we had better adopt theirs when we return the
visit. They are doubtless quite wrong throughout,
but it is not worth while to bristle one's back against
the opinions of some score millions.”

The foam disappeared from the stream, as we followed
it on, and the roar of the falls—

was soon faint in our ears, and like the regret of parting,
lessened with the increasing distance till it was
lost. Job began to look around him, and see something
else besides a lovely face in the turnings of the
road, and the historian of this memorable journey,
who never had but one sorrow that “would not budge
with a fillip,” rose in his stirrups as he descried the
broad blue bosom of Lake Ontario, and gave vent to
his feelings in (he begs the reader to believe) the most
suitable quotation.

Seeing any celebrated water for the first time was
always, to me, an event. River, waterfall, or lake, if
I have heard of it and thought of it for years, has a
sensible presence, that I feel like the approach of a
human being in whom I am interested. My heart flutters
to it. It is thereafter an acquaintance, and I defend
its beauty or its grandeur as I would the fair fame
and worth of a woman that had shown me a preference.
My dear reader, do you love water? Not to
drink, for I own it is detestable in small quantities—
but water, running or falling, sleeping or gliding, tinged
by the sunset glow, or silvered by the gentle alchymist
of the midnight heaven? Do you love a
lake? Do you love a river? Do you “affect” any
one laughing and sparkling brook that has flashed on
your eye like a fay overtaken by the cock-crowing,
and tripping away slily to dream-land? As you see
four sisters, and but one to love; so, in the family of
the elements, I have a tenderness for water.

Lake Ontario spread away to the horizon, glittering
in the summer sun, boundless to the eye as the Atlantic;
and directly beneath us lay the small town of
Fort Niagara, with the steamer at the pier, in which
we promised ourselves a passage down the St. Lawrence.
We rode on to the hotel, which we found to
our surprise crowded with English officers, and having
disposed of our Narragansets, we inquired the hour
of departure, and what we could eat meantime, in as
nearly the same breath as possible.

“Cold leg of mutton and the steamboat's engaged,
sir!”

The mercury in Job's Britishometer fell plump to
zero. The idea of a monopoly of the whole steamer
by a colonel and his staff, and no boat again for a
week!

There was a government to live under!

We sat down to our mutton, and presently enter
the waiter.

“Colonel—'s compliments; hearing that two
gentlemen have arrived who expected to go by the
steamer, he is happy to offer them a passage if they
can put up with rather crowded accommodations.”

“Well, Job! what do you think now of England,
politically, morally, and religiously? Has not the
gentlemanlike courtesy of one individual materially
changed your opinions upon every subject connected
with the United Kingdom of Great Britain?”

“It has.”

“Then, my dear Job, I recommend you never again
to read a book of travels without writing down on the
margin of every bilious chapter, `probably lost his
passage in the steamer,' or `had no mustard to his
mutton,' or `could find no ginger-nuts for the interesting
little traveller,' or some similar annotation. Depend
upon it, that dear delightful Mrs. Trollope would
never have written so agreeable a book, if she had
thriven with her bazar in Cincinnati.”

We paid our respects to the colonel, and at six
o'clock in the evening got on board. Part of an Irish
regiment was bivouacked on the deck, and happier,
fellows I never saw. They had completed their nine
years' service on the three Canadian stations, and
were returning to the ould country, wives, children,
and all. A line was drawn across the deck, reserving
the after quarter for the officers; the sick were disposed
of among the women in the bows of the boat,
and the band stood ready to play the farewell air to the
cold shores of Upper Canada.

The line was cast off, when a boy of thirteen rushed
down to the pier, and springing on board with a
desperate leap, flew from one end of the deck to the
other, and flung himself at last upon the neck of a
pretty girl sitting on the knee of one of the privates.

“Mary, dear Mary!” was all he could utter. His
sobs choked him.

“Avast with the line, there!” shouted the captain,
who had no wish to carry off this unexpected passenger.
The boat was again swung to the wharf, and the
boy very roughly ordered ashore. His only answer
was to cling closer to the girl, and redouble his tears,
and by this time the colonel had stepped aft, and the
case seemed sure of a fair trial. The pretty Canadian
dropped her head on her bosom, and seemed divided
between contending emotions, and the soldier stood up
and raised his cap to his commanding officer, but held
firmly by her hand. The boy threw himself on his
knees to the colonel, but tried in vain to speak.

“Who's this, O'Shane?” asked the officer.

“Sure, my swateheart, your honor.”

“And how dare you bring her on board, sir?”

“Och, she'll go to ould Ireland wid us, your honor.”

“No, no, no!” cried the convulsed boy, clasping
the colonel's knees, and sobbing as if his heart would
break; “she is my sister! She isn't his wife! Father'll
die if she does! She can't go with him! She
sha'n't go with him!”

Job began to snivel, and I felt warm about the eyes
myself.

“Have you got a wife, O'Shane?” asked the
colonel.

“Plase your honor, never a bit,” said Paddy. He
was a tight, good-looking fellow, by the way, as you
would wish to see.

“Well—we'll settle this thing at once. Get up, my
little fellow! Come here, my good girl! Do you
love O'Shane well enough to be his wife?”

“Indeed I do, sir!” said Mary, wiping her eyes with
the back of her hand, and stealing a look at the “six
feet one” that stood as straight as a pike beside her.

“O'Shane! I allow this girl to go with us only on
condition that you marry her at the first place where
we can find a priest. We will make her up a bit of a
dowry, and I will look after her comfort as long as she
follows the regiment. What do you say, sir? Will
you marry her?”

O'Shane began to waver in his military position,
from a full front face getting to very nearly a right-about.
It was plain he was taken by surprise. The
eyes of the company were on him, however, and public
opinion, which, in most human breasts, is considerably
stronger than conscience, had its effect.

“I'll do it, your honor!” said he, bolting it out as
a man volunteers upon a “forlorn hope.”

Tears might as well have been bespoken for the
whole company. The boy was torn from his sister's
neck, and set ashore in the arms of two sailors, and
poor Mary, very much in doubt whether she was happy
or miserable, sank upon a heap of knapsacks, and
buried her eyes in a cotton handkerchief with a map
of London upon it, probably a gage d'amour from the
desaving O'Shane. I did the same myself with a
silk one, and Job item. Item the colonel and several
officers.

The boat was shoved off, and the wheels spattered
away, but as far as we could hear his voice, the cry
came following on, “Mary, Mary!”

It rung in my ears all night: “Mary, Mary!”

I was up in the morning at sunrise, and was glad
to escape from the confined cabin and get upon deck.
The steamer was booming on through a sea-as calm
as a mirror, and no land visible. The fresh dewiness
of the morning air ashore played in my nostrils, and
the smell of grass was perceptible in the mind, but in
all else it was like a calm in mid ocean. The soldiers
were asleep along the decks, with their wives and
children, and the pretty runaway lay with her head on
O'Shane's bosom, her red eyes and soiled finery
showing too plainly how she had passed the night.
Poor Mary! she has enough of following a soldier,
by this, I fear.

I stepped forward, and was not a little surprised to
see standing against the railing on the larboard bow,
the motionless figure of an Indian girl of sixteen,
Her dark eye was fixed on the line of the horizon we
were leaving behind, her arms were folded on her
bosom, and she seemed not even to breathe. A common
shawl was wrapped carelessly around her, and
another glance betrayed to me that she was in a situation
soon to become a mother. Her feet were protected
by a pair of once gaudy but now shabby and
torn moccasins, singularly small; her hands were of a
delicate thinness unusual to her race, and her hollow
cheeks, and forehead marked with an expression of
pain, told all I could have prophesied of the history of
a white man's tender mercies. I approached very
near, quite unperceived. A small burning spot was
just perceptible in the centre of her dark cheek, and
as I looked at her steadfastly, I could see a working of
the muscles of her dusky brow, which betrayed, in one
of a race so trained to stony calmness, an unusual fever
of feeling. I looked around for the place in which
she must have slept. A mantle of wampum-work,
folded across a heap of confused baggage, partly occupied
as a pillow by a brutal-looking and sleeping
soldier, told at once the main part of her story. I felt
for her, from my soul!

“You can hear the great waterfall no more,” I said,
touching her arm.

“I hear it when I think of it,” she replied, turning
her eyes upon me as slowly, and with as little surprise,
as if I had been talking to her an hour.

I pointed to the sleeping soldier. “Are you going
with him to his country?”

`Yes.”

“Are you his wife?”

“My father gave me to him.”

“Has he sworn before the priest in the name of the
Great Spirit to be your husband!”

“No.” She looked intently into my eyes as she
answered, as if she tried in vain to read my meaning.

“Is he kind to you?”

She smiled bitterly.

“Why then did you follow him?”

Her eyes dropped upon the burden she bore at her
heart. The answer could not have been clearer if
written with a sunbeam. I said a few words of kindness,
and left her to turn over in my mind how I could
best interfere for her happiness.

3. III.—THE ST. LAWRENCE.

On the third evening we had entered upon the St.
Lawrence, and were winding cautiously into the
channel of the Thousand Isles. I think there is not,
within the knowledge of the “all-beholding sun,” a
spot so singularly and exquisitely beautiful. Between
the Mississippi and the Cimmerian Bosphorus, I know
there is not, for I have pic-nicked from the Symplegades
westward. The Thousand Isles of the St. Lawrence
are as imprinted on my mind as the stars of heaven.
I could forget them as soon.

The river is here as wide as a lake, while the channel
just permits the passage of a steamer. The
islands, more than a thousand in number, are a singular
formation of flat, rectangular rock, split, as it
were, by regular mathematical fissures, and overflowed
nearly to the tops, which are loaded with a
most luxuriant vegetation. They vary in size, but
the generality of them would about accommodate a
tea-party of six. The water is deep enough to float a
large steamer directly at the edge, and an active deer
would leap across from one to the other in any direction.
What is very singular, these little rocky platforms
are covered with a rich loam, and carpeted with
moss and flowers, while immense trees take root in the
clefts, and interlace their branches with those of the
neighboring islets, shadowing the water with the unsunned
dimness of the wilderness. It is a very odd
thing to glide through in a steamer. The luxuriant
leaves sweep the deck, and the black funnel parts the
drooping sprays as it keeps its way, and you may
pluck the blossoms of the acacia, or the rich chestnut
flowers, sitting on the taffrail, and, really, a magic passage
in a witch's steamer, beneath the tree-tops of an
untrodden forest, could not be more novel and startling.
Then the solitude and silence of the dim and
still waters are continually broken by the plunge and
leap of the wild deer springing or swimming from one

island to another, and the swift and shadowy canoe of
the Indian glides out from some unseen channel, and
with a single stroke of his broad paddle he vanishes,
and is lost again, even to the ear. If the beauty-sick
and nature-searching spirit of Keats is abroad in the
world, “my basnet to a 'prentice-cap” he passes his
summers amid the thousand isles of the St. Lawrence!
I would we were there with our tea-things,
sweet Rosa Matilda!

We had dined on the quarter-deck, and were sitting
over the colonel's wine, pulling the elm-leaves from
the branches as they swept saucily over the table, and
listening to the band, who were playing waltzes that
probably ended in the confirmed insanity of every
wild heron and red deer that happened that afternoon
to come within ear-shot of the good steamer Queenston.
The paddles began to slacken in their spattering,
and the boat came to, at the sharp side of one of the
largest of the shadowy islands. We were to stop an
hour or two, and take in wood.

Everybody was soon ashore for a ramble, leaving
only the colonel, who was a cripple from a score of
Waterloo tokens, and your servant, reader, who had
something on his mind.

“Colonel! will you oblige me by sending for Mahoney?
Steward! call me that Indian girl sitting
with her head on her knees in the boat's bow.”

They stood before us.

“How is this?” exclaimed the colonel; “another!
good God! these Irishmen! Well, sir! what do you
intend to do with this girl, now that you have ruined
her?”

Mahoney looked at her out of a corner of his eye
with a libertine contempt that made my blood boil.
The girl watched for his answer with an intense but
calm gaze into his face, that if he had had a soul,
would have killed him. Her lips were set firmly but
not fiercely together, and as the private stood looking
from one side to the other, unable or unwilling to answer,
she suppressed a rising emotion in her throat,
and turned her look on the commanding officer with a
proud coldness that would have become Medea.

“Mahoney!” said the colonel, sternly, “will you
marry this poor girl?”

“Never, I hope, your honor!”

The wasted and noble creature raised her burdened
form to its fullest height, and, with an inaudible murmur
bursting from her lips, walked back to the bow
of the vessel. The colonel pursued his conversation
with Mahoney, and the obstinate brute was still refusing
the only reparation he could make the poor
Indian, when she suddenly reappeared. The shawl
was no longer around her shoulders. A coarse blanket
was bound below her breast with a belt of wampum,
leaving her fine bust entirely bare, her small feet
trod the deck with the elasticity of a leopard about to
leap on his prey, and her dark, heavily-fringed eyes,
glowed like coals of fire. She seized the colonel's
hand, and imprinted a kiss upon it, another upon mine,
and without a look at the father of her child, dived
with a single leap over the gangway. She rose directly
in the clear water, swam with powerful strokes
to one of the most distant islands, and turning once
more to wave her hand as she stood on the shore,
strode on, and was lost in the tangles of the forest.

THE CHEROKEE'S THREAT.

There were a hundred students in the new class
matriculated at Yale College in Connecticut, in the
year 18—. They were young men of different ages
and of all conditions in life, but less various in their
mien and breeding than in the characteristics of the
widely-separate states from which they came. It is
not thought extraordinary in Europe that the French
and English, the German, and the Italian, should possess
distinct national traits: yet one American is supposed
to be like every other, though the two between
whom the comparison is drawn were born and bred as
far apart, and in as different latitudes, as the Highland
cateran and the brigand of Calabria.

I looked around me with some interest, when, onthe
first morning of the term, the president, professors,
and students of the university assembled in the college
chapel at the sound of the prayer-bell, and, with my
brother freshmen, I stood in the side aisle, closing
up with our motley, and, as yet, unclassical heads and
habiliments, the long files of the more initiated classes.
The berry-brown tan of the sun of Georgia, unblanched
by study, was still dark and deep on the cheek of one;
the look of command, breathing through the indolent
attitude, betrayed, in another, the young Carolinian
and slave-master; a coat of green, garnished with fur
and bright buttons, and shaped less by the tailor than
by the Herculean and expansive frame over which it
was strained, had a taste of Kentucky in its complexion;
the white skin and red or sandy hair, cold expression,
stiff black coat, and serious attention to the
service, told of the puritan son of New Hampshire or
Vermont; and, perked up in his well-fitted coat, the
exquisite of the class, stood the slight and metropolitan
New-Yorker, with a firm belief in his tailor and himself
written on his effeminate lip, and an occasional
look at his neighbors' coats and shoulders, that might
have been construed into wonder upon what western
river or mountain dwelt the builders of such coats and
men!

Rather annoyed at last by the glances of one or two
seniors, who were amusing themselves with my simple
gaze of curiosity, I turned my attention to my more
immediate neighborhood. A youth with close, curling,
brown hair, rather under-size, but with a certain
decision and nerve in his lip which struck me immediately,
and which seemed to express somehow a confidence
in himself which his limbs scarce bore out,
stood with his back to the pulpit, and, with his foot on
the seat and his elbow on his knee, seemed to have
fallen at once into the habit of the place, and to be
beyond surprise or interest. As it was the custom of
the college to take places at prayers and recitation
alphabetically, and he was likely to be my neighbor
in chapel and hall for the next four years, I speculated
rather more than I should else have done on his face
and manner; and as the president came to his Amen,
I came to the conclusion, that whatever might be Mr.
“S.'s” capacity for friendship, his ill-will would be
very demonstrative and uncomfortable.

The term went on, the politics of the little republic
fermented, and as first appearances wore away, or
peculiarities wore off by collision or developed by intimacy,
the different members of the class rose or fell
in the general estimation, and the graduation of talent
and spirit became more just and definite. The
“Southerners and Northerners,” as they are called,
soon discovered, like the classes that had gone before
them, that they had no qualities in common, and, of
the secret societies which exist among the students in
that university, joined each that of his own compatriots.
The Carolinian or Georgian, who had passed his
life on a plantation, secluded from the society of his
equals, soon found out the value of his chivalrous deportment
and graceful indolence in the gay society for
which the town is remarkable; while the Vermontese,
or White-Mountaineer, “made unfashionably,” and ill
at ease on a carpet, took another line of ambition, and
sat down with the advantage of constitutional patience

and perseverance to the study which he would find in
the end a “better continuer,” even in the race for a
lady's favor.

It was the only republic I have ever known—that
class of freshmen. It was a fair arena; and neither
in politics, nor society, nor literature, nor love, nor religion,
have I, in much searching through the world,
found the same fair play or good feeling. Talk of our
own republic!—its society is the very core and gall of
the worst growth of aristocracy. Talk of the republic
of letters!—the two graves by the pyramid of Caius
Cestius laugh it to scorn. Of love!—of religion.
What is bought and sold like that which has the name
of the first? What is made a snare and a tool by the
designing like the last? But here—with a government
over us ever kindly and paternal, no favor shown,
and no privilege denied; every equality in the competitors
at all possible—age, previous education, and,
above all, worldly position—it was an arena in which
a generous spirit would wrestle with an abandon of
heart and limb he might never know in the world
again. Every individual rising or falling by the estimation
he exacts of his fellows, there is no such
school of honor; each, of the many palms of scholarship,
from the severest to the lightest, aiming at that
which best suits his genius, and as welcome as another
to the goal, there is no apology for the laggard. Of
the feelings that stir the heart in our youth—of the
few, the very few, which have no recoil, and leave no
repentance—this leaping from the starting-post of
mind—this first spread of the encouraged wing in the
free heaven of thought and knowledge—is recorded in
my own slender experience as the most joyous and
the most unmingled. He who has soiled his bright
honor with the tools of political ambition—he who has
leant his soul upon the charity of a sect in religion—
he who has loved, hoped, and trusted, in the greater
arena of life and manhood—must look back on days
like these as the broken-winged eagle to the sky—as
the Indian's subdued horse to the prairie.

2. II.

New Haven is not alone the seat of a university.
It is a kind of metropolis of education. The excessive
beauty of the town, with its embowered streets and
sunny gardens, the refinement of its society, its central
position and accessibility, and the facilities for attending
the lectures of the college professors, render
it a most desirable place of instruction in every department.
Among others, the female schools of the
place have a great reputation, and this, which in Europe,
or with a European state of society, would
probably be an evil, is, from the simple and frank
character of manners in America, a mutual and decided
advantage. The daughters of the first families
of the country are sent here, committed for two, three,
and four years, to the exclusive care of the head of
the establishment, and (as one of the privileges and
advantages of the school) associating freely with the
general society of the town, the male part, of course,
composed principally of students. A more easy and
liberal intercourse exists in no society in the world,
and in no society that I have ever seen is the tone of
morals and manners so high and unexceptionable.
Attachments are often formed, and little harm is
thought of it; and unless it is a very strong case of
disparity or objection, no obstacle is thrown in the
way of the common intercourse between lovers; and
the lady returns to her family, and the gentleman
senior disappears with his degree, and they meet and
marry—if they like. If they do not, the lady stands
as well in the matrimonial market as ever, and the
gentleman (unlike his horse) is not damaged by having
been on his knees.

Like “Le Noir Fainéant,” at the tournament, my
friend St. John seemed more a looker-on than an actor
in the various pursuits of the university. A sudden
interference in a quarrel, in which a brother freshman
was contending against odds, enlightened the class as
to his spirit and personal strength; he acquitted himself
at recitations with the air of self-contempt for
such easy excellence; he dressed plainly, but with
instinctive taste; and at the end of the first term,
having shrunk from all intimacy, and lived alone with
his books and a kind of trapper's dog he had brought
with him from the west, he had acquired an ascendency
in the opinion of the class for which no one
could well account, but to which every one unhesitatingly
assented.

We returned after our first short vacation, and of
my hundred class-mates there was but one whom I
much cared to meet again. St. John had passed the
vacation in his rooms, and my evident pleasure at
meeting him, for the first time, seemed to open his
heart to me. He invited me to breakfast with him.
By favor seldom granted to a freshman, he had a lodging
in the town—the rest of the class being compelled
to live with a chum in the college buildings. I found
his rooms—(I was the first of the class who had entered
them)—more luxuriously furnished than I had
expected from the simplicity of his appearance, but
his books, not many, but select, and (what is in America
an expensive luxury) in the best English editions and
superbly bound, excited most my envy and surprise.
How he should have acquired tastes of such ultra-civilization
in the forests of the west was a mystery
that remained to be solved.

3. III.

At the extremity of a green lane in the outer skirt
of the fashionable suburb of New Haven stood a rambling
old Dutch house, built probably when the cattle
of Mynheer grazed over the present site of the town.
It was a wilderness of irregular rooms, of no describable
shape in its exterior, and from its southern balcony,
to use an expressive Gallicism, “gave upon the bay.”
Long Island sound, the great highway from the northern
Atlantic to New York, weltered in alternate lead
and silver (oftener like the brighter metal, for the climate
is divine), between the curving lip of the bay and
the interminable and sandy shore of the island some
six leagues distant; the procession of ships and steamers
stole past with an imperceptible progress; the
ceaseless bells of the college chapel came deadened
through the trees from behind, and (the day being one
of golden autumn, and myself and St. John waiting
while black Agatha answered the door-bell) the sunsteeped
precipice of East Rock, with its tiara of blood-red
maples flushing like a Turk's banner in the light,
drew from us both a truant wish for a ramble and a
holyday. I shall have more to say anon of the foliage
of an American October: but just now, while I remember
it, I wish to record a belief of my own, that if, as
philosophy supposes, we have lived other lives—if

it is surely in the days tempered like the one I am remembering
and describing—profoundly serene, sunny
as the top of Olympus, heavenly pure, holy, and more
invigorating and intoxicating than luxurious or balmy;
the sort of air that the visiting angels might have
brought with them to the tent of Abraham—it is on
such days, I would record, that my own memory steps
back over the dim threshold of life (so it seems to me),
and on such days only. It is worth the translation of
our youth and our household gods to a sunnier land,
if it were alone for those immortal revelations.

In a few minutes from this time were assembled in

Mrs. Ilfrington's drawing-room the six or seven young
ladies of my more particular acquaintance among her
pupils, of whom one was a newcomer, and the object
of my mingled curiosity and admiration. It was the
one day of the week when morning visiters were admitted,
and I was there, in compliance with an unexpected
request from my friend, to present him to the
agreeable circle of Mrs. Ilfrington. As an habitué in
her family, this excellent lady had taken occasion to
introduce to me, a week or two before, the newcomer
of whom I have spoken above—a departure from the
ordinary rule of the establishment, which I felt to be
a compliment, and which gave me, I presumed, a tacit
claim to mix myself up in that young lady's destiny
as deeply as I should find agreeable. The newcomer
was the daughter of an Indian chief, and her name
was Nunu.

The wrongs of civilization to the noble aborigines
of America are a subject of much poetical feeling in
the United States, and will ultimately become the poetry
of the nation. At present the sentiment takes
occasionally a tangible shape, and the transmission of
the daughter of a Cherokee chief to New Haven, to
be educated at the expense of the government, and of
several young men of the same high birth to different
colleges, will be recorded among the evidences in history
that we did not plough the bones of their fathers
into our fields without some feelings of compunction.
Nunu had come to the seaboard under the charge of a
female missionary, whose pupil she had been in one
of the native schools of the west, and was destined,
though a chief's daughter, to return as a teacher to
her tribe when she should have mastered some of
the higher accomplishments of her sex. She was an
apt scholar, but her settled melancholy, when away
from her books, had determined Mrs. Ilfrington to try
the effect of a little society upon her, and hence my
privilege to ask for her appearance in the drawing-room.

As we strolled down in the alternate shade and sunshine
of the road, I had been a little piqued at the want
of interest, and the manner of course, with which St.
John had received my animated descriptions of the
personal beauty of the Cherokee.

“I have hunted with the tribe,” was his only answer.
“and know their features.”

“But she is not like them,” I replied, with a tone
of some impatience; “she is the beau ideal of a red
skin, but it is with the softened features of an Arab or
an Egyptian. She is more willowy than erect, and
has no higher cheek-bones than the plaster Venus in
your chambers. If it were not for the lambent fire in
her eye, you might take her, in the sculptured pose
of her attitudes, for an immortal bronze of Cleopatra.
I tell you she is divine.”

St. John called to his dog, and we turned along
the green bank above the beach, with Mrs. Ilfrington's
house in view, and so opens a new chapter in my story.

4. IV.

In the united pictures of Paul Veronese and Raphael,
steeped as their colors seem to have been in the
divinest age of Venetian and Roman female beauty, I
have scarcely found so many lovely women, of so different
models and so perfect, as were assembled during
my sophomore year under the roof of Mrs. Ilfrington.
They went about in their evening walks, graceful and
angelic, but, like the virgin pearls of the sea, they
poured the light of their loveliness on the vegetating
oysters about them, and no diver of fashion had
yet taught them their value. Ignorant myself in those
days of the scale of beauty, their features are enamelled
in my memory, and I have tried insensibly by
that standard (and found wanting) of every court in
Europe the dames most worshipped and highest born.
Queen of the Sicilies, loveliest in your own realm of
sunshine and passion! Pale and transparent princess
—pearl of the court of Florence—than whom the creations
on the immortal walls of the Pitti less discipline
our eye for the shapes of heaven! Gipsy of the Pactolus!
Jewess of the Thracian Gallipolis! Bright
and gifted cynosure of the aristocracy of England!—
ye are five women I have seen in as many years' wandering
over the world, lived to gaze upon, and live to
remember and admire—a constellation, I almost believe,
that has absorbed all the intensest light of the
beauty of a hemisphere—yet, with your pictures colored
to life in my memory, and the pride of rank and
state thrown over most of you like an elevating charm,
I go back to the school of Mrs. Ilfrington, and (smile
if you will!) they were as lovely, and stately, and as
worthy of the worship of the world.

I introduced St. John to the young ladies as they
came in. Having never seen him, except in the presence
of men, I was a little curious to know whether
his singular aplomb would serve him as well with the
other sex, of which I was aware he had had a very
slender experience. My attention was distracted at
the moment of mentioning his name to a lovely little
Georgian (with eyes full of the liquid sunshine of the
south), by a sudden bark of joy from the dog, who had
been left in the hall; and as the door opened, and the
slight and graceful Indian girl entered the room, the
usually unsocial animal sprang bounding in, lavishing
caresses on her, and seemingly wild with the delight
of a recognition.

In the confusion of taking the dog from the room, I
had again lost the moment of remarking St. John's
manner, and on the entrance of Mrs. Ilfrington, Nunu
was sitting calmly by the piano, and my friend was
talking in a quiet undertone with the passionate Georgian.

“I must apologize for my dog,” said St. John, bowing
gracefully to the mistress of the house; “he was
bred by Indians, and the sight of a Cherokee reminded
him of happier days—as it did his master.”

Nunu turned her eyes quickly upon him, but immediately
resumed her apparent deep study of the abstruse
figures in the Kidderminster carpet.

“You are well arrived, young gentlemen,” said Mrs.
Ilfrington; “we press you into our service for a botanical
ramble. Mr. Slingsby is at leisure, and will be
delighted, I am sure. Shall I say as much for you,
Mr. St. John?”

St. John bowed, and the ladies left the room for
their bonnets—Mrs. Ilfrington last. The door was
scarcely closed when Nunu reappeared, and checking
herself with a sudden feeling at the first step over the
threshold, stood gazing at St. John, evidently under
very powerful emotion.

“Nunu!” he said, smiling slowly and unwillingly,
and holding out his hand with the air of one who forgives
an offence.

She sprang upon his bosom with the bound of a
leveret, and between her fast kisses broke the endearing
epithets of her native tongue, in words that I only
understood by their passionate and thrilling accent.
The language of the heart is universal.

The fair scholars came in one after another, and we
were soon on our way through the green fields to the
flowery mountain-side of East Rock; Mrs. Ilfrington's
arm and conversation having fallen to my share, and
St. John rambling at large with the rest of the party,
but more particularly beset by Miss Temple, whose
Christian name was Isabella, and whose Christian charity
had no bowels for broken hearts.

The most sociable individuals of the party for a while
were Nunu and Lash; the dog's recollections of the
past seeming, like those of wiser animals, more agreeable
than the present. The Cherokee astonished Mrs.
Ilfrington by an abandonment to joy and frolic which

she had never displayed before—sometimes fairly out-running
the dog at full speed, and sometimes sitting
down breathless upon a green bank, while the rude
creature overpowered her with his caresses. The
scene gave origin to a grave discussion between that
well-instructed lady and myself, upon the singular
force of childish association—the extraordinary intimacy
between the Indian and the trapper's dog being
explained satisfactorily (to her, at least) on that attractive
principle. Had she but seen Nunu spring
into the bosom of my friend half an hour before, she
might have added a material corollary to her proposition.
If the dog and the chief's daughter were not
old friends, the chief's daughter and St. John certainly
were.

As well as I could judge by the motions of two
people walking before me, St. John was advancing fast
in the favor and acquaintance of the graceful Georgian.
Her southern indolence was probably an apology in
Mrs. Ilfrington's eyes for leaning heavily on her companion's
arm; but, in a momentary halt, the capricious
beauty disembarrassed herself of the bright scarf that
had floated over her shoulders, and bound it playfully
around his waist. This was rather strong on a first
acquaintance, and Mrs. Ilfrington was of that opinion.

“Miss Temple!” said she, advancing to whisper a
reproof in the beauty's ear.

Before she had taken a second step, Nunu bounded
over the low hedge, followed by the dog, with whom
she had been chasing a butterfly, and springing upon
St. John with eyes that flashed fire, she tore the scraf
into shreds, and stood trembling and pale, with her feet
on the silken fragments.

“Madam!” said St. John, advancing to Mrs. Ilfrington,
after casting on the Cherokee a look of surprise
and displeasure, “I should have told you before that
your pupil and myself are not new acquaintances. Her
father is my friend. I have hunted with the tribe, and
have hitherto looked upon Nunu as a child. You will
believe me, I trust, when I say her conduct surprises
me, and I beg to assure you that any influence I may
have over her will be in accordance with your own
wishes exclusively.”

His tone was cold, and Nunu listened with fixed lips
and frowning eyes.

“Have you seen her before since her arrival?” asked
Mrs. Ilfrington.

“My dog brought me yesterday the first intelligence
that she was here: he returned from his morning ramble
with a string of wampum about his neck, which
had the mark of the tribe. He was her gift,” he added,
patting the head of the dog, and looking with a softened
expression at Nunu, who dropped her head upon
her bosom, and walked on in tears.

5. V.

The chain of the Green mountains, after a gallop of
some five hundred miles, from Canada to Connecticut,
suddenly pulls up on the shore of Long-island sound,
and stands rearing with a bristling mane of pine-trees,
three hundred feet in air, as if checked in mid career
by the sea. Standing on the brink of this bold precipice,
you have the bald face of the rock in a sheer perpendicular
below you; and, spreading away from the
broken masses at its feet, lies an emerald meadow, inlaid
with a crystal and rambling river, across which,
at a distance of a mile or two, rise the spires of the
university, from what else were a thick-serried wilderness
of elms. Back from the edge of the precipice
extends a wild forest of hemlock and fir, ploughed on
its northern side by a mountain-torrent, whose bed of
marl, dry and overhung with trees in the summer, serve
as a path and a guide from the plain to the summit. It
were a toilsome ascent but for that smooth and hard
pavement, and the impervious and green thatch of
pine tassels overhung.

Antiquity in America extends no farther back than
the days of Cromwell, and East Rock is traditionary
ground with us—for there harbored the regicides
Whalley and Goffe, and many a breath-hushing tale
is told of them over the smouldering log-fires of Connecticut.
Not to rob the historian, I pass on to say
that this cavernous path to the mountain-top was the
resort in the holyday summer afternoons of most of the
poetical and otherwise well-disposed gentlemen sophomores,
and, on the day of which I speak, of Mrs. Ilfrington
and her seven-and-twenty lovely scholars. The
kind mistress ascended with the assistance of my arm,
and St. John drew stoutly between Miss Temple and
a fat young lady with an incipient asthma. Nunu had
not been seen since the first cluster of hanging flowers
had hidden her from our sight, as she bounded
upward.

The hour or two of slanting sunshine, poured in
upon the summit of the precipice from the west, had
been sufficient to induce a fine and silken moss to
show its fibres and small blossoms above the carpet of
pine-tassels; and emerging from the brown shadow of
the wood, you stood on a verdant platform, the foliage
of sighing trees overhead, a fairies' velvet beneath you,
and a view below that you may as well (if you would
not die in your ignorance) make a voyage over the
water to see.

We found Nunu lying thoughtfully near the brink
of the precipice, and gazing off over the waters of the
sound, as if she watched the coming or going of a
friend under the white sails that spotted its bosom.
We recovered our breath in silence, I alone, perhaps,
of that considerable company gazing with admiration
at the lithe and unconscious figure of grace lying in
the attitude of the Grecian Hermaphrodite on the brow
of the rock before us. Her eyes were moist and motionless
with abstraction, her lips just perceptibly
curved in an expression of mingled pride and sorrow,
her small hand buried and clinched in the moss, and
her left foot and ankle, models of spirited symmetry, escaped
carelessly from her dress, the high instep strained
back as if recovering from a leap, with the tense control
of emotion.

The game of the coquettish Georgian was well
played. With a true woman's pique, she had redoubled
her attentions to my friend from the moment
that she found it gave pain to another of her sex; and
St. John, like most men, seemed not unwilling to see
a new altar kindled to his vanity, though a heart he
had already won was stifling with the incense. Miss
Temple was very lovely. Her skin, of that teint of
opaque and patrican white which is found oftenest in
Asian latitudes, was just perceptibly warmed toward
the centre of the cheek with a glow like sunshine
through the thick white petal of a magnolia; her eyes
were hazel, with those inky lashes which enhance the
expression a thousand-fold, either of passion or melancholy;
her teeth were like strips from the lily's
heart; and she was clever, captivating, graceful, and a
thorough coquette. St. John was mysterious, romantic-looking,
superior, and, just now, the only victim in
the way. He admired, as all men do, those qualities
which, to her own sex, rendered the fair Isabella unamiable;
and yielded himself, as all men will, a satisfied
prey to enchantments of which he knew the
springs were the pique and vanity of the enchantress.
How singular it is that the highest and best qualities
of the female heart are those with which men are the
least captivated!

A rib of the mountain formed a natural seat a little
back from the pitch of the precipice, and here sat Miss
Temple, triumphant in drawing all eyes upon herself
and her tamed lion; her lap full of flowers, which he
had found time to gather on the way, and her white

hands employed in arranging a bouquet, of which the
destiny was yet a secret. Next to their own loves,
ladies like nothing on earth like mending or marring
the loves of others; and while the violets and already-drooping
wild flowers were coquettishly chosen or rejected
by those slender fingers, the sun might have
swung back to the east like a pendulum, and those
seven-and-twenty misses would have watched their
lovely schoolfellow the same. Nunu turned her head
slowly around at last, and silently looked on. St.
John lay at the feet of the Georgian, glancing from
the flowers to her face, and from her face to the flowers,
with an admiration not at all equivocal. Mrs.
Ilfrington sat apart, absorbed in finishing a sketch of
New-Haven; and I, interested painfully in watching
the emotions of the Cherokee, sat with my back to
the trunk of a hemlock—the only spectator who
comprehended the whole extent of the drama.

A wild rose was set in the heart of the bouquet at
last, a spear of riband-grass added to give it grace
and point, and nothing was wanting but a string. Reticules
were searched, pockets turned inside out, and
never a bit of riband to be found. The beauty was
in despair.

“Stay,” said St. John, springing to his feet.
“Lash! Lash!”

The dog came coursing in from the wood, and
crouched to his master's hand.

“Will a string of wampum do?” he asked, feeling
under the long hair on the dog's neck, and untying a
fine and variegated thread of many-colored beads,
worked exquisitely.

The dog growled, and Nunu sprang into the middle
of the circle with the fling of an adder, and seizing
the wampum as he handed it to her rival, called the
dog, and fastened it once more around his neck.

The ladies rose in alarm; the belle turned pale, and
clung to St. John's arm; the dog, with his hair bristling
upon his back, stood close to her feet in an attitude
of defiance; and the superb Indian, the peculiar
genius of her beauty developed by her indignation,
her nostrils expanded, and her eyes almost showering
fire in their flashes, stood before them like a young
Pythoness, ready to strike them dead with a regard.

St. John recovered from his astonishment after a
moment, and leaving the arm of Miss Temple, advanced
a step, and called to his dog.

The Cherokee patted the animal on his back, and
spoke to him in her own language; and, as St. John
still advanced, Nunu herself to her fullest height,
placed herself before the dog, who slunk growling
from his master, and said to him, as she folded her
arms, “The wampum is mine.”

St. John colored to the temples with shame.

“Lash!” he cried, stamping with his feet, and endeavoring
to fright him from his protectress.

The dog howled and crept away, half crouching
with fear, toward the precipice; and St. John shooting
suddenly past Nunu, seized him on the brink, and
held him down by the throat.

The next instant, a scream of horror from Mrs. Ilfrington,
followed by a terrific echo from every female
present, started the rude Kentuckian to his feet.

Clear over the abyss, hanging with one hand by an
ashen sapling, the point of her tiny foot just poising
on a projecting ledge of rock, swung the desperate
Cherokee, sustaining herself with perfect ease, but
with all the determination of her iron race collected
in calm concentration on her lips.

“Restore the wampum to his neck,” she cried, with
a voice that thrilled the very marrow with its subdued
fierceness, “or my blood rest on your soul!”

St. John flung it toward the dog, and clasped his
hands in silent horror.

The Cherokee bore down the sapling till its slender
stem cracked with the tension, and rising lightly with
the rebound, alit like a feather upon the rock. The
subdued student sprang to her side; but with scorn
on her lip, and the flush of exertion already vanishedfrom
her cheek, she called to the dog, and with rapid
strides took her way alone down the mountain.

6. VI.

Five years had elapsed. I had put to sea from the
sheltered river of boyhood—had encountered the
storms of a first entrance into life—had trimmed my
boat, shortened sail, and, with a sharp eye to windward,
was lying fairly on my course. Among others
from whom I had parted company was Paul St. John,
who had shaken hands with me at the university gate,
leaving me, after four years' intimacy, as much in
doubt as to his real character and history as the first
day we met. I had never heard him speak of either
father or mother, nor had he, to my knowledge, received
a letter from the day of his matriculation. He
passed his vacations at the university; he had studied
well, yet refused one of the highest college honors
offered him with his degree; he had shown many
good qualities, yet some unaccountable faults; and,
all in all, was an enigma to myself and the class. I
knew him, clever, accomplished, and conscious of
superiority; and my knowledge went no farther. The
coach was at the gate, and I was there to see him off;
and, after four years' constant association, I had not
an idea where he was going, or to what he was destined.
The driver blew his horn.

“God bless you, Slingsby!”

“God bless you, St. John”

And so we parted.

It was five years from this time, I say, and, in the
bitter struggles of first manhood, I had almost forgotten
there was such a being in the world. Late in the
month of October, in 1829, I was on my way westward,
giving myself a vacation from the law. I embarked,
on a clear and delicious day, in the small
steamer which plies up and down the Cayuga lake,
looking forward to a calm feast of scenery, and caring
little who were to be my fellow-passengers. As we
got out of the little harbor of Cayuga, I walked astern
for the first time, and saw the not very unusual sight
of a group of Indians standing motionless by the
wheel. They were chiefs, returning from a diplomatic
visit to Washington.

I sat down by the companion-ladder, and opened
soul and eye to the glorious scenery we were gliding
through. The first severe frost had come, and the
miraculous change had passed upon the leaves which
is known only in America. The blood-red sugar maple,
with a leaf brighter and more delicate than a Circassian
lip, stood here and there in the forest like the
Sultan's standard in a host—the solitary and far-seen
aristocrat of the wilderness; the birch, with its spirit-like
and amber leaves, ghosts of the departed summer,
turned out along the edges of the woods like a lining
of the palest gold; the broad sycamore and the fan-like
catalpa flaunted their saffron foliage in the sun,
spotted with gold like the wings of a lady-bird; the
kingly oak, with its summit shaken bare, still hid its
majestic trunk in a drapery of sumptuous dyes, like a
stricken monarch, gathering his robes of state about
him to die royally in his purple; the tall poplar, with
its minaret of silver leaves, stood blanched like a coward
in the dying forest, burthening every breeze with
its complainings; the hickory paled through its enduring
green; the bright berries of the mountain-ash
flushed with a more sanguine glory in the unobstructed
sun; the gaudy tulip-tree, the Sybarite of vegetation,
stripped of its golden cups, still drank the intoxicating
light of noonday in leaves than which the lip of an
Indian shell was never more delicately teinted; the
still deeper-dyed vines of the lavish wilderness, perishing

with the noble things whose summer they had
shared, outshone them in their decline, as woman in
her death is heavenlier than the being on whom in life
she leaned; and alone and unsympathizing in this
universal decay, outlaws from Nature, stood the fir
and the hemlock, their frowning and sombre heads
darker and less lovely than ever, in contrast with the
death-struck glory of their companions.

The dull colors of English antumnal foliage give
you no conception of this marvellous phenomenon.
The change here is gradual; in America it is the
work of a night—of a single frost!

Oh, to have seen the sun set on hills bright in the
still green and lingering summer, and to wake in the
morning to a spectacle like this!

It is as if a myriad of rainbows were laced through
the tree-tops—as if the sunsets of a summer—gold,
purple, and crimson—had been fused in the alembic
of the west, and poured back in a new deluge of light
and color over the wilderness. It is as if every leaf
in those countless trees had been painted to outflush
the tulip—as if, by some electric miracle, the dyes of
the earth's heart had struck upward, and her crystals
and ores, her sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies, had let
forth their imprisoned colors to mount through the
roots of the forest, and, like the angels that in olden
time entered the body of the dying, reanimate the perishing
leaves, and revel an hour in their bravery.

I was sitting by the companion-ladder, thinking to
what on earth these masses of foliage could be resembled,
when a dog sprang upon my knees, and, the
moment after, a hand was laid on my shoulder.

“St. John? Impossible!”

“Bodily!” answered my quondam classmate.

I looked at him with astonishment. The soigné
man of fashion I had once known was enveloped in a
kind of hunter's frock, loose and large, and girded to
his waist by a belt; his hat was exchanged for a cap
of rich otter skin; his pantaloons spread with a slovenly
carelessness over his feet; and, altogether, there
was that in his air which told me at a glance that he
had renounced the world. Lash had recovered his
leanness, and, after wagging out his joy, he crouched
between my feet, and lay looking into my face, as if
he was brooding over the more idle days in which we
had been acquainted.

“And where are you bound?” I asked, having answered
the same question for myself.

“Westward with the chiefs!”

“For how long?”

“The remainder of my life.”

I could not forbear an exclamation of surprise.

“You would wonder less,” said he, with an impatient
gesture, “if you knew more of me. And, by-the-way,”
he added with a smile, “I think I never
told you the first half of the story—my life up to the
time I met you.”

“It was not for want of a catechist,” I answered,
settling myself in an attitude of attention.

“No; and I was often tempted to gratify your curiosity:
but from the little intercourse I had had with
the world, I had adopted some precocious principles;
and one was, that a man's influence over others was
vulgarized and diminished by a knowledge of his
history.”

I smiled, and as the boat sped on her way over the
calm waters of the Cayuga, St. John went on leisurely
with a story which is scarce remarkable enough
for a repetition. He believed himself the natural son
of a western hunter, but only knew that he had passed
his early youth on the borders of civilization, between
whites and Indians, and that he had been more particularly
indebted for protection to the father of Nunu.
Mingled ambition and curiosity had led him eastward
while still a lad, and a year or two of a most vagabond
life in the different cities had taught him the caution
and bitterness for which he was so remarkable. A
fortunate experiment in lotteries supplied him with
the means of education, and, with singular application
in a youth of such wandering habits, he had applied
himself to study under a private master, fitted himself
for the university in half the usual time, and cultivated,
in addition, the literary taste which I have remarked
upon.

“This,” he said, smiling at my look of astonishment,
“brings me up to the time when we met. I
came to college at the age of eighteen, with a few
hundred dollars in my pocket, some pregnant experience
of the rough side of the world, great confidence
in myself, and distrust of others, and, I believe, a kind
of instinct of good manners, which made me ambitious
of shining in society. You were a witness to
my débût. Miss Temple was the first highly-educated
woman I had ever known, and you saw her
effect on me.”

“And since we parted?”

“Oh, since we parted my life has been vulgar
enough. I have ransacked civilized life to the bottom,
and found it a heap of unredeemed falsehoods.
I do not say it from common disappointment, for I
may say I succeeded in everything I undertook—”

“Except Miss Temple,” I said, interrupting, at the
hazard of wounding him.

“No; she was a coquette, and I pursued her till I
had my turn. You see me in my new character now.
But a month ago I was the Apollo of Saratoga, playing
my own game with Miss Temple. I left her for
a woman worth ten thousand of her—and here she
is.”

As Nunu came up the companion-way from the
cabin, I thought I had never seen breathing creature
so exquisitely lovely. With the exception of a pair
of brilliant moccasins on her feet, she was dressed in
the usual manner, but with the most absolute simplicity.
She had changed in those five years from
the child to the woman, and, with a round and well-developed
figure, additional height, and manners at
once gracious and dignified, she walked and looked
the chieftain's daughter. St. John took her hand,
and gazed on her with moisture in his eyes.

“That I could ever have put a creature like this,”
he said, “into comparison with the dolls of civilization!”

We parted at Buffalo; St. John with his wife and
the chiefs to pursue their way westward by Lake
Erie, and I to go moralizing on my way to Niagara.

F. SMITH.

—Philaster.

If you can imagine a buried Titan lying along the
length of a continent with one arm stretched out into
the midst of the sea, the place to which I would transport
you, reader mine! would lie as it were in the
palm of the giant's hand. The small promontory to
which I refer, which becomes an island in certain
states of the tide, is at the end of one of the long capes
of Massachusetts, and is still called by its Indian name,
Nahant. Not to make you uncomfortable; I beg to
introduce you at once to a pretentious hotel, “squat
like a toad” upon the unsheltered and highest point
of this citadel in mid sea, and a very great resort for
the metropolitan New-Englanders. Nahant is perhaps,

liberally measured, a square half-mile; and it is
distant from what may fairly be called mainland, perhaps
a league.

Road to Nahant there is none. The oi polloi go
there by steam; but when the tide is down, you may
drive there with a thousand chariots over the bottom
of the sea. As I suppose there is not such another
place in the known world, my tale will wait while I
describe it more fully. If the Bible had been a fiction
(not to speak profanely), I should have thought
the idea of the destruction of Pharaoh and his host
had its origin in some such wonder of nature.

Nahant is so far out into the ocean, that what is
called the “ground swell,” the majestic heave of its
great bosom going on for ever like respiration (though
its face may be like a mirror beneath the sun, and a
wind may not have crisped its surface for days and
weeks), is as broad and powerful within a rood of the
shore as it is a thousand miles at sea.

The promontory itself is never wholly left by the
ebb; but, from its western extremity, there runs a
narrow ridge, scarce broad enough for a horse-path,
impassible for the rocks and sea-weed of which it is
matted, and extending at just high-water mark from
Nahant to the mainland. Seaward from this ridge,
which is the only connexion of the promontory with
the continent, descends an expanse of sand, left bare
six hours out of the twelve by the retreating sea, as
smooth and hard as marble, and as broad and apparently
as level as the plain of the Hermus. For three
miles it stretches away without shell or stone, a surface
of white, fine-grained sand, beaten so hard by the
eternal hammer of the surf, that the hoof of a horse
scarce marks it, and the heaviest wheel leaves it as
printless as a floor of granite. This will be easily understood
when you remember the tremendous rise and
fall of the ocean swell, from the very bosom of which,
in all its breadth and strength, roll in the waves of the
flowing tide, breaking down on the beach, every one,
with the thunder of a host precipitated from the battlements
of a castle. Nothing could be more solemn
and anthem-like than the succession of these plunging
surges. And when the “tenth wave” gathers, far out
at sea, and rolls onward to the shore, first with a
glassy and heaving swell as if some mighty monster
were lurching inland beneath the water, and then,
bursting up into foam, with a front like an endless and
sparry crystal wall, advances and overwhelms everything
in its progress, till it breaks with a centupled
thunder on the beach—it has seemed to me, standing
there, as if thus might have beaten the first surge on
the shore after the flat which “divided sea and land.”
I am no Cameronian, but the sea (myself on shore)
always drives me to Scripture for an illustration of my
feelings.

The promontory of Nahant must be based on the
earth's axle, else I can not imagine how it should have
lasted so long. In the mildest weather, the groundswell
of the sea gives it a fillip at every heave that
would lay the “castled crag of Drachenfels” as low as
Memphis. The wine trembles in your beaker of
claret as you sit after dinner at the hotel; and if you
look out at the eastern balcony (for it is a wooden
pagoda, with balconies, verandahs, and colonnades ad
libitum), you will see the grass breathless in the sunshine
upon the lawn, and the ocean as polished and
calm as Miladi's brow beyond, and yet the spray and
foam dashing fifty feet into the air between, and enveloping
the “Devil's Pulpit” (a tall rock split off from
the promontory's front) in a perpetual kaleidoscope of
mist and rainbows. Take the trouble to transport
yourself there! I will do the remaining honors on the
spot. A cavern as cool (not as silent) as those of
Trophonius lies just under the brow of yonder precipice,
and the waiter shall come after us with our wine.
You have dined with the Borromeo in the grotto of
Isola Bella, I doubt not, and know the perfection of
art—I will show you that of nature. (I should like to
transport you for a similar contrast from Terni to
Niagara, or from San Giovanni Laterano to an aisle in
a forest of Michigan; but the Dædalian mystery, alas!
is unsolved. We “fly not yet.”)

Here we are, then, in the “Swallow's Cave.” The
floor descends by a gentle declivity to the sea, and
from the long dark cleft stretching outward you look
forth upon the broad Atlantic—the shore of Ireland
the first terra firma in the path of your eye. Here is
a dark pool left by the retreating tide for a refrigerator,
and with the champagne in the midst, we will recline
about it like the soft Asiatics of whom we learned
pleasure in the east, and drink to the small-featured
and purple-lipped “Mignons” of Syria—those fine-limbed
and fiery slaves, adorable as Peris, and by turns
languishing and stormy, whom you buy for a pinch
of piastres (say 5l. 5s.) in sunny Damascus. Your
drowsy Circassian, faint and dreamy, or your crockery
Georgian—fit dolls for the sensual Turk—is, to him
who would buy soul, dear at a para the hecatomb.

We recline, as it were, in an ebon pyramid, with a
hundred feet of floor and sixty of wall, and the fourth
side open to the sky. The light comes in mellow and
dim, and the sharp edges of the rocky portal seem let
into the pearly arch of heaven. The tide is at half-ebb,
and the advancing and retreating waves, which at
first just lifted the fringe of crimson dulse at the lip
of the cavern, now dash their spray-pearls on the rock
below, the “tenth” surge alone rallying as if in scorn
of its retreating fellows, and, like the chieftain of Culloden
Moor, rushing back singly to the contest. And
now that the waters reach the entrance no more, come
forward and look on the sea! The swell lifts!—would
you not think the bases of the earth rising beneath it?
It falls!—would you not think the foundation of the
deep had given way? A plain, broad enough for the
navies of the world to ride at large, heaves up evenly
and steadily as if it would lie against the sky, rests a
moment spell-bound in its place, and falls again as
far—the respiration of a sleeping child not more regular
and full of slumber. It is only on the shore that
it chafes. Blessed emblem! it is at peace with itself!
The rocks war with a nature so unlike their own, and
the hoarse din of their border onsets resounds through
the caverns they have rent open; but beyond, in the
calm bosom of the ocean, what heavenly dignity! what
godlike unconsciousness of alarm! I did not think we
should stumble on such a moral in the cave!

By the deeper base of its hoarse organ, the sea is
now playing upon its lowest stops, and the tide is down.
Hear! how it rushes in beneath the rocks, broken and
stilled in its tortuous way, till it ends with a washing
and dull hiss among the sea-weed, and, like a myriad
of small tinkling bells, the dripping from the crags is
audible. There is fine music in the sea!

And now the beach is bare. The cave begins to
cool and darken, and the first gold teint of sunset is
stealing into the sky, and the sea looks of a changing
opal, green, purple, and white, as if its floor were
paved with pearl, and the changing light struck up
through the waters. And there heaves a ship into the
horizon, like a white-winged bird lying with dark breast
on the waves, abandoned of the sea-breeze within sight
of port, and repelled even by the spicy breath that
comes with a welcome off the shore. She comes from
“merry England.” She is freighted with more than
merchandise. The home-sick exile will gaze on her
snowy sail as she sets in with the morning breeze, and
bless it; for the wind that first filled it on its way
swept through the green valley of his home! What
links of human affection brings she over the sea?
How much comes in her that is not in her “bill of
lading,” yet worth, to the heart that is waiting for it, a
thousand times the purchase of her whole venture!

Mais montons nous! I hear the small hoofs of
Thalaba; my stanhope waits; we will leave this half
bottle of champagne, that “remainder biscuit,” and the
echoes of our philosophy, to the Naiads who have lent
us their drawing-room. Undine, or Egeria! Lurly,
or Arethusa! whatever thou art called, nympth of this
shadowy cave! adieu!

Slowly, Thalaba! Tread gingerly down this rocky
descent! So! Here we are on the floor of the vasty
deep! What a glorious race-course! The polished
and printless and spreads away before you as far as
the eye can see, the surf comes in below, breast-high
ere it breaks, and the white fringe of the sliding wave
shoots up the beach, but leaves room for the marching
of a Persian phalanx on the sands it has deserted.
Oh, how noiselessly runs the wheel, and how dreamily
we glide along, feeling our motion but in the resistance
of the wind, and by the trout-like pull of the
ribands by the excited animal before us. Mark the
color of the sand! White at high-water mark, and
thence deepening to a silvery gray as the water has
evaporated less—a slab of Egyptian granite in the
obelisk of St. Peter's not more polished and unimpressible.
Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is
none; and mar or deface its bright surface as you
will, it is ever beaten down anew, and washed even of
the dust of the foot of man, by the returning sea.
You may write upon its fine-grained face with a crow-quill—you
may course over its dazzling expanse with
a troop of chariots.

Most wondrous and beautiful of all, within twenty
yards of the surf, or for an hour after the tide has left
the sand, it holds the water without losing its firmness,
and is like a gray mirror, bright as the bosom of
the sea. (By your leave, Thalaba!) And now lean
over the dasher, and see those small fetlocks striking
up from beneath—the flying mane, the thorough-bred
action, the small and expressive head, as perfect in
the reflection as in the reality; like Wordsworth's
swan, he

You would swear you were skimming the surface of
the sea; and the delusion is more complete as the
white foam of the “tenth wave” skims in beneath
wheel and hoof, and you urge on with the treacherous
element gliding away visibly beneath you.

We seem not to have driven fast, yet three miles,
fairly measured, are left behind, and Thalaba's blood
is up. Fine creature! I would not give him

We have won champagne ere now, Thalaba, and I,
trotting on this silvery beach; and if ever old age
comes on me, and I intend it never shall on aught
save my mortal coil (my spirit vowed to perpetual
youth), I think these vital breezes, and a trot on these
exhilarating sands, would sooner renew my prime
than a rock in St. Hilary's cradle, or a dip in the well
of Kanathos. May we try the experiment together,
gentle reader!

I am not settled in my own mind whether this description
of one of my favorite haunts in America
was written most to introduce the story that is to follow,
or the story to introduce the description. Possibly
the latter, for having consumed by callow youth
in wandering “to and fro in the earth,” like Sathanas
of old, and looking on my country now with an eye
from which all the minor and temporary features have
gradually faded, I find my pride in it (after its glory
as a republic) settling principally on the superior
handiwork of nature in its land and water. When
I talk of it now, it is looking through another's eyes
—his who listens. I do not describe it after my own
memory of what it was once to me, but according to
my idea of what it will seem now to a stranger.
Hence I speak not of the friends I made, rambling by
lake or river. The lake and the river are there, but
the friends are changed—to themselves and me. I
speak not of the lovely and loving ones that stood by
me, looking on glen or waterfall. The glen and the
waterfall are romantic still, but the form and the heart
that breathed through it are no longer lovely or loving.
I should renew my joys by the old mountain and
river, for, all they ever were I should find them still,
and never seem to myself grown old, or cankered of
the world, or changed in form or spirit, while they
reminded me but of my youth, with their familiar
sunshine and beauty. But the friends that I knew—
as I knew them—are dead. They look no longer
the same; they have another heart in them; the
kindness of the eye, the smilingness of the lip, are
no more there. Philosophy tells me the material
and living body changes and renews, particle by particle,
with time; and experience—cold-blooded and
stony monitor—tells me, in his frozen monotone, that
heart and spirit change with it and renew! But the
name remains, mockery that it is! and the memory
sometimes; and so these apparitions of the past—that
we almost fear to question when they encounter us,
lest the change they have undergone should freeze our
blood—stare coldly on us, yet call us by name, and
answer, though coldly to their own, and have that
terrible similitude to what they were, mingled with
their unsympathizing and hollow mummery, that we
wish the grave of the past, with all that it contained
of kind or lovely, had been sealed for ever. The
heart we have lain near before our birth (so read I the
book of human life) is the only one that can not forget
that it has loved us. Saith well and affectionately
an American poet, in some birth-day verses to
his mother—

2. II.

I have observed that of all the friends one has in the
course of his life, the truest and most attached is exactly
the one who, from his dissimilarity to yourself,
the world finds it very odd you should fancy. We
hear sometimes of lovers who “are made for each
other,” but rarely of the same natural match in friendship.
It is no great marvel. In a world like this,
where we pluck so desperately at the fruit of pleasure,
we prefer for company those who are not formed with
precisely the same palate as ourselves. You will seldom
go wrong, dear reader, if you refer any human
question about which you are in doubt to that icy
oracle—selfishness.

My shadow for many years was a gentle monster,
whom I have before mentioned, baptized by the name
of Forbearance Smith. He was a Vermontese, a descendant
of one of the puritan pilgrims, and the first
of his family who had left the Green mountains since
the flight of the regicides to America. We assimilate
to what we live among, and Forbearance was very
green, and very like a mountain. He had a general
resemblance to one of Thorwaldsen's unfinished apostles—larger
than life, and just hewn into outline. My
acquaintance with him commenced during my first
year at the university. He stalked into my room one
morning with a hair-trunk on his back, and handed me
the following note from the tutor:—

Rather relieved by my lenient sentence (for, till the
next shedding of his well-saturated coat, the sky-blue
body and red mane and tail of the president's once
gray mare would interfere with that esteemed animal's
usefulness), I received Mr. Smith with more politeness
than he expected. He deposited his hair-trunk in
the vacant bedroom, remarked with a good-humored
smile that it was a cold morning, and seating himself
in my easiest chair, opened his Euclid, and went to
work upon a problem, as perfectly at home as if he
had furnished the room himself, and lived in it from
his matriculation. I had expected some preparatory
apology at least, and was a little annoyed; but being
upon my good behavior, I bit my lips, and resumed
the “Art of Love,” upon which I was just then practising
my nascent Latinity, instead of calculating logarithms
for recitation. In about an hour, my new chum
suddenly vociferated “Eureka!” shut up his book,
and having stretched himself (a very unnecessary operation),
coolly walked to my dressing-table, selected
my best hair-brush, redolent of Macassar, and used it
with the greatest apparent satisfaction.

“Have you done with that hair-brush?” I asked, as
he laid it in its place again.

“Oh yes!”

“Then, perhaps, you will do me the favor to throw
it out of the window.”

He did it without the slightest hesitation. He then
resumed his seat by the fire, and I went on with my
book in silence. Twenty minutes had elapsed, perhaps,
when he rose very deliberately, and without a
word of preparation, gave me a cuff that sent me flying
into the wood-basket in the corner behind me. As
soon as I could pick myself out, I flew upon him, but
I might as well have grappled with a boa-constrictor.
He held me off at arm's length till I was quite exhausted
with rage, and, at last, when I could struggle
no more, I found breath to ask him what the devil he
meant.

“To resent what seemed to me, on reflection, to be
an insult,” he answered, in the calmest tone, “and
now to ask your pardon for a fault of ignorance. The
first was due to myself, the second to you.”

Thenceforth, to the surprise of everybody, and Bob
Wilding and the tutor, we were inseparable. I took
Bruin (by a double elision Forbearance became “bear,”
and by paraphrase Bruin, and he answered to the
name)—I took him, I say, to the omnium shop, and
presented him with a dressing-case, and other appliances
for his outer man; and as my inner man was
relatively as much in need of his assistance, we mutually
improved. I instructed him in poetry and politeness,
and he returned the lesson in problems and
politics. My star was never in more fortunate conjunction.

Four years had woven their threads of memory about
us, and there was never woof more free from blemish.
Our friendship was proverbial. All that much care
and Macassar could do for Bruin had been done, but
there was no abating his seven feet of stature, nor reducing
the size of his feet proper, nor making the muscles
of his face answer to their natural wires. At his
most placid smile, a strange waiter would run for a
hot towel and the doctor (colic was not more like itself
than that like colic); and for his motions—oh
Lord! a skeleton, with each individual bone append
ed to its neighbor with a string, would execute a pas
seul with the same expression. His mind, however,
had none of the awkwardness of his body. A simplicity
and truth, amounting to the greatest naïveté, and
a fatuitous unconsciousness of the effect on beholders
of his outer man, were its only approaches to fault or
foible. With the finest sense of the beautiful, the
most unerring judgment in literary taste, the purest
romance, a fervid enthusiasm, constancy, courage, and
good temper, he walked about the world in a mask—
an admirable creature, in the guise and seeming of a
ludicrous monster.

Bruin was sensitive on but one point. He never
could forgive his father and mother for the wrong they
had entailed on him at his baptism. “Forbearance
Smith!” he would say to himself sometimes in unconscious
soliloquy, “they should have given me the virtue
as well as the name!” And then he would sit
with a pen, and scrawl “F.Smith” on a sheet of paper
by the hour together. To insist upon knowing his
Christian name was the one impertinence he never
forgave.

3. III.

My party at Nahant consisted of Thalaba, Forbearance,
and myself. The place was crowded, but I
passed my time very much between my horse and my
friend, and was as certain to be found on the beach
when the tide was down, as the sea to have left the
sands. Job (a synonyme for Forbearance which became
at this time his common soubriquet) was, of
course, in love. Not the least to the prejudice, however,
of his last faithful passion—for he was as fond
of the memory of an old love, as he was tender in the
presence of the new. I intended to have had him dissected
after his death, to see whether his organization
was not peculiar. I strongly incline to the opinion
that we should have found a mirror in the place of his
heart. Strange! how the same man who is so fickle
in love, will be so constant in friendship! But is it
fickleness? Is it not rather a superflu of tenderness in
the nature, which overflows to all who approach the
fountain? I have ever observed that the most susceptible
men are the most remarkable for the finer qualities
of character. They are more generous, more
delicate, and of a more chivalrous complexion altogether,
than other men. It was surprising how reasonably
Bruin would argue upon this point. “Because
I was happy at Niagara,” he was saying one day as
we sat upon the rocks, “shall I take no pleasure in
the falls of Montmorenci? Because the sunset was
glorious yesterday, shall I find no beauty in that of
to-day? Is my fancy to be used but once, and the
key turned upon it for ever? Is the heart like a bonbon,
to be eaten up by the first favorite, and thought
of no more? Are our eyes blind, save to one shape
of beauty? Are our ears insensible to the music save
of one voice?”

“But do you not weaken the heart, and become incapable
of a lasting attachment, by this habit of inconstancy?”

“How long, my dear Phil, will you persist in talking
as if the heart was material, and held so much love
as a cup so much water, and had legs to be weary, or
organs to grow dull? How is my sensibility lessened
—how my capacity enfeebled? What would I have
done for my first love, that I would not do for my last?
I would have sacrificed my life to secure the happiness
of one you wot of in days gone by: I would jump
into the sea, if it would make Blanche Carroll happier
to-morrow.”

“Sautez-done!” said a thrilling voice behind; and
as if the utterance of her name had conjured her out
of the ground, the object of all Job's admiration, and
a little of my own, stood before us. She had a work

basket in her hand, a gipsy-hat tossed carelessly on
her head, and had preceded a whole troop of belles
and matrons, who were coming out to while away the
morning, and breathe the invigorating sea-air on the
rocks.

Blanche Carroll was what the women would call
“a little love,” but that phrase of endearment would
not at all express the feeling with which she inspired
the men. She was small, and her face and figure
might have been framed in fairy-land for bewitching
beauty; but with the manner of a spoiled child, and,
apparently, the most thoughtless playfulness of mind,
she was as veritable a little devil as ever took the shape
of woman. Scarce seventeen at this time, she had
a knowledge of character that was like an instinct, and
was an accomplished actress in any part it was necessary
for her purpose to play. No grave Machiavel
ever managed his cards with more finesse than that
little intriguante the limited world of which she was
the star. She was a natural master-spirit and plotter;
and the talent that would have employed itself in the
deeper game of politics, had she been born a woman
of rank in Europe, displayed itself, in the simple society
of a republic, in subduing to her power everything
in the shape of a single man that ventured to her
net. I have nothing to tell of her at all commensurate
with the character I have drawn, for the disposal
of her own heart (if she has one) must of course be
the most important event of her life; but I merely
pencil the outline of the portrait in passing, as a
specimen of the material that exists—even in the
simplest society—for the dramatis personœ of a
court.

We followed the light-footed beauty to the shelter
of one of the caves opening on the sea, and seated ourselves
about her upon the rocks. Some one proposed
that Job or myself should read.

“Oh, Mr. Smith,” interrupted the belle, “where is
my bracelet?—and where are my verses?”

At the ball the night before she had dropped a
bracelet in the waltz, and Job had been permitted to
take care of the fragments, on condition of restoring
them, with a sonnet, the next morning. She had just
thought of it.

“Read them out! read them out!” she cried, as
Job, blushing a deep blue, extracted a tri-colored pink
document from his pocket, and tried to give it to her
unobserved, with the packet of jewelry. Job looked
at her imploringly, and she took the verses from his
hand, and ran her eye through them.

“Pretty well!” she said; “but the last line might
be improved. Give me a pencil, some one!” And
bending over it, till her luxuriant hair concealed her
fairy fingers in their employment, she wrote a moment
upon her knee, and tossing the paper to me, bade me
read it out with the emendation. Bruin had, meantime,
modestly disappeared, and I read with the more
freedom:—

Job's conclusion was more pathetic, but probably
less true. He appeared after the applause had ceased,
and resumed his place at the lady's feet, with a look
in his countenance of having deserved an abatement
of persecution. The beauty spread out the fragments
of the broken bracelet on the rock beside her.

“Mr. Smith!” said she, in her most conciliating
tone.

Job leaned toward her with a look of devoted inquiry.

“Has the tide turned?”

“Certainly. Two hours since.”

“The beach is passable, then?”

“Hardly, I fear.”

“No matter. How many hours' drive is it to Salem?”

“Mr. Slingsby drives it in two.”

“Then you'll get Mr. Slingsby to lend you his
stanhope, drive to Salem, have this bracelet mended,
and bring it back in time for the ball. I have spoken,
as the grand Turk says. Allez!”

“But my dear Miss Carroll—”

She laid her hand on his mouth as he began to remonstrate,
and while I made signs to him to refuse,
she said something to him which I lost in a sudden
dash of the waters. He looked at me for my consent.

“Oh! you can have Mr. Slingsby's horse,” said the
beauty, as I hesitated whether my refusal would not
check her tyranny, “and I'll drive him out this evening
for his reward, N'est-ce pas? you cross man!”

So, with a sun hot enough to fry the brains in his
skull, and a quivering reflection on the sands that
would burn his face to a blister, exit Job, with the
broken bracelet in his bosom.

“Stop, Mr. Slingsby,” said the imperious little belle,
as I was making up a mouth, after his departure, to
express my disapprobation of her measures, “no lecture,
if you please. Give me that book of plays, and
I'll read you a precedent. Because you are virtuous,
shall we have no more cakes and ale? Ecoutez! And,
with an emphasis and expression that would have been
perfect on the stage, she read the following passage
from “The Careless Husband:”—

“Lady Betty.—The men of sense, my dear, make
the best fools in the world; their sincerity and good
breeding throw them so entirely into one's power, and
give one such an agreeable thirst of using them ill, to
show that power—'tis impossible not to quench it.

“Lady Easy.—But, my Lord Morelove—

“Lady B.—Pooh! my Lord Morelove's a mere Indian
damask—one can't wear him out; o' my conscience,
I must give him to my woman at last. I begin-to
be known by him; had I not best leave him off, my
dear?

“Lady E.—Why did you ever encourage him?

“Lady B.—Why, what would you have one do?
For my part, I could no more choose a man by my
eye than a shoe—one must draw them on a little, to
see if they are right to one's foot.

“Lady E.—But I'd no more fool on with a man I
could not like, than wear a shoe that pinched me.

“Lady B.—Ay; but then a poor wretch tells one
he'll widen 'em, or do anything, and is so civil and
silly, that one does not know how to turn such a trifle
as a pair of shoes, or a heart, upon a fellow's hands
again.

“Lady E.—And there's my Lord Foppington.

“Lady B.—My dear! fine fruit will have flies about
it; but, poor things! they do it no harm; for, if you
observe, people are generally most apt to choose that
the flies have been busy with. Ha! ha!

“Lady E.—Thou art a strange, giddy creature!

“Lady B.—That may be from too much circulation
of thought, my dear!”

“Pray, Miss Carroll,” said I, as she threw aside the
book with a theatrical air, “have you any precedent
for broiling a man's brains, as well as breaking his
heart? For, by this time, my friend Forbearance has
a coup de soleil, and is hissing over the beach like a
steam-engine.”

“How tiresome you are! Do you really think it
will kill him?”

“It might injure him seriously—let alone the danger
of driving a spirited horse over the beach, with the
tide quarter-down.”

“What shall I do to be `taken out of the corner,'
Mr. Slingsby?”

“Order your horses an hour sooner, and drive to
Lynn, to meet him half way on his return. I will resume
my stanhope, and give him the happiness of
driving back with you.”

“And shall I be gentle Blanche Carroll, and no
ogre, if I do?”

“Yes; Mr. Smith surviving.”

“Take the trouble to give my orders, then; and
come back immediately, and read to me till it is time
to go. Meantime, I shall look at myself in this black
mirror.” And the spoilt, but most lovely girl bent
over a dark pool in the corner of the cave, forming a
picture on its shadowy background that drew a murmur
of admiration even from the neglected group who
had been the silent and disapproving witnesses of her
caprice.”

4. IV.

A thunder-cloud strode into the sky with the rapidity
which marks that common phenomenon of a
breathless summer afternoon in America, darkened the
air for a few minutes, so that the birds betook themselves
to their nests, and then poured out its refreshing
waters with the most terrific flashes of lightning,
and crashes of thunder, which for a moment seemed to
still even the eternal base of the sea. With the same
fearful rapidity, the black roof of the sky tore apart, and
fell back, in rolling and changing masses, upon the
horizon; the sun darted with intense brilliancy
through the clarified and transparent air; the light-stirring
breeze came freighted with delicious coolness;
and the heavy sea-birds, who had lain brooding on the
waves while the tumult of the elements went on, rose
on their cimeter-like wings, and fled away, with incomprehensible
instinct, from the beautiful and freshened
land. The whole face of earth and sky had been
changed in an hour.

Oh, of what fulness of delight are even the senses
capable! What a nerve there is sometimes in every
pore! What love for all living and all inanimate
things may be born of a summer shower! How stirs
the fancy, and brightens hope, and warms the heart,
and sings the spirit within us, at the mere animal joy
with which the lark flees into heaven! And yet, of
this exquisite capacity for pleasure we take so little
care! We refine our taste, we elaborate and finish
our mental perception, we study the beautiful, that
we may know it when it appears—yet the senses by
which these faculties are approached, the stops by
which this fine instrument is played, are trifled with
and neglected. We forget that a single excess blurs
and confuses the music written on our minds; we
forget that an untimely vigil weakens and bewilders
the delicate minister to our inner temple; we know
not, or act as if we knew not, that the fine and easilyjarred
harmony of health is the only interpreter of
Nature to our souls; in short, we drink too much
claret, and eat too much pâté foie gras. Do you understand
me, gourmand et gourmet?

Blanche Carroll was a beautiful whip, and the two
bay ponies in her phaeton were quite aware of it. La
Bruyère says, with his usual wisdom, “Une belle
femme qui a les qualités d'un honnête homme est ce
qu'il y a au monde d'un commerce plus délicieux;”
and, to a certain degree, masculine accomplishments
too, are very winning in a woman—if pretty; if plain,
she is expected not only to be quite feminine, but
quite perfect. Foibles are as hateful in a woman who
does not possess beauty, as they are engaging in a woman
who does. Clouds are only lovely when the
heavens are bright.

She looked loveliest while driving, did Blanche
Carroll, for she was born to rule, and the expression
native to her lip was energy and nerve; and as she
sat with her little foot pressed against the dasher, and
reined in those spirited horses, the finely-pencilled
mouth, usually playful or pettish, was pressed together
in a curve as warlike as Minerva's, and twice
as captivating. She drove, too, as capriciously as
she acted. At one moment her fleet ponies fled over
the sand at the top of their speed, and at the next they
were brought down to a walk, with a suddenness
which threatened to bring them upon their haunches.
Now far up on the dry sand, cutting a zigzag to
lengthen the way, and again below at the tide edge,
with the waves breaking over her seaward wheel; all
her powers at one instant engrossed in pushing them
to their fastest trot, and in another the reins lying
loose on their backs, while she discussed some sudden
flight of philosophy. “Be his fairy, his page, his
everything that love and poetry have invented,” said
Roger Ascham to Lady Jane Grey, just before her
marriage; but Blanche Carroll was almost the only
woman I ever saw capable of the beau idéal of fascinating
characters.

Between Miss Carroll and myself there was a safe
and cordial friendship. Besides loving another better,
she was neither earnest, nor true, nor affectionate
enough to come at all within the range of my possible
attachments, and though I admired her, she felt that
the necessary sympathy was wanting for love; and,
the idea of fooling me with the rest once abandoned,
we were the greatest of allies. She told me all her
triumphs, and I listened and laughed without thinking
it worth while to burden her with my confidence in
return; and you may as well make a memorandum,
gentle reader, that that is a very good basis for a friendship.
Nothing bores women or worldly persons so
much as to return their secrets with your own.

As we drew near the extremity of the beach, a boy
rode up on horseback, and presented Miss Carroll with
a note. I observed that it was written on a very dirty
slip of paper, and was waiting to be enlightened as to
its contents, when she slipped it into her belt, took the
whip from the box, and flogging her ponies through
the heavy sand of the outer beach, went off, at a pace
which seemed to engross all her attention, on her road
to Lynn. We reached the hotel and she had not
spoken a syllable, and as I made a point of never inquiring
into anything that seemed odd in her conduct,
I merely stole a glance at her face, which wore the
expression of mischievous satisfaction which I liked
the least of its common expressions, and descended
from the phaeton with the simple remark, that Job
could not have arrived, as I saw nothing of my stanhope
in the yard.

“Mr. Slingsby.” It was the usual preface to asking
some particular favor.

“Miss Carroll.”

“Will you be so kind as to walk to the library and

select me a book to your own taste, and ask no questions
as to what I do with myself meantime?”

“But, my dear Miss Carroll—your father—”

“Will feel quite satisfied when he hears that Cato
was with me. Leave the ponies to the groom, Cato,
and follow me.” I looked after her as she walked
down the village street with the old black behind her,
not at all certain of the propriety of my acquiescence,
but feeling that there was no help for it.

I lounged away a half hour at the library, and found
Miss Carroll waiting for me on my return. There
were no signs of Bruin; and as she seemed impatient
to be off, I jumped into the phaeton, and away we flew
to the beach as fast as her ponies could be driven
under the whip. As we descended upon the sands
she spoke for the first time.

“It is so civil of you to ask no questions, Mr. Slingsby;
but you are not offended with me?”

“If you have got into no scrape while under my
charge, I shall certainly be too happy to shake hands
upon it to-morrow.”

“Are you quite sure?” she asked archly.

“Quite sure.”

“So am not I,” she said with a merry laugh; and
in her excessive amusement she drove down to the sea,
till the surf broke over the nearest pony's back, and
filled the bottom of the phaeton with water. Our wet
feet were now a fair apology for haste, and taking the
reins from her, I drove rapidly home, while she wrapped
herself in her shawl, and sat apparently absorbed
in the coming of the twilight over the sea.

I slept late after the ball, though I had gone to bed
exceedingly anxious about Bruin, who had not yet
made his appearance. The tide would prevent his
crossing the beach after ten in the morning, however,
and I made myself tolerably easy till the sands were
passable with the evening ebb. The high-water mark
was scarcely deserted by the waves, when the same
boy who had delivered the note to Miss Carroll the
day before, rode up from the beach on a panting horse,
and delivered me the following note:—

I got upon the boy's horse, and hurried over the
beach with whip and spur. I stopped at the justice's
office, and that worthy seemed uncommonly pleased
to see me.

“We have got him, sir,” said he.

“Got whom?” I asked rather shortly.

“Why, the fellow that stole your stanhope and Miss
Carroll's bracelet, and passed a twenty dollar counterfeit
bill—ha'n't you hearn on't?”

The justice's incredulity, when I told him it was
probably the most intimate friend I had in the world,
would have amused me at any other time.

“Will you allow me to see the prisoner?” I asked.

“Be sure I will. I let Miss Carroll have a peep at
him yesterday, and what do you think? Oh, Lord!
he wanted to make her believe she knew him! Good!
wasn't it? Ha! ha! And such an ill-looking fellow!
Why, I'd know him for a thief anywhere!
Your intimate friend, Mr. Slingsby! Oh, Lord!
when you come to see him! Ha! ha!”

We were at the prison-door. The grating bolts
turned slowly, the door swung rustily on its hinges as
if it was not often used, and in the next minute I was
enfolded in Job's arms, who sobbed and laughed, and
was quite hysterical with his delight. I scarce won
dered at the justice's prepossessions when I looked at
the figure he made. His hat knocked in, his coat
muddy, his hair full of the dust of straw—the natural
hideousness of poor Job had every possible aggravation.

We were in the stanhope, and fairly on the beach,
before he had sufficiently recovered to tell me the
story. He had arrived quite overheated at Lynn, but,
in a hurry to execute Miss Carroll's commission, he
merely took a glass of soda-water, had Thalaba's
mouth washed, and drove on. A mile on his way, he
was overtaken by a couple of ostlers on horseback,
who very roughly ordered him back to the inn. He
refused, and a fight ensued, which ended in his being
tied into the stanhope, and driven back as a prisoner.
The large note, which he had given for his soda-water,
it appeared; was a counterfeit, and placards, offering a
reward for the detection of a villain, described in the
usual manner as an ill-looking fellow, had been sticking
up for some days in the village. He was taken
before the justice, who declared at first sight that he
answered the description in the advertisement. His
stubborn refusal to give the whole of his name (he
would rather have died, I suppose), his possession of
my stanhope, which was immediately recognised, and
lastly, the bracelet found in his pocket, of which he
refused indignantly to give any account, were circumstances
enough to leave no doubt on the mind of the
worthy justice. He made out his mittimus forthwith,
granting Job's request that he might be allowed to
write a note to Miss Carroll (who, he knew, would
drive over the beach toward evening), as a very great
favor. She arrived as he expected.

“And what in Heaven's name did she say?” said I,
interested beyond my patience at this part of the story.

“Expressed the greatest astonishment when the
justice showed her the bracelet, and declared she
never saw me before in her life!”

That Job forgave Blanche Carroll in two days, and
gave her a pair of gloves with some verses on the
third, will surprise only those who have not seen that
lady. It would seem incredible, but here are the
verses, as large as life:—

EDITH LINSEY.

1. PART I.
FROST AND FLIRTATION.

It began to snow. The air softened; the pattering
of the horse's hoofs was muffled with the impeded vibration;
the sleigh glided on with a duller sound;
the large loose flakes fell soft and fast, and the low
and just audible murmur, like the tread of a fairy
host, melted on the ear with a drowsy influence, as if
it were a descent of palpable sleep upon the earth.
You may talk of falling water—of the running of a
brook—of the humming song of an old crone on a
sick vigil—or of the levi susurro of the bees of Hybla
—but there is nothing like the falling of the snow for
soft and soothing music. You hear it or not, as you
will, but it melts into your soul unaware. If you have
ever a heartache, or feel the need of “poppy or mandragora,”
or, like myself, grow sometimes a-weary of
the stale repetitions of this unvaried world, seek me
out in Massachusetts, when the wind softens and veers
south, after a frost—say in January. There shall
have been a long-lying snow on the ground, well-trodden.
The road shall be as smooth as the paths
to our first sins—of a seeming perpetual declivity, as
it were—and never a jolt or jar between us and the
edge of the horizon; but all onward and down apparently,
with an insensible ease. You sit beside me in
my spring-sleigh, hung with the lightness of a cobweb
cradle for a fairy's child in the trees. Our horse
is, in the harness, of a swift and even pace, and around
his neck is a string of fine small bells, that ring to his
measured step in a kind of muffled music, softer and
softer as the snow-flakes thicken in the air. Your
seat is of the shape of the fauteuil in your library,
cushioned and deep, and with a backward and gentle
slope, and you are enveloped to the eyelids in warm
furs. You settle down, with every muscle in repose,
the visor of your ermine cap just shedding the snow
from your forehead, and with a word, the groom stands
back, and the horse speeds on, steady, but beautifully
fast. The bells, which you hear loudly at first, begin
to deaden, and the low hum of the alighting flakes
steals gradually on your ear; and soon the hoof-strokes
are as silent as if the steed were shod with
wool, and away you flee through the white air, like
birds asleep upon the wing diving through the feathery
fleeces of the moon. Your eyelids fall—forgetfulness
steals upon the senses—a delicious torpor takes possession
of the uneasy blood—and brain and thought
yield to an intoxicating and trance-like slumber. It
were perhaps too much to ask that any human bosom
may go scathless to the grave; but in my own unworthy
petitions I usually supplicate that my heart
may be broken about Christmas. I know an anodyne
o' that season.

Fred Fleming and I occupied one of the seven long
seats in a stage-sleigh, flying at this time twelve miles
in the hour (yet not fast enough for our impatience),
westward from the university gates. The sleighing
had been perfect for a week, and the cold keen air had
softened for the first time that morning, and assumed
the warm and woolly complexion that foretokened
snow. Though not very cheerful in its aspect, this is
an atmosphere particularly pleasant to breathe, and
Fred, who was making his first move after a six weeks'
fever, sat with the furs away from his mouth, nostrils
expanded, lips parted, and the countenance altogether
of a man in a high state of physical enjoyment. I
had nursed him through his illness, by-the-way, in
my own rooms, and hence our position as fellow-travellers.
A pressing invitation from his father to
come home with him to Skaneateles, for the holydays,
had nursed me from my usual winter journey to the
North; and for the first time in my life, I was going
upon a long visit to a strange roof. My imagination
had never more business upon its hands.

Fred had described to me, over and over again,
every person I was to meet, brothers, sisters, aunts,
cousins, and friends—a household of thirty people,
guests included; but there was one person among
them of whom his descriptions, amplified as they
were, were very unsatisfactory.

“Is she so very plain?” I asked for the twentieth
time.

“Abominably!”

“And immense black eyes?”

“Saucers!”

“And large mouth?”

“Huge!”

“And very dark?”

“Like a squaw!”

“And skinny hands, did you say?”

“Lean, long, and pokerish!”

“And so very clever?”

“Knows everything, Phil!”

“But a sweet voice?”

“Um! everybody says so.”

“And high temper?”

“She's the devil, Phil! don't ask any more questions
about her.”

“You don't like her, then?”

“She never condescends to speak to me; how
should I?”

And thereupon I put my head out of the sleigh, and
employed myself with catching the snow-flakes on my
nose, and thinking whether Edith Linsey would like
me or no; for through all Fred's derogatory descriptions,
it was clearly evident that she was the ruling
spirit of the hospitable household of the Flemings.

As we got farther on, the new snow became deeper,
and we found that the last storm had been heavier
here than in the country from which we had come.
The occasional farm-houses were almost wholly
buried, the black chimney alone appearing above the
ridgy drifts, while the tops of the doors and windows
lay below the level of the trodden road, from which a
descending passage was cut to the threshold, like the
entrance to a cave in the earth. The fences were
quite invisible. The fruit-trees looked diminished to
shrubberies of snow-flowers, their trunks buried under
the visible surface, and their branches loaded with the
still falling flakes, till they bent beneath the burden.
Nothing was abroad, for nothing could stir out of the
road without danger of being lost, and we dreaded to
meet even a single sleigh, lest in turning out, the
horses should “slump” beyond their depth, in the
untrodden drifts. The poor animals began to labor
severely, and sunk at every step over their knees in
the clogging and wool-like substance; and the long
and cumbrous sleigh rose and fell in the deep pits like
a boat in a heavy sea. It seemed impossible to get on.
Twice we brought up with a terrible plunge and stood
suddenly still, for the runners had struck in too deep
for the strength of the horses; and with the snow-shovels,
which formed a part of the furniture of the
vehicle, we dug them from their concrete beds. Our
progress at last was reduced to scarce a mile in the
hour, and we began to have apprehensions that our
team would give out between the post-houses. Fortunately
it was still warm, for the numbness of cold
would have paralyzed our already flagging exertions.

We had reached the summit of a long hill with the
greatest difficulty. The poor beasts stood panting
and reeking with sweat; the runners of the sleigh
were clogged with hard cakes of snow, and the air
was close and dispiriting. We came to a stand-still,
with the vehicle lying over almost on its side, and I
stepped out to speak to the driver and look forward.
It was a discouraging prospect; a long deep valley
lay before us, closed at the distance of a couple of

miles by another steep hill, through a cleft in the top
of which lay our way. We could not even distinguish
the line of the road between. Our disheartened animals
stood at this moment buried to their breasts, and
to get forward without rearing at every step seemed
impossible. The driver sat on his box looking uneasily
down into the valley. It was one undulating
ocean of snow, not a sign of a human habitation to be
seen, and even the trees indistinguishable from the
general mass by their whitened and overladen branches.
The storm had ceased, but the usual sharp cold
that succeeds a warm fall of snow had not yet lightened
the clamminess of the new-fallen flakes, and
they clung around the foot like clay, rendering every
step a toil.

“Your leaders are quite blown,” I said to the driver,
as he slid off his uncomfortable seat.

“Pretty nearly, sir!”

“And your wheelers are not much better.”

“Sca'cely.”

“And what do you think of the weather?”

“It'll be darnation cold in an hour.” As he spoke
he looked up to the sky, which was already peeling
off its clouds in long stripes, like the skin of an
orange, and looked as hard and cold as marble between
the widening rifts. A sudden gust of a more
chilling temperature followed immediately upon his
prediction, and the long cloth curtains of the sleigh.
flew clear of their slight pillars, and shook off their
fringes of icicles.

“Could you shovel a little, mister?” said the driver,
handing me one of the broad wooden utensils
from his foot-board, and commencing himself, after
having thrown off his box-coat, by heaving up a solid
cake of the moist snow at the side of the road.

“It's just to make a place to rub down them creturs,”
said he, as I looked at him, quite puzzled to
know what he was going to do.

Fred was too weak to assist us, and having righted
the vehicle a little, and tied down the flapping curtains,
he wrapped himself in his cloak, and I set heartily
to work with my shovel. In a few minutes, taking
advantage of the hollow of a drift, we had cleared a
small area of frozen ground, and releasing the tired
animals from their harness, we rubbed them well down
with the straw from the bottom of the sleigh. The
persevering driver then cleared the runners of their
iced and clinging masses, and a half hour having
elapsed, he produced two bottles of rum from his box,
and, giving each of the horses a dose, put them again
to their traces.

We heaved out of the pit into which the sleigh had
settled, and for the first mile it was down-hill, and we
got on with comparative ease. The sky was by this
time almost bare, a dark, slaty mass of clouds alone
settling on the horizon in the quarter of the wind,
while the sun, as powerless as moonlight, poured with
dazzling splendor on the snow, and the gusts came
keen and bitter across the sparkling waste, rimming
the nostrils as if with bands of steel, and penetrating to
the innermost nerve with their pungent iciness. No
protection seemed of any avail. The whole surface
of the body ached as if it were laid against a slab of
ice. The throat closed instinctively, and contracted
its unpleasant respiration—the body and limbs drew
irresistibly together, to economize, like a hedge-hog,
the exposed surface—the hands and feet felt transmuted
to lead—and across the forehead, below the pressure
of the cap, there was a binding and oppressive
ache, as if a bar of frosty iron had been let into the
scull. The mind, meantime, seemed freezing up—unwillingness
to stir, and inability to think of anything
but the cold, becoming every instant more decided.

From the bend of the valley our difficulties became
more serious. The drifts often lay across the road
like a wall, some feet above the heads of the horses,
and we had dug through one or two, and had been
once upset, and often near it, before we came to the
steepest part of the ascent. The horses had by this
time begun to feel the excitement of the rum, and
bounded on through the snow with continual leaps,
jerking the sleigh after them with a violence that
threatened momently to break the traces. The steam
from their bodies froze instantly, and covered them
with a coat like hoar-frost, and spite of their heat, and
the unnatural and violent exertions they were making,
it was evident by the pricking of their ears, and the
sudden crouch of the body when a stronger blast
swept over, that the cold struck through even their
hot and intoxicated blood.

We toiled up, leap after leap, and it seemed miraculous
to me that the now infuriated animals did not
burst a blood-vessel or crack a sinew with every one
of those terrible springs. The sleigh plunged on after
them, stopping dead and short at every other moment,
and reeling over the heavy drifts, like a boat in a
surging sea. A finer crystallization had meantime
taken place upon the surface of the moist snow, and
the powdered particles flew almost insensibly on the
blasts of wind, filling the eyes and hair, and cutting
the skin with a sensation like the touch of needle-points.
The driver and his maddened but almost exhausted
team were blinded by the glittering and whirling
eddies, the cold grew intenser every moment, the
forward motion gradually less and less, and when, with
the very last effort apparently, we reached a spot on
the summit of the hill, which, from its exposed situation,
had been kept bare by the wind, the patient and
persevering whip brought his horses to a stand, and
despaired, for the first time, of his prospects of getting
on. I crept out of the sleigh, the iron-bound runners
of which now grated on the bare ground, but found it
impossible to stand upright.

“If you can use your hands,” said the driver, turning
his back to the wind which stung the face like the
lash of a whip, “I'll trouble you to untackle them
horses.”

I set about it, while he buried his hands and face
in the snow to relieve them for a moment from the
agony of cold. The poor animals staggered stiffly as
I pushed them aside, and every vein stood out from
their bodies like ropes under the skin.

“What are you going to do?” I asked, as he joined
me again, and taking off the harness of one of the
leaders, flung it into the snow.

“Ride for life!” was his ominous answer.

“Good God! and what is to become of my sick
friend?”

“The Almighty knows—if he can't ride to the
tavern!”

I sprang instantly to poor Fred, who was lying in
the bottom of the sleigh almost frozen to death, informed
him of the driver's decision, and asked him if
he thought he could ride one of the horses. He was
beginning to grow drowsy, the first symptom of death
by cold, and could with difficulty be roused. With
the driver's assistance, however, I lifted him out of the
sleigh, shook him soundly, and making stirrups of the
traces, set him upon one of the horses, and started
him off before us. The poor beasts seemed to have a
presentiment of the necessity of exertion, and though
stiff and sluggish, entered willingly upon the deep
drift which blocked up the way, and toiled exhaustedly
on. The cold in our exposed position was agonizing.
Every small fibre in the skin of my own face felt splitting
and cracked, and my eyelids seemed made of ice.
Our limbs soon lost all sensation. I could only press
with my knees to the horse's side, and the whole collected
energy of my frame seemed expended in the
exertion. Fred held on wonderfully. The driver had
still the use of his arm, and rode behind, flogging the
poor animals on, whose every step seemed to be the

last summons of energy. The sun set, and it was
rather a relief, for the glitter upon the snow was exceedingly
painful to the sight, and there was no warmth
in its beams. I could see my poor friend drooping
gradually to the neck of his horse, but until he should
drop off it was impossible to assist him, and his faithful
animal still waded on. I felt my own strength fast
ebbing away. If I had been alone, I should certainly
have lain down, with the almost irresistible inclination
to sleep; but the thought of my friend, and the shouting
of the energetic driver, nerved me from time to
time—and with hands hanging helplessly down, and
elbows fastened convulsively to my side, we plunged
and struggled painfully forward. I but remember
being taken afterward to a fire, and shrinking from it
with a shriek—the suffering of reviving consciousness
was so intolerable. We had reached the tavern literally
frozen upon our horses.

2. II.

I was balancing my spoon on the edge of a cup at
the breakfast-table, the morning after our arrival, when
Fred stopped in the middle of an eulogium on my
virtues as a nurse, and a lady entering at the same
moment, he said simply in parenthesis, “My cousin
Edith, Mr. Slingsby,” and went on with his story. I
rose and bowed, and as Fred had the parote, I had
time to collect my courage, and take a look at the
enemy's camp—for, of that considerable household, I
felt my star to be in conjunction or opposition with
hers only, who was at that moment my vis-à-vis across
a dish of stewed oysters.

In about five minutes of rapid mental portrait-painting,
I had taken a likeness of Edith Linsey, which I
see at this moment (I have carried it about the world
for ten years) as distinctly as the incipient lines of age
in this thin-wearing hand. My feelings changed in
that time from dread or admiration, or something between
these, to pity; she was so unscrupulously and
hopelessly plain—so wretchedly ill and suffering in
her aspect—so spiritless and unhappy in every motion
and look. “I'll win her heart,” thought I, “by being
kind to her. Poor thing! it will be something new to
her, I dare say!” Oh, Philip Slingsby! what a doomed
donkey thou wert for that silly soliloquy!

And yet even as she sat there, leaning over her untasted
breakfast, listless, ill, and melancholy—with her
large mouth, her protruding eyes, her dead and sallow
complexion, and not one redeeming feature—there
was something in her face which produced a phantom
of beauty in my mind—a glimpse, a shadowing of a
countenance that Beatrice Cenci might have worn at
her last innocent orison—a loveliness moulded and
exalted by superhuman and overpowering mind—instinct
through all its sweetness with energy and fire.
So strong was this phantom portrait, that in all my
thoughts of her as an angel in heaven (for I supposed
her dying for many a month, and a future existence
was her own most frequent theme), she always rose to
my fancy with a face half Niobe, half Psyche, radiantly
lovely. And this, too, with a face of her own, a boná
fide physiognomy, that must have made a mirror an
unpleasant article of furniture in her chamber.

I have no suspicion in my own mind whether Time
was drunk or sober during the succeeding week of
those Christmas holydays. The second Saturday had
come round, and I just remember that Fred was very
much out of humor with me for having appeared to
his friends to be everything he had said I was not, and
nothing he had said I was. He had described me as
the most uproarious, noisy, good-humored, and agreeable
dog in the world. And I was not that at all—
particularly the last. The old judge told him he had
not improved in his penetration at the university.

A week! and what a life had been clasped within
its brief calendar, for me! Edith Linsey was two
years older than I, and I was considered a boy. She
was thought to be dying slowly, but irretrievably, of
consumption; and it was little matter whom she loved,
or how. They would only have been pleased, if, by
a new affection, she could beguile the preying melancholy
of illness; for by that gentle name they called,
in their kindness, a caprice and a bitterness of character
that, had she been less a sufferer, would not have
been endured for a day. But she was not capricious,
or bitter to me! Oh no! And from the very extreme
of her impatience with others—from her rudeness, her
violence, her sarcasm—she came to me with a heart
softer than a child's, and wept upon my hands, and
weighed every word that might give me offence, and
watched to anticipate my lightest wish, and was humble,
and generous, and passionately loving and dependant.
Her heart sprang to me with a rebound. She
gave herself up to me with an utter and desperate
abandonment, that owed something to her peculiar
character, but more to her own solemn conviction that
she was dying—that her best hope of life was not worth
a week's purchase.

We had begun with books, and upon them her past
enthusiasm had hitherto been released. She loved her
favorite authors with a passion. They had relieved
her heart; and there was nothing of poetry or philosophy
that was deep or beautiful, in which she had not
steeped her very soul. How well I remember her repeating
to me from Shelley those glorious lines to the
soaring swan:—

There was a long room in the southern wing of the
house, fitted up as a library. It was a heavily-curtained,
dim old place, with deep-embayed windows, and so
many nooks, and so much furniture, that there was
that hushed air, that absence of echo within it, which
is the great charm of a haunt for study or thought.
It was Edith's kingdom. She might lock the door,
if she pleased, or shut or open the windows; in short,
when she was there, no one thought of disturbing her,
and she was like a “spirit in its cell,” invisible and
inviolate. And here I drank into my very life and
soul the outpourings of a bosom that had been locked
till (as we both thought) the last hour of its life—a
flow of mingled intellect and passion that overran my
heart like lava, sweeping everything into its resistless
fire, and (may God forgive her!) leaving it scorched
and desolate when its mocking brightness had gone
out.

I remember that “Elia”—Charles Lamb's Elia—
was the favorite of favorites among her books; and
partly that the late death of this most-to-be-loved author
reminded me to look it up, and partly to have
time to draw back my indifference over a subject that
it something stirs me to recall, you shall read an imitation
(or continuation, if you will) that I did for Edith's
eye, of his “Essay on Books and Reading.” I sat
with her dry and fleshless hand in mine while I read
it to her, and the fingers of Psyche were never fairer
to Canova than they to me.

“It is a little singular,” I began (looking into her
eyes as long as I could remember what I had written),
“that, among all the elegancies of sentiment for which
the age is remarkable, no one should ever have thought
of writing a book upon `Reading.' The refinements

the true epicure in books are surely as various as
those of the gastronome and the opium-eater; and I
can conceive of no reason why a topic of such natural
occurrence should have been so long neglected, unless
is that the taste itself, being rather a growth of indolence
has never numbered among its votaries one of
the busy craft of writers.

“The great proportion of men read, as they eat, for
hunger. I do not consider them readers. The true
secret of the thing is no more adapted to their comprehension
than the sublimations of Louis Eustache Ude
for the taste of a day-laborer. The refined reading-taste,
like the palate of gourmanderie, must have got
beyond appetite—gross appetite. It shall be that of a
man who, having fed through childhood and youth
on simple knowledge, values now only, as it were, the
apotheosis of learning—the spiritual nare. There are,
it is true, instances of a keen natural relish: a boy, as
you will sometimes find one, of a premature thoughtfulness,
will carry a favorite author in his bosom, and
feast greedily on it in his stolen hours. Elia tells the
exquisite story:—

“The pleasure as well as the profit of reading depends
as much upon time and manner, as upon the
book. The mind is an opal—changing its color with
every shifting shade. Ease of position is especially
necessary. A muscle strained, a nerve unpoised, an
admitted sunbeam caught upon a mirror, are slight
circumstances, but a feather may tickle the dreamer
from paradise to earth. `Many a froward axiom,'
says a refined writer, `many an inhumane thought
hath arisen from sitting uncomfortably, or from a want
of symmetry in your chamber.' Who has not felt, at
times, an unaccountable disrelish for a favorite author?
Who has not, by a sudden noise in the street, been
startled from a reading dream, and found, afterward,
that the broken spell was not to be rewound? An
ill-tied cravat may unlink the rich harmonies of Taylor.
You would not think Barry Cornwall the delicious
heart he is, reading him in a tottering chair.

“There is much in the mood with which you come
to a book. If you have been vexed out of doors, the
good humor of an author seems unnatural. I think
I should scarce relish the `gentle spiriting' of Ariel
with a pulse of ninety in the minute. Or if I had
been touched by the unkindness of a friend, Jack
Falstaff would not move me to laughter as easily as
he is wont. There are tones of the mind, however,
to which a book will vibrate with a harmony than
which there is nothing more exquisite in nature. To
go abroad at sunrise in June, and admit all the holy
influences of the hour—stillness, and purity, and
blam—to a mind subdued and dignified, as the mind
will be by the sacred tranquillity of sleep, and then to
come in with bathed and refreshed senses, and a temper
of as clear joyfulness as the soaring lark's and
sit down to Milton or Spenser, or, almost loftier still,
the divine `Prometheus' of Shelley, has seemed to
me a harmony of delight almost too heavenly to be
human. The great secret of such pleasure is sympathy.
You must climb to the eagle poet's eyry.
You must have senses, like his, for the music that is
only audible to the fine ear of thought, and the beauty
that is visible only to the spirit-eye of a clear, and for
the time, unpolluted fancy. The stamp and pressure
of the magician's own time and season must be upon
you. You would not read Ossian, for example, in a
bath, or sitting under a tree in a sultry noon; but
after rushing into the eye of the wind with a fleet
horse, with all his gallant pride and glorious strength
and fire obedient to your rein, and so mingling, as it
will, with his rider's consciousness, that you feel as
if you were gifted in your own body with the swiftness
and energy of an angel; after this, to sit down
to Ossian, is to read him with a magnificence of de
lusion, to my mind scarce less than reality. I never
envied Napoleon till I heard it was his habit, after a
battle, to read Ossian.

“You can not often read to music. But I love,
when the voluntary is pealing in church—every breath
in the congregation suppressed, and the deep-volumed
notes pouring through the arches of the roof with the
sublime and almost articulate praise of the organ—to
read, from the pew Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes.
The solemn stateliness of its periods is fitted to music
like a hymn. It is to me a spring of the most thrilling
devotion—though I shame to confess that the
richness of its eastern imagery, and, above all, the inimitable
beauty of its philosophy, stand out somewhat
definitely in the reminiscences of the hour.

“A taste for reading comes comparatively late.
`Robinson Crusoe' will turn a boy's head at ten.
The `Arabian Nights' are taken to bed with us at
twelve. At fourteen, a forward boy will read the
`Lady of the Lake,' `Tom Jones,' and `Peregrine
Pickle;' and at seventeen (not before) he is ready for
Shakspere, and, if he is of a thoughtful turn, Milton.
Most men do not read these last with a true relish till
after this period. The hidden beauties of standard
authors break upon the mind by surprise. It is like
discovering a secret spring in an old jewel. You take
up the book in an idle moment, as you have done a
thousand times before, perhaps wondering, as you
turn over the leaves, what the world finds in it to admire,
when suddenly, as you read, your fingers press
close upon the covers, your frame thrills, and the
passage you have chanced upon chains you like a
spell—it is so vividly true and beautiful. Milton's
`Comus' flashed upon me in this way. I never could
read the `Rape of the Lock' till a friend quoted some
passages from it during a walk. I know no more exquisite
sensation than this warming of the heart to an
old author; and it seems to me that the most delicious
portion of intellectual existence is the brief period in
which, one by one, the great minds of old are admitted
with all their time-mellowed worth to the affections.
With what delight I read, for the first time,
the `kind-hearted plays' of Beaumont and Fletcher!
How I doated on Burton! What treasures to me
were the `Fairy Queen' and the Lyrics of Milton!

“I used to think, when studying the Greek and
Latin poets in my boyhood, that to be made a school-author
was a fair offset against immortality. I would
as lief; it seemed to me, have my verses handed down
by the town-crier. But latterly, after an interval of a
few years, I have taken up my classics (the identical
school copies with the hard places all thummed and
pencilled) and have read them with no little pleasure.
It is not to be believed with what a satisfaction the
riper eye glides smoothly over the once difficult line,
finding the golden cadence of poetry beneath what
once seemed only a tangled chaos of inversion. The
associations of hard study, instead of reviving the old
distaste, added wonderfully to the interest of a re-perusal.
I could see now what brightened the sunken
eye of the pale and sickly master, as he took up the
hesitating passage, and read on, forgetful of the delinquent,
to the end. I could enjoy now, what was a
dead letter to me then, the heightened fulness of Herodotus,
and the strong-woven style of Thucydides,
and the magnificent invention of Eschylus. I look
an aversion to Homer from hearing a classmate in the
next room scan it perpetually through his nose.

There is no music for me in the `Iliad.' But, spite of
the recollections scored alike upon my palm and the
margin, I own to an Augustan relish for the smooth
melody of Virgil, and freely forgive the sometime
troublesome ferule—enjoying by its aid the raciness
of Horace and Juvenal, and the lofty philosophy of
Lucretius. It will be a dear friend to whom I put
down in my will that shelf of defaced classics.

“There are some books that bear reading pleasantly
once a year. `Tristram Shandy' is an annual with
me. I read him regularly about Christmas. Jeremy
Taylor (not to mingle things holy and profane) is a
good table-book, to be used when you would collect
your thoughts and be serious a while. A man of
taste need never want for Sunday reading while he
can find the sermons of Taylor, and South, and Fuller—writers
of good theological repute—though, between
ourselves, I think one likelier to be delighted
with the poetry and quaint fancifulness of their style,
than edified by the piety it covers. I like to have a
quarto edition of Sir Thomas Brown on a near shelf,
or Milton's prose works, or Bacon. These are healthful
moods of the mind when lighter nutriment is distasteful.

“I am growing fastidious in poetry, and confine
myself more and more to the old writers. Castaly of
late runs shallow. Shelley's (peace to his passionate
heart!) was a deep draught, and Wordsworth and
Wilson sit near the well, and Keats and Barry Cornwall
have been to the fountain's lip, feeding their
imaginations (the latter his heart as well), but they
have brought back little for the world. The `small
silver stream' will, I fear, soon cease to flow down to
us, and as it dries back to its source, we shall close
nearer and nearer upon the `pure English undefiled.'
The dabblers in muddy waters (tributaries to Lethe)
will have Parnassus to themselves.

“The finest pleasures of reading come unbidden.
You can not, with your choicest appliances for the
body, always command the many-toned mind. In the
twilight alcove of a library, with a time-mellowed
chair yielding luxuriously to your pressure, a June
wind laden with idleness and balm floating in at the
window, and in your hand some Russia-bound rambling
old author, as Izaak Walton, good-humored and
quaint, one would think the spirit could scarce fail to
be conjured. Yet often, after spending a morning
hour restlessly thus, I have risen with my mind unhinged,
and strolled off with a book in my pocket to
the woods; and, as I live, the mood has descended
upon me under some chance tree, with a crooked root
under my head, and I have lain there, reading and
sleeping by turns, till the letters were blurred in the
dimness of twilight. It is the evil of refinement that
it breeds caprice. You will sometimes stand unfatigued
for hours on the steps of a library; or in a
shop, the eye will be arrested, and all the jostling of
customers and the looks of the jealous shopman will
not divert you till you have read out the chapter.

“I do not often indulge in the supernatural, for I
am an unwilling believer in ghosts, and the topic excites
me. But, for its connexion with the subject
upon which I am writing, I must conclude these
rambling observations with a late mysterious visitation
of my own.

“I had, during the last year, given up the early
summer tea-parties common in the town in which the
university stands; and having, of course, three or
four more hours than usual on my hands, I took to an
afternoon habit of imaginative reading. Shakspere
came first, naturally; and I feasted for the hundredth
time upon what I think his (and the world's) most
delicate creation—the `Tempest.' The twilight of
the first day overtook me at the third act, where the
banquet is brought in with solemn music by the fairy
troop of Prospero, and set before the shipwrecked
king and his followers. I closed the book, and leaning
back in my chair, abandoned myself to the crowd
of images which throng always upon the traces of
Shakspere. The fancy music was still in my mind,
when an apparently real strain of the most solemn
melody came to my ear, dying, it seemed to me as it
reached it, the tones were so expiringly faint and low.
I was not startled, but lay quietly, holding my breath,
and more fearing when the strain would be broken,
than curious whence it came. The twilight deepened,
till it was dark, and it still played on, changing the
tune at intervals, but always of the same melancholy
sweetness; till, by-and-by, I lost all curiosity, and,
giving in to the charm, the scenes I had been reading
began to form again in my mind, and Ariel, with his
delicate ministers, and Prospero, and Miranda, and
Caliban, came moving before me to the measure, as
bright and vivid as the reality. I was disturbed in the
midst of it by Alfouse, who came in at the usual
hour with my tea; and, on starting to my feet, I listened
in vain for the continuance of the music. I sat
thinking of it a while, but dismissed it at last, and went
out to enjoy, in a solitary walk, the loveliness of the
summer night. The next day I resumed my book,
with a smile at my previous credulity, and had read
through the last scenes of the `Tempest,' when the
light failed me. I again closed the book, and presently
again, as if the sympathy was instantaneous, the
strain broke in, playing the same low and solemn melodies,
and falling with the same dying cadence upon
the ear. I listened to it, as before, with breathless attention;
abandoned myself once more to its irresistible
spell; and, half-waking, half-sleeping, fell again into
a vivid dream, brilliant as fairy-land, and creating itself
to the measures of the still audible music. I could
not now shake off my belief in its reality; but I was so
wrapt with its strange sweetness, and the beauty of my
dream, that I cared not whether it came from earth or
air. My indifference, singularly enough, continued
for several days; and, regularly at twilight, I threw
aside my book, and listened with dreamy wakefulness
for the music. It never failed me, and its results were
as constant as its coming. Whatever I had read—
sometimes a canto of Spenser, sometimes an act of a
play, or a chapter of romance—the scene rose before
me with the stately reality of a pageant. At last I
began to think of it more seriously; and it was a relief
to me one evening when Alfonse came in earlier than
usual with a message. I told him to stand perfectly
still; and after a minute's pause, during which I heard
distinctly an entire passage of a funeral hymn, I asked
him if he heard any music? He said he did not. My
blood chilled at his positive reply, and I bade him
listen once more. Still he heard nothing. I could
endure it no longer. It was to me as distinct and
audible as my own voice; and I rushed from my room
as he left me, shuddering to be left alone.

“The next day I thought of nothing but death.
Warnings by knells in the air, by apparitions, by mysterious
voices, were things I had believed in speculatively
for years, and now their truth came upon me
like conviction. I felt a dull, leaden presentiment
about my heart, growing heavier and heavier with
every passing hour. Evening came at last, and with
it, like a summons from the grave, a `dead march'
swelled clearly on the air. I felt faint and sick at
heart. This could not be fancy; and why was it, as
I thought I had proved, audible to my ear alone? I
threw open the window, and the first rush of the cool
north wind refreshed me; but, as if to mock my attempts
at relief, the dirge-like sounds rose, at the instant,
with treble distinctness. I seized my hat and
rushed into the street, but, to my dismay, every step
seemed to bring me nearer to the knell. Still I hurried
on, the dismal sounds growing distractingly louder,
till, on turning a corner that leads to the lovely

burying-ground of New Haven, I came suddenly upon
—a bell foundry! In the rear had lately been hung,
for trial, the chiming bells just completed for the new
Trinity church, and the master of the establishment
informed me that one of his journeymen was a fine
player, and every day after his work, he was in the
habit of amusing himself with the `Dead March in
Saul,' the `Marsellois Hymn,' and other melancholy
and easy tunes, muffling the hammers that he might
not disturb the neighbors.”

I have had my reward for these speculations, dear
reader—a smile that is lying at this instant, perdu, in
the innermost recess of memory—and I care not much
(without) offence) whether you like it or no. She
thanked me—she thought it well done—she laid her
head on my bosom while I read it in the old library of
the Flemings, and every word has been “paid for in
fairy gold.”

I have taken up a thread that lengthens as I unravel
it, and I can not well see how I shall come to the
end, without trespassing on your patience. We will
cut it here, if you like, and resume it after a pause;
but before I close, I must give you a little instance of
how love makes the dullest earth poetical. Edith
had given me a portefeuille crammed with all kinds of
embossed and curious note-paper, all quite too pretty
for use, and what I would show you are my verses
on the occasion. For a hand unpractised, then, in
aught save the “Gradus ad Parnassum,” I must own
I have fished them out of that same old portefeuille
(faded now from its glory, and worn with travel—but
O how cherished!) with a pleasant feeling of paternity:

2. PART II.
LOVE AND SPECULATION.

Edith Linsey was religious. There are many
intensifiers (a new word, that I can't get on without:
I submit it for admission into the language);—there
are many intensifiers, I say, to the passion of love:
such as pride, jealousy, poetry (money, sometimes,
Dio mio!) and idleness:[1] but, if the experience of
one who first studied the Art of Love in an “evangelical”
country is worth a para, there is nothing
within the bend of the rainbow that deepens the tender
passion like religion. I speak it not irreverently.
The human being that loves us throws the value of
its existence into the crucible, and it can do no more.
Love's best alchymy can only turn into affection what
is in the heart. The vain, the proud, the poetical,
the selfish, the weak, can and do fling their vanity,
pride, poetry, selfishness, and weakness, into a first
passion; but these are earthly elements, and there is
an antagonism in their natures that is for ever striving
to resolve them back to their original earth. But
religion is of the soul as well as the heart—the mind
as well as the affections—and when it mingles in love,
it is the infusion of an immortal essence into an unworthy
and else perishable mixture.

Edith's religion was equally without cant, and
without hesitation or disguise. She had arrived
at it by elevation of mind, aided by the habit of never
counting on her tenure of life beyond the setting of
the next sun, and with her it was rather an intellectual
exaltation than an humility of heart. She thought
of God because the subject was illimitable, and her
powerful imagination found in it the scope for which
she pined. She talked of goodness, and purity, and
disinterestedness, because she found them easy virtues
with a frame worn down with disease, and she was
removed by the sheltered position of an invalid from
the collision which tries so shrewdly in common life
the ring of our metal. She prayed, because the fulness
of her heart was loosed by her eloquence when
on her knees, and she found that an indistinct and
mystic unburthening of her bosom, even to the Deity,
was a hush and a relief. The heart does not always
require rhyme and reason of language and tears.

There are many persons of religious feeling who,
from a fear of ridicule or misconception, conduct themselves
as if to express a devout sentiment was a want
of taste or good-breeding. Edith was not of these.
Religion was to her a powerful enthusiasm, applied
without exception to every pursuit and affection. She
used it as a painter ventures on a daring color, or a
musician a new string in his instrument. She felt
that she aggrandized botany, or history, or friendship,
or love, or what you will, by making it a stepping-stone
to heaven, and she made as little mystery of it as
she did of breathing and sleep, and talked of subjects
which the serious usually enter upon with a suppressed
breath, as she would comment upon a poem or
define a new philosophy. It was surprising what an
impressiveness this threw over her in everything;
how elevated she seemed above the best of those
about her; and with what a worshipping and half-reverent
admiration she inspired all whom she did not
utterly neglect or despise. For myself, my soul was
drank up in hers as the lark is taken into the sky, and
I forgot there was a world beneath me in my intoxication.
I thought her an angel unrecognised on earth.
I believed her as pure from worldliness, and as spotless
from sin, as a cherub with his breast upon his
lute; and I knelt by her when she prayed; and held
her upon my bosom in her fits of faintness and exhaustion,
and sat at her feet with my face in her hands
listening to her wild speculations (often till the morning
brightened behind the curtains) with an utter and
irresistible abandonment of my existence to hers,
which seems to me now like a recollection of another
life—it were, with this conscious body and mind, a
self-relinquishment so impossible!

Our life was a singular one. Living in the midst

of a numerous household, with kind and cultivated
people about us, we were as separated from them as if
the ring of Gyges encircled us from their sight. Fred
wished me joy of my giraffe, as he offensively called
his cousin, and his sisters, who were quite too pretty to
have been left out of my story so long, were more indulgent,
I thought, to the indigenous beaux of Skaneateles
than those aboriginal specimens had a right to
expect; but I had no eyes, ears, sense, or civility for
anything but Edith. The library became a forbidden
spot to all feet but ours; we met at noon after our late
vigils and breakfasted together; a light sleigh was set
apart for our tête-à-tête drives over the frozen lake, and the world seemed to me to revolve on its axle
with a special reference to Philip Slingsby's happiness.
I wonder whether an angel out of heaven would have
made me believe that I should ever write the story of
those passionate hours with a smile and a sneer! I
tell thee, Edith! (for thou wilt read every line that I
have written, and feel it, as far as thou canst feel anything),
that I have read “Faust” since, and thought
thee Mephistopheles! I have looked on thee since,
with thy cheek rosy dark, thy lip filled with the blood
of health, and curled with thy contempt of the world
and thy yet wild ambition to be its master-spirit and
idol, and struck my breast with instinctive self-questioning
if thou hadst given back my soul that was
thine own! I fear thee, Edith. Thou hast grown
beautiful that wert so hideous—the wonder-wrought
miracle of health and intellect, filling thy veins, and
breathing almost a newer shape over form and feature;
but it is not thy beauty; no, nor thy enthronement
in the admiration of thy woman's world. These are
little to me; for I saw thy loveliness from the first,
and I worshipped thee more in the duration of a
thought than a hecatomb of these worldlings in their
lifetime. I fear thy mysterious and unaccountable
power over the human soul! I can scorn thee here,
in another land, with an ocean weltering between us,
and anatomize the character that I alone have read
truly and too well, for the instruction of the world (its
amusement, too, proud woman—thou wilt writhe at
that)—but I confess to a natural and irresistible obedience
to the mastery of thy spirit over mine. I would
not willingly again touch the radius of thy sphere. I
would come out of Paradise to walk alone with the
devil as soon.

How little even the most instructed women knew
the secret of this power! They make the mistake of
cultivating only their own minds. They think that,
by self-elevation, they will climb up to the intellects
of men, and win them by seeming their equals. Shallow
philosophers! You never remember that to subdue
a human being to your will, it is more necessary
to know his mind than you own—that, in conquering
a heart vanity is the first out-post—that while your are
employing your wits in thinking how most effectually
to dazzle him, you should be sounding his character
for its undeveloped powers to assist him to dazzle you
—that love is a reflected light, and to be pleased with
others we must be first pleased with ourselves!

Edith (it has occurred to me in my speculations
since) seemed to me always an echo of myself. She
expressed my thought as it sprang into my brain. I
thought that in her I had met my double and counterpart,
with the reservation that I was a little the
stronger spirit, and that in my mind lay the material
of the eloquence that flowed from her lips—as the almond
that you endeavor to split equally leaves the
kernel in the deeper cavity of its shell. Whatever
the topic, she seemed using my thoughts, anticipating
my reflections, and, with an unobtrusive but thrilling
flattery, referring me to myself for the truth of what
I must know was but a suggestion of my own! O!
Lucrezia Borgia! if Machiavelli had but practised that
subtle cunning upon thee, thou wouldst have had lit
tle space in thy delirious heart for the passion that, in
the history of crime, has made thee the marvel and
the monster.

The charm of Edith to most people was that she
was no sublimation. Her mind seemed of any or no
stature. She was as natural, and earnest, and as satisfied
to converse, on the meanest subject as on the
highest. She overpowered nobody. She (apparently)
eclipsed nobody. Her passionate and powerful eloquence
was only lavished on the passionate and powerful.
She never misapplied herself: and what a
secret of influence and superiority is contained in that
single phrase! We so hate, him who out-measures
us, as we stand side by side before the world!

I have in my portfolio several numbers of a manuscript
“Gazette,” with which the Flemings amused
themselves during the deep snows of the winter in
which I visited them. It was contributed to by everybody
in the house, and read aloud at the breakfast
table on the day of its weekly appearance, and, quite
apropos to these remarks upon the universality of
Edith's mind, there is in one of them an essay of hers
on what she calls minute philosophies. It is curious
as showing how, with all her loftiness of speculation
she descended sometimes to the examination of the
smallest machinery of enjoyment.

“The principal sources of everyday happiness,” (I
am copying out a part of the essay, dear reader), “are
too obvious to need a place in a chapter of breakfast-table
philosophy. Occupation and a clear conscience,
the very truant in the fields will tell you, are craving
necessities. But when these are secured, there are
lighter matters, which, to the sensitive and educated
at least, are to happiness what foliage is to the tree
They are refinements which add to the beauty of life
without diminishing its strength; and, as they spring
only from a better use of our common gifts, they are
neither costly nor rare. I have learned secrets under
the roof of a poor man, which would add to the luxury
of the rich. The blessings of a cheerful fancy
and a quick eye come from nature, and the trailing of
a vine may develop them as well as the curtaining of
a king's chamber.

“Riding and driving are such stimulating pleasures,
that to talk of any management in their indulgence
seems superfluous. Yet we are, in motion or at rest,
equally liable to the caprices of feeling, and, perhaps,
the gayer the mood the deeper the shade cast on it by
untoward circumstances. The time of riding should
never be regular. It then becomes a habit, and habits,
though sometimes comfortable, never amount to
positive pleasure. I would ride when nature prompted—when
the shower was past, or the air balmy, or
the sky beautiful—whenever and wherever the significant
finger of Desire pointed. Oh! to leap into
the saddle when the west wind blows freshly, and gallop
off into its very eye, with an undrawn rein, careless
how far or whither; or, to spring up from a book
when the sun breaks through after a storm, and drive
away under the white clouds, through light and shadow,
while the trees are wet and the earth damp and
spicy; or, in the clear sunny afternoons of autumn,
with a pleasant companion on the seat beside you, and
the glorious splendor of the decaying foliage flushing
in the sunshine, to loiter up the valley dreaming over
the thousand airy castles that are stirred by such
shifting beauty—these are pleasures indeed, and such
as he who rides regularly after his dinner knows as
little of as the dray-horse of the exultation of the
courser.

“There is a great deal in the choice of a companion.
If he is an indifferent acquaintance, or an indiscriminate
talker, or has a coarse eye for beauty, or is
insensible to the delicacies of sensation or thought—
if he is sensual, or stupid, or practical constitutionally
—he will never do. He must be a man who can detect

a rare color in a leaf, or appreciate a peculiar
passage in scenery, or admire a grand outline in a
cloud: he must have accurate and fine senses, and a
heart, noble at least by nature, and subject still to her
direct influences; he must be a lover of the beautiful
in whatever shape it comes; and, above all, he must
have read and thought like a scholar, if not like a
poet. He will then ride by your side without crossing
your humor; if talkative, he will talk well, and if
silent, you are content, for you know that the same
grandeur or beauty which has wrought the silence, in
your own thoughts has given a color to his.

“There is much in the manner of driving. I like
a capricious rein—now fast through a hollow, and
now loiteringly on the edge of a road or by the bank
of a never. There is a singular delight in quickening
your speed in the animation of a climax, and in
coming down gently to a walk with a digression of
feeling, or a sudden sadness.

“An important item in household matters is the
management of light. A small room well-lighted is
much more imposing than a large one lighted ill.
Cross lights are painful to the eye, and they destroy
besides the cool and picturesque shadows of the furniture
and figures. I would have a room always partially
darkened: there is a repose in the twilight dimness
of a drawing-room which affects one with the
proper gentleness of the place: the out-of-door humor
of men is too rude, and the secluded light subdaes
them fitly as they enter. I like curtains—heavy,
and of the richest material: there is a magnificence
in large crimson folds which nothing else equals, and
the color gives everything a beautiful teint as the light
streams through them. Plants tastefully arranged are
pretty; flowers are always beautiful. I would have my
own room like a painter's—one curtain partly drawn;
a double shadow has a nervous look. The effect of a
proper disposal of light upon the feelings is by most
people surprisingly neglected. I have no doubt that
as an habitual thing it materially affects the character;
the disposition for study and thought is certainly dependant
on it in no slight degree. What is more
contemplative than the twilight of a deep alcove in a
library? What more awakens thought than the dim
interior of an old church with its massive and shadowy
pillars?

“There may be the most exquisite luxury in furnimre.
A crowded room has a look of comfort, and
suspended lamps throw a mellow depth into the features.
Descending light is always the most becoming;
it deepens the eye, and distributes the shadows in the
face indiciously. Chairs should be of different and
curious fashions, made to humor every possible weariness.
A spice-lamp should burn in the corner, and
the pictures should be colored of a pleasant tone, and
the subjects should be subdued and dreamy. It should
be a place you would live in for a century without an
uncomfortable thought. I hate a neat room. A dozen
of the finest old authors should lie about, and a new
novel, and the last new prints. I rather like the French
fashion of a bonbonniere, though that perhaps is an extravagance.

“There is a management of one's own familiar intercourse
which is more neglected, and at the same
time more important to happiness, than every other;
it is particularly a pity that this is not oftener understood
by newly-married people; as far as my own
observation goes, I have rarely failed to detect, far too
early, signs of ill-disguised and disappointed weariness.
It was not the reaction of excitement—not the return
to the quiet ways of home—but a new manner—a forgetful
indifference, believing itself concealed, and yet
betraying itself continually by unconscious and irrepressible
symptoms. I believe it resulted oftenest
from the same causes: partly that they saw each
other too much, and partly that when the form of eti
quette was removed, they forgot to retain its invaluable
essence—an assiduous and minute disinterestedness.
It seems nonsense to lovers, but absence is the
secret of respect, and therefore of affection. Love is
divine, but its flame is too delicate for a perpetual
household lamp; it should be burned only for incense,
and even then trimmed skilfully. It is wonderful how
a slight neglect, or a glimpse of a weakness, or a chance
defect of knowledge, dims its new glory. Lovers, married
or single, should have separate pursuits—they
should meet to respect each other for new and distinct
acquisitions. It is the weakness of human affections
that they are founded on pride, and waste with over-much
familiarity. And oh, the delight to meet after
hours of absence—to sit down by the evening lamp,
and with a mind unexhausted by the intercourse of
the day, to yield to the fascinating freedom of conversation,
and clothe the rising thoughts of affection in
fresh and unhackneyed language! How richly the
treasures of the mind are colored—not doled out,
counter by counter, as the visible machinery of thought
coins them, but heaped upon the mutual altar in lavish
and unhesitating profusion! And how a bold fancy assumes
beauty and power—not traced up through all its
petty springs till its dignity is lost by association, but
flashing full-grown and suddenly on the sense! The
gifts of no one mind are equal to the constant draught
of a lifetime; and even if they were, there is no one
taste which could always relish them. It is an humiliating
thought that immortal mind must be husbanded
like material treasure!

“There is a remark of Godwin, which, in rather
too strong language, contains a valuable truth: `A
judicious and limited voluptuousness,' he says, `is necessary
to the cultivation of the mind, to the polishing
of the manners, to the refinement of the sentiment,
and to the development of the understanding; and a
woman deficient in this respect may be of use in the
government of our families, but can not add to the
enjoyment, nor fix the partiality of a man of taste!'
Since the days when `St. Leon' was written, the word
by which the author expressed his meaning is grown
perhaps into disrepute, but the remark is still one of
keen and observant discrimination. It refers (at least
so I take it) to that susceptibility to delicate attentions,
that fine sense of the nameless and exquisite tenderness
of manner and thought, which constitute in
the minds of its possessors the deepest undercurrent
of life—the felt and treasured, but unseen and inexpressible
richness of affection. It is rarely found in
the characters of men, but it outweighs, when it is, all
grosser qualities—for its possession implies a generous
nature, purity, fine affections, and a heart open to all
the sunshine and meaning of the universe. It belongs
more to the nature of woman; but indispensable as it
is to her character, it is oftener than anything else,
wanting. And without it, what is she? What is love
to a being of such dull sense that she hears only its
common and audible language, and sees nothing but
what it brings to her feet to be eaten, and worn, and
looked upon? What is woman, if the impassioned
language of the eye, or the deepened fulness of the
tone, or the tenderness of a slight attention, are things
unnoticed and of no value?—one who answers you
when you speak, smiles when you tell her she is grave,
assents barely to the expression of your enthusiasm,
but has no dream beyond—no suspicion that she has
not felt and reciprocated your feelings as fully as you
could expect or desire? It is a matter too little looked
to. Sensitive and ardent men too often marry with
a blindfold admiration of mere goodness or loveliness.
The abandon of matrimony soon dissipates the gay
dream, and they find themselves suddenly unsphered,
linked indissolubly with affections strangely different
from their own, and lavishing their only treasure on
those who can neither appreciate nor return it. The

after-life of such men is a stifling solitude of feeling.
Their avenues of enjoyment are their maniform sympathies,
and when these are shut up or neglected, the
heart is dark, and they have nothing to do thenceforward
but to forget:

“There are many, who, possessed of the capacity
for the more elevated affections, waste and lose it by
a carcless and often unconscious neglect. It is not a
plant to grow untended. The breath of indifference,
or a rude touch, may destroy for ever its delicate texture.
To drop the figure, there is a daily attention to
the slight courtesies of life, and an artifice in detecting
the passing shadows of feeling, which alone can preserve,
through life, the first freshness of passion. The
easy surprises of pleasure, and earnest cheerfulness of
assent to slight wishes, the habitual respect to opinions,
the polite abstinence from personal topics in the
company of others, the assiduous and unwavering attention
to her comfort, at home and abroad, and, above
all, the absolute preservation in private of those proprieties
of conversation and manner which are sacred
before the world—are some of the thousand secrets of
that rare happiness which age and habit alike fail to
impair or diminish.”

2. II.

Vacation was over, but Fred and myself were still
lingering at Fleming Farm. The roads were impassable
with a premature THAW. Perhaps there is nothing
so peculiar in American meteorology as the phenomenon
which I alone probably, of all the imprisoned
inhabitants of Skaneateles, attributed to a kind and
“special Providence.” Summer had come back, like
Napoleon from Elba, and astonished usurping winter
in the plenitude of apparent possession and security.
No cloud foreboded the change, as no alarm preceded
the apparition of “the child of destiny.” We awoke
on a February morning, with the snow lying chin-deep
on the earth, and it was June! The air was soft
and warm—the sky was clear, and of the milky cerulean
of chrysoprase—the south wind (the same, save
his unperfumed wings, who had crept off like a satiated
lover in October) stole back suddenly from the
tropics, and found his flowery mistress asleep and insensible
to his kisses beneath her snowy mantle. The
sunset warmed back from its wintry purple to the
golden teints of heat, the stars burned with a less
vitreous sparkle, the meteors slid once more lambently
down the sky, and the house-dove sat on the eaves,
washing her breast in the snow-water, and thinking
(like a neglected wife at a capricious return of her
truant's tenderness) that the sunshine would last for
ever!

The air was now full of music. The water trickled
away under the snow, and, as you looked around and
saw no change or motion in the white carpet of the
earth, it seemed as if a myriad of small bells were ringing
under ground—fairies, perhaps, startled in mid-revel
with the false alarm of summer, and hurrying
about with their silver anklets, to wake up the slumbering
flowers. The mountain-torrents were loosed,
and rushed down upon the valleys like the Children
of the Mist; and the hoarse war-cry, swelling and falling
upon the wind, maintained its perpetual undertone
like an accompaniment of bassoons; and occasionally,
in a sudden lull of the breeze, you would hear the
click of the undermined snow-drifts dropping upon the
earth, as if the chorister of spring were beating time
to the reviving anthem of nature.

The snow sunk perhaps a foot in a day, but it was
only perceptible to the eye where you could measure
its wet mark against a tree from which it had fallen
away, or by the rock, from which the dissolving bank
shrunk and separated, as if rocks and snow were as
heartless as overselves and threw off their friends, too,
in their extremity! The low-lying lake, meantime,
surrounded by melting mountains, received the abandoned
waters upon its frozen bosom, and, spreading
them into a placid and shallow lagoon, separate by a
crystal plane from its own lower depths, gave them the
repose denied in the more elevated sphere in which
lay their birthright. And thus—(oh, how full is nature
of these gentle moralities!)—and thus sometimes
do the lowly, whose bosom, like the frozen lake, is at
first cold and unsympathetic to the rich and noble,
still receive them in adversity, and, when neighborhood
and dependence have convinced them that they
are made of the same common element, as the lake
melts its dividing and icy plane, and mingles the strange
waters with its own, do they dissolve the unnatural barrier
of prejudice, and take the humbled wanderer to
their bosom!

The face of the snow lost its dazzling whiteness as
the thaw went on—as disease steals away the beauty
of those we love—but it was only in the distance,
where the sun threw a shadow into the irregular pits
of the dissolving surface. Near to the eye (as the
dying one pressed to the bosom), it was still of its
original beauty, unchanged and spotless. And now
you are tired of my loitering speculations, gentle reader,
and we will return (please Heaven, only on paper!)
to Edith Linsey.

The roads were at last reduced to what is expressively
called, in New England, slosh (in New York,
posh, but equally descriptive), and Fred received a
hint from the judge that the mail had arrived in the
usual time, and his bcaux jours were at an end.

A slighter thing than my departure would have been
sufficient to stagger the tottering spirits of Edith. We
were sitting at table when the letters came in, and the
dates were announced that proved the opening of the
roads; and I scarce dared to turn my eyes upon the
pale face that I could just see had dropped upon her
bosom. The next instant there was a general confusion,
and she was carried lifeless to her chamber.

A note, scarce legible, was put into my hand in the
course of the evening, requesting me to sit up for her
in the library. She would come to me, she said, if
she had strength.

It was a night of extraordinary beauty. The full
moon was high in the heavens at midnight, and there
had been a slight shower soon after sunset, which,
with the clearing-up wind, had frozen thinly into a
most fragile rime, and glazed everything open to the
sky with transparent crystal. The distant forest looked
serried with metallic trees, dazzlingly and unspeakably
gorgeous; and, as the night-wind stirred through them
and shook their crystal points in the moonlight—the
aggregated stars of heaven springing from their Maker's
hand to the spheres of their destiny, or the
march of the host of the archangel Michael with their
irradiate spear-points glittering in the air, or the diamond
beds of central earth thrust up to the sun in
some throe of the universe—would, each or all, have
been well bodied forth by such similitude.

It was an hour after midnight when Edith was supported
in by her maid, and, choosing her own position,
sunk into the broad window-seat, and lay with her head
on my bosom, and her face turned outward to the glittering
night. Her eyes had become, I thought, unnaturally
bright, and she spoke with an exhausted
faintness that gradually strengthened to a tone of the
most thrilling and melodious sweetness. I shall never
get that music out of my brain!

“Philip!” she said.

“I listen, dear Edith!”

“I am dying.”

And she looked it, and I believed her; and my heart
sunk to its deepest abyss of wretchedness with the
conviction.

She went on to talk of death. It was the subject

that pressed most upon her mind, and she could
scarce fail to be eloquent on any subject. She was
very eloquent on this. I was so impressed with the
manner in which she seemed almost to rhapsodize
between the periods of her faintness, as she lay in
my arms that night, that every word she uttered is
still fresh in my memory. She seemed to forget my
presence, and to commune with her own thoughts
aloud.

“I recollect,” she said, “when I was strong and
well (years ago, dear Philip!), I left my books on a
morning in May, and looking up to find the course of
the wind, started off alone for a walk into its very eye.
A moist steady breeze came from the southwest, driving
before it fragments of the dispersed clouds. The
air was elastic and clear—a freshness that entered freely
at every pore was coming up, mingled with the profuse
perfume of grass and flowers—the colors of the
new, tender foliage were particularly soothing to an
eye pained with close attention—and the just perceptible
murmur of the drops shaken from the trees, and
the peculiarly soft rustle of the wet leaves, made as
much music as an ear accustomed to the silence of
solitude could well relish. Altogether, it was one of
those rarely-tempered days when every sense is satisfied,
and the mind is content to lie still with its common
thoughts, and simply enjoy.

“I had proceeded perhaps a mile—my forehead
held up to the wind, my hair blowing back, and the
blood glowing in my cheeks with the most vivid flush
of exercise and health—when I saw coming toward
me a man apparently in middle life, but wasted by illness
to the extremest emaciation. His lip was colorless,
his skin dry and white, and his sunken eyes had
that expression of inquiring earnestness which comes
always with impatient sickness. He raised his head,
and looked steadily at me as I came on. My lips were
open, and my whole air must have been that of a person
in the most exulting enjoyment of health. I was
just against him, gliding past with an elastic step,
when, with his eye still fixed on me, he half turned,
and in a voice of inexpressible meaning, exclaimed,
`Merciful Heaven! how well she is!' I passed on,
with his voice still ringing in my ear. It haunted me
like a tone in the air. It was repeated in the echo of
my tread—in the panting of my heart. I felt it in the
neating of the strong pulse in my temples. As if it
was strange that I should be so well! I had never
before realized that it could be otherwise. It seemed
impossible to me that my strong limbs should fail me,
or the pure blood I felt bounding so bravely through
my veins could be reached and tainted by disease.
How should it come? If I ate, would it not nourish
me? If I slept, would it not refresh me? If I came
out in the cool, free air, would not my lungs heave,
and my muscles spring, and my face feel its grateful
freshness? I held out my arm, for the first time in my
life, with a doubt of its strength. I closed my hand
life, with a fear it would not obey. I drew
a deep breath, to feel if it was difficult to breathe; and
even my bounding step, that was as elastic then as a
fawn's, seemed to my excited imagination already to
have become decrepit and feeble.

“I walked on, and thought of death. I had never
before done so definitely; it was like a terrible shape
that had always pursued me dimly, but which I had
never before turned and looked steadily on. Strange!
that we can live so constantly with that threatening
hand hung over us, and not think of it always! Strange!
that we can use a limb, or enter with interest into any
pursuit of time, when we know that our continued
life is almost a daily miracle!

“How difficult it is to realize death! How difficult
it is to believe that the hand with whose every vein
you are familiar, will ever lose its motion and its
warmth? That the quick eye, which is so restless
now, will settle and grow dull? That the refined lip,
which now shrinks so sensitively from defilement, will
not feel the earth lying upon it, and the tooth of the
feeding worm? That the free breath will be choked,
and the forehead be pressed heavily on by the decaying
coffin, and the light and air of heaven be shut quite
out; and this very body, warm, and breathing, and
active as it is now, will not feel uneasiness or pain?
I could not help looking at my frame as these thoughts
crowded on me; and I confess I almost doubted my
own convictions—there was so much strength and
quickness in it—my hand opened so freely, and my
nostrils expanded with such a satisfied thirst to the
moist air. Ah! it is hard to believe at first that we
must die! harder still to believe and realize the repulsive
circumstances that follow that terrible change!
It is a bitter thought at the lightest. There is little
comfort in knowing that the soul will not be there—
that the sense and the mind that feel and measure suffering,
will be gone. The separation is too great a
mystery to satisfy fear. It is the body that we know.
It is this material frame in which the affections have
grown up. The spirit is a mere thought—a presence
that we are told of, but do not see. Philosophize as
we will, the idea of existence is connected indissolubly
with the visible body, and its pleasant and familiar
senses. We talk of, and believe, the soul's ascent to
its Maker; but it is not ourselves—it is not our own
conscious breathing identity that we send up in imagination
through the invisible air. It is some phantom
that is to issue forth mysteriously, and leave us gazing
on it in wonder. We do not understand, we can not
realize it.

“At the time I speak of, my health had been always
unbroken. Since then, I have known disease in many
forms, and have had, of course, more time and occasion
for the contemplation of death. I have never,
till late, known resignation. With my utmost energy
I was merely able, in other days, to look upon it with
quiet despair; as a terrible, unavoidable evil. I remember
once, after severe suffering for weeks, I overheard
the physician telling my mother that I must
die, and from that moment the thought never left me.
A thin line of light came in between the shutters of
the south window; and, with this one thought fastened
on my mind, like the vulture of Prometheus, I lay
and watched it, day after day, as it passed with its
imperceptible progress over the folds of my curtains.
The last faint gleam of sunset never faded from its
damask edge, without an inexpressible sinking of my
heart, and a belief that I should see its pleasant light
no more. I turned from the window when even imagination
could find the daylight no longer there, and
felt my pulse and lifted my head to try my remaining
strength. And then every object, yes, even the meanest,
grew unutterably dear to me; my pillow, and the
cup with which my lips were moistened, and the cooling
amber which I had held in my hand, and pressed
to my burning lips when the fever was on me—everything
that was connected with life, and that would remain
among the living when I was gone.

“It is strange, but with all this clinging to the world
my affection for the living decreased sensibly. I grew
selfish in my weakness. I could not bear that they
should go from my chamber into the fresh air, and
have no fear of sickness and no pain. It seemed unfeeling
that they did not stay and breathe the close
atmosphere of my room—at least till I was dead.—
How could they walk round so carelessly, and look
on a fellow-creature dying helplessly and unwillingly,
and never shed a tear! And then the passing courtesies
exchanged with the family at the door, and the
quickened step on the sidewalk, and the wandering looks
about my room, even while I was answering with my
difficult breath their cold inquiries! There was an inhuman
caerlessness in all this that stung me to the soul.

“I craved sympathy as I did life; and yet I doubted
it all. There was not a word spoken by the friends
who were admitted to see me, that I did not ponder
over when they were gone, and always with an impatient
dissatisfaction. The tone, and the manner,
and the expression of face, all seemed forced; and
often, in my earlier sickness, when I had pondered for
hours on the expressed sympathy of some one I had
loved, the sense of utter helplessness which crowded
on me with my conviction of their insincerity, quite
overcame me. I have lain night after night, and
looked at my indifferent watchers: and oh how I
hated them for their-careless ease, and their snatched
moments of repose! I could scarce keep from dashing
aside the cup they came to give me so sluggishly.

“It is singular that, with all our experience of sickness,
we do not attend more to these slight circumstances.
It can scarce be conceived how an ill-managed
light, or a suppressed whispering, or a careless
change of attitude, in the presence of one whose senses
are so sharpened, and whose mind is so sensitive as a
sick person's, irritate and annoy. And, perhaps, more
than these to bear, is the affectedly subdued tone of
condolence. I remember nothing which I endured so
impatiently.

“Annoyances like these, however, scarcely diverted
for a moment the one great thought of death. It became
at last familiar, but, if possible, more dreadfully
horrible from that very fact. It was giving it a new
character. I realized it more, The minute circumstances
became nearer and more real—I tried the position
in which I should lie in my coffin—I lay with
my arms to my side, and my feet together, and with
the cold sweat standing in large drops on my lip, composed
my features into a forced expression of tranquillity.

“I awoke on the second morning after the hope of
my recovery had been abandoned. There was a narrow
sunbeam lying in a clear crimson line across the
curtain, and I lay and watched the specks of lint sailing
through it, like silver-winged insects, and the thin
dust, quivering and disappearing on its definite limit,
in a dream of wonder. I had thought not to see
another sun, and my mind was still fresh with the expectation
of an immediate change; I could not believe
that I was alive. The dizzy throb in my temples was
done; my limbs felt cool and refreshed; my mind had
that feeling of transparency which is common after
healthful and sweet sleep; and an indefinite sensation
of pleasure trembled in every nerve. I thought that
this might be death, and that, with this exquisite feeling
of repose, I was to linger thus consciously with
the body till the last day; and I dwelt on it pleasantly
with my delicious freedom from pain. I felt no regret
for life—none for a friend even: I was willing—quite
willing—to lie thus for ages. Presently the physician
entered; he came and laid his fingers on my pulse,
and his face brightened. `You will get well,' he said,
and I heard it almost without emotion. Gradually,
however, the love of life returned; and as I realized it
fully, and all the thousand chords which bound me to
it vibrated once more, the tears came thickly to my eyes,
and a crowd of delightful thoughts pressed cheerfully
and glowingly on me. No language can do justice
to the pleasure of convalescence from extreme sickness.
The first step upon the living grass—the first
breath of free air—the first unsuppressed salutation of
a friend—my fainting heart, dear Philip, rallies and
quickens even now with the recollection.”

I have thrown into a continuous strain what was
murmured to me between pauses of faintness, and with
difficulty of breath that seemed overpowered only by
the mastery of the eloquent spirit apparently trembling
on its departure. I believed Edith Linsey would die
that night; I believed myself listening to words spoken
almost from heaven; and if I have wearied you, dear
reader, with what must be more interesting to me than
to you, it is because every syllable was burnt like
enamel into my soul, in my boundless reverence and
love.

It was two o'clock, and she still lay breathing painfully
in my arms. I had thrown up the window, and
the soft south wind, stirring gently among the tinkling
icicles of the trees, came in, warm and genial, and she
leaned over to inhale it, as if it came from the source
of life. The stars burned gloriously in the heavens;
and, in a respite of her pain, she lay back her head,
and gazed up at them with an inarticulate motion of
her lips, and eyes so unnaturally kindled, that I thought
reason had abandoned her.

“How beautiful are the stars to night, Edith!” I
said, with half a fear that she would answer me in
madness.

“Yes,” she said, putting my hand (that pressed her
closer, involuntary, to my bosom) first to her lips—
“Yes; and, beautiful as they are, they are all accurately
numbered and governed, and just as they burn
now have they burned since the creation, never `faint
in their watches,' and never absent from their place.
How glorious they are! How thrilling it is to see them
stand with such a constant silence in the sky, unsteadied
and unsupported, obeying the great law of
their Maker! What pure and silvery light it is! How
steadily it pours from those small fountains, giving
every spot of earth its due portion! The hovel and
the palace are shone upon equally, and the shepherd
gets as broad a beam as the king, and these few rays
that are now streaming into my feverish eyes were
meant and lavished only for me! I have often
thought—has it never occurred to you, dear Philip?—
how ungrateful we are to call ourselves poor, when
there is so much that no poverty can take away!
Clusters of silver rays from every star in these heavens
are mine. Every breeze that breaks on my forehead
was sent for my refreshment. Every tinkle and ray
from those stirring and glistening icicles, and the invigorating
freshness of this unseasonable and delicious
wind, and moonlight, and sunshine, and the glory of
the planets, are all gifts that poverty could not take
away! It is not often that I forget these treasures; for
I have loved nature, and the skies of night and day, in
all their changes, from my childhood, and they have
been unspeakably dear to me; for in them I see the
evidence of an Almighty Maker, and in the excessive
beauty of the stars and the unfading and equal splendor
of their steadfast fires, I see glimpses of an immortal
life, and find an answer to the eternal questioning
within me!

“Three! The village clock reaches us to night.
Nay, the wind can not harm me now. Turn me more
to the window, for I would look nearer upon the stars:
it is the last time—I am sure of it—the very last! Yet
to-morrow night those stars will all be there—not one
missing from the sky, nor shining one ray the less because
I am dead! It is strange that this thought
should be so bitter—strange that the companionship
should be so close between our earthly affections and
those spititual worlds—and stranger yet, that, satisfied
as we must be that we shall know them nearer
and better when released from our flesh, we still cling
so fondly to our earthly and imperfect vision. I feel,
Philip, that I shall traverse hereafter every star in those
bright heavens. If the course of that career of knowledge,
which I believe in my soul it will be the reward
of the blessed to run, be determined in any degree by
the strong desires that yearn so sickeningly within us,
I see the thousand gates of my future heaven shining
at this instant above me. There they are! the clustering
Pleiades, with `their sweet influences;' and
the morning star, melting into the east with its transcendent
lambency and whiteness; and the broad galaxy,
with its myriads of bright spheres, dissolving into

each other's light, and belting the heavens like a girdle.
I shall see them all! I shall know them and
their inhabitants as the angels of God know them;
the mystery of their order, and the secret of their
wonderful harmony, and the duration of their appointed
courses—all will be made clear!”

I have trespassed again, most indulgent reader, on
the limits of these Procrustean papers. I must defer
the “change” that “came o'er the spirit of my dream”
till another mood and time. Meanwhile, you may
consider Edith, if you like, the true heart she thought
herself (and I thought her) during her nine deaths in
the library; and you will have leisure to imagine the
three years over which we shall skip with this finale,
during which I made a journey to the north, and danced
out a winter in your own territories at Quebec—a circumstance
I allude to, no less to record the hospitalities
of the garrison of that time (this was in 27—were
you there?) than to pluck forth from Time's hindermost
wallet a modest copy of verses I addressed thence
to Edith. She sent them back to me considerably
mended; but I give you the original draught, scorning
her finger in my poesies.

3. PART III.
A DIGRESSION.

Boy.

Will you not sleep, sir?

Knight.

Boy.

Here, master!

knight.

Boy.

Are you well, Sir?

Knight.

Boy!
Love you the stars?

Boy.

Knight.

Boy.

“Sir Fabian,” an unpublished Poem.

It was a September night at the university. On the
morrow I was to appear upon the stage as the winner
of the first honors of my year. I was the envy—the
admiration—in some degree the wonder, of the col
legiate town in which the university stands; for I had
commenced my career as the idlest and most riotous
of freshmen. What it was that had suddenly made
me enamored of my chambers and my books—that
had saddened my manners and softened my voice—that
had given me a disgust to champagne and my old allies,
in favor of cold water and the Platonists—that, in
short, had metamorphosed, as Bob Wilding would
have said, a gentleman-like rake and vau-rien into so
dull a thing as an exemplary academician—was past
the divining of most of my acquaintances. Oh, once-loved
Edith! hast thou any inkling in thy downward
metempsychosis of the philosophy of this marvel?

If you were to set a poet to make a town, with
carte blanche as to trees, gardens, and green blinds,
he would probably turn out very much such a place
as New Haven. (Supposing your education in geography
to have been neglected, dear reader, this is
the second capital of Connecticut, a half-rural, half-metropolitan
town, lying between a precipice that
makes the fag-end of the Green mountains and a
handsome bay in Long-Island sound.) The first
thought of the inventor of New Haven was to lay out
the streets in parallelograms, and the second was to
plant them from suburb to water-side with the magnificent
elms of the country. The result is, that at
the end of fifty years, the town is buried in leaves. If
it were not for the spires of the churches, a bird flying
over on his autumn voyage to the Floridas would
never mention having seen it in his travels. It is a
glorious tree, the elm—and those of the place I speak
of are famous, even in our land of trees, for their surprising
size and beauty. With the curve of their
stems in the sky, the long weepers of their outer and
lower branches drop into the street, fanning your face
as you pass under with their geranium-like leaves;
and close overhead, interwoven like the trellice of a
vine, they break up the light of the sky into golden
flecks, and make you, of the common highway, a
bower of the most approved secludedness and beauty.
The houses are something between an Italian palace
and an English cottage—built of wood, but, in the
dim light of those overshadowing trees, as fair to the
eye as marble with their triennial coats of paint; and
each stands in the midst of its own encircling grass-plot,
half buried in vines and flowers, and facing outward
from a cluster of gardens divided by slender
palings, and filling up with fruit-trees and summer-houses
the square on whose limit it stands. Then,
like the vari-colored parallelograms upon a chessboard,
green openings are left throughout the town,
fringed with triple and interweaving elm-rows, the long
and weeping branches sweeping downward to the
grass, and with their enclosing shadows keeping moist
and cool the road they overhang; and fair forms (it is
the garden of American beauty—New-Haven) flit
about in the green light in primitive security and freedom,
and you would think the place, if you alit upon
it in a summer's evening—what it seems to me now
in memory, and what I have made it in this Rosa-Matida
description—a scene from Boccacio, or a
vision from long-lost Arcady.

New Haven may have eight thousand inhabitants.
Its steamers run to New York in six hours (or did in
my time—I have ceased to be astonished on that subject,
and should not wonder if they did it now in one
—a trifle of seventy miles up the sound), and the
ladies go up in the morning for a yard of bobbin and
return at night, and the gentlemen the same for a
stroll in Broadway; and it is to this circumstance that,
while it preserves its rural exterior, it is a very metropolitan
place in the character of its society. The
Armaryllis of the petty cottage you admire wears the
fashion twenty days from Paris, and her shepherd has
a coat from Nugee, the divine peculiarity of which is
not yet suspected east of Bond street; and, in the

newspaper hanging half out of the window, there is
news, red-hot with the velocity of its arrival, from
Russia and the Rocky Mountains, from the sources of
the Mississippi and the brain of Monsieur Herbault.
Distance is an imaginary quantity, and Time, that
used to give everything the go-by, has come to a
stand-still in his astonishment. There will be a proposition
in congress ere long to do without him altogether—every
new thing “saves time” so marvellously.

Bright as seems to me this seat of my Alma
Mater, however, and gayly as I describe it, it is to
me, if I may so express it, a picture of memory
glazed and put away; if I see it ever again, it will
be but to walk through its embowered streets by
a midnight moon. It is vain and heart-breaking to go
back, after absence, to any spot of earth of which the
interest was the human love whose home and cradle it
had been. But there is a period in our lives when
the heart fuses and compounds with the things about
it, and the close enamel with which it overruns and
binds in the affections, and which hardens in the
lapse of years till the immortal germ within is not
more durable and unwasting, warms never again, nor
softens; and there is nothing on earth so mournful
and unavailing as to return to the scenes which are
unchanged, and look to return to ourselves and others
as we were when we thus knew them.

Yet we think (I judge you by my own soul, gentle
reader) that it is others—not we—who are changed!
We meet the friend that we loved in our youth, and it
is ever he who is cold and altered! We take the
hand that we bent over with our passionate kisses in
boyhood, and our raining tears when we last parted,
and it is ever hers that returns not the pressure and
her eyes, and not ours—oh, not ours!—that look back
the moistened and once familiar regard with a dry lid
and a gaze of stone! Oh God! it is ever he—the
friend you have worshipped—for whom you would
have died—who gives you the tips of his fingers, and
greets you with a phrase of fashion, when you would
rush into his bosom and break your heart with weeping
out the imprisoned tenderness of years! I could
carve out the heart from my bosom, and fling it with
a malison into the sea, when I think how utterly and
worse than useless it is in this world of mocking
names! Yet “love” and “friendship” are words
that read well. You could scarce spare them in
poetry.

2. II.

It was, as I have said, a moonlight night of unparalleled
splendor. The morrow was the college anniversary—the
day of the departure of the senior class
—and the town, which is, as it were, a part of the university,
was in the usual tumult of the gayest and
saddest evening of the year. The night was warm,
and the houses, of which the drawing-rooms are all
on a level with the gardens in the rear, and through
which a long hall stretches like a ball-room, were
thrown open, doors and windows, and the thousand
students of the university, and the crowds of their
friends, and the hosts of strangers drawn to the place
at this season by the annual festivities, and the families,
every one with a troop of daughters (as the leaves
on our trees, compared with those of old countries—
three to one—so are our sons and daughters) were all
sitting without lamps in the moon-lit rooms, or strolling
together, lovers and friends, in the fragrant gardens,
or looking out upon the street, returning the
greetings of the passers-by, or, with heads uncovered,
pacing backward and forward beneath the elms before
the door—the whole scene one that the angels in
heaven might make a holyday to see.

There were a hundred of my fellow-seniors—young
men of from eighteen to twenty four—every one of
whom was passing the last evening of the four most
impressible and attaching years of his life, with the
family in which he had been most intimate, in a town
where refinement and education had done their utmost
upon the society, and which was renowned
throughout America for the extraordinary beauty of
its women. They had come from every state in the
Union, and the Georgian and the Vermontese, the
Kentuckian and the Virginian, were to start alike on
the morrow-night with a lengthening chain for home,
each bearing away the hearts he had attached to him
(one or more!) and leaving his own, till, like the magnetized
needle, it should drop away with the weakened
attraction; and there was probably but one that
night in the departing troop who was not whispering
in some throbbing ear the passionate but vain and
mocking avowal of fidelity in love! And yet I had
had my attachments too; and there was scarce a
house in that leafy and murmuring paradise of friendship
and trees, that would not have hailed me with
acclamation had I entered the door; and I make this
record of kindness and hospitality (unforgotten after
long years of vicissitude and travel), with the hope
that there may yet live some memory as constant as
mine, and that some eye will read it with a warmth in
its lid, and some lip—some one at least—murmur, “I
remember him!” There are trees in that town whose
drooping leaves I could press to my lips with an affection
as passionate as if they were human, though the
lips and voices that have endeared them to me are as
changed as the foliage upon the branch, and would
recognise my love as coldly.

There was one, I say, who walked the thronged
pavement alone that night, or but with such company
as Uhland's;[2] yet the heart of that solitary senior was
far from lonely. The palm of years of ambition was
in his grasp—the reward of daily self-denial and midnight
watching—the prize of a straining mind and
a yearning desire; and there was not one of the many
who spoke of him that night in those crowded rooms,
either to rejoice in his success or to wonder at its attainment,
who had the shadow of an idea what spirit
sat uppermost in his bosom. Oh! how common is
this ignorance of human motives! How distant, and
slight, and unsuspected, are the springs often of the
most desperate achievement! How little the world
knows for what the poet writes, the scholar toils, the
politician sells his soul, and the soldier perils his life!
And how insignificant and unequal to the result would
seem these invisible wires, could they be traced back
from the hearts whose innermost resource and faculty
they have waked and exhausted! It is a startling
thing to question even your own soul for its motive.
Ay, even in trifles. Ten to one you are surprised at
the answer. I have asked myself, while writing this
sentence, whose eye it is most meant to please; and,
as I live, the face that is conjured up at my bidding is
of one of whom I have not had a definite thought for
years. I would lay my life she thinks at this instant
I have forgotten her very name. Yet I know she
will read this page with an interest no other could
awaken, striving to trace in it the changes that have
come over me since we parted. I know (and I knew
then, though we never exchanged a word save in
friendship), that she devoted her innermost soul when
we strayed together by that wild river in the West
(dost thou remember it, dear friend? for now I speak
to thee!) to the study of a mind and character of which

she thought better than the world or their possessor;
and I know—oh, how well I know!—that with husband
and children around her, whom she loves and
to whom she is devoted, the memory of me is laid
away in her heart like a fond but incomplete dream
of what once seemed possible—the feeling with which
the mother looks on her witless boy, and loves him
more for what he might have been, than his brothers
for what they are!

I scarce know what thread I dropped to take up this
improvista digression (for, like “Opportunity and the
Hours,” I “never look back;”[3] ) but let us return to
the shadow of the thousand elms of New Haven.

The Gascon thought his own thunder and lightning
superior to that of other countries, but I must run the
hazard of your incredulity as well, in preferring an
American moon. In Greece and Asia Minor, perhaps
(ragione—she was first worshipped there), Cytheris
shines as brightly; but the Ephesian of Connecticut
sees the flaws upon the pearly buckler of the goddess,
as does the habitant of no other clime. His eye lies
close to the moon. There is no film, and no visible
beam in the clarified atmosphere. Her light is less
an emanation than a presence—the difference between
the water in a thunder-shower and the depths of
the sea. The moon struggles to you in England—
she is all about you, like an element of the air, in
America.

The night was breathless, and the fragmented light
lay on the pavement in motionless stars, as clear and
definite in their edges as if the “patines of bright gold”
had dropped through the trees, and lay glittering beneath
my feet. There was a kind of darkness visible
in the streets, overshadowed as they were by the massy
and leaf-burthened elms, and as I looked through the
houses, standing in obscurity myself, the gardens
seemed full of daylight—the unobstructed moon
poured with such a flood of radiance on the flowery
alleys within, and their gay troops of promenaders.
And as I distinguished one and another familiar friend,
with a form as familiar clinging to his side, and, with
drooping head and faltering step, listening or replying
(I well knew), to the avowals of love and truth, I murmured
in thought to my own far away, but never-forgotten
Edith, a vow as deep—ay, deeper than theirs,
as my spirit and hers had been sounded by the profounder
plummet of sorrow and separation. How the
very moonlight—how the stars of heaven—how the
balm in the air, and the languor of summer night in
my indolent frame, seemed, in those hours of loneliness,
ministers at the passionate altar-fires of my love!
Forsworn and treacherous Edith! do I live to write
this for thine eye?

I linger upon these trifles of the past—these hours
for which I would have borrowed wings when they
were here—and, as then they seemed but the flowering
promise of happiness, they seem now like the fruit,
enjoyed and departed. Past and future bliss there
would seem to be in the world—knows any one of
such a commodity in the present? I have not seen
it in my travels.

3. III.

I was strolling on through one of the most fashionable
and romantic streets (when did these two words
ever before find themselves in a sentence together?)
when a drawing-room with which I was very familiar,
lit, unlike most others on that bright might, by a suspended
lamp, and crowded with company, attracted
my attention for a moment. Between the house and
the street there was a slight shrubbery shut in by a
white paling, just sufficient to give an air of seclusion
to the low windows without concealing them from the
passer by, and, with the freedom of an old visiter, I
unconsciously stopped, and looked unobserved into
the rooms. It was the residence of a magnificent
girl, who was generally known as the Connecticut
beauty—a singular instance in America of what is
called in England a fine woman. (With us that word
applies wholly to moral qualities.) She was as large
as Juno, and a great deal handsomer, if the painters
have done that much-snubbed goddess justice. She
was a “book of beauty” printed with virgin type;
and that, by the way, suggests to me what I have all
my life been trying to express—that some women
seem wrought of new material altogether, apropos to
others who seem mortal réchauffes—as if every limb
and feature had been used, and got out of shape in
some other person's service. The lady I speak of
looked new—and her name was Isidora.

She was standing just under the lamp, with a single
rose in her hair, listening to a handsome coxcomb of
a classmate of mine with evident pleasure. She was
a great fool, (did I mention that before?) but weak,
and vacant, and innocent of an idea as she was,
Faustina was not more naturally majestic, nor Psyche
(soit elle en grande) more divinely and meaningly
graceful. Loveliness and fascination came to her as
dew and sunshine to the flowers, and she obeyed her
instinct, as they theirs, and was helplessly, and without
design, the loveliest thing in nature. I do not
see, for my part, why all women should not be so.
They are as useful as flowers; they perpetuate our
species.

I was looking at her with irresistible admiration,
when a figure stepped out from the shadow of a tree,
and my chum, monster, and ally, Job Smith (of whom
I have before spoken in these historical papers), laid
his hand on my shoulder.

“Do you know, my dear Job,” I said, in a solemn
tone of admonition, “that blind John was imprisoned
for looking into people's windows?”

But Job was not in the vein for pleasantry. The
light fell on his face as I spoke to him, and a more
haggard, almost blasted expression of countenance, I
never saw even in a madhouse. I well knew he had
loved the splendid girl that stood unconsciously in our
sight, since his first year in college; but that it would
ever so master him, or that he could link his monstrous
deformity, even in thought, with that radiant
vision of beauty, was a thing that I thought as probable
as that hirsute Pan would tempt from her sphere
the moon that kissed Endymion.

“I have been standing here looking at Isidora, ever
since you left me,” said he. (We had parted three
hours before, at twilight.)

“And why not go in, in the name of common
sense?”

“Oh! God, Phil!—with this demon in my heart?
Can you see my face in this light?”

It was too true, he would have frightened the
household gods from their pedestals.

“But what would you do, my dear Job? Why
come here to madden yourself with a sight you must
have known you would see.

“Phil?”

“What, my dear boy?”

“Will you do me a kindness?”

“Certainly.”

“Isidora would do anything you wished her to do.'

“Um! with a reservation, my dear chum!”

“But she would give you the rose that is in her
hair.”

“Without a doubt.”

“And for me—if you told her it was for me.
Would she not?”

“Perhaps. But will that content you?”

“It will soften my despair. I will never look on
her face more; but I should like my last sight of her
to be associated with kindness?”

Poor Job! how true it is that “affection is a fire
which kindleth as well in the bramble as in the oak,
and catcheth hold where it first lighteth, not where it
may best burn.” I do believe in my heart that the
soul in thee was designed for a presentable body—thy
instincts were so invariably mistaken. When didst
thou ever think a thought, or stir hand or foot, that it
did not seem prompted, monster though thou wert, by
conscious good-looking-ness! What a lying similitude
it was that was written on every blank page in
thy Lexicon: “Larks that mount in the air, build
their nests below in the earth; and women that cast
their eyes upon kings, may place their hearts upon
vassals.” Apelles must have been better looking than
Alexander, when Campaspe said that!

As a general thing you may ask a friend freely to
break any three of the commandments in your service,
but you should hesitate to require of friendship a violation
of etiquette. I was in a round jacket and boots,
and it was a dress evening throughout New Haven. I
looked at my dust-covered feet, when Job asked me
to enter a soirée upon his errand, and passed my
thumb and finger around the edge of my white jacket;
but I loved Job as the Arabian loves his camel, and for
the same reason, with a difference—the imperishable
well-spring he carried in his heart through the desert
of the world, and which I well knew he would give up
his life to offer at need, as patiently as the animal
whose construction (inner and outer) he so remarkably
resembled. When I hesitated, and looked down at
my boots, therefore, it was less to seek for an excuse
to evade the sacrificing office required of me, than to
beat about in my unprepared mind for a preface to my
request. If she had been a woman of sense, I should
have had no difficulty; but it requires caution and
skill to go out of the beaten track with a fool.

“Would not the rose do as well,” said I, in desperate
embarrassment, “if she does not know that it is
for you, my dear Job?” It would have been very
easy to have asked for it for myself.

Job laid his hand upon his side, as if I could not
comprehend the pang my proposition gave him.

“Away prop, and down, scaffold,” thought I, as I
gave my jacket a hitch, and entered the door.

“Mr. Slingsby,” announced the servant.

“Mr. Slingsby?” inquired the mistress of the house,
seeing only a white jacket in the clair obscur of the
hall.

“Mr. Slingsby!!!” cried out twenty voices in
amazement, as I stepped over the threshold into the
light.

It has happened since the days of Thebet Ben Khorat,
that scholars have gone mad, and my sanity was
evidently the uppermost concern in the minds of all
present. (I should observe, that in those days, I relished
rather of dandyism.) As I read the suspicion
in their minds, however, a thought struck me. I went
straight up to Miss Higgins, and, sotto voce, asked her
to take a turn with me in the garden.

“Isidora,” I said, “I have long known your superiority
of mind” (when you want anything of a woman,
praise her for that in which she is most deficient,
says La Bruvère), “and I have great occasion to rely
on it in the request I am about to make of you.”

She opened her eyes, and sailed along the gravelwalk
with heightened majesty. I had not had occasion
to pay her a compliment before since my freshman
year.

“What is it, Mr. Slingsby?”

“You know Smith—my chum.”

“Certainly.”

“I have just come from him.”

“Well!”

“He is gone mad!”

“Mad! Mr. Slingsby?”

“Stark and furious!”

“Gracious goodness!”

“And all for you!”

“For me!!”

“For you!” I thought her great blue eyes would
have become what they call in America “sot,” at this
astounding communication.

“Now, Miss Higgins,” I continued, “pray listen;
my poor friend has such extraordinary muscular
strength, that seven men can not hold him.”

“Gracious!”

“And he has broken away, and is here at your
door.”

“Good gracious!”

“Don't be afraid! He is as gentle as a kitten when
I am present. And now hear my request. He leaves
town to-morrow, as you well know, not to return. I
shall take him home to Vermont with keepers. He
is bent upon one thing, and in that you must humor
him.”

Miss Higgins began to be alarmed.

“He has looked through the window and seen you
with a rose in your hair, and, despairing even in his
madness of your love, he says, that if you would give
him that rose, with a kind word, and a farewell, he
should be happy. You will do it, will you not?”

“Dear me! I should be so afraid to speak to him!”

“But will you? and I'll tell you what to say.”

Miss Higgins gave a reluctant consent, and I passed
ten minutes in drilling her upon two sentences, which,
with her fine manner and sweet voice, really sounded
like the most interesting thing in the world. I left her
in the summer-house at the end of the garden, and
returned to Job.

“You have come without it!” said the despairing
lover, falling back against the tree.

“Miss Higgins' compliments, and begs you will go
round by the gate, and meet her in the summer-house.
She prefers to manage her own affairs.”

“Good God! are you mocking me?”

“I will accompany you, my dear boy.”

There was a mixture of pathos and ludicrousness
in that scene which starts a tear and a laugh together,
whenever I recall it to my mind. The finest heart in
the world, the most generous, the most diffident of
itself, yet the most self-sacrificing and delicate, was
at the altar of its devotion, offering its all in passionate
abandonment for a flower and a kind word; and she,
a goose in the guise of an angel, repeated a phrase of
kindness of which she could not comprehend the
meaning or the worth, but which was to be garnered
up by that half-broken heart, as a treasure that repaid
him for years of unrequited affection! She recited it
really very well. I stood at the latticed door, and interrupted
them the instant there was a pause in the
dialogue; and getting Job away as fast as possible, I
left Miss Higgins with a promise of secrecy, and resumed
my midnight stroll.

Apropos—among Job's letters is a copy of verses,
which, spite of some little inconsistencies, I think
were written on this very occasion:—

Job had rejoiced in a more euphonious name, I
should have bought a criticism in some review, and
started him fairly as a poet. But “Job Smith!”—
“Poems by Job Smith!”—It would never do! If he
wrote like a seraph, and printed the book at his own
expense, illustrated and illuminated, and half-a-crown
to each person that would take one away, the critics
would damn him all the same! Really, one's father
and mother have a great deal to answer for!

But Job is a poet who should have lived in the
middle ages, no less for the convenience of the nom de
guerre, fashionable in those days, than because his
poetry, being chiefly the mixed product of feeling and
courtesy, is particularly susceptible to ridicule. The
philosophical and iron-wire poetry of our day stands
an attack like a fortification, and comes down upon
the besieger with reason and logic as good as his own.
But the more delicate offspring of tenderness and chivalry,
intending no violence, and venturing out to sea
upon a rose-leaf, is destroyed and sunk beyond diving-bells
by half a breath of scorn. I would subscribe
liberally myself to a private press and a court of honor
in poetry—critics, if admitted, to be dumb upon a
penalty. Will no Howard or Wilberforce act upon
this hint? Poets now-a-days are more slaves and
felons is than your African, or your culprit at the old
Bailey!

I would go a great way, privately, to find a genuine
spark of chivalry, and Job lit his every-day lamp with
it. See what a redolence of old time there is in these
verses,, which I copied long ago from a lady's album.
Yet, you may ridicule them if you like!—

I am mounted upon my hobby now, dear reader;
for Job Smith, though as hideous an idol as ever was
worshipped on the Indus, was still my idol. Here is
a little touch of his quality:—

I think I must give Edith another reprieve. I have
no idea why I have digressed this time from the story
which (you may see by the motto at the beginning of
the paper) I have not yet told. I can conceive easily
how people, who have nothing to do, betake themselves
to antobiography—it is so pleasant rambling
about over the past, and regathering only the flowers.
Why should pain and mortification be unsepultured?
The world is no wiser for these written experiences.
“The best book,” said Southey, “does but little good
to the world, and much harm to the author.” I shall
deliberate whether to enlighten the world as to Edith's
metempsychosis, or no.

4. PART IV.
SCENERY AND A SCENE.

Job Smith and myself were on the return from Niagara.
It was in the slumberous and leafy midst of
June. Lake Erie had lain with a silver glaze upon
its bosom for days; the ragged trees upon its green
shore dropping their branches into the stirless water,
as if it were some rigid imitation—the lake glass, and
the leaves emerald; the sky was of an April blue, as
if a night-rain had washed out its milkiness, till you
could see through its clarified depths to the gates of
heaven; and yet breathless and sunny as was the
face of the earth, there was a nerve and a vitality in
the air that exacted of every pulse its full compass—
searched every pore for its capacity of the joy of existence.

No one can conceive, who has not had his imagination
stretched at the foot of Niagara, or in the Titanic
solitudes of the west, the vastness of the unbroken
phases of nature; where every tree looks a king, and
every flower a marvel of glorious form and color—
where the rocks are rent every one as by the “tenth”
thunderbolt—and lake, mountain, or river, ravine or
waterfall, cave or eagle's nest, whatever it may be that
feeds the eye or the fancy, is as the elements have
shaped and left it—where the sculpture, and the painting,
and the poetry, and the wonderful alchymy of
nature, go on under the naked eye of the Almighty,
and by his own visible and uninterrupted hand, and
where the music of nature, from the anthem of the
torrent and storm, broken only by the scream of the
vulture, to the trill of the rivulet with its accompaniment
of singing birds and winds, is for ever ranging its
changes, as if for the stars to hear—in such scenes, I
say, and in such scenes only, is the imagination overtasked
or stretched to the capacity of a seraph's; and
while common minds sink beneath them to the mere
inanition of their animal senses, the loftier spirit takes
their color and stature, and outgrows the common and
pitiful standards of the world. Cooper and Leatherstocking
thus became what they are—the one a high-priest
of imagination and poetry, and the other a simple-hearted
but mere creature of instinct; and Cooper
is no more a living man, liable to the common laws of
human nature, than Leatherstocking a true and life-like
transcript of the more common effect of those
overpowering solitudes on the character.

We got on board the canal-boat at noon, and Job
and myself, seated on the well-cushioned seats, with
the blinds half-turned to give us the prospect and exclude
the sun, sat disputing in our usual amicable way.
He was the only man I ever knew with whom I could
argue without losing my temper; and the reason was,
that I always had the last word, and thought myself
victorious.

“We are about to return into the bosom of society,
my dear Job,” said I, “looking with unctuous good
nature on the well-shaped boot I had put on for the
first time in a month that morning. (It is an unsentimental
fact that hob-nailed shoes are indispensable on
the most poetical spots of earth.)

“Yes,” said Job; “but how superior is the society
we leave behind! Niagara and Erie! What in your
crowded city is comparable to these?”

“Nothing, for size!—but for society—you will think
me a pagan, dear chum—but, on my honor, straight
from Niagara as I come, I feel a most dissatisfied yearning
for the society of Miss Popkins!”

“Oh, Phil!”

“On my honor!”

“You, who were in such raptures at the falls!”

“And real ones—but I wanted a woman at my elbow
to listen to them. Do you know, Job, I have
made up my mind on a great principle since we have
been on our travels? Have you observed that I was
pensive?”

“Not particularly—but what is your principle?”

“That a man is a much more interesting object than
a mountain.”

“A man! did you say?”

“Yes—but I meant a woman!”

“I don't think so.”

“I do!—and I judge by myself. When did I ever
see wonder of nature—tree, sunset, waterfall, rapid,
lake, or river—that I would not rather have been talking
to a woman the while? Do you remember the
three days we were tramping through the forest without
seeing the sun, as if we had been in the endless
aisle of a cathedral? Do you remember the long morning
when we lay on the moss at the foot of Niagara,
and it was a divine luxury only to breathe? Do you
remember the lunar rainbows at midnight on Goat
island? Do you remember the ten thousand glorious
moments we have enjoyed between weather and scenery
since the bursting of these summer leaves? Do
you?”

“Certainly, my dear boy!”

“Well, then, much as I love nature and you, there
has not been an hour since we packed our knapsacks,
that, if I could have distilled a charming girl out of a
mixture of you and any mountain, river, or rock, that
I have seen, I would not have flung you, without remorse,
into any witch's caldron that was large enough,
and would boil at my bidding.”

“Monster!”

“And I believe I should have the same feelings in
Italy or Greece, or wherever people go into raptures
with things you can neither eat nor make love to.”

“Would not even the Venus fill your fancy for a
day?”

“An hour, perhaps, it might; for I should be studying,
in its cold Parian proportions, the warm structure
of some living Musidora—but I should soon tire of it,
and long for my lunch or my love; and I give you my
honor I would not lose the three meals of a single day
to see Santa Croce and St. Peter's.”

“Both?”

“Both.”

Job disdained to argue against such a want of sentimental
principle, and pulling up the blind, he fixed
his eyes on the slowly-gliding panorama of rock and
forest, and I mounted for a promenade upon the deck.

Mephistopheles could hardly have found a more
striking amusement for Faust than the passage of three
hundred miles in the canal from Lake Erie to the
Hudson. As I walked up and down the deck of the
packet-boat, I thought to myself, that if it were not
for thoughts of things that come more home to one's
“business and bosom” (particularly “bosom”), I could
be content to retake my berth at Schenectady, and return
to Buffalo for amusement. The Erie canal-boat
is a long and very pretty drawing-room afloat. It has
a library, sofas, a tolerable cook, curtains or Venetian
blinds, a civil captain, and no smell of steam or perceptible
motion. It is drawn generally by three horses
at a fair trot, and gets you through about a hundred
miles a day, as softly as if you were witched over the
ground by Puck and Mustard-seed. The company
(say fifty people) is such as pleases Heaven; though I
must say (with my eye all along the shore, collecting
the various dear friends I have made and left on that

long canal) there are few highways on which you will
meet so many lovely and loving fellow-passengers.
On this occasion my star was bankrupt—Job Smith
being my only civilized companion—and I was left to
the unsatisfactory society of my own thoughts and the
scenery.

Discontented as I may seem to have been, I remember,
through eight or ten years of stirring and thickly-sown
manhood, every moment of that lonely evening.
I remember the progression of the sunset, from the
lengthening shadows and the first gold upon the clouds,
to the deepening twilight and the new-sprung star
hung over the wilderness. And I remember what I
am going to describe—a twilight anthem in the forest
—as you remember an air of Rossini's, or a transition
in the half-fiendish, half-heavenly creations of Meyerbeer.
I thought time dragged heavily then, but I
wish I had as light a heart and could feel as vividly
now!

The Erie canal is cut a hundred or two miles
through the heart of the primeval wilderness of
America, and the boat was gliding on silently and
swiftly, and never sailed a lost cloud through the
abyss of space on a course more apparently new and
untrodden. The luxuriant soil had sent up a rank
grass that covered the horse-path like velvet; the
Erie water was clear as a brook in the winding canal;
the old shafts of the gigantic forest spurred into the
sky by thousands, and the yet unscared eagle swung
off from the dead branch of the pine, and skimmed the
tree-tops for another perch, as if he had grown to
believe that gliding spectre a harmless phenomenon
of nature. The horses drew steadily and unheard at
the end of the long line; the steersman stood motionless
at the tiller, and I lay on a heap of baggage
in the prow, attentive to the slightest breathing of nature,
but thinking, with an ache at my heart, of Edith
Linsey, to whose feet (did I mention it?) I was hastening
with a lover's proper impatience. I might as
well have taken another turn in my “fool's paradise.”

The gold of the sunset had glided up the dark pine
tops and disappeared, like a ring taken slowly from an
Ethiop's finger; the whip-poor-will had chanted the
first stave of his lament; the bat was abroad, and the
screech-owl, like all bad singers, commenced without
waiting to be importuned, though we were listening
for the nightingale. The air, as I said before, had
been all day breathless; but as the first chill of evening
displaced the warm atmosphere of the departed
sun, a slight breeze crisped the mirrored bosom of the
canal, and then commenced the night anthem of the
forest, audible, I would fain believe, in its soothing
changes, by the dead tribes whose bones whiten amid
the perishing leaves. First, whisperingly yet articulately,
the suspended and wavering foliage of the birch
was touched by the many-fingered wind, and, like a
faint prelude, the silver-lined leaves rustled in the low
branches; and, with a moment's pause, when you
could hear the moving of the vulture's claws upon
the bark, as he turned to get his breast to the wind,
the increasing breeze swept into the pine-tops, and
drew forth from their fringe-like and myriad tassels a
low monotone like the refrain of a far-off dirge; and
still as it murmured (seeming to you sometimes like
the confused and heart-broken responses of the penitents
on a cathedral floor), the blast strengthened and
filled, and the rigid leaves of the oak, and the swaying
fans and chalices of the magnolia, and the rich cups
of the tulip-trees, stirred and answered with their different
voices like many-toned harps; and when the
wind was fully abroad, and every moving thing on the
breast of the earth was roused from its daylight repose,
the irregular and capricious blast, like a player on an
organ of a thousand stops, lulled and strengthened by
turns, and from the hiss in the rank grass, low as the
whisper of fairies, to the thunder of the impinging
and groaning branches of the larch and the fir, the
anthem went ceaselessly through its changes, and the
harmony (though the owl broke in with his scream,
and though the over-blown monarch of the wood
came crashing to the earth), was still perfect and without
a jar. It is strange that there is no sound of nature
out of tune. The roar of the waterfall comes
into this anthem of the forest like an accompaniment
of bassoons, and the occasional bark of the wolf, or
the scream of a night-bird, or even the deep-throated
croak of the frog, is no more discordant than the outburst
of an octave flute above the even melody of an
orchestra; and it is surprising how the large raindrops,
pattering on the leaves, and the small voice of
the nightingale (singing, like nothing but himself,
sweetest in the darkness) seems an intensitive and a
low burthen to the general anthem of the earth—as
it were, a single voice among instruments.

I had what Wordsworth calls a “couchant ear” in
my youth, and my story will wait, dear reader, while
I tell you of another harmony that I learned to love
in the wilderness.

There will come sometimes in the spring—say in
May, or whenever the snow-drops and sulphur butterflies
are tempted out by the first timorous sunshine—
there will come, I say, in that yearning and youth-renewing
season, a warm shower at noon. Our tent
shall be pitched on the skirts of a forest of young
pines, and the evergreen foliage, if foliage it may be
called, shall be a daily refreshment to our eye while
watching, with the west wind upon our cheeks, the
unclothed branches of the elm. The rain descends
softly and warm; but with the sunset the clouds break
away, and it grows suddenly cold enough to freeze.
The next morning you shall come out with me to a
hill-side looking upon the south, and lie down with
your ear to the earth. The pine tassels hold in every
four of their fine fingers a drop of rain frozen like a
pearl in a long ear-ring, sustained in their loose grasp
by the rigidity of the cold. The sun grows warm at
ten, and the slight green fingers begin to relax and
yield, and by eleven they are all drooping their icy
pearls upon the dead leaves with a murmur through
the forest like the swarming of the bees of Hybla.
There is not much variety in its music, but it is a
pleasant monotone for thought, and if you have a
restless fever in your bosom (as I had, when I learned
to love it, for the travel which has corrupted the heart
and the ear that it soothed and satisfied then) you may
lie down with a crooked root under your head in the
skirts of the forest, and thank Heaven for an anodyne
to care. And it is better than the voice of your friend,
or the song of your lady-love, for it exacts no gratitude,
and will not desert you ere the echo dies upon
the wind.

Oh, how many of these harmonies there are!—how
many that we hear, and how many that are “too
constant to be heard!” I could go back to my youth,
now, with this thread of recollection, and unsepulture
a hoard of simple and long-buried joys that would
bring the blush upon my cheek to think how my senses
are dulled since such things could give me pleasure!
Is there no “well of Kanathos” for renewing the
youth of the soul?—no St. Hilary's cradle? no elixir
to cast the slough of heart-sickening and heart-tarnishing
custom? Find me an alchymy for that, with
your alembic and crucible, and you may resolve to
dross again your philosopher's stone!

2. II.

Everybody who makes the passage of the Erie
canal, stops at the half-way town of Utica, to visit a
wonder of nature fourteen miles to the west of it, called
Trenton Falls. It would be becoming in me, before
mentioning the falls, however, to sing the praises of

Utica and its twenty thousand inhabitants—having
received much hospitality from the worthy burghers,
and philandered up and down their well-flagged trottoir
very much to my private satisfaction. I should
scorn any man's judgment who should attempt to convince
me that the Erie water, which comes down the
canal a hundred and fifty miles, and passes through
the market-place of that pleasant town, has not communicated
to the hearts of its citizens the expansion
and depth of the parent lake from which it is drawn.
I have a theory on that subject with which I intend to
surprise the world whenever politics and Mr. Bulwer
draw less engrossingly on its attention. Will any one
tell me that the dark eyes I knew there, and whose
like for softness and meaning I have inquired for in
vain through Italy, and the voice that accompanied
their gaze—(that Pasta, in her divinest out-gush of
melody and soul, alone recalls to me)—that these, and
the noble heart, and high mind, and even the genius,
that were other gifts of the same marvel among women—that
these were born of common parentage, and
nursed by the air of a demi-metropolis? We were
but the kindest of friends, that bright creature and myself,
and I may say, without charging myself with the
blindness of love, that I believe in my heart she was
the foster-child of the water-spirits on whose wandering
streamlet she lived—that the thousand odors that
swept down from the wilderness upon Lake Erie, and
the unseen but wild and innumerable influences of
nature, or whatever you call that which makes the
Indian a believer in the Great Spirit—that these
came down with those clear waters, ministering to the
mind and watching over the budding beauty of this
noble and most high-hearted woman! If you do not
believe it, I should like you to tell me how else such
a creature was “raised,” as they phrase it in Virginia.
I shall hold to my theory till you furnish me with a
more reasonable.

We heard at the hotel that there were several large
parties at Trenton Falls, and with an abridgment of
our toilets in our pockets, Job and I galloped out of
Utica about four o'clock of as bright a summer's afternoon
as was ever promised in the almanac. We drew
rein a mile or two out of town, and dawdled along the
wild road more leisurely, Job's Green mountain proportions
fitting to the saddle something in the manner
and relative fitness of a skeleton on a poodle. By the
same token he rode safely, the looseness of his bones
accommodating itself with singular facility to the
irregularities in the pace of the surprised animal beneath
him.

I dislike to pass over the minutest detail of a period
of my life that will be rather interesting in my biography
(it is my intention to be famous enough to merit
that distinction, and I would recommend to my friends
to be noting my “little peculiarities”), and with this
posthumous benevolence in my heart, I simply record,
that our conversation on the road turned upon Edith
Linsey—at this time the lady of my constant love—for
whose sake and at whose bidding I was just concluding
(with success I presumed) a probation of three
years of absence, silence, hard study, and rigid morals,
and upon whose parting promise (God forgive her!) I
had built my uttermost gleaning and sand of earthly
hope and desire. I tell you in the tail of this mocking
paragraph, dear reader, that the bend of the rainbow
spans not the earth more perfectly than did the
love of that woman my hopes of future bliss; and the
ephemeral arc does not sooner melt into the clouds—
but I am anticipating my story.

Job's extraordinary appearance, as he extricated
himself from his horse, usually attracted the entire attention
of the by-standers at a strange inn, and under
cover of this, I usually contrived to get into the house
and commit him by ordering the dinner as soon as it
could be got ready. Else, if it was in the neighbor
hood of scenery, he was off till Heaven knew when,
and as I had that delicacy for his feelings never to
dine without him, you may imagine the necessity of
my hungry manœuvre.

We dined upon the trout of the glorious stream we
had come to see; and as our host's eldest daughter
waited upon us (recorded in Job's journal, in my possession
at this moment, as “the most comely and gracious
virgin” he had seen in his travels), we felt bound
to adapt our conversation to the purity of her mind,
and discussed only the philosophical point, whether
the beauty of the stream could be tasted in the flavor
of the fish—Job for it, I against it. The argument
was only interrupted by the entrance of an apple-pudding,
so hot that our tongues were fully occupied
in removing it from place to place as the mouth felt
its heat inconvenient, and then, being in a country
of liberty and equality, and the damsel in waiting, as
Job smilingly remarked, as much a lady as the President's
wife, he requested permission to propose her
health in a cool tumbler of cider, and we adjourned to
the moonlight.

3. III.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the existence of Trenton
Falls was not known. It was discovered, like Pæstum,
by a wandering artist, when there was a town of ten
thousand inhabitants, a canal, a theatre, a liberty-pole,
and forty churches, within fourteen miles of it.
It may be mentioned to the credit of the Americans,
that in the “hardness” of character of which travellers
complain, there is the soft trait of a passion for
scenery; and before the fact of its discovery had got
well into the “Cahawba Democrat” and “Go-the-whole-hog-Courier,”
there was a splendid wooden
hotel on the edge of the precipice, with a French
cook, soda-water, and olives, and a law was passed by
the Kentucky Travellers' Club, requiring a hanging-bird's
nest from the trees “frowning down the awful
abysm,” (so expressed in the regulation), as a qualification
for membership. Thenceforward to the present
time it has been a place of fashionable resort
during the summer solstice, and the pine woods, in
which the hotel stands, being impervious to the sun,
it is prescribed by oculists for gentlemen and ladies
with weak eyes. If the luxury of corn-cutters had
penetrated to the United States, it might be prescribed
for tender feet as well—the soft floor of pine-tassels
spread under the grassless woods, being considered
an improvement upon Turkey carpets and green-sward.

Trenton Falls is rather a misnomer. I scarcely
know what you would call it, but the wonder of nature
which bears the name is a tremendous torrent,
whose bed, for several miles, is sunk fathoms deep
into the earth—a roaring and dashing stream, so far
below the surface of the forest in which it is lost, that
you would think, as you come suddenly upon the
edge of its long precipice, that it was a river in some
inner world (coiled within ours, as we in the outer
circle of the firmament), and laid open by some
Titanic throe that had cracked clear asunder the crust
of this “shallow earth.” The idea is rather assisted
if you happen to see below you, on its abysmal shore,
a party of adventurous travellers; for, at that vast
depth, and in contrast with the gigantic trees and
rocks, the same number of well-shaped pismires,
dressed in the last fashions, and philandering upon
your parlor floor, would be about of their apparent size
and distinctness.

They showed me at Eleusis the well by which
Proserpine ascends to the regions of day on her annual
visit to the plains of Thessaly—but with the
genius loci at my elbow in the shape of a Greek girl
as lovely as Phryné, my memory reverted to the bared

axle of the earth in the bed of this American river,
and I was persuaded (looking the while at the feronière
of gold sequins on the Phidian forehead of my
Katinka) that supposing Hades in the centre of the
earth you are nearer to it by some fathoms at Trenton.
I confess I have had, since my first descent into
those depths, an uncomfortable doubt of the solidity
of the globe—how the deuse it can hold together with
such a crack in its bottom!

It was a night to play Endynion, or do any Tomfoolery
that could be laid to the charge of the moon,
for a more omnipresent and radiant atmosphere of
moonlight never sprinkled the wilderness with silver.
It was a night in which to wish it might never be
day again—a night to be enamored of the stars, and
bid God bless them like human creatures on their
bright journey—a night to love in, to dissolve in—to
do everything but what night is made for—sleep!
Oh heaven! when I think how precious is life in such
moments; how the aroma—the celestial bloom and
flower of the soul—the yearning and fast-perishing
enthusiasm of youth—waste themselves in the solitude
of such nights on the senseless and unanswering air;
when I wander alone, unloving and unloved, beneath
influences that could inspire me with the elevation of
a seraph, were I at the ear of a human creature that
could summon forth and measure my limitless capacity
of devotion—when I think this, and feel this, and
so waste my existence in vain yearnings—I could extinguish
the divine spark within me like a lamp on an
unvisited shrine, and thank Heaven for an assimilation
to the animals I walk among! And that is the
substance of a speech I made to Job as a sequitur of a
well-meant remark of his own, that “it was a pity
Edith Linsey was not there.” He took the clause
about the “animals” to himself, and I made an apology
for the same a year after. We sometimes give our
friends, quite innocently, such terrible knocks in our
rhapsodies!

Most people talk of the sublimity of Trenton, but I
have haunted it by the week together for its mere
loveliness. The river, in the heart of that fearful
chasm, is the most varied and beautiful assemblage of
the thousand forms and shapes of running water that
I know in the world. The soil and the deep-striking
roots of the forest terminate far above you, looking like
a black rim on the enclosing precipices; the bed of
the river and its sky-sustaining walls are of solid rock,
and, with the tremendous descent of the stream—
forming for miles one continuous succession of falls
and rapids—the channel is worn into curves and cavities
which throw the clear waters into forms of inconceivable
brilliancy and variety. It is a sort of
half twilight below, with here and there a long beam
of sunshine reaching down to kiss the lip of an eddy
or form a rainbow over a fall, and the reverberating
and changing echoes:—

maintain a constant and most soothing music, varying
at every step with the varying phase of the current.
Cascades of from twenty to thirty feet, over which
the river flies with a single and hurrying leap (not a
drop missing from the glassy and bending sheet,) occur
frequently as you ascend; and it is from these
that the place takes its name. But the falls, though
beautiful, are only peculiar from the dazzling and unequalled
rapidity with which the waters come to the
leap. If it were not for the leaf which drops wavering
down into the abysm from trees apparently painted
on the sky, and which is caught away by the flashing
current as if the lightning had suddenly crossed it,
you would think the vault of the steadlast heavens a
flying element as soon. The spot in that long gulf of
beauty that I best remember is a smooth descent of some
hundred yards, where the river in full and undivided
volume skims over a plane as polished as a table of
scagliola, looking, in its invisible speed, like one mirror
of gleaming but motionless crystal. Just above,
there is a sudden turn in the glen which sends the
water like a catapult against the opposite angle of the
rock, and, in the action of years, it has worn out a
cavern of unknown depth, into which the whole
mass of the river plunges with the abandonment of a
flying fiend into hell, and, reappearing like the angel
that has pursued him, glides swiftly but with divine
serenity on its way. (I am indebted for that last
figure to Job, who travelled with a Milton in his
pocket, and had a natural redolence of “Paradise
Lost” in his conversation.)

Much as I detest water in small quantities (to drink),
I have a hydromania in the way of lakes, rivers, and
waterfalls. It is, by much, the belle in the family of
the elements. Earth is never tolerable unless disguised
in green. Air is so thin as only to be visible
when she borrows drapery of water; and Fire is so
staringly bright as to be unpleasant to the eyesight;
but water! soft, pure, graceful water! there is no
shape into which you can throw her that she does not
seem lovelier than before. She can borrow nothing
of her sisters. Earth has no jewels in her lap so brilliant
as her own spray-pearls and emeralds; Fire has
no rubies like what she steals from the sunset; Air
has no robes like the grace of her fine-woven and ever-changing
drapery of silver. A health (in wine!) to
Water!

Who is there that did not love some stream in his
youth? Who is there in whose vision of the past
there does not sparkle up, from every picture of childhood,
a spring or a rivulent woven through the darkened
and torn woof of first affections like a thread of
unchanged silver? How do you interpret the instinctive
yearning with which you search for the
river-side or the fountain in every scene of nature—
the clinging unaware to the river's course when a
truant in the fields in June—the dull void you find in
every landscape of which it is not the ornament and
the centre? For myself, I hold with the Greek:
“Water is the first principle of all things: we were
made from it and we shall be resolved into it.”[4]

4. IV.

The awkward thing in all story-telling is transition.
Invention you do not need if you have experience;
for fact is stranger than fiction. A beginning in these
days of startling abruptness is as simple as open your
mouth; and when you have once begun you can end
whenever you like, and leave the sequel to the reader's
imagination: but the hinges of a story—the turning
gracefully back from a digression (it is easy to turn
into one)—is the pas qui coûte. My education on that
point was neglected.

It was, as I said before, a moonlight night, and
Job and myself having, like Sir Fabian, “no mind
to sleep,” followed the fashion and the rest of the company
at the inn, and strolled down to see the falls by
moonlight. I had been there before, and I took Job
straight to the spot in the bed of the river which I
have described above as my favorite, and, after watching
it for a few minutes, we turned back to a dark
cleft in the rock which afforded a rude seat, and sat
musing in silence.

Several parties had strolled past without seeing us
in our recess, when two female figures, with their
arms around each other's waists, sauntered slowly
around the jutting rock below, and approached us,
eagerly engaged in conversation. They came on to
the very edge of the shadow which enveloped us,
and turned to look back at the scene. As the head
nearest me was raised to the light, I started half to

my feet: it was Edith! In the same instant her
voice of music broke on my ear, and an irresistible
impulse to listen unobserved drew me down again
upon my seat, and Job, with a similar instinct, laid his
hand on my arm.

“It was his favorite spot!” said Edith. (We had
been at Trenton together years before.) “I stood here
with him, and I wish he stood here now, that I might
tell him what my hand hesitates to write.”

“Poor Philip!” said her companion, whom by the
voice I recognised as the youngest of the Flemings,
“I can not conceive how you can resolve so coldly to
break his heart.”

I felt a dagger entering my bosom, but still I listened.
Edith went on.

“Why, I will tell you, my dear little innocent. I
loved Philip Slingsby when I thought I was going to
die. It was then a fitting attachment, for I never
thought to need, of the goods of this world, more
than a sick chamber and a nurse; and Phil was kind-hearted
and devoted to me, and I lived at home.
But, with returned health, a thousand ambitious desires
have sprung up in my heart, and I find myself
admired by whom I will, and every day growing
more selfish and less poetical. Philip is poor, and
love in a cottage, though very well for you if you
like it, would never do for me. I should like him
very well for a friend, for he is gentlemanlike and
devoted, but, with my ideas, I should only make him
miserable, and so—I think I had better put him out of
misery at once—don't you think?

A half-smothered groan of anguish escaped my lips;
but it was lost in the roar of the waters, and Edith's
voice, as she walked on, lessened and became inaudible
to my ear. As her figure was lost in the shadow
of the rocks beyond, I threw myself on the bosom of
my friend, and wept in the unutterable agony of a
crushed heart. I know not how that night was spent,
but I awoke at noon of the next day, in my bed, with
Job's hand clasped tenderly in my own.

5. V.

I kept my tryst. I was to meet Edith Linsey at
Saratoga in July—the last month of the probation by
which I had won a right to her love. I had not spoken
to her, or written, or seen her (save, unknown to
her, in the moment I have described), in the three
long years to which my constancy was devoted. I
had gained the usual meed of industry in my profession,
and was admitted to its practice. I was on the
threshold of manhood; and she had promised, before
heaven, here to give me heart and hand.

I had parted from her at twelve on that night three
years, and, as the clock struck, I stood again by her
side in the crowded ballroom of Saratoga.

“Good God! Mr. Slingsby!” she exclaimed, as I
put out my hand.

“Am I so changed that you do not know me, Miss
Linsey?” I asked, as she still looked with a wondering
gaze into my face—pressing my hand, however,
with real warmth, and evidently under the control,
for the moment, of the feelings with which we had
parted.

“Changed, indeed! Why, you have studied yourself
to a skeleton! My dear Philip, you are ill!”

I was—but it was only for a moment. I asked her
hand for a waltz, and never before or since came wit
and laughter so freely to my lip. I was collected, but,
at the same time, I was the gayest of the gay; and
when everybody had congratulated me, in her hearing,
on the school to which I had put my wits in my
long apprenticeship to the law, I retired to the gallery
looking down upon the garden, and cooled my brow
and rallied my sinking heart.

The candles were burning low, and the ball was
nearly over, when I entered the room again, and requested
Edith to take a turn with me on the colonnade.
She at once assented, and I could feel by her
arm in mine, and see by the fixed expression on her
lip, that she did so with the intention of revealing to
me what she little thought I could so well anticipate.

“My probation is over,” I said, breaking the silence
which she seemed willing to prolong, and which
had lasted till we had twice measured the long, colonnade.

“It was three years ago to-night, I think, since we
parted.” She spoke in an absent and careless tone, as
if trying to work out another more prominent thought
in her mind.

“Do you find me changed?” I asked.

“Yes—oh, yes! very!”

“But I am more changed than I seem, dear Edith!”

She turned to me as if to ask me to explain myself.

“Will you listen to me while I tell you how?”

“What can you mean? Certainly.”

“Then listen, for I fear I can scarce bring myself
to repeat what I am going to say. When I first learned
to love you, and when I promised to love you for
life, you were thought to be dying, and I was a boy.
I did not count on the future, for I despaired of your
living to share it with me, and, if I had done so, I
was still a child, and knew nothing of the world. I
have since grown more ambitious, and, I may as well
say at once, more selfish and less poetical. You will
easily divine my drift. You are poor, and I find myself,
as you have seen to-night, in a position which
will enable me to marry more to my advantage; and,
with these views, I am sure I should only make you
miserable by fulfilling my contract with you, and you
will agree with me that I consult our mutual happiness
by this course—don't you think?”

At this instant I gave a signal to Job, who approached
and made some sensible remarks about the weather;
and, after another turn or two, I released Miss Linsey's
arm, and cautioning her against the night air, left her
to finish her promenade and swallow her own projected
speech and mine, and went to bed.

And so ended my first love!

SCENES OF FEAR.

1. No. I.
THE DISTURBED VIGIL.

Such a night! It was like a festival of Dian. A
burst of a summer shower at sunset, with a clap or
two of thunder, had purified the air to an intoxicating
rareness, and the free breathing of the flowers, and
the delicious perfume from the earth and grass, and
the fresh foliage of the new spring, showed the delight
and sympathy of inanimate Nature in the night's beauty.
There was no atmosphere—nothing between the
eye and the pearly moon—and she rode through the
heavens without a veil, like a queen as she is, giving a
glimpse of her nearer beauty for a festal favor to the
worshipping stars.

I was a student at the famed university of Connecticut,
and the bewilderments of philosophy and poetry
were strong upon me, in a place where exquisite natural
beauty, and the absence of all other temptation,
secure to the classic neophite an almost supernatural
wakefulness of fancy. I contracted a taste for the
horrible in those days, which still clings to me. I

have travelled the world over, with no object but general
observation, and have dawdled my hour at courts
and operas with little interest, while the sacking and
drowning of a woman in the Bosphorus, the impalement
of a robber on the Nile, and the insane hospitals
from Liverpool to Cathay, are described in my capricious
journal with the vividness of the most stirring
adventure.

There is a kind of crystallization in the circumstances
of one's life. A peculiar turn of mind draws
to itself events fitted to its particular nucleus, and it is
frequently a subject of wonder why one man meets
with more remarkable things than another, when it is
owing merely to a difference of natural character.

It was, as I was saying, a night of wonderful beauty.
I was watching a corpse. In that part of the United
States, the dead are never left alone till the earth is
thrown upon them; and, as a friend of the family, I
had been called upon for this melancholy service on
the night preceding the interment. It was a death
which had left a family of broken hearts; for, beneath
the sheet which sank so appallingly to the outline of
a human form, lay a wreck of beauty and sweetness
whose loss seemed to the survivors to have darkened
the face of the earth. The ethereal and touching
loveliness of that dying girl, whom I had known only
a hopeless victim of consumption, springs up in my
memory even yet, and mingles with every conception
of female beauty.

Two ladies, friends of the deceased, were to share
my vigils. I knew them but slightly, and, having read
them to sleep an hour after midnight, I performed
my half-hourly duty of entering the room where the
corpse lay, to look after the lights, and then strolled
into the garden to enjoy the quiet of the summer night.
The flowers were glittering in their pearl-drops, and
the air was breathless.

The sight of the long, sheeted corpse, the sudden
flare of lights as the long snuffs were removed from
the candles, the stillness of the close-shuttered room,
and my own predisposition to invest death with a supernatural
interest, had raised my heart to my throat.
I walked backward and forward in the garden-path;
and the black shadows beneath the lilacs, and even
the glittering of the glow-worms within them, seemed
weird and fearful.

The clock struck, and I re-entered. My companions
still slept, and I passed on to the inner chamber.
I trimmed the lights, and stood and looked at the
white heap lying so fearfully still within the shadow
of the curtains; and my blood seemed to freeze. At
the moment when I was turning away with a strong
effort at a more composed feeling, a noise like a flutter
of wings, followed by a rush and a sudden silence,
struck on my startled ear. The street was as quiet as
death, and the noise, which was far too audible to be a
deception of the fancy, had come from the side toward
an uninhabited wing of the house. My heart stood
still. Another instant, and the fire-screen was dashed
down, and a white cat rushed past me, and with the
speed of light sprang like an hyena upon the corpse.
The flight of a vampyre into the chamber would not
have more curdled my veins. A convulsive shudder
ran cold over me, but recovering my self-command, I
rushed to the animal (of whose horrible appetite for
the flesh of the dead I had read incredulously), and attempted
to tear her from the body. With her claws
fixed in the breast, and a yowl like the wail of an infernal
spirit, she crouched fearlessly upon it, and the
stains already upon the sheet convinced me that it
would be impossible to remove her without shockingly
disfiguring the corpse. I seized her by the throat, in
the hope of choking her; but with the first pressure
of my fingers, she flew into my face, and the infuriated
animal seemed persuaded that it was a contest for life.
Half blinded by the fury of her attack, I loosed her
for a moment, and she immediately leaped again upon
the corpse, and had covered her feet and face with
blood before I could recover my hold upon her. The
body was no longer in a situation to be spared, and I
seized her with a desperate grasp to draw her off; but
to my horror, the half-covered and bloody corpse rose
upright in her fangs, and, while I paused in fear, sat
with drooping arms, and head fallen with ghastly helplessness
over the shoulder. Years have not removed
that fearful spectacle from my eyes.

The corpse sank back, and I succeeded in throttling
the monster, and threw her at last lifeless from the
window. I then composed the disturbed limbs, laid
the hair away once more smoothly on the forehead,
and, crossing the hands over the bosom, covered the
violated remains, and left them again to their repose.
My companions, strangely enough, slept on, and I paced
the garden-walk alone, till the day, to my inexpressible
relief, dawned over the mountains.

2. No. II.
THE MAD SENIOR.

I was called upon in my senior year to watch with
an insane student. He was a man who had attracted
a great deal of attention in college. He appeared in
an extraordinary costume at the beginning of our
freshman term, and wrote himself down as Washington
Greyling, of —, an unheard-of settlement
somewhere beyond the Mississippi. His coat and other
gear might have been the work of a Chickasaw
tailor, aided by the superintending taste of some white
huntsman, who remembered faintly the outline of habiliments
he had not seen for half a century. It was
a body of green cloth, eked out with wampum and
otter-skin, and would have been ridiculous if it had
not encased one of the finest models of a manly frame
that ever trod the earth. With close-curling black
hair, a fine weather-browned complexion, Spanish features
(from his mother—a frequent physiognomy in
the countries bordering on Spanish America), and
the port and lithe motion of a lion, he was a figure to
look upon in any disguise with warm admiration.
He was soon put into the hands of a tailor-proper,
and, with the facility which belongs to his countrymen,
became in a month the best-dressed man in college.
His manners were of a gentleman-like mildness,
energetic, but courteous and chivalresque, and, unlike
most savages and all coins, he polished without “losing
his mark.” At the end of his first term, he would
have been called a high-bred gentleman at any court
in Europe.

The opening of his mind was almost as rapid and
extraordinary. He seized everything with an ardor
and freshness that habit and difficulty never deadened.
He was like a man who had tumbled into a new star,
and was collecting knowledge for a world to which he
was to return. The first in all games, the wildest in
all adventure, the most distinguished even in the elegant
society for which the town is remarkable, and
unfailingly brilliant in his recitations and college performances,
he was looked upon as a sort of admirable
phenomenon, and neither envied nor opposed in anything.
I have often thought, in looking on him, that
his sensations at coming fresh from a wild western
prairie, and, at the first measure of his capacities with
men of better advantages, finding himself so uniformly
superior, must have been stirringly delightful. It is a
wonder he never became arrogant; but it was the last
foible of which he could have been accused.

We were reading hard for the honors in the senior
year, when Greyling suddenly lost his reason. He

had not been otherwise ill, and had, apparently in the
midst of high health, gone mad at a moment's warning.
The physicians scarce knew how to treat him.
The confinement to which he was at first subjected,
however, was thought inexpedient, and he seemed to
justify their lenity by the gentlest behavior when at
liberty. He seemed oppressed by a heart-breaking
melancholy. We took our turns in guarding and
watching with him, and it was upon my first night of
duty that the incident happened which I have thus
endeavored to introduce.

It was scarce like a vigil with a sick man, for our
patient went regularly to bed, and usually slept well.
I took my “Lucretius” and the “Book of the Martyrs,”
which was just then my favorite reading, and
with hot punch, a cold chicken, books, and a fire, I
looked forward to it as merely a studious night; and,
as the wintry wind of January rattled in at the old
college windows, I thrust my feet into slippers, drew
my dressing-gown about me, and congratulated myself
on the excessive comfortableness of my position.
The Sybarite's bed of roses would have been no temptation.

It had snowed all day, but the sun had set with a
red rift in the clouds, and the face of the sky was
swept in an hour to the clearness of—I want a comparison—your
own blue eye, dear Mary! The all-glorious
arch of heaven was a mass of sparkling stars.

Greyling slept, and I, wearied of the cold philosophy
of the Latin poet, took to my “Book of Martyrs.” I
read on, and read on. The college clock struck, it
seemed to me, the quarters rather than the hours.
Time flew; it was three.

“Horrible! most horrible!” I started from my chair
with the exclamation, and felt as if my scalp were
self-lifted from my head. It was a description in the
harrowing faithfulness of the language of olden time,
painting almost the articulate groans of an impaled
Christian. I clasped the old iron-bound book, and
rushed to the window as if my heart was stifling for
fresh air.

Again at the fire. The large walnut fagots had
burnt to a bed of bright coals, and I sat gazing into it,
totally unable to shake off the fearful incubus from
my breast. The martyr was there—on the very hearth
—with the stakes scornfully crossed in his body; and
as the large coals cracked asunder and revealed the
prightness within, I seemed to follow the nerve-rending
instrument from hip to shoulder, and suffer with him
pang for pang, as if the burning redness were the pools
of his fevered blood.

“Aha!”

It struck on my ear like the cry of an exulting fiend.

“Aha!”

I shrunk into the chair as the awful cry was repeated,
and looked slowly and with difficult courage
over my shoulder. A single fierce eye was fixed upon
me from the mass of bed-clothes, and, for a moment,
the relief from the fear of some supernatural presence
was like water to a parched tongue. I sank back relieved
into the chair.

There was a rustling immediately in the bed, and,
starting again, I found the wild eyes of my patient
fixed still steadfastly upon me. He was creeping
stealthily out of bed. His bare foot touched the floor,
and his toes worked upon it as if he was feeling its
strength, and in a moment he stood upright on his
feet, and, with his head forward and his pale face livid
with rage, stepped toward me. I looked to the door.
He observed the glance, and in the next instant he
sprang clear over the bed, turned the key, and dashed
it furiously through the window.

“Now!” said he.

“Greyling!” I said. I had heard that a calm and
fixed gaze would control a madman, and with the most
difficult exertion of nerve, I met his lowering eye, and
we stood looking at each other for a full minute, like
men of marble.

“Why have you left your bed?” I mildly asked.

“To kill you!” was the appalling answer; and in
another moment the light-stand was swept from between
us, and he struck me down with a blow that
would have felled a giant. Naked as he was, I had
no hold upon him, even if in muscular strength I had
been his match; and with a minute's struggle I yielded,
for resistance was vain. His knee was now upon my
breast and his left hand in my hair, and he seemed
by the tremulousness of his clutch to be hesitating
whether he should dash my brains out on the hearth.
I could scarce breathe with his weight upon my chest,
but I tried, with the broken words I could command,
to move his pity. He laughed, as only maniacs can,
and placed his hand on my throat. Oh God! shall I
ever forget the fiendish deliberation with which he
closed those feverish fingers?

“Greyling! for God's sake! Greyling!”

“Die! curse you!”

In the agonies of suffocation I struck out my arm,
and almost buried it in the fire upon the hearth.
With an expiring thought, I grasped a handful of the
red-hot coals, and had just strength sufficient to press
them hard against his side.

“Thank God!” I exclaimed with my first breath,
as my eyes recovered from their sickness, and I looked
upon the familiar objects of my chamber once more.

The madman sat crouched like a whipped dog in
the farthest corner of the room, gibbering and moaning,
with his hands upon his burnt side. I felt that I
had escaped death by a miracle.

The door was locked, and, in dread of another attack,
I threw up the broken window, and to my
unutterable joy the figure of a man was visible upon
the snow near the out-buildings of the college. It
was a charity-student, risen before day to labor in the
wood-yard. I shouted to him, and Greyling leaped
to his feet.

“There is time yet!” said the madman; but as he
came toward me again with the same panther-like
caution as before, I seized a heavy stone pitcher
standing in the window-seat, and hurling it at him
with a fortunate force and aim, he fell stunned and
bleeding on the floor. The door was burst open at
the next moment, and, calling for assistance, we tied
the wild Missourian into his bed, bound up his head
and side, and committed him to fresh watchers....

We have killed bears together at a Missouri salt-lick
since then; but I never see Wash. Greyling with
a smile off his face, without a disposition to look
around for the door.

3. No. III.
THE LUNATIC'S SKATE.

I have only, in my life, known one lunatic—properly
so called. In the days when I carried a satchel
on the banks of the Shawsheen (a river whose half-lovely,
half-wild scenery is tied like a silver thread
about my heart), Larry Wynn and myself were the
farthest boarders from school, in a solitary farm-house
on the edge of a lake of some miles square, called by
the undignified title of Pomp's pond. An old negro,
who was believed by the boys to have come over with
Christopher Columbus, was the only other human
being within anything like a neighborhood of the
lake (it took its name from him), and the only approaches
to its waters, girded in as it was by an almost
impenetrable forest, were the path through old Pomp's
clearing, and that by our own door. Out of school,
Larry and I were inseparable. He was a pale, sad-faced

boy, and, in the first days of our intimacy, he
had confided a secret to me which, from its uncommon
nature, and the excessive caution with which he
kept it from every one else, bound me to him with
more than the common ties of schoolfellow attachment..
We built wigwams together in the woods, had
our tomahawks made of the same fashion, united our
property in fox-traps, and played Indians with perfect
contentment in each other's approbation.

I had found out, soon after my arrival at school,
that Larry never slept on a moonlight night. With
the first slender horn that dropped its silver and graceful
shape behind the hills, his uneasiness commenced,
and by the time its full and perfect orb poured a flood
of radiance over vale and mountain, he was like one
haunted by a pursuing demon. At early twilight he
closed the shutters, stuffing every crevice that could
admit a ray; and then, lighting as many candles as
he could beg or steal from our thrifty landlord, he sat
down with his book in moody silence, or paced the
room with an uneven step, and a solemn melancholy
in his fine countenance, of which, with all my familiarity
with him, I was almost afraid. Violent exercise
seemed the only relief, and when the candles
burnt low after midnight, and the stillness around the
lone farm-house became too absolute to endure, he
would throw up the window, and, leaping desperately
out into the moonlight, rush up the hill into the
depths of the wild forest, and walk on with supernatural
excitement till the day dawned. Faint and pale he
would then creep into his bed, and, begging me to
make his very common and always credited excuse of
illness, sleep soundly till I returned from school. I
soon became used to his way, ceased to follow him,
as I had once or twice endeavored to do, into the
forest, and never attempted to break in on the fixed
and wrapt silence which seemed to transform his lips
to marble. And for all this Larry loved me.

Our preparatory studies were completed, and, to
our mutual despair, we were destined to different
universities. Larry's father was a disciple of the great
Channing, and mine a Trinitarian of uncommon zeal;
and the two institutions of Yale and Harvard were in
the hands of most eminent men of either persuasion,
and few are the minds that could resist a four years'
ordeal in either. A student was as certain to come
forth a Unitarian from one as a Calvinist from the
other; and in the New England states these two sects
are bitterly hostile. So, to the glittering atmosphere
of Channing and Everett went poor Larry, lonely
and dispirited; and I was committed to the sincere
zealots of Connecticut, some two hundred miles off,
to learn Latin and Greek, if it pleased Heaven, but
the mysteries of “election and free grace,” whether
or no.

Time crept, ambled, and galloped, by turns, as we
were in love or out, moping in term-time, or revelling
in vacation, and gradually, I know not why, our correspondence
had dropped, and the four years had
come to their successive deaths, and we had never
met. I grieved over it; for in those days I believed
with a school-boy's fatuity,

and I loved Larry Wynn, as I hope I may never love
man or woman again—with a pain at my heart. I
wrote one or two reproachful letters in my senior
years, but his answers were overstrained, and too full
of protestations by half; and seeing that absence had
done its usual work on him, I gave it up, and wrote
an epitaph on a departed friendship. I do not know,
by the way, why I am detaining you with all this, for
it has nothing to do with my story; but let it pass as
an evidence that it is a true one. The climax of things
in real life has not the regular procession of incidents
in a tragedy.

Some two or three years after we had taken “the
irrevocable yoke” of life upon us (not matrimony,
but money-making), a winter occurred of uncommonly
fine sleighing—sledging, you call it in England.
At such times the American world is all
abroad, either for business or pleasure. The roads
are passable at any rate of velocity of which a horse
is capable; smooth as montagnes Russes, and hard
as is good for hoofs; and a hundred miles is diminished
to ten in facility of locomotion. The hunter
brings down his venison to the cities, the western
trader takes his family a hundred leagues to buy
calicoes and tracts, and parties of all kinds scour the
country, drinking mulled wine and “flip,” and shaking
the very nests out of the fir-trees with the ringing of
their horses' bells. You would think death and sorrow
were buried in the snow with the leaves of the
last autumn.

I do not know why I undertook, at this time, a
journey to the west; certainly not for scenery, for it
was a world of waste, desolate, and dazzling whiteness,
for a thousand unbroken miles. The trees were
weighed down with snow, and the houses were
thatched and half-buried in it, and the mountains and
valleys were like the vast waves of an illimitable sea,
congealed with its yesty foam in the wildest hour of a
tempest. The eye lost its powers in gazing on it.
The “spirit-bird” that spread his refreshing green
wings before the pained eyes of Thalaba would have
been an inestimable fellow-traveller. The worth of
the eyesight lay in the purchase of a pair of green
goggles.

In the course of a week or two, after skimming over
the buried scenery of half a dozen states, each as
large as Great Britain (more or less), I found myself
in a small town on the border of one of our western
lakes. It was some twenty years since the bears had
found it thinly settled enough for their purposes, and
now it contained perhaps twenty thousand souls.
The oldest inhabitant, born in the town, was a youth
in his minority. With the usual precocity of new
settlements, it had already most of the peculiarities of
an old metropolis. The burnt stumps still stood about
among the houses, but there was a fashionable circle,
at the head of which were the lawyer's wife and the
member of Congress's daughter; and people ate their
peas with silver forks, and drank their tea with scandal,
and forgave men's many sins and refused to forgive
woman's one, very much as in towns whose history
is written in black letter. I dare say there were
not more than one or two offences against the moral
and Levitical law, fashionable on this side the water,
which had not been committed, with the authentic
aggravations, in the town of —; I would mention
the name if this were not a true story.

Larry Wynn (now Lawrence Wynn, Esq.) lived
here. He had, as they say in the United States, “hung
out a shingle” (Londonicé, put up a sign) as attorney-at-law,
and to all the twenty thousand innocent inhabitants
of the place, he was the oracle and the squire.
He was besides colonel of militia, churchwarden,
and canal commissioner; appointments which speak
volumes for the prospects of “rising young men” in
our flourishing republic.

Larry was glad to see me—very. I was more glad
to see him. I have a soft heart, and forgive a wrong
generally, if it touches neither my vanity nor my
purse. I forgot his neglect, and called him “Larry.”
By the same token he did not call me “Phil.” (There
are very few that love me, patient reader; but those
who do, thus abbreviate my pleasant name of Philip.
I was called after the Indian sachem of that name,
whose blood runs in this tawny hand.) Larry looked
upon me as a man. I looked on him, with all his
dignities and changes, through the sweet vista of
memory—as a boy. His mouth had acquired the

pinched corners of caution and mistrust common to
those who know their fellow-men; but I never saw it
unless when speculating as I am now. He was to me
the pale-faced and melancholy friend of my boyhood;
and I could have slept, as I used to do, with my arm
around his neck, and feared to stir lest I should wake
him. Had my last earthy hope lain in the palm of
my hand, I could have given it to him, had he needed
it, but to make him sleep; and yet he thought of me
but as a stranger under his roof, and added, in his
warmest moments, a “Mr.” to my name! There is
but one circumstance in my life that has wounded me
more. Memory avaunt!

Why should there be no unchangeableness in the
world? why no friendship? or why am I, and you,
gentle reader (for by your continuing to pore over
these idle musings, you have a heart too), gifted with
this useless and restless organ beating in our bosoms,
if its thirst for love is never to be slaked, and its aching
self-fulness never to find flow or utterance? I
would positively sell my whole stock of affections for
three farthings. Will you say “two?”

“You are come in good time,” said Larry one morning,
with a half-smile, “and shall be groomsman to
me. I am going to be married.”

“Married?”

“Married.”

I repeated the word after him, for I was surprised.
He had never opened his lips about his unhappy lunacy
since my arrival, and I had felt hurt at this apparent
unwillingness to renew our ancient confidence,
but had felt a repugnance to any forcing of the topic
upon him, and could only hope that he had outgrown
or overcome it. I argued, immediately on this information
of his intended marriage, that it must be so.
No man in his senses, I thought, would link an impending
madness to the fate of a confiding and lovely
woman.

He took me into his sleigh, and we drove to her
father's house. She was a flower in the wilderness.
Of a delicate form, as all my countrywomen are, and
lovely, as quite all certainly are not, large-eyed, soft
in her manners, and yet less timid than confiding and
sister-like, with a shade of melancholy in her smile,
caught, perhaps, with the “trick of sadness” from himself,
and a patrician slightness of reserve, or pride,
which Nature sometimes, in very mockery of high
birth, teaches her most secluded child—the bride elect
was, as I said before, a flower in the wilderness. She
was one of those women we sigh to look upon as they
pass by, as if there went a fragment of the wreck of
some blessed dream.

The day arrived for the wedding, and the sleigh-bells
jingled merrily into the village. The morning
was as soft and genial as June, and the light snow on
the surface of the lake melted, and lay on the breast
of the solid ice beneath, giving it the effect of one white
silver mirror, stretching to the edge of the horizon.
It was exquisitely beautiful, and I was standing at the
window in the afternoon, looking off upon the shining
expanse, when Larry approached, and laid his hand
familiarly on my shoulder.

“What glorious skating we shall have,” said I, “if
this smooth water freezes to-night!”

I turned the next moment to look at him; for we
had not skated together since I went out, at his earnest
entreaty, at midnight, to skim the little lake where we
had passed our boyhood, and drive away the fever from
his brain, under the light of a full moon.

He remembered it, and so did I; and I put my arm
behind him, for the color fled from his face, and I
thought he would have sunk to the floor.

“The moon is full to-night,” said he, recovering instantly
to a cold self-possession.

I took hold of his hand firmly, and, in as kind a
tone as I could summon, spoke of our early friend
ship, and apologizing thus for the freedom, asked if he
had quite overcome his melancholy disease. His face
worked with emotion, and he tried to withdraw his
hand from my clasp, and evidently wished to avoid an
answer.

“Tell me, dear Larry,” said I.

“Oh God! No!” said he, breaking violently from
me, and throwing himself with his face downward upon
the sofa. The tears streamed through his fingers upon
the silken cushion.

“Not cured? And does she know it?”

“No! no! thank God! not yet!”

I remained silent a few minutes, listening to his
suppressed moans (for he seemed heart-broken with
the confession), and pitying while I inwardly condemned
him. And then the picture of that lovely and
fond woman rose up before me, and the impossibility
of concealing his fearful malady from his wife, and
the fixed insanity in which it must end, and the whole
wreck of her hopes and his own prospects and happiness—and
my heart grew sick.

I sat down by him, and, as it was too late to remonstrate
on the injustice he was committing toward her,
I asked how he came to appoint the night of a full
moon for his wedding. He gave up his reserve, calmed
himself, and talked of it at last as if he were relieved
by the communication. Never shall I forget the
doomed pallor, the straining eye, and feverish hand,
of my poor friend during that half hour.

Since he had left college he had striven with the
whole energy of his soul against it. He had plunged
into business—he had kept his bed resolutely night
after night, till his brain seemed on the verge of phrensy
with the effort—he had taken opium to secure to himself
an artificial sleep; but he had never dared to confide
it to any one, and he had no friend to sustain him
in his fearful and lonely hours; and it grew upon him
rather than diminished. He described to me with the
most touching pathos how he had concealed it for
years—how he had stolen out like a thief to give vent
to his insane restlessness in the silent streets of the city
at midnight, and in the more silent solitudes of the
forest—how he had prayed, and wrestled, and wept
over it—and finally, how he had come to believe that
there was no hope for him except in the assistance and
constant presence of some one who would devote life
to him in love and pity. Poor Larry! I put up a silent
prayer in my heart that the desperate experiment might
not end in agony and death.

The sun set, and, according to my prediction, the
wind changed suddenly to the north, and the whole
surface of the lake in a couple of hours became of the
lustre of polished steel. It was intensely cold.

The fires blazed in every room of the bride's paternal
mansion, and I was there early to fulfil my office
of master of ceremonies at the bridal. My heart was
weighed down with a sad boding, but I shook off at
least the appearance of it, and superintended the concoction
of a huge bowl of punch with a merriment
which communicated itself in the shape of most joyous
hilarity to a troop of juvenile relations. The house
resounded with their shouts of laughter.

In the midst of our noise in the small inner room
entered Larry. I started back, for he looked more like
a demon possessed than a Christian man. He had walked
to the house alone in the moonlight, not daring to
trust himself in company. I turned out the turbulent
troop about me, and tried to dispel his gloom, for a face
like his at that moment would have put to flight the
rudest bridal party ever assembled on holy ground.
He seized on the bowl of strong spirits which I had
mixed for a set of hardy farmers, and before I could
tear it from his lips had drank a quantity which, in an
ordinary mood, would have intoxicated him helplessly
in an hour. He then sat down with his face buried in
his hands, and in a few minutes rose, his eyes sparkling

with excitement, and the whole character of his
face utterly changed. I thought he had gone wild.

“ Now, Phil,” said he; “now for my bride!” And
with an unbecoming levity he threw open the door,
and went half dancing into the room where the friends
were already assembled to witness the ceremony.

I followed with fear and anxiety. He took his place
by the side of the fair creature on whom he had placed
his hopes of life, and, though sobered somewhat by
the impressiveness of the scene, the wild sparkle still
danced in his eyes, and I could see that every nerve
in his frame was excited to the last pitch of tension.
If he had fallen a gibbering maniac on the floor, I
should not have been astonished.

The ceremony proceeded, and the first tone of his
voice in the response startled even the bride. If it had
rung from the depths of a cavern, it could not have
been more sepulchral. I looked at him with a shudder.
His lips were curled with an exulting expression,
mixed with an indefinable fear; and all the blood
in his face seemed settled about his eyes, which were
so bloodshot and fiery, that I have ever since wondered
he was not, at the first glance, suspected of insanity.
But oh! the heavenly sweetness with which that loveliest
of creatures promised to love and cherish him, in
sickness and in health! I never go to a bridal but it
half breaks my heart; and as the soft voice of that
beautiful girl fell with its eloquent meaning on my
ear, and I looked at her, with lips calm and eyes moistened,
vowing a love which I knew to be stronger than
death, to one who, I feared, was to bring only pain and
sorrow into her bosom, my eyes warmed with irrepressible
tears, and I wept.

The stir in the room as the clergyman closed his
prayer, seemed to awake him from a trance. He
looked around with a troubled face for a moment; and
then, fixing his eyes on his bride, he suddenly clasped
his arms about her, and straining her violently to his
bosom, broke into an hysterical passion of tears and
laughter. Then suddenly resuming his self-command,
he apologized for the over-excitement of his feelings,
and behaved with forced and gentle propriety till the
guests departed.

There was an apprehensive gloom over the spirits
of the small bridal party left in the lighted rooms; and
as they gathered round the fire, I approached, and endeavored
to take a gay farewell. Larry was sitting
with his arm about his wife, and he wrung my hand in
silence as I said. “Good-night,” and dropped his head
upon her shoulder. I made some futile attempt to
rally him, but it jarred on the general feeling, and I
left the house.

It was a glorious night. The clear piercing air had
a vitreous brilliancy, which I have never seen in any
other climate, the rays of the moonlight almost visibly
splintering with the keenness of the frost. The
moon herself was in the zenith, and there seemed
nothing between her and the earth but palpable and
glittering cold.

I hurried home: it was but eleven o'clock; and,
heaping up the wood in the large fireplace, I took a
volume of “Ivanhoe,” which had just then appeared,
and endeavored to rid myself of my unpleasant
thoughts. I read on till midnight; and then, in a
pause of the story, I rose to look out upon the night,
hoping, for poor Larry's sake, that the moon was
buried in clouds. The house was near the edge of
the lake; and as I looked down upon the glassy waste,
spreading away from the land, I saw the dark figure
of a man kneeling directly in the path of the moon's
rays. In another moment he rose to his feet, and
the tall, slight form of my poor friend was distinctly
visible, as, with long and powerful strokes, he sped
away upon his skates along the shore.

To take my own Hollanders, put a collar of fur
around my mouth, and hurry after him, was the work
of but a minute. My straps were soon fastened; and,
following in the marks of the sharp irons at the top of
my speed, I gained sight of him in about half an hour,
and with great effort neared him sufficiently to shout
his name with a hope of being heard.

“Larry! Larry!”

The lofty mountain-shore gave back the cry in repeated
echoes—but he redoubled his strokes, and
sped on faster than before. At my utmost speed I
followed on; and when, at last, I could almost lay
my hand on his shoulder, I summoned my strength
to my breathless lungs, and shouted again—“Larry!
Larry!”

He half looked back, and the full moon at that instant
streamed full into his eyes. I have thought
since that he could not have seen me for its dazzling
brightness; but I saw every line of his features with
the distinctness of daylight, and I shall never forget
them. A line of white foam ran through his half-parted
lips; his hair streamed wildly over his forehead,
on which the perspiration glittered in large drops; and
every lineament of his expressive face was stamped with
unutterable and awful horror. He looked back no
more; but, increasing his speed with an energy of
which I did not think his slender frame capable, he
began gradually to outstrip me. Trees, rocks, and
hills, fled back like magic. My limbs began to grow
numb; my fingers had lost all feeling, but a strong
northeast wind was behind us, and the ice smoother
than a mirror: and I struck out my feet mechanically,
and still sped on.

For two hours we had kept along the shore. The
branches of the trees were reflected in the polished
ice, and the hills seemed hanging in the air, and floating
past us with the velocity of storm-clouds. Far
down the lake, however, there glimmered the just
visible light of a fire, and I was thanking God that
we were probably approaching some human succor,
when, to my horror, the retreating figure before me
suddenly darted off to the left, and made swifter than
before toward the centre of the icy waste. Oh, God!
what feelings were mine at that moment! Follow him
far I dared not; for, the sight of land once lost, as it
would be almost instantly with our tremendous speed,
we perished, without a possibility of relief.

He was far beyond my voice, and to overtake him
was the only hope. I summoned my last nerve for
the effort, and keeping him in my eye, struck across
at a sharper angle, with the advantage of the wind full
in my back. I had taken note of the mountains, and
knew that we were already forty miles from home, a
distance it would be impossible to retrace against the
wind; and the thought of freezing to death, even if
I could overtake him, forced itself appallingly upon
me.

Away I flew, despair giving new force to my limbs,
and soon gained on the poor lunatic, whose efforts
seemed flagging and faint. I neared him. Another
struggle! I could have dropped down where I was,
and slept, if there were death in the first minute, so
stiff and drowsy was every muscle in my frame.

“Larry!” I shouted. “Larry!”

He started at the sound, and I could hear a smothered
and breathless shriek, as, with supernatural
strength, he straightened up his bending figure, and,
leaning forward again, sped away from me like a
phantom on the blast.

I could follow no longer. I stood stiff on my skates,
still going on rapidly before the wind, and tried to
look after him, but the frost had stiffened my eyes,
and there was a mist before them, and they felt like
glass. Nothing was visible around me but moonlight
and ice, and dimly and slowly I began to retrace the
slight path of semicircles toward the shore. It was
painful work. The wind seemed to divide the very
fibres of the skin upon my face. Violent exercise no

longer warmed my body, and I felt the cold shoot
sharply into my loins, and bind across my breast like
a chain of ice; and, with the utmost strength of mind
at my command, I could just resist the terrible inclination
to lie down and sleep. I forgot poor Larry.
Life—dear life!—was now my only thought! So selfish
are we in our extremity!

With difficulty I at last reached the shore, and then,
unbuttoning my coat, and spreading it wide for a sail,
I set my feet together, and went slowly down before
the wind, till the fire which I had before noticed began
to blaze cheerily in the distance. It seemed an
eternity in my slow progress. Tree after tree threw
the shadow of its naked branches across the way; hill
after hill glided slowly backward; but my knees
seemed frozen together, and my joints fixed in ice;
and if my life had depended on striking out my feet,
I should have died powerless. My jaws were locked,
my shoulders drawn half down to my knees, and in a
few minutes more, I am well convinced, the blood
would have thickened in my veins, and stood still, for
ever.

I could see the tongues of the flames—I counted
the burning fagots—a form passed between me and
the fire—I struck, and fell prostrate on the snow; and
I remember no more.

The sun was darting a slant beam through the trees
when I awoke. The genial warmth of a large bed of
embers played on my cheek, a thick blanket enveloped
me, and beneath my head was a soft cushion of withered
leaves. On the opposite side of the fire lay four
Indians wrapped in their blankets, and, with her head
on her knees, and her hands clasped over her ankles,
sat an Indian woman, who had apparently fallen asleep
upon her watch. The stir I made aroused her, and,
as she piled on fresh fagots, and kindled them to a
bright blaze with a handful of leaves, drowsiness came
over me again, and I wrapped the blanket about me
more closely, and shut my eyes to sleep.

I awoke refreshed. It must have been ten o'clock
by the sun. The Indians were about, occupied in various
avocations, and the woman was broiling a slice
of deer's flesh on the coals. She offered it to me as I
rose; and having eaten part of it with a piece of a cake
made of meal, I requested her to call in the men, and,
with offers of reward, easily induced them to go with
me in search of my lost friend.

We found him, as I had anticipated, frozen to death,
far out on the lake. The Indians tracked him by the
marks of his skate-irons, and from their appearance
he had sunk quietly down, probably drowsy and exhausted,
and had died of course without pain. His
last act seemed to have been under the influence of
his strange madness, for he lay on his face, turned
from the quarter of the setting moon.

We carried him home to his bride. Even the Indians
were affected by her uncontrollable agony. I
can not describe that scene, familiar as I am with pictures
of horror.

I made inquiries with respect to the position of his
bridal chamber. There were no shutters, and the
moon streamed broadly into it: and after kissing his
shrinking bride with the violence of a madman, he
sprang out of the room with a terrific scream, and she
saw him no more till he lay dead on his bridal bed.

INCIDENTS ON THE HUDSON.

M. Chabert, the fire-eater, would have found New
York uncomfortable. I would mention the height of
the thermometer, but for an aversion I have to figures.
Broadway, at noon, had been known to fry soles.

I had fixed upon the first of August for my annua
trip to Saratoga—and with a straw hat, a portmanteau,
and a black boy, was huddled into the “rather-faster-than-lightning”
steamer, “North America,” with about
seven hundred other people, like myself, just in time.
Some hundred and fifty gentlemen and ladies, thirty
seconds too late, stood “larding” the pine chips upon
the pier, gazing after the vanishing boat through showers
of perspiration. Away we “streaked” at the rate
of twelve miles in the hour against the current, and
by the time I had penetrated to the baggage-closet,
and seated William Wilberforce upon my portmanteau,
with orders not to stir for eleven hours and seven minutes,
we were far up the Hudson, opening into its hills
and rocks, like a witches' party steaming through the
Hartz in a caldron.

A North-river steamboat, as a Vermont boy would
phrase it, is another guess sort o' thing from a Britisher.
A coal-barge and an eight-oars on the Thames
are scarce more dissimilar. Built for smooth water
only, our river boats are long, shallow, and graceful,
of the exquisite proportions of a pleasure-yacht, and
painted as brilliantly and fantastically as an Indian
shell. With her bow just leaning up from the surface
of the stream, her cut-water throwing off a curved and
transparent sheet from either side, her white awnings,
her magical speed, and the gay spectacle of a thousand
well-dressed people on her open decks, I know nothing
prettier than the vision that shoots by your door
as you sit smoking in your leaf-darkened portico on
the bold shore of the Hudson.

The American edition of Mrs. Trollope (several
copies of which are to be found in every boat, serving
the same purpose to the feelings of the passengers as
the escape-valve to the engine) lay on a sofa beside
me, and taking it up, as to say, “I will be let alone,”
I commenced dividing my attention in my usual quiet
way between the varied panorama of rock and valley
flying backward in our progress, and the as varied
multitude about me.

For the mass of the women, as far as satin slippers,
hats, dresses, and gloves, could go, a Frenchman might
have fancied himself in the midst of a transplantation
from the Boulevards. In London, French fashions are
in a manner Anglified: but an American woman looks
on the productions of Herbault, Boivin, and Maneuri,
as a translator of the Talmud on the inspired text. The
slight figure and small feet of the race rather favor the
resemblance; and a French milliner, who would probably
come to America expecting to see bears and buffaloes
prowling about the landing-place, would rub her
eyes in New York, and imagine she was still in France,
and had crossed, perhaps, only the broad part of the
Seine.

The men were a more original study. Near me sat
a Kentuckian on three chairs. He had been to the metropolis,
evidently for the first time, and had “looked
round sharp.” In a fist of no very delicate proportions,
was crushed a pair of French kid-gloves, which,
if they fulfilled to him a glove's destiny, would flatter
“the rich man” that “the camel” might yet give him
the required precedent. His hair had still the traces
of having been astonished with curling-tongs, and
across his Atlantean breast was looped, in a complicated
zig-zag, a chain that must have cost him a wilderness
of rackoon-skins. His coat was evidently the
production of a Mississippi tailor, though of the finest
English material; his shirt-bosom was ruffled like a
swan with her feathers full spread, and a black silk
cravat, tied in a kind of a curse-me-if-I-care-sort-of-a-knot,
flung out its ends like the arms of an Italian
improvisatore. With all this he was a man to look
upon with respect. His under jaw was set up to its
fellow with an habitual determination that would
throw a hickory-tree into a shiver; but frank good-nature,
and the most absolute freedom from suspicion,

lay at large on his Ajacean features, mixed with
an earnestness that commended itself at once to your
liking.

In a retired corner, near the wheel, stood a group
of Indians, as motionless by the hour together as
figures carved in rosso antico. They had been on
their melancholy annual visit to the now-cultivated
shores of Connecticut, the burial-place, but unforgotten
and once wild home of their fathers. With the
money given them by the romantic persons whose
sympathies are yearly moved by these stern and poetical
pilgrims, they had taken a passage in the “fire-canoe,”
which would set them two hundred miles on
their weary journey back to the prairies. Their
Apollo-like forms loosely dressed in blankets, their
gaudy wampum-belts and feathers, the muscular arm
and close clutch upon the rifle, the total absence of
surprise at the unaccustomed wonders about them,
and the lowering and settled scorn and dislike expressed
in their copper faces, would have powerfully
impressed a European. The only person on whom
they deigned to cast a glance was the Kentuckian,
and at him they occasionally stole a look, as if, through
all his metropolian finery, they recognised metal with
whose ring they were familiar.

There were three foreigners on board, two of them
companions, and one apparently alone. With their
coats too small for them, their thick-soled boots and
sturdy figures, collarless cravats, and assumed unconsciousness
of the presence of another living soul, they
were recognisable at once as Englishmen. To most
of the people on board they probably appeared equally
well-dressed, and of equal pretensions to the character
of gentlemen; but any one who had made observations
between Temple Bar and the steps of Crockford's,
would easily resolve them into two Birmingham bagmen
“sinking the shop,” and a quiet gentleman on a
tour of information.

The only other persons I particularly noted were a
southerner, probably the son of a planter from Alabama,
and a beautiful girl, dressed in singularly bad
teste, who seemed his sister. I knew the “specimen”
well. The indolent attitude, the thin but powerfully-jointed
frame, the prompt politeness, the air of superiority
acquired from constant command over slaves, the
mouth habitually flexible and looking eloquent even
in silence, and the eye in which slept a volcano of violent
passions, were the marks that showed him of a
race that I had studied much, and preferred to all the
many and distinct classes of my countrymen. His
sister was of the slightest and most fragile figure,
graceful as a fawn, but with no trace of the dancing
master's precepts in her motions, vivid in her attention
to everything about her, and amused with all she saw;
a copy of Lalla Rookh sticking from the pocket of
her French apron, a number of gold chains hung outside
her travelling habit, and looped to her belt, and a
glorious profusion of dark curls broken loose from her
combs and floating unheeded over her shoulders.

Toward noon we rounded West Point, and shot
suddenly into the overshadowed gorge of the mountains,
as if we were dashing into the vein of a silver
mine, laid open and molten into a flowing river by a
flash of lightning. (The figure should be Montgomery's;
but I can in no other way give an idea of
the sudden darkening of the Hudson, and the underground
effect of the sharp over-hanging mountains as
you sweep first into the highlands.)

The solitary Englishman, who had been watching
the southern beauty with the greatest apparent interest,
had lounged over to her side of the boat, and,
with the instinctive knowledge that women have of
character, she had shrunk from the more obtrusive
attempts of the Brummagems to engage her in conversation,
and had addressed some remark to him,
which seemed to have advanced them at once to ac
quaintances of a year. They were admiring the stupendous
scenery together a moment before the boat
stopped for a passenger, off a small town above the
point. As the wheels were checked, there was a sudden
splash in the water, and a cry of “a lady overboard!”
I looked for the fair creature who had been
standing before me, and she was gone. The boat was
sweeping on, and as I darted to the railing I saw the
gurgling eddy where something had just gone down;
and in the next minute the Kentuckian and the
youngest of the Indians rushed together to the stern,
and clearing the taffrail with tremendous leaps, dived
side by side into the very centre of the foaming circle.
The Englishman had coolly seized a rope, and, by the
time they reappeared, stood on the railing with a coil
in his hand, and flung it with accurate calculation
directly over them. With immovably grave faces, and
eyes blinded with water, the two divers rose, holding
high between them—a large pine fagot! Shouts of
laughter pealed from the boat, and the Kentuckian,
discovering his error, gave the log an indignant fling
behind, and, taking hold of the rope, lay quietly to be
drawn in; while the Indian, disdaining assistance,
darted through the wake of the boat with arrowy
swiftness, and sprang up the side with the agility of a
tiger-cat. The lady reappeared from the cabin as
they jumped dripping upon the deck; the Kentuckian
shook himself, and sat down in the sun to dry; and
the graceful and stern Indian, too proud even to put
the wet hair away from his forehead, resumed his
place, and folded his arms, as indifferent and calm,
save the suppressed heaving of his chest, as if he had
never stirred from his stone-like posture.

An hour or two more brought us to the foot of the
Catskills, and here the boat lay alongside the pier to
discharge those of her passengers who were bound to
the house on the mountain. A hundred or more
moved to the gangway at the summons to get ready,
and among them the southerners and the Kentuckian.
I had begun to feel an interest in our fair fellow-passenger,
and I suddenly determined to join their party
—a resolution which the Englishman seemed to come
to at the same moment, and probably for the same
reason.

We slept at the pretty village on the bank of the
river, and the next day made the twelve hours' ascent
through glen and forest, our way skirted with the
most gorgeous and odorent flowers, and turned aside
and towered over the trees whose hoary and moss-covered
trunks would have stretched the conceptions
of the “Savage Rosa.” Everything that was not
lovely was gigantesque and awful. The rocks were
split with the visible impress of the Almighty power
that had torn them apart, and the daring and dizzy
crags spurred into the sky, as if the arms of a buried
and phrensied Titan were thrusting them from the
mountain's bosom. It gave one a kind of maddening
desire to shout and leap—the energy with which it
filled the mind so out-measured the power of the frame.

Near the end of our journey, we stopped together
on a jutting rock, to look back on the obstacles we
had overcome. The view extended over forty or fifty
miles of vale and mountain, and, with a half-shut eye,
it looked, in its green and lavish foliage, like a near
and unequal bed of verdure, while the distant Hudson
crept through it like a half-hid satin riband, lost as if
in clumps of moss among the broken banks of the
highlands. I was trying to fix the eye of my companion
upon West Point, when a steamer, with its
black funnel and retreating line of smoke, issued as if
from the bosom of the hills into an open break of the
river. It was as small apparently as the white hand
that pointed to it so rapturously.

“Oh!” said the half-breathless girl, “is it not like
some fairy bark on an eastern stream, with a spice-lamp
alight in its prow?”

“More like an old shoe afloat, with a cigar stuck in
it,” interrupted Kentucky.

As the sun began to kindle into a blaze of fire, the
tumultuous masses, so peculiar to an American sky,
turning every tree and rock to a lambent and rosy
gold, we stood on the broad platform on which the
house is built, braced even beyond weariness by the
invigorating and rarified air of the mountain. A hot
supper and an early pillow, with the feather beds and
blankets of winter, were unromantic circumstances,
but I am not aware that any one of the party made
any audible objection to them; I sat next the Kentuckian
at table, and can answer for two.

A mile or two back from the mountain-house, on
nearly the same level, the gigantic forest suddenly
sinks two or three hundred feet into the earth, forming
a tremendous chasm, over which a bold stag might
almost leap, and above which the rocks hang on
either side with the most threatening and frowning
grandeur. A mountain-stream creeps through the
forest to the precipice, and leaps as suddenly over, as
if, Arethusa-like, it fled into the earth from the pursuing
steps of a satyr. Thirty paces from its brink,
you would never suspect, but for the hollow reverberation
of the plunging stream, that anything but a
dim and mazy wood was within a day's journey. It
is visited as a great curiosity in scenery, under the
name of Cauterskill Falls.

We were all on the spot by ten the next morning,
after a fatiguing tramp through the forest; for the
Kentuckian had rejected the offer of a guide, undertaking
to bring us to it in a straight line by only the
signs of the water-course. The caprices of the little
stream had misled him, however, and we arrived half-dead
with the fatigue of our cross-marches.

I sat down on the bald edge of the precipice, and
suffered my more impatient companions to attempt
the difficult and dizzy descent before me. The Kentuckian
leaped from rock to rock, followed daringly
by the southerner; and the Englishman, thoroughly
enamored of the exquisite child of nature, who knew
no reserve beyond her maidenly modesty, devoted
himself to her assistance, and compelled her with
anxious entreaties to descend more cautiously. I lay
at my length as they proceeded, and with my head
over the projecting edge of the most prominent crag,
watched them in a giddy dream, half-stupified by the
grandeur of the scene, half-interested in their motions.

They reached the bottom of the glen at last, and
shouted to the two who had gone before, but they had
followed the dark passage of the stream to find its
vent, and were beyond sight or hearing.

After sitting a minute or two, the restless but overfatigued
girl rose to go nearer the fall, and I was remarking
to myself the sudden heaviness of her steps,
when she staggered, and turning toward her companion,
fell senseless into his arms. The closeness of the
air below, combined with over-exertion, had been too
much for her.

The small hut of an old man who served as a guide
stood a little back from the glen, and I had rushed
into it, and was on the first step of the descent with a
flask of spirits, when a cry from the opposite crag, in
the husky and choking scream of infuriated passion,
suddenly arrested me. On the edge of the yawning
chasm, gazing down into it with a livid and death-like
paleness, stood the southerner. I mechanically followed
his eye. His sister lay on her back upon a flat
rock immediately below him, and over her knelt the
Englishman, loosening the dress that pressed close
upon her throat, and with his face so near to hers as to
conceal it entirely from the view. I felt the brother's
misapprehension at a glance, but my tongue clung to
the roof of my mouth; for in the madness of his fury
he stood stretching clear over the brink, and every
instant I looked to see him plunge headlong. Be
fore I could recovery my breath, he started back, gazed
wildly round, and seizing upon a huge fragment of
rock, heaved it up with supernatural strength, and
hurled it into the abyss. Giddy and sick with horror,
I turned away and covered up my eyes. I felt assured
he had dashed them to atoms.

The lion roar of the Kentuckian was the first sound
that followed the thundering crash of the fragments.

“Hallo, youngster! what in tarnation are you arter?
You 've killed the gal, by gosh!”

The next moment I heard the loosened stones as he
went plunging down into the glen, and hurrying after
him with my restorative, I found the poor Englishman
lying senseless on the rocks, and the fainting girl,
escaped miraculously from harm, struggling slowly to
her senses.

On examination, the new sufferer appeared only
stunned by a small fragment which had struck him
on the temple, and the Kentuckian, taking him up in
his arms like a child, strode through the spray of the
fall, and held his head under the descending torrent
till he kicked lustily for his freedom. With a draught
from the flask, the pale Alabamian was soon perfectly
restored, and we stood on the rock together looking
at each other like people who had survived an earthquake.

We climbed the ascent and found the brother lying
with his face to the earth, beside himself with his
conflicting feelings. The rough tongue of the Kentuckian
to whom I had explained the apparent cause
of the rash act, soon cleared up the tempest, and he
joined us presently, and walked back by his sister's
side in silence.

We made ourselves into a party to pass the remainder
of the summer on the lakes, unwillingly letting off
the Kentuckian, who was in a hurry to get back to
propose himself for the legislature.

Three or four years have elapsed, and I find myself
a traveller in England. Thickly sown as are the
wonders and pleasures of London, an occasional dinner
with a lovely countrywoman in — Square, and
a gossip with her husband over a glass of wine, in
which Cauterskill Falls are not forgotten, are memorandums
in my diary never written but in “red
letters.”

THE GIPSY OF SARDIS.

Our tents were pitched in the vestibule of the house
of Crœsus, on the natural terrace which was once the
imperial site of Sardis. A humpbacked Dutch artist,
who had been in the service of Lady Hester Stanhope
as a draughtsman, and who had lingered about between
Jerusalem and the Nile till he was as much at
home in the east as a Hajji or a crocodile; an Englishman
qualifying himself for “The Travellers';”
a Smyrniote merchant in figs and opium; Job Smith
(my inseparable shadow) and myself, composed a
party at this time (August, 1834), rambling about
Asia Minor in turbans and Turkish saddles, and pitching
our tents, and cooking our pilau, wherever it
pleased Heaven and the inexorable suridji who was
our guide and caterer.

I thought at the time that I would compound to
abandon all the romance of that renowned spot, for a
clean shirt and something softer than a marble frustrum
for a pillow; but in the distance of memory, and my

self at this present in a deep morocco chair in the
library at “The Travellers';” the same scene in the
ruins of Sardis does not seem destitute of interest.

It was about four in the lazy summer afternoon.
We had arrived at Sardis at mid-day, and after a
quarrel whether we should eat immediately or wait till
the fashionable hour of three, the wooden dish containing
two chickens buried in a tumulus of rice,
shaped (in compliment to the spirit of the spot) like
the Mound of Alyattis in the plain below, was placed
in the centre of a marble pedestal; and with Job and
the Dutchman seated on the prostrate column dislodged
for our benefit, and the remainder of the party squatted
in the high grass, which grew in the royal palace as if
it had no memory of the foot-prints of the kings of
Lydia, we spooned away at the saturated rice, and
pulled the smothered chickens to pieces with an independence
of knives and forks that was worthy of the
“certain poor man in Attica.” Old Solon himself,
who stood, we will suppose, while reproving the ostentatious
monarch, at the base of that very column now
ridden astride by an inhabitant of a country of which
he never dreamed—(at least it strikes me there is no
mention of the Yankees in his philosophy)—the old
graybeard of the Academy himself, I say, would have
been edified at the primitive simplicity of our repast.
The salt (he would have asked if it was Attic) was
contained in a ragged play-bill, which the Dutchman
had purloined as a specimen of Modern Greek, from
the side of a house in Corfu; the mustard was in a
cracked powder-horn, which had been slung at the
breast of old Whalley the regicide, in the American
revolution, and which Job had brought from the Green
mountains, and held, till its present base uses, in religious
veneration; the ham (I should have mentioned
that respectable entremet before) was half enveloped
in a copy of the “Morning Post;” and the bread,
which had been seven days out from Smyrna, and had
been kept warm in the suridji's saddle bags twelve
hours in the twenty-four, lay in disjecta membra around
the marble table, with marks of vain but persevering
attacks in its nibbled edges. The luxury of our larder
was comprised in a flask which had once held Harvey's
sauce, and though the last drop had served as a
condiment to a roasted kid some three months before,
in the Acropolis at Athens, we still clung to it with
affectionate remembrance, and it was offered and refused
daily around the table for the melancholy pleasure
of hearing the mention of its name It was unlucky
that the only thing which the place afforded of the
best quality, and in sufficient quanities, was precisely
the one thing in the world for which no individual of
the party had any particular relish—water! It was
brought in a gourd from the bed of the “golden-sanded
Pactolus,” rippling away to the plain within pistol-shot
of the dining-room; but, to the shame of our simplicity
I must record, that a high-shouldered jug of
the rough wine of Samos, trodden out by the feet of
the lovely slaves of the ægean, and bought for a farthing
the bottle, went oftener to the unclassical lips of
the company. Methinks, now (the wind east in London,
and the day wet and abominable). I could barter
the dinner that I shall presently discuss, with its suite
of sherries and anchovy, to kneel down by that golden
river in the sunshine, and drink a draught of pure
lymph under the sky of effeminate Asia. Yet, when
I was there—so rarely do we recognise happiness till
she is gone—I wished myself (where I had never been)
in “merry England.” “Merry,” quotha? Scratch
it out, and write comfortable. I have seen none
“merry” in England, save those who have most cause
to be sad—the abandoned of themselves and the
world!

Out of the reach of ladies and the laws of society,
the most refined persons return very much to the natural
instincts from which they have departed in the
progress of civilization. Job rolled off the marble
column when there was nothing more to eat, and went
to sleep with the marks of the Samian wine turning
up the corners of his mouth like the salacious grin of
a satyr. The Dutchman got his hump into a hollow,
and buried his head in the long grass with the same obedience
to the prompting of nature, and idem the suridji
and the fig-merchant, leaving me seated alone among
the promiscuous ruins of Sardis and the dinner. The
dish of philosophy I had with myself on that occasion
will appear as a rechauffe in my novel (I intend to
write one); but meantime I may as well give you the
practical inference; that, as sleeping after dinner is
evidently Nature's law, Washington Irving is highly
excusable for the practice, and he would be a friend of
reason who should introduce couches and coffee at that
somnolent period, the digestive nap taking the place
of the indigestible politics usually forced upon the company
on the disappearance of the ladies. Why should
the world be wedded for ever to these bigoted inconveniences!

The grand track from the south and west of Asia
Minor passes along the plain between the lofty Acropolis
of Sardis and the tombs of her kings; and with
the snore of travellers from five different nations in
my ear, I sat and counted the camels in one of the
immense caravans never out of sight in the valley of
the Hermus. The long procession of those brown
monsters wound slowly past on their way to Smyrna,
their enormous burthens covered with colored trappings
and swaying backward and forward with their disjointed
gait, and their turbaned masters dozing on the
backs of the small asses of the east, leading each a
score by the tether at his back; the tinkling of their
hundred bells swarmed up through the hot air of the
afternoon with the drowsiest of monotones; the native
oleanders, slender-leaved and tall, and just now in all
their glory, with a color in their bright flowers stolen
from the bleeding lips of Houris, brightened the plains
of Lydia like the flush of sunset lying low on the earth;
the black goats of uncounted herds browsed along the
ancient Sarabat, with their bearded faces turned every
one to the faintly coming wind: the eagles (that abound
now in the mountains from which Sardis and a hundred
silent cities once scared their bold progenitors) sailed
slowly and fearlessly around the airy citadel that flung
open its gates to the Lacedæmonian; and, gradually,
as you may have lost yourself in this tangled paragraph,
dear reader, my senses became confused among the
objects it enumerates, and I fell asleep with the speech
of Solon in my ears, and my back to the crumbling
portico of Crœsus.

The Dutchman was drawing my picture when I
awoke, the sun was setting, and Job and the suridji
were making tea. I am not a very picturesque object.
generally speaking, but done as a wild Arab lying at
the base of a column in a white turban, with a stork's
nest over my head, I am not so ill-looking as you would
suppose. As the Dutchman drew for gelt, and hoped
to sell his picture to some traveller at Smyrna who
would take that opportunity to affirm in his book that
he had been at Sardis (as vide his own sketch), I do
not despair of seeing myself yet in lithograph. And,
talking of pictures, I would give something now if I
had engaged that hump-backed draughtsman to make
me a sketch of Job, squat on his hams before a fire in
the wall, and making tea in a tin pot with a “malignant
and turbaned Turk,” feeding the blaze with the
dry thorn of Syria.[5] It would have been consolation
to his respectable mother, whom he left in the Green
mountains (wondering what he could have to do with
following such a scapegrace as myself through the

world), to have seen him in the turban of a Hajji taking
his tea quietly in ancient Lydia. The green turban,
the sign of the Hajji, belonged more properly to
myself; for though it was Job who went bodily to
Jerusalem (leaving me ill of a fig-fever at Smyrna), the
sanctity of the pilgrimage by the Mohammedan law
falls on him who provides the pilgrim with scallop-shell
and sandals, aptly figured forth in this case, we will suppose,
by the sixty American dollars paid by myself for
his voyage to Jaffa and back. The suridji was a
Hajji, too, and it was amusing to see Job, who respected
every man's religious opinions, and had a little
vanity besides in sharing with the Turk[6] the dignity of
a pilgrimage to the sacred city, washing his knees and
elbows at the hour of prayer, and considerately, but
very much to his own inconvenience, transferring the
ham of the unclean beast from the Mussulman's saddle-bags
to his own. It was a delicate sacrifice to a
pagan's prejudices worthy of Socrates or a Christian.

2. II.

In all simple states of society, sunset is the hour of
better angels. The traveller in the desert remembers
his home—the sea-tost boy his mother and her last
words—the Turk talks, for a wonder, and the chattering
Greek is silent, for the same—the Italian forgets
his mustache, and hums la patria—and the Englishman
delivers himself of the society of his companions,
and “takes a walk.” It is something in the influences
of the hour, and I shall take trouble, some day, to
maintain that morn, noon, and midnight, have their
ministry as well, and exercise each an unobserved but
salutary and peculiar office on the feelings.

We all separated “after tea;” the Suridji was off to
find a tethering place for his horses; the Englishman
strolled away by himself to a group of the “tents of
Kedar” far down in the valley with their herds and
herdsmen; the Smyrniote merchant sat by the camel-track
at the foot of the hill waiting for the passing of a
caravan; the Green-Mountaineer was wandering around
the ruins of the apostolic church; the Dutchman was
sketching the two Ionic shafts of the fair temple of
Cybele; and I, with a passion for running water which
I have elsewhere alluded to, idled by the green bank
of the Pactolus, dreaming sometimes of Gyges and
Alexander, and sometimes of you, dear Mary!

I passed Job on my way, for the four walls over
which the “Angel of the Church of Sardis” kept his
brooding watch in the days of the Apocalypse stand
not far from the swelling bank of the Pactolus, and
nearly in a line between it and the palace of Crœsus. I
must say that my heart almost stood still with awe as I
stepped over the threshold. In the next moment, the
strong and never-wasting under-current of early religious
feeling rushed back on me, and I involuntarily
uncovered my head, and felt myself stricken with the
spell of holy ground. My friend, who was never without
the Bible that was his mother's parting gift, sat on
the end of the broken wall of the vestibule with the
sacred volume open at the Revelation in his hand.

“I think, Philip,” said he, as I stood looking at him
in silence, “I think my mother will have been told by
an angel that I am here.”

He spoke with a solemnity that, spite of every other
feeling, seemed to me as weighty and true as prophecy.

“Listen, Philip,” said he, “it will be something to
tell your mother as well as mine, that we have read the
Apocalypse together in the Church of Sardis.”

I listened with what I never thought to have heard
in Asia—my mother's voice loud at my heart, as I had
heard it in prayer in my childhood:—

“Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have
not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with
me in white: for they are worthy.”

I strolled on. A little farther up the Pactolus stood
the Temple of Cybele. The church to which “He”
spoke “who hath the seven spirits of God and the seven
stars,” was a small and humble ruin of brick and mortar;
but, of the temple of the Heathen Mother of the
world, remained two fair columns of marble with the
curiously carved capitals, and the earth around was
strewn with the gigantic frusta of an edifice, stately
even in the fragments of its prostration. I saw for a
moment the religion of Jupiter and of Christ with the
eyes of Crœsus and the philosopher from Athens; and
then I turned to the living nations that I had left to
wander among these dead empires, and looking still
on the eloquent monuments of what these religious
were, thought of them as they are, in wide-spread
Christendom.

We visit Rome and Athens, and walk over the ruined
temples of their gods of wood and stone, and take pride
to ourselves that our imaginations awake the “spirit
of the spot.” But the primitive church of Christ, over
which an angel of God kept watch—whose undefiled
members, if there is truth in Holy Writ, are now
“walking with him in white” before the face of the
Almighty—a spot on which the Savior and his apostles
prayed, and for whose weal, with the other churches
of Asia, the sublime revelation was made to Jolin—
this, the while, is an unvisited shrine, and the “classic”
of pagan idolatry is dearer to the memories of men
than the holy antiquities of a religion they profess!

3. III.

The Ionic capitals of the two fair columns of the
fallen temple were still tinged with rosy light on the
side toward the sunset, when the full moon, rising
in the east, burnished the other like a shaft of silver.
The two lights mingled in the sky in a twilight
of opal.

“Job,” said I, stooping to reach a handful of sand
as we strolled up the western bank of the river, “can
you resolve me why the poets have chosen to call this
pretty stream the `golden-sanded Pactolus?' Did you
ever see sand of a duller gray?”

“As easy as give you a reason,” answered Job,
“why we found the turbidus Hermus, yesterday, the
clearest stream we have forded—why I am no more
beautiful than before, though I have bathed like Venus
in the Scamander—why the pumice of Naxos no
longer reduces the female bust to its virgin proportions—and
why Smyrna and Malta are not the best
places for figs and oranges!”

“And why the old king of Lydia, who possessed
the invisible ring, and kept a devil in his dog's collarlies
quietly under the earth in the plain below us, and
his ring and his devil were not bequeathed to his successors.
What a pleasant auxiliary to sin must have
been that invisible ring! Spirit of Gyges, thrust thy
finger out of the earth, and commit it once more to a
mortal! Sit down, my dear monster, and let us speculate
in this bright moonshine on the enormities we
would commit!”

As Job was proceeding, in a cantious periphrasis,
to rebuke my irreverent familiarity with the prince of
darkness and his works, the twilight had deepened
and my eye was caught by a steady light twinkling for
above us in the ascending bed of the river. The green
valley wound down from the rear of the Acropolis, and
the single frowning tower stood in broken and strong
relief against the sky; and from the mass of shadow below
peered out, like a star from a cloud rack, the steady
blaze of a lamp.

“Allons! Job!” said I, making sure of an adventure,
“let us see for whose pleasure a lamp is lit in
the solitude of this ruined city.”

“I could not answer to your honored mother,” said
my scrupulous friend, “if I did not remind you that
this is a spot much frequented by robbers, and that
probably no honest man harbors at that inconvenient
altitude.”

I made a leap over a half-buried frieze that had
served me as a pillow, and commenced the ascent.

“I could as ill answer to your anxious parent,” said
Job, following with uncommon alacrity, “if I did not
partake your dangers when they are inevitable.”

We scrambled up with some difficulty in the darkness,
now rolling into an unseen hollow, now stumbling
over a block of marble—held fast one moment by the
lacerating hooked thorn of Syria, and the next brought
to a stand-still by impenetrable thickets of brushwood.
With a half hour's toil, however, we stood on a clear
platform of grass, panting and hot; and as I was suggesting
to Job that we had possibly got too high, he
laid his hand on my arm, and, with a sign of silence,
drew me down on the grass beside him.

In a small fairy amphitheatre, half encircled by a
bend of the Pactolus, and lying a few feet below the
small platform from which we looked, lay six low tents,
disposed in a crescent opposite to that of the stream,
and enclosing a circular area of bright and dewy grass,
of scarce ten feet in diameter. The tents were round,
and laced neatly with wicker-work, with their curtain-doors
opening inward upon the circle. In the largest
one, which faced nearly down the valley, hung a small
iron lamp of an antique shape, with a wick alight in
one of its two projecting extremities, and beneath it
swung a basket-cradle suspended between two stakes,
and kept in motion by a woman apparently of about
forty, whose beauty, but for another more attractive
object, would have rewarded us alone for our toil. The
other tents were closed and seemed unoccupied, but the
curtain of the one into which our eyes were now straining
with intense eagerness, was looped entirely back to
give admission to the cool night air; and, in and out,
between the light of the lamp and the full moon, stole
on naked feet a girl of fifteen, whose exquisite symmetry
and unconscious but divine grace of movement
filled my sense of beauty as it had never been filled by
the divinest chisel of the Tribune. She was of the
height and mould of the younger water-nymph in
Gibson's Hylas,[7] with limbs and lips that, had I created
and warmed her to life like Pygmalion, I should
have just hesitated whether or not they wanted another
half-shade of fulness. The large shawl of the east,
which was attached to her girdle, and in more guarded
hours concealed all but her eyes, hung in loose
folds from her waist to her heels, leaving her bust and
smoothly-rounded shoulders entirely bare; and, in
strong relief even upon her clear brown skin, the flakes
of her glossy and raven hair floated over her back, and
swept around her with a grace of a cloud in her indolent
motions. A short petticoat of striped Brusa silk
stretched to her knees, and below appeared the full
trowser of the east, of the same material, narrowed at
the ankle, and bound with what looked in the moonlight
an anklet of silver. A profusion of rings on her
fingers, and a gold sequin on her forehead, suspended
from a colored fillet, completed her dress, and left
nothing to be added by the prude or the painter. She
was at that ravishing and divinest moment of female
life, when almost the next hour would complete her
womanhood—like the lotus ere it lays back to the
prying moonlight the snowy leaf nearest its heart.

She was employed in filling a large jar which stood
at the back of the tent, with water from the Pactolus,
and as she turned with her empty pitcher, and came
under the full blaze of the lamp in her way outward,
treading lightly lest she should disturb the slumber of
the child in the cradle, and pressing her two round
hands closely to the sides of the vessel, the gradual
compression of my arm by the bony hand which still
held it for sympathy, satisfied me that my own leaping
pulse of admiration found an answering beat in the
bosom of my friend. A silent nod from the woman,
whose Greek profile was turned to us under the lamplight,
informed the lovely water-bearer that her labors
were at an end; and with a gesture expressive of heat,
she drew out the shawl from her girdle, untied the
short petticoat, and threw them aside, and then tripping
out into the moonlight with only the full silken
trowsers from her waist to her ankles, she sat down on
the brink of the small stream, and with her feet in the
water, dropped her head on her knees, and sat as motionless
as marble.

“Gibson should see her now,” I whispered to Job,
“with the glance of the moonlight on that dimpled
and polished back, and her almost glittering hair veiling
about her in such masses, like folds of gossamer!”

“And those slender fingers clasped over her knees,
and the air of melancholy repose which is breathed into
her attitude, and which seems inseparable from those
indolent Asiatics. She is probably a gipsy.”

The noise of the water dashing over a small cascade
a little farther up the stream had covered our approach
and rendered our whispers inaudible. Job's conjecture
was probably right, and we had stumbled on a small
encampment of gipsies—the men possibly asleep in
those closed tents, or possibly absent at Smyrna. After
a little consultation, I agreed with Job that it would
be impolitic to alarm the camp at night, and resolving
on a visit in the morning, we quietly and unobserved
withdrew from our position, and descended to our own
tents in the ruins of the palace.

4. IV.

The suridji had given us our spiced coffee in the
small china cups and filagree holders, and we sat discussing,
to the great annoyance of the storks over our
heads, whether we should loiter another day at Sardis,
or eat melons at noon at Casabar on our way to Constantinople.
To the very great surprise of the Dutchman,
who wished to stay to finish his drawings, Job and
myself voted for remaining—a view of the subject which
was in direct contradiction to our vote of the preceding
evening. The Englishman, who was always in a hurry,
flew into a passion, and went off with the phlegmatic
suridji to look after his horse; and having disposed
of our Smyrniote, by seeing a caravan (which
was not to be seen) coming southward from Mount
Tmolus, I and my monster started for the encampment
of the gipsies.

As we rounded the battered wall of the Christian
church, a woman stepped out from the shadow; through
a tattered dress, and under a turban of soiled cotton set
far over her forehead, and throwing a deep shadow into
her eyes, I recognised at once the gipsy woman whom
we had seen sitting by the cradle.

“Buon giorno, signori,” she said, making a kind of
salaam, and relieving me at once by the Italian salutation
of my fears of being unintelligible.

Job gave her the good-morning, but she looked at
him with a very unsatisfactory glance, and coming
close to my ear, she wished me to speak to her out of
the hearing of “il mio domestico!”

“Amico piu tosto!” I added immediately with a consideration
for Job's feelings, which, I must do myself
the justice to say, I always manifested, except in very
elegant society. I gave myself the greater credit in

this case, as, in my impatience to know the nature of
the gipsy's communication, I might be excused for
caring little at the moment whether my friend was
taken for a gentleman or a gentleman's gentleman.

The gipsy looked vexed at her mistake, and with a
half-apologetic inclination to Job, she drew me into
the shade of the ruin, and perused my face with great
earnestness. “The same to yourself,” thought I, as
I gave back her glance, and searched for her meaning
in two as liquid and loving eyes as ever looked out of
the gates of the Prophet's paradise for the coming of
a young believer. It was a face that had been divine,
and in the hands of a lady of fashion would have still
made a bello rifacimento.

“Inglese?” she said at last.

“No, madre—Americano.”

She looked disappointed.

“And where are you going, filio mio?”

“To Stamboul.”

“Benissimo!” she answered, and her face brightened.
“Do you want a servant?”

“Unless it is yourself, no!”

“It is my son.”

It was on my lips to ask if he was like her daughter,
but an air of uneasiness and mystery in her manner put
me on the reserve, and I kept my knowledge to myself.
She preserved in her suit, and at last the truth came
out, that her boy was bound on an errand to Constantinople,
and she wished safe conduct for him. The
rest of the troop, she said, were at Smyrna, and she
was left in care of the tents with the boy and an infant
child. As she did not mention the girl, who, from the
resemblance, was evidently her daughter—I thought it
unwise to allude to our discovery: and promising that,
if the boy was mounted, every possible care should be
taken of him, I told her the hour on the following
morning when we should be in the saddle, and rid myself
of her with the intention of stealing a march on
the camp.

I took rather a circuitous route, but the gipsy was
there before me, and apparently alone. She had sent
the boy to the plains for a horse, and though I presumed
that the loveliest creature in Asia was concealed
in one or the other of those small tents, the curtains
were closely tied, and I could find no apology for intruding
either my eyes or my inquiries. The handsome
Zingara, too, began to look rather becomingly
fiere; and as I had left Job behind, and was always
naturally afraid of a woman, I reluctantly felt myself
under the necessity of comprehending her last injunction,
and with a promise that the boy should join us
before we reached the foot of Mount Sypilus, she fairly
bowed me off the premises. I could have forsworn
my complexion and studied palmistry for a gipsy, had
the devil then tempted me!

5. V.

We struck our tents at sunrise, and were soon dashing
on through the oleanders upon the broad plain of
the Hermus, the dew lying upon their bright vermeil
flowers like the pellucid gum on the petals of the ice-plant,
and nature, and my five companions, in their
gayest humor. I was not. My thoughts were of
moonlight and the Pactolus, and two round feet
ankle-deep in running water. Job rode up to my
side.

“My dear Phil! take notice that you are nearing
Mount Sypilus, in which the magnetic ore was first
discovered.”

“It acts negatively on me, my dear chum! for I
drag a lengthening chain from the other direction.”

Silence once more, and the bright red flowers still
fled backward in our career. Job rode up again.

“You must excuse my interrupting your revery, but
I thought you would like to know that the town where
we sleep to-night is the residence of the `beys of Oglou,'
mentioned in the `Bride of Abydos.”'

No answer, and the bright red blossoms still flew
scattered in our path as our steeds flew through the
coppice, and the shovel-like blades of the Turkish stirrups
cut into them right and left in the irregular gallop.
Job rode again to my side.

“My dear Philip, did you know that this town of
Magnesia was once the capital of the Turkish empire—
the city of Timour the Tartar?”

“Well!”

“And did you know that when Themistocles was
in exile, and Artaxerxes presented him with the tribute
of three cities to provide the necessaries of life, Magnesia
[8] found him in bread?”

“And Lampascus in wine. Don't bore me, Job!'

We sped on. As we neared Casabar toward noon,
and (spite of romance) I was beginning to think with
complacency upon the melons, for which the town is
famous, a rattling of hoofs behind put our horses upon
their mettle, and in another moment a boy dashed into
the midst of our troop, and reining up with a fine display
of horsemanship, put the promised token into
my hand. He was mounted on a small Arabian mare,
remarkable for nothing but a thin and fiery nostril,
and a most lavish action, and his jacket and turban
were fitted to a shape and head that could not well
be disguised. The beauty of the gipsy camp was
beside me!

It was as well for my self-command, that I had
sworn Job to secrecy in case of the boy's joining us,
and that I had given the elder gipsy, as a token, a very
voluminous and closely-written letter of my mother's.
In the twenty minutes which the reading of so apparently
“lengthy” a document would occupy, I had
leisure to resume my self-control, and resolve on my
own course of conduct toward the fair masquerader.
My travelling companions were not a little astonished
to see me receive a letter by courier in the heart of
Asia, but that was for their own digestion. All the
information I condescended to give, was that the boy
was sent to my charge on his road to Constantinople;
and as Job displayed no astonishment, and entered
simply into my arrangements, and I was the only person
in the company who could communicate with the
suridji (I had picked up a little modern Greek in the
Morea), they were compelled (the Dutchman, John
Bull, and the fig-merchant) to content themselves
with such theories on the subject as Heaven might
supply them withal.

How Job and I speculated apart on what could be
the errand of this fair creature to Constantinople—
how beautifully she rode and sustained her character
as a boy—how I requested her, though she spoke
Italian like her mother, never to open her lips in any
Christian language to my companions—how she slept
at my feet at the khans, and rode at my side on the
journey, and, at the end of seven days, arriving at
Scutari, and beholding across the Bosphorus the golden
spires of Stamboul, how she looked at me with tears
in her unfathomable eyes, and spurred her fleet Arab
to his speed to conceal her emotion, and how I felt
that I could bury myself with her in the vizier's
tomb we were passing at the moment, and be fed on
rice with a goule's bodkin, if so alone we might not
be parted—all these are matters which would make
sundry respectable chapters in a novel, but of which
you are spared the particulars in a true story. There
was a convenience both to the dramatist and the audience
in the “cetera intus agentur” of the Romans.

6. VI.

We emerged from the pinnacled cypresses of the
cemetery overlooking Constantinople, and dismount

ing from my horse, I climbed upon the gilded turban
crowning the mausoleum of a royal Ichoglan (a sultan's
page, honored more in his burial than in his life),
and feasted my eyes on the desecrated but princely
fair birth-right of the Palæologi. The Nekropolis—
the city of the dead—on the outermost tomb of whose
gloomy precincts I had profanely mounted, stands
high and black over the Bosphorus on one side, while
on the other, upon similar eminences, stand the gleaming
minarets and latticed gardens of the matchless city
of the living—as if, while Europe flung up her laughing
and breathing child to the sun, expiring Asia, the
bereaved emperess of the world, lifted her head to the
same heavens in majestic and speechless sorrow.

But oh! how fairer than Venice in her waters—
that Florence and Rome in their hills and habitations,
than all the cities of the world in that which is most
their pride and glory—is this fairest metropolis of the
Mahomets! With its two hundred mosques, each
with a golden sheaf of minarets laying their pointed
fingers against the stars, and encircled with the fretted
galleries of the callers to prayer, like the hand of a
cardinal with its costly ring—with its seraglio gardens
washed on one side by the sea, and on the other by the
gentle stream that glides out of the “Valley of Sweet
Waters:” men-of-war on one side, flaunting their red
pennants over the nightingale's nest which sings for
the delight of a princess, and the swift caique on the
other gliding in protected waters, where the same imprisoned
fair one might fling into it a flower (so slender
is the dividing cape that shuts in the bay)—with
its Bosphorus, its radiant and unmatched Bosphorus—
the most richly-gemmed river within the span of the
sun, extending with its fringe of palaces and castles
from sea to sea, and reflecting in its glassy eddies a
pomp and sumptuousness of costume and architecture
which exceeds even your boyish dreams of Bagdad
and the califs—Constantinople, I say, with its turbaned
and bright-garmented population—its swarming
sea and rivers—its columns, and aqueducts, and
strange ships of the east—is impenetrable seraglio,
and its close-shuttered harems—its bezestein and its
Hippodrome—Constantinople lay before me! If the
star I had worshipped had descended to my hand out
of the sky—if my unapproachable and yearning dream
of woman's beauty had been bodied forth warm and
real—if the missing star in the heel of Serpentarius,
and the lost sister of the Pleiades had waltzed back
together to their places—if poets were once more
prophets, not felons, and books were read for the good
that is in them, not for the evil—if love and truth had
been seen again, or any impossible or improbable thing
had come to pass—I should not have felt more thrillingly
than now the emotions of surprise and wonder!

While I stood upon the marble turban of the Ichoglan,
my companions had descended the streets of
Scutari, and I was left alone with the gipsy. She sat
on her Arab with her head bowed to his neck, and
when I withdrew my eye from the scene I have faintly
described, the tear-drops were glistening in the flowing
mane, and her breast was heaving under her embroidered
jacket with uncontrollable grief. I jumped
to the ground, and taking her head between my hands,
pressed her wet cheek to my lips.

“We part here, signor,” said she, winding around
her head the masses of hair that had escaped from
her turban, and raising herself in the saddle as if to
go on.

“I hope not, Maimuna!”

She bent her moist eyes on me with a look or earnest
inquiry.

“You are forbidden to intrust me with your errand
to Constantinople, and you have kept your word to
your mother. But whatever that errand may be, I
hope it does not involve your personal liberty?”

She looked embarrassed, but did not answer.

“You are very young to be trusted so far from your
mother, Maimuna!”

“Signor, si!”

“But I think she can scarce have loved you so well
as I do to have suffered you to come here alone!”

“She intrusted me to you, signor.”

I was well reminded of my promise. I had given
my word to the gipsy that I would leave her child at
the Persian fountain of Tophana. Maimuna was
evidently under a control stronger than the love I half-hoped
and half-feared I had awakened.

“Andiamo!” she said, dropping her head upon her
bosom with the tears pouring once more over it like
rain; and driving her stirrups with abandoned energy
into the sides of her Arabian, she dashed headlong
down the uneven streets of Scutari, and in a few minutes
we stood on the limit of Asia.

We left our horses in the “silver city,”[9] crossing to
the “golden” in a caique, and with Maimuna in my
bosom, and every contending emotion at work in my
heart, the scene about me still made an indelible impression
on my memory. The star-shaped bay, a
mile perhaps in diameter, was one swarm of boats of
every most slender and graceful form, the caikjis, in
their silken shirts, and vari-colored turbans, driving
them through the water with a speed and skill which
put to shame the gondolier of Venice, and almost the
Indian in his canoe; the gilded lattices and belvideres
of the seraglio, and the cypresses and flowering trees
that mingle their gay and sad foliage above them,
were already so near that I could count the roses upon
the bars, and see the moving of the trees in the evening
wind; the muezzins were calling to sunset-prayer,
their voices coming clear and prolonged over the
water; the men-of-war in the mouth of the Bosphorus
were lowering their blood-red flags; the shore we
were approaching was thronged with veiled women,
and bearded old men, and boys with the yellow slipper
and red scull-cap of the east; and watching our approach,
stood apart, a group of Jews and Armenians,
marked by their costume for an inferior race, but looking
to my cosmopolite eye as noble in their black
robes and towering caps as the haughty Mussulman
that stood aloof from their company.

We set foot in Constantinople. It was the suburb
of Tophana, and the suridji pointed out to Maimuna,
as we landed, a fountain of inlaid marble and brass,
around whose projecting frieze were traced inscriptions
in the Persian. She sprang to my hand.

“Remember, Maimuna!” I said, “that I offer you
a mother and a home in another and a happier land.
I will not interfere with your duty, but when your
errand is done, you may find me if you will. Farewell.”

With a passionate kiss in the palm of my hand, and
one beaming look of love and sorrow in her large and
lustrous eyes, the gipsy turned to the fountain, and
striking suddenly to the left around the mosque of
Sultan Selim, she plunged into the narrow street running
along the water-side to Galata.

7. VII.

We had wandered out from our semi-European,
semi-Turkish lodgings on the third morning after our
arrival at Constantinople, and picking our way listlessly
over the bad pavement of the suburb of Pera,
stood at last in the small burying-ground at the summit
of the hill, disputing amicably upon what quarter
of the fair city beneath us we should bestow our share
in the bliss of that June morning.

“It is a heavenly day,” said Job, sitting down unthinkingly
upon a large sculptured turban that formed

the head-stone to the grave of some once-wealthy
pagan, and looking off wistfully toward the green summit
of Bulgurlu.

The difference between Job and myself was a mania,
on his part for green fields, and on mine for human
faces. I knew very well that his remark was a leader
to some proposition for a stroll over the wilder hills of
the Bosphorus, and I was determined that he should
enjoy, instead, the pleasure of sympathy in my nevertiring
amusement of wandering in the crowded bazars
on the other side of the water. The only way to accomplish
it, was to appear to yield the point, and then
rally upon his generosity. I had that delicacy for his
feelings (I had brought him all the way from the Green
mountains at my own expense) never to carry my
measures too ostentatiously.

Job was looking south, and my face was as resolutely
turned north. We must take a caique in any case
at Galata (lying just below us) but if we turned the
prow south in the first instance, farewell at every
stroke to the city! Whereas a northern course took
us straight up the Golden Horn, and I could appear to
change my mind at any moment, and land immediately
in a street leading to the bazars. Luckily, while
I was devising an errand to go up the channel instead
of down, a small red flag appeared gliding through the
forest of masts around the curve of the water-side at
Tophana, and, in a moment more, a high-pooped
vessel, with the carved railings and outlandish rigging
of the ships from the far east, shot out into the
middle of the bay with the strong current of the
Bosphorus, and squaring her lateen sail, she rounded
a vessel lying at anchor with the flag of Palestine, and
steered with a fair wind up the channel of the Golden
Horn. A second look at her deck disclosed to me a
crowd of people, mostly women, standing amid-ships,
and the supposition with which I was about inducing
Job to take a caique and pull up the harbor after her
seemed to me now almost a certainty.

“It is a slave-ship from Trebizond, ten to one, my
dear Job!”

He slid off the marble turban which he had profaned
so unscrupulously, and the next minute we
passed the gate that divides the European from the
commercial suburb, and were plunging down the steep
and narrow straits of Galata with a haste that, to the
slippered and shuffling Turks we met or left behind,
seemed propably little short of madness. Of a hundred
slender and tossing caiques lying in the disturbed
waters of the bay, we selected the slenderest and best
manned: and getting Job in with the usual imminent
danger of driving his long legs through the bottom of
the egg-shell craft, we took in one of the obsequious
Jews who swarm about the pier as interpreters, coiled
our legs under us in the hollow womb of the caique,
and shot away like a nautilus after the slaver.

The deep-lying river that coils around the throbbing
heart of Constantinople is a place of as delicate navigation
as a Venetian lagoon on a festa, or a soiree of
middling authors. The Turk, like your plain-spoken
friend, rows backward, and with ten thousand egg-shells
swarming about him in every direction, and his
own prow rounded off in a pretty iron point, an extra
piastre for speed draws down curses on the caikji and
the Christian dogs who pay him for the holes he lets
into his neighbors' boats, which is only equalled in bitterness
and profusion by the execrations which follow
what is called “speaking your mind.” The Jew
laughed, as Jews do since Shylock, at the misfortunes
of his oppressors; and, in the exercise of his vocation,
translated us the oaths as they came in right and left
—most of them very gratuitous attacks on those (as
Job gravely remarked), of whom they could know very
little—our respected mothers.

The slackening vessel lost her way as she got opposite
the bazar of dried fruits, and, as her yards came
down by the run, she put up her helm, and ran her
towering prow between a piratical-looking Egyptian
craft, and a black and bluff English collier, inscribed
appropriately on the stern as the “snow-drop” from
Newcastle. Down plumped her anchor, and in the
next moment the Jew hailed her by our orders, and
my conjecture was proved to be right. She was from
Trebizond, with slaves and spices.

“What would they do if we were to climb up her
side?” I asked the Israelite.

He stretched up his crouching neck till his twisted
beard hung clear off like a waterfall from his chin, and
looked through the carved railing very intently.

“The slaves are Georgians,” he answered, after
awhile, “and if there were no Turkish purchasers on
board, they might simply order you down again.”

“And if there were—”

“The women would be considered damaged by a
Christian eye, and the slave merchant might shoot you
or pitch you overboard.”

“Is that all?” said Job, evolving his length very
deliberately from his coil, and offering me a hand the
next moment from the deck of the slaver. Whether
the precedence he took in all dangers arose from affection
for me, or from a praiseworthy indifference to the
fate of such a trumpery collection as his own body
and limbs, I have never decided to my own satisfaction.

In the confusion of port-officers and boats alongside,
all hailing and crying out together, we stood on the
outer side of the deck unobserved, and I was soon intently
occupied in watching the surprise and wonder
of the pretty toys who found themselves for the first
time in the heart of a great city. The owner of their
charms, whichever of a dozen villanous Turks I saw
about them it might be, had no time to pay them very
particular attention, and dropping their dirty veils
about their shoulders, they stood open-mouthed and
staring—ten or twelve rosy damsels in their teens, with
eyes as deep as a well, and almost as large and liquid.
Their features were all good, their skins without a
flaw, hair abundant, and figures of a healthy plumpness—looking,
with the exception of their eyes, which
were very oriental and magnificent, like the great, fat,
pie-eating, yawning, boarding-school misses one sees
over a hedge at Hampstead. It was delicious to see
their excessive astonishment at the splendors of the
Golden Horn—they from the desert mountains of
Georgia or Circassia, and the scene about them
(mosques, minarets, people, and men-of-war, all together),
probably the most brilliant and striking in the
world. I was busy following their eyes and trying to
divine their impressions, when Job seized me by the
arm. An old Turk had just entered the vessel from
the land-side, and was assisting a closely-veiled female
to mount after him. Half a glance satisfied me that it
was the Gipsy of Sardis—the lovely companion of our
journey to Constantinople.

“Maimuna!” I exclaimed, darting forward on the
instant.

A heavy hand struck me back as I touched her, and
as I returned the blow, the swarthy crew of Arabs
closed about us, and we were hurried with a most unceremonious
haste to the side of the vessel. I scarce
know, between my indignation and the stunning effect
of the blow I had received, how I got into the caique,
but we were pulling fast up the Golden Horn by the
time I could speak, and in half an hour were set ashore
on the green bank of the Barbyses, bound on a solitary
ramble up the valley of Sweet Waters.

8. VIII.

The art of printing was introduced into the Mohammedan
empire in the reigns of Achmet III. and
Louis XV. I seldom state a statistical fact, but this

is one I happen to know, and I mention it because the
most fanciful and romantic abode with which I am acquainted
in the world was originally built to contain
the first printing-press brought from the court of Versailles
by Mehemet Effendi, ambassador from the
“Brother of the Sun.” It is now a maison de plaisance
for the sultan's favorite women, and in all the
dreams of perfect felicity which visit those who have
once seen it, it rises as the Paradise of retreats from
the world.

The serai of Khyat-Khana is a building of gold and
marble, dropped down unfenced upon the green-sward
in the middle of a long emerald valley, more
like some fairy vision, conjured and forgotten to be
dissolved, than a house to live in, real weather-proof,
and to be seen for the value of one and sixpence. The
Barbyses falls over the lip of a sea-shell (a marble
cascade sculptured in that pretty device), sending up
its spray and its perpetual music close under the gilded
lattice of the sultana, and following it back with the
eye, like a silver thread in a broidery of green velvet,
it comes stealing down through miles of the tenderest
verdure, without tree or shrub upon its borders, but
shut in with the seclusion of an enchanted stream and
valley by mountains which rise in abrupt precipices
from the edges of its carpet of grass, and fling their
irregular shadows across it at every hour save high
noon-sacred in the east to the sleep of beauty and
idleness.

In the loving month of May it is death to set foot in
the Khyat-Khana. The ascending caique is stopped
in the Golden Horn, and on the point of every hill is
stationed a mounted eunuch with drawn sabre. The
Arab steeds of the sultan are picketed on the low-lying
grass of the valley, and his hundred Circassians
come from their perfumed chambers in the seraglio,
and sun their untold loveliness on the velvet banks of
the Barbyses. From the Golden Horn to Belgrade,
twelve miles of greensward (sheltered like a vein of
ore in the bosom of the earth, and winding away after
the course of that pebbly river, unseen, save by the
eye of the sun and stars), are sacred in this passion-born
month from the foot of man, and, riding in their
scarlet arubas with the many-colored ribands floating
back from the horns of their bullocks, and their own
snowy veils dropped from their guarded shoulders and
deep-dyed lips, wander, from sunrise to sunset, these
caged birds of a sultan's delight, longing as wildly
(who shall doubt?) to pass that guarded barrier into
the forbidden world, as we, who sigh for them without,
to fly from falsehood and wrong, and forget that same
world in their bosoms!

How few are content! How restless are even the
most spoiled children of fortune! How inevitably
the heart sighs for that which it has not, even though
its only want is a cloud on its perpetual sunshine!
We were not of those—Job and I—for we were of
that school of philosophers[10] who “had little and
wanted nothing;” but we agreed, as we sat upon the
marble bridge sprung like a wind-lifted cobweb over
the Barbyses, that the envy of a human heart would
poison even the content of a beggar! He is a fool
who is sheltered from hunger and cold and still complains
of fortune; but he is only not a slave or a seraph,
who feeling on the innermost fibre of his sensibility the
icy breath of malice, utters his eternal malison on the
fiend who can neither be grappled with nor avoided.
I could make a paradise with loveliness and sunshine,
if envy could be forbidden at the gate!

We had walked around the Serai and tried all its
entrances in vain, when Job spied, under the shelter
of the southern hill, a blood-red flag flying at the top
of a small tent of the Prophet's green—doubtless concealing
the kervas, who kept his lonely guard over the
precincts. I sent my friend with a “pinch of piastres”
to tempt the trowsered infidel to our will, and he soon
came shuffling in his unmilitary slippers, with keys,
which, the month before, were guarded like the lamp
of Aladdin. We entered. We rambled over the
chambers of the chosen houries of the east; we looked
through their lattices, and laid the palms of our hands
on the silken cushions dimmed in oval spots by the
moisture of their cheeks as they slept; we could see by
the tarnished gold, breast-high at the windows, where
they had pressed to the slender lattices to look forth
upon the valley; and Job, more watchfully alive to
the thrilling traces of beauty, showed me in the diamond-shaped
bars the marks of their moist fingers and
the stain as of lips between, betraying where they had
clung and laid their faces against the trellis in the
indolent attitude of gazers from a wearisome prison.
Mirrors and ottomans were the only furniture; and
never, for me, would the wand of Cornelius Agrippa
have been more welcome, than to wave back into
those senseless mirrors the images of beauty they had
lost.

I sat down on a raised corner of the divan, probably
the privileged seat of the favorite of the hour. Job
stood with his lips apart, brooding in speechless poeticalness
on his own thoughts.

“Do you think, after all,” said I, reverting to the
matter-of-fact vein of my own mind, which was paramount
usually to the romantic—“do you think really,
Job, that the Zuleikas and Fatimas who have by turns
pressed this silken cushion with their crossed feet
were not probably inferior in attraction to the most
third-rate belle of New England? How long would
you love a woman that could neither read, nor write,
nor think five minutes on any given theme? The utmost
exertion of intellect in the loveliest of these deep-eyed
Circassians is probably the language of flowers;
and, good Heavens! think how one of your della
Cruscan sentiments would be lost upon her! And yet,
here you are, ready to go mad with romantic fancies
about women that were never taught even their
letters.”

Job began to hum a stave of his favorite song, which
was always a sign that he was vexed and disenchanted
of himself.

“How little women think,” said I, proceeding with
my unsentimental vein, while Job looked out of the
window, and the kervas smoked his pipe on the sultana's
ottoman—“how little women think that the
birch and the dark closet, and the thumbed and dogeared
spelling-book (or whatever else more refined torments
their tender years in the shape of education),
was, after all, the groundwork and secret of their fascination
over men! What a process it is to arrive at
love! `D-o-g, dog—c-a-t, cat!' If you had not
learned this, bright Lady Melicent, I fear Captain
Augustus Fitz-Somerset would never have sat, as I
saw him last night, cutting your initials with a diamond
ring on the purple-claret glass which had just
poured a bumper to your beauty!”

“You are not far wrong,” said Job, after a long
pause, during which I had delivered myself, unheard,
of the above practical apostrophe—“you are not far
wrong, quoad the women of New England. They
would be considerable bores if they had not learned,
in their days of bread-and-butter, to read, write, and
reason. But, for the women of the softer south and
east, I am by no means clear that education would
not be inconsistent with the genius of the clime. Take
yourself back to Italy, for example, where, for two
mortal years, you philandered up and down between
Venice and Amalfi, never out of the sunshine or away
from the feet of women, and, in all that precious episode
of your youth, never guilty, I will venture to presume,
of either suggesting or expressing a new thought.
And the reason is, not that the imagination is dull, but

that nobody thinks, except upon exigency, in these
latitudes. It would be violent and inapt to the spirit
of the hour. Indolence, voluptuous indolence of body
and mind (the latter at the same time lying broad
awake in its chamber, and alive to every pleasurable
image that passes uncalled before its windows) is the
genius, the only genius, of the night and day. What
would be so discordant as an argument by moonlight
in the Coliseum? What so ill-bred and atrocious as
the destruction by logic of the most loose-spun theory
by the murmuring fountains of the Pamfili? To live
is enough in these lands of the sun. But merely to
live, in ours, is to be bound, Prometheus-like, to a
rock, with a vulture at our vitals. Even in the most
passionate intercourse of love in your northern clime,
you read to your mistress, or she sings to you, or you
think it necessary to drive or ride; but I know nothing
that would more have astonished your Venetian bionda
than, when the lamp was lit in the gondola that you
might see her beauty on the lagune in the starless
night, to have pulled a book from your pocket, and
read even a tale of love from Boccaccio. And that is
why I could be more content to be a pipe-bearer in
Asia than a schoolmaster in Vermont, or, sooner than
a judge's ermine in England, to wear a scrivener's
rags, and sit in the shade of a portico, writing love-letters
for the peasant-girls of Rome. Talk of republics
—your only land of equality is that in which to breathe
is the supreme happiness. The monarch throws open
his window for the air that comes to him past the brow
of a lazzaroni, and the wine on the patrician's lip intoxicates
less than the water from the fountain that is
free to all, though it gush from the marble bosom of a
nymph. If I were to make a world, I would have the
climate of Greece, and no knowledge that did not
come by intuition. Men and women should grow
wise enough, as the flowers grow fair enough, with
sunshine and air, and they should follow their instincts
like the birds, and go from sweet to sweet with as little
reason or trouble. Exertion should be a misdemeanor,
and desire of action, if it were not too monstrous
to require legislation, should be treason to the
state.”

“Long live King Job!”

2. PART II.

I had many unhappy thoughts about Maimuna: the
glance I had snatched on board the Trebizond slaver
left in my memory a pair of dark eyes full of uneasiness
and doubt, and I knew her elastic motions so well,
that there was something in her single step as she
came over the gangway which assured me that she
was dispirited and uncertain of her errand. Who was
the old Turk who dragged her up the vessel's side
with so little ceremony? What could the child of
a gipsy be doing on the deck of a slaver from Trebizond?

With no very definite ideas as to the disposal of
this lovely child should I succeed in my wishes, I had
insensibly made up my mind that she could never be
happy without me, and that my one object in Constantinople
was to get her into my possession. I had a
delicacy in communicating the full extent of my design
to Job, for, aside from the grave view he would take
of the morality of the step, and her probable fate as a
woman, he would have painful and just doubts of my
ability to bear this additional demand upon my means.
Though entirely dependant himself, Job had that natural
contempt for the precions metals, that he could
not too freely assist any one to their possession who
happened to set a value on the amount in his pocket;
and this, I may say, was the one point which, between
my affectionate monster and myself, was not discussed
as harmoniously as the loves of Corydon and Alexis.
The account of his expenditure, which I regularly exacted
of him before he tied on his bandanna at night,
was always more or less unsatisfactory; and though
he would not have hesitated to bestow a whole scudo
unthinkingly on the first dirty dervish he should meet,
he was still sufficiently impressed with the necessity
of economy to remember it in an argument of any
length or importance: and for this and some other
reasons I reserved my confidence upon the intended
addition to my suite.

Not far from the Burnt Column, in the very heart
of Stamboul, lived an old merchant in attar and jessamine,
called Mustapha. Every one who has been at
Constantinople will remember him and his Nubian
slave in a small shop on the right, as you ascend to
the Hippodrome. He calls himself essence-seller to
the sultan, but his principal source of profit is the
stranger who is brought to his divans by the interpreters
in his pay; and to his credit be it said, that, for the
courtesy of his dealings, and for the excellence of his
extracts, the stranger could not well fall into better
hands.

It had been my fortune, on my first visit to Mustapha,
to conciliate his good will. I had laid in my
small stock of spice-woods and essences on that occasion,
and the call which I made religiously every time
I crossed the Golden Horn was purely a matter of
friendship. In addition to one or two trifling presents,
which (with a knowledge of human nature) I
had returned in the shape of two mortal sins—a keg
of brandy and a flask of gin, bought out of the English
collier lying in the bay—in addition to his kind
presents, I say, my large-trowsered friend had made
me many pressing offers of service. There was little
probability, it was true, that I should ever find occasion
to profit by them; but I nevertheless believed
that his hand was laid upon his heart in earnest sincerity,
and in the course of my reflections upon the
fate of Maimuna, it had occurred to me more than
once that he might be of use in clearing up the mystery
of her motions.

“Job!” said I, as we were dawdling along the street
of confectioners with our Jew behind us one lovely
morning, “I am going to call at Mustapha's.”

We had started to go to the haunt of the opium-eaters,
and he was rather surprised at my proposition,
but, with his usual amiableness (very inconvenient
and vexatious in this particular instance), he stepped
over the gutter without saying a word, and made for
the first turning to the right. It was the first time
since we had left New England that I wished myself
rid of his company.

“But, Job,” said I, calling him back to the shady
side of the street, and giving him a great lump of
candy from the nearest stall (its oriental name, by the
way, is “peace-to-your-throat,”) “I thought you were
bent on eating opium to-day?”

My poor friend looked at me for a minute, as if to
comprehend the drift of my remark, and as he arrived
by regular deduction at the result, I read very clearly
in his hideous physiognomy the painful embarrassment
it occasioned him. It was only the day before, that,
in descending the Bosphorus, we had seen a party of
the summary administrators of justice quietly suspending
a Turkish woman and her Greek paramour
from the shutters of a chamber-window—intercourse
with a Christian in that country of liberal legislation
being punishable without trial or benefit of dervish.
From certain observations on my disposition in the
course of my adventures, Job had made up his mind,
I well knew, that my danger was more from Delilah
than the Philistines; and while these victims of love
were kicking their silken trowsers in the air, I saw, by
the look of tender anxiety he cast upon me, from the
bottom of the caique, that the moral in his mind would

result in an increased vigilance over my motions.
While he stood with his teeth stuck full of “peace-to-your-throat,”
therefore, forgetting even the instinct
of mastication in his surprise and sorrow, I well understood
what picture was in his mind, and what construction
he put upon my sudden desire to solitude.

“My dear Philip!” he began, speaking with difficulty
from the stickiness of the candy in his teeth,
“your respected mother —”

At this instant a kervas, preceding a Turk of rank,
jostled suddenly against him, and as the mounted
Mussulman, with his train of runners and pipe-bearers,
came sweeping by, I took the opportunity of Job's
surprise to slip past with the rest, and, turning down
an ally, quietly mounted one of the saddle-horses
standing for hire at the first mosque, and pursued my
way alone to the shop of the attar-merchant. To
dismount and hurry Mustapha into his inner and private
apartment, with an order to the Nubian to deny
me to everybody who should inquire, was the work of
a minute, but it was scarcely done before I heard Job
breathless at the door.

“Ha visto il signore?” he exclaimed, getting to the
back of the shop with a single stride.

“Effendi, no!” said the imperturbable Turk, and he
laid his hand on his heart, as he advanced, and offered
him with grave courtesy the pipe from his lips.

The Jew had come puffing into the shop with his
slippers in his hand, and dropping upon his hams near
the door, he took off his small gray turban, and was
wiping the perspiration from his high and narrow forehead,
when Job darted again into the street with a
sign to him to follow. The look of despair and exhanstion
with which he shook out his baggy trowsers
and made after the striding Yankee, was too much
even for the gravity of Mustapha. He laid aside his
pipe, and, as the Nubian struck in with the peculiar
cackle of his race, I joined myself in their merriment
with a heartiness to which many a better joke might
have failed to move me.

While Mustapha was concluding his laugh between
the puffs of his amber pipe, I had thrown myself along
the divan, and was studying with some curiosity the
inner apartment in which I had been concealed. A
curtain of thick but tarnished gold cloth (as sacred
from intrusion in the east as the bolted and barred
doors of Europe) separated from the outer shop a
small octagonal room, that, in size and furniture, resembled
the Turkish boudoirs, which, in the luxurious
palaces of Europe, sometimes adjoin a lady's chamber.
The slippered foot was almost buried in the rich carpets
laid, but not fitted to the floor. The divans were
covered with the flowered and lustrous silk of Brusa,
and piled with vari-colored cushions. A perpetual
spice-lamp sent up its thin wreaths of smoke to the
black and carved ceiling, diffusing through the room a
perfume which, while it stole to the innermost fibres
of the brain with a sense of pleasure, weighed on the
eyelids and relaxed the limbs; and as the eye became
more accustomed to the dim light which struggled in
from a window in the arched ceiling, and dissolved in
the luxurious and spicy atmosphere, heaps of the rich
shawls of the east became distinguishable with their
sumptuous dyes, and, in a corner, stood a cluster of
crystal narghiles, faintly reflecting the light in their
dim globes of rose-water, while costly pipes, silver-mounted
pistols, and a rich Damascus sabre in a
sheath of red velvet, added gorgeousness to the apartment.

Mustapha was a bit of a philosopher in his way, and
he had made his own observations on the Europeans
who came to his shop. The secluded and oriental
laxuriousness of the room I have described was one of
his hires to that passion for the picturesque which he
saw in every traveller; and another was his gigantic
Nubian, who, with bracelets and anklets of gold, a
white turban, and naked legs and arms, stood always
at the door of his shop, inviting the passers-by—not to
buy essences and pastilles—but to come in and take
sherbet with his master. You will have been an hour
upon his comfortable divans, have smoked a pipe or
two, and eaten a snowy sherbet or a dish of rice-paste
and sugar, before Mustapha nods to his slave, and produces
his gold-rimmed jars of essences, from which,
with his fat fore-finger, he anoints the palm of your
hand, or, with a compliment to the beauty of your
hair, throws a drop into the curl on your temples.
Meanwhile, as you smoke, the slave lays in the bowl
of your pipe a small pastille wrapped in gold leaf,
from which presently arrives to your nostrils a perfume
that might delight a sultan; and then, from the
two black hands which are held to you full of cubical-edged
vials with gilded stoppers, you are requested
with the same bland courtesy to select such as in
size or shape suit your taste and convenience—the
smallest of them, when filled with attar, worth near a
gold piastre.

This is not very ruinous, and your next temptation
comes in the shape of a curiously-wrought censer,
upon the filagree grating of which is laid strips of
odorent wood which, with the heat of the coals beneath,
give out a perfume like gums from Araby.
This, Mustapha swears to you by his beard, has a
spell in its spicy breath provocative as a philtre, and
is to be burnt in your lady's chamber. It is worth its
weight in gold, and for a handful of black chips you
are persuaded to pay a price which would freight a
caique with cinnamon. Then come bracelets, and
amulets, and purses, all fragrant and precious, and,
while you hesitate, the Nubian brings you coffee that
would open the heart of Shylock, and you drink and
purchase. And when you have spent all your money,
you go away delighted with Mustapha, and quite persuaded
that you are vastly obliged to him. And, all
things considered, so you are!

When Mustapha had finished his prayers (did I say
that it was noon?) he called in the Nubian to roll up
the sacred carpet, and then closing the curtain between
us and the shop, listened patiently to my story
of the gipsy, which I told him faithfully from the
beginning. When I arrived at the incident on board
the slaver, a sudden light seemed to strike upon his
mind.

“Pekhe, filio mio! pekhe!” he exclaimed, running
his fore-finger down the middle of his beard, and
pouring out a volume of smoke from his mouth and
nostrils which obscured him for a moment from my
sight.

(I dislike the introduction of foreign words into a
story, but the Turkish dissyllable in the foregoing
sentence is as constantly on an eastern lip as the amber
of the pipe.)

He clapped his hands as I finished my narration,
and the Nubian appeared. Some conversation passed
between them in Turkish, and the slave tightened his
girdle, made a salaam, and taking his slippers at the
outer door, left the shop.

“We shall find her at the slave-market,” said Mustapha.

I started. The thought had once or twice passed
through my mind, but I had as often rejected it as
impossible. A freeborn Zingara, and on a confidential
errand from her own mother!—I did not see how
her freedom, if there were danger, should have been
so carelessly put in peril.

“And if she is there!” said I; remembering, first,
that it was against the Mohammedan law for a Christian
to purchase a slave, and next, that the price, if it did
not ruin me at once, would certainly leave me in a situation
rather to lessen than increase my expenses.

“I will buy her for you,” said Mustapha.

The Nubian returned at this moment, and laid at

my feet a bundle of wearing apparel. He then took
from a shelf a shaving apparatus, with which he proceeded
to lather my forehead and temples, and after a
short argument with Mustapha, in which I pleaded in
vain for two very seducing clusters of curls, those
caressed minions dropped into the black hand of the
slave, and nothing was left for the petits soins of my
thumb and fore-finger in their leisure hours save a
well-coaxed and rather respectable mustache. A
scull-cap and turban completed the transformation of
my head, and then, with some awkwardness, I got
into a silk shirt, big trowsers, jacket, and slippers, and
stood up to look at myself in the mirror. I was as
like one of the common Turks of the street as possible,
save that the European cravat and stockings had
preserved an unoriental whiteness in my neck and
ankles. This was soon remedied with a little brown
juice, and after a few cautions from Mustapha as to my
behavior, I settled my turban and followed him into
the street.

It is a singular sensation to be walking about in a
strange costume, and find that nobody looks surprised.
I could not avoid a slight feeling of mortification at
the rude manner with which every dirty mussulman
took the wall of me. After long travel in foreign
lands, the habit of everywhere exciting notice as a
stranger, and the species of consequence attached to
the person and movements of a traveller, become
rather pleasures than otherwise, and it is not without
pain that one finds oneself once more like common
people. I have not yet returned to my own land
(Slingsby is an American, gentle reader), and can not
judge, therefore, how far this feeling is modified by
the pleasures of a recovered home; but I was vexed
not to be stared at when playing the Turk at Constantinople,
and, amusing as it was to be taken for an
Englishman on first arriving in England (different as
it is from every land I have seen, and still more different
from my own), I must confess to have experienced
again a feeling of lessened consequence, when, on my
first entrance into an hotel in London, I was taken for
an Oxonian, “come up for a lark” in term-time. Perhaps
I have stumbled in this remark upon one of those
unconfessed reasons why a returned traveller is proverbially
discontented with his home.

Whether Mustapha wished to exhibit his new pipe-bearer
to his acquaintances, or whether there was fun
enough in his obese composition to enjoy my difficulties
in adapting myself to my new circumstances, I
can not precisely say; but I soon found that we were
not going straight to the slave-market. I had several
times forgotten my disguise so far as to keep the narrow
walk till I stood face to face with the bearded
Mussulmans, who were only so much astonished at my
audacity that they forgot to kick me over the gutter;
and passing, in the bazar of saddle-cloths, an English
officer of my acquaintance, who belonged to the
corvette lying in the Bosphorus, I could not resist the
temptation of whispering in his ear the name of his
sweetheart (which he had confided to me over a bottle
at Smyrna), though I rather expected to be seized
by the turban the next moment, with the pleasant consequences
of a mob and an exposure. My friend was
so thoroughly amazed, however, that I was deep in
the crowd before he had drawn breath, and I look
daily now for his arrival in England (I have not seen
him since) with a curiosity to know how he supposes
a “blackguard Turk” knew anything of the lock of
hair he carried in his waistcoat pocket.

The essence-seller had stopped in the book-bazar,
and was condescendingly smoking a pipe, with his
legs crossed on the counter of a venerable Armenian,
who sat buried to the chin in his own wares, when
who should come pottering along (as Mrs. Butler would
say) but Job with his Jew behind him. Mustapha
(probably unwilling to be seen smoking with an Ar
menian) had ensconced himself behind a towering
heap of folios, and his vexed and impatient pipe-bearer
had taken his more humble position on the narrow
base of one of the chequered columns which are peculiar
to the bazar devoted to the bibliopolists. As
my friend came floundering along “all abroad” with
his legs and arms, as usual, I contrived, by an adroit
insertion of one of my feet between his, to spread him
over the musty tomes of the Armenian in a way calculated
to derange materially the well-ordered sequence
of the volumes.

“Allah! Mashallah!” exclaimed Mustapha, whose
spreading lap was filled with black-letter copies of the
Khoran, while the bowl of his pipe was buried in the
fallen pyramid.

“Bestia Inglese!” muttered the Armenian, as Job
put one hand in the inkstand in endeavoring to rise,
and with the next effort laid his blackened fingers on
a heap of choice volumes bound in snowy vellum.

The officious Jew took up the topmost copy, marked
like a cinq-foil with his spreading thumb and fingers,
and quietly asked the Armenian what il signore would
be expected to pay. As I knew he had no money in
his pocket, I calculated safely on his new embarrassment
to divert his anger from the original cause of his
overthrow.

“Tre colonati,” said the bookseller.

Job opened the book, and his well-known guttural
of surprise and delight assured me that I might come
out from behind the column and look over his shoulder.
It was an illuminated copy of Hafiz, with a
Latin translation—a treasure which his heart had
been set upon from our first arrival in the east,
and for which I well knew he would sell his coat
off his back without hesitation. The desire to give
it him passed through my mind, but I could see no
means, under my present circumstances, either of
buying the book or relieving him from his embarrassment;
and as he buried his nose deeper between
the leaves, and sat down on the low counter, forgetful
alike of his dilemma and his lost friend, I nodded
to Mustapha to get off as quietly as possible,
and, fortunately slipping past both him and the
Jew unrecognised, left him to finish the loves of
Gulistan and settle his account with the incensed
Armenian.

2. II.

As we entered the gates of the slave-market, Mustapha
renewed his cautions to me with regard to my
conduct, reminded me that, as a Christian, I should see
the white female slaves at the peril of my life, and immediately
assumed, himself, a sauntering and poco-curante
manner, equally favorable to concealment and to his
interests as a purchaser. I followed close at his heels
with his pipe, and, as he stopped to chat with his acquaintances,
I now and then gave a shove with the bowl
between his jacket and girdle, rendered impatient to the
last degree by the sight of the close lattices on every
side of us, and the sounds of the chattering voices
within.

I should have been interested, had I been a mere
spectator, in the scene about me, but Mustapha's unnecessary
and provoking delay, while (as I thought possible,
if she really were in the market), Maimuna might
be bartered for at that moment within, wound my rage
to a pitch at last scarcely endurable.

We had come up from a cellar to which one of Mustapha's
acquaintances had taken him to see a young
white lad he was about to purchase, and I was hoping
that my suspense was nearly over, when a man came forward
into the middle of the court, ringing a hand-bell,
and followed by a black girl, covered with a scant blanket.
Like most of her race (she was an Abyssinian), her
head was that of a brute, but never were body and limbs

more exquisitely moulded. She gazed about without
either surprise or shame, stepping after the crier with
an elastic, leopard-like tread, her feet turned in like
those of the North American Indian, her neck bent
gracefully forward, and her shoulders and hips working
with that easy play so lost in the constrained dress and
motion of civilized women. The Mercury of Giovanni
di Bologna springs not lighter from the jet of the fountain
than did this ebon Venus from the ground on which
she stood.

I ventured to whisper to Mustapha, that, under cover
of the sale of the Abyssinian, we might see the white
slaves more unobserved.

A bid was made for her.

“Fifteen piastres!” said the attar-seller, wholly absorbed
in the sale, and not hearing a syllable I said to
him, “She would be worth twice as much to gild my
pastilles!” And handing me his pipe, he waddled into
the centre of the court, lifted the blanket from the slave's
shoulders, turned her round and round, like a Venus
on a pivot, looked at her teeth and hands, and after a
conversation aside with the crier, he resumed his pipe,
and the black disappeared from the ground.

“I have bought her!” he said, with a salacious grin,
as I handed him his tobacco-bag, and muttered a round
Italian execration in his ear.

The idea that Maimuna might have become the
property of that gross and sensual monster just as easily
as the pretty negress he had brought, sent my blood
boiling for an instant to my cheek. Yet I had seen this
poor savage of seventeen sold without a thought, save
mental congratulation that she would be better fed and
clad. What a difference one's private feelings make
in one's sympathies!

I was speculating, in a kind of tranquil despair, on
the luxurious evils of slavery, when Mustapha called to
him an Egyptian, in a hooded blue cloak, whom I remembered
to have seen on board the Trebisondian.
He was a small-featured, black-lipped, willowy Asiatic,
with heavy-lidded eyes, and hands as dry and rusty as
the claws of a harpy. After a little conversation, he
rose from the platform on which he had crossed his
legs, and taking my pro-tempore master by the sleeve,
traversed the quadrangle to a closed door in the best-looking
of the miserable houses that surrounded the
court. I followed close upon his heels with a beating
heart. It seemed to me as if every eye in the crowded
market-place must penetrate my disguise. He knocked,
and answering to some one who spoke from within,
the door was opened, and the next moment I found myself
in the presence of a dozen veiled women, seated in
various attitudes on the floor. At the command of our
conductor, carpets were brought for Mustapha and himself;
and, as they dropped upon their hams, every veil
was removed, and a battery of staring and unwinking
eyes was levelled full upon us.

“Is she here?” said Mustapha to me in Italian, as
I stooped over to hand him his eternal pipe.

“Dio mio! no!”

I felt insulted, that with half a glance at the Circassian
and Georgian dolls sitting before us, he could ask
me the question. Yet they were handsome! Red
cheeks, white teeth, black eyes, and youth could scarce
compose a plain woman; and thus much of beauty
seemed equally bestowed on all.

“Has he no more?” I asked, stooping to Mustapha's
ear.

I looked around while he was getting the information
I wanted in his own deliberate way; and, scarce
knowing what I did, applied my eye to a crack in the
wall, through which had been coming for some time a
strong aroma of coffee. I saw at first only a small dim
room, in the midst of which stood a Turkish manghal,
or brazier of coals, sustaining the coffee-pot from which
came the agreeable prefume I had inhaled. As my
eye became accustomed to the light, I could distinguish
a heap of what I took to be shawls lying in the centre
of the floor; and presuming it was the dormitory of one
of the slave-owners, I was about turning my head away,
when the coffee on the manghal suddenly boiled over,
and at the same instant started, from the heap at which
I had been gazing, the living form of Maimuna!

“Mustapha!” I cried, starting back, and clasping
my hands before him.

Before I could utter another word, a grasp upon my
ankle, that drew blood with every nail, restored me to
my self-possession. The Circassians began to giggle,
and the wary old Turk, taking no apparent notice of
my agitation, ordered me, in a stern tone, to fill his
pipe, and went on conversing with the Egyptian.

I leaned with an effort at carelessness against the
wall, and looked once more through the crevice. She
stood by the manghal, filling a cup with a small filagree-holder
from the coffee-pot, and by the light of the
fire I could see every feature of her face as distinctly
as daylight. She was alone, and had been sitting
with her head on her knees, and the shawl, which had
now fallen to her shoulders, drawn over her till it concealed
her feet. A narrow carpet was beneath her
and as she moved from the fire, a slight noise drew my
attention downward, and I saw that she was chained by
the ankle to the floor. I stooped to the ear of Mustapha,
told him in a whisper of my discovery, and implored
him, for the love of Heaven, to get admission
into her apartment.

“Pekhe! pekhe! filio mio!” was the unsatisfactory
answer to my impatience, while the Egyptian rose and
proceeded to turn around, in the light of the window,
the fattest of the fair Circassians, from whom he had
removed every article of dress save her slippers and
trousers.

I returned to the crevice. Maimuna had drunk her
coffee, and stood, with her arms folded, thoughtfully
gazing on the fire. The expression in her beautiful
and youthful face was one I could scarcely read to my
satisfaction. The slight lips were firmly but calmly
compressed, the forehead untroubled, the eye alone
strained, and unnaturally fixed and lowering. I
looked at her with the heart beating like a hammer in
my bosom, and the impatience in my trembling limbs
which it required every consideration of prudence to
suppress. She moved slowly away at last, and sinking
again to her carpet, drew out the chain from beneath
her, and drawing the shawl once more over her
head, lay down, and sunk apparently to sleep.

Mustapha left the Circassian, whose beauties he had
risen to examine more nearly, and came to my side.

“Are you sure that it is she?” he asked, in an almost
inaudible whisper.

“Si!”

He took the pipe from my hand, and requested me,
in the same suppressed voice, to return to his shop.

“And Maimuna”—

His only answer was to point to the door, and thinking
it best to obey his orders implicity, I made the
best of my way out of the slave-market, and was soon
drinking a sherbet in his inner apartment, and listening
to the shuffle of every passing slipper for the coming
of the light step of the gipsy.

3. III.

The rules of good-breeding discountenance in society
what is usually called “a scene.” I detest it as
well on paper. There is no sufficient reason, apparent
to me, why my sensibilities should be drawn upon
at sight, as I read, any more than when I please myself
by following my own devices in company. Violent
sensations are, abstractly as well as conventionally,
ill-bred. They derange the serenity, fluster the manner,
and irritate the complexion. It is for this reason
that I forbear to describe the meeting between Maimuna

and myself after she had been bought for forty
pounds by the wily and worthy seller of essences and
pastilles—how she fell on my neck when she discovered
that I, and not Mustapha, was her purchaser and master—how
she explained, between her hysterical sobs,
that the Turk who had sold her to the slave-dealer was
a renegade gipsy, and her mother's brother (to whom
she had been on an errand of affection)—and how she
sobbed herself to sleep with her face in the palms of
my hands, and her masses of raven hair covering my
knees and feet like the spreading fountains of San Pietro—and
how I pressed my lips to the starry parting
of those raven tresses on the top of her fairest head,
and blessed the relying child as she slept—are circumstances,
you will allow, my dear madam! that could
not be told passably well without moving your amiable
tenderness to tears. You will consider this paragraph,
therefore, less as an ingenious manner of disposing of
the awkward angles of my story, than as a polite and
praise-worthy consideration of your feelings and complexion.
Flushed eyelids are so very unbecoming!

4. IV.

My confidential interviews with Job began to take
rather an unpleasant coloring. The forty pounds I
had paid for Maimuna's liberty, with the premium to
Mustapha, the suit of European clothes necessary to
disguise my new companion, and the addition of a
third person in our European lodgings at Pera, rather
drove my finances to the wall. Job cared very little
for the loss of his allowance of pocket-money, and
made no resistance to eating kibaubs at a meat-shop,
instead of his usual silver fork and French dinner at
Madame Josepino's. He submitted with the same
resignation to a one-oared caique on the Bosphorus,
and several minor reductions in his expenses, thinking
nothing a hardship, in short, which I shared cheerfully
with him. He would have donned the sugar-loaf hat
of a dervish, and begged his way home by Jerusalem
or Mecca. so only I was content. But the morality of
the thing!

“What will you do with this beautiful girl when
you get to Rome? how will you dispose of her in
Paris? how will your friends receive a female, already
arrived at the age of womanhood, who shall have
travelled with you two or three years on the continent?
how will you provide for her? how educate her? how
rid yourself of her, with any Christian feeling of compassion,
when she has become irrevocably attached to
you?”

We were pulling up to the Symplegades while my
plain-spoken Mentor thrust me these home questions,
and Maimuna sat coiled between my feet in the bottom
of the caique, gazing into my face with eyes that
seemed as if they would search my very soul for the
cause of my emotion. We seldom spoke English in
her presence, for the pain it gave her when she felt
excluded from the conversation amounted in her all-expressive
features to a look of anguish that made it
seem to me a cruelty. She dared not ask me, in
words, why I was vexed; but she gathered from Job's
tone that there was reproof in what he said, and
flashing a glance of inquiring anger at his serious
face, she gently stole her hand under the cloak to
mine, and laid the back of it softly in my palm. There
was a delicacy and a confidingness in the motion that
started a tear into my eye; and as I smiled through it,
and drew her to me and impressed a kiss on her forehead.
I inwardly resolved, that, as long as that lovely
creature should choose to eat of my bread, it should
be free to her in all honor and kindness, and, if need
were, I would supply to her, with the devotion of my
life, the wrong and misconstruction of the world.
As I turned over that leaf in my heart, there crept
through it a breath of peace, and I felt that my good
angel had taken me into favor. Job began to fumble
for the lunch, and the dancing caique shot forth merrily
into the Black sea.

“My dearest chum!” said I, as we sat round our
brown paper of kibaubs on the highest point of the
Symplegades, “you see yourself here at the outermost
limit of your travels.”

His mouth was full, but as soon as he could conveniently
swallow, he responded with the appropriate
sigh.

“Six thousand miles, more or less, lie between you
and your spectacled and respectable mother; but
nineteen thousand, the small remainder of the earth's
circumference, extending due east from this paper of
cold meat, remain to you untravelled!”

Job fixed his eye on a white sea-bird apparently
asleep on the wing, but diving away eastward into the
sky, as if it were the heart within us sped onward with
our boundless wishes.

“Do you not envy him?” he asked enthusiastically.

“Yes; for nature pays his travelling expenses, and
I would our common mother were as considerate to
me! How soon, think you, he will see Trebisond,
posting at that courier speed?”

“And Shiraz, and Isaphan, and the valley of Cashmere!
To think how that stupid bird will fly over
them, and, spite of all that Hafiz, and Saadi, and Tom
Moore, have written on the lands that his shadow may
glide throught, will return, as wise as he went, to
Marmora! To compound natures with him were a
nice arrangement, now!”

“You would be better looking, my dear Job!”

“How very unpleasant you are, Mr. Slingsby! But
really, Philip, to cast the slough of this expensive and
il-locomotive humanity, and find yourself afloat with
all the necessary apparatus of life stowed snugly into
breast and tail, your legs tucked quietly away under
you, and, instead of coat and unmentionables to be put
off and on and renewed at such inconvenient expense, a
self-renewing tegument of cleanly feathers, brushed
and washed in the common course of nature by wind
and rain—no valet to be paid and drilled—no dressing-case
to be supplied and left behind—no tooth-brushes
to be mislaid—no tight boots—no corns—no passports
nor host-horses! Do you know, Phil, on reflection, I
find this `mortal coil' a very inferior and inconvenient
apparatus!”

“If you mean your own, I quite agree with you.”

“I am surprised, Mr. Slingsby, that you, who value
yourself on knowing what is due from one highly-civilized
individual to another, should indulge in these
very disagreeable reflections!”

Maimuna did not quite comprehend the argument,
but she saw that the tables were turned, and, without
ill-will to Job, she paid me the compliment of always
taking my side. I felt her slender arm around my
neck, and as she got upon her knees behind me and
put forward her little head to get a peep at my lips, her
clear bird-like laugh of enjoyment and triumph added
visibly to my friend's mortification. A compunctious
visiting stole over me, and I began to feel that I should
scarce have revenged myself for what was, after all,
but a kind severity.

“Do you know, Job,” said I (anxious to restore his
self-complacency without a direct apology for my rudeness),
“do you know there is a very deep human truth
hidden in the familiar story of `Beauty and the Beast?'
I really am of opinion, that, between the extremes of
hideousness and the highest perfection of loveliness,
there is no face which, after a month's intercourse,
does not depend exclusively on its expression (or, in
other words, on the amiable qualities of the individual)
for the admiration it excites. The plainest features
become handsome unaware when associated only with
kind feelings, and the loveliest face disagreeable when
linked with ill-humor or caprice. People should re

member this when selecting a face which they are to
see every morning across the breakfast-table for the remainder
of their natural lives.”

Job was appeased by the indirect compliment contained
in this speech; and, gathering up our kibaubs,
we descended to the caique, and pulling around the
easternmost point of the Symplegades, bade adieu to
the orient, and took the first step westward with the
smile of conciliation on our lips.

We were soon in the strong current of the Bosphorus,
and shot swiftly down between Europe and Asia,
by the light of a sunset that seemed to brighten the
west for our return. It was a golden path homeward.
The east looked cold behind; and the welcome of
our far-away kinsmen seemed sent to us on those purpling
clouds, winning us back. Beneath that kindling
horizon—below that departed sun—lay the fresh and
free land of our inheritance. The light of the world
seemed gone over to it. These, from which the day
had declined, were countries of memory—ours, of
hope. The sun, that was setting on these, was dawning
gloriously on ours.

On ordinary occasions, Job would have given me a
stave of “Hail Columbia!” after such a burst of patriotism.
The cloud was on his soul, however.

“We have turned to go back,” he said, in a kind of
musing bitterness, “and see what we are leaving behind!
In this fairy-shaped boat you are gliding like a
dream down the Bosphorus. The curving shore of
Therapia yonder is fringed for miles with the pleasure-loving
inhabitants of this delicious land, who think a
life too short, of which the highest pleasure is to ramble
on the edge of these calm waters with their kinsmen
and children. Is there a picture in the world
more beautiful than that palace-lined shore? Is there
a city so magnificent under the sun as that in which it
terminates? Are there softer skies, greener hills,
simpler or better people, to live among, than these?
Oh, Philip! ours, with all its freedom, is a `working-day'
land. There is no idleness there! The sweat is
ever on the brow, the `serpent of care' never loosened
about the heart! I confess myself a worshipper of
leisure: I would let no moment of my golden youth
go by unrecorded with a pleasure. Toil is ungodlike,
and unworthy of the immortal spirit, that should walk
unchained through the world. I love these idle orientals.
Their sliding and haste-forbidding slippers, their
flowing and ungirded habiliments, are signs most expressive
of their joy in life. Look around, and see
how on every hill-top stands a maison de plaisance;
how every hill-side is shelved into those green platforms,
[11] so expressive of their habits of enjoyment!
Rich or poor, their pleasures are the same. The
open air, freedom to roam, a caique at the water-side,
and a sairgah on the hill—these are their means of
happiness, and they are within the reach of all; they
are nearer Utopia than we, my dear Philip! We shall
be more like Turks than Christians in paradise!”

“Inglorious Job!”

“Why? Because I love idleness? Are there
braver people in the world than the Turks? Are
there people more capable of the romance of heroism?
Energy, though it sound a paradox, is the child of
idleness. All extremes are natural and easy; and the
most indolent in peace is likely to be the most fiery in
war. Here we are, opposite the summer serai of Sultan
Mahmoud; and who more luxurious and idle?
Yet the massacre of the Janissaries was one of the
boldest measures in history. There is the most perfect
orientalism in the description of the Persian beauty
by Hafiz:—

Perhaps nothing would be so contradictory as the true
analysis of the character of what is called an indolent
man. With all the tastes I have just professed, my
strongest feeling on leaving the Symplegades, for example,
was, and is still, an unwillingness to retrace my
steps. `Onward! onward!' is the perpetual cry of
my heart. I could pass my life in going from land to
land, so only that every successive one was new. Italy
will be old to us; France, Germany, can scarce lure
the imagination to adventure, with the knowledge we
have; and England, though we have not seen it, is so
familiar to us from its universality that it will not seem,
even on a first visit, a strange country. We have satiety
before us, and the thought saddens me. I hate
to go back. I could start now, with Maimuna for a
guide, and turn gipsy in the wilds of Asia.”

“Will you go with him, Maimuna?”

“Signor, no!”

I am the worst of story-tellers, gentle reader; for I
never get to the end. The truth is, that in these rambling
papers, I go over the incidents I describe, not as
they should be written in a romance, but as they occurred
in my travels: I write what I remember. There
are, of course, long intervals in adventure, filled up
sometimes by feasting or philosophy, sometimes with
idleness or love; and, to please myself, I must unweave
the thread as it was woven. It is strange how,
in the memory of a traveller, the most wayside and unimportant
things are the best remembered. You may
have stood in the Parthenon, and, looking back upon
it through the distance of years, a chance word of the
companion who happened to be with you, or the attitude
of a Greek seen in the plain below, may come up
more vividly to the recollection than the immortal
sculptures on the frieze. There is a natural antipathy
in the human mind to fulfil expectations. We wander
from the thing we are told to admire, to dwell on
something we have discovered ourselves. The child
in church occupies itself with the fly on its prayer-book,
and “the child is father of the man.” If I indulge
in the same perversity in story-telling, dear
reader—if, in the most important crisis of my tale, I
digress to some trifling vein of speculation—if, at the
close even, the climax seem incomplete, and the moral
vain—I plead, upon all these counts, an adherence to
truth and nature. Life—real life—is made up of half-finished
romance. The most interesting procession of
events is delayed, and travestied, and mixed with the
ridiculous and the trifling, and at the end, oftenest left
imperfect. Who ever saw, off the stage, a five-act
tragedy, with its proprieties and its climax?

3. PART III.

Ten-o'clock A. M., and the weather like the prophet's
paradise,

Madame Josepino stood at the door of her Turco-Italian
boarding-house in the nasty and fashionable main
street of Pera, dividing her attention between a handsome
Armenian, with a red button in the top of his
black lamb's-wool cap,[12] and her three boarders, Job,
Maimuna, and myself, at that critical moment about
mounting our horses for a gallop to Belgrade.

We kissed our hands to the fat and fair Italian, and
with a promise to be at home for supper, kicked our
shovel-shaped stirrups into the sides of our horses, and
pranced away up the street, getting many a glance of
curiosity, and one or two that might be more freely
translated, from the dark eyes that are seen day and
night at the windows of the leaden-colored houses of
the Armenians.

We should have been an odd-looking cavalcade for
the Boulevard or Bond street, but, blessed privilege of
the east! we were sufficiently comme il faut for Pera.
To avoid the embarrassment of Maimuna's sex, I had
dressed her, from an English “slop-shop” at Galata,
in the checked shirt, jacket, and trowsers of a sailor-boy,
but as she was obstinately determined that her
long black hair should not be shorn, a turban was her
only resource for concealment, and the dark and
glossy mass was hidden in the folds of an Albanian
shawl, forming altogether as inharmonious a costume
as could well be imagined. With the white duck
trowsers tight over her hips, and the jacket, which was
a little too large for her, loose over her shoulders and
breast, the checked collar tied with a black silk cravat
close round her throat, and the silken and gold fringe
of the shawl flowing coquetishly over her left cheek
and ear, she was certainly an odd figure on horseback,
and, but for her admirable riding and excessive grace of
attitude, she might have been as much a subject for a
caricature as her companion. Job rode soberly along
at her side, in the green turban of a Hajji (which he
had persisted in wearing ever since his pilgrimage to
Jerusalem), and, as he usually put it on askew, the
gaillard and rakish character of his head-dress, and
the grave respectability of his black coat and salt-and-pepper
trowsers, produced a contrast which elicited
a smile even from the admiring damsels at the windows.

Maimuna went caracoling along till the road entered
the black shadow of the cemetery of Pera, and then,
pulling up her well-managed horse, she rode close to
my side, with the air of subdued respect which was
more fitting to the spirit of the scene. It was a lovely
morning, as I said, and the Turks, who are early risers,
were sitting on the graves of their kindred with their
veiled wives and children, the marble turbans in that
thickly-sown nekropolis less numerous than those of the
living, who had come, not to mourn the dead who lay
beneath, but to pass a day of idleness and pleasure on
the spot endeared by their memories.

“I declare to you,” said Job, following Maimuna's
example in waiting till I came up, “that I think the
Turks the most misrepresented and abused people on
earth. Look at this scene! Here are whole families
seated upon graves over which the grass grows green
and fresh, the children playing at their feet, and their
own faces the pictures of calm cheerfulness and enjoyment.
They are the by-word for brutes, and there is
not a gentler or more poetical race of beings between
the Indus and the Arkansas!”

It was really a scene of great beauty. The Turkish
tombs are as splendid as white marble can make them,
with letters and devices in red and gold, and often the
most delicious sculptures, and, with the crowded closeness
of the monuments, the vast extent of the burial-ground
over hill and dale, and the cypresses (nowhere
so magnificent) veiling all in a deep religious shadow,
dim, and yet broken by spots of the clearest sunshine,
a more impressive and peculiar scene could scarce be
imagined. It might exist in other countries, but it
would be a desert. To the Mussulman death is not
repulsive, and he makes it a resort when he would be
happiest. At all hours of the day you find the
tombs of Constantinople surrounded by the living.
They spread their carpets, and arrange their simple
repast around the stone which records the name and
virtues of their own dead, and talk of them as they do
of the living and absent—parted from them to meet
again, if not in life, in paradise.

“For my own part,” continued Job, “I see nothing
in scripture which contradicts the supposition that we
shall haunt, in the intermediate state between death
and heaven, the familiar places to which we have been
accustomed. In that case, how delightful are the habits
of these people, and how cheeringly vanish the horrors
of the grave! Death, with us, is appalling! The
smile has scarce faded from our lips, the light scarce
dead in our eye, when we are thrust into a noisome
vault, and thought of but with a shudder and a fear.
We are connected thenceforth, in the memories of our
friends, with the pestilent air in which we lie, with the
vermin that infest the gloom, with chillness, with darkness,
with disease; and, memento as it is of their own
coming destiny, what wonder if they chase us, and the
forecast shadows of the grave, with the same hurried
disgust from their remembrance. Suppose, for an instant
(what is by no means improbable), that the
spirits of the dead are about us, conscious and watchful!
Suppose that they have still a feeling of sympathy
in the decaying form they have so long inhabited,
in its organs, its senses, its once-admired and long-cherished
grace and proportion; that they feel the
contumely and disgust with which the features we professed
to love are cast like garbage into the earth, and
the indecent haste with which we turn away from the
solitary spot, and think of it but as the abode of festering
and revolting corruption!”

At this moment we turned to the left, descending to
the Bosphorus, and Maimuna, who had ridden a little
in advance during Job's unintelligible monologue, came
galloping back to tell us that there was a corpse in the
road. We quickened our pace, and the next moment
our horses started aside from the bier, left in a bend of
the highway with a single individual, the grave-digger,
sitting cross-legged beside it. Without looking up at
our approach, the man mumbled something between
his teeth, and held up his hand as if to arrest us in our
path.

“What does he say?” I asked of Maimuna.

“He repeats a verse of the Koran,” she replied,
“which promises a reward in paradise to him who
bears the dead forty steps on its way to the grave.”

Job sprang instantly from his horse, threw the bridle
over the nearest tombstone, and made a sign to the
grave-digger that he would officiate as bearer. The
man nodded assent, but looked down the road without
arising from his seat.

“You are but three,” said Maimuna, “and he waits
for a fourth.”

I had dismounted by this time, not to be behind my
friend in the humanities of life, and the grave-digger,
seeing that we were Europeans, smiled with a kind
of pleased surprise, and uttering the all-expressive
“Pekkhe!” resumed his look-out for the fourth
bearer.

The corpse was that of a poor old man. The coffin
was without a cover, and he lay in it, in his turban
and slippers, his hands crossed over his breast, and
the folds of his girdle stuck full of flowers. He might
have been asleep, for any look of death about him.
His lips were slightly unclosed, and his long beard was
combed smoothly over his breast. The odor of the
pipe and the pastille struggled with the perfume of the
flowers, and there was in his whole aspect a life-likeness
and peace, that the shroud and the close coffin,
and the additional horrors of approaching death, perhaps,
combine, in other countries, utterly to do away.

“Hitherto,” said Job, as he gazed attentively on the
calm old man, “I have envied the Scaligers their uplifted
and airy tombs in the midst of the cheerful street
of Verona, and, next to theirs, the sunny sarcophagus
of Petrarch, looking away over the peaceful Campagna
of Lombardy; but here is a Turkish beggar who will

be buried still more enviably. Is it not a paradise of
tombs—a kind of Utopia of the dead?”

A young man with a load of vegetables for the
market of Pera, came toiling up the hill behind his
mule. Sure of his assistance, the grave-digger arose,
and as we took our places at the poles, the marketer
quietly turned his beast out of the road, and assisted
us in lifting the dead on our shoulders. The grave
was not far off, and having deposited the corpse on its
border, we returned to our horses, and, soon getting
clear of the cemetery, galloped away with light hearts
toward the valley of Sweet Waters.

2. II.

We were taking breath on the silken banks of the
Barbyses—Maimuna prancing along the pebbly bed,
up to her barb's girths in sparkling water, and Job and
myself laughing at her frolics from either side, when
an old woman, bent double with age, came hobbling
toward us from a hovel in the hill-side.

“Maimuna,” said Job, fishing out some trumpery
paras from the corner of his waistcoat pocket, “give
this to that good woman, and tell her that he who gives
it is happy, and would share his joy with her.”

The gipsy spurred up the bank, dismounted at a
short distance from the decrepit creature, and after a
little conversation returned, leading her horse.

“She is not a beggar, and wishes to know why you
give her money?”

“Tell her, to buy bread for her children,” said my
patriarchal friend.

Maimuna went back, conversed with her again, and
returned with the money.

“She says she has no need of it. There is no human
creature between her and Allah!”

The old woman hobbled on, Job pocketed his rejected
paras, and Maimuna rode between us in silence.

It was a gem of natural poetry that was worthy of
the lips of an angel.

3. III.

We kept up the valley of Sweet Waters, tracing
the Barbyses through its bosom, to the hills; and then
mounting a steep ascent, struck across to the east, over
a country, which, though so near the capital of the
Turkish empire, is as wild as the plains of the Hermus.
Shrubs, forest-trees, and wild grass, cover the apparently
illimitable waste, and save a half-visible horse-path
which guides the traveller across, there is scarce
an evidence that you are not the first adventurer in the
wilderness.

What a natural delight is freedom! What a bound
gives the heart at the sight of the unfenced earth, the
unseparated hill-sides, the unhedged and unharvested
valleys! How thrilling it is—unlike any other joy—
to spur a fiery horse to the hill-top, and gaze away
over dell and precipice to the horizon, and never a
wall between, nor a human limit to say “Thus far
shalt thou go, and no farther!” Oh, I think we have
an instinct, dulled by civilization, which is like the
caged eaglet's, or the antelope's that is reared in the
Arab's tent; an instinct of nature that scorns boundary
and chain; that yearns to the free desert; that would
have the earth, like the sea or the sky, unappropriated
and open; that rejoices in immeasurable liberty of foot
and dwelling-place, and springs passionately back to
its freedom even after years of subduing method and
spirit-breaking confinement! I have felt it on the sea,
in the forests of America, on the desolated plains of
Asia and Roumelia; I should feel it till my heart
burst, had I the wings of a bird!

The house once occupied by Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu stands on the descent of a hill in the little village
of Belgrade, some twelve or fourteen miles from
Constantinople. It is a common-place two-story affair,
but the best house of the dozen that form the village,
and overlooks a dell below that reminds one of the
“Emerald valleys of Cashmeer.” We wandered
through its deserted rooms, discussed the clever woman
who has described her travels so graphically, and
then followed Maimuna to the narrow street, in search
of kibaubs. The butcher's shop in Turkey is as open
as the trottoir to the street, and with only an entire
sheep hanging between us and a dozen hungry beggars,
attracted by the presence of strangers, we crossed
our legs on the straw carpet, and setting the wooden
tripod in the centre, waited patiently the movements of
our feeder, who combined in his single person the
three vocations of butcher, cook, and waiter. One
must have travelled east of Cape Colonna to relish a
dinner so slightly disguised, but, once rid of European
prejudices, there is nothing more simple than the fact
that it is rather an attractive mode of feeding—a traveller's
appetite subauditur.

Our friend was a wholesome-looking Turk, with a
snow-white turban, a black, well-conditioned beard, a
mouth incapable of a smile, yet honest, and a most
trenchant and janissaresque style of handling his
cleaver. Having laid open his bed of coals with a
kind of conjurer's flourish of the poker, he slapped the
pendent mutton on the thigh in a fashion of encouragement,
and waiting an instant for our admiration to subside,
he whipping his knife from its sheath, and had out
a dozen strips from the chine (as Job expressed it in
Vermontese) “in no time.” With the same alacrity
these were cut into bits “of the size of a piece of
chalk” (another favorite expression of Job's), run
upon a skewer, and laid on the coals, and in three
minutes, more or less, they appeared smoking on the
trencher, half lost in a fine green salad, well peppered,
and of a most seducing and provocative savor. If you
have performed your four ablutions A. M., like a devout
Mussulman, it is not conceived in Turkey that you
have occasion for the medium of a fork, and I frankly
own, that I might have been seen at Belgrade, cross-legged
in a kibaub-shop, between my friend and the
gipsy, and making a most diligent use of my thumb
and fore-finger. I have dined since at the Rocher de
Cancale and the Traveller's with less satisfaction.

Having paid something like sixpence sterling for
our three dinners (rather an overcharge, Maimuna
thought), we unpicketed our horses from the long
grass, and bade adieu to Belgrade, on out way to the
aqueducts. We were to follow down a verdant valley,
and, exhilarated by a flask of Greek wine (which
I forgot to mention), and the ever-thrilling circumstances
of unlimited greensward and horses that wait
not for the spur, we followed the daring little Asiatic
up hill and down, over bush and precipice, till Job
cried us mercy. We pulled up on the edge of a sheet
of calm water, and the vast marble wall, built by the
sultans in the days of their magnificence and crossing
the valley from side to side, burst upon us like a scene
of enchantment in the wilderness.

Those same sultans must have lived a great deal at
Belgrade. Save these vast aqueducts, which are splendid
monuments of architecture, there is little in the
first aspect to remind you that you are not in the wilds
of Missouri; but a further search discloses, in the recesses
of the hidden windings of the valley, circular
staircases of marble leading to secluded baths, now
filled with leaves and neglected, but evidently on a
scale of the most imperial sumptuousness. From the
perishable construction of Turkish dwelling-houses, all
traces even of the most costly serai may easily have
disappeared in a few years, when once abandoned to
ruin; and I pleased myself with imagining, as we
slackened bridle, and rode slowly beneath the gigantic
trees of the forest, the gilded pavilions, and gay scenes
of oriental pleasure that must have existed here in

the days of the warlike yet effeminate Selims. It is a
place for the enchantments of the “Arabian Nights”
to have been realized.

I have followed the common error in giving these
structures in the forest of Belgrade the name of aqueducts.
They are rather walls built across the deep
valleys, of different altitudes, to create reservoirs for
the supply of aqueducts, but are built with all the
magnificence and ornament of a facade to a temple.

We rode on from one to the other, arriving at last at
the lowest, which divides the valley at its wildest part,
forming a giddy wall across an apparently bottomless
ravine, as dark and impracticable as the glen of the
Cauterskill in America. Our road lay on the other
side, but though with a steady eye one might venture
to cross the parapet on foot, there were no means of
getting our horses over, short of a return of half a mile
to the path we had neglected higher up the valley.
We might swim it, above the embankment, but the
opposite shore was a precipice.

“What shall we do?” I asked.

Job made no answer, but pulled round his beast,
and started off in a sober canter to return.

I stood a moment, gazing on the placid sheet of
water above, and the abyss of rock and darkness below,
and then calling to Maimuna, who had ridden
farther down the bank, I turned my horse's head after
him.

“Signore!” cried the gipsy from below.

“What is it, Carissima?”

“Maimuna never goes back!”

“Silly child!” I answered, “you are not going to
cross the ravine?”

“Yes!” was the reply, and the voice became more
indistinguishable as she galloped away. “I will be
over before you!”

I was vexed, but I knew the self-will and temerity
of the wild Asiatic, and, very certain that if there
were danger it would be run before I could reach
her, I drove the stirrups into my horse's sides, and
overtook Job at the descent into the valley, We ascended
again, and rode down the opposite shore to the
embankment, at a sharp gallop. Maimuna was not
there.

“She will have perished in the abyss,” said Job.

I sprang from my horse to cross the parapet on foot
in search of her, when I heard her horse's footsteps,
and the next moment she dashed up the steep, having
failed in her attempt, and stood once more where we
had parted. The sun was setting, and we had ten
miles to ride, and impatient of her obstinacy, I sharply
ordered her to go up the ravine at speed, and cross as
we had done.

I think I never shall forget, angry as I was at the
moment, the appearance of that lovely creature, as
she resolutely refused to obey me. Her horse, the
same fiery Arabian she had ridden from Sardis (an
animal that, except when she was on his back, would
scarce have sold for a gold sequin), stood with head
erect and panting nostrils, glancing down with his
wild eyes upon the abyss into which he had been
urged—the whole group, horse and rider, completely
relieved against the sky from the isolated mound they
occupied, and, at this instant, the gold flood of the setting
sun pouring full on them through a break in the
masses of the forest. Her own fierce attitude, and
beautiful and frowning face, the thin lip curled resolutely,
and the brown and polished cheek deepened
with a rosy glow, her full and breathing bosom swelling
beneath its jacket, and her hair, which had escaped
from the turban, flowing over her neck and shoulders,
and mingling with the loosened fringes of red and gold
in rich disorder—it was a picture which the pencil of
Martin (and it would have suited his genius) could
scarce have exaggerated. The stately half Arabic,
half Grecian architecture of the aqueducts, and the
cold and frowning tints of the abyss and the forest
around, would have left him nothing to add to it as a
composition.

I was crossing the giddy edge of the parapet, looking
well to my feet, with the intention of reasoning
with the obstinate being, who, vexed at my reproaches
and her own failure, was now in as pretty a rage as
myself, when I heard the trampling of horses in the
forest. I stopped mid-way to listen, and presently
there sprang a horseman up the bank in an oriental
costume, with pistols and ataghan flashing in the
sun, and a cast of features that at once betrayed his
origin.

“A Zingara!” I shouted back to Job.

The gipsy, who was about nineteen, and as well-made
and gallant a figure for a man as Maimuna for a
woman, seemed as much astonished as ourselves, and
sat in his saddle gazing on the extraordinary figure I
have described, evidently recognising one of his own
race, but probably puzzled with the mixture of costumes,
and struck at the same time with Maimuna's
excessive beauty. Lovely as she always was, I had
never seen her to such advantage as now. She might
have come from fairy-land, for the radiant vision she
seemed in the gold of that burning sunset.

I gazed on them both a moment, and was about
finishing my traverse of the parapet, when a troop of
mounted gipsies and baggage-horses came up the bank
at a quick pace, and in another minute Maimuna was
surrounded. I sprang to her bridle, and apprehensive
of, I scarce knew what danger, gave her one of the
two pistols I carried always in my bosom.

The gipsy chief (for such he evidently was) measured
me from head to foot with a look of dislike, and
speaking for the first time, addressed Maimuna in his
own language, with a remark which sent the blood to
her temples with a suddenness I had never before
seen.

“What does he say?” I asked.

“It is no matter, signore, but it is false!” Her
black eyes were like coals of fire, as she spoke.

“Leave your horse,” I said to her, in a low tone,
“and cross the parapet. I will prevent his following
you, and will join you on your own before you can
reach Constantinople. Turn the horses' heads homeward!”
I continued in English to Job, who was crying
out to me from the other side to come back.

Maimuna laid her hand on the pommel to dismount,
but the gipsy, anticipating her motion, touched his
horse with the stirrup, and sprang with a single leap
between her and the parapet. The troop had gathered
into a circle behind us, and seeing our retreat
thus cut off, I presented my pistol to the young chief,
and demanded, in Italian, that he should clear the
way.

A blow from behind, the instant that I was pulling
the trigger, sent the discharged pistol into the ravine,
and, in the same instant, Maimuna dashed her horse
against the unguarded gipsy, nearly overturning him
into the abyss, and spurred desperately upon the parapet.
One cry from the whole gipsy troop, and then
all was as silent as the grave, except the click of her
horse's hoofs on the marble verge, as, trembling palpably
in every limb, the terrified animal crossed the
giddy chasm at a half trot, and, in the next minute,
bounded up the opposite bank, and disappeared with
a snort of fear and delight amid the branches of the
forest.

What with horror and wonder, and the shock of the
blow which had nearly broken my arm, I stood motionless
where Maimuna had left me, till the gipsy, recovering
from his amazement, dismounted and put his
pistol to my breast.

“Call her back!” he said to me, in very good Italian,
and with a tone in which rage and determination
were strangely mingled, “or you die where you stand!”

Without regarding his threat, I looked at him, with
a new thought stealing into my mind. He probably
read the pacific change in my feelings, for he dropped
his arm, and the frown on his own features moderated
to a steadfast and inquisitive regard.

“Zingara!” I said, “Maimuna is my slave.”

A clutch of his pistol-stock, and a fiery and impatient
look from his fine eyes, interrupted me for an instant.
I proceeded to tell him briefly how I had obtained
possession of her, while the troop gradually
closed around, attracted by his excessive look of interest
in the tale, though they probably did not understand
the language in which I spoke, and all fixing
their wild eyes earnestly on my face.

“And now, Zingara,” I said, “I will bring her back
on one condition—that, when the offer is fairly made
her, if she chooses still to go with me, she shall be
free to do so. I have protected her, and sworn still
to protect her as long as she should choose to eat of
my bread. Though my slave, she is pure and guiltless
as when she left the tent of her mother, and is
worthy of the bosom of an emperor.”

The Zingara took my hand, and put it to his lips.

“You agree to our compact, then?” I asked.

He put his hand on his forehead, and then laid it,
with a slight inclination, on his breast.

“She can not have gone far,” I said, and stepping
on the mound above the parapet, I shouted her name
till the woods rang again with the echo.

A moment, and Job and Maimuna came riding to
the verge of the opposite hill, and with a few words
of explanation, fastened their horses to a tree, and
crossed to us by the parapet.

The chief returned his pistols to his girdle, and
stood aside while I spoke to Maimuna. It was a difficult
task, but I felt that it was a moment decisive of
her destiny, and the responsibility weighed heavily on
my breast. Though excessively attached to her—
though she had been endeared to me by sacrifices, and
by the ties of protection—though, in short, I loved
her, not with a passion, but with an affection—as a
father more than as a lover—I still felt it to be my duty
to leave no means untried to induce her to abandon
me, to return to her own people and remain in her own
land of the sun. What her fate would be in the state
of society to which I must else introduce her, had
been eloquently depicted by Job, and will readily be
imagined by the reader.

After the first burst of incredulity and astonishment
at my proposal, she folded her arms on her bosom,
and, with the tears streaming like rain over her jacket,
listened in silence and with averted eyes. I concluded
with representing to her, in rather strong colors,
the feelings with which she might be received by my
friends, and the difficulty she would find in accommodating
herself to the customs of people, to whom not
only she must be inferior in the accomplishments of
a woman, but who might find, even in the color of that
loveliest cheek, a reason to despise her.

Her lip curled for an instant, but the grief in her
heart was stronger than the scorn for an imaginary
wrong, and she bowed her head again, and her tears
flowed on.

I was silent at last, and she looked up into my face.

“I am a burthen to you,” she said.

“No, dearest Maimuna! no! but if I were to see
you wretched hereafter, you would become so. Tell
me! the chief will make you his wife; will you rejoin
your people?”

She flung herself upon the ground, and wept as if
her heart would break. I thought it best to let her
feelings have away, and walking apart with the young
gipsy, I gave him more of the particulars of her history,
and exacted a promise that, if she should finally
be left with the troop, he would return with her to the
tribe of her mother, at Sardis.

Maimuna stood gazing fixedly into the ravine when
we turned back, and there was an erectness in her attitude,
and a fierte in the air of her head, that, I must
acknowledge, promised more for my fears than my
wishes. Her pride was roused, it was easy with half
a glance to see.

With the suddenness of oriental passion, the young
chief had become already enamored of her, and, with
a feeling of jealousy which, even though I wished him
success, I could not control, I saw him kneel at her
feet and plead with her in an inaudible tone. She had
been less than woman if she had been insensible to
that passionate cadence, and the imploring earnestness
of the noble countenance on which she looked.
It was evident that she was interested, though she
began with scarce deigning to lift her eyes from the
ground.

I felt a sinking of the heart which I can not describe
when he rose to his feet and left her standing alone.
The troop had withdrawn at his command, and Job,
to whom the scene was too painful, had recrossed the
parapet, and stood by his horse's head waiting the result.
The twilight had deepened, the forest looked
black around us, and a single star sprang into the sky,
while the west was still glowing in a fast purpling gold
and crimson.

“Signore!” said Maimuna, walking calmly to my
hand, which I stretched instinctively to receive her,
“I am breaking my heart; I know not what to do.”

At this instant a faint meteor shot over the sky, and
drew its reflection across the calm mirror whose verge
we were approaching.

“Stay!” she cried; “the next shall decide the fate
of Maimuna! If it cross to the east, the will of Allah
be done! I will leave you!”

I called to the gipsy, and we stood on the verge of
the parapet in breathless expectation. The darkness
deepened around us, the abyss grew black and indistinguishable,
and the night-birds flitted past like audible
shadows. I drew Maimuna to my bosom, and
with my hands buried in her long hair, pressed her to
my heart, that beat as painfully and as heavily as her
own.

A sudden shriek! She started from my bosom, and
as she fell upon the earth, my eye caught, on the face
of the mirror from which I had forgetfully withdrawn
my gaze, the vanishing pencil of a meteor, drawn like
a beam of the sunset, from west to east!

I lifted the insensible child, impressed one long kiss
on her lips, and flinging her into the arms of the gipsy,
crossed the parapet, and rode, with a speed that tried
in vain to outrun my anguish, to Constantinople.

TOM FANE AND I.

Tom Fane's four Canadian ponies were whizzing
his light phaeton through the sand at a rate that would
have put spirits into anything but a lover absent from
his mistress. The “heaven-kissing” pines towered on
every side like the thousand and one columns of the
Palœologi at Constantinople; their flat and spreading
tops shutting out the light of heaven almost as effectually
as the world of mussulmans, mosques, kiosks,
bazars, and Giaours, sustained on those innumerable
capitals, darkens the subterranean wonder of Stamboul.
An American pine forest is as like a temple,
and a sublime one, as any dream that ever entered
into the architectural brain of the slumbering Martin.
The Yankee methodists in their camp-meetings, have

but followed an irresistible instinct to worship God in
the religious dimness of these interminable aisles of the
wilderness.

Tom Fane and I had stoned the storks together in
the palace of Crœsus at Sardis. We had read Anastasius
on a mufti's tomb in the Nekropolis of Scutari.
We had burned with fig-fevers in the same caravanserai
at Smyrna. We had cooled our hot foreheads
and cursed the Greeks in emulous Romaic in the dim
tomb of Agamemnon at Argos. We had been grave
at Paris, and merry at Rome; and we had pic-nic'd
with the beauties of the Fanar in the Valley of Sweet
Waters in pleasant Roumelia; and when, after parting
in France, he had returned to England and his regiment,
and I to New England and law, whom should
I meet in a summer's trip to the St. Lawrence but
Captain Tom Fane of the —th, quartered at the
cliff-perched and doughty garrison of Quebec, and
ready for any “lark” that would vary the monotony
of duty!

Having eaten seven mess-dinners, driven to the
falls of Montmorenci, and paid my respects to Lord
Dalhousie, the hospitable and able governor of the
Canadas, Quebec had no longer a temptation: and
obeying a magnet, of which more anon, I announced
to Fane that my traps were packed, and my heart sent
on, a l'avant courier, to Saratoga.

“Is she pretty?” said Tom.

“As the starry-eyed Circassian we gazed at through
the grill in the slave-market at Constantinople!”—
(Heaven and my mistress forgive me for the comparison!—but
it conveyed more to Tom Fane than a folio
of more respectful similitudes.)

“Have you any objection to be drawn to your lady-love
by four cattle that would buy the soul of Osbaldiston?”

“`Objection!' quotha?”

The next morning, four double-jointed and well-groomed
ponies were munching their corn in the bow
of a steamer, upon the St. Lawrence, wondering possibly
what, in the name of Bucephalus, had set the
hills and churches flying at such a rate down the river.
The hills and churches came to a stand-still with the
steamer opposite Montreal, and the ponies were landed
and put to their mettle for some twenty miles, where
they were destined to be astonished by a similar flying
phenomenon in the mountains girding the lengthening
waters of Lake Champlain. Landed at Ticonderoga,
a few miles' trot brought them to Lake George and a
third steamer, and, with a winding passage among
green islands and overhanging precipices loaded like
a harvest-wagon with vegetation, we made our last
landing on the edge of the pine forest, where our story
opens.

“Well, I must object,” says Tom, setting his whip
in the socket, and edging round upon his driving-box,
“I must object to this republican gravity of yours. I
should take it for melancholy, did I not know it was
the `complexion' of your never-smiling countrymen.”

“Spare me, Tom! `I see a hand you can not see.'
Talk to your ponies, and let me be miserable, if you
love me.”

“For what, in the name of common sense? Are
you not within five hours of your mistress? Is not
this cursed sand your natal soil? Do not

and in the years that we have dangled about, `here-and-there-ians'
together, were you ever before grave,
sad, or sulky? and will you without a precedent, and
you a lawyer, inflict your stupidity upon me for the
first time in this waste, and being-less solitude? Half
an hour more of the dread silence of this forest, and
it will not need the horn of Astolpho to set me irremediably
mad!”

“If employment will save your wits, you may invent
a scheme for marrying the son of a poor gentleman
to the ward of a rich trader in rice and molasses.”

“The programme of our approaching campaign, I
presume?”

“Simply.”

“Is the lady willing?”

“I would fain believe so.”

“Is Mr. Popkins unwilling?”

“As the most romantic lover could desire.”

“And the state of the campaign?”

“Why, thus: Mr. George Washington Jefferson
Frump, whom you have irreverently called Mr. Popkins,
is sole guardian to the daughter of a dead West
Indian planter, of whom he was once the agent. I fell
in love with Kate Lorimer from description, when she
was at school with my sister, saw her by favor of a
garden-wall, and after the usual vows—”

“Too romantic for a Yankee, by half!”

“—Proposed by letter to Mr. Frump.”

“Oh, bathos!”

“He refused me.”

“Because—”

“Imprimis, I was not myself in the `sugar line,' and
in secundis, my father wore gloves and `did nothing
for a living'—two blots in the eyes of Mr. Frump,
which all the waters of Niagara would never wash from
my escutcheon.”

“And what the devil hindered you from running off
with her?”

“Fifty shares in the Manhattan Insurance Company,
a gold mine in Florida, Heaven knows how many
hogsheads of treacle, and a million of acres on the
banks of the Missouri.”

“`Pluto's flame-colored daughter' defend us! what
a living El Dorado!”

“All of which she forfeits if she marries without old
Frump's consent.”

“I see—I see! And this Io and her Argus are now
drinking the waters at Saratoga?”

“Even so.”

“I'll bet you my four-in-hand to a sonnet, that I get
her for you before the season is over.”

“Money and all?”

“Mines, molasses, and Missouri acres!”

“And if you do, Tom, I'll give you a team of Virginian
bloods that would astonish Ascot, and throw you
into the bargain a forgiveness for riding over me with
your camel on the banks of the Hermus.”

“Santa Maria! do you remember that spongy foot
stepping over your frontispiece? I had already cast
my eyes up to Mont Sypilus to choose a clean niche
for you out of the rock-hewn tombs of the kings of
Lydia. I thought you would sleep with Alyattis,
Phil!”

We dashed on through dark forest and open clearing,
through glens of tangled cedar and wild vine, over
log bridges, corduroy marshes, and sand hills, till, toward
evening, a scattering shanty or two, and an occasional
sound of a woodman's axe, betokened our vicinity
to Saratoga. A turn around a clump of tall pines
brought us immediately into the broad street of the
village, and the flaunting shops, the overgrown, unsightly
hotels, riddled with windows like honeycombs,
the fashionable idlers out for their evening lounge to
the waters, the indolent smokers on the colonnades,
and the dusty and loaded coaches driving from door
to door in search of lodgings, formed the usual evening
picture of the Bath of America.

As it was necessary to Tom's plan that my arrival
at Saratoga should not be known, he pulled up at a
small tavern at the entrance of the street, and dropping
me and my baggage, drove on to Congress Hall,
with my best prayers, and a letter of introduction to
my sister, whom I had left on her way to the Springs

with a party at my departure for Montreal. Unwilling
to remain in such a tantalizing vicinity, I hired a
chaise the next morning, and despatching a note to
Tom, drove to seek a retreat at Barhydt's—a spot that
can not well be described in the tail of a paragraph.

Herr Barhydt is an old Dutch settler, who, till the
miner springs of Saratoga were discovered some five
miles from his door, was buried in the depth of a forest
solitude, unknown to all but the prowling Indian. The
sky is supported above him (or looks to be) by a wilderness
of straight, columnar pine shafts, gigantic in
girth, and with no foliage except at the top, where
they branch out like round tables spread for a banquet
in the clouds. A small ear-shaped lake, sunk as deep
into the earth as the firs shoot above it, black as Erebus
in the dim shadow of its hilly shore and the obstructed
light of the trees that nearly meet over it, and
clear and unbroken as a mirror, save the pearl-spots
of the thousand lotuses holding up their cups to the
blue eye of heaven that peers through the leafy vault,
sleeps beneath his window; and around him, in the
forest, lies, still unbroken, the elastic and brown carpet
of the faded pine tassels, deposited in yearly layers
since the continent rose from the flood, and rooted a
foot beneath the surface to a rich mould that would
fatten the Sympleglades to a flower-garden. With his
black tarn well stocked with trout, his bit of a farm
in the clearing near by, and an old Dutch bible, Herr
Barhydt lived a life of Dutch musing, talked Dutch to
his geese and chickens, sung Dutch psalms to the
echoes of the mighty forest, and, except on his far-between
visits to Albany, which grew rarer and rarer
as the old Dutch inhabitants dropped faster away, saw
never a white human face from one maple-blossoming
to another.

A roving mineralogist tasted the waters of Saratoga,
and, like the work of a lath-and-plaster Aladdin, up
sprung a thriving village around the fountain's lip, and
hotels, tin tumblers, and apothecaries, multiplied in the
usual proportion to each other, but out of all precedent,
with everything else for rapidity. Libraries,
newspapers, churches, livery stables, and lawyers, followed
in their train; and it was soon established, from
the plains of Abraham to the savannahs of Alabama,
that no person of fashionable taste or broken constitution
could exist through the months of July and August
without a visit to the chalybeate springs and populous
village of Saratoga. It contained seven thousand
inhabitants before Herr Barhydt, living in his
wooded seclusion only five miles off, became aware of
its existence. A pair of lovers, philandering about the
forest on horseback, popped in upon him one June
morning, and thenceforth there was no rest for the
soul of the Dutchman. Everybody rode down to eat
his trout and make love in the dark shades of his mirrored
lagoon; and at last, in self-defence, he added a
room or two to his shanty, enclosed his cabbage-garden,
and put a price upon his trout-dinners. The
traveller now-a-days who has not dined at Barhydt's
with his own champagne cold from the tarn, and the
white-headed old settler “gargling” Dutch about the
house, in his manifold vocation of cook, ostler, and
waiter, may as well not have seen Niagara.

Installed in the back-chamber of the old man's last
addition to his house, with Barry Cornwall and Elia
(old fellow-travellers of mine), a rude chair, a ruder,
but clean bed, and a troop of thoughts so perpetually
from home, that it mattered very little what was the
complexion of anything about me, I waited Tom's operations
with a lover's usual patience. Barhydt's visiters
seldom arrived before two or three o'clock, and the
long, soft mornings, quiet as a shadowy Elysium on the
rim of that ebon lake, were as solitary as a melancholy
man could desire. Didst thou but know, oh! gentle
Barry Cornwall! how gratefully thou hast been read
and mused upon in those dim and whispering aisles of
the forest, three thousand and more miles from thy
smoky whereabout, methinks it would warm up the
flush of pleasure around thine eyelids, though the
“golden-tressed Adelaide” were waiting her goodnight
kisses at thy knee!

I could stand it no longer. On the second evening
of my seclusion, I made bold to borrow old Barhydt's
superannuated roadster, and getting up the steam with
infinite difficulty in his rickety engine, higgled away,
with a pace to which I could not venture to affix a
name, to the gay scenes of Saratoga.

It was ten o'clock when I dismounted at the stable
in Congress Hall, and, giving der Teufel, as the old
man ambitiously styled his steed, to the hands of the
ostler, stole round through the garden to the eastern
colonnade.

I feel called upon to describe “Congress Hall.”
Some fourteen or fifteen millions of white gentlemen
and ladies consider that wooden and windowed Babylon
as the proper palace of Delight—a sojourn to be
sighed for, and sacrificed for, and economized for—
the birthplace of Love, the haunt of Hymen, the arena
of fashion—a place without which a new lease of life
were valueless—for which, if the conjuring cap of King
Erricus itself could not furnish a season ticket, it
might lie on a lady's toilet as unnoticed as a bride's
night-cap a twelvemonth after marriage. I say to myself,
sometimes, as I pass the window at White's, and
see a worldsick worldling with the curl of satiety and
disgust on his lip, wondering how the next hour will
come to its death. “If you but knew, my friend, what
a campaign of pleasure you are losing in America—
what belles than the bluebell slighter and fairer—what
hearts than the dewdrops fresher and clearer—are living
their pretty hour, like gems undived for in the
ocean—what loads of foliage, what Titans of trees,
what glorious wildernesses of rocks and waters, are
lavishing their splendors on the clouds that sail over
them, and all within the magic circle of which Congress
Hall is the centre, and which a circling dove
would measure to get an appetite for his breakfast—if
you but knew this, my lord, as I know it, you would
not be gazing so vacantly on the steps of Crockford's,
nor consider `the graybeard' such a laggard in his
hours!”

Congress Hall is a wooden building, of which the
size and capacity could never be definitely ascertained.
It is built on a slight elevation, just above the strongly-impregnated
spring whose name it bears, with little attempt
at architecture, save a spacious and vine-covered
colonnade, serving as a promenade on either side, and
two wings, the extremities of which are lost in the distance.
A relic or two of the still-astonished forest
towers above the chimneys, in the shape of a melancholy
group of firs; and, five minutes' walk from the
door, the dim old wilderness stands looking down on
the village in its primeval grandeur, like the spirits of
the wronged Indians, whose tracks are scarce vanished
from the sand. In the strength of the summer solstice,
from five hundred to a thousand people dine together
at Congress Hall, and after absorbing as many
bottles of the best wines of the world, a sunset promenade
plays the valve to the sentiment thus generated,
and, with a cup of tea, the crowd separates to dress
for the nighty ball. There are several other hotels
in the village, equally crowded and equally spacious,
and the ball is given alternately at each. Congress
Hall is the “crack” place, however, and I expect that
Mr. Westcott, the obliging proprietor, will give me the
preference of rooms, on my next annual visit, for this
just and honorable mention.

The dinner-tables were piled into an orchestra, and
draped with green baize and green wreaths, the floor
of the immense hall was chalked with American flags
and the initials of all the heroes of the Revolution, and
the band were playing a waltz in a style that made

the candles quiver, and the pines tremble audibly in
their tassels. The ballroom was on the ground floor,
and the colonnade upon the garden side was crowded
with spectators, a row of grinning black fellows edging
the cluster of heads at every window, and keeping
time with their hands and feet in the irresistible sympathy
of their music-loving natures. Drawing my hat
over my eyes, I stood at the least-thronged window,
and concealing my face in the curtain, waited impatiently
for the appearance of the dancers.

The bevy in the drawing-room was sufficiently
strong at last, and the lady patronesses, handed in by
a state governor or two, and here and there a member
of congress, achieved the entree with their usual intrepidity.
Followed beaux and followed belles. Such
belles! Slight, delicate, fragile-looking creatures, elegant
as Retzsch's angels, warm-eyed as Mohammedan
houries, yet timid as the antelope whose hazel orbs
they eclipse, limbed like nothing earthly except an
American woman—I would rather not go on! When
I speak of the beauty of my countrywomen, my heart
swells. I do believe the New World has a newer
mould for its mothers and daughters. I think I am
not prejudiced. I have been years away. I have
sighed in France; I have loved in Italy; I have bargained
for Circassians in an eastern bezestein, and I
have lounged at Howell and James's on a sunny day
in the season; and my eye is trained, and my perceptions
quickened: but I do think (honor bright! and
Heath's “Book of Beauty” forgiving me) that there
is no such beautiful work of God under the arch of
the sky as an American girl in her bellehood.

Enter Tom Fane in a Stultz coat and Sparding
tights, looking as a man who had been the mirror of
Bond street might be supposed to look, a thousand
leagues from his club-house. She leaned on his arm.
I had never seen her half so lovely. Fresh and calm
from the seclusion of her chamber, her transparent
cheek was just tinged with the first mounting blood,
from the excitement of lights and music. Her lips
were slightly parted, her fine-lined eyebrows were
arched with a girlish surprise, and her ungloved arm
lay carelessly and confidingly within his, as white,
round, and slender, as if Canova had wrought it in
Parian for his Psyche. If you have never seen a
beauty of northern blood nurtured in a southern clime,
the cold fairness of her race warmed up as if it had
been steeped in some golden sunset, and her deep blue
eye darkened and filled with a fire as unnaturally resplendent
as the fusion of crysoprase into a diamond,
and if you have never known the corresponding contrast
in the character, the intelligence and constancy
of the north kindling with the enthusiasm and impulse,
the passionateness and the abandon of a more burning
latitude—you have seen nothing, let me insinuate,
though you “have been i' the Indies twice,” that
could give you an idea of Kate Lorimer.

She waltzed, and then Tom danced with my sister,
and then, resigning her to another partner, he offered
his arm again to Miss Lorimer, and left the ballroom
with several other couples for a turn in the fresh air
of the colonnade. I was not jealous, but I felt unpleasantly
at his returning to her so immediately. He
was the handsomest man, out of all comparison, in the
room, and he had dimmed my star too often in our
rambles in Europe and Asia, not to suggest a thought,
at least, that the same pleasant eclipse might occur in
our American astronomy. I stepped off the colonnade,
and took a turn in the garden.

Those “children of eternity,” as Walter Savage
Landor poetically calls “the breezes,” performed their
soothing ministry upon my temples, and I replaced
Tom in my confidence with an heroic effort, and turned
back. A swing hung between two gigantic pines, just
under the balustrade, and flinging myself into the cushioned
seat, I abandoned myself to the musings natural
to a person “in my situation.” The sentimentalizing
promenaders lounged backward and forward above me,
and not hearing Tom's drawl among them, I presumed
he had returned to the ballroom. A lady and gentleman,
walking in silence, stopped presently, and leaned
upon the railing opposite the swing. They stood a
moment, looking into the dim shadow of the pine-grove,
and then a voice, that I knew better than my
own, remarked in a low and silvery tone upon the
beauty of the night.

She was not answered, and after a moment's pause,
as if resuming a conversation that had been interrupted,
she turned very earnestly to her companion, and asked,
“Are you sure, quite sure, that you could venture to
marry without a fortune?”

“Quite, dear Miss Lorimer!”

I started from the swing, but before the words of
execration that rushed choking from my heart could
struggle to my lips, they had mingled with the crowd
and vanished.

I strode down the garden-walk in a phrensy of passion.
Should I call him immediately to account?
Should I rush into the ballroom and accuse him of
his treachery to her face? Should I drown myself in
old Barhydt's tarn, or join an Indian tribe, and make
war upon the whites? Or should I—could I—be magnanimous—and
write him a note immediately, offering
to be his groomsman at the wedding?

I stepped into the punch-room, asked for pen, ink,
and paper, and indited the following note:—

Having despatched it to his room, I flew to the stable,
roused der Teufel, who had gathered up his legs in the
straw for the night, flogged him furiously out of the
village, and giving him the rein as he entered the forest,
enjoyed the scenery in the humor of mad old Hieronymo
in the Spanish tragedy—“the moon dark, the
stars extinct, the winds blowing, the owls shrieking,
the toads croaking, the minutes jarring, and the clock
striking twelve!”

Early the next day Tom's “tiger” dismounted at
Barhydt's door, with an answer to my note, as follows:—

“`Comedy!' call you this, Mr. Fane?” I felt my
heart turn black as I threw down the letter. After a
thousand plans of revenge formed and abandoned—
borrowing old Barhydt's rifles, loading them deliberately,
and discharging them again into the air—I flung
myself exhausted on the bed, and reasoned myself back
to my magnanimity. I would be his groomsman!

It was a morning like the burst of a millennium on
the world. I felt as if I should never forgive the birds
for their mocking enjoyment of it. The wild heron
swung up from the reeds, the lotuses shook out their
dew into the lake as the breeze stirred them, and the

senseless old Dutchman sat fishing in his canoe, singing
one of his unintelligible psalms to a quick measure
that half maddened me. I threw myself upon the
yielding floor of pine-tassels on the edge of the lake,
and with the wretched school philosophy, “Si gravis
est, brevis est,” endeavored to put down the tempest
of my feelings.

A carriage rattled over the little bridge, mounted the
ascent rapidly, and brought up at Barhydt's door.

“Phil!” shouted Tom, “Phil!”

I gulped down a choking sensation in my throat, and
rushed up the bank to him. A stranger was dismounting
from his horse.

“Quick!” said Tom, shaking my hand hurriedly—
“there is no time to lose. Out with your inkhorn,
Mr. Poppletree, and have your papers signed while I
tie up my ponies.”

“What is this, sir?” said I, starting back as the
stranger deliberately presented me with a paper, in
which my own name was written in conspicuous letters.

The magistrate gazed at me with a look of astonishment.
“A contract of marriage, I think, between
Mr. Philip Slingsby and Miss Katherine Lorimer, spinster.
Are you the gentleman named in that instrument,
sir?”

At this moment my sister, leading the blushing girl
by the hand, came and threw her arms about my neck,
and drawing her within my reach, ran off and left us
together.

There are some pure moments in this life that description
would only profane.

We were married by the village magistrate in that
magnificent sanctuary of the forest, old Barhydt and
his lotuses the only indifferent witnesses of vows as
passionate as ever trembled upon human lips.

I had scarce pressed her to my heart and dashed the
tears from my eyes, when Fane, who had looked more
at my sister than at the bride during the ceremony, left
her suddenly, and thrusting a roll of parchment into
my pocket, ran off to bring up his ponies. I was on
the way to Saratoga, a married man, and my bride on
the seat beside me, before I had recovered from my
astonishment.

“Pray,” said Tom, “if it be not an impertinent
question, and you can find breath in your ecstasies,
how did you find out that your sister had done me
the honor to accept the offer of my hand?”

The resounding woods rung with his unmerciful
laughter at the explanation.

“And pray,” said I, in my turn, “if it is not an impertinent
question, and you can find a spare breath in
your ecstasies, by what magic did you persuade old
Frump to trust his ward and her title-deeds in your
treacherous keeping?”

“It is a long story, my dear Phil, and I will give you
the particulars when you pay me the `Virginia bloods'
you wot of. Suffice it for the present, that Mr. Frump
believes Mr. Tom Fane (alias Jacob Phipps, Esq.,
sleeping partner of a banking-house at Liverpool) to
be the accepted suitor of his fair ward. In his extreme
delight at seeing her in so fair a way to marry into a
bank, he generously made her a present of her own
fortune, signed over his right to control it by a document
in your possession, and will undergo as agreeable
a surprise in about five minutes as the greatest lover
of excitement could desire.”

The ponies dashed on. The sandy ascent by the
Pavilion Spring was surmounted, and in another minute
we were at the door of Congress Hall. The last
stragglers from the breakfast-table were lounging down
the colonnade, and old Frump sat reading the newspaper
under the portico.

“Aha! Mr. Phipps,” said he, as Tom drove up—
“back so soon, eh? Why, I thought you and Kitty
would be billing it till dinner-time!”

“Sir!” said Tom, very gravely, “you have the honor
of addressing Captain Thomas Fane, of his majesty's
—th Fusileers; and whenever you have a moment's
leisure, I shall be happy to submit to your perusal a
certificate of the marriage of Miss Katherine Lorimer
to the gentleman I have the pleasure to present to you.
Mr. Frump, Mr. Slingsby!”

At the mention of my name, the blood in Mr.
Frump's ruddy complexion turned suddenly to the
color of the Tiber. Poetry alone can express the
feeling pictured in his countenance:—

George Washington Jefferson Frump, Esq., left
Congress Hall the same evening, and has since ungraciously
refused an invitation to Captain Fane's wedding
—possibly from his having neglected to invite him on
a similar occasion at Saratoga. This last, however, I
am free to say, is a gratuitous supposition of my own.

LARKS IN VACATION.

1. CHAPTER I.
DRIVING STANHOPE PRO TEM.

In the edge of a June evening in the summer vacation
of 1827, I was set down by the coach at the gate
of my friend Horace Van Pelt's paternal mansion—a
large, old-fashioned, comfortable Dutch house, clinging
to the side of one of the most romantic dells on
the North river. In the absence of his whole family
on the summer excursion to the falls and lakes (taken
by almost every “well-to-do” citizen of the United
States), Horace was emperor of the long-descended,
and as progressively enriched domain of one of the
earliest Dutch settlers—a brief authority which he exercised
more particularly over an extensive stud, and
bins number one and two.

The west was piled with gold castles, breaking up
the horizon with their burnished pinnacles and turrets,
the fragrant dampness of the thunder-shower that had
followed the heat of noon was in the air, and in a low
room, whose floor opened out so exactly upon the
shaven sward, that a blind man would not have known
when he passed from the heavily-piled carpet to the
grass, I found Horace sitting over his olives and claret,
having waited dinner for me till five (long beyond the
latest American hour), and, in despair of my arrival,
having dined without me. The old black cook was
too happy to vary her vocation by getting a second
dinner; and when I had appeased my appetite, and
overtaken my friend in his claret, we sat with the
moonlight breaking across a vine at our feet, and coffee
worthy of a filagree cup in the Bezestein, and debated,
amid a true embarras des richesses, our plans
for the next week's amusement.

The seven days wore on, merrily at first, but each
succeeding one growing less merry than the last. By
the fifth eve of my sojourn, we had exhausted variety.
All sorts of headaches and megrims in the morning,
all sorts of birds, beasts, and fishes, for dinner, all sorts
of accidents in all sorts of vehicles, left us on the seventh
day out of sorts altogether. We were two discontented
Rasselases in the Happy Valley. Rejoicing
as we were in vacation, it would have been a relief to
have had a recitation to read up, or a prayer-bell to
mark the time. Two idle sophomores in a rambling,

lonely old mansion, were, we discovered, a very insufficient
dramatis personæ for the scene.

It was Saturday night. A violent clap of thunder
had interrupted some daring theory of Van Pelt's on
the rising of champagne-bubbles, and there we sat,
mum and melancholy, two sated Sybarites, silent an
hour by the clock. The mahogany was bare between
us. Any number of glasses and bottles stood in their
less about the table; the thrice-fished juice of an
olive-dish and a solitary cigar in a silver case had been
thrust aside in a warm argument, and, in his father's
sacred gout-chair, buried to the eyes in his loosened
cravat, one leg on the table, and one somewhere in
the neighborhood of my own, sat Van Pelt, the eidolon
of exhausted amusement.

“Phil!” said he, starting suddenly to an erect position,
“a thought strikes me!”

I dropped the claret-cork, from which I was at the
moment trying to efface the “Margaux” brand, and
sat in silent expectation. I had thought his brains as
well evaporated as the last bottle of champagne.

He rested his elbows on the table, and set his chin
between his two palms.

“I'll resign the keys of this mournful old den to the
butler, and we'll go to Saratoga for a week. What
say?”

“It would be a reprieve from death by inanition,”
I answered, “but, as the rhetorical professor would
phrase it, amplify your meaning, young gentleman.”

“Thus: To-morrow is Sunday. We will sleep till
Monday morning to purge our brains of these cloudy
vapors, and restore the freshness of our complexions.
If a fair day, you shall start alone in the stanhope, and
on Monday night sleep in classic quarters at Titus's
in Troy.”

“And you!” I interrupted, rather astonished at his
arrangement for one.

Horace laid his hand on his pocket with a look of
embarrassed care.

“I will overtake you with the bay colts in the
drosky, but I must first go to Albany. The circulating
medium—”

“I understand.”

II.

We met on Monday morning in the breakfast-room
in mutual spirits. The sun was two hours high, the
birds in the trees were wild with the beauty and elasticity
of the day, the dew glistened on every bough,
and the whole scene, over river and hill, was a heaven
of natural delight. As we finished our breakfast, the
light spattering of a horse's feet up the avenue, and
the airy whirl of quick-following wheels, announced
the stanhope. It was in beautiful order, and what
would have been termed on any pave in the world a
tasteful turn-out. Light cream-colored body, black
wheels and shafts, drab lining edged with green, dead-black
harness, light as that on the panthers of Bacchus—it
was the last style of thing you would have
looked for at the “stoup” of a Dutch homestead.
And Tempest! I think I see him now!—his small inquisitive
ears, arched neck, eager eye, and fine, thin
nostril—his dainty feet flung out with the grace of a
flaunted riband—his true and majestic action and his
spirited champ of the bit, nibbling at the tight rein with
the exciting pull of a hooked trout—how evenly he
drew!—how insensibly the compact stanhope, just
touching his iron-gray tail, bowled along on the road
after him!

Horace was behind with the drosky and black boy,
and with a parting nod at the gate, I turned northward,
and Tempest took the road in beautiful style. I
do not remember to have been ever so elated. I was
always of the Cyrenaic philosophy that “happiness is
motion,” and the bland vitality of the air had refined
my senses. The delightful feel of the reins thrilled me
to the shoulder. Driving is like any other appetite,
dependant for the delicacy of its enjoyment on the
system, and a day's temperate abstinence, long sleep,
and the glorious perfection of the morning, had put
my nerves “in condition.” I felt the air as I rushed
through. The power of the horse was added to my
consciousness of enjoyment, and if you can imagine a
centaur with a harness and stanhope added to his living
body, I felt the triple enjoyment of animal exercise
which would then be his.

It is delightful driving on the Hudson. The road is
very fair beneath your wheels, the river courses away
under the bold shore with the majesty inseparable
from its mighty flood, and the constant change of outline
in its banks gives you, as you proceed, a constant
variety of pictures, from the loveliest to the most sublime.
The eagle's nest above you at one moment, a
sunny and fertile farm below you at the next—rocks,
trees, and waterfalls, wedded and clustered as, it
seems to me, they are nowhere else done so picturesquely—it
is a noble river, the Hudson! And every
few minutes, while you gaze down upon the broad
waters spreading from hill to hill like a round lake, a
gayly-painted steamer with her fringed and white awnings
and streaming flag, shoots out as if from a sudden
cleft in the rock, and draws across it her track of
foam.

Well—I bowled along. Ten o'clock brought me
to a snug Dutch tavern, where I sponged Tempest's
mouth and nostrils, lunched and was stared at by the
natives, and continuing my journey, at one I loosed
rein and dashed into the pretty village of —, Tempest
in a foam, and himself and his extempore master
creating a great sensation in a crowd of people, who
stood in the shade of the verandah of the hotel, as if
that asylum for the weary traveller had been a shop for
the sale of gentlemen in shirt-sleeves.

Tempest was taken round to the “barn,” and I ordered
rather an elaborate dinner, designing still to go
on some ten miles in the cool of the evening, and having,
of course, some mortal hours upon my hands.
The cook had probably never heard of more than
three dishes in her life, but those three were garnished
with all manner of herbs, and sent up in the best
china as a warranty for an unusual bill, and what with
coffee, a small glass of new rum as an apology for a
chasse café, and a nap in a straight-backed chair, I
killed the enemy to my satisfaction till the shadows of
the poplars lengthened across the barnyard.

I was awoke by Tempest, prancing round to the
door in undiminished spirits; and as I had begun the
day en grand seigneur, I did not object to the bill,
which considerably exceeded the outside of my calculation,
but giving the landlord a twenty-dollar note,
received the change unquestioned, doubled the usual
fee to the ostler, and let Tempest off with a bend forward
which served at the same time for a gracious bow
to the spectators. So remarkable a coxcomb had probably
not been seen in the village since the passing of
Cornwallis's army.

The day was still hot, and as I got into the open
country, I drew rein and paced quietly up hill and
down, picking the road delicately, and in a humor of
thoughtful contentment, trying my skill in keeping the
edges of the green sod as it leaned in and out from the
walls and ditches. With the long whip I now and
then touched the wing of a sulphur butterfly hovering
over a pool, and now and then I stopped and gathered
a violet from the unsunned edge of the wood.

I had proceeded three or four miles in this way,
when I was overtaken by three stout fellows, galloping
at speed, who rode past and faced round with a
peremptory order to me to stop. A formidable pitchfork
in the hand of each horseman left me no alternative.
I made up my mind immediately to be robbed

quietly of my own personals, but to show fight, if necessary,
for Tempest and the stanhope.

“Well, gentlemen,” said I, coaxing my impatient
horse, who had been rather excited by the clatter of
hoofs behind him, “what is the meaning of this?”

Before I could get an answer, one of the fellows
had dismounted and given his bridle to another, and
coming round to the left side, he sprang suddenly into
the stanhope. I received him as he rose with a well-placed
thrust of my heel which sent him back into the
road, and with a chirrup to Tempest, I dashed through
the phalanx and took the road at a top speed. The
short lash once waved round the small ears before me,
there was no stopping in a hurry, and away sped the
gallant gray, and fast behind followed my friends in
their short sleeves, all in a lathering gallop. A couple
of miles was the work of no time, Tempest laying his
legs to it as if the stanhope had been a cobweb at his
heels; but at the end of that distance there came a
sharp descent to a mill-stream, and I just remember
an unavoidable milestone and a jerk over a wall, and
the next minute, it seemed to me, I was in the room
where I had dined, with my hands tied, and a hundred
people about me. My cool white waistcoat was matted
with mud, and my left temple was, by the glass
opposite me, both bloody and begrimed.

The opening of my eyes was a signal for a closer
gathering around me, and between exhaustion and the
close air I was half suffocated. I was soon made to
understand that I was a prisoner, and that the three
white frocked highwaymen, as I took them to be, were
among the spectators. On a polite application to the
landlord, who, I found out, was a justice of the peace
as well, I was informed that he had made out my mittimus
as a counterfeiter, and that the spurious note I
had passed upon him for my dinner was safe in his
possession! He pointed at the same time to a placard
newly stuck against the wall, offering a reward for the
apprehension of a notorious practiser of my supposed
craft, to the description of whose person I answered,
to the satisfaction of all present.

Quite too indignant to remonstrate, I seated myself
in the chair considerately offered me by the waiter,
and listening to the whispers of the persons who were
still permitted to throng the room, I discovered, what
might have struck me before, that the initials on the
panel of the stanhope and the handle of the whip had
been compared with the card pasted in the bottom of
my hat, and the want of correspondence was taken as
decided corroboration. It was remarked also by a by-stander
that I was quite too much of a dash for an
honest man, and that he had suspected me from first
seeing me drive into the village! I was sufficiently
humbled by this time to make an inward vow never
again to take airs upon myself if I escaped the county
jail.

The justice meanwhile had made out my orders,
and a horse and cart had been provided to take me to
the next town. I endeavored to get speech of his
worship as I was marched out of the inn parlor, but
the crowd pressed close upon my heels, and the dignitary
landlord seemed anxious to rid his house of me.
I had no papers, and no proofs of my character, and
assertion went for nothing. Besides, I was muddy,
and my hat was broken in on one side, proofs of villany
which appeal to the commonest understanding.

I begged for a little straw in the bottom of the cart,
and had made myself as comfortable as my two rustic
constables thought fitting for a culprit, when the vehicle
was quickly ordered from the door to make away
for a carriage coming at a dashing pace up the road.
It was Van Pelt in his drosky.

Horace was well known on the road, and the stanhope
had already been recognised as his. By this
time it was deep in the twilight, and though he was instantly
known by the landlord, he might be excused
for not so readily identifying the person of his friend
in the damaged gentleman in the straw.

“Ay, ay! I see you don't know him,” said the landlord,
while Van Pelt surveyed me rather coldly; “on
with him, constables! he would have us believe you
knew him, sir! walk in, Mr. Van Pelt! Ostler, look
to Mr. Van Pelt's horses! Walk in, sir!”

“Stop!” I cried out in a voice of thunder, seeing
that Horace really had not looked at me, “Van Pelt!
stop, I say!”

The driver of the cart seemed more impressed by
the energy of my cries than my friends the constables,
and pulled up his horse. Some one in the crowd cried
out that I should have a hearing or he would “wallup
the comitatus,” and the justice, called back by this expression
of an opinion from the sovereign people, requested
his new guest to look at the prisoner.

I was preparing to have my hands untied, yet feeling
so indignant at Van Pelt for not having recognised
me that I would not look at him, when, to my surprise,
the horse started off once more, and looking back, I
saw my friend patting the neck of his near horse, evidently
not having thought it worth his while to take
any notice of the justice's observation. Choking with
rage, I flung myself down upon the straw, and jolted
on without further remonstrance to the county town.

I had been incarcerated an hour when Van Pelt's
voice, half angry with the turnkey and half ready to
burst into a laugh, resounded outside. He had not
heard a word spoken by the officious landlord, till after
the cart had been some time gone. Even then, believing
it to be a cock-and-bull story, he had quietly
dined, and it was only on going into the yard to see
after his horses that he recognised the debris of his
stanhope.

The landlord's apologies, when we returned to the
inn, were more amusing to Van Pelt than consolatory
to Philip Slingsby.

2. CHAPTER II.
SARATOGA SPRINGS.

It was about seven o'clock of a hot evening when
Van Pelt's exhausted horses toiled out from the Pine.
Forest, and stood, fetlock deep in sand, on the brow
of the small hill overlooking the mushroom village of
Saratoga. One or two straggling horsemen were returning
late from their afternoon ride, and looked at
us, as they passed on their fresher hacks, with the curiosity
which attaches to new-comers in a watering-place;
here and there a genuine invalid, who had
come to the waters for life, not for pleasure, took advantage
of the coolness of the hour and crept down
the foot-path to the Spring; and as Horace encouraged
his flagging cattle into a trot to bring up gallantly
at the door of “Congress Hall,” the great bell
of that vast caravanserai resounded through the dusty
air, and by the shuffling of a thousand feet, audible as
we approached, we knew that the fashionable world
of Saratoga were rushing down, en masse, “to tea.”

Having driven through a sand-cloud for the preceding
three hours, and, to say nothing of myself, Van
Pelt being a man, who, in his character as the most
considerable beau of the University, calculated his first
impression, it was not thought advisable to encounter,
uncleansed, the tide of fashion at that moment streaming
through the hall. We drove round to the side-door,
and gained our pigeon-hole quarters under cover
of the back-staircase.

The bachelors' wing of Congress Hall is a long, unslightly,
wooden barrack, divided into chambers six feet
by four, and of an airiness of partition which enables

the occupant to converse with his neighbor three rooms
off, with the ease of clerks calling out entries to the
leger across the desks of a counting-house. The
clatter of knives and plates came up to our ears in a
confused murmur, and Van Pelt having refused to dine
at the only inn upon the route, for some reason best
known to himself, I commenced the progress of a long
toilet with an appetite not rendered patient by the
sounds of cheer below.

I had washed the dust out of my eyes and mouth,
and, overcome with heat and hunger, I knotted a cool
cravat loosely round my neck, and sat down in the one
chair.

“Van Pelt!” I shouted.

“Well, Phil!”

“Are you dressed?”

“Dressed! I am as pinguid as a pate foie gras—
greased to the eyelids in cold cream!”

I took up the sixpenny glass and looked at my own
newly-washed physiognomy. From the temples to the
chin it was one unmitigated red—burned to a blister
with the sun! I had been obliged to deluge my head
like a mop to get out the dust, and not naturally remarkable
for my good looks, I could, much worse than
Van Pelt, afford these startling additions to my disadvantages.
Hunger is a subtle excuse-finder, however,
and, remembering there were five hundred people in
this formidable crowd, and all busy with satisfying their
appetites, I trusted to escape observation, and determined
to “go down to tea.” With the just-named
number of guests, it will easily be understood why it
is impossible to obtain a meal at Congress Hall, out of
the stated time and place.

In a white roundabout, a checked cravat, my hair
plastered over my eyes a la Mawworm, and a face like
the sign of the “Rising Sun,” I stopped at Van Pelt's
door.

“The most hideous figure my eyes ever looked
upon!” was his first consolatory observation.

“Handsome or hideous,” I answered, “I'll not
starve! So here goes for some bread and butter!”
and leaving him to his “appliances,” I descended to the
immense hall which serves the comers to Saratoga, for
dining, dancing, and breakfasting, and in wet weather,
between meals, for shuttlecock and promenading.

Two interminable tables extended down the hall,
filled by all the beauty and fashion of the United States.
Luckily, I thought, for me, there are distinctions in this
republic of dissipation, and the upper end is reserved
for those who have servants to turn down the chairs
and stand over them. The end of the tables nearest
the door, consequently, is occupied by those whose
opinion of my appearance is not without appeal, if they
trouble their heads about it at all, and I may glide in,
in my white roundabout (permitted in this sultry
weather), and retrieve exhausted nature in obscurity.

An empty chair stood between an old gentleman
and a very plain young lady, and seeing no remembered
faces opposite, I glided to the place, and was soon lost
to apprehension in the abysm of a cold pie. The table
was covered with meats, berries, bottles of chalybeate
water, tea appurtenances, jams, jellies, and radishes,
and, but for the absence of the roast, you might have
doubted whether the meal was breakfast or dinner,
lunch or supper. Happy country! in which any one
of the four meals may serve a hungry man for all.

The pigeon-pie stood, at last, well quarried before
me, the debris of the excavation heaped upon my plate;
and, appetite appeased, and made bold by my half
hour's obscurity, I leaned forward and perused with
curious attention the long line of faces on the opposite
side of the table, to some of whom, doubtless, I was to
be indebted for the pleasures of the coming fortnight.

My eyes were fixed on the features of a talkative
woman just above, and I had quite forgotten the fact
of my dishabille of complexion and dress, when two
persons entered who made considerable stir among
the servants, and eventually were seated directly opposite
me.

“We loitered too long at Barhydt's,” said one of the
most beautiful women I had ever seen, as she pulled
her chair nearer to the table and looked around her
with a glance of disapproval.

In following her eyes to see who was so happy as
to sympathize with such a divine creature even in the
loss of a place at table, I met the fixed and astonished
gaze of my most intimate friend at the University.

“Ellerton!”

“Slingsby!”

Overjoyed at meeting him, I stretched both hands
across the narrow table, and had shaken his arm nearly
off his shoulders, and asked him a dozen questions, before
I became conscious that a pair of large wondering
eyes were coldly taking an inventory of my person
and features. Van Pelt's unflattering exclamation
upon my appearance at his door, flashed across my
mind like a thunderstroke, and, coloring through my
burned skin to the temples, I bowed and stammered I
know not what, as Ellerton introduced me to his
sister!

To enter fully into my distress, you should be apprized
that a correspondence arising from my long and
constant intimacy with Tom Ellerton, had been carried
on for a year between me and his sister, and that, being
constantly in the habit of yielding to me in manners of
taste, he had, I well knew, so exaggerated to her my
personal qualities, dress, and manners, that she could
not in any case fail to be disappointed in seeing me.
Believing her to be at that moment two thousand miles
off in Alabama, and never having hoped for the pleasure
of seeing her at all, I had foolishly suffered this
good-natured exaggeration to go on, pleased with seeing
the reflex of his praises in her letters, and, Heaven
knows, little anticipating the disastrous interview upon
which my accursed star would precipitate me! As I
went over, mentally, the particulars of my unbecomingness,
and saw Miss Ellerton's eyes resting inquisitively
and furtively on the mountain of pigeon bones
lifting their well-picked pyramid to my chin, I wished
myself an ink-fish at the bottom of the sea.

Three minutes after, I burst into Van Pelt's room,
tearing my hair and abusing Tom Ellerton's good nature,
and my friend's headless drosky, in alternate
breaths. Without disturbing the subsiding blood in his
own face by entering into my violence, Horace coolly
asked me what the devil was the matter.

I told him.

“Lie down here!” said Van Pelt, who was a small
Napoleon in such trying extremities; “lie down on
the bed, and anoint your phiz with this unguent. I see
good luck for you in this accident, and you have only
to follow my instructions. Phil Slingsby, sunburnt,
in a white roundabout, and Phil Slingsby, pale and well
dressed, are as different as this potted cream and a dancing
cow. You shall see what a little drama I'll work
out for you!”

I lay down on my back, and Horace kindly anointed
me from the trachea to the forelock, and from ear to
ear.

“Egad,” said he, warming with his study of his proposed
plot as he slid his fore-fingers over the bridge of
my nose, “every circumstance tells for us. Tall man
as you are, you are as short-bodied as a monkey (no
offence, Phil!) and when you sit at table, you are rather
an under-sized gentleman. I have been astonished
every day these three years, at seeing you rise after
dinner in Commons' Hall. A thousand to one, Fanny
Ellerton thinks you a stumpy man.”

“And then, Phil,” he continued, with a patronising
tone, “you have studied minute philosophy to little
purpose if you do not know that the first step in winning

a woman to whom you have been overpraised, is
to disenchant her at all hazards, on your first interview.
You will never rise above the ideal she has
formed, and to sink below it gradually, or to remain
stationary, is not to thrive in your wooing.”

Leaving me this precocious wisdom to digest,
Horace descended to the foot of the garden to take a
warm bath, and overcome with fatigue, and the recumbent
posture, I soon fell asleep and dreamed of the
great blue eyes of Fanny Ellerton.

2. II.

The soaring of the octave flute in “Hail Columbia,”
with which the band was patriotically opening the
ball, woke me from the midst of a long apologetic letter
to my friend's sister, and I found Van Pelt's black
boy Juba waiting patiently at the bed-side with curling-tongs
and Cologne-water, ordered to superintend
my toilet by his master, who had gone early to the
drawing-room to pay his respects to Miss Ellerton.
With the cold cream disappeared entirely from my
face the uncomfortable redness to which I had been a
martyr, and, thanks to my ebony coiffeur, my straight
and plastered locks soon grew as different to their
“umquhile guise” as Hyperion's to a satyr's. Having
appeared to the eyes of the lady, in whose favor I
hoped to prosper, in red and white (red phiz and white
jacket), I trusted that in white and black (black suit
and pale viznomy), I should look quite another person.
Juba was pleased to show his ivory in a complimentary
smile at my transformation, and I descended to
the drawing-room, on the best terms with the coxcomb
in my bosom.

Horace met me at the door.

“Proteus redivivus!” was his exclamation. “Your
new name is Wrongham. You are a gentle senior,
instead of a bedeviled sophomore, and your cue is to
be poetical. She will never think again of the monster
in the white jacket, and I have prepared her for
the acquaintance of a new friend, whom I have just
described to you.

I took his arm, and with the courage of a man in a
mask, went through another presentation to Miss Ellerton.
Her brother had been let into the secret by
Van Pelt, and received me with great ceremony as his
college superior; and, as there was no other person at
the Springs who knew Mr. Slingsby, Mr. Wrongham
was likely to have an undisturbed reign of it. Miss
Ellerton looked hard at me for a moment, but the
gravity with which I was presented and received, dissipated
a doubt if one had arisen in her mind, and
she took my arm to go to the ball-room, with an
undisturbed belief in my assumed name and character.

I commenced the acquaintance of the fair Alabamian
with great advantages. Received as a perfect
stranger, I possessed, from long correspondence with
her, the most minute knowledge of the springs, of her
character, and of her favorite reading and pursuits,
and, with the little knowledge of the world which she
had gained on a plantation, she was not likely to penetrate
my game from my playing it too freely. Her
confidence was immediately won by the readiness
with which I entered into her enthusiasm and anticipated
her thoughts; and before the first quadrille was
well over, she had evidently made up her mind that
she had never in her life met one who so well “understood
her.” Oh! how much women include in that
apparently indefinite expression, “He understands
me!”

The colonnade of Congress Hall is a long promenade
laced in with vines and columns, on the same
level with the vast ball-room and drawing-room, and
(the light of heaven not being taxed at Saratoga)
opening at every three steps by a long window into
the carpeted floors. When the rooms within are lit
in a summer's night, that cool and airy colonnade is
thronged by truants from the dance, and collectively
by all who have anything to express that is meant for
one ear only. The mineral waters of Saratoga are no
less celebrated as a soporific for chaperons than as a
tonic for the dyspeptic, and while the female Argus
dozes in the drawing-room, the fair Io and her Jupiter
(represented in this case, we will say, by Miss Ellerton
and myself) range at liberty the fertile fields of
flirtation.

I had easily put Miss Ellerton in surprised good
humor with herself and me during the first quadrille,
and with a freedom based partly upon my certainty of
pleasing her, partly on the peculiar manners of the
place, I coolly requested that she would continue to
dance with me for the rest of the evening.

“One unhappy quadrille excepted,” she replied,
with a look meant to be mournful.

“May I ask with whom?”

“Oh, he has not asked me yet; but my brother has
bound me over to be civil to him—a spectre, Mr.
Wrongham! a positive spectre.”

“How denominated?” I inquired, with a forced indifference,
for I had a presentiment I should hear my
own name.

“Slingsby—Mr. Philip Slingsby—Tom's fidus
Achates, and a proposed lover of my own. But you
don't seem surprised!”

“Surprised! E-hem! I know the gentleman!”

“Then did you ever see such a monster! Tom
told me he was another Hyperion. He half admitted
it himself, indeed; for to tell you a secret, I have corresponded
with him a year!”

“Giddy Miss Fanny Ellerton!—and never saw
him!”

“Never till to-night! He sat at supper in a white
jacket and red face, with a pile of bones upon his plate
like an Indian tumulus.”

“And your brother introduced you?”

“Ah, you were at table! Well, did you ever see in
your travels, a man so unpleasantly hideous?”

“Fanny!” said her brother, coming up at the moment,
“Slingsby presents his apologies to you for not
joining your cordon to-night—but he's gone to bed
with a head-ache.”

“Indigestion, I dare say,” said the young lady.
“Never mind, Tom, I'll break my heart when I have
leisure. And now, Mr. Wrongham, since the spectre
walks not forth to-night, I am yours for a cool hour
on the colonnade.”

Vegetation is rapid in Alabama, and love is a weed
that thrives in the soil of the tropics. We discoursed
of the lost Pleiad and the Berlin bracelets, of the five
hundred people about us, and the feasibility of boiling
a pot on five hundred a year—the unmatrimonial sum
total of my paternal allowance. She had as many negroes
as I had dollars, I well knew, but it was my cue
to seem disinterested.

“And where do you mean to live, when you marry,
Mr. Wrongham?” asked Miss Ellerton, at the two
hundredth turn on the colonnade.

“Would you like to live in Italy?” I asked again,
as if I had not heard her.

“Do you mean that as a sequitur to my question,
Mr. Wrongham?” said she, half stopping in her walk;
and though the sentence was commenced playfully,
dropping her voice at the last word, with something, I
thought, very like emotion.

I drew her off the colonnade to the small garden
between the house and the spring, and in a giddy
dream of fear and surprise at my own rashness and
success, I made, and won from her, a frank avowal of
preference.

Matches have been made more suddenly.

3. III.

Miss Ellerton sat in the music-room the next morning
after breakfast, preventing pauses in a rather interesting
conversation, by a running accompaniment
upon the guitar. A single gold thread formed a fillet
about her temples, and from beneath it, in clouds of
silken ringlets, floated the softest raven hair that ever
grew enamored of an ivory shoulder. Hers was a
skin that seemed woven of the lily-white, but opaque
fibre of the magnolia, yet of that side of its cup turned
toward the fading sunset. There is no term in painting,
because there is no touch of pencil or color, that
could express the vanishing and impalpable breath
that assured the healthiness of so pale a cheek. She
was slight as all southern women are in America, and
of a flexible and luxurious gracefulness equalled by
nothing but the movings of a smoke-curl. Without
the elastic nerve remarkable in the motions of Taglioni,
she appeared, like her, to be born with a lighter specific
gravity than her fellow-creatures. If she had
floated away upon some chance breeze you would only
have been surprised upon reflection.

“I am afraid you are too fond of society,” said Miss
Ellerton, as Juba came in hesitatingly and delivered
her a note in the hand writing of an old correspondent.
She turned pale on seeing the superscription, and
crushed the note up in her hand, unread. I was not
sorry to defer the denouement of my little drama, and
taking up the remark which she seemed disposed to
forget, I referred her to a scrap-book of Van Pelt's,
which she had brought home with her, containing
some verses of my own, copied (by good luck) in that
sentimental sophomore's own hand.

“Are these yours, really and really?” she asked,
looking pryingly into my face, and showing me my
own verses, against which she had already run a pencil
line of approbation.

“Peccavi!” I answered. “But will you make me
in love with my offspring by reading them in your own
voice.”

They were some lines written in a balcony at daybreak,
while a ball was still going on within, and contained
an allusion (which I had quite overlooked) to
some one of my ever-changing admirations. As well
as I remember they ran thus:—

“And who was this `sweet lover,' Mr. Wrongham?
I should know, I think, before I go farther with so expeditious
a gentleman.”

“As Shelley says of his ideal mistress—

It was but an apostrophe to the presentiment of that
which I have found, dear Miss Ellerton! But will you
read that ill-treated billet-doux, and remember that
Juba stands with the patience of an ebon statue waiting
for an answer?”

I knew the contents of the letter, and I watched the
expression of her face, as she read it, with no little
interest. Her temples flushed, and her delicate lips
gradually curled into an expression of anger and scorn,
and having finished the perusal of it, she put it into
my hand, and asked me if so impertient a production
deserved an answer.

I began to fear that the eclaircissement would not
leave me on the sunny side of the lady's favor, and felt
the need of the moment's reflection given me while
running my eye over the letter.

“Mr. Slingsby,” said I, with the deliberation of an
attorney, “has been some time in correspondence with
you?”

“Yes.”

“And, from his letters and your brother's commendations,
you had formed a high opinion of his character,
and had expressed as much in your letters?”

“Yes—perhaps I did.”

“And from this paper intimacy he conceives himself
sufficiently acquainted with you to request leave
to pay his addresses?”

A dignified bow put a stop to my catechism.

“Dear Miss Ellerton!” I said, “this is scarcely a
question upon which I ought to speak, but by putting
this letter into my hand, you seemed to ask my opinion.”

“I did—I do,” said the lovely girl, taking my hand,
and looking appealingly into my face; “answer it for
me! I have done wrong in encouraging that foolish
correspondence, and I owe perhaps to this forward
man a kinder reply than my first feeling would have
dictated. Decide for me—write for me—relieve me
from the first burden that has lain on my heart
since—”

She burst into tears, and my dread of an explanation
increased.

“Will you follow my advice implicitly?” I asked.

“Yes—oh, yes!”

“You promise?”

“Indeed, indeed!”

“Well, then, listen to me! However painful the
task, I must tell you that the encouragement you have
given Mr. Slingsby, the admiration you have expressed
in your letters of his talents and acquirements, and the
confidences you have reposed in him respecting yourself,
warrant him in claiming as a right, a fair trial of
his attractions. You have known and approved Mr.
Slingsby's mind for years—you know me but for a few
hours. You saw him under the most unfavorable
auspices (for I know him intimately), and I feel bound
in justice to assure you that you will like him much
better upon acquaintance.”

Miss Ellerton had gradually drawn herself up during
this splendid speech, and sat at last as erect and
as cold as Agrippina upon her marble chair.

“Will you allow me to send Mr. Slingsby to you,”
I continued, rising—“and suffer him to plead his own
cause?”

“If you will call my brother, Mr. Wrongham, I
shall feel obliged to you,” said Miss Ellerton.

I left the room, and hurrying to my chamber, dipped
my head into a basin of water, and plastered my long
locks over my eyes, slipped on a white roundabout,
and tied around my neck the identical checked cravat
in which I had made such an unfavorable impression
on the first day of my arrival. Tom Ellerton was soon
found, and easily agreed to go before and announce me
by my proper name to his sister; and treading closely
on his heels, I followed to the door of the music-room.

“Ah, Ellen!” said he, without giving her time for
a scene, “I was looking for you. Slingsby is better,
and will pay his respects to you presently. And, I
say—you will treat him well, Ellen, and—and, don't
flirt with Wrongham the way you did last night!—
Slingby's a devilish sight better fellow. Oh, here he
is!”

As I stepped over the threshold, Miss Ellerton gave
me just enough of a look to assure herself that it was
the identical monster she had seen at the tea-table,
and not deigning me another glance, immediately commenced
talking violently to her brother on the state of
the weather. Tom bore it for a moment or two with
remarkable gravity, but at my first attempt to join in
the conversation, my voice was lost in an explosion of
laughter which would have been the death of a gentleman
with a full habit.

Indignant and astonished, Miss Ellerton rose to her
full height, and slowly turned to me.

“Peccavi!” said I, crossing my hands on my bosom,
and looking up penitently to her face.

She ran to me, and seized my hand, but recovered
herself instantly, and the next moment was gone from
the room.

Whether from wounded pride at having been the
subject of a mystification, or whether from that female
caprice by which most men suffer at one period or
other of their bachelor lives, I know not—but I never
could bring Miss Ellerton again to the same interesting
crisis with which she ended her intimacy with Mr.
Wrongham. She proffered to forgive me, and talked
laughingly enough of our old correspondence; but
whenever I grew tender, she referred me to the “sweet
lover,” mentioned in my verses in the balcony, and
looked around for Van Pelt. That accomplished
bean, on observing my discomfiture, began to find out
Miss Ellerton's graces without the aid of his quizzing-glass,
and I soon found it necessary to yield the pas
altogether. She has since become Mrs. Van Pelt,
and when I last heard from her was “as well as could
be expected.”

3. CHAPTER III.
MRS. CAPTAIN THOMPSON.

The last of August came sweltering in, hot, dusty,
and faint, and the most indefatigable belles of Saratoga
began to show symptoms of weariness. The stars
disappeared gradually from the ballroom; the barkeeper
grew thin under the thickening accounts for
lemonades; the fat fellow in the black band, who
“vexed” the basson, had blown himself from the
girth of Falstaff to an “eagle's talon in the waist;”
papas began to be waylaid in their morning walks by
voung gentlemen with propositions; and stage-coaches
that came in with their baggageless tails in the air, and
he driver's weight pressing the foot-board upon the
astonished backs of his wheelers, went out with the
rim of a Venetian gondola—the driver's up-hoisted
figure answering to the curved proboscis of that sternladen
craft.

The vocation of tin-tumblers and water-dippers was
gone. The fashionable world (brazen in its general
habit) had drank its fill of the ferrugineous waters.
Mammas thanked Heaven for the conclusion of the
chaperon's summer solstice; and those who came to
bet, and those who came to marry, “made up their
books,” and walked off (if they had won) with their
winnings.

Having taken a less cordial farewell of Van Pelt
than I might have done had not Miss Ellerton been
hanging confidingly on his arm, I followed my baggage
to the door, where that small epitome of the inheritance
of the prince of darkness, an American stage-coach,
awaited me as its ninth inside passenger. As
the last person picked up, I knew very well the seat
to which I was destined, and drawing a final cool
breath in the breezy colonnade, I summoned resolution
and abandoned myself to the tender mercies of
the driver.

The “ray of contempt” that “will pierce through
the shell of the tortoise,” is a shaft from the horn of
a new moon in comparison with the beating of an
American sun through the top of a stage-coach. This
“accommodation,” as it is sometimes bitterly called,
not being intended to carry outside passengers, has a
top as thin as your grandmother's umbrella, black, porous,
and cracked; and while intended for a protection
from the heat, it just suffices to collect the sun's
rays with an incredible power and sultriness, and exclude
the air that makes it sufferable to the beasts of
the field. Of the nine places inside this “dilly,” the
four seats in the corners are so far preferable that the
occupant has the outer side of his body exempt from
a perspirative application of human flesh (the thermometer
at 100 degrees of Fahrenheit), while, of the
three middle places on the three seats, the man in the
centre of the coach, with no support for his back, yet
buried to the chin in men, women, and children, is at
the ninth and lowest degree of human suffering. I
left Saratoga in such a state of happiness as you
might suppose for a gentleman, who, besides fulfilling
this latter category, had been previously unhappy in
his love.

I was dressed in a white roundabout and trowsers
of the same, a straw hat, thread stockings, and pumps,
and was so far a blessing to my neighbors that I looked
cool. Directly behind me, occupying the middle of
the back seat, sat a young woman with a gratis passenger
in her lap (who, of course, did not count among
the nine), in the shape of a fat and a very hot child
of three years of age, whom she called John, Jacky,
Johnny, Jocket, Jacket, and the other endearing diminutives
of the namesakes of the great apostle. Like
the saint who had been selected for his patron, he was
a “voice crying in the wilderness.” This little gentleman
was exceedingly unpopular with his two neighbors
at the windows, and his incursions upon their legs
and shoulders in his occasional forays for fresh air,
ended in his being forbidden to look out at either window,
and plied largely with gingerbread to content him
with the warm lap of his mother. Though I had no
eyes in the back of my straw hat, I conceived very
well the state in which a compost of soft gingerbread,
tears, and perspiration, would soon leave the two unscrupulous
hands behind me; and as the jolts of the
coach frequently threw me back upon the knees of
his mother, I could not consistently complain of the
familiar use made of my roundabout and shoulders in
Master John's constant changes of position. I vowed
my jacket to the first river, the moment I could make
sure that the soft gingerbread was exhausted—but I
kept my temper.

How an American Jehu gets his team over ten
miles in the hour, through all the variety of sand, ruts,
clay-pits, and stump-thickets, is a problem that can
only be resolved by riding beside him on the box. In
the usual time we arrived at the pretty village of Troy,
some thirty miles from Saratoga; and here, having exchanged
my bedaubed jacket for a clean one, I freely
forgave little Pickle his freedoms, for I hoped never
to set eyes on him again during his natural life. I was
going eastward by another coach.

Having eaten a salad for my dinner, and drank a
bottle of iced claret, I stepped forth in my “blanched
and lavendered” jacket to take my place in the other
coach, trusting Providence not to afflict me twice in

the same day with the evil I had just escaped, and feeling,
on the whole, reconciled to my troubled dividend
of eternity. I got up the steps of the coach with as
much alacrity as the state of the thermometer would
permit, and was about drawing my legs after me upon
the forward seat, when a clammy hand caught me
unceremoniously by the shirt-collar, and the voice I
was just beginning to forget cried out with a chuckle,
“Dada!”

“Madam!” I said, picking off the gingerbread from
my shirt as the coach rolled down the street, “I had
hoped that your infernal child—”

I stopped in the middle of the sentence, for a pair
of large blue eyes were looking wonderingly into mine,
and for the first time I observed that the mother of
this familiar nuisance was one of the prettiest women I
had seen since I had become susceptible to the charms
of the sex.

“Are you going to Boston, sir?” she inquired, with
a half-timid smile, as if, in that case, she appealed to
me for protection on the road.

“Yes, madam!” I answered, taking little Jocket's
pasty hand into mine, affectionately, as I returned her
hesitating look; “may I hope for your society so
far?”

My fresh white waistcoat was soon embossed with a
dingy yellow, where my enterprising fellow-passenger
had thrust his sticky fist into the pockets, and my sham
shirt-bosom was reduced incontinently to the complexion
of a painter's rag after doing a sunset in gamboge.
I saw everything, however, through the blue eyes of
his mother, and was soon on such pleasant terms with
Master John, that, at one of the stopping-places, I inveigled
him out of the coach and dropped him accidentally
into the horse-trough, contriving to scrub him
passably clean before he could recover breath enough
for an outcry. I had already thrown the residuum
of his gingerbread out of the window, so that his familiarities
for the rest of the day were, at least, less
adhesive.

We dropped one or two way-passengers at Lebanon,
and I was left in the coach with Mrs. Captain and
Master John Thompson, in both whose favors I made
a progress that (I may as well depone) considerably
restored my spirits—laid flat by my unthrift wooing at
Saratoga. If a fly hath but alit on my nose when my
self-esteem hath been thus at a discount, I have
soothed myself with the fancy that it preferred me—a
drowning vanity will so catch at a straw!

As we bowled along through some of the loveliest
scenery of Massachusetts, my companion (now become
my charge), let me a little into her history, and at the
same time, by those shades of insinuation of which
women so instinctively know the uses, gave me perfectly
to comprehend that I might as well economize
my tenderness. The father of the riotous young gentleman
who had made so free with my valencia waistcoat
and linen roundabouts, had the exclusive copyhold
of her affections. He had been three years at
sea (I think I said before), and she was hastening to
show him the pledge of their affections—come into
the world since the good brig Dolly made her last
clearance from Boston bay.

I was equally attentive to Mrs. Thompson after this
illumination, though I was, perhaps, a shade less enamored
of the interesting freedoms of Master John.
One's taste for children depends so much upon one's
love for their mothers!

It was twelve o'clock at night when the coach rattled
in upon the pavements of Boston. Mrs. Thompson
had expressed so much impatience during the last
few miles, and seemed to shrink so sensitively from
being left to herself in a strange city, that I offered my
services till she should find herself in better hands,
and, as a briefer way of disposing of her, had bribed
the coachman, who was in a hurry with the mail, to
turn a little out of his way, and leave her at her husband's
hotel.

We drew up with a prodigious clatter, accordingly
at the Marlborough hotel, where, no coach being expected,
the boots and bar-keeper were not immediately
forthcoming. After a rap “to wake the dead,” I set
about assisting the impatient driver in getting off the
lady's trunks and boxes, and they stood in a large
pyramid on the sidewalk when the door was opened.
A man in his shirt, three parts asleep, held a flaring
candle over his head, and looked through the half-opened
door.

“Is Captain Thompson up?” I asked rather brusquely,
irritated at the sour visage of the bar-keeper.

“Captain Thompson, sir!”

“Captain Thompson, sir!” I repeated my words
with a voice that sent him three paces back into the
hall.

“No, sir,” he said at last, slipping one leg into his
trowsers, which had hitherto been under his arm.

“Then wake him immediately, and tell him Mrs.
Thompson is arrived.” Here's a husband, thought I,
as I heard something between a sob and a complaint
issue from the coach-window at the bar-keeper's intelligence.
To go to bed when he expected his wife and
child, and after three years' separation! She might
as well have made a parenthesis in her constancy!

“Have you called the captain?” I asked, as I set
Master John upon the steps, and observed the man
still standing with the candle in his hand, grinning
from ear to ear.

“No, sir,” said the man.

“No!” I thundered, “and what in the devil's name
is the reason?”

“Boots!” he cried out in reply, “show this gentleman
`forty-one.' Them may wake Captain Thompson
as likes! I never hearn of no Mrs. Thompson!”

Rejecting an ungenerous suspicion that flashed
across my mind, and informing the bar-keeper en passant,
that he was a brute and a donkey, I sprang up
the staircase after a boy, and quite out of breath, arrived
at a long gallery of bachelors' rooms on the fifth
floor. The boy pointed to a door at the end of the
gallery, and retreated to the banisters as if to escape
the blowing up of a petard.

Rat-a-tat-tat!

“Come in!” thundered a voice like a hailing trumpet.
I took the lamp from the boy, and opened the
door. On a narrow bed well tucked up, lay a most
formidable looking individual, with a face glowing
with carbuncles, a pair of deep-set eyes inflamed and
fiery, and hair and eyebrows of glaring red, mixed
slightly with gray; while outside the bed lay a hairy
arm, with a fist like the end of the club of Hercules.
His head tied loosely in a black silk handkerchief, and
on the light-stand stood a tumbler of brandy-and-water.

“What do you want?” he thundered again, as I stepped
over a threshold and lifted my hat, struck speechless
for a moment with this unexpected apparition.

“Have I the pleasure,” I asked, in a hesitating
voice, “to address Captain Thompson?”

“That's my name!”

“Ah! then, captain, I have the pleasure to inform
you that Mrs. Thompson and little John are arrived.
They are at the door at this moment.”

A change in the expression of Captain Thompson's
face checked my information in the middle, and as I
took a step backward, he raised himself on his elbow,
and looked at me in a way that did not diminish my
embarrassment.

“I'll tell you what, Mr. Milk-and-water,” said he,
with an emphasis on every word like the descent of a
sledge-hammer; “if you're not out of this room in
two seconds with your `Mrs. Thompson and little

John,' I'll slam you through that window, or the devil
take me!”

I reflected as I took another step backward, that if
I were thrown down to Mrs. Thompson from a fifth
story window I should not be in a state to render her
the assistance she required; and remarking with an
ill-feigned gayety to Captain Thompson that so decided
a measure would not be necessary, I backed
expeditiously over the threshold. As I was closing
his door, I heard the gulp of his brandy-and-water,
and the next instant the empty glass whizzed past my
retreating head, and was shattered to pieces on the
wall behind me.

I gave the “boots” a cuff for an untimely roar of
laughter as I reached the staircase, and descended,
very much discomfited and embarrassed, to Mrs.
Thompson. My delay had thrown that lady into a
very moving state of unhappiness. Her tears were
glistening in the light of the street lamp, and Master
John was pulling away unheeded at her stomacher,
and crying as if he would split his diaphragm. What
to do? I would have offered to take her to my paternal
roof till the mystery could be cleared up—but I
had been absent two years, and to arrive at midnight
with a woman and a young child, and such an improbable
story—I did not think my reputation at
home would bear me out. The coaçhman, too, began
to swear and make demonstrations of leaving us in the
street, and it was necessary to decide.

“Shove the baggage inside the coach,” I said at
last, “and drive on. Don't be unhappy Mrs. Thompson!
Jocket, stop crying, you villain! I'll see that
you are comfortably disposed of for the night where
the coach stops, madam, and to-morrow I'll try a
little reason with Captain Thompson. How the devil
can she love such a volcanic specimen!” I muttered
to myself, dodging instinctively at the bare remembrance
of the glass of brandy-and-water.

The coachman made up for lost time, and we rattled
over the pavements at a rate that made Jocket's hullybaloo
quite inaudible. As we passed the door of my
own home, I wondered what would be the impression
of my respectable parent, could he see me whisking
by, after midnight, with a rejected woman and her
progeny upon my hands; but smothering the unworthy
doubt that re-arose in my mind, touching the
legitimacy of Master John, I inwardly vowed that I
would see Mrs. Thompson at all risks fairly out of
her imbroglio.

We pulled up with a noise like the discharge of a
load of paving-stones, and I was about saying something
both affectionate and consolatory to my weeping
charge, when a tall handsome fellow, with a face as
brown as a berry, sprang to the coach-door, and seized
her in his arms! A shower of kisses and tender epithets
left me not a moment in doubt. There was
another Captain Thompson!

He had not been able to get rooms at the Marlborough,
as he had anticipated when he wrote, and
presuming that the mail would come first to the post-office,
he had waited for her there.

As I was passing the Marlborough a week or two
afterward, I stopped to inquire about Captain Thompson.
I found that he was an old West India captain,
who had lived there between his cruises for twenty
years more or less, and had generally been supposed a
bachelor. He had suddenly gone to sea, the landlord
told me, smiling at the same time, as if thereby
hung a tale if he chose to tell it.

“The fact is,” said Boniface, when I pushed him a
little on the subject, “he was skeared off.”

“What scared him?” I asked very innocently.

“A wife and child from some foreign port!” he answered
laughing as if he would burst his waistband,
and taking me into the back parlor to tell me the particulars.

A LOG IN THE ARCHIPELAGO.

The American frigate, in which I had cruised as
the ward-room guest for more than six months, had
sailed for winter quarters at Mahon, and my name was
up at the pier of Smyrna, as a passenger in the first
ship that should leave the port, whatever her destination.

The flags of all nations flew at the crowded peaks of
the merchantmen lying off the Marina, and among them
lay two small twin brigs, loading with figs and opium
for my native town in America. They were owned by
an old schoolfellow of my own, one of the most distinguished
and hospitable of the Smyrniote merchants,
and, if nothing more adventurous turned up, he had
offered to land me from one of his craft at Malta or
Gibraltar.

Time wore on, and I had loitered up and down the
narrow street “in melancholy idleness” by day, and
smoked the narghile with those “merchant princes”
by night, till I knew every paving-stone between the
beach and the bazar, and had learned the thrilling
events of the Greek persecution with the particularity
of a historian. My heart, too, unsusceptible enough
when “packed for travel,” began to uncoil with absence
of adventure, and expose its sluggish pulses to
the “Greek fire,” still burning in those Asiatic eyes,
and I felt sensibly, that if, Telemachus-like, I did not
soon throw myself into the sea, I should yield, past
praying for, to the cup of some Smyrniote Circe.
Darker eyes than are seen on that Marina swim not in
delight out of paradise!

I was sitting on an opium-box in the counting-house
of my friend L—n (the princely and hospitable merchant
spoken of above), when enter a Yankee “skipper,”
whom I would have clapped on the shoulder for
a townsman if I had seen him on the top of the minaret
of the mosque of Sultan Bajazet. His go-ashore black
coat and trowsers, worn only one month in twelve,
were of costly cloth, but of the fashion prevailing in
the days of his promotion to be second mate of a cod-fisher;
his hat was of the richest beaver, but getting
brown with the same paucity of wear, and exposure to
the corroding air of the ocean; and on his hands were
stretched (and they had well need to be elastic) a pair
of Woodstock gloves that might have descended to
him from Paul Jones “the pilot.” A bulge just over
his lowest rib gave token of the ship's chronometer,
and, in obedience to the new fashion of a guard, a fine
chain of the softest auburn hair (doubtless his wife's,
and, I would have wagered my passage-money, as pretty
a woman as he would see in his v'yage)—a chain, I
say, braided of silken blond ringlets passed around his
neck, and drew its glossy line over his broad-breasted
white waistcoat—the dewdrop on the lion's mane not
more entitled to be astonished.

A face of hard-weather, but with an expression of
care equal to the amount of his invoice, yet honest and
fearless as the truck of his mainmast; a round sailor's
back, that looked as if he would hoist up his deck if
you battered him beneath hatches against his will;
and teeth as white as his new foresail, completed the
picture of the master of the brig Metamora. Jolly old
H—t, I shall never feel the grip of an honester hand,
nor return one (as far as I can with the fist you crippled
at parting) with a more kindly pressure! A fair
wind on your quarter, my old boy, wherever you may
be trading!

“What sort of accommodations have you, captain?”
I asked, as my friend introduced me.

“Why, none to speak of, sir! There's a starboard
birth that a'n't got much in it—a few boxes of figs, and
the new spritsail, and some of the mate's traps—but I
could stow away a little perhaps, sir.”

“You sail to-morrow morning?”

“Off with the land-breeze, sir.”

I took leave of the kindest of friends, laid in a few
hasty stores, and was on board at midnight. The next
morning I awoke with the water rippling beside me,
and creeping on deck, I saw a line of foam stretching
behind us far up the gulf, and the ruins of the primitive
church of Smyrna, mingled with the turrets of a
Turkish castle, far away in the horizon.

The morning was cool and fresh, the sky of an oriental
purity, and the small low brig sped on like a
nautilus. The captain stood by the binnacle, looking
off to the westward with a glass, a tarpaulin hat over
his black locks, a pair of sail-cloth pumps on his feet,
and trowsers and roundabout of an indefinable tarriness
and texture. He handed me the glass, and, obeying
his direction, I saw, stealing from behind a point of
land, shaped like a cat's back, the well-known topsails
of the two frigates that had sailed before us.

We were off Vourla, and the commodore had gone
to pay his respects to Sir Pulteney Malcolm, then lying
with his fleet in this little bay, and waiting, we
supposed, for orders to force the Dardanelles. The
frigates soon appeared on the bosom of the gulf, and
heading down, neared our larboard bow, and stood for
the Archipelago. The Metamora kept her way, but
the “United States,” the fleetest of our ships, soon
left us behind with a strengthening breeze, and, following
her with the glass till I could no longer distinguish
the cap of the officer of the deck, I breathed a
blessing after her, and went below to breakfast. It is
strange how the lessening in the distance of a ship in
which one has cruised in these southern seas, pulls on
the heartstrings!

I sat on deck most of the day, cracking pecan-nuts
with the captain, and gossiping about schooldays in
our native town, occasionally looking off over the hills
of Asia Minor, and trying to realize (the Ixion labor of
the imagination in travel) the history of which these
barren lands have been the scene. I know not whether
it is easy for a native of old countries to people these
desolated lands from the past, but for me, accustomed
to look on the face of the surrounding earth as mere
vegetation, unstoried and unassociated, it is with a constant
mental effort alone that I can be classic on classic
ground—find Plato in the desert wastes of the
Academy, or Priam among the Turk-stridden and
prostrate columns of Troy. In my recollections of
Athens, the Parthenon and the Theseion and the solemn
and sublime ruins by the Fount of Callirhoe stand
forth prominent enough; but when I was on the spot
—a biped to whom three meals a day, a washerwoman,
and a banker, were urgent necessities—I shame
to confess that I sat dangling my legs over the classic
Pelasgicum, not “fishing for philosophers with gold
and figs,” but musing on the mundane and proximate
matters of daily economy. I could see my six shirts
hanging to dry, close by the temple of the Winds, and
I knew my dinner was cooking three doors from the
crumbling capitals of the Agora.

As the sun set over Ephesus, we neared the mouth
of the gulf of Smyrna, and the captain stood looking
over the leeward-bow rather earnestly.

“We shall have a snorter out of the nor'east,” he
said, taking hold of the tiller, and sending the helmsman
forward—“I never was up this sea but once
afore, and it's a dirty passage through these islands in
any weather, let alone a Levanter.”

He followed up his soliloquy by jamming his tiller
hard a port, and in ten minutes the little brig was running
her nose, as it seemed to me, right upon an inhospitable
rock at the northern headland of the gulf.
At the distance of a biscuit-toss from the shore, however,
the rock was dropped to leeward, and a small
passage appeared, opening with a sharp curve into
the miniature but sheltered bay of Fourgas. We
dropped anchor off a small hamlet of forty or fifty
houses, and lay beyond the reach of Levanters in a
circular basin that seemed shut in by a rim of granite
from the sea.

The captain's judgment of the weather was correct,
and, after the sun set, the wind rose gradually to a violence
which sent the spray high over the barriers of
our protected position. Congratulating ourselves that
we were on the right side of the granite wall, we got
out our jolly-boat on the following morning, and ran
ashore upon the beach half a mile from town, proposing
to climb first to the peak of the neighboring hill,
and then forage for a dinner in the village below.

We scrambled up the rocky mountain-side, with
some loss of our private stock of wind, and considerable
increase from the nor'easter, and getting under the
lee of a projecting shelf, sat looking over toward Lesbos,
and ruminating in silence—I, upon the old question,
“an Sappho publica fuerit,” and the captain probably
on his wife at Cape Cod, and his pecan-nuts, figs,
and opium, in the emerald-green brig below us. I
don't know why she should have been painted green,
by-the-by (and I never thought to suggest that to the
captain), being named after an Indian chief, who was
as red as her copper bottom.

The sea toward Mitylene looked as wild as an eagle's
wing ruffling against the wind, and there was that
smoke in the sky as if the blast was igniting with its
speed—the look of a gale in those seas when unaccompanied
with rain. The crazy-looking vessels of
the Levant were scudding with mere rags of sails for
the gulf; and while we sat on the rock, eight or ten
of those black and unsightly craft shot into the little
bay below us, and dropped anchor—blessing, no doubt,
every saint in the Greek calendar.

Having looked toward Lesbos an hour, and come to
the conclusion, that, admitting the worst with regard
to the private character of Sappho, it would have been
very pleasant to have known her; and the captain
having washed his feet in a slender tricklet oozing
from a cleft in a rock, we descended the hill on the
other side, and stole a march on the rear to the town
of Fourgas. Four or five Greek women were picking
up olives in a grove lying half way down the hill, and
on our coming in sight, they made for us with such
speed, that I feared the reverse of the Sabine rape—
not yet having seen a man on this desolate shore; they
ran well, but they resembled Atalanta in no other possible
particular. We should have taken them for the
Furies, but there were five. They wanted snuff and
money—making signs easily for the first, but attempting
amicably to put their hands in our pockets when
we refused to comprehend the Greek for “Give us a
para.” The captain pulled from his pocket an American
dollar-note (payable at Nantucket), and offered it
to the youngest of the women, who smelt at it and returned
it to him, evidently unacquainted with the Cape
Cod currency. On farther search he found a few of
the tinsel paras of the country, which he substituted
for his “dollar-bill,” a saving of ninety-nine cents to
him, if the bank has not broke when he arrives at Massachusetts.

Fourgas is surrounded by a very old wall, very much
battered. We passed under a high arch containing
marks of having once been closed with a heavy gate
and, disputing our passage with cows, and men that
seemed less cleanly and civilized, penetrated to the
heart of the town in search of the barber's shop, café
and kibaub shop—three conveniences usually united
in a single room and dispensed by a single Figaro in
Turkish and Greek towns of this description. The
word café is universal, and we needed only to pronounce
it to be led by a low door into a square apartment
of a ruinous old building, around which, upon a
kind of shelf, waist-high, sat as many of the inhabitants
of the town as could cross their legs conveniently.
As soon as we were discerned through the smoke by
the omnifarious proprietor of the establishment, two

of the worst-dressed customers were turned off the
shelf unceremoniously to make room for us, the fire
beneath the coffeepot was raked open, and the agreeable
flavor of the spiced beverage of the east ascended
refreshingly to our nostrils. With his baggy trowsers
tucked up to his thigh, his silk shirt to his armpits,
and his smoke-dried but clean feet wandering at large
in a pair of red morocco slippers, our Turkish Ganymede
presented the small cups in their filagree holders,
and never was beverage more delicious or more
welcome. Thirsty with our ramble, and unaccustomed
to such small quantities as seem to satisfy the
natives of the east, the captain and myself soon became
objects of no small amusement to the wondering beards
about us. A large tablespoon holds rather more than
a Turkish coffee-cup, and one, or, at most, two of
these, satisfies the dryest clay in the Orient. To us,
a dozen of them was a bagatelle, and we soon exhausted
the copper pot, and intimated to the astonished
cafidji that we should want another. He looked
at us a minute to see if we were in earnest, and then
laid his hand on his stomach, and rolling up his eyes,
made some remark to his other customers which provoked
a general laugh. It was our last “lark” ashore
for some time, however, and spite of this apparent
prophecy of a colic, we smoked our narghiles and
kept him running with his fairy cups for some time
longer. One never gets enough of that fragrant liquor.

The sun broke through the clouds as we sat on the
high bench, and, hastily paying our Turk, we hurried
to the seaside. The wind seemed to have lulled, and
was blowing lightly off shore; and, impatient of loitering
on his voyage, the captain got up his anchor and
ran across the bay, and in half an hour was driving
through a sea that left not a dry plank on the deck of
the Metamora.

The other vessels at Fourgas had not stirred, and
the sky in the northeast looked to my eye very threatening.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and the
captain crowded sail and sped on like a sea-bird,
though I could see by his face when he looked in the
quarter of the wind, that he had acted more from impulse
than judgment in leaving his shelter. The heavy
sea kicked us on our course, however, and the smart
little brig shot buoyantly over the crests of the waves
as she outran them, and it was difficult not to feel that
the bounding and obedient fabric beneath our feet was
instinct with self-confidence, and rode the waters like
their master.

I well knew that the passage of the Archipelago was
a difficult one in a storm even to an experienced pilot,
and with the advantage of daylight; and I could not
but remember with some anxiety that we were entering
upon it at nightfall, and with a wind strengthening
every moment, while the captain confessedly had made
the passage but once before, and then in a calm sea of
August. The skipper, however, walked his deck confidently,
though he began to manage his canvass with a
more wary care, and, before dark, we were scudding
under a single sail, and pitching onward with the heave
of the sea at a rate that, if we were to see Malta at all,
promised a speedy arrival. As the night closed in we
passed a large frigate lying-to, which we afterward
found out was the Superbe, a French eighty-gun ship
(wrecked a few hours after on the island of Andros).
The two American frigates had run up by Mitylene,
and were still behind us: and the fear of being run
down in the night, in our small craft, induced the
captain to scud on, though he would else have lain-to
with the Frenchman, and perhaps have shared his
fate.

I stayed on deck an hour or two after dark, and before
going below satisfied myself that we should owe
it to the merest chance if we escaped striking in the
night. The storm had become so furious that we ran
with bare poles before it; and though it set us pretty
fairly on our way, the course lay through a narrow
and most intricate channel, among small and rocky
islands, and we had nothing for it but to trust to a
providential drift.

The captain prepared himself for a night on deck,
lashed everything that was loose, and filled the two
jugs suspended in the cabin, which, as the sea had
been too violent for any hope from the cook, were to
sustain us through the storm. We took a biscuit and
a glass of Hollands and water, holding on hard by the
berths lest we should be pitched through the skylight,
and as the captain tied up the dim lantern, I got a
look at his face, which would have told me, if I had
not known it before, that though resolute and unmoved,
he knew himself to be entering on the most
imminent hazard of his life.

The waves now broke over the brig at every heave,
and occasionally the descent of the solid mass of water
on the quarter-deck seemed to drive her under like a
cork. My own situation was the worst on board, for
I was inactive. It required a seaman to keep the deck,
and as there was no standing in the cabin without great
effort, I disembarrassed myself of all that would impede
a swimmer, and got into my berth to await a wreck
which I considered almost inevitable. Braced with
both hands and feet, I lay and watched the imbroglio
in the bottom of the cabin, my own dressing-case
among other things emptied of its contents and swimming
with some of my own clothes and the captain's,
and the water rushing down the companion-way with
every wave that broke over us. The last voice I heard
on deck was from the deep throat of the captain calling
his men aft to assist in lashing the helm, and then,
in the pauses of the gale, came the awful crash upon
deck, more like the descent of a falling house than a
body of water, and a swash through the scuppers immediately
after, seconded by the smaller sea below, in
which my coat and waistcoat were undergoing a rehearsal
of the tragedy outside.

At midnight the gale increased, and the seas that descended
on the brig shook her to the very keel. We
could feel her struck under by the shock, and reel and
quiver as she recovered and rose again; and, as if to
distract my attention, the little epitome of the tempest
going on in the bottom of the cabin grew more and
more serious. The unoccupied berths were packed
with boxes of figs and bags of nuts, which “brought
away” one after another, and rolled from side to side
with a violence which threatened to drive them through
the side of the vessel; my portmanteau broke its lashings
and shot heavily backward and forward with the
roll of the sea; and if I was not to be drowned like a
dog in a locked cabin, I feared, at least, I should have
my legs broken by the leap of a fig-box into my berth.
My situation was wholly uncomfortable, yet half ludicrous.

An hour after midnight the captain came down, pale
and exhausted, and with no small difficulty managed
to get a tumbler of grog.

“How does she head?” I asked.

“Side to wind, drifting five knots an hour.”

“Where are you?”

“God only knows. I expect her to strike every
minute.”

He quietly picked up the wick of the lamp as it
tossed to and fro, and watching the roll of the vessel,
gained the companion-way, and mounted to the deck.
The door was locked, and I was once more a prisoner
and alone.

An hour elapsed—the sea, it appeared to me,
strengthening in its heaves beneath us, and the wind
howling and hissing in the rigging like a hundred
devils. An awful surge then burst down upon the
deck, racking the brig in every seam: the hurried
tread of feet overhead told me that they were cutting

the lashings of the helm; the seas succeeded each
other quicker, and, conjecturing from the
shortness of the pitch, that we were nearing a reef, I
was half out of my berth when the cabin door was
wrenched open, and a deluging sea washed down the
companion-way.

“On deck for your life!” screamed the hoarse voice
of the captain.

I sprang up through streaming water, barefoot and
bareheaded, but the pitch of the brig was so violent
that I dared not leave the ropes of the companion ladder,
and, almost blinded with the spray and wind, I
stood waiting for the stroke.

“Hard down!” cried the captain in a voice I shall
never forget, and as the rudder creaked with the strain,
the brig fell slightly off, and rising with a tremendous
surge, I saw the sky dimly relieved against the edge
of a ragged precipice, and in the next moment, as if
with the repulse of a catapult, we were flung back
into the trough of the sea by the retreating wave, and
surged heavily beyond the rock. The noise of the
breakers, and the rapid commands of the captain
now drowned the hiss of the wind, and in a few minutes
we were plunging once more through the uncertain
darkness, the long and regular heavings of
the sea alone assuring us that we were driving from
the shore.

The wind was cold, and I was wet to the skin.
Every third sea broke over the brig and added to the
deluge in the cabin, and from the straining of the
masts I feared they would come down with every succeeding
shock. I crept once more below, and regained
my berth, where wet and aching in every joint, I
awaited fate or the daylight.

Morning broke, but no abatement of the storm.
The captain came below and informed me (what I had
already presumed) that we had run upon the southernmost
point of Negropont, and had been saved by a
miracle from shipwreck. The back wave had taken
us off, and with the next sea we had shot beyond it.
We were now running in the same narrow channel for
Cape Colonna, and were surrounded with dangers.
The skipper looked beaten out; his eyes were protruding
and strained, and his face seemed to me to have
emaciated in the night. He swallowed his grog, and
flung himself for half an hour into his berth, and then
went on deck again to relieve his mate, where tired of
my wretched berth, I soon followed him.

The deck was a scene of desolation. The bulwarks
were carried clean away, the jolly-boat swept off, and
the long-boat the only moveable thing remaining.
The men were holding on to the shrouds, haggard and
sleepy, clinging mechanically to their support as the
sea broke down upon them, and, silent at the helm,
stood the captain and the second mate keeping the
brig stern-on to the sea, and straining their eyes for
land through the thick spray before them.

The day crept on, and another night, and we passed
it like the last. The storm never slacked, and all
through the long hours the same succession went on,
the brig plunging and rising, struggling beneath the
overwhelming and overtaking waves, and recovering
herself again, till it seemed to me as if I had never
known any other motion. The captain came below
for his biscuit and grog and went up again without
speaking a word, the mates did the same with the same
silence, and at last the bracing and holding on to prevent
being flung from my berth became mechanical,
and I did it while I slept. Cold, wet, hungry, and
exhausted, what a blessing from Heaven were five
minutes of forgetfulness!

How the third night wore on I scarce remember.
The storm continued with unabated fury, and when
the dawn of the third morning broke upon us the captain
conjectured that we had drifted four hundred
miles before the wind. The crew were exhausted
with watching, the brig labored more and more heavily,
and the storm seemed eternal.

At noon of the third day the clouds broke up a little,
and the wind, though still violent, slacked somewhat
in its fury. The sun struggled down upon the lashed
and raging sea, and, taking our bearings, we found ourselves
about two hundred miles from Malta. With
great exertions, the cook contrived to get up a fire in
the binnacle and boil a little rice, and never gourmet
sucked the brain of a woodcock with the relish which
welcomed that dark mess of pottage.

It was still impossible to carry more than a hand's
breadth of sail, but we were now in open waters and
flew merrily before the driving sea. The pitching and
racking motion, and the occasional shipping of a heavy
wave, still forbade all thoughts or hopes of comfort,
but the dread of shipwreck troubled us no more, and
I passed the day in contriving how to stand long
enough on my legs to get my wet traps from my
floating portmanteau, and go into quarantine like a
Christian.

The following day, at noon, Malta became visible
from the top of an occasional mountain wave; and still
driving under a reefed topsail before the hurricane, we
rapidly neared it, and I began to hope for the repose
of terra firma. The watch towers of the castellated
rock soon became distinct through the atmosphere of
spray, and at a distance of a mile, we took in sail and
waited for a pilot.

While tossing in the trough of the sea the following
half hour, the captain communicated to me some embarrassment
with respect to my landing which had not
occurred to me. It appeared that the agreement to
land me at Malta was not mentioned in his policy of
insurance, and the underwriters of course were not responsible
for any accident that might happen to the
brig after a variation from his original plan of passage.
This he would not have minded if he could have set
me ashore in a half hour, as he had anticipated, but
his small boat was lost in the storm, and it was now a
question whether the pilot-boat would take ashore a
passenger liable to quarantine. To run his brig into
harbor would be a great expense and positive loss of
insurance, and to get out the long-boat with his broken
tackle and exhausted crew was not to be thought of.
I knew very well that no passenger from a plague port
(such as Smyrna and Constantinople) was permitted
to land on any terms at Gibraltar, and if the pilot here
should refuse to take me off, the alternative was clear,
I must make a voyage against my will to America!

I was not in a very pleasant state of mind during the
delay which followed; for, though I had been three
years absent from my country and loved it well, I had
laid my plans for still two years of travel on this side
the Atlantic, and certain moneys for my “charges” lay
waiting my arrival at Malta. Among lesser reasons,
I had not a rag of clothes dry or clean, and was
heartily out of love with salt water and the smell of
figs.

As if to aggravate my unhappiness, the sun broke
through a rift in the clouds and lit up the white and
turreted battlements of Malta like an isle of the blessed
—the only bright spot within the limits of the stormy
horizon. The mountain waves on which we were
tossing were tempestnous and black, the comfortless
and battered brig with her weary crew looked more
like a wreck than a seaworthy merchantman, and no
pilot appearing, the captain looked anxiously seaward,
as if he grudged every minute of the strong wind rushing
by on his course.

A small speck at last appeared making toward us
from the shore, and, riding slowly over the tremendous
waves, a boat manned by four men came within hailing
distance. One moment as high as our topmast, and
another in the depths of the gulf a hundred feet below
us, it was like conversing from two buckets in a well.

“Do you want a pilot?” screamed the Maltese in
English, as the American flag blew out to the wind

“No!” roared the captain, like a thunder-peal,
through his tin-trumpet.

The Maltese, without deigning another look, put
up his helm with a gesture of disappointment, and
bore away.

“Boat ahoy!” bellowed the captain.

“Ahoy! ahoy!” answered the pilot.

“Will you take a passenger ashore?”

“Where from?”

“Smyrna!”

“No—o—o—o!”

There was a sound of doom in the angry prolongation
of that detested monosyllable that sunk to the
bottom of my heart like lead.

“Clear away the mainsail,” cried the captain getting
round once more to the wind. “I knew how it
would be, sir,” he continued, to me, as I bit my lips in
the effort to be reconciled to an involuntary voyage of
four thousand miles; “it wasn't likely he'd put himself
and his boat's crew into twenty days' quarantine
to oblige you and me.”

I could not but own that it was an unreasonable expectation.

“Never mind, sir,” said the skipper, consolingly,
“plenty of salt fish in the locker, and I'll set you on
Long Wharf in no time!”

“Brig ahoy!” came a voice faintly across the waves.

The captain looked over his shoulder without losing
a capful of wind from his sail, and sent back the hail
impatiently.

The pilot was running rapidly down upon us, and
had come back to offer to tow me ashore in the brig's
jolly-boat for a large sum of money.

“We've lost our boat, and you're a bloody shark,”
answered the skipper, enraged at the attempt at extortion.
“Head your course!” he muttered gruffly to
the man at the helm, who had let the brig fall off that
the pilot might come up.

Irritated by this new and gratuitous disappointment,
I stamped on the deck in an ungovernable fit of rage,
and wished the brig at the devil.

The skipper looked at me a moment, and instead of
the angry answer I expected, an expression of kind
commiseration stole over his rough face. The next
moment he seized the helm and put the brig away
from the wind, and then making a trumpet of his two
immense hands, he once more hailed the returning
pilot.

“I can't bear to see you take it so much to heart,
sir,” said the kind sailor, “and I'll do for you what I
wouldn't do for another man on the face o' the 'arth.
All hands there!”

The men came aft, and the captain in brief words
stated the case to them, and appealed to their sense
of kindness for a fellow-countryman, to undertake a
task, which, in the sea then running, and with their
exhausted strength, was not a service he could well
demand in other terms. It was to get out the long-boat,
and wait off while the pilot towed me ashore and
returned with her.

“Ay, ay! sir,” was the immediate response from
every lip, and from the chief mate to the black cabinboy,
every man sprang cheerily to the lashings. It
was no momentary task, for the boat was as firmly set
in her place as the mainmast, and stowed compactly
with barrels of pork, extra rigging, and spars—in short,
all the furniture and provision of the voyage. In the
course of an hour, however, the tackle was rigged on
the fore and main yards, and with a desperate effort
its immense bulk was heaved over the side, and lay
tossing on the tempestuous waters. I shook hands
with the men, who refused every remuneration beyond
my thanks, and, following the captain over the
side, was soon toiling heavily on the surging waters,
thanking Heaven for the generous sympathies of home
and country implanted in the human bosom. Those
who know the reluctance with which a merchant captain
lays-to, even to pick up a man overboard in a fair
wind, and those who understand the meaning of a forfeited
insurance, will appreciate this instance of difficult
generosity. I shook the hard fist of the kind-hearted
skipper on the quarantine stairs, and watched
his heavy boat as she crept out of the little harbor
with the tears in my eyes. I shall travel far before I
find again a man I honor more heartily.

THE REVENGE OF THE SIGNOR BASIL.

1. PART I.

It was in the golden month of August, not very
long ago, that the steamer which plies between St.
Mark's Stairs, at Venice, and the river into which
Phaeton turned a somerset with the horses of the sun,
started on its course over the lagoon with an unusual
God-send of passengers. The moon was rising from
the unchaste bed of the Adriatic (wedded every year
to Venice, yet every day and night sending the sun
and moon from her lovely bosom to the sky), and while
the gold of the west was still glowing on the landward
side of the Campanile, a silver gleam was brightening
momently on the other, and the Arabic domes of St.
Mark and the flying Mercury on the Dogana paled to
the setting orb and kindled to the rising with the same
Talleyrand-esque facility.

For the first hour the Mangia-foco sputtered on her
way with a silent company; the poetry of the scene,
or the regrets at leaving the delicious city lessening
in the distance, affecting all alike with a thoughtful
incommunicativeness. Gradually, however, the dolphin
hues over the Brenta faded away—the marble
city sank into the sea, with its turrets and bright spires
—the still lagoon became a sheet of polished glass—
and the silent groups leaning over the rails found
tongues and feet, and began to stir and murmur.

With the usual unconscious crystallization of society,
the passengers of the Mangia-foco had yielded
one side of the deck to a party of some rank, who had
left their carriages at Ferrara in coming from Florence
to Venice, and were now upon their return to the city
of Tasso, stomaching, with what grace they might, the
contact of a vulgar conveyance, which saved them the
hundred miles of posting between Ferrara and the
Brenta. In the centre of the aristocratic circle stood
a lady enveloped in a cashmere, but with her bonnet
hung by the string over her arm—one of those women
of Italy upon whom the divinest gifts of loveliness are
showered with a profusion which apparently impoverishes
the sex of the whole nation. A beautiful woman
in that land is rarely met; but when she does appear,
she is what Venus would have been after the contest
for beauty on Ida, had the weapons of her antagonists,
as in the tournaments of chivalry, been added to the
palm of victory. The marchesa del Marmore was apparently
twenty-three, and she might have been an
incarnation of the morning-star for pride and brightness.

On the other side of the deck stood a group of
young men, who, by their careless and rather shabby
dress, but pale and intellectual faces, were of that class
met in every public conveyance of Italy. The portfolios
under their arms, ready for a sketch, would have
removed a doubt of their profession, had one existed;
and with that proud independence for which the class

is remarkable, they had separated themselves equally
from the noble and ignoble—disqualified by inward
superiority from association with the one, and by accidental
poverty from the claims cultivation might give
them upon the other. Their glances at the divine
face turned toward them from the party I have alluded
to, were less constant than those of the vulgar, who
could not offend; but they were evidently occupied
more with it than with the fishing-boats lying asleep
on the lagoon: and one of them, half-buried in the
coil of rope, and looking under the arm of another,
had already made a sketch of her that might some day
make the world wonder from what seventh heaven of
fancy such an angelic vision of a head had descended
upon the painter's dream.

In the rear of this group, with the air of one who
would conceal himself from view, stood a young man
who belonged to the party, but who, with less of the
pallor of intellectual habits in his face, was much better
dressed than his companions, and had, in spite of
the portfolio under his arm, and a hat of the Salvator
breadth of rim, the undisguisable air of a person accustomed
to the best society. While maintaining a
straggling conversation with his friends, with whom he
seemed a favorite, Signor Basil employed himself in
looking over the sketch of the lovely marchesa going
on at his elbow—occasionally, as if to compare it with
the original, stealing a long look from between his
hand and his slouched hat at the radiant creature sitting
so unconsciously for her picture, and in a low
voice correcting, as by the result of his gaze, the rapid
touches of the artist.

“Take a finer pencil for the nostril, caro mio!” said
he; “it is as thin as the edge of a violet, and its transparent
curve—”

“Cospetto!” said the youth; “but you see by this
faint light better than I: if she would but turn to the
moon—”

The signor Basil suddenly flung his handkerchief
into the lagoon, bringing its shadow between the queen
of night and the marchesa del Marmore; and, attracted
from her revery by the passing object, the lady
moved her head quickly to the light, and in that moment
the spirited lip and nostril were transferred to the
painter's sketch.

“Thanks, mio bravo!” enthusiastically exclaimed
the looker-on; “Giorgione would not have beaten
thee with the crayon!”—and, with a rudeness which
surprised the artist, he seized the paper from beneath
his hand, walked away with it to the stern, and leaning
far over the rails, perused it fixedly by the mellow
lustre of the moon. The youth presently followed
him, and after a few words exchanged in an undertone,
Signor Basil slipped a piece of gold into his
hand, and carefully placed the sketch in his own portfolio.

2. II.

It was toward midnight when the Mangia-foco entered
the Adige, and keeping its steady way between
the low banks of the river, made for the grass-grown
and flowery canal which connects its waters with the
Po. Most of the passengers had yielded to the drowsy
influence of the night air, and, of the aristocratic party
on the larboard side, the young marchesa alone was
waking: her friends had made couches of their cloaks
and baggage, and were reclining at her feet, while the
artists, all except the signor Basil, were stretched fairly
on the deck, their portfolios beneath their heads, and
their large hats covering their faces from the powerful
rays of the moon.

“Miladi does justice to the beauty of the night,”
said the waking artist, in a low and respectful tone,
as he rose from her feet with a cluster of tuberoses she
had let fall from her hand.

“It is indeed lovely, Signor Pittore,” responded the
marchesa, glancing at his portfolio, and receiving the
flowers with a gracious inclination; “have you touched
Venice from the lagoon to-night?”

The signor Basil opened his portfolio, and replied
to the indirect request of the lady by showing her a
very indifferent sketch of Venice from the island of
St. Lazzaro. As if to escape from the necessity of
praising what had evidently disappointed her, she
turned the cartoon hastily, and exposed, on the sheet
beneath, the spirited and admirable outline of her own
matchless features.

A slight start alone betrayed the surprise of the
highborn lady, and raising the cartoon to examine it
more closely, she said with a smile, “You may easier
tread on Titian's heels than Canaletti's. Bezzuoli has
painted me, and not so well. I will awake the marquis,
and he shall purchase it of you.”

“Not for the wealth of the Medici, madam!” said
the young man, clasping his portfolio hastily, “pray
do not disturb monsignore! The picture is dear to
me!”

The marchesa, looking into his face, and with a
glance around, which the accomplished courtier before
her read better than she dreamed, she drew her
shawl over her blanched shoulders, and settled herself
to listen to the conversation of her new acquaintance.

“You would be less gracious if you were observed,
proud beauty,” thought Basil; “but while you think
the poor painter may while away the tediousness of a
vigil, he may feed his eyes on your beauty as well.”

The Mangia-foco turned into the canal, threaded
its lily-paved waters for a mile or two, and then, putting
forth upon the broad bosom of the Po, went on
her course against the stream, and, with retarded pace,
penetrated toward the sun-beloved heart of Italy. And
while the later hours performed their procession with
the stars, the marchesa del Marmore leaned sleepless
and unfatigued against the railing, listening with mingled
curiosity and scorn to the passionate love-murmur
of the enamored painter. His hat was thrown aside,
his fair and curling locks were flowing in the night
air, his form was bent earnestly but respectfully toward
her, and on his lip, with all its submissive tenderness,
there sat a shadow of something she could not define,
but which rebuked, ever and anon, as with the fierce
regard of a noble, the condescension she felt toward
him as an artist.

3. III.

Upon the lofty dome of the altar in the cathedral of
Bologna stands poised an angel in marble, not spoken
of in the books of travellers, but perhaps the loveliest
incarnation of a blessed cherub that ever lay in the
veined bosom of Pentelicus. Lost and unobserved on
the vast floor of the nave, the group of artists, who had
made a day's journey from Ferrara, sat in the wicker
chairs hired for a baioch during the vesper, and drew
silently from this angel, while the devout people of
Bologna murmured their Ave Marias around. Signor
Basil alone was content to look over the work of his
companions, and the twilight had already begun to
brighten the undying lamps at the shrine, when he
started from the pillar against which he leaned, and
crossed hastily toward a group issuing from a private
chapel in the western aisle. A lady walked between
two gentlemen of noble mien, and behind her, attended
by an equally distinguished company, followed that
lady's husband, the marchese del Marmore. They
were strangers passing through Bologna, and had been
attended to vespers by some noble friends.

The companions of the signor Basil looked on with
some surprise as their enamored friend stepped confidently
before the two nobles in attendance upon the

lady, and arrested her steps with a salutation which,
though respectful as became a gentleman, was marked
with the easy politeness of one accustomed to a favorable
reception.

“May I congratulate miladi,” he said, rising slowly
from his bow, and fixing his eyes with unembarrassed
admiration on her own liquid but now frowning orbs,
“upon her safe journey over the marches! Bologna,”
he continued, glancing at the nobles with a courteous
smile, “welcomes her fittingly.”

The lady listened with a look of surprise, and the
Bolognese glanced from the dusty boots of the artist
to his portfolio.

“Has the painter the honor to know la signora?”
asked the cavalier on her right.

“Signor, si!” said the painter, fiercely, as a curl
arched the lady's lip, and she prepared to answer.

The color mounted to the temples of the marchesa,
and her husband, who had loitered beneath the madonna
of Domenichino, coming up at the instant, she
bowed coldly to the signor Basil, and continued down
the aisle. The artist followed to her carriage, and
lifted his hat respectfully as the lumbering equipage
took its way by the famous statue of Neptune, and
then with a confident smile, which seemed to his companions
somewhat mistimed, he muttered between his
teeth, “Ciascuno son bel' giorno!” and strolled loitering
on with them to the trattoria.

4. IV.

The court of the grand-duke of Florence is perhaps
the most cosmopolitan and the most easy of access in
all Europe. The Austrian-born monarch himself,
adopting in some degree the frank and joyous character
of the people over whom he reigns, throws open
his parks and palaces, his gardens and galleries, to the
strangers passing through; and in the season of gayety
almost any presentable person, resident at Florence,
may procure the entree to the court balls, and start
fair with noble dames and gentlemen for grace in
courtly favor. The fêtes at the Palazzo Pitti, albeit
not always exempt from a leaven of vulgarity, are always
brilliant and amusing, and the exclusives of the
court, though they draw the line distinctly enough to
their own eye, mix with apparent abandonment in the
motley waltz and mazurka, and either from good-nature
or a haughty conviction of their superiority, never
suffer the offensive cordon to be felt, scarce to be suspected,
by the multitude who divert them. The
grand-duke, to common eyes, is a grave and rather
timid person, with more of the appearance of the
scholar than of the sovereign, courteous in public, and
benevolent and earnest in his personal attentions to
his guests at the palace. The royal quadrille may be
shared without permission of the grand chamberlain,
and the royal eye, after the first one or two dances of
ceremony, searches for partners by the lamp of beauty,
heedless of the diamonds on the brow, or the star of
nobility on the shoulder. The grand supper is scarce
more exclusive, and on the disappearance of the royal
cortege, the delighted crowd take their departure,
having seen no class more favored than themselves,
and enchanted with the gracious absence of pretension
in the nobilita of Tuscany.

Built against the side of a steep hill, the Palazzo
Pitti encloses its rooms of state within massive and
sombre walls in front, while in the rear the higher stories
of the palace open forth on a level with the delicious
gardens of the Boboli, and contain suites of
smaller apartments, fitted up with a cost and luxury
which would beggar the dream of a Sybarite. Here
lives the monarch, in a seclusion rendered deeper and
more sacred by the propinquity of the admitted world
in the apartments below; and in this sanctuary of royalty
is enclosed a tide of life as silent and unsuspected
by the common inhabitant of Florence as the flow of
the ocean-veiled Arethusa by the mariner of the Ionian
main. Here the invention of the fiery genius of Italy
is exhausted in poetical luxury; here the reserved and
silent sovereign throws off his maintein of royal condescension,
and enters with equal arms into the lists of
love and wit; here burn (as if upon an altar fed with
spice-woods and precious gums) the fervent and uncalculating
passions of this glowing clime, in senses refined
by noble nurture, and hearts prompted by the
haughty pulses of noble blood; and here—to the
threshold of this sanctuary of royal pleasure—press all
who know its secrets, and who imagine a claim to it
in their birth and attractions, while the lascia-passare
is accorded with a difficulty which alone preserves its
splendor.

Some two or three days after the repulse of the
signor Basil in the cathedral of Bologna, the group of
travelling artists were on their way from the grand gallery
at Florence to their noonday meal. Loitering
with slow feet through the crowded and narrow Via
Calzaiole, they emerged into the sunny Piazza, and
looking up with understanding eyes at the slender shaft
of the Campanile (than which a fairer figure of religious
architecture points not to heaven), they took
their way toward the church of Santa Trinita, proposing
to eat their early dinner at a house named, from
its excellence in a certain temperate beverage, La
Birra. The traveller should be advised, also, that by
paying an extra paul in the bottle, he may have at this
renowned eating-house an old wine sunned on the
southern shoulder of Fiesole, that hath in its flavor a
certain redolence of Boccaccio—scarce remarkable,
since it grew in the scene of the Decameron—but of a
virtue which, to the Hundred Tales of Love (read
drinking), is what the Gradus ad Parnassum should
be to the building of a dithyrambic. The oil of two
crazie upon the palm of the fat waiter Giuseppe will
assist in calling the vintage to his memory.

A thundering rap upon the gate of the adjoining
Palazzo arrested the attention of the artists as they
were about to enter the Birra, and in the occupant of
a dark-green cabriolet, drawn by a pampered horse of
the duke's breed, they recognised, elegantly dressed
and posed on his seat a la d'Orsay, the signor Basil.
His coat was of an undecided cut and color, and his
gloves were of primrose purity.

The recognition was immediate, and the cordiality
of the greeting mutual. They had parted from their
companion at the gate of Florence, as travellers part,
without question, and they met without reserve to part
as questionless again. The artists were surprised at
the signor Basil's transformation, but no follower of
their refined art would have been so ill-bred as to express
it. He wished them the bon appetito, as a tall
chasseur came out to say that her ladyship was at
home; and with a slacked rein the fiery horse sprang
through the gateway, and the marble court of the
palace rang with his prancing hoofs.

He who was idle and bought flowers at the Café of
the Colonna at Florence will have remarked, as he sat
in his chair upon the street in the sultry evening the
richly ornamented terrace and balustrade of the Palazzo
Corsi giving upon the Piazza Trinita. The
dark old Ghibelline palace of the Strozzi lets the eye
down upon it, as it might pass from a helmeted knight
with closed vizor to his unbonneted and laughing
page. The crimson curtains of the window opening
upon the terrace, at the time of our story, reminded
every passing Florentine of the lady who dwelt within
—a descendant of one of the haughtiest lines of English
chivalry—resident in Italy since many years for
health, but bearing in her delicate frame and exquisitely
transparent features, the loftiest type of patrician
beauty that had ever filled the eye that looked
upon her. In the inner heaven of royal exclusiveness

at the Pitti—in its constellation of rank and wit—the
lady Geraldine had long been the worshipped and ascendant
cynosure. Happy in a husband without rank
and but of moderate fortune, she maintained the spotless
character of an English wife in this sphere of
conventional corruption; and though the idol of the
duke and his nobles, it would have been like a whisper
against the purity of the brightest Pleiad, to have
linked her name with love.

With her feet upon a sofa covered with a gossamer
cashmere, her lovely head pillowed on a cushion of
silk, and a slight stand within arm's length holding a
vase of flowers and the volume from which she had
been reading, the lady Geraldine received the count
Basil Spiriford, some time attaché to the Russian embassy
at Paris (where he had first sunned his eyes in
her beauty), and at present the newly-appointed secretary
to the minister of the same monarch near the
court of Tuscany.

Without a bow, but with the hasty step and gesture
of a long absent and favored friend, the count Basil
ran to the proffered hand, and pressed its alabaster
fingers to his lips. Had the more common acquaintances
of the diplomate seen him at this moment, they
would have marvelled how the mask of manhood may
drop, and disclose the ingenuous features of the boy.
The secretary knew his species, and the lady Geraldine
was one of those women for whom the soul is
unwilling to possess a secret.

After the first inquiries were over, the lady questioned
her recovered favorite of his history since they
had parted. “I left you,” she said, “swimming the
dangerous tide of life at Paris. How have you come
to shore?”

“Thanks, perhaps, to your friendship, which made
life worth the struggle! For the two extremes, however,
you know what I was at Paris—and yesterday I
was a wandering artist in velveteen and a sombrero!”

Lady Geraldine laughed.

“Ah! you look at my curls—but Macassar is at a
discount! It is the only grace I cherished in my incognito.
A resumer—I got terribly out of love by the
end of the year after we parted, and as terribly in
debt. My promotion in diplomacy did not arrive, and
the extreme hour for my credit did. Pozzo di Borgo
kindly procured me conge for a couple of years, and I
dived presently under a broad-rimmed hat, got into a
vetturino with portfolio and pencils, joined a troop of
wandering artists, and with my patrimony at nurse,
have been two years looking at life without spectacles
at Venice.”

“And painting?”

“Painting!”

“Might one see a specimen?” asked the lady Geraldine,
with an incredulous smile.

“I regret that my immortal efforts in oils are in the
possession of a certain Venetian, who lets the fifth
floor of a tenement washed by the narrowest canal in
that fair city. But if your ladyship cares to see a
drawing or two—”

He rang the bell, and his jocki Anglais presently
brought from the pocket of his cabriolet a wayworn
and thinly furnished portfolio. The lady Geraldine
turned over a half-dozen indifferent views of Venice,
but the last cartoon in the portfolio made her start.

“La Marchesa del Marmore!” she exclaimed, looking
at Count Basil with an inquiring and half uneasy
eye.

“Is it well drawn?” he asked quietly.

“Well drawn? It is a sketch worthy of Raphael.
Do you really draw so well as this, or”—she added,
after a slight hesitation—“is it a miracle of love?”

“It is a divine head,” soliloquized the Russian, half
closing his eyes, and looking at the drawing from a
distance, as if to fill up the imperfect outline from his
memory.

The lady Geraldine laid her hand on his arm. “My
dear Basil,” she said seriously, “I should be wretched
if I thought your happiness was in the power of this
woman. Do you love her?”

“The portrait was not drawn by me,” he answered,
“though I have a reason for wishing her to think so.
It was done by a fellow-traveller of mine, whom I wish
to make a sketch of yourself, and I have brought it
here to interest you in him as an artist. Mais revenons
a nos moutons—la marchesa was also a fellow-traveller
of mine, and without loving her too violently, I owe
her a certain debt of courtesy contracted on the way.
Will you assist me to pay it?”

Relieved of her fears, and not at all suspecting the
good faith of the diplomatist in his acknowledgments
of gratitude, the lady Geraldine inquired simply how
she could serve him.

“In the twenty-four hours since my arrival at Florence,”
he said, “I have put myself, as you will see,
au courant of the minor politics of the Pitti. Thanks
to my Parisian renown, the duke has enrolled me already
under the back-stairs oligarchy, and to-morrow
night I shall sup with you in the saloon of Hercules
after the ball is over. La marchesa, as you well know,
has, with all her rank and beauty, never been able to
set foot within those guarded penetralia—soit her malicious
tongue, soit the interest against her of the men
she has played upon her hook too freely. The road
to her heart, if there be one, lies over that threshold,
and I would take the toll. Do you understand me,
most beautiful lady Geraldine?”

The count Basil imprinted another kiss upon the
fingers of the fair Englishwoman, as she promised to
put into his hand the following night the illuminated
ticket which was to repay, as she thought, too generously,
a debt of gratitude; and plucking a flower from
her vase for his bosom, he took his leave to return at
twilight to dinner. Dismissing his cabriolet at the
gate, he turned on foot toward the church of San
Gaetano, and with an expression of unusual elation in
his step and countenance, entered the trattoria, where
dined at that moment his companions of the pencil.

5. V.

The green lamps glittering by thousands amid the
foliage of the Boboli had attained their full brightness,
and the long-lived Italian day had died over the distant
mountains of Carrara, leaving its inheritance of light
apparently to the stars, who, on their fields of deepening
blue, sparkled, each one like the leader of an unseen
host in the depths of heaven, himself the foremost
and the most radiant. The night was balmy and
voluptuous. The music of the ducal band swelled
forth from the perfumed apartments on the air. A
single nightingale, far back in the wilderness of the
garden, poured from his melodious heart a chant of
the most passionate melancholy. The sentinel of the
body-guard stationed at the limit of the spray of the
fountain leaned on his halberd and felt his rude senses
melt in the united spells of luxury and nature. The
ministers of a monarch's pleasure had done their utmost
to prepare a scene of royal delight, and night and
summer had flung in their enchantments when ingenuity
was exhausted.

The dark architectural mass of the Pitti, pouring a
blaze of light scarce endurable from its deeply-sunk
windows, looked like the side of an enchanted mountain
laid open for the revels of sorcery. The aigrette
and plume passed by; the tiara and the jewel upon
the breast; the gayly-dressed courtiers and glittering
dames; and to that soldier at his dewy post, it seemed
like the realized raving of the improvisatore when he
is lost in some fable of Araby. Yet within walked
malice and hate, and the light and perfume that might
have fed an angel's heart with love, but deepened

in many a beating bosom the consuming fires of
envy.

With the gold key of office on his cape, the grand
chamberlain stood at the feet of the dowager grand
dutchess, and by a sign to the musicians, hidden in
a latticed gallery behind the Corinthian capital of the
hall, retarded or accelerated the soft measure of the
waltz. On a raised seat in the rear of the chairs of
state, sat the ladies of honor and the noble dames
nearest allied to royal blood; one solitary and privileged
intruder alone sharing the elevated place—the
lady Geraldine. Dressed in white, her hair wound
about her head in the simplest form, yet developing
its divine shape with the clear outline of statuary, her
eyes lambent with purity and sweetness, heavily fringed
with lashes a shade darker than the light auburn
braided on her temples, and the tint of the summer's
most glowing rose turned out from the threadlike parting
of her lips; she was a vision of loveliness to take
into the memory, as the poet enshrines in his soul
the impossible shape of his ideal, and consumes youth
and age searching in vain for its like. Fair Lady Geraldine!
thou wilt read these passionate words from
one whose worship of thy intoxicating loveliness has
never before found utterance, but if this truly-told tale
should betray the hand that has dared to describe thy
beauty, in thy next orisons to St. Mary of pity, breathe
from those bright lips a prayer that he may forget
thee!

By the side of the lady Geraldine, but behind the
chair of the grand dutchess, who listened to his conversation
with singular delight, stood a slight young
man of uncommon personal beauty, a stranger apparently
to every other person present. His brilliant uniform
alone betrayed him to be in the Russian diplomacy;
and the marked distinction shown him, both by the
reigning queen of the court, and the more powerful
and inaccessible queen of beauty, marked him as an
object of keen and universal curiosity. By the time
the fifth mazurka had concluded its pendulous refrain,
the grand chamberlain had tolerably well circulated
the name and rank of Count Basil Spirifort, the renowned
wit and elegant of Paris, newly appointed to
the court of his royal highness of Tuscany. Fair
eyes wandered amid his sunny curls, and beating bosoms
hushed their pulses as he passed.

Count Basil knew the weight of a first impression.
Count Basil knew also the uses of contempt. Upon
the first principle he kept his place between the grand
dutchess and Lady Geraldine, exerting his deeply-studied
art of pleasing, to draw upon himself their exclusive
attention. Upon the second principle, he was
perfectly unconscious of the presence of another human
being; and neither the gliding step of the small-eared
princess S— in the waltz, nor the stately
advance of the last female of the Medici in the mazurka,
distracted his large blue eyes a moment from their
idleness. With one hand on the eagle-hilt of his
sword, and his side leaned against the high cushion of
red velvet honored by the pressure of the lady Geraldine,
he gazed up into that beaming face, when not
bending respectfully to the dutchess, and drank steadfastly
from her beauty, as the lotus-cup drinks light
from the sun.

The new secretary had calculated well. In the
deep recess of the window looking toward San Miniato,
stood a lady nearly hidden from view by the muslin
curtains just stirring with the vibration of the music,
who gazed on the immediate circle of the grand dutchess
with an interest that was not attempted to be disguised.
On her first entrance into the hall, the marchesa
del Marmore had recognised in the new minion
of favor her impassioned lover of the lagoon, her slighted
acquaintance of the cathedral. When the first shock
of surprise was over, she looked on the form which
she had found beautiful even in the disguise of pover
ty, and, forgetting her insulting repulse when he would
have claimed in public the smile she had given him
when unobserved, she recalled with delight every syllable
he had murmured in her ear, and every look she
had called forth in the light of a Venetian moon. The
man who had burned upon the altar of her vanity the
most intoxicating incense—who had broken through
the iron rules of convention and ceremony, to throw
his homage at her feet—who had portrayed so incomparably
(she believed) with his love-inspired pencil
the features imprinted on his heart—this chance-won
worshipper, this daring but gifted plebeian, as she had
thought him, had suddenly shot into her sphere and
become a legitimate object of love; and, beautified by
the splendor of dress, and distinguished by the preference
and favor of those incomparably above her, he
seemed tenfold, to her eyes, the perfection of adorable
beauty. As she remembered his eloquent devotion to
herself, and saw the interest taken in him by a woman
whom she hated and had calumniated—a woman who
she believed stood between her and all the light of existence—she
anticipated the triumph of taking him
from her side, of exhibiting him to the world as a falcon
seduced from his first quarry; and never doubting
that so brilliant a favorite would control the talisman
of the paradise she had so long wished to enter, she
panted for the moment when she should catch his eye
and draw him from his lure, and already heard the
chamberlain's voice in her ear commanding her presence
after the ball in the saloon of Hercules.

The marchesa had been well observed from the first
by the wily diplomate. A thorough adept in the art
(so necessary to his profession) of seeing without appearing
to see, he had scarce lost a shade of the varying
expressions of her countenance; and while she
fancied him perfectly unconscious of her presence, he
read her tell-tale features as if they had given utterance
to her thoughts. He saw, with secret triumph,
the effect of his brilliant position upon her proud and
vain heart; watched her while she made use of her
throng of despised admirers to create a sensation near
him and attract his notice; and when the ball wore on,
and he was still in unwearied and exclusive attendance
upon the lady Geraldine, he gazed after her with a
momentary curl of triumph on his lip, as she took up
her concealed position in the embayed window, and
abandoned herself to the bitter occupation of watching
the happiness of her rival. The lady Geraldine had
never been so animated since her first appearance at
the court of Tuscany.

It was past midnight when the grand-duke, flushed
and tired with dancing, came to the side of the lady
Geraldine. Count Basil gave place, and, remaining a
moment in nominal obedience to the sovereign's polite
request which he was too politic to construe literally,
he looked down the dance with the air of one who has
turned his back on all that could interest him, and,
passing close to the concealed position of the marchesa,
stepped out upon the balcony.

The air was cool, and the fountain played refreshingly
below. The count Basil was one of those minds
which never have so much leisure for digression as
when they are most occupied. A love, as deep and
profound as the abysses of his soul, was weaving thread
for thread with a revenge worthy of a Mohican; yet,
after trying in vain to count eight in the Pleiades, he
raised himself upon the marble balustrade, and perfectly
anticipating the interruption to his solitude which
presently occurred, began to speculate aloud on the
dead and living at that hour beneath the roof of the
Pitti.

“A painter's mistress,” he said, “immortal in her
touch of her paramour's pencil, is worshipped for centuries
on these walls by the pilgrims of art; while the
warm perfection of all loveliness—the purest and divinest
of highborn women—will perish utterly with the

eyes that have seen her! The Bella of Titian, the
Fornarina of Raffaelle—peasant-girls of Italy—have,
at this moment, more value in this royal palace than
the breathing forms that inhabit it! The lady Geraldine
herself, to whom the sovereign offers at this moment
his most flattering homage, would be less a loss
to him than either! Yet they despise the gods of the
pencil who may thus make them immortal! The dull
blood in their noble veins, that never bred a thought
beyond the instincts of their kind, would look down,
forsooth, on the inventive and celestial ichor that inflames
the brain, and prompts the fiery hand of the
painter! How long will this very sovereign live in the
memories of men? The murderous Medici, the ambitious
cardinals, the abandoned women, of an age gone
by, hang in imperishable colors on his walls; while of
him, the lord of this land of genius, there is not a bust
or a picture that would bring a sequin in the marketplace!
They would buy genius in these days like
wine, and throw aside the flask in which it ripened.
Raffaelle and Buonarotti were companions for a pope
and his cardinals: Titian was an honored guest for the
doge. The stimulus to immortalize these noble friends
was in the love they bore them; and the secret of their
power to do it lay half in the knowledge of their characters,
gained by daily intimacy. Painters were princes
then, as they are beggars now; and the princely art is
beggared as well!”

The marchesa del Marmore stepped out upon
the balcony, leaning on the arm of the grand
chamberlain. The soliloquizing secretary had foretold
to himself both her coming and her companon.

“Monsieur le comte,” said the chamberlain, “la
marchesa del Marmore wishes for the pleasure of your
acquaintance.”

Count Basil bowed low, and in that low and musical
tone of respectful devotion which, real or counterfeit,
made him irresistible to a woman who had a soul to be
thrilled, he repeated the usual nothings upon the beauty
of the night; and when the chamberlain returned
to his duties, the marchesa walked forth with her
companion to the cool and fragrant alleys of the garden,
and, under the silent and listening stars, implored
forgiveness for her pride; and, with the sudden abandonment
peculiar to the clime, poured into his ear
the passionate and weeping avowal of her sorrow and
love.

“Those hours of penitence in the embayed window,”
thought Count Basil, “were healthy for your
soul.” And as she walked by his side, leaning heavily
on his arm, and half-dissolved in a confiding tenderness,
his thoughts reverted to another and a far sweeter
voice; and while the caressing words of the marchesa
fell on an unlistening ear, his footsteps insensibly turned
back to the lighted hall.

6. VI.

As the daylight stole softly over Vallombrosa, the
luxurious chariot of the marchesa del Marmore stopped
at the door of Count Basil. The lady Geraldine's suit
had been successful; and the hitherto excluded Florentine
had received, from the hand of the man she had
once so ignorantly scorned, a privilege for which she
would have bartered her salvation: she had supped at
his side in the saloon of Hercules. With many faults
of character, she was an Italian in feeling, and had a
capacity, like all her countrywomen, for a consuming
and headlong passion. She had better have been born
of marble.

“I have lifted you to heaven,” said Count Basil, as
her chariot-wheels rolled from his door; “but it is as
the eagle soars into the clouds with the serpent. We
will see how you will relish the fall!”

2. PART II.

The grand-duke's carriages, with their six horses
and outriders, had turned down the Borg'ognisanti,
and the “City of the Red Lily,” waking from her
noonday slumber, was alive with the sound of wheels.
The sun was sinking over the Apennine which kneels
at the gate of Florence; the streets were cool and
shadowy; the old women, with the bambina between
their knees, braided straw at the doors; the booted
guardsman paced his black charger slowly over the
jeweller's bridge; the picture-dealer brought forward
his brightest “master” to the fading light; and while
the famous churches of that fairest city of the earth
called to the Ave-Maria with impatient bell, the gallantry
and beauty of Tuscany sped through the dampening
air with their swift horses, meeting and passing
with gay greetings amid the green alleys of the Cascine.

The twilight had become gray, when the carriages
and horsemen, scattered in hundreds through the interlaced
roads of this loveliest of parks, turned by common
consent toward the spacious square in the centre,
and drawing up in thickly-serried ranks, the soirée on
wheels, the reunion en plein air, which is one of the
most delightful of the peculiar customs of Florence,
commenced its healthful gayeties. The showy carriages
of the grand-duke and the ex-king of Wurtemberg
(whose rank would not permit them to share in
the familiarities of the hour) disappeared by the avenue
skirting the bank of the Arno, and with much delicate
and some desperate specimens of skill, the coachmen
of the more exclusive nobility threaded the embarrassed
press of vehicles, and laid their wheels together
on the southern edge of the piazza. The beaux in the
saddle, disembarrassed of ladies and axletrees, enjoyed
their usual butterfly privilege of roving, and with light
rein and ready spur pushed their impatient horses to
the coronetted panels of the loveliest or most powerful;
the laugh of the giddy was heard here and there
over the pawing of restless hoofs; an occasional scream
—half of apprehension, half of admiration—rewarded
the daring caracole of some young and bold rider;
and while the first star sprang to its place, and the dew
of heaven dropped into the false flowers in the hat of
the belle, and into the thirsting lips of the violet in the
field (simplicity, like virtue, is its own reward!), the
low murmur of calumny and compliment, of love and
lightheartedness, of politeness, politics, puns, and poetry,
arose over that assembly upon wheels: and if it
was not a scene and an hour of happiness, it was the
fault neither of the fragrant eve nor of the provisions
of nature and fortune. The material for happiness
was there.

A showy calêche with panels of dusky crimson, the
hammer-cloth of the same shade, edged with a broad
fringe of white, the wheels slightly picked out with the
same colors, and the coachman and footman in corresponding
liveries, was drawn up near the southern edge
of the Piazzi. A narrow alley had been left for horsemen
between this equipage and the adjoining ones,
closed up at the extremity, however, by a dark-green
and very plain chariot, placed with a bold violation of
etiquette directly across the line, and surrounded just
now by two or three persons of the highest rank leaning
from their saddles in earnest conversation with the
occupant. Not far from the calêche, mounted upon
an English blood-horse of great beauty, a young man
had just drawn rein as if interrupted only for a moment
on some pressing errand, and with his hat slightly
raised, was paying his compliments to the venerable
Prince Poniatowski, at that time the Amphytrion of
Florence. From moment to moment, as the pauses
occurred in the exchange of courteous phrases, the
rider, whose spurred heel was close at his saddle-girths,
stole an impatient glance up the avenue of

carriages to the dark-green chariot, and, excited by
the lifted rein and the proximity of the spur, the graceful
horse fretted on his minion feet, and the bending
figures from a hundred vehicles, and the focus of
bright eyes radiating from all sides to the spot, would
have betrayed, even to a stranger, that the horseman
was of no common mark. Around his uncovered temples
floated fair and well-cherished locks of the sunniest
auburn; and if there was beauty in the finely-drawn
lines of his lips, there was an inexpressibly fierce spirit
as well.

2. II.

The count Basil had been a month at Florence. In
that time he had contrived to place himself between
the duke's ear and all the avenues of favor, and had
approached as near, perhaps nearer, to the hearts of
the women of his court. A singular and instinctive
knowledge of the weaknesses of human nature, perfected
and concealed by conversance with the consummate
refinement of life at Paris, remarkable personal
beauty, and a quality of scornful bitterness for which
no one could divine a reason in a character and fate
else so happily mingled, but which at the same time
added to his fascination, had given Count Basil a command
over the varied stops of society, equalled by few
players on that difficult and capricious instrument.
His worldly ambition went swimmingly on, and the
same wind filled the sails of his lighter ventures as
well. The love of the marchesa del Marmore, as he
had very well anticipated, grew with his influence and
renown. A woman's pride, he perfectly knew, is difficult
to wake after she has once believed herself adored;
and, satisfied that the portrait taken on the lagoon, and
the introduction he had given her to the exclusive penetralia
of the Pitti, would hold her till his revenge was
complete, he left her love for him to find its own food
in his successes, and never approached her but to lay
to her heart more mordently the serpents of jealousy
and despair.

For the lady Geraldine the count Basil had conceived
a love, the deepest of which his nature was capable.
Long as he had known her, it was a passion
born in Italy, and while it partook of the qualities of
the clime, it had for its basis the habitual and well-founded
respect of a virtuous and sincere friendship.
At their first acquaintance at Paris, the lovely Englishwoman,
newly arrived from the purer moral atmosphere
of her own country, was moving in the dissolute,
but skilfully disguised society of the Faubourg
St. Germain, with the simple unconsciousness of the
pure in heart, innocent herself, and naturally unsuspicious
of others. The perfect frankness with which
she established an intimacy with the clever and accomplished
attaché, had soon satisfied that clear-sighted
person that there was no passion in her preference,
and, giddy with the thousand pleasures of that metropolis
of delight, he had readily sunk his first startled
admiration of her beauty in an affectionate and confiding
friendship. He had thus shown her the better
qualities of his character only, and, charmed with his
wit and penetration, and something flattered, perhaps,
with the devotion of so acknowledged an autocrat of
fashion and talent, she had formed an attachment for
him that had all the earnestness of love without its
passion. They met at Florence, but the “knowledge
of good and evil” had by this time driven the lady
Geraldine from her Eden of unconsciousness. Still
as irreproachable in conduct, and perhaps as pure in
heart as before, an acquaintance with the forms of vice
had introduced into her manners those ostensible cautions
which, while they protect, suggest also what is
to be feared.

A change had taken place also in Count Basil. He
had left the vitreous and mercurial clime of France,
with its volatile and superficial occupations, for the
voluptuous and indolent air of Italy, and the study of
its impassioned deifications of beauty. That which
had before been in him an instinct of gay pleasure—a
pursuit which palled in the first moment of success,
and was second to his ambition or his vanity—had become,
in those two years of a painter's life, a thirst
both of the senses and the imagination, which had
usurped the very throne of his soul. Like the Hindoo
youth, who finds the gilded plaything of his childhood
elevated in his maturer years into a god, he bowed his
heart to what he held so lightly, and brought the
costly sacrifice of time and thought to its altars. He
had fed his eyes upon the divine glories of the pencil,
and upon the breathing wonders of love in marble, beneath
the sky and in the dissolving air in which they
rose to the hand of inspiration; and with his eye disciplined,
and his blood fused with taste and enthusiasm,
that idolatry of beauty, which had before seemed
sensual or unreal, kindled its first fires in his mind,
and his senses were intoxicated with the incense.
There is a kind of compromise in the effects of the
atmosphere and arts of Italy. If the intellect takes
a warmer hue in its study of the fair models of antiquity,
the senses in turn become more refined and
intellectual. In other latitudes and lands woman is
loved more coldly. After the brief reign of a passion
of instinct, she is happy if she can retain her empire
by habit, or the qualities of the heart. That divine
form, meant to assimilate her to the angels, has never
been recognised by the dull eye that should have
seen in it a type of her soul. To the love of the painter
or the statuary, or to his who has made himself conversant
with their models, is added the imperishable
enthusiasm of a captivating and exalted study. The
mistress of his heart is the mistress of his mind. She
is the breathing realization of that secret ideal which
exists in every mind, but which, in men ignorant of the
fine arts, takes another form, and becomes a woman's
rival and usurper. She is like nothing in ambition—
she is like nothing in science or business—nothing in
out-of-door pleasures. If politics, or the chase, or the
acquisition of wealth, is the form of this ruling passion,
she is unassociated with that which is nearest his heart,
and he returns to her with an exhausted interest and a
flagging fancy. It is her strongest tie upon his affection,
even, that she is his refuge when unfit for that
which occupies him most—in his fatigue, his disappointment,
his vacuity of head and heart. He thinks
of her only as she receives him in his most worthless
hours; and, as his refreshed intellects awake, she is
forgotten with the first thought of his favorite theme—
for what has a woman's loveliness to do with that?

Count Basil had not concluded his first interview
with the lady Geraldine, without marvelling at the new
feelings with which he looked upon her. He had
never before realized her singular and adorable beauty.
The exquisitely turned head, the small and pearly
ears, the spiritual nostril, the softly moulded chin, the
clear loftiness of expression yet inexpressible delicacy
and brightness in the lips, and a throat and bust than
which those of Faustina in the delicious marble of the
Gallery of Florence might be less envied by the queen
of love—his gaze wandered over these, and followed
her in the harmony of her motions, and the native and
unapproachable grace of every attitude; and the pictures
he had so passionately studied seemed to fade in
his mind, and the statues he had half worshipped
seemed to descend from their pedestals depreciated.
The lady Geraldine, for the first time, felt his eye.
For the first time in their acquaintance, she was offended
with its regard. Her embarrassment was read
by the quick diplomate, and at that moment sprang
into being a passion, which perhaps had died but for
the conscious acknowledgment of her rebuke.

Up to the evening in the Cascine, with which the

second chapter of this simply true tale commences,
but one of the two leading threads in the count Basil's
woof had woven well. “The jealous are the damned,”
and the daily and deadly agony of the marchesa del
Marmore was a dark ground from which his love to
the lady Geraldine rose to his own eye in heightened
relief. His dearest joy forwarded with equal step his
dearest revenge; and while he could watch the working
of his slow torture in the fascinated heart of his
victim, he was content to suspend a blow to which
that of death would be a mercy. “The law,” said
Count Basil, as he watched her quivering and imploring
lip, “takes cognizance but of the murder of
the body. It has no retribution for the keener dagger
of the soul.”

3. III.

The conversation between the Russian secretary
and the prince Poniatowski ended at last in a graceful
bow from the former to his horse's neck; and the
quicker rattling of the small hoofs on the ground, as
the fine creature felt the movement in the saddle and
prepared to bound away, drew all eyes once more
upon the handsomest and most idolized gallant of
Florence. The narrow lane of carriages, commencing
with the showy calêche of the marchesa del Marmore,
and closed up by the plain chariot of the lady Geraldine,
was still open, and with a glance at the latter
which sufficiently indicated his destination. Count
Basil raised his spurred heel, and with a smile of delight
and the quickness of a barb in the desert, galloped
toward the opening. In the same instant the
marchesa del Marmore gave a convulsive spring forward,
and, in obedience to an imperative order, her
coachman violently drew rein and shot the back and
forward wheels of the calĉhe directly across his path.
Met in full career by this sudden obstacle, the horse
of the Russian reared high in air; but ere the screams
of apprehension had arisen from the adjacent carriages,
the silken bridle was slacked, and with a low bow to
the foiled and beautiful marchesa as he shot past, he
brushed the hammer-cloths of the two scarce separated
carriages, and at the same instant stood at the
chariot window of the lady Geraldine, as calm and
respectful as if he had never known danger or emotion.

A hundred eyes had seen the expression of his face
as he leaped past the unhappy woman, and the drama
of which that look was the key was understood in Florence.
The lady Geraldine alone, seated far back in
her chariot, was unconscious of the risk run for the
smile with which she greeted its hero; and unconscious,
as well, of the poignant jealousy and open mortification
she had innocently assisted to inflict, she
stretched her fair and transparent hand from the carriage,
and stroked the glossy neck of his horse, and
while the marchesa del Marmore drove past with a
look of inexpressible anguish and hate, and the dispersing
nobles and dames took their way to the city
gates, Count Basil leaned close to the ear of that loveliest
of breathing creatures, and forgot, as she forgot
in listening to the bewildering music of his voice, that
the stars had risen, or that the night was closing
around them.

The Cascine had long been silent when the chariot
of the lady Geraldine took its way to the town, and,
with the reins loose upon his horse's neck, Count
Basil followed at a slower pace, lost in the revery of a
tumultuous passion. The sparkling and unobstructed
stars broke through the leafy roof of the avenue whose
silence was disturbed by those fine and light-stepping
hoofs, and the challenge of the duke's forester, going
his rounds ere the gates closed, had its own deep-throated
echo for its answer. The Arno rippled
among the rushes on its banks; the occasional roll of
wheels passing the paved arch of the Ponte Seraglio,
came faintly down the river upon the moist wind, the
pointed cypresses of the convent of Bello Sguardo
laid their slender fingers against the lowest stars in the
southern horizon, and with his feet pressed, carelessly,
far through his stirrups, and his head dropped on his
bosom, the softened diplomate turned instinctively to
the left in the last diverging point of the green alleys,
and his horse's ears were already pricked at
the tread, before the gate, of the watchful and idle
doganieri.

Close under the city wall on this side Florence,
the traveller will remember that the trees are more
thickly serried, and the stone seats, for the comfort
and pleasure of those who would step forth from the
hot streets for an hour of fresh air and rest, are mossy
with the depth of the perpetual shade. In the midst
of this dark avenue, the unguided animal beneath the
careless and forgetful rider suddenly stood still, and
the next moment starting aside, a female sprang high
against his neck, and Count Basil, ere awake from his
revery, felt the glance of a dagger-blade across his bosom.

With the slender wrist that had given the blow
firmly arrested in his left hand, the count Basil slowly
dismounted, and after a steadfast look, by the dim
light, into the face of the lovely assassin, he pressed
her fingers respectfully, and with well counterfeited
emotion, to his lips.

“Twice since the Ave-Maria!” he said in a tone of
reproachful tenderness, “and against a life that is your
own!”

He could see, even in that faint light, the stern compression
of those haughty lips, and the flash of the
darkest eyes of the Val d'Arno. But leading her gently
to a seat, he sat beside her, and with scarce ten
brief moments of low-toned and consummate eloquence,
he once more deluded her soul!

“We meet to-morrow,” she said, as, after a burst
of irrepressible tears, she disengaged herself from his
neck, and looked toward the end of the avenue, where
Count Basil had already heard the pawing of her impatient
horses.

“To-morrow!” he answered; “but, mia carissima!”
he continued, opening his breast to stanch the blood of
his wound, “you owe me a concession after this rude
evidence of your love.”

She looked into his face as if answer were superfluous.

“Drive to my palazzo at noon, and remain with me
till the Ave-Maria.”

For but half a moment the impassioned Italian hesitated.
Though the step he demanded of her was apparently
without motive or reason—though it was one
that sacrificed to a whim her station, her fortune, and
her friends—she hesitated but to question her reason
if the wretched price of this sacrifice would be paid—
if the love, to which she fled from this world and heaven,
was her own. In other countries, the crime of infidelity
is punished: in Italy it is the appearance only
that is criminal. In proportion as the sin is overlooked,
the violation of the outward proprieties of life is
severely visited; and while a lover is stipulated for is
the marriage-contract, an open visit to that lover's
house is an offence which brands the perpetrator with
irremediable shame. The marchesa del Marmore
well knew that in going forth from the ancestral palace
of her husband on a visit to Count Basil, she took
leave of it for ever. The equipage that would bear
her to him would never return for her; the protection,
the fortune, the noble relations, the troops of friends,
would all drop from her. In the pride of her youth
and beauty—from the highest pinnacle of rank—from
the shelter of fortune and esteem—she would descend,
by a single step, to be a beggar for life and love from
the mercy of the heart she fled to!

“I will come,” she said, in a firm voice, looking

close into his face, as if she would read in his dim features
the prophetic answer of his soul.

The count Basil strained her to his bosom, and starting
back as if with the pain of his wound, he pleaded
the necessity of a surgeon, and bade her a hasty good-night.
And while she gained her own carriage in secrecy,
he rode round to the other gate, which opens
upon the Borg'ognisanti, and dismounting at the
Café Colonna, where the artists were at this hour usually
assembled, he sought out his fellow-traveller,
Giannino Speranza, who had sketched the marchesa
upon the lagoon, and made an appointment with him
for the morrow.

4. IV.

While the count Basil's revenge sped thus merrily,
the just Fates were preparing for him a retribution in
his love. The mortification of the marchesa del Marmore,
at the Cascine, had been made the subject of
conversation at the prima sera of the lady Geraldine;
and other details of the same secret drama transpiring
at the same time, the whole secret of Count Basil's
feelings toward that unfortunate woman flashed clearly
and fully upon her. His motives for pretending to
have drawn the portrait of the lagoon—for procuring
her an admission to the exclusive suppers of the Pitti
—for a thousand things which had been unaccountable,
or referred to more amiable causes—were at once
unveiled. Even yet, with no suspicion of the extent
of his revenge, the lady Geraldine felt an indignant pity
for the unconscious victim, and a surprised disapproval
of the character thus unmasked to her eye. Upon
further reflection, her brow flushed to remember that
she herself had been made the most effective tool of
his revenge; and as she recalled circumstance after
circumstance in the last month's history, the attention
and preference he had shown her, and which had gratified
her, perhaps, more than she admitted to herself,
seemed to her sensitive and resentful mind to have
been only the cold instruments of jealousy. Incapable
as she was of an unlawful passion, the unequalled fascinations
of Count Basil had silently found their way
to her heart, and if her indignation was kindled by a
sense of justice and womanly pity, it was fed and
fanned unaware by mortified pride. She rang, and
sent an order to the gate that she was to be denied for
the future to Count Basil Spirifort.

The servant had appeared with his silver tray in his
hand, and before leaving her presence to communicate
the order, he presented her with a letter. Well
foreseeing the eclaircissement which must follow the
public scene in the Cascine, the count Basil had left
the café for his own palazzo; and, in a letter, of which
the following is the passage most important to our
story, he revealed to the lady he loved a secret, which
he hoped would anticipate the common rumor:—

* * * * * “But these passionate words will have
offended your ear, dearest lady, and I must pass to a
theme on which I shall be less eloquent. You will
hear to-night, perhaps, that which, with all your imagination,
will scarce prepare you for what you will
hear to-morrow. The marchesa del Marmore is the
victim of a revenge which has only been second in my
heart to the love I have for the first time breathed to
you. I can never hope that you will either understand
or forgive the bitterness in which it springs; yet
it is a demon to which I am delivered, soul and body,
and no spirit but my own can know its power. When
I have called it by its name, and told you of its exasperation,
if you do not pardon, you will pity me.

“You know that I am a Russian, and you know the
station my talents have won me; but you do not know
that I was born a serf and a slave! If you could rend
open my heart and see the pool of blackness and bitterness
that lies in its bottom—fallen, drop by drop,
from this accursed remembrance—there would be little
need to explain to you how this woman has offended
me. Had I been honorably born, like yourself, I
feel that I could have been, like you, an angel of light:
as it is, the contumely of a look has stirred me to a
revenge which has in it, I do not need to be told, the
darkest elements of murder.

“My early history is of no importance, yet I may
tell you it was such as to expose to every wind this
lacerated nerve. In a foreign land, and holding an
official rank, it was seldom breathed upon. I wore,
mostly, a gay heart at Paris. In my late exile at Venice
I had time to brood upon my dark remembrance,
and it was revived and fed by the melancholy of my
solitude. The obscurity in which I lived, and the occasional
comparison between myself and some passing
noble in the Piazza, served to remind me, could I have
forgotten it. I never dreamed of love in this humble
disguise, and so never felt the contempt that had most
power to wound me. On receiving the letters of my
new appointment, however, this cautious humility did
not wait to be put off with my sombrero. I started
for Florence, clad in the habiliments of poverty, but
with the gay mood of a courtier beneath. The first
burst of my newly-released feelings was admiration for
a woman of singular beauty, who stood near me on
one of the most love-awakening and delicious eves
that I ever remember. My heart was overflowing, and
she permitted me to breathe my passionate adoration
in her ear. The marchesa del Marmore, but for the
scorn of the succeeding day, would, I think, have been
the mistress of my soul. Strangely enough, I had
seen you without loving you.

“I have told you, as a bagatelle that might amuse
you, my rencontre with del Marmore and his dame in
the cathedral of Bologna. The look she gave me
there sealed her doom. It was witnessed by the companions
of my poverty, and the concentrated resentment
of years sprang up at the insult. Had it been a
man, I must have struck him dead where he stood:
she was a woman, and I swore the downfall of her
pride.” * * *

Thus briefly dismissing the chief topic of his letter,
Count Basil returned to the pleading of his love. It
was dwelt on more eloquently than his revenge; but
as the lady Geraldine scarce read it to the end, it need
not retard the procession of events in our story. The
fair Englishwoman sat down beneath the Etruscan
lamp, whose soft light illumined a brow cleared, as if
by a sweep from the wing of her good angel, of the
troubled dream which had overhung it, and in brief
and decided, but kind and warning words, replied to
the letter of Count Basil.

5. V.

It was noon on the following day, and the Contadini
from the hills were settling to their siesta on the steps
of the churches, and against the columns of the Piazza
del Gran' Duca. The artists alone, in the cool gallery,
and in the tempered halls of the Pitti, shook off
the drowsiness of the hour, and strained sight and
thought upon the immortal canvass from which they
drew; while the sculptor, in his brightening studio,
weary of the mallet, yet excited by the bolder light,
leaned on the rough block behind him, and with listless
body but wakeful and fervent eye, studied the last
touches upon his marble.

Prancing hoofs, and the sharp quick roll peculiar to
the wheels of carriages of pleasure, awakened the aristocratic
sleepers of the Via del Servi, and with a lash
and jerk of violence, the coachman of the marchesa
del Marmore, enraged at the loss of his noonday repose,
brought up her showy calêche at the door of
Count Basil Spirifort. The fair occupant of that luxu

rious vehicle was pale, but the brightness of joy and
hope burned almost fiercely in her eye.

The doors flew open as the marchesa descended,
and following a servant in the count's livery, of whom
she asked no question, she found herself in a small saloon,
furnished with the peculiar luxury which marks
the apartment of a bachelor, and darkened like a painter's
room. The light came in from a single tall window,
curtained below, and under it stood an easel, at
which, on her first entrance, a young man stood
sketching the outline of a female head. As she advanced,
looking eagerly around for another face, the
artist laid down his palette, and with a low reverence
presented her with a note from Count Basil. It informed
her that political news of the highest importance
had called him suddenly to the cabinet of his
chef, but that he hoped to be with her soon; and,
meantime, he begged of her, as a first favor in his
newly-prospered love, to bless him with the possession
of her portrait, done by the incomparable artist who
would receive her.

Disappointment and vexation overwhelmed the heart
of the marchesa, and she burst into tears. She read
the letter again, and grew calmer; for it was laden with
epithets of endearment, and seemed to her written in
the most sudden haste. Never doubting for an instant
the truth of his apology, she removed her hat, and
with a look at the deeply-shaded mirror, while she
shook out from their confinement the masses of her
luxuriant hair, she approached the painter's easel, and
with a forced cheerfulness inquired in what attitude
she should sit to him.

“If the signora will amuse herself,” he replied,
with a bow, “it will be easy to compose the picture,
and seize the expression without annoying her with a
pose.”

Relieved thus of any imperative occupation, the unhappy
marchesa seated herself by a table of intaglios
and prints, and while she apparently occupied herself
in the examination of these specimens of art, she was
delivered, as her tormentor had well anticipated, to the
alternate tortures of impatience and remorse. And
while the hours wore on, and her face paled, and her
eyes grew bloodshot with doubt and fear, the skilful
painter, forgetting everything in the enthusiasm of his
art, and forgotten utterly by his unconscious subject,
transferred too faithfully to the canvass that picture of
agonized expectation.

The afternoon, meantime, had worn away, and the
gay world of Florence, from the side toward Fiesole,
rolled past the Via dei Servi on their circuitous way
to the Cascine, and saw, with dumb astonishment, the
carriage and liveries of the marchesa del Marmore at
the door of Count Basil Spirifort. On they swept by
the Via Mercata Nova to the Lung' Arno, and there
their astonishment redoubled: for in the window of
the Casino del Nobili, playing with a billiard-cue, and
laughing with a group of lounging exquisites, stood
Count Basil himself, the most unoccupied and listless
of sunset idlers. There was but one deduction to be
drawn from this sequence of events; and when they
remembered the demonstration of passionate jealousy
on the previous evening in the Cascine, Count Basil,
evidently innocent of participation in her passion, was
deemed a persecuted man, and the marchesa del Marmore
was lost to herself and the world!

Three days after this well-remembered circumstance
in the history of Florence, an order was received from
the grand-duke to admit into the exhibition of modern
artists a picture by a young Venetian painter, an
elève of Count Basil Spirifort. It was called “The
Lady expecting an Inconstant,” and had been pronounced
by a virtuoso, who had seen it on private
view, to be a masterpiece of expression and color. It
was instantly and indignantly recognised as the portrait
of the unfortunate marchesa, whose late aban
donment of her husband was fresh on the lips of common
rumor; but ere it could be officially removed,
the circumstance had been noised abroad, and the
picture had been seen by all the curious in Florence.
The order for its removal was given; but the purpose
of Count Basil had been effected, and the name of the
unhappy marchesa had become a jest on the vulgar
tongue.

This tale had not been told, had there not been
more than a common justice in its sequel. The worse
passions of men, in common life, are sometimes inscrutably
prospered. The revenge of Count Basil,
however, was betrayed by the last which completed
it; and while the victim of his fiendish resentment
finds a peaceful asylum in England under the roof of
the compassionate Lady Geraldine, the once gay and
admired Russian wanders from city to city, followed
by an evil reputation, and stamped unaccountably as a
jattatore.[1]

LOVE AND DIPLOMACY.

It was on a fine September evening, within my time
(and I am not, I trust, too old to be loved), that Count
Anatole L—, of the impertinent and particularly
useless profession of attaché, walked up and down before
the glass in his rooms at the “Archduke Charles,”
the first hotel, as you know, if you have travelled, in
the green-belted and fair city of Vienna. The brass
ring was still swinging on the end of the bell-rope, and,
in a respectful attitude at the door, stood the just-summoned
Signor Attilio, valet and privy councillor
to one of the handsomest coxcombs errant through
the world. Signor Attilio was a Tyrolese, and, like
his master, was very handsome.

Count Anatole had been idling away three golden
summer months in the Tyrol, for the sole purpose,
as far as mortal eyes could see, of disguising his fine
Phidian features in a callow mustache and whiskers.
The crines ridentes (as Eneas Sylvius has it) being now
in a condition beyond improvement, Signor Attilio had
for some days been rather curious to know what course
of events would next occupy the diplomatic talents of
his master.

After a turn or two more, taken in silence, Count
Anatole stopped in the middle of the floor, and eying
the well-made Tyrolese from head to foot, begged to
know if he wore at the present moment his most becoming
breeches, jacket, and beaver.

Attilio was never astonished at anything his master
did or said. He simply answered, “Si, signore.”

“Be so kind as to strip immediately, and dress yourself
in that travelling suit lying on the sofa.”

As the green, gold-corded jacket, knee-breeches,
buckles, and stockings, were laid aside, Count Anatole
threw off his dressing-gown, and commenced encasing
his handsome proportions in the cast-off habiliments.
He then put on the conical, slouch-rimmed hat, with
the tall eagle's-feather stuck jauntily on the side, and
the two rich tassels pendant over his left eye; and, the
toilet of the valet being completed at the same moment,
they stood looking at one another with perfect gravity
—rather transformed, but each apparently quite at home
in his new character.

“You look very like a gentleman, Attilio,” said the
count.

“Your excellency has caught to admiration, l'aria

del paese,” complimented back again the sometime
Tyrolese.

“Attilio!”

“Signore?”

“Do you remember the lady in the forest of
Friuli?”

Attilio began to have a glimmering of things. Some
three months before, the count was dashing on at a
rapid post-pace through a deep wood in the mountains
which head in the Adriatic. A sudden pull-up
at a turning in the road nearly threw him from his
britska; and looking out at the “anima di porco!” of
the postilion, he found his way impeded by an overset
carriage, from which three or four servants were endeavoring
to extract the body of an old man, killed
by the accident.

There was more attractive metal for the traveller,
however, in the shape of a young and beautiful woman,
leaning, pale and faint, against a tree, and apparently
about to sink to the ground, unassisted. To bring a
hat full of water from the nearest brook, and receive
her falling head on his shoulder, was the work of a
thought. She had fainted quite away, and taking her,
like a child, into his arms, he placed her on a bank by
the road-side, bathed her forehead and lips, and chafed
her small white hands, till his heart, with all the distress
of the scene, was quite mad with her perfect
beauty.

Animation at last began to return, and as the flush
was stealing into her lips, another carriage drove up
with servants in the same livery, and Count Anatole,
thoroughly bewildered in his new dream, mechanically
assisted them in getting their living mistress and dead
master into it, and until they were fairly out of sight,
it had never occurred to him that he might possibly
wish to know the name and condition of the fairest
piece of work he had ever seen from the hands of his
Maker.

An hour before, he had doubled his bono mano to
the postilion, and was driving on to Vienna as if to sit
at a new congress. Now, he stood leaning against the
tree, at the foot of which the grass and wild flowers
showed the print of a new-made pressure, and the
postilion cracked his whip, and Attilio reminded him
of the hour he was losing, in vain.

He remounted after a while; but the order was to
go back to the last post-house.

Three or four months at a solitary albergo in the
neighborhood of this adventure, passed by the count
in scouring the country on horseback in every direction,
and by his servant in very particular ennui, brings
up the story nearly to where the scene opens.

“I have seen her!” said the count.

Attilio only lifted up his eyebrows.

“She is here, in Vienna!”

“Felice lei!” murmured Attilio.

“She is the princess Leichstenfels, and, by the
death of that old man, a widow.”

“Veramente?” responded the valet, with a rising
infelxion; for he knew his master and French morals
too well not to foresee a damper in the possibility of
matrimony.

“Veramente!” gravely echoed the count. “And
now listen. The princess lives in close retirement.
An old friend or two, and a tried servant, are the only
persons who see her. You are to contrive to see this
servant to-morrow, corrupt him to leave her, and recommend
me in his place, and then you are to take
him as your courier to Paris; whence, if I calculate
well, you will return to me before long, with important
despatches. Do you understand me?”

“Signor, si!”

In the small boudoir of a masio de plaisance, belonging
to the noble family of Leichstenfels, sat the
widowed mistress of one of the oldest titles and finest
estates of Austria. The light from a single long win
dow opening down to the floor and leading out upon
a terrace of flowers, was subdued by a heavy crimson
curtain, looped partially away, a pastille lamp was
sending up from its porphyry pedestal a thin and just
perceptible curl of smoke, through which the lady
musingly passed backward and forward one of her
slender fingers, and, on a table near, lay a sheet of
black-edged paper, crossed by a small silver pen, and
scrawled over irregularly with devices and disconnected
words, the work evidently of a fit of the most
absolute and listless idleness.

The door opened, and a servant in mourning livery
stood before the lady.

“I have thought over your request, Wilhelm,” she
said. “I had become accustomed to your services,
and regret to lose you; but I should regret more to
stand in the way of your interest. You have my permission.”

Wilhelm expressed his thanks with an effort that
showed he had not obeyed the call of mammon without
regret, and requested leave to introduce the person
he had proposed as his successor.

“Of what country is he?”

“Tyrolese, your excellency.”

“And why does he leave the gentleman with whom
he came to Vienna?”

“Il est amoureux d'une Viennaise, madame,” answered
the ex-valet, resorting to French to express
what he considered a delicate circumstance.

“Pauvre enfant!” said the princess, with a sigh
that partook as much of envy as of pity; let him
come in!”

And the count Anatole, as the sweet accents reached
his ear, stepped over the threshold, and in the coarse
but gay dress of the Tyrol, stood in the presence of
her whose dewy temples he had bathed in the forest,
whose lips he had almost “pried into for breath,”
whose snowy hands he had chafed and kissed when the
senses had deserted their celestial organs—the angel
of his perpetual dream, the lady of his wild and uncontrollable,
but respectful and honorable love.

The princess looked carelessly up as he approached,
but her eyes seemed arrested in passing over his features.
It was but momentary. She resumed her
occupation of winding her taper fingers in the smoke-curls
of the incense-lamp, and with half a sigh, as if
she had repelled a pleasing thought, she leaned back
in the silken fauteuil, and asked the new-comer his
name.

“Anatole, your excellency.”

The voice again seemed to stir something in her
memory. She passed her hand over her eyes, and
was for a moment lost in thought.

“Anatole,” she said (oh, how the sound of his own
name, murmured in that voice of music thrilled
through the fiery veins of the disguised lover!)
“Anatole, I receive you into my service. Wilhelm
will inform you of your duties, and—I have a fancy
for the dress of the Tyrol—you may wear it instead
of my livery, if you will.”

And with one stolen and warm gaze from under his
drooping eyelids, and heart and lips on fire, as he
thanked her for her condescension, the new retainer
took his leave.

Month after month passed on—to Count Anatole in
a bewildering dream of ever deepening passion. It
was upon a soft and amorous morning of April, that a
dashing equipage stood at the door of the proud palace
of Leichstenfels. The arms of E— blazed on the
panels, and the insouciants chasseurs leaned against
the marble columns of the portico, waiting for their
master, and speculating on the gayety likely to ensue
from the suite he was prosecuting within. How could
a prince of E— be supposed to sue in vain?

The disguised footman had ushered the gay and
handsome nobleman to his mistress' presence. After

rearranging a family of very well-arranged flower-pots,
shutting the window to open it again, changing
the folds of the curtains not at all for the better, and
looking a stolen and fierce look at the unconscious
visiter, he could find no longer an apology for remaining
in the room. He shut the door after him in a
tempest of jealousy.

“Did your excellency ring?” said he, opening the
door again, after a few minutes of intolerable torture.

The prince was on his knees at her feet!

“No, Anatole; but you may bring me a glass of
water.”

As he entered with a silver tray trembling in his
hand, the prince was rising to go. His face expressed
delight, hope, triumph—everything that could madden
the soul of the irritated lover. After waiting on
his rival to his carriage, he returned to his mistress,
and receiving the glass upon the tray, was about
leaving the room in silence, when the princess called
to him.

In all this lapse of time it is not to be supposed that
Count Anatole played merely his footman's part. His
respectful and elegant demeanor, the propriety of his
language, and that deep devotedness of manner which
wins a woman more than all things else, soon gained
upon the confidence of the princess; and before a
week was passed she found that she was happier when
he stood behind her chair, and gave him, with some
self-denial, those frequent permissions of absence from
the palace which she supposed he asked to prosecute
the amour disclosed to her on his introduction to her
service. As time flew on, she attributed his earnestness
and occasional warmth of manner to gratitude;
and, without reasoning much on her feelings, gave
herself up to the indulgence of a degree of interest in
him which would have alarmed a woman more skilled
in the knowledge of the heart. Married from a convent,
however, to an old man who had secluded her
from the world, the voice of the passionate count in
the forest of Friuli was the first sound of love that had
ever entered her ears. She knew not why it was that
the tones of her new footman, and now and then a look
of his eyes, as he leaned over to assist her at table,
troubled her memory like a trace of a long-lost dream.

But, oh, what moments had been his in these fleeting
months! Admitted to her presence in her most
unguarded hours—seeing her at morning, at noon, at
night, in all her unstudied and surpassing loveliness—
for ever near her, and with the world shut out—her
rich hair blowing with the lightest breeze across his
fingers in his assiduous service—her dark full eyes,
unconscious of an observer, filling with unrepressed
tears, or glowing with pleasure over some tale of love
—her exquisite form flung upon a couch, or bending
over flowers, or moving about the room in all its native
and untrammelled grace—and her voice, tender, most
tender to him, though she knew it not, and her eyes,
herself unaware, ever following him in his loitering
attendance—and he, the while, losing never a glance
nor a motion, but treasuring all up in his heart with
the avarice of a miser—what, in common life, though
it were the life of fortune's most favored child, could
compare with it for bliss?

Pale and agitated, the count turned back at the call
of his mistress, and stood waiting her pleasure.

“Anatole!”

“Madame!”

The answer was so low and deep it startled even
himself.

She motioned him to come nearer. She had sunk
upon the sofa, and as he stood at her feet she leaned
forward, buried her hands and arms in the long curls
which, in her retirement, she allowed to float luxuriantly
over her shoulders, and sobbed aloud. Over
come and forgetful of all but the distress of the lovely
creature before him, the count dropped upon the cushion
on which rested the small foot in its mourning
slipper, and taking her hand, pressed it suddenly and
fervently to his lips.

The reality broke upon her! She was beloved—
but by whom? A menial! and the appalling answer
drove all the blood of her proud race in a torrent upon
her heart, sweeping away all affection as if her nature
had never known its name. She sprang to her feet,
and laid her hand upon the bell.

“Madame!” said Anatole, in a cold proud tone.

She stayed her arm to listen.

“I leave you for ever.”

And again, with the quick revulsion of youth and
passion, her woman's heart rose within her, and she
buried her face in her hands, and dropped her head in
utter abandonment on her bosom.

It was the birthday of the emperor, and the courtly
nobles of Austria were rolling out from the capital to
offer their congratulations at the royal palace of
Schoenbrunn. In addition to the usual attractions
of the scene, the drawing-room was to be graced by
the first public appearance of a new ambassador,
whose reputed personal beauty, and the talents he had
displayed in a late secret negotiation, had set the whole
court, from the queen of Hungary to the youngest
dame d'honneur, in a flame of curiosity.

To the prince E— there was another reason for
writing the day in red letters. The princess Leichstenfels,
by an express message from the emperess,
was to throw aside her widow's weeds, and appear
once more to the admiring world. She had yielded
to the summons, but it was to be her last day of splendor.
Her heart and hand were plighted to her Tyrolese
minion; and the brightest and loveliest ornament
of the court of Austria, when the ceremonies of the
day were over, was to lay aside the costly bauble
from her shoulder, and the glistening tiara from her
brow, and forget rank and fortune as the wife of his
bosom!

The dazzling hours flew on. The plain and kind
old emperor welcomed and smiled upon all. The
wily Metternich, in the crime of his successful manhood,
cool, polite, handsome, and winning, gathered
golden opinions by every word and look; the young
duke of Reichstadt, the mild and gentle son of the
struck eagle of St. Helena, surrounded and caressed
by a continual cordon of admiring women, seemed forgetful
that opportunity and expectation awaited him,
like two angels with their wings outspread; and haughty
nobles and their haughtier dames, statesmen, scholars,
soldiers, and priests, crowded upon each other's
heels, and mixed together in that doubtful podrida,
which goes by the name of pleasure. I could moralize
here had I time!

The princess of Leichstenfels had gone through the
ceremony of presentation, and had heard the murmur
of admiration, drawn by her beauty, from all lips. Dizzy
with the scene, and with a bosom full of painful and
conflicting emotions, she had accepted the proffered
arm of Prince E— to breathe a fresher air upon
the terrace. They stood near a window, and he was
pointing out to his fair but inattentive companion the
various characters as they passed within.

“I must contrive,” said the prince, “to show you
the new envoy. Oh! you have not heard of him.
Beautiful as Narcissus, modest as Pastor Corydon,
clever as the prime minister himself, this paragon of
diplomatists has been here in disguise these three
months, negotiating about—Metternich and the devil
knows what—but rewarded at last with an ambassador's
star, and—but here he is: Princess Leichstenfels,
permit me to present —”

She heard no more. A glance from the diamond

star on his breast to the Hephæstion mouth and keen
dark eye of Count Anatole, revealed to her the mystery
of months. And as she leaned against the window
for support, the hand that sustained her in the
forest of Friuli, and the same thrilling voice, in almost
the same never-forgotten cadence, offered his impassioned
sympathy and aid—and she recognised and remembered
all.

I must go back so far as to inform you, that Count
Anatole, on the morning of this memorable day, had
sacrificed a silky but prurient mustache, and a pair
of the very sauciest dark whiskers out of Coventry.
Whether the prince E— recognised in the new
envoy the lady's gentleman who so inopportunely
broke in upon his tender avowal, I am not prepared to
say. I only know (for I was there) that the princess
Leichstenfels was wedded to the new ambassador in
the “leafy month of June;” and the prince E—,
unfortunately prevented by illness from attending the
nuptials, lost a very handsome opportunity of singing
with effect—

supposing it translated into German.

Whether the enamored ambassadress prefers her
husband in his new character, I am equally uncertain;
though from much knowledge of German courts and
a little of human nature, I think she will be happy if
at some future day she would not willingly exchange
her proud envoy for the devoted Tyrolese, and does
not sigh that she can no more bring him to her feet
with a pull of a silken string.

THE MADHOUSE OF PALERMO.

He who has not skimmed over the silvery waters of
the Lipari, with a summer breeze right from Italy in
his topsails, the smoke of Stromboli alone staining the
unfathomable-looking blue of the sky, and, as the sun
dipped his flaming disk in the sea, put up his helm for
the bosom of La Concha d'Oro, the Golden Shell, as
they beautifully call the bay of Palermo: he who has
not thus entered, I say, to the fairest spot on the face
of this very fair earth, has a leaf worth the turning in
his book of observation.

In ten minutes after dropping the anchor, with sky
and water still in a glow, the men were all out of the
rigging, the spars of the tall frigate were like lines pencilled
on the sky, the band played inspiringly on the
poop, and every boat along the gay Marina was freighted
with fair Palermitans on its way to the stranger
ship.

I was standing with the officer-of-the-deck by the
capstan, looking at the first star which had just sprung
into its place like a thing created with a glance of the
eye.

“Shall we let the ladies aboard, sir?” said a smiling
middy, coming aft from the gangway.

“Yes, sir. And tell the boatswain's mate to clear
away for a dance on the quarter-deck.”

In most of the ports of the Mediterranean, a ship-of-war,
on a summer cruise, is as welcome as the breeze
from the sea. Bringing with her forty or fifty gay
young officers overcharged with life and spirits, a band
of music never so well occupied as when playing for a
dance, and a deck whiter and smoother than a ballroom
floor, the warlike vessel seems made for a scene
of pleasure. Whatever her nation, she no sooner
drops her anchor, than she is surrounded by boats from
the shore; and when the word is passed for admission,
her gangway is crowded with the mirth-loving and
warm people of these southern climes, as much at
home on board, and as ready to enter into any scheme
of amusement, as the maddest-brained midshipman
could desire.

The companion-hatch was covered with its grating,
lest some dizzy waltzer should drop his partner into the
steerage, the band got out their music-stand, and the
bright buttons were soon whirling round from larboard
to starboard, with forms in their clasp, and dark eyes
glowing over their shoulders, that might have tempted
the devil out of Stromboli.

Being only a passenger myself, I was contented with
sitting on the slide of a carronade, and with the music
in my ear, and the twilight flush deepening in the fine-traced
angles of the rigging, abandoning myself to the
delicious listlessness with which the very air is pregnant
in these climates of paradise.

The light feet slid by, and the waltz, the gallopade,
and the mazurka, had followed each other till it was
broad moonlight on the decks. It was like a night
without an atmosphere, the radiant flood poured down
with such an invisible and moonlike clearness.

“Do you see the lady leaning on that old gentleman's
arm by the hammock-rail?” said the first lieutenant,
who sat upon the next gun—like myself, a
spectator of the scene.

I had remarked her well. She had been in the ship
five or ten minutes, and in that time, it seemed to me,
I had drunk her beauty, even to intoxication. The
frigate was slowly swinging round to the land breeze,
and the moon, from drawing the curved line of a gipsy-shaped
capella di paglia with bewitching concealment
across her features, gradually fell full upon the
dark limit of her orbed forehead. Heaven! what a
vision of beauty! Solemn, and full of subdued pain
as the countenance seemed, it was radiant with an almost
supernatual light of mind. Thought and feeling
seemed steeped into every line. Her mouth was large
—the only departure from the severest model of the
Greek—and stamped with calmness, as if it had been
a legible word upon her lips. But her eyes—what can
I say of their unnatural lightning—of the depth, the
fulness, the wild and maniac-like passionateness of their
every look?

My curiosity was strongly moved. I walked aft to
the capstan, and throwing off my habitual reserve with
some effort, approached the old gentleman on whose
arm she leaned, and begged permission to lead her out
for a waltz.

“If you wish it, carissima mia!” said he, turning to
her with all the tenderness in his tone of which the
honeyed language of Italy is capable.

But she clung to his arm with startled closeness, and
without even looking at me, turned her lips up to his
ear, and murmured, “Mai piu!”

At my request the officer on duty paid them the compliment
of sending them ashore in one of the frigate's
boats; and after assisting them down the ladder, I stood
upon the broad stair on the level of the water, and
watched the phosphoric wake of the swift cutter till
the bright sparkles were lost amid the vessels nearer
land. The coxswain reported the boat's return; but
all that belonged to the ship had not come back in her.
My heart was left behind.

The next morning there was the usual bustle in the
gunroom preparatory to going ashore. Glittering uniforms
lay about upon the chairs and tables, sprinkled
with swords, epaulettes, and cocked hats; very well-brushed
boots were sent to be rebrushed, and very
nice coats to be made, if possible, to look nicer; the
ship's barber was cursed for not having the hands of
Briareus, and no good was wished to the eyes of the
washerwoman of the last port where the frigate had
anchored. Cologne-water was in great request, and
the purser had an uncommon number of “private interviews.”

Amid all the bustle, the question of how to pass the

day was busily agitated. Twenty plans were proposed;
but the sequel—a dinner at the Hotel Anglais, and a
“stroll for a lark” after it—was the only point on which
the speakers were quite unanimous.

One proposition was to go to Bagaria, and see the
palace of Monsters. This is a villa about ten miles
from Palermo, which the owner, Count Pallagonia, an
eccentric Sicilian noble, has ornamented with some
hundreds of statues of the finest workmanship, representing
the form of woman in every possible combination,
with beasts, fishes, and birds. It looks like the
temptation of St. Anthony on a splendid scale, and is
certainly one of the most extraordinary spectacles in
the world.

Near it stands another villa, the property of Prince
Butera (the present minister of Naples at the court of
France), containing, in the depths of its pleasure-grounds,
a large monastery, with wax monks, of the
size and appearance of life, scattered about the passages
and cells, and engaged in every possible unclerical
avocation. It is a whimsical satire on the order,
done to the life.

Another plan was to go to the Capuchin convent,
and see the dried friars—six or eight hundred bearded
old men, baked, as they died, in their cowls and beards,
and standing against the walls in ghastly rows, in the
spacious vaults of the monastery. A more infernal
spectacle never was seen by mortal eyes.

A drive to Monreale, a nest of a village on the mountain
above the town—a visit to the gardens of a nobleman
who salutes the stranger with a jet d'eau at every
turning—and a lounge in the public promenade of
Palermo itself—shared the honors of the argument.

I had been in Sicily before, and was hesitating which
of these various lions was worthy of a second visit,
when the surgeon proposed to me to accompany him
on a visit to a Sicilian count living in the neighborhood,
who had converted his château into a lunatic asylum,
and devoted his time and a large fortune entirely to
this singular hobby. He was the first to try the system,
now, thank God, generally approved, of winning
back reason to these most wretched of human sufferers
by kindness and gentle treatment.

We jumped into one of the rattling calesini standing
in the handsome corso of Palermo, and fifteen minutes
beyond the gates brought us to the Casa dei Pazzi.
My friend's uniform and profession were an immediate
passport, and we were introduced into a handsome
court, surrounded by a colonnade, and cooled by a
fountain, in which were walking several well-dressed
people, with books, drawing-boards, battledores, and
other means of amusement. They all bowed politely
as we passed, and at the door of the interior we were
met by the count.

“Good God!” I exclaimed—“she was insane,
then!”

It was the old man who was on board the night before!

“E ella?” said I, seizing his arm, before he had
concluded his bow, quite sure that he must understand
me with a word.

“Era pazza.” He looked at me as he answered,
with a scrutiny, as if he half suspected my friend had
brought him a subject.

The singular character of her beauty was quite explained.
Yet what a wreck!

I followed the old count around his establishment
in a kind of dream, but I could not avoid being interested
at every step. Here were no chains, no whips,
no harsh keepers, no cells of stone and straw. The
walls of the long corridors were painted in fresco, representing
sunny landscapes, and gay dancing figures.
Fountains and shrubs met us at every turn. The
people were dressed in their ordinary clothes, and all
employed in some light work or amusement. It was
like what it might have been in the days of the count's
ancestors—a gay château, filled with guests and dependants,
with no more apparent constraint than the
ties of hospitality and service.

We went first to the kitchen. Here were ten
people, all, but the cook, stark mad! It was one of
the peculiarities of the count's system, that his patients
led in his house the lives to which they had previously
been accustomed. A stout Sicilian peasant
girl was employed in filling a large brasier from the
basin of a fountain. While we were watching her
task, the fit began to come on her, and after a fierce
look or two around the room, she commenced dashing
the water about her with great violence. The cook
turned, not at all surprised, and patting her on the
back, with a loud laugh, cried, “Brava, Pepina!
brava!” ringing at the same moment a secret bell.

A young girl of sixteen with a sweet, smiling countenance,
answered the summons, and immediately
comprehending the case, approached the enraged
creature, and putting her arms affectionately round her
neck, whispered something in her ear. The expression
of her face changed immediately to a look of delight,
and dropping the bucket, she followed the young
attendant out of the room with peals of laughter.

“Venite!” said the count, “you shall see how we
manage our furies.”

We followed across a garden filled with the sweetest
flowers to a small room opening on a lawn. From
the centre of the ceiling was suspended a hammock,
and Pepina was already in it, swung lightly from side
to side by a servant, while the attendant stood by, and,
as if in play, threw water upon her face at every approach.
It had all the air of a frolic. The violent
laughter of the poor maniac grew less and less as the
soothing motion and the coolness of the water took
effect, and in a few minutes her strained eyes gently
closed, the hammock was swung more and more
gently, and she fell asleep.

“This,” said the count, with a gratified smile, “is
my substitute for a forced shower-bath and chains;
and this,” kissing his little attendant on the forehead,
“for the whip and the grim turnkey.” I blessed him
in my heart.

“Come!” said he, as we left the sleeper to her repose,
“I must show you my grounds.”

We followed him to an extensive garden, opening
from the back of the château, laid out originally in the
formal style of an Italian villa. The long walks had
been broken up, however, by beautiful arbors with
grottoes in their depths, in which wooden figures, of
the color and size of life, stood or sat in every attitude
of gayety or grotesqueness. It was difficult, in the
deep shadow of the vines and oleanders, not to believe
them real. We walked on through many a winding
shrubbery, perfumed with all the scented flowers of
the luxuriant climate, continually surprised with little
deceptions of perspective, or figures half concealed in
the leaves, till we emerged at the entrance of a charming
summer theatre, with sodded seats, stage, orchestra,
and scenery, complete. Orange-trees, roses, and
clematis, were laced together for a wall in the rear.

“Here,” said the old man, bounding gayly upon the
stage, “here we act plays the summer long.”

“What! not with your patients?”

“Si signore! Who else?” And he went on to
describe to us the interest they took in it, and the singular
power with which the odd idea seized upon their
whimsied intellects. We had been accompanied from
the first, by a grave, respectable looking man, whom I
had taken for an assistant. While we were listening
to the description of the first attempt they had made
at a play, he started out from the group, and putting
himself in an attitude upon the stage, commenced
spouting a furious passage in Italian.

The count pointed to his forehead, and made a sign
to us to listen. The tragedian stopped at the end of

his sentence, and after a moment's delay, apparently
in expectation of a reply, darted suddenly off and disappeared
behind the scenes.

“Poveretto!” said the count, “it is my best actor!”

Near the theatre stood a small chapel, with a circular
lawn before it, on which the grass had been lately
much trodden. It was surrounded partly by a green
bank, and here the count seated us, saying with a significant
look at me, that he would tell us a story.

I should like to give it you in his own words—still
more with his own manner; for never was a tale told
with more elegance of language, or a more natural
and pleasant simplicity. But a sheet of “wire-wove”
is not a Palermitan cavaliere, and the cold English
has not the warm eloquence of the Italian. He laid
aside his hat, ordered fruit and wine, and proceeded.

“Almost a year ago I was called upon by a gentleman
of a noble physiognomy and address, who inquired
very particularly into my system. I explained
it to him at his request, and he did me the honor, as
you gentlemen have done, to go over my little establishment.
He seemed satisfied, and with some hesitation
informed me that he had a daughter in a very desperate
state of mental alienation. Would I go and
see her?

“This is not, you know, gentlemen, a public institution.
I am crazy,” he said it very gravely, “quite
crazy—the first of my family of fools, on this particular
theme—and this asylum is my toy. Of course it is
only as the whim seizes me that I admit a patient; for
there are some diseases of the brain seated in causes
with which I wish not to meddle.

“However, I went. With the freedom of a physician
I questioned the father, upon the road, of the
girl's history. He was a Greek, a prince of the Fanar,
who had left his degraded people in their dirty and
dangerous suburb at Constantinople, to forget oppression
and meanness in a voluntary exile. It was just
before the breaking out of the last Greek revolution,
and so many of his kinsmen and friends had been sacrificed
to the fury of the Turks, that he had renounced
all idea of ever returning to his country.

“`And your daughter?'

“`My dear Katinka, my only child, fell ill upon receiving
distressing news from the Fanar, and her
health and reason never rallied after. It is now several
years, and she has lain in bed till her limbs are withered,
never having uttered a word, or made a sign
which would indicate even consciousness of the presence
of those about her.'

“I could not get from him that there was any disappointment
of the heart at the bottom of it. It seemed
to be one of those cases of sudden stupefaction, to
which nervously sensitive minds are liable after a violent
burst of grief; and I began, before I had seen her,
to indulge in bright hopes of starting once more the
sealed fountains of thought and feeling.

“We entered Palermo, and passing out at the other
gate, stopped at a vine-laced casino on the lip of the
bay, scarcely a mile from the city wall. It was a
pretty, fanciful place, and, on a bed in its inner chamber,
lay the most poetical-looking creature I had ever
seen out of my dreams. Her head was pillowed in an
abundance of dark hair, which fell away from her forehead
in masses of glossy curls, relieving with a striking
effect, the wan and transparent paleness of a face which
the divinest chisel could scarce have copied in alabaster.
Dio mio!—how transcendant was the beauty of
that poor girl!”

The count stopped and fed his memory a moment
with closed eyes upon the image.

“At the first glance I inwardly put up a prayer to
the Virgin, and determined, with her sweet help, to
restore reason to the fairest of its earthly temples. I
took up her shadow of a hand, and spread out the thin
fingers in my palm, and as she turned her large wan
dering eye toward me, I felt that the blessed Mary
had heard my prayer, `You shall see her well again,'
said I confidently.

“Quite overcome, the prince Ghika fell on the bed
and embraced his daughter's knees in an agony of
tears.

“You shall not have the seccatura, gentlemen, of
listening to the recital of all my tedious experiments
for the first month or two. I brought her to my house
upon a litter, placed her in a room filled with every
luxury of the east, and suffered no one to approach
her except two Greek attendants, to whose services
she was accustomed. I succeeded in partially restoring
animation to her benumbed limbs by friction,
and made her sensible of music, and of the perfumes
of the east, which I burned in a pastille-lamp in
her chamber. Here, however, my skill was baffled.
I could neither amuse nor vex. Her mind was beyond
me. After trying every possible experiment, as it
seemed to me, my invention was exhausted, and I
despaired.

“She occupied, however, much of my mind.
Walking up and down yonder orange-alley one sweet
morning, about two months ago, I started off suddenly
to my chamber with a new thought. You would
have thought me the maddest of my household, to
have seen me, gentlemen. I turned out by the shoulders
the regazza, who was making my bed, washed
and scented myself, as if for a ball, covered my white
hairs with a handsome brown wig, a relic of my coxcombical
days, rouged faintly, and, with white gloves,
and a most youthful appearance altogether, sought
the chamber of my patient.

“She was lying with her head in the hollow of her
thin arm, and, as I entered, her dark eyes rested full
upon me. I approached, kissed her hand with a respectful
gallantry, and in the tenderest tones of which
my damaged voice was susceptible, breathed into her
ear a succession of delicately-turned compliments to
her beauty.

“She lay as immovable as marble, but I had not
calculated upon the ruling passion of the sex in vain.
A thin flush on her cheek, and a flutter in her temple,
only perceptible to my practised eye, told me that the
words had found their way to her long-lost consciousness.

“I waited a few moments, and then took up a ringlet
that fell negligently over her hand, and asked permission
to sever it from the glossy mass in which the
arm under her head was literally buried.

“She clutched her fingers suddenly upon it, and
glancing at me with the fury of a roused tigress, exclaimed
in a husky whisper, `Lasciate me, signore!'

“I obeyed her, and, as I left the room, I thanked
the Virgin in my heart. It was the first word she had
spoken for years.

“The next day, having patched myself up more
successfully in my leisure, in a disguise so absolute
that not one even of my pets knew me as I passed
through the corridor, I bowed myself up once more to
her bedside.

“She lay with her hands clasped over her eyes, and
took no notice of my first salutation. I commenced
with a little raillery, and under cover of finding fault
with her attitude, contrived to pay an adroit compliment
to the glorious orbs she was hiding from admiration.
She lay a moment or two without motion, but
the muscles of her slight mouth stirred just perceptibly,
and presently she drew her fingers quickly apart,
and looking at me with a most confiding expression
in her pale features, a full sweet smile broke like sudden
sunshine through her lips. I could have wept for
joy.

“I soon acquired all the influence over her I could
wish. She made an effort at my request to leave her
bed, and in a week or two walked with me in the garden.

Her mind, however, seemed to have capacity
but for one thought, and she soon began to grow unhappy,
and would weep for hours. I endeavored to
draw from her the cause, but she only buried her face
in my bosom, and wept more violently, till one day,
sobbing out her broken words almost inarticulately, I
gathered her meaning. She was grieved that I did not
marry her!

“Poor girl!” soliloquized the count, after a brief
pause, “she was only true to her woman's nature. Insanity
had but removed the veil of custom and restraint.
She would have broken her heart before she had betrayed
such a secret, with her reason.

“I was afraid at last she would go melancholy mad,
this one thought preyed so perpetually on her brain—
and I resolved to delude her into the cheerfulness necessary
to her health by a mock ceremony.

“The delight with which she received my promise
almost alarmed me. I made several delays, with the
hope that in the convulsion of her feelings a ray of
reason would break through the darkness; but she
took every hour to heart, and I found it was inevitable.

“You are sitting, gentlemen, in the very scene of our
mad bridal. My poor grass has not yet recovered, you
see, from the tread of the dancers. Imagine the spectacle.
The chapel was splendidly decorated, and at
the bottom of the lawn stood three long tables, covered
with fruits and flowers, and sprinkled here and
there with bottles of colored water (to imitate wine),
sherbets, cakes, and other such innocent things as I
could allow my crazy ones. They were all invited.”

“Good God!” said the surgeon, “your lunatics?”

“All—all! And never was such a sensation produced
in a household since the world was created.
Nothing else was talked of for a week. My worst patients
seemed to suspend for the time their fits of violence.
I sent to town for quantities of tricksy stuffs,
and allowed the women to deck themselves entirely
after their own taste. You can conceive nothing like
the business they made of it! Such apparitions!—
Santa Maria! shall I ever forget that Babel?

“The morning came. My bride's attendants had
dressed her from her Grecian wardrobe; and with her
long braid parted over her forehead, and hanging back
from her shoulders to her very heels, her close-fitted
jacket, of gorgeous velvet and gold, her costly bracelets,
and the small spangled slippers upon her unstockinged
feet, she was positively an angelic vision of beauty.
Her countenance was thoughtful, but her step was
unusually elastic, and a small red spot, like a rose-leaf
under the skin, blushed through the alabaster paleness
of her cheek.

“My maniacs received her with shouts of admiration.
The women were kept from her at first with
great difficulty, and it was only by drawing their attention
to their own gaudier apparel, that their anxiety
to touch her was distracted. The men looked at
her, as she passed along like a queen of love and
beauty, and their wild, gleaming eyes, and quickened
breaths, showed the effect of such loveliness upon the
unconcealed feelings. I had multiplied my attendants,
scarce knowing how the excitement of the scene
might affect them; but the interest of the occasion,
and the imposing decencies of dress and show, seemed
to overcome them effectually. The most sane guests
at a bridal could scarce have behaved with more propriety.

“The ceremony was performed by an elderly friend
of mine, the physician to my establishment. Old as I
am, gentlemen, I could have wished that ceremony to
have been in earnest. As she lifted up her large liquid
eyes to heaven, and swore to be true to me till death, I
forgot my manhood, and wept. If I had been younger
—ma che porcheria!

“After the marriage the women were invited to sa
lute the bride, and then all eyes in my natural party
turned at once to the feast. I gave the word. Fruits,
cakes, and sherbets, disappeared with the rapidity of
magic, and then the music struck up from the shrubbery,
and they danced—as you see by the grass.

“I committed the bride to her attendants at sunset,
but I could with difficulty tear myself away. On the
following day I called at her door, but she refused to
see me. The next day and the next I could gain no
admittance without exerting my authority. On the
fourth morning I was permitted to enter. She had resumed
her usual dress, and was sad, calm, and gentle.
She said little, but seemed lost in thought to which
she was unwilling or unable to give utterance.

“She has never spoken of it since. Her mind, I
think, has nearly recovered its tone, but her memory
seems confused. I scarce think she remembers her
illness, and its singular events, as more than a troubled
dream. On all the common affairs of life she seems
quite sane, and I drive out with her daily, and have
taken her once or twice to the opera. Last night we
were strolling on the Marina when your frigate came
into the bay, and she proposed to join the crowd and
go off to hear the music. We went on board, as you
know; and now, if you choose to pay your respects
to the lady who refused to waltz with you, take another
sip of your sherbet and wine, and come with
me.”

To say more would be trespassing perhaps on the
patience of my readers, but certainly on my own feelings.
I have described this singular case of madness
and its cure, because I think it contains in itself the
seeds of much philosophy on the subject. It is only
within a very few years that these poor sufferers have
been treated otherwise than as the possessors of incarnate
devils, whom it was necessary to scourge out
with unsparing cruelty. If this literal statement of a
cure in the private madhouse of the eccentric conte
—, of Palermo, induce the friends of a single unfortunate
maniac to adopt a kind and rational system
for his restoration, the writer will have been repaid for
bringing circumstances before the public which have
since had much to do with his own feelings.

MINUTE PHILOSOPHIES.

A summer or two since, I was wasting a college vacation
among the beautiful creeks and falls in the
neighborhood of New York. In the course of my
wanderings, up-stream and down-stream, sometimes
on foot, sometimes on horseback, and never without
a book for an excuse to loiter on the mossy banks and
beside the edge of running water, I met frequently a
young man of a peculiarly still and collected eye, and
a forehead more like a broad slab of marble than a human
brow. His mouth was small and thinly cut; his
chin had no superfluous flesh upon it; and his whole
appearance was that of a man whose intellectual nature
prevailed over the animal. He was evidently a
scholar. We had met so frequently at last, that, on
passing each other one delicious morning, we bowed
and smiled simultaneously, and, without further introduction,
entered into conversation.

It was a temperate day in August, with a clear but
not oppressive sun, and we wandered down a long

creek together, mineralizing here, botanizing there,
and examining the strata of the ravines, with that sort
of instinctive certainty of each other's attainments
which scholars always feel, and thrusting in many a
little wayside parenthesis, explanatory of each other's
history and circumstances. I found that he was one
of those pure and unambitious men, who, by close
application and moderate living while in college, become
in love with their books; and, caring little for
anything more than the subsistence, which philosophy
tells them is enough to have of this world, settle down
for life into a wicker-bottomed chair, more contentedly
than if it were the cushion of a throne.

We were together three or four days, and when I
left him, he gave me his address, and promised to write
to me. I shall give below an extract from one of his
letters. I had asked him for a history of his daily
habits, and any incidents which he might choose to
throw in—hinting to him that I was a dabbler in literature,
and would be obliged to him if he would do it
minutely, and in a form of which I might avail myself
in the way of publication.

After some particulars, unimportant to the reader,
he proceeds:—

“I keep a room at a country tavern. It is a quiet,
out-of-the-way place, with a whole generation of elms
about it; and the greenest grass up to the very door,
and the pleasantest view in the whole country round
from my chamber-window. Though it is a public
house, and the word `HOTEL' swings in golden capitals
under a landscape of two hills and a river, painted
for a sign by some wandering Tinto, it is so orderly a
town, that not a lounger is ever seen about the door;
and the noisiest traveller is changed to a quiet man, as
if it were by the very hush of the atmosphere.

“Here, in my pleasant room, upon the second floor,
with my round table covered with choice books, my
shutters closed just so much as to admit light enough
for a painter, and my walls hung with the pictures
which adorned my college chambers, and are therefore
linked with a thousand delightful associations—I
can study my twelve hours a day, in a state of mind
sufficiently even and philosophical. I do not want for
excitement. The animal spirits, thanks to the Creator,
are enough at all times, with employment and
temperate living, to raise us above the common shadows
of life; and after a day of studious confinement,
when my mind is unbound, and I go out and give it
up to reckless association, and lay myself open unreservedly
to the influences of nature—at such a time,
there comes mysteriously upon me a degree of pure
joy, unmingled and unaccountable, which is worth
years of artificial excitement. The common air seems
to have grown rarer; my step is strangely elastic; my
sense of motion full of unwonted dignity; my thoughts
elevated; my perceptions of beauty acuter and more
pleasurable; and my better nature predominant and
sublime. There is nothing in the future which looks
difficult, nothing in my ambition unattainable, nothing
in the past which can not be reconciled with good: I
am a purer and a better man; and though I am elevated
in my own thoughts, it will not lead to vanity,
for my ideas of God, and of my fellow-men, have been
enlarged also. This excitement ceases soon; but it
ceases like the bubbling of a fountain, which leaves
the waters purer for the influence which has passed
through them—not like the mirth of the world, which
ebbs like an unnatural tide, and leaves loathsomeness
and disgust.

“Let no one say that such a mode of life is adapted
to peculiar constitutions, and can be relished by those
only. Give me the veriest worldling—the most devoted,
and the happiest of fashionable ephemera, and
if he has material for a thought, and can take pride
in the improvement of his nature, I will so order his
daily round, that, with temperance and exercise, he
shall be happier in one hour spent within himself,
than in ten wasted on folly.

“Few know the treasures in their own bosoms—
very few the elasticity and capacity of a well-regulated
mind for enjoyment. The whole world of philosophers,
and historians, and poets, seem, to the secluded
student, but to have labored for his pleasure; and as
he comes to one new truth and beautiful thought after
another, there answers a chord of joy, richer than
music, in his heart—which spoils him for the coarser
pleasures of the world. I have seen my college chum
—a man, who, from a life of mingled business and
pleasure, became suddenly a student—lean back in his
chair, at the triumph of an argument, or the discovery
of a philosophical truth, and give himself up for a few
moments to the enjoyment of sensations, which, he
assured me, surpassed exceedingly the most vivid
pleasures of his life. The mind is like the appetite—
when healthy and well-toned, receiving pleasure from
the commonest food; but becoming a disease, when
pampered and neglected. Give it time to turn in upon
itself, satisfy its restless thirst for knowledge, and it
will give birth to health, to animal spirits, to everything
which invigorates the body, while it is advancing
by every step the capacities of the soul. Oh! if
the runners after pleasure would stoop down by the
wayside, they might drink waters better even than
those which they see only in their dreams. They will
not be told that they have in their possession the golden
key which they covet; they will not know that the
music they look to enchant them, is sleeping in their
own untouched instruments; that the lamp which
they vainly ask from the enchanter, is burning in
their own bosoms!

“When I first came here, my host's eldest daughter
was about twelve years of age. She was, without being
beautiful, an engaging child, rather disposed to be
contemplative, and, like all children, at that age, very
inquisitive and curious. She was shy at first, but soon
became acquainted with me; and would come into
my room in her idle hours, and look at my pictures
and read. She never disturbed me, because her natural
politeness forbade it; and I pursued my thoughts
or my studies just as if she were not there, till, by-and-by,
I grew fond of her quiet company, and was happier
when she was moving stealthily around, and looking
into a book here and there in her quiet way.

“She had been my companion thus for some time,
when it occurred to me that I might be of use to her
in leading her to cultivate a love for study. I seized
the idea enthusiastically. Now, thought I, I will see
the process of a human mind. I have studied its philosophy
from books, and now I will take a single
original, and compare them, step by step. I have
seen the bud, and the flower full blown, and I am told
that the change was gradual, and effected thus—leaf
after leaf. Now I will watch the expansion, and while
I water it and let in the sunshine to its bosom, detect
the secret springs which move to such beautiful results.
The idea delighted me.

“I was aware that there was great drudgery in the
first steps, and I determined to avoid it, and connect
the idea of my own instruction with all that was delightful
and interesting to her mind. For this purpose
I persuaded her father to send, her to a better
school than she had been accustomed to attend, and,
by a little conversation, stimulated her to enter upon
her studies with alacrity.

“She was now grown to a girl, and had begun to
assume the naive, womanly airs which girls do at her
age. Her figure had rounded into a flowing symmetry,
and her face, whether from associating principally
with an older person, or for what other reason I
know not, had assumed a thoughtful cast, and she
was really a girl of most interesting and striking personal
appearance.

“I did not expect much from the first year of my
experiment. I calculated justly on its being irksome
and common-place. Still I was amused and interested.
I could hear her light step on the stair, always at the
same early hour of the evening, and it was a pleasure
to me to say `Come in,' to her timid rap, and set her
a chair by my own, that I might look over her book,
or talk in a low tone to her. I then asked her about
her lessons, and found out what had most attracted her
notice, and I could always find some interesting fact
connected with it, or strike off into some pleasant association,
till she acquired a habit of selection in her
reading, and looked at me earnestly to know what I
would say upon it. You would have smiled to see
her leaning forward, with her soft blue eye fixed on
me, and her lips half parted with attention, waiting for
my ideas upon some bare fact in geography or history;
and it would have convinced you that the natural,
unstimulated mind, takes pleasure in the simplest
addition to its knowledge.

“All this time I kept out of her way everything
that would have a tendency to destroy a taste for mere
knowledge, and had the pleasure to see that she
passed with keen relish from her text books to my observations,
which were as dry as they, though recommended
by kindness of tone and an interested manner.
She acquired gradually, by this process, a habit of
reasoning upon everything which admitted it, which
was afterward of great use in fixing and retaining the
leading features of her attainments.

“I proceeded in this way till she was fifteen. Her
mind had now become inured to regular habits of inquiry,
and she began to ask difficult questions and
wonder at common things. Her thoughts assumed a
graver complexion, and she asked for books upon subjects
of which she felt the want of information. She
was ready to receive and appreciate truth and instruction,
and here was to begin my pleasure.

“She came up one evening with an air of embarrassment
approaching to distress. She took her usual
seat, and told me that she had been thinking all day
that it was useless to study any more. There were so
many mysterious things—so much, even that she could
see, which she could not account for, and, with all her
efforts, she got on so slowly, that she was discouraged.
It was better, she said, to be happy in ignorance, than
to be constantly tormented with the sight of knowledge
to which she could not attain, and which she only knew
enough to value. Poor child! she did not know that
she was making the same complaint with Newton, and
Locke, and Bacon, and that the wisest of men were
only `gatherers of pebbles on the shore of an illimitable
sea!' I began to talk to her of the mind. I spoke
of its grandeur, and its capacities, and its destiny. I
told her instances of high attainment and wonderful
discovery—sketched the sublime philosophies of the
soul—the possibility that this life was but a link in a
chain of existences, and the glorious power, if it were
true, of entering upon another world, with a loftier capacity
than your fellow-beings for the comprehension
of its mysteries. I then touched upon the duty of self-cultivation—the
pride of a high consciousness of improved
time, and the delicious feelings of self-respect
and true appreciation.

“She listened to me in silence, and wept. It was
one of those periods which occur to all delicate minds,
of distrust and fear; and when it passed by, and her
ambition stirred again, she gave vent to her feelings
with a woman's beautiful privilege. I had no more
trouble to urge her on. She began the next day with
the philosophy of the mind, and I was never happier
than while following her from step to step in this delightful
study.

“I have always thought that the most triumphant
intellectual feeling we ever experience, is felt upon the
first opening of philosophy. It is like the interpreta
tion of a dream of a lifetime. Every topic seems to
you like a phantom of your own mind, from which a
mist has suddenly melted. Every feature has a kind
of half-familiarity, and you remember musing upon it
for hours, till you gave it up with an impatient dissatisfaction.
Without a definite shape, this or that very
idea has floated in your mind continually. It was a phenomenon
without a name—a something which you
could not describe to your friend, and which, by-and-by,
you came to believe was peculiar to yourself, and
would never be brought out or unravelled. You read
on, and the blood rushes to your face in a tumultuous
consciousness—you have had feelings in peculiar
situations which you could not define, and here
are their very features—and you know, now, that it was
jealousy, or ambition, or love. There have been moments
when your faculties seemed blinded or reversed.
You could not express yourself at all when you felt
you should be eloquent. You could not fix your
mind upon the subject, of which, before, you had been
passionately fond. You felt an aversion for your very
partialities, or a strange warming in your heart toward
people or pursuits that you had disliked; and when
the beauty of the natural world has burst upon you,
as it sometimes will, with an exceeding glory, you
have turned away from it with a deadly sickness of
heart, and a wish that you might die.

“These are mysteries which are not all soluble even
by philosophy. But you can see enough of the machinery
of thought to know its tendencies, and like
the listener to mysterious music, it is enough to have
seen the instrument, without knowing the cunning
craft of the player.

“I remembered my school-day feelings, and lived
them over again with my beautiful pupil. I entered
with as much enthusiasm as she, into the strength and
sublimity which I had wondered at before; and I believe
that, even as she sat reading by herself, my blood
thrilled, and my pulses quickened, as vividly as her
own, when I saw, by the deepening color of her cheek,
or the marked passages of my book, that she had found
a noble thought or a daring hypothesis.

“She proceeded with her course of philosophy rapidly
and eagerly. Her mind was well prepared for its
relish. She said she felt as if a new sense had been
given her—an inner eye which she could turn in upon
herself, and by which she could, as it were, stand aside
while the process of thought went on. She began to
respect and to rely upon her own mind, and the elevation
of countenance and manner, which so certainly
and so beautifully accompanies inward refinement,
stole over her daily. I began to feel respectful in her
presence, and when, with the peculiar elegance of a
woman's mind, she discovered a delicate shade of
meaning which I had not seen, or traced an association
which could spring only from an unsullied heart,
I experienced a sensation like the consciousness of an
unseen presence—elevating, without alarming me.

“It was probably well that with all this change in
her mind and manner, her person still retained its
childish grace and flexibility. She had not grown
tall, and she wore her hair yet as she used to do—falling
with a luxuriant fulness upon her shoulders.
Hence she was still a child, when, had she been taller
or more womanly, the demands upon her attention,
and the attractiveness of mature society, might have
divided that engrossing interest which is necessary to
successful study.

“I have often wished I was a painter; but never so
much as when looking on this beautiful being as she
sat absorbed in her studies, or turned to gaze up a
moment to my face, with that delicious expression of
inquiry and affection. Every one knows the elevation
given to the countenance of a man by contemplative
habits. Perhaps the natural delicacy of feminine features
has combined with its rarity, to make this expression

less observable in woman; but, to one familiar
with the study of the human face, there is, in the
look of a truly intellectual woman, a keen subtlety of
refinement, a separation from everything gross and
material, which comes up to our highest dream of the
angelic. For myself, I care not to analyze it. I leave
it to philosophy to find out its secret. It is enough
for me that I can see and feel it in every pulse of my
being. It is not a peculiar susceptibility. Every man
who approaches such a woman feels it. He may not
define it; he may be totally unconscious what it is
that awes him; but he feels as if a mysterious and invisible
veil were about her, and every dark thought is
quenched suddenly in his heart, as if he had come
into the atmosphere of a spirit. I would have every
woman know this. I would tell every mother who
prays nightly for the peculiar watchfulness of good
spirits over the purity of her child, that she may weave
round her a defence stronger than steel—that she may
place in her heart a living amulet whose virtue is like
a circle of fire to pollution. I am not `stringing pearls.'
I have seen, and I know, that an empty mind is not a
strong citadel; and in the melancholy chronicle of
female ruin, the instances are rare of victims distinguished
for mental cultivation. I would my pen were
the `point of a diamond,' and I were writing on living
hearts! for when I think how the daughters of a house
are its grace and honor—and when I think how the
father and mother that loved her, and the brother that
made her his pride, and the sister in whose bosom she
slept, are all crushed, utterly, by a daughter's degradation,
I feel, that if every word were a burning coal,
my language could not be extravagant!

“My pupil, had, as yet, read no poetry. I was uncertain
how to enter upon it. Her taste for the beautiful
in prose had become so decided, that I feared for
the first impression of my poetical world. I wished it
in burst upon her brilliantly—like the entrance to an
inner and more magnificent temple of knowledge. I
hoped to dazzle her with a high and unimagined
beauty, which should exceed far the massive but plain
splendors of philosophy. We had often conversed on
the probability of a previous existence, and, one evening.
I opened Wordsworth, and read his sublime
'Ode upon Intimations of Immortality.' She did not
interrupt me, but I looked up at the conclusion, and
she was in tears. I made no remark, but took Byron,
and read some of the finest passages in Childe Harold,
and Manfred, and Cain—and, from that time, poetry
has been her world!

“It would not have been so earlier. It needs the
simple and strong nutriment of truth to fit us to relish
and feel poetry. The mind must have strength and
cultivated taste, and then it is like a language from
Heaven. We are astonished at its power and magnificence.
We have been familiar with knowledge as
with a person of plain garment and a homely presence
—and he comes to us in poetry, with the state of a
king, glorious in purple and gold. We have known
him as an unassuming friend who talked with us by
the wayside, and kept us company on our familiar
paths—and we see him coming with a stately step, and
a glittering diadem on his brow; and we wonder that
we did not see that his plain garment honored him
not, and his bearing were fitter for a king!

“Poetry entered to the very soul of Caroline Grey.
It was touching an unreached string, and she felt as
if the whole compass of her heart were given out. I
used to read to her for hours, and it was beautiful to
see her eye kindle, and her cheek burn with excitement.
The sublimed mysticism and spirituality of
Wordsworth were her delight, and she feasted upon
the deep philosophy and half-hidden tenderness of
Coleridge.

“I had observed, with some satisfaction, that, in the
rapid development of her mental powers, she had not
found time to study nature. She knew little of the
character of the material creation, and I now commenced
walking constantly abroad with her at sunset,
and at all the delicious seasons of moonlight and starlight
and dawn. It came in well with her poetry. I
can not describe the effect. She became, like all who
are, for the first time, made sensible of the glories
around them, a worshipper of the external world.

“There is a time when nature first loses its familiarity,
and seems suddenly to have become beautiful.
This is true even of those who have been taught early
habits of observation. The mind of a child is too
feeble to comprehend, and does not soon learn, the
scale of sublimity and beauty. He would not be surprised
if the sun were brighter, or if the stars were
sown thicker in the sky. He sees that the flower is
beautiful, and he feels admiration at the rainbow; but
he would not wonder if the dyes of the flower were
deeper, or if the sky were laced to the four corners
with the colors of a prism. He grows up with these
splendid phenomena at work about him, till they have
become common, and, in their most wonderful forms,
cease to attract his attention. Then his senses are
suddenly, as by an invisible influence, unsealed, and,
like the proselyte of the Egyptian pyramids, he finds
himself in a magnificent temple, and hears exquisite
music, and is dazzled by surpassing glory. He never
recovers his indifference. The perpetual changes of
nature keep alive his enthusiasm, and if his taste is not
dulled by subsequent debasement, the pleasure he receives
from it flows on like a stream—wearing deeper
and calmer.

“Caroline became now my constant companion.
The changes of the natural world have always been
my chief source of happiness, and I was curious to
know whether my different sensations, under different
circumstances, were peculiar to myself. I left her,
therefore, to lead the conversation, without any expression
of my feelings, and, to my surprise and delight,
she invariably struck their tone, and pursued the
same vein of reflection. It convinced me of what I
had long thought might be true—that there was, in
the varieties of natural beauty, a hidden meaning, and
a delightful purpose of good; and, if I am not deceived,
it is a new and beautiful evidence of the proportion
and extent of God's benevolent wisdom.
Thus, you may remember the peculiar effect of the
early dawn—the deep, unruffled serenity, and the perfect
collectedness of your senses. You may remember
the remarkable purity that pervades the stealing
in of color, and the vanishing of the cold shadows of
gray—the heavenly quiet that seems infused, like a
visible spirit, into the pearly depths of the east, as the
light violet tints become deeper in the upper sky, and
the morning mist rises up like a veil of silvery film,
and softens away its intensity; and then you will remember
how the very beatings of your heart grew
quiet, and you felt an irresistible impulse to pray!
There was no irregular delight, no indefinite sensation,
no ecstacy. It was deep, unbroken repose, and
your pulses were free from the fever of life, and your
reason was lying awake in its chamber.

“There is a hush also at noon; but it is not like
the morning. You have been mingling in the business
of the world, and you turn aside, weary and distracted,
for rest. There is a far depth, in the intense blue of
the sky which takes in the spirit, and you are content
to lie down and sleep in the cool shadow, and forget
even your existence. How different from the cool
wakefulness of the morning, and yet how fitted for the
necessity of the hour!

“The day wears on and comes to the sunsetting.
The strong light passes off from the hills, and the
leaves are mingled in golden masses, and the tips of the
long grass, and the blades of maize, and the luxuriant
grain, are all sleeping in a rich glow, as if the daylight

had melted into gold and descended upon every living
thing like dew. The sun goes down, and there is a
tissue of indescribable glory floating upon the clouds,
and the almost imperceptible blending of the sunset
color with the blue sky, is far up toward the zenith.
Presently the pomp of the early sunset passes away;
and the clouds are all clad in purple, with edges of
metallic lustre; and very far in the west, as if they
were sailing away into another world, are seen spots
of intense brightness, and the tall trees on the hilly
edge of the horizon seem piercing the sky, on fire with
its consuming heat. There is a tumultuous joy in
the contemplation of this hour which is peculiar to
itself. You feel as if you should have had wings; for
there is a strange stirring in your heart to follow on—
and your imagination bursts away into that beautiful
world, and revels among the unsubstantial clouds till
they become cold. It is a triumphant and extravagant
hour. Its joyousness is an intoxication, and its pleasure
dies with the day.

“The night, starry and beautiful, comes on. The
sky has a blue, intense almost to blackness, and the
stars are set in it like gems. They are of different
glory, and there are some that burn, and some that
have a twinkling lustre, and some are just visible and
faint. You know their nature, and their motion; and
there is something awful in so many worlds moving on
through the firmament so silently and in order. You
feel an indescribable awe stealing upon you, and your
imagination trembles as it goes up among them. You
gaze on, and on, and the superstitions of olden time,
and the wild visions of astrology, steal over your memory,
till, by-and-by, you hear the music which they
`give out as they go,' and drink in the mysteries of
their hidden meaning, and believe that your destiny is
woven by their burning spheres. There comes on
you a delirious joy, and a kind of terrible fellowship
with their sublime nature, and you feel as if you could
go up to a starry place and course the heavens in company.
There is a spirituality in this hour, a separation
from material things, which is of a fine order of
happiness. The purity of the morning, and the noontide
quietness, and the rapture of the glorious sunset,
are all human and comprehensible feelings; but this
has the mystery and the lofty energy of a higher world,
and you return to your human nature with a refreshed
spirit and an elevated purpose: see now the wisdom
of God!—the collected intellect for the morning prayer
and our daily duty—the delicious repose for our
noontide weariness—and the rapt fervor to purify us
by night from our worldliness, and keep wakeful the
eye of immortality! They are all suited to our need;
and it is pleasant to think, when we go out at this or
that season, that its peculiar beauty is fitted to our peculiar
wants, and that it is not a chance harmony of our
hearts with nature.

“The world had become to Caroline a new place.
No change in the season was indifferent to her—nothing
was common or familiar. She found beauty in
things you would pass by, and a lesson for her mind or
her heart in the minutest workmanship of nature. Her
character assumed a cheerful dignity, and an elevation
above ordinary amusements or annoyances. She was
equable and calm, because her feelings were never
reached by ordinary irritations; and, if there were no
other benefit in cultivation, this were almost argument
enough to induce it.

“It is now five years since I commenced my tutorship.
I have given you the history of two of them. In
the remaining three there has been much that has interested
my mind—probably little that would interest
yours. We have read together, and, as far as possible,
studied together. She has walked with me, and shared
all my leisure, and known every thought. She is now a
woman of eighteen. Her childish graces are matured,
and her blue eye would send a thrill through you. You
might object to her want of fashionable tournure, and
find fault with her unfashionable impulses. I do not.
She is a high-minded, noble, impassioned being, with
an enthusiasm that is not without reason, and a common
sense that is not a regard to self-interest. Her
motion was not learned at schools, but it is unembarrassed
and free; and her tone has not been educated
to a refined whisper, but it expresses the meaning of
her heart, as if its very pulse had become articulate.
The many might not admire her—I know she would
be idolized by the few.

“Our intercourse is as intimate still; and it could
not change without being less so—for we are constantly
together. There is—to be sure—lately—a slight
degree of embarrassment—and—somehow—we read
more poetry than we used to do—but it is nothing at
all—nothing.”

My friend was married to his pupil a few months
after writing the foregoing. He has written to me
since, and I will show you the letter if you will call,
any time. It will not do to print it, because there are
some domestic details not proper for the general eye;
but, to me, who am a bachelor, bent upon matrimony,
it is interesting to the last degree. He lives the same
quiet, retired life, that he did before he was married.
His room is arranged with the same taste, and with
reference to the same habits as before. The light
comes in as timidly through the half-closed window,
and his pictures look as shadowy and dim, and the
rustle of the turned leaf adds as mysteriously to the
silence. He is the fondest of husbands, but his affection
does not encroach on the habits of his mind. Now
and then he looks up from his book, and, resting his
head upon his hand, lets his eye wander over the pale
cheek and drooping lid of the beautiful being who sits
reading beside him; but he soon returns to his half-forgotten
page, and the smile of affection which had
stolen over his features fades gradually away into the
habitual soberness of thought. There sits his wife,
hour after hour, in the same chair which she occupied
when she first came, a curious loiterer to his room;
and though she does not study so much, because other
cares have a claim upon her now, she still keeps pace
with him in the pleasanter branches of knowledge, and
they talk as often and as earnestly as before on the
thousand topics of a scholar's contemplation. Her
cares may and will multiply; but she understands the
economy of time, and I have no doubt that, with every
attention to her daily duties, she will find ample time
for her mind, and be always as well fitted as now for
the companionship of an intellectual being.

I have, like all bachelors, speculated a great deal
upon matrimony. I have seen young and beautiful
women, the pride of gay circles, married—as the world
said—well! Some have moved into costly houses, and
their friends have all come and looked at their fine
furniture and their splendid arrangements for happiness,
and they have gone away and committed them to
their sunny hopes, cheerfully, and without fear. It is
natural to be sanguine for the young, and, at such
times, I am carried away by similar feelings. I love to
get unobserved into a corner, and watch the bride in
her white attire, and with her smiling face and her soft
eyes moving before me in their pride of life, weave a
waking dream of her future happiness, and persuade
myself that it will be true. I think how they will sit
upon that luxurious sofa as the twilight falls, and build
gay hopes, and murmur in low tones the now unforbidden
tenderness, and how thrillingly the allowed kiss
and the beautiful endearments of wedded life, will
make even their parting joyous, and how gladly they
will come back from the crowd and the empty mirth
of the gay, to each other's quiet company. I picture
to myself that young creature, who blushes, even now
at his hesitating caress, listening eagerly for his footsteps

as the night steals on, and wishing that he would
come; and when he enters at last, and, with an affection
as undying as his pulse, folds her to his bosom, I
can feel the very tide that goes flowing through his
heart, and gaze with him on her graceful form as
she moves about him for the kind offices of affection,
soothing all his unquiet cares, and making him
forget even himself, in her young and unshadowed
beauty.

I go forward for years, and see her luxuriant hair
put soberly away from her brow, and her girlish graces
ripened into dignity, and her bright loveliness chastened
with the gentle meekness of maternal affection.
Her husband looks on her with a proud eye, and
shows the same fervent love and delicate attention
which first won her, and fair children are growing
up about them, and they go on, full of honor and
untroubled years, and are remembered when they
die!

I say I love to dream thus when I go to give the
young bride joy. It is the natural tendency of feelings
touched by loveliness that fears nothing for itself,
and, if I ever yield to darker feelings, it is because the
light of the picture is changed. I am not fond of
dwelling on such changes, and I will not, minutely,
now. I allude to it only because I trust that my simple
page will be read by some of the young and beautiful
beings who move daily across my path, and I
would whisper to them as they glide by, joyously and
confidingly, the secret of an unclouded future.

The picture I have drawn above is not peculiar. It
is colored like the fancies of the bride; and many—oh
many an hour will she sit, with her rich jewels lying
loose in her fingers, and dream such dreams as these.
She believes them, too—and she goes on, for a while,
undeceived. The evening is not too long while they
talk of their plans for happiness, and the quiet meal is
still pleasant with the delightful novelty of mutual reliance
and attention. There comes soon, however, a
time when personal topics become bare and wearisome,
and slight attentions will not alone keep up the social
excitement. There are long intervals of silence, and
detected symptoms of weariness, and the husband, first
in his impatient manhood, breaks in upon the hours
they were to spend together. I can not follow it circumstantially.
There come long hours of unhappy
listlessness, and terrible misgivings of each other's worth
and affection, till, by-and-by, they can conceal their
uneasiness no longer, and go out separately to seek
relief, and lean upon a hollow world for the support
which one who was their “lover and friend” could not
give them!

Heed this, ye who are winning, by your innocent
beauty, the affections of highminded and thinking
beings! Remember that he will give up the brother
of his heart with whom he has had, ever, a fellowship
of mind—the society of his contemporary runners in
the race of fame, who have held with him a stern
companionship—and frequently, in his passionate love,
he will break away from the arena of his burning ambition,
to come and listen to the “voice of the charmer.”
It will bewilder him at first, but it will not long;
and then, think you that an idle blandishment will
chain the mind that has been used, for years, to an
equal communion? Think you he will give up, for a
weak dalliance, the animating themes of men, and the
search into the fine mysteries of knowledge?—Oh no,
lady!—believe me—no! Trust not your influence to
such light fetters! Credit not the old-fashioned absurdity
that woman's is a secondary lot—ministering
to the necessities of her lord and master! It is a
higher destiny I would award you. If your immortality
is as complete, and your gift of mind as capable
as ours of increase and elevation, I would put no wisdom
of mine against God's evident allotment. I
would charge you to water the undying bud, and give
it healthy culture, and open its beauty to the sun—
and then you may hope, that when your life is bound
up with another, you will go on equally, and in a
fellowship that shall pervade every earthly interest!

LOITERINGS OF TRAVEL

LADY RAVELGOLD.

1. CHAPTER I.

Rule a Wife.

It was what is called by people on the continent a
“London day.” A thin, gray mist drizzled down
through the smoke which darkened the long cavern
of Fleet street; the sidewalks were slippery and clammy;
the drays slid from side to side on the greasy
pavement, creating a perpetual clamor among the
lighter carriages with which they came in contact;
the porters wondered that “gemmen” would carry
their umbrellas up when there was no rain, and the
gentlemen wondered that porters should be permitted
on the sidewalks; there were passengers in box-coats,
though it was the first of May, and beggars with bare
breasts, though it was chilly as November; the boys
were looking wistfully into the hosier's windows who
were generally at the pastry-cook's; and there were
persons who wished to know the time, trying in vain
to see the dial of St. Paul's through the gamboge atmosphere.

It was twelve o'clock, and a plain chariot with a
simple crest on the panels, slowly picked its way
through the choked and disputed thoroughfare east
of Temple Bar. The smart glazed hat of the coachman,
the well-fitted drab greatcoat and gaiters of the
footman, and the sort of half-submissive, half-contemptuous
look on both their faces (implying that they
were bound to drive to the devil if it were miladi's orders,
but that the rabble of Fleet street was a leetle too
vulgar for their contact), expressed very plainly that
the lady within was a denizen of a more privileged
quarter, but had chosen a rainy day for some compulsory
visit to “the city.”

At the rate of perhaps a mile an hour, the well-groomed
night-horses (a pair of smart, hardy, twelve-mile
cabs, all bottom, but little style, kept for night-work
and forced journeys) had threaded the tortuous
entrails of London, and had arrived at the arch of a
dark court in Throgmorton street. The coachman
put his wheels snug against the edge of the sidewalk,
to avoid being crushed by the passing drays, and settled
his many-caped benjamin about him; while the
footman spread his umbrella, and making a balustrade
of his arm for his mistress's assistance, a closely-veiled
lady descended and disappeared up the wet and ill-paved
avenue.

The green-baize door of Firkins and Co. opened on
its silent hinges and admitted the mysterious visiter,
who, inquiring of the nearest clerk if the junior partner
were in, was shown to a small inner room containing
a desk, two chairs, a coal fire, and a young gentleman.
The last article of furniture rose on the lady's
entrance, and as she threw off her veil he made a low
bow, with the air of a gentleman, who is neither surprised
nor embarrassed, and pushing aside the door-check,
they were left alone.

There was that forced complaisance in the lady's
manner on her first entrance, which produced the
slightest possible elevation in a very scornful lip owned
by the junior partner, but the lady was only forty-five,
highborn, and very handsome, and as she looked at
the fine specimen of nature's nobility, who met her
with a look as proud and yet as gentle as her own, the
smoke of Fleet street passed away from her memory,
and she became natural and even gracious. The
effect upon the junior partner was simply that of removing
from his breast the shade of her first impression.

“I have brought you,” said his visiter, drawing a
card from her reticule, “an invitation to the dutchess
of Hautaigle's ball. She sent me half a dozen to fill
up for what she calls `ornamentals'—and I am sure I
shall scarce find another who comes so decidedly under
her grace's category.”

The fair speaker had delivered this pretty speech
in the sweetest and best-bred tone of St. James's,
looking the while at the toe of the small brodequin
which she held up to the fire—perhaps thinking only
of drying it. As she concluded her sentence, she
turned to her companion for an answer, and was surprised
at the impassive politeness of his bow of acknowledgment.

“I regret that I shall not be able to avail myself of
your ladyship's kindness,” said the junior partner, in
the same well-enunciated tone of courtesy.

“Then,” replied the lady with a smile, “Lord Augustus
Fitz-Moi, who looks at himself all dinner-time
in a spoon, will be the Apollo of the hour. What a
pity such a handsome creature should be so vain!—
By-the-way, Mr. Firkins, you live without a looking-glass,
I see.”

“Your ladyship reminds me that this is merely a
place of business. May I ask at once what errand
has procured me the honor of a visit on so unpleasant
a day?”

A slight flush brightened the cheek and forehead
of the beautiful woman, as she compressed her lips,
and forced herself to say with affected ease, “The
want of five hundred pounds.”

The junior partner paused an instant, while the lady
tapped with her boot upon the fender in ill-dissembled
anxiety, and then, turning to his desk, he filled up the

check without remark, presented it, and took his hat
to wait on her to her carriage. A gleam of relief and
pleasure shot over her countenance as she closed her
small jewelled hand over it, followed immediately by a
look of embarrassed inquiry into the face of the unquestioning
banker.

“I am in your debt already.”

“Thirty thousand pounds, madam!”

“And for this you think the securities on the estate
of Rockland—”

“Are worth nothing, madam! But it rains. I regret
that your ladyship's carriage can not come to the
door. In the old-fashioned days of sedan-chairs, now,
the dark courts of Lothbury must have been more attractive.
By-the-way, talking of Lothbury, there is
Lady Rosberry's fête champétre next week. If you
should chance to have a spare card—”

“Twenty, if you like—I am too happy—really, Mr.
Firkins—”

“It's on the fifteenth; I shall have the honor of
seeing your ladyship there! Good-morning! Home,
coachman!”

“Does this man love me?” was Lady Ravelgold's
first thought, as she sank back in her returning chariot.
“Yet no! he was even rude in his haste to be
rid of me. And I would willingly have stayed too, for
there is something about him of a mark that I like.
Ay, and he must have seen it—a lighter encouragement
has been interpreted more readily. Five hundred
pounds!—really five hundred pounds! And thirty
thousand at the back of it! What does he mean?
Heavens! if he should be deeper than I thought! If
he should wish to involve me first!”

And spite of the horror with which the thought was
met in the mind of Lavy Ravelgold, the blush over
her forehead died away into a half smile and a brighter
tint in her lips; and as the carriage wound slowly
on through the confused press of Fleet street and the
Strand, the image of the handsome and haughty young
banker shut her eyes from all sounds without, and she
was at her own door in Grosvenor square before she
had changed position or wandered half a moment from
the subject of those busy dreams.

2. CHAPTER II.

The morning of the fifteenth of May seemed to
have been appointed by all the flowers as a jubilee of
perfume and bloom. The birds had been invited, and
sang in the summer with a welcome as full-throated
as a prima donna singing down the tenor in a duet;
the most laggard buds turned out their hearts to the
sunshine, and promised leaves on the morrow; and
that portion of London that had been invited to Lady
Roseberry's fête, thought it a very fine day! That
portion which was not, wondered how people would
go sweltering about in such a glare for a cold dinner!

At about half past two, a very elegant dark-green
cab without a crest, and with a servant in whose slight
figure and plain blue livery there was not a fault,
whirled out at the gate of the Regent's Park, and took
its way up the well-watered road leading to Hampstead.
The gentlemen whom it passed or met turned
to admire the performance of the dark-gray horse, and
the ladies looked after the cab as if they could see the
handsome occupant once more through its leather
back. Whether by conspiracy among the coachmakers,
or by an aristocracy of taste, the degree of
elegance in a turn-out attained by the cab just described,
is usually confined to the acquaintances of
Lady —; that list being understood to enumerate
all “the nice young men” of the West End, beside
the guardsmen. (The ton of the latter, in all matters
hat affect the style of the regiment, is looked after by
the club and the colonel.) The junior Firkins seemed
an exception to this exclusive rule. No “nice man”
could come from Lothbury, and he did not visit Lady
—; but his horse was faultless, and when he turned
into the gate of Rose-Eden, the policeman at the
porter's lodge, though he did not know him, thought
it unnecessary to ask for his name. Away he spattered
up the hilly avenue, and giving the reins to his
groom at the end of a green arbor leading to the reception-lawn,
he walked in and made his bow to Lady
Roseberry, who remarked, “How very handsome!
Who can he be?”—and the junior partner walked on
and disappeared down an avenue of laburnums.

Ah! but Rose-Eden looked a paradise that day!
Hundreds had passed across the close-shaven lawn,
with a bow to the lady-mistress of this fair abode. Yet
the grounds were still private enough for Milton's pair,
so lost were they in the green labyrinths of hill and
dale. Some had descended through heavily-shaded
paths to a fancy dairy, built over a fountain in the bottom
of a cool dell; and here, amid her milk-pans of
old and costly china, the prettiest maid in the country
round pattered about upon a floor of Dutch tiles, and
served her visiters with creams and ices—already, as it
were, adapted to fashionable comprehension. Some
had strayed to the ornamental cottages in the skirts
of the flower-garden—poetical abodes, built from a
picturesque drawing, with imitation roughness; thatch,
lattice-window, and low palling, all complete; and inhabited
by superannuated dependants of Lord Roseberry,
whose only duties were to look like patriarchs,
and give tea and new cream-cheese to visiters on fêtedays.
Some had gone to see the silver and gold pheasants
in their wire-houses, stately aristocrats of the game
tribe, who carry their finely-pencilled feathers like
“Marmalet Madarus,” strutting in hoop and farthingale.
Some had gone to the kennels, to see setters
and pointers, hounds and terriers, lodged like gentlemen,
each breed in its own apartment—the puppies, as
elsewhere, treated with most attention. Some were
in the flower-garden, some in the greenhouses, some
in the graperies, aviaries, and grottoes; and at the side
of a bright sparkling fountain, in the recesses of a fir-grove,
with her foot upon its marble lip, and one hand
on the shoulder of a small Cupid who archly made a
drinking-cup of his wing, and caught the bright water
as it fell, stood Lady Imogen Ravelgold, the loveliest
girl of nineteen that prayed night and morning within
the parish of May Fair, listening to very passionate
language from the young banker of Lothbury.

A bugle on the lawn rang a recall. From every
alley, and by every path, poured in the gay multitude,
and the every path, poured in the gay multitude,
and the smooth sward looked like a plateau of animated
flowers, waked by magic from a broidery on
green velvet. Ah! the beautiful demi-toilettes!—so
difficult to attain, yet, when attained, the dress most
modest, most captivating, most worthy the divine grace
of woman. Those airy hats, sheltering from the sun,
yet not enviously concealing a feature or a ringlet that
a painter would draw for his exhibition-picture!
Those summery and shapeless robes, covering the
person more to show its outline better, and provoke
more the worship, which, like all worship, is made
more adoring by mystery! Those complexions which
but betray their transparency in the sun; lips in which
the blood is translucent when between you and the
light; cheeks finer-grained than alabaster, yet as cool
in their virgin purity as a tint in the dark corner of a
Ruysdael: the human race was at less perfection in
Athens in the days of Lais—in Egypt in the days of
Cleopatra—than that day on the lawn of Rose-Eden.

Cart-loads of ribands, of every gay color, had been
laced through the trees in all directions; and amid
every variety of foliage, and every shade of green, the
tulip-tints shone vivid and brilliant, like an American
forest after the first frost. From the left edge of the

lawn, the ground suddenly sunk into a dell, shaped
like an amphitheatre, with a level platform at its bottom,
and all around, above and below, thickened a
shady wood. The music of a delicious band stole up
from the recesses of a grove, draped as an orchestra
and green-room on the lower side, and while the
audience disposed themselves in the shade of the upper
grove, a company of players and dancing-girls
commenced their theatricals.—Imogen Ravelgold,
who was separated, by a pine tree only, from the junior
partner, could scarce tell you, when it was finished,
what was the plot of the play.

The recall-bugle sounded again, and the band
wound away from the lawn, playing a gay march.
Followed Lady Roseberry and her suite of gentlemen,
followed dames and their daughters, followed all who
wished to see the flight of my lord's falcons. By a
narrow path and a wicket-gate, the long music-guided
train stole out upon an open hill-side, looking down
on a verdant and spreading meadow. The band played
at a short distance behind the gay groups of spectators,
and it was a pretty picture to look down upon
the splendidly-dressed falconer and his men, holding
their fierce birds upon their wrists, in their hoods and
jesses, a foreground of old chivalry and romance;
while far beyond extended, like a sea over the horizon,
the smoke-clad pinnacles of busy and every-day London.
There are such contrasts of the eyes of the
rich!

The scarlet hood was taken from the trustiest
falcon, and a dove, confined, at first, with a string,
was thrown up, and brought back, to excite his attention.
As he fixed his eye upon him, the frightened
victim was let loose, and the falcon flung off; away
skimmed the dove in a low flight over the meadow,
and up to the very zenith, in circles of amazing swiftness
and power, sped the exulting falcon, apparently
forgetful of his prey, and bound for the eye of the sun
with his strong wings and his liberty. The falconer's
whistle and cry were heard; the dove circled round
the edge of the meadow in his wavy flight; and down,
with the speed of lightning, shot the falcon, striking
his prey dead to the earth before the eye could settle
on his form. As the proud bird stood upon his
victim, looking around with a lifted crest and fierce eye,
Lady Imogen Ravengold heard, in a voice of which
her heart knew the music, “They who soar highest
strike surest; the dove lies in the falcon's bosom.”

3. CHAPTER III.

The afternoon had, meantime, been wearing on,
and at six the “breakfast” was announced. The
tents beneath which the tables were spread were in
different parts of the grounds, and the guests had
made up their own parties. Each sped to his rendezvous,
and as the last loiterers disappeared from
the lawn, a gentleman in a claret coat and a brown
study, found himself stopping to let a lady pass who
had obeying the summons as tardily as himself. In
a white chip hat, Hairbault's last, a few lilies of the
valley laid among her raven curls beneath, a simple
white robe, the chef-d'œuvre of Victotine in style and
tournure, Lady Ravelgold would have been the belle
of the fête, but for her daughter.

“Well emerged from Lothbury!” she said, courtesying,
with a slight flush over her features, but immediately
taking his arm; “I have lost my party, and
meeting you is opportune. Where shall we breakfast?”

There was a small tent standing invitingly open on
the opposite side of the lawn, and by the fainter rattle
of soup-spoons from that quarter, it promised to be
less crowded than the others. The junior partner
would willingly have declined the proffered honor, but
he saw at a glance that there was no escape, and submitted
with a grace.

“You know very few people here,” said his fair
creditor, taking the bread from her napkin.

“Your ladyship and one other.”

“Ah, we shall have dancing by-and-by, and I must
introduce you to my daughter. By the way, have
you no name from your mother's side? `Firkins'
sounds so very odd. Give me some prettier word to
drink in this champagne.”

“What do you think of Tremlet?”

“Too effeminate for your severe style of beauty—
but it will do. Mr. Tremlet, your health! Will you
give me a little of the paté before you? Pray, if it
is not indiscreet, how comes that classic profile, and
more surprising still, that distinguished look of yours,
to have found no gayer destiny than the signing of
`Firkins and Co.' to notes of hand? Though I thought
you became your den in Lothbury, upon my honor you
look more at home here.”

And Lady Ravengold fixed her superb eyes upon
the beautiful features of her companion, wondering
partly why he did not speak, and partly why she had
not observed before that he was incomparably the
handsomest creature she had ever seen.

“I can regret no vocation,” he answered after a
moment, “which procures me an acquaintance with
your ladyship's family.”

“There is an arriére pensée in that formal speech,
Mr. Tremlet. You are insincere. I am the only
one in my family whom you know, and what pleasure
have you taken in my acquaintance? And, now
I think of it, there is a mystery about you, which, but
for the noble truth written so legibly on your features,
I should be afraid to fathom. Why have you suffered
me to over-draw my credit so enormously, and without
a shadow of a protest?”

When Lady Ravelgold had disburdened her heart
of this direct question, she turned half round and
looked her companion in the face with an intense
interest, which produced upon her own features an
expression of earnestness very uncommon upon their
pale and impassive lines. She was one of those persons
of little thought, who care nothing for causes or
consequences, so that the present difficulty is removed,
or the present hour provided with its wings; but the
repeated relief she had received from the young banker,
when total ruin would have been the consequence of
his refusal, and his marked coldness in his manner to
her, had stimulated the utmost curiosity of which she
was capable. Her vanity, founded upon her high rank
and great renown as a beauty, would have agreed that
he might be willing to get her into his power at that
price, had he been less agreeable in his own person,
or more eager in his manner. But she had wanted
money sufficiently to know, that thirty thousand pounds
are not a bagatelle, and her brain was busy till she discovered
the equivalent he sought for it. Meantime
her fear that he would turn out to be a lover, grew
rapidly into a fear that he would not.

Lady Ravelgold had been the wife of a dissolute
earl, who had died, leaving his estate inextricably involved.
With no male heir to the title or property,
and no very near relation, the beautiful widow shut
her eyes to the difficulties by which she was surrounded,
and at the first decent moment after the
death of her lord, she had re-entered the gay society
of which she had been the bright and particular star,
and never dreamed either of diminishing her establishment,
or of calculating her possible income. The
first heavy draft she had made upon the house of
Firkins and Co., her husband's bankers, had been returned
with a statement of the Ravelgold debt and
credit on their books, by which it appeared that Lord
Ravelgold had overdrawn four or five thousand pounds
before his death, and that from some legal difficulties,

nothing could be realized from the securities given
on his estates. This bad news arrived on the morning
of a fête to be given by the Russian ambassador, at
which her only child. Lady Imogen, was to make her
debùt in society. With the facility of disposition
which was peculiar to her, Lady Ravelgold thrust the
papers into her drawer, and determining to visit her
banker on the following morning, threw the matter
entirely from her mind and made preparations for the
ball. With the Russian government the house of
Firkins and Co. had long carried on very extensive
fiscal transactions, and in obedience to instructions
from the emperor, regular invitations for the embassy
fêtes were sent to the bankers, accepted occasionally
by the junior partner only, who was generally supposed
to be a natural son of old Firkins. Out of the
banking-house he was known as Mr. Tremlet, and it
was by this name, which was presumed to be his
mother's, that he was casually introduced to Lady
Imogen on the night of the fête, while she was separated
from her mother in the dancing-room. The consequence
was a sudden, deep, ineffaceable passion in
the bosom of the young banker, checked and silenced,
but never lessened or chilled by the recollection of
the obstacle of his birth. The impression of his subdued
manner, his worshipping, yet most respectful
tones, and the bright soul that breathed through his
handsome features with his unusual excitement, was,
to say the least, favorable upon Lady Imogen, and they
parted on the night of the fête, mutually aware of each
other's preference.

On the following morning Lady Ravelgold made
her proposed visit to the city; and inquiring for Mr.
Firkins, was shown in as usual to the junior partner,
to whom the colloquial business of the concern had
long been intrusted. To her surprise she found no
difficulty in obtaining the sum of money which had
been refused her on the preceding day—a result which
she attributed to her powers of persuasion, or to some
new turn in the affairs of the estate; and for two years
these visits had been repeated at intervals of three or
four months, with the same success, though not with
the same delusion as to the cause. She had discovered
that the estate was worse than nothing, and the
junior partner cared little to prolong his têtes-à-têtes
with her, and, up to the visit with which this tale
opened, she had looked to every succeeding one with
increased fear and doubt.

During these two years, Tremlet had seen Lady
Imogen occasionally at balls and public places, and
every look they exchanged wove more strongly between
them the subtle threads of love. Once or twice
she had endeavored to interest her mother in conversation
on the subject, with the intention of making
a confidence of her feelings; but Lady Ravengold,
when not anxious, was giddy with her own success,
and the unfamiliar name never rested a moment on her
ear. With this explanation to render the tale intelligible,
“let us,” as the French say, “return to our
muttons.”

Of the conversation between Tremlet and her mother,
Lady Imogen was an unobserved and astonished
witness. The tent which they had entered was large,
with a buffet in the centre, and a circular table waited
on by servants within the ring; and, just concealed
by the drapery around the pole, sat Lady Imogen
with a party of her friends, discussing very seriously
the threatened fashion of tight sleeves. She had half
risen, when her mother entered, to offer her a seat by
her side, but the sight of Tremlet, who immediately
followed, had checked the words upon her lip, and to
her surprise they seated themselves on the side that
was wholly unoccupied, and conversed in a tone inaudible
to all but themselves. Not aware that her
lover knew Lady Ravelgold, she supposed that they
might have been casually introduced, till the earnest
ness of her mother's manner, and a certain ease between
them in the little courtesies of the table, assured
her that this could not be their first interview. Tremlet's
face was turned from her, and she could not
judge whether he was equally interested; but she
had been so accustomed to consider her mother as
irresistible when she chose to please, that she supposed
it of course; and very soon the heightened color of
Lady Ravelgold, and the unwavering look of mingled
admiration and curiosity which she bent upon the
handsome face of her companion, left no doubt in her
mind that her reserved and exclusive lover was in the
dangerous toils of a rival whose power she knew.
From the mortal pangs of a first jealousy, Heaven send
thee deliverance, fair Lady Imogen!

“We shall find our account in the advances on
your ladyship's credit;” said Tremlet, in reply to the
direct question that was put to him. “Meantime
permit me to admire the courage with which you look
so disagreeable a subject in the face.”

“For `disagreeable subject,' read `Mr. Tremlet.'
I show my temerity more in that. Apropos of faces,
yours would become the new fashion of cravat. The
men at Crockford's slip the ends through a ring of
their lady-love's, if they chance to have one—thus!”
and untying the loose knot of his black satin cravat,
Lady Ravelgold slipped over the ends a diamond of
small value, conspicuously set in pearls.

“The men at Crockford's,” said Tremlet, hesitating
to commit the rudeness of removing the ring,
“are not of my school of manners. If I had been so
fortunate as to inspire a lady with a preference for me,
I should not advertise it on my cravat.”

“But suppose the lady were proud of her preference
as dames were of the devotion of their knights in the
days of chivalry—would you not wear her favor as
conspicuously as they?”

A flush of mingled embarrassment and surprise
shot over the forehead of Tremlet, and he was turning
the ring with his fingers, when Lady Imogen, attempting
to pass out of the tent, was stopped by her
mother.

“Imogen, my daughter! this is Mr. Tremlet. Lady
Imogen Ravelgold, Mr. Tremlet!”

The cold and scarce perceptible bow which the
wounded girl gave to her lover, betrayed no previous
acquaintance to the careless Lady Ravelgold. Without
giving a second thought to her daughter, she held
her glass for some champagne to a passing servant,
and as Lady Imogen and her friends crossed the lawn
to the dancing-tent, she resumed the conversation
which they had interrupted; while Tremlet, with his
heart brooding on the altered look he had received,
listened and replied almost unconsciously; yet from
this very circumstance, in a manner which was interpreted
by his companion as the embarrassment of a
timid and long-repressed passion for herself.

While Lady Ravelgold and the junior partner were
thus playing at cross purposes over their champagne
and bons-bons, Grisi and Lablanche were singing a
duet from I Puritani, to a full audience in the saloon;
the drinking young men sat over their wine at the
nearly-deserted tables; Lady Imogen and her friends
waltzed to Collinet's band, and the artisans were busy
below the lawn, erecting the machinery for the fireworks.
Meantime every alley and avenue, grot and
labyrinth, had been dimly illuminated with colored
lamps, showing like vari-colored glow-worms amid
the foliage and shells; and if the bright scenery of
Rose-Eden had been lovely by day, it was fay-land
and witchery by night. Fatal impulse of our nature,
that these approaches to paradise in the “delight of
the eye,” stir only in our bosoms the passions upon
which law and holy writ have put ban and bridle!

“Shall we stroll down this alley of crimson lamps?”
said Lady Ravelgold, crossing the lawn from the tent

where their coffee had been brought to them, and putting
her slender arm far into that of her now pale and
silent companion.

A lady in a white dress stood at the entrance of that
crimson avenue, as Tremlet and his passionate admirer
disappeared beneath the closing lines of the
long perspective, and, remaining a moment gazing
through the unbroken twinkle of the confusing lamps,
she pressed her hand hard upon her forehead, drew
up her form as if struggling with some irrepressible
feeling, and in another moment was whirling in the
waltz with Lord Ernest Fitzantelope, whose mother
wrote a complimentary paragraph about their performance
for the next Saturday's Court Journal.

The bugle sounded, and the band played a march
upon the lawn. From the breakfast tents, from the
coffee-rooms, from the dance, from the card-tables,
poured all who wished to witness the marvels that lie
in saltpetre. Gentlemen who stood in a tender attitude
in the darkness, held themselves ready to lean the
other way when the rockets blazed up, and mammas
who were encouraging flirtations with eligibles, whispered
a caution on the same subject to their less experienced
daughters.

Up sped the missiles, round spun the wheels, fair
burned the pagodas, swift flew the fire-doves off and
back again on their wires, and softly floated down
through the dewy atmosphere of that May night the
lambent and many-colored stars, flung burning from
the exploded rockets. Device followed device, and
Lady Imogen almost forgot, in her child's delight at
the spectacle, that she had taken into her bosom a
green serpent, whose folds were closing like suffocation
about her heart.

The finalè was to consist of a new light, invented
by the pyrotechnist, promised to Lady Roseberry to
be several degrees brighter than the sun—comparatively
with the quantity of matter. Before this last
flourish came a pause; and while all the world were
murmuring love and applause around her, Lady
Imogen, with her eyes fixed on an indefinite point in
the darkness, took advantage of the cessation of light
to feed her serpent with thoughts of passionate and
uncontrollable pain. A French attaché, Phillipiste to
the very tips of his mustache, addressed to her ear,
meantime, the compliments he had found most effective
in the Chaussée d'Antin.

The light burst suddenly from a hundred blazing
points, clear, dazzling, intense—illuminating, as by
the instantaneous burst of day, the farthest corner of
Rose-Eden. And Monsieur Mangepoire, with a
French contempt for English fireworks, took advantage
of the first ray to look into Lady Imogen's eyes.

“Mais, Miladi!” was his immediate exclamation,
after following their direction with a glance, “ce n'est
qu'un tableau vivant, cela! Help, gentlemen! Elle
s'évanôuit. Some salts! Misericorde! Mon Dieu!
Mon Dieu!” And Lady Imogen Ravelgold was carried
fainting to Lady Roseberry's chamber.

In a small opening at the end of a long avenue of
lilacs, extended from the lawn in the direction of
Lady Imogen's fixed and unconscious gaze, was presented,
by the unexpected illumination, the tableau
vivant, seen by her ladyship and Monsieur Mangepoire
at the same instant—a gentleman drawn up to
his fallest height, with his arms folded, and a lady
kneeling on the ground at his feet with her arms
stretched up to his bosom.

4. CHAPTER IV.

A little after two o'clock on the following
Wednesday, Tremlet's cabriolet stopped near the
perron of Willis's rooms in King street, and while he
sent up his card to the lady patronesses for his ticket
to that night's Almack's, he busied himself in looking
into the crowd of carriages about him, and reading on
the faces of their fair occupants the hope and anxiety
to which they were a prey till John the footman
brought them tickets or despair. Drawn up on the
opposite side of the street, stood a family-carriage of
the old style, covered with half the arms of the herald's
office, and containing a fat dowager and three very overdressed
daughters. Watching them, to see the effect
of their application, stood upon the sidewalk three or
four young men from the neighboring club-house, and
at the moment Tremlet was observing these circumstances,
a foreign britscka, containing a beautiful woman
of a reputation better understood than expressed
in the conclave above stairs, flew round the corner of
St. James's street, and very nearly drove into the open
mouth of the junior partner's cabriolet.

“I will bet you a Ukraine colt against this fine bay
of yours,” said the Russian secretary of legation, advancing
from the group of dandies to Tremlet, “that
miladi, yonder, with all the best blood of England in
her own and her daughters' red faces, gets no tickets
this morning.”

“I'll take a bet upon the lady who has nearly
extinguished me, if you like,” answered Tremlet,
gazing with admiration at the calm, delicate, child-like
looking creature, who sat before him in the
britscka.

“No!” said the secretary, “for Almack's is a republic
of beauty, and she'll be voted in without either
blood or virtue. Par exémple, Lady Ravelgold's
voucher is good here, though she does study tableaux
in Lothbury—eh, Tremlet?”

Totally unaware of the unlucky discovery by the
fireworks at Lady Roseberry's fête, Tremlet colored
and was inclined to take the insinuation as an affront;
but a laugh from the dandies drew off his companion's
attention, and he observed the dowager's footman
standing at her coach window with his empty hands
held up in most expressive negation, while the three
young ladies within sat aghast, in all the agonies of
disappointed hopes. The lumbering carriage got into
motion—its ineffective blazonry paled by the mortified
blush of its occupants—and, as the junior partner
drove away, philosophizing on the arbitrary opinions
and unprovoked insults of polite society, the britscka
shot by, showing him, as he leaned forward, a lovely
woman who bent on him the most dangerous eyes in
London, and an Almack's ticket lying on the unoccupied
cushion beside her.

The white redievo upon the pale blue wall of Almack's
showed every crack in its stucco flowers, and
the faded chaperons who had defects of a similar description
to conceal, took warning of the walls, and
retreated to the friendlier dimness of the tea-room.
Collinet was beginning the second set of quadrilles,
and among the fairest of the surpassingly beautiful
women who were moving to his heavenly music, was
Lady Imogen Ravelgold, the lovelier to-night for the
first heavy sadness that had ever dimmed the roses
in her cheek. Her lady-mother divided her thoughts
between what this could mean, and whether Mr.
Tremlet would come to the ball; and when, presently
after, in the dos-a-dos, she forgot to look at her daughter,
on seeing that gentleman enter, she lost a very
good opportunity for a guess at the cause of Lady
Imogen's paleness.

To the pure and true eye that appreciates the
divinity of the form after which woman is made, it
would have been a glorious feast to have seen the perfection
of shape, color, motion, and countenance, shown
that night on the bright floor of Almack's. For the
young and beautiful girls whose envied destiny is to
commence their woman's history in this exclusive

hall, there exists aids to beauty known to no other
class or nation. Perpetual vigilance over every limb
from the cradle up; physical education of a perfection,
discipline, and judgment, pursued only at great
expense and under great responsibility; moral education
of the highest kind, habitual consciousness of
rank, exclusive contact with elegance and luxury, and
a freedom of intellectual culture which breathes a soul
through the face before passion has touched it with a
line or a shade—these are some of the circumstances
which make Almack's the cynosure of the world for
adorable and radiant beauty.

There were three ladies who had come to Almack's
with a definite object that night, each of whom was
destined to be surprised and foiled: Lady Ravelgold,
who feared she had been abrupt with the inexperienced
banker, but trusted to find him softened by a day or
two's reflection; Mrs. St. Leger, the lady of the
britscka who had ordered supper for two on her arrival
at home from her morning's drive, and intended
to have the company of the handsome creature she
had nearly run over in King street; and Lady Imogen
Ravelgold as will appear in the sequel.

Tremlet stood in the entrance from the tea-room a
moment, gathering courage to walk alone into such a
dazzling scene, and then, having caught a glimpse of
the glossy lines of Lady Imogen's head at the farthest
end of the room, he was advancing toward her, when he
was addressed by a lady who leaned against one of the
slender columns of the orchestra. After a sweetly-phrased
apology for having nearly knocked out his
braits that morning with her horses' fore feet, Mrs. St.
Leger took his arm, and walking deliberately two or
three times up and down the room, took possession, at
last, of a banquette on the highest range, so far from any
other person, that it would have been a marked rudeness
to have left her alone. Tremlet took his seat by
her with this instinctive feeling, trusting that some of
her acquaintances would soon approach, and give him
a fair excuse to leave her; but he soon became
amused with her piquant style of conversation, and,
not aware of being observed, fell into the attitude of a
pleased and earnest listener.

Lady Ravelgold's feelings during this petit entretien,
were of a very positive description. She had
an instinctive knowledge, and consequently a jealous
dislike of Mrs. St. Leger's character; and, still under
the delusion that the young banker's liberality was
prompted by a secret passion for herself, she saw her
credit in the city and her hold upon the affections of
Tremlet (for whom she had really conceived a violent
affection), melting away in every smile of the dangerous
woman who engrossed him. As she looked around
for a friend, to whose ear she might communicate
some of the suffocating poison in her own heart, Lady
Imogen returned to her from a galopade; and, like a
second dagger into the heart of the pure-minded girl,
went this second proof of her lover's corrupt principle
and conduct. Unwilling to believe even her own eyes
on the night of Lady Roseberry's fête, she had summoned
resolution on the road home to ask an explanation
of her mother. Embarrassed by the abrupt question,
Lady Ravelgold felt obliged to make a partial
confidence of the state of her pecuniary affairs; and
to clear herself, she represented Tremlet as having
taken advantage of her obligations to him, to push a
dishonorable suit. The scene disclosed by the sudden
blaze of the fireworks being thus simply explained
Lady Imogen determined at once to give up
Tremlet's acquaintance altogether; a resolution which
his open flirtation with a woman of Mrs. St. Leger's
character served to confirm. She had, however, one
errand with him, prompted by her filial feelings and
favored by an accidental circumstance which will appear.

“Do you believe in animal magnetism?” asked
Mrs. St. Leger, “for by the fixedness of Lady Ravelgold's
eyes in this quarter,something is going to happen
to one of us.”

The next moment the Russian secretary approached
and took his seat by Mrs. St. Leger, and with
diplomatic address contrived to convey to Tremlet's
ear that Lady Ravelgold wished to speak with him.
The banker rose, but the quick wit of his companion
comprehended the manœuvre.

“Ah! I see how it is,” she said, “but stay—you'll
sup with me to-night? Promise me—parole d'honneur!”

“Parole!” answered Tremlet, making his way
out between the seats, half pleased and half embarrassed.

“As for you, Monsieur le Secretaire,” said Mrs.
St. Leger, “you have forfeited my favor, and may
sup elsewhere. How dare you conspire against me?”

While the Russian was making his peace, Tremlet
crossed over to Lady Ravelgold; but, astonished
at the change in Lady Imogen, he soon broke in
abruptly upon her mother's conversation, to ask her
to dance. She accepted his hand for a quadrille;
but as they walked down the room in search of a vis-à-vis.
she complained of heat, and asked timidly if he
would take her to the tea-room.

“Mr. Tremlet,” she said, fixing her eyes upon the
cup of tea which he had given her, and which she
found some difficulty in holding, “I have come here
to-night to communicate to you some important information,
to ask a favor, and to break off an acquaintance
which has lasted too long.”

Lady Imogen stopped, for the blood had fled from
her lips, and she was compelled to ask his arm for a
support. She drew herself up to her fullest height
the next moment, looked at Tremlet, who stood in
speechless astonishment, and with a strong effort, commenced
again in a low, firm tone—

“I have been acquainted with you some time, sir,
and have never inquired, nor knew more than your
name, up to this day. I suffered myself to be pleased
too blindly—”

“Dear Lady Imogen!”

“Stay a moment, sir! I will proceed directly to
my business. I received this morning a letter from
the senior partner of a mercantile house in the city,
with which you are connected. It is written on the
supposition that I have some interest in you, and informs
me that you are not, as you yourself suppose,
the son of the gentleman who writes the letter.”

“Madam!”

“That gentleman, sir, as you know, never was
married. He informs me that in the course of many
financial visits to St. Petersburgh, he formed a friendship
with Count Manteuffel, then minister of finance
to the emperor, whose tragical end, in consequence
of his extensive defalcations, is well known. In
brief, sir, you were his child, and were taken by this
English banker, and carefully educated as his own, in
happy ignorance, as he imagined, of your father's misfortunes
and mournful death.”

Tremlet leaned against the wall, unable to reply
to this astounding intelligence, and Lady Imogen
went on.

“Your title and estates have been restored to you
at the request of your kind benefactor, and you are
now the heir to a princely fortune, and a count of
the Russian empire. Here is the letter, sir, which
is of no value to me now. Mr. Tremlet! one word
more, sir.”

Lady Imogen grasped for breath.

“In return, sir, for much interest given you heretofore—in
return, sir, for this information—”

“Speak, dear Lady Imogen!”

“Spare my mother!”

“Mrs. St. Leger's carriage stops the way!” shouted

a servant at that moment, at the top of the stairs;
and as if there were a spell in the sound to nerve her
resolution anew, Lady Imogen Ravelgold shook the
tears from her eyes, bowed coldly to Tremlet, and
passed out into the dressing-room.

“If you please, sir,” said a servant, approaching the
amazed banker, “Mrs. St. Leger waits for you in her
carriage.”

“Will you come home and sup with us?” said
Lady Ravelgold at the same instant, joining him in
the tea-room.

“I shall be only too happy, Lady Ravelgold.”

The bold coachman of Mrs. St. Leger continued
to “stop the way,” spite of policemen and infuriated
footmen, for some fifteen minutes. At the end of
that time Mr. Tremlet appeared, handing down
Lady Ravelgold and her daughter, who walked to
their chariot, which was a few steps behind; and
very much to Mrs. St. Leger's astonishment, the
handsome banker sprang past her horses' heads a
minute after, jumped into his cabriolet, which stood
on the opposite side of the street, and drove after
the vanishing chariot as if his life depended on overtaking
it. Still Mrs. St. Leger's carriage “stopped
the way.” But, in a few minutes after, the same
footman who had summoned Tremlet in vain, returned
with the Russian secretary, doomed in blessed
unconsciousness to play the pis aller at her tête-à-tête supper in Spring Gardens.

5. CHAPTER V.

If Lady Ravelgold showed beautiful by the uncompromising
light and in the ornamented hall of
Almack's, she was radiant as she came through the
mirror door of her own loved-contrived and beauty-breathing
boudoir. Tremlet had been showed into
this recess of luxury and elegance on his arrival, and
Lady Ravelgold and her daughter, who preceded her
by a minute or two, had gone to their chambers, the
first to make some slight changes in her toilet, and
the latter (entirely ignorant of her lover's presence in
the house), to be alone with a heart never before in
such painful need of self-abandonment and solitude.

Tremlet looked about him in the enchanted room
in which he found himself alone, and, spite of the
prepossessed agitation of his feelings, the voluptuous
beauty of every object had the effect to divert and
tranquillize him. The light was profuse, but it came
softened through the thinnest alabaster; and while
every object in the room was distinctly and minutely
visible, the effect of moonlight was not more soft and
dreamy. The general form of the boudoir was an
oval, but within the pilasters of folded silk with their
cornices of gold, lay crypts containing copies exquisitely
done in marble of the most graceful statues of antiquity,
one of which seemed, by the curtain drawn
quite aside and a small antique lamp burning near it,
to be the divinity of the place—the Greek Antinous,
with his drooped head and full, smooth limbs, the
most passionate and life-like representation of voluptuous
beauty that intoxicates the slumberous air of
Italy. Opposite this, another niche contained a few
books, whose retreating shelves swung on a secret
door, and as it stood half open, the nodding head of a
snowy magnolia leaned through, as if pouring from
the lips of its broad chalice the mingled odors of the
unseen conservatory it betrayed. The first sketch in
crayons of a portrait of Lady Ravelgold by young
Lawrence, stood against the wall, with the frame half
buried in a satin ottoman; and, as Tremlet stood before
it, admiring the clear, classic outline of the head
and bust, and wondering in what chamber of his brain
the gifted artist had found the beautiful drapery in
which he had drawn her, the dim light glanced faintly
on the left, and the broad mirror by which he had
entered swung again on its silver hinges, and admitted
the very presentment of what he gazed on. Lady
Ravelgold had removed the jewels from her hair, and
the robe of wrought lace, which she had worn that
night over a boddice of white satin laced loosely below
the bosom. In the place of this she had thrown upon
her shoulders a flowing wrapper of purple velvet,
made open after the Persian fashion, with a short and
large sleeve, and embroidered richly with gold upon
the skirts. Her admirable figure, gracefully defined
by the satin petticoat and boddice, showed against the
gorgeous purple as it flowed back in her advancing
motion, with a relief which would have waked the very
soul of Titian; her complexion was dazzling and
faultless in the flattering light of her own rooms; and
there are those who will read this who know how the
circumstances which surround a woman—luxury,
elegance, taste, or the opposite of these—enhance or
dim, beyond help or calculation, even the highest order
of woman's beauty.

Lady Ravelgold held a bracelet in her hand as she
came in.

“In my own house,” she said, holding the glittering
jewel to Tremlet, “I have a fancy for the style
antique. Tasseline, my maid, has gone to bed, and
you must do the devoir of a knight, or an abigail, and
loop up this Tyrian sleeve. Stay—look first at the
model—that small statue of Cytheris, yonder! Not
the shoulder—for you are to swear mine is prettier—
but the clasp. Fasten it like that. So! Now take
me for a Grecian nymph the rest of the evening”

“Lady Ravelgold!”

“Hermione or Agläe, if you please! But let us
ring for supper!”

As the bell sounded, a superb South American
trulian darted in from the conservatory, and, spreading
his gorgeous black and gold wings a moment
over the alabaster shoulder of Lady Ravelgold, as if
he took a pleasure in prolonging the first touch as
he alighted, turned his large liquid eye fiercely on
Tremlet.

“Thus it is,” said Lady Ravelgold, “we target our
old favorites in our new. See how jealous he is!”

“Supper is served, miladi!” said a servant entering.

“A hand to each, then, for the present,” she said,
putting one into Tremlet's, and holding up the trulian
with the other. “He who behaves best shall drink
first with me.”

“I beg your ladyship's pardon,” said Tremlet,
drawing back, and looked at the servant, who immediately
left the room. “Let us understand each
other! Does Lady Imogen sup with us to-night?”

“Lady Imogen has retired,” said her mother, in
some surprise.

“Then, madam, will you be seated one moment and
listen to me?”

Lady Ravelgold sat down on the nearest ottoman,
with the air of a person too high bred to be taken by
surprise, but the color deepened to crimson in the
centre of her cheek, and the bird on her hand betrayed
by one of his gurgling notes that he was held
more tightly than pleased him. With a calm and decisive
tone, Tremlet went through the explanation
given in the previous parts of this narration. He declared
his love for Lady Imogen, his hopes (which he
had doubts of his birth) that Lady Ravelgold's increasing
obligations and embarrassments and his own wealth
might weigh against his disadvantages; and now, his
honorable descent being established, and his rank entitling
him to propose for her hand, he called upon
Lady Ravelgold to redeem her obligations to him by
an immediate explanation to her daughter of his conduct
toward herself, and by lending her whole influence
to the success of his suit.

Five minutes are brief time to change a lover into a
son-in-law; and Lady Ravelgold, as we have seen in
the course of this story, was no philosopher. She
buried her face in her hands, and sat silent for a while
after Tremlet had concluded: but the case was a very
clear one. Ruin and mortification were in one scale,
mortification and prosperity in the other. She rose,
pale but decided, and requesting Monsieur le conte
Manteuffel to await her a few minutes, ascended to
her daughter's chamber.

“If you please, sir,” said a servant, entering in about
half an hour, “miladi and Lady Imogen beg that you
will join them in the supper-room.”

6. CHAPTER VI.

The spirit of beauty, if it haunt in such artificial atmospheres
as Belgrave square, might have been pleased
to sit invisibly on the vacant side of Lady Ravelgold's
table. Tremlet had been shown in by the servant to a
small apartment, built like a belvidere over the garden,
half boudoir in its character, yet intended as a supper-room,
and at the long window (opening forth upon
descending terraces laden with flowers, and just now
flooded with the light of a glorious moon) stood Lady
Imogen, with her glossy head laid against the casement,
and the palm of her left hand pressed close upon
her heart. If those two lights—the moon faintly shed
off from the divine curve of her temple, and the stained
rose-lamp pouring its mellow tint full on the heavenly
shape and whiteness of her shoulder and neck—if those
two lights, I say, could have been skilfully managed,
Mr. Lawrence! what a picture you might have made
of Lady Imogen Ravelgold!

“Imogen, my daughter! Mr. Tremlet!” said her
mother as he entered.

Without changing her position, she gave him the
hand she had been pressing on her heart.

“Mr. Tremlet!” said Lady Ravelgold, evidently
entering into her daughter's embarrassment, “trouble
yourself to come to the table and give me a bit of this
pheasant. Imogen, George waits to give you some
champagne.”

“Can you forgive me?” said the beautiful girl, before
turning to betray her blushing cheek and suffused
eyes to her mother.

Tremlet stopped as if to pluck a leaf from the verbena
at her feet, and passed his lips over the slight fingers
he held.

“Pretty trulian!” murmured Lady Ravelgold to her
bird, as he stood on the edge of her champagne-glass,
and curving his superb neck nearly double, contrived
to drink from the sparkling brim—“pretty trulian!
you will be merry after this! What ancient Sybarite,
think you, Mr. Tremlet, inhabits the body of this
bright bird? Look up, mignon, and tell us if you were
Hylas or Alcibiades! Is the pheasant good, Mr. Tremlet?”

“Too good to come from Hades, miladi. Is it true
that you have your table supplied from Crockford's?”

“Tout bonnement! I make it a principle to avoid all
great anxieties, and I can trust nobody but Ude. He
sends my dinners quite hot, and if there is a particular
dish of game, he drives round at the hour and gives it
the last turn in my own kitchen. I should die, to be
responsible for my dinners. I don't know how people
get on that have no grand artiste. Pray, Mr. Tremlet
(I beg pardon—Monsieur le conte, perhaps I should
say?”)

“No, no, I implore you! `Tremlet' has been spoken
too musically to be so soon forgotten. Tremlet or
Charles, which you will!”

Lady Ravelgold put her hand in his, and looked
from his face to her daughter's with a smile, which as
sured him that she had obtained a victory over herself.
Shrinking immediately, however, from anything like
sentiment (with the nervous dread of pathos so peculiar
to the English), she threw off her trulian, that
made a circle and alighted on the emerald bracelet of
Lady Imogen, and rang the bell for coffee.

“I flatter myself, Mr. Tremlet,” she said, “that I
have made a new application of the homœopathic philosophy.
Hahnemann, they say, cures fevers by aggravating
the disease; and when I can not sleep, I
drink coffee. J'en suis passablement fiére! You did
not know I was a philosopher?”

“No, indeed!”

“Well, take some of this spiced mocha. I got it of
the Turkish ambassador, to whom I made beaux yeux
on purpose. Stop! you shall have it in the little tinsel
cups he sent me. George, bring those filagree
things! Now, Mr. Tremlet, imagine yourself in the
serail du Bosphore—Imogen and I two lovely Circassians,
par exemple! Is it not delicious? Talking of
the Bosphorus, nobody was classical enough to understand
the device in my coiffure to-night.”

“What was it?” asked Tremlet, absently, gazing
while he spoke, with eyes of envy at the trulian, who
was whetting his bill backward and forward on the
clear bright lips of Lady Imogen.

“Do you think my profile Grecian?” asked Lady
Ravelgold.

“Perfectly!”

“And my hair is coiffed à la Grec?”

“Most becomingly.”

“But still you won't see my golden grasshopper!
Do you happen to know, sir, that to wear the golden
grasshopper was the birthright of an Athenian? I saw
it in a book. Well! I had to explain it to everybody.
By-the-way, what did that gambler, George Heriot,
mean, by telling me that its legs should be black?—
`All Greeks have black legs,' said he, yawning in his
stupid way. What did he mean, Mr. Tremlet?”

“`Greeks' and blacklegs are convertible terms. He
thought you were more au fait of the slang dictionary.
Will you permit me to coax my beautiful rival from
your hand, Lady Imogen?”

She smiled, and put forward her wrist, with a bend
of its slender and alabaster lines which would have
drawn a sigh from Praxiteles. The trulian glanced
his fiery eyes from his mistress's face to Tremlet's,
and as the strange hand was put out to take him from
his emerald perch, he flew with the quickness of lightning
into the face of her lover, and buried the sharp
beak in his lip. The blood followed copiously, and
Lady Imogen, startled from her timidity, sprang from
her chair and pressed her hands one after the other
upon the wound, in passionate and girlish abandonment.
Lady Ravelgold hurried to her dressing-room
for something to stanch the wound, and, left alone
with the divine creature who hung over him. Tremlet
drew her to his bosom and pressed his cheek long and
closely to hers, while to his lips, as if to keep in life,
clung her own crimsoned and trembling fingers.

“Imogen!” said Lady Ravelgold, entering, “take
him to the fountain in the garden and wash the wound:
then put on this bit of gold-beater's skin. I will come
to you when I have locked up the trulian. Is it painful,
Mr. Tremlet?”

Tremlet could not trust his voice to answer, but
with his arm still around Lady Imogen, he descended
by the terrace of flowers to the fountain.

They sat upon the edge of the marble basin, and
the moonlight striking through the jet of the fountain,
descended upon them like a rain of silver. Lady Imogen
had recovered from her fright, and buried her face
in her hands, remembering into what her feelings had
betrayed her; and Tremlet, sometimes listening to the
clear bell-like music of the descending water, sometimes
uttering the broken sentences which are most

eloquent in love, sat out the hours till the stars began
to pale, undisturbed by Lady Ravelgold, who, on the
upper stair of the terrace, read by a small lamp, which,
in the calm of that heavenly summer night, burned
unflickeringly in the open air.

It was broad daylight when Tremlet, on foot, sauntered
slowly past Hyde Park corner on his way to the
Albany. The lamps were still struggling with the
brightening approach to sunrise, the cabmen and their
horses slept on the stand by the Green Park, and with
cheerful faces the laborers went to their work, and with
haggard faces the night-birds of dissipation crept wearily
home. The well-ground dust lay in confused heelmarks
on the sidewalk, a little dampened by the night-dew;
the atmosphere in the street was clear, as it never
is after the stir of day commences; a dandy, stealing
out from Crockford's, crossed Piccadilly, lifting up his
head to draw in long breaths of the cool air, after the
closeness of over-lighted rooms and excitement; and
Tremlet, marking none of these things, was making
his way through a line of carriages slowly drawing up
to take off their wearied masters from a prolonged fête
at Devonshire house, when a rude hand clapped him
on the shoulder.

“Monsieur Tremlet!”

“Ah, Baron! bien bon jour!”

“Bien rencontrè, Monsieur! You have insulted a
lady to-night, who has confided her cause to my hands.
Madam St. Leger, sir, is without a natural protector,
and you have taken advantage of her position to insult
her—grossly, Mr. Tremlet, grossly!”

Tremlet looked at the Russian during this extraordinary
address, and saw that he was evidently highly
excited with wine. He drew him aside into Berkeley
street, and in the calmest manner attempted to explain
what was not very clear to himself. He had totally
forgotten Mrs. St. Leger. The diplomate, though
quite beyond himself with his excitement, had sufficient
perception left to see the weak point of his statement;
and infuriated with the placid manner in which
he attempted to excuse himself, suddenly struck his
glove into his face, and turned upon his heel. They
had been observed by a policeman, and at the moment
that Tremlet, recovering from his astonishment, sprang
forward to resent the blow, the gray-coated guardian
of the place laid his hand upon his collar and detained
him till the baron had disappeared.

More than once on his way to the Albany, Tremlet
surprised himself forgetting both the baron and the insult,
and feeding his heart in delicious abandonment
with the dreams of his new happiness. He reached
his rooms and threw himself on the bed, forcing from
his mind, with a strong effort, the presence of Lady
Imogen, and trying to look calmly on the unpleasant
circumstance before him. A quarrel which, the day
before, he would have looked upon merely as an inconvenience,
or which, under the insult of a blow, he
would have eagerly sought, became now an almost insupportable
evil. When he reflected on the subject
of the dispute—a contention about a woman of doubtful
reputation taking place in the same hour with a
first avowal from the delicate and pure Lady Imogen—
when he remembered the change in his fortunes,
which he had as yet scarcely found time to realize—
on the consequences to her who was so newly dear to
him, and on all he might lose, now that life had become
invaluable—his thoughts were almost too painful
to bear. How seldom do men play with an equal stake
in the game of taking life, and how strange it is that
equality of weapons is the only comparison made necessary
by the laws of honor!

Tremlet was not a man to be long undecided. He
rose, after an hour's reflection, and wrote as follows:—

There was a bridal on the following Monday at St.
George's church, and the Russian secretary stood behind
the bridegroom. Lady Ravelgold had never been
seen so pale, but her face was clear of all painful feeling;
and it was observed by one who knew her well,
that her beauty had acquired, during the brief engagement
of her daughter, a singular and undefinable elevation.
As the carriages with their white favors turned
into Bond street, on their way back to Belgrave square,
the cortége was checked by the press of vehicles, and
the Russian, who accompanied Lady Ravelgold in her
chariot, found himself opposite the open britscka of a
lady who fixed her glass full upon him without recognising
a feature of his face.

“I am afraid you have affronted Mrs. St. Leger,
baron!” said Lady Ravelgold.

“Or I should not have been here!” said the Russian;
and as they drove up Piccadilly, he had just time
between Bond street and Milton Crescent to tell her
ladyship the foregone chapter of this story.

The trulian, on that day, was fed with wedding-cake,
and the wound on Mr. Tremlet's lip was not cured by
letting alone.

PALETTO'S BRIDE.

1. CHAPTER I.

“My daughter!” said the count Spinola.

The lady so addressed threw off a slight mantle and
turned her fair features inquiringly to her father. Heedless
of the attention he had arrested, the abstracted
count paced up and down the marble pavement of his
hall, and when, a moment after, Francesca came to
him for his good-night kiss, he imprinted it silently
on her forehead, and stepped out on the balcony to
pursue, under the aiding light of the stars, thoughts
that were more imperative than sleep.

There had been a fête of great splendor in the ducal
gardens of the Boboli, and Francesca Spinola had
shown there, as usual, the most radiant and worshipped
daughter of the nobilita of Florence. The melancholy
duke himself (this was in the days of his first
marriage) had seemed even gay in presenting her with
flowers which he had gathered at her side, with the
dew on them (in an alley glittering with the diamonds on
noble bosoms, and dewdrops on roses that would slumber,
though it was the birth-night of a princess), and

marked as was the royal attention to the envied beauty,
it was more easily forgiven her than her usual triumphs—for
it cost no one a lover. True to his conjugal
vows, the sad-featured monarch paid to beauty
only the homage exacted alike by every most admirable
work of nature.

The grand-duke Leopold had not been the only admirer
whose attentions to Francesca Spinola had been
remarked. A stranger, dressed with a magnificence
that seemed more fitted for a masquerade than a court-hall,
and yet of a mien that promised danger to the
too inquisitive, had entered alone, and, marking out the
daughter of the haughty count from the first, had
procured an introduction, no one knew how, and
sought every opportunity which the intervals of the
dance afforded, to place himself at her side. Occupied
with the courtly devoirs of his rank, the count
was, for a while, unaware of what struck almost every
one else, and it was only when the stranger's name
was inquired of him by the duke, that his dark and
jealous eye fell upon a face whose language of kindling
and undisguised admiration a child would have interpreted
aright. It was one of those faces that are of
no degree—that may belong to a barbaric king, or to
a Greek slave—that no refinement would improve, and
no servile habits degrade; faces which take their
changes from an indomitable and powerful soul, and
are beyond the trifling impression of the common usages
of life. Spinola was offended with the daring and
passionate freedom of the stranger's gaze upon his
daughter; but he hesitated to interrupt their conversation
too rudely. He stayed to exchange a compliment
with some fair obstruction in his way across the
crowded saloon, and, in the next moment, Francesca
stood alone.

“Who left you this moment, my Francesca?” asked
the count, with affected unconcern.

“I think, a Venetian,” she answered.

“And his name?”

“I know not, my father!”

The count's face flashed.

“Who presented him to my darling?” he asked,
again forcing himself to composure.

Francesca colored; and, with downcast eyes, answered:—

“No one, my father! He seemed to know me, and
I thought I might have forgotten him.”

Spinola turned on his heel, and, after a few vain inquiries,
and as vain a search for the stranger, ordered
his attendants, and drove silently home.

It was close upon the gray of the morning, and the
count still leaned over the stone-railing of his balcony.
Francesca had been gone an hour to her chamber.
A guitar-string sounded from the street below, and, a
moment after, a manly and mellow voice broke into a
Venetian barcarole, and sang with a skill and tenderness
which a vestal could scarce have listened to unmoved.
Spinola stepped back and laid his hand upon
his sword; but, changing his thought, he took a lamp
from the wall within, and crept noiselessly to his
daughter's chamber. She lay within her silken curtains,
with her hands crossed on her bosom, and from
her parted lips came the low breath of innocent and
untroubled sleep. Reassured, the count closed her
window and extinguished his lamp; and, when the
guitar was no longer heard echoing from the old
palace walls, and the rich voice of the serenader had
died away with his footsteps, the lord of the Palazzo
Spinola betook himself to sleep with a heart somewhat
relieved of its burden.

On the following day, the count pleaded the early-coming
heats of summer; and, with slight preparation,
left Florence for his summer-palace in the Apennines.
When Francesca joined him cheerfully, and
even gayly, in his sudden plan, he threw aside the
jealous fears that had haunted his breast, and forgot
the stranger and his barcarole. The old trees of his
maison de plaisance were heavy with the leaves of the
Italian May; the statues stood cool in the shade; the
mountain rivulets forgot their birth in the rocky
brooks, and ran over channels of marble, and played
up through cactus-leaves and sea-shells, and nereids'
horns, all carved by the contemporaries of Donatello.
“And here,” thought the proud noble, “I am á l'ecart
of the designs of adventurers, and the temptations and
dangers of gayety, and the child of my hopes will refresh
her beauty and her innocence, under the watchful
eye, ever present, of my love.

Francesca Spinola was one of those Italian natures
of which it is difficult for the inhabitants of other
climes to conceive. She had no feelings. She had
passions. She could love—but it sprang in an instant
to its fullest power—and maidenly reserve and hesitation
were incompatible with its existence. She had
listened, unmoved, to all the adulation of the duke's
court, and had been amused with the devotion of all
around her—but never touched. The voice of the
stranger at the fête of the Boboli—the daring words
he had addressed to her—had arrested her attention;
and it needed scarce the hour—which flew like a moment
at his side—to send a new sensation, like a tempest,
through her heart. She reasoned upon nothing
—asked nothing; but, while she gave up her soul
wholly to a passion hitherto unfelt, the deep dissimulation
which seems a natural part of the love of that
burning clime, prompted her, by an unquestioned impulse,
to conceal it entirely from her father. She had
counterfeited sleep when nearly surprised in listening
to the barcarole, and she had little need to counterfeit
joy at her departure for the mountains.

The long valley of the Arno lay marked out upon
the landscape by a wreath of vapor, stealing up as if
enamored of the fading color of the clouds; and far
away, like a silver bar on the rim of the horizon, shone
the long line of the Mediterranean. The mountain
sides lay bathed in azure; and, echoing from the
nearest, came the vesper-bells of Vallombrosa. Peace
and purity were stamped upon the hour.

“My child,” said the softened count, drawing Francesca
to his bosom, as they stood looking off upon
this scene from the flowery terrace beneath the portico;
“does my child love me?”

Francesca placed her hands upon his shoulders and
kissed him for reply.

“I feel impelled,” he continued, “to talk to you
while this beautiful hour is around us, of an affection
that resembles it.”

“Resembles the sunset, my father?”

“Yes! Shall I tell you how? By affecting with
its soft influence every object under the bend of the
sky! My Francesca! there are parents who love
their children, and love them well, and yet find feelings
for other attachments, and devotion for every
other interest in life. Not so mine! My love for
my child is a whole existence poured into hers.
Look at me, Francesca! I am not old. I am capable,
perhaps, of other love than a parent's. There are
among the young and beautiful who have looked on
me with favoring eyes. My blood runs warm yet, and
my step is as full of manhood—perhaps my heart as
prompt to be gay—as ever. I mean to say that I am
not too old for a lover. Does my daughter think so?”

“I have been long vain of your beauty, dear father,”
said Francesca, threading her hand in his dark
curls.

“There are other things that might share your
empire in my heart—politics, play, the arts—a hundred
passions which possess themselves of men whose
fortune or position gives them means and leisure.
Now listen, my daughter! You have supplanted all
these! You have filled my heart with yourself.

I am tempted to love—my heart is my daughter's.
I am asked to play—my thoughts are with my child.
I have neither time for politics, nor attention for the
arts—my being breathes through my child. I am
incapable of all else. Do you hear me, Francesca?”

“I do, dear father!”

“Then, one moment more! I can not conceal my
thoughts from you, and you will pardon love like mine
for ungrounded fears. I liked not the stranger at the
duke's palace.”

Francesca stole a quick look at her father, and,
with the rapidity of light, her dark eye resumed its
tranquillity.

“I say I liked him not! No one knew him! He
is gone, no one knows whither! I trust he will never
be seen more in Florence. But I will not disguise
from you that I thought you—pleased with him!”

“Father!”

“Forgive me if I wrong you—but, without pursuing
the subject, let your father implore you, on his
knees, for the confidence of your heart. Will you
tell me your thoughts, Francesca? Will you love
me with but the thousandth part of my adoration, my
devotion, for my child?”

“Father! I will!”

The count rose from the knee on which he had
fallen, gave his daughter a long embrace, and led her
in. And that night she fled over the Tuscan border,
into neighboring Romagna, and, with the stranger at
her side, sped away, under the cover of night, toward
the shores of the Brenta.

Like a city of secrets, sleeps silent Venice. Her
sea-washed foundations are buried under the smooth
glass of the tide. Her palace-entrances are dark caverns,
impenetrable to the eye. Her veiled dames are
unseen in their floating chambers, as they go from
street to street; and mysteriously and silently glide to
and fro those swift gondolas, black as night, yet carrying
sadness and mirth, innocence and guilt, alike
swiftly, mysteriously, and silently. Water, that betrays
no footstep, and covers all with the same mantle
of light, fills her streets. Silence, that is the seal of
secrecy, reigns day and night over her thousand
palaces.

For an hour the smooth mirror of the broad canal
that sweeps under the Rialto, had not been divided by
the steel prow of a gondola. Francesca Spinola stood
at the window of a chamber in a palace of gorgeous
magnificence, watching that still water for the coming
of her husband. The silver lines of the moon stole
back imperceptibly, as her full orb sailed up the
heavens, and the turrets of the old architecture of
Venice, drawn clearly on the unruffled bosom of the
canal, seemed retiring before a consuming sheet of
silver. The silence seemed painful. To the ear of
the beautiful Florentine, the want of the sound of a
footstep, of the echo of some distant wheel, the utter
death of all sound common to even the stillest hour of
a paved city, seemed oppressive and awful. Behind
her burned lamps of alabaster, and perfumes filled the
chamber, and on a cushion of costly velvet lay a mean
and unornamented guitar. Its presence in so costly a
palace was a secret yet withheld. She wished to
toach its strings, if only to disperse the horro of silence.
But she raised her fingers, and again, without
touching it, leaned out and watched the dark arch of
the Rialto.

A gondola, with a single oar, sped swiftly from its
black shadow. It could not be Paletto. He had
gone with his two faithful servants to St. Mark's.
The oar ceased—the bark headed in—the water
splashed on the marble stair—and the gondolier stepped
on shore. Ah, who but Paletto had such a form
as stood there in the moonlight?

“Are we to be married again,” said Francesca, as
her husband entered the chamber, “that you have
once more disguised yourself as a fisherman?”

Paletto turned from the light, and took up the
mysterious guitar. “It is no night to be in-doors, my
Francesca! Come with me to the lagoon, and I will
tell you the story of this despised instrument. Will
you come?” he pursued, as she stood looking at him
in wonder at his strange dress and disturbed look.
“Will you come, my wife?”

“But you have returned without your gondoliers!”
she said, advancing a step to take his hand.

“I have rowed a gondola ere now,” he answered;
and, without further explanation, he led her down the
lofty staircase, and seating her in the stern of the bark
which he had brought with him, stepped upon the
platform, and, with masterly skill and power, drove it
like a shadow under the Rialto.

He who has watched the horn of a quarter-moon
gliding past the towers, pinnacles and palaces of the
drifting clouds, and in his youthful and restless brain,
fancied such must be the smooth delight and changing
vision of a traveller in strange lands—one who has
thus dreamed in his boyhood will scarce shoot though
Venice for the first time in a gondola, without a
sense of familiarity with the scene and motion. The
architecture of the clouds is again drifting past, and
himself seems borne onward by the silver shallop of
the moon.

Francesca sat on the low cushion of the gondola,
watching and wondering. How should her luxurious
Paletto have acquired the exquisite skill with which
he drove the noiseless boat like a lance-fly over the
water. Another gondola approached or was left behind,
the corner of a palace was to be rounded, or the
black arch of a bridge to be shot under, and the
peculiar warning-cry of the gondoliers, giving notice
of their unheard approach, fell from his lips so mechanically,
that the hireling oarsmen of the city, marvelling
at his speed, but never doubting that it was a
comrade of the Piazza, added the “fratello mio” to
their passing salutation. She saw by every broad
beam of light, which, between the palaces, came down
across them, a brow clouded and a mind far from the
oar he turned so skilfully. She looked at the gondola
in which she sat. It was old and mean. In the prow
lay a fisher's net, and the shabby guitar, thrown upon
it, seemed now, at least, not out of place. She looked
up at Paletto once more, and, in his bare throat and
bosom, his loose cap and neglected hair, she could
with difficulty recognise the haughty stranger of the
Boboli. She spoke to him. It was necessary to
break the low-born spell that seemed closing around
her. Paletto started at her voice, and suspending his
oar, while the gondola still kept way as if with its own
irresistible volition, he passed his hand over his eyes
and seemed waking from some painful dream.

The gondola was now far out in the lagoon.—
Around them floated an almost impalpable vapor
just making the moonlight visible, and the soft click
of the water beneath the rising and dropping prow was
the only sound between them and the cloudless heaven.
In that silence Paletto strung his guitar and sang to
his bride with a strange energy. She listened and
played with his tangled locks, but there seemed a spell
upon her tongue when she would ask the meaning of
this mystery.

“Francesca!” he said at last, raising his head from
her lap.

“What says my fisherman?” she replied, holding
up his rough cap with a smile.

Paletto started, but recovering his composure, instantly
took the cap from her jewelled fingers and
threw it carelessly upon his head.

“Francesca! who is your husband?”

“Paletto?”

“And who is Paletto?”

“I would have asked sometimes, but your kisses
have interrupted me. Yet I know enough.”

“What know you?”

“That he is a rich and noble seignior of Venice!”

“Do I look one to-night?”

“Nay—for a masquerade, I have never seen a
better! Where learned you to look so like a fisherman
and row so like a gondolier?”

Paletto frowned.

“Francesca!” said he folding his arms across his
bosom, “I am the son of a fisherman, and I was bred
to row the gondola beneath you!”

The sternness of his tone checked the smile upon
her beautiful lip, and when she spoke it was with a
look almost as stern as his own.

“You mock me too gravely, Paletto! But come!
I will question you in your own humor. Who educated
the fisherman's son?”

“The fisherman.”

“And his palace and his wealth—whence came
they, Signor Pescatore?”

The scornful smile of incredulity with which this
question was asked, speedily fled from her lip as Paletto
answered it.

“Listen! Three months since I had never known
other condition than a fisherman of the lagoon, nor
worn other dress than this in which you see me. The
first property I ever possessed beyond my day's earnings,
was this gondola. It was my father's, Giannotto
the fisherman. When it became mine by his death,
I suddenly wearied of my tame life, sold boat and nets,
and with thoughts which you can not understand,
but which have brought you here, took my way to
the Piazza. A night of chance, begun with the whole
of my inheritance staked upon a throw, left me master
of wealth I had never dreamed of. I became a
gay signore. It seemed to me that my soul had gone
out of me, and a new spirit, demoniac if you will, had
taken possession. I no longer recognised myself. I
passed for an equal with the best-born, my language
altered, my gait, my humor. One strong feeling alone
predominated—an insane hatred to the rank in which
you were born, Francesca! It was strange, too, that
I tried to ape its manners. I bought the palace you
have just left, and filled it with costly luxuries. And
then there grew upon me the desire to humiliate that
rank—to pluck down to myself some one of its proud
and cherished daughters—such as you!”

Francesca muttered something between her teeth,
and folded her small arms over her bosom. Paletto
went on.

“I crossed to Florence with this sole intention.
Unknown and uninvited, I entered the palace at the
fête of the Boboli, and looked around for a victim.
You were the proudest and most beautiful. I chose
you and you are here.”

Paletto looked at her with a smile, and never sunbeam
was more unmixed with shadow than the smile
which answered it on the lips of Spinola's daughter.

“My Paletto!” she said, “you have the soul of a
noble, and the look of one, and I am your bride. Let
us return to the palace!”

“I have no palace but this!” he said, striking his
hand like a bar of iron upon the side of the gondola.

`You have not heard out my tale.”

Francesca sat with a face unmoved as marble.

“This night, at play, I lost all. My servants are
dismissed, my palace belongs to another, and with
this bark which I had repurchased, I am once more
Paletto the fisherman!”

A slight heave of the bosom of the fair Florentine
was her only response to this astounding announcement.
Her eyes turned slowly from the face of the
fisherman, and fixing apparently on some point far out
in the Adriatic, she sat silent, motionless, and cold.

“I am a man, Francesca!” said Paletto after a pause
which, in the utter stillness of the lagoon around them,
seemed like a suspension of the breathing of nature,
and “I have not gone through this insane dream without
some turning aside of the heart. Spite of myself,
I loved you and I could not dishonor you. We
are married, Francesca!”

The small dark brows of the Florentine lowered
till the silken lashes they overhung seemed starting
from beneath her forehead. Her eyes flashed fire
below.

“Bene!” said Paletto, rising to his feet; “one
word more while we have silence around us and are
alone. You are free to leave me, and I will so far repair
the wrong I have done you, as to point out the
way. It will be daylight in an hour. Fly to the
governor's palace, announce your birth, declare that
you were forced from your father by brigands, and
claim his protection. The world will believe you, and
the consequences to myself I will suffer in silence.”

With a sudden, convulsive motion, Francesca thrust
out her arm, and pointed a single finger toward Venice.
Paletto bent to his oar, and quivering in every seam
beneath its blade, the gondola sped on his way. The
steel prow struck fire on the granite steps of the
Piazza, the superb daughter of Spinola stepped over
the trembling side, and with a half-wave of her hand,
strode past the Lion of St. Mark, and approached the
sentinel at the palace-gate. And as her figure was
lost among the arabesque columns shaded from the
moon, Paletto's lonely gondola shot once more silently
and slowly from the shore.

2. CHAPTER II.

The smooth, flat pavement of the Borg'ognisanti
had been covered since morning with earth, and the
windows and balconies on either side were flaunting
with draperies of the most gorgeous colors. The
riderless horse-races, which conclude the carnival in
Florence, were to be honored by the presence of the
court. At the far extremity of the street, close by the
gate of the Cascine, an open veranda, painted in fresco,
stood glittering with the preparations for the royal party,
and near it the costlier hangings of here and there a
window or balustrade, showed the embroidered crests
of the different nobles of Tuscany. It was the people's
place and hour, and beneath the damask and cloth of
gold, the rough stone windows were worn smooth by
the touch of peasant hands, and the smutched occupants,
looking down from the balconies above, upon
the usupers of their week-day habitations, formed, to
the stranger's eye, not the least interesting feature of
the scene.

As evening approached, the balconies began to
show their burden of rank and beauty, and the street
below filled with the press of the gay contadini.
The ducal cortege, in open carriages, drove down
the length of the course to their veranda at the gate,
but no other vehicle was permitted to enter the serried
crowd; and, on foot like the peasant-girl, the
noble's daughter followed the servants of her house,
who slowly opened for her a passage to the balcony
she sought. The sun-light began to grow golden.
The convent-bell across the Arno rang the first peal
of vespers, and the horses were led in.

It was a puzzle to any but an Italian how that race
was to be run. The entire population of Florence
was crowded into a single narrow street—men, women,
and children, struggling only for a foothold. The signal
was about to be given for the start, yet no attempt
was made to clear a passage. Twenty high-spirited
horses fretted behind the rope, each with a dozen
spurs hung to his surcingales, which, at the least motion,

must drive him onward like the steed of Mazeppa.
Gay ribands were braided in their manes, and the
bets ran high. All sounded and looked merry, yet it
would seem as if the loosing of the start-rope must be
like the letting in of destruction upon the crowd.

In a projecting gallery of a house on the side next
the Arno, was a party that attracted attention, somewhat
from their rank and splendid attire, but more
from the remarkable beauty of a female, who seemed
their star and idol. She was something above the
middle height of the women of Italy, and of the style
of face seen in the famous Judith of the Pitti—dark,
and of melancholy so unfathomable as almost to affray
the beholder. She looked a brooding prophetess;
yet through the sad expression of her features
there was a gleam of fierceness, that to the more critical
eye betrayed a more earthly gleam of human passion
and suffering. As if to belie the maturity of years
of which such an expression should be the work, an
ungloved hand and arm of almost childlike softness
and roundness lay on the drapery of the railed gallery;
and stealing from that to her just-perfected form, the
gazer made a new judgment of her years, while he
wondered what strange fires had forced outward the
riper lineaments of her character.

The count Fazelli, the husband of this fair dame,
stood within reach of her hand, for it was pressed on
his arm with no gentle touch, yet his face was turned
from her. He was a slight youth, little older, apparently,
than herself, of an effeminate and yet wilful cast
of countenance, and would have been pronounced by
women (what a man would scarce allow him to be)
eminently handsome. Effeminate coxcomb as he was,
he had power over the stronger nature beside him, and
of such stuff, in courts and cities, are made sometimes
the heroes whose success makes worthier men almost
forswear the worship due to women.

There were two other persons in the balconies of
the Corso, who were actors in the drama of which this
was a scene. The first was the prima donna of the
Cocomero, to whose rather mature charms the capricious
Fazelli had been for a month paying a too open
homage; and the second was a captain in the duke's
guard, whose personal daring in the extermination of
a troop of brigands, had won for him some celebrity
and his present commission. What thread of sympathy
rested between so humble an individual and the
haughty countess Fazelli, will be shown in the sequel.
Enough for the present, that, as he stood leaning
against the pillar of an opposite gallery, looking carelessly
on the preparations for the course, that proud
dame saw and remembered him.

A blast from a bugle drew all eyes to the starting-post,
and in another minute the rope was dropped, and
the fiery horses loosed upon their career. Right into
the crowd, as if the bodies of the good citizens of
Florence were made of air, sprang the goaded troop,
and the impossible thing was done, for the suffocating
throngs divided like waves before the prow, and united
again as scathless and as soon. The spurs played
merrily upon the flanks of the affrighted animals, and
in an instant they had swept through the Borg'ognisanti,
and disappeared into the narrow lane leading to
the Trinita. It was more a scramble than a race, yet
there must be a winner, and all eyes were now occupied
in gazing after the first glimpse of his ribands as
he was led back in triumph.

Uncompelled by danger, the suffocating crowd made
way with more difficulty for the one winning horse
than they had done for the score that had contended
with him. Yet, champing the bit, and tossing his
ribands into the air, he came slowly back, and after
passing in front of the royal veranda, where a small
flag was thrown down to be set into the rosette of his
bridle, he returned a few steps, and was checked by
the groom under the balcony of the prima donna. A
moment after, the winning flag was waving from the
rails above, and as the sign that she was the owner of
the victorious horse was seen by the people, a shout
arose which thrilled the veins of the fair singer more
than all the plaudits of the Cocomero. It is thought
to be pleasant to succeed in that for which we have
most struggled—that for which our ambition and our
efforts are known to the world—to be eminent, in
short, in our metier, our vocation. I am inclined to
think it natural to most men, however, and to all possessors
of genius, to undervalue that for which the
world is most willing to praise them, and to delight
more in excelling in that which seems foreign to their
usual pursuits, even if it be a trifle. It is delightful to
disappoint the world by success in anything. Detraction,
that follows genius to the grave, sometimes admits
its triumph, but never without the “back-water”
that it could do no more. The fine actress had won a
shout from assembled Florence, yet off the scene. She
laid one hand upon her heart, and the other, in the
rash exultation of the moment, ventured to wave a
kiss of gratitude to the count Fazelli.

As that favored signor crossed to offer his congratulations,
his place beside the countess was filled by a
young noble, who gave her the explanatory information—that
the horse was Fazelli's gift. Calmly, almost
without a sign of interest or emotion, she turned her
eyes upon the opposite balcony. A less searching and
interested glance would have discovered, that if the
young count had hitherto shared the favor of the admired
singer with his rivals, he had no rival now.
There was in the demeanor of both an undisguised
tenderness that the young countess had little need to
watch long, and retiring from the balcony, she accepted
the attendance of her communicative companion,
and was soon whirling in her chariot over the Ponte
St. Angelo, on her way to the princely palace that
would soon cease to call her its mistress.

Like square ingots of silver, the moonlight came
through the battlements of the royal abode of the
Medici. It was an hour before day. The heavy heel
of the sentry was the only sound near the walls of the
Pitti, save, when he passed to turn, the ripple of the
Arno beneath the arches of the jeweller's bridge broke
faintly on the ear. The captain of the guard had
strolled from the deep shadow of the palace into the
open moonlight, and leaned against a small stone shrine
of the Virgin set into the opposite wall, watching musingly
the companionable and thought-stirring emperess
of the night.

“Paletto!” suddenly uttered a voice near him.

The guardsman started, but instantly recovered his
position, and stood looking over his epaulet at the
intruder, with folded arms.

“Paletto!” she said again, in a lower and more appealing
tone—“will you listen to me?”

“Say on, Countess Fazelli!”

“Countess Fazelli no longer, but Paletto's wife!”

“Ha! ha!” laughed the guardsman bitterly, “that
story is old, for so false a one.”

“Scorn me not! I am changed.” The dark eyes
of Francesca Cappone lifted up, moist and full, into
the moonlight, and fixing them steadfastly on the soldier's,
she seemed to demand that he should read her
soul in them. For an instant, as he did so, a troubled
emotion was visible in his own features, but a new
thought seemed to succeed the feeling, and turning
away with a cold gesture, he said, “I knew you false,
but till now I thought you pure. Tempt me not to
despise as well as hate you!”

“I have deserved much at your hand,” she answered,
with a deeper tone, “but not this. You are my husband,
Paletto!”

“One of them!” he replied, with a sneer.

Francesca clasped her hands in agony. “I have
come to you,” she said, “trusting the generous nature

which I have proved so well. I can not live unloved.
I deserted you, for I was ignorant of myself. I have
tried splendor and the love of my own rank, but one
is hollow and the last is selfish. Oh, Paletto! what
love is generous like yours?”

The guardsman's bosom heaved, but he did not turn
to her. She laid her hand upon his arm: “I have
come to implore you to take me back, Paletto. False
as I was to you, you have been true to me. I would
be your wife again. I would share your poverty, if
you were once more a fisherman on the lagoon. Are
you inexorable, Paletto?”

Her hand stole up to his shoulder: she crept closer
to him, and buried her head, unrepelled, in his bosom.
Paletto laid his hand upon the mass of raven hair
whose touch had once been to him so familiar, and
while the moon drew their shadows as one on the
shrine of the Virgin, the vows of early love were repeated
with a fervor unknown hitherto to the lips of
Cappone's daughter, and Paletto replied, not like a
courtly noble, but like that which was more eloquent
—his own love-prompted and fiery spirit.

The next day there was a brief but fierce rencontre
between Count Fazelli and the guardsman Paletto, at
the door of the church of Santa Trinita. Francesca
had gone openly with her husband to vespers, attended
by a monk. When attracked by the young count
as the daring abducer of his wife, he had placed her
under that monk's protection till the quarrel should be
over, and, with the same holy man to plead his cause,
he boldly claimed his wife at the duke's hands, and
bore her triumphantly from Florence.

I heard this story in Venice. The gondolier Paletto,
they say, still rows his boat on the lagoon: and
sometimes his wife is with him, and sometimes a daughter,
whose exquisite beauty, though she is still a child,
is the wonder of the Rialto as he passes under. I
never chanced to see him, but many a stranger has
hired the best oar of the Piazza, to pull out toward the
Adriatic in the hope of finding Paletto's boat and getting
a glimpse of his proud and still most beautiful
wife—a wife, it is said, than whom a happier or more
contented one with her lot lives not in the “city of
the sea.”

VIOLANTA CESARINI.

1. CHAPTER I.

It was an eve fit for an angel's birthnight (and we
know angels are born in this loving world), and while
the moon, as if shining only for artists' eyes, drew the
outlines of palace and chapel, stern turret and serenaded
belvidere, with her silver pencil on the street,
two grave seniors, guardians in their own veins of the
blood of two lofty names known long to Roman story,
leaned together over a balcony of fretted stone, jutting
out upon the Corso, and affianced a fair and noble
maid of seventeen summers to a gentleman whose
character you shall learn, if we come safe to the sequel.

“The cardinal has offered me a thousand scudi for
my Giorgione, said the old count Malaspina, at last,
changing his attitude and the subject at the same
time.

“Anima di porco!” exclaimed the other, “what stirs
the curtain? The wind is changing, Malaspina. Let
us in! So, he offers but a thousand! I shall feel my
rheumatism to-morrow with this change. But a thousand!—ha!
ha! Let us in, let us in!”

“Let us out, say I!” murmured two lips that were
never made of cherries, though a bird would have
pecked at them; and stealing from behind the curtain,
whose agitation had persuaded her father that the wind
was rising, Violanta Cesarini, countess in her own right,
and beautiful by Heaven's rare grace, stepped forth
into the moonlight.

She drew a long breath as she looked down into the
Corso. The carriages were creeping up and down at
a foot-pace, and the luxurious dames, thrown back on
their soft cushions, nodded to the passers-by, as they
recognised friends and acquaintances where the moonlight
broke through; crowds of slow promenaders loitered
indolently on, now turning to look at the berry-brown
back of a contadini, with her stride like a tragedy-queen,
and her eyes like wells of jet, and now
leaning against a palace wall, while a wandering harp-girl
sung better for a baiocco than noble ladies for the
praise of a cardinal; at one corner stood an artist with
his tablet, catching some chance effect perhaps in the
drapery of a marble saint, perhaps in the softer drapery
of a sinner; the cafés, far up and dawn, looked
like festas out of doors, with their groups of gayly-dressed
idlers, eating sherbets and buying flowers; a
gray friar passed now with his low-toned benedicite;
and again a black cowl with a face that reddened the
very moonbeam that peeped under; hunchbacks contended
testily for the wall, and tall fellows (by their
long hair and fine symmetry, professed models for
sculptors and painters) yielded to them with a gibe.
And this is Rome when the moon shines well, and on
this care-cheating scene looked down the countess
Violanta, with her heart as full of perplexity as her
silk boddice-lace would bear without breaking.

I dare say you did not observe, if you were in Rome
that night, and strolling, as you would have been in
the Corso (this was three years ago last May, and if
you were in the habit of reading the Diario di Roma,
the story will not be new to you); you did not observe,
I am sure, that a thread ran across from the balcony I
speak of, in the Palazzo Cesarim, to a high window
in an old palace opposite, inhabited, as are many
palaces in Rome, by a decayed family and several artists.
On the two sides of this thread, pressed, while
she mused, the slight fingers of Violanta Cesarini;
and, as if it descended from the stars at every pull
which the light May-breeze gave it in passing, she
turned her soft blue eyes upward, and her face grew
radiant with hope—not such as is fed with star-gazing!

Like a white dove shooting with slant wings downward
a folded slip of paper flew across on this invisible
thread, and, by heaven's unflickering lamp, Violanta
read some characters traced with a rough crayon, but
in most sweet Italian. A look upward, and a nod, as
if she were answering the stars that peeped over her,
and the fair form had gone with its snowy robes from
the balcony, and across the high window from which
the messenger had come, dropped the thick and impenetrable
folds of the gray curtain of an artist.

It was a large upper room, such as is found in the
vast houses of the decayed nobility of Rome, and of
its two windows one was roughly boarded up to exclude
the light, while a coarse gray cloth did nearly
the same service at the other, shutting out all but an
artist's modicum of day. The walls of rough plaster
were covered with grotesque drawings, done apparently
with bits of coal, varied here and there with scraps of
unframed canvass, nailed carelessly up, and covered
with the study of some head, by a famous master. A
large table on one side of the room was burdened with
a confused heap of brushes, paint-bags, and discolored
cloths, surmounted with a clean palette; and not far
off stood an easel, covered with thumb-marks of all

dyes, and supporting a new canvass, on which was
outlined the figure of a nymph, with the head finished
in a style that would have stirred the warm blood of
Raphael himself with emulous admiration. A low
flock bed, and a chair without a bottom, but with a
large cloak hung over its back, a pair of foils and a
rapier, completed so much of the furniture of the
room as belonged to a gay student of Corregio's art,
who wrote himself Biondo Amieri.

By the light of the same antique lamp, hung on a
rusty nail against the wall, you might see a very good
effect on the face of an unfinished group in marble,
of which the model, in plaster, stood a little behind,
representing a youth with a dagger at his heart, arrested
in the act of self-murder by a female whose
softened resemblance to him proclaimed her at the first
glance his sister. A mallet, chisels, and other implements
used in sculpture, lay on the rough base of
the unfinished group, and half-disclosed, half-concealed,
by a screen covered with prints by some curious
female hand, stood a bed with white curtains, and
an oratory of carved oak at its head, supporting a
clasped missal. A chair or two, whose seats of worked
satin had figured one day in more luxurious neighborhood,
a table covered with a few books and several
drawings from the antique, and a carefully-locked
escritoire, served, with other appearances, to distinguish
this side of the room as belonging to a separate
occupant, of gentler taste or nurture.

While the adventurous Violanta is preparing herself
to take advantage of the information received by
her secret telegraph, I shall have time, dear reader,
to put you up to a little of the family history of the
Cesarini, necessary no less to a proper understanding
of the story, than to the heroine's character for discretion.
On the latter point, I would suggest to you,
you may as well suspend your opinion.

It is well known to all the gossips in Rome, that,
for four successive generations, the marquises of
Cesarini have obtained dispensations of the pope for
marrying beautiful peasant-girls from the neighborhood
of their castle, in Romagna. The considerable
sums paid for these dispensations, reconciled the holy
see to such an unprecedented introduction of vulgar
blood into the veins of the nobility, and the remarkable
female beauty of the race (heightened by the addition
of nature's aristocracy to its own), contributed to maintain
good will at a court, devoted above all others to
the cultivation of the fine arts, of which woman is the
Eidolon and the soul. The last marquis, educated
like his fathers, in their wild domain among the mountains,
selected, like them, the fairest wild-flower that
sprung at his feet, and after the birth of one son, applied
for the tardy dispensation. From some unknown
cause (possibly a diminished bribe, as the marquis
was less lavish in his disposition than his predecessors),
the pope sanctioned the marriage, but refused
to legitimatize the son, unless the next born
should be a daughter. The marchioness soon after
retired (from mortification it is supposed) to her home
in the mountains and after two years of close seclusion,
returned to Rome, bringing with her an infant
daughter, then three months of age, destined to be the
heroine of our story. No other child appearing, the
young Cesarini was legitimatized, and with his infant
sister passed most of his youth at Rome. Some three
or four years before the time when our tale commences,
this youth, who had betrayed always, a coarse
and brutal temper, administered his stiletto to a gentleman
on the Corso, and flying from Rome, became
a brigand in the Abruzzi. His violence and atrocity
in this congenial life, soon put him beyond hope of
pardon, and on his outlawry by the pope, Violanta became
the heiress of the estates of Cesarini.

The marchioness had died when Violanta was between
seven and eight years of age, leaving her, by a
death-bed injunction, in the charge of her own constant
attendant, a faithful servant from Romagno, supposed
to be distant kinswoman to her mistress. With
this tried dependant, the young countess was permitted
to go where she pleased, at all hours when not attended
by her masters, and seeing her tractable and
lovely, the old marquis, whose pride in the beauty of
his family was the passion next to love of money in
his heart, gave himself little trouble, and thought himself
consoled for the loss of his son in the growing attractions
and filial virtues of his daughter.

On a bright morning in early spring, six years before
the date of our tale, the young countess and her attendant
were gathering wild flowers near the fountain
of Egeria (of all spots of earth, that on which the wild
flowers are most profuse and sweetest), when a deformed
youth, who seemed to be no stranger to Donna
Bettina, addressed Violanta in a tone of voice so musical,
and with a look so kindly and winning, that the
frank child took his hand, and led him off in search of
cardinals and blue-bells, with the familiarity of an established
playfellow. After this day, the little countess
never came home pleased from a morning drive and
ramble in which she had not seen her friend Signor
Giulio; and the romantic baths of Caracalla, and the
many delicious haunts among the ruins about Rome,
had borne witness to the growth of a friendship, all
fondness and impulse on the part of Violanta, all tenderness
and delicacy on that of the deformed youth.
By what wonderful instinct they happened always to
meet, the delighted child never found time or thought
to inquire.

Two or three years passed on thus, and the old
marquis had grown to listen with amused familiarity
to his daughter's prattle about the deformed youth,
and no incident had varied the pleasant tenor of their
lives and rambles, except that, Giulio once falling ill,
Bettina had taken the young countess to his home,
where she discovered that, young as he was, he made
some progress in moulding in clay, and was destined for
a sculptor. This visit to the apartment of an obscure
youth, however, the marquis had seen fit to object to;
and though, at his daughter's request, he sent the
young sculptor an order for his first statue, he peremptorily
forbade all further intercourse between him
and Violanta. In the paroxysm of her grief at the
first disgrace she had ever fallen into with her master,
Bettina disclosed to her young mistress, by way of
justification, a secret she had been bound by the
most solemn oaths to conceal, and of which she now
was the sole living depository—that this deformed
youth was born in the castle of the Cesarini, in Romagna,
of no less obscure parentage than the castle's
lord and lady, and being the first child after the dispensation
of marriage, and a son, he was consequently
the rightful heir to the marquisate and estates of Cesarini;
and the elder son, by the terms of that dispensation,
was illegitimate.

This was astounding intelligence to Violanti, who,
nevertheless, child as she was, felt its truth in the
yearnings of her heart to Giulio; but it was with no
little pains and difficulty on Bettina's part, that she was
persuaded to preserve the secret from her father. The
Romagnese knew her master's weakness; and as the
birth of the child had occurred during his long absence
from the castle, and the marchioness, proud of
her eldest-born, had determined from the first that he
alone should enjoy the name and honors of his father,
it was not very probable that upon the simple word of
a domestic, he would believe a deformed hunchback
to be his son and heir.

The intermediate history of Giulio, Bettina knew
little about, simply informing her mistress, that disgusted
with his deformity, the unnatural mother had
sent him to nurse in a far-off village of Romagna, and
that the interest of a small sum which the marquis

supposed had been expended on masses for the souls
of his ancestors, was still paid to his foster-parents for
his use.

From the time of this disclosure, Violanta's life had
been but too happy. Feeling justified in contriving
secret interviews with her brother; and possessing the
efficient connivance of Bettina, who grew, like herself,
almost to worship the pure-minded and the gentle
Giulio, her heart and her time were blissfully crowded
with interest. So far, the love that had welled from
her heart had been all joyous and untroubled.

It was during the absence of the marquis and his
daughter from Rome, and in an unhealthy season,
that Giulio, always delicate in health and liable to excessive
fits of depression, had fallen ill in his solitary
room, and, but for the friendly care of a young artist
whom he had long known, must have died of want
and neglect. As he began to recover, he accepted the
offer of Amieri, his friend, to share with him a lodging
in the more elevated air of the Corso, and, the more
readily, that this room chanced to overlook the palace
of Cesarina. Here Violanta found him on her return,
and though displeased that he was no longer alone,
she still continued, when Amieri was absent, to see
him sometimes in his room, and their old haunts
without the walls were frequented as often as his
health and strength would permit. A chance meeting
of Violanta and Amieri in his own studio, however,
made it necessary that he should be admitted to their
secret, and the consequence of that interview, and
others which Violanta found it impossible to avoid,
was a passion in the heart of the enthusiastic painter,
which consumed, as it well might, every faculty of
his soul.

We are thus brought to an evening of balmy May,
when Giulio found himself alone. Biondo had been
painting all day on the face of his nymph, endeavoring
in vain to give it any other features than those of the
lady of his intense worship, and having gone out to
ramble for fresh air and relaxation in the Corso,
Giulio thought he might venture to throw across his
ball of thread and send a missive to his sister, promising
her an uninterrupted hour of his society.

With these preliminaries, our story will now run
smoothly on.

2. CHAPTER II.

“Come in, carissima!” said the low, silver-toned
voice of the deformed sculptor, as a female figure, in
the hood and cloak of an old woman, crossed the
threshold of his chamber.

“Dear Giulio!” And she leaned slightly over the
diminutive form of her brother, and first kissing his
pale forehead, while she unfastened the clasp of
Bettina's cloak of black silk, threw her arms about
him as the disguise fell off, and multiplied, between
her caresses, the endearing terms in which the language
of that soft clime is so prodigal.

They sat down at the foot of his group in marble,
and each told the little history of the hours they had
spent apart. They grew alike as they conversed;
for theirs was that resemblance of the soul, to which
the features answer only when the soul is breathing
through. Unless seen together, and not only together,
but gazing on each other in complete abandonment
of heart, the friends that knew them best would have
said they were unlike. Yet Amieri's nymph on the
canvass was like both, for Amieri drew from the picture
burnt on his own heart by love, and the soul of Violanta
lay breathing beneath every lineament.

“You have not touched the marble to-day!” said
the countess, taking the lamp from its nail, and shedding
the light aslant on the back of the statue.

“No! I have lifted the hammer twenty times to
break it in pieces.”

“Ah! dearest Giulio! talk not thus! Think it is
my image you would destroy!”

“If it were, and truly done, I would sooner strike
the blessed crucifix. But, Violanta! there is a link
wanting in this deformed frame of mine! The sense
of beauty, or the power to body it forth, wants room in
me. I feel it—I feel it!”

Violanta ran to him and pressed the long curls that
fell over his pallid temples to her bosom. There was
a tone of conviction in his voice that she knew not how
to answer.

He continued, as if he were musing aloud:—

“I have tried to stifle this belief in my bosom, and
have never spoken of it till now—but it is true!
Look at that statue! Parts of it are like nature—
but it wants uniformity—it wants grace—it wants
what I want—proportion! I never shall give it that,
because I want the sense, the consciousness, the emotion,
of complete godlike movement. It is only the
well formed who feel this. Sculptors may imitate
gods! for they are made in God's image. But oh,
Violanta! I am not!”

“My poor brother!”

“Our blessed Savior was not more beautiful than
the Apollo,” he passionately continued, “but could I
feel like the Apollo! Can I stand before the clay and
straighten myself to his attitude, and fancy, by the
most delirious effort of imagination, that I realize in
this frame, and could ever have conceived and moulded
his indignant and lofty beauty? No—no—no!”

“Dear—dear Giulio.” He dropped his head again
and she felt his tears penetrate to her bosom.

“Leave this melancholy theme,” she said, in an
imploring tone, “and let us talk of other things, I have
something to tell you, Giulio!”

“Raphael was beautiful,” he said, raising himself
up, unconscious of the interruption, “and Giorgione,
and Titian, both nobly formed, and Michael Angelo
had the port of an archangel! Yes, the soul inhabits
the whole body, and the sentiment of beauty moves
and quickens through it all. My tenement is cramped!—Violanta!”

“Well, dear brother!”

“Tell me your feelings when you first breathe the
air in a bright morning in spring. Do you feel graceful?
Is there a sensation of beauty? Do you lift
yourself and feel swan-like and lofty, and worthy of
the divine image in which you breathe. Tell me
truly, Violanta.”

“Yes, brother!”

“I knew it! I have a faint dream of such a feeling—a
sensation that is confined to my brain somehow
which I struggle to express in motion—but if I lift
my finger, it is gone. I watch Amieri sometimes,
when he draws. He pierces my very soul by assuming,
always, the attitude on his canvass. Violanta!
how can I stand like a statue that would please the
eye?”

“Giulio! Giulio!”

“Well, I will not burden you with my sadness.
Let us look at Biondo's nymph. Pray the Virgin he
come not in the while—for painting, by lamp-light,
shows less fairly than marble.”

He took the lamp, and while Violanta shook the
tears from her eyes, he drew out the pegs of the easel,
and lowered the picture to the light.

“Are you sure Amieri will not come in, Giulio?”
inquired his sister, looking back timidly at the door
while she advanced.

“I think he will not. The Corso is gay to night,
and his handsome face and frank carriage, win greetings,
as the diamond draws light. Look at his picture,
Violanta! With what triumph he paints! How
different from my hesitating hand! The thought that

is born in his fancy, collects instant fire in his veins
and comes prompt and proportionate to his hand. It
looks like a thing born, not wrought! How beautiful
you are, my Violanta! He has done well—brave
Biondo!”

“It is like me, yet fairer.”

“I wish it were done! There is a look on the lips
that is like a sensation I feel sometimes on my own I
almost feel as if I should straighten and grow fair as it
advances. Would it not be a blessed thing, Violanta?”

“I love you as you are, dear Giulio!”

“But I thirst to be loved like other men! I would
pass in the street and not read pity in all eyes. I
would go out like Biondo, and be greeted in the street
with `Mio bravo!' `Mio bello!' I would be beloved
by some one that is not my sister, Violanta! I would
have my share—only my share—of human joy and regard.
I were better dead than be a hunchback. I
would die, but for you—to-night—yes, to night.”

With a convulsive hand he pulled aside the curtain,
and sent a long, earnest look up to the stars. Violanta
had never before heard him give words to his melancholy
thoughts, and she felt appalled and silenced by
the inexpressible poignancy of his tones, and the feverish,
tearless, broken-heartedness of his whole manner.
As she took his hand, there was a noise in the street
below, and presently after, a hurried step was heard
on the stair, and Amieri rushed in, seized the rapier
which hung over his bed and without observing Violanta,
was flying again from the apartment.

“Biondo!” cried a voice which would have stayed
him were next breath to have been drawn in heaven.

“Contessa Violanta!”

“What is it, Amieri? Where go you now?”
asked Giulio, gliding between him and the door.
Biondo's cheek and brow had flushed when first arrested
by the voice of the countess, but now he stood
silent and with his eyes on the floor, pale as the statue
before him.

“A quarrel, Giulio!” he said at length.

“Biondo!” The countess sprang to his side with
the simple utterance of his name, and laid her small
hand on his arm. “You shall not go! You are dear
to us—dear to Guilio, Signor Amieri! If you love us
—if you care for Giulio—nay, I will say it—if you
care for me, dear Biondo, put not your life in peril.”

“Lady!” said the painter, bowing his head to his
wrist, and kissing lightly the small white fingers that
pressed it, “if I were to lose my life this hour, I should
bless with my dying lips the occasion which had drawn
from you the blessed words I hear. But the more
life is valuable to me by your regard, the more need
you should not delay me. I am waited for. Farewell!”

Disengaging himself from Violanta's grasp, quickly
but gently, Amieri darted through the door, and was
gone.

3. CHAPTER III.

Biondo had readily found a second in the first
artist he met on the Corso, and after a rapid walk
they turned on the lonely and lofty wall of the Palatine,
to look back on the ruins of the Forum.—At a
fountain side, not far beyond, he had agreed to find
his antagonist; but spite of the pressing business of
the hour, the wonderful and solemn beauty of the ruins
that lay steeped in moonlight at his feet, awoke, for
an instant, all of the painter in his soul.

“Is it not glorious, Lenzoni?” he said, pointing with
his rapier to the softened and tall columns that carried
their capitals among the stars.

“We have not come out to sketch, Amieri!” was
the reply.

“True, caro! but my fingers work as if the pencil
was in them, and I forget revenge while I see what I
shall never sketch again!”

Lenzoni struck his hand heavily on Amieri's shoulder,
as if to wake him from a dream, and looked close
into his face.

“If you fight in this spirit, Biondo —”

“I shall fight with heart and soul, Lenzoni; fear
me not! But when I saw, just now, the bel'effetto of
the sharp-drawn shadows under the arch of Constantine,
and felt instinctively for my pencil, something
told me, at my heart's ear—you will never trace line
again, Amieri!”

“Take heart, caro amico!”

My heart is ready, but my thoughts come fast!
What were my blood, I can not but reflect, added to
the ashes of Rome? We fight in the grave of an
empire! But you will not philosophize, dull Lenzoni!
Come on to the fountain!”

The moon shone soft on the greensward rim of the
neglected fountain that once sparkled through the
“gold palace” of Nero. The white edges of half-buried
marble peeped here and there from the grass,
and beneath the shadow of an ivy-covered and tottering
arch, sang a nightingale, the triumphant possessor
of life amid the forgotten ashes of the Cæsars.
Amieri listened to his song.

“You are prompt, signor!” said a gay-voiced gentleman,
turning the corner of the ruined wall, as
Biondo, still listening to the nightingale, fed his heart
with the last sweet words of Violanta.

“`Sempre pronto,' is a good device,” answered Lenzoni,
springing to his feet. “Will you fight, side to
the moon, signors, or shall we pull straws for the
choice of light?”

Amieri's antagonist was a strongly-made man of
thirty, costly in his dress, and of that class of features
eminently handsome, yet eminently displeasing. The
origin of the quarrel was an insulting observation,
coupled with the name of the young countess Cesarini,
which Biondo, who was standing in the shadow
of a wall, watching her window from the Corso, accidentally
overheard. A blow on the mouth was the
first warning the stranger received of a listener's
neighborhood, and after a momentary struggle they
exchanged cards, and separated to meet in an hour,
with swords, at the fountain, on the Palatine.

Amieri was accounted the best foil in the ateliers of
Rome, but his antagonist, the count Lamba Malaspina
had just returned from a long residence in France,
and had the reputation of an accomplished swordsman.
Amieri was slighter in person, but well-made, and
agile as a leopard; but when Lenzoni looked into the
cool eye of Malaspina, the spirit and fire which he
would have relied upon to ensure his friend success in
an ordinary contest, made him tremble now.

Count Lamba bowed, and they crossed swords.
Amieri had read his antagonist's character, like his
friend, and, at the instant their blades parted, he broke
down his guard with the quickness of lightning, and
wounded him in the face. Malaspina smiled as he
crossed his rapier again, and in the next moment
Amieri's sword flew high above his head, and the
count's was at his breast.

“Ask for your life, mio bravo!” he said, as calmly
as if they had met by chance in the Corso.

“A'morte! villain and slanderer!” cried Amieri, and
striking the sword from his bosom, he aimed a blow
at Malaspina, which by a backward movement, was
received on the point of the blade. Transfixed through
the wrist, Amieri struggled in vain against the superior
strength and coolness of his antagonist, and falling
on his knee, waited in silence for his death-blow,
Malaspina drew his sword gently as possible from the
wound, and recommending a tourniquet to Lenzoni
till a surgeon could be procured, washed the blood

from his face in the fountain, and descended into the
Forum, humming the air of a new song.

Faint with loss of blood, and with his left arm
around Lenzoni's neck, Biondo arrived at the surgeon's
door.

“Can you save his hand?” was the first eager question.

Amieri held up his bleeding wrist with difficulty,
and the surgeon shook his head as he laid the helpless
fingers in his palm. The tendon was entirely
parted.

“I may save the hand,” he said, “but he will never
use it more!”

Amieri gave his friend a look full of anguish, and
fell back insensible.

“Poor Biondo!” said Lenzoni, as he raised his
pallid head from the surgeon's pillow. “Death were
less misfortune than the loss of a hand like thine.
The foreboding was too true, alas! that thou never
wouldst use pencil more!”

4. CHAPTER IV.

The frowning battlements of St. Angelo were
brightened with the glare of lamps across the Tiber,
and the dark breast of the river was laced with bars of
gold like the coat of a captain of dragoons. Here and
there lay a boat in mid-stream, and while the drift of
the current was counteracted by an occasional stroke
at the oar, the boatman listened to the heavenly strains
of a waltz, dying and triumphing in alternate cadences
upon the breath of night and the pope's band. A
platform was built out over the river, forming a continuation
of the stage; the pit was floored over, and
all draped like a Persian harem; and thus began a
masquerade at the Teatro della Pergola at Rome,
which stands, if you will take the trouble to remember,
close by the bridge and castle of St. Angelo upon
the bank of the “yellow Tiber.”

The entrance of the crowd to the theatre was like a
procession intended to represent the things of which
we are commanded not to make graven images, nor
to bow down and worship them. There was the likeness
of everything in heaven above and on the earth
beneath, and in the waters under the earth. There
were angels, devils, serpents, birds, beasts, fishes, and
fair women—of which none except the last occasioned
much transgression of the commandment. Oddly
enough, the fishes waltzed—and so did the beasts and
fair women, the serpents and birds—pairing off as they
came within sound of the music, with a defiance of
natural antipathies which would have driven a naturalist
out of his senses.

A chariot drove up with the crest of the Cesarini
on the pannel, and out of it stepped rather a stiff figure
dressed as a wandering palmer, with serge and scallop-shells,
followed by a masked hunchback whose costume,
even to the threadbare spot on the ridge of his
deformity, was approved, by the loungers at the door,
in a general “bravissimo.” They entered the dressing-room,
and the cloak-keeper was not surprised
when the lump was withdrawn in the shape of a pad
of wool, and by the aid of a hood and petticoat of
black silk, the deformed was transformed into a slender
domino, undistinguished but for the grace and elasticity
of her movements. The attendant was surprised,
however, when having stepped aside to deposite
the pad given in charge to her, she turned and saw the
domino fitting from the room, but the hunchback
with his threadbare hump still leaning on the palmer's
arm!

“Santissima Vergine!” she exclaimed, pulling out
her cross and holding it between herself and Giulio,
“the fiend—the unholy fiend!”

Donna Bettina laughed under her palmer's cowl,
and drawing Giulio's arm within her own, they mingled
in the masquerade.

The old count Cesarini arrived a few minutes after
in one of the equipages of the Malaspina, accompanied
by a red-cross knight in a magnificent armor, his
sword-hilt sparkling with diamonds, and the bars of
his visor half-drawn, yet showing a beard of jetty and
curling black, and a mouth of the most regular, yet
unpleasant beauty. The upper part of his face was
quite concealed, yet the sneer on his lips promised a
cold and unfeeling eye.

“As a hunchback, did you say, count?”

“It was her whim,” answered Cesarini. “She has
given alms to a poor sculptor with that deformity till
her brain is filled with it. Pray the saints to affect
not your offspring, Lamba!”

Malaspina surveyed himself in the long mirror at
the entrance of the saloon, and smiled back incredulously
with his white teeth.

“I gave Bettina strict orders not to leave her side,”
said Cesarini. “You will find the old donna by her
palmer's dress. The saints speed your suite, Lamba!
I will await you in the card-room when the dance
wearies you!”

It was not for some time after the two old nobles
had affianced their children, that Cesarini had found
a fitting opportunity to break the subject to his daughter.
When he did so, somewhat to his embarrassment,
Violanta listened to it without surprise; and
after hearing all he had to say upon the honorable descent,
large fortune, and courtly accomplishments of
the young count Lamba, she only permitted her father
to entertain any future hope on the subject, upon
the condition, that, till she was of age, her proposed
husband should not even be presented to her. For
this victory over the most cherished ambition of the
old count, Violanta was indebted partly to the holy
see, and partly to some qualities in her own character,
of which her father knew the force. He was aware
with what readiness the cardinal would seize upon the
slightest wish she might express to take the veil and
bring her possessions into the church, and he was
sufficiently acquainted with the qualities of a Cesarini,
not to drive one of their daughters to extremity.

With some embarrassment the old count made a
clean breast to Malaspina and his son, and was exhausting
language in regrets, when he was relieved by
an assurance from Lamba that the difficulty increased
his zest for the match, and that, with Cesarini's permission,
he would find opportunities to encounter her
in her walks as a stranger, and make his way after the
romantic taste which he supposed was alone at the bottom
of her refusal. For success in this, Count Lamba
relied on his personal beauty and on that address in
the arts of adventure which is acquired by a residence
in France.

Since his duel, Amieri had been confined to his
bed with a violent fever, dangerously aggravated by
the peculiar nature of his calamity. The love of the
pencil was the breath of his soul, and in all his
thoughts of Violanta, it was only as a rival of the
lofty fame of painters who had made themselves the
companions of kings, that he could imagine himself a
claimant for her love. It seemed to him that his
nerveless hand had shut out heaven's entire light.

Giulio had watched by his friend with the faithful
fondness of a woman, and had gathered from his moments
of delirium, what Biondo had from delicacy to
Violanta never revealed to his second, Lenzoni—the
cause of his quarrel with Malaspina. Touched with
this chivalric tenderness toward his sister, the kind
Giulio hung over him with renewed affection, and
when, in subsequent ravings, the maimed youth betrayed
the real sting of his misfortune—the death of
his hopes of her love—the unambitious brother resolved

in his heart that if he could aid him by service
or sacrifice, by influence with Violanta, or by making
the almost desperate attempt to establish his own
claims to the name and fortunes of Cesarini, he would
devote himself to his service heart and soul.

During the confinement of Amieri to his room, the
young countess had of course been unable to visit her
brother, and as he scarce left the patient's side for a
moment, their intercourse for two or three weeks had
been entirely interrupted. On the first day the convalescent
youth could walk out, she had stolen to the
studio, and heard from Giulio the whole history of
the duel and its consequences. When he had finished
his narrative, Violanta sat, for a few minutes, lost in
thought.

“Giulio!” she said at last, with a gayety of tone
which startled him.

“Violanta!”

“Did you ever remark that our voices are very
much alike?”

“Biondo often says so.”

“And you have a foot almost as small as mine.”

“I have not the proportions of a man, Violanta!”

“Nay, brother, but I mean that—that—we might
pass for each other, if we were masked. Our height
is the same. Stand up, Giulio!”

“You would not mock me!” said the melancholy
youth with a faint smile, as he rose and set his bent
back beside the straight and lithe form of his sister.

“Listen to me, amato-bene!” she replied, sitting
down and drawing him upon her knee, after satisfying
himself that there was no perceptible difference in
their height. “Put your arm about my neck, and
love me while I tell you of my little plot.”

Giulio impressed a kiss upon the clear, alabaster
forehead of the beautiful girl, and looked into her face
inquiringly.

“There is to be a masquerade at La Pergola,” she
said—“a superb masquerade given to some prince!
And I am to go, Giulio mio!”

“Well,” answered the listener, sadly.

“But do you not seem surprised that I am permitted
to go! Shall I tell you the reason why papa gave me
permission?”

“If you will, Violanta!”

“A little bird told me that Malaspina means to be
there!”

“And you will go to meet him?”

“You shall go to meet him, and I —” she hesitated
and cast down the long dark fringes of her eyes;
“I will meet Biondo!”

Giulio clasped her passionately to his heart.

“I see!—I see!” he cried, springing upon his feet,
as he anticipated the remaining circumstances of the
plot. “We shall be two hunchbacks—they will little
think that we are two Cesarini. Dear, noble Violanta!
you will speak kindly to Biondo. Send Bettina for
the clothes, carina mia! You will get twin masks in
the Corso. And, Violanta?”

“What, Giulio?”

“Tell Bettina to breathe no word of our project to
Amieri! I will persuade him to go but to see you
dance! Poor Amieri! Dear, dear sister! Farewell
now! He will be returning, and you must be gone.
The Holy Virgin guard you, my Violanta!”

5. CHAPTER V.

The reader will long since have been reminded, by
the trouble we have to whip in and flog up the lagging
and straggling members of our story, of a flock of
sheep driven unwillingly to market. Indeed, to stop
at the confessional (as you will see many a shepherd
of the Campagna, on his way to Rome), this tale of
many tails should have been a novel. You have, in
brief, what should have been well elaborated, embarrassed
with difficulties, relieved by digressions, tipped
with a moral, and bound in two volumes, with a portrait
of the author. We are sacrificed to the spirit of the
age. The eighteenth century will be known in
hieroglyphics by a pair of shears. But, “to return to
our muttons.”

The masquerade went merrily on, or, if there were
more than one heavy heart among those light heels,
it was not known, as the newspapers say, “to our reporter.”
One, there certainly was—heavy as Etna on
the breast of Enceladus. Biondo Amieri sat in a corner
of the gallery, with his swathed hand laid before
him, pale as a new statue, and with a melancholy in
his soft dark eyes, which would have touched the executioners
of St. Agatha. Beside him sat Lenzoni,
who was content to forego the waltz for a while, and
keep company for pity with a friend who was too busy
with his own thoughts to give him word or look, but
still keeping sharp watch on the scene below, and
betraying by unconscious ejaculations how great a
penance he had put on himself for love and charity.

“Ah, la bella musica, Biondo!” he exclaimed
drumming on the banquette, while his friend held
up his wounded hand to escape the jar, “listen to that
waltz, that might set fire to the heels of St. Peter.
Corpo di Bacco! look at the dragon!—a dragon
making love to a nun, Amieri! Ah! San Pietro!
what a foot! Wait till I come, sweet goblin! That
a goblin's tail should follow such ankles, Biondo!
Eh! bellissimo! the knight! Look at the red-cross
knight, Amieri! and—what?—il gobbo, by St. Anthony!
and the red-cross takes him for a woman!
It is Giulio, for there never were two hunchbacks so
wondrous like! Ecco, Biondo!”

But there was little need to cry “look” to Amieri,
now. A hunchback, closely masked, and leaning on
a palmer's arm, made his way slowly through the
crowd, and a red-cross knight, a figure gallant enough
to have made a monarch jealous, whispered with courteous
and courtly deference in his ear.

“Cielo! it is she!” said Biondo, with mournful
earnestness, not heeding his companion, and laying
his hand upon his wounded wrist, as if the sight he
looked on gave it a fresher pang.

“She?” answered Lenzoni, with a laugh. “If it
is not he—not gobbo Giulio—I'll eat that cross-hilted
rapier! What `she' should it be, caro Biondo!”

“I tell thee,” said Amieri, “Giulio is asleep at the
foot of his marred statue! I left him but now, he is
too ill with his late vigils to be here—but his clothes,
I may tell thee, are borrowed by one who wears them
as you see. Look at the foot, Lenzoni!”

“A woman, true enough, if the shoe were all!
But I'll have a close look! Stay for me, dear Amieri!
I will return ere you have looked twice at them!”

And happy, with all his kind sympathy, to find a
fair apology to be free, Lenzoni leaped over the
benches and mingled in the crowd below.

Left alone, Biondo devoured with his eyes, every
movement of the group in which he was so deeply
interested, and the wound in his hand seemed burning
with a throb of fire, while he tried in vain to detect,
in the manner of the hunchback, that coyness
which might show, even through a mask, dislike or
indifference. There was even, he thought (and he
delivered his soul over to Apollyon in the usual phrase
for thinking such ill of such an angel); there was
even in her manner a levity and freedom of gesture
for which the mask she wore should be no apology.
He was about to curse Malaspina for having spared
his life at the fountain, when some one jumped lightly
over the seat, and took a place beside him. It was
a female in a black domino, closely masked, and
through the pasteboard mouth protruded the bit of

ivory, commonly held in the teeth by maskers, to disguise
the voice.

“Good evening to you, fair signor!”

“Good even to you, lady!”

“I am come to share your melancholy, signor!”

“I have none to give away unless you will take all;
and just now, my fair one, it is rather anger than sadness.
If it please you, leave me!”

“What if I am more pleased to stay!”

“Briefly, I would be alone. I am not of the festa.
I but look on, here!” And Biondo turned his shoulder
to the mask, and fixed his eyes again on the hunchback,
who having taken the knight's arm, was talking
and promenading most gayly between him and the
palmer.

“You have a wounded hand, signor!” resumed his
importunate neighbor.

“A useless one, lady. Would it were well!”

“Signor Melancholy, repine not against providence.
I that am no witch, tell thee that thou wilt yet bless
Heaven that this hand is disabled.”

Biondo turned and looked at the bold prophetess,
but her disguise was impenetrable.

“You are a masker, lady, and talk at random!”

“No! I will tell you the thought uppermost in your
bosom!”

“What is it?”

“A longing for a pluck at the red-cross, yonder!”

“True, by St. Mary!” said Biondo, starting energetically:
“but you read it in my eyes!”

“I have told you your first thought, signor, and I will
give you a hint of the second. Is there a likeness
between a nymph on canvass, and a gobbo in a mask!”

“Giulio!” exclaimed Amieri, turning suddenly
round; but the straight back of the domino met his
eye, and totally bewildered, he resumed his seat, and
slowly perused the stranger from head to foot.

“Talk to me as if my mask were the mirror of your
soul, Amieri,” said the soft but disguised voice.
“You need sympathy in this mood, and I am your
good angel. Is your wrist painful to-night?”

“I can not talk to you,” he said, turning to resume
his observation on the scene below. “If you know
the face beneath the gobbo's mask, you know the
heaven from which I am shut out. But I must gaze
on it still.”

“Is it a woman?”

“No! an angel.”

“And encourages the devil in the shape of Malaspina?
You miscall her, Amieri!”

The answer was interrupted by Lenzoni, who ran
into the gallery, but seeing his friend beset by a mask,
he gave him joy of his good luck, and refusing to interrupt
the tête-à-tête, disappeared with a laugh.

“Brave, kind Lenzoni!” said the stranger.

“Are you his good angel, too?” asked Amieri,
surprised again at the knowledge so mysteriously displayed.

“No! Little as you know of me you would not be
willing to share me with another! Say, Amieri! love
you the gobbo on the knight's arm?”

“You have read me riddles less clear, my fair incognita!
I would die at morn but to say farewell to
her at midnight!”

“Do you despair of her love?”

“Do I despair of excelling Raphael with these
unstrung fingers? I never hoped—but in my dreams,
lady!”

“Then hope, waking! For as there is truth in
heaven, Violanta Cesarini loves you, Biondo!”

Laying his left hand sternly on the arm of the
stranger, Biondo raised his helpless wrist and pointed
toward the hunchback, who, seated by the red-cross
knight, played with the diamond cross of his sword-hilt,
while the palmer turned his back, as if to give
two lovers an opportunity.

With a heart overwhelmed with bitterness, he then
turned to the mocking incognito. Violanta sat beside
him!

Holding her mask between her and the crowd below,
the maiden blush mounted to her temples, and
the long sweeping lashes dropped over her eyes their
veiling and silken fringes. And while the red-cross
knight still made eloquent love to Giulio in the saloon
of the masquerade, Amieri and Violanta, in their unobserved
retreat, exchanged vows, faint and choked
with emotion on his part, but all hope, encouragement,
and assurance, on hers

6. CHAPTER VI.

“Will you waltz?” said a merry-voiced domino
to the red-cross knight, a few minutes after tapping
him smartly on the corslet with her black fan, and
pointing, for the first step, a foot that would have
tempted St. Anthony.

“By the mass!” answered Malaspina, “I should
pay an ill compliment to the sweetest voice that ever
enchanted human ear” (and he bowed low to Guilio),
“did I refuse invitation so sweetly toned. Yet my
Milan armor is not light!”

“I have been refusing his entreaties this hour,”
said Giulio, as the knight whirled away with Violanta,
“for though I can chatter like a woman, I should
dance like myself. He is not unwilling to show his
grace to `his lady-mistress!' Ha! ha! It is worth
while to sham the petticoat for once to see what fools
men are when they would please a woman! But,
close mask! Here comes the count Cesarini!”

“How fares my child?” said the old noble, leaning
over the masked Giulio, and touching with his lips the
glossy curl which concealed his temple. Are you
amused, idolo mio?”

A sudden tremor shot through the frame of poor
Giulio at the first endearment ever addressed to his
ear by the voice of a parent. The tears coursed down
under his mask, and for all answer to the question, he
could only lay his small soft hand in his father's and
return his pressure with irresistible strength and emotion.

“You are not well, my child!” he said, surprised at
not receiving an answer, “this ugly hump oppresses
you! Come to the air! So—lean on me, caro tesoro!
We will remove the hump presently. A Cesarini with
a hump indeed! Straighten yourself, my life, my
child, and you will breathe more freely!”

Thus entered, at one wound, daggers and balm into
the heart of the deformed youth; and while Bettina,
trembling in every limb, grew giddy with fear as they
made their way through the crowd, Giulio, relieved
by his tears, nerved himself with a strong effort and
prepared to play out his difficult part with calmness.

They threaded slowly the crowded maze of waltzers,
and, emerging from the close saloons, stood at last in
the gallery overhanging the river. The moon was
rising, and touched with a pale light the dark face of
the Tiber; the music came faintly out to the night
air, and a fresh west wind, cool and balmy from the
verdant campagna, breathed softly through the lattices.

Refusing a chair, Giulio leaned over the balustrade,
and the count stood by his side and encircled his waist
with his arm.

“I can not bear this deformity, my Violanta!” he
said, “you look so unlike my child with it; I need
this little hand to reassure me.”

“Should you know that was my hand, father?” said
Giulio.

“Should I not! I have told you a thousand times
that the nails of a Cesarini were marked—let me see

you again—by the arch of this rosy line! See, my
little Gobbo! They are like four pink fairy shells of
India laid over rolled leaves of roses. What was the
poet's name who said that of the old countess Giulia
Cesarini—la bella Giulia?”

“Should you have known my voice, father?” asked
Giulio, evading the question.

“Yes, my darling, why ask me?”

“But, father!—if I had been stolen by brigands
from the cradle—or you had not seen me for many,
many years—and I had met you to-night as a gobbo
and had spoken to you—only in sport—and had
called you `father, dear father!' should you have
known my voice? would you have owned me for a
Cesarini?”

“Instantly, my child!”

“But suppose my back had been broken—suppose
I were a gobbo—a deformed hunchback indeed, indeed—but
had still nails with a rosy arch, and the
same voice with which I speak to you now—and
pressed your hand thus—and loved you—would you
disown me, father?”

Giulio had raised himself while he spoke, and taken
his hand from his father's with a feeling that life or
death would be in his answer to that question. Cesarini
was disturbed, and did not reply for a moment.

“My child!” said he at last, “there is that in your
voice that would convince me you are mine, against
all the evidence in the universe. I can not imagine
the dreadful image you have conjured up, for the
Cesarini are beautiful and straight by long inheritance.
But if a monster spoke to me thus, I should love
him! Come to my bosom, my blessed child! and
dispel those wild dreams! Come, Violanta!”

Giulio attempted to raise his arms to his father's
neck, but the strength that had sustained him so well,
began to ebb from him. He uttered some indistinct
words, lifted his hand to his mask as if to remove it
for breath, and sunk slowly to the floor.

“It is your son, my lord!” cried Bettina. “Lift
him, Count Cesarini! Lift your child to the air before
he dies!”

She tore off his mask and disclosed to the thunder-stricken
count the face of the stranger! As he stood
pale and aghast, too much confounded for utterance or
action, the black domino tripped into the gallery, followed
by the red-cross knight, panting under his armor.

“Giulio! my own Giulio!” cried Violanta, throwing
herself on her knees beside her pale and insensible
brother, and covering his forehead and lips with kisses.
“Is he hurt? Is he dead? Water! for the love
of Heaven! Will no one bring water?” And tearing
away her own mask, she lifted him from the
ground, and, totally regardless of the astonished group
who looked on in petrified silence, fanned and caressed
him into life and consciousness.

“Come away, Violanta!” said her father at last, in
a hoarse voice.

“Never, my father! he is our own blood! How
feel you now, Giulio?”

“Better, sweet! where is Biondo?”

“Near by! But you shall go home with me.
Signor Malaspina, as you hope for my favor, lend my
brother an arm. Bettina, call up the chariot. Nay,
father! he goes home with me, or I with him, we
never part more!”

The red-cross knight gave Giulio an arm, and leaning
on him and Violanta, the poor youth made his
way to the carriage. Amieri sat at the door, and received
only a look as she passed, and helping Giulio
tenderly in, she gave the order to drive swiftly home,
and in a few minutes they entered together the palace
of their common inheritance.

It would be superfluous to dwell on the incidents
of the sequel, which were detailed in the Diario di
Roma, and are known to all the world. The hunchback
Count Cesarini has succeeded his father in his
title and estates, and is beloved of all Rome. The
next heir to the title is a son (now two years of age)
of the countess Amieri, who is to take the name of
Cesarini on coming to his majority. They live together
in the old palazzo, and all strangers go to see
their gallery of pictures, of which none are bad, except
some well intended but not very felicitously executed
compositions by one Lenzoni.

Count Lamba Malaspina is at present in exile, having
been convicted of drawing a sword on a disabled gentleman,
on his way from a masquerade at La Pergola.
His seclusion is rendered the more tolerable by the
loss of his teeth, which were rudely thrust down his
throat by this same Lenzoni (fated to have a finger in
every pie) in defence of the attacked party on that occasion.
You will hear Lenzoni's address (should you
wish to purchase a picture of his painting) at the Caffé
del Gioco, opposite the trattoria of La Bella Donna
in the Corso.

PASQUALI, THE TAILOR OF VENICE.

1. CHAPTER I.

Giannino Pasquali was a smart tailor some five
years ago, occupying a cool shop on one of the smaller
canals of Venice. Four pairs of suspenders, a print
of the fashions, and a motley row of the gay-colored
trousers worn by the gondoliers, ornamented the window
looking on the dark alley in the rear, and, attached
to the post of the water-gate on the canal side,
floated a small black gondola, the possession of which
afforded the same proof of prosperity of the Venetian
tailor which is expressed by a horse and buggy at the
door of a snip in London. The place-seeking traveller,
who, nez en l'air, threaded the tangled labyrinth
of alleys and bridges between the Rialto and St.
Mark's, would scarce have observed the humble shop-window
of Pasquali, yet he had a consequence on the
Piazza, and the lagoon had seen his triumphs as an
amateur gondolier. Giannino was some thirty years
of age, and his wife Fiametta, whom he had married
for her zecchini, was on the shady side of fifty.

If the truth must be told, Pasquali had discovered
that, even with a bag of sequins for eye-water, Fiametta
was not always the most lovely woman in
Venice. Just across the canal lived old Donna
Bentoccata, the nurse, whose daughter Turturilla
was like the blonde in Titian's picture of the Marys;
and to the charms of Turturilla, even seen through
the leaden light of poverty, the unhappy Pasquali was
far from insensible.

The festa of San Antonio arrived after a damp week
of November, and though you would suppose the atmosphere
of Venice not liable to any very sensible increase
of moisture, Fiametta, like people who live on
land, and who have the rheumatism as a punishment
for their age and ugliness, was usually confined to her
brazero of hot coals till it was dry enough on the Lido
for the peacocks to walk abroad. On this festa, however,
San Antonio being, as every one knows, the
patron saint of Padua, the Padovese were to come
down the Brenta, as was their custom, and cross over
the sea to Venice to assist in the celebration; and
Fiametta once more thought Pasquali loved her for
herself alone when he swore by his rosary that unless
she accompanied him to the festa in her wedding dress,
he would not turn an oar in the race, nor unfasten his
gondola from the door-post. Alas! Fiametta was

married in the summer solstice, and her dress was
permeable to the wind as a cobweb or gossamer. Is
it possible you could have remembered that, oh, wicked
Pasquali?

It was a day to puzzle a barometer; now bright,
now rainy; now gusty as a corridor in a novel, and
now calm as a lady after a fit of tears. Pasquali was
up early and waked Fiametta with a kiss, and, by way
of unusual tenderness, or by way of ensuring the wedding
dress, he chose to play dressing maid, and arranged
with his own hands her jupon and fezzoletta.
She emerged from her chamber looking like a slice
of orange-peel in a flower-bed, but smiling and nodding,
and vowing the day warm as April, and the sky
without a cloud. The widening circles of an occasional
drop of rain in the canal were nothing but the
bubbles bursting after a passing oar, or perhaps the last
flies of summer. Pasquali swore it was weather to win
down a peri.

As Fiametta stepped into the gondola, she glanced
her eyes over the way and saw Turturilla, with a face
as sorrowful as the first day in Lent, seated at her
window. Her lap was full of work, and it was quite
evident that she had not thought of being at the festa.
Fiametta's heart was already warm, and it melted quite
at the view of the poor girl's loneliness.

“Pasquali mio!” she said, in a deprecating tone,
as if she were uncertain how the proposition would
be received, “I think we could make room for poor
Turturilla!”

A gleam of pleasure, unobserved by the confiding
sposa, tinted faintly the smooth olive cheek of Pasquali.

“Eh! diavolo!” he replied, so loud that the sorrowful
seamstress heard, and hung down her head
still lower; “must you take pity on every cheese-paring
of a regezza who happens to have no lover!
Have reason! have reason! The gondola is narrower
than your brave heart my fine Fiametta!” And away
he pushed from the water-steps.

Turturilla rose from her work and stepped out upon
the rusty gratings of the balcony to see them depart.
Pasquali stopped to grease the notch of his oar, and
between that and some other embarrassments, the
gondola was suffered to float directly under her
window. The compliment to the generous nature
of Fiametta, was, meantime, working, and as she was
compelled to exchange a word or two with Turturilla
while her husband was getting his oar into the socket,
it resulted (as he thought it very probable it would),
in the good wife's renewing her proposition, and making
a point of sending the deserted girl for her holyday
bonnet. Pasquali swore through all the saints
and angels by the time she had made herself ready,
though she was but five minutes gone from the window,
and telling Fiametta in her ear that she must consider
it as the purest obligation, he backed up to the steps of
old Donna Bentoccata, helped in her daughter with a
better grace than could have been expected, and with
one or two short and deep strokes, put forth into the
grand canal with the velocity of a lance-fly.

A gleam of sunshine lay along the bosom of the
broad silver sheet, and it was beautiful to see the
gondolas with their gay colored freights all hastening
in one direction, and with swift track to the festa.
Far up and down they rippled the smooth water, here
gliding out from below a palace-arch, there from a narrow
and unseen canal, the steel beaks curved and flashing,
the water glancing on the oar-blades, the curtains
moving, and the fair women of Venice leaning out and
touching hands as they neared neighbor or acquaintance
in the close-pressing gondolas. It was a beautiful
sight, indeed, and three of the happiest hearts in
that swift gliding company were in Pasquali's gondola,
though the bliss of Fiametta, I am compelled to say,
was entirely owing to the bandage with which love is
so significantly painted. Ah! poor Fiametta!

From the Lido, from Fusina, from under the Bridge
of Sighs, from all quarters of the lagoon, and from all
points of the floating city of Venice, streamed the flying
gondolas to the Giudecca. The narrow walk
along the edge of the long and close-built island was
thronged with booths and promenaders, and the black
barks by hundreds bumped their steel noses against
the pier as the agitated water rose and fell beneath
them. The gondolas intended for the race pulled
slowly up and down, close to the shore, exhibiting
their fairy-like forms and their sinewy and gayly dressed
gondoliers to the crowds on land and water; the
bands of music, attached to different parties, played
here and there a strain; the criers of holy pictures
and gingerbread made the air vocal with their lisping
and soft Venetian; and all over the scene, as if it was
the light of the sky or some other light as blessed but
less common, shone glowing black eyes, black as
night, and sparkling as the stars on night's darkest
bosom. He who thinks lightly of Italian beauty
should have seen the women of Venice on St. Antonio's
day '32, or on any or at any hour when their
pulses are beating high and their eyes alight—for they
are neither one nor the other always. The women
of that fair clime, to borrow the simile of Moore, are
like lava-streams, only bright when the volcano kindles.
Their long lashes cover lustreless eyes, and their blood
shows dully through the cheek in common and listless
hours. The calm, the passive tranquillity in which
the delicate graces of colder climes find their element
are to them a torpor of the heart when the blood scarce
seems to flow. They are wakeful only to the energetic,
the passionate, the joyous movements of the
soul.

Pasquali stood erect in the prow of his gondola, and
stole furtive glances at Turturilla while he pointed
away with his finger to call off the sharp eyes of Fiametta;
but Fiametta was happy and unsuspicious.
Only when now and then the wind came up chilly
from the Adriatic, the poor wife shivered and sat
closer to Turturilla, who in her plainer but thicker
dress, to say nothing of younger blood, sat more comfortably
on the black cushion and thought less about
the weather. An occasional drop of rain fell on the
nose of poor Fiametta, but if she did not believe it was
the spray from Pasquali's oar, she at least did her best
to believe so; and the perfidious tailor swore by St.
Anthony that the clouds were as dry as her eyelashes.
I never was very certain that Turturilla was not in the
secret of this day's treacheries.

The broad centre of the Giudecca was cleared, and
the boats took their places for the race. Pasquali
ranged his gondola with those of the other spectators,
and telling Fiametta in her ear that he should sit on
the other side of Turturilla as a punishment for their
malapropos invitation, he placed himself on the small
remainder of the deep cushion on the farthest side
from his now penitent spouse, and while he complained
almost rudely of the narrowness of his seat, he
made free to hold on by Turturilla's waist which no
doubt made the poor girl's mind more easy on the
subject of her intrusion.

Who won and who lost the race, what was the
device of each flag, and what bets and bright eyes
changed owners by the result, no personage of this
tale knew or cared, save Fiametta. She looked on
eagerly. Pasquali and Turturilla, as the French say,
trouvaient autress chats á frotter.

After the decision of the grand race, St. Antonio
being the protector, more particularly of the humble
(“patron of pigs” in the saints' calendar), the seignoria
and the grand people generally, pulled away for St.
Mark's, leaving the crowded Giudecca to the people.
Pasquali, as was said before, had some renown as a
gondolier. Something what would be called in other
countries a scrub race, followed the departure of the

winning boat, and several gondolas, holding each one
person only, took their places for the start. The
tailor laid his hand on his bosom, and, with the smile
that had first stirred the heart and the sequins of
Fiametta, begged her to gratify his love by acting as
his make-weight while he turned an oar for the pig of
St. Antonio. The prize roasted to an appetizing
crisp, stood high on a platter in front of one of the
booths on shore, and Fiametta smacked her lips,
overcame her tears with an effort, and told him, in
accents as little as possible like the creak of a dry oar
in the socket, that he might set Turturilla on shore.

A word in her ear, as he handed her over the gunwale,
reconciled Bonna Bentoccata's fair daughter to
this conjugal partiality, and stripping his manly figure
of its upper disguises, Pasquali straightened out his
fine limbs, and drove his bark to the line in a style that
drew applause from even his competitors. As a mark
of their approbation, they offered him an outside place
where his fair dame would be less likely to be spattered
with the contending oars; but he was too generous
to take advantage of this considerate offer, and crying
out as he took the middle, “ben pronto, signori!” gave
Fiametta a confident look and stood like a hound in
the leash.

Off they went at the tap of the drum, poor Fiametta
holding her breath and clinging to the sides of the
gondola, and Pasquali developing skill and muscle—
not for Fiametta's eyes only. It was a short, sharp
race, without jockeying or management, all fair play
and main strength, and the tailor shot past the end of
the Giudecca a boat's length ahead. Much more applauded
than a king at a coronation or a lord-mayor
taking water at London stairs, he slowly made his way
back to Turturilla, and it was only when that demure
damsel rather shrunk from sitting down in two inches
of water, that he discovered how the disturbed element
had quite filled up the hollow of the leather cushion
and made a peninsula of the uncomplaining Fiametta.
She was as well watered, as a favorite plant in a flower-garden.

“Pasquali mio!” she said in an imploring tone,
holding up the skirt of her dress with the tips of her
thumb and finger, “could you just take me home
while I change my dress.”

“One moment, Fiametta cara! they are bringing
the pig!”

The crisp and succulent trophy was solemnly placed
in the prow of the victor's gondola, and preparation
was made to convoy him home with a triumphant
procession. A half hour before it was in order to
move—an hour in first making the circuit of the grand
canal, and an hour more in drinking a glass and exchanging
good wishes at the stairs of the Rialto, and
Donna Fiametta had sat too long by two hours and a
half with scarce a dry thread on her body. What
afterward befell will be seen in the more melancholy
sequel.

2. CHAPTER II.

The hospital of St. Girolamo is attached to the
convent of that name, standing on one of the canals
which put forth on the seaward side of Venice. It is
a long building, with its low windows and latticed
doors opening almost on the level of the sea, and the
wards for the sick are large and well aired; but, except
when the breeze is stirring, impregnated with a
saline dampness from the canal, which, as Pasquali
remarked, was good for the rheumatism. It was not
so good for the patient.

The loving wife Fiametta grew worse and worse
after the fatal festa, and the fit of rheumatism brought
on by the slightness of her dress and the spattering he
had given her in the race, had increased by the end of
the week, to a rheumatic fever. Fiametta was old
and tough, however, and struggled manfully (woman
as she was) with the disease, but being one night a
little out of her head, her loving husband took occasion
to shudder at the responsibility of taking care of
her, and jumping into his gondola, he pulled across to
St. Girolamo and bespoke a dry bed and a sister of
charity, and brought back the pious father Gasparo
and a comfortable litter. Fiametta was dozing when
they arrived, and the kind-hearted tailor willing to
spare her the pain of knowing that she was on her way
to the hospital for the poor, set out some meat and
wine for the monk, and sending over for Turturilla
and the nurse to mix the salad, they sat and ate away
the hours till the poor dame's brain should be wandering
again.

Toward night the monk and Dame Bentoccata were
comfortably dozing with each other's support (having
fallen asleep at table), and Pasquali with a kiss from
Turturilla, stole softly up stairs. Fiametta was mutturing
unquietly, and working her fingers in the palms
of her hands, and on feeling her pulse he found the
fever was at its height. She took him, besides, for the
prize pig of the festa, for he knew her wits were fairly
abroad. He crept down stairs, gave the monk a strong
cup of coffee to get him well awake, and, between the
four of them, they got poor Fiametta into the litter,
drew the curtains tenderly around and deposited her
safely in the bottom of the gondola.

Lightly and smoothly the winner of the pig pulled
away with his loving burden, and gliding around the
slimy corners of the palaces, and hushing his voice
as he cried out “right!” or “left!” to guard the
coming gondoliers of his vicinity, he arrived, like a
thought of love to a maid's mind in sleep, at the door
of St. Girolamo. The abbess looked out and said,
“Benedicite!” and the monk stood firm on his brown
sandals to receive the precious burden from the arms
of Pasquali. Believing firmly that it was equivalent
to committing her to the hand of St. Peter, and of
course abandoning all hope of seeing her again in
this world, the soft-hearted tailor wiped his eye as
she was lifted in, and receiving a promise from Father
Gasparo that he would communicate faithfully the
state of her soul in the last agony, he pulled, with
lightened gondola and heart, back to his widower's
home and Turturilla.

For many good reasons, and apparent as good, it is
a rule in the hospital of St. Girolamo, that the sick
under its holy charge shall receive the visit of neither
friend nor relative. If they recover, they return to
their abodes to earn candles for the altar of the restoring
saint. If they die, their clothes are sent to their
surviving friends, and this affecting memorial, besides
communicating the melancholy news, affords all the
particulars and all the consolation they are supposed
to require upon the subject of their loss.

Waiting patiently for Father Gasparo and his bundle,
Pasquali and Turturilla gave themselves up to hopes,
which on the tailor's part (we fear it must be admitted),
augured a quicker recovery from grief than might be
credited to an elastic constitution. The fortune of
poor Fiametta was sufficient to warrant Pasquali in
neglecting his shop to celebrate every festa that the
church acknowledged, and for ten days subsequent to
the committal of his wife to the tender mercies of St.
Girolamo, five days out of seven was the proportion of
merry holydays with his new betrothed.

They were sitting one evening in the open piazza
of St. Mark, in front of the most thronged café of
that matchless square. The moon was resting her
silver disk on the point of the Campanile, and the
shadows of thousands of gay Venetians fell on the
immense pavement below, clear and sharply drawn
as a black cartoon. The four extending sides of the

square lay half in shades half in light, with their
innumerable columns and balconies and sculptured
work, and, frowning down on all, in broken light and
shadow, stood the arabesque structure of St. Mark's
itself dizzying the eyes with its mosaics and confused
devices, and thrusting forth the heads of her four
golden-collared steeds into the moonbeams, till they
looked on that black relief, like the horses of Pluto
issuing from the gates of Hades. In the centre of
the square stood a tall woman, singing, in rich contralto,
and old song of the better days of Venice; and
against one of the pillars, Polichinello had backed
his wooden stage, and beat about his puppets with
an energy worthy of old Dandolo and his helmeted
galley-men. To those who wore not the spectacles
of grief or discontent, the square of St. Mark's that
night was like some cozening tableau. I never saw
anything so gay.

Everybody who has “swam in a gondola,” knows
how the cafés of Venice thrust out their checkered
awnings over a portion of the square, and filled the
shaded space below with chairs and marble tables.
In a corner of the shadow thus afforded, with ice and
coffee on a small round slab between them, and the
flat pavement of the public promenade under their feet,
sat our two lovers. With neither hoof nor wheel to
drown or interrupt their voices (as in cities whose
streets are stones, not water), they murmured their
hopes and wishes in the softest language under the
sun, and with the sotto voce acquired by all the inhabitants
of this noiseless city. Turturilla had taken ice to
cool her and coffee to take off the chill of her ice, and
a biechiere del perfetto amore to reconcile these two
antagonists in her digestion, when the slippers of a
monk glided by, and in a moment the recognised
Father Gasparo made a third in the shadowy corner.
The expected bundle was under his arm, and he was
on his way to Pasquali's dwelling. Having assured
the disconsolate tailor that she had unction and wafer
as became the wife of a citizen of Venice like himself,
he took heart and grew content that she was in heaven.
It was a better place, and Turturilla for so little as a
gold ring, would supply her place in his bosom.

The moon was but a brief week older when Pasquali
and Turturilla stood in the church of our lady
of grief, and Father Gasparo within the palings of the
altar. She was as fair a maid as ever bloomed in the
garden of beauty beloved of Titian, and the tailor was
nearer worth nine men to look at, than the fraction of
a man considered usually the exponent of his profession.
Away mumbled the good father upon the matrimonial
service, thinking of the old wine and rich
pastries that were holding their sweetness under cork
and crust only till he had done his ceremony, and
quicker by some seconds than had ever been achieved
before by priest or bishop, he arrived at the putting on
of the ring. His hand was tremulous, and (oh unlucky
omen!) he dropped it within the gilden fence
of the chancel. The choristers were called, and
Father Gasparo dropped on his knees to look for it—
but if the devil had not spirited it away, there was no
other reason why that search was in vain. Short of
an errand to the goldsmith on the Rialto, it was at
last determined the wedding could not proceed. Father
Gasparo went to hide his impatience within the
restiary, and Turturilla knelt down to pray against the
arts of Sathanas. Before they had settled severally
to their pious occupations, Pasquali was half way to
the Rialto.

Half an hour elapsed, and then instead of the light
grazing of a swift-sped gondola along the church
stairs, the splash of a sullen oar was heard, and Pasquali
stepped on shore. They had hastened to the
door to receive him—monk, choristers and bride—
and to their surprise and bewilderment, he waited to
hand out a woman in a strange dress, who seemed dis
posed, bridegroom as he was, to make him wait her
leisure. Her clothes fitted her ill, and she carried in
her hand a pair of shoes, it was easy to see were never
made for her. She rose at last, and as her face became
visible, down dropped Turturilla and the pious
father, and motionless and aghast stood the simple
Pasquali. Fiametta stepped on shore!

In broken words Pasquali explained. He had
landed at the stairs near the fish market, and with two
leaps reaching the top, sped off past the buttress in
the direction of the goldsmith, when his course was
arrested by encountering at full speed, the person of
an old woman. Hastily raising her up, he recognised
his wife, who, fully recovered, but without a gondola,
was threading the zig-zag alleys on foot, on her way
to her own domicil. After the first astonishment was
over, her dress explained the error of the good father
and the extent of his own misfortune. The clothes
had been hung between the bed of Fiametta and that
of a smaller woman who had been long languishing
of a consumption. She died, and Fiametta's clothes,
brought to the door by mistake, were recognised by
Father Gasparo and taken to Pasquali.

The holy monk, chop-fallen and sad, took his solitary
way to the convent, but with the first step he felt
something slide into the heel of his sandal. He sat
down on the church stairs and absolved the devil from
theft—it was the lost ring, which had fallen upon his
foot and saved Pasquali the tailor from the pains of
bigamy.

THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA.

—La Bruyere.

Fast and rebukingly rang the matins from the
towers of St. Etienne, and, though unused to wake,
much less to pray, at that sunrise hour, I felt a compunctious
visiting as my postillion cracked his whip
and flew past the sacred threshold, over which tripped,
as if every stroke would be the last, the tardy yet
light-footed mass-goers of Vienna. It was my first
entrance into this Paris of Germany, and I stretched
my head from the window to look back with delight
upon the fretted gothic pile, so cumbered with ornament,
yet so light and airy—so vast in the area it
covered, yet so crusted in every part with delicate device
and sculpture. On sped the merciless postillion,
and the next moment we rattled into the court-yard of
the hotel.

I gave my keys to the most faithful and intelligent
of valets—an English boy of sixteen, promoted from
white top-boots and a cabriolet in London, to a plain
coat and almost his master's friendship upon the continent—and
leaving him to find rooms to my taste,
make them habitable and get breakfast, I retraced my
way to ramble a half hour through the aisles of St.
Etienne.

The lingering bell was still beating its quick and
monotonous call, and just before me, followed closely
by a female domestic, a veiled and slightly-formed lady
stepped over the threshold of the cathedral, and took
her way by the least-frequented aisle to the altar. I
gave a passing glance of admiration at the small ankle
and dainty chaussure betrayed by her hurried step;
but remembering with a slight effort that I had sought

the church with at least some feeble intentions of religious
worship, I crossed the broad nave to the opposite
side, and was soon leaning against a pillar, and
listening to the heavenly-breathed music of the voluntary,
with a confused, but I trust, not altogether unprofitable
feeling of devotion.

The peasants, with their baskets standing beside
them on the tesselated floor, counted their beads upon
their knees; the murmur, low-toned and universal,
rose through the vibrations of the anthem with an accompaniment
upon which I have always thought the
great composers calculated, no less than upon the
echoing arches, and atmosphere thickened with incense;
and the deep-throated priest muttered his
Latin prayer, more edifying to me that it left my
thoughts to their own impulses of worship, undemeaned
by the irresistible littleness of criticism, and
unchecked by the narrow bounds of another's comprehension
of the Divinity. Without being in any
leaning of opinion a son of the church of Rome, I
confess my soul gets nearer to heaven; and my religious
tendencies, dulled and diverted from improvement
by a life of travel and excitement, are more
gratefully ministered to, in the indistinct worship of
the catholics. It seems to me that no man can pray
well through the hesitating lips of another. The
inflated style or rhetorical efforts of many, addressing
Heaven with difficult grammar and embarrassed
logic—and the weary monotony of others, repeating
without interest and apparently without
thought, the most solemn appeals to the mercy of
the Almighty—are imperfect vehicles, at least to
me, for a fresh and apprehensive spirit of worship.
The religious architecture of the catholics favors the
solitary prayer of the heart. The vast floor of the
cathedral, the far receding aisles with their solemn
light, to which penetrate only the indistinct murmur
of priest and penitent, and the affecting wail or triumphant
hallelujah of the choir; the touching attitudes
and utter abandonment of all around to their
unarticulated devotions; the freedom to enter and depart,
unquestioned and unnoticed, and the wonderful
impressiveness of the lofty architecture, clustered
with mementoes of death, and presenting through
every sense, some unobtrusive persuasion to the duties
of the spot—all these, I can not but think, are aids,
not unimportant to devout feeling, nor to the most
careless keeper of his creed and conscience, entirely
without salutary use.

My eye had been resting unconsciously on the
drapery of a statue, upon which the light of a painted
oriel window threw the mingled dyes of a peacock.
It was the figure of an apostle; and curious at last to
see whence the colors came which turned the saintly
garb into a mantle of shot silk, I strayed toward the
eastern window, and was studying the gorgeous dyes
and grotesque drawing of an art lost to the world, when
I discovered that I was in the neighborhood of the
pretty figure that had tripped into church so lightly
before me. She knelt near the altar, a little forward
from one of the heavy gothic pillars, with her maid
beside her, and, close behind knelt a gentleman, who
I observed at a second glance, was paying his devotions
exclusively to the small foot that peeped from
the edge of a snowy peignoir, the dishabille of which
was covered and betrayed by a lace-veil and mantle.
As I stood thinking what a graceful study her figure
would make for a sculptor, and what an irreligious impertinence
was visible in the air of the gentleman behind,
he leaned forward as if to prostrate his face upon
the pavement, and pressed his lips upon the slender
sole of (I have no doubt) the prettiest shoe in Vienna.
The natural aversion which all men have for each
other as strangers, was quickened in my bosom by a
feeling much more vivid, and said to be quite as natural—resentment
at any demonstration by another of
preference for the woman one has admired. If I have
not mistaken human nature, there is a sort of imaginary
property which every man feels in a woman he has
looked upon with even the most transient regard,
which is violated malgré lui, by a similar feeling on
the part of any other individual.

Not sure that the gentleman, who had so suddenly
become my enemy, had any warrant in the lady's connivance
for his attentions, I retreated to the shelter
of the pillar, and was presently satisfied that he was as
much a stranger to her as myself, and was decidedly
annoying her. A slight advance in her position to
escape his contact gave me the opportunity I wished,
and stepping upon the small space between the skirt
of her dress and the outpost of his ebony cane, I began
to study the architecture of the roof with great seriousness.
The gothic order, it is said, sprang from the
first attempts at constructing roofs from the branches
of trees, and is more perfect as it imitates more closely
the natural wilderness with its tall tree-shafts and interlacing
limbs. With my eyes half shut I endeavored
to transport myself to an American forest, and convert
the beams and angles of this vast gothic structure
into a primitive temple of pines, with the sunshine
coming brokingly through; but the delusion, otherwise
easy enough, was destroyed by the cherubs roosting
on the cornices, and the apostles and saints perched
as it were in the branches; and, spite of myself, I
thought it represented best Shylock's “wilderness of
monkeys.”

“S'il vous plait, monsieur!” said the gentleman,
pulling me by the pantaloons as I was losing myself
in these ill-timed speculations.

I looked down.

“Vous me gênez, monsiêur!”

“J'en suis bien sure, monsieur!”—and I resumed my
study of the roof, turning gradually round till my heels
were against his knees, and backing peu-à-peu.

It has often occurred to me as a defect in the system
of civil justice, that the time of the day at which a
crime is committed is never taken into account by judge
or jury. The humors of an empty stomach act so energetically
on the judgment and temper of a man, and
the same act appears so differently to him, fasting and
full, that I presume an inquiry into the subject would
prove that few offences against law and human pity
were ever perpetrated by villains who had dined. In
the adventure before us, the best-disposed reader will
condemn my interference in a stranger's gallantries as
impertinent and quixotic. Later in the day, I should
as soon have thought of ordering water-cresses for the
gentleman's dindon aux truffes.

I was calling myself to account something after the
above fashion, the gentleman in question standing near
me, drumming on his boot with his ebony cane, when
the lady rose, threw her rosary over her neck, and
turning to me with a graceful smile, courtesied slightly
and disappeared. I was struck so exceedingly with
the intense melancholy in the expression of the face—
an expression so totally at variance with the elasticity
of the step, and the promise of the slight and riante
figure and air—that I quite forgot I had drawn a
quarrel on myself, and was loitering slowly toward the
door of the church, when the gentleman I had offended
touched me on the arm, and in the politest manner
possible requested myaddress. We exchanged cards,
and I hastened home to breakfast, musing on the
facility with which the current of our daily life may be
thickened. I fancied I had a new love on my hands,
and I was tolerably sure of a quarrel—yet I had been
in Vienna but fifty-four minutes by Bréguet.

My breakfast was waiting, and Percie had found
time to turn a comb through his brown curls, and get
the dust off his gaiters. He was tall for his age, and
(unaware to himself, poor boy!) every word and action
reflected upon the handsome seamstress in Cranbourne

Alley, whom he called his mother—for he showed
blood. His father was a gentleman, or there is no
truth in thorough-breeding. As I looked at him, a
difficulty vanished from my mind.

“Percie!”

“Sir!”

“Get into your best suit of plain clothes, and if a
foreigner calls on me this morning, come in and forget
that you are a valet. I have occasion to use you for
a gentleman.”

“Yes, sir!”

“My pistols are clean, I presume?”

“Yes, sir!”

I wrote a letter or two, read a volume of “Ni
jamais, ni toujours,” and about noon a captain of
dragoons was announced, bringing me the expected
cartel. Percie came in, treading gingerly in a pair
of tight French boots, but behaving exceedingly like
a gentleman, and after a little conversation, managed on
his part strictly according to my instructions, he took
his came and walked off with his friend of the steel
scabbard to become acquainted with the ground.

The gray of a heavenly summer morning was
brightening above the chimneys of the fair city of
Vienna as I stepped into a caléche, followed by Percie.
With a special passport (procured by the politeness
of my antagonist) we made our sortie at that early
hour from the gates, and crossing the glacis, took the
road to the banks of the Danube. It was but a mile
from the city, and the mist lay low on the face of the
troubled current of the river, while the towers and
pinnacles of the silent capital cut the sky in clear and
sharp lines—as if tranquillity and purity, those immaculate
hand-maidens of nature, had tired of innocence
and their mistress—and slept in town!

I had taken some coffee and broiled chicken before
starting, and (removed thus from the category of the
savage unbreakfasted) I was in one of those moods of
universal benevolence, said (erroneously) to be produced
only by a clean breast and milk diet. I could
have wept, with Wordsworth, over a violet.

My opponent was there with his draggon, and Percie,
cool and gentlemanlike, like a man who “had
served,” looked on at the loading of the pistols, and
gave me mine with a very firm hand, but with a moisture
and anxiety in his eye which I have remembered
since. We were to fire any time after the counting
of three, and having no malice against my friend,
whose impertinence to a lady was (really!) no business
of mine. I intended, of course, to throw away my fire.

The first word was given and I looked at my antagonist,
who, I saw at a glance, had no such gentle
intentions. He was taking deliberate aim, and in the
four seconds that elapsed between the remaining two
words, I changed my mind (one thinks so fast when
his leisure is limited!) at least twenty times whether I
should fire at him or no.

“Trois!” pronounced the dragoon, from a throat
like a trombone, and with the last thought, up flew
my hand, and as my pistol discharged in the air, my
friend's shot struck upon a large turquoise which I
wore on my third finger, and drew a slight pencil-line
across my left organ of causality. It was welf aimed
for my temple, but the ring had saved me.

Friend of those days, regretted and unforgotten!
days of the deepest sadness and heart-heaviness, yet
somehow dearer in remembrance than all the joys I
can recall—there was a talisman in thy parting gift thou
didst not think would be, one day, my angel!

“You will be able to wear your hair over the scar,
sir!” said Percie, coming up and putting his finger on
the wound.

“Monsieur!” said the dragoon, advancing to Percie
after a short conference with his principal, and
looking twice as fierce as before.

“Monsieur!” said Percie, wheeling short upon him.

“My friend is not satisfied. He presumes that
monsieur l' Anglais wishes to trifle with him.”

“Then let your friend take care of himself,” said I,
roused by the unprovoked murderousness of the feeling.
Load the pistols, Percie! In my country,” I
continued, turning to the dragoon, “a man is disgraced
who fires twice upon an antagonist who has spared
him! Your friend is a ruffian, and the consequences
be on his own hand!”

We took our places and the first word was given,
when a man dashed between us on horseback at top-speed.
The violence with which he drew rein brought
his horse upon his haunches, and he was on his feet in
half a breath.

The idea that he was an officer of the police was
immediately dissipated by his step and air. Of the
finest athletic form I had ever seen, agile, graceful,
and dressed pointedly well, there was still an indefinable
something about him, either above or below
a gentleman—which, it was difficult to say. His
features were slight, fair, and, except a brow too
heavy for them and a lip of singular and (I thought)
habitual defiance, almost feminine. His hair grew
long and had been soigné, probably by more caressing
fingers than his own, and his rather silken mustache
was glossy with some odorent oil. As he
approached me and took my hand, with a clasp like a
smith's vice, I observed these circumstances, and could
have drawn his portrait without ever seeing him again
—so marked a man was he, in every point and feature.

His business was soon explained. He was the
husband of the lady my opponent had insulted, and
that pleasant gentleman could, of course, make no objection
to his taking my place. I officiated as tèmoin,
and, as they took their position, I anticipated for the
draggon and myself the trouble of carrying them both
off the field. I had a practical assurance of my friend's
pistol, and the stranger was not the looking man to
miss a hair's breadth of his aim.

The word was not fairly off my lips when both
pistols cracked like one discharge, and high into the
air sprang my revengeful opponent, and dropped like
a clod upon the grass. The stranger opened his
waistcoat, thrust his fore-finger into a wound in his
left breast, and slightly closing his teeth, pushed a
bullet through, which had been checked by the bone
and lodged in the flesh near the skin. The surgeon
who had accompanied my unfortunate antagonist, left
the body, which he had found beyond his art, and
readily gave his assistance to stanch the blood of my
preserver; and jumping with the latter into my calêche,
I put Percie upon the stranger's horse, and we drove
back to Vienna.

The market people were crowding in at the gate,
the merry peasant girls glanced at us with their blue,
German eyes, the shopmen laid out their gay wares
to the street, and the tide of life ran on as busily and
as gayly, though a drop had been extracted, within
scarce ten minutes, from its quickest vein. I felt a
revulsion at my heart, and grew faint and sick. Is a
human life—is my life worth anything, even a thought,
to my fellow-creatures? was the bitter question forced
upon my soul. How icily and keenly the unconscious
indifference of the world penetrates to the nerve and
marrow of him who suddenly realizes it.

We dashed through the kohl-market, and driving
into the porte-cochére of a dark-looking house in one
of the cross streets of that quarter, were ushered into
apartments of extraordinary magnificence.

2. CHAPTER II.

“What do you want, Percie?”

He was walking into the room with all the deliberate
politeness of a “gold-stick-in-waiting.”

“I beg pardon, sir, but I was asked to walk up, and
I was not sure whether I was still a gentleman.”

It instantly struck me that it might seem rather
infra dig to the chevalier (my new friend had thus
announced himself) to have had a valet for a second, and
as he immediately after entered the room, having stepped
below to give orders about his horse, I presented
Percie as a gentleman and my friend, and resumed my
observation of the singular apartment in which I found
myself.

The effect on coming first in at the door, was that
of a small and lofty chapel, where the light struggled
in from an unseen aperture above the altar. There
were two windows at the farther extremity, but curtained
so heavily, and set so deeply into the wall, that
I did not at first observe the six richly-carpeted steps
which led up to them, nor the luxuriously cushioned
seats on either side of the casement, within the niche,
for those who would mount thither for fresh air. The
walls were tapestried, but very ragged and dusty, and
the floor, through there were several thicknesses of the
heavy-piled, small, Turkey carpets laid loosely over it,
was irregular and sunken. The corners were heaped
with various articles I could not at first distinguish.
My host fortunately gave me an opportunity to gratify
my curiosity by frequent absences under the house-keeper's
apology (odd I thought for a chevalier) of
expediting breakfast; and with the aid of Percie, I
tumbled his chattels about with all necessary freedom.

“That,” said the chevalier, entering, as I turned out
the face of a fresh colored picture to the light, “is a
capo d'opera of a French artist, who painted it, as you
may say, by the gleam of the dagger.”

“A cool light, as a painter would say!”

“He was a cool fellow, sir, and would have handled
a broadsword better than a pencil.”

Percie stepped up while I was examining the exquisite
finish of the picture, and asked very respectfully
if the chevalier would give him the particulars
of the story. It was a full-length portrait of a young
and excessively beautiful girl, of apparently scarce
fifteen, entirely nude, and lying upon a black velvet
couch, with one foot laid on a broken diadem, and her
right hand pressing a wild rose to her heart.

“It was the fancy, sir,” continued the chevalier,
“of a bold outlaw, who loved the only daughter of a
noble of Hungary.”

“Is this the lady, sir?” asked Percie, in his politiest
valet French.

The chevalier hesitated a moment and looked over
his shoulder as if he might be overheard.

“This is she—copied to the minutest shadow of a
hair! He was a bold outlaw, gentlemen, and had
plucked the lady from her father's castle with his
own hand.”

“Against her will?” interrupted Percie, rather
energetically.

“No!” scowled the chevalier, as if his lowering
brows had articulated the word, “by her own will and
connivance; for she loved him.”

Percie drew a long breath, and looked more closely
at the taper limbs and the exquisitely-chiselled
features of the face, which was turned over the
shoulder with a look of timid shame inimitably true
to nature.

“She loved him,” continued our fierce narrator,
who, I almost began to suspect was the outlaw himself,
by the energy with which he enforced the tale,
“and after a moonlight ramble or two with him in the
forest of her father's domain, she fled and became his
wife. You are admiring the hair, sir! It is as
luxuriant and glossy now!”

“If you please, sir, it is the villain himself!” said
Percie in an undertone.

“Bref,” continued the chevalier, either not understanding
English or not heeding the interruption, “an
adventurous painter, one day hunting the picturesque
in the neighborhood of the outlaw's retreat, surprised
this fair creature bathing in one of the loneliest mountain-streams
in Hungary. His art appeared to be his
first passion, for he hid himself in the trees and drew
her as she stood dallying on the margin of the small
pool in which the brook loitered; and so busy was he
with his own work, or so soft was the mountain moss
under its master's tread, that the outlaw looked, unperceived
the while, over his shoulder, and fell in love
anew with the admirable counterfeit. She looked
like a naiad, sir, new-born of a dew-drop and a violet.”

I nodded an assent to Percie.

“The sketch, excellent as it seemed, was still un
finished when the painter, enamored as he might
well be, of these sweet limbs, glossy with the shining
water, flug down his book and sprang toward her
The outlaw—”

“Struck him to the heart? Oh Heaven!” said
Percie, covering his eyes as if he could see the
murder.

“No! he was a student of the human soul, and deferred
his vengeance.”

Percie looked up and listened, like a man whose
wits were perfectly abroad.

“He was not unwilling since her person had been
seen irretrievably, to know how his shrinking Iminild
(this was her name of melody) would have escaped,
had she been found alone.”

“The painter”—prompted Percie, impatient for
the sequel.

“The painter flew over rock and brake, and sprang
into the pool in which she was half immersed; and
my brave gril—”

He hesitated, for he had betrayed himself.

“Ay—she is mine, gentlemen; and I am Yvain,
the outlaw—my brave wife, I say with a single bound
leaped to the rock where her dress was concealed,
seized a short spear which she used as a staff in her
climbing rambles, and struck it through his shoulder
as he pursued!”

“Bravely done!” I thought aloud.

“Was it not? I came up the next moment, but the
spear stuck in his shoulder, and I could not fall upon
a wounded man. We carried him to our ruined
castle in the mountains, and while my Iminild cured
her own wound, I sent for his paints, and let him
finish his bold beginning with a difference of my own.
You see the picture.”

“Was the painter's love cured with his wound!”
I asked with a smile.

“No, by St. Stephen! He grew ten times more
enamored as he drew. He was as fierce as a welk
hawk, and as willing to quarrel for his prey. I could
have driven my dagger to his heart a hundred times
for the mutter of his lips and the flash of his dark eyes
as he fed his gaze upon her: but he finished the picture,
and I gave him a fair field. He chose the broadsword,
and hacked away at me like a man.”

“And the result”—I asked.

“I am here!” replied the outlaw significantly.

Percie leaped upon the carpeted steps, and pushed
back the window for fresh air; and, for myself, I scarce
knew how to act under the roof of a man, who, though
he confessed himself an outlaw and almost an assassin,
was bound to me by the ties of our own critical adventure,
and had confided his condition to me with so
ready a reliance on my honor. In the midst of my
dilemma, while I was pretending to occupy myself
with examining a silver mounted and peaked saddle,
which I found behind the picture in the corner, a deep
and unpleasant voice announced breakfast.

“Wolfen is rather a grim chamberlain,” said the
chevalier, bowing with the grace and smile of the
softest courtier, “but he will usher you to breakfast
and I am sure you stand in need of it. For myself,

I could eat worse meat than my grandfather with this
appetite.”

Percie gave me a look of inquiry and uneasiness
when he found we were to follow the rough domestic
through the dark corridors of the old house, and
through his underbred politeness of insisting on following
his host, I could see that he was unwilling to
trust the outlaw with the rear; but a massive and
broad door, flung open at the end of the passage, let
in upon us presently the cool and fresh air from a
northern exposure, and, stepping forward quickly to
the threshold, we beheld a picture which changed the
current and color of our thoughts.

In the bottom of an excavated area, which, as
well as I could judge, must be forty feet below the
level of the court, lay a small and antique garden,
brilliant with the most costly flowers, and cooled by
a fountain gushing from under the foot of a nymph in
marble. The spreading tops of six alleys of lindens
reaching to the level of the street, formed a living
roof to the grot-like depths of the garden, and concealed
it from all view but that of persons decending
like ourselves from the house; while, instead of
walls to shut in this paradise in the heart of a city,
sharply-inclined slopes of green-sward leaned in
under the branches of the lindens, and completed the
fairy-like enclosure of shade and verdure. As we
descended the rose-laden steps and terraces, I observed,
that, of the immense profusion of flowers in
the area below, nearly all were costly exotics, whose
pots were set in the earth, and probably brought
away from the sunshine only when in high bloom;
and as we rounded the spreading basin of the fountain
which broke the perspective of the alley, a table,
which had been concealed by the marble nymph,
and a skilfully-disposed array of rhododendrons lay
just beneath our feet, while a lady, whose features
I could not fail to remember, smiled up from her
couch of crimson cushions and gave us a graceful
welcome.

The same taste for depth which had been shown
in the room sunk below the windows, and the garden
below the street, was continued in the kind of marble
divan in which we were to breakfast. Four steps
descending from the pavement of the alley introduced
us into a circular excavation, whose marble seats,
covered with cushions of crimson silk, surrounded a
table laden with the substantial viands which are
common to a morning meal in Vienna, and smoking
with coffee, whose aroma (Percie agreed with me)
exceeded even the tube roses in grateful sweetness.
Between the cushions at our backs and the pavements
just above the level of our heads, were piled circles
of thickly-flowering geraniums, which enclosed
us in rings of perfume, and, pouring from the cup of
a sculptured flower, held in the hand of the nymph,
a smooth stream like a silver rod supplied a channel
grooved around the centre of the marble table, through
which the bright water, with the impulse of its descent,
made a swift revolution and disappeared.

It was a scene to give memory the lie if it could
have recalled the bloodshed of the morning. The
green light flecked down through the lofty roof upon
the glittering and singing water; a nightingale in a
recess of the garden, gurgled through his wires as if
intoxicated with the congenial twilight of his prison;
the heavy-cupped flowers of the tropics nodded with
the rain of the fountain spray; the distant roll of
wheels in the neighboring streets came with an
assurance of reality to this dream-land, yet softened
by the unreverberating roof and an air crowded with
flowers and trembling with the pulsations of falling
water; the lowering forehead of the outlaw cleared
up like a sky of June after a thunder-shower, and his
voice grew gentle and caressing; and the delicate
mistress of all (by birth, Countess Iminild), a crea
ture as slight as Psyche, and as white as the lotus,
whose flexile stem served her for a bracelet, welcomed
us with her soft voice and humid eyes, and
saddened by the event of the morning, looked on her
husband with a tenderness that would have assoiled
her of her sins against delicacy, I thought even in the
mind of an angel.

“We live, like truth, here, in the bottom of a well,”
said the countess to Percie, as she gave him his coffee;
“how do you like my whimsical abode, sir?”

“I should like any place where you were, Miladi!”
he answered, blushing and stealing his eyes across at
me, either in doubt how far he might presume upon
his new character, or suspecting that I should smile
at his gallantry.

The outlaw glanced his eyes over the curling head
of the boy, with one of those just perceptible smiles
which developed, occasionally, in great beauty, the
gentle spirit in his bosom; and Iminild, pleased with
the compliment or the blush, threw off her pensive
mood, and assumed in an instant, the coquettish air
which had attracted my notice as she stepped before
me into the church of St. Etienne.

“You had hard work,” she said, “to keep up
with your long-legged draggon yesterday, Monsieur
Percie!”

“Miladi?” he answered, with a look of inquiry.

“Oh, I was behind you, and my legs are not much
longer than yours. How he strided away with his
long spurs, to be sure! Do you remember a smart
young gentleman with a blue cap that walked past
you on the glacis occasionally.”

“Ah, with laced boots, like a Hungarian?”

“I see I am ever to be known by my foot,” said
she, putting it out upon the cushion, and turning it
about with naive admiration; “that poor captain of
the imperial guard paid dearly for kissing it, holy
virgin!” and she crossed herself and was silent for a
moment.

“If I might take the freedom, chevalier,” I said,
“pray how came I indebted to your assistance in this
affair?”

“Iminild has partly explained,” he answered.
“She knew, of course, that a challenge would follow
your interference, and it was very easy to know that
an officer of some sort would take a message in the
course of the morning to Le Prince Charles, the only
hotel frequented by the English d'un certain gens.

I bowed to the compliment.

“Arriving in Vienna late last night, I found Iminild
(who had followed this gentleman and the dragoon
unperceived) in possession of all the circumstances;
and, but for oversleeping myself this morning, I should
have saved your turquoise, mon seigneur!”

“Have you lived here long, Miladi?” asked Percie,
looking up into her eyes with an unconscious
passionateness which made the countess Iminild color
slightly, and bite her lips to retain an expression of
pleasure.

“I have not lived long, anywhere, sir!” she answered
half archly, “but I played in this garden when not
much older than you!”

Percie looked confused and pulled up his cravat.

“This house said the chevalier, willing apparently
to spare the countess a painful narration, “is the
property of the old count Ildefert, my wife's father.
He has long ceased to visit Vienna, and has left it, he
supposes, to a stranger. When Iminild tires of the
forest, she comes here, and I join her if I can find
time. I must to the saddle to-morrow, by St. Jacques!”

The word had scarce died on his lips when the door
by which we had entered the garden was flung open,
and the measured tread of gens-d'armes resounded in
the corridor. The first man who stood out upon the
upper terrace was the draggon who had been second
to my opponent.

“Traiter and villain!” muttered the outlaw between
his teeth, “I thought I remembered you! It is that
false comrade Berthold, Iminild!”

Yvain had risen from the table as if but to stretch
his legs; and drawing a pistol from his bosom he
cocked it as he quietly stepped up into the garden.
I saw at a glance that there was no chance for his
escape, and laid my hand on his arm.

“Chevalier!” I said, “surrender and trust to opportunity.
It is madness to resist here.”

“Yvain!” said Iminild, in a low voice, flying to his
side as she comprehended his intention, “leave me
that vengeance, and try the parapet. I'll kill him before
he sleeps! Quick! Ah, Heavens!”

The dragoon had turned at that instant to fly, and
with suddenness of thought the pistol flashed, and
the traitor dropped heavily on the terrace. Springing
like a cat up the slope of green sward, Yvain stood
an instant on the summit of the wall, hesitating where
to jump beyond, and in the next moment rolled heavily
back, stabbed through and through with a bayonet
from the opposite side.

The blood left the lips and cheek of Iminild; but
without a word or a sign of terror, she sprang to the
side of the fallen outlaw and lifted him up against
her knee. The gens-d'armes rushed to the spot, but
the subaltern who commanded them yielded instantly
to my wish that they should retire to the skirts of the
garden; and, sending Percie to the fountain for water,
we bathed the lips and forehead of the dying man and
set him against the sloping parapet. With one hand
grasping the dress of Iminild and the other clasped in
mine, he struggled to speak.

“The cross!” he gasped, “the cross!”

Iminild drew a silver crucifix from her bosom.

“Swear on this,” he said, putting it to my lips and
speaking with terrible energy, “swear that you will
protect her while you live!”

“I swear!”

He shut our hands together convulsively, gasped
slightly as if he would speak again, and, in another
instant sunk, relaxed and lifeless, on the shoulder of
Iminild.

3. CHAPTER III.

The fate and history of Yvain, the outlaw, became,
on the following day, the talk of Vienna. He had
been long known as the daring horse-stealer of Hungary;
and, though it was not doubted that his sway
was exercised over plunderers of every description,
even pirates upon the high seas, his own courage and
address were principally applied to robbery of the well-guarded
steeds of the emperor and his nobles. It was
said that there was not a horse in the dommions of
Austria whose qualities and breeding were not known
to him, nor one he cared to have which was not in his
concealed stables in the forest. The most incredible
stories were told of his horsemanship. He would so
disguise the animal on which he rode, either by forcing
him into new paces or by other arts only known to himself,
that be would make the tour of the Glacis on the
emperor's best horse, newly stolen, unsuspected even
by the royal grooms. The roadsters of his own troop
were the best steeds bred on the banks of the Danube;
but, though always in the highest condition, they
would never have been suspected to be worth a florin
till put upon their mettle. The extraordinary escapes
of his band from the vigilant and well-mounted gens-d'armes
were thus accounted for; and, in most of the
villages in Austria, the people, on some market-day
or other, had seen a body of apparently ill-mounted
peasants suddenly start off with the speed of lightning
at the appearance of gens-d'armes, and, flying over
fence and wall, draw a straight course for the mountains,
distancing their pursuers with the ease of swallows
on the wing.

After the death of Yvain in the garden, I had been
forced with Percie into a carriage, standing in the
court, and accompanied by a guard, driven to my
hotel, where I was given to understand that I was to
remain under arrest till further orders. A sentinel at
the door forbade all ingress or egress except to the
people of the house: a circumstance which was only
distressing to me, as it precluded my inquiries after
the countress Iminild, of whom common rumor, the
servants informed me, made not the slightest mention.

Four days after this, on the relief of the guard at
noon, a subaltern, entered my room and informed me
that I was at liberty. I instantly made preparations to
go out, and was drawing on my boots, when Percie,
who had not yet recovered from the shock of his
arrest, entered in some alarm, and informed me that
one of the royal grooms was in the court with a letter,
which he would deliver only into my own hands. He
had orders beside, he said, not to leave his saddle.
Wondering what new leaf of my destiny was to turn
over, I went below and received a letter, with apparently
the imperial seal, from a well-dressed groom in the
livery of the emperor's brother, the king of Hungary.
He was mounted on a compact, yet fine-limbed horse,
and both horse and rider were as still as if cut in
marble.

I returned to my room and broke the seal. It was
a letter from Iminild, and the bold bearer was an out-law
disguised! She had heard that I was to be released
that morning, and desired me to ride out on the
road to Gratz. In a postscript she begged I would
request Monsieur Percie to accompany me.

I sent for horses, and, wishing to be left to my own
thoughts, ordered Percie to fall behind, and rode
slowly out of the southern gate. If the countess
Iminild were safe, I had enough of the adventure for
my taste. My oath bound me to protect this wild and
unsexed woman, but farther intercourse with a hand
of outlaws, or farther peril of my head for no reason
that either a court of gallantry or of justice would recognise,
was beyond my usual programme of pleasant
events. The road was a gentle ascent, and with the
bridle on the neck of my hack I paced thoughtfully on,
till, at a slight turn, we stood at a fair height above
Vienna.

“It is a beautiful city, sir,” said Percie, riding up.

“How the deuce could she have escaped?” said I,
thinking aloud.

“Has she escaped, sir? Ah, thank Heaven!” exclaimed
the passionate boy, the tears rushing to his
eyes.

“Why, Percie!” I said with a tone of surprise
which called a blush into his face, “have you really
found leisure to fall in love amid all this imbroglio?”

“I beg pardon, my dear master!” he replied in a
confused voice, “I scarce know what it is to fall in
love; but I would die for Miladi Iminild.”

“Not at all an impossible sequel, my poor boy!
But wheel about and touch your hat, for her comes
some one of the royal family!”

A horseman was approaching at an easy canter,
over the broad and unfenced plain of table-land which
overlooks Vienna on the south, attended by six mounted
servants in the white kerseymere frocks, braided
with the two-headed black eagle, which distinguish the
members of the imperial household.

The carriages on the road stopped while he passed,
the foot-passengers touched their caps, and, as he came
near, I perceived that he was slight and young, but
rode with a confidence and a grace not often attained.
His horse had the subdued, half-fiery action of an
Arab, and Percie nearly dropped from his saddle when
the young horseman suddenly drove in his spurs,

and with almost a single vault stood motionless before
us.

“Monsieur!”

“Madame la Contesse!”

I was uncertain how to receive her, and took refuge
in civility. Whether she would be overwhelmed with
the recollection of Yvain's death, or had put away the
thought altogether with her masculine firmness, was
a dilemma for which the eccentric contradictions of
her character left me no probable solution. Motioning
with her hand after saluting me, two of the party
rode back and forward in different directions, as if
patrolling; and giving a look between a tear and a
smile at Percie, she placed her hand in mine, and
shook off her sadness with a strong effort.

“You did not expect so large a suite with your
protégée,” she said, rather gayly, after a moment.

“Do I understand that you come now to put yourself
under my protection?” I asked in reply.

“Soon, but not now, nor here. I have a hundred
men at the foot of Mount Semering, whose future
fate, in some important respects, none can decide but
myself. Yvain was always prepared for this, and
everything is en train. I come now but to appoint a
place of meeting. Quick! my patrole comes in, and
some one approaches whom we must fly. Can you
await me at Gratz?”

“I can and will!”

She put her slight hand to my lips, waved a kiss
at Percie, and away with the speed of wind, flew her
swift Arab over the plain, followed by the six horsemen,
every one of whom seemed part of the animal
that carried him—he rode so admirably.

The slight figure of Iminild in the close fitting dress
of a Hungarian page, her jacket open and her beautiful
limbs perfectly defined, silver fringes at her ankles
and waist, and a row of silver buttons gallonné down
to the instep, her bright, flashing eyes, her short curls
escaping from her cap and tangled over her left temple,
with the gold tassel, dirk and pistol at her belt and
spurs upon her heels—it was an apparition I had
scarce time to realize, but it seemed painted on my
eyes. The cloud of dust which followed their rapid
flight faded away as I watched it, but I saw her still.

“Shall I ride back and order post-horses, sir!”
asked Percie standing up in his stirrups.

“No; but you may order dinner at six. And Percie!”
he was riding away with a gloomy air; “you
may go to the police and get our passports for Venice.”

“By the way of Gratz, sir!”

“Yes, simpleton!”

There is a difference between sixteen and twenty-six,
I thought to myself, as the handsome boy flogged
his horse into a gallop. The time is gone when I
could love without reason. Yet I remember when a
feather, stuck jauntily into a bonnet, would have made
any woman a princess; and in those days, Heaven help
us! I should have loved this woman more for her
galliardize than ten times a prettier one with all the
virtues of Dorcas. For which of my sins am I made
guardian to a robber's wife, I wonder!

The heavy German postillions, with their cocked
hats and yellow coats, got us over the ground after a
manner, and toward the sunset of a summer's evening
the tall castle of Gratz, perched on a pinnacle of rock
in the centre of a vast plain, stood up boldly against
the reddening sky. The rich fields of Styria were
ripening to an early harvest the people sat at their
doors with the look of household happiness for which
the inhabitants of these “despotic countries” are so
remarkable; and now and then on the road the rattling
of steel scabbards drew my attention from a book or a
revery, and the mounted troops, so perpetually seen
on the broad roads of Austria, lingered slowly past
with their dust and baggage-trains.

It had been a long summer's day, and, contrary to
my usual practice, I had not mounted, even for half a
post, to Percie's side in the rumble. Out of humor
with fate for having drawn me into very embarrassing
circumstances—out of humor with myself for the
quixotic step which had first brought it on me—and a
little of out humor with Percie (perhaps from an unacknowledged
jealousy of Iminild's marked preference
for the varlet), I left him to toast alone in the sun,
while I tried to forget him and myself in “Le Marquis
de Pontangos.” What a very clever book it is, by
the way!

The pompous sergeant of the guard performed his
office upon my passport at the gate—giving me at
least a kreutzer worth of his majesty's black sand in
exchange for my florin and my English curse (I said
before I was out of temper, and he was half an hour
writing his abominable name), and leaving my carriage
and Percie to find their way together to the hotel, I
dismounted at the foot of a steep street and made my
way to the battlements of the castle, in search of scenery
and equanimity.

Ah! what a glorious landscape! The precipitous
rock on which the old fortress is built seems dropped
by the Titans in the midst of a plain, extending miles
in every direction, with scarce another pebble. Close
at its base run the populous streets, coiling about it
like serpents around a pyramid, and away from the
walls of the city spread the broad fields, laden, as far
as the eye can see, with tribute for the emperor! The
tall castle, with its armed crest, looks down among the
reapers.

“You have not lost your friend and lover, yet you
are melancholy!” said a voice behind me, that I was
scarce startled to hear.

“Is it you, Iminild?”

“Scarce the same—for Iminild was never before so
sad. It is something in the sunset. Come away while
the woman keeps down in me, and let us stroll through
the Plaza, where the band is playing. Do you love
military music?”

I looked at the costume and figure of the extraordinary
creature before I ventured with her on a
public promenade. She was dressed like one of the
travelling apprentices of Germany, with cap and bleuzer.
and had assumed the air of the craft with a success
absolutely beyond detection. I gave her my arm and
we sauntered through the crowd, listening to the
thrilling music of one of the finest bands in Germany.
The privileged character and free manners of the
wandering craftsmen whose dress she had adopted,
I was well aware, reconciled, in the eyes of the inhabitants,
the marked contrast between our conditions
in life. They would simply have said, if they had
made a remark at all, that the Englishman was bon
enfant and the craftsman bon camarade.

“You had better look at me, messieurs!” said the
dusty apprentice, as two officers of the regiment passed
and gave me the usual strangers' stare; “I am better
worth your while by exactly five thousand florins.”

“And pray how?” I asked.

“That price is set on my head!”

“Heavens! and you walk here!”

“They kept you longer than usual with your pass
port, I presume?”

“At the gate? yes.”

“I came in with my pack at the time. They have
orders to examine all travellers and passports with
unusual care, these sharp officials! But I shall get
out as easily as I got in!”

“My dear countess!” I said, in a tone of serious
remonstrance, “do not trifle with the vigilance of the
best police in Europe! I am your guardian, and you
owe my advice some respect. Come away from the
square and let us talk of it in earnest.”

“Wise seignior! suffer me to remind you how

deftly I slipped through the fingers of these gentry
after our tragedy in Vienna, and pay my opinion some
respect! It was my vanity that brought me, with
my lackeys, to meet you à la prince royale so near
Vienna; and hence this alarm in the police, for I was
seen and suspected. I have shown myself to you
in my favorite character, however, and have done
with such measures. You shall see me on the road
to-morrow, safe as the heart in your bosom. Where
is Monsieur Percie!”

“At the hotel. But stay! can I trust you with
yourself?”

“Yes, and dull company, too! A revoir!”

And whistling the popular air of the craft she had
assumed, the countess Iminild struck her long staff
on the pavement, and with the gait of a tired and
habitual pedestrian, disappeared by a narrow street
leading under the precipitory battlements of the
castle.

Percie made his appearance with a cup of coffee
the following morning, and, with the intention of posting
a couple of leagues to breakfast, I hurried through
my toilet and was in my carriage an hour after sunrise.
The postillion was in his saddle and only waited
for Percie, who, upon inquiry, was nowhere to be
found. I sat fifteen minutes, and just as I was beginning
to be alarmed he ran into the large court of
the hotel, and, crying out to the postillions that all
was right, jumped into his place with an agility,
it struck me, very unlike his usual gentlemanlike
deliberation. Determining to take advantage of the
first up-hill to catechize him upon his matutinal rambles,
I read the signs along the street till we pulled
up at the gate.

Iminild's communication had prepared me for unusual
delay with my passport, and I was not surprised
when the officer, in returning it to me, requested me
as a matter of form, to declare, upon my honor, that
the servant behind my carriage was an Englishman,
and the person mentioned in my passport.

“Foi d'honneur, monsieur,” I said, placing my hand
politely on my heart, and off trotted the postillion,
while the captain of the guard, flattered with my civility,
touched his foraging-cap, and sent me a German
blessing through his mustache.

It was a divine morning, and the fresh and dewy
air took me back many a year, to the days when I
was more familiar with the hour. We had a long
trajet across the plain, and unlooping an antivibration
tablet, for the invention of which my ingenuity took
great credit to itself (suspended on caoutchouc cords
from the roof of the carriage—and deserving of a
patent I trust you will allow!) I let off my poetical
vein in the following beginning to what might have
turned out, but for the interruption, a very edifying
copy of verses:—

A foot thrust into my carriage-window rudely broke
the thread of these delicate musings. The postillion
was on a walk, and before I could get my wits back
from their wool-gathering, the countess Iminild, in
Percie's clothes, sat laughing on the cushion beside
me.

“On what bird's back has your ladyship descended
from the clouds?” I asked with unfeigned astonishment.

“The same bird has brought us both down—c'est
à dire, if you are not still en l'air,” she added, looking
from my scrawled tablets to my perplexed face.

“Are you really and really the countess Iminild?”
I asked with a smile, looking down at the trowsered
feet and loose-fitting boots of the pseudo-valet.

“Yes, indeed! but I leave it to you to swear,
`foi d'honneur,' that a born countess is an English
valet!” And she laughed so long and merrily that
the postillion looked over his yellow epaulets in astonishment.

“Kind, generous Percie!” she said, changing her
tone presently to one of great feeling, “I would scarce
believe him last night when he informed me, as as inducement
to leave him behind, that he was only a servant!
You never told me this. But he is a gentleman,
in every feeling as well as in every feature, and,
by Heavens! he shall be a menial no longer!”

This speech, begun with much tenderness, rose,
toward the close, to the violence of passion; and
folding her arms with an air of defiance, the lady-outlaw
threw herself back in the carriage.

“I have no objection,” I said, after a short silence,
“that Percie should set up for a gentleman. Nature
has certainly done her part to make him one; but till
you can give him means and education, the coat which
you wear, with such a grace, is his safest shell. `Ants
live safely till they have gotten wings, says the old
proverb.”

The blowing of the postillion's horn interrupted the
argument, and, a moment after, we were rolled up,
with German leisure, to the door of the small inn where
I had designed to breakfast. Thinking it probable
that the people of the house, in so small a village,
would be too simple to make any dangerous comments
upon our appearance, I politely handed the countess
out of the carriage, and ordered plates for two.

“It is scarce worth while,” she said, as she heard
the order, “for I shall remain at the door on the look
out. The eil-waggen, for Trieste, which was to leave
Gratz an hour after us, will be soon here, and (if my
friends have served me well), Percie in it. St. Mary
speed him safely!”

She strode away to a small hillock to look out for the
lumbering diligence, with a gait that was no stranger
to, “doublet and hose.” It soon came on with its
usual tempest of whip-cracking and bugle-blasts, and
nearly overturning a fat burgher, who would have
proffered the assistance of his hand, out jumped a
petticoat, which I saw, at a glance, gave a very embarrassed
motion to gentleman Percie.

“This young lady,” said the countess, dragging
the striding and unwilling damsel into the little parlot
where I was breakfasting “travels under the charge of
a deaf old brazier, who has been requested to protect her
modesty as far as Laybach. Make a courtesy, child!”

“I beg pardon, sir!” began Percie.

“Hush, hush! no English! Walls have ears, and
your voice is rather gruffish, mademoiselle. Show
me your passport? Cunegunda Von Krakenpate,
eighteen years of age, blue eyes, nose and chin middling,
etc! There is the conductor's horn! Allez
vite! We meet at Laybach. Adieu, charmante
femme! Adieu!”

And with the sort of caricatured elegance which
women always assume in their imitations of our sex,
Countess Iminild, in frock-coat and trowsers, helped
into the diligence, in hood and petticoat, my “tiger
from Cranbourne-alley!

4. CHAPTER IV.

Spite of remonstrance on my part, the imperative
countess, who had asserted her authority more than
once on our way to Laybach, insisted on the company
of Miss Cunegunda Von Krakenpate, in an
evening walk around the town. Fearing that Percie's
masculine stride would betray him, and objecting
to lend myself to a farce with my valet, I opposed
the freak as long as it was courteous—but it was not
the first time I had learned that a spoiled woman
would have her own way, and too vexed to laugh, I
soberly promenaded the broad avenue of the capital
of Styria, with a valet en demoiselle, and a dame en
valet.

It was but a few hours hence to Planina, and Iminild,
who seemed to fear no risk out of a walled city, waited
on Percie to the carriage the following morning, and
in a few hours we drove up to the rural inn of this
small town of Littorale.

I had been too much out of humor to ask the
countess, a second time, what errand she could have
in so rustic a neighborhood. She had made a mystery
of it, merely requiring of me that I should defer all
arrangements for the future, as far as she was concerned,
till we had visited a spot in Littorale, upon which
her fate in many respects depended. After twenty
fruitless conjectures, I abandoned myself to the course
of circumstances, reserving only the determination, if it
should prove a haunt of Yvain's troop, to separate at
once from her company and await her at Trieste.

Our dinner was preparing at the inn, and tired of
the embarrassment Percie exhibited in my presence,
I walked out and seated myself under an immense
linden, that every traveller will remember, standing
in the centre of the motley and indescribable clusters
of buildings, which serve the innkeeper and blacksmith
of Planina for barns, forge, dwelling, and out-houses.
The tree seems the father of the village.
It was a hot afternoon, and I was compelled to dispute
the shade with a congregation of cows and double-jointed
posthorses; but finding a seat high up on the
root, at last I busied myself with gazing down the
road, and conjecturing what a cloud of dust might contain,
which, in an opposite direction from that which
we had come, was slowly creeping onward to the inn.

Four roughly-harnessed horses at length, appeared,
with their traces tied over their backs—one of them
ridden by a man in a farmer's frock. They struck me
at first as fine specimens of the German breed of
draught-horses, with their shaggy fetlocks and long
manes; but while they drank at the trough which
stood in the shade of the linden, the low tone in which
the man checked their greedy thirst, and the instant
obedience of the well-trained animals, awakened at
once my suspicions that we were to become better
acquainted. A more narrow examination convinced
me that, covered with dust and disguised with coarse
harness as they were, they were four horses of such
bone and condition, as were never seen in a farmer's
stables. The rider dismounted at the inn door, and
very much to the embarrassment of my suppositions,
the landlord, a stupid and heavy Boniface, greeted him
with the familiarity of an old acquaintance, and in answer,
apparently to an inquiry, pointed to my carriage,
and led him into the house.

“Monsieur Tyrell,” said Iminild, coming out to
me a moment after, “a servant whom I had expected
has arrived with my horses, and with your consent,
they shall be put to your carriage immediately.”

“To take us where?”

“To our place of destination.”

“Too indefinite, by half, countess! Listen to me!
I have very sufficient reason to fancy that, in leaving
the post-road to Trieste, I shall leave the society of
honest men. You and your `minions of the moon'
may be very pleasant, but you are not very safe companions;
and having really a wish to die quietly in
my bed—”

The countess burst into a laugh.

“If you will have the character of the gentleman
you are about to visit from the landlord here—”

“Who is one of your ruffians himself, I'll be sworn!”

“No, on my honor! A more innocent old beer-guzzler
lives not on the road. But I will tell you
thus much, and it ought to content you. Ten miles
to the west of this dwells a country gentleman, who,
the landlord will certify, is as honest a subject of his
gracious majesty as is to be found in Littorale. He
lives freely on his means, and entertains strangers
occasionally from all countries, for he has been a
traveller in his time. You are invited to pass a day
or two with this Mynheer Krakenpate (who, by the
way, has no objection to pass for father of the young
lady you have so kindly brought from Laybach),
and he has sent you his horses, like a generous host,
to bring you to his door. More seriously, this was
a retreat of Yvain's, where he would live quietly and
play bon citoyen, and you have nothing earthly to fear
in accompanying me thither. And now will you wait
and eat the greasy meal you have ordered, or will you
save your appetite for la fortune de pot at Mynheer
Krakenpate's, and get presently on the road!”

I yielded rather to the seducing smile and captivating
beauty of my pleasing ward, than to any confidence
in the honesty of Mynheer Krakenpate; and
Percie being once more ceremoniously handed in, we
left the village at the sober trot becoming the fat steeds
of a landholder. A quarter of a mile of this was quite
sufficient for Iminild, and a word to the postillion
changed, like a metamorphosis, both horse and rider.
From a heavy unelastic figure, he rose into a gallant
and withy horseman, and, with one of his low-spoken
words, away flew the four compact animals, treading
lightly as cats, and, with the greatest apparent ease,
putting us over the ground at the rate of fourteen
miles in the hour.

The dust was distanced, a pleasant breeze was
created by the motion, and when at last we turned
from the main road, and sped off to the right at the
same exhilarating pace, I returned Iminild's arch
look of remonstrance with my best-humored smile
and an affectionate je me fie à vous! Miss Krakenpate,
I observed, echoed the sentiment by a slight pressure
of the countess's arm, looking very innocently out of
the window all the while.

A couple of miles, soon done, brought us round the
face of a craggy precipice, forming the brow of a hill,
and with a continuation of the turn, we drew up at the
gate of a substantial-looking building, something between
a villa and a farm-house, built against the rock,
as if for the purpose of shelter from the north winds.
Two beautiful Angora hounds sprang out at the noise,
and recognised Iminild through all her disguise, and
presently, with a look of forced courtesy, as if not quite
sure whether he might throw off the mask, a stout
man of about fifty, hardly a gentleman, yet above a
common peasant in his manners, stepped forward from
the garden to give Miss Krakenpate his assistance in
alighting.

“Dinner in half an hour!” was Iminild's brief
greeting, and, stepping between her bowing dependant
and Percie, she led the way into the house.

I was shown into a chamber, furnished scarce above
the common style of a German inn, where I made a
hungry man's despatch in my toilet, and descended
at once to the parlor. The doors were all open upon
the ground floor, and, finding myself quite alone, I
sauntered from room to room, wondering at the scantiness
of the furniture and general air of discomfort, and
scarce able to believe that the same mistress presided
over this and the singular paradise in which I had

first found her at Vienna. After visiting every corner
of the ground floor with a freedom which I assumed in
my character as guardian, it occurred to me that I
had not yet found the dining-room, and I was making
a new search, when Iminild entered.

I have said she was a beautiful woman. She was
dressed now in the Albanian costume, with the additional
gorgeousness of gold emhroidery, which might
distinguish the favorite child of a chief of Suli. It
was the male attire, with a snowy white juktanilla
reaching to the knee, a short jacket of crimson velvet,
and a close-buttoned vest of silver cloth, fitting admirably
to her girlish bust, and leaving her slender and
pearly neck to rise bare and swan-like into the masses
of her clustering hair. Her slight waist was defined
by the girdle of fine linen edged with fringe of gold,
which was tied coquettishly over her left side and fell
to her ankle, and below the embroidered leggin appeared
the fairy foot, which had drawn upon me all this
long train of adventure, thrust into a Turkish slipper
with a sparkling emerald on its instep. A feronière
of the yellowest gold sequins bound her hair back
from her temples, and this was the only confinement
to the dark brown meshes which, in wavy lines and
in the richest profusion, fell almost to her feet. The
only blemish to this vision of loveliness was a flush
about her eyes. The place had recalled Yvain to her
memory.

“I am about to disclose to you secrets,” said she,
laying her hand on my arm, “which have never been
revealed but to the most trusty of Yvain's confederates.
To satisfy those whom you will meet you must swear
to me on the same cross which he pressed to your lips
when dying, that you will never violate, while I live,
the trust we repose in you.”

“I will take no oath,” I said: “for you are leading
me blindfolded. If you are not satisfied with the
assurance that I can betray no confidence which honor
would preserve, hungry as I am, I will yet dine in
Planina.”

“Then I will trust to the faith of an Englishman.
And now I have a favor, not to beg, but to insist upon
—that from this moment you consider Percie as dismissed
from your service, and treat him, while here
at least, as my equal and friend.”

“Willingly!” I said; and as the word left my lips,
enter Percie in the counterpart dress of Iminild, with
a silver-sheathed ataghan at his side, and the bluish
muzzles of a pair of Egg's hair-triggers peeping from
below his girdle. To do the rascal justice, he was as
handsome in his new toggery as his mistress, and carried
it as gallantly. They would have made the prettiest
tableau as Juan and Haidée.

“Is there any chance that these `persuaders' may
be necessary,” I asked, pointing to his pistols which
awoke in my mind a momentary suspicion.

“No—none that I can foresee—but they are loaded.
A favorite, among men whose passions are professionally
wild,” she continued with a meaning glance at
Percie; “should be ready to lay his hand on them,
even if stirred in his sleep!”

I had been so accustomed to surprises of late, that
I scarce started to observe, while Iminild was speaking,
that an old-fashioned clock, which stood in a
niche in the wall, was slowly swinging out upon
hinges. A narrow aperture of sufficient breadth to
admit one person at a time, was disclosed when it
had made its entire revolution, and in it stood, with
a lighted torch, the stout landlord Von Krakenpate.
Iminild looked at me an instant as if to enjoy my
surprise.

“Will you lead me in to dinner, Mr. Tyrell?” she
said at last, with a laugh.

“If we are to follow Mynheer Von Krakenpate,” I
replied, “give me hold of the skirt of your juktanilla,
rather, and let me follow! Do we dine in the cellar?”

I stepped before Percie, who was inclined to take
advantage of my hesitation to precede me, and followed
the countess into the opening, which, from
the position of the house, I saw must lead directly
into the face of the rock. Two or three descending
steps convinced me that it was a natural opening enlarged
by art; and after one or two sharp turns, and
a descent of perhaps fifty feet, we came to a door
which, suddenly flung open by our torch-bearer,
deluged the dark passage with a blaze of light which
the eyesight almost refused to bear. Recovering
from my amazement, I stepped over the threshold
of the door, and stood upon a carpet in a gallery of
sparkling stalactites, the dazzling reflection of innumerable
lamps flooding the air around, and a long
snow-white vista of the same brilliancy and effect
stretching downward before me. Two ridges of
the calcareous strata running almost parallel over
our heads, formed the cornices of the descending
corridor, and from these, with a regularity that
seemed like design, the sparkling pillars, white as
alabaster, and shaped like inverted cones, dropped
nearly to the floor, their transparent points resting on
the peaks of the corresponding stalagmites, which of
a darker hue and coarser grain, seemed designed as
bases to a new order of architectural columns. The
reflection from the pure crystalline rock gave to this
singular gallery a splendor which only the palace of
Aladdin could have equalled. The lamps were hung
between in irregular but effective ranges, and in our
descent, like Thalaba, who refreshed his dazzled eyes
in the desert of snow by looking on the green wings of
the spirit bird, I was compelled to bend my eyes perpetually
for relief upon the soft, dark masses of hair
which floated upon the lovely shoulders of Iminild.

At the extremity of the gallery we turned short to
the right, and followed an irregular passage, sometimes
so low that we could scarce stand upright, but
all lighted with the same intense brilliancy, and formed
of the same glittering and snow-white substance. We
had been rambling on thus far perhaps ten minutes,
when suddenly the air, which I had felt uncomfortably
chill, grew warm and soft, and the low reverberation
of running water fell delightfully on our ears.
Far ahead we could see two sparry columns standing
close together, and apparently closing up the way.

“Courage! my venerable guardian!” cried Iminild.
laughing over her shoulder; “you will see your dinner
presently. Are you hungry, Percie?”

“Not while you look back, Madame la Comtesse!”
answered the callow gentleman, with an instinctive
tact at his new vocation.

We stood at the two pillars which formed the extremity
of the passage, and looked down upon a scene
of which all description must be faint and imperfect.
A hundred feet below ran a broad subterraneous river,
whose waters sparkling in the blaze of a thousand
torches, sprang into light from the deepest darkness,
crossed with foaming rapidity the bosom of the vast
illuminated cavern, and disappeared again in the same
inscrutable gloom. Whence it came or whither it
fled was a mystery beyond the reach of the eye. The
deep recesses of the cavern seemed darker for the intense
light gathered about the centre.

After the first few minutes of bewilderment. I endeavored
to realize in detail the wondrous scene before
me. The cavern was of an irregular shape, but
all studded above with the same sparry incrustation,
thousands upon thousands of pendent stalactites glittering
on the roof, and showering back light upon the
clusters of blazing torches fastened everywhere upon
the shelvy sides. Here and there vast columns,
alabaster white, with bases of gold color, fell from the
roof to the floor, like pillars left standing in the ruined
aisle of a cathedral, and from corner to corner ran
their curtains of the same brilliant calcareous spar,

shaped like the sharp edge of a snow-drift, and almost
white. It was like laying bare the palace of some
king-wizard of the mine to gaze down upon it.

“What think you of Mynheer Krakenpate's taste
in a dining-room, Monsieur Tyrell?” asked the countess,
who stood between Percie and myself, with a
hand on the shoulder of each.

I had scarce found time, as yet, to scrutinize the
artificial portion of the marvellous scene, but, at the
question of Iminild, I bent my gaze on a broad platform,
rising high above the river on its opposite bank,
the rear of which was closed in by perhaps forty irregular
columns, leaving between them and the sharp
precipice on the river-side, an area, in height and extent
of about the capacity of a ball-room. A rude
bridge, of very light construction, rose in a single
arch across the river, forming the only possible access
to the platform from the side where we stood, and,
following the path back with my eye, I observed a
narrow and spiral staircase, partly of wood and partly
cut in the rock, ascending from the bridge to the gallery
we had followed hither. The platform was carpeted
richly, and flooded with intense light, and in its
centre stood a gorgeous array of smoking dishes,
served after the Turkish fashion, with a cloth upon
the floor, and surrounded with cushions and ottomans
of every shape and color. A troop of black slaves,
whose silver anklets, glittered as they moved, were
busy bringing wines and completing the arrangements
for the meal.

“Allons, mignon!” cried Iminild, getting impatient
and seizing Percie's arm, “let us get over the river,
and perhaps Mr. Tyrell will look down upon us with
his grands yeux while we dine. Oh, you will come
with us! Suivez done!”

An iron door, which I had not hitherto observed,
let us out from the gallery upon the staircase, and
Mynheer Von Krakenpate carefully turned the key
behind us. We crept slowly down the narrow staircase
and reached the edge of the river, where the
warm air from the open sunshine came pouring through
the cavern with the current, bringing with it a smell
of green fields and flowers, and removing entirely the
chill of the cavernous and confined atmosphere I had
found so uncomfortable above. We crossed the
bridge, and stepping upon the elastic carpets piled
thickly on the platform, arranged ourselves about the
smoking repast, Mynheer Von Krakenpate sitting down
after permission from Iminild, and Percie by order of
the same imperative dictatress, throwing his graceful
length at her feet.

5. CHAPTER V.

“Take a lesson in flattery from Percie, Mr. Tyrell,
and be satisfied with your bliss in my society without
asking for explanations. I would fain have the use
of my tongue (to swallow) for ten minutes, and I see
you making up your mouth for a question. Try this
pilau! It is made by a Greek cook, who fries, boils,
and stews, in a kitchen with a river for a chimney.”

“Precisely what I was going to ask you. I was
wondering how you cook without smoking your snow-white
roof.”

“Yes, the river is a good slave, and steals wood as
well. We have only to cut it by moonlight and commit
it to the current.”

“The kitchen-it down stream, then?”

“Down stream; and down stream lives jolly Perdicaris
the cook, who having lost his nose in a sea-fight,
is reconciled to forswear sunshine and mankind,
and cook rice for pirates.”

“Is it true then that Yvain held command on the
sea?”

“No, not Yvain, but Tranchcœur—his equal in
command over this honest confederacy. By the way,
he is your countryman, Mr. Tyrell, though he fights
under a nom de guerre. You are very likely to see
him, too, for his bark is at Trieste, and he is the only
human being besides myself (and my company here)
who can come and go at will in this robber's paradise.
He is a lover of mine, parbleu! and since Yvain's
death, Heaven knows what fancy he may bring hither
in his hot brain! I have armed Percie for the
hazard?”

The thin nostrils of my friend from Cranbourne-alley
dilated with prophetic dislike of a rival thus
abruptly alluded to, and there was that in his face
which would have proved, against all the nurses'
oaths in Christendom, that the spirit of a gentleman's
blood ran warm through his heart. Signor Tranchcœur
must be gentle in his suit, I said to myself,
or he will find what virtue lies in a hair-trigger!
Percie had forgot to eat since the mention of the
pirate's name, and sat with folded arms and his right
hand on his pistol.

A black slave brought in an omelette souffleé, as
light and delicate as the chef-d'œuvre of an artiste in
the Palais Royal. Iminild spoke to him in Greek, as
he knelt and placed it before her.

“I have a presentiment,” she said, looking at me
as the slave disappeared, “that Tranchcœur will be
here presently. I have ordered another omelette on the
strength of the feeling, for he is fond of it, and may be
soothed by the attention.”

“You fear him, then?”

“Not if I were alone, for he is as gentle as a woman
when he has no rival near him—but I doubt his relish
of Percie. Have you dined?”

“Quite.”

“Then come and look at my garden, and have a
peep at old Perdicaris. Stay here, Percie, and finish
your grapes, mon-mignon! I have a word to say to
Mr. Tyrell.”

We walked across the platform, and passing between
two of the sparry columns forming its boundary,
entered upon a low passage which led to a large
opening, resembling singularly a garden of low shrubs
turned by some magic to sparkling marble.

Two or three hundred of these stalagmite cones,
formed by the dripping of calcareous water from the
roof (as those on the roof were formed by the same
fluid which hardened and pondered), stood about in
the spacious area, every shrub having an answering
cone on the roof, like the reflection of the same marble
garden in a mirror. One side of this singular
apartment was used as a treasury for the spoils of the
band, and on the points of the white cones hung
pitchers and altar lamps of silver, gold drinking-cups,
and chains, and plate and jewellery of every age and
description. Farther on were piled, in unthrifty confusion,
heaps of velvets and silks, fine broadcloths,
French gloves, shoes, and slippers, brocades of Genoa,
pieces of English linen, damask curtains still fastened
to their cornices, a harp and mandolin, cases of
damaged bons-bons, two or three richly-bound books,
and (last and most valuable in my eyes), a miniature
bureau, evidently the plunder of some antiquary's
treasure, containing in its little drawers antique gold
coins of India, carefully dated and arranged, with a
list of its contents half torn from the lid.

“You should hear Tranchcœur's sermons on
these pretty texts,” said the countess, trying to thrust
open a bale of Brusa silk with her Turkish slipper.

“He will beat off the top of a stalagmite with his
sabre-hilt, and sit down and talk over his spoils and the
adventures they recall, till morning dawns.”

“And how is that discovered in this sunless cave?”

“By the perfume. The river brings news of it,
and fills the cavern with the sun's first kisses. Those

violets `kiss and tell,' Mr. Tyrell! Apropos des
bottes, let us look into the kitchen.”

We turned to the right, keeping on the same level,
and a few steps brought us to the brow of a considerable
descent forming the lower edge of the carpeted
platform, but separated from it by a wall of close
stalactites. At the bottom of the descent ran the
river, but just along the brink, forming a considerable
crescent, extended a flat rock, occupied by all the
varied implements of a kitchen, and lighted by the
glare of two or three different fires blazing against
the perpendicular limit of the cave. The smoke of
these followed the inclination of the wall, and was
swept entirely down with the current of the river.
At the nearest fire stood Perdicaris, a fat, long-haired
and sinister-looking rascal, his noseless face glowing
with the heat, and at his side waited, with a silver
dish, the Nubian slave who had been sent for Tranchcœur's
omelette.

“One of the most bloody fights of my friend the
rover,” said Iminild, “was with an armed slaver, from
whom he took these six pages of mine. They have
reason enough to comprehended an order, but too
little to dream of liberty. They are as contented as
tortoises, ici-bas.”

“Is there no egress hence but by the iron door?”

“None that I know of, unless one could swim up
this swift river like a salmon. You may have surmised
by this time, that we monopolize an unexplored
part of the great cave of Adelsberg. Common report
says it extends ten miles under ground, but common
report has never burrowed as far as this, and I doubt
whether there is any communication. Father Krakenpate's
clock conceals an entrance, discovered first by
robbers, and handed down by tradition, Heaven knows
how long. But—hark! Tranchcœur, by Heaven!
my heart foreboded it!”

I sprang after the countess, who, with her last exclamation,
darted between two of the glittering columns
separating us from the platform, and my first glance
convinced me that her fullest anticipations of the
pirate's jealousy were more than realized. Percie
stood with his back to a tall pillar on the farther side,
with his pistol levelled, calm and unmoveable as a
stalactite; and, with his sabre drawn and his eyes
flashing fire, a tall powerfully-built man in a sailor's
dress, was arrested by Iminild in the act of rushing on
him. “Stop! or you die, Tranchcœur!” said the
countess, in a tone of trifling command. “He is my
guest!”

“He is my prisoner, madame!” was the answer, as
the pirate changed his position to one of perfect repose
and shot his sabre into his sheath, as if a brief delay
could make little difference.

“We shall see that,” said the countess, once more,
with as soft a voice as was ever heard in a lady's
boudoir; and stepping to the edge of the platform,
she touched with her slipper a suspended gong, which
sent through the cavern a shrill reverberation heard
clearly over the rushing music of the river.

In an instant the click of forty muskets from the
other side fell on our ears; and, at a wave of her
hand, the butts rattled on the rocks, and all was still
again.

“I have not trusted myself within your reach,
Monsieur Tranchcœur,” said Iminild, flinging herself
carelessly on an ottoman, and motioning to Percie to
keep his stand, “without a score or two of my free-riders
from Mount Semering to regulate your conscience.
I am mistress here, sir! You may sit
down!”

Tranchcœur had assumed an air of the most gentlemanly
tranquillity, and motioning to one of the
slaves for his pipe, he politely begged pardon for
smoking in the countess's presence, and filled the
enamelled bowl with Shiraz tobacco.

“You heard of Yvain's death?” she remarked after
a moment passing her hand over her eyes.

“Yes, at Venice.”

“With his dying words, he gave me and mine in
charge to this Englishman. Mr. Tyrell, Monsieur
Tranchcœur.”

The pirate bowed.

“Have you been long from England?” he asked
with an accent and voice that even in that brief
question, savored of the nonchalant English of the
west end.

“Two years!” I answered.

“I should have supposed much longer from your
chivalry in St. Etienne, Mr. Tyrell. My countrymen
generally are less hasty. Your valet there,” he continued,
looking sneeringly at Percie, “seems as quick
on the trigger as his master.”

Percie turned on his heel, and walked to the edge
of the platform as if uneasy at the remark, and Iminild
rose to her feet.

“Look you, Tranchcœur! I'll have none of your
sneers. That youth is as well-born and better bred
than yourself, and with his consent, shall have the
authority of the holy church ere long to protect my
property and me. Will you aid me in this, Mr.
Tyrell?”

“Willingly, countess!”

“Then, Tranchcœur, farewell! I have withdrawn
from the common stock Yvain's gold and jewels, and
I trust to your sense of honor to render me at Venice
whatever else of his private property may be concealed
in the island.”

“Iminild!” cried the pirate, springing to his feet.
“I did not think to show a weakness before this
stranger, but I implore you to delay!”

His bosom heaved with strong emotion as he spoke,
and the color fled from his bronzed features as if he
were struck with a mortal sickness.

“I can not lose you, Iminild! I have loved you
too long. You must—”

She motioned to Percie to pass on.

“By Heaven, you shall!” he cried, in a voice suddenly
become hoarse with passion; and reckless of
consequences, he leaped across the heaps of cushion,
and, seizing Percie by the throat, flung him with
terrible and headlong violence into the river.

A scream from Iminild, and the report of a musket
from the other side, rang at the same instant through
the cavern, and as I rushed forward to seize the pistol
which he had struck from Percie's hand, his half-drawn
sabre slid back powerless into the sheath, and
Tranchcœur dropped heavily on his knee.

“I am peppered, Mr. Tyrell!” he said, waving me
off with difficult effort to smile, “look after the boy,
if you care for him! A curse on her German wolves!”

Percie met me on the bridge, supporting Iminild,
who hung on his neck, smothering him with kisses.

“Where is that dog of a pirate?” she cried, suddenly
snatching her ataghan from the sheath and flying
across the platform. “Tranchcœur!”

Her hand was arrested by the deadly pallor and
helpless attitude of the wounded man, and the weapon
dropped as she stood over him.

“I think it is not mortal,” he said, groaning as he
pressed his hand to his side, “but take your boy out
of my sight! Iminild!”

“Well, Tranchcœur!”

“I have not done well—but you know my nature
—and my love! Forgive me, and farewell! Send
Bertram to stanch this blood—I get faint! A little
wine, Iminild!”

He took the massive flagon from her hand, and
drank a long draught, and then drawing to him a cloak
which lay near, he covered his head and dropped on
his side as if to sleep.

Iminild knelt beside him and tore open the shirt

beneath his jacket, and while she busied herself in
stanching the blood, Perdicaris, apparently well prepared
for such accidents, arrived with a surgeon's
probe, and, on examination of the wound, assured
Iminild that she might safely leave him. Washing
her hands in the flagon of wine, she threw a cloak over
the wet and shivering Percie, and, silent with horror
at the scene behind us, we made our way over the
bridge, and in a short time, to my infinite relief, stood
in the broad moonlight on the portico of Mynheer
Krakenpate.

My carriage was soon loaded with the baggage and
treasure of the countess, and with the same swift
horses that had brought us from Planina, we regained
the post-road, and sped on toward Venice by the
Friuli. We arrived on the following night at the fair
city so beloved of romance, and with what haste I
might, I procured a priest and married the Countess
Iminild to gentleman Percie.

As she possessed now a natural guardian, and a
sufficient means of life, I felt released from my death
vow to Yvain, and bidding farewell to the “happy
couple,” I resumed my quiet habit of travel, and three
days after my arrival at Venice, was on the road to
Padua by the Brenta.

OONDER-HOOFDEN, OR THE UNDERCLIFF.
A TALE OF THE VOYAGE OF HENDRICK HUDSON.

1. CHAPTER I.

“It is but an arm of the sea, as I told thee, skipper,”
said John Fleming, the mate of the “Halve-Mane,”
standing ready to jam down the tiller and bring-to,
if his master should agree with him in opinion.

Hudson stood by his steersman, with folded arms,
now looking at the high-water mark on the rocks,
which betrayed a falling tide, now turning his ear
slightly forward to catch the cry of the man who stood
heaving the lead from the larboard bow. The wind
drew lightly across the starboard quarter, and, with a
counter-tide, the little vessel stole on scarce perceptibly,
though her mainsail was kept full—the slowly
passing forest trees on the shore giving the lie to the
merry and gurgling ripple at the prow.

The noble river, or creek, which they had followed
in admiring astonishment for fifty miles, had hitherto
opened fairly and broadly before them, though, once
or twice, its widening and mountain-girt bosom had
deceived the bold navigator into the belief, that he
was entering upon some inland lake. The wind still
blew kindly and steadily from the southeast, and the
sunset of the second day—a spectacle of tumultuous
and gorgeous glory which Hudson attributed justly
to the more violet atmospheric laws of an unsettled
continent—had found them apparently closed in by
impenetrable mountains, and running immediately on
the head shore of an extended arm of the sea.

“She'll strike before she can follow her helm,”
cried the young sailor in an impatient tone, yet still
with habitual obedience keeping her duly on her
course.

“Port a little!” answered the skipper, a moment
after, as if he had not heard the querulous comment
of his mate.

Fleming's attention was withdrawn an instant by
a low guttural sound of satisfaction, which reached
his ear as the head of the vessel went round, and,
casting his eye amidships, he observed the three
Indians who had come off to the Half-Moon in a
canoe, and had been received on board by the master,
standing together in the chains, and looking forward
to the rocks they were approaching with countenances
of the most eager interest.

“Master Hendrick!” he vociferated in the tone of
a man who can contain his anger no longer, “will you
look at these grinning red-devils, who are rejoicing to
see you run so blindly ashore?”

The adventurous little bark was by this time within
a biscuit toss of a rocky point that jutted forth into
the river with the grace of a lady's foot dallying with
the water in her bath; and, beyond the sedgy bank
disappeared in an apparent inlet, barely deep enough,
it seemed to the irritated steersman, to shelter a
canoe.

As the Half-Moon obeyed her last order, and headed
a point more to the west, Hudson strode forward to
the bow, and sprang upon the windlass, stretching his
gaze eagerly into the bosom of the hills that were now
darkening with the heavy shadows of twilight, though
the sky was still gorgeously purple overhead.

The crew had by this time gathered with unconscious
apprehension at the halyards, ready to let go
at the slightest gesture of the master, but, in the slow
progress of the little bark, the minute or two which
she took to advance beyond the point on which his
eye was fixed, seemed an age of suspense.

The Half-Moon seemed now almost immoveable,
for the current, which convinced Hudson there was
a passage beyond, set her back from the point with
increasing force, and the wind lulled a little with the
sunset. Inch by inch, however, she crept on, till at
last the silent skipper sprang from the windlass upon
the bowsprit, and running out with the agility of a
boy, gave a single glance ahead, and the next moment
had the tiller in his hand, and cried out with a
voice of thunder, “Stand by the halyards! helm's-a-lee!”

In a moment, as if his words had been lightning,
the blocks rattled, the heavy boom swung round like
a willow spray, and the white canvass, after fluttering
an instant in the wind, filled and drew steadily on the
other tack.

Looks of satisfaction were exchanged between the
crew, who expected the next instant an order to take
in the sail and drop anchor; but the master was at the
helm, and to their utter consternation, he kept her
steadily to the wind, and drove straight on, while a
gorge, that, in the increasing darkness, seemed the
entrance to a cavern, opened its rocky sides as they
advanced.

The apprehensions of the crew were half lost in
their astonishment at the grandeur of the scene. The
cliffs seemed to close up behind them; a mountain,
that reached apparently to the now colorless clouds,
rose up gigantic, in the increasing twilight, over the
prow; on the right, where the water seemed to bend,
a craggy precipice extended its threatening wall; and
in the midst of this round bay, which seemed to them
to be an enclosed lake in the bottom of an abyss, the
wind suddenly took them aback, the Halve-Mane lost
her headway, and threatened to go on the rocks with
the current, and audible curses at his folly reached
the ears of the determined master.

More to divert their attention than with a prognostic
of the direction of the wind, Hudson gave the
order to tack, and, more slowly this time, but still
with sufficient expedition, the movement was executed,
and the flapping sails swung round. The halyards
were not belayed before the breeze, rushing
down a steep valley on the left, struck full on
the larboard quarter, and, running sharp past the face
of the precipice over the starboard bow, Hudson
pointed out, exultingly, to his astonished men, the
broad waters of the mighty river, extending far through
the gorge beyond—the dim purple of the lingering

day, which had been long lost to the cavernous and
overshadowed pass they had penetrated, tinting its far
bosom like the last faint hue of the expiring dolphin.

The exulting glow of triumph suffused the face
of the skipper, and relinquishing the tiller once more
to the mortified Fleming, he walked forward to look
out for an anchorage. The Indians, who still stood
in the chains together, and who had continued to
express their satisfaction as the vessel made her way
through the pass, now pointed eagerly to a little
bay on the left, across which a canoe was shooting
like the reflection of a lance in the air, and, the wind
dying momently away, Hudson gave the order to
round to, and dropped his anchor for the night.

In obedience to the politic orders of Hudson the
men were endeavoring, by presents and signs, to
induce the Indians to leave the vessel, and the master
himself stood on the poop with his mate, gazing
back on the wonderful scene they had passed through.

“This passage,” said Hudson, musingly, “has been
rent open by an earthquake, and the rocks look still as
if they felt the agony of the throe.”

“It is a pity the earthquake did its job so raggedly,
then!” answered his sulky companion, who had not
yet forgiven the mountains for the shame their zig-zag
precipices had put upon his sagacity.

At that instant a sound, like that of a heavy body
sliding into the water, struck the ear of Fleming,
and looking quickly over the stern, he saw one of
the Indians swimming from the vessel with a pillow
in his hand, which he had evidently stolen from the
cabin window. To seize a musket, which lay ready
for attack on the quarter-deck, and fire upon the poor
savage, was the sudden thought and action of a man on
the watch, for a vent to incensed feelings.

The Indian gave a yell which mingled wildly with
the echoes of the report from the reverberating hills,
and springing waist-high out of the water, the gurgling
eddy closed suddenly over his head.

The canoe in which the other savages were already
embarked shot away, like an arrow, to the shore, and
Hudson, grieved and alarmed inexpressibly at the fool-hardy
rashness of his mate, ordered all hands to arms,
and established a double watch for the night.

Hour after hour, the master and the non-repentant
Fleming paced fore and aft, each in his own
quarter of the vessel, watching the shore and the
dark face of the water with straining eyes: but no
sound came from the low cliff round which the flying
canoe had vanished, and the stars seemed to
wink almost audibly in the dread stillness of nature.
The men alarmed at the evident agitation of Hudson,
who, in these pent-up waters, anticipated a most effective
and speedy revenge from the surrounding
tribes, drowsed not upon their watch, and the gray
light of the morning began to show faintly over the
mountains before the anxious master withdrew his
aching eyes from the still and star waters.

2. CHAPTER II.

Like a web woven of gold by the lightning, the
sun's rays ran in swift threads from summit to summit
of the dark green mountains, and the soft mist
that slept on the breast of the river began to lift like
the slumberous lid from the eye of woman, when her
dream is broken at dawn. Not so poetically were
these daily glories regarded, however, by the morning
watch of the Half-Moon, who, between the desire to
drop asleep with their heads on the capstan, and the
necessity of keeping sharper watch lest the Indians
should come off through the rising mist, bore the
double pains of Tantalus and Sysiphus—ungratified
desire at their lips and threatening ruin over their heads.

After dividing the watch at the break of day, Hudson,
with the relieved part of his crew, had gone below,
and might have been asleep an hour, when Eleming
suddenly entered the cabin and laid his hand upon
his shoulder. The skipper sprang from his berth
with the habitual readiness of a seaman, and followed
his mate upon deck, where he found his men standing
to their arms, and watching an object that, to his first
glance, seemed like a canoe sailing down upon them
through the air. The rash homicide drew close to
Hendrick as he regarded it, and the chatter of his
teeth betrayed that, during the long and anxious
watches of the night, his conscience had not justified
him for the hasty death he had awarded to a fellow-creature.

“She but looms through the mist!” said the skipper,
after regarding the advancing object for a moment.
“It is a single canoe, and can scarce harm us. Let
her come alongside!”

The natural explanation of the phenomenon at once
satisfied the crew, who had taken their superstitious
fears rather from Fleming's evident alarm than from
their own want of reflection; but the guilty man himself
still gazed on the advancing phantom, and when
a slight stir of the breeze raised the mist like the corner
of a curtain, and dropped the canoe plain upon
the surface of the river, he turned gloomily on his
heel, and muttered in an undertone to Hudson“It
brings no good, Skipper Hendrick!”

Meanwhile the canoe advanced slowly. The single
paddle which propelled her paused before every turn,
and as the mist lifted quite up and showed a long
green line of shore between its shadowy fringe and
the water, an Indian, highly-painted, and more ornamented
than any they had hitherto seen, appeared
gazing earnestly at the vessel, and evidently approaching
with fear and caution.

The Half-Moon was heading up the river with
the rising tide, and Hudson walked forward to the
bows to look at the savage more closely. By the
eagle and bear, so richly embroidered in the gay-colored
quills of the porcupine on his belt of wampum,
he presumed him to be a chief; and glancing
his eye into the canoe, he saw the pillow which had
occasioned the death of the plunderer the night before,
and on it lay two ears of corn, and two broken arrows.
Pausing a moment as he drew near, the Indian pointed
to these signs of peace, and Hudson, in reply, spread
out his open hands and beckoned him to come on
board. In an instant the slight canoe shot under the
starboard bow, and with a noble confidence which the
skipper remarked upon with admiration, the tall savage
sprang upon the deck and laid the hand of the commander
to his breast.

The noon arrived, hot and sultry, and there, was no
likelihood of a wind till sunset. The chief had been
feasted on board, and had shown, in his delight, the
most unequivocal evidence of good feeling; and even
Fleming, at last, who had drank more freely than usual
during the morning, abandoned his suspicion, and
joined in amusing the superb savage who was their
guest. In the course of the forenoon, another canoe
came off, paddled by a single young woman, whom
Fleming, recognised as having accompanied the plunderers
the night before, but in his half-intoxicated
state, it seemed to recall none of his previous bodings,
and to his own surprise, and that of the crew, she
evidently regarded him with particular favor, and by
pertinacious and ingenious signs, endeavored to induce
him to go ashore with her in the canoe. The
particular character of her face and form would have
given the mate a clue to her probable motives, had he
been less reckless from his excitement. She was
taller than is common for females of the savage tribes,
and her polished limbs, as gracefully moulded in their

dark hues as those of the mercury of the fountain,
combined, with their slightness, a nerve and steadiness
of action which betrayed strength and resolution
of heart and frame. Her face was highly beautiful,
but the voluptuous fulness of the lips was contradicted
by a fierce fire in her night-dark eyes, and a quickness
of the brow to descend, which told of angry passions
habitually on the alert. It was remarked by Hans
Christaern, one of the crew, that when Fleming left
her for an instant, she abstracted herself from the
other joyous groups, and, with folded arms and looks
of brooding thoughtfulness, stood looking over the
stern; but immediately on his reappearance, her
snowy teeth became visible between her relaxing lips,
and she resumed her patient gaze upon his countenance,
and her occasional efforts to draw him into the
canoe.

Quite regardless of the presence of the woman, the
chief sat apart with Hudson, communicating his ideas
by intelligent signs, and after a while, the skipper
called his mate, and informed him that, as far as he
could understand, the chief wished to give them a
feast on shore. “Arm yourselves well,” said he,
“though I look for no treachery from this noble pagan;
and if chance should put us in danger, we shall be
more than a match for the whole tribe. Come with
me, Fleming,” he continued, after a pause, “you are
too rash with your firearms to be left in command.
Man the watch, four of you, and the rest get into the
long-boat. We'll while away these sluggish hours,
though danger is in it”

The men sprang gayly below for their arms, and
were soon equipped and ready, and the chief, with an
expression of delight, put off in his canoe, followed
more slowly by the heavy long-boat, into which Hudson,
having given particular orders to the watch to let
no savages on board during his absence, was the last
to embark. The woman, whom the chief had called
to him before his departure by the name of Kihyalee,
sped off before in her swift canoe to another point of
the shore, and when Fleming cried out from the bow
of the boat, impatiently motioning her to follow, she
smiled in a manner that sent a momentary shudder
through the veins of the skipper who chanced to observe
the action, and by a circular movement of her
arm conveyed to him that she should meet him from
the other side of the hill. As they followed the chief,
they discovered the wigwams of an Indian village behind
the rocky point for which she was making, and
understood that the chief had sent her thither on some
errand connected with his proposed hospitality.

A large square rock, which had the look of having
been hurled with some avalanche from the mountain,
lay in the curve of a small beach of sand, surrounded
by the shallow water, and, on the left of this, the chief
pointed out to the skipper a deeper channel, hollowed
by the entrance of a mountain-torrent into the river,
through which he might bring his boat to land. At
the edge of this torrent's bed, the scene of the first act
of hospitality to our race upon the Hudson, stands at
this day the gate to the most hospitable mansion on
the river, as if the spirit of the spot had consecrated it
to its first association with the white man.

The chief led the way when the crew had disembarked,
by a path skirting the deep-worn bed of the
torrent, and after an ascent of a few minutes, through
a grove of tall firs, a short turn to the left brought
them upon an open table of land, a hundred and fifty
feet above the river shut in by a circle of forest-trees,
and frowned over on the east by a tall and bald cliff,
which shot up in a perpendicular line to the height
of three hundred feet. From a cleft in the face of
this precipice a natural spring oozed forth, drawing
a darker line down the sun-parched rock, and feeding
a small stream that found its way to the river on the
northern side of the platform just mentioned, creating
between itself and the deeper torrent to the south, a
sort of highland peninsula, now constituting the estate
of the hospitable gentleman above alluded to.

Hudson looked around him with delight and surprise
when he stood on the highest part of the broad
natural table selected by the chief for his entertainment.
The view north showed a cleft through the
hills, with the river coiled like a lake in its widening
bed, while a blue and wavy line of mountains formed
the far horizon at its back; south, the bold eminences,
between which he had found his adventurous
way, closed in like the hollowed sides of a bright-green
vase, with glimpses of the river lying in its
bottom like crystal; below him descended a sharp
and wooded bank, with the river at its foot, and
directly opposite rose a hill in a magnificent cone to
the very sky, sending its shadow down through the
mirrored water, as if it entered to some inner world.
The excessive lavishness of the foliage clothed these
bold natural features with a grace and richness altogether
captivating to the senses, and Hudson long
stood, gazing around him, believing that the tales of
brighter and happier lands were truer than he had
deemed, and that it was his lucky destiny to have been
the discoverer of a future Utopia.

A little later, several groups of Indians were seen
advancing from the village, bearing the materials for
a feast, which they deposited under a large tree, indicated
by the chief. It was soon arranged, and Hudson
with his men surrounded the dishes of shell and
wood, one of which, placed in the centre, contained a
roasted dog, half buried in Indian-corn. While the
chief and several of his warriors sat down in company
with the whites, the young men danced the calumet-dance
to the sound of a rude drum, formed by drawing
a skin tightly over a wooden bowl, and near them, in
groups, stood the women and children of the village,
glancing with looks of curiosity from the feats of the
young men to the unaccustomed faces of the strangers.

Among the women stood Kihyalee, who kept her
large bright eyes fixed almost fiercely upon Fleming,
yet when he looked toward her, she smiled and turned
as if she would beckon him away—a bidding which he
tried in vain to obey, under the vigilant watch of his
master.

The feast went on, and the Indians having produced
gourds, filled with a slight intoxicating liquor made
from the corn, Hudson offered to the chief, some
spirits from a bottle which he had intrusted to one
of the men to wash down the expected roughness of
the savage viands. The bottle passed in turn to the
mate, who was observed to drink freely, and, a few
minutes after, Hudson rising to see more nearly a trial
of skill with the bow and arrow, Fleming found the
desired opportunity, and followed the tempting Kihyalee
into the forest.

The sun began to throw the shadows of the tall
pines in gigantic pinnacles along the ground, and the
youths of the friendly tribe, who had entertained the
great navigator, ceased from their dances and feats
of skill, and clustered around the feast-tree. Intending
to get under weigh with the evening breeze and
proceed still farther up the river, Hudson rose to collect
his men, and bid the chief farewell. Taking the
hand of the majestic savage and putting it to his
breast, to express in his own manner the kind feelings
he entertained for him, he turned toward the path
by which he came, and was glancing round at his men,
when Hans Christaern inquired if he had sent the
mate back to the vessel.

“Der teufel, no!” answered the skipper, missing
him for the first time; “has he been long gone?”

“A full hour!” said one of the men.

Hudson put his hand to his head, and remembered
the deep wrong Fleming had done to the tribe. Retribution,

he feared, had over-taken him—but how was
it done so silently? How had the guilty man been
induced to leave his comrades, and accelerate his
doom by his own voluntary act?

The next instant resolved the question. A distant
and prolonged scream, as of a man in mortal agony,
drew all eyes to the summit of the beetling cliff, which
overhung them. On its extremest verge, outlined
distinctly against the sky, stood the tall figure of Kihyalee,
holding from her, yet poised over the precipice,
the writhing form of her victim, while in the other
hand, flashing in the rays of the sun, glittered the
bright hatchet she had plucked from his girdle. Infuriated
at the sight, and suspecting collision on the
part of the chief, Hudson drew his cutlass and gave
the order to stand to arms, but as he turned, the gigantic
savage had drawn an arrow to its head with incredible
force, and though it fell far short of its mark, there
was that in the action and in his look which, in the
passing of a thought, changed the mind of the skipper.
In another instant, the hesitating arm of the widowed
Kihyalee descended, and loosening her hold upon the
relaxed body of her victim, the doomed mate fell
heavily down the face of the precipice.

The chief turned to Hudson, who stood trembling
and aghast at the awful scene, and plucked the remaining
arrows from his quiver, he broke them and
threw himself on the ground. The tribe gathered
around their chief, Hudson moved his hand to them
in token of forgiveness, and in a melancholy silence
the crew took their way after him to the shore.

THE PICKER AND PILER.

The nature of the strange incident I have to relate
forbids me to record either place or time.

On one of the wildest nights in which I had ever
been abroad, I drove my panting horses through a
snowdrift breast high, to the door of a small tavern in
the western country. The host turned out unwillingly
at the knock of my whip handle on the outer door,
and, wading before the tired animals to the barn, which
was nearly inaccessible from the banks of snow, he
assisted me in getting off their frozen harnesses, and
bestowing them safely for the night.

The “bar-room” fire burnt brightly, and never was
fire more welcome. Room was made for me by four
or five rough men who sat silent around it, and with a
keen comprehension of “pleasure after pain,” I took
off my furs and moccasins, and stretched my cold contracted
limbs to the blaze. When, a few minutes
after, a plate of cold salt beef was brought me, with a
corn cake and a mug of “flip” hissing from the poker,
it certainly would have been hard to convince me that
I would have put on my coats and moccasins again to
have ridden a mile to paradise.

The faces of my new companions, which I had not
found time to inspect very closely while my supper
lasted, were fully revealed by the light of a pitch-pine
knot, thrown on the hearth by the landlord, and their
grim reserve and ferocity put me in mind, for the first
time since I had entered the room, of my errand in
that quarter of the country.

The timber-tracts which lie convenient to the rivers
of the west, offer to the refugee and desperado of every
description, a resource from want and (in their own
opinion) from crime, which is seized upon by all at
least who are willing to labor. The owners of the extensive
forests, destined to become so valuable, are
mostly men of large speculation, living in cities, who,
satisfied with the constant advance in the price of
lumber, consider their pine-trees as liable to nothing
but the laws of nature, and leave them unfenced and
unprotected, to increase in size and value till the land
beneath them is wanted for culture. It is natural
enough that solitary settlers, living in the neighborhood
of miles of apparently unclaimed land, should
think seldom of the owner, and in time grow to the
opinion of the Indian, that the Great Spirit gave the
land, the air, and the water, to all his children, and
they are free to all alike. Furnishing the requisite
teams and implements, therefore, the inhabitants of
these tracts collect a number of the stragglers through
the country, and forming what is called a “bee,” go
into the nearest woods, and for a month or more, work
laboriously at selecting, and felling the tallest and
straightest pines. In their rude shanty at night they
have bread, pork, and whiskey, which hard labor makes
sufficiently palatable, and the time is passed merrily
till the snow is right for sledding. The logs are then
drawn to the water sides, rafts are formed, and the
valuable lumber, for which they paid nothing but their
labor is run to the cities for their common advantage.

The only enemies of this class of men are the agents
who are sometimes sent out in the winter to detect
them in the act of felling or drawing off timber, and
in the dark countenances around the fire, I read this
as the interpretation of my own visit to the woods.
They soon brightened and grew talkative when they
discovered that I was in search of hands to fell and
burn, and make clearing for a farm; and after a talk
of an hour or two, I was told in answer to my inquiries,
that all the “men people” in the country were busy
“Iumbering for themselves,” unless it were—
the “Picker and Piler.”

As the words were pronounced, a shrill neigh
outside the door pronounced the arrival of a new-comer.

“Talk of the devil”—said the man in a lower tone,
and without finishing the proverb he rose with a
respect which he had not accorded to me, to make
room for the Picker and Piler.

A man of rather low stature entered, and turned to
drive back his horse, who had followed him nearly in.
I observed that the animal had neithersaddle nor bridle.
Shutting the door upon him without violence, he exchanged
nods with one or two of the men, and giving
the handlord a small keg which he had brought, he
pleaded haste for refusing the offered chair, and stood
silent by the fire. His features were blackened with
smoke, but I could see that they were small and regular,
and his voice, though it conveyed in its deliberate
accents an indefinable resolution, was almost femininely
soft and winning.

“That stranger yonder has got a job for you,” said
the landlord, as he gave him back the keg and received
the money.

Turning quickly upon me, he detected me in a very
eager scrutiny of himself, and for a moment I was
thrown too much off my guard to address him.

“Is it you, sir?” he asked, after waiting a moment.

“Yes,—I have some work to be done hereabouts,
but—you seem in a hurry. Could you call here to-morrow.”

“I may not be here again in a week.”

“Do you live far from here?” He smiled.

“I scarce know where I live, but I am burning a
piece of wood a mile or two up the run, and if you
would like a warmer bed than the landlord will give
you—”

That personage decided the question for me by
telling me in so many words that I had better go.
His beds were all taken up, and my horses should be
taken care of till my return. I saw that my presence
had interrupted something, probably the formation of
a “bee,” and more willingly than I would have believed
possible an hour before, I resumed my furs and
wrappers, and declared that I was ready. The Picker

and Piler had inspired me, and I knew not why, with
an involuntary respect and liking.

“It is a rough night, sir,” said he, as he shouldered
a rifle he had left outside, and slung the keg by a
leather strap over the neck of his horse, “but I will
soon show you a better climate. Come, sir, jump on!”

“And you?” I said inquisitively, as he held his
horse by the mane for me to mount. It was a Canadian
pony, scarce larger than a Newfoundland dog.

“I am more used to the road, sir, and will walk.
Come?”

It was no time to stand upon etiquette, even if it
had been possible to resist the strange tone of authority
with which he spoke. So without more ado, I
sprang upon the animal's back, and holding on by the
long tuft upon his withers, suffered him passively to
plunge through the drift after his master.

Wondering at the readiness with which I had entered
upon this equivocal adventure, but never for an
instant losing confidence in my guide, I shut my eyes
to the blinding cold, and accommodated my limbs as
well as I could to the bare back and scrambling paces
of the Canadian. The Picker and Piler strode on
before, the pony following like a spaniel at his heels,
and after a half hour's tramp, during which I had
merely observed that we were rounding the base of a
considerable hill, we turned short to the right, and
were met by a column of smoke, which, lifting, the
moment after, disclosed the two slopes of a considerable
valley enveloped in one sea of fire. A red, lurid
cloud, overhung it at the tops of the tallest trees, and
far and wide, above that, spread a covering of black
smoke, heaving upward in vast and billowy masses, and
rolling away on every side into the darkness.

We approached a pine of gigantic height, on fire
to the very peak, not a branch left on the trunk, and
its pitchy knots distributed like the eyes of the lamprey,
burning pure and steady amid the irregular flame. I
had once or twice, with an instinctive wish to draw
rein, pulled hard upon the tangled tuft in my hand,
but master and horse kept on. This burning tree,
however, was the first of a thousand, and as the pony
turned his eyes away from the intense heat to pass between
it and a bare rock, I glanced into the glowing
labyrinth beyond, and my faith gave way. I jumped
from his back and hailed the Picker and Piler, with a
halloo scarcely audible amid the tumult of the crackling
branches. My voice did not evidently reach his
ear, but the pony, relieved from my weight, galloped
to his side, and rubbed his muzzle against the unoccupied
hand of his master.

He turned back immediately. “I beg pardon,” he
said, “I have that to think of just now which makes
me forgetful. I am not surprised at your hesitation,
but mount again and trust the pony.”

The animal turned rather unwillingly at his master's
bidding, and a little ashamed of having shown
fear, while a horse would follow, I jumped again on
his back.

“If you find the heat inconvenient, cover your face.”
And with this laconic advice, the Picker and Piler
turned on his heel, and once more strode away before
us.

Sheltering the sides of my face by holding up the
corners of my wrapper with both hands, I abandoned
myself to the horse. He overtook his master with a
shuffling canter, and putting his nose as close to the
ground as he could carry it without stumbling, followed
closely at his heels. I observed, by the green
logs lying immediately along our path, that we were
following an avenue of prostrate timber which had been
felled before the wood was fired; but descending
presently to the left, we struck at once into the deep
bed of a brook, and by the lifted head and slower gait
of the pony, as well as my own easier respiration, I
found that the hollow through which it ran, contained
a body of pure air unreached by the swaying curtains
of smoke or the excessive heat of the fiery currents
above. The pony now picked his way leisurely along
the brookside, and while my lungs expanded with the
relief of breathing a more temperate atmosphere, I
raised myself from my stooping posture in a profuse
perspiration, and one by one disembarrassed myself
from my protectives against the cold.

I had lost sight for several minutes of the Picker
and Piler, and presumed by the pony's desultory
movements that he was near the end of his journey,
when, rounding a shelvy point of rock, we stood suddenly
upon the brink of a slight waterfall, where the
brook leaped four or five feet into a shrunken dell, and
after describing a half circle on a rocky platform, resumed
its onward course in the same direction as before.
This curve of the brook and the platform it
enclosed lay lower than the general level of the forest,
and the air around and within it, it seemed to me, was
as clear and genial as the summer noon. Over one
side, from the rocky wall, a rude and temporary roof
of pine slabs drooped upon a barricade of logs, forming
a low hut, and before the entrance of this, at the moment
of my appearance, stood a woman and a showily-dressed
young man, both evidently confused at the
sudden apparition of the Picker and Piler. My eyes
had scarce rested on the latter, when, from standing
at his fullest height with his rifle raised as if to beat
the other to the earth, he suddenly resumed his stooping
and quiet mien, set his rifle against the rock, and
came forward to give me his hand.

“My daughter!” he said, more in the way of explanation
than introduction, and without taking further
notice of the young man whose presence seemed
so unwelcome, he poured me a draught from the keg
he had brought, pointed to the water falling close at
my hand, and threw himself at his length upon the
ground.

The face and general appearance of the young man,
now seated directly opposite me, offered no temptation
for more than a single glance, and my whole attention
was soon absorbed by the daughter of my singular
host, who, crossing from the platform to the hut,
divided her attention between a haunch of venison
roasting before a burning log of hickory, and the arrangement
of a few most primitive implements for our
coming supper. She was slight, like her father, in
form, and as far as I had been able to distinguish his
blackened features, resembled him in the general outline.
But in the place of his thin and determined
mouth, her lips were round and voluptuous, and
though her eye looked as if it might wake, it expressed,
even in the presence of her moody father, a
drowsy and soft indolence, common enough to the
Asiatics, but seldom seen in America. Her dress was
coarse and careless, but she was beautiful with every
possible disadvantage, and, whether married or not,
evidently soon to become a mother.

The venison was placed before us on the rock, and
the young man, uninvited, and with rather an air of
bravado, cut himself a steak from the haunch and
broiled it on the hickory coals, while the daughter kept
as near him as her attention to her father's wants would
permit, but neither joined us in eating, nor encouraged
my attempts at conversation. The Picker and Piler
ate in silence, leaving me to be my own carver, and
finishing his repast by a deep draught from the keg
which had been the means of our acquaintance, he
sprang upon his feet and disappeared.

“The wind has changed,” said the daughter, looking
up at the smoke, “and he has gone to the western
edge to start a new fire. It's a full half mile, and he'll
be gone an hour.”

This was said with a look at me which was anything
but equivocal. I was de trop. I took up the
rifle of the Picker and Piler, forgetting that there was

probably nothing to shoot in a burning wood, and remarking
that I would have a look for a deer, jumped
up the water-fall side, and was immediately hidden by
the rocks.

I had no conception of the scene that lay around
me. The natural cave or hollow of rock in which the
hut lay embosomed, was the centre of an area of perhaps
an acre, which had been felled in the heart of the
wood before it was set on fire. The forest encircled
it with blazing columns, whose capitals were apparently
lost in the sky, and curtains of smoke and
flame, which flew as if lashed into ribands by a whirlwind.
The grandeur, the violence, the intense brightness
of the spectacle, outran all imagination. The
pines, on fire to the peak, and straight as arrows,
seemed to resemble, at one moment the conflagration
of an eastern city, with innumerable minarets abandoned
to the devouring element. At the next moment,
the wind, changing its direction, swept out every
vestige of smoke, and extinguished every tongue of
flame, and the tall trees, in clear and flameless ignition,
standing parallel in thousands, resembled some
blinding temple of the genii, whose columns of
miraculous rubies, sparkling audibly, outshone the
day. By single glances, my eye penetrated into aisles
of blazing pillars, extending far into the forest, and the
next instant, like a tremendous surge alive with serpents
of fire, the smoke and flame swept through it,
and it seemed to me as if some glorious structure had
been consumed in the passing of a thought. For a
minute, again, all would be still except the crackling
of the fibres of the wood, and with the first stir of the
wind, like a shower of flashing gems, the bright coals
rained down through the forest, and for a moment the
earth glowed under the trees as if its whole crust were
alive with one bright ignition.

With the pungency of the smoke and heat, and the
variety and bewilderment of the spectacle, I found my
eyes and brain growing giddy. The brook ran cool
below, and the heat had dried the leaves in the small
clearing, and with the abandonment of a man overcome
with the sultriness of summer, I lay down on the
rivulet's bank, and dipped my head and bathed my
eyes in the running water. Close to its surface there
was not a particle of smoke in the air, and, exceedingly
refreshed with its temperate coolness, I lay for sometime
in luxurious ease, trying in vain to fancy the
winter that howled without. Frost and cold were
never more difficult to realize in midsummer, though
within a hundred rods, probably, a sleeping man would
freeze to death in an hour.

“I have a better bed for you in the shanty,” said the
Picker and Piler, who had approached unheard in the
noise of the fires; and suddenly stood over me.

He took up his rifle, which I had laid against a
prostrate log, and looked anxiously toward the descent
to the hut.

“I am little inclined for sleep,” I answered, “and
perhaps you will give me an hour of conversation here.
The scene is new to me”—

“I have another guest to dispose of,” he answered,
“and we shall be more out of the smoke near the
shanty.”

I was not surprised, as I jumped upon the platform,
to find him angrily separating his daughter and the
stranger. The girl entered the hut, and with a decisive
gesture, he pointed the young man to a “shake-down”
of straw in the remotest corner of the rocky
enclosure.

“With your leave, old gentleman,” said the intruder,
after glancing at his intended place of repose,
“I'll find a crib for myself.” And springing up the
craggy rock opposite the door of the shanty he gathered
a slight heap of brush, and threw it into a hollow
left in the earth by a tree, which, though full grown
and green, had been borne to the earth and partly
uprooted by the falling across it of an overblown and
gigantic pine. The earth and stones had followed the
uptorn mass, forming a solid upright wall, from which,
like struggling fingers, stretching back in agony to
the ground from which they had parted, a few rent
and naked roots pointed into the cavity. The sequel
will show why I am so particular in this description.

“When peace was declared between England and
this country,” said the Picker and Piler (after an
hour's conversation, which had led insensibly to his
own history), I was in command of a privateer. Not
choosing to become a pirate, by continuing the cruise,
I was set ashore in the West Indies by a crew in open
mutiny. My property was all on board, and I was
left a beggar. I had one child, a daughter, whose
mother died in giving her birth.

“Having left a sufficient sum for her education in
the hands of a brother of my own, under whose roof
she had passed the first years of her life, I determined
to retrieve my fortunes before she or my friends should
be made acquainted with my disaster.

“Ten years passed over, and I was still a wanderer
and a beggar.

“I determined to see my child, and came back
like one from the dead, to my brother's door. He had
forgotten me, and abused his trust. My daughter,
then seventeen, and such as you see her here, was the
drudge in the family of a stranger—ignorant and friendless.
My heart turned against mankind with this last
drop in a bitter cup, and, unfitted for quiet life, I looked
around for some channel of desperate adventure.
But my daughter was the perpetual obstacle. What
to do with her? She had neither the manners nor
the education of a lady, and to leave her a servant was
impossible. I started with her for the west, with the
vague design of joining some tribe of Indians, and
chance and want have thrown me into the only mode
of life on earth that could now be palatable to me.”

“Is it not lonely,” I asked, “after your stirring adventures?”

“Lonely! If you knew the delight with which I
live in the wilderness, with a circle of fire to shut out
the world! The labor is hard it is true, but I need it,
to sleep and forget. There is no way else in which I
could seclude my daughter. Till lately, she has been
contented, too. We live a month together in one
place—the centre like this of a burning wood. I can
bear hardship, but I love a high temperature—the
climate of the tropics—and I have it here. For weeks
I forget that it is winter, tending my fires and living
on the game I have stored up. There is a hollow or
a brook—a bed or a cave, in every wood, where the
cool air, as here, sinks to the bottom, and there I can
put up my shanty, secure from all intrusion—but such
as I bring upon myself.”

The look he gave to the uprooted ash and the
sleeper beneath it, made an apology for this last clause
unnecessary. He thought not of me.

“Some months since,” continued the Picker and
Piler, in a voice husky with suppressed feeling, “I
met the villain who sleeps yonder, accidentally, as I
met you. He is the owner of this land. After
engaging to clear and burn it, I invited him, as I
did yourself, from a momentary fever for company
which sometimes comes over the solitary, to go with
me to the fallow I was clearing. He loitered in the
neighborhood awhile, under pretext of hunting, and
twice on my return from the village, I found that my
daughter had seen him. Time has betrayed the
wrong he inflicted on me.

The voice of the agitated father sank almost to a
whisper as he pronounced the last few words, and,
rising from the rock on which we were sitting, he
paced for a few minutes up and down the platform in
silence.

The reader must fill up from his own imagination

the drama of which this is but the outline, for the
Picker and Piler was not a man to be questioned, and
I can tell but what I saw and heard. In the narration
of his story he seemed but recapitulating the prominent
events for his own self-converse, rather than attempting
to tell a tale to me, and it was hurried over
as brokenly and briefly as I have put it down. I sat in
a listening attitude after he concluded, but he seemed
to have unburthened his bosom sufficiently, and his
lips were closed with stern compression.

“You forget,” he said, after pacing awhile, “that I
offered you a place to sleep. The night wears late.
Stretch yourself on that straw, with your cloak over
you. Good night!”

I lay down and looked up at the smoke rolling
heavily into the sky till I slept.

I awoke, feeling chilled, for the rock sheltered me
from the rays of the fire. I stepped out from the
hollow. The fires were pale with the gray of the
morning, and the sky was visible through the smoke.
I looked around for a place to warm myself. The
hickory log had smouldered out, but a fire had been
kindled under the overblown pine, and its pitchy heart
was now flowing with the steady brilliancy of a torch.
I took up one of its broken branches, cracked it on my
knee, and stirring up the coals below, soon sent up a
merry blaze, which enveloped the whole trunk.

Turning my back to the increasing heat, I started,
for, creeping toward me, with a look of eagerness for
which I was at a loss to account, came the Picker and
Piler.

“Twice doomed!” he muttered between his teeth,
“but not by me!”

He threw down a handful of pitch pine knots, laid
his axe against a burning tree, and with a branch of
hemlock, swept off the flame from the spot where the
fire was eating through, as if to see how nearly it was
divided.

I began to think him insane, for I could get no
answer to my questions, and when he spoke, it was
half audible, and with his eyes turned from me fixedly.
I looked in the same direction, but could see nothing
remarkable. The seducer slept soundly beneath his
matted wall, and the rude door of the shanty was behind
us. Leaving him to see phantoms in the air, as
I thought, I turned my eyes to the drips of the waterfall,
and was absorbed in memories of my own, when
I saw the girl steal from the shanty, and with one
bound overleap the rocky barrier of the platform. I
laid my hand on the shoulder of my host, and pointed
after her, as with stealthy pace looking back occasionally
to the hut, where she evidently thought her
father slept, she crept round toward her lover.

“He dies!” cried the infuriated man; but as he
jumped from me to seize his axe, the girl crouched
out of sight, and my own first thought was to awake
the sleeper. I made two bounds and looked back, for
I heard no footstep.

“Stand clear!” shouted a voice of almost supernatural
shrillness! and as I caught sight of the Picker
and Piler standing enveloped in smoke upon the burning
tree, with his axe high in the air, the truth flashed
on me.

Down came the axe into the very heart of the pitchy
flame, and trembling with the tremendous smoke, the
trunk slowly bent upward from the fire.

The Picker and Piler sprang clear, the overborne
ash creaked and heaved, and with a sick giddiness in
my eyes, I look at the unwarned sleeper.

One half of the dissevered pine fell to the earth,
and the shock startled him from his sleep. A whole
age seemed to me elapsing while the other rose with
the slow lift of the ash. As it slid heavily away, the
vigorous tree righted, like a giant springing to his
feet. I saw the root pin the hand of the seducer to
the earth—a struggle—a contortion and the leafless
and waving top of the recovered and upright tree
rocked with its effort, and a long, sharp cry had gone
out echoing through the woods, and was still. I felt
my brain reel.

Blanched to a livid paleness, the girl moved about
in the sickly daylight, when I recovered; but the
Picker and Piler, with a clearer brow than I had yet
seen him wear, was kindling fires beneath the remnants
of the pine.

KATE CREDIFORD.

I found myself looking with some interest at the
back of a lady's head. The theatre was crowded, and
I had come in late, and the object of my curiosity,
whoever she might be, was listening very attentively to
the play.—She did not move. I had time to build a
life-time romance about her before I had seen a feature
of her face. But her ears were small and of an exquisite
oval, and she had that rarest beauty of woman
—the hair arched and joined to the white neck with
the same finish as on the temples. Nature often
slights this part of her masterpiece.

The curtain dropped, and I stretched eagerly forward
to catch a glimse of the profile.—But no! she
sat next one of the slender pilasters, and with her head
leaned against it, remained immovable.

I left the box, and with some difficulty made my
way into the crowded pit. Elbowing, apologizing,
persevering, I at last gained a point where I knew I
could see my incognita at the most advantage. I
turned—pshaw!—how was it possible I had not recognised
her?

Kate Crediford!

There was no getting out again, for a while at least,
without giving offence to the crowd I had jostled so
unceremoniously. I sat down—vexed—and commenced
a desperate study of the figure of Shakspere on
the drop-curtain.

Of course I had been a lover of Miss Crediford's,
or I could not have turned with indifference from the
handsomest woman in the theatre. She was very
beautiful—there was no disputing. But we love women
a little for what we do know of them, and a great
deal more for what we do not. I had love-read Kate
Crediford to the last leaf. We parted as easily as a
reader and a book. Flirtation is a circulating library,
in which we seldom ask twice for the same volume,
and I gave up Kate to the next reader, feeling no
property even in the marks I had made in her perusal.
A little quarrel sufficed as an excuse for the closing of
the book, and both of us studiously avoided a reconciliation.

As I sat in the pit, I remembered suddenly a mole
on her left cheek, and I turned toward her with the
simple curiosity to knew whether it was visible at that
distance. Kate looked sad. She still leaned immoveable
against the slight column, and her dark eyes, it
struck me, were moist. Her mouth, with this peculiar
expression upon her countenance, was certainly
inexpressibly sweet—the turned-down corners ending
in dimples, which in that particular place, I have always
observed, are like wells of unfathomable melancholy.
Poor Kate! what was the matter with her?

As I turned back to my dull study of the curtain, a
little pettish with myself for the interest with which I
had looked at an old flame, I detected half a sigh
under my white waistcoat; but instantly persuading
myself that it was a disposition to cough, coughed, and
began to hum “suoni la tromba.” The curtain rose
and the play went on.

It was odd that I never had seen Kate in that humor
before. I did not think she could be sad. Kate
Crediford sad! Why, she was the most volatile, light-hearted,
care-for-nothing coquette that ever held up
her fingers to be kissed. I wonder, has any one really
annoyed you, my poor Kate! thought I. Could I,
by chance, be of any service to you—for, after all, I
owe you something! I looked at her again.

Strange that I had ever looked at that face without
emotion! The vigils of an ever-wakeful, ever-passionate,
yet ever-tearful and melancholy spirit, seemed set,
and kept under those heavy and motionless eyelids.
And she, as I saw her now, was the very model and
semblance of the character that I had all my life been
vainly seeking! This was the creature I had sighed
for when turning away from the too mirthful tenderness
of Kate Crediford! There was something new,
or something for the moment miswritten, in that
familiar countenance.

I made my way out of the pit with some difficulty,
and returned to sit near her. After a few minutes, a
gentleman in the next box rose and left the seat vacant
on the other side of the pilaster against which she
leaned. I went around while the orchestra were playing
a loud march, and, without being observed by the
thoughtful beauty, seated myself in the vacant place.

Why did my eyes flush and moisten, as I looked
upon the small white hand lying on the cushioned
barrier between us! I knew every vein of it, like the
strings of my own heart.—I had held it spread out in
my own, and followed its delicate blue traceries with
a rose-stem, for hours and hours, while imploring, and
reproaching, and reasoning over love's lights and
shadows. I knew the feel of every one of those exquisite
fingers—those rolled up rose-leaves, with nails
like pieces cut from the lip of a shell! Oh, the
promises I had kissed into oaths on that little chef-d'œuvre
of nature's tinted alabaster! the psalms and
sermons I had sat out holding it, in her father's pew!
the moons I had tired out of the sky, making of it a
bridge for our hearts passing backward and forward!
And how could that little wretch of a hand, that knew
me better than its own other hand (for we had been
more together), lie there, so unconscious of my presence?
How could she—Kate Crediford—sit next to
me as she was doing, with only a stuffed partition between
us, and her head leaning on one side of a pilaster,
and mine on the other, and never start, nor recognise,
nor be at all aware of my neighborhood? She was
not playing a part, it was easy to see. Oh, I knew
those little relaxed fingers too well! Sadness, indolent
and luxurious sadness, was expressed in her countenance,
and her abstraction was unfeigned and contemplative.
Could she have so utterly forgotten me—
magnetically, that is to say?—Could the atmosphere
about her, that would once have trembled betrayingly
at my approach, like the fanning of an angel's invisible
wing, have lost the sense of my presence?

I tried to magnetize her hand. I fixed my eyes on
that little open palm, and with all the intensity I could
summon, kissed it mentally in its rosy centre. I reproached
the ungrateful little thing for its dulness and
forgetfulness, and brought to bear upon it a focus of
old memories of pressures and caresses, to which a
stone would scarce have the heart to be insensible.

But I belie myself in writing this with a smile. I
watched those unmoving fingers with a heart. I could
not see the face, nor read the thought, of the woman
who had once loved me, and who sat near me, now, so
unconsciously—but if a memory had stirred, if a pulse
had quickened its beat, those finely-strung fingers I
well know would have trembled responsively. Had
she forgotten me altogether? Is that possible? Can
a woman close the leaves of her heart over a once-loved
and deeply-written name, like the waves over a vessel's
track—like the air over the division of a bird's flight?

I had intended to speak presently to Miss Crediford,
but every moment the restraint became greater. I felt
no more privileged to speak to her than the stranger
who had left the seat I occupied. I drew back, for
fear of encroaching on her room, or disturbing the
folds of her shawl. I dared not speak to her. And,
while I was arguing the matter to myself, the party
who were with her, apparently tired of the play, arose
and left the theatre, Kate following last, but unspoken
to, and unconscious altogether of having been near
any one whom she knew.

I went home and wrote to her all night, for there was
no sleeping till I had given vent to this new fever at my
heart. And in the morning, I took the leading thoughts
from my heap in incoherent scribblings, and embodied
them more coolly in a letter:—

“You will think, when you look at the signature,
that this is to be the old story. And you will be as
much mistaken as you are in believing that I was ever
your lover, till a few hours ago. I have declared love
to you, it is true. I have been happy with you, and
wretched without you; I have thought of you, dreamed
of you, haunted you, sworn to you, and devoted to
you all and more than you exacted, of time and outward
service and adoration; but I love you now for
the first time in my life. Shall I be so happy as to
make you comprehend this startling contradiction?

“There are many chambers in the heart, Kate; and
the spirits of some of us dwell, most fondly and secretly,
in the chamber of tears—avowedly, however, in the
outer and ever-open chamber of mirth. Over the
sacred threshold, guarded by sadness, much that we
select and smile upon, and follow with adulation in
the common walks of life, never passes. We admire
the gay. They make our melancholy sweeter by contrast,
when we retire within ourselves. We pursue
them. We take them to our hearts—to the outer
vestibules of our hearts—and if they are gay only, they
are content with the unconsecrated tribute which we
pay them there. But the chamber within is, meantime,
lonely. It aches with its desolation. The echo
of the mirthful admiration without jars upon its
mournful silence.—It longs for love, but love toned
with its own sadness—love that can penetrate deeper
than smiles ever came—love that, having once entered,
can be locked in with its key of melancholy, and
brooded over with the long dream of a life-time. But
that deep-hidden and unseen chamber of the heart
may be long untenanted. And, meantime, the spirit
becomes weary of mirth, and impatiently quenches the
fire even upon its outer altar, and in the complete
loneliness of a heart that has no inmate or idol, gay
or tearful, lives mechanically on.

“Do you guess at my meaning, Kate?—Do you
remember the merriment of our first meeting? Do
you remember in what a frolic of thoughtlessness you
first permitted me to raise to my lips those restless
fingers? Do you remember the mock condescension,
the merry haughtiness, the rallying and feigned incredulity,
with which you first received my successive
steps of vowing and love-making—the arch look when
it was begun, the laugh when it was over, the untiring
follies we kept up, after vows plighted, and the future
planned and sworn to? That you were in earnest, as
much as you were capable of being, I fully believe.
You would not else have been so prodigal of the sweet
bestowings of a maiden's tenderness. But how often
have I left you with the feeling, that in the hours I
had passed with you, my spirit had been alone! How
often have I wondered if there were depths in my heart,
which love can never reach! How often mourned
that in the procession of love there was no place allotted
for its sweetest and dearest followers—tears and
silence! Oh, Kate! sweet as was that sun-gleam of
early passion, I did not love you! I tired of your

smiles, waiting in vain for your sadness. I left you,
and thought of you no more?

“But now (and you will be surprised to know that
I have been so near to you unperceived)—I have drank
an intoxication from one glance into your eyes, which
throws open to you every door of my heart, subdues
to your control every nerve and feeling of my existence.
Last night, I sat an hour, tracing again the
transparent and well-remembered veins upon your
hand, and oh! how the language written in those
branching and mystic lines had changed in meaning
and power.—You were sad. I saw you from a distance,
and, with amazement at an expression upon
your face which I had never before seen. I came and
sat near you. It was the look I had longed for when
I knew you, and when tired of your mirth. It was
the look I had searched the world for, combined with
such beauty as yours. It was a look of tender and
passionate melancholy, which revealed to me an unsuspected
chamber in your heart—a chamber of tears.
Ah, why were you never sad before? Why have we
lost—why have I lost the eternity's worth of sweet
hours when you love me with that concealed treasure
in your bosom?—Alas! that angels must walk the
world, unrecognised, till too late! Alas, that I have
held in my arms and pressed to my lips, and loosed
again with trifling and weariness, the creature whom
it was my life's errand, the thirst and passionate longing
of my nature, to find and worship!

“Oh, Heaven! with what new value do I now
number over your adorable graces of person! How
spiritualized is every familiar feature, once so deplorably
misappreciated!—How compulsive of respectful
adoration is that flexible waist, that step of aerial lightness,
that swan-like motion, which I once dared to
praise triflingly and half-mockingly, like the tints of a
flower or the chance beauty of a bird! And those
bright lips! How did I ever look on them, and not
know that within their rosy portal slept voiceless, for
a while, the controlling spell of my destiny—the tearful
spirit followed and called in my dreams, with perpetual
longing? Strange value given to features and
outward loveliness by qualities within! Strange
witchery of sadness in a woman! Oh, there is, in
mirth and folly, dear Kate, no air for love's breathing,
still less of food for constancy, or of holiness to consecrate
and heighten beauty of person.

“What can I say else, except implore to be permitted
to approach you—to offer my life to you—to
begin, thus late, after being known so long, the worship
which till death is your due? Pardon me if I
have written abruptly and wildly. I shall await your
answer in an agony of expectation. I do not willingly
breathe till I see you—till I weep at your feet over my
blindness and forgetfulness. Adieu! but let it not be
for long I pray you!”

I despatched this letter, and it would be difficult to
embody in language the agony I suffered in waiting
for a reply. I walked my room, that endless morning,
with a death-pang in every step—so fearful was I—so
prophetically fearful—that I had forfeited for ever the
heart I had once flung from me.

It was noon when a letter arrived. It was in a handwriting
new to me. But it was on the subject which
possessed my existence, and it was of final import.
It follows:—

But I never called on Mrs. Samuel Smithers.

FLIRTATION AND FOX-CHASING.

I was moping one day in solitary confinement in
quarantine at Malta, when, in a turn between my stone
window and the back wall I saw the yards of a vessel
suddently cross the light, and heard the next moment
the rattle of a chain let go, and all the bustle of a
merchantman coming to anchor. I had the privilege
of promenading between two ring-bolts on the wharf
below the lazaretto, and with the attraction of a newcomer
to the sleepy company of vessels under the
yellow flag, I lost no time in descending the stone
stairs, and was immediately joined by my vigilant sentinel,
the guardiano, whose business it was to prevent
my contact with the other visiters to the wharf. The
tricolor flew at the peak of the stranger, and we easily
made out that she was a merchantman from Marseilles,
subject therefore to a week's quarantine on account
of the cholera. I had myself come from a
plague port, Smyrna, and was subjected to twenty
days' quarantine, six of which had passed; so that the
Frenchman, though but beginning his imprisonment,
was in a position comparatively enviable.

I had watched for an hour the getting of the vessel
into mooring trim, and was beginning to conclude
that she had come without passengers, when a gentleman
made his appearance on deck, and the jolly-boat
was immediately lowered and manned. A traveller's
baggage was handed over the side, the gentleman took
leave of the captain, and, in obedience to directions
from the quarantine officer on the quarterdeck, the
boat was pulled directly to the wharf on which I stood.
The guardiano gave me a caution to retire a little, as
the stranger was coming to take possession of the next
apartment to my own, and must land at the stairs near
by; but, before I had taken two steps backward, I
began to recognise features familar to me, and with a
turn of the head as he sprang on the wharf the identity
was established completely. Tom Berryman, by all
that was wonderful! I had not seen him since we
were suspended from college together ten years before.
Forgetting lazaretto and guardiano, and all the salt
water between New Haven and Malta, I rushed up to
Tom with the cordiality of other days (a little sharpened
by abstinence from society), and we still had hold
of hands with a firm grip, when the quarantine master
gravely accosted us, and informed my friend that he
had incurred an additional week by touching me—in
short, that he must partake of the remainder of my
quarantine.

Aghast and chap-fallen as Berryman was at the consequences
of our rencontre (for he had fully calculated
on getting into Malta in time for the carnival), he was
somewhat reconciled to his lot by being permitted to
share my room and table instead of living his week in
solitude; and, by enriching our supplies a little from

town, sleeping much, and chatting through the day in
the rich sunshine of that climate of Paradise, we contrived
to shove off the fortnight without any very intolerable
tedium.

My friend and I had begun our travels differently—
he taken England first, which I proposed visiting last.
It is of course the bonne bouche of travel to everybody,
and I was very curious to know Tom's experiences;
and, as I was soon bound thitherward, anxious to pick
out of his descriptions some chart of the rocks and
shoals in the “British channel” of society.

I should say, before quoting my friend, that he was
a Kentuckian, with the manner (to ladies) of mingled
devotion and nonchalance so popular with the sex,
and a chivalric quality of man altogether. His father's
political influence had obtained for him personal letters
of introduction from the president, and, with this advantage,
and his natural air of fashion, he had found
no obstacle to choosing his society in England;
choosing the first, of course, like a true republican!

We were sitting on the water-steps with our feet
immersed up to the ankles (in January too), and in
reply to some question of mine as to the approachability
of noble ladies by such plebeian lovers as himself,
Tom told me the story which follows. I take the
names at random, of course, but, in all else, I shall try
to “tell the tale as 'twas told to me.”

Why, circumstances, as you know, sometimes put
people in the attitude of lovers whether they will or no;
and it is but civil in such a case, to do what fate expects
of you. I knew too much of the difference between
crockery and porcelain to enter English society
with the remotest idea of making love within the red
book of the peerage, and though I've a story to tell, I
swear I never put a foot forward till I thought it was
knightly devoir; inevitable, though ever so ridiculous.
Still, I must say, with a beautiful and unreserved
woman beside one, very much like other beautiful and
unreserved woman, a republican might be pardoned for
forgetting the invisible wall. “Right honorable” loveliness
has as much attraction about it, let me tell you,
and is quite as difficult to resist, as loveliness that is
honored, right or wrong, and a man must be brought
up to it, as Englishmen are, to see the heraldric dragons
and griffins in the air when a charming girl is talking
to him.

Eh? But to begin with the “Tityre tu patulæ.”

I had been passing a fortnight at the hunting lodge
of that wild devil, Lord —, in the Scotch Highlands,
and what with being freely wet outside every day, and
freely wet inside every night, I had given my principle
of life rather a disgust to its lodgings, and there were
some symptoms of preparation for leave-taking. Unwilling
to be ill in a bachelor's den, with no solace
tenderer than a dandy lord's tiger, I made a twilight
flit to the nearest post-town, and tightening my life-screws
a little with the aid of the village apothecary,
started southward the next morning with four posters.

I expected to be obliged to pull up at Edinboro', but
the doctor's opiates, and abstinence, and quiet did
more for me than I had hoped, and I went on very
comfortably to Carlisle. I arrived at this place after
nightfall, and found the taverns overflowing with the
crowds of a fair, and no bed to be had unless I could
make one in a quartette of snoring graziers. At the
same time there was a great political meeting at
Edinboro', and every leg of a poster had gone north
—those I had brought with me having been trans-hitched
to a return chaise, and gone off while I was
looking for accommodations.

Regularly stranded, I sat down by the tap-room
fire, and was mourning my disaster, when the horn
of the night-coach reached my ear, and in the minute
of its rattling up to the door, I hastily resolved that it
was the least of two evils, and booked myself accordingly.
There was but one vacant place, an outsider!
With hardly time enough to resolve, and none to repent,
I was presently rolling over the dark road, chilled
to the bone in the first five minutes, and wet through
with a “Scotch mist” in the next half hour. Somewhere
about daybreak we rolled into the little town
of —, five miles from the seat of the earl of Tresethen,
to whose hospitalities I stood invited, and I went
to bed in a most comfortable inn and slept till noon.

Before going to bed I had written a note to be despatched
to Tresethen castle, and the earl's carriage
was waiting for me when I awoke. I found myself
better than I had expected, and dressing at once for
dinner, managed to reach the castle just in time to
hand in Lady Tresethen. Of that dinner I but remember
that I was the only guest, and that the earl
regretted his daughter's absence from table, Lady
Caroline having been thrown that morning from her
horse. I fainted somewhere about the second remove,
and recovered my wits some days after, on the safe side
of the crisis of a fever.

I shall never forget that first half hour of conscious
curiosity. An exquisite sense of bodily repose mingled
with a vague notion of recent relief from pain, made
me afraid to speak lest I should awake from a dream,
yet, if not a dream, what a delicious reality! A lady
of most noble presence, in a half-mourning dress, sat
by the side of a cheerful fire, turning her large dark eyes
on me, in the pauses of a conversation with a gray-headed
servant. My bed was of the most sumptuous
luxury; the chamber was hung with pictures and
draped with spotless white; the table covered with
the costliest elegancies of the toilet; and in the gentle
and deferential manner of the old liveried menial, and
the subdued tones of inquiry by the lady, there was a
refinement and tenderness which, with the keen susceptibility
of my senses, “lapt me in Elysium.” I was
long in remembering where I was. The lady glided
from the room, the old servant resumed his seat by
my bedside, other servants in the same livery came
softly in on errands of service, and, at the striking of
the half hour by a clock on the mantelpiece, the lady
returned, and I was raised to receive something from
her hand. As she came nearer, I remembered the
Countess Tresethen.

Three days after this I was permitted to take the
air of a conservatory which opened from the countess's
boudoir. My old attendant assisted me to dress, and,
with another servant, took me down in a fauteuil. I
was in slippers and robe-de-chambre, and presumed
that I should see no one except the kind and noble
Lady Tresethen, but I had scarce taken one turn up
the long alley of flowering plants, when the countess
came toward me from the glass door beyond, and on
her arm a girl leaned for support, whose beauty—

(Here Tom dabbled his feet for some minutes in
the water in silence.)

God bless me! I can never give you an idea of it!
It was a new revelation of woman to me; the opening
of an eighth seal. In the minute occupied by her
approach, my imagination (accelerated, as that faculty
always is, by the clairvoyance of sickness), had gone
through a whole drama of love—fear, adoration, desperation,
and rejection—and so complete was it, that
in after moments when these phases of passion came
round in the proper lapse of days and weeks, it seemed
to me that I had been through with them before; that
it was all familiar; that I had met and loved in some
other world, this same glorious creature, with the
same looks, words, and heart-ache; in the same conservatory
of bright flowers, and faith, myself in the
same pattern of a brocade dressing-gown!

Heavens! what a beautiful girl was that Lady Caroline!
Her eyes were of a light gray, the rim of the

lids perfectly inky with the darkness of the long sweeping
lashes, and in her brown hair there was a gold
lustre that seemed somehow to illuminate the curves
of her small head like a halo. Her mouth had too
much character for a perfectly agreeable first impression.
It was nobility and sweetness educated over
native high spirit and scornfulness—the nature shining
through the transparent blood, like a flaw through
enamel. She would have been, in other circumstances,
a maid of Saragossa or a Gertrude Von Wart;
a heroine; perhaps a devil. But her fascination was
resistless!

“My daughter,” said Lady Tresethen (and in that
beginning was all the introduction she thought necessary),
“is, like yourself, an invalid just escaped from
the doctor; you must congratulate each other. Are
you strong enough to lend her an arm, Mr. Berryman?”

The countess left us, and with the composure of a
sister who had seen me every day of my life, Lady
Caroline took my arm and strolled slowly to and fro,
questioning me of my shooting at the lodge, and talking
to me of her late accident, her eyes sometimes
fixed upon her little embroidered slippers, as they
peeped from her snowy morning dress, and sometimes
indolently raised and brought to bear on my flushed
cheek and trembling lips; her singular serenity operating
on me as anything but a sedative! I was taken
up stairs again, after an hour's conversation, in a fair
way for a relapse, and the doctor put me under embargo
again for another week, which, spite of all the
renewed care and tenderness of Lady Tresethen,
seemed to me an eternity! I'll not bother you with
what I felt and thought all that time!

It was a brilliant autumnal day when I got leave to
make my second exodus, and with the doctor's permission
I prepared for a short walk in the park. I
declined the convoy of the old servant, for I had heard
Lady Caroline's horse gallop away down the avenue,
and I wished to watch her return unobserved. I had
just lost sight of the castle in the first bend of the path,
when I saw her quietly walking her horse under the
trees at a short distance, and the moment after she
observed and came toward me at an easy canter. I
had schooled myself to a little more self-possession,
but I was not prepared for such an apparition of splendid
beauty as that woman on horseback. She rode an
Arabian bay of the finest blood; a lofty, fiery, matchless
creature, with an expression of eye and nostril
which I could not but think a proper pendant to her
own, limbed as I had seldom seen a horse, and his
arched neck, and forehead, altogether, proud as a steed
for Lucifer. She sat on him as if it were a throne
she was born to, and the flow of her riding-dress
seemed as much a part of him as his mane. He appeared
ready to bound into the air, like Pegasus, but
one hand calmly stroked his mane, and her face was
as tranquil as marble.

“Well met!” she said; “I was just wishing for a
cavalier. What sort of a horse would you like, Mr.
Berryman? Ellis!” (speaking to her groom), “is old
Curtal taken up from grass?”

“Yes, miladi!”

“Curtal is our invalid horse, and as you are not
very strong, perhaps his easy pace will be best for you.
Bring him out directly, Ellis. We'll just walk along
the road a little way; for I must show you my Arabian;
and we'll not go back to ask mamma's permission,
for we shouldn't get it! You won't mind riding
a little way, will you?”

Of course I would have bestrided a hippogriff at
her bidding, and when the groom came out, leading
a thorough-bred hunter, with apparently a very elastic
and gentle action, I forgot the doctor and mounted
with great alacrity. We walked our horses slowly
down the avenue and out at the castle gate, followed
by the groom, and after trying a little quicker pace on
the public road, I pronounced old Curtal worthy of
her ladyship's eulogium, and her own Saladin worthy,
if horse could be worthy, of his burthen.

We had ridden perhaps a mile, and Lady Caroline
was giving me a slight history of the wonderful feats
of the old veteran under me, when the sound of a horn
made both horses prick up their ears, and on rising
a little acclivity, we caught sight of a pack of hounds
coming across the fields directly toward us, followed
by some twenty red-coated horsemen. Old Curtal
trembled and showed a disposition to fret, and I observed
that Lady Caroline dexterously lengthened
her own stirrup and loosened the belt of her riding-dress,
and the next minute the hounds were over the
hedge, and the horsemen, leap after leap, after them,
and with every successive jump, my own steed reared
and plunged unmanageably.

“Indeed, I can not stand this!” cried Lady Caroline,
gathering up her reins, “Ellis! see Mr. Berryman
home!” and away went the flying Arabian over
the hedge with a vault that left me breathless with
astonishment. One minute I made the vain effort to
control my own horse and turn his head in the other
direction, but my strength was gone. I had never
leaped a fence in my life on horseback, though a
tolerable rider on the road; but before I could think
how it was to be done, or gather myself together for
the leap, Curtal was over the hedge with me, and
flying across a ploughed field like the wind—Saladin
not far before him. With a glance-ahead I saw the
red coats rising into the air and disappearing over
another green hedge, and though the field was crossed
in twenty leaps, I had time to feel my blood run cold
with the prospect of describing another parabola in
the air, and to speculate on the best attitude for a
projectile on horseback. Over went Saladin like a
greyhound, but his mistress's riding-cap caught the
wind at the highest point of the curve, and flew back
into my face as Curtal rose on his haunches, and over
I went again, blinded and giddy, and, with the cap
held flat against my bosom by the pressure of the air,
flew once more at a tremendous pace onward. My
feet were now plunged to the instep in the stirrups,
and my back, too weak to support me erect, let me
down to my horse's mane, and one by one, along the
skirt of a rising woodland, I could see the red coats
dropping slowly behind. Right before me like a
meteor, however, streamed back the loosened tresses
of Lady Caroline, and Curtal kept close on the track
of Saladin, neither losing nor gaining an inch apparently,
and nearer and nearer sounded the baying of the
hounds, and clearer became my view of the steady and
slight waist riding so fearlessly onward. Of my horse
I had neither guidance nor control. He needed none.
The hounds had crossed a morass, and we were rounding
a half-circle on an acclivity to come up with them,
and Curtal went at it too confidently to be in error.
Evenly as a hand-gallop on a green sward his tremendous
pace told off, and if his was the ease of muscular
power, the graceful speed of the beautiful creature
moving before me seemed the aerial buoyancy of a
bird. Obstructions seemed nothing. That flowing
dress and streaming hair sailed over rocks and ditches,
and over them, like their inseparable shadow, glided
I, and, except one horseman who still kept his distance
ahead, we seemed alone in the field. The
clatter of hoofs, and the exclamations of excitement
had ceased behind me, and though I was capable of
no exertion beyond that of keeping my seat, I no
longer feared the leap nor the pace, and began to anticipate
a safe termination to my perilous adventure.
A slight exclamation from Lady Caroline reached my
ear and I looked forward. A small river was before
us, and, from the opposite bank, of steep clay, the
rider who had preceded us was falling back, his horse's

forefeet high in the air, and his arms already in the
water. I tried to pull my reins. I shouted to my
horse in desperation. And with the exertion, my
heart seemed to give way within me. Giddy and faint
I abandoned myself to my fate. I just saw the flying
heels of Saladin planted on the opposite bank and the
streaming hair still flying onward, when, with a bound
that, it seemed to me, must rend every fibre of the
creature beneath me, I saw the water gleam under
my feet, and still I kept on. We flew over a fence
into a stubble field, the hounds just before us, and over
a gate into the public highway, which we followed for
a dozen bounds, and then, with a pace slightly moderated,
we successively cleared a low wall and brought
up, on our horses' haunches, in the midst of an uproar
of dogs, cows, and scattering poultry—the fox having
been run down at last in the enclosure of a barn. I
had just strength to extricate my feet from the stirrups,
take Lady Caroline's cap, which had kept its place
between my elbows and knees, and present it to her
as she sat in her saddle, and my legs gave way under
me. I was taken into the farmhouse, and, at the close
of a temporary ellipse, I was sent back to Tresethen
Castle in a post-chaise, and once more handed over to
the doctor!

Well, my third siege of illness was more tolerable,
for I received daily, now, some message of inquiry or
some token of interest from Lady Caroline, though I
learned from the countess that she was in sad disgrace
for her inveiglement of my trusting innocence. I also
received the cards of the members of the hunt, with
many inquiries complimeatary to what they were
pleased to consider American horsemanship, and I
found that my seizure of the flying cap of Lady Caroline
and presentation of it to her ladyship at “the
death,” was thought to be worthy, in chivalry of
Bayard, and in dexterity of Ducrow. Indeed, when
let out again to the convalescent walk in the conservatory,
I found that I was counted a hero even by the
stately earl. There slipped a compliment, too, here
and there, through the matronly disapprobation of
Lady Tresethen—and all this was too pleasant to put
aside with a disclaimer—so I bid truth and modesty
hold their peace, and took the honor the gods chose
to provide!

But now came dangers more perilous than my ride
on Curtal. Lady Caroline was called upon to be kind
to me! Daily as the old servant left me in the alley
of japonicas, she appeared from the glass door of her
mother's boudoir and devoted herself to my comfort—
walking with me, while I could walk, in those fragrant
and balmy avenues of flowers, and then bringing me
into her mother's luxurious apartment, where books,
and music, and conversation as frank and untrammelled
as man in love could ask, wiled away the day. Wiled
it away?—winged it—shod it with velvet and silence,
for I never knew how it passed! Lady Caroline had
a mind of the superiority stamped so consciously on
her lip. She anticipated no consequences from her
kindness, therefore she was playful and unembarrassed.
She sang to me, and I read to her. Her rides were
given up, and Saladin daily went past the window to
his exercise, and with my most zealous scrutiny I
could detect in her face neither impatience of confinement
nor regret at the loss of weather fitter for
pleasures out of doors. Spite of every caution with
which hope could be chained down, I was flattered.

You smile—(Tom said, though he was looking
straight into the water, and had not seen my face for
half an hour)—but, without the remotest hope of
taking Lady Caroline to Kentucky, or of becoming
English on the splendid dowry of the heiress of Tresethen, I still felt it impossible to escape from my lover's
attitude—impossible to avoid hoarding up symptoms,
encouragements, flatteries, and all the moonshine of amatory
anxiety. I was in love—and who reasons in love?

One morning, after I had become an honorary
patient—an invalid only by sufferance—and was slowly
admitting the unwelcome conviction that it was
time for me to be shaping my adieux—the conversation
took rather a philosophical turn. The starting
point was a quotation in a magazine from Richter:
“Is not a man's universe within his head, whether a
king's diadem or a torn scullcap be without?”—and I
had insisted rather strenuously on the levelling privilege
we enjoyed in the existence of a second world around
us—the world of revery and dream—wherein the tyranny,
and check, and the arbitrary distinctions of the
world of fact, were never felt—and where he, though
he might be a peasant, who had the consciousness in
his soul that he was a worthy object of love to a princess,
could fancy himself beloved and revel in imaginary
possession.

“Why,” said I, turning with a sudden flush of self-confidence
to Lady Caroline, “Why should not the
passions of such a world, the loving and returning of
love in fancy, have the privilege of language? Why
should not matches be made, love confessed, vows exchanged,
and fidelity sworn, valid within the realm of
dream-land only? Why should I not say to you, for
example, I adore you, dear lady, and in my world of
thought you shall, if you so condescend, be my bride
and mistress; and why, if you responded to this and
listened to my vows of fancy, should your bridegroom
of the world of fact feel his rights invaded?”

“In fancy let it be then!” said Lady Caroline, with
a blush and a covert smile, and she rang the bell for
luncheon.

Well, I still lingered a couple of days, and on the
last day of my stay at Tresethen, I became sufficiently
emboldened to take Lady Caroline's hand behind the
fountain of the conservatory, and to press it to my lips
with a daring wish that its warm pulses belonged to
the world of fancy.

She withdrew it very kindly, and (I thought) sadly,
and begged me to go to the boudoir and bring her a
volume of Byron that lay on her work-table.

I brought it, and she turned over the leaves a moment,
and, with her pencil, marked two lines and gave
me the book, bidding me an abrupt good morning.
I stood a few minutes with my heart beating and my
brain faint, but finally summoned courage to read—

I left Tresethen the next morning, and —

“Hold on, Tom!” cried I—“there comes the boat
with our dinner from Valletta, and we'll have your
sorrows over our Burgundy.”

“Sorrows!” exclaimed Tom, “I was going to tell
you of the fun I had at her wedding!”

“Lord preserve us!”

“Bigamy—wasn't it?—after our little nuptials in
dream-land! She told her husband all about it at the
wedding breakfast, and his lordship (she married the
Marquis of —) begged to know the extent of my
prerogatives. I was sorry to confess that they did not
interfere very particularly with his!”

THE POET AND THE MANDARIN.

The moon shone like glorified and floating dew on
the bosom of the tranquil Pei-ho, and the heart of the
young poet Le-pih was like a cup running over with
wine. It was no abatement of his exulting fulness
that he was as yet the sole possessor of the secret of
his own genius. Conscious of exquisite susceptibility
to beauty, fragrance and music (the three graces of

the Chinese), he was more intent upon enjoying his
gifts than upon the awakening of envy for their possession—the
latter being the second leaf in the book of
genius, and only turned over by the finger of satiety.
Thoughtless of the acquisition of fame as the youthful
poet may be, however, he is always ready to anticipate
its fruits, and Le-pih committed but the poet's
error, when, having the gem in his bosom which
could buy the favor of the world, he took the favor
for granted without producing the gem.

Kwonfootse had returned a conqueror, from the wars
with the Hwong-kin, and this night, on which the
moon shone so gloriously, was the hour of his triumph,
for the Emperor Tang had condescended to honor
with his presence, a gala given by the victorious general
at his gardens on the Pei-ho. Softened by his
exulting feelings (for though a brave soldier, he was
as haughty as Luykong the thunder-god, or Hwuyloo
the monarch of fire), the warlike mandarin threw open
his gardens on this joyful night, not only to those who
wore in their caps the gold ball significant of patrician
birth, but to all whose dress and mien warranted their
appearance in the presence of the emperor.

Like the realms of the blest shone the gardens of
Kwonfootse. Occupying the whole valley of the
Pei-ho, at a spot where it curved like the twisted
cavity of a shell, the sky seemed to shut in the grounds
like the cover of a vase, and the stars seemed but the
garden-lights overhead. From one edge of the vase
to the other—from hill-top to hill-top—extended a
broad avenue, a pagoda at either extremity glittering
with gold and scarlet, the sides flaming with colored
lamps and flaunting with gay streamers of barbarian
stuffs, and the moonlit river cutting it in the centre, the
whole vista, at the first glance, resembling a girdle of
precious stones with a fastening of opal. Off from
this central division radiated in all directions alleys of
camphor and cinnamon trees, lighted with amorous
dimness, and leading away to bowers upon the hill-side,
and from every quarter resounded music, and in
every nook was seen feasting and merriment.

In disguise, the emperor and imperial family mingled
in the crowd, and no one save the host and his daughters
knew what part of the gardens was honored with
their presence. There was, however, a retreat in the
grounds, sacred to the privileged few, and here, when
fatigued or desirous of refreshment, the royal personages
laid aside disguise and were surrounded with
the deferential honors of the court. It was so contrived
that the access was unobserved by the people,
and there was, therefore, no feeling of exclusion to
qualify the hilarity of the entertainment, Kwonfootse,
with all his pride, looking carefully to his popularity.
At the foot of each descent, upon the matted banks
of the river, floated gilded boats with lamps burning in
their prows, and gayly-dressed boatmen offering conveyance
across to all who required it; but there were
also, unobserved by the crowd, boats unlighted and
undecorated holding off from the shore, which, at a
sign given by the initiated, silently approached a marble
stair without the line of the blazing avenue, and taking
their freight on board, swiftly pulled up the moonlit
river, to a landing concealed by the shoulder of the hill.
No path led from the gardens hither, and from no point
of view could be overlooked the more brilliant scene
of imperial revel.

It was verging toward midnight when the unknown
poet, with brain floating in a celestial giddiness of delight,
stood on the brink of the gleaming river. The boats
plied to and fro with their freights of fair damsels and
gayly-dressed youths, the many-colored lamps throwing
a rainbow profusion of tints on the water, and
many a voice addressed him with merry invitation, for
Le-pih's beauty, so famous now in history, was of no
forbidding stateliness, and his motions, like his countenance,
were as frankly joyous as the gambols of a
young leopard. Not inclined to boisterous gayety at
the moment, Le-pih stepped between the lamp-bearing
trees of the avenue, and folding his arms in his silken
vest, stood gazing in revery on the dancing waters.
After a few moments, one of the dark boats on which
he had unconsciously fixed his gaze drew silently
toward him, and as the cushioned stern was brought
round to the bank, the boatman made a reverence to
his knees and sat waiting the poet's pleasure.

Like all men born to good fortune, Le-pih was
prompt to follow the first beckonings of adventure, and
asking no questions, he quietly embarked, and with a
quick dip of the oars the boat shot from the shore and
took the descending current. Almost in the next instant
she neared again to the curving and willow-fringed
margin of the stream, and lights glimmered through
the branches, and sweet, low music became audible,
and by rapid degrees, a scene burst on his eye, which
the first glimpse into the gate of paradise (a subsequent
agreeable surprise, let us presume) could scarcely have
exceeded.

Without an exchange of a syllable between the
boatman and his freight, the stern was set against a
carpeted stair at the edge of the river, and Le-pih disembarked
with a bound, and stood upon a spacious
area lying in a lap of the hill, the entire surface carpeted
smoothly with Persian stuffs, and dotted here and there
with striped tents piched with poles of silver. Garlands
of flowers hung in festoons against the brilliant-colored
cloths, and in the centre of each tent stood a
low tablet surrounded with couches and laden with
meats and wine. The guests, for whom this portion
of the entertainment was provided, were apparently
assembled at a spot farther on, from which proceeded
the delicious music heard by the poet in approaching;
and, first entering one of the abandoned tents for a
goblet of wine, Le-pih followed to the scene of attraction.

Under a canopy of gold cloth held by six bearers,
stood the imperial chair upon a raised platform—not
occupied, however, the august Tang reclining more at
his ease, a little out of the circle, upon cushions
canopied by the moonlight. Around upon the steps
of the platform and near by, were grouped the noble
ladies of the court and the royal princesses (Tang
living much in the female apartments and his daughters
numbering several score), and all, at the moment
of Le-pih's joining the assemblage, turning to observe
a damsel with a lute, to whose performance the low
sweet music of the band had been a prelude. The
first touch of the strings betrayed a trembling hand,
and the poet's sympathies were stirred, though from
her bent posture and her distant position he had not
yet seen the features of the player. As the tremulous
notes grew firmer, and the lute began to give out a
flowing harmony, Le-pih approached, and at the same
time, the listening groups of ladies began to whisper
and move away, and of those who remained, none
seemed to listen with pleasure except Kwonfootse and
the emperor. The latter, indeed, rivalled the intruding
bard in his interest, rolling over upon the cushions
and resting on the other imperial elbow in close attention.

Gaining confidence evidently from the neglect of
her auditory, or, as is natural to women, less afraid of
the judgment of the other sex, who were her only
listeners, the fair Taya (the youngest daughter of
Kwonfootse), now joined her voice to her instrument,
and sang with a sweetness that dropped like a plummet
to the soul of Le-pih. He fell to his knee upon
a heap of cushions and leaned eagerly forward. As
she became afterward one of his most passionate
themes, we are enabled to reconjure the features that
were presented to his admiring wonder. The envy
of the princesses was sufficient proof that Taya was of
rare beauty; she had that wonderful perfection of

feature to which envy pays its bitterest tribute, which
is apologized for if not found in the poet's ideal, which
we thirst after in pictures and marble, of which loveliness
and expression are but lesser degrees—fainter
shadowings. She was adorably beautiful. The outer
corners of her long almond-shaped eyes, the dipping
crescent of her forehead, the pencil of her eyebrow
and the indented corners of her mouth—all these
turned downward; and this peculiarity which, in faces
of a less elevated character, indicates a temper morose
and repulsive, in Taya's expressed the very soul of
gentle and lofty melancholy. There was something
infantine about her mouth, the teeth were so small
and regular, and their dazzling whiteness, shining between
lips of the brilliant color of a cherry freshly
torn apart, was in startling contrast with the dark
lustre of her eyes. Le-pih's poetry makes constant
allusion to those small and snowy teeth, and the turned-down
corners of the lips and eyes of his incomparable
mistress.

Taya's song was a fragment of that celebrated
Chinese romance from which Moore has borrowed so
largely in his loves of the angels, and it chanced to
be particularly appropriate to her deserted position
(she was alone now with her three listeners), dwelling as
it did upon the loneliness of a disguised Peri, wandering
in exile upon earth. The lute fell from her hands
when she ceased, and while the emperor applauded,
and Kwonfootse looked on her with paternal pride,
Le-pih modestly advanced to the fallen instrument,
and with a low obeisance to the emperor and a hesitating
apology to Taya, struck a prelude in the same
air, and broke forth into an impulsive expression of
his feelings in verse. It would be quite impossible to
give a translation of this famous effusion with its
oriental load of imagery, but in modifying it to the
spirit of our language (giving little more than its thread
of thought), the reader may see glimpses of the material
from which the great Irish lyrist spun his woof
of sweet fable. Fixing his keen eyes upon the bright
lips just closed, Le-pih sang:—

The song over, Le-pih sat with his hands folded
across the instrument and his eyes cast down, and
Taya gazed on him with wondering looks, yet slowly,
and as if unconsciously, she took from her breast a
rose, and with a half-stolen glance at her father, threw
it upon the lute. But frowningly Kwonfootse rose
from his seat and approached the poet.

“Who are you?” he demanded angrily, as the bard
placed the rose reverently in his bosom.

“Le-pih!”

With another obeisance to the emperor, and a deeper
one to the fair Taya, he turned, after this concise answer,
upon his heel, lifting his cap to his head, which,
to the rage of Kwonfootse, bore not even the gold ball
of aristocracy.

“Bind him for the bastinado!” cried the infuriated
mandarin to the bearers of the canopy.

The six soldiers dropped their poles to the ground,
but the emperor's voice arrested them.

“He shall have no violence but from you, fair
Taya,” said the softened monarch; “call to him by
the name he has just pronounced, for I would hear
that lute again!”

“Le-pih! Le-pih!” cried instantly the musical
voice of the fair girl.

The poet turned and listened, incredulous of his
own ears.

“Le-pih! Le-pih!” she repeated, in a soft tone.

Half-hesitating, half-bounding, as if still scarce believing
he had heard aright, Le-pih flew to her feet,
and dropped to one knee upon the cushion before her,
his breast heaving and his eyes flashing with eager
wonder. Taya's courage was at an end, and she sat
with her eyes upon the ground.

“Give him the lute, Kwonfootse!” said the emperor,
swinging himself on the raised chair with an
abandonment of the imperial avoirdupois, which set
ringing violently the hundred bells suspended in the
golden fringes.

“Let not the crow venture again into the nest of
the eagle,” muttered the mandarin between his teeth
as he handed the instrument to the poet.

The sound of the bells brought in the women and
courtiers from every quarter of the privileged area,
and, preluding upon the strings to gather his scattered
senses, while they were seating themselves around
him, Le-pih at last fixed his gaze upon the lips of
Taya, and commenced his song to an irregular harmony
well adapted to extempore verse. We have tried
in vain to put this celebrated song of compliment into
English stanzas. It commenced with a description
of Taya's beauty, and an enumeration of things she
resembled, dwelling most upon the blue lily, which
seems to have been Le-pih's favorite flower. The
burthen of the conclusion, however, is the new value
everything assumed in her presence. “Of the light
in this garden,” he says, “there is one beam worth all
the glory of the moon, for it sleeps on the eye of Taya.
Of the air about me there is one breath which my soul
drinks like wine—it is from the lips of Taya. Taya
looks on a flower, and that flower seems to me, with
its pure eye, to gaze after her for ever. Taya's jacket
of blue silk is my passion. If angels visit me in my
dreams, let them be dressed like Taya. I love the
broken spangle in her slipper better than the first star
of evening. Bring me, till I die, inner leaves from
the water-lily, since white and fragrant like them are
the teeth of Taya. Call me, should I sleep, when
rises the crescent moon, for the blue sky in its bend
curves like the drooped eye of Taya,” &c., &c.

“By the immortal Fo!” cried the emperor, raising
himself bolt upright in his chair, as the poet ceased,
“you shall be the bard of Tang! Those are my sentiments
better expressed! The lute, in your hands,
is my heart turned inside out! Lend me your gold
chain, Kwonfootse, and, Taya! come hither and put
it on his neck!”

Taya glided to the emperor, but Le-pih rose to his
feet, with a slight flush on his forehead, and stood
erect and motionless.

“Let it please your imperial majesty,” he said,
after a moment's pause, “to bestow upon me some
gift less binding than a chain.”

“Carbuncle of Budha! What would the youth have”
exclaimed Tang in astonishment. “Is not the gold
chain of a mandarin good enough for his acceptance?”

“My poor song,” replied Le-pih, modestly casting
down his eyes, “is sufficiently repaid by your majesty's
praises. The chain of the mandarin would gall the
neck of the poet. Yet—if I might have a reward
more valuable—”

“In Fo's name what is it?” said the embarrassed
emperor.

Kwonfootse laid his hand on his cimeter, and his
daughter blushed and trembled.

“The broken spangle on the slipper of Taya!” said
Le-pih, turning half indifferently away.

Loud laughed the ladies of the court, and Kwonfootse
walked from the bard with a look of contempt,
but the emperor read more truly the proud and delicate
spirit that dictated the reply; and in that moment
probably commenced the friendship with which, to the
end of his peaceful reign, Tang distinguished the most
gifted poet of his time.

The lovely daughter of the mandarin was not behind
the emperor in her interpretation of the character of
Le-pih, and as she stepped forward to put the detached
spangle into his hand, she bent on him a look full
of earnest curiosity and admiration.

“What others give me,” he murmured in a low
voice, pressing the worthless trifle to his lips, “makes
me their slave; but what Taya gives me is a link that
draws her to my bosom.”

Kwonfootse probably thought that Le-pih's audience
had lasted long enough, for at this moment the
sky seemed bursting into flame with a sudden tumult
of fireworks, and in the confusion that immediately
succeeded, the poet made his way unquestioned to
the bank of the river, and was reconveyed to the spot
of his first embarkation, in the same silent manner with
which he had approached the privileged area.

During the following month, Le-pih seemed much
in request at the imperial palace, but, to the surprise
of his friends, the keeping of “worshipful society”
was not followed by any change in his merry manners,
nor apparently by any improvement in his worldly
condition. His mother still sold mats in the public
market, and Le-pih still rode, every few days, to the
marsh, for his panniers of rushes, and to all comers,
among his old acquaintances, his lute and song were
as ready and gratuitous as ever.

All this time, however, the fair Taya was consuming
with a passionate melancholy which made startling
ravages in her health, and the proud mandarin, whose
affection for his children was equal to his pride, in vain
shut his eyes to the cause, and eat up his heart with
mortification. When the full moon came round again,
reminding him of the scenes the last moon had shone
upon, Kwonfootse seemed suddenly lightened of his
care, and his superb gardens on the Pei-ho were suddenly
alive with preparations for another festival. Kept
in close confinement, poor Taya fed on her sorrow,
indifferent to the rumors of marriage which could
concern only her sisters; and the other demoiselles
Kwonfootse tried in vain, with fluttering hearts, to pry
into their father's secret. A marriage it certainly was
to be, for the lanterns were painted of the color of
peach-blossoms—but whose marriage?

It was an intoxicating summer's morning, and the
sun was busy calling the dew back to heaven, and the
birds wild with entreating it to stay (so Le-pih describes
it), when down the narrow street in which the
poet's mother piled her vocation, there came a gay
procession of mounted servants with a led horse richly
caparisoned, in the centre. The one who rode before
held on his pommel a velvet cushion, and upon it lay
the cap of a noble, with its gold ball shining in the sun.
Out flew the neighbors as the clattering hoofs came
on, and roused by the cries and the barking of dogs,
forth came the mother of Le-pih, followed by the
poet himself, but leading his horse by the bridle, for
he had just thrown on his panniers, and was bound
out of the city to cut his bundle of rushes. The poet
gazed on the pageant with the amused curiosity of
others, wondering what it could mean, abroad at so
early an hour; but, holding back his sorry beast to
let the prancing horsemen have all the room they re
quired, he was startled by a reverential salute from
the bearer of the velvet cushion, who, drawing up his
followers in front of the poet's house, dismounted and
requested to speak with him in private.

Tying his horse to the door-post, Le-pih led the
way into the small room, where sat his mother braiding
her mats to a cheerful song of her son's making,
and here the messenger informed the bard, with much
circumstance and ceremony, that in consequence of
the pressing suit of Kwonfootse, the emperor had been
pleased to grant to the gifted Le-pih, the rank expressed
by the cap borne upon the velvet cushion, and
that as a noble of the celestial empire, he was now a
match for the incomparable Taya. Furthermore the
condescending Kwonfootse had secretly arranged the
ceremonial for the bridal, and Le-pih was commanded
to mount the led horse and come up with his cap and
gold ball to be made forthwith supremely happy.

An indefinable expression stole over the features of
the poet as he took up the cap, and placing it on his
head, stood gayly before his mother. The old dame
looked at him a moment, and the tears started to her
eyes. Instantly Le-pih plucked it off and flung it on
the waste heap at her side, throwing himself on his
knees before her in the same breath, and begging her
forgiveness for his silly jest.

“Take back your bauble to Kwonfootse!” he said,
rising proudly to his feet, “and tell him that the emperor,
to whom I know how to excuse myself, can
easily make a poet into a noble, but he can not make
a noble into a poet. The male bird does not borrow
its brighter plumage from its mate, and she who marries
Le-pih will braid rushes for his mother!”

Astonished, indeed, were the neighbors, who had
learned the errand of the messenger from his attendants
without, to see the crest-fallen man come forth again
with his cap and cushion. Astonished much more
were they, ere the gay cavalcade were well out of sight,
to see Le-pih appear with his merry countenance and
plebeian cap, and, mounting his old horse, trot briskly
away, sickle in hand, to the marshes. The day passed
in wondering and gossip, interrupted by the entrance
of one person to the house while the old dame was
gone with her mats to the market, but she returned
duly before sunset, and went in as usual to prepare
supper for her son.

The last beams of day were on the tops of the
pagodas when Le-pih returned, walking beside his
heavy-laden beast, and singing a merry song. He
threw off his rushes at the door and entered, but his
song was abruptly checked, for a female sat on a low
seat by his mother, stooping over a half-braided mat,
and the next moment, the blushing Taya lifted up her
brimming eyes and gazed at him with silent but pleading
love.

Now, at last, the proud merriment and self respecting
confidence of Le-pih were overcome. His eyes
grew flushed and his lips trembled without utterance.
With both his hands pressed on his beating heart, he
stood gazing on the lovely Taya.

“Ah!” cried the old dame, who sat with folded
hands and smiling face, looking on at a scene she did
not quite understand, though it gave her pleasure,
“Ah! this is a wife for my boy, sent from heaven!
No haughty mandarin's daughter she! no proud minx,
to fall in love with the son and despise the mother!
Let them keep their smart caps and gift-horses for
those who can be bought at such prices! My son is
a noble by the gift of his Maker—better than an emperor's
gold ball! Come to your, supper, Le-pih!
Come, my sweet daughter!”

Taya placed her finger on her lip, and Le-pih
agreed that the moment was not yet come to enlighten
his mother as to the quality of her guest. She was
not long in ignorance, however, for before they could
seat themselves at table, there was a loud knocking at

the door, and before the old dame could bless herself,
an officer entered and arrested the daughter of Kwonfootse
by name, and Le-pih and his mother at the
same time, and there was no dismissing the messenger
now. Off they marched, amid the silent consternation
and pity of the neighbors—not toward the palace
of justice, however, but to the palace of the emperor,
where his majesty, to save all chances of mistake,
chose to see the poet wedded, and sit, himself, at the
bridal feast. Tang had a romantic heart, fat and
voluptuous as he was, and the end of his favor to Le-pih
and Taya was the end of his life.

MEENA DIMITY;
OR, WHY MR. BROWN CRASH TOOK THE TOUR.

Fashion is arbitrary, we all know. What it was
that originally gave Sassafras street the right to despise
Pepperidge street, the oldest inhabitant of the
village of Slimford could not positively say. The
courthouse and jail were in Sassafras street; but the
orthodox church and female seminary were in Pepperidge
street. Two directors of the Slimford bank
lived in Sassafras street—two in Pepperidge street.
The Dyaper family lived in Sassafras street—the
Dimity family in Pepperidge street; and the fathers
of the Dyaper girls and the Dimity girls were worth
about the same money, and had both made it in the
lumber line. There was no difference to speak of in
their respective mode of living—none in the education
of the girls—none in the family gravestones or
church-pews. Yet, deny it who liked, the Dyapers
were the aristocracy of Slimford.

It may be a prejudice, but I am inclined to think
there is always something in a nose. (I am about to
mention a trifle, but trifles are the beginning of most
things, and I would account for the pride paramount
of the Dyapers, if it is any way possible.) The most
stylish of the Miss Dyapers—Harriet Dyaper—had a
nose like his grace the Duke of Wellington. Neither
her father nor mother had such a feature; but
there was a foreign umbrella in the family with exactly
the same shaped nose on the ivory handle. Old
Dyaper had once kept a tavern, and he had taken this
umbrella from a stranger for a night's lodging. But
that is neither here nor there. To the nose of Harriet
Dyaper, resistlessly and instinctively, the Dimity
girls had knocked under at school. There was authority
in it; for the American eagle had such a nose,
and the Duke of Wellington had such a nose; and
when, to these two warlike instances, was added the
nose of Harriet Dyaper, the tripod stood firm. Am
I visionary in believing that the authority introduced
into that village by a foreigner's umbrella (so unaccountable
is fate) gave the dynasty to the Dyapers?

I have mentioned but two families—one in each of
the two principal streets of Slimford. Having a little
story to tell, I can not afford to distract my narrative
with unnecessary “asides;” and I must not only
omit all description of the other Sassafrasers and
Pepperidgers, but I must leave to your imagination
several Miss Dyapers and several Miss Dimitys—Harriet
Dyaper and Meena Dimity being the two exclusive
objects of my hero's Sunday and evening attentions.

For eleven months in the year, the loves of the
ladies of Slimford were presided over by indigenous
Cupids. Brown Crash and the other boys of the village
had the Dyapers and the Dimitys for that respective
period to themselves. The remaining month,
when their sun of favor was eclipsed, was during the
falling of the leaf, when the “drummers” came up to
dun. The townish clerks of the drygoods merchants
were too much for the provincials. Brown Crash
knocked under and sulked, owing, as he said, to the
melancholy depression accompanying the fall of the
deciduous vegetation. But I have not yet introduced
you to my hero.

Brown Crash was the Slimford stage-agent. He
was the son of a retired watch-maker, and had been
laughed at in his boyhood for what they called his
“airs.” He loved, even as a lad, to be at the tavern
when the stage came in, and help out the ladies.
With instinctive leisureliness he pulled off his cap
as soon after the “whoa-hup” as was necessary (and
no sooner), and asked the ladies if they would “alight
and take dinner,” with a seductive smile which began,
as the landlord said, “to pay.” Hence his promotion.
At sixteen he was nominated stage-agent, and thence-forward
was the most conspicuous man in the village;
for “man” he was, if speech and gait go for anything.

But we must minister a moment to the reader's
inner sense; for we do not write altogether for Slimford
comprehension. Brown Crash had something
in his composition “above the vulgar” If men's
qualities were mixed like salads, and I were giving a
“recipe for Brown Crashes,” in Mrs. Glass's style, I
should say his two principal ingredients were a dictionary
and a dunghill cock—for his language was as
ornate as his style of ambulation was deliberate
and imposing. What Brown Crash would have been,
born Right Honorable, I leave (with the smaller Dyapers
and Dimitys) to the reader's fancy. My object
is to show what he was, minus patrician nurture and
valuation. Words, with Brown Crash, were susceptible
of being dirtied by use. He liked a clean towel—he
preferred an unused phrase. But here stopped
his peculiarities. Below the epidermis he was like
other men, subject to like tastes and passions. And
if he expressed his loves and hates with grandiloquent
imagery, they were the honest loves and hates of a
week-day world—no finer nor flimsier for their bedecked
plumage.

To use his own phrase, Brown frequented but two
ladies in Slimford—Miss Harriet Dyaper and Miss
Meena Dimity. The first we have described in
describing her nose, for her remainder was comparatively
inconsiderable. The latter was “a love,” and
of course had nothing peculiar about her. She was
a lamp—nothing till lighted. She was a mantle—
nothing, except as worn by the owner. She was a
mirror—blank and unconscious till something came
to be reflected. She was anything, loved—unloved,
nothing! And this (it is our opinion after half a
life) is the most delicious and adorable variety of
woman that has been spared to us from the museum
of specimen angels. (A remark of Brown Crash's,
by the way, of which he may as well have the credit.)

Now Mr. Crash had an ambitious weakness for the
best society, and he liked to appear intimate with the
Dyapers. But in Meena Dimity there was a secret
charm which made him wish she was an ever-to-be-handed-out
lady-stage-passenger. He could have
given her a hand, and brought in her umbrella and
bandbox, all day long. In his hours of pride he
thought of the Dyapers—in his hours of affection of
Meena Dimity. But the Dyapers looked down upon
the Dimitys; and to play his card delicately between
Harriet and Meena, took all the diplomacy of Brown
Crash. The unconscious Meena would walk up
Sassafras street when she had his arm, and the scornful
Harriet would be there with her nose over the
front gate to sneer at them. He managed as well as
he could. He went on light evenings to the Dyapers—on
dark evenings to the Dimitys. He took
town-walks with the Dyapers—country-walks with

the Dimitys. But his acquaintance with the Dyapers
hung by the eyelids. Harriet liked him; for he was
the only beau in Slimford whose manners were not
belittled beside her nose. But her acquaintance with
him was a condescension, and he well knew that he
could not “hold her by the nose” if she were offended.
Oh no! Though their respective progenitors
were of no very unequal rank—though a horologist
and a “boss lumberman” might abstractly be equals—
the Dyapers had the power! Yes—they could lift
him to themselves, or dash him down to the Dimitys;
and all Slimford would agree in the latter case that
he was a “slab” and a “small potato!”

But a change came o'er the spirit of Brown Crash's
dream! The drummers were lording it in Slimford,
and Brown, reduced to Meena Dimity (for he was too
proud to play second fiddle to a town dandy), was
walking with her on a dark night past the Dyapers.
The Dyapers were hanging over the gate unluckily,
and their Pearl-street admirers sitting on the top rail
of the fence.

“Who is it?” said a strange voice.

The reply, sent upward from a scornfully projecting
under lip, rebounded in echoes from the tense
nose of Miss Dyaper.

“A Mr. Crash, and a girl from the back street!”

It was enough. A hot spot on his cheek, a warm
rim round his eyes, a pimply pricking in his skin,
and it was all over! His vow was made. He coldly
bid Meena good night at her father's door, and went
home and counted his money. And from that hour,
without regard to sex, he secretly accepted shillings
from gratified travellers, and “stood treat” no more.

Saratoga was crowded with the dispersed nuclei of
the metropolises. Fashion, wealth, and beauty, were
there. Brown Crash was there, on his return from a
tour to Niagara and the lakes.

“Brown Crash, Esq.,” was one of the notabilities
of Congress Hall. Here and there a dandy “could
not quite make him out;” but there was evidently
something uncommon about him. The ladies thought
him “of the old school of politeness,” and the politicians
thought he had the air of one used to influence
in his county. His language was certainly very
choice and peculiar, and his gait was conscious dignity
itself. He must have been carefully educated;
yet his manners were popular, and he was particularly
courteous on a first introduction. The elegance and
ease with which he helped the ladies out of their
carriages were particularly remarked, and a shrewd
observer said of him, that “that point of high breeding
was only acquired by daily habit. He must have
been brought up where there were carriages and ladies.”
A member of congress, who expected to run
for governor, inquired his county, and took wine
with him. His name was mentioned by the letter-writers
from the springs. Brown Crash was in his
perihelion!

The season leaned to its close, and the following
paragraph appeared in the New York American:—

“Fashionable Intelligence.—The company at the
Springs is breaking up. We understand that the
Vice-President and Brown Crash, Esq., have already
left for their respective residences. The latter gentleman,
it is understood, has formed a matrimonial
engagement with a family of wealth and distinction
from the south. We trust that these interesting
bonds, binding together the leading families of the
far-divided extremities of our country, may tend to
strengthen the tenacity of the great American Union!”

It was not surprising that the class in Slimford who
knew everything—the milliners, to-wit—moralized
somewhat bitterly on Mr. Crash's devotion to the
Dyapers after his return, and his consequent slight to
Meena Dimity. “If that was the effect of fashion
and distinction on the heart, Mr. Crash was welcome
to his honors! Let him marry Miss Dyaper, and
they wished him much joy of her nose; but they
would never believe that he had not ruthlessly broken
the heart of Meena Dimity, and he ought to be
ashamed of himself, if there was any shame in such
a dandy.”

But the milliners, though powerful people in their
way, could little affect the momentum of Brown
Crash's glories. The paragraph from the “American”
had been copied into the “Slimford Advertiser,”
and the eyes of Sassafras street and Pepperidge street
were alike opened. They had undervalued their indigenous
“prophet.” They had misinterpreted and
misread the stamp of his superiority. He had been
obliged to go from them to be recognised. But he
was returned. He was there to have reparation
made—justice done. And now, what office would he
like, from Assessor to Pathmaster, and would he be
good enough to name it before the next town-meeting.
Brown Crash was king of Slimford!

And Harriet Dyaper! The scorn from her lip had
gone, like the blue from a radish! Notes for “B.
Crash,Esq.,” showered from Sassafras street—bouquets
from old Dyaper's front yard glided to him, per black
boy—no end to the endearing attentions, undisguised
and unequivocal. Brown Crash and Harriet Dyaper
were engaged, if having the front parlor entirely given
up to them of an evening meant anything—if his
being expected every night to tea meant anything—
if his devoted (though she thought rather cold) attentions
meant anything.

They did n't mean anything! They all did n't
mean anything! What does the orthodox minister
do, the third Sunday after Brown Crash's return, but
read the banns of matrimony between that faithless
man and Meena Dimity!

But this was not to be endured. Harriet Dyaper
had a cousin who was a “strapper.” He was boss of
a sawmill in the next county, and he must be sent for.

He was sent for.

The fight was over. Boss Dyaper had undertaken
to flog Brown Crash, but it was a drawn battle—for
the combatants had been pulled apart by their coattails.
They stepped into the barroom and stood recovering
their breath. The people of Slimford
crowded in, and wanted to have the matter talked
over. Boss Dyaper bolted out his grievance.

“Gentlemen!” said Brown Crash, with one of his
irresistible come-to-dinner smiles, “I am culpable,
perhaps, in the minutiæ of this business—justifiable,
I trust you will say, in the general scope and tendency.
You, all of you, probably, had mothers, and some of
you have wives and sisters; and your `silver cord'
naturally sympathizes with a worsted woman. But,
gentlemen, you are republicans! You, all of you,
are the rulers of a country very large indeed; and
you are not limited in your views to one woman, nor
to a thousand women—to one mile, nor to a thousand
miles. You generalize! you go for magnificent principles,
gentlemen! You scorn high-and-mightiness,
and supercilious aristocracy!”

“Hurra for Mr. Crash!” cried a stagedriver from
the outside.

“Well, gentleman! In what I have done, I have
deserved well of a republican country! True—it has
been my misfortune to roll my Juggernaut of principle
over the sensibilities of that gentleman's respectable
female relative. But, gentlemen, she offended,
remedilessly and grossly, one of the sovereign
people! She scorned one of earth's fairest daughters,
who lives in a back street! Gentlemen, you know
that pride tripped up Lucifer! Shall a tiptop angel fall
for it, and a young woman who is nothing particular

be left scornfully standing? Shall Miss Dyaper have
more privileges than Lucifer? I appreciate your indignant
negative!

“But, gentlemen, I am free to confess, I had also
my republican private end. You know my early history.
You have witnessed my struggles to be respected
by my honorable contemporaries. If it be my
weakness to be sensitive to the finger of scorn, be it
so. You will know how to pardon me. But I will
be brief. At a particular crisis of my acquaintance
with Miss Dyaper, I found it expedient to transfer my
untrammelled tendernesses to Pepperidge street. My
heart had long been in Pepperidge street. But,
gentlemen, to have done it without removing from
before my eyes the contumelious finger of the scorn
of Sassafras street, was beyond my capabilities of endurance.
In justice to my present `future,' gentlemen,
I felt that I must remove `sour grapes' from my
escutcheon—that I must soar to a point, whence,
swooping proudly to Meena Dimity, I should pass
the Dyapers in descending!

(Cheers and murmurs.)

“Gentlemen and friends! This world is all a fleeting
show. The bell has rung, and I keep you from
your suppers. Briefly. I found the means to travel
and test the ring of my metal among unprejudiced
strangers. I wished to achieve distinction and return
to my birthplace; but for what? Do me justice,
gentlemen. Not to lord it in Sassafras street. Not
to carry off a Dyaper with triumphant elation!
Not to pounce on your aristocratic No. 1, and
link my destiny with the disdainful Dyapers! No!
But to choose where I liked, and have the credit
of liking it! To have Slimford believe that if I
preferred their No. 2, it was because I liked it better
than No. 1. Gentlemen, I am a republican! I
may find my congenial spirit among the wealthy—I
may find it among the humble. But I want the libcrty
to choose. And I have achieved it, I trust you
will permit me to say. Having been honored by the
dignitaries of a metropolis—having consorted with a
candidate for gubernatorial distinction—having been
recorded in a public journal as a companion of the
Vice-President of this free and happy country—you
will believe me when I declare that I prefer Pepperidge
street to Sassafras—you will credit my sincerity,
when, having been approved by the Dyapers' betters,
I give them the go-by for the Dimitys! Gentlemen,
I have done.”

The reader will not be surprised to learn that Mr.
Brown Crash is now a prominent member of the
legislature, and an excessive aristocrat—Pepperidge
street and very democratic speeches to the contrary
notwithstanding.

THE POWER OF AN “INJURED LOOK.”

1. CHAPTER I.

I had a sort of candle-light acquaintance with Mr.
Philip McRueit when we were in college. I mean to
say that I had a daylight repugnance to him, and never
walked with him, or talked with him, or rode with
him, or sat with him; and, indeed, seldom saw him—
expect as one of a club oyster-party of six. He was
a short, sharp, satirical man (nicknamed “my cruet,”
by his cronies—rather descriptively!) but as plausible
and as vindictive as Mephistopheles before and after
the ruin of a soul. In some other state of existence
I had probably known and suffered by Phil. McRueit
—for I knew him like the sleeve of an old coat, the
first day I laid eyes on him; though other people
seemed to have no such instinct. Oh, we were not
new acquaintances—from whatever star he had been
transported, for his sins, to this planet of dirt. I think
he was of the same opinion, himself. He chose between
open warfare and conciliation in the first five
minutes—after seeing me as a stranger—chose the
latter.

Six or seven years after leaving college, I was following
my candle up to bed rather musingly, one night
at the Astor, and on turning a corner, I was obliged to
walk round a short gentleman who stood at the head
of the stairs in an attitude of fixed contemplation. As
I weathered the top of his hat rather closely, I caught
the direction of his eye, and saw that he was regarding,
very fixedly, a pair of rather dusty kid slippers,
which had been set outside the door, probably for
cleaning, by the occupant of the chamber opposite.
As the gentleman did not move, I turned on the half
landing of the next flight of stairs, and looked back,
breaking in, by my sudden pause, upon his fit of abstraction.
It was McRueit, and on recognising me,
he immediately beckoned me to his side.

“Does it strike you,” said he, “that there is anything
peculiar in that pair of shoes?”

“No—except that they certify to two very small
feet on the other side of the door.”

“Not merely `small,' my dear fellow! Do you
see where the pressure has been in those slender shoes,
how straight the inside line, how arched the instep,
how confidingly flat the pressure downward of the
little great toe! It's a woman of sweet and relying
character who wore that shoe to-day, and I must know
her. More, sir, I must marry her! Ah, you laugh
—but I will! There's a magnetism in that pair of
shoes addressed to me only. Beg your pardon—good
night—I'll go down stairs and find out her number—
`74!' I'll be well acquainted with `74' by this time
to-morrow!”

For the unconscious young lady asleep in that room,
I lay awake half the night, troubled with foreboding
pity. I knew the man so well, I was so certain that
he would leave nothing possible undone to carry out
this whimsical purpose! I knew that from that moment
was levelled, point-blank, at the lady, whoever
she might be (if single) a battery of devilish and pertinactious
ingenuity which would carry most any
small fort of a heart, most any way barricaded and
defended. He was well off; he was well-looking
enough; he was-deep and crafty. But if he did win
her, she was gone! gone, I knew, from happiness,
like a stone from a sling. He was a tyrant—subtle
in his cruelties to all people dependant on him—and
her life would be one of refined torture, neglect, betrayal,
and tears.

A fit of intermittent disgust for strangers, to which
all persons living in hotels are more or less liable,
confined my travels, for some days after this rencontre,
to the silence-and-slop thorough-fare of the back
stairs, “Coming to my feed” of society one rainy
morning, I went into the drawing-room after breakfast,
and was not surprised to see McRueit in a posture of
absorbed attention beside a lady. His stick stood on
the floor, and with his left cheek rested on the gold
head, he was gazing into her face, and evidently keeping
her perfectly at her ease as to the wants and gaps
of conversation, as he knew how to do—for he was the
readiest man with his brick and mortar whom I ever
had encountered.

“Who is that lady?” I asked of an omni-acquainted
old bachelor friend of mine.

“Miss Jonthee Twitt—and what can be the secret
of that rather exclusive gentleman's attention to her.
I can not fancy.”

I pulled a newspaper from my pocket, and seating
myself in one of the deep windows, commenced rather
a compassionate study of Miss Twitt—intending fully,
if I should find her interesting, to save her from the
clutches of my detestable classmate.

She was a slight, hollow-chested, consumptive-looking
girl, with a cast of features that any casual
observer would be certain to describe as “interesting.”
With the first two minutes' gaze upon her, my sympathies
were active enough for a crusade against a
whole army of connubial tyrants. I suddenly paused,
however. Something McRueit said made a change
in the lady's countenance. She sat just as still; she
did not move her head from its negligent posture; her
eyebrows did not contract; her lips did not stir; but
the dull, sickly-colored lids descended calmly and
fixedly till they hid from sight the upper edges of the
pupils! and by this slight but infallible sign I knew
—but the story will tell what I knew. Napoleon was
nearly, but not quite right, when he said that there
was no reliance to be placed on peculiarities of feature
or expression.

2. CHAPTER II.

In August of that same year, I followed the world
to Saratoga. In my first reconnoitre of the drawing-room
of Congress Hall, I caught the eye of Mr. McRueit,
and received from him a cordial salutation.
As I put my head right, upon its pivot, after an easy
nod to my familiar aversion, my eyes fell upon Miss
Jonthee Twitt—that was—for I had seen, in the
newspapers of two months before, that the resolve
(born of the dusty slipper outside her door), had been
brought about, and she was now on the irrevocable
side of a honeymoon sixty days old.

Her eyelid was down upon the pupil—motionless,
concentrated, and vigilant as a couched panther—and
from beneath the hem of her dress curved out the
high arched instep of a foot pointed with desperate
tension to the carpet; the little great toe (whose relying
pressure on the soiled slipper Mr. McRueit had
been captivated by), now rigid with as strong a purpose
as spiritual homeopathy could concentrate in so
small a tenement. I thought I would make Mr. and
Mrs. McRueit the subject of quiet study while I remained
at Saratoga.

But I have not mentioned the immediate cause of
Mrs. McRueit's resentment. Her bridegroom was
walking up and down the room with a certain Mrs.
Wanmaker, a widow, who was a better woman than
she looked to be, as I chanced to know, but as nobody
could know without the intimate acquaintance with
Mrs. Wanmaker upon which I base this remark.
With beauty of the most voluptuous cast, and a
passion for admiration which induced her to throw
out every possible lure to men any way worth her
time as victims, Mrs. Wanmaker's blood was as
“cold as the flow of Iser,” and her propriety, in fact,
wholly impregnable. I had been myself “tried on”
by the widow Wanmaker, and twenty caravan-marches
might have been made across the Desert of Sahara,
while the conviction I have just stated was “getting
through my hair.” It was not wonderful, therefore,
that both the bride and her (usually) most penetratious
bridegroom, had sailed over the widow's shallows, unconscious
of soundings. She was a “deep” woman,
too—but in the love line.

I thought McRueit singularly off his guard, if it
were only for “appearances.” He monopolized the
widow effectually, and she thought it worth her while
to let the world think him (a bridegroom and a rising
young politician), mad for her, and, truth to say, they
carried on the war strenuously. Perfectly certain as I
was that “the whirligig of time” would “bring about
the revenges” of Mrs. McRueit, I began to feel a
meantime pity for her, and had myself presented duly
by McRueit the next morning after breakfast.

It was a tepid, flaccid, revery-colored August morning,
and the sole thought of the universe seemed to
be to sit down. The devotees to gayety and mineral
water dawdled out to the porticoes, and some sat on
chairs under the trees, and the dandies lay on the
grass, and the old ladies on the steps and the settees,
and here and there, a man on the balustrade, and, in
the large swing, vis-à-vis, sat McRueit and the widow
Wanmaker, chattering in an undertone quite inaudible.
Mrs. McRueit sat on a bench, with her back
against one of the high-shouldered pine trees in the
court-yard, and I had called McRueit out of his swing
to present me. But he returned immediately to the
widow.

I thought it would be alleviative and good-natured
to give Mrs. McRueit an insight to the harmlessness
of Mrs. Wanmaker, and I had done so very nearly to
my satisfaction, when I discovered that the slighted
wife did not care sixpence about the fact, and that,
unlike Hamlet, she only knew seems. The more I
developed the innocent object of the widow's outlay
of smiles and confidentialities, the more Mrs. McRueit
placed herself in a posture to be remarked by the
loungers in the court-yeard and the dawdlers on the
portico, and the more she deepened a certain look—
you must imagine it for the present, dear reader. It
would take a razor's edge of analysis, and a Flemish
paint-pot and patience, to carve that injured look into
language, or paint it truthfully to the eye! Juries
would hang husbands, and recording angels “ruthlessly
overcharge,” upon the unsupported evidence of
such a look. She looked as if her heart must have
suffocated with forbearance long before she began to
look so. She looked as if she had forgiven and wept,
and was ready to forgive and weep again. She looked
as if she would give her life if she could conceal “her
feelings,” and as if she was nerving soul, and heart,
and eyelids, and lachrymatory glands—all to agony—
to prevent bursting into tears with her unutterable
anguish! It was the most unresisting, unresentful,
patient, sweet miserableness! A lamb's willingness
to “furnish forth another meal” of chops and sweet-bread,
was testy to such meek endurance! She was
evidently a martyr, a victim, a crushed flower, a “poor
thing!” But she did, now and then—unseen by anybody
but me—give a glance from that truncated orb
of a pupil of hers, over the top of her handkerchief,
that, if incarnated, would have made a hole in the hide
of a rhinoceros! It was triumph, venom, implacability—such
as I had never before seen expressed in human
glances.

There are many persons with but one idea, and that
a good one. Mrs. McRueit, I presume, was incapable
of appreciating my interest in her. At any rate
she played the same game with me as with other
people, and managed her affairs altogether with perfect
unity. It was in vain that I endeavored to hear
from her tongue what I read in the lowering pupil of
her eye. She spoke of McRueit with evident reluctance,
but always with discretion—never blaming
him, nor leaving any opening that should betray resentment,
or turn the current of sympathy from herself.
The result was immediate. The women in the
house began to look black upon McRueit. The men
“sent him to Coventry” more unwillingly, for he was
amusing and popular—but “to Coventry” he went!
And at last the widow Wanmaker became aware that
she was wasting her time on a man whose attentions
were not wanted elsewhere—and she (the unkindest
cut of all) found reasons for looking another way when
he approached her. He had became aware, during

this process, what was “in the wind,” but he knew
too much to stay in the public eye when it was inflamed.
With his brows lowering, and his face
gloomy with feelings I could easily interpret, he took
the early coach on the third morning after my introduction
to Mrs. McRueit, and departed, probably for
a discipline trip, to some place where sympathy with
his wife would be less dangerous.

3. CHAPTER III.

I think, that within the next two or three years, I
heard McRueit's name mentioned several times, or
saw it in the papers, connected with strong political
movements. I had no very definite idea of where he
was residing, however. Business called me to a
western county, and on the road I fell into the company
of a great political schemer and partisan—one
of those joints (of the feline political body), the next
remove from the “cat's paw.” Finding that I cared
not a straw for politics, and that we were going to the
same town, he undertook the blandishment of an overflow
of confidence upon me, probably with the remote
possibility that he might have occasion to use me. I
gave in to it so far as courteously to receive all his
secrets, and we arrived at our destination excellent
friends.

The town was in a ferment with the coming election
of a member for the legislature, and the hotel being
very crowded, Mr. Develin (my fellow-traveller) and
myself were put into a double-bedded room. Busy
with my own affairs, I saw but little of him, and he
seemed quite too much occupied for conversation, till
the third night after our arrival. Lying in bed with
the moonlight streaming into the room, he began to
give me some account of the campaign, preparing for,
around us, and presently mentioned the name of
McRueit—(the name, by the way, that I had seen
upon the placards, without caring particularly to inquire
whether or not it was “mine ancient” aversion).

“They are not aware,” said Mr. Develin, after
talking on the subject awhile, “that this petty election,
is, in fact, the grain of sand that is to turn the presidential
scale. If McRueit should be elected (as I
am sorry to say there seems every chance he will be),
Van Buren's doom is sealed. I have come a little
too late here. I should have had time to know something
more of this man McRueit—”

“Perhaps I can give you some idea of him,” interrupted
I, “for he has chanced to be more in my way
than I would have bargained for. But what do you
wish to know particularly?” (I spoke, as the reader
will see, in the unsuspecting innocence of my heart.)

“Oh—anything—anything! Tell me all you know
of him!”

Mr. Develin's vividness rather surprised me, for he
raised himself on his elbow in bed—but I went on and
narrated very much what I have put down for the
reader in the two preceding chapters.

“How do you spell Mrs. Wanmaker's name?”
asked my imbedded vis-à-vis, as I stopped and turned
over to go to sleep.

I spelt it for him.

He jumped out of bed, dressed himself and left the
room. Will the reader permit me to follow him, like
Asmodeus, giving with Asmodean brevity the knowledge
I afterward gained of his use of my involuntary
revelation?

Mr. Develin roused the active member of the Van
Buren committee from his slumber, and in an hour
had the printers of their party paper at work upon a
placard. A large meeting was to be held the next
day in the town-hall, during which both candidates, it
was supposed, would address the people. Ladies
were to occupy the galleries. The hour came round.
Mrs. McRueit's carriage drove into the village a few
minutes before eleven, and as she stopped at a shop
for a moment, a letter was handed her by a boy. She
sat still and read it. She was alone. Her face turned
livid with paleness after its first flush, and forgetting
her errand at the shop, she drove on to the town-hall.
She took her seat in a prominent part of the gallery.
The preliminaries were gone through with, and her
husband rose to speak. He was a plausible orator,
an eloquent man. But there was a sentiment circulating
in the audience—something whispered from man
to man—that strangely took off the attention of the
audience. He could not, as he had never before found
difficulty in doing, keep their eyes upon his lips.
Every one was gazing on his wife! And there she
sat—with her INJURED LOOK!—pale, sad, apparently
striving to listen and conceal her mental suffering. It
was as convincing to the audience of the truth of the
insinuation that was passing from mouth to mouth—
as convincing as would have been a revelation from
Heaven. McRueit followed the many upturned eyes
at last, and saw that they were bent on his wife, and
that—once more—after years of conciliation, she wore
THAT INJURED LOOK! His heart failed him. He
evidently comprehended that the spirit that had driven
him from Saratoga, years before—popular sympathy
with women—had overtaken him and was plotting
against him once more. His speech began to lose
its concentration. He talked wide. The increasing
noise overpowered him, and he descended at last from
the platform in the midst of a universal hiss. The
other candidate rose and spoke; and at the close of
his speech the meeting broke up, and as they dispersed,
their eyes were met at every corner with a
large placard, in which “injured wife,” “unfaithful
husband,” “widow W—n—k—r,” were the words in
prominent capitals. The election came on the next
day, and Mr. McRueit being signally defeated, Mr.
Van Buren's election to the Presidency (if Mr. Develin
knew anything) was made certain—brought about by
a woman's INJURED LOOK.

My business in the county was the purchase of land,
and for a year or two afterward, I was a great deal
there. Feeling that I had unintentionally furnished
a weapon to his enemies, I did penance by cultivating
McRueit. I went often to his house. He was at
first a good deal broken up by the sudden check to
his ambition, but he rallied with a cliange in his
character for which I was not prepared. He gave up
all antagonism toward his wife. He assumed a new
manner to her. She had been skilfully managed before—but
he took her now confidingly behind his
shield. He felt overmastered by the key she had to
popular sympathy, and he determined wisely to make
it turn in his favor. By assiduity, by tenderness,
childlikeness, he succeeded in completely convincing
her that he had but one out-of-doors wish—that of
embellishing her existence by his success. The effort
on her was marvellous. She recovered her health,
gradually changed to a joyous and earnest promoter
of her husband's interests, and they were soon a marked
model in the county for conjugal devotion. The
popular impression soon gained ground that Mr. McRueit
had been shamefully wronged by the previous
prejudice against his character as a husband. The
tide that had already turned, soon swelled to a flood,
and Mr. McRueit now—but Mr. McRueit is too powerful
a person in the present government to follow any
farther. Suffice it to say that he might return to Mrs.
Wanmaker and his old courses if he liked—for his
wife's INJURED LOOK is entirely fattened out of possibility
by her happiness. She weighs two hundred, and
could no more look injured than Sir John Falstaff.

BEWARE OF DOGS AND WALTZING.

The birds that flew over County Surrey on the
twelfth of June, 1835, looked down upon a scene of
which many a “lord of creation,” travelling only by
the roads, might well have envied them the seeing.
For, ever so merry let it be within the lordly parks of
England, the trees that look over the ring fence upon
the world without, keep their countenance—aristocrats
that they are! Round and round Beckton Park you
might have travelled that sunny day, and often within
arrow-shot of its hidden and fairy lawn, and never
suspected, but by the magnetic tremor in your veins,
that beautiful women were dancing near by, and “marvellous
proper men,” more or less enamored, looking
on—every pink and blue girdle a noose for a heart,
of course, and every gay waistcoat a victim venturing
near the trap (though this last is mentioned entirely
on my own responsibility).

But what have we to do with the unhappy exiles
without this pretty paradise! You are an invited
guest, dear reader. Pray walk in!

Did you ask about the Becktons? The Becktons
are people blessed with money and a very charming
acquaintance. That is enough to know about them.
Yet stay! Sir Thomas was knighted for his behavior
at some great crisis in India (for he made his fortune
in India)—and Lady Beckton is no great beauty, but
she has the mania of getting handsome people together,
and making them happier than belongs properly to
handsome people's destiny. And this, I think, must
suffice for a first introduction.

The lawn, as you see, has the long portico of the
house on one side of it, a bend of the river on two
other sides, and a thick shrubbery on the fourth.
The dancing-floor is in the centre, inlaid at the level
of the smooth sward, and it is just now vibrating to
the measured step of the mazurka—beautifully danced,
we must say!

And now let me point out to you the persons most
concerned in this gossip of mine.

First, the ladies.

Miss Blakeney—(and she was never called anything
but Miss Blakeney—never Kate, or Kitty, or Kathleen,
I mean, though her name was Catherine)—Miss
Blakeney is that very stylish, very striking, very
magnificent girl, I think I may say, with the white
chip hat and black feather. Nobody but Miss Blakeney
could venture to wear just the dress she is sporting,
but she must dash, though she is in half-mourning,
and, faith! there is nothing out of keeping, artistically
speaking, after all. A white dress embroidered
with black flowers, dazzling white shoulders turned
over with black lace, white neck and forchead (brilliantly
white), waved over and kissed by luxuriant black
ringlets (brilliantly black). And very white temples
with very black eyes, and very white eyelids with long
black lashes, and, since those dazzling white teeth
were without a contrast, there hung upon her neck a
black cross of ebony—and now we have put her in
black and white, where she will “stay put.” Scripta
verba manent, saith the cautionary proverb.

Here and there, you observe, there is a small Persian
carpet spread on the sward for those who like to
lounge and look at the dancers, and though a score of
people, at least, are availing themselves of this oriental
luxury, no one looks so modestly pretty, half-couched
on the richly-colored woof, as that simply dressed
blonde, with a straw hat in her lap, and her light
anburn curls taking their saucy will of her blue-veined
neck and shoulders. That lady's plain name is Mabel
Brown, and, like yourself, many persons have wished
to change it for her. She is half-married, indeed, to
several persons here present, for there is one conseming
party. Mais l'autre ne vout pas, as a French novelist
laments, it stating a similar dilemma. Meantime, Miss
Brown is the adopted sister of the black and white Miss
Blakeney.

One more exercise of my function of cicerone!

Lying upon the bank of the river, with his shoulder
against that fine oak, and apparently deeply absorbed
in the fate of the acorn-cups which he throws into the
current, you may survey the elegant person of Mr.
Lindsay Maud—a gentleman whom I wish you to take
for rather more than his outer seeming, since he will
show you at the first turn of his head, that he cares
nothing for your opinion, though entitled, as the
diplomatists phrase it, to your “high consideration.”
Mr. Maud is twenty-five, more or less—six feet, or
thereabouts. He has the sanguineous tint, rather
odd for so phlegmatic a person as he seems. His
nose is un petit peu rétroussè, his lips full, and his
smile easy and ready. His eyes are like the surface
of a very deep well. Curling brown hair, broad and
calm forehead, merry chin with a dimple in it, and
mouth expressive of great good humor, and quite
enough of fastidiousness. If this is not your beau
ideal, I am very sorry—but experience went to show
that Lindsay Maud was a very agreeable man, and
pleased generally where he undertook it.

And now, if you please, having done the honors, I
will take up the story en simple conteur.

The sky was beginning to blush about the sun's
going to bed, and the dancers and archers were pairing
off, couple by couple, to stroll and cool in the dim
shrubberies of Beckton Park. It was an hour to
breakfast, so called, for breakfast was to be served in
the darker edge of the twilight. With the aforenamed
oak-tree between him and the gay company,
Mr. Lindsay Maud beguiled his hunger (for hungry
he was), by reading a volume of that very clever novel,
“Le Pere Goriot,” and, chapter by chapter, he
“cocked up his ear,” as the story-books say, hoping
to hear the cheerful bell of the tower announce the
serving of the soup and champagne.

“Well, Sir Knight Faineant!” said Lady Beckton,
stepping in suddenly between his feet and the river
brink, “since when have you turned woman-hater,
and enrolled among the unavailables? Here have you
lain all day in the shade, with scores of nice girls
dancing on the other side of your hermit tree, and not
a sign of life—not a look even to see whether my
party, got up with so much pains, flourished or languished!
I'll cross you out of my little book, recreant!”

Maud was by this time on his feet, and he penitently
and respectfully kissed the fingers threateningly
held up to him—for the unpardonable sin in a single
man is to appear unamused, let alone failing to amuse
others—at a party sworn to be agreeable.

“I have but half an apology,” he said, “that of
knowing that your parties go swimmingly off, whether
I pull an oar or no; but I deserve not the less to be
crossed out of your book. Something ails me. I am
growing old, or my curiosity has burnt out, or I am
touched with some fatal lethargy. Upon my word I
would as lief listen to a Latin sermon as chat for the
next half hour with the prettiest girl at Beckton!
There's no inducement, my dear Lady Beckton!
I'm not a marrying man, you know; and flirtation—
flirtation is such tiresome repetition—endless reading
of prefaces, and never coming to the agreeable first
chapter. But I'll obey orders. Which is the destitute
woman? You shall see how I will redeem my damaged
reputation!”

But Lady Beckton, who seldom refused an offer
from a bean to make himself useful at-her parties,
seemed hardly to listen to Maud's justification. She
placed her arm in his, and led him across the bridge
which spanned the river a little above, and they were
presently out of hearing in one of the cool and shaded
avenues of the park.

“A penny for your thought!” said Maud, after
walking at her side a few minutes in silence.

“It is a thought, certainly, in which pennies are
concerned,” replied Lady Beckton, “and that is why
I find any trouble in giving expression to it. It is
difficult enough to talk with gentlemen about love, but
that is easy to talking about money.”

“Yet they make a pretty tandem, money on the
lead!”

“Oh! are you there?” exclaimed Lady Beckton,
with a laugh; “I was beginning too far back, altogether!
My dear Lindsay, see how much better I
thought of you than you deserved! I was turning
over in my mind with great trepidation and embarrassment
how I should venture to talk to you about a money-and-love
match!”

“Indeed! for what happy man?”

“Toi m%ecirc;eme, mon ami!”

“Heavens! you quite take away my breath! Spare
yourself the overture, my dear Lady Beckton! I
agree! I am quite ready—sold from this hour if you
can produce a purchaser, and possession given immediately!”

“Now you go too fast; for I have not time to banter,
and I wish to see my way in earnest before I leave you.
Listen to me. I was talking you over with Beckton
this morning. I'll not trouble you with the discussion—it
would make you vain, perhaps. But we arlived
at this: Miss Blakeney would be a very good
match for you, and if you are inclined to make a demonstration
that way, why, we will do what we can to
make it plain sailing. Stay with us a week, for instance,
and we will keep the Blakeneys. It's a sweet
month for pairing, and you are an expeditious love-maker,
I know. Is it agreed?”

“You are quite serious!”

“Quite!”

“I'll go back with you to the bridge, kindest of
friends, and return and ramble here till the bell rings,
by myself. I'll find you at table, by-and-by, and express
my gratitude at least. Will that be time enough
for an answer?”

“Yes—but no ceremony with me! Stay and
ponder where you are! Au revoir! I must see after
my breakfast!”

And away tripped the kind-hearted Lady Beckton.

Maud resumed his walk. He was rather taken
aback. He knew Miss Blakeney but as a waltzing
partner, yet that should be but little matter; for he
had long ago made up his mind that, if he did not
marry rich, he could not marry at all.

Maud was poor—that is to say, he had all that an
angel would suppose necessary in this hungry and cold
world—assurance of food and clothing—in other words,
three hundred a year. He had had his unripe time
like other youths, in which he was ready to marry for
love and no money; but his timid advances at that
soft period had not been responsibly met by his first
course of sweethearts, and he had congratulated himself
and put a price on his heart accordingly. Meantime,
he thought, the world is a very entertaining
place, and the belonging to nobody in particular, has
its little advantages.

And very gayly sped on the second epoch of Mr.
Lindsay Maud's history. He lived in a country where,
to shine in a profession, requires the “audace, patience
et volonté de quoi renverser le monde,” and having turned
his ambition well about, like a strange coin that
might perhaps have passed current in other times, he
laid it away with romance and chivalry, and other
things suited only to the cabinets of the curious. He
was well born. He was well bred. He was a fair
candidate for the honors of a “gay man about town”
—that untaxed exempt—that guest by privilege—that
irresponsible denizen of high life, possessed of every
luxury on earth except matrimony and the pleasures
of payment. And, for a year or two, this was very
delightful. He had a half dozen of those charming
female friendships which, like other ephemera in this
changing world, must die or turn into something else
at the close of a season, and, if this makes the feelings
very hard, it makes the manners very soft; and Maud
was content with the compensation. If he felt, now
and then, that he was idling life away, he looked about
him and found countenance at least; for all his friends
were as idle, and there was an analogy to his condition
in nature (if need were to find one), for the butterfly
had his destiny like the bee, and was neither
pitied nor reproached that he was not a honey-maker.

But Maud was now in a third lustrum of his existence,
and it was tinted somewhat differently from the
rose-colored epochs precedent. The twilight of
satisfied curiosity had fallen imperceptibly around
him. The inner veils of society had one by one lifted,
and there could be nothing new for his eye in the
world to which he belonged.

A gay party, which was once to him as full of unattained
objects as the festal mysteries of Eleusinia to
a rustic worshipper of Ceres, was now as readable at
a glance as the stripes of a backgammon-board. He
knew every man's pretensions and chances, every woman's
expectations and defences. Not a damsel whose
defects he had not discovered, whose mind he had not
sounded, whose dowry he did not know. Not a beauty,
married or single, whose nightly game in society he
could not perfectly foretell; not an affection unoccupied
of which he could not put you down the cost of engaging
it in your favor, the chances of constancy, the
dangers of following or abandoning. He had no stake
in society, meantime, yet society itself was all his
world. He had no ambitions to further by its aid.
And until now, he had looked on matrimony as a
closed door—for he had neither property, nor profession
likely to secure it, and circumstances like these,
in the rank in which he moved, are comprehended
among the “any impediments.” To have his own
way, Maud would have accepted no invitations except
to dine with the beaux esprits, and he would have concentrated
the remainder of his leisure and attentions
upon one agreeable woman (at a time)—two selfishnesses
very attractive to a blasé, but not permitted to
any member of society short of a duke or a Cræsus.

And now, with a new leaf turning over in his dull
book of life—a morning of a new day breaking on
his increasing night—Lindsay Maud tightly screwed
his arms across his breast, and paced the darkening
avenue of Beckton Park. The difference between
figuring as a fortune-hunter, and having a fortune
hunted for him by others, he perfectly understood.
In old and aristocratic societies, where wealth is at
the same time so much more coveted and so much
more difficult to win, the eyes of “envy, malice, and
all uncharitableness,” are alike an omnipresent argus,
in their watch over the avenues to its acquisition. No
step, the slightest, the least suspicious, is ever taken
toward the hand of an heiress, or the attainment of
an inheritance, without awakening and counter-working
of these busy monsters; and, for a society-man,
better to be a gambler or seducer, better to have all
the fashionable vices ticketed on his name, than to
stand affiched as a fortune-hunter. If to have a fortune
cleverly put within reach by a powerful friend,
however, be a proportionate beatitude, blessed was
Maud. So thought he, at least, as the merry bell of
Beckton tower sent its summons through the woods,
and his revery gave place to thoughts of something
more substantial.

And thus far, oh adorable reader! (for I see what
unfathomable eyes are looking over my shoulder) thus
far, like an artist making a sketch, of which one part
is to be finished, I have dwelt a little on the touches
of my pencil. But, by those same unfathomable eyes

I know (for in those depths dwell imagination), that
if the remainder be done ever so lightly in outline,
even then there will be more than was needed for the
comprehension of the story. Thy ready and boundless
fancy, sweet lady, would supply it all. Given,
the characters and scene, what fair creature who has
loved, could fail to picture forth the sequel and its
more minute surroundings, with rapidity and truth
daguerreotypical?

Sketchily, then, touch we the unfinished dénouement
of our story.

The long saloon was already in glittering progress
wken Maud entered. The servants in their blue and
white liveries were gliding rapidly about with the terrestrial
nutriment for eyes celestial—to-wit, wines and
oysters.

Half blinded with the glare of the numberless
lights, he stood a moment at the door.

“Lady Beckton's compliments, and she has reserved
a seat for you!” said a footman approaching
him.

He glanced at the head of the table. The vacant
chair was near Lady Beckton and opposite Miss Blakeney.
“Is a vis-a-vis better for love-making than a
seat at the lady's ear?” thought Maud. But Lady
Beckton's tactics were to spare his ear and dazzle his
eye, without reference especially to the corresponding
impressions on the eyes and ear of the lady. And
she had the secondary object of avoiding any betrayal
of her designs till they were too far matured to be defeated
by publicity.

“Can you tell me, Mr. Maud,” said the sweet
voice of Mabel Brown as he drew his chair to the
table, “what is the secret of Lady Beckton's putting
you next me so pertinaciously?”

“A greater regard for my happiness than yours,
probably,” said Maud; “but why `pertinaciously?'
Has there been a skirmish for this particular chair?”

“No skirmish, but three attempts at seizure by
three of my admirers.”

“If they admire you more than I, they are fitter
companions for a tête-à-tête than a crowded party,”
said Maud. “I am as near a lover as I can be, and
be agreeable!”

To this Maud expected the gay retort due to a bagatelle
of gallantry; but the pretty Mabel was silent.
The soup disappeared and the entremets were served.
Maud was hungry, and he had sent a cutlet and a
glass of Johannisberg to the clamorous quarter before
he ventured to look toward his hostess.

He felt her eye upon him. A covert smile stole
through her lips as they exchanged glances.

“Yes?” she asked, with a meaning look.

“Yes!”

And in that dialogue of two monosyllables Lady
Beckton presumed that the hand and five thousand a
year of Miss Catherine Blakeney, were virtually made
over to Mr. Lindsay Maud. And her diplomacy
made play to that end without farther deliberation.

Very unconscious indeed that she was under the
eye of the man who had entered into a conspiracy to
become her husband, Miss Blakeney sat between a
guardsman and a diplomatist, carrying on the war in
her usual trenchant and triumphant fashion. She
looked exceedingly handsome—that Maud could not
but admit. With no intention of becoming responsible
for her manners, he would even have admired,
as he often had done, her skilful coquetries and adroit
displays of the beauty with which nature had endowed
her. She succeeded, Maud thought, in giving
both of her admirers the apparent preference (apparent
to themselves, that is to say), and considering her
vis-a-vis worth a chance shaft at least, she honored
that very attentive gentleman with such occasional
notice, as, under other circumstances, would have
been far from disagreeable. It might have worn a
better grace, however, coming from simple Miss
Blakeney. From the future Mrs. Lindsay Maud, he
could have wished those pretty inveiglements very
much reduced and modified.

At his side, the while, sweet Mabel Brown carried
on with him a conversation, which to the high tone
of merriment opposite, was like the intermitted murmur
of a brook heard in the pauses of merry instruments.
At the same time that nothing brilliant or
gay seemed to escape her notice, she toned her own
voice and flow of thought so winningly below the excitement
around her, that Maud, who was sensible of
every indication of superiority, could not but pay her
a silent tribute of admiration. “If this were but the
heiress!” he ejaculated inwardly. But Mabel Brown
was a dependant.

Coffee was served.

The door at the end of the long saloon was suddenly
thrown open, and as every eye turned to gaze
into the blazing ballroom, a march with the full power
of the band burst upon the ear.

The diplomatist who had been sitting at the side
of Miss Blakeney was a German, and a waltzer comme
il y en a peu. At the bidding of Lady Beckton, he
put his arm around the waist of the heiress, and bore
her away to the delicious music of Strauss, and, by
general consent, the entire floor was left to this pair
for a dozen circles. Miss Blakeney was passionately
fond of waltzing, and built for it, like a Baltimore
clipper for running close to the wind. If she had a
fault that her friends were afraid to jog her memory
about, it was the wearing her dresses a flounce too
short. Her feet and ankles were Fenella's own, while
her figure and breezy motion would have stolen Endymion
from Diana. She waltzed too well for a
lady—all but well enough for a premiere danseuse de
l'opera. Lady Beckton was a shrewd woman, but
she made a mistake in crying “encore!” when this
single couple stopped from their admired pas de deux.
She thought Maud was just the man to be captivated
by that display. But the future Mrs. Lindsay Maud
must not have ankles for general admiration. Oh, no!

Maud wished to efface the feeling this exhibition
had caused by sharing in the excitement.

“Miss Brown,” he said, as two or three couples
went off, “permit me the happiness of one turn!”
and, scarce waiting for an answer, he raised his arm
to encircle her waist.

Mabel took his hands, and playfully laid them
across each other on his own breast in an attitude of
resignation.

“I never waltz,” she said. “But don't think me
a prude! I don't consider it wrong in those who
think it right.”

“But with this music tugging at your heels!” said
Maud, who did not care to express how much he admired
the delicacy of her distinction.

“Ah, with a husband or a brother, I should think
one could scarce resist bounding away; but I can
not—”

“Can not what?—can not take me for either?” interrupted
Maud, with an air of affected malice that
covered a very strong desire to ask the question in
earnest.

She turned her eyes suddenly upon him with a rapid
look of inquiry, and, slightly coloring, fixed her attention
silently on the waltzers.

Lady Beckton came, making her way through the
crowd. She touched Maud on the arm.

“`Hold hook and line—is it not?” she said, in a
whisper.

After an instant's hesitation, Maud answered.
“Yes!”—but pages, often, would not suffice to express
all that passes through the mind in “an instant's
hesitation.” All Lindsay Maud's prospects and circumstances
were reviewed in that moment; all his

many steps by which he had arrived at the conclusion
that marriage with him must be a matter of convenance
merely; all his put-down impulses and built-up resolutions;
all his regrets, consolations, and offsets; all
his better and worser feelings; all his former loves
(and in that connexion, strangely enough, Mabel
Brown); all his schemes, in short, for smothering his
pain in the sacrifice of his heart, and making the
most of the gain to his pocket, passed before him in
that half minute's review. But he said “Yes!”

The Blakeney carriage was dismissed that night,
with orders to bring certain dressing-maids and certain
sequents of that useful race, on the following
morning to Beckton Park, and the three persons who
composed the Blakeney party, an old aunt, Miss
Blakeney, and Mabel Brown, went quietly to bed under
the hospitable roof of Lady Beckton.

How describe (and what need of it, indeed!) a week
at an English country-house, with all its age of
chances for loving and hating, its eternity of opportunities
for all that hearts can have to regulate in this
shorthand life of ours? Let us come at once to the
closing day of this visit.

Maud lay late abed on the day that the Blakeneys
were to leave Beckton Park. Fixed from morning
till night in the firm resolution at which he had arrived
with so much trouble and self-control, he was
dreaming from night till morning of a felicity in
which Miss Blakeney had little share. He wished
the marriage could be all achieved in the signing of a
bond. He found that he had miscalculated his philosophy
in supposing that he could venture to loose
thought and revery upon the long-forbidden subject
of marriage. In all the scenes eternally being conjured
up to his fancy—scenes of domestic life—the
bringing of Miss Blakeney into the picture was an
after effort. Mabel Brown stole into it, spite of himself—the
sweetest and dearest feature of that enchanting
picture, in its first warm coloring by the heart.
But, day by day, he took the place assigned him by
Lady Beckton at the side of Miss Blakeney, riding,
driving, dining, strolling, with reference to being near
her only, and still scarce an hour could pass in which,
spite of all effort to the contrary, he did not betray
his passionate interest in Mabel Brown.

He arose and breakfasted. Lady Beckton and the
young ladies were bonneted and ready for a stroll in
the park woods, and her ladyship came and whispered
in Maud's ear, as he leaned over his coffee, that he
must join them presently, and that she had prepared
Miss Blakeney for an interview with him, which she
would arrange as they rambled.

“Take no refusal!” were her parting words as she
stepped out upon the verandah.

Maud strolled leisurely toward the rendezvous indicated
by Lady Beckton. He required all the time
he could get to confirm his resolutions and recover
his usual mainticn of repose. With his mind made
up at last, and a face in which few would have read
the heart in fetters beneath, he jumped a wicker-fence,
and, by a cross path, brought the ladies in
view. They were walking separately, but as his footsteps
were heard, Lady Beckton slipped her arm into
Miss Brown's, and commenced apparently a very earnest
undertone of conversation. Miss Blakeney
turned. Her face glowed with exercise, and Maud
confessed to himself that he rarely had seen so beautiful
a woman.

“You are come in time, Mr. Maud,” she said, “for
something is going on between my companions from
which I am excluded.”

“En revanche, suppose we have our little exclusive
secret!” said Maud, offering his arm.

Miss Blakeney colored slightly, and consented to
obey the slight resistance of his arm by which they
fell behind. A silence of a few moments followed,
for if the proposed secret were a proposal of marriage,
it had been too bluntly approached. Maud felt
that he must once more return to indifferent topics,
and lead on the delicate subject at his lips with more
tact and preparation.

They rose a slight elevation in the walk which overlooked
the wilder confines of the park. A slight
smoke rose from a clump of trees, indicating an intrusion
of gipsies within, and the next instant, a deep-mouthed
bark rang out before them, and the two ladies
came rushing back in violent terror, assailed at
every step of their flight by a powerful and infuriated
mastiff. Maud ran forward immediately, and succeeded
in driving the dog back to the tents; but on his
return he found only the terrified Mabel, who, leaning
against a tree, and partly recovered from her
breathless flight, was quietly awaiting him.

“Here is a change of partners as my heart would
have it!” thought Maud, as he drew her slight arm
within his own. “The transfer looks to me like the
interposition of my good angel, and I acept the
warning!”

And in words that needed no management to bring
them skilfully on—with the eloquence of a heart released
from fetters all but intolerable, and from a
threatened slavery for life—Lindsay Maud poured
out the fervent passion of his heart to Mabel Brown.
The crust of a selfish and artificial life broke up in
the tumult of that declaration, and he found himself
once more natural and true to the instincts and better
impulses of his character. He was met with the
trembling response that such pure love looks for
when it finds utterance, and without a thought of
worldly calculation, or a shadow of a scheme for their
means and manner of life, they exchanged promises
to which the subsequent ceremony of marriage was
but the formal seal.

And at the announcement of this termination to
her matrimonial schemes. Lady Beckton seemed
much more troubled than Miss Blakeney.

But Lady Beckton's disappointment was somewhat
modified when she discovered that Miss Blakeney had
long before secretly endowed her adopted sister Mabel
with the half of her fortune.

THE INLET OF PEACH-BLOSSOMS.

The Emperor Yuentsoong, of the dynasty Chow,
was the most magnificent of the long-descended succession
of Chinese sovereigns. On his first accession
to the throne, his character was so little understood,
that a conspiracy was set on foot among the yellow-caps,
or eunuchs, to put out his eyes, and place upon
the throne the rebel Szema, in whose warlike hands,
they asserted, the empire would more properly maintain
its ancient glory. The gravity and reserve which
these myrmidons of the palace had construed into
stupidity and fear, soon assumed another complexion,
however. The eunuchs silently disappeared; the
mandarins and princes whom they had seduced from
their allegiance, were made loyal subjects by a generous
pardon: and in a few days after the period fixed
upon for the consummation of the plot, Yuentsoong
set forth in complete armor at the head of his troops
to give battle to the rebel in the mountains.

In Chinese annals this first enterprise of the youthful
Yuentsoong is recorded with great pomp and particularity.
Szema was a Tartar prince of uncommon
ability, young like the emporor, and, during the few
last imbecile years of the old sovereign, he had gathered
strength in his rebellion, till now he was at the
head of ninety thousand men, all soldiers of repute

and tried valor. The historian has unfortunately
dimmed the emperor's fame to European eyes, by attributing
his wonderful achievements in this expedition
to his superiority in arts of magic. As this account
of his exploits is only prefatory to our tale, we
will simply give the reader an idea of the style of the
historian, by translating literally a passage or two of
his description of the battle:—

“Szema now took refuge within a cleft of the
mountain, and Yuentsoong, upon his swift steed, outstripping
the body-guard in his ardor, dashed amid
the paralyzed troops with poised spear, his eyes fixed
only on the rebel. There was a silence of an instant,
broken only by the rattling hoofs of the intruder, and
then, with dishevelled hair and waving sword, Szema
uttered a fearful imprecation. In a moment the wind
rushed, the air blackened, and with the suddenness of
a fallen rock, a large cloud enveloped the rebel, and
innumerable men and horses issued out of it. Wings
flapped against the eyes of the emperor's horse, hellish
noises screamed in his ears, and, completely beyond
control, the animal turned and fled back through
the narrow pass, bearing his imperial master safe into
the heart of his army.

“Yuentsoong, that night, commanded some of his
most expert soldiers to scale the beetling heights of
the ravine, bearing upon their backs the blood of
swine, sheep and dogs, with other impure things, and
these they were ordered to shower upon the combatants
at the sound of the imperial clarion. On the following
morning. Szema came forth again to offer battie,
with flags displayed, drums beating, and shouts
of triumph and defiance. As on the day previous, the
bold emperor divided, in his impatience, rank after
rank of his own soldiery, and, followed closely by his
body-guard, drove the rebel army once more into their
fastness. Szema sat upon his warhorse as before, intrenched
amid his officers and ranks of the tallest Tartar
spearmen, and as the emperor contended hand to
hand with one of the opposing rebels, the magic imprecation
was again uttered, the air again filled with
cloudy horsemen and chariots, and the mountain shaken
with discordant thunder. Backing his willing
steed, the emperor blew a long sharp note upon his
silver clarion, and in an instant the sun broke through
the darkness, and the air seemed filled with paper men,
horses of straw, and phantoms dissolving into smoke.
Yuentsoong and Szema now stood face to face, with
only mortal aid and weapons.”

The historian goes on to record that the two armies
suspended hostilities at the command of their leaders,
and that the emperor and his rebel subject having engaged
in single combat, Yuentsoong was victorious,
and returned to his capital with the formidable enemy,
whose life he had spared, riding beside him like a
brother. The conqueror's career, for several years
after this, seems to have been a series of exploits of
personal valor, and the Tartar prince shared in all his
dangers and pleasures, his inseparable friend. It was
during this period of romantic friendship that the
events occurred which have made Yuentsoong one of
the idols of Chinese poetry.

By the side of a lake in a distant province of the
empire, stood one of the imperial palaces of pleasure,
seldom visited, and almost in ruins. Hither, in one
of his moody periods of repose from war, came the
conqueror Yuentsoong, for the first time in years separated
from his faithful Szema. In disgnise, and
with only one or two attendants, he established himself
in the long silent halls of his ancestor Tsinchemong,
and with his boat upon the lake, and his spear
in the forest, seemed to find all the amusement of
which his melancholy was susceptible. On a certain
day in the latter part of April, the emperor had set
his sail to a fragrant south wind, and reclining on the
cushions of his bark, watched the shore as it softly
and silently glided past, and, the lake being entirely
encircled by the imperial forest, he felt immersed in
what he believed to be the solitude of a deserted paradise.
After skirting the fringed sheet of water in
this manner for several hours, he suddenly observed
that he had shot through a streak of peach-blossoms
floating from the shore, and at the same moment he
became conscious that his boat was slightly headed
off by a current setting outward. Putting up his
helm, he returned to the spot, and beneath the drooping
branches of some luxuriant willows, thus early in
leaf, he discovered the mouth of an inlet, which, but
for the floating blossoms it brought to the lake, would
have escaped the notice of the closest observer. The
emperor now lowered his sail, unshipped the slender
mast, and betook him to the oars, and as the current
was gentle, and the inlet wider within the mouth, he
sped rapidly on, through what appeared to be but a
lovely and luxuriant vale of the forest. Still, those
blushing betrayers of some flowering spot beyond,
extended like a rosy clue before him, and with impulse
of muscles swelled and indurated in warlike exercise,
the swift keel divided the besprent mirror winding
temptingly onward, and, for a long hour, the royal
oarsman untiringly threaded this sweet vein of the
wilderness.

Resting a moment on his oars while the slender
bark still kept her way, he turned his head toward
what seemed to be an opening in the forest on the
left, and in the same instant the boat ran, head on, to
the shore, the inlet at this point almost doubling on
its course. Beyond, by the humming of bees, and
the singing of birds, there should be a spot more open
than the tangled wilderness he had passed, and disengaging
his prow from the alders, he shoved the boat
again into the stream, and pulled round a high rock,
by which the inlet seemed to have been compelled to
curve its channel. The edge of a bright green meadow
now stole into the perspective, and, still widening
with his approach, disclosed a slightly rising terrace
clustered with shrubs, and studded here and there
with vases; and farther on, upon the same side of the
stream, a skirting edge of peach-trees, loaded with the
gay blossoms which had guided him hither.

Astonished at these signs of habitation in what was
well understood to be a privileged wilderness, Yuentsoong
kept his boat in mid-stream, and with his eyes
vigilantly on the alert, slowly made headway against
the current. A few strokes with his oars, however,
traced another curve of the inlet, and brought into
view a grove of ancient trees scattered over a gently
ascending lawn, beyond which, hidden by the river
till now by the projecting shoulder of a mound, lay a
small pavilion with gilded pillars, glittering like fairy
work in the sun. The emperor fastened his boat to a
tree leaning over the water, and with his short spear
in his hand, bounded upon the shore, and took his
way toward the shining structure, his heart beating
with a feeling of wonder and interest altogether new.
On a nearer approach, the bases of the pillars seemed
decayed by time, and the gilding weather-stained and
tarnished, but the trellised porticoes on the southern
aspect were laden with flowering shrubs, in vases of
porcelain, and caged birds sang between the pointed
arches, and there were manifest signs of luxurious
taste, elegance, and care.

A moment, with an indefinable timidity, the emperor
paused before stepping from the green sward
upon the marble floor of the pavilion, and in that
moment a curtain was withdrawn from the door, and
a female, with step suddenly arrested by the sight of
the stranger, stood motionless before him. Ravished
with her extraordinary beauty, and awe-struck with
the suddenness of the apparition and the novelty of
the adventure, the emperor's tongue cleaved to his
mouth, and ere he could summon resolution, even

for a gesture of courtesy, the fair creature had fled
within, and the curtain closed the entrance as before.

Wishing to recover his composure, so strangely
troubled, and taking it for granted that some other inmate
of the house would soon appear, Yuentsoong
turned his steps aside to the grove, and with his head
bowed, and his spear in the hollow of his arm, tried
to recall more vividly the features of the vision he
had seen. He had walked but a few paces, when
there came toward him from the upper skirt of the
grove, a man of unusual stature and erectness, with
white hair, unbraided on his shoulders, and every sign
of age except infirmity of step and mien. The emperor's
habitual dignity had now rallied, and on his
first salutation, the countenance of the old man softened,
and he quickened his pace to meet and give him
welcome.

“You are noble?” he said, with confident inquiry.

Yuentsoong colored slightly.

“I am,” he replied, “Lew-melin, a prince of the
empire.”

“And by what accident here?”

Yuentsoong explained the clue of the peach-blossoms,
and represented himself as exiled for a time to
the deserted palace upon the lakes.

“I have a daughter,” said the old man, abruptly,
“who has never looked on human face, save mine.”

“Pardon me!” replied his visiter; “I have thoughtlessly
intruded on her sight, and a face more heavenly
fair—”

The emperor hesitated, but the old man smiled encouragingly.

“It is time,” he said, “that I should provide a
younger defender for my bright Teh-leen, and Heaven
has sent you in the season of peach-blossoms, with
provident kindness.[1] You have frankly revealed to
me your name and rank. Before I offer you the hospitality
of my roof, I must tell you mine. I am
Choo-tseen, the outlaw, once of your own rank, and
the general of the Celestial army.”

The emperor started, remembering that this celebrated
rebel was the terror of his father's throne.

“You have heard my history,” the old man continued.
“I had been, before my rebellion, in charge
of the imperial palace on the lake. Anticipating an
evil day, I secretly prepared this retreat for my family;
and when my soldiers deserted me at the battle of
Ke-chow, and a price was set upon my head, hither I
fled with my women and children; and the last alive
is my beautiful Teh-leen. With this brief outline of
my life, you are at liberty to leave me as you came,
or to enter my house, on the condition that you become
the protector of my child.”

The emperor eagerly turned toward the pavilion,
and, with a step as light as his own, the erect and
stately outlaw hastened to lift the curtain before him.
Leaving his guest for a moment in the outer apartment,
he entered to an inner chamber in search of his
daughter, whom he brought, panting with fear, and
blushing with surprise and delight, to her future lover
and protector. A portion of an historical tale so delicate
as the description of the heroine is not work for
imitators, however, and we must copy strictly the portrait
of the matchless Teh-leen, as drawn by Le-pih,
the Anacreon of Chinese poetry, and the contemporary
and favorite of Yuentsoong.

“Teh-leen was born while the morning star shone
upon the bosom of her mother. Her eye was like
the unblemished blue lily, and its light like the white
gem unfractured. The plum-blossom is most fragrant
when the cold has penetrated its stem, and the
mother of Teh-leen had known sorrow. The head
of her child drooped in thought, like a violet overladen
with dew. Bewildering was Teh-leen. Her
mouth's corners were dimpled, yet pensive. The
arch of her brows was like the vein in the tulip's
heart, and the lashes shaded the blushes on her cheek.
With the delicacy of a pale rose, her complexion put
to shame the floating light of day. Her waist, like a
thread in fineness, seemed ready to break; yet was it
straight and erect, and feared not the fanning breeze;
and her shadowy grace was as difficult to delineate, as
the form of the white bird rising from the ground by
moonlight. The natural gloss of her hair resembled
the uncertain sheen of calm water, yet without the
false aid of unguents. The native intelligence of her
mind seemed to have gained strength by retirement,
and he who beheld her, thought not of her as human.
Of rare beauty, of rarer intellect was Teh-leen, and
her heart responded to the poet's lute.”

We have not space, nor could we, without copying
directly from the admired Le-pih, venture to describe
the bringing of Teh-leen to court, and her surprise at
finding herself the favorite of the emperor. It is a
romantic circumstance, besides, which has had its
parallels in other countries. But the sad sequel to
the loves of poor Teh-leen is but recorded in the cold
page of history; and if the poet, who wound up the
climax of her perfections, with her susceptibility to
his lute, embalmed her sorrows in verse, he was probably
too politic to bring it ever to light. Pass we to
these neglected and unadorned passages of her history.

Yuentsoong's nature was passionately devoted and
confiding; and, like two brothers with one favorite
sister, lived together Teh-leen, Szema, and the emperor.
The Tartar prince, if his heart knew a mistress
before the arrival of Teh-leen at the palace, owned
afterward no other than her; and fearless of check
or suspicion from the noble confidence and generous
friendship of Yuentsoong, he seemed to live but for
her service, and to have neither energies nor ambition
except for the winning of her smiles. Szema was of
great personal beauty, frank when it did not serve him
to be wily, bold in his pleasures, and of manners almost
femininely soft and voluptuous. He was renowned
as a soldier, and, for Teh-leen, he became a
poet and master of the lute; and, like all men formed
for ensnaring the heart of women, he seemed to forget
himself in the absorbing devotion of his idolatry. His
friend, the emperor, was of another mould. Yuentsoong's
heart had three chambers—love, friendship,
and glory. Teh-leen was but a third in his existence,
yet he loved her—the sequel will show how well! In
person he was less beautiful than majestic, of large
stature, and with a brow and lip naturally stern and
lofty. He seldom smiled, even upon Teh-leen, whom
he would watch for hours in pensive and absorbed delight;
but his smile, when it did awake, broke over
his sad countenance like morning. All men loved and
honored Yuentsoong, and all men, except only the
emperor, looked on Szema with antipathy. To such
natures as the former, women give all honor and approbation;
but for such as the latter, they reserve
their weakness!

Wrapt up in his friend and mistress, and reserved
in his intercourse with his counsellors, Yuentsoong
knew not that, throughout the imperial city, Szema
was called “the kieu,” or robber-bird, and his fair
Teh-leen openly charged with dishonor. Going out
alone to hunt as was his custom, and having left his
signet with Szema, to pass and repass through the
private apartments at his pleasure, his horse fell with
him unaccountably in the open field. Somewhat
superstitious, and remembering that good spirits sometimes
“knit the grass,” when other obstacles fail to
bar our way into danger, the emperor drew rein and
returned to his palace. It was an hour after noon,
and having dismissed his attendants at the city gate,
he entered by a postern to the imperial garden, and
bethought himself of the concealed couch in a cool

grot by a fountain (a favorite retreat, sacred to himself
and Teh-leen), where he fancied it would be refreshing
to sleep away the sultriness of the remaining
hours till evening. Sitting down by the side of the
murmuring fount, he bathed his feet, and left his slippers
on the lip of the basin to be unencumbered in
his repose within, and so with unechoing step entered
the resounding grotto. Alas! there slumbered the
faithless friend with the guilty Teh-leen upon his
bosom!

Grief struck through the noble heart of the emperor
like a sword in cold blood. With a word he
could consign to torture and death the robber of his
honor, but there was agony in his bosom deeper than
revenge. He turned silently away, recalled his horse
and huntsmen, and, outstripping all, plunged on
through the forest till night gathered around him.

Yuentsoong had been absent many days from his
capitol, and his subjects were murmuring their fears
for his safety, when a messenger arrived to the counsellors
informing them of the appointment of the
captive Tartar prince to the government of the province
of Szechuen, the second honor of the Celestial
empire. A private order accompanied the announcement,
commanding the immediate departure of Szema
for the scene of his new authority. Inexplicable as
was this riddle to the multitude, there were those who
read it truly by their knowledge of the magnanimous
soul of the emperor; and among these was the crafty
object of his generosity. Losing no time, he set forward
with great pomp for Szechuen, and in their joy
to see him no more in the palace, the slighted princes
of the empire forgave his unmerited advancement.
Yuentsoong returned to his capitol; but to the terror
of his counsellors and people, his hair was blanched
white as the head of an old man! He was pale as
well, but he was cheerful and kind beyond his wont,
and to Teh-leen untiring in pensive and humble attentions.
He pleaded only impaired health and restless
slumbers as an apology for nights of solitude.
Once, Teh-leen penetrated to his lonely chamber, but
by the dim night lamp she saw that the scroll over her
window[2] was changed, and instead of the stimulus to
glory which formerly hung in golden letters before
his eyes, there was a sentence written tremblingly in
black:—

Six months from this period the capitol was thrown
into a tumult with the intelligence that the province
of Szechuen was in rebellion, and Szema at the head
of a numerous army on his way to seize the throne
of Yuentsoong. This last sting betrayed the serpent
even to the forgiving emperor, and tearing the reptile
at last from his heart, he entered with the spirit of
other times into the warlike preparations. The imperial
army was in a few days on its march, and at
Keo-yang the opposing forces met and prepared for
encounter.

With a dread of the popular feeling toward Teh-leen,
Yuentsoong had commanded for her a close
litter, and she was borne after the imperial standard in
the centre of the army. On the eve before the battle,
ere the watch-fires were lit, the emperor came to
her tent, set apart from his own, and with the delicate
care and kind gentleness from which he never varied,
inquired how her wants were supplied, and bade her,
thus early, farewell for the night; his own custom of
passing among his soldiers on the evening previous to
an engagement, promising to interfere with what was
usually his last duty before retiring to his couch.
Teh-leen on this occasion seemed moved by some
irrepressible emotion, and as he rose to depart, she fell
forward upon her face, and bathed his feet with her
tears. Attributing it to one of those excesses of feeling
to which all, but especially hearts ill at ease, are
liable, the noble monarch gently raised her, and, with
repeated efforts at reassurance, committed her to the
hands of her women. His own heart beat far from
tranquilly, for, in the excess of his pity for her grief
he had unguardedly called her by one of the sweet
names of their early days of love—strange word now
upon his lip—and it brought back, spite of memory
and truth, happiness that would not be forgotten!

It was past midnight, and the moon was riding high
in heaven, when the emperor, returning between the
lengthening watch-fires, sought the small lamp which,
suspended like a star above his own tent, guided him
back from the irregular mazes of the camp. Paled
by the intense radiance of the moonlight, the small
globe of alabaster at length became apparent to his
weary eye, and with one glance at the peaceful beauty
of the heavens, he parted the curtained door beneath
it, and stood within. The Chinese historian asserts
that a bird, from whose wing Teh-leen had once
plucked an arrow, restoring it to liberty and life, and
in grateful attachment to her destiny, removed the
lamp from the imperial tent, and suspended it over
hers. The emperor stood beside her couch. Startled
at his inadvertent error, he turned to retire; but the
lifted curtain let in a flood of moonlight upon the
sleeping features of Teh-leen, and like dew-drops, the
undried tears glistened in her silken lashes. A lamp
burned faintly in the inner apartment of the tent, and
her attendants slept soundly. His soft heart gave
way. Taking up the lamp, he held it over his beautiful
mistress, and once more gazed passionately and
unrestrainedly on her unparalleled beauty. The
past—the early past—was alone before him. He forgave
her—there, as she slept, unconscious of the
throbbing of his injured, but noble heart, so close
beside her—he forgave her in the long silent abysses
of his soul! Unwilling to wake her from her tranquil
slumber, but promising to himself, from that hour,
such sweets of confiding love as had well nigh been
lost to him for ever, he imprinted one kiss upon the
parted lips of Teh-leen, and sought his couch for
slumber.

Ere daybreak the emperor was aroused by one of
his attendants with news too important for delay.
Szema, the rebel, had been arrested in the imperial
camp, disguised, and on his way back to his own
forces, and like wildfire, the information had spread
among the soldiery, who, in a state of mutinous
excitement, were with difficulty restrained from rushing
upon the tent of Teh-leen. At the door of his
tent, Yuentsoong found messengers from the alarmed
princes and officers of the different commands, imploring
immediate aid and the imperial presence to allay
the excitement, and while the emperor prepared to
mount his horse, the guard arrived with the Tartar
prince, ignominiously tied, and bearing marks of
rough usage from his indignant captors.

“Loose him!” cried the emperor, in a voice of
thunder.

The cords were severed, and with a glance whose
ferocity expressed no thanks, Szema reared himself
up to his fullest height, and looked scornfully around
him. Daylight had now broke, and as the group
stood upon an eminence in sight of the whole army,
shouts began to ascend, and the armed multitude,
breaking through all restraint, rolled in toward the
centre. Attracted by the commotion, Yuentsoong
turned to give some orders to those near him, when

Szema suddenly sprang upon an officer of the guard,
wrenched his drawn sword from his grasp, and in an
instant was lost to sight in the tent of Teh-leen. A
sharp scream, a second of thought, and forth again
rushed the desperate murderer, with his sword flinging
drops of drops of blood, and ere a foot stirred in the
paralyzed group, the avenging cimeter of Yuentsoong
had cleft him to the chin.

A hush, as if the whole army was struck dumb by
a bolt from heaven, followed this rapid tragedy.
Dropping the polluted sword from his hand, the
emperor, with uncertain step, and the pallor of death
upon his countenance, entered the fatal tent.

He came no more forth that day. The army was
marshalled by the princes, and the rebels were routed
with great slaughter; but Yuentsoong never more
wielded sword. “He pined to death,” says the historian,
“with the wane of the same moon that shone
upon the forgiveness of Teh-leen.”

THE BELLE OF THE BELFRY;
OR, THE DARING LOVER.

A grisette is something else beside a “mean girl”
or a “gray gown,” the French dictionary to the contrary
notwithstanding. Bless me! you should see the
grisettes of Rochepot! And if you wished to take a
lesson in political compacts, you should understand
the grisette confederacy of Rochepot! They were
working-girls, it is true—dressmakers, milliners, shoe-binders,
tailoresses, flowermakers, embroideresses—
and they never expected to be anything more aristocratic.
And in that content lay their power.

The grisettes of Rochepot were a good fourth of
the female population. They had their jealousies,
and little scandals, and heart-burnings, and plottings,
and counterplottings (for they were women) among
themselves. But they made common cause against
the enemy. They would bear no disparagement.
They knew exactly what was due to them, and what
was due to their superiors, and they paid and gave
credit in the coin of good manners, as can not be done
in countries of “liberty and equality.” Still there
were little shades of difference in the attention shown
them by their employers, and they worked twice as
much in a day when sewing for Madame Durozel,
who took her dinner with them, sans façon in the
work-room, as for old Madame Chiquette, who dined
all alone in her grand saloon, and left them to eat by
themselves among their shreds and scissors. But
these were not slights which they seriously resented.
Wo only to the incautious dame who dared to scandalize
one of their number, or dispute her dues, or
encroach upon her privileges! They would make
Rochepot as uncomfortable for her, parbleu! as a
kettle to a slow-boiled lobster.

But the prettiest grisette of Rochepot was not often
permitted to join her companions in their self-chaperoned
excursions on the holydays. Old Dame
Pomponney was the sexton's widow, and she had the
care of the great clock of St. Roch, and of one only
daughter; and excellent care she took of both her
charges. They lived all three in the belfry—dame,
clock, and daughter—and it was a bright day for
Thénais when she got out of hearing of that “tick,
tick, tick,” and of the thumping of her mother's
cane on the long staircase, which always kept time
with it.

Not that old Dame Pomponney had any objection
to have her daughter convenably married. She had
been deceived in her youth (or so it was whispered)
by a lover above her condition, and she vowed, by the
cross on her cane, that her daughter should have no
sweetheart above a journeyman mechanic. Now the
romance of the grisettes (parlons bas!) was to have
one charming little flirtation with a gentleman before
they married the leather-apron—just to show that,
had they by chance been born ladies, they could have
played their part to the taste of their lords. But it
was at this game that Dame Pomponney had burnt her
fingers, and she had this one subject for the exercise
of her powers of mortal aversion.

When I have added that, four miles from Roche
pot, stood the château de Brevanne, and that the old
Count de Brevanne was a proud aristocrat of the an
cien régime, with one son, the young Count Felix,
whom he had educated at Paris, I think I have prepared
you tolerably for the little romance I have to
tell you.

It was a fine Sunday morning that a mounted hussar
appeared in the street of Rochepot. The grisettes
were all abroad in their holyday parure, and the gay
soldier soon made an acquaintance with one of them
at the door of the inn, and informed her that he had
been sent on to prepare the old barracks for his troop.
The hussars were to be quartered a month at Rochepot.
Ah! what a joyous bit of news! And six officers
beside the colonel! And the trumpeters were
miracles at playing quadrilles and waltzes! And not
a plain man in the regiment—except always the
speaker. And none, except the old colonel, had ever
been in love in his life. But as this last fact required
to be sworn to, of course he was ready to kiss the
book—or, in the absence of the bock, the next most
sacred object of his adoration.

“Finissez donc, Monsieur!” exclaimed his pretty
listener, and away she ran to spread the welcome intelligence
with its delightful particulars.

The next day the troop rode into Rochepot, and
formed in the great square in front of St. Roch; and
by the time the trumpeters had played themselves red
in the face, the hussars were all appropriated, to a
man—for the grisettes knew enough of a marching
regiment to lose no time. They all found leisure to
pity poor Thénais, however, for there she stood in
one of the high windows of the belfry, looking down
on the gay crowd below, and they knew very well
that old Dame Pomponney had declared all soldiers
to be gay deceivers, and forbidden her daughter to
stir into the street while they were quartered at
Rochepot.

Of course the grisettes managed to agree as to each
other's selection of a sweetheart from the troop, and
of course each hussar thankfully accepted the pair of
eyes that fell to him. For, aside from the limited
duration of their stay, soldiers are philosophers, and
know that “life is short,” and it is better to “take the
goods the gods provide.” But “after everybody was
helped,” as they say at a feast, there appeared another
short jacket and foraging cap, very much to the relief
of red-headed Susette, the shoebinder, who had
been left out in the previous allotment. And Susette
made the amiable accordingly, but to no purpose, for
the lad seemed an idiot with but one idea—looking
for ever at St. Roch's clock to know the time of day!
The grisettes laughed and asked their sweethearts his
name, but they significantly pointed to their foreheads
and whispered something about poor Robertin's being
a privileged follower of the regiment and a protegé of
the colonel.

Well, the grisettes flirted, and the old clock of St.
Roch ticked on, and Susette and Thénais, the plainest
and the prettiest girl in the village, seemed the
only two who were left out in the extra dispensation
of lovers. And poor Robertin still persisted in occupying
most of his leisure with watching the time
of day.

It was on the Sunday morning after the arrival of
the troop that old Dame Pomponney went up, as
usual, to do her Sunday's duty in winding up the
clock. She had previously locked the belfry door to
be sure that no one entered below while she was
above; but—the Virgin help us!—on the top stair,
gazing into the machinery of the clock with absorbed
attention, sat one of those devils of hussars! “Thief,”
“vagabond,” and “house-breaker,” were the most
moderate epithets with which Dame Pomponney accompanied
the enraged beating of her stick on the
resounding platform. She was almost beside herself
with rage. And Thénais had been up to dust the
wheels of the clock! And how did she know that
that scélérat of a trooper was not there all the time!

But the intruder, whose face had been concealed
till now, turned suddenly round and began to gibber
and grin like a possessed monkey. He pointed at the
clock, imitated the “tick, tick, tick,” laughed till the
big bell gave out an echo like a groan, and then suddenly
jumped over the old dame's stick and ran down
stairs.

“Eh, Sainte Vierge!” exclaimed the old dame, “it's
a poor idiot after all! And he has stolen up to see
what made the clock tick! Ha! ha! ha! Well!—
well! I can not come up these weary stairs twice a
day, and I must wind up the clock before I go down
to let him out. `Tick, tick, tick!'—poor lad! poor
ad! They must have dressed him up to make fun
of him—those vicious troopers! Well!—well!”

And with pity in her heart, Dame Pomponney hobbled
down, stair after stair, to her chamber in the
square turret of the belfry, and there she found the
poor idiot on his knees before Thénais, and Thénais
was just preparing to put a skein of thread over his
thumbs, for she thought she might make him useful
and amuse him with the winding of it till her mother
came down. But as the thread got vexatiously entangled,
and the poor lad sat as patiently as a wooden
reel, and it was time to go below to mass, the dame
thought she might as well leave him there till she
came back, and down she stumped, locking the door
very safely behind her.

Poor Thénais was very lonely in the belfry, and
Dame Pomponney, who had a tender heart where her
duty was not involved, rather rejoiced when she returned,
to find an unusual glow of delight on her
daughter's cheek; and if Thénais could find so much
pleasure in the society of a poor idiot lad, it was a
sign, too, that her heart was not gone altogether after
those abominable troopers. It was time to send the
innocent youth about his business, however, so she
gave him a holyday cake and led him down stairs and
dismissed him with a pat on his back and a strict injunction
never to venture again up to the “tick, tick,
tick.” But as she had had a lesson as to the accessibility
of her bird's nest, she determined thenceforth
to lock the door invariably and carry the key in her
pocket.

While poor Robertin was occupied with his researches
into the “tick, tick, tick,” never absent a
day from the neighborhood of the tower, the more
fortunate hussars were planning to give the grisettes
a fête champétre. One of the saints' days was coming
round, and, the weather permitting, all the vehicles
of the village were to be levied, and, with the troop-hourses
in harness, they were to drive to a small wooded
valley in the neighborhood of the château de
Brevanne, where seclusion and a mossy carpet of
grass were combined in a little paradise for such enjoyment.

The morning of this merry day dawned, at last,
and the grisettes and their admirers were stirring be-times,
for they were to breakfast sur l'herbe, and they
were not the people to turn breakfast into dinner. The
sky was clear, and the dew was not very heavy on the
grass, and merrily the vehicles rattled about the town,
picking up their fair freights from its obscurest corners.
But poor Thénais looked out, a sad prisoner,
from her high window in the belfry.

It was a half hour after sunrise and Dame Pomponney
was creeping up stairs after her matins, thanking
Heaven that she had been firm in her refusals—at
least twenty of the grisettes having gathered about
her, and pleaded for a day's freedom for her imprisoned
daughter. She rested on the last landing but one
to take a little breath—but hark!—a man's voice talking
in the belfry! She listened again, and quietly
slipped her feet out of her high-heeled shoes. The
voice was again audible—yet how could it be! She
knew that no one could have passed up the stair, for
the key had been kept in her pocket more carefully
than usual, and, save by the wings of one of her own
pigeons, the belfry window was inaccessible, she was
sure. Still the voice went on in a kind of pleading
murmur, and the dame stole softly up in her stockings,
and noiselessly opened the door. There stood
Thénais at the window, but she was alone in the room.
At the same instant the voice was heard again, and
sure now that one of those desperate hussars had
climbed the tower, and unable to control her rage at
the audacity of the attempt, Dame Pomponney clutched
her cane and rushed forward to aim a blow at the
military cap now visible at the sill of the window.
But at the same instant the head of the intruder was
thrown back, and the gibbering and idiotic smile of
poor Robertin checked her blow in its descent, and
turned all her anger into pity. Poor, silly lad! he
had contrived to draw up the garden ladder and place
it upon the roof of the stone porch below, to climb
and offer a flower to Thénais! Not unwilling to have
her daughter's mind occupied with some other thought
than the forbidden excursion, the dame offered her
hand to Robertin and drew him gently in at the window.
And as it was now market-time she bid Thénais
be kind to the poor boy, and locking the door
behind her, trudged contentedly off with her stick and
basket.

I am sorry to be obliged to record an act of filial
disobedience in the heroine of my story. An hour
after, Thénais was welcomed with acclamations as she
suddenly appeared with Robertin in the midst of the
merry party of grisettes. With Robertin—not as he
had hitherto been seen, his cap on the back of his
head and his under lip hanging loose like an idiot's—
but with Robertin, gallant, spirited, and gay, the handsomest
of hussars, and the most joyous of companions.
And Thénais, spite of her hasty toilet and the cloud
of conscious disobedience which now and then shaded
her sweet smile, was, by many degrees, the belle of
the hour; and the palm of beauty, for once in the
world at least, was yielded without envy. The grisettes
dearly love a bit of romance, too, and the circumventing
of old Dame Pomponney by his ruse of
idiocy, and the safe extrication of the prettiest girl
of the village from that gloomy old tower, was quite
enough to make Robertin a hero, and his sweetheart
Thénais more interesting than a persecuted princess.

And, seated on the ground while their glittering
cavaliers served them with breakfast, the light-hearted
grisettes of Rochepot were happy enough to be envied
by their betters. But suddenly the sky darkened,
and a slight gust murmuring among the trees, announced
the coming up of a summer storm. Sauve
qui peut! The soldiers were used to emergencies,
and they had packed up and reloaded their cars and
were under way for shelter almost as soon as the
grisettes, and away they all fled toward the nearest
grange—one of the dependencies of the château de
Brevanne.

But Robertin, now, had suddenly become the director
and ruling spirit of the festivities. The soldiers

treated him with instinctive deference, the old farmer
of the grange hurried out with his keys and unlocked
the great storehouse, and disposed of the horses under
shelter; and by the time the big drops began to
fall, the party were dancing gayly and securely on the
dry and smooth thrashing-floor, and the merry harmony
of the martial trumpets and horns rang out far
and wide through the gathering tempest.

The rain began to come down very heavily, and the
clatter of a horse's feet in a rapid gallop was heard in
one of the pauses in the waltz. Some one seeking
shelter, no doubt. On went the bewitching music
again, and at this moment two or three couples ceased
waltzing, and the floor was left to Robertin and Thénais,
whose graceful motions drew all eyes upon them
in admiration. Smiling in each other's faces, and
wholly unconscious of any other presence than their
own, they whirled blissfully around—but there was
now another spectator. The horseman who had been
heard to approach, had silently joined the party, and
making a courteous gesture to signify that the dancing
was not to be interrupted, he smiled back the
courtesies of the pretty grisettes—for, aristocratic as
he was, he was a polite man to the sex, was the Count
de Brevanne.

“Felix!” he suddenly cried out, in a tone of surprise
and anger.

The music stopped at that imperative call, and
Robertin turned his eyes, astonished, in the direction
from which it came.

The name was repeated from lip to lip among the
grisettes, “Felix!” “Count Felix de Brevanne!”

But without deigning another word, the old man
pointed with his riding-whip to the farm-house. The
disguised count respectfully bowed his head, but held
Thénais by the hand and drew her gently with him.

“Leave her! disobedient boy!” exclaimed the
father.

But as Count Felix tightened his hold upon the
small hand he held, and Thénais tried to shrink back
from the advancing old man, old Dame Pomponney,
streaming with rain, broke in unexpectedly upon the
scene.

“Disgrace not your blood,” said the Count de Brevanne
at that moment.

The offending couple stood alone in the centre of
the floor, and the dame comprehended that her daughter
was disparaged.

“And who is disgraced by dancing with my daughter?”
she screamed with furious gesticulation.

The old noble made no answer, but the grisettes,
in an under tone, murmured the name of Count
Felix!

“Is it he—the changeling! the son of a poor gardener,
that is disgraced by the touch of my daughter?”

A dead silence followed this astounding exclamation.
The old dame had forgotten herself in her rage,
and she looked about with a terrified bewilderment—
but the mischief was done. The old man stood aghast.
Count Felix clung still closer to Thénais, but his
face expressed the most eager inquisitiveness. The
grisettes gathered around Dame Pomponney, and the
old count, left standing and alone, suddenly drew his
cloak about him and stepped forth into the rain; and
in another moment his horse's feet were heard clattering
away in the direction of the château de Brevanne.

We have but to tell the sequel.

The incautious revelation of the old dame turned
out to be true. The dying infant daughter of the
Marchioness de Brevanne had been changed for the
healthy son of the count's gardener, to secure an heir
to the name and estates of the nearly extinct family
of Brevanne. Dame Pomponney had assisted in
this secret, and but for her heart full of rage at the
moment, to which the old count's taunt was but the
last drop, the secret would probably have never been
revealed. Count Felix, who had played truant from
his college at Paris, to come and hunt up some of his
childish playfellows, in disguise, had remembered and
disclosed himself to the little Thénais, who was not
sorry to recognise him, while he played the idiot in
the belfry. But of course there was now no obstacle
to their union, and united they were. The old count
pardoned him, and gave the new couple a portion of
his estate, and they named their first child Robertin,
as was natural enough.

PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL.
KEPT ON A LATE VISIT TO ENGLAND.

Ship Gladiator, off the Isle of Wight,
Evening of June 9th, 1839.

The bullet which preserves the perpendicular of
my cabin-lamp is at last still, I congratulate myself;
and with it my optic nerve resumes its proper and
steady function. The vagrant tumblers, the peripatetic
teeth-brushes, the dancing stools, the sidling wash-basins
and et-ceteras, have returned to a quiet life.
The creaking bulk-heads cry no more. I sit on a
trunk which will not run away with me, and pen and
paper look up into my face with their natural sobriety
and attention. I have no apology for not writing to
you, except want of event since we parted. There is
not a milestone in the three thousand four hundred
miles I have travelled. “Travelled!” said I. I am
as unconscious of having moved from the wave on
which you left me at Staten Island as the prisoner in
the hulk. I have pitched forward and backward, and
rolled from my left cheek to my right; but as to any
feeling of having gone onward I am as unconscious
of it as a lobster backing after the ebb. The sea is a
dreary vacuity, in which he, perhaps, who was ever
well upon it, can find material for thought. But for
one, I will sell, at sixpence a month, all copyhold
upon so much of my life as is destined “to the deep,
the blue, the black” (and whatever else he calls it) of
my friend the song-writer.

Yet there are some moments recorded, first with a
sigh, which we find afterward copied into memory
with a smile. Here and there a thought has come
to me from the wave, snatched listlessly from the
elements—here and there a word has been said which
on shore should have been wit or good feeling—here
and there a good morning, responded to with an effort,
has, from its courtesy or heartiness, left an impression
which will make to-morrow's parting phrases more
earnest than I had anticipated.—With this green isle
to windward, and the smell of earth and flowers coming
to my nostrils once more, I begin to feel an interest
in several who have sailed with me. Humanity,
killed in me invariably by salt water, revives, I think,
with this breath of hawthorn.

The pilot tells us that the Montreal, which sailed
ten days before us, has not yet passed up the channel,
and that we have brought with us the first west wind
they have had in many weeks. The sailors do not
know what to say to this, for we had four parsons on
board, and, by all sea-canons, they are invariable
Jonahs. One of these gentlemen, by the way, is an
abolitionist, on a begging crusade for a school devoted
to the amalgam of color, and very much to the amusement
of the passengers he met the steward's usual
demand for a fee with an application for a contribution
to the funds of his society! His expectations

from British sympathy are large, for he is accompanied
by a lay brother “used to keeping accounts,”
whose sole errand is to record the golden results of
his friend's eloquence. But “eight bells” warn me
to bed; so when I have recorded the good qualities
of the Gladiator, which are many, and those of her
captain, which are more, I will put out my sea-lamp
for the last time, and get into my premonitory “six
feet by two.”

The George Inn, Portsmouth.—This is a morning
in which (under my circumstances) it would be difficult
not to be pleased with the entire world. A fair
day in June, newly from sea, and with a journey of
seventy miles before me on a swift coach, through
rural England, is what I call a programme of a pleasant
day. Determined not to put myself in the way
of a disappointment, I accepted, without the slightest
hesitation, on landing at the wharf, the services of an
elderly gentleman in shabby black, who proposed to
stand between me and all my annoyances of the
morning. He was to get my baggage through the
customs, submit for me to all the inevitable impositions
of tide-waiters, secure my place in the coach,
bespeak me a fried sole and green peas, and sum up
his services, all in one short phrase of l. s. d. So
putting my temper into my pocket, and making up
my mind to let roguery take the wall of me for one
day unchallenged, I mounted to the grassy ramparts
of the town to walk off the small remainder of sea-air
from my stomach, and admire everything that came
in my way. I would recommend to all newly-landed
passengers from the packets to step up and accept of
the sympathy of the oaks of the “king's bastion” in
their disgust for the sea. Those sensible trees,
leaning toward the earth, and throwing out their
boughs as usual to the landward, present to the seaward
exposure a turned-up and gnarled look of nausea
and disgust, which is as expressive to the commonest
observer as a sick man's first look at his bolus. I
have great affinity with trees, and I believe implicitly
that what is disagreeable to the tree can not be pleasant
to the man. The salt air is not so corrosive here
as in the Mediterranean, where the leaves of the olive
are eaten off entirely on the side toward the sea; but
it is quite enough to make a sensible tree turn up its
nose, and in that attitude stands most expressively
every oak on the “king's bastion.”

The first few miles out of Portsmouth form one
long alley of ornamented cottages—wood-bine creeping
and roses flowering over them all. If there were
but two between Portsmouth and London—two even
of the meanest we saw—a traveller from any other
land would think it worth his while to describe them
minutely. As there are two thousand (more or less),
they must pass with a bare mention. Yet I became
conscious of a new feeling in seeing these rural paradises;
and I record it as the first point in which I find
myself worse for having become a “dweller in the
shade.” I was envious. Formerly, in passing a
tasteful retreat, or a fine manor, I could say, “What
a bright lawn! What a trim and fragrant hedge!
What luxuriant creepers! I congratulate their
fortunate owner!” Now it is, “How I wish I had
that hedge at Glenmary! How I envy these people
their shrubs, trellices, and flowers!” I wonder not
a little how the English emigrant can make a home
among our unsightly stumps that can ever breed a
forgetfulness of all these refined ruralities.

After the first few miles, I discovered that the two
windows of the coach were very limited frames for
the rapid succession of pictures presented to my eye,
and changing places with William, who was on the
top of the coach, I found myself between two tory
politicians, setting forth to each other most eloquently
the mal-administrations of the whigs, and the queen's
mismanagement. As I was two months behind the
English news, I listened with some interest. They
made out to their own satisfaction that the queen was
a silly girl; that she had been caught in a decided
fib about Sir Robert Peel's exactions with respect to
the household; and one of the Jeremiahs, who seemed
to be a sturdy grazier, said that “in 'igh life the
queen-dowager's 'ealth was now received uniwersally
with three times three, while Victoria's was drank in
solemn silence.” Her majesty received no better
treatment at the hands of a whig on the other end of
the seat; and as we whirled under the long park fence
of Claremont, the country palace of Leopold and the
Princess Charlotte, he took the pension of the Belgian
king for the burden of his lamentation, and, between
whig and tory, England certainly seemed to be in
a bad way. This Claremont, it will be remembered
by the readers of D'Israeli's novels, is the original of
the picture of the luxurious maison de plaisance, drawn
in the young duke.

We got glimpses of the old palace at Esher, of
Hampton court, of Pitt's country seat at Putney, and
of Jane Porter's cottage at Esher, and in the seventh
hour from leaving Portsmouth (seventy-four miles)
we found the vehicles thickening, the omnibuses
passing, the blue-coated policemen occurring at short
intervals, and the roads delightfully watered—symptoms
of suburban London. We skirted the privileged
paling of Hyde Park; and I could see, over the rails,
the flying and gay-colored equipages, the dandy horsemen,
the pedestrian ladies followed by footmen with
their gold sticks, the fashionable throng, in short,
which, separated by an iron barrier from all contact
with unsightliness and vulgarity, struts its hour in this
green cage of aristocracy.

Around the triumphal arch opposite the duke of
Wellington's was assembled a large crowd of carriages
and horsemen. The queen was coming from Buckingham
palace through the Green park, and they
were waiting for a glimpse of her majesty on horse-back.
The regulator whirled mercilessly on; but
far down, through the long avenues of trees, I could
see a movement of scarlet liveries, and a party coming
rapidly toward us on horseback. We missed the
queen by a couple of minutes.

It was just the hour when all London is abroad,
and Piccadilly was one long cavalcade of splendid
equipages on their way to the park. I remembered
many a face, and many a crest; but either the faces
had beautified in my memory, or three years had
done time's pitiless work on them all. Near Devonshire
house I saw, fretting behind the slow-moving
press of vehicles, a pair of magnificent and fiery blood
horses, drawing a coach, which, though quite new,
was of a color and picked out with a peculiar stripe
that was familiar to my eye. The next glance convinced
me that the livery was that of Lady B.; but,
for the light chariot in which she used to drive, here
was a stately coach—for the one tall footman, two—
for the plain but elegant harness, a sumptuous and
superb caparison—the whole turn-out on a scale of
splendor unequalled by anything around us. Another
moment decided the doubt—for as we came against
the carriage, following, ourselves, an embarrassed
press of vehicles, her ladyship appeared, leaning back
in the corner with her wrists-crossed, the same in the
grace of her attitude and the elegance of her toilet,
but stouter, more energetic, and graver in the expression
of her face, than I ever remembered to have seen
her. From the top of the stage-coach I looked,
unseen, directly down upon her, and probably got, by
chance, a daylight and more correct view of her
countenance than I should obtain in a year of opera
and drawing-room observation.

Tired and dusty, we were turned from hotel to hotel,

all full and overflowing; and finding at last a corner
at Raggett's, in Dover street, we dressed, dined,
and posted to Woolwich. Unexpected and mournful
news closed our first day in England with tears.

I drove up to London the second day after our arrival,
and having a little “Grub-street” business, made
my way to the purlieus of publishers in Paternoster
row. If you could imagine a paper mine, with a very
deep-cut shaft laid open to the surface of the earth,
you might get some idea of Ivy lane. One walks
along through its dim subterranean light, with no idea
of breathing the proper atmosphere of day and open
air. A strong smell of new books in the nostrils, and
one long stripe of blue sky much farther off than usual,
are the predominant impressions.

From the dens of the publishers, I wormed my way
through the crowds of Cheapside and the Strand, toward
that part of London which, as Horace Smith says,
is “open at the top.” Something in the way of a
ship's fender, to save the hips and elbows, would sell
well I should think to pedestrians in London. What
crowds, to be sure! On a Sunday in New York,
when all the churches are pouring forth their congregations
at the same moment, you have seen a faint
image of the Strand. The style of the hack cabriolets
is very much changed since I was in London. The
passenger sits about as high up from the ground as he
would in a common chair—the body of the vehicle
suspended from the axle instead of being placed upon
it, and the wheels very high. The driver's seat would
suit a sailor, for it answers to the ship's tiller, well astern.
He whips over the passenger's head. I saw one or
two private vehicles built on this principle, certainly
one of safety, though they have something the beauty
of a prize hog.

The new National Gallery in Trafalgar square, not
finished when I left England, opened upon me as I
entered Charing Cross, with what I could not but feel
was a very fine effect, though critically, its “pepper-boxity”
is not very creditable to the architect. Fine
old Northumberland house, with its stern lion atop on
one side, the beautiful Club house on the other, St.
Martin's noble church and the Gallery—with such a
fine opening in the very cor cordium of London, could
not fail of producing a noble metropolitan view.

The street in front of the gallery was crowded with
carriages, showing a throng of visiters within; and
mounting the imposing steps (the loftiness of the vestibule
dropping plump as I paid my shilling entrance),
I found myself in a hall whose extending lines of pillars
ran through the entire length of the building,
offering to the eye a truly noble perspective. Off
from this hall, to the right and left, lay the galleries
of antique and modern paintings, and the latter were
crowded with the fair and fashionable mistresses of the
equipages without. You will not care to be bothered
with criticisms on pictures, and mine was a cursory
glance—but a delicious, full-length portrait of a noble
lady by Grant, whose talent is now making some noise
in London, a glorious painting of Van Amburgh
among his lions by Edwin Landseer, and a portrait of
Miss Pardoe in a Turkish costume, with her pretty
feet coiled under her on a Persian carpet, by Pickersgill,
are among those I remember. I found a great
many acquaintances in the gallery: and I was sitting upon
a bench with a lady, who pointed out to me a portrait
of Lord Lyndhurst in his chancellor's wig and robes
—a very fine picture of a man of sixty or thereabouts.
Directly between me and it, as I looked, sidled a person
with his back to me, cutting off my view very provokingly.
“When this dandy gets out of the way with
his eyeglass,” said I, “I shall be able to see the picture.”
My friend smiled. “Who do you take the
dandy to be?” It was a well-formed man, dressed in
the top of the fashion, with a very straight back, curl
ing brown hair, and the look of perhaps thirty years
of age. As he passed on and I caught his profile, I
saw it was Lord Lyndhurst himself.

I had not seen Taglioni since the first representation
of the Sylphide, eight or nine years ago at Paris
Last night I was at the opera, and saw her in La
Gitana; and except that her limbs are the least in the
world rounder and fuller, she is, in person, absolutely
unchanged. I can appreciate now, better than I could
then (when opera dancing was new to me), what it is
that gives this divine woman the right to her proud
title of La Déesse de la Danse. It is easy for the
Ellslers, and Augusta, and others, who are said to be
only second to her, to copy her flying steps, and even
to produce, by elasticity of limb, the beautiful effect
of touching the earth, like a thing afloat, without being
indebted to it for the rebound. But Taglioni alone
finishes the step, or the pirouette, or the arrowy bound
over the scene, as calmly, as accurately, as faultlessly,
as she begins it. She floats out of a pirouette as if,
instead of being made giddy, she had been lulled by
it into a smiling and child-like dream, and instead of
trying herself and a plomb (as is seen in all other dancers,
by their effort to recover composure), it had been
the moment when she had rallied and been refreshed.
The smile, so expressive of enjoyment in her own
grace, which steals over Taglioni's lips when she closes
a difficult step, seems communicated, in an indefinable
languor, to her limbs. You can not fancy her fatigued
when, with her peculiar softness of motion, she
courtesies to the applause of the enchanted audience,
and walks lightly away. You are never apprehensive
that she has undertaken too much. You never detect,
as you do in all other dancers, defects slurred
over adroitly, and movements that, from their anticipating
the music of the ballet, are known by the critical
eye to cover some flaw in the step, from giddiness
or loss of balance. But oh what a new relation bears
the music to the dance, when this spirit of grace replaces
her companions in the ballet! Whether the
motion seems born of the music, or the music floats
out of her dreamy motion, the enchanted gazer might
be almost embarrassed to know.

In the new ballet of La Gitana, the music is based
upon the Mazurka. The story is the old one of the
child of a grandee of Spain, stolen by gipsies, and recovered
by chance in Russia. The gradual stealing
over her of a recollection of music she had heard in
her childhood was the finest piece of pantomimic acting
I ever saw. But there is one dance, the Cachucha,,
introduced at the close of the ballet, in which Taglioni
has enchanted the world anew. It could only be done
by herself; for there is a succession of flying movements
expressive of alarm, in the midst of which she
alights and stands poised upon the points of her feet,
with a look over her shoulder of fierté and animation
possible to no other face, I think, in the world. It
was like a deer standing with expanded nostril and
neck uplifted to its loftiest height, at the first scent of
his pursuers in the breeze. It was the very soul of
swiftness embodied in a look! How can I describe it
to you?

My last eight hours have been spent between Bedlam
and the opera—one of those antipodal contrasts
of which London life affords so marry. Thanks to
God, and to the Howards who have arisen in our time,
a madhouse is no longer the heart-rending scene that
it used to be; and Bedlam, though a place of melan-choly
imprisonment, is as cheering a spectacle to the
humane as imprisonment can be made by care and
kindness. Of the three hundred persons who are inmates
of its wards, the greater part seemed quiet and
content, some playing at ball in the spacious court-yards,
some lying on the grass, and some working voluntarily

at a kind of wheel arranged for raising water
to their rooms.

On the end of a bench in one of the courts, quite
apart from the other patients, sat the youth who came
up two hundred miles from the country to marry the
queen! You will remember the story of his forcing
himself into Buckingham palace. He was a stout,
sandy-haired, sad-looking young man, of perhaps
twenty-four; and with his arms crossed, and his eyes
on the ground, he sat like a statue, never moving even
an eyelash while we were there. There was a very
gentlemanlike man working at the waterwheel, or
rather walking round, with his hand on the bar, in a
gait that would have suited the most finished exquisite
of a drawing-room—Mr. Davis, who shot (I think)
at Lord Londonderry. Then in an upper room we
saw the Captain Brown who shook his fist in the
queen's face when she went to the city—really a most
officer-like and handsome fellow; and in the next
room, poor old Hatfield, who shot at George the Third,
and has been in Bedlam for forty years—quite sane!
He was a gallant dragoon, and his face is seamed with
scars got in battle before his crime. He employs himself
with writing poetry on the death of his birds and
cats whom he has outlived in prison—all the society
he has had in this long and weary imprisonment. He
received us very courteously, and called our attention
to his favorite canary showed us his poetry, and all
with a sad, mild, subdued resignation, that quite
moved me.

In the female wards I saw nothing very striking, except
one very noble-looking woman who was standing
at her grated window, entirely absorbed in reading the
Bible. Her face expressed the most heart-rending
melancholy I had ever witnessed. She has been for
years under the terrible belief that she has committed
“the unpardonable sin,” and though quiet all the day,
her agony at night becomes horrible. What a comment
on a much-practised mode of preaching the mild
and forgiving religion of our Savior!

As I was leaving one of the wards, a young woman
of nineteen or twenty came up to me with a very polite
courtesy, and said, “Will you be so kind as to
have me released from this dreadful place?” “I am
afraid I can not,” said I. “Then,” she replied, laying
her hand on my arm, with a most appealing earnestness,
“perhaps you will on Monday—you know
I've nothing to pack!” The matron here interposed,
and led her away, but she kept her eyes on us till the
door closed. She was confined there for the murder
of her child.

We visited the kitchens, wash-houses, bakery, &c.,
&c.—all clean, orderly, and admirable, and left our
names on the visiters' book, quite of the opinion of a
Frenchman who was there just before us, and who had
written under his own name this expressive praise:—
“J'ai visité certains palais moins beaux et moins bien
entretenus que cette maison de la folie.”

Two hours after, I was listening to the overture of
La Cenerentola, and watching the entrance to the opera
of the gay, the celebrated, and the noble. In the
house I had left, night had brought with it (as it does
always to the insane) a maddening and terrific exaltation
of brain and spirit—but how different from that
exaltation of brain and spirit sought at the same hour,
by creatures of the same human family, at the opera!
It was difficult not to wonder at the distribution of
allotments to mankind. In a box on the left of me sat
the queen, keeping time with a fan to the delicious
singing of Pauline Garcia, her favorite minister standing
behind her chair, and her maids of honor around
—herself the smiling, youthful, and admired sovereign
of the most powerful nation on earth! I thought of
the poor girl in her miserable cell at Bedlam imploring
release.

The queen's face has thinned and grown more oval
since I saw her at a drawing-room, four years ago, as
Princess Victoria. She has been compelled to think
since then, and such exigencies, in all stations of life,
work out the expression of the face. She has now
what I should pronounce a decidedly intellectual
countenance, a little petulant withal when she turns
to speak, but, on the whole, quite beautiful enough
for a virgin queen. No particular attention seemed
paid to her by the audience. She was dressed less
gayly than many others around her. Her box was at
the left side of the house, undistinguished by any mark
of royalty, and a stranger would never have suspected
her presence.

Pauline Garcia sang better than I thought it possible
for any one to sing after Malibran was dead. She
has her sister's look about the forehead and eyes, and
all her sister's soul and passionateness in her style of
singing. Her face is otherwise very plain, but, plain
as it is, and young as she is, the opera-going public
prefer her already to the beautiful and more powerful
Grisi. The latter long triumphant prima donna is
said to be very unhappy at her eclipse by this new favorite;
and it is curious enough to hear the hundred
and one faults found in the declining songstress by
those who once would not admit that she could be
transcended on earth. A very celebrated person, whom
I remembered, when in London before, giving Grisi
the most unqualified eulogy, assured the gay admirers
in her box last night that she had always said that
Grisi had nothing but lungs and fine eyes. She was
a great healthy Italian girl, and could sing in tune;
but soul or sentiment she never had! Poor Grisi!
Hers is the lot of all who are so unhappy as to have
been much admired. “Le monde ne hail rien autant
que ses idoles quand ils sont à terre,” said the wise La
Bruyère.

Some of the most delightful events in one's travels
are those which afford the least matériel for description,
and such is our séjour of a few days at the vicarage
of B—. It was a venerable old house with
pointed gables, elaborate and pointed windows, with
panes of glass of the size of the palm of the hand,
low doors, narrow staircases, all sorts of unsuspected
rooms, and creepers outside, trellised and trained to
every corner and angle. Then there was the modern
wing, with library and dining-room, large windows,
marble fireplaces, and French paper; and in going
from your bedroom to breakfast, you might fancy
yourself stepping from Queen Elizabeth's time to
Queen Victoria's. A high hedge of holly divided the
smoothly-shaven lawn from the churchyard, and in
the midst of the moss-grown headstones stood a gray
old church with four venerable towers, one of the most
picturesque and beautiful specimens of the old English
architecture that I have ever seen. The whole
group, church, vicarage, and a small hamlet of vine-covered
and embowered stone cottages, lay in the lap
of a gently rising sweep of hills, and all around were
spread landscapes of the finished and serene character
peculiar to England—rich fields framed in flowering
hedges, clumps of forest trees, glimpses of distant
parks, country seats, and village spires, and on the
horizon a line of mist-clad hills, scarce ever more distinct
than the banks of low-lying clouds retiring after
a thunderstorm in America.

Early on Sunday morning we were awakened by
the melody of the bells in the old towers; and with
brief pauses between the tunes, they were played upon
most musically, till the hour for the morning services.
We have little idea in America of the perfection to
which the chiming of bells is carried in England. In
the towers of this small rural church are hung eight
bells of different tone, and the tunes played on them
by the more accomplished ringers of the neighboring
hamlet are varied endlessly. I lay and listened to the

simple airs as they died away over the valley, with a
pleasure I can scarcely express. The morning was
serene and bright, the perfume of the clematis and
jasmine flowers at the window penetrated to the curtains
of my bed, and Sunday seemed to have dawned
with the audible worship and palpable incense of nature.
We were told at breakfast that the chimes had
been unusually merry, and were a compliment to ourselves,
the villages always expressing thus their congratulations
on the arrival of guests at the vicarage.
The compliment was repeated between services, and a
very long peal rang in the twilight—our near relationship
to the vicar's family authorizing a very special
rejoicing.

The interior of the church was very ancient looking
and rough, the pews of unpainted oak, and the
massive stone walls simply whitewashed. The congregation
was small, perhaps fifty persons, and the
men were (with two exceptions) dressed in russet
carters' frocks, and most of them in leather leggins.
The children sat on low benches placed in the centre
of the one aisle, and the boys, like their fathers, were
in smock frocks of homespun, their heavy shoes shod
with iron like horses' hoofs, and their little legs buttoned
up in the impenetrable gaiters of coarse leather.
They looked, men and boys, as if they were intended
to wear but one suit in this world.

I was struck with the solemnity of the service, and
the decorous attention of men, women, and children,
to the responses. It was a beautiful specimen of
simple and pastoral worship. Each family had the
name of their farm or place of residence printed on
the back of the pew, with the number of seats to
which they were entitled, probably in proportion to
their tithes. The “living” is worth, if I remember
right, not much over a hundred pounds—an insufficient
sum to support so luxurious a vicarage as is
appended to it; but, happily for the people, the vicar
chances to be a man of fortune, and he unites in his
excellent character the exemplary pastor with the
physician and lord of the manor. I left B— with
the conviction that if peace, contentment, and happiness,
inhabit one spot more than all others in a world
whose allotments are so difficult to estimate, it is the
vicarage in the bosom of that rural upland.

We left B— at twelve in the Brighton “Age”—
the “swell coach” of England. We were to dine
thirty miles nearer London, at — Park, and we did
the distance in exactly three hours, including a stop
of fifteen minutes to dine. We are abused by all
travellers for our alacrity in dining on the road; but
what stage-coach in the United States ever limited
its dining time to fifteen minutes, and what American
dinner of roast, pastry, and cheese, was ever despatched
so briefly? Yet the travellers to Brighton are of
the better class; and whose who were my fellow-passengers
the day I refer to were particularly well
dressed and gentlemanly—yet all of them achieved a
substantial dinner of beef, pudding, and cheese, paid
their bills, and drained their glass of porter, within
the quarter of an hour. John Bull's blindness to the
beam in his own eye is perhaps owing to the fact that
this hasty meal is sometimes called a “lunch!”

The two places beside our own in the inside were
occupied by a lady and her maid and two children—
an interpretation of the number two to which I would
not have agreed if I could have helped it. We can not
always tell at first sight what will be most amusing,
however; and the child of two years, who sprawled
over my rheumatic knees with her mother's permission,
thereby occasioning on my part a most fixed
look out of the window, furnished me after a while
with a curious bit of observation. At one of the
commons we passed, the children running out from a
gipsy encampment flung bunches of heath flowers
into the coach, which the little girl appropriated, and
commenced presenting rather graciously to her mother,
the maid, and Mrs. W., all of whom received them
with smiles and thanks. Having rather a sulky face
of my own when not particularly called on to be
pleased, the child omitted me for a long time in her
distributions. At last, after collecting and re-distributing
the flowers for about an hour, she grew suddenly
grave, laid the heath all out upon her lap, selected the
largest and brightest flowers, and made them into a
nosegay. My attention was attracted by the seriousness
of the child's occupation; and I was watching
her without thinking my notice observed, when she
raised her eyes to me very timidly, turned her new
bouquet over and over, and at last, with a blush,
deeper than I ever saw before upon a child, placed
the flowers in my hand and hid her face in her mother's
bosom. My sulkiness gave way, of course, and the
little coquette's pleasure in her victory was excessive.
For the remainder of the journey, those who had
given her their smiles too readily were entirely neglected,
and all her attentions were showered upon the
only one she had found it difficult to please. I thought
it as pretty a specimen of the ruling passion strong in
baby-hood as I ever saw. It was a piece of finished
coquetry in a child not old enough to speak plain.

The coachman of “the age” was a young man of
perhaps thirty, who is understood to have run through
a considerable fortune, and drives for a living—but he
was not at all the sort of looking person you would
fancy for a “swell whip.” He drove beautifully, and
helped the passengers out and in, lifted their baggage,
&c., very handily, but evidently shunned notice, and
had no desire to chat with the “outsides.” The excessive
difficulty in England of finding any clean way
of making a living after the initiatory age is passed—
a difficulty which reduced gentlemen feel most keenly—probably
forced this person as it has others to
take up a vocation for which the world fortunately
finds an excuse in eccentricity. He touches his hat
for the half crown or shilling, although probably if it
were offered to him when the whip was out of his
hand he would knock the giver down for his impertinence.
I may as well record here, by the way, for
the benefit of those who may wish to know a comparison
between the expense of travelling here and at
home, that for two inside places for thirty miles the
coach fare was two pounds, and the coachman's fee
five shillings, or half-a-crown each inside. To get
from the post town to — Park (two miles) cost me
five-and-sixpence for a “fly,” so that for thirty-two
miles travel I paid 2l. 10s. 6d., a little more than
twelve dollars.

And speaking of vocations, it would be a useful
lesson to some of our ambitious youths to try a beginning
at getting a living in England. I was never
at all aware of the difficulty of finding even bread and
salt for a young man, till I had occasion lately to endeavor
to better the condition of a servant of my own
—a lad who has been with me four or five years, and
whose singular intelligence, good principles, and high
self-improvement, fitted him, I thought, for any confidential
trust or place whatever. His own ideas, too
(I thought, not unreasonably), had become somewhat
sublimated in America, and he was unwilling to continue
longer as a servant. He went home to his
mother, a working-woman of London, and I did my
utmost, the month I was in town, inquiring among all
classes of my friends, advertising, &c., to find him any
possible livelihood above menial service. I was met
everywhere with the same answer: “There are
hundreds of gentlemen's sons wearing out their youth
in looking for the same thing.” I was told daily that
it was quite in vain—that apprenticeships were as
much sought as clerkships, and that every avenue to
the making of a sixpence was overcrammed and inaccessible.

My boy and his mother at last came to
their senses; and, consenting to apply once more for
a servant's place, he was fortunate enough to engage
as valet to a bachelor, and is now gone with his new
master on a tour to France. As Harding the painter
said to me, when he returned after his foreign trip,
“England is a great place to take the nonsense out of
people.”

When London shall have become the Rome or
Athens of a fallen empire (qu. will it ever?) the termini
of the railways will be among its finest ruins.
That of the Birmingham and Liverpool track is almost
as magnificent as that flower of sumptuousness,
the royal palace of Caserta, near Naples. It is really
an impressive scene simply to embark for “Brummagem;”
and there is that utility in all this showy
expenditure for arch, gateway, and pillar, that no one
is admitted but the passenger, and you are refreshingly
permitted to manage your baggage, &c., without
the assistance of a hundred blackguards at a shilling
each. Then there are “ladies” waiting-rooms,” and
“gentlemen's waiting-rooms,” and attached to them
every possible convenience, studiously clean and orderly.
I wish the president and directors of the Utica
and other American railroads would step over and
take a sumptuary hint.

The cars are divided into stalls, i. e. each passenger
is cushioned off by a stuffed partition from his neighbor's
shoulder, and sleeps without offence or encroachment.
When they are crowded, that is an admirable
arrangement; but I have found it very comfortable in
long journeys in America to take advantage of an
empty car, and stretch myself to sleep along the
vacant seat. Here, full or empty, you can occupy
but your upright place. In every car are suspended
lamps to give light during the long passages through
the subterranean tunnels.

We rolled from under the Brobdignag roof of the
terminus, as the church of Mary-le-bone (Cockney
for Marie-la-bonne, but so carved on the frieze) struck
six. Our speed was increased presently to thirty
miles in the hour; and with the exception of the
slower rate in passing the tunnels, and the slackening
and getting under way at the different stations, this
rate was kept up throughout. We arrived at Liverpool
(205 miles or upward) at three o'clock, our
stoppages having exceeded an hour altogether.

I thought, toward the end, that all this might be
very pleasant with a consignment of buttons, or an
errand to Gretna Green. But for the pleasure of the
thing, I would as lief sit in an arm-chair and see bales
of striped green silk unfolded for eight hours, as travel
the same length of time by the railroad. (I have described
in this simile exactly the appearance of the
fields as you see them in flying past.) The old women
and cabbages gain by it, perhaps, for you can not
tell whether they are not girls and roses. The washerwoman
at her tub follows the lady on the lawn so
quickly that you confound the two irresistibly—the
thatched cottages look like browsing donkeys, and the
browsing donkeys like thatched cottages—you ask the
name of a town, and by the time you get up your
finger, your point at a spot three miles off—in short,
the salmon well packed in straw on the top of the
coach, and called fresh-fish after a journey of 200
miles, sees quite as much of the country as his most
intellectual fellow-passenger. I foresee in all this a
new distinction in phraseology. “Have you travelled
in England?” will soon be a question having no
reference to railroads. The winding turnpike and
cross-roads, the coaches and post-carriages, will be
resumed by all those who consider the sense of sight
as useful in travel, and the bagmen and letter-bags
will have almost undisputed possession of the rail-cars.

The Adelphi is the Astor house of Liverpool, a
very large and showy hotel near the terminus of the
railway. We were shown into rather a magnificent
parlor on our arrival; and very hungry with rail-roading
since six in the morning, we ordered dinner at
their earliest convenience. It came after a full hour,
and we sat down to four superb silver covers, anticipating
a meal corresponding to the stout person and
pompous manners of the fattest waiter I have seen in my
travels. The grand cover was removed with a flourish
and disclosed—divers small bits of second-hand beef-steak,
toasted brown and warped at the corners by a
second fire, and on the removal of the other three
silver pagodas, our eyes were gratified by a dish of
peas that had been once used for green soup, three
similarly toasted and warped mutton chops, and three
potatoes. Quite incredulous of the cook's intentions,
I ventured to suggest to the waiter that he had probably
mistaken the tray and brought us the dinner of
some sportsman's respectable brace of pointers; but
on being assured that there were no dogs in the cellar.
I sent word to the master of the house that we had
rather a preference for a dinner new and hot, and
would wait till he could provide it. Half an hour
more brought up the landlord's apologies and a fresh
and hot beef-steak, followed by a tough-crusted apple-pie,
custard, and cheese—and with a bottle of Moselle,
which was good, we finished our dinner at one of the
most expensive and showy hotels in England. The
manners and fare at the American hotels being always
described as exponents of civilization by English
travellers, I shall be excused for giving a counter-picture
of one of the most boasted of their own.

Regretting exceedingly that the recent mourning
of my two companions must prevent their presence
at the gay festivities of Eglinton, I put them on board
the steamer, bound on a visit to relatives in Dublin,
and returned to the Adelphi to wait en garçon for the
Glasgow steamer of Monday. My chamber is a large
and well-furnished room, with windows looking out
on the area shut in by the wings of the house; and I
must make you still more contented at the Astor, by
describing what is going on below at this moment.
It is half-past eight, and a Sunday morning. All the
bells of the house, it seems to me, are ringing, most
of them very impatiently, and in the area before the
kitchen windows are six or eight idle waiters, and four
or five female scullions, playing, quarrelling, scolding,
and screaming; the language of both men and women
more profane and indecent than anything I have ever
before chanced to hear, and every word audible in
every room in this quarter of the hotel. This has
been going on since six this morning; and I seriously
declare I do not think I ever heard as much indecent
conversation in my life as for three mortal hours must
have “murdered sleep” for every lady and gentleman
lodged on the rear side of the “crack hotel” of Liverpool.

Sick of the scene described above, I went out just
now to take a turn or two in my slippers in the long
entry. Up and down, giving me a most appealing
stare whenever we met, dawdled also the fat waiter
who served up the cold victuals of yesterday. He
evidently had some errand with me, but what I did
not immediately fathom. At last he approached—

“You—a—got your things, sir?”

“What things?”

“The stick and umbrella, I carried to your bed-room,
sir.”

“Yes, thank you,” and I resumed my walk.

The waiter resumed his, and presently approached
again.

“You—a—don't intend to use the parlor again, sir?”

“No: I have explained to the master of the house
that I shall breakfast in the coffee-room” And again
I walked on.

My friend began again at the next turn.

“You—a—pay for those ladies' dinner yourself,
sir?”

“Yes.” I walked on once more.

Once more approaches my fat incubus, and with a
twirl of the towel in his hand looks as if he would fain
be delivered of something.

“Why the d—l am I badgered in this way?” I
stormed out at last, losing patience at his stammering
hesitation, and making a move to get round the fat
obstruction and pursue my walk.

“Will you—a—remember the waiter, if you please,
sir?”

“Oh! I was not aware that I was to pay the waiter
at every meal. I generally do it when I leave the
house. Perhaps you'll be kind enough to let me
finish my walk, and trust me till to-morrow morning?”

P. S. Evening in the coffee-room.—They say the
best beginning in love is a decided aversion, and badly
as I began at Liverpool, I shall always have a tender
recollection of it for the admirable and unequalled
luxury of its baths. A long and beautiful Grecian
building crests the head of George's pier, built by the
corporation of Liverpool, and devoted exclusively to
salt-water baths. I walked down in the twilight to
enjoy this refreshing luxury, and it being Sunday
evening. I was shown into the ladies' end of the
building. The room where I waited till the bath
was prepared was a lofty and finely proportioned
apartment, elegantly furnished, and lined with superbly
bound books and pictures, the tables covered with
engravings, and the whole thing looked like a central
apartment in a nobleman's residence. A boy showed
me presently into a small drawing-room, to which was
attached a bath closet, the two rooms lined, boudoir
fashion, with chintz, a clock over the bath, a nice
carpet and stove, in short, every luxury possible to
such an establishment. I asked the boy if the gentlemen's
baths were as elegant as these. “Oh yes,” he
said: “there are two splendid pictures of Niagara
Falls and Catskill.” “Who painted them?” “Mr.
Wall.” “And whose are they?” “They belong to
our father, sir!” I made up my mind that “our
father” was a man of taste and a credit to Liverpool.

I have just returned from the dinner given to Macready
at the Freemason's tavern. The hall, so celebrated
for public “feeds,” is a beautiful room of a
very showy style of architecture, with three galleries,
and a raised floor at the end usually occupied by the
cross table. It accommodated on this occasion four
hundred persons.

From the peculiar object of the meeting to do
honor to an actor for his intellectual qualities, and for
his efforts to spiritualise and elevate the stage, there
probably never was collected together in one room so
much talent and accomplishment. Artists, authors,
critics, publishers, and amateurs of the stage—a large
body in London—made up the company. My attention
was called by one of my neighbors to the singularly
superior character of the heads about us, and I
had already observed the striking difference, both in
head and physiognomy, between this and a common
assemblage of men. Most of the persons connected
with the press, it was said, were present; and perhaps
it would have been a worthy service to the world had
some shorn Samson, among the authors, pulled the
temple upon the heads of the Philistines.

The cry of “make way!” introduced the duke of
Sussex, the chairman of the meeting—a stout, mild-looking.
dignified old man, wearing a close black scull-cap
and the star and riband. He was followed by
Lord Conyngham, who, as grand chamberlain, had
done much to promote the interests of the drama; by
Lord Nugent (whom I had last seen sailing a scampavia
in the bay of Corfu), by Sir Lytton Bulwer, Mr.
Sheil, Sir Martin Shee, Young, the actor, Mr. Milnes,
the poet, and other distinguished men. I should
have said, by the way Mr. Macready followed next
his royal highness.

The cheering and huzzas, as this procession walked
up the room, were completely deafening. Macready
looked deadly pale and rather overcome; and amid
the waving of handkerchiefs and the stunning uproan
of four hundred “gentlemen and scholars,” the duke
placed the tragedian at his right hand, and took his
seat before the turbot.

The dinner was an uncommonly bad one; but of
this I had been forewarned, and so had taken a provisory
chop at the club. I had leisure, therefore, to
look about me, and truly there was work enough for
the eyes. M—'s head interested me more than
any one's else, for it was the personification of his
lofty, liberal, and poetic genius. His hair, which
was long and profuse, curled in tendrils over the
loftiest forehead; but about the lower part of the face
lay all the characteristics which go to make up a
voluptuous yet generous, an enthusiastic and fiery,
yet self-possessed and well directed character. He was
excessively handsome; yet it was the beauty of
Masaniello, or Salvator Rosa, with more of intellect
than both together. All in all, I never saw a finer
face for an artist; and judging from his looks and
from his works (he is perhaps twenty-four), I would
stake my sagacity on a bold prophecy of his greatness.

On the same side were the L—s, very quiet-looking
men, and S— the portrait-painter, a merry-looking
grenadier, and L— B— the poet, with a
face like a poet. Near me was L—, the painter,
poet, novelist, song and music writer, dramatist, and
good fellow—seven characters of which his friends
scarce know in which he is most excellent—and he
has a round Irish face, with a bright twinkle in his
eye, and a plump little body which carries off all his
gifts as if they were no load at all.—And on my left
was S—, the glorious painter of Vemce, of the
battle of Trafalgar, the unequalled painter of the sea
in all its belongings; and you would take him for a
gallant lieutenant of the navy, with the fire of a score
of battles asleep in his eye, and the roughening of a
hundred tempests in his cheek. A franker and more
manly face would not cross your eye in a year's travel.

Mr. J— was just beyond, a tall, sagacious-looking,
good humored person of forty-five. He was a
man of very kind manners, and was treated with great
marks of liking and respect by all about him. But
directly opposite to me sat so exact a picture of Paul
Pry as he is represented on the stage, particularly of
my friend Finn in that character, that it was difficult
not to smile in looking at him. To my surprise, I
heard some one behind me point him out, soon after,
as the well-known original in that character—the
gentleman, whose peculiarities of person, as well as
manners, were copied in the farce of Mr. Poole.—
“That's my name—what's yours?” said he the moment
after he had seated himself, thrusting his card
close to the nose of the gentleman next him. I took
it of course for a piece of fun between two very old
friends, but to my astonishment the gentlemen next
him was as much astonished as I.

The few servants scattered up and down were deaf
to everything but calls for champagne (furnished only
at an extra charge when called for—a very mean
system for a public dinner, by the way), and the
wines on the table seemed selected to drive one to
champagne or the doctor. Each person had four
plates, and when used, they were to be put under the
bench, or on the top of your head, or to be sat upon,
or what you would, except to be taken away, and the
soup and fish, and the roast and boiled and all, having
been put on together, was all removed at one fell
swoop—the entire operation of dinner having lasted

just twenty-five minutes. Keep this fact till we are recorded
by some new English traveller as the most expeditious
eaters in Christendom.

Here end my croakings, however, for the speeches
commenced directly, and admirable they were. To
the undoing of much prejudice got by hearsay, I
listened to Bulwer. He is, beyond all comparison,
the most graceful and effective speaker I ever heard
in England. All the world tells you that he makes
signal failures in oratory—yet he rose, when his health
was drank, and, in self-possessed, graceful, unhesitating
language, playful, yet dignified, warm, yet not
extravagant, he replied to the compliments of his
royal highness, and brought forward his plan (as you
have seen it reported in the papers) for the erection
of a new theatre for the legitimate drama and Macready.
I remember once hearing that Bulwer had a
belief in his future eminence as an orator—and I would
warrant his warmest anticipations in that career of
ambition. He is a better speaker than Sheil, who followed
him, and Sheil is renowned as an orator. Really
there is nothing like one's own eyes and ears in this
world of envy and misrepresentation.

D— sat near Sheil, at the cross table, very silent,
as is his custom and that of most keen observers.
The courtly Sir M— S— was near B—, looking
like some fine old picture of a wit of Charles the
second's time, and he and Y— the actor made two
very opposite and gentlemanlike speeches. I believe
I have told you nearly all that struck me, except what
was reported in the gazettes, and that you have no
need to read over again. I got away at eleven, and
reached the opera in time to hear the last act of the
Puritani, and see the Elsslers dance in the ballet, and
with a look-in at a ball, I concluded one of those exhausting,
exciting, overdone London days, which are
pleasanter to remember than to enjoy, and pleasanter
to read about than either.

One of the most elegant and agreeable persons I
ever saw was Miss P—, and I think her conversation
more delightful to remember than any person's
I ever knew. A distinguished artist told me that he
remembered her when she was his beau-ideal of female
beauty; but in those days she was more “fancy-rapt,”
and gave in less to the current and spirit of society.
Age has made her, if it may be so expressed, less
selfish in her use of thought, and she pours it forth,
like Pactolus—that gold which is sand from others.
She is still what I should call a handsome woman, or,
if that be not allowed, she is the wreck of more than
a common allotment of beauty, and looks it. Her
person is remarkably erect, her eyes and eyelids (in
this latter resembling Scott) very heavily moulded,
and her smile is beautiful. It strikes me that it always
is so—where it ever was. The smile seems to be the
work of the soul.

I have passed months under the same roof with Miss
P—, and nothing gave me more pleasure than to
find the company in that hospitable house dwindled
to a “fit audience though few,” and gathered around
the figure in deep mourning which occupied the
warmest corner of the sofa. In any vein, and à-propos
to the gravest and the gayest subject, her well-stored
mind and memory flowed forth in the same rich current
of mingled story and reflection, and I never saw
an impatient listener beside her. I recollect, one evening
a lady's singing “Auld Robin Gray,” and some
one remarking (rather unsentimentally), at the close,
“By-the-by, what is Lady — (the authoress of the
ballad) doing with so many carpenters. Berkeley
square is quite deafened with their hammering!”
“A-propos of carpenters and Lady —,” said Miss
P—, “this same charming ballad-writer owes something
to the craft. She was better-born than provided
with the gifts of fortune, and in her younger days was
once on a visit to a noble house, when to her dismay
a large and fashionable company arrived, who brought
with them a mania for private theatricals. Her wardrobe
was very slender, barely sufficient for the ordinary
events of a week-day, and her purse contained one
solitary shilling. To leave the house was out of the
question, to feign illness as much so, and to decline
taking a part was impossible, for her talent and sprightliness
were the hope of the theatre. A part was cast
for her, and, in despair, she excused herself from the
gay party bound to the country town to make purchases
of silk and satin, and shut herself up, a prey to
mortified low spirits. The character required a smart
village dress, and it certainly did not seem that it could
come out of a shilling. She sat at her window, biting
her lips, and turning over in her mind whether she
could borrow of some one, when her attention was attracted
to a carpenter, who was employed in the construction
of a stage in the large hall, and who, in the
court below, was turning off from his plane broad and
long shavings of a peculiarly striped wood. It struck
her that it was like riband. The next moment she
was below, and begged of the man to give her half-a-dozen
lengths as smooth as he could shave them. He
performed his task well, and depositing them in her
apartment, she set off alone on horseback to the village,
and with her single shilling succeeded in purchasing
a chip hat of the coarsest fabric. She carried
it home, exultingly, trimmed it with her pine shavings,
and on the evening of the performance appeared with
a white dress, and hat and belt-ribands which were
the envy of the audience. The success of her invention
gave her spirits and assurance, and she played to
admiration. The sequel will justify my first remark.
She made a conquest on that night of one of her titled
auditors, whom she afterward married. You will allow
that Lady — may afford to be tolerant of carpenters.”

An eminent clergyman one evening became the subject
of conversation, and a wonder was expressed that
he had never married. “That wonder,” said Miss
P—, “was once expressed to the reverend gentleman
himself in my hearing, and he told a story in answer
which I will tell you—and perhaps, slight as it
may seem, it is the history of other hearts as sensitive
and delicate as his own. Soon after his ordination,
he preached once every Sabbath, for a clergyman in
a small village not twenty miles from London. Among
his auditors, from Sunday to Sunday, he observed a
young lady, who always occupied a certain seat, and
whose close attention began insensibly to grow to him
an object of thought and pleasure. She left the
church as soon as service was over, and it so chanced
that he went on for a year without knowing her name;
but his sermon was never written without many a
thought how she would approve it, nor preached with
satisfaction unless he read approbation in her face.
Gradually he came to think of her at other times than
when writing sermons, and to wish to see her on other
days than Sundays; but the weeks slipped on, and
though he fancied she grew paler and thinner, he
never brought himself to the resolution either to ask
her name or to seek to speak with her. By these
silent steps, however, love had worked into his heart,
and he had made up his mind to seek her acquaintance
and marry her, if possible, when one day he was
sent for to minister at a funeral. The face of the
corpse was the same that had looked up to him Sunday
after Sunday, till he had learned to make it a part
of his religion and his life. He was unable to perform
the service, and another clergyman present officiated;
and after she was buried, her father took him aside and
begged his pardon for giving him pain—but he could
not resist the impulse to tell him that his daughter
had mentioned his name with her last breath, and he
was afraid that a concealed affection for him had hur

ried her to the grave. Since that, said the clergyman
in question, my heart has been dead within me, and I
look forward only. I shall speak to her in heaven.”

London is wonderfully embellished within the last
three years—not so much by new buildings, public or
private, but by the almost insane rivalry that exists
among the tradesmen to outshow each other in the expensive
magnificence of their shops. When I was in
England before, there were two or three of these palaces
of columns and plate-glass—a couple of shawl-shops,
and a glass warehouse or two, but now the
west end and the city have each their scores of establishments
of which you would think the plate-glass
alone would ruin anybody but Aladdin. After an absence
of a month from town lately, I gave myself the
always delightful treat of an after-dinner ramble among
the illuminated palaces of Regent street and its neighborhood,
and to my surprise, found four new wonders
of this description—a shawl-house in the upper Regent
Circus, a silk-mercer's in Oxford street, a whipmaker's
in Regent street, and a fancy stationer's in the
Quadrant—either of which establishments fifty years
ago would have been the talk of all Europe. The
first-mentioned warehouse lines one of the quarters of
the Regent Circus, and turns the corner of Oxford
street with what seems but one window—a series of
glass plates, only divided by brass rods, reaching from
the ground to the roof—window-panes twelve feet high,
and four or five feet broad! The opportunity which
this immense transparency of front gives for the display
of goods is proportionately improved; and in the
mixture of colors and fabrics to attract attention there
is evidently no small degree of art—so harmonious are
the colors and yet so gorgeous the show. I see that
several more renovations are taking place in different
parts of both “city” and “town;” and London promises,
somewhere in the next decimals, to complete its
emergence from the chrysalis with a glory to which
eastern tales will be very gingerbread matters indeed.

If I may judge by my own experience and by what
I can see in the streets, all this night-splendor out of
doors empties the play-houses—for I would rather
walk Regent street of an evening than see ninety-nine
plays in a hundred; and so think, apparently, multitudes
of people, who stroll up and down the clean and
broad London sidewalks, gazing in at the gorgeous
succession of shop-windows, and by the day-bright
glare of the illumination exchanging nods and smiles
—the street, indeed, becoming gradually a fashionable
evening promenade, as cheap as it is amusing and delightful.
There are large classes of society, who find
the evenings long in their dingy and inconvenient
homes, and who must go somewhere; and while the
streets were dark, and poorly paved and lighted, the
play-house was the only resort where they could beguile
their cares with splendor and amusement, and
in those days theatricals flourished, as in these days
of improved thoroughfares and gay shops they evidently
languish. I will lend a hint to the next essayist
on the “Decline of the Drama.”

The increased attractiveness of London, from thus
disclosing the secrets of its wondrous wealth, compensates
in a degree for what increases as rapidly on me
—the distastefulness of the country, from the forbidding
and repulsive exclusiveness of high garden-walls,
impermeable shrubberies, and every sort of contrivance
for confining the traveller to the road, and nothing but
the road. What should we say in America to travelling
miles between two brick walls, with no prospect
but the branches of overhanging trees from the invisible
park lands on either side, and the alley of cloudy
sky overhead? How tantalizing to pass daily by a
noble estate with a fine specimen of architecture in its
centre, and see no more of it than a rustic lodge and
some miles of the tops of trees over a paling! All
this to me is oppressive—I feel abridged of breathing-room
and eyesight—deprived of my liberty—robbed
of my horizon Much as I admire high preservation
and cultivation, I would compromise for a “snake-fence”
all over England.

On a visit to a friend a week or two since in the
neighborhood of London, I chanced, during a long
walk, to get a glimpse over the wall of a nicely-gravelled
and secluded path, which commanded what the
proprietor's fence enviously shut from the road—a
noble view of London and the Thames. Accustomed
to see people traversing my own lawn and fields in
America without question, as suits their purpose, and
tired of the bricks, hedges and placards of blacking
and pills, I jumped the fence, and with feelings of
great relief and expansion aired my eyes and my imagination
in the beautiful grounds of my friend's opulent
neighbor. The Thames with its innumerable
steamers, men-of-war, yachts, wherries, and ships—a
vein of commercial and maritime life lying between the
soft green meadows of Kent and Essex—formed a delicious
picture of contrast and meaning beauty, which
I gazed upon with great delight for—some ten minutes.
In about that time I was perceived by Mr. B—'s
gardener, who, with a very pokerish-looking stick in
his hand, came running toward me, evidently, by his
pace, prepared for a vigorous pursuit, of the audacious
intruder. He came up to where I stood, quite out of
breath, and demanded, with a tight grasp of his stick,
what business I had there. I was not very well prepared
with an answer, and short of beating the man
for his impudence (which in several ways might have
been a losing job), I did not see my way very clearly
out of Mr. B—'s grounds. My first intention, to
call on the proprietor and apologise for my intrusion
while I complained of the man's insolence, was defeated
by the information, evidently correct, that Mr.
B— was not resident at the place, and so I was walked
out of the lodge-gate with a vagabond's warning—
never to let him “catch me there again!” So much
for my liberal translation of a park-fence!

This spirit of exclusion makes itself even more disagreeably
felt where a gentleman's paling chances to
include any natural curiosity. One of the wildest, as
well as most exquisitely beautiful spots on earth, is
the Dargle, in the county Wicklow, in Ireland. It is
interesting, besides, as belonging to the estate of the
orator and patriot Grattan. To get to it, we were let
through a gate by an old man, who received a
douceur; we crossed a newly-reaped field, and came
to another gate; another person opened this, and we
paid another shilling. We walked on toward the
glen, and in the middle of the path, without any object
apparently but the toll, there was another locked
gate, and another porter to pay; and when we made
our exit from the opposite extremity of the grounds,
after seeing the Dargle, there was a fourth gate and a
fourth porter. The first field and fee belonged, if I
remember rightly, to a Captain Somebody, but the
other three gates belong to the present Mr. Grattan,
who is very welcome to my three shillings, either as
a tribute to his father's memory, or to the beauty ofTinnehinch
and the Dargle. But on whichever
ground he pockets it, the mode of assessment is, to say
the least, ungracious. Without subjecting myself
to the charge of a mercenary feeling, I think I may
say that the enthusiasm for natural scenery is very
much clipped and belittled by seeing it at a shilling
the perch—paying the money and taking the look. I
should think no sum lost which was expended in
bringing me to so romantic a glen as the Dargle; but
it should be levied somewhere else than within sound
of its wild waterfall—somewhere else than midway
between the waterfall and the fine mansion of Tinnehinch.

The fish most “out of water” in the world is certainly
a Frenchman in England without acquaintances.
The illness of a friend has lately occasioned
me one or two hasty visits to Brighton; and being
abandoned on the first evening to the solitary mercies
of the coffee-room of the hotel, I amused myself not
a little with watching the ennui of one of these unfortunate
foreigners, who was evidently there simply to
qualify himself to say that he had been at Brighton
in the season. I arrived late, and was dining by myself
at one of the small tables, when, without looking
up, I became aware that some one at the other end of
the room was watching me very steadily. The place
was as silent as coffee-rooms usually are after the
dinner-hour, the rustling of newspapers the only sound
that disturbed the digestion of the eight or ten persons
present, when the unmistakeable call of “Vaitare!”
informed me that if I looked up I should encounter
the eyes of a Frenchman. The waiter entered at the
call, and after a considerable parley with my opposite
neighbor, came over to me and said in rather an
apologetic tone, “Beg pardon, sir, but the shevaleer
wishes to know if your name is Coopair.” Not very
much inclined, fatigued as I was, for a conversation
in French, which I saw would be the result of a polite
answer to his question, I merely shook my head, and
took up the newspaper. The Frenchman drew a long
sigh, poured out his last glass of claret, and crossing
his thumbs on the edge of the table, fell into a profound
study of the grain of the mahogany.

What with dawdling over coffee and tea and reading
half-a-dozen newspapers, I whiled away the time till
ten o'clock, pitying occasionally the unhappy chevalier,
who exhibited every symptom of a person bored to
the last extremity. One person after another called
for a bed-room candle, and exit finally the Frenchman
himself, making me, however, a most courteous
bow as he passed out. There were two gentlemen
left in the room, one a tall and thin old man of seventy,
the other a short portly gentleman of fifty or thereabouts,
both quite bald. They rose together and
came to the fire near which I was sitting.

“That last man who went out calls himself a chevalier,”
said the thin gentleman.

“Yes,” said his stout friend—“he took me for a
Mr. Cooper he had travelled with.”

“The deuce he did,” said the other—“why he
took me for a Mr. Cooper, too, and we are not very
much alike.”

“I beg pardon, gentlemen,” said I—“he took me
for this Mr. Cooper too.”

The Frenchman's ruse was discovered. It was instead
of a snuff-box—a way he had of making acquaintance.
We had a good laugh at our triple resemblance
(three men more unlike it would be difficult
to find), and bidding the two Messrs. Cooper
good night, I followed the ingenious chevalier up
stairs.

The next morning I came down rather late to breakfast,
and found my friend chipping his egg-shells to
pieces at the table next to the one I had occupied the
night before. He rose immediately with a look of
radiant relief in his countenance, made a most elaborate
apology for having taken me for Mr. Cooper
(whom I was so like, cependant, that we should be
mistaken for each other by our nearest friends), and
in a few minutes, Mr. Cooper himself, if he had entered
by chance, would have returned the compliment,
and taken me for the chevalier's most intimate friend
and fellow-traveller.

I remained three or four days at Brighton, and
never discovered in that time that the chevalier's ruse
succeeded with any other person. I was his only
successful resemblance to “Monsieur Coopair.” He
always waited breakfast for me in the coffee-room,
and when I called for my bill on the last morning, he
dropped his knife and asked if I was going to London
—and at what hour—and if I would be so obliging as
to take a place for him in the same coach.

It was a remarkably fine day; and with my friend
by my side outside of “the Age,” we sped on toward
London, the sun getting dimmer and dimmer, and the
fog thicker and more chilly at every mile farther from
the sea. It was a trying atmosphere for the best of
spirits—let alone the ever-depressed bosom of a stranger
in England. The coach stopped at the Elephant
and Castle, and I ordered down my baggage, and informed
my friend, for the first time, that I was bound
to a country-house six miles from town. I scarce
know how I had escaped telling him of it before, but
his “impossible mon ami!” was said in a tone and
accompanied with a look of the most complete surprise
and despair. I was evidently his only hope in
London.

I went up to town a day or two after; and in making
my way to Paternoster Row, I saw my friend on
the opposite side of the strand, with his hands thrust
up to the wrists in the pockets of his “Taglioni,” and
his hat jammed down over his eyes, looking into the
shop windows without much distinction between the
trunkmaker's and the printsellers—evidently miserable
beyond being amused at anything. I was too
much in a hurry to cross over and resume my office
of escape-valve to his ennui, and I soon outwalked his
slow pace, and lost sight of him. Whatever title he
had to the “chevalier” (and he was decidedly too
deficient in address to belong to the order “d'industrie”),
he had no letter of recommendation in his
personal appearance, and as little the air of even a
Frenchman of “quality” as any man I ever saw in
the station of a gentleman. He is, in short, the person
who would first occur to me if I were to see a
paragraph in the times headed “suicide by a foreigner.”

Revenons un peu. Brighton at this season (November)
enjoys a climate, which, as a change from the
heavy air in the neighborhood of London, is extremely
exhilarating and agreeable. Though the first day of
my arrival was rainy, a walk up the west cliff gave me a
feeling of elasticity and lightness of spirits, of which I
was beginning to forget the very existence, in the
eternal fogs of the six months I had passed inland.
I do not wonder at the passion of the English for
Brighton. It is, in addition to the excellence of the
air, both a magnificent city and the most advantageous
ground for the discomfiture of the common enemy,
“winter and rough weather.” The miles of broad
gravel-walk just out of reach of the surf of the sea, so
hard and so smoothly rolled that they are dry in five
minutes after the rain has ceased to fall, are alone no
small item in the comfort of a town of professed idlers
and invalids. I was never tired of sauntering along
this smooth promenade so close to the sea. The
beautiful children, who throng the walks in almost all
weathers (and what children on earth are half as
beautiful as English children?) were to me a constant
source of pleasure and amusement. Tire of this, and
by crossing the street you meet a transfer of the gay
throngs of Regent street and Hyde Park, with splendid
shops and all the features of a metropolis, while
midway between the sea and this crowded sidewalk
pours a tide of handsome equipages, parties on horse-back,
and vehicles of every description, all subservien
to exercise and pleasure.

My first visit to Brighton was made in a very cold
day in summer, and I saw it through most unfavorable
spectacles. But I should think that along the cliffs,
where there are no trees or vendure to be seen, there
is very little apparent difference between summer and
winter; and coming here with the additional clothing
of a severer season, the temperature of the elastic and
saline air is not even chilly. The most delicate children

play upon the beach in days when there is no
sunshine; and invalids, wheeled out in these convenient
bath chairs, sit for hours by the seaside, watching
the coming and retreating of the waves, apparently
without any sensation of cold—and this in December.
In America (in the same latitudes with Leghorn and
Venice), an invalid sitting out of doors at this season
would freeze to death in half an hour. Yet it was as
cold in August, in England, as it has been in November,
and it is this temperate evenness of the weather
throughout the year which makes English climate,
on the whole, perhaps the healthiest in the world.

In the few days I was at Brighton, I became very
fond of the perpetual loud beat of the sea upon the
shore. Whether, like the “music of the spheres,”
it becomes at last “too constant to be heard,” I did
not ask—but I never lost the consciousness of it except
when engaged in conversation, and I found it
company to my thoughts when I dined or walked
alone, and a most agreeable lullaby at night. This
majestic monotone is audible all over Brighton, indoors
and out, and nothing overpowers it but the
wind in a storm; it is even then only by fits, and the
alternation of the hissing and moaning of the blast
with the broken and heavy plash of the waters, is so
like the sound of a tempest at sea (the whistling in the
rigging, and the burst of the waves), that those who
have been at Brighton in rough weather have realized
all of a storm at sea but the motion and the sea-sickness—rather
a large but not an undesirable diminution
of experience.

Calling on a friend at Brighton, I was introduced
casually to a Mr. Smith. The name, of course, did
not awaken any immediate curiosity, but a second
look at the gentleman did—for I thought I had never
seen a more intellectual or finer head. A fifteen
minutes' conversation, which touched upon nothing
that could give me a clue to his profession, still satisfied
me that so distinguished an address, and so keen
an eye, could belong to no nameless person, and I was
scarcely surprised when I read upon his card at parting—
Horace Smith. I need not say it was a very
great pleasure to meet him. I was delighted, too,
that the author of books we love as much as “Zillah,”
and “Brambletye-House,” looks unlike other men.
It gratifies somehow a personal feeling—as if those
who had won so much admiration from us should, for
our pride's sake, wear the undeniable stamp of superiority—as
if we had acquired a property in him by
loving him. How natural it is, when we have talked
and thought a great deal about an author, to call him
“ours.” “What Smith? Why our Smith—Horace
Smith”—is as common a dialogue between persons
who never saw him as it is among his personal friends.

These two remarkable brothers, James and Horace
Smith, are both gifted with exteriors such as are not
often possessed with genius—yet only James is so
fortunate as to have stumbled upon a good painter.
Lonsdale's portrait of James Smith, engraved by
Cousens, is both the author and the man—as fine a
picture of him, with his mind seen through his features,
as was ever done. But there is an engraved picture
extant of the author of Zillah, that, though it is no
likeness of the author, is a detestable caricature of the
man. Really this is a point about which distinguished
men, in justice to themselves, should take some
little care. Sir Thomas Lawrence's portraits, and
Sir Joshua Reynolds's, are a sort of biography of the
eminent men they painted. The most enduring
history, it has been said, is written in coins. Certainly
the most effective biography is expressed in portraits.
Long after the book and your impressions of
the character of which it treats have become dim in
your memory your impression of the features and
mien of a hero or a poet, as received from a picture,
remains indelible. How often does the face belie the
biography—making us think better or worse of the
man, after forming an opinion from a portrait in words,
that was either partial or malicious! I am persuaded
the world would think better of Shelley, if there were
a correct and adequate portrait of his face; as it has
been described to me by one or two who knew him.
How much of the Byronic idolatry is born and fed
from the idealized pictures of him treasured in every
portfolio! Sir Thomas Lawrence, Chalon, and Parris,
have composed between them a biography of Lady
Blessington, that have made her quite independent
of the “memoirs” of the next century. And who, I
may safely ask, even in America, has seen the nice,
cheerful, sensible, and motherly face which prefaces
the new edition of “The Manners of the American
Domestics” (I beg pardon for giving the title from my
Kentucky copy), without liking Mrs. Trollope a great
deal better, and at once dismissing all idea of “the
bazar” as a libel on that most lady-like countenance?

I think Lady S— had more talent and distinction
crowded into her pretty rooms, last night, than I ever
before saw in such small compass. It is a bijou of a
house, full of gems of statuary and painting, but all
its capacity for company lies in a small drawing-room,
a smaller reception-room, and a very small, but very
exquisite boudoir—yet to tell you who were there
would read like Colburn's list of authors, added to a
paragraph of noble diners-out from the Morning Post.

The largest lion of the evening certainly was the
new Persian ambassador, a man six feet in his slippers;
a height which, with his peaked calpack, of a foot and
a half, superadded, keeps him very much among the
chandeliers. The principal article of his dress does
not diminish the effect of his eminence—a long white
shawl worn like a cloak, and completely enveloping
him from beard to toe. From the twisted shawl
around his waist glitters a dagger's hilt, lumped with
diamonds—and diamonds, in most dazzling profusion,
almost cover his breast. I never saw so many
together except in a cabinet of regalia. Close behind
this steeple of shawl and gem, keeps, like a short
shadow when the sun is high, his excellency's secretary,
a dwarfishly small man, dressed also in cashmere
and calpack, and of a most ill-favored and bow-stringish
countenance and mien. The master and man seem
chosen for contrast, the countenance of the ambassador
expressing nothing but serene good nature. The
ambassador talks, too, and the secretary is dumb.

T— H— stood bolt upright against a mirror-door,
looking like two T— H—s trying to see
which was taller. The one with his face to me looked
like the incarnation of the John Bull newspaper, for
which expression he was indebted to a very hearty
face, and a very round subject for a buttoned-up coat;
while the H— with his back to me looked like an
author, for which he was indebted to an exclusive view
of his cranium. I dare say Mr. H— would agree
with me that he was seen, on the whole, at a most enviable
advantage. It is so seldom we look, beyond the
man, at the author.

I have rarely seen a greater contrast in person and
expression than between H— and B—, who stood
near him. Both were talking to ladies—one bald,
burly, upright, and with a face of immovable gravity,
the other slight, with a profusion of curling hair, restless
in his movements, and of a countenance which
lights up with a sudden inward illumination. H—'s
partner in the conversation looked into his face with a
ready-prepared smile for what he was going to say,
B—'s listened with an interest complete, but without
effort. H— was suffering from what I think is the
common curse of a reputation for wit—the expectation
of the listener had outrun the performance.

H— B—, whose diplomatic promotion goes on
much faster than can be pleasing to “Lady Cheveley,”

has just received his appointment to Paris—the object
of his first wishes. He stood near his brother, talking
to a very beautiful and celebrated woman, and I
thought, spite of her ladyship's unflattering description,
I had seldom seen a more intellectual face, or a
more gentlemanly and elegant exterior.

Late in the evening came in his royal highness the
duke of C—, and I wondered, as I had done many
times before, when in company with one of these royal
brothers, at the uncomfortable etiquette so laboriously
observed toward them. Wherever he moved in the
crowded rooms, everybody rose and stood silent, and
by giving way much more than for any one else, left
a perpetual circular space around him, in which, of
course, his conversation had the effect of a lecture to
a listening audience. A more embarrassed manner
and a more hesitating mode of speech than the duke's,
I can not conceive. He is evidently gêné to the last
degree with this burdensome deference; and one
would think that in the society of highly-cultivated
and aristocratic persons, such as were present, he
would be delighted to put his highness into his pocket
when the footman leaves him at the door, and hear no
more of it till he goes again to his carriage. There
was great curiosity to know whether the duke would
think it etiquetical to speak to the Persian, as in consequence
of the difference between the shah and the
British envoy the tall minister is not received at the
court of St. James. Lady S— introduced them,
however, and then the duke again must have felt his
rank nothing less than a nuisance. It is awkward
enough, at any time, to converse with a foreigner who
has not forty English words in his vocabulary, but
what with the duke's hesitating and difficult utterance,
the silence and attention of the listening guests, and
the Persian's deference and complete inability to comprehend
a syllable, the scene was quite painful.

There was some of the most exquisite amateur singing
I ever heard after the company thinned off a little,
and the fashionable song of the day was sung by a
most beautiful woman in a way to move half the company
to tears. It is called “Ruth,” and is a kind of
recitative of the passage in Scripture, “Where thou
goest I will go,” &c.

I have driven in the park several days, admiring the
queen on horseback, and observing the changes in the
fashions of driving, equipages, &c., &c. Her majesty
seems to me to ride very securely and fearlessly,
though it is no wonder that in a country where everybody
rides, there should be bolder and better horse-women.
Miss Quentin, one of the maids of honor,
said to be the best female equestrian in England,
“takes the courage out” of the queen's horse every
morning before the ride—so she is secured against one
class of accidents. I met the royal party yesterday in
full gallop near the centre of Rotten Row, and the two
grooms who ride ahead had brief time to do their work
of making the crowd of carriages give way. On came
the queen upon a dun-colored, highly-groomed horse,
with her prime minister on one side of her and Lord
Byron upon the other, her cortège of maids of honor
and ladies and lords in waiting checking their more
spirited horses, and preserving always a slight distance
between themselves and her majesty. Victoria's round
and plump figure looks extremely well in her dark-green
riding-dress, but I thought the man's hat unbecoming.
Her profile is not sufficiently good for
that trying style, and the cloth riding-cap is so much
prettier, that I wonder she does not remember that
“nice customs courtesy to great queens,” and wear
what suits her. She rode with her mouth open, and
looked exhilarated with the exercise. Lord Melbourne,
it struck me, was the only person in her party whose
face had not the constrained look of consciousness of
observation.

I observe that the “crack men” ride without martingals,
and that the best turnouts are driven without
a check-rein. The outstretched neck which is the
consequence, has a sort of Arab or blood look, probably
the object of the change; but the drooping head
when the horse is walking or standing seems to me
ugly and out of taste. All the new carriages are built
near the ground. The low park-phæton, light as a
child's plaything, and drawn by a pair of ponies, is the
fashionable equipage. I saw the prettiest thing conceivable
of this kind yesterday in the park—a lady
driving a pair of small cream-colored horses of great
beauty, with her two children in the phæton, and two
grooms behind mounted on cream-colored saddle-horses,
all four of the animals of the finest shape and
action. The new street cabs (precisely the old-fashioned
sedan-chair suspended between four wheels, a
foot from the ground) are imitated by private carriages,
and driven with two horses—ugly enough. The cabphæton,
is in great fashion, with either one or two
horses. The race of ponies is greatly improved since
I was in England. They are as well-shaped as the
large horse, with very fine coats and great spirit. The
children of the nobility go scampering through the
park upon them, looking like horsemen and horse-women
seen through a reversed opera-glass. They
are scarce larger than a Newfoundland dog, but they
patter along with great speed. There is one fine lad
of about eight years, whose parents seem to have very
little care for his neck, and who, upon a fleet, milk-white,
long-tailed pony, is seen daily riding at a rate
of twelve miles an hour through the most crowded
streets, with a servant on a tall horse plying whip and
spur to keep up with him. The whole system has the
droll effect of a mixture of Lilliput and Brobdignag.

We met the king of Oude a few days since at a party,
and were honored by an invitation to dine with his
majesty at his house in the Regent's park. Yesterday
was the appointed day; and with the pleasant anticipation
of an oriental feast, we drove up at seven,
and were received by his turbaned ayahs, who took
shawl and hat with a reverential salaam, and introduced
us to the large drawing-room overlooking the park.
The king was not yet down; but in the corner sat
three parsees or fire-worshippers, guests like ourselves,
who in their long white linen robes, bronze faces, and
high caps, looked like anything but “diners-out” in
London. To our surprise they addressed us in excellent
English, and we were told afterward that they
were all learned men—facts not put down to the credit
of the Ghebirs in Lalla Rookh.

We were called out upon the balcony to look at a
balloon that was hovering over the park, and on stepping
back into the drawing-room, we found the company
all assembled, and our royal host alone wanting.
There were sixteen English ladies present, and five
white gentlemen beside myself. The Orient, however,
was well represented. In a corner, leaning silently
against a table, stood Prince Hussein Mirza, the
king's cousin, and a more romantic and captivating
specimen of Hindoo beauty could scarcely be imagined.
He was slender, tall, and of the clearest olive
complexion, his night-black hair falling over his
shoulders in profusion, and his large antelope eyes
fixed with calm and lustrous surprise upon the half-denuded
forms sitting in a circle before him. We
heard afterward that he has conceived a most uncontrollable
and unhappy passion for a high-born and
beautiful English girl whom he met in society, and
that it is with difficulty he is persuaded to come out
of his room. His dress was of shawls most gracefully
draped about him, and a cap of gold cloth was thrown
carelessly on the side of his head. Altogether he was
like a picture of the imagination.

A middle-aged stout man, ashy black, with Grecian

features, and a most determined and dignified expression
of mouth, sat between Lady — and Miss Porter,
and this was the wakeel or ambassador of the
prince of Sutara, by name Afzul Ali. He is in England
on business for his master, and if he does not succeed
it will be no fault of his under lip. His secretary,
Keeram Ali, stood behind him—the wakeel dressed in
shawls of bright scarlet, with a white cashmere turban,
and the scribe in darker stuffs of the same fashion.
Then there was the king's physician, a short, wiry,
merry-looking, quick-eyed Hindoo, with a sort of quizzical
angle in the pose of his turban: the high-priest,
also a most merry-looking Oriental, and Ali Acbar, a
Persian attaché. I think these were all the Asiatics.

The king entered in a few minutes, and made the
circuit of the room, shaking hands most cordially with
all his guests. He is a very royal-looking person indeed.
Perhaps you might call him too corpulent, if
his fine height (a little over six feet), and very fine
proportions, did not give his large size a character of
majesty. His chest is full and round, and his walk
erect and full of dignity. He has the Italian olive
complexion, with straight hair, and my own remark at
first seeing him was that of many others, “How like
a bronze cast of Napoleon!” The subsequent study
of his features remove this impression, however, for
he is a most “merry monarch,” and is seldom seen
without a smile. His dress was a mixture of oriental
and English fashions—a pair of baggy blue pantaloons,
bound around the waist with a rich shawl, a splendid
scarlet waistcoat buttoned close over his spacious
chest, and a robe of very fine snuff-colored cloth something
like a loose dressing-gown without a collar. A
cap of silver cloth, and a brilliant blue satin cravat
completed his costume, unless in his covering should
be reckoned an enormous turquoise ring, which almost
entirely concealed one of his fingers.

Ekbal-ood-Dowlah, Nawaub of Oude (his name and
title), is at present appealing to the English against
his uncle, who usurps his throne by the aid and countenance
of the East India company. The Mohammedan
law, as I understand, empowers a king to choose
his successor from his children without reference
to primogeniture, and the usurper, though an elder
brother, having been imbecile from his youth, Ekbal's
father was selected by the then king of Oude to succeed
him. The question having been referred to
Lord Wellesley, however, then governor of India, he
decided that the English law of primogeniture should
prevail, or in other words (as the king's friends say)
preferred to have for the king of a subject province an
imbecile who would give him no trouble. So slipped
from the Nawaub's hands a pretty kingdom of six
millions of faithful Mohammedans! I believe this is
the “short” of the story. I wonder (we are reproached
so very often by the English for our treatment of
the Indians) whether a counter-chapter of “expedient
wrong” might not be made out from the history of the
Indians under British government in the east?

Dinner was announced with a Hindostanee salaam,
and the king gave his arm to Lady —. The rest
of us “stood not upon the order of our going,” and
I found myself seated at table between my wife and a
Polish countess, some half dozen removes from the
Nawaub's right hand. His highness commenced helping
those about him most plentifully from a large
pillau talking all the while most merrily in broken
English, or resorting to Hindostanee and his interpreter
whenever his tongue got into trouble. With
the exception of one or two English joints, all the
dishes were prepared with rice or saffron, and (wine
being forbidden by the Mahommedan law) iced water
was served round from Indian coolers freely. For
one, I would have compounded for a bottle of wine
by taking the sin of the entire party on my soul, for,
what with the exhaustion of a long London day, and
the cloying quality of the Nawaub's rich dishes, I
began to be sorry I had not brought a flask in my
pocket. His majesty's spirits seemed to require no
aid from wine. He talked constantly, and shrewdly,
and well. He impresses every one with a high
estimate of his talents, though a more complete and
undisguised child of nature I never saw. Good sense,
with good humor, frankness, and simplicity, seem to
be his leading qualities.

We were obliged to take our leave early after dinner,
having other engagements for the evening, but
while coffee was serving, the Hindostanee cook, a
funny little old man, came in to receive the compliments
of the company upon his dinner, and to play
and dance for his majesty's amusement. He had at
his back a long Indian drum, which he called his
“tum tum,” and playing himself an accompaniment
upon this, he sang two or three comic songs in his
own language to a sort of wild yet merry air, very
much to the delight of all the orientals. Singer,
dancer, musician, and cook, the king certainly has a
jewel of a servant in him.

One moment bowing ourselves out from the presence
of a Hindoo king, and the next beset by an Irishman
with “Heaven bless your honor for the sixpence
you mean to give me!” what contrasts strike the traveller
in this great heart of the world! Paddy lighted
us to our carriage with his lantern, implored the coachman
to “dhrive carefully,” and then stood with his
head bent to catch the sound upon the pavement of
another sixpence for his tenderness. Wherever there
is a party in the fashionable quarters of London, these
Tantaluses flit about with their lanterns—for ever at
the door of pleasure, yet shivering and starving for
ever in their rags. What a life!

One of the most rational and agreeable of the fashionable
resorts in London is Kensington Gardens, on the
days when the royal band plays from five to seven
near the bridge of the Serpentine. Some twenty of
the best instrumental musicians of London station
themselves under the trees in this superb park (for
though called “gardens,” it is but a park with old
trees and greensward), and up and down the fine silky
carpet stroll hundreds of the fashionables of “May
fair and Belgrave square,” listening a little perhaps,
and chattering a great deal certainly. It is a good
opportunity to see what celebrated beauties look like
by daylight; and, truth to say, one comes to the conclusion
there, that candle-light is your true kalydor.
It is very ingeniously contrived by the grand chamber-lain
that this public music should be played in a far
away corner of the park, inaccessible except by those
who have carriages. The plebeians, for whose use
and pleasure it seems at first sight graciously contrived,
are pretty well sifted by the two miles walk,
and a very aristocratic and well-dressed assembly indeed
is that of Kensington gardens.

Near the usual stand of the musicians runs a bridle-path
for horsemen, separated from the greensward by
a sunk fence, and as I was standing by the edge of the
ditch yesterday, the queen rode by, pulling up to listen
to the music, and smile right and left to the crowd of
cavaliers drawn up in the road. I pulled off my hat
and stood uncovered instinctively, but looking around
to see how the promenaders received her, I found to
my surprise that with the exception of a bald-headed
nobleman whem I chanced to know, the Yankee stood
alone in his homage to her.

I thought before I left America that I should find
the stamp of the new reign on manners, usages, conversation,
and all the outer form and pressure of society.
One can not fancy England under Elizabeth to
have struck a stranger as did England under James.
We think of Shakspere, Leicester, and Raleigh, and
conclude that under a female sovereign chivalry at

least shines brighter, and poetry should. A good
deal to my disappointment, I have looked in vain for
even a symptom of the queen's influence on anything.
She is as completely isolated in England, as entirely
above and out of the reach of the sympathies and
common thoughts of society, as the gilt grasshopper
on the steeple. At the opera and play, half the
audience do not even know she is there; in the park,
she rides among the throng with scarcely a head
turned to look after her; she is unthought of, and
almost unmentioned at balls, routes, and soirées; in
short, the throne seems to stand on glass—with no one
conductor to connect it with the electric chain of human
hearts and sympathies.

MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT.

That Irish Channel has, as the English say, “a
nasty way with it.” I embarked at noon on the 26th,
in a magnificent steamer, the Royal Sovereign, which
had been engaged by Lord Eglinton (as per advertisement)
to set down at Ardrossan all passengers bound
to the tournament. This was a seventeen hours' job,
including a very cold, blowy, and rough night; and
of the two hundred passengers on board, one half
were so biest as to have berths or settees—the others
were unblest, indeed.

I found on board several Americans; and by the
time I had looked at the shape of the Liverpool harbor,
and seen one or two vessels run in before a slapping
breeze, the premonitory symptom (which had
already sent many to their berths) sent me to mine.
The boat was pitching backward and forward with a
sort of handsaw action that was not endurable. By
foregoing my dinner and preserving a horizontal position,
I escaped all sickness, and landed at Ardrossan
at six the next morning, with a thirty-six hours' fast
upon me, which I trusted my incipient gout would remember
as a per contra to the feast in the promised
“banquet.”

Ardrossan, built chiefly, I believe, by Lord Eglinton's
family, and about eight miles from the castle, is
a small but very clean and thirfty-looking hamlet on
that part of the western coast of Scotland which lies
opposite the Isle of Arran. Alisa Rock, famous in
song, slumbers like a cloud in the southwestern horizon.
The long breakers of the channel lay their lines
of foam almost upon the street, and the harbor is
formed by a pier jutting out from a little promontory
on the northern extremity of the town. The one
thoroughfare of Ardrossan is kept clean by the broom
of every wind that sweeps the Irish sea. A cleaner or
bleaker spot I never saw.

A Gael, who did not comprehend a syllable of such
English as a Yankee delivers, shouldered my portmanteau
without direction or request, and travelled
away to the inn, where he deposited it and held out
his hand in silence. There was certainly quite enough
said between us; and remembering the boisterous accompaniment
with which the claims of porters are
usually pushed upon one's notice, I could well wish
that Gaelic tide-waiters were more common.

“Any room, landlord?” was the first question.—
“Not a cupboard, sir,” was the answer.—“Can you
give me some breakfast?” asked fifty others in a breath.
—“Breakfast will be put upon all the tables presently,
gentlemen,” said the dismayed Boniface, glancing at
the crowds who were pouring in, and, Scotchmanlike,
making no promises to individuals.—“Landlord!”
vociferated a gentleman from the other side of the
hall—“what the devil does this mean? Here's the
room I engaged a fortnight ago occupied by a dozen
people shaving and dressing!”—“I canna help it, sir!
Ye're welcome to turn 'em a' out—if ye can!” said
the poor man, lifting up his hands in despair, and retreating
to the kitchen. The hint was a good one,
and taking up my own portmanteau, I opened a door
in one of the passages. It led into a small apartment,
which in more roomy times might have been a pantry,
but was now occupied by three beds and a great variety
of baggage. There was a twopenny glass on the
mantel-piece, and a drop or two of water in a pitcher,
and where there were sheets I could make shift for a
towel. I found presently, by the way, that I had had
a narrow escape of surprising some one in bed, for
the sheet which did duty as a napkin was still warm
with the pressure of the newly-fled occupant.

Three or four smart-looking damsels in caps looked
in while I was engaged in my toilet, and this, with one
or two slight observations made in the apartment, convinced
me that I had intruded on the dormitory of the
ladies' maids belonging to the various parties in the
house. A hurried “God bless us!” as they retreated,
however, was all either of reproach or remonstrance
that I was troubled with; and I emerged with a
smooth chin in time for breakfast, very much to the
envy and surprise of my less enterprising companions.

There was a great scramble for the tea and toast;
but, uniting forces with a distinguished literary man
whose acquaintance I had been fortunate enough to
make on board the steamer, we managed to get places
at one of the tables, and achieved our breakfasts in
tolerable comfort. We were still eight miles from
Eglinton, however, and a lodging was the next matter
of moment. My friend thought he was provided for
nearer the castle, and I went into the street, which I
found crowded with distressed-looking people, flying
from door to door, with ladies on their arms and wheelbarrows
of baggage at their heels, the townspeople
standing at the doors and corners staring at the novel
spectacle in open-mouthed wonder. Quite in a dilemma
whether or not to go on to Irvine (which, being
within two miles of the castle, was probably much
more over-run than Ardrossan), I was standing at the
corner of the street, when a Liverpool gentleman,
whose kindness I must record as well as my pleasure
in his society for the two or three days we were together,
came up and offered me a part of a lodging he
had that moment taken. The bed was what we call
in America a bunk, or a kind of berth sunk into the
wall, and there were two in the same garret, but the
sheets were clean; and there was a large bible on the
table—the latter a warrant for civility, neatness, and
honesty, which, after many years of travel, I have
never found deceptive. I closed immediately with
my friend; and whether it was from a smack of authorship
or no, I must say I took to my garret very
kindly.

It was but nine o'clock, and the day was on my
hands. Just beneath the window ran a railroad, built
to bring coal to the seaside, and extending to within
a mile of the castle; and with some thirty or forty
others, I embarked in a horse-car for Eglinton to see
the preparations for the following day's tournament.
We were landed near the park gate, after an hour's
drive through a flat country blackened with coal-pits;
and it was with no little relief to the eye that I entered
upon a smooth and gravelled avenue, leading by
a mile of shaded windings to the castle. The day was
heavenly; the sun-flecks lay bright as “patines of
gold” on the close-shaven grass beneath the trees;
and I thought that nature had consented for once to
remove her eternal mist-veil from Scotland, and let
pleasure and sunshine have a holyday together. The
sky looked hard and deep; and I had no more apprehension

of rain for the morrow than I should have had
under a July sun in Asia.

Crossing a bright little river (the Lugton, I think
it is called), whose sloping banks, as far as I could see
up and down, were shaven to the rich smoothness of
“velvet of three-pile,” I came in sight of the castle
towers. Another bridge over a winding of the same
river lay to the left, a Gothic structure of the most
rich and airy mould, and from either end of this extended
the enclosed passage for the procession to the
lists. The castle stood high upon a mound beyond. Its
round towers were half concealed by some of the finest
trees I ever saw; and though less antique and of a less
frowning and rude aspect than I had expected, it was
a very perfect specimen of modern castellated architecture.
On ascending to the lawn in front of the
castle, I found that it was built less upon a mound
than upon the brow of a broad plateau of table-land,
turned sharply by the Lugton, close under the castle
walls—a natural sight of singular beauty. Two Saracenic-looking
tents of the gayest colors were pitched
upon the bright-green lawn at a short distance, and
off to the left, by several glimpses through the trees,
I traced along the banks of the river the winding enclosures
for the procession.

The large hall was crowded with servants; but presuming
that a knight who was to do his devoir so conspicuously
on the morrow would not be stirring at so
early an hour, I took merely a glance of the armor
upon the walls in passing, and deferring the honor of
paying my respects, crossed the lawn and passed over
the Lugton by a rustic foot-bridge in search of the
lists. A cross-path (leading by a small temple enclosed
with wire netting, once an aviary, perhaps, but
now hung around in glorious profusion with game,
venison, a boar's head, and other comestibles), brought
me in two or three minutes to a hill-side overlooking
the chivalric arena. It was a beautiful sight of itself
without plume or armor. In the centre of a verdant
plain, shut in by hills of an easy slope, wooded richly,
appeared an oblong enclosure glittering at either end
with a cluster of tents, striped with the gayest colors
of the rainbow. Between them, on the farther side,
stood three galleries, of which the centre was covered
with a Gothic roof highly ornamented, the four front
pillars draped with blue damask, and supporting a canopy
over the throne intended for the queen of beauty.
A strongly-built barrier extended through the lists;
and heaps of lances, gay flags, and the heraldic ornaments,
still to be added to the tents, lay around on
the bright grass in a picture of no little richness. I
was glad afterward that I had seen thus much with
the advantage of an unclouded sun.

In returning, I passed in the rear of the castle, and
looked into the temporary pavilions crected for the
banquet and ball. They were covered exteriorly with
rough board and sails, and communicated by an enclosed
gallery with one of the larger apartments of the
castle. The workmen were still nailing up the drapery,
and arranging lamps and flowers; but with all this disadvantage,
the effect of the two immense halls, lined as
they were with crimson and white in broad alternate
stripes, resembling in shape and fashion two gigantic
tents, was exceedingly imposing. Had the magnificent
design of Lord Eglinton been successfully carried out,
it would have been a scene, with the splendor of the
costumes, the lights, music, and revelry, unsurpassed,
probably, by anything short of enchantment.

PRINCIPAL DAY.

I was awakened at an early hour the morning after
my arrival at Ardrossan by a band of music in the
street. My first feeling was delight at seeing a bit of
blue sky of the size of my garret skylight, and a dazzling
sunshine on the floor. “Skirling” above all the
other instruments of the band, the Highland bagpipe
made the air reel with “A' the blue bonnets are over
the border,” and, hoisting the window above my head.
I strained over the house-leads to get a look at the
performer. A band of a dozen men in kilt and bonnet
were marching up and down, led by a piper, something
in the face like the heathen representations of Boreas;
and on a long line of roughly-constructed rail-cars
were piled, two or three deep, a crowd resembling, at
first sight, a crushed bed of tulips. Bonnets of every
cut and color, from the courtier's green velvet to the
shepherd's homely gray, struggled at the top; and
over the sides hung red legs and yellow legs, cross-barred
stockings and buff boots, bare feet and pilgrim's
sandals. The masqueraders scolded and laughed, the
boys halloed, the quiet people of Ardrossan stared in
grave astonishment, and, with the assistance of some
brawny shoulders, applied to the sides of the overladen
vehicles, the one unhappy horse got his whimsical
load under way for the tournament.

Train followed train, packed with the same motley
array; and at ten o'clock, after a clean and comfortable
Scotch breakfast in our host's little parlor, we sallied
forth to try our luck in the scramble for places.
After a considerable fight we were seated, each with a
man in his lap, when we were ordered down by the
conductor, who informed us that the chief of the
Campbells had taken the car for his party, and that,
with his band in the succeeding one, he was to go in
state (upon a railroad!) to Eglinton. Up swore half-a-dozen
Glasgow people, usurpers like ourselves, that
they would give way for no Campbell in the world;
and finding a stout hand laid on my leg to prevent my
yielding to the order to quit, I gave in to what might
be called as pretty a bit of rebellious republicanism as
you would find on the Mississippi. The conductor
stormed, but the Scotch bodies sat firm; and as Scot
met Scot in the fight, I was content to sit in silence
and take advantage of the victory. I learned afterward
that the Campbell chieftain was a Glasgow manufacturer;
and though he undoubtedly had a right to
gather his clan, and take piper and eagle's plume, there
might, possibly, be some jealous disapprebation at the
bottom of his townsmen's rudeness.

Campbell and his party presently appeared, and a
dozen or twenty very fine looking men they were. One
of the ladies, as well as I could see through the black
lace veil thrown over her cap and plumes, was a remarkably
handsome woman; and I was very glad when
the matter was compromised, and the Campbells were
distributed among our company. We jogged on at a
slow pace toward the tournament, passing thousands
of pedestrians, the men all shod, and the women all
barefoot, with their shoes in their hands, and nearly
every one, in accordance with Lord Eglinton's printed
request, showing some touch of fancy in his dress. A
plaid over the shoulder, or a Glengary bonnet, or, perhaps,
a goose-feather stuck jauntily in the cap, was
enough to show the feeling of the wearer, and quite
enough to give the crowd, all in all, a most festal and
joyous aspect.

The secluded bit of road between the rail-track and
the castle lodge, probably never before disturbed by
more than two vehicles at a time, was thronged with a
press of wheels, as closely jammed as Fleet street at
noon. Countrymen's carts piled with women and
children like loads of market-baskets in Kent; post-chaises
with exhausted horses and occupants straining
their eyes forward for a sight of the castle; carriages
of the neighboring gentry with “bodkins” and overpacked
dickeys, all in costume; stout farmers on
horseback, with plaid and bonnet; gingerbread and
ale-carts, pony-carts, and coal-carts; wheelbarrows
with baggage, and porters with carpet-bags and hat-boxes,

were mixed up in merry confusion with the
most motley throng of pedestrians it has ever been my
fortune to join. The vari-colored tide poured in at
the open gate of the castle; and if I had seen no other
procession, the long-extended mass of caps, bonnets,
and plumes, winding through that shaded and beautiful
avenue, would have repaid me for no small proportion
of my subsequent discomfort. I remarked, by the
way, that I did not see a hat in the entire mile between
the porter's lodge and the castle.

The stables, which lay on the left of the approach
(a large square structure with turret and clock, very
like four methodist churches, dos-à-dos), presented
another busy and picturesque scene—horses half-caparisoned,
men-at-arms in buff and steel, and the
gay liveries of the nineteenth century paled by the revived
glories of the servitude of more knightly times.
And this part of the scene, too, had its crowd of laughing
and wondering spectators.

On reaching the Gothic bridge over the Lugton,
we came upon a cordon of police who encircled the
castle, turning the crowd off by the bridge in the direction
of the lists. Sorry to leave my merry and
motley fellow-pedestrians, I presented my card of invitation
and passed on alone to the castle. The sun
was at this time shining with occasional cloudings-over;
and the sward and road, after the two or three
fine days we had had, were in the best condition for
every purpose of the tournament.

Two or three noble trees with their foliage nearly
to the ground stood between me and the front of the
castle, as I ascended the slope above the river; and
the lifting of a stage curtain could scarce be more
sudden, or the scene of a drama more effectively composed,
than the picture disclosed by the last step upon
the terrace. Any just description of it, indeed, must
read like a passage from the “prompter's book.” I
stood for a moment, exactly where you would have
placed an audience. On my left rose a noble castle
with four round towers, the entrance thronged with
men-at-arms, and busy comers and goers in every
variety of costume. On the greensward in front of the
castle lounged three or four gentlemen archers in
suits of green silk and velvet. A cluster of grooms
under an immense tree on the right were fitting two
or three superb horses with their armor and caparisons,
while one beautiful blood palfrey, whose fine limbs
and delicately veined head and neck were alone visible
under his embroidered saddle and gorgeous trappings
of silk, was held by two “tigers” at a short distance.
Still farther on the right, stood a cluster of gayly decorated
tents; and in and out of the looped-up curtain
of the farthest passed constantly the slight forms of
lady archers in caps with snowy plumes, kirtles of
green velvet, and petticoats of white satin, quivers at
their backs and bows in their hands—one tall and
stately girl (an Ayrshire lady of very uncommon
beauty, whose name I took some pains to inquire),
conspicuous by her grace and dignity above all.

The back-ground was equally well composed—the
farther side of the lawn making a sharp descent to the
small river which bends around the castle, the opposite
shore thronged with thousands of spectators watching
the scene I have described; and in the distance behind
them, the winding avenue, railed in for the procession,
hidden and disclosed by turns among the
noble trees of the park, and alive throughout its whole
extent with the multitudes crowding to the lists.
There was a chivalric splendor in the whole scene,
which I thought at the time would repay one for a
long pilgrimage to see it—even should the clouds,
which by this time were coming up very threateningly
from the horizon, put a stop to the tournament altogether.

On entering the castle hall, a lofty room hung
round with arms, trophies of the chase, ancient
shields, and armor of every description, I found myself
in a crowd of a very merry and rather a motley
character—knights half armed, esquires in buff, palmers,
halberdiers, archers, and servants in modern
livery, here and there a lady, and here and there a
spectator like myself, and in a corner by one of the
Gothic windows—what think you?—a minstrel?—a
gray-haired harper?—a jester? Guess again—a reporter
for the Times! With a “walking dictionary”
at his elbow, in the person of the fat butler of the
castle, he was inquiring out the various characters in
the crowd, and the rapidity of his stenographic jottings-down
(with their lucid apparition in print two
days after in London) would, in the times represented
by the costumes about him, have burnt him at the
stake for a wizard with the consent of every knight in
Christendom.

I was received by the knight-marshal of the lists,
who did the honors of hospitality for Lord Eglinton
during his preparation for the “passage of arms;”
and finding an old friend under the gray beard and
scallop shell of a venerable palmer, whose sandal and
bare toes I chanced to stumble over, we passed in
together to the large dining-room of the castle.
“Lunch” was on the long table, and some two hundred
of the earl's out-lodging guests were busy at
knife and fork, while here and there were visible some
of those anachronisms which, to me, made the zest
of the tournament—pilgrims eating Périgord pies,
esquires dressing after the manner of the thirteenth
century diving most scientifically into the richer veins
of pátés de foie-gras, dames in ruff and farthingale discussing
blue blanc-mange, and a knight with an over-night
headache calling out for a cup of tea!

On returning to the hall of the castle, which was
the principal place of assemblage, I saw with no little
regret that ladies were coming from their carriages
under umbrellas. The fair archers tripped in doors
from their crowded tent, the knight of the dragon,
who had been out to look after his charger, was being
wiped dry by a friendly pocket handerckief, and all
countenances had fallen with the barometer. It was
time for the procession to start, however, and the
knights appeared, one by one, armed cap-à-pie, all
save the helmet, till at last the hall was crowded with
steel-clad and chivalric forms; and they waited only
for the advent of the queen of beauty. After admiring
not a little the manly bearing and powerful “thewes
and sinews” displayed by the array of modern English
nobility in the trying costumes and harness of olden
time, I stepped out upon the lawn with some curiosity
to see how so much heavy metal was to be got into a
demipique saddle. After one or two ineffectual attempts,
foiled partly by the restlessness of his horse,
the first knight called ingloriously for a chair. Another
scrambled over with great difficulty; and I fancy,
though Lord Waterford and Lord Eglinton, and one
other whom I noticed, mounted very gallantly and
gracefully, the getting to saddle was possibly the most
difficult feat of the day. The ancient achievement
of leaping on the steed's back from the ground in
complete armor would certainly have broken the
spine of any horse present, and was probably never
done but in story. Once in the saddle, however,
English horsemanship told well; and one of the finest
sights of the day I thought was the breaking away of
a powerful horse from the grooms, before his rider had
gathered up his reins, and a career at furious speed
through the open park, during which the steel-encumbered
horseman rode as safely as a fox-hunter, and
subdued the affrighted animal, and brought him back
in a style worthy of a wreath from the queen of
beauty.

Driven in by the rain, I was standing at the upper
side of the hall, when a movement in the crowd and
an unusual “making-way” announced the coming of

the “cynosure of all eyes.” She entered from the
interior of the castle with her train held up by two
beautiful pages of ten or twelve years of age, and attended
by two fair and very young maids of honor.
Her jacket of ermine, her drapery of violet and blue
velvet, the collars of superb jewels which embraced
her throat and bosom, and her sparkling crown, were
on her (what they seldom are, but should be only)
mere accessaries to her own predominating and radiant
beauty. Lady Seymour's features are as nearly faultless
as is consistent with expression; her figure and
face are rounded to the complete fulness of the mould
for a Juno; her walk is queenly, and peculiarly unstudied
and graceful, yet (I could not but think then
and since) she was not well chosen for the queen of a
tournament. The character of her beauty, uncommon
and perfect as it is, is that of delicacy and loveliness—the
lily rather than the rose—the modest pearl,
not the imperial diamond. The eyes to flash over a
crowd at a tournament, to be admired from a distance,
to beam down upon a knight kneeling for a public
award of honor, should be full of command, dark,
lustrous, and fiery. Hers are of the sweetest and
most tranquil blue that ever reflected the serene
heaven of a happy hearth—eyes to love, not wonder
at, to adore and rely upon, not admire and tremble for.
At the distance at which most of the spectators of the
tournament saw Lady Seymour, Fanny Kemble's
stormy orbs would have shown much finer, and the
forced and imperative action of a stage-taught head
and figure would have been more applauded than the
quiet, nameless, and indescribable grace lost to all but
those immediately round her. I had seen the Queen
of Beauty in a small society, dressed in simple white,
without an ornament, when she was far more becomingly
dressed and more beautiful than here, and I have
never seen, since, the engravings and prints of Lady
Seymour which fill every window in the London
shops, without feeling that it was a profanation of a
style of loveliness that would be
The day wore on, and the knight-marshal of the
lists (Sir Charles Lamb, the stepfather of Lord
Eglinton, by far the most knightly looking person at
the tournament), appeared in his rich surcoat and
embossed armor, and with a despairing look at the increasing
torrents of rain, gave the order to get to
horse. At the first blast of the trumpet, the thickleaved
trees around the castle gave out each a dozen
or two of gay colored horsemen who had stood almost
unseen under the low-hanging branches—mounted
musicians in silk and gay trappings, mounted men-at-arms
in demi-suits of armor, deputy marshals and
halberdiers; and around the western tower, where
their caparisons had been arranged and their horse-armor
carefully looked to, rode the glittering and
noble company of knights, Lord Eglinton in his armor
of inlaid gold, and Lord Alford, with his athletic
frame and very handsome features, conspicuous above
all. The rain, meantime, spared neither the rich
tabard of the pursuivant, nor the embroidered saddle-cloths
of the queen's impatient palfrey: and after a
half-dozen of dripping detachments had formed and
led on, as the head of the procession, the lady-archers
(who were to go on foot) were called by the marshal
with a smile and a glance upward which might have
been construed into a tacit advice to stay in doors.
Gracefully and majestically, however, with quiver at
her back, and bow in hand, the tall and fair archer of
whose uncommon beauty. I have already spoken,
stepped from the castle loor; and, regardless of the
rain which fell in drops as large as pearls on her unprotected
forehead and snowy shoulders, she took her
place in the procession with her silken-booted troop
picking their way very gingerly over the pools behind
her. Slight as the circumstance may seem, there
was in the manner of the lady, and her calm disregard
of self in the cause she had undertaken, which would
leave me in no doubt where to look for a heroine
were the days of Wallace (whose compatriot she is)
to come over again. The knight-marshal put spurs
to his horse, and re-ordered the little troop to the
castle; and regretting that I had not the honor of the
lady's acquaintance for my authority, I performed my
only chivalric achievement for the day, the sending a
halberdier whom I had chanced to remember as the
servant of an old friend, on a crusade into the castle
for a lady's maid and a pair of dry stockings! Whether
they were found, and the fair archer wore them, or
where she and her silk-shod company have the tournament
consumption, rheumatism, or cough, at this
hour, I am sorry I can not say.

The judge of peace, Lord Saltoun, with his wand,
and retainers on foot bearing heavy battle-axes, was
one of the best figures in the procession; though, as
he was slightly gray, and his ruby velvet cap and saturated
ruff were poor substitutes for a warm cravat
and hat-brim, I could not but associate his fine horse-manship
with a sore throat, and his retainers and their
battle-axes with relays of nurses and hot flannels. The
flower of the tournament, in the representing and
keeping up of the assumed character, however, was its
king, Lord Londonderry. He, too, is a man, I should
think, on the shady side of fifty, but of just the high
preservation and embonpoint necessary for a royal presence.
His robe of red velvet and ermine swept the
ground as he sat in his saddle; and he managed to
keep its immense folds free of his horse's legs, and
yet to preserve its flow in his prancing motion, with a
grace and ease, I must say, which seemed truly imperial.
His palfrey was like a fiery Arabian, all action,
nerve, and fire; and every step was a rearing
prance, which, but for the tranquil self-possession and
easy control of the king, would have given the spectators
some fears for his royal safety. Lord Londo-derry's
whole performance of his part was without a
fault, and chiefly admirable, I thought, from his sustaining
it with that unconsciousness and entire freedom
from mauvaise honte which the English seldom can
command in new or conspicuous situations.

The queen of beauty was called, and her horse led
to the door; but the water ran from the blue saddle-cloth
and housings like rain from a roof, and the storm
seemed to have increased with the sound of her name.
She came to the door, and gave a deprecating look
upward which would have mollified anything but a
Scotch sky, and, by the command of the knight marshal,
retired again to wait for a less chivalric but drier
conveyance. Her example was followed by the other
ladies, and their horses were led riderless in the procession.

The knights were but half called when I accepted
a friend's kind offer of a seat in his carriage to the lists.
The entire park, as we drove along, was one vast expanse
of umbrellas; and it looked from the carriage-window,
like an army of animated and gigantic mushrooms,
shouldering each other in a march. I had no
idea till then of the immense crowd the occasion had
drawn together. The circuitous route railed in for
the procession was lined with spectators six or seven
deep, on either side, throughout its whole extent of a
mile; the most distant recesses of the park were
crowded with men, horses, and vehicles, all pressing
onward; and as we approached the lists we found the
multitude full a quarter of a mile deep, standing on all
the eminences which looked down upon the enclosure,
as closely serried almost as the pit of the opera, and
all eyes bent in one direction, anxiously watching the
guarded entrance. I heard the number of persons
present variously estimated during the day, the estimates

ranging from fifty to seventy-five thousand, but
I should think the latter was nearer the mark.

We presented our tickets at the private door, in the
rear of the principal gallery, and found ourselves introduced
to a very dry place among the supports and
rafters of the privileged structure. The look-out was
excellent in front, and here I proposed to remain, declining
the wet honor of a place above stairs. The
gentleman-usher, however, was very urgent for our
promotion; but as we found him afterward chatting
very familiarly with a party who occupied the seatswe
had selected, we were compelled to relinquish the
flattering unction that he was actuated by an intuitive
sense of our deservings. On ascending to the covered
gallery, I saw, to my surprise, that some of the best
seats in front were left vacant, and here and there,
along the different tiers of benches, ladies were crowding
excessively close together, while before or behind
them there seemed plenty of unoccupied room. A
second look showed me small streams of water coming
through the roof, and I found that a dry seat was
totally unattainable. The gallery held about a thousand
persons (the number Lord Eglinton had invited
to the banquet and ball), and the greater part of these
were ladies, most of them in fancy dresses, and the remainder
in very slight demi-toilette—everybody having
dressed apparently with a full reliance on the morning's
promise of fair weather. Less fortunate than
the multitude outside, the earl's guests seemed not to
have numbered umbrellas among the necessities of a
tournament; and the demand for this despised invention
was sufficient (if merit were ever rewarded) to
clevate it for ever after to a rank among chivalric appointments.
Substitutes and imitations of it were
made of swords and cashmeres; and the lenders of
veritable umbrellas received smiles which should induce
them, one would think, to carry half-a-dozen to
all future tournaments in Scotland. It was pitiable
to see the wreck going on among the perishable elegancies
of Victorine and Herbault—chip hats of the
most faultless tournure collapsing with the wet;
starched ruffs quite flat; dresses passing helplessly
from “Lesbia's” style to “Nora Creina's;” shawls,
tied by anxious mammas over chapeau and coiffure,
crushing pitilessly the delicate fabric of months of invention;
and, more lamentable still, the fair brows and
shoulders of many a lovely woman proving with rainbow
clearness that the colors of the silk or velvet composing
her head-dress were by no means “fast.” The
Irvine archers, by the way, who, as the queen's body-guard,
were compelled to expose themselves to the
rain on the grand staircase, resembled a troop of New-Zealanders
with their faces tattooed of a delicate
green; though, as their Lincoln bonnets were all
made of the same faithless velvet, they were fortunately
streaked so nearly alike as to preserve their uniform.

After a brief consultation between the rheumatisms
in my different limbs, it was decided (since it was vain
to hope for shelter for the entire person) that my cloth-cap
would be the best recipient for the inevitable wet;
and selecting the best of the vacated places, I seated
myself so as to receive one of the small streams as
nearly as possible on my organ of firmness. Here I
was undisturbed, except that once I was asked (my
seat supposed to be a dry one) to give place to a lady
newly arrived, who, receiving my appropriated rivulet
in her neck, immediately restored it to me with many
acknowledgments, and passed on. In point of position,
my seat, which was very near the pavilion of the
queen of beauty, was one of the best at the tournament;
and diverting my aqueduct, by a little management,
over my left shoulder, I contrived to be more
comfortable, probably, than most of my shivering and
melancholy neighbors.

A great agitation in the crowd, and a dampish sound
of coming trumpets, announced the approach of the
procession. As it came in sight, and wound along the
curved passage to the lists, its long and serpentine line
of helmets and glittering armor, gonfalons, spear-points,
and plumes, just surging above the moving sea
of umbrellas, had the effect of some gorgeous and
bright-scaled dragon swimming in troubled waters.
The leaders of the long cavalcade pranced into the
arena at last, and a tremendous shout from the multitude
announced their admiration of the spectacle. On
they came toward the canopy of the queen of beauty,
men-at-arms, trumpeters, heralds, and halberdiers, and
soon after them the king of the tournament, with his
long scarlet robe flying to the tempest, and his rearing
palfrey straining every nerve to show his pride and
beauty. The first shout from the principal gallery
was given in approbation of this display of horsemanship,
as Lord Londonderry rode past; and considering
the damp state of the enthusiasm which prompted
it, it should have been considered rather flattering.
Lord Eglinton came on presently, distinguished above
all others no less by the magnificence of his appointments
than by the case and dignity with which he
rode, and his knightly bearing and stature. His
golden armor sat on him as if he had been used to
wear it; and he managed his beautiful charger, and
bowed in reply to the reiterated shouts of the multitude
and his friends, with a grace and chivalric courtesy
which drew murmurs of applause from the spectators
long after the cheering had subsided.

The jester rode into the lists upon a gray steed,
shaking his bells over his head, and dressed in an odd
costume of blue and yellow, with a broad-flapped hat,
asses' ears, &c. His character was not at first understood
by the crowd, but he soon began to excite merriment
by his jokes, and no little admiration by his
capital riding. He was a professional person, I think
it was said, from Astley's, but as he spoke with a most
excellent Scotch “burr,” he easily passed for an indigenous
“fool.” He rode from side to side of the
lists during the whole of the tournament, borrowing
umbrellas, quizzing the knights, &c.

One of the most striking features of the procession
was the turn-out of the knight of the Gael, Lord
Glenlyon, with seventy of his clansmen at his back
in plaid and philibeg, and a finer exhibition of calves
(without a joke) could scarce be desired. They followed
their chieftain on foot, and when the procession
separated, took up their places in line along the
palisade, serving as a guard to the lists.

After the procession had twice made the circuit of
the enclosure, doing obeisance to the queen of beauty,
the jester had possession of the field while the knights
retired to don their helmets (hitherto carried by their
esquires), and to await the challenge to combat. All
eyes were now bent upon the gorgeous clusters of
tents at either extremity of the oblong area; and in a
very few minutes the herald's trumpet sounded, and
the knight of the swan rode forth, having sent his defiance
to the knight of the golden lion. At another
blast of the trumpet they set their lances in rest, selected
opposite sides of the long fence or barrier running
lengthwise through the lists, and rode furiously
past each other, the fence of course preventing any
contact except that of their lances. This part of the
tournament (the essential part, one would think) was,
from the necessity of the case, the least satisfactory of
all. The knights, though they rode admirably, were
so oppressed by the weight of their armor, and so embarrassed
in their motions by the ill-adjusted joints,
that they were like men of wood, unable apparently
even to raise the lance from the thigh on which it
rested. I presume no one of them either saw where
he should strike his opponent, or had any power of
directing the weapon. As they rode close to the
fence, however, and a ten-foot pole sawed nearly off
in two or three places was laid crosswise on the legs

of each, it would be odd if they did not come in contact;
and the least shock of course splintered the lance
—in other words, finished what was begun by the carpenter's
saw. The great difficulty was to ride at all
under such a tremendous weight, and manage a horse
of spirit, totally unused both to the weight and the
clatter of his own and his rider's armor. I am sure
that Lord Eglinton's horse, for one, would have
bothered Ivanboe himself to “bring to the scratch;”
and Lord Waterford's was the only one that, for all
the fright he showed, might have been selected (as
they all should have been) for the virtue of having
peddled tin-ware. These two knights, by the way, ran
the best career, Lord Eglinton, malgre his bolter,
coming off the victor.

The rain, meantime, had increased to a deluge, the
queen of beauty sat shivering under an umbrella, the
jester's long ears were water-logged, and lay flat on
his shoulders, and everybody in my neighborhood had
expressed a wish for a dry seat and a glass of sherry.
The word “banquet” occurred frequently right and
left; hopes for “mulled wine or something hot before
dinner” stole from the lips of a mamma on the
seat behind; and there seemed to be but one chance
for the salvation of health predominant in the minds
of all, and that was drinking rather more freely than
usual at the approaching banquet. Judge what must
have been the astonishment, vexation, dread, and despair,
of the one thousand wet, shivering, and hungry
caudidates for the feast, when Lord Eglinton rode up
to the gallery unhelmeted, and delivered himself as
follows:—

“Ladies and gentlemen, I had hoped to have given
you all a good dinner; but to my extreme mortification
and regret, I am just informed that the rain has
penetrated the banqueting pavilions, and that, in consequence,
I shall only be able to entertain so many of
my friends as can meet around my ordinary table.”

About as uncomfortable a piece of intelligence, to
some nine hundred and sixty of his audience, as they
could have received, short of a sentence for their immediate
execution.

To comprehend fully the disastrous extent of the
disappointment in the principal gallery, it must be
taken into consideration that the domicils, fixed or
temporary, of the rejected sufferers, were from five to
twenty miles distant—a long ride at best, if begun on
the point of famishing, and in very thin and well-saturated
fancy dresses. Grievance the first, however,
was nothing to grievance the second; viz., that from
the tremendous run upon post-horses and horses of all
descriptions, during the three or four previous days,
the getting to the tournament was the utmost that
many parties could achieve. The nearest baithing-place
was several miles off; and in compassion to the
poor beasts, and with the weather promising fair on
their arrival, most persons had consented to take
their chance for the quarter of a mile from the lists to
the castle, and had dismissed their carriages with
orders to return at the close of the banquet and ball
—daylight the next morning! The castle, everybody
knew, was crammed, from “donjon-keep to turret-top.”
with the relatives and intimate friends of the
noble earl, and his private table could accommodate
no more than these. To get home was the inevitable
alternative.

The rain poured in a deluge. The entire park was
trodden into a slough, or standing in pools of water—
carts, carriages, and horsemen, with fifty thousand
flying pedestrians, crowding every road and avenue.
How to get home with a carriage! How the deuce
to get home without one!

A gentleman, who had been sent out on the errand
of Noah's dove by a lady whose carriage and horses
were ordered at four the following morning, came
back with the mud up to his knees, and reported that
there was not a wheel-barrow to be had for love or
money. Afterthreading the crowd in every direction,
he had offered a large sum, in vain, for a one-horse
cart!

Night was coming on, meantime, very fast; but
absorbed by the distresses of the shivering groups
around me, I had scarce remembered that my own invitation
was but to the banquet and ball—and my
dinner, consequently, nine miles off, at Ardrossan.
Thanking Heaven, that, at least, I had no ladies to
share my evening's pilgrimage, I followed the queen
of beauty down the muddy and slippery staircase, and,
when her majesty had stepped into her carriage, I
stepped over ankles in mud and water, and began my
wade toward the castle.

Six hours of rain, and the trampling of such an immense
multitude of men and horses, had converted
the soft and moist sod and soil of the park into a deep
and most adhesive quagmire. Glancing through the
labyrinth of vehicles on every side, and seeing men
and horses with their feet completely sunk below the
surface, I saw that there was no possibility of shying
the matter, and that wade was the word. I thought,
at first, that I had a claim for a little sympathy on the
score of being rather slenderly shod (the impalpable
sole of a pattern leather-boot being all that separated
me from the subsoil of the estate of Eglinton); but
overtaking, presently, a party of four ladies who had
lost several shoes in the mire, and were positively
wading on in silk stockings, I took patience to myself
from my advantage in the comparison, and thanked
fate for the thinnest sole with leather to keep it on.
The ladies I speak of were under the charge of a most
despairing-looking gentleman, but had neither cloak
nor umbrella, and had evidently made no calculations
for a walk. We differed in our choice of the two
sides of a slough, presently, and they were lost in the
crowd; but I could not help smiling, with all my pity
of their woes, to think what a turning up of prunella
shoes there will be, should Lord Eglinton ever plough
the chivalric field of the Tournament.

As I reached the castle, I got upon the Macadamised
road, which had the advantage of a bottom somewhere,
though it was covered with a liquid mud, of which
every passing foot gave you a spatter to the hips. My
exterior was by this time equally divided between
water and dirt, and I trudged on in comfortable fellowship
with farmers, coal-miners, and Scotch lasses—
envying very much the last, for they carried their
shoes in their hands, and held their petticoats, to say
the least, clear of the mud. Many a good joke they
seemed to have among them, but as they spoke in
Gaelic, it was lost on my Sassenach ears.

I had looked forward with a faint hope to a gingerbread
and ale-cart, which I remembered having seen
in the morning established near the terminus of the
railroad, trusting to refresh my strength and patience
with a glass of anything that goes under the generic
appellation of “summat;” but though the cart was
there, the gingerbread shelf was occupied by a row of
Scotch lasses, crouching together under cover from
the rain, and the pedlar assured me that “there wasna
a drap o' speerit to be got within ten mile o' the castle.”
One glance at the railroad, where a car with a single
horse was beset by some thousands of shoving and
fighting applicants, convinced me that I had a walk
of eight miles to finish my “purgation by” tournament;
and as it was getting too dark to trust to any
picking of the way, I took the middle of the rail-track,
and set forward.

Eight miles in a heavy rain, with boots of the consistence
of brown paper, and a road of alternate deep
mud and broken stone, should entitle one to the green

turban. I will make the pilgrimage of a Hadji from
the “farthest inn” with half the endurance.

I found my Liverpool friends over a mutton-chop
in the snug parlor of our host, and with a strong brew
of hot toddy, and many a laugh at the day's adventures
by land and water, we got comfortably to bed “somewhere
in the small hours.” And so ended the great
day of the tournament.

After witnessing the disasters of the first day, the
demolition of costumes, and the perils by water, of
masqueraders and spectators, it was natural to fancy
that the tournament was over. So did not seem to
think several thousands of newly-arrived persons,
pouring from steamer after steamer upon the pier of
Ardrossan, and in every variety of costume, from the
shepherd's maud to the courtier's satin, crowding to
the rail-cars for Eglinton. It appeared from the
chance remarks of one or two who came to our lodgings
to deposite their carpet-bags, that it had rained
very little in the places from which the steamers had
come, and that they had calculated on the second as
the great day of the joust. No dissuasion had the
least effect upon them, and away they went, bedecked
and merry, the sufferers of the day before looking out
upon them, from comfortable hotel and lodging, with
prophetic pity.

At noon the sky brightened; and as the cars were
running by this time with diminished loads, I parted
from my agreeable friends, and bade adieu to my
garret at Ardrossan. I was bound to Ireland, and my
road lay by Eglinton to Irvine and Ayr. Fellow-passengers
with me were twenty or thirty men in
Glengary bonnets, plaids, &c.; and I came in for my
share of the jeers and jokes showered upon them by
the passengers in the return-cars, as men bound on a
fruitless errand. As we neared the castle, the crowds
of people with disconsolate faces waiting for conveyances,
or standing by the reopened gingerbread carts
in listless idleness, convinced my companions, at last,
that there was nothing to be seen, for that day at least,
at Eglinton. I left them sitting in the cars, undecided
whether to go on or return without losing their places;
and seeing a coach marked “Irvine” standing in the
road, I jumped in without question or ceremony. It
belonged to a private party of gentlemen, who were to
visit the castle and tilting-ground on their way to
Irvine; and as they very kindly insisted on my remaining
after I had apologised for the intrusion, I
found myself “booked” for a glimpse of the second
day's attractions.

The avenue to the castle was as crowded as on the
day before; but it was curious to remark how the
general aspect of the multitude was changed by the
substitution of disappointment for expectation. The
lagging gait and surly silence, instead of the elastic
step and merry joke, seemed to have darkened the
scene more than the withdrawal of the sun, and I was
glad to wrap myself in my cloak, and remember that
I was on the wing. The banner flying at the castle
tower was the only sign of motion I could see in its
immediate vicinity; the sail-cloth coverings of the
pavilion were dark with wet; the fine sward was everywhere
disfigured with traces of mud, and the whole
scene was dismal and uncomfortable. We kept on to
the lists, and found them, as one of my companions
expressed it, more like a cattle-pen after a fair than a
scene of pleasure—trodden, wet, miry, and deserted.
The crowd, content to view them from a distance,
were assembled around the large booths on the ascent
of the rising ground toward the castle, where a band
was playing some merry reels, and the gingerbread
and ale venders plied a busy vocation. A look was
enough; and we shaped our course for Irvine, sympathizing
deeply with the disappointment of the high-spirited
and generous lord of the Tourney. I heard
at Irvine, and farther on, that the tilting would be re
newed, and the banquet and ball given on the succeeding
days; but after the wreck of dresses and peril of
health I had witnessed, I was persuaded that the best
that could be done would be but a slender patching
up of the original glories, as well as a halting rally of
the original spirits of the tournament. So I kept on
my way.

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL.

1. CHAPTER I.
LONDON.

There is an inborn and inbred distrust of “foreigners”
in England—continental foreigners, I should say
—which keeps the current of French and Italian society
as distinct amid the sea of London, as the blue
Rhone in Lake Leman. The word “foreigner,” in
England, conveys exclusively the idea of a dark-complexioned
and whiskered individual, in a frogged coat
and distressed circumstances; and to introduce a
smooth-cheeked, plainly-dressed, quiet-looking person
by that name, would strike any circle of ladies and
gentlemen as a palpable misnomer. The violent and
unhappy contrast between the Parisian's mode of life
in London and in Paris, makes it very certain that few
of those bien nés et convenablement riches will live in
London for pleasure; and then the flood of political
émigrés, for the last half century, has monopolised
hair-dressing, &c., &c., to such a degree, that the
word Frenchman is synonymous in English ears with
barber and dancing-master. If a dark gentleman,
wearing either whisker or mustache, chance of offend
John Bull in the street, the first opprobrious language
he hears—the strongest that occurs to the fellow's
mind—is, “Get out, you — Frenchman!”

All this, malgré the rage for foreign lions in London
society. A well-introduced foreigner gets easily into
this, and while he keeps his cabriolet and confines
himself to frequenting soirées and accepting invitations
to dine, he will never suspect that he is not on an
equal footing with any “milor” in London. If he
wishes to be disenchanted, he has only to change his
lodgings from Long's to Great Russell street; or (bitterer
and readier trial) to propose marriage to the
honorable Augusta or Lady Fanny.

Everybody who knows the society of Paris, knows
something of a handsome and very elegant young
baron of the Faubourg St. Germain, who, with small
fortune, very great taste, and greater credit, contrived
to go on very swimmingly as an adorable roué and
vaurien till he was hard upon twenty-five. At the
first crisis in his affairs, the ladies, who hold all the
politics in their laps, got him appointed consul to
Algiers, or minister to Venezuela, and with this pretty
pretext for selling his horses and dressing-gowns, these
cherished articles brought twice their original value,
saved his loyauté, and set him up in fans and monkeys
at his place of exile. A year of this was enough for
the darling of Paris, and not more than a day before
his desolate loves would have ceased to mourn for
him, he galloped into his hotel with a new fashion of
whiskers, a black female slave, and the most delicious
histories of his adventures during the ages he had
been exiled. Down to the earth and their previous
obscurity dropped the rivals who were just beginning
to usurp his glories. A new stud, an indescribable
vehicle, a suite of rooms à l'Africaine, and a mystery,
preserved at some expense, about his negress, kept all
Paris, including his new creditors, in admiring astonishment

for a year. Among the crowd of his worshippers,
not the last or least fervent, were the fair-haired
and glowing beauties who assemble at the levées of
their ambassador in the Rue St. Honoré, and upon
whom le beau Adolphe had looked as pretty savages,
whose frightful toilets and horrid French accent
might be tolerated one evening in the week—vu le
souper!

Eclipses will arrive as calculated by insignificant
astronomers, however, and debts will become due as
presumed by vulgar tradesmen. Le beau Adolphe
began to see another crisis, and betook himself to his
old advisers, who were desolés to the last degree; but
there was a new government, and the blood of the
Faubourg was at a discount. No embassies were to
be had for nothing. With a deep sigh, and a gentle
tone, to spare his feelings as much as possible, his
friend ventures to suggest to him that it will be necessary
to sacrifice himself.

“Ahi! mais comment!”

“Marry one of these bête Anglaises, who drink
you up with their great blue eyes, and are made of
gold!”

Adolphe buried his face in his gold-fringed oriental
pocket-handkerchief; but when the first agony was
passed, his resolution was taken, and he determined to
go to England. The first beautiful creature he should
see, whose funds were enormous and well-invested,
should bear away from all the love, rank, and poverty
of France, the perfumed hand he looked upon.

A flourishing letter, written in a small, cramped
hand, but with a seal on whose breadth of wax and
blazon all the united heraldry of France was interwoven,
arrived, through the ambassador's despatch
box, to the address of Miladi —, Belgrave square,
announcing, in full, that le beau Adolphe was coming
to London to marry the richest heiress in good society;
and as Paris could not spare him more than a
week, he wished those who had daughters to marry,
answering the description, to be bien prévenus of his
visit and errand. With the letter came a compend of
his genealogy, from the man who spoke French in the
confusion of Babel to le dit Baron Adolphe.

To London came the valet of le beau baron, two
days before his master, bringing his slippers and dressing-gown
to be aired after their sea-voyage across the
channel. To London followed the irresistible youth,
cursing, in the politest French, the necessity which
subtracted a week from a life measured with such
“diamond sparks” as his own in Paris. He sat himself
down in his hotel, sent his man Porphyre with his
card to every noble and rich house, whose barbarian
tenants he had ever seen in the Champs Elysées, and
waited the result. Invitations from fair ladies, who
remembered him as the man the French belles were
mad about, and from literary ladies, who wanted his
whiskers and black eyes to give their soirées the necessary
foreign complexion, flowed in on all sides, and
Monsieur Adolphe selected his most mignon cane and
his happiest design in a stocking, and “rendered himself”
through the rain like a martyr.

No offers of marriage the first evening!

None the second!!

None the third!!!

Le beau Adolphe began to think either that English
papas did not propose their daughters to people as in
France; or, perhaps, that the lady whom he had commissioned
to circulate his wishes had not sufficiently
advertised him. She had, however.

He took advice, and found it would be necessary to
take the first step himself. This was disagreeable,
and he said to himself, “Le jeu ne vaut pas le chandelle;”
but his youth was passing, and his English
fortune was at interest.

He went to Almack's and proposed to the first
authenticated fortune that accepted his hand for a
waltz. The young lady first laughed, and then told
her mother, who told her son, who thought it an insult,
and called out le beau Adolphe, very much to the
astonishment of himself and Porphyre. The thing
was explained, and the baron looked about the next
day for one pas si bête. Found a young lady with
half a million sterling, proposed in a morning call,
and was obliged to ring for assistance, his intended
having gone into convulsions with laughing at him.
The story by this time had got pretty well distributed
through the different strata of London society; and
when le beau Adolphe convinced that he would not
succeed with the noble heiresses of Belgrave square,
condescended, in his extremity, to send his heart by
his valet to a rich little vulgarian, who “never had a
grandfather,” and lived in Harley street, he narrowly
escaped being prosecuted for a nuisance, and, Paris
being now in the possession of the enemy, he buried
his sorrows in Belgium. After a short exile his friends
procured him a vice-consulate in some port in the
north sea, and there probably at this moment he sorrowfully
vegetates.

This is not a story founded upon fact, but literally
true. Many of the circumstances came under my own
observation; and the whole thus affords a laughable
example of the esteem in which what an English fox-hunter
would call a “trashy Frenchman” is held in
England, as well as of the travestie produced by transplanting
the usages of one country to another.

Ridiculous as any intimate mixture of English and
French ideas and persons seems to be in London, the
foreign society of itself in that capital is exceedingly
spiritual and agreeable. The various European embassies
and their attachés, with their distinguished
travellers, from their several countries, accidentally
belonging to each; the French and Italians, married
to English noblemen and gentry, and living in London,
and the English themselves, who have become
cosmopolite by residence in other countries, form a
very large society in which mix, on perfectly equal
terms, the first singers of the opera, and foreign musicians
and artists generally. This last circumstance
gives a peculiar charm to these reunions, though it
imparts a pride and haughty bearing to the prima
donna and her fraternity, which is, at least, sometimes
very inconvenient to themselves. The remark recalls
to my mind a scene I once witnessed in London,
which will illustrate the feeling better than an essay
upon it.

I was at one of those private concerts given at an
enormous expense during the opera season, at which
“assisted” Julia Grisi, Rubini, Lablache, Tamburini,
and Ivanhoff. Grisi came in the carriage of a foreign
lady of rank, who had dined with her, and she walked
into the room looking like an empress. She was
dressed in the plainest white, with her glossy hair put
smooth from her brow, and a single white japonica
dropped over one of her temples. The lady who
brought her chaperoned her during the evening, as if
she had been her daughter, and under the excitement
of her own table and the kindness of her friends, she
sung with a rapture and a freshet of glory (if one may
borrow a word from the Mississippi) which set all
hearts on fire. She surpassed her most applauded
hour on the stage—for it was worth her while. The
audience was composed, almost exclusively, of those
who are not only cultivated judges, but who sometimes
repay delight with a present of diamonds.

Lablache shook the house to its foundations in his
turn; Rubini ran through his miraculous compass
with the ease, truth, and melody, for which his singing
is unsurpassed; Tamburini poured his rich and even
fulness on the ear, and Russian Ivanhoff, the one
southern singing-bird who has come out of the north,
wire-drew his fine and spiritual notes, till they who had
been flushed, and tearful, and silent, when the others

had sang, drowned his voice in the poorer applause
of exclamation and surprise.

The concert was over by twelve, the gold and silver
paper bills of the performance were turned into fans, and
every one was waiting till supper should be announced
—the prima donna still sitting by her friend, but surrounded
by foreign attachés, and in the highest elation
at her own success. The doors of an inner suite of
rooms were thrown open at last, and Grisi's cordon of
admirers prepared to follow her in and wait on her at
supper. At this moment, one of the powdered menials
of the house stepped up and informed her very respectfully
that supper was prepared in a separate room for
the singers!

Medea, in her most tragic hour, never stood so
absolutely the picture of hate as did Grisi for a single
instant, in the centre of that aristocratic crowd. Her
chest swelled and rose, her lips closed over her snowy
teeth, and compressed till the blood left them, and, for
myself, I looked unconsciously to see where she would
strike. I knew, then, that there was more than fancy
—there was nature and capability of the real—in the
imaginary passions she plays so powerfully. A laugh
of extreme amusement at the scene from the highborn
woman who had accompanied her, suddenly
turned her humor, and she stopped in the midst of a
muttering of Italian, in which I could distinguish
only the terminations, and, with a sort of theatrical
quickness of transition, joined heartily in her mirth.
It was immediately proposed by this lady, however,
that herself and their particular circle should join the
insulted prima donna at the lower table, and they succeeded
by this manœuvre in retaining Rubini and the
others, who were leaving the house in a most unequivocal
Italian fury.

I had been fortunate enough to be included in the
invitation, and, with one or two foreign diplomatic
men, I followed Grisi and her amused friend to a
small room on a lower floor, that seemed to be the
housekeeper's parlor. Here supper was set for six
(including the man who had played the piano), and
on the side-table stood every variety of wine and fruit,
and there was nothing in the supper, at least, to make
us regret the table we had left. With a most imperative
gesture and rather an amusing attempt at
English, Grisi ordered the servants out of the room,
and locked the door, and from that moment the conversation
commenced and continued in their own
musical, passionate, and energetic Italian. My long
residence in that country had made me at home in it;
every one present spoke it fluently; and I had an
opportunity I might never have again, of seeing with
what abandonment these children of the sun throw
aside rank and distinction (yet without forgetting it),
and join with those who are their superiors in every
circumstance of life, in the gayeties of a chance hour.

Out of their own country these singers would probably
acknowledge no higher rank than that of the kind
and gifted lady who was their guest; yet, with the
briefest apology at finding the room too cold after the
heat of the concert, they put on their cloaks and hats
as a safeguard to their lungs (more valuable to them
than to others); and as most of the cloaks were the
worse for travel, and the hats opera-hats with two
corners, the grotesque contrast with the diamonds of
one lady, and the radiant beauty of the other, may
easily be imagined.

Singing should be hungry work, by the knife and
fork they played; and between the excavations of
truffle pies, and the bumpers of champagne and burgundy,
the words were few. Lablache appeared to be
an established droll, and every syllable he found time
to utter was received with the most unbounded laughter.
Rubini could not recover from the slight he conceived
put upon him and his profession by the separate table;
and he continually reminded Grisi, who by this time
had quite recovered her good humor, that, the night
before, supping at Devonshire house, the duke of
Wellington had held her gloves on one side, while his
grace, their host attended to her on the other.

“E vero!” said Ivanhoff, with a look of modest admiration
at the prima donna.

“E vero, e bravo!” cried Tamburini, with his sepulchral-talking
tone, much deeper than his singing.

“Si, si, si, bravo!” echoed all the company; and
the haughty and happy actress nodded all round with
a radiant smile, and repeated, in her silver tones,
“Grazie! cari amici! grazie!”

As the servants had been turned out, the removalof
the first course was managed in pic-nic fashion;
and when the fruit and fresh bottles of wine were set
upon the table by the attachés, and younger gentlemen,
the health of the princess who honored them by
her presence was proposed in that language, which, it
seems to me, is more capable than all others of expressing
affectionate and respectful devotion. All uncovered
and stood up, and Grisi, with tears in her eyes,
kissed the hand of her benefactress and friend, and
drank her health in silence.

It is a polite and common accomplishment in Italy
to improvise in verse, and the lady I speak of is well
known among her immediate friends for a singular
facility in this beautiful art. She reflected a moment
or two with the moisture in her eyes, and then commenced,
low and soft, a poem, of which it would be
difficult, nay impossible, to convey, in English, an
idea of its music and beauty. It took us back to Italy,
to its heavenly climate, its glorious arts, its beauty and
its ruins, and concluded with a line of which I remember
the sentiment to have been, “out of Italy every
land is exile!”

The glasses were raised as she ceased, and every
one repeated after her, “Fuori d'Italia tutto e esilio!”

“Ma!” cried out the fat Lablache, holding up his
glass of champagne, and looking through it with one
eye, “siamo ben esiliati qua!” and, with a word of
drollery, the party recovered its gayer tone, and the
humor and wit flowed on brilliantly as before.

The house had long been still, and the last carriage
belonging to the company above stairs had rolled from
the door, when Grisi suddenly remembered a bird that
she had lately bought, of which she proceeded to give
us a description, that probably penetrated to every
corner of the silent mansion. It was a mocking-bird,
that had been kept two years in the opera-house, and
between rehearsal and performance had learned parts
of everything it had overheard. It was the property
of the woman who took care of the wardrobes. Grisi
had accidentally seen it, and immediately purchased
it for two guineas. How much of embellishment there
was in her imitations of her treasure I do not know;
but certainly the whole power of her wondrous voice,
passion, and knowledge of music, seemed drunk up at
once in the wild, various, difficult, and rapid mixture
of the capricious melody she undertook. First came,
without the passage which it usually terminates, the
long, throat-down, gurgling, water-toned trill, in which
Rubini (but for the bird and its mistress, it seemed to
me) would have been inimitable: then, right upon it,
as if it were the beginning of a bar, and in the most
unbreathing continuity, followed a brilliant passage
from the Barber of Seville, run into the passionate
prayer of Anna Bolena in her madness, and followed
by the air of “Suoni la tromba intrepida,” the tremendous
duet in the Puritani, between Tamburini and
Lablache. Up to the sky, and down to the earth
again—away with a note of the wildest gladness, and
back upon a note of the most touching melancholy—
if the bird but half equals the imitation of his mistress,
he were worth the jewel in a sultan's turban.

“Giulia!” “Giulietta!” “Giuliettina!” cried out
one and another, as she ceased, expressing in their

Italian diminutives, the love and delight she had inspired
by her incomparable execution.

The stillness of the house in the occasional pauses
of conversation reminded the gay party, at last, that it
was wearing late. The door was unlocked, and the
half-dozen sleepy footmen hanging about the hall were
despatched for the cloaks and carriages; the drowsy
porter was roused from his deep leathern dormeuse,
and opened the door—and broad upon the street lay
the cold gray light of a summer's morning. I declined
an offer to be set down by a friend's cab, and strolled
off to Hyde Park to surprise myself with a sunrise;
balancing the silent rebuke in the fresh and healthy
countenances of early laborers going to their toil,
against the effervescence of a champagne hour, which,
since such come so rarely, may come, for me, with
what untimeliness they please.

2. CHAPTER II.
THE STREETS OF LONDON.

It has been said, that “few men know how to take
a walk.” In London it requires some experience to
know where to take a walk. The taste of the perambulator,
the hour of the day, and the season of the
year, would each affect materially the decision of the
question.

If you are up early—I mean early for London—say
ten o'clock—we would start from your hotel in Bond
street, and hastening through Regent street and the
Quadrant (deserts at that hour), strike into the zigzag
of thronged alleys, cutting traversely from Coventry
street to Covent Garden. The horses on the cabstand
in the Haymarket “are at this hour asleep.”
The late supper-eaters at Dubourg's and the Café de
l'Europe were the last infliction upon their galled
withers, and while dissipation slumbers they may find
an hour to hang their heads upon the bit, and forget
gall and spavin in the sunshiny drowse of morning.
The cabman, too, nods on his perch outside, careless
of the custom of “them as pays only their fare,” and
quite sure not to get “a gemman to drive” at that unseasonable
hour. The “waterman” (called a “water
man,” as he will tell you, “because he gives hay to
the 'orses”) leans against the gas-lamp at the corner,
looking with a vacant indifference of habit at the
splendid coach with its four blood bays just starting from
the Brighton coach-office in the Crescent. The side-walk
of Coventry street, usually radiant with the
flaunting dresses of the fail and vicious, is now sober
with the dull habiliments of the early-stirring and the
poor. The town (for this is town, not city) beats its
more honest pulse. Industry alone is abroad.

Rupert street on the left is the haunt of shabby-genteel
poverty. To its low-doored chop-houses steal
the more needy loungers of Regent street, and in confined
and greasy, but separate and exclusive boxes,
they cat their mutton-chop and potato, unseen of their
gayer acquaintances. Here comes the half-pay officer,
whose half-pay is halved or quartered with wife
and children, to drink his solitary half-pint of sherry,
and over a niggardly portion of soup and vegetables,
recall, as well as he may in imagination, the gay dinners
at mess, and the companions now grown cold—in
death or worldliness! Here comes the sharper out
of luck, the debtor newly out of prison. And here
comes many a “gay fellow about town,” who will dine
to-morrow, or may have dined yesterday, at a table of
unsparing luxury, but who now turns up Rupert street
at seven, cursing the mischance that draws upon his
own slender pocket for the dinner of to-day. Here
are found the watchful host and the suspicious waiter
—the closely-measured wine, and the more closely-
measured attention—the silent and shrinking company,
the close-drawn curtain, the suppressed call for
the bill, the lingering at the table of those who value
the retreat and the shelter to recover from the embarrassing
recognition and the objectless saunter through
the streets. The ruin, the distress, the despair, that
wait so closely upon the heels of fashion, pass here
with their victims. It is the last step within the
bounds of respectability. They still live “at the West
end,” while they dine in Rupert street. They may
still linger in the park, or stroll in Bond street, till
their better-fledged friends flit to dinner at the clubs,
and within a stone's throw of the luxurious tables and
the gay mirth they so bitterly remember, sit down to
an ill-dressed meal, and satisfy the calls of hunger in
silence. Ah, the outskirts of the bright places in life
are darker for the light that shines so near them!
How much sweeter is the coarsest meal shared with
the savage in the wilderness, than the comparative
comfort of cooked meats and wine in a neighborhood
like this!

Come through this narrow lane into Leicester
square. You cross here the first limit of the fashionable
quarter. The Sablonière hotel is in this square;
but you may not give it as your address unless you
are a foreigner. This is the home of that most miserable
fish out of water—a Frenchman in London.
A bad French hotel, and two or three execrable
French restaurants, make this spot of the metropolis
the most habitable to the exiled habitué of the Palais
Royal. Here he gets a mocking imitation of what, in
any possible degree, is better than the sacré biftek, or
the half-raw mutton-chop and barbarous boiled potato!
Here he comes forth, if the sunshine perchance for
one hour at noon, and paces up and down on the side-walk,
trying to get the better of his bile and his bad
breakfast. Here waits for him at three, the shabby,
but most expensive remise cab, hired by the day for
as much as would support him a month in Paris.
Leicester square is the place for conjurors, bird-fanciers,
showmen, and generally for every foreign
novelty in the line of nostrums and marvels. If there
is a dwarf in London, or a child with two heads, or a
learned pig, you will see one or all in that building, so
radiant with placards, and so thronged with beggars.

Come on through Cranbourne alley. Old clothes,
second-hand stays, idem shawls, capes, collars, and
ladies' articles of ornamental wear generally: cheap
straw-bonnets, old books, gingerbread, and stationery!
Look at this once-expensive and finely-worked muslin
cape! What fair shoulders did it adorn when these
dingy flowers were new—when this fine lace-edging
bounded some heaving bosom, perhaps, like frost-work
on the edge of a snow-drift. It has been the property
of some minion of elegance and wealth, vicious or virtuous,
and by what hard necessity came it here? Ten
to one, could it speak, its history would keep us standing
at this shop window, indifferent alike to the curious
glances of these passing damsels and the gentle
eloquence of the Jew on the other side, who pays us
the unflattering compliment of suggesting an improvement
in our toilet by the purchase of the half-worn
habiliments he exposes.

I like Cranbourne alley, because it reminds me of
Venice. The half-daylight between the high and
overhanging roofs, the just audible hum of voices and
occupation from the different shops, the shuffling of
hasty feet over the smooth flags, and particularly the
absence of horses and wheels, make it (in all but the
damp air and the softer speech) a fair resemblance to
those close passages in the rear of the canals between
St. Mark's and the Rialto. Then I like studying a
pawnbroker's window, and I like ferreting in the old
book-stalls that abound here. It is a good lesson in
humility for an author to see what he can be bought
for in Cranbourne alley. Some “gentle reader,” who

has paid a guinea and a half for you, has resold you
for two-and-sixpence. For three shillings you may
have the three volumes, “as good as new,” and the
shopman, by his civility, pleased to be rid of it on the
terms. If you would console yourself, however, buy
Milton for one-and-sixpence, and credit your vanity
with the eighteen-pence of the remainder.

The labyrinth of alleys between this and Covent
Garden, are redolent of poverty and pot-houses. In
crossing St. Martin's lane, life appears to have become
suddenly a struggle and a calamity. Turbulent
and dirty women are everywhere visible through the
open windows: the half-naked children at the doors
look already care-worn and incapable of a smile; and
the men throng the gin-shops, bloated, surly, and repulsive.
Hurry through this leprous spot in the vast
body of London, and let us emerge in the Strand.

You would think London Strand the main artery
of the world. I suppose there is no thoroughfare on
the face of the earth where the stream of human life
runs with a tide so overwhelming. In any other
street in the world you catch the eye of the passer-by.
In the Strand, no man sees another except as a solid
body, whose contact is to be avoided. You are safe
nowhere on the pavement without all the vigilance of
your senses. Omnibuses and cabs, drays, carriages,
wheelbarrows, and porters, beset the street. Newspaper-hawkers,
pickpockets, shop-boys, coal-heavers,
and a perpetual and selfish crowd dispute the sidewalk.
If you venture to look at a print in a shop-window,
you arrest the tide of passengers, who immediately
walk over you; and, if you stop to speak with a friend,
who by chance has run his nose against yours rather
than another man's, you impede the way, and are
made to understand it by the force of jostling. If you
would get into an omnibus you are quarrelled for by
half-a-dozen who catch your eye at once, and after
using all your physical strength and most of your discrimination,
you are most probably embarked in the
wrong one, and are going at ten miles the hour to
Blackwell, when you are bound to Islington. A
Londoner passes his life in learning the most adroit
mode of threading a crowd, and escaping compulsory
journeys in cabs and omnibuses; and dine with any
man in that metropolis from twenty-five to sixty years
of age, and he will entertain you, from the soup to the
Curacoa, with his hair-breadth escapes and difficulties
with cads and coach-drivers.

3. CHAPTER III.
LONDON.

A Londoner, if met abroad, answers very vaguely
any questions you may be rash enough to put to him
about “the city.” Talk to him of “town,” and he
would rather miss seeing St. Peter's, than appear ignorant
of any person, thing, custom, or fashion, concerning
whom or which you might have a curiosity.
It is understood all over the world that the “city” of
London is that crowded, smoky, jostling, omnibus and
cab-haunted portion of the metropolis of England
which lies east of Temple Bar. A kind of debatable
country, consisting of the Strand, Covent Garden, and
Tottenham Court road, then intervenes, and west of
these lies what is called “the town.” A transit from
one to the other by an inhabitant of either is a matter
of some forethought and provision. If milord, in
Carlton Terrace, for example, finds it necessary to
visit his banker in Lombard street, he orders—not the
blood bay and the cane tilbury which he is wont to
drive in the morning—but the crop roadster in the
cab, with the night harness, and Poppet his tiger in
plain hat and gaiters. If the banker in Lombard
street, on the contrary, emerges from the twilight of
his counting-house to make a morning call on the
wife of some foreign correspondent, lodging at the
Clarendon, he steps into a Piccadilly omnibus, not in
the salt-and-pepper creations of his Cheapside tailor,
but (for he has an account with Stultz also for the
west-end business) in a claret-colored frock of the last
fashion at Crockford's, a fresh hat from New Bond
street, and (if he is young) a pair of cherished boots
from the Rue St. Honoré. He sits very clear of his
neighbors on the way, and, getting out at the crossing
at Farrance's, the pastry cook, steps in and indulges
in a soup, and then walks slowly past the clubs to his
rendezvous, at a pace that would ruin his credit irrevocably
if practised a mile to the eastward. The difference
between the two migrations is, simply, that
though the nobleman affects the plainness of the city;
he would not for the world be taken for a citizen;
while the junior partner of the house of Firkins and
Co. would feel unpleasantly surprised if he were not
supposed to be a member of the clubs, lounging to a
late breakfast.

There is a “town” manner, too, and a “city” manner,
practised with great nicety by all who frequent
both extremities of London. Nothing could be in
more violent contrast, for example, than the manner
of your banker when you dine with him at his country-house,
and the same person when you meet him
on the narrow sidewalk in Throgmorton street. If you
had seen him first in his suburban retreat, you would
wonder how the deuce such a cordial, joyous, spare-nothing
sort of good fellow could ever reduce himself
to the cautious proportions of Change alley. If you
met him first in Change alley, on the contrary, you
would wonder, with quite as much embarrassment,
how such a cold, two-fingered, pucker-browed slave
of mammon could ever, by any license of interpretation,
be called a gentleman. And when you have
seen him in both places, and know him well, if he is
a favorable specimen of his class, you will be astonished
still more to see how completely he will sustain
both characters—giving you the cold shoulder, in a
way that half insults you, at twelve in the morning,
and putting his home, horses, cellar, and servants,
completely at your disposal at four in the afternoon.
Two souls inhabit the banker's body, and each is apparently
sole tenant in turn. As the Hampstead early
coach turns the corner by St. Giles's, on its way to
the bank, the spirit of gain enters into the bosom of
the junior Firkins, ejecting, till the coach passes the
same spot at three in the afternoon, the more gentlemanly
inhabitants. Between those hours, look to
Firkins for no larger sentiment than may be written
upon the blank lines of a note of hand, and expect no
courtesy that would occupy the head or hands of the
junior partner longer than one second by St. Paul's.
With the broad beam of sunshine that inundates the
returning omnibus emerging from Holborn into Tottenham
Court road, the angel of port wine and green
fields passes his finger across Firkins's brow, and
presto! the man is changed. The sight of a long
and narrow strip of paper, sticking from his neighbor's
pocket, depreciates that person in his estimation, he
criticises the livery and riding of the groom trotting
past, says some very true things of the architecture of
the new cottage on the roadside, and is landed at the
end of his own shrubbery, as pleasant and joyous-looking
a fellow as you would meet on that side of
London. You have ridden out to dine with him, and
as he meets you on the lawn, there is still an hour to
dinner, and a blood horse spatters round from the stables,
which you are welcome to drive to the devil if
you like, accompanied either by Mrs. Firkins or himself;
or, if you like it better, there are Mrs. Firkins's
two ponies, and the chaise holds two and the tiger.
Ten to one Mrs. Firkins is a pretty woman, and has

her whims, and when you are fairly on the road, she
proposes to leave the soup and champagne at home
to equalize their extremes of temperature, drive to
Whitehall Stairs, take boat and dine, extempore, at
Richmond. And Firkins, to whom it will be at least
twenty pounds out of pocket, claps his hands and
says—“By Jove, it's a bright thought! touch up the
near pony, Mrs. Firkins.” And away you go, Firkins
amusing himself the whole way from Hampstead to
Richmond, imagining the consternation of his cook
and butler when nobody comes to dine.

There is an aristocracy in the city, of course, and
Firkins will do business with twenty persons in a day
whom he could never introduce to Mrs. Firkins. The
situation of that lady with respect to her society is
(she will tell you in confidence) rather embarrassing.
There are many very worthy persons, she will say,
who represent large sums of money or great interests
in trade, whom it is necessary to ask to the Lodge,
but who are far from being ornamental to her new
blue satin boudoir. She has often proposed to Firkins
to have them labelled in tens and thousands according
to their fortunes; that if, by any unpleasant
accident, Lord Augustus should meet them there, he
might respect them like = in algebra, for what they
stand for. But as it is, she is really never safe in calculating
on a societé choisie to dine or sup. When
Hook or Smith is just beginning to melt out, or Lady
Priscilla is in the middle of a charade, in walks Mr.
Snooks, of the foreign house of Snooks, Son, and
Co.—“unexpectedly arrived from Lisbon, and run
down without ceremony to call on his respectable correspondent.”

“Isn't it tiresome?”

“Very, my dear madam! But then you have the
happiness of knowing that you promote very essentially
your husband's interests, and when he has made
a plum —”

“Yes, very true; and then, to be sure, Firkins has
had to build papa a villa, and buy my brother Wilfred
a commission, and settle an annuity on my aunt, and
fit out my youngest brother Bob to India; and when I
think of what he does for my family, why I don't mind
making now and then a sacrifice; but, after all, it's a
great evil not to be able to cultivate one's own class
of society.”

And so murmurs Mrs. Firkins, who is the prettiest
and sweetest creature in the world, and really loves
the husband she married for his fortune; but as the
prosperity of Haman was nothing while Mordecai sat
at the gate, it is nothing to Mrs. Firkins that her father
lives in luxury, that her brothers are portioned
off, and that she herself can have blue boudoirs and
pony-chaises ad libitum, while Snooks, Son, and Co.,
may at any moment break in upon the charade of
Lady Priscilla!

There is a class of business people in London,
mostly bachelors, who have wisely declared themselves
independent of the West End, and live in a style of
their own in the dark courts and alleys about the Exchange,
but with a luxury not exceeded even in the
silken recesses of May Fair. You will sometimes
meet at the opera a young man of decided style, unexceptionable
in his toilet, and quiet and gentleman-like
in his address, who contents himself with the side
alley of the pit, and looks at the bright circles of beauty
and fashion about him with an indifference it is difficult
to explain. Make his acquaintance by chance,
and he takes you home to supper in a plain chariot on
the best springs Long Acre can turn out; and while
you are speculating where, in the name of the prince
of darkness, these narrow streets will bring you to,
you are introduced through a small door into saloons,
perfect in taste and luxury, where, ten to one, you sup
with the prima donna, or la première danseuse, but
certainly with the most polished persons of your own
sex, not one of whom, though you may have passed a
life in London, you ever met in society before. There
are, I doubt not, in that vast metropolis, hundreds of
small circles of society, composed thus of persons
refined by travel and luxury, whose very existence is
unsuspected by the fine gentleman at the West End,
but who, in the science of living agreeably, are almost
as well entitled to rank among the cognoscenti as Lord
Sefton or the “member for Finsbury.”

4. CHAPTER IV.
LONDON.

You return from your ramble in “the city” by two
o'clock. A bright day “toward,” and the season in
its palmy time. The old veterans are just creeping
out upon the portico of the United Service club, having
crammed “The Times” over their late breakfast,
and thus prepared their politics against surprise for
the day; the broad steps of the Athenæum are as yet
unthronged by the shuffling feet of the literati, whose
morning is longer and more secluded than that of idler
men, but who will be seen in swarms, at four, entering
that superb edifice in company with the employés and
politicians who affect their society. Not a cab stands
yet at the “Travellers,” whose members, noble or
fashionable, are probably at this hour in their dressing-gowns
of brocade or shawl of the orient, smoking
a hookah over Balzac's last romance, or pursuing at
this (to them) desert time of day some adventure which
waited upon their love and leisure. It is early yet for
the park; but the equipages you will see by-and-by
“in the ring” are standing now at Howell and James's,
and while the high-bred horses are fretting at the
door, and the liveried footmen lean on their gold-headed
sticks on the pavement, the fair creature whose
slightest nod these trained minions and their fine-limbed
animals live to obey, sits upon a three-legged
stool within, and in the voice which is a spell upon all
hearts, and with eyes to which rank and genius turn
like Persians to the sun, discusses with a pert clerk
the quality of stockings!

Look at these equipages and their appointments!
Mark the exquisite balance of that claret-bodied chariot
upon its springs—the fine sway of its sumptuous hammer-cloth
in which the un-smiling coachman sits
buried to the middle—the exact fit of the saddles, setting
into the curve of the horses' backs so as not break,
to the most careless eye, the fine lines which exhibit
action and grace! See how they stand together,
alert, fiery, yet obedient to the weight of a silken
thread; and as the coachman sees you studying his
turn-out, observe the imperceptible feel of the reins
and the just-visible motion of his lips, conveying to
the quick ears of his horses the premonitory, and, to
us, inaudible sound, to which, without drawing a
hair's breadth upon the traces, they paw their fine
hoofs, and expand their nostrils impatiently! Come
nearer, and find a speck or a raised hair, if you can,
on these glossy coats! Observe the nice fitness of
the dead-black harness, the modest crest upon the
panel, the delicate picking out of white in the wheels,
and, if you will venture upon a freedom in manners,
look in through the window of rose-teinted glass, and
see the splendid cushions and the costly and perfect
adaptation of the interior. The twinmated footmen
fly to the carriage-door, and the pomatumed clerk who
has enjoyed a tête-à-tête for which a prince-royal might
sigh, and an ambassador negotiate in vain, hands in
his parcel. The small foot presses on the carpeted
step, the airy vehicle yields lightly and recovers from
the slight weight of the descending form, the coachman
inclines his ear for the half-suppressed order

from the footman, and off whirls the admirable structure,
compact, true, steady, but magically free and
fast—as if horses, footmen, and chariot were but the
parts of some complicated centaur—some swift-moving
monster upon legs and wheels!

Walk on a little farther to the Quadrant. Here
commences the most thronged promenade in London.
These crescent colonnades are the haunt of foreigners
on the lookout for amusement, and of strangers in the
metropolis generally. You will seldom find a town-bred
man there, for he prefers haunting his clubs; or,
if he is not a member of them, he avoids lounging
much in the Quadrant, lest he should appear to have
no other resort. You will observe a town dandy
getting fidgety after his second turn in the Quadrant,
while you will meet the same Frenchman there from
noon till dusk, bounding his walk by those columns as
if they were the bars of a cage. The western side
toward Piccadilly is the thoroughfare of the honest
passer-by; but under the long portico opposite, you
will meet vice in every degree, and perhaps more
beauty than on any other pavé in the world. It is
given up to the vicious and their followers by general
consent. To frequent it, or to be seen loitering there
at all, is to make but one impression on the mind of
those who may observe you.

The two sides of Regent street continue to partake
of this distinction to the end. Go up on the left, and
you meet the sober citizen perambulating with his
wife, the lady followed by her footman, the grave and
the respectable of all classes. Go up on the other,
and in color and mien it is the difference between a
grass-walk and a bed of tulips. What proof is here
that beauty is dangerous to its possessor! It is said
commonly of Regent street, that it shows more beauty
in an hour than could be found in all the capitals of
the continent. It is the beauty, however, of brilliant
health—of complexion and freshness, more than of
sentiment or classic correctness. The English features,
at least in the middle and lower ranks, are seldom
good, though the round cheek, the sparkling lip, the
soft blue eyes and hair of dark auburn, common as
health and youth, produce the effect of high and almost
universal beauty on the eye of the stranger. The
rarest thing in these classes is a finely-turned limb,
and to the clumsiness of their feet and ankles must be
attributed the want of grace usually remarked in their
movements.

Regent street has appeared to me the greatest and
most oppressive solitude in the world. In a crowd of
business men, or in the thronged and mixed gardens
of the continent, the pre-occupation of others is less
attractive, or at least, more within our reach, if we
would share in it. Here, it is wealth beyond competition,
exclusiveness and indifference perfectly unapproachable.
In the cold and stern mien of the
practised Londoner, it is difficult for a stranger not to
read distrust, and very difficult for a depressed mind
not to feel a marked repulsion. There is no solitude,
after all, like the solitude of cities.

“O dear, dear London” (says the companion of
Asmodeus on his return from France), “dear even in
October! Regent street, I salute you! Bond street,
my good fellow, how are you? And you, oh, beloved
Oxford street, whom the opium-eater called `stony-hearted,'
and whom I, eating no opium, and speaking
as I find, shall ever consider the most kindly and maternal
of all streets—the street of the middle classes—
busy without uproar, wealthy without ostentation.
Ah, the pretty ankles that trip along thy pavement!
Ah! the odd country-cousin bonnets that peer into
thy windows, which are lined with cheap yellow shawls,
price one pound four shillings, marked in the corner!
Ah! the brisk young lawyers flocking from their quarters
at the back of Holborn! Ah! the quiet old ladies,
living in Duchess street, and visiting thee with their
eldest daughters in the hope of a bargain! Ah, the
bumpkins from Norfolk just disgorged by the Bull and
Mouth—the soldiers—the milliners—the Frenchmen
—the swindlers—the porters with four-post beds on
their backs, who add the excitement of danger to that of
amusement! The various shifting, motley group that
belong to Oxford street, and Oxford street alone! What
thoroughfares equal thee in the variety of human
specimens! in the choice of objects for remark, satire,
admiration! Besides, the other streets seem chalked
out for a sect—narrow-minded and devoted to a coterie.
Thou alone art catholic—all-receiving. Regent street
belongs to foreigners, cigars, and ladies in red silk,
whose characters are above scandal. Bond street belongs
to dandies and picture-dealers. St. James's
street to club loungers and young men in the guards,
with mustaches properly blackened by the cire of
Mr. Delcroix; but thou, Oxford street, what class can
especially claim thee as its own? Thou mockest at
oligarchies; thou knowest nothing of select orders!
Thou art liberal as air—a chartered libertine; accepting
the homage of all, and retaining the stamp of
none. And to call thee `stony-hearted!'—certainly
thou art so to beggars—to people who have not the
WHEREWITHAL. But thou wouldst not be so respectable
if thou wert not capable of a certain reserve to
paupers. Thou art civil enough, in all conscience,
to those who have a shilling in their pocket—those
who have not, why do they live at all?”

5. CHAPTER V.
LONDON.

It is near four o'clock, and in Bond street you
might almost walk on the heads of livery-servants—
at every stride stepping over the heads of two ladies
and a dandy exclusive. Thoroughfare it is none, for
the carriages are creeping on, inch by inch, the blood-horses
“marking time,” the coachman watchful for
his panels and whippletrees, and the lady within her
silken chariot, lounging back, with her eyes upon the
passing line, neither impatient nor surprised at the
delay, for she came there on purpose. Between the
swaying bodies of the carriages, hesitating past, she
receives the smiles and recognitions of all her male
acquaintances; while occasionally a female ally (for
allies against the rest of the sex are as necessary in
society to women, as in war to monarchs)—occasionally,
I say, a female ally announced by the crest upon
the blinker of an advancing horse, arrives opposite her
window, and, with only the necessary delay in passing,
they exchange, perhaps, inquiries for health, but, certainly,
programmes, comprehensive though brief, for
the prosecution of each other's loves or hates. Occasionally
a hack cab, seduced into attempting Bond
street by some momentary opening, finds itself closed
in, forty deep, by chariots, butckas, landaus, and family
coaches; and amid the imperturbable and unanswering
whips of the hammercloth, with a passenger
who is losing the coach by the delay, he must wait,
will-he-nill-he, till some “pottering” dowager has
purchased the old lord his winter flannels, or till the
countess of Loiter has said all she has to say to the
guardsman whom she has met accidentally at Pluck-rose,
the perfumer's. The three tall fellows, with
gold sticks, would see the entire plebeian population
of London thrice-sodden in vitriol, before they would
advance miladi's carriage a step, or appear to possess
eyes or ears for the infuriated cabman.

Bond street, at this hour, is a study for such observers,
as, having gone through an apprenticeship of
criticism upon all the other races and grades of men
and gentlemen in the world, are now prepared to study

their species in its highest fashionable phase—that of
“nice persons” at the West End. The Oxford-street
“swell,” and the Regent-street dandy, if seen here,
are out of place. The expressive word “quiet” (with
its present London signification), defines the dress,
manner, bow, and even physiognomy, of every true
denizen of St. James's and Bond street. The great
principle among men of the clubs, in all these particulars,
is to subdue—to deprive their coats, hats, and
manners, of everything sufficiently marked to be caricatured
by the satirical or imitated by the vulgar.
The triumph of style seems to be that the lines which
define it shall be imperceptible to the common eye—
that it shall require the difficult education which creates
it to know its form and limit. Hence an almost
universal error with regard to English gentlemen—
that they are repulsive and cold. With a thousand
times the heart and real politeness of the Frenchman,
they meet you with the simple and unaffected address
which would probably be that of shades in Elysium,
between whom (we may suppose) there is no longer
etiquette or concealment. The only exceptions to
this rule in London, are, first and alone, Count—,
whose extraordinary and original style, marked as it
is, is inimitable by any man of less brilliant talents
and less beauty of person, and the king's guardsmen,
who are dandies by prescriptive right, or, as it were,
professionally. All other men who are members of
Brooks's and the Traveller's, and frequent Bond street
in the flush of the afternoon, are what would be called
in America, plain, unornamental, and, perhaps, ill-dressed
individuals, who would strike you more by the
absence than the possession of all the peculiarities
which we generally suppose marks a “picked man of
countries.” In America, particularly, we are liable to
error on this point, as, of the great number of our
traveliers for improvement, scarce one in a thousand
remains longer in London than to visit the tower and
the Thames tunnel. The nine hundred and ninety-nine
reside principally, and acquire all they get of foreign
manner and style, at Paris—the very most artificial,
corrupt, and affected school for gentlemen in the
polite world.

Prejudice against any one country is an illiberal
feeling, which common reflection should, and which
enlightened travel usually does, entirely remove.
There is a vulgar prejudice against the English in
almost all countries, but more particularly in ours,
which blinds its entertainers to much that is admirable,
and deprives them of the good drawn from the
best models. The troop of scurrilous critics, the class
of English bagmen, and errant vulgarians of all kinds,
and the industriously-blown coals of old hostilities,
are barriers which an educated mind may well overlook,
and barriers beyond which lie, no doubt, the best
examples of true civilization and refinement the world
ever saw. But we are getting into an essay when we
should be turning down Bruton street, on our way to
the park, with all the fashion of Bond street and May
Fair.

May Fair! what a name for the core of dissipated
and exclusive London! A name that brings with it
only the scent of crushed flowers in a green field, of a
pole wreathed with rose, booths crowded with dancing
peasant-girls, and nature in its holyday! This—to
express the costly, the courtlike, the so-called “heartless”
precinct of fashion and art, in their most authentic
and envied perfection. Mais, les extrêmes se touchent,
and, perhaps, there is more nature in May Fair
than in Rose Cottage or Honeysuckle Lodge.

We stroll on through Berkeley square, by Chesterfield
and Curzon streets to the park gate. What an
aristocratic quiet regins here! How plain are the exteriors
of these houses: how unexpressive these doors,
without a name, of the luxury and high-born pride
within! At the open window of the hall sit the butler
and footman, reading the morning paper, while they
wait to dispense the “not at home” to callers not disappointed.
The rooks are noisy in the old trees of
Chesterfield house. The painted window-screens of
the probably still-slumbering Count —, in his bachelor's
den, are closely drawn, and, as we pass Seymour
place, a crowd of gay cabs and diplomatic chariots,
drawn up before the dark-green door at the farther extremity,
announce to you the residence of one whose
morning and evening levées are alike thronged by distinction
and talent—the beautiful Lady —.

This short turn brings us to the park, which is rapidly
filling with vehicles of every fashion and color,
and with pedestrians and horsemen innumerable. No
hackney-coach, street-cab, cart, or pauper, is allowed
to pass the porters at the several gates: the road is
macadamized and watered, and the grass within the
ring is fresh and verdant. The sun here triumphs
partially over the skirt of London smoke, which sways
backward and forward over the chimneys of Park lane,
and, as far as it is possible so near the dingy halo of
the metropolis, the gay occupants of these varied conveyances
“take the air.”

Let us stand by the railing a moment, and see what
comes by. This is the field of display for the coachman,
who sits upon his sumptuous hammercloth,
and takes more pride in his horses than their owner,
and considers them, if not like his own honor and
blood, very like his own property. Watch the delicate
handling of his ribands, the affected nonchalance of
his air, and see how perfectly, how admirably, how
beautifully, move his blood horses, and how steadily
and well follows the compact carriage! Within (it is
a dark-green calêche, and the liveries are drab, with
red edgings) sits the oriental form and bright spiritual
face of a banker's wife, the daughter of a noble race,
who might have been, but was not, sacrificed in “marrying
into the finance,” and who soars up into the sky
of happiness, like the unconscious bird that has escaped
the silent arrow of the savage, as if her destiny
could not but have been thus fulfilled. Who follows?
D'Israeli, alone in his cab; thoughtful, melancholy,
disappointed in his political schemes, and undervaluing
his literary success, and expressing, in his scholar-like
and beautiful profile, as he passes us, both the thirst
at his heart and the satiety at his lips. The livery of
his “tiger” is neglected, and he drives like a man who
has to choose between running and being run against,
and takes that which leaves him the most leisure for reflection.
Poor D'Israeli! With a kind and generous
heart, talents of the most brilliant order, an ambition
which consumes his soul, and a father who expects
everything from his son; lost for the want of a tact
common to understandings fathoms deep below his
own, and likely to drive in Hyde Park forty years
hence, if he die not of the corrosion of disappointment,
no more distinguished than now, and a thousand times
more melancholy.

An open barouche follows, drawn by a pair of dark
bays, the coachman and footman in suits of plain gray,
and no crest on the panels. A lady, of remarkable
small person, sits, with the fairest foot ever seen, just
peeping from under a cashmere, on the forward cushion,
and from under her peculiarly plain and small
bonnet burn, in liquid fire, the most lambent and
spiritual eyes that night and sleep ever hid from the
world. She is a niece of Napoleon, married to an
English nobleman; and beside her sits her father,
who refused the throne of Tuscany, a noble-looking
man, with an expression of calm and tranquil resignation
in his face, unusually plain in his exterior, and
tess alive than most of the gay promenaders to the
bright scene passing about him. He will play in the
charade at his daughter's soiréc in the evening, however,
and forget his exile and his misfortunes; for he
is a fond father and a true philosopher.

6. CHAPTER VI.
LONDON.

If you dine with all the world at seven, you have
still an hour or more for Hyde Park, and “Rotten
Row:” this half mile between Oxford street and Piccadilly,
to which the fashion of London confines itself,
as if the remainder of the bright green park were forbidden
ground, is now fuller than ever. There is the
advantage in this condensed drive, that you are sure to
see your friends here, earlier or later, in every day—
(for wherever you are to go with horses, the conclusion
of the order to the coachman is, “home by the
park”)—and then if there is anything new in the way
of an arrival, a pretty foreigner, or a fresh face from
the country, some dandy's tiger leaves his master at
the gate, and brings him at his club, over his coffee,
all possible particulars of her name, residence, condition,
and whatever other circumstances fall in his
way. By dropping in at Lady —'s soirèe in the
evening, if you were interested in the face, you may
inform yourself of more than you would have drawn
in a year's acquaintance from the subject of your curiosity.
Malapropos to my remark, here comes a
turn-out, concerning which and its occupant I have
made many inquiries in vain—the pale-colored chariot,
with a pair of grays, dashing toward us from the Seymour
gate. As it comes by you will see, sitting quite
in the corner, and in a very languid and elegant attitude,
a slight woman of perhaps twenty-four, dressed
in the simplest white cottage-bonnet that could be
made, and, with her head down, looking up through
heavy black eyelashes, as if she but waited till she had
passed a particular object, to resume some engrossing
revery. Her features are Italian, and her attitude,
always the same indolent one, has also a redolence of
that land of repose; but there has been an English
taste, and no ordinary one, in the arrangement of that
equipage and its dependants; and by the expression,
never mistaken in London, of the well-appointed menials,
you may be certain that both master and mistress
(if master there be), exact no common deference.
She is always alone, and not often seen in the park;
and whenever I have inquired of those likely to know,
I found that she had been observed, but could get no
satisfactory information. She disappears by the side
toward the Regent's park, and when once out of the
gate, her horses are let off at a speed that distances
all pursuit that would not attract observatin. There
is a look of “Who the deuce can it be?” in the faces
of all the mounted dandies, wherever she passes, for
it is a face which once seen is not easily thought of
with indifference, or forgotten. Immense as London
is, a woman of anything like extraordinary beauty
would find it difficult to live there incognito a week;
and how this fair incomprehensible has contrived to
elude the curiosity of Hyde-park admiration, for nearly
two years, is rather a marvel. There she goes, however,
and without danger of being arrested for a flying
highwayman you could scarcely follow.

It is getting late, and, as we turn down toward the
clubs, we shall meet the last and most fashionable
comers to the park. Here is a horseman, surrounded
with half a dozen of the first young noblemen of England.
He rides a light bay horse with dark legs,
whose delicate veins are like the tracery of silken
threads beneath the gloss of his limbs, and whose
small, animated head seems to express the very essence
of speed and fire. He is the most beautiful
park horse in England; and behind follows a high-bred
milk-white pony, ridden by a small, faultlessly-dressed
groom, who sits the spirited and fretting creature
as if he anticipated every movement before the
fine hoof rose from the ground. He rides admirably,
but his master is more of a study. A luxuriance of
black curls escapes from the broad rim of a peculiar
hat, and forms a relief to the small and sculpture-like
profile of a face as perfect, by every rule of beauty, as
the Greek Antinous. It would be too feminine but
for the muscular neck and broad chest from which
the head rises, and the indications of great personal
strength in the Herculean shoulders. His loose coat
would disguise the proportions of a less admirable
figure; but, au reste, his dress is without fold or
wrinkle, and no figurante of the ballet ever showed
finer or more skilfully developed limbs. He is one
of the most daring in this country of bold riders; but
modifies the stiff English school of equestrianism,
with the ease and grace of that of his own country.
His manner, though he is rather Angtomane, is in
striking contrast to the grave and quiet air of his companions;
and between his recognitions, right and left,
to the passing promenaders, he laughs and amuses
himself with the joyous and thoughtless gayety of a
child. Acknowledged by all his acquaintances to possess
splendid talents, this “observed of all observers”
is a singular instance of a modern Sybarite—content
to sacrifice time, opportunity, and the highest advantages
of mind and body, to the pleasure of the moment.
He seems exempt from all the usual penalities of such
a career. Nothing seems to do its usual work on him
—care, nor exhaustion, nor recklessness, nor the disapprobation
of the heavy-handed opinion of the world.
Always gay, always brilliant, ready to embark at any
moment, or at any hazard, in anything that will amuse
an hour, one wonders how and where such an unwonted
meteor will disappear.

But here comes a carriage without hammercloth or
liveries; one of those shabby-genteel conveyances,
hired by the week, containing three or four persons in
the highest spirits, all talking and gesticulating at once.
As the carriage passes the “beau-knot” (as —, and
his inseparable troop are sometimes called), one or
two of the dandies spur up, and resting their hands on
the windows, offer the compliments of the day to the
only lady within, with the most earnest looks of admiration.
The gentlemen in her company become
silent, and answer to the slight bows of the cavaliers
with foreign monosyllables, and presently the coachman
whips up once more, the horsemen drop off, and
the excessive gayety of the party resumes its tone.
You must have been struck, as the carriage passed,
with the brilliant whiteness and regularity of the lady's
teeth, and still more with the remarkable play of her
lips, which move as if the blood in them were imprisoned
lightning. (The figure is strong, but nothing
else conveys to my own mind what I am trying to describe.)
Energy, grace, fire, rapidity, and a capability
of utter abandoment to passion and expression, live
visibly on those lips. Her eyes are magnificent. Her
nose is regular, with nostrils rimmed round with an
expansive nerve, that gives them constantly the kind
of animation visible in the head of a fiery Arab. Her
complexion is one of those which, dark and wanting
in brilliance by day, light up at night with an alabaster
fairness; and when the glossy black hair, which is
now put away so plainly under her simple bonnet,
falls over her shoulders in heavy masses, the contrast
is radiant. The gentlemen in that carriage are Rubini,
Lablache, and a gentleman who passes for the lady's
uncle; and the lady is Julia Grisi.

The smoke over the heart of the city begins to
thicken into darkness, the gas-lamps are shooting up,
bright and star-like, along the Kensington road, and
the last promenaders disappear. And now the world
of London, the rich and gay portion of it at least,
enjoy that which compensates them for the absence
of the bright nights and skies of Italy—a climate
within doors, of comfort and luxury, unknown under
brighter heavens.

7. CHAPTER VII.
ISLE OF WIGHT—RYDE.

“Instead of parboiling you with a soirée or a dinner,”
said a sensible and kind friend, who called on us
at Ryde, “I shall make a pic-nic to Netley.” And on
a bright, breezy morning of June, a merry party of
some twenty of the inhabitants of the green Isle of
Wight shot away from the long pier, in one of the
swift boats of those waters, with a fair wind for Southampton.

Ryde is the most American-looking town I have
seen abroad; a cluster of white houses and summery
villas on the side of a hill, leaning up from the
sea. Geneva, on the Seneca lake, resembles it. It
is a place of baths, boarding-houses, and people of
damaged constitutions, with very select society, and
quiet and rather primitive habits. The climate is deliciously
soft, and the sun seems always to shine
there.

As we got out into the open channel, I was assisting
the skipper to tighten his bowline, when a beautiful
ship, in the distance, putting about on a fresh track,
caught the sun full on her snowy sails, and seemed to
start like an apparition from the sea.

“She's a liner, sir!” said the bronzed boatman, suspending
his haul to give her a look of involuntary admiration.

“An American packet, you mean?”

“They're the prettiest ships afloat, sir,” he continued,
“and the smartest handled. They're out to New
York, and back again, before you can look round,
a'most. Ah, I see her flag now—stars and stripes.
Can you see it, sir?”

“Are the captains Englishmen, principally?” I
asked.

“No, sir! all `calkylators;' sharp as a needle!”

“Thank you.” said I; “I am a calculator too!”

The conversation ceased, and I thought from the
boatman's look, that he had more respect than love
for us. The cloud of snowy sail traversed the breadth
of the channel with the speed of a bird, wheeled again
upon her opposite tack, and soon disappeared from
view, taking with her the dove of my imagination to
return with an olive-branch from home. It must be
a cold American heart whose strings are not swept by
that bright flag in a foreign land, like a harp with the
impassioned prelude of the master.

Cowes was soon upon our lee, with her fairy fleet
of yachts lying at anchor—Lord Yarborough's frigate-looking
craft asleep amid its dependant brood, with all
its fine tracery of rigging drawn on a cloudless sky, the
picture of what it is, and what all vessels seem to me
a thing for pleasure only. Darting about like a swallow
on the wing, a small, gayly-painted sloop-yacht,
as graceful and slender as the first bow of the new
moon, played off the roadstead for the sole pleasure
of motion, careless whither; and meantime the low-fringed
shores of the Southampton side grew more
and more distinct, and before we had well settled upon
our cushions, the old tower of the abbey lay sharp
over the bow.

We enjoyed the first ramble through the ruins the
better, that to see them was a secondary object. The
first was to select a grassy spot for our table. Threading
the old unroofed vaults with this errand, the pause
of involuntary homage exacted by a sudden burst upon
in arch or a fretted window, was natural and true; and
or those who are disturbed by the formal and trite
enthusiasm of companions who admire by a prompter,
his stalking-horse of another pursuit was not an inlifferent
advantage.

The great roof over the principal nave of the abbey
has fallen in, and lies in rugged and picturesque masses
within the Gothic shell—windows, arches, secret staircases,
and gray walls, all breaking up the blue sky
around, but leaving above, for a smooth and eternal
roof, an oblong and ivy-fringed segment of the blue
plane of heaven. It seems to rest on those crumbling
corners as you stand within.

We selected a rising bank under the shoulder of a
rock, grown over with moss and ivy, and following the
suggestion of a pretty lover of the picturesque, the
shawls and cloaks, with their bright colors, were
thrown over the nearest fragments of the roof, and everybody
unbonneted and assisted in the arrangements. An
old woman who sold apples outside the walls was employed
to build a fire for our teakettle in a niche
where, doubtless, in its holier days, had stood the
effigy of a saint; and at the pedestals of a cluster of
slender columns our attendants displayed upon a table
a show of pasties and bright wines, that, if there be
monkish spirits who walk at Netley, we have added a
poignant regret to their purgatories, that their airy
stomachs can be no more vino ciboque gravati.

We were doing justice to a pretty shoulder of lamb,
with mint sauce, when a slender youth who had been
wandering around with a portfolio, took up an artist's
position in the farther corner of the ruins, and began
to sketch the scene. I mentally felicitated him on the
accident that had brought him to Netley at that particular
moment, for a prettier picture than that before
him an artist could scarce have thrown together. The
inequalities of the floor of the abbey provided a mossy
table for every two or three of the gayly-dressed ladies,
and there they reclined in small and graceful groups,
their white dresses relieved on the luxuriant grass,
and between them, half buried in moss, the sparkling
glasses full of bright wines, and an air of ease and
grace over all, which could belong only to the two
extremes of Arcadian simplicity, or its high-bred imitation.
We amused ourselves with the idea of appearing,
some six months after, in the middle ground
of a landscape, in a picturesque annual; and I am
afraid that I detected, on the first suggestion of the
idea, a little unconscious attitudinizing in some of the
younger members of the party. It was proposed that
the artist should be invited to take wine with us; but
as a rosy-cheeked page donned his gold hat to carry
our compliments, the busy draughtsman was joined
by one or two ladies not quite so attractive-looking as
himself, but evidently of his own party, and our messenger
was recalled. Sequitur—they who would find
adventure should travel alone.

The monastic ruins of England derive a very peculiar
and touching beauty from the bright veil of ivy
which almost buries them from the sun. This constant
and affectionate mourner draws from the moisture
of the climate a vividness and luxuriance which is
found in no other land. Hence the remarkable loveliness
of Netley—a quality which impresses the visiters
to this spot, far more than the melancholy usually
inspired by decay.

Our gayety shocked some of the sentimental people
rambling about the ruins, for it is difficult for those
who have not dined to sympathize with the mirth of
those who have. How often we mistake for sadness
the depression of an empty stomach! How differently
authors and travellers would write, if they commenced
the day, instead of ending it, with meats and wine! I
was led to these reflections by coming suddenly upon
a young lady and her companion (possibly her lover),
in climbing a ruined staircase sheathed within the
wall of the abbey. They were standing at one of the
windows, quite unconscious of my neighborhood, and
looking down upon the gay party of ladies below, who
were still amid the débris of the feast arranging their
bonnets for a walk.

“What a want of soul,” said the lady, “to be eating
and drinking in such a place!”

“Some people have no souls,” responded the gentlean.

After this verdict, I thought the best thing I could
do was to take care of my body, and I very carefully
backed down the old staircase, which is probably more
hazardous now than in the days when it was used to
admit damsels and haunches of venison to the reverend
fathers.

I reached the bottom in safety, and informed my
friends that they had no souls, but they manifested
the usual unconcern on the subject, and strolled away
through the echoing arches, in search of new points
of view and fresh wild-flowers. “Commend me at
least,” I thought, as I followed on, “to those whose
pulses can be quickened even by a cold pie and a glass
of champagne. Sadness and envy are sown thickly
enough by any wayside.”

We were embarked once more by the middle of the
afternoon, and with a head wind, but smooth water and
cool temperature, beat back to Ryde. If the young
lady and her lover have forgiven or forgotten us, and
the ghosts of Netley, frocked or petticoated, have
taken no umbrage, I have not done amiss in marking
the day with a stone of the purest white. How much
more sensible is a party like this, in the open air, and
at healthy hours, than the untimely and ceremonious
civilities usually paid to strangers. If the world would
mend by moralising, however, we should have had a
Utopia long ago.

8. CHAPTER VIII.
COMPARISON OF THE CLIMATE OF EUROPE AND
AMERICA.

One of Hazlitt's nail-driving remarks is to the effect
that he should like very well to pass the whole of his life
in travelling, if he could anywhere borrow another life
to spend afterward at home. How far action is necessary
to happiness, and how far repose—how far the
appetite for novelty and adventure will drive, and how
far the attractions of home and domestic comfort will
recall us—in short, what are the precise exactions of
the antagonist principles in our bosoms of curiosity
and sloth, energy and sufferance, hope and memory—
are questions which each one must settle for himself,
and which none can settle but he who has passed his
life in the eternal and fruitless search after the happiest
place, climate, and station.

Contentment depends upon many things within our
own control, but, with a certain education, it depends
partly upon things beyond it. To persons delicately
constituted or delicately brought up, and to all idle
persons, the principal ingredient in the cup of enjoyment
is climate; and Providence, that consults “the
greatest happiness of the greatest number,” has made
the poor and the roughly-nurtured independent of the
changes of the wind. Those who have the misfortune
to be delicate as well as poor—those, particularly, for
whom there is no hope but in a change of clime, but
whom pitiless poverty compels to languish in vain
after the reviving south, are happily few; but they
have thus much more than their share of human calamity.

In throwing together my recollections of the climates
with which I have become acquainted in other
lands, I am aware that there is a greater difference of
opinion on this subject than on most others. A man
who has agreeable society about him in Montreal, but
who was without friends in Florence, would be very
likely to bring the climate in for its share of the difference,
and prefer Canada to Italy; and health and
circumstances of all kinds affect, in no slight degree,
our susceptibility to skies and atmosphere. But it is
sometimes interesting to know the impressions of others,
even though they agree not with our own; and I
will only say of mine on this subject, that they are so
far likely to be fair, as I have been blessed with the
same perfect health in all countries, and have been
happy alike in every latitude and season.

It is almost a matter of course to decry the climate
of England. The English writers themselves talk of
the suicidal months; and it is the only country where
part of the livery of a mounted groom is his master's
great-coat strapped about his waist. It is certainly a
damp climate, and the sun shines less in England than
in most other countries. But to persons of full habit
this moisture in the air is extremely agreeable; and
the high condition of all animals in England, from
man downward, proves its healthfulness. A stranger
who has been accustomed to a brighter sky, will, at
first, find a gloom in the gray light so characteristic of
an English atmosphere; but this soon wears off, and
he finds a compensation, as far as the eye is concerned,
in the exquisite softness of the verdure, and
the deep and enduring brightness of the foliage. The
effect of this moisture on the skin is singularly grateful.
The pores become accustomed to a healthy action,
which is unknown in other countries; and the
bloom by which an English complexion is known all
over the world is the index of an activity in this important
part of the system, which, when first experienced,
is almost like a new sensation. The transition
to a dry climate, such as ours, deteriorates the condition
and quality of the skin, and produces a feeling,
if I may so express it, like that of being glazed. It is
a common remark in England, that an officer's wife
and daughters follow his regiment to Canada at the
expense of their complexions; and it is a well-known
fact that the bloom of female beauty is, in our country,
painfully evanescent.

The climate of American is, in many points, very
different from that of France and Great Britain. In
the middle and northern states, it is a dry, invigorating,
bracing climate, in which a strong man may do
more work than in almost any other, and which makes
continual exercise, or occupation of some sort, absolutely
necessary. With the exception of the “Indian
summer,” and here and there a day scattered through
the spring and the hot months, there is no weather
tempered so finely that one would think of passing
the day in merely enjoying it, and life is passed, by
those who have the misfortune to be idle, in continual
and active dread of the elements. The cold is so
acrid, and the heat so sultry, and the changes from
one to the other are so sudden and violent, that no
enjoyment can be depended upon out-of-doors, and
no system of clothing or protection is good for a day
together. He who has full occupation for head and
hand (as by far the greatest majority of our countrymen
have) may live as long in America as in any portion
of the globe—vide the bills of mortality. He
whose spirits lean upon the temperature of the wind,
or whose nerves require a genial and constant atmosphere,
may find more favorable climes; and the habits
and delicate constitutions of scholars and people
of sedentary pursuits generally, in the United States,
prove the truth of the observation.

The habit of regular exercise in the open air, which
is found to be so salutary in England, is scarcely possible
in America. It is said, and said truly, of the
first, that there is no day in the year when a lady may
not ride comfortably on horseback; but with us, the
extremes of heat and cold, and the tempestuous character
of our snows and rains, totally forbid, to a delicate
person, anything like regularity in exercise. The
consequence is, that the habit rarely exists, and the
high and glowing health so common in England, and
consequent, no doubt, upon the equable character of
the climate in some measure, is with us sufficiently

rare to excite remark. “Very English-looking,” is a
common phrase, and means very healthy-looking.
Still our people last—and though I should define the
English climate as the one in which the human frame
is in the highest condition, I should say of America,
that it is the one in which you could get the most
work out of it.

Atmosphere, in England and America, is the first
of the necessaries of life. In Italy, it is the first of its
luxuries. We breathe in America, and walk abroad,
without thinking of these common acts but as a means
of arriving at happiness. In Italy, to breathe and to
walk abroad are themselves happiness. Day after day
—week after week—month after month—you wake
with the breath of flowers coming in at your open
window, and a sky of serene and unfathomable blue,
and mornings and evenings of tranquil, assured, heavenly
purity and beauty. The few weeks of the rainy
season are forgotten in these long halcyon months of
sunshine. No one can have lived in Italy a year, who
remembers anything but the sapphire sky and the
kindling and ever-seen stars. You grow insensibly to
associate the sunshine and moonlight only with the
fountain you have lived near, or the columns of the
temple you have seen from your window, for on no
objects in other lands have you seen their light so
constant.

I scarce know how to convey, in language, the effect
of the climate of Italy on mind and body. Sitting
here, indeed, in the latitude of thirty-nine, in the
middle of April, by a warm fire, and with a cold wind
whistling at the window, it is difficult to recall it, even
to the fancy. I do not know whether life is prolonged,
but it is infinitely enriched and brightened, by
the delicious atmosphere of Italy. You rise in the
morning, thanking Heaven for life and liberty to go
abroad. There is a sort of opiate in the air, which
makes idleness, that would be the vulture of Prometheus
in America, the dove of promise in Italy. It is
delicious to do nothing—delicious to stand an hour
looking at a Savoyard and his monkey—delicious to
sit away the long, silent noon, in the shade of a column,
or on the grass of a fountain—delicious to be
with a friend without the interchange of an idea—to
dabble in a book, or look into the cup of a flower. You do not read, for you wish to enjoy the weather.
You do not visit, for you hate to enter a door while
the weather is so fine. You lie down unwillingly for
your siesta in the hot noon, for you fear you may
oversleep the first coolness of the long shadows of
sunset. The fancy, meantime, is free, and seems liberated
by the same languor that enervates the severer
faculties; and nothing seems fed by the air but
thoughts, which minister to enjoyment.

The climate of Greece is very much that of Italy.
The Mediterranean is all beloved of the sun. Life
has a value there, of which the rheumatic, shivering,
snow-breasting, blue-devilled idler of northern regions
has no shadow, even in a dream. No wonder Dante
mourned and languished for it. No wonder at the
sentiment I once heard from distinguished lips—Fuori
d'Italia tutto e esilio.

This appears like describing a Utopia; but it is
what Italy seemed to me. I have expressed myself
much more to my mind, however, in rhyme, for a
prose essay is, at best, but a cold medium.

9. CHAPTER IX.
STRATFORD-ON-AVON.

“One-p'un'-five outside, sir, two p'un' in.”

It was a bright, calm afternoon in September, promising
nothing but a morrow of sunshine and autumn,
when I stepped in at the “White Horse Cellar,” in
Piccadilly, to take my place in the Tantivy coach for
Stratford-on-Avon. Preferring the outside of the
coach, at least by as much as the difference in the
prices, and accustomed from long habit to pay dearest
for that which most pleased me, I wrote myself down
for the outside, and deposited my two pounds in the
horny palm of the old ex-coachman, retired from the
box, and playing clerk in this dingy den of parcels and
portmanteaus. Supposing my business concluded, I
stood a minute speculating on the weather-beaten,
cramp-handed old Jehu before me, and trying to reconcile
his ideas of “retirement from office” with those
of his almost next door neighbor, the hero of Strathfieldsaye.

I had mounted the first stair toward daylight, when
a touch on the shoulder with the end of a long whip
—a technical “reminder,” which probably came easier
to the old driver than the phrasing of a sentence to a
“gemman”—recalled me to the cellar.

“Fifteen shillin', sir,” said he laconically, pointing
with the same expressive exponent of his profession
to the change for my outside place, which I had left
lying on the counter.

“You are at least as honest as the duke,” I soliloquised,
as I pocketed the six bright and substantial
half-crowns.

I was at the “White Horse Cellar” again the following
morning at six, promising myself with great
sincerity never to rely again on the constancy of an
English sky. It rained in torrents. The four inside
places were all taken, and with twelve fellow-outsides,
I mounted to the wet seat, and begging a little straw
by way of cushion from the ostler, spread my umbrella,
abandoned my knees with a single effort of
mind to the drippings of the driver's weather-proof
upper Benjamin, and away we sped. I was “due” at
the house of a hospitable catholic baronet, a hundred
and two miles from London, at the dinner-hour of that
day, and to wait till it had done raining in England is
to expect the millennium.

London in the morning—I mean the poor man's
morning, daylight—is to me matter for the most
speculative and intense melancholy. Hyde park in
the sunshine of a bright afternoon, glittering with
equipages and gay with the Aladdin splendors of rank
and wealth, is a scene which sends the mercurial qualities
of the blood trippingly through the veins. But
Hyde park at daylight seen from Piccadilly through
fog and rain, is perhaps, of all contrasts, to one who
has frequented it in its bright hours, the most dispiriting
and dreary. To remember that behind the barricaded
and wet windows of Apsley house sleeps the
hero of Waterloo—that under these crowded and fog-wrapped
houses lie, in their dim chambers breathing
of perfume and luxury, the high-born and nobly-moulded
creatures who preserve for the aristocracy
of England the palm of the world's beauty—to remember
this, and a thousand other associations linked with
the spot, is not at all to diminish, but rather to deepen,
the melancholy of the picture. Why is it that the
deserted stage of a theatre, the echo of an empty ball-room,
the loneliness of a frequented promenade in
untimely hours—any scene, in short, of gayety gone
by but remembered—oppresses and dissatisfies the
heart! One would think memory should re-brighten
and re-populate such places.

The wheels hissed through the shallow pools in the
Macadam road, the regular pattering of the small
hoofs in the wet carriage-tracks maintained its quick
and monotonous beat on the ear; the silent driver kept
his eye on the traces, and “reminded” now and then
with but the weight of his slight lash a lagging wheeler
or leader, and the complicated but compact machine
of which the square foot that I occupied had been so
nicely calculated, sped on its ten miles in the hour

with the steadfastness of a star in its orbit, and as independent
of clouds and rain.

“Est ce que monsieur parle Francois?” asked at the
end of the first stage my right-hand neighbor, a little
gentleman, of whom I had hitherto only remarked that
he was holding on to the iron railing of the seat with
great tenacity.

Having admitted in an evil moment that I had been
in France, I was first distinctly made to understand
that my neighbor was on his way to Birmingham
purely for pleasure, and without the most distant object
of business—a point on which he insisted so long,
and recurred to so often, that he succeeded at last in
persuading me that he was doubtless a candidate for
the French clerkship of some exporter of buttons.
After listening to an amusing dissertation on the rashness
of committing one's life to an English stagecoach,
with scarce room enough for the perch of a
parrot, and a velocity so diablement dangereaux, I tired
of my Frenchman; and, since I could not have my
own thoughts in peace, opened a conversation with a
straw-bonnet and shawl on my left—the property, I
soon discovered, of a very smart lady's maid, very indignant
at having been made to change places with
Master George, who, with his mother and her mistress,
were dry and comfortable inside. She “would not
have minded the outside place,” she said, “for there
were sometimes very agreeable gentlemen on the outside,
very!—but she had been promised to go inside,
and had dressed accordingly; and it was very provoking
to spoil a nice new shawl and best bonnet, just
because a great school-boy, that had nothing on that
would damage chose not to ride in the rain.”

“Very provoking, indeed!” I responded, letting in
the rain upon myself unconsciously, in extending my
umbrella forward so as to protect her on the side of
the wind.

“We should have gone down in the carriage, sir,”
she continued, edging a little closer to get the full advantage
of my umbrella; “but John the coachman
has got the hinfluenzy, and my missis wo'n't be driven
by no other coachman; she's as obstinate as a mule,
sir. And, that isn't all I could tell, sir; but I scorns
to hurt the character of one of my own sex.” And
the pretty abigail pursed up her red lips, and looked
determined not to destroy her mistress's character—
unless particularly requested.

I detest what may be called a proper road-book—
even would it be less absurd than it is to write one on
a country so well conned as England.

I shall say nothing, therefore, of Marlow, which
looked the picture of rural loveliness though seen
through fog, nor of Oxford, of which all I remember
is that I dined there with my teeth chattering, and
my knees saturated with rain. All England is lovelyto
the wild eye of an American unused to high cultivation;
and though my enthusiasm was somewhat damp,
I arrived at the bridge over the Avon, blessing England
sufficiently for its beauty, and much more for the speed
of its coaches.

The Avon, above and below the bridge, ran brightly
along between low banks, half sward, half meadow;
and on the other side lay the native town of the immortal
wool-comber—a gay cheerful-looking village,
narrowing in the centre to a closely built street, across
which swung, broad and fair, the sign of the “Red
horse.” More ambitious hotels lay beyond; and
broader streets; but while Washington Irving is remembered
(and that will be while the language lasts),
the quiet inn in which the great Geoffrey thought
and wrote of Shakspere will be the altar of the pilgrim's
devotions.

My baggage was set down, the coachman and guard
tipped their hats for a shilling, and, chilled to the bone,
I raised my hat instinctively to the courtesy of a slender
gentlewoman in black, who, by the keys at her girdle,
should be the landlady. Having expected to see a
rosy little Mrs. Boniface, with a brown pinafore and
worsted mittens, I made up my mind at once that the
inn had changed mistresses. On the right of the old-fashioned
entrance blazed cheerily the kitchen fire,
and with my enthusiasm rather dashed by my disappointment,
I stepped in to make friends with the cook,
and get a little warmth and information.

“So your old mistress is dead, Mrs. Cook,” said I,
rubbing my hands with great satisfaction between the
fire and a well-roasted chicken.

“Lauk, sir, no, she isn't!” answered the rosy lass,
pointing with a dredging-box to the same respectable
lady in black who was just entering to look after me.

“I beg pardon, sir,” she said, dropping a courtesy;
“but are you the gentleman expected by Sir
Charles —?”

“Yes, madam. And can you tell me anything of
your predecessor who had the inn in the days of
Washington Irving?”

She dropped another courtesy, and drew up her
thin person to its full height, while a smile of gratified
vanity stole out at the corners of her mouth.

“The carriage has been waiting some time for you,
sir,” she said, with a softer tone than that in which
she had hitherto addressed me; “and you will hardly
be at C— in time for dinner. You will be coming
over to-morrow or the day after, perhaps, sir; and
then, if you would honor my little room by taking a
cup of tea with me, I should be pleased to tell you all
about it, sir.”

I remembered a promise I had nearly forgotten,
that I would reserve my visit to Stratford till I could
be accompanied by Miss J. P—, whom I was to
have the honor of meeting at my place of destination;
and promising an early acceptance of the kind land-lady's
invitation, I hurried on to my appointment over
the fertile hills of Warwickshire.

I was established in one of those old Elizabethan
country-houses, which, with their vast parks, their
self-sufficing resources of subsistence and company,
and the absolute deference shown on all sides to the
lord of the manor, give one the impression rather of a
little kingdom with a castle in its heart, than of an
abode for a gentleman subject. The house itself
(called, like most houses of this size and consequence
in Warwickshire, a “Court,”) was a Gothic, half-castellated
square, with four round towers, and innumerable
embrasures and windows; two wings in
front, probably more modern than the body of the
house, and again two long wings extending to the rear,
at right angles, and enclosing a flowery and formal
parterre. There had been a trench about it, now
filled up, and at a short distance from the house stood
a polyangular and massive structure, well calculated
for defence, and intended as a strong-hold for the retreat
of the family and tenants in more troubled times.
One of these rear wings enclosed a catholic chapel,
for the worship of the baronet and those of his tenants
who professed the same faith; while on the northern
side, between the house and the garden, stood a large
protestant stone church, with a turret and spire, both
chapel and church, with their clergyman and priest,
dependant on the estate, and equally favored by the
liberal and high-minded baronet. The tenantry formed
two considerable congregations, and lived and worshipped
side by side, with the most perfect harmony
—an instance of real Christianity, in my opinion, which
the angels of heaven might come down to see. A
lovely rural graveyard for the lord and tenants, and a
secluded lake below the garden, in which hundreds of
wild ducks swam and screamed unmolested, completed
the outward features of C— court.

There are noble houses in England, with a door
communicating from the dining-room to the stables,
that the master and his friends may see their favorites,

after dinner, without exposure to the weather. In the
place of this rather bizarre luxury, the oak-panelled
and spacious dining-hall of C— is on a level with
the organ loft of the chapel, and when the cloth is removed,
the large door between is thrown open, and
the noble instrument pours the rich and thrilling
music of vespers through the rooms. When the
service is concluded, and the lights on the altar extinguished,
the blind organist (an accomplished musician,
and a tenant on the estate), continues his voluntaries
in the dark until the hall-door informs him of
the retreat of the company to the drawing-room.
There is not only refinement and luxury in this
beautiful arrangement, but food for the soul and
heart.

I chose my room from among the endless vacant
but equally luxurious chambers of the rambling old
house; my preference solely directed by the portrait
of a nun, one of the family in ages gone by—a picture
full of melancholy beauty, which hung opposite the
window. The face was distinguished by all that in
England marks the gentlewoman of ancient and pure
descent; and while it was a woman with the more
tender qualities of her sex breathing through her features,
it was still a lofty and sainted sister, true to her
cross, and sincere in her vows and seclusion. It was
the work of a master, probably Vandyke, and a picture
in which the most solitary man would find company
and communion. On the other walls, and in most of
the other rooms and corridors, were distributed portraits
of the gentlemen and soldiers of the family, most
of them bearing some resemblance to the nun, but
differing, as brothers in those wild times may be supposed
to have differed, from the gentle creatures of the
same blood, nursed in the privacy of peace.

10. CHAPTER X.
VISIT TO STRATFORD-ON-AVON—SHAKSPERE.

One of the first visits in the neighborhood was naturally
to Stratford-on-Avon. It lay some ten miles
south of us, and I drove down, with the distinguished
literary friend I have before mentioned, in the carriage
of our kind host, securing, by the presence of
his servants and equipage, a degree of respect and attention
which would not have been accorded to us in
our simple character of travellers. The prim mistress
of the “Red Horse,” in her close black bonnet and
widow's weeds, received us at the door with a deeper
courtesy than usual, and a smile of less wintry formality;
and proposing to dine at the inn, and “suck the
brain” of the hostess more at our leisure, we started
immediately for the house of the wool-comber—the
birthplace of Shakspere.

Stratford should have been forbidden ground to
builders, masons, shopkeepers, and generally to all
people of thrift and whitewash. It is now rather a
smart town, with gay calicoes, shawls of the last pattern,
hardware, and millinery, exhibited in all their
splendor down the widened and newer streets; and
though here and there remains a glorious old gloomy
and inconvenient abode, which looks as if Shakspere
might have taken shelter under its eaves, the gayer
features of the town have the best of it, and flaunt their
gaudy and unrespected newness in the very windows
of that immortal birthplace. I stepped into a shop to
inquire the way to it.

“Shiksper's 'ouse, sir? Yes, sir!” said a dapper
clerk, with his hair astonished into the most impossible
directions by force of brushing; “keep to the
right, sir! Shiksper lived in the wite 'ouse, sir—the
'ouse, you see beyond, with the windy swung up, sir.”

A low, old-fashioned house, with a window suspended
on a hinge, newly whitewashed and scrubbed,
stood a little up the street. A sign over the door informed
us in an inflated paragraph, that the immortal
Will Shakspere was born under this roof, and that an
old woman within would show it to us for a consideration.
It had been used until very lately, I had been
told, for a butcher's shop.

A “garrulous old lady” met us at the bottom of the
narrow stair leading to the second floor, and began-not
to say anything of Shakspere—but to show us the
names of Byron, Moore, Rogers, &c., written among
thousands of others on the wall! She had worn out
Shakspere! She had told that story till she was tired
of it! or (what, perhaps, is more probable) most
people who go there fall to reading the names of the
visiters so industriously, that she has grown to think
some of Shakspere's pilgrims greater than Shakspere.

“Was this old oaken chest here in the days of
Shakspere, madam?” I asked.

“Yes, sir, and here's the name of Byron—here with
a capital B. Here's a curiosity, sir.”

“And this small wooden box?”

“Made of Shakspere's mulberry, sir. I had sich a
time about that box, sir. Two young gemmen were
here the other day—just run up, while the coach was
changing horses, to see the house. As soon as they
were gone I misses the box. Off scuds my son to the
`Red Horse,' and there they sat on the top looking as
innocent as may be. `Stop the coach,' says my son
`What do you want?' says the driver. `My mother's
mulberry-box!—Shakspere's mulberry-box!—One of
them 'ere young men's got it in his pocket.' And
true enough, sir, one on 'em had the imperence to
take it out of his pocket, and flings it into-my son's
face; and you know the coach never stops a minnit for
nothing, sir, or he'd a' smarted for it.”

Spirit of Shakspere! dost thou not sometimes walk
alone in this humble chamber! Must one's inmost
soul be fretted and frighted always from its devotion
by an abominable old woman? Why should not such
lucrative occupations be given in charity to the deaf
and dumb? The pointing of a finger were enough in
such spots of earth!

I sat down in despair to look over the book of visiters,
trusting that she would tire of my inattention.
As it was of no use to point out names to those who
would not look, however, she commenced a long story
of an American who had lately taken the whim to
sleep in Shakspere's birth chamber. She had shaken
him down a hed on the floor, and he had passed the
night there. It seemed to bother her to comprehend
why two thirds of her visiters should be Americans—
a circumstance that was abundantly proved by the
books.

It was only when we were fairly in the street that I
began to realize that I had seen one of the most glorious
altars of memory—that deathless Will Shakspere,
the mortal, who was, perhaps (not to speak profanely),
next to his Maker, in the divine faculty of creation
first saw the light through the low lattice on which
we turned back to look.

The single window of the room in which Scott died
at Abbotsford, and this in the birth-chamber of Shakspere,
have seemed to me almost marked with the
touch of the fire of those great souls—for I think we
have an instinct which tells us on the spot where
mighty spirits have come or gone, that they came and
went with the light of heaven.

We walked down the street to see the house where
Shakspere lived on his return to Stratford. It stands
at the corner of a lane, not far from the church where
he was buried, and is a newish un-Shaksperian looking
place—no doubt, if it be indeed the same house, most
profanely and considerably altered. The present proprietor
or occupant of the house or site took upon
himself some time since the odium of cutting down

the famous mulberry-tree planted by the poet's hand
in the garden.

I forgot to mention in the beginning of these notes
that two or three miles before coming to Stratford we
passed through Shottery, where Anne Hathaway lived.
A nephew of the excellent baronet whose guests we
were occupies the house. I looked up and down the
green lanes about it, and glanced my eye round upon
the hills over which the sun has continued to set and
the moon to ride in her love-inspiring beauty ever
since. There were doubtless outlines in the landscape
which had been followed by the eye of Shakspere
when coming, a trembling lover, to Shottrey—doubtless,
teints in the sky, crops on the fields, smoke-wreaths
from the old homesteads on the high hillsides,
which are little altered now. How daringly the
imagination plucks back the past in such places!
How boldly we ask of fancy and probability the thousand
questions we would put, if we might, to the magic
mirror of Agrippa? Did that great mortal love timidly,
like ourselves? Was the passionate outpouring
of his heart simple, and suited to the humble condition
of Anne Hathaway, or was it the first fiery coinage of
Romeo and Othello? Did she know the immortal
honor and light poured upon woman by the love of
genius? Did she know how this common and oftenest
terrestrial passion becomes fused in the poet's bosom
with celestial fire, and, in its wondrous elevation
and purity, ascends lambently and musically to the
very stars? Did she coy it with him? Was she a
woman to him, as commoner mortals find woman—capricious,
tender, cruel, intoxicating, cold—everything
by changes impossible to calculate or foresee? Did
he walk home to Stratford, sometimes, despairing, in
perfect sick-heartedness, of her affection, and was he
recalled by a message or a lover's instinct to find her
weeping and passionately repentant?

How natural it is by such questions and speculations
to betray our innate desire to bring the lofty
spirits of our common mould to our own inward level—
to seek analogies between our affections, passions, appetites,
and theirs—to wish they might have been no more
exalted, no more fervent, no more worthy of the adorable
love of woman than ourselves! The same temper
that prompts the depreciation, the envy, the hatred,
exercised toward the poet in his lifetime, mingles, not
inconsiderably, in the researches so industriously prosecuted
after his death into his youth and history. To
be admired in this world, and much more to be beloved
for higher qualities than his fellow-men, insures to
genius not only to be persecuted in life, but to be
ferreted out with all his frailties and imperfections
from the grave.

The church in which Shakspere is buried stands
near the banks of the Avon, and is a most picturesque
and proper place of repose for his ashes. An avenue
of small trees and vines, ingeniously overlaced, extends
from the street to the principal door, and the
interior is broken up into that confused and accidental
medley of tombs, pews, cross-lights, and pillars, for
which the old churches of England are remarkable.
The tomb and effigy of the great poet lie in an inner
chapel, and are as described in every traveller's book.
I will not take up room with the repetition.

It gives one an odd feeling to see the tomb of his
wife and daughter beside him. One does not realize
before, that Shakspere had wife, children, kinsmen,
like other men—that there were those who had a right
to lie in the same tomb; to whom he owed the charities
of life; whom he may have benefited or offended;
who may have influenced materially his destiny, or
he theirs; who were the inheritors of his household
goods, his wardrobe, his books—people who looked
an him—on Shakspere—as a landholder, a renter of a
pew, a townsman; a relative, in short, who had claims
upon them, not for the eternal homage due to celestial
inspiration, but for the charity of shelter and bread
had he been poor, for kindness and ministry had he
been sick, for burial and the tears of natural affection
when he died. It is painful and embarrassing to the
mind to go to Stratford—to reconcile the immortality
and the incomprehensible power of genius like Shakspere's,
with the space, tenement, and circumstance
of a man! The poet should be like the sea-bird, seen
only on the wing—his birth, his slumber, and his
death, mysteries alike.

I had stipulated with the hostess that my baggage
should be put into the chamber occupied by Washington
Irving. I was shown into it to dress for dinner
—a small neat room, a perfect specimen, in short, of
an English bedroom, with snow-white curtains, a looking-glass
the size of the face, a well-polished grate
and poker, a well-fitted carpet, and as much light as
heaven permits to the climate.

Our dinner for two was served in a neat parlor on
the same floor—an English inn dinner—simple, neat,
and comfortable, in the sense of that word unknown in
other countries. There was just fire enough in the
grate, just enough for two in the different dishes, a
servant who was just enough in the room, and just
civil enough—in short, it was, like everything else in
that country of adaptation and fitness, just what was
ordered and wanted, and no more.

The evening turned out stormy, and the rain pattered
merrily against the windows. The shutters were
closed, the fire blazed up with new brightness, the
well-fitted wax lights were set on the table; and when
the dishes were removed, we replaced the wine with a
tea-tray, and sent for the hostess to give us her company
and a little gossip over our cups.

Nothing could be more nicely understood and defined
than the manner of English hostesses generally
in such situations, and of Mrs. Gardiner particularly
in this. Respectful without servility, perfectly sure
of the propriety of her own manner and mode of expression,
yet preserving in every look and word the
proper distinction between herself and her guests, she
insured from them that kindness and ease of communication
which would make a long evening of social
conversation pass, not only without embarrassment on
either side, but with mutual pleasure and gratification.

“I have brought up, mem,” she said, producing a
well-polished poker from under her black apron, before
she took the chair set for her at the table—“I
have brought up a relic for you to see, that no money
would buy from me.”

She turned it over in my hand, and I read on one
of the flat sides at the bottom—“GEOFFREY CRAYON'S
SCEPTRE.”

“Do you remember Mr. Irving,” asked my friend,
“or have you supposed, since reading his sketch of
Stratford-on-Avon; that the gentleman in number
three might be the person?”

The hostess drew up her thin figure, and the expression
of a person about to compliment herself stole
into the corners of her mouth.

“Why, you see, mem, I am very much in the habit
of observing my guests, and I think I may say I knows
a superior gentleman when I sees him. If you remember,
mem” (and she took down from the mantlepiece
a much-worn copy of the Sketch-Book), “Geoffrey
Crayon tells the circumstance of my stepping in
when it was getting late, and asking if he had rung.
I knows it by that, and then the gentleman I mean
was an American, and I think, mem, besides” (and she
hesitated a little, as if she was about to advance an
original and rather venturesome opinion)—“I think
I can see that gentleman's likeness all through this
book.”

A truer remark or a more just criticism was perhaps
never made on the Sketch-Book. We smiled,
and Mrs. Gardiner proceeded:—

“I was in and out of the coffee-room the night he
arrived, mem, and I sees directly by his modest ways
and timid look that he was a gentleman, and not fit
company for the other travellers. They were all young
men, sir, and business travellers, and you know, mem,
ignorance takes the advantage of modest merit, and after
their dinner they were very noisy and rude. So, I
says to Sarah, the chambermaid, says I, `That nice
gentleman can't get near the fire, and you go and light
a fire in number three, and he shall sit alone, and it
shan't cost him nothing, for I like the look on him.'
Well, mem, he seemed pleased to be alone, and after
his tea, he puts his legs up over the grate, and there
he sits with the poker in his hand till ten o'clock.
The other travellers went to bed, and at last the house
was as still as midnight, all but a poke in the grate
now and then in number three, and every time I heard
it, I jumped up and lit a bed-candle, for I was getting
very sleepy, and I hoped he was getting up to ring for
a light. Well, mem, I nodded and nodded, and still
no ring at the bell. At last I says to Sarah, says I,
`Go into number three, and upset something, for I am
sure that gentleman has fallen asleep.'—`La, ma'am,'
says Sarah, `I don't dare.'—`Well, then,' sayd I, `I'll
go.' So I opens the door, and I says, `If you please,
sir, did you ring?'—little thinking that question would
ever be written down in such a beautiful book, mem.
He sat with his feet on the fender poking the fire, and
a smile on his face, as if some pleasant thought was
in his mind. `No, ma'am,' says he, `I did not.' I
shuts the door, and sits down again, for I hadn't the
heart to tell him that it was late, for he was a gentleman
not to speak rudely to, mem. Well, it was past
twelve o'clock, when the bell did ring. `There,' says
I to Sarah, `thank Heaven he has done thinking, and
we can go to bed.' So he walked up stairs with his
light, and the next morning he was up early and off
to the Shakspere house, and he brings me home a box
of the mulberry-tree, and asks me if I thought it was
genuine, and said it was for his mother in America.
And I loved him still more for that, and I'm sure I
prayed she might live to see him return.”

“I believe she did, Mrs. Gardiner; but how soon
after did you set aside the poker?”

“Why, sir, you see there's a Mr. Vincent that
comes here sometimes, and he says to me one day—
`So, Mrs. Gardiner, you're finely immortalized. Read
that.' So the minuit I read it, I remembered who it
was, and all about it, and I runs and gets the number
three poker, and locks it up safe and sound, and by-and-by
I sends it to Brummagem, and has his name
engraved on it, and here you see it, sir—and I wouldn't
take no money for it.”

I had never the honor to meet or know Mr. Irving,
and I evidently lost ground with the hostess of the
“Red Horse” for that misfortune. I delighted her,
however, with the account which I had seen in a late
newspaper, of his having shot a buffalo in the prairies
of the west; and she soon courtesied herself out, and
left me to the delightful society of the distinguished
lady who had accompanied me. Among all my many
loiterings in many lands, I remember none more intellectually
pure and gratifying, than this at Stratford-on-Avon.
My sleep, in the little bed consecrated by
the slumbers of the immortal Geoffrey, was sweet and
right; and I write myself his debtor for a large share
of the pleasure which genius like his lavishes on the
world.

11. CHAPTER XI.
CHARLECOTE.

Once more posting through Shottery and Stratford-on-Avon,
on the road to Kenilworth and Warwick, I
felt a pleasure in becoming an habitué in Shakspere's
town—in being recognised by the Stratford post-boys,
known at the Stratford inn, and remembered at the
toll-gates. It is pleasant to be welcomed by name
anywhere; but at Stratford-on-Avon, it is a recognition
by those whose fathers or predecessors were the
companions of Shakspere's frolics. Every fellow in
a slouched hat—every idler on a tavern bench—every
saunterer with a dog at his heels on the highway—
should be a deer-stealer from Charlecote. You would
almost ask him, “Was Will Shakspere with you last
night?”

The Lucys still live at Charlecote, immortalized
by a varlet poacher who was tried before old Sir
Thomas for stealing a buck. They have drawn an
apology from Walter Savage Landor for making too
free with the family history, under cover of an imaginary
account of the trial. I thought, as we drove
along in sight of the fine old hall, with its broad park
and majestic trees—very much as it stood in the
days of Sir Thomas, I believe—that most probably
the descendants of the old justice look even now upon
Shakspere more as an offender against the game-laws
than as a writer of immortal plays. I venture to say,
it would be bad tact in a visiter to Charlecote to felicitate
the family on the honor of possessing a park in
which Shakspere had stolen deer—to show more interest
in seeing the hall in which he was tried than in
the family portraits.

On the road which I was travelling (from Stratford
to Charlecote) Shakspere had been dragged as a culprit.
What were his feelings before Sir Thomas!
He felt, doubtless, as every possessor of the divine fire
of genius must feel, when brought rudely in contact
with his fellow-men, that he was too much their superior
to be angry. The humor in which he has drawn
Justice Shallow proves abundantly that he was more
amused then displeased with his own trial. But was
there no vexation at the moment? A reflection, it
might be, from the estimate of his position in the
minds of those who were about him—who looked on
him simply as a stealer of so much venison. Did he
care for Anne Hathaway's opinion then?

How little did Sir Thomas Lucy understand the
relation between judge and culprit on that trial! How
little did he dream he was sitting for his picture to the
pestilent varlet at the bar; that the deer-stealer could
better afford to forgive him than he the deer-stealer!
Genius forgives, or rather forgets, all wrongs done in
ignorance of its immortal presence. Had Ben Jonson
made a wilful jest on a line in his new play, it would
have rankled longer than fine and imprisonment for
deer-stealing. Those who crowd back and trample
upon men of genius in the common walk of life; who
cheat them, misrepresent them, take advantage of their
inattention or their generosity in worldly matters, are
sometimes surprised how their injuries, if not themselves,
are forgotten. Old Adam Woodcock might
as well have held malice against Roland Græme for
the stab in the stuffed doublet of the Abbot of Misrule.

Yet, as I might have remarked in the paragraph
gone before, it is probably not easy to put conscious
and secret superiority entirely between the mind and
the opinions of those around who think differently.
It is one reason why men of genius love more than
the common share of solitude—to recover self-respect.
In the midst of the amusing travesty he was drawing
in his own mind of the grave scene about him, Shakspere
possibly felt at moments as like a detected culprit
as he seemed to the gamekeeper and the justice. It
is a small penalty to pay for the after worship of the
world! The ragged and proverbially ill-dressed
peasants who are selected from the whole campagna,
as models to the sculptors of Rome, care little what
is thought of their good looks in the Corso. The

disguised proportions beneath their rags will be admired
in deathless marble, when the noble who scarce
deigns their possessor a look will lie in forgotten dust
under his stone scutcheon.

12. CHAPTER XII.
WARWICK CASTLE.

Were it not for the “out-heroded” descriptions in
the guide-books, one might say a great deal of Warwick
castle. It is the quality of overdone or ill-expressed
enthusiasm to silence that which is more
rational and real. Warwick is, perhaps, the best kept
of all the famous old castles of England. It is a superb
and admirably-appointed modern dwelling, in the shell,
and with all the means and appliances preserved, of
an ancient stronghold. It is a curious union, too. My
lady's maid and my lord's valet coquet upon the bartizan,
where old Guy of Warwick stalked in his coat-of-mail.
The London cockney, from his two days'
watering at Leamington, stops his pony-chaise, hired
at half-a-crown the hour, and walks Mrs. Popkins
over the old draw-bridge as peacefully as if it were the
threshold of his shop in the Strand. Scot and Frenchman
saunter through fosse and tower, and no ghost of
the middle ages stalks forth, with closed visor, to
challenge these once natural foes. The powdered
butler yawns through an embrasure, expecting “miladi,”
the countess of this fair domain, who in one day's
posting from London seeks relief in Warwick Castle
from the routs and soirées of town. What would old
Guy say, or the “noble imp” whose effigy is among
the escutcheoned tombs of his fathers, if they could
rise through their marble slabs, and be whirled over the
drawbridge in a post-chaise? How indignantly they
would listen to the reckoning within their own portcullis,
of the rates for chaise and postillion. How
astonished they would be at the butler's bow, and the
proffered officiousness of the valet. “Shall I draw
off your lordship's boots? Which of these new vests
from Staub will your lordship put on for dinner?”

Among the pictures at Warwick, I was interested
by a portrait of Queen Elizabeth (the best of that sovereign
I ever saw); one of Machiavelli, one of Essex,
and one of Sir Philip Sidney. The delightful and
gifted woman whom I had accompanied to the castle
observed of the latter, that the hand alone expressed
all his character. I had often made the remark in
real life, but I had never seen an instance on painting
where the likeness was so true. No one could doubt,
who knew Sir Philip Sidney's character, that it was a
literal portrait of his hand. In our day, if you have
an artist for a friend, he makes use of you while you
call, to “sit for the hand” of the portrait on his easel.
Having a preference for the society of artists myself,
and frequenting their studios habitually, I know of
some hundred and fifty unsuspecting gentlemen on
canvass, who have procured for posterity and their
children portraits of their own heads and dress-coats
to be sure, but of the hands of other persons!

The head of Machiavelli is, as is seen in the marble
in the gallery of Florence small, slender, and visibly
“made to creep into crevices.” The face is impassive
and calm, and the lips, though slight and almost feminine,
have an indefinable firmness and character. Essex
is the bold, plain, and blunt soldier history makes
him, and Elizabeth not unqueenly, nor (to my thinking)
of an uninteresting countenance; but, with all
the artist's flattery, ugly enough to be the abode of
the murderous envy that brought Mary to the block.

We paid our five shillings for having been walked
through the marble hall of Castle Warwick, and the
dressing-room of its modern lady, and, gratified much
more by our visit than I have expressed in this brief
description, posted on to Kenilworth.

13. CHAPTER XIII:
KENILWORTH.

On the road from Warwick to Kenilworth, I thought
more of poor Pierce Gaveston than of Elizabeth and
her proud earls. Edward's gay favorite was tried at
Warwick, and beheaded on Blacklow hill, which we
passed soon after leaving the town. He was executed
in June; and I looked about on the lovely hills and
valleys that surround the place of his last moments,
and figured to myself very vividly his despair at this
hurried leave-taking of this bright world in its brightest
spot and hour. Poor Gaveston! It was not in
his vocation to die! He was neither soldier nor prelate,
hermit nor monk. His political sins, for which
he suffered, were no offence against good-fellowship,
and were ten times more venial than those of the
“black dog of Arden,” who betrayed and helped to
murder him. He was the reckless minion of a king,
but he must have been a merry and pleasant fellow;
and now that the world (on our side the water at least),
is grown so grave, one could go back with Old Mortality,
and freshen the epitaph of a heart that took life
more gayly.

As we approached the castle of the proud Leicester,
I found it easier to people the road with the flying
Amy Robsart and her faithful attendant, with Mike Lambourne,
Flibbertigibbet, Richard Varney, and the troop
of mummurs and players, than with the more real
characters of history. To assist the romance, a little
Italian boy, with his organ and monkey, was fording
the brook on his way to the castle, as if its old towers
still held listeners for the wandering minstrel. I
tossed him a shilling from the carriage window, and
while the horses slowly forded the brook, asked him
in his own delicious tongue, where he was from.

“Son' di Firenze, signore!”

“And where are you going?”

“Li! al castello.”

Come from Florence and bound to Kenilworth!
Who would not grind an organ and sleep under a hedge,
to answer the hail of the passing traveller in terms
like these? I have seen many a beggar in Italy,
whose inheritance of sunshine and leisure in that delicious
clime I could have found it in my heart to
envy, even with all its concomitants of uncertainty
and want; but here was a bright-faced and inky-eyed
child of the sun, with his wardrobe and means upon
his back, travelling from one land to another, and loitering
wherever there was a resort for pleasure, without
a friend or a care; and, upon my life, I could have
donned his velveteen jacket, and with his cheerful
heart to button it over, have shouldered his organ,
put my trust in i forestieri, and kept on for Kenilworth.
There really is, I thought, as I left him behind, no
profit or reward consequent upon a life of confinement
and toil; no moss ever gathered by the unturned
stone, that repays, by a thousandth part, the loss of
even this poor boy's share of the pleasures of change.
What would not the tardy winner of fortune give to
exchange his worn-out frame, his unloveable and
furrowed features, his dulled senses, and his vain
regrets, for the elastic frame, the unbroken spirits,
and the redeemable. yet not oppressive poverty of this
Florentine regazzo! The irrecoverable gem of youth
is too often dissolved, like the pearl of Cleopatra, in a
cup which thins the blood and leaves disgust upon
the lip.

The magnificent ruins of Kenilworth broke in upon
my moralities, and a crowd of halt and crippled ciceroni

beset the carriage-door as we alighted at the outer
tower. The neighborhood of the Spa of Leamington,
makes Kenilworth a place of easy resort; and the
beggars of Warwickshire have discovered that your
traveller is more liberal of his coin than your sitter-at-home.
Some dozens of pony-chaises and small, crop
saddle-horses, clustered around the gate, assured us
that we should not muse alone amid the ruins of
Elizabeth's princely gift to her favorite. We passed
into the tilt-yard, leaving on our left the tower in
which Edward was confined, now the only habitable
part of Kenilworth. It gives a comfortable shelter to
an old seneschal, who stands where the giant probably
stood, with Flibbertigibbet under his doublet for a
prompter; but it is not the tail of a rhyme that serves
now for a passport.

Kenilworth, as it now stands, would probably disenchant
almost any one of the gorgeous dreams conjured
up by reading Scott's romance. Yet it is one
of the most superb ruins in the world. It would scarce
be complete to a novel-render, naturally, without a
warder at the gate, and the flashing of a spear-point
and helmet through the embrasures of the tower. A
horseman in armor should pace over the draw-bridge,
and a squire be seen polishing his cuiras through
the opening gate; while on the airy bartizan should
be observed a lady in hoop and farthingale, philandering
with my lord of Leicester in silk doublet and
rapier. In the place of this, the visiter enters Kenilworth
as I have already described, and stepping out
into the tilt-yard, he sees, on an elevation before him,
a fretted and ivy-covered ruin, relieved like a cloud-castle
on the sky; the bright blue plane of the western
heavens shining through window and broken wall,
flecked with waving and luxuriant leaves, and the
crusted and ornamental pinnacles of tottering masonry
and sculpture just leaning to their fall, though the
foundations upon which they were laid, one would
still think, might sustain the firmament. The swelling
root of a creeper has lifted that arch from its base,
and the protruding branch of a chance-sprung tree
(sown perhaps by a field-sparrow) has unseated the
key-stone of the next; and so perish castles and reputations,
the masonry of the human hand, and the
fabrics of human forethought; not by the strength
which they feared, but by the weakness they despised!
Little thought old John of Gaunt, when these rudely-bewn
blocks were heaved into their seat by his herculean
workmen, that, after resisting fire and foe, they
would be sapped and overthrown at last by a vine-tendril
and a sparrow!

Clinging against the outer wall, on that side of the
castle overlooking the meadow, which was overflowed
for the aquatic spots of Kenilworth, stands an antique
and highly ornamental fireplace, which belonged,
doubtless, to the principal hall. The windows on
either side looking forth upon the fields below, must
have been those from which Elizabeth and her train
observed the feats of Arion and his dolphin; and at all
times, the large and spacious chimney-place, from the
castle's first occupation to its last, must have been the
centre of the evening revelry, and conversation of its
guests. It was a hook whereon to hang a revery, and
between the roars of vulgar laughter which assailed
my ears from a party lolling on the grass below, I contrived
to figure to myself, with some distinctness, the
personages who had stood about it. A visit to Kenilworth,
without the deceptions of fancy, would be as
disconnected from our previous enthusiasm on the
subject as from any other scene with which it had no
relation. The general effect at first, in any such spot,
is only to dispossess us, by a powerful violence, of the
cherished picture we had drawn of it in imagination;
and it is only after the real recollection has taken root
and ripened—after months, it may be—that we can
fully bring the visionary characters we have drawn to
inhabit it. If I read Kenilworth now, I see Mike
Lambourne stealing out, not from the ruined postern
which I clambered through, over heaps of rubbish,
but from a little gate that turned noiselessly on its
hinges, in the unreal castle built ten years ago in my
brain.

I had wandered away from my companion, Miss
Jane Porter, to climb up a secret staircase in the wall,
rather too difficult of ascent for a female foot, and
from my elevated position I caught an accidental view
of that distinguished lady through the arch of a Gothic
window, with a background of broken architecture and
foliage—presenting, by chance, perhaps the most fitting
and admirable picture of the authoress of the
Scottish Chiefs, that a painter in his brightest hour
could have fancied. Miss Porter, with her tall and
striking figure, her noble face (said by Sir Martin Shee
to have approached nearer in its youth to his beau
ideal of the female features than any other, and still
possessing the remains of uncommon beauty), is at all
times a person whom it would be difficult to see without
a feeling of involuntary admiration. But standing,
as I saw her at that moment, motionless and erect, in
the morning dress, with dark feathers, which she has
worn since the death of her beloved and gifted sister,
her wrists folded across, her large and still beautiful
eyes fixed on a distant object in the view, and her
nobly-cast lineaments reposing in their usual calm and
benevolent tranquillity, while, around and above her,
lay the material and breathed the spirit over which she
had held the first great mastery—it was a tableau
vivant which I was sorry to be alone to see.

Was she thinking of the great mind that had evoked
the spirits of the ruins she stood among—a mind in
which (by Sir Walter's own confession) she had first
bared the vein of romance which breathed so freely
for the world's delight? Were the visions which
sweep with such supernatural distinctness and rapidity
through the imagination of genius—visions of which
the millionth portion is probably scarce communicated
to the world in a literary lifetime—were Elizabeth's
courtiers, Elizabeth's passions, secret hours, interviews
with Leicester—were the imprisoned king's
nights of loncliness and dread, his hopes, his indignant,
but unheeded thoughts—were all the possible circumstances,
real or imaginary, of which that proud castle
might have been the scene, thronging in those few
moments of revery through her fancy? Or was her
heart busy with its kindly affections, and had the
beauty and interest of the scene but awakened a thought
of one who was most wont to number with her the
sands of those brighter hours?

Who shall say? The very question would perhaps
startle the thoughts beyond recall—so elusive are even
the most angelic of the mind's unseen visitants?

I have recorded here the speculations of a moment
while I leaned over the wall of Kenilworth, but as I
descended by the giddy staircase, a peal of rude
laughter broke from the party in the fosse below, and
I could not but speculate on the difference between
the various classes whom curiosity draws to the spot.
The distinguished mind that conceives a romance
which enchants the world, comes in the same guise
and is treated but with the same respect as theirs.
The old porter makes no distinction in his charge of
half-a-crown, and the grocer's wife who sucks an
orange on the grass, looks at the dark crape hat and
plain exterior—her only standards—and thinks herself
as well dressed, and therefore equal or superior to the
tall lady, whom she presumes is out like herself on a
day's pleasuring. One comes and goes like the other,
and is forgotten alike by the beggars at the gate and
the seneschal within, and thus invisibly and unsuspected,
before our very eyes, does genius gather its golden
fruit, and while we walk in a plain and commonplace
world, with commonplace and sordid thoughts

and feelings, the gifted walk side by side with us in a
world of their own—a world of which we see distant
glimpses in their after-creations, and marvel in what
unsunned mine its gems of thought were gathered!

14. CHAPTER XIV.
A VISIT TO DUBLIN ABOUT THE TIME OF THE QUEEN'S
MARRIAGE.

The usual directions for costume, in the corner of
the court card of invitation, included, on the occasion
of the queen's marriage, a wedding favor, to be worn
by ladies on the shoulder, and by gentlemen on the
left breast. This trifling addition to the dress of the
individual was a matter of considerable importance to
the milliners, hatters, etc., who, in a sale of ten or
twelve hundred white cockades (price from two dollars
to five) made a very pretty profit. The power of giving
a large ball to the more expensive classes, and ordering
a particular addition to the costume—in other
words, of laying a tax on the rich for the benefit of
the poor, is exercised more frequently in Ireland than
in other countries, and serves the double purpose of
popularity to the lord lieutenant, and benefit to any
particular branch of industry that may be suffering
from the decline of a fashion.

The large quadrangular court-yard of the castle
rattled with the tramp of horses' feet and the clatter of
sabres and spurs, and in the uncertain glare of torches
and lamps, the gay colors and glittering arms of the
mounted guard of lancers had a most warlike appearance.
The procession which the guard was stationed
to regulate and protect, rather detracted from the romantic
effect—the greater proportion of equipages
being the covered hack cars of the city—vehicles of
the most unmitigated and ludicrous vulgarity. A
coffin for two, set on its end, with the driver riding on
the turned-down lid, would be a very near resemblance;
and the rags of the driver, and the translucent leanness
of his beast, make it altogether the most deplorable
of conveyances. Here and there a carriage with
liveries, and here and there a sedan-chair with four
stout Milesian calves in blue stockings trotting under
the poles, rather served as a foil than a mitigation of
the effect, and the hour we passed in the line, edging
slowly toward the castle, was far from unfruitful in
amusement. I learned afterward that even those who
have equipages in Dublin go to court in hack cars as
a matter of economy—one of the many indications of
that feeling of lost pride which has existed in Ireland
since the removal of the parliament.

A hall and staircase lined with files of soldiers is not
quite as festive an entrance to a ball as the more common
one of alleys of flowering shrubs; but with a
waltz by a military band resounding from the lofty
ceiling, I am not sure that it does not temper the blood
as aptly for the spirit of the hour. It was a rainy
night, and the streets were dark, and the effect upon
myself of coming suddenly into so enchanted a scene
—arms glittering on either side, and a procession of
uniforms and plumed dames winding up the spacious
stairs—was thrilling, even with the chivalric scenes of
Eglinton fresh in my remembrance.

At the head of the ascent we entered a long hall,
lined with the private servants of Lord Ebrington, and
the ceremony of presentation having been achieved the
week before, we left the throne-room on the right, and
passed directly to St. Patrick's Hall, the grand scene
of the evening's festivities. This, I have said before,
is the finest ball-room I remember in Europe. Twelve
hundred people, seated, dancing, or promenading,
were within its lofty walls on the night whose festivities
I am describing; and at either end a gallery, sup
ported by columns of marble, contained a band of
music, relieving each other with alternate waltzes and
quadrilles. On the long sides of the hail were raised
tiers of divans, filled with chaperons, veteran officers,
and other lookers-on, and at the upper end was raised
a platform with a throne in the centre, and seats on
either side for the family of the lord lieutenant and the
more distinguished persons of the nobility. Lord
Ebrington was rather in his character of a noble host
than that of viceroy, and I did not observe him once
seated under his canopy of state; but with his aids
and some one of the noble ladies of his family on his
arm, he promenaded the hall conversing with his acquaintances,
and seemingly enjoying in a high degree
the brilliant gayety of the scene. His dress, by the
way, was the simple diplomatic dress of most continental
courts, a blue uniform embroidered with gold,
the various orders on his breast forming its principal
distinction. I seldom have seen a man of a more
calm and noble dignity of presence than the lord lieutenant,
and never a face that expressed more strongly
the benevolence and high purity of character for which
he is distinguished. In person, except that he is
taller, he bears a remarkably close resemblance to the
Duke of Wellington.

We can scarcely conceive, in this country of black
coats, the brilliant effect of a large assembly in which
there is no person out of uniform or court-dress—
every lady's head nodding with plumes, and every
gentleman in military scarlet and gold or lace and
embroidery. I may add, too, that in this country of
care-worn and pale faces, we can as little conceive the
effect of an assembly rosy with universal health,
habitually unacquainted with care, and abandoned with
the apparent child-like simplicity of high breeding, to
the inspiring gayety of the hour. The greater contrast,
however, is between a nation where health is the
first care, and one in which health is never thought
of till lost; and light and shade are not more contrasted
than the mere general effect of countenance
in one and in the other. A stranger travelling in our
country, once remarked to me that a party he had attended
seemed like an entertainment given in the convalescent
ward of a hospital—the ladies were so pale
and fragile, and the men so unjoyous and sallow. And
my own invariable impression, in the assemblies I
have first seen after leaving my own country was a
corresponding one—that the men and women had the
rosy health and untroubled gayety of children round a
May-pole. That this is not the effect of climate, I do
most religiously believe. It is over-much care and over-much
carelessness—the corroding care of an avid temerity
in business, and the carelessness of all the functions
of life till their complaints become too imperative to
be disregarded. But this is a theme out of place.

The ball was managed by the grand chamberlain
(Sir William Leeson), and the aids-de-camp of the
lord lieutenant, and except that now and then you
were reminded by the movement around you that you
stood with your back to the representative of royalty,
there was little to draw your attention from the attractions
of the dance. Waltz, quadrille, and gallop, followed
each other in giddy succession, and “what do
you think of Irish beauty?” had been asked me as
often as “how do you like America?” was ever mumbled
through the trumpet of Miss Martineau, when I
mounted with a friend to one of the upper divans, and
tried, what is always a difficult task, and nowhere so
difficult as in Ireland, to call in the intoxicated fancy,
and anatomize the charm of the hour.

Moore's remark has been often quoted—“there is
nothing like an Irish woman to take a man off his
feet;” but whether this figure of speech was suggested
by the little bard's common soubriquet of “Jump-up-and-kiss-me
[3] Tom Moore,” or simply conveyed his

idea of the bewildering character of Irish beauty, it
contains, to any one who has ever travelled (or waltzed)
in that country, a very just, as well as realizing description.
Physically, Irish women are probably the finest
race in the world—I mean, taller, better limbed and
chested, larger eyed, and with more luxuriant hair,
and freer action, than any other nation I have observed.
The Phœnician and Spanish blood which
has run hundreds of years in their veins, still kindles
its dark fire in their eyes, and with the vivacity of the
northern mind and the bright color of the nor hern
skin, these southern qualities mingle in most admirable
and superb harmony. The idea we form of Italian
and Grecian beauty is never realized in Greece and
Italy, but we find it in Ireland, heightened and exceeded.
Cheeks and lips of the delicacy and bright
teint of carnation, with snowy teeth, and hair and eyebrows
of jet, are what we should look for on the palette
of Appelles, could we recall the painter, and reanimate
his far-famed models; and these varied charms, united,
fall very commonly to the share of the fair Milesian
of the upper classes. In other lands of dark eyes, the
rareness of a fine-grained skin, so necessary to a brunette,
makes beauty as rare—but whether it is the
damp softness of the climate or the infusion of Saxon
blood, a coarse skin is almost never seen in Ireland.
I speak now only of the better-born ranks of society,
for in all my travels in Ireland, I did not chance to
see even one peasant-girl of any pretensions to good
looks. From north to south, they looked, to me,
coarse, ill-formed, and repulsive.

I noticed in St. Patrick's Hall what I had remarked
ever since I had been in the country, that with all
their beauty, the Irish women are very deficient in
what in England is called style. The men, on the
contrary, were particularly comme il faut, and as they
are a magnificent race (corresponding to such mothers
and sisters), I frequently observed I had never seen
so many handsome and elegant men in a day. Whenever
I saw a gentleman and lady together, riding,
driving, or walking, my first impression was, almost
universally, that the man was in attendance upon a
woman of an inferior class to his own. This difference
may be partly accounted for by the reduced circumstances
of the gentry of Ireland, which keeps the
daughters at home, that the sons may travel and improve;
but it works differently in America, where,
spite of travel and every other advantage to the contrary,
the daughters of a family are much oftener
lady-like than the sons are gentleman-like. After
wondering for some time, however, why the quick-witted
women of Ireland should be less apt than those
of other countries in catching the air of high breeding
usually deemed so desirable, I began to like them better
for the deficiency, and to find a reason for it in the
very qualities which make them so attractive. Nothing
could be more captivating and delightful than the
manners of Irish women, and nothing, at the same
time, could be more at war with the first principles of
English high breeding—coldness and reténu. The
frank, almost hilarious “how are you?” of an Irish
girl, her whole-handed and cordial grasp, as often in
the day as you meet her, the perfectly un-missy-ish,
confiding, direct character of her conversation, are all
traits which would stamp her as somewhat rudely bred
in England, and as desperately vulgar in New York
or Philadelphia.

Modest to a proverb, the Irish woman is as unsuspecting
of an impropriety as if it were an impossible
thing, and she is as fearless and joyous as a midshipman,
and sometimes as noisy. In a ball-room she
looks ill-dressed, not because her dress was ill-put-on,
but because she dances, not glides, sits down without
care, pulls her flowers to pieces, and if her head-dress
incommodes her, gives it a pull or a push—acts which
would be perfect insanity at Almack's. If she is of
fended, she asks for an explanatino. If she does not
understand you, she confesses her ignorance. If she
wishes to see you the next day, she tells you how and
when. She is the child of nature, and children are
not “stylish.” The niminy-piminy, eye-avoiding,
finger-tipped, drawling, don't-touch-me manner of
some of the fashionable ladies of our country, would
amuse a cold and reserved English woman sufficiently,
but they would drive an Irish girl into hysterics. I
have met one of our fair country-people abroad, whose
“Grecian stoop,” and exquisitely subdued manner,
was invariably taken for a fit of indigestion.

The ball-supper was royally sumptuous, and served
in a long hall thrown open at midnight; and in the
gray of the morning, I left the floor covered with
waltzers, and confessed to an Irish friend, that I never
in my life, not even at Almack's, had seen the half as
much true beauty as had brightened St. Patrick's Hall
at the celebration of the queen's marriage.

15. CHAPTER XV.
CLOSING SCENES OF THE SESSION AT WASHINGTON.

The paradox of “the more one does, the more one
can do,” is resolved in life at Washington with more
success than I have seen it elsewhere. The inexorable
bell at the hotel or boarding-house pronounces the
irrevocable and swift transit of breakfast to all sleepers
after eight. The elastic depths of the pillow have
scarcely yielded their last feather to the pressure of
the sleeper's head, before the drowse is rudely shaken
from his eyelids, and with an alacrity which surprises
himself, he finds his toilet achieved, his breakfast over,
and himself abroad to lounge in the sunshine till the
flag waves on the capitol. He would retire to his
chamber to read during these two or three vacant
hours, but the one chair in his pigeon-hole creaks, or
has no back or bottom, or his anthracite fire is out, or
is too hot for the size of the room; or, in short, Washington,
from whatever cause, is a place where none
read except those who stand up to a padlocked newspaper.
The stars and stripes, moving over the two
wings of the capitol at eleven, announce that the two
chambers of legislation are in session, and the hard-working
idler makes his way to the senate or the
house. He lingers in the lobby awhile, amused with
the button-hole seizers playing the unwilling ears of
members with their claims, or enters the library,
where ladies turn over prints, and enfilade, with their
battery of truant eyes, the comers in at the green
door. He then gropes up the dark staircase to the
senate gallery, and stifles in the pressure of a hot
gallery, forgetting, like listeners at a crowded opera,
that bodily discomfort will unlink the finest harmonies
of song or oratory. Thence he descends to the rotunda
to draw breath and listen to the more practical, but
quite as earnest eloquence of candidates for patents;
and passes, after while, to the crowded gallery of the
house, where, by some acoustic phenomena in the
construction of the building, the voices of the speakers
comes to his ear as articulate as water from a narrownecked
bottle. “Small blame to them!” he thinks,
however: for behind the brexia columns are grouped
all the fair forms of Washington; and in making his
bow to two hundred despotic lawgivers in feathers and
velvet, he is readily consoled that the duller legislators
who yield to their sway are inaudible and forgotten.
To this upper house drop in, occasionally, the younger
or gayer members of the lower, bringing, if not political
scandal, at least some slight résumer of what Mr.
Somebody is beating his desk about below; and thus,
crammed with the day's trifles or the day's business,
and fatigned from heel to eyelid, our idler goes home

at five to dress for dinner and the night's campaign,
having been up and on his legs for ten mortal hours.

Cold water and a little silence in his own room have
rather refreshed him, and he dines at six with a party
of from fifteen to twenty-five persons. He discusses
the vital interests of fourteen millions of people over
a glass of wine with the man whose vote, possibly,
will decide their destiny, and thence hurries to a ball-room
crammed like a perigord-pie, where he pants,
elbows, eats supper, and waltzes till three in the
morning. How human constitutions stand this, and
stand it daily and nightly, from the beginning to the
end of a session, may well puzzle the philosophy of
those who rise and breakfast in comfortable leisure.

I joined the crowd on the twenty-second of February,
to pay my respects to the president, and see the
cheese. Whatever veneration existed in the minds of
the people toward the former, their curiosity in reference
to the latter predominated, unquestionably.
The circular pavé, extending from the gate to the
White House, was thronged with citizens of all classes,
those coming away having each a small brown paper
parcel and a very strong smell; those advancing manifesting,
by shakings of the head and frequent exclamations,
that there may be too much of a good thing,
and particularly of a cheese. The beautiful portico
was thronged with boys and coach-drivers, and the
odor strengthened with every step. We forced our
way over the threshold, and encountered an atmosphere,
to which the mephitic gas floating over Avernus
must be faint and innocuous. On the side of the
hall hung a rough likeness of the general, emblazoned
with eagle and stars, forming a background to the
huge tub in which the cheese had been packed; and
in the centre of the vestibule stood the “fragrant gift,”
surrounded with a dense crowd, who, without crackers,
or even “malt to their cheese,” had, in two hours,
eaten and purveyed away fourteen hundred pounds!
The small segment reserved for the president's use
counted for nothing in the abstractions.

Glad to compromise for a breath of cheeseless air,
we desisted from the struggle to obtain a sight of the
table, and mingled with the crowd in the east room.
Here were diplomates in their gold coats and officers
in uniform, ladies of secretaries and other ladies,
soldiers on volunteer duty, and Indians in war-dress
and paint. Bonnets, feathers, uniforms, and all—it
was rather a gay assemblage. I remembered the descriptions
in travellers' books, and looked out for
millers and blacksmiths in their working gear, and for
rudeness and vulgarity in all. The offer of a mammoth
cheese to the public was likely to attract to the
presidental mansion more of the lower class than would
throng to a common levee. Great-coats there were,
and not a few of them, for the day was raw, and unless
they were hung on the palings outside, they must remain
on the owners' shoulders; but, with a single exception
(a fellow with his coat torn down his back,
possibly in getting at the cheese), I saw no man in a
dress that was not respectable and clean of its kind,
and abundantly fit for a tradesman out of his shop.
Those who were much pressed by the crowd put their
hats on; but there was a general air of decorum
which would surprise any one who had pinned his
faith on travellers. An intelligent Englishman, very
much inclined to take a disgust to mobocracy, expressed
to me great surprise at the decency and proper
behavior of the people. The same experiment in
England, he thought, would result in as pretty a riot
as a paragraph-monger would desire to see.

The president was down stairs in the oval reception
room, and, though his health would not permit him
to stand, he sat in his chair for two or three hours, and
received his friends with his usual bland and dignified
courtesy. By his side stood the lady of the mansion,
dressed in full court costume, and doing the honors
of her place with a grace and amenity which every one
felt, and which threw a bloom over the hour. General
Jackson retired, after a while, to his chamber, and
the president elect remained to support his relative,
and present to her the still thronging multitude, and
by four o'clock the guests were gone, and the “banquet
hall” was deserted. Not to leave a wrong impression
of the cheese, I dined afterward at a table to
which the president had sent a piece of it, and found
it of excellent quality. It is like many other things,
more agreeable in small quantities.

Some eccentric mechanic has presented the president
with a sulkey, made entirely (except the wheels)
of rough-cut hickory, with the bark on. It looks
rude enough, but has very much the everlasting look
of old Hickory himself; and if he could be seen driving
a high-stepping, bony old iron-gray steed in it,
any passer by would see that there was as much fitness
in the whole thing as in the chariot of Bacchus and
his reeling leopards. Some curiously-twisted and
gnarled branches have been very ingeniously turned
into handles and whip-box, and the vehicle is compact
and strong. The president has left it to Mr. Van
Buren.

In very strong contrast to the sulkey, stood close by,
the elegant phaeton, made of the wood of the old
frigate Constitution. It has a seat for two, with a
driver's box, covered with a superb hammercloth, and
set up rather high in front; the wheels and body are
low, and there are bars for baggage behind; altogether,
for hightness and elegance, it would be a creditable
turn out for Long Acre. The material is excessively
beautiful—a fine-grained oak, polished to a very high
degree, with its colors delicately brought out by a coat
of varnish. The wheels are very slender and light, but
strong, and, with all its finish, it looks a vehicle capable
of a great deal of service. A portrait of the Constitution,
under full sail, is painted on the panels.

16. CHAPTER XVI.
THE INAUGURATION.

While the votes for president were being counted
in the senate, Mr. Clay remarked to Mr. Van Buren,
with courteous significance:—

“It is a cloudy day, sir!”

“The sun will shine on the fourth of March!” was
the confident reply.

True to his augury, the sun shone out of heaven
without a cloud on the inaugural morning. The air
was cold, but clear and life-giving; and the broad
avenues of Washington for once seemed not too large
for the throning population. The crowds who had
been pouring in from every direction for several days
before, ransacking the town for but a shelter from the
night, were apparent on the spacious sidewalks; and
the old campaigners of the winter seemed but a thin
sprinkling among the thousands of new and strange
faces. The sun shone alike on the friends and opponents
of the new administration, and, as far as one
might observe in a walk to the capitol, all were made
cheerful alike by its brightness. It was another
augury, perhaps, and may foretell a more extended
fusion under the light of the luminary new risen. In
a whole day passed in a crowd composed of all classes
and parties, I heard no remark that the president would
have been unwilling to hear.

I was at the capitol a half hour before the procession
arrived, and had leisure to study a scene for
which I was not at all prepared. The noble stairease
of the east front of the building leaps over three
arches, under one of which carriages pass to the basement
door; and, as you approach from the gate, the

eye cuts the ascent at right angles, and the sky, broken
by a small spire at a short distance, is visible beneath.
Broad stairs occur at equal distances, with corresponding
projections; and from the upper platform rise
the outer columns of the portico, with ranges of columns
three deep extending back to the pilasters. I
had often admired this front with its many graceful
columns, and its superb flight of stairs, as one of the
finest things I had seen in the world. Like the effect
of the assembled population of Rome waiting to receive
the blessing before the front of St. Peter's, however,
the assembled crowd on the steps and at the
base of the capitol heightened inconceivably the grandeur
of the design. They were piled up like the
people on the temples of Babylon in one of Martin's
sublime pictures—every projection covered, and an
inexpressible soul and character given by their presence
to the architecture. Boys climbed about the
bases of the columns, single figures stood on the posts
of the surrounding railings in the boldest relief against
the sky; and the whole thing was exactly what Paul
Veronese would I have delighted to draw. I stood near
an accomplished artist who is commissioned to fill one
of the panels of the rotunda, and I can not but hope
he may have chosen this magnificent scene for his
subject.

The republican procession, consisting of the presidents
and their families, escorted by a small volunteer
corps, arrived soon after twelve. The General and
Mr. Van Buren were in the constitution phaeton,
drawn by four grays, and as it entered the gate, they
both rode uncovered. Descending from the carriage
at the foot of the steps, a passage was made for them
through the dense crowd, and the tall white head of
the old chieftain, still uncovered, went steadily up
through the agitated mass, marked by its peculiarity
from all around it.

I was in the crowd thronging the opposite side of
the court, and lost sight of the principal actors in this
imposing drama, till they returned from the senate
chamber. A temporary platform had been laid, and
railed in on the broad stair which supports the portico,
and, for all preparation to one of the most important
and most meaning and solemn ceremonies on
earth—for the inauguration of a chief magistrate over a
republic of fifteen millions of freemen—the whole addition
to the open air, and the presence of the people,
was a volume of holy writ. In comparing the impressive
simplicity of this consummation of the wishes of
a mighty people, with the tricked-out ceremonial, and
hollow show, which embarrass a corresponding event
in other lands, it was impossible not to feel that the
moral sublime was here—that a transaction so important,
and of such extended and weighty import, could
borrow nothing from drapery or decoration, and that
the simple presence of the sacred volume, consecrating
the act, spoke more thrillingly to the heart than the
trumpets of a thousand heralds.

The crowd of diplomatists and senators in the rear
of the columns made way, and the ex-president and
Mr. Van Buren advanced with uncovered heads. A
murmur of feeling rose up from the moving mass below,
and the infirm old man, emerged from a sick-chamber,
which his physician had thought it impossible
he should leave, bowed to the people, and, still
uncovered in the cold air, took his seat beneath the
portico. Mr. Van Buren then advanced, and with a
voice remarkably distinct, and with great dignity, read
his address to the people. The air was elastic, and
the day still; and it is supposed that near twenty thousand
persons heard him from his elevated position distinctly.
I stood myself on the outer limit of the
crowd, and though I lost occasionally a sentence from
the interruption near by, his words came clearly articulated
to my ear.

When the address was closed, the chief justice ad
vanced and administered the oath. As the book
touched the lips of the new president, there arose a
general shout, and expression of feeling common
enough in other countries, but drawn with difficulty
from an American assemblage. The sons, and the
immediate friends of Mr. Van Buren, then closed
about him; the ex-president, the chief justice, and
others, gave him the hand of congratulation, and the
ceremony was over. They descended the steps, the
people gave one more shout as they mounted the constitution
carriage together, and the procession returned
through the avenue, followed by the whole population
of Washington.

Mr. Van Buren held a levee immediately afterward,
but I endeavored in vain to get my foot over the
threshold. The crowd was tremendous. At four,
the diplomatic body had an audience; and in replying
to the address of Don Angel Calderon, the president
astonished the gold coats, by addressing them as the
democratic corps. The representatives of the crowned
heads of Europe stood rather unesily under the
epithet, till it was suggested that he possibly meant to
say diplomatic.

17. CHAPTER XVII.
WASHINGTON IN THE SESSION.

There is a sagacity acquired by travel on the subject
of forage and quarters which is useful in all other
cities in the world where one may happen to be a
stranger, but which is as inapplicable to the emergencies
of an arrival in Washington as waltzing in a shipwreck.
It is a capital whose peculiarities are as much
sui generis as those of Venice; but as those who have
become wise by a season's experience neither remain
on the spot to give warning, nor have recorded thei
experiences in a book, the stranger is worse off in a
coach in Washington than in a gondola in the “city
of silver streets.”

It is well known, I believe, that when the future
city of Washington was about being laid out, there
were two large lot-buyers or land-owners, living two
miles apart, each of whom was interested in having
the public buildings upon the centre of his own domain.
Like children quarrelling for a sugar horse,
the subject of dispute was pulled in two, and one got
the head, the other the tail. The capitol stands on a
rising ground in solitary grandeur, and the president's
house and department buildings two miles off on another.
The city straddles and stretches between,
doing its best to look continuous and compact; but
the stranger soon sees that it is, after all, but a “city
of magnificent distances,” built to please nobody on
earth but a hackney-coachman.

The new-comer, when asked what hotel he will
drive to, thinks himself very safe if he chooses that
nearest the capitol—supposing, of course, that, as
Washington is purely a legislative metropolis, the
most central part will naturally be near the scene of
action. He is accordingly set down at Gadsby's, and,
at a price that would startle an English nobleman, he
engages a pigeon-hole in the seventh heaven of that
boundless caravansary. Even at Gadsby's, however,
he finds himself over half a mile from the capitol, and
wonders, for two or three days, why the deuce the
hotel was not built on some of the waste lots at the
foot of Capitol hill, an improvement which might
have saved him, in rainy weather, at least five dollars
a day in hack-hire. Meantime the secretaries and
foreign ministers leave their cards, and the party and
dinner-giving people shower upon him the “small
rain” of pink billets. He sets apart the third or fourth
day to return their calls, and inquires the addresses

of his friends (which they never write on their cards,
because, if they did, it would be no guide), and is told
it is impossible to direct him, but the hackney-coachmen
all know! He calls the least ferocious-looking of the
most bullying and ragged set of tatterdemalions he has
ever seen, and delivers himself and his visiting-list into
his hands. The first thing is a straight drive two
miles away from the capitol. He passes the president's
house, and getting off the smooth road, begins
to drive and drag through cross lanes and open lots,
laid out according to no plan that his loose ideas of
geometry can comprehend, and finds his friends living
in houses that want nothing of being in the country,
but trees, garden, and fences. It looks as if it had
rained naked brick houses upon a waste plain, and
each occupant had made a street with reference to his
own front door. The much-shaken and more-astonished
victim consumes his morning and his temper,
and has made, by dinner-time, but six out of forty
calls, all imperatively due, and all scattered far and
wide with the same loose and irreconcilable geography.

A fortnight's experience satisfies the stranger that
this same journey is worse at night than at morning;
and that, as he leaves his dinner which he pays for at
home, runs the risk of his neck, passes an hour or
two on the road, and ruins himself in hack-hire, it
must be a very—yes, a very pleasant dinner-party to
compensate him. Consequently, he either sends a
“p. p. c.” to all his acquaintances, and lives incog.,
or, which is a more sensible thing, moves up to the
other settlement, and abandons the capitol.

Those who live on the other side of the president's
house are the secretaries, diplomatists, and a few
wealthy citizens. There is no hotel in this quarter,
but there are one or two boarding-houses, and (what
we have been lucky enough to secure ourselves) furnished
lodgings, in which you have everything but
board. Your dinner is sent you from a French cook's
near by, and your servant gets your breakfast—a plan
which gives you the advantage of dining at your own
hour, choosing your own society, and of having covers
for a friend or two whenever it suits your humor, and
at half an hour's warning. There are very few of
these lodgings (which combine many other advantages
over a boarding-house), but more of them would be a
good speculation to house-owners, and I wish it were
suggested, not only here, but in every city in our
country.

Aside from society, the only amusement in Washington
is frequenting the capitol. If one has a great
deal of patience and nothing better to do, this is very
well; and it is very well at any rate till one becomes
acquainted with the heads of the celebrated men in
both the chambers, with the noble architecture of the
building, and the routine of business. This done, it
is time wearily spent for a spectator. The finer orators
seldom speak, or seldom speak warmly, the floor is
oftenest occupied by prosing and very sensible gentlemen,
whose excellent ideas enter the mind more
agreeably by the eye than the ear, or, in other words,
are better delivered by the newspapers, and there is a
great deal of formula and etiquetical sparring which
is not even entertaining to the members, and which
consumes time “consumedly.” Now and then the
senate adjourns when some one of the great orators
has taken the floor, and you are sure of a great effort
the next morning. If you are there in time, and can
sit, like Atlas with a world on your back, you may enjoy
a front seat and hear oratory, unsurpassed, in my
opinion, in the world.

The society in Washington, take it all in all, is by
many degrees the best in the United States. One is
prepared, though I can not conceive why, for the contrary.
We read in books of travels, and we are told
by everybody, that the society here is promiscuous,
rough, inelegant, and even barbarous. This is an
untrue representation, or it has very much changed.

There is no city, probably no village in America,
where the female society is not refined, cultivated, and
elegant. With or without regular advantages, woman
attains the refinements and the tact necessary to polite
intercourse. No traveller ever ventured to complain
of this part of American society. The great deficiency
is that of agreeable, highly-cultivated men, whose pursuits
have been elevated, and whose minds are pliable
to the grace and changing spirit of conversation.
Every man of talents possesses these qualities naturally,
and hence the great advantage which Washington enjoys
over every other city in our country. None but
a shallow observer, or a malicious book maker, would
ever sneer at the exteriors or talk of the ill-breeding
of such men as form, in great numbers, the agreeable
society of this place—for a man of great talents never
could be vulgar; and there is a superiority about most
of these which raises them above the petty standard
which regulates the outside of a coxcomb. Even
compared with the dress and address of men of similar
positions and pursuits in Europe, however (members
of the house of commons, for example, or of the chamber
of deputies in France), it is positively the fact that
the senators and representatives of the United States
have a decided advantage. It is all very well for Mr.
Hamilton, and other scribblers whose books must be
spiced to go down, to ridicule a Washington soirée for
English readers; but if the observation of one who
has seen assemblies of legislators and diplomatists in
all the countries of Europe may be fairly placed
against his and Mrs. Trollope's, I may assert, upon
my own authority, that they will not find, out of May
Fair in England, so well-dressed and dignified a body
of men. I have seen as yet no specimen of the rough
animal described by them and others as the “western
member;” and if David Crockett (whom I was never
so fortunate as to see) was of that description, the race
must have died with him. It is a thing I have learned
since I have been in Washington, to feel a wish that
foreigners should see congress in session. We are
so humbugged, one way and another, by travellers'
lies.

I have heard the observation once or twice from
strangers since I have been here, and it struck myself
on my first arrival, that I had never seen within the
same limit before, so many of what may be called
“men of mark.” You will scarce meet a gentleman
on the sidewalk in Washington who would not attract
your notice, seen elsewhere, as an individual possessing
in his eye or general features a certain superiority.
Never having seen most of the celebrated speakers of
the senate, I busied myself for the first day or two in
examining the faces that passed me in the street, in
the hope of knowing them by the outward stamp
which, we are apt to suppose, belongs to greatness.
I gave it up at last, simply from the great number I
met who might be (for all that features had to do with
it) the remarkable men I sought.

There is a very simple reason why a congress of the
United States should be, as they certainly are, a much
more marked body of men than the English house of
commons or lords, or the chamber of peers or deputies
in France. I refer to the mere means by which, in
either case, they come by their honors. In England
and France the lords and peers are legislators by hereditary
right, and the members of the commons and
deputies from the possession of extensive property or
family influence, or some other cause, arguing, in
most cases, no great personal talent in the individual.
They are legislators, but they are devoted very often
much more heartily to other pursuits—hunting or
farming, racing, driving, and similar out-of-door passions
common to English gentlemen and lords, or the
corresponding penchants of French peers and deputies

It is only the few great leaders and orators who devote
themselves to politics exclusively. With us every
one knows it is quite the contrary. An American
politician delivers himself, body and soul, to his pursuit.
He never sleeps, eats, walks, or dreams, but in
subservience to his aim. He can not afford to have
another passion of any kind till he has reached the
point of his ambition—and then it has become a
mordent necessity from habit. The consequence is,
that no man can be found in an elevated sphere in our
country, who has not had occasion for more than ordinary
talent to arrive there. He inherited nothing of
his distinction, and has made himself. Such ordeals
leave their marks, and they who have thought, and
watched, and struggled, and contended with the passions
of men as an American politician inevitably
must, can not well escape the traces of such work.
It usually elevates the character of the face—it always
strongly marks it.

A-propos of “men of mark;” the dress circle of the
theatre, at Power's benefit, not long since, was graced
by three Indians in full costume—the chief of the
Foxes, the chief of the Ioways, and a celebrated warrior
of the latter tribe, called the Sioux-killer. The
Fox is an old man of apparently fifty, with a heavy,
aquiline nose, a treacherous eye, sharp as an eagle's,
and a person rather small in proportion to his head
and features. He was dressed in a bright scarlet
blanket, and a crown of feathers, with an eagle's plume,
standing erect on the top of his head, all dyed in the
same deep hue. His face was painted to match, except
his lips, which looked of a most ghastly sallow,
in contrast with his fiery nose, forehead, and cheeks.
His tomahawk lay in the hollow of his arm, decked
with feathers of the same brilliant color with the rest
of his drapery. Next him sat the Sioux-killer, in a
dingy blanket, with a crown made of a great quantity
of the feathers of a pea-hen, which fell over his face,
and concealed his features almost entirely. He is
very small, but is famous for his personal feats, having,
among other things, walked one hundred and thirty
miles in thirty successive hours, and killed three Sioux
(hence his name) in one battle with that nation. He
is but twenty-three, but very compact and wiry-looking,
and his eye glowed through his veil of hen-feathers
like a coal of fire.

Next to the Sioux-killer sat “White Cloud,” the
chief of the Ioways. His face was the least warlike
of the three, and expressed a good nature and freedom
from guile, remarkable in an Indian. He is about
twenty-four, has very large features, and a fine, erect
person, with broad shoulders and chest. He was
painted less than the Fox chief, but of nearly the same
color, and carried, in the hollow of his arm, a small,
glittering tomahawk, ornamented with blue feathers.
His head was encircled by a kind of turban of silver-fringed
cloth, with some metallic pendents for earrings,
and his blanket, not particularly clean or handsome,
was partly open on the breast, and disclosed a calico
shirt, which was probably sold to him by a trader in
the west. They were all very attentive to the play,
but the Fox chief and White Cloud departed from the
traditionary dignity of Indians, and laughed a great
deal at some of Power's fun. The Sioux-killer sat
between them, as motionless and grim as a marble
knight on a tomb-stone.

The next day I had the pleasure of dining with
Mr. Power, who lived at the same hotel with the Indian
delegation; and while at dinner he received a
message from the Ioways, expressing a wish to call on
him. We were sitting over our wine when White
Cloud and the Sioux-killer came in with their interpreter.
There were several gentlemen present, one
of them in the naval undress uniform, whose face the
Sioux-killer scrutinized very sharply. They smiled
in bowing to Power, but made very grave inclinations
to the rest of us. The chief took his seat, assuming
a very erect and dignified attitude, which he preserved
immoveable during the interview; but the Sioux-killer
drew up his legs, resting them on the round of the
chair, and, with his head and body bent forward,
seemed to forget himself, and give his undivided attention
to the study of Power and his naval friend.

Tumblers of champagne were given them, which
they drank with great relish, though the Sioux-killer
provoked a little ridicule from White Cloud, by coughing
as he swallowed it. The interpreter was a halfbreed
between an Indian and a negro, and a most intelligent
fellow. He had been reared in the loway
tribe, but had been among the whites a great deal for
the last few years, and had picked up English very
fairly. He told us that White Cloud was the son of
old White Cloud, who died three years since, and
that the young chief had acquired entire command
over the tribe by his mildness and dignity. He had
paid the debts of the Ioways to the traders, very much
against the will of the tribe; but he commenced by
declaring firmly that he would he just, and had carried
his point. He had come to Washington to receive a
great deal of money from the sale of the lands of the
tribe, and the distribution of it lay entirely in his own
power. Only one old warrior had ventured to rise in
council and object to his measures; but when White
Cloud spoke, he had dropped his head on his bosom
and submitted. This information and that which
followed was given in English, of which neither of the
Ioways understood a word.

Mr. Power expressed a surprise that the Sioux-killer
should have known him in his citizen's dress.
The interpreter translated it, and the Indian said in
answer:—

“The dress is very different, but when I see a man's
eye I know him again.”

He then told Power that he wished, in the theatre,
to raise his war-cry and help him fight the three bad-looking
men who were his enemies (referring to the
three bailiffs in the scene in Paddy Carey). Power
asked what part of the play he liked best. He said
that part where he seized the girl in his arms and ran
off the stage with her (at the close of an Irish jig in
the same play).

The interpreter informed us that this was the first
time the Sioux-killer had come among the whites.
He had disliked them always till now, but he said he
had seen enough to keep him telling tales all the rest
of his life. Power offered them cigars, which they
refused. We expressed our surprise; and the Sioux-killer
said that the Indians who smoked gave out
soonest in the chase; and White Cloud added, very
gravely, that the young women of his tribe did not
like the breaths of the smokers. In answer to an inquiry
I made about the comparative size of Indians
and white men, the chief said that the old men of the
whites were larger than old Indians, but the young
whites were not so tall and straight as the youths of
his tribe. We were struck with the smallness of the
chief's hands and feet; but he seemed very much
mortified when the interpreter translated our remark to
him. He turned the little sallow fingers over and over,
and said that old White Cloud, his father, who had
been a great warrior, had small hands like his. The
young chief, we were told by the interpreter, has never
yet been in an engagement, and is always spared from
the heavier fatigues undergone by the rest of the
tribe.

They showed great good nature in allowing us to
look at their ornaments, tomahawks, &c. White
Cloud wore a collar of bear's claws, which marked
him for a chief; and the Sioux-killer carried a great
cluster of brass bells on the end of his tomahawk, of
which he explained the use very energetically. It
was to shake when he stood over his fallen enemy in

he fight, to let the tribe know he had killed him.
After another tumbler of champagne each, they rose
to take their leave, and White Cloud gave us his hand
gently, with a friendly nod. We were all amused,
however, with the Sioux-killer's more characteristic
adieu. He looked us in the eye like a hawk, and gave
us each a grip of his iron fist, that made the blood
tingle under our nails. He would be an awkward
customer in a fight, or his fixed lips and keen eye very
much belie him.

18. CHAPTER XVIII.
WASHINGTON AFTER THE SESSION.

The leaf that is lodged in some sunny dell, after
drifting on the whirlwind—the Indian's canoe, after it
has shot the rapids—the drop of water that has struggled
out from the Phlegethon of Niagara, and sleeps
on the tranquil bosom of Ontario—are faint images
of contrast and repose, compared with a Washingtonian
after the session. I have read somewhere, in an
oriental tale, that a lover, having agreed to share his
life with his dying mistress, took her place in the
grave six months in the year. In Bagdad it might
have been a sacrifice. In Washington I could conceive
such an arrangement to make very little difference.

Nothing is done leisurely in our country; and, by
the haste with which everybody rushes to the railroad
the morning after the rising of congress, you
would fancy that the cars, like Cinderella's coach,
would be changed into pumpkins at the stroke of
twelve. The town was evacuated in a day. On the
fifth of March a placard was sent back by the innkeepers
at Baltimore, declaring that there was not so
much as a garret to be had in that city, and imploring
gentlemen and ladies to remain quietly at Washington
for twenty-four hours. The railroad engine, twice a
day, tugged and puffed away through the hills, drawing
after it, on its sinuous course, a train of brick-colored
cars, that resembled the fabulous red dragon trailing
its slimy length through the valley of Crete. The
gentlemen who sit by the fire in the bar-room at
Gadsby's, like Theodore Hook's secretary, who could
hear his master write “Yours faithfully” in the next
room, learned to distinguish “Received payment”
from “Sundries,” by listening to the ceaseless scratch
of the bookkeeper. The ticket-office at the depot
was a scene of struggle and confusion between those
who wanted places; while, looking their last on these
vanishing paymasters, stood hundreds of tatterdemalions,
white, yellow, and black, with their hands in
their pockets, and (if sincere regret at their departure
could have wrung it forth) a tear in their eye. The
bell rang, and the six hundred departures flocked to
their places—young ladies, with long faces, leaving
the delights of Washington for the dull repose of the
country—their lovers, with longer faces, trying, in vain,
to solve the X quantity expressed by the aforesaid
“Sundries” in their bill—and members of congress
with long faces, too—for not one in twenty has “made
the impression” he expected; and he is moralizing
on the decline of the taste for eloquence, and on the
want of “golden opportunity” for the display of indignant
virtue!

Nothing but an army, or such a concourse of people
as collects to witness an inauguration, could ever make
Washington look populous. But when congress, and
its train of ten thousand casual visiters are gone, and
only the official and indigenous inhabitants remain,
Balbec, or Palmyra, with a dozen Arabs scattered
among its ruins, has less a look of desolation. The
few stragglers in the streets add to its loneliness—pro
ducing exactly the effect sometimes given to a woodland
solitude by the presence of a single bird. The
vast streets seem grown vaster and more disproportionate—the
houses seem straggling to greater distances—the
walk from the president's house to the capitol
seems twice as long—and new faces are seen here and
there, at the doors and windows—for cooks and innkeepers
that had never time to lounge, lounge now,
and their families take quiet possession of the unrented
front parlor. He who would be reminded of his departed
friends should walk down on the avenue. The
carpet, associated with so many pleasant recollections
—which has been pressed by the dainty feet of wits
and beauties—to tread on which was a privilege and
a delight—is displayed on a heap of old furniture, and
while its sacred defects are rudely scanned by the curious,
is knocked down, with all its memories, under the
hammer of the auctioneer. Tables, chairs, ottomans
—all linked with the same glowing recollections—go
for most unworthy prices; and while, humiliated with
the sight, you wonder at the artificial value given to
things by their possessors, you begin to wonder whether
your friends themselves, subjected to the same
searching valuation, would not be depreciated too!
Ten to one, if their characters were displayed like
their carpets, there would come to light defects as unsuspected!

The person to whom this desolation is the “unkindest
cut” is the hackney-coachman. “His vocation”
is emphatically gone! Gone is the dollar made
every successive half hour! Gone is the pleasant sum
in compound addition, done “in the head,” while waiting
at the doors of the public offices! Gone are the
short, but profitable, trips to the theatre! Gone the
four or five families, all taken the same evening to parties,
and each paying the item of “carriage from nine
till twelve!” Gone the absorbed politician, who would
rather give the five-dollar bill than wait for his change!
the lady who sends the driver to be paid at “the bar;”
the uplifted fingers, hither and thither, which embarrass
his choice of a fare—gone, all! The chop-fallen
coachy drives to the stand in the morning and drives
home at noon; he creeps up to Fuller's at a snail-pace,
and, in very mockery of hope, asks the homeward-bound
clerk from the department if he wants a
coach! Night comes on, and his horses begin to believe
in the millenium—and the cobwebs are wove
over his whip-socket.

These changes, however, affect not unpleasantly the
diplomatic and official colony extending westward from
the president's. The inhabitants of this thin-sprinkled
settlement are away from the great thoroughfare, and
do not miss its crowds. The cessation of parties is to
them a relief from night-journeys, colds, card-leavings,
and much wear and tear of carriage-horses. They
live now in dressing-gowns and slippers, read the reviews
and the French papers, get their dinners comfortably
from the restaurateurs, and thank Heaven that
the capitol is locked up. The attachés grow fat, and
the despatches grow thin.

There are several reasons why Washington, till the
month of May, spite of all the drawbacks in the picture
delineated above, is a more agreeable residence
than the northern cities. In the first place, its climate
is at least a month earlier than that of New York, and,
in the spring, is delightful. The trees are at this moment
(the last week in March) bursting into buds;
open carriages are everywhere in use; walking in the
sun is oppressive; and for the last fortnight, this has
been a fair chronicle of the weather. Boston and
New York have been corroded with east winds, meantime,
and even so near as Baltimore, they are still
wrapped in cloaks and shawls. To those who, in
reckoning the comforts of life, agree with me in making
climate stand for nine tenths, this is powerful attraction.

Then the country about Washington, the drives
and rides, are among the most lovely in the world,
the banks of Rock creek are a little wilderness of
beauty. More brigh waters, more secluded bridle-paths,
more sunny and sheltered hill-sides, or finer
mingling of rock, hill, and valley, I never rode among.
Within a half hour's gallop, you have a sylvan retreat
of every variety of beauty, and in almost any direction;
and from this you come home (and this is not the
case with most sylvan rides) to an excellent French
dinner and agreeable society, if you like it. You have
all the seclusion of a rural town, and none of its petty
politics and scandal—all the means and appliances of
a large metropolis, and none of its exactions and limitations.
That which makes the charm of a city, and
that for which we seek the country, are equally here,
and the penalties of both are removed.

Until the reflux of population from the Rocky
mountains, I suppose Washington will never be a metropolis
of residence. But if it were an object with
the inhabitants to make it more so, the advantages I
have just enumerated, and a little outlay of capital and
enterprise, would certainly, in some degree, effect it.
People especially who come from Europe, or have
been accustomed to foreign modes of living, would be
glad to live near a society composed of such attractive
materials as the official and diplomatic persons at the
seat of government. That which keeps them away is,
principally, want of accommodation, and, in a less degree,
it is want of comfortable accommodation in the
other cities which drives them back to Europe. In
Washington you must either live at an hotel or a
boarding-house. In either case, the mode of life is
only endurable for the shortest possible period, and
the moment congress rises, every sufferer in these detestable
places is off for relief. The hotels are crowded
to suffocation; there is an utter want of privacy in
the arrangement of the suites of apartments; the service
is ill-ordered, and the prices out of all sense or
reason. You pay for that which you have not, and
you can not get by paying for it that which you want.

The boarding-house system is worse yet. To possess
but one room in privacy, and that opening on a
common passage; to be obliged to come to meals at
certain hours, with chance table companions, and no
place for a friend, and to live entirely in your bedroom
or in a public parlor, may truly be called as abominable
a routine as a gentleman could well suffer. Yet the
great majority of those who come to Washington are
in one or the other of these two categories.

The use of lodgings for strangers or transient residents
in the city does not, after all the descriptions in
books, seem at all understood in our country. This
is what Washington wants, but it is what every city in
the country wants generally. Let us describe it as if
it was never before heard of, and perhaps some enlightened
speculator may advance us half a century in
some of the cities, by creating this luxury.

Lodgings of the ordinary kind in Europe generally
consist of the apartments on one floor. The house,
we will suppose, consists of three stories above the
basement, and each floor contains a parlor, bedroom,
and dressing-room, with a small antechamber. (This
arrangement of rooms varies, of course, and a larger
family occupies two floors.) These three suites of
apartments are neatly furnished; bed-clothes, table-linen,
and plate, if required, are found by the proprietor,
and in the basement story usually lives a man and
his wife, who attend to the service of the lodgers;
i. e., bring water, answer the door-bell, take in letters,
keep the rooms in order, make the fires, and, if it is
wished, do any little cookery in case of sickness.
These people are paid by the proprietor, but receive a
fee for extra service, and a small gratuity, at departure,
from the lodger. It should be added to this, that it is
not infra. dig. to live in the second or third story.

In connexion with lodgings, there must be of course
a cook or restaurateur within a quarter of a mile.
The stranger agrees with him for his dinner, to consist
of so many dishes, and to be sent to him at a certain
hour. He gives notice in the morning if he dines out,
buys his own wine of the wine-merchant, and thus
saves two heavy items of overcharge in the hotel or
boarding-house. His own servant makes his tea or
coffee (and for this purpose has access to the fire in
the basement), and does all personal service, such as
brushing clothes, waiting at table, going on errands,
&c., &c. The stranger comes in, in short, at a moment's
warning, brings nothing but his servant and
baggage, and finds himself in five minutes at home,
his apartments private, and every comfort and convenience
as completely about him as if he had lived
there for years.

At from ten to fourteen dollars a week, such apartments
would pay the proprietor handsomely, and afford
a reasonable luxury to the lodger. A cook would
make a good thing of sending in a plain dinner for a
dollar a head (or more if the dinner were more expensive),
and at this rate, a family of two or more persons
might have a hundred times the comfort now enjoyed
at hotels, at certainly half the cost.

We have been seduced into a very unsentimental
chapter of “ways and means,” but we trust the suggestions,
though containing nothing new, may not be
altogether without use. The want of some such thing
as we have recommended is daily and hourly felt and
complained of.

THE FOUR RIVERS.
THE HUDSON—THE MOHAWK—THE CHENANGO-SUSQUEHANNAII.

Some observer of nature offered a considerable a
word for two blades of striped grass exactly similar.
The infinite diversity, of which this is one instance,
exists in a thousand other features of nature, but in
none more strikingly than in the scenery of rivers.
What two in the world are alike! How often does
the attempt fail to compare the Hudson with the Rhine
—the two, perhaps, among celebrated rivers, which
are the nearest to a resemblance? Yet looking at the
first determination of a river's course, and the natural
operation of its search for the sea, one would suppose
that, in a thousand features, their valleys would scarce
be distinguishable.

I think, of all excitements in the world, that of the
first discovery and explanation of a noble river, must
be the most eager and enjoyable. Fancy “the bold
Englishman,” as the Dutch called Hendrich Hudson,
steering his little yacht, the Halve-Mane, for the first
time through the Highlands! Imagine his anxiety
for the channel forgotten as he gazed up at the towering
rocks, and round upon the green shores, and onward,
past point and opening bend, miles away into the
heart of the country; yet with no lessening of the
glorious stream beneath him, and no decrease of
promise in the bold and luxuriant shores! Picture
him lying at anchor below Newburgh, with the dark
pass of the “Wey-Gat” frowning behind him the
lofty and blue Catskills beyond, and the hill-sides
around covered with the red lords of the soil, exhibiting
only less wonder than friendliness. And how
beautifully was the assurance of welcome expressed,
when the “very kind old man” brought a bunch of
arrows, and broke them before the stranger, to induce
him to partake fearlessly of his hospitality!

The qualities of the Hudson are those most likely
to impress a stranger. It chances felicitously that the
traveller's first entrance beyond the sea-board is usually
made by the steamer to Albany. The grand and imposing
outlines of rock and horizon answer to his anticipations
of the magnificence of a new world; and if
he finds smaller rivers and softer scenery beyond, it
strikes him but as a slighter lineament of a more enlarged
design. To the great majority of tastes, this,
too, is the scenery to live among. The stronger lines
of natural beauty affect most tastes; and there are
few who would select country residence by beauty at
all, who would not sacrifice something to their preference
for the neighborhood of sublime scenery. The
quiet, the merely rural—a thread of a rivulet instead
of a broad river—a small and secluded valley, rather
than a wide extent of view, bounded by bold mountains,
is the choice of but few. The Hudson, therefore,
stands usually foremost in men's aspirations for
escape from the turmoil of cities; but to my taste,
though there are none more desirable to see, there
are sweeter rivers to live upon.

I made one of a party, very lately, bound upon a
rambling excursion up and down some of the river-courses
of New York. We had anticipated empty
boats, and an absence of all the gay company usually
found radiating from the city in June, and had made
up our minds for once to be contented with the study
of inanimate nature. Never were wiseheads more
mistaken. Our kind friend, Captain Dean, of the
Stevens, stood by his plank when we arrived, doing his
best to save the lives of the female portion of the
crowd rushing on board; and never, in the most palmy
days of the prosperity of our country, have we seen a
greater number of people on board a boat, nor a stronger
expression of that busy and thriving haste, which
is thought to be an exponent of national industry.
How those varlets of newsboys contrive to escape in
time, or escape at all, from being crushed or carried
off; how everybody's baggage gets on board, and
everybody's wife and child; how the hawsers are
slipped, and the boat got under way, in such a crowd
and such a crush, are matters understood. I suppose,
by Providence and the captain of the Stevens—but
they are beyond the comprehension of the passenger.

Having got out of hearing of “Here's the Star!”
“Buy the old major's paper, sir?” “Here's the Express!”
“Buy the New-Ery?” “Would you like a
New-Era, sir?” “Take a Sun, miss?” and a hundred
such deafening cries, to which New York has of
late years become subject, we drew breath and comparative
silence off the green shore of Hoboken, thanking
Heaven for even the repose of a steamboat, after
the babel of a metropolis. Stillness, like all other
things, is relative.

The passage of the Hudson is doomed to be be-written,
and we will not again swell its great multitude of
describers. Bound onward, we but gave a glance, in
passing, to romantic Undercliff and Cro'-Nest, hallowed
by the sweetest poetry our country has yet committed
to immortality; gave our malison to the black
smoke of iron-works defacing the green mantle of
nature, and our benison to every dweller on the shore
who has painted his fence white, and smoothed his
lawn to the river; and sooner than we used to do by
some five or six hours (ere railroads had supplanted
the ploughing and crawling coaches to Schenectady),
we fed our eyes on the slumbering and broad valley
of the Mohawk.

How startled must be the Naiad of this lovely river
to find her willowy form embraced between railroad
and canal! one intruder on either side of the bed so
sacredly overshaded! Pity but there were a new
knight of La Mancha to avenge the hamadryads and
water-nymphs of their wrongs from wood-cutters and
contractors! Where sleep Pan and vengeful Oread,
when a Yankee settler hews me down twenty wood-nymphs
of a morning! There lie their bodies, limbless
trunks, on the banks of the Mohawk, yet no Dutchman
stands sprouting into leaves near by, nor woollen
jacket turning into bark, as in the retributive olden
time! We are abandoned of these gods of Arcady!
They like not the smoke of steam funnels!

Talking of smoke reminds me of ashes. Is there
no way of frequenting railroads without the loss of
one's eyes. Must one pay for velocity as dearly as
Cacus for his oxen? Really this new invention is a
blessing—to the oculists! Ten thousand small crystals
of carbon cutting right and left among the fine vessels
and delicate membranes of the eye, and all this amid
glorious scenery, where to go bandaged (as needs
must), is to slight the master-work of nature! Either
run your railroads away from the river courses, gentlemen
contractors, or find some other place than your
passengers' eyes to bestow your waste ashes! I have
heard of “lies in smiles,” but there's a lye in tears,
that touches the sensibilities more nearly!

There is a drowsy beauty in these German flats that
seems strangely profaned by a smoky monster whisking
along twenty miles in the hour. The gentle canal-boat
was more homogeneous to the scene. The hills
lay off from the river in easy and sleepy curves, and
the amber Mohawk creeps down over its shallow gravel
with a deliberateness altogether and abominably out
of tune with the iron rails. Perhaps it is the rails out
of tune with the river—but any way there is a discord.
I am content to see the Mohawk, canal, and railroad
inclusive, but once a year.

We reached the head waters of the Chenango river,
by what Miss Martineau celebrates as an “exclusive
extra,” in an afternoon's ride from Utica. The latter
thrifty and hospitable town was as redolent of red
bricks and sunshine as usual; and the streets, to my
regret, had grown no narrower. They who laid out
the future legislative capital of New York, must have
been lovers of winter's wind and summer's sun. They
forgot the troubles of the near-sighted—(it requires
spectacles to read the signs or see the shops from one
side to the other); they forgot the perils of old women
and children in the wide crossings; they forgot the
pleasures of shelter and shade, of neighborly vis-à-vis,
of comfortable-lookingness. I maintain that Utica is
not a comfortable-looking town. It affects me like the
clown in the pantomime, when he sits down without
bending his legs—by mere straddling. I would not
say anything so ungracious if it were not to suggest a
remedy—a shady mall up and down the middle! What
a beautiful town it would be—like an old-fashioned
shirt bosom, with a frill of elms! Your children
would walk safely within the rails, and your country-neighbors
would expose their “sa'ace,” and cool their
tired oxen in the shade. We felt ourselves compensated
for paying nearly double price for our “extra,”
by the remarkable alacrity with which the coach came
to the door after the bargain was concluded, and the
politeness with which the “gentleman who made out
the way-bill,” acceded to our stipulation. He bowed
us off, expressed his happiness to serve us, and away
we went.

The Chenango, one of the largest tributaries to the
Susquehannah, began to show itself, like a small brook,
some fifteen or twenty miles from Utica. Its course
lay directly south—and the new canal kept along its
bank, as deserted, but a thousand times less beautiful
in its loneliness than the river, whose rambling curves
it seemed made to straighten. We were not in the
best humor, for our double priced “extra” turned out
to be the regular sage; and while we were delivering
and waiting for mails, and taking in passengers, the
troop of idlers at tavern-doors amused themselves with
reading the imaginative production called our “extra
way-bill,” as it was transferred, with a sagacious wink,

from one driver's hat to the other. I thought of
Paddy's sedan-chair, with the bottom out. “If it
were not for the name of the thing,” said he, as he
trotted along with a box over his head.

I say we were not in the best of humors with our
prompt and polite friend at Utica, but even through
these bilious spectacles, the Chenango was beautiful.
Its valley is wide and wild, and the reaches of the
capricious stream through the farms and woods along
which it loiters, were among the prettiest effects of
water scenery I have ever met. There is a strange
loneliness about it; and the small towns which were
sprinkled along the hundred miles of its course, seem
rather the poineers into a western wilderness, than
settlements so near the great thoroughfare to the lakes.
It is a delicious valley to travel through, barring
“corduroy.” Tre-men-dous! exclaims the traveller,
as the coach drops into a pit between two logs, and
surges up again—Heaven only knows how. And, as
my fellow-passenger remarked, it is a wonder the road
does not echo—“tree-mend-us!”

Five miles before reaching the Susquehannah, the
road began to mend, the hills and valleys assumed the
smile of cultivation, and the scenery before us took a
bolder and broader outline. The Chenango came
down full and sunny to her junction, like the bride,
who is most lovely when just losing her virgin name,
and pouring the wealth of her whole existence into
the bosom of another; and, untroubled with his new
burden, the lordly Susquehannah kept on his majestic
way, a type of such vainly-dreaded, but easily-borne
responsibilities.

At Binghamton, we turned our course down the
Susquehannah. This delicious word, in the Indian
tongue, describes its peculiar and constant windings,
and I venture to say that on no river in the world are
the grand and beautiful in scenery so gloriously mixed.
The road to Owego follows the course of the valley
rather than of the river, but the silver curves are constantly
in view; and, from every slight elevation, the
majestic windings are seen—like the wanderings of a
vein, gleaming through green fringes of trees, and
circling the bright islands which occasionally divide
their waters. It is a swift river, and singularly living
and joyous in its expression.

At Owego there is a remarkable combination of bold
scenery and habitable plain. One of those small,
bright rivers, which are called “creeks” in this country,
comes in with its valley at right angles, to the vale
and stream of the Susquehannah, forming a star with
three rays, or a plain with three radiating valleys, or a
city (in the future, perhaps), with three magnificent
exits and entrances. The angle is a round mountain,
some four or five hundred feet in height, which kneels
fairly down at the meeting of the two streams, while
another round mountain, of an easy acclivity, lifts
gracefully from the opposite bank, as if rising from
the same act of homage to Nature. Below the town
and above it, the mountains, for the first time, give in
to the exact shape of the river's short and capricious
course; and the plain on which the town stands, is
enclosed between two amphitheatres of lofty hills,
shaped with the regularity and even edge of a coliseum,
and resembling the two halves of a leaf-lined vase,
struck apart by a twisted wand of silver.

Owego creek should have a prettier name—for its
small vale is the soul and essence of loveliness. A
meadow of a mile in breadth, fertile, soft, and sprinkled
with stately trees, furnishes a bed for its swift
windings; and from the edge of this new tempe, on
the southern side, rise three steppes, or natural terraces,
over the highest of which the forest rears its
head, and looks in upon the meeting of the rivers,
while down the sides, terrace by terrace, leap the small
streamlets from the mountain-springs, forming each
again its own smaller dimple in this loveliest face of
Nature.

There are more romantic, wilder places than this
in the world, but none on earth more habitably beautiful.
In these broad valleys, where the grain-fields,
and the meadows, and the sunny farms, are walled in
by glorious mountain sides, not obtrusively near, yet
by their noble and wondrous outlines, giving a perpetual
refreshment, and an hourly-changing feast to
the eye—in these valleys, a man's household gods
yearn for an altar. Here are mountains that, to look
on but once, “become a feeling”—a river at whose
grandeur to marvel—and a hundred streamlets to lace
about the heart. Here are fertile fields, nodding with
grain; “a thousand cattle” grazing on the hills—here
is assembled together, in one wondrous centre, a specimen
of every most loved lineament of Nature. Here
would I have a home! Give me a cottage by one of
these shining streamlets—upon one of these terraces,
that seem steps to Olympus, and let me ramble over
these mountain sides, while my flowers are growing,
and my head silvering in tranquil happiness. He
whose Penates would not root ineradicably here, has
no heart for a home, nor senses for the glory of Nature!